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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 pseudepi-

graphical 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

ISSN 1368-8804 print/ISSN 1469-9729 online/05/01-20003-17 # 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd

DOI: 10.1080/1368880052000342389

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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

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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 govern-

ment 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

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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 seventeenth century it developed the

opposed signification of excessive liberty. In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night Sir Toby

encourages Sir Andrew to write an abusive letter to his enemy: ‘Taunt him with the

licence of ink’ [14]. He implies that the ink of manuscript communication is permitted

a degree of liberty not permitted in spoken conversation (or, perhaps, in the realm of

print, governed by licensing?). In the context of an account of liberty that stresses the

importance of self-discipline and restraint as the basis for personal freedom, licence-

as-excess has particular semantic value [15]. This is the context that Milton

foregrounds in his sonnet on the response to his divorce tracts: ‘Licence they mean

when they cry liberty’ [16]. In Areopagitica (1644), condemning the practice of pre-

publication licensing as an obstacle to the liberty of reading and thinking, he

qualifies his argument, ‘lest I should be condemn’d of introducing licence, while I

oppose Licensing’, and offers a history of censorship [17]. Licentious speech or

discourse, in everyday parlance, was speech that went beyond traditional freedoms

and penetrated into matters of state, irresponsible discussion of news. What

constituted this was a matter of perspective, related to perceptions of social status

and political right. In December 1620 James VI and I issued A Proclamation against

Excesse of Lavish and Licentious Speech of Matters of State, in which he stated that

‘it is come to Our eares, by common report, That there is at this time a more

licentious passage of lavish discourse, and bold Censure in matters of State, then hath

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been heretofore’. He condemned it in all subjects, from the highest to the lowest, but

defined license as subjects concerning themselves with ‘matters, above their reach and

calling’. Seven months later he issued another proclamation of the same title in which

he reiterated the proscription against dealing ‘with causes of state, and secrets of

governement . . . by licentious and bold Speaking of Writing’ [18]. This prohibited

matter is news. James’ proclamations need to be understood in the context of the

efflux of news publications, translated from German and Dutch, printed in London

from 1618 onwards. These occasional publications culminated in the first serial

corantos in English, published in Amsterdam from 1620 onwards (the earliest extant

issue is dated 2 December, and while it is likely that earlier issues have not survived,

their first appearance in December would explain the timing of James’ first

proclamation). In January 1621 James persuaded the States General of the United

Province to ban the export of these publications to Britain [19]. What separates

ordinary discourse from licentious discourse is a matter of decorum, the elaborate

and highly overdetermined rules and conventions that inform and govern behaviour

and that assign behaviour social meaning [20]. One cannot separate the business of

news*/the form of books, licensing and censorship, the presentation of opinion, the

language of ‘news’, ‘opinion’ and ‘intelligence’, networks and communications, and

the coherent significations of this language in context*/from social conventions. To

treat the business of news as detached from these decorums is to lose contact with the

very phenomena that gave it coherence and meaning, and thus to commit the kind of

anachronism that damages rather than enhances understanding.

III

And thus it is with propaganda, a word that slips easily from my pen yet immediately

stimulates anxieties about misrepresentation. Before dismissing it in favour of

contemporary words or ‘actor’s categories’, however, it is worth considering the

ways in which propaganda might be a useful term in characterizing aspects of

seventeenth-century political culture.

One of the most influential accounts of propaganda and modernity is Jacques

Ellul’s The Technological Society (1954), which characterizes propaganda as one of

the techniques associated with capitalism, as a corollary to the introduction of mass

media. The effect of propaganda is to suppress the critical faculty and subject people

to collective passions [21]. While the account of the growth of capitalism upon which

Ellul’s account is founded is much disputed, the association between the emergence

of this technique and the growth of mass media, and the invasion of politics by the

media, may be useful to early modern historians concerned with the growth of a

public sphere of popular political opinion in the context of the rapidly expanding

print culture of Britain [22]. Some of the properties or effects that Ellul associated

with the mass media in the age of capitalism were present in seventeenth-century

Britain, as has become apparent with a resurgence of interest in the material history

of books. Much of the research on book history has, however, coincided in its

arguments with a developing a post-revisionist account of the growth of a political

opposition in the 1620s or in the 1640s, an opposition in part expressed in or

coordinated through printed pamphlets. Here it seems that the mass media is not so

easily subordinated to the interest of the state [23]. Ellul’s account of propaganda

offers a largely negative picture of the media, which, though it has a role in

constructing a social conscience, is an instrumental force, solely a means of

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manipulating the public. Perhaps because of the interest among post-revisionist

historians in the nature of political opinion and the places in which it was expressed,

Jurgen Habermas’ model of a public sphere has proved more influential [24]; in this

account the media, and the social spaces associated with them, create a semi-

autonomous realm where private persons come together as a public in order to

exchange opinions. The public sphere is definitively not a tool of the state, and this

fits better with our understanding of the political opposition and its dynamic and

contestatory acts of reading in early modern Britain than Ellul’s instrumental

account. However, Habermas’ public sphere, for all its imaginative force, simulta-

neously presents a prescriptive and ideal-typical account of the nature of the media,

one which is more likely to restrict than enhance research on the early modern book

trade and its relationship with politics and public opinion [25].

One work which has developed (and explicitly altered) the Habermasian model in

an original and powerful fashion is David Zaret’s Origins of Democratic Culture

(2000), an account of printed petitions, propaganda and the seventeenth-century

public sphere. Zaret argues that printing transformed news from its earlier

incarnation in oral and manuscript forms, governed by norms of secrecy and

privilege, and led to the invention of public opinion. Print only amplified tendencies

in existing news relations, but the enormous quantitative expansion resulted in a

qualitative shift, altering the nature of political messages as well as their form. The

significance of printing does not primarily lie in increased distribution and access.

After the ‘explosion’ in 1641, print imposed a ‘dialogic order on political conflict’:

messages are sent in both directions [26]. Most significant in this dynamic was the

petition, a traditional form which was transformed into the means by which popular

opinion entered politics. Petitions became a medium through which views filtered

through to the governors, but also a form exploited by competing parties during the

civil wars, through which messages were sent back to the public. From this dynamic

emerged the principle of accountable government central to modern liberal

democracy. Zaret may overstate the importance of petitions, and understate the

impact of other pamphlet forms in the 1640s and earlier, especially news (to which he

extends, however, much attention). News also shaped political conflict and

transformed norms of secrecy, and with other pamphlet forms underwent transfor-

mations similar to petitions in the 1640s. Yet Zaret’s account has the singular virtue

of combining historical research with sociological analysis, and of explaining,

without recourse to technological determinism, how printing could alter modes of

communication that predated it, and how a quantitative shift can effect a radical

qualitative shift. It takes us beyond rather sterile debates about the relative influence

of modes of communication*/speech, manuscript and print*/towards reflecting

upon how these modes interact and modify each other and constitute the whole

fabric of the communicative networks in and beyond Britain [27]. In its account of

the dialogic order, moreover, it suggests one of the shortcomings of the concept of

propaganda as applied to seventeenth-century Britain. The media that might have

been used to control public opinion rather opened up conflict and debate, so it was

opinion that seemed to rule the world, rather than be ruled by it. Instead of

manipulation we find a dialogue within and among texts, and a dialogue among

readers with texts more or less directly involved in it. The commercial networks that

produced printed texts, though themselves far from disinterested, and though ruled

by a monopoly in the form of the Stationers’ Company, were nonetheless the basis

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for the diversification of competing views. Far from stifling heterogeneity, they

facilitated it.

We could alternatively define propaganda as that part of the print culture that was

sponsored by identifiable political interests, that articulated not the author’s own

views, but a patronage relation between a writer and the government or an influential

public figure. This functional approach offers a means of classifying a body of

writings that are approximate to the idea of propaganda. To official propaganda

commissioned by the state or its representatives can be added semi-official

propaganda, which includes writings that attempt to cultivate patronage by reflecting

views that are perceived to belong to the government or an influential figure. In both

cases, the texts promote an official or semi-official point of view and are motivated

by personal or financial interest rather than public interest [28]. These texts appeared

to contemporaries to be associated by shared characteristics, and they fit a modern

definition of how propaganda performs. Propaganda in this sense is usually

understood to have begun in England as early as the reign of Henry VII, and it

certainly seems reasonable to speak of propaganda during the Reformation, when

ecclesiastical patronage was extended to those who offered arguments on behalf of

Henry VIII against the Roman Church [29]. In his detailed and imaginative account

of German Reformation propaganda, Robert Scribner suggests that propaganda first

became possible with the competing ideologies of the Reformation [30]. It has been

suggested that state propaganda reached its apogee*/to that date*/during the 1650s,

and the most detailed analyses of the subject in that period, by Michael Seymour and

Sean Kelsey, extend not only to printed pamphlets, broadsides and newsbooks but

also to coins, ships’ names, symbols of honour, spectacles, trials and speeches.

Seymour finds in the early years of the decade a remarkable period of innovation in

propaganda combined with a consistency of message, though he suggests that it

constituted as much an attempt to self-persuade as to make ideological converts [31].

Kelsey also finds in the Rump [32] Parliament’s self-presentation a coherent and

innovatory intervention in political culture that was securely founded on native ideas

of participatory government. Kevin Sharpe challenges this account, contending that

the culture of the republic failed to commend itself to the British people, in part

because it was unable to break with the iconographical traditions of monarchy [33].

In both cases, the argument is focused not upon propaganda so much as political

culture in the broader sense. If interventions to shift the terms of politics, to amend

the visual and verbal iconography of a culture, are deemed propaganda then ‘spin’

would seem to be universal, and the value of any functional definition of propaganda

brought into question.

Contemporaries did seem to have a sense of a corpus of works that were generated

to promote the interests of individuals, and after 1640 there were frequent complaints

about political patronage shaping the presentation of news. Lucy Hutchinson records

that the parliamentarian officer Sir John Gell

kept the diurnal makers in pension, so that whatever was done in any of theneighbouring counties against the enemy was ascribed to him; and he hath

indirectly purchased himself a name in story which he never merited . . . that

which made his courage the more doubted was the care he took, and

expense he was at, to get it weekly mentioned in the diurnals. [34]

The same charge was frequently levelled at Marchamont Nedham, perhaps the most

notorious journalist (to use an anachronism) of the seventeenth century, who

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changed sides repeatedly and received, in addition to the profits from his trade, a

pension from the king and subsequently the commonwealth. In 1677 Andrew

Marvell wrote that Nedham had been

hired by the Conspirators at so much a sheet, or for day wages; and whenthat is spent, he shall for lesse mony Blaspheme his God, Revile his Prince,

and Belye his Country, if his former Books have Omitted any thing of those

Arguments; and shall Curse his own Father into the Bargain. [35]

The heresiographer Thomas Edwards suggested that the radical sects of the 1640s

kept pamphleteers and newsbook writers in pension in order to disseminate their

scandalous opinions; and the royalist astrologer and newsbook-writer George

Wharton accused his opponent William Lilly of having hired John Hall to edit a

newsbook that would discredit Wharton and praise Lilly [36].

During the 1640s, it seems, many in the public eye*/in the public eye for the first

time because the outburst of pamphlets and news periodicals put them on the public

stage*/realized the benefits of having a pensioner beneficially to present them, to

create positive ‘spin’. The patronage networks that characterized literary (in the

restricted sense) production in early modern Britain easily transferred themselves to

embrace political relations, in which pensions were extended to polemicists; political

patronage was therefore a factor in literary production in the broader sense [37]. Here

again, to define propaganda by a patronage relation risks diluting the significance of

the term beyond what is useful. If any kind of financial or institutional influence is

exerted upon a writer, is his or her output then propaganda? If the writer expresses

his or her own personally held views in the text that is commissioned by a political

figure, is it still propaganda? Does the functional definition imply an account of

authorial motivation, and if so, do we need to understand the author’s motivation in

order to identify the text as propaganda? In which case how are the numerous

anonymous satires and polemics (polemic was a popular and fairly new word in the

1640s, and we can use it confidently) from the 1640s to be understood? This account

of propaganda-as-patronage has limited usefulness when applied to the pamphlet

wars of the 1640s and 1650s, precisely the period for which, at first appearance, the

term propaganda might seem most useful. At best it refracts polemical texts through

a particular lens, in which their physical and textual complexities are approached

though an account of their origins.

The realities of institutional pressure are more variegated, and the promise of

reward was only one element in shaping a writer’s approach to his or her text. As

Jason McElligott argues in his paper in the present issue, the Stationers’ Company

succeeded in exerting some control over the book trade even during its least orderly

period, the 1640s and 1650s. While this might not resemble the modern image of

absolute control, commonly associated with the word ‘censorship’ today, it none-

theless applied a significant pressure to speech, restricting what might be said,

inhibiting some authors, discouraging others. If the book trade was not governed by

a draconian and omniscient institution, it is nonetheless wrong to discount the

widespread impact of hunts for transgressing authors and printers and exemplary

punishments. The frequency of intervention is not a sound guide to its impact [38].

From about 1640 onwards, at moments of political conflict press output increased

significantly, and more ‘dangerous’ or seditious books were published; but at

precisely these times parliament or the Council of State had diminished resources to

address transgressors.

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Moreover, licensing enabled positive interventions, in which some arguments were

given visibility just as others were suppressed. Parliament introduced in 1643 a

licenser solely responsible for newsbooks. The first licenser was Henry Walley, a

Clerk of the Stationers’ Company, and therefore well positioned to supervise and

intervene in the trade. Perhaps because Walley was too lax or commercially minded

in his performance in 1644 the Earl of Essex, Lord General of the parliamentary

army, succeeded in exempting the parliamentarian newsbook Mercurius Britanicus

from Walley’s control and assumed authority for licensing it himself. Shortly

afterwards parliament in any case replaced Walley with its clerk-assistant John

Rushworth, a stationer himself but one with closer relations to the army’s officers; a

month later Rushworth was appointed secretary to Sir Thomas Fairfax, Comman-

der-in-Chief of the New Model Army. By this means the army, or officers within it,

sought to use the licensing system for newsbooks to ensure positive publicity [39].

More directly, in September 1649 the Rump Parliament passed an act effectively

abolishing all extant newsbooks; when it had succeeded in eliminating them it

authorized two newsbooks, favouring as editors those who were likely to be

sympathetic to the parliament; then in 1650 it allowed the creation of Mercurius

Politicus, an official weekly newsbook that presented republican political theory and

news. Though Politicus was overseen by the Council of State, it nonetheless became

for some time the mouthpiece of the radical party in the Rump. In these examples

patronage is closely tied to commerce, licensing, and conflict between and among

institutions: it does not present a guide to how to classify or even read the resultant

texts, so much as an alert that the text is likely to be a complex one. Defining

propaganda in this sense does not instruct us in how to interpret it; reading these

writings is more likely to invite a reconsideration of the nature and extent of politico-

literary patronage.

IV

In a move fairly typical of seventeenth-century political historians, David Smith

expresses reservations about the historiographical usefulness of those texts classified

as ‘propaganda’, among which are the newsbooks of the civil war. The problem with

them is that they distort or present falsehoods. ‘None the less,’ he adds, ‘they do tell

us something about how the two sides wished to be seen*/this is after all the main

purpose of propaganda*/and they sometimes contain information which cannot be

gleaned anywhere else’ [40]. This is to treat propaganda as a veil that obscures

information; information can be recovered from a text by wiping away the scum of

rhetoric and disinformation. Yet isn’t that rhetoric and disinformation itself a kind of

information? Smith’s book, Constitutional Royalism, is in part a study of political

allegiance: is allegiance a hard fact that lies beyond the mere ephemera of rhetoric,

representation, distortion, spin? Is belief not a matter of argument, stereotyping,

wilful interpretation? There is little discussion of polemic as such in Smith’s book,

though several pages are devoted to royalist verse, presumably a more direct

expression of belief than controversial prose [41]. When Smith does discuss prose

works it is usually to distil from them ideas, i.e. ‘serious’ thought about constitutional

politics; newsbooks make more cursory appearances, in the diligent reconstruction of

factual narratives [42].To label a text as ‘propaganda’ works as a sort of methodological disinfectant; one

can clean up the germs from the sound matter, and thereby avoid the risk of infection.

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In his discussion of the royalist Jasper Mayne’s Oxlo�/maxia, or The Peoples War

(1647) Smith focuses on the tract’s account of law and good government. The tract

begins, however, with an admission that not everyone sees Charles I in the same light,

even when reading the king’s own words:

I have in my time seen certain Pictures with two faces. Beheld one way, they

have presented the shape and figure of a Man . Beheld another, they have

presented the shape and figure of a Serpent . Me thinks, Sir, for some years,

whatever Letters the King wrote either to the Queene, or his friends, or

what ever Declarations he publisht in the defence of his Rights and Cause,

had the ill fortune to undergoe the fate of such a Picture.

This offers a useful way of thinking about the verbal complexities of polemical texts:

representations enable multiple readings (even if one is privileged as the correct

reading, the touchstone of which is for Mayne the king’s intentions), and both

readings seem to be simultaneously present in the same text. Reading is not, after all,

a passive occupation, but one that actively shapes meaning, three parts appropriation

to one part inspiration [43]. Mayne observes that a fallacy in judgement follows a

fallacy in perception, just as a distorting medium transforms the object seen, ‘As

square, bright, angular things through a mist show darke and round ; and straight

things seen through water show broken and distorted ’ [44]. In polemical texts,

however, there is no anterior lens and posterior object; we cannot simply lift the dark

glass because it is one with the vision. We can, however, learn to appreciate the

transformed image in itself.

It is worth dwelling, further, on the characteristic Smith gives to the form:

propaganda’s main purpose is to present a side (must there always be two or more

sides?) as it wishes to be seen. This looks like too narrow a definition: much

propaganda focuses on presenting another as he or she does not wish to be seen,

which is not the same thing. More seriously, the definition seems to discount the

possibility that ideologically driven writing might seek to persuade or convert its

readers, to demonstrate by argument. Polemic can involve persuasion as much as self-

presentation. By suggesting that propaganda is about appearance, and that

appearance is disconnected from content (necessary if one is bent on extracting the

content in an uncontaminated form), one assumes that propaganda feeds a form of

false-consciousness. This is entirely appropriate for a revisionist historiography that

seeks to downplay the extent of political conflict and oppositional political thought

in Tudor and early Stuart Britain. Yet the turn away from a high-political narrative

towards questions of political culture, the historiographical shift that characterizes

post-revisionism, has discovered new depths of popular political understanding and

consciousness prior to the civil wars. In other words, a new account of popular

political sentiment in early Stuart Britain suggests that we cannot see the persuasive

representations of the force of monarchy or the rights of parliament as the

manipulation of a passive, uncomprehending populace [45]. If we define propaganda

as something apart from political argument, something that presents only images

that sway the emotions, as something that controls rather than persuades, we are far

from the nature of political culture in seventeenth-century Britain.

The printed news media of early modern Britain were commercially produced texts

that sought to influence as well as inform their readers, and did so through complex

rhetorical forms and imaginative or ‘literary’ devices, such as fictional epistles,

dialogues, ballads, prognostications and elaborate metaphors. These were not

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optional devices, added to a pre-existing message by the writer, but part of the fabric

of political discourse which we also find in more ‘serious’ works such as Thomas

Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) and James Harrington’s Oceana (1656). Such discourse

was imaginative as well as commercial, moral and influential [46]. Quentin Skinner

has argued for some decades that the role of the historian of ideas or political

thought is to understand meaning in context, not as the unmediated projection of

intention or motivation, but as formed through contemporary political vocabularies,

the conceptual tools with which political thought and argument are conducted. Thus

recovering meaning involves the recovery of these languages. Skinner’s work, with

that of J.G.A. Pocock, has constituted a ‘linguistic’ turn in the history of political

thought [47]. Pocock explains this with characteristically precise density:

the paradigmatic functions to be found in political speech are multiple,

simultaneously present and so imperfectly distinguished that it is by nature

multivalent. It follows that the loads of implication and intimation which

such a speech bears are extremely heavy and that, even on levels where

speech is being used and explored with considerable sophistication, thepolitical and linguistic functions it may discharge, the universes of discourse

into which it may be pursued by intensified discussion and critical analysis,

are indefinitely numerous. It is in a sense this which constitutes the ‘history’

of political ‘thought’. [48]

‘Intelligence’, ‘information’ and ‘news’ fit this pattern of multivalency. While

Skinner’s strictures on anachronism govern much of what I have said in the

preceding paragraphs, they raise some peculiar difficulties in relation to news

discourse, admittedly not something at the forefront of Skinner’s analysis. In news

and polemic the matter of motivation (informing versus conveying news), and the

illocutionary force of not meaning what one says (because one is seeking to persuade

through generic or formal means), are as fundamental to the lexical field as meaning

and intention; as are the pressures applied by censorship and the commercial

circumstances of the book trade, other, material practices that are entirely marginal

to the linguistic turn. Can we simply reduce either the material forms of articulation,

or the motivation of intelligencers to another mode of meaning? Or is the form as

fundamental to the meaning, and as irreducible to a paraphraseable or rational

statement, as it is in poetry? If a nexus of political ideas*/let us say republicanism*/

is best understood as a language, it follows that that language should be understood

as others, as something that exists not in the abstract but in the material domain of

conversations, books, public spaces, worship, the printing house. Polemic and poetry

have more in common than is commonly recognized.

V

‘Propaganda’ as a category closes down too many questions and is too blunt a tool

for understanding what ‘news’ and ‘intelligence’ and so on meant to early modern

readers and talkers. By creating a map of news discourse from these and other

terms*/a map recording geography, society, politics and language*/we will be

empowered to understand the interface between printed, oral and manuscript news;

between local and national communities; between news, satire and history and other

forms; between opinion and politics. To do so, however, jeopardizes the kind of

synthetic understanding that Habermas’ work offered: it risks losing the concrete,

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archival detail possible in studies that focus on a particular form or a particular

historical moment. The history of newspapers in particular has suffered from

impressionistic accounts that pay insufficient detail to political contexts, to the

commercial and social origins of change, even to the basic chronology of their formal

development [49].

The papers in this issue look not at newspaper or media history but at various

aspects of communication. This began as an accident, but in retrospect it revealed

itself as a consequence of shifting concerns within new scholarship in the field. By

avoiding a specific focus on themes, institutions or individual serials, these papers

collectively approach contemporary uses and perceptions of the nature of news. They

do not comprise a comprehensive sketch of news networks, either formally,

chronologically or geographically. Such a project is in any case probably not feasible

at the present moment, when sweeping narratives of the longue duree and archivally

driven analyses seem too much at odds. Together these papers advance a project of

drawing up such a map for the domain of communicative networks. Several themes

arise from their interconnections.

The first and perhaps most significant theme is networks*/communicative,

political, patronage and ideological networks. By tracing the transport and trade

lines that shaped communication within the Habsburg Netherlands, and between the

Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe, Paul Arblaster lays the foundations for an

account of news transmission as the product of a series of social and geographical

information networks. To follow the lines of communication is necessarily to bypass

the conventional separation between oral, manuscript and printed media. The same

is true of Greenspan’s paper, which follows a specific set of communications between

London and Paris, in which the informant Manning exchanged ‘news’ or

‘intelligence’ with Thurloe. Manning’s letters arrived in an office concerned with

collecting intelligence, surveying private correspondence originating and arriving in

Britain, and with promoting an official view of the commonwealth in printed form, in

the journal Mercurius Politicus, which substantially concerned itself with foreign

news and with promoting overseas an image of Britain as a triumphant republic.

Mark Knights, in a paper on the Whig bookseller John Starkey, considers networks

of news and political association from the perspective of a bookseller’s shop, one of

the essential spaces in any account of a developing ‘public sphere’ in restoration

Britain. Starkey’s shop brought together not only manuscripts and printers, texts and

customers, and various readers, but also different traditions in the history of political

thought. Similarly, Filippo de Vivo’s discussion of Paolo Sarpi as a broker of

information sketches in brilliant detail Sarpi’s communicative networks, and their

relation to networks of power in early seventeenth-century Venice. Translation of

Venetian ideas and texts formed part of Starkey’s business. Hamish Mathison’s paper

on Scotland’s first literary journal considers the translation of an English literary

form to the post-Union lowlands. It was this, rather than a news publication, that

seemed an appropriate vehicle for discussing Scottish identity, politeness, culture and

language. These papers avoid some of the formal, geographical and narratological

obstacles commonly faced in newspaper history, and explore places and pathways of

exchange, and the relationship between ideas and politics and modes of commu-

nication.

These nexuses of communication were founded on, and brought about, new

technologies, understood in the broadest sense. The second theme of this issue is the

impact of communicative networks upon society and the forms of news media, the

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means of controlling communication, and the means of exploiting its potential.

Arblaster emphasizes the importance of postal systems for laying the foundations of

seriality and periodicity, two of the defining characteristics of later news media.

Marcus Nevitt also surveys the early corantos in a paper on Ben Jonson’s satire of the

burgeoning news business. Nevitt outlines the development of representational

techniques necessary for this business of news: editorial procedure, acknowledge-

ments of uncertainty, testimony and the cultivation of the reader. Editors responded

to the demands of seriality*/and irregular periodicity in the case of corantos*/and

their dependence upon the consumer; so did Jonson, who picks up on these motifs in

The Staple of News. Mathison shows how Robert Hepburn, editor of the Scottish

Tatler (1711), appropriated the literary periodical, a recent London invention, to

explore anxieties about Scottish cultural identity, anxieties provoked by a shift in

political geography; the serial form proved to be a pliable medium for messages other

than news. Nicholas Brownlees also considers editorial improvisation in an essay on

the language of early news serials. Adopting the perspective of a linguist*/unusual in

approaches to early modern news, even in this interdisciplinary age*/he examines the

use of direct and reported speech in pre- and post-1641 news serials. To some extent

editors were responding to the self-evident overlap between oral and written modes

of communicating news, but they also exploited the affective value of spoken forms in

order to convey an ideological message. Before the advent of the editorial, editors

explored other means of asserting their own opinion through reportage. Editors were

developing ad hoc means of understanding and acting upon changes in the media;

the same is true of the governors of the trade and of the state. Perhaps the most

significant shaping factor in the book trade in early modern England was that it was

governed by a monopoly, the Stationers’ Company. Much of the recent scholarship

on the history of the book, concurrent with or developing from revisionist

historiography, has downplayed the effectiveness of the Company as a body that

policed the trade, even going so far as to dismiss traditional accounts of censorship in

early modern Britain as a ‘fiction’ [50]. Looking at the Company in the civil war

decades, McElligott develops a post-revisionist case, arguing that, though reactive

and even ‘chaotic’ at times, its interventions were effective and capable of sustaining a

significant ideological influence on behalf of supportive governments. While the old

narrative of the triumph of the newspaper as a champion of free speech over a hostile

state no longer holds, it is not tenable to dismiss the pressures upon the news media

exerted by the state. In Venice, as de Vivo shows, Sarpi explicitly dismissed any

principle of absolute censorship as practically unfeasible: he reconciled ‘bending

information’ with the admission that public discussions of government and policy

were inevitable.

A third theme of the volume is the political uses of news, the relationship between

publicity and politics. Nevitt observes that the editors of early news serials were

honest about the limits of their information, and that reporting took place within

a framework of scepticism and confirmation. It is striking, for example, how many

letter-writers defer the certain reporting of a news event until it has been confirmed

in print. Far from being the gullible and credulous consumers we find in satires, many

early modern news readers were critical and judicious in their gathering and

interpretation of news. When news media were exploited to shape the opinions of this

public, it was with this in mind, and the means of exploitation were complex and

rarely fully coherent. News was seldom unspun, seldom reached Milton’s ideal of

‘a free and open encounter’ or John Saltmarsh’s ‘free debates and open conferences

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and communication for all’ [51]. News was too politically useful. Sarpi understood

that news was a powerful instrument of political action, and in the papers by de Vivo,

McElligott, Greenspan, Brownlees and Knights, we find those involved in

the business of news acting as brokers or intelligencers between politicians or

governments and readers. Yet in many cases this intelligencing operated on the

boundaries between public and private action. Sarpi went beyond the restrictions

of aristocratic transactions in secrets of state to address a wider public. Starkey’s

role as a publisher places him firmly in the realm of the public, yet Knights

finds him situated at the intersection between two conventionally distinguished

traditions in political thought, the neo-Harringtonian and the neo-Lockean.

The seditious newsmonger presents a complication to historians of political

thought; Knights suggests we need a less author-centred approach to political

thought, one more attuned to public discourse and the material histories of books.

The frequency of anonymity and the use of pseudonyms by pamphleteers and

news-writers suggest the same. Manning’s news was by definition both secret and

useful, yet it seemed to Thurloe trustworthy and valuable only in so far as

Manning could demonstrate his ideological commitment to the commonwealth.

Even Jonson, for all his love of the privileged seclusion of a private library

and his scorn for vulgar appetite, was a caterer to the public stage, and found

himself implicated in what he satirized. These papers open perspectives onto

the expansive and complex nexus of modes of communications, social and

political communities, and commercial practices of the early modern news media.

As we continue to write the history of these media, we create a map where oral,

manuscript and print transmission coexist, where commerce and politics need to

be understood side by side, where social and intellectual networks are mutually

explanatory. The themes of networks, the means of exploiting and controlling news

media, and the intersection between public and private shape much of this map.

The history of the news appears more clearly when seen within the contours of other

histories.

But news is nonetheless a profoundly powerful conceptual tool in these

explorations. In Shakespeare’s Henry VI part 2 , Queen Margaret, reflecting on the

trials of her dynasty, exclaims: ‘Ay me! What is this world? What news are these?’ [52].

Shakespeare’s plots frequently pivot upon news, revealed by messenger or letter, but it

is not just as a character in a meta-drama that Margaret articulates her sense that her

world is shaped by news. Henry VI part 2 , was probably written in 1591 and was

originally published with the title The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two

Famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster in 1594. The quarto title resembles that of a

news pamphlet, such as the many that were translated from the French in the years

1589�/1592. In the year 1592, if not before, the printer John Wolfe seems to have

devised a series of translated news pamphlets, not strictly a periodical, that represents

the most significant development in news publishing before the corantos of 1618�/

1620 [53]. English intervention in the war between the Netherlands, France and Spain

provoked an expansion in the print and manuscript news market, and readers of

news were encouraged by these publications to understand their place in a pan-

European network, shaped by confessional as much as geographical boundaries.

Margaret’s exclamation may therefore be symbolic of a wider sense that the world is

shaped, ruled and governed, perhaps structured by news. This issue is offered as a

contribution to our understanding of the history of the networks that are both

shaped by and give shape to news.

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Correspondence : Dr Joad Raymond, School of Literature and Creative Writing,

University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK. E-mail: j.raymond@uea.ac.uk

NOTES

[1] M. Davies, Eikon Mikro-Biblion. Sive Icon Libellorum, Or A Critical History of Pamphlets (London,

1715), Part 1, Preface, 1.

[2] Davies, Eikon Mikro-Biblion , Part 1, Preface, 4.

[3] Davies, Eikon Mikro-Biblion , Part 1, Preface, 9.

[4] Cf. J. Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: class struggle in the English revolution (London: Verso, 2000), 23�/24.

[5] A. Grafton, Defenders of the Text: the traditions of scholarship in an age of science (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1991), 1�/22.

[6] Q. Skinner, Visions of Politics , vol. 1: Regarding method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2002), 57�/89.

[7] Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger, 98; N. Jardine, ‘Uses and Abuses of Anachronism in the History of the

Sciences’, History of Science, 38 (2000), 251�/70; and ‘Whigs and Stories: Herbert Butterfield and the

historiography of science’, History of Science, 41 (2003), 125�/40.

[8] I refer to Raymond William’s classic, Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society (London:

Fontana, 1976), which is more than superficially influential on this piece.

[9] Below, 106.

[10] J. Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2003), 149.

[11] Quoted in A. Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage in the Reign of Charles II, 1660�/1685 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1994), 2; cf. anon. [Michael Scheuer], Imperial Hubris: why the West is

losing the war on terror (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 2004).

[12] See J. Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English newsbooks, 1641�/1660 (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1996), 158�/63.

[13] H. Peacham, The World is Ruled & Governed by Opinion (London, 1641). See also H. P[eacham].,

Square-Caps Turned into Round-Heads (London, 1642).

[14] Twelfth Night , III. ii. 37; The Norton Shakespeare , ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York and London:

W.W. Norton, 1997), 1798.

[15] Quentin Skinner has argued for the relevance in the seventeenth century of this ‘positive’ or, in his

later writings, neo-Roman theory of liberty in ‘The Republican Ideal of Political Liberty’, in G. Bock,

Q. Skinner and M. Viroli, eds, Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1990), 293�/309; ‘John Milton and the Politics of Slavery’, in G. Parry and J. Raymond, eds,

Milton and the Terms of Liberty (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), 1�/22; and Liberty Before Liberalism

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

[16] Milton, Complete Shorter Poems , ed. J. Carey (1968; London: Longman, 1997), 297.

[17] Complete Prose Works of John Milton , 8 vols, general ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven, CT and

London, 1953�/1982), vol. 2, 493.

[18] By the King. A proclamation against excesse of lavish and licentious speech (London, 14 December

1620); By the King. A proclamation against excesse of lavish and licentious speech (London, 26 July

1621).

[19] See Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering , 130.

[20] F. Levy, ‘The Decorum of News’, in J. Raymond, ed., News, Newspapers and Society in Early Modern

Britain (London: Frank Cass, 1999), 12�/38.

[21] J. Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. J. Wilkinson (1954; London: Jonathan Cape, 1965), 363�/75.

[22] See, e.g. Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 1994), 137�/39, 145�/46.

[23] For news and the opposition in the 1620s, see T. Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution: English politics and

the coming of war, 1621�/1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); R. Cust, ‘News and

Politics in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, Past & Present , 112 (1986), 60�/90; T. Cogswell, ‘The

Politics of Propaganda: Charles I and the people in the 1620s’, Journal of British Studies, 29 (1990),

187�/215.

[24] See especially J.K. Sawyer, Printed Poison: pamphlet propaganda, faction politics, and the public sphere

in early seventeenth-century France (Berkeley, 1990); C. Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere

Introduction: networks, communication, practice 17

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(Cambridge, MA, 1992); Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader ; R. Burt, ed., The

Administration of Aesthetics: censorship, political criticism, and the public sphere , Cultural Politics, vol.

7 (Minneapolis and London, 1994); S. Pincus, ‘‘‘Coffee Politicians Does Create’’: coffeehouses and

restoration political culture’, Journal of Modern History, 67 (1995), 807�/34; A. Halasz, The

Marketplace of Print: pamphlets and the public sphere in early modern England (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1997); D. Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: printing, petitions, and

the public sphere in early-modern England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); P. Lake

and M. Questier, ‘Puritans, Papists and the ‘‘Public Sphere’’ in Early Modern England: the Edmund

Campion affair in context’, Journal of Modern History, 72 (2000), 587�/627.

[25] For critiques of the Habermasian turn see Raymond, ‘The Newspaper, Public Opinion, and the Public

Sphere in the Seventeenth Century’, in Raymond, ed., News, Newspapers and Society, 109�/40;

‘Review Article: Describing Publicity in Early Modern England’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 67

(2004), 101�/29; and ‘Perfect Speech: the public sphere and communication in seventeenth-century

England’, in W. Maley and A. Benchimol, eds, Spheres of Influence: intellectual and cultural publics

from Shakespeare to Habermas (Frankfurt: Lang, forthcoming).

[26] Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture , 175.

[27] See also A. Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500�/1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2000); A. Fox and D. Woolf, eds, The Spoken Word: oral culture in Britain, 1500�/1850 (Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 2002); P. Lake with M. Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants,

papists and players in post-Reformation England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002);

P. Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: ‘orthodoxy’, ‘heterodoxy’ and the politics of the parish in early Stuart

London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001); Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle

for the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

[28] For the currency of the language of ‘interest’, see J.A.W. Gunn, Politics and the Public Interest in the

Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969).

[29] There is an extensive literature on this. See, for instance: R. Rex, Henry VIII and the English

Reformation (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), 15�/16, 26�/31; J. Guy, ‘Thomas More and Christopher

St. German: the battle of the books’, 95�/120, in A. Fox and J. Guy, Reassessing the Henrician Age:

humanism, politics and reform 1500�/1550 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); A. Fox, Politics and Literature in

the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); G. Walker, Persuasive Fictions:

faction, faith and political culture in the reign of Henry VIII (Aldershot: Scolar, 1996); C. Levin,

Propaganda in the English Reformation: heroic and villainous images of King John (Lewiston:

E. Mellen Press, 1988); J.C. Warner, Henry VIII’s Divorce: literature and the politics of the printing

press (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1998).

[30] R.W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: popular propaganda for the German Reformation (1981;

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); the revised edition offers more detailed conceptual

reflections on the nature and definition of propaganda, pp. xxi�/xxix.

[31] M.J. Seymour, Pro-government propaganda in interregnum England, 1649�/1660 , PhD thesis (Cam-

bridge, 1987), esp. 3, 424, 435.

[32] The Rump Parliament refers to the remaining body of the Long Parliament following Pride’s Purge in

December 1648, plus those members who were readmitted in the winter and spring of 1649�/1650

following the regicide, the parliament that constituted Britain’s most republican moment, 1649�/1653.

The fact that it is still known by this derogatory term indicates the long-term success of anti-

commonwealth polemic, if not historians’ sympathy with anti-commonwealth sentiment.

[33] S. Kelsey, Inventing a Republic: the political culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649�/1653

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); K. Sharpe, ‘‘‘An Image Doting Rabble’’: the failure

of republican culture in seventeenth-century England’, in his Remapping Early Modern England: the

culture of seventeenth-century politics (Cambridge, 2000), 223�/65; see also D. Hirst, ‘The Politics of

Literature in the English Republic’, The Seventeenth Century, 5 (1990), 133�/55; N. Smith, Literature

and Revolution in England, 1640�/1660 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1994),

ch. 6; S. Barber, Regicide and Republicanism: politics and ethics in the English Revolution, 1646�/1659

(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998); D. Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: poetry,

rhetoric and politics, 1627�/1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

[34] L. Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson , ed. N.H. Keeble (1806; London: Dent,

1995), 92�/93.

[35] A. Marvell, An Account of the Growth of Popery (London, 1677), 121.

[36] Raymond, Invention , 262�/63, 194; Mercurius Elencticus, 27 (31 May 1648), 205�/206.

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[37] J. Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers: propaganda during the English civil wars and interregnum

(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).

[38] Cf. D.F. McKenzie, ‘Printing and Publishing 1557�/1700: constraints on the London book trades’, in

J. Barnard and D.F. McKenzie, eds, A History of the Book in Britain , vol. 4: 1557�/1695 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2002), 553�/67, at 566�/67. See also Raymond, Pamphlets and

Pamphleteering , 163�/72; and Raymond, ‘‘‘The Language of the Public’’: print, politics, and the

book trade in 1614’, in S. Clucas and R. Davies, eds, The Crisis of 1614 and the Addled Parliament:

literary and historical perspectives (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 98�/117.

[39] Raymond, Invention of the Newspaper, 29, 31, 38; A.N.B. Cotton, London newsbooks in the Civil War:

their political attitudes and sources of information , DPhil thesis (Oxford, 1971), 30�/31.

[40] D.L. Smith, Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement, c. 1640�/1649 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1994), 15.

[41] Smith, Constitutional Royalism , 283�/89.

[42] See, e.g. Smith, Constitutional Royalism , 134�/35.

[43] There is a considerable literature on reading; for recent surveys see K. Sharpe, Reading Revolutions:

the politics of reading in early modern England (New Haven, CT and London, 2000) and K. Sharpe

and S.N. Zwicker, eds, Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2003).

[44] J. Mayne, Oxlo�/maxia, or The Peoples War (Oxford, 1647), 1. See also J. Raymond, ‘Popular

Representations of Charles I’, in T.N. Corns, ed., The Royal Image: representations of Charles I

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 47�/73.

[45] See, e.g. P. Lake, ‘Retrospective: Wentworth’s political world in revisionist and post-revisionist

perspective’, in J.F. Merritt, ed., The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 252�/83; Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England ,

part one; A. Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: news culture and the

Overbury affair, 1603�/1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and the works cited in n.

33, above.

[46] This is argued at length in Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering .

[47] See, for example, Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 1, chs 6, 9.

[48] J.G.A. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time: essays on political thought and history (1971; Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1989), 28�/29.

[49] For example, C.J. Sommerville, The News Revolution in England: cultural dynamics of daily

information (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

[50] Perhaps most canonically, see McKenzie, ‘Printing and Publishing 1557�/1700’; cf. Raymond,

Pamphlets and Pamphleteering , 66�/71, 169�/71.

[51] Complete Prose Works of John Milton , 8 vols, general ed. D.M. Wolfe (New Haven, CT and London,

1953�/1982), vol. 2, 561; J. Saltmarsh, Smoke in the Temple (London, 1646), 2�/3.

[52] 2 Henry VI , III. ii. 382; Norton Shakespeare , 259.

[53] Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering , 103�/108; see also L.F. Parmalee, Good Newes from

Fraunce: French Anti-League propaganda in late Elizabethan England (Rochester, NY: University of

Rochester Press, 1996).

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