Portrait of an Ogre
The Family Affairs of Sir Thomas Phillipps (Phillipps' Studies No. 2). By A. N. L. Munby. (Cambridge University Press. 15s.) ANYONE familiar with the town of Cheltenham will be aware of Thirlestaine House, whose dignified and portico 'd facade overlooks the Bath Road just beyond the main block of College buildings. Built in 1823, enlarged by Lord Northwick about 1840, the huge stately house was first rented in 1862, then in 1867 purchased, by Sir–Thomas Phillipps Bart. of Middle Hill, near Broadway in the Cotswolds. Phillipps—the only child and heir of a wealthy calico- printer—wanted this spacious dwelling in order to house his vast collections of manuscripts and printed books (also, on a lesser scale but still bulky, his collection of pictures); and, when he died in 1872, Thirlestaine House, books and pictures apart, was crammed with the largest assemblage of manuscripts ever got together by one man.
And what kind of a man ? This is the question which Mr. A. N. L. Munby, Fellow and Librarian of King's College, Cambridge, sets himself to answer in the second volume of a projected series devoted to Phillipps and his collections. The first volume dealt with the complexities of the collector's several privately-printed catalogues ; the subsequent volumes will be devoted to his myriad possessions and to his activities as author and editor ; the present work intro- duces the man himself as a living (one can hardly write " human ") being, in relation to his two wives; his three children and a crowd of reluctant or apprehensive acquaintances. It is a tribute to the skill and restraint of Mr. Munby's portraiture that he persuades us to suspend judgement on his model until we can respect him as a truly great collector ; for in any other capacity a nastier piece of work than Sir Thomas Phillipps Bart. would be hard to imagine. He was stingy and a bully, a ruthless hater, arro- gant, purse-proud and violent to the point of insanity. His savage temper and implacable cruelty were swiftly in evidence when a member of his family disobeyed his wishes, or a committee refused to be hectored, or opportunity offered to give rough unmannerly expression to his rabid, anti-Catholic phobia. Of these resentments, by far the bitterest and longest-lived was provoked by his eldest daughter's marriage, against her father's wishes, to James Orchard Halliwell, a young man of growing reputation among antiquarians and destined to become a Shakespearean scholar of distinction. This resentment was the greater because an entail on the Middle Hill property secured it to Henrietta Halliwell after her father's death, and directed that her husband take the name of Phillipps in addition to his own. The Baronet deliberately set out to ruin his son-in-law and to destroy an inheritance which he could not prevent. Halliwell was considerably vulnerable to attack and innuendo, on account of a mysterious affair involving certain manuscripts sold by him and formerly in the Library at Trinity College, Cambridge. As one might expect, defeated in his attempts to break the entail, Phillipps exploited to the utmost the dubious element in Halliwell's career, and lost no opportunity of making reckless accusations against the thief and liar who " persuaded his.wife to play the whore and run away from her home." For a time Mrs. Halliwell showed filial patience under this barrage of insult ; but at last she turned on her detestable parent, and the two parties were at war. Phillipps, beside himself with fury, took an almost unbelievable revenge. Leaving Middle Hill for his new mansion in Cheltenham (and blandly ignoring his legal obligation as life-tenant to hand on to Henrietta a family property in good order), he determined that his hated son-in-law should inherit a ruin in the middle of a desert. Instead of letting the place to his own profit, he cut down the timber and left the building to rot, so that, by the time successive hooligans from Birmingham had broken in, stolen lead frqrn the roof and fittings from the windowless house, Middle Hill was a wreck. All of this, and the rest of the acts of Sir Thomas Phillipps (a private citizen) and the barbarities he committed out of sheer ill-nature, are they not recounted in Munby's deft and documented monograph, which can be warmly recommended to amateurs of eccentricity, to ogre-fanciers and to all who regard collectors of every kind as indefensible maniacs ? Those of us branded as members of the herd must endure in dignified silence the tramplings of a rogue- elephant we cannot disown. The later volumes of " Phillipps Studies " will do us right ; and our " Family Affairs " will be forgotten, in appreciation of our services to posterity as rescuers of
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