A History of three Judges of King Charles I, Major-General Whalley, Major-General Goffe, and Colonel Dixwell: Who at the restoration, 1660, Fled to America and Were Secreted and Concealed in Massachusetts and Connecticut, for Nearly Thirty years…
first edition
1794. · Hartford:
by Stiles, Ezra.
12mo, period full calf, red morocco label on spine, illustrated with engraved portrait frontispiece, and 8 plates and maps, 3 folding, errata mounted on bottom of last page, 357 pp. Binding rubbed and somewhat worn, front free endpaper chipped, 19th century newspaper clipping pasted to endpapers, bookplates on front free endpaper and verso of final text leaf, one plate with short tear and creasing from improper folding, frontispiece with a scrape on image, foxing and aging throughout. Despite these faults, a respectable copy.This work is a history of the three judges that had Charles I beheaded in 1649. The author, Ezra Stiles (1727-1795), was a Congregational minister, who would become the president of Yale University around 1778, and would hold that post until his death in 1795. While Stiles was a strong believer in religious and political freedom, and intellectually supported the American Revolution, he did some more as a spectator than as a participant. He did dabble in the sciences, particularly, climatology and demography. The present copy has eight plates in addition to the frontispiece. Like most copies, plate seven is not present; Evans suggests that there is no plate seven, and that the plates are numbered I-IX, which is the case in this copy. ANB. Evans 27743. (Inventory #: 100913)