This Little Britain

by Harry Bingham

  What does all this prove? Perhaps not much; or rather it proves two contradictory things: first, how ordinary our country used to be; second, how unordinary it became. The story of post-Conquest Britain is one of kings and warlords struggling for power, whether through battle or marriage. For a time England did well, securing a huge chunk of France from the Channel to the Med, before in due course losing the lot. The foreign kings were simply an emblem of the way the country’s affairs were being handled: by men whose thoughts, fortunes and hopes for the future often lay elsewhere.

  The later long spell of foreign monarchy indicates something quite different. In 1714, the Act of Succession drove parliament to look for a new king fifty-eight places down the pecking order, in Germany. But the choice of a monarch who couldn’t speak English wasn’t awkward: it was a definite plus. How could a king govern if he couldn’t even speak its language? He couldn’t—and parliament never wanted him to. A foreign monarch was an impotent one: the emblem of the final, decisive shift towards a revolutionary form of government, parliamentary rule. The monarchy’s very survival has depended on its ability to slip into insignificance.

  Which brings us back to the question that we started with. If Charles’s elder son is crowned king, he will—if we are to be strict about these things—be just the second king to bear the name of William. (There was one other true William, who reigned 1830-37, just preceding Victoria.) Yet though Charles’s son may be crowned king, there’s a school of thought which argues that he won’t be the rightful king of anything at all. When Prince Willem seized the English throne in 1688, the deposed monarch, James II, refused to give up the cause. There was sporadic fighting for another half-century, culminating in the disaster of the 1745 Jacobite uprising. But military failure didn’t mean the end of the succession. According to modern-day Jacobites, the rightful king of the United Kingdom is alive and poised to take the crown.

  His name? None other than the impeccably German Duke of Bavaria, Franz Bonaventura Adalbert Maria von Wittelsbach. Or, as we would certainly insist on calling him, good King Frank.

  * Queen Mary was also Princess von Teck in the kingdom of Württemberg, so that the princely-‘n’-Protestant rule was still being obeyed, if only rather notionally by this point.

  A MOST STRANGE AND WONDERFULL HERRING

  In 1477, Wiliam Caxton brought the printing press to England. With the press came some of the finest fruits of the human mind: poetry, chivalric romances, history, the best of classical antiquity; in due course, Bibles, scriptures and theology too.

  And rubbish. The more the cost of printing fell, the more it became possible to make a living from printing ephemera—early-modern chip papers. In 1597, for example, one enterprising printer brought out a pamphlet that showed images of ‘A most Strange and wonderfull Herring’ whose scales displayed ‘on the one side the picture of two armed men fighting, and on the other most strange Characters, as in the picture is here expressed.’ (After all, a woodcut never lies.)

  Sensation and scandal also found a ready market. A 1605 newsbook—an early newspaper, in effect—announced that the ‘pittilesse’ John Fites, ‘thirstie of blood’, had killed a man and his wife before turning the sword on himself. ‘Proude heart, wilt thou not yielde?’ Fites is reported to have said. ‘Split, split and in this onely wound die: that I thy owner may not live, to heare the honour of my credite stayned with these odious actes.’ The style may be more Shakespeare than Daily Star, but the journalist’s willingness to make stuff up is eerily modern.

  What’s more, the market then was as entrepreneurial and inventive as the market now. The illiterate masses, after all, were as thirsty for news as anyone else, so the market found ways to satisfy that thirst and make a groat or two at the same time. News might be put out in the form of plays, or broadside ballads. Here’s one such, reporting the destruction of a Suffolk town. (It is the town itself which speaks the lines.)

  But now beholde my great decay,

  Which on a sodaine came;

  My sumptuous buildings burned be

  By force of fires flame:

  A careless wretch, most rude in life,

  His chymney set on fire,

  The instrument, I must confess,

  Of God’s most heavie ire.

  As poetry goes this is as bad as it gets, but then cash, not posterity, was the aim. Printed ballads were sold, and spoken out loud (or worse still, sung) in markets and meeting places. Enterprising publicans often subscribed to whatever news sources there were going, in order to tempt people in to eat, drink and catch up.

  For those wanting a more serious approach to news, there were more upmarket approaches available. One notch up were corantos and newsbooks, both early forms of the newspaper. Such productions were widely regarded as having more weight than the populist and mass-market ballads, but contemporaries remained sceptical all the same. In 1632, one wit commented that ‘now every one can say, its even as true as a Currantoe, meaning that it’s all false’. Yet more positive journalistic ethics were also visible. The better corantos tried to give themselves a reputation for truthfulness, even at the expense of having nothing interesting to say. According to a recent article in The Economist, the world’s oldest surviving political headline is the splendid ‘The new tidings out of Italie are not yet com’—an early precursor of the 1920 BBC’s ‘Good evening. There is no news tonight.’

  The very top end of the news market was occupied by professional news-gatherers who would compile regular newsletters in manuscript form (that is, written longhand) for sending out to paying subscribers. The fees for such a service were by no means cheap—say about £20 a year for a weekly newsletter, which you could multiply at least a hundredfold to get a contemporary equivalent. Anyone paying these sums for news wanted accuracy, not sensation, and on the whole they got it. One professional letter writer, John Flower, reported that he had received ‘divers stragling reports’ of events on the Continent, before adding that ‘because I perceive noe creditt is given to them, I will forbear the writing of them’.

  All of this posed a wholly new challenge to the state. When Henry Tudor came to the throne in 1485, there was no national news market and no instant or reliable reportage of major events, with the result that though public opinion mattered, it was neither volatile nor even necessarily national in scope. A hundred years later, with the English state under threat from without (Spain) and within (Catholics), the easy availability of news formed a dangerous new battle front for statesmen to deal with. As the Tudors gave way to the Stuarts and the internal dissension and pressures grew, that front grew to be more complex, more ominous.

  The state responded as states tend to do: by repressing the offending institutions. In 1559, Queen Elizabeth announced a number of royal injunctions, requiring, among much else, that all new works needed to be submitted in advance to herself, one of her half-dozen closest counsellors or a handful of other luminaries. For plays, pamphlets and ballads—mass-market productions whose volume would have swamped the Queen and her counsellors—licensing was to come from one of three London ecclesiastical commissioners. No ballads or suchlike could be printed outside London.

  The new rules weren’t wholly obeyed, but they weren’t wholly disregarded either. If printers wanted to bring out ‘strange and wonderfull’ news of herrings, or anything equally uncontentious, they generally dared to do so without prior authority. But the people of England weren’t going to be satisfied with stories about fish, no matter how remarkable. The pressure of demand continued to boil up, threatening to overload the system of censorship, whose rules were constantly being adjusted in the effort to cope.

  Those who did offend the powerful faced draconian punishments. In 1579, for example, a pamphlet appeared, snappily entitled The Discovrie of a Gaping Gulf whereinto England is like to be swallowed by another French marriage; if the Lord forbid not the banes, by letting her Maiestie see the sin and punishment thereof. This was dangerous stuff—not simply a discourse on hig
h politics, but an attack on that holy of holies, the Queen’s own intentions regarding marriage. The offending author and printer were immediately searched for and found. After failing to get the men hanged for one offence, Elizabeth had them prosecuted for another, conspiracy to excite sedition. This time the men were convicted, and the author, John Stubbe, had his right hand chopped off by way of punishment: press management, Taliban-style.

  As time went by, the profusion of printed material continued to grow, state affairs grew, if anything, more delicate, and the censors struggled to cope. On the one hand, they sought to release the pressure of demand by allowing innocent material to see the light of day. On the other hand, the punishments for ‘sedition’—very broadly defined—grew more savage and unconstrained by conventional courts. Under the early Stuarts, James and Charles, the tensions increased and, in the end, the challenges overwhelmed the system. As war broke out between king and parliament in the mid-seventeenth century, censorship collapsed completely. Printed matter of every variety proliferated. Views of every conceivable description were aired. Although the mechanisms of prosecution and punishment still existed, the country was in too much chaos to bother with such things. One collection of newsbooks held in the British Museum indicates the huge surge that took place over the period. The collection holds just four newspapers from 1641, 167 from 1642, 402 from 1643, and a monster 722 from 1645. In all this ferment, the poet John Milton published his pamphlet Areopagitica, proclaiming the virtues of free debate:

  And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?…Truth is strong next to the Almighty; she needs no policies, no strategems nor licensings to make her victorious…[Above all liberties] give me the liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according to conscience.

  This was a stirring trumpet blast for freedom, a revolutionary call addressed to a revolutionary age, one that should have heralded the birth of press freedom in England and the world.

  Except that it didn’t. No reference to Milton’s Areopagitica has ever been found in the literature of the time, and it took later generations to rediscover its brilliance. Furthermore, the surge in printed matter proved to be nothing more than a temporary aberration. Under Cromwell’s Protectorate, the old repressive rules came back as before, as, indeed, they were always bound to. Nobody in those days conceived of freedom of speech as being the fundamental right we think it today. The concept itself simply hadn’t entered political thought. When Milton spoke of ‘the liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely’, we naturally understand him to mean that anyone should be able to say anything. He meant no such thing; indeed, he’d have been shocked at the very suggestion. What he meant was that any well-educated Puritan-inclined Protestant should be able to say anything not threatening to the integrity of the state. The idea that riff-raff or women or (whisper it softly) Catholics should be able to pick up their pen and write what they liked would have struck him as both barmy and dangerous. Indeed, it wouldn’t be long before Milton himself was working as a censor for the new Puritan regime.

  By 1660, with Cromwell dead and a king back on the throne once again, that whole period of revolutionary upheaval would seem to have accomplished nothing as regards broadening the freedom of the press. Press freedom was an issue neither in England nor on the Continent. There was no doctrine or philosophy of free speech, no popular movement in its support. The issue seemed so dead that no one even recognized there was an issue.

  Yet the times they were a-changing, all the same. London was the centre of one of Europe’s two fastest-growing economic powers (the other was the Netherlands). Commerce, finance, insurance and shipping all relied on a free flow of news, often mediated through the newly fashionable coffee houses. Alongside the purely economic factors, there were the more frivolous ones. People liked their gossip, their scandal, their sense of being in the know. The prevailing mood was expressed in one 1665 poem, in which a coffee drinker says:

  Sirs unto me

  It reason seems that liberty

  Of speech and words should be allow’d

  Where men of differing judgements croud,

  And that’s a Coffee-house, for where

  Should men discourse so free as there.

  The poem wonderfully encapsulates the mood of the times, and the forces of change that mattered. It’s often lazily said today that ‘people died’ for our right to freedom of speech. And they didn’t. That simply wasn’t how it happened. That radical call for ‘liberty of speech and words’ came not in the ferment of revolution, but in the very ordinary context of the leisured rich demanding their entertainment.

  In 1695, the basic tool of state censorship, the Licensing Act, came up for renewal. The old system was widely seen as necessary, but unworkable in its current form, so the decision was made to let the old act lapse, in order that a whole new system could be brought into being. The aim wasn’t to give up on censorship, but to invent a whole new, improved system for the coming century. That new system never came. When parliament assembled to look at a version of the proposed new bill, a hundred niggling objections were raised, mostly having to do with small but significant details of implementation. The bill was sent back to committee, and never came out again. The basic mechanism of state censorship had gone for ever. One of the greatest constitutional revolutions in world history had come about because no one could quite figure out a sensible way to hold it back. In the more autocratic regimes of continental Europe, any such niggling technicalities would have been simply shoved aside in the interests of the state. In England—more permissive, more responsive to opinion, more commercially pushy—those technicalities made the difference.

  The press in England still wasn’t entirely free. It wouldn’t be for another hundred years and more. (The prosecution for seditious libel would become the state’s favourite new weapon of attack; the Stamp Act, a tax on newspapers among other things, its favourite form of restraint.) Yet the eighteenth-century British press was the freest in the world: scurrilous, lively, satirical, dissenting, abusive, creative, argumentative. Further battles for press freedom were fought and won. By the time the American colonists fought for and won their independence, the central importance of free speech to a free society was widely embedded in political thought. It stands there in the very first amendment to the US constitution, which requires that ‘Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press’.

  The concept spread from Britain to America, and from those countries to the rest of the free world. No one now doubts the central, elemental importance of freedom of speech: a freedom won not at the barricades, but at the coffee houses; a freedom brought about less by philosophers than by that most strange and wonderfull herring—a free people’s appetite for news.

  CLEAN HANDS, DIRTY MONEY

  As I write, a police investigation of a possible cash-for-honours scandal creeps ever closer to the walls of Downing Street. An entire cabinet has been interviewed. The honours system has been debased. A prime minister’s integrity is in doubt.

  There’s much to relish in stories such as this, but the joy does not lie in novelty. The dirty connections between money and power are no doubt as old as money itself, and even the form of those connections has altered remarkably little. Take, for instance, the whole business of selling honours. When Queen Elizabeth I died there were just fifty-five peers and around 550 knights, slightly fewer in both cases than the totals at her accession to the throne, implying that honours in late Tudor England formed a fairly stable currency of prestige. The problem with a stable currency, however, is that there are fat profits to be made in debauching it, and Good Queen Bess’s successor, James, lost little time in doing just that. He marked his ascent to the English throne (he was already king of Scotland) by knighting some 432 men on a single
day, then went on to create knights at the rate of about seventy a year for the rest of his reign. During that time, the number of English peers more than doubled; the number of Irish ones more than quadrupled.

  His motivation was simple: cash. Most of James’s honours were either sold or given in the expectation of gifts in exchange. Eager as any young entrepreneur to spot any gap in the market, James even created a brand-new honour, the baronetage, available to punters for the handsome price of £1,095. There were ninety English takers for the honour—a product launch so successful that James rolled out the offering in Ireland and Scotland too, which produced a further forty-four and 132 baronetages respectively. Nor did he stop at flogging off honours. Monopolies, licences and other economic privileges were all available for sale, as were positions in the royal household. (Or rather households, plural. After all, why restrict yourself to just one, if you could create—as James I did, following precedent—separate royal households for yourself, your wife and your three children?) Put like this, the Stuart court seems like some kind of car boot sale, the king himself a regal Del Boy.