Public Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

Whereas recent scholarship has analysed and theorized the practice of public diplomacy in modern international relations, early modern diplomacy is still often thought of in terms of peer-to-peer interaction and secrecy. This article seeks to show that public diplomacy was a central aspect of early modern international relations as well. While examining how, when, and why early modern diplomats communicated with foreign audiences, it argues that early public diplomacy opened up spaces for public debate and created transnational issues, and is therefore central to the history of news and the development of the public sphere.

KEYWORDS:

• Public diplomacy
• transnational communication
• early modern history
• news
• propaganda
• Dutch Republic

In traditional diplomatic history, diplomacy is often seen as a secretive practice, conducted best when shielded from public view. Diplomats, it was and is still often thought, are peer-oriented: they engage with other diplomats and politicians in the interest of the state and of relationships between states. The history of this business was long written by focusing on elites, on high politics, secret negotiations and espionage, on hard, power politics. It hardly needs pointing out that this view of diplomacy is tied up with the narrative of the nation-state, in which the interests of the state and the nation governed by it intersect, and in which a bureaucratized government is firmly in control of its diplomatic corps through a monolithic foreign office.

In recent years, this narrative of diplomats managing international relations among each other and out of view of the public eye has become increasingly at odds with reality. Modern diplomats interact with the public in their country of residence in many ways, both directly and through a wide range of media, and their governments expect them to do so. This practice, also called soft diplomacy, has led to the birth of a new and vibrant field of study: the study of public diplomacy, in which the history, techniques, and effects of diplomatic engagements with foreign audiences are scrutinized. The history of public diplomacy is often taken to begin in the Cold War, when the United States effectively waged an international PR-war on the USSR, and the American diplomat Edward Gullion coined the term. Indeed soft diplomacy had never been conducted on such a scale, and with such sophistication as during the Cold War.¹ And yet there is an early modern pre-history of public diplomacy that has little to do with the democracy with which it is often associated. This history is important, it is worth writing, and it is central to the history of news and the public sphere.

The relatively new study of public diplomacy alerts us to the great promise of this area of research.² It also provides a point of reference against which we can sharpen our ideas of early modern diplomatic communicative practices. It offers viable concepts such as Joseph Nye’s soft power, nation and place branding, and competitive identity. Partly, such concepts overlap with those in wide use in early modern studies, such as reputation, honour, image, and propaganda. The latter term especially is often considered a pejorative corollary or even synonym of public diplomacy. However, public diplomacy, although it envelops international propaganda, is a much more capacious concept, that deals with news publicity that is usually not considered to be propaganda, with public ceremonies, as well as outright polemical publications.

In the past decades, various historians, including Lucien Bély, Andreas Gestrich, Malte Griesse, and Jason Peacey, have started to investigate the ways in which early modern diplomats employed the press. The study of public diplomacy challenges historians to expand on this work, and to think about how, when, and why diplomats communicated with foreign audiences, with which audiences they engaged, and to which effects. By offering some tentative answers to these questions, this article seeks to show in which ways early modern diplomacy sought to manage the news. Public diplomacy also requires us to rethink our conception of diplomacy. It may even lead us to consider, in George Kennan’s phrase, a world of ‘diplomacy without diplomats’—a world in which diplomacy is mediated.³ Early modern Europe, with its infant system of resident ambassadors, to a certain extent was such a world,⁴ which offered the conditions in which news media could assist or even partly replace diplomatic representatives.

From a theoretical point of view, early modern public diplomacy complicates the Habermasian paradigm of the development of the public sphere, and offers a way to understand that development. Much of the publicity generated by diplomats, one might argue, belongs to the category Habermas calls ‘representative publicness’, the controlled and ostentatious top-down sort of communication in which authorities ‘represented their lordship not for, but before the people’.⁵ This conception, for sure, has been sufficiently criticized by historians, critiques I will not repeat here, but it is widely accepted that the preferred form of communication in the ancien regime was in fact ceremonial or symbolic.⁶ Up to a certain point news, too, functioned symbolically: as long as coranteers such as the extremely loyalist Abraham Verhoeven published good news only, for example, this was fully in line with the authorities’ main concern to appear successful and in control.⁷

The point I want to make regarding representativeness is twofold. First, because it entailed not only vertical communication between authorities and subjects, but also horizontal communication between states, diplomatic publicity was frequently in friction with, or even clashed with, domestic representativeness. In periods of international tensions, public diplomacy tended to challenge national authorities, opening up space not only for bad news and rival symbols, but also for forms of publicity unwanted by the ruling elites. Diplomats might engender debates or empower oppositional discourses that would otherwise have been suppressed. It was through German news disseminated partly by the Palatine court in exile, for instance, that both the foreign and domestic policies of James I became subject to public scrutiny and criticism in the early 1620s.⁸ Second, the publicity generated by the rapidly developing diplomatic system was much more complex both in its modes of expression and in its ways of interacting with foreign audiences than the conception of representative communication can explain.

In what follows, I will outline the various ways in which diplomats engaged with foreign audiences, and managed the news both of themselves and of the states they represented. In doing so, I shall focus on public diplomacy in and by the Dutch Republic (and the revolting provinces that preceded it) between 1560 and 1670. Although this is mainly due to my own expertise, the (emerging) Dutch Republic in this period does present us with an important, and arguably exceptional case, for several reasons. First, as a new state, it needed to assert itself to international audiences and fight its way into the diplomatic hierarchy. Dutch diplomats might therefore not only have been more sensitive to the needs of publication, they might also have been open to other forms of communication. Second, as a federation of sovereign provinces, ruled, effectively, by local magistrates, the Dutch Republic was more vulnerable to public diplomacy from abroad. As I have argued elsewhere, in certain matters, foreign meddling with Dutch public opinion was more likely to actually affect Dutch policies, simply because major decisions might depend on the votes of a handful of individual cities.⁹ The relatively high number of people involved in running the state, often with conflicting interests, also increased the risk of leaking.¹⁰ Thirdly, the Dutch Republic was exceptional because of its print industry, which grew into the largest in Europe in the seventeenth century, partly owing to the relatively high tolerance and ineffective control of the press. Evidently, these factors might skew my analysis. In the end, however, I hope to offer enough to facilitate international comparison and stimulate further research into a phenomenon that has been called ‘one of the most multidisciplinary areas in modern scholarship’.¹¹

Ceremony and Representation

The most obvious interactions between diplomats and foreign audiences can be found in the representational sphere, and especially in the conspicuous ceremonial public appearances of diplomats. In Fictions of Embassy, Timothy Hampton has argued that literary representation and diplomatic representation were closely intertwined in the early modern period.¹² This was partly so because the diplomat was such a public figure, whose professional showmanship and dissimulation were not unlike acting. Diplomats were well aware of the fact that they were public figures, and sought to manage their appearance carefully—on the streets as well as in the printed media.

The concern with representation started well before diplomatic negotiations began. Diplomatic travel was mostly a very conspicuous affair, fully geared towards being seen; not only when diplomats first arrived with their sometimes enormous entourages, but also during their stay abroad, they were intent on communicating the grandeur of both their state, their monarch, and themselves, through ostentatious display.¹³ Print reinforced their visibility. In printed news (corantos, pamphlets, engravings) the coming and going of ambassadors was publicized, allowing readers to become impressed by the pomp of the representatives of foreign kings, to memorialize major events, or to keep track of negotiations at hand. In the absence of better information, who was arriving in which manner, and how they were received could be important indications of upcoming changes in foreign policy. Although diplomatic ceremony was formalized and protocolled in order to minimize the risk of hostilities, it also enabled a ‘carefully nuanced rhetoric of space’, that was anxiously watched both at court, on the streets and in the press.¹⁴

The public appearance of diplomats, then, was about much more than impressing the audience—it was a communicative event, an important part of the diplomatic process in which both elite and popular audiences were active players.¹⁵ As Laurie Nussdorfer has shown, ambassadors ‘could create zones of potential political conflict simply by riding through the city streets’ in attempts to activate certain (migrant) neighbourhoods.¹⁶ Public confrontations with other diplomats were also common in the major diplomatic centres. David Magliocco has recently analysed the famous and catastrophic coach incident between the Spanish and the French ambassador in London in 1661 as ‘diplomatic theatre’, which played towards a public response. In this case, the response revealed a clear support for the Spanish ambassador both among audiences that witnessed the incident on the streets and among those who learned about it through the media.¹⁷ Although the Prince of Orange once initiated an incident with the French ambassador, Dutch authorities were ever anxious to contain such diplomatic public conflicts, not only to maintain order, but also because they could seriously imperil negotiations.¹⁸

Diplomats were actors playing to an audience that was able to read their ceremonial language. While creating and managing the news through their performance, however, they were not always the directors of the diplomatic theatre. In 1621, Maurice of Orange famously lured the Archdukes’ ambassador Peckius to the Dutch Republic, counting on the fact that the popular enmity he would meet with would frustrate the final attempt to extend the Dutch–Spanish peace. Various slanderous publications were published that emphasized Dutch hostility during Peckius’ disastrous visit.¹⁹ By contrast, when the French ambassador De la Thuillerie left unexpectedly in 1648 to signal his displeasure with the States, the latter were quick to spread rumours explaining his departure in order to remedy the bad impression it would have made on the people.²⁰ The extent to which the meaning of a diplomat’s public (dis)appearances could be managed, then, was constrained by his control over the media.

Diplomats therefore frequently turned to printed genres in order to broadcast their arrival, improve their reputation, or, occasionally, intervene in public debate. Ambassadorial harangues that were often printed throughout the period could have either of these functions. While not necessarily revealing much, the orations’ principal function was, like the ostentatious travel, a statement of presence and stature. In line with ceremonial presence, some orations were also geared towards display, showcasing the diplomat’s verbal prowess and his capabilities in the rhetorical arts that were at the heart of his education as an orator.²¹ Frequently, however, they were also timed to engender, or intervene in, public debate. Dudley Carleton’s printed speeches famously elicited a flurry of printed responses by various Dutch authors, for instance, when Carleton spoke in favour of the Contraremonstrants.²² The French ambassador in the Dutch Republic in this case responded with his own printed oration, thus staging a sort of paper coach incident.

Visual material played a major role in creating the diplomat’s public image.²³ Portraits of diplomats were often disseminated in the seventeenth century to augment their reputation and to celebrate their achievements. Like military leaders, successful negotiators often attained a heroic status, which some actively cultivated. The 18 ambassadors and commissioners who had negotiated the Dutch Truce with Spain saw their portraits disseminated in print both individually and collectively. Already in 1608, Hendrick Hondius published a portrait collection of the negotiators in his trilingual (Latin, Dutch, and French) memorial Belgiae Pacificatorum vera Delineatio, and later images added to the ambassadors’ reputation (Figure 1).²⁴ Certainly the motto of the Hondius collection, Matthew 5:5 (‘Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth’), reflected well on all of them.

FIGURE 1 Anonymous, Ware afbeeldinge der H. Ambassadevrs ende Gecommiteerde tot het Bestand (c. 1609). Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. This image has been provided by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and is in the free domain.

In itself this practice of ambassadorial self-presentation and image-making may not be very interesting. However, the fact that diplomatic missions were almost as a rule surrounded by public ceremony, news, and publicity, created a situation in which they or their work might become the object of debate (as happened to Carleton in 1618). Images of ambassadors that had been circulated to enhance their reputation might be appropriated by opposing parties. Thus, one of the most brilliant and most reviled ambassadors in early modern Europe, the count of Gondomar, became the target of Protestant libel in various countries, his well-known portrait abused in the process. Representational, conspicuous diplomatic display, then, could easily result in actually involving the public with rather counterproductive results. Managing their own public persona was an integral part of diplomats’ efforts to manage the news and propaganda about their state.

Managing News on Events

Ever since Mattingly’s classic study of Renaissance diplomacy we know that one of the diplomat’s main occupations was to collect and distribute news.²⁵ Dudley Carleton, the English ambassador in The Hague, is only one among many diplomats who can be characterized as a news gatherer.²⁶ But this kind of news management was thought to have been confined to the secret sphere of government. More recent work has challenged this idea, pointing at the ways in which histories of diplomacy and the active management of public news and opinion were intertwined.²⁷ This management goes much further than early modern diplomacy’s meddling with censorship, which reinforces the image of politicians suppressing information.²⁸ As Jason Peacey’s article in this issue exemplifies, we now know that diplomats also actively sought to change the news. It was owing to such diplomatic activity, then, that certain news-items appeared in certain places, and others did not.

When circumstances dictated so, managing printed news, too, became part of their efforts to influence foreign opinion. There is, by now, a wide body of scholarship that provides evidence of diplomats meddling with the publication of topical printed material. The work is dispersed, however, and focused on national traditions or specific episodes, available in a wide variety of languages. In this paragraph, I use both examples from my own work and of many others in order to show not only the proliferation of the practice, but also the various motives and manners involved.

The traditional way to engage with foreign audiences was through pamphlets. Especially in wartime, multilingual pamphlet publication campaigns were extremely common. Arguably the most famous product of this practice would be Gustav Adolphus’ apology (Ursachen, Warumb der Durchlauchstigste … ), published upon his intervention in Germany. Dispersed by his agents throughout Europe, it appeared in five languages and at least 23 editions.²⁹ Though spectacular, Gustavus’ campaign was hardly unique. Indeed, one of the typical features of war legitimations was that they were widely dispersed among a variety of European audiences. They developed into a genre with its own rules and language, and were often inspired by each other.³⁰ There was but a limited stock of arguments available. Thus, Gustavus’ argument that he was fighting for Protestantism and the German liberties was not altogether different from William of Orange’s claim, fifty years earlier, to be fighting for the Dutch privileges and freedom of religion. This language was consequently taken up in other vernacular pamphlets, thus allowing the creation of a widely shared European discourse on war and peace. Still, as Gustavus Adolphus’ example shows, pamphlet campaigns in early modern Europe were evidently event-related.

Like international war, domestic conflict, civil war, and revolution were major catalysts of diplomatic publications.³¹ Thus, during the French wars of religion, the French embassy in London became the ‘well-head’ of many multilingual pamphlet publications in the 1590s. These pamphlets were notably unpolemical—their propaganda value lay in the fact that they provided mostly good news from the perspective of the French monarch.³² For the Protestant opposition—whether it were the Huguenots in France, the Calvinists in the Dutch Revolt, or the Puritans in the English Revolution—such official channels were unavailable, and print was even more important to disseminate their view. In the Dutch Revolt, when the rebels initially could not dispose of a diplomatic network (certainly not one that matched the status of their adversary) print might even be said to have replaced diplomacy, since in the absence of a network of representatives, the rebels sought to gain foreign support by way of their publications.

For opposition groups such as the Dutch rebels, non-governmental agents were vital to getting their message across. Diplomats maintained close ties to migrant communities, who were both subjects of their propaganda, and instruments of spreading it. Confessional networks also did much to enhance the impact of public diplomacy. Thus, when William III employed the Huguenot Pierre du Moulin to argue against the inter-Protestant Third Anglo-Dutch War, he built on a long history of transnational Protestant political publication reinforcing confessionalized forms of diplomacy.³³ These transnational networks enabled diplomats both to extend their reach and to engage in ad hoc propaganda activities.

The Dutch were among the first to develop what we might call an institutionalized public diplomacy. From very early in the revolt, Dutch public diplomacy was coordinated by the Nassau dynasty, which had a keen sense of public relations, especially in France and the Empire. Already in 1569, William of Orange’s spin-doctor Jacob van Wesembeke, for instance, published his Description de l’état both in French and Dutch, while he still worked on the Latin and German translations. In a letter of the same year, Wesembeke pressed William ‘to push ahead with plans to distribute pamphlets explaining the just cause of the Revolt, in particular among the German princes’.³⁴ Marnix van St Aldegonde, one of Orange’s most capable propagandists, published various pamphlets that circulated in Latin, Dutch, French, English, and German editions.³⁵ William’s international propaganda was a multimedia affair. Printed engravings published during this period of the Revolt were mostly meant for foreign audiences as well, as is evidenced by their frequent captions in German, French, and Latin.³⁶ The 1573 German translation of the rebel song and later national anthem of the Netherlands, the Wilhelmus, is even the oldest extant version, and generally assumed to be part of the same effort to win over the German princes for the Revolt.³⁷

As suggested above, other revolts produced similar campaigns. At the onset of the Bohemian Revolt in 1618, the Directors in Prague organized a multilingual European campaign to gain support for their revolution against the emperor. Their pamphlets written in Prague were distributed in translation, and sent through an ad hoc network not only to the courts of the German Princes, but also to Paris, Amsterdam, and London.³⁸ Similarly, when the Bishops’ War and later the English civil war broke out in Britain, Scottish and Parliamentary agents unleashed a veritable storm of translated pamphlets in the Netherlands, with considerable success.³⁹ In all these examples, a local crisis necessitated reaching out to foreign leaders and public opinion by using existing non-governmental networks.

What made the Dutch Revolt exceptional is the longevity of the structures developed by William of Orange in the sixteenth century. The protracted nature of the war against Spain allowed the ad hoc mechanisms to become ingrained. Dutch governmental bodies both adopted Orange’s methods, and built on the extensive Nassau networks. Early in 1581, William of Orange’s Apology, printed in French the year before, was circulated in Dutch, French, English, and Latin by the same order of the States of Holland that stipulated it should be widely disseminated.⁴⁰ From 1602 onwards, the Dutch ambassador in the Holy Roman Empire, Pieter Cornelisz Brederode, worked closely with John VI of Nassau, William’s younger brother, to formalize the Nassau network and to establish a transnational correspondence network that enveloped England, France, the Netherlands, Protestant Germany, and Switzerland. They envisioned a ‘Kollegium’ that would coordinate ‘die Beeinflussung der allgemeine[n] Meinung’, in John’s words, both among states and governments and the common people in Protestant Europe.⁴¹ Connected to an extended network of ‘agents, envoys and sollicitors’ (‘gesandten, agenten, und sollicitatoren’), the Kollegium would be a transit station for protestant theologians, jurists, politicians and officers, to exchange, compare and negotiate news, experiences, and opinions.⁴² The Nassau plans would never be fully realized, but their ambition speaks volumes. All evidence suggests that the Nassaus, and the Dutch state after them, succeeded not only in getting their own message across to an international audience, but also that of their Protestant allies such as the Elector Palatine. Amsterdam and The Hague became the nexus of Protestant diplomatic publication.

Not all public diplomacy was related to violent conflict, however. In diplomatic negotiations, publicity could also help to further a diplomat’s cause. The first recorded instance of this use of print I have been able to find occurred during the Polish–Lithuanian royal election of 1573. The instigator was the wily French bishop and diplomat, Jean de Monluc, who was charged with the mission to have the Duke of Anjou, the later Henry III of France, elected to the Polish throne. Monluc was evidently aware of the workings of opinion-formation, and the vital importance of rendering his patron agreeable and his arguments easily accessible to the assembly. Confronted with stiff Swedish, imperial, and papal opposition at the diet, Monluc resorted to printed publications in order to maintain the reputation of his master, and to argue in his favour. When libels against Anjou were published by his adversaries, Monluc published both a response and panegyrics on the Duke. Moreover, he circulated his portrait, in order to show to the Poles that Anjou was far from the cruel creature which his detractors claimed him to be.⁴³ In the final stages of the election, Monluc was initially at a disadvantage, because the other ambassadors delivered their orations in the vernacular, while he addressed his Polish audience in Latin. Again he used print to turn the situation in his favour. While the other ambassadors printed only 32 versions of their orations for the main electors, who were supposed to read them to their assemblies, Monluc set his secretary Choisnin to work, who had the Latin oration translated into Polish, and secretly printed 1500 copies of the now bilingual version ‘pour en distribuer en grand nombre parmy la Noblesse’.⁴⁴ Anjou, of course, was eventually elected king of Poland. Although it is hard to gauge to what extent he owed this to Monluc’s publication strategy, other diplomats used similar means during negotiations.⁴⁵

The early modern concern with the honour and reputation of the state was a force behind public diplomacy which was less dependent upon circumstances.⁴⁶ Comparable to ‘nation branding’, taking care of the media representation of the state or its ruling dynasty in the news was a major task of early modern resident diplomats. Louis XIV’s France is arguably the most famous example, in which the ‘fabrication of the king’, as Peter Burke termed it, was a central concern of many diplomats.⁴⁷ This concern translated both into appeals to foreign censors when pamphlets detrimental to the state’s honour were published abroad, as well as to active publication campaigns.⁴⁸ That the political gain of a good reputation, or what contemporaries would have termed ‘gloire’, was substantial needs not be explained.

In accordance with the concern for the state’s honour, news on events such as battles needed to be disseminated, obfuscated, or spun. It was extremely important for diplomatic agents to spread news of victories, and they did so in many different genres, from broadside engravings to instant history books. The Dutch Republic, as a nascent state in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, was just as deeply concerned with its own reputation and that of the House of Orange as the established monarchies in Europe. Both the States and the House of Orange spent considerable money and energy to spread news of its successes in print for international audiences. Throughout the century, poets, engravers, medal-makers, and cartographers were patronized to produce high-quality representations that ambassadors and the extended network of agents and consuls could disseminate internationally.⁴⁹

Portraits of monarchs represented a category of images that was frequently used by diplomats to further their cause. Tracey Sowerby has recently discussed the ways in which diplomats made use of portraiture to further bilateral relationships and negotiations in courtly contexts that remained largely shielded from the public eye.⁵⁰ Her observation that portraiture functioned in political negotiations, however, also has ramifications in more public spheres. Thus, diplomats disseminated printed portraits of their monarch in print in foreign countries to improve his or her image. Royal marriages, successions, or deaths occasioned numerous engravings abroad, at least some of which were actively disseminated by agents of the portrayed.⁵¹ Regal portraits were also used to help persuade foreign audiences of the rightfulness of a dynasty. A poignant example is the circulation of the portrait of Charles I, in 1649, by the English court in exile. Seeking continental support for their war against Parliament, the Stuarts commissioned the portrait with Wenceslaus Hollar in Antwerp. From here the copperplate of the martyr-king was distributed throughout Europe to settle his image as a pensive, sympathetic figure. Used in numerous books and pamphlets, the image was extremely successful in giving a sympathetic and recognizable face to the international Stuart campaign.⁵²

Diplomatic news publication was evidently far from trustworthy. Even though many of the publications produced by diplomats were not polemical, and frequently faithful relations of real news that was politically useful, spreading disinformation was as much part of the diplomat’s press office as anything else. In the late sixteenth century, William Cecil made use of an extensive network of agents and translators in order to spread false news on the continent, with false imprints, so as to mislead the Spanish.⁵³ Like Cecil’s agents, the early modern diplomat would frequently be called upon to downplay failures or fabricate successes in print.⁵⁴ Although the latter stratagem seems to have been rarer than the first, desperate circumstances led to desperate measures. In 1651, a Dutchman reproved Charles II’s Scottish ambassador, MacDowell, for the ‘Victories, successes, and advantages which he daily forged, and printed here last Summer’.⁵⁵ Another response would be to keep news of defeats out of the news, or to downplay successes claimed by the opponent. But the competition between states and parties ensured that competing information continued to circulate, and made deception or obstruction at best temporarily effective. McDowell’s disinformation brought him little advantage, if only because he was unmasked in the press.

If all else failed, there was always slander. In line with the requirements of epideictic rhetoric, diplomats were expected not only to disseminate glorious national achievements, but also to heap blame upon foreign countries or monarchs with whom their country was at war. The Dutch were extremely successful in libelling their opponents. Thus, Orange’s Apology and the Dutch publicity network greatly aided the Dutch in spreading the so-called Black Legend throughout Europe.⁵⁶ Brederode himself wrote a pamphlet in German in which he explained the causes of the Dutch Revolt to the Germans by painting a very dark picture of the Spanish ambitions.⁵⁷ The establishment of this image in Germany, France, and England arguably presented one of the greatest successes of Dutch public diplomacy. The anti-French propaganda in the late seventeenth century was just as successful as the anti-Spanish, and contributed to the grand alliance William III was able to forge.⁵⁸

Blackening the enemy was best achieved when the publications were not polemical in nature, but veritable documents leaked to the press. Damning the enemy by publishing his own (secret) words was among the most effective ways to show his wicked intentions and confirm a carefully constructed image. Examples of the practice abound. In the late sixteenth century, William Cecil had Spanish diplomatic documents translated and disseminated both in England and on the continent, while the Dutch disseminated Campanella’s De Monarchia Hispanica as evidence of Spain’s perfidious ambitions.⁵⁹ During the First Civil War in England, Parliament published the letters captured from the King for an international audience. The most famous publications of this kind, however, belong to the so-called Kanzleienstreit, in which the Emperor and his Palatine opponent in turn published each other’s secrets.⁶⁰ Traditionally studied in an exclusively German context, Malcolm has recently emphasized the European impact of these pamphlets, one of which was translated into English by Thomas Hobbes.⁶¹ These pamphlets provide vivid illustration of the existence of a European public sphere, and the temporary openness that could attend international conflict.

Images were as powerful as secrets. A major force behind the successful Dutch libel campaigns was the Dutch engravings industry. From the beginning of the revolt, images played a major part in the Prince’s propaganda machine. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, the Dutch still reaped the fruits of their skilled and prolific engravers. Joad Raymond has recently cited the example of Romeyn de Hooghe’s print satires of the Dutch Republic’s enemies in 1672. These evidently circulated widely, since they made their way into the English State Papers. Considering Romeyn de Hooghe’s proximity to the Orange court, they may well have been printed with the knowledge of the court. As every so often, the English ambassador complained, but to no avail; it was not until the peace negotiations had started that the Court of Holland forbade them, as a sign of good will. A libel, Raymond rightly observed, could be ‘the continuation of diplomacy with other means’.⁶²

Political libels were not only employed to gain political leverage, they could also result in trade advantages. Samuel Collins, the English physician to Czar Alexis I, complained that the Dutch rendered the English ‘cheap and ridiculous’ by their ‘lying Pictures’, and ‘libelling Pamphlets’. Prints he considered to be especially harmful, since the Dutch were ‘more ingenious in the use of their Pencils than Pens’. According to Collins, the Dutch merchants disseminated prints that represented the English as ‘a Lyon painted with three Crowns reversed, and without a tayl: and by many Mastive Dogs, whose ears are crop’d, and tayls cut off’. These representations did much harm to the English trade, because as long as there was nobody to contradict them, Dutch ‘scorn and derision’ made ‘the Russian think us a ruined Nation’.⁶³

The dangers of putting such a powerful satiric press to diplomatic use are obvious: it was bound to offend and create unnecessary complications. Henry Stubbe, who cited Collins’ observations in his Justification (1672) of the Third Anglo-Dutch War,⁶⁴ added examples of his own in his Farther Justification (1673), in which he complained on the ‘Curious Prints [that were] divulged every where of the English Phaetons, being overthrown, not by the Thunderbolts of Jove, but Valour of the United Provinces’. Stubbe affected to be deeply upset about satires that depicted Britannia trampled over by Holland, or Dutch ‘boors’ cutting off the ‘tailes of English mastiffs’.⁶⁵ He considered Dutch international publicity an act of hostile diplomacy, despite the fact that not all ‘lying pictures’ were published by the state. ‘It is no Iustification for the States General to say,’ Stubbe wrote,

that these are for the most part the actions of particular persons, for which the publick is not accountable. It is enough for the English that the States themselves published some, and that no sollicitations and complaints could make them recall, suppress, and prohibit the others.

For Stubbe, this amounted ‘to an authorizing of them’, and such libel was sufficient cause for war.⁶⁶ Significantly, Stubbe dwelt on the point so extensively because he was defending Charles II’s declaration of war, in which one of the casus belli was a medal struck by the States upon the Anglo-Dutch peace of 1667 which the king—not without reason—had interpreted as slanderous because the representation of the figure of Discord trampled by the Dutch virgin resembled the Charles II’s face.⁶⁷

The Periodical Press

In the above, I have discussed only incidental (pamphlet) publicity, which was the traditional and most common method employed by diplomats to affect public opinion. The meteoric rise in the seventeenth century of the periodical press, which was often bound to the interest of the local powers that granted their monopoly, both posed new difficulties and offered new opportunities for media diplomats. Because of its periodicity, the newspaper was normally subjected to considerable (self)censorship: the publisher required the support of the local or national authorities to continue his or her business. That rendered some newspapers into useful diplomatic instruments for those authorities to get their message to foreign audiences. Renaudot’s Gazette, for example, was effectively the mouthpiece of Richelieu, through which a broad international audience was informed of French ‘miracles’. Bad news was not suppressed, but seriously downplayed.⁶⁸ Controlling the domestic periodical press was an effective way of managing international communication because newspapers were disseminated throughout Europe by (resident) diplomats, who eagerly supplemented their own intelligence with printed newsletters.

In addition to controlling the domestic press, governments also sought to control the press abroad through their diplomatic representatives. Excessively monitoring the press, diplomats often filed complaints on individual reports they regarded detrimental to their state, but these efforts to subdue newspaper makers through official channels were only one instrument (very visible in the archives) to manage the foreign press. More covert ways of managing the news are much more difficult to study. Existing research suggests that especially the absence of central, royal control over the news encouraged diplomats to seek more direct influence over the press in republics. Mario Infelise has shown how the French and the Imperial ambassadors in Venice fought over the services of the Venetian gazetteers. Not only were they willing to buy their services with pensions (one gazetteer called the imperial ambassador ‘my lord and patron’), they also resorted to threatening, assaulting, and murdering those who served their opponent.⁶⁹ In the Dutch Republic, the English ambassadors went through similar motions. While Henry Sidney paid a pension to the Huguenot Jean de la Font, the first publisher of the hugely influential Gazette de Leyde, William Carr, the English consul, paid a visit to the courantier Abraham Casteleyn and threatened him not to publish any more news detrimental to his master, James II.⁷⁰ It is questionable whether residents in centralized monarchies such as France or England were prepared to use similar combinations of patronage and intimidation, if only because it would be far more effective to focus their attention on the figure of the monarch.

Residents had other ways to influence the gazettes however. Filippo de Vivo has discussed what he calls ‘the politics of leaking’ in Venice, suggesting that leaking to manuscript newsletters was common practice among ambassadors.⁷¹ The diplomatic newsletter being a direct predecessor of the coranto, diplomats were well versed in the newspaper style, and presumably they and their entourage were major sources for the printed press in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As the printed newspapers gained in societal importance and increased their reach, it became ever more important to control their contents.

Relatively few cases have been reported of ambassadors leaking to the printed gazettes, but examples that have been found in a variety of European cities are certainly suggestive of a close affinity and frequent interaction between diplomacy and the early printed press. Abraham Casteleijn, the famous publisher of the Haarlem coranto in the second half of the seventeenth century, was extremely close to diplomatic circles. Receiving intelligence from various envoys (including the Danish and the English), his information surpassed many diplomatic reports in quality.⁷² But many of Casteleijn’s colleagues must had similar networks. A resident in Danzig supplied the local courantier with copies of the information he sent to his masters, only censoring the bits that might cause affront.⁷³ Other residents were less prudent, and used the corantos to test how people would respond to their (mis)information.⁷⁴ Despite such suggestive findings, it would require broad archival research of the kind De Vivo has conducted in Venice to find out exactly how systematic the relationship between diplomats and the periodical press really was in early modern Europe.

Audience and Effect

The impact of international publicity campaigns can easily be downplayed. One might argue that the social reach of diplomatic publicity was extremely limited, and indeed, they seem primarily to have been directed at the elites, or what has been called a European society of Princes. In many cases, the impact might indeed have been limited to several hundred pamphlets mainly read by those in government. It is essential, however, to recognize that early modern public diplomacy often reached much wider circles.

Partly, this was due to information trickling down.⁷⁵ The documents printed in limited numbers were frequently reprinted for a wider audience than was initially intended. The Bohemian apology, for instance, appeared in many editions over the years and was advertised in the Amsterdam newspapers. Its arguments, moreover, were rehearsed in other, more accessible forms. Although this might be due to the influence of the Bohemian and Palatine representatives, it is more likely that the demand for news led the printers and coranteers to disseminate further what had been intended for a society of peers. By circulating political information internationally in print, diplomats ceased to control that information. Occasionally, when diplomats misjudged the political climate, their publications could even be further disseminated by their adversaries, as indications of their wicked policies.

And yet there are many signs that diplomats strove to reach a wide audience themselves too. Addressing a broader audience than the elite was important, Brederode stressed in a letter, because ‘le bastiments des affections est la source du biens et du mal ( … ) les soldats, capitaines, gouverneurs, munitions et forteresses ne sont rien, si les affections ne marchent devant’.⁷⁶ For Brederode and many of his colleagues working for states at war, harnessing public support was instrumental both to recruit soldiers and to affect a change of foreign policy abroad. As we have seen above, they used a wide range of media and languages in order to diversify and enlarge their public.

Many diplomats had a specific strategy to reach a variety of audiences. Thus, when the English consul William Carr set up his private publishing office in Amsterdam, in order ‘to undeceive the Amsterdammers from beleiving our English phanaticks’,⁷⁷ he evidently intended to reach multiple audiences, and chose the appropriate way to reach each. In one of his letters, Carr described how he worked: ‘I received from a friend’ he wrote,

His Majesties declaration, the which I presently got translated into Dutch, and printed 500 of them and dispersed amongst the Magistrates, and likewise gave them unto the boys to cry upon the Dam, the which hath exceedingly taken amongst the Dutch.⁷⁸

Carr then proceeded to send these pamphlets on to other Protestant centres, Heidelberg and Geneva, where they were likewise translated, published, and further advertized by the local English envoy. Carr’s primary audience were the decision-makers in Amsterdam, but he relied on word of mouth and translation in order to spread his propaganda. Knowing very well that for a more popular audience, crying upon the Dam was certainly more effective than flyering, Carr adopted what modern scholars call a multi-step model of public opinion.

Even if the audience of early modern public diplomacy remained small in comparison to Cold War standards, the effects of diplomacy’s public manifestations were profound. In the first place, the publicity surrounding diplomats, and the popularity or unpopularity of a specific diplomat, could have a very direct effect on political debate, negotiations and political processes. The necessity to assert one’s status in public opened up unanticipated spaces for conflict and debate.

Public diplomacy was a standard reflex of early modern politics: upon a crisis, either a civil war or a bilateral conflict, political elites in one nation turned to foreign audiences. Jan Melissen has recently argued that ‘public diplomacy is made more effective with the help of non-governmental agents of the sending country’s own civil society and by employing local networks in target countries’.⁷⁹ There is no doubt that early modern governments knew this very well. They mobilized their network of diplomats, and agents, and an extended network of consuls and preachers, to appeal to audiences of one or more other states in transnational, often multilingual publication campaigns. It was the enemy, or the opposition, or an alliance between them, that set the agenda, that made the issue, and the government was forced to respond.

Diplomatic publicity therefore resulted in transnational issue-making and caused the entanglement of international and national debates. In order to appeal to specific parties and stir up national factional rivalries, diplomats created international identities and shared political discourses: they had to show that their battle or their interest was also the battle or the interest of their addressees. Foreign quarrels thus easily became entangled with domestic ones. Confessional discourses, such as those employed by the Dutch, Bohemian, and English rebels, were fomented by diplomats throughout the seventeenth century partly because they were able to connect causes that might have widely diverse political origins and objectives. The anti-Spanish Black Legend, too, was strategically used and created by Dutch pamphleteers to construct and stiffen an anti-Habsburg alliance in Europe.

Effectively, the diplomatic system and mentality that had emerged in Europe in the sixteenth century contributed to the internationalization of public spheres, in ever changing configurations. If governments in early modern Europe ever succeeded in controlling the news internally (which proved difficult enough without foreign interference), they could never control the international news and publicity brought into circulation by their peers, and were continually invaded by it. Diplomats were the busy managers of such potentially destabilizing publications. Against their own intentions, they helped secure the survival of an open and diverse media system and political debate even in the most authoritarian of states. Political competition, as much as the market, allowed the news to develop into a free press.

Conclusion

This essay was meant to provide evidence that public diplomacy existed in the early modern period, to inventorize the shapes it could take, and to outline the conditions under which it was practised. At present, this evidence is still dispersed, and the above cannot pretend to be more than a tentative survey. The most important questions remain to be answered. Did approaches to public diplomacy differ among European states (for instance between those at the centre and periphery of Europe) or between states with different forms of government? Can we discern developments in diplomatic publicity, including diplomacy’s interactions with the periodical press, in time? Were there, like the Nassau Kollegium, formal or informal structures or guidelines to regulate diplomatic uses of publicity? To answer these questions, a much greater and more systematic research effort is required than I have been able to undertake. It is an effort well worth considering for those involved in media history or (new) diplomatic history.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCiD

Helmer Helmers http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7247-0787

Additional information

Funding

This work is part of my research project ‘Transnational Publicity in Early Modern Europe’, which is financed by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research.

Notes on contributors

Helmer Helmers

Helmer Helmers, Faculty of Humanities, Department of Dutch Literature, University of Amsterdam, Spuistraat 134, Amsterdam 1012VB, The Netherlands.

Notes

1. On Cold War public diplomacy, see e.g. Cull, The Cold War.

2. Snow and Taylor, Routledge Handbook; Melissen, The New Public Diplomacy.

3. Kennan, “Diplomacy Without Diplomats?”

4. Sharp, Diplomatic Theory, 290–2.

5. Habermas, The Structural Transformation, 5–12.

6. Stollberg-Rilinger, “Symbolische Kommunikation.”

7. Arblaster, From Ghent to Aix.

8. Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution.

9. Helmers, The Royalist Republic.

10. De Bruin, Geheimhouding en verraad.

11. Gilboa, “Media Diplomacy,” 56.

12. Hampton, Fictions of Embassy.

13. Hennings, “The Semiotics of Diplomatic Dialogue.”

14. Dillon, The Language of Space, 80–3; Solomon, Public Welfare, 134.

15. On diplomatic ceremonies as communicative events, see e.g. Roosen, “Early Modern Diplomatic Ceremonial.”

16. Nussdorfer, “The Politics of Space,” 168–71, 170.

17. Magliocco, “Panic on the Streets of London.”

18. Heringa, Eer en hoogheid, 11, 405.

19. Marshall, Dudley Carleton, 180–1.

20. Molsbergen, Frankrijk en de Republiek, 18.

21. Craigwood, “Diplomatic Metonymy,” 819.

22. E.g. Koopmans, “Dutch Censorship,” 223–4.

23. Israel, “Art and Diplomacy.”

24. Hondius, Belgiae Pacificatorum.

25. Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy; Pettegree, The Invention of News, 107–18.

26. Marshall, Sir Dudley Carleton, 23.

27. Raymond, “Les Libelles”; Peacey, “My Friend the Gazetier”; De Vivo, Information and Communication, 57–74; Helmers, The Royalist Republic, 27–61. I thank Jason Peacey for sharing his manuscript with me.

28. Koopmans, “Dutch Censorship”; Clegg, Press Censorship, 161–96.

29. E.g. Böttcher, “Propaganda und öffentliche Meinung,” 336.

30. Repgen, “Kriegslegitimationen in Alteuropa,” 27–49.

31. Griesse, From Mutual Observation to Propaganda War, 127–81.

32. Shaaber, Some Forerunners of the Newspaper, 264–5.

33. Haley, William of Orange. For other examples, see e.g. Parmelee, Good Newes; Helmers, Royalist Republic.

34. Van Stipriaan, “Words at War,” 342–3.

35. Schmidt, Vaterlandsliebe und Religionskonflikt, 311–16.

36. Van Stipriaan, “Words at War,” 343.

37. Van Stipriaan, “Words at War,” 347. A French version, by the Flemish translator Gabriel Fourmennois, appeared in 1581.

38. Schubert, Ludwig Camerarius, 109–11, 129, 600ff; Krüner, Johann von Rusdorf, 42–65.

39. Helmers, The Royalist Republic, 27–61.

40. Swart, Willem van Oranje, 197.

41. Paul, Nassauische Unionspläne, 103–7.

42. Ibid., 115.

43. Petitot, Memoires de Jean Choisnin, 82.

44. Ibid., 116–7.

45. Oliver St John and Walter Strickland similarly sought to smoothen their mission to procure an Anglo-Dutch alliance through public diplomacy, with rather more disappointing results. See Helmers, Royalist Republic, 160–1.

46. Cf. Gestrich, Absolutismus, 78.

47. Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV.

48. On censorship, Koopmans, “Dutch Censorship.”

49. Swart, “Defeat, Honour, and the News.” I thank Erik Swart for sharing his manuscript with me. See also Verhaegen, “Early Modern Noblemen.”

50. Sowerby, “A Memorial and a Pledge of Faith.”

51. E.g. Sharpe, Image Wars, 58–88.

52. Helmers, Royalist Republic, 120.

53. Parmelee, Good Newes from Fraunce, 32–3.

54. Cf. Bély, “Propagande et désinformation.”

55. Kn. 6988. Aenmerckinge op seeckere Schots antwoort (1651), A4v.

56. Schmidt, Spanische Universalmonarchie.

57. Verhaegen, “Early Modern Noblemen,” 39–40.

58. Haks, Vaderland en vrede.

59. Parmelee, Good Newes from Fraunce, 35.

60. Schmidt, Spanische Universalmonarchie, 95–321.

61. Malcolm, Reason of State.

62. Raymond, “Les libelles,” par. 15.

63. Collins, The Present State of Russia, 129.

64. Stubbe, A Justification of the Present War, 40.

65. Stubbe, A Further Iustification of the Present War, 2. One such print was reproduced on the opposite page in Stubb’s pamphlet. See also Staffell, The Horrible Tail-man, 182–6.

66. Stubbe, A Justification of the Present War, 40.

67. Scharloo, “A Peace Medal.”

68. Solomon, Public Welfare, passim, and 134.

69. Infelise, “The War, the News, and the Curious,” 225–6.

70. Peacey, “My Friend the Gazeteer.”

71. De Vivo, Information and Communication, 57–70.

72. Sauteijn Kluit, “De Haarlemse Courant”; Peacey, “My Friend the Gazeteer.”

73. Böning, “Gewiß ist es,” 219.

74. Gestrich, Absolutismus und Öffentlichkeit, 83.

75. Gestrich, Absolutismus und Öffentlichkeit, 78, 82.

76. Groen van Prinsterer, Archives II, 2, 271.

77. Cited in Hoftijzer, “English Spies,” 83.

78. Cited in Hoftijzer, Engelse boekverkopers, 213.

79. Melissen, The New Public Diplomacy, 16.