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A Proper Answer to a late scurrilous Libel, entitled, an Apology for the Conduct of a late celebrated second-rate Minister. By the Author of the Jacobite’s Journal … The second Edition.

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Second edition, scarce, published only a week after the first on 2 January 1748, of Fielding’s last political pamphlet; this copy from the library of the Walpole family at Wolterton Hall, Norfolk.

In April 1746 the prominent Whig politician Thomas Winnington had died suddenly of a cold; a year and a half later a mischievous pamphleteer issued An Apology for the Conduct of a late celebrated second-rate Minister, in which ‘Winnington’ flaunted his Jacobitism and claimed that most Whig leaders since the Revolution of 1688 had actually been secret Jacobites. ‘The pamphlet created a sensation. Throughout the winter it was the talk of everybody. Winnington’s executors offered a reward of fifty pounds for the discovery of the author, but he was not found’ (Cross), and a number of pamphlets were published in response. After reading one of these, Fielding entered the fray in the current work, which defended the current government from the charge, and accused the author of the Apology of ‘Impudence and Falsehood’; this exposed him in turn to the pamphleteers, who suggested that he must also be a Jacobite, and that he was also the author of the original Apology.

Largely from the same setting of type as the first edition, with a few page numbers reset and different press figures, this second edition is rarer than the first, with only one copy in the UK in ESTC (NLS).

ESTC T178892; Cross III, p. 315.