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by Philip M. Taylor
The increasing involvement of the public in both politics and warfare since the Reformation partly reflected and partly caused the growth of propaganda. In England in the 1640s it exploded into full scale civil war, or the Great Rebellion as it was known. Professor Kamen:
The situation had to be faced: revolutionary propaganda was more than an exercise in persuasion; it frequently reflected genuine popular attitudes, it was committed not to the support of established parties but to the questioning of all authority. As soon as the floodgates of censorship had been opened, the sentiments of all sections of the people burst through.
The printing press enabled people to involve themselves in politics to an unprecedented degree. As one man commented in 1641, ‘the art of printing will so spread knowledge that the common people, knowing their own rights and liberties, will not be governed by way of oppression’. When, therefore, the opponents of Charles I (r. 1625-49) launched a massive propaganda assault against the king, whom they believed was trying to destroy their constitutional position, they were not only defending their rights as ‘freeborn Englishmen’, they were also developing the idea of propaganda as a liberating force. From the Reformation and the Dutch Revolt onwards, printing provided a means by which oppressed could attack oppressor, a medium of liberation and revolution of such power that it inevitably demanded the twin response of counter- propaganda and censorship from the authorities.
Although both James I and Charles I had tried to continue Elizabeth’s censorship system, they were unable to stem the rising influence of the Puritans, a dissident Calvinistic movement within England’s state Church, and of the growing Parliamentary criticism of their policies. By the late 1620s the political and religious opponents of the Stuarts had forged an alliance in an attempt to prevent the king’s extravagant spending and his High Church innovations. Charles I dissolved Parliament and ruled without it throughout the 1630s. He also got the Star Chamber to pass a decree prohibiting the import of books from abroad unless a catalogue was submitted to him or to the Bishop of London in advance.
Without a standing army, however, Charles was unable to suppress the Scottish rebellion that occurred in 1638. When the Scots invaded England, Charles had no option but to summon Parliament. It was during this Long Parliament, from 1640 to 1653, that all the ideo- logical issues (merchants v. aristocrats, Puritans v. Anglicans, parliament v. royal absolutism) came to a head. Though it was initially successful in dismantling the king’s personal government of the previous decade (including the abolition of the Star Chamber and the dismantling of other agents of royal absolutism), the Long Parliament quickly divided into royalist and parliamentary factions, and when the king attempted a military-style coup against the latter, mob pressure forced Charles to leave London and the opposing sides began to raise troops.
During the civil war that followed from 1642-6, the breakdown of the censorship and licensing system established by the Tudors and Stuarts led to a massive flow of news-sheet propaganda. Royalists (‘Cavaliers’) and Parliamentarians (‘Roundheads’) also produced their own newspapers, the former’s principal organ being the Mercurius Aulicus and the latter’s the Mercurius Britannicus. Motivated by Puri- tan zeal, and with the advantage of holding London and the south- east with its abundance of printing presses, the Roundheads were also able to gain the military advantage over the king’s northern- based forces. Mass demonstrations were held to maintain public morale while a huge torrent of pamphlets poured forth from Puritan and Parliamentary presses. The bookseller George Thomason collected 15,000 pamphlets between 1640 and 1663 and his collection in the British Library lists 2000 for the year 1642 alone. Newspapers likewise increased in number; Thomason’s collection contains only 4 for 1641 but 167 for 1642 and a staggering 722 for 1645. But the Long Parliament grew alarmed at the vehemence of opposing viewpoints and reintroduced censorship by licensing in 1643.
Among the most successful propagandists were the Levellers, who managed to circumvent the renewed censorship and licensing laws with particular skill. They made extensive use of the printing press and had publications smuggled in from the continental publishing centre of Amsterdam. In 1647, John Lilburne declared that he was determined ‘to appeal to the whole kingdom and Army’ against the Presbyterians and he did this through the newspaper, the Moderate. The risks were considerable, with severe penalties for sedition, including dismemberment. But freedom of speech, within the confines of national security, was one of those rights for which ‘free-born Englishmen’ were prepared to fight. Censorship, wrote the Puritan John Goodwin, prevented the Holy Ghost from coming forth by way of the press. The Puritan poet John Milton echoed this demand in his famous work Areopagitica, published in 1644. But it was for political reasons that the Levellers protested against the reintroduction of censorship; as one of their leaders demanded in 1644, the press must ‘be free for any man that writes nothing highly scandalous or dangerous to the state’. The Stationers Company, they argued, now had powers ‘to suppress everything which hath any true declaration for the just rights and liberties of the freeborn of the nation’, while at the same time could ‘print, divulge and disperse whatsoever books, pamphlets and libels they please, though they be full of lies and tend to the poisoning of the kingdom with unjust and tyrannical principles’. But it was the definition of what constituted a danger to the State which then, as now, caused most controversy. Not even Milton trusted purely to unfettered truth and recognized in Areopagitica the need for control of that ‘which is impious or evil absolutely against faith or manners’. However, it was from demands for religious freedom of speech and conscience that demands for political freedom of expression emerged.
Older Roundhead generals were reluctant to fight their anointed king. In civil war, the image of the enemy presents a much more difficult task for the propagandists, especially in one which began so reluctantly as in England. But Oliver Cromwell, whose Ironside regiment was characterized by a high degree of religious fervour and zeal and motivated by a genuine conviction that his cause was the right one, had no such qualms. Winning every engagement it fought, Cromwell’s New Model Army finally defeated the Royalists at Naseby in 1645. ‘God made them as stubble to our swords,’ wrote Cromwell of his enemies. Thus, with strict discipline and high morale (singing psalms as they went into battle), Cromwell’s troops captured the king in 1646 and imprisoned him for two years. With the war over, the various political factions began to jostle for power. But the king refused to accommodate Puritan demands and, once the Presbyterian and Cavalier opponents of Cromwell’s Independents had been prevented from entering parliament by military force in 1648, the ‘rump’ parliament decided to execute the king in 1649 and Britain became a Puritan republic. Cromwell’s ruthless suppression of Ireland, his conquest of Scotland, and his war with the Dutch and Spanish all took place against the establishment of a personal dictatorship at home by which he became Lord Protector.
Foreign wars and the establishment of a new regime that had to consolidate its position necessarily led to a controlled propaganda campaign employing both positive and negative means. Neither seems to have been particularly effective, despite the justificatory works of Milton and Andrew Marvell. In 1651 Cromwell published his First Defence of the People of England in order to sell the idea of the Commonwealth; a Second Defence in 1654 portrayed him as a biblical figure come to restore liberty to England. But these titles reveal a key flaw: Cromwell was indeed on the defensive, and increasingly so by the later 1650s when projected coins and published broadsheets began to show him wearing an imperial laurel, even a crown. With his position at home resting upon the support of a 50,000-strong standing army, public opinion came to resent not only his military dictatorship and his expensive and belligerent foreign policy, but also a range of powers that would have been the envy of the late King Charles. Despite censor- ship regulations romanticized images were able to maintain the offensive (literally, in view of the satirical broadsides levelled at ‘Copper Nose’ Cromwell) with such publications as England’s New Chains Discovered. The political crisis that followed Cromwell’s death in 1658 demonstrated that centuries of monarchical propaganda could not be eradicated from the English psyche by a ten- year experiment in republicanism. The Tudors had done their work well. England wanted a legitimate king, and Charles I’s son was crowned Charles II in 1660. Although the crisis was by no means over, the English monarch now realized that his (or her) government would in future be dependent for its position upon public support rather than divine right. And with the advent of party politics, attempts to appeal to that public were bound to increase.
