The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself

by Andrew Pettegree

  It is therefore no surprise that the first serial news publication in English was published not in London but in Amsterdam. In December 1620 the enterprising Pieter van den Keere published the Courant out of Italy, Germany etc. This was a straightforward translation of the Dutch edition, published in the same single-sheet format.32 It was sufficiently successful for van den Keere to maintain publication for the best part of a year. Success brought imitation: by 1621 several of these single-sheet ‘corantos’ were in circulation. The most successful, though prudently attributed to the Amsterdam firm of Broer Jansz, may actually have been printed in London, and from September 1621 the London publisher Nathaniel Butter was openly advertising his responsibility for what was in effect a continuation of van den Keere's series.33 Several other London printers also re-entered the market with unnumbered pamphlet news-books.34

  Rather than tolerate an unregulated free-for-all, the English authorities resorted to their preferred means of control: establishing a monopoly. This was awarded to Butter and Nicolas Bourne, who were now permitted to publish a weekly news-book provided it was submitted for prior inspection. The publishers would not be permitted to publish any domestic news or comment on English affairs. What was intended was a dry and fairly literal translation of the reports inherited from the continental newspapers.

  While they accepted these conditions in order to kill off competition, Butter and Bourne soon demonstrated that they would bring to their task a keen commercial spirit. Butter was an old hand with printed news: news pamphlets, many of them with tales of sensational domestic murders, had made up a large part of the output of the print shop he had inherited from his father. Immediately Butter and Bourne converted their news-book back from the single sheet of the Amsterdam translations to the familiar pamphlet form.35 Rather than follow the practice of the German newspapers, where the news followed immediately after the heading on the title-page, the English editors chose to imitate Verhoeven's Antwerp style (or that of their own earlier news pamphlets) where the title-page was occupied with a description of the contents.36 Deprived of the opportunity to decorate their pamphlets with an expressive woodcut (this was not something that could easily have been furnished in London), Butter and Bourne instead allowed their title-page description of contents to stray down the whole page. Since this militated against a standard title, only the provision of a date and numbering reminded the reader that these were part of a serial.

  Nor were Butter and Bourne prepared to replicate slavishly the contents of the continental news-books. At some point around 1622 they engaged the services of an editor, Captain Thomas Gainsford. Gainsford was the classic English adventurer. Driven by debt into military service, he had travelled extensively on the continent, ending with a period in the service of Maurice of Nassau. Like Nathanial Butter he was a passionate advocate of the Protestant cause. Returning finally to England, Gainsford embarked on a somewhat unlikely literary career, specialising in works of popular history. Butter, the publisher of at least one of these volumes, clearly thought of him as the man to add spice and zest to the rather lifeless reports inherited from the continental news-books.37 In this Gainsford succeeded magnificently. The reports of troop movements and diplomatic manoeuvres were knitted together into a coherent narrative. Sometimes Gainsford would address the ‘Gentle reader’ directly, assuring him of the veracity of the reports and defending himself against any taint of partiality. These murmurings must have stung, for Gainsford was eventually moved to a spirited defence:

  Gentle readers, how comes it then to pass that nothing can please you? If we afford you plain stuff, you complain … it is nonsense; if we add some [embellishment], then you are curious to examine the method and coherence, and are forward in saying the sentences are not well adapted.38

  Nor could Gainsford concoct news if none were to be had. Readers must not be greedy, not ‘look for fighting every day, nor taking of towns; but as they happen you shall know’39.

  Butter and Bourne faced one problem that did not impact on the continental news men: the English Channel. If the wind was adverse, or the sea shrouded in fog, the news reports could not get through, and the English news-books had nothing to report. So the English news-books do not observe the strict periodicity of their continental peers: a weekly issue was the clear intention, but the London paper had no regular day of publication. Even so it seems to have been widely read in London and distributed to the country by the regular London carrier services. Gentlemen readers took to enclosing corantos in their correspondence with friends.40 Even the purveyors of the subscription manuscript news services recommended that their moneyed clients also read the printed sheets. John Pory put it rather loftily in a letter to John Scudamore: ‘The reason [sic] why I would have your lordship read all corantos are, first, because it is a shame for a man of quality to be ignorant of that which the vulgar know.’41 It is interesting that Pory did not regard the new printed medium as any sort of threat to his superior bespoke service; as on the continent, the two subsisted together.

  9.4 Butter's news serial. Only later in this year did Butter begin to number the series.

  Thomas Gainsford died in 1624 and was not replaced. Without him the news-books struggled to maintain their appeal. The printers adopted the non de plume Mercurius Britannicus, and gave their news-books a title that most usually began The continuation of our weekly news; but by this date the news for a predominantly Protestant audience was unremittingly bad, and this may have damaged sales. In 1625 Butter made a memorable appearance in Ben Jonson's A Staple of News, a brilliant satire on the craze for current affairs. Jonson's darts hit the mark, but he was, if anything, unlucky with his date. Not only was the craze declining, the play also pre-dated by a couple of years the most remarkable episode of the early history of English newspapers: an attempt to corral the newspaper trade as a propaganda vehicle for the Duke of Buckingham's assault on La Rochelle.

  Heroes and Villains

  In 1627 the Duke of Buckingham's public reputation was in sharp decline. Previously feted for his perceived role in saving the young Prince Charles from a Spanish marriage, when Charles became king in 1625 Buckingham became the whipping boy for every discontent. As the war with Spain teetered towards disaster, Parliament made a formal complaint against his influence. The favourite was fast becoming a national laughing stock. A group of fiddlers toured the country with a song of ironic praise for the duke, lauding his achievements: ‘let us sing all of this noble duke's praise, and pray for the length of his life and his days’. The audience then joined in the chorus of refutation: ‘the clean contrary way, O the clean contrary way’.42

  Buckingham opted for decisive action: almost incredibly the regime responded to the failure of war with Spain by precipitating a simultaneous conflict with Europe's other great power, France. An expedition would be sent to assist the French Protestant minority at La Rochelle; Buckingham would lead it in person.

  Buckingham was no general, but he did have a quite precocious view of public relations. Some years before, Thomas Locke and John Pory, both purveyors of manuscript news services, had suggested that the government capitalise on the appetite for news by creating their own paper. Their petition set out three potential benefits; it is a perceptive and prescient document. In times of crisis, they argued, a newspaper could help mould and direct public opinion; in more sober times newspapers could circulate the official viewpoint; thirdly, newspapers could raise morale and train the people to a habit of obedience. It was a remarkably forthright view of the benefits of a controlled press.43

  At the time this went unheeded, and Butter and Bourne received the privilege, with uncertain results from the government's perspective. Now Buckingham resolved to do better. When the fleet sailed for La Rochelle, he could exercise complete control over reporting from the front; his despatches were sent back to London, and placed in the hands of a cooperative bookseller. The first issue of this new Journal cast the duke in a heroic mode, and clearly resonated with the publi
c. A second was planned, but first the Privy Council had to deal with Butter and Bourne. This proved easy enough; the news-book printers had been slack in presenting their texts for censorship, and this provided the justification for hauling Butter off to prison. He was soon released but suitably warned, and The continuation of the weekly news henceforth confined its reports from La Rochelle to the tersest notes. This left the field clear for Thomas Walkley, Buckingham's instrument.

  This exercise in war propaganda has received little attention, though it deserves more.44 The progress of the expedition was charted in successive issues of the Journal that ran from August to November. The avid reader could hardly fail to be impressed by the swift progress of England's previously untrained forces, under the decisive yet chivalrous leadership of Buckingham. Casualties were light, and those who did fall victim to the unfamiliar temptations of the local wine were assured of expert medical attention. Buckingham, like Henry V before Harfleur, was everywhere. On the day of the landing ‘the L. General was up and ready by three of the clock’. After a hard day's fighting he ‘spent every evening visiting those that were hurt on our side’.45 Even Buckingham's numerous critics at home began to revise their opinions of him.

  In the short term these carefully prepared despatches could not have been more successful. But ultimately they could not disguise the military catastrophe that was unfolding on the Île de Ré, the fortified island that held the key to the assault on La Rochelle. The citadel held by the French could not be breached. Through strategic bungling half the troops involved in the final assault were cut off and mercilessly slaughtered. As the bedraggled survivors stumbled back to England, a shocked Privy Council imposed a news blackout on casualties; but the number of gentlemen who did not return told its own story. Buckingham had used the media so brilliantly to raise expectations of victory that the impact on his reputation of a surprise defeat was all the more calamitous. A year later he would be assassinated by one of the men he had led to disaster.

  The chequered early history of the English newspapers had one final act. After the collapse of Walkley's Journal, Butter and Bourne were left to resume their monopoly. For a time, the news-books prospered. The Swedish intervention in the Thirty Years War had rekindled Protestant hopes, and placed ever greater scrutiny on the veracity of the reports received in this most turbulent era. Many, perhaps remembering the Île de Ré fiasco, may have prayed with the Reverend Christopher Foster:

  to inspire the Coranto-makers with the spirit of truth, that one may know when to praise thy blessed and glorious name and when to pray unto thee. For we often praise and laud thy holy name for the King of Sweden's victories, and afterwards we hear that there is no such thing. And we oftentimes pray unto thee to relieve that same King in his distress, and we likewise hear that there is no such cause.46

  For a time the news from Germany offered hope to Protestant hearts; too much, indeed, for the rather different spirit of Charles I. In 1632, following a complaint from the Spanish ambassador, the government instructed Butter and Bourne to cease publishing. Butter, a newsman through and through, remained in the market with works of contemporary history that were thinly disguised hymns to the Protestant cause.47 Bourne, more wisely, diversified into other ventures. When the prohibition was relaxed in 1638, the revived corantos were soon overtaken by news-books devoted to domestic politics. Bourne, the businessman, was in due course elected master of the Stationers’ Company, and prospered. Butter, the frustrated newsman, died a pauper.

  Two Machiavellian Statesmen

  For twenty years England made a lively and potentially innovative contribution to the early history of the newspaper. By the time English production revived in the years before the Civil Wars a dense network of serial publications extended from London through the Low Countries and across the German-speaking lands to Danzig, Prague and Vienna. Elsewhere in Europe serial publication did not enjoy the same success. The early newspapers were a geographically circumscribed phenomenon. Spain was a latecomer to the market in serial news publications, and this was true also of two of the three largest markets for print, France and Italy. In the case of Italy this was all the more striking as the peninsula had been the fulcrum of the European news network since the Middle Ages. In France the suppression of a market for news was a conscious act of state on the part of the most potent statesman of the age, Cardinal Richelieu.

  Richelieu had no reason to love the press. His had been a backstairs career; a steady rise to eminence through carefully cultivated royal favour. His political apprenticeship had coincided with the turbulent minority of Louis XIII, a brutal struggle for power between the Queen Mother and successive favourites. This feuding at court spilled out into the streets in a torrent of frantic pamphleteering that reached its peak in the years between the summons of the Estates General in 1614 (the last meeting of this national assembly before the French Revolution) and the assassination of the hated favourite Concini three years later. Over a thousand political pamphlets were published in these years, many boldly contemptuous of those who struggled for supremacy at court.48 The passions unleashed were truly terrifying in a nation apparently teetering on the brink of the resumption of the civil war that had scarred the country in the sixteenth century. Richelieu's first years in power were dominated by the last great Huguenot rebellion, finally resolved when the Protestant citadel of La Rochelle was reduced to obedience (the campaign in which Buckingham's intervention had proved so ineffective).

  Richelieu was a keen student of the press. In his early career he had followed the political campaigning that accompanied the Estates General, and he ensured that the triumph of La Rochelle was marked by an intense flurry of laudatory pamphlets celebrating the Catholic victory.49 Thus when the first weekly newspapers appeared in 1631, Richelieu was quick to see the benefit of bringing them within his orbit. These were not strictly speaking the first weekly news-sheets to be published in French. As in the English case, the Amsterdam news men had tried their hand with a French translation of the Dutch Courante, but it had lasted only a few issues.50 When this paper folded it would be ten years before another French-language newspaper was established, this time in Paris. The Nouvelles ordinaires des divers endroits was the work of three experienced Paris bookmen, who sensibly employed a German, Louis Epstin, to shape the new venture.51 It clearly found a ready audience, and this in turn encouraged competition. On 30 May 1631 there appeared the first edition of the Paris Gazette, the work of a man well known in Paris, though not in the printing fraternity: Théophraste Renaudot.

  Renaudot was a rather unlikely newsman.52 Born into a Protestant family in 1586, he was a star student at the famous medical faculty at Montpellier, attaining his doctorate at the age of twenty. Returning to his home town Loudun, in 1611 he was introduced to the local bishop, Armand de Richelieu. Renaudot immediately gravitated into Richelieu's circle. Appointed a royal physician in 1612, he followed Richelieu to Paris, converted to Catholicism, and was appointed to manage and reform the provision of poor relief in the capital. Well connected among the Parisian intellectual community, Renaudot had little experience as a printer. But when he tried his hand at a weekly news-sheet, sparking outraged protests from the publishers of the Nouvelles ordinaires, Richelieu saw the opportunity to take the nascent newspapers under his control. On 11 November 1631, by Crown decree, it was confirmed that Renaudot should have the exclusive right to print, sell and distribute newspapers within the kingdom.53

  Renaudot moved quickly to press home his advantage. Epstin was induced to leave the Paris consortium to work for him; Renaudot even stole the title and published his own Nouvelles ordinaires as a supplement to the weekly Gazette. His competitors did not give up without a fight. They protested to the king that Renaudot's Gazette was little more than a translation of news gathered from foreign news-sheets. The Gazette may indeed have been professionally unadventurous, but at this point this was exactly what Richelieu wanted. In 1633 and 1635 Renaudot's exclusive privilege was confirme
d, with ever harsher penalties for breach. The Paris consortium gave way.

  The Gazette appeared every Saturday. Using three presses, Renaudot could publish an edition of 1,200 copies in a day, no mean feat since with the addition of the Nouvelles ordinaires the Gazette ran to twelve or more quarto pages. Although foreign despatches remained a mainstay, Renaudot began to offer in addition increasingly detailed reports of the king's activities, from Paris, Versailles or St Germain. It was here that the Gazette deviated most profoundly from the European norm, for in contrast to the dry detail of the foreign despatches, the news from court adopted a tone of worshipful adulation. Renaudot's glorification of the king was unrestrained and unremitting: France was blessed with a ruler of rare gentility, talent, courage and humanity. This catalogue of all the virtues extended of course to artistic talents: he performed at ballet ‘with the delight inseparable from all the activities to which His Majesty applied himself’.54

  9.5 The Paris Gazette. Despite his previous lack of experience in the industry, Renaudot brought to the enterprise considerable flair and design sense. The Nouvelles ordinaires specialised in news from the Empire.

  The reality was that Louis XIII was never robust; the steady deterioration of his health in 1642, well known at court, was not touched upon in the Gazette. The same gushing deference was of course extended to Richelieu, to whom Renaudot exhibited unstinting loyalty. When Richelieu appeared before the Parlement of Paris in 1634 to deal with the difficult issue of the king's brother's marriage, Renaudot was on hand to record his persuasive skills: