to the reader,’ stating that the author had ‘for some causes thought it at this time more fit to let goe these four bookes by themselves than to stay both them and the rest till the whole might together be published.’ ‘Such generalities as here are handled it will be perhaps not amisse to consider apart, as by way of introduction unto the bookes that are to follow concerning particulars.’ 1592 is the date given by Ames to this edition; Walton, more probably, suggests 1594. In 1597 Windet published the fifth book, which is longer by sixty pages than the volume containing the first four. The title runs, ‘Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie. The fift booke by Richard Hooker,’ and it is dedicated to Whitgift, archbishop of Canterbury. Towards the end is an address to the reader running, ‘Have patience with me for a small time, and by the helpe of Almightie God I will pay the whole.’ No other portion of the work appeared in Hooker's lifetime. A second edition of the first four books appeared in 1604, edited by John Spencer, of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, the husband of a sister of Hooker's pupil Cranmer. In 1611 was issued together in folio a third edition of the first and a second edition of the second volume, with a title-page engraved by Hole. In 1617 a new edition in six parts included ‘Certayn Divine Tractates, and other Godly Sermons,’ by Hooker, which have often been absurdly identified by bibliographers with later books of the ‘Politie.’ The tractates and sermons had been already published separately in 1612 and 1613 (see below). Other editions, all in folio, with the same contents, are dated 1622 (called the fifth), 1632, and 1638, and an undated copy in 8vo is known (Notes and Queries, 3rd ser. x. 511).
In 1648, and again in 1651, two additional books of the ‘Politie’—the sixth and eighth—were published together in 8vo. The title-page describes them as ‘a work long expected, and now published according to the most authentique copies.’ The text had been prepared from a collation of six transcripts. The editor, in an apology to the reader, laments the absence of the seventh book, and states that the endeavours used to recover it had hitherto proved fruitless. In 1662 Gauden edited Hooker's works, with a dedication to Charles II; a very incomplete life was prefixed, together with a good portrait engraved by Faithorne after the bust at Bishopsbourne. Here a seventh book appeared for the first time. Of the recovered book, Gauden writes that, ‘by comparing the writing of it with other indisputable papers or known MSS. of Mr. Hooker's,’ he had ascertained that it was ‘undoubtedly his own hand throughout.’ This edition reappeared, with the improved life by Izaak Walton, in 1666, 1676, and 1682. Reissues, with some corrections by Strype, are dated 1705, 1719, 1723, 1739, &c. In 1793 an 8vo edition was issued by the Clarendon Press, Oxford, edited by Bishop Randolph. Two improved editions followed; one, edited by the Rev. W. S. Dobson, appeared in London 1825, and the other, edited by B. Hanbury, in 1831. In 1836 Keble issued at Oxford an admirable edition of Hooker's works, and the seventh edition was revised by Dean Church and Canon Paget (afterwards Bishop of Oxford) in 1888. Useful abridgments appeared in 1705 and 1840. John Earle, bishop of Salisbury [q. v.], prepared a Latin translation of the ‘Politie,’ but his manuscript was destroyed before it went to press (Letters from the Bodleian, i. 141).
The genuineness of the three posthumously published books (vi.–viii.) has been much disputed. Bishop Andrewes on 7 Nov. 1600 wrote that immediate care was necessary to preserve Hooker's manuscripts from the clutches of his ignorant relatives, whose puritan proclivities were undoubted (Hooker, Works (1888), i. 91). According to Walton, a month after Hooker's death Archbishop Whitgift sent a chaplain to inquire of Mrs. Hooker concerning the unpublished books, and she declined to give any information. Three months later Whitgift summoned her to be examined by the council on the subject. On her arrival Whitgift saw her privately at Lambeth, and she confessed to him that her son-in-law Charke, and ‘another minister that dwelt near Canterbury,’ had, with her consent, obtained access to her husband's library after his death, and had ‘burnt and tore’ many of his writings, ‘assuring her that they were not fit to be seen.’ In the 1604 edition, containing the first five books only, John Spencer, the editor and Hooker's friend, informed the reader that the last three books had been completed by Hooker, and had been destroyed by ‘some evil-disposed minds,’ who had ‘left unto us nothing but the old, imperfect, mangled draughts, dismembered into pieces;’ but Spencer added, ‘it is intended the world shall see them as they are.’ William Covel, in his ‘Just and Temperate Defence’ of the ‘Politie’ (1603), p. 149, refers to these three books, ‘which from his [i.e. Hooker's] own mouth I am informed that they were finished.’ Spencer was president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, from 1607 till his death in 1614, and during those years he entrusted such of Hooker's papers as he possessed to a scholar of his college, Henry Jackson (d. 1662) [q. v.], for transcription. Jackson
