2 - The Developing European News Trade: Methods and Content

Summary

By the early seventeenth century, news was collected and exchanged in Europe through networks communicating across the Continent. Knowing how this happened, and why, helps us to see the appearance of periodical news in London in the winter of 1620/1 (and how the defeat at White Mountain was reported) in context and to understand the scope and nature of the news coverage, and the inherent limitations of the content available. This chapter explores the logistics of the international news trade to establish a baseline description of the material that the London trade received to inform discussion about the timeliness, extent, quality and accuracy of the information that reached readers and shed light on questions about whether networks were partisan and engaged in propaganda, constrained by government controls or influenced by patronage. This understanding, in turn, provides a context for addressing some underlying questions about the development of political awareness, opinion and the beginnings of an informed and critical public sphere. The news press became active in progressively more cities as the Thirty Years War continued, and more soldiers and embassies departed from Britain to the Continent, allowing the London trade to diversify its sources as the European news trade evolved.

England was part of a Europe-wide news trade community both economically and politically. It played its part fully, transmitting and receiving news through a diaspora that included printers, agents and correspondents. There are now more than 50,000 known copies of pre-1700 German printed periodical news publications in addition to known Dutch corantos, the work of the French presses in the 1630s and perhaps a further two thousand periodical news issues from the Habsburg Netherlands. This growing body of material allows us to see the role of London in the context of how news was gathered and how the industry worked as an interconnected whole.

Print was used increasingly during the sixteenth century to present information, persuade, reinforce allegiance and influence opinion. In the United Provinces and France public debate developed rapidly with the state playing a central role. During the Reformation, especially in Germany, images became a speciality of Protestant propaganda. By the seventeenth century, Germany experienced a flood of leaflets and pamphlets that reached a climax with the Swedish invasion in the 1630s.