William Oldys

• 1. Introduction

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  William Oldys was born on the 14th of July 1696, probably in London, and he spent his life navigating the precarious world of books, manuscripts, and patrons at a time when scholarship was not yet a profession. His father held one of the more distinguished legal posts in England, advocate of the admiralty, but lost it because he refused to prosecute sailors who had served James II as an act of conscience rather than treason. That backstory of principled financial ruin set the tone for a family that would repeatedly find itself on the wrong side of fortune.

  Oldys himself lost part of his modest inheritance to the South Sea Bubble, one of the most catastrophic financial collapses in English history. He fled London for Yorkshire, sheltered for years by the hospitality of the Earl of Malton. When he came back to the city, his books and papers had vanished, sold off by a landlord who had no legal right to them. Among those papers was an annotated copy of a major reference work on English dramatists, and its disappearance would ripple forward through literary history in ways he could not have anticipated.

  Who was William Oldys? A man who assembled one of the great private libraries of his era, only to sell it out of necessity. A writer who contributed to major biographical reference works across more than a decade. A herald appointed to England's most ancient heraldic institution despite, by his own institution's admission, being wholly ignorant of heraldry. And a man whose grandfather was hunted through the streets of Adderbury and killed by soldiers for backing the wrong side in a civil war. The story of William Oldys is a story about books, debt, and what survives when almost everything else is lost.

• 2. A Family of Misfortune

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  The church bell at Adderbury in Oxford still bears the name of the Reverend William Oldys, who died there on the 15th of September 1645. Parliamentarian soldiers hunted him through the town for his support of the monarchy. Even when he threw money to the ground to slow his pursuers, they caught him and ran him through with a sword. A Latin plaque on the vestry wall records that day. The account survives in the British Library as Addit 4240, in the Diary of Birch.

  That martyred clergyman was the great-grandfather of the antiquarian. His son Dr. William Oldys was born in 1636 and rose to become chancellor of Lincoln diocese and advocate of the admiralty. He lost that admiralty post in 1693, not through scandal but through scruple: he would not prosecute as pirates and traitors the sailors who had served England's exiled king James II. His wife Margaret, born a Sacheverell, outlived him by only a few years, dying on the 7th of May 1705. She was the daughter of Ambrose Sacheverell, who had served as Reverend at Tadmarton in 1617.

  The family's ancestry, as traced in the British Library records, stretches back through several generations of men named John Oldys to John Oldys, Bishop of Clonmacnoise in Ireland in 1444, and from there to Richard Oldys born in 1366. The family that produced the antiquarian was itself a document waiting to be read, full of clerical office, political loyalty, and violent consequence.

• 3. The Lost Library

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  Oldys lost part of his inheritance to the South Sea Bubble, and in 1724 he left London for Yorkshire, spending the better part of six years as a guest of the Earl of Malton. When he returned to the city, he found that his landlord had sold the books and papers he had left behind. The damage done to English literary history by that act of casual theft is hard to calculate.

  Among the missing materials was an annotated copy of Gerard Langbaine's Dramatick Poets, a foundational reference work for anyone studying the Elizabethan and Restoration stage. Oldys had filled it with notes accumulated through years of reading. That copy made its way to a man named Thomas Coxeter, and from Coxeter it passed to Theophilus Cibber. In 1753, a multi-volume work called Lives of the Poets appeared under Cibber's name. Most of it was actually written by Robert Shiels, but the annotations Oldys had made in his purloined copy provided much of the underlying research. Oldys received no credit.

  In 1731, before the full scale of the loss was clear, Oldys had sold his collections to Edward Harley, the 2nd Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer, one of the great manuscript collectors of the age. Harley appointed him his literary secretary in 1738. That relationship offered stability Oldys had not known since before the South Sea disaster, and it placed him at the center of a library that would later form the nucleus of the British Museum's holdings. Harley died three years after appointing Oldys to the post, and with him went the last reliable patron Oldys would have.

• 4. Booksellers and the Fleet

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  After Harley's death, Oldys worked for the booksellers, the commercial publishers who dominated London's literary trade. The arrangement suited neither his habits nor his finances. His lifestyle, described by contemporaries as irregular, pulled him steadily into debt. By 1751 the debts were severe enough that he was committed to the Fleet prison, the debtors' prison along the Fleet River in London.

  He remained there for two years. His release came not through any improvement in his own circumstances but through friends who paid what he owed. The episode was a measure of how completely the scholarly economy of the time depended on patronage. Once Harley was gone, there was no institutional support for a bibliographer of Oldys's kind, only the piecemeal income of contributing to publishers' projects.

  From 1747 to 1760, Oldys contributed twenty-two articles to the Biographia Britannica, one of the most ambitious biographical reference projects of the eighteenth century. That work continued even during and after his imprisonment, which meant he was producing careful scholarly writing at some of the lowest points of his personal life. The British Muse, one of the earliest poetry anthologies to appear in Britain, had been published in 1738, the same year Harley made him literary secretary. That combination of an early anthology and years of biographical writing represents the core of Oldys's contribution to English letters.

• 5. Herald Without Heraldry

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  In April 1755, the Duke of Norfolk appointed Oldys to the position of Norfolk Herald Extraordinary. The appointment was followed by a further one as Norroy King of Arms, one of the senior heralds at the College of Arms, the institution that has governed English heraldry since the fifteenth century. The irony is that the College of Arms itself later recorded a candid assessment of the man they had granted this office.

  According to the current College of Arms, Oldys was described as a noted antiquary and bibliographer but wholly ignorant of heraldry. The same institutional record added that he was known for being rarely sober in the afternoon, never after supper, and much addicted to low company. The language is period-specific in its bluntness. For an institution built on precision, rank, and lineage, the assessment reads as remarkably unguarded.

  The appointment was in some ways consistent with how patronage worked in Georgian England: scholarly reputation in one field could earn an official title in an adjacent one, regardless of competence. Oldys's genuine expertise in biography and bibliography was real enough to attract the notice of a duke. What he did with the role of Norroy King of Arms, a position that carried responsibility for granting and registering coats of arms across northern England, the record does not say with warmth. He held the post until his death on the 15th of April 1761, a man perpetually between what he knew and what he was asked to be.