James Howell

James Howell was a Welsh-born writer who spent years travelling Europe on business for a London glass factory before politics landed him in the Fleet Prison in the 1640s. There he assembled Epistolae Ho-Elianae (“Howell’s Letters”), a collection of familiar letters — some genuine, some almost certainly composed for the page — that became one of the first books in English to make its author a living by his pen. In 1660 Charles II appointed him the first Historiographer Royal.