Elizabeth Calvert (d. 1674/5; fl. 1664–1675)

Elizabeth Calvert, bookseller at the Black Spread Eagle, St. Paul's Churchyard, 1664–1666; in Little Britain, 1666–1667; at the Black Spread Eagle, Barbican, 1667–1674/5. Widow of and successor to Giles Calvert, bookseller.

Frank Qiao, McGill University
September 2024

Elizabeth Calvert was a prominent nonconformist and “seditious” bookseller in early Restoration London. As the wife of Giles Calvert, England’s leading publisher of radical religious literature during the Interregnum, and the sister-in-law of Martha Simmonds (née Calvert), a prominent early Quaker, Elizabeth had extensive connections among Protestant dissenters of various denominations. After the death of her husband Giles and the imprisonment or execution of other anti-royalist stationers, dubbed the “Confederate Printers,” by 1664 Elizabeth had taken over Giles’ bookshop, the Black-Spread-Eagle at St. Paul’s Churchyard, arguably the centre of the English book trade. She published many nonconformist books throughout the next decade, many of which criticized the king and the Anglican Church. Elizabeth Calvert’s importance in the illegal book trade is documented by extensive State Paper records and pamphlets written by Roger L’Estrange, Charles II’s Surveyor of the Press, rendering her a valuable case study of women’s involvement in the book trade and how stationers circumvented Restoration censorship.

Elizabeth Calvert’s birth year and maiden name are unknown, but she might be related to the London printer Henry Ballard (d. 1609). She married Giles sometime before March 1639, when their first child, Elizabeth, was baptized at St. Nicholas Cole Abbey in the City of London. Of the couple’s children, Elizabeth and John died young, while another son was stillborn; only Nicholas (1643–1664) and Giles (1653–after 1674) survived to adulthood. Giles senior gained his freedom from the Stationer’s Company in January 1639, and his bookshop prospered during the 1640s and 50s, publishing, on average, over thirty known titles per year and becoming a crucial liaison point for religious radicals. In particular, Giles was the principal publisher of the Quakers until James Nayler and his supporters, including Giles’ sister Martha, broke away from George Fox’s leadership. Little is known about Elizabeth’s activities during the Civil Wars and the Interregnum, although she presumably gained experience in the book trade while assisting her husband.

Direct evidence of Elizabeth Calvert’s involvement in the book trade emerges at the onset of the Restoration amidst a royalist crackdown on pro-republican pamphlets. In 1661, while Giles was imprisoned for commissioning the printing of The Phoenix, a book supporting the Solemn League and Covenant, Elizabeth helped finish printing another of his planned publications called the Annus Mirabilis, a compilation of prodigies that allegedly “portend[ed] the fall of great men from their power, who rule with pride and disdain.” Its unstated connotation was clear to Roger L’Estrange: God will soon ordain the overthrow of “the Government by King and Bishops.” Elizabeth was consequently arrested in October 1661, by which time Giles had been released and fled to the countryside, allegedly to escape arrest for debt. While held at the Gatehouse, Elizabeth pled ignorance, claiming that her husband Giles instructed her to hand over the remaining sheets of Annus Mirabilis to Edward Nicholas, Secretary of State, but that she, desperately impoverished and ignorant of the book trade, sold them for waste paper. It is doubtful whether any of the crown’s officers believed her claims, but she was released on a bond of £500 in December 1661 after three months’ imprisonment. Due to the common law principle of coverture, which assumes married women to be acting on their husbands’ behalf, Elizabeth would have been unlikely to suffer prosecution in any case.

Elizabeth continued to attract official attention for seditious printing in the following two years but avoided serious trouble. 1662 saw redoubled official suppression of illegal print: L’Estrange was officially appointed Surveyor of the Press in February, Parliament passed the Licensing Act in June, and many search warrants were issued to scour London for seditious texts. Giles, who had returned to London, suffered at least two arrests in 1662. On the day of his second recorded arrest on 16 December, the authorities also ordered two stationers to bring Elizabeth into the custody of one of the King’s Messengers. It is unclear how long she was apprehended, but she was presumably freed soon afterwards and resumed printing seditious books. L’Estrange, dismayed at the Licensing Act’s ineffectiveness at controlling the spread of seditious libels, called for stricter regulation of the stationers in a June 1663 pamphlet. Subsequently, Elizabeth was again delivered to the Gatehouse on 29 June. Nevertheless, her imprisonment was comparatively brief, as the Earl of Carlisle, recently appointed ambassador to Sweden, requested her release. Elizabeth was released on bail on 24 July. Ill tidings awaited her on her return home, for Giles, released at some earlier point, was mortally sick. He made his will on 11 August 1664, which was proved on the 28th, leaving Elizabeth as his sole executrix.

Now head of the Calvert bookshop alongside her twenty-year-old elder son Nathaniel, Elizabeth was soon implicated in the only treason case involving a stationer in Charles II’s reign. On 7 October 1663, Roger L’Estrange stormed the house of John Twyn, a printer at Cloth Fair, catching him printing sheets from an incendiary tract called A Treatise of the Execution of Justice. The tract gravely alarmed L’Estrange and the crown’s officers as it explicitly denounced Charles II for cruelly oppressing the people and declared that “If a King have shed innocent blood, the Law of God requires the people to put him to death.” A Treatise’s inflammatory language and the fact it was printed on the eve of the ultimately unsuccessful Farnley Wood Plot prompted an urgent governmental search for its author and contributors. When questioned by L'Estrange, Twyn reported that this print job was commissioned by the Calverts, whose maid Elizabeth Evans delivered him a down payment of £40. Following this lead, the crown’s officers arrested Elizabeth Calvert’s son Nathaniel and apprentice Matthew Stevenson on 9 October. On 12 October, royal officers searched the house of Richard Moone, a stationer in Bristol and one of Giles’ former apprentices, for seditious books and arrested him. However, the arrests of Elizabeth Calvert and Evans were curiously delayed, as L’Estrange obtained a warrant to apprehend them only on 12 October, five days after Twyn’s arrest.

These investigations led only to dead ends. Moone admitted to dealing with Elizabeth Calvert but possessed no sheets of A Treatise or its prequel, Mene Tekel. Nathaniel Calvert and Matthew Stevenson were released on bail in November, seemingly cleared of involvement. Elizabeth Calvert remained on the run until February 1664, when L’Estrange finally brought her into custody. The State Paper archives record a set of “Questioners to be propounded to Mrs. Calvert,” including who printed Mene Tekel (with A Treatise included), who stitched the book, and who authored it, to which she had a day to respond. Her answers are unknown but likely inconclusive, for she was not called to testify at Twyn’s treason trial on 20 February 1664. At the trial, Twyn reiterated that he received the manuscript from Evans but refused to reveal the author; he was convicted of treason and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. Elizabeth Evans was arrested sometime after Twyn’s trial and petitioned for pardon, after which she disappeared from official records. Curiously, the crown made no effort to prosecute Elizabeth Calvert, now widowed and no longer shielded by coverture. She was held in custody until early April 1664, when she was granted release to bury her son Nathaniel, who had recently died of illness. The reasons for her repeated escapes from prosecution will be investigated in greater detail later in the article.   

Now the sole proprietor of the Black-Spread-Eagle (her only surviving son, Giles, was ten years old), Elizabeth Calvert continued her husband’s business of nonconformist publishing. The years between 1664 and 1666 saw a lull in known publishing activities. As Maureen Bell points out, Elizabeth was likely deterred by the fierce governmental persecution against nonconformists in this period and focused on repairing the shop’s finances, which were probably in ruins after the Calverts’ prolonged flight from the authorities and imprisonment. Nevertheless, a warrant to take her to the Gatehouse was issued on 4 February 1665, indicating that she did not completely withdraw from the illegal book trade. Although the Great Fire of 1666 destroyed the Black-Spread-Eagle, which was not rebuilt until 1669, it did not seem to impact the business financially; instead, it heralded a new spurt of publications from the shop. The Great Plague and the Fire disrupted governmental suppression of the nonconformists and incited popular anti-Catholic sentiments, culminating in the relaxation of anti-dissenter persecution and allowing them to publish more openly. Correspondingly, the period from 1666 to 1671 marked the peak of Elizabeth’s recorded publishing activities.  

Virtually all imprints bearing Elizabeth’s name from this period were nonconformist in theme and technically illegal since they were unlicensed. They were predominantly polemical tracts and religious instructions by nonconformist preachers, many of whom authored multiple pieces. William Dyer, an ejected minister and Quaker sympathizer, was probably the first author to establish longstanding cooperation with Elizabeth, who published two of his sermons under her imprint and one incognito. Dyer’s two openly published works, Christ’s Voice to London (1666) and A Cabinet of Jewels (1668), were not blatantly subversive, but they attributed the Great Plague and Fire to divine wrath at the people’s sinfulness and called for religious toleration. Elizabeth also produced three tracts on popular piety by the Presbyterian minister Richard Steele, which taught common folk how to avoid being distracted from serving God by worldly affairs and live piously in daily labour. Apart from titles similar in theme to Dyer’s and Steele’s works, Elizabeth published an astrological book by John Gadbury and Sir Josiah Child’s Brief Observations Concerning Trade, and Interest of Money, which partially attributed the Dutch Republic’s commercial success to its religious tolerance.

Concurrent with her acknowledged publications, Elizabeth sold her more subversive titles anonymously. For instance, A True and Faithful Account (1666), presented as a parliamentary report on the Great Fire, claims that a French Catholic started the fire and that English Catholics foreknew the disaster. Thus, it accuses English Catholics of being the pope’s agents and advocates for “removing all the Papists in England.” Elizabeth’s secret publications also contained excoriating attacks on the royalist government and the Anglican Church. Among the most notable was a satirical poem called Directions to a Painter (1667), one of a series of verse satires associated with Andrew Marvell that ridiculed state policies during the Second Anglo-Dutch War. Nehustan (1668) was even more provocative, comparing Charles I to the tyrant Ahaz, insinuating that Charles II was no better than his father, and proclaiming that “the LITƲRGY, CEREMONIES, and other things used at this day in the Church of England, ought neither to be imposed, nor retained, but utterly extirpated and laid aside.” Elizabeth might have had some of these books printed at her secret press in a rented room in Southwark.

Elizabeth Calvert’s illicit printing did not go unnoticed by the authorities, although she continued to evade prosecution until 1671. In July 1667, the mayor of Bristol discovered that Elizabeth had sent fifty books “concerning the late fire in London and popish Recusants,” most probably A True and Faithful Account, to the local bookseller Susanna Moone, Richard Moone’s wife, and recommended London authorities to prosecute Elizabeth. No evidence suggests Elizabeth was imprisoned or questioned in the aftermath. In April 1668, L’Estrange, returning to his post as Surveyor of the Press after a brief hiatus, sought to clamp down on London’s underground presses and root out the remaining “Confederate Printers.” As part of this undertaking, L’Estrange’s agents apprehended John Darby, later known as a radical Whig printer, and Elizabeth Calvert. In early May, Samuel Mearne, the king’s bookbinder, also seized Elizabeth’s Southwark press and “Tenne pare of Cases.” Elizabeth had been held at the Gatehouse for eight days by 7 May when she requested permission for her son Giles to visit her, but she would be released without further prosecution. In approximately October 1668, she was again incarcerated at the King’s Bench for selling Nehustan. In a petition to the king, Elizabeth claimed ignorance of its seditious content and promised never to print such books again, a pledge she would fail to keep after her release.

Elizabeth Calvert was finally indicted at the sessions of 5 December 1670 for printing Directions to a Painter and bailed on 7 December to appear at the next sessions. She absconded the next sessions but eventually appeared in February 1671. On 10 March, she was convicted of seditious publishing after pleading not guilty and fined 20 marks. However, she failed to pay her fine and repeatedly defaulted her bail to appear at subsequent sessions; she did not seem to have suffered further prosecutions or reprisals from the crown.

Elizabeth Calvert adopted a more cautious publishing strategy after her conviction. Many of the books she sold in the last years of her life appeared to come from an old stock of works previously published by Giles or herself. Meanwhile, her number of new publications declined considerably, and whilst they still consisted predominantly of nonconformist pamphlets, such as Samuel Petto’s The Difference between the New and Old Covenant Stated, none possessed a clear anti-governmental edge. Elizabeth also began selling more innocuous genres like cookbooks and obtaining official imprimaturs for some prior publications, such as for two of Richard Steele’s books.

Elizabeth’s newfound conformism might be attributable to her desire to avoid a repeat of the 1671 trial, which would have been disruptive to her business. The bookshop’s finances were likely already in poor shape; for all Elizabeth’s publishing activities in the late 1660s, she still could not repay her debts to the Stationers’ Company in 1670 and mentioned residual debts in her 1674 will. Elizabeth may have also begun preparing her affairs for her impending death. Specifically, in 1674, Elizabeth entered her only recorded entries, her three publications authored by Richard Steele, to the Stationer’s Company Register, perhaps, as Bell contends, to secure her son’s copyright. After all, Elizabeth would have been in her late 50s and was probably in ill health, as mentioned in various petitions she made from prison. That is not to say Elizabeth stayed wholly on the right side of the law in her last years. A warrant was issued for her arrest on 28 January 1674, followed by one for the arrest of Joshua Waterhouse, her former apprentice, the next day. In any case, no further proceedings took place. 

Elizabeth Calvert made her will on 17 October 1674, “being sick of body but of perfect memory and understanding.” She named her “well beloved cosen William Ballard of Rochester Gent” her sole executor and recipient of all her “Goods moveable and immoveable,” while the “overplus” after payment of debts was bequeathed to her son Giles. She died sometime between then and 5 February 1675, when her will was proved. Although the will describes Giles as a bookseller, he never became a freeman of the Stationers’ Company and did not seem to have carried on the business. 

Despite being frequently arrested and interrogated, Elizabeth Calvert exhibited a remarkable ability to avoid prosecution throughout her career. Martin Dzelzainis notes that Restoration censors typically went after printers rather than booksellers. However, while this may generally be correct, the fact that the bookseller Thomas Brewster was pilloried for selling The Phoenix while the printer he and Giles the elder hired was released unscathed shows that it was not a universal rule. What appears more important was Elizabeth Calvert’s connections with powerful allies. As mentioned above, Elizabeth was released in July 1663 from the Gatehouse due to the Earl of Carlisle’s intervention. When she was in prison for her involvement in Twyn’s treason case, Elizabeth again attempted to appeal to Carlisle, who was now on ambassadorial duties. Carlisle was associated with the suspected Fifth Monarchist George Cockaine, and his cousin and brother-in-law William Howard was a Baptist with potential Leveller connections. Thus, Bell posits that he might have been one of Elizabeth Calvert’s patrons. Andrew Marvell, an MP and Carlisle’s secretary while abroad, was another possible ally, as Elizabeth published his anonymous satire Directions to a Painter. Leading members of the Stationers Company, particularly Samuel Mearne, might have also protected Elizabeth. Indeed, Mearne visited Elizabeth during her incarceration for the Twyn case in 1664 and, after confiscating her Southwark press in 1668 with royal officers, purportedly requested the King’s Messenger John Wickham to return the seized books to her.

Elizabeth’s publishing business also relied on a network of nonconformists formed through personal connections. For example, Richard Steele, one of Elizabeth’s favourite authors, was probably a family friend and sent his son to apprentice at her shop in 1670. Richard and Susanna Moone of Bristol likewise appeared to be the Calverts’ long-term collaborators, their mutual links having been revealed during Twyn’s case and investigations over A True and Faithful Account. Through the Moones, Elizabeth could disseminate her publications all over western England. For instance, eighteen copies of A True and Faithful Account were found in Carlisle a month after she sent them to Bristol in July 1667.

In her will, Elizabeth requested her “Body to be decently Buryed amongst the Baptists,” but whether this reflects her longstanding religious affiliation is unclear. Elizabeth’s publications, which incorporated works from nonconformists of various hues, do not evince a unique tie with the Baptists and reveal little of her religious beliefs except that she was a dissenter. Other documentary evidence often associates her with the Quakers. One 1655 letter addressed to Margaret Fell reports that “Gyles Calverts wife it seems hath Cast some Asspertions of Anthony Pearson,” a new Quaker convert, demonstrating that Elizabeth was closely concerned with Quaker affairs and might have been recognized as a Quaker. However, Elizabeth’s relationship with the Quakers had unquestionably soured by 1671, when the Quaker Ellis Hookes dubbed her “Jesebell” in a letter to Margaret Fell. Indeed, Elizabeth probably sided with James Nayler’s faction, including her sister-in-law Martha, when they split from the main Quaker church. The Naylerites, who may have formed a separate church, remained friends with Elizabeth and invited her to one of their member’s wedding feast in 1671. Nevertheless, no evidence suggests Elizabeth ever became an official member of this congregation.

Many scholarly works on early Restoration nonconformism and book trade mention Elizabeth Calvert. However, Maureen Bell's two exhaustive accounts are the only contributions that describe her life and career in significant detail. Bell’s 1992 article “Elizabeth Calvert and the ‘Confederates’” meticulously recounts her career up to Twyn’s trial and identifies the crucial connection between Elizabeth Calvert and the Earl of Carlisle. Its sequel, “‘Her Usual Practices’: The Later Career of Elizabeth Calvert (1994),” is equally comprehensive, providing a sweeping narrative of Elizabeth’s publishing activities, associates, and interactions with the authorities from 1664 to 1675. Additionally, Richard Greaves’ Deliver Us from Evil: The Radical Underground in Britain, 1660-1663 (1986) deserves credit for placing Elizabeth’s early career in the context of early Restoration pro-republican and revolutionary discourse, while Martin Dzelzainis’s “Andrew Marvell and the Restoration Literary Underground: Printing the Painter Poems (2007)” importantly highlights the links between Marvell and Elizabeth Calvert.