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A Jacobite Antiquary in Grub Street: Captain John Stevens (c.1662–1726)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2015

Martin Murphy
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Extract

Some of the multifarious literary activities of Captain John Stevens have received attention from specialists. His journal of the Irish wars of 1688–91, not published until 1912, is now generally recognised as being one of the most important primary sources for the campaign. His place in the history of travel writing, as the translator into English of classical works in Spanish and Portuguese on the history, geography and ethnology of the Iberian world, has been established by Dr. Colin Steele. His major contribution to English monastic history, as the translator and continuator of Sir Thomas Dugdale, though less well known, and deserving closer study, has been recognised by David Douglas. More recently a Portuguese scholar has paid tribute to him as one of the first writers to introduce the English reader to Portuguese history and literature. English Hispanists have acknowledged his prolific output as a translator of Spanish authors, notably Cervantes and Quevedo. More controversially, in Pat Rogers’s fascinating study of the literary underclass in London during the age of Pope and Swift, he is ignominiously—and, I shall argue, unjustly—indexed under the heading ‘Dunces and their allies’.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , October 1999 , pp. 437 - 454
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 1973

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References

Notes

1 Simms, J. G., Jacobite Ireland (1969), p. 67 Google Scholar; Steele, Colin, English Interpreters of the Iberian New World, from Parchas to Stevens (Oxford: Dolphin Book Company, 1975)Google Scholar; Douglas, David, English Scholars, 1660–1730 (1951), pp. 39–4 Google Scholar; Serra, Pedro, ‘ The Government of a Wife a Carta de Guia de Casados em Inglaterra nos finais do século XVII’, Revista da Biblioteca Nacional, 1–2 (Lisbon, 1995), pp. 35–93 Google Scholar; Rogers, Pat, Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture (1972), 201, 303 Google Scholar, and index.

2 Singer, Samuel W. (ed.), The Correspondence of Henry Hyde, Earl of Clarendon (1828), vol. 1, p. 653 Google Scholar; vol. 2, pp. 45, 64–65.

3 CRS Records Series, vol. 38 (1941), p. xxix. The marriage register of the royal chapel (ibidem, p. 24) records Richard Stevens, junior, and his sister Catherine as witnesses to the marriage of Mary Anne Stevens to Antonio Soltrain on 18 April 1676. There is no record of any member of the family in the chapel’s unpublished baptismal register (copy in AAW), which begins in July 1663.

4 Stevens, John, A New Spanish and English Dictionary (1706)Google Scholar, alv.

5 List of Boys at St Gregory’s (Downside Abbey, 1972), p. 4 (Stevens is listed as no. 163); Birt, Norbert, History of Downside School (1902), p. 335.Google Scholar

6 Lunn, David, The English Benedictines, 1540–1688 (1980), pp. 190–91.Google Scholar

7 His petition ‘for the place of Mr Haughton, accountant of the Excise, deceased’, PRO T 4/4/16.

8 BL Lansdowne MS 828, ff.11–12; Journal of John Stevens (1912), pp. 8, 19.

9 Preface to Manuel de Faria y Sousa, The Portuguese Asia (1695).

10 Journal (1912), p. 3.

11 Swift, Jonathan, A Complete Collection of genteel and ingenious Conversation (1738), pp. lxvii, 118 Google Scholar. The ‘compliment’ is all the more deadly for coming from Simon Wagstaff, Swift’s imaginary hack, who embodies Grub Street dulness. Stevens’s translation of Quixote was among Swift’s books auctioned after his death: see Williams, Harold, Dean Swift’s Library (1932)Google Scholar, no. 476.

12 The interpolations (in the original English) are reprinted in Pedro Serra, art. cit. (see note 1), pp. 79–93.

13 BL Sloane MS 3093, f.lr (Williams, R. H., Revue de Litterature Comparée, 16 (1936), p. 148)Google Scholar.

14 Dedication and preface to The History of… Don Quixote (1706).

15 BL Sloane MS 3093 f.3v (R. H. Williams, RLC vol. 16, 1936, p. 152).

16 Holmes, Geoffrey, ‘The Sacheverell Riots: the Church and the Crowd in early 18th century London’, in Politics, Religion and Society in England, 1649–1742 (1986), pp. 217–247.Google Scholar Holmes quotes from A True List of the Names of those Persons committed to the several Goals [sic] &c, 1710. The names include John Berkeley, gent., of Spetchley, Worcs, and a certain John Stevens, who was overheard at the Lamb Inn, Clement Lane, to vow that ‘he would head a mobb of ten thousand men’ to rescue Sacheverell from Parliament. Could this be the Captain? He was not a lover of either mobs or inns.

17 Honoré, J., ‘Charles Gildon, rédacteur du British Mercury, 1711–12’, Études Anglaises, 1962, pp. 347–64 Google Scholar. Gildon was a Catholic by birth and had been educated at Douay College, but by this time had lapsed into Deism.

18 British Mercury of 11 June 1715.

19 Sun Insurance Office, General Committee Minute Books, vol. 1, 1709/10–1715 (Guildhall Library, London, L.64.9). An entry of 26 October 1712 records that Stevens was called in to explain ‘some expressions in the news which were taken ill by some persons’, and that he promised to prevent any further suspicions arising.

20 See Douglas, David, ‘William Dugdale: the “Grand Plagiary’”, History, vol. 20 (1935), p. 193.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 The History of the Ancient Abbies &c, vol. 1 (1722), pp. 212–215 (learned Benedictines); vol. 2 (1723), appendix, pp. 29–34 (EBC briefs and bull). It is notable that ‘the Benedictine College of Douay’ is added on the title page of Stevens’s Abridgment to the list of libraries cited by Dugdale.

22 History of the Ancient Abbies, vol. 1, pp. 106–08 (account of the execution of Thomas Bullaker, Henry Heath, Francis Bell, Martin Woodcock and Walter Coleman) and p. vi (Stevens’s defence). There is some mild criticism of Stevens in the anonymous Memoirs of the Antiquities of Great Britain relating to the Reformation (London; H. Tracy, 1723). The author of this slight duodecimo volume—a mouse in comparison with Stevens’s mountain—detected ‘some spot of guilt’ in him for casting aspersions on Bishop Burnet, who had told some truths about the monasteries ‘which the nature of Bigotry could not stomach’.

23 Parry, Graham, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1995), p. 226.Google Scholar

24 Hearne’s Collections, vol. 8 (Oxford Historical Society, 1907), pp. 267–68 (entry of 15 September 1724). Though Hearne disapproved of Stevens’s publication of his documents in English translation, rather than in the original Latin, he considered him to be ‘an honest man’, noting with satisfaction that ‘he is pleased to speak very honourably of me’. See Collections, vol. 7 (1906), p. 344; vol. 8 (1907), pp. 35–36.

25 The Flying-Post: or, The Weekly Medley, 8 February 1729. Its editors were James Moore Smith and James Ralph. The latter (see the entry in DNB) was among those satirised in Pope’s Dunciad (1728). John Stevens’s death was reported in Boyer’s Political State of Great Britain (1726), p. 411.

26 Letter of 5 April 1727 (BL Sloane MS 4048, f.277). Catherine Stevens recalled that John, had met Sir Hans at the house of Charles Killigrew, ‘whose memory I shall always esteem for the Favours he bistowed on my Brother’. For her own literary remains, see Appendix 2.

27 The Royal Treasury of England (1725), p. 318.