"THE MOST VALUABLE OF ALL CONTEMPORARY ACCOUNTS": CLARENDON ON THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR

CLARENDON, Edward, Earl of. The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, Together with an Historical View of the Affairs of Ireland. WITH: The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon… In Which is Included, A Continuation of His History of the Grand Rebellion. Oxford: At the University Press, 1849 & 1857. Nine volumes. Octavo, contemporary full vellum gilt, red and green morocco gilt spine labels, elaborately gilt-decorated spines, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt. Housed in three matching green cloth slipcases. $3200.

Beautifully bound edition of this “broad and lucid” history of the “Puritan Revolution,” the struggle between a king who claimed to rule by divine right and a Parliament that professed to have rights independent of the crown, with the author's autobiography, the set in ornate vellum bindings.

Soldier, administrator, and politician, Clarendon supported Charles I in his struggle against the Parliamentarians and composed the first part of this History while in exile following the king's defeat. "Since its publication at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Earl of Clarendon's history of the English Civil War has remained one of the most important sources for our understanding of the events which changed the course of British history… [It] chronicles in absorbing detail the intrigues and upheavals, the alliances and confrontations, the triumphs and the tragedies, of the 1640s and 1650s. In elegant and vital prose it brings to life the personalities who shaped the era, and the principles for which a nation was divided" (Oxford University Press). Clarendon's is "the most valuable of all the contemporary accounts of the Civil Wars… His characters are not simply bundles of characteristics, but consistent and full of life, sketched sometimes with affection, sometimes with light humor" (DNB). "Now for the first time carefully printed from the original MS. preserved in the Bodleian Library" according to the title page, with the preliminary advertisement adding that this edition "differs materially from any of those which have preceded it." The seven-volume History is accompanied here by a two-volume Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon, "extracted from a large manuscript in [Clarendon's] own hand-writing" (p. vi). Lowndes I, 467. Bookplates of Shadworth Holloway Hodgson and Rugby School, noting Hodgson bequest.

Text clean and fresh; front joint of one volume and a few spine labels expertly restored. A very attractive set.