Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  To stem this unfavourable foreign tide, the English Republic appointed John Milton its ‘Secretary for Foreign Tongues’, and charged him with justifying the new regime abroad. He began with a translation of his vitriolic counterblast to ‘The king's image’, provocatively entitled Eikonoklastes, and prepared numerous pamphlets and official publications specifically for foreign distribution. Meanwhile the Republic produced a weekly newspaper in French, Nouvelles ordinaires de Londres, and maintained a ‘Resident for the Parliaments of England and Scotland at Paris’ who monitored and disseminated news of foreign rebellions from Naples to Ukraine. In 1654 Milton's Second defence of the English people defiantly imagined that

  From the pillars of Hercules [Cádiz in Spain] all the way to the farthest boundaries of [India], I seem to be leading home again everywhere in the world, after a vast space of time, Liberty herself, so long expelled and exiled … I seem to introduce to the nations of the earth a product from my own country: … the renewed cultivation of freedom and civic life that I disseminate throughout cities, kingdoms and nations.33

  The success of these efforts can be measured by the German proclamations that prohibited the translation of any more ‘books by the rebels’, and owning or selling any work by John Milton; and Cardinal Mazarin's ban on all works by Milton, whom he accused of being ‘the most impudent and most wily apologist of the blackest of all parricides, by which the English nation has just been sullied’.34

  In 1652 English agents went to France with instructions to survey the defensive state of its ports and ascertain whether any of them might prove receptive to the republican form of government. Led by Edward Sexby, a prominent protagonist in the New Model Army's debates at Putney, the agents converged on the southwestern port of Bordeaux, mainly because it was already in revolt against the central government (the Ormée: see chapter 10). Sexby prepared two printed tracts that set out a blueprint for a republican form of government in the province of Guyenne (one of them clearly modelled on An agreement of the people, which he had drafted: see page 372 above), and the revolutionary government of Bordeaux sent delegates to London to secure English aid. Cromwell offered 40 warships and 5,000 men in return for control of Bordeaux itself, but although the city's leaders accepted the offer, Louis XIV forced their surrender before English aid could arrive.35 One French pamphleteer now complained that the English leaders saw themselves as ‘so many Moses and Josuahs’ who ‘boasted that they would offer the peoples of Europe forces sufficient to recover their liberty’ and aspired to an ‘empire of the universe’.36

  A ‘Public Sphere’ in the West?

  The ability to spread the ‘contagion’ of rebellion by words as well as deeds reflected both the production of an unprecedented multitude of texts and the existence of an immense audience capable of receiving and understanding them. In 1605 Johan Carolus of Strasbourg (in southwest Germany), who had previously made his living by compiling and circulating weekly handwritten newsletters, acquired a printing press and created the first printed newspaper in the world. Henceforth, instead of distributing 15–20 manuscript copies of his weekly bulletin for individual wealthy clients, he produced up to 500 copies for sale at a fraction of the cost. The Defenestration of Prague in 1618 – which almost everyone recognized as the harbinger of war (see chapter 8 above) – triggered a rapid expansion of the new medium: at least 15 cities published a German-language newspaper by 1620, rising to 30 by 1640. By then, Hamburg published two newspapers, each with a run of 2,500–3,000 copies; and in 1650 the first daily German newspaper began production.37 Other printed media also expanded rapidly. In Germany, perhaps 10,000 political pamphlets and 2,000 broadsheets appeared during the course of the Thirty Years War, with peaks during the war for Bohemia and during Gustavus Adolphus's invasion (see Fig. 23). A century would pass before Germany produced as many printed works again.38

  ‘Let the news be good or bad, it is always welcome to me because it tells me of the world,’ wrote the Dutch intellectual Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft in 1640 – but others felt less enthusiastic. One French intellectual complained that newspapers ‘make people know too much about their own affairs as well as about those of their neighbours. … It does not seem wise to me that ordinary people should know so much news: what is the point of informing them in such detail about the revolt of Naples, the insurgency in Turkey, and the regicide in England?’ A generation later, an Italian political commentator went further. ‘Ordinary people,’ he observed, read the news ’as it is written, but interpret it as they wish, and they more often turn good news into bad than bad news into good‘. Previously, he continued,

  People had no reason to exercise their minds in the delusions and fantasies that they read in the newspapers, but were idle, everyone thinking about his own affairs instead of those of their rulers; but deluding and fantasizing has turned the people into princes, the ignorant into experts, the simpletons into sages, and the obedient into disobedient.

  According to a colleague, the arrival of news about military developments proved particularly disruptive, because they ‘caused wars about wars, and [the audience] did more skirmishing with lashing tongues than the soldiers had done with sharpened swords’.39

  The audience for military (and other) news comprised not only readers but also illiterate listeners. For example, late in 1659 General George Monck issued a pamphlet explaining his motives for leading an army from Scotland to restore parliamentary government in England and calling for universal support. One copy reached a captain in the garrison of Leith, the port of Edinburgh, who read it himself, discussed it with another officer and then, since the pamphlet contained fewer than 1,000 words, he ‘had it read to the soldiers’ under his command. The same message thus reached hundreds of people, illiterate as well as literate, and if we imagine similar scenes throughout the army, the absence of effective resistance to Monck's march on London becomes more understandable (see chapter 12 above). The word had indeed become mightier than the sword.40

  Taken together, the combination of multiple media with a large audience created a ‘popular public sphere’: a series of arenas, at least partially free from government interference, where for the first time in the world ‘claims and counter-claims could be asserted and negotiated, and where the range of princely and imperial power could be questioned and contested’.41 The destabilizing tendencies of this public sphere perplexed and frightened some contemporaries. ‘It is strange to note how we have insensibly slid into this beginning of a civil war,’ a Member of the English Parliament lamented in 1642, through ‘paper combats, by declarations, remonstrances, protestations, votes, messages, answers and replies’; while a generation later a royalist argued that nothing had ‘hurt the late king [Charles I more] than the paper bullets of the press’. In 1646 a Catalan cleric loyal to Philip IV made exactly the same point: ‘In this day and age, we fight more with books than with armies,’ he claimed, and intended the book he had just published to ‘win back Catalonia in the same manner that it was lost’.42 Rebels throughout Europe seemed able to find a printing press with ease: the Ormée of Bordeaux issued tracts; the Nu-Pieds of Normandy issued manifestos; and even Giuseppe Piantanida, whose proposed rebellion in Milan was discovered before it began, managed to print a proclamation. Naples produced so many bandi (ordinances) after the outbreak of rebellion in 1647 that, five months later, ‘considering the importance of works in print, and the way they are believed throughout the world’, its leaders ordered the printers of the city to submit all future texts for their imprimatur or face a heavy fine and the confiscation of their presses.43

  Looking back just after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, John Locke roundly condemned ‘the scribbling of this age’ and

  Accused the pens of Englishmen of as much guilt as their swords, judging that the issue of blood from whence such an inundation hath flowed had scarce been opened, or at least not so long unstopped had men been more unsparing of their ink; and that these furies, wars, cruelty, rapine, confusion, e
tc., which have so wearied and wasted this poor nation have been conjured up in private studies and from thence sent abroad to disturb the quiet we enjoyed.44

  Some of Locke's contemporaries blamed education for the emergence of Europe's first ‘public sphere’. In Spain, a government committee called on Philip IV to ‘close down some grammar schools newly founded in villages and small towns, because with the opportunity of having them so near, the peasants divert their sons from the jobs and occupations in which they were born and raised, and put them to study’. In France, Cardinal Richelieu wanted to close three-quarters of the collèges de plein exercice (schools that provided a general education in Classical studies) because he, like Philip IV, reasoned that, if everyone received an education, ‘the sons of the poor would desert the productive occupations of their parents for the comforts of office’. The French scholar Gabriel Naudé agreed, predicting in 1639 that ‘the great number of colleges, seminaries and schools’ would increase the frequency of ‘revolutions of state’. Twenty years later, the marquis of Newcastle, sometime preceptor to Charles II, warned his illustrious charge that ‘there are too many grammar schools’ in England. The country, he asserted, needed only enough schools ‘to serve the church, and moderately the Law, for else they run out to idle and unnecessary people that become a factious burden to the Commonwealth’. In America, Sir William Berkeley, the royalist Governor of Virginia, agreed. ‘Learning’, he complained in 1676, ‘has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world; and printing has divulged them and libels against the best government. God keep us from both!’45

  These critics made a valid point. A heightened appreciation of Classical learning (the Renaissance), followed by the religious fervour that called forth a more literate clergy and laity (the Reformation), had produced an ‘educational revolution’ in sixteenth-century Europe. Almost everywhere, schools sprang up to teach local children to read, write and undertake simple arithmetical calculations, until by the 1640s half the parishes in some parts of England and Wales, three-quarters of the parishes of Lowland Scotland and four-fifths of the parishes in and around Paris boasted their own school. Some preceptors explicitly set out ‘to traine up young gentlemen, and all others whom we would have become wise men and good-commonwealths men’, by fostering ‘a free and bold speech’, modelled on Classical precedents, that might inspire ‘the hearts of princes and people’ and thus ‘turne and manage with their tongues, as with the helme in steerage, the floting vessels of states and empires’. Therein lay the danger: ‘The immoderat libertie of speech given to orators who direct and guide the peoples' hearts and minds,’ warned a French politician, could easily cause ‘seditions and rebellions’ because ‘there is nothing that hath more force over the minds of men, than hath eloquence’. ‘A powerful eloquence’, echoed Thomas Hobbes in 1641, on the eve of the English Civil War, is ‘the true feature of those who agitate and incite the people to revolution’.46

  Many schoolteachers nevertheless failed to impart ‘eloquence’ to their pupils because education cost money. A survey of schools in Madrid in 1642 revealed that one-third of the pupils paid two reales a month just to learn to read, whereas those learning to read and write paid four, while those also learning arithmetic paid six. With up to 140 pupils per school, Richard Kagan has written, ‘one can imagine the poorest students, the “readers” paying only two reales apiece, clustered in the back of the classroom and the sons of the more prosperous families who were each paying six reales seated in front’.47 Nevertheless, since Spanish (like all European languages) uses an alphabet of around 26 characters, those with the necessary determination did not have to rely exclusively on schools in order to learn to read and to express themselves. Several seventeenth-century men and women from humble backgrounds described the progress of their self-instruction. When Oliver Sansom, born in Berkshire (England) in 1636, ‘was about six years of age, I was put to school to a woman, to learn to read, who finding me not unapt to learn, forwarded me so well, that in about four months’ time I could read a chapter of the Bible pretty readily’. At ‘about five years old’ Thomas Tryon, born two years earlier in Gloucestershire, started ‘school, but being addicted to play, after the example of my young school-fellows, I scarcely learned to distinguish my letters before I was taken away to work for my living’ since his father, a village craftsman ‘having many children, was forced to bring them all to work betimes’. Thomas carded and spun wool and then became a shepherd, so that ‘All this while, though now about thirteen years old, I could not read; then, thinking of the vast usefulness of reading, I bought me a primer’ and persuaded other shepherds ‘to teach me to spell, and so learned to read imperfectly, my teachers not being ready readers; but in a little time’ he ‘learned to read competently well’. The shepherds could not teach him to write, because none of them knew how; but Tryon persuaded ‘a lame young man who taught some poor people's children to read and write’ to ‘teach me to make the letters, and join them together’. He eventually published some 20 books – a remarkable achievement for someone whose formal schooling ended when he was six.48 Some seventeenth-century women also became literate without going to school. Elizabeth Angier, a clergyman's daughter from Lancashire, ‘could read the hardest chapter in the Bible when she was but four years of age’ and ‘at six years of age [could] write down passages of the sermon in the chapel’. The Quaker Mary Fell, also from Lancashire, not only had learned the Bible by heart but quoted extensive passages from memory in a book she wrote in prison (albeit her ‘virtual Bible’ omitted those passages that enjoined female subservience to men).49

  Lutheran Sweden provides the most striking example of the extent of reading ability in seventeenth-century Europe. Because most parishes contained huge areas, the Church (backed by the government) devolved the task of teaching young children to memorize their catechism to all heads of households. Then, either at the parish school or (more often) at the house of the pastor or a church elder, the children learned to read and comprehend what they already knew by heart. Next, the minister examined both abilities annually and awarded one of six grades, ranging from ‘cannot read’ to ‘reads acceptably’. Finally, the local dean scrutinized and verified the examination registers. By the 1680s, these registers revealed ‘acceptable’ reading rates of up to 90 per cent for both males and females. Eventually it was possible to deny a licence to marry to those who could not read a passage of Scripture satisfactorily.50

  Because only Sweden systematically measured the ability to read, historians have estimated literacy elsewhere via proxies: by counting the frequency of signatures (as opposed to marks, or an admission of illiteracy) in documents such as marriage registers or notarial deeds. Although the number in rural areas and among women rarely rose above 10 per cent, in thriving cities like Amsterdam by the 1680s over two-thirds of all males and over one-third of all females could sign their own name. Since pupils all over Europe learned to write only after they could read, male functional literacy in Amsterdam (and perhaps in other major towns) probably approached Swedish levels. Although an English tract of 1649 witheringly asked, ‘who looks at school-books after he has left going to school?’, distinct literary genres developed in the seventeenth century expressly to inform the functionally literate.51

  The most common medium for the semi-literate was the ‘broadsheet’, a single sheet of printed paper not unlike the front page of a modern newspaper: a striking ‘headline’ above an image with an explanatory text beneath (often in rhyming verse, which made it easier for both readers and listeners to follow). To attract purchasers, the headlines always stressed either novelty or alarm, while the images showed both ingenuity and ambiguity. From 1606, the printer Nicholas Oudot of Troyes (a French provincial town) used these same techniques to produce booklets of 8 or 16 pages, sold by peddlers for a few pennies. Most of these ‘chapbooks’ were devotional works (especially saints' lives), news of recent events (especially crimes and punishments), predictions (‘almanacs’), stori
es (mostly romantic or escapist) and jokes (mostly obscene). Other chapbooks offered practical advice: how to play games, how to write a letter, how to succeed in love and in life, how to stay healthy. Oudot and his heirs printed most items in large type, with a striking image on the title page (similar to a broadsheet), short chapters and numerous illustrations. Some items achieved print runs of 100,000 copies. Although until the Fronde, censorship restrained Oudot (like other French printers) from publishing political news, in the words of a chronicler: ‘The little books that circulate widely among the common people attract them like Manna’. Chapbooks thus played a crucial role in creating the broad reading public for the political polemics produced in the mid-seventeenth century. So, paradoxically, did official propaganda.52

  France had no newspaper until 1631, when an official weekly Gazette began to appear. Although the government vetted its contents carefully (see chapter 10 above), like the chapbooks, the Gazette's ‘good-news’ diet whetted the appetite of readers for political news and, when censorship collapsed in 1649, on some days no fewer than 12 new pamphlets appeared for sale in the streets of Paris (see Figs 32 and 33). So many publications targeted Cardinal Mazarin (hence their title: Mazarinades) that one critic jovially assured him that ‘more attacks have been composed against you than against all the tyrants of Rome’. The 5,000 surviving Mazarinades fill over 50,000 printed pages.53

  This initial attempt to mobilize French public opinion ended with the collapse of the Fronde in 1653, but another began almost at once when the Pope condemned five ‘propositions’ allegedly found in the writings of Cornelius Jansen (see chapter 10 above), whose emphasis on asceticism and devotion had won many followers. Four years later, one of Jansen's supporters began to publish a series of Provincial Letters, supposedly from a Parisian to a friend in the countryside, which made fun of the Jansenists' enemies. The author of these wickedly ironic epistles, Blaise Pascal, deliberately aimed at a general audience, and in 1656 he could claim that ‘everybody has seen them, everybody understands them, and everybody believes them. They are not only in high repute among theologians: they have proved agreeable to men of the world and intelligible even to ladies.’ The impact of the Letters can be gauged from the fact that Louis XIV ordered all of them to be shredded and burned.54