Journalism in the English Civil War - Political crisis and the origins of public opinion
The social and political upheavals that occurred in Britain between 1640 and 1660 included the fall of the government and the execution of the king, the creation of a secular parliament, and a civil war between supporters of Parliament and Royalists.
These momentous events – sometimes seen as the beginning of the modern era in British history – certainly gave birth to the first writing and publication we can recognise as professional journalism in newspapers.
Change was spectacular – and fast.
SLIDE 1
In 1581 Queen Elizabeth I had made the production of seditious literature a capital offence. And, in early years of the 17th Century printing was controlled via strict censorship by the Star Chamber.
The crown claimed the right to publish (or not) all matters pertaining to England, and the few news based pamphlets that circulated in London dealt exclusively with foreign news.
This was partly because printers felt they could safely distribute reports and opinions about events in France, Germany and Holland. Writing about domestic affairs was risky.
But there was also a commercial reason to concentrate on news from abroad. The powerful and literate in London had a reasonable chance of finding out what was going on at the Royal Court and in Parliament through social contacts with friends and associates.
News from abroad was harder to obtain from such informal sources. And it was a lot more interesting. Religious wars on the continent produced sensational tales – often involving gruesome accounts of barbarity and torture. And, given that these were happening a long way from home and were largely unverifiable, they could also be embellished to make them more sellable.
There was an influx of news-sheets (as they were called) from Europe. Periodicals published in Amsterdam and Cologne became available and they were avidly read.
This encouraged English publishers – none of whom would yet call themselves journalists – to distribute tales from abroad. In 1622 Nicholas Bourne and Thomas Archer launched a title. Weekely Newes from Italy, Germanie, Hungaria, Bohemia and the Palatinate, France and the Low Countries.
SLIDE 2
So, these entrepreneurs were publishing something we would recognise as a newspaper. But note that it still dealt exclusively with foreign news.
Domestic news was formally illegal anda bit too hot for commercially ambitious printers to touch – but that did not mean it did not exist. Manuscript letters about British political issues – including debates in parliament – circulated among a small elite based in London. They were expensive – and only available to people who knew of their existence – but their circulation created an appetite for the tide of printed domestic news that would flow from London printing presses after 1641.
(For a detailed description of these events please read Denis Griffiths, Fleet Street, Five Hundred Years of the Pressand Martin Conboy’s Journalism, A Critical History.)
Today I want to introduce you to the journalism of the English Civil War. First – and briefly - what was the Civil War?
Between 1642 and 1646 England experienced a vicious and bloody civil war, which, as civil wars do, pitted friend against friend and sometimes even brother against brother. The two sides are commonly referred to as Royalists and Parliamentarians. And that’s accurate enough in the sense that the Royalists were supporters of the institution of monarchy and of the king, Charles I, while the Parliamentarians fought for the rights of parliament and asserted its right to make crucial decisions about how the country was governed.
From the beginning each side referred to the other by a derogatory nickname – and those names help us to understand what they thought of each other. As far as the Parliamentarians were concerned the Royalists were Cavaliers – the name derives from the Spanish for soldiers on horseback – but it implies much more than that. By using a foreign name for soldiers wealthy enough to fight as cavalry the Parliamentarians sought to convey the message that their enemies were decadent, posh and slightly foreign i.e. not good, plain English men.
To the Royalists the Parliamentarians were Roundheads. Again the name isovertly descriptive. It refers to the close shaven heads of the many young London apprentices who demonstrated in support of Parliament just before the real fighting began. Again it implies much more. The Royalists were depicting their enemies as poor, working class people who lacked the education and sophistication to govern competently. In seventeenth century parlance the Parliamentarians were low-born, base mechanics (if you’ve read Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream you’ll know he uses a similar phrase)
But while there was a class element to the conflict, it was only a minor factor – more useful as a way of stigmatising opponents than understanding them. The real differences between the Royalists and the Parliamentarians were more profound.
First, the King himself was not a great monarch. Charles I was shy and indecisive. He did not inspire confidence.
Even more important was the religious dimension. Many people suspected that Charles was really a Catholic. They thought he had a secret plan to reverse the English Reformation and make the country Catholic again. There was intense distrust between factions in Parliament who wanted to make England properly protestant – people who believed Henry VIIIs split from Rome had left the Church of England only ‘half-reformed’ – and those who were happy with the poorly defined theological compromises that defined the English Church then and which some argue still define it today.
The catalyst for all these arguments was money: the King needed it to fight a war in Scotland, where he was determined to assert his authority and to introduce a new prayer book. Only Parliament could give him the authority to raise money. And it was reluctant to give him what he wanted.
(There are many other factors – including personal gain – if you read Dr Mike Stoyle’s essay in your reading packs you will be familiar with them.)
My main point is that this was exciting, brutal and divisive stuff – and it invigorated journalism.
In the years before the war began in 1642, radical Protestants produced a deluge of illegal pamphlets promoting their religious opinions and criticising the King.
Initially, Archbishop Laud, the King’s official Censor of the Press, came down hard on them. Printers were fined, whipped and jailed. In extreme cases some were branded with red hot iron and had their ears cut off.
But political crisis creates an appetite for information.
The political crisis that precipitated the English Civil War began to simmer when King Charles failed to crush the Scots in the autumn of 1640. The Long Parliament was summoned – on November 3 1640 – and members of parliament assembled to discuss the affairs of the nation.
This was politics in the raw – and the MPs of all factions wanted their views heard beyond the Palace of Westminster. They insisted on having their speeches printed and distributed. They responded to each other’s speeches by publishing criticism.
All this was a boon for printers – the disputatious politicians were paying to put their views in the public domain. More than this, it placed topical controversies before the public in greater numbers and at lower cost than ever before.
In the Spring of 1642 the exchange of printed declarations and opinions between
Parliament and the King produced a plethora of publications known as “Separates” essentially half-sheets of printed material or several sheets folded together. This period became known as the “War of Words.”
Public interest in news now became intense. So intense that, in a reversal of the previous tradition of bringing in interesting news from abroad, British printers now began to sell news about England to the continent. One title, Le Mercure Anglois, was printed in London and sent to France.
The King tried in vain to restrict this outpouring of critical news and commentary – but he had lost control of Parliament. In 1641, the Star Chamber was abolished. Religious and political pamphlets and sheets poured of the presses including, on November 22 1641 the first official report of parliamentary news. It was called Heads of Severall Proceedings in this Present Parliament.
Print was on its way to becoming a medium of genuinely public debate and information. Accounts of debates in Parliament involved readers in political debate. Publishing created a channel for the circulation of political news and opinion. The appearance of a real newspaper in 1641 saw politics breaking through the barriers that had always existed under absolute monarchy.
Informed members of the public wanted to know what was taking place in parliament and to participate in debates about what should happen next. They needed journalists to tell them. Parliamentarians needed journalists – or propagandists – to promote their case and convince supporters. The demand for news created regular, professional newspapers – known as newsbooks.
Civil War newsbooks made politics part of the daily experience of their readers. Note that these readers were a small minority of the population, but they were a much larger group than the tiny elite that had previously dealt with affairs of state.
And this early journalism offered a distinct advantage to those who opposed the King and supported parliament. Charles did not use the new means of communication to make his case. He was an absolute monarch. He did not believe that he should engage in dialogue with his subjects. He considered himself king by divine right. To use persuasion to advance his case would be to accept that he had a case that needed to be argued. As far as he was concerned, that was nonsense. He was king because God had made him king.
So, at first, the Royalist faction left the new opportunity for propaganda to their parliamentary opponents. This was a colossal error. The leaders of the parliamentary faction were articulate and passionate. They did not hesitate to use journalism to create a new form of public politics of a kind never previously seen. They had new and radical ideas about religion and power and they wanted to share them and build public support for them.
Thus, the period between 1640 and 1660 became, in Martin Conboy’s words “an extended experiment in the politics of the press under conditions ranging from almost absolute freedom to almost absolute control.” This was also a time when several techniques used in modern political journalism were used for the first time. These included:
Planted stories
Exposés – particularly of royal corruption
Editorial comment
Specialist correspondence
The first use of headlines (short sentences indicating the content of the story below first appeared in the Kingdom’s Weekly Intelligencer in January 1643. The idea soon caught on)
The first use of illustrations – Mercurius Civicus: London’s Intelligencerbegan to use woodcuts as soon as it was launched in 1643
Use of shorthand – In your reading pack you will find an account of the execution of King Charles on Tuesday, January 30 1649. It comes from APerfect Diurnall. It is plain that the reporter has taken a verbatim shorthand note of the speeches.
The Civil War itself brought about a huge advance. Both sides saw the need to promote their cause and condemn their opponents. They knew that newspapers were an effective way to do it.
The war saw the launch of the most famous of the early newsbooks – The Mercuries. Many titles included the word Mercury – he was, after all, the Roman God of Messages – usually depicted as the winged messenger. Two of these titles, Mercurius Aulicus and Mercurius Britannicus are best remembered as intensely partisan propaganda newspapers.
In the disputes that preceded the outbreak of fighting in 1642, several newsbooks had attempted objective reporting. They knew there was a market for information. It made commercial sense to supply it. However, when the conflict began polemical and partisan writing began to dominate. The two most famous Mercuries exemplify it
(SLIDE)
Mercurius Aulicus was the official Royalist title. It ‘Communicated the Intelligence and Affaires of the Court to the Rest of the Kingdom.’
Mercurius Britannicusoffered the alternative view.
Writing in 1651 one observer of the newspaper scene, Clement Barksdale wrote a verse about the competing versions of events presented in these titles:
As the armies did against each other fight;
Even so doe our modern Historians write;
Each for his side; The Stationer says, Buy Both:
Compare them, and you may pick out the truth.
That argument – that truth may be discerned by considering a diverse range of accounts of the same event in various publications - would become very much more familiar centuries later as a genuinely free press emerged in Victorian England. It retains some value today.
The propagandas has a distinctly salacious feel. To my mind it sometimes feels vaguely modern. This is from Mercurius Aulicus – the Royalist title – of 23 December 1643. The war is in full swing and the Royalists are keen to blacken their enemy’s reputation.
“On Sunday last…While his majesty’s forces were at Church, one of their prisoners was missed by his Keeper, who searching for him, and looking through a cranny into the stable, he saw a ladder erected and the holy rebel committing buggery on the keeper’s own mare”
But, in seventeenth Century England the argument against censorship had not been won. As soon as the Parliamentarians under Oliver Cromwell has executed the King and proclaimed their Commowealth, they reacted no less vigorously than the King to the challenge of free speech. They sought to suppress it. The Long Parliament created the ‘Committee for Examinations to search for unlicensed Presses,’ and it ordered that ‘No book shall be printed unless the same be approved and licensed by such.’
This provoked the scholar, poet and independent Protestant, John Milton, (the future author of Paradise Lost, 1667) to write the Areopagitica (Explain using St. Lawrence Institute notes) ***Hand out Copies***
So the Civil War provoked an initial outburst of furious propaganda – after which Cromwell imposed a state monopoly of news under the supervision of a government censor. At the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 the system was embraced and operated by the new king.
(Take in Grayson Ditchfield’s notes)
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