Introduction

The King's Printer had the monopoly for printing official Bibles, the Bishops' Bible and the KJB, Prayer Books, official documents and statutes. As if this was not enough, he took on other work, including the Geneva Bible. Robert Barker held what should have been a very lucrative position, yet he was a poor businessman. Perhaps by the time he began printing the KJB he was in partnership with two men whose names also appear on the title pages of KJBs, Bonham Norton and John Bill. In 1615 Barker's son Christopher married Norton's daughter Sarah, but three years later Barker was suing Norton and Bill ‘for the recovery of a moiety of the office and stock of the King's Printing House’ (Plomer, p. 355). Litigation and imprisonment dogged them all for the rest of their lives, and titular and effective tenure of the office of King's Printer passed between them as their fortunes varied. Norton became an implacable enemy, a bitter and malicious man. Tried with others in 1630 for ‘preferring a most false and scandalous petition to his Majestie against the Rt. Hon. the Lord Keeper’ and other such slanders and libels, he was sentenced to pay £3,000 to the King, and, as damages, the same to the Lord Chancellor; he was imprisoned ‘during his majesties pleasure’, and may still have been in prison when he died in 1635 (Plomer, pp. 365–8). Robert Barker fared little better.