In his own words

There is an interesting article by John Morrill in the February issue of BBC History, announcing that he is part of a team of eight editors picked by Oxford University Press to compile a new, scholarly edition of Oliver Cromwell’s collected writings and speeches.

As Morrill says in the article, this is long overdue. The first collected edition of Cromwell’s words was Thomas Carlyle’s Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, published in 1845 and updated by S. C. Lomas in 1904. If you skip Carlyle’s commentary, it is a reasonable reference edition, but the provenance of the texts – especially where variant versions exist – is not really covered. Then there is W. C. Abbott’s Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, published between 1937 and 1947. I have all three volumes of this and the only good thing about them is that one copy used to be owned by Brian Wormald and still has lot of notes he made tucked into the dustjacket. That, and that in an emergency it can double as an effective doorstop. Otherwise, it is a pig of an edition to use. Abbott’s accompanying history of the period takes up most of the space, it’s really difficult to find what you’re looking for, and like Carlyle/Stainer it doesn’t deal with variant versions.

Morrill’s argument in the article – which he has made before in the Historical Journal, and to a generation of undergraduates like me who took his Cromwell special subject in the late 1990s – is that being clear about variant versions matters. One of the examples he gives in the article is the famous one, pointed out by Austin Woolrych in his study of the Barebones Parliament, of Cromwell’s speech at the opening of that body. One version, recorded in 1654,  is as follows:

I confess I never looked to see such a day as this – it may not be nor you neither – when Jesus Christ should be so owned as He is, at this day, and in this work. Jesus Christ is owned this day by your call, and you own Him by your willingness to appear for Him; and you manifest this, as far as poor creatures can, to the day of the power of Christ.

Another, recorded a century later, runs like this:

I confess I never looked to see such a day as this – it may not be nor you neither – when Jesus Christ should be so owned as He is, at this day, and in this work. Jesus Christ is owned this day by you all, and you own Him by your willingness to appear here; and you manifest this, as far as poor creatures can, to a day of the power of Christ.

The differences are small but important. In the first version, Cromwell is far more radical. Members of the Parliament have called forth the spirit of Christ through their presence, and the day itself is “the day of the power of Christ”, an apocalyptic climax to the struggles of the past eleven years. In the second version, Cromwell calls it “a day of the power of Christ”, which softens its millenarianism. Representatives have been summoned by Christ, not the other way around.

Establishing the provenance of these variant versions more precisely, and weighing up their likely accuracy, could make a fundamental difference to how historians interpret this and many other of Cromwell’s actions. If Morrill and his co-editors can pull this off, it will be a fantastic achievement. They ought to produce a definitive edition of Cromwell’s recorded words. As Morrill puts it:

Cromwell will come alive in much the same way as a Great Master painting takes on a new and different life when it is cleaned and restored.

I agree with the sentiment of this statement, but part of me wonders about the extent to which his work will “restore” Cromwell’s original words. A new version of Cromwell will be born, it’s true: but whether it will be the original Cromwell resurrected is a different matter. Like any historian of Cromwell, the editors will still have to wrestle with numerous ambiguities in what survives of his words. One example that springs to mind is Bulstrode Whitelocke’s famous description – or more accurately, descriptions – of a night-time encounter with Cromwell in Hyde Park in November 1652. Here is the version in a manuscript ‘diary’ written up by Whitelocke years after the event:

But suddeinly and unexpectedly Crom brake forth in this expression, What if a man should take uppon him to be King? Wh answerd that it would be more to his prejudice than advantage to doe so.

And here is the version in Whitelocke’s Annals:

Cromwell.—” What if a man should take upon him to be King?”

Whitelock.—” I think that remedy would be worse than the disease.”

Cromwell.—” Why do you think so?”

Whitelock.—” As to your own person, the title of King would be of no advantage, because you have the full kingly power in you already, concerning the militia, as you are General. So that I apprehend less envy, and danger, and pomp, but not less power and opportunities of doing good, in your being General, than would be if you had assumed the title of King.”

Here we have two versions of an encounter written retrospectively – both in the third person, but one in direct speech and one in reported speech. Which is more accurate? Has Whitelocke remembered events correctly, and dated them properly? Has he embellished, or even made things up? Given what we know of Cromwell’s frustrations with the Rump Parliament at this time, it is not implausible that this conversation took place. (One might add that given what we know about Whitelocke, it’s not implausible that it’s exaggerated, either). But it would be more plausible if it had taken place in 1657, when the offer of kingship was for a time seriously on the table. From what we know of both Cromwell and Whitelocke, we can contextualise this source to some extent. But ultimately, we can never know whether it reflects Cromwell’s actual words.

A similar problem might be raised with those of Cromwell’s words intended for publication. Cromwell wrote detailed accounts to William Lenthall, Speaker of the Commons, of battles in which he had commanded Parliamentary forces. Many of these were ordered to be published by Parliament, and formed part of an increasingly sophisticated propaganda war as the 1640s went on. We rely on these letters for much of our insight into Cromwell’s military and political career during the 1640s. One example amongst many is Cromwell’s famous – or infamous – account of the sack of Drogheda in September 1649. This is a critical source for trying to understand what happened during the siege, and for unpicking Cromwell’s attitude towards the Irish. It includes this grim account of the assault:

And indeed, being in the heat of action, I forbade them to spare any that were in arms in the town, and, I think, that night they put to the sword about 2,000 men, diverse of the officers and soldiers being fled over the bridge into the other part of the town, where about one hundred of them possessed St. Peter’s church-steeple, some the west gate and others a strong round tower next the gate called St. Sunday’s. These being summoned to yield to mercy, refused, whereupon I ordered the steeple of St. Peter’s Church to be fired, where one of them was heard to say in the midst of the flames: “God damn me, God confound me; I burn, I burn.”

It also has this oft-quoted phrase:

I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood; and that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future, which are the satisfactory grounds to such actions, which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret.

This letter survives in a number of printed sources: in the “official” pamphlet ordered to be published by Parliament, and reprinted in various newsbooks. But do we know that its contents are actually Cromwell’s words? As far as I know, Cromwell’s original letter does not survive. We don’t know whether the Council of State, or the clerk to Parliament, or the printers, may have made alterations or amendments. And even this aside, we also know very little about how Cromwell composed these letters. John Rushworth is known to have ghost-written equivalent letters sent back to Parliament by Thomas Fairfax. Did Cromwell write these letters on his own, or with the help of others under his command? Were they “tidied up” before publication?

My own answer is that I don’t really know. If anyone does, it’s John Morrill, which is why the work he and his co-editors are taking forward is so important. The Cromwell that emerges from their work will no doubt be much more sophisticated portrait than anything produced so far. But to extend Morrill’s metaphor, bits of it will be still be smudged or frayed at the edges. They will probably always remain that way. That is part of the challenge for anyone studying Cromwell, but it’s also what makes him such a fascinating and controversial figure.

As a footnote, a podcast by Professor Morrill about the work on a new edition of Cromwell’s words will go up on the BBC History site on 12 February.

Not that kind of pirate

For a limited time you can download a complete e-book of Adrian Johns’s new book on piracy and intellectual property at the University of Chicago Press website.

(via the Twitter feeds of Lee Durbin at Marginalia and Laura at Bookn3rd)

Bloody newes from Dover

AN363033001, © The Trustees of the British Museum

I found this gruesome woodcut from the title page of a 1647 pamphlet while looking for illustrated news pamphlets. Bloody Newes from Dover tells the story of John Champion, a tradesman from Dover, and his wife Mary. After the birth of their child, John wanted to have it christened. Mary disagreed, and when the baby was six or seven weeks old, she took a knife and cut off the child’s head:

And when her husband came in, she called him into a little Parlour, where the poore Infant lay bleeding, uttering these words.

Behold husband, they sweet Babe without a head, now go and baptize it; if you will, you must christen the head without a body: for here they lye separated.

Here is the husband’s shocked reaction:

O thou bloody and inhumane wretch, what haste thou done.

Mary was apprehended for trial at the Assizes, and went on to suffer some kind of post-traumatic shock disorder while in prison awaiting trial:

For, shee can no wayes fixe her eyes upon anything, but presently (she conceives) the poore Babe to appear before her without a head.

This kind of repenting was traditional for early modern murder pamphlets, as was the moral lesson to be drawn from the horrible incident:

Thus may we see, that where division and controversie doth arise, sad effects will suddenly follow: for no sooner can there a beach appear; but presently Sathan is ready to stop it up, by infusing his deluding spirit into their hearts, for the increasing of variance, discord and contention, and when once it had taken possession, it is a hard matter to remove it, but shall lyeth open to the deluding snare of the Divel, being ready to Be entrapped on any occasion.

Dirty book

In 1647, the bookseller George Thomason was asked to lend a book to Charles I. Thomason wasn’t sure at first, but eventually decided to loan it to his king. Charles – not unlike a few of the people I lend my books to – didn’t look after it as well as he might have, and ended up dropping it in some mud.

Years later, in the early 1660s, Thomason took stock of his collection of almost 23,000 tracts from the civil war period and began binding them into nearly 2,000 volumes. The 100th volume – shelfmark E.95 under the British Library ordering – starts with a handwritten note by Thomason, recalling the incident:

Memorandum that Col Will Legg and Mr Arthur Treavor were imployed by his matie K. Charles to gett for his present use, a pamphlet which his matie had then occasion to make use of, and not meetinge with it they both came to me, havinge heard that I did imploy my selfe to take up all such things, from the beginning of the Parlement, and findinge it with me told me it was for the kinges owne use. I tould them all I had were at his matis command & service, and withal tould them if I should part with it, & loose it, presuming that when his matie had done with it, that little accompt would be made of it, and yet if I should loose it, by that losse a limbe of my collection, which I should be very loth to see, well knowinge it would be impossible to supplie it if it should happen to be lost, with which answer they returned to his matie at Hampton Court, (as I take it) and and tould him they had found that peece he much desired and withall how loath he that had it was to part with it he much fearing its losse; wheruppon they were both sent to me againe by his Mâtie to tell me that upon the worde of a kinge (to use their own expressions) he would safely returne it, thereuppon immediately by them I sent it to his matie who having done with it and having it with him when he was going towards the Isle of Wight (11-13 Nov. 1647) let it fall in the durt, and then callinge for the two persons before mentioned (who attended him) delivered it to them with a charge, as they should answer it another day, that they should both speedily and safely return it to him, from whom they had received it, and withall to desire the partie to goe on and continue what had begun, which booke together with his Matie signification to me by these worthy and faithfull gentln I received both speedily and safely. Which volume hath the marke of honor upon it, which noe other volume in my collection hath, and very diligently and carefully I continued the same, until the most hapie restoration & coronation of his most gratious Matie Kinge Charles the Second whom God long preserve.

Geo. Thomason.

The “marke of honor” was the mud stains which the pamphlet was left with.

There seems to be some doubt about which pamphlet Charles actually wanted to borrow. The tract which follows Thomason’s annotation is The Reasons of the Lords and Commons why they cannot agree to the Alteration and Addition in the Articles of Cessation offered by his Majesty. With His Majestie’s gratious Answer thereunto, printed onApril 4, 1643. The version on Early English Books Online doesn’t appear to have any mud stains, though – but apparently there is a different version in the British Library which does. I have come across another account which thinks it was the pamphlet at the end of the volume, A remonstrance of the right honourable Iames Earle of Castlehaven and Lord Audley, which was the one dropped. The entry on EEBO for this says that it has been “reviewed, corrected, and augmented” – perhaps implying that mud stains have been digitally removed – but doesn’t give any further information.

However, my understanding is that Thomason only bound his volumes when he came to catalogue them in the 1660s. His note talks about lending a pamphlet, not a volume of them. So it must have been an individual tract which was dropped in the mud, not a collection of them. Logically, then, only one pamphlet in this volume should have mud stains.

My suspicion is that The Reasons of the Lords and Commons was Charles’s choice of reading. The reference to Hampton Court dates this incident to between August and November 1647, when Charles was under house arrest by the New Model at that palace. He had moved there after his failure to engage with the army’s Heads of Proposals. In September he turned down a further set of negotations, closely based on the Newcastle Propositions of 1646. It seems plausible that Charles might have wanted to consult previous records of negotiations with Parliament, to remind himself of previous statements they had made.

What is frustrating is that the note by Thomason is completely disconnected from what else appears on EEBO. There is an assumption that the pamphlets themselves are what scholars must be interested in, not the collection more widely or the impulses that lay behind it. All of my speculation above would be easy to confirm if I had access to the tracts themselves (which I don’t); but it could just as easily be confirmed if EEBO presented and glossed its sources in a different way.

(The image above is a composite made up of the two sides of paper on which Thomason wrote his annotation – the left hand side is from the verso of one page, the right hand side from the recto of another page).

“The new orthodox title makes it now very handsome”

On 17 April 1663, Samuel Pepys walked over to St. Paul’s churchyard on an errand:

Friday 17 April 1663. After dinner my father and I walked into the city a little, and parted and to Paul’s Church Yard, to cause the title of my English “Mare Clausum” to be changed, and the new title, dedicated to the King, to be put to it, because I am ashamed to have the other seen dedicated to the Commonwealth.

Mare Clausum, by John Selden, was an innocent enough book, which asserted sovereign nations’ right to claim dominion over the sea as well as the land. The original edition had been dedicated to Charles I. However, the particular edition Pepys owned was more suspect. It was the 1652 translation by Marchamont Nedham, a salaried pamphleteer and newsbook editor employed by the Commonwealth during the 1650s. The title page contained the Commonwealth arms, and the second page dedicated the work ‘To the Supreme Autoritie of the Nation: The Parliament of the Commonwealth of England’.

In 1663 a new edition – keeping Nedham’s translation, but changing the title page – had been published by two booksellers called Andrew Kembe and Edward Thomas:

For readers who already owned the 1652 edition, and who didn’t want the shame of the old title page but were reluctant to shell out for a new one, there was another option. The bookseller Robert Walton was offering a new title page that could be bound or pasted into the old edition, restoring the dedication to Charles I. It was Walton who Pepys visited that Friday evening to make the appropriate arrangements.

A week later the new title page had been inserted and Pepys was well pleased with it:

Tuesday 21 April 1663. Up betimes and to my office, where first I ruled with red ink my English “Mare Clausum,” which, with the new orthodox title, makes it now very handsome.

Pepys’s focus on the title is significant. His text remained exactly the same as that which he had spent the winter of 1661/1662 enjoying reading. Only on the surface had things changed.  What mattered was the appearance of the frontispiece, not what lay beneath.

This episode sums up an important tendency in Pepys: that he liked to make a good impression on others. “Others” includes us reading his diaries in the twenty-first century. Because of the detail of the diaries – particularly their recording of the fights, farts and flings of his private life – it is easy to assume that he was uncompromisingly honest and self-critical in his account of his life. This version of Pepys as master of the examined life has remained popular since the diaries were first published. Over a hundred years ago, Robert Louis Stephenson declared in a celebrated essay about the diaries that:

He has outstripped all competitors in the art or virtue of a conscious honesty about oneself.

Robert Latham made much the same point in his introduction to the condensed edition of the diaries:

He almost persuades us that we are sharing his life. We are the more willing to be persuaded because Pepys was so frank about himself.

A few years ago Claire Tomalin came to a similar conclusion in her biography of Pepys:

He was more interested in observing and recording his own actions than in presenting an immaculate or even favourable image of himself.

But then there is the academic version of Pepys, who is rather different. Francis Barker was amongst the first to argue, in the mid-1980s, that the account Pepys gives of himself contains rather more self-fashioning than at first apparent. It’s true that his diary does present to us very uncompromising details about his life. The famous account of his wife Elizabeth catching him in flagrante with their maid, Deb, hardly spares his blushes. And yet if Pepys had been unstinting in his accuracy, the point remains that we have no way of knowing that he was. We assume that this was the case, given Pepys’s skills as a narrator in drawing us into his life. Wealso assume that he wrote for posterity – why, as many argued, would he have gone to such trouble to preserve his diaries? Perhaps so. But nobody close to him left an equivalent diary in which they recorded their own observations about Pepys’s life, with the result that it is impossible to know what he did and didn’t record – or what he softened or altered.

My suspicion is that, wittingly or unwittingly, Pepys did exercise at least some self-censorship in his diary. Pepys came of age just as the Commonwealth died. He owed his career to the ideological volte-face performed by his employer, Montagu, who had previously been a loyal supporter of Cromwell. As a result, he moved from one phase of his life to another just as the political nation did the same. Like Nedham’s translation of Mare Clausum,  on the surface Pepys jettisoned the puritanism that he had imbibed during his youth from his time at Huntingdon grammar school then Magdalene, Cambridge. Beneath the surface, however, the odd current survived.

You can see this tension working itself out in the early days of the diary, as events move towards the restoration of Charles II. Pepys was quick to criticise his fellow clerk John Creed for changing his spots:

Sunday 12 May 1661. From thence homewards, but met with Mr. Creed, with whom I went and walked in Grayes-Inn-walks, and from thence to Islington, and there eat and drank at the house my father and we were wont of old to go to; and after that walked homeward, and parted in Smithfield: and so I home, much wondering to see how things are altered with Mr. Creed, who, twelve months ago, might have been got to hang himself almost as soon as go to a drinking-house on a Sunday.

But Pepys was also changing his beliefs during this period. Early in 1660 he joined the republican Rota Club:

Tuesday 10 January 1660. Thence to the Coffee-house, where were a great confluence of gentlemen; viz. Mr. Harrington, Poultny, chairman, Gold, Dr Petty; &c., where admirable discourse till at night.

Incidentally Pepys’s membership of this club also results in one of my favorite throwaway asides of the diary:

Sunday 14 January 1660. Nothing to do at our office… went myself to the Coffee-house, and heard exceeding good argument against Mr. Harrington’s assertion, that overbalance of propriety was the foundation of government.

Those skiving from the office on slow days today probably don’t go to philosophical discussions at Starbucks, but they still share a common impulse with Pepys.

Despite this flirtation with republicanism, later in the year Pepys bumps into an old schoolfriend and is afraid that his past beliefs may catch up with him:

Thursday 1 November 1660. Here dined with us two or three more country gentle men; among the rest Mr. Christmas, my old school-fellow, with whom I had much talk. He did remember that I was a great Roundhead when I was a boy, and I was much afraid that he would have remembered the words that I said the day the King was beheaded (that, were I to preach upon him, my text should be “The memory of the wicked shall rot”); but I found afterwards that he did go away from school before that time.

Often this tension between the two sides of his character emerges in his attitudes to the changing fashions of the 1660s. Here is his initial reaction to Montagu’s wife and daughter wearing fashionable black patches, then his subsequent actions:

Saturday 20 October 1660. To my Lord’s by land, calling at several places about business, where I dined with my Lord and Lady; when he was very merry, and did talk very high how he would have a French cook, and a master of his horse, and his lady and child to wear black patches; which methought was strange.

Sunday 4 November 1660. My wife seemed very pretty to-day, it being the first time I had given her leave to wear a black patch.

Similarly he wrestles with whether or not to wear a periwig, weighing up the bother of doing so with the fact that everyone who’s anyone is doing it:

Saturday 29 August 1663. Abroad with my wife by water to Westminster, and there left her at my Lord’s lodgings, and I to Jervas the barber’s, and there was trimmed, and did deliver back a periwigg, which he brought by my desire the other day to show me, having some thoughts, though no great desire or resolution yet to wear one, and so I put it off for a while.

Saturday 31 October 1663. But it hath chiefly arisen from my layings-out in clothes for myself and wife; viz., for her about 12l., and for myself 55l., or thereabouts; having made myself a velvet cloake, two new cloth suits, black, plain both; a new shagg gowne, trimmed with gold buttons and twist, with a new hat, and, silk tops for my legs, and many other things, being resolved henceforward to go like myself. And also two perriwiggs, one whereof costs me 3l., and the other 40s. — I have worn neither yet, but will begin next week, God willing.

Friday 5 May 1665. This day, after I had suffered my owne hayre to grow long, in order to wearing it, I find the convenience of periwiggs is so great, that I have cut off all short again, and will keep to periwiggs.

Pepys always has an eye on his social betters, and even when he disapproves of their actions it is normally not long before you find him following them. In this case his about-turns are recorded quite obviously. But there are the occasional moments of self-delusion, like when he chances upon a pornographic book at the stationer’s and protests rather too loudly:

Monday 13 January 1668. Thence homeward by coach and stopped at Martin’s, my bookseller, where I saw the French book which I did think to have had for my wife to translate, called L’escholle des filles, but when I come to look in it, it is the most bawdy, lewd book that ever I saw, rather worse than Putana errante, so that I was ashamed of reading in it, and so away home.

We know, and Pepys knows, that he will go back and buy it later, and end up doing what you do with pornographic books:

Friday 7 February 1668. We sang till almost night, and drank my good store of wine; and then they parted and I to my chamber, where I did read through L’Escholle des Filles; a lewd book, but what doth me no wrong to read for imagination’s sake (but it did hazer my prick para stand all the while, and una vez to decharger); and after I had done it, I burned it, that it might not be among my books to my shame.

This is the seventeenth-century equivalent of wiping your browser history. Burning the book was partly, I’m sure, to prevent his wife discovering it. But it doesn’t seem too far-fetched to me to wonder whether it was also to hide it from his conscience. The same might be said of his lapses into jumbled Spanish, French and Latin to describe sexual encounters. Given that the diary was already written in shorthand, you have to ask why Pepys added a second later of encoding to such sentences. If someone proficient with that particular form of shorthand had discovered the diary, then perhaps it would have puzzled them for a bit. Nevertheless, I do wonder whether it was also a convenient rhetorical device to separate the lecherous Pepys from the business-like Pepys.

What I’ve just set out may seem slightly harsh. But I actually like Pepys all the more for his occasional attempts to fool himself. Many critics see Pepys as a consummate humanist, dispassionately exposing and analysing his merits and flaws to readers of the diary. If this was actually what Pepys was like, I think I would find him less sympathetic. As it is, he was intelligent, lively, enthusiastic but at times colossally flawed. In other words, he was a human being like any of the rest of us and for me, this is what makes him so readable. If he was your friend, he would probably be the kind of friend you can tolerate only in small doses: but that doesn’t make his diaries any the less addictive a portrait of his personality.