The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society

One of the more unfair comments penned by the seventeenth- century antiquary and MP, Sir Simonds D'Ewes, concerned the son of his fellow scholar, Sir Robert Cotton, owner of one of the most famous early modern libraries. Writing in his autobiography D'Ewes claimed that Cotton's son and heir, Sir Thomas Cotton, 2nd Bt (1594–1662), was 'altogether unworthy to be the master of so inestimable a library as his father'. ¹ Although Sir Thomas was clearly no scholar or collector, the inaccuracy of this statement is now recognised by scholars who have demonstrated the efforts that Sir Thomas devoted to lobbying the government of Charles I to release the Cotton library, within two years of his father's death, from the sequestration that had been imposed in 1629.² Moreover, evidence suggests that he took great care to preserve and protect the collection, and to ensure that it remained available to be consulted, and borrowed from, in the decades that followed. Indeed, it was Sir Thomas who personally compiled parts of the catalogue of his father's great collection.³ Furthermore, evidence from Sir Thomas Cotton's financial papers indicates that he was himself an enthusiastic customer of London's bookshops, and that he acquired numerous new works as they emerged from the capital's presses, at least during the 1650s. However, in keeping with the profound transformation that both the publishing industry and political culture had undergone since Sir Robert's death, Cotton's own obsession can be shown to have been the political pamphlets and newspapers that appeared in such profusion during the decades of civil war and interregnum. It is the evidence regarding Cotton's consumption of such tracts, and particularly two bookseller's bills from 1659, with which this piece is concerned. [End Page 3]

I

Scholarly interest in the consumption of print, and in bookseller's bills in particular, is clearly not new, given the light that they shed upon the interests and opinions of more or less prominent individuals, upon the workings of the book trade, and upon book prices in the early modern period. However, their comparative scarcity has ensured that the historiography on the subject remains severely limited.⁴ Known sources for book and pamphlet purchases during the seventeenth century are often frustratingly vague, for while they tend to indicate with some precision the date on which purchases were made, and the sums of money involved, they generally offer little specific information regarding the works acquired.⁵ Evidence regarding the purchase of named books and tracts tends to be fragmentary at best.⁶ Archival sources that are both extensive and detailed are rare indeed, and those that have survived, such as Humphrey Dyson's notebooks for the period 1610–30 and Richard Whitaker's bill for Sir Thomas Barrington, covering 1635–39, have rightly received detailed attention.⁷ Others, such as Sir Edward Dering's account books for the period 1619–27 and Henry Seile's bill for books supplied to the Prince of Wales and Duke of York in early 1642, deserve much greater scrutiny.⁸

Like so many of the sources related to the purchase of books and pamphlets in the seventeenth century, however, lists such as Barrington's are almost entirely devoted to works of a fairly substantial nature. In his case the majority of items ranged in price from a few shillings to over £1. Only a tiny handful were priced under a shilling, and only one — a royal proclamation — was priced at 1d.⁹ Barrington's list clearly does not relate to works at the more ephemeral end of the print spectrum, especially those brief political tracts and newspapers that were growing in importance, and in which Barrington himself displayed obvious interest during the period covered by Whitaker's bill.¹⁰

Archival evidence indicates that, at least amongst the gentry and the scholarly and political elite, such political literature was increasingly [End Page 4] popular in the two decades before the 1640s, although the accounts of individuals such as Sir Simonds D'Ewes are vague about specific titles.¹¹ Expenditure on ephemeral literature may have needed recording for accountancy purposes, but there is no reason to expect early modern gentlemen to accommodate modern scholarly interest in their taste in newspapers (D'Ewes) or playbooks (Dering) with what might reasonably be regarded as obsessive book-keeping. Likewise, both library and sale catalogues tend to be of limited value, since they offer imprecise evidence regarding the date and manner of the acquisition of printed works, and do not generally record the contents of composite volumes, thus providing an impression of the number of pamphlets, but not their nature.¹²

Fortunately archival sources survive to shed light upon the acquisition of tracts and newspapers in the 1640s, although the single best indicator of the vast scale on which newspapers were consumed during the 1640s and 1650s, the accounts of the Barrington family, offers little evidence about which journals were read.¹³ The expense book of the Kentish gentleman, James Master, provides valuable information regarding the consumption of political tracts, although it too is vague about which newspapers he was reading.¹⁴ Until now some of the most helpful evidence about the readership for individual newspaper titles has come from the archives of the Cecil family at Hatfield House, in the shape of the book bills submitted by Hugh and Catherine Perry.¹⁵ The Cecil book bills can now be supplemented, however, by evidence from the papers of Sir Thomas Cotton, contained in a volume that has hitherto been neglected because it has only recently been recognised as forming part of the Cotton family 'charters' in the British Library, and catalogued as such.¹⁶

II

Sir Thomas Cotton's career was a pale reflection of that enjoyed by his father, who was an MP and polemical author of note, as well as being a [End Page 5] scholar and antiquary.¹⁷ Like a good country squire, Cotton junior served as a justice of the peace and deputy lieutenant from a relatively young age, but although he was elected to Parliament in 1624, 1625, and 1628, he made little or no impression upon proceedings. As Sheriff of Huntingdonshire in the late 1630s he worked assiduously to collect Ship Money, but once again he made little recorded mark upon the Short Parliament of 1640, to which he was elected as a knight of the shire for the same county. His reaction to the outbreak of civil war has been characterized as one of 'studied neutrality', and it is certainly likely that contemporaries would have been uncertain of his allegiance. Named by the king as a commissioner of array in 1642, he failed to support the royalist war effort, remaining instead within parliamentarian territory, where he was named to a series of local commissions in the early months of hostilities. That he failed to serve as commissioner for sequestrations or assessments, however, provoked allegations among the hotter sort of parliamentarians that he was a closet royalist, as well as wildly inaccurate stories of his having joined the king at Oxford and served in the cavalier army. However, that Cotton was not 'obnoxious to the Parliament', as John Aubrey later claimed, is evident from the fact that his many friends at Westminster were able to ensure that he evaded sequestration.¹⁸ Where Aubrey was more accurate was in suggesting that Cotton 'skulked in the country', and it is probable that he spent a great deal of the 1640s and 1650s at his estate at Eyworth in Bedfordshire. Having removed the Cotton library there from Westminster, he led, as his biographer has commented, 'an unremarkable and unremarked upon life'.¹⁹

However, the evidence from Cotton's accounts indicates that if he had absented himself from the nation's political crucible, he was not in the least disinterested in its affairs. If he was 'neutral', then he was very far from disengaged. Part of the importance of Cotton's financial accounts lies in confirming the extent to which contemporaries had developed a voracious appetite for pamphlets and newspapers by the 1650s. This much is known from the famous collections of the London bookseller, George Thomason, and of John Rushworth and William Clarke,²⁰ but is less well studied for those who lacked a professional interest in the press during this period. Cotton was evidently an avid reader of newspapers from their first appearance in large numbers in 1641,²¹ but it is the summary accounts of his [End Page 6] expenses in later years, prepared for him on what appears to have been a biannual basis by his agent or solicitor in London, which indicate the extent of his expenditure on this relatively new form of political literature:

Although the vast majority of these entries in Cotton's accounts refer to 'newsbooks', this appears to have been a means of denoting the kind of topical and brief pamphlets of which newspapers formed merely one kind. The one occasion when Cotton's accountant referred to 'newsbooks and other books' was probably telling, and evidence from the bookseller's bills from which such accounts were probably compiled, and which are reproduced below, indicates that 'newsbooks' referred to anything from newspapers to parliamentary speeches, proclamations, and Acts of Parliament, as well as treatises on foreign affairs, domestic politics, and political thought. That larger books were accounted for separately (and perhaps thus purchased from a different source) is evident from other entries in Cotton's accounts: [End Page 7]

Thus far, however, such evidence merely confirms what is known from other sources, namely the contemporary appetite for news and politics, as represented in cheap print culture.⁴⁰ Nevertheless, Cotton's accounts are also important for giving the lie to the idea that he led a disengaged and withdrawn life in Cromwell's England, and for demonstrating how well informed even a retired country gentleman could be in the 1650s. As such, they provide an impressive illustration of the claims made by those historians who suggest that distance from London was no great obstacle to the acquisition of news and print culture.⁴¹

The most important evidence from Cotton's papers, however, is provided by accounts for 1659, the year that saw the collapse of the Protectorate, the revival of the Rump Parliament, and the subsequent tussle between the military and civilian republicans in the months before the Restoration. Particularly important are two bookseller's bills from the same unnamed London stationer, who may have been Livewell Chapman (see below).⁴² Together with other portions of the Cotton accounts, these reveal expenditure on 'newsbooks' between January and mid-July 1659 to have been as follows: [End Page 8]

It is not entirely clear, however, whether these purchases were separate from, or somehow part of, other entries in Cotton's accounts during this period, namely:

In any case, it is clear that further purchases were made later in the year, as recorded in subsequent accounts:

On this basis, Cotton can be shown to have spent over £3, and perhaps in excess of £4, on newspapers and political tracts during the tumultuous year of 1659. In order to gain an impression of the volume of items being acquired, however, rather than merely the amount of money being spent, it is necessary to turn to the two bookseller's bills themselves.⁵² The first, covering 30 December 1658–17 March 1659, gives more or less precise details of thirty-six items, while the second, covering 26 April–9 June 1659, gives details of a further ninety-two items. Together these bills therefore itemize 128 items, acquired at a cost to Cotton of £1.00.04, an average price of 1.9d. per volume. If these accounts reflect Cotton's reading tastes throughout the [End Page 9] 1650s, he could have purchased in excess of 1,300 political tracts and newspapers in the period 1652–58, to which he may have added over 400 more in 1659. To place this in context, it is possible that Cotton purchased in eight years some 1,700 tracts and pamphlets, or 28.6% of the 5,942 items amassed by the London stationer George Thomason over the same period. This would have been a startling achievement for a supposedly 'neutral' and retired gentleman, not least since this does not include Cotton's purchases of more substantial books, of the kind that formed part of Thomason's col-lection.⁵³

III

In terms of the substantive content of Cotton's accounts for 1659, the importance lies less in identifying new pamphlets, or in revising our understanding of book prices during the late 1650s, than it does in shedding important light upon the reading habits of a seventeenth-century gentleman, both in terms of the items purchased and the manner in which they were acquired. There are relatively few unidentifiable items on the lists, and some of these arise as a result of the vague notation of the bookseller. One news-book was recorded without any title [20], and the item regarding elections from January 1659 [6] is impossible to identify with any precision, although it may have been an official proclamation or order announcing the polls. Our bookseller was not always any more precise when noting which of the many works by William Prynne and James Harrington he had supplied [48, 55, 75, 114, 139], and gave little detailed information regarding which of the petitions addressed to the army grandee, Charles Fleetwood [47], and which of the works relating to the 'good old cause' [59], he had sold. More interesting is 'Remarkable passages' [108], a title not known from this period among either tracts or newspapers, as well as the first issue of the journal Perfect Occurrences [57], of which no copies survive. Most intriguing of all, perhaps, is the reference to Goldsmith's almanac for 1659 [5], since this long-running work is not known to have begun before 1663.

In terms of book and newspaper prices the lists merely confirm what is known from other evidence, namely that broadsides and pamphlets of up to eight quarto pages tended to sell for 1d., while a work of twelve quarto pages would cost 2d.⁵⁴ However, the evidence from these lists indicates that prices were anything but standard in the way that the Stationers Company had once sought to insist. Scarcity and/or scandalous content could evidently have a profound affect. The Exact relation concerning Denmark and Sweden [14], a work of only sixteen quarto pages, cost Cotton 10d., some 4d. more [End Page 10] than Englands Confusion [112], which contained twenty-four pages, while another work of sixteen pages, the notorious Killing No Murder [123] cost him a mere 3d. The most expensive item on the list, the Second Narrative of the 1656 Parliament [31], a work of fifty-six pages, cost a shilling.

When considering the nature of Cotton's purchases, the most striking fact is the overwhelming predominance of political news and opinion. There is little evidence that he was buying devotional works and sermons, aside from a statement by the congregational churches [22] and a work by John Flowre [32], or works of historical and literary interest. If Cotton was acquiring such works, then he was getting them from other booksellers, a hypothesis that might serve to confirm that readers were aware of where best to obtain different types of works.⁵⁵ Cotton turned to this particular bookseller for what we would now seek in a newsagent: for newspapers as well as other forms of political information and comment. During both Richard Crom-well's parliament (January–April 1659) and the restored Rump (from May 1659) Cotton displayed an interest in elections [6], as well as in speeches from Westminster [15, 19], Acts [70, 91, 111, 119], and declarations, orders, and votes [64, 68, 77], not to mention works that offered narratives of parliamentary sessions after their demise [31, 124]. He also acquired printed lists of the MPs sitting in the Commons [56, 118], as well as statements issued by Richard and Henry Cromwell after the collapse of the protectorate [102, 106], and some of the many petitions addressed to Parliament from around the country. In this last respect Cotton's collection amply reflects one of the most important developments in mid-seventeenth-century print culture [21, 71, 79, 80, 105, 121].⁵⁶ His interest in current affairs led also to the acquisition of works regarding plots against the government [35, 73], as well as a number of works regarding Continental affairs, particularly relating to Sweden and Denmark [10, 13, 14, 24, 25, 34, 39], then the most serious diplomatic issue for the English government.⁵⁷ However, the bills also demonstrate the extent to which readership for 'murder' literature extended up the social scale [30].⁵⁸ [End Page 11]

Cotton's taste in contemporary pamphlets also extended to political comment and criticism. This is most obvious in his acquisition of works by, or about, noted authors from across the political spectrum, including William Prynne [48, 75, 80, 90, 114], James Harrington [55, 139], Henry Neville [81], and John Streater [66, 97], as well as of the infamous Killing No Murder [123]. However, Cotton also acquired works of political economy, relating to the condition of the poor [99] and the advancement of trade [107], and he was an enthusiastic reader of tracts that analysed contemporary political divisions and offered advice about the shape of a future political settlement, both during the protectorate [16, 18, 29], and subsequently during the Rump [51, 52, 59, 60, 65, 72, 74, 86, 94, 103, 112, 116, 117]. As the army returned to political prominence in late April 1659, Cotton began acquiring dozens of the works that represented the opinions emanating from within the military, and which debated the legitimacy of their political influence [37, 38, 40, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 54, 61, 62, 76, 82, 89, 95, 98, 101, 125].

Cotton's book bills demonstrate beyond doubt, therefore, the extent to which contemporaries had developed an appetite for news, indeed an appetite that could barely be satiated during the tumultuous events of 1659. Perhaps the greatest indication of this stems, however, from Cotton's consumption of newspapers, which also raises the understudied issue of readers' 'taste' during the early modern print revolution.⁵⁹ From September 1655 until early 1659 the protectoral government enforced a near monopoly of published news, which was dominated by two journals written by the leading journalist of the age, Marchamont Nedham — Mercurius Politicus and the Publick Intelligencer.⁶⁰ These journals were virtually identical, differing largely in the fact that the former appeared on Thursdays, while the latter was published on Mondays. The difference in their content sprang largely from their day of publication, and each tended to contain the same news.⁶¹ As one historian of the seventeenth-century press suggested, the patient reader needed to buy only one weekly paper, since the advantage of buying both journals lay merely in not having to wait three days for the latest intel-ligence.⁶² Until now there has been little or no evidence that individual readers were sufficiently impatient to purchase both titles, and so the fact that Cotton regularly did just this is particularly illuminating. It indicates that he treated the two journals almost as one title that appeared twice [End Page 12] rather than once a week, and that he was highly impatient to learn of the latest developments both at home and abroad. However, the evidence from the two bills also indicates that readers of newspapers in the 1650s were not entirely satisfied with the news that the government's journalists provided, for as soon as new titles started to emerge in April 1659 Cotton began to experiment with the reborn unofficial news industry.⁶³ While continuing to buy Politicus and the Intelligencer, therefore, he also bought new titles as and when they emerged, such as Daniel Border's Faithfull Scout [44] and Henry Walker's Perfect Occurrences [57], as well as Weekly Post [67], Weekly Intelligencer [83], and Mercurius Democritus [85]. Some of these titles he liked more than others, and while he began to read the Faithfull Scout on a regular basis [44, 58, 93, 109], he may have had little enthusiasm for the semi-pornographic 'journalism' of Democritus. That Cotton was addicted to the news medium is evident from the fact that in the week between 10 and 17 May 1659 he acquired six different journals.

This addiction to news is evident not merely from the number of works acquired but also from the way in which they were purchased. Although it is difficult to be certain by whom the bills were sent, it is evident that Cotton — like Sir Thomas Barrington in the 1630s — was a sufficiently good customer to have been able to open an 'account', and that his London agent was able to take what he wanted as and when it appeared, settling the account every few months.⁶⁴ That the culture of book buying had changed since the 1630s, however, is apparent from the fact that Cotton's agent visited the shop on an almost daily basis in order to acquire the latest items from the press.

Moreover, the frequency with which Cotton's agent visited his favourite bookseller also facilitates observations about the nature of the collection acquired by Cotton's more famous contemporary, George Thomason. Cotton acquired seventeen items that are not part of Thomason's collection, including two items not known to be extant [5, 57], as well perhaps as one of the works by Prynne [48] and one of the works on the 'good old cause' [59]. Only two of these items were newspapers [57, 85], one of which was a new title that Thomason did not begin acquiring until the following issue [85]. Thomason evidently found it difficult keeping up with the incessant flow of brief petitions and tracts relating to the army, lacking seven in Cot-ton's collection [29, 71, 72, 82, 88, 95, 121], but his failure to acquire four titles relating to Continental politics may reflect a slight Anglocentric bias [10, 13, 14, 24]. Perhaps the most intriguing of Thomason's omissions are three tracts produced for Livewell Chapman [71, 72, 73], bookseller and [End Page 13] publisher at the sign of the Crown in Pope's Head Alley, Cornhill, London.⁶⁵ Cotton acquired at least sixteen works for which Chapman was the bookseller, and that he acquired three that Thomason failed to obtain may indicate that Chapman was the bookseller whom Cotton patronized. This possibility is all the more intriguing given Chapman's status as one of London's most consistently radical publishers and booksellers of the 1650s. The publisher of Harington's Oceana and Milton's Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, he was also close to the Fifth Monarchists. In 1654 he was arrested for seditious publishing, and was regarded with some suspicion thereafter. Indeed he was reckoned by one prominent Cromwellian to be 'owner, or at least a sharer in the private press that hath done so much mischief'. By early 1660 he was clearly working closely with republican grandees such as John Disborow, for which he again faced arrest.⁶⁶

Aside from such differences in the content of the Thomason and Cotton collections, these two book bills also permit an assessment of the reliability of Thomason's dating of contemporary tracts. From the summer of 1642 Thomason famously annotated his copies with the date of acquisition, boasting that 'such exact care hath been taken that the very day is written upon most of them that they came out'.⁶⁷ This has proved invaluable to scholars who seek to contextualize Civil War politics and literature.⁶⁸ Until now, however, there has been little way of testing Thomason's dates, and Cotton's lists offer a fascinating opportunity to undertake such a task, even if only over a brief period.

Of the 108 items that both Thomason and Cotton acquired, thirty-three were newspapers, which Thomason did not date, although here Cotton's evidence is interesting because it suggests that journals tended to appear on the day that their title-pages suggested, at least during this period.⁶⁹ Three more items (all parliamentary declarations or Acts) were undated by Thomason [64, 70, 111], and one was acquired by Cotton twice [101, 104]. This leaves seventy-one items on which to base a comparison. Using the dating on Thomason's copies, rather than the unreliable Fortescue catalogue, it can be shown that Cotton made his acquisitions as follows: [End Page 14]

Of those that Cotton purchased after Thomason, the vast majority (twenty) were purchased within one to three days [22, 46, 47, 55, 60, 61, 74, 77, 90, 91, 92, 94, 102, 103, 106, 112, 114, 115, 118, 125], and one other was acquired within five days [98]. The remainder were acquired at least a fortnight after Thomason added them to his mountain of tracts:

More interesting, however, are those pamphlets that Cotton purchased before Thomason. Of these, seven were purchased one to three days earlier [15, 37, 40, 45, 99, 107, 120] and a further five were purchased four to seven days earlier [25, 30, 66, 86, 87]. The most intriguing cases are the tracts that Thomason acquired over a week later than Cotton:

What this suggests is that there were occasions when Thomason acquired tracts significantly later than the day they were published, and this ought to serve as a caution to those who place significant weight upon the dates he provides. However, the bigger picture provided by the bookseller's bills is that Thomason's dates are remarkably reliable. This is particularly clear when the figures are presented in another way, in order to demonstrate that Cotton and Thomason acquired the overwhelming majority of their tracts within three days of each other:

Moreover, what these statistics mask is the fact that the widest discrepancies between the dates on which Cotton and Thomason acquired their tracts occur in the period before the collapse of the protectorate. For the period of [End Page 15] the second bookseller's bill, in which there are fifty-eight items for comparison, the figures are as follows:

When political tension mounted, and when the future of England and its government became markedly less certain, the London presses burst back into life after a relatively quiet period, and both Cotton and Thomason displayed a desire and a determination to acquire the latest pamphlets as early as possible, to a degree that had not been the case during the relatively calm months after Richard Cromwell's accession to the protectoral helm.

IV

The early modern 'news revolution' has largely been constructed from the printed texts that survive from the seventeenth century, including collections like Thomason's, and analysis of readership and reception has been hampered by the fragmentary nature of the archival evidence.⁷⁰ The survival of Sir Thomas Cotton's accounts, and of his book bills from 1659, permits study of this phenomenon to be taken in new directions, and for the period's greatest collector to be subjected to scrutiny and contextualization. Cotton's accounts provide an opportunity to assess how one seventeenth-century gentleman consumed political news during a key moment in that turbulent era, highlighting not merely that his fascination with contemporary politics led him to acquire vast numbers of ephemeral tracts and treatises, but also his methods of purchasing such works, and the nature of his taste in print culture. The amount of money spent, the frequency with which visits were made to London's bookshops, and the nature of the items acquired all indicate beyond doubt that Cotton was a seventeenth-century 'news junkie', and one who appears to have been conscious of the attraction of culling information from a variety of sources, and of the need to look beyond the news presented by the government. This obsession with news provides the key to understanding the light that Cotton's bills shed upon the Thomason collection. First, since the desire to keep up to date with the latest developments prompted Cotton or his agent to make frequent trips to the bookseller with whom he had an account, it is possible to suggest that the 'publication' dates recorded by Thomason were — with notable exceptions — remarkably accurate. Second, it is instructive to recognise that a politically inactive country gentleman might have acquired somewhere approaching a third of [End Page 16] the works that a prominent and very well connected London stationer amassed. Huge though it clearly is, the size of Thomason's collection may actually be something of an illusion, since little evidence has hitherto been produced with which to provide a contemporary frame of reference and scale. It may be that what was remarkable about Thomason was not so much his acquisition of huge numbers of pamphlets but his preservation of them.