Thomas Hollis and Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Statue of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Geneva. Image by Rachel Hammersley, 2025.

On a trip to Switzerland earlier this year I looked forward to visiting the statue of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the museum dedicated to him in Geneva. What I did not expect to find were references to Rousseau in the Hollis collection at the Universitätsbibliothek in Bern. Yet the material there alerted me to the fact that Thomas Hollis communicated with the notoriously prickly Genevan thinker and defended his cause in 1765. Moreover, the case had profound consequences for Hollis's book dissemination project.

Rousseau published both Du Contrat Social and Emile in May 1762. Both were condemned by the authorities in Catholic France and in Rousseau's Calvinist home town of Geneva. The French ordered Rousseau's arrest causing him to flee from Montmorency (just north of Paris), where he had been living, to Neuchâtel, which was then governed by Prussia. Rousseau renounced his Genevan citizenship and began work on his Confessions. In 1765 he spent the summer on the island of Saint Pierre in Lac de Bienne, which was under the authority of Bern. Rousseau had visited the island a year earlier and had cultivated a desire to live there. He settled on a 'wild and uncultivated island' to the south of the main island and apparently 'detached from it by storms'. Rousseau's description of it in The Confessions conveys his love for it:

its gravelly soil produces nothing but willows and persicaria, but there is in it a high hill well covered with greensward and very pleasant. The form of the lake is an almost regular oval. The banks, less rich than those of the lake of Geneva and Neuchatel, form a beautiful decoration, especially towards the western part, which is well peopled, and edged with vineyards at the foot of a chain of mountains (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions. London, 1903. Project Gutenberg. Book XII).

Isle de Saint Pierre in Lake Biel. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Rousseau claimed that he intended to spend the rest of his life on the island, but his happy stay was cut short after just six weeks when the freemen of Bern ordered his expulsion from their territory. He travelled from Bienne to Strasbourg and from there to Paris arriving in the French capital on 16th December 1765.

‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau’, by Angelique Allais. National Portrait Gallery. NPG D19002. Reproduced under a Creative Commons licence.

News of Rousseau's fate spread across Europe. At the end of October Rudolph Vautravers wrote to his friend Hollis in London reporting that the local 'Bigots' had obtained an order from the magistrates at Berne 'to expel poor Rousseau ... from his beautiful Retreat ... in the Lake of Bienne (where he had just settled himself; as he hoped, out of the Reach of his enemies'. Rousseau, Vautravers reported, had moved to the city of Bienne itself and if necessary would escape to Potsdam 'under the immediate Protection of a wise and beneficent Monarch, who hath been pleased constantly and pressingly to offer it to him'. (Vautravers to Hollis, 28 October 1765).  Less than two weeks later Vautravers wrote again to announce that 'poor Rousseau has been expelled from all Switzerland' and was heading for Potsdam, though given his poor health it was uncertain whether he would survive the journey (Vautravers to Hollis, 9 November 1765).

Hollis had known Vautravers since 1759. In November of that year he recorded in his diary that he had taken tea with Vautravers (who was then staying in London) for the first time. Hollis's interest in Switzerland - and in particular in the Canton of Bern - also dated back to that time. He had been preparing a parcel of books for the Library at Bern since April and it was finally sent with Vautravers' assistance in January 1760. Two years later Vautravers settled at Rockhall near Bern.

Vautravers was still living at Rockall when the controversy over Rousseau erupted and hence his letter to Hollis. In response, Hollis sent Vautravers a package for Rousseau which contained an invitation for him to come to England and a copy of John Wallis's grammar (to help him to improve his English language skills). Unfortunately, the package did not reach Rousseau before he left the country. Rousseau did travel to England in 1766, but on the invitation of David Hume rather than Hollis. Yet Hollis did take some action on Rousseau's behalf in London. On 18th November 1765 he went to see Noah Thomas, the director of the St. James' Chronicle, to present him with an extract from Vautravers's letter requesting that it be printed in the paper. It duly appeared the following day. Vautravers's letter announcing Rousseau's expulsion from Switzerland followed on 28th November. The publication of these letters, Hollis hoped, would secure the support of the English public for the exiled Genevan author while also highlighting the precariousness of civil and religious liberty. The following year, Hollis received from Vautravers several sketches depicting Rousseau's 'sufferings' in Switzerland by the artist Samuel Jerom Grim. These he passed on to his close friend Thomas Brand.

One of the beautifully bound books that Thomas Hollis sent to the Library at Bern. Bern, UB Münstergasse, MUE Hollis 67. Image Rachel Hammersley, 2025.

The treatment of Rousseau on the part of the Bern authorities had a huge impact on Hollis. His initial sympathy for the Canton owed much to their protection of the English republican exile Edmund Ludlow in the late seventeenth century. Their less sympathetic treatment of Rousseau one hundred years later soured Hollis's favour. Though he sent the Library more than 200 volumes between 1759 and 1765 - including some that were presented in extremely lavish bindings - he sent nothing after 1765. The treatment of Rousseau by the Bernese authorities indicated that they were not committed to the principles of civil and religious liberty that Hollis held so dear and were not, therefore, worthy recipients of his gifts.

June Blogpost: A Tale of Two Thomases: Part 1

Thomas Hollis and Thomas Spence were very different men, but as readers of this blog will be aware, I have recently been exploring the lives and works of them both.

Thomas Hollis by Joseph Wilton, marble bust, c.1862. National Portrait Gallery, NPG 6946. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

Hollis was born in London on 14 April 1720. His family had made their fortune in the metalworking industry in Yorkshire and had then established a London branch of their cutlery business. Hollis was an only child and was unfortunate in losing most of his close relatives before the age of eighteen. One consequence of this was that by the time he was thirty he was an extremely rich man. Hollis travelled extensively in Europe in the late 1740s and early 1750s before settling in London. Though he briefly toyed with a political career, he soon turned to pursuing politics via other means. Physically, Hollis was described as being over six-feet tall and very strong. He had 'bright brown eyes, a short nose, and laughing mouth' (Colin Bonwick, 'Hollis, Thomas (1720-1774), political propagandist, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 19 May 2025). Hollis retired to his estate in Dorset in 1770, where he died four years later

Profile of Thomas Spence from the Hedley Papers at the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society. Reproduced with kind permission.

Spence was born in Newcastle upon Tyne on 21 June 1750. His father and mother were of Scottish origin and Spence was one of nineteen children. Despite being poor, Spence's father was keen that his sons should learn to read, and by his early twenties Spence was working as a school teacher in Newcastle. He moved to London in early 1788 where he worked as a bookseller for the rest of his life. He produced radical tracts of his own which he sold alongside those by others. The nature of his work got Spence into trouble, and he was arrested on a number of occasions. Physically, Spence was a short man - barely five-feet tall and slightly built. His life-long poverty meant that he was always poorly dressed, and he suffered from both a limp and a speech impediment. Spence was married twice - once in the north east and once in London - but neither marriage was happy. His son William, who moved with him to London, died as a teenager around 1797. Spence himself died in September 1814.

Despite these striking differences in their appearance, backgrounds, and prospects, these two men devoted their lives to very similar activities.

Bern, Universität Bibliothek, ‘Die Hollis-Sammlung’ 64. The Oceana and other works of James Harrington Esq, ed. John Toland (London: A. Millar, 1747). Reproduced with kind permission. Image, Rachel Hammersley, 2025.

Hollis distributed thousands of books to a range of public and university libraries between 1754 and 1774. Some of the books were simply bought by Hollis in London and sent on. Some had gold tooling added to their front cover or spine, others were specially bound for the purpose. In a small number of cases, the edition itself was commissioned by Hollis before being bound and sent. As a bookseller struggling to make a living, Spence disseminated books but was not in a position to give them away for free. Instead, he offered his own variation on Hollis's project in the form of his journal Pigs' Meat which appeared between 1793 and 1795. Here, for the price of just a penny an issue, readers had access to extracts from a range of texts.

There was significant overlap in the works the two men disseminated. Both focused on politics and religion and had a particular interest in the writings of seventeenth-century republicans, as well as in the eighteenth-century commonwealthmen who applied earlier republican ideas to their own circumstances. The importance of these works to Hollis is reflected in his decision to commission new editions of some of these texts - for example Sidney's Discourses - and in the exquisite bindings of the works of Sidney, John Milton, Edmund Ludlow, and James Harrington that he sent abroad. Spence included extracts from works by Sidney and Milton in Pigs' Meat, but it was Harrington who was the most frequently cited author across the three volumes, closely followed by the commonwealthmen John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon.

The title page of the edition of Sidney’s Discourses commissioned by Hollis with the smoke printed image of the pileus at the bottom. The National Library of Scotland: ([Ac]. 1/1.3]). Reproduced with kind permission. Image, Rachel Hammersley, 2022.

The header to Pigs’ Meat.

Hollis's lavish bindings reflect another parallel between the two men: their concern with the appearance - as well as the content - of works, and their use of symbolic images to convey ideas. Hollis claimed that while he did not value bindings himself, he saw the importance of them in rendering texts of interest to others. There appears to have been some truth in this, since the members of the Council of Bern were persuaded to accept Hollis's donation of books because of the beauty of the volumes. The gold tooling that Hollis added to the cover and spines of the volumes he sent had symbolic meaning - the pileus to indicate liberty, the owl for wisdom, and Britannia for works of patriotic value. Sometimes (for example in the case of the Sidney edition commissioned by Hollis) these symbols were also smoke printed onto the page. Once again, Spence's poverty meant he did not have the same opportunities available to him. Yet the pig image used on the title page of the second edition of Pigs' Meat served a similar purpose. Moreover, it too included a pileus or liberty bonnet that closely resembled that used regularly by Hollis.

The Three Thomases coin owned by the author. Image, Rachel Hammersley, 2025.

Both men also conveyed their political messages in metal as well as print. Hollis bought, commissioned, and disseminated medals alongside books. Spence described himself as a 'Dealer in Prints & Coins' and designed his own tokens - including one depicting three Thomases (though sadly Hollis was not one of them). Moreover, while Spence could not afford to give books away, a contemporary claimed that he tossed tokens out of the window and that passers by who picked up a token could then exchange it at his shop for a pamphlet (British Library: Add. MS. 27,808, 184). He also gave away a token free with each copy of the first issue of his final periodical The Giant Killer or, Anti-Landlord.

Despite their differences, then, both Spence and Hollis made extensive efforts to disseminate political ideas to a wide audience. Moreover, they did so because they believed that this would bring wider societal benefits. While there were differences in their political perspectives, they were both committed to ensuring that the public had access to republican ideas and those in support of liberty and rights. This was reflected in the dedication Hollis used in various forms in the works he donated:

Thomas Hollis, an Englishman, a Lover of

Liberty, his Country & its excellent

Constitution as NOBLY restored at the happy

Revolution, is desirous of having the

honor to present Milton's Prose Works to the

Public Library of Harvard College, at

Cambridge in New England.

Pall Mall, oct. 14, 1764 (Bond, p. 135).

An Englishman, a lover of liberty, civil & religious, Citizen of the World, is desirous

of having the honor to present this book to the public library at Berne in

Switzerland.

London jan 1, 1765. (Bern, Universität Bibliothek, 'Die Hollis-Sammlung' 71).

Elsewhere he explained that he sent books on government: 'for, if Government goeth right, ALL goeth right.' (Bond, p. 34).

On the title page to Pigs' Meat, Spence asserted a similar aim. The works collected in the periodical were designed, he explained:

To promote among the Labouring Part of Mankind proper Ideas of their Situation,

of their Importance, and of their Rights. And to convince them That their forlorn

Condition has not been entirely overlooked and forgotten, nor their just Cause

unpleaded, neither by their Maker nor by the best and most enlightened of men in

all Ages. (Thomas Spence, Pigs' Meat, Volume 1. London, 1793, Title page).

There might be a temptation to dismiss both Hollis and Spence as at best naïve and at worst eccentrics or cranks. Yet it is hard to deny that informed citizens are necessary for the preservation of liberty and the successful functioning of democracy. It is especially important to remember this at the present time when education seems to be under threat from all directions - from cuts in school budgets to threats of compulsory redundancies in higher education. I suspect that Hollis and Spence would be appalled.

A month with Thomas Hollis

Thomas Hollis has been much on my mind over the past month. April began with a wonderful celebration in Oxford of Blair Worden's 80th birthday year, at which I gave a paper. It was a pleasure and an honour to celebrate this occasion, to meet up with Blair again, and to speak alongside several esteemed colleagues.

Thomas Hollis by Giovanni Battista Cipriani, 1767. National Portrait Gallery, NPG D46107. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

The topic of my paper was the puzzle as to why Hollis was enamoured with Oliver Cromwell; displaying a portrait of the Lord Protector in his house, collecting Cromwell memorabilia, and even cultivating friendships with Cromwell's descendants. This was despite the fact that most eighteenth-century radicals (including those with whom Hollis was closely associated, such as Catharine Macaulay) were hostile to Cromwell, accusing him of having betrayed the parliamentarian cause and of turning it to his own interests.

One of the crucial sources for my paper was Hollis's Diary. My main reason for reading this was to gain a deeper insight into his intellectual pursuits. I am taking careful notes on the books he commissioned for publication and those he sent abroad to various institutions, and I am keen to identify the contacts and networks that facilitated his publishing and dissemination activities. Yet I cannot help being repeatedly distracted by more mundane details. Hollis records when he plays his flute - generally in the evening and often as a means of reducing stress. As a lapsed clarinet player this gives me the urge to get my own instrument out of its case. He also comments on more personal activities: '30 July 1762: Employed the greater part of the morning in washing my feet, & cleansing myself extraordinarily.' (The Diary of Thomas Hollis V from 1759 to 1770, ed. W. H. Bond. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1996, p. 126). Hollis's recording of his washing routine is striking - not least for how infrequently it takes place. This reminds me that even when we immerse ourselves in the past, important elements - such as the smells - are missing. Hollis is also frequently exercised by his relations (and often disagreements) with his servants. On 8 June 1761 he recorded that his maid servant Mary Foard 'gave me warning to leave me, pretending too much work. Accepted the warning, but differed in opinion with her concerning the work.' (The Diary of Thomas Hollis, p. 75). Two weeks later she left his service voluntarily. This is the stuff of social, rather than intellectual, history, but I have found it helpful in giving me a sense of the man behind the editing and dissemination work, and this enriches my understanding of his intellectual activities.

Image of Bern old town. Rachel Hammersley, 2025.

I myself combined the personal and the intellectual this month in relation to Hollis. At the end of April I went on holiday with my children to Switzerland by train. We visited Geneva, Lausanne, Bern, and Basel. While at Bern I left them to explore the city by themselves while I spent a day at the Universitätsbibliothek to look at its collection of Hollis material.

'Die Hollis-Sammlung' comprises approximately 430 volumes that were sent to the burghers of the city between 1758 and 1765. I am very grateful to Stefan Matter and his colleagues at the library for allowing me to view the collection and to reproduce images from it here. While there was much for Hollis to admire in Bern, his donations to the city owed a lot to Rodolphe Vautravers, whom Hollis had met in Genoa in 1753 and who was a Bernese subject and a member of an important Bernese improvement society. Vautravers' role as intermediary allowed Hollis to make his donations anonymously, describing himself simply as 'An English-man, a lover of liberty, his country, and its excellent constitution'. Vautravers was also involved in presenting the collection to the Bernese Assembly and persuading them to accept the donation.

Bern, UB Münstergasse, MUE Hollis 183. Image, Rachel Hammersley, 2025.

I will be exploring what I found in the collection in future papers and publications. Here I want to reflect on just one volume: Hollis 183. The binding of this volume is not as lavish as some, but there is gold tooling on the spine and significant marginalia within. The volume is a Sammelband comprised of Robert Molesworth's major works (An Account of Denmark, An Account of Sweden and the 1721 edition of his translation of François Hotman's Franco-Gallia) alongside more minor works by him and others. I will focus here on the major Molesworth works, which we know from other copies were of particular significance to Hollis. A marginal note on the flyleaf of the edition of An Account of Denmark sent to Harvard University describes that work and Molesworth's 1721 preface to Hotman's Franco-Gallia as 'two of the noblest in the English Language' (W. B. Bond, "From the Great Desire of Promoting Learning": Thomas Hollis's Gifts to the Harvard College Library, Cambridge - Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2010, p. 136). Hollis reinforced that point in the Bern volume by writing 'Ut Spargum' ('that we may scatter them') on the title pages of both works. As I have noted before, Hollis added this phrase to many of the works he sent to specific institutions to indicate their importance

Bern, UB Münstergasse, MUE Hollis 183. Image: Rachel Hammersley, 2025.

The other marginalia in the volume is more distinctive. On a flyleaf, Hollis added a handwritten account of an exchange that took place immediately following the publication of An Account of Denmark between the Danish Minister (presumably the Danish Ambassador to England) and King William III. The comment reinforced the claim about the contrast between English liberty and continental absolutism that was made in the volume itself. The Danish Minister apparently complained to King William about the book and the King asked in reply what the Minister would have him do. The Minister responded that if the roles had been reversed, the Danish King 'would have sent you the Author's head'. King William replied: 'That I cannot do ... but if you please the author shall insert what you say in his second edition.' On the next page Hollis had copied out a sentence 'From an old tract', - namely Marchamont Nedham's The Excellencie of a Free State:

Bern, UB Münstergasse, MUE Hollis 183 : 2. Image: Rachel Hammersley, 2025.

The truth is of it is, the Interest of

freedom is a Virgin, that every one

seeks to deflower; and like a Virgin it

must be kept from any other form, or

else, so great is the Lust of mankind

after dominion, there follows a Rape

upon the first opportunity.

The emphasis on the value and nature of freedom continues in the marginalia added to the title page of An Account of Sweden.

No free People ever yet existed, that left its fate to the conscience of a ruler; and with us it is a maxim, that the Kingdom shall be ruled, "not by the King's conscience, but by the known Laws".

From the journal of the Senate of Sweden of Nov. 7. 1755.

This is, of course, an assertion of the notion of liberty as independence, which was examined in detail by Quentin Skinner in his latest book and discussed in my last blogpost.

Bern, UB Münstergasse, MUE Hollis 183 : 5, p. vii. Image: Rachel Hammersley, 2025.

Hollis also annotated the prefatory material to the 1721 edition of Franco-Gallia. It was there that Molesworth had set out his political creed - which he described as being that of a 'real Whig'. In the version he sent to Harvard, Hollis added a comment to indicate that he shared Molesworth's political creed.  (Bond, "From the Great Desire of Promoting Learning", p. 107). Similarly, in the Bern volume he underlined this section and added a note at the bottom: 'Observe this Political faith, how fine!' He also provided further reading for his audience. On page xxv, where Molesworth declared that 'A Whig is against the raising or keeping up a Standing Army in Time of Peace', Hollis underlined the passage and added a note referring his readers to works against a standing army by John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon and Walter Moyle. Hollis perhaps thought this discussion was particularly relevant given the Swiss attitude to defence. Bern, like other Swiss cantons, was protected by a militia of freeholders. A few pages later, again on the subject of defence, Hollis referred readers to specific pages from Bernard Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees. All of these works were among those sent to Bern, meaning that readers of this marginalia would have been able to follow up his references

Bern, UB Münstergasse, MUE Hollis 183 : 5, p. xxv. Image: Rachel Hammersley, 2025.

Hollis's marginalia demonstrate his deep regard for Molesworth and his ideas, as well as his belief that they were relevant to the citizens of Bern in the mid-eighteenth century. There is, of course, a parallel here with Molesworth's own treatment of Hotman's work. It had originally been published in 1573, but Molesworth believed it still had resonance in the early eighteenth century. His 1721 translator's preface was designed to show why.

Our homeward journey involved taking a train from Bern to Basel where we could then pick up the TGV back to Paris - and then via Eurostar home. Keen to make the most of our trip we travelled to Basel a few hours early and briefly explored the city. We came to the Münster and saw an open door into the outer crypt. Curious, we entered and began looking at the funeral monuments  - many of which dated from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Struggling to decipher the Latin I turned and spotted a name I recognised: François Hotman. A quick check on the internet confirmed that the author of Franco-Gallia died in Basel in 1590. As I stood looking at his funeral monument I thought of Molesworth and Hollis and wondered whether, on his own trip to Switzerland in 1748, Hollis had visited this monument himself.

François Hotman’s memorial in the outer crypt at Basel Münster. Image, Rachel Hammersley, 2025. I am very grateful to my friend and colleague Katie East for assisting me with the Latin.