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A History of English Journalism to the foundation of the Gazette (1908), by J.B. Williams, is now available in its entirety to download from the Internet Archive. His chapter in the Cambridge History of English and American Literature (1907-21) is also available in full on Bartleby.
Williams’s work is important for those studying English print culture during the seventeenth century. It was the first modern history of early seventeenth-century newsbooks, and spans the trade in corantoes in the 1620s and 1630s as well as the development of the newsbook proper in the 1640s and 1650s. Much like the political histories of the period by S.R. Gardiner and C.H. Firth, it has cast a long shadow over historians’ interpretation of early modern news culture.
Williams’s narrative is Whiggish and sees the 1640s as the crucible of the modern newspaper. In particular, he introduces a cast-list of “pioneering journalists” that have influenced how historians have interpreted newsbooks and used them as sources. Williams actually wrote under a pseudonym, at least during the early stages of his career (he abandoned it in 1914 although I haven’t yet discovered why, or found much else out about his background). His real name was J.G. Muddiman, and he was a descendant of the Restoration journalist Henry Muddiman (perhaps a reason for the pseudonym). For Williams, Muddiman is a “patriarch of English journalism”:
From the founding of the Gazette, until his death in 1692, he was little less than an institution, and the reason why up to the present he has been forgotten is because he devoted himself entirely to journalism, was not a pamphleteer, and engaged in no controversies. (p. 176).
Other newsbook writers receive short shrift compared to Muddiman. Marchamont Nedham, for example, is dismissed with the following words:
He was no patriarch of journalism, invented nothing, originated nothing, and his name is chiefly to be associated with the retrogressive and decadent Mercurius Politicus. (p. 178)
Only recently have scholars like Blair Worden and Joad Raymond restored Nedham’s reputation, together with the importance of Mercurius Politicus as a publication.
By contrast, Williams is intrigued by more eccentric personalities. For example, he has a love-hate relationship with Henry Walker, the independent preacher and pamphleteer. He takes gossip and invective about Walker by his enemies at face value, eager to cast him as an ugly red-headed Judas figure (p.73), who employed a “ragged regiment of tatterdemalions, Mercuries, and hawkers” to sell his books (p. 72). But he also wants to portray Walker as an early news pioneer – pioneering the newspaper advertisement and bringing a capitalist business sense to civil war journalism. This portrait of Walker as part purveyor of titillation, part Fleet Street editor is to misunderstand his complex personality. Walker was not just a newsbook writer: he worked as an ironmonger, seems briefly to have been ordained a deacon, was a well-known preacher, and later in the 1650s ministered to a parish. Walker is still misunderstood and his works sometimes dismissed, a mistake that derives in some part from Williams’s portrait of him.
While Williams was a pioneer in trawling the Thomason Tracts for newsbooks, his scholarship is not always perfect. Writers sometimes have titles mistakenly attributed to them, or attributions made without evidence. This focus on editors also ignores the role of printers, patrons and readers in bringing newsbooks to print.
Williams was also an ardent royalist. This is obvious from the moment you open his book, where you are confronted by a print from the Thomason collection of Charles II. The link to Thomason seems to be the only sketchy link to the book, given that it stops its main narrative in 1659 a year before Charles was restored to the throne, and deals only in conclusion with what happened in the early years of the Restoration.
So why still read Williams? Partly because his fascination with gossip makes for a good read. But he’s also important because, much like Gardiner, his work set the tone for subsequent generations of scholars. His history is a good starting point for anyone interested in understanding mid-seventeenth century newsbooks, although it needs to be read alongside more recent work on the subject. The extent to which Williams was himself influenced by the powerful narratives established by contemporary newsbook writers and historians is, however, another story…
© The Trustees of the British Museum
Patrick Little (ed.), The Cromwellian Protectorate (Boydell, 2007). 218pp.
David L. Smith and Patrick Little, Parliaments and Politics During the Cromwellian Protectorate (Cambridge University Press, 2007). 352pp.
The engraving above is from a Dutch satirical print, and shows Oliver Cromwell in armour, wearing a crown and ermine cloak and holding the sword of justice and orb of sovereignty. Behind is a depiction of the execution of Charles . The print encapsulates one of the key tensions behind the English Commonwealth: a revolutionary event in British history was succeeded by successive attempts to restore stability and, in many spheres, traditional political and cultural forms.
Negotiating and explaining these tensions is one of the key tasks for any historian of the 1650s. But untl recently, the Commonwealth and the Protectorate have attracted less scholarly attention than the early and later Stuart periods. The 1640s in particular have had significant attention from revisionists and post-revisionists alike. By contrast, the 1650s have been reassessed in less detail.
In recent years this has started to change. There has been a significant cultural turn in the historiography of the 1650s. Laura Lunger Knoppers and Sean Kelsey have studied the iconography both of the Commonwealth and its critics. Roy Sherwood has examined the monarchical trappings of the Protectoral regime. Jason Peacey and Blair Worden have extended analysis of mid-seventeenth century print culture into the 1650s. There has also been a move towards more local studies. For example, Christopher Durston has reconstructed the impact of the major-generals in the localities and analysed why their attempt at godly rule failed. Now two additional studies, one edited by Patrick Little on various aspects of the Protectorate, and one by Little and David Smith on the parliaments of the Protectorate, have been added to this body of work.
At first glance Smith and Little’s work on the Protectorate parliaments looks like a move away from these historigraphical trends, choosing a very traditional parliamentary and constitutional topic for study. However, the authors bring a decidely revisionist twist to their analysis, looking at a familiar subject from new angles. One such twist is a re-examination of the core constitutional documents of the Protectorate. There were six different constitutional documents produced between 1653 and 1657: not just the Instrument of Government and the Humble Petition and Advice, but also the failed parliamentary constitution; the failed monarchical Remonstrance; the Protectoral constitution; and the Additional Petition and Advice. Smith and Little analyse the twists and turns of these texts in detail, drawing out the implications of each document for parliamentary politics.
Smith and Little also examine the factions of the various Parliaments. For example, they analyse the loose “court” group associated with Cromwel during 1654-55, which included Sir Charles Wolseley, Walter Strickland, John Lambert, John Disbrowe, Broghill, Henry Cromwell, John Claypole, Edward Montagu. This mixture of civilians and soldiers makes it misleading to think in terms of broad divisions between soldiers and statesmen. The book concludes by agreeing, to an extent, with Hugh Trevor-Roper’s argument that Cromwell’s problems with his parliaments were of his own making. However, they look not to his disposition as a “natural back-bencher” and instead to Cromwell’s desire to see England converted to godly rule, with no fixed vision for the political form that might take. In joining this with a desire for parliaments that supported his vision, they argue Cromwell was setting himself an impossible task.
The book concludes with an intriguing hypothesis about Cromwell’s successor as Protector, his son Richard. He has often been seen as an ineffective ruler – the nickname “Tumbledown Dick” says it all. The woodcut below, with Richard as the “meek knight” in the middle, sums up his traditional reputation. (AN352990001, © The Trustees of the British Museum).
But Smith and Little argue instead that Richard tried to entrench the rise in power of the Presbyterian faction during the 1650s, spotting which way the tide had been turning during Oliver’s last years. They suggest that Richard’s failure as Protector was actually prompted by the army’s fears that he and his parliament were too strong.
A re-evaluation of Richard’s time as Protector is also one of themes addressed by the contributors to Patrick Little’s edited collection on the Protectorate. Jason Peacey re-examines the Humble Petition and Advice, pointing out that its intention as a monarchical constitution for a system of rule that never materialised left Richard at a profound disadvantage when he inherited the Protectorship. This revisionist focus on central government during the Protectorate is shared by a number of essays in this volume. Blair Worden, for example, looks at Cromwell’s Council of State and reassesses its importance, arguing that it mattered politically only because the army generals were represented on it. Lloyd Bowen and Patrick Little begin a process of bringing out the British context of the English Protectorate, with Little looking at the Irish and Scottish councils and Bowen examining the impact of the Protectorate in Wales.
Perhaps the highlight is a brilliant essay by Paul Hunneyball on Cromwellian architectural style. This extends Sean Kelsey’s findings about the extent to which the Commonwealth drew on and recycled monarchical ritual and iconography. Many state buildings saw significant repairs and improvements.
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For example, in 1656 a fountain of Diana designed by Inigo Jones and executed by Hubert Le Sueur was brought from Somerset House to the garden at Hampton Court. The statue of Diana on the top was surrounded by Venus, Cleopatra, Adonis and Apoollo, with sea monsters, boys on dolphins and scallops around it. The statue, depicted to the left, was moved to Bushy Park in 1690.
As Hunneyball argues, the effect of this was to restore the architectural tastes of Charles I in the 1630s. Similar efforts were made to restore Whitehall to its former state. The Banqueting House was requipped with lavish tapestries, with Cromwell personally overriding objections by the Council of State to the high expenditure.
A number of themes emerge from these two books. One is the return to constitutional documents as a focus for study, and the impact that these had on high politics. Another is a more negative depiction of Cromwell’s period as Protector. Smith and Little argue for more emphasis on his failings to manage his parliaments, whilst Worden analyses a number of “senior moments” during his final years. Richard Cromwell, by contrast, emerges as a more sympathetic figure. It will be interesting to see whether these themes are developed in further works on the Protectorate in the coming years.
Unlike English pamphlets of the seventeenth century, which are easily accessible on EEBO, I’ve found it harder to track down their French equivalents. I’ve been looking at Mazarinades of the mid-seventeenth century: libelles or political pamphlets mostly directed against Cardinal Mazarin during the Fronde. They take their name from a libelle by Paul Scarron, La Mazarinade, of 1651:
Buggering bugger, buggered bugger,
Bugger to the supreme degree,
Hairy bugger and feathered bugger,
Bugger in large and small volume,
Bugger sodomizing the State,
And bugger of the purest mixture…
Below are a few sources of Mazarinades and details about them online:
- Moreau, Choix de Mazarinades (1853), vol. 1.
- Moreau, Choix de Mazarinades (1853), vol. 2.
- Moreau, Bibliographie des Mazarinades (1851).
Christian Jouhaud and Hubert Carrier’s secondary works on the Mazarinades sadly aren’t available online, let alone in translation, but Jeffrey Sawyer’s book on earlier libelles of the seventeenth century, Printed Poison, is available in its entirety here.
Skimming through the Palgrave catalogue, I’ve noticed a couple of books that will be out in December that may be of interest.
The first is a collection edited by John Adamson on the English civil wars. The contributors and essays are:
- Introduction – High Roads and Blind Alleys: The English Civil war and its Historiography: John Adamson.
- Rethinking Royalist Politics, 1642-49: David Scott.
- Anglicanism and Royalism in the 1640s: Antony Milton.
- Perceptions of Parliament: Faction and ‘The Public’: Jason Peacey.
- The Baronial Context of the Irish Civil Wars; Jane Ohlmeyer.
- The ‘Scottish Moment’, 1638-45: Alan Macinnes.
- Centre and Locality in Civil War England: Clive Holmes.
- The Politics of Fairfax’s Army, 1645-49: Ian Gentles.
- Rhetoric, Reality, and the Varieties of Civil War Radicalism: Philip Baker.
The second is edited by Patrick Little and is on Oliver Cromwell. It looks very much like a successor to John Morrill’s outstanding edited volume of essays on Cromwell from the early 1990s.
- 1636: The Unmaking of Oliver Cromwell?: Simon Healy.
- ‘One That Would Sit Well At the Mark: The Early Parliamentary Career of Oliver Cromwell: Stephen Roberts.
- ‘Lord of the Fens’: Oliver Cromwell’s Reputation and the First Civil War: S.L. Sadler.
- ‘A Despicable Contemptible Generation of Men’?: Cromwell and The Levellers: Philip Baker.
- Cromwell in Ireland Before 1649: Patrick Little.
- Oliver Cromwell and the Solemn League and Covenant of the Three Kingdoms: K. MacKenzie.
- Oliver Cromwell (alias William) and Wales: L Bowen.
- The Lord Protector’s Servants and Courtiers: Andrew Barclay.
- John Thurloe and the Offer of the Crown to Cromwell: Patrick Little.
- ‘Fit for Public Services’; The Upbringing of Richard Cromwell: Jason Peacey.
Regular readers will probably have picked up that my day job is as a civil servant in one of the big UK Government departments. I deliberately don’t post about anything work-related – this is a blog about history, after all – but I figure I’m on safe ground with this post.
Officials working on policy often have to draft speeches for Ministers. These can range from keynote addresses to major conferences through to very much more technical speeches for specialist audiences. I found a great example of one of the latter recently that I would love to have been asked to write.
While searching for something else, I found a speech that Lord Falconer (Lord Chancellor until last year) made in 2004. It was to mark the 350th anniversary of the Whitelocke treaty between England and Sweden.
If you haven’t come across Bulstrode Whitelocke before, here’s a bit of background. Born in 1605, he was a lawyer and MP who became involved in supporting John Hampden’s resistance to Charles I’s fiscal policies in the 1630s. He was involved in the early failed negotiations with the king and later in the 1640s became a keeper of the great seal. He managed to hedge his bets with the trial and execution of the king: he was a member of the committee that prepared the charges, but never attended, and he stayed at home on the day of the execution itself.
In November 1652, he recorded in his memoirs that he chanced upon Cromwell late one night in St James’s Park, who asked him “what if a man should take upon him to be king?”. Whitelocked reportedly advised Cromwell against, although there are limits to the reliability we can place on this source. In 1653, Whitelocke became ambassador-extraordinary to Queen Christina of Sweden, the topic of Lord Falconer’s speech. He negotiated a treaty of peace which, as Lord Falconer makes clear, has never been repealed.
Whitelocke is important for historians of the seventeenth century because of his writings. He left two substantial works, the Annals (a narrative of public events up to 1660 which draw from his journal), and his Memorials which are a tidied up version of his journal (not quite a diary, as Blair Worden has pointed out). Both of these are fantastic sources for those reconstructing the high politics of the 1640s and 1650s.
The man himself has found less favour with historians. He’s been seen as a pragmatist, or less charitably as a trimming official concerned with saving his own skin. Probably the most memorable judgement is that of Thomas Carlyle, who characterised him as ‘Dryasdust’: ‘our Pedant friend’ but one whose prose did demonstrate ‘occasional friskiness; most unexpected, as if the hippopotamus should show a tendency to dance’. But as an official myself I’ve always had a bit more sympathy with him.
Lord Falconer’s speech is a wonderful potted history of relations between the two countries in the mid-seventeenth century. There is the obligatory delight at Whitelocke’s unusual first name, praise for Queen Christina, and a summary of Cromwellian foreign policy in 1654. And whoever drafted the speech has a wonderfully dry sense of humour. Take this line:
First, and most importantly, it sought to establish a contractual basis for long-term peace and amity between our nations. Perpetual peace, indeed (the 1654 Treaty was nothing if not ambitious). 350 years is a solid start, you will agree.
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