Page:The English Historical Review Volume 36.djvu/103

 96 THE AUTHORSHIP OF TOWNSHEND'S January The Authorship of Townshend' s ' Historical Collections ' Little is known of Hay ward Townshend. He was a member of parliament for Bishop's Castle, Shropshire, in 1597 and 1601 ; and he had died by the year 1623. 1 In 1680 there appeared what ostensibly was a posthumous work of his, entitled Historical Collections : or An exact Account of the Proceedings of the Four last Parliaments of Q. Elizabeth. . . Faithfully and Laboriously Collected, By Heywood Townshend Esq; a Member in those Parliaments. . . ; and this was reprinted in 1682, along with Sir William Monson's description of the wars with Spain, under the title of Megalopsychy. From the Historical Collections pro- ceeds Townshend's fame and his place in the Dictionary of National Biography. That the authorship of the book is, however, fictitious, in part at least, one first suspects because of two editorial insertions, the one a passage in the preface, where amongst the journals which the volume contains, particular praise is claimed for ' the very last. . ., collected by M r Townshend a worthy Member in that Session ', 2 and the other a sub-heading restricted to this last journal, ' Collected by M r Hey ward Townshend, one of the Members of the said House '. 3 When the work is analysed, its extraordinary resemblance to • D'Ewes' Journals makes confirmation of the suspicion possible. Of the eight journals which the Historical Collections contain, all but two, the lords' journal of 1597/8 and the commons' journal of 1601, are akin to the journals in D'Ewes' collection. In the first place they follow the practice which he adopted of grouping together the readings of two or more bills, only one or two of which are named, as in the case of an entry on 13 December 1597, which reads, ' six Bills had each of them one reading ; of which the last being the Bill for the true making of Daggers,. . . was read the second time. . . .' 4 Identical grouping is found in both works, in the number and in the titles of bills entered ; and as the author of Historical Collections abandoned the conven- tion in the two exceptional journals of 1597/8 and 1601, it is evident that he copied and did not invent it. It is, in fact, one of several devices distinctive of D'Ewes, and I have examined all the sources of his Journals without finding it elsewhere. This, however, is only one point of resemblance. It would be possible to cite, from each of the six journals, passages that are editorial redactions or comments, and yet are common to both compilations. Thus an introductory paragraph to D'Ewes' 1 Diet, of Nat. Biogr. lvii. 127; The Visitation of Shropshire. . . in. . . 1623 (Har- leian Soc), 465 ; Wood, Athenae Ozon. i. 724. 2 Historical Collections, preface. 3 Ibid. p. 173. 4 D'Ewes' Journals, p. 572 b; Historical Collections, p. 115.