In the course of researching Sparrowhawk, I collected my own library of reference books so that library hours would not govern the progress of the writing. The following list is by no means a complete one of the titles I assembled. Many of the monographs on specific colonial era subjects, such as food, cooperage, medicine, and printing, most of them catalogued in the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library at Colonial Williamsburg, are not included. However, the list does include many titles found in that library, The Mariners’ Museum archives, the Earl Gregg Swem Library at the College of William and Mary, and other research venues, but of which I was able to procure copies for my own collection.
Among the titles not included in the list, but mentioned here for the record, are the multiple volumes of the noncirculating Journals of the House of Lords and the House of Commons Journals, which, together with especially the single Namier and Turberville titles listed below, were of invaluable help in the task of faithfully recreating Parliament in the eighteenth century. These I found, dusty and neglected, atop shelves of the Swem Library. I must have been the first person in a decade to open them. These, in turn, were complemented by official reports, letters, diaries, private journals, and period newspapers and magazines in a detective’s task of piecing together the puzzling and often exasperating machinations of British politics. A.S. Turberville noted in an appendix to his The House of Lords in the XVIIIth Century:
“There was no such thing as the verbatim reporting of parliamentary speeches in the eighteenth century. Since the taking of notes [especially by nonmember spectators] was a breach of privilege, anything done in this way had to be more or less surreptitious. The severity with which the House enforced its Standing Order on the subject varied from time to time, but not until late in the century was there any degree of security.”
For a member of either the Commons or Lords, that “degree of certainty” meant not being held responsible to his electorate or to the public for whatever he might say in his House; nor was he accountable for his voting record, for which he did not regard himself as answerable to anyone, least of all to his electorate. It was not until the mid-1770s that the Commons relented and permitted the public reporting, without penalty, by printers and newspapers of speeches and the business of the lower House. It was only then that members of the Commons began to mind what they said and how they voted.
Another work that was of priceless assistance was Alan Valentine’s The British Establishment, 1760-1784: An Eighteenth Century Biographical Dictionary, published in 1970 by the University of Oklahoma Press (UOP), an edition of which I invested in. It contains over three thousand entries and often served as the starting point for further research of the lives and actions of particular members of the Commons and Lords and of events in Parliament itself, and featured biographical information on key “establishment” figures in law, the arts, and other professions. Particular emphasis was put on Parliamentary members’ voting records on key issues such as the Stamp Act of 1765 and its repeal almost a year later in the face of unexpected colonial opposition.
While I did not need one for purposes of Sparrowhawk, I searched in vain for its American companion, a reference work that would contain biographical précis of all the men who participated in the various colonial legislatures and governments up to the time of the Declaration of Independence, in addition to précis of the colonial “establishment” in the arts, law, and other professions. I queried the editor of the UOP about the prospect of producing an American Colonial Establishment, 1740-1776. Was one in the works? I noted that it would be a research tool of inestimable value to scholars, historians. and novelists alike. No, replied the editor, but it was a marvelous idea. Did I know anyone who might be willing to assume the task of researching and writing one? I submitted the names of some historians I knew, and presumably they were approached, but apparently they declined to embark on such a project.
As a result, to write those chapters in the Sparrowhawk series set in the Virginia General Assembly, because that body’s Journals gloss over the voting and speaking records of its burgesses, inference and deduction were my chief tools.
As noted above, this bibliography is selective and not all-inclusive, intended chiefly to give a reader an idea of the scope of research necessary to recreate the British-American culture and politics of the period between 1744 and 1775.