Chapter Twenty-three - Press and Politics in the Seventeenth Century

Summary

The seventeenth century saw the emergence of the periodical press in Britain. This had significant implications for the political landscape, a development that has given rise to a host of scholarly publications. From the initial appearance of the avvisi in the sixteenth century, news in manuscript which normally communicated information from diplomats, news and politics have been intimately connected (Raymond and Moxham 2016: 8). This chapter will analyse how new scholarship has reworked traditional areas of debate on the press and politics: the role of newspapers in the development of public opinion, the significance of print in the ‘news revolution’ and the almost exclusive focus on England (rather than Britain) when examining the development of the periodical press.

Early analyses of the periodical press idealised it as an agent of freedom, aimed at ‘speaking truth to power’. The Whig view of the evolution of the press is – predictably – a history of progress, where initial haphazard reporting of news in the sixteenth century becomes increasingly bolder and more sophisticated, reaching its peak (or ‘maturity’) in the 1640s (Frank 1961). It is also an exclusively English story: there is no mention of the Scottish or Irish press. The English press is conceptualised as being in battle against the powers of absolutism and censorship. This metanarrative gained more impetus with the translation into English of Jürgen Habermas's work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1989. Habermas argued that ‘the state-governed public sphere was appropriated by the public of private people making use of their reason and was established as a sphere of criticism of public authority’ ([1962] 1989: 51). This highlights the extent to which the ‘public sphere’ is envisaged in opposition to the claims of the state. Habermas located the emergence of the public sphere after the 1695 lapse of the Licensing Act, highlighting the role of the press in the formation of a public opinion antagonistic to the state, but also the role of censorship in stifling oppositional voices. The Habermasian concept of the public sphere has been adapted to earlier periods, but has also been widely critiqued (Pincus 1995; Lake and Pincus 2006; Downie 2005; Mah 2000).