INTRODUCTION

Early in 1660, John Starkey, bookseller at the Mitre, near St Pauls, put Lawson's Politica on the market. George Thomason acquired his copy in May, the month in which the final terms for the return of Charles II were being worked out, and in which the twilight power of the Presbyterians in the Convention Parliament finally guttered.

The Politica, then, appeared towards the end of that brief and explosive recrudescence of political speculation associated with the demise of the Commonwealth and the Restoration of the Stuarts. Starkey was responsible for six other volumes in 1660; Tyton could boast some twenty-six, more than double his output for 1657 when he sold Lawson's Examination. But these were both small fish. The extraordinary and concentrated bulk of political works, ranging from bawdy verse and broadside to heavy tome, itself indicates a widespread awareness of a distinct crisis of settlement. Yet hitherto, Lawson's Politica has been associated with the last troubled months of Oliver Cromwell's regime. It has been thought to have been written in 1657 around the very time when Lawson's patron was licking his wounds after rejection from Cromwell's last Parliament, a very different context.

Franklin suggests that the work may have been conceived even earlier, possibly growing from a lost Engagement tract, which he has tentatively identified as Conscience Puzzled (1650).