A NOTE ABOUT THIS ARTICLE
The Harvard Library Bulletin originally commissioned the following article by The Reverend Professor Peter Gomes to accompany a 1997 Houghton Library exhibition that examined the library of Harvard’s first endowed chair.
“Thomas Hollis of London: Piety, Philanthropy, and Harvard at Two Hundred Seventy-Five Years,” however, first appeared in The Contentious Triangle: Church, State, and University, a festschrift in honor of Professor George Hunston Williams published in 2000 by the Truman University Press, by whose courtesy we reprint it in these pages.
Its belated appearance in the summer 2002 volume of the Bulletin — 280 years after the appointment of the first Hollis Professor — was occasioned by the completion of Peter X. Accardo’s bibliographical examination of the books that Thomas Hollis gave for his professor’s use, which number among the earliest extant Harvard collections. Accardo, who is Acquisitions Bibliographer in Houghton Library, has compiled a checklist of the Hollis books, which follows Professor Gomes’s essay at the end of this issue.
The subject of Professor Gomes’s essay was the third of five generations to bear the name of Thomas Hollis and the second of four Harvard benefactors in that line. In his biography of Thomas Hollis V (Thomas Hollis of Lincoln’s Inn: A Whig and his Books, Cambridge 1990), William H. Bond writes poignantly of the Hollis affection for the college: “curiously enough,” he notes, “none of the seventeenth or eighteenth-century Hollises crossed the Atlantic to inspect the college for themselves. Their good works were founded on faith, reinforced by the reports of travellers, correspondents, and agents in and from the New World.”
It is Thomas Hollis III whose many good deeds The Reverend Professor Gomes and Peter X. Accardo not only ably document in the pages that follow, but eloquently commemorate as well.
Thomas Hollis of London and His Gifts: Two Hundred Seventy-Five Years of Piety and Philanthropy at Harvard
Peter J. Gomes
The Most Bountiful Benefactor
At the time of his death Thomas Hollis was the greatest benefactor that Harvard College had ever known, his gifts having amounted to nearly £5,000 sterling, an extraordinary sum and nearly one quarter of the value of the entire Harvard endowment. A funeral oration in Cambridge on April 7, 1731, called him “The most bountiful benefactor to [this] Society.” He was the single largest benefactor of the College library, and the provider of two professorships, the first of which, the Professorship of Divinity, was the first in any American college. A devout and discerning Baptist layman of the English merchant class, Hollis had never seen Harvard nor been to the new world, yet he conceived a generous devotion to a place which by his worldly standards was provincial and ill-supplied, and by his religious principles, parochial and intolerant. It proved to be a match as unlikely as it was profitable. At his death his eulogists both in England and in New England remarked upon the capaciousness and imagination of his charity, for by his gifts he had helped to secure the future of a modest college, and to open up to it the possibilities of greater and more useful service. 275 years after the October 24, 1722 inauguration of his first professor, and alone after John Harvard himself, the College eponym, Thomas Hollis, Merchant, of London, may indeed yet be called Harvard’s “Most Bountiful Benefactor.”
The Man Behind the Gifts
What we know of Thomas Hollis and his bountiful relationship with Harvard College from 1718 to 1730, we know from his prolific correspondence with Harvard officials, and most particularly from the more than fifty letters that he wrote to his closest friend and ally in Boston, The Reverend Benjamin Colman, A.B. 1692. Colman was minister of the Brattle Street Church in Boston, and a Fellow and Overseer of Harvard College, and when President John Leverett died in 1724, Colman was Hollis’s candidate to succeed him. Hollis’s letters are filled with the detailed transactions of a man of business, including instructions to his agents in Boston, whose sale of his goods provided the money that he gave to
the College; and to the College treasurer for the good management of that money. He followed Harvard’s financial affairs with the practiced eye of a very careful investor. To Colman he wrote “I am glad to heare your College is in cash …” but rather than raising the salaries of the existing tutors from the surplus, Hollis wished that a few more tutors might have been engaged. If there were to be a general raise, he hoped that his Professor would see the benefit in his own salary. While clear in his views he did not wish to issue instructions to the Harvard authorities from such a distance, although the wishes of a donor, as he well knew, are always to be taken very seriously: “I shall not direct them,” he writes, “but I may let you know, and you may let whom you please see these lines, that I shall be very well pleased, if they let him share also in their present Bounty. And I do hope, he will deserve and merit it, at least I wish it.”
While business was the principle purpose of these letters, they were not devoted exclusively to business, and provide details not only about Harvard College and about eighteenth century life in London, but a memoir of a dissenting English philanthropist of unusual interests and particular habits as well. He writes, for example, of his theological conviction: “I make the bible the Rule of my Life and practice —and ground of my future hopes, though I am very Imperfect in Works, and weak in Faith”; his physical ailments: “Since my Wifes decease, I have had small touches and uneasines with the Gout for Weeks, but no great Pains” ; his taste in personal reading: “I think of sending with the Herbal two volums, Burnet of the Charterhouse, Theory of the Earth Deluge and Conflagration in English … I think they are finely writt, tho I cant agree with his Hypothesis in many things.” We know that Hollis was fluent in French, had some Latin, was a friend of Isaac Watts, and an admirer of John Milton. He had opinions on European politics which he shared with his provincial correspondent: “The King of Spaine having resigned his Crowne to this eldest Son and he and his Queen retiring from worldly affairs, fills the head of our politicians with amuzements, whether it be Trick or Superstition.”
He could also write quite sharply. Of the College library, one of whose chief benefactors he had become, he wrote,
Your library is reckoned here to be ill managed, by the account I have of some that know it. You want seats to sett and read, and chains to your valuable books like our Bodleian Library, or Sion College in London. You know their methods, which are approved, but do not imitate them. You let your books be taken at pleasure home to Mens houses, and many are lost. Your (boyish) Students take them to their chambers, and teare out pictures and Maps to adorne the Walls; such things are not good… Your goodnes will excuse me, if I hint to you what I think is faulty; if you are convinced my hints are just, your own prudence will rectify what is amiss, so far as you can.
He was so annoyed with the poor penmanship of his own Professor, Edward Wigglesworth, that he wrote to him, “I beseech you if you write me any busines as requires an answer never write to me any more so, If you will not write larger (for I doubt not but you can) get some one to transcribe it in a character I may read, or else never write to me again.” He was not simply being difficult, he was losing his eyesight: “. . . my own Father was quite blind at my Age . . .” and it was a mercy of God “. . . that I am able to see and write at all Glory be to his Name.” He was then sixty-four years old.
In his first letter to Harvard, on March 2, 1718/19, Mr. Hollis wrote to “Mr. Increase Mather formerly President of Harvard Colledg in New England —or to the Gentleman who is now President thereof,” suggesting a rather imprecise knowledge of the institution to which he was making his first gift of “twelve casks of Nales and one cask of cutlery wares, at a value of £104.4.7.” His last letter to Benjamin Colman, dated January 24, 1729/30, concludes his arrangements for the gift of his second professorship to the College, of which he had become the chief and most distinguished benefactor. It ends on this rather sad note:
Hoping this long and tedious Correspondence is near finishing and I think it is time now, I having compleated my seaventieth yeare, the age of man. What may still awaite me in the next stage of sorrows I know not. My aged Mother my fathers widow is now gone to rest this winter, almost 80 Aet. My brother John Hollis has been dangrosly ill this Winter of the Milliary Fever, is now abroad again, blessed be God. My Nepheu Tho [mas] Hollis has been very ill of a Complication of disorders, how long may last I know not.”
Distant and remote countries, as well as Britain, will miss him, and lament his death. The communities to which he stood related received instances of his distinguished bounty: and what made this part of his character the more shining, is that his goodness was not confined or restrained entirely to a party.
He was mourned in New England as well. The New England Weekly Journal of April 19, 1731, contained an extensive account of the Hollis benefactions to Harvard in which it was desired to explain “how he [Hollis] had come to show us the kindness of God as he has done.”
How It All Began
In his letter to Increase Mather of March 2, 1718/19, Thomas Hollis begins by reminding the father of a message delivered to him by his son, Cotton Mather:
When you was at London, you may remember I gave to your Son that was at my Shop in the Minoris a Minute out of my Unkle Robert Thorners Will of a future bequest that he ordred should be paid to your Colledg and left me one of his Trustees. That Legacy is yet many Years distant. Perhaps you may remember I told you, possibly you might hear from me sooner.’
Robert Thornor was the brother of Thomas Hollis’s mother, Ann Thornor, and therefore an uncle by marriage. Thornor and his brother-in-law, Thomas Hollis 11, our Thomas’s father, were both members of prominent dissenting families with origins in the English midlands. This generation of Hollises and Thornors settled in London where they looked after their extensive business affairs and became active in the non-conformist religious community in the years between the restoration of the monarchy in 1659 and the early years of William and Mary after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The same set of political upheavals that sent James II into exile and placed upon the throne his sister and brother-in-law, Mary Stuart and William of Orange, added also to the uncertainties of the political situation in New England, placing in particular jepoardy the charters of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Bay Colony. For some time Increase Mather, who rejoiced in the title ‘Rector of Harvard College,’ had been in England as agent of both College and colony in an attempt to win friends where he could. He had begun his efforts in 1688, and had had five interviews with the soon-to-be deposed James II: when King James was replaced Mather had to start all over again with the new monarchs. One of Mather’s most natural constituencies in London would have been that small but influential community of well-off and well-placed dissenters for whom the welfare of a reformed and Protestant College in New England, the last best hope of an English reformed Protestantism, was of some interest, if not priority. Among the conspicuous leaders of this community were Thomas Hollis 11, and his brother-in-law, Robert Thornor, and it was to them and their circle that Increase Mather repaired in his search for friends and support.
While Increase Mather was the first graduate of Harvard College to be its president, that distinction should not lead to the conclusion that he was merely the domestic product of a local college in the wilderness. He had taken his degree with the Class of 1656, and the next year he had gone to Ireland where in 1658 he took the degree of MA. from Trinity College, Dublin. He then went to England where he accepted various preaching appointments and served for a brief time as chaplain to the Commonwealth garrison at Guernsey. Wisely, when Charles II was proclaimed on May 30, 1660, Mather decided to return to New England. While in England he was well regarded as a preacher and had offers of ecclesiastical preferment if only he would become an Anglican, and although he was very much at home in England and had many friends there, he felt that his true calling was in the New England of his birth. In Boston he rose to prominence, and by 1683 he had published more than twenty-five books. In 1685 he was appointed Acting President of Harvard, and the next year he took over the presidency with the title of Rector, while never giving up the pastoral care of his large church in Boston. Three years later, in 1688, he was in London doing his ambassadorial best for New England, where he remained until he returned to Boston in 1692. It was during this interval that he doubtless met Robert Thornor and his brother-in-law, Thomas Hollis. Hollis would be named the executor of Thornor’s will, in which Harvard was to be remembered, and our Thomas Hollis would succeed his father as executor of his uncle’s trust. It can thus be claimed that it was the agency of Increase Mather which first directed the notice of the Hollis family toward Harvard College.
At the time of Hollis’s 1718/19 letter to Increase Mather, both Hollis’s father, Thomas Hollis 11, and his uncle, Robert Thornor, were dead. Hollis was principal heir to his father’s considerable estate, and together with his brother John was also now trustee of his uncle Thornor’s trust, thus both head of his family and arguably one of the most influential dissenters in London. Like his father and grandfather he was by persuasion and practice a Baptist, and a leading member of Pinner’s Hall in London, perhaps the most prominent dissenting chapel in the city. Its pastor, The Reverend Jeremiah Hunt, was related to Hollis by marriage, and the congregation had long enjoyed a distinguished reputation. In his letter to Mather he indicates that he too intended to benefit Harvard, following the example of his uncle. This is the second time that Hollis had invited expectations from Harvard College. The first time occurs in a letter dated June 26, 1710, from Henry Newman, the Corporation’s agent in London, to President Leverett. Newman had been asked by Leverett to inquire into the state of the Thornor Legacy which had been proven on May 31, 1690, and which provided a sum of five hundred pounds. Newman had done his work well. He had met with two of Thornor’s trustees, and one of these trustees, Mr. Thomas Hollis “. . . at the Cross Daggers in the little Minories desires his Will may be enquir’d for after his Decease.”
Hollis clearly had intended to add a legacy of his own to that of his uncle, but by 1719 he had decided to give the money to Harvard outright, hence his somewhat coy phrase, “Perhaps you may remember I told you, possibly you might hear from me sooner.” He proposed to give Harvard one hundred pounds stirling “to the use of pious young Students for the Ministry instructed in your Colledg.” To provide this money he sent over twelve casks of nails which he had been told produced the readiest of money, and one cask of cutlery wares to be sold in New England, and the net proceeds with all freight and other charges deducted payable to the “President of the Colledg as shal be then alive . . .”
That “President of the Colledg as shal be then alive” was John Leverett, who had been in office since succeeding Increase Mather in 1701, and who had been informed in 1710 by Henry Newman that Thomas Hollis had some intention of favoring Harvard in his will. Leverett may or may not have remembered this intelligence given some years previously from Newman, and certainly he had no reason to expect that Hollis was prepared to make an outright gift. We may assume that he was caught unaware by this benefaction, and that his surprise was superceded by his delight. Whatever his emotions, Leverett was slow in replying to Hollis, who wrote to him on April 4, 1720, in mild rebuke:
Last yeare I made a present to your College for use of poor Pious Students for the Ministry, and have your Treasurer’s receipt for the same. I received a letter from Mr. E. (sic, doubtless meaning B.) Colman about it informing me in part the Method and government of your Colege and made me hope to receive a letter also from you Sir, which I should esteem a favour when your leisure permits.
While Hollis was certainly annoyed with Leverett’s laggardly response he was not deterred in his intention to support the needs of divinity students, which his first gift was intended to supply. In this letter he specified that he wanted each man to get ten pounds per year, New England money, and that he was sending more goods whose sale should produce between six and seven hundred pounds, New England money, to be added to his account created by his previous gift, “. . . and the produce thereof to be disposed of as I shal hereafter expresly order …” With words that should have been music to any college president’s ear, he then wrote, “And if it seem good to you to incorage my pious intention I Have thoughts living or dying to make farther addition.”
President Leverett replied to Hollis’s first letter on June 3, 1720, but only a few days before he would have received Hollis’s chastening letter of April. From Hollis’s reply to Leverett of August I, we know that the letters crossed in the mail, and that part of the reason for the delay in Leverett’s reply was the death of his wife on June 7, 1720, for which Hollis offers his condolences. The apparent discrepancy between the date of Leverett’s letter, June 3, in which he writes of the death of his wife on June 7, may be explained by the habit of adding postscripts to letters from the date of the original writing up to the date on which the letter is actually dispatched on board ship. Leverett wrote to Hollis’s cousin, the historian John Neale, on June 13, and by Neale’s reply of August 6, we note that Leverett must have mentioned what Neale calls his “Affliction,” by which he means the death of Mrs. Leverett, because Neale also offers condolences and the consolations of Scripture.
Hollis and Leverett had at last begun their correspondence which was to prove so profitable for Harvard. From this first exchange between them we know that Harvard accepted the Hollis gifts and terms, and that Hollis, Leverett, and Harvard all parted on very good terms.
A Curious Coincidence
Thomas Hollis wrote to Increase Mather with the intention of his gift on March 2, 1718/19, and President Leverett made his reply in June 1720, over a year later. Between these two letters Benjamin Colman enters the correspondence on November 16, 1729, with a letter not to Thomas Hollis but to his brother John Hollis, with whom he had been writing over previous years concerning the welfare of two orphaned daughters of a clergyman. Colman, as described by Clifford Shipton, “was in his time both the youngest and the oldest minister of Boston.” He would serve Harvard for forty-eight years as an Overseer and eleven as a member of the Corporation, in which he was regarded by President Leverett as his right hand. He was elected president in succession to Leverett but declined the office for fear that his elitist reputation would prove hurtful to the financial interests of the college, which were then controlled by “the rustic Puritans who comprised a majority of the Lower House” of the General Court.
Immediately after his graduation in 1692, Colman sailed for London, where, after a series of misadventures, he began to make a name for himself as a preacher. He was introduced into prominent dissenting circles and made his way as well among Anglicans, and he served churches in Cambridge and Ipswich but spent his longest and happiest time in Bath, where he preached for two years. Altogether he was in England for seven years, during which he doubtless came into contact with that circle of London merchant-dissenters of whom John Hollis, the younger brother of Thomas, was a part. It was to the younger Hollis that he wrote on November 16, 1720, and in his letter spoke of the surprise gift of Thomas Hollis to the College, and noted,
It may be the Gentleman may be known to You, or may be related to You; and if it should so happen I would pray you to give Him my Thanks, being one of the present Governours of the College, and let him see the following account of it.
The “following account” described Harvard as a place where “The sons of parents Episcopal in their judgement, or Baptists, were equally received, instructed, and graduated in our little academy, as well as those of our profession, Congregational or Presbyterian.”
The younger brother shared this letter with the elder, who replied on January 14, 1720, in what would be the first of more than fifty letters between himself and Benjamin Colman. “I have received your letter dated Nov. 16, directed to Mr. John Hollis who is my Brother. We were copartners in trade when he corresponded with you, but l am since that retired.” We can understand his mild annoyance when it appears that so prominently placed a figure in Harvard’s affairs as Dr. Colman obviously has no idea of who he is:
I suppose if you look again into the N.E. College Register you wil find the gift your letter mentions entred in my name according to the receipt which was sent me under the hand of Mr. White your Treasurer from Messers Cradock and Gilbert, with whom I contracted before I sent the goods that they should take no provision, and I find they have complied by the account of sales sent me, with which I am wel satisfied.
He acknowledged Colman’s description of Harvard College, “. . . of which I had not so particular account before although I have had many thoughts of shewing some liberallity to it —ever since the death of my honored Unkle Robert Thorner —who made me one of his Trustees, of his Estate, devoted to pious uses. My Brother John Hollis is of late made a Trustee with me therein.” While repeating essentially what he had written to Increase Mather, Hollis went on to ask Colman’s advice on how his scholarship plan “… to assist Pious young men in their studies for the Ministry …” might be put to good effect, not only for New England but for the “. . . British Colonies beyond you which are greatly deficient of such helps as I am informed and rarely any of serious Religion and good morals are sent hence . . .” He indicated that he was sending over a chest of books, many of which he himself had read, together with a catalogue. Those which the College wished to have it could have. He then directs that The Reverend Elisha Callender of Boston be allowed to choose for his own use what remains of these books. Callender was minister of the Baptist Church in Boston, and in connection with this gift is Hollis’s first statement of his own religious identity: “My self and Brother and many of our family profess Adult Baptism. . . ,”
With apologies for the length of this first letter and with a request for Colman to answer him “so soon as you can with convenience,” Hollis signed off. In a “P.S.” he indicated that he was sending two chests of arms and some casks of nails to be sold and the income added to his account for the benefit of the College. On this letter, Benjamin Colman after the death of Thomas Hollis in 1731 notes, “Mr. Thomas Hollis No. 1 Mr. Hollis his Letters to me, respecting the Colledge, put in order, In all fifty and three.”
Raising the Stakes
On July 22, President Leverett, making up for lost time, wrote a second letter of thanks, and the next day, so too did Benjamin Colman. These letters were so full of unctuous praise that Hollis remonstrated with both of them, “I farther intreat you Sirs to cease your praises to me, I have it so much, I am weary of the thanks, it is overdoing, I feare it should hurt the Instrument, and swell the pride of a naughty heart . . . .” The real purpose of the letters of Leverett and Colman, however, was not merely to thank him, but to ask for Hollis to consider a gift of another kind for the College. It should be remembered that Harvard had not asked Hollis for scholarships but he had supplied them, and seemed keen on adding to his funds for that purpose. It is very likely from the time of his first gift that Leverett and Colman conceived to ask Hollis for something which they really did need and want. Doubtless hoping not to risk the scholarship funds now in place, nor to offend the donor with the hint of greed or ingratitude or both, they ventured to ask him for a professorship in Divinity, “Which should have born the Benefactor’s Name to all Posterity among us.” In their letters of July 22 and 23, 1720, we know that they put such a proposal before him, and that Hollis’s reaction was one of curious surprise:
Your new proposal of a suitable stipend for a Divinty Professor to read lectures in the Hall to the Students, Surprises me. I could not have thought but in the standing of your College you had made such a provision long since—however if not, or I mistake your meaning—l desire you at convenient time to explain more largely that matter to me, and to tell me how much will be called an Honorable Stipend.
Transatlantic correspondence in the eighteenth century was erratic: there was always the weather to be considered, and in winter fewer ships dared to cross in either direction. It is also clear that more ships sailed from England to Boston than in the other direction, and that as eager and impatient a correspondent as Thomas Hollis could send off two letters to Boston for every one that he received. This meant inevitable cross-overs of letters and delays in responding to inquiries, and Hollis’s letters are full of repeated requests for information not supplied in timely enough fashion. Had he been a less than determined giver he might have given up in the face of the very slow pace of correspondence from Cambridge. He had asked for details of the “Honorable Stipend” in his letter of September 23, 1720, but by the time of his letter to Colman of February 24, 1721, he had heard nothing. Referring to the letter which contained the proposal he wrote:
Towards the close of your letter [of July 23, 1720], you propose to my consideration, that I should appropriate an Income to make an honorable stipend for a Professor of Divinity to read Lectures in the Hall to the Students. At first I was much surprized at the Motion, not doubting but your College of so long standing had been wel furnisht with Professors as wel as Tutors. And indeed it has caused many thoughts in my Mind, by the delay of an answer, which I Presume is not your fault, but by occasion of the ships missing her Passage.
Thus preparing his readers for a “no,” Hollis writes, “I have taken your motion into consideration, thinking it a particular call of Providence to me to comply with it, hoping it may be of publick service, by the blessing of God, if a fitt Person be chosen, and it be put into a proper Method. Therefore I have inlarged my designed Bounty to your College . . . .” He had drafted up what he called “Orders and Institutions” governing his gifts. He did not regard these as yet definitive, but merely his “present thoughts, to be farther alterd, amended and confirmed, as you shal advise me …” but until an improved set of rules was agreed upon both by himself and by the College, these would have to stand. He asked that he be advised in the matter with “. . . your more mature and judicios thoughts in Summer so as to have time to Reply . . .” and that a copy of the College’s version of the rules be sent him. For the moment he proposed to provide one thousand pounds to support ten students at ten pounds a year, forty pounds as a stipend for a Professor of Divinity, five pounds for the Treasurer keeping and passing an annual account, and five pounds for some necessary expenses of the Trust, for a total of one hundred fifty pounds per year.
He was not certain that the salary for the professor was sufficient, not having had any advice on the matter from Cambridge, so he wrote “. . . now if you think what I here allott to the Professor and to the accomptant is too little, I shal be willing to take your opinions into a reconsideration.” He wanted to be sure that if the professor gave his lectures free to all the students, that those students who were the recipients of his scholarships should be relieved of college expenses elsewhere as a sign of their special need and special status. Among his other rules, he wanted to be assured that the proposed professor would always be in communion with one of the three denominations: Presbyterian, Congregationalist, or Baptist. These, and his other terms, he indicated he had given to his cousin, The Reverend John Neale, an eminent London dissenting divine and historian, for his review. He dispatched his letter and awaited a reply.
In the meantime Hollis corresponded with the treasurer of Harvard College, John White, with whom he had been used to discussing the details of the sale of his goods and the investments of the proceeds to his account, the interest from which was paid out to the College to defray the expenses of his scholarships. In his letter of August 4, 1721, Hollis discussed the means of”. . . future improvement of my donations to raise an income to defray the Expences annuall to the Professor and Students …” He had thought to do so by investing in real estate and in property but was dissuaded from real estate because 4% income could not be realized on it, and houses ran the risk of fire. Taking the advice, he decided to lend out the money at 6% common interest and good securities duly registered. Believing this to be the most prudent form of investment should the treasurer concur, Hollis instructed him to proceed along these lines. If the investment scheme proved sound, he asked that the treasurer send him a computation of how much more goods he needed to send the next year to completely fund his trust.
My desire is to have ten students on my foundation, if so many may be found, qualified as my Institutions direct —and a Professor of Divinity —at my sole charge, and hereby incorage some other publick Spirits to raise and maintain Professors in the other useful Sciences as the Universitys abroad are furnished.
Here is found the first mention of “Professors in the other useful Sciences,” which suggests that Hollis was not merely interested in subventing a divinity school, but had greater ambitions for Harvard’s development into a wellrounded University in the arts and sciences. His models were neither Oxford nor Cambridge, schools closed to the sons of dissenters and deficient in both piety and learning, but rather the Dutch universities. He expanded upon this theme in a letter to Benjamin Colman nearly a year later, when he wrote:
I should rejoyce to see or heare your College was wel furnished with Professors in every Science over and above your President Fellowes or Tutors —that Young Students might be compleatly instructed for the Ministry —and our Ministers at London incourage the sending such like Youth so designed to Harvard College N.E. instead of Leiden or Utrecht, our present practise, which would bring some moneys or money worth into New England and perhaps notwithstanding the charge of the voyage, would be as easy an expence, as they are now at in Holland.
In this letter Hollis informs the treasurer that it is unnecessary to send letters to him in care of his cousin, the arms merchant J. Williams: “. . . you need onely to direct your letters for Tho. Hollis Senior Marchant London. My name is wel known at the post offices . . . .”
The treasurer of Harvard College on June 10, 1721, in response to a request from President Leverett, prepared what he called a “short account of the unparalleled unceasing Munificence and Donations of the incomparable Mr. Hollis to the College.” Total cash received was two thousand five hundred and eighty-six pounds, five shillings, and six pence. He added “And the Present of Books is not to be forgotten, the Value whereof is better known to you than me.” Noting that the General Court was about to pass a formal vote of thanks to Mr. Hollis for his generosity, the treasurer, with ever an eye to the College’s bottom line, reminded President Leverett to remind the legislators that Mr. Hollis’s bounty did not in any way relax the College’s necessary financial burdens, nor the legislature’s responsibility to continue to meet them.
Nasty Debates and Pious Deceits
It is a point well to be remembered that Thomas Hollis did not propose to establish a chair in Divinity, but rather that he responded to the proposal of President Leverett and Dr. Colman. It is also well to remember that he made no efforts to disguise his Baptist persuasions, nor did he insist that his scholarship aid be restricted to his co-religionists. In this regard, while feeling a responsibility to help as many as he could in their preparation for the ministry, he felt a particular interest to assist Baptists for he knew that nobody else would provide for them at Harvard. In 1727 he was as sensitive on the subject of aid to Baptist students as he had been nearly a decade earlier. Writing to Colman, Hollis said:
I desire none of your College money to assist a Son of a Baptist, while I live. I think I have [reserved] power in my Gift to dispose of my own Exhibitions, but I have little prospect of desiring your favour for the poor Baptists, I wish heartily that I had.
It was thus with clarity and charity that Thomas Hollis undertook his philanthropic relationship with Harvard College. Amending the provisions of his Trust to provide for the new professorship, Hollis sent his version of his Orders to Cambridge on February 14, 1720. After providing forty pounds for the Professor and five pounds for the Treasurer, he devoted the rest of his Orders to the regulation of his Exhibitions, the ten scholarships of “Ten pounds a yeare…to assist one Pious young man, in the Judgement of Charity, Religiosly inclined, in his Studyes for the Ministry of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, One who is poor in this world, and can not comfortably goe forward without such charitable helps for three or four years.” No worthy candidate was to be deprived because of his belief and practice of Adult Baptism, “if he be sober and Religiosly inclined,” and he specifically excluded the nomination of any “Dunces or Rakes as not fitt to partake of this bounty.”
Hollis spent more time in the provisions for his scholarships than on the details of his professorship, for with the scholarships he was on familiar ground. In thinking about the professorship he had consulted with his London friends, chief among whom was his cousin, John Neale, and his Pastor, also a relative, Jeremiah Hunt. He had asked Colman and Leverett also to give further thought to his preliminary plans and to communicate their mature thoughts to him by summer so that he could make a thoughtful reply, and also could be assured that the money was in hand.
On June 21, 1721, the first day of summer, the Corporation met and drafted “Minutes directly in answer to Mr. Hollis letters,” as he had requested. The Minutes are conciliatory in spirit and substance, responding point for point to Hollis’s concerns and desires. Most importantly at point No. 10, where Hollis wished to be certain that the Professor belonged to a particular church among which he specified Presbyterian, Congregationalist, or Baptist, the Corporation agreed: “As to the Professor’s being in communion with a particular church, we judge it highly fitting; and, as to the limitation, we leave it to himself.
One week later the Corporation met again and on June 28, 1721, elected The Reverend Edward Wigglesworth into the new professorship. A letter signed by President Leverett and Dr. Colman was sent to Mr. Hollis for his consent to the election. This would appear to be the timely end to an agreeable transaction, and the beginning of a whole new era for Harvard College, but it was hardly the case.
In the political and theological climate of the 1720’s, the Harvard Corporation was in the firm possession of those who in the terms of the day would be called the liberals, chief among whom were President Leverett and Benjamin Colman. The Board of Overseers in Harvard’s divided governance, however, was the abiding place of the politically conservative and theologically orthodox. They were jealous of their prerogatives of inspection and approbation and determined to protect the College against heresies, and innovations which they regarded as heresies. The Hollis gift of a professorship excited the long-simmering tensions between the two governing boards.
To these general suspicions was added the particularly incendiary fear of the rising influence of Baptists, who were still anathema to the orthodox Calvinists. Hardly any objections had been made to Hollis’s scholarships, or to his constant pleas that Baptists not be excluded from his support, and it is clear that there were Baptist students in the College. A professorship, however, and of Divinity, the primary subject, was an entirely different matter. A Baptist donor who, while not favoring Baptists in the election to his professorship did not wish them to be excluded, was a dangerous thing in a College whose orthodoxy was already quite suspect.
President Leverett’s election in 1701 represented to many the vanquishing of the Mathers and their conservative influence, and Colman, with his Addisonianstyle preaching and his upper-class proto-Anglicanism, added to the orthodox fears for the College. If they supported the cause, the cause must be suspect. There was little subtlety about the controversy although no one wanted Hollis to hear of it lest he be tempted to withdraw all of the support upon which the College had come to depend. The Overseers suspected that Hollis’s vague terms, perhaps aided and abetted by Colman and Leverett, were a device to slip a Baptist or at least a liberal into the bosom of the College.
Where Hollis wanted his professor chosen without a religious test, it was indeed just such a test of orthodoxy that the Overseers wished to impose, and they would not accept his gift without the assurance that the professor would be sound and orthodox in the New England sense. This meant that he was “sound and orthodox” on the essential points of Calvinism, and particularly on the matter of the divine right of infant baptism, a position no Baptist could possibly affirm.
In the Overseers’ debates on Hollis’s original terms, Judge Samuel Sewall recorded in his diary his objections: “I objected against that article [permitting the professor to be a Presbyterian, a Congregationalist, or a Baptist] as choosing rather to lose the donation than accept it . . . This qualification of the Divinity Professor is to me a bribe to give my sentence to the disparagement of infant baptism, and I will endeavor to shake my hands from holding it.” Quincy implies that the Overseers coerced the Corporation into devising a revision of Hollis’s first set of orders with the purpose of hoodwinking him into conformity with New England orthodoxy. This was to be done by requiring that the professor be sound and orthodox with the tacit understanding that those qualities would be parsed after the formula of New England. Hollis could hardly object to the concept of theological soundness and orthodoxy; he was himself after all one of the chief dissenters in England and demonstrably in sympathy with Harvard College, which was itself meant to be a center of soundness and orthodoxy. Just how the Corporation came to agree to this device, and how the early negotiations with Hollis in 1721-1722 were carried out is unknown, for the records are silent and the usually reliable file of correspondence between Harvard and Hollis has substantial omissions. Quincy suspects mischief and a cover-up of what was clearly an exercise in duplicity.
Hollis, however, was not so easily deceived. First, he was theologically sophisticated and knew the terrain of doctrinal strife as well as any of his New England antagonists. Second, he was a shrewd man of business and well acquainted with the devices of sharp practice. Third, he had long surrounded himself with some of the most able minds in London. He invited seven of these London Divines to review the New England “scheme of the Professor’s work.” They did so and advised him not to sign until their suggested revisions had been reviewed by the Harvard authorities. They understood at a glance what the New Englanders were attempting to put over with the “sound and orthodox” clause, and the New Englanders knew that their perfidy had been exposed for all to see. The matter, however, did not end in a deadlock, or even in the withdrawal of the gift, as Judge Sewall had favored, but was allowed to go forward because of Hollis’s persistent generosity and his ultimate trust in the good faith of the Corporation. While it was clear that what Hollis and Harvard meant by “orthodox” were two different things, after some three years of negotiation and annoying delays on both sides, the statutes were endorsed and the professorship formally established. Edward Wigglesworth was thus twice elected, first under Hollis’s original terms, and then again under the revised terms, where he was determined “sound and orthodox” by the Overseers on the basis of his assent to the essential doctrines of Calvinism, particularly those relating to the divine right of infant baptism: it was at last agreed to go forward with his installation on October 24, 1722, according to the formula of his Founder.
The Professor is Installed
When The Reverend Edward Wigglesworth, A.B., 1710, was installed as the first Hollis Professor of Divinity, the installation was the fruition of an ambitious hope for both Harvard College and for its pious and generous benefactor. As we have seen, it was not an easy achievement: no New England harvest is, but in Harvard Hall on that October day, in the favoring presence of the Corporation, the Overseers, the students, and an assembly of civil and ecclesiastical dignitaries, with President Leverett in the chair, a great occasion was in progress.
The proceedings opened with prayer, and before the governor and two judges the professor-elect swore his oaths to the civil government. Then before the president the professor-elect subscribed to the statutes of his professorship as proposed by the Founder. These legalities being concluded, Professor Wigglesworth gave a Latin address to which the president responded in kind. After prayer and the singing of a portion of Psalm 122, which begins “I was glad when they said unto me, let us go into the house of the Lord . . . ,” a contemporary account reports, “. . . ye Assembly brake up. And then as soon as ye Dinner could be brought into ye Hall, ye Gentlemen went to Dinner; it being ended, everyone went his way.”
In his address the new professor paid appropriate compliments to his Founder:
That a Man from a Far Country, to Whom our Place and Name were hardly known, as soon as He had heard that the Fear of God was in this Place, and that our Charity and Good will to men, differing from us in the Lesser matters of the Law, was not altogether so contracted, as it is in too many other Places, and that many advantages enjoyed by Foreign Universities were still wanting to us; that such a Person (I say) though differing from us Himself in some points which have been too often the unhappy occasions of much unchristian animosity in the Christian Church, should yet set himself only upon hearing these things to seek our Welfare with unwearied Diligence, Consummate prudence, and a Flowing Stream of Liberality: This is what surely calls upon us to render most hearty Thanks, in the First place to our Heavenly Father Who hath inclined the Heart of His Servant to these Things, and then to our Earthly Benefactor, by Whose Kindness such Worthy Deeds are done unto us!
Wigglesworth went on to wish for his benefactor “… a Name better than of Sons and of Daughters even an Everlasting Name that shall not be cut off.” His memory was to be “rendered Dear and Honorable to the Latest Posterity,” and would flourish in the study of Divinity by the young. As Thomas Hollis himself was childless, this appeal to a lasting posterity was a particularly graceful note struck by an ingratiating beneficiary.
Then, after an acknowledgement of the great need of instruction in the Word of God to those who would preach, and of the great opportunity this professorship permitted in that instruction, Wigglesworth asked for an indulgence of his inadequacies. He asked the assembled “Honored Patrons and Reverend Fathers, for the Lord Jesus Christ’s Sake and for the Love of the Youth Devoted to His service, to strive togther with me in Your Prayers to God for me; and not to press upon me, at my first entrance on this Work harder than my strength will bear.” For himself, he concluded, “I can only promise Truthfulness and Diligent Application as far as my Health will allow and sincere endeavours to promote peace, Truth and Holiness.”
The address was given in Latin, to which the president made a Latin reply, and when printed it had the Latin version on the right hand side of the page with the English version on the left. On June 6, 1722, five months before the installation, Hollis had written to his Professor:
From the first account sent to me of your Person and abilities about a yeare since, to fill the chaire of a Professor of Divinity, which I imeditated to settle in Harvard College in N.E. for the glory of God and promoting the knolege of true Religion and practical Piety, I conceived a good affection for you and opinion of you. The now repeated recomendation of you by the Corporation and superadded testimony from the honorable and Reverend the Board of Overseers has confirmed me in it . . .
In this same letter, he invites the Professor to a course of tolerance and charity particularly with regard to such Baptist students as may come under his instruction, and urges him to avoid the theological controveries between Baptists and non-Baptists “which by experience I know does not tend to Godly edifying, but ends in vaine Jangling and bitterness of Spirit, and it is too frequent in your country as wel as in ours.” Of himself, Hollis says,
I profes my self a Christian and indevor to live in love and peace with all Christians, though in some perticulars they differ from me, if they hold the Head, and live Godly in Christ Jesus. I own my Opinion is for Adult Baptism, but my practice shews by the Society I walk with I think not the mode an essential to Salvation, nor do I judg others, but cordially love all who live Godly and declare they love our Lord Jesus Christ in Sincerity.
In another letter of this same date, June 6, 1722, addressed to President Leverett, Hollis gave his formal consent to Wigglesworth’s election:
And I doe hereby acquaint you Sir and the Corporation that upon your and their Recommendation I do freely and willingly accept of him [Edward Wigglesworth] as such, to begin his office and to be paid his Sallary from your now next Commencement. And I do desire that he may be inducted into that Office in a becomeing manner, that he may have the respect shewn him, suitable to his Character . . . .
Wigglesworth wrote to Hollis on October 25, the day after his installation, with an account of the proceedings. Benjamin Colman had also written with details, and Hollis obviously was pleased to be so promptly informed. In his reply to Wigglesworth, dated January 5, 1722/3, Hollis asked “If it were not too much trouble for you to transcribe your Oration, I should be pleased to see a coppy thereof, and shew it my Neibors the Ministers, who assisted me in drawing up the Rules and Orders I sent over relating there unto.” He also noted with pleasure that Wigglesworth had not forgotten his admonition concerning the Baptists: “I thank you Sir for your promise to have due regard to such Children as are or may be in the College of Baptist Parents equally with others, and I have no doubt but you wil do it.”
Hollis wrote to President Leverett also thanking him “… and all the Gentlemen concerned in the wise and decent manner of inducting my Professor into his work, the account whereof I have received with pleasure from my estemed freind (sic) Mr. Benjamin Colman and I do humbly hope God wil attend it with success, and that I may heare there of and Rejoice. If it were not too much trouble, I should be glad to see a coppy of your and his Oration on that occasion, if you so see fitt, but I shal not urge it.”
Thomas Hollis clearly never intended to discriminate against anyone, and although he recognized Harvard’s intention to discriminate against his own tradition, he made the best of a difficult situation. In the end, his liberal interpretation of orthodoxy would prevail in the most controversial of all elections to his professorship. The theological tensions which were exposed by the gift in 1721 had widened into a profound division by the turn of the nineteenth century when, in 1804, the Reverend Henry Ware, a non-Calvinist Congregationalist and the forerunner of a long Unitarian hegemony at Harvard, was narrowly elected into the Hollis professorship, precipitating a theological and social controversy which would redefine the New England theological landscape and place Harvard firmly in the control of the liberals. Calvinist Congregationalists tried to argue that the Hollis Professor must be “orthodox,” that is Calvinist and Trinitarian, according to Mr. Hollis’s own statutes, and one of their most agitated partisans, The Reverend Jedidiah Morse, a Yale graduate and minister of the Church at Charlestown, tried in a polemical pamphlet to make the case that Hollis himself was a Calvinist.
It was pointed out that Mr. Hollis’s consent to the terms in the statutes had in some sense been extorted, that he himself was by no means a Calvinist, nor was the church to which he belonged, and that he was opposed in principle to a rigid doctrinal test for his professorship. Nearly eighty years after his first gift, the spirit of his benefactions was finally affirmed in the election of the fourth incumbent.
The Money
Hollis always described himself as a merchant. Descended from a line of non-conformist merchants, he was determined not only to do well but to do good as well. He understood that what he had was lent to him by the Lord, and thus it was an act of religious duty to be scrupulous in business, prudent in financial affairs, and generous to those less well off than himself. He was not embarrassed by money, nor was he unaware of what good could be done with it. He had been trained in these matters by the convictions of his family, his church, and his own experience as a Christian philanthropist eager to make a difference in the world. He gave not so much out of guilt as out of a love and a sense of responsibility that can only be described by the Christian concept of stewardship. By the time of his father’s death in 1718, Thomas Hollis 111 was in a position to consider how to use the rest of his life in stewardship of the bounty which industry and providence had supplied him. In 1721, the year of his first major gift to Harvard, he wrote of his own wealth:
After forty years’ diligent application to mercantile business, my God whom I serve, has mercifully succeeded my endeavours, and with my increase, inclined my heart to proportional distribution. I have credited the promise, “he that giveth to the poor lendeth to the Lord,” and have found it verified in this life.
Unusual in his or in any other day in philanthropy, Hollis was a quiet giver. His non-conformist scruples did not permit him to trumpet abroad his charities, and he understood the New Testament instruction of Jesus that alms should be given in secret and without display. While his good works were well known it was not because he -wished it so, and he complained that his liberality toward Harvard was just a little too well known in London:
My donations to the College having made more discourse about it than formerly in London, I could have wished to have been less known, only quiet my mind, in that possibly hearby some others may be moved to like good work for your advantage.
Thus demonstrating an early grasp of the concept of the leveraged gift, Hollis was able to inspire others to support some of his favorite causes, including Harvard. He got friends to buy books for the library, and he passed on what was
now a family interest in Harvard to his nephew, also named Thomas Hollis, who as the fifth to bear that name, would greatly enrich the college library and influence his own circle of friends to adopt the Harvard cause. It is this Thomas Hollis V whose name adorns the current information retrieval system of the Harvard University Library system, and whose keen interest in books and their bindings and ornamentation is represented in the collections of Houghton Library.
The Books: "My Professor's Closet"
It is well known that the library of Harvard College had its origins in the gift of books of John Harvard. It is, alas, not as well known that the oldest special collection within the College library consists of the books given and solicited by Thomas Hollis 111 for the support of his professorship, and added to by successive Hollis professors and friends. Unlike many mercantile men, Thomas Hollis was interested in books, and he understood that one of the best things he could do for his professor was to supply him with good books, of which a ready supply was more likely to be found in England than in New England. Thus Hollis in effect became an agent for the Harvard College Library. While a young man he was sent on business to France where he became fluent in the language, and sending French books to Harvard, he thus occasioned the concern of the provincials who seemed to worry about heretical ideas in those texts. Hollis, in some irritation to the Yankee critics, noted, “… if some not quite orthodox, don’t be afraid of them. Let the students read, try, judge, see for themselves.”
For his professor Hollis chose books that represented a well-stocked working collection of classical texts and contemporary commentary, without which a learned ministry could not be sustained. He sent books to the College by the trunkload, and he sent books to a wide circle of clergy throughout New England and beyond, with the stipulation that their ultimate destination was to be the College library at Cambridge: duplicate books in the College library were to be assigned for the particular use of his professor. It was in fact at Hollis’s suggestion that the first catalogue of the library was printed in 1723 so that he could distribute it to potential donors in England who would then know what was not needed. The plate in his books carried the following inscription:
Ex dono tho. Hollis arming.
In usum sui Professoris S.S. Theol.
The gift of Sir Thomas Hollis
For the use of his Professor of Divinity
Typical of his instructions are these sent over with a load of books in 1724-1725:
. . . and supposing any alredy sent or now sending that you have alreddy of the same sorts, I order for myself and by leave of the Donors, let the library keep the best books and the Duplicates be for my Professors Closet, or with the advice of the President given to any of my Students that go out of the College for the Ministry.
Apparently there remained some confusion as to what to do with the constant stream of books Hollis and his friends continued to send. On June 21, 1725, Hollis wrote to Benjamin Colman asking him to have the Library Keeper prepare a printed supplement of the first library catalog indicating the books the College still needed. This would be helpful in soliciting further useful gifts for the library. As to the duplicates, he directed:
Where I send any books that the library have alredy, let the best Edition or best bound be kept in the library, the Duplicat be for the Professors closet, if he is not furnished with it; if he is then let it be given some one on my foundation with the Presidents advice — and like as I formerly ordred expresly in Relation to a Bible I sent, for him and to descend to his successor, so do I now expresly order, these duplicates to Remaine to him and his Successors, Professor of Divinity in Harvard College.
In his essay “My Professor’s Closet,” published in the December 4, 1936 issue of the Harvard Alumni Bulletin, then Hollis Professor Henry Joel Cadbury recounted the history of the Hollis theological books and arranged for their display in the Treasure Room of Widener Library. In 1969, James E. Walsh, Keeper of Printed Books in the Harvard College Library, wrote then Hollis Professor George Huntston Williams asking for permission to give the Hollis books “full rare-book cataloguing and assign them numbers according to the regular Houghton scheme.” Walsh went on to point out that “Since Houghton was built in 1942, these books have been kept together in the stacks but have not been on any kind of exhibition, ‘semi-permanent’ [referring to Professor Cadbury’s 1936 Treasure Room exhibition] or otherwise.” To his letter Walsh attached the list of thirty-five titles and fifty-seven volumes which had been sent from the Andover-Harvard Library for the 1936 exhibition. “I ask for your opinion and consent,” Walsh wrote to Professor Williams, “since you, as Hollis Professor of Divinity, would seem to be the present ‘owner’ of these books.” Williams consulted with his two extant predecessors, Professors Cadbury and Amos Niven Wilder, each of whom agreed that something should be done with the Hollis Professor’s books. Williams expressed the hope that the collection might be enlarged “with other memorabilia for a permanent or seasonal exhibition.”
Following Walsh’s exchange of letters with Professor Williams, the Hollis books were given full rare-book cataloguing in Houghton Library in 1973-4. The books were reclassified so they would remain shelved together in the Houghton stack; to each catalogue entry was appended the note “From the library of the Hollis Professor of Divinity,” with additional comments on provenance included as well. With the conversion of the card catalogue to HOLLIS, these notes were made available online. So even when the books of the Hollis Professor entered Houghton’s collection, they retained their nature as a coherent, unified whole, and were accessible as such to all interested researchers.
In October 1997, for the first time since 1936, these books were displayed together at an exhibition in Houghton Library on the occasion of the 275 th anniversary of the installation of the first Hollis Professor. In 1936, Professor Cadbury had been the first person in more than a century to pay any attention to this remarkable library; doubtless he had been stimulated to do so by the celebrations of Harvard’s three hundredth anniversary, and by the fact that he was also director of the Andover-Harvard Theological Library, which then had custody of many of the books. Since the founding of the Divinity School as a separate faculty in 1811, the Hollis Professor had been assigned to its work, and it is likely that the Hollis Library went with him to become a founding part of the Divinity Library. Cadbury’s interest was therefore appropriate and proximate. When we determined to bring the books together once again for public consideration, we enlisted the services and interests of Peter Xavier Accardo of Houghton Library, whose checklist and extensive notes on provenance are very helpful. It is to be hoped that the exhibition and the present essay will have renewed public appreciation for this collection, and for the contributions Thomas Hollis made to the early College.
The Shades of Thomas Hollis
In the course of preparing the 1997 Hollis exhibition in Houghton Library, we had occasion to examine with some care the three extant likenesses of Thomas Hollis in Harvard’s possession. All three of these representations are in some sense unusual in that not one of them is taken from the life, and yet all three are in some sense contemporary. In addition to the three likenesses we are able to reproduce here are what I will call two “ghosts” or non-extant originals, from which two of our three representations ‘were copied.
The College Seeks a Likeness
The first of these paintings is what we will call The Highmore Portrait. In gratitude for his gifts to the College, the Corporation asked Thomas Hollis to send them a portrait of himself that might be hung in the College Hall. Overcoming a non-conformist modesty Hollis complied, and wrote to President Leverett on September 26, 1722: “I now send you my shade by Capt. Cary to be put up in your college hall . . . my wife and some others of my family seconded your letter or else I should hardly have been so vain as to have attempted it.” He went on to note that while some may be pleased with the painter’s work, “others may secretly despise it because of the particular Principle of the Original.” We should remember that at this point Hollis and Harvard were still in rather testy negotiations over the terms of the professorship, and the Overseers’s animosity to Baptists well known. Against the imputation that he was trying to smuggle in Baptist seditions, he adds, “Let such know . . . and tell them Mr. Hollis means nothing by all he has done and is doing for your college but for the glory of God.” The picture came with a gilt frame for which Hollis had paid twentyeight pounds. He had proposed to send curtains to protect the picture from the light, but when he learned of the Corporation’s exhibition plans from Benjamin Colman, he wrote, “. . . as you inform me now of the public uses of your Hall of which I was ignorant before, I forbeare, judging a wainscot box and doors, as you now propose will do better and what you who are on the spott do like I approve of and am satisfied.”
Joseph Highmore, London Society Painter
The painter to whom Thomas Hollis sat was Joseph Highmore (1692-1780) who, though a nephew of Thomas Highmore who held the title of Sergeant- Painter to the King, nevertheless began his professional life as an articled clerk to an attorney. In 1715 he abandoned the law and set up as a portrait painter in the City of London. In 1723 he took up residence in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, a fashionable and profitable neighborhood for artists in search of prosperous clients, where in later life he would be a neighbor of Thomas Hollis V, great nephew of his sitter of 1721/2. At the time of the Hollis portrait, Highmore was thirty years old and had been painting professionally for only seven years; the Hollis commission was likely a very welcome endorsement of his skills, although the painting itself was destined for the obscurity of the new world. While Highmore enjoyed some royal and aristocratic patronage as a successful society painter, his work appealed largely to the rising middle class for whom he could produce an impressive likeness in a single sitting; he gave up the work in 1762, retiring in order to become an essayist. His Hollis portrait shows the sitter, then aged sixtytwo, swathed in a splendid brocade dressing gown, the picture of prudent prosperity. In a post script to his letter of September 26, 1722 to President Leverett, Hollis writes, “The painter [Highmore] thinks that the Picture being nailed up a long voyage may a [be] a little flatt the paint it being so newly finished, but after it has been some time hung up in your Hall the airs may recover its proper colour.”
Peter Pelham: Instrument of Preservation
This portrait was destroyed in the fire of 1764 which burned up the contents of Harvard Hall. Fortunately, however, it was preserved in the form of a mezzotint taken from it in 1751, twenty years after the sitter’s death, by Peter Pelham. Born in London in 1697, Pelham was apprenticed to the mezzotint engraver John Simon in 1713, and between 1720 and 1726 produced at least twenty-five mezzotints of prominent London figures: a contemporary of Highmore, he doubtless was familiar with his work. In 1726 or 1727 he left for Boston, where in 1728 he painted the portrait of Cotton Mather and from it engraved the first mezzotint in the American colonies. He was a popular portrait painter, and the patronage of Cotton Mather and his establishment friends did nothing to harm his trade. Mezzotints became a popular art form as they were cheaper than oil portraits and more easily reproduced. Pelham engraved fifteen mainly bust-length portraits of the great and the good, and sold them from his shop in Lindel’s Lane. In 1748 he married Mary, widow of Richard Copley, each of them marrying for the second time, and he took into his household and studio her young son, John Singleton Copley, whose artistic career began at the hands of his stepfather. In 1751, the year of his death, Pelham approached the Harvard Corporation for permission to copy the Highmore portrait of Hollis on display in Harvard Hall since 1722, and it was agreed to allow him to “. . . take a mezzotint from Mr. Hollis’s picture now standing in the Hall, providing all due care be taken by him that no injury be done to said picture.”
Pelham placed an advertisement in The Boston News Letter for September, 1751, which read
To be sold, at his home near the Quaker Meeting House, a print in mezzotinting of Thomas Hollis, late of London, Merchant . . . done from a curious picture by Joseph Highmore in London, and placed in the College Hall in Cambridge. Also sundry other prints at said Pelham’s.
Peter Pelham died in Boston and was buried there on December 14, 1751.
The College mourned the loss by fire of its Hall and contents, and most particularly it grieved the loss of the portrait of its first benefactor, which had been one of the chief ornaments of the place. Probably had Peter Pelham been alive the Corporation would have asked him to reproduce in oil his mezzotint of Highmore’s portrait. He had a good reputation, and although he usually worked from painting to mezzotint he could have easily and satisfactorily reversed the
process. He was dead, however, and the College turned to London and to Thomas Hollis V, with the hope that he would somehow replace their loss. “As the only ornament of our Hall was our benefactor’s picture, which was consumed in the flames,” wrote President Holyoke, “so we greatly desire, if you have one with you, to send us a copy, to be placed in our hall, when rebuilt, and also an escutcheon of the arms of the family, which also was lost in the library.”
The younger Hollis had continued the generous habits of his family towards Harvard, and had greatly enriched the college library which the fire had destroyed, busily at work doing his best to resupply the shelves. In reply to the request of President Holyoke, Thomas Hollis V wrote on April 5, 1764, four months after the fire:
I will endeavour to have the honour to present a drawing of a painting of the effigies [head] of Thomas Hollis of London, Merchant, my great Unkle, to your College during the autumn, after a portrait taken from the life in my possession.
Giovanni Battista Cipriani, Copiest of a Ghost
Giovanni Battista Cipriani was born in Florence in 1727, where he trained as a painter, draughtsman, and designer. Before he moved to Rome in 1750 he had enjoyed a modest success, and in Rome he encountered Englishmen on the Grand Tour, many of whom —including Hollis’s heir, Thomas Hollis V, known as Thomas Hollis of Lincoln’s Inn —became interested in his work. In 1755, under the influence of William Chambers and Joseph Wilton, Cipriani settled in London, and by 1761 he had married an English woman and become one of the leading artistic figures of the day, enjoying the friendship and patronage of the cultural establishment. He was much in favor with George 111, and he enjoyed a high reputation among his peers, one of whom, a close colleague and friend in artistic endeavors, was Thomas Hollis V. This association is explored in some detail in William Henry Bond’s Thomas Hollis Of Lincoln’s Inn: A Whig And His Books. Bond notes that “[a]n important link between the artistic community and bibliographical part of Hollis’s activities lay in the small group dominated by Cipriani . . . .” The design of books was one of the artistic interests, but not only books, for Cipriani valued Hollis’s artistic judgment sufficiently to consult him about the designs he was commissioned to paint for George III’s coronation coach in 1760. As one of London’s most active patrons of the arts, Hollis frequently commissioned Cipriani to provide him with drawings and engravings. It would be Cipriani who in 1767 would first draw and then engrave the double portrait of Hollis which was meant in part to satisfy the repeated requests of the authorities of Harvard College for a portrait of their latest Hollis benefactor. It was thus to Cipriani that Thomas Hollis V turned to supply the need of Harvard College for a portrait to replace the burned Highmore portrait of Thomas Hollis 111.
Francis Blackburne, in his Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, is less than clear when he says that Hollis sent to Harvard a picture of his great uncle, “copied from an original by Cipriani.” What he means to say is that Thomas Hollis V engaged
Cipriani to copy a picture in his possession which had been painted in the lifetime of his late uncle. The “effigy” done by Cipriani has clearly noted in the lower right hand corner the date ‘1722,’ and Cipriani, as we know, was born in 1727. The donor also indicates that the painting was copied from one “taken from the life,” which certainly means before the elder Hollis’s death in 1731. Writing on August 17, 1764, to President Holyoke, Hollis says,
The copy of the Picture of the founder of his [referring to Edward Wigglesworth, Sr.] Professorship was begun by an able artist on the receit (sic) of your last letter; is finished, even to the frame and case; but will be kept back a few weeks till the colors are wholly fixed and then, Sir, forwarded to you.
A week later, he writes again,
Having been assured by Mr. Cipriani, the able artist who copies the picture of Thomas Hollis of London, Mercht. intended for Harvard College, that that picture was in condition to be forwarded to you safely…l this day caused it to be cased and shipped in the Pitt Packett, Capt. Dixey.
Hollis goes so far as to instruct the College how to hang and care for the picture: “I forgot to request that the picture might be so placed in the College as to receive its light from left to right & always to remain without sunshine and when in the course of time it should become dirty that then it might be gently washed, by a soft spunge with fair water only, and varnished over lightly with white of egg.”
Although we have heard Thomas Hollis III’s resistence to sitting for a portrait for Harvard in 1721, we must conclude that he sat not only to Joseph Highmore but also to someone else, and that this “ghost” paint- ing, perhaps intended for the family, was the one which Cipriani was commissioned to copy. The Cipriani now hanging at Harvard has an antecedent whose original painter and present whereabouts are unknown, but there exists an interesting theory about it.
In her Harvard M.A. thesis on Joseph Highmore written for the Department of Fine Arts in 1975, A.S. Lewis suggests that Highmore painted two likenesses of Hollis, the grand portrait copied by Pelham in mezzotint, and the “effigy” or bust copied by Cipriani. Of the first, she says that it probably was “the first full length portrait by a major English artist to be sent to America.” Of the Cipriani she writes, “The original bust-length was surely taken from the same sitting as the Highmore full-length, for Hollis’s head is a replica of the larger portrait head. Cipriani’s copy reflects a bust-length portrait that Hollis probably commissioned at the same time he sat for the large portrait sent to Harvard . . . Hollis’s family had persuaded him with difficulty into sitting in the first place, and it seems far more likely that Hollis got two portraits from the one sitting than that he sat immediately to another artist.” Lewis concedes that the original from which Cipriani made his copy is not known to have been signed by Highmore, nor is it listed in any of his known works. She bases her conclusion on the circumstantial evidence that Hollis was unlikely to sit for two painters within so short a period of time, and that the faces are similarly posed. It could be argued that the difference in ‘feel’ of the two paintings has to do with their ultimate destination: one for ceremonial purposes abroad, and the other for domestic purposes. If Lewis is right, Highmore painted two paintings both of which have disappeared, one by fire, and the other simply unknown. In the absence of that second painting, the absence of a signature or an attribution to Highmore in any listing, I think it is safer to render the Scottish verdict of “not proven” to the Highmore attribution; and we remain with our ghost.
John Singleton Copley, a Creative Composite
Having badgered Thomas Hollis V to send a portrait to replace the lost Highmore, Harvard seems to have been less than satisfied with the Cipriani sent in replacement, for two years later, in 1766, the College commissioned John Singleton Copley, the most fashionable portrait painter in Boston, to paint another portrait of Thomas Hollis 111. Perhaps the Cipriani didn’t seem grand enough for the new Harvard Hall, suggesting again that it was never really intended for public display. Compared to the rather stately Highmore as represented in the Pelham mezzotint, the portrait which was made available for Cipriani to copy seems rather austere, honest but unflattering, though perhaps just the kind of image of himself that Thomas Hollis 111 preferred. It is very much in the plain style, and possibly the grandees of Harvard did not think it worthy of themselves or of their benefactor. The record is silent on the reasons, but on July 9, 1766, President Holyoke wrote to Thomas Hollis V repeating a request in a previous letter that Hollis send over the proper form of the Hollis family arms. The new Harvard Hall was to be a more stately mansion than the old one, and the library was to consist of ten alcoves, one of which was to be reserved for the Hollis books with the name ‘Hollis’ engraved on a tablet in large gilt capitals. A portrait of Thomas Hollis V was requested again, but the point of the letter was to inform him that the arms were now needed. “For the carver who hath made a frame for your excellent Unckle’s Picture (which we have got drawn at large by a Painter who takes a fine likeness) hath constructed it so, as to have an escutcheon for his arms on the Top of it wherefore if you please to send us the Blazonry they shall be added.”
This picture could not possibly be the Cipriani, for it says that Harvard secured the services of a painter “who takes a fine likeness,” and for which painting, “drawn at large” —suggesting a full-length portrait compared to the Cipriani head and shoulders —a carver had constructed a frame large enough to take a coat of arms. This is obviously a new commission, intended to impress, and the most impressive portrait painter at work in Boston at the time was John Singleton Copley (1738-1815).
Copley’s father, Richard, had died shortly after his birth, and, as previously mentioned, his mother Mary had remained a widow for about ten years until in 1748 she married Peter Pelham, the engraver, mezzotint artist, and print seller. Pelham’s success as an artist was well known, and his stepson began his acquaintance with painting in his stepfather’s studio, painting his first portraits at the age of fifteen. Pelham’s contemporary in the Boston art world was the distinguished John Smibert, and young Copley early on demonstrated a familiarity with the work of Smibert, while at the same time being easily influenced by the work of the leading painters of the day, John Greenwood, a close professional colleague of his late stepfather, Robert Feke, and Joseph Blackburn: the influence of each can be seen in the formative painting of Copley. In the decade from 1756 to 1766 he was much in demand. He was also ambitious, and in 1766 he sent a portrait of his half-brother, Henry Pelham, to London to be exhibited for the Spring Exhibition of the Society of the Artists of Great Britain, where it attracted the favorable attention of Benjamin West and Joshua Reynolds. In Boston he painted anybody who was anybody, and although particularly good with women, one art historian has pointed out that in this period he developed a rich and robust technique which was especially well suited to flattering portraits of portly old gentlemen.
There therefore could not possibly be a better candidate to paint a state portrait of Thomas Hollis 111 for Harvard than John Singleton Copley; he was allowed to borrow the Cipriani effigy, and he was doubtless familiar with his stepfather’s mezzotint of the Highmore. His task was to fashion from these two quite remarkably different likenesses a full-length portrait suitable to adorn the new library: the 94×5 8-inch painting depicts Hollis in an olive brown suit with gold buttons, and black shoes with gold buckles. The curtain to the right is blue with a gold border, the wall is grey, the urn red, and the inlaid floor has squares of red, green, and brown; to the sitter’s left is a table on which sits a letter addressed “To The Rev. J. Leverett, President of Harvard Colledge in New England.” For this painting Copley was paid by the treasurer of Harvard College on July 14, 1766, twenty-two pounds, eight shillings.
This portrait has generated quite a bit of confusion and controversy. William G. Brown’s 1898 Catalog of the University Portraits was not certain that the large oil painting of Thomas Hollis then located in the Faculty Room of University Hall was by Copley, and he had no knowledge that the other oil of Hollis was by Cipriani. For some years in Memorial Hall, with its walls covered with paintings, the Hollis was mislabelled. One account of an officer in charge of the paintings early in this century reads, “I found two portraits which had the label of Thomas Hollis. I observed that the two were not of the same man, and
late by means of one of these portraits and an engraving, I identified a large fulllength picture which I found in the basement of the Fogg Museum as a picture of Thomas Hollis by Copley.” Laura M. Huntsinger writing in Harvard Portraits: A Catalogue of Portrait Paintings at Harvard University states emphatically that Copley did not utilize the Pelham mezzotint. There is no evidence for such a statement, in fact a case for the opposite conclusion can be made, and Anne Allison made it the very next year in a letter to Frederick B. Robinson. She says, “Obviously Copley didn’t copy the mezzotint but I think I can detect influences of it both in details of Hollis’s face and incidentals.” The feeling of the Copley is certainly much more akin to the Highmore than to the Cipriani, and why would Copley fail to take advantage of his stepfather’s well-regarded work? Alas, Parker and Wheeler in 1938 perpetuate certain errors in their notes to Plate 72. Cipriani, as we now know, painted a copy and not an original portrait of Thomas Hollis 111. President Wadsworth wrote to Thomas Hollis V of Lincoln’s Inn and not to Thomas Hollis, “Jr.” They also favor the notion that the Copley “face” is Cipriani and that the Pelham mezzotint is without influence, a claim made but unsubstantiated by the 1936 Harvard Catalogue.
An Almoner of Providence
In one of his most extensive and revealing letters to Benjamin Colman, Thomas Hollis proceeded to give a summary of his life and experiences. He was born into a pious home in 1659, “my father and Mother then members of the same church.” By their pastors he was given a religious education, “trained up in the knolege of the Scriptures and Chatechisme,” with many an early impression of sin and Christian duty. At age ten he was stricken with a severe case of small pox and promised to amend his life if God should spare it. He lapsed in his promise, however, the next year, and fell into a spiritual crisis. He was advised by one of his family’s maids to keep a spiritual journal “which might be of use in after trials and temptations to review.” In 1672 he nearly drowned, and upon rescue again made pious promises. In 1673 he was sent to Sheffield on his father’s business, and in 1674 was sent to France to work for the family firm. There he became fluent in French. He returned to England where in 1676 he was baptized, returning to France on business where he confessed to the temptations of youthful lusts, “but God kept me in his direction.” In 1677 he was admitted into the membership of the Church, understanding himself to be converted, and in 1700 he was chosen a Deacon of the church. In 1707, The Reverend Jeremiah Hunt who in 1731 would preach his funeral sermon, and who entered his family by marriage, became pastor of Pinner’s Hall, the Hollis family church in London. The church at the time of his writing was now small, and would get smaller as Hollis himself grew older. Of himself he says “I having with drawn myself in a good degree from Trade I have more liberty for Reading and some services of goodnes and Charity,” but continuing in a critical scrutiny of himself says, “but doe not find it easy some times to improve my Time as I would to good purpose.” He records a happy married life of thirty-seven years, calling his wife, “a sharer and partner of my Joyes and Cares, and a helper forward of every good work I project, and her self a Dorcas ordering and making coats for the poor.” He notes that he has been a trader and merchant for forty years and “used Diligence in my calling without neglecting family worship.” God has prospered his endeavors, and “with my Increase inclined my heart to a proportionable distribution.
Thus was he settled by the time of his first gifts to Harvard —in the words of Josiah Quincy —as an “Almoner of Providence,” and Harvard was the steadfast beneficiary of that Providence.
In the face of difficulty and opportunity, not to mention Harvard’s own provocations, Thomas Hollis remained steadfast in his loyalty to the College. In 1720, word of his generosity to Harvard was so widely known that Hollis was importuned in a London coffeehouse by Jeremiah Dummer, a graduate of the College in the Class of 1699. After thanking him for his generosity to Harvard, Dummer, writes Hollis, “acquainted me about a College building at Newhaven, which he proposed to my bounty. I could onely answer, I had not heard of it before.” In 1721 he was asked “to let one or two years income goe in building a wall and gates to joyne your two Wings and inclose your College Yard, but I am not willing to be diverted in my design, which is of another nature,” and he did not yield to the temptations of bricks and mortar. In January of 1726/7 he was again solicited in a London coffeehouse, this time to support The Reverend Thomas Prince and his New England Library in Boston’s Old South Church. The argument was that no one knew into whose hands the Harvard College Library might fall, and thus a private library such as Prince proposed would be secure to posterity. “I was disgusted at the suggestion,” wrote Hollis, “and refused to read on, and bid him write Mr. Prince word. I disliked his motion and would not be concerned.”
Childless, he doted on his nephew, Thomas Hollis IV, but his real ‘child’ was the College, and he took an almost obsessive interest in ‘his’ students who received his scholarship, demanding to know all about them, and that they write with regular accounts of themselves. He proposed to pay for an annual commemoration of himself and of those on his foundation. “I will allow a little expence on a day to be appointed annually for your self and the Corporation and Tutors with my Professor and Ten Students and any other you Sir please to invite in commemoration of the Founder.” This idea did not take, and writing to President Leverett in August, 1723, he conceded: “As to my motion of an annual dinner for my Students &c I drop it, approving of the reasons against it, which Mr. Colman has offred me.”
Thomas Hollis lived in the neighborhood of his brother John Hollis and many of his other friends in the prosperous area of Lincoln’s Inn, Fields, and Square. His grand nephew, Thomas Hollis V, would also live in that increasingly fashionable neighborhood, in which artists and their patrons and men of business and leisure lived in Georgian gentility. This would become the place in which Sir John Soane would choose to settle and at century’s end establish his house and museum. His world, however, began to close in on him. In a letter to Benjamin Colman on January 6, 1724/5, he writes:
It hath pleased God in his Soverainty to remove from me my Deare Wife — the Companion of my Joyes and Sorrows about 41 years — after a few weeks illnes of a Fever on her Spirits… Pray for me my Freind that I may behave like Christian under this sore Trial, and be kept Honest to Death.
Writing to Colman on July 24, 1727, he notes the death of George I, and asks that if the New Englanders wish to address a memorial to the new King George 11, they should not send it to him to communicate with the palace. “I have no acquaintance with the Great ones at Court. I live privately among my own family and decline the Publick shewe.” Writing two years later to Edward Wigglesworth, Hollis notes the defections of young dissenting clergymen into the ranks of the Church of England. Their services will be missed in the free church meetinghouses, he suggests, and all the more so for there are so few candidates for the ministry nowadays. They are attracted by the security of ecclesiastical preferment, “… tempting them away from us, and the power of Religion and Godlines visibly decaying among us is worst of all.”
“Two years before his death,” wrote his pastor Jeremiah Hunt in his funeral sermon on the death of Thomas Hollis, “feeling his strength to abate, he lived in a constant expectation of his dissolution. In his last illness, before his sense failed him, desirous only that his relations would do what might satisfy themselves, and not expressing any solicitude about the event, he discovered a calmness and serenity of mind, which was agreeable to all about him.”
Josiah Quincy, in his History of Harvard College, writes of Thomas Hollis:
He had quitted business and lived in the vicinity of London in retirement, frugally but hospitably. Regarding himself as an almoner of Providence and his wealth as a trust, he constantly sought objects of just and useful charities.
How fortunate it was for Harvard to become one of those objects of a just and useful charity, and how faithful Hollis was in the prosecution of his ambitions for Harvard. A merchant of merchants, he invested in the fragile wares of humankind, his ten students, his two professors, and the books and equipment by which they would transform and be transformed. In the face of provocation he remained a model of Christian philanthropy, setting an example for good works rarely equalled and never exceeded in the history of the University. His precept was glorified by his example, and after two hundred and seventy-five years his legacy continues to flourish in the two professors who bear his name, the divinity students who study on his bounty, the libraries which continue to rejoice in his books, and the dormitory which continues to shelter the youngest members of the College. When we remember Thomas Hollis, as duty and honor tell us that we must, we would do well to remember that his vision was always for the future. In pausing to look back, once again in this new Cambridge he encourages us to look ahead.
End Note
This paper was occasioned by an exhibition erected in September and October 1997 in the Amy Lowell Room of Houghton Library of Harvard College, to commemorate the two hundred seventy-fifth anniversary of the inauguration on October 24, 1722, of the first Hollis Professor of Divinity.
I wish to acknowledge with sincere thanks the staff of the Houghton Library; Harley P. Holden, Keeper of the University Archives; Sandra Grindlay, Curator of the University Portrait Collection; and Dr. Nancy Cline, the Larsen Librarian of Harvard College, for their support as lenders to the exhibition. I wish also to thank The Reverend Professor Ronald Thiemann, Dean of the Faculty of Divinity, for underwriting the costs of the exhibition. I thank also Peter Xavier Accardo of the Houghton Library for his practical assistance and for the preparation of his checklist of the Hollis books. Finally, I acknowledge with a grateful pleasure the indefatigable assistance of Cynthia Wight Rossano, without whom there would be neither exhibition nor essay.
On the afternoon of October 28, 1997, a festive gathering assembled in the Amy Lowell Room of the Houghton Library to view the exhibition, and in the favoring presence of the two living Hollis Professors, Richard R. Niebuhr, incumbent since 1980, and George Huntston Williams, the ninth Hollis Professor, and now Emeritus, a toast was raised to Thomas Hollis, Edward Wigglesworth, and Professor Niebuhr. Remarks were made by Dean Thiemann and Professor Gomes, and a reply was given by Professor Niebuhr on behalf of himself and of Professor Williams. Thus was kept a commemoration of Harvard’s first and America’s oldest professorship.
The Professors
1721-1765: Edward Wigglesworth, A.B. 1710
The first incumbent was twice elected. First named in 1721, he was re-elected in 1722 after Harvard was satisfied that his theological views were sufficiently Calvinist. His sermon on the death of Thomas Hollis in 1731 represents the official thanks of a grateful beneficiary of “the most bountiful benefactor.”
1765—1791: Edward Wigglesworth, A.B. 1749
This is the only instance in Harvard history in which a son succeeded his father in the same chair; together the Wigglesworths covered the first seventy years of the Hollis professorship. The younger Wigglesworth saw Harvard through the Revolution and the establishment of the Republic.
1792—1803: David Tappan
Together with the President, the Hollis Professor provided not only theological instruction but pastoral care to the College. The third Hollis Professor preached one of the earliest Baccalaureate sermons extant, to the Class of 1794.
1805—1840: Henry Ware
Twice acting President, first Professor assigned to the new Divinity School, and longest incumbent of the chair, Henry Ware was a theological liberal whose election signalled Harvard’s departure from Calvinism and the fracture of New England Congregationalism. Ware’s long and influential tenure shaped the first generation of Unitarian clergy: his lectures on theology were gathered and published in 1842 as Christian Evidences.
1882—1910: David Gordon Lyon
The Hollis chair lay vacant for forty years until President Charles William Eliot, in his efforts to revitalize the Divinity School, filled it in 1882 with a thirty-year-old Southern Baptist scholar of Hebrew and Semitic languages, a bold and unusual choice. Lyon was founder and curator, in 1891, of the Semitic Museum, and in 1910 became Hancock Professor of Hebrew and Other Oriental Languages, the second-oldest chair in the Divinity faculty. The only Baptist to hold the chair, he was accounted the foremost Semitic scholar of his generation; his book, Assyriology and the Old Testament, was published in 1887. Lyon retired in 1922 and died in 1935.
1910—1933: James Hardy Ropes
A Congregationalist, Ropes was a member of the faculty of Andover Theological Seminary, and came with it when that faculty formed an affiliation with Harvard in 1903. His field was the New Testament, and his area of specialty the Synoptic Gospels.
1934-1954: Henry Joel Cadbury
Cadbury was a Quaker, a founder of the American Friends Service Committee, and a New Testament scholar whose special field concerned the study of Luke- Acts. As director of the Andover-Harvard Theological Library he took special interest in the library assembled by Thomas Hollis (“for my professor”), and arranged for its first public exhibition in Widener Library in 1936, of which his article, “My Professor’s Closet,” is an account.
1956—1963: Amos Niven Wilder
Also a New Testament scholar, Wilder was a graduate of Yale University and the University of Chicago, and came to Harvard as part of Nathan Marsh Pusey’s revitalization of the Divinity School. Interested in the eschatology and ethics of the New Testament, Wilder was also a distinguished poet and Congregationalist churchman. Brother of Thornton Wilder, he maintained a lifelong interest in the relationship of religion and the arts, and toward the close of a long life published a memoir of his experiences in the First World War. He died in 1993.
1963-1980: George Huntston Williams
Ordained to the ministry of the Congregational and Unitarian churches, Williams came to Harvard in 1947, and served from 1953-55 as Acting Dean of the Faculty of Divinity. A church historian of enormous range, with particular interests in the ancient and medieval periods, the Reformation, Puritanism, and the papacy, Williams is the biographer of the present Pope, and author of Divinings: The History of Religion at Harvard (Pilgrim Press 1998).
1981-present: Richard Reinhold Niebuhr Niebuhr was appointed to the Faculty of Divinity in 1963 in the field of theology. Holding ordination in the United Church of Christ, Professor Niebuhr has made a specialty of the work of Frederick Schliermacher, and writes in the area of contemporary theological thought. Having retired in June 2000, Professor Niebuhr now holds the Hollis chair emeritus. He taught in the Faculty of Divinity and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
The Library of the Hollis Professor of Divinity to 1778: A Checklist
Peter X. Accardo
In a booklist dated December 4, 1772 (with a postscript added in 1778), Edward Wigglesworth the younger records the fifty-two titles then in the library of the Hollis Professor of Divinity and the names of their donors: twenty-nine titles from Thomas Hollis 111 (1659-1731), five from Mrs. Grace Gardner (d. 1772), one from Samuel Quincy (1735-1789), seven from the first Hollis Professor of Divinity, Edward Wigglesworth D.D. (ca. 1693-1765), and ten from his son and successor to the Hollis Professorship, Edward Wigglesworth A.M. (1732-1794). Of these titles, forty-six are preserved at Houghton Library; an additional six titles, not noted by Wigglesworth, are bound with them. Most of the books retain their contemporary bindings —typically paneled calf —and “sanguine” bookplates, indicating their non-circulating status. The books also bear evidence of the marking conventions described by W. H. Bond in his introduction to The Printed Catalogues of the Harvard College Library 1723-1790, co-edited with Hugh Amory: “In the early Harvard College Library the shelf marks were written, usually in ink, on a front flyleaf or the title page, and the last element of the number was also written on the fore-edge, showing that at first the books were shelved with their spines turned in.” Later library markings, such as paper labels and the ink stamp of the Harvard Divinity School Library, are also present. Henry Joel Cadbury provides the essential background to the collection in his article “My Professor’s Closet,” published in the December 4, 1936 issue of the Harvard Alumni Bulletin, while Peter J. Gomes brings many new facts to light regarding Thomas Hollis 111, Harvard’s “Most Bountiful Benefactor.” Hollis’s surviving letters, especially those addressed to Benjamin Colman and the elder Wigglesworth, contain valuable information about the early College Library and the formation of the divinity library. “The want of a Catalogue of your library you see Sir is the occasion of sundry repetitions,” wrote Hollis to Colman in September 1722, “in devizing away these few books, but I hope we shal be favored with it shortly for the publick servise of the College.” The following year, Hollis was distributing copies of the Catalogus librorum Bibliothecae Collegii Harvardini quod est Cantabrigiae in Nova Anglia, compiled by then Library Keeper Joshua Gee (A.B. 1717), to friends and prospective donors in London. The catalogue did not, however, prevent duplication in the library donations he arranged from abroad, a circumstance which led to the creation of a separate library for the use of his Professor of Divinity. In a letter to Wigglesworth dated January 6, 1724/5, Hollis established this rule for his books: “supposing any alredy sent, or now sending, that you have alreddy of the same sorts, I order for my self and by leave of the donors, let the library keep the best books and the Duplicates be for my Professors closet, or with the advice of the President given to any of my Students that go out of the College for the Ministry.”
In fact, no fewer than twenty-one titles in the divinity library duplicated earlier Harvard copies, so designated on their title pages or preliminary leaves by Wigglesworth with the note, “A duplicate ordered to ye Hollisian Divinity Professor & his successors by Mr Hollis 1726.” Of these, some number were withdrawn from the “publick Library” as inferior copies, thus predating the Hollis gifts of 1726 and ranking among the earliest survivals from the College Library. In addition, contemporary inscriptions reveal the names of nine early owners and donors not mentioned in the Wigglesworth list: Sir Edmund Andros, Benjamin Avery, Benjamin Colman, Thomas Coram, John Erskine, John Evans, Joshua Gee, Joseph Hussey, and Sir John Maynard.
While not necessarily by design, the books that comprise the divinity library embrace a diverse theological heritage. This would have pleased Hollis, who took a liberal view of collection development, here expressed in a letter to Colman dated February 15, 1724/5: “A publick library ought to be furnished if they can with Con, as well as Pro —that students may read, try, judg —see for themselvs and beleive upon Argument and just reasonings of the Scriptures. Thus saith Aristotle, thus saith Calvin, will not now pass for proof in our London disputations. Holy Scripture is available in a 1672 English Bible printed at Amsterdam, a 1598 Greek New Testament edited by Theodore de Beze, and a 1605 Latin New Testament edited by Erasmus. Fathers of the Church are represented by Eusebius and Saint Cyril. The oldest title in the library is a 1569 edition of Calvin’s Institutes; works by prominent Calvinists Francois Turrettini and John Edwards are also included. There are a number of works by English and Scottish divines and dissenters, such as William Bates, Richard Baxter, David Dickson, John Evans, Michael Jermin, and Benjamin Robinson, as well as works by Royal Society members Isaac Newton and Samuel Clarke. Works by Harvard authors Samuel Willard (A.B. 1659), Ebenezer Pemberton (A.B. 1691), Henry Flynt (A.B. 1693), Thomas Prince (A.B. 1707), and Charles Chauncy (A.B. 1721) deserve special mention, further evidence of what Samuel Eliot Morison called “the puritan purpose to maintain intellectual standards in the New World.”
Books in the following catalogue are arranged alphabetically by author, allowing for some minor dislocations due to modern headings. Entries consist of short title, place and year of publication. Donors have been reported following the Wigglesworth list and are supported by transcriptions of contemporary manuscript inscriptions. Other notations have also been transcribed where they offer evidence of early Harvard provenance. Bond & Amory citations have been provided for all entries, even though in most cases they describe other Old Library copies. Early manuscript shelf marks, usually found on flyleaves and title pages in ink, have been noted, as have numbers inked on the fore-edge. The printed catalogues of the Harvard College Library from the years 1723, 1773, and 1790 have enabled the compiler to ascertain the exact place and year of publication for five of the six missing titles; in only one case, John Taylor’s A paraphrase with notes on the Epistle to the Romans, is there some doubt as to the specific edition. All missing titles can be consulted at Harvard in other copies. Houghton Library shelf marks have been provided with the hope that future scholars will continue these investigations.
This checklist is dedicated to my late colleague Hugh Amory, who provided this translation from the “Praemonitio ad lectorem” of the 1723 Catalogus: “Since anyone with experience in this line of work is aware how prone to occasional error he is in recording numbers and other things of that sort, there can be no objection if here, trusting to the Candor and Humanity of the Reader, I shall snap my thread.” I am grateful to W. H. Bond, Dennis Marnon, and Roger Stoddard for saving me from more than “occasional error,” and wish to extend my sincere thanks to The Reverend Peter J. Gomes and Cynthia Rossano for encouraging me to examine more closely this important library collection.
The full list can be seen HERE (https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:427335035$11i)
