ancient art.  “The statues go on prosperously,” says Cardinal Barberini, in a letter to a Mazarin, “nor shall I hesitate to rob Rome of her most valuable ornaments, if in exchange we might be so happy as to have the King of England’s name among those princes who submit to the Apostolic See.”  Charles the First was particularly urgent to procure a statue of Adonis in the Villa Ludovisia:  every effort was made by the queen’s confessor, Father Philips, and the vigilant cardinal at Rome; but the inexorable Duchess of Fiano would not suffer it to be separated from her rich collection of statues and paintings, even for the chance conversion of a whole kingdom of heretics."[190]

This monarch, who possessed “four-and-twenty palaces, all of them elegantly and completely furnished,” had formed very considerable collections.  “The value of pictures had doubled in Europe, by the emulation between our Charles and Philip the Fourth of Spain, who was touched with the same elegant passion.”  When the rulers of fanaticism began their reign, “all the king’s furniture was put to sale; his pictures, disposed of at very low prices, enriched all the collections in Europe; the cartoons when complete were only appraised at L300, though the whole collection of the king’s curiosities were sold at above L50,000.[191] Hume adds, “the very library and medals at St. James’s were intended by the generals to be brought to auction, in order to pay the arrears of some regiments of cavalry; but Selden, apprehensive of this loss, engaged his friend Whitelocke, then lord-keeper of the Commonwealth, to apply for the office of librarian.  This contrivance saved that valuable collection.”  This account is only partly correct:  the love of books, which formed the passion of the two learned scholars whom Hume notices, fortunately intervened to save the royal collection from the intended scattering; but the pictures and medals were, perhaps, objects too slight in the eyes of the book-learned; they wore resigned to the singular fate of appraisement.  After the Restoration very many books were missing; but scarcely a third part of the medals remained:  of the strange manner in which these precious remains of ancient art and history were valued and disposed of, the following account may not be read without interest.

In March, 1648, the parliament ordered commissioners to be appointed, to inventory the goods and personal estate of the late king, queen, and prince, and appraise them for the use of the public.  And in April, 1648, an act, adds Whitelocke, was committed for inventorying the late king’s goods, &c.[192]

This very inventory I have examined.  It forms a magnificent folio, of near a thousand pages, of an extraordinary dimension, bound in crimson velvet, and richly gilt, written in a fair large hand, but with little knowledge of the objects which the inventory writer describes.  It is entitled “An Inventory of the Goods, Jewels, Plate, &c. belonging to King Charles the First, sold by order of the Council of State, from the year 1619 to 1652.”  So that from the decapitation of the king, a year was allowed to draw up the inventory; and the sale proceeded during three years.