Full title: Rights of the kingdom; or, Customs of our Ancestours: touching The Duty, Power, Election, or Succession, of our Kings and Parliaments; our True Liberty, Due Allegiance, Three Estates, their Legislative Power Originall, Judiciall, and Executive, with the Militia: Freely Discussed through the Brittish, Saxon, Norman, Lawes and Histories. With an Occasionall Discourse of Great Changes yet expected in the World.

Small 4to. pp. [8], 93, 30-191, 176-184, [4]. Signatures: 2¶⁴ 2A-2M⁴ F-Z⁴ a-c⁴ †² (the eccentric collation explained on the verso of the last leaf). Modern full smooth mottled calf, gilt, blue marbled pastedowns and endleaves. This copy has two final content leaves, errata on the last page and on the verso of the title page. A few pages are slightly trimmed at the foot, costing numerals, catchwords, and parts of letters in the last lines, but all text is entirely legible.

First edition.

John Sadler (1615-1674), political theorist and reformer, Hebrew scholar, millenarian, and ‘Cambridge Platonist’, was a close friend and correspondent of both Milton and Samuel Hartlib, and an ally and promoter of Menasseh ben Israel, sharing Oliver Cromwell’s commitment to the readmission and enfranchisement of Jews to mid-17th-century Britain. ‘The Rights of the Kingdom,’ his principal achievement, is notable in particular as a fountainhead of ‘British Israelism,’ or the notion that the peoples of the UK are – like the natives of North and South America – ‘genetically, racially, and linguistically the descendant[s] of the Ten Lost [Northern] Tribes of Israel’ (William H. Brackney, Historical Dictionary of Radical Christianity, Lanham, Md, 2012, p. 61). C. T. Dimont in 1933 described Sadler’s book as ‘the first hint of this movement,’ at least in England, although the hypothesis, still very much alive among semi-serious historians and on the Internet, was not pursued vigorously until the late eighteenth century with Richard Brothers, and later in John Wilson’s seminal ‘Our Israelitish Origin’ (1840). Henry Spelman had perhaps anticipated Sadler in considering the ancient emigrational possibilities, and James VI and I was more than sympathetic toward them, believing himself to be thereby, in his own time, ‘King of Israel.’ Sadler’s quest for historical precedents for his own political arguments, however, led him to credit some very dodgy traditions, and Richard Greaves in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography rightly observes that ‘Rights of the Kingdom’ is ‘a work replete with citations to mythical British monarchs.’ This reflects in part Sadler’s reliance on such legendary regnal chronologies as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century ‘Historia regum Britanniae,’ and the myth of discovery and settlement by Brutus, a fugitive from Troy, which has a ninth-century origin in the anonymous ‘Historia Britonum,’ edited by the Welsh monk Nennius. And Sadler was among the many 16th- and 17th-century English writers – like John Bale, Richard Rowlands or Verstegen, and Richard White of Basingstoke – to be victimized by the spuria of ‘pseudo-Berosus,’ among the forgeries of Annius of Viterbo (1498).

This first edition of Rights of the Kingdom appeared in 1649, the year of the execution of Charles I, which is never mentioned; it was followed by a piracy (?) with the imprint ‘London, 1649,’ which was probably printed in Holland, and a later reprint of 1682. See D. Wing (ed.), Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America, and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700. 4 vols. New York, 1982-98 (2nd ed.), S 278A, the earlier ‘Variant I’.

Click here to view the Johns Hopkins University catalog record.

Rights of the kingdom; or, Customs of our Ancestours

Rights of the kingdom; or, Customs of our Ancestours

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