A Man and his Influence

Camden's last entry in his personal diary, the Memorabilia, is 7 June 1622, when he records a night of sleeplessness and sickness. Characteristically, Camden continued to write entries for his diary of public affairs, his Annales for James's reign, nearly until his death the next year, and our last fleeting glimpse is of him subsumed into the larger picture of this national chronicle. On 18 August 1623 he records falling from his chair in church and his temporary paralysis and illness, then noting Prince Charles's return and welcome back to England. The last entry is of the disaster at Blackfriars theatre, killing eighty-one playgoers: “Ex occasu domus Scenicae apud Black-Fryers Londini 81 personae spectabiles necantur” (Annales, in Epistolae, p. 83). Three months later he died at his home in Chislehurst. Letters went out across the nation, across the English Channel and the Irish Sea – Camden was not well, was on his deathbed, was dead. Word spread slowly but certainly among the European intelligensia of the loss of one of their members; his death had been expected for some time and so came as no surprise. During his last sickness he was visited by friends; it was clear that his end was near, and his life literally passed out of his hands. His annals of James's reign in which these entries were made, and his personal diary, or “memorabilia”, were “filched” by John Hacket, later Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, while visiting the old man “as he lay dying”, as he later boasted to William Dugdale. The process of refashioning Camden began.