Conclusion: Journalism and Authority

Summary

The culture of politics undergoes a radical change in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The civil wars of the 1640s had challenged the centuries-old tradition that while a monarch's power might in theory have its limits, that power was widely accepted. One legacy of the wars was the notion of divided sovereignty between king and parliament, the idea that a parliament could act independently of the royal sovereign. What happened in 1688 represented, of course, another enormous transformation in English attitudes toward power. Evolving understandings of monarchical authority and its limits generated some anticipation of and demand for popular representation. The emergence of a clear-cut two-party system, with a governing party and an opposition, contributed to a new political landscape, as did the shift from septennial to triennial elections and the more constant culture of partisan debate that such a development fostered. The advent of a daily newspaper press combined with these and other changes to create an entirely different set of expectations about and parameters for public politics.

The daily press that started to come into existence in 1702 meant a huge expansion of what ‘the people’ knew. As late as 1690, readers could only assemble the news for themselves from distinctly limited resources: The London Gazette and Votes of the House of Commons, along with pamphlets, newsletters, and the foreign broadsheets found in coffeehouses and taverns. After 1702, a vastly larger percentage of the population had relatively affordable access to debate about the course of national and ‘global’ events. The weekly and daily news gave citizens more immediate insight into current affairs; it gave them not only a political education but an unprecedented presumption of a right to participate. Even those who could not read the papers could still engage. As the arch-conservative Charles Leslie complained, the Whig ‘weekly penny Papers … have done more Mischief than the others’, and the sub-literate ‘will Gather together about one that can Read, and Listen to an Observator or Review (as I have seen them in the Streets) where all the Principles of Rebellion are Instill’d into them’.