Richard Overton (pamphleteer)

Richard Overton (fl. 1640–1664) was an English pamphleteer and Leveller during the Civil War and Interregnum (England).

Richard Overton may have spent part of his early life in Holland, although some of his writings show an interest in agricultural issues such as the enclosure of common land and may indicate that instead of living in the Netherlands he spent his early years in rural England, possibly Lincolnshire, a county in which the surname Overton was common. A Richard Overton matriculated as a sizar from Queens' College, Cambridge, at Easter 1631 and may be the very same subject of this biography. However whatever his origins he is known to have begun publishing anonymous attacks on the bishops about the time of the opening of the Long Parliament, together with some pungent verse satires, like Lambeth Fayre and Articles of High Treason against Cheapside Cross, 1642.

Overton turned next to theology, and wrote an anonymous tract during the civil war on Man's Mortality. This he described as "a treatise wherein 'tis proved, both by theology and philosophy, that whole man (as a rational creature) is a compound wholly mortal, contrary to that common distinction of soul and body: and that the present going of the soul into heaven or hell is a mere fiction; and that at the resurrection is the beginning of our immortality, and then actual condemnation and salvation, and not before". Ecclesiastes. chapter iii., verse 19 is quoted as a motto, and the tract is signed "R. O.", and said to be "printed by John Canne" at Amsterdam. According to Thomason's note in the British Museum copy, it appeared on 19 January 1644, and was really printed in London. The tract made a great stir, and a small sect arose known as Soul Sleepers, who adopted Overton's doctrine in a slightly modified form. On 26 August 1644 the House of Commons, on the petition of the Stationers' Company, ordered that the authors, printers, and publishers of the pamphlets against the immortality of the soul and concerning divorce should be diligently inquired for, thus coupling Overton with Milton as the most dangerous of heretics.Daniel Featley in the Dippers Dipt and Thomas Edwards (1599–1647) in Gangræn both denounced the unknown author, the latter asserting that Clement Wrighter "had a great hand in the book".

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