John Nalson (–1686) was an English clergyman, historian and early Tory pamphleteer. Life Born about 1638, he is said to have been educated at St. John's College, Cambridge, but his name does not appear in the list of admissions. He entered the church, and became rector of Doddington in the Isle of Ely. In 1678 he took the degree of LL.D. Nalson was an active polemical writer on the side of the government during the latter part of the reign of Charles II. The Countermine, published in 1677 quickly went through three editions, and was highly praised by Roger L'Estrange. Published anonymously, its authorship was soon discovered, and the parliament of 1678, in which the opposition, whom he had attacked, had the majority, resolved to call Nalson to account. On 26 March 1678 he was sent for on the charge of having written a pamphlet called A Letter from a Jesuit in Paris, showing the most efficient way to ruin the Government and the Protestant Religion, in which the names of various members of parliament were introduced. After being kept in custody for about a month, he was discharged, but ordered to be put out of the commission of the peace, and to be reprimanded by the speaker (1 May). Nalson then published several other pamphlets, undertook to make a collection of documents in answer to John Rushworth (1682), and printed the Trial of Charles I (1684), prefixing to his historical works long polemical attacks on the whigs. He begged William Sancroft for preferment; he asked on 21 July 1680 for the deanery of Worcester, on 14 August 1680 for the mastership of Trinity College, Cambridge, and to be given a prebend either at Westminster or Ely. In 1684 he did receive a prebend at Ely. He died on 24 March 1686, aged 48, and was buried at Ely. Works and collection of papers Nalson's major work is the Impartial Collection of the Great Affairs of State, from the beginning of the Scotch Rebellion in the year 1639 to the murder of King Charles I. The first volume was published in 1682, and the second in 1683, but the collection in fact ends in January 1642. Its avowed object was to serve as an antidote to the similar collection of materials by Rushworth, and the work was undertaken under the special patronage of Charles II. Nalson was allowed free access