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 The Book-Lover's Library. 
 
 Edited by 
 
 Henry B. Wheatley, F.S.A.
 
 BOOKS CONDEMNED 
 TO BE BURNT. 
 
 BY 
 
 JAMES ANSON FARRER. 
 
 r 
 
 LONDON 
 
 ELLIOT STOCK, 62, PATERNOSTER ROW 
 
 1892
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 HEN did books first come to 
 be burnt in England by the 
 common hangman, and what 
 was the last book to be so treated? 
 This is the sort of question that occurs 
 to a rational curiosity, but it is just 
 this sort of question to which it is 
 often most difficult to find an answer. 
 Historians are generally too engrossed 
 with the details of battles, all as 
 drearily similar to one another as 
 scenes of murder and rapine must of 
 necessity be, to spare a glance for the 
 far brighter and more instructive field 
 of the mutations or of the progress of 
 manners. The following work is an 
 attempt to supply the deficiency on this 
 particular subject. 
 
 b
 
 vi Preface. 
 
 I am indebted to chance for having 
 directed me to the interest of book- 
 burning as an episode in the history 
 of the world's manners, the discursive 
 allusions to it in the old numbers of 
 " Notes and Queries " hinting to me 
 the desirability of a more systematic 
 mode of treatment. To bibliograpJiers 
 and literary historians I conceived that 
 such a work might prove of utility and 
 interest, and possibly serve to others as 
 an introduction and incentive to a 
 branch of our literary history that is 
 not witlioiit its fascination. But I 
 must also own to a less unselfisli 
 motive, for I imagined that not with- 
 out its reward of delight would be 
 a temporary sojourn among the books 
 which, for their boldness of utterance 
 or unconventional opinions, were not 
 only not received by the best literary 
 society of their day, but were with 
 ignominy expelled from it. Nor was 
 I wrong in my calculation.
 
 Preface. vii 
 
 But could I impart or convey the 
 same delight to others ? Clearly all 
 that I coii Id do zvas to invite them to 
 enter on the same road, myself only 
 subserving the humble functions of a 
 signpost. I could avoid merely com- 
 piling for them a bibliographical dic- 
 tionary^ but I could not treat at 
 length of each offender in my catalogue, 
 without, in so exhausting my subject, 
 exhausting at the same time my 
 reader's patience. I have tried there- 
 fore to give something of tlie life of 
 their history and times to the authors 
 with whom I came in contact ; to cast 
 a little light on the idiosyncrasies or 
 misfortunes of this one or of that ; 
 but to do them full justice, and to 
 enable the reader to make their complete 
 acquaintance, how was that possible with 
 any regard for the laws of literary pro- 
 portion ? All I could do was to aim at 
 something less dull than a dictionary, 
 but something far short of a history.
 
 viii Preface. 
 
 I trust that no one will be either 
 attracted or alarmed by any anticipa- 
 tions suggested by the title of my book. 
 Although primarily a book for the 
 library, it is also one of which no 
 drawing-room table ?ieed be the least 
 afraid. If I have found anything 
 in my condemned authors which they 
 would have done better to have left 
 unsaid, I have, in referring to their 
 fortunes, felt under no compulsion to 
 reproduce their indiscretions. But, in 
 all of them put together, I doubt 
 whether there is as much to offend a 
 scrupulous taste as in many a latter- 
 day novel, the claim of wJiicJi to the 
 distinction of burning is often as 
 indisputable as the certainty of its 
 regrettable immunity from that fiery 
 but fitting fate. 
 
 The custom I write about suggests 
 some obvious reflections on the muta- 
 bility of our national manners. Was 
 the wisdom of our ancestors really so
 
 Preface. ix 
 
 much greater than our own, as many 
 profess to believe ? If so, it is strange 
 with how vutch of that wisdom we 
 have learnt to dispense. One by one 
 their old customs have fallen away 
 from us, and I fancy that if any 
 gentleman could come back to us from 
 the seventeenth century, he would be 
 less astonished by the novel sights he 
 would see than by the old familiar 
 sights he would miss. He would see 
 no one standing in the pillory, no 
 one being burnt at a stake, no one 
 being " swum " for witchcraft, no one's 
 veracity being tested by torture, and, 
 above all, no hangman burning books 
 at Cheapside, no unfortunate authors 
 being flogged all the way from Fleet 
 Street to Westminster. The absence of 
 these things would probably strike him 
 more than even the railways a?td the 
 telegraph wires. Returning with his 
 old-world ideas, he would wonder how 
 life and property had survived the
 
 x Preface. 
 
 removal of their time-honoured props, 
 or how, when all fear of punishment 
 
 had been removed from the press, 
 Church and State were still where he 
 had left them. Reflecting on these 
 things, he would recognise the fact 
 that he himself had been living in an 
 age of barbarism from which we, his 
 posterity, were in process of gradual 
 emergence. What vistas of still fur- 
 tlier improvement would not then be 
 conjured tip before his mind I 
 
 We can hardly wonder at our an- 
 cestors burning books when we recollect 
 their readiness to burn one another. 
 It was not till the year 1790 that 
 women ceased to be liable to be burnt 
 alive for high or for petit treason, 
 and Blackstone found nothing to say 
 against it. He saw nothing unfair 
 in burning a woman for coining, but 
 in only hanging a man. " The punish- 
 ment of petit treason',' he says, " in a 
 man is to be drawn and hanged, and
 
 Preface. xi 
 
 in a woman to be drawn and burned ; 
 the idea of which latter punishment 
 seems to have been handed down to 
 us by the ancient Druids, which con- 
 demned a woman to be burnt for 
 murdering her husband, and it is now 
 the usual punishment for all sorts of 
 treasons committed by those of the 
 female sex." Not a suspicion seems to 
 Juive crossed the great jurist's mind 
 that the supposed barbarity of the 
 Druids was not altogether a conclusive 
 justification for the barbarity of his 
 own contemporaries. So let us take 
 warning from his example, and let 
 the history of our practice of book- 
 burning serve to help us to keep our 
 minds open with regard to anomalies 
 which may still exist amongst us, 
 descended from as suspicious an origin., 
 and as little supported by reason.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Introduction . . . . . . i 
 
 Chapter I. Sixteenth-Century Book-Fires 25 
 II. Book-Fires under James I. . 48 
 
 III. Charles the First's Book-Fires 69 
 
 IV. Book-Fires of the Rebellion. 94 
 V. Book-Fires of the Restoration 117 
 
 VI. Book-Fires of the Revolution 136 
 VII. Our Last Book-Fires . .170 
 
 Appendix 191 
 
 Index ... .... 201
 
 BOOKS 
 CONDEMNED TO BE BURNT 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 HERE is the sort of attraction 
 that belongs to all forbidden 
 fruit in books which some public 
 authority has condemned to the 
 flames. And seeing that to collect some- 
 thing is a large part of the secret of human 
 happiness, it occurred to me that a variety 
 of the happiness that is sought in book 
 collecting might be found in making a 
 collection of books of this sort. I have, 
 therefore, put together the following narra- 
 tive of our burnt literature as some kind 
 of aid to any book-lover who shall choose 
 to take my hint and make the peculiarity 
 I have indicated the key-note to the for- 
 mation of his library. 
 
 But the aid I offer is confined to books
 
 2 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 so condemned in the United Kingdom. 
 Those who would pursue the study farther 
 afield, and extend their wishes beyond the 
 four seas, will find all the aid they need 
 or desire in Peignot's admirable Diction- 
 naire Critique, Littcraire, et Bibliogra- 
 phique des principaux Livres condamnes au 
 feu, supprimes ou censures : Paris, 1806. To 
 have extended my studies to cover this 
 wider ground would have swollen my 
 book as well as my labour beyond the 
 limits of my inclination. I may mention 
 that Hart's Index Expurgatorius covers this 
 wider ground for England, as far as it goes. 
 Nevertheless, I may, perhaps, appropri- 
 ately, by way of introduction, refer to 
 some episodes and illustrations of book- 
 burning, to show the place the custom 
 had in the development of civilisation, 
 and the distinction of good or bad com- 
 pany and ancient lineage enjoyed by 
 such books as their punishment by burn- 
 ing entitles to places on the shelves of 
 our fire-library. The custom was of pagan 
 observance long before it passed into 
 Christian practice ; and for its existence 
 in Greece, and for the first instance I 
 know of, I would refer to the once famous 
 or notorious work of Protagoras, certainly 
 one of the wisest philosophers or sophists 
 of ancient times. He was the first
 
 Introduction. 3 
 
 avowed Agnostic, for he wrote a work 
 on the gods, of which the very first re- 
 mark was that the existence of gods at 
 all he could not himself either affirm or 
 deny. For this offensive sentiment his 
 book was publicly burnt ; but Protagoras, 
 could he have foreseen the future, might 
 have esteemed himself happy to have 
 lived before the Christian epoch, when 
 authors came to share with their works 
 the purifying process of fire. The world 
 grew less humane as well as less sensible 
 as it grew older, and came to think more 
 of orthodoxy than of any other condition 
 of the mind. 
 
 The virtuous Romans appear to have 
 been greater book-burners than the Greeks, 
 both under the Republic and under the 
 Empire. It was the Senate's function to 
 condemn books to the flames, and the 
 praetor's to see that it was done, generally 
 in the Forum. But for this evil habit 
 we might still possess many valuable 
 works, such as the books attributed to 
 Numa on Pontifical law (Livy 3d.), and 
 those eulogies of Paetus Thrasea and 
 Helvidius, which were burnt, and their 
 authors put to death, under the tyranny 
 of Domitian (Tacitus, Agricola 2). Let 
 these cases suffice to connect the custom 
 with Pagan Rome, and to prove that this
 
 4 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 particular mode of warring with the ex- 
 pression of free thought boasts its pre- 
 cedents in pre-Christian antiquity. 
 
 Nevertheless it is the custom as it was 
 manifested in Christian times that has 
 chief interest for us, because it is only 
 with condemned books of this period that 
 we have any chance of practical acquaint- 
 ance. Some of these survived the flames, 
 whilst none of antiquity's burning have 
 come down to us. But on what principle 
 it was that the burning authorities (in 
 France generally the Parlement of Paris, 
 or of the provinces), burnt some books, 
 whilst others were only censured, con- 
 demned, or suppressed, I am unable to 
 say, and I doubt whether any principle was 
 involved. Peignot has noticed the chief 
 books stigmatised by authority in all these 
 various ways ; but though undoubtedly 
 this wider view is more philosophical, the 
 view is quite comprehensive enough which 
 confines itself to the consideration of books 
 that were condemned to be burnt. 
 
 Books so treated may be classified 
 according as they offended against (i) the 
 religion, (ii) the morals, or (hi) the politics 
 of the day, those against the first being 
 by far the most numerous, and so ad- 
 mitting here of notice only of their most 
 conspicuous specimens.
 
 Introduction. 5 
 
 I. Of all the books burnt for offence 
 under the first head, the most to be 
 regretted, from an historical point of view, 
 I take to be Porphyry's Treatise against 
 the Christians, which was burnt a.d. 388 
 by order of Theodosius the Great. Por- 
 phyry believed that Daniel's prophecies 
 had been written after the events foretold 
 in them by some one who took the name 
 of Daniel. It would have been interest- 
 ing to have known Porphyry's grounds 
 for this not improbable opinion, as well as 
 his general charges against the Christians; 
 and if there is anything in the tradition 
 of the survival of a copy of Porphyry in 
 one of the libraries of Florence, the 
 testimony of the distinguished Platonist 
 may yet enlighten us on the causes of the 
 growing darkness of the age in which he 
 lived. 
 
 All the books of the famous Abelard 
 were burnt by order of Pope Innocent II. ; 
 but it was his Treatise on the Trinity, 
 condemned by the Council of Soissons 
 about 1 121, and by the Council of Sens 
 in 1 140, which chiefly led St. Bernard to 
 his cruel persecution of this famous man. 
 That great saint, using the habitual language 
 of ecclesiastical charity, called Abelard 
 an infernal dragon and the precursor of 
 Antichrist. Among his heresies Abelard
 
 6 Books Condemned to be B?irnt. 
 
 seems to have held the opinion that the 
 devil has no power over man ; but at all 
 events the Church had in those days, 
 as Abelard learnt to his cost, though, 
 considering that his disciple Arnauld of 
 Brescia was destined to be burnt alive 
 at Rome in 1 155, Abelard might have 
 deemed himself fortunate in only incurring 
 imprisonment, and not sharing the fate of 
 his works as well as that of his illustrious 
 follower. 
 
 The latter calamity befell John Huss, 
 who, having been led before the bishop's 
 palace to see his own condemned works 
 burnt, was then led on to be burnt him- 
 self, in 1415. Many of his works, how- 
 ever, were republished in the following 
 century ; but the twenty-nine errors which 
 the Council of Constance detected in his 
 work on the Church would probably now- 
 adays seem venial enough. It was his 
 misfortune to live in those days when 
 the inhumanity of the world was at its 
 climax. 
 
 It continued at that climax for some 
 time, though heretical authors were not 
 always burnt with their books. Enjedim, 
 for instance, the Hungarian Socinian, who 
 died in 1596, survived the burning in 
 many places of his " Explanations of 
 Difficult Passages of the Old and New
 
 Introduction. J 
 
 Testament, from which the Dogma of the 
 Trinity is usually established" (Explica- 
 tiones locorum difficilium, etc.)- Peter 
 d'Osma also, the Spanish theologian, 
 whose Treatise on Confession was con- 
 demned by the Archbishop of Toledo in 
 the fifteenth century, might have esteemed 
 himself happy that only his chair shared 
 the burning of his book. Pomponacius, 
 an Italian professor of philosophy, whose 
 Treatise on the Immortality of the Soul 
 (15 16), was burnt by the Venetians for 
 the heretical opinion that the soul's im- 
 mortality was not believed by Aristotle, 
 and could only be proved by Scripture 
 and the authority of the Church, seems 
 to have died peacefully in 1526, albeit 
 with the reputation of an atheist-, which 
 his writings do not support. DespeYiers 
 was only imprisoned when his Cymbalum 
 Mundi, censured by the Sorbonne, was 
 consigned to the flames by the Parlement 
 of Paris (March 7th, 1537). And Luther, 
 all of whose works were condemned to 
 be burnt by the Diet of Worms (1521), 
 actually survived their burning twenty-five 
 years, though he himself had publicly 
 burnt at Wittenberg Leo X.'s bull, ana- 
 thematising his books, as well as the 
 Decretals of previous Popes. 
 
 Less fortunate than these were the
 
 8 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 famous martyrs of free thought, Dolet, 
 Servetus, and Tyndale. All the works, 
 which Dolet wrote or printed, were burnt 
 as heretical by the Parlement of Paris 
 (February 14th, 1543), and himself hanged 
 and burnt three years later (August 3rd, 
 1546), at the age of thirty-seven. The 
 reason seems chiefly to have been Dolet's 
 unsparing exposure of the immoralities of 
 monks and priests, and of the plan of 
 the Sorbonne to put down the art of 
 printing in France. In Peignot is pre- 
 served a long list of the names of the 
 works to the publication of which he 
 lent his aid. 
 
 The burning of Servetus, the Parisian 
 doctor, at Geneva (October 27th, 1553), 
 because his opinions on the Trinity did 
 not agree with Calvin's, is of course the 
 greatest blot on the memory of Calvin. 
 All his books or manuscripts were burnt 
 with him or elsewhere, so that his works 
 are among the rarest of bibliographical 
 treasures, and his Christianismi Restitutio 
 (1553) is said to be the rarest book in 
 the world. But apart from their rarity, I 
 should hardly imagine that the works of 
 Servetus possessed the slightest interest, 
 or that their loss was the smallest loss to 
 the literature of the world. 
 
 But if Calvin must bear the burden of
 
 Introduction. 9 
 
 the death of Servetus, Christianity itself 
 is responsible for the death of William 
 Tyndale, who, deeming it desirable that 
 his countrymen should possess in their 
 own language the book on which their 
 religion was founded, took the infinite 
 trouble of translating the Scriptures into 
 English. His New Testament was forth- 
 with burnt in London, and himself after 
 some years strangled and burnt at Ant- 
 werp (1536). 
 
 The same literary persecution continued 
 in the next century, the seventeenth. 
 Bissendorf perished at the hands of the 
 executioner at the same time that his 
 books, Nodigordii resolutio (on the priestly 
 calling), 1624, and The Jesuits, were burnt 
 by the same agent. In the case of the 
 De Republica Ecdesiastica (1617) by De 
 Dominis, Christian savagery surpassed 
 itself, for not only was it burnt by sen- 
 tence of the Inquisition, but also the dead 
 body of its author was exhumed for the 
 purpose. Dominis had been a Jesuit for 
 twenty years, then a bishop, and finally 
 Archbishop of Spalatro. This office he 
 gave up, and retired to England, where 
 he might write with greater freedom than 
 in Italy. There he wrote this work and 
 a history of the Council of Trent. His 
 chief offence was his advocacy of the
 
 I o Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 unchristian principles of toleration ; he 
 wished to reunite and reconcile the 
 Christian communions. But alas for 
 human frailty ! he retracted his errors, 
 many of them most sensible opinions, in 
 London, and again at Rome, whither he 
 returned. Pope Urban VIII., however, 
 imprisoned him in the Castle of St. 
 Angelo, where he is said to have died of 
 poison, so that only his dead body was 
 available to burn with his book the same 
 year (1625). Literary lives were tragic in 
 those times. 
 
 Simon Morin was burnt with all the 
 copies of his Pensees that could be found, 
 on the Place de Greve, at Paris, March 
 14th, 1663. Morin called himself the 
 Son of Man, and such thoughts of his as 
 survived the fire do not lead us in his 
 case to grudge the flames their literary 
 fuel. But it is curious to think that we 
 are only two centuries from the time 
 when the Parlement of Paris could pass 
 such a sentence on such a sufferer. 
 
 The Parlement of Dijon condemned to 
 be burnt by the executioner Morisot's 
 Ahitophili Veritatis Lacrymce (July 4th, 
 1625), but though this work was a violent 
 satire upon the Jesuits, Morisot survived 
 his book thirty-six years, the Jesuits re- 
 venging themselves with, nothing worse
 
 Introduction. I I 
 
 than an epitaph, containing a bad pun, to 
 the effect that their enemy, after a life 
 not spent in wisdom, preferred to die as 
 a fool ( Voluit mori-soi). 
 
 In the same century Molinos, the 
 Spanish priest, and founder of Quietism, 
 wrote his Conduite Spiritucllc, which was 
 condemned to the flames for sixty-eight 
 heretical propositions, whilst its author was 
 consigned to the prisons of the Inquisition, 
 where he died after eleven years of it 
 (1696). Self-absorption of the soul in 
 God to the point of complete indifference 
 to anything done to or by the body, even 
 to the sufferings of the latter in hell, was 
 the doctrine of Quietism that led eccle- 
 siastic authority to feel its usual alarm for 
 consequences ; and it must be admitted 
 that similar doctrines have at times played 
 sad havoc with Christian morality. But 
 perhaps they helped Molinos the better 
 to bear his imprisonment. 
 
 I may next refer to seventeenth-century 
 writers who were fortunate enough not 
 to share the burning of their books. (1) 
 Wolkelius, a friend of Socinus, the edition 
 of whose book De Vera Religione, pub- 
 lished at Amsterdam in 1645, was there 
 burnt by order of the magistrates for its 
 Socinian doctrines, appears to have lived 
 for many years afterwards. Schlicttingiu-.
 
 1 2 Books Condemned to be Bur tit. 
 
 a Polish follower of the same faith, escaped 
 with expulsion from Poland, when the 
 Diet condemned his book, Confessio Fidei 
 Christians, to be burnt by the execu- 
 tioner. Sainte Foi, or Gerberon, whose 
 Miroir de la Verite Chr'etienne was con- 
 demned by several bishops and arch- 
 bishops, and burnt by order of the 
 Parlement of Aix (1678), lived to write 
 other works, of probably as little interest. 
 La Peyrere was only imprisoned at 
 Brussels for his book on the Pre- 
 adamites, which was burnt at Paris (1655). 
 And Pascal saw his famous Lettres a un 
 Provincial, which made too free with the 
 dignity of all authorities, secular and 
 religious, twice burnt, once in French 
 (1657), and once in Latin (1660), without 
 himself incurring a similar penalty. So 
 did Derodon, professor of philosophy at 
 Nismes, outlive the Disputatio (1645), 
 in which he made light of Cyril of 
 Alexandria, and which was condemned 
 and burnt by the Parlement of Toulouse 
 for its opposition to some beliefs of 
 Roman Catholicism. 
 
 Passing now to the eighteenth century, 
 we find book-burning, then declining in 
 England, in full vigour on the Continent. 
 
 The most important book that so 
 suffered was Rousseau's admirable treatise
 
 Introduction. 1 3 
 
 on education, entitled Emile (1762), con- 
 demned by the Parlement of Paris to be 
 torn and burnt at the foot of its great 
 staircase. It was also burnt at Geneva. 
 Three years later the same writer's Lettres 
 de la Montagne were sentenced by the 
 same tribunal to the same fate. Not all 
 burnt books should be read, but Rousseau's 
 Amite is one that should be. 
 
 So should the Marquis de Langle's 
 Voyage en Espagne, condemned to the 
 flames in 1788, but translated into English, 
 German, and Italian. De Langle antici- 
 pated this fate for his book if it ever 
 passed the Pyrenees : " So much the 
 better," said he ; " the reader loves the 
 books they burn, so does the publisher, 
 and the author ; it is his blue ribbon." 
 But, considering that he wrote against 
 the Inquisition, and similar inhumanities 
 or follies of Catholicism, Ue Langle must 
 have been surprised at the burning of his 
 book in Paris itself. 
 
 A book at whose burning we may feel 
 less surprise is the Thcologie Portative ou 
 Dictionnaire abregede la Religion Chretienne, 
 by the Abbe Bernier (1775), for a long 
 time attributed to Voltaire, but really the 
 work of an apostate monk, Dulaurent, 
 who took refuge in Holland to write this 
 and similar works.
 
 1 4 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 The number of books of a similai 
 strong anti-Catholic tendency that were 
 burnt in these years before the outbreak 
 of the Revolution should be noticed as 
 helping to explain that event. Their 
 titles in most cases may suffice to indicate 
 their nature. De la Mettrie's L'homme 
 Machine (1748) was written and burnt in 
 Holland, its author being a doctor, of 
 whom Voltaire said that he was a mad- 
 man who only wrote when he was drunk. 
 Of a similar kind was the Testament of 
 Jean Meslier, published posthumously in 
 the Evangile de la Raison, and condemned 
 to the flames about 1765. On June nth, 
 1763, the Parlement of Paris ordered to 
 be burnt an anonymous poem, called 
 La Religion a PAssemblee du Clerg'e de 
 France, in which the writer depicted in 
 dark colours the morals of the French 
 bishops of the time (1762). On January 
 29th, 1768, was treated in the same way 
 the Histoire Impartiale des Jesuites of 
 Linguet, whose Annates Politiques in 1779 
 conducted him to the Bastille, and who 
 ultimately died at the hands of the 
 Revolutionary Tribunal (1794). But the 
 18th of August, 1770, is memorable for 
 having seen all the seven following books 
 sentenced to burning by the Parlement 
 of Paris : —
 
 Introduction. 1 5 
 
 1. Woolston's Discours sur les Miracles 
 de Jesus-Christ, translated from the English 
 
 (1727)- 
 
 2. Boulanger's Christianisme dcvoile. 
 
 3. Freret's Examen Critique des Apolo- 
 gistes de la Religion Cliritic/nn\ 1767. 
 
 4. The Examen Impartial des Princi- 
 pales Religions du Monde. 
 
 5. Baron d'Holbach's Contagion Sacrce, 
 or IHistoire Naturelle de la Superstition, 
 1768. 
 
 6. Holbach's Systeme de la Nature on 
 des Lois du Monde Physique et du Monde 
 Moral. 
 
 7. Voltaire's Dieu et les Hommes ; 
 a- wore thcologique, mais raisonnable (1769). 
 
 No one writer, indeed, of the eighteenth 
 century contributed so many books to the 
 flames as Voltaire. Besides the above 
 work, the following of his works incurred 
 the same fate : — (1) the Lettres Philoso- 
 phiques (1733), (2) the Cantique des 
 Cantiques (1759), (3) the Dictionnaire 
 Philosophique ( 1 7 64), also burnt^at Geneva; 
 
 (4) L Homme aux Quarante Ecus (1767), 
 
 (5) Le Diner du Comte de Boulainvilliers 
 (1767). When we add to these burnings 
 the fact that at least fourteen works of 
 Voltaire were condemned, many others 
 suppressed or forbidden, their author him- 
 self twice imprisoned in the Bastille, and
 
 1 6 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 often persecuted or obliged to fly from 
 France, we must admit that seldom or 
 never had any writer so eventful a 
 literary career. 
 
 II. Turning now to the books that 
 were burnt for their real or supposed 
 immoral tendency, I may refer briefly in 
 chronological order to the following as 
 the principal offenders, though of course 
 there is not always a clear distinction 
 between what was punished as immoral 
 and punished as irreligious. This applies 
 to the four volumes of the works of the 
 Carmelite Mantuanus, published at Ant- 
 werp in 1576, of which nearly all the 
 copies were burnt. This facile poet, who 
 is said to have composed 59,000 verses, 
 was especially severe against women and 
 against the ecclesiastical profession. In 
 1664, the Journal de Louis Gorin de Saint 
 Amour, a satirical work, was condemned, 
 chiefly apparently because it contained 
 the five propositions of Jansenius. In 
 1623, the Parlement of Paris condemned 
 Theophile to be burnt with his book, Le 
 Parnasse des Poctes Satyrioues, but the 
 author escaped with his burning in effigy, 
 and with imprisonment in a dungeon. 
 I am tempted to quote Theophile's im- 
 promptu reply to a man who asserted that 
 all poets were fools : —
 
 Introduction. 1 7 
 
 " Oui, je 1'avoue avec vous 
 Que tous les poetes sont fous ; 
 Mais sachant ce que vous i 
 Tous les fous ne sont pas poetes. " 
 
 Helot also escaped with a burning in 
 effigy when his JUEcole des Filles was 
 burnt at the foot of the gallows (1672). 
 Lyser, who spent his life and his pro- 
 perty in the advocacy of polygamy, was 
 threatened by Christian V. with capital 
 punishment if he appeared in Denmark, 
 and his Discursus Politicus de Poly- 
 gamia was sentenced to public burning 
 (1677). 
 
 In the eighteenth century (17 17) Gigli's 
 satire, the Vocabulario di Sa?ita Caterina 
 e delta lingua Sanese; Dufresnoy's Prin- 
 cesses Malabares, ou le Celibat Philosophique 
 (1734) ; Deslandes' Pigmalion ou la Statue 
 Animee (1741); the Jesuit Busembaum's 
 Theologia Moralis (which defends as an 
 act of charity the commission to kill an 
 excommunicated person), (1757); Tous- 
 saint's Les Mceurs (1748) ; and the Abbe" 
 Talbert's satirical poem, Langrognet aux 
 Enfers (1760), — seem to complete the list 
 of the principal works burnt by public 
 authority. And of these the best is 
 Toussaint's, who in 1764 published an 
 apology for or retraction of his Mceurs, 
 which has far less claim upon public
 
 1 8 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 attention than was obtained and merited 
 by the original work. 
 
 III. Books condemned for some un- 
 popular political tendency may likewise 
 be arranged in the order of their centuries. 
 
 In the sixteenth, the most important 
 are Louis d'Orleans' Expostidatio (1593), 
 a violent attack on Henri IV., and con- 
 demned by the Parlement of Paris ; Arch- 
 bishop Genebrard's De sacrarum elec- 
 tionnni jure et necessitate ad Ecclesice 
 GaUicance redintegrationem (1593), con- 
 demned by the Parlement of Aix, and its 
 author exiled. He maintained the right 
 of the clergy and people to elect bishops 
 against their nomination by the king. It 
 is curious that the Parlement of Paris 
 thought it necessary to burn the Jesuit 
 Mariana's book De Rege (1599) as anti- 
 monarchical, seeing that it appeared with 
 the privilege of the King of Spain. He 
 maintained the right of killing a king for 
 the cause of religion, and called Jacques 
 Clement's act of assassination France's 
 everlasting glory (Gadice externum decus). 
 But it is only fair to add that the superior 
 of the Order disapproved of the work as 
 much as the Sorbonne. 
 
 In the seventeenth century, I notice 
 first the Ecdesiasticus of Scioppius, a 
 work directed against our James I. and
 
 Introduction. 1 9 
 
 Casaubon (161 1). The libel having been 
 burnt in London, and its author hanged 
 and beaten in effigy before the king on the 
 stage, was burnt in Paris by order of the 
 Parlement, chiefly for its calumnies on 
 Henri IV. The author, originally a Jesuit, 
 has been called the Attila of writers, having 
 been said to have known the abusive 
 terms of all tongues, and to have had 
 them on the tip of his own. He wrote 
 104 works, apparently of the violent sort, 
 so that Casaubon called him, according 
 to the style of learned men in those days, 
 " the most cruel of all wild beasts," whilst 
 the Jesuits called him " the public pest of 
 letters and society." 
 
 The Senate of Venice caused to be 
 burnt the Delia Liberia Veneta, by a 
 man who called himself Squitinio (16 12), 
 because it denied the independence of the 
 Republic, and asserted that the Emperor 
 had rightful claims over it ; and about the 
 same time (1617) the Parlement of Paris 
 consigned to the same penalty D' Aubign^'s 
 Histoire Universelle for the freedom of 
 its satire on Charles IX., Henri III., 
 Henri IV., and other French royal per- 
 sonages of the time. The second edition 
 of D'Aubigne" (1626) is the poorer for 
 being shorn of these caustic passages. 
 
 The Jesuit Keller's Admonitio ad
 
 20 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 Ludovicum XIII. (1625), and the same 
 author's Mysteria Politica (1625), were 
 both sentenced to be burnt; also the 
 Jesuit Sanctarel's Tradatas de Hceresi 
 (1625), which claimed for the Pope the 
 right to dispose, not only of the thrones, 
 but also of the lives of princes. This 
 doctrine was approved by the General of 
 the Jesuits, but, under threat of being 
 accounted guilty of treason, expressly 
 disclaimed by the Jesuits as a body. In 
 resisting such pretensions, the Sorbonne 
 deserved well of France and of humanity. 
 In 1665, the Chatelet ordered to be 
 burnt Claude Joly's Recueil des Maximes 
 v'eritables et importantes pour V Institution 
 du Roi, contre la fausse et pernicieiise poli- 
 tique de Cardinal pretefidu surintendant de 
 I education de Louis XIV. (1652) ; a book 
 which, if it had been regarded instead 
 of being burnt, might have altered the 
 character of that pernicious devastator, 
 and therefore of history itself, very much 
 for the better. About the same time, 
 Milton's Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, 
 not to be burnt in England till the 
 Restoration, had a foretaste in Paris of 
 its ultimate fate. Eustache le Noble's 
 satire against the Dutch, Dialogue d'Esope 
 et de Mercure, and burnt by the execu- 
 tioner at Amsterdam, may complete the list
 
 Introduction. 2 1 
 
 of political works that paid for their offences 
 by fire in the seventeenth century. 
 
 The first to notice in the next century 
 is Giannone's Historia Civile de Regno di 
 Napoli (1723), in five volumes, burnt by 
 the Inquisition, which, but for his escape, 
 would have suppressed the author as well 
 as his book, for his free criticism of Popes 
 and ecclesiastics. His escape saved the 
 eighteenth century from the reproach of 
 burning a writer. Next deserves a passing 
 allusion the Historia Nostri Temporis, by 
 the once famous writer Emmius, whose 
 posthumous book suffered at the hands 
 of George Albert, Prince of East Frisia. 
 The Parlement of Toulouse condemned 
 Reboulet's Histoire des Filles de la Con- 
 gregation de PEftfance (1734) for accusing 
 Madame de Moudonville, the founder of 
 that convent, of publishing libels against 
 the king. That of Paris and Besangon 
 condemned Boncerf's Des Inconv'eniens 
 des Droits Feodaux (1770). 
 
 The number, indeed, of political works 
 burnt during the eighth decade of the last 
 century is as remarkable as the number 
 of religious books so treated about the 
 same period : one of the lesser indications 
 of the coming Revolution. During this 
 decade were condemned: (1) Pidanzet's 
 Correspondance secrete etfamiliere de Chan-
 
 2 2 Books Condevined to be Burnt. 
 
 celier Maupeon avec Sorhouet (177 1) for 
 being blasphemous and seditious, and 
 calculated to rouse people against govern- 
 ment ; a work that made sport of Maupeon 
 and his Parlement. (2) Beaumarchais' 
 Mhnoires (1774), of the literary style of 
 which Voltaire himself is said to have 
 been jealous, but which was condemned 
 to the flames for its imputations on the 
 powers that were. (3) Lanjuinais' Mon- 
 arque Accompli (1774), whose other title 
 explains why it was condemned, as tending 
 to sedition and revolt, Prodiges de bonte, 
 de savoir, et de sagesse, qui font Peloge de 
 Sa Majeste Imperiale Joseph II., et qui 
 rendent cet auguste monarque si precieux 
 a rhumanite, discutes au tribu?ial de la 
 raison et tequite. Lanjuinais, principal of 
 a Catholic college in Switzerland, passed 
 over to the Reformed Religion. (4) Martin 
 de Marivaux's L 'Atni des Lois (1775), a pam- 
 phlet, in which the author protested against 
 the words put into the mouth of the king 
 by Chancellor Maupeon, Sept. 7th, 1770: 
 " We hold our Crown of God alone ; the 
 right of law-making, without dependence 
 or partition, belongs to us alone." The 
 author contended that the Crown was held 
 only of the nation, and he excited the 
 vengeance of the Crown by sending a 
 copy of his work to each member of the
 
 Introduction. 23 
 
 l'arlement. At the same time, to the 
 same penalty and for the same offence, 
 was condemned to the flames Le Cat'e- 
 chisme du Citoyen, on Elemens du Droit 
 public Francais, par dcmandes et par r'e- 
 ponses ; the episode, and the origin of the 
 dispute, clearly pointing to the rapidly ap- 
 proaching Revolutionary whirlwind, the 
 spirit of which these literary productions 
 anticipated and expressed. 
 
 The last book I find to notice is the 
 Abbe* Raynal's Histoire philosophique et 
 politique des Etablissemens et du Commerce 
 des Europcens dans les Deux Indes, pub- 
 lished in 1 77 1 at Geneva, and, after a first 
 attempt at suppression in 1779, finally burnt 
 by the order of the Parlement of Paris 
 of May 25th, 1781, as impious, blasphe- 
 mous, seditious, and the rest. Like many 
 another eminent writer, Raynal had started 
 as a Jesuit. 
 
 From the above illustrations of the prac- 
 tice abroad, we may turn to a more de- 
 tailed account of its history in England. 
 Although in France it was much more 
 common than in England during the 
 eighteenth century, it appears to have 
 come to an end in both countries about 
 the same time. I am not aware of any 
 proofs that it survived the French Revo- 
 lution, and it is probable that that event,
 
 24 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 directly or indirectly, put an end to it. 
 In England it seems gradually to have 
 dwindled, and to have become extinct be- 
 fore the end of the century. If the same 
 was the case in other countries, it would 
 afford another instance of the fundamental 
 community of development which seems 
 to govern at least our part of the civilised 
 world, regardless of national differences 
 or boundaries. The different countries 
 of the world seem to throw off evil habits, 
 or to acquire new habits, with a degree of 
 simultaneity which is all the more re- 
 markable for being the result of no sort 
 of agreement. At one time, for instance, 
 they throw off Jesuitism, at another the 
 practice of torture, at another the judicial 
 ordeal, at another burnings for heresy, at 
 another trials for witchcraft, at another 
 book-burning ; and now the turn seems 
 approaching of war, or the trade of pro- 
 fessional murder. The custom here to be 
 dealt with, therefore, holds its place in the 
 history of humanity, and is as deserving 
 of study as any other custom whose rise 
 and decline constitute a phase in the 
 world's development.
 
 m&Mmmfm 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 Sixteenth Century Book-Fires. 
 
 IRE, which is the destruction of 
 so many things, and destined, 
 according to old Indian belief, 
 one day to destroy the world, is 
 so peculiarly the enemy of books, that the 
 worm itself is not more fatal to them. 
 Whole libraries have fallen a prey to the 
 flames, and oftener, alas ! by design than 
 accident ; the warrior always, whether 
 Alexander at Persepolis, Antiochus at 
 Jerusalem, Caesar and Omar at Alexandria, 
 or General Ulrich at Strasburg (in 1870), 
 esteeming it among the first duties of his 
 barbarous calling to consign ideas and 
 arts to destruction. 
 
 But these are the fires of indiscriminate 
 rage, due to the natural antagonism be- 
 tween civilisation and military barbarism ; 
 it is fire, discriminate^ applied, that at- 
 taches a special interest and value to 
 books condemned to it. Whether the 
 sentence has come from Pope or Arch- 
 bishop, Parliament or King, the book so
 
 26 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 sentenced has a claim on our curiosity, 
 and as often on our respect as our dis- 
 dain. Fire, indeed, has been spoken of 
 as the blue ribbon of literature, and many 
 a modern author may fairly regret that 
 such a distinction is no longer attainable 
 in these days of enlightened advertise- 
 ment. 
 
 To collect books that have been dis- 
 honoured — or honoured — in this way, 
 books that at the risk of heavy punish- 
 ment have been saved from the public 
 fire or the common hangman, is no mean 
 amusement for a bibliophile. Some col- 
 lect books for their bindings, some for 
 their rarity, a minority for their contents ; 
 but he who collects a fire-library makes 
 all these considerations secondary to the 
 associations of his books with the lives of 
 their authors and their place in the his- 
 tory of ideas. Perhaps he is thereby the 
 more rational collector, if reason at all 
 need be considered in the matter ; for if 
 my whim pleases myself, let him go hang 
 who disdains or disapproves of it. 
 
 All the books of such a library are not, 
 of course, suitable for general reading, 
 there being not a few disgraceful ones 
 among them that fully deserved the stigma 
 intended for them. But most are inno 
 cent enough, and many of them as dull
 
 Sixteenth Century Book-Fires. 27 
 
 as the authors of their condemnation ; 
 whilst others, again, are so sparkling and 
 well written that I wish it were possible 
 to rescue them from the oblivion that 
 enshrouds them even more thickly than 
 the dust of centuries. The English books 
 of this sort naturally stand apart from their 
 foreign rivals, and may be roughly classi- 
 fied according as they deal with the affairs 
 of State or Church. The original flavour 
 has gone from many of them, like the 
 scent from dried flowers, with the dispute 
 or ephemeral motive that gave rise to 
 them ; but a new flavour from that very 
 fact has taken the place of the old, of the 
 same sort that attaches to the relics of 
 extinct religions or of bygone forms of life. 
 The history of our country since the 
 days of printing is exactly reflected in its 
 burnt literature, and so little has the 
 public fire been any respecter of class or 
 dignity, that no branch of intellectual 
 activity has failed to contribute some 
 author whose work, or works, has been 
 consigned to the flames. Our greatest 
 poets, philosophers, bishops, lawyers, 
 novelists, heads of colleges, are all repre- 
 sented in my collection, forming indeed 
 a motley but no insipid society, wherein 
 the gravest questions of government and 
 the deepest problems of speculation are
 
 2 8 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 handled with freedom, and men who were 
 most divided in their lives meet at last 
 in a common bond of harmony. Cowell, 
 the friend of prerogative, finds himself 
 here side by side with Milton, the repub- 
 lican ; and Sacheverell, the high church- 
 man, in close company with Tindal and 
 Defoe. 
 
 For nearly 300 years the rude censor- 
 ship of fire was applied to literature in 
 England, beginning naturally in that fierce 
 religious war we call the Reformation, 
 which practically constitutes the history 
 of England for some two centuries. The 
 first grand occasion of book-burning was 
 in response to the Pope's sentence against 
 Martin Luther, when Wolsey went in 
 state to St. Paul's, and many of Luther's 
 publications were burned in the church- 
 yard during a sermon against them by 
 Fisher, Bishop of Rochester (152 1). 
 
 But the first printed work by an Eng- 
 lishman that was so treated was actually 
 the Gospel. The story is too familiar to 
 repeat, of the two occasions on which 
 Tyndale's New Testament in English was 
 burnt before Old St. Paul's ; but in pausing 
 to reflect that the book which met with 
 this fiery fate, and whose author ultimately 
 met with the same, is now sold in Eng- 
 land by the million (for our received
 
 Sixteenth Century Book-Fires. 29 
 
 version is substantially Tyndale's), one 
 can only stand aghast at the irony of the 
 fearful contrast, which so widely separated 
 the labourer from his triumph. But per- 
 haps we can scarcely wonder that our 
 ancestors, after centuries of mental blind- 
 ness, should have tried to burn the light 
 they were unable to bear, causing it 
 thereby only to shine the brighter. 
 
 It certainly spread with remarkable 
 celerity; for in 1546 it became necessary 
 to command all persons possessing them 
 to deliver to the bishop, or sheriff, to be 
 openly burnt, all works in English pur- 
 porting to be written by Frith, Tyndale, 
 Wicliff, Joye, Basil, Bale, Barnes, 
 Coverdale, Turner, or Tracy. The ex- 
 treme rarity and costliness of the works 
 of these men are the measure of the com- 
 pleteness with which this order was carried 
 out ; but not of its success, for the ideas 
 survived the books which contained them. 
 A list of the books is given in Foxe (v. 
 566), and comprises twelve by Coverdale, 
 twenty-eight by Bale, thirteen by Basil 
 {alias Becon), ten by Frith, nine by Tyn- 
 dale, seven by Joye, six by Turner, three 
 by Barnes. Some of these may still be 
 read, but more are non-existent. A com- 
 plete account of them and their authors 
 would almost amount to a history of the
 
 30 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 Reformation itself; but as they were 
 burnt indiscriminately, as heretical books, 
 they have not the same interest that at- 
 taches to books specifically condemned 
 as heretical or seditious. Such of them, 
 however, as a book-lover can light upon 
 — and pay for — are, of course, treasures 
 of the highest order. 
 
 Great numbers of books were burnt in 
 the reigns of Edward VI. and Mary, but 
 it is not till the reign of the latter that 
 a particular book stands forward as mal- 
 treated in this way. And, indeed, so 
 many men were burnt in the reign of 
 Queen Mary, that the burning of particular 
 books may well have passed unnoticed, 
 though pyramids of Protestant volumes, 
 as Mr. D'Israeli says, were burnt in those 
 few years of intolerance rampant and 
 triumphant. The Historie of Italie, by 
 William Thomas (1549), is sometimes 
 said (on what authority I know not) to 
 have been not merely burnt, but burnt 
 by the common hangman, at this time. 
 If so, it is the first that achieved a dis- 
 tinction which is generally claimed for 
 Prynne's Histriomastix (1633). The fact 
 of the mere burning is of itself likely 
 enough, for Thomas wrote very freely of 
 the clergy at Rome and of Pope Paul III. : 
 " By report, Rome is not without 40,000
 
 Sixteenth Century Book-Fires. 3 1 
 
 harlots, maintained for the most part by 
 the clergy and their followers." " Oh ! 
 what a world it is to see the pride and 
 abomination that the churchmen there 
 maintain." Yet Thomas himself had 
 held a Church living, and had been clerk 
 of the Council to Edward VI. He 
 was among the ablest men of his time, 
 and wrote, among other works, a lively 
 defence of Henry VIII. in a work called 
 Peregryne, on the title-page of which are 
 these lines : 
 
 "He that dieth with honour, liveth for ever, 
 And the defamed dead recovereth never." 
 
 And a sadly inglorious death was destined 
 to be his own. For, shortly after Wyatt's 
 insurrection, he was sent to the Tower, 
 Wyatt at his own trial declaring that the 
 conspiracy to assassinate Queen Mary 
 when out walking was Thomas's, he him- 
 self having been opposed to it. For this 
 cause, at all events, Thomas was hanged 
 and quartered in May 1554, and his head 
 set the next day upon London Bridge. He 
 assured the crowd, in a speech before his 
 execution, that he died for his country. 
 Wood says he was of a hot, fiery spirit, 
 that had sucked in damnable principles. 
 Possibly they were not otherwise than 
 sensible, for if he died on Wyatt's evi-
 
 3 2 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 dence alone, one cannot feel sure that he 
 died justly. But had the insurrection only 
 succeeded, it is curious to think what an 
 amount of misery might have been spared 
 to England, and how dark a page been 
 lacking from the history of Christianity ! 
 
 Thomas's book was republished in 1561 : 
 but the first edition, that of 1549, is, of 
 course, the right one to possess ; though 
 its fate has caused it to be extremely 
 rare. 
 
 Coming now to Queen Elizabeth's reign, 
 the comparative rarity of book-burning 
 is an additional testimony to the wisdom 
 of her government. But (to say nothing 
 of books that were prohibited or got their 
 printers or authors into trouble) certain 
 works, religious, political, and poetical, 
 achieved the distinction of being publicly 
 burnt, and they are works that curiously 
 illustrate the manners of the time. 
 
 The most important under the first of 
 these heads are the translations of the 
 works of Hendrick Niclas, of Leyden, 
 Father of the Family of Love, or House 
 of Charity, which were thought dangerous 
 enough to be burnt by Royal Proclama- 
 tion on October 13th, 1579 ; so that such 
 works as the Joyful Message of the King- 
 do?n, Peace upon Earth, the Prophecy of 
 the Spirit of Love, and others, are now
 
 Six tee) it J i Century Book -Fires. 33 
 
 exceedingly rare and costly. There are 
 many extracts from the first of these in 
 Knewstub's Confutation u of its monstrous 
 and horrible blasphemies" (1579)1 wherein 
 I fail to recognise cither the blasphemies 
 or their confutation, nor do I find any- 
 thing but sense in Niclas's letter to two 
 daughters of Warwick, whom he seeks to 
 dissuade from suffering death on a matter 
 of conformity to certain Church cere- 
 monies. He insists on the life or spirit 
 of Christ as of more importance than any 
 ceremony. " How well would they do 
 who do now extol themselves before the 
 simple, and say that they are the preachers 
 of Christ, if they would first learn to 
 know Christ before they made themselves 
 ministers of Him ! " " Whatever is served 
 without the Spirit of Christ, it is an abomi- 
 nation to God." Nevertheless the young 
 persons seem to have preferred death to 
 his very sensible advice. 
 
 Probably the Family of Love were 
 misunderstood and misrepresented, both 
 as regards their doctrines and their prac- 
 tices. Camden says that " under a show 
 of singular integrity and sanctity they in- 
 sinuated themselves into the affections of 
 the ignorant common people " ; that they 
 regarded as reprobate all outside their 
 Family, and deemed it lawful to deny on
 
 34 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 oath whatsoever they pleased. Niclas, 
 according to Fuller, "wanted learning in 
 himself and hated it in others." This is 
 a failing so common as to be very pro- 
 bable, as it also is, that his disciples 
 allegorised the Scriptures (like the Alexan- 
 drian Fathers before them), and counter- 
 feited revelations. Fuller adds that they 
 " grieved the Comforter, charging all their 
 sins on God's Spirit, for not effectually 
 assisting them against the same . . . 
 sinning on design that their wickedness 
 might be a foil to God's mercy, to set it 
 off the brighter." But that they were 
 Communists, Anarchists, or Libertines, 
 there is no evidence ; and the Queen's 
 menial servant who wrote and presented to 
 Parliament an apology for the Service of 
 Love probably complained with justice of 
 their being " defamed with many manner 
 of false reports and lies." This availed 
 nothing, however, against public opinion ; 
 and so the Queen commanded by pro- 
 clamation " that the civil magistrate should 
 be assistant to the ecclesiastical, and that 
 the books should be publicly burnt." 
 The sect, however, long survived the 
 burning of its books. 
 
 But already it was not enough to burn 
 books of an unpopular tendency, cruelty 
 against the author being plainly progres-
 
 Sixteenth Century Book-Fires. 35 
 
 sive from this time forward to the atrocious 
 penalties afterwards associated with the 
 presence of Laud in the Star Chamber. 
 All our histories tell of John Stubhs, of 
 Lincoln's Inn, who, when his right hand 
 had been cut off for a literary work, with 
 his left hand waved his hat from his head 
 and cried, " Long live the Queen ! " The 
 punishment was out of all proportion to 
 the offence. Men had a right to feel 
 anxious when Elizabeth seemed on the 
 point of marrying the Catholic Duke of 
 Anjou. They remembered the days of 
 Mary, and feared, with reason, the return 
 of Catholicism. Stubbs gave expression 
 to this fear in a work entitled the Dis- 
 coverie of a Gaping Gulf ivhereinto Eng- 
 la?id is like to be swallowed by another 
 French marriage, if the Lord forbid not 
 the banes by letting her Majestie see the 
 sin and punishment thereof (1579). Page, 
 the disperser of the book, suffered the 
 same penalty as its author. 
 
 The book made a great stir and was 
 widely circulated, much to the vexation 
 of the Queen. On September 27th ap- 
 peared a very long proclamation calling it 
 "a lewd, seditious book . . . bolstered 
 up with manifest lies, <\rc," and com- 
 manding it, wherever found, " to be de- 
 stroyed ( = burnt) in open sight of some
 
 36 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 public officer." The book itself is written 
 with moderation and respect, if we make 
 allowance for the questionable taste of 
 writing on so delicate a subject at all. It 
 is true that he calls France " a den of 
 idolatry, a kingdom of darkness, con- 
 fessing Belial and serving Baal " ; nor 
 does he spare the personal character of 
 the Duke himself: he only desires that 
 her Majesty may marry with such a house 
 and such a person " as had not provoked 
 the vengeance of the Lord.'' But plain 
 speaking was needed, and it is possible 
 that the offensive book had something 
 to do with saving the Queen from a great 
 folly and the nation from as great a danger. 
 
 Stubbs, one is glad to find, though 
 maimed, was neither disgraced nor dis- 
 heartened by his misfortune. He learnt 
 to write with his left hand, and wrote so 
 much better with that than many people 
 with their right, that Lord Burleigh em- 
 ployed him many years afterwards (1587) 
 to compose an answer to Cardinal Allen's 
 work, A Modest Answer to English Per- 
 secutors. After that I lose sight of Stubbs. 
 
 The strong feeling against Episcopacy, 
 which first meets us in works like Fish's 
 Supplication of Beggars, or Tyndale's 
 Practice of Prelates, and which found vent 
 at last, as a powerful contributory cause,
 
 Sixteenth Century Book- Fires. 37 
 
 in the Revolution of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury, was most clearly pronounced under 
 Elizabeth in the famous tracts known as 
 those of Martin Marprelate ; and among 
 these most bitterly in a small work that was 
 burnt by order of the bishops, entitled a 
 Dialogue wherein is plainly laide open the 
 tyrannieal dealing of Lord Bishops against 
 God's Church, with certain points of doc- 
 trine, wherein they approve themselves (ac- 
 cording to D. Bridges his judgement) to be 
 tritely Bishops of the Divell (15S9). This is 
 shown in a sprightly dialogue between a 
 Puritan and a Papist, a jack of both sides, 
 and an Idol (i.e., church) minister, wherein 
 the most is made of such facts as that the 
 Bishop of St. David's was summoned 
 before the High Commission for having 
 two wives living, and that Bishop Cul- 
 pepper, of Oxford, was fond of hawking 
 and hunting. It is significant that this 
 little tract was reprinted in 1640, on the 
 eve of the Revolution. 
 
 I pass now to a book of great political 
 and historical interest : The Conference 
 about the Succession to the Crown of Eng- 
 land (1594), attributed to Doleman, but 
 really the handiwork of Parsons, the Jesuit, 
 Cardinal Allen, and others. In the first 
 part, a civil lawyer shows at length that 
 lineal descent and propinquity of blood
 
 3 8 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 are not of themselves sufficient title to the 
 Crown ; whilst in the second part a tem- 
 poral lawyer discusses the titles of par- 
 ticular claimants to the succession of 
 Queen Elizabeth. Among these, that 
 of the Earl of Essex, to whom the book 
 was dedicated, is discussed ; the object of 
 the book being to baffle the title of King 
 James to the succession, and to fix it 
 either on Essex or the Infanta of Spain. 
 No wonder it gave great offence to the 
 Queen, for it advocated also the lawful- 
 ness of deposing her ; and it throws some 
 light on those intrigues with the Jesuits 
 which at one time formed so marked an 
 incident in the eventful career of that 
 unfortunate earl. Great efforts were made 
 to suppress it, and there is a tradition that 
 the printer was hanged, drawn, and quar- 
 tered. 
 
 The book itself has played no small part 
 in our history, for not only was Milton's 
 Defensio mainly taken from it, but it 
 formed the chief part of Bradshaw's long 
 speech at the condemnation of Charles I. 
 In 1 68 1, when Parliament was debating 
 the subject of the exclusion of the Duke 
 of York from the succession, it was thought 
 well to reprint it ; but only two years later 
 it was among the books which had the 
 honour of being condemned to the flames
 
 Sixteenth Century Book-Fires. 39 
 
 by the University of Oxford, in its famous 
 and loyal hook-tire of 1683 (see p. 194). 
 
 But if the history of the book was 
 eventful, how much more so was that of 
 its chief author, the famous Robert Par- 
 sons, first of Balliol College, and then of 
 the Order of Jesus ! Parsons was a very 
 prince of intrigue. To say that he actually 
 tried to persuade Philip II. to send a 
 second Armada ; that he tried to persuade 
 the Earl of Derby to raise a rebellion, and 
 then is suspected of having poisoned him 
 for not consenting ; that he instigated an 
 English Jesuit to try to assassinate the 
 Queen ; and, among other plans, wished 
 to get the Pope and the Kings of France 
 and Spain to appoint a Catholic successor 
 to Elizabeth, and to support their nominee 
 by an armed confederacy, is to give but 
 the meagre outline of his energetic career. 
 The blacksmith's son certainly made no 
 small use of his time and abilities. His life 
 is the history in miniature of that of his 
 order as a body ; that same body whose 
 enormous establishments in England at 
 this day are in such bold defiance of the 
 Catholic Emancipation Act, which makes 
 even their residence in this kingdom 
 illegal. 
 
 Doleman's Conference was answered in 
 a little book by Peter Wentworth, entitled
 
 40 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 A Pithy Exhortation to Her Majesty for 
 establishing her Successor to the Crown, in 
 which the author advocated the claims of 
 James I. The book was written in terms 
 of great humility and respect, the author 
 not being ignorant, as he quaintly says, 
 " that the anger of a Prince is as the 
 roaring of a Lyon, and even the messenger 
 of Death." But this he was to learn by 
 personal experience, for the Queen, in- 
 censed with him for venturing to advise 
 her, not only had his book burnt, but 
 sent him to the Tower, where, like so 
 many others, he died. So at least says a 
 printed slip in the Grenville copy of his 
 book. 
 
 But Wentworth is better and more 
 deservedly remembered for his speeches 
 than for his book — his famous speeches 
 in 1575, and again in 1587, in Parliament 
 in defence of the Commons' Right of 
 Free Speech, for both of which he was 
 temporarily committed to the Tower. 
 Rumours of what would please or dis- 
 please the Queen, or messages from the 
 Queen, like that prohibiting the House 
 to interfere in matters of religion, in 
 those days reduced the voice of the 
 House to a nullity. Wentworth's chief 
 question was, " Whether this Council be 
 not a place for any member of the
 
 Sixteenth Century Book-Fires. 4 1 
 
 same here assembled, freely and with- 
 out control of any person or danger 
 of laws, by bill or speech to utter any 
 of the griefs of this Commonwealth what- 
 soever, touching the service of God, 
 the safety of the prince and this noble 
 realm." Yet so servile was the House of 
 that period, that on both occasions it dis- 
 claimed and condemned its advocate — on 
 the first occasion actually not allowing 
 him to finish his speech. Yet, fortunately, 
 both his speeches live, well reported in 
 the Parliamentary Debates. 
 
 To pass from politics to poetry; little 
 as Archbishop Whitgift's proceedings in 
 the High Commission endear his name 
 to posterity, I am inclined to think he 
 may be forgiven for cleansing Stationers' 
 Hall by fire, in 1599, of certain works 
 purporting to be poetical ; such works, 
 namely, as Marlowe's Elegies of Ovid, 
 which appeared in company with Davies's 
 Epigrammes, Marston's Metamorphosis of 
 Pigmalion's Image, Hall's Satires, and 
 Cutwode's Caltha Poetarum ; or, The 
 Bumble Bee. The latter is a fantastic 
 poem of 187 stanzas about a bee and a 
 marigold, and deserved the fire rather for its 
 insipidity than for the reasons which justi- 
 fied the cleansing process applied to the 
 others, the youthful productions of men
 
 42 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 who were destined to attain celebrity in 
 very different directions of life. 
 
 Marlowe, like Shakespeare, from an 
 actor became a writer of plays ; but though 
 Ben Jonson extolled his " mighty muse," 
 I doubt whether his Edward II, Dr. 
 Faustus, or Jew of Malta, are now widely 
 popular. Anthony Wood has left a very dis- 
 agreeable picture of Marlowe's character, 
 which one would fain hope is overdrawn ; 
 but the dramatist's early death in a low 
 quarrel prevented him from ever redeem- 
 ing his early offences, as a kinder fortune 
 permitted to his companions in the 
 Stationers' bonfire. 
 
 Marston came to be more distinguished 
 for his Satires than for his plays, his 
 Scourge of Villainie being his chief title to 
 fame. Of his Pigmalion all that can be 
 said is, that it is not quite so bad as Mar- 
 lowe's Elegies. Warton justly says, with 
 pompous euphemism : " His stream of 
 poetry, if sometimes bright and unpolluted, 
 almost always betrays a muddy bottom." 
 But this muddy bottom is discernible, not 
 in Marston alone, but also in Hall's 
 Virgidemiarum, or Satires, of which 
 Warton did all he could to revive the 
 popularity. Hall was Marston's rival at 
 Cambridge, but Hall claims to be the first 
 English satirist. He took Juvenal for
 
 Sixteenth Century Book-Fires. 43 
 
 his model, but the 1 .atin of Juvenal seems 
 to me far less obscure than the English 
 of Hall. I quote two lines to show what 
 this Cambridge student thought of the 
 great Elizabethan period in which he 
 lived. Referring to some remote golden 
 age, he says : — 
 
 "Then men were men ; but now the greater part 
 Beasts are in life, and women are in heart." 
 
 But strange are the evolutions of men. 
 The author of the burnt satires rose from 
 dignity to dignity in the Church. He 
 became successively Bishop of Exeter and 
 bishop of Norwich, and to this day his 
 devotional works are read by thousands 
 who have never heard of his satires. He 
 was sent as a deputy to the famous Synod 
 of Dort, and was faithful to his Church 
 and king through the Civil War. For 
 this in his old age he suffered sequestra- 
 tion and imprisonment, and he lived to 
 see his cathedral turned into a barrack, and 
 his palace into an ale-house, dying shortly 
 before the Restoration, in 1656, at the age 
 of 82. Bayle thought him worthy of a 
 place in his Dictionary, but he is still 
 worthier of a place in our memories as 
 one of those great English bishops who, 
 like Burnet, Butler, or Tillotson, never 
 put their Church before their humanity,
 
 44 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 but showed (what needed showing) that 
 the Christianity of the clergy was not of 
 necessity synonymous with the ahsolute 
 negation of charity. 
 
 Davies, too, Marlowe's early friend, rose 
 to fame both as a poet and a statesman. 
 But he began badly. He was disbarred 
 from the Middle Temple for breaking a 
 club over the head of another law student 
 in the very dining-hall. After that he 
 became member for Corfe Castle, and 
 then successively Solicitor-General and 
 Attorney-General for Ireland. He was 
 knighted in 1607. O ne of the best books 
 on that unhappy country is his Discovery 
 of the true causes why Ireland was never 
 entirely subdued, nor brought tinder obedi- 
 ence of the Crozvn of England until the 
 beginning of Her Majesty's happy reign 
 (161 1), dedicated to James I. His chief 
 poems are his Nosce Teipsum and The 
 Orchestra. In 16 14 he was elected for 
 Newcastle-under-Lyme, and he died in 
 1626, aged only 57. Yet in that time he 
 had travelled a long way from the days 
 of his early literary companionship with 
 Christopher Marlowe. 
 
 The Church at the end of the sixteenth 
 century assuredly aimed high. At the 
 time the above books were burnt, it was 
 decreed that no satires or epigrams should
 
 Sixteenth Century Book- Fires. 45 
 
 be printed in the future ; and that no plays 
 should be printed without the inspection 
 and permission of the Archbishop of Can- 
 terbury and the Bishop of London ! But 
 even this is nothing compared with that 
 later attempt to subject the Press to the 
 Church which called forth Milton's Areo- 
 pagitica ; there indeed soon came to be 
 very little to choose between the Inquisi- 
 tion of the High Commission and the 
 more noxious Inquisition of Rome. 
 
 Near to the burnt works of the pre- 
 vious writers must be placed those of that 
 prolific writer of the same period, Samuel 
 Rowlands. The severity of his satire, and 
 the obviousness of the allusions, caused 
 two of his works to be burnt, first publicly, 
 and then in the hall kitchen of the Sta- 
 tioners' Company, in October 1600. These 
 were : The Letting Humour's Blood in the 
 Headvein, and, A Merry Meeting ; or, 'tis 
 Merry zvhen Knaves meet ; both of which 
 subsequently reappeared under the titles 
 respectively of Humours Ordinarie, where 
 a man may be verie tnerrie and exceeding 
 well used for his sixpence, and the Ktiave 
 of Clubs. Either work would now cost 
 much more than sixpence, and probably 
 fail to make the reader very merry, or 
 even merry at all. One of the epigrams, 
 however, of the first work may be quoted
 
 46 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 as of more than ephemeral truth and 
 interest : — 
 
 " Who seeks to please all men each way, 
 And not himself offend, 
 He may begin his work to-day, 
 But God knows when he'll end." 
 
 Little appears to be known of Rowlands, 
 but, like Bishop Hall, he could turn his 
 pen to various purposes with great facility ; 
 for the prayers which he is thought to 
 have composed, and which are published 
 with the rest of his works in the admir- 
 able edition of 1870, are of as high an 
 order of merit as the religious works of 
 his more famous contemporary. 
 
 The only wonder is that the Archbishop 
 did not enforce the burning of much more 
 of the literature of the Elizabethan period, 
 whilst he was engaged on such a crusade. 
 He may well, however, have shrunk ap- 
 palled from the magnitude of the task, 
 and have thought it better to touch the 
 margin than do nothing at all. And, 
 after all, in those days a poet was lucky if 
 they only burnt his poems, and not him- 
 self as well. In 1619 John Williams, 
 barrister, was actually hanged, drawn, and 
 quartered, for two poems which were 
 not even printed, but which exist in manu- 
 script at Cambridge to this day. These were 
 Balaam's Ass and the Speculum Regale.
 
 Sixteenth Century Book-Fires. 47 
 
 "Williams was indiscreet enough to predict 
 the King's death in 1621, and to send the 
 poems secretly to his Majesty in a box. 
 The odd thing is that he thought himself 
 justly punished for his foolish freak, so 
 very peculiar were men's notions of 
 justice in those far-off barbarous days.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 Book-Fires under James I. 
 
 ESPITE Mr. Disraeli's able de- 
 fence of him, the fashion has 
 survived of speaking disdain- 
 fully of James I. and all his 
 works. The military men of his day, 
 hating him for that wise love of peace 
 which saved us at least from one war on 
 the Continent, complained of a king who 
 preferred to wage war with the pen than 
 with the pike, and vented his anger on 
 paper instead of with powder. But for 
 all that, the patron and friend of Ben 
 Jonson, and the constant promoter of arts 
 and letters, was one of the best literary 
 workmen of his time; nor will any one who 
 dips into his works fail to put them aside 
 without a considerably higher estimate 
 than he had before of the ability of the 
 most learned king that ever occupied the 
 British throne — a monarch unapproached 
 by any of his successors, save William III., 
 in any sort of intellectual power.
 
 Book-Fires under James I. 49 
 
 Yet here our admiration for James I. 
 must perforce stop. For of many of his 
 ideas the only excuse is that they were 
 those of his age ; and this is an excuse 
 that is fatal to a claim to the highest 
 order of merit. All men to some extent 
 are the sport and victims of their intel- 
 lectual surroundings ; but it is the mark 
 of superiority to rise above them, and this 
 James I. often failed to do. He cannot, 
 for instance, in this respect compare with 
 a man whose works he persecuted, namely, 
 Reginald Scot, who in 1584 published 
 his immortal Discoverie of Witchcraft, a 
 book which, alike for its motive as its 
 matter, occupies one of the highest places 
 in the history of the literature of Europe. 
 
 Yet Scot was only a Kentish country 
 gentleman, who gave himself up solely, 
 says Wood, to solid reading and the 
 perusal of obscure but neglected authors, 
 diversifying his studies with agriculture, 
 and so producing the first extant treatise 
 on hops. Nevertheless, he is among the 
 heroes of the world, greater for me at least 
 than any one of our most famous generals, 
 for it was at the risk of his life that he 
 wrote, as he says himself, " in behalf of 
 the poor, the aged, and the simple " ; and 
 if he has no monument in our English 
 Pantheon, he has a better and more
 
 5 O Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 abiding one in the hearts of all the well- 
 wishers of humanity. For his reading led 
 him to the assault of one of the best 
 established, most sacred, yet most stupid, 
 of the superstitions of mankind; and to 
 have exposed both the folly of the belief, 
 and the cruelty of the legal punishments, of 
 witchcraft, more justly entitles his memory 
 to honour than the capture of many 
 stormed cities or the butchery of thousands 
 of his fellow-beings on a battlefield. 
 
 How trite is the argument that this or 
 that belief must be true because so many 
 generations have believed it, so many 
 countries, so many famous men, — as if 
 error, like stolen property, gained a title 
 from prescription of time ! Scot pierced 
 this pretension with a single sentence : 
 "Truth must not be measured by time, 
 for every old opinion is not sound." " My 
 great adversaries," he says, " are young 
 ignorance and old custom. For what folly 
 soever tract of time hnth fostered, it is so 
 superstitiously pursued of some as though 
 no error could be acquainted with custom." 
 May we not say, indeed, that beliefs are 
 rendered suspect by the very extent of 
 their currency and acceptance ? 
 
 But Scot had a greater adversary than 
 even young ignorance or old custom ; and 
 that was King James, who, whilst King of
 
 Book- Fires under James I. 5 1 
 
 Scotland, wrote his Demonologie against 
 Scot's ideas (1597). James's mind was 
 strictly Bible-bound, and for him the dis- 
 belief in witches savoured of Sadduceeism, 
 or the denial of spirits. Yet Scot had 
 taken care to guard himself, for he wrote : 
 " I deny not that there are witches or 
 images; but I detest the idolatrous opinions 
 conceived of them." Nor can James have 
 carefully read Scot, for tacked on to the 
 Diseoz'erie is a Discourse of Devils and 
 Spirits, which to the simplest Sadducee 
 would have been the veriest trash. Scot, 
 for instance, says of the devil that " God 
 created him purposely to destroy. I take 
 his substance to be such as no man can 
 by learning define, nor by wisdom search 
 out " : a conclusion surely as wise as the 
 theology is curious. Anyhow it is the 
 very reverse of Sadduceean. It is said 
 that one of the first proceedings of James's 
 reign was to have all the copies of Scot's 
 book burnt that could be seized, and 
 undoubtedly one of the first of his Acts 
 of Parliament was the statute that made 
 all the devices of witchcraft punishable 
 with death, as felony, without benefit of 
 clergy. 
 
 But about the burning there is room for 
 doubt. For there is no English contempo- 
 rary testimony of the fact. Voet, a professor
 
 5 2 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 of theology in Holland, is its only known 
 contemporary witness ; but he may have 
 assumed the suppression of the book to 
 have been identical with its burning ; a 
 common assumption, but a no less common 
 mistake. On the other hand, many books 
 undoubtedly were burnt under James that 
 are not mentioned by name ; and the great 
 rarity of the first edition of the book, and 
 its absence from some of our principal 
 libraries, support the possibility of its 
 having been among them. 1 Nevertheless, 
 to quote Mr. D'Israeli : " On the King's 
 arrival in England, having discovered the 
 numerous impostures and illusions which 
 he had often referred to as authorities, he 
 grew suspicious of the whole system of 
 Dsemonologie, and at length recanted it 
 entirely. With the same conscientious zeal 
 James had written the book, the King 
 condemned it ; and the sovereign separated 
 himself from the author, in the cause of 
 truth ; but the clergy and the Parliament 
 persisted in making the imaginary crime 
 felony by the statute.'" So that if James 
 really burnt the book, he must have burnt 
 it to please others, not himself; and though 
 
 1 That is Dr. Brinsley Nicholson's conclusion in 
 his preface to Scot ; yet, if the book was burnt, it 
 is highly improbable that the common hangman 
 
 officiated.
 
 Book-Fins under James I. 53 
 
 he may have done so, the presumption is 
 rather that he did not. 
 
 The wonder is that Scot himself escaped 
 the real or supposed fate of his book. 
 Pleasing indeed is it to know that he lived 
 out his days undisturbed to the end (1599) 
 with his family and among his hops and 
 flowers in Kent ; not, however, before he 
 had lived to see his book make a percept- 
 ible impression on the magistracy and even 
 on the clergy of his time, till a perceptible 
 check was given to his ideas by the Demon- 
 ologie. But at all events he had given 
 superstition a reeling blow, from which 
 it never wholly recovered, and to which 
 it ultimately succumbed. More than this 
 can few men hope to do, and to have done 
 so much is ample cause for contentment. 
 
 Fundamental questions of all sorts were 
 growing critical in the reign of James, who 
 had not only the clearest ideas of their 
 answer, but the firmest determination to 
 have them, if possible, answered in his 
 own way. The principal ones were: The 
 relationship of the King to his subjects ; 
 of the Pope to kings ; of the Established 
 Church to Puritanism and Catholicism. 
 And on the leading political and religious 
 questions of his day James caused cer- 
 tain books to be burnt which advocated 
 opinions contrary to his own — a mode of
 
 54 Books Condemned to be Burnt, 
 
 reasoning that reflects less credit on his 
 philosophy than does his conduct in 
 most other respects. 
 
 But the first book that was burnt for 
 its sentiments on Prerogative was one of 
 which the King was believed personally 
 to approve. This was probably the gist of 
 its offence, for it appeared about the time 
 that the King made his very supercilious 
 speech to the Commons in answer to their 
 complaints about the High Commission 
 and other grievances. 
 
 I allude to the famous Interpreter (1607) 
 by Cowell, Doctor of Civil Law at Cam- 
 bridge, which, written at the instigation 
 of Archbishop Bancroft, was dedicated to 
 him, and caused a storm little dreamt 
 of by its author. Sir E. Coke disliked 
 Cowell, whom he nicknamed Cow-heel, 
 and naturally disliked him still more for 
 writing slightingly of Littleton and the 
 Common Law. He therefore caused 
 Parliament to take the matter up, with 
 the result that Cowell was imprisoned and 
 came near to hanging ; * James only saving 
 his life by suppressing his book by pro- 
 clamation, for which the Commons re- 
 turned him thanks with great exultation 
 over their victory. 
 
 1 Winwood's Memorials, I. 125.
 
 Book-Fins under James I. 55 
 
 For Cowell had taken too strongly the 
 high monarchical line, and the episode of 
 his book is really the first engagement 
 in that great war between Prerogative and 
 People which raged through the seven- 
 teenth century. " I hold it uncontrol- 
 lable," he wrote, " that the King of Eng- 
 land is an absolute king." " Though it 
 be a merciful policy, and also a politic 
 policy (not alterable without great peril) 
 to make laws by the consent of the whole 
 realm . . . yet simply to bind the prince 
 to or by these laws were repugnant to the 
 nature and custom of an absolute mon- 
 archy." " For those regalities which are of 
 the higher nature there is not one that 
 belonged to the most absolute prince in 
 the world which doth not also belong to 
 our King." But the book was condemned, 
 not only for its sins against the Subject, but 
 also for passages that were said to pinch 
 on the authority of the King. Yet, con- 
 sidered merely as a Law Dictionary, it is 
 still one of the best in our language. 
 
 In the King's proclamation against the 
 Interpreter are some passages that curiously 
 illustrate the mind of its author. He 
 thus complains of the growing freedom 
 of thought : " From the very highest 
 mysteries of the Godhead and the most 
 inscrutable counsels in the Trinitie to the
 
 5 6 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 very lowest pit of Hell and the confused 
 action of the divells there, there is nothing 
 now unsearched into by the curiositie 
 of men's brains " ; so that " it is no 
 wonder that they do not spare to wade in 
 all the deepest mysteries that belong to 
 the persons or the state of Kinges and 
 Princes, that are gods upon earth." King 
 James's attitude to Free Thought reminds 
 one of the legendary contention between 
 Canute and the sea. No one has ever 
 repeated the latter experiment, but how 
 many thousands still disquiet themselves, 
 as James did, about or against the progress 
 of the human mind ! 
 
 In the proclamation itself there is no 
 actual mention of burning, all persons in 
 possession of the book being required to 
 deliver their copies to the Lord Mayor 
 or County Sheriffs " for the further order 
 of its utter suppression " (March 25th, 
 1610) ; neither is there any allusion to 
 burning in the Parliamentary journals, 
 nor in the letters relating to the subject 
 in Winwood's Memorials. The contem- 
 porary evidence of the fact is, however, 
 supplied by Sir H. Spelman, who says in his 
 Glossarium (under the word "Tenure") 
 that Cowell's book was publicly burnt. 
 Otherwise, James's proclamations were not 
 always attended to (by one, for instance,
 
 Book-Fires under James I. 57 
 
 he prohibited hunting) ; and Roger Coke 
 says that the books being out, " the 
 proclamation could not call them in, but 
 only served to make them more taken 
 notice of." x 
 
 That books were often suppressed or 
 called in without being publicly burnt is 
 well shown by Heylin's remark about 
 Mocket's book (presently referred to), that 
 it was " thought fit not only to call it in, 
 but to expiate the errors of it in a public 
 flame." 2 Among works thus suppressed 
 without being burnt may be mentioned 
 Bishop Thornborough's two books in 
 favour of the union between England and 
 Scotland (1604), Lord Coke's Speech and 
 Charge at the Norwich Assizes (1607), and 
 Sir W. Raleigh's first volume of the History 
 of the World (1614). I suspect that Scott's 
 Discoverie was likewise only suppressed, 
 and that Voet erroneously thought that this 
 involved and implied a public burning. 
 
 But it was not for long that James had 
 saved Cowell's life, for the latter's death 
 the following year, and soon after the 
 resignation of his professorship, is said 
 by Fuller to have been hastened by the 
 trouble about his book. The King through- 
 
 1 Detection of Court and State of England 
 ^1696). I. 30. 
 
 2 Life of Laud, 70.
 
 5 8 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 out behaved with great judgment, nor is 
 it so true that he surrendered Cowell to 
 his enemies, as that he saved him from 
 imminent personal peril. Men like Cowell 
 and Blackwood and Bancroft were pro- 
 bably more monarchical than the monarch 
 himself; and, though James held high 
 notions of his own powers, and could even 
 hint at being a god upon earth, his subjects 
 were far more ready to accept his divinity 
 than he was to force it upon them. It 
 was not quite for nothing that James had 
 had for his tutor the republican George 
 Buchanan, one of the first opponents of 
 monarchical absolutism in his famous De 
 Jure Regni apud Scotos ; nor did he ever 
 quite forget the noble words in which at 
 his first Parliament he thus defined for 
 ever the position of a constitutional king : 
 " That I am a servant it is most true, that 
 as I am head and governor of all the 
 people in my dominion who are my natural 
 vassals and subjects, considering them in 
 numbers and distinct ranks : so, if we will 
 take the whole people as one body and 
 mass, then, as the head is ordained for 
 the body and not the body for the head, 
 so must a righteous king know himself 
 to be ordained for his people and not 
 his people for him. . . . I will never be 
 ashamed to confess it my principal honour
 
 Book-Fires under James I. 59 
 
 to be the great servant of the Common- 
 wealth" 
 
 And in this very matter of Cowell's 
 book James not only denied any prefer- 
 ence for the civil over the common law, 
 hut professed " that, although he knew 
 how great and large a king's rights and 
 prerogatives were, yet that he would never 
 affect nor seek to extend his beyond the 
 prescription and limits of the municipal 
 laws and customs of this realm." l 
 
 A few years later Sir Walter Raleigh's 
 first volume of his History of the World 
 was called in at the King's command, 
 " especially for being too saucy in censur- 
 ing princes." This fate its wonderful 
 author took greatly to heart, as he had 
 hoped thereby to please the King extra- 
 ordinarily;- and, considering the terms 
 wherewith in his preface he pointed the 
 contrast between James and our previous 
 rulers, one cannot but share his astonish- 
 ment. 
 
 This would seem to indicate that the 
 King grew more sensitive about his posi- 
 tion as time went on ; and this conclusion 
 is corroborated by his extraordinary con- 
 duct in reference to the works of David 
 
 ' Winwood's Memorials, III. 136. 
 
 ' Letter of January 5th, 1614, in Court and 
 
 Times of James I.
 
 60 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 Parseus, the learned Protestant Professor 
 of Divinity at Heidelberg. One can 
 conceive no mortal soul ever reading 
 those three vast folios of closely printed 
 Latin in which Parseus commented on 
 the Old and New Testament; but in 
 those days people must have read every- 
 thing. At all events, it was discovered 
 that in his commentary on Romans xiii. 
 Parous had contended at great length 
 and detail in favour of the people's right 
 to restrain, even by force of arms, tyran- 
 nical violence on the part of the superior 
 magistrate. On March 22nd, 1622, there- 
 fore, the Archbishop of Canterbury and 
 twelve bishops, at the King's request, 
 represented this doctrine to be most 
 dangerous and seditious ; and accordingly, 
 on July 1 st, the books of Parous were 
 publicly burnt after a sermon by the 
 Bishop of London ; and about the same 
 time the Universities of Oxford and Cam- 
 bridge, ever on the side of the divine 
 right, proved their loyalty by condemning 
 and burning the book, perhaps the only 
 book whose condemnation never tempted 
 to its perusal. But that very same year 
 (August 22nd, 1622) the King found it 
 necessary to issue directions concerning 
 preaching and preachers, so freely was 
 the Puritanical side of the community
 
 Hook- lures under James I. 6 1 
 
 then beginning to express itself about the 
 
 royal prerogative. 
 
 As connected with the question of the 
 prerogative must be mentioned, as burnt 
 by James' order, the Doctrina et Politia 
 Ecclesne Anglicana (1616), a Latin trans- 
 lation of the English Prayer Book, as well 
 as of Jewell's Apolog) 1 and Newell's Cate- 
 chism, by Richard Mocket, then Warden 
 of All Souls'. Mocket was chaplain to 
 Archbishop Abbot, and wished to recom- 
 mend the formularies and doctrines of the 
 Church of England to foreign nations. 
 History does not, indeed, record any deep 
 impression as made on foreign nations by 
 the book ; though Heylin asserts that it 
 had given no small reputation to the 
 Church of England beyond the seas 
 {Laud, 70) ; but it does record the fact 
 of its being publicly burnt, as well as give 
 some intimations of the reason. Fuller 
 says that the main objection to it was, 
 that Mocket had proved himself a better 
 chaplain than subject, touching James in 
 one of his tenderest points in contending 
 for the right of the Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury to confirm the election of bishops 
 in his province. Mocket also gave such 
 extracts from the Homilies as seemed to 
 have a Calvinistic leaning ; and treated 
 fast days as onl) 1 f political institution.
 
 62 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 For such reasons the book was burnt by 
 public edict, a censure which the writer 
 took so much to heart that, as Fuller says, 
 being " so much defeated in his expecta- 
 tion to find punishment where he looked 
 for preferment, as if his life were bound 
 up by sympathy in his book, he ended his 
 days soon after." Poor Mocket was only 
 forty when he died, succumbing, like 
 Cowell, to the rough reception accorded 
 to his book. 
 
 Mocket's book is less one to read than 
 to treasure as a sort of lusus tiaturce in 
 the literary world ; for it would certainly 
 have seemed safe antecedently to wager 
 a million to one that no Warden of All 
 Souls' would ever write a book that would 
 be subjected to the indignity of fire ; and, 
 in spite of his example, I would still wager 
 a million to one that a similar fate will 
 never befall any literary work of Mocket's 
 successors. Mocket's book, therefore, has 
 a certain distinction which is all its own ; 
 but those who do not love the Church of 
 England without it will hardly be led to 
 such love by reading Mocket. And Mocket 
 himself, if we follow Fuller, seems to have 
 wished to make his love for the Church 
 a vehicle to his own preferment ; but as, 
 perhaps, in that respect he does not stand 
 alone, I should be sorry that the implied
 
 Book- Fires under James f. 63 
 
 reproach should rest as any stain upon 
 his memory. 
 
 Next to the question of the rights of 
 kings over their subjects, the most im- 
 portant one of that time was concerning 
 the rights of popes over kings — a question 
 which, having been intensified by the 
 Reformation, naturally came to a crisis 
 after the Gunpowder Plot. James I. then 
 instituted an oath of allegiance as a test 
 of Catholic loyalty, and many Catholics 
 took the oath without scruple, including 
 the Archpriest Blackwell. Cardinal Bellar- 
 mine thereupon wrote a letter of rebuke 
 to the latter, and Pope Paul V. sent a brief 
 forbidding Catholics either to take the oath 
 or to attend Protestant churches (October 
 1606). But it is remarkable that, so 
 little did the Catholics believe in the au- 
 thenticity of this brief, another — and an 
 angry one — had to come from Rome the 
 following September, to confirm and en- 
 force it. King James very fairly took 
 umbrage at the action and claims of the 
 Pope, and spent six days in making notes 
 which he wished the Bishop of Winchester 
 to use in a reply to the Pope and the 
 Cardinal. But when the Archbishop of 
 Canterbury' and the Bishop of Ely saw 
 the King's notes, they thought them answer 
 enough, and so James's Apology for the
 
 64 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 Oath of Allegiance came to light, but 
 without his name, the author, among 
 other reasons, deeming it beneath his 
 dignity to contend in argument with a 
 cardinal. As the Cardinal responded, 
 the King took a stronger measure, and 
 under his own name wrote, in a single 
 week, his Premonition to all most Mighty 
 Mofiarchs, wherein he exposed with great 
 force the danger to all states from the 
 pretensions of the Papacy. Thereupon, at 
 Paul's invitation, Suarez penned that vast 
 folio (778 pp.), the Defensio Catholicce Fidei 
 contra Anglicance Sectce Errores (1613), as 
 a counterblast to James's Apology. Con- 
 sidering the subject, it was certainly written 
 with singular moderation ; and James would 
 have done better to have left the book to 
 the natural penalty of its immense bulk. 
 As it was, he ordered it to be burnt at 
 London, and at Oxford and Cambridge ; 
 forbade his subjects to read it, under severe 
 penalties ; and wrote to Philip III. of Spain 
 to complain of his Jesuit subject. But 
 Philip, of course, only expressed his sym- 
 pathy with Suarez, and exhorted James 
 to return to the Faith. The Parlement 
 of Paris also consigned the book to the 
 flames in 16 14, as it had a few years before 
 Bellarmine's Tractatus de Potestate sumtni 
 Pontificis in Temporalibus, in which the
 
 Book- Fires under J aims I. 65 
 
 same high pretensions were claimed for 
 the Pope as were claimed by Suarez. 
 
 The question at issue remains, of course, 
 a burning one to this day. To James I., 
 however, is due the credit of having been 
 one of the earliest and ablest champions 
 against the Temporal Power ; and there- 
 fore side by side on our shelves with 
 Bellarmine and Suarez should stand copies 
 of the Apology and the Premonition — both 
 of them works which can scarcely fail 
 to raise the King many degrees in the 
 estimation of all who read them. 
 
 But we have yet to see James as a 
 theologian, for on his divinity he prided 
 himself no less than on his king-craft. 
 The burnings of Legatt at Smithfield and 
 of YVightman at Lichfield for heretical 
 opinions are sad blots on the King's 
 memory ; for it would seem that he per- 
 sonally pressed the bishops to proceed to 
 this extremity, in the case of Legatt at 
 least. Nor in the case of poor Conrad 
 Vorst did he manifest more toleration or 
 dignity. It was no concern of his if 
 Vorst was appointed by the States to 
 succeed Arminius as Professor of Theology 
 at Leyden ; yet, deeming his duty as 
 Defender of the Faith to be bound by no 
 seas, he actually interfered to prevent it, 
 and rendered Vorst's life a burden to him,
 
 66 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 ■when he might just as reasonably have 
 protested against the choice of a Grand 
 Lama of Thibet. 
 
 Vorst's book — the Tractatus Theologicm 
 de Deo, an ugly, square, brown book of 
 five hundred pages — is as unreadable as 
 it is unprepossessing. Bayle says that it 
 was shown to the King whilst out hunting, 
 and that he forthwith read it with such 
 energy as to be able to despatch within an 
 hour to his resident at the Hague a de- 
 tailed list of its heresies. Nothing in his 
 reign seems to have excited him so much. 
 Not only did he have it publicly burnt in 
 St. Paul's Churchyard (October 1611), 
 and at Oxford and Cambridge, but he 
 entreated the States, under the pain of 
 the loss of his friendship, to banish Vorst 
 from their dominions altogether. No 
 heretic, he said, ever better deserved to 
 be burnt, but that he would leave to their 
 Christian wisdom. " Such a Disquisition 
 deserved the punishment of the Inquisi- 
 tion." If Vorst remained, no English 
 youths should repair to "so infected a 
 place " as the University of Leyden. 
 
 The States resented at first the inter- 
 ference of the King of England, and 
 supported Vorst, but the ultimate result 
 of James's prolonged agitation was that 
 in 1 619 the National Synod of Dort de-
 
 Book-Fires under James I. 67 
 
 clared Vorst's works to be impious and 
 blasphemous, and their author unworthy 
 to be an orthodox professor. He was 
 accordingly banished from the University 
 and from Holland for life, and died three 
 years afterwards, fully justified by his 
 persecution in his original reluctance to 
 exchange his country living for the dignity 
 of a professorship of theology. 
 
 Bayle thinks he was fairly chargeable 
 with Socinian views, but what most of- 
 fended James was his metaphysical specu- 
 lations on the Divine attributes. I will 
 quote from Vorst two passages which 
 vexed the royal soul, and should teach us 
 to rejoice that the reign of such discus- 
 sions shows signs of passing away : — 
 
 " Is there a quantity in God? 
 There is ; but not a physical quantity, 
 But a supernatural quantity ; 
 One nevertheless that is plainly imperceptible 
 
 to us, 
 And merely spiritual." 
 
 Or again : — 
 
 " Hath God a body ? If we will speak 
 properly, He has none ; yet is it no ab- 
 surdity, speaking improperly, to ascribe a 
 body unto God, that is, as the word is 
 taken improperly and generally (and yet 
 not very absurdly) for a true substance, in a 
 large signification, or, if you will, abusive."
 
 68 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 The above are the principal books 
 whose names have come down to us as 
 burnt in the reign of James, and the 
 initiation of such burning seems always 
 to have come from the King himself. As 
 yet, the Star Chamber and Court of High 
 Commission do not appear to have as- 
 sumed the direction of this lesser but not 
 unimportant department of government. 
 Nor is there yet any mention of the hang- 
 man : the mere burning by any menial 
 official being, thought stigma enough. It 
 is also remarkable that the books which 
 chiefly roused James's anger to the burning 
 point were the works of foreigners — of 
 Parasus, Suarez, and Vorst. After James 
 our country was too much occupied in 
 burning its own books and pamphlets to 
 burden itself with the additional labour 
 of burning its neighbours' ; the instances 
 that occur are comparatively few and far 
 between. But it is clear that, whatever 
 were James's real views as to the limits 
 of his political prerogative, in the field of 
 literature he meant to play and did play 
 the despot. Pity that one who could so 
 deftly wield his pen should have rested 
 his final argument on the bonfire !
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Charles the First's Book-Fires. 
 
 EW things now seem more sur- 
 prising than the sort of fury 
 with which in the earlier part 
 of the seventeenth century the 
 extreme rights of monarchs were advocated 
 by large numbers of Englishmen. Political 
 servitude was then the favourite dream 
 of thousands. The Church made herself 
 especially prominent on the side of pre- 
 rogative ; the pulpits resounded with what 
 our ancestors called Crown Divinity ; and 
 in the reign of Charles I. the rival 
 principles, ultimately fought for on the 
 battlefield, first came into conflict over 
 sermons, the immediate cause, indeed, of 
 so many of the greatest political move- 
 ments of our history. 
 
 The first episode in this connection is 
 the important case of Dr. Roger Man- 
 waring, one of Charles's chaplains, who, 
 at the time when the King was pressing 
 for a compulsory loan, preached two
 
 yo Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 sermons before him, advocating the 
 King's right to impose any loan or tax 
 without consent of Parliament, and, in 
 fact, making a clean sweep of all the 
 liberties of the subject whatsoever. At 
 Charles's request, Manwaring published 
 these sermons under the title of Religion 
 and Allegiance (1627). But the popular 
 party in Parliament resolved to make an 
 example of him, and a long speech on the 
 subject by Pym is preserved in Rushworth. 
 The Commons begged the Lords to pro- 
 nounce judgment upon him, and a most 
 severe one they did pronounce. He was 
 to be imprisoned during the House's 
 pleasure ; to be fined ^1000 to the King ; 
 to make a written submission at the bars 
 of both Houses ; to be suspended for 
 three years ; to be disabled from ever 
 preaching at Court, or holding any eccle- 
 siastical or secular office ; and the King 
 was to be moved to grant a proclamation 
 for calling in and burning his book. 
 
 On June 23rd, 1628, Manwaring made 
 accordingly a most abject submission at 
 the bars of both Houses, Heylin says, on 
 his knees and with tears in his eyes, 
 confessing his sermons to have been 
 "full of dangerous passages, inferences, 
 and scandalous aspersions in most parts " ; 
 and the next day Charles issued a procla-
 
 Charles the First's Book-Fires. 71 
 
 mation for calling them in, as having 
 incurred " the just censure and sentence 
 of the High Court of Parliament." The 
 sentence of suppression presumably in this 
 case carried the burning ; but, if so, there 
 is no mention of any public burning by 
 the bishops and others, to whom the 
 books were to be delivered by their 
 owners. 
 
 Fuller says that much of Manwaring's 
 sentence was remitted in consideration of 
 his humble submission ; and Charles the 
 very same year not only pardoned him, 
 but gave him ecclesiastical preferment, 
 finally making him Bishop of St. David's. 
 Heylin attests the resentment this indis- 
 creet indulgence roused in the Commons; 
 but, unfortunately, as Manwaring was 
 doubtless well aware, to have incurred 
 the anger of Parliament was motive 
 enough with Charles for the preferment 
 of the offender, and the shortest road 
 to it. 
 
 This is shown by the similar treatment 
 accorded to the Rev. Richard Montagu, 
 who had made himself conspicuous on 
 the anti-Puritan side in the time of James. 
 In defence of himself he had written 
 his Appello Casarem, with James's leave 
 and encouragement. It was a long book, 
 refuting the charges made against him of
 
 "] 2 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 Popery and Arminianism, and full of 
 bitter invectives against the Puritans. 
 After the matter had been long under 
 the consideration of Parliament, the House 
 prayed Charles to punish Montagu, and 
 to suppress and burn his books ; and this 
 Charles did in a remarkable proclama- 
 tion (January 17th, 1628), wherein the 
 Appello Ccesarem is admitted to have 
 been the first cause of those disputes and 
 differences that have since much troubled 
 the quiet of the Church, and is therefore 
 called in, Charles adding, that if others 
 write again on the subject, " we shall take 
 such order with them and those books 
 that they shall wish they had never thought 
 upon these needless controversies." It 
 appears, however, from Rushworth that, in 
 spite of this, several answers were penned 
 to Montagu, and that they were sup- 
 pressed. And what, indeed, would life 
 be but for its "needless controversies"? 
 
 Nothing could be more praiseworthy 
 than Charles's attempt to put a stop to 
 the idle disputations and bitter recrimina- 
 tions of the combatants on either side 
 of religious controversy. Could he have 
 succeeded he might have staved off the 
 Civil War, which we might almost more 
 fitly call a religious one. But in those 
 days few men, unfortunately, had the cool
 
 Charles tlie First's Book-Fires. 73 
 
 wisdom to remain as neutral between 
 Arminian and Calvinist, Papist and Pro- 
 testant, as between the rival Egyptian 
 sects which, in Juvenal's time, fought for 
 the worship of the ibis or the crocodile. 
 Our comparatively greater safety in these 
 days is due to the large increase of that 
 neutral party, which was so sadly insignifi- 
 cant in the time of Charles. May that 
 party therefore never become less, but 
 constantly grow larger ! 
 
 Montagu, at the time of the proclama- 
 tion of his book, had been appointed 
 Bishop of Chichester, having been raised 
 to that see in spite or because of his 
 quarrel with Parliament. He was con- 
 secrated by Laud in August of the same 
 year, and Heylin admits that his promo- 
 tion was more magnanimous than safe on 
 the part of Charles, being clearly calculated 
 to exasperate the House. Ten years later 
 (1638) he was preferred to the see of 
 Norwich. All his life he remained a 
 prominent member of the Romanising 
 party. 
 
 These books of Manwaring and Mon- 
 tagu are important as proving clearly two 
 historical points, viz. : — (1) The early date 
 at which the Court party alienated even 
 the House of Lords. (2) The fact that the 
 original exciting cause of all the subsequent
 
 74 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 discord between Puritan and Prelatist 
 came from a prominent member of the 
 Laudian or Romanising faction. 
 
 The rising temper of the people, and its 
 justification, is shown even in these literary 
 disputes. But the popular temper was 
 destined to be more seriously roused by 
 those atrocious sentences against the 
 authors of certain books which were 
 passed within a few years by the Star 
 Chamber and High Commission. The 
 heavy fines and cruel mutilations imposed 
 by these courts were not new in the reign 
 of Charles, but they became far more 
 frequent, and were directed less against 
 wrong conduct than disagreeable opinions. 
 They are intimately connected with the 
 memory of Laud, first as Bishop of 
 London, and then as Archbishop of 
 Canterbury, whose letters show that the 
 severities in question were to him and 
 Strafford (to use Hallam's expression) 
 " the feebleness of excessive lenity." To 
 the last Charles was not despotic enough 
 to please Laud, who complains petulantly in 
 his Diary of a prince " who knew not how 
 to be, or be made great." 
 
 As the first illustration of Laud's method 
 for attaining this end must be mentioned 
 the case of a book which enjoys the dis- 
 tinction of having brought its author to a
 
 diaries the First's Book-Fires. 75 
 
 more severe punishment than any other 
 book in the English language. Our litera- 
 ture has had many a martyr, but Alex- 
 ander Leighton is the foremost of the 
 rank. 
 
 He was a Scotch divine ; nor can it 
 be denied that his Syon's Plea against the 
 Prelacy (1628) contained, indeed, some 
 bitter things against the bishops ; he said 
 they were of no use in God's house, and 
 called them caterpillars, moths, and can- 
 kerworms. But our ancestors habitually 
 indulged in such expressions ; and even 
 Tyndale, the martyr, called church func- 
 tionaries horse-leeches, maggots, and cater- 
 pillars in a kingdom. Such terms were 
 among the traditional amenities of all 
 controversy, but especially of religious con- 
 troversy. But since the Martin-Marprelate 
 Tracts or Latimer's sermons the strong 
 anti-Episcopalian feeling of the country 
 had never expressed itself so vigorously as 
 in this " decade of grievances " against the 
 hierarchy, presented to Parliament by a 
 man who was too sensitive of "the ruin 
 of religion and the sinking of the State." 
 
 The Star Chamber fined him ^10,000, 
 and then the High Commission Court 
 deprived him of his ministry, and sen- 
 tenced him to be whipped, to be pilloried, 
 to lose his ears, to have his nose slit, to
 
 y6 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 be branded on his cheeks with "S. S." 
 (Sower of Sedition), and to be imprisoned 
 for life ! Probably with all this, the burn- 
 ing of his book went without saying; 
 though I have found no specific mention 
 of its incurring that fate. 
 
 The sentence was executed in Novem- 
 ber 1630, in frost and snow, making its 
 victim, as he says himself, "a theatre of 
 misery to men and angels." It was all 
 done in the name of law and order, like 
 all the other great atrocities of history. 
 After ten years' imprisonment Leighton 
 was released by the Long Parliament, and 
 a few years later he wrote an account of his 
 sufferings, and a report of his trial in the Star 
 Chamber. Therein we learn that Laud, the 
 Bishop of London, was the moving spirit of 
 the whole thing. At the end of his speech 
 he apologised for his presence at the trial, 
 admitting that by the Canon law no eccle- 
 siastic might be present at a judicature 
 where loss of life or limb was incurred, 
 but contending that there was no such 
 loss in ear-cutting, nose-slitting, branding, 
 and whipping. Leighton, of course, may 
 have been misinformed of what occurred 
 at his trial (for he himself was not allowed 
 to be present !) ; and so some doubt must 
 also attach to the story that when the 
 censure was delivered "the Prelate off
 
 Charles the First's Book-Fires. 7 7 
 
 with his cap, and holding up his hands 
 gave thanks to God who had given him 
 the victory over his enemies." 
 
 Shortly after his release, Leighton was 
 made keeper of Lambeth Palace, and then 
 he died, " rather insane of mind for the 
 hardships he had suffered " ; but, such is 
 the irony of fate, the man who had paid 
 so heavily for his antipathy to bishops 
 became himself the father of an arch- 
 bishop ! 
 
 By an unexplained law of our nature 
 the very severity of punishment seems to 
 invite men to incur it ; and Leighton's 
 fate, like most penal warnings, rather 
 incited to its imitation than deterred from 
 it. The next to feel the grip of the Star 
 Chamber was the famous William Prynne, 
 barrister of Lincoln's Inn, and one of the 
 most erudite as well as most voluminous 
 writers our country has ever produced. 
 
 He was only thirty-three when in 1633 
 he published his Histriomastix ; or, the 
 Player's Scourge. His labour had taken 
 him seven years, nor was it the first work 
 of his that had attracted the notice 
 of authority. In a thousand closely- 
 printed pages, he argued, by an appeal 
 to fifty-five councils, seventy-one fathers 
 and Christian writers, one hundred and 
 fifty Protestant and Catholic authors, and
 
 7 8 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 forty heathen philosophers into the bar- 
 gain, that stage-plays, besides being sinful 
 and heathenish, were "intolerable mis- 
 chiefs to churches, to republics, to the 
 manners, minds, and souls of men." Little 
 as we think so now, this opinion, which 
 was afterwards also Defoe's, was not with- 
 out justification in those days. But 
 Prynne's crusade did not stop at theatres ; 
 and Heylin's account reveals the feeling 
 of contemporaries : " Neither the hospi- 
 tality of the gentry in the time of Christ- 
 mas, nor the music in cathedrals and the 
 chapels royal, nor the pomps and gallan- 
 tries of the Court, nor the Queen's harm- 
 less recreations, nor the King's solacing 
 himself sometimes in masques and dances 
 could escape the venom of his pen." " He 
 seemed to breathe nothing but disgrace 
 to the nation, infamy to the Church, re- 
 proaches to the Court, dishonour to the 
 Queen." For his remarks against female 
 actors were thought to be aimed at Hen- 
 rietta Maria, though the pastoral in which 
 she took part was posterior by six weeks 
 to the publication of the book ! l The four 
 
 1 Whitelock's Memorials of Charles I., 1822. 
 Laud is represented as mainly instrumental in the 
 conduct of the whole of this nefarious proceeding, 
 especially in procuring the sentence in the Star 
 Chamber.
 
 Charles the First's Book-Fires. 79 
 
 legal societies " presented their Majesties 
 with a pompous and magnificent masque, 
 to let them see that Prynne's leaven had 
 not soured them all, and that they were 
 not poisoned with the same infection." l 
 
 This surely might have been enough ; 
 hut by the time the matter had come 
 before the Star Chamber, Laud had suc- 
 ceeded Abbot (with whom Prynne was on 
 friendly terms) as Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury (August 1633); and Laud was in 
 favour of rigorous measures. So was 
 Lord Dorset, and Lord Cottington, Chan- 
 cellor of the Exchequer, whose judgment 
 is of importance as showing that this was 
 really the first occasion when the hang- 
 man's services were called in aid for the 
 suppression of books : — 
 
 " I do in the first place begin censure 
 with his book. I condemn it to be burnt 
 in the most public manner that can be. 
 The manner in other countries is (where 
 such books are) to be burnt by the hang- 
 man, though not used in England (yet I 
 wish it may, in respect of the strangeness 
 and heinousness of the matter contained 
 in it) to have a strange manner of burning; 
 therefore I shall desire it may be so 
 burnt by the hand of the hangman. If 
 
 1 Life of Laud, 294.
 
 8o Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 it may agree with the Court, I do 
 adjudge Mr. Prynne to be put from the 
 Bar, and to be for ever uncapable of his 
 profession. I do adjudge him, my Lords, 
 that the Society of Lincoln's Inn do put 
 him out of the Society ; and because he 
 had his offspring from Oxford " (now with 
 a low voice said the Archbishop of 
 Canterbury, " I am sorry that ever Oxford 
 bred such an evil member ") " there to 
 be degraded. And I do condemn Mr. 
 Prynne to stand in the pillory in two 
 places, in Westminster and Cheapside, 
 and that he shall lose both his ears, one 
 in each place ; and with a paper on his 
 head declaring how foul an offence it is, 
 viz. that it is for an infamous libel against 
 both their Majesties, State and Govern- 
 ment. And lastly (nay, not lastly) I do 
 condemn him in ^5,000 fine to the King. 
 And lastly, perpetual imprisonment." x 
 
 In this spirit the highest in the land 
 understood justice in those golden mon- 
 archical days, little recking of the retribu- 
 tion that their cruelty was laying in store 
 for them. A few years later history pre- 
 sents us with another graphic picture of 
 the same sort, showing us the facetious as 
 well as the ferocious aspect of the Star 
 
 1 From the account in the State Trials, III. 576.
 
 Charles the First 's Book- Fires. 8 I 
 
 Chamber. Again l'rynne stands before 
 his judges, a full court (and theoretically 
 the Star Chamber was co-extensive with 
 the House of Lords), but this time in 
 company with Bastwick, the physician, 
 and Burton, the divine. Sir J. Finch, 
 Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, says : 
 " I had thought Mr. Prynne had had no 
 ears, but methinks he hath ears." There- 
 upon many Lords look more closely at 
 him, and the usher of the court is ordered 
 to turn up his hair and show his ears. 
 Their Lordships are displeased that no 
 more had been cut off on the previous 
 occasion, and "cast out some disgraceful 
 words of him." To whom Prynne re- 
 plies : " My Lords, there is never a one 
 of your Honours but would be sorry to 
 have your ears as mine are." The Lord- 
 Keeper says : " In good truth he is some- 
 what saucy." " I hope," says Prynne, 
 "your Honours will not be offended. I 
 pray God give you ears to hear." 
 
 The whole of this interesting trial is 
 best read in the fourth volume of the 
 Harleian Miscellany. Prynne's main 
 offence on this occasion was his Neivs 
 from Ipswich, written in prison, and his 
 sentence was preceded by a speech from 
 Laud, which the King made him after- 
 wards publish, and which, after a denial 
 
 6
 
 82 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 of the Puritan charge of making innova- 
 tions in religion, ended with the words : 
 " Because the business hath some reflec- 
 tion upon myself I shall forbear to censure 
 them, and leave them to God's mercy 
 and the King's justice." Yet Laud in the 
 very previous sentence had thanked his 
 colleagues for the " just and honourable 
 censure " they had passed ; and when he 
 spoke in this Pharisaical way of God's 
 mercy and the King's justice, he knew 
 that the said justice had condemned 
 Prynne to be fined another ,£5,000, to 
 be deprived of the remainder of his 
 ears in the pillory, to be branded on 
 both cheeks with " S. L." (Schismatical 
 Libeller), and to be imprisoned for life 
 in Carnarvon Castle. 1 Apart from that, 
 Laud's defence seems conclusive on many 
 of the points brought against him. 
 
 Bastwick and Burton were at the same 
 time, for their books, condemned to a 
 fine of £"5,000 each, to be pilloried, to 
 lose their ears, and to be imprisoned, one 
 
 1 In his defence he says that he always voted 
 last or last but one. In that case he must always 
 have heard the sentence passed by those who 
 spoke before him, and not dissented from it. His 
 sole excuse is, that he was no worse than his 
 colleagues ; to which the answer is, he ought to 
 have been better.
 
 Charles the First's Book- Fires. 83 
 
 at Launceston Castle, in Cornwall, and 
 the other in Lancaster Castle. It does 
 not appear that the burning of their books 
 was on this occasion included in the 
 sentence ; but as the order for seizing 
 libellous books was sometimes a separate 
 matter from the sentence itself (Laud's 
 Hist., 252), or could be ordered by the 
 Archbishop alone, one may feel fairly sure 
 that it followed. 
 
 The execution of this sentence (June 
 30th, 1637) marks a turning-point in our 
 history. The people strewed the way from 
 the prison to the pillory with sweet herbs. 
 From the pillory the prisoners severally ad- 
 dressed the sympathetic crowd, Bastwick, 
 for instance, saying, "Had I as much blood 
 as would swell the Thames, I would shed 
 it every drop in this cause." Prynne, 
 returning to prison by boat, actually made 
 two Latin verses on the letters branded 
 on his cheeks, with a pun upon Laud's 
 name. As probably no one ever made 
 verses on such an occasion before or since, 
 they are deserving of quotation : — 
 
 " Stigmata maxillis referens insignia Laudis, 
 Exultans remeo, victima grata Deo." 
 
 Their journey to their several prisons 
 was a triumphal procession all the way ; 
 the people, as Heylin reluctantly writes,
 
 84 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 " either foolishly or factiously resorting to 
 them as they passed, and seeming to be- 
 moan their sufferings as unjustly rigorous. 
 And such a haunt there was to the several 
 castles to which they were condemned . . . 
 that the State found it necessary to remove 
 them further," Prynne to Jersey, Burton 
 to Guernsey, and Bastwick to Scilly. The 
 alarm of the Government at the resent- 
 ment they had aroused by their cruelties 
 is as conspicuous as that resentment itself. 
 No English Government has ever with 
 impunity incurred the charge of cruelty ; 
 nor is anything clearer than that as these 
 atrocious sentences justified the coming 
 Revolution, so they were among its most 
 immediate causes. 
 
 The Letany, for which Bastwick was 
 punished on this occasion, was not the 
 first work of his that had brought him 
 to trouble. His first work, the Elenchns 
 Papisticcz Religionis (1627), against the 
 Jesuits, was brought before the High 
 Commission at the same time with his 
 Flagellant Pontificis (1635), a work which, 
 ostensibly directed against the Pope's 
 temporal power, aimed, in Laud's eyes, 
 at English Episcopacy and the Church of 
 England. The sting occurs near the end, 
 where the author contends that the 
 essentials of a bishop, namely, his election
 
 Charles the First's Book-Fires. 85 
 
 by his flock and the proper discharge 
 of episcopal duties, are wanting in the 
 bishops of his time. "Where is the 
 ministering of doctrine and of the Word, 
 and of the Sacraments? Where is the 
 care of discipline and morals ? Where is 
 the consolation of the poor? where the 
 rebuke of the wicked ? Alas for the fall 
 of Rome ! Alas for the ruin of a flourish- 
 ing Church ! The bishops are neither 
 chosen nor called; but by canvassing, 
 and by money, and by wicked arts they 
 are thrust upon their government." This 
 was the beginning of trouble. The Court 
 of High Commission condemned both his 
 books to be burnt, 1 and their author to be 
 fined ;£ 1,000, to be excommunicated, to 
 be debarred from his profession, and to 
 be imprisoned in the Gatehouse till he 
 recanted ; which, wrote Bastwick, would 
 not be till Doomsday, in the afternoon. 
 
 In the Gatehouse Bastwick penned his 
 Apologeticus ad JPmsules Anglicanos, and 
 his Letany, the books for which he 
 suffered, as above described, at the hands 
 of the Star Chamber. The first was an 
 attack on the High Commission, the 
 second on the bishops, the Real Presence, 
 and the Church Prayer Book. The 
 
 1 Prynne, Ne-cu Discovery, 132.
 
 86 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 language of the Letany is in many pas- 
 sages extremely, coarse, and it is only 
 possible to quote such milder expressions 
 as since the time of Tyndale had been 
 traditional in the Puritan party. " As 
 many prelates in England, so many vipers 
 in the bowels of Church and State." 
 They were "the very polecats, stoats, 
 weasels, and minivers in the warren of 
 Church and State." They were "Anti- 
 christ's little toes." To judge from these 
 expressions merely one might be disposed 
 to agree with Heylin, who says of the 
 Letany that it was " so silly and con- 
 temptible that nothing but the sin and 
 malice which appeared in every line of it 
 could have possibly preserved it from 
 being ridiculous." But the Letany is 
 really a most important contribution to 
 the history of the period. Nothing is 
 more graphic than Bastwick's account of 
 the almost regal reverence claimed for 
 the Archbishop of Canterbury, the traffic 
 of the streets interrupted when he issued 
 from Lambeth, the overturning of the 
 stalls ; the author's description of the 
 excessive power of the bishops, of the 
 extortions of the ecclesiastical courts, is 
 corroborated by abundant correlative testi- 
 mony; and he appeals for the truth of 
 his charges of immorality against the
 
 Charles the First's Book-Fires. 87 
 
 clergy of that time to the actual cases 
 that came before the High Commission. 
 
 Lord Clarendon speaks of Bastwick as 
 " a half-witted, crack-brained fellow," un- 
 known to either University or the College 
 of Physicians ; perhaps it was because 
 he was unknown to either University that 
 he acquired that splendid Latin style to 
 which even Lord Clarendon does justice. 
 The Latin preface to the second edition 
 of the F/age/lu/n, in which Bastwick re- 
 turns thanks to the Long Parliament for 
 his release from prison, is unsurpassed by 
 the Latin writing of the best English 
 scholars, and bespeaks anything but a 
 half-witted brain. Cicero himself could 
 hardly have done it better. 
 
 Burton's book, however, was considered 
 worse than Prynne's or Bastwick's, for 
 Heylin calls it " the great masterpiece of 
 mischief." It consists of two sermons, 
 republished with an appeal to the King, 
 under the title of For God and King. 
 Like Bastwick, he writes in the interest of 
 the King against the encroachments of 
 the bishops ; and complains bitterly of the 
 ecclesiastical innovations then in vogue. 
 His accusation is no less forcible, though 
 less well known, than Laud's Defence in 
 his Star Chamber speech ; and if he did 
 call the bishops " limbs of the Beast,"
 
 8 8 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 " ravening wolves," and so forth, the lan- 
 guage of Laud's party against the Puritans 
 was not one whit more refined. So convinced 
 was Burton of the justice of his cause, that 
 he declared that all the time he stood in 
 the pillory he thought himself " in heaven, 
 and in a state of glory and triumph if any 
 such state can possibly be on earth." 
 
 It is in connection with Bastwick's 
 Letany and Prynne's News from Ipswich 
 that Lilburne, of subsequent revolutionary 
 fame, first appears on the stage of history, 
 as responsible for their printing in Holland 
 and dispersion in England. At all events 
 he was punished for that offence, being 
 whipped with great severity, by order of 
 the Star Chamber, all the way from the 
 Fleet Prison to Westminster, where he 
 stood for some hours in the pillory. He 
 was then only twenty. Laud had the 
 second instalment of the books seized 
 upon landing, and then burnt. 
 
 In this matter of book-burning the 
 Archbishop seems at that time to have 
 had sole authority, and doubtless many 
 more books met with a fiery fate than 
 are specifically mentioned. Laud himself 
 refers in a letter to an order he issued 
 for the seizure and public burning in 
 Smithfield of as many copies as could 
 be found of an English translation of
 
 Charles the First's Book -Fires. 89 
 
 St. Francis de Sales' Praxis Spirituals; 
 
 or, The Introduction to a Devout Life, 
 which, after having been licensed by his 
 chaplain, had been tampered with, in the 
 Roman Catholic interest, in its passage 
 through the press. Of this curious book 
 some twelve hundred copies were burnt, 
 but a few hundred copies had been dis- 
 persed before the seizure. 
 
 The Archbishop's duties, as general 
 superintendent of literature and the 
 press, constituted, indeed, no sinecure. 
 For ever since the year 1585, the Star 
 Chamber regulations, passed at Arch- 
 bishop Whitgift's instigation, had been in 
 force ; and, with unimportant exceptions, 
 no book could be printed without being 
 first seen, perused, and allowed by the 
 Archbishop of Canterbury or Bishop of 
 London. Rome herself had no more 
 potent device for the maintenance of in- 
 tellectual tyranny. The task of perusal 
 was generally deputed to the Archbishop's 
 chaplain, who, as in the case of Prynne's 
 Histrio/uastix, ran the risk of a fine and 
 the pillory if he suffered a book to be 
 licensed without a careful study of its 
 contents. 
 
 But the powers of the Archbishop over 
 the press were not yet enough for Laud, 
 and in July 1637 the Star Chamber
 
 90 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 passed a decree, with a view to prevent 
 English books from being printed abroad, 
 that in addition to the compulsory licensing 
 of all English books by the Archbishop 
 of Canterbury, Bishop of London, or the 
 University Chancellors, no books should 
 be imported from abroad for sale without 
 a catalogue of them being first sent to the 
 Archbishop of Canterbury or Bishop of 
 London, who, by their chaplains or others, 
 were to superintend the unlading of such 
 packages of books. The only merit of 
 this decree is that it led Milton to write 
 his Areopagitica. The Puritan belief that 
 Laud aimed at the restoration of Popery 
 has long since been proved erroneous. 
 One of his bad dreams recorded in his 
 Diary is that of his reconciliation with the 
 Church of Rome ; but there is abundant 
 proof that he and his faction aimed at 
 a spiritual and intellectual tyranny which 
 would in no wise have been preferable to 
 that of Rome. And of all Laud's dreams, 
 surely that of the Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury exercising a perpetual dictatorship 
 over English literature is not the least 
 absurd and grotesque. 
 
 Moreover, in August of this very same 
 year Laud made another move in the 
 direction of ecclesiastical tyranny. Bast- 
 wick and his party had contended, not
 
 Charles the First's Book-Fires. 91 
 
 only that Episcopacy was not of Divine 
 institution, or Jure divino (as, indeed, 
 Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, had argued 
 before the King) l ; but that the issuing 
 of processes in the names and with the 
 seals of the bishops in the ecclesiastical 
 courts was a trespass on the Royal Pre- 
 rogative. What happened proves that it 
 was. The statute of Edward VI. (1 Ed. VI., 
 c. 2) had enacted that all the proceedings 
 of the ecclesiastical courts should " be 
 made in the name and the style of the 
 King," and that no other seal of juris- 
 diction should be used but with the Royal 
 arms engraven, under penalty of imprison- 
 ment. Mary repealed this Act, nor did 
 Elizabeth replace it. But a clause in a 
 statute of James (1 Jac. I., c. 25) repealed 
 the repealing Act of Mary, so that the Act 
 of Edward came back into force ; and 
 Bastwick was perfectly right. The judges, 
 nevertheless, in May 1637, decided that 
 Mary's repeal Act was still in force ; and 
 Charles, at Laud's instigation, issued a 
 proclamation, in August 1637, to the effect 
 that the proceedings of the High Com- 
 mission and other ecclesiastical courts 
 were agreeable to the laws and statutes 
 of the realm.- In this manner did the 
 
 1 Laud's Diary (Newman's edition), 87. 
 
 2 Heylin's Land, 321, 322.
 
 92 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 judges, the bishops, and the King conspire 
 to subject Englishmen to the tyranny of 
 the Church ! 
 
 The consequences belong to general 
 history. Never was scheme of ecclesi- 
 astical ambition more completely shattered 
 than Laud's ; never was historical retribu- 
 tion more condign. Among the first acts 
 of the Long Parliament (November 1640) 
 was the release of Prynne and Bastwick 
 and Burton ; who were brought into the 
 City, says Clarendon, by a crowd of some 
 ten thousand persons, with boughs and 
 flowers in their hands. Compensation 
 was subsequently voted to them for the 
 iniquitous fines imposed on them by the 
 Star Chamber, and Prynne before long 
 was one of the chief instruments in bring- 
 ing Laud to trial and the block. But this 
 was not before that ambitious prelate had 
 seen the bishops deprived of their seats 
 in the House of Lords, and the Root and 
 Branch Bill for their abolition introduced, 
 as well as the Star Chamber and High 
 Commission Courts abolished. This should 
 have been enough ; and it is to be re- 
 gretted that his punishment went beyond 
 this total failure of the schemes of his life. 
 
 Of the heroes of the books whose con- 
 demnation contributed so much to bring 
 about the Revolution, only Prynne con-
 
 Charles the First's Book-Fires. 93 
 
 tinued to figure as an object of interest in 
 the subsequent stormy times. As a meml >er 
 of Parliament his political activity was 
 only exceeded by his extraordinary literary 
 productiveness ; his legacy to the Library 
 of Lincoln's Inn of his forty volumes of 
 various works is probably the largest 
 monument of literary labour ever produced 
 by one man. His spirit of independence 
 caused him to be constant to no political 
 party, and after taking part against Crom- 
 well he was made by the Government of 
 the Restoration Keeper of the Records in 
 the Tower, in which congenial post he 
 finished his eventful career.
 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Book-Fires of the Rebellion. 
 
 ITH the beneficent Revolution 
 that practically began with the 
 Long Parliament in November 
 1640, and put an end to the 
 Star Chamber and High Commission, it 
 might have been hoped that a better time 
 was about to dawn for books. But the 
 control of thought really only passed from 
 the Monarchical to the Presbyterian party ; 
 and if authors no longer incurred the 
 atrocious cruelties of the Star Chamber, 
 their works were more freely burnt at the 
 order of Parliament than they appear to 
 have been when the sentence to such a 
 fate rested with the King or the Arch- 
 bishop of Canterbury. 
 
 Parliament, in fact, assumed the dictator- 
 ship of literature, and exercised supreme 
 jurisdiction over author, printer, publisher, 
 and licenser. Either House separately, 
 or both concurrently, assumed the exercise 
 of this power; and, if" a book were sentenced 
 to be burnt, the hangman seems always
 
 Book -Fires of the Rebellion. 95 
 
 to have been called in aid. In an age 
 which was pre-eminently the age of 
 pamphlets, and torn in pieces by religious 
 and political dissension, the number of 
 pamphlets that were condemned to be 
 burnt by the common hangman was 
 naturally legion, though, of course, a still 
 greater number escaped with some lesser 
 form of censure. It is only with the 
 former that I propose to deal, and only 
 with such of them as seem of more than 
 usual interest as illustrating: the manners 
 and thoughts of that turbulent time. 
 
 It is a significant fact that the first 
 writer whose works incurred the wrath of 
 Parliament was the Rev. John Pock- 
 lington, D.D., one of the foremost in- 
 novators in the Church in the days of 
 Laud's prosperity. The House of Lords 
 consigned two of his books to be burnt 
 by the hangman, both in London and the 
 two chief Universities (February 12th. 
 1 641). These were his Sunday no Sabbath, 
 and the Altare Christianum. 
 
 The first of these was originally a 
 sermon, preached on August 17th, 1635, 
 wherein the Puritan view of Sunday was 
 vehemently assailed, and the Puritans 
 themselves vigorously abused. "These 
 Church Schismatics are the most gross, 
 nay, the most transparent hypocrites and
 
 g6 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 the most void of conscience of all others. 
 They will take the benefit of the Church, 
 but abjure the doctrine and discipline of 
 the Church.'' How often has not this 
 argument done duty since against Pock- 
 lington's ecclesiastical descendants ! But 
 it is to be historically regretted that 
 Pocklington's views of Sunday, the same 
 of course as those of James the First's 
 famous book, or Declaration of Sports, 
 were not destined to prevail, and seem still 
 as far as ever from attainment. 
 
 The A/tare Christianum had been pub- 
 lished in 1637, in answer to certain books 
 by Burton and Prynne, its object being to 
 prove that altars and churches had existed 
 before the Christian Church was 200 years 
 old. But had these churches any more 
 substantial existence than that one built, 
 as he says, by Joseph of Arimathea, at 
 Glastonbury, in the year 55 a.d. ? Did 
 the Arimathean really visit. Glastonbury ? 
 Anyhow, the book is full of learning 
 and instruction, and, indeed, both Pock- 
 lington's books have an interest of their 
 own, apart from their fate, which, of so 
 many, is their sole recommendation. 
 
 The sentence against Pocklington was 
 strongly vindictive. Both his practices 
 and his doctrines were condemned. In 
 his practice he was declared to have been
 
 Book-Fires of the Rebellion. 97 
 
 "very superstitious and full of idolatry," 
 and to have used many gestures and 
 ceremonies " not established by the laws 
 of this realm." These were the sort of 
 ceremonies that, without ever having been 
 so established by law, our ritualists have 
 practically established by custom; and 
 the offence of the ritualist doctrine as 
 held in those days, and as illustrated by 
 Pocklington, lay in the following tenets 
 ascribed to him : (1) that it was men's 
 duty to bow to altars as to the throne of 
 the Great God ; (2) that the Eucharist 
 was the host and held corporeal presence 
 therein ; (3) that there was in the Church 
 a distinction between holy places and a 
 Holy of holies ; (4) that the canons and 
 constitutions of the Church were to be 
 obeyed without examination. 
 
 For these offences of ritual and doctrine 
 — offences to which, fortunately, we can 
 afford to be more indifferent than our 
 ancestors were, no reasonable man now 
 thinking twice about them — Pocklington 
 was deprived of all his livings and dignities 
 and preferments, and incapacitated from 
 holding any for the future, whilst his 
 books were consigned to the hangman. 
 It may seem to us a spiteful sentence ; 
 but it was after all a mild revenge, con- 
 sidering the atrocious sufferings of the
 
 98 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 Puritan writers. It is worse to lose 
 one's ears and one's liberty for life than 
 even to be deprived of Church livings ; 
 and it is noticeable that bodily muti- 
 lations came to an end with the clipping 
 of the talons of the Crown and the 
 Church at the beginning of the Long 
 Parliament. 
 
 Taking now in order the works of a 
 political nature that were condemned by 
 the House of Commons to be burnt by 
 the hangman, we come first to the Speeches 
 of Sir Edward Dering, member for Kent 
 in the Long Parliament, and a greater 
 antiquary than he ever was a politician. 
 He it was who, on May 27 th, 1641, 
 moved the first reading of the Root and 
 Branch Bill for the abolition of Episcopacy. 
 " The pride, the avarice, the ambition, 
 and oppression by our ruling clergy is 
 epidemical," he said ; thereby proving 
 that such an opinion was not merely a 
 Puritan prejudice. But Dering appears 
 only really to have aimed at the abolition 
 of Laud's archiepiscopacy, and to have 
 wished to see some purer form of prelacy 
 re-established in place of the old. Naturally 
 his views gave offence, which he only 
 increased by republishing his speeches on 
 matters of religion, Parliament being so 
 incensed that it burned his book, and
 
 Book-Fires of the Rebellion. 99 
 
 committed its author for a week to the 
 Tower (February 2nd, 1642). 
 
 Dering's was the common fate of 
 moderate men in stormy times, who, 
 seeing good on each side, are ill thought 
 of by both. Failing to be loyal to either, 
 he was by both mistrusted. For not 
 only did he ultimately vote on the side of 
 the royalist episcopal party, but he actually 
 fought on the King's side ; then, being 
 disgusted with the royalists for their 
 leaning to Popery, he accepted the pardon 
 offered for a compensation by Parliament 
 in 1644, an< 3 died the same year, leaving 
 posterity to regret that he was ever so 
 ill-advised as to exchange antiquities for 
 politics and party strife. 
 
 The famous speech of the statesman 
 whom Charles, with his usual defiance of 
 public opinion, soon afterwards raised to 
 the peerage as Lord Digby (on the passing 
 of the Bill of Attainder against Lord 
 Strafford), was, after its publication by its 
 author, condemned to be burnt at West- 
 minster, Cheapside, and Smithfield (July 
 13th, 1642). Digby voted against putting 
 Strafford to death, because he did not 
 think it proved by the evidence that 
 Strafford had advised Charles to employ 
 the army in Ireland for the subjection of 
 England. But he condemned his general
 
 1 00 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 conduct as strongly as any man. He calls 
 him " the great apostate to the Common- 
 wealth, who must not expect to be 
 pardoned it in this world till he be 
 dispatched to the other." He refers very 
 happily to his great abilities, " whereof 
 God hath given him the use, but the devil 
 the application." But does the critic's 
 own memory stand much higher? Was 
 he not the King's evil genius, who, together 
 with the Queen, pushed him to that fatal 
 step — the arrest of the five members ? 
 
 How soon Parliament acquired the evil 
 habit of dealing by fire and the hangman 
 with uncongenial publications is proved 
 by the fact that in one year alone the 
 following five leaflets or pamphlets suffered 
 in this way : — 
 
 i. The Kentish Petition, drawn up at 
 the Maidstone Assizes by the gentry, 
 ministry, and commonalty of Kent, pray- 
 ing for the preservation of episcopal 
 government, and the settlement of religious 
 differences by a synod of the clergy (April 
 17th, 1642). The petition was couched 
 in very strong language ; and Professor 
 Gardiner is probably right in saying that 
 it was the condemnation of this famous 
 petition which rendered civil war inevit- 
 able. 
 
 2. A True Relation of the Proceedings of
 
 Book-Fires of the Rebellion. 101 
 
 the Scots and English Forces in the North 
 of Ireland. This was thought to be dis- 
 honouring to the Scots, and was accord- 
 ingly ordered to be burnt (June 8th, 1642). 
 
 3. King James: his Judgment of a King 
 and a tyrant (September 12th, 1642). 
 
 4. A Speedy Post from Heaven to the 
 King of England (October 5 th, 1642). 
 
 5. Letter from Lord Falkland to the 
 Earl of Cumberland, concerning the action 
 at Worcester (October 8th, 1642). 
 
 Thus did Parliament, and the House 
 of Commons especially, improve upon the 
 precedent first set by the Star Chamber ; 
 and the practice must soon have some- 
 what lost its force by the very frequency 
 of its repetition. David Buchanan's 
 Truth's Manifest, containing an account 
 of the conduct of the Scotch nation in 
 the Civil War, was condemned to be 
 burnt by the hangman (April 13th, 1646), 
 but may still be read. An Unhappy Game 
 at Scotch and English, pamphlets like 
 the Mercurius Elenchicus and Mercurius 
 Pragmatieus, the Justia'arius Justificatus, 
 by George Wither, perished about the 
 same time in the same way ; and in 1648 
 such profane Royalist political squibs as 
 The Parliament V Ten Commandments; The 
 Parliament's Pater Noster, and Articles of 
 the Faith ; and Ecce the New Testament
 
 102 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 of our Lords and Saviours, the House of 
 Commons at Westminster, or the Supreme 
 Council at Windsor, were, for special 
 indignity, condemned to be burnt in the 
 three most public places of London. 
 
 The observance of Sunday has always 
 been a fruitful source of contention, and 
 in 1649 the chief magistrates in England 
 and Wales were ordered by the House of 
 Commons to cause to be burnt all copies 
 of James Okeford's Doctrine of the Fourth 
 Commandment,defor?ned by Popery, reformed 
 and restored to its primitive purity (March 
 1 8th, 1650). They did their duty so well 
 that not a copy appears to survive, even 
 in the British Museum. The author, 
 moreover, was sentenced to be taken and 
 imprisoned ; so thoroughly did the spirit 
 of persecution take possession of a Parlia- 
 mentary majority when the power of it 
 fell into their hands. 
 
 This was also shown in other matters. 
 For instance, not only were Joseph Primatt's 
 Petition to Parliament, with reference 
 to his claims to certain coal mines, and 
 Lilburne's Just Reproof to Haberdasher's 
 Hall on Primatt's behalf, condemned to 
 be burnt by the hangman (January 15th, 
 July 30th, 1652), but both authors were 
 sentenced, one to fines amounting to 
 ^5,000, the other to fines amounting to
 
 Book-Fires of the Rebellion. I o 3 
 
 ^7,000, which, though falling far short 
 of the Star Chamber fines, were very con- 
 siderable sums in those days. Lilburne, 
 on this occasion, was also sentenced to 
 be banished, and to be deemed guilty of 
 felony if he returned; but this part of the 
 sentence was never enforced, for Lilburne 
 remained, to continue to the very end, by 
 speech and writing, that perpetual warfare 
 with the party in power which constituted 
 his political life. 
 
 John. Fry, M.P., who sat in the High 
 Court of Justice for the trial of Charles I., 
 wrote in 1648 his Accuser Shamed against 
 Colonel Downes, a fellow-member, who 
 had most unfairly charged him before the 
 House with blasphemy for certain expres- 
 sions used in private conversation, and 
 thereby caused his temporary suspension. 
 Dr. Cheynel, President of St. John's at 
 Oxford, printed an answer to this, and 
 Fry rejoined in his Clergy in their True 
 Colours (1650), a pamphlet singularly ex- 
 pressive of the general dislike at that time 
 entertained for the English clergy. He 
 complains of the strange postures assumed 
 by the clergy in their prayers before the 
 sermon, and says : " Whether the fools 
 and knaves in stage plays took their pat- 
 tern from these men, or these from them, 
 I cannot determine ; but sure one is the
 
 1 04 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 brat of the other, they are so well alike." 
 He confesses himself " of the opinion of 
 most, that the clergy are the great incen- 
 diaries." In the matter of Psalm-singing 
 he finds " few men under heaven more 
 irrational in their religious exercises than 
 our clergy." As to their common evasion 
 of difficulties by the plea that it is above 
 reason, he fairly observes : " If a man will 
 consent to give up his reason, I would 
 as soon converse with a beast as with that 
 man." Nevertheless, how many do so 
 still ! 
 
 Fry wrote as a rational churchman, not 
 as an anti-Christian, "from a hearty desire 
 for their (the clergy's) reformation, and a 
 great zeal to my countrymen that they 
 may no longer be deceived by such as call 
 themselves the ministers of the Gospel, 
 but are not." This appears on the title- 
 page ; but a good motive has seldom yet 
 saved a man or a book, and the House, 
 having debated about both tracts from 
 morning till night, not only voted them 
 highly scandalous and profane, but con- 
 signed them to the hangman to burn, and 
 expelled Fry from his seat in Parliament 
 (February 21st, 1651). 
 
 So far of the political utterances that 
 for the offence they gave were condemned 
 to the flames ; but these only represent
 
 Book-Fires of the Rebellion. 105 
 
 one side of the activity of the legislature 
 of that tunc. Nothing, indeed, better 
 illustrates the mind of the seventeenth 
 
 century than the several instances in 
 which Parliament, in the exercise of its 
 assumed power over literature generally, 
 interfered with works of a theological 
 nature, nor does Anything more clearly 
 or curiously reveal the mental turmoil of 
 that period than does the perusal of some 
 of the works that then met with Parlia- 
 mentary censure or condemnation. In 
 undertaking this interference it is possible 
 that Parliament exceeded its province, 
 and one is glad that it has long since 
 ceased to claim the keepership of the 
 People's Conscience. But in those days 
 ideas of toleration were in their infancy ; 
 the right of free thought, or of its expres- 
 sion, had not been established ; and the 
 maintenance of orthodoxy was deemed as 
 much the duty of Parliament as the main- 
 tenance of the rights of the people. So 
 a Parliamentary majority soon came to 
 exercise as much tyranny over thought 
 as ever had been exercised by king or 
 bishop ; and, in fact, the theological writer 
 ran even greater personal risks from the 
 indignation of Parliament than he would 
 have run in the period preceding 1640, 
 for he began to run in danger of his life.
 
 106 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 The first theological work dealt with 
 by Parliament appears to have been that 
 curious posthumous work, entitled Com- 
 fort for Believers about their Sinnes and 
 Troubles, which appeared in June 1645, by 
 John Archer, Master of Arts, and preacher 
 at All Hallows', Lombard Street. It had 
 but a short life, for the very next month the 
 Assembly of Divines, then sitting at West- 
 minster, complained to Parliament of its 
 contents, and Parliament condemned it 
 to be publicly burnt in four places, the 
 Assembly to draw up a formal detestation 
 to be read at the burning. In this docu- 
 ment it was admitted that the author had 
 been " of good estimation for learning and 
 piety " ; but the author's logic was better 
 than his theology, for he attributed all 
 evil to the Cause of all things, and con- 
 tended that for wise purposes God not 
 only permitted sin, but had a hand in 
 its essence, namely, " in the privity, and 
 ataxy, the anomye, or irregularity of the 
 act " (if that makes it any clearer). A 
 single passage will convey the drift of the 
 seventy-six pages devoted to this difficult 
 problem : — 
 
 " Who hinted to God, or gave advice 
 by counsel to Him, to let the creature 
 sin ? Did any necessity, arising upon the 
 creature's being, enforce it that sin must
 
 Book- Fires of the Rebellion. 107 
 
 be ? Could not God have hindered sin, 
 if He would? Might He not have kept 
 man from sinning, as He did some of 
 the angels ? Therefore, it was His device 
 and plot before the creature was that 
 there should be sin. ... It is by sin that 
 most of God's glory in the discovery of 
 His attributes doth arise. . . . Therefore 
 certainly it limits Him much to bring in 
 sin by a contingent accident, merely from 
 the creature, and to deny God a hand 
 and will in its being and bringing forth." 
 
 The author thought these positions 
 quite compatible with orthodoxy ; not so, 
 however, the Presbyterian divines, nor 
 Parliament ; and certainly Archer's ques- 
 tions were more easily and more swiftly 
 answered by fire than in any other way. 
 Had he lived, one wonders how the 
 divines would have punished him. For 
 the next two cases prove how dangerous 
 it was becoming to be convicted or even 
 suspected of heterodoxy. Parliament was 
 beginning to understand its duty as De- 
 fender of the Faith as the Holy Inquisition 
 has always understood it — namely, by the 
 death of the luckless assailant. 
 
 Thus, on July 24th, 1647, tne House 
 of Commons condemned to be burnt in 
 three different places, on three different 
 days, Paul Best's pamphlet, of the follow-
 
 io8 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 ing curious title : Mysteries Discovered, or 
 a Mercurial Picture pointing out the tvay 
 from Babylon to the Holy City, For the 
 Good of all such as during that Night of 
 General Error and Apostacy, II Thess. 
 ii. 3, Rev. Hi. 10, have been so long misled 
 with Rome's Hobgoblin, by me, Paul Best, 
 prisoner in the Gatehouse, Westminster. 
 It concluded with a prayer for release 
 from an imprisonment, which had then 
 lasted more than three years, for certain 
 theological opinions "committed to a 
 minister (a supposed friend) for his judg- 
 ment and advice only." This minister 
 was the Rev. Roger Leys, who infamously 
 betrayed the trust reposed in him, and 
 made public the frankness of private 
 conversation. 
 
 Best had been imprisoned in the Gate- 
 house for certain expressions he was 
 supposed to have used about the Trinity ; 
 and before he wrote this pamphlet the 
 House of Commons had actually voted 
 that he should be hanged. Justly, there- 
 fore, he wrote : " Unless the Lord put to 
 His helping hand of the magistrate for 
 the manacling of Satan in that persecut- 
 ing power, there is little hope either of 
 the liberty of the subject or the law of 
 God amongst us." And if he was not 
 orthodox, he was sensible, for he says : " I
 
 Book-Fires of the Rebellion. 1 09 
 
 cannot understand what detriment could 
 redound either to Church or Common- 
 wealth by toleration of religions." 
 
 His heresy consisted in thinking that 
 pagan ideas had been imported into, and 
 so had corrupted, the original monotheism 
 of Christianity. " We may perceive how 
 by iniquity of time the real truth of God 
 hath been trodden under foot by a verbal 
 kind of divinity, introduced by the semi- 
 pagan Christianity of the third century in 
 the Western Church." He certainly did 
 not hold the doctrine of the Trinity in 
 what was then deemed the orthodox way, 
 but his precise belief is rather obscurely 
 stated, and is a matter of indifference. 
 
 One is glad to learn that he escaped 
 hanging after all, and was released about 
 the end of 1647, probably at the instance 
 of Cromwell. He then retired to the 
 family seat in Yorkshire, where he com- 
 bined farming with his favourite theo- 
 logical studies for the ten remaining years 
 of his life. His career at Cambridge had 
 been distinguished, as might also have 
 been his career in the world but for that 
 unfortunate bent for theology, and the 
 use of his reason in its study, that has 
 led so many worthy men to disgrace and 
 destruction. 
 
 But, in spite of the Assembly of Divines,
 
 1 1 o Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 the air was thick with theological specula- 
 tion ; and only a few weeks after the 
 condemnation of Best's Mysteries, the 
 House condemned to a similar fate 
 Bidle's Twelve Arguments drawn out of 
 Scripture, wherein the Commonly Received 
 Opinion touching the Deity of the Holy 
 Spirit is Clearly and Fully Refuted. 
 
 Bidle, a tailor's son, must take high 
 rank among the martyrs of learning. 
 After a brilliant school career at Glou- 
 cester, he went to Magdalen College, 
 Oxford, where, says his biographer, " he 
 did so philosophise, as it might be ob- 
 served, he was determined more by 
 Reason than Authority " ; and this dan- 
 gerous beginning he shortly followed up, 
 when master of the Free School at Glou- 
 cester, by the still more dangerous con- 
 clusion that the common doctrine of the 
 Trinity " was not well grounded in Reve- 
 lation, much less in Reason." For this 
 he was brought before the magistrates at 
 Gloucester on the charge of heresy ( 1 644) ; 
 and from that time till his death from 
 gaol-fever in 1662, at the age of forty- 
 two, Bidle seldom knew what liberty was. 
 It was soon after his first imprisonment 
 that he published his Twelve Arguments. 
 Though the House had this burnt by the 
 hangman, it was so popular that it was
 
 Book-Fires of tlie Rebellion, i i i 
 
 reprinted the same year. The year fol- 
 lowing (1648) the House passed an ordi- 
 nance making a denial of the Trinity a 
 capital offence ; in spite of which Bidle 
 published his Confession of Faith touching 
 the Holy Trinity, according to Scripture, 
 and his Testimonies of Different Fathers 
 regarding the same, the last of which 
 manifests considerable learning. The 
 Assembly of Divines then appealed to 
 Parliament to put him to death; yet, 
 strange to say, Parliament did not do so, 
 but soon after released their prisoner. In 
 1654 he published his Twofold Catechism, 
 for which he was again committed to the 
 Gatehouse, and debarred from the use of 
 pens, ink, and paper ; and all his books 
 were sentenced to be burnt (December 
 13th, 1654). After a time, his fate being 
 still uncertain, Cromwell procured his 
 release, or rather sent him off to the 
 Scilly Isles. But his enemies got him 
 into prison again at last, and there a 
 blameless and pious life fell a victim to 
 the power of bigotry. One may regret a 
 life thus spent and sacrificed ; but only 
 so has the cause of free thought been 
 gradually won. 
 
 Bidle has also been thought to have 
 been the translator of the famous Raco- 
 vian Catechism, first published in Polish
 
 112 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 at Racow in 1605, and in Latin in 1609. 
 In it two anti-Trinitarian divines reduced 
 to a systematic form the whole of the 
 Socinian doctrine. A special interest 
 attaches to it from the fact that Milton, 
 then nearly blind, was called before the 
 House in connection with the Catechism, 
 as though he had had a share in its trans- 
 lation or publication. It was condemned 
 to be burnt as blasphemous (April 1st, 
 1652). In the Journals of the House copi- 
 ous extracts are given from the work, from 
 which the following may serve to indicate 
 what chiefly gave offence : — 
 
 "What do you conceive exceedingly 
 profitable to be known of the Essence of 
 God? 
 
 " It is to know that in the Essence of 
 God there is only one person . . . and 
 that by no means can there be more 
 persons in that Essence, and that many 
 persons in one essence is a pernicious 
 opinion, which doth easily pluck up and 
 destroy the belief of one God. . . . 
 
 " But the Christians do commonly affirm 
 the Son and Spirit to be also persons in 
 the unity of the same Godhead. 
 
 " I know they do, but it is a very great 
 error ; and the arguments brought for it 
 are taken from Scriptures misunderstood. 
 
 " But seeing the Son is called God in
 
 Book- Fires of tlie Rebellion. I I 3 
 
 the Scriptures, how can that be an- 
 swered ? 
 
 "The word God in Scripture is chiefly 
 used two ways : first, as it signifies Him 
 that rules in heaven and earth . . . ; 
 secondly, as it signifies one who hath 
 received some high power or authority 
 from that one God, or is some way made 
 partaker of the Deity of that one God. 
 It is in this latter sense that the Son 
 in certain places in Scripture is called 
 God. And the Son is upon no higher 
 account called God than that He is sanc- 
 tified by the Father and sent into the 
 world. 
 
 "But hath not the Lord Jesus Christ 
 besides His human a Divine nature also? 
 
 " No, by no means, for that is not only 
 repugnant to sound reason, but to the 
 Holy Scripture also." 
 
 This is doubtless enough to convey an 
 idea of the Catechism, which was again 
 translated in 181 8 by T. Rees. Whether 
 Bidle was the translator or not, he must 
 have been actuated by good intentions in 
 what he wrote ; for he says of the Two- 
 fold Catechism, that it " was composed 
 for their sakes that would fain be mere 
 Christians, and not of this or that sect, 
 inasmuch as all the sects of Christians, 
 by what names soever distinguished, have 
 
 8
 
 114 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 either more or less departed from the 
 simplicity and truth of the Scripture." 
 But these Christians, who preferred their 
 religion to their sect, Bidle should have 
 known were too few to count. 
 
 Far inferior writers to Bidle were Ebiezer 
 Coppe and Laurence Clarkson : nor, if 
 religious madness could be so stamped 
 out, can we complain of the House of 
 Commons for condemning their works to 
 the flames. The strongest possible con- 
 demnation was passed for its " horrid 
 blasphemies " on Coppe's Fiery Flying 
 Roll ; or, Word from the Lord to all the 
 Great Ones of the Earth whom this may 
 concern, being the Last Warning Peace at 
 the Dreadful Day of Judgment. All dis- 
 coverable copies of this book were to be 
 burnt by the hangman at three different 
 places (February ist, 1650); and Coppe 
 was imprisoned, but was released on his 
 recantation of his opinions. His book was 
 the cause of that curious ordinance of 
 August 9th, 1650, for the "punishment of 
 atheistical, blasphemous, and execrable 
 opinions," which is the best summary and 
 proof of the intense religious fanaticism 
 then prevalent, and so curiously similar in 
 all its details to that of the primitive 
 Christian Church. At both periods the 
 distinctive features were the claim to
 
 Book-Fires of the Rebellion. 1 1 5 
 
 actual divinity, and to superiority to all 
 moral laws. 
 
 On September 27th, 1650, Clarkson's 
 Singh Eye : all Lights ?w Darkness, was 
 condemned to be burnt by the hang- 
 man; and Clarkson himself not only sent 
 to the House of Correction for a month, 
 but sentenced to be banished after that 
 for life under a penalty of death if he 
 returned. 
 
 These books have their value for students 
 of human nature, and so have the next I 
 refer to, the works of Ludovic Muggleton, 
 most of which were written during this 
 period, though not condemned to be burnt 
 till the year 1676, and which in other 
 respects seem to touch the lowest attain- 
 able depth of religious demoralisation. 
 The extraordinary thing is that Muggle- 
 ton actually founded a sort of religion of 
 his own ; at all events, he gave life and 
 title to a sect, which counts votaries to 
 this day. Only so recently as 1846 a 
 list of the works of Muggleton and his 
 colleague Reeve was published, and the 
 books advertised for sale. These two men 
 claimed to be the two last witnesses or 
 prophets, with power to sentence men to 
 eternal damnation or blessedness. Mug- 
 gleton had a decided preference for exer- 
 cising the former power, especially in
 
 1 1 6 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 regard to the Quakers, one of his books 
 being called A Looking Glass for George 
 Fox, the Quaker, and other Quakers, 
 wherein they may See Themselves to be 
 Right Devils. There is no reason to be- 
 lieve Muggleton to have been a conscious 
 impostor ; only in an age vexed to mad- 
 ness by religious controversy, religious 
 madness carried him further than others. 
 An asylum would have met his case better 
 than the sentence of the Old Bailey, which 
 condemned him to stand for three days in 
 the pillory at the three most eminent places 
 in the City, his books to be there in three 
 lots burnt over his head, and himself then 
 to be imprisoned till he had paid a sum of 
 ^500 (1676). But this did not finish the 
 man, for in 1681 he wrote his Letter to 
 Colonel Phaire, the language of which is 
 perhaps unsurpassed for repulsiveness in 
 the whole range of religious literature. 
 Muggleton's writings in short read as a 
 kind of religious nightmare. In their 
 case the fire was rather profaned by its 
 fuel than the books honoured by the 
 fire.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Book-Fires of the Restoration. 
 
 ITH the Restoration, the burning 
 of certain obnoxious books 
 formed one of the first episodes 
 of that Royalist war of revenge 
 of which the most disgraceful expression 
 was the exhumation and hanging at Ty- 
 burn of the bones of Cromwell and Ireton. 
 And had Goodwin and Milton not ab- 
 sconded, it is probable that the revenge 
 which had to content itself with their 
 books would have extended to their 
 persons. 
 
 John Goodwin, distinguished as a min- 
 ister and a prolific writer on the people's 
 side, had dedicated in 1649 to tne House 
 of Commons his Obstructours of Justice, 
 in which he defended the execution of 
 Charles I. He based his case, indeed, 
 after the fashion of those days, too com- 
 pletely on Biblical texts to suit our modern 
 taste ; but his book is far from being the 
 "very weak and inconclusive performance"
 
 1 1 8 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 of which Neal speaks in his history of 
 the Puritans. The sentiments follow 
 exactly those of Rutherford's Lex Rex ; 
 as, for example, "The Crown is but 
 the kingdom's or people's livery. . . . 
 The king bears the relation of a politi- 
 cal servant or vassal to that state, king- 
 dom, or people over which he is set 
 to govern." But the commonplaces of 
 to-day were rank heresy in a chaplain to 
 Cromwell. 
 
 There seems to be no evidence to sup- 
 port Bishop Burnet's assertion that Good- 
 win was the head of the Fifth-Monarchy 
 fanatics ; and his story is simply that of a 
 fearless, sensible, and conscientious min- 
 ister, who took a strong interest in the 
 political drama of his time, and advocated 
 liberty of conscience before even Milton or 
 Locke. But his chief distinction is to have 
 been marked out for revenge in company 
 with Milton by the miserable Restoration 
 Parliament. 
 
 Milton's Eikonoklastes and Defensio 
 Populi Anglicani rank, of course, among 
 the masterpieces of English prose, and 
 ought to be read, where they never will be, 
 in every Board and public school of Eng- 
 land. In the first the picture of Charles I., 
 as painted in the Eikon Basilike, was 
 unmercifully torn to pieces. Charles's
 
 Book-Fires of the Restoration. 1 1 9 
 
 religion, Milton declares, had been all 
 hypocrisy. He had resorted to " ignoble 
 shifts to seem holy, and to get a saintship 
 among the ignorant and wretched people." 
 The prayer he had given as a relic to the 
 l)ishop at his execution had been stolen 
 from Sidney's Arcadia. In outward devo- 
 tion he had not at all exceeded some of 
 the worst kings in history. But in spite 
 of Milton, the Eikon Basilike sold rapidly, 
 and contributed greatly to the reaction ; 
 and the Secretary of the Council of State 
 had just reason to complain of the per- 
 verseness of his generation, " who, having 
 first cried to God to be delivered from 
 their king, now murmur against God for 
 having heard their prayer, and cry as loud 
 for their king against those that delivered 
 them." 
 
 The next year (1650) Milton had to 
 take up his pen again in the same cause 
 against the Defence of Charles I. to 
 Charles II. by the learned Salmasius. 
 Milton was not sparing in terms of abuse. 
 He calls Salmasius " a rogue," " a foreign 
 insignificant professor," "a slug," "a silly 
 loggerhead," " a superlative fool." Even 
 a Times leader of to-day would fall short 
 of Milton in vituperative terms. It is not 
 for this we still reverence the Defensio : 
 but for its political force, and its occa-
 
 120 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 sional splendid passages. Two samples 
 must suffice : — 
 
 " Be this right of kings whatever it will, 
 the right of the people is as much from 
 God as it. And whenever any people, 
 without some visible designation from God 
 Himself, appoint a king over them, they 
 have the same right to pull him down as 
 they had to set him up at first. And cer- 
 tainly it is a more Godlike action to depose 
 a tyrant than to set one up ; and there 
 appears much more of God in the people 
 when they depose an unjust prince than in 
 a king that oppresses an innocent people. 
 ... So that there is but little reason for 
 that wicked and foolish opinion that kings, 
 who commonly are the worst of men, 
 should be so high in God's account as 
 that He should have put the world under 
 them, to be at their beck and be governed 
 according to their humour ; and that for 
 their sakes alone He should have reduced 
 all mankind, whom He made after His 
 own image, into the same condition as 
 brutes." 
 
 The conclusion of Milton's Defensio is 
 not more remarkable for its eloquence 
 than it is for its closing paragraph. Ad- 
 dressing his countrymen in an exhortation 
 that reminds one of the speeches of 
 Pericles to the Athenians, he proceeds : —
 
 Book-Fires of the Restoration, i 2 I 
 
 " God has graciously delivered you, the 
 first of nations, from the two greatest 
 miseries of this life, and most pernicious 
 to virtue, tyranny, and superstition ; He 
 has endued you with greatness of mind to 
 be the first of mankind, who, after having 
 conquered their own king, and having had 
 him delivered into their hands, have not 
 scrupled to condemn him judicially, and 
 pursuant to that sentence of condemnation 
 to put him to death. After the perform- 
 ing so glorious an action as this, you ought 
 to do nothing that is mean and little, not 
 so much as to think of, much less to do, 
 anything but what is great and sublime." 
 
 An exhortation to virtue founded on an 
 act of regicide ! To such an issue had 
 come the dispute concerning the Divine 
 Right of kings ; and with such diversity 
 of opinion do different men form their 
 judgments concerning the leading events 
 of their time ! 
 
 The House of Commons, reverting for 
 a time to the ancient procedure in these 
 matters, petitioned the King on June 16th, 
 1660, to call in these books of Goodwin 
 and Milton, and to order them to be burnt 
 by the common hangman : and the King 
 so far assented as to issue a proclamation 
 ordering all persons in possession of such 
 books to deliver them up to their county
 
 1 2 2 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 sheriffs to be burnt by the hangman at 
 the next assizes (August 13th, 1660). 1 In 
 this way a good many were burnt ; but, 
 happily for the authors themselves, " they 
 so fled or so obscured themselves " that 
 all endeavours to apprehend their persons 
 failed. Subsequently the benefits of the 
 Act of Oblivion were conferred on Milton ; 
 but they were denied to Goodwin, who, 
 having barely escaped sentence of death 
 by Parliament, was incapacitated from ever 
 holding any office again. 
 
 The Lex Rex, or the Law and the 
 Prince (1644), by the Presbyterian divine 
 Samuel Rutherford, was another book 
 which incurred the vengeance of the 
 Restoration, and for the same reasons as 
 Goodwin's book or Milton's. It was burnt 
 by the hangman at Edinburgh (October 
 1 6th, 1660), St. Andrews (October 23rd, 
 1 66o), 2 and London ; its author was deprived 
 of his offices both in the University and the 
 Church, and was summoned on a charge 
 of high treason before the Parliament of 
 Edinburgh. His death in 1661 antici- 
 pated the probable legal sentence, and 
 saved Rutherford from political mar- 
 tyrdom. 
 
 1 In Rennet's Register, 189. 
 - Lamont's Diary, 1 59.
 
 Book-Fires of tlic Restoration. I 2 3 
 
 His book was an answer to the Sacra 
 Sancta Regum Majestas, in which the 
 Divine Right of kings, and the duty of 
 passive obedience, had been strenuously 
 upheld. Its appearance in 1644 created a 
 great sensation, and threw into the shade 
 Buchanan's De Jure Regni apud Scotos, 
 which had hitherto held the field on the 
 popular side. The purpose and style of 
 the book may be gathered from the 
 passage in the preface, wherein the writer 
 gives, as his reason for writing, the opinion 
 that arbitrary government had " over- 
 swelled all banks of law, that it was now 
 at the highest float . . . that the naked 
 truth was, that prelates, a wild and pushing 
 cattle to the lambs and flocks of Christ, 
 had made a hideous noise ; the wheels of 
 their chariot did run an unequal pace with 
 the bloodthirsty mind of the daughter of 
 Babel." The contention was, that all 
 regal power sprang from the suffrages of 
 the people. " The king is subordinate to 
 the Parliament, not co-ordinate, for the 
 constituent is above the constituted." 
 " What are kings but vassals to the State, 
 who, if they turn tyrants, fall from their 
 right ? " For the rest, a book so crammed 
 and stuffed with Biblical quotations as to 
 be most unreadable. And indeed, of all 
 the features of that miserable seventeenth
 
 124 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 century, surely nothing is more extraor- 
 dinary than this insatiate taste of men of 
 all parties for Jewish precedents. Never 
 was the enslavement of the human mind 
 to authority carried to more absurd lengths 
 with more lamentable results ; never was 
 manifested a greater waste, or a greater 
 wealth, of ability. For that reason, though 
 Rutherford may claim a place on our 
 shelves, he is little likely ever to be taken 
 down from them. But may the principles 
 he contended for remain as undisturbed 
 as his repose ! 
 
 The year following the burning of these 
 books the House of Commons directed 
 its vengeance against certain statutes 
 passed by the Republican government. 
 On May 17th, 1661, a large majority con- 
 demned the Solemn League and Cove?iant 
 to be burnt by the hangman, the House 
 of Lords concurring. All copies of it 
 were also to be taken down from all 
 churches and public places. Evelyn, see- 
 ing it burnt in several places in London 
 on Monday 22nd, exclaims, " Oh ! prodi- 
 gious change ! " The Irish Parliament 
 also condemned it to the flames, not 
 only in Dublin, but in all the towns of 
 Ireland. 
 
 A few days later, May 27th, the House 
 of Commons, unanimously and with no
 
 Book-Fires of the Restoration. 125 
 
 petition to the King, condemned to 
 be burnt as "treasonable parchment 
 writings " : 
 
 1. "The Act for erecting a High Court 
 of Justice for the trial of Charles I." 
 
 2. "The Act declaring and constitut- 
 ing the people of England a Common- 
 wealth." 
 
 3. " The Act for subscribing the En- 
 gagement." 
 
 4. " The Act for renouncing and dis- 
 annulling the title of Charles Stuart " 
 (September 1656). 
 
 5. "The Act for the security of the 
 Lord Protector's person and continuance 
 of the Nation in peace and safety " (Sep- 
 tember 1656). 
 
 Three of these were burnt at West- 
 minster and two at the Exchange. Pepys, 
 beholding the latter sight from a balcony, 
 was led to moralise on the mutability of 
 human opinion. The strange thing is that, 
 when these Acts were burnt, the Act for 
 the abolition of the House of Lords (1649) 
 appears to have escaped condemnation. 
 For its intrinsic interest, I here insert the 
 words of the old parchment : — 
 
 " The Commons of England assembled 
 in Parliament, finding by too long ex- 
 perience that the House of Lords is 
 useless and dangerous to the people of
 
 126 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 England to be continued, hath thought fit 
 to ordain and enact, and be it ordained 
 and enacted by this present Parliament 
 and by the authority of the same : That 
 from henceforth the House of Lords in 
 Parliament shall be and is hereby wholly 
 abolished and taken away ; and that the 
 Lords shall not from henceforth meet and 
 sit in the said house, called the Lords' 
 House, or in any other house or place 
 whatsoever as a House of Lords ; nor 
 shall sit, vote, advise, adjudge, or deter- 
 mine of any matter or thing whatsoever 
 as a House of Lords in Parliament : 
 Nevertheless, it is hereby declared, that 
 neither such Lords as have demeaned 
 themselves with honour, courage, and 
 fidelity to the Commonwealth, nor their 
 posterities (who shall continue so), shall 
 be excluded from the public councils of 
 the Nation, but shall be admitted thereunto 
 and have their free vote in Parliament, if 
 they shall be thereunto elected, as other 
 persons of interest elected and qualified 
 thereunto ought to have. And be it fur- 
 ther ordained and enacted by the authority 
 aforesaid, That no peer of this land (not 
 being elected, qualified, and sitting as 
 aforesaid) shall claim, have, or make use 
 of any privilege of Parliament either in 
 relation to his person, quality, or estate,
 
 Book-Fires of the Restoration. 127 
 
 any law, usage, or custom to the contrary 
 notwithstanding." ' 
 
 How true a presentiment our ances- 
 tors had of the incompatibility between 
 an hereditary chamber and popular 
 liberty is conspicuously shown by the 
 next book we read of as burnt ; and indeed 
 there are few more instructive historical 
 tracts than Locke's Letter from a Person 
 of Quality to his Friend in the Country, 
 which was ordered to be burnt by the 
 Privy Council ; and wherein he gave an 
 account of the debates in the Lords on a 
 Bill "to prevent the dangers which may 
 arise from persons disaffected to the 
 Government," in April and May 1675. 
 It was actually proposed by this Bill to 
 make compulsory on all officers of Church 
 or State, and on all members of both 
 Houses, an oath, not only declaring it un- 
 lawful upon any pretence to take arms 
 against the King, but swearing to endea- 
 vour at no time the alteration of the 
 government in Church and State. To that 
 logical position had the Royalist spirit come 
 within fifteen years of the Restoration ; 
 Charles II., according to Burnet, being 
 much set on this scheme, which, says 
 Locke, was " first hatched (as almost all 
 the mischiefs of the world have been) 
 1 Scobell's Collection of Acts, II. 8.
 
 1 2 8 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 amongst the great churchmen." The 
 bishops and clergy, by their outcry, had 
 caused Charles's Declaration of Indulgence 
 (March 17th, 1671) to be cancelled, and the 
 great seal broken off it ; they had " tricked 
 away the rights and liberties of the people, 
 in this and all other countries, wherever 
 they had had opportunity . . . that priest 
 and prince may, like Castor and Pollux, 
 be worshipped together as divine, in the 
 same temple, by us poor lay-subjects ; and 
 that sense and reason, law, properties, 
 rights, and liberties shall be understood as 
 the oracles of those deities shall interpret." 
 There seems no doubt that the extinc- 
 tion of liberty was as vigorously aimed at 
 as it was nearly achieved at the period 
 Locke describes, under the administration 
 of Lord Danby. But the Bill, though 
 carried in the Lords, was strongly con- 
 tested. Locke says that it occupied six- 
 teen or seventeen whole days of debate, 
 the House sitting often till 8 or 9 p.m., 
 or even to midnight. His account of the 
 speakers and their arguments is one of 
 the most graphic pages of historical paint- 
 ing in our language ; but it is said to have 
 been drawn up at the desire, and almost 
 at the dictation, of Locke's friend, Lord 
 Shaftesbury, who himself took a promi- 
 nent part against the Bill. Fortunately,
 
 Book- Fires of the Restoration. 129 
 
 it never got beyond the House of Lords, 
 a dispute between the two Houses leading 
 to a prorogation of Parliament and so to 
 the salvation of liberty. But the whole 
 episode impresses on the mind the force 
 of the current then, as always, flowing in 
 favour of arbitrary government throughout 
 our history, as well as a sense of the very 
 narrow margin by which liberty of any 
 sort has escaped or been evolved, and, in 
 general, of wonder that it should ever have 
 survived at all the combinations of adverse 
 circumstances against it. 
 
 It has been shown in the account of 
 books burnt in the time of the Rebellion, 
 how freely in the struggle between Ortho- 
 doxy and Free Thought— between the 
 dogmas, that is, of the strongest sect and 
 the speculations of individuals — fire was 
 resorted to for the purpose of burning out 
 unpopular opinions. These, indeed, were 
 often of so fantastic a nature, that no fire 
 was really needed to insure their extinc- 
 tion ; whilst of others it may be said that, 
 as their existence was originally indepen- 
 dent of actual expression, so the punish- 
 ment inflicted on their utterance could 
 prove no barrier to their propagation. 
 
 But besides the war that was waged in 
 the domain of theology proper, between 
 opinions claiming to be sound and opinions
 
 I 3 o Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 claiming to be true, a contest no less fierce 
 centred for long round the very organisa- 
 tion of the Church ; and between the 
 Establishment and Dissent that hostile 
 condition of thrust and parry, which has 
 since become chronic, and is so detri- 
 mental to the cause professed by both 
 alike, is no less visible in the field of 
 literature than in that of our general his- 
 tory. Associated with the literary side of 
 this great and bitter conflict — a side only 
 too much ignored in the discreet popular 
 histories of the English Church — are the 
 names of Delaune, Defoe, Tindal, on the 
 aggressive side, of Sacheverell and Drake 
 on the defensive ; each party, during the 
 heat of battle, giving vent to sentiments 
 so offensive to the other as to make it 
 seem that fire alone could atone for the 
 injury or remove the sting. 
 
 The first book to mention in con- 
 nection with this struggle is Delaune's 
 Plea for the Nonconformists; a book round 
 which hangs a melancholy tale, and which 
 is entitled to a niche in the library of 
 Fame for other reasons than the mere fact 
 of its having been burnt before the Royal 
 Exchange in 1683. The story shows the 
 sacerdotalism of the Church of England 
 at its very worst, and helps to explain the 
 evil heritage of hatred which, in the hearts
 
 Book-Fires of tlie Restoration, i 3 1 
 
 of the nonconforming sects, has since de- 
 scended and still clings to her. 
 
 Dr. Calamy, one of the King's chap- 
 lains, had preached and printed a sermon 
 called Scrupulous Conscience, challenging to, 
 or advocating, the friendly discussion of 
 points of difference between the Church 
 and the Nonconformists. Delaune, who 
 kept a grammar school, was weak enough 
 to take him at his word, and so wrote his 
 Plea, a book of wondrous learning, and to 
 this day one of the best to read concern- 
 ing the origin and growth of the various 
 rites of the Church. Thereupon he was 
 whisked off to herd with the commonest 
 felons in Newgate, whence he wrote re- 
 peatedly to Dr. Calamy, to beg him, as 
 the cause of his unjust arrest, to pro- 
 cure his release. Delaune disclaimed all 
 malignity against the English Church, 
 or any member of it, and, with grim 
 humour, entreated to be convinced of his 
 errors " by something more like divinity 
 than Newgate." But the Church has not 
 always dealt in more convincing divinity, 
 and accordingly the cowardly ecclesiastic 
 held his peace and left his victim to 
 suffer. 
 
 It is difficult even now to tell the rest 
 of Delaune's story with patience. He 
 was indicted for intending to disturb the
 
 132 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 peace of the kingdom, to bring the King 
 into the greatest hatred and contempt, and 
 for printing and publishing, by force of 
 arms, a scandalous libel against the King 
 and the Prayer-Book. Of course it was 
 extravagantly absurd, but these indict- 
 ments were the legal forms under which 
 the luckless Dissenters experienced suffer- 
 ings that were to them the sternest re- 
 alities. Delaune was, in consequence, 
 fined a sum he could not possibly pay; 
 his books (for he also wrote The Image of 
 the Beast, wherein he showed, in three 
 parallel columns, the far greater resem- 
 blance of the Catholic rites to those of 
 Pagan Rome than to those of the New 
 Testament) were condemned to be burnt ; 
 and his judges, humane enough to let him 
 off the pillory in consideration of his edu- 
 cation, sent him back to Newgate not- 
 withstanding it. There, in that noisome 
 atmosphere and in that foul company, he 
 was obliged to shelter his wife and two 
 small children ; and there, after fifteen 
 months, he died, having first seen all he 
 loved on earth pine and die before him. 
 And he was only one of eight thousand 
 other Protestant Dissenters who died in 
 prison during the merry, miserable reign 
 of Charles II. ! Of a truth, Dissent has 
 something to forgive the Church ; for
 
 Book-Fins of the Restoration, i 3 3 
 
 persecution in Protestant England was 
 very much the same as in Catholic France, 
 with, if possible, less justification. 
 
 The main argument of Delaune's book 
 was, that the Church of England agreed 
 more in its rites and doctrines with the 
 Church of Rome, and both Churches with 
 Pagan or pre-Christian Rome, than either 
 did with the primitive Church or the word 
 of the Gospel — a thesis that has long since 
 become generally accepted ; but his main 
 offence consisted in saying that the Lord's 
 Prayer ought in one sentence to have been 
 translated precisely as it now has been in 
 the Revised Version, and in contending 
 that the frequent repetition of the prayer 
 in church was contrary to the express 
 command of Scripture. On these and 
 other points Delaune's book was never 
 answered — for the reason, I believe, that 
 it never could be. After the Act of 
 Toleration (1689) it was often reprinted; 
 the eighth and last time in 1706, when 
 the High Church movement to persecute 
 Dissent had assumed dangerous strength, 
 with an excellent preface by Defoe, and 
 concluding with the letters to Dr. Calamy, 
 written by Delaune from Newgate. Defoe 
 well points out that the great artifice of 
 Delaune's time was to make the persecu- 
 tion of Dissent appear necessary, by repre-
 
 I 34 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 senting it as dangerous to the State as 
 well as the Church. 
 
 The mention of two other books seems 
 to complete the list of burnt political 
 literature down to the Revolution of 1688. 
 
 One is Malice Defeated, or a brief rela- 
 tion of the accusation and deliverance 
 of Elizabeth Cellier. The authoress was 
 implicated in the Dangerfield conspiracy, 
 and, having been indicted for plotting to 
 kill the King and to reintroduce Popery, 
 was sentenced at the Old Bailey to be 
 imprisoned till she had paid a fine of 
 ^1,000, to stand three times in the 
 pillory, and to have her books burnt by 
 the hangman. I do not suppose that, in 
 her case, literature incurred any loss. 
 
 The other is the translation of Claude's 
 Plaintes des Protestants, burnt at the Ex- 
 change on May 5th, 1686. After the 
 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, people 
 like Sir Roger l'Estrange were well paid 
 to write denials of any cruelties as con- 
 nected with that measure in France ; 
 much as in our own day people wrote 
 denials of the Turkish atrocities in Bul- 
 garia. The famous Huguenot minister's 
 book proved of course abundantly the 
 falsity of this denial ; but, as Evelyn says, 
 so great a power in the English Court had 
 then the French ambassador, " who was
 
 Book-Fires of the Restoration. I 3 5 
 
 doubtless in great indignation at the pious 
 and truly generous charity of all the nation 
 for the relief of those miserable sufferers 
 who came over for shelter," that, in defer- 
 ence to his wishes, the Government of 
 James II. condemned the truth to the 
 flames. Nothing in that monarch's reign 
 proves more conclusively the depth of 
 degradation to which his foreign policy 
 and that of his brother had caused his 
 country to fall.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Book-Fires of the Revolution. 
 
 HE period of the Revolution, by 
 which I mean from the accession 
 of William III. to the death 
 of Queen Anne, was a time 
 in which the conflict between Orthodoxy 
 and Free Thought, and again between 
 Church and Dissent, continued with an 
 unabated ferocity, which is most clearly 
 reflected in and illustrated by the sen- 
 sational history of its contemporary 
 literature, especially during the reign of 
 Queen Anne. I am not aware that any 
 book was burnt by authority of the Eng- 
 lish Parliament during the reign of William, 
 but to say this in the face of Molyneux's 
 Case for Ireland, which has been so fre- 
 quently by great authorities declared to 
 have been so treated, compels me to 
 allude to the history of that book, and 
 to give the reasons for a contrary belief. 
 
 It is first stated in the preface to the 
 edition of 1770 that William Molyneux
 
 Book-Fires of tJie Revolution. 1 3 7 
 
 Case for Ireland bang bound by Acts of 
 Parliament in England, first published 
 in 1698, was burnt by the hangman at 
 the order of Parliament ; and the state- 
 ment has been often repeated by later 
 writers, as by Mr. Lecky, Dr. Ball, and 
 others. Why then is there no mention 
 of such a sentence in the Journals of the 
 Commons, where a full account is given 
 of the proceedings against the book ; nor 
 in Swift's Drapier Letters, where he refers 
 to the fate of the Case for Ireland? This 
 seems almost conclusive evidence on the 
 negative side ; but as the editor of 1770 
 may have had some lost authority for his 
 remark, and not been merely mistaken, 
 some account may be given of the book, 
 as of one possibly, but not probably, con- 
 demned to the flames. 1 
 
 Molyneux was distinguished for his 
 scientific attainments, was a member of 
 the Irish Parliament, first for Dublin City 
 and then for the University, and was also 
 a great friend of Locke the philosopher. 
 The introduction in 1698 of the Bill, 
 which was carried the same year by the 
 English Parliament, forbidding the ex- 
 
 1 In Notes and Queries for March nth, 1854, 
 Mr. James Graves, of Kilkenny, mentions as in 
 his possession a copy of Molyneux, considerable 
 portions of which had been consumed by fire.
 
 138 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 portation of Irish woollen manufactures 
 to England or elsewhere — one of the 
 worst Acts of oppression of the many that 
 England has perpetrated against Ireland 
 — led Molyneux to write this book, in 
 which he contends for the constitutional 
 right of Ireland to absolute legislative in- 
 dependence. As the political relationship 
 between the two countries — a relation 
 now of pure force on one side, and of 
 subjection on the other — is still a matter 
 of contention, it will not be out of place 
 to devote a few lines to a brief summary 
 of his argument. 
 
 Before 1641 no law made in England 
 was of force in Ireland without the con- 
 sent of the latter, a large number of 
 English Acts not being received in Ireland 
 till they had been separately enacted there 
 also. At the so-called conquest of Ireland 
 by Henry II., the English laws settled by 
 him were voluntarily accepted by the 
 Irish clergy and nobility, and Ireland was 
 allowed the freedom of holding parlia- 
 ments as a separate and distinct kingdom 
 from England. So it was that John was 
 made King (or Dominus) of Ireland even 
 in the lifetime of his father, Henry II., 
 and remained so during the reign of his 
 brother, Richard I. Ireland, therefore, 
 could not be bound by England without
 
 Book-Fins of the Revolution, i 39 
 
 the consent of her own representatives ; 
 
 and the happiness of having her repre- 
 sentatives in the English Parliament 
 could hardly be hoped for, since that 
 experiment had been proved in Crom- 
 well's time to be too troublesome and 
 inconvenient. 
 
 Molyneux concluded his argument with 
 a warning that subsequent history has 
 amply justified — "Advancing the power 
 of the Parliament of England by breaking 
 the rights of another may in time have ill 
 effects." So, indeed, it has ; but such 
 warnings or prophecies seldom bring 
 favour to their authors, and the English 
 Parliament was moved to fury by Moly- 
 neux' arguments. Yet the latter, writing 
 to Locke on the subject of his book, had 
 said : " I think I have treated it with that 
 caution and submission that it cannot 
 justly give any offence ; insomuch that I 
 scruple not to put my name to it; and, 
 by the advice of some good friends, have 
 presumed to dedicate it to his Majesty. . . . 
 but till I either see how the Parliament 
 at Westminster is pleased to take it, or 
 till I see them risen, I do not think it 
 advisable for me to go on t'other side of 
 the water. Though I am not apprehensive 
 of any mischief from them, yet God only 
 knows what resentments captious men
 
 1 40 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 may take on such occasions." (April 19th, 
 1698.) 
 
 Molyneux, however, was soon to know 
 this himself, for on May 21st his book was 
 submitted to the examination of a com- 
 mittee; and on the committee's report 
 (June 22nd) that it was "of dangerous 
 consequence to the Crown and people of 
 England, by denying the authority of the 
 King and Parliament of England to bind 
 the kingdom and people of Ireland," an 
 address was presented to the King praying 
 him to punish the author of such " bold 
 and pernicious assertions," and to dis- 
 courage all things that might lessen the 
 dependence of Ireland upon England ; 
 to which William replied that he would 
 take care that \Vhat they complained of 
 should be prevented and redressed. Per- 
 haps the dedication of the book to the 
 King restrained the House from voting 
 it to the flames; but, anyhow, there is 
 not the least contemporary evidence of 
 their doing so. Molyneux did not survive 
 the year of the condemnation of his book ; 
 but, in spite of his fears, he spent five 
 weeks with Locke at Oates in the autumn 
 of the same year, his book surviving him, 
 to attest his wonderful foresight as much 
 as later events justified his spirited re- 
 monstrance.
 
 Book-Fires of the Revolution. 141 
 
 There is, however, no doubt about the 
 burning of a book for its theological senti- 
 ments at this time, though it was no Par- 
 liament but only an university which com- 
 mitted it to the fire. Oxford University 
 has always tempered her love for learning 
 with a dislike for inquiry, and set the 
 cause of orthodoxy above the cause of 
 truth. This phase of her character was 
 never better illustrated than in the case 
 of The Naked Gospel, by the Rev. Arthur 
 Bury, Rector of Exeter College (1690). 
 
 A high value attaches to the first edition 
 of this book, wherein the author essayed 
 to show what the primitive Gospel really 
 was, what alterations had been gradually 
 made in it, and what advantages and dis- 
 advantages had therefrom ensued. Bury, 
 many years before, in 1648, had known 
 what it was to be led from his college 
 by a file of musketeers, and forbidden to 
 return to Oxford or his fellowship under 
 pain of death, because he had the courage 
 in those days to read the prayers of the 
 Church. So he had some justification 
 for ascribing his anonymous work to "a 
 true son of the Church " ; and his motive 
 was the promotion of that charity and 
 toleration which breathes in its every page. 
 The King had summoned a Convocation, 
 to make certain changes in the Litany, and,
 
 142 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 if possible, to reconcile ecclesiastical 
 differences ; he even dreamt of uniting 
 the Protestant Churches of England and 
 of the Continent, and his Comprehension 
 Bill, had it passed Parliament, might have 
 made the English Church a really national 
 Church ; and it was from his sympathy 
 with the broad ideas of the King that Bury 
 wrote his pamphlet, intending not to 
 publish it, but to present it to the members 
 of Convocation severally. Unfortunately 
 he showed or presented a few copies to 
 a few friends, with the natural result that 
 the work became known, the author ad- 
 monished for heresy and driven from his 
 rectorship, and the book publicly burnt, 
 by a vote of the university, in the area 
 of the schools (August 19th, 1690). He 
 should have reflected that it is as little the 
 part of a discreet man to try to reconcile 
 religious factions as to seek to separate 
 fighting tigers. 
 
 The unexpected commotion roused by 
 his book led the author to republish it 
 with great modifications and omissions ; a 
 fact which much diminishes the interest of 
 the second edition of 169 1. For instance, 
 the preface to the second edition omits 
 this passage of the first : " The Church 
 of England, as it needs not, so it does not, 
 forbid any of its sons the use of their own
 
 Book-Fires of the Revolution. 143 
 
 eyes ; if it did, this alone would he suffi- 
 cient reason not only to distrust but to 
 condemn it." Nevertheless both editions 
 alike contain many passages remarkable 
 for their breadth of view no less than 
 for their admirable expression. What, 
 for instance, could be better than the 
 passage wherein he speaks of the priests 
 cramming the people with doctrines, " so 
 many in numbers that an ordinary mind 
 cannot retain them ; so perplexed in 
 matter that the best understanding can- 
 not comprehend them ; so impertinent 
 to any good purpose that a good man 
 need not regard them ; and so unmen- 
 tioned in Scripture that none but the 
 greatest subtlety can therein discover the 
 least intimations of them " ? Or again : 
 " No king is more independent in his 
 own dominions from any foreign juris- 
 diction in matters civil, than every Chris- 
 tian is within his own mind in matters 
 of faith " ? UTiat Doctor of Divinity of 
 these days would speak as courageously 
 as this one did two hundred years ago ? 
 So let any one be prepared to give a 
 good price for a first edition copy of The 
 Naked Gospel, and, when obtained, to 
 study as well as honour it. 
 
 History is apt to repeat itself, and 
 therefore it is of interest to note here
 
 1 44 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 that about a century and a half later 
 (March 1849) Exeter College was again 
 stirred to the burning point, and that in 
 connection with a book which, apart from 
 its intrinsic interest, enjoys the distinction 
 of having been actually the last to be 
 burnt in England. In the Morning Post 
 of March 9th, 1 849, it is written : " We 
 are informed that a work recently pub- 
 lished by Mr. Froude, M.A., Fellow of 
 Exeter College, entitled the Nemesis of 
 Faith, was a few days since publicly 
 burned by the authorities in the College 
 Hall." The Nemesis, therefore, deserves 
 a place in our libraries, and many will 
 even prize it above its author's historical 
 works, as the last example of the effort of 
 the ecclesiastical spirit to crush the dis- 
 cussion of its dogmas. It is owing to this 
 attempt that the Nemesis is now so well 
 known as to render any reference to its 
 contents superfluous. 
 
 We now pass to the reign of Queen 
 Anne, when Toryism became the preva- 
 lent power in the country, and manifested 
 its peculiar spirit by the increased persecu- 
 tion of literature. 
 
 Among strictly theological works one 
 by John Asgill, barrister, claims a peculiar 
 distinction, for it was burnt by order of 
 two Parliaments, English and Irish, and
 
 Book- Fires of the Revolution. 145 
 
 its author expelled from two Houses of 
 Commons. This was the famous Argu- 
 ment Proving that According to the 'Cove- 
 nant of Eternal Life, revealed in the Scrip- 
 tures, Man may be Translated from Hence 
 into that Eternal Life without Passing 
 Through Death, although the Human 
 Nature of Christ Himself could not he thus 
 Translated till He had Passed Through 
 Death (1700). In this book of 106 pages 
 Asgill argued that death, which had come 
 by Adam, had been removed by the death 
 of Christ, and had lost its legal power. 
 He claimed the right, and asserted his 
 expectation, of actual translation ; and so 
 went by the nickname of " Translated 
 Asgill." He tells how in writing it he 
 felt two powers within him, one bidding 
 him write, the other bobbing his elbow ; 
 but unfortunately the former prevailed, as 
 it generally does. His printer told him 
 that his men thought the author a little 
 crazed, in which Asgill fancied the printer 
 spoke one word for them and two for 
 himself. Other people agreed with the 
 printer, to Asgill's advantage, for, as he 
 says, " Coming into court to see me as a 
 monster, and hearing me talk like a man, 
 I soon fell into my share of practice " : 
 which I mention as a hint for the brief- 
 less. This was in Ireland, where Asgill 
 
 10
 
 1 46 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 was elected member for Enniscorthy, for 
 which place however he only sat four 
 days, being expelled for his pamphlet on 
 October 10th, 1703. Shortly afterwards 
 Asgill became member for Bramber, in 
 Sussex, but this seat, too, he lost in 1707 
 for the same reason, the English House, 
 like the Irish, though not by a una- 
 nimous vote, condemning his book to 
 the flames. AsgilPs debts caused him 
 apparently to spend the rest of his days 
 in the comparative peace of the Fleet 
 prison. 
 
 Coleridge says there is no genuine 
 Saxon English better than Asgill's, and 
 that his irony is often finer than Swift's. 
 At all events, his burnt work — the labour 
 of seven years — is very dreary reading, 
 relieved however by such occasional good 
 sayings as " It is much easier to make a 
 creed than to believe it after it is made," 
 or " Custom itself, without a reason for it, 
 is an argument only for fools." Asgill's 
 defence before the House of Commons 
 shows that a very strained interpretation 
 was placed upon the passages that gave 
 offence. Let it suffice to quote one : 
 "Stare at me as long as you will, I am 
 sure that neither my physiognomy, sins, 
 nor misfortune can make me so unlikely 
 to be translated as my Redeemer was to
 
 Book-Fires of the Revolution. 1 47 
 
 be hanged." Asgill clearly wrote in all 
 honesty and sincerity, though the contrary 
 has been suggested ; and his defence was 
 not without spirit or point : " Pray what 
 is this blasphemous crime I here stand 
 charged with ? A belief of what we all 
 profess, or at least of what no one 
 can deny. If the death of the body be 
 included in the fall, why is not this life 
 of the body included in the redemption ? 
 And if I have a firmer belief in this than 
 another, am I therefore a blasphemer?" 
 But the House thought that he was ; and 
 to impugn the right of the majority to 
 decide such a point would be to impugn 
 a fundamental principle of the British 
 Constitution. I therefore refrain from 
 an opinion, and leave the matter to the 
 reader's judgment. 
 
 Among the many books that have owed 
 an increase of popularity, or any popu- 
 larity at all, to the fire that burnt them, 
 may be instanced the two works of Dr. 
 Coward, which were burnt by order of the 
 House of Commons in Palace Yard on 
 March 18th, 1704. Dr. Coward had been 
 a Fellow of Merton, and he wrote poetry 
 as well as books of medicine, but in 1702 
 he ventured on metaphysical ground, and 
 under the pseudonym of " Estibius Psy- 
 chalethes " dedicated to the clergy his
 
 148 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 Second Thoughts concerning the Human 
 Son/, in which he contended that the 
 notion of the soul as a separate immaterial 
 substance was " a plain heathenist inven- 
 tion : " not exactly a position the clergy 
 were likely to welcome, although the 
 author repeatedly avowed his belief in 
 an eternal future life. In 1704 the Doctor 
 published his Grand Essay: a Vindica- 
 tion of Reason and Religion against the 
 Impostures of Philosophy, in which he 
 repeated his ideas about immaterial sub- 
 stances, and argued that matter and motion 
 were the foundation of thought in man 
 and brutes. The House of Commons 
 called him to its bar, and burnt his books ; 
 a proceeding which conferred such ad- 
 ditional popularity upon them that the 
 Doctor was enabled the very same year 
 to bring out a second edition of his Second 
 Thoughts. Certainly no other treatment 
 could have made the books popular. 
 They are perfectly legitimate, but rather 
 dry, metaphysical disquisitions ; and Par- 
 liament might quite as fairly have burnt 
 Locke's famous essay on the Human 
 Understanding. 
 
 For Parliament thus to constitute itself 
 Defender of the Faith was not merely to 
 trespass on the office of the Crown, but 
 to sin against the more sacred right of
 
 Book-Fins of the Revolution. 149 
 
 common sense itself. We cannot be 
 surprised, therefore, since the English Par- 
 liament sinned in this way (as it does to this 
 day in a minor degree), that the Irish 
 Parliament should have sinned equally, as 
 it did about the same time, in the case of a 
 book whose title far more suggested heresy 
 than its contents substantiated it. I refer 
 to Toland's Christianity not Mysterious 
 (1696), which was burnt by the hangman 
 before the Parliament House Gate at 
 Dublin, and in the open street before the 
 Town-House, by order of the Committee 
 of Religion of the Irish House of 
 Commons, one member even going so far 
 as to advocate the burning of Toland 
 himself. It is difficult now to understand 
 the extreme excitement caused by Toland's 
 book, seeing that it was evidently written 
 in the interests of Christianity, and would 
 now be read without emotion by the most 
 orthodox. It was only the superstructure, 
 not the foundation, that Toland attacked : 
 his whole contention being that Chris- 
 tianity, rightly understood, contained 
 nothing mysterious or inconsistent with 
 reason, but that all ideas of this sort, and 
 most of its rites, had been aftergrowths, 
 borrowed from Paganism, in that compro- 
 mise between the new and old religion 
 which constituted the world's Christianisa-
 
 i 5 o Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 tion. 1 Although this fact is now generally 
 admitted, Toland puts the case so well 
 that it is best to give his own words : — 
 
 "The Christians," he says, "were careful 
 to remove all obstacles lying in the way 
 of the Gentiles. They thought the most 
 effectual way of gaining them over to 
 their side was by compounding the matter, 
 which led them to unwarrantable compli- 
 ances, till at length they likewise set up 
 for mysteries. Yet not having the least 
 precedent for any ceremonies from the 
 Gospel, excepting Baptism and the Supper, 
 they strangely disguised and transformed 
 these by adding to them the pagan mystic 
 rites. They administered them with the 
 strictest secrecy; and to be inferior to 
 their adversaries in no circumstance, they 
 permitted none to assist at them but such 
 as were antecedently prepared or initiated." 
 
 The parallel Toland proceeds to draw 
 is extremely instructive, and could only 
 be improved on in our own day by 
 tracing both Pagan and Christian rites to 
 their antecedent origins in India. What 
 
 1 In a letter in his Vindicius Liberius he says : 
 " As for the Christian religion in general, that 
 book is so far from calling it in question that it 
 was purposely written for its service, to defend it 
 against the imputations of contradiction and ob- 
 scurity which are frequently objected by its 
 opposers."
 
 Book-Fires of the Revolution. 1 5 1 
 
 he says also of the Fathers would be 
 nowadays assented to by all who have 
 ever had the curiosity to look into their 
 writings ; namely, " that they were as in- 
 judicious, violent, and factious as other 
 men ; that they were, for the greatest part, 
 very credulous and superstitious in reli- 
 gion, as well as pitifully ignorant and 
 superficial in the minutest punctilios of 
 literature." 
 
 Toland was only twenty-six when he 
 published his first book, but, to judge 
 from the correspondence between Locke 
 and Molyneux, he was vain and indiscreet. 
 " He has raised against him," says the 
 latter from Dublin (May 27th, 1697), "the 
 clamours of all parties ; and this not so 
 much by his difference in opinion as by 
 his unseasonable way of discoursing, pro- 
 pagating, and maintaining it." Again 
 (September nth, 1697): "Mr. T. is at 
 last driven out of the kingdom ; the poor 
 gentleman, by his imprudent management, 
 had raised such an universal outcry that 
 it was even dangerous for a man to have 
 been known once to converse with him. 
 This made all men wary of reputation 
 decline seeing him ; insomuch that at last 
 he wanted a meal's meat (as I am told), 
 and none would admit him to their tables. 
 The little stock of money which he
 
 i 5 2 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 brought into the country being exhausted, 
 he fell to borrowing from any one that 
 would lend him half-a-crown, and ran in 
 debt for his wigs, clothes, and lodging." 
 Then when the Parliament ordered him 
 to be taken into custody, and to be pro- 
 secuted, he very wisely fled the country, 
 suffering only a temporary rebuff, and 
 writing many other books, political and 
 religious, none of which ever attained the 
 distinction of his first. 
 
 But it was in the struggle between the 
 Church and Dissent that the party-spirit 
 of Queen Anne's reign chiefly manifested 
 itself in the burning of books. No one 
 fought for the cause of Dissent with 
 greater energy or greater personal loss 
 than the famous Defoe, the author of 
 Robinson Crusoe. It brought him to ruin, 
 and one of his books to the hangman. 
 
 It would seem that his Shortest Way 
 with the Dissenters (1702), which ironi- 
 cally advocated their extermination, was in 
 answer to a sermon preached at Oxford 
 by Sacheverell in June of the same year, 
 called The Political Union, wherein he 
 alluded to a party against whom all friends 
 of the Anglican Church " ought to hang 
 out the bloody flag and banner of de- 
 fiance." Defoe's pamphlet so exactly 
 accorded with the sentiments of the
 
 Book-Fires of the Revolution. 153 
 
 High Church party against the Dissenters 
 that the extent of their applause at first 
 was only equalled by that of their subse- 
 quent fury when the true author and his 
 true object came to be known. Parlia- 
 ment ordered the work to be burnt by the 
 hangman, and Defoe was soon afterwards 
 sentenced to a ruinous fine and imprison- 
 ment, and to three days' punishment in 
 the pillory. It was on this occasion 
 that he wrote his famous Hymn to the 
 Pillory, which he distributed among the 
 spectators, and from which (as it is 
 somewhat long) I quote a few of the 
 more striking lines : — 
 
 "Hail. Hieroglyphick State machine, 
 Contrived to pvinish fancy in ; 
 Men that are men in thee can feel no pain, 
 And all thy insignificants disdain. 
 
 Here by the errors of the town 
 
 The fools look out and knaves look on. 
 
 Actions receive their tincture from the times, 
 And, as they change, are virtues made or crimes. 
 Thou art the State-trap of the Law, 
 But neither can keep knaves nor honest men 
 in awe. 
 
 Thou art no shame to Truth and Honesty, 
 Nor is the character of such defaced by thee, 
 Who suffer by oppression's injury. 
 Shame, like the exhalations of the Sun, 
 Falls back where first the motion was begun,
 
 i 54 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 And they who for no crime shall on thy brows 
 
 appear, 
 Bear less reproach than they who placed them 
 
 there." 
 
 The State-trap of the Law, however, 
 long survived Defoe's hymn to it, and 
 was unworthily employed against many 
 another great Englishman before its abo- 
 lition. That event was delayed till the 
 first year of Queen Victoria's reign ; the 
 House of Lords defending it, as it de- 
 fended all other abuses of our old penal 
 code, when the Commons in 1815 passed 
 a Bill for its abolition. 
 
 About the same time, Parliament ordered 
 to be burnt by the hangman a pamphlet 
 against the Test, which one John Humph- 
 rey, an aged Nonconformist minister, had 
 written and circulated among the mem- 
 bers of Parliament. 1 There seems to be 
 no record of the pamphlet's name ; and I 
 only guess it may be a work entitled, A 
 Draught for a Natmial Church accom- 
 modation, whereby the subjects of North 
 and South Britain, hozvever different in 
 their judgments concerning Episcopacy and 
 Presbytery, may yet be united (lyog). For, 
 to suggest union or compromise or recon- 
 ciliation between parties is generally to 
 court persecution from both. 
 
 1 Wilson's Defoe, hi. 52.
 
 Book-Fires of the Revolution. I 5 5 
 
 A book that was very famous in its clay, 
 on the opposite side to Defoe, was Doctor 
 Drake's Memorial of the Chunk of Eng- 
 land, published anonymously in 1705. 
 The Tory author was indignant that the 
 House of Lords should have rejected the 
 Bill against Occasional Conformity, which 
 would have made it impossible for Dis- 
 senters to hold any office by conforming 
 to the Test Act ; he complained of the 
 knavish pains of the Dissenters to divide 
 Churchmen into High and Low ; and he 
 declared that the present prospect of the 
 Church was " very melancholy," and that 
 of the government " not much more com- 
 fortable." Long habit has rendered us 
 callous to the melancholy state of the 
 Church and the discomfort of govern- 
 ments ; but in Queen Anne's time the 
 croakers' favourite cry was a serious 
 offence. The Queen's Speech, therefore, 
 of October 27 th, 1705, expressed strong 
 resentment at this representation of the 
 Church in danger ; both Houses, by con- 
 siderable majorities, voted the Church to 
 be " in a most safe and flourishing con- 
 dition " ; and a royal proclamation censured 
 both the book and its unknown author, 
 a few months after it had been presented 
 by the Grand Jury of the City, and 
 publicly burnt by the hangman. It was
 
 156 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 more rationally and effectually dealt with 
 in Defoe's High Church Legion, or the 
 Memorial examined; but one is some- 
 times tempted to wish that the cry of the 
 Church in danger might be as summarily 
 disposed of as it was in the reign of 
 Queen Anne, when to vote its safety was 
 deemed sufficient to insure it. 
 
 Drake's misfortunes as a writer w r ere as 
 conspicuous as his abilities. Two years 
 before the Memorial was burnt, his His- 
 toria Anglo-Scotica, purporting to give an 
 impartial history of the events that 
 occurred between England and Scotland 
 from William the Conqueror to Queen 
 Elizabeth, was burnt at Edinburgh (June 
 30th, 1703). It was dedicated to Sir 
 Edward Seymour, one of the Queen's 
 Commissioners for the Union, and a High 
 Churchman ; and as it also expressed the 
 hope that the Union would afford the 
 Scotch "as ample a field to love and 
 admire the generosity of the English as 
 they had theretofore to dread their valour," 
 it was clearly not calculated to please the 
 Scotch. They accordingly burned it for 
 its many reflections on the sovereignty 
 and independence of their crown and 
 nation. As the Memorial was also burnt 
 at Dublin, Drake enjoys the distinction of 
 having contributed a book to be burnt in
 
 Book-Fires of the Revolution. 157 
 
 each of the three kingdoms. He would, 
 perhaps, have done better to have stuck to 
 medicine ; and indeed the number of books 
 written by doctors, which have brought 
 their authors into trouble, is a remarkable 
 fact in the history of literature. 
 
 Next to Drake's Memorial, and closely 
 akin to it in argument, come the two 
 famous sermons of Dr. Sacheverell, the 
 friend of Addison ; sermons which made 
 a greater stir in the reign of Queen Anne 
 than any sermons have ever since made, 
 or seem ever likely to make again. They 
 were preached in August and November 
 1709, the first at Derby, called the Com- 
 munication of Sin, and the other at St. 
 Paul's. The latter, Perils among False 
 Brethren, is very vigorous, even to read, 
 and it is easy to understand the commo- 
 tion it caused. The False Brethren are 
 the Dissenters and Republicans ; Sach- 
 everell is as indignant with those " upstart 
 novelists " who presume " to evacuate the 
 grand sanction of the Gospel, the eternity 
 of hell torments," as with those false breth- 
 ren who " will renounce their creed and 
 read the Decalogue backward . . . fall 
 down and worship the very Devil himself 
 for the riches and honour of this world." 
 In his advocacy of non-resistance he was 
 thought to hit at the Glorious Revolution
 
 158 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 itself. " The grand security of our govern- 
 ment, and the very pillar upon which it 
 stands, is founded upon the steady belief of 
 the subject's obligation to an absolute and 
 unconditional obedience to the supreme 
 power in all things lawful, and the utter 
 illegality of any resistance upon any pre- 
 tence whatsoever." 
 
 Then came the great trial in the House 
 of Lords, and Sacheverell's most able de- 
 fence, often attributed to his friend Atter- 
 bury. This speech, which Boyer calls 
 " studied, artful, and pathetic," deeply 
 affected the fair sex, and even drew tears 
 from some of the tender-hearted; but a 
 certain lady to whom, before he preached 
 the sermon, Sacheverell had explained the 
 allusions in it to William III., the Ministry, 
 and Lord Godolphin, was so astonished at 
 the audacity of his public recantation that 
 she suddenly cried out, " The greatest 
 villain under the sun ! " But for this little 
 fact, one might think Sacheverell was 
 unfairly treated. At the end of it all, 
 however, he was only suspended from 
 preaching for three years, and his sermons 
 condemned to be burnt before the Royal 
 Exchange in presence of the Lord Mayor 
 and sheriffs ; a sentence so much more 
 lenient than at first seemed probable, that 
 bonfires and illuminations in London and
 
 Book-Fires of the Revolution. I 59 
 
 Westminster attested the general delight. 
 At the instance, too, of Sacheverell's 
 friends, certain other hooks were burnt 
 two days before his own, by order of the 
 House of Commons : so that the High 
 Church party had not altogether the worst 
 of the battle. The books so burnt were 
 the following : — 1. The Rights of the Chris- 
 tian Church asserted against the Romish 
 and all other Priests. By M. Tindal. 2. 
 A Defence of the Rights of the Christian 
 Church. 3. A Letter from a Country 
 Attorney to a Country Parson concerning 
 the Rights of the Church. 4. Le Clerc's 
 extract and judgment of the same. 5. 
 John Clendon's Tractatus Philosophico- 
 Theologicus de Persona : a book that dealt 
 with the subject of the Trinity. 
 
 Eoyer gives a curious description of 
 Sacheverell : "A man of large and strong 
 make and good symmetry of parts ; of a 
 livid complexion and audacious look, with- 
 out sprightliness ; the result and indication 
 of an envious, ill-natured, proud, sullen, 
 and ambitious spirit '' — clearly not the por- 
 trait of a friend. Lord Campbell thought 
 the St. Paul sermon contemptible, and 
 General Stanhope, in the debate, called it 
 nonsensical and incoherent. It seems to me 
 the very reverse, even if we abstract it from 
 its stupendous effect. Sacheverell, no doubt,
 
 1 60 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 was a more than usually narrow-minded 
 priest ; but in judging of the preacher we 
 must think also of the look and the voice 
 and the gestures, and these probably fully 
 made up, as they so often do, for anything 
 false or illogical in the sermon itself. 
 
 At all events, Sacheverell won for 
 himself a place in English history. That 
 he should have brought the House of 
 Lords into conflict with the Church, 
 causing it to condemn to the flames, 
 together with his own sermons, the famous 
 Oxford decree of 1683, which asserted 
 the most absolute claims of monarchy, 
 condemned twenty-seven propositions as 
 impious and seditious, and most of them 
 as heretical and blasphemous, and con- 
 demned the works of nineteen writers to 
 the flames, would alone entitle his name 
 to remembrance. 1 So incensed indeed 
 were the Commons, that they also con- 
 demned to be burnt the very Collections of 
 Passages referred to by Dr. Sacheverell in the 
 Answer to the Articles of his Impeachment. 
 
 1 See Somers' Tracts (1748), VII., 223, and the 
 Entire Confutation of Mr. Hoadley's Book, for the 
 decree itself, and the authors condemned. After 
 the Rye House Plot, which caused this decree, 
 Oxford addressed Charles II. as " the breath of our 
 nostrils, the anointed of the Lord " ; Cambridge 
 called him " the Darling of Heaven ! " Could the 
 servility of ultra-loyalty go further ?
 
 Book-Fires of the Revolution, 1 6 1 
 
 But Parliament was in a burning mood ; 
 for Sacheverell's friends, wishing to justify 
 his cry of the Church in danger, which 
 he had ascribed to the heretical works 
 lately printed, easily succeeded in pro- 
 curing the burning of Tindal's and Clen- 
 don's books, before mentioned. Nor can 
 any one who reads that immortal work, The 
 Rights of the Christian Church, asserted 
 against the Romish and all other Priests zvho 
 claim an independent power over it, wonder 
 at their so urging the House, however much 
 he may wonder at their succeeding. 
 
 The first edition of The Rights of the 
 Christian Church appeared in 1706, pub- 
 lished anonymously, but written by the 
 celebrated Matthew Tindal, than whom 
 All Souls' College has never had a more 
 distinguished Fellow, nor produced a more 
 brilliant writer. In those days, when the 
 question that most agitated men's minds 
 was whether the English Church was of 
 Divine Right, and so independent of the 
 civil power, or whether it was the creature 
 of, and therefore subject to, the law, no 
 work more convincingly proved the latter 
 than this work of Tindal ; a work which, 
 even now, ought to be far more generally 
 known than it is, no less for its great 
 historical learning than for its scathing 
 denunciations of priestcraft. 
 
 ii
 
 1 62 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 As the subordination of the Church to 
 the State is now a principle of general 
 acceptance, there is less need to give a 
 summary of Tindal's arguments, than to 
 quote some of the passages which led the 
 writer to predict, when composing it, that 
 he was writing a book that would drive 
 the clergy mad. The promoting the inde- 
 pendent power of the clergy has, he says, 
 " done more mischief to human societies 
 than all the gross superstitions of the 
 heathen, who were nowhere ever so stupid 
 as to entertain such a monstrous contradic- 
 tion as two independent powers in the same 
 society ; and, consequently, their priests 
 were not capable of doing so much mis- 
 chief to the Commonwealth as some since 
 have been." The fact, that in heathen 
 times greater differences in religion never 
 gave rise to such desolating feuds as had 
 always rent Christendom, proves that 
 " the best religion has had the misfortune 
 to have the worst priests." " 'Tis an 
 amazing thing to consider that, though 
 Christ and His Apostles inculcated nothing 
 so much as universal charity, and enjoined 
 their disciples to treat, not only one 
 another, notwithstanding their differences, 
 but even Jews and Gentiles, with all the 
 kindness imaginable, yet that their pre- 
 tended successors should make it their
 
 Book-Fires of the Revolution. 1 6 3 
 
 business to teach such doctrines as destroy 
 all love and friendship among people of 
 different persuasions ; and that with so 
 good success that never did mortals hate, 
 abhor, and damn one another more 
 heartily, or are readier to do one another 
 more mischief, than the different sects of 
 Christians." " If in the time of that wise 
 heathen Ammianus Marcellinus, the Chris- 
 tians bore such hatred to one another 
 that, as he complains, no beasts were 
 such deadly enemies to men as the more 
 savage Christians were generally to one 
 another, what would he, if now alive, say 
 of them ? " etc. " The custom of sacri- 
 ficing men among the heathens was owing 
 to their priests, especially the Druids. . . . 
 And the sacrificing of Christians upon 
 account of their religious tenets (for which 
 millions have suffered) was introduced for 
 no other reason than that the clergy, who 
 took upon them to be the sole judges of 
 religion, might, without control, impose 
 what selfish doctrines they pleased." Of 
 the High Church clergy he wittily ob- 
 serves : " Some say that their lives might 
 serve for a very good rule, if men would 
 act quite contrary to them ; for then there 
 is no Christian virtue which they could 
 fail of observing." 
 
 If Tindal wished to madden the clergy.
 
 1 64 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 he certainly succeeded, for the pulpits 
 raged and thundered against his book. 
 But the only sermon to which he re- 
 sponded was Ur. Wotton's printed Visita- 
 tion sermon preached before the Bishop 
 of Lincoln ; and his Defence of the Rights 
 of the Christian Church (55 pages) was 
 burnt in company with the larger work. 
 It contained the " Letter from a Country 
 Attorney to a Country Parson concerning 
 the Rights of the Church," and the philo- 
 sopher Le Clerc's appreciative reference to 
 Tindal's work in his Bibliotheque Choisie. 
 
 Nevertheless, Queen Anne had given 
 Tindal a present of ^500 for his book, and 
 told him that she believed he had banished 
 Popery beyond a possibility of its return. 
 Tindal himself, it should be said, had 
 become a Roman Catholic under James II. 
 and then a Protestant again, but whether 
 before or after the abdication of James is 
 not quite clear. He placed a high value 
 on his own work, for when, in December 
 1707, the Grand Jury of Middlesex pre- 
 sented The Rights its author sagely re- 
 flected that such a proceeding would 
 " occasion the reading of one of the best 
 books that have been published in our 
 age by many more people than otherwise 
 would have read it." This probably was 
 the case, with the result that it was burnt,
 
 Book-Fins of the Revolution. 1 6 5 
 
 as aforesaid, by the hangman in 17 10 by 
 order of the House of Commons, at the 
 instance of Sacheverell's friends, in the 
 very same week that Sacheverell's sermons 
 themselves were burnt ! The House 
 wished perhaps to show itself impartial. 
 The victory, for the time at least, was 
 with Sacheverell and the Church. The 
 Whig ministry was overturned, and its 
 Tory successor passed the Bill against 
 Occasional Conformity, and the Schism 
 Act ; and, had the Queen's reign been 
 prolonged, would probably have repealed 
 the very meagre Toleration Act of 1689. 
 Tindal, however, despite the Tory reaction, 
 continued to write on the side of civil and 
 religious liberty, keeping his best work for 
 the last, published within three years of 
 his death, when he was past seventy, 
 namely, Christianity as Old as the Creation; 
 or, the Gospel a republication of the Religion 
 of Nature (1730). Strange to say, this 
 work, criticised as it was, was neither 
 presented nor burnt. I have no reason, 
 therefore, to present it here, and indeed it 
 is a book of which rather to read the whole 
 than merely extracts. 
 
 About the same time that Sacheverell's 
 sermons were the sensation of London, a 
 sermon preached in Dublin on the Pres- 
 byterian side was attended there with the
 
 1 66 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 same marks of distinction. In November 
 171 1 Boyse's sermon on The Office of a 
 Scriptural Bishop was burnt by the hang- 
 man, at the command of the Irish House 
 of Lords. Unfortunately one cannot ob- 
 tain this sermon without a great number 
 of others, amongst which the author em- 
 bedded it in a huge and repulsive folio 
 comprising all his works. The sermon 
 was first preached and printed in 1709, 
 and reprinted the next year : it enters at 
 length into the historical origin of Episco- 
 pacy in the early Church, the author allud- 
 ing as follows to the Episcopacy aimed at 
 by too many of his own contemporaries : 
 " A grand and pompous sinecure, a domi- 
 nation over all the churches and ministers 
 in a large district managed by others as 
 his delegates, but requiring little labour 
 of a man's own, and all this supported 
 by large revenues and attended with con- 
 siderable secular honours." Boyse could 
 hardly say the same in these days, true, no 
 doubt, as it was in his own. Still, that 
 even an Irish House of Lords should have 
 seen fit to burn his sermon makes one 
 think that the political extinction of that 
 body can have been no serious loss to the 
 sum-total of the wisdom of the world. 
 
 The last writer to incur a vote of burn- 
 ing from the House of Commons in Queen
 
 Book-Fires of the Revolution. 167 
 
 Anne's reign was William Fleetwood, 
 Bishop of St. Asaph ; and this for the 
 preface to four sermons he had preached 
 and published: (1) on the death of Queen 
 Mary, 1694 ; (2) on the death of the Duke 
 of Gloucester, 1700 ; (3) on the death of 
 King William, 1701; (4) on the Queen's 
 Accession, in 1702. It was voted to the 
 public flames on June 10th, i7i2,as "mali- 
 cious and factious, highly reflecting upon 
 the present administration of public affairs 
 under Her Majesty, and tending to create 
 discord and sedition among her subjects." 
 The burning of the preface caused it to be 
 the more read, and some 4,000 numbers 
 of the Spectator, No. 384, carried it far 
 and wide. Probably it was more read 
 than the prelate's numerous tracts and 
 sermons, such as his Essay on Miracles, 
 or his Vindication of the Thirteenth of 
 Romans. 
 
 The bishop belonged to the party that 
 was dissatisfied with the terms of the Peace 
 of Utrecht, then pending, and his preface 
 was clearly written as a vehicle or vent for 
 his political sentiments. The offensive 
 passage ran as follows : " We were, as all 
 the world imagined then, just entering on 
 the ways that promised to lead to such 
 a peace as would have answered all the 
 prayers of our religious Queen . . . when
 
 1 68 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 God, for our sins, permitted the spirit of 
 discord to go forth, and by troubling sore 
 the camp, the city, and the country (and 
 oh ! that it had altogether spared the 
 places sacred to His worship !), to spoil 
 for a time the beautiful and pleasing pro- 
 spect, and give us, in its stead, I know not 
 what — our enemies will tell the rest with 
 pleasure." Writing to Bishop Burnet, he 
 expresses himself still more strongly : " I 
 am afraid England has lost all her con- 
 straining power, and that France thinks 
 she has us in her hands, and may use us 
 as she pleases, which, I daresay, will be 
 as scurvily as we deserve. What a change 
 has two years made ! Your lordship may 
 now imagine you are growing young again ; 
 for we are fallen, methinks, into the very 
 dregs of Charles the Second's politics." 
 Assuredly Bishop Fleetwood had done 
 better to reserve his political opinions for 
 private circulation, instead of exposing 
 them to the world under the guise and 
 shelter of what purported to be a religious 
 publication. 
 
 But he belonged to the age of the 
 great political churchmen, when the 
 Church played primarily the part of a 
 great political institution, and her more 
 ambitious members made the profession 
 of religion subsidiary to the interests
 
 Book- Fires of the Revolution. 1 69 
 
 of the political party they espoused. 
 The type is gradually becoming extinct, 
 and the time is long since past when 
 the preface to a bishop's sermons, or 
 even his sermons themselves, could con- 
 vulse the State. One cannot, for instance, 
 conceive the recurrence of such a com- 
 motion as was raised by Fleetwood or 
 Sacheverell, possible as everything is in 
 the zigzag course of history. Still less can 
 one conceive a repetition of such perse- 
 cution of Dissent as has been illustrated 
 by the cases of Delaune and Defoe. For 
 either the Church moderated her hostility 
 to Dissent, or her power to exercise it 
 lessened ; no instance occurring after the 
 reign of Queen Anne of any book being 
 sentenced to the flames on the side either 
 of Orthodoxy or Dissent.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Our Last Book-Fires. 
 
 HE eighteenth century, which saw 
 the abolition, or the beginning 
 of the abolition, of so many bad 
 customs of the most respectable 
 lineage and antiquity, saw also the hang- 
 man employed for the last time for the 
 punishment of books. The custom of 
 book-burning, never formally abolished, 
 died out at last from a gradual decline of 
 public belief in its efficacy ; just as tor- 
 tures died out, and judicial ordeals died 
 out, and, as we may hope, even war will 
 die out, before the silent, disintegrating 
 forces of increasing intelligence. As our 
 history goes on, one becomes more struck 
 by the many books which escape burning 
 than by the few which incur it. The tale 
 of some of those which were publicly 
 burnt during the eighteenth century has 
 already been told ; so that it only remains 
 to bring together, under their various 
 heads, the different literary productions
 
 Our Last Book-Fires. I 7 1 
 
 which complete the record of British 
 works thus associated with the memory of 
 the hangman. 
 
 After the beginning of the Long Parlia- 
 ment, the House of Commons constituted 
 itself the chief book-burning authority ; 
 but the House of Lords also, of its own 
 motion, occasionally ordered the burning 
 of offensive literary productions. Thus, 
 on March 29th, 1642, they sentenced John 
 Bond, for forging a letter purporting to be 
 addressed to Charles I. at York from the 
 Queen in Holland, to stand in the pillory 
 at Westminster Hall door and in Cheap- 
 side, with a paper on his head inscribed 
 with " A contriver of false and scandalous 
 libels," the said letter to be called in and 
 burnt near him as he stood there. 
 
 On December 18th, 1667, they sen- 
 tenced William Carr, for dispersing scan- 
 dalous papers against Lord Gerrard, of 
 Brandon, to a fine of ^1000 to the 
 King, and imprisonment in the Fleet, and 
 ordered the said papers to be burnt. 
 
 On March 17th, 1697, a sentence of 
 burning was voted by them against a libel 
 called Mr. Bertie's Case, with some Re- 
 marks on the Judgment Given Therein. 
 
 Sometimes they thought in this way to 
 safeguard not merely truth in general, or 
 the honour of their House, but also the
 
 172 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 interests of religion ; as when, on Decem- 
 ber 8th, 1693, they ordered to be burnt 
 by the hangman the very next day a 
 pamphlet that had been sent to several 
 of them, entitled A Brief but Clear Con- 
 futation of the Trinity, a copy of which 
 possibly still lies hid in some private 
 libraries, but about which, not having 
 seen it, I can offer no judgment. At that 
 time Lords and Commons alike disquieted 
 themselves much over religious heresy, 
 for in 1698 the Commons petitioned 
 William III. to suppress pernicious books 
 and pamphlets directed against the Trinity 
 and other articles of the Faith, and gave 
 ready assent to a Bill from the Lords " for 
 the more effectual suppressing of atheism, 
 blasphemy, and profaneness." But it 
 would seem that these efforts had but a 
 qualified success, for on February 12th, 
 1 720, the Lords condemned a work which, 
 "in a daring, impious manner, ridiculed 
 the doctrine of the Trinity and all re- 
 vealed religion," and was called, A Sober 
 Reply to Mr. Higgs' Merry Arguments 
 from the Light of Nature for the Tritheistic 
 Doctrine of the Trinity, with a Postscript 
 relating to the Rev. Dr. Waterland. This 
 work, which was the last to be burnt as 
 an offence against religion, was the work 
 of one Joseph Hall, who was a gentleman
 
 Oar Last Book-Fires. 173 
 
 and a serjeant-at-arms to the King, and 
 in this way won his small title to fame. 
 
 By the beginning of the eighteenth 
 century, the House of Lords had come 
 to assume a more active jurisdiction over 
 the Press. Thus in 1702, within a few 
 days we find them severely censuring the 
 notorious Dr. Drake's History of the Last 
 Parliament, begun 1700 ; somebody's Tom 
 Double, returned out of the Country ; or, 
 The True Picture of a modern Whig : 
 Dr. Blinke's violent sermon, preached on 
 January 30th, 1701, before the Lower 
 House of Convocation ; and a pamphlet, 
 inviting over the Elector of Hanover. In 
 the same month they condemned to be 
 burnt by the hangman a book entitled, 
 Animadversions upon the two last $oth 
 of January Sermons : one preached to the 
 Honourable House of Commons, the other 
 to the Loiver House of Convocation. In 
 a letter. They resolved that it was "a 
 malicious, villainous libel, containing very 
 many reflections on King Charles I., of 
 ever-blessed memory, and tending to the 
 subversion of the Monarchy." 
 
 But the more general practice was for 
 the House of Lords to seek the concur- 
 rence of the other House in the consign- 
 ment of printed matter to the flames ; a 
 concurrence which in those days was of
 
 174 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 far more easy attainment over book-burn- 
 ing or anything else than it is in our own 
 time, or is ever likely to be in the future. 
 It would also seem that during the 
 eighteenth century it was generally the 
 House of Lords that took the initiative in 
 the time-honoured practice of condemning 
 disagreeable opinions to the care of the 
 hangman. 
 
 The unanimity alluded to between our 
 two Houses was displayed in several in- 
 stances. Thus on November i6th, 1722, 
 the Commons agreed with the resolution 
 of the Peers to have burnt at the Ex- 
 change the Declaration of the Pretender, 
 beginning: "Declaration of James III., 
 King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 
 to all his loving Subjects of the three 
 Nations, and to all Foreign Princes and 
 States, to serve as a Foundation for a 
 Lasting Peace in Europe," and signed 
 " James Rex." In this interesting docu- 
 ment, George I. was invited to quietly 
 deliver up his possession of the British 
 throne in return for James's bestowal on 
 him of the title of king in his native 
 dominions, and the ultimate succession to 
 the same title in England. The indigna- 
 tion of the Peers raised their effusive 
 loyalty to fever point, and they promptly 
 voted this singular document "a false,
 
 Our Last Book- Fi res. 1 7 5 
 
 insolent, and traitorous libel, the highest 
 indignity to his most sacred Majesty- 
 King George, our lawful and undoubted 
 sovereign, full of arrogance and presump- 
 tion, in supposing the Pretender in a con- 
 dition to offer terms to his Majesty ; and 
 injurious to the honour of the British 
 nation, in imagining that a free, Protestant 
 people, happy under the government of 
 the best of princes, can be so infatuated 
 as, without the utmost contempt and 
 indignation, to hear of any terms from a 
 Popish bigoted Pretender." But was it 
 loyalty or sycophancy that could thus 
 transmute even George I. into " the best 
 of princes " ? 
 
 A less serious cause of alarm to their 
 loyalty occurred in 1750, when certain 
 Constitutional Queries were "earnestly 
 recommended to the serious consideration 
 of every true Briton." This was directed 
 against the Duke of Cumberland, of Cul- 
 loden fame, who was in it compared to the 
 crooked-backed Richard III. ; and it was 
 generally attributed to Lord Egmont.M.P., 
 as spokesman of the opposition to the 
 government of George II., then headed 
 by the Prince of Wales, who died the 
 year following. It caused a great sensa- 
 tion in both Houses, though several 
 members in the Commons defended it.
 
 176 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 Nevertheless, at a conference both Houses 
 voted it "a false, malicious, scandalous, 
 infamous, and seditious libel, containing 
 the most false, audacious, and abomin- 
 able calumnies and indignities against his 
 Majesty, and the most presumptuous and 
 wicked insinuations that our laws, liberties, 
 and properties, and the excellent constitu- 
 tion of this kingdom, were in danger under 
 his Majesty's legal, mild, and gracious 
 government" . . . and that "in abhor- 
 rence and detestation of such abominable 
 and seditious practices," it should be burnt 
 in New Palace Yard by the hangman on 
 January 25th. Even a reward of ^1,000 
 failed to discover the author, printer, or 
 publisher of this paper, the condemnation 
 of which rather whets the curiosity than 
 satisfies the reason. I would shrink from 
 saying that a paper so widely disseminated 
 no longer exists ; but even if it does not, 
 its non-existence affords no proof that in 
 its time it lacked justification. 
 
 But what justification was there for 
 George King, the bookseller, who a few 
 years later did a very curious thing, actually 
 forging and publishing a Royal speech — 
 " His Majesty's most Gracious Speech to 
 both Houses of Parliament on Thursday, 
 December 2nd, 1756"? Surely never since 
 the giants of old assaulted heaven, was
 
 Our Last Book-Fires. \y~ 
 
 there such an invasion of sanctity, or so 
 profane a scaling of the heights of intel- 
 lect ! What could the Lords do, being a 
 patriotic body, but vote such an attempt, 
 without even waiting for a conference with 
 the Commons, " an audacious forgery and 
 high contempt of his Majesty, his crown 
 and dignity," and condemn the said forgery 
 to be burnt on the 8th at Westminster, and 
 three days later at the Exchange ? How 
 could they sentence King to less than six 
 months of Newgate and a fine of ^50, 
 though, in their gentleness or fickleness, 
 they ultimately released him from some 
 of the former and all the latter penalty ? 
 Happy those who possess this political 
 curiosity, and can compare it with the 
 speech which the King really did make 
 on the same day, and which, perhaps, did 
 not show any marked superiority over the 
 forged imitation. 
 
 The next book-fire to which history 
 brings us is associated with one of the 
 most important and singular episodes in 
 the annals of the British Constitution. I 
 allude to the famous North Briton, No. 45, 
 for which, as constituting a seditious libel, 
 Wilkes, then member for Aylesbury, was, 
 in spite of his privilege as a member, 
 seized and imprisoned in the Tower 
 (1763). We know from the experiences 
 
 12
 
 178 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 of recent times how ready the House of 
 Commons is to throw Parliamentary or 
 popular privileges to the winds whenever 
 they stand in the way of political resent- 
 ment, and so it was in our fathers' times. 
 For, in spite of a vigorous speech from 
 Pitt against a surrender of privilege which 
 placed Parliament entirely at the mercy of 
 the Crown, the Commons voted, by 258 
 to 133, that such privilege afforded no pro- 
 tection against the publication of seditious 
 libels. The House of Lords, of course, 
 concurred, but not without a protest from 
 the dissentient minority, headed by Lord 
 Temple, which has the true ring of politi- 
 cal wisdom ; and, like so many similar 
 protests, is so instinct with zeal for public 
 liberty as to atone in some measure for 
 the fundamental injustice of the existence 
 of an hereditary chamber. They held it 
 " highly unbecoming the dignity, gravity, 
 and wisdom of the House of Peers, as 
 well as of their justice, thus judicially to 
 explain away and diminish the privileges 
 of their persons," etc. 
 
 A few days later (December 1st) a 
 second conference between the two 
 Houses condemned No. 45 to be burnt 
 at the Royal Exchange by the common 
 hangman. And so it was on the 3rd, 
 but not without a riot, which conveys a
 
 Our Las I Book- Fins. ij<j 
 
 vivid picture of those "good old" or tur- 
 bulent days ; for the mob, encouraged by- 
 well-dressed people from the shops and 
 balconies, who cried out, " Well done, 
 boys ! bravely done, boys ! " set up such 
 a hissing, that the sheriff's horses were 
 frightened, and brave Alderman Hurley 
 with difficulty reached the place where the 
 paper was to be burnt. The mob seized 
 what they could of the paper from the 
 burning torch of the executioner, and 
 finally thrashed the officials from the field. 
 Practically, too, they had thrashed the 
 custom out of existence, for there were 
 very few such burnings afterwards. 
 
 Wilkes was then expelled from the 
 House of Commons ; and the same- 
 House, becoming suddenly as tender of 
 its privileges as it had previously been 
 indifferent to them, passed a resolution, to 
 which the Attorney-General, Sir Fletcher 
 Norton, was said to have declared that he 
 would pay no more regard than " to the 
 oaths of so many drunken porters in 
 Covent Garden," to the effect that a 
 general warrant for apprehending and 
 seizing the authors, printers, and pub- 
 lishers of a seditious and treasonable 
 libel was not warranted by law. Such 
 was the vaunted wisdom of our ancestors, 
 that, having first decided that there could
 
 I So Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 be no breach of privilege to protect a 
 seditious libel, they then asserted the 
 illegality of the very proceedings they 
 had already justified ! Truly they are not 
 altogether in the wrong who deem that 
 the chief glory of our Constitution lies in 
 its singular elasticity. 
 
 All the numbers of the North Briton, 
 especially No. 45, have high interest as 
 political and literary curiosities. Com- 
 paring even now the King's speech on 
 April 19th, 1763, at the close of the Seven 
 Years' War, with the passage in No. 45 
 which contained the sting of the whole, 
 one feels that Walpole hardly exaggerated 
 when he said that Wilkes had given " a 
 flat lie to the King himself." Perhaps so ; 
 but are royal speeches as a rule conspicu- 
 ous for their truth ? The King had said : 
 " My expectations have been fully an- 
 swered by the happy effects which the 
 several allies of my crown have derived 
 from this salutary measure. The powers 
 at war with my good brother the King 
 of Prussia have been induced to agree 
 to such terms of accommodation as that 
 great prince has approved ; and the suc- 
 cess which has attended my negotiation 
 has necessarily and immediately diffused 
 the blessings of peace through every part 
 of Europe." Wilkes's comment was as
 
 Our Last Book-Fins. I 8 I 
 
 follows: "The infamous fallacy of this 
 whole sentence is apparent to all mankind ; 
 for it is known that the King of Prussia 
 did not barely approve, but absolutely 
 dictated as conqueror, every article of the 
 terms of peace. No advantage of any 
 kind has accrued to that magnanimous 
 prince from our negotiation ; but he was 
 basely deserted by the Scottish Prime 
 Minister of England " (Lord Bute). And, 
 after all, that truth was on the side of 
 Wilkes rather than of the King is the 
 verdict of history. 
 
 The House of Lords, soon after its un- 
 constitutional attack upon popular liberties 
 in the case of Wilkes, showed itself as 
 suddenly enamoured of them a few 
 months later, when Timothy Brecknock, 
 a hack writer, published his Droit le Roy, 
 or a Digest of the Rights and Prerogatives 
 of the Imperial Crown of Great Britain 
 (February 1764). Timothy, like Cowell 
 in James I.'s time, favoured extreme 
 monarchical pretensions, so much to the 
 offence of the defenders of the people's 
 rights, that they voted it " a false, mali- 
 cious, and traitorous libel, inconsistent 
 with the principles of the Revolution to 
 which we owe the present happy esta- 
 blishment, and an audacious insult upon 
 His Majesty, whose paternal care has been
 
 1 82 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 so early and so effectually shown to the 
 religion, laws, and liberties of his people ; 
 tending to subvert the fundamental laws 
 and liberties of these kingdoms and to 
 introduce an illegal and arbitrary power." 
 The Commons concurred with the Lords 
 in condemning a copy to the flames at 
 Westminster Palace Yard and the Ex- 
 change on February 25th and 27th respect- 
 ively ; and the book is consequently so 
 rare that for practical purposes it no 
 longer exists. Sad to say, the Royalist 
 author came to as bad an end as his book, 
 for in his own person as well he came to 
 require the attentions of the hangman for 
 a murder he committed in Ireland. 
 
 The next work which the Lower House 
 concurred with the Upper in consigning to 
 the hangman was The Present Crisis with 
 regard to America Considered (February 
 24th, 1775); but of this book the fate it 
 met with seems now the only ascertainable 
 fact about it. It appears to enjoy the real 
 distinction of having been the last book 
 condemned by Parliament in England to 
 the flames ; although that honour has 
 sometimes been claimed for the Commer- 
 cial Restraints of Ireland, by Provost Hely 
 Hutchinson (1779); a claim which will 
 remain to be considered after a brief sur- 
 vey of the works which in Scotland the
 
 Our Last Book- Lives. 183 
 
 wisdom of Parliament saw fit to punish by 
 fire. 
 
 The first order of this sort was dated 
 November 16th, 1700, and sentenced to 
 be burnt by the hangman at Mercat 
 Cross His Majesty's High Commissmi 
 and Estates of Parliament. 
 
 In the same way was treated A Defe?ice 
 of the Scots abdicating Darien, including an 
 Answer to the Defence of the Scots Settle- 
 ment there, and A Vindication of the same 
 pamphlet, both by Walter Herries, who 
 was ordered to be apprehended. More 
 interesting to read would doubtless be a 
 lampoon, said to reflect on everything 
 sacred to Scotland, and burnt accordingly, 
 which was called Caledonia : or, the Pedlar 
 turned Merchant. 
 
 Dr. James Drake, whose Memorial of 
 the Church of England was burnt in Eng- 
 land in 1705, published a work two years 
 earlier which stirred the Scotch Parliament 
 to the same fiery point of indignation. 
 This was his already mentioned Historia 
 Anglo-Scotica : an impartial History of all 
 that happened between the Kings and King- 
 doms of England and Scotland from the 
 beginning of the Reign of William the Con- 
 queror to the Reign of Queen Elizabeth 
 (1703). This stout volume of 423 pages 
 Prake printed without any date or name,
 
 184 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 pretending that the manuscript had come 
 to him in such a way that it was impos- 
 sible to trace its authorship. He dedicated 
 it to Sir Edward Seymour, one of Queen 
 Anne's commissioners for the then medi- 
 tated and unpopular union between the 
 two kingdoms. It gave the gravest offence, 
 and was burnt at the Mercat Cross on June 
 30th for containing " many reflections on 
 the sovereignty and independence of this 
 crown and nation." But, apart from the 
 history that attaches to it, I doubt if any 
 one could regard it with interest. 
 
 No less offence was given to Scotland 
 by the English Whig writer William 
 Attwood, whose Superiority and Direct 
 Dominion of the Imperial Crown of Eng- 
 land over the Crown and Kingdom of 
 Scotland, the true Foundation of a Compleat 
 Union reasserted (1704), was burnt as 
 " scurrilous and full of falsehoods," whilst 
 a liberal reward was voted to Hodges and 
 Anderson, who by their pens had advo- 
 cated the independence of the Scotch 
 crown. Ten years later Attwood contri- 
 buted another work to the flames, called 
 The Scotch Patriot Unmasked (17 15). 
 Attwood was a barrister by profession, a 
 controversialist in practice, writing against 
 the theories of Filmer and the Tories. He 
 had a great knowledge of old charters, and
 
 Our Last Book-Fires. 185 
 
 wrote an able but inconclusive answer to 
 Molyneux' Case for Ireland. He last 
 appears as Chief Justice in New York, 
 where he became involved in debt and 
 died. 
 
 In 1706 two works were condemned to 
 the Mercat Cross : (1) An Account of the 
 Burning of the Articles of Union at Dum- 
 fries ; (2) Queries to the Presbyterian 
 Noblemen, Barons, Burgesses, Ministers, 
 and Commissiotiers in Scotland who are for 
 the Scheme of an Incorporating Union with 
 England. 
 
 Hutchinson's Commercial Restravits of 
 Ireland, published in 1779, and reviewing 
 the progress of English misgovernment, 
 proved the correctness of Molyneux' 
 prognostications nearly a century before. 
 "Can the history of any fruitful country 
 on the globe," he asked (and the question 
 may be asked still), " enjoying peace for 
 fourscore years, and not visited by plague 
 or pestilence, produce so many recorded 
 instances of the poverty and wretchedness 
 and of the reiterated want and misery of 
 the lower orders of the people ? There 
 is no such example in ancient or modern 
 history." 
 
 That a book of such sentiments should 
 have been burnt, as easier so to deal with 
 than to answer, would accord well enough
 
 I 86 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 with antecedent probability ; but, inas- 
 much as there is no such record in the 
 Commons' Journals, the probability must 
 remain that Captain Valentine Blake, M.P. 
 for Galway, who, in a letter to the Times 
 of February 14th, 1846, appears to have 
 been the first to assert the fact, erroneously 
 identified the fate of Hutchinson's anony- 
 mous work with the then received version 
 of the fate of the work of Molyneux. 
 The rarity of the first edition of the Com- 
 mercial Restraints may well enough accord 
 with other methods of suppression than 
 burning. 
 
 The Present Crisis, therefore, of 1775, 
 must retain the distinction of having been 
 the last book to be condemned to the 
 public fire ; and with it a practice which 
 can appeal for its descent to classical 
 Greece and Rome passed at last out of 
 fashion and favour, without any actual 
 legislative abolition. When, in 1795, the 
 great stir was made by Reeve's Thoughts 
 on English Government, Sheridan's pro- 
 posal to have it burnt met with little ap- 
 proval, and it escaped with only a censure. 
 Reeve, president of an association against 
 Republicans and Levellers, like Cowell 
 and Brecknock before him, gave offence 
 by the extreme claims he made for the 
 English monarch. The relation between
 
 Our Last Book-Fires. 187 
 
 our two august chambers and the monarchy 
 he compared to that between goodly- 
 branches and the tree itself: they were 
 only branches, deriving their origin and 
 nutriment from their common parent ; 
 but though they might be lopped off, the 
 tree would remain a tree still. The 
 Houses could give advice and consent, 
 but the Government and its administration 
 in all its parts rested wholly and solely 
 with the King and his nominees. That 
 a book of such sentiments should have 
 escaped burning is doubtless partly due to 
 the panic of Republicanism then raging 
 in England ; but it also shows the gradual 
 growth of a sensible indifference to the 
 power of the pen. 
 
 And when we think of the freedom, 
 almost unchecked, of the literature of the 
 century now closing, of the impunity with 
 which speculation attacks the very roots 
 of all our political and theological tra- 
 ditions, and compare this state of liberty 
 with the servitude of literature in the 
 three preceding centuries, when it rested 
 with archbishop or Commons or Lords 
 not only to commit writings to the flames 
 but to inflict cruelties and indignities on 
 the writers, we cannot but recognise how 
 proportionate to the advance we have made 
 in toleration have been the benefits we
 
 I 88 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 have derived from it. Possibly this tolera- 
 tion arose from the gradual discovery that 
 the practical consequences of writings 
 seldom keep pace with the aim of the 
 writer or the fears of authority ; that, for 
 instance, neither is property endangered 
 by literary demonstrations of its im- 
 morality, nor are churches emptied by 
 criticism. At all events, taking the risk 
 of consequences, we have entered on an 
 era of almost complete literary impunity ; 
 the bonfire is as extinct as the pillory ; the 
 only fiery ordeal is that of criticism, and 
 dread of the reviewer has taken the place 
 of all fear of the hangman. 
 
 Whether the change is all gain, or the 
 milder method more effectual than the 
 old one, I would hesitate to affirm. He 
 would be a bold man who would assert 
 any lack of burnworthy books. The older 
 custom had perhaps a certain picturesque- 
 ness which was lost with it. It was a bit 
 of old English life, reaching far back into 
 history — a custom that would have been 
 not unworthy of the brush of Hogarth. 
 For all that we cannot regret it. The 
 practice became so common, and lent 
 itself so readily to abuse by its indiscri- 
 minate application in the interests of reli- 
 gious bigotry or political partisanship, that 
 the lesson of history is one of warning
 
 Our Last Book-Fires. 189 
 
 against it. Such a practice is only de- 
 fensible or impressive in proportion to 
 the rarity of its use. Applied not oftener 
 than once or twice in a generation, in the 
 case of some work that flagrantly shocked 
 or injured the national conscience, the 
 book-fire might have retained, or might 
 still recover, its place in the economy 
 of well-organised States; and the stigma 
 it failed of by reason of its frequency 
 might still attach to it by reason of its 
 rarity. 
 
 If, then, it were possible (as it surely 
 would be) so to regulate and restrict its 
 use that it should serve only as the last 
 expression of the indignation of an offended 
 community instead of the ready weapon of 
 a party or a clique, one can conceive its 
 revival being not without utility. To take 
 an illustration. With the ordinary daily 
 libels of the public press the community 
 as such has no concern ; there is no need 
 to grudge them their traditional impunity. 
 But supposing a newspaper, availing itself 
 of an earlier reputation and a wide circu- 
 lation, to publish as truths, highly damag- 
 ing to individuals, what it knows or might 
 know to be forgeries, the limit has clearly 
 been overstepped of the bearable liberty 
 of the press ; the cause of the injured 
 individual becomes the cause of the in-
 
 190 Books Condemned to be Burnt. 
 
 jured community, insulted by the unscru- 
 pulous advantage that has been taken of 
 its trustfulness and of its inability to judge 
 soundly where all the data for a sound 
 judgment are studiously withheld. Such 
 an action is as much and as flagrant a 
 crime or offence against the community 
 as an act of robbery or murder, which, 
 though primarily an injury to the indi- 
 vidual, is primarily avenged as an injury 
 to the State. As such it calls for punish- 
 ment, nor could any punishment be more 
 appropriate than one which caused the 
 offending newspaper to atone by dishonour 
 for the dishonour it sought to inflict. 
 Condemnation by Parliament to the flames 
 would exactly meet the exigencies of a 
 case so rare and exceptional, and would 
 succeed in inflicting that disgrace of which 
 such a punishment often formerly failed 
 by very reason of its too frequent applica- 
 tion.
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 FTER the conspiracy, known as 
 the Rye House Plot, to kill 
 Charles II. and his brother, 
 the Duke of York, the Univer- 
 sity of Oxford ordered the public burning 
 of books which ran counter to the doctrine 
 of the Divine right of kings. As the 
 decree is a literary and political curiosity 
 of the highest order, and not easily 
 accessible, I here transcribe it from Lord 
 Somers' Tracts. The authors whose books 
 were condemned are sometimes referred 
 to quite generally, so that some arc diffi- 
 cult to identify, but the following appear 
 to be the principal ones that incurred 
 the fiery indignation of the University : — i. 
 Rutherford's Lex Rex ; 2. G. Buchanan's 
 De Jure Reg/ii apud Scotos ; 3. Bellar- 
 mine's De Potestate Papa, and his De 
 Conriliis et Ecclesia Militante; 4. Milton's 
 Eikonoklastes, and his Defensio Populi 
 Anglicani ; 5. Goodwin's Obstructours <>J 
 fustice ; 6. Baxter's Holy CommonwealtJi ;
 
 192 Appendix. 
 
 7. Dolman's Succession ; 8. Hobbes' De 
 Give and Leviathan. 
 
 The Judgment and Decree of the University 
 of Oxford, passed in their Convocation, 
 July 21, 1683, against certain per- 
 nicious books, and damnable doctrines, 
 destructive to the sacred persons of 
 princes, their State and Government, 
 and of all Human Society. 
 
 " Although the barbarous assassination 
 lately enterprised against the person of his 
 sacred majesty and his royal brother, engages 
 all our thoughts to reflect with utmost de- 
 testation and abhorrence on that execrable 
 villainy, hateful to God and man, and pay 
 our due acknowledgments to the Divine 
 Providence, which, by extraordinary methods, 
 brought it to pass, that the breath of our 
 nostrils, the anointed of the Lord, is not 
 taken in the pit which was prepared for him, 
 and that under his shadow we continue to 
 live and to enjoy the blessings of his govern- 
 ment ; yet, notwithstanding, we find it to be 
 a necessary duty at this time to search into 
 and lay open those impious doctrines, which 
 having been of late studiously disseminated, 
 gave rise and growth to those nefarious 
 attempts, and pass upon them our solemn 
 public censure and decree of condemnation. 
 
 " Therefore, to the honour of the holy 
 and undivided Trinity, the preservation of 
 Catholic truth in the Church, and that the 
 king's majesty may be secured both from
 
 Appendix. 193 
 
 the attempts of open bloody enemies and 
 machinations of treacherous heretics and 
 schismatics, we, the vice-chancellor, doctors, 
 proctors, and masters regent, met in convo- 
 cation, in the accustomed manner, the one 
 and twentieth day of July, in the year 1683, 
 concerning certain propositions contained in 
 divers books and writings, published in the 
 English and also in the Latin tongue, re- 
 pugnant to the Holy Scriptures, decrees of 
 councils, writings of the fathers, the faith 
 and profession of the primitive Church, and 
 also destruction of the kingly government, 
 the safety of his Majesty's person, the public 
 peace, the laws of nature, and bonds of 
 human society, by our unanimous assent and 
 consent, have decreed and determined in 
 manner and form following : — 
 
 "The 1st Proposition. — All civil authority 
 is derived originally from the people. 
 
 "2. There is a mutual compact, tacit or 
 express, between a prince and his subjects, 
 that if he perform not his duty, they are 
 discharged from theirs. 
 
 " 3. That if lawful governors become 
 tyrants, or govern otherwise than by the laws 
 of God and man they ought to do, they 
 forfeit the right they had unto their govern- 
 ment. — Lex Rex; Buchanan, dc Jure Regni; 
 Vindicice contra fyrannos ; Bellarmine, de 
 Conciliis, de Pontlfice ; Miltoti ; Goodwin; 
 Baxter ; H.C. 
 
 "4. The sovereignty of England is in the 
 three estates, viz., Kings, Lords, and Com- 
 mons. The king has but a co-ordinate 
 power, and may be overruled by the other 
 
 13
 
 1 94 Appendix. 
 
 two. — Lex Rex; Hunter, of a united and mixed 
 monarchy. Baxter, H. C. Polit. Catechis. 
 
 "5. Birthright and proximity of blood give 
 no title to rule or government, and it is law- 
 ful to preclude the next heir from his right 
 and succession to the crown. — Lex Rex ; 
 Hunt's Postscript ; Doleman's History of 
 Succession ; Julian the Apostate ; Mene Tekel. 
 
 "6. It is lawful for subjects, without the 
 consent, and against the command, of the 
 supreme magistrate, to enter into leagues, 
 covenants, and associations, for defence of 
 themselves and their religion. — Solemn 
 League and Covenant ; Late Association. 
 
 "7. Self-preservation is the fundamental 
 law of nature, and supersedes the obligation 
 of all others, whensoever they stand in com- 
 petition with it. — Hobbes de Cive ; Leviathan. 
 
 " 8. The doctrine of the gospel concerning 
 patient suffering of injuries is not inconsistent 
 with violent resisting of the higher powers 
 in case of persecution for religion. — Lex Rex; 
 Julian Apostate ; Apolog. Relat. 
 
 " 9. There lies no obligation upon Christians 
 to passive obedience, when the prince com- 
 mands anything against the laws of our 
 country ; and the primitive Christians chose 
 rather to die than resist, because Christianity 
 was not settled by the laws of the Empire. 
 — Julian Apostate. 
 
 " 10. Possession and strength give a right 
 to govern, and success in a cause, or enter- 
 prise, proclaims it to be lawful and just ; to 
 pursue it is to comply with the will of God, 
 because it is to follow the conduct of His 
 providence. — Hobbes; Owen's Sermon before
 
 Appendix. 195 
 
 the Regicides, Jan. 31,1 648 / Baxter; Jenkins 
 Petition, Oct. 1651. 
 
 "11. In the state of nature there is no 
 difference between good and evil, right and 
 wrong; the state of nature is the state of 
 war, in which every man hath a right to all 
 things. 
 
 " 12. The foundation of civil authority is 
 this natural right, which is not given, but 
 left to the supreme magistrate upon mens 
 entering into societies ; and not only a foreign 
 invader, but a domestic rebel, puts himself 
 again into a state of nature to be proceeded 
 against, not as a subject, but an enemy, and 
 consequently acquires by his rebellion the 
 same right over the life of his prince, as the 
 prince for the most heinous crimes has over 
 the life of his own subjects. 
 
 " 13. Every man, after his entering into a 
 society, retains a right of defending himself 
 against force, and cannot transfer that right 
 to the commonwealth when he consents to 
 that union whereby a commonwealth is 
 made ; and in case a great many men toge- 
 ther have already resisted the commonwealth, 
 for which every one of them expecteth death, 
 they have liberty then to join together to 
 assist and defend one another. This bearing 
 of arms subsequent to the first breach of 
 their duty, though it be to maintain what they 
 have done, is no new unjust act, and if it be 
 only to defend their persons, is not unjust 
 at all. 
 
 " 14. An oath superadds no obligation to 
 fact, and a fact obliges no further than it is 
 credited ; and consequently if a prince gives
 
 196 Appendix. 
 
 any indication that he does not believe the 
 promises of fealty and allegiance made by 
 any of his subjects, they are thereby freed 
 from their subjection ; and, notwithstanding 
 their pacts and oaths, may lawfully rebel 
 against, and destroy their sovereign. — Hobbes 
 de Cive ; Leviathan. 
 
 "15. If a people, that by oath and duty 
 are obliged to a sovereign, shall sinfully dis- 
 possess him, and, contrary to their covenants, 
 choose and covenant with another, they may 
 be obliged by their later covenants, notwith- 
 standing their former. — Baxter; H. C. 
 
 " 16. All oaths are unlawful and contrary to 
 the Word of God. — Quakers. 
 
 " 17. An oath obligeth not in the sense of 
 the imposer, but the taker's. — Sheriff's Case. 
 
 " 18. Dominion is founded in grace. 
 
 "19. The powers of this world are usurpa- 
 tions upon the prerogative of Jesus Christ ; 
 and it is the duty of God's people to destroy 
 them, in order to the setting Christ upon His 
 throne. — Fifth Monarchy Men. 
 
 "20. The presbyterian government is the 
 sceptre of Christ's kingdom, to which kings, 
 as well as others, are bound to submit ; and 
 the king's supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs, 
 asserted by the Church of England, is in- 
 jurious to Christ, the sole King and Head of 
 His Church. — Altare Damascenum ; Apolog. 
 Relat. Hist. Indulg ; Cartwright ; Travers. 
 
 "21. It is not lawful for superiors to impose 
 anything in the worship of God that is not 
 antecedently necessary. 
 
 "22. The duty of not offending a weak 
 brother is inconsistent with all human au-
 
 Appendix. 1 97 
 
 thority of making laws concerning indifferent 
 things . — Protest. Reconciler. 
 
 " 23. Wicked kings and tyrants ought to 
 be put to death; and if the judges and inferior 
 magistrates will not do their office, the power 
 of the sword devolves to the people ; if the 
 major part of the people refuse to exercise 
 this power, then the ministers may excom- 
 municate such a king ; after which it is law- 
 ful for any of the subjects to kill him, as 
 the people did Athaliah, and Jehu Jezebel. — 
 Buchanan; Knox; Goodman; Gibby ; Jesuits. 
 "24. After the sealing of the Scripture- 
 canon the people of God in all ages are to 
 expect new revelations for a rule of their 
 actions (a) ; and it is lawful for a private 
 man, having an inward motion from God, 
 to kill a tyrant (b). — (a) Quakers and other 
 Enthusiasts, (b) Goodman. 
 
 " 25. The example of Phineas is to us 
 instead of a command ; for what God hath 
 commanded or approved in one age must 
 needs oblige in all. — Goodman; Knox; 
 Napthali. 
 
 " 26. King Charles the First was lawfully 
 put to death, and his murderers were the 
 blessed instruments of God's glory in their 
 generation. — Milton; Goodwin; Owen. 
 
 " 27. King Charles the First made war upon 
 his Parliament ; and in such a case the king 
 may not only be resisted, but he ceaseth to 
 be king. — Baxter. 
 
 "We decree, judge, and declare all and 
 every of these propositions to be false, 
 seditious, and impious ; and most of them to 
 be also heretical and blasphemous, infamous
 
 198 Appendix. 
 
 to Christian religion, and destructive of all 
 government in Church and State. 
 
 " We further decree, That the books which 
 contain the aforesaid propositions and im- 
 pious doctrines are fitted to deprave good 
 manners, corrupt the minds of unwary men, 
 stir up seditions and tumults, overthrow 
 states and kingdoms, and lead to rebellion, 
 murder of princes, and atheism itself; and 
 therefore we interdict all members of the 
 university from the reading of the said books, 
 under the penalties in the statutes expressed. 
 We also order the before-recited books to be 
 publicly burnt by the hand of our marshal, in 
 the court of our schools. 
 
 "Likewise we order, that, in perpetual 
 memory hereof, these our decrees shall be 
 entered into the registry of our convocation ; 
 and that copies of them being communicated 
 to the several colleges and halls within this 
 university, they be there publicly affixed in 
 the libraries, refectories, or other fit places, 
 where they may be seen and read of all. 
 
 " Lastly, we command and strictly enjoin 
 all and singular, the readers, tutors, cate- 
 chists, and others to whom the care and trust 
 of institution of youth is committed, that they 
 diligently instruct and ground their scholars 
 in that most necessary doctrine, which, in a 
 manner, is the badge and character of the 
 Church of England, of submitting to every 
 ordinance of man for the Lord's sake, whe- 
 ther it be to the king as supreme, or unto 
 governors as unto them that are sent by him, 
 for the punishment of evil doers, and for the 
 praise of them that do well; teaching that
 
 Appendix. 1 99 
 
 this submission and obedience is to be clear, 
 absolute, and without exception of any state 
 or order of men. Also that they, according 
 to the Apostle's precept, exhort, that first of 
 all supplications, prayers, intercessions, and 
 giving ol thanks be made for all men, for the 
 king, and all that are in authority; that we 
 may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all 
 godliness and honesty ; for this is good and 
 acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour ; 
 and in especial manner that they press and 
 oblige them humbly to offer their most ardent 
 and daily prayers at the throne of grace, for 
 the preservation of our Sovereign Lord King 
 Charles from the attempts of open violence 
 and secret machinations of perfidious traitors ; 
 that the defender of the faith, being safe 
 under the defence of the Most High, may 
 continue his reign on earth till he exchange 
 it for that of a late and happy immortality."
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Abela d, all his books burnt, 5. 
 
 Allen (Cardinal), 37. 
 
 Archer (John), of AH Hallows, Lombard Street, 
 
 106. 
 Asgill (John), his book burnt by two Parliaments, 
 
 144-47. 
 Aitwood (William), the English Whig, 184. 
 Aubigne (D'), his Histoire Universelle, 19. 
 
 Bale (Bishop), 29. 
 
 Barnes, 29. 
 
 Bastwick (the physician), 8 1 -92. 
 
 Beaumarchais, his Memoirs condemned to the 
 flames, 22. 
 
 Becon, 29. 
 
 Bellarmine, his Tractatus condemned by the Par- 
 liament of Paris, 64 
 
 Bernier ( Abbe) fseud. , 13. 
 
 Best (Paul), prisoner at the Gatehouse, 107-109. 
 
 Bidle (a tailor's son), no. 
 
 Bissendorf burnt, as well as his books, 9. 
 
 Boncerf, 21. 
 
 Book-fires of the Sixteenth Century, 25-47. 
 
 under fames I. , 48-68. 
 
 under Charles I., 69-93. 
 
 of the Rebellion, 94-116. 
 
 of the Restoration, 1 17-135. 
 
 of the Revolution, 136-169. 
 
 {our last), 170-190.
 
 202 Index. 
 
 Boulanger, Christianisme devoile, IS- 
 
 Boyse, his sermon burnt by the hangman, 1 66. 
 
 Brecknock (Timothy), 181. 
 
 Buchanan (David), ioi. 
 
 Buchanan (George), 58, 123. 
 
 Burton, the divine, 81-92. 
 
 Bury (Rev. Arthur), 141-43- 
 
 Busenbaum (the Jesuit), 17. 
 
 Calamy (Dr.), 131. 
 
 Carr (William), 171. 
 
 Cellier (Elizabeth), 134. 
 
 Charles L's Book-fires, 69-93. 
 
 Clarkson (Laurence), 114. 
 
 Claude, his Plaintes des Protestants, 1 34. 
 
 Clendon (John), 159. 
 
 Coke (Sir Edward), 57. 
 
 Constitutional Queries (1750), 175. 
 
 Coppe (Ebiezer), 1 14. 
 
 Coverdale (Bishop), 29. 
 
 Coward (Dr.), 147, 148. 
 
 Cowell (Dr.), 28, 54-59. 
 
 Crisis, the Present (1775), 182, 186. 
 
 Cumberland (Duke of), of Culloden, compared 
 
 with Richard III., 175. 
 Cutwode, his Caltha Pcetarum, 41. 
 
 Davies (Sir John), 41, 44. 
 
 Declaration of James III., 174. 
 
 Defoe (Daniel), 152-4. 
 
 Delaune, his Plea for the Nonconformists, 130-34. 
 
 Dering (Sir Edward), 98. 
 
 Derodon, Professor at Nismes, 12. 
 
 Deslandes, 17. 
 
 Desperiers, 7. 
 
 Digby (Lord), 99. 
 
 Dolet, 8. 
 
 Doleman's Conference, 37.
 
 Index. 203 
 
 Dominis (Marcus Antonius de), 9. 
 Drake (Dr. James), 155-57, 173- 183. 
 Dufresnoy, 17. 
 Dulaurent, an apostate monk, 13. 
 
 Emmius, his posthumous book, 21. 
 Enjedim, the Hungarian Socialist, 6. 
 
 Falkland (Lord), ior. 
 
 Fleetwood (William), Bishop of St. Asaph, 167. 
 
 Fish's Supplication of Beggars, 36. 
 
 Freret, 15. 
 
 Froude (J. A.), his Nemesis of Fail h burned, 144. 
 
 Frith, 29. 
 
 F.y (John), M.P., 103, 4. 
 
 ( ienebrazcl (Archbishop), 18. 
 
 Gerberon, 12. 
 
 Giannone, his Historia Civile, 21. 
 
 Gigli, his Vocabulario, 17. 
 
 Goodwin (John), prolific writer, 1 17-122. 
 
 Hall (Bishop), 41, 2, 3. 
 
 Hall (Joseph), serjeant-at-arms, 172. 
 
 Helot, his L Escole des Filles, 17. 
 
 Hemes (Walter), 183. 
 
 Holbach (Baron d'), 15. 
 
 Humphrey (John), 154. 
 
 Huss (John), 6. 
 
 Hutchinson (Provost Hely), 182, 185. 
 
 James I., Book-fires under, 48-68. 
 
 James III., Declaration of, 174. 
 
 Joly (Claude), 20. 
 
 Joye, e9. 
 
 fusliciarius justificatus, 10 1 .
 
 204 Index. 
 
 Keller, the Jesuit, 19. 
 Kentish Petition (1642), 100. 
 King (George), the bookseller, 176. 
 Knewstub, his Confutation (1579), 33- 
 
 La Mettrie (De), 14. 
 
 Langle (Marquis de), 13. 
 
 Lanjuinais, 22. 
 
 La Peyrere imprisoned, 12. 
 
 Leighton (Alexander), 75. 
 
 Le Noble (Eustache), 20. 
 
 Lilburne Qohn), 88, 102. 
 
 Linguet, 14. 
 
 Locke (John), 127-29. 
 
 Love, Family of, 32. 
 
 Luther, 7, 28. 
 
 Lyser, advocate of polygamy, 17. 
 
 Mantuanus, the Carmelite, 16. 
 
 Manwaring (Roger), 69-71. 
 
 Mariana, the Jesuit, 18. 
 
 Marivaux (Martin de), 22. 
 
 Marlowe (Christopher), 41, 42. 
 
 Martin Marprelate, 37. 
 
 Marston (John), 41, 42. 
 
 Mercurius Elenchicus, 101. 
 
 Mercurius Pragmaticus, 101. 
 
 Meslier (Jean), 14. 
 
 Milton, 20, 90, 118-22. 
 
 Mocket (Richard), 61. 
 
 Molinos, founder of Quietism, II. 
 
 Molyneux (William), his Case for Ireland, 136-40. 
 
 Mondonville (Madame de), 21. 
 
 Montagu (Richard), anti-Puritan, 71-3. 
 
 Morin (Simon), 10. 
 
 Morisot, 10. 
 
 Muggleton (Ludovic), 115, 116.
 
 Index. 205 
 
 Niclas (Hendrick), of Leyden, 32. 
 North Briton (No. 45), 177. 
 
 Okeford (Jamas') , 102. 
 Orleans (Louis d')i 18. 
 Osma (Peter d'), 7. 
 
 Oxford (University of) Decree against certain per- 
 nicious books, 192. 
 
 PflnetU (David), 60. 
 
 Parliament's Ten Commandments, 101. 
 
 Parliament's Pater Nosier, 10 1. 
 
 Parsons (Robert), the Jesuit, 37, 39. 
 
 Pascal, 12. 
 
 Peignot, the historian of Condemned Books, 2. 
 
 Pidanzet, 21. 
 
 Pocklington (Dr. John), 95-8. 
 
 Pomponacius, 7. 
 
 Porphyry, 5. 
 
 Primatt (Joseph), 102. 
 
 i'rynne (William), 30, 77-93. 
 
 Racovian Cateehism, Hi-13. 
 Raleigh (Sir Walter), 59. 
 Raynal (Abbe), 23. 
 Reboulet, 21. 
 
 Reeves' Thoughts on English Government, 186. 
 Rousseau, 13. 
 Rowlands (Samuel), 45. 
 Rutherford (Samuel), 122. 
 
 Rye House Plot, Decree against pernicious books, 
 191. 
 
 Sacheveiell (Henry), 157-61. 
 Sainte Foi, 12. 
 Salmasius, 119. 
 Sanctarel, the Jesuit, 20.
 
 206 Index. 
 
 Schlicttingius, II. 
 
 Scioppius, 1 8. 
 
 Scot (Reginald), one of the heroes of the world, 
 
 49-53- 
 Servetus, his burning, 8. 
 Squitinio, 19. 
 Stubbs (John), 35. 
 Suarez, 64. 
 
 Talbert (Abbe), 17. 
 
 Theophile, 16. 
 
 Thomas (William), 30. 
 
 Thornborough (Bishop), 57. 
 
 Tindal (Matthew), 159, 161-63. 
 
 Toland, 149. 
 
 Toussaint, 17. 
 
 Tracy, 29. 
 
 Turner, 29. 
 
 Tyndale (William), 9, 28, 75. 
 
 Voet, professor of theology, 51. 
 
 Voltaire, contributed more books to the flames 
 
 than any other author of the eighteenth 
 
 century, 15. 
 Vorst (Conrad), 66. 
 
 Wentworth (Peter), 39. 
 
 Wicliff, 29. 
 
 Wilkes (John), and the North Briton, 177. 
 
 Williams (John), 46, 47. 
 
 Wither (George), 101. 
 
 Wolkelius, friend of Socinus, II. 
 
 Woolston, his Discourse on Miracles, 15.
 
 
 
 'Sf^T&iiS? 
 
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 £//;0/ Stock, 62, Paternoster Row, London, E.C.
 
 THE PRECEDING VOLUMES OF 
 
 Zbe ffioofc Xover's Xibrarg 
 
 ARE AS FOLLOWS:— 
 
 The Story of the Imitatio Christi. By 
 Leonard Wheatley. 
 
 Studies in Jocular Literature. By W. C. 
 Hazlitt. 
 
 Neivspaper Reporting in Olden Time and 
 To-day. By John Pendleton. 
 
 How to Catalogue a Library. By Henry 
 B. Wheatley, F.S.A. 
 
 Foreign Visitors in England^ and What They 
 Thought of Us. By Edward Smith. 
 
 The Book of Noodles : Stories of Simpletons ; 
 or, Fools and their Follies. By W. A. CLOUSTON. 
 
 The Enemies of Books. By William Blades. 
 
 The Story of Some Famous Books. By 
 Frederick Saunders. 
 
 Gleanings in Old Garden Literature. By 
 W. C. Hazlitt. 
 
 The Dedication of Books. To Patron and 
 Friend. By Henry B. Wheatley, F.S.A. 
 
 Modern Methods of Lllustrating Books. 
 
 The Literature of Local Lnstitutions. By 
 G. L. Gomme, F.S.A. 
 
 Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine. By 
 W. C. Hazlitt. 
 
 How to Form a Library. By Henry B. 
 Wheatley, F.S.A. 
 
 London : ELLIOT STOCK, 62, Paternoster Row, E.C. 
 
 14
 
 THE LATE WILLIAM BLADES' LAST WORK. 
 
 Now Ready, tastefully printed on fine paper, crown 4to size, 
 
 fully illustrated, and handsomely bound, price 15s. 
 
 ONE HUNDRED copies only have been printed on lVhatman Paper 
 
 for sale in England, and bound in roxburgh gilt, 
 
 top, numbered and signed . 
 
 Zbe pentateucb of printing, 
 
 WITH A CHAPTER ON JUDGES. 
 By William Blades, Author of the " Life and Times of 
 
 Caxton," ,; The Enemies of Books," etc., etc. 
 
 With a Memoir of the Author and a List 0/ His Works, by TALBOT 
 
 Baines Reed. 
 
 " Book-lovers can hardly fail to appreciate this simple, clear, 
 attractive, and unconventional sketch of the origin and develop- 
 ment of the art of printing. Scattered through the text are a 
 number of portraits, facsimiles, and other illustrations, repro- 
 duced in many instances from interesting woodblocks of a former 
 age." — Speaker. 
 
 " Aiming only at giving a popular summary, ' The Pentateuch 
 0/ Printing ' more than fulfils its aim. It is delightfully illus- 
 trated, and contains, in addition to reproductions of the earliest 
 dated woodblock presenting St. Christopher and of various ob- 
 jects of interest, some original designs." — Notes and Queries. 
 
 " The work necessarily appeals to only a few, but those few, 
 without a doubt, will greatly treasure it not only because of its 
 own merits, but also by reason of its being the last literary effort 
 of a gentleman who may certainly be considered the most 
 learned exponent of the printing art this century has seen." — 
 City Press. 
 
 " The illustrations have the attractions not only of appro- 
 priateness and good execution, but also of rarity. It should be 
 added that the work has been edited by Mr. Talbot B. Reed, 
 who besides putting its author's manuscript into shape has 
 prefixed to it an interesting biographical sketch of the biblio- 
 grapher." — Scotsman, 
 
 " No man could have better qualified himself to give a lucid, 
 practical, and reliable history of printing from its genesis on- 
 ward." — Aberdeen Journal. 
 
 " The book is full of curious and interesting details bearing 
 on the origin and history of printing at home and abroad. They 
 are set forth in a painstaking and judicial manner, that contrasts 
 favourably with the intemperate partisanship and the contro- 
 versial acrimony which have disfigured the writings of so many 
 who have undertaken to throw light on these subjects." — Daily 
 News. 
 
 " As to the mechanical production of the work, it is just what 
 we should expect, seeing that it is a monument of William 
 Blades executed at the office which he raised to such name and 
 fame for typography." — Printers' Register — Supplement. 
 
 London : ELLIOT STOCK, 62, Paternoster Row, -E.C.
 
 In demy 8vo, strongly bound in buckram, and printed on 
 good paper, with broad margin for notes and addi- 
 tions, price £1 js. 6d. net. 
 
 THE NEW YOLUME OF 
 
 $5ooft prices Current 
 
 Being a record of the Prices at which 
 Books have been sold at Auction, with the 
 titles and description in full, the Catalogue 
 Numbers, and the Names of the Purchasers. 
 From December 1889 to November 1890. 
 
 " Valuable to booksellers, and still more so to book 
 buyers. " — Athenceum. 
 
 "The practical utility of such a record will be best 
 appreciated by those who have been accustomed to 
 consult such guides as Lowndes and Brunet with a 
 feeling that their information, though in great part 
 obsolete, is at least much better than no information 
 at all." — Daily News. 
 
 . * A few copies only of Vols. II. and III. are left, 
 price £2 2s. each. Vol. I. is quite out of print and is 
 fetching nearly three times its price. 
 
 London : ELLIOT STOCK, C2, Patkknostisk Row, E.C.
 
 NEW VOLUME OF THE POPULAR COUNTY HISTORIES. 
 
 Tastefully printed ok antique paper, and bound in cloth, is. 6d. 
 On hand made paper, roxburgh binding, 10s. 6d. 
 
 B Ibistoq? of IRottingbamsbire, 
 
 BY CORNELIUS BROWN, 
 
 Aut/ior of' 1 Annals of Newark-on-Trent " 
 
 BEING THE SEVENTH VOLUME OF THE 
 "POPULAR COUNTY HISTORIES." 
 
 IN this " History," Mr. Cornelius Brown, whose knowledge 
 and love of his native county have already resulted in the 
 production of two large works. " The Worthies and Celebrities 
 of Notts" and "The Annals of Newark-on-Trent," has given 
 an entertaining account of all those features of interest that 
 merit the attention of the general reader, the local resident, and 
 the antiquary. 
 
 It treats of the Archaeology and Antiquities of the county in 
 great detail, the Churches, Abbeys, Castles, Mansions being 
 all noticed more or less at length. The numerous historic events 
 occurring in the county are recorded graphically. Sherwood 
 Forest, the " Dukeries," and the various parts of the county 
 celebrated for their natural beauty are described fully, and the 
 celebrated men and women of noted county families are noticed 
 fully. There are chapters on the Fauna, Flora, Geology, 
 Dialect, and Folk-lore of the county, and a full index. 
 
 The work is written in a popular style, but is marked by 
 historical accuracy, the result of much patient research in 
 ancient records and documents. 
 
 The other volumes in the series are— 
 A HISTORY OF CUMBERLAND. By Chancellor Richard 
 
 S. Ferguson, M.A., F.S.A. 
 A HISTORY OF WARWICKSHIRE. By Sam Timmins, 
 
 F.S.A. 
 A HISTORY OF BERKSHIRE. By Lieut-Colonel Cooper 
 
 King. 
 A HISTORY OF DERBYSHIRE. By John Pendleton. 
 THE HISTORY OF DEVONSHIRE. By R. N. Worth, 
 
 F.G.S., Author of "The West Country Garland,' etc. 
 
 Second Edition. 
 A HISTORY OF NORFOLK. By Walter Rye, Author of 
 
 "The Norfolk Antiquarian Miscellany," "Handbook of 
 
 Norfolk Topography, ' etc. 
 
 London : ELLIOT STOCK, 62, Paternoster Row, E.C.
 
 
 "Jo/yyw. 
 
 
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