SOURCE: Pebworth, Ted-Larry. “An Anglican Family Worship Service of the Interregnum: A Cancelled Early Text and a New Edition of Owen Felltham's ‘A Form of Prayer.’” English Literary Renaissance 16, no. 1 (winter 1986): 206-33.

[In the following excerpt, Pebworth argues that Felltham's “A Form of Prayer” had been printed in at least some copies of the 1661 edition of the Resolves, leading to the conclusion that the author's liturgical challenge to the Anglican Book of Common Prayer was a product of the Interregnum and not the Restoration, as previously assumed.]

For two hundred fifty years, scholars and critics of the essayist and poet Owen Felltham (1604?-1668) have considered his “Form of Prayer” to be a Restoration document. Ostensibly not included in the 1661 folio of Felltham's Resolves (which is, in effect, his collected works to that date) and apparently published for the first and only time in the twelfth edition of Resolves (1709), “A Form of Prayer” was thought to be a reworking of the morning and evening services in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, of limited literary importance, and of historical significance only in being one of a very small number of Anglican family devotional services in a sea of Puritan services. Recently, however, three copies of the 1661 folio of Resolves containing “A Form of Prayer” have surfaced. The existence of this hitherto unknown early printing shows that the work dates from the Interregnum, not the Restoration, and reveals its fiercely royalist and Anglican content as a political as well as a religious statement. Moreover, “A Form of Prayer” can now be seen to have considerable historical importance. It is an “amended” version of the Anglican morning and evening prayer services designed to circumvent the letter of the 1645 act of Parliament proscribing the use of the Book of Common Prayer in private family devotion. As such it is the only “amended” version of the Anglican prayerbook designed specifically for domestic worship now known to exist. And finally, “A Form of Prayer” is of considerable liturgical interest. In it, Felltham moved four of the so-called “five prayers” from the close of the Litany to the morning prayer service, thereby anticipating by several years one of the changes in liturgy effected by the committee who prepared the official revision of the Book of Common Prayer promulgated in 1662.

Redated to the Interregnum, Felltham's “Form of Prayer” should be of considerable interest to social, political, and religious historians, as well as to literary scholars. Written out of necessity and firmly rooted in a particular political and religious context, it is a significant historical document. In addition, it is a work of ingenuity, grace, and style that can be appreciated for its literary worth even by those who do not share its religious and political beliefs. Since the authoritative text of 1661 survives in only three known copies, and since even the silently emended, modernized, and otherwise faulty recension of 1709 has never been reprinted, a new edition is needed.

I

Owen Felltham (or Feltham) was born sometime between 1602 and 1604, probably in Suffolk, the second son of a prosperous member of the landed gentry. After an education in the standard Latin authors, probably at the hands of private tutors, he apparently sought his fortune in London, setting himself up as a merchant there by 1621. By 1628, he left London and the world of trade to become steward to Barnabas O'Brien (after 1639, the sixth Earl of Thomond), and was primarily responsible for overseeing the Irish aristocrat's recently acquired English manor at Great Billing, near Northampton. For the rest of his life, Felltham remained in the service of the O'Brien family as both a well-remunerated employee and a trusted friend. When Barnabas died, in 1657, Felltham stayed on as steward to Henry, the seventh earl, and to the Dowager Countess Mary, dying in the latter's service and at her London townhouse in February of 1667/8.¹

Felltham began his series of gentlemanly publications in 1623 with a small book entitled Resolues Divine, Morall, Political (STC 10755), issued by the London bookseller Henry Seile. This duodecimo volume consists of 100 brief musings on religious, ethical, and social subjects, each concluding with a resolve to better future conduct in the area under consideration. When Seile issued a second, quarto edition of the book in 1628 (STC 10756), Felltham more than tripled the contents by adding a second “century” of longer, more essay-like musings, which he designated “Excogitations” (STC 10757). The augmented book must have been an almost instant success, for later that same year Seile issued a third edition, reversing the order of its “centuries” to put the excogitations in primary position and adding titles to the individual early resolves (STC 10758). In this new format, Seile reissued the book in four more quarto printings by 1647 (STC 10759-61 and Wing F 654).

In addition to composing resolves and excogitations, the young Felltham also wrote a humorous portrait of Holland and the Dutch people, A Brief Character of the Low-Countries (ca. 1623-28), which circulated widely in manuscript and was twice pirated in truncated form (Pebworth 16, Wing T 1105 and T 2430) before Seile issued an authoritative, though anonymous, edition in 1652 (Wing F 648, with reprints in 1659 and 1660, Wing F 649-50). Moreover, from youth through middle age, Felltham wrote lyric, reflective, and satiric poetry, some of his poems achieving print shortly after their composition and others circulating in manuscript.

At some point late in the Interregnum or during the early months of the Restoration, Felltham, approaching the age of sixty, obviously determined to compile a volume of record, collecting and asserting his authorship of those works in prose and verse that he wished to have preserved and presenting them in texts that met his mature standards. In effect he rewrote the original century of his resolves, producing in their stead an impressive collection of eighty-five essays, some of which were based on the 1623 resolves, others of which were wholly new; and he added to these new essays and the 1628 excogitations a collection of poems, two discourses on biblical texts, the character of the Low Countries, and a collection of letters. The resulting compilation, in effect Felltham's collected works, was issued in 1661, appropriately in folio, as Resolves: The eight [sic] Impressiō, With New, & Severall other Additions both in Prose and Verse (Wing F 655A), printed for Henry Seile's widow Anne by another widow who had taken over her husband's business, Ellen Cotes. …

The preface “To the Reader” explains Felltham's reason for revising the resolves first published in 1623 (to excise the “weaknesses” of youth by improving their “Composure,” sig. A2); and although it is silent on the matter of the two discourses on biblical passages, its final paragraph specifically calls attention to the poems, the prose character of the Low Countries, and the letters (sig. A2v). The tone of the whole preface, moreover, is that of an elderly writer seeking to present a retrospective of his best work to posterity. The reader is led to think that nothing of substance has been omitted. Thus, the assumption has been that the prose work added to Felltham's canon in the twelfth edition of Resolves in 1709 (London: for Cha[rles] Harper; Pebworth 33), namely, “A FORM of PRAYER Compos'd / for the Family of the Right Honora- / ble the Countess of THOMOND” (sigs. Nn7v-Oo3; pp. 558-65), was written after the compilation and publication of the 1661 folio.

Essentially a reprint of the 1661 and subsequent folios (Wing F 656-58) with “the Language refin'd” (title-page), this early eighteenth-century edition of Resolves adds “A Form of Prayer” to the book's previous contents and inserts a sentence into the last paragraph of “To the Reader” that alleges “A Form of Prayer” to have been “made use of, when the Liturgy of the Church, was, as the Church it self in the Revelation, forc'd to flee into the wilderness” (sig. A5v). But given the sometimes mendacious publishing practices of the day and the fact that Felltham had been dead forty-one years by the time this twelfth edition appeared, most scholars have suspected the authority of such an assertion, concluding that the publisher added it to the preface to create interest in the newly-presented family liturgy. In both my bibliography of Felltham and in my critical study of his works, I followed previous scholars in making just such an assumption.

After my Felltham bibliography was published, however, my attention was called to two copies of the 1661 folio of Resolves that contain “A Form of Prayer,” as well as a sentence in “To the Reader” that is—except for accidentals and one variant of substance—identical to the sentence referring to “A Form of Prayer” in the 1709 edition. One of these copies is in the Reading University Library (shelf-mark 828.4 Folio Reserve), the other in the Sydney Jones Library of the University of Liverpool (shelf-mark Y66.5.23). Then, as a result of a survey of twenty copies of the 1661 Resolves listed in Wing's Short Title Catalogue and the National Union Catalogue Pre-1956 Imprints, I discovered still a third copy containing “A Form of Prayer” in the Folger Shakespeare Library (call number F655b). What is now clear is that the 1661 folio was set into type with the “Form of Prayer” included; that the printer pulled at least a few copies of the book in that state; and that before the printing of copies for general sale, the liturgy itself and the sentence referring to it in “To the Reader” were excised. The 1661 folio of Felltham's Resolves as it has been commonly known—including the copies of it in such distinguished repositories as the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the New York Public Library, the Houghton Library, Harvard, the University of Illinois Library, the Regenstein Library of the University of Chicago, and the Huntington Library—contains a major, previously unnoticed cancel.

It is easy to see how the cancellation of “A Form of Prayer” in nearly all known copies of the 1661 folio of Resolves went undetected for so long. In the uncanceled copies, Felltham's domestic liturgy occupies a discrete gathering (signed Fff, with the verso of Fff4 blank; pp. 395-401) in a position just prior to the first gathering of Lusoria, that second part of the volume where the signing of gatherings and the numbering of pages begin over again with “a” and [1] respectively. Too, there apparently never was a catchword at the bottom of page 394 (sig. Eee2v), only a definitive-sounding “FINIS.” centered in the space beneath the final paragraph of the discourse on Luke 14:20. A discrete gathering occupying such a position lends itself to undetectable excision.

The cancellation of the sentence referring to “A Form of Prayer” in the final paragraph of “To the Reader” (sig. A2v) is somewhat more apparent (cf. Plates 1 and 2), but only if one has some reason to suspect a cancellation. In the Liverpool and Folger copies of the 1661 folio (“To the Reader” is missing in the Reading copy), that sentence occupies eight full lines (Plate 1, ll. 16-23), with its final word and punctuation mark standing at the head of l. 24. The sentence reads in full:

The Form of Prayer that is here extant, being such as was made use of, when the Liturgy of the Church, was, as the Church it self in the Revelation, forc'd to flie into the wilderness; and perhaps somewhat more appropriated to the conditions of a Private Family, then that appointed for the Church in Publick; he confesses to have willingly publish't: not to obtrude it upon any, but that if any like it (as some have done) they might not want a Form to invite them to so necessary a Duty.

Comparing l. 24 of the Liverpool and Folger copies with the corresponding line in other copies (Plate 2, 1.16), it is easy to see how the cancellation was effected. The typesetter unlocked the forme containing signatures A and A2v of the preliminaries, pulled out the eight full lines of “To the Reader” referring to the liturgy, lifted out the word “Duty” and the period following it on the next line, and stretched the remaining words and punctuation marks of the line thus shortened—that is, “Other things are left to themselves, and all to every mans”—to fill the resulting gap. Once they are pointed out, the abnormally large spaces between words and punctuation marks in this line as it appears in the canceled text are evident. The typesetter then moved up the last seven lines of the final paragraph of “To the Reader,” moved the catchword “RESOLVES:” and the horizontal rule above it up 1-1/2 inches to balance the page, inserted a new horizontal rule beneath them, locked the forme, and resumed printing the preliminaries, now canceled.

II

The existence of the uncanceled Liverpool and Folger copies of the 1661 folio of Resolves proves that Felltham himself wrote the statement regarding “A Form of Prayer” that appears in the 1709 text of “To the Reader” and that the liturgy itself was in fact written and used during the Interregnum. Certain knowledge that the work was composed prior to the Restoration casts it in a new historical and critical light. The realization that Felltham's profoundly Anglican and royalist liturgy was written and used in a prominent Northamptonshire and London household during the Cromwell-dominated Interregnum reveals it to be a political as well as a religious document. Its prayer asking God to bestow special favor on “our gracious Sovereign———,” as the text reads in the 1709 printing (sig. Nn8; p. 559), was actually written by Felltham to read “our gracious Soveraign Lord King Charles” (1661 folio, sig. Fff1v; p. 396). Knowledge that this prayer was composed to be recited daily, not after Charles II was secure on the throne of England but while he was still an uncrowned exile on the Continent reveals it to be a political commitment of some consequence.

Indeed, Felltham was a lifelong supporter of the Stuart monarchy and of the Established Church. In the 1661 preface “To the Reader,” he states that he wrote the resolves first published in 1623 when he was “but Eighteen” (sig. A2); and in one of those early resolves (No. LXXXI, headed “The great Good of Good Order” in the third and successive quartos), he obliquely suggests that those who work to destroy the church's rituals may have Satanic origins: “Disorder is a Bird of the Diuels hatching: I feare lest those that rent the Church for Ceremonie, haue some affinitie with that Prince of mis-rule: we oft finde the parents disposition, though not propagated to the childe, yet followed by him. I doe not censure, but doubt” (STC 10758, sig. Ee4).

In the excogitations first published in 1628, Felltham is more emphatic in his outrage over divisiveness in the church and more outspoken in his defense of the establishment. In what is probably the best-known piece of the 1628 collection, “Of Puritans” (No. V), he scorns the puritan who is “a Church-Rebell, or one that would exclude order, that his braine might rule;” and he offers this judgment:

when a man, in things but ceremoniall, shall spurne at the graue Authoritie of the Church, and out of a needlesse nicetie, be a Thiefe to himselfe, of those benefits which God hath allowed him: or out of a blinde and vncharitable Pride, censure, and scorne others, as reprobates: or out of obstinacy, fill the World with brawles, about vndeterminable Tenets. I shall thinke him one of those, whose opinion hath fevered his zeale to madnesse and distraction.

(STC 10757, sigs. H5v, H6)

And in the 1628 excogitation “Of the choice of Religion” (No. XVI), Felltham details his reasons for preferring the Established Church:

Among all the Diuersities of Religion, that the world holds, I thinke, it may stand with most safety, to take that, which makes most for Gods Glory, and Mans quiet. I confesse, in all the Treatises of Religion that I euer saw; I finde none that I should so soone follow, as that of the Church of England. I neuer found so sound a Foundation, so sure a direction for Religion: as the Song of the Angels at the Birth of Christ: Glory be to God on high. There is the Honour, the reuerend Obedience, and the Admiration, and the Adoration, which wee ought to giue him. On earth Peace. This is the effect of the former: working in the hearts of Men, whereby the world appeares in his noblest beauty, being an entire chaine of intermutuall amitiy. And good will toward men. This is Gods mercy, to reconcile Man to himselfe, after his fearfull dissertion of his Maker. Search all Religions the world thorow, and you will find none that ascribes so much to God, Nor that constitutes so firme a loue among men, as does the establisht Doctrine of the Protestant Church among vs. All other either detract from God: Or infringe the Peace of Men.

(STC 10757, sigs. K8v-L1)

Thirteen years after the publication of the above excogitation, the purifying Long Parliament set about to detract from Felltham's conception of God and to infringe upon what he conceived to be the peace of men.

In a series of blows against the monarchy and the established Church, Parliament impeached and imprisoned William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury and primate of England (February 1640/1); raised an army against King Charles I (summer 1642); ordered the abolishing of church altars, the razing of chancels, and the destruction of ecclesiastical images (August 1643 and again in May 1644); proscribed the use of the Book of Common Prayer, first in churches (January 1644/5), then “in any private place or family” (August 1645); and, by the extra-legal means of a Bill of Attainder, executed Laud (January 1644/5). Obviously stunned by this series of events, Felltham poured out his grief and fear for church and state in a Latin epitaph for Laud that culminates in a dire assessment:

Quocum Majestas Principum, Procerum Tutela,
                                        Ecclesiae Patrimonium,
                                                  Libertas Subjecti,
                                   Et Britannici orbis immunitas,
                              Simul pro tempore Tumulantur.

“(With him [i.e., Laud], the grandeur of the Kingdom, the defence of the Cavaliers, / The tradition of the Church, / The freedom of the subjects, / And the safety of the British sphere / Are, for a season, buried together.)”²

The attack on church and state culminated in the beheading of King Charles himself in January of 1648/9. In his epitaph for the executed monarch, Felltham rejected the learned language of his poem on Laud to write in English; and from the title onwards, he does not mince words. Headed “AN EPITAPH To the Eternal Memory of CHARLES the First, King of Great Britain, France and Ireland, &c. Inhumanely murthered by a perfidious Party of His prevalent Subjects, Jan.30.1648,” the poem dwells as much on Charles's function as head of the church as it does on his role as ruler of “three Kingdoms” (l.17). It explicitly equates Cromwell with Judas and identifies John Bradshaw, president of the court that tried and condemned Charles, with Pilate; and it sweeps to a hyperbolic climax:

When it appear'd, He [Charles] to this world was sent,
The Glory of KINGS, but Shame of PARLIAMENT:
The stain of th'English, that can never dye;
The Protestants perpetual Infamy:
When He had rose thus, Truths great Sacrifice,
Here CHARLES the First, and CHRIST the second lyes.

One can hardly take devotion to royalism much further.

Felltham was joined in his political and religious convictions by at least one important member of the family employing him, the Countess Mary, and it was for her that he wrote “A Form of Prayer.” The youngest daughter of fifteen children born to Sir George Fermor and his wife Mary, nee Curson, the future Countess of Thomond was baptized at Easton Neston, Northamptonshire, on 12 March 1591/2. At the age of sixteen, she married Robert, fifth Lord Chrichton of Sanquhar, who was hanged four years later for the murder of a fencing master who had accidentally blinded him in one eye. At the age of twenty-three, she married the Irish aristocrat Barnabas O'Brien and in 1639 became Countess of Thomond. The couple had two children: Henry (1629-91), who became the seventh Earl of Thomond on his father's death in 1657, and Penelope (d. 1702), who became Countess of Peterborough upon her marriage to Henry Mordaunt in 1655. The Dowager Countess Mary survived her second husband by eighteen years and was buried on 13 April 1675.³ As well as long-lived, the Countess Mary must have been a strong-willed individual. It is notable that throughout Felltham's “Form of Prayer,” from its full title onwards, it is she who is presented as head of the O'Brien family, not her husband or (after 1657) her son.

During the 1640s and 1650s, those successive earls of Thomond accommodated themselves to Parliament and later to Cromwell, perhaps necessarily to insure the continued possession of their estates. But while the Countess Mary may have acquiesced in the compromising actions of her husband and her son, she obviously remained—like Felltham—a fervent royalist and Anglican in her personal convictions. Thus, it must have been particularly irksome to her and to Felltham to have the pulpit of their parish church, St. Andrew's, Great Billing, filled by a man of strong Presbyterian convictions. The Reverend Daniel Cawdry (1588-1664) had held the living at Great Billing since December 1625, antedating the arrival of the O'Briens and Felltham in the parish. Not only was Cawdry a publishing sectarian controversialist—attacking both Anglicans and Independents with frequency and verve—but he became, in 1643, one of the leaders in an assembly of anti-Laudian divines appointed by the Long Parliament to regulate the nation's religion. And while he may not have approved of regicide, Cawdry was not the kind of deferential, compromising minister who would allow the quiet use of the proscribed Book of Common Prayer in his parish, even under pressure from an aristocratic parishioner.⁴

With the kind of services that they wished to attend banned in their parish church, it is evident that Felltham—learned as well as devout in religious matters—began to serve the O'Briens, and in particular the Countess Mary, as a lay chaplain. Rather than attending public Presbyterian services in St. Andrew's, the family apparently held their own Anglican services in the manor house. And obviously to circumvent the letter of the act of Parliament proscribing the use of the Book of Common Prayer in family worship, Felltham, either at the countess's instigation or on his own accord, composed his Anglican and royalist “Form of Prayer.” This evasion of what Felltham and the Countess Mary must have considered a profoundly vexing law is placed in perspective by his prefatory statement in the 1661 folio, subsequently canceled, that his “Form of Prayer … was made use of, when the Liturgy of the Church, was … forc'd to flie into the wilderness.”

III

Since in the uncanceled version of the 1661 folio's “To the Reader” Felltham “confesses to have willingly publish't” his “Form of Prayer,” the question arises as to why the worship service was canceled in almost all of the surviving copies of the eighth edition of Resolves. One possibility is that it was excised, while the book was in proof state, in response either to an official order banning its publication or to quiet but no less official pressure requesting its removal. A second is that it was canceled at the insistence of its bookseller-publisher out of fear for the safety and profitability of her business. Based on the surviving evidence, neither of these seems likely. No agency was censoring works of royalist or Anglican bias in the summer of 1661, when Felltham's book was in press, and Anne Seile was not a timid publisher. A third possibility—that the omission of “A Form of Prayer” from most copies of the 1661 folio was planned from the beginning and effected after a small number of copies of the uncanceled contents had been printed for private circulation—is the most likely answer, strongly suggested by bibliographical evidence and bolstered by the autograph inscription in the uncanceled Folger copy, presenting the book “To the Noble Lady, the Lady Duncombe from her / Humble servant / Felltham.”

The first folio printing of Resolves must have been in press during the summer months of 1661. Because this augmented version of Felltham's book was to contain material not covered by prior registrations of Resolves to Henry Seile in 1623 and again when its contents were expanded in 1628, it was advisable—for the continued protection of the publisher's exclusive rights to it—to re-register the work with the Stationers' Company. Anne Seile, who had taken over Henry's business upon his death (which must have occurred during the winter or spring of 1660/1), sought that additional protection; and “a booke entituled Resolves Divine Morall and Politicall, the Eight impression with new addicons both in prose & verse by Owen Felltham, Esq^r” was entered to her in the Stationers' Register on 25 June 1661 (Eyre's Transcript, II, 298). And as is evident from the printed title-pages in some of the copies (Wing F 655), another London bookseller, Peter Dring, contracted for a portion of the edition. If one may trust White Kennett's Register and Chronicle Ecclesiastical and Civil, the folio—at least Dring's consignment of it—appeared “in or about October 1661.”⁵

The governmental licensing (and concomitant censorship) of books was in a state of statutory limbo during the second half of 1660 and all of 1661. J. Walker summarizes the situation: “With the Restoration an accomplished fact, Bradshaw's [Press] Act of 1649 and all other Interregnum Ordinances [including Cromwell's ‘Printing and Printers’ Ordinance of 1655] ceased to be valid. Prior to the passage of the Licensing Act in 1662 there was no statutory authority to deal with abuses in the press.”⁶ The newly-restored King, however, through his Privy Council, hurried to fill a part of that vacuum by extra- or supra-statutory means, quickly appointing a licenser of the press in the person of Sir John Birkenhead, a newssheet editor of royalist allegiance, and issuing “an order in council, dated 7 June 1660, instructing the Stationers' Company to seize copies of certain anti-monarchical tracts” (Walker, pp. 222-23, citing Kennett's Register, p. 176). But since Felltham's “Form of Prayer” is so outspokenly royalist, it seems highly unlikely that Birkenhead or his employers, the Privy Council, could have found it objectionable on political grounds.

“A Form of Prayer” is a liturgy, however, and during the time that the folio of Resolves was in press, many parties were concerned in the re-establishment of an official liturgy for the state church: the King, the Privy Council, the newly-called “Cavalier” Parliament, the restored Anglican hierarchy sitting in Convocation (its upper house brought nearly to full pre-Interregnum strength during the fall and winter of 1660-61 by the reinstatement and translation of old bishops who had survived the troubles of the 1640s and 1650s and by the consecration of new prelates to fill vacant sees), and the Savoy Conference, a special body set up by the King specifically to deal with the subject of ritual, which held sessions from 15 April through 24 July 1661.⁷ It would be understandable if, to avoid confusing or inflaming the delicate issue at hand, one or more of these concerned parties had ordered a moratorium on the publication of liturgies until the conclusion of these official negotiations and deliberations. Such does not seem to have been the case, however. The royal declarations and proclamations of the summer and fall of 1661, as well as the acts of the Privy Council and the journals, proceedings, and memoirs of Parliament, Convocation, and the Savoy Conference, are silent on the matter of banning the publication of liturgies. Furthermore, the bias of Felltham's “Form of Prayer,” firmly based on the liturgy of the pre-Interregnum Church of England, could offend no one but committed Presbyterians, Independents, and other anti-establishment sectarians; and such groups were virtually powerless during 1661, as the anti-Laudian delegates to the Savoy Conference quickly learned. The likelihood of official censorship is thus quite remote.

Also unlikely is any supposition that Felltham's publisher may have forced the excision of “A Form of Prayer” from the 1661 folio of Resolves, refusing at the last moment to publish a work of overtly religious or political bias in order to avoid any possible provocation to violence or boycott. It is true that the spring and summer of 1661 were unsettled and unsettling times in London. But the publisher of Resolves does not seem likely to have been intimidated by possible threats. The Seiles were bookseller-publishers of some distinction. Beginning his publishing career as early as 1619 and operating first out of a shop formerly owned by Laurence Lisle at “the Tygers head in S^t Paules Church yard” (title page, STC 10758) and later from premises under the same sign in Fleet Street, variously identified as “neere the Conduit” (title-page, STC 1393) and “over against S^t Dunstans Church” (St. Dunstans-in-the-West; title-page, Wing F 655A), Henry Seile (or Seyle or Seale) secured rights to and issued such works as Sir John Beaumont's Bosworth-field (STC 1694), John Ford's The Lovers Melancholy (STC 11163), the Kingsmill Long translation of John Barclay's popular roman à clef Argenis (STC 1392), John Donne's Juvenilia (STC 7043), Fulke Greville's Certaine Learned and Elegant Workes (STC 12361) and his biography of Sir Philip Sidney (Wing B 4899), Thomas Hobbes's translation of Thucydides (STC 24058), the Posthuma of Sir Robert Cotton (Wing C 6485), and Abraham Cowley's first two publications, Poetical Blossomes (STC 5906) and Naufragium Joculare (STC 5905).

Far from shying away from works of religious or political controversy during the early months of the Restoration, the Seiles—first Henry and, after his death, Anne—virtually specialized in publishing works of strong Anglican and royalist bias. Among the last books published by Henry are a folio of XXXIV Sermons by Robert Sanderson, who was consecrated Bishop of Lincoln on 28 October 1660 (Wing S 633), and the Rerum Judicatarum by the vigorously monarchical jurist David Jenkins (Wing J 606). Indeed, the last book entered to Henry Seile in the Stationers' Register (18 October 1660) was a treatise by the recently deceased James Ussher (d. 1656), Archbishop of Armagh, re-asserting the divine right of kingship: The Power Communicated by God to the Prince (Wing U 196). Henry must have died while this book was in production, for when it appeared in 1661, its title-page designated Anne Seile as its publisher-seller. Consistent with the pattern laid down by her late husband, Anne included among her earliest publishing ventures the Short Strictures of the zealous royalist Thomas Tomkins (Wing T 1839) and a work celebrating the first anniversary of the Restoration of Charles II by the Reverend Peter Heylyn, a waspish churchman so closely identified with the person and policies of the late Archbishop Laud that his name was virtually anathema to Presbyterians and Independents: A Sermon preached in the Collegiate Church of S. Peter in Westminster on Wednesday 29 May 1661; on Psal. 31.21 (Wing H 1734). The publisher of such works as these would hardly have censored Owen Felltham's “Form of Prayer” as being too controversial for her personal comfort or for the safety and prosperity of her business.

One bibliographical oddity in the 1661 folio suggests that the cancellation of “A Form of Prayer” from most of the known copies was planned in advance by the book's printer. Felltham's ritual, following the two discourses on biblical passages and paged consecutively with them, should have commenced—under normal circumstances—on the recto of sig. Eee3 and concluded on the recto of sig. Fff2. Instead, the gathering signed Eee is abnormally small (the only gathering in twos in the volume other than in the front and back matter), allowing “A Form of Prayer” its own discrete gathering. This anomaly was surely designed to facilitate the omission of Felltham's ritual from most copies of the edition. It is safe to conclude that only a few of the copies of the 1661 folio were intended to include “A Form of Prayer,” and that after printing enough copies of the full version of “To the Reader” to preface that limited run, the sentence referring to the service on sig. A2v was canceled and the preliminaries for those copies of the book designed for general sale were printed.

It is possible to trace what happened in Ellen Cotes's print shop, and in what order, while the eighth edition of Resolves was in press. Throughout the whole volume, the text is set within ruled lines (double rules at the top and outer edge, single rules at the bottom and inner edge), and the peculiarities and progressive deterioration of those marginal rules, added to the implications of an error made in pagination while the book was being set and printed, are witnesses to the following sequence of events.⁸

A compositor or group of compositors, working from a printed text, began setting the 1628 excogitations as the first century of the resolves proper, signing the sheets in fours beginning with B and numbering the pages beginning with 1. Presswork was begun with a single skeleton forme (hereafter cited as Forme 1), and a second (Forme 2) was added for the outer formes of C. Throughout both centuries of resolves, these two formes predominate, though a third (Forme 3) was added at L and a fourth (Forme 4) at M, both used sporadically and sparingly thereafter until the printing of the second century was drawing to a close. Probably at the same time that the first century of resolves was being set and printed, work began on the Lusoria section of the book, its compositor signing its gatherings in fours with lower-case letters beginning with “a” and numbering its pages beginning with “1.” For the presswork, still another skeleton forme (Forme 5) was employed, its rulings crisp and relatively straight.

Just as the setting and printing of the first century of resolves was drawing to a conclusion, at sig. Aa1, a mistake was made in pagination. Sig. Z4v, which prints the middle portion of Resolve XCIX, is correctly numbered page 176; but sig. Aa1, which contains the conclusion of Resolve XCIX and the beginning of Resolve C, is misnumbered 171. The error is not corrected. Sig. Aa1v, which concludes the final resolve of the first century, is numbered 172; and sig. Aa2, which begins the new century, is numbered 173. Beginning with sig. Aa2, the first page of the newly revised second century of resolves (which are in fact essays and eighty-five in number), the typesetting had to be done from manuscript. At some point during the composing and printing of this second century of resolves, after the mistake in pagination had been made, someone cast off the manuscript copy, determining that its contents would conclude at the end of sig. Bbb if that gathering were expanded to six leaves. Given the six repeated and uncorrected page numbers at the end of the first century and the beginning of the second (i.e., 171-76), and the fact that Jj, Vv, and Ww would not be used in signing, sig. Bbb6v would consequently bear the number 374 (it should actually be page 380).

After this casting off of the second century of resolves, someone began to set, from manuscript, the two discourses—“Something upon Eccles. 2.11” and “St. Luke 14.20”—and “A Form of Prayer,” signing the first gathering Ccc and numbering its first page 375, but setting “A Form of Prayer” in a discrete gathering (Fff), with the consequence that sig. Eee needed only two leaves. Forme 5, its rulings worn and bent from the printing of Lusoria, was used for the presswork. As the progressive further deterioration of its rulings shows, the printing of Ccc-Fff was carried out sequentially in textbook order, inner forme Ccc2v and Ccc3 (with running heads inadvertently left out), followed by outer forme Ccc3v and Ccc2 (with running heads in place), followed by inner forme Ccc1v and Ccc4, down to inner forme Fff1v and Fff4 and outer forme Fff1 (with Fff4v blank and unruled).

In the meantime, Formes 1-4 were all pressed into service as the setting and printing of the final pages of the second century of the resolves neared completion: 1, 2, and 4 used in gathering Yy; 1 and 3 in Zz; 2 and 4 in Aaa. Despite the fact that Bbb had been assigned six leaves rather than the usual four, its augmented length was not enough to print the text of the remaining resolves. An extra leaf was necessary, its signature and page numbers (the latter already used by the compositor of the discourse on Ecclesiastes 2.11) placed in parentheses: (bbb); (375), (376). The other half of the sheet was used for setting “The Face of the Book, Unmasked,” which was to preface the engraved allegorical title-page. The printing of the twice augmented Bbb gathering was chaotic. Forme 3 was used for 3v and 4, 5v and 2, 1v and 6, and 6v and 1; Forme 2 for 4v and 3, 2v and 5, and (bbb)2v (“The Face of the Book, Unmasked”) and (bbb) 1; Forme 1 for (bbb)1v, with (bbb)2 blank and unruled.

After all this was accomplished, the book was proofread, and the Errata sheet—which calls for a correction in “A Form of Prayer”—was set and printed in the recto side of Forme 5. Then the preliminaries to the whole volume (gathering A), including the statement referring to “A Form of Prayer” on the second page of “To the Reader,” (sig. A2v) were set—sigs. A1v and A2 in Forme 1; sigs. A2v and A1 in Forme 4—and printed for the presentation copies. Then Forme 4 was unlocked; the sentence referring to “A Form of Prayer” was pulled out of sig. A2v and the necessary adjustments were made to the page's remaining text, its catchword, and its rulings; the forme was relocked; and the printing of the preliminaries for the copies of the book offered for general sale proceeded. Finally, the “Table of the Matter”—which does not include a reference to “A Form of Prayer”—was set and printed in a skeleton forme having a double rule at the top of each page and single rules at the sides and bottom.

In all likelihood, the person who wished to restrict the circulation of “A Form of Prayer” in 1661 was not its author, but the one person who had reason to think that she owned it, the Dowager Countess Mary. Not only had Felltham written the service specifically for her, but he also dedicated to her the whole of the 1661 Resolves, remarking in the dedicatory epistle that “these ensuing Pieces” were “(most of them) Composed under the Coverture of your Roof, and so born Subjects under your Dominion” (sig. A1). It seems likely that the Countess took her steward's hyperbolic statement literally, and may have indeed considered the “Form of Prayer” to be her personal property and determined to restrict its circulation to a few friends and acquaintances in the form of presentation copies. Perhaps she did not wish it known abroad that she and her family had used an “amended” Anglican and royalist worship service during the Interregnum; perhaps one or both of her children requested that the circulation of the liturgy be restricted. Perhaps she did not wish to see her personal ritual “vulgarized” by making it available to anyone who could afford to purchase a copy of the folio of Resolves. In any case, having written that the contents of the 1661 folio were virtually owned by his employer-patroness—“It would have been the incurring of too apparent a Premunire, against Equity and Justice, to intitle any other, to their owning or Protection; or to set up any forain Power, to be Supreme and Paramount, to that of your Ladiships, over them” (sig. A1)—Felltham could have had little recourse if the Countess Mary requested the exclusion of “A Form of Prayer” from those copies of the volume offered for public sale. That Anne Seile should have agreed to a fairly costly special printing of a few augmented copies of the 1661 folio is not surprising. She and Felltham were more than publisher and author joined by the necessity of business. In his will, dated 4 May 1667, Felltham refers to her as his “kind friend” and bequeaths to her “tenne pownds to buy hir a piece of plate, whereby to remember me.”⁹

The subsequent publication history of Resolves corroborates the suspicion that the Dowager Countess may have been responsible for the restricted circulation of “A Form of Prayer” in 1661. Anne Seile issued a ninth edition in 1670 (Wing F 656), again without “A Form of Prayer.” Five years later, in the same month that the Countess Mary died, Seile transferred the rights to Resolves, along with those to some three dozen other books that she and Henry had published, to Andrew Clark and Charles Harper (Eyre's Transcript, 14 April 1675, II, 507-08). In 1677, Clark and Harper issued a tenth edition of Resolves (Wing F 657), and in 1696, Harper alone issued an eleventh (Wing F 658); neither included “A Form of Prayer.” It was not until 1709—after the deaths of both of the Dowager Countess' children—that Harper finally published the Thomond family's ritual in an edition of Resolves. Obviously among the physical objects that Anne Seile transferred to Clark and Harper in 1675 along with the right and title to Felltham's book was a copy of the uncanceled 1661 folio. Nothing else can account for the reappearance of the sentence concerning “A Form of Prayer” in the 1709 printing of “To the Reader” in the exact place and with the same wording (save 1709's reading of “flee” for 1661's “flie”) that it has in the uncanceled Liverpool and Folger copies of the 1661 folio. That Harper should have held off printing this “new” material by a popular author for thirty-four years after it came into his possession strongly suggests that Countess Mary's children—on their own account or in deference to their late mother's wish—may also have exerted pressure against the general publication of “A Form of Prayer.”

As of now, the only copy of the 1661 folio of Resolves containing “A Form of Prayer” definitely known to be a presentation copy is the one in the Folger Shakespeare Library. The Reading copy is missing its first leaf, on the blank recto of which an inscription may have been written; the name “Anne Fenton” is written on the engraved title-page, and the verso of the Errata leaf is signed “Charles Jermy” and “Ra: Cooper.” The Liverpool copy bears only the dated signature of one of its nineteenth-century owners, “Rich^d. C. Dublin / 1884,” that is, Richard Chenevix Trench (1807-86), a Cambridge friend of Tennyson, Hallam, and Kemble who became the last Anglican archbishop of Dublin before the disestablishment of the Church of England in Ireland. While it is not signed by Felltham, the Liverpool copy is otherwise distinctive. All other copies of the 1661 folio that I have seen or surveyed are trimmed, most of them to a page size of approximately 7 × 11 inches. The pages of the Liverpool copy are untrimmed, measuring approximately 8-1/2 × 13 inches. In the seventeenth century, leaving copies of a book untrimmed was sometimes the equivalent of the later practice of issuing limited editions and presentation copies in large-paper format. It is possible, then, that the Liverpool copy is a presentation copy that Felltham never got around to presenting. It is also possible that as more and more old family libraries in England are either catalogued or put up for sale, additional presentation copies of the 1661 folio of Resolves containing “A Form of Prayer” may come to light.

IV

As noted earlier, Felltham's “Form of Prayer” is the only “amended” Anglican service designed specifically for use in family worship known to survive from the Interregnum. But a contemporaneous service for congregational use so amended is well known to historians, Robert Sanderson's A Liturgy in Time of Rebellion; and the account of its composition in Izaak Walton's Life of Dr. Sanderson is instructive. Sanderson, who was later to publish with the Seiles and who was to be consecrated Bishop of Lincoln after the Restoration, was expelled from his chair as Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford in 1642 and retired to an obscure living in Boothby Pagnell, Lincolnshire. There, toward the end of 1650, he was, in Walton's words, “advised by a Parliament-man of power and note, that loved and valued him much, not to be strict in reading all the Common Prayer, but make some little variation, especially if the Soldiers came to watch him; for if he did, it might not be in the power of him and his other friends to secure him from taking the Covenant, or sequestration. For which reasons he did vary somewhat from the strict rules of the Rubric.”¹⁰ Although Felltham was a layman and therefore, unlike Sanderson, in no danger of losing his employment should he continue to use the Book of Common Prayer, the O'Brien family had much to lose if they openly defied an act of Parliament. And just as Sanderson, following the advice of his friend in the enemy camp, proceeded, in the words of Horton Davies, “to abbreviate, and to change a phrase here and there, while following the outline of the Prayer Book, its order of items, and its spirit,”¹¹ so Felltham abbreviated, conflated, interpolated, and otherwise amended the Caroline Prayer Book services for morning and evening prayer, making them minimally legal in form while defiantly preserving their Anglican and royalist spirit.

Since the services for morning and evening prayer in the 1636 Book of Common Prayer are considerably briefer than their modern counterparts, it might be helpful to set out in tabular form its services and Felltham's modifications of them:

Book of Common Prayer, 1636	Felltham's “A Form of Prayer”
Morning Prayer
1. Scriptural Call to Worship (eleven choices)	1. Ps. 19.14 (not one of the Prayer Book choices)
2. Exhortation	omitted
3. General Confession	2. An expansion of the General Confession
4. Absolution	3. A plea for absolution
5. Lord's Prayer	4. Lord's Prayer
6. Brief responsive sentences	omitted
7. Gloria	omitted
8. Venite	omitted
9. Psalm for the day	5. Psalm for the day
10. Gloria	omitted
11. Old Testament reading	6. Old Testament reading
12. Te deum laudamus or Benedicite omnia opera	omitted
13. New Testament reading	omitted
14. Benedictus or Jubilate deo	omitted
15. Apostles' Creed	omitted
16. Lord's Prayer	omitted
17. Responsive sentence prayers for the king and the clergy, for peace, and for clean hearts	7. Prayer for the king and the royal family conflating two prayers in the Litany
	8. Prayer for the church modified from the Litany's Prayer for the Clergy & People
	9.-15. Interpolated prayers, many of them adapted from or suggested by prayers in the Litany
18. Collect of the day	omitted
19. Collect for peace	omitted
20. Collect for grace	16. A loose adaptation and expansion of the collect for grace
	17. 2 Cor. 13.14 interpolated from the conclusion to the Litany
Evening Prayer
	1. Interpolated opening prayer
1. Lord's Prayer	2. Lord's Prayer
2. Brief responsive sentences	omitted
3. Gloria	omitted
3. Psalm for the day	3. Psalm for the day
5. Old Testament reading	omitted
6. Magnificat or Cantate Domine	omitted
7. New Testament reading	4. New Testament reading
8. Nunc dimittis or Deus miserreatur	omitted
9. Apostles' Creed	omitted
	5.-11. Interpolated prayers
10. Collect of the day	omitted
11. Collect for peace	13. Phil. 4.7 as an abbreviated collect for peace
12. Collect for aid against all perils	12. Expanded collect for aid against all perils
	14. 2 Cor. 13.14 interpolated from the conclusion to the Litany

Felltham's “Form of Prayer” domesticates both Caroline liturgies. In Morning Prayer he replaces the absolution, which can be pronounced only by a clergyman, with a plea for divine absolution; and from both services he excises those somewhat formal parts that might be thought most appropriate to a congregation larger than a family: the Gloria, the Venite, the creed, and the anthem celebrations appointed to be read or sung after each of the readings from Scripture. Finally, from both he omits the collect of the day—the inclusion of which would require physical use of the proscribed Prayer Book—and removes the New Testament reading from Morning Prayer and the Old Testament reading from Evening Prayer.

But while he may have thus made the services “perhaps somewhat more appropriated to the conditions of a Private Family, then that appointed for the Church in Publick” (uncanceled “To the Reader,” 1661, sig. A2v), he has not appreciably shortened either. For in place of those parts of the liturgy omitted he has interpolated several prayers original in wording but largely adapted from or suggested by passages in the Litany (Morning Prayer 9-15, Evening Prayer 5-11); and in the morning service he has interpolated from the Litany his own versions of four of the “five prayers” subsequently added to the end of both Morning and Evening Prayer in the Restoration revision of the Book of Common Prayer. In their 1662 designations, those five are “A Prayer for the Kings Majesty,” “A Prayer for———[i. e., the royal family]” (these first two conflated in Felltham's Morning Prayer 7), “A Prayer for the Clergy & People” (cf. Felltham's Morning Prayer 8), “A Prayer of S. Chrysostom” (not included by Felltham), and “2 Corinthians 13” (Felltham's Morning Prayer 17 as well as Evening Prayer 14, its wording variously altered in the two services).

In all cases, Felltham modified those parts of the Caroline services that he retained. Obliged to reword them to circumvent the act of Parliament proscribing the Prayer Book liturgy, he did so with an essayist's hand, expanding the often terse and formal sentences of the originals to make them more nearly conversational and more immediately and concretely apprehensible. A good example of this expansion of statement and application of metaphor occurs in his adaptation of the General Confession in the Morning Prayer service. The opening clauses of the confession in its Prayer Book text are formal in their stateliness and balance:

Almighty and most mercifull Father, we have erred and strayed from thy wayes like lost sheep, we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, we have offended against thy holy laws, we have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us. …

While Felltham does not simplify the concept of unworthiness behind these clauses, and while he generally maintains balanced and parallel structures, he draws out the periods of the Prayer Book version. Not only does he make unmistakably clear and immediate the existence and nature of sins of omission and commission in the lives of all participants in his service, but he also goes beyond the Prayer Book text to locate a primary impetus for sin not in ignorance, but in the willful, perversely self-destructive impulses and desires of postlapsarian man:

Almighty God, and in Jesus Christ our most mercifull Father, We acknowledge we have erred from all the waies of thy Commandements. Not only like sheep going a stray out of Ignorance, and weaknesse: But we have often wilfully and presumingly offended against thee. Wee have committed what thou hast forbidden us, And we have omitted what Thou hast commanded us. All our waies are become Corrupt. …

The rhythms and the elaborations in Felltham's version of the General Confession are those of an essayist.

Another stylistic device of “A Form of Prayer,” employed in both the adaptations and the interpolations, is the use of similes that are both concrete and allusive, such as those found in Felltham's prayer to the Trinity in the morning service (Morning Prayer 10). Showing virtually no debt to any prayerbook address to the Trinity, Felltham's plea is directed less to the Tripartite Godhead than to God as terrible but merciful judge. Especially pregnant with allusion are the similes in this sentence: “O Lord, if once thou set'st thy self against us, our place is known no more, but as the Moth we do consume, and vanish as the Morning dew.” Comparison of man's condition with that of the “Moth” and “Morning dew” serves not only to point up the brevity and fragility of human life by comparing it to delicate and transitory natural objects, but also to recall such biblical passages as “When thou with rebukes dost correct man for iniquity, thou makest his beauty to consume away like a moth: surely every man is vanity” (Ps. 39.11) and the judgment that sinners “shall be as the morning cloud, and as the early dew that passeth away, as the chaff that is driven with the whirlwind out of the floor, and as the smoke out of the chimney” (Hos. 13.3). This combination of expansive suggestiveness and localized concreteness is a mark of Felltham's style in all his literary productions.

It is not surprising that Felltham should turn to the Litany for inspiration and for the topics of many of his interpolated prayers. In the pre-Interregnum Prayer Book, as in the Restoration revision, that service was appointed to be used three times a week—on Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays—and so was a familiar part of church ritual. Moreover, its emphasis on the sinful nature of man and its posture of supplication are congenial to Felltham's view of the religious situation in the late 1640s and in the 1650s, when he felt his church trodden down by the forces of wickedness. In the resolves of 1623 and the excogitations of 1628, Felltham is by and large a joyful Christian. He occasionally has troubled thoughts that call for the consolation of Christian Stoicism, but he considers the pervasive somberness of extreme Puritanism an affront to God, as well as to man. In the 1628 excogitation “Of Puritans,” for example, he declares that “God delights in nothing more, then in a cheerful heart, carefull to performe him seruice”; he modifies Ephesians 4.26 to read “Bee merry, but sinne not”; and he asserts that “A bounded mirth, is a Pattent adding time and happines to the crazed life of Man” (STC 10757, sigs. H5v, H6). But the political and religious climate of England had drastically changed by the time Felltham wrote “A Form of Prayer”; and that change, in his view almost apocalyptically evil, makes him more conscious of the sinfulness of man and society.

A conviction of sin—in both the individual and the state—pervades both prayer services, at times virtually overpowering the obligatory elements of consolation and praise. “All our waies are become Corrupt,” Felltham declares (Morning Prayer 2); “our whole life hath been a continued course of sin” (Evening Prayer 5); “we have defiled our selves” (Evening Prayer 5). He marks “the Injuries and Injustice of men” (Morning Prayer 9), “the hatred and uncharitableness of Men” (Morning Prayer 11), “our own inherent Frailty” (Evening Prayer 5), and “Errors in opinion and in practice” (Morning Prayer 11). Moreover, the implication is that, just as happened frequently to Israel in the Old Testament accounts, the accumulated sins of individual Englishmen have brought about the scourging of the whole population by an evil, repressive government. Felltham calls England “this sinfull and undeserving nation” (Evening Prayer 10), and he prays that its beleaguered state church be assisted in withstanding “all the errors, that the envious man sowes” and that “the Gates of hell may not prevaile against her” (Morning Prayer 8).

Happily for Felltham, he outlived the times that necessitated the writing of “A Form of Prayer” and witnessed the Restoration. In one of the wholly new essays in the second century of the 1661 Resolves, “Of Peace” (No. LXXXIV), he wrote of the new age,

let men see, how the Sacred wheel of Providence hath resurrection'd all our joys. How the Church recovers her late besmeared beauties. How the Tide of Trade returns, How brightned Swords have now a peaceful glitter; how Glory, Wealth, and Honour, with Loyalty, is return'd. How shouts of joy have drown'd the Cannons Roar; that till men come in Heaven, such joy on Earth can ne're again be expected to be seen. Three Nations looking for a fatal stroke, at once repriev'd from slavery and ruine.

(sig. Bbb6)

Less than a year after the publication of Felltham's 1661 folio, the Reverend Daniel Cawdry was ejected from the living of St. Andrew's, Great Billing, for refusing to subscribe to the Act of Uniformity; and on the same day, 24 August 1662, a revised Anglican Book of Common Prayer went into general use throughout England.¹²

Notes

1. For biographical information on Felltham, see Chapter 1 of Ted-Larry Pebworth, Owen Felltham (Boston, 1976), along with supplementary information in Barbara E. Bergquist, “Owen Felltham: A Few Biographical Facts,” Notes and Queries N.S. 3 (1976), 233-35. For detailed descriptions of his publications, see Ted-Larry Pebworth, “An Annotated Bibliography of Owen Felltham,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 79 (1976), 209-24, which corrects errors and omissions in STC and Wing. Hereafter, STC or Wing numbers are cited parenthetically for each publication when possible; in cases of their lacunae, item numbers in the Pebworth bibliography are cited.

2. Felltham, “In Gulielmi Laud, Archiepiscopi Cantuariensis, Decollationem, Jan. 10.1643 [sic],” ll.24-28, in The Poems of Owen Felltham, 1604?-1668, ed. Ted-Larry Pebworth and Claude J. Summers (University Park, Pa., 1973), p. 55; the translation is the editors', p. 56. The subsequent quotation from Felltham's epitaph on Charles I, ll.41-46, is taken from the same edition, p. 66.

3. For further information about the O'Brien family, see Albert F. Pollard's article on Barnabas in the DNB [Dictionary of National Biography] and the account of the holders of the Thomond title in the revised and enlarged edition of G. E. Cokayne's Complete Peerage (London, 1910-59), XII, pt. 1, 708-09. In his DNB article on Robert Chrichton, Thomas F. Henderson mistakenly gives Mary's name as Anne.

4. See the article on Cawdry by John Henry Overton in the DNB. For his publications, see STC 4881 and Wing C 1621-42.

5. White Kennett, Register and Chronicle Ecclesiastical and Civil (London, 1708), p. 553. Kennett errs in listing the book as printed for “T[homas] Dring,” a different bookseller from Peter.

6. J. Walker, “The Censorship of the Press during the Reign of Charles II,” History N.S. 35 (1950), 222.

7. For details of the re-establishment of the Church of England during 1660-62, see the final two chapters in Robert S. Bosher, The Making of the Restoration Settlement (London, 1951); and Anne Whiteman, “The Restoration of the Church of England,” and E. C. Ratcliff, “The Savoy Conference and the Revision of the Book of Common Prayer,” in From Uniformity to Unity, 1662-1962, ed. Geoffrey F. Nuttall and Owen Chadwick (London, 1962), pp. 19-88 and 89-148, respectively.

8. For an illuminating study of the significance of marginal rules in determining the order of printing, see Ernest W. Sullivan, II, “Marginal Rules as Evidence,” Studies in Bibliography 30 (1977), 171-80.

9. Quoted from the holograph of Felltham's will, P.C.C. Registered Hene 46, proved 22 April 1668.

10. Izaak Walton, The Life of Dr. Sanderson, in The Works of Robert Sanderson, D.D., 6 vols. (Oxford, 1844), VI, 312. Immediately after this passage, Walton quotes the Confession from Sanderson's amended liturgy. The entire Sanderson liturgy is printed in Fragmentary Illustrations of the History of the Book of Common Prayer, from Manuscript Sources, ed. William Jacobson (London, 1874), pp. 1-40.

11. Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England from Andrewes to Baxter and Fox, 1603-1690 (Princeton, 1975), p. 357.

12. I should like to acknowledge the support of the University of Michigan-Dearborn Grants Committee and the University of Michigan's Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies and to thank the always hospitable and helpful staff of the Huntington Library, where I did much of the research for this text. I also wish to thank my friend Ernest W. Sullivan, II, of Texas Tech University, for making very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this study and for checking uncanceled and canceled copies of sig. A2v for me on the Hinman collator to confirm that the type had not been reset in the canceled copy. Finally, I should like to express my appreciation to my colleague and frequent collaborator, Claude J. Summers, for his valuable suggestions and his encouragement throughout all the stages of this project.