The Lettres d'un Suisse were a considerable literary success, but by 1709 even Torcy was forced to concede that their continuation now served no useful purpose. For, as he admitted to a correspondent in Italy, ‘I would very much like to be able to soothe [your pains] with some good news, but unfortunately the greater part of what our enemies are circulating is true.’19 Now the French Crown faced the difficult task of explaining why the hopes of peace (of which many must have been aware from the imported Dutch papers) would be dashed: the war must go on to rescue the king's honour and uphold his obligations to Philip of Spain. In these desperate times Louis spoke to his people directly, in a circular letter ostensibly addressed to the governors of the provinces. Printed in numerous editions, this frank and moving exposition achieved a massive circulation. It marked a sea change in the propaganda priorities of the king. For as Joachim Legrand, a gifted pamphlet writer of these later years, put it to Torcy:
It is not enough that the actions of kings be always accompanied by justice and reason. Their subjects must also be convinced of it, particularly when wars are undertaken which, although just and necessary, nearly always bring so much misery in their wake.20
The king's address helped rally the French nation for a last desperate effort; certainly the allies were taken aback by the recovery of French morale, and realised that they had overplayed their hand. The first signs of a weakening of English resolution led to a new onslaught of Torcy's propaganda effort, ably seconded by Legrand. In the end it was probably Philip of Spain's victory over his Habsburg challenger that proved most decisive in ending the war, but the emissaries did not operate in a vacuum. The groundwork for the peace treaty signed at Utrecht in 1713 had been carefully laid by a torrent of pamphlets, in large measure orchestrated by the contending parties, but never wholly under their control.
Restorations
In England following the Restoration of 1660, Louis XIV had one fervent, if for the time being secret admirer: the king, Charles II. Skilfully riding a tide of popular sentiment exhausted by the austerities and hypocrisies of the Republic, Charles displayed a charm and public optimism that caught the mood of the moment. Beneath this appealing persona, however, Charles was deeply scarred by the long years of deprivation and humiliations abroad. If he conquered, to an extent, the natural instinct for revenge, he still aspired to rule, and to prevail, against the whirlwind of conflicting expectations aroused by his return. For this, he required a complaisant press. This opened the way for a fascinating conflict between a devious and stubborn monarch and a publishing community anticipating a return to the vigorous exchange of opinions that had preceded the sour austerities of Cromwell's personal rule.21
The newspapers inherited from the Commonwealth were soon put into reliable hands. Marchamont Nedham was too associated with Cromwell to hope for further employment, and prudently departed for Holland. But Henry Muddiman, a schoolmaster turned journalist who had attached himself to the architect of the Restoration, General George Monck, successfully contrived a change of allegiance alongside his patron. His Parliamentary Intelligencer was continued, though tactfully renamed The Kingdom's Intelligencer.22 Despite these promising beginnings it did not take long for Charles's view of the press to be made manifest. In June 1662 Parliament passed the Licensing Act, requiring all printed books to receive prior authorisation. The upholding of these regulations was placed in the hands of Sir Roger L'Estrange, appointed to the new post of Surveyor of the Press.23
L'Estrange was a rather unusual newspaper man in that he believed that in a well-ordered world newspapers should not exist at all. This uncompromising viewpoint was trenchantly expressed when, in 1663, he was granted a monopoly of news publishing. The first issue of the re-launched Intelligencer contained the following statement of his journalistic philosophy:
Supposing the press to be in order, the people in their right wits, and news or no news to be the question, a Public Mercury should never have my vote, because I think it makes the multitude too familiar with the actions and counsels of their superiors, too pragmatical and censorious, and gives them not only an itch but a kind of colourable right and license to be meddling with the government.
These, though, were not normal times. If a paper were necessary, at least it could be put to good use, for nothing, at this instant, ‘more imports his Majesty's service and the public, than to redeem the public from their former mistakes’.24
Muddiman was initially retained on a salary to assist in the production of the new paper, but working for L'Estrange could hardly have been a pleasure. More and more of Muddiman's energies were instead devoted to the production of a manuscript newsletter, which he provided as a confidential service for favoured clients and public officials. For this purpose he was attached to the office of the Secretary of State, where his operation fell under the wistful gaze of an ambitious young under-secretary, Joseph Williamson. Williamson saw in the exploitation of the official communications flowing into the Secretary's office the chance to place himself at the heart of the news operation. But first he had to remove L'Estrange. The opportunity arose in 1665, when plague drove the court, accompanied by Williamson and Muddiman, to the sanctuary of Oxford. Marooned in London and shorn of his professional assistant, L'Estrange's incompetence as a newsman was laid bare. Williamson easily persuaded his superiors to strip L'Estrange of his publishing responsibilities in return for a generous pension. His news publications would be shut down, to be replaced by a single official paper: the Oxford, later The London Gazette.25
11.2 The London Gazette.
For the next fourteen years the Gazette would be the only paper published in England. Williamson's concept drew on several contemporary and historical models: Nedham's monopoly of news under Cromwell was one; the Paris Gazette was the obvious source of the title. But in contrast to these two, The London Gazette was not published in pamphlet form; instead it reverted to the broadsheet style of the earliest Dutch papers. From its first issue the Gazette would be a single sheet, printed front and back, with the text in two columns. And whereas the Paris paper was a private monopoly, The London Gazette would be edited from within the office of the Secretaries of State, its text chosen from incoming newsletters and foreign newspapers. The actual editorial work was performed by civil servants, often quite junior members of the Secretary's staff. Williamson and Muddiman, meanwhile, devoted themselves to their real prize: the confidential manuscript news.26
The London Gazette was therefore a curious sort of newspaper. It quickly developed a wide circulation, its twice-weekly issues (sold for one penny) snapped up by the inhabitants of the news-hungry capital. In principle it should have been well informed and authoritative. Its editors sat at the centre of a considerable network of information. Their office received regular reports both from agents abroad (including consuls settled in many strategic ports) and from correspondents all over England. But very little of this domestic news appeared in the Gazette. This was a quite conscious policy of Williamson and Muddiman. To an extent they shared the prejudices of L'Estrange, that the public should not be kept abreast of public matters. One of the first acts of the new regime had been to decree that the votes of the House of Commons should no longer be reported. This was a touchstone issue for proponents and critics of a free press in England and in consequence a reliable barometer of attitudes towards public opinion. The Gazette was therefore largely filled with foreign news, in the best tradition of its Paris cognate, and the early corantos. Domestic news was kept for the confidential newsletters, circulated to a carefully defined circle of public officials: the county lieutenants, postmasters and members of the Privy Council. In return for a free copy the postmasters and customs officials were required to write regularly with their own news.27 Other recipients paid a subscription, which underwrote the costs of the copy office.
The official manuscript newsletters were also sent to select newsmen abroad in return for their news services. They used the English news contained in the newsletters for
the basis of their newspapers, with the rather bizarre result that the readers of a Dutch newspaper like the Oprechte Haerlemse Dingsdaegse Courant could read more English domestic news than was available to English subscribers of The London Gazette.
The Gazette, in this way, provided its readers with a very partial view of affairs, mostly confined to foreign news. But its sources of information were very good: text was abstracted from a range of continental newspapers and the manuscript news-books provided by continental newsmen as part of their exchange agreement. The Gazette was therefore reliable, and as informative as the government wished it to be. But apart from official communications, a reprinted proclamation or court circular, it said little or nothing about the pulsating politics of the day.
11.3 Oprechte Haerlemse Dingsdaegse Courant. As this issue reveals, its readers would have been very well informed about English domestic politics.
Coffee
The public enthusiasm that had greeted the Restoration turned to discontent with remarkable rapidity. Twice in rapid succession England found itself back at war with the Dutch. The Second Dutch War, between 1665 and 1667, led to a ragged and humiliating defeat; the Third, from 1672 to 1674, raised widespread public unease at Charles II's alliance with Louis XIV against a fellow Protestant nation. Public anxiety focused increasingly on the king's brother James, Duke of York; his evasive and truculent response to the Test Act in 1673 confirmed what the political nation had long suspected: that the heir to the throne was a Catholic. The political crisis was brought to a head in 1678 when the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, a firm Parliamentary defender of Protestantism, seemed to lend some plausibility to shocking allegations of a Popish plot to assassinate Charles and install James in his stead.28 The Godfrey murder made a popular hero of Titus Oates, the opportunist charlatan who had first concocted the plot. Parliament now brought forward a formal bill to exclude James from the succession. Rather than allow this, Charles first prorogued, then dissolved Parliament altogether.
11.4 The Popish plot. Scenes from the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey.
An unintended victim of this crisis was the Licensing Act, which had been due for renewal and now lapsed. The collapse of the Gazette’s monopoly led to a flurry of new publications, many of them openly hostile to the court, and supportive of James's exclusion. Aware that in the circumstances Parliament would hardly sanction the return of licensing, the king struck back through the courts, obtaining a judgment that ‘His Majesty may by law prohibit the printing and publishing of all News-Books and Pamphlets of news whatsoever, not licensed by his Majesty's authority, as manifestly tending to the breach of the peace, and disturbance of the kingdom’.29 A proclamation to this effect brought some temporary respite, but by 1681, as the Exclusion Crisis reached its Parliamentary climax, London newsmen were no longer sufficiently intimidated by the fear of retribution to abstain from publication. This year and 1682 saw a wave of new, mostly short-lived London papers. It was only in the summer of this year, as the king at last succeeded in re-establishing control, that the opposition papers were suppressed. When, in 1685, James II succeeded to the throne, the Licensing Act was restored, and with it the Gazette’s exclusive privilege.
The Exclusion Crisis proved a false dawn for English newspapers. The public hysteria over the Popish plot was in fact at its most intense when the Licensing Act and Gazette monopoly were still in force; and the Gazette, with its stolid diet of largely foreign news, had certainly done nothing to feed public concerns. Yet something was clearly afoot. A genuine groundswell of public anxiety combined with the emergence in the political nation of what amounted to an organised political faction bent on opposing the king's will through Parliamentary action. In these years we can detect the origins of the combinations that became, through the dramas of the Glorious Revolution and the Hanoverian Succession, organised political parties, the Whigs and Tories. How was this debate conducted?
Jürgen Habermas was not the first to point the finger at the London coffee houses. Although the first of London's coffee shops had opened only in 1652, by 1670 they were a well-established institution, each with their own character and particular clientele.30 Here men of business came to drink a dish of coffee, converse and hear the latest news. Proprietors were careful to ensure that they supplied their patrons with the current news-sheets: the Gazette certainly, but also occasional pamphlets of current affairs, and commercial manuscript newsletters. Henry Muddiman had built a lucrative commercial service alongside his official despatches, but he was not alone. In the 1670s opposition writers, notably the notorious Whig newsman Giles Hancock, created their own networks of clients. The manuscript newsletters successfully supplied the appetite for news left unsatisfied by the austere policies of the Gazette; pamphlets, rumour and private correspondence did the rest.
As opposition began to make itself felt in the 1670s, Charles II's ministers were all too aware of the role that coffee houses played in the circulation of information. During the Third Dutch War the French alliance was openly condemned. When the king's brother James took a Catholic wife, the coffee houses were a ferment of rumour as she made her way towards England. As Joseph Williamson remarked with some exasperation, ‘every car-man and porter is now a statesman; and indeed the coffee-houses are good for nothing else’. ‘It was not thus,’ he added with some nostalgia, ‘when we drank nothing but sack and claret, or English beer and ale. These sober clubs produce nothing but scandalous and censorious discourses, and at these nobody is spared.’31
The king had had his eye on the coffee shops for some time. The appearance of a controversial pamphlet in 1675 alleging a plot to reintroduce Catholicism resulted in a search of the London coffee houses for copies. In December the Privy Council finally gave way to the king's desire that they should be closed altogether. This provoked an immediate outcry; sustained lobbying led first to a delay in implementation, then a grudging acceptance that licensed houses might remain open, on a pledge of future good behaviour.32 These pledges were unlikely to be met. As the crisis unfolded different coffee houses became known as centres of Whig or loyalist sentiment.
The flow of information was further improved by the introduction in London of a penny postal service, several centuries before the more celebrated national institution devised by Rowland Hill.33 This London post was the brainwave of a customs official, William Dockwra. Though the national post had been somewhat improved during the Commonwealth, it was widely acknowledged that the expanding metropolis was ill-served. It was also generally (and correctly) surmised that the royal post functioned more as a source of revenue and intelligence than as a service to commerce (letters were routinely opened before delivery).34 Dockwra now proposed a network of receiving stations from which post was collected hourly. Letters intended for the Post Office were taken straight there; those with London addresses were relayed to five sorting stations for immediate delivery. The system was remarkably successful, and openly supported by the London Whigs, who appreciated a service that bypassed the inspections performed by the postal clerks. For the same reason the service was resented at court and as soon as the Exclusion Crisis was passed, James, Duke of York, intervened to force closure of Dockwra's service. He was, however, shrewd enough to Recognise a commercial need, so just four days later he announced a new London district post which in effect replicated Dockwra's innovation.
In the last resort Charles II was also canny enough to appreciate that the suppression of information offered no solution to political conflict: the court would have to make its own case. Sir Roger L'Estrange was recalled to the colours and given his head. L'Estrange was responsible for two remarkably successful serial publications, not papers in the true sense, but opinion pieces presented in dialogue form. The first, Heraclitus Ridens, proclaimed its purpose, with L'Estrange's usual winning sensitivity, in its very first issue. Its aim was
[t]o prevent mistakes and false news, and to give you a true information of the state of things, and advance your understand
ing above the common rate of Coffee-House statesmen who think themselves wiser than the Privy Council, or the sages of the law.35
It was joined two months later by The Observator in Question and Answer, which L'Estrange continued until March 1687. This was forthright and surprisingly witty. In 931 consecutive issues L'Estrange rained abuse on the Whigs and all their doings. L'Estrange's conversion to the principle of engaging with public opinion was complete, or as he put it more succinctly himself, ‘'Tis the press that has made ‘um mad, and the press must set ‘em right again.’36 Although not really a paper, the Observator imitated the Gazette in its layout: a folio half-sheet, printed in two columns, on both sides. Like the Gazette it sold for a penny.
The success of this royalist counter-attack makes the point that, for all the hubbub of the rapidly maturing information market, pamphlets still played a dominant role in the discussion of public affairs. Between 1679 and 1681 the volume of pamphlets in circulation reached astonishing levels: estimates based on surviving print runs indicate that as many as 5 to 10 million copies may have been printed in these three years.37 Whereas some were substantial works, pamphleteers had now seized the point that less is more or, as one contemporary put it, ‘two sheets’ (that would be eight pages) ‘is enough in all reason for a dose for the strongest constitution, and one [sheet] for the weaker’.38 Many of these little pamphlets sold for as little as one penny, the cost of the Gazette. In London, particularly, where a large proportion of the population could read, a broad cross section of the people could now engage with public debate – even in an age when the newspaper trade was carefully controlled.
The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself Page 30