3 - Texts in conflict

Summary

In 1640, the bookseller George Thomason purchased 22 printed titles; in 1642, he purchased well over 2,000. To him, something new and extraordinary was happening in the press no less than in politics or on the battlefield. With a passion that was historical and not strictly bibliographical, Thomason collected as many specimens as was possible of each publication emerging in the volatile Civil War period. Thomason, a Presbyterian and friend of the poet and polemicist John Milton, was a leading stationer who sympathized with Parliament during the Civil War. Though Thomason was rewarded by Parliament for his importation of foreign books, he became increasingly royalist from 1647 onwards, as did many Presbyterians in the wake of the King's surrender. Arrested in 1651, he was imprisoned for seven weeks in connection with a Presbyterian plot to bring in Charles II; after 1651 he played no role in politics. With the coming of the Restoration, Thomason pledged his oath of allegiance to the monarchy. Thomason ended his collection of pamphlets soon after the coronation of Charles II, 23 April 1661, with a few pamphlets dribbling in until the last in December of that year, as if Thomason was recognizing, or hoping, that an era had come to an end.