The Royal English College of St Alban at Valladolid was one of several seminaries founded in Europe during the sixteenth century for the education and training of priests for the English and Welsh Catholic mission. It was established in 1589 by the English Jesuit Robert Persons with the permission and financial support of the Spanish King Philip II.Footnote 1 Given the timing of its foundation, in the year following the defeat of the Armada, it is unsurprising that there was some concerns which needed to be addressed. Among these was the danger that the Englishmen arriving to study at the College might be suspected of being spies or heretics by the citizens of Valladolid. So too, it was feared that the existence of a relatively large English community within the city might create unrest among the Spanish Catholic authorities. Persons believed that the concerns of their Spanish neighbours could be appeased, and the Inquisition’s fear of English heterodoxy assuaged, by placing overall responsibility for the College in the hands of the Spanish Jesuits.Footnote 2 Equally, there was the potential for discord between the Spanish Jesuits and the English Catholic clerical establishment in exile to whom St Alban’s was subject. It was agreed, therefore, at its foundation that the rectors of the College would be Spanish and its administration would be left in English hands.Footnote 3 Persons did not, however, remain in the College: his responsibilities required his presence and intervention in other institutions in Spain and elsewhere in continental Europe.Footnote 4 He became Prefect of the English Mission, and was responsible for all the English colleges on the Continent under Jesuit administration, in addition to those members of the Society working on the English Mission.Footnote 5
However, in spite of the precautions taken by Persons, the existence of the English College proved to be somewhat problematic in relation to the city, and it continued to arouse suspicion and distrust among the inhabitants of Valladolid.Footnote 6 On academic matters it was established that English students at the English College were to share lessons with the Spanish Jesuits in training at St Ambrose, the neighbouring Jesuit college.Footnote 7 This arrangement proved to be an unceasing source of dissatisfaction among the students throughout the Jesuit period of the College. The English pupils often complained that the lectures were not suitable for their future work as missionaries in England and argued that they had a greater need for more exercises on controversies.Footnote 8 Furthermore, the coexistence of young English seminarians and Spanish Jesuit rectors was not always harmonious and peaceful. Tensions between students and the College staff arose several times during this period of Spanish management. Many joined the Society of Jesus, generating accusations of Jesuit proselytism in the College. Others in the seventeenth century ‘defected’ to join the Benedictines at the nearby monastery of St Benito in Valladolid. This caused considerable unrest among the Jesuit superiors who feared English spies might infiltrate the monastery; it resulted in tougher discipline at the College.Footnote 9 There were many further periods of tension between the students and their superiors, as the numerous letters addressed to Persons in Rome show.Footnote 10
As time passed and the political scene in Europe changed, the nature of the College evolved gradually. However, it was the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain in 1767 that caused a drastic shift in its identity. The secular administration that was put in place brought about changes not only in the management and administration of the College but also in the education and seminary training of new students. Thus, the dual English and Spanish identity of St Alban’s, originally intended to strengthen and protect the College, frequently became a source of continued conflict and unrest internally and externally until 1767. Therefore, it is only logical to assume that this ‘island of England in Castile’—as Javier Burrieza has described itFootnote 11—would also cause concern and confusion among the Spanish authorities in charge of the expulsion of the Society from the English College. When executing government orders, the Spanish commissioners appointed to seize and inventory the belongings of the Jesuits were at a loss as to how to proceed. The College was undoubtedly unlike other Jesuit houses on Spanish soil, and the legal uncertainties that this generated is reflected in the resulting documents.
From a bureaucratic point of view, the English College’s dual identity was crucial during the process of expulsion of the Society of Jesus, as will become evident from the analysis of the archival evidence created during the course of these events. This article will focus on the unique and authentic archival documentation generated by the expulsion of the Jesuits. By reviewing the surviving legal orders issued by the Council of Castile and the resulting administrative records, the earliest stages of this complex judicial process can be outlined. Furthermore, identification and examination of the different governmental orders and decrees, as well as the resulting legal roll, which contains a relation of the events of 1767, will allow us to establish a chronology in which to frame the surviving documentary material.Footnote 12
More specifically, this study will also present an overview of the three extant manuscript indexes of the books in the College library compiled in the earliest stages of the expulsion of the Jesuit staff from St Alban’s. By examining these surviving inventories in context and by mapping out those which have not yet been found, this article will allow us to broaden our understanding of the process of inventorying the College library.
The banishment of the Jesuits and the records of the confiscation of their temporalities
The expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain was not an isolated event. Across Europe, other governments had already banished the order from their territories: Portugal in 1759, France in 1764, and more would follow with Parma and Malta in 1768, until the suppression by Pope Clement XIV in 1773.Footnote 13 In Portugal, the Society was accused of having conspired to take the life of King on 3 September 1758.Footnote 14 The investigation to determine its culpability or innocence was undertaken by the Junta de Inconfidência set up by the marquis of Pombal.Footnote 15 This resulted in the closure of Jesuit schools and colleges in the kingdom of Portugal on 28 July 1759. On 3 September 1759 a royal decree was published, banishing the Jesuits from Portuguese territories and forcing them to either abandon the society or be imprisoned.Footnote 16 One of the consequences of this action was the production and dissemination of books containing evident anti-Jesuit propaganda in Europe, showcasing the supposed regicidal and despotic nature of the Society.Footnote 17
The influence that the events in Portugal had on the expulsion of the Jesuits from France and Spain has also been the subject of scholarly research which has shown how the three events were linked; they cannot, therefore, be considered in isolation.Footnote 18 Members of the Society in France were also accused of attempting to assassinate Louis XV in 1757. Legal action was taken against the Order by the Parlement of Paris, opening the debate on whether their nature was compatible with French public law.Footnote 19 The expulsion of the Society from French soil resulted in the seizure of the English College of St Omer and the relocation of the English Jesuits to Bruges in August 1762. Protests of English Jesuits at St Omer’s ensuedFootnote 20 and claims were made on the involvement of the English secular clergy.Footnote 21
In Spain, the Society of Jesus was suspected by the Spanish Monarch, Charles III, and the Council of Castile of being accomplices of a series of revolts against the crown and the authorities in the capital and in other parts of Spain.Footnote 22 In order to determine whether this accusation was true, Charles III issued a Royal Decree on 21 April 1766, by which the President of the Council of Castile, the Count of Aranda; Pedro Rodriguez Campomanes, fiscal of the Council of Castile; and a trusted minister of their choice were ordered to carry out a secret investigation – pesquisa reservada o secreta.Footnote 23 The compilation of reports by different witnesses would determine whether the Society of Jesus was involved in these uprisings. After receiving the different declarations, the Consejo Extraordinario agreed that the Jesuits had participated in the revolts, contributing and encouraging the rebels at the riots against the Crown with political posters, satirical poetry and manifestos.Footnote 24 Despite the fact that their culpability for this specific crime could not be proven, the main reason to support this allegation were unfounded accusations by several witnesses whose testimonies revealed a bias against the Society. Their loyalty, or ‘blind obedience’, to the Holy See was deemed ‘despotic’ and accusations were made trying to prove their regicidal tendencies.Footnote 25 As many scholars have noted, this loyalty or devotion to a foreign sovereign generated animosity within the powerful elite close to the king at that time. However, whether the Jesuits were or were not in fact accomplices of these riots has not yet been determined.
In December 1766, Campomanes published his Dictamen fiscal Footnote 26 containing a list of 746 reasons or arguments with which he aimed to persuade Charles III and the members of the Council to banish the Jesuits from the Spanish kingdom so as to restore social order and ensure the security of the monarch. Campomanes also presented their expulsion from Portugal and France as examples to follow. These ideas resonated with the king, who, on 27 February 1767, issued a Pragmatic SanctionFootnote 27 proclaiming that all Jesuits were to be expelled from the Spanish Kingdom.Footnote 28 Letters were then sent to the commissioners in the different Spanish Jesuit provinces, setting out a series of instructions and guidelines on how to proceed.Footnote 29 The guidelines for all colleges were uniform and clear, and one of the most noticeable aspects of the operation as a whole is the consistency and efficiency with which these proceedings were undertaken.
Initially, this operation was enshrouded in secrecy, and it was not until 1 April that the envelopes containing the orders could be opened. The instructions dictated that all the Jesuits were to leave their colleges, except the procurators, who were allowed to stay in a different religious house or the house of a secular. This was mainly due to their involvement with the economic matters of the Society—they would be required to help with the preparation of exhaustive inventories of their temporalities in the days after the expulsion.Footnote 30 Following the estrangement orders, the Government issued a Royal Sanction on 2 April 1767,Footnote 31 which required them to prepare inventories listing all belongings in their houses, including their books. Their material properties and rents would ultimately be seized and sold in order to finance the whole operation of estrangement.
Such was the speed with which the commissioned officers of some provinces assumed the task of inventorying the Jesuit houses, and, more specifically their libraries, that only twenty-five days after the estrangement, the first letters with inventories and accounts of the proceedings reached Madrid from various colleges of several Spanish provinces.Footnote 32 The resulting inventories did not match the expectations of the Council of Castile. The descriptions of items were often so vague or incomplete, that they were, in fact, utterly useless for the purposes of the Council. Both the haste and the paucity of guidance on how to proceed had become flaws in the system. It became necessary, therefore, to produce a series of guidelines to standardize the proceedings of each of these commissioners when inventorying books. In the royal order of 7 April 1767 Campomanes had specified that ‘books in the individual bedchambers and in the college libraries should be inventoried separately.’Footnote 33 As a supplement to this document, a new royal order was issued on 23 April 1767 under the title Instructions on how to precisely and consistently inventory books and documents at the Jesuit Colleges in the Spanish Kingdom. Footnote 34 The purpose of this document was not only to unify the criteria to follow in cataloguing the books in order to avoid possible confusion or disorganization, but also to obtain all the data necessary to establish their value.
Firstly, the royal order from 23 April ordered the commissioners to appoint booksellers to carry out the task. They were experts who could identify the volumes and also fix the price of each item wherever possible. The instructions were precise: ‘manuscript books were to be catalogued separately from the printed ones.’Footnote 35 Thus, the commissioners would ‘produce two separate catalogues in alphabetical order,’Footnote 36 each of them describing books in a different manner: for manuscripts, ‘the first two lines and the final two of each manuscript should be copied stating the number of pages of the volume,’Footnote 37 so as to identify whether the text was whole or incomplete. For printed books, ‘the surname of the author should appear first, then his name in parentheses. After that, the title of the volume.’Footnote 38 Moreover, the place and year of publication had to be included, in order to determine the exact edition of each text. As for those instances where more than one book was bound within the same volume, each of these was to be noted on the catalogue.Footnote 39 The Council of Castile must have gathered by then that the task was far more onerous than expected. Given the amount of detail that the authorities ordered to be included in the inventory, the task would now require more time than initially estimated, and therefore, the deadline for submitting inventories was extended until June 1767.Footnote 40 One of the main consequences of the enactment of this order is that by the end of 1767, most of the finalized versions of the catalogues started to be sent to Madrid from the different Jesuit provinces in Spain. Others would take some more time—even a few more years—to be completed, depending on the size of the colleges and the thoroughness of the operation. For example, the inventory for the College in Bilbao was finished in 1768,Footnote 41 while the one for the Colegio Máximo in Alcalá was finished as late as 30 June 1770.Footnote 42
After complying with this order, the resulting inventories might be considered faithful witnesses that describe the Jesuit libraries at this time. The fact that each of the books is itemized in such a descriptive manner, specifying author, title, format, date and place of publication, has allowed a scholars to explore the intellectual profile of these Jesuit colleges.Footnote 43
The process of expulsion at the College of St Alban
In Valladolid, St Alban’s College was seized by the military during the night of 2/3 April. The following days were spent in transferring the Spanish Jesuits to their new destinations ahead of their leaving the country.Footnote 44 The Rollo Principal de autos hechos para la ocupación de temporalidades de el Colegio de San Albano Seminario de Ingleses de la Ciudad de Valladolid at the Archivo Histórico NacionalFootnote 45 is a notarized and chronological relation of the events that ensued after the occupation of the College by the commissioners that Campomanes had designated, followed by the inventory of all the effects in the College.Footnote 46 This document describes the process of expulsion at St Alban’s following a chronological order. The Rollo provides further insight on the particularities of the process and how it differed from that of other Spanish Jesuit houses due to the dual nature of this English institution.
On 6 April, after having entered the College, and after all the Spanish religious— except for the two English students, Joseph Addis and John Buller, who remained there until 24 AprilFootnote 47—had left, Andrés Durango, commissioner Judge, started inventorying the jewels, gold, silver and other valuables. There is no record of any pleas for help or appeals for the Spanish Jesuits to remain in the College in these earliest moments of their expulsion.
On 11 April, Durango and his men prepared the inventories of the belongings found in the church, bedrooms, and furniture. These inventories contain valuable information which improves our understanding of how the members of College lived their daily lives, the nature of their religious practices, the material culture within which they developed their education, and the material culture associated with their specific situation. However, the focus of this study is the inventories of the College library and the information extracted from them, which allows us to ascertain the connection among these three indices and the inventory process as a whole.
It was not until 13 April that the arduous task of preparing an inventory for the Library started. It was finished relatively soon, on 17 April.Footnote 48 The resulting document—now preserved at the AGD, which shall be referred to as AGD1 for clarity purposes—is a 31-page index bound with the inventories of the rest of the College.
The instruction for the course of action to be taken in all Jesuit houses in all Spanish provinces was that one commissioner should pick up a book from the shelf and dictate the information to the scribe writing beside him. Thus, in the case of St Alban’s book inventory, the resulting record, AGD1, presents a series of running lines listing the books, separated by means of colons. The commissioners specified the day and time of day that each section of the library was examined and which bookshelf was being inspected. The scribes marked each section with the letters of the alphabet, but do not indicate the contents of each shelf. These features suggest that AGD1 was a draft, made in the earliest stages of the expulsion process. This hypothesis will be corroborated upon inspection of the legal documentation available in the archives of Madrid and Valladolid. Moreover, the fact that the inventory does not bear notarial signatures, or official stamps of the Council of Castile on the pages supports the claim that this was, in fact, a draft. Furthermore, not much care was taken by the scribes, and mistakes on the number of volumes are often crossed out and rewritten on the margins. This inventory was produced before the royal order, noted above, on how to inventory books was issued on 23 April and, hence, the books are not arranged in alphabetical order, but rather follow the topographic arrangement in the library. Another differentiating feature of this inventory in comparison with others compiled at this time is a list of some books found on the floor behind the shelves. The fact that the commissioners chose to record that these books were not in a bookcase not only illustrates the how careful and rigorous the authorities were but also paints a faithful picture of the state of the library in 1767.Footnote 49
Each item listed in AGD1 contains the name of the author (if known) and an abridged title—never the complete version—the size, number of volumes, and sometimes the material that the book is made of and a succinct description (old, used, tattered, etc.). One example would be ‘Guillaudi, in Epistolas Divi Pauli, one volume in quarto, bound in boards.’Footnote 50 In some other instances, not much detail is provided to identify the specific work, edition and other relevant bibliographical aspects. Such is the case of ‘another one in octavo, Correccion Romana’Footnote 51, or ‘Bibliotheca Veterum Patrum, eight volumes, folio, four of them are old and bound in wood, and the rest bound in parchment.’Footnote 52 This scarcity of detail is even more palpable when the officers are faced with books in a foreign language, English in particular. From the items in the inventory, it becomes apparent that the process of inventorying the books was as follows: one officer—who did not speak English—picked the book from the shelf and dictated the title to the scribe—who did not speak English either. Thus the hispanized pronunciation of the former and the hispanized hearing of the latter resulted in an abstruse annotation of the books. For instance, ‘Replima de Hurto [sic], another volume, in quarto’Footnote 53 is actually John Fisher’s A reply made unto Mr. Anthony Wotton and Mr. Iohn White ministers […].Footnote 54 There are numerous book entries that can only be identified by putting ourselves in the mind of a Spanish speaker transferring Spanish phonetics to an English title. It becomes obvious, therefore, that no assistance came from the English students in transcribing foreign book titles into the inventory. In some other cases, although sporadically, only a brief description of the book was given. Such is the case of ‘a little book in Greek, in octavo’Footnote 55, from which we can gather that the officers could not even read the Greek alphabet. Unfortunately, it is virtually impossible to identify these books.
It is unusual to find more than one inventory of a Jesuit library made upon the expulsion. In the case of St Alban’s, the fact that there is a second inventory still extant in the Archivo General Diocesano is undoubtedly the product of this confusing and sometimes even problematic Anglo-Spanish duality of the College; this document will henceforth be referred to as AGD2. Other studies on Jesuit library inventorying in 1767 only take into consideration one book catalogue, usually the finalised version, as that is normally the only extant copy. The finding of this second inventory proves, yet again, how unique the bureaucratic aspect of the expulsion was for this institution, because, as we shall see, this second inventory is the result of the idiosyncratic circumstances of St Alban’s.
AGD2 is an incomplete copy of AGD1. Unfortunately, only five bifolios of the whole document survive. In this case, the paper bears the official government stamp, and a space was left by the scribe for the notarization of the proceedings, which never actually happened. There are many similarities with AGD1. The shelves are labelled and contain the same number of book entries, but AGD2 presents each entry on a different line instead of an uninterrupted running line listing books, in a cleaner layout that favours the visual location of books. The mistakes in number of volumes or spellings which had been crossed out in the draft are now corrected and incorporated in a neat fashion. These hispanized titles of books in English, however, were not corrected, and therefore we can infer that the remaining English students did not help in the making of AGD2 either. There are only minor differences between AGD1 and AGD2. On the one hand, the dates of when each section of the library was inventoried, which were initially copied from AGD1, have been crossed out afterwards and corrected and, therefore, differ from those given in AGD1.Footnote 56 The stamped paper and the space left for the notarization indicate that this would become the official inventory. The reasons why this document was discarded and never notarized, thus remaining a discarded draft, are not stated in the inventory.
A third copy of the inventory survives in the Archivo Histórico Nacional (AHN) at Madrid. This is an exceptional finding, especially if we consider that what has been preserved are the final copies of the book catalogue that eventually reached the Council of Castile. An examination of its formal and legal features suggests that it was not started from scratch, but that this third inventory is a clean, authenticated copy of AGD1. The reasons to support this claim are, first of all, that this third version—AHN Inventory—presents the same topographic order as AGD1 and AGD2 and the same number of volumes, without any significant change in the organization of the items. Moreover, all the spelling of the hispanized foreign book titles and ambiguous descriptions of foreign book titles coincide with those of the AGD1 and AGD2 inventories. In fact, the only differences between AGD1 and AHN are its extension— 30 pages in the formerFootnote 57 vs. 49 in the latter—and the fact the latter bears the official signatures and notarial stamp, with a neater layout and presentation overall. The notarial stamp indicates that the contents of the document have been verified by a member of the Government commission appointed for the expulsion. Neither AGD1 nor AGD2 were verified. AHN is, therefore, an official and authenticated document.Footnote 58 Its physical features are similar to the incomplete AGD2. A line is utilized to record to each item in the AHN copy, resulting in a considerably lengthier document.
There is, however, a noteworthy change in the content of the final section of this inventory. All three inventories end with a section devoted to the Infierno or Hell, where the books banned by the Inquisition were kept. While AGD1 and 2 have the same titles with the same hispanized spellings in foreign books, the AHN copy gives a literal translation into Spanish of the titles of the books in English. By combining AGD1 and AHN we can identify more books than by looking at one document in isolation. For example, ‘Te memori obte rigeous relibet, another volume, in octavo’Footnote 59 becomes ‘Breve colleccion delos libros y cartas escritas de Juan Canne, en octavo’Footnote 60, and is in fact John Camm’s The memory of the righteous revived being a brief collection of the books and written epistles of John Camm & John Audland.Footnote 61 It is quite evident that the two remaining English students collaborated with the process in this section, since AGD1 and AGD2 prove that the official commissioners could not speak, write or read English and could not have translated those titles into Spanish by themselves.Footnote 62 We might assume that the commissioners felt the need to be extra thorough in fear of what books this section might contain, since they were all prohibited by the Inquisition and a special permit was necessary to read them, one which the rectors of St Alban’s had been granted.Footnote 63
Although the focus of this article is the process of inventorying the library rather than its contents, it might be of interest to mention the main features of its holdings, as far as they have been identified. These include a large number of religious works by renowned Catholic writers at that time, both Continental and English: Lawrence Anderton, John Fisher, Gregory Martin, and Robert Persons among others, as well as some non-religious texts by a number of authors, some of them by Protestant authors, for example Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, a Shakespeare Folio, and John Lyly’s Euphues.Footnote 64
These three inventories, therefore, show the progress in the process of cataloguing St Alban’s College Library, and, though undated, can be easily ordered chronologically. However, their relation to the final, official account remains to be seen. Michael E. Williams, who has studied the expulsion of the Jesuits at St Albans, provided a detailed relation based on the Rollo Principal.Footnote 65 He does not, however, seem to have known or seen any of the inventories of the library studied in this article, given that he alludes only to the two catalogues referred to in the Rollo Principal whose elaboration would last from May until August of that same year.Footnote 66 It was the Instruction on how to prepare catalogues issued on 23 April, noted above, which would render the AGD and AHN inventories impractical and which would also prompt the preparation of a new definitive one, which has not been yet unearthed.
On the one hand, neither AGD1-AGD2 nor AHN discriminated between printed or manuscript books, as was established by the order of 23 April. Thus, a single document, instead of two with differentiation of manuscript and printed books, had been produced. On the other hand, the book entries do not follow the guidelines of the government’s order, consequently making it rather vague: manuscripts were neither labelled nor described, and none of the printed books on the lists contained information about the time or place of publication. The AGD1, AGD2 and AHN copies discussed were just lists of items made in order to record the existence of the books and to allow their identification, but they were not intended for their appraisal, and, therefore, cannot be used to estimate the value of the individual volumes. This is of relevance to the operation, as the money from the sale of Jesuit property would pay for the expenses of the process of expulsion. That is precisely why the government order required the appointment of booksellers for the preparation of the definitive versions of the catalogues—no longer called ‘inventories’ on paper by the authorities—in all colleges: their knowledge of the material allowed them to identify the value of every item in the shelves of the library. The shift in denomination of the document, from an inventory to a catalogue, marks the difference of interest as well. While an inventory just lists the items, a catalogue presents detailed information and the focus lies on the exact value of each book.
According to the Rollo Principal, the Instruction to catalogue books and papers reached Durango on 2 May, a Saturday,Footnote 67 and on the very next day preparations started to be made to prepare an index complying with those guidelines. That Sunday, he appointed a Mercedarian brother to elaborate the new and final inventory. On Monday 4 May, with two more assistants, a Law professor, who was versed in Latin, as amanuensis, and a bookseller as supervisor, the new inventory was started.Footnote 68 Whether these commissioners could speak or read English seemed to be irrelevant for them, as it was not mentioned on the Rollo. What the Rollo states is that Joseph Addis and John Buller, the remaining two English students, left the college on 24 AprilFootnote 69 and thus they were not involved in the compilation of the final catalogue.
The task of cataloguing books and papers proved to be more cumbersome than expected, and on 26 May, Bustamante informed Durango that an extension of the two-month deadline had been granted by the Council of Castile,Footnote 70 since communication with each of the different Jesuit Provinces had evidenced that more than two months were necessary to deal with such a large number of properties.Footnote 71 As a result, two Mercedarian brothers—their theology rector and another brother—were sent over to St Alban’s to prepare the library catalogue.Footnote 72
According to the Rollo principal, the draft version was completed on 16 June, a date that could be of significance in understanding the complexities of the process.Footnote 73 In order to prepare a clean copy, two more scribes were appointedFootnote 74 until the task was finished on 7 July.Footnote 75 It finally reached Madrid and was bound in leather on 4 August 1767.Footnote 76 But why have these documents, mere drafts, survived and not the final catalogues? These procedural records find their place in the state archives. The AHN inventory is part of the documentation sent to the Council of Castile, which would eventually be transferred, as all other files resulting from the expulsion of the Jesuits, to the Archivo Histórico Nacional at Madrid. On the other hand, the draft AGD1 and AGD2 inventories are quite recent acquisitions of the Archivo General Diocesano at Valladolid. It was only in the early twentieth century, when a legal dispute concerning the appointment of a new rector at St Alban’s required the authorities to delve into these documents to determine their rights as an institution, that they were sent from the College archives to the archbishop of Valladolid who was acting as a mediator.Footnote 77 Since they bore no legal interest for the Council of Castile, they had previously been kept at the St Alban’s archive along with a series of letters exchanged between Durango and Bustamante.Footnote 78
The other two catalogues described in the Rollo have not yet been found in either AGD or AHN. There is, however, a single folio in the Archivo General Diocesano, which is possibly a discarded page of the final book catalogue. The heading reads ‘Index of Manuscript Books of the Common Library’Footnote 79 followed by three manuscript books, described following the 23 April guidelines: the three of them have their own incipit and explicit transcribed, as well as the number of pages and the book size. Unfortunately, this is the only surviving page, left unfinished for unknown reasons. Nonetheless, this manuscript allows us to form an idea of what the final book catalogue might have looked like.
It was at these final stages of the inventorying process, as early as the summer of 1767, that the English Bishops made an inquiry to the Ambassador Extraordinary of Spain in London, Prince Masserin, about the three colleges in Spain, claiming that they belonged to the Catholic Church in England. On 26 July, following the investigations on the foundations and ownership of the colleges, the Vicar Apostolic of the London District, Richard Challoner (1691–1781), suggested that the three colleges be merged in Valladolid and passed on to the English secular clergy. The Council of Castile agreed on 8 September 1767.Footnote 80 The tensions which had arisen in the seventeenth century as a result of the dual national identity of the College—as well as those which had occurred between the secular clergy and the English Jesuits—had caused problems on the national sphere. So too the ecclesiastical authorities in England had their concerns of the goings-on within the College. The acquisition of the College at Valladolid put an end to the issue on Spanish soil.Footnote 81 The Bishops’ inquiry is yet another instance of the difficulties which had arisen as a result of the dual national identity of the College. In this case, their action was essential to ensure the survival and the future of the English Mission in Spain, its heritage, and, in particular, the book collection that can be seen in the 1767 inventories. The number of copies that are extant, and the ones missing, reflect, however, the complexities of the process at St Alban’s.
After the library catalogues reached the Council of Castile, usually only the fairer complete version was preserved, but that was not the case for the English College. Certainly, there are several other instances of 1767 Jesuit inventories that deviate from the standard book catalogue which was kept in the archives after the expulsion. For instance, in a similar fashion to the inventories discussed in this article, the book index of the Colegio de la Anunciada in Pamplona contains vague book descriptions and omits names of authors, places and dates of publications. There is a reference to a fairer copy of this inventory ‘expanded and perfected’,Footnote 82 probably after the royal order of 23 April on how to inventory books, but which has not yet been studied. It is not possible to know when these inventories were drawn up, as the dates are not given, and, consequently, we cannot claim that the inventorying process presented the same uncertainties and difficulties to that at St Alban’s.Footnote 83 Another example of an early book inventory similar to St Alban’s book index is that of the library of the Colegio de San Andrés in Bilbao, which dates from 17 April 1767.Footnote 84 The process of inventorying the library seems to have been comparable at this college, as an additional copy—a cleaner version dating from 9 May 1767—was also prepared after in order to comply with the guidelines of the royal order of 23 April.Footnote 85 A different example of is that of the Jesuit Colegio de la Concepción in Albacete, with eight surviving catalogues. Each of the chambers of the Jesuit staff was inventoried separately in 1767, and five years later, they were inventoried again, as the books were to be transferred to a secular institution. No library inventory survives.Footnote 86 Finally, a curious example is that of the inventory of the Colegio de la Inmaculada Concepción in Orihuela. It was finished on 2 May 1767Footnote 87 without complying with the Instruction on how to Catalogue Books, and is accompanied by a series of letters in which the commissioner in charge of the process explains that the inventory is the outcome of the need for haste in order to avoid an increase in costs. This inventory also presents the books in their original place within the library, instead of the usual alphabetical order, or outside in other areas of the college. The finalised version, however, has not yet been located.
On the European scene, there are some library inventories produced as a result of the Suppression of the Society in 1773 that bear resemblances to the indices presented in this study. In a similar manner to the inexact transcription of book details on the AGD1, AGD2 and AHN inventories, it is the norm for Croatian library inventories resulting from the expulsion to omit authors’ names, places and dates of publications of books.Footnote 88 The lists were often written in Latin—regardless of the language in which the book was written—which presents an added difficulty in the process of identification of books. There are also resemblances between St Alban’s book inventories and the inventory of the Great Library of the English Academy at Liège. This book index was drawn up after the expulsion of the Society from the Academy.Footnote 89 The document, produced with the involvement of English Jesuits in or around 1792 and under different circumstances, serves as a still image of the physical disposition of the books and the different sections which the library contained. This inventory states that the books were arranged into thirteen sections, each of them bearing the Latin subject heading.Footnote 90
In spite of the shared peculiarities with the archival documentation produced at the English College, not as much material evidence survives regarding the proceedings or timelines of the process of inventorying. The reasons behind this lack of information on the bureaucratic aspect of the operation is that in many cases the only extant copies of the catalogues are the finalised copies and, thus, any information on the fieldwork carried out by the commissioners in Spain or in Europe is impossible to ascertain. Moreover, it has been made evident that the difficulties and uncertainties arising when seizing the properties at this particular College—St Alban’s—were the product of its dual English and Spanish nature. The surviving documents of other Spanish Jesuit colleges, not vital for the contextualization of the inventories of those libraries, have not gathered much scholarly attention either.
Unlike these previous Spanish examples, the richness of archival documentation, and of book inventories in the case of St Alban’s College is clearly prompted by its complex identity as an institution: it was conceived as part of the English Mission and its students were English, but it was under Spanish management and on Spanish soil. All of this might have caused a higher degree of concern about the possible impact of the expulsion of the Jesuits, and therefore a certain eagerness to have the contents of the library inventoried as soon as possible.
Conclusion
The three surviving copies of the inventories of the library of the Royal English College of St Alban’s offer a wealth of information about its content, as well as about the process of expulsion and the inventorying of its holdings. These inventories are both alike and completely different to others produced in other Jesuit colleges. Through them, not only can we learn about the inventory process and the people involved in it, but we can also see a still image of the cultural and material life at the College in 1767 as reflected in its book collection. These three indices display the urge felt by the Spanish commissioners to finish within a very short deadline, undoubtedly accompanied by doubts on how to comply with the government orders in that foreign institution. The documents that bear witness of such a rush—three incomplete and, in the pecuniary sense, useless inventories and the as yet unearthed final two catalogues mentioned in the Rollo—are unique and idiosyncratic to this institution. It is unfortunate that both of these two final copies remain missing. However, the extant ‘draft’ inventories and the single page labelled ‘Index of Manuscript Books of the Common Library’ should not be discarded or considered useless. They offer answers to questions that have remained unanswered until now. Not only do they inform us of bureaucratic aspects of the expulsion of the Jesuits from St Alban’s that would otherwise remain unknown, they also provide valuable insight into aspects of the library contents that a finalised catalogue could not. These draft inventories open multiple doors to future studies of the library of the College. Since the books were listed as they were found on the shelves, they present an exact topographical description of the library at the time of the expulsion, so it is possible to determine the organization of the books on the shelves and the possible thematic classification followed to arrange the library.Footnote 91 We are able to know the exact location of each book, even when they had been found behind the bookshelves. Furthermore, we can gather information on the reading habits and into the educational practices of the College by the state in which these books were found—very new, fairly used, tattered, etc.
Thanks to the Rollo principal and the three inventories, we get a glimpse of how many people were involved in undertaking each different assignment, and the distribution of tasks within the timeline of the whole process. The collaborative cataloguing process is manifested by the way in which books were itemized and the multiple revisions and corrections made in the different versions of the indices. As to the interactions between the Spanish officers and the English students, we can be certain that they were cut off very early in the process, despite the fact that they still remained in the College. We can infer that, while inventorying the common access sections of the library, the officers acted on their own. This is evident by observing that the vast majority of English titles in AGD1, AGD2 and AHN1 contain mistakes or quandaries. Only when facing the forbidden section, the Infierno, did they consider seeking help from the two remaining English speakers. Perhaps they felt somewhat uneasy about the contents of the books in the forbidden section and felt the need to be ultra-scrupulous. However, neither of the two English pupils could have helped in the compilation of the final catalogue, since they had left the College on 24 April,Footnote 92 before the fairer copy of the catalogue was even started.
There are several conclusions that we can draw from the existence of this unique archival documentation. The surviving inventories were prepared only twelve days after the College was seized, which is a very short length of time when compared to other instances, such as those mentioned above. These archival documents, which were long forgotten, remaining as drafts and, thus, never sent to the Council of Castile, reflect with great depth a particular and relevant moment in the history of St Alban’s College. From their pages exude both the desire felt by the commissioners to be efficient, and the anxiety generated by the turbulent and uncertain times that this institution was living through. In addition, the fact that they were rewritten more than three times and the speed with which they were prepared also evinces a clash of Spanish and English interests. Therefore, they should not only be regarded as lists of books providing information on the holdings of the library, but also as faithful witnesses of this crucial moment of the history of the English College in Valladolid.
