English Radicalism and the Struggle for Reform The Library of Sir Geoffrey Bindman, QC. Part I. BERNARD QUARITCH LTD MMXX BERNARD QUARITCH LTD 36 Bedford Row, London, WC1R 4JH tel.: +44 (0)20 7297 4888 fax: +44 (0)20 7297 4866 email: [email protected] / [email protected] web: www.quaritch.com Bankers: Barclays Bank PLC 1 Churchill Place London E14 5HP Sort code: 20-65-90 Account number: 10511722 Swift code: BUKBGB22 Sterling account: IBAN: GB71 BUKB 2065 9010 5117 22 Euro account: IBAN: GB03 BUKB 2065 9045 4470 11 U.S. Dollar account: IBAN: GB19 BUKB 2065 9063 9924 44 VAT number: GB 322 4543 31 Front cover: from item 106 (Gillray) Rear cover: from item 281 (Peterloo Massacre) Opposite: from item 276 (‘Martial’) List 2020/1 Introduction My father qualified in medicine at Durham University in 1926 and practised in Gateshead on Tyne for the next 43 years – excluding 6 years absence on war service from 1939 to 1945. From his student days he had been an avid book collector. He formed relationships with antiquarian booksellers throughout the north of England. His interests were eclectic but focused on English literature of the 17th and 18th centuries. Several of my father’s books have survived in the present collection. During childhood I paid little attention to his books but in later years I too became a collector. During the war I was evacuated to the Lake District and my school in Keswick incorporated Greta Hall, where Coleridge lived with Robert Southey and his family. So from an early age the Lake Poets were a significant part of my life and a focus of my book collecting. Later the emphasis of my legal career was on civil liberties and human rights. My Romantic poetry collection found its proper home at the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere in 2004 but I continued to collect legal and political works, tracing particularly the history of civil liberty as expressed through the writings of radical political philosophers, activists and campaigners, and their confrontations with law and government. Among them was John Thelwall [175-180, 295-7], a friend and contemporary of Wordsworth and Coleridge. He was a poet, playwright, novelist, and a leader of the London Corresponding Society, which argued for universal suffrage. His writings debating the issues raised by the French Revolution formed the early nucleus of the collection – many are extremely rare. The publisher of many radicals of the 1790s, including Thomas Paine [135-142, 279-80], was Daniel Isaac Eaton [92-102, 236-8 et passim] who was frequently prosecuted for sedition, whereupon he published the record of his trials relying on the legal privilege available to trial transcripts. Eaton, and the other radical publishers of the time such as Richard Carlile, Richard Lee and Joseph Johnson are extensively represented in the collection. As we moved forward towards the Reform Act of 1832, the writings of Henry Hunt [260-268, and seen speaking below], the star speaker at the ill-fated Manchester gathering in 1819 which became Peterloo, are a focus, together with contemporary accounts of the massacre and its legal consequences [214, 262, 281-2]. Having started with the radicals at the time of the French Revolution I also developed the collection backwards in time to embrace their forbears in that earlier revolution in mid-17th century England. My hero in that period was John Lilburne [13-24], leader of the Levellers, who had incidentally attended the same school as me, the Royal Free Grammar School in Newcastle. Here we have some of his earliest and most important pamphlets, as well as the accounts of his trials in 1649 and 1653. Several pamphlets of Lilburne’s contemporaries are also present, including the undelivered opening speech of the prosecuting solicitor-general, John Cook, at the trial of King Charles the First, published 3 weeks after the trial began on 20 January 1649 [4]. Following the interregnum came the plots and consequent trials inspired by Titus Oates, Algernon Sidney and others. Sidney’s great speech as he ascended the scaffold is there, published immediately after his execution at Tyburn [42]. Of course the written story of the struggle for English liberty is far too voluminous to form a single collection. I have done what I can to put together a fair selection of the published highlights. Sadly, the time has come for me to hand the torch to other collectors. GEOFFREY BINDMAN 1-50 CIVIL WAR TO GLORIOUS REVOLUTION 1630-1689 LEVELLERS, REPUBLICANS, AND FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS 1 ASHHURST, William. Reasons against agreement with a late printed paper, intituled, Foundations of freedome, or, the agreement of the people. Whereby it doth appears, that the particulars proposed in the said paper are not foundations of freedome, but of tyrannie and slaverie to the people … London, 1648. Small 4to, pp. [4], 14; without the final blank; woodcut initials, head-pieces; a little light foxing and browning, small paper repair to foot of last leaf; in recent calf, with numerous blanks bound in, by Chivers; bookplate of D.G. Mackenzie. £650 One of several editions to appear in late 1648, all scarce on the market, of Ashhurst’s reply to the Foundations of freedom, a Leveller tract published earlier that year and attributed to John Lilburne (passim). Ashhurst (1607-56) was returned as MP for Newton, Lancashire, in 1642, becoming an influential member of numerous parliamentary committees and commissions during the Civil War, and a special favourite of Oliver Cromwell. ‘In summer 1648, he joined Swynfen and other zealous Presbyterians in aligning with the Independent grandees in common hostility to royalists, Scottish engagers, and radical opponents of negotiation with the king ... Late in December, Ashhurst published an attack upon the Levellers’ constitutional manifesto The Agreement of the People. If adopted, he argued, the Agreement would establish a “Government without Authority. A Magistrate without power; If a Minister, yet without maintenance”, and would drive a wedge between English parliamentarians and “the faithfull” in Scotland, “both Ministers and people, that have adhered to us in this Cause”’ (ODNB). Wing A3976. 2 BACON, Sir Francis, Lord Verulam [and John DODDRIDGE?]. The Elements of the common lawes of England, branched into a double tract: the one containing a collection of some principall rules and maxims of the common law … The other the use of the common law, for preservation of our person, goods, and good names … London, by the assigns of J. More, [1636]. 4to, pp. [20], 44, 49-94, [8], 72, wanting the terminal blank; A Collection and The Use of the law have separate title-pages dated 1636 and 1635; title-page cropped at foot affecting date in imprint; first and least pages dusty; a good copy in nineteenth-century calf, rebacked. £750 Second edition (first 1630) of Bacon’s most famous legal work, an attempt to systematise the law in the form of maxims. The second part, on the ‘use of law’, is probably not by Bacon, and was first published as the second part of John Doddridge’s Lawyers Light (1629). STC 1135; Gibson 194. DEFINING TREASON 3 BROOKE, Sir Robert. The Reading of M. Robert Brook, serjeant of the law, and recorder of London, upon the stat. of Magna Carta, chap. 16 [recte 17]. London, M. Flesher and R. Young for Laurence Chapman and William Coke, 1641. 4to, pp. [4], 23, [1]; a fine copy, lower and outer edges uncut, in modern boards. £200 First edition, a treatise on the interpretation of a chapter of Magna Carta which relates to treason, murder and burglary. It was written in 1551 and circulated in manuscript, but was first published here on the eve of the Civil War – the opening words make clear the relevance: ‘Inprimis, If any man imagine the death of the King … it is high Treason. If any keep warre against the King in his Realme, it is high Treason’. Wing B4896. PROSECUTING THE KING 4 COOK, John. King Charls his case: or, an appeal to all rational men, concerning his trial at the High Court of Justice … London, Peter Cole for Giles Calvert, 1649. 4to, pp. 43, [1]; slightly dusty, but a good copy, lower edge uncut, in modern boards. £500 First edition, by the judge and regicide John Cook (1608-1660) – the speech he would have delivered as prosecutor had not Charles I refused to plead. Cook, who had been a counsel to John Lilburne in 1646, took on in January 1649 ‘the invidious task of prosecuting Charles I … The king’s refusal to plead largely confined Cook’s public role as solicitor-general for the Commonwealth to reading the indictment which he had drafted. A version of his intended speech for the prosecution, published shortly after the king’s execution as King Charls his Case, or, An Appeal to All Rational Men, characterized the trial as “the most comprehensive, impartial, and glorious piece of justice that ever was acted” and claimed “I went as cheerfully about it, as to a Wedding” (p. 39) (DNB). Wing C6025. 5 COOKE, Edward. Memorabilia, or, the most remarkable passages and counsels collected out of the several declarations and speeches that have been made by the King, his L. Chancellors and Keepers, and the Speakers of the honourable House of Commons in Parliament since his majesty’s happy restauration, anno, 1660, till the end of the last parliament, 1680. Reduced under four heads; 1. Of the Protestant religion. 2. Of popery. 3. Of liberty and property, &c. 4. Of parliaments ... London, for Nevil Simmons, Tho. Simmons, and Sam. Lee, 1481 [i.e. 1681]. Folio, pp. [2], 32, ff.