Will you have a cup of tea, Father?

From Thomas Scot’s account of his role as intelligencer for the Council of State in the early 1650s, describing his network of spies and agents:

For France there was one who went by the name of N. N., who had for a long time before (as I understood from Mr Frost) given Intelligence to the Committee of both Kingdomes, and after to the Committee of safety at Derby House, which I saw was satisfactorie, but when the King came thither wee added, and by the meanes of Father Creely an Irish Abbott, knowne here by the name of Capt. Holland, got something more in relation to his Maties affaires and from about ye Queene his Mothers Court.

Is it wrong that when I read about Father Creely I immediately thought of his modern-day counterpart?

Killing Noe Murder

I’ve been reading Edward Sexby’s Killing Noe Murder for class this week, and it got me thinking about the mechanics of actually publishing controversial pamphlets.

Sexby was born around 1616 and served under Oliver Cromwell in his Ironsides during the early 1640s. By the time the New Model was formed in 1645, he was serving under Fairfax and went on to play an important role in the radicalisation of the army during the later 1640s. He famously set out his political views on the first day of the Putney debates:

The cause of our misery is upon two things. We sought to satisfy all men, and it was well; but in going about to do it we have dissatisfied all men. We have laboured to please a king and I think, except we go about to cut all our throats, we shall not please him; and we have gone to support an house which will prove rotten studs — I mean the Parliament, which consists of a company of rotten members.

After Putney, Pride’s Purge and the regicide, Sexby became an important figure for the Commonwealth and went to Bordeaux to try to influence his fellow Protestant Frondeurs and support them in their struggle. By 1655, though, like many fellow supporters of the Good Old Cause, he had fallen out of love with Cromwell and the Protectorate. He was involved in the plot by Miles Sindercombe to assassinate Cromwell in early 1657.

After the plot failed, Sexby – who was at this point in the Netherlands – wrote a pamphlet called Killing Noe Murder, giving biblical and classical humanist justifications for why Cromwell was a tyrant and could lawfully be killed. Although there is some debate about the extent of involvement, it seems likely that Sexby took the lead in writing it but perhaps in consultation with Silius Titus, the Presbyterian representative of the royalists Sexby had allied himself with against Cromwell. He introduced the pamphlet with this sardonic preface:

May it please your Highness,
How I have spent some hours of the leisure your Highness has been pleased to give me, this following paper will give your Highness an account. How you will please to interpret it I cannot tell; but I can with confidence say my intention in it is to procure your Highness that justice nobody yet does you, and to let the people see the longer they defer it, the greater injury they do both themselves and you. To your Highness justly belongs the honour of dying for the people; and it cannot choose but be unspeakable consolation to you in the last moments of your life to consider with how much benefit to the world you are like to leave it. ‘Tis then only, my Lord, the titles you now usurp will be truly yours. You will then be indeed the deliverer of your country, and free it from a bondage little inferior to that from which Moses delivered his. You will then be that true reformer which you would be thought. Religion shall be then restored, liberty asserted, and parliaments have those privileges
they have fought for.

The pamphlet seems to have arrived in London by 18 May. The Publick Intelligencer reported on that day that “divers abominable desperate pamphlets” had been scattered about the streets, including at Charing Cross and other places in the City.

The former Leveller John Sturgeon (formerly a member of Cromwell’s life guard, but since the mid-1650s an opponent of the Protectorate) was arrested on 25 May with two bundles of copies on him – about 300 in all. Two days later a search was made of St Catherine’s Dock and seven parcels with 200 copies – 1,400 in all – were found in the house of Samuel Rogers, a waterman. A bundle of 140 found near steps of a house. So perhaps 2,000 were taken out of circulation.

Many more did get circulated, though. John Thurloe wrote to Henry Cromwell on 26 May enclosing a copy:

There is lately a very vile booke dispersed abroad, called Killinge noe murder. The scope is, to stirre up men to assassinate his highnes. I have made search after it, but could not finde out the spring-head thereof. The last night there was one Sturgeon, formerly one of his highness’s life-guard, a great leveller, taken in the street, with two bundles of them under his arme. The same fellow had a hand in Syndercombe’s buissines, and fledd for it into Holland, and is now come over with these bookes. I have sent your lordship one of them, though the principles of them are soe abominable, that I am almost ashamed to venture the sendinge it to your lordship.

Thurloe’s assistant Samuel Morland wrote to John Pell at the start of June that:

There has been the most dangerous pamphlet lately thrown about the streets that ever has been printed in these times. I have sent you the preface, which is more light, but, believe me, the body of it is more solid; I mean as to showing the author’s learning, though the greatest rancour, malice, and wickedness that ever man could show – nay, I think the devil himself could not have shown more.

People paid up to 5 shillings to get hold of copies. A copy even got thrown into Cromwell’s coach.

So how did Sexby and his accomplices achieve this? The first step was maximise the numbers who could have read Killing Noe Murder had. The pamphlet is 16 pages of quarto, and hence made up of two sheets of paper. Each set of 8 pages would have been printed as follows: the numbers represent page numbers in the final book.

It was printed on cheap paper – possibly ‘pot paper’, which in the 1620s had sold for between 3s. 4d. and 4s.6d. a ream. A ream contained 500 sheets, so one ream would have supplied 250 copies of the book. The 2,000 copies confiscated by the authorities would hence have cost at least £1 for Sexby and his accomplices to commission. Of course this does not include printer’s costs: by way of comparison, in 1655 Sturgeon had paid the radical printer Richard Moone 40 shillings for 1,000 copies of A Short Discovery of his Highness the Lord Protector’s Intentions. This was 8 pages long so a work double the size might have cost 80 shillings, or £4, for 1,000 copies. Assuming on top of the 2,000 confiscated copies that perhaps another 1,000 or 2,000 copies did survive and go into circulation, the whole enterprise might have cost Sexby £12 to £16.

Parcels of the pamphlet would then have been shipped across to London. Thurloe ordered a search of Dutch boats but had no luck in finding which skipper had shipped them over. It seems likely that John Sturgeon was Sexby’s London agent when it came to receiving and distributing copies. He had fled to the Netherlands after being involved in Miles Sindercombe’s failed plot to kill Cromwell earlier in 1657, so probably accompanied the pamphlets over to England from Amsterdam.

When it came to scattering copies about London’s streets, it’s impossible to know exactly how Sturgeon achieved this. However, it seems likely that he drew on radical political and religious communities within London. Sturgeon was a member of the Baptist church of Edmund Chillenden, which met at St Paul’s. In the 1630s, Chillenden had been involved with John Lilburne in distributing subversive puritan literature, and had subsequently been involved in army politics with Sexby. It seems plausible that his church was the centre for a number of London-based Levellers and Baptists whom Sturgeon may have mobilised to help. Someone else arrested along with Sturgeon was Edward Wroughton, a haberdasher who was a member of Thomas Venner’s Fifth Monarchist congregation at Coleman Street. Members of this church were mostly young men and apprentices, who would be likely candidates for dispersing the pamphlet during the middle of the night.  So it’s possible too that a network of congregations played a part in helping Sexby.

Killing Noe Murder had an impact out of proportion to its size and the number of copies distributed. It became a major talking point and the Protectorate took significant steps to take it out of circulation and arrest its conspirators. Sadly for Sexby, he was arrested after returning to London in June 1657 to foment further assassination attempts. While being held in the Tower of London he confessed authorship of Killing Noe Murder. He died there in January 1658.

My illustration is of course of the Master DI Sam Tyler John Simms as Sexby in The Devil’s Whore. For more on Sexby and Killing Noe Murder:

• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. [subscription or Athens access needed]
• ‘State Papers, 1657: May (6 of 6)’, A collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, volume 6: January 1657 – March 1658 (1742), pp. 315-329.
• James Holstun, Ehud’s dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (London and New York, 2000), ch. 8.
• C.H. Firth, ‘Killing No Murder’, English Historical Review (1902), pp. 308-311. [subscription or Athens access needed]
  

Information technology and early modern readers

Bookshelves are not the most obvious thing that comes to mind when you think about information technology. But the word technology is actually a very appropriate description: the word “τέχνη” from which it derives means craft or art, which is apt given the skills that go into producing shelves. For early modern readers, and even readers today, bookshelves were and are one of the most important methods for storing and accessing information. And bookshelves are not just passive, functional pieces of wood, metal or plastic that provide a neutral home for books to sit on. The other Greek word from which technology derives – “λογία” – means saying or utterance, and this expressive, constitutive aspect of technology is important to bear in mind. As with any other material aspect of a book, bookshelves mediate a reader’s experience of a text.

This was certainly the case for many early modern readers. Michel de Montaigne kept his book collection in the third storey of a tower, which allowed him unfettered views not just of his geographical domain but also his textual and intellectual domain:

My library is round in shape, squared off only for the needs of my table and chair; as it curves round it offers me at a glance every one of my books ranged on five shelves all the way along. It has three splendid and unhampered views and a circle of free space sixteen yards in diameter.

You can see a reconstruction of Montaigne’s library here. The arrangement of shelves allowed him a remarkable intellectual freedom to wander through his books:

Here I leaf through now one book, now another, without order and without plan, by disconnected fragments. One moment I muse, another moment I set down or dictate, walking back and forth, these fancies of mine that you see here.

Sir Robert Cotton’s library helped to order his reading in a different way. At some point between 1620 and his death in 1631, Cotton arranged his extensive collection of rare manuscripts into fourteen cabinets, each mounted by a bust of a famous classical figure such as Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Caligula or Nero. Kevin Sharpe’s reconstruction of how this might have looked can be seen here.

Unlike other collections, this meant his library was not organised by subject. Nero, for example, contains the Lindisfarne gospels alongside collections of royal diplomatic correspondence. Julius contains Ælfric’s Lives of Saints alongside a copy of the charges brought against Cardinal Wolsey.

Cotton allowed liberal borrowing from his library by friends and colleagues, making it both a private and semi-public collection. But only Cotton and his libarian would have had the knowledge to find books quickly. As Kevin Sharpe has put it:

Cotton and his books went together and contemporaries had to know Cotton before they knew much about the contents of his manuscripts.

For Cotton, then, bookshelves were a way of organising other readers’ experience of his books, as well as his own.

Samuel Pepys was another seventeenth-century reader whose bookshelves helped to mediate his reading. In the 1660s Pepys drew on his contacts as a naval administrator to procure the services of Thomas Simpson, a joiner at the Royal Naval Dockyard in Woolwich. Simpson was first employed to build a closet for clothes, but in 1666 Pepys commissioned him to build a set of bookcases for his growing collection of books. Practical considerations seem to be what first motivated his decision to build the shelves:

23 July 1666. Up, and to my chamber doing several things there of moment, and then comes Sympson, the Joyner; and he and I with great pains contriving presses to put my books up in: they now growing numerous, and lying one upon another on my chairs, I lose the use to avoyde the trouble of removing them, when I would open a book.

The need to manage growing amounts of information, or otherwise risk overload, seems to have been a common impulse for readers with the money to afford book collections. Later, during his retirement, Pepys devoted considerable time to cataloguing his library, employing Paul Lorrain and his nephew Jackman as librarians to help him.

But there were also more sensual pleasures to be had from building shelves:

10 August 1666. Thence to Sympson, the joyner, and I am mightily pleased with what I see of my presses for my books, which he is making for me.

In Pepys’s case, pleasure could be had not just from organising his collection, but from making it beautiful too:

24 August 1666. Up, and dispatched several businesses at home in the morning, and then comes Sympson to set up my other new presses for my books, and so he and I fell in to the furnishing of my new closett, and taking out the things out of my old, and I kept him with me all day, and he dined with me, and so all the afternoon till it was quite darke hanging things, that is my maps and pictures and draughts, and setting up my books, and as much as we could do, to my most extraordinary satisfaction; so that I think it will be as noble a closett as any man hath, and light enough – though, indeed, it would be better to have had a little more light.

You can make out the portraits and a map in this engraving of Pepys’s later house at Buckingham Street in 1693.

A finely decorated library was undoubtedly an important status symbol for Pepys; but the aesthetics of his library were also crucial. He took great pleasure in commissioning shelves that were intricate and beautiful, as well as practical. His bookcases were made of oak and glass-fronted, with the main section holding folio size books. The lower sections use sliding glass panels for smaller books. The Pepys Library site hosted by Magdalene College has a good selection of images: 1, 2, 3.

Books also needed to look right on the shelf. Pepys was adamant that the books should be arranged by height, even specifying in a codicil to his will that after his death:

8 thly That the placing as to heighth be strictly reviewed and where found requiring it more nicely adjusted.

Even the books themselves were turned into objects of beauty. They were expensively bound, stamped with Pepys’s crest, had bookplates in the front and endplates at the back. You can see Pepys’s bookplate here.

So what difference did bookshelves make to these three early modern readers? We shouldn’t underestimate the functional aspect of shelves. As private book collections grew, they needed to be stored somewhere. But for Montaigne, Cotton and Pepys, bookshelves also provided different experiences of reading. They allowed Montaigne to wander through his collection, whereas for Cotton they helped to close it off to others. Pepys, meanwhile, derived both pleasure and status from his bookcases.

The growth in recent years of a new history of the book has resulted in a much greater focus on the material aspect of texts, such as the paper they are printed on, the typeface they use, or the ink they are printed with, and on the ways in which early modern readers approached and constructed their reading. In Don McKenzie’s words:

A book is never simply a remarkable object. Like every other technology it is the product of human agency in complex and highly volatile contexts which a responsible scholarship must seek to recover if we are to understand better the creation and communication of meaning as the defining characteristic of human societies.

As a product of human agency themselves, bookshelves too have their place in the history of books and reading.

My illustration is from Claude du Molinet’s “Le Cabinet de la Bibliothèque de Sainte Geneviève” (Paris, 1692). AN465647001, © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Mazarinades

Unlike English pamphlets of the seventeenth century, which are easily accessible on EEBO, I’ve found it harder to track down their French equivalents. I’ve been looking at Mazarinades of the mid-seventeenth century: libelles or political pamphlets mostly directed against Cardinal Mazarin during the Fronde. They take their name from a libelle by Paul Scarron, La Mazarinade, of 1651:

Buggering bugger, buggered bugger,
Bugger to the supreme degree,
Hairy bugger and feathered bugger,
Bugger in large and small volume,
Bugger sodomizing the State,
And bugger of the purest mixture…

Below are a few sources of Mazarinades and details about them online:

• Moreau, Choix de Mazarinades (1853), vol. 1.
• Moreau, Choix de Mazarinades (1853), vol. 2.
• Moreau, Bibliographie des Mazarinades (1851).

Christian Jouhaud and Hubert Carrier’s secondary works on the Mazarinades sadly aren’t available online, let alone in translation, but Jeffrey Sawyer’s book on earlier libelles of the seventeenth century, Printed Poison, is available in its entirety here.

Europe’s Physician

Europe’s Physician: the various life of Sir Theodore de Mayerne
by Hugh Trevor-Roper
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006

Here is a long overdue review of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s biography of Sir Theodore de Mayerne. I originally read this book over Christmas in a vain attempt to delay the process of essay writing, but it’s taken me a while to get round to writing about it.

The manuscript for the book was amongst various unfinished works found in Trevor-Roper’s papers when he died in 2003. Much of the research seems to have been carried out during the 1970s, with the bulk of the manuscript completed by 1979 – but then, other projects got in the way and Trevor-Roper never fully completed it. Blair Worden, Trevor-Roper’s literary executor, has been the mastermind behind its eventual publication – his editing (rightly) confined to chasing references and the occasional polishing of roughly drafted text.

Mayerne was born into a Huguenot family in Geneva – his father having fled France following the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre. He studied first in Geneva then at Heidelberg and Montpellier, at the latter finding inspiration from Joseph du Chesne and building an interest in the new, heretical medical practices of Paracelsus. Trevor-Roper does a fine job of explaining and illuminating the battle between Galenic medicine and Paracelsian “chemical” medicine that was underway during Mayerne’s lifetime. Where Galen had argued that illness could be controlled by balancing the four humours within the body, Paracelsus and his followers argued that the universe and everything in it – including the human body – was chemically controlled, and could be adjusted through appropriate treatments.

After moving to Paris to set up practice, Mayerne continued his interest in Paracelsus but also managed to become one of Henri IV’s physicians. It was here that he developed the practice of keeping detailed case notes, something which has allowed historians to gain insight into the medical conditions of many contemporaries – Oliver Cromwell, for instance, sought treatment from Mayerne in 1628 and was described as “valde melancholicus”. At this time Mayerne also developed a political role, accompanying the Duc de Rohan on diplomatic missions. Trevor-Roper is excellent at bringing out Mayerne’s politics, particularly his commitment to the Huguenot cause. This is an aspect that is missing from other biographies that focus solely on Mayerne’s medical career. He was also later employed by James I for similar purposes of statecraft.

After Henri IV’s assassination in 1610, Mayerne was invited to England and became James I’s personal physician – and vet, too, for the royal horses (there was no distinction between the two roles at the time). He managed to ride out criticism of his treatment of Robert Cecil and Henry Prince of Wales – both of whom would die, despite his efforts. In Cecil’s case he was criticised for bleeding the patient by other doctors; in Henry’s case, the treatment was initially senna and rhubarb cordial, but when Henry’s typhoid fever did not respond to this, Mayerne’s desire to bleed him was vetoed by other doctors. Instead, his head was shaved and pigeons applied to it, and a cock was slit down the back and placed on his feet. Despite this, Henry went downhill and was dead by the next day. Mayerne was then caught up in the scandal surrounding the murder of Thomas Overbury, who died a horrible death, poisoned by Frances Howard and Robert Carr. Mayerned had been involved in Overbury’s treatment but managed to escape censure.

Mayerne was far-thinking in some of his ideas. During the plague of 1630, for example, he suggested a centralised office for public health, with royally-funded hospitals and trained doctors. He also saw which direction the wind was blowing in terms of monopolies – he applied for monopolies in lead-mining and in oyster-farming, although neither attempt was successful. Later in his career, he also developed an interest in art, applying his chemical interests to the science and technology of painting and pottery, and producing an influential history of the technique of oil painting.

In his later years, Mayerne kept a low profile during the civil wars and had his position as doctor to Henry and Elizabeth Stuart (Charles’s younger children, under Parliament’s care at St James’s) regularised by Parliament. He died on 22 March 1655, at the age of 82.

Trevor-Roper’s life is a fascinating account of the man, ranging equally from analysis of Mayerne’s role in high politics, through to his medical ideas, to interesting tidbits about arcane treatments or passing interests in non-medical issues. He has an eye for the funny detail – for example, the treatment of ointment of made of green lizards, applied to the feet, that he prescribed for the Duchess of Lennox. Some of the writing does jar slightly, though. The book was written in an age when literary tastes differed from today’s, and I found some of the language slightly overblown in places. There are also various points, particularly in Trevor-Roper’s account of European politics, where the historiography has significantly overtaken him. His summary of the English civil wars, for example, is very out of date. But this is to be expected in a book that was largely completed thirty years ago, and it does not take away from what an enjoyable read it is.