Oxo advertising during Great War

Oxo advertising for the 1924 Empire Exhibition

King Henry VII

Arguably, the seeds of Empire were sown as far back as the reign of King Henry VII (b. 1457 d. 1509, reign 1485 to 1509), the last king of England to win his crown on the battlefield.

During the reign of Henry VII, Britain’s navy was significantly strengthened, great steps were made in the direction of realising absolute monarchy, diplomatic foreign policy led to greater economic prosperity, and the country was, broadly, reaching unity under centralised rule.  Although as late as the mid 16th century, England was perceived to lag its educated European neighbours, particularly France, Spain and Portugal, in many fields, it led them in shifting away from serfdom, the source of much civil unrest, and establishing a sense of national unity.

Like many of his European counterparts, one of Henry VII’s overwhelming interests was foreign policy.  Henry realised the benefits of overseas diplomacy, seeing it as a reliable substitute for the violence used by his predecessors. He established England’s first diplomatic envoys, and a system of spies brought forth information from many European seats of power.

However, the focus of Henry’s foreign policy was to develop ties and policy that would stimulate domestic economic development. With sheep outnumbering men by about three to one, the legendary English wool so admired and bought copiously by Italian merchants was in good supply. However, it left English shores on German controlled ships to be profitably dispersed by Hanseatic traders. Henry set about establishing a protective legal framework for English traders (under a series of ‘Navigation Acts’) from which he aggressively sought to secure greater economic benefit for the nation.

At the time of accession, the English fleet and supporting infrastructure had degenerated almost to the point of extinction; some report as few as three sea-worthy vessels, with pirates free to roam the English Channel unhindered. Henry commissioned a series of large ‘Man-o-War’ ships, built the naval bastion at Portsmouth (including the dry dock in 1495), and provided funding for a number of large merchant ships under the condition that they would be put at the disposal of the navy if needed. By Henry VII’s passing in 1509, the English navy comprised 15 vessels built to the highest standards of the day.

It was a generation later, in 1533, that Henry VII’s third child, then King Henry VIII solemnly decreed in the Act of Restraint of Appeals that “with the consent of the Lords spiritual and temporal and the Commons [...] this realm England is an Empire.”

The architects of this statute were not proclaiming any notion of world dominion. Moreover, it was a statement of independence. An emphatic severance from Papal control and influence, setting England on a path that, within a generation, would see her merchants and explorers span the globe to lay the cornerstones of the largest Empire the world has seen.

The initial collection of books from which the library grew came from Sir Hans Sloane (b. 1660, d. 1752), a physician and Fellow of the Royal Society.  He had amassed a large collection covering many fields, listed in 46 catalogues. On his death he wished the collection to be offered to the Crown for a sum of £20 000.

After accepting this offer, in 1753, an Act of Parliament established a body of trustees led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor and the Speaker of the House of Commons who were tasked to find a suitable “repository” for the collection and act as its governing body. The same Act authorized a lottery to raise money to pay for Sloane’s collection in addition to the Harleian manuscripts which were then up for sale.

The trustees declined an offer of Buckingham House (now Buckingham Palace) for £30 000, but settled to purchase Montagu House in Great Russell Street, and to repair and refit it to house the collection at a total cost of  under £25 000.

Statutes were drawn up in 1758, the collection was arranged in 14 lower rooms of the main block, and on 15th January, 1759, the British Museum as it was then called was opened to “studious and curious persons” who were admitted at a rate of 10 per hour.

One very important additional donation was made to the Sloane collection prior to the museum’s opening. In 1757, King George II transferred to its care the Library of the Kings and Queens of England, now called the Old Royal Library, an extensive collection gathered by successive Kings of England from around the time of Edward IV.

The museum library absorbed further collections over the ensuing decades. In 1799, one of the collection’s trustees, Rev. C. M. Cracherode, bequeathed to the museum his collection of 4500 volumes.  This collection included some fine examples of early printing.

In 1823, the museum’s collection doubled in size when King George IV offered to the Government a vast collection amassed by his father, which totalled 65 000 books and 19 000 pamphlets.

Ongoing acquisitions made space a pressing problem. In 1815, Sir Robert Smirke was appointed as architect to the museum. Smirke proposed to construct a new building in the neoclassical style of four wings enclosing a quadrangle. A wing to the northeast corner of Montagu House to house the “King’s Library” was completed in 1826.

The Domed Reading Room at the British Museum

Further expansion was undertaken in the middle of the 19th century as the library’s collection grew rapidly. In 1852, work commenced on the famous domed Reading Room and the surrounding ‘Iron Library‘ to the designs of Sydney Smirke (Sir Robert‘s brother.)  It was erected in the central quadrangle and opened in May 1857. The collection of close to a million books was held in revolutionary space-saving arrangements that surrounded the central reading room; such a design was thereafter adopted by many other great libraries abroad.

For more than a century, beneath the great dome of the Reading Room (larger in diameter than St. Paul‘s and St. Peter‘s), scholars and writers worked and pored over the library’s increasing stock.  To name but a few: Karl Marx, Charles Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Carlyle and Virginia Woolf.  As did a young man under the name of Jacob Richter, the name used by Vladimir Lenin on his reader‘s pass.

By 1867, separate departments were established for maps and Oriental manuscripts, and in 1881, the museum’s natural history collection was relocated to South Kensington as part of the new Natural History Museum.

Another landmark in the history of the library occurred in 1879: the printing of the General Catalogue, which had previous been maintained as manuscript.

By the end of the century, the library again seemed to be growing beyond its space as a rapidly growing newspaper archive competed with books for shelf space.  A site in Colindale was purchased and a repository for newspapers was built. In 1906, the newspaper archive was relocated to these new premises.

The problem of space remains as a consequence of the endless intake of books, periodicals, music and other materials under the Copyright Act. The Act of Parliament of 1911 established the library as one of six permitted to receive a free copy of every item published in the United Kingdom by ‘legal deposit‘.

The remarkable growth of the museum library over 200 hundred years was checked only temporarily by the destruction of Second World War air raids. The library lost about 150 00 books from its Bloomsbury site, and some 30 000 newspapers were reduced to ash at the newspaper archives in Colindale as a result of World War II bombing raids.

In 1973, the library was fully disengaged from the British Museum with the passing of the British Library Act. Following unsuccessful plans to build larger premises in Bloomsbury, a derelict goods yard between Euston and St. Pancras stations was chosen as the site of a new building.

HM The Queen opened the British Library in June 1998.