Richard Rowlands

Richard Verstegan, born Richard Rowlands (c. 1550 – 1640), was an Anglo-Dutch antiquary, publisher, humorist and translator. Verstegan was born in East London the son of a cooper; his grandfather, Theodore Roland Verstegen, was a refugee from Guelders who arrived in England around the year 1500.

Biography

Under the patronym Rowlaunde, Richard went to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1564, where he may have studied early English history and the Anglo-Saxon language. Having become a Catholic, he left the university without a degree to avoid swearing the Oath of Supremacy. Thereafter he was indentured to a goldsmith, and in 1574 became a freeman of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths. In 1576 he published a guidebook to Western Europe, translated from German, entitled The Post of the World.

At the end of 1581 he secretly printed an account of the execution of Edmund Campion but was discovered and 'being apprehended, brake out of England'. In exile he resumed the surname of Verstegen (Anglicized Verstegan). While in Paris he was briefly imprisoned at the insistence of the English Ambassador; in Rome, he was the recipient of a short-lived pension from the pope. In both of these cities he published accounts of the suffering of priests in England.

In 1585 or 1586 he moved to Antwerp, and set up in business as a publisher and engraver, an intelligencer, and a smuggler of books and people. From 1617 to about 1630 Verstegan was a prolific writer in Dutch, producing epigrams, characters, jestbooks, polemics. He also penned journalistic commentaries, satires and editorials for the Nieuwe Tijdinghen (New Tidings) printed in Antwerp by Abraham Verhoeven from 1620 to 1629.[1] This makes him one of the earliest identifiable newspaper journalists in Europe. He spent the rest of his long life in Antwerp, dying there in 1640.

Works

Plate from Theatrum Crudelitatum haereticorum nostri temporis (1587), depicting reported Protestant atrocities.

The verses on the defeat of the Irish rebels under Tyrone, entitled England's Joy, by R. R. (1601), have mistakenly been attributed to him.

References

  1. ↑ Paul Arblaster, From Ghent to Aix: How They Brought the News in the Habsburg Netherlands (Leiden and Boston, 2014), pp. 92-93. Partial view on Google Books.
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