8
with the situation there, a companion’s knowledge of the daily routine
and of the old man's generosity which may have been Plume’s own
experience:
“
In bad times, when he had lost his best income and, like the
Widow of Sarepta, had but an handful of Meal and Cruze of Oyl
left for himself and his Family, yet he then .. has given a
distressed Friend twenty pounds at a time . .."
[3.2(
c)].
Dr Hacket was very much the patron a young man needed in the
1650
s and 1660s. He was able to recommend Plume to one of the
surviving bishops for ordination; he may have been able to use his
reviving influence in 1658, as the return of the Monarchy and the
Established Church became more certain, to secure Plume’s
appointment at Greenwich and that was an invaluable advancement, a
desirable benefice in a well-to-do parish, a vicarage formerly in the
patronage of the Crown and in 1658 in the gift of the new Lord
Protector, Richard Cromwell. When Hacket became Bishop of
Coventry and Lichfield in 1661 he was in a position to secure for his
former secretary the royal mandate to the University of Cambridge by
which Plume graduated Bachelor of Divinity without having followed a
course of residential studies or taken the statutory academic exercises in
the Divinity Schools. This degree was, like Greenwich Vicarage, a very
desirable promotion, a highly respected “second degree’’ which took
precedence over the M.A. (and perhaps equivalent to a modern Ph.D.
degree).
More to the point of understanding this Library, Dr Hacket had
initiated the young scholar into the world of bibliographical scholarship.
Plume explained particularly how Hacket had refused to set foot in
London after the execution of King Charles I because, in his opinion, it
had been polluted by that sacrilegious act. Books he needed, however,
and Thomas Plume had been their purchaser. A degree of personal
judgement and considerable time in sorting through variant editions is
needed when buying books for others—librarianship at least—and the
young man came to that task at a time when the lifting of press
censorship had filled the bookstalls to an unusual extent. In the late
1650
s he commenced a life-long acquaintance with the many
book-sellers of London, with their specialities and the range of
materials in print.