Afterword

Writers of scribal news in the 17th and 18th centuries were often keen to evade scrutiny of how their productions were created and transmitted but – as the articles in this volume have demonstrated – they certainly merit that scrutiny. The information that a political newsletter contained was not, and is not, confined to what the words on the page relay about events in parliament or other developments. As each manuscript was the product of a set of political interactions, it can be used to investigate the networks which produced, circulated and preserved it, rather than being treated only as a repository of reports. In adopting this approach to scribal news, the authors of this collection share a position with the investigators of the 17th and 18th centuries. Those investigators well understood the value of examining a newsletter – and, where possible, its author – as a means to uncover information about the people and the motives behind its transmission. So, in 1683, the news writer William Cotton, having been arrested on several warrants, was pressed to offer up information on other news writers in order to win clemency. In response, he produced an account of ‘those as are writers of newes’, and he addressed letters to the king and privy council that touch on many of the themes considered in this collection. Focusing on commercial writers of political news, Cotton sketched a picture of highly interrelated, time-sensitive news services, with writers rapidly recycling each other's content for their own clienteles. A typical post day for Cotton began with gathering foreign news, including a trip to the Royal Exchange, the City's main trading forum. At 3pm he received the newsletter of ‘Pike & Bill’ who used ‘to goe partners in Parliament time’ to serve coffeehouses – the demands of the parliamentary session, Cotton indicated, prompted special, seasonal arrangements among news writers. Finally, at 8 or 9pm, Cotton would pay an intermediary in order to acquire Giles Hancock's newsletter, which was known for its coverage of ‘Court & Councell’, and then lift material from it.1 As contributors have noted, the arrangement of items in both printed newspapers and scribal newsletters generally proceeded from the foreign to the domestic, and Cotton's collecting methods indicate his was no exception – it was also an arrangement governed by the timetables of other news writers, which in turn followed the post. Once assembled, Cotton's newsletter therefore combined oral and scribal sources, providing foreign, parliament and court news drawn from different areas of what Jason Peacey and Rachael King have each characterised as a news ‘ecosystem’. Cotton's own sense of how this ecosystem operated was distinctly hierarchical – along the lines of a reverse food chain where those at the top nourished those further down. At the very top were writers such as Hancock who could offer ‘verry privett things’ from inside sources at Whitehall, so that ‘what ever is considerable, whether publique or privett, hee hath it with the first’. News writers at this level, Cotton was clear, could command ‘great’ prices precisely because they had ‘that which is privett’. Their most eager readers therefore included other news writers, himself among them. Some writers, he suggested, were known for their specialisms in terms of content and for their literary talents – ‘Mr Blackhall’, for example, was well informed about Scottish news; while John Combes was ‘in great request’ because he combined private news from court with ‘a good stile’. At the bottom of the ranks of news writers were men such as Mr Cleiypole who ‘generally depends upon others for his newes for hee is one that will not take any paines for it but will word things well if not in drink’.2 Apparently a news writer's rhetorical skill might help to compensate for both a lack of novel content and the unreliability of a writer prone to booze. Cotton's account of the operations of political news writers is revealing while also being exemplary of the often problematic sources with which contributors to this volume, and indeed any investigation into political newswriting, have to deal. Cotton claimed to be one of the lowly news writers – a politically naive man who copied what others produced and who had taken up the job only temporarily to feed his family. Yet he simultaneously claimed to be an amazingly authoritative source on the news writers’ activity, who was able to reveal ‘as much of this Intreague as any man in London if not more’.3 Writing to save his skin, Cotton's less than reliable account survives in the state papers because, unlike the majority of news writers, the steps he took to protect himself were unsuccessful. More than most early modern writers and readers, the many people who engaged with political newsletters often had reason to be cautious about the evidence they left of their involvement and views. Despite what was evidently a thriving culture of scribal news well into the 18th century, its participants are often hard to trace. As we have seen, letters go unsigned; writers omit the sources for their news; the many hands through which a letter passed leave no marks; or, where readers can be identified, they can be tricky to find in the archives (perhaps because, being women or labourers, they were not in a position to write or to preserve their papers, or because, as employees of a diplomatic service, the records of their activities are dispersed internationally across collections). In contending with frequently elusive evidence, the essays in this collection have offered a wealth of insights for future work on parliamentary and political newswriting to develop. Collectively they have demonstrated how, when it comes to scribal newswriting, familiar terms and categories for considering early modern texts and activities tend to require refining in order to capture the complexities and nuances of these exchanges. While it is possible to study printed news to understand 17th and 18th-century politics, contributors have shown that this would have appeared a strange method of evaluation to many early modern readers – for print and manuscript news circulated alongside each other (sometimes literally in the same packet), fed each other, and were produced by the same news writers. Although contemporaries like Cotton wrote of ‘private’ and ‘public’ news as if these categories required no explanation, contributors have illustrated how the gradations of ‘private’ (or privileged or confidential) information were many, shaped by factors ranging from access to reserved spaces (as with the Lords’ and Commons’ chambers), to the medium (what was not in print), to time (what news writers considered ‘private’ at the start of one day began to lose its exclusivity over a matter of hours as multiple news services circulated it around the town, the country and beyond).4 In discussing newsletters, the classifications that have emerged to describe their types or genres refer not to the content as such, but the relationship between the writer and their readers: newsletters are ‘sociable’, ‘commercial’, ‘diplomatic’ or ‘official’, while the boundaries between these recognisable types are often less than firm.5 Moreover, even standard terms such as ‘writer’ and ‘reader’ require consideration. A news ‘writer’ might range from someone who put considerable effort into seeking material and crafting sentences, to someone who acted principally as compiler of others’ words, to someone who served as a straightforward copyist. Meanwhile to talk only of ‘readers’ can obscure the part played by the recipients of news and the addressees of letters who may not have been readers of the contents themselves but who nonetheless served significant roles in circulating scribal news.6 Examining scribal news therefore prompts closer attention to the words we use in describing early modern information exchange in political and literary cultures. It has also shown the importance of recognising that the meanings newsletters carried were not only borne by words: the material qualities of a newsletter shaped its interpretation. For example, the paper's format might align the work with a genre of news; the layout could be used to locate the type of news or identify a writer's priorities; while paratexts – including adverts, annotations, salutations and a letter's address – were part of the whole and potential influences upon the ways the news content was received.7 Today, achieving literacy is understood to involve more than becoming fluent in recognising how letters form words: it also entails learning how the mise-en-page conveys meaning and how to use information derived from texts in ways that are endorsed by the reader's society.8 A number of the articles in this collection have explicitly or tacitly proposed ways we can improve our own literacy in scribal news: by familiarising ourselves with newsletters’ conventions and their material characteristics, we can better appreciate the range of signals that they provided to the more proficient of their early readers. Those early readers of scribal news ranged from apex intelligencers such as Joseph Williamson in the secretary of state's office to sociable newsletter writers such as Robert Wodrow, and from the illustrious earl of Hardwicke to the anonymous annotator of the Newey newsletters.9 The records of the responses of actual readers have to be set alongside what can be deduced from the newsletters themselves about their potential uses. William Cotton believed the value of a scribal news service was raised when the writer was able to provide customers with information that arrived speedily, was ‘privett’, written ‘in a good stile’ and ‘considerable’ (i.e., significant), but he also conveyed that not all of these attributes were required for success. That a news writer had troubled to copy out an item implied it should have value to the intended reader or to a portion of the intended readership, even if it was not ‘considerable’ – yet identifying what exactly the value of that information was may have puzzled the actual readers, as it sometimes perplexes us. Contributors have discussed, for example, what readers might have gained from learning the extreme minutiae of parliamentary business, such as an account of a minor refinement to the wording of a bill. For foreign courtiers this kind of extensive detail on parliamentary divisions might cumulatively offer a pragmatic appreciation of Westminster politics that could not be had from other sources. For a Derbyshire gentlewoman such as Anne Pole, the opportunities to deploy this knowledge in political action are less apparent, but she might nonetheless have appreciated the sense of expertise and being ‘in the know’ that this detailed reportage offered.10 In both cases the advantages may have lain, not in the usefulness of the information itself, but in being seen by others to be more fully informed on activities at the centre of power and as having information that – by virtue of being reported by a commercial or diplomatic news service – appeared to be of value and thus to hold out the potential of further exchange. Although the value of news was generally dependent on its timely reception and news publications themselves were widely regarded as ephemeral, this was not always the case. For certain writers, such as Abel Boyer, news publications were written with an eye to posterity, as a form of history.11 For certain readers, newsletters served as a means to store and preserve information – which is, of course, often how we come to have them at all. The literary qualities of some writers’ letters and some news genres evidently helped encourage readers to collect them, binding the documents together or copying them into notebooks, as Edward Taylor has described with political verse. Meanwhile, Leith Davis has illustrated how one of the uses of newsletters and newspapers in the 18th century was as material to be woven together into a historical narrative. It was an approach that in the case of at least one historical volume, A Compleat History of the Late Rebellion (1716), involved removing references to the letters as sources, in order to recast communication acts as objective information. In investigating scribal political news, this volume of Parliamentary History has, rather aptly, reversed that process. It has urged appreciation of scribal accounts as communication events, as material objects and as texts which, in relaying parliamentary history, have other stories to tell about the politics, news and culture of the 17th and 18th centuries

Sociology · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Scottish History and National Identity