The reader who glances at this pedigree will notice that some of the COTTONS of 1600–1750 were as fortunate in getting heiress-wives as had been their foregoers of preceding centuries. But their possessions were scattered almost as rapidly as they had been augmented. Conington, which was the most valued possession of Sir Robert, was less prized by his descendants. The Council Books show that some of its appendant manors and members—notably Glatton and Hulme—gave to the Founder himself a good deal of trouble. The Sequestration Books show the anxieties and losses which the busy Parliamentarians of Huntingdonshire inflicted on his next successor. Other circumstances tended also to bring the place into disfavour with owners who had a choice of seats. It lay so close to the great northern road, as to be exposed to undue demands alike from the movement of troops and from the tramping of professional vagrants. Nor was it less exposed, from its situation, to injuries by great floods. [Sidenote: DESERTION OF THE OLD SEAT OF CONINGTON.] Long before the extinction of the male line, Conington was deserted, in favour of more attractive abodes in southern counties. We learn from a passage in Stukeley’s _Itinerary_ that the house was fast becoming a ruin, even in the reign of GEORGE THE FIRST; although it had been solidly rebuilt by Sir Robert himself. ‘I thought it,’ writes that antiquary, ‘a piety to turn half a mile out of the road, to visit Conington the seat of the noble Sir Robert COTTON,—where he and Camden have often sat in council upon the Antiquities of Britain, and where he had a choice collection of Roman inscriptions picked up from all parts of the kingdom. I was concerned to see a stately old house of hewn stone, large and handsome, already falling into ruin.’[22] By the Statute which established the COTTON Library as a national institution, it was enacted as follows: ‘The Cottonian Library ... shall be kept and preserved, in the name and family of the COTTONS, for public use and advantage. [Sidenote: THE ESTABLISHMENT ACT OF 1700.] And therefore, according to the desire of the said Sir John COTTON, and at his request, the said Mansion House, ... and also all the said Library, ... together with all the Coins, Medals, and other rarities, ... shall be vested in Trustees ... with a perpetual succession.’ The first Trustees were the Lord Chancellor SOMERS, Mr. Speaker HARLEY (afterwards Earl of Oxford), and the Lord Chief Justice, _ex officio_; together with Sir Robert COTTON, of Hatley St. George, Cambridgeshire; Philip COTTON, of Conington; Robert COTTON of Gedding, in Cambridgeshire, and William HANBURY, of the Inner Temple. [Sidenote: 12 & 13 WILL. III, c. 7.] It was provided that on the decease of any one of the four family trustees the heir male, for the time being, of Sir Robert COTTON, the founder, should appoint a successor.