Sir Robert Bruce Cotton

Sir Robert Bruce Cotton, 1st Baronet (22 January 1570/1 – 6 May 1631) of Conington Hall in the parish of Conington in Huntingdonshire, England, was a Member of Parliament and an antiquarian who founded the Cotton library.

He was born on 22 January 1571 in Denton, Huntingdonshire, the son and heir of Thomas Cotton (1544–1592) of Conington (son of Thomas Cotton of Conington Sheriff of Huntingdonshire in 1547) by his first wife Elizabeth Shirley, a daughter of Francis Shirley of Staunton Harold in Leicestershire. The Cotton family originated at the manor of Cotton in Cheshire, from which they took their surname.

Cotton was educated at Westminster School where he was a pupil of the antiquarian William Camden, under whose influence he began to study antiquarian topics. He began collecting notes on the history of Huntingdonshire when he was seventeen. He proceeded to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he graduated BA in 1585 and in 1589 entered the Middle Temple to study law. He began to amass a library in which the documents rivalled, then surpassed, the royal manuscript collections.

Cotton was elected a Member of Parliament for Newtown, Isle of Wight in 1601 and as Knight of the Shire for Huntingdonshire in 1604. He helped to devise the institution of the title of baronet as a means for King James I to raise funds: like a peerage, a baronetcy was heritable but, like a knighthood, it gave the holder no seat in the House of Lords. Despite an early period of goodwill with King James I, during which Cotton was himself made a baronet, his approach to public life, based on his immersion in the study of old documents, was essentially based on that "sacred obligation of the king to put his trust in parliaments" which in 1628 was expressed in his monograph The Dangers wherein the Kingdom now Standeth, and the Remedye. From the Court party's point of view, this was anti-royalist in nature, and the king's ministers began to fear the uses being made of Cotton's library to support pro-parliamentarian arguments. Thus it was confiscated in 1630 and returned only after his death to his heirs.

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