James I’s Last Book Burning

Banning books goes back thousands of years, almost as long as people have been writing. For Banned Books Week (October 4–10, 2026), Aaron T. Pratt, the Andrew W. Mellon curator of rare books and prints at the Folger, looks at one of 15 books that James I went beyond banning to publicly burn during his reign.

IF YOU WERE WALKING THROUGH ST. PAUL’S CHURCHYARD ON FEBRUARY 13, 1625—or were nearly anywhere in central London at the right time that day—you would have seen a raging fire at Paul’s Cross, the city’s fabled open-air pulpit. Or at least its smoke. This, though, was not the kind of uncontrolled fire that would devastate the area in 1666. It was a decidedly intentional one, part of a propagandistic spectacle complete with a sermon.

Its fuel: nearly 900 printed copies of a new book on the ten commandments titled Gods holy mind (1625). According to Daniel Featley, minister and press censor, the bonfire marked the “greatest holocaust that hath been offered in this kinde in our memorie,” the last and largest of roughly fifteen book-burnings during the reign of James I. Not long before his own death on March 27, the king was making a very public point. This book wasn’t just banned, with copies seized and quietly destroyed: the publisher’s entire remaining stock was burned, for all to see.

There appear to have been two theological matters, in particular, that caught James’s attention. Edward Elton, the book’s recently deceased author, had come down hard on Sunday leisure activities that James had explicitly allowed in a 1618 declaration, which is known as the Book of Sports. Elton was also no fan of administering the Eucharist to the sick and dying, which he considered idolatrous. At least in the eyes of Elton, salvation was at stake. For James, though, a hardline view like this contributed toward religious and political polarization, which not only strained the social fabric but also threatened his authority.

Weeks before the burning, the clergyman and press censor Daniel Featley had found himself at Whitehall in front of James, who “seemed very much displeased” with his decision to authorize Gods holy mind for publication. As Featley explains in Cygnea cantio [“Swan Song”] (1629), a book detailing James’s demonstration of religious conviction and theological prowess at this meeting, he had only read the first 52 pages of Gods holy mind and “was confident that there was nothing contrary of the discipline or doctrine of the Church of England.” He emphasizes that it was there, right on page 52, that he added his imprimatur—not the end of the manuscript. The publication of the complete text was not, then, on his watch: “the booke tooke the libertie to flie out of the Press without licence.” Nonetheless, Featley also reminds his readers that Elton had previously published books that no one complained about, was never suspected of nonconformity during his long career as a minister, and was the one who had asked Featley to review the manuscript in the first place.

In a brief postscript that was apparently only distributed with some copies of Cygnea cantio, the publisher of Gods holy mind details the impact of the burning on his wellbeing, describing the seizure and destruction of his stock as “the greatest losse…that ever any Stationer received.” Named Robert Mylbourne, he was also briefly imprisoned, which came with additional price tag. All said, he was out £70. From the vantage of an average worker, that was about $270,000 in today’s money. No small change.

Ultimately, the book-burning only achieved so much. By the time Mylbourne’s stock was seized, plenty of copies of God’s holy mind had already sold. And with the winds of change that the English Civil War brought in, there was a second edition in 1647. It circulated freely. And there is Featley’s Cygnea cantio, which gives us a uniquely detailed window into the often imperfect, ad hoc nature of book bans in early modern England at the same time that it ostensibly praises a ruler not dissimilar from characters that readers would have been encountering for the first time in Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623). One they might have purchased in Paul’s Churchyard, in eyeshot of the book-fueled bonfire.