Our ambassador, Sir Henry Wotton, was also a warm personal friend. And thus he had contemplated with pleasure his removal to England. He came in October 1610 with his wife, the mother of his nineteen children. She was Florence, daughter of Henri Stephanus, and had been married to him at St. Peter’s, Geneva, on 28th April 1586.
On the 17th January 1611, he was made a Prebendary of Canterbury, and was allowed to hold the prebend without taking holy orders. In the same month the king granted him £300 a-year (see a copy of the Grant under the Privy Seal, in my Historical Introduction).
In the State Paper Office there are letters alluding to Casaubon, of which I give extracts:—
Sir Thomas Lake wrote to the Earl of Salisbury, 7th April 1611:— “His Mat. also willed me to advertise your lo. that whereas Mor Causabon was sending his wife into France to remove his family hither and his library, your lo. should writt in his Mat. name to his Ambr. in France to give unto hir all manner of assistance that he may, in furthering hir return or procuring any favors from the Court there which may further it.”
John Chamberlain wrote to Sir Dudley Carleton, London, 20th November 1611: “I was this day with the Bishop of Ely, and among other talk lighted upon Casabon who, it seems, is scant contented with his entertainment of £300 a-year, being promised greater matters by the late archbishop who bestowed a prebend upon him at Canterbury which he valued at six score pounds a year, and falls not out worth the fourth part.”
As to the pension, there is extant His Majesty’s Memorandum:— “Chancelor of my Excheker, I will have Mr. Casaubon paid before me, my wife, and my barnes (23d September 1612).”[1] His friend, Andrew Melville, for resisting the introduction of Episcopacy into Scotland, was undergoing a four years’ imprisonment. Dr. M‘Crie says, “The warm approbation of the constitution of the Church of England, which Casaubon expressed, and the countenance which he gave to the consecration of the Scottish prelates at Lambeth, were by no means agreeable to Melville. But notwithstanding this he received frequent visits from him in the Tower; and on these occasions they entertained and instructed one another with critical remarks on ancient authors, and especially on the Scriptures.” Casaubon has recorded his delight with an improved punctuation of 1 Tim. iii. 15, 16, of which Melville informed him:— “These things write I unto thee — that thou mayest know how thou oughtest to behave thyself in the house of God, which is the Church of the Living God. The pillar and ground of the truth, and great without controversy, is the mystery of godliness, God was manifest in the flesh,” &c. It is said that such society was Casaubon’s relief from the literary tasks set him by the king. “He (says M‘Crie) who had devoted his life to the cultivation of Grecian and Oriental literature, and who had edited and illustrated Strabo, Athenseus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Polyaenus, and Polybius, was now condemned to drudge in replying to the Jesuit Fronto le Duc, correcting His Majesty’s answer to Cardinal Du Perron, refuting the annals of Cardinal Baronius, and writing letters to induce his illustrious friend De Thou to substitute King James’s narrative of the troubles of Scotland in the room of that which he had already published on the authority of Buchanan.”
His twentieth child was born in England. Chamberlain writes to Carleton, London, 4th November 1612 — “Casaubon had a son lately born here, christened by the King and the Archbishop of Canterbury, whose deputies for that purpose were the Bishops of Bath and Wells, and Rochester; the godmother was Sir George Caries lady.”
Under the year 1613 Anthony Wood notes:— “The most learned Isaac Casaubon was entered a student in Bodley’s Library as a member of Christ Church in the month of May, but died soon after to the great loss of learning; he was a great linguist, a singular Grecian, and an excellent philologer.” Maittaire furnishes the date of his death, viz., 1st July 1614.[2] I find in a letter from John Chamberlain to Sir Dudley Carleton, dated London, 7th July 1614, “Casaubon died some few days since, and his wife and children are suitors for his pension.”
I have not attempted a list of his publications. With regard to his “Epistolae,” Dr. M‘Crie refers to the folio edition by Almeloveen (Theodorus Janson), published in 1709, prefaced by Joh. Fred. Gronovius, in a dedicatory epistle dated 9 Kal. Oct. 1638.
