Narcissus Luttrell (1657-1732)
By 1676, the Manatons were dealing in land interests in Stratton, Cornwall that were considered part of the Grafton Estate, in the possession of Queen Catherine, wife of Charles II. The estate was granted in reversion, on her death to Henry FitzRoy, 1st Duke of Grafton, KG (1663 – 1690) an illegitimate son of King Charles II of England and his mistress Barbara Villiers.
Francis Luttrell had been in the possession of the manor of Stratton in Cornwall which is found in the records of the Grafton Estate. Following the death of Francis, Katherine, his widow and aunt to Ambrose and Henry Manaton and their cousin Narcissus Luttrell (1657-1732), son and heir of Francis, made an assignment of the estate at Stratton on 9 January, 1677 and 14 of 15 parts were then sold the following day.
Narcissus Luttrell was an English historian, diarist, and bibliographer, and briefly Member of Parliament for two different Cornish boroughs. His Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs from September 1678 to April 1714, a chronicle of the Parliaments of England and Great Britain, was distilled from his diary and published in 1857, after Macaulay had drawn attention to the manuscript in All Souls College, Oxford.
When Narcissus Luttrell was returned for Bossiney at the autumn election of 1679, Ambrose Manaton, his cousin, was the newly appointed mayor, and the first country gentleman to occupy that office in the period. Luttrell was appointed to no committees and made no speeches in the second Exclusion Parliament, though he is said to have been ‘one of the warm promoters of the exclusion bill’. He was probably the ‘Mr Luttrell’ whom the townsmen of Barnstaple preferred as a court candidate in 1688. He sat as a Whig in the second Parliament of William III, when he kept a valuable parliamentary diary.
Although Luttrell was for most of his life a private citizen and relied primarily on secondary sources for the workings of Parliament, he is often the best source available for legal and political matters of the time. The legislation itself is covered by the official parliamentary journals, but Luttrell's diary is often the only record of debates within the Palace of Westminster. As a result, Luttrell provides crucial political information which cannot be found elsewhere; as one example out of many, he notes that the debate on taxation of 1691 was divided according to geography, with Norfolk and Suffolk arguing against the remainder of the country over methods of taxation. Since individual members' votes were not recorded, the political significance of the legislation would be less clear without Luttrell's record.
Luttrell's diary also covers major events in diplomacy, literature and the arts, as well as parliamentary proceedings, and is supplemented in those areas by annotations within his massive library. He also compiled a bibliography of texts relating to the Popish Plot, The Compleat Catalogue of Stitch’d Books and Single Sheets, &c. Luttrell had one of the most impressive book collections of his time, and it was his wish that the library would be preserved intact, perhaps in an institution such as Gray's Inn (where he was called to the bar in 1680).
He was a collector by nature, and, for all his learning and industry, published nothing. With a private income of £300-£475 p.a., he soon abandoned ‘the practice of the law’, and amassed a large collection of books, pamphlets, and manuscripts, which John Locke (1632-1704), philosopher and author of the Two Treatises of Government and his patron Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury (1621 – 1683), a prominent English politician during the Interregnum and the reign of King Charles II and founder of the Whig party, both consulted. Proud of his kinship with the Luttrells of Dunster Castle he collated the family muniments.
With increasing prosperity he was able to purchase a house at Chelsea from the third Earl of Shaftesbury in 1710. He died on 27 June 1732 after a long illness and was buried at Chelsea, the last of this branch of the family to sit in Parliament.
After the death in 1749 of Luttrell's only surviving son, Francis, the library passed to Luttrell's sister, Dorothy Wynne. Her grandson, Luttrell Wynne, a fellow of All Souls College Oxford, gave Luttrell's MSS to the Codrington Library at All Souls College, but other material was dispersed through sales.
While many pieces from Luttrell's collection were eventually acquired by the British Library, many were not. Material purchased by Professor James Osborn from two sales at Sotheby's (in 1936 and 1957) was later given to Beinecke Library at Yale University. Various portions of the collection are now housed in several libraries in Britain and the United States, notably the British Library, Beinecke Library, Newberry Library and Huntington Library. The whereabouts of other material remains unknown.