Notes
Preface
1. It is ironic that this piece, which Oglethorpe told Boswell had been published, was apparently never printed. It seems certain that “Lord Egmont [John Percival, the second earl of Egmont] was sent to him and got [the] instruction” (Boswell Papers, Yale University Library, M208:1). Apparently Oglethorpe believed that it had been “published in pamph[let] to settle Island of St. Johns’” —i.e., printed with Egmont’s proposal to settle Prince Edward Island. Oglethorpe’s legal document is mentioned in a postscript to the table of contents of the rare extended version, printed about 1765, of To the King’s most Excellent Majesty, the Memorial of John Earl of Egmont; but it is not printed there. Of this memorial, several copies of the brief, early edition have survived; but I have been able to locate only one copy of the later, enlarged edition—in the Public Archives of Nova Scotia. The historian of eighteenth-century Prince Edward Island, Professor John Michael Bumsted, of St. John’s College, Winnipeg, agrees that the instruction was evidently never printed. I am indebted to Nicolas de Jong, Provincial Archivist of Prince Edward Island, who informed me of the copy in the Nova Scotia Archives, and to Wendy Duff and Philip L. Hartling, Librarian and Microfilm Archivist there, who kindly provided me with a microfilm. To Professor Bumsted, author of Land, Settlement, and Politics on Eighteenth-Century Prince Edward Island (Kingston, 1987), I am indebted for his note of April 4, 1991.
Quisquis amissam
1. James Boswell, Boswell: The Ominous Years, ed. Charles Ryskamp and Frederick A. Pottle (New York, 1963), 97.
2. Levin Theodore Reichel, The Early History of the Church of the United Brethren (Nazareth, Pa., 1888), 65.
3. Boswell, Boswell: The Applause of the Jury, 1782–1785, ed. Irma S. Lustig and Frederick A. Pottle (New York, 1981), 129.
4. As general models for Oglethorpe’s poem, Professor Harris suggests the apotheosis of Daphnis (Julius Caesar) in Virgil’s Eclogue 5; and he points out the following Horatian echoes. In line 2 “pius frustra” seems to evoke Horace’s Odes 1.24.11–12: “tu frustra pius heu non ita creditum / poscis Quintilium deos.” More generally the first stanza evokes Odes 2.20.21ff. In line 10 “Fama Quam pennâ” seems to echo Odes 2.2.7–8: “ilium aget pinna metuente solvi / Fama superstes.” By 1714 Oglethorpe may have owned several editions of Virgil (items 26, 39, 606, 792, 1009, and 2189), and two of Horace’s Opera (566 and 1528). See A Catalogue of the Entire and Valuable Library of General Oglethorpe, Lately Deceased (London, 1788). Since this booksale catalog embodies also the smaller library of the Reverend Mr. Samuel Pollen and since I have discovered no way of separating his books there from Oglethorpe’s, my assigning any book from the Catalogue to the general represents a probability rather than a certainty.
A Duel Explained
1. Mr. Sharpe may have been a son of the Bishop of London’s friend John Sharp, Archbishop of York—perhaps Thomas Sharp (1693–1753), the father of Granville Sharp, friend of Oglethorpe half a century later.
2. It was reprinted in Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal for March 31, 1722, and in Amos Aschbach Ettinger, James Edward Oglethorpe: Imperial Idealist (Oxford, 1936), 82–83.
The Sailors Advocate
1. Prince Hoare, Memoirs of Granville Sharp, Esq., composed from his own Manuscripts (London, 1820), 489, 160.
2. Hoare, Memoirs, 2d ed. (London, 1828), 2:238n.
3. Sir Edward Knatchbull, The Parliamentary Diary of Sir Edward Knatchbull, ed. A. N. Newman, Camden Society, third series, vol. 94 (London, 1963), 75.
4. Daniel A. Baugh, ed., British Naval Administration in the Age of Walpole (Princeton, 1965), 149–50; Knatchbull, Diary, 78.
5. See J. Robert Hutchinson, The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore (London, 1913); Baugh, British Naval Administration, 147–240; Baugh, ed., Naval Administration, 1715–1750, Navy Records Society, vol. 120 (London, 1977), 89–190; and Christopher Lloyd, The British Seaman, 1200–1860: A Social Survey (Rutherford, N.J., 1970), 112–72.
6. Hutchinson, Press-Gang, 1–17; Lloyd, British Seaman, 16–17, 82–86, 150–72; Baugh, British Naval Administration, 224–25, 233.
7. Lloyd, British Seaman, 173–80.
8. Baugh, British Naval Administration, 227.
9. To these proposals, Leslie F. Church devoted most of his attention in his analysis of The Sailor’s Advocate, in James Edward Oglethorpe: A Study of Philanthropy in England and Georgia (London, 1932), 25–29.
10. A single sheet folio, the Orelbar pamphlet is tentatively dated 1720—before the author entered Parliament.
11. Aaron Lambe’s single sheet folio A Proposal for the Encouragement of Seamen; by Reviving a Register (London, 1727); and Thomas Robe’s Ways and Means Whereby His Majesty may Man his Navy (London, 1726).
12. Great Britain, Parliament, The Journals of the House of Commons (London, n.d.), 21:22, hereinafter cited as JHC.
13. JHC, 21:52.
14. Also in February there appeared views similar to Oglethorpe’s in Some Considerations on the Reasonableness and Necessity of Encreasing and Encouraging the Seamen, attributed to Daniel Defoe, and The Encouragement and Increase of Seamen Consider’d, which was perhaps elicited by Oglethorpe.
15. Agnes Mary Clerke, “Samuel Molyneux,” Dictionary of National Biography, hereinafter designated DNB; Baugh, ed., Naval Administration, 1715–1750, 98–106. Baugh (p. 91) tentatively identified Thomas Corbett as the author.
16. Baugh, ed., Naval Administration, 1715–1750, 102.
17. For example, see Lloyd, British Seamen, 154. Oglethorpe’s pamphlet, Lloyd attributed tentatively to Thomas Robe (p. 181).
18. JHC, 21:74.
19. 1 George II, stat. 2, cap. 14, sect. 15: Great Britain. The Statutes at Large, ed. Danby Pickering, 46 vols. (Cambridge, 1762–1807), 15:481, hereinafter cited as Pickering’s Statutes.
20. JHC, 21:79.
21. JHC, 21:135.
22. 1 George II, stat. 2, cap. 14, sects. 12–13: Pickering’s Statutes, 15: 480–81.
23. JHC, 21:147.
24. JHC, 21:168.
25. Baugh, ed., Naval Administration, 1715–1750, 161.
26. One piece of evidence seems to point to the Goldsmith copy as representing the corrected state: the 1777 reprint follows it rather than the Kress. But all the rest of the evidence points to the Kress. It corrects a misstatement given in the Goldsmith; and page 18, where the correction occurs, embodies only twenty-nine lines in the Kress copy, an abnormally short page in a pamphlet where the norm is thirty or thirty-one lines and where there are sometimes thirty-two. Moreover page 6 is incorrectly paginated in the Goldsmith copy, the i is missing from the if on the same page, and periods are missing on pages 18 and 20. All these errors are corrected in the Kress state. Apparently Oglethorpe used a copy of the uncorrected state for the 1777 edition, forgetting that on one page he had corrected the text. Copies of the uncorrected state are found also in the New York Public Library, the Huntington Library, and the Library of the University of Chicago. The University of Indiana Library has a copy of the rare corrected state.
27. Milton’s phrase occurs in Paradise Lost, 4.393–934. The Library of Oglethorpe shows editions of 1669, 1688, and 1719 (items 419, 1459, and 1071).
28. In the debates in the House of Commons, Sir Charles Wager, a Lord of the Admiralty, maintained that the care of seamen could not be improved. See Knatchbull, Diary, 78.
29. Oglethorpe quotes Sir Edward Coke, Le Quart Part des Reportes (London, 1610), sig. [B6].
30. Oglethorpe compares Sir Robert Walpole with Julius Caesar, who, according to Cato, in Joseph Addison’s Cato 4.4.109, lost all sense of shame after his victory at Pharsalia. Oglethorpe later quoted from the play in a conversation with Dr. Johnson and Boswell on April 14, 1778. See Boswell, Boswell in Extremes, 1776–1778, ed. Charles McC. Weis and Frederick A. Pottle (New York, 1970), 278.
31. Oglethorpe, not Granville Sharp.
32. The Library of Oglethorpe lists (item 266) a copy of Sir John Fortescue’s On the Laws of England, trans. Robert Mulcaster (London, 1599), but there Fortescue merely glances at the Admiralty Court, in ch. 32, fol. 73, verso. Perhaps Oglethorpe remembered John Selden’s extensive note concerning the Admiralty Court in his edition of Fortescue—De Laudibus Legum Angliae (London, 1616), Notes, 31–37. On December 24, 1776, Oglethorpe sent “a very old edition of Fortescue” to Granville Sharp. See Hoare, Memoirs, 1st ed., 163.
33. Oglethorpe quotes from sections 5 and 6, evidently from Pickering’s Statutes, 15:468, 469, italicizing Pickering’s roman in sec. 6.
34. Apparently attracted by the black letter type that was still occasionally used in England, especially for printing statutes, either Oglethorpe designated them for that purpose in his first appendix or the compositor decided to use them there. They also appear for emphasis in the central essay and the final letter. For black letter, which never appears in Oglethorpe’s other publications, I have substituted italic, pointing out in the notes the rare appearances of italic in the three sections where black letter is substituted for the same purpose.
35. The national stock, secured through the Bank of England and a few other companies, as a source of revenue.
36. Samuel Daniel, The Collection of the History of England, 4th ed. (London, 1650), 121. The Library of Oglethorpe lists this edition, item 932.
37. The Magna Charta, cap. 29. Italicizing Magna Charta, Oglethorpe presumably quoted from his copy of the Barthelet edition of 1531–32 or from his copy of Great Britain. The Statutes at Large, ed. Joseph Keble (London, 1676), 4, hereinafter cited as Keble’s Statutes. See The Library of Oglethorpe, items 1267 and 941.
38. 16 Charles I, cap. 5 was concerned with the recruitment of sailors.
39. The Petition of Right, of May 27–28, 1628, maintained that no freeman ought to be committed to or be detained in prison, or otherwise restrained, without cause.
40. Oglethorpe’s unorthodox reference cites Keble’s Statutes, 795, section 43, not 48.
41. This phrase is italicized.
42. The “Ostend ships” were apparently the Prince Eugene and the Stahremberg, commissioned by “the authorities at Ostend” for use against the Spaniards in the Pacific. See Sir William Laird Clowes, The Royal Navy: A History, 7 vols. (London, 1897–1903; rpt., New York: AMS Press, 1966), 3: 316–17.
43. The first edition reads “dreadful morality.”
44. A year later, on the floor of the House of Commons, Oglethorpe put the loss at “near 4000”; and in response Sir Charls Wager “said he had a list of every man dead on that expedition, which amounted in all to but 1900 men.” John Percival, first Earl of Egmont, Diary of Viscount Percival, ed. R. A. Roberts, Historical Manuscripts Commission, 3 vols. (London, 1920–23), 3:346–47. In his Naval Administration, 327, Baugh put the figure above three thousand.
45. It was apparently this Baltic expedition in which Admiral Wager admitted the loss of “above 500.” See Percival, Diary, 3: 347.
46. In 1725 Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas Parker, first Earl of Macclesfield, was found guilty of defalcation of funds in his custody.
47. This entire sentence is italicized.
48. Viz. is italicized.
49. The earlier state reads, “the purser is the first creditor, and if he runs away, no other is paid.” Originally Oglethorpe apparently did not realize, or perhaps forgot, that the buyer of the sailor’s prospective wages frequently managed to collect the wages of even those who had deserted.
50. The phrase is italicized.
51. The first edition reads “The Duth method.”
52. The black letter here apparently reproduced that in Oglethorpe’s copy of Keble’s Statutes, 316–17, 345; 7 Henry VII, cap. 1, par. 1; and 3 Henry VIII, cap. 5, par. 4.
53. Italics appear in this title and all subsequent titles of the appendix except in Number IV.
54. The word pressing appears in black letter. The writer of this section may have been John Barnard, a member of the parliamentary committee. Although he had become an Anglican, Barnard had once been a Quaker.
55. In the 1777 edition “Shoe-beacon” became “Sohoc-beacon.” In 1542 this warning signal was called the “horse-shoe beacon.” It is now Maplin Light. The man of war was the Flamborough. Its captain, John Hildesley, had a bad reputation within the Navy. On April 23, 1717, a complaint was lodged in the Admiralty against him for drawing his sword and making a disturbance among the workmen at the Navy Yard, also for “cursing and swearing and abusing the Officers, and that he would kick the Builder over the wharf.” (Baugh, ed., Naval Administration, 1715–1750, 46, 48; see also 49, 140–41.) In March of 1721, Hildesley attempted to help restore Governor Robert Johnson to power in South Carolina. With five ships, he sailed into the harbor of Charleston and, as commander of the militia for Berkeley County, furnished eighty sailors as militiamen for Johnson’s abortive attempt. In August 1923 L. G. Carr Laughton printed a letter from the Lords of the Admiralty giving the official account of the incident narrated in The Sailor’s Advocate (Mariner’s Mirror, 9:240–42); and in 1931 “W.S.” added notes excerpted from the evidence taken at the hearings of the case (Mariner’s Mirror, 17:397–98). This evidence seems to confirm the accuracy of the account published by Oglethorpe.
56. The apprentices were William Risham and George Whalebone.
57. In this paragraph Sailors Hardships is italized; and in the following, Letter and Service.
58. In this paragraph are italicized forgery, Sheriffs, and Crown.
59. Recorded as having deserted.
60. Indulgences is italicized.
61. The phrase is italicized.
A Preliminary Report on the Fleet Prison
1. Knatchbull, Diary, 88–89. Charles Selwyn (1689–1749) later defended the new colony of Georgia in the House of Commons. Knatchbull’s assertion that Sir William had stabbed Bambridge’s underling is correct. The press uniformly reported only that Sir William had stabbed Bambridge himself, and so Oglethorpe stated in his appendix to his report on the Marshalsea Prison. In his own defense, however, Bambridge asserted that Sir William had attacked his assistant also, in a separate incident (Mr. Bambridge’s Case [London, 1729?], 2).
A Report from the Committee . . . Relating to the Fleet Prison
1. JHC, 20:303.
2. JHC, 21:264.
3. See Baine, “The Prison Death of Robert Castell and Its Effect on the Founding of Georgia,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 73 (1989): 67–78.
4. JHC, 21:237.
5. Moses Pitt, The Cry of the Oppressed (London, 1691), 84–86.
6. A “Newgate solicitor,” Thomas Bambridge, along with Thomas Corbett, acquired the freehold of the Fleet Prison from John Huggins and was sworn warden of the prison on November 16, 1728. After the investigation, Bambridge was accused of the murder of Robert Castell; and when he was acquitted, he was tried again on the appeal of the widow, who was doubtless subvented by Oglethorpe. Again acquitted, he was then tried for felony on the charges of his prisoner Elizabeth Berkeley. Though found not guilty of these indictments, Bambridge was by the unanimous vote of the House of Commons deprived of his freehold of the Fleet and disabled forever from again holding the office of warden there. Despite his legal protests and his self-exculpation in Mr. Bambridge’s Case, he was never able to regain his post. After apparently resuming his legal practice, he died in his chambers in London on July 11, 1741. Reportedly he cut his own throat. He is pictured by Hogarth in both the sketch and the final painting of Oglethorpe’s committee visiting the Fleet.
7. The Historical Register . . . for the Year 1729, 128n.
8. On March 10 the Daily Post announced a visit planned for that day.
9. Sidney James Webb, Baron Passfield, and Beatrice Potter Webb, English Prisons Under Local Conditions (London, 1922; rpt., Archon, 1963), 28.
10. JHC, 21:283, 310, 374; Great Britain, Parliament, Journals of the House of Lords (London, n.d.), 23:438; Pickering’s Statutes, 16:88 (2 George II, cap. 32).
11. James Boswell, notes toward a biography of Oglethorpe, Boswell Papers, M208: 1, Yale University Library; The Register of Admissions to Gray’s Inn, 1521–1889, ed. Joseph Foster (London, 1889), 369.
12. JHC, 21:387n. The Fleet report also appeared in Journals of the House of Lords, 23:404–34; and it was reprinted in 1729 in Dublin. The body of the report was included in Abel Boyer’s Political State of Great Britain in the number for April of 1929 (37:359–77). All three major reports were reprinted, with the exception of Appendix B in the Marshalsea report and minor compressions elsewhere, by William Cobbett in his Parliamentary History of England, 36 vols. (London, 1806–20), 8:706–53, 803–26.
13. Particularly oppressive during the reigns of James I and Charles I, the Court of the Star Chamber was abolished in 1641.
14. This act, 16 Charles I, cap. 10, was entitled “An Act for the regulating of the privy council, and for taking away the court commonly called the star-chamber.” See Pickering’s Statutes, 7:338–42.
15. Oglethorpe focuses upon the specific charge to investigate the use of charity monies. See 22–23 Charles II, cap. 20, sec. 11: Pickering’s Statutes, 8:372.
16. The Magna Charta.
17. This was Richard Tyrell of Asshton, in Essex. At his death, in 1566, his executors acted until his eldest son, Edward, attained his majority.
18. After the Great Fire of 1666 destroyed the prison, the prisoners were temporarily housed in Caron House, in South Lambeth. Sir Jeremy’s grant came in September 1667, and he evidently sold the grant before he died in 1677.
19. During these years the Fleet was successively held by Edmund Pierce, Thomas Dickenson, Thomas Bromhall, Escrick Howard, and Richard Manlove, who was deprived of his office for abuses, extortion, and escapes.
20. Although Colonel Baldwyn Leighton was granted wardenship in 1690, William Weedon Ford continually contested his right to the prison.
21. Leighton was still living in 1703, but Huggins’s patent was dated July 22, 1713. Perhaps this patent confirmed an earlier one. Henry Hyde, second Earl of Clarendon, sold his patent to Thomas Bambridge and Dougal Cuthbert in August of 1728. During his wardenship Huggins exercised his office by deputy, preferring to live at his leisure in St. Martin in the Fields, where he was a vestryman, or at his estate in Headly Park, Hampshire, where from time to time he entertained members of Parliament. A man of genteel pretensions, he acquired the books of Sir Isaac Newton and had his library painted by Sir James Thornhill, whom he had evidently helped to become Royal Historical Painter. He was later charged with the death of Edward Arne, who died while Thomas Guybon was acting as deputy. Huggins was acquitted. In Hogarth’s painting of the committee examining the Fleet, tradition names Huggins as the shadowy figure at the extreme left (easily visible in S. Bull’s engraving a century later), his back turned upon the proceedings—so depicted by Hogarth “out of consideration for his friend’s feelings.” See R. B. Beckett, “Hogarth’s Early Paintings: III 1728/9: The Gaols Enquiry,” Burlington Magazine 90 (1948): 225. Huggins died in 1745.
22. For a detailed look at the case of Thomas Periom, Periam, or Perrin, see the following report on the Marshalsea Prison.
23. Vains, who ran a coffee-house, subsequently testified at Bambridge’s second trial for the murder of Castell.
24. Bishop, who had paid two hundred pounds for his position as tipstaff, had been at the Fleet at least as early as 1723/24, when he attacked Major Wilson. Bishop was a prisoner himself, at least from June 25, 1728.
25. After Reed’s first escape, in 1724 or 1725, Bambridge claimed that he paid five hundred pounds to Reed’s creditors and thereafter put the prisoner in chains. In 1726 Reed escaped again.
26. A man who neglected his business and allegedly left his wife and family to starve, Edward Arne earlier appeared as the improvident upholsterer of Addison and Steele’s Tatlers 155, 160, 178, and 232. He became thereby the prototype of the improvident newsmonger, frequently an upholsterer, as in Arthur Murphy’s The Upholsterer, or What News? (1758). Since 1786, when John Nichols combined the two in his edition of The Tatler, he has often been confused with his first cousin Thomas Arne, father of the composer of “Rule, Britannia.” Perhaps at one time Edward and Thomas Arne shared “The Two Crowns and Cushion,” for both lived in King’s Street and were “upholders,” members of a small guild that then numbered about 144 and that combined upholstery with the sale of second-hand wares. In 1725 Edward was the “servant” of the guild, then located at Exeter Change, and was arrested for debts to some of the other members. By this time he was reduced to the clothes he was wearing, his seal, his gold-headed cane, and his gold watch. Ostracized by his fellow prisoners for his eccentricities, he was eventually confined in a dungeon over an open sewer, where he had neither heat, proper food, nor proper care. He soon died. In the trial for his murder, Warden John Huggins managed to shift the blame to his agent John Barnes, who had fled, and to the deceased deputy, Thomas Guybon.
27. After Bambridge was removed from office, Cuthbert took charge about March 22, 1729.
28. See Oglethorpe’s appendix A.
29. Captain John Macphreadris, described by John Mackay as a “Gentleman worth 100000 Pounds” (Mackay, A True State of the Proceedings of the Prisoners in the Fleet-Prison, 37), was confined, along with eighty or a hundred other prisoners, for tearing down partitions in the prison (Mr. Bambridge’s Case, 1–2). Bambridge claimed that he was then merely visiting the prison and was not employed there.
30. Richard Corbett, tipstaff and keeper of a sponging house adjacent to the Fleet, was taken into custody on April 2, 1729, to stand trial for the murder of Castell.
31. Lieutenant Jenkin Leyson, or Lyson, was committed to the Fleet by Lord Chief Justice Eyre on January 18, 1728.
32. An officer of the superior courts at Westminster.
33. Thomas Hogg was transferred to the Fleet from the King’s Bench Prison on December 10, 1726, and again committed to the Fleet, by Chief Justice Eyre, on May 3, 1727.
34. Thomas Guybon, or Gybbon, came to the Fleet in 1724 and served for a while as Huggins’s deputy.
35. “An act for the relief of insolvent debtors,” 6 George I, cap. 22: Pickering’s Statutes, 14:291. Charles Fitch, or Fytche, was Clerk of the Enquiries under Guybon.
36. In a letter to the editor on November 24, 1988, Mr. D. Crook, of the Search Department of the Public Record Office wrote, “Only three of the five Committment Books he [Oglethorpe] mentions have survived. PRIS 1/2 is the one which begins, as he says, on 26 March 1708, and it ends on 4 November 1713. PRIS 1/4 is the one beginning on 6 May 1728, its last entry being made on 13 June 1729. The only other for that period, PRIS 1/3, runs from 9 February 1725 to 6 May 1728. The gap between 1713 and 1725 was presumably filled by the two volumes now wanting. . . . None of the other items he mentioned seems to have survived, and there are no other records of the Fleet Prison before 1729 except two earlier Committment Books, for James II—William and Mary, and for 1699–1700. . . .” I am grateful to Mr. Crook and the Public Record Office for microfilm copies of the three extant books, which have been a major source of my information concerning the prisoners.
37. David Boyce, or Boyes, was in the Fleet by 1725 and complained to Chief Justice Eyre of being overcharged. Bambridge maintained that Boyce, Booth, and Kilbury all escaped before he had custody of the prison.
38. William Kilbury, or Kilberry, was confined to the Fleet by order of Lord Chief Justice Gilbert on July 20, 1726. He testified at Bambridge’s second trial for the murder of Castell.
39. William Booth was committed to the Fleet by Justice Pangellys on December 7, 1726.
40. William Talure, Tayleur, or Taylor was committed to the Fleet by Justice C. J. Tracey on May 7, 1726, and was transferred back to the Fleet from the King’s Bench Prison on October 28, 1727. Bambridge claimed (Bambridge’s Case, 1) that Barnes, King, and Talure were never in his custody.
41. James Barnes became a prisoner in the Fleet during Hilary Term, 1724. He soon became a runner and watchman for Guybon, with liberty of the gate. He escaped when the order for his arrest arrived.
42. Pickering’s Statutes, 8:371: 2–3 Charles II, cap. 20, sec. 9.
43. This toy ship apparently found its way into the possession of Lord Chief Justice Sir Robert Eyre, according to the testimony recorded by Luke Kenn, in “Minutes of the Proceedings of the Committee appointed to Enquire into the State of the Goals of this Kingdom, touching a Charge against Sir Robert Eyre,” p. 8. See Rodney M. Baine, “The Oglethorpe Prison Committee and Lord Chief Justice Robert Eyre,” Journal of Legal History 10 (1989): 343–51.
44. Sir Edward Herbert (1648?–1698), titular Earl of Portland, became Chief Justice of the Common Pleas in 1687.
45. Jacob Mendez Solas, or Jacob Mendez, a Portuguese Jew turned Christian and baptized, was apparently a jeweler. He testified at Bambridge’s trial for felony and later contributed five guineas to the the Georgia Trustees via Dr. William Berriman, rector of St. Andrew Undershaft. Solas is probably the kneeling figure in Hogarth’s portrait of the Fleet committee. Bambridge maintained that Solas was put in irons before he had any concern in the Fleet Prison.
46. In his Case Bambridge responded that Sinclair, or Sinkler, insulted, “collar’d, struck, and kick’d him” until he was rescued by the watch (p. 2). Sinclair testified at the appeal for the murder of Castell.
47. John Everett, turnkey and taphouse keeper at the Fleet, was executed at Tyburn for highway robbery on February 20, 1730/31, before he could give evidence concerning Chief Justice Eyre. When the first rope broke, he was strung up again. An alleged autobiography was published and circulated for the occasion.
48. Peter King, first Baron King, of Ockham (1669–1734), was Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas from 1724 until 1725.
49. My long dash substitutes for space left blank for the insertion of Guybon’s first name, Thomas. In JHC, 21:280, an asterisk was substituted for the space.
50. John Holder was an old offender. A debtor in the Fleet as early as March of 1702, he escaped during that month. He was accused in the House of Commons of sending to Cadiz two ships, the galley Cloudsley and the frigate Holder, heavily insured for forty thousand pounds, and of having Mate Robert Acres transfer the cargo of the Cloudsley to the Holder and then burn the galley. One of the officers confessed to the committe of the House (JHC, 13:796, 826–28). Warden Ford was ordered prosecuted because of Holder’s escape.
51. Major George Wilson, or Willson, a merchant of Leeds, was in the Fleet by 1723 (Mackay, True State, 21) and was later confined there on June 13, 1726. Bambridge confined him in the strong room for alleged drunkenness and insults. John Pigot, or Piggot, was committed to the Fleet by Lord Chief Justice Robert Tracey on May 19, 1726. Bambridge said that Pigot was discharged from prison.
52. William Pindar was an underling and probably a prisoner in the Fleet by 1724, when he attacked Major Wilson. He was certainly committed to the Fleet on November 20, 1728. Thomas King, an accomplice of Bambridge, was committed to the Fleet on November 22, 1726. Apparently none of the four were ever charged for their alleged offenses.
A Report from the Committee . . . Relating to the Marshalsea Prison
1. JHC, 18:131; 20:86.
2. JHC, 20:360.
3. Daily Journal, March 29, 1729, p. 1.
4. For an analysis of this court and its problems, see William Buckley, The Jurisdiction and Practice of the Marshalsea and Palace Courts (London, 1827).
5. London Evening Post, March 19, 1730, p. 2.
6. Sir Philip Meadows the younger (d. 1757) was made Knight Marshal of the King’s Household on July 2, 1700.
7. Contrary to the recommendations of Oglethorpe’s committee and of the House of Commons, Darby was never charged with a crime. Even before Acton became his deputy, Acton seems to have run the prison as head turnkey, for Darby seems to have been rarely at the prison after 1725. Of the parish of St. George the Martyr, Acton served for four years as a butcher with a Mr. Haysey before becoming turnkey at the Marshalsea.
8. 22–23 Charles II, cap. 20, sec. 10: Pickering’s Statutes, 8:372.
9. Punishing a prisoner if he refuses, or is unable, to pay garnish—the fee demanded of a new prisoner.
10. 12 George I, cap. 29: Pickering’s Statutes, 15:331–33.
11. Sir Thomas Gresham (1519?–1579), the founder of Gresham College, left ten pounds a year for debtors in each of six London prisons.
12. Sir John Bennett (d. 1724) should be distinguished from John Bennett, Esq., an M.P. who served as Master of Chancery from 1717 until his death in 1739.
13. Clerk of the Papers for five years, Grace remembered the Marshalsea before Acton arrived there. He testified at Acton’s trial for the murder of Thomas Bliss.
14. 11 George I, cap. 21: Pickering’s Statutes, 15:231.
15. Sir John Darnall the younger (1672–1735) usually cooperated fully with the keeper of the prison under his jurisdiction. He testified for Acton at his trial for the murder of Thomas Bliss and defended Bambridge in his trial for the murder of Castell.
16. Lionel Cranfield Sackville, first Duke of Dorset (1688–1765) served as Lord Steward of the Household from 1725 to 1730 and again later.
17. John Campbell, second Duke of Argyll (1678–1743), a relative of Oglethorpe, was Lord Steward of the Household from 1718 to 1725.
18. 11 George I, cap. 21: Pickering’s Statutes, 15:231.
19. For details concerning Thomas Bliss, see Acton’s trial for his murder, in A Complete Collection of State Trials, ed. T. B. Howell, 33 vols. (London, 1809–26), 17:461–510.
20. Since John Darby was himself only deputy warden of the prison, terminology for Acton’s role as his deputy was awkward. Acton was sometimes called chief turnkey, but he was certainly “farmer,” or deputy leaser of the prison.
21. See the report on the Fleet, n. 26.
22. See ibid., n. 25.
23. For Bishop, see ibid., n. 24.
24. On May 25, 1728, the London Evening Post reported, p. 2, “Last Monday a charitably disposed Lady came to the Marshalsea Prison in Southwark, and discharg’d thirty poor Debtors for Sums not exceeding 50 Shillings each, besides the Fees of the Prison.”
25. For Pindar, see the Fleet report, n. 52.
26. See also the preliminary report on the Fleet. In Oglethorpe’s reports Bambridge is always the aggressor; but in Bambridge’s version of this incident, after Sir William stabbed one of the keepers “three several times,” the next morning he stabbed Bambridge himself “with a Shoemaker’s Paring-Knife, provided on purpose, without any other Reason or Apology, for so doing, than Damn you take that to your Heart” (Case, 2). On March 3, 1729, a grand jury at the Old Baily indicted Bambridge for an assault on Sir William “with an Intent to murther him,” but at the same time indicted Sir William for an assault on Bambridge (Daily Post, March 4, 1729, p. 1). Apparently neither case was brought to trial. It is probably Sir William who appears before the committee as the slight figure in the foreground in Hogarth’s sketch of the committee investigating the Fleet Prison.
A Preliminary Report on the King’s Bench Prison
1. John Mackay, Senior, was not an agent of the committee, but the attorney for the prisoners. In 1729 he dedicated to the committee his True State of the Proceedings of the Prisoners in the Fleet-Prison.
A Report from the Committee . . . Relating to the King’s Bench Prison
1. Knatchbull, Diary, 100.
2. Percival, Diary, 1:46.
3. Ibid., 1:49.
4. JHC, 21:444.
5. See Baine, “The Oglethorpe Prison Committee,” 343–51.
6. Oglethorpe cites the Calendar of Postmortem Inquisitions, 11 Henry VI, No. 43. The office of Marshal of the King’s Bench Prison was ancillary to the office of Marshal, or Earl Marshal of England from at least as early as 1246, when Roger le Bigod, fourth Earl of Norfolk, was created Earl Marshal, with the ancillary posts of Marshal of the King’s Bench Prison and Marshal of the Exchequer. Until 1572, when Thomas Howard II, fourth Duke of Norfolk, was executed, these offices were bestowed upon the earls and later the duke of Norfolk, though the offices were temporarily separated when the Norfolk line failed or the heir was under age—i.e., following the death of Thomas de Brotherton, Earl of Norfolk (1300–1338), and during the minority of John Mowbray, fourth Duke of Norfolk (1444–76). During these intervals and after 1572 the offices reverted to the Crown and were separately appointed.
7. See Great Britain, Parliament, Rotuli Parliamentorum, 6 vols. (London, 1767–77). 3:343–44.
8. Sir John Cutler (1608?–1693) was a parsimonius but civic-minded financier. He lent Lenthall more than twenty thousand pounds and left his daughter, Lady Radnor, above sixty thousand pounds, including his equity in the King’s Bench Prison.
9. Nor did Oglethorpe discover the circumstances of the Lenthall title in 1752, when he again reported on the King’s Bench Prison. In the subsequent report of 1753, however, Sir William Calvert managed to clarify Lenthall’s title. On May 15, 1616, King James I had granted the marshalship of the King’s Bench to Sir William Smith, “his Heirs and Assigns, to be exercised by him or themselves, or sufficient Deputy or Deputies, for ever” (JHC, 26:680). Thus the Crown and Parliament were virtually powerless to reform the prison because of the terms of James’s careless grant and Parliament’s subsequent legislation of 1708, confirming Lenthall’s title. On May 16, 1631, Sir John Rous acquired the office, and on May 13, 1669, William Lenthall acquired it from Rous. However Sir John Lenthall (not to be confused with his nephew Sir John Lenthall, Speaker of the House of Commons) was acting marshal from at least as early as February 27, 1633, and continued to act, by deputy, until he died. He had evidently purchased the reversion of the marshalship some decades before he actually acquired it, for Sir John Rous admitted that he held it in trust for John Lenthall and his heirs (JHC, 26:680–81). After Lenthall’s death in 1668, his grandson William Lenthall became marshal and successfully resisted legal and parliamentary efforts to remove him. After William died, childless, in 1702, efforts to establish responsibility in the management of the King’s Bench Prison were for decades thwarted by the legislation that Oglethorpe cites.
10. 8–9 William III, cap. 27: Pickering’s Statutes, 10:89–98.
11. As Cutler’s executor, Boulter assigned the mortgage of the King’s Bench to Radnor by deed poll on January 17, 1700.
12. Charles Bodville (Robartes), Earl of Radnor (1660–1723), was the heir of Robert Robartes, styled Viscount Bodmin.
13. Although Joseph Studley owned only a twentieth part in the King’s Bench, he seems to have managed financial affairs for the others as well.
14. As appears later, Richard Mullens became deputy warden in January of 1724.
15. Sir John Pratt (1657–1725) was made puisne judge in 1714 and served as Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench court from 1718 until his death. Sir John Fortescue Aland (1670–1746) was a justice of the court from 1701 until he retired in 1726. Sir Robert Raymond, later Baron Raymond (1673–1733), was in 1720 attorney general, then in 1724 puisne judge of the King’s Bench, and in 1725, Lord Chief Justice. In his rulings and summaries he helped to clarify the distinction between murder and manslaughter, especially in the trials of Bambridge for the murder of Castell.
16. James Reynolds (1686–1739) was puisne judge from 1725 until 1730. The painter Sir Joshua Reynolds was his nephew.
17. Sir John Holt (1642–1710) was Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench from 1689 until 1710. Praised as Verus in Tatler 14, he was apparently independent and conscientious.
18. This may have been the murder described in The Miseries of Goals, and the Cruelty of Goalers (London, 1729), 15–16.
19. The interesting legal fiction developed here seems to have been ignored by the London newspapers.
20. See the account of the charity monies for the King’s Bench Prison in The Miseries of Goals, 25–27.
21. 2 George II, cap. 20: Pickering’s Statutes, 16:44–45.
22. See 8–9 William III, cap. 27, secs. 19, 22: Pickering’s Statutes, 10:97–98.
23. The surviving books of the King’s Bench Prison are now in the Public Record Office. To the list of marshals given by Oglethorpe can be added the names of Joseph Coling, in 1678; a Mr. Glover, removed from his office in 1686; a Mr. Farrington; a Mr. Church; and a Mr. Ford, all in 1698. Gimbert is “Gunibert” in the 1752 report.
24. Sir John Gonson attained some popularity in his addresses, from the bench, to the grand juries of Westminster. These addresses were frequently printed in the newspapers and were often reprinted as pamphlets. Sir John became a Georgia Trustee on March 13, 1733.
An Appeal for the Georgia Colony
1. The appeal was excerpted and summarized in the London Magazine for August 1732 (1:197–98). The editor of the London Journal, Francis Osborne, attained perhaps his greatest fame by being “beaten” by Dr. Johnson, for rudeness.
2. Benjamin Martyn, the new secretary for the Georgia Trustees, might conceivably have written the appeal: he had already used Oglethorpe’s manuscript of Some Account for his own Some Account of the Designs of the Trustees, which he read to the Trustees on August 3, less than a week after Oglethorpe’s appeal appeared; and he later embodied other passages from Oglethorpe’s manuscript in his Reasons for Establishing the Colony of Georgia (1733). All his known writings on behalf of the colony, however, were first read, approved, and published by the Trustees. The general’s were not. It seems quite unlikely that Martyn would have been so officious as to obtrude upon Oglethorpe’s special province as newspaper publicist. Internal evidence enforces the ascription to Oglethorpe: like Oglethorpe’s separate Georgia tracts, this appeal opens with classical models; and just as in the Preface of A New and Accurate Account the author pretends to have only recently come upon Select Tracts, so here the author pretends to be unfamiliar with the exact intentions of the Georgia Trustees. Such ruses were the stock in trade of the “puffer.” Finally, the rare quotation of Eccelsiastes 9:15 reappears in Oglethorpe’s second “Faber” letter.
3. Publius Cornelius Scipio, Africanus Major.
4. Terence, Heautontimorumenos 1.77, with “nil” altered to “nihil.” Later, in The Naked Truth, Oglethorpe quoted from Terence’s Eunuchus. The Library of Oglethorpe lists the 1706 Dacier edition of Terence (item 988) and the Echard edition of 1718 (item 1059).
5. He will not increase his fees by writing needless prescriptions.
6. Hippocrates, the Greek physician idealized in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, was doubtless intended to suggest Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753). President of the Royal Society, Sir Hans never refused a needy patient and gave his salary to charity and his fortune and his collections to the nation. His friend Oglethorpe served as a trustee for his donation to the British Museum. Sir Hans contributed to the Georgia colony and in 1734 treated Tomochichi’s dying companion.
7. Decius (Publius Decius Mus the elder or the younger?) could be intended for Colonel Charles Selwyn (1688–1751), one of the most active members of the prison committee and a Georgia Trustee; but was more likely meant for Colonel George Carpenter (c. 1695–1749), who was soon to be elected President of the Trustees.
8. Massala (Marcus Massala, Niger?) was surely Lord Chief Justice Sir Robert Raymond, whose probity Oglethorpe praised in his prison reports.
9. Cornelius (Publius Cornelius Scipio, Africanus Major?) may have been Oglethorpe’s cousin John Campbell, second Duke of Argyll.
10. The well-to-do Captain Thraso appears in Terence’s Eunuchus.
11. Alphus, a name unfamiliar to readers of the classics, was doubtless intended for Sir Gilbert Heathcote, Mayor of London and Governor of the Bank of England, who had been pilloried as a miser by Alexander Pope in three of his poems. One of the richest commoners, with large estates, Sir Gilbert spoke in Parliament for the Georgia colony and used his influence in the bank on its behalf. His nephew George Gilbert Heathcote was an active member of the prison committee and served as treasurer of the Georgia Trustees.
12. An Account of the Sufferings of the Persecuted Protestants in the Archbishoprick of Saltzhurg. Translated from the German, probably by the Reverend Frederich Michael Ziegenhagen’s secretary, the book was apparently in the press in May of 1732.
13. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK).
14. Ecclesiastes 9:15: “Now there was found in it a poor wise man, and he by his wisdom delivered the city.”
15. A favorite phrase of Oglethorpe. See his Some Account of the Design of the Trustees for establishing Colonys in America, ed. Baine and Phinizy Spalding (Athens, 1990), 11; and his letter to Bishop George Berkeley of May 1731, in Benjamin Rand, ed., Berkeley and Percival: The Correspondence of George Berkeley and Sir John Percival (Cambridge, 1914), 276–77.
16. For material here Oglethorpe drew on his Some Account, 11.
17. These two sentences come from Some Account, 11–12. In the following sentence I have substituted angled brackets for Oglethorpe’s retangular ones.
18. On April 18, 1732, Richard Smith, a bookbinder, and his wife Briget hanged themselves after killing their two-year-old child. Smith left letters explaining these deaths, and these letters were published not only in the London newspapers, but separately, as An Exact Copy of Some Genuine Letters Wrote by the late Unhappy Mr. Smith (London, 1732).
19. Writers on civil law.
20. This long sentence, with the exception of the opening phrase, appears in Some Account, 42.
21. Compare ibid., 48.
22. Compare ibid., 45.
23. Compare ibid., 45–56.
24. Compare ibid., 15.
Select Tracts Relating to Colonies
1. By Verner W. Crane, “The Promotional Literature of Georgia,” Bibliographical Essays: A Tribute to Wilberforce Eames (Cambridge, Mass., 1924), 290–91; and by Leonard Mackall, ed., Catalogue of the Wymberley Jones De Renne Georgia Library, 3 vols. (Wormsloe, Ga., 1931), 3:1336c.
2. Thomas Coram to Henry Newman, November 20, 1732, Rawlinson MS D.839, fol. 130, Bodleian Library, Oxford University, from a photostat kindly furnished by the Bodleian. For a fuller account of Oglethorpe’s editorship, see Baine, “James Oglethorpe and the Early Promotional Literature for Georgia,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, 45 (January 1988): 104–5.
3. John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, 9 vols. (London, 1812–15; rpt., New York: AMS, 1966), 2:17.
4. The Library of Oglethorpe, items 292, 562, 1111, and 1864.
5. Although eighteenth-century English translations identified the author as Jan de Witt, he furnished at most only a few chapters, and not that on colonies. See Herbert H. Rowen, John de Witt, Grand Pensionary of Holland, 1625–1672 (Princeton, 1978), 391–98.
6. See especially Fayrer Hall, The Importance of the British Plantations in America (London, 1731); the enlarged, third edition of Joshua Gee’s The Trade and Navigation of Great-Britain Considered (London, 1731); the newspapers; and Gentleman’s Magazine and London Magazine.
7. A favorite adventurer and author for Oglethorpe, Raleigh was twice quoted in Some Account. Oglethorpe apparently owned several editions of Raleigh’s History of the World (The Library of Oglethorpe, items 503, 717, 1160, 2113, and 2350); and on his first voyage to Georgia he apparently carried with him Raleigh’s Discoverie of . . . the Empyre of Guiana (London, 1596). According to the South Carolina Gazette for March 24, 1732/33, “Mr. Oglethorpe has with him, Sir Walter Raleigh’s written Journal, and by the Latitude of the Place, the Marks and Tradition of the Indians, it’s [Savannah is] the very Place where he [Raleigh] first went a-shore and talk’d with the Indians.”
8. Arthur Wodenoth, A Short Collection of the Most Remarkable Passages from the Originall to the Dissolution of the Virginia Company (London, 1651), 2, paraphrased by Oglethorpe rather than quoted. Oglethorpe cited Wodenoth again in his New and Accurate Account.
9. According to Michael Kiernan, “The essay appears to have been written . . . c. 1619–22.” See Sir Francis Bacon, The Essayes or Counsels, Civil and Morall, ed. Kiernan (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 239. The essay was first printed in the edition of 1625. In his capacity as solicitor-general, Bacon may have helped to write the second charter of the Virginia Company.
10. Niccolo di Bernardo dei Machiavelli.
11. William Penn, Some Account of the Province of Pennsilvania, published by Benjamin Clark shortly after Penn’s patent was granted, on March 4, 1681, with no price listed. Charles M. Andrews also said that it was printed in 1680 and “never sold,” but he may have based his statement on Oglethorpe. See The Colonial Period of American History, 4 vols. (New York, 1934–38), 4:337 and n. 3.
12. I have been unable to identify the source of this quotation; the writer may have been Thomas Penn, with whom Oglethorpe was corresponding at this period.
13. Sir Josiah Child, A New Discourse concerning Trade (London, 1692), reprinted from one of Oglethorpe’s copies, apparently of the 1698 edition. (The Library of Oglethorpe, items 791 and 1111. Item 1111 is undated.)
14. Convicts were among the first Virginia settlers. See Bacon, Essayes, ed. Kiernan, 92–95.
15. The Virginia Company then comprised more than a thousand patentees and about a hundred counselors.
16. Kiernan implies (Essayes, 239) that Bacon may have seen the manuscript (c. 1610) of William Strachey’s True Repotory (London, 1625), which criticizes the site selected for the colony.
17. The italics and capitals are Oglethorpe’s added emphasis. Bacon surely completed his essay before the Indians massacred 347 white settlers on March 22, 1622.
18. The most celebrated of the dozen or so Indians brought over in 1616 was Powhatan’s daughter Pocahontas.
19. Niccolo Machiavelli, Works (London, 1680), 22–24, the first paragraph of book 2, with the final words “they were wont” altered to “of the Ancients.”
20. Genoa was pillaged and burned by the Saracens in 936.
21. Machiavelli, Works, 201, parts of the first two paragraphs, with Oglethorpe’s own chapter heading. Oglethorpe’s three long dashes indicate the omissions, successively, of a sentence, part of a sentence, and five sentences.
22. Machiavelli, Works, 213, again with Oglethorpe’s chapter heading. Machiavelli’s own heading was “How the strength of all principalities is to be computed.” In the first sentence Oglethorpe changed “free” to “safe.” Oglethorpe’s long dash indicates the omission of part of a sentence.
23. Machiavelli, Works, 268–69. Titus Livius was the Roman historian Livy. Oglethorpe reprinted parts of three paragraphs, omitting the first four lines, then skipping the final two sentences of the first paragraph, and finally skipping sixteen fines, indicating omissions by long dashes.
24. Ragusa.
25. Selim I (1467/70–1520).
26. Dinocrates actually designed Alexandria. The anecdote apparently comes from Vitruvius Pollio, De Architectura, Preface, 2–3. Although The Library of Oglethorpe shows no copy of Vitruvius, the general knew and apparently quoted from Robert Castell’s manuscript translation. See Oglethorpe, Some Account, xxiv.
27. Machiavelli, Works, 281, part of the long opening paragraph.
28. Scipio Africanus Major (236–184/3 B.C.), reputedly incorruptible; Gaius Julius Caesar (100–44 B.C.); Agesilaus II (444–360 B.C.), patriot king of Sparta; Timolean (d. 334 B.C.), opponent of tyranny and protagonist of Benjamin Martyn’s 1730 tragedy; Dion (c. 408–354 B.C.), liberator of Syracuse; Nabis (d. 192 B.C.), Spartan tyrant; Phalaris (c. 570/65–554/49 B.C.), tyrant of Acragas and originator of the brazen bull; Dionysius I (430–367 B.C.), tyrant of Syracuse.
29. Lucius Sergius Catalina (c. 108–62 B.C.), the conspirator.
30. Machiavelli, Works, 283. Oglethorpe opens in the middle of a sentence and does not finish the paragraph. Machiavelli’s “Commonwealth,” in the first line, Oglethorpe changed to “virtuous City.”
31. Numa Pompilius (715–673 B.C.), reputedly the author of many Roman institutions.
32. Machiavelli, Works, 293–94, using Oglethorpe’s own chapter heading and opening in the middle of a paragraph.
33. Pelopidas (c. 410–364 B.C.) and Epaminondas (d. 362 B.C.) rescued Thebes from the Spartans in 379 B.C.
34. Tullus Hostilius (c. 673–642 B.C.), legendary third king of Rome.
35. Aeneid, 6.813–14. Machiavelli’s change of Virgil’s “Residesque” to “Desidesque” Oglethorpe kept, but stopped just short of the translation: “No soft unactive people Tullus knows / But trains up all promiscuously to blows.”
36. Machiavelli, Works, 341. The long dashes indicate the omissions, succesively, of a phrase, a sentence, parts of two sentences, most of a long sentence, and part of a sentence.
37. In 396 B.C. the Romans besieged and captured Vei, an Etruscan city about ten miles north of Rome.
38. Machiavelli, Works, 342, combining two paragraphs. The chapter heading is Machiavelli’s.
39. Livy, Annales, 5.24.
40. Machiavelli, Works, 357, part of the first paragraph, with the omission of four sentences.
41. [Pieter de la Court], The True Interest and Political Maxims of the Republick of Holland (London, 1702), 139–46, 153–54. Oglethorpe used De la Court’s chapter title, adding the inaccurate ascription to De Witt and the words “A Treatise proving.”
42. Not only the Dutch colonies of Cochin, Negapatam, and Ceylon, but the numerous colonies in the East Indies. Just as contemporary references to the East and West Indies often designated the mainland, so vice versa. The subsequent italics are Oglethorpe’s.
43. Oglethorpe’s compositor erroneously substituted “heard” for “hard.”
44. At this point Oglethorpe skipped seven pages without indicating an omission. He also stopped short of the final sentence.
45. Trading groups, rather than colonies in the modern sense. Lyfland was the Dutch name for Livonia.
46. The first half of William Penn’s Some Account, 1–4, beginning with the second paragraph and omitting Penn’s second word there, “then.”
47. Caleb was one of the Jewish spies sent into Canaan. Lycurgus, the third prominent Greek of that name (c. 390–325/4 B.C.), was responsible for many naval reforms. The legendary Theseus reputedly united all Attica into one state. Romulus was one of the legendary founders of Rome.
48. Child, New Discourse (1698 ed.), 178–94.
49. Here Oglethorpe skipped points six through eleven, Child, New Discourse, 179–80.
50. Oglethorpe did not finish Child’s sentence (New Discourse, 181), but modified the structure in order to complete the sense.
51. Especially the Puritans and the Anabaptists.
52. Cromwell’s victory on September 3, 1651.
53. John Graunt, Natural and Political. . . Observations upon the Bills of Mortality, 3d ed. (London, 1665), 76, 100–101.
54. Oglethorpe quoted and paraphrased this passage in his Some Account, 44.
55. Just before the word “Utensils” Oglethorpe omitted “the Negroes and,” and after “him” he omitted “it being customary in most of our Islands in America, upon every Plantation, to employ eight or ten Blacks for one white Servant” (190).
56. Graunt, Observations, 88.
57. Since “Falselet” was surely the compositor’s misreading of Child’s Taffelet, rather than Oglethorpe’s mistake, I have restored Child’s original (New Discourse, 193) here.
A New and Accurate Account of the Provinces of South-Carolina and Georgia
1. Crane, “Promotional Literature,” 289.
2. Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, 2:17.
3. See Oglethorpe, Some Account, Introduction, xxi–xxvi.
4. See Baine, “Oglethorpe and Promotional Literature,” 105–6.
5. Klaus E. Knorr, British Colonial Theories, 1570–1850 (Toronto, 1944), 77, n. 63.
6. David S. Shields, Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, and Commerce in British America, 1690–1750 (Chicago, 1990), 58; Knorr, British Colonial Theories, 131.
7. John Archdale, A New Description of that Fertile and Pleasant Province of Carolina (London, 1707).
8. Milton R. Ready, “The Georgia Concept: An Eighteenth-Century Experiment in Colonization,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 55 (1971): 162, 171, n. 23; Webb Garrison, Oglethorpe’s Folly: The Birth of Georgia (Lakemont, Ga., 1982), 44, 229, n. 8.
9. Purry had already developed his conviction in his Memorial Presented to his Grace the Duke of Newcastle (London, 1724).
10. The bibliographical collation follows: half title, verso blank; title, verso blank; text, 1–76: *2A2a2, B–E8, F2. The preliminaries were obviously printed as part of sheet E. I have not reproduced the half title: “A / New and Accurate ACCOUNT / OF THE / PROVINCES / OF / SOUTH-CAROLINA / AND / GEORGIA.”
11. Collections of the Georgia Historical Society, 21 vols. to date (Savannah, 1840–), 1:42–78; Trevor Reese, ed., The Most Delightful Country of the Universe: Promotional Literature of the Colony of Georgia, 1717–1734 (Savannah, 1972), 114–56, xvi.
12. It was purchased in 1903 from Henry Stevens, Son, and Styles. This firm acquired it in 1893, from a source it can not now identify. Thomas P. Macdonnel to the editor, August 31, 1989.
13. Mackall, ed., Catalogue, 1:32. The judgment may have actually been that of G. W. Cole.
14. Archdale, Description (1707 ed.).
15. Thomas Nairne, A Letter from South Carolina (London, 1710); 2d ed., 1718; 3d ed., 1732.
16. Nairne, Letter, 1st ed., 17–23, 33–34, 35–39.
17. Doubtless a common jest, but Oglethorpe may have had in mind Thomas Shadwell’s comedy The Humorists, where in act one the quack French doctor Pullim cures Crazy in this way.
18. Archdale wrote that “17 Ships, this Year, came laden from Carolina” (Description, 11); and Nairne wrote of “two and twenty Sail of English Ships” (Letter, 1st ed., 57). In his Description Abregée de l’Etat présent de la Caroline Meridionale, 2d ed. (Neuchatel, 1732), 11, Jean Pierre Purry stated that there were “up to about 200 Ships annually.”
19. “Drawn up at Charles-Town, in September, 1731,” Purry’s tract was partially translated for the Gentleman’s Magazine for August, September, and October 1732 (2:894–96, 969–70, 1007–18). This translation was reprinted by B. R. Carroll, ed., Historical Collections of South Carolina, 2 vols. (New York, 1836), 2:124–40. Purry apparently brought not 600 Swiss, but about 150, though his colonists totaled some 700 within three years. See Robert L. Meriwether, The Expansion of South Carolina, 1729–1765 (Kingsport, Tenn., 1940), 35; and Arlin C. Migliazzo, “A Tarnished Legacy Revisited: Jean Pierre Purry and the Settlement of the Southern Frontier, 1718–1736,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 92 (1992): 232–52.
20. Samuel Butler, Hudibras, part 2, canto 1 (London, 1674), p. 251: item 510 in The Library of Oglethorpe.
21. Archdale was chosen in 1698 as M.P. for Chipping Wycombe, Buckinghamshire.
22. Oglethorpe is indulging in the conventional eighteenth-century practice of “puffing,” praising one’s other publications. See, post, his denial of the practice in his praise of John Howard.
23. Benjamin Martyn’s Some Account of the Designs of the Trustees (London, 1732) appeared both separately and in the newspapers, as in the Country Journal, or the Craftsman for August 12, 1732. Actually Martyn produced merely a pastiche of the Georgia Charter and Oglethorpe’s Some Account.
24. In 1609, through a group of guilds, the City of London began “the Plantation in Ulster,” an organization that in 1612–13 became “the Irish Society.” Oglethorpe was especially interested in this plantation because his grandfather Richard Wall had been “transplanted” to Connaught in 1656 and because his mother claimed kinship with the Argyll family through her grandfather Maurice Roche, of Killcoman, Tipperary.
25. “The Society of the Governors and Assistants, London, of the New Plantation in Ulster.”
26. In his Some Account, 14, Oglethorpe placed the southern boundary of Carolina at 29 degrees longitude, in accordance with the grant of 1665. Moreover, in his later dealings with the Spaniards concerning the Georgia border he apparently insisted on a boundary far south of the Altamaha. See Antonio de Arrendondo, Historical Proof of Spain’s Title to Georgia, ed. Herbert E. Bolton (Berkeley, 1925), 72–74, 191–92, 298–99.
27. In the map appended to Martyn’s Some Account, St. Augustine is shown “far south of its actual site.” See Louis de Vorsey, Jr., “Oglethorpe and the Earliest Maps of Georgia,” Oglethorpe in Perspective: Georgia’s Founder After Two Hundred Years, ed. Phinizy Spalding and Harvey H. Jackson (Tuscaloosa, 1989), 33.
28. The Pacific Ocean.
29. Pope Alexander VI’s concessions of May 4, 1493.
30. The material in this paragraph and the next seems to be paraphrased from John Oldmixon, The British Empire in America, 2 vols. (London, 1708), 1:325–29.
31. So Archdale, Description, 5; but Oldmixon (1:325) correctly dismissed this inaccurate claim for Cabot.
32. The French King.
33. In the De Renne copy, Oglethorpe deleted “from Invaders.”
34. Anthony Ashley Cooper, first Earl of Shaftesbury, “The Fundamental Constitutions for the Government of Carolina,” dated July 21, 1669, in the Public Record Office, is in Locke’s hand, but Locke was secretary to the proprietors; he seems, however, to have assisted in framing the document. See Maurice Cranston, John Locke (London, 1957), 119–20; and John C. Attig, comp., The Works of John Locke: A Comprehensive Bibliography (Westport, Conn., 1985), 5–6.
35. In the De Renne copy, Oglethorpe moved “only” from in front of “be.”
36. From Edmund Waller, “The Battle of the Summer-Islands.” For the changes here in the De Renne copy, see my introductory comments.
37. Thomas Burnet, The Sacred Theory of the Earth, ed. Basil Willey (Carbondale, 1965), 149–63.
38. “Some say he bid his Angels turne ascanse / The Poles of the Earth twice ten degrees and more / From the Suns Axle” (John Milton, Paradise Lost, 10.668–70).
39. In the De Renne copy Oglethorpe pluralized “Vicissitude.”
40. Samuel Purchase, Purchase his Pilgrimage (London, 1613), 645, bk. 8, ch. 7 (item 944 in The Library of Oglethorpe).
41. According to legend, his beloved son Eos (Aurora) so changed him, out of pity.
42. “Old age withered Tithonus slowly.” Horace, Odes 2.16.30.
43. In the De Renne copy, Oglethorpe restored the arabic numbers that the compositor had spelled out. Oglethorpe had done the same thing in proofreading The Sailors Advocate.
44. See Oldmixon, British Empire, 1:161–62.
45. Archdale, Description, 8. See also Oldmixon, British Empire, 1:344–45.
46. Oglethorpe may have combined Captain John Smith’s various estimates of the Virginia Indians interspersed through his Map of Virginia (Oxford, 1612), 29–33, and his Generall Historie (London, 1624). For an interesting analysis of Indian populations, see Peter H. Wood, “The Changing Population of the Colonial South: An Overview by Race and Region,” in Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, ed. Wood et al. (Lincoln, Nebr., 1989), 35–103.
47. Horace, Ars Poetica, 2o6: “That was, when listeners could still be counted.”
48. In 1616 Powhatan so instructed Uttamaccomack. See Oldmixon, British Empire, 1:285.
49. For the various visits, see Carolyn Thomas Foreman, Indians Abroad, 1493–1938 (Norman, Okla., 1943).
50. In De Renne, Oglethorpe excised the “somewhat” before “tawny” and added “or olive-Coloured.”
51. The fact that in De Renne Oglethorpe had to correct the blunder “Four-pence” to “Four Shillings” here suggests, along with other evidence, that in his absence in 1732, no one read proof except the printer.
52. In the De Renne copy, Oglethorpe changed the comma here to a period, but neglected to capitalize the t of “they.”
53. This De Renne correction replaces the original “at least, easy Education.” Brackets enclose my conjectural readings.
54. Oglethorpe replaced the period after “Suretyship” by a semicolon and added “[in thin]king.”
55. In De Renne, Oglethorpe altered “here” to “there.”
56. Sir William Petty, Political Arithmetic (London, 1690); Sir William Temple, Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands (London, 1673).
57. Among the principal advancements to trade Temple lists “The Severity of Justice,” with “Workehouses, or Hospitals, as they [beggars] are able or unable to labour” (Temple, Observations, 200–201). Most “Rasp-houses” were houses of correction where prisoners were put to rasping wood.
58. Oglethorpe is whimsically exaggerating Temple’s remark in his sixth chapter that “the true original and ground of Trade” was “the great multitude of people crowded into small compass of Land” (Observations, 187).
59. Oglethorpe is actually quoting Thomas Sheridan, The Intelligencer, no. 6. He was misled because the second, collected edition (London, 1730), advertised the essays as “By the Author of a TALE of a TUB”—Swift. Although Swift started the journal and contributed to it, Sheridan wrote this sixth number. See the AMS reprint of The Intelligencer (New York, 1967), 61–63; and The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis and Harold Williams, 16 vols. (Oxford, 1939–74), 12:xv.
60. In the De Renne copy, Oglethorpe moved the “and” after “Pounds” to follow “Removal.”
61. Here Oglethorpe inserted “of” after “Encouragement” and changed “of Propagation” to “by Propagation.”
62. The natural analogy was still timely because of the increased popularity of the controversial Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits, by Bernard Mandeville (London, 1714). Part 2 appeared in 1728; and his final works, in 1732.
63. In De Renne, Oglethorpe deleted “Martyrs and” before “Confessors.” Evidently almost twenty thousand Saltzburgers emigrated to East Prussia.
64. Here Oglethorpe corrected his blunder giving credit to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), another blunder which suggests that no one read proof except the printer. He also adjusted “have” to “h[as]” and “themselves” to “itse[lf].”
65. In De Renne, Oglethorpe inserted the “about” and supplied the “1” missing in the “10” of “1/10.”
66. Bartolome de las Casas, probably from the retelling in Purchas, Pilgrimage, 449 (bk. 5, ch. 16).
67. Corrected in De Renne from “2 Brit. Emp. Fol.I, p.162.”
68. Oglethorpe refers to the acts against the inalienable return of lands and buildings held by the Catholic Church: 26 Henry VIII, cap. 28; 31 Henry VIII, cap. 13, 35; 35 Henry VIII, cap. 14; 37 Henry VIII, cap. 20; and 1 Edward VI, cap. 14: Pickering’s Statutes, 4:403–10, 455–68; 5:207, 236, 267–86.
69. In the De Renne copy, Oglethorpe deleted the “but” after “Life.”
70. Here Oglethorpe clarified by inserting “, South Carolina,.”
71. Here he changed “sent” to “send.”
72. Here Oglethorpe deleted the repetitive “a Year” and inserted “wh[at]” after “compute.”
73. William Houston.
74. In De Renne, Oglethorpe penciled “might” to replace “may.”
75. “Sh[illings]” here corrects the deleted “Pence.”
76. “More” is Oglethorpe’s clarification in the De Renne copy.
77. “An act for granting liberty to carry rice from . . . Carolina . . . directly to any part, of Europe” is 3 George II, cap. 28: Pickering’s Statutes, 16:182–86.
78. “Homew[ard]” is Oglethorpe’s insertion in De Renne.
79. John Selden, Of the Dominion, or, Ownership of the Sea (London, 1652). The Library of Oglethorpe shows two editions, or copies, items 893 and 1423. Josiah Burchett, A Complete History of the most Remarkable Transactions at Sea (London, 1720). In De Renne, Oglethorpe corrected the misspelling “Martime.”
80. Sir Edward Coke, “Ad Lectorem,” Le Quart Part des Reportes (London, 1610), sig. [B6], recto. In the De Renne copy, Oglethorpe corrected several mistakes, probably the compositor’s: he corrected “ominantium” to “dominantium,” “ego” to “ago,” and the period after “includuntur” to a comma. He did not, however, correct the blunder eum to eam, or supply the omitted “rerum.”
81. Paul de Rapin-Thoyras, The History of England, trans. N. Tindal, 28 vols. (London, 1726–47), 1:391–92. This edition is item 173 7 in The Library of Oglethorpe.
82. Arthur Wodenoth, A Short Collection, 4–16.
83. “Vers 1731 il avait 100 à 106 métiers battants qui produisaient annuellement 30.000 à 40.000 aunes d’étoffes.” Albert Demangeon, La Picardie (Paris, 1905), 265. Percival told Sloper, on February 16, 1730, that “the manufacture [of wool] at Abbeville was set up the very year ours [the Irish] was ruined, and that by the Irish weavers who were obliged to leave their country for want of business.” Percival, Diary, 1:48.
84. Percival commented that “the Irish will certainly furnish France with wool by running it thither though a hundred ships were employed to prevent it” (Diary, 1:48). See F. G. James, “Irish Smuggling in the Eighteenth Century,” Irish Historical Studies, 12:299–317.
85. In 1704 Captain Thomas Coram, later a Georgia Trustee, was instrumental in obtaining a bounty on tar imported from the colonies.
86. Although Oglethorpe was himself too busy in Georgia to follow up this puff, he provided Benjamin Martyn with materials for his Reasons for Establishing the Colony of Georgia (London, 1733).
A Description of the Indians in Georgia
1. This account, variously titled, was several times reprinted, at first virtually entire, in the Gentleman’s Magazine for August 1733 (3:413–15) and the London Magazine for the same month (2:399–400), then, considerably cut, in Thomas Salmon’s Modern History: Or the Present State of all Nations, 3d ed., 3 vols. folio (London, 1739), 3:602, and in A New Voyage to Georgia. By a Young Gentleman (London, 1735), 57–60. In 1841 this truncated version was reprinted in Collections of the Georgia Historical Society, 2:61–64. The account was not included in Peter Force’s 1837 reprint of A New Voyage.
2. On August 1, 1733, Percival recorded in his Journal, “A long letter from Mr. Oglethorp was read, giving a character of the Indians with whom he has made a Treaty,” and on the same day he noted in his Diary, “A long letter from Mr. Oglethorp received yesterday was read, giving . . . a character at large of the Indians with whom he has made a treaty.” John Percival, The Journal of the Earl of Egmont, ed. Robert G. McPherson (Athens, 1962), 31; and Percival, Diary, 1:398.
3. On the contrary, according to Charles Hudson, “The Creeks placed a high value on having several wives or concubines, though only the wealthier men could afford it.” See his The Southeastern Indians (Knoxville, 1976), 199.
4. Evidently when they visited the white settlers, the Yuchis, who lived upriver from Savannah, helped themselves, in approved Indian fashion, to whatever fruits and vegetables they needed.
5. During the Yamacraw’s visit to England in 1734, William Verelst painted Tomochichi with his eagle feathers and his buffalo robe.
An Account of Carolina and Georgia
1. Thomas Salmon, Modern History, 3 vols. (London: Bettesworth and Hitch, 1739), 3:770–73. This edition was announced in the Daily Advertiser on April 9, 1739. Salmon later reprinted various sections from Oglethorpe’s “Account” in his New Geographical and Historical Grammar (London, 1749) and his Modern Gazeteer: Or a Short View of the Several Nations of the World (London, 1746).
2. Thaddeus Mason Harris, Biographical Memoirs of James Oglethorpe (Boston, 1841), 312–22. The only “fourth” edition of Salmon’s Modern History consists of late issues of the octavo edition sold by J. Crokatt and others. I am greatly indebted to Alexander E. Lucas, Reference Librarian at the Newberry Library, for locating and furnishing me with a copy of Oglethorpe’s “Account.” Henry Bruce excerpted sections from Harris’s reprint for his Life of General Oglethorpe (New York, 1890), 80–92; but he further confused the provenance of Oglethorpe’s “Account” by giving the impression that he took it from an imaginary fourth, folio edition of Modern History, which he dated about 1752.
3. Salmon, Modern History, Bettesworth’s edition, 3:770.
4. For the suggestion about Gascoigne, on whose ship Oglethorpe returned to England in 1734, I am indebted to my colleague Louis De Vorsey, Professor Emeritus of Geography.
5. Captain John Smith so used the word “swamps,” at least as early as 1624.
6. “Sir” John Hill called the magnolia “the laurel-leaved Tulip-tree.” Later the native Georgian poet Thomas Holley Chivers called it “the wild emerald cucumber-tree” (“Rosalie Lee”).
7. See my introduction to this “Account.”
8. Probably the Indian name for Jekyll Sound. The Spanish name was Gouadaquini, or Gualquini Sound. Captain George Dymond testified before the Georgia Trustees on January 16, 1740, “That Jekyll Sound can contain twelve Men of War in safety, being well Land Lock’d.” See Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, ed. Allen D. Candler, Kenneth Coleman, et al., 32 vols. to date (Atlanta and Athens, 1904–), 1:363. Subsequent references cite this work as CRG.
9. When Admiral Francis Hosier’s blockade of the Spanish galleons at Porto Bello was raised, in 1727, his forces had been decimated by fever. The admiral himself died of its effects.
10. “Sulwan’s Island” in Salmon seems to be the compositor’s misreading of “Sulivan’s Island.”
11. “Makes the entry” in Salmon seems, again, a compositor’s misreading.
12. The lighthouse was completed about March 30, 1736 (CRG, 21:274).
13. The Vernon River runs just northeast of the Ogeechee. The Westbrook River, which was later called Augustine Creek, was, like the tiny village of Westbrook, named after Oglethorpe’s estate at Godalming. The village centered about Walter Augustine’s saw mill, about ten miles upriver from Savannah. In this sentence and four sentences later, the compositor’s “country” may well be misreadings of Oglethorpe’s “county.”
14. See Samuel Urlsperger, ed., Detailed Reports on the Salzburger Emigrants Who Settled in America, trans. and ed. George Fenwick Jones et al., 18 vols. to date (Athens, 1968–), 3:244, 250, 251, and 5:79, 188; and CRG, 20:132–33. Although Henry Parker’s mill was on Abercorn Creek, both Ebenezer River (Creek) and Abercorn Creek were outlets of the same stream (Detailed Reports, 5:143).
15. For Brims, see Walter A. Harris, Emperor Brim (Macon, Ga., 1956), and David H. Corkran, The Creek Frontier, 1540–1783 (Norman, Okla., 1967), 61–80. Oglethorpe apparently just missed meeting Brims, for the South Carolina Gazette for June 2, 1733, called “old Breen” “lately dead.”
16. Oglethorpe’s use of buffaloe for bison anticipates by half a century the first example in the NED, where the same protest of impropriety is registered.
17. Probably the mountain lion, or cougar (felis concolor).
18. The bobolink.
An Account of the Negroe Insurrection in South Carolina
1. Lieutenant Governor William Bull’s reports on October 5 to the Duke of Newcastle and to the Board of Trade and Plantations are not so detailed, and the South Carolina Gazette for September 15, 1739, contains nothing about the rebellion. Later issues for that month are apparently not extant.
2. Percival, Diary, 3:105, 118.
3. Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974), 320.
4. Phinizy Spalding, Oglethorpe in America (Chicago, 1977), 74.
5. Oglethorpe to Verelst, October 9, 1739, Great Britain, Public Record Office, Colonial Office 5/640:392r, hereinafter cited as CO. Brackets enclose conjectural readings for words obliterated in the MS.
6. On the following day the account appeared in both the London Daily Post, and General Advertiser and the London Evening Post. It appeared also in the March issues of the Gentleman’s Magazine (10:127–29) and (excerpted) the Scots Magazine (2:138–39). It was published in CRG, 22 (2):232–36, with sidenotes added by the editor.
7. CO 5/640:393r~396r. On folio 391r it was addressed “To Mr. Harman Verelst. These” and marked “recd. 13 March 1939.” The account was written fair and quite separate, so that it could be sent to a newspaper. Martyn apparently made several copies for this purpose and retained the original. I have italicized the words that Oglethorpe wrote in large script to indicate italics; and I have substituted angle brackets for his square ones.
8. Oglethorpe’s implication that the slaves were encouraged to revolt by the Spanish proclamation is regarded by Wood (Black Majority, 314) as likely. Oglethorpe apparently began his parenthesis with “then at embargo of,” but deleted the last two words.
9. In November of 1738 nineteen slaves of Captain Caleb Davis and fifty others escaped to St. Augustine.
10. Evidently Lieutenant Raymond Demeré. Paul Demeré did not attain this rank until December 1740.
11. Captain James McPherson commanded the Rangers.
12. Joseph Anthony Mazzique, a Spanish physician, and William Shannon, an Irish Catholic who had enlisted in Oglethorpe’s regiment. In the previous sentence in the text I have changed Oglethorpe’s rectangular brackets to angle ones.
13. Don Pedro Lamberto, with whom Oglethorpe occasionally corresponded.
14. After “Stonehow” (Stono) Oglethorpe wrote “——miles from Charles Town,” but unable to ascertain the distance, deleted the phrase.
15. Alexander Hext, colonel in the militia and a member of the Assembly and the Council, was unmarried. The overseer’s wife perished.
16. A member of the Assembly, Royal Spry had a plantation near Pon Pon Bridge; Thomas Sacheverelle’s son was in the Assembly.
17. Before “Shot,” Oglethorpe wrote “after,” apparently intending “afterwards,” but then deleted the word.
18. Lieutenant Governor William Bull’s reports to Oglethorpe doubtless furnished him with most of the facts he needed for his account. Bull was of course not only warning Georgia, but reporting to his superior officer: since 1737 Oglethorpe had been in command of the armed forces of South Carolina as well as Georgia.
A Thanksgiving for Victory
1. Bolzius translated it to read to his flock and sent it to Germany, where Samuel Urlsperger published it in his Neunte Continuation der Ausführlichen Nachrichten von den Salzburgischen Emigranten (Halle, 1743), 1261–63. See the discussion there, p. 1264, and in George F. Jones’s Detailed Reports, 9:183. The German translation, Thaddeus Mason Harris Englished for his Oglethorpe, 387–89.
2. It may have appeared around October 1 in a now-missing issue of the Virginia Gazette. The Reverend Mr. George Whitefield included almost the entire proclamation in a letter that he wrote, on January 9, 1742, to a “Mr. T.” in Scotland, and that was later published in his Works, 6 vols. (London, 1771–72), 2:7–8.
3. Although Oglethorpe exaggerated the Spanish forces and casualties, he doubtless based them upon what he considered reliable reports.
4. See, in Appendix 2, “A Refutation of Calumnies.”
The King’s Bench Prison Revisited
1. See my “Oglethorpe and the Moravians—After Georgia,” Atlanta History 35 (1990): 25–31.
2. Not John Howard, Oglethorpe’s successor in prison reform, but the Reverend Mr. Leonard Howard, chaplain to the Prince of Wales and “poet laureate” of the King’s Bench, in which he was frequently imprisoned because of his improvidence.
3. Ashton (d. 1768) was marshal of the King’s Bench Prison from 1749 to 1766. It seems strange that Oglethorpe did not interview Theodore, “King” of Corsica, who was in prison in the King’s Bench for debt from 1749 to 1755. For an interesting fictional account of Theodore and his club at the prison, see Tobias George Smollett, The Adventures of Ferdinard Count Fathom (1753), chs. 39–42.
4. In his more specific report, Sir William Calvert detailed that “by Indenture, dated the 4th of February 1684, the said William Lenthall, for securing the Sum of 10,000l. and Interest, at 5l. 10s. per Centum per Annum, mortgaged the Manor of Latchford and Great Haseley, in the County of Oxon, and the Profits of the said Office, to Sir John Cutler’s Trustees, therein named; and Lenthall covenanted, that he and his Heirs should stand seised of the inheritance and Fee-simple of the said Office, subject to the Payment of the said 10,000l. and Interest” (JHC, 26:681).
5. By “original Grant or Patent” Oglethorpe apparently meant the patent awarded Sir William Smith in 1617, in which James I resigned to Sir William and his heirs and assigns subsequent control of the King’s Bench Prison. Oglethorpe thus left it to Calvert to clear up the title.
6. Sir William Lee (1686–1754), appointed Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench in 1737, had been one of Bambridge’s prosecutors in 1729.
7. Philip Yorke, first Earl of Hardwicke (1690–1764), followed Sir Robert Raymond and preceded Sir William Lee as Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench.
The Naked Truth
1. On the following day it was advertised in the Whitehall Evening Post, p. 2, and the London Evening Post.
2. It was advertised on that day in the Whitehall Evening Post as forthcoming.
3. British Library shelfmark 102.d.3 (1).
4. Printed in part in the Reports of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, vol. 9, appendix, part 2 (London, 1884), these two letters are now in the Scottish Record Office, which supplied microfilm copies, with the kind permission of the owner, James Alexander Elphinstone, Baron Elphinstone.
5. Boswell Papers M208:1, Yale University Library.
6. See Rodney M. Baine and Mary E. Williams, “Oglethorpe’s Early Military Campaigns,” Yale University Library Gazette 60 (October 1985): 75.
7. Owen Aubrey Sherrard, Lord Chatham: A War Minister in the Making (London, 1952), 294–95.
8. Ernest Marsh Lloyd, “William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland,” DNB; Lee McCardell, Ill-Starred General: Braddock of the Coldstream Guards (Pittsburgh, 1958), 123, 130; Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune (New York, 1988), 115; Reed Browning, The Duke of Newcastle (New Haven, 1975), 217–19.
9. Henry R. Plomer, A Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers, 1726–1775 (London, 1977), 203; Monthly Review for September 1755, 238.
10. For translations of works inaccurately attributed to Oglethorpe, see Appendix I.
11. “Vox populi, vox Dei.” Alcuin to Charlemagne. Alexander Pope Englished it in The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace, lines 89–90.
12. “The wellbeing of the people should be the supreme law.” Cicero, De Legibus 3.3.8. This quotation opens John Trenchard’s Cato’s Letters, No. 11, for January 7, 1721. See Cato’s Letters, 3d ed., 4 vols. (London, 1733; rpt., New York, 1969), 1:66.
13. The first edition ends the quotation with “they are deceived or bribed.” Oglethorpe follows the sense of Cato’s Letters, No. 22, for March 25, 1721.
14. Apparently not a quotation and surely not a biblical one. The British lion is of course a national symbol.
15. Major General John Lambert opposed Monk’s advance into England in 1659–60 and was subsequently sent to the Tower and then to Guernsey. Thomas Harrison, for a while second in command to Cromwell, helped to expel the Long Parliament and was ultimately executed.
16. Horace, Satires 1.1.24, with Horace’s “quid” altered to “Quis.” Here and on the title page the first edition of The Naked Truth reads “discere,” which appears in Horace’s Satires two lines later.
17. Like Socrates, condemned to drink hemlock (in 399 B.C.), Phocion was condemned in 319 B.C. for advising peace with Macedonia.
18. Edition 1 reads “loved Truth, Simplicity, and Nakedness, so that. . . .”
19. According to Plutarch, Lycurgus, in the process of instituting his reforms of luxury, was pelted with stones at the instigation of the wealthy and had one eye clubbed out.
20. The sense of the quotation appears in William Wycherly’s “To Nath. Lee, in Bethlem,” in Miscellany Poems (1704). Especially suggestive is line 17 there: “For telling Naked Truths, like Mad-Men, stripp’d.” “Bethlem” is more familiar to us as “Bedlam.”
21. The story may derive from a similar one told by “Democritus Junior” in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). See the edition of Thomas C. Faulkner et al., 2 vols. (Oxford, 1989), 1:33–37. In the second edition Oglethorpe substituted “Magistrates” for “Citizens.”
22. Lucius Junius Brutus may have assumed stupidity to escape vengeance. Like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Solon at one stage of his life apparently pretended insanity. In the third sentence of this paragraph Oglethorpe added “of him” in the second edition.
23. Abraham Cowley, “Brutus,” stanza 2, from Pindarique Odes, with the first four lines omitted. Edition 1 omits “In standing pools” and substitutes “should” for “may” in the last line. Since Oglethorpe’s booksale catalog lists two copies of Cowley’s Works in the edition of 1669 and one in that of 1684 (The Library of Oglethorpe, items 249, 1442, and 1141), Oglethorpe at first evidently quoted from memory or made a hasty and inaccurate transcription.
24. Edition 1 reads “People go on. . . .”
25. Master mariner Robert Jenkins.
26. Edition 1 reads “we lowered the price of Corn . . . and it hath never rise, because. . . .”
27. Edition 2 substitutes the final “it” for “a great deal.”
28. Oglethorpe refers to the 1742 campaign of Admiral Edward Vernon and Major General Thomas Wentworth (1693–1747) to land at Porto Bello and march across to the town of Panama; but the venture achieved virtually nothing.
29. The clause concerning General John Guise, who commanded the Sixth Regiment of Foot at Cartagena, was added in the second edition. General Charles Cathcart, eighth Baron Cathcart (1686–1740), commanded the forces sent to attack the Spaniards at Cartagena.
30. In edition 1, “and perhaps” follows.
31. The commander was Admiral George Anson.
32. Oglethorpe’s use of “Patriot” here is that set in the same year by Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary for “patriotism” — “the last refuge of a scoundrel.”
33. “Yet if the fates could find no other way / For Nero’s coming . . . / For this boon supreme / Welcome, ye gods, be wickedness and crime.” Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, The Pharsalia of Lucan 1.33–38, trans. Edward Ridley (London, 1896), 4. Oglethorpe substituted “Aut” for “Quod, “ipsa “for “ista,” and “venturi” for “venturo.” Schrevelio’s edition of Lucan (Amsterdam, 1658) is item 630 in The Library of Oglethorpe.
34. “For our homes and our religion,” a favorite phrase that appears, for example, in Cicero’s De Natura Deorum 3.40, and in Sallust’s De Conjuratione Catalinae 59.5.
35. After supporting the Old Pretender, James Francis Edward Stuart, for several decades, France finally made him feel unwelcome.
36. Oglethorpe evokes Falstaff’s characterization of “grinning Honour” in Henry IV, Part I, 5.3.59.
37. In edition 2 the numbers that were spelled out in edition 1 are given in arabic figures; “and so” following “Commissions” is deleted; and “Stock on” is changed to “Stock of.”
38. In William Congreve’s The Old Batchelor, 2.1.18off., Captain Bluff says, “Hannibal was a very pretty Fellow in those Days, it must be granted—But Alas Sir! were he alive now, he would be nothing.” The Complete Plays of William Congreve, ed. Herbert Davis (Chicago, 1967), 52. The Library of Oglethorpe lists the 1733 edition of Congreve’s Works (item 332).
39. Dragoons then fought either on horseback or afoot.
40. “To no one master do I swear fealty.”—Horace, Epistles 1.14, a favorite quotation that appears in Pope’s First Epistle of the First Book of Horace Imitated, 24; in Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random, ch. 17; and serves as the motto for Samuel Johnson’s Rambler.
41. Luke 14:31, paraphrased. Edition 1 spells out the numbers.
42. “Spare the lash, my boy, and more strongly use the reins.”—Frank Justus Miller. The advice of Phaeton in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 2.127. Edition 1 reads “Parce Puer stimulus / Sed major utite Lora. “
43. Oglethorpe added considerably here: the first edition reads, “. . . for War. So did Demosthenes. And the great Cicero. . . .”
44. “Quicquid delirant reges, plectuntur Achivi.” Horace, Epistles 1.2.14, used as a motto by Richard Steele for his Spectator 180, and his Englishman 23.
45. The Marriage Act of 1755 was designed to prevent runaway marriages of wealthy young women to seducers of a lower class; but many younger sons of the nobility and gentry were forced into the military service to become in Falstaff’s phrase, “Food for Powder.” Henry IV, Part I, 4.2.65–66.
46. Acts 19:34.
47. The “to” in this phrase was inserted in edition 2, probably for clarity.
48. Edition 2 deletes “and” before “yet” and inserts “this.”
49. Gaius Marius was tried for bribery in 115 B.C., but was acquitted. Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus II was prosecuted for resisting a tribune but was released. A mob stoned his brother Gaius Sempronius Gracchus.
50. Edition 1 reads “in the Collection” rather than “for the Collection.”
51. In edition 1 “Engine” is “Ensign,” doubtless a compositor’s misreading.
52. Edition 1 reads, “Thus Pare Mustifa, or Black Mustifa, got the Whenca. . . .” Oglethorpe apparently possessed (item 2355 in The Library of Oglethorpe) Richard Knolles’s The Turkish History, 6th ed., 3 vols. (London, 1687–1700), with acounts of the campaign against Vienna by both Sir Roger Manley (2:288–308) and Sir Paul Ricaut (3:92–134).
53. Edition 1 reads “Captain Bashaws” and “Festadur” and lacks the parenthetical material that follows.
54. Edition 1 reads “Pare mustifa.”
55. Dionysius I, tyrant of Syracuse (c. 430–367 B.C.).
56. Agathocles secured his election in troubled Syracuse as general and keeper of the peace, then used his soldiers to gain control of the city.
57. Not a fable from Aesop, La Fontaine, or John Gay, but perhaps Oglethorpe’s adaptation of the ironic proverb “Set the wolf to keep the sheep.”
58. Edition 2 pluralizes “The Seaman” and “Ship.”
59. Charles I’s levies of ship-money helped to precipitate the Civil War and were declared illegal in 1641. John Hampden was a prominent protestor against the levies.
60. Edition 2 substitutes “therefore” for “so.”
61. Edition 2 pluralizes “Merchant” and “him.”
62. John Radcliffe, physician (1650–1714), left his fortune for charitable purposes. For Sir Hans Sloane and Sir Gilbert Heathcote, see notes for “An Appeal to Benefactors.” Sir Peter Delme (d. 1728) was governor of the Bank of England and mayor of London. His son Peter was a member of Parliament from 1734 to 1754; and his daughter was sought by Percival as a wife for his son. Abraham Crasteyn, a Hamburg merchant, died in 1754 worth four hundred thousand pounds.
63. Although this proverb goes back to Plato’s Phaedo 38.89, Oglethorpe may have remembered it from Erasmus, Adagia, where it appears on p. 115 of his 1629 Frankfort edition (The Library of Oglethorpe, item 702). For assistance here I am indebted to my colleague Richard La Fleur, Head of the Classics Department, and to August Krickel, of Columbia, South Carolina.
64. “One Englishman cou’d beat three Frenchmen.” Addison’s Sir Roger de Coverley, in the Spectator 383 (The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. [Oxford, 1965], 3:437).
65. Edition 1 reads “heap up,” probably a compositor’s misreading.
66. Not a quotation from Shakespeare, but perhaps from a minor play in which Theophilus Cibber enacted his favorite role of Pistol, perhaps from his Humorists, never printed, but enacted the previous year at Drury Lane—in 1754. In the preceding paragraph, “for” replaces the “or” of the first edition.
67. “Deprived of food and wine, Love is lifeless.” Terence, Eunuchus 4.5.6, with “Baccho” substituted for “Libero.” The Library of Oglethorpe shows both the 1706 edition (item 988) and the 1718, by Echard (item 1059). Edition 2 replaces “Luxury” with “Letchery.”
68. Late in 1754 an act was passed requiring all carriages and wagons “of burden” to have wheels at least nine inches broad. This legislation followed extensive debate in the press, as in the Public Advertiser, where Oglethorpe may have read the discussions of July 26 and October 12.
69. George Byng, Viscount Torrington (1663–1733), commanded the Mediterranean fleet in 1718–20 and destroyed one Spanish fleet off Cape Passaro in 1718. Edition 1 reads “subsidy all Germany.”
70. Edition 1 reads “Subsidy.”
71. Oglethorpe compares the writer “T.C.” with the protagonist of the burlesque Hurlothrumbo (1729), by Samuel Johnson of Cheshire. White’s Coffee House was then a popular Tory club where large bets were sometimes laid upon mere trifles. In 1755 it removed to its present location in St. James’s Street.
72. To make a wager intending to abscond rather than pay up.
73. Edition 1 reads “Cape-Briton.”
74. Edition 1 reads, “He wastes them.”
75. Oglethorpe’s is not an unfair paraphrase of “T.C.,” “The Benefits that will accrue to this Nation by driving the French out of all the Continent of America.”
76. Wentworth’s expedition against Porto Bello and Panama.
Some Account of the Cherokees
1. “Some Account of the Cherokees” appeared also in Lloyd’s Evening Post, and the British Chronicle for July 30, 1762, which added to the title “who often conversed with their Chiefs while he was Governor of Georgia; which is the only authentic Account that has even been given of that Nation.” It was reprinted in the anonymous An Enquiry into the Origin of the Cherokees (Oxford, 1762), 20–21. Although an incautious reader of John Phillip Read’s A Law of Blood (New York, 1970) might assume that Oglethorpe wrote the rest of this pamphlet, Read only seems to attribute it to him, and there is every reason not to do so. See Read, A Law, 4 and 279, n. 9; 84 and 305, n. 84; 154 and 309, n. 9. Oglethorpe’s account led Philip Thicknesse, as “A PLEBEIAN,” to contribute an account of Tomochichi to the Public Adveriser for August 14, 1762. For Thicknesse’s Georgia journalism, see Baine, “Philip Thicknesse’s Reminiscences of Early Georgia,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 76 (winter 1990): 672–98.
2. Ettinger, Oglethorpe, 287, n. 2.
3. See Foreman, Indians Abroad, 65–81; and Henry Timberlake, Memoirs, 1756–1765, ed. Samuel Cole Williams (Marietta, Ga., 1948).
4. The “Uscheeses,” or Yuchis, were members of the Creek Confederacy, but only loosely affiliated. They had their own language.
5. William Bartram, on the other hand, described the Cherokees as “the largest race of men I ever saw.” See his “Observations on the Creek and Cherokee Indians” (1789) in Transactions of the American Ethnological Society 3 (1853): 28.
6. Oglethorpe did not take into account the ravages inflicted by war and smallpox since his departure. Reports of 1755 place the figure at “‘above three Thousand Men’” or at only 2,590. See Peter H. Wood, in Powhatan’s Mantle, 63.
7. Southeastern Indians certainly interred personal possessions with the corpse of the deceased. See Hudson, Southeastern Indians, 334–35. Their principal motive, however, was to enable the dead to use their possessions in the afterlife.
Three Letters on Corsica
1. The letters appeared on May 2, 19, and 27, 1768. The first appeared also in the London Magazine for May 1768 (37:253–55); and the second, in the London Chronicle for May 21, 1768, and in the Gazette for June 3, 1768. In James Boswell’s British Essays in Favour of the Brave Corsicans (London, 1768), they constitute the opening series of essays, pp. 3–26. For authorship, see Frederick A. Pottle, James Boswell: The Earlier Years, 1740–1769 (New York, 1966), 395, 553. For a discussion, see Richard C. Cole, “James Oglethorpe as Revolutionary Propagandist: The Case of Corsica, 1768,” the Georgia Historical Quarterly 74 (1990): 463–74.
2. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill and L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1934–64), 2:350, n. 2.
3. Pottle, James Boswell, 381, 549; Boswell, Boswell in Search of a Wife, 1766–1769, ed. Frank Brady and F. A. Pottle (New York, 1956), 163, 166, 167; Cole, “Oglethorpe,” 74:465.
4. See Ettinger, Oglethorpe, 291–328; and Mary Elizabeth Williams, “Oglethorpe’s Literary Friendships,” University of Georgia dissertation, 1980.
5. Joseph Foladare, Boswell’s Paoli, in Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 48:65.
6. This introductory paragraph by Boswell he reprinted as Essay I of his British Essays.
7. The Family Compact, or contract, of 1761 had closely united the Bourbon courts of France, Spain, Parma, and the Two Sicilies (Sicily and Naples).
8. The Peace of Aix-le-Chapelle, in 1748.
9. Queen Elizabth dispatched an army to the assistance of the United Provinces in 1585. The Triple Alliance was signed in 1668.
10. In 1572 Elizabeth privately assisted the Protestants besieged in the sea-port city of La Rochelle. The Library of Oglethorpe shows, item 64, Pierre Mervault’s Journal des Choses plus memorable qui sont passés au dernier Siege de la Rochelle (Rouen, 1671).
11. Like George III himself, Oglethorpe apparently viewed Gustavus Adolphus as a Protestant champion of Danzig (Gdansk) against the Catholic king of Poland.
12. In 1724 in the “blood-bath of Thorn” (Toron, on the Vistula), ten Protestant citizens were executed with the complicity of the Polish king, Augustus II.
13. The independent coastal city of Sanremo was in 1729 protected by the Austrians when the Genoese threatened its autonomy.
14. Many of these French interventions Oglethorpe saw as selfish, unlike the other, altruistic interventions. In 1640 the French assisted the Catalonians against Philip IV of Spain and in the following year helped to sow dissension in Naples and Sicily, where Oglethorpe himself must have witnessed the Sicilian preference of the Spanish to the Savoyards or the Austrians. In 1640 also, in a revolt against Spain, John II of Braganza became John IV of Portugal, with at least the early recognition of France. In his Lettres écrites de la Montaigne (1764) Rousseau condemned the Petit Counseil of Geneva for repressing liberties at the suggestion of Voltaire and the French Minister, Choiseul.
15. In 1736, while Robert Walpole was Prime Minister, France acquired Lorraine under the Third Treaty of Vienna.
16. Oglethorpe took his figures from Boswell’s Account of Corsica (London, 1768), 253. The Library of Oglethorpe shows a copy, item 1723.
17. Apparently Oglethorpe here refers to the unconditional promise that George I made to Spain in June 1721, while Carteret was Secretary of State. Actually a defender of the British claim to Gibraltar, Carteret knew that the promise would be meaningless. See Archibald Ballantyne, Lord Carteret: A Political Biography (London, 1887), 73–74, 77; and W. Baring Pemberton, Carteret: The Brilliant Failure of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1936), 70 and 338, nn. 37, 38. John Trenchard’s first Cato letter, of November 5, 1720, emphasized the importance of Gibraltar to England and reassured that “Secretary Grimaldo” had promised to keep it. See Cato’s Letters, 1:5. Trenchard reasserted England’s determination in letters of June 30, 1722 (3:148–49), and June 6, 1723 (4:226). The Craftsman 35, of April 10, 1727, dwelt upon the importance of Gibraltar.
18. Denied his seat in Parliament and then outlawed, on November 1, 1764, “that Devil Wilkes” became the idol of London.
19. Guy Fawkes Night, November 5.
20. Clive used Mir Jaffir to replace the Nawab of Bengal: Suraj-ud-Daulah.
21. Sir John Dick, British consul at Leghorn, corresponded with Boswell and contributed an essay to his British Essays.
The Adams Letters
1. The first three were excerpted in the General Evening Post on November 13, 1773, and December 4 and 23, 1773. The first was excerpted in the St. James Chronicle on November 11, 1773.
2. Phinizy Spalding, “James Oglethorpe and the American Revolution,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 3 (1975): 406, n. 15, quoting Boswell to Oglethorpe, December 3, 1773 (James Boswell MS L995, Yale University Library).
3. Boswell, The Private Papers of James Boswell from Malahide Castle, ed. Geoffrey Scott, 18 vols. (Mount Vernon, N.Y., 1928–34), 6:123.
4. See W. F. Tate, The Enclosure Movement (New York, 1967), 84–85. Contemporary defenders of enclosure included John Arbuthnot, in his Inquiry into the Connection between the present Price of Provisions and the Size of Farms (1773) and the anonymous author of Advantages and Disadvantages of Inclosing Waste Lands (1772). Opposed were Stephen Addington, in his Inquiry into the Reasons for and against Inclosing Open-Fields (1767, 1772), and John Lewis, in Uniting and Monopolizing Farms, Plainly Proved disadvantageous to the Land-Owners and highly prejudicial to the Public (1767, 1772), from the latter of which Oglethorpe may well have drawn.
5. Not an author but a collector and encourager of the arts, George III possessed “a noble collection of books,” according to Boswell and Johnson—a library to which Dr. Johnson often resorted and where the king at least once interviewed him on literary subjects and suggested his writing the lives of the poets.
6. Oliver Goldsmith’s Deserted Village had appeared in 1770.
7. Private acts of enclosure were passed at every meeting of Parliament and were routinely approved by the king.
8. The Magna Carta, as Oglethorpe realized, marked a success not for the common man, but for the aristocracy.
9. By “corn” Oglethorpe of course denotes grain; in England, specifically, wheat.
10. Oglethorpe suggests that George Spencer, fourth Duke of Marlborough (1739–1817), had experienced a change of heart. As Lord of the Manor of Westcote, he had in 1765 enclosed the commons in the tything of Westcote, in the parish of Waldesden, Buckinghamshire. See JHC, 30:56.
11. An M.P. for Yorkshire, Sir George Savile (1726–84) voted for the repeal of the Stamp Act, supported religious liberty, was concerned about criminal justice, and opposed press gangs. His Irish estates lay mainly in County Fermanagh. Although Sir George enclosed the commons adjoining his English estate, he apparently protected his less affluent neighbors in doing so. See John Lawrence Le Breton Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The Village Labourer, 1760–1832: A Study in the Government of England Before the Reform Bill, new ed. (London, 1920), 30–31.
12. I have substituted “counties,” the reading of the General Evening Post, for the Morning Chronicle’s “countries,” evidently the compositor’s misreading.
13. The Pantheon and Ranelegh were well-known pleasure gardens. Theresa Cornelys (1723–97), an actress-singer, had purchased Carlisle House in Soho Square in 1760 and was thus for Oglethorpe a most obnoxious neighbor as a manager of assemblies, balls, and concerts. Although she was indicted in 1771 for keeping a “disorderly house,” i.e., a house of prostitution, and became bankrupt in 1772, she apparently remained active, to Oglethorpe’s annoyance.
14. William Cox was executed for robbery on October 27, 1773, at Tyburn. Two different criminal biographies appeared that year. One reached five editions and an abridgment.
The Faber Letters
1. Spalding, “James Oglethorpe,” 13:406–7.
2. The heading “FOR BINGLEY’S JOURNAL” can be detected from the remaing feet of the cropped letters in the second number that Oglethorpe sent to Boswell. I have followed the dates noted on the Yale copies by Mr. or Mrs. Frederick A. Pottle. According to a letter of December 3, 1992, from Mr. Vincent Giroud, curator of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Pottles left no indication of their source for these dates. I have been unable to locate any file of Bingley’s Journal that includes these late issues.
3. Boswell Papers, Yale Library, C2119.
4. See “Oglethorpe’s Missing Years,” by Rodney M. Baine and Mary E. Williams, Georgia Historical Quarterly 69:193–210.
5. Charles Geneviève Louis Auguste André Timothée d’Eon de Beaumont (1728–1810); Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (1732–99), author of The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro.
6. In his Political Disquisitions, or an Enquiry into Public Errors, Defects, and Abuses, 3 vols. (London, 1774–75), James Burgh found bribery to be the normal practice of English kings, and in book 5, devoted to parliamentary corruption, he again found bribery “our disease” (1:267). See also Sir Louis Namier, The Structure of British Politics at the Accession of George III, 2d ed. (London, 1957); and John T. Noonan, Jr., Bribes (New York, 1984), 417ff.
7. The first Bourbon, Henry IV, ascended the French throne in 1589.
8. Cato the Censor (234–149 B.C.) regularly ended his speeches to the Roman Senate with the warning that Carthage must be destroyed.
9. The Peace of Paris (1763) between Great Britain and France.
10. Not the House of Brunswick (Braunschweig)-Lünenburg, of which George III was elector, but that of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, headed by Duke Charles (1735–80) and his brother Duke Ferdinand (1721–92), who commanded the Anglo-German Army of Observation after the Duke of Cumberland departed.
11. George Grenville (1712–70), First Lord of the Treasury from 1762 to 1765.
12. Although some writers described the coasts of East Florida as pestilential, Oglethorpe probably confused the Floridas. In Mobile, in West Florida, in 1765 sickness wiped out the Twenty-first Regiment, and subsequent summers brought wholesale death to the garrison. See Bernard Romans, A Concise Natural History of East and West-Florida (New York, 1776), 10–13, 238; Charles Loch Mowat, East Florida as a British Province, 1763–1784 (Berkeley, 1943), 51; and Peter J. Hamilton, Colonial Mobile, rev. ed. (Mobile, 1952), 264–74. The reading “somber” is conjectural.
13. John Manners, Marquis of Granby (1721–70), retired from the army in 1770; Field Marshal Henry Seymour Conway (1721–95) resigned all military command in 1772; and Admiral Edward Hawke, Baron Hawke (1705–1781), retired in 1771.
14. Robert Clive, Baron Clive (1725–74), had been subjected to a parliamentary inquiry in 1772–73.
15. George Sackville, Lord Germaine, had been dismissed from the service after he failed to attack at Minden.
16. After surrendering at Saratoga, John Burgoyne (1722–92) gave at least one ball while he was imprisoned by the Americans at Cambridge.
17. Suraj-ud-Dowlah.
18. “A Plain Dealer,” “Scotch FRAUD and English FOLLY displayed,” Gazeteer and New Daily Advertiser, March 30, 1778, pp. 1–2. Oglethorpe’s quotations are not precise, but are substantially reliable.
19. Oglethorpe follows Chamberlayne faithfully, taking the liberty only of substituting arabic numbers, using the fifth edition of Part II (1764). The Library of Oglethorpe shows a copy (item 1933) of an undated edition, presumably this one, a continuation of the eighth edition of Part I.
20. Ecclesiastes 9:15. Oglethorpe had already employed this rare quotation in his appeal for the Georgia colony in 1732.
21. The signature has been torn off in the copy that Oglethorpe sent to Boswell.
Three Letters Supporting Lord North
1. For a discussion of the North letters, see Spalding, “James Oglethorpe,” 403–4; and Ettinger, Oglethorpe, 316–17.
2. See Alan Valentine, Lord North (Norman, Okla., 1967), 2:303–4.
3. See Cobbett’s Parliamentary History, 22, cols. 1150–62. During March the Public Advertiser printed extensive reports from the debates.
4. The earl regarded the theaters as “places not only of rational amusement, but of great instruction and improvement.” Cobbett, History, 22, col. 1166.
5. According to the Public Advertiser of March 9, 1782, Sir John Delaval (1728–1808) “declared himself an independent Country Gentleman, and that he never in his Life received or solicited any Favour from the Administration that had supported them. He could see no Plan which was framed by the Opposition, and he wished them to name any Set of Men who were to carry on the Business of the Country.”
6. All the licensed physicians.
7. Letters from “One in the Secret,” appearing in the Public Advertiser for March 11, 13, and 15, 1782, predicted a “Reconciliation with America (not an abject and disgraceful Offer of Peace on such Terms as they shall think fit to prescribe)” and published “Important Considerations on ‘the Proposals for an Accommodation with the Revolted Colonies’ as laid before his Majesty.”
8. There were various proposals, one for a fixed fee of five shillings; another for a fee from ten to fifty shillings according to the size of the establishment.
Appendix 1: Spurious Attributions
1. Boswell in Extremes, 306–7.
2. Patrick Sutherland, An Account of the late Invasion of Georgia (London, 1742).
3. John Harriss, Navigantium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca, enlarged ed., ed. John Campbell, 2 vols. (London, 1748), 2:347.
Appendix 2: Probable Attributions
A Refutation of Calumnies
1. In the Egmont Papers, 14206:258–61, in the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Georgia, there is a MS copy entitled “A Certificate relating to Mr. Fenwickes Speech to Colonel Vander Dussen Sept. 1742.”
2. The Spanish Hireling Detected: Being a Refutation of the Several Calumnies and Falshoods in a late Pamphlet Entitul’d “An Impartial Account of the late Expedition against Saint Augustine under General Oglethorpe (London, 1743). Unfortunately George Cadogan’s defense has never been reprinted.
3. James Killpatrick’s biased report was reissued in a facsimile edition, with an introduction and notes by Aileen Moore Topping (Gainesville, 1978). Killpatrick responded to Cadogan in A Full Reply to Lieut. Cadogan’s “Spanish Hireling” &c. and Lieut Mackay’s Letter, Concerning the Action at Moosa (London, 1743).
4. This brief report supplemented the full one made during 1741–42 and published as The Report of Both Houses of Assembly of the Province of South-Carolina, Appointed to enquire into the Causes of the Disapointment of Success, in the late Expedition against St. Augustine, Under the Command of General Oglethorpe (Charles Town, 1742). The fuller report was reprinted in London in 1743, and again, in large part, in the nineteenth century, in Collections of the South Carolina Historical Society, 4:1–177. In the middle of the present century it has been twice edited and reissued, by J. H. Easterby in Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, May 18, 1741–July 10, 1742 (Columbia, 1953), 78–247; and by John Tate Lanning in his St. Augustine Expedition of 1740 (Columbia, 1954). The Carolinan position has been frequently voiced.
5. Colonel Alexander Vander Dussen may have been a member of the Van der Dussen family of Delft or Dordrecht, in the Netherlands. He arrived in South Carolina in 1731, perhaps from Curaçao, with some military experience, and he rapidly became prominent in political and military circles. Mentally disordered, he was removed from the Council in 1756. He seems to have treated ruthlessly not only his slaves, but according to Lieutenant Patrick Sutherland, even his own family. See Walter B. Edgar, ed., Biographical Directory of the South Carolina House of Representatives, 4 vols. (Columbia, 1977), 2:685–86; and Robert Wright, A Memoir of General James Oglethorpe (London, 1867), 347–48.
6. Alexander Heron arrived in Georgia in 1738, from Bermuda, and became a major in 1740 and lieutenant colonel in 1744. (For military commissions, see W. R. Williams, compiler, “British-American Officers, 1720 to 1763,” in South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 33 [July, 1932]: 183–96). After the Georgia regiment was disbanded in 1749, he was assigned to South Carolina. George Dunbar, master of the Prince of Wales, recruited and brought over Scots servants as well as Oglethorpe’s Indian delegation. Given a grant of five hundred acres at Josephstown and subsequently land at Darien, he served as emissary to the Indians in 1741 and to the British government, for military assistance, in 1743. Given command of the fourteen-gun captured sloop Walker, he became captain lieutenant in 1740 and captain in 1741. James Mackay of Scoury, brother of Hugh, arrived in 1733, became ensign in 1740 and captain in 1742. Samuel Mackay became ensign in 1742. Primrose Maxwell became a lieutenant in 1740 and an adjutant in 1741. George Cadogan became lieutenant in 1741 and captain lieutenant in 1747. At Oglethorpe’s order, he commanded the general’s own company when it removed to Augusta in 1748. Agent to the Cherokees and author of the hitherto anonymous “Ranger’s Report of Travels with General Oglethorpe, 1739–1742,” Thomas Eyre became ensign in 1740. Probart Howarth became ensign in 1741, lieutenant in 1744, and ultimately colonel in South Carolina, commanding Fort Johnson. Ensign in 1742/43, Solomon Chamberlain died in 1746. William Robinson was probably the Highlander, aged twenty-one, who arrived in 1741.
7. Surely a reference to the anonymous Impartial Account.