Clandestine Dissent and Covert Martyr-Making in Restoration Pamphleteering: John Twyn's Tryal Narrative

In February of 1664, four London bookmen were tried for the publication of anonymously written treasonous materials. All were found guilty: one was drawn and quartered. The three documents that John Twyn (printer), Thomas Brewster (bookseller), Simon Dover (printer), and Nathan Brooks (bookbinder) produced were deemed by London book licensor Roger L'Estrange to be disloyal and dangerous to the monarchy. L'Estrange succeeded in halting the publication of the offending three documents in questions, and in fact, wiped all evidence of one of them from history. Later that year, however, the trial of the offending bookmen produced perhaps a more seditious pamphlet than any of those L'Estrange destroyed. The biting criticism of the crown's policy of suppression of the press is so subtly conveyed that L'Estrange himself signed off on the pamphlet's publication. This 78-page pamphlet detailing the trial,¹ An Exact Narrative of the Tryal and Condemnation of John Twyn (1664), ostensibly documents court proceedings in order to discourage other would-be dissenters in the book trade from the publication of writings against the interest of the government. In this article, I argue that there are powerful dissenting viewpoints to be exposed in this pamphlet, hereafter referred to as An Exact Narrative, which scholars have not previously noticed.

Today, An Exact Narrative is occasionally cited as the historical record and transcript of this obscure trial by those interested in English publication history, publication law, the history of censorship, and pamphleteering in the early modern period.² Otherwise, Twyn and his codefendants have been all but forgotten. My aim is to show the importance of An Exact Narrative in the history of English dissenting literature by examining closely the preface to the reader and the epilogue that frame its account of historical events. Viewed through the lens of these devices, An Exact Narrative conveys a strong underlying message of dissent that destabilizes its overt Royalist rhetoric and its apparent objectivity. Far from serving simply as a dispassionate historical record, or as a state-sponsored public warning against the printing of seditious material, the introduction and conclusion of An Exact Narrative form a complex rhetorical apparatus that simultaneously protests the execution of John Twyn and encourages public support for freedom of the press. The anonymous producers of The Exact Narrative, as I will demonstrate, were subtle and skillful: they at once met the expectations of an overbearing Royalist book licensor and critiqued the oppression imposed by this office.

Recent scholarship supports the notion that ephemeral documents such as pamphlets can be taken seriously as literature. Joad Raymond's 2003 Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain identifies the modest pamphlet as "a literary form" and invites us to read pamphlets as "literary texts" (10). In this spirit, I will illuminate the ways in which An Exact Narrative is literature, and not simply a chronology of Twyn's trial and execution for the publication of dissident propaganda. Rather, An Exact Narrative is itself an example of dissident propaganda.

In the seventeenth century, a pamphlet could be produced quickly and cheaply after a noteworthy event, such as the Twyn trial. Within a few days, people would be reading the news, and just as quickly, the pamphlet could be found lining a pie plate, or dispatched in some other useful manner. But the pamphlet's ephemeral nature should not be taken to mean that it was insignificant or unliterary. As Joad Raymond explains, it is true that by the late sixteenth-century the word pamphlet was used pejoratively: "Pamphlets were small, insignificant, ephemeral, disposable, untrustworthy, unruly, noisy, deceitful, poorly printed, addictive, and a waste of time" (10). And by the time of the Twyn trial, pamphlets suffered such a poor reputation that the word pamphlet had become nearly interchangeable with the word libel (Hamburger 667). In fact, in An Exact Narrative, the word libel is used in place of pamphlet to describe the document's publication format. Complaining of the vast quantity of seditious materials in circulation, the author mentions "several sorts of Treasonous, Seditious, Schismatical, and Scandalous Books...