[BRUCE, John.]

Report on the arrangements which were made, for the internal defence of these kingdoms, when Spain, by its armada, projected the invasion and conquest of England; and application of the wise proceedings of our ancestors, to the present crisis of public safety.

[London, printed by A. Strahan, 1798.] 8vo (235 x 150 mm), pp. [iv], 97, [1, blank], [14], cccxxviii, with a folding plan of the Thames; original marbled boards; worn; spine splitting and slightly chipped. First edition. A report commissioned by Henry Dundas, as secretary of state for war, to encourage the preparation of defences against French invasion. It compares the invasion threat of 1798 to that of the Spanish Armada in 1588, noting that ‘Though then, the menaced evil, in the end of the sixteenth, was less, in degree, than it is in the end of the eighteenth century, it is precisely the same in kind; – hence the measures adopted in the one period, having experience and success to recommend them, may furnish useful lessons in the other’ (p. 2). The suggestions recommended in the report eventually formed the basis of Pitt’s measures for the provisional cavalry and the army of the reserve.The map of the Thames River between Tilbury and Lambeth was originally published in Petruccio Ubaldini’s Expeditionis Hispanorum in Angliam vera descriptio (STC 24481.a), and is thought to have been reproduced by John Pine as the tapestry hangings of the House of Lords in 1739. Bruce’s engraving was based on a 1738 drawing taken from the original parchment by Joseph Ames.The report was written and is signed by John Bruce, whose manuscript corrections can be found throughout the text. Bruce, a professor of logic at Edinburgh from 1778 to 1792 and a fellow of the royal societies of Edinburgh, London, and Göttingen, accompanied Henry Dundas’s son, Robert, on a continental journey in 1786. After which ‘Dundas continued to employ Bruce to lend academic weight to his pragmatic policies, noting that the professor’s sole joy was to be “buried in old records”. The duties were formalized in an official position as historiographer to the East India Company in 1793’ (Oxford DNB). During this time he wrote a number of reports for Dundas on a variety of subjects from the balance of power in Europe in 1796 to this report on the defences of Britain against foreign invasion in 1798. His efforts on Dundas’s behalf were rewarded in 1809 when he was brought in for Mitchell by Sir Christopher Hawkins. Bruce served in the House of Commons until his retirement in 1814.The NMM bibliography refers to an engraved frontispiece but no mention of this is made in the collations of other libraries, including Harvard and the British Library, nor does ESTC call for it.Goldsmiths 17427; NMM V 220.

• GBP 800.00 > autres monnaies
• Commande nro.: T2169

• libraire: Bernard Quaritch Ltd. (GREAT BRITAIN)