Cotton, SIR ROBERT BRUCE, an English antiquary, was born at Denton, Huntingdonshire, 22d January 1571. From Westminster School, where he had the famous Camden for master, he passed to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. in 1585. He soon settled in a house in Westminster on the site of the present House of Lords, and here he commenced to accumulate books, manuscripts, coins, and other articles, and to practise that large hospitality that made Cotton House the meeting-place of all the scholars of the kingdom. His papers read before the Antiquarian Society spread wide the reputation of his learning; King James knighted him in 1603, created him a baronet in 1611, and frequently consulted him on political matters. But he kept the scholar in prison for eight months in connection with the Overbury case. He had been returned to parliament in 1604, and soon identified himself completely with the policy of constitutional opposition to the crown. His protest against the proposed debasement of the coinage (1626), his frank criticism of kingcraft in his History of Henry III. (1626-27), his outspoken review of the present political situation in his tract, The Dangers wherein the Kingdom now Standeth, and the Remedye (1628), and the frequent meeting in his house for deliberations of Eliot, Pym, Selden, and Sir E. Coke, marked him out to the court as an enemy to be crushed. The occasion was soon found. An ironical tract, entitled A Proposition for His Majesty's Service to Bridle the Impertinency of Parliaments, having fallen into the hands of Wentworth, it was found on inquiry that the original was in Cotton's library, from which a copy had been made, though without his knowledge, for the press. Cotton and others were flung into prison, but proceedings were stayed and the prisoners released on the occasion of the birth of an heir to the throne (29th May 1630). But Cotton's library was not restored to him in spite of his pathetic petitions, and as his heart was bound up in his books, he pined and died less than a year after (6th May 1631). Fourteen of his tracts were collected and published as Cotton's Posthuma in 1651. His son, Sir Thomas Cotton (1594-1662), had the books restored to him; and his great-grandson, Sir John Cotton (1679-1731), bestowed the library on the nation.
The COTTONIAN LIBRARY was accordingly removed to Ashburnham House, Westminster, in 1730. In the following year a fire occurred in the house, in which about 114 out of the 958 volumes of MSS. which the library contained were reported as 'lost, burned, or entirely spoiled; and 98 damaged so as to be defective.' The library was transferred to the British Museum (see Vol. II. p. 462) in 1753.