1645: Ergot Drake, Domus Draconis
To His Most Excellent Majesty
With the humblest submission of hand and heart, I take boldness to address a matter that touches not only upon private injury but upon the repute of those houses whose faith Your Majesty has known these many years. I speak of Master Nicholas Culpeper’s recently printed volume—styled The English Herbal—in which divers portions of prose, apothegms, and experiment are taken word for word from a tract attributed falsely to another source, though first composed and circulated from my own press within Domus Draconis.
I would make no noise of this business, were it not that his theft proceeds beneath a mantle of public usefulness, and thus appears as virtue rather than defalcation. My counsellors urge that formal remedy be sought in law: to declare the property of invention as zealously guarded as that of estate. Yet, Sire, the courts are slow, and I, being a woman, stand in every proceeding as curiosity rather than complainant. Therefore I turn instead to justice’s living image—Your Majesty himself.
The injury is twofold. Firstly, to my name, which was hitherto kept in that delicate shade between commerce and charity, neither professing to sell knowledge nor to hoard it. Secondly, to the house of Mallard, from whose line I am maternally descended and whose arms my husband bears quartered. It will not advantage Your Majesty’s servants that a family loyal since Bosworth should appear to claim profits from what was their generosity.
I enclose, under separate seal, the passages in question: those concerning the distillate of rue and clary wine, my own observations on the humours of the fair sex, and the advice that bleeding in spring should be undertaken only before new moon. These, being known to my circle these twenty years, now parade in print under Mr. Culpeper’s name, his annotations giving them the air of discovery.
My chief fear is not of ridicule, nor of loss, but of silence—that the record of a lady’s thought be erased by the casual industry of a political empiric. I seek, therefore, Your Majesty’s gracious notice, that he may be restrained to amend his next edition with acknowledgment, or else to withdraw the offending leaves. Such mediation would rescue both our reputations: his from suspicion of vulgar piracy, mine from the unbecoming posture of clamorous complaint.
If my petition seem trivial when weighed against the kingdom’s wounds, I entreat Your Majesty to think instead that small justice, done publicly, gives confidence in great justice not yet seen. In this assurance lies my devotion, which neither rebellion nor disease has lessened. I am, and shall remain,
Your Majesty’s most obedient and careful servant,
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