Over three generations, an 18th-century aristocratic family built up an extraordinary collection of early playbooks.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) is a glamorous, dramatic figure - the epitome of the Georgian court lady who dazzled with
her beauty and brilliance, enjoying legendary feuds and friendships with wits such as Alexander Pope. She is also celebrated as
the first western European woman to travel to Constantinople and write of her experiences. And it was on this journey that she
discovered the practice of inoculation against smallpox, which she introduced to Britain in the face of much opposition.
But there was another Lady Mary behind this vivid image. Born Lady Mary Pierrepoint, she was an enthusiastic reader who spent
hours with her books from childhood onwards – like William Drummond, particularly enjoying French and English literature. Daringly
for a lady of the times she was not afraid to pass judgement on what she read – her books can be annotated ‘trash’ or ‘intolerable’
– but she was one of the rare early 18th-century critics who praised Shakespeare above the rule-bound drama of her own age.
John Stuart, (1713-1792) the third Earl of Bute, was born in Edinburgh and educated in England and the Netherlands. He married
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's daughter, also called Mary, in 1736.
In 1747 he became friends with Frederick, Prince of Wales, son of the then King George II. He joined the Prince and his circle
in performing Shakespearean and other plays at their country house parties. After Frederick's early death in 1751 the Earl became
tutor and confidant to his son, the future George III, and a controversial Prime Minister in the early 1760s once his pupil had
succeeded to the throne.
He was also a patron of prominent Scottish Enlightenment figures, and had wide-ranging intellectual interests. The Edinburgh
minister and dramatist John Home sought Bute's advice on his writing, and later became his secretary. Bute also established the
Regius Chair of Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres – what we would now call English Literature – at Edinburgh in 1762. As he had remarked
in a letter the previous year, 'most of our best writers are devoted to me'.
John Stuart, (1744-1814) was the eldest of the Earl of Bute’s eight children. He married a wealthy wife who inherited her family
estates in Cardiff, so that with Scottish Mount Stuart and the Butes’ English home at Luton Hoo, he had homes throughout mainland
Britain. He inherited his father’s title but soon after was created first Marquess of Bute in 1796, as a reward for his diplomatic service.
His grandfather Edward Wortley, Lady Mary’s husband, had chosen to leave his vast wealth not to John but to his younger brother.
Lady Mary’s books were perhaps his only inheritance he received from his mother’s family.
The Marquess lived during a golden age of book collecting – the age of ‘bibliomania’. He added some of the most interesting early
Shakespeare quartos to the family collection, acquiring them from the sales of some legendary libraries. He also had many of the
playbooks rebound in a uniform style, splitting up many of the volumes that Lady Mary had originally assembled, before his death in 1814.