Unrecorded, and otherwise unknown, ‘Twentieth Edition’ of the prayers of the staunchly royalist Anne Douglas, saviour of Charles I’s daughter Princess Henrietta.
Bound in contemporary sheepskin, blind panels to boards and horizontal lines to spine. The binding is sound with cracking to the leather over the outer hinges; speckled edges to text block. Prayers inscribed on front pastedown by ‘Tho[ma]s Scotman’ in an eighteenth century hand and again on verso of title page and A4v, B6-B7v, this last suggesting a minister’s hand: ‘The Collects of our Church furnish us with the most excellent prayers on every occasion...’ Collates complete A1-G12v; no endpaper at the front of the book but one to the rear with an eighteenth century pencil portrait drawing of a man in a full bottomed wig. Some toning to the paper stock but otherwise a very good of this tiny 24mo edition. This is also the only occasion when the original bookseller, Royston, put out the work to be printed by Heptinstall.
Anne Douglas’s prayers survive in only half a dozen editions from the two dozen or so that were produced, mostly in just a handful of copies for each edition following on from first publication in 1666. We can find no record of this edition which seems to be the only extant appearance of the text between the 16th edition of 1696 and a Dublin edition of 1723. This edition combines her prayers for morning, afternoon, evening, for journeys, times of danger, during illness and after recovery, for confession and pardon, as well as for before and after communion. In addition there are prayers for church and country and for divine guidance in the words of Henry Hammond (1605–1660). Anne Douglas (1610-1654) was an English noblewoman, famed for her bravery and loyalty to the throne. Despite joining the royal family in exile during the Civil War she refused to convert to Catholicism, moving to Scotland where she died in 1654. The book is jointly dedicated to the Scottish noblewoman, her daughter Lady Anne Douglas, Countess Marischal.
