University of Virginia Library

Wither and the Stationers
by
Norman E. Carlson

In "George Wither's Quarrel with the Stationers: An Anonymous Reply to The Schollers Purgatory,"[1] Allan Pritchard has added a document both entertaining and enlightening to the materials which are available and relevant to Wither's life and work. He has, however, not gone far enough in correcting one of the traditional misconceptions in Wither biography, the notion that The Schollers Purgatory is the final statement of a bitter loser in a struggle against the impregnable fortress of the all-powerful Stationers. Detailed consideration of documents which Pritchard surveys outlines a sketch of a Wither in action more consistent with the personality that his biography reveals, and also demonstrates that it was not always as easy for the Stationers to have their way as is generally assumed.

A recent example of the misconception concerning Wither's struggle with the Stationers over his patent for The Hymnes and Songs of the Church [2] appears in W. W. Greg's Some Aspects and Problems of London Publishing between 1550 and 1650 (1956). In order to qualify his use of a passage from The Schollers Purgatory, regarding the practices of the Stationers, Greg explains the composition of that work as follows:

The essence of this statement, the judgment that Wither was "not an impartial witness," is a valid and necessary judgment. However, the assertion that the Stationers' Company had "successfully fought" Wither's grant, and that the poet was "smarting under defeat" at their hands does not accurately reflect the facts of the case. In 1624, the battle between Wither and the Stationers had just begun, and what Greg labels "defeat" is merely an early setback in the maneuvering for position.

To be fair, it must be noted that the misconception originally derives from crediting Wither's own complaints with too much veracity at a time when various documents relating to the matter were not easily accessible. It is only since the publication of the Records of the Court of The Stationers Company, 1602 to 1640,[3] and the more recent volumes of the Acts of the Privy Council,[4] that it has been possible to reconstruct even fragmentarily the struggle between Wither and the London Stationers. Such a reconstruction — one naturally to be attempted only by the occasional few who stir Wither's dust — indicates that in this matter, as in every other concerning himself, Wither was not "an impartial witness," that he was always purposefully exaggerating his troubles.

Wither's patent, with its "unreasonable proviso,"[5] was granted on February 17, 1623, the day on which Buckingham, the royal favorite, rode off incognito with Prince Charles to court the Spanish Infanta. James, a prematurely old man at fifty-six, was left despondent and vulnerable to many suitors for favor, to whom he is reported to have exclaimed: "I would God you had first my doublet and then my shirt. Were I naked, I think you would give me leave to be quiet."[6] Whether James's distraught state had anything to do with his generosity to Wither must, of course, remain a matter of speculation, but it seems not at all unlikely that the unsettled conditions worked in Wither's favor. In any case, early in 1623 Wither held a grant that promised a sizable return if its conditions were executed, for in the following ten years at least fifty-nine separate editions, or about 87,000 copies, of the Metrical Psalms were to be printed.[7]

It is not hard to understand why the Stationers might object to Wither's grant. For one thing, the addition of Wither's book would increase considerably the size and cost of the Metrical Psalms; the small octavo edition (1623) would, for example, be swollen by 112 additional leaves. The

expected result would be a decrease in sales, and hence a loss of income to the company. The Stationers might also reasonably be angered by their not receiving a share of the profits from this new book. They might further fear the powers given to Wither; by virtue of his patent Wither could, taking a constable with him, search the premises of any printer or bookseller and seize copies of the Hymnes and Songs of the Church printed without his authorization or copies of the Metrical Psalms that did not have his book bound with them. Half of the seized books would become the property of the King, the other half of Wither. Finally, the Stationers resisted the recognition of an author's rights implicit in the patent, for their industry had flourished partly because of the minimal sums they had to pay for their copy.

The Stationers apparently tried negotiating first; on March 10, three weeks after the grant, the Court of the Stationers' Company appointed five members "to talke with Mr. Withers about his Patent, of the hymnes of the Church" (Records, p. 156). That failing, they petitioned James for relief in the autumn (Records, p. 162), meanwhile openly resisting the patent by methods Wither described at great length in The Schollers Purgatory. The Stationers may also have had a hand in a petition against Wither's patent from the Bookbinders sent to Parliament in the spring of 1624 (a session in which the Commons had set about to remedy longstanding "grievances" that had in effect been tabled from earlier Parliaments in James's reign).[8]

Neither petition achieved its aim, and Wither struck back at the Stationers' non-compliance by appearing before the Privy Council. His "victory" is recorded in The Acts of the Privy Council, dated July 12, 1624:

The Stationers refused to be intimidated by this order, and Wither went ahead with publication of The Schollers Purgatory denouncing them. This phase of the conflict included the raid by the Stationers on the printshop of George Wood, whom Wither had hired to print his book, and the confiscation and destruction of Wood's press, type founts, and accessories. Undaunted, Wither rescued the first two sheets of the book, already printed, had another printer do the remaining seven, and published the book (Records, pp. 169-170). An appearance before the Commissioners for Causes Ecclesiastic vindicated his having had the book printed before securing "license" for it, and publication was allowed;[10] thus matters stood when the plague of 1625 depopulated London and turned Wither's attention to other matters.[11]

The Stationers perhaps assumed (as have literary historians) that the struggle was over,[12] but they did not reckon with Wither's astounding pertinacity. In January, 1627, Wither was back before the Privy Council, securing another order supporting his patent.[13] At that point the Stationers discontinued resistance along the lines they had been following, for on February 21 the Court of the Company issued a conciliatory order:

Wither had won a battle, if not the war.

How earnestly the booksellers complied with the Privy Council order of February, 1627, is difficult to say. An entry in the Records of the Court of the Company for March 27, 1633, indicates at least ostensible cooperation:

But the disparity between the number of metrical psalmbooks printed and the number of copies of Hymnes and Songs of the Church suggests that compliance was nominal, although it undoubtedly varied from bookseller to bookseller, since the individual bookseller would be responsible for the binding of the books he sold. Wither was not happy with the situation, and he petitioned the Privy Council again in March, 1634. He asserted in his petition that he had expected the Stationers to conform to the previous order without further compulsion, but that "gentleness" on his part had only made them "more obstinate." He estimated that he had "by their contentions disbursed and injured himself about 1,200 l." and that he had £500 worth (perhaps 4,000-5,000 copies) of the books in his possession for three years, which he thought the Stationers could have sold in a year if they had tried to. He concluded his petition on a desperate note: Although records of the decision on the petition are not available, the final episode in the case indicates that a judgment in Wither's favor was handed down once more.

That final episode is slightly comic. By 1635 Wither apparently wanted to settle down in earnest as a country squire and wash his hands of this feud with the Stationers. But since he did not want to wash his hands of any possible profit, he sold the rights to his patent for twenty-one years, along with £400 worth of books, to Robert Crosse and Toby Knowles, "two of his Majesty's messengers in ordinary" (SPD, 1635-1636, p. 80). In 1635 these two were petitioning Sir Francis Windebank, Secretary of State, "to favour them in a question about to come up to a hearing." They needed the favor, because they were bound to pay Wither "yearly great sums of money" (SPD, 1635-1636, p. 80). The editor of the State Papers Domestic suggests that the hearing was one "respecting the right of the stationers or the patentees to bind up these hymns with Bibles," but an agreement recorded on June 11, 1635, seems to indicate that it was only a hearing between the petitioners and Wither. The agreement between Wither and Crosse stipulated that Crosse should return all the copies of Hymnes and Songs of the Church which he and his partners had not sold, and pay Wither the money they had received for the copies they had sold, "provided 57 l. be first deducted for moneys and diet formerly paid to Wither by Crosse and Toby Knowles." Wither was to deliver up the contracts between them to be cancelled (SPD, 1635, p. 118). He was, at the end of the game, stuck with the old maid — several thousand copies of The Hymnes and Songs of the Church.

The account which can at present be pieced together is hardly complete (future volumes of the Acts of the Privy Council will perhaps add something

more to it) and not as coherent as one would like, but it is at least clear that Wither was not "smarting under defeat" while composing The Schollers Purgatory in 1624. Rather, he was merely engaging in one skirmish, staging a raid one can view as quite daring in light of the Stationers' established position and his own shortage of truly powerful allies. Moreover, in 1624 the Stationers had not "successfully fought" the King's grant to Wither, but had only thus far defended their entrenched position. If in the long run they frustrated Wither's hope of earning a large return for his labors in verse, it was not without concessions that must have earned greater profits than he was willing to admit over the eight years from 1627 to 1635 for the most indomitable of the English poets.

Notes