Oct. 8. 1853.] 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



347 



Historia Anglo- Scotica, 1703, there were no bounds 

 to the angry passions and jealousies evoked by the 

 discussion of the projected union ; consequently, 

 what may appear to us in the present day an in- 

 sufficient reason for the treatment the book met 

 with in the northern metropolis, wore a very 

 different aspect to the Scots, who, under the 

 popular belief that they were to be sold to their 

 enemies, saw every movement with distrust, and 

 tortured everything said or written on this side 

 the Tweed, upon the impending question, to dis- 

 cover an attack upon their national independence, 

 their church, and their valour. 



Looking at Dr. Drake's book, then, for the 

 data upon which it was condemned, we find that 

 it opens with a prefatory dedication to Sir E. 

 Seymour, one of Queen Anne's Commissioners 

 for the Union, and a high churchman, wherein the 

 author distinctly ventures a blow at Presbytery 

 when he says to his patron : 



" The languishing oppressed Church of Scotland is 

 not without hopes of finding in you hereafter the same 

 successful champion and restorer that her sister of 

 England has already experienced." 



He farther calculated upon Sir Edward inspiring 

 the neighbouring nation "with as great a respect 

 for the generosity of the English as they have 

 heretofore had to dread their valour." Now the 

 Scots neither acknowledged the Episcopacy which 

 Seymour is here urged to press upon them, nor 

 had they any such slavish fear of the vaunted 

 English prowess with which Dr. Drake would have 

 them intimidated ; without going farther, there- 

 fore, into the book, it appears to me that the 

 Scots parliament had a right to consider it written 

 in a bad spirit, and to pacify the people by con- 

 demning it. 



Defoe, in his History of the Union (G. Chal- 

 mers' edition, London, 1786), says: 



" One Dr. Drake writes a preface to an abridgment 

 of the Scots History, wherein, speaking something re- 

 flecting upon the freedom and independence of Scot- 

 land, the Scots parliament caused it to be burned by 

 the hangman in Edinburgh." 



In his Northern Memoirs, 1715, Oldmixon ob- 

 serves : 



" They (the Jacobites) therefore put Dr. Drake, au- 

 thor of the High Church Memorials, upon publishing 

 an antiquated Scotch history, on purpose to vilify the 

 whole nation in the preface, and create more ill blood. 

 This had the desired effect. The Scots parliament 

 highly resented the affront, and ordered it to be burnt 

 by the common hangman at Edinburgh." 



D'Israeli, in his Calamities of Authors, has the 

 following interesting notice of Drake : 



" I must add one more striking example of a political 

 author in the case of Dr. James Drake, a man of 

 genius and an excellent writer. He resigned an ho- 

 norable profession, that of medicine, to adopt a very 



contrary one, that of becoming an author by profession 

 for a party. As a Tory writer he dared every ex- 

 tremity of the law, while he evaded it by every sub- 

 tlety of artifice ; he sent a masked lady with his MSS. 

 to the printer, who was never discovered ; and was 

 once saved by a flaw in the indictment, from the simple 

 change of an r for a t, or nor for not, one of those 

 shameful evasions by ^ich the law, to its perpetual 

 disgrace, so often protects the criminal from punish- 

 ment. Dr. Drake had the honor of hearing himself 

 censured from the throne, of being imprisoned, of 

 seeing his Memorials of the Church of England burned 

 at (the Royal Exchange) London, and his Hist. Angl. 

 Scot, at Edinburgh. Having enlisted himself in the 

 pay'of the booksellers, among other works, I suspect, 

 he condescended to practise some literary impositions ; 

 for he has reprinted Father Parson's famous libel 

 against the Earl of Leicester, under the title of Secret 

 Memoirs of Robert Dudley, E. of L., 1706, with a 

 preface pretending it was printed from an old MS." 



The same instructive writer adds : 



" Drake was a lover of literature ; lie left behind him 

 a version of Herodotus, and a system of anatomy, once 

 the most popular and curious of its kind. After all 

 this turmoil of his literary life, neither his masked lady 

 nor the flaws in his indictments availed him ; govern- 

 ment brought a writ of error, severely prosecuted him ; 

 and abandoned, as usual, by those for whom he had 

 annihilated a genius which deserved a better fate, his 

 perturbed spirit broke out into a fever, and he died 

 raving against cruel persecutors, and patrons not much 

 more humane." 



Another book before me, and one which shared 

 the fate of Drake's in Edinburgh, is The Supe- 

 riority and Direct Dominion of the Imperial Crown 

 of England over the Crown and Kingdom of Scot- 

 land, the true Foundation of a compleat Union re- 

 asserted : 4to. London, 1705. This had appeared 

 the year before, but was reproduced to answer 

 the objections to it from the other side. It was 

 written by William Attwood, Esq. If it required 

 a nice discrimination to discover the offence of 

 Drake, there was no such dubiety about this 

 book, which goes the whole length of Scottish 

 vassalage ; and Mr. Attwood would lead us to be- 

 lieve that he knocks over the arguments of Hodges 

 and Anderson * for Scottish independence with as 

 much ease as he would ninepins. 



* Jas. Hodges, a Scotch gentleman, who supported 

 the Independency in a work entitled War betwixt the 

 Two Kingdoms considei-ed, for which, says Attwood, 

 " he had 4800 Scots Funds given him for nothing but 

 begging the question, and bullying England with the 

 terror of her arms." 



" An Historical Essay, showing that the Crown of 

 Scotland is Independent ; wherein the gross Errors of 

 a late book, entitled ' The Superiority and Direct Do- 

 minion,' &c., and some other books for that purpose, 

 are exposed by Jas. Anderson, A. M., Writer to His 

 Majesty's Signet," Edin. 1705. For this work An- 



