The Paper Chase

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In the summer of 1705, a masked woman knocked on the door of David Edwards's London workshop. She did not leave her name, only a package and a coded means of identifying her courie r. Edwards was a Welsh printer working in the dark confines of Nevill's Alley, outside the city walls. The package was an illegal, anonymous pamphlet: The Memorial of the Church of England. The argument it proposed threatened to topple the government, but sedition sold well in the coffeehouses of Fleet Street and the woman promised protection. Edwards swiftly set about printing and surreptitiously distributing the pamphlet. Parliament was soon in turmoil and government minister Robert Harley launched a hunt for all those involved. Joseph Hone shows us a nation in crisis through the story of a single incendiary document. Show more