The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself (46 page)

Despite this occasional hiccup, the provincial press took off in the eighteenth century. Around 150 titles were ventured in sixty different towns, and while not all succeeded, some continued for many years. This longevity was equally a feature of the London press. Whereas in the first serial boom of the mid-seventeenth century most titles had failed after a few issues, the newspaper revival of the early eighteenth century reversed these polarities: some spluttered and died, but many endured and made their publishers a very good living.

These were, in many respects, propitious times for the expanding newspaper market. England was in the middle of an extended economic boom. Rising prosperity meant that many more households had the disposable income for luxuries like papers. The long period of continental warfare that
dominated the reign of Queen Anne engaged the interest of a wide public, and provided a series of military victories on which the papers could feast. The Duke of Marlborough's despatch from the battlefield of Blenheim in 1704 was published in full in
The Daily Courant
, and
The Flying Post
followed up with a gleeful translation of the report from the Paris
Gazette
, which somehow seemed to imply that the French had emerged victorious. So that their readers were left in no doubt, this was accompanied by two intercepted letters from French officers that candidly confessed the true state of affairs.
⁴⁴

As these examples suggest, the newspapers of the early eighteenth century remained dominated by foreign news. The domestic stories that made it into the London papers often reflected a rather patronising attitude to provincial society, with reports of crime, extreme weather and the sort of celestial apparitions that sophisticated Londoners now affected to treat with scepticism.
⁴⁵
The papers continued to eschew overt editorialising. In this they followed
The Daily Courant
, where, in its first edition, the editor averred that he would publish no comments or conjectures of his own, ‘supposing other people to have sense enough to make reflections for themselves’.
⁴⁶

The treatment of domestic political issues remained extremely circumspect. As the War of the Spanish Succession ground on and the political battle became more intense, with the looming prospect of a contested succession after the death of Queen Anne, it was once again pamphlets and the new pamphlet series such as Defoe's
Review
that bore the main burden of political debate. The key political writings of this period sold in fantastic numbers: Defoe's satirical poem ‘The True Born Englishman’ 80,000 copies; Richard Steele's
The Crisis
40,000; Henry Sacheverell's notorious sermon,
The Perils of False Brethren
, as many as 100,000.
⁴⁷
Helping to insulate the newspapers from more virulent criticism was the fact that opinion pieces like Defoe's
New Review
were so recognisably different, whole pamphlets devoted to a single essay, notwithstanding that they shared with the newspaper a serial form.

The long continental war was undoubtedly good for newspaper circulation, but its last years witnessed a new crisis. Because they were aware that the peace would be controversial, and opposition politicians likely to make trouble, the administration set out to muzzle the press. The chosen instrument was not a new Licensing Act but a tax, the Stamp Act (1712). Papers could only be published on stamped paper, supplied from the revenue warehouse in London, at the cost of one half penny a sheet. Industry observers feared a general collapse of newspapers, particularly outside London where editors faced the additional logistical burden of sending to the capital for supplies of the stamped paper. So it says a great deal for the maturity of the market that whereas a few papers did go under, most survived. Some proved ingenious in
shifting shape to minimise their tax burden (the Act had not specified the size of sheets, nor anticipated a paper made from one and a half sheets).
⁴⁸
Others simply passed on the tax to their customers, who paid. Rather than attempting to subdue the press, the next generation of ministers would take a more pragmatic response and buy the papers. This way, under a compliant editor, they could become a mouthpiece for the regime. The newspapers, moving on from their dull but dependable recitation of foreign despatches, would no longer offer a respite from the advocacy journalism pioneered in the work of Defoe, Swift and L'Estrange. In the age of Walpole, the two would merge.

PART THREE

ENLIGHTENMENT?

CHAPTER 12

The Search for Truth

O
N
4 June 1561 the steeple of St Paul's Cathedral, the largest church in England, was struck by lightning. It caught fire, and collapsed into the roof of the church: this, too, could not be saved. Such a calamitous event at the heart of the metropolis stirred even the relatively conservative English print industry into action; since the stalls of many booksellers were located in St Paul's yard, they would probably have been among the horrified eyewitnesses. Within days an atmospheric pamphlet account was circulating on the streets, recounting the heroic efforts of London citizens, led by the Lord Mayor, to save the church: ‘there were above five hundred persons that laboured in carrying and filling water. Divers substantial citizens took pains as if they were labourers.’
¹
Even these well-born auxiliaries could not save St Paul's; the church was wholly ruined. Distraught Londoners were soon offering explanations. ‘Some say it was the negligence of plumbers; others suspect that it was by some wicked practice of wild fire or gunpowder. Some suspect conjurors and sorcerers.’ The
True report
offered more sober counsels. ‘The true cause, as it seemeth, was the tempest, by God's sufferance.’
²

This final qualification was significant, for in all the uncertainties of life our ancestors sought evidence of divine purpose. This was equally true of what we would think of as natural phenomena (thunder, flood or earthquakes) as of man-made disasters (fires, battles or crime). They dutifully gave thanks for God's blessings, and trembled at evidence of God's displeasure. The calamity at the headquarters of the new Elizabethan Church, so soon after the restoration of Protestantism, naturally attracted conflicting interpretations. To a Catholic writer, the bolt of lightning was quite evidently a sign of God's wrath at the abolition of the Mass. This could not go unanswered, and one of the newly appointed bishops was swiftly put up to parry this charge. Bishop Pilkington agreed that the destruction was a potent sign from God, but rather
it urged God's people to repentance and swifter reform: ‘He exhorted his audience to take this as a general warning … of some greater plague to follow if amendment of life in all estates did not ensue.’
³

It was a fundamental belief of all Christian societies, Protestant or Catholic, that evil deeds would not go unpunished: neither those of others nor your own. The law was strictly enforced, and grim penalties were widely approved. But only God could see into men's hearts. Where the law failed, early modern people were happy to see God's hand at work to ensure that those guilty of evil deeds were brought to book. At the time that the steeple of St Paul's was struck by lightning, John Foxe was working towards publication of his massive chronicle of the lives of the English Protestant martyrs. Although these stories were dramatic enough, Foxe also found room to chronicle the many instances of misfortune that had struck down those who had denounced or condemned these victims. This was a popular theme, as was the retribution that befell those who abandoned the true faith. One of the most widely circulated pamphlets of the sixteenth century was the tale of Francesco Spiera, an Italian who had first adhered to the Gospel and then returned to Catholicism. He died heartbroken. This moral tale achieved an enormous circulation in several languages, and was still being published a century later.
⁴
Among its admirers was the seventeenth-century London puritan Nehemiah Wallington, who collected from his circle of acquaintance and reading of news-books a whole series of ‘notable judgements of God’ on those who transgressed his laws and paid the price.
⁵

When fire from heaven struck the greatest of God's houses, such an event was obviously pregnant with meaning. News readers wanted to know not just what had occurred, but what it portended for the future. In this way the news world united past, present and future; and the truth had many layers.

Through a Glass Darkly

The news world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was full of portents. Comets, celestial apparitions, freaks of nature and natural disasters: all were regarded as harbingers of great events. While news men passed on news of strange and marvellous happenings, astrologers scanned the skies for meaning. The passage of a comet was regarded as particularly portentous, since it was widely believed to prophesy the death of some great ruler. Naturally Europe's princes maintained a close if nervous interest. This was in one sense good news for the Continent's most celebrated cosmographers, since its rulers wanted to have them close by to offer their interpretations at first hand. The tactful conduct of these duties secured several distinguished
scholars, such as Tycho Brahe and Peter Apian, valuable royal support for their scientific work.

Others less doubtfully wise also profited. The slyly opaque prophecies of Michel de Nostradamus secured him a comfortable billet as prognosticator to Catherine of Medici, and made him one of Europe's most published authors.
⁶
The subtle genius of prophecies simultaneously portentous and utterly ambiguous has ensured Nostradamus a following through the ages, but in his own time they hit home. When for 1560 he predicted misery, calamity and trouble, particularly for the clergy, this was taken particularly hard in England. Some were convinced by the astrologer that the world would come to an end twenty days after Elizabeth adopted her title as Supreme Governor of the Church. Strange premonitions reached into the heart of the Elizabethan establishment; so much so that when Matthew Parker warned William Cecil that he did not wish to be Archbishop of Canterbury, he was forced to assure him this was not because of the prophecies: ‘I pray you think not that the prognostication of Mr Michael Nostredame reigns in my head.’
⁷
The Privy Council were sufficiently alarmed to attempt to suppress the astrologer's prophecies altogether. In 1562 twenty separate booksellers were fined for selling one of Nostradamus's works. Yet his writings were only the most visible aspect of a vast market in calendars and almanacs, which combined lists of festivals and fairs with astronomical charts and some predictions of future events.
⁸
Excerpts from such works were still being used as fillers in the newspaper press in the eighteenth century.

Heavenly apparitions were a staple of all parts of the news market. Comets and unusual conjunctions of the heavenly bodies were widely reported in news pamphlets, but it was illustrated broadsheets that most adequately conveyed the full drama of these events. The German poet Sebastian Brant had shown the way with his dramatic (and highly political) celebration of the Ensisheim meteorite in 1492, and as the capacities of the press expanded in the later sixteenth century this form of broadsheet news became extremely popular.
⁹
The comet of 1577 was recorded in at least four separate broadsheets, and others plotted the appearance of shooting stars, darkness at noon, the simultaneous appearance of sun and moon, or multiple suns.
¹⁰
Some of these observations may be attributed to the application of an untutored imagination to recognisable natural phenomena, like the description of the Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights) in 1580 and 1590.
¹¹
But what are we to make of the relatively frequent accounts of animals, riding horsemen or monstrous beasts seen galloping across the skies? Armed soldiers were frequently reported among these celestial wonders: sometimes whole armies. It is little surprise that such accounts became frequent during times of warfare, in Germany during the
conflict between Charles V and the Schmalkaldic League and during the War of Cologne (1583–8).
¹²
But this was not a phenomenon confined to the sixteenth century. In Denmark in 1628, at a time when much of the kingdom had recently been occupied by Wallenstein's imperial troops, the inhabitants of Sønderborg were transfixed by the sight of two great armies in the sky. The battle waged for several hours and was purportedly witnessed by hundreds of people. They took comfort in the fact that the army of the north emerged victorious, which they took to be a sign that they would eventually be free of the occupying force.
¹³
Almost twenty years later the Protestant wood-turner Nehemiah Wallington recorded something very similar, reported ‘by credible persons certified from Hull’: the appearance ‘visibly in the air’ of two armies of foot soldiers, ‘which charged each other with much fierceness’.
¹⁴
Strange times indeed.