The soveraigne power of Parliaments and kingdomes: divided into fovre parts together with an appendix …

London: Michael Sparke Senior, 1643. FIRST EDITION. Complete and continuous despite pagination errors. General title (misbound between A2 and A3) and separate titles to each of the four parts. Woodcut initials, head- and tailpieces. Contemporary calf, rebacked and re-cornered, spine label; book label appears to have been removed from paste-down. First edition. Prynne, a Puritan, wrote extensively against the introduction of “papist” policies into the government during the English Civil Wars. In Soveraigne power, he argues that only the Parliament has supreme control over the law of the land, and he intends to “eternally silence ignorant, the most malicious Tongues and Pennes of all Royalists, &c. Anti-Parliamentary Malignants.” Not difficult to see which side of the aisle Prynne occupied.

Prynne (1600–1669) was a prolific pamphleteer and attorney who wrote on numerous subjects from theater to theology and published about 200 books and pamphlets during his lifetime.