The prejudice the licensers were pleased to take against the authors [Bunyan and one other] constrained my printing them without licence.
FRANCIS SMITH1
BUNYAN’S experience with printers is intriguing, and throws more light on him than has perhaps been appreciated.2 His first book, Some Gospel-truths Opened (1656), was printed for John Wright, to be sold by Matthias Cowley, Bookseller in Newport Pagnell. A Vindication of Some Gospel-truths was also printed by Wright for Cowley in 1657; A Few Sighs from Hell (1658) was printed by Ralph Wood for M. Wright (widow of John Wright). The Doctrine of Law and Grace Unfolded (1659) was variously ‘printed for M. Wright’, ‘printed for M. Cowley’.
Bunyan may have come to know Cowley during his years in Newport Pagnell: perhaps they served together. Cowley appears to have been a Baptist. His first child is recorded as having been buried in 1662, unbaptized. Bunyan’s Bedford congregation had associations with that of Newport Pagnell. In Edward VI’s reign local presses, banned by Henry VIII, had briefly flourished. From 1557 to 1640, and again after the restoration, printing outside London, Oxford, and Cambridge was prohibited, in the interests of government control.3 Printing required very little capital equipment, and Cowley is a reminder that provincial printing might have developed but for the repressive policy of post-restoration governments, frustrating a burgeoning provincial cultural independence. It is not impossible that Bunyan positively wished to encourage the local industry.
After 1660 there was a new situation, with fierce if erratically enforced censorship. There was no return to the prerogative control of the press which had existed before 1640. Parliament passed the Licensing Act of 1662, providing that all books must be licensed and entered in the Register of the Stationers’ Company. This Act expired from time to time and was normally renewed except between 1679 and 1685. From 1681 to 1685 Charles failed to call a Parliament. But his judges nevertheless enforced censorship. It may have been less the expiry of the Licensing Act than the crisis of the Popish Plot that reduced the severity of the censorship after 1678. The Act was finally allowed to lapse in 1695, partly because of the difficulty of enforcing it, partly because of the opposition of booksellers to it.
Of Bunyan’s major books only The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part I, and A Book for Boys and Girls state on the title-page that they have been licensed as required by the Licensing Act of 1662. How did his printers manage to break the law successfully for twenty-eight years? And why did Ponder not license Part II of The Pilgrim’s Progress? Francis Smith’s remark cited as epigraph to this chapter reminds us that Richard Baxter was told by a licenser that they censored men rather than books. Bunyan was in prison from 1660 to 1672, and in 1669 his church was accused (wrongly) of having its hands in the blood of Charles I. There was undoubtedly ‘prejudice’ against him. But why were neither he nor his printers prosecuted for printing without licence? Francis Smith’s account of his own experiences suggests that the system for enforcing the licensing laws was very haphazard; informers were often rival printers who ‘could print and sell, and connive at printing and selling, the same book’. Most of them were bribable.4
It is difficult for us to grasp the problems of law-enforcement in a society without a police force or a significant bureaucracy. The attempts of Laudians and Presbyterians to introduce their very different disciplines are often seen as outrageous infringements of the liberty of the subject. They might equally well be seen as first steps towards reducing the chaos of London to some sort of order by enforcing norms of behaviour which after three centuries we have internalized. The impossibility of enforcing the Licensing Act without a large bureaucracy was indeed one of the reasons for allowing it to lapse after 1695.
Siebert estimated that probably not more than half the pamphlets and books published at this time were licensed. Very little effort, he suggested, was made to suppress opposition pamphlets in the early years of Charles II’s reign, although control was tightened up in the crisis years of the 1680s. The Stationers’ Company, mainly responsible for working the system, was reluctant to initiate prosecutions, partly because it did not want to deprive its poorer members of profits from ‘risky’ popular books, partly out of sympathy with opponents of the government. The censorship laws, like those against nonconformists, worked quite arbitrarily. Some printers broke them for twenty years with impunity: others were penalized to the utter disruption of their economic and family life. In 1664 John Twine, a London printer, suffered the gruesome penalties of high treason for printing a treatise justifying the right of peoples to call their governments to account—a Miltonic theme.5 Printers were always potentially at risk from informers or jealous rivals.
The second edition of Bunyan’s I Will Pray with the Spirit (1663) was printed in London ‘for the author’: no copy of the first edition survives. It was unlicensed. But Bunyan had already chosen another printer for his verse Profitable Meditations (1661–2?). This was Francis Smith, generally known as ‘Elephant Smith’ from his shop at the Elephant and Castle. Smith was a Baptist, ‘teacher’ of a congregation in Goswell Street. Bunyan may have known him, or known of him, before the restoration. In 1659 Smith printed a pamphlet attacking Quakers, which must have pleased Bunyan.6 In the same year he printed the Leveller Captain William Bray’s Plea for the People’s Good Old Cause. In December 1659 Smith’s house was frequently searched for arms. In March 1660 he signed A Brief Confession, with thirty-nine other Baptists. Later that year he published Symptomes of Growth and Decay, a treatise of his own writing, with prefaces by Henry Jessey and Henry Denne. In this and other writings Smith was as critical as Bunyan himself of ‘the sins of professors’, their ‘running from one thing to another’. In 1669 Smith published the second edition of Bunyan’s millenarian work, The Holy City; the first edition in 1665 had no printer’s name.7
Smith is one of the many unsung heroes of the struggle for freedom of the press in England. Or, as Henry Muddiman put it in 1684, he was ‘the prime dispenser of all sorts of the most lewd and seditious pamphlets.’ It all depended on the point of view. Smith spent much of his life in and out of prison—three times in 1660. In 1661 his house was searched again when he was accused of participating in Venner’s revolt: but Smith was rescued by trained bands. He was imprisoned later in the year for printing, in association with Giles Calvert and Livewell Chapman (famous radical printers of the revolutionary decades), Mirabilis Annus, a collection of post-1660 portents and calamities which were taken to show divine disapproval of the restored monarchy. It was a bestseller, and called forth many replies, including Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis. In consequence of this last rallying gesture of the defeated revolutionaries, Smith lost his shop and his trade for two years. In 1666 his stock of books was seized; a number of them perished in the Great Fire—which may account for the rarity of many of Bunyan’s early works. Smith was ‘restrained’ by King’s messengers ten times between 1661 and 1680. One messenger, Smith observed, not without pride, ‘said he had more trouble with me than with all the booksellers and printers in town besides.’ Smith was, as he plausibly tells us, the victim of bullying and injustice from Judge Jeffreys. Eighty years before Wilkes, Smith was querying the legality of general search warrants. In 1680 he claimed—no doubt with some exaggeration—that since 1660 he had lost nearly £1, 400 in fines, fees, and damages. Thomas Brewster, Giles Calvert, Livewell Chapman, and Simon Dover had suffered similar or worse fates.8
In 1666 Smith printed an account of the Great Fire, attributing it to papist incendiaries. An anonymous pamphlet of 1670 about persecution of nonconformists in Bedford seemed to that excellent judge John Brown likely to have been printed by Smith. In 1671 he was charged with preaching in contravention of the Conventicle Act; in 1673, under the Indulgence, he was licensed to preach in Croydon. Next year he was arrested for illegally publishing the proceedings of Parliament.9 (Six years later the House of Commons appointed him its official printer.) Between 1678 and 1681 Smith was many times charged with publishing seditious pamphlets, but sympathetic London juries returned ignoramus verdicts.
In 1679 Smith was accused of going ‘up and down getting hands to petitions for sitting of the Parliament’, and made his defence before Charles II himself. A year later he printed a speech attacking the King, which had been prepared by Shaftesbury but was never delivered. In March 1681 Smith presented each MP at Oxford with a copy of Vox Populi which he had printed. From February to April 1681–2 he published Smith’s Protestant Intelligence—in close contact with Shaftesbury, it was said. Smith’s autobiographical An Account of the Injurious Proceedings of Sir George Jeffreys … against Francis Smith was dedicated to Shaftesbury, ‘I having in many cases experienced your Lordship’s kindness’, as well as sharing the indebtedness to him of all protestant Englishmen.10
Smith’s apprentices included Edith and Stephen College. Smith printed The Raree Show, a ballad attacking the King and the Duke of York by the ‘protestant joiner’, Stephen College. (‘What have such people to do to interfere with the business of government?’ asked Jeffreys whilst sentencing College to death; J. G. Muddiman in the present century thought The Raree Show ‘too offensive to quote’.) On 15 April 1681 Smith was committed to Newgate and charged with high treason; he was alleged to have declared ‘he would never leave printing and writing till this kingdom was brought to a free state.’ Next year he was reported as plotting with Titus Oates and Henry Danvers.11
Between 1661 and 1678 Smith printed nearly all Bunyan’s books. In 1666 Grace Abounding was given to a twenty-four-year-old, George Larkin, probably because Smith’s warehouse was liable to be raided. Bunyan may have been trying to help Larkin, also a printer of unlicensed pamphlets: in 1668 he was prosecuted for his connection with the notorious Advice to a Painter. In 1682 Larkin printed The Impartial Protestant Intelligencer, an Exclusionist newspaper.12
In 1665 Bunyan had given The Holy City to J. Dover to print. This was no doubt Joan Dover, widow and successor of Simon Dover; Bunyan may have been making a gesture of solidarity with a victim of political persecution. Simon Dover had printed the speeches of the regicides, and many other seditious books. He had been convicted of seditious libel, heavily fined, pilloried, and imprisoned. He died in jail shortly afterwards, and his widow (‘a common printer for all scandalous pamphlets’) seems soon to have gone out of business (or died). Bunyan reverted to Smith for the second edition of The Holy City in 1669 (the first appeared with no printer’s name) and for the third edition of Grace Abounding (between 1672 and 1674): no copy of the second edition survives, but Smith may have published that too. Nathaniel Ponder took over the fifth and sixth editions (1680, 1688). In 1673 Jonathan Robinson printed the first edition of The Barren Fig-tree, and John Wilkins Differences in Judgment about Water Baptism.13
In 1678, with Smith in permanent trouble and occupied with politics, Bunyan switched to another radical, Benjamin Harris, who printed Come, and Welcome. Between July 1679 and January 1679–80 Harris printed the Whig Exclusionist Domestick Intelligence, Or News both from Court and Country, continued as The Protestant (Domestick) Intelligence until mid-April 1681. He also printed a number of political ballads, broadsheets, and pamphlets. Harris was in continual trouble with the authorities. He was accused by Jeffreys in 1679 of publishing a book ‘only designed to rake up all sedition and rebellion’. Lord Chief Justice Scroggs agreed about the book; and added, ‘there is scarce any but Smith that is so factious a seller of books as Harris.’ Harris was pilloried and fined the vast sum of £500. The jury tried to get him off by returning him guilty only of selling the book, but Scroggs overruled them. Harris’s Case gets into the textbooks of constitutional history since in 1680 Scroggs laid it down that any book which was ‘scandalous to the government’ might be seized; and that no man had a right to publish without permission any matter bearing on government. In 1681 Harris was pilloried again; after 1685 he emigrated, first to the Netherlands, then to New England, where he published the first American newspaper. He was back in England by 1695, printing various newspapers. John Harris, who in 1685 printed Bunyan’s A Discourse upon the Pharisee and the Publican, may have been Benjamin’s son. He is said to have written a poem on Lord William Russell.14
Bunyan’s principal publisher after 1678 was Nathaniel Ponder (1640–99). Ponder printed Part I of The Pilgrim’s Progress, Mr. Badman in 1680, and Part II of The Pilgrim’s Progress in 1684. Ponder too was a political and religious radical. His father had been in trouble with the ecclesiastical authorities as long ago as 1634; twenty-two years later he was a founder and first elder of the Rothwell (Northants) Independent church. Nathaniel Ponder had Bedfordshire connections, and in 1672 helped nonconformist ministers to procure licences, John Whitman to preach at the house of Bunyan’s friend George Cokayne, Cotton End, Bedfordshire, for instance, and many in Northamptonshire and adjoining counties. Ponder married a gentleman’s daughter, whose father Robert Guy and his son in 1677 purchased land at Northill, Bedfordshire. Nathaniel Ponder was the publisher of John Owen, who may have introduced him to Bunyan. Ponder published many nonconformist books and was imprisoned for printing Andrew Marvell’s anonymous The Rehearsal Transpros’d in 1672—the classically witty defence of the nonconformist position. Owen had been involved in printing and proof-reading Marvell’s book: it would be agreeable to think that he introduced the two great satirists to one another. In 1676 Ponder was imprisoned for printing a seditious pamphlet without licence: he was discharged after paying fees and entering into a bond for £500. In 1682 he published Bulstrode Whitelocke’s Memorials.15
For Bunyan Ponder printed A Treatise of the Fear of God (1679), A Caution to Stir Up (1684), The Seventh-Day Sabbath (1685), A Book for Boys and Girls (1686) and The Water of Life (1688), the fifth and sixth editions of Grace Abounding (1680 and 1688), and the third editions of Law and Grace and One Thing is Needful in 1683.16 But Bunyan did not have the same steady relationship with Ponder that he had had with Smith. Perhaps Ponder just could not cope with the flow of works coming from Bunyan’s pen in the 1680s. In 1682 The Holy War went to Dorman Newman and Benjamin Alsop (second edition Newman only, who also printed The Advocateship of Jesus Christ in 1688). Alsop printed four others of Bunyan’s works in 1683–4. He too was a radical (‘a wild sort of a spark’) who published a eulogy on Shaftesbury’s career in 1683, and went off to be a captain in Monmouth’s army two years later. After 1685 he seems to have lived in exile in the Netherlands.17
So Bunyan employed the two most notorious radical printers of his day, Smith and Harris, and George Larkin, also a radical. Bunyan seems to have tried to help Simon Dover’s widow. After 1678 Bunyan employed the nonconformist Ponder, who had also been in jail, and Ponder’s former apprentice Benjamin Alsop, a Monmouth supporter. Only in the last six years of Bunyan’s life—dangerous years—did he employ a relatively inoffensive printer like Dorman Newman; and he too was a nonconformist.18
Some have suggested that Bunyan dropped Smith as printer because he disliked the political extremism which the latter showed after 1679. But Smith had been deeply involved in oppositionist politics before Bunyan employed him, and Bunyan switched to Benjamin Harris, second only to Smith in political involvement. Professor McGee suggests, more plausibly, that Bunyan may have come to resent Smith’s printing tracts advocating universal grace, and attacks on Bunyan himself by Thomas Paul, Henry Danvers, and John Denne.19
The evidence presented in this chapter suggests to me that Bunyan chose his printers because of their radicalism. Any other explanation would necessitate postulating a remarkable series of coincidences. Evidence from Bunyan’s posthumous works given in chapter 26 may throw further light on the difficult problem of his attitude towards politics. Bunyan became quite well-informed about the technicalities of printing: he was not uninvolved here either.20