I

A celebrated series of books by the English commonwealthmen of the seventeenth century was published between 1698 and 1700. The series included major editions of works by John Milton, Algernon Sidney, and James Harrington, and the Civil War memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, Denzil Holles, John Berkeley, and Thomas Fairfax. Collectively, these texts have become known as the ‘whig canon’.Footnote ¹ Over the following century, this set of writings would profoundly shape the development of republican thought on both sides of the Atlantic.Footnote ² The texts of the whig canon would be cited approvingly by thinkers as diverse as Bolingbroke and the founding fathers of the American constitution.Footnote ³ At their original moment of publication, however, the series was designed to bolster opposition to the consolidation of power by the court whigs under William III. By reasserting ‘true whig’ principles against the corruption of the apostates who made their peace with the court, these historic works were made to chime with the political challenges faced by the opposition in the present moment: attacking the maintenance of standing armies by the state, inveighing against priestcraft, and asserting the primacy of the ancient constitution.

Historians have detected the guiding hand of a single figure behind these publications. The Irish deist John Toland put his name only to the edition of Harrington and his initials to the Life of Milton, but the entire series is covered with his fingerprints. More than forty years ago, in a terrific feat of historical detection, Blair Worden demonstrated how Toland doctored the original text of Ludlow's Memoirs, stripping the book of Ludlow's millenarian puritanism and enhancing aspects which served his immediate political ends.Footnote ⁴ More recently, Mark Goldie has illuminated the means by which Toland likely acquired the memoirs of Holles and Berkeley in manuscript.Footnote ⁵ Indeed, this collection of texts has been described by no less a historian than J. G. A. Pocock as ‘Toland's canon’.Footnote ⁶ For Goldie, this ‘hackneyed canon of political high virtue’ was ‘chiefly the work of the prolific Toland’.Footnote ⁷ Although Justin Champion clarifies that ‘Toland's project was not solitary but collaborative’, he remains convinced that the ‘adventurous project of republishing the canonical works of the commonwealth tradition’ was principally Toland's idea.Footnote ⁸

There was another person involved. All the principal texts of the whig canon came from the press of John Darby of Bartholomew Close. If Toland was the mastermind of the ‘whig history factory’, Darby was its engineer.Footnote ⁹ And yet the printer's role in the creation of the whig canon has always been considered subsidiary to that of its editor. Even though Goldie hints at ‘the Darby–Toland partnership’ and Worden refers to these books as ‘the Darby series’ and as ‘Darby's creation’, there has been no sustained attempt to situate these texts within the context of Darby's printing career.Footnote ¹⁰ Perhaps this is attributable to the assumption that, like other printers, Darby was a jobbing freelancer, albeit one with an ideological stake in the works he printed. And it is true that much of Darby's trade involved printing works to order for copyright-owning booksellers such as Richard Chiswell, for whom he covertly reprinted Hobbes's Leviathan at the turn of the century.Footnote ¹¹ But Darby was also a printer-bookseller manufacturing books on his own behalf, usually to be distributed by the trade publisher Richard Baldwin or, after 1698, his widow Abigail.Footnote ¹² With the exception of a pathbreaking Cambridge thesis by John S. T. Hetet, which shed some light on Darby's early activities, he is mostly a bit player, lurking in the footnotes of scholarship on Andrew Marvell, Toland, and Matthew Tindal, while the full extent of his activities remain hidden from view.Footnote ¹³ This is hardly surprising, because like other nonconformist printers of the time he covered his tracks to avoid legal censure.Footnote ¹⁴ Darby disguised books with false and misleading imprints.Footnote ¹⁵ More often than not, uncovering his handiwork requires sifting through the anonymous pamphlets of the later seventeenth century with an eye to typography, ornaments, paper stock, and advertisements, which is hardly an attractive proposition to most historians of political thought.Footnote ¹⁶

Yet bibliographical methods do yield results. Scholars such as Noel Malcolm have demonstrated that it is possible to identify the output of Darby's press beyond those titles to which he put his imprint.Footnote ¹⁷ In reopening this chapter, my aim is to move Darby from the periphery to the centre of our attention. Doing so reveals that the whig canon as we know and study it was just one element in a much broader and more ambitious programme to establish an historic canon of oppositional literature. The printer may not have co-ordinated the whole campaign, but he certainly helped shape it. In a very real sense, Toland's canon was just one branch of Darby's canon. Alongside the celebrated works of philosophy and memoir, and a quickfire series of tracts against standing armies, Darby was simultaneously republishing ‘secret histories’ and ‘state poems’ from the Interregnum and Restoration. Darby did not put his name to these books and has not previously been recognized as their printer. By identifying the relationship between these volumes and the canonical texts edited by Toland, I want to encourage scholars towards a more expansive vision of the whig canon, which was fundamentally part of an oppositional campaign not a republican project. If the texts edited by Toland provided a philosophical framework for the oppositional activities of the country whigs, the poems supplied their cultural foundation. More broadly, the example of John Darby and the whig canon demonstrates that any history of political thought which ignores the history of the book is in danger of oversimplifying the past.

II

Little enough is known about Darby's career to make a brief summary of his early activities necessary. He was bound as an apprentice to John Hide in September 1647, a few months before the second phase of the Civil Wars was triggered in early 1648.Footnote ¹⁸ In religion, Darby was said to align with the anabaptists.Footnote ¹⁹ It seems likely that his sympathy for the radical fringe of dissent was forged in the religious crucible of Interregnum London, during his years as an apprentice. Soon after he was released from his apprenticeship in November 1660, Darby began printing incendiary tracts on a variety of political and religious topics.

The underground book trade was bound together as much by political and religious loyalties as by professional interest. Darby worked with members of the trade he could trust. Others, in turn, trusted him. According to the surveyor of the press, Roger L'Estrange, in 1663 he worked with John Twyn on parts of the tyrannicidical pamphlet Mene tekel. After Twyn was seized along with his unfinished sheets, Darby ‘perfected’ the book and issued it for sale.Footnote ²⁰ When arrested in 1668 for printing a lampoon on the king, he was linked to the bookseller Ann Brewster, the widow of Thomas Brewster with whom he had earlier worked on a notorious commonwealth tract, The phoenix of the Solemn League and Covenant.Footnote ²¹ Perhaps his closest associate in this period was the nonconformist bookseller Nathaniel Ponder, for whom he printed Andrew Marvell's The rehearsal transpros'd in 1672 and, four years later, composed one sheet of Marvell's puritan satire Mr Smirke.Footnote ²² In 1677, he was employed by another nonconformist, Francis Smith, to print what would become Marvell's most celebrated polemic, An account of the growth of popery.Footnote ²³ Like most of Darby's pamphlets of that year, the Account was a surreptitious edition, printed with a false Amsterdam imprint, though the ruse seems to have fooled no one.Footnote ²⁴ A warrant was soon drawn up for the printer's arrest and, a month later, a reward issued for information leading to his capture.Footnote ²⁵

Outside the book trade, Darby cultivated personal links with dangerous opposition figures. Those connections came sharply into focus during the spring and summer of 1683, in the weeks surrounding the failed Rye House plot, when the press was under renewed surveillance.Footnote ²⁶ As part of his duties for the secretary of state, the government agent Sir Philip Lloyd had been running spies among the whigs.Footnote ²⁷ During his inquiries Lloyd received a tip-off about ‘a Hamper’ which had been sent to a printer from the house of Robert West, one of the leading plotters. Lloyd was given the address of Thomas Braddyll, another printer who had recently turned informer.Footnote ²⁸ But the package had actually been delivered to Darby's workshop on Bartholomew Close. L'Estrange suspected foul play from Lloyd's men: ‘It was a palpable Abuse, for they do know; (Both of them) that Braddyl does not live in St Bartholomews Close; if the Information poynted thither: And then that Darby the Printer, does Live there: as dangerous, and Desperate an Anabaptist as lives.’Footnote ²⁹ He informed the secretary of state that Darby's daughter had until recently lived with West's wife and mother-in-law. Regarding the Rye House plotters being investigated by Lloyd, he entertained ‘no doubt of Darby's beeing as far in as any man’.Footnote ³⁰

The precise nature of Darby's involvement was left unclear. The printer was reportedly ‘Inseparable’ from Henry Danvers, a notable Baptist plotter who was described in another letter as Darby's ‘Crony’.Footnote ³¹ He could have been working as a courier between the conspirators; alternatively, we might speculate that the hamper contained manuscript papers to be printed. On the same day that Algernon Sidney and Lord Russell were arrested, 26 June, L'Estrange updated the secretary of state that ‘there is some Lewd work in the Presse in St Barthlomew Close’. Darby and his servants had been observed ‘doing some desperate piece of night-work’ which he believed was ‘nothing more likely then some Declaration or Discourse in favour of this Conspiracy’.Footnote ³² Such ‘night-work’ would need to be smuggled out of the printing house without attracting attention. Darby had the necessary infrastructure in place. In anticipation of a raid on Bartholomew Close, L'Estrange notified the messengers of ‘a secret Conveyance’ out of the premises, large enough to hold fifty or sixty people, which he alone could ‘Direct to’.Footnote ³³ Such a passageway could have been used by Darby to hide finished books, spirit them away, or take delivery of sheets printed elsewhere. It was suggested that Darby's men operated an additional ‘private presse’ on Blue Anchor Alley, which was accessible only via ‘many back doors by holes and passages’.Footnote ³⁴ The ‘secret Conveyance’ at Bartholomew Close might therefore have been used to traffic material between the two presses.

The identity of the ‘night-work’ undertaken by Darby and his men in the summer of 1683 is an unsolved puzzle. But we do know that around this time he was busy printing a new pamphlet by the whig cleric Samuel Johnson. The main sheets of Julian's arts to undermine and extirpate Christianity were completed well before 3 August, when Darby was taken for questioning. The pamphlet was a sequel to Johnson's exclusionist tract of the previous year, Julian the apostate, which would be among the seditious and heretical books burned at Oxford in the following month.Footnote ³⁵ His servants had printed 3,000 copies and were waiting for the prefatory matter before stitching the pamphlets and sending them to Johnson to be distributed.Footnote ³⁶ At the end of September, the printer was interrogated once again, and explained that although Julian's arts had been printed, it was ‘not publick’ for he had obeyed the secretary of state's injunction and had ‘disposed of itt, to supress itt’. When asked where he had hidden the sheets, though, Darby ‘Refused to tell’. Meanwhile, he had printed for Johnson another 3,000 copies of Julian with a false ‘1682’ imprint. These copies were now ‘in y^e Country’ at large.Footnote ³⁷

With the tory reaction in full swing, Johnson was prosecuted for seditious libel in November. Darby was tried and convicted on the same day for printing 20,000 copies of the scaffold speech of the whig martyr Lord Russell, of which Johnson, as Russell's chaplain, was widely suspected of being the author.Footnote ³⁸ He was responsible for three editions that year, the second printed from standing type, ‘by Direction of the Lady RUSSEL’.Footnote ³⁹ The most ‘remarkable’ feature of this printed speech, in the judgement of Narcissus Luttrell, was that Darby ‘putt his name to it, and did it not in private’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Copies of the speech had been distributed across the country by Russell's widow, though it was Darby on whom the blame fell.Footnote ⁴¹ On this occasion he escaped with a fine. Previously he had faced the pillory.Footnote ⁴²

III

Having suffered for the whig cause under the Stuart kings, Darby and his associates had good cause to welcome the regime change of 1689. In the early months of the revolution, a small group of commonwealthmen had urged root-and-branch constitutional reform.Footnote ⁴³ They argued that kings could rule only by the consent of the people and that any new political settlement ought to enshrine the right of popular resistance. Once it became clear that establishment whigs would surrender these principles in return for office, and that William would continue to govern as an authoritarian monarch, the commonwealthmen aimed to transform the dissident whigs into a legitimate party of opposition, without the taint of sedition. There were two sides to this project. The first was to establish the principles along which an opposition could legitimately be formed. The second was to adapt and apply those principles to the present circumstances. In the first instance, this required the compilation of an historic canon of whig texts; in the second, it required a co-ordinated quick-fire series of pamphlets. Darby was to prove integral to both efforts.

The project of reprinting true whig literature began with a series of works that appeared to celebrate the revolution while pressing the new regime to cleave to the commonwealth ideas of those who enabled it. Once Johnson was released from prison in the early months of 1689, Darby issued the suppressed 1683 edition of Julian's arts and a retrospective collection of his polemical writings, A second five year's struggle against popery and tyranny (1689), which helped establish Johnson's reputation as the ‘incomparable Phœnix of our Age’.Footnote ⁴⁴ The major event was the publication of State tracts by Richard Baldwin in 1689 and 1692, parts of which look to have been printed by Darby. Totalling nearly a thousand pages of dense print, the two folio volumes of State tracts collected together more than a hundred treatises from the previous two reigns, including parliamentary speeches, private letters, coronation oaths, royal proclamations, and major works such as Marvell's Account, excerpts of which were separately published as a Character of popery in January 1689. It was printed explicitly ‘at the request, and for the sole use of some particular Gentlemen, who set an extraordinary value and estimate’ on the arguments of the early whigs, in which ‘is the Constitution of the English Government truly Stated and Asserted’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Each volume opened with a preface clarifying that true whig principles could be used to oppose as well as to uphold the new regime. The tracts contained therein were written not against particular monarchs or counsellors, rather against ‘the Interruption of the free course of the Laws, and the altering of the Legislative Power’.Footnote ⁴⁶ ‘This is a Collection, that in the general will set forth the true and Legal Constitution of our Ancient, Famous English Government’, explained the second volume.Footnote ⁴⁷

The contents of State tracts reinforced the importance of a balanced trinitarian constitution, founded on the laws of the Saxon republic, ‘Interruption’ of which provided legitimate grounds for opposition. This ancient constitutionalism was shared by the whig historian James Tyrrell, whose collected Bibliotheca politica (1692–4) contained advertisements for State tracts and other books printed by Darby, and was rumoured to have been printed by him.Footnote ⁴⁸ It was shared by William Atwood, whose The fundamental constitution of the English government was printed by Darby in 1690, shortly before Atwood reconciled with the court.Footnote ⁴⁹ And it was shared by Johnson, who frequently invoked historians of the Saxon republic in his writings.Footnote ⁵⁰ In particular, his citation of the medieval The mirror of justices, which established the Saxon precedent for elective kingship and frequent parliaments, echoed that of Milton's Eikonoklastēs, which was abridged and reprinted in 1690.Footnote ⁵¹ Despite the ‘Amsterdam’ imprint, the specific combination of founts strongly hints that this new edition came from Darby's workshop. Naming the ‘old Laws’ recorded in the Mirror, Milton had demanded ‘that a Parliament should be call'd every Year’ or ‘twice a Year’ in London.Footnote ⁵² Johnson transformed Milton's ancient constitutionalism into a practical language of opposition, reapplying his arguments to the ongoing tussle over a new triennial bill.Footnote ⁵³ More generally, in his celebrated Argument of 1692, Johnson warned that if the new regime should ‘Relapse into the Miseries of Arbitrary Government’, the nation ‘shall then want a new Revolution’.Footnote ⁵⁴ The book was manufactured covertly by Darby but owned openly by the cleric: Johnson splashed his name across the title page, whereas Darby would not even put his initials to the imprint until the fifth edition of the following year. Establishment whigs were outraged by Johnson's return to ‘the same Kidney and Spirit’ of his writings from ‘the Ad-Republican Days’, which they believed over.Footnote ⁵⁵ Equally, the commonwealthmen were dismayed by a king who failed to govern by the principles for which they had suffered under the Stuart yoke.

Johnson did not receive the preferment he was promised and, following the publication of the Argument, was nearly killed by masked vigilantes.Footnote ⁵⁶ Another martyr of the revolution was the old regicide Edmund Ludlow, who had returned from exile in 1689 only to be promptly deported.Footnote ⁵⁷ Between 1691 and 1693, four pamphlets were published under his name. Like Johnson's writings, those pamphlets appropriated arguments previously set out in Eikonoklastēs.Footnote ⁵⁸ The 1690 edition had for the first time published the memorandum asserting John Gauden's role as the true author of Eikon basilike. The ‘Ludlow’ pamphlets latched onto this memorandum and, as one tory polemicist observed, reused ‘the very words of Milton’ against the Eikon.Footnote ⁵⁹ The authorship of the ‘Ludlow’ pamphlets has long been a vexed question. They have been attributed variously to Slingsby Bethel and to John Toland, who later echoed material from them in Amyntor (1699) and his Life of Milton.Footnote ⁶⁰ According to Anthony Wood, they were ‘commonly reported’ to have been written by Milton's nephew John Phillips, whose association with his uncle makes him a likely contributor.Footnote ⁶¹ Another candidate was a Cambridgeshire lawyer called Thomas Percival, who was certainly involved in some capacity.Footnote ⁶²

Although the ‘Ludlow’ pamphlets appeared with ‘Amsterdam’ imprints, and the bibliographical evidence is inconclusive, there are external clues linking them to Darby. In 1697, he printed an advertisement for ‘BOOKS published by Thomas Percival, Author of Ludlow's Letters’ and, in the prefatory matter to his reissue of Bethel's The providences of God, he likewise attributed the ‘Ludlow’ pamphlets to Percival.Footnote ⁶³ Although Percival is named as ‘Author’ of the pamphlets, his role as ‘publisher’ of the other books on the list would suggest that he was responsible for communicating manuscripts to the press. Until these advertisements, Percival's involvement with the ‘Ludlow’ pamphlets was a well-kept secret. Darby's confidence assigning the books to him shows he must have been privy to inside knowledge. His usual founts appear in most of the books listed as ‘published’ by Percival, including Charles Blount's Reasons humbly offered for the liberty of unlicens'd printing (1693). Like the ‘Ludlow’ pamphlets, Blount's text reworked a Miltonic original. It was a plagiarism of Areopagitica.Footnote ⁶⁴ So between 1691 and 1693, we find Percival shepherding multiple adaptations of Milton through the press. In 1692 was published Joseph Washington's English translation of Milton's Defensio, from unknown quarters. His translation emphasized the text's radical ancient constitutionalism.Footnote ⁶⁵ Edward Phillips's edition of Milton's Letters of state was printed in 1694. In this instance, too, the printer and publisher go unnamed in the imprint; but the founts match those used elsewhere by Darby.Footnote ⁶⁶

This cluster of activity lends credence to the idea that the folio Collection of Milton's prose published by Darby in 1698 was already in the works. An examination of the books would suggest that they were substantially completed in 1694. With the exception of the Latin writings in the third volume, which have a 1698 imprint, texts were grouped together with title pages dated 1694 with ‘Amsterdam’ as the place of publication, like the earlier Eikonoklastēs and ‘Ludlow’ pamphlets.Footnote ⁶⁷ Washington's translation was included, and may have been commissioned for the edition.Footnote ⁶⁸ The life published with Phillips's Letters of state in 1694 gives the impression of somebody working through Milton's texts with an editor's eye for detail.Footnote ⁶⁹ Probably the Phillips brothers were responsible for preparing the text, perhaps with the assistance of the enigmatic Percival. Ultimately, several factors contributed to work on the edition being suspended. In 1689, the bookseller Awnsham Churchill had announced his intention of publishing Milton's prose.Footnote ⁷⁰ Darby was Churchill's go-to printer at this time and may originally have been recruited for the project by the bookseller.Footnote ⁷¹ But the edition would also include texts for which neither Darby nor Churchill owned the copyright.Footnote ⁷² Equally important was the cost of printing a multivolume folio edition. Darby was operating at least three presses and was capable of printing the entire edition in house, but could not have shouldered the financial burden alone.Footnote ⁷³ With the elevation of the junto and the entrenchment of ‘modern’ whiggism by 1694, it would not have been prudent for dissident radicals to sponsor a collection of works by a notorious champion of the regicide.Footnote ⁷⁴ The edition was put to one side until a more opportune moment arrived. When it appeared in 1698, the principal bookseller was not Churchill. It was Darby.

IV

By 1694, the Darby press had already begun to lay down the roots of a true whig canon. Through their writings, Johnson and the commonwealthmen demonstrated how earlier arguments made by Milton and the first whigs could now be turned against an increasingly powerful executive. Another strand of this campaign was the publication of partisan history. Some of this writing was intended to set out the ancient constitutional principles to which the nation ought to have returned after the revolution. Soliciting subscriptions for his General history in 1694, Tyrrell explained he would draw on material ‘by which the Reader may have a better View of our History and Constitution, the Prerogatives of the King, and the Rights and Liberties of the People’.Footnote ⁷⁵ The first volume would be advertised among Darby books once it appeared in 1697.Footnote ⁷⁶ Also published were ‘secret histories’ of court intrigue under the Stuarts, many of them hastily cobbled together from earlier printed accounts.Footnote ⁷⁷ State tracts claimed to uncover ‘the secret Springs’ that set the revolution ‘in motion’ and to ‘discover to us the Mysteries of the Monarchy in the two Late Reigns’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Another of Darby's more successful publications, Roger Coke's A detection of the court and state of England (1694), was written expressly ‘to shew the Consequences’ of a king lavishing grants ‘upon Minions and Favourites, whose Servant he makes himself’.Footnote ⁷⁹ That was precisely the behaviour of which William was now accused.

Secret history could take other forms. Late in 1696 was published the first in a four-volume series of Poems on affairs of state.Footnote ⁸⁰ Some of the contents were lifted from three earlier collections of ‘state poems’ by Andrew Marvell and ‘other Eminent Wits’, which republished the satires of Marvell alongside three elegies for ‘the late Usurper Oliver Cromwell’ by the turncoat royalists John Dryden, Edmund Waller, and Thomas Sprat.Footnote ⁸¹ To these were added a number of lampoons dating from the days of the protectorate through to 1688. Its preface linked the collection to State tracts and the recent histories by Coke and others. The poems in the volume were calculated to expose ‘the selfish evil Designs of a corrupt Court’, explained the editor. The resulting collection constituted ‘a just and secret History of the former Times’, which, the editor observed, ‘cannot be thought unseasonable’, even under a ‘Government founded on Liberty’, as ‘an Account of the true sourse of all our present Mischiefs’.Footnote ⁸²

Bibliographical evidence, advertisements, copyright, and contemporary gossip all point towards Darby as the printer of Poems on affairs of state and to Richard Baldwin as distributor of the first volume.Footnote ⁸³ First, there is the evidence of the book itself. The combination of several different founts enables us to narrow the search to two printers: John Darby and Thomas Braddyll. The prefatory matter on sheet A uses an old-fashioned swash italic great primer: the capital ‘B’, ‘D’, ‘P’, and ‘R’ are easily distinguished by the exaggerated serif.Footnote ⁸⁴ The pica used for the body of the text is undistinctive but entirely of a piece with the fount Darby used elsewhere for smaller octavo books; likewise with the large capitals used for headers, though the lack of any obviously broken pieces of type makes it impossible to match them with complete certainty. More significant is the title page, which uses the swash italic alongside a larger black letter fount. Common enough in books of this decade, the fount nonetheless precisely matches the black letter used elsewhere by Darby and Braddyll.Footnote ⁸⁵

The contents of the second volume settle the argument in favour of Darby. Unlike the first volume, which mostly comprised old manuscript lampoons, this volume included recently printed satires. Of the newer texts, almost all of them were first printed by Darby, though his name was seldom in the imprints. The separate editions of the opening poem, John Tutchin's The foreigners, were printed with the same amply spaced great primer used elsewhere by Darby and the title page featured precisely the same ornament that adorned his editions of both Johnson and Milton.Footnote ⁸⁶ The second poem in the collection was Defoe's famous The true-born Englishman, which first appeared in December 1700 as a riposte to Tutchin. Gossip assigned the book to Darby. Reporting the ‘common Discourse’ of the town, the Jacobite pamphleteer and poet William Pittis wrote that Darby was to ‘be taken up by a Messenger’ for printing this satire and would soon be consigned to the pillory.Footnote ⁸⁷ Examination of the type confirms Pittis's accusation. The preface is set in the familiar italic great primer.

From here, a pattern can be spotted. The anonymous A description of Mr Dryden's funeral was a Darby production; the third edition was printed with advertisements for twenty-five books from Darby's press.Footnote ⁸⁸ Robert Gould's The dream had been listed in those advertisements and in the catalogue of Darby books at the end of The foreigners.Footnote ⁸⁹ The first edition of A poem on the death of his highness the duke of Gloucester (1701) had Darby's name in the imprint. The ‘Fables on state affairs’, which take up fifty-eight pages, were reprinted from a series of ‘Aesop’ pamphlets from 1698, variously written from the perspectives of court and country.Footnote ⁹⁰ Æsop at Amsterdam (1698) appeared with a suspicious ‘Amsterdam’ imprint and the attribution ‘By Ludlow Redivivus’; the row of four ornaments decorating the title page precisely match a set often used by Darby for anonymous publications, and make his involvement certain.Footnote ⁹¹ The printer of Toland's Clito (1700) is unknown, though Darby would be a fair guess considering that he was simultaneously guiding Toland's edition of Harrington through the press. One final piece of evidence ought to clinch the matter. In 1707, after all four volumes of Poems on affairs of state had been published and the rights seemingly handed over to the bookseller James Woodward, a printed list of ‘Books sold by J. Darby’ contained an entry for ‘State-Poems, in 4 vol.’.Footnote ⁹² A 1709 catalogue of Darby's wares included ‘Poems on Affairs of State, by the greatest Wits of the Age. Many of which never before publish'd. In 4 Vol.’Footnote ⁹³ At this stage, Darby was not a common retail bookseller. These catalogues listed books printed by him for sale to the trade.

Linking Darby to the first volumes of Poems on affairs of state prompts a fresh evaluation of their purpose. For the consensus among literary critics has been that these volumes celebrate the revolution settlement and the ‘liberating political climate’ of the Williamite regime.Footnote ⁹⁴ But like Coke's Detection, the preface gestured to the ‘corrupt Court’ of the Stuarts with one hand while slyly pointing to ‘all our present Mischiefs’ with the other.Footnote ⁹⁵ In short, the preface constructed a parallel between the corruptions of the old and the new regimes. The same holds true of the poems. Whereas slavish courtiers such as Waller and Dryden deserted their principles and praised the tyrant Cromwell in verse, the opposition satirists led by Marvell and Rochester were shown to have held fast to the cause of liberty. Marvell's embarrassing Cromwellian poems were excluded from the volume. He was included purely as an antagonist of the Stuart court, a model citizen in the vein of Catullus, who, according to the preface, ‘in the midst of Cæsar's Triumphs attack'd the Vices of that great Man, and expos'd ’em to lessen that Popularity and Power he was gaining among the Roman People, which he saw would be turn'd to the destruction of the Liberty of Rome’.Footnote ⁹⁶ The implicit message was that true whigs ought to be equally concerned by the destruction of liberties at the present moment in England.

Concern would lead to fresh literary opposition. Much like Milton's prose had shaped the polemics issued from Darby's press, so Marvell's lampoons inspired his poetic campaign against the court. The most dynamic adherent of this tradition was John Tutchin, whose verse owed much to Marvell's satirical technique.Footnote ⁹⁷ A key figure in Darby's entourage and close friend of John Phillips, Tutchin recycled the familiar complaint of the disgruntled commonwealthmen in his invectives against the court: that ‘none are so fit to support a just Government, as those who oppos'd the Tyranny of an arbitrary One, and purchas'd a just and legal Settlement with the expence of their Blood’, whereas William retained only ‘Fools and Knaves’ who made the revolution ‘precarious’.Footnote ⁹⁸ He was overheard exclaiming that the king ‘employed Rogues and Tories, Men that would betray and Ruin the Protestant Religion, the King himself, and the civil Rights of the People’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Tutchin's poems reflect this country sensibility. After Whitehall burned to the ground in 1698, he wrote a smirking ode on the opportunity to demolish a court tainted by ‘numerous Crimes’ and rebuild it in ‘comely Order’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The appearance of The foreigners from Darby's press in 1700 was a triumph of opposition propaganda, initiating a flurry of responses from the government.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Here, Tutchin inveighed against both the ‘crafty Knaves’ of the junto and the ‘lavish Grants’ bestowed by William to his Dutch favourites.Footnote ¹⁰² And though he was careful to endorse support for the king, he protested that these wicked counsellors would ‘set your Constitution soon aside, / And o'er your Liberties in Triumph ride.’Footnote ¹⁰³ The poem was, in essence, a versification of Johnson's nativist Saxon constitutionalism, and indeed Johnson seems to have acted as Tutchin's early mentor.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The avowed aim of the poem was to press the court whigs to ‘return to their old Principles’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Within the year, Darby would print a sequel. As his title suggests, in The apostates (1701) Tutchin once more took aim at those whig courtiers who had abandoned their principles in the wake of the revolution: men who ‘quit their Freedoms and their Antient Rights’ in return for ‘Wealth’ and ‘Office’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The poem compared these quisling statesmen to ‘Leeches’ growing fat from ‘our Pockets and our Blood’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The purpose of these satirical texts was identical to the secret histories and the polemics by Johnson and his followers: to expose the apostacy and corrupt dealings of the court whigs. But the satires achieved those ends by different means, harnessing the potent forces of ridicule, wit, and invective in place of ironclad moral argumentation.

V

Darby's 1698 editions of Sidney, Milton, and Ludlow emerged from the same workshop and context as Poems on affairs of state. These historic texts were also brought into dialogue with the immediate circumstances of their republication. When William concluded his war with France in 1697, he resolved to maintain his army during peacetime. From the earliest days of the revolution, standing armies had been condemned as instruments of tyranny. The preface to State tracts had underscored ‘the dangerous Consequences of keeping up a standing Army within these Kingdoms in a time of Peace’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ William ignored those warnings, kickstarting a stagnant opposition in parliament and the press. During the war, it had been difficult for commonwealthmen to attack the government without attracting charges of disloyalty. Resistance to a standing army provided a more solid foundation on which their opposition could be justified.

It has long been known that the headquarters of the anti-standing army campaign was the Grecian coffeehouse.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The alleged ringleaders of this ‘republican clubbe’ were John Trenchard and Thomas Raulins.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Trenchard was a classically educated lawyer whose writings were steeped in the republicanism of James Harrington. His initial salvo in the anti-army campaign, An argument showing that a standing army is inconsistent with a free government, printed by Darby in November 1697, drew on examples from both ancient and modern history to illustrate how professional armies had been used by a corrupt executive to overpower the legislature. About Raulins, much less is known. As a pamphleteer, he was careful to cover his tracks when necessary.Footnote ¹¹¹ He came from a family of Herefordshire landowners with firm whig allegiances, and, in 1686, was pardoned for ‘misprisions of Treason and Rebellion’, which could suggest that he had been tangentially involved in the Monmouth rebellion of the previous year.Footnote ¹¹² By January 1697, Raulins was thick with both Toland and Darby. In that month, he countersigned Toland's contract with the printer concerning delivery of ‘original copy or Translations’.Footnote ¹¹³ One year later, he was described in Toland's Life of Milton as the writer's ‘best Friend’, before joining Trenchard on the board of Irish forfeitures in 1700.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Another shady figure in this group was the translator Isaac Littlebury, a man of ‘republican spirit’ who ‘carried’ the manuscript of Trenchard and Moyle's Argument to Bartholomew Close in 1697.Footnote ¹¹⁵ He performed the same duties for Sidney's Discourses in 1698; in a later advertisement for the book, Darby named Littlebury as the ‘publisher’ of the ‘Original Manuscript’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ His use of the same word in 1697 to describe Thomas Percival's involvement with the ‘Ludlow’ pamphlets suggests that Littlebury was once again the person who brought the edited copy to the press.

The Grecian club took instruction from country MPs such as Walter Moyle and Robert Harley, who suggested possible lines of argument that would influence votes in the house.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Less noticed is the fact that the Grecian also became the meeting point for this new generation of classical whigs and Darby's existing core of writers. In 1699, Tutchin joined the Grecian set by contributing his own anonymous pamphlet to their campaign, revamping country arguments against ‘Evil Ministers’ and warning that the ‘Court-party’ had ‘grown already to such a height, that there is no way of calling them to an Account’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Johnson was a more influential presence. His ancient constitutionalism shaped Trenchard's engagement with the republicanism of Harrington and Machiavelli.Footnote ¹¹⁹ ‘I am of Mr Johnson's Opinion’, Trenchard wrote bluntly.Footnote ¹²⁰ The last of the original whigs, Johnson returned to the fold in 1698 and 1700 with the two parts of his A confutation of a late pamphlet, both printed by Darby. Before the end of 1698, the new generation of commonwealthmen were clamouring for a collected folio of Johnson's writings, subsuming him into the canon of whig political thought.Footnote ¹²¹

Of the sixteen anti-army interventions catalogued by Lois G. Schwoerer, Darby is known to have printed all but three.Footnote ¹²² Advertisements demonstrate the importance of these tracts to his business. Darby often added a list of his books to the final leaf of a pamphlet. Those lists fall into two categories: advertisements for titles ‘printed for’ booksellers such as John Harris and Awnsham Churchill, or advertisements for books ‘sold by’ retailers such as Abigail Baldwin and Darby's son-in-law Andrew Bell. The former include some titles not printed by Darby, presumably taken from a list supplied by the bookseller.Footnote ¹²³ The latter comprise books printed by Darby on his own behalf and are a useful guide to his output.Footnote ¹²⁴ In 1699, he started adding ‘A Catalogue of Books written against a standing Army’, including all the major treatises by Trenchard, Toland, Tutchin, and Johnson.Footnote ¹²⁵ It was unusual for a printer to single out a certain polemical stance in their advertising. Listing the tracts in this manner displayed Darby's commitment to the issue. Sometimes, this catalogue of anti-army tracts appeared alongside advertisements for Darby's other books.Footnote ¹²⁶ Heading that other list was Sidney's Discourses and the Collection of Milton's prose. In 1700, Darby entered eight occasional pamphlets in the term catalogues, including works by Tindal, Johnson, Tutchin, Toland, and William Stephens, alongside the Harrington, Milton, and Sidney folios.Footnote ¹²⁷ The link between these newly published historical works of the whig canon and their contemporaneous application in the pamphlets could not be clearer.

Debate over standing armies shaped this new phase of canon formation. In his preface to volume three of Ludlow's Memoirs, Toland warned how ‘the Cromwellian Tyranny’ demonstrated that ‘Liberty and a Standing Mercenary Army are incompatible.’Footnote ¹²⁸ He had altered Ludlow's text to emphasize this message. Likewise, from Milton's prose he drew the lesson that as the New Model Army ‘was capable of inslaving their Country’ so the same ‘may be expected from any other’ standing force.Footnote ¹²⁹ Another person conducting very similar editorial work for Darby was David Jones, whose The secret history of White-hall (1697) and its sequel inveighed against the corrupt use of ‘a Standing Army to Enslave the Nation’.Footnote ¹³⁰ Jones was an old friend of Coke's and in 1697 ‘very much corrected’ a new edition of his Detection, printed by Darby for Andrew Bell.Footnote ¹³¹ The original text was already hostile to standing armies, which gave it obvious currency.Footnote ¹³² Its editor inserted new material on Cromwellian tyranny, including a lengthy account of the folly and expense of foreign military campaigns.Footnote ¹³³ There are clues that Jones either consulted Toland while he was editing Ludlow's manuscript or had advance access to the finished text; several of his interventions concerning Cromwell echoed material from the as yet unpublished Memoirs.Footnote ¹³⁴ In its earliest iteration, the Detection belonged to the first phase of whig canon formation in 1694. Through Jones's editorial labours it was brought into the second phase.

Just as standing armies were a symptom of corruption and arbitrary government, not their cause, so the standing army controversy shaped the whig canon but did not create it. Toland was responding to his immediate political circumstances. But his editorial activities also belonged to a deep-rooted campaign to marshal the intellectual resources of the commonwealthmen against the apostacy of the court whigs. From the earliest days of the revolution, Darby had systematically published books that justified opposition to corrupt administrations. He had done so on grounds that the constitution was under threat. His publications provided a language, a rationale, and a model for country opposition, not for republicanism: in both the civic virtue of Sidney and Harrington, and the lampoons of Johnson and Marvell. The standing army controversy was an opportunity to imitate those models and put their principles to practice.

VI

One question remains. To what extent was Darby his own man or a mere functionary? It has long been alleged that Darby was dancing to the tune of wealthy patrons ‘helping to finance the whole coordinated project’.Footnote ¹³⁵ And there can be little doubt that the Grecian set provided financial assistance. The danger of mercenary parliaments was, according to Toland, written ‘by Lord Shaftesbury's Direction, and printed and dispersed privately at his Expense’.Footnote ¹³⁶ The Milton edition was likewise rumoured to have been published ‘at the expence of some worthy Patriots’.Footnote ¹³⁷ There is also the evidence of Toland's two surviving contracts with Darby. The second contract, in which Toland promised Darby £30 for reprinting Oceana ‘upon very good paper’, was witnessed by Charlwood Lawton.Footnote ¹³⁸ A prominent ‘whig Jacobite’ who combined commonwealth principles with support for the exiled Stuarts, Lawton's involvement reinforces the oppositional aims of the project; Darby was more comfortable working with a Jacobite commonwealthman than with a court whig.Footnote ¹³⁹ Equally importantly, Lawton provided a concrete link between the Harrington edition and Robert Harley, his fellow Middle Temple lawyer with whom he maintained a lively correspondence.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Toland later claimed that Harley had ‘encourag'd’ the republication of Harrington as a statement against the court.Footnote ¹⁴¹ One possibility is that Lawton was working as intermediary and that Harley provided the £30 subvention which Toland passed on to Darby. Shaftesbury too seems to have been involved, albeit at a later stage, purchasing multiple copies through Awnsham Churchill to send to friends in Rotterdam.Footnote ¹⁴²

In the case of prestige folio editions, such financial backing is to be expected; those volumes required huge initial outlay in both paper and labour.Footnote ¹⁴³ But, as I hope to have demonstrated here, the folios were merely the culmination of a much broader and more miscellaneous publishing campaign. Darby began to lay down the roots of a true whig canon in 1689 with the retrospective collection of Johnson's polemical writings. Before the standing army controversy took off in 1697, Darby had already printed and reprinted classic works of whig polemic, satire, and history. Drawing contrasts and comparisons with the English past, Tyrell, Percival, and Coke all made a distinct intervention in contemporary political debate. The editors of Poems on affairs of state likewise demonstrated how earlier modes of whig satire could inspire new oppositional verse. The separation of the prestige editions from the more humble products of Darby's press is a result of the later eighteenth-century reception, not least the efforts of the whig bibliophile Thomas Hollis in promoting and reprinting particular texts from this earlier campaign while ignoring other, seemingly more ephemeral texts.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ And yet all these volumes were originally prepared and printed by the same personnel. They were advertised alongside one another. They ought to be seen as a group. Certainly that is how Darby saw them.

To appreciate the distinctive stamp Darby left on this canon it is important to situate the major texts within the broader context of his entire output. In some ways, the classical republicanism of the Harrington edition is anomalous, as is that of the concomitant anti-army tracts by Trenchard and his followers. From the earliest days of the revolution, Darby's publications had been characterized not by Harringtonianism but by the ancient constitutionalism of Johnson, Tyrrell, Tutchin, and the followers of Milton. And yet, as Ashley Walsh has recently demonstrated, ancient constitutionalism could be brought fruitfully into dialogue with classical republicanism.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Both doctrines were averse to parliamentary corruption, an overpowerful executive, and the maintenance of standing armies. The coherence of this body of writings came not from a singular conceptual framework, but from a shared set of polemical objectives. Drawing political lessons from the recent past, the canon underscored the enduring threat of arbitrary power and corruption while providing historical exemplar for virtuous country opposition. Darby was prepared to draw on diverse intellectual resources to achieve those ends.

Toland shared Darby's aims. In a private letter, he confessed that the editions of Harrington and Milton were intended not to advocate for ‘Democratical Schemes of Government’, rather to ‘beget in the minds of men’ an ‘extreme aversion to arbitrary power’.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Aversion should give rise to activism. Through these means the commonwealthmen hoped both to win loyal Williamites to their cause, and to prompt their more docile sympathizers into active opposition. An important figure in the story is John Holles, duke of Newcastle, who is commonly assumed to have ‘encouraged Toland to publish’ the Memoirs of Denzil Holles.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ And yet, in his dedicatory epistle to the duke, Toland bluntly states that the papers were not given to him by Newcastle but ‘happen'd to fall into my Hands’.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Mark Goldie has shown the likely source to have been Holles's former chaplain, Roger Morrice, from whom Toland also acquired the manuscript of Berkley's Memoirs.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ In this instance, then, the dedicatory address is no evidence of direct patronage. Rather, by praising Holles as someone who ‘took up arms, not to destroy the King, or alter the constitution, but to restore the last, and oblige the former to rule according to Law’, Toland was encouraging Newcastle to take up the opposition battlecry.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ The canon was fundamentally a spur to action.

The deep-rooted oppositional aims of this campaign were understood by contemporaries. Readers eagerly assigned anonymous works to Darby's press. Regarding the false ‘Switzerland’ imprint of Ludlow's Memoirs, William Baron riddled ‘had they said at Darby it had been nigher home, and nigher truth too’ by ‘a little quibling transition from Place to Person’.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Elsewhere, a hostile pamphleteer teased that the main printer of opposition propaganda was ‘as well known to the rest of the Trade, as Darby Ale to a Toper’.Footnote ¹⁵² The Tory wit Tom Brown ventriloquized the spirit of Richard Baldwin in the underworld, asking a new arrival: ‘have no fresh batteries attack'd the Court lately from honest Mr Darby's in Bartholomew Close?’Footnote ¹⁵³ The question is soon answered by the shades of Harrington, Sidney, Milton, and Ludlow, who boast of their ‘friends in London’ by whom their works are ‘lately reprinted’.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ In this satire, the works of the whig canon were conceived as oppositional country ‘batteries’. William Pittis shifted the emphasis in a parodical letter addressed from Darby to Toland, after the latter left London for Hanover. Pittis was plainly aware of Toland's editorial role; his incarnation of Darby begs Toland for ‘Another Sydneys Works or Harringtons Oceana’.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ But the overall sense is one of a fruitful partnership. ‘It is the time for us’, explains Darby, ‘to sound the Trumpet for the Preservation of our Liberties and Immunities.’Footnote ¹⁵⁶ In short, Darby required Toland's assistance to spur the commonwealthmen into action. In this narrative, it is Toland who follows Darby's lead.

Shifting attention from Toland to his printer underscores that the whig publishing campaign was a collaborative enterprise rather than one man's crusade. Toland was an editor of the whig canon, but only one of several. Equally significant in Darby's circle were Johnson, Tutchin, Percival, Littlebury, and Jones, each of whom deserves greater scholarly attention. Many of the broader patterns in Darby's output from this period may be traced to the shared priorities of this milieu rather than to the individual nuances of thought associated with Toland. This is particularly true of the emphasis on the maleficence of government ministers and the endangered status of the ancient constitution, which had been the enduring shibboleths of Darby's press in the decade before Toland's edition of Harrington was published.

Usually the writings of the whig canon are viewed by modern scholars through the prism of republican political thought. Pocock's verdict that ‘this whig canon was in fact a republican canon’ has cast a long shadow.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Expanding the focus to include Darby's broader output reveals that the original aim of his publishing campaign was not to establish coherent republican principles of government, but to invigorate a stale opposition by emphasizing the dangers of corruption and apostacy. Darby was an activist not a philosopher. He used his press to move readers from political thought to political action.