[Rarebooks] fa: ALGERNON SIDNEY - A PAPER DELIVERED UPON THE SCAFFOLD BEFORE HIS EXECUTION 1683

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, May 24. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/mft586p

Thanks,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.

Algernon Sidney (or Sydney): The Very Copy of a Paper Delivered to the Sheriffs, Upon the Scaffold on Tower-hill, on Friday Decemb. 7. 1683. By Algernoon[sic] Sidney, Esq; Before his Execution there. London: Printed for R[obert]. H[orn]. J[ohn]. B[aker]. and J[ohn]. R[edmayne]. and are to be sold by Walter Davis in Amen Corner, MDCLXXXIII [1683]. FIRST EDITION; folio (34 cm); 3 + [1] pp.; bound into 19th-century half calf and marbled boards. ESTC R12869; Wing S3766.

Though a republican, a colonel in the parliamentary army during the Civil Wars, and a member of the commission that tried Charles I, Algernon Sidney (1623-1683) opposed the decision to execute the king, declaring that "the King could be tried by noe court" (in a speech that gave rise to Oliver Cromwell's famous rejoinder, "I tell you, wee will cut off his head with the crowne upon it"). Nevertheless, Sidney retained his republican principles and his hatred for tyrants, among whom he counted Cromwell, during his long years of exile on the Continent. In 1677, on the death of his father the Earl of Lancaster, he returned to England to claim his inheritance, and quickly became involved in the politics of the Restoration Crisis, writing his Discourses Concerning Government, a work that would later have a profound influence on the American Founding Fathers (Jefferson considered Sidney and John Locke the two main sources of the patriots' conception of liberty). It was this work that ultimately cost Sidney his life; implicated in the Rye House Plot to assassinate Charles II and his brother James, Sidney was arrested and the as yet unpublished Discourses were used by the government as a witness against him, the solicitor general describing them as "an argument for the people to rise up in arms against the King." Sidney was found guilty of treason and sentenced to death. In this gallows statement, printed immediately after his death, Sidney disputes the fairness of his trial and asserts his right to express his "Thoughts, and the Reasons upon which they were grounded." He concludes by thanking God for permitting him to "Dye… for that OLD CAUSE in which I was from my Youth engaged, and for which Thou hast Often and Wonderfully declared thy Self."

Hole near the lower gutter causing loss of a few words, with old tissue-repair obscuring a few others; ink stain and small hole under the "A" in "Algernoon"; paper repairs to the margins; staining to the the first page, creases from folding; later folio binding with rubbing and wear, front board detached.