John Twyn (1619–1664)

John Twyn, printer in Cloth Fair, 1640–1664. May be the same printer identified as J.T. on imprints from ca. 1658–1662.

Thomas Keymer and Frank Qiao, University of Toronto
July 2024

John Twyn, a dissident printer hanged for treason in 1664, was the most conspicuous victim of the crackdown on unlicensed pamphleteering launched by Roger L’Estrange, Charles II’s ferocious surveyor of the press, on assuming this office in 1662. “Many Hundred-Thousands of Seditious Papers” were now circulating in London—Fifth Monarchist prophecies, regicidal scaffold speeches, and the like—and drastic remedies were needed, L’Estrange declared in his Considerations and Proposals in Order to the Regulation of the Press (1663). He already knew where to look: “The most Dangerous People of all are the Confederate Stationers, and the breaking of That Knot would do the work alone.” Twyn was caught red-handed as he printed an incendiary treatise in October 1663, and he went to trial the following February alongside three other members of the alleged “Knot.” He alone was indicted for treason (the lesser charge of sedition was used for the rest) and sentenced to be executed. Many further book-trade professionals were imprisoned, pilloried, or fined in the Restoration era, but there were no further stationer executions until that of William Anderton, a Jacobite printer convicted of treason in 1693, and the last such case, that of the Jacobite John Matthews (18 years old and technically still an apprentice) in 1719.

Twyn (sometimes Twinne or other variants) was baptized on 14 March 1619 in the Hertfordshire village of Kelshall, the eldest son of Robert Twyn, yeoman, and his wife, Jane Warren. On 24 August 1633, aged 14, he was bound apprentice to the prominent London printer William Stansby, and he was made free on 7 September 1640, two years after Stansby’s death; in the mean time, Stansby’s extensive business had been sold to Richard Bishop, who took Twyn’ s younger brother Francis as an apprentice in 1642. Little is known of Twyn’s earliest years in the trade, but he was well enough connected to be put in charge of the King’s Printing House in Edinburgh, recently acquired by the Stationers’ Company, in 1647. He married Joyes Hudsone there the following year, and he was still resident in Scotland in July 1650, the month of Cromwell’s invasion, at which point he was managing seven other printers, all of them English. He took at least four apprentices over the course of his career: in 1649 Thomas Bramston and William Balfore, in 1658 Symon Walton, and in 1660 Joseph Walker (who, evidently scared, was to testify as loyally as he could in the treason trial).

On the evidence of surviving records, Twyn does not seem to have been especially prolific as a printer after returning to London, and he described himself at trial as “a poore man.” Some of his activities were quite orthodox, including biblical printing and part of the 1662 edition of Richard Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity (a work to which Stansby and Bishop had previously held the rights). Other publications had a nonconformist but not extremist flavour, including The Danger of Being Almost a Christian (1658) by the Presbyterian minister John Chishull, and Sephersheba; or, The Oath Book, Being a Treatise Concerning Swearing (1662) by the Baptist minister John Tombes. Both these authors were ejected after the Restoration, although Tombes’s book, which justified taking the oath of supremacy, was loyalist in tone and gained a licence from the Bishop of London. In 1661, Twyn recorded John Pringle’s translation of The Three Books of Hermas, the Disciple of Paul the Apostle in the Stationers’ Company Register, his one and only entry there. He was probably the “J. T.” who printed a number of further works for Andrew Crook, the bookseller responsible for Sephersheba and the 1662 Hooker.

The little more we know of Twyn’s personal life arises from records of his interrogation and trial, including a previous arrest. In a petition dated 1642 (but this must be an error for 1662) in the Calendar of State Papers, he describes himself as “a very poore man, his wife beinge dead and noe guide to looke after his 4 small children but himselfe.” The petition follows a search of his premises by L’Estrange’s men, who were looking for unspecified illicit material and broke or impounded his press. Twyn protested his innocence and promised (presumably with his fingers crossed) good behaviour on release: “And as to the best of his knowledge, he never printed any thinge, that was any way prejudiciall to his Majestie or his honourable Counsell; soe he Engadges for the future he never will doe.” By the time of his trial in early 1664, the number of surviving children was down to three, and one of these was no doubt the John Twinn who in 1679 obtained freedom of the Stationers’ Company by patrimony. Of the three brothers (Francis, Richard, Robert) who visited him in jail shortly after his arrest, at least one had a book-trade background. According to L’Estrange’s report of his surveillance of and eventual raid on Twyn’s premises in 1663, he lived and worked in Cloth Fair, Farringdon (which incidentally is the site of the only pre-1666 house in the City of London to have survived the Great Fire).

Underground printing is by definition hard to trace, and there is no knowing exactly what seditious material Twyn produced before A Treatise of the Execution of Justice (1663), the work that occasioned his arrest, trial, and execution. The full subtitle of this 32-page tract makes clear its incendiary nature: “wherein is clearly proved, that the Execution of Judgement and Justice, is as well the Peoples as the Magistrates Duty; And that if Magistrates pervert Judgement, the People are bound by the Law of God to execute Judgement without them, and upon them.” Decades later, the historian Roger Coke recalled that in 1663 “Swarms of Pamphlets were spread abroad, to defame [the King’s] Person and Government: For printing some of which, Twyn the Printer was hanged” (A Detection of the Court and State of England During the Four Last Reigns (3^rd edn, 1697)). One can only guess what else was in the swarm, but a prime suspect is Mene Tekel; or, The Downfal of Tyranny (1663), a regicidal tract by “Laophilus Misotyrannus,” which in its title makes grim allusion to the writing on the wall at Belshazzar’s feast: a standard reference point in the Fifth Monarchist playbook, where the doomed tyrannies of Babylon in the Book of Daniel foreshadow the impending fate of the restored Stuarts.

In a memorandum written twenty years later, L’Estrange recalled that the young John Darby, afterwards prominent as a radical Whig printer, had “printed 6 or 7 sheets of Mene Tekel; a Book I seized in the Presse, & one Twyn was Hangd and Quarterd for ’t. He perfected this Book, after the Other had dyd for ’t.” At first sight, L’Estrange might appear to be confusing two separate works, the Treatise and Mene Tekel, but as Laura Knoppers has argued, he seems to have recognized them as an inseparable pair, designed as two parts of a continuous whole. Perhaps Darby was indeed responsible for the surviving edition of the Treatise, which in some respects is even fiercer in wording than the pages L’Estrange seized from Twyn’s premises (though another early source traces this edition to the Dutch republic). Seven of the pages being printed by Twyn now survive in the National Archives, their most provocative passages marked up by hand in preparation for his indictment, which listed no fewer than thirteen such passages, adding that “each of them contains as many Treasons, as there be lines in it.” In the event, only one extract was read out in court; the rest were “too Impious to be Published, and indeed too Foul to be Repeated,” jurors were told.

They were indeed strong stuff. Like Mene Tekel, Twyn’s version of the tract draws on the Book of Daniel and applies its lessons to the present juncture, while finding the present in some respects more egregious still. In one of the passages picked out for the indictment, Israel may for a time have been commanded to accept bondage in Babylon or Egypt, “but these extraordinary cases bind us not to submit to the Yoak of Tyranny in the least; For God hath not forbid us to cast off the Yoak of this present Tyrant.” Much energy is spent on this last point, which shifts, as the Treatise proceeds, from an absence of divine prohibition to the presence of divine command. The Gospels do not instruct us to suffer oppression, so “doth it follow therefore that we must stand still, and let him spoyle our Goods, beggar our Children, Murder us one after another as fast as he dares, and glut himself with innocent blood in a time of peace.” Obviously not—for “if wicked Magistrates intend to murther us, if the Lord hath afforded us opportunity to resist their violence, and defend our selves, we may conclude that it is not Gods will that we should suffer.”

In the end, it becomes God’s will that we must resist—a position supported by the secular republican tenet that rulers are the servants of “Free-born Persons,” not vice versa: “This man had his authority from the People of England (or else he hath none) and is sworn to protect us, and yet doth most cruelly oppress us.”  And while religion may indeed require the godly to pray for their persecutors, we may at the same time “execute Justice upon them also when God shall deliver them into our hands; those dutyes are not inconstant.” The second duty becomes inescapable, for in one of the tract’s most forthright sentences, “If a King have shed innocent blood, the Law of God requires the people to put him to death.” This duty is also urgent, and as the argument of the Treatise nears its climax, perhaps its most alarming word was the adverb that ends the following sentence: “It is not unbeseeming a Christian to take a Sword upon a lawful and righteous account; and if ever there was a reason which required the Lords people to sell their Garments and buy Swords, it is now.” During the trial, it was alleged that publication was timed to coincide with, and energize, the abortive Farnley Wood Plot or Northern Rebellion of October 1663: the Treatise “was intended to set a Flame in this Nation; to raise and stir up Rebellion in this Kingdom against the King and his Government.”

Twyn was imprisoned in Westminster Gatehouse between L’Estrange’s raid on his house in the small hours of 8 October 1663 and his Old Bailey trial of 20 February 1664. During the trial, he claimed not to know the identity of the Treatise’s author, but several witnesses alleged him to have said “Methoughts it was mettlesome stuffe, the man was a hot fiery man that wrote it,” or again “an angry smart fellow, it was good mettlesome stuff.” An angry and fiery man indeed, but his identity remains unknown. Twyn could possibly have saved himself, or at least the most excruciating aspects of his punishment, by naming the author, but he denied all knowledge, and in any case “it was not his Principle to betray the Authour.” As for Mene Tekel, informers at the time came up with at least three candidates, of whom the likeliest is Captain Roger Jones, a Fifth Monarchist conspirator who played a role in the failed Northern Rebellion but escaped with his life; also in the frame were the preacher and former officer Nathaniel Strange, and, more implausibly, the ejected minister John Goodwin, who had written a regicidal tract in 1649 but opposed Fifth Monarchist doctrines.

An Exact Narrative of the Tryal and Condemnation of John Twyn, for Printing and Dispersing of a Treasonable Book (1664) provides extraordinary detail about Twyn’s clandestine nocturnal printing, L’Estrange’s surveillance and raid on Cloth Fair, and the frantic attempts of Twyn and his apprentices to break up incriminating formes and dispose of printed sheets while L’Estrange sent for a smith to force the door. The apprentices were too slow to break up one of the two formes, a corner of which survived intact and could be read by the tame printer, a man named Thomas Mabb, who accompanied L’Estrange on the raid. The impression was far too large to be concealed (Mabb estimated a thousand copies, which Twyn then confirmed), and the bulk of it was found to have been thrown in haste down the back stairs, the ink still wet on some of the sheets. Other sheets had already been delivered to the radical bookseller Elizabeth Calvert, who was arrested and imprisoned but never prosecuted in relation to the Treatise; she seems to have been protected by an influential patron, Charles Howard, Earl of Carlisle.

Much of the interrogation and trial turned on evidence of proof correction and other details to demonstrate that Twyn understood the material he was handling, which he denied with unconvincing excuses. He was too ill on receiving the manuscript to absorb the contents; he did not personally compose (meaning typeset) the text, but then neither did his apprentices; he was only in it for the money, of which 40 shillings had so far been paid via Calvert’s maid. Normally, the mere fact of printing was all that was needed to secure a conviction, but Twyn was tried, very unusually, under the terms of “the Old Statute” (the treason statute of 25 Edw. III), which required intention: in the words of the trial judge Sir Edward Hyde, “the Compassing and indeavouring the Death of the King ... and he rests not there, but he incites the People to Rebellion, to Dethrone Him, to raise War; And the Publishing of this Book is all one and the same, as if he had raised an Army to do this.” The Exact Narrative is thus an important source for practices, conventions, and assumptions governing print production at the time, and in this respect it is significant that six of the twelve jurors charged with reaching a verdict were book-trade professionals (including two prominent royalists, Richard Royston and Thomas Roycroft). More immediately, the role of the Exact Narrative was plainly to reinforce the exemplary, intimidating nature of Twyn’s fate. Published by L’Estrange’s bookseller and close associate Henry Brome, the work was topped and tailed by alarmist paratexts in which it is hard not to hear L’Estrange’s own voice. At a time when “above Three Hundred several Sorts of Treasonous, Seditious, Schismatical, and Scandalous Books, Libels, and Papers” had been printed since the Restoration, Twyn’s case was to serve as a conspicuous warning. It would “manifest the Insufferable Liberties of the Presse, and the Necessity of bringing it into better Order,” while also reminding miscreant printers that they could not expect to get off “upon the Plea of Trade, or Ignorance.” In a happy further touch that was pure L’Estrange, Twyn’s co-defendants (the bookseller Thomas Brewster, the printer Simon Dover, and the bookbinder Nathan Brooks, all complicit in a 1660 volume of gallows speeches by 1649 regicides) were urged to applaud “the Kings incomparable Clemency” in charging them with mere sedition, a non-capital misdemeanour.

Twyn went to his death at the Smithfield gallows on 24 February 1664, still refusing to give up the author of A Treatise of the Execution of Justice, but with an implication, now, that he knew who it was. He refused the Anglican sacrament (“he was not free to do it; He was against receiving according to the Forms of this Church”) and instead prayed privately on the ladder. He was hanged, taken down while still alive, and then—assuming his sentence was followed to the letter—castrated and disembowelled. Following dismemberment of the body, Twyn’s head was displayed on Ludgate on a spike, with his quarters on Aldersgate and other gates of the city, left there (as Voltaire might have said) to encourage the others.

Twyn appears frequently in histories of print, politics, and censorship in the Restoration era, but rarely in much detail. There are good brief accounts of his career by Geoff Kemp in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004, revised 2008) and Volume 3 of the Pickering & Chatto anthology Censorship and the Press 1580-1720 (2009), which partly reprints An Exact Narrative of the Tryal and Condemnation of John Twyn (1664). In an article about Elizabeth Calvert, Maureen Bell identifies a community of radical printers and publishers in the early Restoration—L’Estrange’s knot of “Confederate Stationers”—from whose ranks Twyn was to become the exemplary victim (Publishing History 32 (1992)). A more recent essay on Twyn’s trial by Magi Smith in Restoration 40:2 (2016) is marred by some factual errors and an implausible reading of the Exact Narrative as laced with ironies promoting freedom of the press. The authorship of Mene Tekel is investigated in Richard Greaves’s Deliver Us from Evil: The Radical Underground in Britain, 1660–1663 (1986), and the relationship between Mene Tekel and A Treatise of the Execution of Justice is established by Laura L. Knoppers in Milton Studies 48 (2008). Manuscript sources concerning Twyn’s career and both these tracts are summarized in Volumes 1 and 2 of Donald McKenzie and Maureen Bell (ed.), A Chronology and Calendar of Documents Relating to the London Book Trade 1641–1700 (2006). The implications of Twyn’s case for emerging concepts of authorship and literary property, and for the relative liability of different categories of book-trade professional, are explored from different standpoints by Joseph F. Loewenstein (his contribution to The Production of English Renaissance Culture (1994)), Jody Greene (The Trouble with Ownership: Literary Property and Authorial Liability 1660–1730 (2011)), and Grace Egan and Colin Johnston (in Ilha do Desterro 71:2 (2018)).