PDF hosted at the Radboud Repository of the Radboud University Nijmegen The following full text is a publisher's version. For additional information about this publication click this link. http://hdl.handle.net/2066/148274 Please be advised that this information was generated on 2021-10-10 and may be subject to change. NATHANIEL THOMPSON TORY PRINTER, BALLAD MONGER AND PROPAGANDIST G.M. Peerbooms NATHANIEL THOMPSON Promotor: Prof. T.A. Birrell NATHANIEL THOMPSON TORY PRINTER, BALLAD MONGER AND PROPAGANDIST Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor in de letteren aan de Katholieke Universiteit te Nijmegen, op gezag van de Rector Magnificus Prof. Dr. J.H.G.I. Giesbers volgens besluit van het College van Dekanen in het openbaar te verdedigen op dinsdag 28 juni 1983 des namiddags te 2 uur precies door GERARD MARIA PEERBOOMS geboren te Bom Sneldruk Boulevard Enschede ISBN 90-9000482-3 С. 19Θ3 G.M.Peerbooms,Instituut Engels-Amerikaans Katholieke Universiteit,Erasmusplein 1«Nijmegen. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank the authorities and staffs of the following libraries and record offices for permission to examine books and manuscripts in their possession, for their readiness to answer my queries and to provide microfilms: the British Library, London; the Corporation of London Record Office; Farm Street Church Library, London; the Greater London Record Office; the Guildhall Library, London; Heythrop College Library, London; the House of Lords Record Office, London; Lambeth Palace Library, London; the Public Record Office, London; St. Bride's Printing Library, London; the Stationers' Company, London; Westminster Public Library, London, the Bodleian Library, Oxford; Christ Church College Library, All Souls Collecte Library, Merton College Library, New College Library, Worcester College Library, Oxford; Chetam's Library, Manchester; the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the H.E. Huntington Library, San Marino; the Newberry Library, Chicago and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles. My thanks are also due to Miss Mary Pollard of Trinity College Dublin; Dr. J. Treadwell of Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario; Dom H. Steuert of Downside Abbey, Bath; and in particular to Miss Robin Myers of Stationers' Hall, London. The Netherlands Organisation for the Advancement of Pure Research (ZWO) and The British Council provided grants which enabled me to do part of my research in British Libraries. Finally I would like to thank Miss C. van Heertum who kindly checked a number of documents for me and Mrs Mies Faber, Miss Diane Crook and Miss Marjan de Ruyter who typed the manuscript. I dedicate this work to my wife and children. ν CONTENTS Acknowledgements ν Introduction 1 Chapter I - Nathaniel Thompson and Thomas Ratcliffe 3 Chapter II - Nathaniel Thompson, 1679-1681 15 - The True Domes tick Intelligence and its Rivals 19 - Thompson and the Authorities 29 Chapter III - Nathaniel Thompson, Tory Pamphleteer, 1681-1685 33 - The Loyal Protestant and True Domestiok Intelligence and the Whig News-sheets 34 - Books and Pamphlets Printed and Sold by Nathaniel Thompson 58 - Nathaniel Thompson and the Authorities, 1681-1685 68 Chapter IV - Nathaniel Thompson's Collections of Loyal Songs and Loyal Poems, 1684-1685 83 Chapter V - Nathaniel Thcmpson's Printing House after 1685 103 Notes 112 Appendix I _ A.The Contents of /1 Choice Collection of 120 Loyal Songs and A Choice Colleaticm of 180 Loyal Songs 175 - B.The Contents of A Collection of 86 Loyal Poems 213 Appendix II - List of Books and Pamphlets Printed and Sold by Nathaniel and Mary Thonçson, 1678-1689 231 Bibliography - A. Manuscripts 267 - B. News-sheets 269 " C. Pamplets and Books in which N. Thompson is mentioned 272 - D. Seventeenth Century Books and Pamphlets 275 - E. Later Works 287 - F. Articles and Theses 297 Index to Text and Notes 304 INTRODUCTION Between 1678 and 1683, England, and especially the capital, London, was seething with the excitement of political strife. For the first time in English history, two more or less organized political parties were struggling to gain power. The supporters of the King and the Church, the Court party, of Tories as they came to be called by their opponents, found themselves confronted by the advocates of parliamen­ tary oligarchy, the Country party or Whigs. The age-old English fear of popery and royal absolutism was exploited by the Whigs under the direction of Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first Earl of Shaftesbury, who used Titus Oates's preposterous allegations of a Popish Plot against the life of the King to achieve their immediate political objective, the exclusion from the succession to the throne of the King's Roman Catholic brother, James, Dulce of York. A Roman Catholic on the throne of England was synonymous with absolutism, slavery and popery, Shaftesbury kept telling the nation. The Court party in turn insisted that the Whig movement was '1641 come again' and that the country was on the brink of another civil war between the King's loyal Church of England supporters and the 'phanatique Presbyterian' republicans, who had also been responsible for the civil wars of the 1640's. The battle between the two rival political movements was not restricted to the circles of power: both parties appealed to the na­ tion for support, and London saw its streets and coffeehouses flooded with pamphlets, broadsheets, ballads and poems by political propagan­ dists.1 The royalist party had a powerful pamphleteer in Sir Roger L'Estrange, who, since 1660, had advocated a strict control of the press. While he had the authority to do so, he had laboured hard to impose that control by seizing all the seditious pamphlets that he could lay his hands on. When it proved impossible to stop the publi­ cation of Whig pamphlets, he entered the lists himself and wrote, be­ sides his periodical The Observator, innumerable pamphlets in refuta­ tion of Whig propaganda.2 Another name that the student of the political literature of the time meets again and again, is that of Nathaniel Thompson. Not only does Thompson's name figure in the imprints of a great many Tory pamphlets, it also regularly crops up in the pamphlets themselves. Thompson's must have been a household name in the London of the 1680's, so much so that the pamphleteers did not find it necessary to provide any explanations about his identity when they praised or abused him as 'loyal Nat', 'honest Thompson', lying Nat', 'Trinculo' or whatever other name they cared to call him. Printers and booksel­ lers even found it worth their while to make Nathaniel Thompson the subject of their pamphlets, which means that they must have seen a market for such publications. That Nathaniel Thompson, no doubt a man of humble origins without 1 any claim to social standing, became so well-known to his fellow citizens was due to the fact that, like Sir Roger L'Estrange, he was one of the Tory propagandists at a time when supporting the cause of the Court party was not without personal danger. There were more printers and booksellers who published Tory propaganda under their own imprints, but none of them was as famous or as notorious as Thompson; none of them was mentioned in one breath with Sir Roger L'Estrange as often as Thompson and none of them was attacked as fiercely or as frequently as Thompson. So far, no full-length study has ever been made of Nathaniel Thompson and his role in seventeenth-century printing and publish­ ing. The present study will discuss Thompson's life and his career as a printer, publisher and bookseller. An examination of the works that carry his name, as well as of the works ascribed to him by his contemporaries, will show that three main periods can be distinguished in his career. Between 1665 and 167Θ, he worked as a printer in Dublin and in London, first for the Dublin printing-firm of Bladen, later in association with the London printer Thomas Ratcliffe. From 1678 he had his own printing-house in London and gradually became one of the main propagandists for the Tory cause, printing and publishing Tory pamphlets and a Tory news-sheet. After the accession of King James II in 1685, Thompson entered on the third stage of his career and became one of the main publishers of Roman Catholic devotional and controversial work. When he died in 16Θ7, his shop was continued for some time by his wife Mary Thompson, until it was taken over by Thompson's son-in-law David Edwards. 2 CHAPTER I NATHANIEL THOMPSON AND THOMAS RATCLIFFE The first part of Nathaniel Thompson's life must, unfortunately, remain in the dark. We have no information about the date or the place of his birth. If he was apprenticed to a bookseller or a printer, the records are silent about the contract. Thompson was often called 'Irish Nat' by his Whig opponents, and it is in Ireland that we first meet his name. In 1665 and 1666, working for the Dublin printing house of Bladen1*, Thompson printed and put his name to Ambrose White's An Almanack and Prognostication for the Year 1665, Francis Clarke or Clerke's Praxis Francisai Clarke, edited by the Reverend Thomas Bladen5, and Dr. Faithful Teate's A Discourse Grounded on Prov. 12.5 ... Proving our State (Godward) to Be as our Thoughts Are Sc. William Bladen, a London bookseller, had in 1631 succeeded Arthur Johnson as the Dublin factor of the London Stationers' Company. In 1639 he had bought the Company's Irish Stock for £2,600 and with it he had obtained a monopoly position as 'Printer to the King's Most Sacred Majesty', a title which he assumed for the first time on 10 June 1642.