The Present Laura Cleaver In his diary entry for the 16 May 1919, Sydney Cockerell, a well-known collector of manuscripts and Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, recorded that at lunch with the Chester Beattys, ‘to my amazement I found that Mrs CB had bought the Coëtivy Horae from Yates Thompson for £4000 and had given it to her husband’.1 The purchase of the Coëtivy Hours by Chester Beatty’s wife Edith (1) from the famous collection of Henry Yates Thompson was indeed remarkable. In December 1917 Yates Thompson had conided in Cockerell that he intended to put his manuscripts up for auction, a decision that horriied Cockerell, who pleaded for them to come to the Fitzwilliam as a collection.2 Yates Thompson arranged to donate one manuscript to the museum, but persevered with his plan for a series of auctions to sell most of his collection. Nevertheless he agreed to sell the Coëtivy Hours privately in advance of the irst auction. The cost, £4000 (approximately €200,000 today) appears to have been the highest sum spent by either Chester or Edith Beatty on a western manuscript to date. The explanation for both these decisions may be found in the relationships between a small group of collectors, and in the history and contents of this exceptional manuscript. Chester Beatty (2) made his initial fortune as a mining engineer in America. Following the death of his irst wife, Ninette Rickard, in 1911, Beatty left America for London where he married Edith Dunn in 1913. He appears to have begun collecting western manuscripts around this time, with the irst recorded purchases dated to 1914. In December 1915 Beatty met Cockerell when he visited the Fitzwilliam. Cockerell had tea with Beatty and Edith, before taking Beatty to look at his own collection of manuscripts. In January 1916, Cockerell visited the Beattys at their London home, 24 Kensington Palace Gardens (Baroda House), where he inspected Beatty’s collection of about ifteen western manuscripts. The museum director judged these books to be ‘not exciting’, though he acknowledged that Beatty had ‘some beautiful Chinese books’.3 Nevertheless, Cockerell saw potential in this rich collector and immediately ‘took him to tea with the Yates Thompsons, where he saw some MSS that raised his standard’. The Yates Thompson collection was famous for its emphasis on quality. Yates Thompson’s (3) ambition was to own one hundred of the best manuscripts available, selling one when he acquired something he judged to be better.4 It is possible that amongst the books Beatty saw on this irst visit to the Yates Thompsons was the Coëtivy Hours, which Yates Thompson had bought in Paris in 1900. Beatty’s admission to an elite group of manuscript collectors including Cockerell and Yates Thompson played a signiicant role in shaping his approach to collecting western manuscripts. In September 1916 Cockerell’s diary records that the three men examined manuscripts together in the 1. Edith Beatty, Philip de Laszlo, oil on canvas, 1916, London, CBL Wx 85 104 105 Bodleian Library in Oxford.5 When Beatty met Yates Thompson, the latter was in the process of publishing seven volumes of illustrations from manuscripts in his collection. The last of these appeared in 1918 and a copy was sent to Beatty, inscribed to ‘Chester Beatty with great regard from H Y Thompson’.6 In addition, Beatty adopted Yates Thompson’s practice of recording prices paid for manuscripts using a code. Beatty’s code was based on the name of his country estate, Calehill Park. Yates Thompson’s code was BRYANSTOLE, where B = 1, R = 2, etc., probably inspired by his residence in Bryanston Square. Yates Thompson used this code to enter the price paid for manuscripts, together with a note of the date of purchase and the person from whom he acquired the manuscript, on bookplates inserted into the front of his manuscripts. The bookplate in the front of the Coëtivy Hours indicates that Yates Thompson paid £1600 for the manuscript, which he bought from Gustave Pawlowski on the 11 April 1900. The news that Yates Thompson intended to put his exceptional collection up for auction gave Beatty the chance to acquire some of these treasures. The irst of three sales took place on the 3 June 1919. The Beattys were in America at the time, but Beatty left commission bids with the bookdealer Bernard Quaritch for two items, the Verdun Breviary and a Pontiical. In both cases Beatty was heavily outbid, with the manuscripts selling for almost twice what Beatty had been willing to pay. However Beatty could comfort himself with the knowledge that Edith had obtained the Coëtivy Hours. Beatty was more successful at the following two sales of Yates Thompson’s manuscripts in 1920 and 1921, obtaining six volumes (of which he returned one). These purchases included a richly illuminated thirteenth-century Book of Hours for which Beatty paid £2000, and which he presented to the British Museum in 1955.7 Books of Hours had been amongst Beatty’s earliest purchases of western manuscripts. His unpublished catalogue includes references to two Books of Hours bought in 1914, for £450 and £200 respectively. He acquired at least one more in 1915, for just £20. Following his introduction to Yates Thompson, Beatty began to pay much higher prices for manuscripts. His purchases in 1916 included four Books of Hours, for one of which, another richly illuminated ifteenth-century Book of Hours known as the De Levis Hours (4) and now at Yale, he paid £2000.8 Like the Coëtivy Hours, the De Levis Hours has decorated borders on each page. These are mostly comprised of designs of leaves executed in gold, but sixteen major divisions of the text are marked by miniatures and fully painted borders. As the most commonly produced manuscripts of the Middle Ages, Books of Hours were (and still are) readily available on the market. They varied in size, level of decoration, and condition, and the last two factors inluence the prices that collectors were willing to pay. The Coëtivy Hours was in excellent condition, and painstakingly decorated, with illuminated borders on every page as well as 148 miniatures. It is thus unsurprising that Yates Thompson asked a high price for it. 106 2. Chester Beatty, photograph, c. 1911, New York (?), CBL Archive, Quie Donation, Ac 2002.2 3. Henry Yates Thompson, Sir (John) Benjamin Stone, platinum print, July 1906, © National Portrait Gallery, London, x35220 4. 107 Annunciation, De Levis Hours, c. 1400-25, France, Beinecke Ms. 400 f.23r, © General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University The Yates Thompson sales came at a time when the market for medieval manuscripts was running high. They coincided with the sales of other major collections, notably Lord Mostyn’s sale in 1920, which helped to generate excitement around illuminated medieval books. The sales attracted American collectors, including J. P. Morgan’s librarian Belle da Costa Greene, which further helped to drive up prices. After the Yates Thompson sale in 1920, The Times estimated that the manuscripts had sold for somewhere ‘between ive and 10 times the original cost’.9 By such a reckoning, Edith might have been considered to have obtained the Coëtivy Hours at a bargain price. Nevertheless, £4000 was more than any sum that Beatty had spent on a western manuscript by 1919. Indeed, Beatty was cautious with money when it came to buying books. In 1920 he made his irst visit to the exceptional collection of manuscripts amassed by the nineteenth-century collector Thomas Phillipps. Beatty made notes on some manuscripts, including indications of the prices being asked for them by their owner, Phillipps’ grandson, Thomas Fitzroy Fenwick. Some of the books were rejected by Beatty on the grounds that the prices being asked were too high. In contrast, when Edith visited the Phillipps collection in 1925, to buy presents for her husband, she ofered much higher prices. In particular she spent £7000 each on two volumes (Thebaid of Statius, CBL W 076, and Dictys Cretensis, De Bello Troiano, CBL W 122, both still in the Chester Beatty Collection) that Beatty had previously declined to buy at prices of £3000-5000. After her purchases Edith wrote to Fenwick declaring ‘if you decide to sell any other treasures (…) I shall always buy them, even if I have to sell some of my jewels’, a promise that was not followed through.10 Nevertheless, Edith’s ability to persuade Yates Thompson and Fenwick to part with their treasures should not be undervalued. After Edith’s death in 1952, Cockerell described her as ‘the nearest approach to Shakespeare’s Cleopatra that I have ever known’.11 Part of the attraction of the Coëtivy Hours for Edith Beatty may have been its association with Prigent de Coëtivy and his wife Marie de Rais. Yates Thompson was particularly interested in the original owners of his manuscripts, declaring that ‘it is very remarkable that the kings, queens, soldiers and statesmen of the troubled mediaeval centuries should have found time and taste, and it may be added money, for the collection and appreciation of these exquisite volumes’, and describing Prigent de Coëtivy as ‘one of the staunchest ighters on the side of the French king’ in the Hundred Years War.12 Yates Thompson also owned a second volume associated with Coëtivy, a copy of Boccaccio’s Des Cleres et Nobles Femmes, now in Lisbon.13 In 1900 the great manuscript scholar Leopold Delisle had identiied the Coëtivy Hours with a manuscript kept by Marie de Rais after her husband’s death, and this detail formed part of the account of the manuscript when Beatty put it up for sale in 1932.14 This association has subsequently been questioned, as alterations to the coats of arms indicate that the manuscript was owned by Marie’s in-laws, nevertheless the idea of the widow preserving 108 5. Inscription and Henry Yates Tompson bookplate, Coëtivy Hours, CBL W 082 f. i-r 6. Sotheby’s London, Catalogue of the Renowned Collection of Western Manuscripts, the Property of A. Chester Beatty, I, 7 June 1932 the manuscript as a memento of her husband added romance to the book.15 Edith added her own inscription on the page with Yates Thompson’s book plate: ‘To A. Chester Beatty from his loving wife Edith Beatty’ (5). Despite the fact that the Coëtivy Hours had been a gift from Edith, in 1932 Beatty put it up for auction in what was intended to be the irst of a series of sales divesting him of his western manuscript collection (6). Cockerell recorded that he was startled and depressed to hear that Beatty was to sell his collection, attributing this to the inancial crisis in the wake of the Wall Street Crash of 1929.16 However, if the sales were designed to raise money they were extremely disappointing. Cockerell estimated that the irst sale raised ‘perhaps about 20% less than Beatty gave for them, owing to the bad times’.17 Although The Times reported that the Coëtivy Hours ‘provoked the keenest contest of the afternoon’, the victorious bidder (at £5000) was in fact a disguise for the fact that the manuscript failed to reach Beatty’s reserve price, and it thus returned to his collection.18 After a second poor sale in 1933 Beatty decided to keep the remainder of his western manuscripts, which he gave to Edith. Following Edith’s death, in 1953 Beatty applied for permission to export most of the remaining collection to Ireland. This may have been when he decided to remove many of the leaves in order to better display them in his new library, which opened in 1952 to researchers and 1954 to the public. The potential for the leaves to be displayed may also have prompted Beatty to include them amongst 40 western manuscripts that were preserved for the library at his death in 1968.19 Thus the Coëtivy Hours is now part of a small group of western manuscripts still in the Chester Beatty’s collection that testiies to the remarkable quality of the volumes acquired by both Chester and Edith Beatty. 109