Portrait of a Dean

Appointed Dean in 1620, Williams found favour with James I and within a year was also Keeper of the Great Seal and Bishop of Lincoln. His fortunes fell under Charles I (who Williams had alienated when Prince of Wales) and exacerbated a long-standing enmity between the Calvinist Williams and the High Church William Laud.

Williams was confined to the Tower for his allegedly liberal attitude to Puritans and when released went to his Bishop’s Palace in Lincolnshire. Though he was later made Archbishop of York he eventually retreated to his native Wales where he died (and was buried) at Llandygai in 1650.

Early in 1623 Williams had paid for a substantial new library at his old Cambridge college, St John’s. This seems to have drawn his attention to the library at the Abbey, which he found to be inadequate. There was no need for a new building because the former monastic dormitory which housed the library was a spacious room, so instead Williams paid for the fitting out of the library with new furniture, echoing on a less lavish scale the work at St John’s.

Double-sided bookcases were installed at right angles to the walls to house the larger books, all of which were chained to the cases so that they could be read in situ but not removed. Smaller books were shelved in a gallery high on the north wall. All this work seems to have been completed by July 1623. 

Today, the book presses survive much as in Williams’ day but the gallery was removed when the library was again refurbished in the 1930s. Surviving photographs show it to have been a vertiginous structure which might not have survived a modern health and safety inspection. 

Williams also provided some 1,800 printed volumes of theology, church history and classical writings and persuaded more than thirty friends and colleagues to donate more. By the end of 1624 about 3,500 printed books had arrived. A large collection of manuscripts, also given by Williams, was kept separately and unhappily perished by fire in 1695.

Surprisingly, Williams was not himself a scholar of particular note. He published very little, and though he certainly owned books none of those he donated appear to have been his own. His desire was that Westminster Abbey have a library appropriate to a collegiate foundation which enjoyed a prominent role in the life of the Church.

Equally generous in other areas of the Abbey’s life, Williams had early on paid for substantial repairs to the Abbey’s external fabric. For Westminster School he funded additional scholarships. In December 1624 Williams entertained the French ambassador in the Jerusalem Chamber as negotiations for the future marriage of the Prince of Wales (later Charles I) to Henrietta Maria of France were finalised. To commemorate the occasion Williams commissioned the cedar overmantel which remains a feature of the Chamber to this day.

For nearly 400 years a portrait of John Williams has hung prominently in the Library. It was given in 1629 by one Lambert Osbalston, a Headmaster of Westminster and later prebendary (canon) of the Abbey, and shows Williams in sober black robes, with a high-crowned hat, one hand resting on the seal purse adorned with the Royal Arms which was in the Lord Keeper's custody. 

The painting is unsigned and the identity of the artist remains unconfirmed, but the Abbey’s curator Susan Jenkins believes the traditional attribution to Gilbert Jackson, remains the most likely. Other artist’s names have been put forward but a notable full-length portrait of Williams at St John’s College, Cambridge, which is close in style to the Abbey painting, bears Jackson’s signature and the date 1625.

The portrait has recently returned to the Library after conservation work undertaken by Abbey paintings conservators Antonella Cassacia and Krista Blessley. With painstaking patience and care they have removed the old varnish and surface dirt, re-touched areas of lost original paint, re-varnished the painting and brought it back to life.

Whatever the truth about the identity of the artist, it is good that after some time away in the conservation studio, Dean Williams once more looks down on his most significant gift to the Abbey.