The Authorship of The Occasional Paper (London, 1697–98)

Abstract

Abstract The Occasional Paper was a series of anonymous pamphlets covering a diverse range of topics, published in ten numbers during 1697 and 1698. The series has always been attributed to Richard Willis (bap. 1664, d. 1734), successively bishop of Gloucester (1715–21), Salisbury (1721–23), and Winchester (1723–34). Edward Waddington’s (1670?–1731) copy of The Occasional Paper provides near-contemporary attributions of nine of the numbers to the clergymen William Hayley (1657–1715), Gilbert Burnet (1643–1715), Richard Lucas (1648/9–1715), Charles Trimnell (1663–1723), Samuel Bradford (1652–1731), William Hodges (1667–1703), and Willis. These attributions are consistent with the content of The Occasional Paper, and with a stylometric analysis of texts known to be by the attributed authors. This demonstrates that it was William Hayley that criticized Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) in the first and fifth of these numbers, not Willis. It also reveals that Number II, ‘Concerning the Late Unfortunate Death of J. H----en, Esq’, presents the contemporary deathbed confession of the politician John Hampden (bap. 1653, d. 1696), communicated by Gilbert Burnet.