A stop-press news item in 1642
The new year in 1642 saw an escalation of the friction between King Charles I and his Parliament. A ‘Grand Remonstrance’ had been drafted by M.P. John Pym and his colleagues, which detailed Charles I’s abuses, both real and imagined, since Charles’s accession in 1625. On 4 January 1642 the King entered the Commons chamber with an armed guard to effect the arrest of the five MPs responsible. The Speaker refused to reveal where they were and Charles had to leave empty-handed. A pamphlet war broke out reporting the speeches made in Parliament by the accused M.P.s and their supporters and the responses of the King and his supporters.
These pamphlets were widely distributed; they survive in large quantities in libraries today. The Cathedral Library at Canterbury has three main collections of these Civil War pamphlets. I am currently working through a volume of them from the Elham Parish Library, collected at the time by Henry Oxenden (1609–1670), a country squire living in Denton, Kent.
Most of the pamphlets are small documents of eight pages, printed on a single sheet of paper, folded twice to make a four-leaf quarto booklet. They were quick to produce and market for a public anxious to keep up-to-date with the dispute between King and Parliament which was about to lead to the break-out of the English Civil War, resulting in the defeat and execution of Charles seven years later.
Elham 417(36) is a little newsbook reporting developments in mid-January 1642. (It is dated 1641 because at this time the official new year started in March, not on 1 January). The pamphlet includes a speech in the House of Lords by the Earl of Monmouth; a petition from Buckinghamshire defending their M.P. John Hampden; a reply from the King halting proceedings against Hampden and his colleagues; and a petition from Somerset opposing the power of bishops. These documents more or less filled the eight pages and the printer set to work to print the pamphlet, probably intending to produce several hundred copies.
However, before the printing had gone very far, more news came in from Ireland. The printer stopped work, removed the type from the press, squeezed an extra paragraph on to the final page and added an extra line on the title page ‘With the last true newes from Ireland’. Printing then started again with the new version of the pamphlet. But the sheets of the original text were not thrown away: they went on sale too. The English Short-Title Catalogue only knew of the final version with the Irish addition. The Elham Library pamphlet at Canterbury Cathedral is a copy of the previously unknown original version printed without the Irish news.
This eagerness of the book trade to keep the public up-to-date with the latest news continued throughout the Civil War period and the Cromwellian Commonwealth. The bookseller George Thomason (died 1666) made a habit of collecting as many of these little publications as he could. His collection is now in the British Library; it contains over 20,000 items from a period of 20 years, a testament to the activity of the printers and booksellers of the time in keeping the public in the know.
The entry in the English Short-Title Catalogue can be consulted at https://datb.cerl.org/estc/R230731.