File NLW MS 22676D - Political Tracts

A volume of tracts, c. 1679-1689, almost entirely political in content, mostly printed (many of them rare), a few in manuscript, collected and bound by Thomas Sebastian Price of Llanfyllin, recusant and antiquary [DWB, Montgomery Collections, 55 (1957), 26-7, 33, 58 (1964), 143-54] in whose hand there is a contents list on ff. ii-[1]. The tracts are grouped under state trials (items 1-5), poems (items 6-32, 28-32 being broadside ballads) and political tracts (items 33-58). The manuscript items are Lord Rochester's 'An allusion to the Tenth Satire of the First Book of Horace' (item 12), with unrecorded variant readings, Abraham Cowley's 'Epitaph on Richard Crashaw' (item 14), Richard Duke's 'Epithalamium upon the marriage of Captain William Bedloe' (item 23), John Dryden and Lord Mulgrave's 'An Essay Upon Satyr' (item 24), with unrecorded variant readings, and 'The Duke of Monmouth's Letter to the King' (item 25); also in manuscript are a copy of the royal pardon to the Earl of Dunbarton and others, 1685, addressed to Thomas Price (item 43) and, evidently on waste paper, a list of Anglesey parishes (item 15) and a table of distances, 'from Dovy to Machenlleth six miles' and from Machynlleth to various English towns, giving stages (item 59, end flyleaf). There is some contemporary marking in crayon and annotation, notably in item 42, adding names of those present at the Council in Whitehall on 22 October 1688 to hear declarations concerning the birth of the Prince of Wales, and, in item 10, identifying persons in Dryden's Absolom and Achitophel. A full typescript list of the contents of the volume is NLW ex 1246.