MY DISCOVERY
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Simon Loftus came across some intriguing marginalia in a political pamphlet at the Library
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While researching the history of Ireland as seen through the eyes of my family for my book The Invention of Memory: An Irish Family Scrapbook (2013), I was constantly waylaid by alluring digressions. I immersed myself in the blizzard of paper that poured from the presses during the War of the Three Kingdoms in the 1640s and 1650s – tens of thousands of violently polemical tracts, the invention of propaganda as an instrument of revolution. At times the thing itself, the physical object, told more intriguing tales than the printed text. Here is a story of one such discovery at The London Library that made it into my book.
On a sleepy afternoon at The London Library I was consulting various obscure seventeenth-century pamphlets, as a gentle susurration of snores rose from the leather armchairs at the far end of the Reading Room. The archaic language and complex phrases of what I was studying had a similarly somnolent effect. Even when I turned to Joyfull Newes from Ireland, written by my forebear Edward Loftus in 1642, my eyelids continued to droop. Then I noticed that a brief and urgent note had been scrawled on the final page: ‘Sr. Tho Bedingfield ye Reccorder of London committed to ye Tower, for refusing to Pleade for Mr Attorny gnrall. This news comitted by ye Lord[s]. ’ Suddenly I was wide awake, because I knew that this particular copy had originally belonged to James Stuart, Duke of Richmond, a cousin of Charles I. This was his writing, scribbled in haste, on the first piece of paper that came to hand. Six months earlier this rich young Scotsman had loaned the enormous sum of £30,000 to his perennially indebted monarch, been rewarded with a dukedom and posed for his portrait – face like a whippet, sitting at his ease in a billowing white shirt, his hand on the neck of a favourite hound. It was one of those extraordinary images of a doomed generation of young cavaliers, immortalised by Anthony van Dyck. Glamorous, haunting, superfluous, they strutted like fashion models in silk and ribbons and lace that would soon be torn, dragged in the mud, and stained with blood. Death was foreshadowed when the Duke received a crucial message from
From top Simon Loftus’s The Invention of Memory (Daunt Books, 2013); James Stuart’s note found in the Library’s copy of Edward Loftus’s Joyfull Newes from Ireland (1642).
the House of Lords, on 9 March 1642, and jotted a note on my ancestor’s pamphlet. The news was bad, for the political skirmishing between King and Commons had at last found its focus with
an extraordinary tactical blunder by King Charles – the affair of the ‘Five Members’ . England was on the brink of civil war. Stubborn conceit was at the heart of things, because the Stuarts as a family almost completely lacked that essential attribute for royal survival, a true instinct for politics, and it was Charles I’s misfortune that he was opposed by one of the most brilliant political opportunists in English history, John Pym. Eventually Charles was so goaded by Pym’s cleverness that he tried to arrest him, together with four of his closest allies, within the supposedly privileged walls of the House of Commons – only to find that ‘the birds had flown’ , warned by their friends at Court. Parliament and the City combined in demonstrations of outrage. Within a week the King had fled London and Pym was carried in triumph back to Westminster in a procession of barges along the Thames. George Digby, a close ally of the King, was impeached by Parliament for his part in this affair and so too was the Attorney General, Sir Edward Herbert. Digby fled to Holland but Herbert was committed for trial, and the House of Lords appointed Sir Thomas Bedingfield as counsel for his defence. The Commons saw no place for legal representation in a case of privilege and Bedingfield himself was reluctant to act. The Lords sent him to the Tower, to reflect on the realities of politics, and someone rushed to the Duke of Richmond to tell him what had happened. The urgency with which he scribbled this news, as soon as he learned it, underlines its significance. This was an omen of all the disasters to come. THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 13
