MY DISCOVERY

Simon Loftus came across some intriguing marginalia in a political pamphlet at the Library

’ ‘ On a sleepy afternoon at The London Library I was consulting various obscure seventeenth-century pamphlets, as a an extraordinary tactical blunder by King Charles – the affair of the ‘Five Members’. England was on the brink of civil war. 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. gentle susurration of snores rose from Stubborn conceit was at the heart of the leather armchairs at the far end of the things, because the Stuarts as a family

Reading Room. The archaic language and almost completely lacked that essential complex phrases of what I was studying attribute for royal survival, a true had a similarly somnolent effect. Even instinct for politics, and it was Charles I’s when I turned to Joyfull Newes from misfortune that he was opposed by one of

Ireland, written by my forebear Edward the most brilliant political opportunists in

Loftus in 1642, my eyelids continued English history, John Pym. to droop. Then I noticed that a brief Eventually Charles was so goaded by and urgent note had been scrawled Pym’s cleverness that he tried to arrest on the final page: ‘Sr. Tho Bedingfield him, together with four of his closest ye Reccorder of London committed to allies, within the supposedly privileged ye Tower, for refusing to Pleade for Mr walls of the House of Commons – only to

Attorny gnrall. This news comitted by find that ‘the birds had flown’, warned ye Lord[s].’ Suddenly I was wide awake, by their friends at Court. Parliament and because I knew that this particular copy the City combined in demonstrations of had originally belonged to James Stuart, outrage. Within a week the King had fled

Duke of Richmond, a cousin of Charles I. London and Pym was carried in triumph

This was his writing, scribbled in haste, on back to Westminster in a procession of the first piece of paper that came to hand. barges along the Thames.

Six months earlier this rich young George Digby, a close ally of the King,

Scotsman had loaned the enormous was impeached by Parliament for his part sum of £30,000 to his perennially in this affair and so too was the Attorney indebted monarch, been rewarded with General, Sir Edward Herbert. Digby fled a dukedom and posed for his portrait to Holland but Herbert was committed for – face like a whippet, sitting at his ease trial, and the House of Lords appointed in a billowing white shirt, his hand on Sir Thomas Bedingfield as counsel for his the neck of a favourite hound. It was defence. The Commons saw no place for one of those extraordinary images of a legal representation in a case of privilege doomed generation of young cavaliers, From top Simon Loftus’s The Invention of Memory and Bedingfield himself was reluctant immortalised by Anthony van Dyck. (Daunt Books, 2013); James Stuart’s note found in the to act. The Lords sent him to the Tower,

Glamorous, haunting, superfluous, they Library’s copy of Edward Loftus’s Joyfull Newes from Ireland (1642). to reflect on the realities of politics, strutted like fashion models in silk and and someone rushed to the Duke of ribbons and lace that would soon be torn, the House of Lords, on 9 March 1642, Richmond to tell him what had happened. dragged in the mud, and stained with and jotted a note on my ancestor’s The urgency with which he scribbled this blood. pamphlet. The news was bad, for the news, as soon as he learned it, underlines

Death was foreshadowed when the political skirmishing between King and its significance. This was an omen of all

Duke received a crucial message from Commons had at last found its focus with the disasters to come.