An Arrow Against All Tyrants: Introduction by Ian Gadd

In 1646, imprisoned in Newgate Gaol in London, Richard Overton penned a political pamphlet which asserted the inalienable rights of the individual.’No man has power over my rights and liberties, and I over no man’s... For by natural birth all men are equally and alike born to like propriety, liberty and freedom.’Reprinted here is Overton’s bold, declamatory pamphlet, with spellings and layout standardised for a modern audience to aid legibility and understanding. The text is introduced by Ian Gadd, Professor of English Literature at Bath Spa University.

Richard Overton (fl. 1640-1664) was an English pamphleteer and Leveller during the Civil War and Interregnum (England). Overton may have spent part of his early life in Holland. Whatever his origins, he is known to have begun publishing anonymous attacks on bishops about the time of the opening of the Long Parliament, together with some pungent verse satires, like Lambeth Fayre and Articles of High Treason against Cheapside Cross, 1642. Overton turned next to theology, and wrote an anonymous tract during the civil war on Man's Mortality, which made a great stir. On 26 August 1644 the House of Commons, on the petition of the Stationers' Company, ordered that the authors, printers, and publishers of the pamphlets against the immortality of the soul and concerning divorce should be diligently inquired for, thus coupling Overton with Milton as the most dangerous of heretics. Meanwhile, Overton had commenced a violent onslaught against the Westminster assembly, under the pseudonym of "Martin Marpriest". The series of tracts he issued under this name, of which the chief are The Arraignment of Mr. Persecution, Martin's Echo, and A Sacred Synodical Decretal, were published clandestinely in 1646. Prynne denounced them to parliament as the quintessence of scurrility and blasphemy demanding the punishment of the writer, whom he supposed to be Henry Robinson. In 1646 Overton, who had been concerned in printing some of Lilburne's pamphlets, took up his case against the Lords, and published An Alarum to the House of Lords against their Insolent Usurpation of the common Liberties and Rights of this Nation. He was arrested by order of the house on 11 August 1646 and was committed to Newgate. Yet in spite of his confinement, he contrived to publish a narrative of his arrest, entitled A Defiance against all Arbitrary Usurpations, and a still more violent attack on the peers, called An Arrow shot from the Prison of Newgate into the Prerogative Bowels of the Arbitrary House of Lords. This imprisonment did not diminish Overton's democratic zeal. He had a great share in promoting the petition of the London levellers on 11 September 1648. He also presented to Fairfax on 28 December 1648 the Plea for Common Right and Freedom. On 28 March 1649 he was arrested, with Lilburne and two other leaders of the Levellers, as one of the authors of England's new Chains Discovered. A refusal to acknowledge the authority of the Council of State or to answer their questions, caused his committal to the Tower. In conjunction with three fellow-prisoners he issued on 1 May 1649 the Agreement of the Free People of England, followed on 14 April by a pamphlet denying the charge that they sought to overthrow property and social order. On his own account he published on 2 July 1649 a Defiance to the government. The failure of the government to obtain a verdict against Lilburne involved the release of his associates, and on 8 November Overton's liberation was arranged. The only condition was that he should take the engagement to be faithful to the Commonwealth, which he probably had no hesitation in doing. In September 1654 Overton proposed to turn spy, and so offered his services to Thurloe for the discovery of plots against the Lord Protector's government. In the following spring he was implicated in the projected rising of the Levellers, and fled to Flanders in company with Lieutenant-colonel Sexby. There, he applied to Charles II, and received a royal commission. Overton was again in prison in England in 1659, and his arrest was ordered on 22 October 1663, for apparently printing something against the government of Charles II. Source: Wikipedia

Ian Gadd is a Professor of English Literature at Bath Spa University. He specialises in the literature and history of the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. He considers himself to be both a bibliographer and book historian. He is particularly interested in the ways in which printed texts were produced and circulated, and the economics of the early modern English book trade as well as the critical editing of literary and non-literary works from that period. He also has broader research interests in the cultural history of early modern London. Ian co-edited Jonathan Swift's _English Political writings, 1711-14_ (Cambridge University Press, 2008) as part of a new critical edition of Swift's complete works; in 2007, he was made Textual Advisor to this project, and in 2009, General Editor. He is co-editing three further volumes in the series. He edited volume one of a new four-volume _The History of Oxford University Press_, under the general editorship of Professor Simon Eliot, the first three volumes of which were published in November 2013. His PhD was on the history of the Stationers' Company, and he has written several articles on the Company's activities. He is currently co-editing an edition of a Company record, Liber A, with Peter Blayney. With Dr Giles Bergel, he is working on a digital project to make the Stationers' Register searchable. Between 2008 and 2010 he collaborated with Professor Gabriel Egan on a project to create a Virtual Printing Press. He has published articles on London history and the English book trade, and has co-edited a collection of essays on the important sixteenth-century London figure, John Stow; he has also co-edited two collections of essays on guilds in the early modern period. Ian has co-organised international conferences at Bath Spa, supervised to successful completion PhD students working on orality, literacy and the early modern stage, and editing early modern plays. Currently, he is supervising a PhD on the writer William Hayley. He has established links with Bath Central Library, Bath University Library, the Bodleian Library, the British Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Stationers' Company in order to draw on their collections for research-related teaching.