The title page of English Liberties: or, the Free-born Subject's Inheritance (1st ed., 1682?),[1] believed to have been written by Care[2]

Henry Care (1646–1688) was an English political writer and journalist, or "Whig propagandist",[3] whose speciality was anti-Catholicism.

Life

Care edited a paper called the Weekly Pacquet of Advice from Rome. It began as a serial publication covering the history of the Protestant Reformation.[4] After the publicity for the alleged Popish Plot of 1678, he wrote against the Church of England and its members, then supposed by some to be deeply inclined towards popery. He was tried at Guildhall, 2 July 1680, on an information against him as the author of this journal, and more particularly for a clause against the lord chief justice, William Scroggs, who himself sat as judge at the trial. The jury found him guilty, and Care was prohibited from printing his journal.[5]

These proceedings then constituted one of the charges brought against Scroggs, who was removed from the bench some months later, and Care continued to publish. Care's last number of the Weekly Pacquet, which extended to five volumes, is dated 13 July 1683, at which time he fell ill. In 1682 Care fell out with Langley Curtis, the original publisher; Care, who lived at the time in the Great Old Bailey, continued to work on his own account. But at the start of the quarrel, Curtis, employed William Salmon, another writer, to publish a continuation of the Pacquets, and he did so from 25 August 1682, the same day as Care's fifth volume also began, until 4 May 1683.[5]

The English Liberties (1680, in later versions often British Liberties) was a cheap polemical book that was influential and much-reprinted, in the American colonies as well as Britain, and made Magna Carta central to the history and the contemporary legitimacy of its subject.[6] The Excellent Priviledge of Liberty (1687), an American book generally attributed to William Penn, reprinted the text of both Magna Carta (its first American printing) and (without attributing it) English Liberties.[7]

Legacy

The English Liberties continued to be reprinted until the late 18th century. A two-volume adaptation of the Weekly Pacquet, under the title The History of Popery, appeared anonymously in 1735–6.[8]

Notes

  1. ↑ Henry Care (c. 1682), English Liberties: Or, The Free-born Subject's Inheritance, Containing I. Magna Charta, the Petition of Right, the Habeas Corpus Act; and Divers other Most Useful Statutes: With Large Comments upon Each of Them. II. The Proceedings in Appeals of Murther; the Work and Power of Parliaments; the Qualifications Necessary for Such as should be Chosen to that Great Trust. Plain Directions for all Persons Concerned in Ecclesiastical Courts; and How to Prevent or Take Off the Writ De Excommunicato Capiendo. As also the Oath and Duty of Grand and Petty Juries. III. All the Laws against Conventicles and Protestant Dissenters with Notes, and Directions both to Constables and Others Concern'd, thereupon; and an Abstract of all the Laws against Papists, London: Printed by G[eorge] Larkin, for John How at the Seven-Stars at the South-west Corner of the Royal-Exchange in Cornhil, OCLC 701822788.
  2. ↑ However, it has also been speculated that the work was by William Penn: see Winthrop S. Hudson (October 1969), "William Penn's English Liberties: Tract for Several Times", The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 26 (4): 578–585, doi:10.2307/1917132, JSTOR 1917132.
  3. ↑ Breay & Harrison, p. 134
  4. ↑ Andrew Pyle (editor), The Dictionary of Seventeenth Century British Philosophers (2000), Thoemmes Press (two volumes), article Henry Care, p. 157.
  5. 1 2 Cooper 1887.
  6. ↑ Breay & Harrison, pp. 110-111, 134
  7. ↑ Breay & Harrison, p. 147
  8. ↑ Lois G. Schwoerer, The Ingenious Mr. Henry Care, Restoration Publicist (2001), p. 226.

References

  • Breay, Claire, Harrison, Julian (eds.), Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy, 2015, The British Library, ISBN 9780712357647
Attribution

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Cooper, Thompson Cooper (1887). "Care, Henry". In Stephen, Leslie (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 9. London: Smith, Elder & Co. pp. 45–46.

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