ENGLISH NEWSBOOKS, STORYTELLING AND POLITICAL CRITICISM

Abstract

The question of how newsbook storytelling contributed to the cultivation and development of thinking about particular political practices during the English Civil Wars in the 1640s needs systematic attention. A sustained examination of newsbook narratives reveals assumptions about political order, activity and legitimacy that were being continuously reiterated in public discourse. Examining how the author of the Royalist Mercurius Aulicus chronicled, selected and ordered recent events into a series of narrative episodes across a number of issues, this article offers a preliminary approach towards understanding how newsbooks contributed to everyday political thinking. Using Charles Taylor's notion of ‘social imaginaries’, it outlines the ideas and assumptions that constituted Aulicus' discussion of the Solemn League and Covenant's introduction in September and October 1643. As an important form of political engagement, the stories newsbooks told were used to shape ideas about political propriety on a weekly basis.

Keywords:

• newsbooks
• Mercurius Aulicus
• English Civil Wars
• Solemn League and Covenant
• political thought
• political criticism
• social imaginaries

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Mike Braddick, Felicity Stout, James Shaw and Jonathan Saha and the anonymous readers for commenting on an earlier draft of this article and offering their encouragement and helpful thoughts and criticisms.

Notes

1. I would like to thank one of the anonymous readers for assistance in clarifying this point.

2. A rule-proving exception includes Mercurius Politicus, by Marchamont Nedham (Worden).

3. Some of these titles only appear to have been published once, or sometimes twice, before discontinuing (Nelson and Seccombe), which accounts for the variation in numbers across the period.

4. On the title page of one of the copies he acquired, Thomason notes the place of publication as ‘London’. See Mercurius Aulicus (43; hereafter Aulicus).

5. I have attempted this elsewhere (Rivett).

6. III (219–20): 26.8.43.

7. Aulicus (36, 495).

8. Aulicus (36, 495).

9. Aulicus (36, 494).

10. Aulicus (36, 495). Presenting parliamentarian ‘attacks’ on churches with this rhetoric was a frequent tactic for Royalist propagandists (Walter).

11. Aulicus (36, 496–97).

12. Aulicus (37, 504).

13. Aulicus (37, 505).

14. Aulicus (37, 505).

15. Aulicus (39, 543).

16. Aulicus (39, 544).

17. Aulicus (39, 586).

18. Aulicus (42, 590).

19. Aulicus (37, 511).

20. Aulicus (38, 522).

21. Aulicus (38, 522).

22. Aulicus (40, 553).

23. Aulicus (40, 553).

24. Aulicus (40, 556).

25. Aulicus (40, 558).

26. See, for example, Aulicus (41, 576–7) where it is reported that members of the Commons had spent much of the previous week in the City attempting to persuade citizens it was in their interests to contribute towards paying the Scots to advance into the Kingdom ‘to relieve us out of our captivity’. The same attempts were made the following week at Goldsmith's Hall and Haberdasher's Hall, Aulicus (41, 592).

27. Britanicus (7, 53–4).