If you are born in London are you English?
Even if your name is Helmut or Stanislas or Giovanni?
If your father is an ex-catholic friar AND an ex-jew?
If only three years previous dad avoided execution
at the hands of...say, the Central Inquisitorial Authority
by escaping from a Roman prison?
Technically you are English, I suppose but - sub rosa -
even if you translated the sublime Montaigne
for the Brit elites to delight in they would never really
allow you full membership in the Elizabethan/Jacobean club.
Only land could be said to have a greater value
than books until relatively recently. The man buried in Stratford
believed to be the author of some very nice plays and poems
left no books in his will - nor manuscripts, letters, drafts, desk,
paper or anything even vaguely or remotely related to writing
or art or civilized correspondence...
but the erstwhile French and Italian tutor to Prince Henry
(and Clerk of the Closet to the Queen Consort Anne of Denmark
whom he also instructed in languages,) John Florio left several hundred books
in several languages to the Pembrokes - aristocrats to the nines.
Curiously, perhaps, all trace of them has been lost.