Giants and a king's fears surface from a cellar
The Times
A SMALL strongroom in the basement of the Home Office has yielded a treasure trove of documents about the turbulent events of the English Civil War. Historians will soon be able to study the 1,700 pamphlets for the first time, after the department officially gives them to the British Library today. The 17 bound volumes are in perfect condition and include handwritten notes in the margins believed to have been composed by courtiers of Charles I. “The most interesting thing is the way it represents a snapshot of a kaleidoscope of opinion in a short space of time during a crucial period in our history,” Giles Mandelbrote, curator of the British Collection 1501-1800 at the British Library, said.
The pamphlets, dated from the 1640s to the 1670s and including a sequence from 1641 to 1649, provide documentary evidence of the controversies raging in the country in the years leading to the beheading of Charles I in 1649. The gem in the collection is a printed Royal Proclamation from Charles I when he was under house arrest in 1647. It shows the King preoccupied with proposals to abolish Easter and his insistence that it be celebrated in the traditional manner. Among the pamphlets are discussions about the Royal Prerogative, the religious divisions in Ireland, the rebellion in Ireland and the balance between local and central authority in Scotland and Ireland.
There are papers debating the rights and wrongs of Parliament’s battle with the monarchy, including one entitled Conscience Satisfied, which argues that “there is no warrant for the armes now taken up by subjects”. There are reports of Civil War skirmishes and battles, and many contain rumours about the King’s links with Catholic powers overseas.
“There are pamphlets about Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s, especially about what would happen when he died,” Mr Mandelbrote added.
There are also records of unusual discoveries, including the finding of a “miraculous sea monster with two heads and ten horns” — probably a giant squid — off the coast of Ireland. Another is an explorer’s account of “hairy giants” in a description of two islands in the South Sea, called Benganga and Coma, discovered in a voyage which started in January 1669 and finished that October.
It says: “The natives that rode in the canoes were all hairy, having no other clothing than what nature had furnished them with; and the least of them, by computation, above 11 foot high.”
The pamphlets are in volumes bound in papier mâché covered in calf leather. They were delivered to the British Library on Thursday and will be formally handed over today by Fiona Mactaggart, a junior Home Office minister. They are being given to the British Library as part of the Home Office’s preparations to move from Queen Anne’s Gate to new premises in Marsham Street, Westminster.
Mystery surrounds who collected the pamphlets and how they came to be at the Home Office, which was founded only in 1782. Mr Mandelbrote said: “A lot are sympathetic to the King and a few are printed in Oxford, where the Royal Court was based for much of the Civil War.”
It is thought that they were put in the Home Office library in the 19th century but no documentation has been found indicating their origins.
The British Library has already taken 40 volumes of 18th-century pamphlets from the Home Office, plus an 1818 book of an inquiry into whether crime and misery are prevented or produced by the prison system. “That debate is still going on today,” Mr Mandelbrote said.
thetimesonline.co.uk
The Times
A SMALL strongroom in the basement of the Home Office has yielded a treasure trove of documents about the turbulent events of the English Civil War. Historians will soon be able to study the 1,700 pamphlets for the first time, after the department officially gives them to the British Library today. The 17 bound volumes are in perfect condition and include handwritten notes in the margins believed to have been composed by courtiers of Charles I. “The most interesting thing is the way it represents a snapshot of a kaleidoscope of opinion in a short space of time during a crucial period in our history,” Giles Mandelbrote, curator of the British Collection 1501-1800 at the British Library, said.
The pamphlets, dated from the 1640s to the 1670s and including a sequence from 1641 to 1649, provide documentary evidence of the controversies raging in the country in the years leading to the beheading of Charles I in 1649. The gem in the collection is a printed Royal Proclamation from Charles I when he was under house arrest in 1647. It shows the King preoccupied with proposals to abolish Easter and his insistence that it be celebrated in the traditional manner. Among the pamphlets are discussions about the Royal Prerogative, the religious divisions in Ireland, the rebellion in Ireland and the balance between local and central authority in Scotland and Ireland.
There are papers debating the rights and wrongs of Parliament’s battle with the monarchy, including one entitled Conscience Satisfied, which argues that “there is no warrant for the armes now taken up by subjects”. There are reports of Civil War skirmishes and battles, and many contain rumours about the King’s links with Catholic powers overseas.
“There are pamphlets about Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s, especially about what would happen when he died,” Mr Mandelbrote added.
There are also records of unusual discoveries, including the finding of a “miraculous sea monster with two heads and ten horns” — probably a giant squid — off the coast of Ireland. Another is an explorer’s account of “hairy giants” in a description of two islands in the South Sea, called Benganga and Coma, discovered in a voyage which started in January 1669 and finished that October.
It says: “The natives that rode in the canoes were all hairy, having no other clothing than what nature had furnished them with; and the least of them, by computation, above 11 foot high.”
The pamphlets are in volumes bound in papier mâché covered in calf leather. They were delivered to the British Library on Thursday and will be formally handed over today by Fiona Mactaggart, a junior Home Office minister. They are being given to the British Library as part of the Home Office’s preparations to move from Queen Anne’s Gate to new premises in Marsham Street, Westminster.
Mystery surrounds who collected the pamphlets and how they came to be at the Home Office, which was founded only in 1782. Mr Mandelbrote said: “A lot are sympathetic to the King and a few are printed in Oxford, where the Royal Court was based for much of the Civil War.”
It is thought that they were put in the Home Office library in the 19th century but no documentation has been found indicating their origins.
The British Library has already taken 40 volumes of 18th-century pamphlets from the Home Office, plus an 1818 book of an inquiry into whether crime and misery are prevented or produced by the prison system. “That debate is still going on today,” Mr Mandelbrote said.
thetimesonline.co.uk