Add MS 78669

Evelyn Papers. Vol. dii. Jacobite ballads, etc., with some miscellaneous prose; circa 1688-1784. Partly French and Italian. Copies, circa mid-late 18^th cent. The transcriber was John Towneley (1731-1813), F.R.S., of Towneley Hall, Lancashire, whose hand is also found in a letter to [?James] Manson of 1807 (Additional MS 35057, f.83), in the pre-1805 catalogues of Towneley Marbles (Additional MS 34009) and in that of printed books (Additional MSS 18064, 18065) that were later auctioned as Bibliotheca Townleiana, Evans, 2 pts., London, 1814. A detailed list of the contents of the manuscript was published in the 4^th Report of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, 1874, App., pp.414-6. The verse and Jacobite prose was edited by A. B. Grosart as English Jacobite ballads, songs & satires, etc., from the MSS at Towneley Hall (privately printed, 1877).

Paper: ff. ii+103. 225 x 180mm. Formerly Evelyn MS 188. Green buckram folder (f. i). Five gatherings of original leaves enclosed within wrappers each embossed with the oval-shaped armorial crest of a bird and inscribed in ink with page-references to Grosart’s edition. Bookseller’s code ‘a/./.’ (f.1) and numbers ‘8/ 8/’ (f. 22) jotted in pencil. Purchased at the sale of Towneley manuscripts at Sotheby’s, 27-28 June 1883, lot 238, by the London bookseller Francis Harvey for four guineas. It may have entered the Evelyn collection when it passed to Stonor in the middle of last century. The contents are as follows:-

1. ff. 2-71v passim. Sixty-seven Jacobite ballads, songs and satires, etc., in English, with two (ff. 6v-9) in French; circa 1688-1751. Copies. Several of the authors are identified. Of two additional pieces (ff. 81, 82) written on loose sheets inserted before the final gathering only the first is in Towneley’s hand. Texts of a few poems survive also in Additional MSS 14854 and 29981, while contemporary printed versions of some twenty are recorded in D. F. Foxon, English verse 1701-1750, Cambridge, 2 vols., 1975. Also included (ff. 5v, 6) is the speech made by Lord Balmerinoch to the Lords, 18 Aug. 1746.

2. ff. 83-88. Jacobite prose, comprising copies of two items, both of which were printed in 1745, viz.:

(a) ff. 83-88. Proclamation by Prince Charles Edward Stuart, dated Holyrood House, 10 Oct. 1745, and subscribed by his secretary Sir John Murray;

(b) ff. 88-103v. ‘A Letter to the Archbishop of York [Thomas Herring]: Humbly offering, to his Grace’s Solution some Doubts & Scruples suggested by his late speech to the Grand meeting of the County of York…’, 15 Oct. 1745, subscribed ‘Philalethes’.

3. ff. 72-79. Miscellaneous prose, viz.:

(a) ff. 72-76. ‘An Account of the Earthquake which happened in Calabria, 28^th March 1783. In a letter from Count Francesco Ippolito to S^r W^m Hamilton….Read at the Royal Society July 10^th 1783’. Copy. Italian;

(b) ff. 76-79. Satirical allegory, in a fictitious Utopian Gazette Extraordinary for 14 Jan. 1784, of the debates that followed Pitt’s appointment as prime minister, consisting of a ‘Copy of a letter from Admiral Hazard to M^r Squirt, Secretary to the Admiralty’ and some ‘Utopian Ship News’.