London's News-Press and the Thirty Years War is an important
addition to our knowledge of the origins of news reporting in the Thirty Years
War. A considerable feat because of the complexity of the subject.
The book is extremely well researched, and Boys present her
arguments clearly and popularly and seeks to demonstrate "the interplay
between high domestic politics, international relations and London news
publication".
Boys believes that Britain in the 17th Century was an
important part of a European-wide news community. The book is welcome in this
respect because it counters recent historiography that has tended to be hostile
to a Eurocentric viewpoint.
During the Thirty Years war, people waited for eager news.
Much of this reporting and printing was illegal and if caught printers and
their writer friends were fined and often jailed.
This book is published at a time when a revolution is taking
place amongst our media, mainly led by the internet. No less a revolution was
taking place in the 17th Century. The media revolution put enormous pressure on
monarchs all over Europe, especially in Britain of James I and Charles I.
The growth of the new media brought unprecedented dangers for
the ruling elites. For the first time, ordinary people could read or hear news
and draw conclusions for themselves about the major issues of the day.
Historiography.
Boys present an understanding of both revisionist and post
revisionist arguments without agreeing with one side or another. It is only
recently that a systematic study of these newsbooks has been undertaken but has
still received a shocking lack of attention by scholars so much so that it is
very difficult at this stage to place Boys work within current historiography.
One of the weaknesses of the book certainly for me is that it
does not in any real detail examine the disparate pre revisionist
historiography of the Thirty Years War. Current revisionist historiography sees
the war as primarily a religious contest as the words of W. Nif's notes it was
the last of the religious wars and one of the many.
However, this viewpoint was challenged by Marxist historians
such as Eric Hobsbawm who saw the war in the context of a general economic,
social and political crisis of the 17th Century. According to, J. V. Polišenský,
the Thirty Years' War was "the logical outcome of the crisis of policy of
the old feudal ruling class. This political crisis of the declining sixteenth
and the commencing seventeenth centuries had deep social and economic roots.
Economic and political changes did not develop evenly. The law of uneven
development resulted in a peculiar situation in those countries whose economic
and political interests were in a violent contradiction. These buffer-countries
" lay in a disputed no-man's land and were necessarily regarded as natural
danger zones". An examination of the various historiography's would have
improved an already good book.
Criticisms
Boys research makes extensive use of Corantos.[1]
She correctly shows that these newsbooks and informational broadsheets during
the Thirty Years War had an important part to play in the dissemination of news
during the English revolution. Boys has spent a significant amount of time
pouring over manuscripts. Her use of the British Library resources is evident
by the use of sources such as the Trumbull Papers and Joseph Mead's
correspondence,
Like the historian, Christopher Hill Boys has been unfairly
criticized for mostly using printed sources, both primary and secondary. One
such critic said "the author cites the Calendar of State Papers Domestic
for the reigns of James I and Charles I, but not the State Papers Domestic
(SP14 and SP16) in manuscript, available on microfilm and online. To
understand what attempts the early Stuart monarchs did make to control the
press, information from the actual documents in SPD is vital. SPD is
primarily the archive of the secretaries of State's office which supervised all
the monarch's correspondence (indeed all the monarch's government
business). The senior secretary of State also coordinated Privy Council
business and exercised crown supervision of printed matter.
"This research lacunae (among others) has led Boys' to
repeat an unfortunate miss-identification of a licenser for the press, Mr.
Cottington, who is the joint focus of an entire chapter in her book.
Cottington's misidentification here is even more unfortunate because he was
correctly identified decades ago by W. W. Greg, with Greg's findings supported
later by research from Sheila Lambert. Boys is aware of the controversy
over Cottington's identity but chose to follow mistakes originating with F. S.
Siebert, perpetuated in more recent studies by Michael Frearson and Cyndia
Clegg. Greg found the autograph imprimatur of George Cottington on a
manuscript submitted to him for approval, now in the Bodleian Library.
Lambert found George Cottington's entrance to and a degree from Oxford.
My research places him among the chaplains of the bishop of London".[2]
Boys point that during the Thirty Years war Britain's ruling
elite showed a real fear that news dissemination to the masses was politically
dangerous. Therefore the Crown actively sought to control the news by
appointing Georg Rudolph Weckherlin in 1627 who was "given oversight of
news, as well as other print genres deemed to be politically dangerous".
Weckherlin's appointment was done in a typically English
empirical fashion. He was not employed directly by the Crown. However with
political and military events proceeding at a dangerous pace the State needed a
far robust response to the growing danger of Britain being dragged into the
Thirty years war and to counteract the growing political, economic and social
crisis already mounting in England.
So from early 1630s William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury,
working through the High Commission for Causes Ecclesiastical was brought in to
control the press. Almost immediately, the Star Chamber was used to indict a
growing number of people deemed to be advocating sedition. Towards the end of
1637 several trials of prominent figures such Henry Burton, John Bastwick,
William Prynne, and John Williams, bishop of Lincoln, were charged with
seditious libel. However, political events beyond the control of Laud and
his master Charles I were to hamper attempts at press censorship.
Of particularly interest is Boys treatment of the foreign
policies of James I and Charles I.as one reviewer said " Boys supports
recent scholarly efforts to rehabilitate James's political and foreign
policies, arguing that the king "was aware of the power of words and
sought to influence public opinion" or that Charles, carried out a "laissez-fair
approach to the press".
It is clear that Charles I had little understanding of the
use of Newsbooks in developing his foreign policy. He "simply did not
appreciate the desirability of telling his side of events, nor see the need to
persuade."
To conclude, the book is also beautifully presented and
illustrated Boydell Press and deserves a wide readership. It enhances our
knowledge of both the Thirty Years War and the early origins of newspapers. The
book as one writer says it also "increases our understanding of the
development of English periodicals, the monograph also helps explain the
fascination with and establishes the importance of international news in early
Stuart England".
[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/coranto
[2] Professor Sabrina Alcorn
Baron, review of London's News Press and the Thirty Years War, (review no. 1374)
URL: http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1374
