Trahison

1720 · 7730 — London: s.n. 1720. 8vo pp. 28. Bound after: Earbery Matthias The Second Part of the Advantages That have Accrued to England by the Succession in the Illustrious House of Hanover. London: Printed in the Year 1721. 8vo pp. 38. And: Religion The Causes Of the Decay of Presbytery in Scotland. In Answer to a Letter from a Clergy-Man of that Perswasion. Edinburgh: Printed in the Year 1713. 3 pamphlets bound together in 20th-century yellow-glazed textured paper boards backed in paler glazed paper spine and front board lettered in ink. Some scattered toning and soiling. Boards a little marked. Folded typewritten fragment of a letter dated 10.3.63 loosely inserted. A scarce pamphlet advocating an armed citizenry against the tyranny of the state in rather florid prose bound with two further anonymous pamphlets with broadly anti-Hanovarian sentiment. The Appeal is recorded in just 5 locations by ESTC: BL NLS and Oxford in the UK and Folger and California in North America. The letter fragment from a previous owner included describes its publication as ‘unquestionably an act of high treason’ adding ‘but I suppose the author was never discovered’. Certainly none of the listed holdings venture an attribution and the printing itself is anonymous with no tell-tale printers’ devices or typographical oddities. Earbery was a non-juring clergyman who was forced to flee to France to avoid arrest when a book of his critical of the monarchy was seized by the government in 1717 and was twice arrested for seditious libel in the decades following; the title of his pamphlet here can be considered ironical. The third pamphlet here is a little earlier and was also published with a London imprint in the same year. ‘This pamphlet was published before the elections of 1713; it tends to confuse more than to clarify matters in Scotland. Written from an Episcopalian point of view but from an English as opposed to a Scottish angle it was a complicated review of the distant and recent political past of Scotland with considerable attention to religious matters’ McLeod & McLeod Anglo-Scottish Tracts 1979. ESTC T108497; T172369; T84150; McLeod & McLeod 73. [s.n.] hardcover