University of Virginia Library

The Printer of Harvard's Humble Proposal (1659)
Bertram C. Cooper and Richard E. Hasker

ABROADSIDE, An Humble Proposal, for the Inlargement of University Learning in New England, by the Trustees hereafter named, to whom the management of this Affair is committed, printed in 1659 for the purpose of raising funds in England for Harvard College, is listed by Evans in his American Bibliography as the work of the Cambridge Press in Massachusetts,[1] but Winship, without stating his evidence, assigns the printing to England.[2] Dr. Lawrence Starkey has called attention to the fact that neither the factotum nor the type used in the Humble Proposal is to be found in other products of the Cambridge Press, although the watermark in the paper on which it is printed is also found in paper used by this

colonial press in its books at approximately the same time.[3] This last is an interesting coincidence which, if taken alone, might lend support to Evans' opinion that the broadside was published in America. However, the more important evidence of the factotum may now be utilized to demonstrate the correctness of Winship's assignment of the printing to an English press.

The factotum is a conventional design measuring 59 x 60 mm. At the top a column, centered over the mortise, is placed between two cherubim, below each of which is a cornucopia, the one on the left of the mortise being topped by a stylized rose, the other by a thistle. At the bottom a fleur-de-lis directly beneath the mortise separates arabesques which extend upward and interwine with the cornucopias. Finally, the whole design is surrounded by double lines, the outer much thicker than the other. In his study of the ornament stock of Thomas Newcombe, Dr. C. William Miller has reproduced this factotum and identified it as belonging to the stock that came to Newcombe in 1648 when he married Ruth Raworth, the widow of the printer John Raworth.[4] The reproduction, no. 3 in Dr. Miller's set of illustrations, is taken from The Compleat Ambassador (Wing D1453), by Dugley Digges, which Newcombe printed in 1655 for Gabriel Bodell and Thomas Collins. When four years later the factotum appears in the Humble Proposal (1659), a conspicuous crack, not present in the earlier occurrence, is to be found at the top just off-center right in the heavy outer line.

Mr. John Wyllie, Curator of Rare Books at the University of Virginia Library, has called our attention to the use of the same factotum in two official documents; (1) An Act for Confirming Publick Acts (comprising signatures D and E immediately following signature C of Wing E994 in the ViU MacGregor set of Charles II Statutes), dated May 8, 1661; and (2) the ViU copy of A Proclamation of Grace, for the Inlargement of Prisoners called Quakers (Wing C3523), dated May 11, 1661. Though both bear the imprint of John Bill and Christopher Barker, the King's Printers, identity of detail and the presence of the break in the upper edge prove that these publications contain the same factotum used by Newcombe and the printer of the Humble Proposal (1659). The latest use of the factotum Miller records is in The Works of Richard Hooker (Wing H2631), which Newcombe printed in 1666. In all of these later appearances there is a noticeable deterioration of the edges of the mortise.

Mr. Wyllie has also found that the precise book in which the crack in the edge of the factotum first occurred is John Rushworth's Historicall Collections, which George Thomason entered in the Stationers' Register on September 14, 1658, and which Newcombe printed for him in 1659, the

same year in which the Humble Proposal was printed. On B1r of this book the line around the factotum is unbroken, but on A2r in the preliminaries, which were undoubtedly machined last, there is present the crack noted in the 1659 broadside and in all subsequent publications containing the factotum.[5] From this evidence it is apparent that the printing of the Historicall Collections was finished before May 11, 1659, the date of the Humble Proposal, and that the factotum had been cracked between that date and the preceding September.

Newcombe's ownership of the factotum can easily be reconciled with its appearance in the two 1661 documents which have the Bill and Barker imprints. According to Plomer, John Bill and Christopher Barker, who were reinstated as King's Printers in 1660, did not themselves print the books whose imprints bear their names, but farmed them out to their assigns.[6] Furthermore, Newcombe, as an assign of John Bill, was the printer and manager of the King's Printing Office from the Restoration until 1677, when he and Henry Hills were appointed King's Printers.[7] This association, then, explains the presence of the Newcombe factotum in An Act for Confirming Publick Acts (1661) and A Proclamation of Grace (1661), both of which Newcombe must have printed himself.

The constant appearance of the factotum in Newcombe books identifies him as the printer of the Humble Proposal in 1659. The only alternative, that the factotum was loaned to the Cambridge Press to print the broadside and then returned to London, is sheer fantasy. Its appearance in the books discussed above is therefore sufficient proof that Winship was correct in denying the Humble Proposal to the Cambridge Press and assigning it to England.

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