9
This relationship of admired patron with valued assistant continued
to Hacket’s death. Even in his last sickness, 1671, the bishop “sent, the
week before he died, to a Friend in London to send him down the new
books from abroad or at home . . .” [3.2(d)] and Plume knew the
contents of the library in Lichfield Palace well enough to estimate its
value: “to the University Library” (at Cambridge) “he bequeath’d by
Will all his own books, which cost him about £1,500” [3.2(e)].
Having been unable to secure a
prebendal stall for Plume at
Lichfield, Hacket bequeathed to him
£40 in 1671 and—probably more
valuable in the long run—all his
manuscript sermons, which Plume
published as
A Century of Sermons
(100
of them), with the biography as
an Introduction.
Little of this could have been
gauged only from the books in his
Library, although they can be
brought into service to illustrate the
veneration of
Charles, King and Martyr [37]; the
insistence on Learning and
Continuity as an Historic Church as
being an essential feature of the
restored Church of England [36]; the
desire to rebuild and repair the fabric
and the standards of that Church
from the ravages of Civil War and
“
fanatic rage”; all of which appear as
policies that Thomas Plume learned from his distinguished patron. The
manuscript notebooks in the Library similarly fail to reveal anything of
lasting significance about their writer, Dr Plume, but can provoke a
useful search of the books. Dr Andrew Clark supposed that the
commonplace books could provide material for a sketch of the man
himself, as:
“
a theologian, with special interest in the Cambridge