An Impartial Collection of the Great Affairs of State, From the Beginning of the Scotch Rebellion in the Year MDCXXXIX. To the Murther of King Charles I. Volumes I & II

Volume I

Bound in full contemporary calf, the spine in six compartments with five raised bands. A newer lettering piece in the second compartment from the top. The boards and spine scuffed. Evidence of old repairs (18^th Century?), with corners renewed and repairs to the top and bottom of the spine. Front board cracked. The binding and book block still strong. One discreet library stamp.

Volume II

Bound in blind stamped contemporary calf, re-backed to style, the spine with six compartments and five raised bands. A newer lettering piece in the second compartment from the top. The boards scuffed. Evidence of old repairs (18th Century?), with corners and edges renewed. The binding and book block still strong.

Internally both volumes with little in the way of stains or foxing, the leaves white and crisp, with generous margins. The three plates with the plate marks visible. Engravings all strong impressions.

Vol. I measures 33 x 21 x 7 cm. Each leaf measures 320 x 200 mm.

Vol. II measures 33.8 x 21.7 x 6.2 cm. Each leaf measures 330 x 205 mm.

John Nalson (c. 1638–1686) was an English clergyman, historian and early Tory pamphleteer.

Nalson was an active polemical writer on the side of the government during the latter part of the reign of Charles II. The Countermine, published in 1677 quickly went through three editions, and was highly praised by Roger L’Estrange. Published anonymously, its authorship was soon discovered, and the parliament of 1678, in which the opposition, whom he had attacked, had the majority, resolved to call Nalson to account. On 26 March 1678 he was sent for on the charge of having written a pamphlet called A Letter from a Jesuit in Paris, showing the most efficient way to ruin the Government and the Protestant Religion, in which the names of various members of parliament were introduced. After being kept in custody for about a month, he was discharged, but ordered to be put out of the commission of the peace, and to be reprimanded by the speaker (1 May).[2]

Nalson then published several other pamphlets, undertook to make a collection of documents in answer to John Rushworth (1682), and printed the Trial of Charles I (1684), prefixing to his historical works long polemical attacks on the whigs. He begged William Sancroft for preferment; he asked on 21 July 1680 for the deanery of Worcester, on 14 August 1680 for the mastership of Trinity College, Cambridge, and to be given a prebend either at Westminster or Ely. In 1684 he did receive a prebend at Ely. He died on 24 March 1686, aged 48, and was buried at Ely.

Of the “Impartial Collection”

Nalson’s major work is the Impartial Collection of the Great Affairs of State, from the beginning of the Scotch Rebellion in the year 1639 to the murder of King Charles I. The first volume was published in 1682, and the second in 1683, but the collection in fact ends in January 1642. Its avowed object was to serve as an antidote to the similar collection of materials by John Rushworth, (Historical Collections 1659 – 1701), and the work was undertaken under the special patronage of Charles II. Nalson was allowed free access to various repositories of state papers. From the documents in the office of the clerk of the parliament he was apparently allowed to take almost anything he pleased. He also had access to the Paper Office, to take copies. He applied to the Duke of Ormonde for documents relating to Ireland, and obtained permission to copy some of the papers. Lord Guilford communicated to him extracts from the memoirs of the Earl of Manchester, and he at least planned to obtain help from the Earl of Macclesfield, one of the last survivors of the king’s generals.

Nalson in these ways brought together a collection of primary sources and original documents illustrating the history of the period between 1638 and 1660. On his death it all remained in the possession of his family. The collection was gradually broken up. Some of the Irish transcripts came into the hands of Thomas Carte, and a considerable number of the parliamentary papers were abstracted by Thomas Tanner. These portions of the collection are in the Bodleian Library. Twenty-two volumes came to Welbeck Abbey; four volumes were purchased by the British Museum in 1846, and four others went missing. Some documents from Nalson’s collection were printed by Zachary Grey in his answer to Daniel Neal’s History of the Puritans (1737-9), and others by Francis Peck in his Desiderata Curiosa (1735).

The Allegorical Engravings

Volume I Frontispiece

The ray from the eye of heaven illuminates the figure of a weeping woman, labelled “Britañia”, at her feet symbols of church and state including Magna Charta; to her right, a relief of the royal coat-of-arms upside down on a block of stone, a broken sceptre and an axe. Approaching from the right is a double headed figure of a man, half Jesuit, half Puritan, carrying a cross and rosary, his cloak lined with little imps and lettered “Solemn League & Covenant”, one foot, cloven, treads on a bible; a devil clutches at him. Behind Britannia is a gothic cathedral, representing the Church of England, one end of which is in ruins; beyond that burning buildings and in the distance a cavalry battle rages beneath a hand emerging from the clouds with a flaming sword.

Volume II Frontispiece

Shows a thunderous sky and a ship being tossed on a wild ocean. A man wearing a fur-lined robe and a crown is held over the side of the ship, presumably about to be thrown to the waves below. A crowd of people stands watching on the land. Most seem transfixed by the ship but some groups have turned away and begun to fight with one another.

In case the imagery employed by the engraver is not clear enough, it is accompanied on the opposite page by a poem entitled simply, “The Meaning of the Frontispiece”. In it, the ship which we see caught in the terrible storm is named the Royal Sovereign,

“Her Rudder lost, her Main-Mast beaten down,

Her Tackling torn, and Mariners desperate grown;

The Captain from his Cabin driv’n away

In that for-ever execrable Day.”

The plight of this ship is clearly supposed to provide a comparison to the experiences of King Charles I during the English Civil War, when the Parliamentarians clashed with the King and his Royalist supporters over the government of England. Ultimately this ended in victory for the Parliamentarians, who in 1649 executed Charles I (the act ‘impartially’ described in Nalson’s title as “murther”) and declared England to be a Commonwealth.