It is a question whether the attention bestowed on the Royal library during the reign of Edward vi. was an advantage to it or the reverse.  It is true that the energy of Sir John Cheke, and Roger Ascham, King’s librarian, secured for it the manuscripts that had belonged to Martin Bucer; but on the other hand, the rabid intolerance of Edward’s Council deprived it of many of its valuable contents.  On the 25th January 1550, a so-called king’s letter, sent from the Council Board, authorised certain commissioners to make a descent upon all public and private libraries, and to “cull out all superstitious books, as missals, legends, and such like, and to deliver the garniture of the books, being either gold or silver, to Sir Anthony Aucher.* The havoc thus wrought was irremediable, and not even the king’s own library was spared the terrible perquisitions.  But at the same time we cannot but marvel that still so many of the condemned books should have escaped the notice of the commissioners.  In the same year the libraries at Oxford were also “purged of a great part of Fathers and Schoolmen,” and great heaps of books set on fire in the market-place were watched with delight by the younger members of the university, who named the conflagration “Scotus’s funeral.”

* Council Book of Edward vi.

The short and troubled reign of Mary afforded no scope for literary activity, and Elizabeth was far too busy outwitting her enemies abroad, and controlling the factious tendencies of her friends at home, to be able to cultivate her taste for books.  Nevertheless, although in the course of a hundred years the Royal library had suffered as much as it had gained, it was even then a goodly sight.  Paul Hentzner, the German literary tourist, who visited it in 1598, says that it was “well stored with Greek, Latin, and French books, bound in velvet of different colours, although chiefly red, with clasps of gold and silver, the corners of some being otherwise adorned with gold and precious stones."* Perhaps the custodians vouchsafed him but a glance at these outer splendours, for he tells us nothing of the treasures within, of which all this magnificence was only the antechamber.

* P. Hentzner, Itnerarium Germaniae, Angliae, etc., p. 188.

But the golden age of the Royal library was in the reign of James I., and its greatest benefactor a youth who died at the age of eighteen.  It were idle to speculate on what might have been the future of Henry, Prince of Wales, had he lived to fulfil the bright promise of his boyhood.  To a singularly well-balanced mind, he appears to have joined an amiability of character that endeared him to all save the crotchety doctrinaire who sat upon the throne.  He loved hunting and hawking and all healthy open-air pursuits no less than he loved books, and the society of men, who were the history-makers of his day.  He would visit Sir Walter Raleigh in his prison in the Tower, and listen to his brilliant projects for the future greatness of England in the development of her colonies, and the annexation of still barbarous lands, the fabulous wealth of which was the life-long dream of the veteran explorer.