Fox and Burke; but the volume, ‘through the unfortunate blindness of the editor,’ was very incorrectly printed. In the prefaces to his varied publications he feelingly refers to his residence in remote country parts of the south of Ireland. All his writings, however, are highly creditable to his scholarship, while his ‘Fasti Ecclesiæ Hibernicæ’ (5 vols. 1851–1860) is a standing monument of the most patient industry. It has done for the Irish church what Hardy's ‘Le Neve’ has done for the English; in fact, it excels its English rival in supplying skeleton biographies of all the bishops and the more distinguished members of the cathedral bodies.
[Cotton's Fasti Ecclesiæ Hibernicæ; Men of the Time (ed. 1865), p. 207; Annual Register (1879), p. 233; Academy, 13 Dec. 1879; Irish Ecclesiastical Gazette, 3 Jan. 1880.]
COTTON, JOHN (12th cent.?), is the author of a valuable treatise on music, first printed by Gerbert in 1784. Of this work there are two manuscripts at Vienna, and one each at Leipzig, Paris, Rome, and Antwerp. A sixth, from which Gerbert printed his edition, was destroyed in the fire at St. Blasien in 1768. The Vatican copy is said by Fetis to contain much the best text. The exact date of the treatise is unknown. The Vienna and St. Blasien copies entitle it merely ‘Joannis Musica,’ while the Paris and Antwerp copies have the name of Cotton or Cottonius. The anonymous monk of Melk who wrote the work (De Script. Eccles.) quoted by Gerbert, says that there was a learned English musician known as Joannes, and the English origin of the work is rendered more probable by the author's dedicating it ‘Domino et patri suo venerabili Anglorum antistiti Fulgentio,’ though the latter, like Cotton, cannot be identified. One theory attributes the work to Pope John XXII (1410–1417), but this rests on the very slight foundation that the author styles himself ‘Joannes servus servorum Dei.’ Gerbert has pointed out that this title was not solely used by popes, besides which it is improbable that a supreme pontiff would address Fulgentius in the deferential manner adopted by the author. The work is also clearly of earlier date, for it speaks of neums being in ordinary use at the time of writing. Another theory ascribes it to a certain Joannes Scolasticus, a monk of the monastery of St. Matthias at Trèves, all that is known of whom is that he was living about 1047, and that he wrote much music, but there seems to be no reason why the work should not have been written by the unknown Englishman, John Cotton. From internal evidence its date appears to be the latter part of the eleventh or beginning of the twelfth century. On the system of harmony of the period the whole work throws much light.
[Gerbert's Scriptores Ecclesiastici de Musica Sacra, 1784, tom. ii.; A. de la Fage's Essais de Dipthérographie Musicale, 1864; Coussemaker's Histoire de l'Harmonie au Moyen Age, 1852; Fétis's Biographie des Musiciens, vol. ii.; Ambros's Geschichte der Musik, ii. 192.]
COTTON, Sir JOHN HYNDE (d. 1752), Jacobite politician, was the only surviving son of Sir John Cotton of Lanwade and Madingley Hall, Cambridgeshire, whose grandfather (John) was created a baronet 14 July 1641. His mother, who married Sir John at Westminster Abbey, on 14 Jan. 1679, was Elizabeth, daughter and coheiress of Sir Joseph Sheldon, lord mayor of London in 1676, and nephew and heir of Archbishop Sheldon. He was entered as a fellow-commoner at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, on 29 Sept. 1701, was created M. A. in 1705, and became fourth baronet on his father's death in 1712. At every election from 1708 to 1734 he was returned for the borough of Cambridge; but during the parliament of 1722–7 he chose to serve for the county of Cambridge, which had also returned him as its representative. Cole says that Cotton was accused of stinginess by the corporation of Cambridge; and if, as is asserted, his election in 1727 cost him 8,000l., his subsequent expenditure may of necessity have subjected him to this charge. At all events, his parliamentary connection with his native county closed in 1741, when he was returned for the borough of Marlborough, and continued to sit for it until his death. Cotton was always a tory, and after the death of Queen Anne was one of the leaders of the Jacobite party. For a year (September 1713 to September 1714) he was a member of the board of trade; but his tenure of office ceased with the queen's death, and his principles forbade his accepting any position under the new government until the fall of Sir Robert Walpole. On that event the Duke of Argyll, one of the most influential in opposition to Walpole, received an assurance that Cotton should be included in the board of admiralty. But the appointment was absolutely vetoed by George II, with the declaration that he was determined to stand by those who had secured the throne of England for his family; and, to the indignation of the tories, Cotton's name did not appear in the list of the board's members. The king was at last forced to yield, and, although he disliked the Jacobite leader personally as well as politically, was compelled to accept him in 1744 in the post of treasurer
