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When I first started working in government, there was an e-mail forward that used to do the rounds every so often with a satirical collection of civil service jargon and what it meant. It’s since made its way online [PDF] and one of the definitions that is not only funny but also true is this one:
Loop (as in “in the loop” or “not fully in the loop”)
A very important phrase especially for those who are not fully in the loop as it can cause resentment and lead to temper tantrums. It is a measure of how important you are as to whether you are in or out of the loop at any one time.
I was reminded of this definition recently when re-reading Filippo de Vivo’s fantastic book about the politics of information in early modern Venice. De Vivo unpicks the various layers of society in which Venetian politics were conducted, tracing the importance of political information for people at all social levels. One of the themes he illuminates is the growing role of what he calls ‘information professionals’ in the conduct of Venetian politics:
Venice also hosted a large constituency of people with a professional interest in political information – diplomats and their agents, authors and newswriters, groups living at the margins of early modern politics… As well as bonding with patricians, ambassadors also surrounded themselves with a more heterogenenous host of intermediaries, people who were not fully part of formal politics but who networked their way into the secrets of the powerful through favours, personal friendship or money… Information professionals were part of the political system, helping communication between different members of the political system. (Filippo de Vivo, Information and communication in Venice: rethinking early modern politics (Oxford, 2007), pp. 4, 74.)
I suppose my own job could quite aptly be described as an ‘information professional’: as a ‘policy wonk’ (a less flattering title, but still fair) much of my role revolves around collecting information and providing it, in mediated form, to others. And then it struck me that my dissertation has also ended up gravitating towards a study of information professionals. In unpicking the evolution and impact of the early Commonwealth’s newsbooks, a substantial chunk of my current draft looks at the roles of their various authors, licensers, printers and publishers. They are people whose names only appear briefly in the major political histories of seventeenth century England: people like Gualter Frost, who was secretary to the Derby House Committee then the Commonwealth’s Council of State, or Henry Walker who went from marginal pamphleteer to state-licensed journalist and sermoniser. Even John Rushworth, secretary to Fairfax and the council of the army, is probably better known for his collection of newsbooks and bricolage-style history of the 1640s than for his role in politics.
All these men certainly fit the definition of living at the margins of early modern politics. Historians have also often gone out of their way to marginalise them. The original Dictionary of National Biography described Rushworth as a ‘historian’, only amended in the 2004 edition to ‘historian and politician’. Frost’s DNB entry focuses on his nepotism and dismisses his attempts to write political propaganda for the Commonwealth. He suffers in comparison to his successor, John Thurloe, who is more often seen as a sophisticated political puppet-master. Walker is probably best known for an incident in 1642 where he threw a scandalous pamphlet into the king’s carriage, than for his relationship with the army and the Council of State.
Yet my suspicion is that all of these men played bigger roles in the politics of the 1640s and 1650s than historians ordinarily allow. What is striking about all three is how widely their careers stray from one type of information to the next. All were involved in editing newsbooks, and some licensing them as well. All wrote or ghost-wrote political propaganda. Walker preached sermons praising Cromwell and the army, while Frost and Rushworth kept records of extremely high-level political meetings. They all had roles that involved shaping or reshaping the political information which grandees used to make decisions, and on which (some) citizens of the Commonwealth (partially) based their political ideologies and allegiances. Their role, basically, was to keep other people in the loop.
Frost, for example, started his career as manciple of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and also wrote almanacs on the side. In the late 1630s he began acting as courier for the Junto in their secret correspondence with the Scots. In 1644 he then became secretary to the Committee of Both Kingdoms, the crucial administrative development of Parliament’s military superiority, and stayed with it as it evolved into the Derby House Committee then the Council of State. He would not have stayed so long unless he was trusted: and his role would almost certainly have quietly involved a great deal of what civil service jargon today calls ’stakeholder management’ – keeping different factions on side.
Similarly, Rushworth started his career as assistant clerk to the Commons, but rose to become secretary to Fairfax and to the general council of the army. During the mid-1640s and then from 1649, he acted a licenser of newsbooks and pamphlets, helping to shape the material the public read. He also ghost-wrote some of the accounts of battles that were sent to Parliament by Fairfax and subsequently published. During Pride’s Purge, in particular, he seems to have played a crucial role behind the scenes in uniting the army grandees with Independents in Parliament. When a group of purged MPs demanded to see Fairfax, it was not Fairfax who answered them, but Rushworth – by letter, hand-delivered by Edward Whalley (one of the Council of Officers).
Walker, too, seems to have been closer to the political centre than has sometimes been realised. Indeed he seems to have lived with Cromwell for some period of time during the late 1640s. During the trial and execution of the king he was able to give detailed coverage in special daily editions of newsbooks due to his links to the army. He was also sufficiently powerful to request, and be granted, his own licenser in a struggle with Gilbert Mabbott during the late 1640s. By the time of Cromwell’s death, it is possible he was acting as a groom of the bedchamber to the Lord Protector.
There are various reasons why such men don’t loom larger in accounts of early modern politics. Their activities were not always ones that tend to leave traces in the historical record. Politicking that is carried out face-to-face or through meetings only survives if a record is kept of it in minutes or a journal. There is also a sense in which historians may be unwilling to grant ‘bureaucrats’ a role in proceedings. It is easy to speak of decisions ‘made’ by Charles I or Oliver Cromwell – partly these are synecdoches for ‘the state’, ‘the monarchy’ or ‘the Commonwealth’, but in an age of personal monarchy early modern rulers were extremely powerful. Nevertheless, they still had a small but significant machinery of government to support them in making decisions and in executing them. Historians are now more alive to occasions where royal proclamations were ghost-written by others, or where key decisions were made on the advice of others. But typically the advisers focused on are still political grandees such as the earl of Clarendon. People like Frost, Rushworth and Walker have been studied in most detailed not in accounts of high politics, but by Gerald Aylmer in his history of the development of the English civil service. It’s true that all three reflect a growing centralisation of officials, a shift from men-of-business attached through patronage to great aristocrats to salaried officials employed by the state. Nonetheless, it might just be the Sir Humphrey in me, but I suspect there is more to them than that.
My image is a woodcut illustration of an army council, probably the Council of War, taken from the frontispiece of A declaration of the engagements, remonstrances, representations, proposals, desires and resolutions from His Excellency Sir Tho: Fairfax, and the generall councel of the Army (London, 1647).
Spotted the poster above pasted onto a wall on the north side of the Millennium Bridge, on the approach to Tate Modern. The URL in the corner is www.neoexternalism.co.uk – but it takes you to a defunct website. A Whois check on the URL doesn’t reveal much, either.
Still, seeing it reminded me that pasting satirical messages onto London’s walls is nothing new, so I thought it would be a good excuse for a post. For comparison, here is one of the Voyeur Card’s famous early modern counterparts: a satirical broadsheet ballad that would probably also have been glued onto walls.
© The Trustees of the British Museum
The World Is Ruled & Governed By Opinion was published in 1641 by Thomas Banks (although subsequent editions did not feature his name). The text is by Henry Peacham, a writer and illustrator who in the late 1630s and 1640s published a number of written works. There is some suggestion that he was down on his luck and attempting to make money by doing so. At this period Peacham collaborated with Wenceslaus Hollar, who is the artist behind the ballad’s illustration. This is one of a number of works they collaborated on at this period. The dedication is to Sir Francis Prujean, a noted physician.
In the illustration you can see Opinion (the blindfolded woman), crowned with the Tower of Babel. She has a globe on her lap, a chameleon on her left arm and a staff in her right hand. In the tree are various pamphlets and broadside ballads. On the left is a jester-like man watering the tree. On the right is the aristocratic cavalier labelled “Viator” or traveller, who is the person Opinion is debating with in the ballad’s text.
The ballad and its illustration are a good example of of views held in the 1640s about the dangers of print, news and opinion – Opinion is an inversion of Justice, watered by a fool, producing nothing but confusion and a world turned upside down. This is ironic, given that the pamphlet’s publisher, Thomas Banks, was a key producer of cheap ballads, pamphlets and newsbooks during the 1640s. Paradoxically, the ballad’s very medium cuts across its message.
Where it gets really interesting are the titles it’s possible to make out of the books hanging from the tree. These are:
- “[John] Taylor’s Reply”
- “The Ironmonger’s Answer”
- “Mercuries Message”
- “News from Elyzium”
- “Hellish Parliament”
- “A Swarme of Sectaries”
- “Canterburies Tooles” (not Troubles as the British Museum website has it)
- “Brownists Conventicle”
- “Taylors Physicke”
- “Lambeth Faire”
Of these, Taylor’s Reply, A Swarme of Sectaries, Taylors Physicke, and The Ironmonger’s Answer all relate to the pamphlet war between John Taylor and Henry Walker.
Mercuries Message was a ballad critical of Laud. Newes from Elizium was a satirical piece using the same woodcut of Laud as Mercuries Message. The Hellish Parliament was another satirical pamphlet by Taylor. Canterburies Tooles is a pamphlet purporting to be by Prynne which reused the same woodcut. Brownists Conventicle was yet another Taylor satire. Lambeth Faire was another satirical ballad hostile to Laud.
I have a hunch – and it is no more than that at this stage – that the listed works may all have been published by Thomas Banks. Certainly Taylor had close professional connections with Banks, who printed a number of his satires. And much of Banks’s output at this time consisted of cheap satirical pamphlets and ballads. To add another layer of paradox, it may be that as well as a critical commentary on the burgeoning public sphere in 1641, The World Is Ruled & Governed By Opinion is also an advert for the very cheap print the ballad criticises.
What is also potentially fascinating for me is that works from both sides of the pamphlet war between John Taylor and Henry Walker are mentioned – not just Taylor’s but also Walker’s. Having blogged about this previously, and hypothesised that the two may have been closer than is supposed, and linked by their mutual associations with Banks and other printers, it is intriguing to wonder whether Banks actually printed all the pamphlets in the dispute. At any rate it’s something I’ll be following up.
Incidentally the ballad also inspired the title of Dagmar Freist’s excellent study of politics and communication in mid-seventeenth century London, which is now available in limited preview on Google Books, and which I would recommend if you want to find out more about print and other forms of communication in 1630s and 1640s London.
The series of posts that follow are a slightly amended and lengthier version of a paper I gave on 12 July at the Birkbeck Early Modern Society.
The pamphlet above is one of a number of salvoes fired in an infamous pamphlet war that started in June 1641, between two writers called John Taylor and Henry Walker.
Taylor was a waterman who had lived in London since his apprenticeship in the early 1590s. Despite only a brief spell at grammar school, contact with actors and writers he ferried to the Bankside triggered a new interest in literature for him. From 1612, Taylor started publishing verses and experimented with other forms of print. For example, in 1614 he produced a miniature “thumb-bible” as a novelty for courtiers. He also experimented with a subscription model for selling books. By the 1630s, Taylor’s predominant output was satirical pamphlets.
Less is known about Henry Walker’s background. In 1638 he was admitted as a pensioner at Queens’ College, Cambridge. However, before this he was apprenticed to an ironmonger in Newgate market. By 1641 he was writing and selling anti-episcopal books. At the same time, he was also becoming well-known as an Independent “tub preacher” – in other words, a preacher without a living.
The first salvo in their pamphlet war was fired by Taylor in a pamphlet called A Swarme of Sectaries. In it Taylor satirised a range of “mechanic” or non-beneficed preachers. Walker responded with An Answer to a Foolish Pamphlet entituled A Swarme of Sectaries, in which he attacked Taylor’s literary and religious credentials. Taylor quickly came back with another pamphlet, A Reply as true as Steele, criticising Walker and throwing in a woodcut of a she-devil giving birth to Walker. Walker then wrote a further response, Taylors Physicke has purged the divel, with a woodcut showing Taylor in his ferry-boat drinking something unmentionable from the rear end of another she-devil: this is the pamphlet you can see above. A third author, George Richardson, then entered the fray on Taylor’s side.
Although the dispute went quiet later in the summer of 1641, Taylor resurrected it in 1642 with two further pamphlets. One, a satire of a sermon preached by Walker, became well-known as “Tobie’s dog” after the mock-sermon’s subject, the book of Tobias. Another was a spoof of a debate held between Walker and a Jesuit.
This dispute has traditionally been seen as one of the literary set-pieces of the 1640s. In the civil war both Taylor and Walker would go on to be propagandists for king and Parliament respectively. As a result, their dispute is often presented as a paper conflict prefiguring the actual conflict that would break out between Charles I and Parliament in 1642. This interpretation has been combined with a tendency to see the dispute as being crude and of low literary merit. More recently, historians have been concerned not to marginalise popular print and instead to see it as an expressive form in its own right. Taylor and Walker’s pamphlet war has also been re-evaluated as part of this trend, and some historians have sought to restore Walker and Taylor’s literary credentials.
However, all of these re-interpretations have continued to stress the oppositional nature of Walker and Taylor’s exchange. Importantly, too, even the most recent interpretations have only considered one aspect of the dispute – the two authors.
But actually it takes more than authors to bring a book to print. As Robert Darnton has argued in work on the print culture of eighteenth-century France, there is a “communication circuit” involved in every book. You also need printers, booksellers and readers. And a text itself doesn’t exist in a vacuum either – it relates to the social and political context of its time. The diagram below shows Darnton’s version of this communication circuit.
What I will do in subsequent posts is analyse some of the missing characters in the communication circuit behind Walker and Taylor’s dispute:
- the texts, and how they relate to seventeenth-century print culture in general
- the readers
- the publishers
A full contextual analysis of all the parties involved, and the creative tensions between them, reveals that the exchange could be at once a pitched battle and a friendly spat, and could simultaneously be both crude and erudite.
A very useful post the other day from Lisa Spiro at Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, covering two things:
- Using word clouds
- Text comparison tools
I’ve been messing around with both over the last couple of days. Below are some thoughts on uses of word clouds.
Word clouds are a useful visual representation of the frequency with which a word appears – the bigger the word in the cloud, the more it appears in the text. They’re often used for blogs to represent tags the blogger has used. I’ve got two in the sidebar on the right, one for the categories I sort my posts into and one for the tags I’ve used.
Words clouds aren’t horribly difficult things to learn how to program. I’ve been following Bill Turkel’s wiki on how to become a programming historian and have managed to make my own using Python. But if you want to cheat, Wordle offers you a much easier way. Just cut and paste your text into the website and it automatically generates a cloud for you. You can then customise it within a range of styles.
How is this useful for historians? Well, I’m in the early stages of planning my dissertation and one use I’ve found has been to refine my topic. There are two extremes in choosing a thesis: you can start with a small topic and work your way up to finding the overall themes it will address, or start with a big theme and work your way down. If you’re choosing the former, word clouds can be a very quick and helpful way of distilling out key concepts.
As an example, I’ve cut and pasted the text for Henry Walker – one of the Civil War journalists and pamphleteers I’m hoping to study in my dissertation – from the Dictionary of National Biography.
What can you glean from this? “Perfect” and “Occurences” occur quite a lot, naturally enough given Perfect Occurences was a newsbook he edited. But what about other titles he edited? They’re less prominent. Is this something significant about Walker’s legacy, or does it also tell us something about his biographer’s priorities? “Trade” and “apprenticeship” also spring out – again, significant given that Walker started life as an ironmonger and did not spend his whole career as a parliamentary hack. This is a context sometimes ignored in his life. “Hebrew” also comes out quite strongly. Walker was fluent in it, but what significance should we read into this – is it of importance for understanding his writing?
Let’s compare this text to the biography of Walker in the early 20th century Cambridge Companion to English Literature.
Perfect Occurences is nowhere to be seen. “Cromwell” and “Charles” loom much larger in the cloud. “Drogheda” also looks quite strong, something that doesn’t emerge in the DNB’s cloud.
These are just a few of the questions that occurred to me when I generated this cloud. They’ve all given me leads to follow up or do more thinking about, both in relation to Walker and the historiography surrounding him, and I was able to do it instantly without a detailed trawl through the text. Now in Walker’s case his biography is very short, and naturally you would go through it in detail anyway – but for much longer texts, I can see Wordle having even more potential. With the set of key words it generates, you can then go trawling through other resources such as JSTOR and the RHS bibliography, looking for additional relevant secondary works. It’s not a substitute for reading and analysing a text yourself in detail. But it does provide a very useful supplement, particularly if you are trying to summarise a text.
Next time I will give some details about the uses I’ve made of text comparison tools.
Here’s an image with which you are probably familiar. It’s a staple of lots of textbooks and narratives of the civil wars, and is commonly used to show how deep the conflict ran – even the dogs had to take sides. But on a closer look it reveals a rather different context.
It’s a woodcut from the title page of a pamphlet published in early 1643:
A dialogue, or, Rather a parley betweene Prince Ruperts dogge whose name is Puddle, and Tobies dog whose name is Pepper, &c.
Whereunto is added the challeng which Prince Griffins dogg called Towzer, hath sent to Prince Ruperts dogg Puddle, in the behalfe of honest Pepper Tobies dog.
Moreover the said Prince Griffin is newly gone to Oxford to lay the wager, and to make up the match.
The dialogue starts with Rupert’s dog, Puddle, and Toby’s dog, Pepper, exchanging insults: “whindling Puppy Dog”, “shag haired Cavalier’s Dogge”. Pepper claims Puddle is an evil spirit, a claim which Puddle throws straight back at him, accusing him of bewitching the apprentices who rioted outside Westminster in the months before war broke out. After establishing what breed of dog they are, they trade insults on the social standing of their respective armies. Puddle contemptously rejects Pepper’s “red-cotton” soldiers, preferring the massed ranks of aristocrats he is able to list on the king’s side.
Puddle then lists the various plots he has been involved in, making Pepper so envious he begs to be told how to emulate him. Puddle reveals a plot to end all plots – a conspiracy to use 1000 barrels of gunpowder, 500 bars of iron, and 600 tonnes of stones to undermine the Thames, blowing them all up at high tide and sweeping the roundheads away.
Pepper is so impressed that he swears to deny all roundheads, and to bark at conventicles. To seal the deal, Puddle asks him to blow his nose backwards, and to fart against all sectaries. Unfortunately Pepper also ends up stinking the place out, much to Puddle’s consternation: “But I gave you no command to stink”. The dialogue closes with Puddle fetching sheeps-wool for Pepper to use as a periwig, completing his side-switching.
The dialogue is obviously a rich mine of information about the stereotypes already flourishing by 1643. There are the feather-capped, long-haired, spur-wearing cavaliers in the woodcut, contrasted against the plain-hatted roundheads. There is the rich imagery deployed by the author of the dialogue, and the scatological humour. There is also the reference to Prince Rupert’s dog, Puddle, who really existed but whose real name was Boye. Boye rode into action with Rupert on a number of occasions and built up quite a reputation amongst Parliamentarian troops as an evil spirit. Here for example is an image from a 1643 pamphlet of Rupert with his familiar.
All this can tell us a lot about the audience for such pamphlets, and the literary tropes and images that were in use at the time, making it a very useful source.
But in fact the main emphasis of the pamphlet is on something rather different. The author was John Taylor, the so- called “water poet”, a staunch royalist who would later travel to Oxford to join Charles I there. During 1642 and 1643 he became engaged in a literary spat with another pamphlet writer, Henry Walker the ironmonger. Walker was a “tub” preacher – in other words, he didn’t have a benefice. Walker is the real subject of the pamphlet. At some point in 1642 Walker had obviously delivered a sermon on the book of Tobit (in which Tobias makes a journey accompanied by a dog). A record of this does not survive, but there is a piss-take by Taylor in which Walker spouts nonsense, each paragraph ending with “and the dog of the man went with him”. There’s even a woodcut of Walker in his tub.
The dialogue between the dogs is scattered with references to this incident. There is Pepper’s owner, most obviously, as well as many references to Walker and to tub-preaching: for example, when switching sides Pepper declares: “all tub-lecturers I defie”. So the real objective of the pamphlet is to continue the battle on paper with Walker, as well as propagandising the royalist cause. Walker was certainly put out by the pamphlet: in a retort titled A Modest Vindication, he grumbled about a “foolish ridiculous Pamphlet of Tobie and his dog”. So he was clearly stung by Taylor’s caricature!
Finally, who is the mysterious Towzer, Prince Griffin’s dog? EEBO reckons it’s a reference to Roger L’Estrange, who would become a famous pamphleteer after the Restoration (but who at this point was a supporter of Parliament). In 1680 he was burnt in effigy by Londoners, who christened him the Dog Towzer. But this is far too early for L’Estrange to have been a target. The answer lies in the reference to Prince Griffin. This is likely to be John Griffith or Griffin, who had been an MP for Caernarvonshire before getting into trouble for basically duelling and killing his way round England. There is a brilliantly-titled denial of having murdered a gentleman’s servant, for example: A vindication or justification of John Griffith, Esq. Against the horrid, malitious, and unconscionable verdict of the coroners iury in Cheshire : vvhich was packt by the means of that pocky, rotten, lying, cowardly, and most perfidious knave, Sir Hugh Caulveley Knight, onely to vent his inveterate hatred and malice against me. Taylor portrays Towzer as challenging Puddle to a duel.
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