THE anonymous printed pamphlet, entitled, Hereafter ensue the trewe encountre or batayle lately don betwene. Englande and: Scotland (?1513), has some claim to be the earliest extant English news pamphlet. As such, it marks the convergence between a number of pressures and conventions and opportunities that would shape British news culture, and hence the book trade, and, ultimately, the literary and political culture of the archipelago. It describes the battle of Flodden Field between the forces of Henry VIII and those of James IV, King of Scotland. The latter was slain at the battle. From the very start, news print was involved with propaganda and the death of kings.
Yet, it is an unimposing and, at first glance, uninspired object (and there survive only a handful of copies), though the organization of the text was to set a pattern for thousands of future pamphlets. The title page, with its meandering title, incorporates a woodcut of the Earl of Surrey approaching James IV in front of the assembled Scottish forces. No author was named on the title page: most early news publications were anonymous. Pages two and three of the single, folded sheet have a narrative, in blackletter type, describing the negotiations before battle, of the lie of the land, and of the battle, before listing the English noblemen slain. After the narrative concludes on the fourth and final page, there is a list of the slain English noblemen and then a colophon: ‘Emprynted by me. Richarde. Faques dwllyng In poulys churche yerde.’ The prose is factual, but has none of the complex rhetoric of proof and demonstration, of eyewitnessing and impartiality that would characterize later reports:
In this batayle the scottes hadde many great Auauntagies, that is to witte the hyghe. Hylles and mountains a great wynde with them and sodayne rayne all contrary to oug bowes and Archers
It is nat to be douthted but the scottes fought manly and were determyned outher to wynne ye felde or to dye[.] They were also as well apoynted as was possyble at all poyntes with Armoure & harneys so that fewe of them were slayne with arrows Howbeit the bylles dyd bete and hewe them downe woth some payne and daunger to Englysshemen.1
The pamphlet dwells on the treating between the two kings and on James’s proud defiance, exhibited in his herald’s approach to the Earl of Surrey. The complex decorum of this encounter would have bypassed all but the most informed and attentive reader. However, the significance is expanded in a contemporaneous publication that serves as a partner to the news pamphlet: A ballade of the Scottyshshe kynge (no place or date, but probably issued by the same printer-publisher, Richard Faques, in 1513). This small folio ballad, attributed to John Skelton, illustrated with a woodcut of the battle, mocks King James for his arrogance: ‘In your somnynge ye were to malaperte/And your harolde no thynge expert/Ye thought ye dyde it full valyauntolye/But not worth thre skppes of a pye’. His pride and his inexperience point to his illegitimacy, and the fatal outcome is providential. In contrast, Henry ‘is our noble Champyon. | A kynge anointed and ye be non’ ([¶]v). As a news report the ballad is uninformative/it relies on prior knowledge of the event. Its purpose is, rather, to gloss the event with a celebratory, nationalist perspective, complementing the news in The trewe encountre.
By 1640 this was very familiar material: perhaps the greatest shift over these decades was in readers’ acclimatization to this kind of news report. There would be significant developments in 1618–22, but the seismic change in the quantity and nature of news would take place in the 1640s. While there is no indication that Trewe encountre is an official publication, and the imprint suggests a commercial publication, including an indication of where the item could be purchased, it must have been tolerated by some means, and can therefore be regarded as something like propaganda, though it might be misleading to infer that it had much in common with modern forms of publicity assigned that name. Moreover, its very difference from A ballade of the Scottyshshe kynge indicates that its intent was to inform, rather than persuade. The desire of some element of Henry’s government to publicize the military victory over the Scots is only one of the forces that brought this nascent form into existence. The commercial potential inherent in printed news was another, which itself depended on an audience of literate consumers and a means of distribution (both of these certainly restricted at this point). To these can be added an apparatus by which news that was traditionally disseminated orally could be translated into written form—which is to say, a shared news rhetoric; and also writers of news and suppliers of news. The quantity of news pamphlets that appeared over the following seven decades suggests that these factors were only intermittently present: if Tudor news is turned into a narrative, it is one that doesn’t really get moving until the 1580s.
This may be the consequence of developments after 1513 that inhibited the evolution of the press, as well as of the limitations imposed by literacy and commercial infrastructure. These developments include, above all, legal restrictions. Two years later, Pope Leo X would issue a decree requiring all cities under his influence to prevent the printing of any book without a licence granted by Rome or a local bishop. He reasoned thus:
Complaints from many persons, however, have reached our ears and those of the apostolic see. In fact, some printers have the boldness to print and sell to the public, in different parts of the world, books—some translated into Latin from Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and Chaldean as well as some issued directly in Latin or a vernacular language—containing errors opposed to the faith as well as pernicious views contrary to the Christian religion and to the reputation of prominent persons of rank. The readers are not edified. Indeed, they lapse into very great errors not only in the realm of faith but also in that of life and morals. This has often given rise to various scandals, as experience has taught, and there is daily the fear that even greater scandals are developing.2
Two years after this, Luther posted his 95 theses, polemic about the reformation of the church grew more acute, and anxiety increased about the pernicious influence of printed debate. Henry VIII became the first European ruler to prohibit a specific list of books (the index librorum prohibitorum) in a proclamation of 1529; Pope Paul IV issued the first papal Index three decades later, in 1559. Print was dangerous because it was public, because it risked the spread of debate, and because readers could be influenced outside of traditional institutional structures of authority. And news—it would gradually be learned—was dangerous because it encouraged discussion of matters of state, it encouraged ‘lavish discourse’, gossip and rumour, and uncontrolled and uncontrollable speech and opinion.3 For this reason, printed news would become the object of increasing suspicion—yet, there would be such a close affinity between news and printing that printed news would appear in one form or another, with varying intensity and frequency, until the development, at the end of our period, of something very much like the modern newspaper.
News—the noun: it was also in Stuart times a verb, to news it about—has two aspects. First: it is an event that is communicated: news of a king’s death, a battle, a monstrous birth, or a strange fish washed up on a shore. News events, according to sociological research on modern news media, become newsworthy because of their possession to some degree of some of twelve characteristics: frequency (it has to fit into a cycle), scale, unambiguity (its implications have to be finite and identifiable), meaningfulness (primarily relevance to your circumscribed cultural context), predictability (we want or predict that it should happen), unpredictability (because rare events are newsworthy), continuity with earlier news, and composition (i.e. they fit expectations of balance or interest). In addition, news events in the modern, Western world, according to the same sociologists, prioritize elite nations, elite people, personify news, and focus on bad news.4 News is thus a commodity, but it is also a currency, something defined by, and itself defining, relationships between communicators. It can take one of many forms—a conversation in the street or in bed, a newsletter, a pamphlet, or a television programme—but these forms also participate in a common pattern of communication. What is communicated within this pattern, whether true or false, old or new, interesting or tedious, is constitutively defined as news through its transmission.
In oral exchange, news could be a social pleasantry. Diaries and libel cases record neighbours and travellers encountering each other and asking ‘what news?’5 It is both a means of commencing or affirming a relationship and a sensuous human need, a material fact of our existence as social beings. The evidence we have of these conversations derives from where they went wrong—and news turned into scandal, slander, or sedition, 6 conversations that violated norms and hence left a legal record—or when they were exceptional and literate individuals, such as Thomas Cotton, John Rous, and Nehemiah Wallington, wrote them down in diaries. As most people in this period were illiterate, it is not possible to recover any but the broadest contours of this oral news culture. Where historians have been able to be more specific, and to explore the content of conversations, it has usually been through its contact with written and printed culture. As Adam Fox and others have shown, oral exchanges fed off the enhancement in the supply of news by the invention of the printed periodical; news and rumour moved freely between printed and manuscript exchange; writing reinvented oral traditions. Indeed, the very idea of an oral culture is one that was, and could only be, formulated after the appearance of print (writing was too obviously exclusively elite before then). Early sixteenth-century England was not simply an oral society; seventeenth-century England was not simply a text-based society; and though the relationships between modes of communication shifted in the period, this cannot be reduced to one displacing another.7
News that was written down presents a richer and more complex resource. It includes familiar communications, newsletters, commercially produced newsletters, and scribal separates of news. What had been an informal mode of communication was commercialized through the emergence in the early sixteenth century, across Europe, though initially in Venice and Rome, of avvisi. These serial news sheets, produced in scribal workshops, compiled stories of news from various sources—including overseas, gathered from the wisps of mercantile trade routes—and were sold to the educated elite, providing them with political and commercial information, facilitating their engagement in public life, as well as enriching their everyday conversation.8 The most celebrated commercial manuscript newsletter consumers included the Fuggers family, proprietors of an Augsburg financial house, who collected, from 1568 onwards, regular newsletters that were distributed widely across Europe.9 In England, and on a more modest scale, there were John Pory, John Chamberlain, Samuel Pecke, and, perhaps, Joseph Meade (who is discussed further below)—all early seventeenth-century writers, suggesting that England lagged behind Europe in this respect.10 Prior to this, individuals wrote regular newsletters, but did so in semi-formal arrangements, not as professionals with multiple recipients.
Nonetheless, written news had a different character from oral—and, subsequently, printed news, though printed news throughout its early history was little more than printed manuscript news. Ben Jonson, who was interested in and perhaps inspired by the peculiar nature of print, its capacities to reach an audience, to preserve the letter, and to detract from the spirit of written words, returned to satire of printed news. In his masque, News from the New World (1620), a writer of manuscript newsletters claims to write a thousand or more newsletters a week, to all parts of the country and to all ranks of persons, tailoring his news to the religious disposition of his recipient. This archetypal newsletter writer disputes with an exemplary printer about the value of their trade: for the former, printing makes news common, and therefore no longer news, while written news, though it may be untrue, is still news; for the printer, the truth is also altogether irrelevant, but the very printing indicates the truth of news to a vulgar audience, ‘who will indeed believe nothing but what’s in Print. For those I doe keep my Presses, and so many Pens going to bring forth wholesome relations, which once in halfe a score yeares (as the age growes forgetfull) I Print over againe with a new date.’11 Print therefore has a fraught relationship with the truth and with the appetites of a credulous public. Jonson’s chosen form is a masque and the commerce in and culture of news represents his principle of disorder, from which an ideal of order must be rescued. He would proceed to explore the same matrix of relationships—news, truth, print, commerce, credibility, and publicity—in his play The Staple of News (1626, 1631): some aspect of printed news threatened to upstage him, or even the dramatic form itself.12
Printed news was regarded with scepticism: from its very earliest days it was associated with falsehood and deception. The very fact of its commonality, its relative lack of social prestige, and its non-exclusivity (more a hypothetical characteristic than a reality because of low levels of literacy) resulted in its denigration—yet, that was precisely the quality that also gave it a distinctive power and therefore authority. Printed news encouraged discussion of matters of state; it could make public things that should possibly be the province of a well-informed and well-educated few. Print affirmed that rumours were true; but it also disseminated untruths. Printed news was thus characterized by a potent ambivalence, one that perhaps more clearly articulates the social tensions around the possession and communication of the news than it does the actual truthfulness of the medium.
How did you know news was true? Over the first two centuries of printed books, there rapidly developed a range of verbal and paratextual means of demonstrating that a news report was truthful and accurate, and even impartial. Central to these was the notion of testimony and eyewitnessing. News close to the source was privileged, which is one of the particular qualities of the epistolary form. One early and sophisticated news pamphlet shows some of these qualities in play: The spoyle of Antwerp (1576) by George Gascoigne (who is not identified as the author in the text: he merely refers to himself as ‘a true English man, who was present’). This is atypical of Tudor news pamphlets in some respects: it has a literary merit deriving from a careful and reflective prose style; its realization of events is vivid; it is not translated, but written in English; and it is a detailed account of a particular event. In other respects it is typical: it concerns war, and conflict between Protestants and Catholics.
Gascoigne had complained in April 1576, in a preface to another’s book, that he was obliged to ‘march amongst the Muses for lacke of exercise in martiall employes’. Later that year, he was writing news to Lord Burghley, Secretary to State, from Paris and then Antwerp, apparently in an official capacity. Hence, he was in Antwerp in October and November 1576 to witness the sacking of the city by Spanish forces.13 Soon after, he wrote the pamphlet, beginning ‘Since my hap was to bee present …’ The emphasis on eyewitnessing serves the convention of proof, but it more evidently colours this personal report than most other instances. Yet, Gascoigne also dwells at unusual length on his conscientiousness and his strategy of reporting. His pamphlet, he writes, will ‘answer all honest expectations with a meane truthe, set downe between thextreme surmises of sundry doubtfull mindes: And encreased by the manyfolde light tales which haue been engendred by feareful or affectionate rehersals’ (Aiir). In an age of confessional conflict, the notion that the truth needed to be presented in a non-emotional way was far from universal. He proceeds to argue for moderation:
let these my few woordes become a forewarnynge on bothe handes: and let them stande as a Lanterne of light between two perilous Rockes … To that ende, all stories and Chronicles are written: and to that ende I presume to publishe this Pamphlet: protestyng that neither mallice to the one syde, nor partiall affection to the other, shall make my pen to swarve any iote from truth of that which I will set down & saw executed: For if I were dispose to write maliciously agaynst the vanquishers: their former barbarous cruelty, insolences, Rapes, spoyles, Incests, and Sacriledges, committed in sundrie other places, might yeeld mee sufficiente matter without the lawful remembrance of this their late stratagemne … But as I sayd before, mine onely entent is to set downe a plaine truthe, for the satisfiynge of sutche as have hetherto beene caried aboute with doubtfull reportes: and for a profitable example unto all sutche as beeyng subiect to like imperfections, might fall thereby into the like calamities. (sigs. Aii–Aiiiv)
The ‘plaine truth’ is a rhetorical commonplace, but that should not lessen the significance of what Gascoigne is undertaking in applying his understanding of the plain style, captatio benevolentiæ, and narratio to a bloody event of pan-European significance he has days before witnessed. He does, however, assume that his readers already know the contents of the false news reports, which makes his corrections harder to penetrate at times. Rather than describing, as an historian might, he sets about clarifying the context of Spanish antagonism to the city, though, like a sophisticated historian, and unlike most early modern news writers, he includes the question of why in his analysis.14
In setting the scene, he establishes both his credibility (though he is perhaps a little disingenuous about his reason for being there—he may have been spying) and the tense mood in the city: ‘At this time and xii. dayes beefore I was in the sayde towne of Antwerpe vpon certeine priuate affaires of myne owne: so that I was enforced to become an eyed witnes of their entry and all that they did. As also afterwards (for all ye gates were kept first shut + I could not departe) to beeholde the pitiful stratageme which folowed’ (Aviir). He is trapped within the city and finds himself a victim, as well as a witness, when he is trampled underfoot by fleeing Walloon forces at one point. He nonetheless diligently states what he cannot affirm: ‘Their order of entry into ye Castle yeard, and of their approch to the trenches, I did not see, for I could not get out of the town … yet as I heard it rehearsed by sundry of them selues, I wil also here rehearce it for a truth’ (Bir). His writing balances a judicious presentation of facts with a sense of the drama of events. The horror of the piles of dead bodies he frames in an orderly way: ‘Now I haue set downe the order of their entry, approch, charge, and assaulte: together with their proceeding in victory: and that by credible report, both of the Spanyerdes themselues, and of others who serued in their company: let me also say a little of that which I sawe executed’ (Biiiv), and he proceeds to describe the fighting he sees when he leaves the English house, as well as the bullet that narrowly misses him. While he does not hesitate to accuse the Spaniards of ‘barbarous cruelty’ (Bviiv), this accusation will be levelled through the lens of a clear narrative, nor will he be impartial: ‘And now to keep promise, and to speake without parciality: I must needs confesse, that it was the greatest victory, and the roun dlyest executed, that hath bene seene, red, or heard of, in our age’ (Bviv). Only after admitting this can it be seen how ungodly their slaughter is, conducted after the signs of God’s favour shown in their victory. Gascoigne performs a remarkably inventive display of balance and reserved emotion, such as are associated with modern, objective reporting.15
Gascoigne is an unusually literary news writer and it is perhaps this self-consciousness that assists him in forging a journalistic style that anticipates later developments in reportage. Perhaps most startling is this painterly reference: ‘I forbeare also to recount the huge numbers, drowned in ye new Toune: where a man might behold as many sundry shapes and formes of mans motio n at time of death: as euer Mighel Angelo dyd portray in his tables of Doomes day’ (Cir). If we were to view the history of news writing in the period 1500–1640 as a narrative, however, Gascoigne is an interesting anomaly: his attention to detail in the techniques of news reporting was not picked up again until Thomas Gainsford was writing between 1622 and 1624. Most of the narrative has to be seen in terms of the development of practicalities, rather than style, and these were driven by the terms of book-commerce, government regulation, and the circumstances of international politics.
Not all domestic news was subject to these restrictions. In fact, a significant proportion of press output was newsy: providential pamphlets on strange and miraculous phenomena, crimes and punishments, and witchcraft.16 Such publications, judging by official censures on the news press, were assigned to a different category from military and parliamentary news. While timeliness was essential to political news, this kind of news fitted longer cycles, and these materials were seldom as precisely dated, and were occasionally recycled. By turns prurient and titillating, they mixed sensation with moral instruction and shaped their narratives with reformed providential and soteriological reflection. Proselytizing preachers, like Henry Goodcole and Thomas Cooper, often with a zealous or puritan agenda, found the news pamphlet, despite its gossipy and even immoral associations, a useful vehicle for exploring elements of Calvinist theology. While political news was circumscribed by social norms and censorship practices, Protestant soteriology was well suited to the forms of cheap print.
Two examples of different approaches to this mixing of news and instruction will be sufficient. The first, A most horrible & detestable Murther committed by a bloudie minded man vpon his owne Wife: and most strangely Reuealed by his Childe that was vnder fiue yeares of age (1595), begins with a two-page address ‘To the Christian Reader’ with the most direct kind of moralizing: ‘How many most execrable murthers haue there beene done of late time, which hath bin published for our example to the world, thereby to put vs inminde of our duties to God, & withhold vs from like trespasses, by viewing their shamefull ends, whom deservedly the Law cuts off for such offences. But so rageth the enemie of mankinds, day and night restlessly with his temptations, that he ceaseth not to vrge vs all to mischeife’ (sig. A2r). The devil is frequently an important character in these pamphlets—so much so that they may be said to express a culture of ‘popular Manicheanism’.17 The purpose is expressly didactic: ‘And that the falls of others may make vs to leaue those sinnes so deeply ingrafted in our harts, that in the last daye we may reape the reward of our charitie and other good deedes to our needie Brethren extended …’ (A2v). The anonymous author is not proposing that the pamphlet will suppress the uxoricidal urges of its readers; rather, the murder is used as a more general lesson in the nature of salvation. The narration does not reveal a motive, but describes how Raph Meaphon returned from labouring and, ‘comming home, his wife with her sonne or fiue yeares, or scarse so much, beeing a bed, he knocked, and was let in, where he fel to rayling and chiding with her: and in the end, whether it were a matter pretended, or otherwise, but lead thereunto by the Diuel, the ancient enemie of our saluation, which doubtless prouoked him therevnto, he drew out hys knife and cut her throate, and so leauing her weltring in her owne goare’ (A3r), he went on to fire the house. By a providential turn, the child is saved and acts as a (truth-speaking and innocent) witness against the father, who is duly executed—still without confessing the fact, further truth of his reprobation. The pamphlet concludes with a further moral counsel on the certain revelation of sins, ‘how the fowles of the ayre, yea the stones in the wall shall declare such horrible sinnes, that the punishment due for the same may be worthely rewarded, as we see by this and many others’ (A4v).
A sharp contrast can be found in A Detection of damnable driftes, practized by three Witches arraigned at Chelmisford in Essex (1579). The anonymous author begins with a protest: ‘Accept this pamphlet (Christian Reader) view and peruse it with discretion, and hedefulnesse. No trifles are therin conteined worthy to be contem ned, nor pernicious fantazies deseruyng to bee condemned’ (Aiir). Indeed, there are not: the text of the pamphlet consists of the confession of the witches and the evidence submitted against them, expressed in the formal language of court record (‘Item, the saied Mother Staunton …’). Some details are nonetheless titillating: ‘Besides the sonne of this Mother Smith, confessed that his mother did keepe three Spirites, whereof the one called by her greate Dick, was enclosed in a wicker Bottle: The seconde names Little Bicke, was putte into a Leather Bottle: And the third termed Willet, she kepte in a Wolle Packe. And thereupon the house was commaunded to bee searched. The Bottles and packe were found, but the Spirites were vanished awaie’ (Aviv). Despite such particularity, the pamphlet provides no substantial context for the events—not even the sentences—and either relies on the reader already possessing such context, or, more likely, pushes the reader away from gossip towards a more abstract, theological interpretation. The court depositions are framed as an essay in the character of election and reprobation:
in this pretie plot may holsome hearbes of admonitions for the vnwarie, and carelesse, and soote flowers to recreate the wearied senses, be gathered. For on thone side the cleare sight maie espie the ambushmentes, whiche Sathan the secrete woorkemaister of wicked driftes, hath placed in moste partes of this realme, either by craftie conueighaunces, to creepe into the conceiptes of the simple, or by apparaunt treacherie to undermine and spoile the states of such as God permitteth him to haue power ouer. And on the other side the eye that is wimpled, may hereby be aduertised of the darkenesse, wherewith his vnderstanding is ouercast, and puttyng of the veile of vanitie, maie reclaime his concept, and esteeme of the impietie of the offendours and vilanie of their actes, according to the woorde of God, and waightinesse of the case. (Aiir–v)
There is a manifest disjuncture between the merely illustrative and unedifying detail of the vanishing spirits and the Manichean moral categories with which the reader is instructed to approach the text. This very heterogeneity is typical of news publications and reminds us that readers may not have approached the matter with the moral earnestness that clerical authors recommended.18
In part because of the appetite for overseas news, in part because of apprehensiveness about the dangers of publishing ‘domestic’ or British news, much news publishing in Britain involved translation of foreign-language news pamphlets. While there were various occasional publications—ballads and pamphlets on the rebellion of the northern earls in 1569–70, for example; and sensational publications on witches and monstrous births—the first glut of news publications appeared in 1589. The Marprelate Controversy was raging, one of the earliest pamphlet wars in English, exposing and satirizing Anglican bishops, and showing the power of the press to reach and influence a broad reading public. Meanwhile, the Protestant Henri of Navarre ascended to the French throne. This dramatic injection of confessional interest into the French Wars of Religion increased English readers’ appetite for news—or, at least, publishers’ estimation of that appetite. Over the next four years, dozens of news pamphlets appeared, directly translated from the French (with little adjustment for the English audience), a glut that ended with the King’s reconversion to Protestantism in 1593.19
During this period, the printer-bookseller John Wolfe, something of a specialist in cheap news pamphlets, as well as illicit printing (until he became a beadle of the Stationers’s Company—the trade guild with a monopoly over printing and publishing, which preserved order in the book trade—in 1587), effectively invented the news serial. His pamphlet Newes out of France on the First of this moneth of March (1592) was conceived as part of a series, which continued with The Chiefe Occurrences of Both the Armies (1592), The Continual Following of the French King (1592), A Discourse of That Which is Past, Since the Kings Departure from Gouy (1592), A True Relation of the French Kinge His Good Successe … With Other Intelligences Given by Other Letters Since the Second of May (1592), and A Journall, Wherein is Truly Sette Downe from Day to Day, what was Doone … from the Coming of the Duke of Parma into Fraunce, Untill the Eighteenth of May 1592 (1592). It is possible that his earlier Newes Lately come on the last day of Februarie 1591, from diuers partes of France, Sauoy, and Tripoli in Soria (1591) was also intended as part of this series. Wolfe was not only specializing in publishing news (‘Truely translated’, as the title page of the last item claimed, ‘out of the French and Italian Copies, as they were sent to right Honourable persons’), but also experimenting with new means of publishing it. A serial publication offered the opportunity to secure an ongoing, loyal audience (and thus stable profits—news was a ‘steady-seller’, though it generally only sold in single editions). Wolfe had perhaps taken the idea from another serial news publication, the weekly Bills of Mortality, which had first appeared in 1581. These government publications documented the deaths in London by parish and cause, constituting a print record of the city’s demographic that was also read as news, provoking fear in readers as plague crept towards them.20 They furnished the idea of serial, periodical news if anyone was able to seize it: and Wolfe appears to have done so.
With the end of the French Wars of Religion the production of news pamphlets abated; with the outbreak of the Thirty Years War in 1618 there was another efflorescence and a more sustained development of the serial press. London booksellers began to produce translations of Dutch and German news sheets. A more developed news-periodical business existed in mainland Europe at this time: weekly vernacular newspapers appeared in Strasbourg and Antwerp in 1605, Basel in 1610, Paris in 1613, Frankfurt and Vienna by 1615, and Amsterdam in 1618, all of which had superseded Mercurius Gallobelgicus, a semi-annual, Latin news publication that first appeared in 1592. From 1618 through 1620 London publishers—generally those specializing in inexpensive print—translated foreign pamphlets. Among these titles we can find A Catalogve of the Depvties of the High and Mightie States Generall of the Vnited Prouinces (1618), The true description of the execution of iustice, done in the Grauenhage, by the counsell of the Generall States holden for the same purpose, vpon Sir Iohn van Olden Barnauelt Against whom the said States purposely thereunto appointed, did worthily pronounce sentence of death according to his deserts; which was executed vpon the third day of May, 1619. stilo nouo. at ten of the clocke in the morning (1619), and A most true relation of the late proceedings in Bohemia, Germany, and Hungaria Dated the 1. the 10. and 13. of Iuly, this present yeere 1620 (1620). These publications, though they have been removed from the histories by subsequent historians, are identical to later ‘corantos’ in every respect except seriality: they are occasional publications. At some point in late 1620 (the earliest surviving issue is unlikely to have been the first) a Dutch publisher issues, for distribution in Britain, an English translation of a Dutch news sheet. This followed the original in its folio format, irregular periodicity, and plainness of style:
From Crakow in Poland. Iuly 4.
The Polonians haue begun to warre with the Turks, and the new Generall Kothwits is gone with the whole armie to Podolia: the report goeth, that they haue had an hot skirmish with the Turkes.21
In 1621 English stationers—especially Thomas Archer, Nathaniel Butter, and Nicholas Bourne—displaced the imports with London-printed translations. These initially imitated the Dutch in assuming folio format, but then reverted to the quarto format of 1618, which was traditional for English-printed pamphlets. In this form the serial publications—they never achieved the fixed periodicity that would enable them to be called periodicals in the strict meaning of the word—known as ‘corantos’ survived until their suppression in 1632. After a brief revival in late 1638 they would continue until they were displaced by the weekly newsbooks, containing news of Britain, that began to appear in November 1641.22
The language of the corantos in the 1620s is largely factual. It sketches events, usually under locatives and with specific dates—both lending an air of credibility to reports and serving as typographical divisions before the invention of headlines—in unemotive language. Glossing is absent, prefatory remarks and transitions are kept to a minimum. This is the consequence of a literalist approach to translation, but also, perhaps, a sign of nervousness about the dangers of publishing news. It was indeed a risky business, as Joseph Meade indicated in one newsletter dated 22 September 1621: ‘My Corrantoer Archer was layd by the heeles for making or adding to Corrantoes &c. as they say: But now there is another who hath gott license to print them & sell them honestly translated out of Dutch.’23 Meade suggests that it was precisely a more creative approach to the translation of Dutch corantos that landed Archer in trouble, and his successor had promised to be more ‘honest’, that is to say, literal.
To obtain more news, and more diverse news, one could turn to manuscript newsletters such as those Meade supplied, as part of a patron–client relationship, rather than a narrowly commercial one, to Sir Martin Stuteville. Meade’s newsletters conveniently overlapped with the early corantos, which he was able to incorporate with his own reporting in various ways. He articulated clearly the distinction between news sources: ‘domestick’, ‘merely forraine’, and ‘mixt’, which last involved news of embassies at home and overseas.24 With his foreign news he tended to indicate his sources, the letters he learned it from; with domestic news he related it as fact, without any such frame, though as a Cambridge don he cannot have witnessed much of the court news first hand. He was aware, however, that the value of his service lay in the heterogeneity of his news content and the inclusion of domestic news that was not available in printed sources. This does not mean he did not have to be careful: though there was not normally a direct form of censorship affecting correspondence, written communication was nonetheless subject to the laws governing libel and the more general risks of irritating those in power. The following is a typical example of the privileged news, reported in a mildly anodyne, positive tone:
On munday His Matie went to Parliament, then most graciously signified his acceptance of their loves vnto him, which was more then he expected; & also approved of their doings, which he acknowledged to be wisely and temperately done. And that now he studied how & wherein to give them all the content he could; and therefore, that there was not any intendment of his whatsoever, not any affection which beare to any person, how great soeuer, but that if they should fine it prejudiciall to state and commonwealth, he would decline from the same; yea though it extended to his son Charles …25
The language of Meade’s reporting parallels the indirect phrasing of this delicate negotiation between parliamentary supply and monarchical prerogative. This is precisely the kind of news that was unavailable in print until 1641. Much of Meade’s foreign news was transcribed from printed corantos, which he evidently regarded as sufficiently reliable. At times (this example is from March 1623) he could go so far as to declare: ‘I haue no more newes to send you at this present then what I enclose & you shall find in the book I send.’26 However, there were respects in which corantos seemed to him unsatisfactory. When he included them with his newsletters to Stuteville he would annotate them with minor corrections and glosses. For example, in a copy of Corante, or, Newes From Italy (Amsterdam, 9 July 1621) that he sent to Stuteville, Meade corrected the printed sentence: ‘In Morauia, there are more principall Lords and Burgers committed to prison, whose expectation, as also in Prague of the prisoners shall this weeke be done …’ He deleted ‘expectation’ and inserted ‘execution’, probably based on inference.27 Elsewhere, he corrected linguistic errors, he identified where obscure towns were, and more generally, he supplied glosses and explanations where the reader (in this case, specifically Stuteville) would benefit from more context. Hence, where one coranto had the phrase ‘The Turkes day at Regensburg …’, Meade corrected ‘Turkes day’ to ‘Reicks day’ and then glossed it in the margin: ‘so they call the day of the Imperiall Diet’.28 As literal translations from texts initially produced for readers in the United Provinces, the corantos may have needed some clarification for most British readers. However, the publishers may have been concerned that by taking the liberty of ‘adding to’ the originals, as Archer had, they risked a spell in prison.
The exception to the convention of avoiding editorial comment on printed news is Thomas Gainsford, who edited the corantos of the syndicate of news publishers (Butter and Bourne, plus Thomas Archer, Bartholomew Downes, and William Sheffard) between 1622 and 1624. Gainsford had a political vision: he was a champion of the Protestant cause in Bohemia, a critic of James’s appeasement of the Spanish, and an advocate of a more active involvement in Europe.29 He also adopted a more interventionist approach to editing the news, digesting fragmentary reports into a continuous narrative, and gently steers the interpretation thereof. This introduction to an unnumbered coranto, Good Newes for the King of Bohemia (April 1622) is probably his work:
Gentle Reader;
Because I see, that the generall Currantos coming weekely ouer, haue rather stifled their owne credites, then giuen satisfaction vnto the world; and that yet men throng as fast to heare Newes, as they beyond the Seas throng ouer, and huddle together all manner of things to please the people, both here and else-where; I could not chuse but take pitty of their longings and desires, that are truly affectionate to Religion, and the Cause of the Palatinate, and so expose vnto thee, whosoeuer thou art, this Relation of credite, which came to my hands the twelfth of Aprill, wherein you shall see a modest declaration of the affaires of Germany, and the tumultuous proceedings of such Princes, as either wish well to the King of Bohemia, or suppose themselues wronged by the Emperours imperiousnesse, and Bauariaes ambitious hastinesse to vsurpe anothers inheritance, and so I fall to the matter, as I finde it thus written.30
The note distinguishes the sympathetic reader, and the distinction is not between Protestant and Catholic alone: the specification of those who are truly affectionate puts the zealous (the puritan) against the lukewarm and implies that these correspond to positions on foreign policy. What follows is not a plain translation, but a careful narrative with embedded value judgements. In a gesture that anticipates the fierce, contestatory journalism of the 1640s, the editor dismisses and discredits other news sources (‘poore Papististicall Newes-mongers’, A3v). He provides not only detail as to time and place—which is central to reporting in the corantos—but analyses cause and motivation, which is uncommon. His dramatizations of circumstance—‘When the Duke of Brunswicke heard of this, he forthwith bestirred himselfe …’ (B1v)—move silently beyond the testimony of an eyewitness and engage the reader at the cost of the objective tone that underpins the journalistic authority. However, the colour of the writing paves the way for the influence of news pamphlets on fictional narrative prose that would define the novel: a process that is effectively anatomized in Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720), an early novel based on 1620s corantos.
After Gainsford’s death, the corantos reverted to the plainer style, with largely factual statements, supplied without context, relying on very active interpretation by the reader:
From Vienna the 22. of October
Some fiue dayes agoe departed hence the Count of Alethyn going towards Offen about the treatie of Peace with the Grand Seignior.31
This is an extreme case—most reports have more colour and context than this—but it illustrates how the reader is required to situate the news in relation to previous reports (about conflict with the Turks), and how one report might stimulate interest in future news, for which it is little more than a trailer. Even this, however, was regarded as risking incursion upon arcana imperii by both James and Charles, and corantos were tolerated provided they caused no offence, and, it seems, provided they did not report domestic news. In 1627 Charles I’s Secretary of State wrote to the Master and Wardens of the Stationers’s Company stating that the king had noted ‘the vnfitting liberties which some of your Companie doe take in printing Weekely for their owne privat gaine, diuers false and scandalous papers vnder the titles of Advises and Courantoes which being gathered out of false advertisements or framed here by some idle persons, doe abuse the people, and often times raise disadvantageous and scandalous reports vpon the proceedings and successes of his Maiesties frends and allies’. The concern is not about the misrepresentation of the King—which by unspoken consent is beyond the pale—but about misrepresentation of foreign powers; the letter imposes a licenser specifically for printed news.32
Interest in the news in the 1620s itself came to be associated with opposition politics.33 Charles’s resistance to using the news as a means of harnessing the sympathy of his subjects may be regarded as all the more surprising, given that his friend the Duke of Buckingham, with whom he had undertaken the Spanish Match escapade, sought to cultivate ‘popularity’ through a serial, published in the same year, 1627, describing his Île de Ré expedition. The bookseller Thomas Walkley’s Continued Iournall of All the Proceedings (six issues in August through November 1627) sought to exploit the publicity potential of the serial form, turning its (presumed) patron the Duke into a military hero, much as the Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus would be (without Walkeley’s support) in 1631–2.34
Charles decided to ban corantos in 1632, through a Star Chamber decree:
Upon Considerac[i]on had at the Board of the greate abuse in the printing & publishing of the ordenary Gazetts and Pamphletts of newes from forraigne p[ar]t[e]s, And upon significa[ti]on of his ma[jes]t[ie]s expresse pleasure and Com[m]aund for the p[re]sent suppressing of the same, It was thought fitt and hereby ordered that all printing and publishing of the same be accordingly supprest and inhibited. And that as well Nathaniell Butter & Nicholas Bourne Booke Sellers, under whose names the said Gazetts have beene usually published, as all other Stationers, Printers and Booke Sellers, p[re]sume not from henceforth to print publish or sell any of the said Pamphletts, &c, as they will answer the Contrary at theire p[e]rills. And Mr Secr[etary]e Windebanke is lykewise prayed to send for the said Butter and Bourne, and to lay a strict Com[m]aund upon them on that behalfe.35
The proscription, it was rumoured, had been at the petitioning of the Spanish ambassador, supported by a faction of English noblemen. The championing of the cause of Gustavus Adolphus in the corantos, and the implicit criticism of Charles’s refusal to support him, had made the publishers vulnerable. The ensuing silence may have provided a breeding ground for opposition politics and rumour. Perhaps aware of this tide of opinion, in December 1638 Charles granted a patent to Butter and Bourne, allowing them exclusive rights ‘for the imprinting & publishing of all matter of History or News of any forraine place or Kingdome since the first beginning of the late German warres to this present’.36 The ensuing monopoly corantos, with an irregular name and a highly irregular periodicity, appeared until September 1641 (a handful, not properly a serial, appeared in 1642) in much the same format as the earlier series. In January 1641 Butter expressed an intention to make them weekly, to ‘keepe a constant Day every week’ (in the same editorial stating that he had almost given up because of a zealous licenser, who ‘(out of partiall affection) would not oftentimes let passe apparent truth’), but his translated news would within the year be displaced by a weekly newsbook containing news of the English parliament, which proved to be a runaway commercial success.37
Butter’s condemnation of the licenser—and the title page of this issue advertised: ‘Examined and Licenced by a better and more Impartiall hand then heretofore’—is striking for its boldness. The irritating licenser had been replaced, but Butter’s comments indicate that the news content was actively censored and that this was not sensational news to his readers. The development of the news periodical between 1500 and 1640 was certainly shaped by press controls, though the influence may have been complicated and indirect. Historians have long assumed that the print publication of domestic news was interdicted. There was, in fact, no such outright proscription (though one may have been written into the Ordinances of the Stationers’s Company in the now-lost ‘red book’); instead, norms and mores were sufficient to regulate the production of domestic news. Repeated royal proclamations, ad hoc legislation, such as the ban on preventing publications reporting the assassination of Henri IV of France (not an Act or Ordinance, but a direction issued to the Stationers’s Company by the Lord Treasurer), and frequent harassment of individual stationers by parliament and other institutions, kept publishers, printers, and news writers on their toes. The abolition of the Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission in July 1641 facilitated the appearance of the weekly newsbook of domestic news in 1641, but the precipitants were more the ideological conflict between king and parliament and the fracture in the body politic that left stationers freer to become involved in politics. After 1640 news publications would become a particular focus for press controls; prior to that, the influence of censorship on news printing was no less real for having been unspoken.
News is barely definable, it is a context-specific piece of information, a commodity, a currency, and a social activity. Yet, its nature came into sharper focus, and was beginning to be subject to reflective analysis, during the century and a half leading up to 1640. This was, in part, because of the greater dissemination of written and printed forms, but also because of the growth of a secular textual culture that had a part to play in the shift towards a market economy and the formation of a centralized state. News was disseminated by oral exchange, writing, and printing; the latter, which has generally been taken as the central focus in histories of news, growing out of the former two, but shaping them in turn. All three were interdependent. But in symbolic terms, printed news acquired a particular force, and it was to prove, in a later period, a powerful component in the shaping of democracy. As it acquired social and political influence it developed a prominence in literary culture—symbolizing commerce, mendacity, addictiveness, the shape of time, and the power of communication. Yet, it also influenced the writing of history, as a way of thinking about evidence and testimony.39
While early printed news was firmly rooted in the epistolary tradition, and relied on the plain style of that tradition to communicate reliability and veracity, with time the personal nature of the epistle disappeared and simultaneously, editorial opinion was introduced and experimented with—the Stuart newspaper was shaped by the interaction of domestic and foreign news, editorial intervention, and advertising. Writing about news was rooted in English vernacular traditions and adapted to the commercial printing practices and transport networks particular to Britain. Yet, developments in news writing also need to be seen as one instantiation of a set of profound shifts—perhaps a revolution—occurring more or less simultaneously across Europe. It is partly because of the emergence of European news networks, owing to war and commerce and, perhaps, interest in transnational communities and civic engagement, that there was sufficient demand for foreign news in Britain to justify the development of a news business.40 And it is the intersection between the local culture, and the extension of a European network into the archipelago, that gives news writing in English its heterogeneous and frequently cosmopolitan character.
Brownlees, Nicholas. The Language of Periodical News in Seventeenth-Century England (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011).
Cust, Richard. ‘News and Politics in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, Past & Present, 112 (1986): 60–90.
Dooley, Brendan, and Sabrina Baron, eds. The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 2001).
Fox, Adam. Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).
Lake, Peter, with Michael Questier. The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).
Parmalee, Lisa Ferrarou. Good Newes from Fraunce: French Anti-League Propaganda in Late Elizabethan England (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1996).
Randall, David. ‘Joseph Mead, Novellante: News, Sociability and Credibility in Early Stuart England’, Journal of British Studies, 45 (2006): 293–312.
Raymond, Joad. The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–1649 (1996; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005).
——— ed. News, Newspapers and Society in Early Modern Britain (London: Frank Cass, 1999).
——— Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Voss, Paul J. Elizabethan News Pamphlets: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe and the Birth of Journalism (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2001).
Walsham, Alexandra. Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).