On 29 October 1627, thousands of English soldiers scrambled in a disorganised, deadly retreat from the citadel at Saint-Martin-de-Ré, just off the west coast of France. It was the humiliating culmination of a siege which had lasted three months.
The army’s commander was George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham and Lord High Admiral of England. He had hoped military success against France, on the behalf of King Charles I, would go some way to temper the increasing criticism and scorn to which he was becoming subject.
Failed foreign policy initiatives — including an abortive attempt in 1625 to capture the Spanish port of Cadiz — had already heavily tarnished what had only a few years ago been a stellar reputation, and he was now facing impeachment in the House of Commons.
Things had deteriorated further when, in 1626, a pamphlet printed in Brussels was smuggled into England. Its author, George Eglisham, had been a physician to James I. He accused Buckingham of poisoning the late king and alleged the “bloodthirstie” duke had tried to have him silenced. “Where Buckingham once misliked,” Eglisham warned, “no apologie, no submission, no reconciliation could keepe him from doing mischeefe.”
But a successful, awe-inspiring, reputation-restoring siege on the Île de Ré never materialised. It had been curious in the first place that Buckingham appeared so piously to support the Protestant Huguenot cause — for it was ostensibly on their behalf that the duke fought — despite in 1625 having supplied warships to Catholic French King Louis XIII to help him quash those same rebels.
Perhaps sensing his blurry religious sympathies were doing him no favours with Parliament and the public, Buckingham — at that time aboard his ship, anchored off the coast of the island — had published in August A Manifestation or Remonstrance (1627). How much of this impressive piece of polemic flowed from his own pen — as opposed to those of his staff, well-versed in preparing persuasive propaganda — is not altogether clear.
But its message was unambiguous: in declaring war with France, supporting the dissident Huguenots, and sending Buckingham to achieve these aims, the King was defending the true religion.
Whatever was thought of the duke’s intentions, the ensuing military campaign had been a fairly unmitigated failure: English regiments, unprepared for a drawn-out waiting game, began to run out of food and drink; constant rain flooded their trenches, in which disease and discontent thrived; basic engineering projects, like batteries and other artillery structures, were shoddily put together and unfit for purpose.
The fortifications erected on the narrow bridge across which the soldiers made their final retreat had been positioned on the wrong end, so the French counter-attack proved devastating. Of nearly 7,000 soldiers under the duke’s charge in October 1627, fewer than 3,000 returned to England.
The Duke of Buckingham also found himself fighting a war on two fronts. His French campaign had, in large part, been part of a public relations effort to bolster his declining public image — an image that would suffer another blow if the public became acquainted with the unsavoury facts.
Conquering public opinion was just as challenging as taking the most fortified castle, and while Buckingham was close at hand to supervise military operations on the Île de Ré, those he wished to persuade in England were more than 300 miles away.
As the siege of St Martin’s collapsed in late October, Buckingham must have been all too aware of the public relations nightmare awaiting him back home.
Mercurius Britannicus and the powerful threat of unfavourable press
Nearly three months earlier, a man had been thrown into Gatehouse Prison in Westminster. A search of his property revealed he had in his possession a manuscript copy of Altera Secretissima Instructio, a Catholic pro-Habsburg libel which attacked the Elector Palatine, Frederick V (who was married to the Charles I’s sister, Elizabeth Stuart) and sought to stoke tensions among his supporters through damning accusations of treachery and betrayal — among them, that Buckingham was trying to marry into the royal family.
But the man’s ownership of this scandalous tract, to which the authorities had been tipped off, was only one part — and probably not the greatest — of the reasons for his arrest.
Because this was no ordinary man: it was Nathaniel Butter, probably the most prolific English newsman of his day. And the “property” which had been searched was his bookshop in St. Paul’s Churchyard, including the offices of his news operation, Mercurius Britannicus.
It was true that manuscripts in booksellers’ storage one day had a tendency to furnish their shelves, printed and in their hundreds, the following week — but when Butter, with his tail between his legs, wrote to Privy Council secretary John Coke that he believed it was a “scandalous railing booke, not fitt for every man to read”, and therefore had no intention to print it for the masses, he was probably telling the truth.
That he “esteemed [it] as wast[e] paper” and had no clue what it said (he being unable to read Latin) were desperate pleas for relief that can hardly have been true; given that he lent one copy and printed two more for a price, he evidently had some familiarity with its appeal — not to mention that one can hardly denounce as “scandalous” in one breath a text which, in the next, one claims not to know about at all.
And, as Noel Malcolm notes, as active and successful a stationer as Butter cannot (as he claimed) have been ignorant of the proclamations issued in 1623 and 1624 which expressly forbade importing this kind of writing.
It was, after all, Butter’s keen sense of the print market and news trends which had allowed him to seize upon a new form of news altogether. As early as 1621, Butter had been selling “corantos” — folio broadsheets printed in the Netherlands which provided regular updates on foreign news, typically about military action or high politics. By 1627, Nathaniel Butter’s shelves were packed with “newsbooks”. These were quarto pamphlets, cheaply-produced and stuffed with news from all corners of Europe.
In 1621, Nathaniel Butter and his associate Nicholas Bourne had obtained a monopoly to publish these kinds of works, conditional on their inspection by a government official. In these early years, the two men had collaborated with (and at times competed against) others — most notably Thomas Archer and Nathaniel Newberry — but by the time Butter found himself imprisoned for at least two weeks by the Privy Council, the newsbook gig belonged to Bourne and himself unrivalled.
Corantos: a novel, but old-fashioned, type of news
These newsbooks must have looked quite mundane in comparison to the news pamphlets sharing their shelves at the Pied Bull, Butter’s shop in St. Paul’s Churchyard.
Was it really possible that the text-heavy, non-pictorial title page of The Newes and Affaires of Europe could compete in the eyes of customers with that of The crying Murther […] of Mr Trat, which included a woodcut image of the titular Mr Trat being unceremoniously disembowelled?
Both were published in the same year, 1624, and were birthed from presses belonging to the same printer, Edward Allde, but the difference in form was stark. The content was different too. The lengthy, moralising, religious paratexts of earlier pamphlets were usually pruned; emotive language was toned down, though far from absent entirely; and information explicitly came from multiple sources (not filtered through a unifying writer), so blocks of text were headed with “From Venice”, “From Vienna”, “From Rome”, “From Prague”, and so on…
It is tempting to describe as “paradoxical” the fact that England’s rapidly-evolving news scene had produced, it seemed, a type of literature whose construction harkened back to the manuscript newsletters from which early news pamphlets had emerged in the sixteenth century — but this was precisely the point.
The more sober, periodical, predictable newsbooks satiated a public desire to know of goings-on outside of England — catalysed no doubt by the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War in 1618 — and could exploit the informational networks which scribal news had long-since developed.
Their selling point was not the titillating reportage and sensationalist imagery which single-story news pamphlets relied on, it was the regular access to (apparently) accurate information of important foreign affairs, previously the domain of political elites, military leaders, and travelling merchants.
And it was, in reality, an issue of Mercurius Britannicus which had landed Butter in rather hot water — for it had covered the early stages of Buckingham’s siege of Saint-Martin-de-Ré and not done so in quite so favourable a fashion as the duke would have liked.
The offending issue was not the first to report on the duke’s foreign mission, but it was easily the most provocative. Earlier coverage was sufficiently drab and flattering for the duke’s staff at home and abroad to take no notice of it. There was possibly a little annoyance at the fact that neither Butter nor Bourne had, as required, submitted their newsbooks for inspection since June — but this was not on its own cause for much concern.
But their 1 August edition, which relayed the duke’s fleet landing at the Île de Ré and the siege’s early stages, was problematic. As Thomas Cogswell argues, “the coverage of the duke was sketchy and somewhat ironic”. The English landing on the island, which Allen French described as plagued by a “miserable lack of discipline” and which was fortunate not to have been repelled, was presented as a grand triumph and a credit to Buckingham’s leadership.
Likewise, Butter had reported that the Huguenots at nearby La Rochelle “have declared themselves for the King of England” and “joyned with my Lord Duke”, despite the fact that — much to Buckingham’s embarrassment — such support would take months to materialise. The problem, then, was not simply that excessive praise appeared sarcastic, but also that these were blatant factual inaccuracies, unsupported by persuasive rhetoric or sophistry, which only highlighted the siege’s shortcomings.
By this time, word of these faults was beginning to spread orally and through the underground networks of manuscript pamphlets. In 1627, a commander serving the duke wrote such a pamphlet, titled An Unhappy View of the Whole Behaviour of My Lord Duke of Buckingham at the French Island Secretly Discovered.
William Fleetwood alleged that Buckingham had only taken charge of the siege to “recover his Creditt, by his owne prowesse in this exploite”. (The duke had, after all, been criticised heavily for failing to lead the 1625 attempt to take Cadiz.) He also claimed the duke had so freely uttered his plans at court that some spy must have heard them and informed the French; it was for this reason, Fleetwood said, that the landing was botched.
Perhaps the duke or his staff, knowing such disloyalty was possible, took additional issue with Butter’s August report on account of the fact that its writer claimed to be aboard the duke’s very ship, entreating the reader to “pardon this brevitie [of the report], the Ship rocking so much”.
Thomas Walkley: state-sponsored newsman
So why had Butter and Bourne, veterans of the news trade and well-acquainted with English censorship laws, decided to ramp up their coverage’s tone and pluck — presumably from thin air — a “speciall hand” to do so, spewing forth dangerous misinformation? It was, as Cogswell has shown, because for the first time in some years the two men had competition.
Thomas Walkley was a fairly minor bookseller in seventeenth-century London. His shop, at the sign of the Eagle and Child in Britain’s Bourse (the “New Exchange”) was not far from St. Paul’s Cathedral. He sold a loose variety of works, but had a penchant for plays — including a 1622 quarto publication of Shakespeare’s Othello. What Walkley did not sell was news.
So Butter and Bourne must have been at first bemused and then, upon closer inspection, shocked when, towards the end of July 1627, Walkley published a successful newsbook, titled A Journall of All the Proceedings of the Duke of Buckingham his Grace, in the Isle of Ree — so successful that its first print run was quickly devoured by the public and a second edition produced.
The Mercurius Britannicus editors may have felt secure in their apparent monopoly of the genre, but here was a competitor stamped with the approval “Published by Authoritie” and whose information derived from a source with apparently detailed knowledge of the duke’s siege.
And whereas Butter’s information was of dubious veracity and relied heavily on conjecture, Walkley’s came from a person with very privileged knowledge: Sir Richard Graham, Buckingham’s Master of the Horse who was with the duke in France. Graham had sent an account of the landing to Whitehall and the duke’s staff had quickly handed it over to the printer Augustine Matthews for publication by Walkley, with almost no edits made.
In the five ensuing issues of Walkley’s Journall (styled A Continued Journall…), the duke’s close staff were key sources of information, their letters refined and polished to varying extents for better consumption by the news-hungry public. This was a kind of government interference in news which had no precedent: Buckingham’s staff (presumably with his authorisation) were de facto editors of a newsbook, creatively engaging with the print market to fashion the duke’s public image.
And because Butter and Bourne were at their mercy, they had free reign to do as they wished — it was, as Cogswell puts it, an opportunity “so tempting that it would have made Josef Goebbels swoon”.
And so while Butter and Bourne submitted to the Privy Council’s pressure — having their subsequent newsbooks inspected and returning their coverage to an obedient, flattering tone — Walkley’s newsbooks allowed the duke’s staff to distribute what were essentially early modern press releases disguised as journalism. In addition to his Master of the Horse, his naval secretary, treasurer, and a trusted diplomatic confidant all had their fingers in this propagandistic pie.
Buckingham was not, they insisted, the cowardly leader who hid safely in his ship while others fought — as Fleetwood had claimed — but the quintessential noble warrior, flinging himself into the fray and fighting selflessly.
A battle in print to salvage the Duke of Buckingham’s reputation
This was an image the duke had been cultivating for some time; in the spring of 1627 he had publicly sported eccentric, soldier-like garments as a fashion statement.
A broadsheet sold by Henry Gosson and John Wright shortly before the siege of Saint-Martin-de-Ré had purportedly served to inform readers of the names of the ships involved and their captains — but an illustrative woodcut of a knight on horseback, clearly supposed to represent Buckingham, was front and centre.
Likewise, English soldiers were not the disobedient, poorly-trained rascals they were frequently though to be, but “the bravest Men in the world” who fought “bravely” without complaint. Miraculously, Walkley’s Journall told the public, the drawn-out siege — which saw thousands of soldiers reside in dirty, half-flooded trenches — had not resulted in any significant illness or discontent.
This despite the fact that correspondence from Secretary of State Edward Conway’s own son complained on 20 September 1627 that “The Army growes every day weaker” as “Victualls waste, our purses are emptie, ammunition consumes, winter growes, [… and] we heare nothing from England”. When an assassination attempt was allegedly made against the duke by a French messenger, the following issue contained a woodcut illustration of the “poyson’d knife”.
As the reader flipped through the newsbook’s pages, they found themselves quite literally holding the would-be murder weapon in their hands — how’s that for immersive news?
Whatever instinctive doubts readers may have had about the suspiciously near-perfect conditions of the English troops abroad must have been partially relieved by the persuasive polemic these extraordinary claims were contained within. It was this — along with the privileged information included in the reports — that trumped anything Butter and Bourne could produce.
Indeed, Walkley’s most impressive scoop was the duke’s very own justification for the siege: George Villiers’ Manifestation or Remonstrance (1627), which was printed by the royal printer John Bill only a few weeks after the first edition of the Journall. This, alongside his newsbooks and a detailed broadsheet map of the siege, cemented Walkley as the go-to source for news about Buckingham’s adventures abroad.
Thomas Walkley’s propaganda machine breaks down
But as the siege struggled on towards its calamitous conclusion, the narrative became harder to control and the facts more difficult to spin. The bungled October retreat and subsequent massacre, which ended Buckingham’s campaign, were so disastrous that no attempt was made to address them by Walkley or any official. And so the machine which had previously been keeping the duke’s reputation afloat now fell silent. The English public, desperate for information (not least the number of casualties sustained), noticed.
As the real version of events began to emerge from returning soldiers, helped by manuscript reports and the speed of gossip, Walkley’s propaganda mission backfired for the duke; he would perhaps have retained a better reputation had he done nothing at all. It was one of these secret, radical manuscript pamphlets which apparently encouraged an aggrieved returning soldier, John Felton, to assassinate Buckingham not even a year later, on 23 August 1628 — an action which large parts of the public celebrated.
Even if the Duke of Buckingham’s PR mission fell at the last hurdle, it was significant nonetheless; after all, it laid the groundwork for the political takeovers of newsbooks which dominated the print market during the Civil War and, highlighting the power of news, encouraged censorious legislation in the 1630s.
Thomas Walkley didn’t venture back into news, though he remained an active bookseller until 1658 and was apparently continuously loyal to the crown, arrested in 1649 for distributing royalist propaganda. Nathaniel Butter and Nicholas Bourne remained in business for another three decades, but fizzled out of relevance quite quickly.
What remained, however, were the foundations of English journalism, no longer the chaotic Wild West of the Tudor and Jacobean periods but an increasingly significant, structured, and regulated market which — as Buckingham and Walkley had shown — was becoming increasingly important to the political elites.
