King George III and the ‘Smith Collection’ of Handel manuscripts

Abstract

The run of morocco-bound manuscript scores of Handel’s oratorios and church music from the Royal Music Library, named the ‘Smith Collection’ by William Barclay Squire in 1927, was assembled as a set for King George III in the early years of his reign. Some of the volumes have year-dates for copying from the period 1766–70, but the sequence also incorporates earlier volumes that originated from the library of the king’s father (Frederick, Prince of Wales, d.1751), partially documented in a sale advertisement by a bookseller soon after Handel’s death. Squire believed that the series had been the property of John Christopher Smith and had been given to the king with the collection of Handel’s autograph scores in the 1770s. Newly identified documents from the Royal Library, now at Windsor, record payments for the copying of many of the scores and enable an alternative reconstruction of the history of the collection under the king’s influence, beginning in 1765–6. They also raise new questions about the identity of the music copyist ‘Mr Teede’. The completion of the series took place in the early 1770s, probably before the king received the autographs. For the shelves in George III’s library the oratorios were arranged in chronological order, but the diverse origins of the volumes had the result that, although the bindings were in similar styles, their sizes were not uniform.