Preface

Marchamont Nedham was a journalist, one of the very first and most distinguished members of a breed in his day entirely new to the world. He was born in August 1620 at Burford in Gloucestershire into a genteel family of modest means. He studied at All Souls College at a time when that now venerable institution actually had students, and he took his bachelor of arts from the University of Oxford in 1637. That year or the next, he accepted a position as an usher at Merchant Taylor's School in London, and in 1640 he successfully sought better remunerated employment as an underclerk at Gray's Inn. Three years thereafter, as internecine strife tore England apart and effective censorship fell into abeyance, Marchamont Nedham discovered his true métier. He was, then, barely twenty-three years in age.

Nedham was an entertainer of sorts and a time-server – “a jack of all sides,” as one contemporary critic put it, “transcendently gifted in opprobrious and treasonable Droll.” In the course of a long and checkered career – stretching from early in the English Civil War in 1643 to a time shortly before his death in 1678, when the Exclusion Crisis was just getting underway – he displayed a political and moral flexibility and a lust for lucre exceeded only by his talent.