Charles I / Paper wars
ABOVE: News pamphlets, such as
James Cranford’s graphic Teares of
Ireland (engraving, 1642), helped fan
the flames of civil war RIGHT: When
the king raised his army in 1642,
people throughout the country heard
about it in news pamphletsT
he English Civil War in
the 1640s killed
proportionately far more
of the population than
the First World War. As a
nation, we have forgotten
about the vast scale of
casualties, devastation and disease caused
by the warfare of the period. And yet the
destruction was on English soil. Research
shows that the press was as fundamental to
the English Civil War as pikes and muskets.
This was the first war to be played out in the
media as well as on the battlefield.
It started when the Thirty Years’ War
was raging in Europe, a campaign that
pitted Protestant against Catholic. London
news pamphlets reported on the terror and
slaughter, and English Protestants read this
news and worried that Catholic forces
would invade England.
One such reader was a craftsman in the
city of London. Nehemiah Wallington was
a woodturner, born in 1598 in the parish of
St Leonards, a few yards north of London
Bridge. He was 44 years old when war
broke out in 1642, and he filled 2,600 pages
with his written “reflections”.A nation drunk with misery
It was the siege of the German city of
Magdeburg where Catholic forces werebesieging Protestants that gave Nehemiah
Wallington his first experience of news:
“In the yeere 1638 I had a booke come to my
hand of the miserable estate of Germany,
wherein as in a glasse you might see the
mourn full face of this our sister nation now
drunke with misery & who knowes how fast
the cup may passe round Gods arrows?”
Wallington was terrified by the stories.
He copied them out and he wrote about his
feelings. Wallington feared for the future
of Protestantism – with good reason. In
one day alone, it was reported that 20,000
innocent civilians were massacred in the
German city of Magdeburg.
“They have tied burning Matches betwixt
their fingers – to their noses, tongues, jaws,
breasts, legs and secret parts. Yea those parts
which nature hideth they have either filled
with powder or hung satchels of powder on
them, and so giving fire to the same, they
have in a horrible manner burst their bellies
and killed them”.
On 22 October 1641, Catholics in Ulster
took up arms against Protestant settlers,
evicting them from their land and
destroying their farms. After the outbreak
of the Irish rebellion, the news of atrocities
dominated the booksellers. These stories of
terror were bought avidly by Londoners.
The news pamphlets were whipping up a
storm of anxiety about the violenceThe
paper
wars of
the 1640 s
The English Civil War was fought in the
press as much as on the battlefield. Helen
We i n ste i n considers how propaganda
created a climate of terror in England
unleashed by “bloodthirsty” Catholics. But
now it wasn’t in Magdeburg, but much
closer to home.
“They came to an Englishman’s house,
where they slew the man at the door, and
afterward they entered the house, where they
found the woman and her maid a-brewing.
The maid they took, and they threw her in to
a boiling cauldron or pan of wort that was
over the fire, and her mistress they slew, and
cut off her head, and afterward fired the
house. Then they took Mr Dabnet, and when
they saw he was resolved to die a Protestant,- they pulled open his mouth, and cut out his
tongue, and run an hot iron down his throat,
and so he died”.
These stories, if not fabricated, were
often exaggerated. But Wallington believed
these reports and he, like others, was
worried about what atrocities Catholics
might commit on Protestants in England.
The impact of these pamphlets on the
Irish Rebellion was to polarise opinion.
Moreover, there were rumours that
Charles I may have supported the Catholic
uprising in Ireland. In parliament, MPs
were concerned that the king would use an
army against Protestants at home instead
of Catholics abroad:
“In agreeing with Papists he has made
cause to distance common protestants and
those whom they call Puritans. And it is