Elizabeth Calvert < d.1674/75: I have always enjoyed history, and especially the religious world of seventeenth-century England, particularly its Parliamentarian and Nonconformist history. Over the years, while working with old Particular Baptist writings and bringing some of them back into print, I began noticing the same bookseller’s name appearing with surprising regularity: Giles Calvert. Samuel Richardson was one of the names that first made the connection interesting to me. Richardson belonged to the Particular Baptist world, but Calvert’s publishing interests reached much farther than that. His shop became associated with an extraordinary mixture of radical, dissenting, and nonconformist literature during one of the most unsettled periods in English history.
The title pages often tell us where to find him: “at the Sign of the Black-spread-Eagle, at the west-end of Pauls.” That was more than decorative language. In seventeenth-century London, before numbered street addresses had become the norm, shops were often known by their signs. The Black Spread Eagle was the sign hanging over Giles Calvert’s bookshop near the west end of St. Paul’s Cathedral, at the center of London’s bookselling world. It was a real place, filled with books and pamphlets, authors and customers, arguments and ideas.
Giles Calvert deserves at least a brief introduction of his own, because the business Elizabeth eventually inherited had already become something far more than an ordinary London bookshop. He had entered the London book trade as a young man and by the 1640s and 1650s had become closely associated with radical religious and political publishing. His list crossed a remarkable range of groups and movements: Quakers, Baptists, Anabaptists, Diggers, Ranters, and other dissenting voices.
A few of the books he published are writings I have personally spent time restoring and bringing back into print. Thomas Collier appears repeatedly in Calvert’s catalogue, including The Exaltation of Christ in the Days of the Gospel and The Marrow of Christianity, both printed for Calvert in the 1640s. John Saltmarsh was another important name connected with the shop. Calvert published Free-Grace: Or, The Flowings of Christ’s Blood Freely to Sinners in 1645 and continued issuing it in subsequent editions, along with Sparkles of Glory, or Some Beams of the Morning-Star. Saltmarsh also contributed the prefatory epistle to Collier’s The Marrow of Christianity. For several years Calvert was one of Saltmarsh’s regular London booksellers and publishers.
That helps explain the character of the Black Spread Eagle itself. It was not the bookshop of one tidy religious party. It stood at the intersection of Baptists, Quakers, political radicals, and other Nonconformists whose writings were often unwelcome to church and state alike. Giles repeatedly found himself in difficulty with the authorities for what he published, and by the Restoration of the King his name was already familiar to those charged with controlling the press.
For years I had read that old bookseller’s address on the title pages of the old writings I was restoring, without giving much thought to the actual shop behind it. Eventually I began wondering what it would have been like to step inside. And then I discovered that the more interesting story may not belong to Giles alone.
Giles Calvert died in 1663. His widow Elizabeth carried on. For roughly another decade, until her own death in 1674 or early 1675, Elizabeth remained in the book trade. Before long her name began appearing not only on books, but in warrants, interrogations, prison records, confiscations, and the papers of the Restoration government. That is where her story really begins.
We do not know what Elizabeth Calvert looked like. We do not know when she was born, and we are not even certain of her maiden name. No diary has survived to tell us what she thought as she opened her little bookshop each morning. Yet during the first years of the Restoration, the government of Charles II came to know her remarkably well. Her name appears in warrants, prison records, interrogations and reports. Again and again the authorities searched for the books that passed through her hands, carried her off to prison, and attempted to discover who stood behind the literature she was selling. In trying to silence Elizabeth Calvert, they inadvertently left us much of what remains of her story.
Elizabeth’s problems with the authorities had begun before Giles died. The surviving records show her already involved while he was still alive, and by 1661 she had been arrested and imprisoned for several months in connection with prohibited literature. When questioned, she portrayed herself as largely unfamiliar with the book trade and as someone simply acting under her husband’s direction. Whatever the truth of that defense, the episode makes one thing clear: long before she took over the business, Elizabeth had already drawn the attention of those responsible for policing the press.
By 1663 the risks surrounding the Calvert business had become deadly. That year the authorities discovered an incendiary tract being printed by John Twyn, a work so openly hostile to the restored monarchy that the investigation became a treason case. The trail led directly toward the Calvert circle. Elizabeth’s son Nathaniel and an apprentice were arrested, and Elizabeth herself disappeared from the authorities for a time before being taken into custody in early 1664. Twyn ultimately paid for the affair with his life. Elizabeth escaped prosecution, but she remained imprisoned until that spring, when events within her own family brought another loss.
Elizabeth had already lost Giles the previous summer. Then, while she was still in custody in the spring of 1664, her son Nathaniel died as well, and she was released in connection with his burial. She was now a widow, one son was gone, another was still a child, and the business Giles had left behind had been battered by arrests, imprisonment, debt, and years of official scrutiny. There would have been every reason to retreat quietly from it all. But for some reason she did not.
Elizabeth continued the business under circumstances that would have discouraged almost anyone. The years immediately following Giles’s death were pretty quiet in terms of known publications, perhaps in part because the family’s finances had been drained by repeated arrests and imprisonments. Then, in 1666, the Great Fire swept through the heart of London and destroyed the Black Spread Eagle at St. Paul’s. Elizabeth moved the business first to Little Britain and later to the Barbican, a district just north of the old City walls, where the familiar sign appeared again. The shop had changed locations, but the trade had not ended. In fact, the years after the Fire would become some of the most active of her career.
One particularly intriguing episode came in August 1667, when the authorities discovered an advertisement for a work entitled A Trumpet Blown in Sion, Sounding an Alarm in God’s Holy Mountain, which was being sold at Elizabeth Calvert’s Black Spread Eagle. The investigation eventually led to her arrest. One historian later noted that Benjamin Keach published A Trumpet Blown in Zion, or an Alarm in God’s Holy Mountain in 1694, with an almost identical title, and suggested that it may have been a later version of the work sold by Elizabeth nearly thirty years earlier. The connection is pretty interesting, especially since Keach belonged to the Baptist world with which the Calverts already had ties, but the authorship of the earlier work remains unresolved. What the episode does show clearly is that Elizabeth’s shop remained deeply involved in the circulation of controversial religious literature long after Giles was gone.
The years that followed continued much as they had begun. Elizabeth remained under the watchful eye of the authorities, was arrested and imprisoned more than once, and continued dealing in literature that challenged the religious and political settlement of the Restoration. At one point a secret press associated with her was discovered in Southwark and seized. She was imprisoned again for selling prohibited material, petitioned for release, and promised to avoid such books in the future. Yet the promise did not mark the end of her involvement. In 1671 she was finally convicted of seditious publishing and fined twenty marks, a hefty penalty. Even then, the surviving records suggest a woman who proved remarkably difficult for the authorities either to restrain or to remove from the trade.
It would be easy, reading these records, to see only the troublesome bookseller whom the government could never quite suppress. But behind the warrants and prison petitions was also a widow who had buried a husband and children, endured repeated imprisonment, watched her shop disappear in the Great Fire, struggled with debts, and somehow continued returning to the trade. Her own religious identity is much harder to define. The Calvert family moved through a remarkably tangled world of political and religious dissent: Giles had been closely involved with early Quaker publishing, his sister Martha Simmonds became deeply connected with that movement, and Elizabeth herself appears in Quaker correspondence. Yet her relationship with the Quakers seems to have cooled, and the books she continued to sell and publish ranged well beyond any single denomination. Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers, and other Nonconformists all passed through the world of the Black Spread Eagle. Perhaps that is why one small instruction in Elizabeth’s will is especially interesting. When she made it in October 1674, describing herself as “sick of body but of perfect memory and understanding,” she asked that her body be “decently buryed amongst the Baptists.” It does not tell us everything we might like to know about her faith, but it tells us enough to make us wonder.
It is strange, in a way, that we know far more about the books Elizabeth Calvert was accused of selling than we know about Elizabeth Calvert herself. Much of what survives of her life remains only because the authorities kept trying to stop her. Yet what survives is enough to show a woman who simply kept going, despite imprisonment, loss, fire, debt, and repeated trouble with the authorities. For someone who spent so many years putting other people’s convictions into print, Elizabeth left remarkably few words of her own. The records tell us what she endured and what she continued to do, but they leave just enough silence around her to keep us wondering who she really was.
And maybe that is where we should leave her, not so easily defined, reduced to a simple label, or forced into some tidy religious category, but still standing somewhere behind the Black Spread Eagle, surrounded by books the authorities wished had never been printed. MPJ
Note: This brief biographical sketch has been drawn from a number of historical and bibliographical studies, especially Richard L. Greaves and Robert Zaller, Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals in the Seventeenth Century, vol. 1, A–F; Richard L. Greaves, Enemies Under His Feet: Radicals and Nonconformists in Britain, 1664–1677; Maureen Bell’s studies of Elizabeth Calvert and the Restoration book trade; and A. E. Terry, Giles Calvert: Mid-Seventeenth-Century English Bookseller and Publisher.