The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself (45 page)

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

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.

Intemperate Freedom

The Revolution of 1688 was not a newspaper event. In the weeks following the landing of the Prince of Orange's Dutch fleet in Devon on 5 November, information was scarce. The
Gazette
carried a brief report of the Prince's landing
on 8 November, but offered little further commentary as King James's authority ebbed away. In December the dam broke: as fear of prosecution receded, a number of London publishers chanced their arm. After all, as the new
London Courant
put it with some justice:

None of these opportunist ventures long survived the arrival of William in London and his prudential proclamation (gleefully published in
The London
Gazette
) banning ‘false, scandalous and seditious books, papers of news, and pamphlets, daily printed and dispersed, containing idle and mistaken relations of what passes’. The Licensing Act was in fact retained until 1695, but by that time the realisation was dawning that the
Gazette
monopoly had run its course. With the regime now more secure, the Act was allowed to lapse and other newspapers could try their hand.

The final removal of the Licensing Act inaugurated a remarkable era in the history of the English newspaper. A number of new papers were launched in 1695, including three that were to prove enduring:
The Post Boy, The Flying Post
and
The Post Man
. The use of the word ‘post’ in all of these titles reflects an aspiration to serve more than a London audience. London papers would, with increasing regularity, be circulated to readers outside the capital with the postal coaches and carriers. The year 1696 saw the launch of the first evening paper, Ichabod Dawks's
News-Letter
, and in 1702 London had its first daily,
The Daily Courant
. This, though, proved very much the exception. The norm was the thrice-weekly publication
of The Flying Post
and others (the
Gazette
also moved from twice to thrice-weekly publication in 1709).
The Daily Courant
would close in 1735, and the real age of the daily still lay some way ahead.

Nevertheless, the growth of the newspaper industry was truly astonishing. By 1704 London had nine newspapers, turning out 44,000 copies a week. In 1709 at least eighteen periodicals appeared weekly or more frequently: a total of fifty-five issues in each weekly cycle. By 1712 it has been estimated that a total of 70,000 copies of newspapers were published every week: this for a total national population of around six million.
⁴⁰
Seen in this perspective, the total inadequacy of the 9,000 copies of the Paris
Gazette
available to serve a French population of 20 million makes a stark contrast.

This era also witnessed the establishment of the first newspapers outside London.
⁴¹
Between 1700 and 1702 papers were established in Exeter, Norwich and Bristol. The difficulty of fixing an exact date of foundation results from the fact that in none of these three cases does the first issue survive – the earliest date of publication has to be surmised by counting back from a much later copy, and assuming regular weekly publication. All of these places were, significantly, located on main roads and at considerable distance from London. Publishers had to be assured of a sufficient captive audience to sustain their venture, but London was still the source of the overwhelming proportion of the news that filled their pages. This was equally the case for the next rash of newspaper foundations, at Worcester, Stamford, Newcastle, Nottingham and Liverpool. Much of their news was lifted directly from the London papers. Other items were provided by subscription newsletters, or by London correspondents. The predominance of foreign news characteristic of the London papers was thus largely replicated, though gradually leavened by other occurrences of interest to a local audience. Some of this was provided by local readers, whose correspondence offered a running commentary on the papers’ qualities and derelictions. If all else failed, the editor took a literary turn. ‘We hope, in the present scarcity of news, the following poems will not be unacceptable to our readers,’ offered the editors of the
Gloucester Journal
, optimistically.
⁴²
Sometimes it was simply necessary to admit defeat, as in one issue of
The British Spy, or Derby Postman
: