Richard Rawlinson 1690-1755

Richard RAWLINSON 1690-1755

Biographical Note

Born in London, younger son of Sir Thomas Rawlinson, vintner and Lord Mayor of London, and brother of Thomas who helped to inspire his interest in books and collecting. BA St John's College, Oxford 1711, MA 1713. He lived for a while with his brother Thomas at the Inns of Court, pursuing and publishing antiquarian research (often in association with the publisher Edmund Curll), and beginning a series of travels around England to investigate local history. Like his brother and father he was a Jacobite and nonjuror, and in 1716 he was ordained as a nonjuring priest; in 1726 he was consecrated a nonjuring bishop.

During the later 1710s, and 1720, he travelled extensively in Europe but returned to England when his brother Thomas died in 1725, to sort out his very tangled affairs; he left a huge library but also debts of around £10,000, and the family estates had been mismanaged. Richard organised the series of ten auction sales of 1726-34 through which Thomas's books were dispersed, and moved into his house in Aldersgate Street. He managed to free the estate of debt by 1749.

Books

Like his brother Thomas, Rawlinson assembled a huge library of books and manuscripts, while also collecting coins, medals, seals, and other artefacts. He was deeply frustrated not to inherit Thomas's library, and bought many items at the sales. He brought at least 2000 books back from his European travels and was a regular purchaser at auctions and other sales once he returned to England, buying from the libraries of (for example) Peter Le Neve, James Brydges, Edward Harley and Richard Mead. He built his manuscript collection partly by scouring the shops of those who were dealing in, or buying, discarded papers for waste and recycling, and acquired archives of Sir John Cooke, William Wake, John Thurloe and Admiralty papers of Samuel Pepys.