News Networks in Seventeenth Century Britain and Europe

Joad Raymond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317998877
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Examining new research, this excellent volume presents a series of case-studies exemplifying the new newspaper history. Using cross-cultural comparisons, Joad Raymond establishes an agenda for answering crucial questions central to the future histories of the political and literary culture of early-modern Britain:

* What is the relationship between the circulation of news in Britain and communication networks elsewhere in Europe?
* Was the British development of the media unique?
* What are the specific rhetorical properties of news-communication in seventeeth-century Britain?
* What was the relationship between commerce and politics?
* How do local exchanges of news relate to national practices and institutions? Previously published as a special issue of the journal Media History, this book is compulsory reading for researchers and students of European history and media studies alike.

Introduction: networks, communication, practice

JOAD RAYMOND, University of East Anglia

I

The Figure Pamphlets make in the world at present is so very considerable, that there seems a kind of necessity laid now-adays on most People to make their Court to them, or at least, to have an eye upon them, upon some account or other. [1]

Thus begins Myles Davies' idiosyncratic and boisterous Eikon Mikro-Biblion. Sive Icon Libellorum, Or A Critical History of Pamphlets (1715), the first attempt to write a long-term history of the pamphlet as a medium. Davies observed that one could find ‘the Genius of the Age’ in its pamphlets, thus positing a difference between the reader who read a pamphlet in order to engage with its argument, and the reader who sought a less involved, more objective perspective, the colder eye of the historian who read to find out what a pamphlet might disclose about the time or the society that produced it. His was a critical history of pamphlets. Davies' detachment is imperfect—throughout his meandering volumes he frequently becomes distracted by his attack on Arianism—but his is nonetheless a brilliant and entertaining history of polemic, overwhelmed by rhetoric and undisciplined reading. In the preface (itself eleven-and-a-half sheets) Davies writes that it is in the nature of the pamphlet that it brings together, or spreads itself between, the full spectrum of human capacities. ’Pamphlets become more and more daily amusements to the Curious, Idle and Inquisitive, Chat to the Talkative, Stories for Nurses, Fans for Misses, Food to the Needy, and Practicings to the News-Mongers…’ [2]. The sentence continues for another lungful. Pamphlets, Davies claims, are occasional conformists. Startlingly he includes in this list of wayward writings not only the secular and fabulous productions of romancers, novelists and newsmongers, common pamphleteers, but also the spiky prose of modern divines and the apocryphal and pseudepigraphical texts allegedly forged by rabbis and the Church. Every biblical figure seems to have his or her own gospel or apocalypse; ‘Ecclesiastical Pamphlets’ and ‘Libels’ Davies calls them. These are spurious writings, if not pamphlets in length, produced by false authority:

By that old Charter, that those [Greek] and other Monks held by, for forging of Manuscripts of all sorts of Matter and Form, 'twas that the Vatican Typographers, de Propaganda fide, went by, in Printing several Treatises, Epistolary and Sermon-Pamphlets… [3]

This claim is remarkable in two respects. First because it lumps ancient pseudepigraphical texts in with common modern pamphlets, on the grounds that they are unreliable, fictitious, and seek to persuade their reader into beliefs that they would otherwise be unlikely to hold. Secondly, because the sentence pulls up short of coining an English name for this: propaganda.

The Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, the Holy congregation for propagating the faith, was founded by the Roman Church in 1622, following the Council of Trent, to promote counter-Reformation doctrine. The English word ‘propaganda’ would only be detached from this college in the early nineteenth century, when it began to mean the putting forward of a certain view with a primary intention to persuade, a systematic attempt to propagate a particular doctrine. Both before and after this shift the word had pejorative connotations, but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the doctrines were those of the Roman Church. ‘Propaganda’ was only used in Latin, or in referring to the Roman college in English, where it was commonly italicized to remind the reader that it was a foreign term. Davies, however, seems to be suggesting that the Propaganda Fide was similar in intention and method to recent ecclesiastical pamphleteers, and to the newsmongers and vendors of gossip. In doing so he sketches his understanding of a mode of publicity that distorts communication and exploits society's and individuals' weaknesses to shape opinion to an end that should always be viewed with suspicion. But his is a tentative sketch, more suggestive than descriptive, relying on association rather than argument. It is so because the concept was not easily available to him: in early modern Britain there was no notion directly equivalent to the modern concept of propaganda. Instead we find a congeries of words that intersect and overlap, and that have different force in different contexts: news, communication, information, intelligence, rumour, gossip, talk, opinion, licence.

II

To use a word that was not available to contemporaries and that imperfectly fits the categories that were available is a form of anachronism. Anachronism might itself be deemed anachronistic in this context: the word as defined in OED (2), ‘anything done or existing out of date; hence, anything which was proper to a former age, but is, or, if it existed, would be, out of harmony with the present’, appears in the early nineteenth century. Earlier uses—OED cites examples from 1646 onwards—refer simply to an error in dating or chronology [4]. Hence to discuss anachronism in the stronger sense in the context of the seventeenth century would be to risk accusations of anachronism. However, humanist scholars contended that to understand the past it was necessary to recognize its social and cultural distance from the present. This committed them to a notion of contextual appropriateness that shares the intellectual underpinnings of the modern idea of anachronism [5]. So the later, stronger sense is implicit in much early modern historiography, and it is the meaning not the name that should concern us. To rely heavily on this correspondence, however, is to risk treating a concept as a fixed unit, that emerges and is given a name and a more or less stable function; to treat a concept, that is, as something that is discovered rather than formed and adapted [6]. In any case, what is significant for my purposes here—that is, how anachronism relates to the way we write the history of the media—is the force of that anachronism. Is the notion of ‘propaganda’ applied to seventeenth-century Britain a ‘fatal anachronism’, a ‘vicious anachronism’, or merely an infelicitous choice of words? [7]. In other words does thinking in terms of early modern propaganda damage our ability to think about and understand the past? We can begin to answer this by tracing some of the significations of cognate terms used by contemporaries, keywords that structure the history of the news media, such as ‘news’, intelligence', ‘information’, ‘opinion’ and ‘license’ [8].

In her paper in this issue Nicole Greenspan points out that there was an overlap between ‘intelligence’, in the sense of the gathering of secret information by the government, and ‘news’ [9]. Intelligence had an additional meaning, beyond the information gathered: the agencies that pursued this information, and the way they evaluated it. News was also gathered and evaluated by albeit often ad hoc agencies. In the case of the spy and double-agent Henry Manning, his intelligence was a form of news; he named and presented it as such in the letters he sent to John Thurloe, secretary to the Council of State during the Commonwealth and Protectorate, and director of Oliver Cromwell's intelligence service. Intelligence and news converged elsewhere in Thurloe's office: Marchamont Nedham, editor of the official government newspaper Mercurius Politicus, answered to the Council via Thurloe. During the 1640s the word ‘intelligencer’ became substitutable with ‘newsmonger’, though the former was not pejorative, whereas the latter was usually indifferent or critical. Hence Intelligencer became a principal term in the titles of periodical news publications. The series of irregular large volumes of overseas news produced after Charles I's ban on corantos was entitled The Swedish Intelligencer [10]. This was perhaps recalled in the title of the pamphlet play written by the satirist Richard Brathwaite in 1641, Mercurius Britanicus, or The English Intelligencer. Another pamphlet satire by John Taylor the same year Old Newes Newly Revived, or, The Discovery of All Occurences Happened Since the Beginning of the Parliament (1641), was presented as a dialogue between 'Mr. Inquisetive a countrey gentleman and Master Intelligencer a newes monger'. Both of these 1641 works assume some connection between intelligencing and news, and both present the communication of news in the form of dramatic exchange. News and dialogue are closely related, and would remain so for the seventeenth century. When the newsbook—the direct antecedent of the modern newspaper, a weekly serial of domestic news published in pamphlet form—was invented, the term intelligencer was soon taken up, in titles like The English Intelligencer (1642), The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer (1643–1649), Mercurius Civicus, Londons Intelligencer (1643–1646), The Moderate Intelligencer (1645–1649) and The Moderne Intelligencer (1647). ‘News’ appears with less than half the frequency in titles of the 1640s. Intelligence was privileged information; a periodical title using the term was laying claim to a special insight or status. One contemporary described intelligence operations as often ‘the mother of prevention’, a phrase that may give us pause to reflect upon modern attitudes to espionage and intelligence, and the hubris they bear [11]. A reader who bought intelligence rather than ordinary news was, like Thurloe, a step above Mr Inquisitive.

‘Information’, on the other hand was something that shaped the reader's judgement; another form of interpreted news, it prevented mis-information, shaped understanding rather than knowledge. Though the word appeared at around the same time as ‘intelligence’ a range of meanings for it were sooner elaborated; it is more embedded in other concepts. One of these meanings is, however, close to ‘intelligence’: knowledge valued because it is scarce or secret. Juxtaposed against ‘news’, ‘intelligencer’ and ‘information’ seem synonymous around 1650. Yet in another respect information is to intelligence as intelligence is to news: information is intelligence that has led to judgement or action, it is the interpretative editorial rather than raw intelligence [12]. These privileged words contrast with ‘rumour’ and ‘opinion’. Opinion is a word split down the middle. On the one hand it meant a judicial or judicious judgement; on the other it was the outcome of radical religious and political speculation. In the minds of those who were not socially qualified to make sound judgements, ‘opinion’ was mere opinion, unfounded, fractious and dangerous. One of the most powerful and memorable accounts of ‘opinion’ is in a satirical broadside engraving of 1641, entitled The World is Ruled and Governed by Opinion. Opinion sits in a tree, her eyes covered by the brim of a hat that looks much like a blindfold surmounted by the tower of Babel, the world resting in her lap; on her left hand sits a chameleon (signifying opinion's ability to assume the appearance of truth), in her right she holds a rod (of instruction, though it could be for punishment). The tree is being watered by a man dressed as a fool; around it springs a thicket of smaller plants, and from its branches hang numerous pamphlets. A man in cavalier's clothes looks up at the tree in wonder. One of the pamphlets shown is entitled Mercuries Message: this is an actual pamphlet, an anti-Laudian verse satire published in 1641 that provoked several responses. By singling this pamphlet out the broadside implicitly aligns itself with those who expressed scandal at the burgeoning market in anti-Laud satires, if not with pro-Laud sentiment itself. In scorning the outpouring of texts the engraver/publisher/author themselves participate in and contribute to the fray; this is the way of publicity. Accompanying the engraving is a poem by Henry Peacham, in which Viator (the cavalier) questions Opinion. She glosses the books and papers hanging from tree, together with her apparent blindness:

Tis true I cannot as cleare JUDGEMENTS see

Through self CONCEIT and haughtie PRIDE

The fruite those idle bookes and libels bee

In everie streete, on everie stall you find[.] [13]

Opinion was one of the things that invaded England in 1640–1642, most visibly in the guise of books and pamphlets.

Like opinion, ‘licence’ was bifurcated: while it traditionally meant permission or liberty to act (or publish), increasingly in the sev...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations and a Note on Dates
• 1 Introduction: networks, communication, practice
• 2 Posts, Newsletters, Newspapers: England in a European system of communications
• 3 Paolo Sarpi and the Uses of Information in Seventeenth-Century Venice
• 4 Ben Jonson and the Serial Publication of News
• 5 Spoken Discourse in Early English Newspapers
• 6 ‘A Couple of Hundred Squabbling Small Tradesmen’? Censorship, the Stationers' Company, and the state in early modern England
• 7 News, Intelligence, and Espionage at the Exiled Court at Cologne: the case of Henry Manning
• 8 John Starkey and Ideological Networks in Late Seventeenth-Century England
• 9 Robert Hepburn and the Edinburgh Tatler: a study in an early British periodical
• Notes on the Contributors
• Index