7 - Travelling Images: Exchanging, Adapting and Appropriating Illustrations for a History of England

Summary

AS RECORDED IN THE previous chapter, one of the books most bor-rowed by Timothy Pickering and his fellow members of the Salem Social Library on the eve of the American Revolution (and a text read for its support to the Patriot cause) was a French history of England by Paul de Rapin. That a French writer should become the most influential historian in England and its colonies in the first half of the eighteenth century is not the least remarkable achievement of Paul de Rapin de Thoyras (1661–1725). Born into a Huguenot family, Rapin began his life far from the English Channel, in the viscounty of Albi in southern France, but was forced to leave his native country after the promulgation of the Edict of Nantes and the attendant death of his father, in 1685. After a brief stay in England, he travelled to the Netherlands, where he became a volunteer soldier in the army of William of Orange, thus returning to England in November 1688 with the impressive flotilla that landed at Torbay. Following a short but active military career, Rapin was offered the position of tutor to the son of Hans Willem Bentinck, Baron Bentinck of Diepenheim and Schoonheten. Rapin then continued to work for Bentinck, who was one of William III's closest advisors and, from 1689, Earl of Portland. It was, however, when his employment with the Portland family ended in 1704 that Rapin turned to the writing of history, dedicating the following twenty years of his life first to his Dissertation sur les whigs et les tories and then to a ten-volume Histoire d’Angleterre, both published in The Hague (La Haye), in 1717 and 1724–25, respectively.

Rapin's Histoire aroused immediate interest in England. First translated by the Reverend Nicholas Tindal (1687–1774), the History of England was published in monthly parts by the leading London bookseller, James Knapton, assisted by his eldest son, John. Filling a gap in a historiographical landscape that had been shaped by religious and political debates, Rapin's narrative offered both the novelty and the variety sought by readers. Tindal's History of England was such a success that competing translations soon emerged on the London book market, prompting the enterprising Knaptons to issue new editions.