ABSTRACT
When the cleric, Edward Boughen, published the text of a visitation sermon in 1620, he dedicated the book to John Howson, Bishop of Oxford, to whom he was chaplain, by saying that, ‘having heretofore … preached this sermon at your lordship’s appointment, and since enlarged it (by your advice) with some necessary additions, I have now also, according to your directions, and by public authority, committed it to the press’.1 Readers of Boughen’s work were confronted, in other words, with a number of claims regarding both the author’s status and the circumstances surrounding the composition and publication of his text. The aim of this chapter is to pay attention to, and unravel, such statements, for having explored the motivation for politicians producing propaganda, it is necessary to examine why authors were willing to engage with the public through the production of polemical tracts and pamphlets. The task is to assess from where the impetus to write, print and publish came, and to understand why authors put pen to paper, and then endeavoured to get their efforts into print. This chapter offers, therefore, an analysis of authorial intention, and the motivations for composition and publication. The aim is not to produce an overly stylised analysis, or to suggest that the overwhelming bulk of polemical literature of the mid-seventeenth century reflected political patronage, whether directly or indirectly.2 It is necessary to be alive to the fact that authors had mixed and multiple motives for engaging in such work, and to the fact that the motives for writing and publishing may not have been the same, not least because the two events may have been separated in time. In seeking to gain an insight into the minds of seventeenth-century political writers and pamphleteers, it is obviously possible to consider the claims made by contemporaries, including hostile critics, as well as the comments made in memoirs and reminiscences. Given the problematic nature of the former, and the rarity of the latter, it is more important at this stage to observe those statements made by authors at the time of publication, and in their own works, and the explanations which they themselves provided for venturing into print.3
