An extraordinary extra-illustrated Bible in a Restoration binding, ‘adorned with historicall Pictures’ and embellished with original additions and ornamentation in the year of the Restoration as a tribute to God and King by a royalist London merchant, Thomas Batt.
Batt has added three sequences of engraved illustrations, plus a few separate single plates, all finely hand-coloured, with details (glorioles, angel wings, shafts of light) picked out in gilt. In Genesis we find a forty-plate suite by William Slatyer and Jacob van Langeren (c. 1635, STC 22634.5), comprising an unfinished title-page, a plate of engraved dedications to Charles I, and thirty-eight full-page illustrations, with engraved text below (plates 3-16 have couplets in English, Latin, Greek and Hebrew). Three smaller plates from a different suite are mounted in Psalms, Joel, and Micah. In the New Testament Batt adds the extensive illustrative scheme (ninety full-page illustrations, fifteen portraits within roundels) published by the royalist printseller Sir Robert Peake (c. 1605–1667), after the engravings of the Flemish master Boethius à Bolswert (c. 1585–1633). Bolswert’s illustrations had first appeared in Vitae Passionis et Mortis Jesu Christi (1622), which had seventy-six plates. Archbishop William Laud apparently instructed Peake to reprint Bolswert’s illustrations, despite their redolence of Catholicism, for inclusion in English Bibles (Laud later denied involvement though a copy of the book was found in his library on his arrest). Peake went on to add portraits of the Evangelists, twelve new images in Acts which were to designed to complement Bolswert’s scenes for the Gospels, and the series of portraits in roundels, which covered Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and the Apostles; the cut of Matthew featured Peake’s imprint (here all but the phrase ‘Are to be sould by’ has been polished out of the plate). The third and final sequence added by Batt is of twenty-eight apocalyptic plates in Revelation, unsigned but after Jan Snellinck (1548–1638) and published by Visscher from 1649.
Though not unprecedented, the inclusion of so much illustration and the lavish care with which they have been coloured and gilt, was the subject of a concerted effort that Batt refers to not only in the special title-page on vellum that he commissioned, but also in his explanatory text: ‘An Embleme is but a silent parable. Let not the tender Eye check to see the allusion to our blessed Saviour figured in these Tipes ... And why not presented so as well to the eye as to ye ear: Before the knowledge of letters God was known by Hieroglyphicks ...’
The Bible and Psalms are framed in the volume by engraved portraits of Charles II and by original material, including a twenty-page manuscript ‘Transcribed by me Tho. Batt, out of an English manuscript translated [by John Sparrow] out of the High Dutch Tongue December the 9th, 1660’. The text appears otherwise unpublished and describes, with reference to Cluverius and Chrysostomos Dudulaeus, several accounts of supposed witnesses of the Crucifixion still living in the sixteenth century. Dudulaeus’s description (published 1602) of ‘Ahasueros’, the ‘eternal’ or ‘wandering Jew’, became a bestseller in contemporary Europe. The lawyer John Sparrow (1615–1670) is best known as the translator of the complete works of the German mystic Jakob Boehme, along with his cousin John Ellistone. At the end, Batt/ Sparrow reminds us that ‘Many things are beleived which ware never done, and many things are done which are not believed’.
Thomas Batt proclaims himself on the extra title-page as a ‘Citizen and Grocer’ of Dowgate; he is known to have issued a trade token from the Sugar Loaf tavern there. The arms that preface the work are seemingly those of the Bate (i.e. Batt) family (sable, a fess engrailed or between three dexter hands argent (here or), as a crest a stag’s head transfixed through the neck with an arrow) impaled with some unidentified arms (or, on a fess gules a lion passant guardant or, between three towers triple-towered sable). He is perhaps the Thomas Batt, who along with his brother Henry arrived in Bruges in 1656 ‘in good clothes, believing the King was ready for England, but are now very poor’ – Hyde loaned them 140 florins to return to England (see Smith, Cavaliers in Exile).
Bible: Darlow, Moule, and Herbert 669 (not mentioning the engraved title – Herbert 670 has one, naming Hills alone rather than both publishers as here); Wing B2256. Psalms: Wing B2438. Genesis plates: STC 22634.5.
