Oliver Cromwell's letters and speeches

First of 4 volumes in 8vo. ff [ii] (blank), [1] (plates), pp. xvi, 412, [2] (blank). Signatures: [A]8 B-Z8 AA-CC8 DD4 EE2. Calf. Double gilt filets with corner floral ornaments on boards, gilded boards’ edges, gilded spine raised on 5 bars with 2 black lettering panels. Marbled edges. Owner’s plate, with anagram, motto “Sure and stedfast.” Has also half-title for each volume. Engraved portrait as frontispiece, with signature "Your most humble servant Olivier Cromwell June 14th, 1645"; and caption: "(Letter XXIX, Vol. 1). Engraved by Francis Holl from a miniature by Cooper in the possession of the Rev.d. Archdeacon Berners." Includes index in volume 4, p. [471]-499.

Includes, in vol. 2, ‘The Squire Papers’, reprinted from Fraser’s Magazine (December 1847), with Thomas Carlyle’s added prefatory note asking the public ‘to excuse me from further function in the matter’. The fabrications of the ‘Squire Papers’–thirty-five letters of Oliver Cromwell to an imaginary ‘Samuel Squire’, with extracts from Squire’s Civil War diary – which took in the incautious editor, are by William Squire of Great Yarmouth and Norwich. Carlyle had published Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, with Elucidations, in two stout volumes in 1845 and (enlarged, in three volumes) 1846, when he received an unsolicited ‘heavy packet’ of transcripts from William Squire, a Norfolk antiquary and professedly a descendent of Cromwell’s officer. Notoriously uncritical in such matters, Carlyle never visited his correspondent, nor demanded a sight of the originals (Squire later gave a circumstantially dubious story of their incineration during a family squabble), but confidently published the alleged transcripts – all wholecloth forgeries, as it turned out, but not systematically exposed until the 1980s–in Fraser’s Magazine for December 1847, adding them to the third edition of his collection. But prior to that, presumably for the benefit of those who already possessed the second edition, Chapman and Hall issued The Squire Papers (1849, with prefaces and notes by Carlyle, see Bib# 4103491/Fr# 840 in this collection) as a slim cloth-bound separatim, which has become one of the rarest books in Carlyle’s voluminous canon.

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