Dissenting printers: the intractable men and women of a seventeenth-century Quaker press

The printer Andrew Sowle learned his trade during Cromwell’s commonwealth, and practised it under the Stuart restoration. On a hidden press he printed Quaker tracts, illicitly. He survived repeated raids and became the Friends’ chief printer and a friend of William Penn. He raised a new generation of printers, most of whom became caught up in the politics of their time. His first apprentice fled to Amsterdam after printing the manifesto of the Duke of Monmouth’s doomed rebellion against James II, and may have been William of Orange’s campaign printer three years later. One daughter married another apprentice and became notorious for press piracy. Another emigrated to America with her husband, also an ex-apprentice, where they set up the first press in Philadelphia and then fell out with the Quaker leadership there. Andrew’s third daughter was herself apprenticed to him as a practical printer, and ran the press in London for over fifty years. A thread of stubborn independence runs through this tribe of printers, who can be tracked through what they published and also in the traces of their collisions with authority.