An Account of Denmark. Robert Molesworth
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by some of his friends,” Molesworth judged that it was best to coordinate publication with the new Parliamentary session in early October.69
After publication, although the Account was admired by many Whigs, the reputation of the work was tarnished by the king of Denmark’s formal complaint to the Privy Council.70 Nevertheless (or perhaps because of this), demand was such that Goodwin, his first edition possibly selling some one thousand per week, produced a third edition in March 1694. A second “foxed” edition was also produced by unknown persons. It is estimated that some six thousand copies were sold at this early stage. Continental editions followed almost immediately, with Dutch clandestine versions in French produced under the imprints (fictitious and not) of Pieter Rabus, Adrian Braakman, and Pierre Marteau. Certainly the work remained available for purchase. The exiled Thomas Johnson in the book-shop familiarly named the Libraire Anglois, Pooten in the Hague, offered copies in the 1700s alongside other classics of the Whig and republican canon such as Buchanan, Ludlow, Spinoza, Locke, Tyrrell, and Sidney. The work was a best-seller, outperforming contemporary works by Locke and others and receiving reviews in English and continental literary journals such as Journal de Hambourg (1695) and Histoire des ouvrages des scavans (1694). A fragment of the preface was also published in 1713.71 As the Bibliographical Descriptions indicate, the work reached some twenty-two editions in the eighteenth century. Records of book ownership suggest it was widely owned in the British Isles and North America.
The semiofficial response of the Danish government was coordinated by Skeel from April 1694. The complaint that William III should have the book burned and the author executed met with a frosty response: “That I cannot do but, if you please, I will tell him what you say, and he shall put it into the next edition of his book.”72 A number of profoundly hostile English-language works, notably William King’s Animadversions on a pretended account of Denmark (1694), disputed Molesworth’s reports of “habitual slavery” as “due obedience to supreme powers.”73 Evidence of the capacity of the work to provoke debate is confirmed by the fact that it was later cited in the House of Commons by a member of Parliament critical of William III’s use of the veto.74
Molesworth completed his translation of Hotman’s Francogallia sometime in 1705; it was first published in 1711 by Timothy Goodwin, without the original editorial preface, which was regarded as too incendiary for the times. Subsequently, the complete edition was published in 1721 by another publisher, Edward Valentine, this time with additional material from Pierre Bayle’s biographical account of Hotman. The preface—later known under the title The Principles of a Real Whig —became a clarion call for the commonwealth tradition in the eighteenth century. Editions of both the Account and Francogallia were available throughout the century. Booksellers’ advertisements in newspapers indicate that the two volumes were usually sold for common binding, or for binding together in one volume. (The publication of new editions of the Account prompted notice of the translation of Hotman’s French work, as the flurry of monthly ads in the London Evening Post between January 1758 and 1761 indicates.)
Evidence of the persisting relevance of the edition can be found in an item in the Gazetteer and London Daily Advertiser of March 13, 1764, responding to defenses of royal prerogative; the author of that “ill designed piece is either a madman, or an arrant Tory, i.e., a villain willingly ready to metamorphose himself into a low petty fawning cur to any ignorant weak king, as soon as such a one shall sit on the throne.” Extracting passages from chapter 15 of Francogallia, which suggested monarchs were secondary to the “whole politic body,” the article continued to recommend “the serious reading not only of the Francogallia, but also of the other most valuable performances of that rare patriot, the real nobleman, Lord Molesworth.” Men like him, “the immortal Whigs,” had begun and completed “the preservation and defence of the natural and social rights of Great Britain,” which were a durable model of how to engage with “tyrannical oppression.”75 Newspaper comments in 1788 and 1793 reinforced this persisting afterlife in commending the lessons of Francogallia to the cause of “publick liberty” in France.76
The edition of Hotman’s work was translated from a combination of the first edition and the 1576 Latin edition. Between the publication of the 1705 and 1721 editions, Molesworth included supplementary material from the original (chapter 19, “concerning the most important affairs of religion”).77 This latter edition saw the expansion of the “preface” from one that made brief remarks about the defense of liberty to the full-blown articulation of “real Whig” ideology.
Indeed, in the interval between the two versions the precise context for the work altered considerably. The 1711 edition had been published under the rule of a queen (which accounts for the judicious remarks made by Molesworth, who was critical of Hotman’s hostile tone in the chapter concerning the rule of queens). The book was also made public at a time when Louis XIV’s military power threatened the security of the Protestant succession (it may well have been calculated to appeal to audiences involved in the complex diplomatic context of the end of the War of the Spanish Succession).
Molesworth also included (in both editions) a biographical portrait of Hotman drawn almost exclusively from Pierre Bayle’s Historical Dictionary. This account reworked the complex ballet between main text and footnotes in Bayle’s original into a seamless celebration of Hotman’s dedication to the principles of constitutional liberty and erudition. Interestingly, Molesworth decided to exclude the material Bayle composed related to Hotman’s theological commitments, preferring to represent his contributions as predominantly civil in idiom.
While complete editions of Francogallia were subsequently republished after 1738, the afterlife of the preface to the volume was even more complex. Large fragments were published in John Ker’s memoirs.78 A full transcription was included in the Wilkesite monthly pamphlet The Political Register, produced by John Almon (later successfully prosecuted for publishing Junius’s letters) in April 1768. The issue was subsequently reprinted in collected volumes of the same work. Almon, under the sobriquet “an independent Whig,” was later to publish works by Paine, Wilkes, and others. Indeed, it seems likely that he also published an unacknowledged history of Denmark based on Molesworth’s work. A list of books and pamphlets printed in 1768 notes “this day are published” An Account of Denmark. Antient and Modern, which was meant to contain “its history from Swain the first Christian King to the present time.” Ornamented with a print of the contemporary king and queen, it was priced at “3s. sewed.”79 Demand was such that John Almon certainly produced a new printing of Francogallia in the winter of 1771–72.80
Even more significantly, an edition of the preface was produced by the “real Whig” London Association in 1775 (sold at 3d each or fifty copies for 8 shillings), dedicated to the “protesting peers, the uncorrupted minority in the House of Commons, the patriotic Freeholders of Middlesex.” Indeed the preface was suitable for “every true, free Englishman, in the British Empire, who is willing and ready to maintain a steady opposition to the introduction of Popery and Slavery into these realms.”81 Thomas Hollis had displayed sympathy for American attempts to preserve the traditions of English liberty and indeed circulated copies of works like James Otis’s Rights of the British colonists asserted and proved. Closely allied with Wilkes and printers like Almon, groups of like-minded common-wealthmen gathered in London clubs like the Honest Whigs, the Bill of Rights Society, and the Constitutional Society to mobilize civic support for America among the common councilmen and aldermen.
Published in the early autumn of 1775, Molesworth’s preface was offered to a new readership as a radical defense of the revolutionary military resistance of the colonies at Lexington and Concord against arbitrary power. The London Association, formed in the summer of 1775 at the Globe Tavern from a group of the capital’s more radical tradesmen and artisans, was, as a hostile contemporary noted, “principally intended to recommend and abett in this country the Rebellion which now exists in America.”82 Produced by men with connections to both John