Helen Weinstein, a historian at Clare Hall,
Cambridge, is the creative director of
Historyworks production companyAKG IMAGES/BRITISH LIBRARY, BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
“By the time that war broke
out, pamphlets were one of
the weapons with which
war was fought”
feared, were he to go to Ireland where he
has an army, he may yet bring that army
against his own people.”
What caused a political revolution was
that, rather than submitting this complaint
to the king through the normal private
channels, a group of MPs led by John Pym
decided, on 15 December 1641, to print the
206 grievances and to demand that the
king distance himself from the Catholic
cause once and for all. This created
division between a king’s party and an
“opposition”. And so it was that when the
“Grand Remonstrance” was released to the
press, ordinary people were able to see for
the first time that their rulers were in bitter
disagreement. Charles I found out through
the press too, like his subjects; this had
never happened before.Getting the people involved
What the parliamentary side did was to ask
humble people, like Wallington, to have
opinions about those in charge above
them. And it used the press to create two
sides, effectively asking the public to decide
“are you with us, or against us?”
This was an exciting and new debate for
the public to read about. Parliamentary
politics had never been published before
because of censorship. In the first half of
1641, censorship of the press broke down
because the official licensor of the press,
Archbishop Laud, was arrested and
imprisoned. Under unevenly enforced
censorship laws, only foreign news
reporting had been permitted, but nowprinters and publishers
started to produce domestic
news for the first time.
Thus, at the very moment
that the Grand Remonstrance
was debated and approved for
publication by parliament, John Pym was
also secretly negotiating with a London
publisher called John Thomas. Together
they printed the first newspaper to contain
reports of the proceedings in parliament.
There is a convergence here. The text
which complains of the king’s misdoings
was published in print, and the context was
published in the first topical newspaper in
England, discussing in detail the
parliamentary debate, and giving the
public for the first time a current sheet
of domestic news.
When domestic news pamphlets
appeared in 1641, Nehemiah Wallington
started consuming them voraciously. He
called them “little thieves” that stole his
money. He became obsessed with
collecting news. This was presented to the
public in the form of cheap pamphlets that
were very readable in eight to 16 pages, and
costing a penny or two each.Fears of terrorism in London
Throughout the winter of 1641, London
was on red alert. Almost daily there were
rumours of “gunpowder plotters” and fires
set by Catholics. These stories were
founded on the idea of terror rather than
on any evidence, but they show how fearful
people were of a Catholic take-over.
England was in a state of panic – and
printed news reports connected people
hundreds of miles apart.
By the time that war broke out,
pamphlets were one of the weapons with
which the war was fought. Charles I was
nervous about the press and it took him along time to realise that he needed a press
machine to fight for his cause. The king
had let the parliamentarian side get the
upper hand, but after 1642 the Royalists
realised that they needed to fight back with
their own propaganda. So when the king
travelled up north to raise his army, he
took a printing press with him:
“As of this day, Monday the 22nd August
1642, his Royal Majesty bought forth his
army and did set up his Royal standard in
the City of Nottingham”.
Nehemiah Wallington never went to
war., thus his experience of armed conflict
was not from actually participating in the
fighting. With the advent of press power,
readers who were hundreds of miles away
knew about the bloodshed.
Wallington consumed a particular type
of news print that plays to his fears about
Royalist barbarities. He calls Prince Rupert
“Prince Rober”, showing that he picked
up the stereotypes that were presented
to him in the parliamentarian press.
This influenced how Wallington’s
understanding of the war.
It was through news reporting that
Wallington was part of the first politically
literate generation. This media revolution
of the 1640s meant that aristocrats like
Brilliana Harley in Herefordshire were
reading the same material as the
woodturner Wallington in Cheapside. This
was the media revolution of the 1640s.Bite him Peper! Civil War propaganda, a 17th-century woodcut