The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself (42 page)

10.5 
Mercurius Pragmaticus
. Marchamont Nedham in the service of the king.

The Parliamentary authorities had at least succeeded in tracking down Nedham, who in June 1649 was consigned to Newgate Prison. This provided the opportunity for deep, if uncomfortable, reflection, and in 1650 Nedham re-emerged into the public eye to announce his conversion to republicanism.
⁵⁷
The Council of State had clearly got his measure. In May they determined his future journalistic efforts should be rewarded with a salary of 100 pounds a year. Thus encouraged, Nedham presented the prospectus for a new news-book, the
Mercurius Politicus
. The flippant, ironical tone of his previous editorials would be replaced by serious essays extolling the virtues of the Republic. Nedham worked closely with John Thurloe, head of the Republic's office of intelligence, whose incoming mails provided an excellent source of foreign news. This took on a renewed importance when England descended into open warfare with the Dutch Republic (1652–4), events that were reported much more fully than Cromwell's final exasperated dismissal of the Rump Parliament (April 1653). When in 1655 the Cromwell regime closed down all but two of the London papers, both the survivors,
Mercurius Politicus
and its midweek stable-mate,
The Publick Intelligencer
, were being run by Nedham.
⁵⁸
With an effective monopoly on sales and advertising revenues, Nedham was well on the way to becoming a rich man.

Nedham's frequent intellectual conversions and brazen exchange of loyalties have been harshly treated by historians. But these were strange times, and contemporaries who contemplated the deluge of print recognised them as such. It was a significant moment of transformation in the English news industry. The serials, pamphlets and official publications; the hiring of professional writers and sympathetic printers; the manipulation, suppression and embroidering of news; the censorship, controls and punishment of dissidence; all of this reflected a recognition that an unusually engaged public had to be cajoled and persuaded. But no one for a moment thought that this would go on indefinitely. All of those involved recognised this engagement with the public as a facet of an emergency, to be regretted rather than celebrated.

Cromwell's steely suppression of opposition voices might have seemed hypocritical, and was certainly denounced as such by Royalists and disillusioned former allies. But most would have grudgingly acknowledged that they would also have celebrated victory by stilling the cacophonous voices stirred up by the Civil War. Certainly the restored monarchy thought as much. The kingdom's liberation from Republicanism in 1660 was followed by a swift crackdown on the press. The chaotic year and more between Cromwell's death in 1658 and the return of Charles II witnessed a steady revival of polemical literature, this time increasingly dominated by supporters of monarchy. An expiring, exhausted regime had few friends; the merciless press that had once hunted Strafford and Laud now found new fiends on which to unload its venom, and atone for their own guilt. These new scapegoats were the regicides, those who had signed the death warrant of the now sainted king: in the autumn of 1660 those excluded from the new king's gracious pardon were hauled to a grisly execution, hounded and mocked by the popular prints. The public desire for news had found a voice, but not yet a sense of humanity.

Printed Pandemonium

The Dutch Republic was the phenomenon of the seventeenth century. Even its enemies, and they were many, could only marvel that a small province, almost destroyed by the struggle for independence in the sixteenth century, could have been transformed into Europe's most prosperous state: and all this without a king.
⁵⁹
The rebellion begun in 1566 was only formally concluded in 1648, when Philip of Spain finally conceded that the northern part of his empire was irrecoverable. By this time, and despite a near constant state of war, the young Republic had turned itself into Europe's most advanced economy. It was the Continent's leading centre of international trade, home to the most sophisticated market in stocks, banking and insurance. It was
Europe's leading shipbuilding centre. Inevitably, it was also a major hub of news.

The new Republic had eagerly embraced the opportunities of the periodical press. By the 1640s Amsterdam had ten weekly newspapers published on four different days of the week.
⁶⁰
The young Republic also took a keen interest in the affairs of its neighbours. The English dispute between king and Parliament was closely followed in Holland, with numerous translations of republican and royalist polemic made available to a new audience in Dutch translation.
⁶¹
Like much of the economy the printing industry fed off the easy availability of investment capital, and the unusual difficulty of imposing restraint: a publication forbidden in one city could usually be put to the press in another of Holland's towns.

All of this feverish economic activity came at a price. The economy was prone to extravagant fluctuations as surplus capital sought an outlet. The most famous example of this was the tulipmania of 1632, the first major economic crisis of the newspaper age.
⁶²
The ruthless treatment of business rivals, exhibited here and in foreign trade, sat uneasily with the pious tone of public life. Religious solidarity cut little ice where there were markets to be protected. The Dutch were notoriously brutal colonists, and fickle allies. In 1672 all of these chickens came home to roost. Brilliant, opulent, ruthless and self-righteous, the young state suddenly found itself utterly without friends.

The crisis that engulfed the Dutch Republic unfolded very quickly. In March 1672 Louis XIV concluded the military alliances that left the Republic isolated and encircled. Lingering hopes of English friendship were dashed when the English navy attacked the returning Levantine fleet. In April France and England declared war. Despite a desperate but indecisive victory over the English at Solebay off the coast of Suffolk on 7 June, the inadequate Dutch land forces were swiftly overrun by Louis XIV's regiments, Europe's most professional army. Soon the landward provinces were in French hands, and Utrecht surrendered without a fight. The very survival of the nation was once more in doubt.

The collapse of Dutch military forces and the advancing French armies set off a tidal wave of popular fury. In July the republican regents of Holland, divided between defeatism and those who wished to fight on, bowed to popular pressure to install William of Orange as Stadtholder of Holland. The enemies of the discredited republican regime now took their revenge. On 4 August the Grand Pensionary, Jan de Witt, who had been wounded by a knife attack on 21 June, resigned his office. Three weeks later he and his brother Cornelis were set upon in The Hague, beaten, stabbed and shot to death. Their bodies were then dragged to the public scaffold, mutilated and dismembered.

Nothing like this had ever before been witnessed in Holland. The public lynching of two of the Republic's leading citizens was a drastic repudiation not just of their regime, but of the civilised values that had characterised this prosperous bourgeois society. The critical moments of the drama could soon be relived in the dramatic sequence of engravings by Romeyn de Hooghe, a sympathetic witness to the brothers’ violent end.
⁶³
These ghastly events and their aftermath also stimulated a torrent of pamphlet literature. The most recent scholarly study of the print history of these episodes enumerates 1,605 pamphlets, of which 996 were original writings, and only 609 reprints.
⁶⁴
Most of these were crowded into a very short period of intense activity between April and August 1672. The campaign engaged a remarkable range of authors, and a wide cross section of the publishing industry. Eighty-six different printing houses were involved in Amsterdam alone. This was not a campaign shaped by rival Orangist and regent factions. Rather, what we see is a highly literate, politically active citizenry responding to unusual events in a situation where the already lax censorship of the Dutch Republic was completely unhinged.

This was a political crisis fought out on the streets and in print: but the relevant print medium was the political pamphlet rather than the newspapers. There were several reasons for this, and this case study, like those above, serves as a sobering verdict on the early newspapers’ real impact on public affairs. Firstly, fifty years after their first introduction, newspapers were still not geared to the production of domestic news. This was partly due to the heavy weight of tradition with its roots in the manuscript news service, but this was not always the case: the news-sheets re-established in England in the 1640s played a noisy and partisan role in the political debates of the Civil War and Interregnum. The real reasons newspapers played such a modest role in domestic political debate on the Continent were largely structural. The fixity of form gave little flexibility to respond adequately to great events. The unvarying sequence of reports from abroad left little room for commentary. This suited both producers and regulating authorities for a number of reasons. Foreign news provided sufficient copy to satisfy their customers and fill their pages. It also minimised risk. The publishers of newspapers were naturally inclined to caution and stylistic conservatism, partly because those in authority were their best customers, partly because any overbold diversion into commentary could lead to retribution. The publisher of a serial had always to think of the next number. He could be sure his text would be carefully read, given the nature of the client base. If he caused offence, he was a sitting target. The only safe strategy was a position of strict political neutrality. That way, when the storm abated, the newsman hoped still to be cranking out his weekly digest, safe from the fear of retribution.

For all of these reasons a pamphleteer could be far more adventurous than a newspaper proprietor. A pamphleteer could take risks, could be funny, abusive and outspoken, and cash in on the public mood. If things changed – if he had misread the political runes or boldly swum against the tide – he could move on. Many political pamphlets were in any case published anonymously, whereas a newspaper, frequently sold out of the printer's shop, had to be published with an address, so that potential purchasers could find it and subscribers knew where to send their payments.

By the middle decades of the seventeenth century, newspapers had established an important role in the political education of a diverse readership. But they were always likely to be overwhelmed by truly extraordinary events, such as those in the Dutch Republic in 1672. Quick-moving events could not necessarily be accommodated by the fixed weekly schedule of publication, and raised passions that demanded wordy advocacy, of the sort that could not easily fit within the confines of a subscription news-sheet. In much the same way the weekly news-sheets played little part in the Fronde, the enormous upheaval of revolt and political protest that swept away the press regime constructed by Richelieu, and, temporarily, his newspaper instrument, the
Gazette
. As in the Netherlands, during the Fronde it was pamphlets – the notorious
Mazarinades
– that bore the major burden of articulating the ideology of protest.
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Only in England had the Civil War pointed the way towards a more active political role for the serial press. And it would be here, in the succeeding half century, that the newspaper would take its most giant strides towards the centre of the political stage.

CHAPTER 11

Storm in a Coffee Cup

S
O
we return to Daniel Defoe, whom we left many pages ago scribbling away at his
Review
. After many failed ventures and several public humiliations – including bankruptcy and a spell in the pillory – this was make or break for Defoe. So he wrote and wrote, for anyone who would pay; and in the febrile period between the deposition of James II in 1688 and the contested Hanoverian succession there were plenty who would. In 1707 he spent a whole year in Scotland seeking to persuade the Scots that the abolition of their Parliament would bring nothing but good.
¹
Journalism and advocacy were becoming inextricably blurred.