ROGER NORTH, MAKING THE PAST PUBLIC1
There has been much interest of late in the English lawyer and essayist the Honourable Roger North (1651–1734) and his work as a musical theorist, biographer and autobiographer, and eccentric natural philosopher. North published little during his lifetime, and nothing under his own name, but he left numerous manuscripts, including several complete works that were later published by his son, Montagu. At the end of the first decade of the eighteenth century, when he was in his sixties, North initiated an asymmetrical dispute with the bishop and historian White Kennett (1660–1728). Although almost invisible in recent historiography, Kennett was a significant public figure in his time, publishing a great deal, both under his own name and anonymously, notably A Complete History of England of 1706. North subsequently ‘named’ Kennett in a vitriolic, anonymous pamphlet published in 1711 in response to the Complete History, and then again in a sustained, seven-hundred-page attack, Examen, or an Inquiry into the Credit and Veracity of a pretended Complete History, which appeared later under his name (although not until 1740, after both men were already dead, in one of the books that Montagu North issued). There is no evidence that the two ever met, although it is possible; they certainly shared acquaintances.
In order to situate and examine the non-parallel relation between the two men, both are considered here as typical historical agents within a third historical entity: Habermas’s notion of the Bourgeois Public Sphere. In this context, I attempt to explore issues connected with each writer’s declared identity as an author before a public. It is quite possible, and very profitable, to understand North’s career as an author and his dispute with Kennett within the general topic of class, or of political party (the ostensible cause of the dispute), or even of cultures of informational exchange, but the Bourgeois Public Sphere offers a general theory of the period that brings these elements together in an enabling way. Such an enquiry into the North–Kennett dispute tests the Bourgeois Public Sphere’s effectiveness as an explanatory device, for even though it was conducted between typical characters, it was not carried out according to the ideal conditions described by Habermas.
Habermas’s account of the Bourgeois Public Sphere described ‘private people come together as a public’2 at a moment in early modernity.3 (Habermas himself did not, in fact, use the term ‘Public Sphere’– his own term Öffentlichkeit is perhaps better translated as ‘Public-ness’ – but ‘Public Sphere’ has been used in the English-speaking world as a double-sided tool of reference both to the ostensible historical object and to the Habermas-ness of that topic.4) ‘The public’ was for Habermas a new entity or force in the world that first comes into view (for us, looking back from now) in England around 1700. It emerged as a political and cultural player, claiming the right to establish knowledge, to determine the rules of commodity exchange, and to decide who was, and who did, what. The formation overlaps with something we might today call ‘public opinion’; it is simultaneous with the emergence of ‘public credit’; and it inaugurates an age of new standards such as ‘public taste’, ‘public decency’ and (with all its dark baggage) ‘public safety’. New sites such as stock exchanges, coffee houses and newspapers produced, or were produced by, a self-consciously emergent, literate, informed and opinionated property-owning class. The published materials that constitute this historical entity as a site, or (for us) an archive of discourse(s), were written in the vernacular. The Bourgeois Public Sphere enclosed a large readership with insufficient Latin for its Other, the Republic of Letters.5 For anyone who enters the literature of the period via Mac Flecknoe, The Battle of the Books and The Dunciad, Habermas’s Bourgeois Public Sphere is a curiously anodyne abstraction. The lived experience of ‘reasoned debate’ included the drab, sometimes brilliant, and often unreasonably toxic pamphleteering of Grub Street party politics. The only checks on excess were the emerging and linked concepts of politeness (not itself necessary to reason, although it may have been polite to reason that it was) and the laws of libel.
At the imagined moment of the perfectly round Bourgeois Public Sphere, in its ideal manifestation (which is hardly a historical object, rather a metaphysical one, and more of a ‘device’ for understanding a set of conjuctions), authority was not granted by the status of the individual speaking (‘publicness (or publicity) of representation’6), but by the quality of their reasoning. Reasoned argument would produce truths and authorize knowledge. Membership of this public was open to all. To be a qualifying private person, you needed literacy, property and opinions (or, later, Tastes, for the Bourgeois Public Sphere inaugurates the Critic). The imagined Bourgeois Public Sphere is therefore rational, secular and open, reverse-engineered out of Kant’s ‘What is Enlightenment?’ The spherical form brought to mind by the English translation of Öffentlichkeit is something to play with. The moment of bourgeois publicness is also the moment of financial bubbles. The conditions under which information circulated, authoring and authorizing new knowledges (within ‘informed and critical discourse’7), were exactly the conditions required to facilitate speculation.
Roger North was the youngest of fourteen children, ten of whom survived into adulthood. His father was Dudley, the fourth Baron North, who had sat in the Long Parliament; his mother was Anne Montagu, an accomplished woman who features prominently in North’s biographical writings. The eldest son inherited the baronetcy and plays no part in this narration. The second, Francis, was trained as a lawyer. He rose through the profession to become Lord Keeper of the Seal during the last years of Charles II. He died in late 1685, but at the time of his death was just months past the peak of his legal and political career. Under Charles, he had been at the heart of court and government, but James II, who became king in the spring of 1685, preferred others. Francis had been the patron of Roger’s rapid ascent through the legal profession during the 1670s and 1680s. The two brothers were close, sharing professional interests, an enthusiasm for natural philosophy and a love of music.8 A third brother, Dudley, five years younger than Francis and ten years older than Roger, was a merchant engaged in trade primarily with Turkey.9 After returning from Constantinople in 1680, Dudley was thrust into politics, being appointed as a pro-crown sheriff of the City of London, entering parliament and serving as a commissioner of the Treasury. Together, all three brothers acted as fixers for Charles II. All three were embroiled in the corrosive legal politics of the Exclusion Crisis and the Popish Plot. Roger, for example, was involved in the trial of the Rye House Plotters, and was a prosecutor in the trials of Algernon Sidney and Lord Russell; Dudley was involved in bullying the Corporation of London. All three became wealthy through these activities (not to mention advantageous marriages).
James II’s determination, upon his accession, to accommodate and even reintroduce the Catholic religion created problems for families such as the Norths. Whereas they were unquestionably loyal to the Stuart monarchy, they were also Protestants. Roger North could not unquestioningly support the king’s policies on toleration, nor his plans for a standing army with Catholic officers – neither could he obstruct his king. He remained a courtier, but not an important one, and definitely not a player. He retained his posts as attorney-general to the Queen and steward to the See of Canterbury, that is, legal advisor to Archbishop Sancroft. In the latter role, he became immersed in the Anglican resistance to James’s Declaration of Indulgence. When James quit the country in 1688 and William and Mary were given the joint throne the following year, Roger found himself further confounded by circumstances. He lost his seat in parliament. He was called before a House of Lords committee to answer for his previous actions. Although he welcomed James’s departure, and would have accepted William and Mary as regents (he was not a believer in divine right, rather in constitutional authority), he felt unable to sign the oath of loyalty to the new regime. He became a non-juror, and remained a suspected Jacobite for the rest of his life.
In December 1690, Roger North completed his purchase of a country seat, Rougham, in the remotest north of Norfolk. A few days less than a year later, Dudley died. At the age of forty, Roger now entered his long retirement from public life. But he remained extremely busy. He became involved in helping other non-jurors, and was approached by many for his advice, especially on legal matters (he was an expert executor and managed the estates of both of his brothers as well as, famously, that of Sir Peter Lely). He married the daughter of a Jacobite City magnate, Sir Robert Gayer, and raised a large family. He indulged his delight in building, music and the improvement of his estate. But most of all, and it would seem every day, he practised his obsession: writing.
As has been said, Roger North published little in his lifetime, committing himself largely to manuscript.10 His first identified writing was the preface to the Discourses on Trade, a short treatise now generally accepted as the work of Dudley North.11 This text was ignored at its publication and, according to Roger’s later biography of his brother, was unobtainable only a few years later.12 There is a rare, original copy in the British Library, where there is also a manuscript version. The manuscript contains a number of marginal comments and emendations, perhaps in Dudley’s hand.13 It would seem that Roger saw what was to be a posthumous and anonymous publication through the press. Perhaps the main text was written by Dudley as a bid for influence upon, or for a place within, the new administration, in which case, had he lived, it is conceivable that it may have been published under his own name.14 The conceit with which the preface opens is the fiction that this is a private document prepared for a public readership:
These Papers came direct to me, in order, as I suppose, to be made Publick: And having transmitted them to the Press, which is the only means whereby the University of Mankind is to be inform’d, I am absolved of that trust.15
The preface argues for plain English, plain-speaking and the conversational presentation of arguments. It commends ‘Mechanical’ scientific thinking (‘built upon clear and evident Truths’16), citing Cartesian ‘Method’. It argues in favour of free trade and deploys a commodity theory of money, turning radically from the ruling ‘balance of trade’ and bullionist dogmas. The preface is expressed in a humorous and conversational tone, confirmed by the conventional, rhetorical anxiety with which the pamphlet is presented before the ‘University of Mankind’:
The publick is an acute, as well as merciless Beast, which neither over-sees a Failing, nor forgives it; but stamps Judgment and Execution immediately, thô upon a Member of itself; and is no less Ingrateful than common Beggars, who affront their Benefactors, without whose Charity their Understandings would starve.17
All in all, the reasoned manner of argument, and argument for reason, along with the rhetorical apprehension of prejudiced and unreasonable readers (albeit phrased so as pleasantly and politely to exclude the present reader), fits with our assumptions about the communication of knowledge and ideas within a Habermasian Bourgeois Public Sphere. Yet, the disappearance of the text from the Public Sphere, lamented by Roger, indicates its power to exclude or not to hear unwanted voices. It is a place where reasoned debate could become lost or appear irrelevant. We need to build this into our model of the Sphere’s function as a space of communicative practice, for it suggests that it was a place where communication could be obstructed or fail. North’s manuscript copy ensured its survival, but only in the Intimate Sphere.18
The fact that North never published under his own name during his lifetime was typical of his class and of his period. But anyone who has read books and pamphlets from this period will be familiar with pencilled-in attributions on their title pages, some of them dating from the time of publication. Anonymity did not protect an identity from identification: John Locke confessed to his authorship of the ‘anonymous’ Treatises on Government only in his will, but the text had been long identified as his. Hilkiah Bedford was fined and went to prison as the identified author of The Hereditary Right of the Crown of England asserted rather than reveal the name of the real author, George Harbin. The publication of Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad was followed by a number of ‘keys’ to the anonymized objects of his satire. Identifying authors was part of the process of reading in the early years of the Bourgeois Public Sphere, and being ‘identified’ could lead to obscurity, celebrity or even confinement. It is unlikely, therefore, that North’s, or anyone’s, use of anonymity was meant absolutely to conceal identity, rather only to screen it and to provide a space for legal manoeuvre. We might argue that, in the context of the Habermasian Bourgeois Public Sphere, those who adopted the screen of anonymity may be eschewing the representation of their status before the public, thus becoming instances of reason (even if public opinion might identify and exclude them). North published three books under the pseudonym ‘A Person of Honour’.19 In the scheme proposed by Habermas, this particular persona, or screen, the ‘Person of Honour’, might indicate a kind of residual ‘publicity of representation’, that is, an identity by kind, for it might refer to North’s title as the son of a baronet, ‘the Honourable’. As Habermas makes clear, the Bourgeois Public Sphere did not bring to an end all the older forms of publicity, and many features of the traditional authority of kind remain (if ‘only’ in ritual) to the present day. The reference to an author as a ‘Person of Honour’ might, on the other hand, or even also, be intended to refer to the writer’s non-juror status, someone standing upon their honour, and function as a coded identity to a specific readership. Then again it may simply and neutrally imply a certain worthiness, appropriate to a private person in the self-assembled public; in support of this we could refer to Steven Shapin’s account of late-seventeenth-century authorship.20
Francis, Dudley and Roger North had unsuccessfully lobbied in parliament during the 1680s for the adoption of a land register. The Arguments & Materials, an anonymous pamphlet published in 1698, is a reworking for the press of their arguments.21 The conceit deployed in the text is that of the anonymous author as an amanuensis, who had written down verbatim and in a busy, engaging style, the opinions expressed in private conversation by ‘A Gentleman of the Long Robe’ (presumably a screened reference to Francis).22 The scandal of multiply sold land; the tortuous processes of transfer and inheritance; the profitability of such confusion to lawyers; the extraordinary legal problems of resolving the situation – all are discussed in a plain and conversational presentation. Like the Discourses, the Arguments & Materials is written with a good humour, but no polemical vigour of its own, rather one that is attributed to a character within the text. A third text, The Reflections on our Common Failings of 1701,23 anonymously presented a translation of an anonymous French original and was decidedly different in tone from Roger North’s own essays on manners.24 It appeared shortly before the appearance of periodicals such as the Tatler and the Spectator, the apotheosis of the topical essay that plays such a role in Habermas’s account of the transformation of the Public Sphere. (Such essays characteristically ventriloquized the world view of their actual, and widely identified, authors through a cast of pseudonymous characters.)
Together these three texts – the Discourses, Arguments & Materials and Reflections – dropped into and through the Public Sphere leaving hardly a ripple, although all three represent and contribute to our understanding of what the Public Sphere might have comprised in an ideal community of texts imagined to represent an ideal community of communicating agents. Two other publications by North can be understood as contributions to the growing bibliography of advice literature. The Gentleman’s Accomptant of 1714 provides a comprehensive introduction to household economy. It was in a long tradition of such advice, a tradition to which Roger’s own father had contributed.25 In the same vein is his advice on fish-keeping, which links out to a new genre of advice on land improvement; it was his most reprinted publication during the eighteenth century.26 North’s manuscripts contain a number of possible additions to this kind of advice literature: there are multiple versions, at different levels of finish, of works on architecture, music, the education of lawyers and much else.
One other anonymous work was published during his lifetime, of a quite different tenor: Reflections upon some passages in Mr Le Clerc’s Life of Mr John Locke, signed as by ‘Your humble Servant’.27 This 1711 pamphlet will disappoint anyone curious to understand North’s reading of the great philosopher. Instead, it is a critique of Le Clerc’s history of recent times, which he calls ‘pure Extract and rectified Spirit of History’.28 It attacks Le Clerc’s presentation of the ‘Secret History’ of the reign of Charles II:
the rankest Libels in their time, by degrees become Secret History (forsooth) and by succeeding Generations are valued as great Curiosities, and Discoveries of concealed Truth, till at length they gain the honourable Title of Anecdotes, turning the Verities of former Times into worse than Fable or Romance […] [T]here were not many, if any Secrets in that Court.29
North especially criticizes Le Clerc’s sympathetic treatment of the early political career of John Locke’s patron, the Earl of Shaftesbury (‘that the Court was bad, and he was good; the Court Popish and Tyrannous, and he a Protestant, and a Protector of Liberty’30). As the full title of the work indicates, the pamphlet included North’s first mention of White Kennett’s third volume of the Complete History of England (‘If he had nam’d it any thing but History, he had come off better’31). Both the Life of Mr John Locke and the Complete History had been in the public domain since 1706. North had apparently not felt the need to comment publicly (or, indeed, privately in his manuscripts) on either, until urged to do so, several years later, by others.32 Retired, retiring and approaching sixty, he was an unlikely political player, and as we shall see, disavowed any party affiliation. But he had been an eyewitness in Charles II’s court, he had been a privy councillor, and before that, from his earliest days as a law student, he had sat in the background, listening and playing bass viol, while his older brother Francis entertained courtiers. Furthermore, he was in possession of the former Lord Keeper’s diaries, notes and correspondence. Certainly, his personal knowledge and his evidently undiminished forensic skills qualified him for the task. Le Clerc’s text was subjected to a prosecuting counsel’s interrogation.
Three important works were published in the early 1740s by Roger’s son, Montagu. These included two biographical volumes – the life of Francis North and the lives of Dudley and John North – and the Examen.33 All appeared under Roger North’s own name and represent his emergence as an identified author in the Bourgeois Public Sphere. They set straight the public record (call it ‘history’) with regard to both the reputation of King Charles II and those of his brothers. The earlier Reflections upon some passages in Mr Le Clerc’s Life of Mr John Locke had been published soon after the Whig prosecution of Henry Sacheverell in 1710; it can be related to a widespread furore that defined the territory of the Public Sphere at that time, reaching from Parliament to Grub Street, a furore that resulted in the passing of the Riot Act in 1714. It is clear from internal evidence that the Examen was substantially complete by then. Why was it not published until 1740? Why was it not pitched into the reasoned exchange of ‘private persons come together as a public’ twenty-five years earlier at a moment when it may have had a greater impact? It is hard to believe that it was likely to lead to the prosecution of someone of North’s status.34 Why were all of the posthumous books published under his name (and this includes the reprint of the 1711 Reflections, which was added as an appendix to the Examen)? There is another puzzle. In the advertisement following the dedication in the Examen, Montagu North states that the original manuscript was to be placed in the library of Jesus College, Cambridge, ‘where, whoever shall entertain any Doubt of the Fidelity of the Publisher, will be permitted to peruse it’.35 The manuscript is still there. What is being proved? The answer to some of these questions, and clues to answers for the rest, can, as Schmidt has argued, be discovered in the preface to the Examen.
First, something needs to be said of White Kennett’s book that prompted North to write. The third volume of the Complete History is a remarkable piece of historical synthesis and a foundational work for the Whig interpretation of history.36 It was very successful, being reprinted four times before 1715, and an amended edition appeared in 1719. It is organized in strict chronological order: the marginalia run relentlessly through the calendar of the seventeenth century from ‘Born Nov 19. 1600’ (‘The Life and Reign of Charles the First’, p. 1) to ‘1701. Question, Whether the Convocation was dissolved with the King’s Death.’ (‘The Life and Reign of King William the Third’, p. 849). It is a ‘scriptural’ history, assembling a comprehensive array of printed materials with scarcely any paraphrase. The transcribed material is glossed by a linking editorial commentary, which not only leads the reader through the ostensible object of the history (that is, what was imputed to have happened), but also reveals an agenda (for example, that popery and religious dissent result in the seizure of arbitrary power). The commentary is notably understated, and the reader is obliged to look out for the implications of the lengthy quotations. Overall it is a remarkably secular and pragmatic account, avoiding any kind of constitutional metaphysics. Charles II and James II are negatively reviewed. Charles was characterized as a secret papist and criticized for his protection of his brother. The Exclusion Crisis and the Popish Plot were presented as manifestations of arbitrary power at its ugliest. If Titus Oates was not exactly made a hero, he was certainly allowed to have been generally in the right. Many ‘court party’ personalities were assigned to damnatio memoriae, or misremembered. Francis North, who had been Lord Keeper throughout the crucial period of the early 1680s, has only two citations in the index. His brother Dudley is wrongly given a baronetcy, rather than a knighthood. The book lacks any sense of the author’s own direct experience of the events covered (even less his personal knowledge of or involvement in them). Kennett was not well connected; he knew few of the personalities discussed; he had not been there; he had not been a spectator. The volume was published anonymously, attributed to ‘a Learned and Impartial Hand’.
In his preface to the Examen, Roger North makes a number of points that, while criticisms of Kennett, stand also as declaration of his own investment in historical writing.37 His opening statement claims that he writes to defend Charles II against the slanders of ‘defamatory Pretenders’. He declares that all historians have some ‘Political scheme of their own’; for his own part, he ‘pretends not to be exempt from that Infirmity’. One side stands for the ‘Preservation … of the National Interest’; the other side, though ‘pretending uncommon Zeal for the Protestant Religion and Law, at the Bottom, mean[s] only private Interests’ (and ‘all the scandalous Atheists, Sectaries and Heretics, are generally found to herd with the latter’). The dispute is presented as being between the ‘constant’ and the ‘querulous’. Histories such as Kennett’s are declared to be continuations of the very squabbles that gave rise to the formation of parties in the time of Charles II.
[T]his Writer [i.e., North himself] defies the Imputation as being of a Party, so long as it is the Side of Truth and Sincerity, which cannot properly be termed a Party, but a Duty, and justly is in no Man’s Election to take and leave, as Party-Dealers commonly suppose; otherwise common Honesty, as well as Fidelity to lawful Governments may be a Party Character.
Here North alludes to the reputation of ‘trimming’ that stuck to Kennett throughout his interesting career. Kennett had been a devoted Stuart loyalist,38 then a defender of the Church against James II, then a signer of the oath of loyalty to William and Mary,39 then a supporter of the Williamite bishops, and eventually a propagandist of Whig ecclesiastical policy (ending up in the House of Lords as Bishop of Peterborough).40 North argues that is the task of historians to reveal the facts, but a historian must not present history without comment:
whoever, on Pretence of Impartiality, in that Distinction is mealy-mouth’d, may be accounted not only a sneaking Neutral in the Cause of Good and Evil, but a positive Traitor to Goodness itself.41
Here North satirizes Kennett’s representation of himself on the title page of the Complete History as ‘a Learned and Impartial Hand’, as well as criticizing his practice of insinuating rather than declaring his judgments. For North, impartiality was not an option. As he saw it, one can only write with a ‘Political scheme’; the only positions available are ‘constant’ avowal of right or ‘querulous’ private interest.
North turns next to a criticism of Kennett’s method. Kennett (and/or John Hughes, the general editor of the Complete History) laid claim to using the ‘best writers’ as sources. North disputes the claim. First, he criticizes the poor citation that compromises the evaluation of sources. Second, he disputes whether the sources were indeed ‘the best’, pointing to the numerous citations from partisan pamphlet literature. North pounces on Kennett’s claim that contemporary history is problematic, that it was difficult for people to judge of their own times. Kennett had been understandably apprehensive of ‘Imperfect Remembrances, confused Notions, Partiality to one Side, and Prejudice to another’, but, North argues, ‘[h]e makes no Distinction; but Divines, Statesmen, Scholars, lawyers, Gentle, Simple, Wise, Unwise, Honest, or Dishonest, all are involved’, going on to point to ‘the most violent Party-Men’ who ‘have wrote the most useful Histories’. The proposition is then turned against Kennett, who had himself used the accounts of ‘Contemporaries’, albeit material drawn only from printed sources (‘Acts of State, Records, Proclamations, Declarations, and the like’). In eschewing the direct expression of experience, North argued, Kennett missed the point of documentary material: ‘What is most useful to be known is seldom or never to be found in any public Registrations; and is not to be expected or hoped for, but from private Memoirs.’ North dismisses Kennett’s history as a mere compilation of stuff that was eavesdropped.42
Posterity is like to want the chief Truths, of our Times, and (subducting private Memoirs and Remembrances until the World will be pleased to accept of them) the Work of Compilers, that is Critical History, will grow exceeding difficult … at present, the Current of History is muddy, and instead of clearing, the Stream grows continually more foul.
In the last paragraphs of the preface, North turns to Kennett’s decision to publish his history anonymously. Kennett had said that ‘No prudent Writer will set a Name to the History of his own Times.’ North’s reply is that not only have many ‘prudent Writers’ done just that, but that it is ‘not only prudent, but just to do it, for the Character of the person always known, is a Character of the History’. North sums up his own intention by stating that he will embrace controversy, from time to time directly criticizing Kennett’s text (the ‘examen’ element), but also allow himself licence to pass back and forth over the issues. He says that he will employ digressions and anecdotal material from memoirs (he refers specifically to those of his brother, Francis). In this way, he intends to produce a ‘New Work’,43 thereby implicitly criticizing Kennett’s rigid chronological organization. On the first page following the preface, page one of the Examen proper, he writes: ‘I shall follow him not by Years, as he moves with an hobbling Pace, but by Subjects, which may assist Unity.’ No reader will have failed to have noticed that before the author’s preface the book had begun with ‘a Concise Chronology of the Chief Passages Taken Notice of in the Examen […] from the Chronological History of England put out by Mr. Pointer 1714, Vol. I.’44 In North’s history, chronology was not irrelevant; it was useful, but it was no more than a tool.
From this, several overlapping responses can be given to the questions asked above. Clearly North could not, by his own admission, publish the Examen or the biographies of his brothers anonymously. The character of the person is the character of the history; authorship determines authority; anonymous publication would have diminished the books’ value and meaning. The unambiguous identification of the author by definition authorizes the narrative of remembered experience. If, as Schmidt argues, he was apprehensive for his own safety, then it might have been prudent to forbear publication until after he was dead and immune from prosecution, although (and here I make a sentimental investment and declare) that was not his style. But then, maybe what was at stake was not so urgent. Maybe what was at stake was not to be hazarded in the poisonous atmosphere of London during the last years of the last Stuart. I am not convinced that North thought that the vindication of his king and his brothers should take place in the same forum as the polemics of contesting parties, not least for fear of that vindication being mistaken for a matter of those parties. The books may have worked better in Latin, in the Republic of Letters, but their intended readership was not to be found there. The books required a more considered readership, something closer to the imagined ‘private people come together as a public’ of the ideal Habermasian Public Sphere, although it is likely that North did not consider that yet to be properly assembled. They were written for a better future and were left to his son. They self-consciously inaugurate an archive of direct experience for generations to come.
The recessive authorization of the text of the Examen by the deposition of Roger North’s manuscript in the library of Jesus College might be understood as a quaint manifestation of that same ambition. A manuscript represents authorship in a different way from a printed text, even one issued under a name. Roger North (or rather, his manuscript trace) was placed outside his book, as a reference or witness. This is hardly a kind of proof by the criteria of what he called ‘critical history’, but it is an impressive investment in the value systems of both traditional ‘publicity of representation’ and self-representation through reason within the Bourgeois Public Sphere. One is reminded of the Arguments & Materials for a Register of Estates, or the system of double-entry bookkeeping advocated in The Gentleman’s Accomptant, where property (and commodities) do not ‘belong’ within the property itself, to be asserted by possession and defended by legal disputation, but in the identification of the property as a relation marked by a separate record in the public domain and beyond dispute.
On the other hand, there may be an alternative anxiety that prompted Montagu North, and his printer Fletcher Gyles, to establish the authenticity of the text of the Examen. On 6 March 1740, Philip Yorke, 1st Earl of Hardwicke, passed judgment on a dispute in Chancery: Gyles v. Wilcox. This was a dispute over ‘fair use’. Fletcher Gyles had published an edition of Matthew Hale’s Pleas of the Crown.45 Wilcox and Barlow had produced an abridgment (with the Old French and Latin translated into English) as the Treatise of Modern Crown Law. The dispute was whether such abridgement was piracy (‘colourably shortened only’ in the terminology developed by Yorke) or the production of a ‘new work’. The case is of further interest inasmuch as it removed responsibility for judgment in such cases from a jury, handing it over to arbitration by experts (who in this case ruled that Wilcox had produced a ‘real and fair abridgement’). Gyles v. Wilcox set a common-law precedent that remains influential, not only in establishing the means by which copyright should be determined (expert witnesses), but also in establishing that a literary work was the product of a writer’s labour (including in this case the labour of the abridger), rather than the property of a publisher.46 The manuscript in Cambridge provides substantial proof of the authorship of the Examen. Should anyone acting on behalf of the Complete History wish to argue that the Examen depended upon the Complete History, and that it was not a ‘new work’, the manuscript would refute them. Furthermore, should publication be complicated by any litigation, the original text would be accessible through the ‘publicity of representation’ offered by the status of a Cambridge college. This is not the absolute answer to my earlier question, any more than the previous meditation on recessive referencing of authorship, but it places the issue firmly in a Bourgeois Public Sphere policed by legal innovation during early modernity.
We have seen that for Roger North, writing about the past should embrace the opacity and complexity of localized, immediate experience, something we could call ‘the personal’. Memoir and anecdote tell us truths about human desire, motive and agency.47 Furthermore, as North freely acknowledged, the writing of history itself is no more than desires, motives and agencies at work in opaque, complex, local and immediate situations (for example, party interest). As we have also seen, in North’s judgment, White Kennett’s Complete History was incomplete, and its author deluded as to the possibility of his impartiality.
‘Anecdotal’ is a word very often deployed as a derogatory term by professional historians.48 Before 1771, parliamentary business could be known only anecdotally; after that date, its reporting the proceedings of Parliament ceased to be punished, although limits remain in place to this day. Parliament retains privileges (‘private laws’) that exempt it (like parts of the legal process and many parts of government process) from full and immediate exposure to publicity. Anecdotes enter the Public Sphere on the authority of the source (‘a government spokesman’, ‘someone close to the minister’, etc.). These limits of public knowledge mark the boundaries of any imagined Public Sphere, and to understand them is to understand the rules of civil society. It is still possible, wherever one lives in the world, to go to prison for sharing anecdotes.
For North, the self-regulating reason of a public did not necessarily offer a neutral space of judgment. That space was polluted by what he called ‘Party’. He was a reader of Hobbes as well as Descartes, and we can trace in his writings a Hobbesian apprehension regarding private reason. Reason, in its reasoning, could not always be trusted to understand itself as separate from private interest and individual desire.49 As Jamie C. Kassler has argued,50 for North it was the English common law that provided a rein on the possible excesses of self-regulating reason. With law comes our understanding of our ‘Duty’ (this notion of Duty is about as metaphysical as North ever gets) to respect and maintain the Crown, Parliament and the Reformation settlement.
The Examen, together with the biographies of North’s brothers, constitutes a Stuart-loyalist version of the recent past. These texts have remained marginal in the dominant narratives of the period, becoming interesting only recently in micro-histories of resistance and of a lost cause. Perhaps they should be read in conjunction with Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones as framing devices for an enquiry into the failure of the Great Rebellion to attract the support of English Jacobites. While the biographies of the North brothers have enjoyed several revivals by antiquarian and revisionist historians since the early nineteenth century, the Examen has never been reprinted, despite Coleridge’s enthusiastic endorsement.51
I would like to turn briefly, and in conclusion, to the intimate sphere of Roger North as represented in the manuscript materials. They document a life occupied in continual, laborious writing. They have been called ‘a trackless sea of loose papers and manuscripts;’52 one can get lost, but they are not that indeterminate. One can read for an underlying system and for a chronology of topics. His Cartesian anti-Newtonianism articulates a distinctive position in natural philosophy that we must attend to.53 His manuscripts on music have been a resource for musicologists for nearly two hundred years.54 His observations on the law, and advice to anyone studying law,55 together with numerous descriptions, characters and anecdotes of legal personalities, are another remarkable resource. As Kassler has shown, such material makes up a complex, fractured but readable whole, and in her persuasive account, presents us with a conservative, neo-stoic intellectual.56 North’s manuscript materials included not only his own writings but also those of his brothers, as well as manuscripts and letters, deeds and records inherited from previous generations of the family. They passed on to his son and remained in the North family until they ceased to do their job or their purpose was forgotten and they were sold off as waste paper. They are now distributed between a number of libraries; some even remain at Rougham. 57
It is unlikely that I have exhaustively explained why Montagu North published his father’s works, but I can point to Roger North’s own explanation of why he wrote. In the preface (‘prfando’) that opens BL Add MS 32526, he states:
Insatiable desire to know, ambitious thincking, care of prserving Even ye hints, & Embrio’s of thought /designe of Improving.\ facility, as well as pleasure, In scribling, and Courting a style, are a Combination of Inducem’ts to what you find here, and /also\ Much More of like fustian, In other places, wch by their solemne appearance In books, seem to have had somewhat of ye polite, [but?] In truth are but Extemporaneous sentiments, from one that writes swifter then thincks, and hath No test of his owne thoughts but his Review after wrighting.
We might pathologize his writing as graphomania. We might empathize with a painful loneliness. What inhibited him from publishing his writings?
Men of collegiate conversation, have often freedome of comunicating sentiment’s, & so test them upon others understanding, wch where candor dwells, is of admirable use and satisfaction! but few ages allow a sett of Men of [this?] candor, to admitt such freedomes without censure, Either [the?] church or some stage principles may be hurt by ye Consequence even of a truth as they thinck, & then it is discourag[ed?] or Els some state policy, or faction may be Interested, & for that cause, truth Is to be supprest, or Els ill Nature, love of contradiction, raish raiseth a battery Impertinently, or a plagiary humour, If a thought be good, to run away [with?] & then claime it, hinder this freedome of Conversation, [Whereby?], In our pudle & slough of time, that advantage is denyed.
Oh! for the Age of hero’s. Galileo, Gassendi, Pieriesk. [….?] Kepler, /[Cartesius?] [&?]\ with ye Noble [train?] of humanists, Erasmus /[longolius?] [….?]\ etc. who sent their thought about by letters.58
North’s longing for the collegiality of honourable persons, where ideas would not be abused, stolen or twisted, but could circulate anecdotally in the private realm and remain unalienated, where the printed form is simply an extension of that process of communication, can be read as a proposal as much for an alternative modernity as for a lost past. The device of the Bourgeois Public Sphere reveals a set of relations (of people, law and technologies) where some such extended privacy, or domesticated publicity, ought surely to have been available, but was not. The Bourgeois Public Sphere was essentially a market for and of information. Inasmuch as that market was an agent in history, it represented its claims to reason, progress and modernity against its own characterization of a darker, traditional past. Persons like Roger North stand for, and in, that darkness. Other Tory intellectuals engaged with the Bourgeois Public Sphere more effectively through satire; they played upon the insecurities of their readership, pointing to a different darkness shining through the gaps in the imagined rationality of modernity. An enquiry into the relationship of North’s published and unpublished works reveals a negotiation of the distinctions between the private and the public, and a nostalgia for, or maybe aspiration for, separate and unmixable domains. This nostalgia is played out in a complicated relationship with the new forms of publicity. It produces a curious publishing career, one that requires careful interpretation by twenty-first-century readers.
Anonymous (White Kennett), A Complete History Of England: With The Lives Of All The Kings and Queens Thereof; From the Earliest Account of Time, to the Death of His late Majesty King William III, Containing A Faithful Relation of all Affairs of State Ecclesiastical and Civil. The Whole Illustrated with Large and Useful Notes, taken from divers Manuscripts, and other good Authors: And the Effigies of the Kings and Queens from the Originals, Engraved by the best Masters, ed. John Hughes. London: Printed for Brab. Aylmer, Reb. Bonwick, Sam. Smith and Benl. Walford, Will. Freeman, Tim. Goodwin, Tho. Bennet, Matth. Wotton, John Walthoe, Sam. Manship, Tho. Newborough, John Nicholson, Richard Parker, and Benj. Took. 1706. Vols 1 and 2 are previously existing texts by various authors: John Milton, Sir Thomas Moore, Samuel Daniell, John Habington, Hall and Hollingshead, George Buck, Sir Francis Bacon, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, John Hayward, Francis Godwin, William Cambden and Arthur Wilson; Vol. 3. is attributed to ‘a Learned and Impartial Hand’.
Anonymous (W.K. A.M. = White Kennett?), A Dialogue Between Two Friends Occasioned by the late Revolution of Affairs And the Oath of Allegiance, by W. K. A.M. London: Printed for Ric. Chiswell at the Rose and Crown in St Paul’s Church-yard. MDCLXXXIX [1689].
Anonymous (White Kennett, 1683), Witt against Wisdom, or a Panegyrick upon Folly: Penn’d in Latin by Desiderius Erasmus, Render’d into English, Oxford, Printed by L. Lichfield, Printer to the University, for Anthony Stephens, Bookseller near the Theater. 1683.
Anonymous (White Kennett), An Address of Thanks to a Good Prince, presented in the Panegyrick of Pliny, upon Trajan, the Best of Roman Emperours, London, Printed by M. Flesher, for Tho. Fickus, Bookseller in Oxford. 1685.
Anonymous (William Newton), The Life of the Right Reverend Dr. White Kennett, Late Lord Bishop of Peterborough. With several Original Letters Of the late Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Tennison, The late Earl of Sunderland, Bishop Kennett, etc. And some Curious Original Papers and Records, Never before Publish’d. London, Printed for T. Cox under the Royal-Exchange; J. Brindley in New-Bond-Street; F. Cogan at the Inner-Temple-Gate, Fleet Street; and J. Stag in Westminster-Hall. M.DCC.XXX [1730].
Anonymous (Dudley North, fourth Baron North), Observations and advices oeconomical, London: Printed by T. R. for John Martyn Printer to the Royal Society, at the sign of the Bell without Temple-Bar, 1669.
Anonymous (Dudley North), Discourses upon Trade; Principally Directed to the Cases of the Interest, Coynage, Clipping, Increase, of Money. London, Printed for Tho. Basset, at the George in Fleet-Street. 1691.
Anonymous (Francis North), A Philosophical Essay on Music Directed to a Friend, London, Printed for John Martyn, Printer to the Royal Society; at the Bell in Saint Paul’s Church-Yard, Feb 3rd 1676/7.
Anonymous (Roger North), Arguments & Materials for a Register of Estates, London: Printed for Samuel Lowndes over against Exeter-Exchange in the Strand, 1698.
Anonymous (Roger North), Reflections in our Common Failings, Done out of French, By a Person of Honour. London: Printed by G. Croom, for R. Smith at the Angel and Bible, without Temple-Bar; and John Chantry, over-against Exeter-Change in the Strand. 1701.
Anonymous (Roger North), Reflections upon some passages in Mr. Le Clerc’s life of Mr. John Locke: In a letter to a friend. With a Preface containing some Remarks on two large Volumes of libels; the one initialled State-Tracts, and the other falslely call’d The Compleat History of England, Vol. III commonly ascrib’d to Dr Kennet, London: Printed for J Morphew, near Stationers Hall, 1711. The pamphlet is signed ‘Your humble Servant; this text is also included as an appendix to the Examen, where it is signed ‘Your humble Servant, R. North’, see below, Roger North, Examen.
Anonymous (Roger North), A Discourse of Fish and Fish-Ponds […] Done by a Person of Honour, London, Printed for E. Curll, at the Dial and Bible against St. Dunstan’s Church in Fleet-Street. 1713.
Anonymous (Roger North), The Gentleman’s Accomptant: or an Essay to Unfold the Mystery of Accompts. By Way of Debtor and Creditor, commonly called Merchants’ Accompts; And Applying the Same to the Concerns of the Nobility and Gentry of England. […] By a Person of Honour. London: Printed for E. Curll, at the Dial and Bible against St. Dunstan’s Church in Fleetstreet. 1714.
Anonymous (Roger North and Sir Richard Weston), The Gentleman Farmer: Or Certain Observations Made by an English Gentleman Upon the Husbandry of Flanders; And the Same Compared with That of England […] Written by a Person of Honour in the County of Norfolk. London: Printed for E. Curll over-against Catherine-Street, in the Strand. M.DCC.XCVI [1726].
White Kennett, Parochial Antiquities Attempted in the History of Ambrosden, Burcester, and Other Adjacent Parts In the Counties of Oxford and Bucks. By White Kennett Vicar of Ambroseden. Oxford, Printed at the Theater, M.DC.XCV. [1695].
Roger North, Examen: or, an Enquiry into the Credit and Veracity of a Pretended Complete History; shewing the Peverse and Wicked design of it, and the many falsities and abuses of Truth contained in it. Together with some Memoirs occasionally inserted. All tending to vindicate the Honour of the late King Charles the Second, and his Happy Reign, from the intended aspersions of that foul pen. By the Honourable Roger North, Esq; London, printed for Fletcher Gyles against Gray’s-Inn Gate in Holborn. MDCCXL [1740].
Roger North, The Life of the Right Honourable Francis North, Baron of Guilford, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal under King Charles II. and King James II. Wherein are inserted The Characters of Sir Matthew Hale, Sir George Jeffries, Sir Leoline Jenkins, Sidney Godolphin, and others the most eminent Lawyers and Statesmen of that Time. By the Honourable Roger North Esq; London. Printed for John Whiston, at Mr. Boyle’s Head in Fleet-street. MDCCXLII [1742].
Roger North, The Life of the Honourable Sir Dudley North, Knt. Commissioner of the Customs, and afterward of the Treasury to his Majesty King Charles the Second. And of the Honourable and Reverend Dr. John North, Master of Trinity College in Cambridge, Prebend of Westminster, and sometime Clerk of the Closet to the same King Charles the Second. By the Honourable Roger North, Esq; London. Printed for the Editor, And sold by John Whiston, at Mr. Boyle’s Head in Fleet-street. MDCCXLIV [1744].
Roger North, A Discourse of the Poor, Shewing the Pernicious Tendency Of the Laws now in Force For their Maintenance and Settlement: Containing likewise, Some Considerations Relating to National Improvement in general. By the late Hon. Roger North, Esq; London: Printed for M. Cooper in Paternoster Row; and Sold by W. Craighton in Ipswich. 1753.
Roger North, A Discourse on the Study of the Laws of England, by the Hon. Roger North. Now first printed from the Original MS. in the Hargrave Collection. With Notes, and Illustrations By a Member of the Inner Temple. London. Printed for Charles Baldwyn, Newgate-Street, London, MDCCCXXIV [1824].
1 ‘Unus oculatus testis praestat auritis decem’, Roger North’s misquotation of a line from the second act of Plautus’ Truculentus. The line is employed as the epitaph, on the title page of Roger North, Life of Francis North. The implication is that (for North) the testimony of a direct witness has greater value than that of any number of secondhand eavesdroppers, a point returned to later in the essay. The primary texts discussed are referred to in shortened form throughout the essay and footnotes; full publication details are given in the bibliography.
2 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Polity Press: Cambridge, 1989), p. 27. The English-language edition emerged long after the German and French editions (Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Luchterhand: Darmstadt, 1962) and L’Espace public: archéologie de la publicité comme dimension constitutive de la société bourgeoise, trans. Marc Buhot de Launay [Payot: Paris, 1978]). Habermas’s concept had a delayed impact on Anglo-American scholarship, arriving at the moment of post-structuralism and the ‘collapse’ of Marxism, a moment marked by the publication of Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992).
3 There is an enormous literature. Three articles have helped me understand current options for contemporary readers: Harold Mah, ‘Phantasies of the Public Sphere: Rethinking the Habermas of Historians’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 72, no. 1 (2000), pp. 153–82; Peter Lake and Steve Pincus, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 45, no. 2 (2006), pp. 270–92; and Conal Condren, ‘Public, Private and the Idea of the “Public Sphere” in Early–Modern England’, Intellectual History Review, vol. 19, no. 1 (2008), pp. 15–28. Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (Yale University Press: New Haven, 2009), especially chapters 5, 6 and 7, gives a compelling account of the pre-emptive foreclosure of any Public Sphere as a ‘real space’ by what the author convincingly calls a Catholic, modernizing king, James II. Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private and the Division of Knowledge (Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 2005) is a productive utilization of the concept, both as a device and as an object of study, for a social and cultural history of early modernity.
4 Mah, ‘Phantasies’, op. cit., p. 154, states that the Habermasian Public Sphere has become ‘a prescriptive disciplinary category – a category to be invoked in studies that aspire to disciplinary significance’. That is an assertion to make one cautious, and encourages a degree of circumspection, if not inhibition, in the rest us.
5 Gareth V. Bennett, White Kennett, 1660–1728, Bishop of Peterborough: A Study in the Political and Ecclesiastical History of the Early Eighteenth Century (SPCK: London, 1957) lists sixty-eight printed works by White Kennett. These can be divided into learned works addressed to the ‘Republic of Letters’ and those presented for the ‘Public Sphere’. An example of the former would be his Parochial Antiquities, which was rare, expensive and full of Latin (and also sent out under the author’s name); of the latter, Witt Against Wisdom (a translation of Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly, published anonymously), which was rightly popular, and frequently reprinted, appearing with Holbein’s illustrations in later editions.
6 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, op. cit., p. 7.
7 Ibid., p. xi.
8 See, for example, Anonymous (Francis North), A Philosophical Essay on Music.
9 For a thorough account of, and context for, Dudley North’s career, see, Richard Grassby, The English Gentleman in Trade: The Life and Works of Sir Dudley North 1641–91 (Clarendon Press: London, 1994).
10 See Peter T. Millard, ‘The Chronology of Roger North’s Main Works’, Review of English Studies, New Series, vol. 24, no. 95 (August 1973), pp. 283–94; and Jamie C. Kassler and Mary Chan, Roger North: Materials for a Chronology of his Writings, Checklist No. 1 (University of New South Wales: Kensington, New South Wales, 1989).
11 Two earlier pamphlets have been attributed, at least in part, to Roger North: ‘The Narrative of Sir Francis North …’ (1680) and ‘A Letter Concerning the Disabling Clauses …’ (1690), see Jamie C. Kassler, The Honourable Roger North, 1651–1734: On Life, Morality, Law and Tradition (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2009), pp. 363–8. No doubt more will be presented, or come to light, in the future.
12 Anonymous (Dudley North), Discourses upon Trade. The Discourses was installed in the canon of economic literature only at the moment of political economy. It features in John Ramsay McCulloch, A Select Collection of Early English Tracts on Commerce, from the originals of Mun, Roberts, North and others (Political Economy Club: London, 1856), and was highly commended by Ricardo ‘I had no idea that anyone entertained such correct opinions, as are expressed in this publication, at so early a period.’ See Letters of David Ricardo to John Ramsay McCulloch, ed. Jacob H. Hollander (Publications of the American Economic Association: New York, 1895), p. 126; this reference from Jacob H. Hollander, (ed.), Discourses upon Trade: A Reprint of Economic Tracts (Johns Hopkins Press: Baltimore, 1907). Roger wrote in his Life of Dudley North, p. 181: ‘it is certain the pamphlet is, and hath been ever since, utterly sunk, and a copy not to be had for money’. Julian Hoppit, ‘The Contexts and Contours of British Economic Literature, 1660–1760’, Historical Journal, vol. 49 (2006), p. 102, quotes Terence Hutchison, Before Adam Smith: The Emergence of Political Economy, 1662–1776 (Basil Blackwell: Oxford, 1988), who noted that the Discourses ‘seems to have disappeared from view almost completely very soon after its publication’.
13 BL Add MS 32522; this volume also includes transcripts of letters from Dudley, sent in the 1660s when he travelled to Archangel, and then via Italy to Turkey; they form part of Roger’s Life of Dudley. The manuscript is not discussed in George D. Choksy, ‘The Bifurcated Economics of Sir Dudley North and Roger North: One Holistic Analytical Engine’, History of Political Economy, vol. 27, no. 3 (1995), pp. 477–92, a comprehensive analysis of the North brothers’ economic and social theory.
14 See Julian Hoppit, ‘Contexts and Contours’, pp. 89–91, for a discussion of the ‘typical’ anonymity of economic texts in the period.
15 Anonymous (Dudley North), Discourses upon Trade, A2.
16 Ibid., A4v.
17 Ibid., A2r.
18 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p. 28, ‘Intimsphäre’ – this is Habermas’s only reference to a spherical object and it is clearly used figuratively. We may infer a limited circulation of texts within the intimate sphere (which includes letters as well as drafts and ‘problematic’ texts). See Harold Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (University of Massachusetts Press: Amherst, 1998) for an account of texts moving from hand to hand within coteries. Such circulation, for example, was Sir William Petty’s principal means of ‘publication’.
19 Anonymous (Roger North), Reflections in Our Common Failings (1701), A Discourse of Fish and Fish-Ponds (1713), and The Gentleman’s Accomptant (1714). There are 803 entries (books and musical scores) in the British Library catalogue for ‘A Person of Honour’. The earliest is dated 1642; nearly all ‘originals’ are from this moment of the Bourgeois Public Sphere. Many are scholarly reproductions, many are duplicates. The number of identified authors is few – attributions run to some twenty suggested names, most, but not all aristocratic.
20 Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1994).
21 Anonymous (Roger North), Arguments & Materials for a Register of Estates. Land registration for the whole of the United Kingdom was introduced only following the Land Registration Act of 1862, and was not properly, or universally, achieved until the twentieth century. Local systems existed at that earlier time – reference is made to one such in Norfolk, which Roger North, as a Norfolk landowner, knew well.
22 Anonymous (Roger North), Arguments & Materials, p. 1. The device of representing ‘philosophical’ arguments in this way is as old as philosophical literature – that is, first person accounts of the conversations of others.
23 Anonymous (Roger North), Reflections in our Common Failings, Done out of French, By a Person of Honour, after Anonymous (Pierre de Villiers), Réflexions sur les défauts d’autrui, Paris, 1691. The original preface, also translated, discusses the anonymity of authors, and the anonymization of the ‘real’ persons discussed in the essays. We might conclude that the effect of their ‘reality’ was enhanced through their screening in this way – the implication being that they had be anonymized to avoid scandal, or to protect the author (an implication that might, furthermore, increase the sense of social prestige of any reader who believed that they could identify them). This kind of reality-effect and double-take was employed ubiquitously in literature of the period, and with great comic effect by numerous satirists.
24 A number are included in Franciscus J. M. Korsten, Roger North (1651–1734): Virtuoso and Essayist (Holland University Press: Amsterdam, 1981).
25 Anonymous (Dudley North, fourth Baron North), Observations and advices oeconomical.
26 Anonymous (Roger North), A Discourse of Fish and Fish-Ponds. It is likely that Roger North was himself responsible for its republication in 1726, accompanied by Sir Richard Weston’s Discours of Husbandrie (originally edited and published by Samuel Hartlib in 1650).
27 Anonymous (Roger North), Reflections, p. 33.
28 Ibid., p. 25.
29 Ibid., pp. 5, 18.
30 Ibid., p. 27.
31 Ibid., p. 6.
32 Roger Schmidt, ‘Roger North’s Examen: A Crisis in Historiography’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 26, no. 1 (Autumn, 1992), pp. 57–75, provides evidence that the Examen, and likely the Reflections, too, came about at the urging of George Hickes, the non-juror ‘Bishop of Thetford’ and former friend (and subsequently enemy) of White Kennett (see especially pp. 61–4).
33 Roger North (1740), (1742), (1744). Montagu North (he spells it ‘Mountagu’) later published an edition of Roger (and Dudley) North’s A Discourse upon the Poor.
34 Bearing in mind and respecting Schmidt’s suspicions of Roger North’s apprehensions on this point, the Examen is far from being a ‘dangerous’ ideological statement like The Hereditary Right of the Crown of England asserted, which saw Hilkiah Bedford fined and imprisoned in 1714.
35 Roger North, Examen, p. b.
36 Butterfield writes (in Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (G. Bell and Sons: London, 1931; Norton: New York and London, 1965), p. 6.) ‘We cling to a certain organisation of the past which amounts to a whig interpretation of history, and all our deference to research brings us only to admit that this needs qualifications in detail […] there is a tendency for all history to veer over into whig history.’ White Kennett and other Whig historians of his generation not only represent Whig party positions, but a methodology and purpose in historical representation for a public that inaugurates a ‘modern’ idea of history, or ‘history in the public sphere’; Habermas is in direct descent from this.
37 Roger North, Examen, pp. i–xiv (in order not to clutter the page and the lower margin, the numerous quotations in the following paragraphs have not been given their own specific reference).
38 Anonymous (White Kennett), An Address of Thanks to a Good Prince.
39 Anonymous (W.K. A.M. = White Kennett?), A Dialogue Between Two Friends.
40 See Bennett, White Kennett, op. cit., for an excellent review of Kennett’s career as an author and churchman; see Anonymous (William Newton), The Life of the Right Reverend Dr. White Kennett (1730) for a contemporary defence of Kennett against his detractors. Kennett was a remarkably interesting scholar of history in his own right, a fact not properly acknowledged in this present essay, and scarcely put right in this note.
41 Schmidt, ‘Roger North’s Examen’, op. cit., p. 70, astutely relates this to a Whig cultural politics of ‘politeness’, citing J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1985), p. 236.
42 Thus the title of this essay; see note 1, above.
43 See below for a discussion of what might be implied by the term ‘New Work’.
44 Roger North, Examen (1740), unnumbered page at front of volume.
45 Sir Matthew Hale (1609–76), Chief Justice, was one of the most important jurists of the seventeenth century, a colleague and adversary of Francis North, known personally to Roger North, who wrote a pungent, though admiring ‘Character’ him in his autobiography: Roger North, Notes of Me: The Autobiography of Roger North, ed. Peter T. Millard (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 2000). Roger North drafted the manuscript of Notes of Me during the first years of his retirement. The text was first published as The Autobiography of the Hon. Roger North […], in a very corrupted transcription, edited by Augustus Jessopp (D. Nutt: London, 1887).
46 For a full account of this case and its contexts, see R. Deazley, ‘Commentary on Gyles v. Wilcox (1741)’, in L. Bently and M. Kretschmer (eds.), Primary Sources on Copyright (1450–1900), accessed via <www.copyrighthistory.org>.
47 Although, bearing in mind that this would require that the anecdote was true, such a judgment depends upon our evaluation of the author’s character and motives – what Aristotle would put under the heading of ‘ethos’ in his trio of artistic proofs in rhetoric.
48 ‘Anecdote noun: origin French anecdote, or its source, medieval Latin anecdota […] from Greek ἀνέκδοτα things unpublished, ἀν priv. + ἔκδοτ-ος published, from ἐκ-διδόναι to give out, publish: applied by Procopius to his ‘Unpublished Memoirs’ of the Emperor Justinian, which consisted chiefly of tales of the private life of the court; whence the application of the name to short stories or particulars.’ OED online, <http://www.oed.com>, accessed 24 November 2012.
49 Individual desire as a motive force in the economic life of a nation was one of the insights (found also in the writings of his fellow radical Tory, Nicholas Barbon) offered by Dudley North in the Discourses upon Trade.
50 Kassler, The Honourable Roger North, op. cit., passim.
51 In an essay in The Friend in 1809, Coleridge wrote: ‘[Roger North’s] language gives us the very nerve, pulse, and sinew of a hearty, healthy conversational English’, see The Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Prose and Verse: Complete in One Volume (Thomas, Cowperthwait and Co.: Philadelphia, 1840), p. 487. Pages 329–41 of the Examen were republished as ‘A Discourse on the English Constitution’ in William Jones (ed.), The Scholar Armed against the Errors of the Time; or, a Collection of tracts on the principles and evidences of Christianity, etc. (F. C. & J. Rivington: London, 1795).
52 Schmidt, ‘Roger North’s Examen’, op. cit., p. 70.
53 John P. Friesen, ‘The Reading of Newton in the Early Eighteenth Century: Tories and Newtonianism’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of Leeds, 2004), pp. 184–209.
54 See Mary Chan and Jamie C. Kassler, Roger North’s ‘The musicall grammarian and Theory of sounds’: digests of the manuscripts; with an analytical index of 1726 and 1728 ‘Theory of sounds’ by Janet D. Hine (University of New South Wales: Kensington, New South Wales, 1988).
55 North, A Discourse on the Study of the Laws, op. cit.
56 Kassler, The Honourable Roger North, op. cit., passim.
57 See Millard, ‘Chronology’, op. cit., and Kassler and Chan, Materials, op. cit.
58 BL Add MS page 32526, f. 2r. I have sought to carry over the provisionality of the manuscript draft by including the illegible, his strikings out and insertions; it is edited to appear unedited – as if presented ‘anecdotally’.