PAMPHLETS AND THE 1640S: POLITICS AND GENRE

In 1640 one reader wrote, ‘I hate these following railing rimes, yet keepe them for the president of the times.’ He recorded this in his news diary where he stored diverse items – verses, dialogues, the whole text of the arraignment of Strafford. In 1643 William Walwyn addressed his levelling tract, The Power of Love, ‘To Every Reader … for there is no respect of persons with God’. In 1648 the East Anglia royalist Thomas Knyvett wrote to Sir John Hobart, describing two pamphlets. On the first, ‘a declaration in the King's name’, he comments ‘sure a counterfeit would never have had the power over my passion that this had’. The authenticity of voice he attributes to the ‘royal’ pamphlet is contrasted with the bastardised parliamentarian product (as he sees it), published by the republican and father of illegitimate children, Henry Marten:

I have read it, and shall say no more but that I look upon it not only as the spurious issue of his brain, but as the sense of the saint-like house: yet brave Harry hath the better on't, to beget the bastard, and make the honourable state to father it; else, sure, it durst never have peeped abroad.