Subscriptions were limited to L1, and all the members of the
royal family, including the Princess Victoria, who two years later
came to the throne, figured, with other leading personages in the
nation's life, in the list of subscribers. But the subscriptions only
produced a sum sufficient to carry out the first purpose of the
Monumental Committee--the repair of the tomb.
In 1847 the sale by public auction was announced of the house in which
Shakespeare was born. It had long been a show-place in private hands.
A general feeling declared itself in favour of the purchase of the
house for the nation. Public sentiment was in accord with the
ungrammatical grandiloquence of the auctioneer, the famous Robins,
whose advertisement of the sale included the sentence: "It is trusted
the feeling of the country will be so evinced that the structure may
be secured, hallowed, and cherished as a national monument almost as
imperishable as the poet's fame." A subscription list was headed by
Prince Albert with L250. A distinguished committee was formed under
the presidency of Lord Morpeth (afterwards the seventh Earl of
Carlisle), then Chief Commissioner of Woods and Forests, who offered
to make his department perpetual conservators of the property.
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