A compleat history of the life and raigne of King Charles from his cradle to his grave.

Collected and written by William Sanderson Esq. London : Printed for Humphrey Moseley, Richard Tomlin’s, and George Sawbridge, 1658. Small thick folio (285 x 190 mm), nineteenth-century full calf, boards with double gilt rule, spine in compartments decorated in gilt and with contrasting leather title label lettered in gilt (spine frayed at head, a trifle worn along the outer joints); all edges gilt; marbled endpapers, front pastedown with armorial bookplate of Henry Cunliffe Armiger; two frontispiece portraits of Sanderson and King Charles I engraved by Faithorne, pp. [12], 408, [24], 409-1149, [15]; occasional early marginalia, but clean and crisp throughout, an excellent copy with both portraits present.

‘An important example of the early attempts by royalists to manage the memory of the martyred king, and therefore a significant work in the development of later seventeenth-century history writing, which was notably more controversial, even polemical, than that of the pre-civil war decades’ (ONDB).

Wing, S646