Moral Panics, the Media and the Law in Early Modern England

Moral Panics, the Media and the Law in Early Modern England

Also by David Lemmings GENTLEMEN AND BARRISTERS: THE INNS OF COURT AND THE ENGLISH BAR, 1680–1730 PROFESSORS OF THE LAW: BARRISTERS AND ENGLISH LEGAL CULTURE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY THE BRITISH AND THEIR LAWS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY (edited ) Also by Claire Walker GENDER AND POLITICS IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE: ENGLISH CONVENTS IN FRANCE AND THE LOW COUNTRIES

Moral Panics, the Media and the Law in Early Modern England Edited by

David Lemmings Professor of History, University of Adelaide and

Claire Walker Senior Lecturer in History, University of Adelaide

Editorial matter and selection © David Lemmings and Claire Walker 2009 All remaining chapters © their respective authors 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN-13: 978-0-230-52732-4

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents List of Illustrations

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Acknowledgements

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Notes on Contributors

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Note on Works Cited in Endnotes

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1 Introduction: Law and Order, Moral Panics, and Early Modern England David Lemmings

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2 The Concept of the Moral Panic: An Historico-Sociological Positioning David Rowe

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3 ‘This Newe Army of Satan’: The Jesuit Mission and the Formation of Public Opinion in Elizabethan England Alexandra Walsham

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4 Cross-dressing and Pamphleteering in Early Seventeenth-Century London Anna Bayman

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5 Fear made Flesh: The English Witch-Panic of 1645–7 Malcolm Gaskill

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6 ‘A sainct in shewe, a Devill in deede’: Moral Panics and Anti-Puritanism in Seventeenth-Century England Tim Harris

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7 ‘Remember Justice Godfrey’: The Popish Plot and the Construction of Panic in Seventeenth-Century Media Claire Walker

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8 The Dark Side of Enlightenment: The London Journal, Moral Panics, and the Law in the Eighteenth Century David Lemmings

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9 Forgers and Forgery: Severity and Social Identity in Eighteenth-Century England Randall McGowen

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Contents

10 ‘How frail are Lovers vows, and Dicers oaths’: Gaming, Governing and Moral Panic in Britain, 1781–1782 Donna T. Andrew

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11 A Moral Panic in Eighteenth-Century London? The ‘Monster’ and the Press Cindy McCreery

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12 The British Jacobins: Folk devils in the Age of Counter-Revolution? Michael T. Davis

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13 Conclusion: Moral Panics, Law and the Transformation of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England David Lemmings

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Index

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Illustrations 7.1 The Solemn Mock Procession of the POPE, Cardinalls, Jesuits, Fryers, &c: through the City of London, November the 17th 1679 (1680). Image courtesy of the British Museum, © Trustees of the British Museum.

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8.1 Lucipher’s new Row-Barge (c. 1721). Image courtesy of the British Museum, © Trustees of the British Museum.

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11.1 William Dent, A Representation of Rynwick alias Renwick Williams, commonly called the Monster (1790). Image courtesy of the British Museum, © Trustees of the British Museum.

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11.2 Isaac Cruickshank, The Monster Cutting a Lady/Copper Bottoms to Prevent being Cut (1790). Image courtesy of the British Museum, © Trustees of the British Museum.

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11.3 James Gillray, Swearing to the Cutting Monster or a Scene in Bow Street (1790). Image courtesy of the British Museum, © Trustees of the British Museum.

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12.1 James Gillray, The Republican Attack (1795). Image courtesy of the British Museum, © Trustees of the British Museum.

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Acknowledgements This book originated in a symposium on ‘Moral Panics, the Media and the Law’, held at the University of Newcastle, Australia, in September 2005. We are very grateful to all the participants who attended and helped to flesh out our ideas, especially those who travelled from Britain and North America. The symposium and this collection of essays form part of a larger project on Moral Panics and the Law in eighteenth-century England, which was funded by a Discovery Grant from the Australian Research Council. We take this opportunity to thank the ARC for their continuing willingness to fund pure research in the humanities. We would also like to acknowledge the University of Newcastle’s financial contribution to the symposium, and the University of Adelaide for its continuing support. In addition we are grateful to Robert Martin for his assiduous proof-reading and assistance with the index.

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Notes on Contributors Donna T. Andrew is Professor of History at the University of Guelph, Ontario. Her published research has centred on the public sphere and eighteenth-century English culture, especially manners, morals and class formation. She is the author of Philanthropy and Police: London Charity in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989) and co-author (with Randall McGowen) of The Perreaus and Mrs. Rudd: Forgery and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century London (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Anna Bayman is Assistant Editor for the English Historical Review and a member of the Faculty of History, University of Oxford. Her research is on pamphleteering in the Elizabethan and early Stuart period. She has published articles on pamphlets about rogues, witches, and female writers, and is completing a book on Thomas Dekker. Michael T. Davis is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Tasmania. He researches in the area of British political, social and legal history, with a focus on working-class culture and discourses. His publications include as editor Radicalism and Revolution in Britain, 1775–1848 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), a six-volume collection on the London Corresponding Society (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2002), (with Iain McCalman and Christina Parolin) Newgate in Revolution: An Anthology of Radical Prison Literature in the Age of Revolution (Continuum, 2005), (with Paul Pickering) Unrespectable Radicals? Popular Politics in the Age of Reform (Ashgate, 2008) and (with Brett Bowden) Terror: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism in Europe, 1605 to the Future (University of Queensland Press, 2008). Malcolm Gaskill is Reader in Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia. His recent publications include Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and Witchfinders: a Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy (London: John Murray, 2005). Tim Harris is Munro-Goodwin-Wilkinson Professor in European History at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. He has published extensively on popular politics and culture in late seventeenth-century England, and his recent books include Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms, 1660–1685 (Penguin/Allen Lane, 2005) and Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (Penguin/Allen Lane, 2006). ix

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David Lemmings is Professor of History in the School of History and Politics at the University of Adelaide. He is the author of Gentlemen and Barristers: The Inns of Court and the English Bar, 1680–1730 (Oxford, OUP, 1990), and Professors of the Law: Barristers and English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, OUP, 2000), and editor of The British and their Laws in the Eighteenth Century (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005). He is currently completing a book on law, governance and English society in the eighteenth century. Cindy McCreery is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on the role of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and colonial illustrated press, including satirical prints. Major works include The Satirical Gaze: Prints of Women in late Eighteenth-century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) and Ports of the World: Prints from the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (Philip Wilson Publishers, 1999). Randall McGowen is Professor of History at the University of Oregon. He is co-author (with Donna Andrew) of The Perreaus and Mrs. Rudd: Forgery and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century London (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). He has written many articles on the cultural history of the death penalty, and is currently at work on a book on forgery and criminal law reform in early nineteenth-century England. David Rowe’s doctoral studies at the University of Essex, UK, partially overlapped with the tenure of Stan Cohen, who first developed the concept of moral panic, as Professor in its Department of Sociology. Professor Rowe is currently Director of the Centre for Cultural Research (CCR), University of Western Sydney, Australia. His books include Sport, Culture and the Media: The Unruly Trinity (second edition, Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press, 2004) and Critical Readings: Sport, Culture and the Media (edited, Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press, 2004). Claire Walker is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Adelaide. Her published research has focussed on religious women and the politics of recusancy in early modern England. She is the author of Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Alexandra Walsham is Professor of History at the University of Exeter, UK. She has published extensively on the religious and cultural history of early modern Britain and is the author of Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1993), Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: OUP, 1999) and Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England 1500–1700 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2006).

Note on Works Cited in Endnotes All works cited were published in London, unless specified otherwise.

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1 Introduction: Law and Order, Moral Panics, and Early Modern England David Lemmings

[T]he suspicion and accusation of heresy among the population at large was used as a means of suppressing resistance to the exercise of power over it, and of legitimizing the new regime in church and state; heightened vigilance for moral and physical health served the same ends. R. I. Moore (The Formation of a Persecuting Society (Oxford, 1987), 144) Throughout this period [1500–1700], the governors of Church and State repeatedly warned ‘the vulgar’ against busying their heads with talk of politics, for such things were above them and none of their concern. By the end of the seventeenth century such warnings were being drowned out by a chorus of people reading aloud, asking for news, and expressing opinion. Adam Fox (Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000), 405) [W]hat strikes one about the Mohock scare is its air of modernity in combining a yellow press, bitter political rivalries, rich kids gone wrong, and public fears of a rising tide of crime. Neil Guthrie (‘“No Truth or very little in the whole Story”? A Reassessment of the Mohock Scare of 1712’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 20 (1996) 33–56)

1.1 The eighteenth-century experience and early modern panics Most adults living in Western societies today who consume the popular press and electronic media will have experienced a moral panic, ‘one of those 1

2 Introduction

episodes in which public anxieties, especially as expressed and orchestrated by the press and by government actions, serve to “amplify deviance” and to promote new measures for its control’.1 For scholars of modern society, moral panics represent the normal constitution and reconstitution of the social order by majorities who regularly identify ‘social problems’ and deviant groups: this is usually facilitated by reportage and comment in the mass media and in legislative assemblies. More broadly conceived, moral panics have a long history, but it is arguable that the quintessentially modern ‘law and order’ species originated in eighteenth-century England, with the hitherto unknown conjunction of a broad-circulation press, the anxiety-driven middle-class public and regular parliamentary sessions. After 1700, English society experienced uniquely rapid growth in the consumption of printed materials, especially newspapers, magazines and satirical prints. The primary audience for the press was the rising middle class, ‘respectable’ people of property and commerce who were defining their identities in the burgeoning ‘public sphere’ of reading, writing and association. They were both alarmed and fascinated by new social and economic conditions in the rapidly growing towns and cities, especially in the metropolis of London. At the same time, there were significant changes to parliament: permanent sessions were established from 1689, and parliamentarians proved highly responsive to public opinion and pressure, producing an unprecedented body of regulatory legislation.2 Moreover, the press brought politicians closer to the public as their everyday comings and goings, sayings and doings were represented and criticized in print across the country. Here, according to sociological theory, were the necessary ingredients for media-driven anxieties about order and ‘deviance’, as well as the opportunities for politicians and legislative ‘solutions’ that animate and legitimate modern governments. Indeed there appear to be excellent evidentiary reasons for reinterpreting eighteenth-century society and governance with the aid of the moral panics paradigm. Certainly linkages between press constructions, rising anxiety and ‘law’ reactions are evident in relation to crime, especially street robbery.3 There were several waves of public anxiety about what were perceived as rising levels of theft and robbery in urban centres at the conclusion of the major wars that punctuated the century. Between 1689 and 1820 parliaments, governments and judges responded to the widespread public concerns about criminality with a series of statutes dealing with property offences that prescribed the penalty of death (usually known as the ‘Bloody Code’). Meanwhile judges and ministers generally tended to increase the proportion of capital convicts they executed at times of the greatest public anxiety. And of course, the penal colony of Botany Bay was founded at great expense after strident public voices called for the resumption of transportation.4 Moreover, enhanced newspaper interest in crime sometimes anticipated a rise in the numbers of prosecutions, and the dramatic tenor of their reports helped to label offenders as social deviants. They were (for example) quickly identified as ‘banditti’ (or members of

David Lemmings

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gangs), discharged convicts, or just ‘troops of human devils’ who struck down respectable people.5 Popular accounts of trials and ‘last dying speeches’ – a publishing tradition which extended back to the seventeenth century – and moralizing pamphleteers often helped to sustain public interest and raise moral concern.6 In reporting aberrant sexuality too, moral indignation was a staple of the eighteenth-century press, and here also the preferred solution was more stringent laws. Apparently there were moral panics relating to prostitution, clandestine marriage and female adultery, to name only some of the most obvious conjunctions between public opinion, attempts at legislative redress and the control of sexuality. Anxiety about issues like these was frequently reinforced by sensational exchanges in the law courts, as well as in the press and parliament. For example, in the 1730s Lord Hardwicke (successively lord chief justice and lord chancellor) publicly condemned clandestine marriage from the judicial bench as ‘one of the growing evils of these times’, and in the 1790s his successor Lord Chief Justice Kenyon ‘inaugurated a reign of terror in King’s Bench against adulterers’.7 Indeed, in an age where conventional concerns about patriarchy and the orderly transmission of property in families were challenged by social mobility, increasing social exchange and freedom of contract, the issue of controlling female sexuality was a major worry for the emerging middle class. So it often found its way into the courts, whose proceedings in turn provided the press with considerable material for titillation (written and visual), as well as moralizing.8 The governance of crime and sexuality in the eighteenth century therefore provides rich territory for investigating the generation of ‘law and order’ moral panics and adding to our knowledge about processes of social regulation. Indeed perhaps these studies may contribute to further understanding the historical development of modern governance and its relations with popular opinion. Of course sixteenth- and seventeenth-century historians are familiar with popular panics about witchcraft and popery, but modern sociologists have shown that during times of rapid social change a competitive press with a commercial interest in sensationalizing deviance may create and replicate uniquely modern ‘social problems’ that carry expectations of official intervention for control.9 It has been argued that official reactions to these issues typically represent the modern state’s necessary investment in exaggerating and acting against social deviance to maintain and legitimate its hegemony in the public sphere. Thus in the eighteenth century increasingly visible government sensitivity to social problems like robbery, alcohol consumption or gaming may be a sign of evolving relations between society and state, whereby ministers and MPs were increasingly conscious of public opinion. Certainly, in the modern context, the maintenance of power depends on manufacturing public consent, and moral panics are often mapped together in the interests of law and order media campaigns that help to elect and re-elect governments.10 Several of the essays in this

4 Introduction

book duly investigate some of the connections between public opinion, the courts and the experience of government in the possibly unique context of eighteenth-century moral panics. However, since one of the main purposes of the book is to test the broad hypothesis that the nexus between law, government and popular opinion changed decisively after 1700, it is also important to study panics in earlier periods for a comparative perspective. The most optimistic view of the public sphere’s prehistory is that in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries political and religious issues created a series of limited and evanescent ‘publics’ associated with the court and parliament that were drawn into discussions about affairs of state.11 Certainly before 1689 access to legislative redress was very restricted, while the press was relatively undeveloped and usually censored. Presumably this means that grass roots oral, visual and performative or theological media must have helped to constitute popular alarms such as those about popery, witchcraft and the place of women; while ‘scribal publication’ of manuscript material enabled courtiers and ministers to raise alarms about issues beyond high political circles.12 Were panics like these therefore more or less susceptible to official manipulation? Perhaps the absence of a developed and enduring public sphere encompassing officials, legislators, and metropolitan and provincial opinion means they were quite different in kind and extent from their eighteenth-century counterparts: being relatively more localized, anarchic and ephemeral? It is true that Civil War and Revolution in the mid-seventeenth-century occasioned a proliferation of public comment and debate, recently characterized as a ‘transitional moment’ in the growth of the public sphere.13 There were moral panics around this time. For example J. C. Davis has argued that in 1650–1 a spate of pamphlets manufactured a panic around the reported behaviour of a tiny handful of religious fanatics whose antics were blown up into strident alarms about a new and dangerous movement: the Ranters. It is not clear how widespread the panic was, although it may have been sufficient to help inspire legislation against blasphemy and adultery.14 There were panics across the Atlantic too. Kai Erikson analysed outbreaks of religious intolerance among the puritan settlers of midseventeenth century New England, as well as the Salem witchcraft hysteria of 1692, interpreting them all as ‘boundary crises’ generated by this close-knit community’s consciousness of doubt about maintaining its values in the midst of development.15 In England levels of public discussion declined after 1660, and Lake and Pincus argue that it was only following the Glorious Revolution, with the triumph of Whig-commercial approaches to political economy and the parallel development of urban-bourgeois culture, that public comment and debate about political economy and other affairs of state became an established feature of national life.16 As suggested above, it appears that public awareness of ‘social problems’ increased too, as discussion on these subjects increased exponentially in speed, volume and intensity. Indeed, do contrasts like these represent a radical shift in relations between the people and the law

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in the eighteenth century, a change that was partly fuelled by the enhanced ability of the press to constitute genuinely middle-class opinion about the growing expectation for central government ‘law and order’ responses to perceptions of rapid social change?

1.2 Hypothesis: Eighteenth-century opinion, law and governance Social histories of eighteenth-century England have highlighted the rise of middle-class consciousness with increasing wealth and pretensions, urbanization, and new habits of consumption and association.17 The working hypothesis of this introduction is that popular engagement with the administration of justice and the business of law making and governance more generally assumed new cultural forms through middle-class habits of print culture consumption and the development of ‘polite’ moral consensus. To be specific, men and women of modest property constituted the readership for newspapers and magazines part of whose staple fare (in peacetime) was news and anguished moral comment about crime, deviance and scandal, together with reports of trials and parliamentary debates. By investigating eighteenth-century moral panics relating to money markets, Jacobitism, crime and the administration of justice, gambling and popular radicalism, and comparing their ‘law and order’ responses with earlier panics about religious minorities, witchcraft and gender roles, this book seeks to reveal some of the distinctive features of modern social relations with law and governance as they were affected by the growth of the ‘public sphere’.18 It is appropriate at this point to outline what appear to be the distinctive features of eighteenth-century panics. 1.2.1 The accelerated production and consumption of print culture Modern moral panics are largely generated by the mass-circulation press. For example, in 1964 the first shock-horror Mods and Rockers story of youth terror at Clacton in England was broken by the Daily Mirror, the Daily Express and the Daily Telegraph. Forty years later The Telegraph and other media agencies carried a series of morally outraged reports about ‘happy slapping’, or public assaults carried out by teenagers who simultaneously filmed their violence on mobile phones for exchange with their friends.19 And in the US in 2005 a host of tabloid newspapers and magazines carried scare stories about ‘meth-mouth’, the corrosive dental effects of methamphetamine, which they labelled as America’s most dangerous drug because it was supposedly spreading like wildfire among young people, especially the prison population.20 There is considerable evidence that panics like these represent what is today called ‘media hype’. The hard-pressed journalists and editors of publications like these have to fill columns and sell stories; they exist in a competitive commercial environment where maximizing circulation and sales is their pre-eminent consideration. But when did these conditions first arise?

6 Introduction

In this connection it is significant that newspapers proliferated in England after the licensing laws lapsed for good in 1695.21 Already by 1712 as many as 12 papers were being produced in London; by mid-century there were 18; and in 1790 there were 23, including 14 dailies, seven tri-weeklies and two weeklies. Moreover, there were also more than 20 provincial papers by the 1720s, and over 70 by 1800. This compares with a handful of licensed newspapers – including the official London Gazette – before 1695.22 Government taxes meant these publications were relatively expensive (2d–6d between 1712 and the 1790s), but the leading London weeklies were selling thousands of copies per issue by the 1740s, and copies were frequently passed around, read by multiple visitors to coffee houses, inns and barber-shops, or even read aloud to interested but illiterate people. It has been estimated that a quarter of the inhabitants of London read a newspaper around 1750, and around a third in the 1780s, and the most important London papers had many readers in the provincial towns and cities, sometimes supplementing a local publication. So although the primary readership of the newspaper press was probably ‘polite’ society, tradesmen, shopkeepers and small freeholders were also readers, and evidence suggests that sometimes ordinary working people were also exposed.23 While this was not strictly a mass audience, it certainly encompassed a broad slice of English society, including the rising middle classes and many beyond. What did they read? Politics and, from the 1760s, parliamentary affairs were staples, and in a century of warfare and imperial ambition foreign news about diplomacy and especially military and naval campaigns was pre-eminent. Naturally, in an environment where they were threatened with oblivion because of cut-throat competition and precarious profit margins, enterprising authors and printers were keen to find other types of material that would interest readers, and from early in the century the London newspapers regularly reported robberies and other crimes.24 By the late eighteenth century newspapers were certainly the main source of printed information about crime and the administration of justice generally, and according to Nicholas Rogers, already by the 1750s some titles were choosing to focus on violent crime in the metropolis as a ‘special priority’.25 Indeed as the reportage developed, it reproduced an impression of crime that was wide-scale in coverage, as well as focused around particularly violent offences, like robbery, burglary and murder. Since the provincial press frequently recycled accounts of London robberies, trials and criminals, and the most popular London newspapers circulated widely, ‘The effect of this coverage was to create a national experience of crime and punishment, one that gave especial prominence to London crime and parliamentary solutions’.26 The experience tended to represent the capital as a dangerous place, a centre of corrupting immorality, by contrast with the rest of the country.27 Moreover the impression of metropolitan deviance was not confined to criminality, strictly defined. As noted previously, there was also space for scandal, especially of

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a sexual nature. For example the details of separation and divorce cases in the London courts were attracting attention from the newspapers by at least the 1730s, and from the middle of the eighteenth century they sustained more and more titillating publications, including dedicated magazines such as the Town and Country Magazine and the rather coarser Bon Ton Magazine.28 In addition to the newspaper reports and magazines, the eighteenthcentury market for crime and scandal spawned a whole genre of pamphlets reporting trials and offenders. Most famously in the case of mainstream crime there were the regular Old Bailey Sessions Papers, semi-official pamphlet reports of criminal trials in London, and the Accounts of the Ordinary of Newgate, which gave potted biographies of the offenders who were hanged in the metropolis, usually including pointed comments about where they had taken a wrong moral turn. Publications like these spawned multi-volume compilations of criminal trials and lives, a subspecies of crime literature which became common after 1760 and often went by the name of the ‘Newgate Calendar’.29 Similarly, occasional pamphlets about adultery trials reached their apogee in 1780, with a seven-volume collection of trials in the ecclesiastical courts.30 Thus the existence of a competitive broad-circulation commercial press, and the proliferation of reportage about metropolitan crime, aberrant sexual behaviour and the administration of justice in these areas is clear. But of course it is also necessary to consider the style and context of this material. 1.2.2 Crime reporting, middling consciousness and morality tales Given the increase of printed materials relating to crime and scandal, perhaps the most important question in the context of studying moral panics is: how far did this material make value judgements and encourage a moral stance, thereby helping to constitute respectable opinion and its discontents? Certainly newspapers, magazines and pamphlets appeared to be opinion makers when it came to reporting crime.31 For example in the 1720s aggregated reports in the London Journal would have conveyed the impression that parts of the east end of London were virtually seminaries for gangs of thieves and housebreakers.32 The style of newspaper reportage about crime also regularly transmitted clear judgements about the perpetrators by the various pejorative labels they attached to them.33 In these ways the paper appeared to construct disciplinary knowledge about moral deviancy; its reports created ‘folk devils’, in Stanley Cohen’s original formulation.34 Newspapers also raised anxiety by focusing coverage of disturbing events at sensitive moments, such as when soldiers and sailors were discharged at the end of wars.35 Indeed sometimes they even suggested cultural crisis, by juxtaposing dramatic accounts of robbers and adulterers with rebellions, military disasters and constitutional breakdowns in ways which anticipate the concept of the ‘signification spiral’, where quite different events are mapped onto the original panic and converge into a heightened and more general sense of crisis.36 Thus in the early 1720s the government-sponsored London Journal mixed lurid

8 Introduction

accounts of vicious London street robberies and social banditry in Hampshire with highly charged reports about the Jacobite conspiracy led by the bishop of Rochester.37 And in the early 1780s, another period of acute concern about violent crime in the context of demobilization and high unemployment, the papers combined graphic reports of robberies and murders with increasingly alarmist accounts of mutinies and complaints about the Fox–North coalition. In this context, readers of the Newcastle Journal would surely have been alarmed to learn (in April 1783) about a veritable ‘contagion’ of immorality and insubordination among the common people which was inspired by the corrupt opportunism of the leading politicians: Riots and mutinies rather encrease than subside! – The reflux of the war seems to be more dangerous than the war itself. – The soldiers and sailors, seeing or hearing of their superiors quarrelling, follow their example, and the State malady becomes contagious! – Those Members of the State, who, in order to thrust themselves into power, strongly inculcated on the people the doctrine of self-government, now feel the effects, and see the evil of stirring up the multitude to affect a greater degree of power than they are capable of exercising with discretion. – Where all these things will end, no body yet knows; but all men of understanding can suggest to themselves the necessary effects of such causes. – May the great hand of Divine Providence interpose to save us from our numerous enemies, and our own vices and folly! Or we are undone.38 Hysterical comments like this one seem to represent the authentic conclusion of an escalating moral panic that generates a widespread ‘social problem’ and ultimately draws a ‘law and order’ response.39 Certainly at the time the government and the judges seem to have been persuaded that there was a real threat to the social order, for it was publicly declared that henceforth capital convicts should not normally expect to obtain pardons, and up and down the country the gallows groaned with disproportionate numbers of victims.40 Indeed after mid-century, and certainly by the 1780s, growing anxiety about what was perceived as proliferating crime and violence, fed by the regular reporting of events in the newspapers, tended to be generalized into concerns that the poor, when removed from the social constraints of small communities and tempted by the wealth of large towns and cities, were intoxicated by prospects of wealth and pleasure.41 While the newspapers furnished the raw material, and many of the essential ingredients for such a view, together with occasional bursts of hysterical comments like the one just noticed, the crisis was most fully fleshed out by essayists like the novelist and police magistrate Henry Fielding, who supplied the essential ingredients of assumed moral consensus and a call for remedial action in the form of more effective judicial punishment. Writing in 1750, Fielding grounded his arguments about crime and the poor in a legal and historical dissertation on the declension of the English polity,

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whereby the balanced constitution of hierarchical society had been destroyed by the corrupting power of wealth and mobility on the common people, with the result that a golden age of minimal crime and social harmony had been lost.42 He also believed the administration of justice had been fatally flawed by social change. According to this view the frankpledge system of the AngloSaxons, which he believed had effectively prevented theft, had been rendered redundant by the ‘wanderings’ of the poor from the supervision of their communities. Since the common people were now so abandoned in their libertine viciousness, they should be only the subjects of law, rather than participants in public punishments. Hence he argued that their disruptive presence should be excluded from executions, which ought to be staged privately, or at least in a highly controlled environment, like those in Holland, with all the majesty which elaborate state ritual could conjure up, to work on ‘the Minds of the Multitude’.43 Fielding therefore seems to exemplify the ‘moral entrepreneur’: the individual with a policy agenda who intervenes in the midst of a moral panic with an opinion piece suggesting ‘something ought to be done about it’, and thereby garners support for his cause.44 Of course newspapers also printed plenty of direct moral commentary, in the form of editorials, cautionary tales and letters, especially in the leading articles of the more ambitious newspapers and periodicals. For example, in April 1725 The Weekly Journal or Saturday’s-Post included a long opening essay on the evils of luxury, which condemned masquerades in particular as a symptom of moral decline in the society, tending ultimately to the destruction of the state if not repressed by the law. In a gesture characteristic of early eighteenth-century opinion, the author adduced classical history to aid his argument, noting that ‘Plutarch dates the Decline and Fall of the Commonwealth of Sparta, from the Time their Magistrates neglected putting the Laws in Execution against little Disorders and Irregularities’. In the contemporary case, however, the particular problem was that ordinary people were emulating their betters, for a recent magistrates’ raid on a masquerade had discovered an assembly of ‘ChamberMaids, Cook-Maids, foot-Men, or Apprentices, who having just received their Christmas-Boxes, were resolved to be vicious in a very polite Way’. Thus he drew the same moral as Fielding and The Newcastle Journal: ‘we may see how Vice descends’, and even threatened similar offenders with the draconian provisions of the Black Act, since it criminalized people who were found in disguise. Readers were reminded, ‘We have … Laws in Force for preventing these lewd Assemblies’ and the authorities were exhorted to do their duty in ‘the preventing the Spreading [of] this Infection’.45 Here again, the eighteenthcentury press was developing the idea of a social problem identified with the common people of the metropolis, and warning that it would spread like a disease, unless the authorities intervened. It is usually taken for granted that the proliferation of the press in eighteenth-century England helped to constitute enlightened and progressive middling consciousness.46 However the role played by scapegoating the

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Introduction

poor has not been fully recognized, even though literary evidence of social condescension and even distaste for the values and habits of the common people is not hard to find.47 For example, while Addison and Steele’s Spectator cultivated sensibility and compassion as refinements which distinguished right-thinking people, they admitted that the poor of London appeared as ‘a different species’, and their progressive merchant Sir Andrew Freeport discouraged giving alms as ‘the Wages of Idleness’.48 Of course at the same time they also gently distanced themselves from the prevailing vices of the aristocracy, and consistently promoted moral leadership among the social and political elite. Indeed, given the eighteenth-century middling sort’s growing appetite for rather more sensational news and comment than that found in the Spectator, their developing sense of differentiation suggests that moral panics about those whom they defined as deviant others would have been a regular feature of the contemporary cultural landscape. Certainly, if we accept Habermas’s argument that the public sphere of critical reflection and discussion developed out of the emotional and imaginative resources generated by the domestic middle-class family,49 it is easy to see that news and comment about crime, disorder, luxury and unrestrained sexuality were natural topics of polite discourse and propertied anxiety. We know that gentler warnings about the dangers of these subjects were the common fare of contemporary novels. Like news of morally transgressive behaviour, they exercised a powerful appeal by confirming the reader’s superior values and habits, while simultaneously exciting the senses. At the same time the consumption of moralizing pamphlets, journals and magazines allowed individual readers to constitute the authentically modern form of civic action: vicarious participation in critical public debate about the protection of the bourgeois family and its economic assets.50 1.2.3 Law solutions: Legislation and judicial reactions Together with the widespread consumption of news and the constitution of ‘respectable’ opinion, as suggested, a third primary ingredient for modern moral panics is reactive ‘law solutions’. Here too, eighteenth-century England was marked by quantitative and qualitative shifts in the availability of coercive law. By contrast with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when parliaments sat irregularly, and the output of legislation was low, from 1689 parliament was in session every year. Indeed, there was a ‘dramatic rise’ in the output of legislation during the eighteenth century: whereas around 2,700 acts were passed in the two centuries between 1485 and 1688, nearly 14,000 reached the statute book in the 100 years or so from the Glorious Revolution of 1689 to the Act of Union with Ireland in 1801.51 The principal reason for this massive increase in the output of law was that there was now much more parliamentary time available for bills to pass all their stages: previously many had been cut off when parliaments were dissolved unexpectedly.

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It is true that the overwhelming majority of the acts passed in the eighteenth century were private, or local measures. For example, there were hundreds of acts for settling estates, enclosing land, establishing toll roads and improving the navigation of rivers. But Joanna Innes has shown that parliament was also responsible for a very substantial body of general legislation which might be categorized together as ‘social policy’ measures, applying as they did (for example) to the regulation of the poor, vagrancy and the practice of imprisonment for debt, as well as the more familiar preoccupations with the prevention and punishment of crime.52 Unlike modern legislative programmes, these acts were not necessarily sponsored by ministers, but it was common for their backbench authors to consult the law officers or judges, especially in criminal justice legislation, and officials were sometimes involved behind the scenes.53 Moreover several of the landmark ‘law and order’ measures were clearly promoted by ministers or MPs close to them. I am thinking here of the Riot Act of 1714, the Black Act of 1723, the Transportation Act of 1718, and at the other end of the century, the Middlesex Justice Act of 1792. Indeed, between 1689 and 1820 parliaments, governments and judges responded to public concerns about criminality with a long series of statutes dealing with property offences which prescribed the penalty of death. Of course this is usually known as the ‘Bloody Code’, and although the individual measures were not necessarily passed quickly or unthinkingly, in the aggregate they do suggest that in the eighteenth century the business of government was much more attuned to ‘social problems’, than it had ever been before. There were other ‘law’ reactions which appeared to be identified with eighteenth-century social problems. Here I am thinking of the comments and reactions of lawyers in the courts, and particularly the judges who passed sentence on defendants. In his analysis of the moral panic about Mods and Rockers, Cohen drew attention to the ways in which magistrates were disproportionately harsh in their sentences passed on the youths prosecuted by the police. He argued that the JPs’ sentences were the result of them being influenced by the ‘generalized belief system’ that the moral problem was contagious among certain social groups and had to be checked by strong measures.54 Can we see this in the 1700s? Certainly it is well known that the judges exercised their discretion to hang proportionately more felons in ‘years of crisis’, when the trial dockets were full and public anxiety was high.55 There is also some evidence of ‘dramatization of deviance’, whereby magistrates and judges use dramatic language and gestures which isolate the offender and exaggerate the scope of the problem.56 For example, faced with what he saw as the spreading corruption of underage marriages in the precincts of the Fleet Prison, Lord Chancellor Hardwicke resorted to physically tearing up the Fleet registers in court, with accompanying moral invective.57 Forty years later, Thomas Erskine, the most famous barrister of his time, teamed up with Lord Chief Justice Kenyon to make

12

Introduction

examples of adulterers by imposing massive damages in criminal conversation cases. In one case Kenyon blasted the defendant thus: ‘God forbid that in this civilised country, such a monster should be suffered to commit these crimes with impunity’. And in another Erskine warned the jury ‘to guard your families from the growing debaucheries of the age’.58 For these moralist lawyers, sexual incontinence in marriage was a spreading contagion, and it was legitimate to use the full dramaturgical weight of the law against it. 1.2.4 Eighteenth-century moral panics So in the eighteenth century there was widespread consumption of news and comment about crime and scandal; developing middling consciousness formed around polite sensibility, the protection of family values and differentiation from the poor; and an activist legislature and judiciary which responded to ‘social problems’ with coercive legislation and exemplary justice. These appear to be the necessary ingredients for modern moral panics of the ‘law and order’ variety. But how far can we connect the dots, and identify individual media-driven panics associated with moral threats which produced ‘law’ reactions? Historians of eighteenth-century England have not been slow to discover moral panics. For example, the parliamentary historian David Hayton sees a moral panic in the series of bills and acts during the 1690s against swearing, profaning the Sabbath, gaming, duelling and adultery.59Admittedly, this was yet another chapter in the long history of attempts to govern personal morals and manners by law, dating from late medieval times.60 But Hayton views the 1690s episode as a new departure because of the urgency of the movement, which was accelerated by a pamphlet war and quickly taken up by the king, the archbishop of Canterbury and the judiciary, not to mention a range of grass roots moral reform societies.61 Another broad cluster of public anxiety outbreaks which historians have tended to brand as moral panics is the ongoing concern about clandestine (i.e. secret) marriage, and adultery and the successive attempts to use the law to prevent them, thereby ensuring the proper transmission of property via monogamous unions. Lawrence Stone claimed to identify a moral panic about adultery in the 1790s, when criminal conversation cases were providing excellent copy for a prurient but moralizing public and Erskine and Kenyon were thundering against marital infidelity. A parliamentary bill designed to criminalize adultery failed in 1800. Clandestine marriage also caused much anxiety. In 1753, after several previous attempts had failed, Hardwicke’s Marriage Act sought to eliminate the problem, which was anathema to families of property because it threatened arranged marriages and encouraged bigamy, leading to the bastardization of children when a previous secret marriage came to light. But most of the pamphleteering on the issue occurred two years after the act was passed, and middling public opinion was divided on its merits. It is therefore hard to see the legislation of 1753 as the culmination of a

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middle-class moral panic, rather than a piece of legislation which was generated by a narrower concern among the parliamentary elite about the need to protect propertied families against the bourgeois marriage market.62 As I have suggested already, one principal species of eighteenth-century ‘social problems’ which seems to be susceptible to interpretation as moral panic centres on crime, popular disorder and the administration of justice. After a careful analysis of prosecutions in one county Douglas Hay commented, ‘A year of high crime rates provoked, to a greater or lesser degree, a moral panic, and the indictment levels of the courts must increasingly have reflected that state of mind’.63 But historians of crime are hardly agreed on this issue, and there are particular doubts about the role of the press. Their doyen John Beattie has written about the eighteenth-century public’s ‘sense of crime as a growing social problem’, and notes that ‘crime reporting and criminal biographies fed the panic’ which he identifies around 1700.64 However Beattie is not fully persuaded about the existence of moral panics in the sense of significant exaggeration by the press. Indeed he regards the successive waves of anxiety about crime which occurred in the eighteenth century as ‘genuine’, insofar as they seem broadly to have reflected the changing incidence of indictments. Also for Beattie, government reaction to public anxiety is a sign that there was a ‘real’ problem: ministers, MPs and magistrates were likely to be well informed about the numbers of indictments and commitments for trial, and they were unlikely to invest complex administrative effort in countering chimeras.65 On the other hand, he admits that in an environment where prosecuting crime depended on discretionary decision-making by victims, magistrates, part-time constables and local jurors, the levels of indictments themselves reflected public opinion about the state of crime, as well as the incidence of robberies.66 Of course victims and prosecutors were exposed to the newspaper and magazines, just as MPs and ministers were. On some occasions the press seems to have had a clear formative influence over anxiety about crime. By contrast with Beattie, Peter King has noted that newspapers often anticipated post-war increases in crime before they were evidenced by rising numbers of indictments, and identifies a newspaper-led moral panic in the early 1780s, at the conclusion of the American War of Independence.67 His detailed study of law-and-order reporting by competing newspapers in the Colchester area of Essex in 1765–6 shows that accounts of local crime were essential ammunition in a circulation war between the Chelmsford Chronicle and the Ipswich Journal. It is likely that the hard-pressed proprietor of the Chronicle saw an opportunity to attract more readers by reporting robberies and offering his paper’s assistance in apprehending the offenders.68 King cautions that more extensive work is needed before it can be shown that newspapers were ‘the major determinants of communal perceptions about the prevalence of crime’, but suggests they may well have focussed ‘general apprehensions’ into ‘more specific fears’, leading to more widespread prosecution of offences.69

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Certainly there is eighteenth-century evidence which provides grounds for being cautious about the precise role of the newspapers in spreading individual panics, while not doubting the overall importance of the press in the constitution and convergence of opinion. According to Jan Bondeson’s treatment of the case of the ‘Monster’, who reportedly terrorized young women on the streets of London in 1788–90, sensational press exposure of assaults on women may have struck a chord among readers because it played upon underlying anxieties about the morally corrosive influence of the French Revolution. Uniting together against the Monster probably provided some release for Londoners alarmed by negative readings of the Revolution like that of Edmund Burke, as nagging anxiety was converted into personalized horror and antipathy.70 Moreover the ensuing panic could well have been a subliminal call for the reassertion of polite relations between the sexes against the threat of sexual liberty, as more or less violent encounters between men and women in the streets were assimilated to the published Monster stories, and the sexual threat of predatory men was collectively condemned. But although the initial press reportage was important in concentrating polite opinion, Bondeson notes that it was the intervention of a moral entrepreneur, John Julius Angerstein, which spread the monster mania among women of all social classes, and thereby multiplied the reporting of attacks. Angerstein was crucial because he arranged to distribute sensational posters all over the capital proclaiming the assailant’s description, and ultimately galvanized opinion into a focused campaign for action.71 In the case of the 1712 moral panic about the Mohocks, supposedly a large gang of privileged young men who violently attacked vulnerable men and women in London just for the fun of it, the initial panic was created by a range of publications: magazines, broadsides and pamphlets as well as newspapers. On this occasion the role of the press in magnifying the reported incidents out of all proportion and raising the ire of respectable opinion is clear; but there is also strong evidence for the importance of political intervention and opportunity on the part of government. Certainly the authorities quickly accredited virtually all the street crime that occurred in London around this time to the Mohocks, and responded with royal proclamations, rewards and vigorous policing measures designed to target similar offenders, thereby further exacerbating public fear. Some politically partisan contemporaries commented acidly that the Tory ministry was simply promoting party advantage by associating the disturbances with some prominent young Whigs arrested for riot and assault, but the more credible motive was the government’s interest in playing on the undercurrent of fears in London about street crime, and demonstrating that they were firmly in control.72 Indeed it has been theorized that a tendency on the part of governments to overreact against or even invent public enemies for political capital is most often experienced at times of political instability, when regimes are seeking to extend and legitimize their authority.73 So it is important to look for the

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hand of the state in the creation of moral panics, as well as the opinion of the public, especially when there is hot competition for political supremacy, as was the case in the early eighteenth century. Perhaps the growth of sophisticated government interventions like this is a characteristic of essentially modern cultures of governance: for while they have been observed as early as the twelfth century, they are usually associated with more recent times, when politicians are necessarily preoccupied with what we would call public relations.

1.3 Conclusion: media, anxiety and law in early modern England Despite these suggestive examples, at this stage the jury is out on the question of prototypical ‘law and order’ moral panics in the eighteenth century. But even if we reject the rather facile connections that I have made in this introduction, and accept that public anxiety about crime and scandal was founded on genuine threats to perceived social norms, nevertheless I believe the links between ‘moral’ opinion-formation and governance are well worth investigating for what they may say about early modern society, opinion and authority. Here it is necessary to be clear about the objectives of this collection. There is little point in simply applying a rather crude sociological model about the representation of cultural reproduction simply to tick off some genuine moral panics while rejecting other events because they do not fit the diagnosis. Rather, by way of heuristic analysis, I want to suggest some ways of using the concept critically to ask significant historical questions of the available evidence. First, how far was eighteenth-century England – if not Britain generally – a uniquely ‘mediatized’ society, in the sense that extensively detailed news was dispersed far beyond local experience by the press and the interchange among its products constituted the growth of active and sophisticated public opinion? Adam Fox has argued that whereas there was plenty of grass roots demand for news about affairs of state throughout the early modern period, and oral or scribal transmission enabled fabulous stories to spread rapidly, the growth of professional journalism, the postal service and commercial printing stimulated an ever-increasing appetite for regular draughts of news and opinion about current affairs. He believes the satisfaction of this demand via the print media made for greater and more sophisticated participation in public affairs.74 The issue of participation is taken up below, but at this point it is worth speculating briefly about whether changes in the incidence and characteristics of panics across the period under consideration suggest greater political sophistication among the public. Certainly on the face of it the sociological model of law and order moral panics implies a high degree of popular irrationality, insofar as the scale and seriousness of events are exaggerated; and there is considerable scope for manipulation

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by politicians, the commercial press and interested pundits. Nevertheless, a superficial comparison of seventeenth and eighteenth-century panics may suggest that after circa 1700, with the multiplication of newspaper, periodical and pamphlet sources of information and comment, there was enhanced consciousness about the conditions of English society, and outbreaks of anxiety therefore became more complicated, if not necessarily more rational. Thus, rather than focusing on single issues, for example fears about Catholic plots, demonic possession or the untimely death of the monarch, eighteenth-century panics appear often to have been multifaceted, involving (for example) interconnected concerns about public finance and government, luxury and social emulation, and gender and sexuality, as well as the perennials of religion, foreign invasion and political conspiracy. Moreover, they frequently seem to have represented rising expectations of remedial governance, perhaps arising out of mediated knowledge about policing exploits, courtroom crackdowns and legislative interventions. According to these lines of thinking, the anxieties and fears of the Georgian middle-classes were not necessarily rational or accurate, but they were the product of a complex amalgam of information sources that promised solutions, as well as identifying social problems. A second and connected question is: does the regular occurrence of moral panics imply a condition of ‘ontological insecurity’ in eighteenth-century England related to the media experience of rapid cultural change? The recent theorists agree that moral panics arise in conditions of enduring anxieties about risk, and these are characteristics of quintessentially modern societies, where perceptions of rapid change and doubts about traditional sources of authority and identity provoke the constitution or affected reconstitution of moral norms.75 It is normally in the period 1550–1700 that historians consider ‘the times were out of joint’, but perhaps the experience of reading about frequent robberies, middle-class adultery, prostitution on an industrial scale and the other moral digressions supposedly associated with the growth of metropolitan culture were as psychologically disturbing as religious reformation, dearth and reliance on a belief-system that failed to explain the natural world? Older textbooks on eighteenth-century Britain often referred to the age of stability, here focusing primarily on high political and constitutional narratives; under this optic the period struggled to compete with the Tudor–Stuart age for dramatic impact. But perhaps they were looking in the wrong place. Reading eighteenth-century newspapers seems to anticipate the Victorians in so far as respectable people appeared to be both fascinated and terrified by deviance and transgression. Indeed, perhaps they were early victims of the ‘incapacitating anxiety’ often associated with modern urban living, whereby the uncertainties of rapid social and cultural change and enhanced consciousness of risk are only managed by constructing and scapegoating cultural enemies who could be the targets of official punishment.76

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Thirdly, and most interesting of all for a historian interested in general questions about law and governance, what do eighteenth-century moral panics tell us about popular participation and agency in law-making? Here it is necessary to consider recent theoretical criticisms of the simple model which I introduced at the start. Stanley Cohen’s original formulation of the classic moral panic was subsequently transformed by a neo-Marxist and Gramscian emphasis on the ability of elite groups to mobilize anxiety with the aim of justifying their hegemony and preferred forms of social regulation.77 However the impact of Foucault’s work has led more recent theorists of moral panics to conceptualize them in terms of discursive formations of opinion, which are generated relatively spontaneously.78 Indeed, it appears to me that with the rise of news media ‘the rule of law’ assumed new and more complex meanings for the population of eighteenth-century England. Although most people’s participation in law and governance was confined to consuming newspapers, magazines and prints with accounts and images of trials and parliamentary debates, it appears that their consumption habits may have had a ‘powerful’ impact, insofar as titles which prospered did so because they helped to constitute their readers’ and viewers’ opinions. Moreover, the apparently reciprocal relations between opinion, judicial decision-making and legislation suggest ‘discipline’ from within society and ‘law’ from above actually formed a continuous culture of social regulation. For some Foucauldian sociologists, this was a coercive form of communication that became the essence of modern government.79 It therefore seems to be vitally important to investigate these processes, and to consider interactions between the growth of the press, the politics of cultural reproduction and the law, if we are to understand how governance and social power developed with the growth of the press and parliamentary government. It is also critical to compare and contrast the constitution of public anxieties before and after 1700, taking account of differing access to legislative redress and the relative importance of oral and visual theological media as sources of popular alarm, as well as the influence of the print media. This collection aims to address such issues across more than two centuries, and takes account of several different types of panics.

Notes Earlier versions of this introduction were read at Lincoln College, Oxford, and the University of Adelaide. I am grateful for the audiences’ useful comments on those occasions. 1. J. Davis, ‘The London Garotting Panic of 1862: A Moral Panic and the Creation of a Criminal Class in mid-Victorian England’, in V. A. C. Gatrell et al. (eds), Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500, (London, 1980) 191. For the concept see S. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (Oxford, 1972, 2nd edn, 1980);

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Introduction K. Thompson, Moral Panics (1998); and C. Critcher, Moral Panics and the Media (Buckingham, 2003). P. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People (Oxford, 1989), 709–11; P. Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman 1689–1798 (Oxford, 1991), ch. 3; J. Innes, ‘Parliament and the Shaping of Eighteenth-Century Social Policy’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 40 (1990), 63–92. Cf. P. King, ‘Moral Panics and Violent Street Crime 1750–2000: A Comparative Perspective’, in B. Godfrey, C. Emsley and G. Dunstall (eds), Comparative Histories of Crime (Collompton, 2003), 53–71. L. Radzinowicz, A History of Criminal law and its Administration from 1750 (London, 1948–86), i. 3–8, 611–59; J. Langbein, ‘Albion’s Fatal Flaws’, Past & Present 98 (1983), 115–19; J. Innes and J. Styles, ‘The Crime Wave: Recent Writing on Crime and Criminal Justice in Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of British Studies, 25 (1986), 420–30; J. M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England 1660–1800 (Oxford, 1986), 516–17, 528–30, 531–4, 583–5, 592–601. D. Hay, ‘War, Dearth and Theft in the Eighteenth Century: the Record of the English Courts’, Past & Present, 95 (1982), 156–7; J. M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 213–29, 629; P. King, ‘Newspaper Reporting, Prosecution Practice and Perceptions of Urban Crime: The Colchester Crime Wave of 1765’, Continuity and Change, 2 (1987), 435–6; P. King, Crime, Justice, and Discretion in England 1740–1820 (Oxford, 2000), 161–6. J. A. Sharpe, ‘“Last Dying Speeches”: Religion, Ideology and Public Execution in Seventeenth-Century England’, Past & Present, 107 (1985), 144–67; J. A. Sharpe, ‘Civility, Civilising Processes, and the End of Public Punishment in England’, in P. Burke, B. Harrison and P. Slack (eds), Civil Histories: Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas (Oxford, 2000), 215–30. P. Yorke, The Life and Correspondence of Philip Yorke, Earl of Hardwicke (Cambridge, 1913), i. 123, ii. 447; L. Stone, Road to Divorce: England 1530–1987 (Oxford, 1990), 273. S. Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660–1833 (Cambridge, MA, 1990); D. Lemmings, ‘Marriage and the Law in the Eighteenth Century’, Historical Journal, 39 (1996), 356–9. For examples of the published cases see Trials for Adultery (7 vols, 1779–80). See S. Cohen and J. Young, The Manufacture of News: Social Problems, Deviance and the Mass Media (1973); Thompson, Moral Panics, 11–12, 27–9. S. Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (1978), 221–2. P. Lake and S. Pincus, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England’, Journal of British Studies, 45 (2006), 270–81 (now republished in P. Lake and S. Pincus, The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007)). See also D. Freist, Governed by Opinion: Politics, Religion and the Dynamics of Communication in Stuart London 1637–1645 (1997); A. Halasz, The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1997). Lake and Pincus, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere’, 277. Lake and Pincus, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere’, 279–81. J. C. Davis, Fear, Myth and History: the Ranters and the Historians (Cambridge, 1986). K. T. Erikson, Wayward Puritans: a Study in the Sociology of Deviance (New York, 1966). Lake and Pincus, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere’, 281–4.

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17. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People; P. Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance (Oxford, 1989). 18. J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. T. Burger (Cambridge, 1989). 19. V. Nightingale, ‘The Cameraphone and Online Image Sharing’, Continuum, 21 (2007), 290; A. Akwagyiram, ‘Does ‘happy slapping’ exist’, BBC News, 12 May 2005. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4539913.stm (accessed 3 Apr. 2008); P. Zimonjic and C. Hastings, ‘Tortured for £75: a victim of the new form of “happy slapping” designed to instill terror’, Telegraph, 29 May 2005; D. Gardham, ‘Police chief questions verdict on “slap” killing’, Telegraph, 16 Dec. 2005; ‘Police release “happy slapping” phone clips’, Telegraph, 23 Feb. 2006; D. Gardham, ‘The night a “happy slap” gang turned into killers’, Telegraph, 25 Jan. 2006; ‘Artist Died in Attack by “happy slap” teenagers’, Telegraph, 23 June 2007; E. Henry ‘“Happy slap” death girl convicted in legal first’, Telegraph, 26 Feb. 2008; C. Hope, ‘“Happy slappers” to get tougher sentences’, ibid. 20. J. Shafer, ‘The Meth-Mouth Myth: Our Latest Moral Panic’, Slate, 9 Aug. 2005. 21. M. Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford, 2005), 225–7. 22. H. Barker, Newspapers, Politics and English Society 1695–1855 (Harlow, 2000), 29–30. See also J. Black, The English Press in the Eighteenth Century (Beckenham, 1987), 12–15. For a more complex account of the various types of London newspapers and the ebbs and flows of their output during the first half of the 18th century, see also M. Harris, London Newspapers in the Age of Walpole (1987), ch. 1. 23. Barker, Newspapers, Politics and English Society, ch. 3. For the wide distribution of the London papers see Harris, London Newspapers, ch. 2. 24. Black, English Press, 15–22, 80–81; Harris, London Newspapers, 30, 55, 63–4. In the early and mid-18th century editorial control varied from paper to paper, but either the printer or principal author was usually responsible (ibid, 105–7). 25. N. Rogers, ‘Confronting the Crime Wave: The Debate over Social Reform and Regulation, 1749–1753’, in L. Davison et al., Stilling the Grumbling Hive: The Response to Social and Economic Problems in England, 1689–1750 (Stroud, 1992), 78–81; P. King, ‘Newspaper Reporting and Attitudes to Crime and Justice in Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century London’, Continuity and Change, 22 (2007), 74–5; S. Devereaux, ‘From Sessions to Newspaper? Criminal Trial Reporting, the Nature of Crime, and the London Press, 1770–1800’, London Journal, 32 (2007), 1–27. 26. R. McGowen, ‘The Problem of Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England’, in S. Devereaux and P. Griffiths (eds), Penal Practice and Culture, 1500–1900 (Basingstoke, 2004), 224. 27. Devereaux, ‘From Sessions to Newspaper?’, 4–5. 28. Stone, Road to Divorce, 248–53. 29. See J. H. Langbein, ‘The Criminal Trial before the Lawyers’, University of Chicago Law Review, 45 (1978), 263–72; J. H. Langbein, ‘Shaping the Eighteenth-Century Criminal Trial: A View from the Ryder Sources’, University of Chicago Law Review, 50 (1983), 3–5; S. Devereaux, ‘The City and the Sessions Paper: “Public Justice” in London, 1770–1800’, Journal of British Studies, 35 (1996), 466–503; P. Linebaugh, ‘The Ordinary of Newgate and His Account’, in J. S. Cockburn (ed.), Crime in England, 1550–1800 (Princeton, NJ, 1977), 246–69; M. Harris, ‘Trials and Criminal Biographies: A Case Study in Distribution’, in M. Harris and R. Myers (eds), Sale

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30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

Introduction and Distribution of Books from 1700 (Oxford, 1982), 1–36; A. McKenzie, Tyburn’s Martyrs: Execution in England, 1675–1775 (2007), xviii–xix, 121–55, 261–5; Devereaux, ‘From Sessions to Newspaper?’, 14–15. See also L. B. Faller, Turned to Account: The Forms and Functions of Criminal Biography in Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth-century England (Cambridge, 1987). Trials for Adultery (see n. 8 above). Cf. a study which demonstrates how the characteristics of modern newspaper reporting help to ‘construct’ news about crime and engender anxiety among their readers (P. Williams and J. Dickinson, ‘Fear of Crime: Read All about It? The Relationship between Newspaper Crime Reporting and Fear of Crime’, British Journal of Criminology, 33 (1993), 33–56). See Chapter 8. See n. 5 above. Cohen, Folk Devils. D. Hay, ‘War, Dearth and Theft’, 156–7. S. Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (New York, 1978), 223; Critcher, Moral Panics and the Media, 15–16. See Chapter 8. Newcastle Journal, 19 Apr. 1783. Cohen and Young, The Manufacture of News, 344–5; Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, 273–82. Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 583–5. See D. Lemmings, Law and Government in Eighteenth-Century England: From Consent to Command? (forthcoming). See M. R. Zirker, ‘General Introduction’, to H. Fielding, An Enquiry into the Late Increase of Robbers, ed. M. R. Zirker (Oxford, 1988), lxiv–lxvii. Increase, ed. Zirker, 131–44, 169–71. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 9, 113–32; Critcher, Moral Panics and the Media, 12, 181 The Weekly Journal or Saturday’s-Post, 10 Apr. 1725, 2093–4. See, for example, R. Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World 2000, 79–80, 91–2, 400–1. For a recent exception, see V. A. C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–1868 (Oxford, 1994), 240, 601–4, 610, and more generally, Porter, Enlightenment, ch. 16. See The Spectator, ed. D. F. Bond (Oxford, 1965), ii. 286, 402–3, iii. 47–8, iv. 139. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 50–51. Ibid., 52. J. Hoppit, ‘Patterns of Parliamentary Legislation, 1660–1800’, The Historical Journal, 39 (1996), 109. See also J. Hoppit, J. Innes and J. Styles, ‘Project Report: Towards a History of Parliamentary Legislation’, Parliamentary History, 13 (1994), 313. J. Innes, ‘Parliament and the Shaping of Eighteenth-Century English Social Policy’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 40 (1990), 63–93. See S. Biddle, Bills and Acts: Legislative Procedure in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1971), 71–83. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 86–7, 101–10. Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 516, 530–8, 582–4. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 106–10. Stone, Road to Divorce, 116–17.

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58. Stone, Road to Divorce, 275–6. 59. E. Cruickshanks, S. Handley and D. W. Hayton, The House of Commons 1690–1715, i. 390. 60. T. C. Curtis and W. A. Speck, ‘The Societies for the Reformation of Manners: A Case Study in the Theory and Practice of Moral Reform’, Literature and History, 3 (1976), 45–64; M. Ingram, ‘Reformation of Manners in Early Modern England’, in P. Griffiths et al. (eds), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England, (Basingstoke, 1996), 47–88. See also F. Dabhoiwala, ‘Sex and Societies for Moral Reform, 1688–1800’, The Journal of British Studies, 46 (2007), 290–319. 61. D. Hayton, ‘Moral Reform and Country Politics’, Past & Present, 128 (1990), 52–4. For a detailed analysis of the societies’ policing activities, see Dabhoiwala ‘Sex and Societies for Moral Reform, 1688–1800’, 290–319. 62. Stone, Road to Divorce, 423; D. Lemmings, ‘Marriage and the Law in the Eighteenth Century: Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1753’, The Historical Journal, 39 (1996), 339–60. 63. Hay, ‘War, Dearth and Theft’, 156. 64. J. M. Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London, 1660–1750 (Oxford, 2001), 22. 65. Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 218–20. 66. Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 201–2. 67. King, Crime, Justice and Discretion, 162–6. 68. King, ‘Colchester Crime Wave’, 437–42. 69. King, Crime, Justice and Discretion, 164–5. 70. Cf. J. Bourke, ‘Fear and Anxiety: Writing about Emotion in Modern History’, History Workshop Journal, 55 (2003), 126–7. 71. J. Bondeson, ‘Monsters and Moral Panic in London’, History Today, 51 (2001), 30–35; J. Bondeson, The London Monster: Terror on the Streets in 1790 (Stroud, 2000), esp. ch. 13. See Chapter 11 for Cindy McCreery’s reinterpretation of the Monster panic. 72. N. Guthrie, ‘“No Truth or very little in the whole Story”? A Reassessment of the Mohock Scare of 1712’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 20 (1996) 33–56. See also D. Start, ‘The Case of the Mohocks: Rake Violence in Augustan London’, Social History, 20 (1995), 179–99. 73. R. I. Moore, Formation of a Persecuting Society, esp. 141–3. 74. A. Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000), 405. 75. Thompson, Moral Panics, 22–4; Critcher, Moral Panics and the Media, 164–7, 172–5. 76. See Bourke, ‘Fear and Anxiety’, 126–7. 77. Critcher, Moral Panics and the Media, 15–16. 78. Thompson, Moral Panics, 24–5. 79. A. Hunt and G. Wickham, Foucault and Law (1994), 22.

2 The Concept of the Moral Panic: An Historico-Sociological Positioning David Rowe

Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes more visible. Sometimes the object of the panic is quite novel and at other times it is something which has been in existence long enough, but suddenly appears in the limelight. Sometimes the panic passes over and is forgotten, except in folk-lore and collective memory; at other times it has more serious and long-lasting repercussions and might produce such changes as those in legal and social policy or even in the way the society conceives itself. Stanley Cohen (Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (London, 1972), 9).

2.1 Introduction: From sociological obscurity to popular label This opening paragraph by Stanley Cohen is among the most cited in the sociology of deviance and the media. Indeed, as Critcher observes, many users of the concept of the moral panic quote no more than this passage and extrapolate from single case studies to a much more extensive sociocultural condition, meaning that ‘Ironically “moral panic” has itself become a label, its application used as proof that little more need be said’.1 The concept of the moral 22

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panic has also entered the popular lexicon via the sociological dictionary in a comparatively short time and in numerous, multiplying discursive sites. To take a fairly random and unlikely example, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, in launching a report on university subject areas that are strategically important and vulnerable, is reported as using it in seeking to allay anxiety, with a story opening in the education press as follows: There is no need for a ‘great moral panic’ if university courses close in future, funding chiefs declared this week ….2 Similarly, in the lead up to the 2007 election campaign in Australia, then Prime Minister John Howard was accused in one newspaper opinion article of targeting Muslims in ‘concocting scapegoats and inciting moral panic to further his political interests’.3 Howard himself had invoked the idea of moral panic in order to deny its validity after the anti-Muslim Cronulla Riots of December 2005, the term having been ‘found repeated endlessly in the commentaries on Cronulla’.4 Such routine deployments of the idea of the moral panic are generally designed to play down levels of threat and negative consequence, and to present anxieties, whether justified or not, as exaggerated and overblown.5 The adjective ‘moral’ (often reinforced by hyperbolic connections to others, such as ‘great’), when coupled with the noun ‘panic’, offers a pejorative, connotative dimension that, for example, a more understated expressive noun like problem, with or without an accompanying adjective like ‘ethical’ or ‘serious’, does not.6 The term ‘moral panic’ has now achieved the status of catchphrase or cliché, as well as that of an established concept in research and scholarship in the social sciences, humanities and even the medical and biological sciences.7 A simple Google search for ‘moral panic’ in January 2008 produced 283,000 results (with 146,000 ‘exact phrase’ results), thereby indicating its wide circulation and use. Apparently few speakers and writers, however, have a deep understanding of the concept and its associated body of theory, tending to use it as a discursive/analytical shortcut to describe a phenomenon with a status analogous to that of the burning of witches or the xenophobic treatment of strangers. In this chapter I wish to review the origins, uses and abuses of the concept of the moral panic, attempting to assess its relevance as an analytical tool, not least, in the context of this collection, to historians of early modern England (among whose number, it will be abundantly clear, this sociologist of the contemporary cannot be counted). An argument is advanced for the necessity of a careful, subtle and reflexive critique of a concept that, in the wrong hands, is more likely to foreclose discussion of social and political issues than encourage it, and to obstruct rather than illuminate the complex relationships between social structure, ideology, media and culture.

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2.2 The seminal work of Stanley Cohen The concept of the moral panic came into common currency in the early 1970s through Stanley Cohen’s seminal book Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. Cohen credits criminologist Jock Young with coining the term in a chapter about drug-takers in London’s Notting Hill in Cohen’s edited book Images of Deviance. Young argues that ‘The media can very quickly and effectively fan public indignation and engineer what one might call “a moral panic” about a certain type of deviancy’.8 Cohen recalls that ‘We both probably picked it up from Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, published in 1964.’9 Modern media, therefore, had a crucially formative influence on the conceptualization of moral panics. Folk Devils and Moral Panics derived partly from Cohen’s doctoral research at the London School of Economics (LSE) in the mid-1960s, with the author noting in the Preface to the first edition that while its immediate empirical objects – two British youth subcultures and the vivid reactions to them – were of limited historical significance, the book’s generalizable analytical framework would prove to be more enduring: The exigencies of life in general and academic life in particular have transformed a study which started its life as an instant sociological response to the immediate, into a piece of historical sociology. Who on earth is still worried about the Mods and Rockers? Who – some might even ask – were the Mods and Rockers? I too would have preferred this book to have appeared when the phenomenon it describes was still a contemporary one, but sustained by friends and colleagues I carried on writing in the belief that this study has implications beyond its immediate subject matter …. The processes by which moral panics and folk devils are generated do not date.10 Cohen has helped maintain the utility of his early work by periodic thoughtful reassessments of it. In his long introduction to the second edition, he notes that ‘Taken as an instant pop sociological response to the immediate and newsworthy problems of the day, this book was “out of date” even when it originally appeared in 1972’, and that this task might be ‘best left to good journalists’ if it were not that ‘then, as now, I would want to justify this piece of historical reconstruction as having implications somewhat beyond the immediate and topical’.11 The ready slippage from sociological theorising into a journalism of the ‘now’, we might observe in passing, helps account for both the salience of explanatory moral panic models and the various intellectual limitations of their deployments. Cohen’s anatomy of a moral panic is now so well known that there is no need to present it in any detail here. In very brief summary, the sequential process is presented in the epigraph above, and unfolds mainly according

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to a condensed, sequenced version of disaster theory involving a framework of Warning, Impact, Inventory and Reaction. Within this sequence Cohen discerns mainly three-part stages, sub-stages or categories: for example, the ‘media inventory’ involves exaggeration and distortion, prediction, and symbolization; the three themes of societal reaction are orientation, images and causation, although differential reaction is acknowledged; the rescue and remedy phases of reaction involve sensitization, the societal control culture and the exploitative culture. The key actors and institutions are those who are labelled deviant, the moral entrepreneurs who do the active labelling, the state (the political apparatus, civil service, police and magistracy/judiciary), the media and the mysterious court of public opinion, all of which interact in ways that engender, sustain and amplify the deviant phenomenon, only to witness its de-amplification for reasons that are rather uncertain. While strict, mechanical sequencing is rejected by Cohen, what frequently unfolds has a momentum and direction that is compelling. Above all, it is the institution of the media to which the ‘student of moral enterprise cannot but pay particular attention’ with regard to its ‘role in defining and shaping social problems’.12 Cohen’s critically self-reflexive approach to his own intellectual history facilitates an ongoing auto-commentary on moral panic analysis. He notes that the earlier assertion that the ‘processes by which moral panics and folk devils are generated do not date’ was ‘a little brash in implying that I had cleverly succeeded in uncovering these processes’, just as his ‘pessimistic concluding words’ about the inevitable manifestation of more moral panics and creation of new folk devils, while unfortunately realized through structural generation and resistance to solution, he judges to be analytically unsatisfactory. This ‘defect of the book was the impression it sometimes might have conveyed of a certain timelessness, an unveiling of a set of consequences insulated from history and politics’.13 The historically specific context of his original research was, Cohen notes, far removed from its origins in 1950s American subcultural theory of delinquency. This was ‘a sour, post welfare state Britain’ before the Summer of Love, with intimations of the ends of easy affluence, full employment and cheap oil, in a period of relative political quiescence and ‘the cracking of all those interdependent myths of classlessness, embourgeoisement, consumerism and pluralism’.14 By the time of publication of the second edition, Margaret Thatcher’s Government was entering its second year of power and the Mods and Rockers looked very tame in the light of Punk, and there had even been a nostalgic Mod revival in the now familiar mode of other recycled, de-politicized and commercialized youth subcultures.15 In 2002 – having returned to the originary point of the LSE following a lengthy residence in Israel; after the demise of Thatcher and Major and the rise of Blair’s Cool Britannia; in a period when Rap and Rave had succeeded Punk on the outraged front pages of the ‘red top’ dailies; and in the wake of September 11 and the ‘War on

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Terror’ – Cohen published a 33-year review of the ‘moral panic’ for the third edition of Folk Devils and Moral Panics, observing again the multiple uses and abuses of his influential concept over the years. In this latest edition he tracks and classifies moral panics across the years according to the location of their ‘objects’ within ‘seven familiar clusters of social identity’.16 For example, the murder of 2-year-old Jamie Bulger in Liverpool, 1993, by two older children is part of the cluster ‘Young, Working-class, Violent Males’, while various media (especially tabloid) campaigns are placed under the heading ‘Refugees and Asylum Seekers: Flooding our Country, Swamping our Services’.17 After three decades had elapsed, Cohen could also take advantage of theories that were largely unavailable at the first time of writing, bypassing the mixed up ‘fusion of labelling theory, cultural politics and critical sociology’ of his early work to go ‘straight into the literature on social constructionism and claims-making’.18 Media and Cultural Studies, especially ‘discourse theory and analysis’, have challenged the positivist assumptions about media effects contained in Folk Devils and Moral Panics, thereby laying bare what Cohen now sees ‘as the book’s weakest link – between moral panics and folk devils’.19 The simple proposition that the media, through deviancy amplification, have a direct causal effect on the creation of folk devils through a stimulus and response mechanism, is seen as outmoded. But what, then, is the status of the folk devil whose relationship to a specific moral panic has been attenuated? More subtle, complex analysis of ‘cognitive framing and moral thresholds’ can be used, but at some necessary loss to the clarity and easy application of the moral panic model. The broader domain of risk theory, such as that articulated in Beck’s influential book Risk Society, has offered new insights into the role of moral panics in the societal management of nameless threats demanding calculative (re)appraisal.20 Indeed, Miller has characterised the USA in the current century as ‘a risk society of moral panic’,21 where there is a constant sense of risk of attack powerfully reinforced by media reactions to the risks that are, in turn, circulated and exaggerated within those same media outlets. For Cohen, questions of the aetiology and trajectory of moral panics have become harder rather than clearer: The concept of moral panic evokes some unease, especially about its own morality. Why is the reaction to Phenomenon A dismissed or downgraded by being described as ‘another moral panic’, while the putatively more significant Phenomenon B is ignored, and not even made a candidate for moral signification? These are not just legitimate questions but the questions. Like the folk objections against labelling, social constructionist or discourse theory in general, they strengthen the very position they are trying to attack. Such

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questions can only be posed if the lack of congruence between action (event, condition, behaviour) and reaction is correctly understood to be normal and obvious. To point to the complexities of the relationship between social objects and their interpretation is not a ‘criticism’ but the whole point of studying deviance and social control.22 The multiple ironies entailed in taking a critical position on a social phenomenon that requires cutting through the many, competing claims of moral affront, professional expertise and policy efficacy, are not lost on Cohen. In a mediatized world where overlapping and discrete moral panics may coexist, and the lines of discursive and communicative authority have become more complex and interwoven,23 the sociologist is required to attend to the demands of adopting a less magisterial academic stance that is more respectful of the critical consciousness of the citizenry. At the same time, this adjustment to the treatment of ‘popular wisdom’ must be accomplished without losing the critical edge of challenging institutional power and common knowledge that is at the heart of most moral panic models. As Cohen puts it with heavy irony: Calling something a ‘moral panic’ does not imply that this something does not exist or happened at all and that reaction is based on fantasy, hysteria, delusion and illusion or being duped by the powerful. Two related assumptions, though, require attention – that the attribution of the moral panic label means that the ‘thing’s’ extent and significance has been exaggerated (a) in itself (compared with other more reliable, valid and objective sources) and/or (b) compared with other, more serious problems. This labelling derives from a wilful refusal by liberals, radicals and leftists to take public anxieties seriously. Instead, they are furthering a politically correct agenda: to downgrade traditional values and moral concerns.24 In the period since Folk Devils and Moral Panics was first published, much has changed in the ways in which legitimate authority and media power tend to be apprehended within social science and the humanities. Institutionalized social power, especially of the state and the professions, is conventionally conceived in much less monolithic terms,25 and the ‘hypodermic syringe’ image of media, whereby ‘ordinary’ people are at the mercy of centralized irresistible media messages, has been largely dismissed as misleading and patronising.26 This stronger emphasis on the fluidity of social structures and relations, the unevenness and contestability of the media’s ideological power, the shifting divisions between public and private spheres and the instability and elusiveness of meaning, all demand a more cautious, qualified approach to the effectiveness of moral entrepreneurship by both elite and non-elite social groups. Indeed, recent media research from Britain, where

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Mods and Rockers were once held up by the press as terrifying the populace and threatening to undermine their orderly lives, has suggested that even the conventional assumption that citizens pay close attention to prioritized news stories (which fully-fledged moral panics definitively must be) is in many respects unwarranted. As Couldry, Livingstone, and Markham observe in their empirical study of media consumption and public engagement: Attracting and sustaining citizens’ attention is a central challenge in modern democracies and a prerequisite for most political or civic action, from opinion formation or public discussion to voting or direct participation in democratic institutions. But how such attention is managed raises important questions, particularly since this attention is likely to be uneven, and perhaps unequally distributed. This complexity is compounded by the contestability of the public/private boundary itself.27 The disaggregation and fragmentation of media audiences and the proliferation of media platforms and forms (especially those involving the Internet) mean that, while media content and use are now more extensive and multifaceted, it may be harder to reach the large audience necessary to the development of major moral panics and widespread deviancy amplification. The concentrated impact of moral entrepreneurship through the restricted broadcast and print outlets of the 1960s is difficult to replicate in the twenty-first century, where there is a much greater degree of choice and customization in media use patterns. Alternatively, of course, telecommunications, computer and broadcast convergence can also enable the insinuation of moral panics into many more media spaces. For example, in the aforementioned Cronulla Riots, anti-Muslim violence was fanned by the sending of multiple text (SMS) messages that incited violence and organized details of time and place, while some commercial talkback radio programmes also referred favourably to physical confrontation in the name of dealing with the ‘menace’.28 The ensuing retaliation by Muslim youths gave further encouragement to moral entrepreneurs opposed to multiculturalism and promoting the notion of an inescapable ‘clash of civilizations’, but the substantial rejection of such apocalyptic scenarios and the speed of the deamplification also challenged its status as full-blown moral panic. Nonetheless, the connotatively loaded idea of a ‘panic’ – with its images of frantic anxiety and mob behaviour – is still defensible for Cohen if interpreted as an ‘extended metaphor’.29 But the media changes or intensification of practices that he sees, such as that of ‘tabloid justice’,30 have made it harder to distinguish panic from the acquired normalcy of campaigning media populism. Ironically, there are now not just questions about the cause and fate of moral panics, but of how to s(t)imulate aspects of them in the service of social justice – in Cohen’s case, for example, to understand why atrocities and suffering are often collectively denied and marginalized:

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Instead of exposing moral panics, my own cultural politics entails, in a sense, encouraging something like moral panics about mass atrocities and political suffering – and trying to expose the strategies of denial deployed to prevent the acknowledgement of these realities. All of us cultural workers – busily constructing social problems, making claims and setting public agendas – think that we are stirring up ‘good’ moral panics.31 The field of public culture is, he recognises, much more crowded than it was in the 1960s and 1970s, with sophisticated and well-resourced governmental and non-governmental organizations constantly introducing new techniques of persuasion. The term ‘spin’ referred mainly to cricket and washing machines when Folk Devils and Moral Panics was written, but is now used widely to describe image manipulation and media management. In this context, critical sociologists and radical criminologists have greater difficulty ‘cutting through’ to expose malign moral panics that stigmatize marginal groups and extend state control over all citizens. Indeed, the media cacophony is such that genuinely shocking information about social ills in Britain and across the globe is often lost among all the political hyperbole and multiple distraction. What Cohen now has in mind is to use his knowledge of the mechanics and techniques of moral panic creation to prevent denial, indifference and inaction in the face of such tragedies as those in Bosnia and Rwanda at the end of the twentieth century,32 and in Darfur in this one. The ironic notion that a moral panic can be ‘good’ – a ‘necessary illusion’, perhaps – demonstrates just how far the analytical terrain has shifted from its simple origins, when it was marked by clearly delineated stigmatized outsiders and repressive agents of social control, media amplifiers and moral entrepreneurs, and when the primary role of the critical sociologist was to unmask hegemonic power and expose the techniques of popular manipulation. In his later work, such as the acclaimed new millennial book States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering, then, Cohen finds himself engaged in a very different politicointellectual activity.33 Instead of debunking the socially distorting significance of moral panics, he is seeking to grasp and utilize the very mechanisms that produce them in order to draw attention, in the blizzard of media images and shocks, to those that have been objectionably repressed rather than unwarrantedly illuminated. The problematic linkage between moral panics and folk devils becomes even more significant when attempting to foster ‘good’ moral panics for humanitarian reasons.34 In such instances, the folk devil may be the victim (refugees, for example, demonized as ‘illegals’ and ‘queue jumpers’), and whose protection may require the creation of new folk devils (say, cynical populist politicians or heartless, racist bureaucrats, or even complacent, self-absorbed citizens). The victim may not be a folk devil at all – for example, a sufferer of famine or war in a far-off country – in

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which case folk devils are presented in ‘good’ moral panics as those who are responsible for the plight of others, deliberately or negligently, either through violence, repression or neglect. Yet a further irony here is that just as citizens may resist in a heartening manner reactionary moral panics, they may be no more accepting of progressive ones that thrust ever more disturbing images of suffering before them in attempts to overcome ‘compassion fatigue’, and which might directly criticize them as selfish, cold-hearted and inert. Calculations of proportionality, and of over- and under-reaction, are not, for Cohen, precisely measurable, but they provide an important opportunity to analyse how ‘cognition itself is socially controlled. And the cognitions that matter here are carried by the mass media’.35 Thus, he recognises that social problems are social constructs, and that no ultimate formula can be produced that will place them in an incontrovertible rank order, but it would be an obvious dereliction of the duties of social scientists and citizens not to recognise and expose the social injustices that arise from clear asymmetries of power and structures of inequality, inflated denunciations of stigmatized groups that camouflage much greater evils and ideological campaigns with no evidentiary basis supported only by prejudicial stereotyping. Ultimately, for their founding father and most eloquent expositor, ‘moral panics are condensed political struggles to control the means of cultural reproduction’, and their analysis an effective way of illuminating social power and ‘the ways we are manipulated into taking some things too seriously and other things not seriously enough’.36 It has been necessary to track Cohen’s reflections on a work that has profoundly influenced many disciplines and interdisciplinary areas, including Sociology, Criminology, Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Political Science – and History. It can be seen that, from its inception, questions of historicity have challenged ‘timeless’ deployments of the concept of the moral panic. As noted above, it first flourished at a certain historical moment in post-war Britain, articulating with the adaptation of subcultural, labelling and deviancy theories that emerged in the ‘new criminology’ of the National Deviancy Symposium. It was also connected closely to the neo-Marxism spliced with structuralism and semiotics that characterised the interventions of the Stuart Hall-era ‘Birmingham School’ Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.37 When reviewing Cohen’s original work, I have not returned to a detailed investigation of its case study. Mods and Rockers have somewhat faded into history, although they do feature in various works about post Second World War British youth (sub)cultures.38 Instead, I have sought to understand the theoretical, conceptual and methodological implications of his theoretically groundbreaking but empirically limited work. These have been deemed to be variable, and, while often judged on balance positively, also criticised on grounds ranging from an unconscious Left functionalism (exaggerating the cohesion and determining power of capitalism and the capitalist state in all

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social domains) to a detachment from structural explanation. According to this latter critique, by giving close attention, in the symbolic interactionist tradition, to such specific features of micro-sociological phenomena as youth subcultural style, the determining macro-forces are obscured.39 There are many questions that require to be asked in this regard, including the degree to which general sociological and historical lessons can be derived from the case of the Mods and Rockers and/or the spectacular youth subcultures that first stimulated the efforts of sociologists of folk devils and moral panics.40 The historical specificity of the ‘processes by which moral panics and folk devils are generated’ is also at issue, as is the possibility that the concept of the ‘moral panic’, even if intellectually valid, has been used so flexibly and loosely as to undermine its own analytical integrity. These questions are especially pertinent when the concept of the moral panic is transported from its twentieth-century British origins and applied in different historical, social, spatial and cultural contexts. Specific characteristics of British society and, crucially, its media, may be especially propitious for the generation of moral panics. Thompson, for example, notes, that ‘Britain is exceptional for the extent to which it has national mass media that are highly concentrated and closely linked’.41 The ‘news agenda set by the press’ is followed, Thompson argues, by broadcasters, and intense competition within the press ‘accelerated by the acquisition by Rupert Murdoch’s News International Corporation of newspapers at both ends of the market’. These nationally-specific media arrangements have created the conditions for tabloid-led campaigning on ‘moral issues’, so that the ‘broadsheet newspapers were led to follow this moral agenda and to undergo processes of ‘tabloidization’ in which social problems were personalized and sensationalized’, with a ripple effect even in the public service broadcasting of a fiscally and politically besieged British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).42 Many social scientists have built on and challenged aspects of Cohen’s work from a variety of perspectives.43 For this reason, I will concentrate next on some recent synoptic appraisals of moral panic theory, concept and method. These have engaged with the concept of the moral panic and considered whether its time has come, either to be revised and reasserted, or consigned to history alongside the folk devils that, in retrospect, often appear quaint and unthreatening – even cute. The moral panic concept is, therefore, perpetually a work in progress, as new sociocultural phenomena and critical analytical frameworks come into being, and judgements of proportionality and ideological efficacy are made.

2.3 Moral panic models and appraisals As the title indicates, Chas Critcher’s Moral Panics and the Media is especially concerned with the contemporary media’s pivotal role in moral panics.44 Critcher’s case studies of AIDS; rave culture and the ecstasy recreational

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drug; ‘video nasties’; child abuse, and paedophilia, reveal how much of news media culture is taken up with moral panics.45 The corruption and victimization of children is a particularly powerful theme, he observes, their assumed loss of innocence both revealed in, and in some ways caused by, the media. Critcher wishes to preserve but also revise the concept of the moral panic. In his theoretical and methodological reassessment, he uses Max Weber’s well-known concept of the ‘ideal type’ to examine the gaps between conceptual model and empirical reality, and to test its generalizability across space, time and social context. Critcher sees Cohen’s model of moral panics as part of a cluster of British processual models that includes Hall et al.’s Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (of which Critcher is a co-author), the latter described as seeking to overcome the latent functionalism in Cohen’s work by drawing heavily on Gramscian hegemony theory and the key role of a capitalist state in crisis.46 In contrast, Critcher regards the USA-originating (though not confining) socially constructionist ‘attributional model of a moral panic’ as resisting structural explanation and underestimating the role of the media by seeing that institution principally as a vector of moral panics, rather than as a ‘claims maker’ in its own right.47 Thompson, similarly, describes a broad transatlantic split in social scientific approaches to moral panic over an interest in the pluralism of claims making as opposed to state ideological enforcement and closure.48 Here the ‘Britishness’ (both theoretical and empirical) of Cohen’s moral panic model and its local successors is readily apparent, with their variable but detectable stress on the relationship between the state and capital. The media, both public and private, are pivotal to this contest of ideologies, the winning of consent and the marginalization of dissent because they are institutionally implicated in these processes. In contrast, the attributional model conceives of a more open and freewheeling social context that resonates with familiar notions of the USA as a site at which the moral panic [then] is characterized by the feeling, held by a substantial number of the members of a given society, that evil doers pose a threat to the society and to the moral order as a consequence of their behavior and, therefore, ‘something should be done’ about them and their behavior.49 In this emphasis on the number rather than the strategic, hierarchical power of those who are instrumental in the production of a moral panic, and on the necessary, combined defining characteristics of ‘concern’, ‘hostility’, ‘consensus’, ‘disproportionality’ and ‘volatility’, Goode and Ben-Yehuda’s attributionalist approach diverges somewhat from those which relate the process of the panic to the effects of institutional social power. Critcher’s book assesses the above-mentioned case studies according to these two models, applying a strict test as to what constitutes a bona fide

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moral panic. For example, the absence of a significant folk devil disqualifies many potential moral panics from achieving that status. He also considers how different social issues play out in different countries, noting a need for much closer attention to local conditions and the nature of the moral panics that produce them. The attributional model typified by Goode and Ben-Yehuda is found wanting in various regards by Critcher, including its naïve approach to the phenomenon of public opinion.50 Cohen’s model, he argues, ‘still remains extraordinarily relevant’51 and can be adjusted in various respects, concluding that, while ‘We cannot yet do without it’, the moral panic ‘remains a necessary but not sufficient explanation’52 of the place, role and mode of representation of certain social issues in the public sphere. His most telling point is that analysts must go beyond moral panics in search of sociocultural explanation: Moral panic analysis does help to understand how and why such distortions [about paedophilic threats to children] happen: the case of paedophilia fits both models more closely than any other example inside or outside this book. Yet, though a necessary starting point, it is never a sufficient explanation. Two issues arise beyond moral panics: first, how the paedophile discourse was constructed in the national arena, and second, the specific role played by local publics and media in expressing and activating hostility towards paedophiles.53 In other words, moral panics are produced contingently rather than through any strict process of determination, but in order to be explanatory rather than descriptive require a broader theoretical framework than is generally offered by moral panic theorists. For Critcher (and, indeed, Thompson and Cohen)54 contemporary moral panics lend themselves to explanation through risk theory and discourse (and narrative) analysis. These help to explain the extraordinary current emphasis on ontological insecurity55 and the ways in which moral panics work themselves in and out of the media. Furthermore, their usefulness for Critcher (‘speculatively’, he concedes) is perfectly exemplified in the current sociocultural obsession with childhood as ‘a consistent focus of moral panics, [demonstrated in] how images of vulnerability and threat have been mobilized to justify increased regulation’.56 Disproportionality and misrecognition of threat enables, just as in the classic moral panic model, elites operating within the public sphere to induce ‘private anxieties’ rather than, as the agents of successive moral panics claim, the other way round.57 Here, the neo-Marxist emphasis on dominant groups as the instigators of moral panics for their own purposes, with which Critcher commenced his analysis in co-authoring Policing the Crisis, meets the Foucauldian assertion of the power of multiplicitous discourses that are hierarchically arranged as discursive formations in which sedimented institutional power is preponderant. The final member of

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Sociology’s ‘Holy Trinity’ alongside Marx and Weber, Emile Durkheim, is also then introduced in a reminder of the uses of exemplary and ritualized punishment and stigmatization in order to police threatened moral boundaries. The moral panic from this critical perspective, therefore, seeks to build a valuational consensus (even among some of those it condemns) in times of disruptive change and threat, when the disturbing anomie of society can be represented as demanding an unimpeachable moral order. Thus, perhaps, a moral panic in contemporary mediatized societies can only be deemed as such in retrospect:58 for among the many competing potential moral crusades and panics, most, like newly-launched consumer products, will fail. As Poynting and Morgan argue, following Critcher, although some attempted moral panics may gain little in the way of socio-political purchase, and the conditions of risk, uncertainty and panic are increasingly normalized across whole societies, ‘it is still possible to isolate turning points’ in public discourse that reveal Cohen’s processual model of the moral panic to distinguish such moments from more routine and regular manifestations of social anxiety and diagnoses of social pathology.59 For Critcher, in the final analysis moral panics must be understood as identifiable processes, sets of discourses [hierarchically ordered], and an expression of irreducible moral values. We should no longer operate with simplistic notions that moral panics require folk devils, mobilize public opinion or are instigated by the state.60 The strengths and limitations of the concept of the moral panic, therefore, lie according to Critcher, Thompson and Cohen himself in its adaptability and applicability, but not in its explanatory comprehensiveness. This is a conclusion that other researchers and scholars in various disciplines should carefully consider before employing a moral panic-based analytical model. It is, as we have seen, easy to claim that a moral panic is in process or has occurred, but rather less so to isolate it from other potential moral panics, and to explain the ‘success’ of some and the ‘failure’ of others (both in the case of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ moral panics). Moral panics tend to operate in sequences, but the order can vary and some elements perhaps sidestepped. Folk devils are now optional, and appeals to the power of public sentiment dubious. The state may be a major actor, or itself subject to moral panics about its intrusiveness or inaction. Analyses and interventions involving a moral panic framework are, then, harder ‘cultural work’ than it at first appears.

2.4 Conclusion: The morality of panic, the panic of morality It has been argued in this chapter that Cohen’s concept and model of the moral panic was shaped by the conditions under which it was created, so problematizing whether it can be fruitfully applied to historical conditions

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radically different to those on which he based his enduring contribution to the study of social order, control and ideological conflict. Indeed, Kenneth Thompson concludes his analytical survey of the moral panic by asserting that it is, despite some neglect in recent British Sociology (largely because of assumed shortcomings relating to structural explanation), a ‘key sociological concept’.61 But he also acknowledges that, while ‘[c]omparable episodes’ can be found in other countries, it is in Britain that it has been of greatest relevance – and, we might add, Britain since the early 1960s in which there was a close association between various types of development – intellectual, political, social and cultural.62 Similarly, Critcher, while declaring Cohen’s model ‘robust’, notes (perhaps unsurprisingly) its better fit with British scholarship and social context.63 It is not intended here to deter deployment of the concept of the moral panic in other times and spaces. In Australia, for example, it has been used to analyse a range of social phenomena, from concerns about larrikinism (young men and, increasingly, young women deemed to lack respectability and suitable deportment) in the 1880s64 to disturbances at the Bathurst ’Bike Races in the 1980s,65 to the Port Arthur Massacre in the mid-1990s,66 and even to the twenty-first century concern with an ageing population.67 Such case studies are of variable persuasiveness and effectiveness, but they do attest to the capacity of moral panic models to encourage engagement with continually troubling questions about how social anxieties are generated and managed, promoted and resisted, maintained and deflected. Moral panics, it may be concluded, revolve around questions of power, discourse and representation. Use of the concept entails an a priori assumption that something is amiss in the way in which social problems are identified and addressed. This apprehension may be that a problem is exaggerated in empirical terms, and/or that its causes are misunderstood and/or that it is being consciously or unconsciously linked to other social phenomena for particular purposes, intended or otherwise. Moral panics may be short-lived, enduring or recurrent and fragmented or overlapping, but their genesis and trajectory are always related to the social constitution of power in any given context, and require to be theorized as such. While elements of moral panics can be found in diverse historical, spatial and sociocultural contexts, they can be distinguished from earlier, more localized outbreaks of anxiety by the specific conditions of modernity. Among these features of the modern, the capacity of the news media to carry ‘data’ beyond everyday sensory experience speedily to large, dispersed and heterogeneous populations is crucial to the analytical efficacy of the concept. If modernity in its earlier forms first produced a media infrastructure that accelerated the spread of moral panic through print and then broadcasting, in ‘late’ or even after modernity, panic – and the sense of risk that both precipitated and arose from it – has been able to flow so effortlessly and irresistibly through multiple media nodes as to invite assessments that it constitutes a condition of entire societies.

36 The Concept of the Moral Panic

This is not the place to debate competing theoretical models of late modernity68 and postmodernity,69 and their precise relationships to the putative emergence of a ‘risk society’ in the context of moral panics. The evident commonalities of late/postmodernity, not least among which are the multiplication of mediatized information sources, challenges to the authority of ‘elites’, internationalization/globalization and the blurring of boundaries between news and entertainment, have made the deployment of moral panic models more difficult but also, in significant ways, more pressing. No doubt in early modernity these developments were also evident to an extent, but the sheer speed and volume of communication and travel, the social and cultural complexity of everyday lives and the transformations of modes of collective and self-governance, have created contemporary conditions that enable moral panics to flare, splutter and die with unprecedented rapidity. That this ‘accelerated culture’ can seem all-consuming requires not only the interrogation of the moral panics of the present day, but also encourages the exploration and re-examination of the past – and of earlier ways of understanding its crises and disputes. As Silverstone aptly puts it in his call to re-engage with the positive and negative aspects of media power: The new media politics, just like the old, must understand its own significance for the conduct and security of everyday life. If we are to avoid a politics of panic […] then we have to address, directly and insistently, the machinery not just of government, but of the context in which government takes place, and which in turn constrains it. That is, in matters of public policy and effective governance, the media are both text and context: here at last we might wish to take a version of Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that the medium is also the message to heart.70 McLuhan’s influence on Cohen’s (and Young’s) development of the concept of moral panic was noted at the beginning of this chapter, and his work, like Cohen’s, has moved in and out of intellectual view, and has been variously used, adapted, challenged – and not infrequently abused. McLuhan’s catchy dictums and terms, such as the ‘the medium is the message’ and ‘global village’, like Cohen’s memorable formulation of the ‘moral panic’ and the figure of the ‘folk devil’, have been used in academic and public discourse for decades. It would not be possible to expunge them from debates on politics, the law, media, social movements and cultural identities even if that were desirable. Instead, they offer ready opportunities to address the enduring questions that animated their scholarly enquiries – in the case of McLuhan, the impact of broadcast media on human consciousness and experience, and, for Cohen, the social processes, involving fractions of the state and organs of the media, that ‘create’ and victimize ‘deviant’ groups. From the above exploration of the concept of the moral panic, it can be concluded

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that its relevance as an analytical device is undiminished in the twenty-first century – and, indeed, is perhaps undergoing something of a revival. Loose application of the moral panic label connotes a certain intellectual arrogance, an ‘absolution’ of the critical observer from the naïve interpretive sins of others. It may also, as noted above, reflect a certain scholarly laziness, the cobbling together of wildly divergent socio-historical phenomena under a single, convenient rubric. But its careful, critically reflexive use is an important tool in the urgent task of understanding, as Cohen and others have wondered, why some social issues devour so much public discursive space and concern while others are marginalized; why some people are heavily stigmatized and others celebrated or left to their own (de)vices; and why some problems, once revealed in the media, lead to major changes in social and legal policy, and others barely disturb the order of things. The production of ideology both within formal institutions and the wider public sphere, and its material consequences within and between human societies across the globe and historical epochs, are of paramount interest to any social science and humanities enquiry that seeks to go beyond the reproduction of currently dominant definitions of social reality and social history. For these reasons, the best available advice is that the concept of the moral panic is still important and relevant, but that, like all dangerous and sensitive notions, it should be handled with care.

Notes I would like to thank David Lemmings and Claire Walker for the opportunity to re-engage with an important part of my personal intellectual history by engaging with the academic field of history; Kylie Brass for some timely assistance at the ‘business end’ of submitting this chapter; and Stan Cohen for writing the book that encouraged me to become a professional sociologist at a time when we had our own folk devil status. 1. C. Critcher, Moral Panics and the Media (Buckingham, 2003), 143. 2. P. Hill, ‘Hefce Plays Down Closures’, The Times Higher Education Supplement, 1 July 2005, 9. 3. A. Muhammad, ‘An Election Looms, so Howard Incites Moral Panic’, The Age, 5 September 2006, 11. 4. J. Lattas, ‘Cruising: “Moral Panic” and the Cronulla Riots’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 18 (2007), 326. 5. K. Thompson, Moral Panics (London and New York, 1998). 6. The concept of panic, intriguingly, has considerable appeal for postmodern theorists with whom Cohen has little in common. For example, the Panic Encyclopedia sees a condition of panic as definitive of postmodernity (A. Kroker, M-L. Kroker and D. Cook, Panic Encyclopedia: The Definitive Guide to the Postmodern Scene, Basingstoke, 1989). The metaphorical adaptability of the concept of panic has, as Cohen notes, caused considerable uneasiness, but it has also brought attention that a more sober notion such as ‘concern’ could not. The place of panic discourse in late and postmodernity is further addressed in the main text.

38 The Concept of the Moral Panic 7. S. Allan, Media, Risk and Science (Buckingham and Philadelphia, 2002). 8. J. Young, ‘The Role of the Police as Amplifiers of Deviancy, Negotiators of Reality and Translators of Fantasy’, in S. Cohen (ed.) Images of Deviance (Harmondsworth, 1971), 37. 9. S. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers, 3rd edn (2002), xxxv, n. 1; M. McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964). Here another American influence can be found on what is conventionally regarded as a ‘very British’ concept, in this case media theory from across the Atlantic (regarding McLuhan, Canadian in origin) rather than labelling and disaster theories. The influence of McLuhan would suggest that moral panics were tied closely to the rise of broadcasting, especially television, but Cohen’s data sources in Folk Devils and Moral Panics were, in fact, more heavily weighted towards newspapers. S. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (2nd edn, Oxford, 1980), 205. 10. Cohen, ‘Preface’, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1973), n.p. 11. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1980), i. 12. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1973), 16. 13. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1980), 1. 14. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1980), iii–iv. 15. G. Melly, Revolt into Style: The Pop Arts in Britain (Harmondsworth, 1970). 16. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (2002), viii. 17. The other five ‘familiar clusters’ are ‘School Violence: Bullying and Shoot-Outs’, ‘Wrong Drugs; Used by Wrong People in Wrong Places’, ‘Child Abuse, Satanic Rituals and Paedophile Registers’, ‘Sex, Violence and Blaming the Media’ and ‘Welfare Cheats and Single Mothers’. 18. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (2002), xxii. 19. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (2002), xxiv. 20. U. Beck, Risk Society (1992). 21. T. Miller, ‘A Risk Society of Moral Panic: The US in the Twenty-First Century’, Cultural Politics, 2 (2006), 299. 22. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (2002), xxi–xxii. 23. A. McRobbie and S. L. Thornton, ‘Rethinking “Moral Panic” for Multi-Mediated Social Worlds’, British Journal of Sociology, 46 (1995), 559–74.; S. Cottle, ‘Mediatized Rituals: Beyond Manufacturing Consent’, Media, Culture & Society, 28 (2006), 411–32. 24. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (2002), viii. 25. R. G. Dunn, Identity Crises: A Social Critique of Postmodernity (Minneapolis and London, 1998); S. Dandaneau, Taking It Big: Developing Sociological Consciousness in Postmodern Times (Thousand Oaks, CA, 2001). 26. R. Silverstone, Why Study the Media? (London, 1999); D. Croteau and W. Hoynes, Media/Society: Industries, Images, and Audiences (3rd edn, Thousand Oaks, CA, 2003). 27. N. Couldry, S. Livingstone and T. Markham, Media Consumption and Public Engagement: Beyond the Presumption of Attention (Basingstoke and New York, 2007), 23–4. 28. S. Poynting, ‘“Thugs” and “Grubs” at Cronulla: From Media Beat-ups to Beating up Migrants’, in S. Poynting and G. Morgan (eds) Outrageous! Moral Panics in Australia (University of Tasmania: Australian Clearinghouse for Youth Studies, 2007), 157–69. 29. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (2002), xxvi.

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30. R. L. Fox and R. W. van Sickel, Tabloid Justice: Criminal Justice in an Age of Media Frenzy (Boulder, CO, 2001). 31. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (2002), xxxiii. 32. S. D. Moeller, Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death (New York, 1999). 33. S. Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering (Cambridge, 2001). 34. S. Cohen, ‘Moral Panics and Folk Concepts’, Paedagogica Historica, 35 (1999), 585–91; Moeller, Compassion Fatigue. 35. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (2002), xxxv. 36. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (2002), xxxv. 37. D. Rowe, Popular Cultures: Rock Music, Sport and the Politics of Pleasure (1995). 38. See, for example, D. Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979); M. Brake, The Sociology of Youth Culture and Youth Subcultures (1980); J. Davis, Youth and the Condition of Britain: Images of Adolescent Conflict (1990). 39. See, for example, various contributions to H. Wilson and P. B. White (eds) ‘Panic: Media, Morality, Culture’, special issue of Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy, 85 (1997), 1–153. 40. See, for example, various contributions to S. Hall and T. Jefferson (eds) Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (1976). 41. Thompson, Moral Panics, 27. See also P. Jenkins, Intimate Enemies: Moral Panics in Contemporary Great Britain (New York, 1992). 42. Thompson, Moral Panics, 27–8. 43. See Critcher, Moral Panics and the Media. 44. Critcher, Moral Panics and the Media. Jenkins similarly sees the media as crucial, and the specific characteristics of the British media as fostering them. Jenkins, Intimate Enemies. 45. Thompson has a similar inventory (Moral Panics) as, already noted, has Cohen (Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 2002). 46. S. Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (1978). 47. Critcher, Moral Panics and the Media, 25. 48. Thompson, Moral Panics. 49. E. Goode and N. Ben-Yehuda, Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance (Oxford, 1994), 46. 50. Goode and Ben-Yehuda, Moral Panics. 51. Critcher, Moral Panics and the Media, 154. 52. Critcher, Moral Panics and the Media, 178. 53. Critcher, Moral Panics and the Media, 113. 54. Thompson, Moral Panics; Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (2002). 55. A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge, 1991). While Giddens is now routinely cited in relation to this concept, Laing’s use of it with regard to Sartrean existentialism is a much earlier Anglophone deployment. R. D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (Harmondsworth, 1960). 56. Critcher, Moral Panics and the Media, 160–1. 57. Critcher, Moral Panics and the Media, 163. 58. S. Ungar, ‘Moral Panic versus the Risk Society: The Implications of the Changing Sites of Social Anxiety’, British Journal of Sociology, 37 (2001), 245–59. 59. S. Poynting and G. Morgan, ‘Introduction’, in S. Poynting and G. Morgan (eds) Outrageous! Moral Panics in Australia, 2.

40 The Concept of the Moral Panic 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67.

68.

69. 70.

Critcher, Moral Panics and the Media, 177–8. Thompson, Moral Panics, 142. Thompson, Moral Panics, 142. C. Critcher, ‘Mighty Dread: Journalism and Moral Panics’, in S. Allan (ed.) Journalism: Critical Issues (Maidenhead and New York, 2005), 177–87. G. Morgan, ‘The Bulletin and the Larrikin: Moral Panic in Late Nineteenth Century Sydney’, Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy, 85 (1997), 17–23. C. Cunneen et al., Dynamics of Collective Conflict: Riots at the Bathurst ’Bike Races (Sydney, 1989). S. Stockwell, ‘Panic at the Port’, Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy, 85 (1997), 56–61. K. Marston, ‘Ageing Folk Devils and Booming Moral Panic’ (Perth: Council on the Ageing (WA) Inc., 2004) http://www.cotawa.asn.au/COTAWA27.htm (accessed 25 September 2005). Ungar, ‘Moral Panic versus the Risk Society’; S. P. Hier, ‘Risk and Panic in Late Modernity: Implications of the Converging Sites of Social Anxiety’, British Journal of Sociology, 54 (2003), 3–20. J. Hartley, Popular Reality: Journalism, Modernity, Popular Culture (1996); Dandaneau, Taking It Big. Silverstone, Why Study the Media?, 152–3.

3 ‘This Newe Army of Satan’: The Jesuit Mission and the Formation of Public Opinion in Elizabethan England Alexandra Walsham

A Jesuit reprobated Is the childe of sin, who being borne for the service of the Divell, cares not what villany he does in the world; he is always in a maze, for his courses are ever out of order, and while his will stands for his wisdome, the best that falls out of him, is a foole; he betraies the trust of the simple, and sucks out the bloud of the innocent; his breath is the fume of blasphemy, and his tongue the firebrand of hell; his desires are the destruction of the vertuous, and his delights are the traps to damnation: he bathes in the bloud of murther, and sups up the broth of iniquity: plots, conspiracies, and all manner of mischiefe, are the chiefest aime of his studies: he frighteth the eies of the godly, and disturbeth the hearts of the religious; he marreth the wits of the wise, and is hatefull to the soules of the gracious. In summe, he is an inhumane creature, a fearfull companion, a monster, and a Divell incarnate; therefore to be quite packed out of this our England, to his owne proper center the whore of Rome. Nicholas Breton (Englands selected characters (1643), 12) Published in 1643, this vivid pen portrait in the guise of a witty Theophrastan character encapsulated a cluster of long-standing assumptions and anxieties about the notorious religious order founded by the former Spanish soldier Ignatius Loyola and officially commissioned in 1540 as the Society of Jesus. It gave graphic expression to a sobering stereotype of diabolical deviance and machiavellian villainy that had crystallized in the English Protestant imagination over the course of the previous century. As elaborated in a vast swathe of polemical sermons, tracts, plays, pamphlets and prints, the Jesuit was a puppet of the Counter Reformation papacy and a tool of the king 41

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of Spain, a crafty dissembler constantly dreaming up treasonous schemes to subvert states and assassinate divinely anointed princes and monarchs. ‘Fatall and ominous to all well governed Common wealths’, he was also a loyal servant of Lucifer, a chief instrument in his eternal struggle ‘to uphold his tottering Antichristian kingdome’ and to enlarge ‘his infernall dominion’ of Hell.1 Endowed with almost superhuman powers to seduce the unwary, he was ‘the Spawn of the Old Serpent’, under whose ‘gilded and spangled Skin, there lies a poisonous Sting’.2 Synonymous with hypocrisy and equivocation by the early seventeenth century, the secretive and underhand activities of these ‘Romish locusts’ and ‘pernicious caterpillars’ became a focus for renewed hostility whenever events seriously jeopardized the religious and political stability of Stuart England. Re-etched and further embellished at each fresh crisis, the image of the evil Jesuit has acquired the status of an enduring black legend.3 Forged on the double anvil of xenophobic anti-popery and Protestant patriotism, it neatly fits the mould of the classic folk devil and has been the subject of repeated episodes that bear the hallmark of a ‘moral panic’. At such moments, the concerns of politicians, lawmakers, literate commentators and the populace at large have typically converged to produce a potent cocktail of hatred and suspicion and to exaggerate the magnitude of the threat which the Society of Jesus presented to the fabric of English society. As delineated by its early theorists, the ‘moral panic’ was at root a pathological phenomenon. Carrying undertones of mass hysteria and collective delusion, the very concept was predicated on a positivist confidence about the capacity of scholars to differentiate ‘fact’ from ‘fiction’ that has been rendered deeply problematic by the advent of postmodernism.4 Recent studies, however, have adopted a more sophisticated perspective and endeavoured to recover the rationality of the spasms of anti-Catholicism that periodically rocked sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English society. Rejecting the impulse to dismiss them simply as instances of popular credulity fuelled by a sensationalist press or manipulated (if not invented) by cynical elites for their own ends, they have sought instead to reconstruct the structure, function and ideological significance of these outbreaks of prejudice. With Frances Dolan, they have fruitfully approached fear not as a cloud or fog which prevents us from apprehending an underlying reality, but rather as the main event itself.5 Following in the footsteps of these historians, the present essay re-examines the furore that surrounded England’s first real encounter with the Society of Jesus: the celebrated mission launched by Fathers Robert Persons and Edmund Campion in June 1580. Much ink has been spilt arguing about the nature and objectives of this eighteen-month enterprise. Sidestepping this historiographical minefield, here I shall concentrate on describing the haze of anxiety through which the regime and its subjects viewed the arrival of these Jesuit priests and on identifying the religious, political and cultural

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climate in which this developed. My aim is to add some additional dimensions to a well-known story and to augment the picture that is emerging from important work by Peter Lake, Michael Questier and others on the origins, dynamics and contours of the Elizabethan public sphere.6 Building on their insight that Catholics were not passive victims of the discursive processes that constituted it, but rather active participants in them, I shall also suggest that the Jesuits themselves played no small part in creating and fostering the impression that their entrée into England had precipitated intense alarm and consternation. They had their own reasons for perpetuating the idea that the mission had filled the Protestant nation with trepidation about the prospects for a reversal of a still precarious and partial Reformation.

3.1 The mission of Campion and Persons: Manifestations of a moral panic It is important to emphasize that England had scarcely any direct contact with the Society during the first forty years of its existence. Ignatius himself crossed the Channel and may have briefly visited the capital while a student in Paris in 1531, but he made no effort to initiate a Jesuit mission to the country until the accession of Mary I to the throne. For reasons which remain disputed, his earnest offers to assist with the restoration of the Catholic faith in her reign were politely rebuffed by Cardinal Reginald Pole.7 In 1541, by contrast, two of Loyola’s followers had been sent to survey the deteriorating situation in Ireland, but they returned to Europe just thirty-four days later convinced that there was little scope for influencing the course of events in this feudal and inhospitable kingdom. Twenty years later David Wolfe undertook an expedition to his native Limerick but the limited mission he initiated here was aborted in 1567. Meanwhile, in the summer of 1562 the Dutchman Nicholas de Gouda had spent three months in Scotland investigating the state of religion at the request of Pope Pius IV. The timidity of the queen inhibited the political impact of his visit and the ‘wonder of so strange a monster as a Jesuiste’ in this northern kingdom blew over almost as soon as he left Edinburgh for Antwerp. It was not until 1578 that John Hay returned to the country with official permission.8 A number of Englishmen joined the Society in the 1560s and 70s, but virtually all of these recruits remained stationed in Flanders, Italy or the Holy Roman Empire throughout the early decades of Elizabeth’s reign.9 Despite the absence of actual Jesuits from England a hostile discourse about the activities of this burgeoning religious order was already beginning to evolve in this period. The very word originated as a term of abuse: coined in the fifteenth-century Netherlands and Rhineland to describe devout busy bodies who practised novel devotions and spoke censoriously of the clergy and ordinary Catholics, the name Jesuit or jésuita was readily applied to early members of the Society, who only belatedly embraced

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the nickname as a badge of glory rather than shame.10 It was firmly fixed in the English lexicon by 1561, when reports reached Rome that Jesuits had been the subject of vitriolic Protestant sermons warning of their eagerness to enter the country and wreak havoc with heresy.11 A few years later Robert Horne, bishop of Winchester, railed against them in the course of a dispute with Abbot John Feckenham, cleverly eliding the order with the tribe of Canaanites who were the cursed seed of Cham in the Bible. Horne’s attack on the ‘monkishe Jebusites’ prompted a spirited ‘counterblast’ from the exiled controversialist Thomas Stapleton, who deftly turned the term back against his ‘ghospelling brethrene’.12 Foreign publications were also contributing to the formation of a negative visual and literary stereotype of the Society: a Bavarian broadsheet of 1569 depicted its members as filthy swine and several French, German and Polish pamphleteers had already made their false teachings (falsche lehre) the subject of diatribes by the late 1570s.13 A Dutch tract translated into English as The bee hive of the romishe church in 1579 made mocking allusion to the ‘marvellous holinesse of this newe Religion of the Jesuites, never heard of before: who have found out a way of ful perfection, which neither prophet, nor Apostle could never spie out before’.14 Reformed commonplaces about this sly and sanctimonious upstart sect were already in wide circulation. This was the backdrop against which Cardinal William Allen and Robert Persons began to urge the General of the Society, Everard Mercurian, to give his permission for the Jesuits to join the stream of seminary priests who had crossed over from the Low Countries into England to succour the faithful since 1574. Mercurian’s hesitations about the wisdom of sanctioning such a perilous enterprise eventually gave way late in 1579 and Persons and Campion were appointed to lead the advance guard. They travelled across Europe to Rheims with a small entourage and at St Omer adopted disguises to aid their safe passage across the Channel in June 1580. Dressed as a captain, Persons went ahead, followed by Campion ten days later wearing the attire of a jewel merchant. After a brief stay in London, the pair split up to undertake a missionary tour of the provinces. The leak (or perhaps deliberate release) of Campion’s manuscript ‘challenge’ or ‘brag’ (a bold defence of his intentions and call for a public disputation intended for circulation in the event of his apprehension) made his return to the capital extremely hazardous and compelled him to lie low in Lancashire, where he compiled his Decem Rationes. Daringly deposited in the university church of St Mary on the day of the Oxford commencement in 1581, this was part of an ambitious campaign of propaganda involving both clandestine printing and scribal publication. Persons’ own Briefe Discourse calling upon Catholics to shun Protestant churches had proved no less inflammatory, not least because of its preface defending recusancy as an act of conscientious objection rather than political disloyalty and petitioning the queen for toleration. The capture of Campion in July of 1581 was at once a serious blow to the

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defiant challenge which the two priests had mounted against the Protestant status quo and a new opportunity for public visibility. Humiliated, tortured and on 1 December hung, drawn and quartered, Campion’s inexorable transformation into a martyr was the triumphant culmination of a year and a half of energetic evangelical and polemical activity. Like other priests, he turned the scaffold into a stage on which to mount a final protest against the Elizabethan state and to demonstrate the truth of his faith to the assembled spectators. Not long after Campion’s apprehension, Persons had strategically retreated to the Continent to pursue other plans for achieving the re-Catholicization of England, but by then two other Jesuits, Jasper Heywood and William Holt, had landed at Newcastle. Others followed, but barely a dozen members of the Society would be present in the country at any one point before 1600.15 How, then, did the authorities and English society respond to the arrival of Persons and Campion? What evidence is there that this fostered a mood of anxiety, panic and fear? Even before they set foot on their native soil intelligence sources coordinated by Sir Francis Walsingham were reporting news of their journey. Officials at ports were put on high alert and apparently supplied with descriptions and mocked up pictures of their habits and features to help identify them.16 After it became known that they had slipped through the net at Dover, attempts to detect and apprehend the two fathers, together with their disciples and sympathizers, intensified. On 6 September 1580, the Privy Council implored Lord Norris and Sir Edward Umpton to take diligent order that ‘the places of haunte and the persons of sundry Jesuites and priestes lurking within the countie of Oxon’ were thoroughly searched. Other letters written in the autumn suggest that the authorities believed that more than a handful were at large in the realm. Reports from spies on the Continent, communications from magistrates and sheriffs in the provinces and intercepted Catholic correspondence between Rheims and Rome reinforced the atmosphere of urgency which gripped Elizabeth’s government.17 So too did the anonymous papers and verses that were surreptitiously being dispersed along the channels of the Catholic underground. As Campion’s ‘brag’ began to pass from hand to hand in manuscript, the houses of prominent laypeople were raided in pursuit of copies of these fly leaves and other ‘lewd and forbidden books’.18 Simultaneously, the Protestant clergy began to crank a formidable counter-propaganda machine into action. The puritan minister William Charke led the way in December 1580 with his Answere to this ‘seditious pamphlet’, which viciously blasted these ‘scorpions’ who sought to poison the ignorant laity with their ‘carnall intisements’ and compared them with the frogs and caterpillars that had plagued ancient Egypt. He appended to his tract a translation of the former German Jesuit Christian Francken’s Colloquium Jesuiticum (1578), an insider’s expose of the ‘pharisaicall religion’ of ‘a swarme of hypocrites and superstitious men’ who cloaked their real

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intentions under the guise of ‘a feined & painted holinesse’.19 The Welsh vicar Meredith Hanmer followed suit early in January with a fresh attack on Campion’s ‘bumbast’ and upon an order of friars that he identified as another device of the devil to inveigle the simple. He followed this up later that year with a further set of scurrilous revelations about the ‘rable of Locustes’ that comprised the Society entitled The Jesuites banner, which also contained a systematic character assassination of its founder Ignatius Loyola.20 Even more vituperative in tone was the Heidelberg professor of divinity Pierre Boquin’s Defence of the olde, and true profession of Christianitie against the new, and counterfaite secte of Jesuites, translated by a certain ‘T. G.’ who declared it to be ‘very necessarie, and profitable for this present time’ to arm Englishmen and women against ‘this newe army of Satan’. Boquin’s book spared no effort to unmask this offspring of the Romish Antichrist and whore of Babylon. ‘The parasites of wicked Popes, ignoraunt princes, and the superstitious vulgar people’, these ‘disguised Apostles’ were the insidious agents of Lucifer’s bid to nourish confusion and sow error in the last age of the Church ‘under the color of reformation’.21 Drawing on an older vocabulary of deviance, such works recombined familiar ingredients to flesh out the skeleton of this new epitome of evil. The apostasy of a former student at the English College at Rome, John Nichols, in February was a windfall for the Protestant cause which the authorities eagerly exploited to cast fresh aspersions on the Jesuits. Alleged to be the ‘Popes Scholer’ and a renowned and learned doctor of the Society, Nichols’ public recantation and the printed version of it that appeared soon after caused a considerable stir in the capital. The renegade proceeded to publish a further tract entitled his Pilgrimage, in which he ‘displaied’ the lives of ‘the hypocriticall Jesuites’ alongside those of ‘proude Popes, ambitious Cardinals, lecherous Bishops’ and ‘fat bellied Monkes’. This crude exercise in caricature added a fresh element to the mix: it incorporated bawdy and salacious revelations about the sexual misdemeanours of members of the order and their lustful liaisons with courtesans and prostitutes.22 Nichols, who was in fact a man of humble abilities, was probably assisted in his literary activities by the Protestant officials who stage-managed the sermons he delivered after his conversion at the Tower of London. Even Robert Persons had to admit that the ‘tempest’ caused by this episode had caused many in the kingdom to waver, compelling him to weigh in with his own ‘discoverie’ of Nichols’ ‘rank fraud’.23 The Nichols affair followed in the wake of a royal proclamation of 10 January 1581 which called for the arrest of these ‘wicked instruments’ of the pope and his delegates, whom, it declared, had been sent under the cover of ‘a holy name’ to corrupt and pervert the populace and foment rebellion in the realm. Maintainers and abettors of these ‘vagrant persons’ would receive severe punishment.24 Later that month Parliament debated and passed a bill extending the law of treason to encompass the activities of missionaries who

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withdrew her Majesty’s subjects from obedience to her to the see of Rome and increasing the fines for recusancy and hearing mass to crippling sums. Sir Walter Mildmay’s vehement speech to the Commons provides a clear expression of the impassioned anxiety about the Jesuit that underpinned this fierce legislative initiative. He spoke of the rable of vagrant fryers newly sprung upp and coming through the world to trowble the Church of God, whose principall errand is, by creeping into the howses and familiarityes of men of behaviour and reputacion, not only to corrupt the realme with false doctrine, but also under that pretence to stir sedition. Tools of the papacy and its princely allies, it was vital that these ‘runagates’ were expunged from the country with the utmost expedition.25 Such sentiments were shared by Lord Burghley, who would later write in his famous Execution of justice (1583) of the ‘evident perils’ that would follow, ‘if these kind of vermin were suffered to creepe by stealth into the Realme and to spreade their poyson within the same, howsoever when they are taken, like hypocrites, they coloure and counterfeit the same with profession of devotion in religion’.26 The language that suffused these acts, proclamations and official manifestoes provided a rhetorical resource that fed back into the wider anti-Jesuit discourse circulating around them: these authorized articulations of the threat presented by the ‘sect’ must be seen as lying on a continuum with other hostile representations of the Society.27 It also set the agenda and supplied the justificatory framework for the public execution of Campion later that year, who was paraded down to London with a paper pinned to his hat emblazoned with the words ‘CAMPION THE SEDITIOUS JESUIT’ in capital letters.28 Such forms of street theatre were simultaneously assertive spectacles of state power and Protestant superiority, and symptoms of a climate of fear about the vulnerability of England to a renewed assault by Rome’s latest set of envoys. Both strands of feeling also found expression in sermons, including those preached to Catholic prisoners in the Tower by William Fulke and John Keltridge in May of 1581 and subsequently published for wider consumption. The latter blasted the Jesuits as ‘instruments of Satan, raysed up for our sinnes, as two edged Swoordes to rent and cut in peece, the poore Church of England’, ‘flaming firebrands’ who loved the Pope as a terrestrial God.29 Preachers at Paul’s Cross such as Anthony Anderson and James Bisse joined the assault upon the ‘late upstart Jesuits’ and ‘pestilent cancre worms’ who troubled the commonwealth.30 The same message was conveyed in the anti-popish ephemera that flowed from the press between June 1580 and December 1581: three halfpenny pamphlets and ballads with titles like The rooting out of the romishe supremacy; The rippinge up of the popes fardell; All shall be well, the pope is now proved vicar of hell; and A gentle Jyrke for the Jesuit

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composed by the well known pot-poet William Elderton.31 Such condemnations of the Catholic cause from ‘the tribunal of an ale bench’ bear witness to an atmosphere of debate and discussion about the arrival of the Jesuits that penetrated to all levels of English society.32 Sung to rousing tunes by minstrels and balladmongers, such items both mirrored and moulded a political discourse that was by no means confined to the educated and literate. Frustratingly, few of the ‘unseemly pictures’ against the papacy and its minions that were circulating at the same time have survived. But a visual satire entitled A newe secte of friars called Capichini accompanied by a stanza of verses offers some insight into the flavour of this pictorial propaganda. Directed at another missionary order ‘sprong up of late’, it warned of the danger these humbly dressed evangelists (which ‘doe nowe within Andwarpe keepe their abidinge’) presented to unwary Protestants who listened to their ‘false tidinge[s]’.33 Such broadsides helped to give shape to emerging stereotypes and the collective anxieties which they enshrined. Finally, attention must be drawn to the part played by speech in the formation of public opinion about the mission. At ‘ordinary tables and in other public meetings’ in the autumn of 1580 there was said to be ‘no other talk’ but of Campion’s brag, and again in March 1581 a gentleman wrote to his cousin in Ludlow that there was ‘much ado in London about papists & Jesuites’. A few months later Persons himself was reporting to his superior in Rome, Alfonso Agazzari, that there is tremendous talk here of Jesuits, and more fables are told about them than were told of old about monsters. For as to the origin of these men, their way of life, their institute, their morals and teaching, their plans and actions, stories of all sorts are spread abroad … and these contradict one another and have a striking resemblance to dreams.34 Remarkably similar rumours had apparently circulated in Scotland in 1579: when John Hay arrived in Dundee ‘the word Jesuit was in everybody’s mouth’ and ‘it was reported all over the kingdom that twelve members of the Society’ had landed there and ‘begun to prove that all the ministers were ignorant deceivers’.35 Such gossip and hearsay were critical in crystallizing ideas and magnifying fears: to echo Ethan Shagan, every person in the chain of their transmission was participating in a conversation about contemporary religious politics and, moreover, adding to it.36 This was something of which the Elizabethan regime itself was keenly aware: a proclamation issued in July 1580 clamped down on ‘murmurers and spreaders’ of rumours about foreign invasion and ordered that they be brought to local justices and punished as ‘sowers of sedition’ and ‘traitorous contagions’.37 One index of the sensitivities to which the arrival of Persons and Campion gave rise in English society is the willingness of individuals to report imprudent remarks made by their neighbours. The case of John Pullyver, who

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was indicted before the Essex assizes for saying that ‘the masse was up in Lyncolneshier very brym’ and ‘that some did saie that we had no quene’, is especially revealing: made on 23 July at Writtle, just a week after Persons had slipped into England, his statement and, more particularly, the reaction of his peers provides a tiny glimpse of the concerns and worries that were coming to a head in local communities that summer.38 No less illuminating is an episode that reached the ears of the Privy Council in May of the following year. The queen’s advisors sent a deputy, Lord North, to investigate allegations that William Shepherd, rector of Heydon on the border between Essex and Cambridgeshire, had ‘in sondry sermons’ delivered ‘verie corrupte and daungerous doctrine, especially tending to the commendacion of the Jesuites (a verie lewde and seditious sorte of Popish preistes)’ and that he remained adamantly ‘in defence of his said doctrine and hathe procured malice towards the complainaunt’. Shepherd, who had been appointed to the benefice in 1541 and weathered the storm of the repeated religious upheavals of the previous four decades, appears to have been the victim of wilful misunderstanding by a faction of zealously Protestant parishioners intent upon depriving him of his living: preaching on New Year’s Day he had innocently exhorted his hearers to aspire to new heights of spiritual virtue – ‘to study to be true Christians, true Jesuits’. But his words assumed a sinister meaning in the context in which they were uttered and his ‘ill willers’ leapt upon the opportunity and accused him of commending ‘those Jesuits that were lately entered into this land from beyond the seas’ and ‘the austerity and holiness of their lives’. Despite Shepherd’s earnest protestations to the contrary, Lord North took a severe view of the seventy-eight year old minister’s unfortunate blunder: he was prohibited from preaching in the future and restricted to reading from the book of homilies; ordered to recant his speech about the Jesuits; and to pay his accusers £3 10s.39 The circumstances in which Shepherd clashed with his adversaries deserve more detailed scrutiny elsewhere; here they open a revealing window into the mindset of the godly and of leading figures in the Elizabethan regime at this tense and troubled time.

3.2 Politics, apocalypticism and the threat of popery We must now turn to examine the environment in which these manifestations of ‘moral panic’ occurred. As Patrick Collinson commented more than forty years ago, this was a moment when ‘Elizabethan policy stood balanced on a knife-edge’: domestic politics converged with international issues to make the late 1570s a critical juncture. The ignominious fall of Edmund Grindal, Archbishop of Canterbury, after clashing with the queen over the suppression of the prophesyings in 1576 had cast a lasting shadow over the progressive and militant Protestant party that had hitherto dominated at court. The ascendancy of moderate puritanism over which the earl of Leicester and his friends had presided now seemed in real danger of

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eclipse, along with their fervent hopes for intervening more proactively in the Netherlands. Changes in the composition of the episcopal hierarchy were threatening the prospects for further reform of the Church and a circle of more conservative and crypto-popish courtiers, including Edward Vere, the earl of Oxford, Lord Henry Howard and Charles Arundell, were rising in influence at the heart of government. In October 1579, when Elizabeth temporarily banished Leicester and Walsingham from her presence and considered the promotion of four Catholics to the rank of privy councillors, ‘there was the chance of a real palace revolution’.40 A key factor in the shifting kaleidoscope of alliance and patronage at court was the revival late the previous year of negotiations for a dynastic match between the English queen and Francis de Valois, duke of Alençon and now duke of Anjou. The whole notion of a marriage between the English monarch and the Catholic heir to the French throne was anathema to those of advanced Protestant views. In the eyes of men like the London lawyer John Stubbe, whose audacious protest against the alliance in The Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf was punished by the amputation of his right hand, it was a heinous breach of divine law and a political catastrophe which opened the way for the kingdom to be absorbed into France. Stubbe’s pamphlet struck a chord with a body of public opinion both inside and outside court antagonistic to the marriage, and to the associated possibility that some kind of religious liberty might be granted to Anjou’s co-religionists. Oxford and others of Catholic sympathy were in fact directly angling for this with the queen.41 Thomas McCoog has recently suggested that the renewal of these marital negotiations was the vital factor that persuaded the reluctant Mercurian to sanction the Jesuit mission led by Persons and Campion. Expectations of a successful French match that would fundamentally transform the situation in England were, he argues persuasively, a sine qua non for the reversal of his earlier refusal to permit such a risky expedition. Upbeat reports from informants at home made it seem like a propitious time at which to parachute the Society into the country. In this sense the mission may indeed be seen as a daring religio-political intervention.42 The leading English Catholics whom Allen and Persons claimed had called urgently for Jesuit assistance may well have included the pro-marriage courtiers Oxford, Arundell and Henry Howard. And here the fallout from the factional jostling that resulted in Oxford’s defection from the Anjou camp at Christmas 1580 is surely significant: his confessions and the cluster of accusations he then levelled against his erstwhile friends hinted at just how serious was the current Catholic threat and how closely the Society of Jesus appeared to be implicated in it. Not only was Arundell alleged to have heard mass celebrated by a Jesuit; he was also said to have brought one to see the queen dance in her privy chamber. It is difficult to substantiate claims coloured by malice and said to be ‘slanderous’, but the very fact of their articulation served to fuel the atmosphere of anxiety I have been describing.43

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Another element in the chemical equation that created this climate of acute unease was the papally financed and Spanish-backed invasion of Ireland by James Fitzmaurice in July of 1579. Accompanied by Nicholas Sander, Fitzmaurice had called upon the Irish lords to join him in a rebellion against the heretical Queen Elizabeth. The repercussions of this challenge resulted in skirmishes and conflicts that were not finally extinguished until the massacre of a force of Italians and Spaniards at Smerwick in November 1580.44 The renewed fears of a general revolt and of an invasion of England itself that coincided with the Jesuits’ arrival fed into the perturbation that surrounded it. Hearing reports of these schemes at Rheims, even Persons and Campion could foresee that they would be regarded as having been privy to them and that the ill-fated Irish offensive would render their own venture all the more dangerous.45 This too served to heighten the sense that the religious integrity of the realm was in great jeopardy. A further piece in the puzzle is the nexus between the concern generated by the arrival of the Jesuits and the simultaneous surge of animus against the ‘horrible secte of grosse and wicked Heretiques’ known as the Family of Love. Chris Marsh has seen the campaign against this mysterious and secretive group (whose members included several of the queen’s own yeomen of the guard), which marked the late 1570s and 80s, as a product of the same worries within the puritan camp that galvanized the drive against papists. Denounced in sermons and tracts, hunted down in the provinces, targeted in a proclamation of 3 October 1580 and the subject of a parliamentary bill that nearly succeeded in outlawing them completely, the Familists, he contends, were ‘a symbolic culprit, a punch bag against which radical protestants sought to relieve their hostile anxieties’. They were a scapegoat for the myriad fears of the godly at a moment of perceived emergency and crisis.46 The chronological link between this crusade and the passions unleashed by the Jesuit mission is, I think, more than a mere coincidence. Both groups operated in a clandestine manner and deployed the printing press with ingenuity; both professed an intense spirituality that their enemies dismissed as hypocritical piety. These similarities were not lost on contemporaries, who regarded these ‘sects’ on the right and the left as two sides of the same diabolical coin. William Charke yoked the Jesuits with ‘the godlesse familie of selflove’ as enemies of the true Gospel; Meredith Hanmer was also quick to point out the ways in which the Jesuits ‘shaketh hands’ with their ‘brethren’ the Familists, a ‘detestable’ society of ‘like antiquity’; and John Keltridge mentioned them in the same breath as evidence of the trials to which the Church of Christ was periodically subject by the permission of the Almighty.47 Both were wolves in sheep’s clothing. They were the ‘false prophets’ which Scripture warned would proliferate immediately prior to the end of the world.48 This brings us to a context for the clamour surrounding the Jesuit mission that has hitherto been overlooked by its historians. It is all too easy to

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dismiss the apocalyptic and demonological language in which Elizabethan polemicists couched their attacks upon the Society as mere hyperbole and empty, if aggressive, rhetoric. We need, though, to take the eschatological tone of many of the texts that the arrival of Persons and Campion engendered very seriously. There is much to suggest that this was a moment when anxiety about providential intervention and the imminence of the final apocalypse reached one of a series of peaks of intensity. The message which some preachers conveyed from the pulpit during this period was fraught with ambivalence: their recognition of the unparalleled mercies and blessings that had been bestowed upon England was tinged with a conviction that its brazen ingratitude and manifold iniquities were drawing down the consuming wrath of God. At Paul’s Cross and Christ’s Church in January 1581, James Bisse warned his audiences that the Lord stood ‘at the doores’ and would soon turn their nation into a Sodom and Gomorrah. He would punish it with a famine of the word and cut down the barren fig tree which, after twenty-three years of the Gospel, had borne so little and such bitter fruit. Taking up the same parable as his text in April, Anthony Anderson was no less certain that lack of zeal combined with rampant sin and security had now tried divine patience to breaking point. The Jesuits and other ‘Papisticall spirites [who] doe streame out againste us’ were just one token that his sharp sentence against England would soon be executed.49 Keltridge too was of the view that the ‘candlesticke’ of the true religion might shortly be removed.50 The sense that all this was a prelude to the second coming of Christ found widespread expression. At Exeter on 6 December 1579, John Chardon gave voice to mounting expectation that the end was nigh, telling his auditors to trim their lamps like wise virgins and urging them to take careful note of the signs in heaven and on earth that foretold the last days. Thomas Roger’s 1577 translation of Sheltco a Geveren’s tract on this topic, enlarged the next year, tapped into the same pocket of feeling and was followed by a work on the General Session in 1581.51 Similar sentiments underpinned Stephen Batman’s Doome Warning all Men to the Judgemente published in March of that year. This was a translation of the voluminous compilation of prodigies by the German writer Conrad Lycosthenes printed in 1557, augmented with many further examples of portents from England and Continental Europe – monstrous births, celestial apparitions, thunderstorms and other strange omens. Batman refrained from deciphering the significance of these phenomena individually, but it is clear that episodes like the birth of a grotesque double-headed baby in Northumberland in January 1580 and the plague of mice and owls which invaded the marshes of Essex in May 1581 carried particular allegorical and anti-Catholic significance for him. He saw them through the same prophetic lens as the popish ass and monk calf described by Luther and Melanchthon in a tract published in England the previous year – as a prelude to the final cataclysm. If his book can be read as ‘a subtle sequel’ to Stubbe’s Gaping Gulf – a timely warning of the dangers

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of the French match – it must also been seen as a product and symptom of the apocalyptic anxieties which the arrival of the Jesuits arguably served to stimulate and invigorate.52 The preoccupation of clerical writers with the ‘extraordinary preachers’ which God sent from heaven to summon human beings to judgement was mirrored at all levels of lay society.53 The eighteen months of Persons’ and Campion’s mission saw a stream of ballads and pamphlets relating news of foreboding phenomena – malformed infants delivered to mothers in Yorkshire and Huntingdonshire; menacing visions of clashing armies and personages clad in black above Brodwells Down in Somerset and the sound of wailing hounds near Blondson in Wiltshire; sightings of spectral castles and ships near Bodmin and Fowey in Cornwall; and the blazing star or meteor that streaked across the sky on 10 October 1580.54 Summarized in Anthony Munday’s anthology of recent prodigies, A view of sundry examples and in John Stow’s Chronicles,55 these and other portents followed hot on the heels of the minor earthquake that had shaken London and the southeast on 6 April, a ‘terrible wonder’ that left a lasting impression on the collective English psyche and which was likewise seen by many as a prognostication of the last judgement. Preachers and pamphleteers like Abraham Fleming dilated on its meaning for many months afterwards and there was evidently much ‘prophesieng of Doomes day’ among the populace. Just the day before Campion crossed over to Dover, an official order for fasting and prayer each Wednesday and Friday was set forth in an endeavour ‘to avert and turn God’s wrath from us’. The liturgy called for heartfelt repentance lest the Lord quench the light of the Gospel and cast the English people and their children ‘out into utter darkness’.56 Re-situated in this context, it becomes apparent that for many Protestants the arrival of the Jesuits heralded the final showdown between truth and falsehood. Reinforced by the ‘pestilent seedes’ of Arianism, Anabaptism, Familism and atheism, these were the instruments by which Satan was laying the foundations for his last battle with Christ, the ‘laste proppe, and staye’ of Antichrist’s ‘totering and ruinous kingdome’. Buttressed with the relevant passages from Revelation and Thessalonians, this was the language T. G. deployed in dedicating his translation of Boquin’s tract on the ‘counterfaite secte’ to the Privy Councillor Francis Russell, earl of Bedford. We need to take it quite literally. He and others genuinely believed that their world might be on the verge of destruction.57 And this was an outlook which Protestants shared with many of their confessional enemies. As Ottavia Niccoli has shown, Italy was awash with apocalyptic expectancy amid the religious ferment, internal political strife and foreign interventions that marked the three decades between 1500 and 1530. Denis Crouzet has found the same eschatological imagination flourishing in France during the late sixteenth-century wars of religion, especially in the circles of the militantly anti-Protestant Catholic League, and, as recently delineated by Geoffrey Parker, it also underpinned the ‘messianic vision’ of Philip II

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of Spain.58 There are tantalizing hints that the mentality of some Elizabethan Catholics had striking similarities. The ‘book of painted pictures of prophecy’ Charles Arundell was said to have exhibited at court is one intriguing straw in the wind.59 Even more suggestive is Robert Persons’ recollection, in the life he wrote of his companion in the 1590s, of the ‘great motion of minds’ that accompanied the Jesuits’ arrival in the summer of 1580. According to Persons, the common and ‘vulgar sort’ of people were ‘much moved’ and ‘amazed’ by their coming and uncertain about what might ensue, particularly in the wake of certain ‘strange signs and wonders that fell out at that time’. Some said that the deformed births were warnings to the Protestants concerning the ‘monstrous doctrine compounded of all ancient heresies’ of which their religion consisted and that the ghostly argosies and galleys seen assaulting the fortification in Cornwall signified ‘these worthy champions of Christ that were newly come from beyond the seas to batter the castle of sin and heresy in England’. The hounds heard in Somerset were another sign of the power of Jesuit preachers to bark against error and the three dozen figures in black attire and harness which repeatedly encountered a rival force in the sky could be interpreted as the combat between these priests and the ministers of England, a contention that would not cease quickly but ‘endure and every day wear hotter and hotter until at last the conquest remain on the one side or the other’.60 These may have been retrospective embellishments dictated by hagiographical convention, but it would be wrong to dismiss the possibility that some contemporaries had indeed engaged in speculations of this kind. The competing meanings which people attached to these apparitions and portents afford compelling insight into the tensions that fractured the religiously divided society in which they were seen. They reveal in sharp relief the latent anxieties and hopes for which the Jesuit mission became a catalyst and focus in post-Reformation England.

3.3 Catholic apology, appellant propaganda and the making of the Jesuit myth The arrival of Persons and Campion did, therefore, coincide with something approximating to the sociological model of a ‘moral panic’. The concluding section of this essay examines how the Jesuits themselves consciously and carefully cultivated the idea that their first entrance to the country had greatly disturbed the English government and its subjects, and how they sought to shape the historical record accordingly. Both the reports of the mission which they sent back to their superiors in Italy in 1580–1, and the subsequent histories written by Persons and other priests to defend and celebrate their activities, emphasized the commotion their appearance had occasioned. Anxious to vindicate the decision to send them at such a treacherous time, the letters Persons dispatched to the General of the order Claudio Aquaviva, the rector of the English College Alfonso Agazzari, and

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Pope Gregory XIII highlighted the natural receptiveness of the English people to their missionary endeavours and described the measures to which the Elizabethan regime felt compelled to resort to discredit them in an attempt to stave off mass defection. Intent upon underlining the purely spiritual nature of their enterprise, they implied that it had deliberately fabricated stories about the Society, manufactured antagonisms about the seditious intentions of the Jesuits that would help to keep it in power. Thus on 17 November 1580, Persons was at pains to stress both the fervour with which the populace had responded to their arrival and the ‘false rumours’ and ‘fraud’ which the authorities sought to impose upon it. Playing up the ‘great throng’ who resorted to the two fathers and the extraordinary zeal of the Catholics despite the intensity with which they were now being persecuted, in a missive written in August 1581, he described the official campaign of calumniation – the parliamentary speeches, polemical tracts, ‘abusive edicts’ and ‘the infinity of lies’ contained in John Nichols’ recantation – only to underline its ineffectiveness. In October, he told of the ‘very large harvest of souls’ being gleaned by Heywood and Holt, adding that the more ‘their adversaries are in fear for themselves, the more savage they are’.61 Campion was no less ebullient in a letter that was destined to be frequently reprinted as a sacred relic of the martyr. Commenting on the stir that followed the circulation of his ‘brag’, he declared ‘they teare and stinge us with their venemous tonges, calling us seditious, hypocrites, yea heretikes too, which is much laughed at. The people hereupon is ours, and that error of spreadinge abroade this writting hath much advaunced the cause’. The best efforts of the Protestant establishment to engineer popular animosity towards himself and Persons, he implied, were doomed to failure: the fruit of the mission was remarkable and its momentum unstoppable. So great was the common opinion of the Society, ‘that I dare skarcely touch the exceeding reverence all Catholikes doe unto us’.62 Scribally copied for wider consumption and written with an eye to the probability that Protestants would intercept and read them, such texts contributed to the construction of a powerful legend about the vital role which the Jesuits had played in rescuing Catholicism in England from terminal decline and in creating a defiant and undaunted recusant community. The impression that their coming had caused ‘greate stormes’ and that propaganda had been cynically whipped up by Elizabeth’s councillors to ‘beguile and incense the simple against them’ was implicit in the life of Campion Persons wrote at the behest of Aquaviva and in the various memoirs about the mission he prepared in the 1590s. Perpetuated in a range of printed works in the following decades, including William Allen’s Briefe historie of the glorious martyrdom of twelve reverend priests (1582), Edward Rishton’s continuation of Nicholas Sanders’ De origine ac progressu schismatic Anglicani liber (1585) and Thomas Worthington’s Relation of sixteen martyrs (1601), it can also be found at the heart of Henry More’s official history of the English

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province of the Society published in Latin in 1660.63 More opened his book with the comment that ‘Of all countries to the north, England was nearly the last to see the Society of Jesus for the first time … it learned to hate the Society before it experienced any real reason for doing so’, and he went on to detail how the Jesuits had braved ‘the fury of the Reformers to become accepted in that island as indomitable defenders of the ancient faith’. Setting the tone for the self-congratulatory account of the order that followed, he quoted a letter written by Campion on the eve of his departure from St Omer for Dover: ‘something positively like a clamour … heralds our approach. Only divine Providence can counteract this kind of publicity, and we fully acquiesce in its dispositions’.64 By the mid-seventeenth century the notion that their advent had sparked a moral panic had become an integral part of the English Jesuits’ self-affirming myth of their own origins. And it is important to note that this developed in dialectic with a rival myth created by the Society’s Catholic as well as Protestant critics.65 It was a by-product of the bitter internecine disputes in which the Jesuits engaged with secular priests during the Appellant and Archpriest controversies at the turn of the seventeenth century. Present in embryo in the conflicts within the English College at Rome in the 1570s and flaring afresh during the so-called Wisbech stirs two decades later, the tensions between the Jesuits’ uncompromising vision of how to re-Catholicize England and the more cautious and non-provocative approach favoured by those who had resigned themselves to minority status not merely provided a fertile breeding ground for the stereotypes constructed by Protestant polemicists, but also significantly augmented them. The vicious war of words that erupted between the two sides extended the black legend of the Jesuits as a ‘generation of vipers’ and evil conspirators in new directions. The stream of insults against this ‘hispaniolised’, machiavellian and satanic Society fired by William Watson, Christopher Bagshaw and Thomas Bluet in tracts like the Sparing discoverie and Decacordon (better known as the Quodlibets) was no less if not more ferocious than anything unleashed by the Protestants, who alighted upon these texts with jubilation and relish. Watson and his colleagues were also responsible for translating into English the antiJesuit works of Gallican Catholic writers like Etienne Pasquier and Antoine Arnauld.66 They readily exploited the hostile analogy between members of the Society and puritans, Anabaptists and Familists, sowing further seeds for the belief that radical Protestant sects were the stooges of the Jesuits which flowered so extravagantly in the minds of men like William Prynne in the 1640s and 50s.67 The caricature of the cunning plotter who hid his real intentions beneath a veneer of feigned sanctity they helped to elaborate has itself been seen as ‘a personification or incarnation of the Appellants’ fears’, ‘a concrete embodiment’ of the ideological and psychological strains of the situation in which they found themselves at the end of Elizabeth’s reign. In short, it too was a folk devil.68

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In his controversial exploration of the workings of fear, myth and history in mid seventeenth-century England, J. C. Davis proposed that the Ranters were not a real religious movement but rather a projection of a cluster of potent anxieties about political strife, religious chaos, moral degeneration and gender inversion. They were a symbol of the maxim that if deviance does not exist, it is often necessary to invent it.69 A rather different case has been argued here: the ‘moral panic’ that surrounded the Jesuit mission was not a malignant fantasy or phobia stirred up by vociferous commentators and a sensationalist press; it reflected instead sentiments and assumptions that were shared by a substantial cross section of English society and which bore witness to a widespread and well-grounded conviction, inflected with apocalyptic feeling, of the vulnerability of this young Protestant nation to domestic rebellion and foreign intervention.70 In the process we have gained further insight into the texture and workings of the Elizabethan public sphere, and the capacity of Catholics not just to engage in but also actively to shape it. This had contemporary repercussions and it has also left lasting historiographical legacies. The echoes of the mutual conspiracy theories to which the mission gave rise that have lingered on in modern historical narratives are not merely a measure of the enduring power of confessional passions and prejudices.71 They also remind us of how far we are at the mercy of the documentary artefacts people in the past left behind, and of the spectacles through which they refracted events. This essay has not sought to penetrate behind, so much as to analyse and to describe them.

Notes I am grateful to Patrick Collinson and Anne Dillon for comments on a draft of this essay and to the editors for their patience. 1. Lewis Owen, Speculum Jesuiticum, or the Jesuites looking-glasse (1629), 1, 20–1. 2. The character of a Jesuit (1681). See also John Taylor, A delicate, dainty, damnable dialogue. Between the devil and a Jesuite (1642); The Jesuits character (1642); The Jesuite and Prieste discovered (1663). 3. See J. C. Aveling, ‘The Jesuit in Literature’, in The Jesuits (1981), ch. 1; Sydney Anglo, ‘More Machiavellian than Machiavel: A Study of the Context of Donne’s Conclave’, in A. J. Smith (ed.), John Donne: Essays in Celebration (1972), 349–84; Geoffrey Cubitt, The Jesuit Myth: Conspiracy Theory and Politics in NineteenthCentury France (Oxford, 1993); Peter Burke, ‘The Black Legend of the Jesuits: An Essay in the History of Social Stereotypes’, in Simon Ditchfield (ed.), Christianity and Community in the West: Essays for John Bossy (Aldershot, 2001), 165–82; Eric Nelson, ‘The Jesuit Legend: Superstition and Myth-Making’, in Helen Parish and William G. Naphy (eds), Religion and Superstition in Reformation Europe (Manchester, 2002), 94–115; Arthur F. Marotti, Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourse in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, 2005), 42–53; Jonathan Wright, The Jesuits: Missions, Myths and Histories (2005), ch. 5.

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4. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (1972); Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda, Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance (Oxford, 1994); Kenneth Thompson, Moral Panics (1998); Chas Critcher, Moral Panics and the Media (Buckingham, 2003). See above, chs 1–2 for further discussion. 5. For some classic studies, see Carol Z. Wiener, ‘The Beleaguered Isle: A Study of Elizabethan and Early Jacobean Anti-Catholicism’, Past and Present, 51 (1971), 27–62; Robin Clifton, ‘The Popular Fear of Catholics during the English Revolution’, Past and Present, 51 (1971), 23–55; Peter Lake, ‘Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice’, in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds), Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603–1642 (1989), 72–106. Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca, NY, 1999), 5. 6. See Peter Lake and Michael Questier, ‘Puritans, Papists, and the “Public Sphere” in Early Modern England: The Edmund Campion Affair in Context’, Journal of Modern History, 72 (2000), 587–627; Natalie Mears, Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms (Cambridge, 2005), ch. 6. On Catholics as part of the political nation, see Ethan H. Shagan, ‘Introduction’, in Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2005). 7. See Thomas F. Mayer, ‘A Test of Wills: Cardinal Pole, Ignatius Loyola, and the Jesuits in England’, in Thomas M. McCoog (ed.), The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits (Woodbridge, 1996), 21–37; Thomas McCoog, ‘Ignatius Loyola and Reginald Pole: A Reconsideration’, Journal of Ecclesiasical History, 47 (1996), 257–73; Thomas McCoog, The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England 1541–1588: ‘Our Way of Proceeding’ (Leiden, 1996), 24–39. 8. See McCoog, Society of Jesus, 14–22, 52–61, for an account of these missions. On Scotland, see Michael Yellowlees, ‘So Strange a Monster as a Jesuite’: The Society of Jesus in Sixteenth-Century Scotland (Argyll, 2003), chs 2, 4. The quotation is from a letter of Thomas Randolph to Sir William Cecil of 1 August 1562: J. H. Pollen (ed.), Papal Negotiations with Mary Queen of Scots During her Reign in Scotland 1561–1567 (Edinburgh, 1901), 142. 9. McCoog, Society of Jesus, 78, 101. 10. Aveling, Jesuits, 20. 11. McCoog, Society of Jesus, 101. See also OED, s.v. ‘jesuit’ and ‘jesuitical’. 12. Thomas Stapleton, A counterblast to M. Hornes vayne blaste against M. Fekenham (Louvain, 1567), fol. 533 [vere 541]–542r. 13. David Kunzle, The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c.1450 to 1825 (Berkeley, CA, 1973), 31–2. Foreign publications include Lukas Osiander, Falsche Lehre der Jesuiten (1568); Johann Fischart, Fides Jesu et Jesuitarum (1573), Pierre Boquin, Assertio contra jesuitismum (1576) and Jan Niemojewski, Diatribe (1577): see Burke, ‘Black Legend’, 181. 14. Philips van Marnix van St. Aldegonde, The bee hive of the romishe church, trans. George Gilpin (1579), fols. 20v–21r. 15. See McCoog, Society of Jesus, ch. 4 for a detailed account. On the way in which Catholic martyrs appropriated the scaffold, see Peter Lake and Michael Questier, ‘Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric under the Gallows: Puritans, Romanists and the State in Early Modern England’, Past and Present, 153 (1996), 64–107. 16. See Stonyhurst College, Lancashire, Stonyhurst MS Grene P, edited as Robert Persons, ‘Of the Life and Martyrdom of Father Edmond Campion’, Letters and

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17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

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Notices, 57 (1877), 219–42; 58 (1877), 308–39; 59 (1878), 1–68, quotation at p. 14. All subsequent quotations are from issue 59. John Roche Dasent et al. (eds), Acts of the Privy Council of England 1542–1631, (1890–1964), xii, 198 and see also p. 271. See also R. Lemon and M. A. E. Green (eds), Calendar of State Papers Domestic 1547–1580 (1856), 672, 676; Calendar of State Papers Domestic 1581–90 (1865) 1, 4, 5, 10, 15, 21, 31. Calendar of State Papers 1547–1580, 688. See also Patrick Ryan (ed.), ‘Some Correspondence of Cardinal Allen, 1579–85, from the Jesuit Archives’, Miscellanea VII, Catholic Record Society 9 (1911), 31. William Charke, An answere to a seditious pamphlet lately cast abroade by a Jesuite (1580), sigs A8r, B1v, B8v, and passim. Francken’s Conference or Dialogue discovering the sect of Jesuites (1580) was appended to it: quotations at sigs F8r, F3r. Meredith Hanmer, The great bragge and challenge of M. Champion (1581), quotation at sig. A3r and The Jesuites banner (1581), quotation at sig. A2v. Boquin, Defence of the olde, and true profession of Christianitie (1581), sigs A1v, A2v, pp. 74, 148, 160, and passim. A declaration of the recantation of John Nichols (1581); John Nichols pilgrimage (1581), esp. sigs I1v–7r. See L. Hicks (ed.), Letters and Memorials of Father Robert Persons, S.J., vol. I to 1588, Catholic Record Society 39 (1942), 85. See J. H. Pollen (ed.), ‘The Memoirs of Father Robert Persons’, in Miscellanea II, Catholic Record Society 2 (1906), 181–2, and Miscellanea IV, Catholic Record Society 4 (1907), 7–9. Robert Persons, A discoverie of I. Nichols minister, misreported a Jesuite, lately recanted in the tower of London ([1581]). Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin (eds), Tudor Royal Proclamations (New Haven, CT, 1964–9), ii. 481–4. 23 Eliz.1, c.1; T. E. Hartley (ed.), Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I, vol. I 1558-1581 (Leicester, 1981), 504–5, and see 528. William Cecil, The execution of justice in England (1583), fol. B1r . Cf. Dolan, Whores of Babylon, 31–2. Ryan, ‘Correspondence of Cardinal Allen’, 99; Hicks (ed.), Letters and Memorials, 92–3. William Fulke, A sermon preached upon Sunday being the twelfth of March anno 1581 (1581); John Keltridge, Two godlie and learned sermons (1581), sigs A2v, D4v and passim. James Bisse, Two sermons preached, the one at Paules Crosse the eight of Januarie 1580 (1581); Anthony Anderson, A sermon preached at Paules Crosse, the 23 of Aprill (1581), quotations at sigs A7v, G5v. See the entries in Edward Arber (ed.), A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London 1554–1640, (1875–94), ii. 371, 387, 397 and 388 respectively. As described by Persons, Discoverie, sig. M6r. As mentioned by Persons: Hicks (ed.), Letters and Memorials, p. 60. A newe secte of friars called Capichini ([London?, 1580]). Persons, ‘Of the Life … of Campion’, 62; Calendar of State Papers Domestic 1581–90, p. 10; Hicks (ed.), Letters and Memorials, 83. W. Forbes-Leith (ed.), Narratives of Scottish Catholics under Mary Stuart and James VI (1889), 145. Ethan H. Shagan, ‘Rumours and Popular Politics in the Reign of Henry VIII’, in Tim Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500–1850 (Basingstoke, 2001), 31 and 30–66. See also Burke, ‘Black Legend’, 172–3. Hughes and Larkin (eds), Tudor Royal Proclamations, ii. 469–71.

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38. J. S. Cockburn (ed.), Calendar of Assize Records: Essex Indictments: Elizabeth I (1978), 203. 39. Acts of the Privy Council, vol. xiii 1581–1582, p. 56; F. S. Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Disorder. Mainly from Essex Sessions and Assize Records (Chelmsford, 1970), 48–9. On Shepherd’s troubles, see the extended discussion in Mark Byford, ‘The Price of Protestantism: Assessing the Impact of Religious Change on Elizabethan Essex: The cases of Heydon and Colchester, 1558–1594’, (unpubl. Oxford DPhil thesis, 1989). On North, an ally of Leicester and a stout supporter of puritan preachers, see John Craig’s entry in the ODNB. 40. Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (1967), 198, 200 and 191–207 passim. 41. See Natalie Mears, ‘Counsel, Debate and Queenship: John Stubbe’s The discoverie of a gaping gulf, 1579’, Historical Journal, 44 (2001), 629–50; Mears, Queenship, 199–203. For this context, see also Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven, CT, 1996). 42. Thomas M. McCoog, ‘The English Jesuit Mission and the French Match, 1579–1581’, Catholic Historical Review, 87 (2001), 185–213; Lake and Questier, ‘Puritans, Papists, and the “Public Sphere”’, 612–25. See also John Bossy, ‘English Catholics and the French Match’, Recusant History, 5 (1959), 2–16. To speak of the mission as a religio-political enterprise is to open a large can of worms. For recent interventions in this ongoing debate, see Michael L. Carrafiello, ‘English Catholicism and the Jesuit Mission of 1580–1581’, Historical Journal, 37 (1994), 761–74; Stefania Tutino, Law and Conscience: Catholicism in Early Modern England, 1570–1625 (Aldershot, 2007), ch. 2. On Persons, see also John Bossy, ‘The Heart of Robert Persons’, in Thomas M. McCoog (ed.), The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits (Woodbridge, 1996), 141–58. 43. Calendar of State Papers Domestic 1581–90, pp. 38–9. On Oxford’s defection, which was prompted by Leicester, see McCoog, ‘English Jesuit Mission’, 202–3. 44. McCoog, Society of Jesus, 116–18. 45. See Persons, ‘Of the Life of … Campion’, 11. For the rumours see Hughes and Larkin (eds), Tudor Royal Proclamations, ii. 469–71. 46. Christopher W. Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 1550–1630 (Cambridge, 1994), ch. 5, quotation at 126. 47. Charke, Answere, ‘To the Reader’; Hanmer, Jesuits banner, sig. A3r–v; Charke, Great bragge, p. 3; Keltridge, Two godlie and learned sermons, sig. 4v. John Calvin linked Anabaptists with the Jesuits: The institution of Christian religion (1561), fol. 127r. 48. Matthew 7.15. 49. Bisse, Two sermons, sigs E1r, G3v–4r and passim; Anderson, Sermon, sig. A7r–v. 50. Keltridge, Two godlie and learned sermons, sig. 3r. 51. John Chardon, A sermon preached in St. Peters Church in Exceter (1580); Sheltco a Geveren, Of the ende of this world, and the seconde commyng of Christ, trans. Thomas Rogers (1577 and 1578); Thomas Rogers, The general session (1581). For the context, see Richard Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse: Sixteenth-Century Apocalypticism, Millenarianism and the English Reformation from John Bale to John Foxe and Thomas Brightman (Abingdon, 1978), esp. chs 8–9; Katharine R. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain, 1530–1645 (Oxford, 1979). 52. Stephen Batman, The doome warning all men to the judgemente (1581), citations at 408, 439. See John R. McNair’s introduction to his facsimile edition (Delamar, NY, 1984), p. viii. Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon, Of two woonderful popish

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53. 54. 55. 56.

57.

58.

59. 60.

61.

62.

63.

64.

65. 66.

67.

61

monsters to wyt, of a popish asse which was found at Rome in the riuer of Tyber, and of a monkish calfe, calved at Friberge in Misne, trans. John Brooke (1579). On German prodigy literature in this period, see Robin Bruce Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis: Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation (Stanford, CA, 1988). Anderson, Sermon, sig. F7v. See Arber, Transcript, ii. 371, 372, 378, 379, 385, 392. Anthony Munday, A view of sundry examples (1580); John Stow, The Chronicles of England, from Brute unto this present yeare of Christ (1580), 1209–15. For the reaction to the earthquake, see my Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999), 130–5. Abraham Fleming, A bright burning beacon (1580), sig. O4v and passim; W. K. Clay (ed.), Liturgical Services: Liturgies and Occasional Forms of Prayer set forth in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, Parker Society (Cambridge, 1847), 562–75, at 575. Boquin, Defence, dedicatory epistle. An elaborately illustrated copy of Paul Grebner’s Latin prophecy dating from c. 1574–1586 includes a depiction of a snake (‘Jesuitas’) being consumed by a stork: Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R. 16. 22, fol. 365r. Ottavia Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton, NJ, 1987); Denis Crouzet, Les guerriers de Dieu: la violence au temps des troubles de religion (vers 1525–vers 1610), (Champ Vallon, 1990), esp. vol. ii, chs 16–18; Geoffrey Parker, ‘The Place of Tudor England in the Messianic Vision of Philip II of Spain’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 12 (2002), 167–221. Calendar of State Papers Domestic 1581–1590, p. 38. Persons, ‘Of the Life … of Campion’, ch. 20, pp. 22–7. For later confirmation of the link between the earthquake and the arrival of Persons and Campion, see John Gee, The Foot out of the Snare (1624), p. 54. Hicks (ed.), Letters and Memorials, 54–62, 83–90, 107–8. See also the Annual Letter for 1580–1, which was probably written by Persons, printed in Henry Foley (ed.), Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus (1877–84), iii. 37–41. Printed in William Allen, A briefe historie of the glorious martyrdom of twelve reverend priests (1908 edn; first publ. Rheims, 1582), 23, 25; cf. Persons’ comment in Hicks (ed.), Letters and Memorials, 59. Persons, ‘Of the Life … of Campion’; Pollen (ed.), ‘Memoirs of Father Robert Persons’, Miscellanea II, pp. 177 and 177–85 passim; Allen, Briefe historie; Nicholas Sander, Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism. Published AD 1585, with a Continuation of the History, by Rev. Edward Rishton, ed. David Lewis (1877), esp. 309–11; Thomas Worthington, A relation of sixtene martyrs (Douai, 1601), 53–4. Francis Edwards (trans. and ed.), The Elizabethan Jesuits: Historia Missionis Anglicanae Societatis Jesu (1660) (Chichester, 1981), 10, 41, 77. On Jesuit historiography, see John O’Malley, ‘The Historiography of the Society of Jesus: Where does it Stand Today?’, in John O’Malley et al. (eds), The Jesuits: Cultures, Societies and the Arts 1540–1773 (Toronto, 1999), 3–37, esp. 4–11. A point made by Nelson, ‘Jesuit Legend’, 95. For an overview of the literature generated by this dispute, see Peter Milward, Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age: A Survey of Printed Sources (1977), 116–26. For a Protestant taking advantage of the controversy, see Thomas Bell, The anatomie of popish tyrannie (1603). See William M. Lamont, Marginal Prynne 1600–1669 (London and Toronto, 1963), ch. 6, esp. 140–3. This fear is also given expression in A catalogue of the severall

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68. 69. 70.

71.

The Jesuit Mission sects and opinions in England and other nations (1647) and [John Moon], A Jesuitical designe discovered: in a piece called, the quakers pedigree (1674). Arnold Pritchard, Catholic Loyalism in Elizabethan England (1979), ch. 5, quotation at 180. J. C. Davis, Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters and the Historians (Cambridge, 1986). Cf. Jonathan Scott, ‘England’s Troubles: Exhuming the Popish Plot’, in Tim Harris, Paul Seaward and Mark Goldie (eds), The Politics of Religion in Restoration England (Oxford, 1990), 107–31. For some representative Protestant and Catholic expressions, see H. R. TrevorRoper, ‘Twice Martyred: The English Jesuits and their Historians’, in Historical Essays (1957), 113–18 and Leo Hicks, An Elizabethan Problem (1964) and Francis Edwards, The Jesuits in England: From 1580 to the Present Day (Tunbridge Wells, 1985) respectively.

4 Cross-Dressing and Pamphleteering in Early Seventeenth-Century London Anna Bayman

On 25 January 1620, John Chamberlain reported in a letter to Dudley Carleton that [y]esterday the bishop of London called together all his Clergie about this towne, and told them he had expresse commandment from the King to will them to inveigh vehemently and bitterly in theyre sermons against the insolencie of our women, and theyre wearing of brode brimd hats, pointed dublets, theyre haire cut short or shorne, and some of them stilletaes or poniards, and such other trinckets of like moment, adding withal that yf pulpit admonitions will not reforme them he wold proceed by another course; the truth is the world is very far out of order, but whether this will mend yt God knows. By the time of his next letter to Carleton, on 12 February, it appears that the campaign ordered by the king was in full swing, and had recruited more voices. Our pulpits ring continually of the insolence and impudence of women: and to helpe the matter forward the players have likewise taken them to taske, and so to the ballades and ballad-singers, so that they can come no where but theyre eares tingle: and yf all this will not serve the King threatens to fall upon theyre husbands, parents, or frends that have or shold have powre over them and make them pay for yt.

4.1 Introduction: The Jacobean campaign to reform cross-dressing Chamberlain’s account suggests a concentrated burst of interest in the fashion among London women for dressing in men’s apparel, and systematic calls 63

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for reform, directed by the highest authorities, expressed in the full range of London’s media: its pulpits, its stages, its cheap print, and its oral cultures. On 11 March, he reported that the dean of Westminster had forbidden admittance to women in yellow ruffs (a target that, as we shall see, was in fact more controversial that the dean perhaps realized).1 Cross-dressing was already a target for criticisms of the theatre, and it now became part of the discourse about gender, itself a staple of the popular press. There had been earlier waves of literary interest in specific forms of female transgression. Shrewish women had become commonplace on the stage.2 Witches too were treated in the drama, the audiences’ interests perhaps piqued by the accession of a king whose own concerns about witches were well-known ( James’s Daemonologie was printed in London upon his accession, and the story of the Berwick witches had been told in an English pamphlet of 1591 or 1592), and by the contestation of a number of possession cases around the turn of the century.3 A cross-dressing heroine turned up in the form of Moll Cutpurse, the Roaring Girl of Dekker and Middleton’s 1611 play. Moll was based on a notorious London woman, Mary Frith, who did public penance in 1612 for lewd behaviour. In 1615, the trials of Anne Turner and Frances Howard, along with their male co-accused, drew London’s attention to a ghoulish mix of sex, murder, witchcraft, and Catholicism, signified, as Alistair Bellany has persuasively argued, in particular forms of fashionable dress and female transgression.4 One consequence of the scandalized interest was the publication of a poem – ironically describing the benefits of marriage to a good wife – written by the victim, Sir Thomas Overbury, along with many additions and sequels. It is unsurprising, then, that shortly after Chamberlain first reported James’s instructions to the preachers, three pamphlets were produced in very rapid succession that engaged with the issue of cross-dressing. Texts promoting moral anxiety – Chamberlain’s sense that the world was ‘very far out of order’ – were familiar enough to late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century readers, most commonly taking the form of exhortation to repudiate the sin that had brought about plague, war, famine (which all visited together in the last years of Elizabeth’s reign), or to arm oneself against the rising tide of Jesuits, witches, vagrants, rogues, and other such ‘caterpillars of the commonwealth’ likely to tend to its subversion. There is good evidence that the press could create a stir at times: the Martin Marprelate pamphlets of 1588–9 were reportedly read in every shopkeeper’s door; the pamphlets that argued against the proposed Spanish Match in 1623–4 did so with a remarkably popular voice; the exaggerated reports of Catholic massacres in Ireland in the early 1640s promoted an atmosphere of terrified hostility to all that could be identified as popish.5 Chamberlain’s picture plausibly points to a moment of ‘moral panic’, in which the press along with the pulpit, and the chattering news culture to which Chamberlain offers us such privileged access, sought to raise levels of public anxiety about a specific form of deviance and to press solutions that reinforced the

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patriarchal order. However, early seventeenth-century readers would also have encountered texts that mimicked ‘moral panic’ publication that in fact sought to entertain their audience, and even celebrate their subjects. Indeed, these works are rather more typical of the late Elizabethan and early Stuart experience (especially in the years of peace during James’s reign). This essay will argue that the cross-dressing pamphlets simultaneously voice and mock moral outrage; taking the opportunity, alongside proposing a reassertion of conventional gender roles, to articulate defences of female freedoms and female transgressions that sit uncomfortably with the patriarchal political agenda we might expect to dominate.6

4.2 The pamphlets and moral panic Cross-dressing, familiar in its male form from puritan criticism of the theatre, was not the only kind of sartorial transgression with which early modern pamphlet readers would have been familiar. Sumptuary legislation and a series of royal proclamations under Elizabeth reminded them that clothes signified social identities, and that the misrepresentation of social status through dress was subject to legal penalty. James, who had repealed the Tudor sumptuary laws, turned instead to the pulpit to remedy the plague of cross-dressing.7 The king’s belief in the social power of the sermon was no doubt informed by his experience in Scotland, and Chamberlain’s picture seems to confirm that a systematic preaching campaign could indeed exert significant pressure. James’s subjects appear equally to have viewed the issue as a moral concern, and were on occasion prepared to apply appropriate judicial solutions, prosecuting the transgression in the ecclesiastical courts and, in London, in Bridewell. David Cressy reminds us, however, that ‘real’ cross-dressers are rare in the court record, and suggests that the charged polemic of the puritan preachers, the reports of Chamberlain, and the ‘flurry of misogynist pamphlets’ are deeply misleading in their picture of profound anxiety about cross-dressing. More cautiously, Bernard Capp notes that crossdressing cases are also rare in the Bridewell record, but that the governors were ‘conscious that the scale of the problem far exceeded their very limited resources’.8 Cross-dressing was, then, in these years at least, part of a mainstream moralizing discourse with the possibility of redress in the ecclesiastical courts, as well as an element of the puritan diatribe against the theatre. The first of the three cross-dressing pamphlets, all of which were anonymous, was Hic Mulier, or, the man-woman: being a medicine to cure the coltish disease of the staggers in the masculine-feminines of our times. It was entered in the Stationers’ Register to John Trundle on the 9th of February 1620, just over a fortnight after the bishop of London reportedly ordered the preaching campaign. One week later, on the 16th, Trundle entered the second pamphlet Haec-Vir, or the womanish man. The proximity of the registrations and publications suggests some coordination between Trundle and the writer or

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writers, although as Joad Raymond points out, if Trundle had been certain of the second when he registered the first, he could have registered that at the same time.9 Another publisher, Richard Meighen, quickly moved in on the debate: the third pamphlet, Muld Sacke: Or the apologie of Hic Mulier, was registered to Meighen on 29 April.10 Hic Mulier takes as its subject ‘you Masculine-women’, who are ‘stranger than strangenesse it selfe, whom Wisemen wonder at; Boyes shoute at, and Goblins themselves start at’.11 It is written as a first person address, with no acknowledgement of its textuality – there is, for example, no introductory epistle, or dedication, which is unusual in printed pamphlets. Its tone is conversational (‘Hic Mulier; How now?’) and the argument is built on a series of rhetorical questions and objections. The author sets up an uncontroversial and unremarkable attack on masculine women and in particular, on the fashion for masculine forms of dress that ‘emulates the plague, and throwes it selfe amongst women of all degrees’. ‘Good women’, the ‘crownes of natures worke’, are excluded from the ‘Declamation’; the author wants to avoid the criticisms of indiscriminacy levelled at the misogynist writers, although is not above repeating misogynist gibes attributed elsewhere, and is keen to emphasize how widespread the fashion for masculinity is. Conventional complaints about the decline of nobility rub shoulders with equally derivative remarks about the unnecessary adornment and corruption of nature, the vanity of women, and the connection between fashionable dress and sexual promiscuity. Familiar, too, are the attacks on women from the lower orders aping their betters, in particular the citizen wives who seek to imitate the ladies of the court by appropriating their fashions. Citation forms a major part of its argument; in both strategy and content, Hic Mulier owes a great deal to the querelle des femmes literature, from which it derives both misogyny and praise of women (as, for example, in the argument that women were made of a more pure substance than men12). It also owes much to the traditions of social complaint that warned of the disorder consequent on any neglect of proper social responsibilities, and emphasized natural hierarchy. Like Hic Mulier, the second pamphlet in the series, Haec-Vir, drew substantially on the querelle as well as on the complaint literature for its central argument that there are designated spheres of responsibility, and its solution that returning to those conventional roles will restore the social order. The final pamphlet, Muld Sacke, is the most derivative of the three. It develops the engagement of the first two with traditions of social complaint. What is Hic Mulier really? asks Muld Sacke, in a commonplace rhetorical device that allows the pamphlet to rehearse conventional criticisms of the usual targets of lawyers, corrupt clergy, exploitative landlords, and especially usurers and brokers. Here the cross-dressing complaint degenerates into a scattergun lament for various forms of moral degeneracy, the decline of traditional values, and the prodigal wasting of patrimonies, familiar from dozens of other pamphlets and losing much of the specificity and topicality of the first two works. Although it casts its net wide, however,

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its targets ranging from puritans to Catholics and across all social levels, Muld Sacke returns several times to the particular themes of sartorial excess and intemperate consumption that dominate the earlier works’ descriptions of cross-dressing. The broker (or usurer) lends money via a bill of sale to Mistris Spendthrift for ‘a Taffata Peticote, a Bever Hat, Gold Band, Yellow Feather, a Fanne, a payre of Silk Stockings, Garters, and Roses’.13 The ancient gentry have abandoned the countryside (another very commonplace complaint) in favour of the wasteful pleasures of the city, which include ‘prodigall cloathing’ and ‘excessive dyet’.14 There was much, then, that was conventional in the pamphlets. They had roots in traditions of social complaint; Hic Mulier puts particular emphasis on cross-dressing as a form of dissimulation, permitting comparison with other social ills: Hic Mulier is ‘the gilt durt, which imbroders Play-houses … the perfumed Carrion that bad men feede on in Brothels’.15 They also chimed with the preaching campaigns, taking cues from the puritan diatribes against cross dressing, including the link so commonly drawn between cross dressing and the theatre, and with attempts to punish cross-dressing in court. Presumably in the light of James’s instructions to the preachers, they seem to promote a particularly topical anxiety about the problem: ‘since the daies of Adam women were never so Masculine’;16 ‘What, Hic-Mulier, the Man-Woman? She that like a Larum-Bell at midnight hath raised the whole Kingdome in Armes against her?’.17 Although in Muld Sacke the Hic Mulier character rejects the accusations of novelty laid against her, pointing out that Hic Mulier’s comment suggests that Eve, or ‘some other’ from the days of Adam, was a masculine woman, and citing biblical and classical examples of ‘masculine’ women,18 this is because it seeks to draw attention away from cross-dressing to more general transgressions. Popular contemporary literature lards both Hic Mulier and Haec-Vir, giving sharp cultural context to their complaint. The layer of irony in Haec-Vir’s Larum-Bell remark (it is put into the mouth of the excited womanish man Haec Vir), however, suggests that there is something more than ‘moral panic’ at work in these texts. If we look more closely, all three pamphlets, with increasing conviction, undermine the earnest censure of female cross-dressing.

4.3 Cross-currents The collapse of the moralizing discourse had begun in the first pamphlet. Hic Mulier starts coherently enough, but begins to break down once the voices of the ‘witty-offending great Ones’ are given space to defend themselves.19 These assertive female voices do more than simply set up the author’s arguments, as earlier interruptions had done, and the absence of editorial framing around the text means that they can be heard uncontained and independent. They make a case for their own cross-dressing on the grounds that noble women should be entitled to distinguish themselves from the common sort:

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‘What, is there no difference among women? No distinction of places, no respect of Honours, nor no regard of bloud, or allyance?’20 Returning after some three pages to the principal speaking voice, the author does not answer the substance of the noble women’s argument but instead takes refuge in a misogynistic commonplace, articulated (tellingly) in a quotation from ‘an excellent Poet’ (it is from Marlowe’s Hero and Leander), that ‘Women never, / Love beauty in their Sexe, but envy ever’.21 The remainder of the argument rests on citation and classical example of generic commonplaces. Taken as a whole, then, the pamphlet simultaneously articulates and criticizes the attack on female cross-dressing. Although the masculine women are Hic Mulier’s targets (the London court record also reflects the emphasis of the king and of John Chamberlain on female cross-dressing22), it nods to the transgressions of effeminizing male fashions too: while long hair on a woman is ‘the ornament of her sex’ (and compared with her ‘chief honour’, ‘bashfull shamefastnesse’), long hair on a man is ‘the vizard for a theevish or murderous disposicion’.23 Haec-Vir takes its cue from the hint dropped here that cross-dressing and inappropriate attire was not the sole preserve of women, introducing the logical counterpart of Hic Mulier in the character Haec Vir. Hic Mulier is depicted in the title-page woodcut wearing spurs, a pistol, a poniard, a sword, and a broadbrimmed hat, vividly recalling the king’s instructions to the preachers – but here she is joined by a foppishly dressed man. As with the first pamphlet, there is little textual framing to Haec-Vir. The scene is set on the title page, on which the work is described as ‘an Answere to a late Booke intituled Hic-Mulier. Exprest in briefe Dialogue betweene Haec-Vir the WomanishMan, and Hic-Mulier the Man-Woman’. The first page simply announces the title and the two speakers. The start is straightforward enough – a comic exchange between Haec Vir and Hic Mulier, mistaking each other for a gentlewoman and a gentleman, and then setting out their surveys of each other. Hic Mulier soon begins to defend her transgression, however, and like the ‘witty-offending great Ones’ of Hic Mulier, she is articulate and posits arguments that go unanswered. Much of the pamphlet is taken up with an unusual and powerful assertion of female freedom and equality. Hic Mulier insists on women’s agency: she is free ‘to crowne my delights with those pleasures which are most suitable to mine affections’, and she asks whether her detractors will ‘have poore woman such a fixed starre, that shee shall not so much as move or twinkle in her own sphere? That were true slavery indeed’.24 She insists that her changeable appearance is appropriate to her natural role, as Nature ‘hath given a singular delight in change’.25 The rhetoric, as well as making a striking contribution to the woman debate (it has echoes of the pamphlets that defended women against the notorious 1615 attack by Joseph Swetnam26), again has strong resonances of the social satires that concentrate on ordained spheres and natural roles. Hic Mulier’s conclusion, insisting that the man-woman’s transgression was forced by the

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original transgression of the men who adopted feminine attributes, leads her to the solution, familiar from social complaint, that both sexes should return to their proper roles. The pamphlet ends with the agreement of the man-woman and the womanish man upon Hic Mulier’s solution. But tangled up with her assertions that there are naturally created spheres for the sexes is a far more radical view: that custom should not dictate these roles, that women are free to comprehend their own roles without reference to tradition. ‘I was created free, born free, and live free: what lets me then so to spinne out my life, that I may dye free? … Are we then bound to be the Flatterers of Time, or the dependants on Custome? … Custome is an Idiot’.27 Like the question of class in Hic Mulier, the attack on custom goes unanswered here. For Jonathan Dollimore, Haec-Vir’s revelation that custom is the cause not the effect of gender divisions is particularly important, suggesting the rejection of natural and fixed gender boundaries in favour of recognizing their createdness and a celebration of (the potential for) change.28 Since the solution lies in the readoption of appropriate clothing, custom, in the form of apparel, and not nature is exposed as the basis for gender difference. Thus, Dollimore argues, ‘the submission ironically incorporates – contains – the original challenge.’29 Furthermore, the insistence that women are superior beings – ‘excellent woman, so much better in that she is something purer’30 – and have the capability and natural right to decide their own behaviour, has only been partially attacked, on the grounds that Hic Mulier’s freedom of choice has in practice led her to slavery to appetite: Haec Vir tells Hic Mulier that ‘You have wrested out some wit, to wrangle forth no reason … what baser bondage … to take a wilfull libertie to doe evill, and to give evill example? this is to bee Hels Prentice, not Heavens Free-woman’.31 Hic Mulier points out that his response is incomplete: ‘Sir, I confesse you have raysd mine eyelids up, but you have not cleare taken away the filme that covers the sight’,32 drawing the reader’s attention to the fact that much of the theoretical substance of her argument has gone unchallenged. Occasional moments in Muld Sacke also see the powerful speaking voice of Hic Mulier derail the earnest complaint. It is the man-woman who dismisses the earlier pamphlets as inadequate. Her comical ‘refutation’ of the faults described by the first pamphlet serves to prove her guilty of all of them; in fact she goes on to acknowledge that ‘those imputations you doe lay against me, are the chiefe summum bonum, the most honourable endes, the only virtues, I ayme at’.33 The (very conventional) diatribe against usurers and brokers is partly driven by ‘mine owne private griefes, against them’, because she has pawned some of her elaborate clothes, originally paid for with money borrowed by her husband ‘Master Woodcocke’ and neighbour ‘goodman Goose’.34 We discover at the end of Muld Sacke that all the discussion has been for nothing, for Hic Mulier is unrepentant: ‘I doe advise all such that may come under the name of Haec-Vir … first remove those misty clouds of

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darkenesse, that now overshadowes their own sight, and then boldly presume to cleare the eyes of others … And so (because I must make mee unready and goe to a maske) I bid you good night’.35 So much for the man-woman. The attack on unsuitable apparel has been shown, by the prioritizing of custom over (what we would call) biology in Haec-Vir, to raise problems for the misogynistic discourse on which it drew. Hic Mulier is articulate and apparently empowered by her cross-dressing; it is particularly clear in Haec-Vir that she has the rhetorical advantage over Haec Vir. While he cannot satisfy Hic Mulier, she can persuade him: he tells her that ‘You have both rais’d mine eye-lids, cleered my sight, and made my heart entertaine both shame and delight at an instant; shame in my Follies past, delight in our Noble and Worthy Conversion’.36 We may well not be surprised by this, for the pamphlets’ readers surely were not. The pamphlets’ Hic Mulier owes at least as much to the cross-dressed female character on stage, with whom the London readership would have been very familiar, as she does to the shameless harlot of the moralizing reformers. This character was transgressive, certainly, but usually portrayed with a great deal of sympathy, and in many cases given a pivotal part in resolving the action, a theme common to many versions of the trickster on stage.37 The most striking version of this character, Middleton and Dekker’s Roaring Girl, is astonishingly enabled by her cross-dressing. The pamphlets do not allow the condemnations of female cross-dressing to close down the possibility that it might empower its practitioners. What then of the effeminate man?

4.4 Effeminate men and court politics Muld Sacke accused Hic Mulier of ‘cowardize’ because it neglected the ‘abuses of Haec-Vir whom you dare not point at, much lesse challenge’.38 There was more to this than simply accusing Hic Mulier of ‘straining at gnats’ (that is, attacking relatively insignificant targets). Muld Sacke hints here that effeminate men were a more dangerous subject than masculine women, bringing our attention to the political resonances of the pamphlets and the particular cultural moment with which they engaged. Although Hic Mulier insists that the fashion is everywhere (‘It is an infection that emulates the plague, and throwes it selfe amongst women of all degrees’39), and Haec-Vir that Haec Vir is ‘no stranger … in Court, Citie, or Countrey’,40 their targets are in fact considerably more narrowly delineated. Hic Mulier shows particular interest in the wealthy, since ‘the greater the person is, the greater is the rage of this sicknesse’.41 Most of its description focuses on noble women and their rivals the city wives; the noble women claim, in their own defence, that the excessive fashions and ‘foolish ambitions’ of the ‘Apes of the City’ are the source of the problem. In Haec-Vir, upon the characters meeting, each assumes the other has some social standing: ‘Most redoubted and worthy Sir (for lesse than a Knight I cannot take you) … Most rare and excellent Lady’.42 Here too the

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fashion for female cross-dressing has its origins in London: Hic Mulier is ‘halfe Birchen-Lane, halfe St Thomas Apostles: the first lent thee a doublet, the later a nether-skirt: Halfe Bridewell, halfe Blacke-friars’.43 The avowed intention of Muld Sacke is to expand the ‘lame description’ offered in the earlier pamphlets to a ‘full definition’ of both Hic Mulier and Haec Vir, but although it therefore encompasses a wider range of characters, the pamphlet also reiterates their original characterization, according to which Haec Vir is ‘those yong Fellowes, who deckes themselves up in effeminate fashions, Sweares, Swaggers, haunts Play-houses, Dicing, Carding, Tavernes, Tobacco shops, Ale-houses, cosens Merchants and Tradesmen, to supply their never heard of prodigalitie’.44 Like the tavern wits, the characters in Haec-Vir spar with poetry. Haec Vir is, then, the foolish young gallant who haunts London and the court, lampooned in numerous character books and most memorably and thoroughly in Thomas Dekker’s The guls horne-book. Hic Mulier’s mockery of Haec Vir recalls this character literature vividly: it would even make Heraclitus himselfe laugh against his nature to see how pulingly you languish in this weake entertained sinne of womanish softnesse: To see one of your gender either shew himselfe (in the midst of his pride or riches) at a Play house, or publique assembly how; (before he dare enter) … hee takes a full survay of himselfe, from the highest sprig in his feather, to the lowest spangle that shines in his Shoo-string.45 As with the other gulls and gallants of the character literature, Haec Vir is not empowered by his effeminacy. In this regard, the pamphlets’ account of cross-dressing is different from that of the stage, where male cross-dressing was, like female, often posited as beneficial.46 Instead, effeminacy equates to weakness, and is caught up with the ‘female’ sins of pride and vanity. This seems to sit neatly with misogynistic and patriarchal commonplace. There are many elements here of the ‘world turned upside down’ scenario familiar from other forms of popular culture, including the carnivalesque skimmingtons used to reassert but also to negotiate the gender order. But not only did the pamphlets fail to properly contain it; their audience might, also, all too easily have read provocative political allusions into the character of Haec Vir in particular. Sharp contemporary detail (in particular the descriptions of the fashions, including yellow ruffs, smoking pipes, poniards, pistols and other weapons, French doublets, open skirts and breasts, and broad-brimmed hats with feathers) helped to make the pamphlets more accessible and relevant to their London readership, reinforcing their topicality in the light of James’s directive. For the alert reader, there was yet more at stake here – a more politically dangerous set of references that Muld Sacke obliquely raised in accusing Hic Mulier of cowardice. James and the London lawcourts focused on female cross-dressing, very possibly reflecting social practice, and differentiating

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their campaign from the puritan attacks on the cross-dressing of male players. Haec-Vir and Muld Sacke, however, did not characterize the effeminate man as an actor, but as an upstart gallant, wasteful and excessive in his consumption. This is the starting point from which Muld Sacke expands, and we have seen that as it encompasses different villains in its survey, it returns repeatedly to the problem of immoderate spending and the wasting of fortunes. Haec Vir’s vices, in this account, are not those of the stage but of the court, on which increasingly critical political attention had been fixed in the years following James’s accession. Money pouring through the ‘leaky cistern’ of James’s finances was spent nowhere more gratuitously than at court and on his courtiers, at least according to the MPs who repeatedly raised the issue of kingly prodigality in Parliament. Letter writers keenly reported the extravagant entertainments at court, all too often connecting lavish spending with moral degeneracy (as most famously in Sir John Harington’s appalled description of the masque performed before Christian IV of Denmark in 1606). Libels and gossip focused intently on the nature of the king’s relationships with his (effeminate) young favourites, never more so than during this period of Buckingham’s stellar ascendance.47 The history of Edward II and his male favourites became, in Curtis Perry’s words, ‘urgently topical’ in the later part of James’s reign. Marlowe’s Edward II returned to the stage, and was reprinted in 1612 and 1622. The issue of court favourites had been raw enough under Elizabeth, when the queen’s sex added a new dimension to the relationship between monarch and favourite; Marlowe’s interest in French politics also inflected the portrayal of an intimate relationship between king and upstart favourite in Edward II. The theatre audiences and London readers already had, then, a set of references into which they could fit criticisms of James’s relationship with his favourites.48 Conventional criticism of courtiers was given particularly acute context by the growing anxiety that the king’s personal or sexual favour was the principal route to political dominance – especially since Buckingham, even more than earlier favourites, increasingly held a monopoly over not only courtly patronage but also political position.49 Muld Sacke’s strategy of expanding the definition of Haec Vir allows it to include the courtly political vices of flattery and detraction among its targets.50 The cross-dressing pamphlets sharpen the reference to contemporary politics by raising the ghost of the Overbury scandal that had rocked London and the court earlier in the decade. Hic Mulier quotes Overbury’s ‘A Wife’;51 the yellow starch and ruffs that were part of the cross-dressers’ wardrobes seem to have been particularly connected with Anne Turner and the scandal.52 The political sensitivity of the issue was not simply drummed up by Muld Sacke to pique the interest of its audience. The dean of Westminster’s attempt to impose sartorial order on his congregation by banning women wearing yellow ruffs earned him a sharp rebuke from the king. Chamberlain reported on March 11 that

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The Deane of Westminster hath ben very strict in his church against Ladies and gentlewomen about yellow ruffes and wold not suffer them to be admitted into any pew, which being yll taken and the King moved in yt, he is come to disavowe him, and sayes his meaning was not for yellow ruffes but for other man-like and unseemly apparell.53 James, it seems reasonable to conclude, was unwilling to allow yellow ruffs to become part of the campaign he had started because they had become politically charged in the wake of the Overbury affair. His attempt to curb female sartorial transgression had led some people to think in much broader and potentially damaging terms about the implications of court-led fashions and effeminate men.

4.5 Conclusion The three pamphlets, then, offer an irreverent and, at times, politically charged take on the fashion for cross-dressing. If there was a ‘moral panic’ at work here, it was far more evident in the preaching campaign than in the pamphlet press. The pamphlets were very probably in tune with their readership in this regard. It seems that cross dressing was not widely perceived to be a particularly serious problem: we have seen that the picture suggested by Chamberlain’s somewhat hysterical remarks is modified by the evidence of the court record, which Cressy has shown indicates that cross-dressing was treated with lenience. It was also sympathetically portrayed on stage. The pamphlets, like the stage, had a particularly good reason to take a tolerant view of these things. They were complicit in the same fashions and commerciality that were the targets of the criticisms of dress, and were highly self-aware about this. And the popular press was transgressive in ways that are very comparable with the cross-dressers. Unlike many sermons and the modern ‘tabloid’, the pamphlets were usually honest about their capacity to titillate: as Haec Vir remarks, ‘shame and delight’ are entertained at ‘an instant’.54 Muld Sacke set its sights higher, dismissing the topic of cross-dressing because there were bigger, albeit less fascinating, fish to fry. But Muld Sacke still used the cross dressing framework, and indulged in the same kind of titillating description of the fashions as the earlier texts, lending its very generic complaints topical and commercial appeal. In sarcastic response to Hic Mulier’s lavish assurance to ‘good women’ that ‘when I write of you, I will write with a golden pen, on leaves of golden paper; now I write with a rough quill, and blacke inke on iron sheetes, the iron deeds of an iron generation’,55 Muld Sacke reminded its readers that the press operated in the mundane real world, subject to all its commercial pressures: ‘I write now with a Goose quill, on white paper, the deedes of a dull leaden age, blackish, I should say, brokish age’.56 Muld Sacke argued that the problem of cross-dressing was unimportant compared with other social

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ills: the panic itself, then, is construed as a fashionable fad comparable with the practice of cross-dressing. The pamphlets themselves were fashionable commodities, riding a wave of interest consequent on the king’s instructions to the preachers in order to make money for their publishers; and in Muld Sacke’s analysis, the attack more generally was suspect – driven not, perhaps, by the commercial imperatives of the book trade, but with as little regard for the ‘real’ social ills identified by the pamphlet. The final remark of Hic Mulier in Muld Sacke indicates that her refusal to reform does not indicate the failure of the discussion, but its success in demystifying (to use the term preferred by Dollimore) the discourse of censure, advising all ‘womanish men’ to ‘remove those misty clouds of darkenesse, that now over-shadowes their own sight’. The cross-dressing pamphlets, then, want to have it both ways: to cash in on the interest in censuring lewd dress; and to challenge the imperatives behind that censure and to undermine the moralizing discourse on which it drew. They were peculiarly able to do this because their own status was unclear; contemporary descriptions of social and moral disintegration, especially that consequent on the growth of London, were undecided as to whether cheap print was part of the solution or part of the problem.57 The popular press was certainly not a mouthpiece for the government, or the ecclesiastical or patriarchal hierarchy; indeed, as many who commented on the Elizabethan exchange between Martin Marprelate and the government-sponsored antiMartinists had remarked, it was a dangerous tool, and tended far too much to the encouragement of uncontrollable public opinion. Readers looking for voyeuristic moralizing would certainly have found it in these pamphlets, but they offer more than this. Their levity and ironic, playful quibbling allowed them to query the moralizing project and expose the hypocrisy at the heart of James’s instructions to the preachers. Read this way, then, the pamphlets seek to reveal the mechanisms of ‘moral panics’ for what they are: commercially driven in the case of the press, cheap or hypocritical political gambits in the hands of the government and the preachers. Thus they demystify not only gender, but also the cheap press and other kinds of discursive practices, including the moralizing of the king and the preachers.

Notes I owe thanks to Faramerz Dabhoiwala and Cliff Davies for their comments on an earlier version of this chapter, and to George Southcombe for helping me work out what I think about gender and the press. 1. All these extracts are reproduced in Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. N. E. McClure (Philadelphia, PA, 1939), ii. 286–7, 289, 294. 2. Plays dealing with shrewish women included Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness and Dekker’s Medicine for a Curst Wife (both performed 1602); The Taming of a Shrew (an Elizabethan play which was republished in 1607) and Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (the dating of which is the subject of some

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4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

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debate); Jonson’s The Silent Woman; Field’s A Woman is a Weathercocke ( performed 1609–10, published 1612) and Amends for Ladies (performed c.1610–11, published 1618); Fletcher’s response to Shakespeare’s Shrew, The Tamer Tamed (1647 [written 1604–17]); and Middleton’s Women beware Women (1613/14 or 1619/23?) and More Dissemblers besides Women (1619?). For an excellent appraisal of the literary representation of shrews, see P. A. Brown, Better a Shrew than a Sheep: women, drama, and the culture of jest in early modern England (Ithaca, NY, 2003). Newes from Scotland (1591?); J. Bath and J. Newton (eds), Witchcraft and the Act of 1604 (Leiden, 2008); for the possession cases see esp. C. Holmes, ‘Witchcraft and possession at the accession of James I: the publication of Samuel Harsnett’s Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures’ in Bath and Newton, ‘Witchcraft and possession’, 69–90. A. Bellany, ‘Mistress Turner’s deadly sins: sartorial transgression, court scandal, and politics in early Stuart England’, Huntington Library Quarterly 58 (1996), 179–210; Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal (Cambridge, 2002); and see also D. Lindley, The Trials of Frances Howard: Fact and Fiction at the Court of King James (London and New York, 1993). J. Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2003) provides an excellent overview. Many studies of the cross-dressing literature have been sensitive to the varied ways in which these texts might be read, although the drama has attracted more nuanced readings than the pamphlets. See J. Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford, 1991); R. Lucas, ‘Hic Mulier: the female transvestite in early modern England’, Renaissance and Reformation, new series 12, 1 (1988), 65–84; S. Orgel, ‘The subtexts of The Roaring Girl’, in S. Zimmerman (ed.), Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage (New York, 1992), 12–26; R. Trubowitz, ‘Cross-dressed women and natural mothers: “boundary panic” in Hic Mulier’, in C. Malcolmson and M. Suzuki (eds), Debating Gender in Early Modern England (New York and Basingstoke, 2002), 185–206. W. Hooper, ‘The Tudor Sumptuary Laws’, The English Historical Review 30 (1915), 433–49. Hooper suggests that the repeal, and opposition to it, were grounded in an intention to manage the problem by means other than statute rather than in any change in ‘sumptuary feeling’ (p. 449). D. Cressy, ‘Gender trouble and cross-dressing in early modern England’, Journal of British Studies 35 (1996), 438–65; B. Capp, ‘Playgoers, Players and Cross-Dressing in Early Modern London: The Bridewell Evidence’, The Seventeenth Century, 18 (2003), 159–71 (quotation at 168). The different emphases of Cressy and Capp may owe something to Capp’s focus on the London record; the impression given in the pamphlets, too, is of a particular concentration of the fashion for crossdressing in London. A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–1640, ed. E. Arber (5 vols,1876), iii. 310; Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering, 293. Publishers did register works in anticipation of their completion; it is possible that Haec-Vir was produced very quickly. Transcript, ed. Arber, iii. 314. Hic Mulier, sigs A3v–A4. Hic Mulier, sigs B4–B4v. Muld Sacke, sig B4. Muld Sacke, sigs B4v–C. Hic Mulier, sig. A4.

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16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

Hic Mulier, sig. A3. Haec-Vir, sig. A3v. Muld Sacke, sigs B–Bv. Hic Mulier, sig. B4v. Hic Mulier, sig. B4v. Hic Mulier, sig. Cv. Capp, ‘Playgoers, Players and Cross-Dressing in Early Modern London’, 167 Hic Mulier, sig. B3. Haec-Vir, sigs A4v–B. Haec-Vir, sig. B. Joseph Swetnam, The araignment of lewde, idle, froward, and unconstant women (1615); the responses were Rachel Speght, A mouzell for Melastomus (1617); Ester Sowernam, Ester hath hang’d Haman (1617); Constantia Munda, The worming of a mad dogge: Or, a soppe for Cerberus the jaylor of hell (1617). Haec-Vir, sigs Bv–B2v. Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, 295. Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, 298. Haec-Vir, sig. Bv. Haec-Vir, sig. B4. Haec-Vir, sig. C. Muld Sacke, sig. B. Muld Sacke, sig. B4v. Muld Sacke, sig. D3–D3v. Haec-Vir, sig. C3v. W. R. Dynes, ‘The trickster figure in Jacobean city comedy’, Studies in English Literature 33 (1993), 365–84. Muld Sacke, sig. B. Hic Mulier, sig. Bv. Haec-Vir, sig. A3v. Hic Mulier, sig. B2. Haec-Vir, sig. A3. Haec-Vir, sig. A4. Muld Sacke, sig. B2v. Haec-Vir, sig. C2. Cressy, ‘Gender trouble’, 453–8. Bellany, Politics of Court Scandal; P. Croft, ‘Libels, popular literacy and public opinion in early modern England’, Historical Research 68 (1995), 266–85; A. McRae, Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State (Cambridge, 2004). C. Perry, ‘The politics of access and representations of the sodomite king in early modern England’, Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000), 1054–83. See, especially, L. L. Peck, Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England (Boston, MA, 1990). Muld Sacke, sigs C2v–C3v. Hic Mulier, sig. B2v. Bellany, ‘Mistress Turner’s deadly sins’; see also A. R. Jones and P. Stallybrass, ‘“Rugges of London and the Diuell’s band”: Irish mantles and yellow starch as hybrid London fashion’, in L. C. Orlin (ed.), Material London, ca. 1600 (Philadelphia, PA, 2000), 128–49. See, for example, Hic Mulier, sig. A4; Haec Vir, sig. A4; it becomes a ‘yellow band’ in Muld Sacke. Letters of John Chamberlain, ii. 294.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

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54. Haec-Vir, sig. C3v. Peter Lake has shown that the sermons deliberately sought to titillate, not least since they were competing with more overtly entertaining pastimes for audience: P. Lake and M. Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven and London, 2002), esp. 335–76, 425–30. 55. Hic Mulier, sig. A3v. 56. Muld Sacke, sig. A4v. There may be a further connection with the literature surrounding the Overbury affair here: Jonson’s Golden Age Restored (performed over the Christmas season of 1615–16) celebrated the restoration of peace and order after the scandal, representing it as the triumph of the golden age over the iron age. 57. L. Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge, 1995); Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering. I have argued the point elsewhere, finding a similar ambivalence in the rogue pamphlets (for example): A. Bayman, ‘Print, learning and the unlearned’, The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Vol I: Beginnings to 1660, ed. J. Raymond [forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2009], and ‘Rogues, conycatching and the scribbling crew’, History Workshop Journal 63 (2007), 1–17.

5 Fear Made Flesh: The English Witch-Panic of 1645–7 Malcolm Gaskill

It may be noticed, that times of misrule and violence seem to create individuals fitted to take advantage from them, and having a character suited to the seasons which raise them into notice and action; just as a blight on any tree or vegetable, calls to life a peculiar insect to feed upon and enjoy the decay which it has produced. Sir Walter Scott (Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, (1830), 255)

5.1 Emotion and persecution Cultural historians have begun to pay serious attention to the history of emotions – defining sentiments and passions, finding ways to demonstrate them and suggesting how they may have influenced more tangible aspects of the past.1 Grand theories have been invoked: Weberian secularization and individualism, Habermas’s concept of the public sphere and Norbert Elias’s ‘civilizing process’ – all ideas about feeling as much as being.2 Historians of more conventional subjects such as the Protestant Reformation, the defence of custom, plebeian rebellions, and crime and punishment, have directly or indirectly touched on emotion.3 The emotional dimension of witchcraft, however, remains relatively unexplored.4 This is surprising not just because so many scholars have studied witches, but because the rise in prosecutions after 1560 is hard to explain unless one takes rage and fear into account. These emotions animated almost all trials, and at certain times and places welled up and spilled over into panic.5 The vocalization of suspicions as accusations, and the deployment of countermeasures, were rooted in social interaction and decision-making in parishes – the politics of everyday life.6 But fear warped sense and reason, illustrating Coleridge’s maxim that ‘in Politics, what begins in Fear usually ends in Folly’.7 78

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Likewise, history that begins with present-centred assumptions usually ends in error. The so-called European ‘witch-craze’ has generated so many myths, as Robin Briggs laments, ‘it seems unlikely that the resulting fog of disinformation will ever properly be dispersed’.8 Many still believe that a male-dominated Church persecuted witches in order to control women (especially midwives and healers), and that peasant-on-peasant accusations were a means to explain misfortune, settle vendettas and release social tension, thus reuniting communities.9 And yet, however plausible this idea may seem on the surface, once we penetrate what Georges Lefebvre, in a study of fear in revolutionary France, called the ‘outer form’, the edifice starts to crumble; what really mattered were the ‘inner motives’ that shaped the situation.10 Experience is never as objective or abstract as historical analysis strives to be: it is subjective and concrete. At the same time, inner motives are more complex, obscure and difficult to uncover than the simple stories of legend, and are therefore less likely to be established as popular truth.11 Even a cursory glance at the data suggests that if witchcraft accusation really was a political weapon for clerics and layfolk it was a weapon used sparingly and with relatively little success. There were some 90,000 witchtrials between 1500 and 1800, half of which resulted in execution. However ghastly the deaths of 45,000 people, killed for what most modern westerners would consider an impossible crime, this needs to be measured against the many millions of Europeans who lived in this period.12 The significance of witchcraft as a lethal ideology is further diminished by two facts. First, the energy with which early modern states were asserting their authority in this period was vast, the desire for control insatiable. Secondly, village disputes were ubiquitous. Had witch-prosecution really been an effective means to crush an enemy, governors and governed would have used it all the time. But they did not. Seen in context, a witch-trial was actually quite a rare thing, and witch-hunts and crazes exceptional.13 Among the intricate mechanisms of rural life, one finds not only the causes of witch-hunting but also the restraints imposed upon it. Accusations backfired easily, resulting in feuding, ostracism and countersuits for slander. Trials might be protracted and expensive, diverting time and money from precarious domestic economies. Even more off-putting was the acquittal rate: 50 per cent, as we have seen. In England, if the Home Circuit assizes are representative, the figure was 78 per cent. This helps to explain why English courts heard only a thousand cases of witchcraft between 1560 and 1690.14 Justice was accusatorial rather than inquisitorial, meaning that accusers pursued their own cases; furthermore, in contrast to procedure at continental tribunals, there were no reliable rules governing grounds for suspicion, still less for admissible proof. Even in the reign of Elizabeth I, when trials began, consensus that witches existed and should be punished did not extend to agreement about who or what a witch was. Without a sworn confession, the

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determination of guilt was a matter of delicacy, and because England did not routinely use torture, confessions were unusual.15 We might wonder, then, not why there were so few witch-trials but why so many. The answer lies partly in the way many accusers pursued their causes, apparently heedless of the possible consequences. Support from the community fostered confidence; but we should also pay attention to the internal animating forces: the passions. Anger that a neighbour was causing harm, and anxiety that worse might be to come, were crucial. From the early Enlightenment, emotions were vilified as enemies of reason and a characteristically female weakness.16 This was the attitude of the Restoration thinker who noticed how, despite men’s better judgements, ‘the Woman in us still prosecutes a deceit’, adding ruefully that ‘where the Will, or Passion hath the casting voyce, the case of Truth is desperate’.17 And yet the ability to override rational decisions helps humans to act decisively – once an evolutionary advantage in a competitive environment. Formerly seen as processes distinct from cognition – even opposing forces – today emotions are regarded as essential to the continuous train of thought and action.18 In seventeenth-century parishes, enclosures of neighbourly intimacy and reciprocity, emotions were components of ‘the culturally constituted self, positioned at the nexus of personal and social worlds’.19 Emotions turned ideas into deeds; they were inherent political tools instinctively deployed. As Jean Delumeau has observed, pre-industrial fear could be ‘salutary or destructive’, a debilitating malady or a creative life force.20 The daily fears of early modern life have been seen as ‘a respected but not invincible enemy’; only when they proliferated into uncontrollable panic, did the debilitating and destructive variety prevail.21 Before the 1640s various institutions in England prevented witchcraft accusations from getting out of hand. Crown, Privy Council, episcopate, Courts of High Commission, King’s Bench and Star Chamber, and the assize judges who rode regional circuits, restrained would-be witchfinders, reviewed evidence and exposed frauds – all in the name of order. After 1600, royal and judicial scepticism grew more robust. As king of England, James I’s reputation as a witch-hunter was undeserved, and his lynx-eyed attention to fraudulent accusations had a profound influence on the administration of justice.22 His son, Charles I, was indifferent to witchcraft and hostile to the demonological obsessions of radical Protestants. These godly dissenters – ‘puritans’ to their enemies – were committed to stripping the Church of its rituals and images, believing them to be idols installed by the Antichrist. Alongside idolatry they saw sorcery, not just in the divination of cunning folk, but also in what they considered as the popish devotions of the monarch.23 The fact that witches seemed to go unpunished at law was an additional source of bitterness.24 By the mid-1630s the crime of witchcraft was virtually redundant; but this was far from being an accurate measure of feeling in godly communities. From 1642 things began to change. In puritan minds the outbreak of civil war signified the fall of Babylon, and triggered a backlash against Catholic

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gentry, church decorations, ceremonialist clergy and pusillanimous judges.25 One man’s anxiety about the future of the nation was another’s sense of vindication and opportunity. However terrifying, fear of Armageddon inspired those who believed they had been chosen to fight its battles, whether against a royalist army or forces of apostasy in the parish. The collapse of authority heralded the demise of censorship and an effusion of cheap print, especially news-sheets, pamphlets and parliamentary propaganda.26 Inside this maelstrom, England experienced its only severe witch-panic, in East Anglia between 1645 and 1647. Over a hundred people died – a fifth of the national total of executed witches between the passing of the Witchcraft Act in 1563 and the repeal of 1736.27 Temporarily uninhibited, either politically or administratively, paranoia and aggression were allowed much freer expression. One historian detects ‘a disregard for danger’ in these years, a giddy sensation that threatened to turn a society obsessed with order into a wilderness where lawlessness, bloodshed and destruction were normal.28

5.2 The spread of fear Did the East Anglian witch-hunt constitute a ‘moral panic’ in the sense understood by sociologists? Doubtless Erich Goode and Nachman BenYehuda would answer affirmatively, on the basis that demonology was imposed from above to satisfy ‘a newly felt need for the definition of the moral boundaries of society’.29 At first glance, this seems to fit. In an era of political insecurity, the fears of ordinary people fuelled a repressive campaign led by self-appointed activists fixated by social chaos.30 A catalytic event, reprising a historic problem, found ‘communicators’ able to raise the importance of the particular to general significance for a willing audience; the same could be said of the classic societal alarms of the 1960s and 70s: Stanley Cohen’s Mods and Rockers, Stuart Hall’s street muggers and the fear of drugs for which the phrase ‘moral panic’ was coined.31 The communicators in Essex in 1645 were Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne, minor gentlemen who emerged from obscurity when providence called on them to fight Antichrist. The witchfinders’ role was not to round up witches and try them; rather, it was to procure effective evidence and to encourage witnesses in order to overcome the legal difficulties experienced by ordinary villagers in the 1630s.32 Events which unfolded in Manningtree, home to Hopkins and Stearne, expose an anatomy not just of panic but of power – its structures and dynamisms, rules and rituals, perpetually complicated by deed and circumstance. The spread of fear and its political expression are interlinked. The story begins in the winter of 1644, when a cunning woman blamed illness on an elderly widow, Elizabeth Clarke. Townsmen interrogated Clarke until she confessed, and through John Stearne presented the evidence to local magistrates. Stearne was permitted to question Clarke further, and was

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joined by Matthew Hopkins. Exhausted and intimidated, Clarke admitted to compacting with Satan and conspiring with others. Accusations rapidly infected the Tendring Hundred, the magistrates’ manorial territory, and, assisted by female searchers for the devil’s mark, the witchfinders became increasingly important as vectors of contagion.33 The outcome was not, of course, mass hysteria; nor should the metaphor of spreading disease be used without qualification.34 This was the model used by Lefebvre for the Great Fear of 1789: rumours sweeping through the countryside by chain reaction.35 The early stages of the Essex witch-hunt were not quite like this. News travelled quickly, but the fear it communicated did not afflict a previously healthy organism. Instead, news of the witchfinders’ approach released hidden stores of fear and anger built up over a generation. To adapt Delumeau’s formulation, in 1645 implicit ‘destructive’ fear was converted into explicit ‘salutary’ fear; or, to use the anthropologist James C. Scott’s model for the way that grumbling discontent turns into voluble protest, the ‘hidden transcript’ became the ‘public transcript’.36 Under close scrutiny the witchfinders seem less like architects of panic, and more like builders who worked to the designs of others. They derived their energy from the people they met on their travels, as much as those people were energized by their expert advice and interventions. Here we might consider the stereotypes and scapegoats essential to moral panics.37 The image of the witch as a marginal, malevolent woman was familiar to contemporaries.38 Widowed, impoverished and crippled, Elizabeth Clarke was an exemplar. Yet only a tiny proportion of old women were tried as witches: however potent the stereotype it was not a licence to transfer anxiety onto weaker neighbours, which explains why mass scapegoating never occurred, even in the 1640s. It is difficult to study the early modern parish, which arguably tended towards consensus and order, and uphold this hackneyed view.39 Conversely, not all people accused of witchcraft were elderly or poor, including those named by Clarke. Accusers could, as Bob Scribner once wrote, ‘both believe in the broad stereotype of witchcraft, while being wholly sceptical of its particular application to their own circumstances’.40 In Suffolk, next stop on the witchfinders’ itinerary, the accused were diverse, with wives and maidservants under investigation. There were male suspects too, confirming what Protestant clergy had always warned: ‘seeing as both [men and women] are subject to the State of damnation, so both are liable to Satans snares’.41 Accusations had crystallized slowly within unique matrices of conflict and belief; they were not formulaic responses with predictable results. Sociologist Tom Douglas’s remark that witches were ‘prime targets of blame in any village community’ is unhelpful, not only because it fails to credit seventeenth-century villagers with any discriminating faculty, but also because it does not tell us how witches were identified.42 Jews, gypsies and Catholics, by contrast, were unequivocally real and visible and so did make handy scapegoats.43

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Malicious accusations, based on storybook stereotypes and unsupported by authentic emotion, risked failure in the courts. Even if a jury were hoodwinked, the bench might demur. In the 1630s a judge at the Somerset assizes decided that a woman had been falsely accused, and ordered that she be funded to countersue.44 In that decade prospective accusers learnt that even impassioned displays of personal conviction would fail if a judge instructed the jury to expect tangible proof. In 1645, then, this was the witchfinders’ raison d’être. By extracting confessions and finding physical marks where demons were supposed to feed, they provided a kind of empirical evidence, in line with mid-seventeenth-century legal expectations. Hearsay was no longer as acceptable as it had been in the 1590s, when courts were advised to treat witches differently from other suspected felons ‘because their dealing is close and secrete’.45 In the summer of 1645 thirty-six women and men were hanged at Chelmsford in Essex and Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. Due to the disruption of the assize circuits, the judge at the Essex trial was not a professional but a godly soldier, the earl of Warwick; at Bury a special commission of oyer and terminer, comprising a junior judge and two puritan clerics, were given the task. These episodes illustrate the terrifying consequences of the legal process when it gave free rein to public fears. The mass hangings not only sharpened people’s sense of the reality and danger of witchcraft, but also encouraged them to think that witchfinding and prosecution, the one activity reinforcing the other, were effective defences. The panic gathered momentum, and Hopkins and Stearne were summoned into Norfolk, and from there to counties further west.46 Central to the concept of the moral panic is the way that the media manipulate fact to contrive crises.47 In the early seventeenth century the potential for this was limited. Censorship was tight, and grew tighter in the 1630s, and the pulpit was the principal channel through which news and ideas were disseminated.48 By the mid-1640s, however, once censorship had collapsed, the London presses took on a more sophisticated role in focusing fear and the legitimation of responses.49 The eastern witch-trials were reported in lurid accounts, widely distributed and avidly consumed.50 Royalist and roundhead writers traded slurs, the former wondering why there were so many witches in godly East Anglia, the latter retorting that wherever God made his Church the devil made his chapel.51 Some went further, asserting that witches were recruited by the devil to assist the king; this included bulletproofing the royalist commander Prince Rupert, as witches in Norfolk had allegedly implied.52 Rupert’s pet dog was rumoured to be a diabolic imp.53 By the 1620s readers may have become weary – and wary – of the extravagant claims of ‘true and remarkable’ witchcraft pamphlets; but within a generation the trend was reversed and tales of demonology from England’s shires enjoyed serious popular currency once again.54 News spread, and with it new fears and the resolve to act. Gossip in east London told of ‘persons of eminence’ pledged to Satan and in cahoots with

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the Suffolk witches.55 Printers and their excitable customers heightened sensitivity to witches beyond London and East Anglia, and by September 1645 one pamphlet was urging all England to take action.56 The mayor of Rye in Sussex subjected women to the water ordeal, and in Cornwall a nineteen-year-old suspect was confined and interrogated by ministers and magistrates to discover whether she consorted with demons.57 Within a month of the executions at Bury, three women were hanged at Faversham in Kent after they confessed to attending a sabbat where they had signed a diabolic covenant in blood. Stylistically, their confessions were identical to those extracted by Hopkins and Stearne, although there is no evidence that the witchfinders were involved.58 Clearly the press was important not just for presenting news of witches as propaganda, but for promoting the idea that a real crime posed a serious threat to the welfare of the nation.

5.3 Reaction and restraint Continental Europe experienced numerous witch-panics, including one in France in 1643–4 when unauthorized witchfinders roamed the countryside looking for commissions.59 Inquisitorial courts routinely employed torture to validate a suspect’s testimony; in cases of witchcraft it was believed that pain would break the devil’s hold over the accused. In England, however, torture was used only by special order.60 And yet in an era of war and reformation ends justified means, not least for Hopkins and Stearne who took their lead from Scripture not from discredited institutions. From the outset, psychological pressure, leading questioning and sleep deprivation were employed. Ordeal by water was also widespread. James I’s approval notwithstanding, this practice remained illegal as an assault and a sacrilege.61 The vicar of Brandeston in Suffolk, John Lowes, was swum in 1645, demonstrating how fear could turn into brutality even against an ordained minister. Forced to run until exhausted, Lowes confessed.62 Opinion was galvanized in some quarters, divided in others. Although sensationalist reporting during moral panics tends to encourage the stigmatization of a minority, more circumspect sections of the population exhibit an opposite response.63 This Hopkins and Stearne discovered to their cost. Their strength was also their fatal weakness: they thrived on the peculiar anxiety of divided communities, but exploiting the enthusiasm of one faction necessarily incurred criticism from rivals. Worse, the witchfinder flouted the law by forcing confessions, and stirred resentment by demanding fees that did not guarantee convictions. Misgivings about their evidence worried men of learning and conscience. Although all but one of the twenty-nine women tried at Chelmsford were convicted, uneasiness resulted in nine reprieves.64 Furthermore, Parliament appointed the special commission at Bury not to inflict draconian penalties but to ensure that evidence was scrutinized. It is hard to say whether in the end credulity or scepticism dominated proceedings

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because the assizes were interrupted by another panic: that of an approaching royalist army. Eighteen executions notwithstanding, the commissioners did advise greater care than had been shown at Chelmsford.65 One newspaper cautioned that ‘Life is precious, and there’s need of great inquisition before it be taken away’; readers were also asked to consider why ‘Devils should choose to be conversant with silly Women that know not their right hands from their left’, and why they wasted their time killing poultry when they could have been helping royalists to win the war.66 By the spring of 1646 Hopkins and Stearne were well-known in East Anglia. In January at Southwold on the Suffolk coast, a yeoman’s wife was accused of injuring a man using evil spirits; but, as at Faversham in Kent, there is no evidence that the witchfinders were involved, suggesting that their influence radiated beyond their immediate itinerary.67 Confessions in Huntingdonshire, however, can be attributed to them directly. From Keyston came news that a woman had given herself to ‘roaring things’ which slithered into her bed ‘in a puffing and roaring manner’, and that she had killed a child. Interrogated by the lord of the manor, she confessed to entertaining imps named ‘Beelzebub’ and ‘Trullibub’; after resting, however, she seemed perplexed.68 Such evidence, compelling but flawed, gave even witchmongers pause for thought. It is important to notice the limits of panic, as well as its wild expansiveness. These limits were most graphically demonstrated that summer at Great Staughton, near Huntingdon. A series of sermons delivered by the vicar, John Gaule, expressed concern that mounting fear might lead to the panic seen in Keyston and elsewhere. The object of Gaule’s scorn was Matthew Hopkins, who had written to a villager to ask whether he might be welcome in the parish. Gaule remarked acidly to his congregation that ‘It is strange to tell what superstitious opinions, affections, relations, are generally risen amongst us, since the Witchfinders came into the Countrey’. Hopkins and Stearne he condemned as upstarts, worse symbols of rebellion than the witches on whom they made war. These were not humanitarian objections: they were rooted in Gaule’s concerns about authority and government, and the restitution of order after four years of chaos and corruption. To hail the witchfinders was to fear the devil more than God – a sign of false religion but also disregard for Crown, commonwealth and the rule of law.69 Hurried into print, Gaule’s sermons helped a wider circle of critics to substantiate their complaint, thus forcing Hopkins to defend his reputation.70 Even though this marked the beginning of the end for him, it would be an overstatement to call it a turning point, as if some maverick faction had spiked a hitherto flourishing career. Besides growing doubts about proof, challenges to the campaign dated back to 1645, for instance when one Suffolk gentleman had ordered that a poor woman be left in peace.71 Even though the witchfinders covered enormous distances in a short period, there were many places en route which they either avoided or where they were ignored. In Essex the witch-hunt had not strayed far beyond the territory

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controlled by the magistrates who had initiated it. Seventeenth-century public life was conducted within intersecting spheres of alliance and affinity: a geography of power that determined the success or failure of ambitions. Shared religious and political affinities had made an intensive witch-hunt possible, but not an extensive one. The fact that Hopkins wrote ahead to Great Staughton suggests that he was cautious of entering an environment where the climate of opinion was unfavourable.72 After Hopkins’s death in August 1647, John Stearne continued his journey into the Cambridgeshire fens, but the court at Ely seems to have been wary of outlandish confessions and acquitted accordingly. The judge, John Godbold, was the same as had presided at Bury: perhaps he had a change of heart, was ordered to exercise restraint or simply sensed which way the wind was blowing.73 Further evidence of the brakes on the panic can be found while the witch-hunt was still confined to Essex. In his memoir, Stearne alludes to opposition in Colchester when certain townsmen issued writs of conspiracy in relation to witch-hunting. One complaint may have focussed on the overcrowded gaol where disease was rife. The witchfinder also mentions being threatened for acting against a suspect, almost certainly a widow named Alice Stansby who was later exonerated.74 Another motive may have been cost: Stansby’s prosecution racked up a bill that would have surely bothered many ratepayers. In Suffolk opposition was explicit. Following a ruling at the Bury assizes, magistrates at Ipswich ordered a levy to cover the costs of prosecuting witches.75 Under such pressures, people throughout the eastern counties lost some of their witch-hunting ardour, feelings which intensified in 1647 with rising rates of acquittal. Experience at Ely and elsewhere taught that money spent on witchfinders who did not deliver convictions was money better spent elsewhere. In the end, fear of witches was weighed against other fears: taxes, appearing superstitious, encouraging extra-legal activity, injustice and the taking of innocent life. This is a story about the art of the possible in local politics, and of the legal checks that restricted panic. But we need to include an even more mundane tale of taxation, expenditure and community protest in defence of finances.

5.4 A moral panic? So we return to the question of whether or not the witch-hunt qualifies as a moral panic. For a short time between 1645 and 1647, overlapping circles of fear – insurrection, invasion, atrocity, divine punishment and diabolism – caused an extraordinary surge of paranoia and aggression in communities where poverty was rife, and dearth and disease a perennial threat. War made everything worse. In these days of dread and destruction, more than ever the image of the witch stood for a social and political world turned upside down: peace conjured into conflict, amity into hatred, sufficiency into scarcity, life into death. Through witchcraft every positive social value became

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a negative, its practitioners incarnations of chaos and disobedience in the eyes of Church and state, and vehicles for psychological anxiety for ordinary villagers.76 To dream of witches was to experience their power, to punish them to rebalance the moral scales. There are parallels with the antitypes of the flick-knife carrying lout, drug pusher and street mugger of twentiethcentury moral panics, not least the way that folk devils’ symbolic threat far exceeded their actual menace.77 Other similarities include the presence of an inciting incident, the intervention of a group of agitators and the broadcasting of fear via the courts and press. One reason to be cautious concerns scale. Across East Anglia, accusations were extensive, especially compared with anything experienced hitherto. News spread by word of mouth and through cheap print – even to Parliament – and so heightened awareness of witchcraft in general and its specific manifestations. Ultimately, though, this was a panic best understood at the level of the community, and in terms of particular customs, beliefs, memories and identities. Even then, there were strict limits to the persecution. Legal sources convey a definite sense of panic in households – farmers whose livestock perish, parents nursing sick children – but this fades as one looks outwards into the neighbourhood, the parish, the manor and beyond. It is also worth remembering that much of the destructive energy of the East Anglian witchhunt was generated at the base of local society despite, or even because of, the authorities’ indifference to witchcraft in the reign of Charles I. The English state did not yet have much to gain politically by assuaging popular fears and punishing scapegoats, and much to be lost by failing to impose order and the rule of law – a concern not well-served by rampant witch-hunting. Finally, however much the witchfinders may have perpetuated the fiction that they operated under official licence, and on behalf of the nation, they remained men of the locality and region, obscure volunteers whose investigations relied on local and regional sanction and support. A second caveat concerns impact. Marx and Durkheim argued that crusades against immorality led first to public outrage then to public unity.78 In a study of deviance in New England, Kai Erikson identified ‘boundary crises’, moments of collective uncertainty eased by ritualistic confrontations between the moral majority and malefactors who challenged their way of life. Witch-trials, especially those at Salem in 1692, provide classic case studies.79 Keith Thomas argued that English witchcraft prosecutions were rooted in the anxiety of communities from whom orthodox rites and tolerance of popular magic had been withdrawn at the Reformation. Guilty feelings about neighbourhood beggars were projected as suspicion that they might seek revenge, with witchcraft accusations providing the essential cathartic release. Thomas, like his student Alan Macfarlane, was influenced by British social anthropology, from which this ‘functionalist’ model was derived.80 This interpretation has lost some ground to an approach where patterns of accusation are captured in all their messy complexity.81 Likewise, the work

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of Foucault and others has advanced a less functionalist interpretation of moral panics, seeing instead a more diffuse, less deterministic grid of power and its many applications.82 The historiographies of witch-trials and moral panics have both veered away from models that make the outcomes of persecution look inevitable and singularly advantageous for the dominant group. However appealing the idea that witch-trials united communities, accusers did not proceed with this in mind, and in any case prosecutions mostly exploited and widened existing rifts between neighbours. Once the initial surge of anger and self-righteousness had been discharged, moreover, feelings of unease, shame and embarrassment often crept in, bequeathing painful legacies of resentment, not to mention confusion about what had actually happened and why. This undesired result may even make the East Anglian witchhunt quite a good illustration of a moral panic. Perhaps all such campaigns are doomed because their objectives are unclear, blurred by prejudice and emotion, blind to reason. Once a moral panic has run its course, the real problems that caused it are bound to remain unsolved. Foucault understood well the insidious nature of ideology put into practice, a phenomenon of central importance to anyone interested in witchcraft or moral panics. Like advertising or propaganda, ideology maintains control by targeting sentiment and belief, offering purification and redemption for people weary of chaos and despair.83 After the monarchy was restored in 1660, royalist writers mocked the soldiers of further reformation as zealots, hypocrites, rebels and regicides.84 The witchfinders conformed to this type: obscure extremists subverting natural authority, and so rather like the witches they had avowed to destroy. Disorder had met with a disorderly solution. Hopkins and Stearne had used the law, but only achieved what they did because the law had ceased to exert an equal and opposite force upon panic and persecution. In this way, the witchfinders came to symbolize the unruly and unchristian effects of civil war, and hardened the resolve of local governors to restore order. At the same time, though, they had existed to assist accusers, not to make accusations. Since the 1560s powerful emotions had driven people to prosecute witches, but by 1640 this fear was more finely balanced with the fear of failure. The witchfinders tipped that balance, turning ‘destructive’ fear into ‘salutary’ fear. They were policemen, lawyers, forensic scientists and professional witnesses rolled into one, and tapped into deep seams of fear and anger. We should also remember that witch-trials occurred long after the Restoration, reflecting enduring fears among rural people which might still be expressed in the courts.85 The Hopkins trials illustrate how in the seventeenth century the law became an axiom of English local government and society. As an instrument of order its use was generally consensual: it was an effective means of punishing antisocial behaviour and resolving disputes.86 And yet differences

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in the definition of order were occasionally exposed, not just between centre and periphery, but between magistracy and parish, law officers and the poor, and between neighbourhood factions representing conflicting territorial, commercial and ideological interests. Whose version of order prevailed depended on a host of contingent factors: the strength of lordship, the geography of parish and manor, and variegated patterns of puritan reformism and traditionalist reaction.87 Witchcraft prosecutions have to be seen within this framework: the law against witchcraft was a relatively simple statute, its implementation infinitely varied and complicated. For a suspicion even to make it to court required popular belief, the self-confidence of plaintiffs, the diligence of JPs and the receptiveness of jurors all to be present and precisely aligned. When connections between these elements were strong, and pure signals passed from terrified householders to judge and jury, deadly witchpanics might occur. But this hardly ever happened, and before 1645 and after 1647 most accusers and witnesses wasted their time. The abstracted rhetoric of justice was clearly drawn and certain, the experience of the administration of justice on the ground much less so.88 Today many people see the East Anglian witch-hunt, and the witch-craze in general, refracted through a prism of folkloric stereotypes and horror clichés. What we get are bogeymen: feverish inquisitors and the peasants they whipped into a frenzy. In fact, the panic of the 1640s was an excessive over-reaction to a perceived problem, working through political and legal institutions, and social networks of communication, which down to that time had prevented such a thing from happening. It was an aberration in the history of English witchcraft, but an instructive one, profoundly suggestive of the value of order, the resilience of government and the growing sophistication of a ‘public sphere’ of communication and consciousness.89 It pays to remember, however, that witch-hunting is not yet at an end. In parts of Africa, India and South East Asia it is endemic, and every year thousands die at their neighbours’ hands.90 Nor are these beliefs confined to the subcontinent, and recent convictions in London for the torture of an eight-year-old Angolan girl branded a witch are salutary.91 Indeed, witchpanics will remain a social reality wherever faith makes sense of misfortune, emotion runs ahead of the law and witches are used, consciously or unconsciously, to translate intangible fears into punishable flesh.

Notes I would like to thank participants at seminars in Cambridge and London and at the original symposium in Newcastle who commented on different versions of the paper. I am also grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding leave during which the research was completed, and to the British Academy for helping with the cost of travelling to Australia. Particular thanks are due to David Lemmings and Claire Walker, who suggested valuable changes to the draft.

90 The English Witch-Panic of 1645–7 1. Peter N. Stearns and Carol N. Stearns, ‘Emotionology: clarifying the history of emotions and emotional standards’, American Historical Review, 90 (1985), 813–36; William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: a Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, 2001), chs 1–4; Barbara J. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about emotions in history’, American Historical Review, 107 (2002), 821–45; Joanna Bourke, ‘Fear and anxiety: writing about emotion in modern history’, History Workshop Journal, 55 (2003), 11–33; Gail Kern Paster et al. (eds), Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia, PA, 2004); Jeroen Deploige, ‘Studying emotions: the medievalist as human scientist?’, in Elodie LecuppreDesjardin and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene (eds), Emotions in the Heart of the City (14th–16th Century) (Turnhout, 2005), 3–24. For some foundations, see Johann Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (1919; Chicago, IL, 1996); Lucien Febvre, ‘Sensibility and history: how to reconstitute the emotional life of the past’, in Peter Burke (ed.), A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre (1973), 12–26. 2. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, ed. Stephen Kalberg (Chicago, 2001); Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, 1992); Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, (Oxford, 1978). 3. See, for example Eamon Duffy, The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village (New Haven, CT, 2001); Andy Wood, ‘Fear, hatred and the hidden injuries of class in early modern England’, Journal of Social History, 39 (2006), 803–26; John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: the Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge, 1999), esp. chs 7–8; Dana Rabin, ‘Bodies of evidence, states of mind: infanticide, emotion and sensibility in eighteenth-century England’, in Mark Jackson (ed.), Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550–2000 (Chicago, IL, 2002), 73–93; V. A. C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–1868 (Oxford, 1994), esp. chs 7–9. 4. For some important exceptions, see Lyndal Roper, ‘Witchcraft and fantasy in early modern Germany’, History Workshop Journal, 32 (1991), 19–43; Diane Purkiss, ‘Women’s stories of witchcraft in early modern England: the house, the body, the child’, Gender and History, 7 (1995), 408–32; Louise Jackson, ‘Witches, wives and mothers: witchcraft persecution and women’s confessions in seventeenth-century England’, Women’s History Review, 4 (1995), 63–83; Katharine Hodgkin, ‘Reasoning with unreason: visions, witchcraft, and madness in early modern England’, in Stuart Clark (ed.), Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology and Meaning in Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke, 1991), 217–36. 5. On pre-modern fear, see R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (Oxford, 1987); William J. Bouwsma, ‘Anxiety and the formation of early modern culture’, in Barbara C. Malament (ed.), After the Reformation: Essays in Honour of J. H. Hexter (Manchester, 1980), 215–46; Sarah Dunant and Roy Porter (eds), The Age of Anxiety (1996); William G. Naphy and Penny Roberts (eds), Fear in Early Modern Society (Manchester, 1997). For the longer perspective, see Joanna Bourke, Fear: a Cultural History (2005). 6. For some recent illustrations, see Julian Goodare (ed.), The Scottish Witch-Hunt in Context (Manchester, 2002), chs 3–4, 8–9; Alison Rowlands, Witchcraft Narratives in Germany: Rothenburg, 1561–1652 (Manchester, 2003); Jonathan B. Durrant, Witchcraft, Gender and Society in Early Modern Germany (Leiden, 2007); Robin Briggs, The Witches of Lorraine (Oxford, 2007). On parish politics, see David Warren

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Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1984); Keith Wrightson, ‘The politics of the parish in early modern England’, in Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steve Hindle (eds), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1996), 10–46; Steve Hindle, On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England, c. 1550– 1750 (Oxford, 2004). Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring (1990), i. 208 (5 Oct. 1830). Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours: the Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (1995), 6. On the origins of myths, see Jonathan Barry and Owen Davies, Witchcraft Historiography (Basingstoke, 2007), esp. chs 4–5, 10–11; Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch-Hunts: a Global History (Cambridge, 2004), ch. 1. Anne Llewellyn Barstow, Witchcraze: a New History of the European Witch Hunts (1995); Marianne Hester, Lewd Women and Wicked Witches: a Study of the Dynamics of Male Domination (1992); Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives and Nurses: a History of Women Healers (Old Westbury, NY, 1973); Elspeth Whitney, ‘International trends: the witch “she”/the historian “he”: gender and the historiography of the European witch-hunts’, Journal of Women’s History, 7 (1995), 77–101. For an anthropological perspective, see Max Marwick, ‘Witchcraft as a social-strain gauge’, Australian Journal of Science, 26 (1964), 263–8. Georges Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France (1973), 1. Even a recent study of myth regards witch-hunts as ‘an irruption of irrationality … a collective demonic fantasy’: Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth (Edinburgh, 2005). 135. These figures come from Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, (3rd edn, Harlow, 2006), 22–3. For some severe episodes, see Wolfgang Behringer, Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria: Popular Magic, Religious Zealotry and Reason of State in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997), chs 3–4; Bengt Ankarloo, ‘Sweden: the mass burnings (1668– 1676)’, in Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (eds), Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries (Oxford, 1990), 285–317; Brian P. Levack, ‘The great Scottish witch hunt of 1661–1662’, Journal of British Studies, 20 (1980), 90–108; Gustav Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition, 1609–1614 (Reno, NV, 1980); Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare: the Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (New York, 2002). James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England, 1550–1750 (1996), 11–13. Barbara J. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ, 1983), chs 5–6; Malcolm Gaskill, ‘Witchcraft and evidence in early modern England’, Past & Present, 198 (2008), 33–70. Rom Harré, ‘An outline of the social constructionist viewpoint’, in Rom Harré (ed.), The Social Construction of Emotions (Oxford, 1986), 2–3; Dorothée Sturkenboom, ‘Historicizing the gender of emotions: changing perceptions in Dutch Enlightenment thought’, Journal of Social History, 34 (2000–1), 55–75. Joseph Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing: or, Confidence in Opinions (1661), 18. Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 8–21. See also Knight Dunlap, ‘Are emotions teleological constructs?’, American Journal of Psychology, 44 (1932), 572–6; Robert B. Zajonc, ‘Feeling and thinking: preferences need no inferences’, American Psychologist, 35 (1980), 151–75; Thomas J. Scheff, ‘Towards integration in the

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19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

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25. 26.

27.

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29. 30. 31.

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social psychology of emotions’, Annual Review of Sociology, 9 (1983), 333–54; Catherine Lutz and Geoffrey M. White, ‘The anthropology of emotions’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 15 (1986), 405–36; Erich Eich and Jonathan W. Schooler, ‘Cognition/emotion interactions’, in Erich Eich et al., Cognition and Emotion (Oxford, 2000), 3–29; Simon J. Williams, Emotion and Social Theory: Corporeal Reflections on the (Ir)Rational (2001), chs 1, 3–4. Lutz and White, ‘Anthropology of emotions’, 417. Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: the Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries (New York, 1990), 555. Naphy and Roberts, ‘Introduction’, (eds), Fear, 5. Wallace Notestein, A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 (Washington, DC, 1991), ch. 5; Brian P. Levack, ‘Possession, witchcraft and the law in Jacobean England’, Washington and Lee Law Review, 52 (1996), 1613–40; James Sharpe, The Bewitching of Anne Gunter (1999). Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (eds), The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700 (Basingstoke, 1996); Tom Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: the Caroline Puritan Movement, c. 1620–1643 (Cambridge, 1997). There were 30 indictments for witchcraft on the Home Circuit, 1625–40, only six of which received guilty verdicts – and reprieves were issued for three of those: C. L’Estrange Ewen, Witch Hunting and Witch Trials (1929), 212–20. For the wider context of religious conflict, see Gary K. Waite, Heresy, Magic, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke, 2003), chs 4–5. David Cressy, England on the Edge: Crisis and Revolution, 1640–1642 (Oxford, 2006); Jason Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (Aldershot, 2004); Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2003), chs 5–6. The causes are analysed in James Sharpe, ‘The devil in East Anglia: the Matthew Hopkins trials reconsidered’, in Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester and Gareth Roberts (eds), Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief (Cambridge, 1996), 237–54; Peter Elmer, ‘Towards a politics of witchcraft in early modern England’, in Clark (ed.), Languages of Witchcraft, 101–18; Brian P. Levack, Witch-Hunting in Scotland: Law, Politics and Religion (New York, 2008), ch. 4. Will Coster, ‘Fear and friction in urban communities during the English Civil War’, in Naphy and Roberts (eds), Fear, p. 114. On the trauma of war, see also Charles Carlton, Going to the Wars: the Experience of the British Civil Wars, 1638–1651 (1992), esp. chs 6–8; Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: a People’s History (2006). Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda, Moral Panics: the Social Construction of Deviance (Oxford, 1994), ch. 10, quotation on page 150. Kenneth Thompson, Moral Panics (1998), 2. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: the Creation of the Mods and Rockers, 3rd edn (2002); Stuart Hall et al. (eds), Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (Basingstoke, 1978); Thompson, Moral Panics, 7. For a definitional framework, see Chas Critcher (ed.), Critical Readings: Moral Panics and the Media (Maidenhead, 2006), Introduction. For a general account, see Malcolm Gaskill, Witchfinders: a Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy (2005). Craig Cabell, Witchfinder General: the Biography of Matthew Hopkins (Stroud, 2006) draws heavily on Richard Deacon’s unsatisfactory Witch Finder General (1976) and is wholly unreliable. H. F., A true and exact Relation Of the severall Informations, Examinations, and Confessions of the late Witches arraigned and executed in the County of Essex (1645);

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34.

35. 36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

41. 42. 43.

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Gaskill, Witchfinders, chs 2–3. On female searchers, see Jim Sharpe, ‘Women, witchcraft and the legal process’, in Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker (eds), Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England (1994), 106–24. For the view that witch-hunting ‘expresses a disease of society’, see George Rosen, ‘Psychopathology in the social process: a study of the persecution of witches in Europe as a contribution to the understanding of mass delusions and psychic epidemics’, Journal of Health and Human Behavior, 1 (1960), 220–11, quotation at pp. 200–211. Lefebvre, Great Fear. It was also used by L. S. Penrose in his analysis of religious crazes: On the Objective Study of Crowd Behaviour (1952), chs 5–6. Delumeau, Sin and Fear, 555; James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT, 1990). Cf. John Walter, ‘Public transcripts, popular agency, and the politics of subsistence in early modern England’, in Michael Braddick and John Walter (eds), Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2001), 123– 48; Wood, ‘Fear, hatred and the hidden injuries of class’. See, in general, C. Neil Macrae, Charles Stangor and Miles Hewstone (eds), Stereotypes and Stereotyping (New York, 1996); Michael Pickering, Stereotyping: the Politics of Representation (Basingstoke, 2001), chs 1–3, 7; Tom Douglas, Scapegoats: Transferring Blame (1995), esp. ch. 1. Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), 7, 13; Samuel Harsnet, A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603; 1605 edn),136. See also Sigrid Brauner, Fearless Wives and Frightened Shrews: the Construction of the Witch in Early Modern Germany (Amherst, MA, 1995). Anne Reiber DeWindt reviews the debate on communities in ‘Witchcraft and conflicting visions of the ideal village community’, Journal of British Studies, 34 (1995), 427–63. According to Robert Darnton, ‘Hatred, jealousy, and conflicts of interest ran through peasant society. The village was no happy and harmonious Gemeinschaft’: The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984), 33. Bob Scribner, ‘Is a history of popular culture possible?’, History of European Ideas, 10 (1989), 183–4. For theoretical guidance, see Ziva Kunda and Kathryn C. Oleson, ‘Maintaining stereotypes in the face of disconfirmation: constructing grounds subtyping deviants’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68 (1995), 565–79; Charles Stangor and Mark Schaller, ‘Stereotypes as individual and collective representations’, in Macrae et al. (eds), Stereotypes, 3–37. Thomas Cooper, The Mystery of Witch-craft (1617), 180–1. Douglas, Scapegoats, 40–1. Frank Felsenstein, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: a Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 1660–1830 (Baltimore, 1995), esp. ch. 2; Robin Clifton, ‘The popular fear of Catholics during the English Revolution’, Past & Present, 52 (1971), 23–55; Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca NY, 1999), esp. chs 1–2. J. S. Cockburn (ed.), Western Circuit Assize Orders 1629–1648: a Calendar, Camden Society, 4th ser., 17 (1976), 99. On vexatious prosecutions, see Malcolm Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2000), 66–70. George Gifford, A Dialogue concerning Witches and Witchcrafts (1593), sig. H4. See also Christina Larner, ‘Crimen exceptum? The crime of witchcraft in Europe’, in V. A. C. Gatrell, Bruce Lenman and Geoffrey Parker (eds), Crime and the Law: the Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500 (1980), 49–75.

94 The English Witch-Panic of 1645–7 46. Gaskill, Witchfinders, chs 4–7. 47. Cohen, Folk Devils, chs 1, 2, 5; Hall et al. (eds), Policing the Crisis, ch. 3; Thompson, Moral Panics, 27–30; Goode and Ben-Yehuda, Moral Panics, chs 4–5. 48. Gordon J. Schochet, ‘Patriarchalism, politics and mass attitudes in Stuart England’, Historical Journal, 12 (1969), 413–41. 49. Joseph Frank, The Beginnings of the English Newspaper, 1620–1660 (Cambridge, MA, 1961), chs 5–8; Dagmar Freist, Governed by Opinion: Politics, Religion and the Dynamics of Communication in Stuart London, 1637–1645 (1997), chs 5–6; Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteering, chs 4–5, 7; Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering, chs 4–6. For the impact of print on news culture, see Richard Cust, ‘News and politics in early seventeenth-century England’, Past & Present, 112 (1986), 60–90, esp. 69–79; Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000), ch. 7. 50. For annotated reproductions of the main pamphlets, see Malcolm Gaskill (ed.), The Matthew Hopkins Trials, in James Sharpe and Richard M. Golden (eds), Writings on English Witchcraft 1560–1736 (2003), iii. 1–97. 51. A Diary, or an Exact Journall (24–31 Jul. 1645), 5–6; Scotish Dove (25 Jul.–1 Aug. 1645), 733; Mercurius Aulicus (10–17 Aug. 1645), 1697–8; Mercurius Britanicus (25 Aug.–1 Sept. 1645). 52. A Perfect Diurnall of Some Passages in Parliament (21–28 Jul. 1645), 830. 53. The Parliaments Unspotted-Bitch (1643), sig. A2; A Dialogue, Or Rather a Parley between Prince Ruperts Dogge … and Tobies Dog (1643), sig. A1v; Observations upon Prince Ruperts White Dog (1643), sigs A2, A4v. 54. On the fading potency of the early pamphlets, see Anna Bayman, ‘“Large hands, wide eares, and piercing sights”: the “discoveries” of the Elizabethan and Jacobean witch pamphlets’, Literature and History, 16 (2007), 26–45. 55. Signes and wonders from Heaven (1645), 2–3. 56. P., The Antidote Animadverted (1645), 8. 57. Historical Manuscripts Commission, Rye and Hereford Corporations (1892), 216; William Turner, A Complete History Of the Most Remarkable Providences (1697), 116–20. 58. The Examination, Confession, Triall, and Execution of Joane Williford, Joan Cariden, and Jane Hott … At Feversham (1645). 59. Briggs, Witches and Neighbours, 193–4; Behringer, Witches and Witch-Hunts, 131. 60. John H. Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien Régime (Chicago, IL, 1977); Lyndal Roper, Witch-Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven, CT, 2004), ch. 2; Levack, Witch-Hunting in Scotland, 21–4. 61. James I, Daemonologie (1603), 79–80. 62. C. L’Estrange Ewen, The Trials of John Lowes, Clerk (n.p., 1937), 4–5. 63. This is broadly the thesis of Rob Sindall, Street Violence in the Nineteenth Century: Media Panic or Real Danger? (Leicester, 1990). 64. House of Lords Record Office, London, Main Papers, 10 Mar. 1646, f. 136. 65. Gaskill, Witchfinders, 150–8. See also the sermons described in Samuel Clark, The Lives of Sundry Eminent Persons in this Later Age (1683), 172. 66. Moderate Intelligencer (4–11 Sept. 1645), 217. 67. The National Archives, London, KB 9/831, mm. 90–1; C. L’Estrange Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism (1933), 429. 68. John Davenport, The Witches of Huntingdon (1646), 7–9. 69. John Gaule, Select Cases of Conscience Touching Witches and Witchcrafts (1646), quotation on p. 150. See also Gaule’s comments in An Admonition Moving Towards Moderation (1660), 55–6, 60–1, 75, 97–8.

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70. Matthew Hopkins, The Discovery of Witches (1647). 71. Francis Hutchinson, An Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft (1718), 63–4. 72. Hopkins and Stearne followed a similar path to another self-styled godly warrior, the iconoclast William Dowsing: Trevor Cooper (ed.), The Journal of William Dowsing: Iconoclasm in East Anglia during the English Civil War (Woodbridge, 2001). 73. Gaskill, Witchfinders, ch. 10. 74. John Stearne, A Confirmation And Discovery of Witch-Craft (1648), 58–60; Essex Record Office, Colchester, D/B 5/Sb2/8, ff. 1–1v; D/B 5/Ab1/17 (unfol.). 75. East Suffolk Record Office, Ipswich, B105/2/1, ff. 80v–81v, 84. 76. Stuart Clark, ‘Inversion, misrule and the meaning of witchcraft’, Past & Present, 87 (1980), 98–127. 77. For a clear illustration, see Nan H. Dreher, ‘The virtuous and the verminous: turn-of-the-century moral panics in London’s public parks’, Albion, 29 (1997), 246–67. 78. An idea summarized in Thompson, Moral Panics, 23–4. 79. Kai Erikson, Wayward Puritans: a Study in the Sociology of Deviance (New York, 1966). For Salem seen thus, see John P. Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (Oxford, 1982); Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: the Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge, MA, 1974). 80. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Belief in Sixteenthand Seventeenth-Century England (1971); Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: a Regional and Comparative Study, (2nd edn, 1991). Their positions were not identical: whereas Thomas implied that accusations expressed communal values, Macfarlane saw them as an expression of nascent individualism. 81. See, for example Annabel Gregory, ‘Witchcraft, politics and “good neighbourhood” in early seventeenth-century Rye’, Past & Present, 133 (1991), 31–66; Malcolm Gaskill, ‘The devil in the shape of a man: witchcraft, conflict and belief in Jacobean England’, Historical Research, 71 (1998), 142–71. 82. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (New York, 1980), esp. chs 6–8; Thompson, Moral Panics, 24–5. 83. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970); Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (New York, 1977). 84. For a classic anti-puritan satire that specifically lampoons Hopkins, see Samuel Butler, Hudibras, ed. John Wilders (Oxford, 1967), xxxix, xl, 156. 85. See Ewen, Witch Hunting, 252–65. 86. James Sharpe, ‘The people and the law’ in Barry Reay (ed.), Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (1985), 244–70; M. J. Ingram, ‘Communities and courts: law and disorder in early-seventeenth-century Wiltshire’, in J. S. Cockburn (ed.), Crime in England, 1550–1800 (1977), 110–42; Cynthia B. Herrup, The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1987). 87. Keith Wrightson, ‘Two concepts of order: justices, constables and jurymen in seventeenth-century England’, in John Brewer and John Styles (eds), An Ungovernable People: the English and their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1980), 21–46; Cynthia B. Herrup, ‘Law and morality in seventeenth-century England’, Past & Present, 106 (1985), 102–23; Joan R. Kent, ‘The centre and the localities: state formation and parish government in England, circa 1640–1740’, Historical Journal, 38 (1995), 363–404. See also J. S. Cockburn, ‘Trial by the book? Fact and theory in the criminal process, 1558–1625’, in J. H. Baker (ed.), Legal Records and the Historian (1978), 60–79.

96 The English Witch-Panic of 1645–7 88. On witchcraft and the law, see Ewen, Witch Hunting and Witch Trials, Introduction; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, ch. 14; C. R. Unsworth, ‘Witchcraft beliefs and criminal procedure in early modern England’, in T. G. Watkin (ed.), Legal Record and Historical Reality (1989), 71–98; Gregory Durston, Witchcraft and Witch Trials: a History of English Witchcraft and its Legal Perspectives, 1542 to 1736 (Chichester, 2000); Sharpe, ‘Women, witchcraft and the legal process’. 89. See Peter Lake and Steve Pincus, ‘Rethinking the public sphere in early modern England’, Journal of British Studies, 45 (2006), pp. 270–92; Alexandra Halasz, The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1997), chs 2, 3, 5; Joad Raymond, ‘The newspaper, public opinion, and the public sphere in the seventeenth century’, in Raymond (ed.), News, Newspapers, and Society in Early Modern Britain (1999), 109–40; Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven, CT, 1994), chs 1–2. 90. R. G. Willis, ‘Instant millennium: the sociology of African witch-cleansing cults’, in Mary Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations (1970), 129–39; Maia Green, ‘Witchcraft suppression practices and movements: public politics and the logic of purification’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 39 (1997), 319–45; Ajay Skaria, ‘Women, witchcraft and gratuitous violence in colonial Western India’, Past & Present, 155 (1997), 109–41. 91. John Steele, ‘Aunt helped to torture girl, 8, for being a witch’, Daily Telegraph (4 June 2005). See also the trend towards the demonization and punishment of children: Tony Thompson, ‘Churches blamed for exorcism growth’, Observer (5 June 2005).

6 ‘A sainct in shewe, a Devill in deede’: Moral Panics and Anti-Puritanism in Seventeenth-Century England Tim Harris

So god love me as I hate a Puritane, the verie name is so odiouse to my eares, it is as bitter in pronownsinge as a pille in swallowinge, I am faine to rellishe my mouthe with honest men and good Christians afterwards, They saye one Lawyer is Inoughe for one sheire, but one Puritane is to many … God … ridde the realme of Puritanes. (Anon, F[olger] S[hakespeare] L[ibrary], V.a.399, fols 19v–20v, n.d.)

6.1 Introduction: Moral panics over Protestant dissent in seventeenth-century England Although a major aim of this volume is to test the role played by the press in helping to fuel moral panics in England, I want to open my chapter by briefly discussing two manuscript texts. The first comes from the papers of Sir Francis North, Charles II’s Lord Chief Justice of Common Pleas from 1675 to 1682 (subsequently made Lord Keeper and created Baron Guilford), and is entitled ‘Instructions For a treatise to be wrote for undeceiving the people, about the late popish plott’. Drawn up at the height of the Exclusion Crisis (1679–81), it was in essence a government memorandum advising how to construct a press campaign to neutralize the Whig exploitation of the Popish Plot of 1678 and to counteract the demand that Charles II’s Catholic brother and heir James, Duke of York, be excluded from the succession. North observed that ‘The Intended discourse must be written persuasively’, not ‘authoritatively’. Simply denying there was a plot would not work because so many witnesses had testified before the king and council as to its existence. One would have to lay the blame elsewhere; fortunately, there were readily available targets. Thus the author should show how, ever since 97

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Charles II’s return in 1660, ‘the Republican party’ had been ‘Restless under Monarchy; and the Presbyterians and sectarys under Episcopacy’, and that they had tried various ways to overthrow the Restoration establishment: promoting rebellions against the state, conspiring with opposition politicians to poison the minds of the common people against the government, ‘wrighting [sic] and dispersing seditious books and pamphletts’, and making malicious charges of false Catholic plots.1 What North had produced, in effect, was an instruction manual on how to orchestrate a press campaign to create a moral panic about republicans and Protestant dissenters in order to provoke a loyalist backlash against the Whigs. The line of argumentation North suggested was indeed the central thrust of much Tory propaganda during the Exclusion Crisis, and it did the job very well. As a result, there was a marked public reaction against the exclusionists, as testified by a flood of loyal addresses, numerous loyalist demonstrations, and even crowd attacks on Whigs and dissenters. Tory polemic also emphasized the need to use the law to crush the Whig and nonconformist threat and to protect against a possible drift into anarchy. The clampdown came from 1681 onwards, during the years known as the Tory Reaction, and saw tens of thousands of nonconformists in London and across the country hauled before the courts to face heavy fines and frequently even imprisonment, as well as a number of treason trials against radical Whigs and a government purge of borough corporations in order to destroy Whig and dissenter urban strongholds.2 Here we have an example of a moral panic, where public anxieties are fuelled by the press and government actions so as to exaggerate the extent of the threat and to demonstrate the need for stern measures to control and contain it.3 It was a ‘moral’ panic because, following the classic formulation, the perceived threat was not something mundane but a threat to the social order itself, and its perpetrators were regarded as the embodiment of evil (what Stanley Cohen called ‘folk devils’). It provoked not only a high level of concern over the behaviour of the group regarded as a threat but also an increased level of hostility towards that group.4 Such moral panics are often seen as quintessentially modern phenomena; indeed, it has been claimed ‘the first real moral panics experienced in Britain’ took place in the late 1850s and early 1860s.5 Yet here we have one occurring before the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9. Furthermore, moral panics over Protestant nonconformists were not new in the latter years of the reign of Charles II. There had been two similar panics earlier in the century. In 1641–2, the royalist press had sought to build on public anxieties over the apparent threat posed by radical Puritans and Protestant separatists in order to rally support for Charles I on the eve of the English Civil War around a ‘law and order’ platform (although such were the divisions in England by this time that this merely served to polarize opinion further so as to accelerate the drift into civil war and

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revolution).6 In 1659–60 heightened anxieties about the threat of radical sectarians following the fall of the Protectorate, once more fuelled by the press, served to turn public opinion against the Republic and pave the way for the restoration of the traditional constitution in Church and state – and with that not just the return of the monarchy, but also (in many people’s eyes) the return of the rule of law, and a subsequent legislative initiative against Protestant dissenters.7 My second text comes from a seventeenth-century commonplace book (or more precisely manuscript miscellany) and is entitled ‘The plaine Protestante to the precise Puritan’.8 The work is undated and anonymous, although internal evidence suggests it belongs to the early years of James I’s reign and was written by a man from Cheshire. The work is a long rant against the Puritans. We cannot tell whether or not the author had copied it from another text, although the roughness of the prose seems to suggest not, as does a line towards the end stating, ‘because I will spende noe more Ynke & paper … I will here conclude’.9 The work is mean-spirited – the author clearly does not like Puritans at all – but at the same time it was intended to be funny. The volume in which it appears is actually filled with witty and somewhat racy rhymes and anecdotes. There are a lot of tales poking fun at the Welsh (Cheshire, of course, is on the Welsh border). There are some rather crude rhymes, such as the one entitled ‘Riddle sweet hart what is this, / a man handleth when he doth pisse’: It is a kinde of pricking stinge … the make peace of all strife, betwixte the husband and the wife … a monster in everie lande, havinge no feete and yet can stande.10 Not all the entries are in the same hand, and there are some later jokes at the expense of Quakers and some witty remarks spoken ‘extempore by Dryden’, suggesting that entries were made by different people at different times over the seventeenth century. Thus the context provided by the book as a whole offers limited insight into the authorial intent behind the antiPuritan diatribe, beyond perhaps reinforcing the point that it was thought of as being humorous. ‘The plaine Protestant to the precise Puritan’ rehearses the basic stereotype of the Puritan as hypocrite: an ignorant, uncharitable, gluttonous dissembler, given to acts of sexual indiscretion, disrespectful of authority, and an unwelcome and divisive presence in local communities. It opens with the lines, ‘I confesse my selfe to be sinfull, wheras thou Hipocrite takest upon thee to be sinlesse, Thou thankest god thou art not as I am an open synner, And I thank god I am not as thou art a secret Desembler’. A Puritan was so opposed to anything that smacked of popery, our text continues, that he

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refused to do any ‘good workes’: ‘Thy mouth is alwaies open to the poore, but thy purse shutt … Thou arte as cruell as a Jewe, Thou art as stonie harted as a stepmother, A sainct in shewe, a Devill in deede’. Although he ‘holdeth it a syne almost againste the holy ghoste to be seene in an Alehouse … to be seene in a whore house he Counteth it to be but a trifle, a veneriall syne, I meane a veniall syne’ (a weak pun, but the intended comedic impact is transparent). He resists royal authority, because he refuses to observe the fast days commanded by the crown. Thus he was also ‘gods Adversarie, for he that resisteth the higher powers resisteth the ordinance of god’. But fasting did not accord well with the Puritan’s voracious appetite, for a Puritan ‘hathe a stomake like an Estrige and can digeste steele, yf it come in the shape of victuales’.11 Puritans were not only hypocrites, but they were also ignorant and taught false doctrine. According to our ‘plaine Protestant’, there was one preacher in Cheshire, a man with a master’s degree and thus supposedly well-educated, who ‘openly maintained in a Sermone that if a maried man had carnall copulation with anie other woman beside his wife and did after knowe his wife before he had reconciled him selfe unto her the childe so begotten was a basterde’, although he was later forced to recant this opinion before a magistrate. Puritans were also confrontational and socially divisive. On another occasion this same preacher, ‘beinge oute of his texte’, started reprehending ‘particular men’ and ‘raylinge againste Papistes & Bishopes, and boxinge the Pulpite pittifullye’. Another local Puritan preacher once ‘raged so in an oulde Pulpite, that downe came pulpite precher and all’, almost killing an old man who sat underneath. ‘Call you this edifijnge’, our author asked: ‘It is not beating of the breste, flinginge of the armes, swaggeringe in the pulpite, or turninge up the white of the eye, but sounde Doctrine plainely pronounced that edifieth the people of god’. The Puritans were ‘false Prophets … in sheppes cloathinge’, when ‘inwardly’ they were ‘raveninge wolves’. They were ‘mercylesse and without all honestye, Charitie, and without all Christianitie’. Reminding his readers that ‘there is a river which devideth Chesheire and Lancassheire called mercye’, our ‘plaine Protestant’ thought it would be a good idea if ‘all Puritanes were ducked ther in to the ende they may be replenished with more droppes of mercye’. God ‘ridde the realme of Puritanes’, he emplored, signing himself ‘A hater of Puritans because they be many’.12 Similar arguments about hypocritical Puritans and the threat they posed to societal norms were articulated during all three of the press-orchestrated campaigns against Protestant dissent mentioned above. Again, this process of stereotyping fits the classic paradigm of a moral panic as outlined by sociologists.13 Yet our early seventeenth-century manuscript source suggests that the anti-Puritan stereotype was not, in any straightforward way, a media creation. This is not to deny that the media played a vital role in helping to forge the anti-Puritan stereotype; Patrick Collinson and others

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have done much to show how the figure of the Puritan was ‘invented’ by the anti-Marprelate literature of the early 1590s and the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean stage.14 Nevertheless, our ‘plaine Protestant’ from Cheshire suggests that some people, at least, had internalized this negative stereotype. In this chapter, therefore, I propose to examine the relationship between the construction of the anti-Puritan stereotype and the orchestration of a moral panic over Puritanism by the press. Because I am particularly interested in charting the construction of the stereotype and testing the role of the media in generating public fear, I intend to concentrate on the early seventeenth century – the period prior to the outbreak of the Civil War, and thus before the Puritans and Protestant separatists could legitimately be accused of having caused the sort of threat to the social order that was to happen during the years of civil war and revolution after 1642. It is true that the moral panic I am focusing on led to a break-down in law and order rather than its successful imposition. However, it helped to create and define what was essentially a law and order party. It also offers an interesting point of comparison with the moral panic that was stirred up in the face of the Whig challenge during the Exclusion Crisis, which did result in mobilizing public opinion behind an intensified legal campaign to eradicate the perceived threat.

6.2 Anti-puritanism: Media construct or socially rooted prejudice? All the ideological ingredients for a moral panic over Puritanism existed long before any of the moral panics mentioned above actually broke out. There was already a well-mapped-out negative stereotype of the Puritan that was available for deployment by hostile polemicists, a stereotype which although multidimensional and capable of expansion was also coherent and, within its own internal logic, rational. This negative stereotype was originally an Elizabethan construction, and grew out of the reaction to the Presbyterian challenge to the Elizabethan settlement in the Church in the late 1580s. Although anti-Puritanism perhaps lost some of its immediacy during the years of the supposed Jacobean consensus in the Church, both printed and manuscript sources point to the persistent vitality of antiPuritan sentiments throughout the reign of James I. And anti-Puritanism was to be revived with a vengeance by the Laudians in the late 1620s and 1630s, finding articulation both in sermons and in print.15 One might well argue, therefore, that the negative stereotype of the Puritan was in many respects a creation of ‘the media’. It grew initially out of the late Elizabethan press and theatre, and was perpetuated, reinforced, and consolidated by pamphlets and sermons (especially court sermons) that appeared in print during the reigns of James I and Charles I. Yet other sources

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hint at the existence of anti-Puritan views within society more generally. Commonplace books often record anti-Puritan ditties and rhymes that were seemingly in general circulation. Some anti-Puritan invective took the form of ballads set to popular tunes – Richard Corbett, later Bishop of Oxford and Norwich, excelled at this genre in his days as Dean of Christ Church Oxford in the 1620s. Libellous writings often arose out of tensions at the local level between Puritan and anti-Puritan factions before enjoying a broader circulation in print.16 Moreover, the very prevalence of the caricature of a Puritan as an object of ridicule on the late-Elizabethan and Jacobean stage suggests a culture deeply familiar with anti-Puritan stereotypes and willing to see the Puritan as an object of derision.17 It would thus be misleading to see anti-Puritanism as somehow imposed on the people by the media. It is possible, in fact, to suggest the opposite, that the media merely picked up on anxieties and tensions that existed at the local level, and that in this respect anti-Puritanism was fuelled from below rather than created from above. The truth, of course, is somewhere in between. The relationship was symbiotic, and cross-fertilization went on all the time. The media served to give public articulation to the stereotype, to publicize and also to consolidate it, to give it a shape that it did not yet possess, helping perhaps to reify a discourse that was not necessarily entirely a media creation, but with the reification then being reinserted into the public domain. Peter Lake has rightly emphasized the multivalent nature of antiPuritanism, and how the charge of ‘Puritanism’ could be levelled in numerous ways against a variety of very different perceived religious and political threats by very different groups pursuing distinct polemical and ideological agendas.18 This suggests the need to take a highly contextualized approach to the study of anti-Puritanism, exploring how specific anti-Puritan rhetoric was deployed by particular groups in specific circumstances, and relating this to specific tensions over an actual Puritan presence at regional, county, or parish level. Here, however, I am interested in reconstructing the overarching contours and basic patterning of the anti-Puritan stereotype. Although anti-Puritanism was undoubtedly socially rooted, there existed at the same time a generalized and even abstracted caricature of the Puritan, not necessarily affixed to any given moment in time or place but which shaped the type of arguments anti-Puritan polemicists found it possible to make. Although Puritanism was a polemical construct, this does not mean Puritans did not exist. Indeed, anti-Puritans invariably constructed their arguments by pointing to specific activities and deeds of actual people who did indeed embrace the particular style of zealous Protestantism that historians tend to associate with Puritanism, even though in the process they misrepresented those activities and deeds. There was certainly considerable fluidity to the stereotyping of Puritans: not everyone understood the same thing by Puritan, and it was possible for contemporaries to label and thus condemn a broad range of activities they disapproved of as being

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‘Puritan’, depending upon their agenda. James I famously sought to distinguish between radical and moderate Puritans, with the former tending towards separation; crucial for him was the willingness to obey royal authority, and he tended to stigmatize as Puritans those he took to be disobedient. Yet James’s definition of Puritanism was continuously shifting and it undoubtedly became much broader towards the end of his reign.19 The definition of Puritanism broadened still further under Charles I. One work from the 1630s, for example, claimed that there were six sorts of Puritans, another that ‘there are ten severall Puritanieties, by which one kind of Puritan distinctly differs from an other’.20 The parliamentarian propagandist Henry Parker argued in 1641 that ‘Puritans … were at first Ecclesiasticall only … but now it is come about, that by a new enlargement of the name, the world is full of nothing else but Puritans. For besides the Puritan in Church policie, there are now added Puritans in Religion, Puritans in State, and Puritans in morality’.21 Thus we must be cautious of any tendency to generalize. Much early Stuart anti-Puritan polemic targeted a very specific type of Puritan: often it was the separatist, or the Anabaptist, but it could also be the Familist, the zealous godly clergyman or layman, or even more loosely political opponents of the Jacobean and Caroline regimes who were associated with a hotter form of Protestantism. Nevertheless, the fact that these different groups at various times were all called ‘Puritans’ encouraged a tendency to attribute any of the negative characteristics associated with any particular type of Puritan to all people who happened to be thought of as being Puritans. For example, what might be true only of separatists (and certain types of separatists at that) came to be thought of as being true of non-separating Puritans as well.22 The adoption of a single, catch-all, stigmatizing label inevitably promoted a conflation of categories and elision of types, resulting in a process of stigma by association and the emergence of a composite picture of a Puritan which, in fact, never existed – because the composite was the sum of parts which never came together in one person (and of parts which were often mutually incompatible). As one (admittedly critical) history of James I’s reign, produced in the 1650s, put it: ‘under that generall terme [Puritan] were comprehended not only those brainsick fooles as did oppose the Discipline and Ceremonies of the Church and made Religion an Umbrella to impiety, But such as out of mere honesty refrained [from] the Vices of the times were branded by this Title’.23 No wonder, then, that individuals we normally think of as being Puritans protested so vehemently against being labelled such.

6.3 The Puritan as folk devil Let us try to reconstruct, then, the composite picture of the Puritan.24 The case against Puritans was based in part on religious disagreement. Beyond specific condemnations of Cartwrightian Presbyterianism or Brownist

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separatism, anti-Puritan polemic denounced a range of beliefs and practices associated with the self-styled godly, such as scrupling to conform to the ceremonies of the established Church, gadding to sermons, attending religious conventicles, and fervent antipathy towards popery, which Puritans saw even within the Church of England.25 In that sense, anti-Puritanism was a religious prejudice. Yet it was also much more. Puritans were disliked for social, cultural, and also political reasons: therein lay the greater threat. As already noted, Puritans were seen as proud, hypocritical, greedy, uncharitable, and immoral (and hence unchaste). So entrenched was the stereotype of the hypocritical Puritan that according to one early seventeenth-century diarist not only were Puritans called hypocrities, but a hypocrite was also called ‘a puritan’.26 You will find the Puritan ‘Proud and Ambitious / Unchaste Avaritious … Ignorant and hatefull / Awdacious Ungratefull’, one early-seventeenth manuscript poem claimed: ‘A formall hypocrite … A loathsome animall’.27 The pride of the Puritans was misplaced because in reality they were ignorant. As Oliver Ormerod put it in a tract of 1605: ‘they are full of pride, thinking themselves … to have all knowledge, when they are ignorant’.28 To versifiers a ‘Puritant’ was ‘A most precise fool’.29 Ignorance caused Puritans to be full of contradictions. One early Stuart manuscript verse asked: ‘do they braines lacke: Are they white black?’30 They were certainly accused of not living up to their own self-professed code of morality. A manuscript from Charles I’s reign sought to emphasize Puritan hypocrisy by showing that the Puritans, in fact, were guilty of breaking every single commandment (although this involved a bit of a stretch).31 A combination of hypocrisy, ignorance, and wilful perversity explained Puritan gluttony. One versifier claimed that while others abstained on Good Friday, a (Scottish) Puritan would ‘eat till I fart againe’, because ‘From meat and drinke all prohibitions / On certain dayes are superstitions’.32 In Bartholomew Fair Ben Jonson has Zeal-of-the-Land Busy proclaim how he ‘will eate exceedingly’ and ‘by the publike eating of Swines flesh … professe [his] hate, and loathing of Iudaisme’.33 And hypocrisy cloaked an underlying immorality. One author wrote: ‘there are noe such cheatinge, cozeninge, dissembling knaves in the whole world, as these Puritans’.34 Hence the argument that the Puritans were given to committing the worst of sexual sins.35 As one manuscript work alleged, there was ‘such fornication amongst them, that is not once named amongst the Gentile; A holie brother lye with a holie sister, ha, ha, ha’.36 We might ask why all this should matter. If the Puritans were merely ignorant fools – hypocrites maybe, but at the same time objects of ridicule – why should contemporaries have been so worried about them? This was because there was something deeply subversive and threatening about Puritans’ underlying character traits. Puritans were uncharitable towards their neighbours, they were outspoken in condemning the sins of their neighbours, and were thus a socially disruptive force. A poem of 1621 claimed that the Puritan was

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‘not only silent for good workes / but in his practise he resembles turkes’.37 One poem has a Scottish Puritan recall how he loved ‘brawles and contentions’ and ‘to live in strife and in dissentions … I hate more to doe least good worke / Then any Panim Jew or Turke’.38 More generally, Puritans were held to threaten widely cherished social values concerning the need for unity and concord. A Puritan, quipped the future Caroline bishop Walter Curll in 1603, was ‘such a one as loves God with all his soule, but hates his neighbour with all his heart’.39 One former separatist, writing in 1606, claimed he had been hounded and persecuted by Puritans ever since he had conformed to the Church, and eventually he had been forced to move his family out into the country as the only way to escape from ‘these tyrants’.40 In 1616 one Yorkshire cleric reproved Puritans for their ‘want of charitie … in pronouncing rash and accusing judgements against’ fellow Protestants and encouraging others to ‘becom such deadly haters of their Brethren’, and to spread this hatred ‘throughout the whole land’.41 An overly censorious attitude towards the ‘sins’ of one’s less godly neighbours was hardly a recipe for social cohesion. A Puritan was guilty of breaking the commandment ‘thou shalt not murder’, one manuscript work claimed, because although ‘hee dares not lay violent hands upon the bodies of men, yet hee wounds and kills the good names of men. Hee is full of malice, hatred, and envie, which is murther in the sight of God’.42 Having one’s character maligned was indeed thought equivalent to social death in this culture. It was an anxiety reflected in jokes: when someone tried to persuade ‘a man to hang his Dog that had done some mischief’, records one jestbook, the man replied that he was ‘loath to hang him’ but that he would ‘go amongst his Neighbours and give him an ill-name, and that’s as bad’.43 Ultimately, Puritans threatened the very unity of the Church – by encouraging schism. James I wrote in 1619 that ‘our Puritans’, who were ‘adverse to the governement of Bishops’ and quarrelled ‘with all the Ceremonies of our Church’, were fathers not only ‘of the Brownists’ but also of ‘all these innumerable Sects of new Heresies, that now swarme in Amsterdam’.44 By questioning the ceremonies of the Church, the Puritans, though ignorant themselves, challenged the authority of the best-educated in the land and also the authority of the king. A tract of 1606 criticized ‘their pride, in … preferring some of their fanaticall prechers and many of their owne selves, before the ancient fathers, yea above S[aint] Peter the Apostle’.45 In 1635 Peter Studley (a strident anti-Puritan but no straightforward Laudian) complained how the Puritans took it upon themselves ‘to glosse and expound the sacred Scriptures’ according to ‘their owne deluded fancies’, which could only ‘produce both heresies in judgment and Schismaticall divisions in practice’, and even questioned ceremonies that had been ‘commanded by the Authoritie of our Soveraigne Lord the King with the assent of all the learned Bishops in our Land … confirmed with the approbation and publike Testimony of both the Universities, and the godly learned therein:

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ratified by Act of Parliament: And lastly, obeyed by many thousands in this Land’.46 Although for Puritans disagreement over certain ceremonies might have been at heart a religious issue – related to a desire to rid the Church of popery – for Church conformists the disputed ceremonies were things indifferent to be settled by the chief magistrate, and thus for them conformity to the Church’s ceremonies was at heart a political issue, a willingness or otherwise to be obedient to the crown.47 Writing in 1631, Giles Widdowes thought the lawless, kneeless, schismatical Puritans ‘should be better Subjects to God, and to his Immediate Vicegerent in these Churches, the King, than to be Prime defenders of Breaking the peace of Orthodoxe Reformed Religion’.48 For Studley, in 1635, ‘in refusing subjection to their Superiours’ the Puritans violated ‘their loyalty to their Prince, by renting the unity of the Churches peace’; they used the ‘pretence of harmlesse Ceremonies, to raise up their cavils’, yet the consequences of ‘these lighter matters’ would not ‘terminate in Ceremonies’ but in ‘alterations in Church and State’ and the subjection of the ‘Scepter of Princely Power, to the subordinate rule and direction of their Presbyterian consistory’.49 This alleged questioning of authority and apparent readiness to threaten the peace of the Church opened up the possibility of a comparison to papists. As Ormerod had written in 1605, Puritans’ refusal to allow the civil magistrate to ordain ceremonies pertaining to the Church ranked them on a par ‘with the Anabaptists and the Papists’, who did ‘all jointly oppugne the Princes authoritie in causes ecclesiasticall’.50 Puritans, then, were socially disruptive and politically dangerous: they caused trouble, stirred up discontents, and undermined (and even overtly challenged) legitimate authority in Church and state. What made matters worse was that Puritanism was apparently spreading. This was paranoia; people sympathetic to those accused of being Puritans were quick to deny that Puritanism was on the increase.51 Yet the paranoia exposes a mindset that is deeply revealing. Writing in 1605 Ormerod claimed that ‘the PuritanPreachers’ had ‘infected all the partes of the Land, and distracted millions of the vulgar sorte from their love and liking of the present state’.52 In 1616 a Yorkshire cleric expressed his alarm that the ‘hatefull sect’ of Puritans were ‘growne infinite in multitudes’.53 Studley blamed the well-to-do for supporting the Puritans and thus encouraging Puritanism to spread. If the country gentry embraced Puritanism, ‘all his Tenants must runne with him’, otherwise they would find themselves evicted when their leases expired. Likewise, ‘If rich Tradesmen in Cities and Corporations incline that way, then all mechanicall and inferiour persons, who have any relation to them, and dependence on them, must comply with them in their vaine opinions, or the streame of their favours will runne another way’.54 But particularly alarming was the supposed attractiveness of Puritanism to the lower orders, ‘the vulgar’, ‘the multitude’. A poem of the 1630s spoke of ‘that dull sect’, which esteemed ‘barnes [and] stables … More than our Churche’, as being

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led by ‘Coblers, Weavers, madmen’.55 A retrospective account accused the Puritan minister Richard Culmer, following his graduation from Cambridge in 1621, of ‘keeping company and correspondence with none … but the Ignobile mobile vulgus, the vulgar spirited rabble, a sort of people naturally given to contemne their governours and superiors, and to quarrel with the present State’.56 Viewed like this, the prospect was indeed alarming to anti-Puritan conformists. Determined action would need to be taken to preserve the very peace of the commonwealth. As early as 1605 Ormerod had warned James I to keep the Puritan flames from ‘kindling again, least a greater mischiefe doe ensue thereupon. For as a fire is kept down, if it breake foorth againe, doth burne more fiercely: so these fiery spirits … if they breake foorth again, they will rage more furiously’.57 In 1606 royal chaplain Anthony Maxey warned magistrates and MPs to do their utmost to ‘procure the Peace of the Church’ and to ensure ‘conformitie’, since ‘a rent schisme in the Church’ was like ‘a great breach in the Sea’, there being ‘almost nothing able to close it up againe’. Indeed, Maxey continued, ‘the greatest Monarchies, and most flourishing Kingdomes of the world, have never received such fearefull blowes, and unexpected downe-fals by open and forraine enemies, as they have done by stealing innovations and secret treasons, first, raised by sects and heresies, in religion’ – one only need recall ‘the bloudy massakers of France’, ‘the wearisome broiles of Flanders’, and ‘the high indignities offered heretofore in Scotland, to our most worthy and religious King James’ by ‘the sodaine and sundry mutinees’ of the ‘presbiteriall discipline’.58 Studley was therefore thinking along traditional lines when he wrote in the mid-1630s that ‘Every Kingdome divided against it self’ would ‘be brought to desolation’ and everyone should fear what might be the result ‘of this division and schisme; which like a Gangraine [had] lately crept into the heart of the Church’, diffusing ‘daily the poison and contagion thereof through all the sound parts of this Kingdome’. If this were not prevented by the vigilant care of the prince, ‘Anarchy and confusion’ would ‘breake in upon us’.59 It is worth re-emphasizing here that we are dealing with representation. As William Prynne pointed out, Puritans were ‘not such in truth, as they [were] commonly taken and reported to be’.60 The stereotype of the Puritan as invariably ignorant and unlettered was contradicted by social reality. Many leading Puritans, both moderate and radical, non-separating and separating had had a university education; indeed, orthodox Puritans emphasized that preachers needed a high degree of formal education and book learning.61 Nor were Puritans necessarily uncharitable. They were ‘very careful to maintain good works’, a pro-Puritan tract of 1642 claimed, while Richard Culmer, who served as minister of Thanet in the mid-1640s, was wellknown for giving ‘meat and money’ to the poor of his parish.62 Works written in defence of Puritans, which became increasingly common from 1641 onwards, frequently sought to throw the charges of the anti-Puritans back

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against their authors. Thus it was the enemies of the Puritans, such works alleged, who were the true hypocrites, who were ignorant and unlearned, prone to error and sin, guilty of heresy, sexually promiscuous, and so forth.63 Nor were Puritans intrinsically anti-authoritarian or natural opponents of hierarchy in Church and state, as Collinson has long since made clear.64 Yet we are not dealing purely with representation. We are also dealing with what were real implications of the Puritan position, at least when judged from the worldview of particular types of conformist Protestants – and not just of the more outré Laudian clerics of the 1630s, but also more mainstream Jacobean clerics, and the poets, rhymesters, playwrights, commonplacers, and pamphleteers whose work we have touched on here. Moreover, there is a sense in which history was, of course, to prove the likes of Ormerod, Maxey, and Studley right: an inability by those in authority to deal with the division and schism that had crept into the Church did ultimately lead to anarchy and confusion breaking out in England.

6.4 Moral panics, the Civil War, and the Exclusion Crisis When royalist publicists sought to build on public anxieties about radical Puritanism in order to rally opinion behind the crown on the eve of the Civil War, there was thus already a long-established negative stereotype of the Puritan upon which they could draw. The royalist press of 1641–2 may have created a moral panic over Puritanism, but they did not create it out of thin air. The situation on the ground had, of course, changed dramatically by 1641–2. There was now a real sense of crisis, and the royalist press was responding to actual Puritan and separatist activities at the parish level, such as the tearing down of altar rails and the interruption of prayer book services. There was now a real and very visible threat, not just an imagined one. The crisis in the Church was accompanied by a crisis for royal authority, as Parliament came to challenge an increasing number of key prerogatives of the crown. It would thus be highly misleading to give the impression that civil war royalism was constructed solely on anti-Puritanism. The royalist press of 1641–2 had to take on the parliamentarian alliance against Charles I on all fronts, political and constitutional, as well as religious. Nor were all writings in support of the crown part of an orchestrated, centralized royalist propaganda campaign. Although there was some coordination from the centre, many of the pro-royalist or anti-Puritan writings of this period were put out by royalist sympathizers working on their own initiative. Having said this, the exploitation of fears of radical Puritanism/Protestant separatism was a prominent feature of writings that came out in support of Charles I on the eve of the Civil War, and the intent was quite clearly to create a sense of moral alarm and panic so as to frighten people into their senses and into rallying behind the crown. What I wish to emphasize is that the fears exploited

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by the royalist press were not in any uncomplicated way ‘imposed’ on the people. We are not dealing simply with a press creation. Rather we see the press drawing on an ideological construction – or, more precisely, central components of a multidimensional ideological construction – that was already deeply imbedded in this culture, amplifying deviance for sure, and relating the supposed threat to actual and specific developments during the crisis years of 1641–2, but certainly not creating something out of nothing. We can see this by considering the extent to which the royalist press on the eve of the Civil War drew upon the negative stereotype of Puritan behaviour that had already been long established. Familiar accusations concerning various forms of the Puritans’ antisocial behaviour were levelled time and time again. A telling, albeit early, example is Differing Worship by the water-poet John Taylor, which dates from midJune 1640. Differing Worship is a rhymed attack on those who refused to kneel to receive the sacrament and who objected to the use of the surplice and of the cross in baptism, yet these are condemned not only for misinterpreting scripture but also because they are ‘Ignorants or Hypocrites’, who ‘cozzen men devoutly’, whose brains were ‘stuft with froath and bubbles’, who promote discord instead of concord, who loved to ‘fish in foule and troubled waters’, who would never part with their money ‘in charity’, and whose ‘spirits’ were so ‘bold’ and ‘audacious’ that they dared to disobey ‘King, Church, State, and Lawes’.65 Other authors made similar points. Writing in 1641, John Harris claimed that whereas ‘A Protestant will deale uprightly, a Puritane will cozen his Father … a Protestant will relieve the poore and fatherlesse, a Puritane will oppresse the fatherlesse and [the] Widdow’. In short, the Puritans were ‘proud’, ‘envious’, ‘enemies to learning’, ‘self-wil[le]d’, ‘selfe-conceited’ ‘covetous’, ‘lyers’, ‘persecutors of the poore, oppressors of the needy’, and most of their followers were ‘mechanick persons, for the most part unlectured’ – ‘ignorant soules’ who ‘preferred the Discipline of ignorant men of their owne Society, before the Discipline of learned men, they prefer the drosse before the treasure’.66 The bitingly satirical Resolution of the Round-Heads of that same year has the Puritans recall ‘the transparency’ of their charity, which was ‘so invisible that neither the right hand nor the left did ere know it’; ‘the multitude’ of their ‘good works which no man can number’; and their condemnation of ‘Learning’ (supposedly ‘no more necessary to religion, then a publick Church’). Continuing in this vein, the pamphlet has the Puritan ‘Round-heads and Prickeares’ resolve to have their religion, tenets, and manners maintained ‘against all reason, Learning, Divinity, Order, Discipline, Morality, Piety, Humanity whatosever’; to have ‘the Felt-maker and the Cobler’ appointed ‘Metropolitans of the two Arch Provinces’, and to have ‘the rest of the Sects preserved [sic], according to their imbecilities of spirit, to such Bishopricks and other Livings as will competently serve to procure fat Poultry, for the filling of their insatiate stomacks’.67

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Above all, royalist propagandists urged people to side with the king against Parliament and their Puritan allies as the only way to preserve order and authority. As one anti-Puritan tract of 1642 put it, ‘these preposterous maligners of Monarchicall government’ sought to shake off ‘all Civill and Ecclesiastical Order’. Whereas James I’s motto had been ‘Beati Pacifici’ (blessed are the peacemakers), the Puritans count ‘them only happy, which are the Peace-breakers’.68 Such allegations were linked intimately to the royalists’ representation of themselves in 1641–2 as the law and order party. It was the sects who now threatened the rule of law. John Taylor, who consistently blurred the line between Puritans and separatists, complained in 1641 of ‘those violent outrages, and Sacrilegious disorders Committed in the Church’ by sectarians, ‘even in the time of Divine Service’, such as assaulting the minister and tearing the surplice from his back, or tearing down the altar rails in a riotous manner.69 An anonymous royalist tract of 1642 bemoaned the increase in sectarianism and condemned the ‘crew of Hypocrites and Round-Heads’ who had taken ‘advantage of these late unlucky differences betwixt the King and his great Councell’ to ‘poison the hearts of many a thousand good Protestants’ and also ‘many of the illiterate People (of London especially) to let in Innovations, both of doctrine and discipline into our Church’ which, this author predicted, ‘could not but produce some sad effect of a civill dissention amongst us’.70 There is little here that is new. They are the same arguments articulated by our ‘plaine Protestant’ from Cheshire towards the beginning of James I’s reign. Why then was there not an earlier moral panic? If playing the antiPuritan card was a good way of rallying support, why did it not work for Laudians under Charles I, who embraced the rhetoric of anti-Puritanism so wholeheartedly? The answer might seem so obvious as to make the question scarcely worth asking. It is worth pausing briefly to reflect on this issue, however, since the reasons serve to highlight what it took to generate a moral panic in this society. There was a more systematic exploitation of the press in 1641–2. Although there were anti-Puritan publications in the 1630s, there was not the same bombardment of the public sphere with anti-Puritan polemic as there was on the eve of the Civil War. Moreover, much of the literature of 1641–2 was self-consciously designed to target a mass audience: short, witty, engaging pieces written in a populist style, rather than lengthier more philosophical reflections aimed at an educated readership.71 Moreover, in 1641–2 supporters of the crown did not simply seek to win sympathizers, by articulating a case in the press that they thought would generate public support; they also sought to mobilize support, to turn sympathy into action, by encouraging petitions in support of episcopacy and the existing establishment in Church and state, which in turn articulated the petitioners’ concerns over the threat of radical Puritanism and pointed to the activities about which the public should be alarmed.72 Such mobilization was not achieved solely through

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the press. Local activists on the ground took it upon themselves to translate latent sympathy into committed support, for example by promoting petitions and gaining signatories.73 Historians have also pointed out how anti-Puritan sentiment at the local level was fuelled verbally, by word of mouth, by outspoken defenders of the status quo self-consciously raising the public alarm about the threat posed by Puritan reformers and separatists.74 Thus even though the press played a vital role in fuelling this moral panic, it is quite clear that the press did not do the whole job by itself. Furthermore, for a latent anxiety to develop into a moral panic, what is being offered as the alternative to the alleged threat has to be perceived to be more desirable. This was not true for Laudianism. The Laudian reforms were too unpopular in the 1630s to make it plausible to represent the Puritans, at this time (that is, prior to the outbreak of revolution), as posing a greater threat to the welfare of the Church. Most importantly, however, the stigmatized other has to have given some genuine cause for concern: there has to be some concrete reality to point to, rather than just a projected abstract fear. Those who were stigmatized as Puritans by Laud and his followers in the 1630s were simply not the threat they were represented as being. The situation had changed dramatically by 1641–2. The activities of the separatists at the parish level made the threat of radical Puritanism seem real enough. For many, the alternative now on offer was much more desirable: a king ruling in accordance with law, guaranteed frequent parliaments, the traditional Church of bishops and prayer book, and the maintenance of social order and discipline. The most alarming prospect in 1641–2 was that there would be a drift into civil war and concomitant political, religious, and social upheaval. As the sociologist Kenneth Thompson has observed, ‘events are more likely to be perceived as fundamental threats and to give rise to moral panics if the society … is in crisis’.75 In 1641–2, of course, the crisis was not avoided. Yet when the prospect of civil war once more seemed to threaten towards the end of Charles II’s reign, during the Exclusion Crisis, this time the crisis was averted, and in large part because of a successful media campaign that sought to exploit public anxieties over the threat supposedly posed by Protestant dissent. On this occasion, in other words, the moral panic did lead to a conservative reaction and a law-and-order crackdown. There are interesting similarities with the moral panic of 1641–2, which limitations of space prevent me from exploring fully here. We see similar arguments levelled against Protestant nonconformists in the latter years of Charles II’s reign as had been made earlier in the century against Puritans – with regard to their hypocrisy, and everything that stemmed from that, including even sexual promiscuity. But although elements of the old stereotype were readily embraced and re-articulated, the context was different, which inevitably gave Tory propaganda a slightly different hue from its earlier royalist counterpart, since new concerns had arisen as a result of the upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century that came

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to feature prominently in the Tory construction of the case against the exclusionists. Tory propagandists could point to the ‘reality’ of what had happened in the 1640s and 1650s, and suggest that the same would come to pass again if people bowed to pressure from the Whigs and their nonconformist allies. Again, this was not an anxiety imposed on the people by the press. It was a lived reality for many people, who had either lived through the civil war years and subsequent republican period themselves or whose parents had done so. The Tory propaganda campaign was successful because it was able to appeal to pre-existing, albeit latent, anxieties about the spectre of republicanism and Protestant dissent: so much so, that Tory propagandists were able to neutralize the Whigs’ skilful exploitation of that other seventeenthcentury popular bugbear, namely the threat of popery. Again this forces us to resist the view of a top-down, media-imposed moral panic: the anxieties already existed in society and the Tory media of the Exclusion Crisis did not so much create these fears as exploit, channel, and redirect them in order to serve their own political agenda. The process of winning over public opinion also involved mobilizing opinion into action, getting people to take to the streets to demonstrate their support for the hereditary succession, or to sign loyal addresses, and also to do their bit – whether as constables, jurors, magistrates, or even ordinary members of the public who might come forward as witnesses or informers – to make sure the laws already on the books upholding the existing order in Church and state were rigorously enforced.76

6.5

Conclusion

A few words must suffice by way of conclusion. Moral panics are not a peculiarly modern phenomenon. They existed in the seventeenth century. If one reads the relevant sociological literature, one can clearly see that the anti-Puritan/anti-nonconformist scares I have mentioned in this chapter fit quite well the classic paradigm of the moral panic. Moral panics might be dependent upon the pre-existence of a public sphere, but few English historians nowadays would follow Habermas in dating the emergence of the public sphere to the period after the Glorious Revolution. There was clearly a public sphere, of sorts, in England, on the eve of the Civil War and also during the Exclusion Crisis.77 Although media fuelled, moral panics can never simply be a media creation. For a panic to develop the media has to pick up on fears that are already present in society. Crucial for the emergence of a moral panic, then, is what Thompson has termed ‘the spiral effect produced by the interaction of the media, public opinion, interest groups, and the authorities’.78 It is with that spiral effect, particularly with regard to the fear of Puritanism in Jacobean and Caroline England, that this chapter has been concerned.

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Notes I am extremely grateful to David Lemmings for his critical input and advice. The research for this essay was undertaken while I was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. Earlier versions were delivered at seminars at Brasenose College, Oxford, and the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. 1. British Library, Add. MS 32,518, fols 144–52 (quotes on fols 144r, 144v, 146v). 2. Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms 1660–1685 (2005), esp. chs 4, 5. 3. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (1972). 4. Kenneth Thompson, Moral Panics (1998), 8, 9. See also Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda, Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance (Oxford, 1994), esp. ch. 2; Ning de Coninck-Smith, ‘Introduction’, Paedagogica Historica, 35 (1999), 581–3; Stanley Cohen, ‘Moral Panics and Folk Concepts’, Paedagogica Historica, 35 (1999), 585–91. 5. R. Sindall, ‘The London Garotting Panics of 1856 and 1862’, Social History, 12 (1987), 351. 6. David Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution 1640–1642 (Oxford, 2006), esp. chs 10, 11, 15. 7. Austin Woolrych, ‘The Good Old Cause and the Fall of the Protectorate’, Cambridge Historical Journal, 13 (1957), 133–67; Austin Woolrych, ‘Historical Introduction’, to Complete Prose Works of John Milton (New Haven, 1953–82), vii. 1–228; Barry Reay, ‘The Quakers, 1659, and the Restoration of the Monarchy’, History, 63 (1978), 193–213; Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II (Cambridge, 1987), ch. 3; Tim Harris, Party Politics under the Later Stuarts (1993), ch. 2. 8. F[olger] S[hakespeare] L[ibrary], V.a.399, fols 18v–20v. 9. Ibid., fol. 20r. 10. Ibid., fol. 11. 11. Ibid., fols 18v–19. 12. Ibid., fols 19v–20v. 13. Cohen, Folk Devils, 9, 31–8; Goode and Ben-Yehuda, Moral Panics, 24–5. 14. Patrick Collinson, The Puritan Character: Polemics and Polarities in Early Seventeenth-Century English Culture (1989); Patrick Collinson, ‘Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair: The Theatre Constructs Puritanism’, in David L. Smith, Richard Strier, and David Bevington (eds), The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre, and Politics in London, 1576–1649 (Cambridge, 1995), 157–69; Patrick Collinson, ‘Ecclesiastical Vitriol: Religious Satire in the 1590s and the Invention of Puritanism’, in John Guy (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge, 1995), 150–70; Peter Lake, with Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (2002), sections IV and V. 15. Lori Anne Ferrell, Government by Polemic: James I, the King’s Preachers, and the Rhetorics of Conformity, 1603–1625 (Stanford, CA, 1998); Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: the Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995); Jason Peacey, ‘The Paronoid Prelate: Archbishop Laud and the Puritan Plot’, in Barry Coward and Julian Swann (eds), Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theory in Early Modern Europe, From the Waldensians to the French Revolution (Aldershot, 2004), 113–34.

114 Moral Panics and Anti-Puritanism 16. The Poems of Richard Corbett, ed. J. A. W. Bennett and H. R. Trevor-Roper (Oxford, 1955); ODNB, Richard Corbett; C. J. Sisson, Lost Plays of Shakespeare’s (Cambridge, 1936); Martin Ingram, ‘Ridings, Rough Music and Mocking Rhymes in Early Modern England’, in Barry Reay, (ed.) Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (1985), 184–5. 17. William P. Holden, Anti-Puritan Satire, 1572–1642 (New Haven, CT, 1954), ch. 3; Collinson, ‘Theatre Constructs Puritanism’; Kristen Poole, Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton (Cambridge, 2000). 18. Peter Lake, ‘Anti-Puritanism: The Structure of a Prejudice’, in Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake (eds), Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Tyacke (Woodbridge, 2006), 80–97. 19. Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, ‘The Ecclesiastical Policy of James I’, Journal of British Studies, 24 (1985), 169–207. 20. BL, Harleian MS 1219, fol. 306; Giles Widdowes, The Lawlesse Kneelesse Schismaticall Puritan (1631), 2. 21. [Henry Parker], A Discourse Concerning Puritans (2nd edn, 1641), 13. 22. Richard Bancroft had used this strategy in the 1580s, to tar Presbyterians and separatists with the same brush. See Joseph Black, ‘The Rhetoric of Reaction: The Martin Marprelate Tracts (1588–89), Anti-Martinism, and the Uses of Print in Early Modern England’, Sixteenth-Century Journal, 28 (1997), 712. 23. Francis Osborne, Traditional Memoyres on the Raigne of King James (1658), 45. 24. For the extent to which early modern attitudes towards Puritans and Protestant nonconformistst drew on medieval attitudes towards heretics and schismatics, see John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge, 2006), esp. ch. 5. 25. For examples, see The Diary of John Manningham of the Middle Temple 1602–1603, ed. Robert Parker Sorlien (Hanover, NH, 1976), 29; Sisson, Lost Plays, 201; Thomas Turner, A Sermon Preached Before the King at White-Hall, the Tenth of March (1635), 31, 33; ‘The True Puritan without Disguise’, Huntington Library HM 198, vol. i, 187. This last manuscript was reprinted, with very minor modifications, as The True Presbyterian without Disguise (1661). 26. Diary of John Manningham, 114. 27. FSL, V.a.137, 124. 28. Oliver Ormerod, The Picture of a Puritane (1605), sig. Cr–v. Cf. Peter Fairlambe, The Recantation of a Brownist (1606), sig. B3. 29. FSL, V.a.137, 120. Cf. Collinson, ‘Religious Satire’, 167; Collinson, ‘Theatre Constructs Puritanism’; Nicholas McDowell, ‘The Stigmatizing of Puritans as Jews in Jacobean England: Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon and the Book of Sports controversy’, Renaissance Studies, 19 (2005), 355–6. 30. FSL, V.a.137, 116. 31. BL, Harleian MS 1219, fol. 302–5. 32. FSL, V.a.137, 128. For the image of the gluttonous Puritan more generally, see Poole, Radical Religion, ch. 2. 33. Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fayre (2nd edn, 1631), 31. 34. BL, Harleian MS 1219, fol. 305. Cf. FSL, V.a.137, 120–1. 35. Thomas Cogswell, ‘Underground Verse and the Transformation of Early Stuart Political Culture’, in Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky (eds), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester, 1995), 277–300; Michael Questier, ‘Arminianism, Catholicism, and Puritanism in England during the 1630s’, Historical Journal, 49 (2006), 71; Holden, Anti-Puritan Satire 1572–1642,

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64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

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52–60; Bernard Capp, The World of John Taylor the Water-Poet 1578–1653 (Oxford, 1994), 123–4. BL, Harleian MS 1219, fol. 304v. Huntington Library, HM 198, vol. i, 186. FSL, V.a.137, 129. Diary of John Manningham, 219. Fairlambe, Recantation of a Brownist, sig. B2r–v. John Walker, The English Pharise, or Religious Ape (1616), 16, 69, 73. BL, Harleian MS 1219, fol. 304v. H[umphrey] C[rouch], England’s Jests: Refin’d and Improv’d (2nd edn, 1687), 31. James I, A Meditation upon the Lords Prayer (1619), 11, 12, 14–15. Fairlambe, Recantation of a Brownist (1606), sig. B2. Peter Studley, The Looking-Glasse of Schisme (1635), 3–4, 76–7. Thomas Scot, Christs Politician, and Salomons Puritan (1616), 11–12, 17. Widdowes, Lawlesse Kneelesse Schismaticall Puritan, 1. Studley, Looking-Glasse, 144, 146–7, 183–4. Ormerod, Picture of a Puritan, sigs D, D4. [Parker], Discourse Concerning Puritans, 9, 11. Ormerod, Picture of a Puritan, sigs B2v, C4r–v. Walker, English Pharise, 80. Studley, Looking-Glasse, 245–6. FSL, V.a.262, 1, 3. Antidotum Culmerianum (1644), 8. Ormerod, Picture of a Puritan, sig. C4v. Anthony Maxey, The Churches Sleepe (1606), sigs A6v, B4r–v, B6r–v, B7v. Studley, Looking-Glasse, 242–3. William Prynne, The Perpetuitie of a Regenerate Mans Estate (2nd edn, 1627), sig. **6v. Nicholas McDowell, The English Radical Imagination (Oxford, 2003), ch. 2; John Morgan, Godly Learning (Cambridge, 1986). The Old Puritan, Goldy, Honest, and Loyal [1642], 6; Richard Culmer, junior, A Parish Looking-Glasse for Persecutors of Ministers (1657), 18. Parker, Discourse Concerning Puritans; [William Walwyn], Some Considerations tending to Undeceiving Those, whose Judgements are Misinformed (1642); Martin MarPrelat, The Character of a Puritan (1643); Sir Peter Wentworth, A Pack of Puritans (1641). Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants (Oxford, 1982). John Taylor, Differing Worships (1640), 13, 17, 18. John Harris, The Puritanes Impuritie (1641), 2–3, 4, 5. The Resolution of the Round-Heads (1641), sigs A1v–A2v. A Puritane Set Forth in his Lively Colours (1642), 1. [John Taylor], The Brownists Synagogue (1641), 2. The Round-Head Uncovered (1642), 4–5. Dagmar Freist, Governed by Opinion: Politics, Religion and the Dynamics of Communication in Stuart London 1637–1645 (1997). My thoughts on this subject have been influenced by Karin Bowie, Scottish Public Opinion and the Anglo-Scottish Union, 1699–1707 (Woodbridge, 2007). Peter Lake, ‘Puritans, Popularity and Petitions: Local Politics in National Context, Cheshire, 1641’, in Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake (eds), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain: Essays in Honour of Conrad Russell

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74. 75. 76. 77.

78.

(Cambridge, 2002), 259–89; John Walter, ‘Confessional Politics in Pre-Civil War Essex: Prayer Books, Profanations, and Petitions’, Historical Journal, 44 (2001), 677–701. Cressy, England on the Edge, 264–5. Thompson, Moral Panics, 8. This case is mapped out in full in Harris, Restoration. See Tim Harris, The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500–1850 (2001), 21–4; Steven Pincus and Peter Lake, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England’, Journal of British Studies, 45 (2006), 270–92; Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (eds), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007). Thompson, Moral Panics, 7.

7 ‘Remember Justice Godfrey’: The Popish Plot and the Construction of Panic in Seventeenth-Century Media Claire Walker

(The dear Resemblance of that Noble Knight,) Who by Romes Restless Rage, and Barbarous Spight, Did lately Fall, (Ah, Treacherous Surprize!) Religion’s Martyr, the State’s Sacrifice! Godfrey! A Name, that shall Embellish Story, The Shame of Popery; But lasting Glory Of Loyal Protestants: He that to save Three Kingdomes, met with an Untimely Grave. (A Poem on the Effigies of Sir Edmund-Bury Godfrey, Who was Barbarously Murthered (1678)) Such a sort of men there is, even here in England, and we have them among us … They are the Jesuits I speak of … They hold it Lawful to kill Men that would prejudice them, or their Religion … God still deliver us from your Bloody hands. God keep England from your Bloody Religion … He that saved us in Eighty Eight, he that saved us from the Gunpowder Plot, he will deliver us from this Cursed Conspiracy. William Lloyd (A Sermon at the Funeral of Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey, One of His Majesties Justices of the Peace, who was Barbarously Murthered (1678), 30, 36, 42) William Lloyd’s funeral oration for the Westminster Justice of the Peace, Edmund Berry Godfrey, who died in suspicious circumstances in October 1678, confirmed the worst fears of the seventy-two divines and ‘prodigious’ crowd who attended his funeral at St Martin’s in the Fields, and the many hundreds more who heard reports afterwards, or read its printed text, hastily published and circulated.1 Amid the already electric atmosphere in England’s 117

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capital generated by Titus Oates’ revelations of a Jesuit conspiracy to assassinate Charles II, the death of the magistrate to whom Oates had sworn the truth of his account clearly corroborated Oates’ evidence that Popish assassins were determined to murder any Protestants who stood between them and England’s return to the Roman Catholic fold. Godfrey’s demise occurred at a fortuitous juncture for Oates and those who believed his evolving testimony about secret Jesuit cabals which implicated an ever-widening circle of clerical and lay Catholics, including several closely associated with the court and government. The assumed murder of Godfrey was touted as concrete evidence for the Plot’s existence and acted as a wake-up call to all Protestants about the very real threats posed by their fellow countrymen who perversely refused to share their true faith. As a Protestant ‘martyr’ he became emblematic in the anti-Catholic discourse which permeated and in many instances dictated popular opinion and parliamentary debate from 1678 into the 1680s. The Popish Plot is an obvious case to examine when investigating the existence of moral panics in an era before the characteristics of the public sphere deemed essential for the creation and manipulation of opinion were fully established. Its structure fits well the schema proposed by Kenneth Thompson, with a clearly defined threat well-represented by the media, leading to a rapid build-up of public concern to which the authorities responded, after which the panic eventually subsided.2 Granted, the mass media envisaged by Thompson and other theorists of modern panics was at best nascent, the fear and demands for prompt action were not confined to the ‘bourgeoisie’, and the ‘moral entrepreneurs’ likewise incorporated a range of interest groups. Yet, just as scholars have revised Jürgen Habermas’s emergence of the public sphere backwards in the seventeenth century to at least the Civil War, so it is possible to argue that moral panic theory should be revised to suit the technological, social and political circumstances in earlier historical periods.3 In Peter Lake’s and Steven Pincus’s recent reconsideration, they argue that the ‘post-revolutionary public sphere’ which emerged after the 1640s and 1650s saw a considerable increase in regular public discussion about politics, and pointed to the powerful role played by the state in this transformation.4 Moreover, contemporaries later wrote of the debates and passions aroused during the Plot years. The Tory, Roger North, noted ‘we have no Parallel, or Example of the like in History. And it was extraordinary in nothing more than this, viz. that, notwithstanding it grew up to a prodigious Energy’. The diarist, John Evelyn, suggested that there were many people willing to believe Oates and others prepared to manipulate the Plot to further their political goals.5 They employed all modes of propaganda to promote the idea of the Plot and fuelled public opinion into a state of high anxiety about the dangers facing state, church and themselves as Protestants, should Oates be proven correct. This chapter seeks to explore the Popish Plot as a moral panic about Catholicism. It does so with the focus on one particular aspect – the murder

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of Edmund Berry Godfrey. The place of Godfrey in the Plot was at once peripheral and central. His contemporaries considered his disappearance and death two weeks after meeting Oates highly significant. John Evelyn commented that the suspicion that the magistrate was assassinated by the Jesuits ‘did so exasperate, not onely the Commons, but all the nation’.6 Roger North suggested that the assumed murder ‘had a surprising Effect for setting up the Plot when it was in the Wane, and without which, it had probably sunk in the Opinion of all People’.7 Gilbert Burnet concurred, writing that Godfrey’s death ‘contributed more than any other thing to the establishing the belief of all this evidence [i.e. Oates’ story]’.8 Modern scholars have largely accepted their assessment of his importance.9 A dissenting voice was that of John Kenyon, who proposed that the agitation sweeping England in November and December 1678 would have most likely occurred without Godfrey’s death. He went so far as to demur as to whether ‘Godfrey’s murder is central to a study of the Plot’.10 I concur with Kenyon that the Plot almost certainly had a life of its own because of the visceral fear about papists and their subversive potential, but I would argue that the magistrate’s death was the vital catalyst which transformed simmering anxiety about the latest rumours of a Catholic conspiracy, which had been circulating since September 1678, into panic. Godfrey’s disappearance and the curious discovery five days later of his body which post-mortem had been run through with his sword was seized upon by moral entrepreneurs in the media and parliament whose political, religious and commercial agendas benefited from the presumed murder. The storm of public opinion against the supposed ‘popish’ assassins and anyone who stood in the way of unravelling the Plot and punishing its instigators forced even the sceptics in the government, including the king, to act against named plotters specifically and Catholics generally. Moreover, the hagiography which grew around Godfrey and the ways in which people’s alarm was expressed encapsulate the essence of the classic seventeenth-century moral panic, which was so often expressed in religious terms.

7.1 Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, the Popish Plot and anti-Catholicism On 21 October 1678 Charles II addressed a joint sitting of the Houses of Commons and Lords and informed them of a Jesuit Plot to assassinate him. Expanding upon the limited information given by the king, the lord chancellor reiterated Charles’ determination ‘to protect the Protestant Religion, and to prevent the swarming of Seminary Priests’.11 Once informed of the danger facing the king, and by extension church and state, the Commons and Lords lost little time in acting to counter it. They appointed committees to protect the king and to investigate the Plot, and sought immediate restrictions on papists’ proximity to London and their place in official positions.12

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The primary function of the Plot committee was ‘to examine concerning the Murder of Sir Edmundbury Godfrey, and to inquire into the Manner and Means how he came by his Death’. Thus, for many in the Parliament, the magistrate’s death was inextricably linked with the newly revealed conspiracy against the king and government. The Popish Plot had ‘begun’ some weeks earlier in August when Titus Oates, a putative Catholic convert who had spent time in English seminaries and colleges abroad, claimed a fantastic Jesuit conspiracy to assassinate the king, re-establish Catholicism, murder Protestants and incinerate London. Despite some doubts as to the Plot’s veracity, the Privy Council pursued it and various people were arrested. Although investigations uncovered no substantial evidence to support Oates’ accusations, other than some circumstantial corroboration in the papers of the duchess of York’s secretary, Edward Coleman, who was duly executed, the authorities continued to take the story seriously, particularly in the light of the mysterious disappearance and death of Edmund Godfrey who recently had taken Oates’ sworn statements. It was in the aftermath of Godfrey’s demise that the king informed Parliament about the Plot and the Commons intervened to examine it further. Oates’ testimony accordingly inflated and more and more people were implicated, including five Catholic peers. His account was supplemented by those of other informers, principally William Bedloe and Miles Prance, who emerged with apparent evidence about Godfrey’s murder. The trials of those arrested for the Plot began in late 1678. Godfrey’s alleged murderers were convicted and executed in February 1679, with others implicated in the Plot mounting the gallows later in the year. Oates continued to appear as a witness in subsequent trials, in spite of growing scepticism regarding his veracity. By 1683 the Plot had collapsed and the informers fell from grace. In 1684 Oates was arrested and he was successfully tried for perjury in May 1685. The longevity of Oates’ role as principal informant and indeed the Plot itself rested to a great extent upon the support both received from some members of Parliament. John Evelyn said as much in 1679 when he observed that ‘the Commons (some leading persons I meane of them) had so exalted him [i.e. Oates], that they tooke for Gospell all he said, & without more ado, ruin’d all whom he nam’d to be Conspirators’.13 Roger North concurred and, like most modern scholars, attributed the panic which followed Oates’ revelations in most part to the opportunistic machinations of his political opponents, subsequently known as the Whigs. There is little doubt that many Whigs supported their leader, the earl of Shaftesbury, in investigating Oates’ claims and ensuring the speedy arrest, trial and execution of the supposed protagonists and their accomplices, as well as agitating for legislation against Catholics. Dissatisfaction with Charles II’s apparent toleration of Catholicism and his seeming drift towards arbitrary government, coupled with increasing fears about his Catholic successor,

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the duke of York, meant that the Plot was a convenient means by which these issues might be highlighted under the guise of protecting monarch, state and church from the nation’s ‘enemies’. North suggested that people were duped by Oates and his political backers, writing of ‘the deceived Rabble’, ‘the deceived and frighted Vulgar’ and ‘Ideot Rabble’.14 Yet, as Tim Harris and others have reminded us, a simple dichotomy between Whig manipulators and the ill-informed and unthinking plebeian mob does not adequately explain popular action in the 1670s and 1680s. Petitioners in the 1680s came from all social classes, and there is evidence that crowds were predominantly comprised of the ‘middling sort’ and might even include members of the political elite.15 Indeed the complex construction of popular politics around the Plot was no doubt aided by the emergent print media, which after the lapse of the licensing Act in 1679 flooded the streets, coffee houses and other venues for public discourse with newspapers, broadsheets and pamphlets full of the latest news and comment on religion, affairs of state and anything deemed to be in the public interest.16 Moreover, as Jonathon Scott has argued persuasively, the ‘vociferous and popular public belief’, which encouraged the perseverance of the Plot well past the point when many had begun to question its reality, was not created by the machinations of the Whig political agenda, but rather depended on the threat of an apparently resurgent international Catholicism which was perceived to be permeating the English body politic.17 With an issue like the Popish Plot, which tapped into long-held fears about the Catholics’ aims to overthrow the Protestant church and state, the conditions were right for the Whigs to press for some of their political goals. The tide of propaganda sponsored by those with Whig sympathies suggests that they clearly intended to manipulate public opinion to their advantage. However, as Tim Harris has observed adroitly ‘a propagandist cannot run counter to the assumptions and prejudices of the audience he is seeking to convert’.18 What is more, the propagandists keen to identify Catholics as the bogeymen had a veritable national treasury of stories and images with which to make their point. Indeed, as Alexandra Walsham has commented, ‘Protestant polemicists … made the repeated interventions of the Almighty in English history the centrepiece of an enduring and chauvinistic national myth. Fusing anti-Catholic providentialism with patriotism, they invented a tradition of prejudice which … took firm root in the imagination and the culture of the populace’.19 However fantastic Oates’ changing evidence was, he ‘convinced an audience already primed to believe such tales through decades of antiCatholic propaganda’.20 The anxiety engendered by popery resulted in sporadic panics throughout the seventeenth century. Robin Clifton’s analysis of scares preceding the civil wars noted at least eight earlier waves of paranoia in between 1596 and 1636, leading him to comment that rather than being representative of any actual Catholic threat they reveal ‘a very basic political attitude in the mass of the

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Protestant nation, an attitude brought into play by specific and recurring circumstances’.21 Some kind of political crisis was often the trigger. Such an external stimulus, if it coincided with a local event, like sightings of strangers, excessive purchases of food or arms, or reports of Catholic gatherings, was enough to prompt a spiral of fear and tension.22 The stereotype of popery, informed by decades of propaganda in sermons and pamphlets, led the anxious to attribute any unsettling circumstances to a Catholic conspiracy. It is tempting to dismiss this omnipresent fear and its occasional eruption into panics about foreign invasions, Catholic uprisings and Protestant massacres as a kind of national psychosis.23 However, Alexandra Walsham has warned against such a condescending and anachronistic judgement, suggesting that outbreaks of violence and prejudice against religious minorities had ‘an underlying logic and structure. Those involved in them were provoked by specific sets of circumstances and inspired by particular goals’.24 Moreover, they were often encouraged in their belief by the actions of the authorities, who passed draconian statutes against popery and acted to round up recusants at the first whiff of trouble, thereby inspiring many to take action before Protestant throats were cut.25 Thus, the panic that spread like wildfire across London in the aftermath of Godfrey’s apparent murder needs to be seen within the context of a deep-seated and ongoing popular discourse about the dangers of popery. Its violence also depended on the pervasive availability of news and comment in a complex variety of forms.

7.2 The media, public opinion and a seventeenth-century panic Daniel Woolf has described the function of daily newspapers and regular periodicals in the eighteenth century ‘as the printed link between members of different clubs and coffee-houses, which were themselves active agents in the dissemination of news, blending oral rumour with writing and print into a pastiche of contemporaneity’.26 In the 1670s daily bulletins may not have been available but news was readily accessible in both written and oral forms. Printed reports appeared in the form of newspapers, broadsheets, pamphlets and ballads. Although private consumption of these print media was possible, research suggests that reading news was commonly a social activity in a public venue, like the alehouse or coffee-house or bookseller’s shop. In this way print intersected with the oral culture of gossip and public discussion in the places where news was bought or read or debated. But there were other locales for the acquisition of information in oral form – most notably via the pulpit, but also in the courts of law and at places of execution. Here again oral and print culture merged with written accounts of sermons, trials and executions printed for wider public consumption. These public discourses existed alongside a continuing scribal culture which was both public and private. Personal correspondence, business letters and

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commercially produced newsletters delivered news of the nation’s affairs to kin and friends who often were removed from the centre of activity. To these one might also add the visual and performance media in the form of prints, plays and ritual.27 Obviously a person’s access to early modern media was dependent on social status, gender and locale, but it was not necessarily restricted by literacy or fortune. There is ample evidence of printed matter passed from person to person and of reading out loud for the benefit of those unable to read. Thus, while not everyone had the leisure to frequent coffee-houses, they could access the news held and discussed there in multiple other locales. News was not simply the preserve of the educated elites and middling sorts, but was available to anyone interested in details of local, national and foreign affairs. Joad Raymond has discussed the relationship between news and propaganda, arguing that the latter term is not only anachronistic for the early modern period but it also obfuscates what ‘news’, ‘intelligence’ and ‘opinion’ meant to readers and discussants of the time.28 Seventeenth-century news was rarely dispassionate; nor was it expected to be. Pamphlets and broadsheets combined ‘news’ with sermonizing editorial comment – indeed the writing of news was ‘unashamedly subservient to the ends of religious indoctrination and political propaganda’. Hence accounts of popish perfidy which claimed to be ‘true’ and based upon the testimony of reliable witnesses were constructed according to a religious and political agenda which valued morality over accuracy.29 This was therefore a media environment that was highly conducive to moral panic. Indeed it was inevitable that accounts of Godfrey’s demise, which happened just as details of the Plot were trickling into London streets, contained a degree of Protestant moralizing about the duplicity of those deemed responsible. Even before there was any evidence that the magistrate had been murdered by Catholics, broadsheets and pamphlets lauded the ‘worthy Knight’ while castigating ‘Rome’s curst Hate’ of the English Protestant ‘Church and State’. An epitaph at the end of An Elegie on the Right Worshipful Sir Edmund-Bury Godfrey, Knight which was licensed before Godfrey’s funeral, described him as ‘Rome’s deadly Enemy’, concluding This Patriots renown Shall ne’re be strangled by the Triple Crown.30 Another elegy which was passed by the censor a day later, likewise lamented the knight’s fall at the hands of treasonous Catholics, and extolled his sacrifice: This Loyal Patriot, by untimely Fate, And basest cruelties of unjust Hate, Falls as a Victim for the Church and State.31

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The ‘news’ about Godfrey was therefore quite naturally attuned to assumptions and prejudices about anti-popery, despite only conjecture effectively linking his death with Oates’ Plot. The religious and political elites simply reinforced these popular assumptions. As William Lloyd’s funeral oration for Godfrey made explicit, it was not only murmuring in the streets that attributed his death to the papists. Clerics and members of parliament echoed the rumours and gave them credence. Lloyd devoted over a quarter of his funeral sermon to Jesuit (and Catholic) justifications for murder, highlighting previous incidences of papist violence, including the Fire of London and massacres of Protestants in France and Ireland, before concluding with a reference to the Spanish Armada and the Gunpowder Plot.32 Lloyd and the early eulogists were not alone in fuelling speculation about the religious and political affiliation of the assassins. As we have seen, the Parliament had been quick to connect the magistrate’s death with Oates’ Plot. The final months of 1678 witnessed a flurry of Plot related business in both houses which left the usual business of government at a standstill. Innumerable raids on the houses and workplaces of suspects and their arrests and incarceration on the orders of the Commons fed speculation that something momentous was afoot. Naturally, the preponderance of Catholics among those arrested and the measures to restrict Catholics’ movements and to disarm them confirmed that the papists were no doubt at the root of the trouble.33 In the aftermath of Bedloe’s and Prance’s evidence confirming the rumours, many publications reported Godfrey’s fate within a familiar litany of popish deceit and Protestant deliverance. A Brief Narrative of the Several Popish Treasons and Cruelties began with ‘Well may we call Popery a Bloody Religion, if at least we may afford the name of Religion to a thing made up of Idolatry, Usurpation, Rebellion, and Cruelty’ before pointing out that England had long been a target for Catholic rebels and plotters. Not surprisingly, it contained a blow-by-blow description of all misdeeds attributable to Rome from the reign of Edward VI up to a vivid account of the contemporary Plot and murdered magistrate.34 Godfrey’s murder became a standard inclusion in such regularly published accounts of popish atrocities. Thus by 1684 William Lord’s, Several Tracts against Popery included the text of Lloyd’s funeral sermon with five anti-Catholic treatises.35 Godfrey’s honoured place in the anti-Catholic narrative was pictorially represented too, with at least one illustrated broadsheet published yearly from 1678 when A Poem on the Effigies of Sir Edmund-Bury Godfrey, who was Barbarously Murthered appeared. It consisted of a central portrait of the magistrate surrounded by four scenes of him taking Oates’ testimony, meeting his killers, his corpse and the pomp and ceremony of his funeral, accompanied by a verse commentary.36 Subsequent representations did not focus solely on Godfrey but rather incorporated him within the wider narrative of the Plot. A Representation of the Popish Plot in 29 Figures included eight depictions of

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Godfrey’s story.37 As time passed and new evidence, executions and further twists occurred, like the nonconformist Protestant ‘Meal Tub Plot’, Godfrey’s prominence in the illustrations diminished, but his murder was always included as a memorable event.38 Whatever the political or commercial intention of such publications, they nonetheless reveal how central Godfrey became in the Plot narrative and its commemorations. His murder was a more evocative (and perhaps easier to depict pictorially) image of the Plot; thus in many ways his demise became a shorthand for it. The panic around Godfrey also provided opportunities for commodification. Indeed, the extent to which ‘remembering Justice Godfrey’ informed contemporary life can be found in the range of Godfrey memorabilia available for purchase. A standard souvenir was the commemorative medal which might simply depict the magistrate’s head and shoulders, some with the cravat which strangled him in place, or more elaborately represent scenes of his murder, with the pope supervising his demise.39 Likewise one might buy a dagger engraved with the words ‘Remember Justice Godfrey’.40 It was also possible to purchase ‘the late Horrid Popish Plot, lively represented in a Pack of Cards’ including Godfrey’s murder.41 Another pack of cards appeared which placed Godfrey within the longer narrative of popish intrigue stretching all the way back to Elizabeth I’s reign.42 The magistrate’s importance in this tableau was such that his story filled almost the entire suit of spades.43 For the more fashion-conscious loyal Protestant there was a ‘Set of very useful Buttons, for shirt Sleeves or Ruffles, there being described upon them some of the most remarkable passages of the late Horrid Plot’.44 The extent to which such objects of material culture influenced public opinion is unclear. Yet, as Tim Harris has suggested with respect to the playing cards, if they were available in public spaces, like coffee-houses or taverns, people using them might ‘become exposed to ideas about which they had given little consideration in the past’.45 In addition to the didactic potential of these souvenirs they also point to a commercial dimension of the Plot that some were prepared to exploit whether they believed in it or not. The Plot, and Godfrey’s part in it, also inspired popular demonstrations that formed part of the ‘media’ constructing the panic and its demons. Rituals dedicated to anti-popery brought the texts, images and memorabilia to life as public spectacle. Commemorations of the Gunpowder Treason on 5 November included bell-ringing, bonfires, sermons and merry-making, celebrating the country’s deliverance, and there were also celebrations on 17 November, the anniversary of Elizabeth I’s accession. By the 1670s there was an ‘anti-Catholic pageant season’ held between these two momentous days for England, with the bonfires, bells and sermons on 5 November culminating in the popeburning processions of 17 November.46 The parades which took place in 1679, 1680 and 1681 began at Moorgate or Whitechapel and wound through London streets before concluding at Temple Bar where an effigy of the pontiff was burned to much acclaim, and they can be described as living tableaux of

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the broadsheet attacks on papists which included noteworthy features of the unfolding Popish Plot.47 Godfrey played a significant part. At the front of the procession marched a bellman ‘who in a Loud and Dolesom Voice Cried all the way, Remember Justice Godfrey’. Immediately after came Godfrey himself on a white horse, sporting the wounds of his martyrdom, supported by one of his murderers who wore the headgear of a Jesuit. In the 1679 line-up, behind him a priest wearing a cope ghoulishly embroidered in skeletons and skulls offered pardons to ‘those who Murder Protestants, and Proclaiming it Meritorious’. Among the assorted ranks of Catholic clergy preceding the final float with the pope, were ‘Six Jesuits with Bloody Daggers’.48 By 1680 and 1681 the spectacle had expanded to include floats lampooning the purported Jesuit instigators of the Plot and presaging their inevitable fate at the gallows, Elizabeth Cellier and the Meal Tub Plot and even anti-Tory propaganda in the assumed person of Sir Roger L’Estrange, the press censor and journalist, whose lack of support for the Plot was widely derided.49 Godfrey’s prominence in all three pageants shows clearly how he had been appropriated by his contemporaries as an emblem of both the Plot and wider

Fig. 7.1 The Solemn Mock Procession of the POPE, Cardinalls, Jesuits, Fryers, &c: through the City of London, November the 17th 1679 (1680). BM Satires 1072.

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popish conspiracy. The anti-Catholic festival surrounding the processions was clearly aimed at a dedicated Protestant and generally Whig-supporting constituency, but the spectacle and the crowds who participated (supposedly 200,000 people in 1679), must have made it difficult for Londoners to ignore.50 With Godfrey at its head, the processions left those who viewed them in no doubt about their primary purpose. Moreover, those who did not witness the spectacle were still able to access its messages through newspaper accounts, the printed pamphlets and broadsheets which described it in detail and often provided illustrations.51 Its didactic potential was recognized by the zealous Protestant publisher, Benjamin Harris, whose rabidly antiCatholic primer for children commenced with an illustrated ‘Account of the Burning the Pope at Temple-Bar in London, November 17, 1679’.52 There were other public forums in which people might learn about the Plot, Godfrey’s sacrifice and the papist threat. Most obviously the message was imparted in the sermons of Protestant clerics with Whig sympathies or simply those who had long preached of the danger of popery. The most obvious occasion for anti-Catholic polemic was 5 November when thanksgiving sermons for England’s deliverance in 1605 were preached all over the country. However, John Kenyon noted that those delivered to the houses of Parliament during the grip of Plot fever in 1678 were curiously ‘temperate’, and he surmised that the king had cautioned the royal chaplains to moderate the usual railing against popery.53 John Evelyn reported various references to the Plot and Catholic perfidy, albeit muted in the circumstances, during several sermons he attended in London in November 1678.54 Provincial offerings were not so circumspect. In Exeter, John Reynolds reminded his congregation of Godfrey’s murder, exclaiming ‘Doth not his blood cry loud enough, to rouse and awaken all your Zeal, Care and Courage against those Catholic Murderers?’55 Even Titus Oates preached during the Plot years.56 His sermons did not have to be inflammatory; just his mere presence in the pulpit was a sufficient reminder of all that had passed. The publication of sermons likewise extended their reach to those who had not attended them. Even the theatre provided the means for staging an anti-Catholic and proProtestant message. Although leading dramatists like John Dryden suggested that audiences were sparse during the Plot because news fulfilled the public’s need for scurrilous entertainment, and many scripts did not pass the censors, there were nonetheless dramas which reflected the political tenor of the times.57 The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth was performed at Bartholomew and Southwark fairs in 1680. Its cast of devils dressed as Jesuits, assassins in similar attire, with cardinals plotting the murder of the newly crowned Elizabeth I who declare ‘Blood and Murthers are Rome’s chiefest Glories’, combined with a tinker, a cooper and a cook who catch the would-be killers and at the end seek the queen’s permission to burn the pope (who has also fallen into their hands) at Temple Bar, suggests that it was a dramatized version of the pope-burning procession and its meaning would not have been lost on

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the audience.58 Alternately Romes Follies or the Amorous Fryars, dedicated to Shaftesbury, was presented to a private audience in a ‘person of qualitie’s’ house in 1681. Its numerous quips about Whigs suggest that it was a somewhat tongue-in-cheek take on the Plot and anti-popery which nonetheless drew upon stock figures and stories to lampoon Rome and its adherents.59 William Bedloe even penned a play specifically about the Plot in 1679, but it does not seem to have been performed publicly.60 Bedloe’s rather turgid theatrical efforts suggest that he, who like the other informers, was well-attuned to the power of the media for broadcasting his credentials and his story, considered the stage a viable platform for yet another retelling of the Plot and other Catholic errors and atrocities. Moreover, ever the opportunist, the informant, like the purveyors of playing cards, medals and buttons, perhaps hoped to gain financially from his thespian version of the story. It is well known that the administration of justice constituted a form of popular theatre and the Popish Plot trials were no exception. During the Plot years, the Old Bailey proved a particularly potent forum for the dissemination of anti-papist discourse. The trials of the plotters attracted considerable interest and spectators availed themselves not only of the evidence and the characters of the informants and the accused, but they were also witness to the extraordinary displays of judicial anti-popery. In December 1678, Lord Chief Justice Scroggs’ summing-up of the evidence against priests William Ireland, a conspirator, and Thomas Pickering and John Grove, the king’s proposed assassins, degenerated into an inventory of priestly deceit after a précis of the evidence presented. He expressed gratitude that through God’s providence ‘we, and our Religion, are delivered from Blood and Oppression’ and declared his confidence that Protestantism would have withstood all their duplicitous and murderous attacks, although in the process ‘we should have been all in Blood ‘tis true’. How could the jury have found the defendants anything other than guilty with invective like the lord chief justice’s famous assertion ‘They eat their God, they kill their King and Saint the Murtherer’ ringing in their ears?61 Capturing the mood of the moment, Scroggs’ synopsis both played upon popular anxieties and focused them by invoking fears of bloody insurrection at the hands of a religious group whose spiritual and moral perversions extended to symbolic cannibalism. Scroggs had moderated his impassioned diatribe against popish falsehood by the trial in June 1679 of five more priests, including Thomas Whitbread, the Jesuit provincial. Yet even then he addressed the defendants combatively, suggesting that to achieve their ends they would have stopped at nothing less than total annihilation of England. You began with Sir Edmundbury Godfrey, but who knows where you would have made an End! It was this one Man you Kill’d in his Person, but in Effigie the Whole Nation. It was in one mans Blood your Hands are Embrewed; but your Souls were Dipt in the Blood of us all. This was a

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Handsel only of what was to follow; and so long as we are convinced you Kill’d him, we cannot but believe, you would also Kill the King. We cannot but believe you would make All of Us away, that stand in the way of your Religion: A Religion, which according to what it is, you would bring in upon us; by a Conversion of us with Blood; and by a Baptism with Fire.62 Eight months after Godfrey’s death and four months after the trial and execution of the three men accused of his murder, Scroggs made much of the new evidence that had come to light in this trial concerning wider Catholic complicity. The lord chief justice’s apparent relish for convicting the plotters and his strenuous anti-Catholic rhetoric was in direct opposition to the king and many in the Privy Council, revealing that he ‘went with the tide of a frightened public’ and allied himself with the House of Commons. The public pressure to secure guilty verdicts for all associated with the Plot came to a head during the July 1679 trial of Sir George Wakeman, the queen’s physician, and three Benedictine monks. Aware that this case spelled impending disaster for the government because of its potential to implicate the queen, Scroggs finally challenged Oates’ and Bedloe’s testimony and his summation favoured the accused. The defendants’ acquittal resulted in public outrage, fuelled by a concerted attack on Scroggs in the press.63 The transformation of the lord chief justice from public champion of the Plot to its pariah perhaps reveals more than anything else the strength of public opinion in driving the Plot. In the final section I consider the construction and significance of this all-powerful opinion.

7.3 The panic and its meaning There is ample evidence that the Plot and Godfrey’s murder touched a vital nerve. People actively sought information about them, and gossip was rife from the moment the magistrate vanished. Roger North claimed rumours of Godfrey’s disappearance were virtually contemporaneous with its occurrence, writing that on the very afternoon ‘went the Report, that Godfrey was missing. It was in every one’s mouth, Where is Godfrey? He has not been seen at his House all this Day, they say he is murdered by the Papists. So the Alarm took, and all People ran about, strangely busy, enquiring what was become of Godfrey’.64 On the day the magistrate’s body was discovered, it was clear that news of the Plot had flooded the provinces, with Secretary of State Williamson informed that in Bridlington in Yorkshire ‘we have no news here, but the discourses of news from London of the late intended Plot’.65 The duke of York commented the next day how Godfrey’s death ‘makes a great noise’.66 A newsletter of 24 October reported that ‘New discoveries of the Plot are much discoursed abroad’.67 By 13 November, Sir Henry Coventry was writing, ‘I believe no time has seen an alarm so universal in the nation as it is at this present’.68 Two days later James Vernon reported widespread

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anticipation as to what William Bedloe’s impending testimony would reveal about Godfrey’s murder.69 By January 1679 coffee-house opinion was apparently agitated about the sluggish pace of the Plot investigation and the authorities’ tardiness with respect to both bringing Godfrey’s murderers to trial and executing those conspirators already condemned.70 John Evelyn encapsulated the general mood when he wrote that the magistrate’s death ‘did so exasperate … all the nation’.71 Public dissatisfaction at the slow pace of justice for the plotters and Godfrey’s perceived murderers reveals the disjunction between the government and popular opinion during the Plot. From the outset Charles II was sceptical about Oates, the other informants and the existence of any conspiracy, and he was acutely aware of its potential to disrupt the succession of his brother. Many in the government shared his concerns, but others were prepared to manipulate the scare to achieve their political goals. Thus the earl of Danby encouraged it at the outset in a bid to deflect the Parliament’s increasing focus from his duplicitous financial dealing with the French. The future Whigs likewise recognized its potential for embarrassing the royal court and pushing for the exclusion of the duke of York from the succession. Thus those with vested interests in the truth of the Plot used all the means at hand to persuade the people that the threat truly existed. Embellishing Oates’ story with the immediately recognizable and highly evocative tropes of anti-popery, they tapped into a deep anxiety about Catholic subversion which inevitably demanded immediate action to secure king, church and country from the forces of evil. As a result, popular feeling ran so high that government officials like Scroggs were carried along by the impetus. Despite his scepticism even the king had to make several concessions, including sanctioning the deaths of several innocent people and agreeing to stringent restrictions on the movement and occupations of Catholics. To a degree, the palpable fear was therefore manufactured: Roger North hinted at ‘what Wonders this Fear-casting Art could do’.72 Londoners in particular became hyper-sensitive to anyone or anything which might be connected with the Plot. Secretary Williamson and other authorities were deluged with reports of suspected plotters and suspicious actions by known Catholics.73 In November an informant reported ‘an unusual concourse’ at the lodgings of Mr Burdett of Holborn Court and a search of his premises was ordered.74 A Catholic cutler was brought before Williamson to explain why he had replaced the handle on his dagger.75 Various people were accused of uttering treasonous words.76 William Staley, the son of a Catholic banker in Covent Garden, who was overheard inopportunely talking in a tavern over his ale about assassinating the king, was tried for treason, found guilty and executed twelve days after the offence.77 The speediness with which Staley met justice is evidence of the tension in the city, which was patrolled by guards night and day.78 Rumours that another magistrate who had taken depositions from informants was missing on 14 November gave

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rise to three weeks of fevered speculation about his grisly fate until he was found alive and not in the hands of Catholics in December.79 Given the pressure of opinion, these reports had to be taken seriously and investigated; the weight of such business suggests that government messengers and sergeants were highly visible on the streets. The authorities were also keen to do everything possible to prevent Catholic violence and there were various measures to disarm papists and keep them at a distance from Whitehall and anywhere they might present a threat to the security of the city. The Lords even recommended examining those in charge of London’s water supply to make sure no papists worked in such a sensitive area.80 The combination of rumour with broadsheet and pamphlet publications, reinforced by the visible evidence that the authorities gave credence to the Plot, bestowed an unnerving reality upon it, in much the same way that Godfrey’s death had done. Amid the ‘news’ and seeming official certainties, it nevertheless remained difficult for some people to make sense of the ongoing furore. John Evelyn, who clearly followed the unfolding events and reported them in his memoirs, chose in mid-1679 to experience firsthand the trial of Sir George Wakeman and the three Benedictine monks. Commenting that he did not usually frequent trials for capital offences, instead reading about them, he said he was present ‘at this signal one, that by the occular view of the carriages, & other Circumstances of the Manegers & parties concerned I might informe my selfe, and regulate my opinion of a Cause that had so alarm’d the whole Nation, & filled it with such expectations’. Clearly Evelyn doubted Oates’ veracity: he believed that the informer only survived in the witness box with Whig support, and the trial confirmed his prejudices.81 However, he felt compelled to witness the ongoing circus in order to comprehend it. Indeed, while Evelyn is not necessarily representative of wider public opinion, it is significant that his doubts prompted him to engage with the public proceedings around the plot, for it is possible that others availed themselves of the trials and other public events for similar reasons.82 According to Roger North, doubting the Plot was difficult: he suggested that passions ran so high that should anyone reasonably challenge even an aspect of it they were met with a horrified ‘What! Is there a Plot or no?’ and treated as a kind of heretic.83 Certainly both Houses of Parliament felt compelled to put the Plot’s existence to the vote.84 Moreover, during some of the trials the case for the Plot was made along with the case against the defendants.85 Arthur Marotti has characterized the Plot as a ‘political fiction attuned to popular fantasy’ and the confusion of contemporaries reflects this.86 For many, even in official circles, while separating reality from rumour and rhetoric was increasingly difficult, in an environment which constructed the public as the principal arbiter of affairs of state, popular opinion had to be taken seriously.87 Amid these uncertainties, the deeply ingrained suspicion of Catholics remained and this fear impelled people to participate in efforts to protect their church and government. In the aftermath of Godfrey’s murder Evelyn

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talked about ‘sharpnesses against even the more honest Ro: Catholicks who lived peaceably’. North implied that had security not been tight there might well have been riots after the corpse’s discovery; he noted that on the day of the magistrate’s funeral Catholics remained inside for their safety. He recalled, ‘there was, all this while, upheld among the common People, an artificial Fright, so as almost every one fancies a popish Knife just at his Throat’.88 In 1681 Sir Edward Dering recollected the tide of ill-feeling against papists unleashed by Godfrey’s death.89 Yet appeals to the authorities prevailed over collective action, and the panic resulted not so much in riots as in boundless reports about imagined invasions, uprisings and violence. Across the country Catholic houses were searched for stashes of arms which fearful neighbours believed were accumulating. In October 1678 there was an inquiry into rumours of weapons transported to reputed Catholic Mr Stitch’s house at Orpington in Kent to be kept in a ‘dark room’.90 Ports and coastal towns were awash with rumours about foreign invaders. A vessel bound for London which was forced by contrary winds to land at Yarmouth in December caused such alarm that locals assumed it carried ‘30 or 40 Jesuits’.91 Between Leeds and Bradford there were ‘great visions and … apparitions of armed men assembled and riding by night’ which when proven unfounded, mutated into stories of 5,000 Spaniards in Wales who had first alighted in Ireland, the French in Scotland and more coming from Dunkirk, all of whom were bound for Hull.92 In December there were great fears that the Island of Purbeck had been invaded.93 In November Wiltshire had been disturbed by regular reports of armed men on horseback and foot ranging from ten to thirty in number. Two days later there were sightings of similar night riders in southern Yorkshire, and then reports came in from Buckinghamshire and several other counties. Amid discussions as to whether papists’ horses should be confiscated along with their arms, night patrols were mounted in a bid to intercept the menacing nocturnal equestrians.94 Investing everyday occurrences in known and suspected Catholic households with sinister meanings and interpreting normal shipping and travel as threatening clearly reflected long-held fears of foreign invasion and domestic uprisings. The Plot panic also relived past popish atrocities. Perhaps because of the perceived connection between Godfrey’s murder by papists and the 1666 inferno attributed to them, imagined and real fires became the acts of Catholic arsonists determined to raze the capital (and other parts of the country) to the ground. At a time when house fires were commonplace, the link between accidents and popish conspirators was assumed to be certain. Foreigners were particularly suspect. A warrant was issued in November 1678 for the arrest of a Frenchman suspected to have fired a house or stable near Smithfield.95 There were various cases of maidservants paid by papists to set fire to their masters’ houses.96 In April 1679 the Commons appointed a committee to investigate a spate of fires in London, which uncovered a supposed Catholic Plot to burn Protestant residences in preparation for a combined

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foreign invasion in June by 60,000 Frenchmen and domestic uprising by English, Irish and French Catholics in the capital.97 Other Catholic plots were similarly revisited and reprised. There were reports in November 1678 of a foiled attempt to blow up Tynemouth Castle in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.98 In September 1679 sufficient fireworks for ‘some Damnable Design of Fire and Desolation’ were discovered near the Bear Inn at Smithfield which had recently suffered a blaze. The Protestant Domestick Intelligence concluded that the papists were responsible.99 The anxiety was not restricted to nervous London householders and provincial folk, for even the Parliament panicked at the prospect of revisiting former popish crimes. On 28 October 1678, the Commons sent six members to search the rooms underneath the House after receiving information that a new Gunpowder Plot was to occur that day.100 On 1 November they appointed a committee to investigate knocking heard at night in Old Palace Yard, and to search houses near the Houses of Parliament and to provide them with a list of all papists living in the vicinity.101 Later that month the king instructed the master general of ordnance to reduce the quantity of gunpowder stored in the Tower of London to other magazines.102 At the end of 1680 the Commons were alarmed by news of an Irish Popish Plot which promised a second massacre of Protestants there to replicate the horrors of 1641.103 The panic was therefore infectious, and it revived widespread fears about the tenuous nature of stability in church and state. Indeed, even those who appropriated Oates’ story to suit their political purpose were not immune from fears that Catholics might rise against Protestants and their institutions of government. The delusions engendered by the Plot and Godfrey’s death suggest that the panic beginning in 1678 was played out almost entirely within the existing anti-papist discourse. The longstanding construction of Catholics as the enemies of church, state and individual Protestants by the seventeenth-century media predisposed the panic to take this path. However, various entrepreneurs used Oates’ story for their own purposes; they included the Whigs in particular, but also certain clergy, printers, judges, members of parliament and members of the general public who believed in the Catholic threat sufficiently to harness the deep-seated anxiety about papists to achieve their political, spiritual or commercial goals. Accordingly the rabidly anti-Catholic fantasies and desire for revenge which motivated Oates were given a credence they did not warrant and they were allowed to dictate the terms of both public opinion and the business of government for a considerable period of time. ‘Remembering Justice Godfrey’ was thus a key element of the panic around the Popish Plot. As a symbol, or in Scroggs’ words, an ‘effigie’ of the Protestant nation, his murder was variously considered as shorthand for Catholic treachery, for the possible fate awaiting England should James ascend the throne, and as a baleful reminder of foreign intervention in England’s affairs. In an age when the media was transitional between traditional oral and ritualistic forms and the age of the printed word, image and newspaper, the meaning

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of Godfrey’s death was broadcast to construct public opinion. Its traction can be measured in the relentless trajectory of the Plot from Oates’ accusations to successful convictions and executions. Once unleashed, the momentum of the anti-Catholic panic carried many along in its path, ranging from North’s ‘deceived Rabble’, through usually sober members of parliament, to the lord chief justice of England. Fear proved to have a powerful appeal. It might even be argued that in the wide range of publications and memorabilia dedicated to Godfrey that we see the commodification of anxiety as publishers and vendors with an eye to making a profit out of the furore printed and manufactured news and items they deemed would entice public interest. But what of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, the Plot’s martyr? His heroic status depended upon the reality of the Catholic threat and the veracity of the informants who spent so many years embellishing the legend of his ignominious yet seemingly noble end. Once Titus Oates had been convicted of perjury and the other informers similarly decried, Godfrey’s place in the narrative of Catholic atrocities diminished. It is possible that many were still able to believe he was murdered by the papists, despite the unravelled Plot, although his record for tolerance of ordinary Catholics suggests that their hand in his demise was unlikely. Whatever his place in the Plot – and maybe he was only the magistrate who took Oates’ depositions – he has remained in the historical eye because of his timely passing. The recent study of his life and death by Alan Marshall confirms an ongoing fascination with his fate. Perhaps the ultimate irony is that without the Plot his demise would never have attracted the degree of attention from both contemporaries and historians that it enjoys. Thus Godfrey’s death, considered at the time as emblematic of the Plot, remains a potent symbol of moral panic as a dangerous chimera.

Notes I would like to thank Robert Martin, Elizabeth Connolly and Susan West for research assistance, and David Lemmings for many discussions about anti-Catholicism and the structure of moral panics in the seventeenth century. 1. Roger North, Examen: or, an Enquiry into the Credit and Veracity of a Pretended Complete History (1740), 204. 2. Kenneth Thompson, Moral Panics (1998), 8. 3. Joad Raymond, ‘The Newspaper, Public Opinion, and the Public Sphere in the Seventeenth Century’, in Joad Raymond (ed.), News, Newspapers and Society in Early Modern Britain (1999), 109–40; Steven Pincus and Peter Lake, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England’, Journal of British Studies 45 (2006), 270–92; Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (eds), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007). 4. Peter Lake and Steven Pincus, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England’, in The Politics of the Public Sphere, 18–22. 5. North, Examen, 125; John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, E.S. de Beer (ed.), 6 vols (Oxford, 1955), iv, 174–5.

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6. Evelyn, Diary, iv, 175. 7. North, Examen, 177, 196. 8. Gilbert Burnet, The History of My Own Time, ed. Osmund Airy (Oxford, 1897–1900), ii. 162. 9. Alan Marshall, The Strange Death of Edmund Godfrey: Plots and Politics in Restoration London (Phoenix Mill, 1999), 86; Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration until the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge, 1987), 108; John Miller, Popery and Politics in England 1660–1688 (Cambridge, 1973), 158. 10. John Kenyon, The Popish Plot (Harmondsworth, 1984), 302. 11. Journals of the House of Lords (hereafter LJ), xiii: 21 Oct. 1678. 12. Journals of the House of Commons (hereafter CJ), ix: 21 Oct. 1678; LJ, xiii: 21 Oct. 1678. 13. Evelyn, Diary, iv, 175. 14. North, Examen, 131. 15. Tim Harris, ‘The Parties and the People: The Press, the Crowd and Politics ‘Out-of-doors’ in Restoration England’, in Lionel K. J. Glassey (ed.), The Reigns of Charles II and James VII and II (New York, 1997), 135–6. 16. Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2003), 329, 331–3; Daniel Woolf, ‘News, History and the Construction of the Present in Early Modern England’, in Brendan Dooley and Sabrina Baron (eds), The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (2001), 88–98; Raymond, ‘The Newspaper, Public Opinion, and the Public Sphere’, 112–7; Steven Pincus, ‘“Coffee Politicians Does Create”: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture’, Journal of Modern History 67 (1995), 807–34; John Miller, ‘Public Opinion in Charles II’s England’, History 80 (1995), 361–7. 17. Jonathon Scott, ‘England’s Troubles: Exhuming the Popish Plot’, in Tim Harris, Paul Seaward and Mark Goldie (eds), The Politics of Religion in Restoration England (Oxford, 1990), 107–31. 18. Harris, London Crowds, 97–8. 19. Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999), 225. 20. ‘Titus Oates’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (hereafter ODNB). 21. Robin Clifton, ‘The Popular Fear of Catholics during the English Revolution’, Past and Present 52 (1971), 24, 41. 22. Clifton, ‘Popular Fear of Catholics’, 43–6. 23. Kenyon, Popish Plot, 115, 116, 120, 123. 24. Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester and New York, 2006), 129. 25. Clifton, ‘Popular Fear of Catholics’, 50–1. 26. Woolf, ‘News, History and the Construction of the Present’, 97–8. 27. For discussions of early modern media, see Raymond, Pamphlets and Pampleteering, 323–30; Harold Love, ‘The Look of News: Popish Plot Narratives 1678–1680’, in John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. IV, 1557–1695 (Cambridge, 2002), 652–6; Miller, ‘Public Opinion’, 361–7; Harris, London Crowds, 98–108; Harold Love, Scribal Publication in SeventeenthCentury England (Oxford, 1993), 191–5, 203–7. 28. Joad Raymond, ‘Introduction: Networks, Communication, Practice’ in Joad Raymond (ed), News Networks in the Seventeenth Century Britain and Europe (2006), 11. 29. Walsham, Providence, 39–41. 30. An Elegie on the Right Worshipful Sir Edmund-Bury Godfrey, Knight (1678).

136 The Popish Plot and the Construction of Panic 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37.

38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

50. 51.

52.

53.

An Elegie Sacred to the Memory of Sir Edmund-bury Godfrey Knight (1678). Lloyd, Sermon at the Funeral, 29–42. Kenyon, Popish Plot, 110–11. A Brief Narrative of the Several Popish Treasons and Cruelties against the Protestants in England, France, and Ireland. Giving a Full Account of the Popish Plot and Full Discovery of the Manner of the Murther of Sir Edmund-bury Godfrey [1678], 1–6. William Lord, Several Tracts against Popery (1684). A Poem on the Effigies of Sir Edmund-Bury Godfrey, who was Barbarously Murthered (1678); England’s Grand Memorial: the Unparalleled Plot to Destroy his Majesty, subvert the Protestant Religion and Sir Edmund Burie Godfrey’s Murder Made Visible (1679). A Representation of the Popish Plot in 29 Figures, as ye Manner of Killing Sr Edmond Bury Godfry, & their Horid Designes to Kill the King, and the Manner of the Plotters Execution [1681]. For example, The Catholick Gamesters or a Dubble Match of Bowleing (1680); The Earl of Shaftsbury’s Loyalty Revived: Or the Popish Damnable Plot against Our Religion and Liberties, lively Delineated in Several of its Branches (1680). Domestick Intelligence or News Both from City and Country, no. 57, 20 Jan. 1680; ‘Medals Illustrating the Death of Godfrey’, in Elias F. Mengel, (ed.), Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660–1714, vol. 2, (New Haven, 1965), image facing p. 4. Alan Marshall, ‘To Make A Martyr: The Popish Plot and Protestant Propaganda’, History Today 47 (1997), 43. Domestick Intelligence, no. 31, 21 Oct. 1679. Domestick Intelligence, no. 47, 16 Dec. 1679. S. A. Hankey, ‘Remarks upon a Series of Forty-Nine Historical Cards, With Engravings, Representing the Conspiracy of Titus Oates’, Archeological Journal 30 (1873), 187–8. Domestick Intelligence, no. 80, 9 Apr. 1680. Harris, London Crowds, 108. David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (1989), 130–55, 178–80. Harris, London Crowds, 120–1; Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, 181; Sheila Williams, ‘The Pope-Burning Processions of 1679, 1680 and 1681’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 21 (1958), 107. The Solemn Mock Procession of the Pope, Cardinalls, Jesuits, Fryers, etc: through the City of London, November the 17th 1679 (1680). The Solemn Mock Procession of the Pope, Cardinalls, Jesuits, Fryers, etc: through the City of London, November the 17th 1679 (1680); The Solemn Mock Procession of the Pope, Cardinalls, Jesuits, Fryers, Nuns etc: Exactly Taken as they Marcht through the City of London, November ye 17th 1679 (1680); Williams, ‘Pope-Burning Processions’, 107–16. Williams, ‘Pope-Burning Processions’, 107. The Solemn Mock Procession or the Tryal & Execution of the Pope and his Ministers, on the 17. of Nov. at Temple-Bar (1680); Weekly Pacquet of Advice from Rome, no. 20, 21 Nov. 1679; Domestic Intelligence, no. 54, 9 Jan. 1680; Observator in Dialogue, no. 74, 21 Nov. 1681. Benjamin Harris, The Protestant Tutor Instructing Children to Spel and Read English and Grounding them in the True Protestant Religio., and Discovering the Errors and Deceits [of the Papists], (1679), 1–8. Kenyon, Popish Plot, 102.

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54. Evelyn, Diary, iv, 156–8. 55. John Reynolds, Vituli Labiorum or, a Thanksgiving Sermon, in Commemmoration of our Great Deliverance from the Horrid Powder Plot, 1605 … Preached at St. Peter’s, Exon, Nov. 5. 1678 (1678), 25. 56. Titus Oates, A Sermon Preached at St Michael’s, Wood Street (1679); Protestant (Domestic) Intelligence or News from both City and Country, no. 59, 27 Jan. 1680; no. 67, 24 Feb. 1680. 57. George W. Whiting, ‘The Condition of the London Theatres, 1679–83: A Reflection of the Political Situation’, Modern Philology 25 (1927), 197–202. 58. J. D., The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth, with the Restauration of the Protestant Religion; Or, the Downfal of the Pope (1680), [sig. A2v], 2, 3, 5–6, 8, 10–12, 16, 20–2; Harris, London Crowds, 103. 59. Romes Follies, or the Amorous Fryars, a Comedy. As it was lately Acted at a Person of Qualitie’s House (1681); Harris, London Crowds, 103; Whiting, ‘London Theatres’, 201. 60. William Bedloe, The Excommunicated Prince: or, the False Relique. A Tragedy … Being the Popish Plot in a Play (1679); Harris, London Crowds, 103. 61. The Tryals of William Ireland, Thomas Pickering, and John Grove; for Conspiring to Murder the King … December the 17th 1678. (1678), 74, 75. 62. The Tryals and Condemnation of Thomas White, alias Whitebread, … William Harcourt, … John Fenwick, … John Gavan alias Gawen, and Anthony Turner, All Jesuits and Priests; for High Treason (1679), 93. 63. ‘Sir William Scroggs’, in ODNB. 64. North, Examen, 201. 65. Calendar of State Papers Domestic (Charles II) [hereafter CSPD], Mar.–Dec. 1678, 462. 66. CSPD, Mar.–Dec. 1678, 466. 67. CSPD, Mar.–Dec. 1678, 480. 68. Historical Manuscripts Commission, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Ormonde (1906), iv, 233. 69. CSPD, Mar.–Dec. 1678, 522. 70. CSPD, Jan. 1679–Aug. 1680, 15, 22. 71. Evelyn, Diary, iv, 175. 72. North, Examen, 128. 73. CSPD, Mar.–Dec. 1678, 589. 74. CSPD, Mar.–Dec. 1678, 513, 514, 516. 75. CSPD, Mar.–Dec. 1678, 518. 76. CSPD, Mar.–Dec. 1678, 547, 548, 570. 77. CSPD, Mar.–Dec. 1678, 523, 537, 541; Kenyon, Popish Plot, 112–3. 78. CSPD, Mar.–Dec. 1678, 595; Domestic Intelligence, no. 7, 28 July 1679. 79. CSPD, Mar.–Dec. 1678, 536, 538, 541. 80. LJ, xiii, 12 Dec. 1678. 81. Evelyn, Diary, iv, 173–5. 82. Evelyn reported ‘innumerable spectators’ at the Old Bailey (Diary, iv, 174). 83. North, Examen, 177. 84. CJ, ix, 31 Oct. 1678, 1 Nov. 1678, 24 Mar. 1679; LJ, xiii, 1 Nov. 1678, 25 Mar. 1679. 85. Tryals of William Ireland, Thomas Pickering, and John Grove, 73; The Tryall of Richard Langhorn Esq, Counsellor at Law: for Conspiring the Death of The King, Subversion of the Government, and Protestant Religion (1679), 63, 64. 86. Arthur F. Marotti, Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, Ind., 2005), 158.

138 The Popish Plot and the Construction of Panic 87. Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford, 2005), 273–4. 88. Evelyn, Diary, iv, 175; North, Examen, 202, 204–5. 89. Edward Dering, The Diaries and Papers of Sir Edward Dering Second Baronet 1644 to 1684, ed. Maurice F. Bond (1976), 126. 90. CSPD, Mar.–Dec. 1678, 462, 480, 489. 91. CSPD, Mar.–Dec. 1678, 577. 92. CSPD, Mar.–Dec. 1678, 562–3. 93. CSPD, Mar.–Dec. 1678, 569–70, 575. 94. CSPD, Mar.–Dec. 1678, 517–8, 521, 542; LJ, xiii, 14 Nov. 1678; Anchitel Grey, Debates of the House of Commons, (1769), vi, 18 Nov. 1678. Kenyon, Popish Plot, 115–6. 95. CSPD, Mar.–Dec. 1678, 513. 96. Domestic Intelligence, no. 40, 21 Nov. 1679; Protestant Domestick Intelligence, no. 74, 19 Mar. 1680. 97. CJ, ix, 15 Apr. 1679, 26 Apr. 1679; LJ, xiii, 12 Apr. 1679, 14 Apr. 1679, 21 Apr. 1679. 98. CSPD, Mar.–Dec. 1678, 521. 99. Protestant Domestick Intelligence, no. 28, 10 Oct. 1679. 100. CJ, ix, 28 Oct. 1678. 101. CJ, ix, 1 Nov. 1678. 102. CSPD, Mar.–Dec. 1678, 535. 103. CJ, ix, 9 Nov. 1680, 11 Nov. 1680, 12 Nov. 1680, 27 Nov. 1680, 4 Dec. 1680, 24 Dec. 1680, 4 Jan. 1681, 6 Jan. 1681.

8 The Dark Side of Enlightenment: The London Journal, Moral Panics, and the Law in the Eighteenth Century David Lemmings

“What? (said they) Are Ministers so little known, and have You so little Experience, that You can be ignorant that there are Times and Seasons when They have a Necessity for a Plot; … A Plot is, in its Consequences, a Vote of Supply, big with Money and Armed Men: and, no doubt, this is the end proposed by the Outcry of Danger.” This was the first Step, in order to argue Themselves and Others out of all Belief of the Thing. Britannicus [Benjamin Hoadly] (The London Journal, no. 189, Sat. 9 Mar. 1723) The real Jacobite plot of 1721–22 was a poor thing, ill-managed and abortive, but it provided an able minister with a unique opportunity. G. V. Bennett (‘Jacobitism and the Rise of Walpole’, in N. McKendrick (ed.), Historical Perspectives, (1971), 91) In 1720–1 The London Journal became the most popular newspaper in the country by condemning the culture of financial speculation which culminated in the South Sea Bubble. Its ‘Cato’s Letters’, authored by the Whig commonwealthmen Gordon and Trenchard, effectively cast the ‘monied men’ who inhabited Exchange Alley in the City of London as the scapegoats for the financial disaster.1 Moreover, in these letters the rise of financial speculation and its creatures were represented as signs of England’s moral decline from a society and polity legitimately led by independent country gentlemen. Here then, in the exaggerated anxiety represented by the press, in its identification of blameable ‘folk devils’ whose culture deviated from normal morality, and in the strident call for legal redress are the classic symptoms of a moral panic with a ‘law’ solution. Public 139

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concern about the supposedly apocalyptic implications of the Bubble, as well as the government’s worries about this particular newspaper’s influence over the panic, suggests the London Journal had successfully constituted public opinion around a moral issue and forced ministers and law makers to redress the problem. This newspaper’s ‘Britannicus’ leading articles also trumpeted the iniquities of the Jacobite conspiracy of 1722–3. Indeed from late 1722 it included sensational crime reportage, highlighting the activities of the Hampshire deer poachers called the ‘Waltham Blacks’, who were represented as another major threat to the King’s government and social elite. This is especially interesting because from September 1722 the paper was controlled by Robert Walpole, now established as first minister, and Britannicus was the Whig pamphleteer-bishop Benjamin Hoadly.2 Since we know that Walpole exploited the Jacobite threat to legitimize his political supremacy, it appears that this particular minister was well aware of the potential for government to take political advantage from generating public anxiety in the press. Certainly on the surface The London Journal seems to evidence a consistent editorial ‘policy’ straddling the leading essays and its reportage, by which anxiety was generated around identified threats to the state, property, and the social order, and strong government was represented as the saviour of the nation. In this chapter I consider the hypothesis that during the early 1720s The London Journal exemplified the modern role of the newspaper press in engendering irrational fear and moral judgements for commercial and political ends. Perhaps by doing so it represented the new development of public opinion as a form of participation in governance that was especially susceptible to manipulation into a conservative ‘law and order’ dialogue with authority. Such an interpretation hardly sits well with conventional views of Enlightenment print culture, and tends to qualify the Habermasian idea of the public sphere as a realm of rational public discourse.

8.1

The London Journal and the South Sea Bubble (1720–2)

The collapse of the South Sea Bubble in September 1720 certainly precipitated a major financial and political crisis. There was a real possibility of state bankruptcy; the survival of the ministry was threatened and its reputation compromised because several ministers and the king’s mistresses had been bribed by the South Sea Company; while the Jacobites were encouraged to accelerate their plotting and propaganda against the Hanoverian regime. Indeed the widespread public alarm was originally constructed and reproduced in contemporary newspaper reports. For example in midOctober The Weekly Packet reported, ‘The Conversation of the whole Town runs now upon the Subject of the South Sea Stock, and a melancholy Theme it is for many Thousands: a general Panick hath seiz’d upon Mankind;

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they are first frighted out of their wits, and then stock jobb’d out of their Fortunes’.3 Not surprisingly, at a time when government deficit finance was in its infancy, and in England large-scale public engagement with joint stock companies and money markets was a relatively novel experience, much of the criticism was couched in conservative and moral terms. In many newspapers stock-jobbers were cast as worthless parasites whose activities represented a corrupting declension from traditional forms of wealth generation and social leadership. The morality had a patriotic edge. The Weekly Journal, or Saturday’s Post said stock-jobbing was simply un-English: ‘This modern Way of employing Time and Money might better be digested in Countries where the genius of the People is more peculiarly turned to Views of Interest; and Profit, by whatever Means promoted, must by the [British] Constitution give way to Politeness’. This paper particularly bemoaned the involvement of the nobility and gentry in what it saw as grubby financial speculation: it was regrettable, and even unmasculine, for members of the social elite to forget their profession of public virtue and descend to associating with ‘cozening Jews, and dirty Tradesmen’.4 Thus it appears that a moral panic was already developing in newspaper and other press commentary about the Bubble only a few weeks after it burst, centred on the brokers who bought and sold stock and the threat their narrow self-interest was said to represent in relation to English ideals of virtue. This moralistic and patriotic theme, and identification of the stock-jobbers as folk-devils, was taken up and most fully developed in Cato’s Letters, first published in The London Journal. As I shall explain, these letters ultimately promoted a complex political agenda that was critical of the government’s engagement with the subculture of the money markets. But its initial interventions in the controversy were much less sophisticated. Cato’s first letter, published in mid-November, simply called for condign justice against the hated jobbers: A Thousand Stock-Jobbers, well Truss’d up, beside the diverting Sight, wou’d be a cheap sacrifice to the Manes of Trade; and one certain expedient to soften the Rage of the People; and to convince them that the future Direction of their Wealth and Estates shall be put in the Hands of those, who will as effectually study to promote the General Benefit and Publick Good, as those who have, lately, most Infamously sacrificed Both to their own private Advantage.5 Obviously the demand that heads should roll was a popular call in the midst of such a crisis, especially if it was promoted as an appeal to populist and neo-classical ideas about the present government’s failure to govern in the public interest. The call for exemplary justice was not universal among the newspapers at the time, however. Despite its previous appeal

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to anti-Semitism, on 5 November the Weekly Journal, or Saturday’s Post cautioned against blaming the directors of the South Sea Company for the crash, doubting they had much control over the price of stock. Rather this paper attributed the calamity to simple ignorance and irrationality, although it was careful to make the point in a way that would satisfy the protestant prejudices of its readers, which were no doubt inflamed on the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot. The paper opined that the South Sea Company ‘seems, in this most fundamental Point, to be upon the same Foot with the Romish Religion; for it was Ignorance, the Mother of the one’s Devotion, that gave Birth to and nourished the other’s Credit’.6 Cato was therefore relatively exceptional in his strident demand for exemplary public justice against those whom he regarded as the criminals, and unlike other newspapers, The London Journal simply refused initially to consider new schemes for securing national credit until they had been dealt with.7 For Gordon and Trenchard, writing here in a Lockean register, the rule of law was above all the guarantee of private property, and since they saw speculative investment in the money markets as a conspiracy to plunder honest but gullible people, it was appropriate for stock-jobbers and dishonest financial projectors to hang, and for their wealth to be confiscated by act of Parliament. As Cato said, certainly reflecting mainstream contemporary opinion, exemplary public vengeance was necessary to prevent repetition of crimes.8 But more particularly, as the promoters of all witch-hunts understand, it is also a standard device for attracting a popular following. And in an age of regular parliaments, where legislation was becoming accepted as sovereign law, the potential for promising law and order solutions to solve social problems was considerably increased. For in Cato’s striking formulation, legislation represented a power, confined by no limitation, but that of publick justice and the publick good; a power, that does not follow precedents, but makes them; a power, which has this for its principle, that extraordinary crimes ought not be tried by ordinary rules, and that unprecedented villanies ought to have unprecedented punishments. Here indeed was an instrument most apt for exploiting popular anxiety by promising to unleash the legal power of the modern state against the outgroup; thereby harnessing it to help constitute the moral majority. In the case of the South Sea projectors, Cato insisted that these ‘publick enemies’ should be brought before Parliament and declared traitors, according to a very broad interpretation of Edward III’s Treason Act.9 With tongue in cheek, knowing the unpopularity of the Hanoverian regime, Cato therefore directed his readers to expect redress from ‘a wise beneficient Prince, a generous and publick spirited Parliament, [and] an able disinterested Ministry’. By doing so, the authors of the letters were clearly helping to focus public attention on the government’s suspected complicity in

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the South Sea affair, thereby revealing its moral and patriotic deficiencies; and ideally, precipitating its replacement with a more virtuous regime. In other words, they were exploiting the panic to achieve political ends, rather than simply sell more copies of newspapers. But again, their intentions were encrypted in patriotic code: in calling for justice against the hated stock-jobbers Cato affected to speak for England, and readers of The London Journal were enjoined to anticipate from future letters ‘something of more weight, than in the poor and feeble Jests of common News Writers’.10 In subsequent letters it clearly emerged that Gordon and Trenchard had a political agenda. Following their republican principles, the authors of Cato’s Letters hinted at the involvement of government insiders in the South Sea schemes for refinancing the national debt.11 For them, public policy was being sacrificed to private advantage, and this was creating a new class of politicians and other administrators who were collaborating with the hated financiers to siphon off the wealth paid in taxes by England’s legitimate rulers, the owners of large estates in land. The malady was provided with a clear pathology as the growth of the self-serving bureaucracy since the time of the Glorious Revolution had threatened to undermine the constitution: Publick corruptions and abuses have grown upon us: Fees in most, if not in all, offices, are immensely increased: Places and employments, which ought not to be sold at all, are sold for triple values… [and] salaries have been augmented, and pensions multiplied.12 So while the Bubble was a national disaster, it was also presented as an opportunity to restore English government to first principles because it had removed the blinkers of ease and luxury from people’s eyes, awakening them to recognize the ‘present evils’ causing the distemper in the body politic.13 Certainly, this was the politics of fear. The remedy, indeed, was a witchhunt: ‘Let us pursue to disgrace, destruction and even death, those who have brought this ruin upon us, let them be ever so great, or ever so many’.14 It was also a very sophisticated intervention in national politics, designed to constitute educated opinion and harness it to a conservative political agenda. The London Journal’s sensationalist commentary on the aftermath of the South Sea Bubble made it very popular with readers. In August 1721 an anonymous correspondent from Birmingham complained to the secretary of state: The generall Cry among the common People is of late, Oh! This is a fine Paper! This Paper contains nothing but Truth! The Man that writes this knows every thing that’s doing at Court! Therefore whatever Person or thing it condemns (tho’ never so Sacred) is condemned by the Suffrage of the giddy Multitude; and last Saturday’s Paper is now become the Generall talk of not only this Place, but Coventry, Warwick, &c. In every Alehouse People have the London Journal in their Hands, Shewing to each other with a kind of Joy the most audacious Reflections therein contained.15

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Fig. 8.1 Lucipher’s new Row-Barge (c. 1721). BM satires 1714. The central character is Robert Knight, cashier of the South Sea Company, who fled from England in 1721 after admitting that he had bribed MPs and peers to support the incorporation of the national debt into the company.

And so Gordon and Trenchard had successfully exploited and exacerbated a moral panic by encouraging exemplary public justice, but they were primarily ‘moral entrepreneurs’ who recommended a return to a supposedly more virtuous kind of politics. Their particular prescription was hardly congenial to the present government in the aftermath of the Bubble, when Robert Walpole was struggling to establish his political supremacy, and under the Septennial Act elections were due within a year. Indeed in April 1721 the ‘news’ sections of the paper had included several comments which

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were directly or obliquely critical of the ministry and of Walpole, the new chancellor of the Exchequer, in particular, alleging that he and his family were enriching themselves by accumulating so many offices. Readers were also encouraged to condemn ministers who ‘screened’ the directors of the South Sea Company, and the paper clearly contributed to generalized popular anger about the experience of the Bubble. The ordinary reportage even managed to convey a sense that as the economic effects of the crash spread, lawlessness followed, for a May edition of the paper included a report from Ireland that as food prices rose ‘Robberies are frequent in the Streets, insomuch, that there is no walking out after Ten at Night, without the utmost Danger’.16 After some attempts at harassment, the ministry therefore decided that the best way to deal with this troublesome publication was simply to take it over and turn its output to support the existing regime.17

8.2

The London Journal and the Jacobite Plots, 1722–3

The London Journal became a government newspaper in September 1722, after the secretary of state had considered and rejected other options for controlling the press, such as mounting a campaign of prosecutions for libel.18 Cato’s Letters were transferred to another newspaper, The British Journal, and The London Journal henceforth included leading essays by a different writer, who styled himself ‘Britannicus’. In his very first essay, this author claimed to divine the intentions of his predecessor. He wrote: In the Common Writers, who have of late very much governed the Politicks and Passions of Men, there seems to have been a Conspiracy to destroy the right Notions of Things from off the Earth, and to substitute in their Room something which is agreeable to the Resentment and Anger of themselves and others; something that, instead of correcting or abating, falls in with and flatters the Uneasiness and Outcries of the World; formenting and encreasing that Ferment upon which it is form’d, and out of which entirely it springs.19 This is certainly a fair description of panic-mongering, and in his following letters Britannicus attempted to counter the influence of Cato and other ‘country’ writers by undermining the association between ‘true’ patriotism and popularity, or ‘what the Passions and Clamours of a Multitude demand’. He even compared populist politicians to witches, who believed they could conjure the spirit of the devil without falling prey to his diabolical schemes. Egging on the ‘Ungoverned Multitude’ he argued, would only end in ‘confusion and calamity’, as popular opposition to the government served the purposes of the Jacobites and degenerated into outright treason.20 Interestingly, however, around this time the news sections of The London Journal were filled with accounts of the arrest of Jacobite conspirators,

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following the discovery by the government in May of a new plot: described as ‘as hellish a one as was ever projected’.21 For example on 6 October the paper reported the arrest and committal to the Tower of the earl of Orrery and Lord North and Grey, with sensational details of the conspiracy: ‘Tis said, it was to open with the Destruction of the Royal Family; that the Tower and Houshold [sic] Troops were to be seized, and the Friends of the current Government sacrificed. The Bank, India, South-Sea and other Corporations were also design’d to be secured. The report was ultimately reassuring, since it ended by anticipating the meeting of Parliament, where the whole ‘Scene of Mischief is now likely soon to be open’d’.22 However on 3 November the Journal ratcheted up the anxiety with fantastic details of the Layer conspiracy, including a plan to assassinate Lord Cadogan, the Commander in Chief, and a vague and mysterious story whereby three gentlemen in laced coats had forced a London waterman to declare whether he was for the Pretender or King George. It was said they threw him overboard on his plumping for the Hanoverian regime. In the same issue, although Britannicus affected to despise those writers who ‘traffick in the Passions of Men’, he described the plot as a ‘a Conspiracy against the very Being of all our Liberties’, and defended the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act and the augmentation of the army by Parliament as necessary measures in very dangerous circumstances.23 By the autumn of 1722, The London Journal was certainly engaged in a new round of panic-mongering centred on the Atterbury and Layer conspiracies. This was hardly a coincidence: in his later essays, after the first public news of the plot, Cato had deprecated the chances of any successful invasion by the Pretender, and one suspects that another reason for the government takeover of the paper was the pressing need to provide a popular print vehicle for stirring up national indignation around the issue of Jacobitism, despite the fact that there was little genuine threat of a successful invasion.24 The new leading essays, written by the pro-government pamphleteer Benjamin Hoadly, bishop of Hereford, necessarily trod a fine line. While his initial brief was clearly to dampen down the anxiety stirred up around the issues of the South Sea Crash and ministerial corruption, at the same time Hoadly’s master Robert Walpole was keen to exploit the spectre of Jacobitism to demonstrate his loyalty and prove his credentials with the king and the House of Commons.25 So the accent in Britannicus-Hoadly’s articles was on the strength and swiftness of government actions in the midst of what was exaggerated into a real national emergency, necessary and decisive preparations which he denied were based on ‘Mock Plots, [or] Tricks to get more Money’, and which contrasted with the imagined chaos and confusion of popular propagandists.26 Thus, despite the change in its ownership and political affiliation, which necessarily meant some shift in the substance of its editorial policy, there was

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considerable continuity in the style of The London Journal around this time. As with Cato, Britannicus peddled the politics of fear. In its new political role The London Journal alleged that the people had previously been blinded to serious danger – in this case that of a Catholic restoration and arbitrary government – by the chimera of minor evils, such as the burden of the national debt and the inconveniences of protestant dissent.27 Moreover, as with Cato’s prognosis for dealing with those whom he blamed for the Crash, combating the present danger of Jacobitism was said to require extraordinary recourse to the law. In November 1722 Britannicus claimed the support of Roman history for draconian powers when he pointed out that at the time of the Catiline conspiracy the senate had decreed that ‘the Consuls should be … vested with All Powers sufficient to preserve the Republick in Time of such Emergency’. He took great delight in asserting that at the time the real Cato had approved. So those MPs and writers who resisted the emergency legislation introduced into Parliament in 1722 were judged, like Caesar, to be closet supporters of arbitrary power.28 Certainly, since the newspaper was now under the close control of the ministry, there was enhanced potential for adducing legislative solutions to stigmatize and persecute the scapegoats, and around this time The London Journal began to demonstrate considerable synchronization with the majority in the House of Commons. For example in the 8 December issue Britannicus defended Walpole’s controversial measure of collective punishment, first introduced into Parliament in November, which was designed to raise an extra tax on Catholic recusants for levying £100,000, supposedly to pay the costs of dealing with the Jacobite conspiracy. He insisted that ‘it is the cause of Popish Bigotry alone, which has put this Nation to so much Trouble, and to much Expense’ and argued that it was only just ‘for the Government to charge it upon Those, who alone can Profit by the Success of it’.29 What I am suggesting here is that, for Britannicus as for Cato, in a political environment where parliamentary sovereignty and a regular stream of new acts were normal, the promise of exemplary legislative punishment was a standard feature of the essayist’s armoury. It seems to me that this added an extra political dimension to the development of moral panics: the availability of a tailor-made but legitimate ‘law and order’ solution was obviously attractive to propagandists and politicians as a means of constituting conservative opinion around the demonization and exclusion of a minority, whether they were stock-jobbers, Catholics, or Jacobite sympathizers. Moreover, the ability of the press to reproduce and comment upon the trials and punishments of deviants like these provided an opportunity to capitalize on anxiety by establishing a moral lesson and demonstrating the corrective power of good government.30 This can be seen most clearly in The London Journal’s treatment of the proceedings against the Jacobite plotters in 1723. Naturally, all the newspapers covered the findings of the House of Commons committee that investigated the plot when it reported in March 1723. By conflating Layer’s sensational but imaginary plans with the evidence of

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correspondence among Atterbury’s circle, the ministry conveyed the impression that there was a nationwide Jacobite plot.31 But the evidence against Atterbury, the bishop of Rochester, was deemed insufficient to proceed by normal prosecution, and so the decision was taken to introduce a parliamentary bill of pains and penalties against him. Such a wholly political process required special attention to public opinion. Ministerial authors were tasked with justifying this unusual and constitutionally suspect measure by exaggerating the dangers of the plot and blackening the characters of the principals. In the letters published in The London Journal around this time Britannicus excoriated the bishop’s moral character: as an ordained clergyman and member of the House of Lords who had taken oaths of loyalty to the king while plotting against him, he was a perjurer ‘by system’.32 But his moral failings were not simply personal. Rather Britannicus associated Atterbury explicitly with the traditional bogy of popery and arbitrary power, since he maintained that it was typically in popish countries that prelates and cardinals engaged in worldly politics and treasonous conspiracies. Indeed the popish ‘Itch of Power and Grandeur’, which determined the behaviour of senior ecclesiastics in Catholic countries, was nothing less than a spreading ‘Plague’ that had infected protestant countries and England particularly.33 By contrast Walpole was lauded for his courage and love of his country, qualities which had enabled him rouse the Parliament to a state of patriotic zeal against the evasion of the laws passed for defending the realm against conspirators.34 Moreover in two letters published under the pseudonym of ‘Philopatris’, Hoadly insisted upon the constitutional power and patriotic duty of Parliament to proceed by legislation against Atterbury and his co-conspirators: ‘here is a body of Traitors, and of Traitors supposed to be acting the very Treason declared to be such in the Laws. … the Supreme Authority cannot neglect an Enquiry into That, which threatens the Publick with the utmost Danger’. 35 As Britannicus had suggested previously, it was the sovereign decisiveness of the MPs in the majority for the bill that made them true Britons, since they showed a patriotic determination to protect their country against covert conspiracies inspired by popery and clerical ambition.36 Indeed other government newspapers chimed in, celebrating the legislative power of Parliament for its ability to constitute ‘a Court, whose Resolutions are not confin’d by any other Rule than general Justice, and the general Good; where Religion, Vertue, common Sense, and the publick Peace and Felicity, are the only Council to be admitted either for the Publick or the Prisoners.’ 37 Certainly these newspapers were dressing up Parliament as the saviour of the nation and the protestant succession in their supposed hour of peril.

8.3 Crime and the Waltham Blacks, 1722–3 Despite Hoadly’s best efforts, the attempted demonization of Atterbury by the government press was not successful: his harsh treatment excited

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considerable public sympathy, and at his trial before the House of Lords he succeeded in exposing the weakness of the prosecution’s case. However the campaign focussed around the Atterbury and Layer plots was not the only node of anxiety being aggravated in the pages of The London Journal around this time. On 10 November, in an issue which carried an opening essay by Britannicus arguing for the suspension of Habeas Corpus and the strengthening of the army to deal with the Jacobite emergency, the paper also carried a long letter from Waltham Chase in Hampshire, detailing the activities of the so-called Waltham Blacks. They were described as a body of ‘artificial negroes’ who blacked their faces and acknowledged allegiance to a leader called ‘King John’. Their primary activities had centred on deer stealing, but the letter also gave details of several occasions when they had intimidated members of the local gentry and thereby enforced the rights of local people against them. The correspondent reported that they were said to number about 100, and called for official action: ‘Who they are is yet a Secret; but it is hoped Means will be found to bring them to a deserved Punishment, since their Insolence is become intolerable; for, with their lawless Authority, they interfere in most disputes that happen’.38 Next month there was a second letter, relating how the Blacks had destroyed hundreds of trees on a local gentleman’s estate, decimated the deer in Waltham Chase, and continued to menace gentry who were alleged to treat local people badly. Indeed ‘Their Insolence is become insupportable, and the Country Gentlemen are about to petition Parliament for Redress’.39 There was no further information in The London Journal until March, but in January 1723 other papers reported rumours that they had murdered several people, and opined that their crimes would be laid before Parliament for legislative redress.40 Certainly in February the newspapers reported that a royal proclamation had been issued against the Blacks, promising a reward of £100 for every offender apprehended, to be paid upon conviction.41 At this time The London Journal was completely taken up with a transcript of Christopher Layer’s trial for treason, and other newspapers continued to report the exploits of these forest bandits, relating how troops had been ordered to deploy and deal with them. Significantly, echoing the scope of the proclamation, these reports noted that the problem was not confined to Hampshire, since ‘disorderly and ill-designing Persons’ who blacked their faces and took deer were present in great numbers in Berkshire too.42 Here, it seems, was a problem of crime, social insubordination, and potential rebellion which was spreading across the forest areas of southern England. The London Journal’s role in the dissemination of this story is clearly significant. Although other papers took the lead in reporting it from January 1723, it was remarked in another paper that the Journal had taken a special interest in King John, and there is no doubt that it was the government newspaper’s extended coverage which provided the spark.43 Moreover,

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it is interesting that in 1723, at a time when Britannicus was justifying the government’s actions and blasting the bishop of Rochester and the Catholics, the newspaper’s reporting of more humble crimes and criminals developed several complex themes which ultimately rose to a discordant and terrifying crescendo. Their collective message was clear. Highwaymen and footpads appeared to have colonized the roads and heaths leading to the capital, making them unsafe, especially for coaches carrying the gentry and the mails; taking a boat on the Thames meant risking sudden attack by the waterman or even a fellow passenger, if they should spy a full purse; and the poor residential and industrial areas spreading from the east end of London, such as Whitechapel, Bow, and Deptford, were nurseries for gangs of thieves and housebreakers who were bred to their trade from an early age.44 The rebellious exploits of the Waltham Blacks also continued to fascinate, and seemed to multiply, in the form of copy-cat violence by smugglers against customs officers.45 Moreover, the reports of ordinary crime became more violent, and the editor’s comments began to take on a note of alarm. In June 1723 there was an account that ‘several disguised Persons’ had destroyed deer and wounded the gamekeeper in a gentleman’s park near Farnham in Hampshire; and the issue of 3 August included a report of a man committed to Newgate after grievously wounding his master and mistress, who had previously loaned him money. The paper related how he had confessed that after being refused another loan he obtained a dagger and had intended to murder them both before robbing their house and running away to Holland.46 October brought further accounts of desperate violence: three footpads were taken and committed to the Marshalsea prison after robbing and shooting a servant for a mere 20d., and there was a report of another gang of footpads who had committed ‘Several Robberies’ in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. They had ‘dragg’d the Persons they attack’d over the Rails, and there strip’d and plunder’d them of what they found valuable about them’.47 The Journal had recently carried a report of a gruesome robbery and murder near Calais, on the road to Paris, where several English gentlemen and their servants were killed in cold blood by a gang of French robbers, to prevent them being detected. Now the editor commented, ‘Robbery and Murder seem to be as common among our Rogues here as in France, and we now hardly hear of the first without the Latter’.48 The next few issues seemed to bear him out, for they were full of further accounts of robbery, murder, and mayhem, including a ‘barbarous’ assault on the customs officers at Portsmouth by ‘12 Persons being disguised and armed with Swords and Staves’, and the discovery of the body of a gentleman in a ditch between Highgate and Hampstead, ‘with his Throat cut from Ear to Ear, and his Handkerchief cramm’d into his Mouth’.49 Nevertheless the reports of crime in The London Journal ultimately conveyed confidence in the ability of the law to hold the ring, for the machinery of justice was represented as awful and inevitable, if somewhat

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irregular. Many of the robberies were reported in the form of the arrest and committal to prison of the suspected offenders. For example in December 1722 readers were advised that two men had been taken by the thief-catcher Jonathan Wild at an ale-house in Fleet Lane and subsequently committed to Newgate, ‘it being strongly suspected that they have been guilty of several Robberies both in Surry and Middlesex’, including the theft of money and a gold watch worth 70 guineas from a member of Parliament on Hampstead Heath.50 And although the ‘King John’ was no longer reported as active after mid-1723, there were accounts of the trials and condemnation of the Windsor Blacks by a special commission of judges at Reading, and of a group of Hampshire Blacks at the King’s Bench in London. These reports made it clear that the prosecutions had been arranged and paid for by the government. The paper also took grim satisfaction in the death sentences handed down. One of the condemned Hampshire Blacks was said to be the keeper of an inn where they used to meet, and the report commented ‘as he shared in their Plunder, he is now likely to bear a Part in their Fate’.51 This complex style of crime reporting, which combined lurid sensationalism with ultimate reassurance, is especially interesting because The London Journal was owned and run by the government of the day, and as we have seen in 1722–3 that government was preoccupied with the need to create and maintain a sense of hysteria around the Jacobite plots.52 As with Hoadly’s treatment of the Jacobite plots, its expressions of alarm about violent crime were balanced by a sense that ministers were firmly in command of the situation, and would crack down hard on violence against private individuals, just as they had in the case of the forest banditti. Indeed, in May 1723 the government introduced and passed into legislation the infamous ‘Waltham Black Act’. This remarkable statute automatically criminalized anyone appearing armed and disguised in any deer park or on the road, and also created a host of other loosely-defined capital felonies, to the extent that a modern authority described it as ‘in itself a complete and extremely severe criminal code’.53 The timing of The London Journal’s reports about the Blacks is very interesting, appearing (in November and December) as they did just when Robert Walpole was desperately seeking to reinforce the sense of national emergency he had created around Jacobitism. Moreover, it has now been proved that in Walpole’s mind the Waltham Blacks were linked with the Atterbury Plot, because he had received intelligence that one of the principals in the conspiracy was reported as having recruited them for the Pretender’s service.54 It is therefore reasonable to suggest that The Journal’s pioneering interest in a group of Hampshire deer stealers was part of a sustained editorial policy to maintain a sense of public fear around threats to the maintenance of order in church, state, and society.55 But a further question is whether this newspaper’s reporting of ordinary crime in 1722–3 was inspired by the same – essentially political – instincts.

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8.4 Conclusion: law and order and the ‘dark side’ of Enlightenment In the colourful detail of its crime reporting in 1722–3 The London Journal was helping to generate a prototypical ‘law and order’ problem: crime appeared to be increasing in volume and savagery; criminals were selfconscious social deviants and potential rebels; and according to the stories it published of those convicted and hanged, an excess of ‘liberty’ and the corrupting temptations of luxury among the common people of London appeared to be multiplying offenders.56 At the same time, the leading essays of Britannicus were also exercises in fear-mongering and scapegoating; in this case stigmatizing Catholics as potential Jacobites in the context of the Atterbury and Layer plots. And as in modern times, for the moral majority that was constituted around these signal examples of deviance, the preferred solution was penal law. Indeed, at this time the dominant minister who stood behind the newspaper was happy to supply legislative solutions to these particular problems: by suspending Habeas Corpus, imposing penal taxes on the hated Catholics, and passing a draconian statute which created a whole range of capital offences. As I have suggested, there is even circumstantial evidence that the whole process of press ‘sensitization’, stereotyping, and ministerial reaction was government ‘policy’, given the ministerial control of the newspaper at that time. In its earlier incarnation, The London Journal sought to stigmatize those whom Cato blamed for the South Sea Bubble: the stock-jobbers, company directors, and ultimately the ministers who ‘screened’ them. Here too, one of the main elements for constituting popular support was the promise of penal law: those responsible for the crash should be hanged and their estates confiscated. Gordon and Trenchard clearly believed that the best way to further their republican agenda was first to prove their patriotic credentials by promising condign public justice. Although their principal aim in writing about the crash was to advance a sophisticated political paradigm of virtue and corruption, their primary strategy was to cast Parliament as the instrument of vengeance, thereby making MPs’ willingness to act against the South Sea directors and their ministerial sponsors the litmus test of public spiritedness.57 As with Hoadly and Walpole, in this case it appears these authors appeared to be using the press to manipulate readers into a ‘law and order’ dialogue, arising out of somewhat artificial moral anxiety, whereby exaggerated social problems were solved by the patriotic application of the legislature. Finally, perhaps these examples are of general importance for popular apprehensions of law. It is arguable that in the pages of the eighteenthcentury newspapers the rule of law began to take on quite different associations, compared to those which had prevailed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Before 1689, and the advent of regular parliaments which mass-produced statutes, most people would have experienced law

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as direct participants or observers in courtroom proceedings. There was an emphasis on the common law jury and public proceedings as forms of consent to government, and it is arguable that law was generally associated with legal processes, especially since so many people were involved in forms of civil litigation. However in the pages of the eighteenth-century press, law increasingly took the form of statutory ‘law and order’ instruments demanded by public opinion and developed by parliamentarians. It is true that courtroom proceedings were also featured in the press, especially in the form of state trials. Moreover the reportage and commentary in the press rendered the creation of new penal law as a process discussed and sanctioned by self-consciously ‘respectable’ middling people. Yet it does appear to me that in the pages of newspapers like The London Journal, domestic governance was increasingly a business of irrational fear-mongering and draconian reaction which made the law amenable to serial refashioning at the hands of ‘moral entrepreneurs’ and insecure politicians and ministers.58 And this certainly sits uneasily against the Habermasian idea of the growth of the public sphere, where the expansion of the press provided a forum for rational discourse about public affairs.59 Indeed from this perspective it appears that one of the distinctive contributions of the early eighteenthcentury newspaper was to turn events into moral panic and ‘law and order’ legislation. This was surely the ‘dark side’ of the Enlightenment.

Notes I am very grateful to Dr Jeska Rees and William Woods for research assistance, and to the Australian Research Council and the University of Adelaide for funding. Earlier versions of this chapter were read at the 2007 North American Conference of British Studies, San Francisco, and the Open University in Milton Keynes. I wish to thank the audiences at those meetings for their constructive feedback. 1. For Thomas Gordon and Sir John Trenchard see Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB). The most recent edition of Cato’s Letters is Cato’s Letters or Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and Other Important Subjects (Indianapolis, IN, 1995), ed. R. Hanowy. 2. He was successively bishop of Bangor, Hereford, Salisbury, and Winchester (see ODNB). For his Britannicus letters see The Works of Benjamin Hoadly, D.D. successively Bishop of Bangor, Hereford, Salisbury, and Winchester (1773), iii. 1–395. Walpole became 1st lord of the Treasury and chancellor of the Exchequer, 3 Apr. 1721. 3. The Weekly Packet, no. 433, Sat. 15–Sat. 22, Oct. 1720. 4. The Weekly Journal, Or Saturday’s Post, no. 100, 29 Oct. 1720, p. 595. 5. Cato’s Letters, i. 42 (London Journal, no. 68, 12 Nov. 1720). 6. The Weekly Journal: Or Saturday’s Post, no. 10, Sat. 5 Nov. 1720, p. 601. 7. See Cato’s Letters, i. 50: ‘To begin then in the first Place with the Criminals, will shew that we are in earnest Champions for Honesty, for Trade, and for the Nation, all oppress’d by Money-Leeches: All other Remedies may be but Mountebank Remedies: It would be Madness to concert new Schemes, liable to new Abuses,

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8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

The London Journal, Moral Panics and the Law without first doing Justice to the Abusers of the old; Impunity for past Crimes is a Warrant to commit more, especially when they are gainful’ (London Journal, no. 70, 26 Nov. 1720). Cato’s Letters, i. 43–4: (London Journal, no. 69, 19 Nov. 1720). Cato’s Letters, i. 93–8 (London Journal, no. 77, 14 Jan. 1721). Cato’s Letters, i. 45–7 (London Journal, no. 69, 19 Nov. 1720). This was echoed in the reportage of the paper. See, for example, London Journal, no. 81, Saturday, 11 Feb. 1721: p. 4 (‘We are assured that it appears on Enquiry, that most of the kept Mistresses of any Fashion in Town, had Subscriptions and South Sea Stock given them upon Foot of secret Service, and at the same low Rate as other Pensioners and Bribists received it; but for this, the Managers pretend a Consideration much more valuable with them, than the Good of their Country’). Cato’s Letters, i. 145–6 (London Journal, no. 85, 11 Mar. 1721). Cato’s Letters, i. 121, 146–7 (London Journal, no. 81, 11 Feb. 1721 and no. 85, 11 Mar. 1721). Cato’s Letters, i. 122 (London Journal, no. 81, 11 Feb. 1721). National Archives, SP 35/28/15: A. B. to Lord Carteret, Birmingham, 16 Aug. 1721. The London Journal, no. 89, 8 Apr. 1721, p. 3; ibid., no. 90, 15 Apr. 1721, p. 3; ibid., no. 91, 22 Apr. 1721, p. 3; ibid., no. 93, 6 May 1721, p. 2. For the harassment, particularly following the issue of 12 Aug. 1721, see C. B. Realey, The London Journal and its Authors, 1720–1723 (Lawrence, KA, 1935), 13–20. See K. L. Joshi, ‘The London Journal, 1719–1738’, Journal of the University of Bombay, n.s., 9 (1940), 33–66. The Works of Benjamin Hoadly, D.D., iii. 4: London Journal, no. 164, 15 Sept. 1722. The Works of Benjamin Hoadly, D.D., iii. 16–19: London Journal, no. 168, 13 Oct. 1722. In May 1722 the secretary of state had written to the Corporation of London informing the city that the government had received intelligence of ‘a Wicked Conspiracy … for raising a Rebellion in this Kingdom in favour of a Popish Pretender’ (Corporation of London RO, COL/CA/01/01/130 (formerly REP/126): Repertory, Nov. 1721–Oct. 1722, pp. 344–6: 9 May 1722). An order in council instructed local authorities to inquire after all papists within their jurisdictions and put the penal laws in operation against them (ibid., pp. 354–6: 11 May 1722). London Journal, no. 167, 6 Oct. 1722, p. 2. The Works of Benjamin Hoadly, D.D., iii. 27–30; London Journal, no. 171, 3 Nov. 1722, pp. 1–3. Cato’s Letters, ii. 599–606; London Journal, no. 152, 23 June 1722, pp. 1–2; ibid., no. 153, 30 June 1722, pp. 1–2. See G. V. Bennett, ‘Jacobitism and the Rise of Walpole’, in N. McKendrick (ed.) Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in Honour of J.H. Plumb, (1974), 82. The Works of Benjamin Hoadly, D.D., iii. 15; London Journal, no. 167, 6 Oct. 1722. The Works of Benjamin Hoadly, D.D., iii. 34–5; London Journal, no. 173, 17 Nov. 1722. The Works of Benjamin Hoadly, D.D., iii. 27–33; London Journal, nos. 171–2, 3 and 10 Nov. 1722. The Works of Benjamin Hoadly, D.D., iii. 47; London Journal, no. 176, 8 Dec. 1722. See also London Journal, 22 and 29 Dec. 1722, 5 and 12 Jan. and 12 Oct. 1723

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31.

32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42.

43. 44. 45.

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for a more extended defense of the measure, labelling Catholics as ‘Determined Enemies to the Civil Government’ (Hoadly, Works, iii. 54, 58, 64: London Journal, nos. 178–9, 181, 22 Dec., 29 Dec. 1722, and 12 Jan. 1723) and suggesting that those protestants who protected them would fall victim to another St. Batholomew’s massacre (Hoadly, Works, iii. 57: London Journal, no. 179, 29 Dec. 1722). For the complex moral and religious lessons associated with the execution of criminals, see R. McGowen, ‘“Making Examples” and the Crisis of Punishment in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England’, in D. Lemmings (ed.), The British and their Laws in the Eighteenth Century (Woodbridge, 1985), 185–9. The report ‘open’d so clear a Scene of Wickedness as will, no doubt, convince even the most Obstinate of the horrid Designs of the Conspirators’ (The London Journal, no. 189, Sat. 9 Mar. 1723, p. 3). See also L. Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 1714–60 (Cambridge, 1982), 199. The Works of Benjamin Hoadly, D.D., iii. 103–5; London Journal, no. 194, 13 Apr. 1723. The Britannicus letters on Atterbury were later re-published in a collected form as Remarks on The Late Bishop of Rochester’s Speech at The Bar of The House of Lords (1723). The Works of Benjamin Hoadly, D.D., iii. 110: London Journal, no. 196, 27 Apr. 1723. See also ibid., 197: London Journal, no. 216, 14 Sept. 1723: ‘You are a Proud, a Covetous, an Ambitious Man; a great Lover of the Grandeur of the Church of Rome; and consequently of a Popish Pretender’. The Works of Benjamin Hoadly, D.D., iii. 109; London Journal, no. 196, 27 Apr. 1723. Hoadly was, of course, in direct communication with Walpole about the content of his articles. See, for example, National Archives, SP 35/44/16: Britannicus [to Walpole], 4 Jul. 1723. The Works of Benjamin Hoadly, D.D., iii. 121: London Journal, no. 199, 18 May 1723. The Works of Benjamin Hoadly, D.D., iii. 109; London Journal, no. 196, 27 Apr. 1723. For further justification of proceeding by bill of pains and penalties, see Hoadly, Works, iii. 154, 201; London Journal, no. 206, 6 July 1723, ibid., no. 218, 28 Sept. 1723. The Whitehall Journal, no. 44, 19 Mar. 1723, p. 262. London Journal, no. 172, Sat., 10 Nov. 1722, pp. 3–4. London Journal, no. 178, Sat., 22 Dec. 1722, p. 3. St. James’s Evening Post, no. 1190, 3 Jan. 1723. This report is also in The Post-Man, no. 6079, 3 Jan. 1723, with the parenthetical comment about the King of the Blacks that mention of him has been made ‘so often’ in the London Journal. The Weekly Journal: Or, British Gazetteer. Being the Freshest Advices Foreign and Domestick, Sat., 9 Feb. 1723; The Weekly Journal or Saturday’s Post, no. 224, Sat. 9 Feb. 1723; The Northampton Mercury, vol. 3, no. 146, Mon., 11 Feb. 1723. The proclamation is printed in The St. James’s Journal; With Memoirs of Literature, and the Freshest Advices Foreign and Domestick, Sat., 9 Feb. 1723. St. James’s Evening Post, no. 1211, 21 Feb. 1723; The Loyal Observator Revived; or Gaylard’s Journal, no. 12, 23 Feb. 1723, p. 5; The Weekly Journal: Or, British Gazetteer, Sat., 23 Feb. 1723; The St. James’s Journal; with Memoirs of Literature, no. 44, Sat., 23 Feb. 1723, p. 264. The Post-Man, no. 6079, 3 Jan. 1723. London Journal, nos. 179, 186–7, 29 Dec. 1722, 16 and 23 Feb. 1723; nos. 188–90, 2, 9, 16 Mar. 1723; no. 207, 13 July 1723. London Journal, nos. 183, 190, 192, 26 Jan., 16 and 30 Mar. 1723.

156 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

54. 55.

56.

57. 58.

59.

The London Journal, Moral Panics and the Law London Journal, nos. 205, 210, 29 June 1723, 3 Aug. 1723. London Journal, no. 219, 5 Oct. 1723. London Journal, nos. 217, 220, 21 Sept. 1723, 12 Oct. 1723. London Journal, nos. 226–7, 230, 23 and 30 Nov., 21 Dec. 1723. London Journal, no. 179, 29 Dec. 1722. London Journal, nos. 202, 226, 8 June 1723, 23 Nov. 1723; E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters (Harmondsworth, 1975), 69–77, 148–55. For a similar point about the complex messages conveyed by crime reporting in late eighteenth-century newspapers, see P. King, ‘Newspaper Reporting and Attitudes to Crime and Justice in Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century London’, Continuity and Change, 22 (2007), 73–112. L. Radzinowicz, A History of English Criminal Law and its Administration from 1750 (1948–56), i. 77. It was initially enacted for three years, but successively prolonged and made perpetual in 1758. E. Cruickshanks and H. Erskine-Hill, ‘The Waltham Black Act and Jacobitism’, Journal of British Studies, 24 (1985), 359–65. For a similar argument about Walpole’s policy, but without any attention to the press, see J. Broad, ‘Whigs and Deer-Stealers in other Guises: A Return to the Origins of the Black Act, Past and Present, 119 (1988), esp. 67–71. London Journal, nos. 230–31, 21 and 28 Dec. 1723. For a slightly later example see [Daniel Defoe] Augusta Triumphans: or, the Way to Make London the Most Flourishing City in the Universe (1728), 47–51. See, particularly, Cato’s Letters, i. 145–7 (London Journal, no. 85, 11 Mar. 1721). Indeed in the early eighteenth century there was increasing concern about ‘the irrationality or credulity of the multitude’ and doubts about the possibility of public reason. See M. Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford, 2005), esp. p. 6 and ch. 7. Cf. Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain, 148–9, 162, 209–10, 249, 255, who finds evidence for the early degradation of the public sphere, especially in the growth of addressing and party politics.

9 Forgers and Forgery: Severity and Social Identity in Eighteenth-Century England Randall McGowen

The crime of Forgery is of so very dangerous a tendency in a commercial country, that too much care cannot be taken, or too exemplary punishments be inflicted on such culprits as are convicted of this baneful innovation upon the properties of their fellow countrymen. (Genuine Memoirs of the Life of Joshua Compton (1778), iii) The report of a forgery in an eighteenth-century newspaper always produced a tremor in the reading public. These episodes often aroused powerful if conflicting emotions – anger, curiosity, sympathy, dismay. The drama that unfolded as the story proceeded from detection to trial and execution followed a predictable but riveting path. At first glance, there is nothing surprising about the response to such stories. Forgery was a much-feared crime in the period. It was an offense that was seen to threaten the financial system widely believed to be the foundation of Britain’s national strength. No other crime could be so ‘hurtful to a trading people’. ‘Hence it is’, concluded an author of the life of one forger, ‘that the English law is more severe against every sort of this fraud than in some other countries’.1 Equally important, a forgery usually involved the discovery of betrayal on the part of someone the victim of the crime had trusted. When Sir John Goodricke, in 1789, was called to Bow-street to identify a man caught passing a forged note, he ‘was astonished to see brought before him for such an offence, a person who had been so much the object of his bounty’. When asked, Goodricke replied that ‘he knew the prisoner very well’.2 There was a deep personal sense of violation in forgery cases that was only compounded by revelations of the moral misbehaviour of the offender. The mingled sense of economic threat and moral indignation led the authorities to impose a severe sentence upon those convicted of the crime. A conviction for forgery was almost certain to carry the condemned offender to the gallows. This steadiness of purpose, so conspicuously lacking in most areas of 157

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criminal justice, testifies to the extraordinary status forgery acquired in the eyes of the eighteenth-century public. These episodes manifested many of the elements we have come to associate with a moral panic. Here was a marked ‘rise in public consciousness of, and anxiety about, a certain type of crime’, fostered by the combined action of judicial pronouncement and newspaper reporting.3 ‘Societal values and interests’ appeared under threat, which required that ‘the moral barricades’ be ‘manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people’.4 The actual incidence of forgery, even in a commercial centre like London, was small. Most forgeries involved a single fraudulent transaction and a modest sum of money. Neither consideration hindered the crime from becoming the focus of intense concern. It was a subject that inspired overheated rhetoric and inflated claims about the danger that threatened society. No one challenged the settled conviction that only the gallows could provide some measure of security against the spread of the crime. Yet in other respects the panic over forgery was different from many such episodes identified by historians. Often such panics conform to a particular rhythm; they rise in response to a distinct event, produce a temporary hysteria about the occurrence of the crime, and subside with the passage of time. The alarm over forgery, once it had resulted in capital legislation, did not diminish. It remained acute well beyond the end of the century. This unexpected outcome can be traced to a peculiar feature of the trajectory of the narrative. As the tale of a forgery unfolded in the press and in the later pamphlets written about the perpetrator, the focus of concern wobbled and drifted. Something got in the way of the clear line the authorities attempted to lay down. And, of course, what obstructed the development of a consistent story was the social identity of the accused. What began as a concern with a crime that seemed particularly disturbing in its consequences, and which plugged into familiar stereotypes of mischievous and unscrupulous dealers, shifted focus to the offender and an equally familiar tale of misfortune and misadventure. The problem was that these different narratives had dramatically opposed moral implications. It was not so much that this shift in perception disrupted the course of justice as that it transformed the nature of the experience of the outcome. The severity imposed upon the offender no longer brought a measure of relief, as it did in other moral panics; rather it heightened the alarm felt among the general public. A moral panic usually involves fear and resentment at disturbing acts or behaviours associated with the conduct of a despised group. In the case of forgery the identity of the offenders and, as we shall see, even the understanding of the criminal act itself refused to settle into the expected pattern. Forgery, which was at first a troubling crime for the authorities and an alarming issue for the public, became even more problematic precisely because of the severity of the punishment and the identity of the condemned. The outrage that arose from a recognition of the vulnerability exposed by the forgery

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soon gave way to the pathetic stories of individuals tortured by fear and stumbling, both figuratively and literally, to the gallows.

9.1 A disturbing crime Forgery had long been a crime that worried Englishmen. The potential threat represented by the forgery of wills and other legal records attracted the attention of Elizabethan legislators. At common law the crime was punishable with a fine, the pillory, and, on occasion, by imprisonment. Still, by the late seventeenth century, legal authors sometimes complained that the penalty was not severe enough, given the circumstances of the crime. By the last decade of the century, in the wake of what has come to be called the ‘Financial Revolution’, the legislature took a more sympathetic approach to such calls. The newly established Bank of England, after the discovery of several frauds involving its paper, secured passage of an act making the forgery of its instruments a capital crime. This protection was soon extended to the paper of the South Sea Company and several other corporations. Parliament, in the midst of transforming government finance, made the forgery of some kinds of state paper and stamps felony as well.5 The passage of these measures looks, in part, to have been a panicked reaction to the precarious political and economic circumstances of the 1690s. What is more striking is the limited extent of these changes. The forgery of much of the paper that circulated among private individuals and commercial men continued to be prosecuted under the common law as misdemeanour. Nonetheless, as credit, whose chief expression was paper, loomed larger in public consciousness, authors began to express concern about the dangers to which this new system lay exposed. Credit was a mighty engine of wealth, but it was also a fragile network of social relations. It required a ‘mutual confidence’ between those who dealt with each other. People had to trust in the promises represented by paper instruments. Such reliance depended in turn upon the congruence of the appearance and reality of wealth. Reputation was everything.6 When character was questioned or trust betrayed, the consequences were wide-ranging. As one early eighteenth-century author wrote, credit must be ‘unsullied’. ‘Indeed, a Readiness and Willingness to perform ones Engagements is such a fundamental of Credit, that all the affluence of Money, and the most immense Riches are of no Consequence, if there be Ground for the least Suspicion of Disingenuity’.7 Yet it was recognized that commercial practice sometimes relied upon or encouraged operations that conflicted with demands for transparency and scrupulous honesty. Dealers too easily became entangled in credit relations beyond their control. Some used fictitious names in credit instruments, and issued paper with no other intention than to cover notes becoming due. These transactions only appeared fraudulent when failure overtook one of the parties. The sober injunctions about plain dealing and honest conduct were meant to guide men in their business practices, but they

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also contained a warning about new kinds of injuries, frauds and forgeries, to which even the most careful of businessmen were exposed. These more narrow concerns gained additional force when they played into wider anxieties about the consequences of the new financial system. Some authors complained that the entire system of credit was a fraud, one that fostered and rewarded deceit and duplicity. The denizens of the City and Exchange-alley, as well as the politicians who seemed to promote their interests, all appeared involved in a vast conspiracy to replace the real wealth of the nation with fictions that only enriched the manipulators of stocks and notes. The literary supporters of the Country critique of London finance unleashed a vitriolic assault upon those groups – Jews, Huguenots, Dissenters – who seemed most representative of the new interest. They were called cheats and adventurers, people whose shady dealings skirted the edge of illegality. Defoe described the brokers as a trade ‘manag’d with the greatest Intrigue, Artifice, and Trick, that ever any thing that appear’d with a face of Honesty could be handl’d with’. The collapse of the South Sea Bubble, along with the exposure of the fraudulent activities that accompanied it, seemed to fulfil the direst predictions about the spread of moral decay, corruption, and national dishonour. The commercial interests most involved in the employment of paper instruments had been slow to demand an increase of the punishment attached to forgery. Nonetheless, there was a growing awareness of the risks that accompanied the growing volume of paper and a heightened demand for proper conduct in the circulation of private notes. This more limited sensitivity could easily be magnified by the wider mistrust represented by the fierce moral complaint that marked the 1720s.8 Newspapers reflected this mounting concern with their increased attention to the occurrence of forgery. In 1728 the Daily Post contained word of several forged notes, supposedly under the hand of Alderman Child, which had turned up in the City. It also reported instances of several men condemned to the pillory for similar frauds in Herefordshire and Lincolnshire. The paper gave fuller coverage to news of an extensive forgery in Edinburgh, where a bookbinder had imitated the notes of the Bank of Scotland. The fraud had unsettled commercial circles in the city. The Bank felt compelled to advertise, even in the London papers, that it continued to accept its notes. The circular, a correspondent wrote, had the desired effect; it ‘made all people here extremely easy’. The scale of the remedial measures belied the assurances offered by the company.9 This episode taught an increasingly familiar lesson. Forgery was not an offense that could be treated lightly. It attacked credit by making people suspicious, reluctant to take the paper of even powerful banks. It had consequences far beyond those of other property crimes. It demanded resolute action to counter the effects upon public opinion of word of the crime. The gathering storm broke when reports appeared in the press of a singular forgery, a case that touched members of Parliament directly and involved an egregious abuse of trust. It brought home, in a particularly striking fashion,

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the dark fears about the mysteries and corruption that had gathered around the rise of the financial system. In September, 1728, William Hales, a bankrupt stockbroker, brother to the philanthropist and scientist Stephen Hales and the royal advisor Robert Hales, was detected in a clever plot to convert parliamentary franks into notes meant to secure thousands of pounds from several wealthy MPs. His trial disclosed how he sought to exploit his knowledge of the intricacies of London finance in order to elude detection. Worse still, his associate in this scheme was an Anglican clergyman, and dark rumours circulated that his brother Robert had been involved as well. Hales nearly succeeded. His detection was largely fortuitous. The crime was widely reported, not only in the London press, but throughout the country. Papers reprinted lengthy summaries of the trial. Hales and his clerical accomplice both died following the ordeal of the pillory and a spell in Newgate. No one expressed sorrow at their fates. Parliamentary action followed quickly upon this episode. The Universal Spectator, in April 1729, announced that the government would soon produce a bill to end ‘the vile practice of Forgery’. The resulting measure made the fraudulent making of paper instruments a capital offense. Newspapers and journals expressed considerable satisfaction that Parliament had taken such resolute action to deal with a potent evil. The severity of the penalty seemed more than warranted by the scale of the threat.10 The statute, 2 Geo. II c. 25, was a short but sweeping act. The authorities, the judges, and royal ministers deciding on petition appeals, soon made clear their readiness to carry out the full measure of the law. They possessed a simple view of the issue. For them forgery stood as an example of a moral lapse whose evil consequences would be compounded if the perpetrator were seen to escape the gallows. The commercial strength of the nation, they believed, depended upon the unimpeded operation of its financial markets. ‘As two thirds of the business of this great Metropolis’, one Recorder remarked, ‘were transacted by paper, it was necessary that the law should have its full effect, in order to preserve the purity and entireness of that inevitable practice’.11 In the face of what they thought was the pressing necessity, the authorities interpreted appeals to mercy for convicted forgers as a symptom of a moral tendency that needed to be fiercely resisted. This firm insistence upon the infliction of death for forgery marked the most distinctive feature of the treatment of the crime. The judges and the Crown were determined to deflect the normal operation of mercy by rejecting petitions for pardon.12 They took a dim view of the excuses offered by the condemned. They saw the lapses that led to the crime as serious and the consequences of an epidemic of the crime as fatal to society. They concluded that it was vital not to be swayed by popular feeling or to accede to the appeals of well-connected individuals. For the most part they succeeded in adhering to this resolution. Commentators regularly remarked that a forgery conviction usually resulted in an execution. This certainty profoundly shaped the experience of the eighteenth-century public when the crime was mentioned.

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9.2

Unexpected complications

It took several years for the full significance of the new policy to appear. Forgeries were infrequent, at least those that came to the attention of the courts. One of the earliest cases to attract the kind of attention that became so familiar later in the century was that of William Newington in 1738. Newington was a native of Chichester. His parents, the Newgate Calendar explained, struggled to promote his success. They placed him with a local attorney in order that he might learn that profession. Unfortunately, he soon acquired habits that made him dissatisfied with provincial life. Drawn to London, he first sought employment with ‘an eminent attorney at law’, though he soon lost that position as a result of his irregular hours. He subsequently found employment with a scrivener, but his dissolute ways soon cost him that job as well. Seeking to redeem his fortunes, he became engaged to a wealthy woman. ‘It is presumed’, the editor suggested, ‘that being distressed for money to support his expensive way of life, and to carry on his amour, he was tempted to commit forgery, which, by act of Parliament then recently passed, had been made a capital offence’. He went to Child’s coffee house where he drew a note on Child and Co. for £120. The note was plausible, but Newington made the mistake of forgetting to put in the date, and so he was arrested.13 Newington made only a feeble defence against the charge. He relied instead upon witnesses to his reputation. At his trial, nine men spoke on his behalf, all of whom gave him ‘a good character’. His most recent employer, ‘an eminent Scrivener’, said he had entrusted Newington with as much as nine thousand pounds, and had never doubted his honesty. The willingness of those who best knew the accused to rally around them was a consistent feature of forgery trials. In his own defence, Newington appealed to his youth and inexperience, saying that his crime was simply a ‘rash deed’, and pleading for understanding. This appeal swayed neither the jury nor the judge. Still, even after his conviction, Newington remained convinced that he would not suffer death. He ‘seem’d pretty confident, that the intercession of his Acquaintance, would prove effectual to the saving his Life’. Word of the contest over his fate was carried in the provincial press, demonstrating at this early date the level of interest such cases aroused. The Derby Mercury reported that ‘great intercession is making … for Newington the Attorney, who now lies under Sentence of Death in Newgate’. When these efforts failed, the papers adopted a still more melodramatic mode for relating details of Newington’s fate. They told of his remorse at the grief he caused his mother, ‘a poor Widow’. The account of their meeting in prison was cast in heart-rending terms. ‘The moving scene’, the Ordinary wrote, ‘drew Tears from the Eyes of those who were accustomed to Scenes of black Distress and Death’. The Derby paper described his execution, noting in particular that Newington behaved penitently and made several moving speeches.14

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The Newington case reveals the main elements that came to compose the treatment of forgery cases over the century. The offense consistently attracted more attention than almost any other crime. The papers hastened to report the first rumour that a forgery had been detected. Even a brief comment was enough to arouse interest and spark concern. A feeling of unease was palpable in these simple reports. In most cases, however, the suspense was cut short by the quick detention of a suspect. Trials were frequently summarized in greater detail than was usual for property offenses. Even in straightforward cases they could be long and involved. The accused regularly had counsel; defendants often offered polished exculpatory statements. Respectable witnesses presented an alternative and more sympathetic portrait of the accused. Judges pronounced verdicts with expressions of regret, though mingled with a firm warning that gave the condemned little hope of avoiding the gallows. These proceedings offered fresh material for consideration. The real drama, however, began with the efforts to sway the course of justice. The papers reported fully on the campaigns mounted by friends and neighbours to secure mercy for the condemned. Indeed, here was the decisive moment in the coverage of these cases. Even as the authorities sought to make an unambiguous example of the offender, the balance of commentary shifted in ways that undercut the message of firm resolve. To the judges the social identity of the condemned exacerbated their guilt. They imagined themselves delivering a warning to those too ready to pardon moral weakness. But the increasing volume of biographical detail worked in the opposite direction to produce sympathy for the condemned. Correspondents described the efforts of families and local notables, some from elite circles, to circulate petitions on behalf of offenders. These reports created a rich sense both of the respectable class of the condemned and of their belonging to a community deeply interested in their fate. The tone of these stories was typically favourable to them. They made poignant reading. Each successive case served to heighten the suspense, as the repeated demonstrations of the resolve of the authorities created a growing sense of the inevitable fate awaiting the convicted forger. ‘The man who is rash enough to adventure on a forgery’, one commentator wrote of John Parks, executed in 1748, ‘dips his pen in blood’.15 The panic occasioned by the crime gave way rapidly to the dismay felt at the prospect of imminent death. Those most closely associated with the case, especially prosecutors though sometimes jurors, were often in the forefront of those attempting to mitigate the sentence. The effect was cumulative. The memory of earlier episodes only sharpened the passions generated in subsequent cases. Without denying the seriousness of the crime, the public came to look upon each instance of it as exceptional, perhaps this time requiring a mercy denied in the past. The stern words delivered by the judges did little to dent this mood.

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9.3

Poignant stories

A flurry of cases from mid-century cemented this experience of the crime. The trials and executions of William Baker, Paul Wells, and William Smith, between 1749 and 1751, received considerable publicity, with stories in the London papers reprinted in the provincial press. Of the three cases, that of Baker was the most poignant. From the earliest reports of the crime, he earned the label ‘the unhappy man’. Baker was the son of ‘very respectable parents’. His father’s industry made it possible for him to acquire ‘a genteel education’. He attended the Merchant-Taylors school, and later married a cousin, the daughter of a clergyman of considerable fortune. Baker was bred up a grocer and achieved considerable prosperity in this line. Not content with the opportunities afforded by this occupation, he joined with another man to become a sugar-baker. Most narratives of his life spoke confidently of the success he enjoyed in this new line of work. Still, they confided, he was restless and dissatisfied. ‘The Minds of Youth’, one writer explained, ‘formed for Enterprize, and elated by the early Allurements of Success, if Trade be their Employment, can never rest satisfied with low Adventures, but must plan out new Schemes of Gain, and pursue unbounded Tracts of accumulating Wealth’. He began attending East India Company sales, where he bought goods worth thousands of pounds. Sustaining considerable losses in these transactions, and his personal fortune being much reduced, he resorted to forging a warrant for the delivery of three chests, in order to provide security for a loan. It was widely reported that he never intended to defraud anyone; he only hoped to secure a grace period until he could recoup his investments. Though technically his act was criminal, many doubted its seriousness. Witnesses on all sides testified that he had led an upright life. They denied that he was addicted to drink or gaming. On the contrary, ‘he bore an exceeding good character in the world’.16 It was generally agreed that his case was an unfortunate one. The man to whom the warrants had been offered, a Mr Holland, suggested he had never intended to prosecute. He simply sent the warrants to the East India House to see if they were correct. At the trial he declined to speculate about Baker’s intent to defraud. Indeed, he answered that for all he knew, if he had had Baker’s note for a thousand pounds, he would have paid it without question.17 Several papers portrayed Baker as giving in to a momentary impulse. The lapse, according to some accounts, appeared to be scarcely criminal at all.18 It seemed to most commentators that Baker suffered a far more severe sentence than he deserved. Sorrow was nearly universal. ‘Upon the Whole’, one paper concluded, ‘Mr. Baker, tho’ guilty of one felonious Act, could hardly be reproached as an Enemy to Society’. He died penitent, composed, and resigned. He was permitted every courtesy. He went to his execution in a mourning coach, and it was accompanied by a hearse.19

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If Baker’s case suggests how elusive was the boundary separating criminal from acceptable conduct, most other forgery cases offered no such ambiguity. Yet they still created problems for those who observed the course of justice. For one of the peculiar features of forgery cases was that even serious evidence of disreputable character and clear proof of misconduct did little to alter the dominant storyline. Paul Wells, for instance, was described as the son of a gentleman who had an estate in Oxfordshire. His parents provided him with an education in the law, and he had served as a clerk to an attorney in Wycombe. Once again, as in so many cases, he developed a taste for luxury which worked to undermine habits of industry. Upon his return to Oxford, he enjoyed some success in his profession, though he failed to reform his conduct. He proved unreliable in various financial transactions. He turned sums entrusted him to his own purposes, and allowed his father to be imprisoned for a debt of £500 for which Paul had persuaded him to stand security. Wells even had the audacity to bring an action for assault against several people who upbraided him for his malfeasance. He was arrested for forging a receipt for the payment of money and was tried at the Oxford Assizes in 1749. Shocked by this turn of events, he failed to defend himself in court. The judge, perhaps moved by his feeble condition, respited his sentence in order to give him an opportunity to apply for mercy. One cleric who took up his cause sought to portray Wells as ‘a wild, gay young fellow’, but not vicious. ‘The Bishop of Oxford’, a London paper reported, ‘drew up a Petition to his Majesty on his Behalf, and the duke of Marlborough carried the Petition to London’. As in so many forgery cases, people went to great lengths to secure royal mercy. ‘All possible means were used by his Friends to obtain a Pardon, but their endeavours proved ineffectual’. The press announced that the Privy Council had rejected the plea because the crime was so dangerous to ‘the safety of trade and commerce, which lays so much exposed to invasions of this nature’. The papers reported the final scenes in prison and at the place of execution in great detail, emphasizing the anguish felt by those in attendance. The sheriff delayed the start of the proceedings in order to see if a reprieve would arrive. ‘There was a great concourse of people assembled to see the execution of so remarkable a person, some of whom expressed their joy, and others their sorrow on the occasion, but all of them behaved with decency and good manner’, as did the doomed man himself. He asked the pardon of friends and family, and thanked the Bishop for his efforts. Though so weak that he had to be supported at the place of execution, he played the role expected of him, asking for the prayers of the crowd and forgiving the executioner.20 Wells’s execution excited an outpouring of emotion, though even a casual reading of his life raises questions about whether he was entirely deserving of public sympathy. On the contrary, his life might more obviously have been used to draw a grim portrait of the connection between ambition, immoral conduct, dangerous criminal activity, and the certain doom

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that awaited such offenders. His consistent pursuit of pleasure led to his downfall, and his forgery was simply the culmination of a career marked by frequent instances of extravagance and financial impropriety. Nonetheless, this was not the approach taken by the accounts of his life and trials. What they highlighted were the more positive aspects of his situation, his family, education, prospects, and respectable connections. It was these attributes that earned him such commiseration with his fate. Anger at his conduct scarcely figured in the narratives. If his death was inevitable, these authors seem to argue, it was not necessarily deserved. Wells did not appear to be a monster; he scarcely seemed to be a bad man. If Wells was an unlikely object for such pity, William Smith, who was the subject of still wider coverage, seems an even more implausible candidate for sympathetic treatment. By any measure Smith looks to have been a thorough-going scoundrel. The success in transforming him into an object of compassion is testimony to the powerful forces at work to produce a particular kind of narrative in forgery cases. Smith was the son of an Irish cleric, who sent him to study at the University of Dublin. Articled to a prominent Dublin attorney, he never completed his term of service. Several pamphlets, published after his death, sketched a career that led from one immoral deed to another. After the death of his father, he fell into loose living, ran up debts, and resorted to forgery in an attempt to raise funds. When these crimes were discovered, he fled to sea. An accomplished penman, he became clerk on a naval vessel, where he practiced the art of forging seamen’s wills. He assumed different names in order to avoid detection. He preyed upon friends and employed his numerous talents to deceive others. ‘He was a perfect Master of the Art of Dissimulation’, one pamphlet claimed, ‘and had a peculiar Talent in engaging People to commiserate and relieve the almost constant necessities he lived in’. He was charged with participating in a conspiracy to blackmail Edward Walpole by accusing him of sodomy. Arrested in connection with this scheme, he was subsequently charged with forging a bill of exchange for £45, and tried at the Old Bailey in 1750. Given a career that had made him notorious, his fall should have excited congratulation.21 Smith, perhaps aware that his other crimes were bound to become known, pleaded guilty to the indictment. Instead of trial by jury, he appealed to the judge to intercede to save his life. He offered a melodramatic account of himself, one that circulated widely in the press, in which he fully acknowledged his sins and asked for forgiveness. His speech, one paper reported, ‘was uttered in so pathetic a Tone of Voice, enforced with such passionate Gestures, and so mournful a Countenance, that many of the Spectators wept’. The London Magazine described Smith as ‘a man of parts’ who ‘had a very gentlemanlike appearance’.22 Smith became the focus of considerable interest and much sympathy. In the days that followed his arrest he displayed a peculiar genius for self-dramatization. The press enthusiastically and uncritically transmitted every note he submitted to the public. He even published

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an ‘ode’ on his situation, an exercise that appeared in the magazines as well as the papers.23 Likewise, papers all across England printed the petition he submitted to the Crown. In this document he pointed out that the prosecutor ‘recommended him to the Mercy of the Court’. He apologized for his public appeal, but he said he lacked a friend in high place to advance his cause. ‘He formed that warm and melancholy Petition’, one writer explained, ‘which he had no other Way to introduce to the Hands of Men of Power, but by publishing it in the News Papers’. One correspondent wrote that the earl of Chesterfield had become interested in his case.24 Everyone conceded that an appeal issued through the press was unusual, but no one cast doubt on its propriety. On the contrary, it was taken as further proof of the man’s merit. ‘The following petition’, concluded the Gentleman’s Magazine, ‘is so striking a picture of that anguish of mind, that distraction, terror, and remorse, which is suffered by those who expect to be cut off in the bloom of life, by a sudden and shameful death, that the publick exhibition of it may, perhaps, answer the same end as the execution of the criminal, with respect to the rest of mankind, counterbalancing temptation by terror, and alarming the vicious by the project of misery, which it is impossible to escape, otherwise than by becoming proselytes to virtue’.25 Some journals became convinced that Smith had become a changed man as a result of his confinement. They found in his literary productions proof of his reformation. Smith’s situation revealed the conundrum that haunted all subsequent celebrated forgery cases; ‘the Whole Town was now sensible of his Abilities; though the Crime was detested, every one pitied the Criminal’.26 Even after the Privy Council determined that he was not ‘a fit Object for Mercy’, Smith continued to press his claims and to elicit compassion for his fate. ‘In vain’, he wrote, ‘has Mercy been intreated; the Vengeance of Heaven has overtaken me; I bow myself unrepining to the fatal Stroke’. ‘As he had no Friends that would undertake the Interment of his Dead Body’, he now petitioned the public soliciting charity ‘on that Score’. He feared that his body might be handed over to the surgeons. His plea ‘had the desired Effect’. Indeed, he collected so much money that some later donations were rejected by him as unneeded.27 In the wake of his execution, several pamphlets sought to remind their readers that Smith fully deserved death. He was often mistaken for an ‘upright and honest Man’, but his life was composed of one long story of deception and criminality. Still, even these accounts had a difficult time making headway against the impression created by his ordeal. Most versions of his life sounded a note of regret rather than outrage. ‘Mr. Smith’, one author concluded, ‘had Talents, and a Genius, that might not only have secured him from the Temptations of Want, but that, if properly applied, and accompanied with Industry, Honesty, and Application, might have rendered him a useful Member of Society, and enabled him to live in Affluence’.28 His various efforts to secure mercy were applauded; his self-portrait, for the most past, was accepted by the public.

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The publicity accorded to the Smith case represented a watershed in the treatment of forgery cases in print. The crime loomed ever larger in the public imagination with every passing decade. The occurrence of three such cases in rapid succession, securing such widespread coverage, helped to plant a particular narrative of the crime in people’s minds. Sadly for the authorities, it was not the story that the judges told from the Bench as they warned the condemned not to expect mercy in their cases. They offered a simple tale, of how the misguided pursuit of wealth and the misapplication of talents led to disaster. ‘Unhappily for him’, one author wrote in support of Smith’s execution, ‘his abilities only served to aggravate his guilt, and gave him opportunities of doing mischief’.29 The lives of forgers often conformed to a familiar pattern, of young men who, in the scramble to get ahead or sustain a fashionable life, abused their skills and betrayed their social advantages. As such they offered easy targets for righteous anger and for satisfaction at the justice of their sentences. Seen in this light, in the eyes of the authorities who felt compelled to reject the frequent appeals for mercy, the condemned not only deserved their fate, the spectacle proved a satisfying occasion for affirming a few widely held truths. It was an antidote to the ills of the time. The crime appeared to epitomize the danger presented by an overheated City culture that robbed people of their social moorings. It was a symptom of a tendency to confuse the illusion with the real substance won by hard work and scrupulous conduct. A stern lesson was required to instil principles of prudence, honesty, and respect for social hierarchy. Even though condemned forgers, in the solemn warning they issued at the gallows, often lent their voices to the dissemination of this message, it did not always register in the way it was intended. While the accounts of the penitent condemned always excited commiseration with those who perished on the scaffold, here the satisfaction that arose from an edifying spectacle was undercut by the social identity of who suffered there. The problem, in part, was simply one of curiosity. Despite the relatively modest sums involved and the ambiguous character of most of the offenders, the stories of their lives and crimes proved irresistibly fascinating. ‘Men of figure in the Mercantile, as well as the Political World’, noted the Bath Journal in the aftermath of Baker’s execution, ‘when they are made Examples of Publick Justice, naturally excite the Curiosity of their Fellow Countrymen to know by what Steps they rose to Eminence, and what the Misfortunes were that had compelled them to close their Scene of Life with Infamy and Reproach’.30 How one reacted to this drama varied. Some saw in the figure of the forger a sinister character who took advantage of the paper system and imperiled national prosperity in the pursuit of selfish gain used to support an immoral life. To others, and perhaps a majority, the condemned were victims of societal pressures beyond their control. They were weak rather than evil. They surrendered to temptation; their conduct was understandable and, to some, pardonable. They were not villains through and through.

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So powerful was this version of the forger’s plight that it could result in the rewriting of the identity of those who actually committed the crime. Despite the variety of cases and the striking differences in the characters of the people involved, the reporting of the episodes followed conventional lines. The accounts in pamphlets and the press tended to emphasize the respectability of the forgers; they sometimes even raised their social status. William Smith gained a posthumous respectability he lacked in life. The portraits of forgers offered in print normalized the perpetrators, making them seem familiar. They scarcely lived up to the alarming images offered by the judges.

9.4 Frustrated sympathy If these three cases established the pattern for reporting forgery cases, the discovery, in 1762, of an extensive forgery, committed by the stockbroker John Rice, inaugurated an epoch in which the crime provided some of the most sensational trials of the day. Forgers such as Rice, the Perreaus (1775), Dr Dodd (1777), the engraver Ryland (1783), and the banker Fauntleoy (1824), gained a notoriety that the public remembered for decades. Rice was the son of an upper clerk in the South Sea house, a man who had made a ‘moderate fortune’ as a broker. Rice followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming a substantial dealer on the Exchange, with a reputation for diligence and honesty. He lived, one paper confided, in ‘genteel plenty’. Correspondents hastened to fill in the details of his story of social ascent. With his marriage he left the artisan district of Spital-square behind and moved to an elegant house near Gray’s Inn. Rice, however, was not content with the path to modest wealth charted by his father. His ambition led him to play in the more speculative market, buying on time, gambling on the rise and fall of stocks. These transactions, the papers dutifully noted with disapproval, did not involve a real transfer of assets. Rather, as one commentator complained, they were made between men with no stock to sell or money to buy it with. The exchanges were merely fictional, sustained only by the promises of those who participated in them. Indeed, since the sale was contrary to statute, no legal obligation existed to honour the contract. The dealers, then, ‘are under a necessity of trusting implicitly to each other’s honour’. If a considerable loss occurred, and one of the parties defaulted, it fell to the broker to cover the shortage or to forfeit his character. The end of the Seven Years’ War saw much frenzied speculation for very large sums. Rice was a major loser in this period, though the press portrayed him as the victim of the failed stratagems of others. He quickly found himself desperately overextended. Faced with the prospect of total ruin, he employed forged letters of attorney to misappropriate funds deposited with him by some of his clients. ‘In the mean time, the same flattering hopes that seduced him to fraud, concurred with his vanity to betray him into unbounded expense’. A house, a villa, carriages, all became elements in his self presentation. They

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represented both the alluring dream to which he was captive and the necessary illusion he required to sustain the belief of others that he was prosperous and credit-worthy. ‘But this splendour, which was baseless as the fabric of a vision’, vanished when one of his clients arrived in London. Fearing certain discovery, Rice fled, first to Holland and finally to France. Before she could follow him, his wife was seized in possession of what remained of the money he had secured by his fraud. Detained in Cambray, Rice soon was forced to return to Britain to stand trial for his crime.31 When they took up events following his return to London, the tone of the narratives changed markedly. Rice became an object of intense sympathetic contemplation. One writer confided that Rice ‘felt his misfortunes with a sensibility so exquisite that nature frequently sunk under it’. When brought to the bar, he ‘sank down again without sign of life’. These displays of feeling found a willing response in a public ready to identify with his predicament. Once again, his misconduct, including his flight, was not held to disqualify him from the gentlest of press treatment. ‘The general appearance of his person, which was genteel, joined with his distress, touched all who saw him with great compassion’. There was no pretence of a neutral reporting of these cases. The language was frequently overwrought. ‘When the unhappy prisoner heard the verdict, he looked up to the bench with a countenance which expressed more than ever can be conceived by any but those who saw it, and with many tears implored the intercession of the court with his majesty to spare his life’. Unfortunately for him, the presiding judge was an unflinching upholder of severity in all cases of forgery. Lord Mansfield answered Rice ‘with great compassion’, but replied that ‘considering his crime and its consequences, in a nation where so much paper is substituted for money, he should think himself bound in conscience and duty to tell his majesty that he was not a proper object of his mercy’. Judging by the press response, few seem to have shared Mansfield’s belief. To many, Rice came to seem a martyr to unbending justice, a victim of fretful royal advisors. His death earned universal sympathy. ‘At the place of execution he was silent, except for prayer, when he expressed himself with great ardour, and the tumult of his mind in a great measure subsiding, he suffered death with a placid hope of an happy immortality’.32 By the 1770s, the public had become convinced that forgery was fatal, not so much for society, as for anyone unlucky enough to be convicted of the crime. In the many pamphlets and news stories about forgers, one seldom encounters a sense of alienation from the offender. Rather every phrase used to characterize the forger’s situation and behaviour was meant to produce a powerful sense of identification with the condemned and the emotions they felt. Edward Johnson, a forger executed in 1782, was ‘a very genteel young Man’, who ‘lived in good credit till this Affair happened’. When he attended chapel before his execution, he ‘was handsomely dressed, and his Hair smartly powdered’. A thousand people pressed into the building to see him.

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‘An immense number of spectators’ also gathered the day of the execution in Lincoln. ‘As it was supposed to be his first Offence’, he was ‘much pitied by the Multitude’.33 The crime invariably produced an ‘affecting narrative’, as it did in the case of Mark Powell, tried at the Old Bailey and executed for forgery in 1786. The ‘unfortunate, but well-respected youth’, originally from Yorkshire, was seized for forging a draft on his employers for £450 14s. What made ‘this matter more lamentable’ was Powell’s ‘universal good character’ and his recent marriage to a young woman of fortune. When the officers came to take Powell, they were so touched by his situation that they told his wife that he was summoned simply as evidence in a trial, and ‘that she would see him again in a few days’. His biographer explained that he committed the crime ‘to answer an immediate purpose in trade’, and fully intended to repay the money as soon as he received funds due to him. He was ‘without any apprehension of the dangerous consequences of the offence’. He did everything in his power to help the officials recover the money he had obtained. The broadsheet describing his case exploited every convention of the sentimental literature of the day to heighten the sorrow the reader felt for his situation. ‘The melancholy fate of Mr. Powell is one amongst the many recent instances which have presented themselves to the public, and impressed every feeling mind with true commiseration’. The author bowed with obvious regret to the necessity of the penalty. Forgery, he admitted, was ‘of such universal concern’ that to grant any extenuation would be the most dangerous precedent. ‘Otherwise, in the present case, the hand of mercy was a circumstance much to be wished for by those acquainted with the unfortunate youth, who (excepting the crime for which his life was forfeited) possessed every requisite which could constitute him an ornament to society’. Still, ‘his own untimely end’, as well as the misery of his wife and parents, ‘lay claim to every sympathetic concern’.34

9.5 Desperate ambivalence Throughout the eighteenth century there was widespread agreement on the special danger that the crime of forgery represented to the nation. Indeed, the portrait of the threat seems strangely exaggerated, even at times almost hysterical, given the infrequency with which it was prosecuted and the modest sums involved. The occurrence of the crime invariably provoked dark reflections on the moral tendency of the age. ‘Forgery gains a very alarming Stride in this Metropolis’, one paper noted in 1783, ‘and is convincing Proof how rapidly Dissipation gets Ground’.35 Authors at the end of the century remained unanimous in demanding death for the crime. ‘Every crime ought to be punished’, one pamphlet announced, ‘proportionally to the degree of secrecy wherewith it is committed, or to the degree of safety that the perpetrator is in for some time after. Thus forgery is more atrocious than theft or housebreaking, for a man may secure his house and repositories from being broken open, but he

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cannot hinder a man from forging his name’.36 These comments point to the lingering unease associated with the expansion of an economy based on paper instruments. Thus the wealth piling up in London appeared insubstantial and untrustworthy. At the same time, most authors conceded that the value of the substitution of paper for specie was undeniable. The answer seemed clear, to use the criminal law to erect a barrier against the temptation to abuse these useful and necessary instruments. ‘Lawyers’, one author explained in 1763, ‘have looked upon it [forgery] to be of so dangerous a nature, that seldom or never has the royal mercy been extended toward the perpetrator of it’.37 While regret was frequently expressed at the death of a particular forger, no one moved from this sentiment to the general claim that the punishment was too heavy for the crime. Set against this settled conviction was the experience of particular cases, where newspapers and pamphlets collaborated in producing a narrative that worked against the feeling of panic first produced by a report of a forgery. Instead they substituted a different ‘panic’, that which was produced by the thought of sending someone so like oneself to his death. It was not simply a case of class position; the identification went deeper. It touched upon the characteristics of the crime itself. The real problem for many who read these accounts was that they could imagine themselves in similar situations, surrounded by temptation or resorting to desperate measures to ward off bankruptcy. In the courtroom one discovered a neighbour or business associate. Character witnesses invariably presented a portrait of a man deeply enmeshed in a community. Samuel Orton, convicted of forging a letter of attorney for £500 in 1766, ‘was as much respected as any man in his neighborhood’. Even if such claims were an exaggeration, they were seldom challenged. Evidence rarely disclosed a settled conspiracy. The deceit was often a solitary, frequently desperate, act. The crime appeared the result of a momentary lapse, brought on by a mixture of miscalculation and extravagance. Orton’s forgery arose from his being embroiled in the collapse of other businessmen. He faced debts that threatened his ruin. The anger that the victims of the crime felt upon the first discovery of the fraud usually gave way to dismay at the idea of bringing an acquaintance or employee to the gallows. In the courtroom they sometimes expressed a reluctance to proceed. Orton’s prosecutor said he ‘would have gladly withdrawn his prosecution, being inexpressibly afflicted at his melancholy reverse of character’.38 Prosecutors and even jurors often signed petitions for mercy for the convicted forger. It was hard to sustain a sense of anger at the crime when one encountered a respectable offender and heard a pathetic story of bad luck, misjudgement, and surrender to temptation. Nothing better symbolized the conflict than the permission sometimes given to the condemned forger to travel to the gallows in a mourning coach. This was an unusual boon. It marked off the forger as a special case, not one deserving of extraordinary opprobrium, as the judicial rhetoric might have suggested, but of commiseration. The death of a forger was guaranteed to

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attract a large crowd. The publicity before hand, the unusual social status of the condemned, excited much attention. These exhibitions, or so the papers assure us, drew large numbers of ‘pitying beholders, a great part of whom shed tears upon the melancholy occasion’.39 The execution of a forger produced a kind of trauma. It seems surprising that such often tawdry affairs, most for trivial amounts and committed by dubious figures, could create such a sensation. It was the punishment that worked the transformation. The press faithfully recorded the shift in sentiment and helped to amplify the effect. These episodes generated conflicting emotions and responses, less between different social classes than within the community of professional and commercial people who were both threatened by the offense but also composed the social strata from which the offender came. These varied reactions mirrored the complexity of responses to the economic forces at work in their society.40 While moralists and literary figures frequently expressed doubts about the values fostered by the spread of commercial civilization and bemoaned the social consequences, the authorities displayed greater consciousness of the extent to which state power depended upon commerce to sustain national greatness. For the latter group, the fragility of the financial system required the support of the full majesty of the law. Thus the arguments of moralists and royal officials worked together to create fertile ground for a panic around forgery as a crime both uniquely symptomatic of the ills that afflicted the age and a disturbing challenge to the all-important credit network. The crime was associated in the minds of many with the behaviour of mistrusted or despised groups, brokers and dealers in stock, gamblers on the Exchange, those who sold their souls in pursuit of the vain pleasures offered by Metropolitan life. The antidote to dissipation and dissimulation was the gallows. An infamous death, it was hoped, would firmly fix in the public mind the evil of the crime. What was unexpected was the reaction to these repeated instances of official rigour. Far from being persuaded by the exemplary punishment, the press reports and pamphlets published after the fact displayed doubt and sorrow about the measures adopted. Much of the drama surrounding these cases arose from frantic efforts made to deflect the sword of justice. A close reading of these stories reveals that what people responded to was not only the class of the forger, but at least as much the narrative of how the offender came to commit the crime. At some point the focus of the story shifted, from a tale of impropriety that earned a well-deserved punishment, to a melodramatic account of understandable ambition and desperate efforts to avoid ruin that led to a momentary lapse of judgement. Above all it was the doom that awaited the forger that monopolized the reader’s attention. The authorities tried to sustain a sense of the seriousness of the crime by the severity of the penalty, but the panic that was most often experienced by readers of these stories was at the thought of executing someone who was a bit too much like themselves. It was word of these scattered but powerfully

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affecting deaths that kept the public on edge and produced a renewed sense of alarm when a fresh report of a forgery surfaced.

Notes This chapter was written with support from a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. 1. An Account of John Rice (1763), iv–vi. 2. Morning Post, 15 Apr. 1789. 3. Peter King, ‘Newspaper Reporting, Prosecution Practice and Perceptions of Urban Crime: The Colchester Crime Wave of 1765’, Continuity and Change 2 (1987), 449. 4. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (New York, 1980), 9. 5. Randall McGowen, ‘Making the “Bloody Code”? Forgery Legislation in EighteenthCentury England’, in Norma Landau (ed.), Law, Crime and English Society, 1660–1830, (Cambridge, 2002), 117–38. 6. Julian Hoppit, ‘The Use and Abuse of Credit in Eighteenth-Century England’, in N. McKendrick and R. B. Outhwaite (eds), Business Life and Public Policy (Cambridge, 1986), 65, more generally 64–78; Julian Hoppit, ‘Attitudes to Credit in Britain, 1680–1790’, The Historical Journal, 33 (1990), 305–22. 7. A. Sykes, A Letter to a Friend in which is Shewn the Inviolable Nature of Public Securities (1717), 5–7. 8. P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England (1967), 17–18, 32–4; H. V. Bowen, ‘“The Pests of Human Society”: Stockbrokers, Jobbers and Speculators in Mid-eighteenth-century Britain’, History, 78 (1993), 38–53. 9. Daily Post, 9 and 27 Jan. 1728, 27 Feb. 1728, 2 and 8 Apr. 1728. 10. Universal Spectator, 5 Apr. 1729. The sense of outrage against the perpetrators of the crime mounted as news of fresh forgeries appeared in the papers. ‘They write from Cheshire’, the Daily Post (20 Feb. 1729) reported, ‘that a clergyman and one of his Majesty’s Justices of the Peace of Chester, has been committed to the Castle of Chester, for forging a promissory note for £60 in the manner of a shopkeeper of that City, after the manner of the late William Hales, by erasing the body of a letter and writing the note over the shopkeepers name’. For a fuller account of the Hales episode and the resulting legislation, see Randall McGowen, ‘From Pillory to Gallows: The Punishment of Forgery in the Age of the Financial Revolution’, Past and Present, 165 (1999), 107–40. 11. An Account of John Rice (1763), iv–vi. 12. For the normal operation of mercy, see John Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800 (Princeton, NJ, 1986), 430–49; Peter King, Crime, Justice, and Discretion in England, 1740–1820 (Oxford, 2000), 297–333. 13. Newgate Calendar (1793), ii: 320. 14. Select Trials at the Session House in the Old Bailey (1742), 302–9; Derby Mercury, 13, 20, and 27 July 1738; see also, London Magazine (1738), 360. 15. New Newgate Calendar (1793), iii. 161. 16. The Annals of Newgate (1776), iii. 209–14; The Universal Magazine (1751), xxi. 47; Bath Journal, 11 Mar. 1751. 17. Gentleman’s Magazine (1751), xxi. 47. 18. Bath Journal, 11 Mar. 1751. 19. Bath Journal, 11 Mar. 1751; London Magazine (1750), 602.

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20. Whitehall Evening Post, 16–19 Sept. 1749; An Authentic Account of the Life of Paul Wells (1749), 1–15, 17, 22, 26. 21. Select Trials at the Old Bailey (1764), ii. 21–36; The Life and Memoirs of Mr. William Smith (1750); Newgate Calendar (1775), iv. 110; The Annals of Newgate (1776), iii. 187–97. 22. Whitehall Evening Post, 20–22 Sept. 1750; The Universal Magazine (1750), vii. 141–2; London Magazine (1750), 474. 23. Bath Journal, 1 Oct. 1750; see also, The British Magazine (1750), v. 405–7. 24. Select Trials at the Old Bailey (1764), ii. 33; Whitehall Evening Post, 25–27 Sept. 1750. 25. Gentleman’s Magazine (1750), xx. 414. The petition was also carried in the Whitehall Evening Post, 20–22 Sept. 1750, and in the Newcastle Courant, 29 Sept. 1750, as well as many other papers. 26. The Life and Memoirs of Mr. William Smith (1750), 23. 27. Select Trials at the Old Bailey (1764), ii. 21–36; Gentleman’s Magazine (1750), xx. 425–6, 473. 28. Select Trials at the Old Bailey (1764), ii. 21–36; the Newcastle Courant, 6 Oct. 1750, not only described Smith’s execution, but published a poem on the subject as well. See also, Newgate Calendar (1775), iv. 110. 29. Newgate Calendar (1775), iv.110. 30. Bath Journal, 11 Mar. 1751. 31. The Annals of Newgate (1776), vi. 91–5; Gentleman’s Magazine (1763), xxxiii. 207–10. 32. A Genuine Account of the Remarkable Life and Transactions of John Rice, Paul Lewis, and Hannah Dayoe (1763), 6–7; An Account of John Rice (1763), 1–8; Gentleman’s Magazine (1763), xxxiii. 207–10; Annals of Newgate (1776), vi. 91–5. 33. Derby Mercury, 7–14, 14–21, Mar. 1782. 34. A True and Affecting Narrative of Mr. Mark Powell (York, 1786). 35. Public Advertiser, 23 Apr. 1783. 36. An Account of John Westcote in Which Is Laid Down an Effectual Method for Preventing Theft and Robbery (1765), 16–17. 37. An Account of John Rice (1763), iv–vi. 38. Annals of Newgate (1776), iv. 191–4; A True and Genuine Account of Samuel Orton (1767). See also, Donna Andrew and Randall McGowen, The Perreaus and Mrs. Rudd: Forgery and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century London (Berkeley, CA, 2001), 22–4. Not everyone adopted a sympathetic tone. The American Loyalist, Samuel Curwen, resisted the popular feeling on behalf of Ryland, ‘whose but too justly deserved fate is deplored by many’. The Journal of Samuel Curwen, ed. Andrew Oliver (Cambridge, MA, 1972), ii. 943. 39. See, for instance, the description of the execution of Robert Carpenter at Winchester, in 1785 (The Times, 7 Apr. 1785), or the execution of a father and son, both named Thomas Phipps, at Shrewsbury, in 1789 (Morning Post, 14 Sept. 1789). 40. Cohen suggests some of these complexities in his treatment of moral panics. Folk Devils, 192–5.

10 ‘How frail are Lovers vows, and Dicers oaths’: Gaming, Governing and Moral Panic in Britain, 1781–1782 Donna T. Andrew

The most happy consequences, it is to be hoped, will arise from the bill preparing by the Attorney General, for the amending the former statutes respecting gaming, gaming houses and the tables which have of late proved so ruinous to many individuals and families, will in all likelihood be totally suppressed, as the new act will render it very dangerous, either to be possessed of, or to be seen at them. (Morning Herald, 17 Jan. 1782; London Courant, 18 Jan. 1782) He was a gambler in politics as well as in social life. L. G. Mitchell, on Fox (Mitchell, Charles James Fox, (Oxford, 1992), 53) On 4 July 1782, Charles James Fox resigned his cabinet seat and, in effect, caused the demise of what had been the tail end of the Rockingham ministry. Just two weeks earlier, a much awaited Bill, The Act to Prevent the Pernicious Practice of Gaming, commonly called the EO Table Bill in the press, had been first introduced to Parliament by George Byng, MP for Middlesex, and despite some deliberation in both Houses, had been ready for the king’s signature, but it was mysteriously misplaced and thus lost with the prorogation of Parliament. This paper will consider this much-discussed, almost-enacted law, to consider why many sectors of public opinion, as revealed by an examination of the newspapers and journals of the metropolis, thought the country required its passage, and to examine how Fox’s notoriety as a gambler became part of the public discussions that surrounded it. At this particular time, when the American War was almost certainly lost, when England was at war with France, Spain and Holland, as well as waging a war in India, why were English newspapers and their readers so concerned about the proliferation 176

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of gambling? Was this an instance of ‘moral panic’? Furthermore, who was responsible for the introduction of the EO Table Bill into the House at this critical moment and did the press create or only reflect an apparent public demand for its passage? These are some of the questions this essay will address and seek to explore. First, a brief introductory to the notion of ‘moral panic,’ especially to the sort that Peter King and others have described as ‘media-created’. In discussing the kind of anxiety created by press reports of violent street crime, King concluded that such panics followed a ‘six-stage pattern’ in which such acts, reported and exaggerated by the press, led to an overdrawn estimation of the size of the problem, which in turn generated legal or quasi-legal responses, and which, in turn, calmed public fears and dissipated anxieties about the problem.1 While this essay will not deal with street crime, I hope, by examining the ‘panic’ surrounding the game of EO, to explore the extent to which such explanations can be employed to understand less violent, though perhaps as fear-raising, offences. However before proceeding, it is necessary to say something about the problem of gaming in eighteenth-century England, and its particular connection with perceptions of failed leadership in society and government around the time of the American War.

10.1 Gaming, ‘the Grand Business of the Nation’2 Gaming was one of the few vices that the English were willing to admit was a native product. Some connected it with their descent from the ancient Germans, whose addiction to gaming was proverbial. Others thought that, whatever its origins, it had received an enormous boost from the get-richquick-schemes which characterized the early eighteenth century.3 This is why two Acts were passed in 1739 and 1745, which sought, though largely unsuccessfully, to regulate public gaming and restrict gambling losses. Needless to say, among its devotees this vice was more a way of acting in the world generally than just a single sort of activity. In addition to betting on unknown outcomes (who would die or marry first, which raindrop would reach the bottom of the window-pane first) English men and women engaged in and bet on, various more organized ‘games’ and ‘sports.’ This paper will only consider indoor gambling of the social sort, leaving horse racing as well as lottery flutters, aside. A concentration on cards, dice and gambling machines not only leaves us a wide field of study, but allows us to ask about the particular form of gambling that the 1782 Bill was aimed at curbing, EO. EO was an early form of roulette. Played on a special table, often shaped like an octagon or circle, punters bet not only against each other, but against the table’s proprietors. In his life of Beau Nash, Oliver Goldsmith claimed that Nash had introduced and made the EO table prominent at Bath. According to David Gadd, EO was first invented in Tunbridge and

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only popularized by Nash. But whomever was its progenitor, one hears little of it before the mid-eighteenth century. It is likely that early EO tables were portable, and were set up in whichever town hosted a well-known horse race, as evening entertainment for the many attracted by the earlier equine competition. Though Gadd claims that the 1745 Act, by making EO illegal, ‘cut off the main source of Nash’s livelihood’,4 there is no evidence for the game’s disappearance. In fact, by the 1750s, EO tables could be found as permanent fixtures throughout London, both in gambling venues and private homes. By the 1780s they figured as the pre-eminent symbols of unchecked and prodigious gaming, of ‘a practice so big with ruin, as threatens destruction wherever it harbours’.5 Gaming was by no means either a new activity, nor seen as a new vice, in the late eighteenth century. Thus, more than a century before, the anonymous author of Timely Advice, or a Treatise of Play noted that by such sport, the gamester ‘loseth very often his patrimonie, wherewith hee should continue the honour of his house and name, and maintaine his own person, wife, children and familie, with that splendour and decencie which the memorie of his Auncestours, and the worth of his state deserve and require’.6 The gaming addict was also a popular subject for theatrical portrayals. Shirley’s tragedy of The Gamester was a hit when it was first performed in 1637 as was Susannah Centlivre’s comic Gamester of 1705. Dedicating this later work to the earl of Huntingdon, Centlivre complimented her patron by wishing that ‘all Men of Rank and Quality [were] as indifferent to this bewitching Diversion of Gameing as Your Lordship’. Unlike these lesser, self-absorbed men, Centlivre noted that Huntingdon ‘pursue[s] a Nobler End, and have chose rather to stain the Field with the Blood of Your Nation’s Enemies, than encrease your Fortune by another’s Ruin; or expose Your Own to the Hazardous Die a Resolution worthy of Your Birth and Fortune’.7 Despite its attractions for the social elite, the real danger of gaming was always seen to be its ubiquity, both in terms of its incidence and its impact. For it was neither an activity restricted to only one class or gender, nor limited in its effects to ruining only its votaries. Among upper-class male devotees, gambling was portrayed as the prelude to political corruption, to duelling or suicide; in females, it was argued, it would invariably, lead to adultery and death. And among working-class men, gaming led inexorably to theft, forgery and the highway. For gambling was a virulent disease; ‘the most fatal and epidemical Folly and Madness, especially among the Persons of superior Degree, and Quality’.8 Indeed, the source of this virulent moral infection, of this consuming vice, was traced to ‘the follies of persons of distinction’ which were apt to be copied by the less well-bred.9 This constituted a failure of leadership: children learned virtue (or vice) it was said, from their parents and instructors; society learned these lessons from the behaviour of its leaders, its patriarchal figures, its fashionable upper classes. When good, they were very, very good, when vicious, they were the

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font of social corruption, even if protected personally by their wealth. For whatever the rich or well-born chose to do with their money, the gambling fever or ‘itch’ as it was often dubbed, would inevitably lead ordinary folk to gambling losses and crime. No wonder Bankrupts weekly crowd Gazettes, Since Drugs or Pistols often frank the Debts Of lavish Gamesters, when undone by Bets.10 It was against this context that Henry Fielding, writing in his capacity as magistrate around mid-century, chastised these vicious lower-class amusements, while exempting the follies of their betters from similar criticism.11 The problem seemed to be growing. Although a law had been passed in 1739, intending to give magistrates the power to regulate and punish such ‘public’ gaming, and, six years later, strengthened and extended to include games, like EO, not covered in the older legislation, it was clear that this had not happened. Indeed it appears that EO had proliferated. Through the 1760s and 1770s both newspapers and magazines published stories and accounts of the large sums lost in short periods while engaged in this supposedly banished game. Thus, in a letter to the Town and Country Magazine, a ‘Broken Gamester’ recounted the loss of 6,000 in six weeks of gaming by Sir Thomas F–. And it is here that we have one of the earliest public mentions of the prodigious gaming losses of Charles James Fox, ‘the young cub’. The amazement of the public is frequently excited by accounts of the sums daily won and lost by young men of quality at the fashionable gaming houses. Their astonishment would be much greater if they were informed of the immense sums borrowed by these gentlemen to answer the exigencies of a few unfortunate casts. The young Cub, it is said, is at this time charged with annuities to the full amount of six thousand pounds on this score alone.12 Certainly, the growth of newspapers in the 1760s and 1770s did much to inform people of the size and nature of such losses among the social elite, as well as to inflame concerns about its implications for national leadership. It is interesting that with worsening relations with the colonies, the negative attitude to gaming hardened, both generally and especially against Parliamentary gamesters. Of course, in some, perhaps large part, this turn can be seen as just another political ploy; for most of the deep players were Whigs, and the attack on gaming was, in many ways, an attack on Fox and his friends. But whether or not such political partisanship was its immediate motive, the force of its rhetorical appeal may well have represented a more general alarm about the state of the nation, which identified gaming as a symptom of moral crisis. It is striking that newspapers of different political

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persuasions, whether supported by the ministry in power or the party out of office, all lamented the fatal growth of and indulgence in such gambling.13 ‘As it is notorious that our Legislators themselves are addicted to this shameful Vice of Gaming almost beyond any of the rest of the People’, remarked the Public Advertiser in 1775, ‘there can be little Hopes of Redress. No effectual Law will be passed by Men against their own favourite Diversion …. A Law Maker, who is at the same Time a Gamester, is an absurd as well as dangerous Character’.14 The London Magazine concurred: ‘Every man incumbered with the consequences of his vices or his follies, who comes into parliament, is a millstone about the neck of his country. He that has had so little thought for himself will have less still for the public; the man who has dismembered his fortune, will dismember the empire to recover it’. How could such perfidious fellows, asked ‘A Friend to Youth’ in a letter to the Gazetteer, be promoted ‘to places of important trust, and considerable emolument, in preference to men of unimpeached integrity?’ ‘Every friend to virtue and his country’, he concluded, ‘must shudder at the prospect’.15 And shudder many did, especially at the worsening news coming from America, from the Caribbean and from the venues of war against France, Spain and Holland. By the early 1780s, it seemed increasingly likely that the war would not end well, and that, in addition to the imperial and fiscal losses, its conclusion would only lead to an increase in crime and internal upheaval. That enormous domestic conflagration of 1780, dubbed the Gordon riots, served only to feed such fears. And so, from 1781 onwards, the press was full of gaming, and its deleterious effect on the morals and future of the nation.

10.2 The attack on EO: ‘Does justice sleep?’16 Even before the introduction of the bill, formally called The Act to Prevent the Pernicious Practice of Gaming, but commonly known as the EO Table Bill, brought to the House of Commons in June 1782, the press had launched an unprecedented, fourfold attack not only on this one game, but on the whole unregulated, reckless and socially deleterious panoply of gaming practices. In some curious way, the EO Table, and its extirpation, had become a symbol of what needed to be rehabilitated in the English polity. In the five months preceding debate on the Bill, the number of comments and items in the press, about gambling in general, and about EO tables in particular, increased dramatically. For the last five months of 1781, for example, a gaming item appeared in the press approximately once every ten days; in the first five months of 1782, a similar story appeared at least once every four days.17 Not only did these sorts of reports appear more frequently, but sometimes in more than one daily paper on the same day, and often copied from one paper to another. In addition London’s magistrates were publicly cautioned ‘to suppress the EO tables which are now kept in every

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corner of the town, and its environs, to ruin the unwary’, and according to the reports magistrates and constables began to enter and break up such illegal gaming-haunts. Moreover, a new comedy called Gambling was being rehearsed at Covent Garden: this was a subject, noted the London Courant ‘truly interesting at the present day, and from which the strongest moral may be drawn. A drama written for the purpose of correcting vice, carries an intrinsic merit in it’.18 Gaming, and especially EO, seemed to be the topic of the day. Despite the broad range of press interest in gaming at this time, there were some particular preoccupations. The first, not surprisingly, was concern over, or commendation for the actions of the magistrates in policing these nuisances. The Morning Herald, for example, noting the activity of London’s magistrates in the control of gaming during the reign of George I, insisted that ‘[t]he present state of gambling in London, the EO Tables, high and low, honourable and dishonourable, demand the same interposition of the magistracy’. However, less than four months later, the same paper had changed its views somewhat. ‘A great deal of ill-founded invective has been lavished on the magistrates of the Westminster police, for not suppressing the various EO tables that are played at within their jurisdiction’ but, it argued that without complaints from the public, no action could be taken.19 In addition to encouraging the magistracy to police this form of gaming, the press also opened its pages to the comments and contributions of the public. A good example of such engagement was the publication of two letters, just months apart, in the Morning Herald, the newspaper that seemed to be in the vanguard of the growing anti-EO campaign. They were more directly critical of the authorities for their inaction, and of elite addiction to gaming. The first, signed ‘Jack the Chicken’, noted that ‘on the public papers taking notice of the permission of EO tables’ in Westminster, the justices had ordered one of the houses shut, but that thereafter, ‘the matter was dropped’. He commented archly that it would be ‘too infamous’ to believe the rumour that the magistrates were sharing in the profits of the proprietors; instead he merely noted their ‘want of activity in suppressing’ the vicious gambling. But expostulating on the evils that have occurred because of legal non-interference, Jack addressed the justices thus: [T]wo subalterns have been obliged to sell their commissions; four apprentices have robbed their masters; two traders have become bankrupts, and one man has shot himself. And all these happened because you did not exert yourself totally to extirpate those tables. The second letter, signed ‘A Constant Reader’ argued that different classes played different games; the lowest play the lottery, ‘[t]hose who soar one degree above these’, played EO at the races, while those of ‘more elevated

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state’ played Hazard or EO in the gaming houses in St. James’s street. Most of the letter, however, which recounts how ‘the violent rage for gaming … prevails through almost every class of people, from the peer to the pauper’, described the losses and gaming addiction of the Great, ranging from ‘the late Lord Chesterfield’ to ‘the present C[harles] F[ox] and Sir W[illiam] D[raper], conqueror of Manila’.20 This second, anti-aristocratic motif, much iterated in these months, focused on the gaming of Fox and his circle. One such comment urged the government to destroy all Hazard and EO tables, for then ‘the existence of the patriotic orators is no more.’ Six months later, it was reported that Mr. Secretary Fox has pledged himself, in the most solemn manner, never to play at any game again, on any pretence whatever.–If one could take the Ghost’s word on this occasion, we should have but little doubt of his making a very vigilant and active Minister!–but alas! how frail are Lovers vows, and Dicers oaths.21 A third trope, of genteel suicide caused by gaming losses, also appeared in the reportage at this time, although this was not a new feature. Here, for example, are a brief few lines from an An Essay on Gaming, in a epistle to a young nobleman, of 1761: Ah, what a Troop of Suicides arise, With mangled Forms, grim Looks, and ghastly Eyes; Undone by Play22 However two actual and dramatic cases of gambling-induced suicide, which occurred less than three months apart, were widely reported in the press. The first report, of ‘an unfortunate young man who put an end to his existence’, in a fit of despair, through losing his money at an EO Table, was reported in the Morning Herald and the London Courant of the same day. Both papers noted that upon hearing of his death, his fiancée, who had been scheduled to wed within a few days, completely lost her mind and was not expected to recover. The second, about a young man, who had shot himself, explained that his ‘rash action’ was the result of ‘his having been enticed to gamingtables, where he lost his whole fortune, which was sufficient to have supported him, and was reduced to the last shilling’. It concluded by ‘wishing that the Magistrates would use their authority to suppress all gaming-houses, as it would be a means of saving many a person from destruction’.23 A fourth important subject, to become much more prominent in the next year, was the need for new and tougher legislation to control gambling. The Morning Chronicle stated it succinctly: ‘There never was an act of the legislature more immediately expedient, than one for the suppression of the EO and other gaming tables’ at that moment. Less than a month later, it was

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reported that such a new law was ‘in the works’; this legislation would lead to the total suppression of all such gaming, since it would ‘render it very dangerous, either to be possessed of [gaming tables] or to be seen at them’.24 Thus, even before the EO Table Bill, was brought to the House of Commons early in the summer of 1782, the London press had begun to whip up public support, and to exert pressure on local magistrates and members of parliament, in an unprecedented campaign to improve public morality by banning illegal gaming. And it had also made the connection between aristocratic gaming, and the excesses of Charles James Fox in particular, with the developing crisis of British policy in the colonies. The greatest newspaper interest, however, lasted from the introduction of the Bill in June 1782 until the end of the year, when a hoped-for reintroduction of the Bill failed to materialize, and most specifically, from June through August 1782, when legislative action was most discussed. While stories about gaming were, as we have already noted, frequent before June 1782, the next three months saw an explosion of newsprint dealing with this issue. There was usually at least one item most days about the evils of gaming, and, if the reader missed the story in one paper, he or she could probably find it in another.25 But what was the tenor of such stories? Had they changed in tone or topic from the previous reports? Certain types of stories continued to be published: the exertions of the magistrates in attempting to eradicate public gambling and the great sums that could be lost or won at the gaming tables were both featured. In April 1782, the Morning Herald, perhaps attempting to spur London’s police into action, thundered: The doors leading to the EO Tables in and about Covent garden are illuminated with additional lamps, and every evening set wide open for the reception of all comers–Yet the proper officers wisely refrain crossing the threshold of those profane dwellings. Let us hear no more of the reformed police of Westminster.26 Yet it is also clear that in the following months the magistracy, perhaps stung by such reports, frequently acted against these establishments. Readers could surely take some comfort from the numerous items of magisterial action, of break-ins of gaming houses and arrests of their denizens. Between April and December of 1782, as many as a dozen such incidents were reported, many simultaneously noted, by most of London’s newspapers.27 But whether reporting police activities, or scolding police inaction, throughout this year the press encouraged and prodded the magistrates and their men to greater exertion. By August 1782, the Morning Post confidently asserted that ‘[t]he interposition of the Justices in the suppression of EO tables, is an act that will gain them the most unbounded applause of the public, and give every reason to hope that the long looked for reform in that body, so necessary

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to the protection of the subject, and the honour of the city of Westminster, is near at hand’.28 As disturbing as the many accounts of the vast sums lost at these tables, were the infrequent accounts of immense sums won.29 Perhaps inevitably, given the commercial context of these reports, an advertisement appeared, proposing to teach young men ‘a method to avoid losing’ at play, specifically at the EO Tables. The advertiser, addressing his notice to ‘those gentlemen who have lost money at that too frequented game of E.O.’ specified that since he did not wish ‘to encourage Gaming, he hopes none but persons of property will apply’. The Public Advertiser reported another, perhaps even more satisfying, solution to gaming losses: A Certain Keeper of an EO Table was horsewhipped last Saturday Morning till he implored Mercy on his Knees, by a Gentleman in Westminster, whose Son he had the impudence to arrest for Money he had lent him to Sport with at his own Table. The Gentleman obliged him to kiss the Whip that chastised him.30 As we have seen, the EO Table Bill was introduced in June, spurred, it was said, by the combined requests of the magistrates of Westminster, and backed by the powerful influence of the Bank of England.31 However it becomes clear from reading the accounts of the debates on the Bill, both in the Commons and the Lords, that few parliamentarians really wished it to pass; many gave it a lukewarm approval, while as many found it inadequate, impolitic or an infringement on civil liberties. We can never know exactly why the Bill did not pass or why a new one was not introduced in the next session, but we can get clues as to what some contemporaries thought might have happened and indications of what objections some had to it. When a variety of amendments were made to the Bill in the House of Lords, the duke of Chandos objected that he thought this would cause the Bill to be lost, as prorogation of the session was imminent. Lord Effingham assured his colleagues of a number of seemingly contradictory things: that the bill could still be passed and that it really was for the best if it wasn’t, since in its unamended form it was badly flawed; and that, in his discussions with London’s magistrates, they had told him that they did not need new powers, but just wanted authority to control EO tables.32 Still, the Lords passed the Bill, although when the king prorogued Parliament on 11 July, the Bill was somehow lost.33 No one could explain how this had happened. Less than a week later, the Morning Herald reported a correspondent as saying that ‘The EO Bill … was lost by one of those kind of accidents which seem as if it happened on purpose!’ But despite this mysterious disappearance, the Herald blamed Fox for its loss; having lost his post as secretary of state by the fall of the Rockingham ministry with its leader’s death, an event his supporters had,

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the paper said, foreseen, ‘his imps were the loudest against the bill, as they foresaw that their master and themselves would soon have occasion for [such] a resource’. And a ‘found account’ of a conversation between Fox and Sheridan makes the nature of this resource clear; in it Fox noted that he had ordered a dozen EO tables, which, with himself and his friends as proprietors, would ‘pick up cash sufficient to support us all the winter’. Still others blamed Effingham, satirically suggesting that a ‘Corps of Sharpers and Pidgeon Pluckers’, in addition to presenting him with an inlaid EO Table, worth three hundred guineas, has ‘unanimously agreed to present an Address of Thanks to the Right Honourable the Earl of Effingham’ for ensuring the failure of the Bill.34 A more potent problem for the success of the bill was that it allowed magistrates and constables to enter private dwellings, as opposed to taverns or inns where gambling was practiced, to pursue illicit and upper-class gaming. Though this was not a new proposal, having been made thirty years before in the Covent Garden Journal35, it still roused anger and distrust. For it was clear that it would allow for the punishment of the gaming of the ton as well as of the hoi polloi, and that, in a Parliament that contained a large number of extraordinary gamesters, such a piece of legislation was anathema. In its discussion in the Commons, this objection was strongly voiced. Thus Sir P. J. Clerke argued that this was a ‘bill militating with the liberty of the subject …. What a shocking thing would it be, to have private houses disturbed by this new authority at all hours, and to have ladies made liable to be sent to the house of correction, at the will of any magistrate’.36 In addition to the enhanced powers of entry into both private and public places by constables, that the Bill would have enacted, and that was objected to by its opponents, an older trope was also frequently invoked; that the men who were to be given these extensive powers were venal and corrupt. As early as July 1769, a long editorial letter in the Oxford Magazine, addressed to Sir J[ohn] F[ieldin]g and entitled ‘Police’, argued that since the ‘civil magistrate is pensioned by bawds, pimps, whores, vintners and gamblers’ it was clear that he would not ‘enforce the execution of the laws against all transgressors, in all times, and at all places, however highly distinguished by rank or title’. Nor, it continued, would he visit those ‘polite places of private resort for the practice of public vices, and … insist that the makers of the laws should be the first on whom they should be obligatory and binding’.37 So too, in the discussions surrounding the EO Bill, some argued that it would be ‘dangerous to extend the authority of Justices of the Peace’, for, it was asserted, their existing summary proceedings exhibited only ‘corruption of heart, and ignorance of head, displayed in the most glaring colours’. The anonymous author of a letter to the lord chancellor, published in the Morning Herald before the Bill’s final reading, noting that constables were ‘a set of fellows, who have no means whatever of livelihood, but those which arise from taking up thieves and other felons, and prosecuting them to conviction, for rewards’, prophesied that were the Bill to

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become law, he would not ‘be surprised if midnight robbers should assume the name of constables, and under the authority of one absurd law, violate all the others’. Waving the banner of the need to preserve inviolate ‘the sanctuary of private houses’ and condemning the venality of London’s police, the Bill was somehow misplaced and thus lost.38 And so, when the Bill failed, that should have been the end of the story. Public interest and newspaper coverage might well have been expected to decline. Yet it did not disappear completely, nor overnight. Its supporters said they were sure that another Bill would be reintroduced in the new session, and, by implication at any rate, that this one would become law. Thus early in September of 1782 the Morning Chronicle reported that ‘A Bill to prevent the pernicious practice of Gaming, it is said, will be moved for a few days after the meeting of Parliament for dispatch of business’. This Bill would, it was asserted, come into effect before Christmas.39 Though we know that such a revised Bill never was proposed in Parliament, its anticipation can explain, at least in part, why newspaper interest continued through the autumn of 1782. In addition, two new stories appeared in these months, and were widely covered during the period between the failure of the first act, and the hoped-for introduction of a second. For many newspapers and for their readers, both stories illustrated the enormously deleterious impact of such games as EO, not only on the dissolute upper classes and the criminal lower classes, but also on that bedrock of respectability, the middling and professional classes. The first of these episodes involved Charles Clutterbuck, a clerk to the Bank of England, who, on the 21st of July 1782 absconded, after he had lost all his own monies and £5,000 worth of Bank notes, by playing at the EO tables. Two days later, an advertisement inserted by the officers of Bow Street appeared in most of London’s major papers, requesting information about Clutterbuck’s whereabouts, describing his dress and demeanour, noting his ‘genteel appearance’ and offering £100 reward for his apprehension.40 It was said that Clutterbuck was so utterly undone by his losses that he had to borrow a few guineas for his escape.41 About a week after his disappearance, an item in the London Chronicle remarked that on a visit to several EO tables, the correspondent had ‘observed several clerks belonging to banking and merchant houses, who are in the custom of frequenting such tables, and sacrificing their time, their character and fortunes, to the meanest gratifications’. In conclusion, he advocated that merchant and banking houses conduct undercover surveillance of such young men’s leisure pursuits, ‘and thereby, perhaps prevent such unhappy situations as that of Clutterbuck’s family’. Other papers noted the heartbreak of Mrs Clutterbuck, Charles’ bereft mother, and in a curious way, Clutterbuck himself became a tragic, but sympathetic character. On the other hand, the infamy of the proprietors of EO tables was capped when, less than a month after Clutterbuck’s disappearance, one EO proprietor tried to cash in one of the bills that Clutterbuck had lost at his table.42

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The other, rather odder and less tragic story involving EO tables, took place during these months at Dr James Graham’s Temple of Health. Established in 1779, Graham gave medical lectures in the Temple, as well as renting out its ‘electrical bed’, which he claimed, improved fecundity and cured sterility. Though wildly successful for a brief period, by the summer of 1782, Graham was facing bankruptcy. In order to extricate himself, and to use the notoriety of the Temple for non-medicinal purposes, Graham and a gaming associate, one John Wiltshire, converted it into an EO establishment. The press delighted in referring to it in these months as the ‘The Temple of Thieves’, ‘The Temple of Hymen’ or ‘The Temple of Destruction.’43 On the same page of the London Chronicle, and in fact, just below the item which discussed the presence of the young men who haunted EO houses, and might, like Clutterbuck, come to destruction, was this report: The constables on Monday night entered the Temple of Health in Pall Mall, and cut the table to pieces; but they were not strong enough to take the company, for there were not less than 300 persons present.44 The next raid on the Temple was even more dramatic. In August 1782, officers of the peace, infiltrating the room, destroyed the EO table with one mighty slash of an axe, ‘the first intimation that the company received’ that their play was ended. In the fray that followed, ‘Mr. Addington [the magistrate] was very severely hurt by a stroke of a bludgeon on his head’. Addington recovered, and eventually Wiltshire was found guilty of keeping an EO table and punished.45 This story formed the kernel of at least one, perhaps two pantomimes presented in London that summer. The first, called ‘The Genius of Nonsense’ described the arrest of the Goddess of Health at the EO table, and her committal to Bridewell. This quip, the Morning Chronicle reported, ‘produced one of the loudest bursts of laughter and applause ever heard in a theatre’. Another pantomime, played at Sadler’s Wells, featured the transformation of Graham’s ‘Celestial Bed’ into an EO table, and the entertainment, according to the report was ‘executed in a manner as deservedly attracts and merits the applause of the spectators’.46 These scenes of apparent pleasure, of a jovial mockery of the game that so many were excoriating, raise an interesting though difficult question about what would appear to be deep-seated anxieties about EO gaming. But perhaps an alternative response to an entrenched evil was black, Swiftian or satiric laughter. Despite the failure of the EO Bill to become law, in the months following its defeat, the magistrates of Middlesex and the City were busy in shutting down EO houses and prosecuting their keepers. Almost a dozen reports of such crackdowns were published in this period, and the Morning Chronicle reported that ‘[we are] credibly informed, that the justices throughout every

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city, town and borough in the kingdom, are determined to exert themselves, and put a stop to the game of EO, especially at the time of races’. By the end of August, the Morning Herald crowed that ‘The vigilance of the magistracy has at length obtained a compleat victory over the various keepers of EO tables, those combined foes to every order of civil society’ and added four months later, that ‘the almost total extirpation of the pernicious game of EO has gained Sir Sampson Wright [a London magistrate] the universal esteem of every friend of social virtue and honest industry’.47 Although, when it became clear that a new EO Bill was not going to be introduced, the exertions of the magistrates diminished and reports of EO’s reappearance emerged.

10.3 Conclusion Two questions remain; first, was the anxiety about gaming, and especially about the EO tables, an instance of a moral panic, and second, what was the relation of this episode to the larger unfolding of events in the 1780s? As a possible instance of a moral panic, the EO table debates and failed legislation fit perfectly with what analysts have described as the role of the press in stirring up fears, in keeping tensions high, in giving concerned members of the public various fora in which to air their views and bring domestic tragedies to the attention of the readership. The timing is also in tune with that suggested by such historians and sociologists, being about eighteen months from beginning to end. Though the element of violence in this instance was minor (except for the suicides, of course) and usually involved the families and employers of the miscreants, rather than the general public itself, the distrust and suspicion created by the Clutterbuck debacle must have been very unsettling to many of the newspapers’ reading public. In some ways, however, the moral panic model fails to explain the complexities of this outbreak of anxiety in the press. Certainly, it did not lead to legislative action. For although public concerns certainly seem to have roused the local magistrates to take positive action, rather than continuing to turn a blind eye to illicit EO activities, and to have spurred them on to harass and prosecute their owners, in the end nothing permanent happened. The law proposed by the enemies of EO failed in Parliament, and, after a discreet interval, the magistrates resumed their indifference toward this form of gaming. While the press continued, and in fact increased its coverage of EO and its victims in the months after the loss of the Bill, no further steps were taken, despite hopes that a new version of the Bill would be introduced. And by the end of the year, the press coverage of EO specifically, and gambling in general, diminished, though it did not come close to disappearing, as the moral panic model suggests.48 So the EO Bill and the furore surrounding it resembled but did not fit perfectly with that model.

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The answer to the second question is even more difficult. It could be argued, as some in the press did, that the future reputation and political success of Charles James Fox depended on his support for the passage of this Bill. At one point, the Morning Herald even hoped that he would be its primary sponsor: Mr. Fox is said to have declared a determined resolution to abandon every species of gaming; he could perhaps not give a more acceptable proof of his sincerity in this particular, than by beginning his parliamentary career as minister, with introducing a bill for the entire suppression of EO tables, which, to its disgrace daily increase in every quarter of this metropolis. ‘[N]o one act of his administration’, added the Morning Chronicle, ‘will gain him more esteem from the true friends of this country’.49 Thus by supporting the EO Bill, Fox would not only have redeemed his own reputation, perhaps he would also have defused the crisis of moral leadership symbolized by press anxiety over aristocratic gaming. Indeed, if the passage of the EO Table Bill would have given Charles James Fox an opportunity to reclaim his reputation as a besotted and self-seeking gamester, an opportunity which he chose not to avail himself of, then the implications both for his future and for England’s, were substantial. We have at least two pieces of evidence that suggest that this was the case, at least in the eyes of contemporaries. The first is a cartoon, published in August 1782, entitled ‘Justice Wright’s a Coming or Secretary EO alias Reynard put to flight’ in which a lupine-headed Fox is portrayed before a gigantic EO table, as the Bow Street magistrates break down the door. The second is a brief letter to the Morning Herald seven months later, signed ‘Common Sense’ and addressed to the merchants and traders of Great Britain. After detailing the early dissipated career of Fox, the author asks, suppose such a man applied to any of you to superintend your affairs; and that he told you, with a very grave face, he was the only man in England capable of such a trust– …. Could you be persuaded, or bullied to take such a man into your counting-houses? … [could you] be induced to put the smallest part of your property under his care?50 So Fox was portrayed as an irredeemable recalcitrant who had gambled with the national interest, and gamesters like him were not to be trusted with the serious business of government. The blasted reputation of Fox was surely symbolic of a larger concern among the reading public. Perhaps newspaper interest in his gambling problem and the high expectations for the EO Table Bill represented an even more unsettling anxiety about the state of England and the condition of its ruling class; and especially about the imminent destruction of its first great Empire:

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This is perhaps the most awful Moment that England has ever experienced …. Where are the Nobility in this Instant of Danger? Gambling!– Where are the Gentry in this Instant of Danger? Gambling!– Where are the Commonalty in this Instant of Danger? Gambling!– What, are they all gambling? They are all at EO, or at Hazard, or at Cards, or at Pharaoh, or at Pass Dice.– …. And are there none of the Nobility, nor any of the Gentry Volunteers on board?– None.– Then is the Genius of England dead!51 Thus, although the power of public opinion, backed by the Bank of England, the City of London and the Westminster magistracy, all pressured Parliament to pass the EO Table Bill; and despite the massive amount of invective, satire and anger mustered by these concerned parties for the sort of moral regeneration that the Bill’s passage would inaugurate; nevertheless the moral panic or crusade launched by these would-be reformers was unable to compete with the entrenched and heedless power of England’s gambling-addicted ruling class, represented in the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The subsequent sense of disappointment and disillusionment in the press was palpable. Ultimately even Fox’s resignation of his position of secretary of state was presented as a gambling ploy: When the partizans of Mr. Fox cry him up for his disinterestedness in giving up the Secretaryship of State, and seem to rest the proof of his political sincerity on that point, they do not take a proper view of that circumstance. Mr. F–, it is well known, has been long in the habits of losing and winning large sums of money, so that by tying up his hands from these habits, and confining himself to the simple sum of 4,000l per year (which is all the revenue of a Secretary of State) Mr. F–, taking in his superior knowledge of play, must be a loser by being in that office, was it not for higher prospects. Hence, by resigning it, he had the credit with the public of abandoning his interest for his duty; whereas, in fact, he did nothing more than play four thousand pounds a year against the Patronage and Supervisorship of the Treasury. It is true he lost–but the opportunity looked lucky, and to men of his Temper, it was worth the risque.52 For many the failure of the EO Table Bill only mirrored the greater failures in international politics and the domestic order, for just as the loss of America sank in to the national consciousness, the great post-war crime wave was already making itself felt.53 Although the furore about the Bill died down, its death, rather than ending, rather marked the beginning of a new and powerful call for personal moral regeneration and for a new seriousness in public and political life.

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Appendix Newspapers consulted Bingley’s Journal Covent Garden Journal Diary or Woodfall’s Register English Chronicle Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser General Advertiser General Evening Post Gentleman’s Magazine Lloyd’s Evening Post London Chronicle London Courant London Evening Post

London Magazine London Packet Middlesex Journal Morning Chronicle Morning Herald Morning Post Parker’s General Advertiser Public Advertiser St. James’s Chronicle Town & Country Magazine Universal Magazine Westminster Journal Whitehall Evening Post

Notes I would like to thank the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, for a Visiting Fellowship during which I began the research for this essay. 1. See Peter King, ‘Moral Panics and Violent Street Crime 1750–2000’ in B. Godfrey, C. Emsley and G. Dunstall, (eds), Comparative Histories of Crime (Collompton, Devon, 2003), 54–5; Chas Critcher, Moral Panics and the Media (Buckingham, 2003), 131–43; Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher et al. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (Basingstoke, 1978), 53–81, 120–81. 2. Grays Inn Journal, vol. 1, 10 Mar. 1753, 142. 3. For English gaming and its Germanic origins, see the Morning Post, 19 Jan. 1776 and Whitehall Evening Post, 30 July/1 Aug. 1782. 4. David Gadd, Georgian Summer (Bath, 1971), 80. 5. Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 24 Oct. 1780. This comment was made about gaming in general, but, as I shall argue, the anxiety about EO tables played on and captured popular concern about the deleteriousness of all gaming. 6. Timely Advice. Or a Treatise of Play and Gaming (1640), 49. 7. James Shirley’s very popular The Gamester of 1637 was said to be based on a story told him by Charles I; Susanna Centlivre also wrote a comedic Gamester in 1705, and Edward Moore’s Gamester of 1753 was a tragic, sentimental take on the same theme. 8. The Whole Art and Mystery of Modern Gaming fully expos’d and detected (1726), iv. 9. On the force of example, the Public Advertiser (18 June 1782) noted that ‘The consequences of gambling in low life are poverty, despair, robbery and murder. These Mischiefs are in a great Measure chargeable to the Great, who set up the baneful Example: And indeed it were vain for a Police to attempt to make a People virtuous, who are copying the Follies and Vices of their Superiors’. 10. An Essay on Gaming, in a epistle to a young nobleman (1761), 2. 11. Henry Fielding, An Enquiry into the Late Increase of Robbers in Marvin R. Zirker, (ed.), An Enquiry into the Late Increase of Robbers and Related Writings, (Oxford, 1988), 77–8. 12. Town and Country Magazine (June 1769) 308; Middlesex Journal, 12/14 Mar. 1772. Fox was called ‘the young cub’ because he was the son of Henry Fox, Lord Holland, the leading Whig politician.

192 Gaming, Governing and Moral Panic 13. The Morning Post, the General Evening Post and the Morning Herald, three supporters of the Ministry in 1782, and the Gazetteer, the Public Advertiser and the Middlesex Journal, opponents of the Ministry, featured similar, often identical anti-gaming stories in this period. For the political affiliation of the newspapers, see Solomon Lutnick, The American Revolution and the British Press 1775–1783 (Columbia, Missouri 1967), Appendix. 14. Letter to the Printer signed ‘Anti-Aleator’, Public Advertiser, 11 May 1775. 15. London Magazine August 1777, 421; Letter from ‘A Friend to Youth’ addressed ‘To the Nobility and Gentry who frequent Bath’, 18 Aug. 1777. For similar comments, see General Evening Post, 4 May 1775, ‘An Epigram: addressed to all Gamblers in High and Low Life’. 16. Morning Herald, 14 Mar. 1781. 17. From August through December 1781, there was at least one story in one newspaper on thirteen different days; from January through May 1782 there was at least one story in a paper on 47 days. These figures are derived from my reading of the Burney newspaper collection on microfilm (see Appendix) and from the digitalized Burney Collection, now online. 18. For the caution to magistrates, see the London Evening Post, 1/4 June 1781; the account of shutdown of an EO table, ibid., 14/16 Mar. 1781. I have found no indication that ‘Gambling’ was ever performed, at Covent Garden or elsewhere; for this mention see the London Courant 6 Oct. 1781. 19. See the Morning Herald, 8 Nov. 1781 for the rebuke to the magistrates, and for the call to the public for action, see ibid., 6 Mar. 1782. 20. ‘Jack the Chicken’’s letter, addressed to the Westminster Justices, appeared in the Morning Herald, 8 May 1781 and ‘A Constant Reader’s letter, in ibid., 4 July 1781. 21. Ibid., 15 Sept. 1781 and for Fox’s pledge, ibid., 29 Mar. 1782; also in Whitehall Evening Post 28/30 Mar. 1782. 22. An Essay on Gaming, 28. 23. The account of the first suicide appeared in both the Morning Herald and the London Courant of 26 Oct. 1781. The details of the note left by the second, and the report of his death, appeared in the London Chronicle, 5 Jan. 1782; the Whitehall Evening Post, 5/8 Jan. 1782; and the Public Advertiser; the General Advertiser; and the London Courant, 9 Jan. 1782. For a third suicide account due to gaming, see the Morning Herald, 19 June 1782. 24. Morning Chronicle, 24 Dec. 1781; Morning Herald, 17 Jan. 1782; and London Courant 18 Jan. 1782. 25. Newspaper Reports about Gaming January through December 1782 No. of days in No. of days in which stories which more appear than one paper January–May 1782 47 19 June–August 1782 69 50 September–December 1782 46 17 26. Morning Herald, 17 Apr. 1782. 27. It is not always possible to tell, from the newspaper accounts, whether they are reporting the same incident or different ones. For April 1782, for example, we get reports of magistrates, aldermen and constables breaking up gaming establishments in the St. James’s Chronicle, 9/13 Apr. 1782, the Whitehall Evening Post, 9/11 Apr. 1782 and the Gazetteer, 16 Apr. 1782. For activity in July, see the Morning Post,

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28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

36. 37.

38.

39. 40.

41. 42.

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31 July 1782, Public Advertiser, 31 July 1782, Whitehall Evening Post, 27/30 July 1782, Morning Herald, 31 July 1782 and the Gazetteer, 31 July 1782. Morning Post, 6 Aug. 1782. For a typical report of gaming losses, of a ‘pigeon plucked’, see the Public Advertiser, 9 Mar. 1782; for the £50,000 reputedly won in the previous year by Charles James Fox and his friends at their Faro Bank, see the Morning Herald, 5 May 1782; and for the unnamed Lord who was said to have won £15,000 in one night’s gaming at the EO Tables, see ibid., 12 June 1782 and the Public Advertiser, 11 June 1782. Morning Herald, 28 May 1782; Public Advertiser, 11 June 1782. Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 10 Aug. 1782. For this, see the London Chronicle, 9/11 July 1782, the London Packet, 10/12 July 1782 and the Gazetteer, 11 July 1782. J. Hoppitt (ed.) Failed Legislation 1660–1800 (1997), 466–7. Both the correspondent’s comment and the subsequent insinuation that Fox was behind the failure of the Bill are found in the Morning Herald, 15 July 1782; the fictitious dialogue between Fox and Sheridan was published in the Town and Country Magazine, July 1782, pp. 342–3; Effingham’s part in its failure, and the proprietors’ thanks appeared in the Morning Chronicle, 12 July 1782. In The Covent Garden Journal of 18 Jan. 1752, no. 5, Fielding had proposed that ‘all places of general rendezvous, tho’ at a private house, shall be deemed public places, and the masters and mistresses of all such houses shall be considered in the same light as the managers of our public theatres, and shall be equally subject to the jurisdiction of this court’. London Packet, 26/28 June 1782. Oxford Magazine, July 1769, p. 5. See also letter from ‘Philanthropos’ in the Morning Chronicle, 23 Sept. 1773, which noted that it was ridiculous to talk of legal enforcement of the laws against gaming when everyone knew such activity flourished in the houses of their parliamentary representatives. London Packet, 28 June/1 July 1782; letter in Morning Herald, 1 July 1782. See also the front-page article in the Whitehall Evening Post of 29 June/2 July 1782, ‘On EO Tables’, reprinted from the European Magazine. This piece, while stressing the grave threat of gaming, concludes by warning against the threat of ‘a gang of constables’ intruding on will, into the family life of London’s citizens. The Morning Chronicle of 8 July 1782, however, argued that the justices, if granted this enlarged authority, would act with ‘all proper caution, circumspection, and with conformity to the laws of the land’. Morning Chronicle, 5 Sept. 1782. The advertisement appeared in the London Evening Post on 23 July 1782, in the Morning Chronicle, the Morning Herald, the Morning Post, and Parkers on 24 July 1782 and in the English Chronicle and the Whitehall Evening Post on 25 July 1782. Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 10 Aug. 1782. London Chronicle, 30 July 1782; the story of the EO table proprietor was reported in ibid., 15 Aug. 1782, the Morning Chronicle and Public Advertiser, 16 Aug. 1782 and the Morning Herald, 17 Aug. 1782. For letters from devastated parents and relations of young men who had lost everything in gambling see ‘A Distressed Parent’ in the Morning Chronicle, 18 June 1782; ‘A Tale of Woe’ in ibid., 22 July 1782 and Whitehall Evening Post, 20/23 July 1782; from ‘A Father’ in the Morning Chronicle, 8 Aug. 1782 and Public Advertiser, 9 Aug. 1782.

194 Gaming, Governing and Moral Panic 43. For Dr Graham and the Temple of Health, see Roy Porter, ‘Dr. James Graham’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Its various descriptions are all found in the Morning Herald, 12, 13 and 19 June 1782. 44. London Chronicle, 30 July 1782. 45. The report of the destruction of the table and the proprietors’ appearance before Sampson Wright in Bow Street are found in the Gazetteer, 7, 9 Aug. 1782. Addington’s injury was reported in Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 10 Aug. 1782 and the conviction of Wiltshire in the Gazetteer, 14 Dec. 1782. 46. For notice of the ‘Genius of Nonsense’ see the Whitehall Evening Post, 20/22 June 1782; the Public Advertiser, 6 Aug. 1782; and the Morning Post, 7 Aug. 1782. This was probably George Colman’s ‘Genius of Nonsense’, performed at the Haymarket in 1780, with topical lines added. For the ‘Nymph of the Grotto’ see the Morning Chronicle, 8, 26 Aug. 1782 and the Morning Herald, 12 Aug. 1782. I have been able to find no more information on this event. However, when George Byng first introduced the EO Table Bill to Parliament, he commented on the ubiquity of these devices, and jocularly supposed that ‘shortly the electrical bed itself would be turned into an EO Table’. London Chronicle, 4/6 June 1782. 47. Morning Chronicle, 15 July 1782; Morning Herald, 31 July 1782 and 1 Jan. 1783. 48. In the first three months of 1782, before the introduction of the Bill, there were 22 days in which the press reported EO and gaming stories; in the first three months of 1783, there were only 17 days of such coverage. 49. Morning Herald, 4 Apr. 1782; Morning Chronicle, 15 Apr. 1782. 50. The cartoon #6119, dated 19 Aug. 1782, is described in M. Dorothy George, Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, Division 1, Political and Personal Satires, (British Museum, Department of Prints, vol. 5); for the letter from ‘Common Sense’ see Morning Herald, 14 Mar. 1783. 51. Public Advertiser, 19 July 1782. 52. Morning Post, 22 Nov. 1782. 53. For this, see J. Innes and J. Styles, ‘The Crime Wave: Recent Writing on Crime and Criminal Justice in Eighteenth Century England’, Journal of British Studies, 25 (1986), 380–435.

11 A Moral Panic in Eighteenth-Century London? The ‘Monster’ and the Press Cindy McCreery

Mr. HERALD, Until your known authenticity stampt credit on the report that there existed a MONSTER, who felt a horrible gratification in maiming the most beautiful part of the creation, I can assure you, that there were several even otherwise credulous people, who imagined the whole a fiction. Bloomsbury-square, April 9. M.T.H. (Morning Herald, 12 April 1790)

11.1 Introduction In 1790, panic gripped Londoners. A man stalked the streets at night, cutting women with a sharp instrument.1 Newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides and satirical prints spread the story of the attacks, and in due course, the arrest of a suspect, his two sensational trials, and their controversial outcomes. For months ‘The Monster’ affair fascinated and horrified the public. Just as many of the attacks took place in darkness, making identification of the assailant difficult, so today our understanding of the affair is complicated by the range of contemporary and scholarly responses to it.2 This essay considers the Monster affair’s status as a ‘moral panic’. Although the concept was developed by sociologists to describe responses to alleged breakdowns of law and order in mid-twentieth century Britain, our research indicates that moral panics first occurred much earlier.3 Yet the Monster affair was more than just a straightforward panic about violent attacks on women in the London streets. Focusing on the role of the press, this essay will demonstrate how the affair highlights gender, class and social relations in late eighteenth-century London. In turn, this helps us to better understand the preoccupations of a society which was undergoing enormous change. 195

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11.2 London c.1790 London in 1790 was an exciting, if bewildering place. Samuel Johnson’s 1777 observation that ‘when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford’ sums up the metropolis’s frenetic appeal.4 The city had long served as the nation’s political, commercial and cultural capital, and in the late eighteenth century London was booming. Almost a million people, many born elsewhere, lived and worked here, and the population was still growing.5 The city was divided into different districts, with trade concentrated in the City of London and political power in Westminster. The living standards of the elite minority and the humble majority contrasted sharply. Nevertheless rich, middling and poor still often worked, lived and walked in close proximity. The parish of St James’s, for example, where Anne Porter was attacked, was at once home to royal palaces, aristocratic homes, hotel-cum-brothels and specialist print shops, as well as main thoroughfares for ordinary people.6 High literacy rates sustained a large and diverse press.7 Over 25 newspapers, including dailies, tri-weeklies as well as weeklies were published each week in London in the 1780s, with total sales reaching approximately 25,000 copies per day.8 At sixpence, newspapers typically sold many more copies than satirical prints and pamphlets, which cost between sixpence and several shillings, with print runs of a few hundred copies.9 Yet even satirical prints and pamphlets, while not cheap, were able to reach many both in and beyond London. Individual copies of newspapers, satirical prints, trial reports and other pamphlets would have been consumed by more than one person, and perhaps as many as ten.10 Press reports of the Monster affair were thus accessible to, and indeed targeted at, middle as well as elite society, female as well as male. As London mushroomed in the late eighteenth century, so too did anxieties about law and order. While violent crime was actually declining, many residents, particularly the relatively wealthy and politically influential middle and upper classes, feared that the city was more dangerous than ever.11 Yet a 1785 Police Bill, which would have radically changed the existing system, frightened off many by giving the central government too much power. Policing arrangements retained their traditional form. Individual parishes bore responsibility for policing neighbourhood streets, funded by rates levied on local residents. There was widespread criticism of this system, however. Night watchmen were lampooned as inattentive, drunken old men who slept on the job and colluded with the thieves and prostitutes who apparently infested the city.12 London in 1790 was thus a city in transition. A booming population brought social mobility but also fear of crime. The thriving city provided work for immigrants from both within and beyond the British Isles, but also for ‘criminals’. Londoners came to know their neighbours less directly, and

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more through the burgeoning press.13 In such an environment, reports of a series of violent attacks on young women in the city streets were perhaps bound to lead to anxious discussion of both the nature of society as well as the best way to fight crime.

11.3 The attacks The Monster affair gained huge publicity in July 1790 with the prosecution of a young Welshman, Rhynwick (or Renwick) Williams, for assaulting a young, single and apparently beautiful woman. Anne Porter was attacked at about 11.15 p.m. on the 18th of January 1790, as she, her sister Sarah and a chaperone, Mrs Miel, walked home from the Queen’s Birthday Ball at St James’s Palace. Just as she reached her front door a man struck Porter with a sharp implement, cutting through her dress to her underclothes and inflicting a small but deep flesh wound. According to Porter’s court testimony, she turned and saw her assailant looking at her closely, but he made no further attempt to touch her. A few months later Porter recognized Williams while strolling in St James’s Park with her sisters and friend John Coleman. Alerted by Porter, Coleman followed Williams through the London streets and eventually approached him and persuaded him to go to Porter’s home, where she identified him as her assailant. A messenger was sent to Bow Street Magistrates Office and Williams was arrested and charged with Porter’s assault.14 News of the arrest led to a flurry of excitement. Porter was only one of several women (estimates vary between ten and fifty) who were attacked by the same man (or several men using the same modus operandi) in the streets of London between 1788 and 1790.15 Violence against women, and in particular working-class women, was commonplace, frequently unreported, and often unrecognized as criminal behaviour.16 Several features of these attacks distinguished them from other assaults. Firstly, while most assaults on women were committed by men known to them, these attacks were perpetrated by an apparent stranger.17 According to press reports, the Monster focused his attacks on young, beautiful, often middle- and upper-class women. In addition to attacking their clothes with a sharp implement he used extremely foul language. Yet the Monster did not, as might have been expected, rape his victims. Instead he often peered closely at them before letting them go.18 Such details help to explain the extraordinary displays of public fear and anxiety which circulated in contemporary London. For by attacking young, beautiful and well-off women, the Monster attacked that section of society which was valued most highly, as property as much as aesthetically pleasing creatures. By making women listen to his foul language, he corrupted their supposed innocence, which made them less appealing to prospective husbands. In other words, by these cruel attacks the Monster devalued his female victims in the eyes of society.

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Yet his behaviour also diminished men. For the fact that the Monster neither robbed nor raped his victims struck many observers as unmanly and indeed unnatural.19 Rape, although criminal, was seen as rational behaviour for a red-blooded Englishman, but mutilating a beautiful woman’s clothes and body without raping her seemed bizarre. The Monster apparently operated ‘in opposition to the Dictates of Nature and Humanity’.20 The perpetrator of such attacks was surely no real man, and it was hard to believe that he could be British. On 20 April the gossipy World newspaper (which along with its rivals the Morning Herald and the Oracle provided regular reports on the affair throughout the spring and summer of 1790), lambasted ‘this disgrace to manhood’ while on 5 May it railed against the ‘Disgrace to the British name’.21 Such sentiments express both chivalric concern at the treatment of women, as well as anxiety about homosexuality (for surely only this, as Hester Thrale believed, could explain the Monster’s behaviour).22 Homosexuality was regarded as ‘un-British’, unnatural, and something which was native to the Continent rather than England. In other words, in the response to the Monster we see both the widespread publicizing of ‘polite’ masculine values, as well as increasing homophobia.23 Darryl Jones argues that the response to the Monster reveals increasing anxiety about female sexuality and both female and male homosexuality. This sexual ‘deviancy’ was linked with political anarchy in the minds of many Britons, spooked by the recent descent of France into revolution.24 Whether or not events in France by 1790 had really made Britons more fearful of acute public disorder at home, contemporary reports suggest that people were increasingly concerned about women flaunting their sexual independence and men displaying homosexual tendencies. Newspaper reports of Williams’ first trial, for example, made much of the fact that Williams (like many poor lodgers) had shared his bed with another man.25 Manly women and effeminate men demonstrated British society’s corruption, and such moral weakness would hamper the nation if it was drawn into war with France. So the Monster revealed the problems with British masculinity as well as femininity.

11.4 Moral panic about law and order Jan Bondeson argues that ‘the Monster mania was a typical moral panic, in which people in an urban society reacted to an elusive outside threat in a neurotic way’.26 Robert Shoemaker also views it as a ‘moral panic’, which he sees as largely created by the media.27 According to sociologists, key elements of a moral panic include: [t]he presence of a condition about which people feel anxious or threatened, the element of moral indignation, a belief system to legitimate social control and the activities of enterprising individuals who facilitate public awareness of the condition.28

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Many aspects of the Monster affair fit this model. At least fifty attacks were reported, and there was widespread concern about the apparent threat to society.29 According to the visiting German naturalist Georg Forster: The newspapers are full of him; the playwrights entertain audiences with his exploits from the stage; the ladies are afraid of him; the mob gives every pedestrian a keen look in case he is the Monster.30 Similarly, Arthur Pigot, the chief prosecutor in Rhynwick Williams’ first trial in July 1790 claimed that: [t]here was not one person resident in this great metropolis who was ignorant or unacquainted with those attacks which had been made upon the fairest of the most beautiful (and if he were to add the best, he would not be saying too much) of nature’s works.31 It was the press who turned the perpetrator(s) of these attacks into the ‘Monster(s)’, which emphasized their inhumanity.32 By the eighteenth century this use of the term was well established, and the World newspaper described the attackers as monsters ‘in the shape of men’.33 Descriptions such as ‘monster’ and ‘unnatural’ were repeated in various newspapers, posters, pamphlets and prints, which reflects the sense of general moral indignation surrounding the Monster’s attacks. Londoners’ knowledge of the Monster came largely (and yet narrowly) from the press. Just as Londoners depended on the press to warn them of the Monster, so the press depended on the Monster. A spoof poster catalogued the wide range of publications which discussed the affair: Mr. ARGENSTEEN, [sic] takes the earliest opportunity of informing the Nobility and the Public, of the MONSTER’s re-appearance in Town on Friday … and, as it is strongly suspected that his present Journey to Town, is in order to devour all Editors of Newspapers, Book-sellers, Engravers and Publishers of Satiric Prints, and every other Person who has dared to arraign his Conduct, the Public are cautioned to be upon their Guard.34 These newspaper editors, booksellers, engravers and publishers of satirical prints made a tidy profit from the Monster. If the Monster had not existed, might not some newspaper editor have invented him? For there was little interest in the attacks until the press, in concert with John Julius Angerstein and the ‘Public Office Bow-Street’, mounted a major campaign to catch the Monster.35 Angerstein was a wealthy insurance broker who posted a generous reward and took it upon himself to interview every alleged victim. He quickly came to be seen as the main driving force in the race to catch the Monster:

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Very great praise is due to Mr. ANGERSTEIN for his unremitted endeavours to discover the unnatural wretch who has directed such wanton barbarity against the pride of the creation. His public spirit is felt in every corner of the Isle.36 In other words, Angerstein was an archetypal ‘moral entrepreneur’, who played an important role ‘in defining behaviour and individuals as deviant and criminal’.37 By praising Angerstein, the press were in fact praising themselves, for his campaign depended on the press. The press was quick to point this out. Both individual newspapers and their readers promoted the idea that the publicity generated by the press was ‘the best instrument to bring the unnatural villain to justice.’38 The press drove the panic, leaving the judiciary behind.39 Yet some observers pooh-poohed the scandal, which they saw as proof of Londoners’ credulity or boredom. The Times, which sought to distinguish itself from lowbrow newspapers, compared the Monster with contemporary ‘wonders’ like the Learned Pig and Cock-Lane Ghost which enthralled naïve audiences.40 Moreover, several commentators saw belief in the Monster as proof of individuals’ humourlessness, and by extension their exclusion from witty London society. Hester Thrale, the writer and friend of both Samuel Johnson and Horace Walpole, gleefully recorded the ridicule which John Julius Angerstein attracted: The Offence was first complained of, & then taken up with a high Hand by a rich Mercht [sic] John Julius Angerstein of Pallmall, who offered a large Reward for the Fellow’s Discovery. This brought forward our natural Spirit of Derision, & the Ladies’ Champion became a Subject of Ridicule to all the Merry Fellows- & most of all, to those who visited at Strawberry Hill whence Pasquinades came forth to laugh, & sett all the Town o’laughing at poor Angerstein, whose Quixoticism was represented on the Summer Stages round London with great effect.41 Thrale describes Angerstein as a ‘rich Merchant’, as if his background in trade, which was both admired and looked down-upon in contemporary society, explains his overeagerness to demonstrate public spiritedness.42 Lacking the social assurance of Thrale’s friend Horace Walpole (the well-connected owner of Strawberry Hill), Angerstein became involved in philanthropic activity in order to claim his place in elite society. Although Thrale doesn’t comment on it, Angerstein’s response may also reflect insecurity at his foreign, and perhaps illegitimate, birth.43 Certainly Angerstein’s name was frequently misspelled in newspaper and other reports (e.g. the spoof poster cited above), including Isaac Cruikshank’s caricature The Monster Cutting a Lady/Copper Bottoms to Prevent being Cut, which will be discussed below. Such misspellings may or may not have been deliberate (satirical prints were often made hurriedly, which increased the likelihood of spelling mistakes), but they perpetuated the

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idea that Angerstein was ‘foreign’ and different from the rest of ‘us’. In short, Angerstein was represented as an outsider, who neither fully understood nor was understood by London society. As we will see, Aimable Michelle, Williams’ former employer and French immigrant, suffered even more prejudice. Yet Williams’ Welsh origins were apparently not ridiculed, probably because he came from a respectable middle-class family. So far, the Monster affair does appear to be a classic moral panic about crime, created largely by the press. But the press was aided by many willing volunteers. Andrew Franklin, for example, the husband of an alleged victim, noted the great impact his letters to the Morning Herald had on the effort to catch the Monster: [M]y greatest stimulus to persevere in the business was the alacrity, with which you inserted every paper I sent you on the subject … My original correspondence excited that of others.44 Thus the campaign to catch the Monster snowballed. Angerstein, via a poster issued on 7 May, urged tradesmen’s servants and bakers’ delivery boys to spread the word to illiterate servant girls who might have seen something suspicious in their household.45 In this way, the press campaign reached even those who could not read. Such initiatives demonstrated how all Londoners, helped by the press, could play (or at least could believe that they were playing) a crucial part in the apprehension of the Monster. The Monster affair did vary from other moral panics in some ways, however. Unlike twentieth-century moral panics, for example, the socalled folk devil had his supporters. While it lacked Angerstein’s enormous resources, Williams’ defence was also conducted in as public (though not as professional) a manner as possible. Williams’ champion, the polemicist Theophilus Swift (who served as his defence counsel in the second trial), appealed to a wide audience via his pamphlet, The Monster at Large.46 So too Swift’s controversial behaviour was designed to command attention both within and beyond the courtroom. While Swift may have defended Williams merely to boost his own public reputation, several other people came forward out of an apparently sincere desire to help. These included Williams’ former employer Aimable Michelle and co-workers, who confirmed his fairly solid alibi, as well as character witnesses, including some alleged prostitutes.47 Rather than close friends or family members, who were tied to the defendant by mutual obligation, these men and women came forward out of a genuine sense of public duty. Many of these witnesses faced suspicion, prejudice and outright ridicule in the courtroom, because they were French, and/or from humble backgrounds.48 Despite repeated laughter and jeers from spectators in the courtroom, these character witnesses persisted with their testimony.49 This suggests ordinary people’s faith not only in Williams’ innocence, but in the justice system.

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These witnesses’ participation both supports and qualifies Shoemaker’s argument that over the course of the eighteenth century Londoners became less likely to get involved personally in public justice. Clearly few individuals were prepared to use violence to apprehend the Monster (as John Coleman’s timid pursuit of Williams makes abundantly clear.)50 Yet many residents remained keen to help the law enforcement process. Indeed, one of the problems the authorities faced was too much, rather than too little information. Often, reports were motivated by the hope of financial reward, or even, as perhaps in the case of the Porter sisters, by revenge on a man who had impugned their sexual reputation. Reputation was a valuable commodity, and vulnerable to slander and ridicule. Ridicule was a powerful weapon.51 Nevertheless, a sizeable number of people risked ridicule to defend Williams because of their ongoing faith in the justice system. Middle and upper-class citizens frequently put forward ideas (and funds) for improving the safety of their communities.52 Sometimes this involved citizens patrolling the streets themselves. For example, a group met in the Percy Street Coffee House, St Pancras, to establish a new volunteer force to patrol the parish streets at night.53 Thus, responses to the Monster tie in with Londoners’ increasing involvement in crime prevention. Public debates offered another way to voice concern about community safety. As Donna Andrew has shown, debates became increasingly popular in the late eighteenth century.54 Such debates, which were held in halls around London and admitted the public for a small fee, could be viewed as part of a larger trend towards private entertainment and away from public justice. Yet, by welcoming women as well as men, and indeed seeking the widest possible audience via advertisements, debates reflected the growth in public society. Like the newspapers which advertised them, debates expressed the public prominence and self-confidence of middle-class society. Debates appealed to women, both as spectators and participants. Many debates were held on topics intended to attract women, such as love and marriage, but the Monster also inspired at least three debates.55 The first, on 6 May 1790, ‘By Desire of several Ladies’, asked: Which is the greater Disgrace to Humanity, the Ruffians who drag the Female African from her Family, her Kindred, and her native Country, or the Monster who has lately wounded and terrified many Ladies in this Metropolis?56 The Managers claimed that the comparison was justified: Several Ladies having repeatedly requested the Managers to frame a Question on the Monster, they have at last (With the assistance of a celebrated public Character, who has long interested himself for a Repeal of the Slave Trade) agreed on the above as the only parallel in atrocity to be found.57

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Whether or not the managers really believed this, a comparison of the Monster with the Slave Trade was bound to attract a sympathetic audience, especially given that ‘We expect many powerful appeals to the heart, on the sufferings of the unhappy Female African.’ The abolitionist cause gave middle-class women such as the writer Hannah More the opportunity to demonstrate that women could be effective leaders. Yet, like most male abolitionists, More accepted the Christian view of family hierarchy, with wives submissive to husbands and daughters their fathers.58 Ultimately, the association of the Monster’s victims with slaves reinforced the view that women needed more rather than less supervision. Public debates were commercial entertainments designed to make a profit. By tapping into society’s concerns with women’s safety and African slavery, the Monster affair was a potentially lucrative topic for debate. But while the organizers sought profit, the people who attended were motivated by a range of reasons, including genuine concern. The managers appealed to this concern by noting that: Those Gentlemen who conduct the Rewards for apprehending this Disgrace to the British name would do well to attend, as … more real information [may] be gained both of his person, the number of Ladies he has wounded, and the reasons which could induce him to such diabolical conduct, than can possibly be collected by private information.59 This suggests that people were more willing to work together to fight crime than Shoemaker suggests. Like public debates, satirical prints embraced the Monster affair. Several commentators on the press’s role in twentieth-century moral panics have noted that visual images can play a particularly powerful role in circulating ideas of the villain or ‘monster’ to audiences.60 Like television with twentiethcentury moral panics, satirical prints provided rapid, colourful and often melodramatic coverage of the Monster affair. Prints reflected eighteenth-century society’s interest in public discussion and in bawdy humour.61 In William Dent’s A Representation of Rynwick Alias Renwick Williams, commonly called The Monster, for example, the viewer is placed in the position of voyeur.62 Like the Monster, he (and this print was intended for a male viewer), pursues women and sees both their underclothing and their suffering. Beneath the design is inscribed a long caption: N.B. An ex post facto Law was made to hang Jonathan Wild, whose attacks were on the Property only, but the above Criminal for attacking the Persons of the fairest of the Creation, is subject to no more than Transportation for Seven Years, a punishment by no means proportioned to the Crime, nor fit, as it may afford the Wretch an opportunity of exercising his cruelties on the Females of another Country.

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Fig. 11.1 William Dent, A Representation of Rynwick alias Renwick Williams, commonly called the Monster (12 July, 1790). BM Satires 7730.

Convinced that Williams is getting off too lightly, Dent takes his revenge through this print. Not only does he take the unusual step of naming Williams as the Monster, but Dent compares him unfavourably with the controversial thief-taker Jonathan Wild.63 Seventy-five years after his execution, Wild remained well known not only for his crimes, but for the sympathy his career generated.64 For Dent, it was imperative that Williams not be allowed to become a folk-hero in the way that Wild had. The Monster must remain a folk-devil. By arguing that the sentence of transportation was too light, Dent repeats the classic Enlightenment position, made famous by Cesare Beccaria, that the punishment should fit the crime.65 While Beccaria was concerned primarily with cruel and arbitrary punishments on the Continent, Dent expresses the contemporary English view that transportation was insufficient punishment. In a society where debtors and defendants awaiting trial were routinely imprisoned (and many died of jail fever), incarceration by itself was not necessarily seen as punishment. Moreover, transportation gave prisoners considerable freedom of movement, which, according to Dent, would simply give Williams further opportunity to attack women. While the thief-taker Wild may well have made amends had he lived, there is no hope of rehabilitating the Monster; his depraved nature is unalterable. Dent’s pessimistic assessment of Williams’ future may have run contrary to

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fashionable Enlightenment principles, yet it was echoed in many other press comments and in the very slow process of criminal law reform.66 This print is both typical and atypical of its genre. By criticizing existing policy, it reflects satirical prints’ tendency to attack rather than to defend. By repeating inaccurate information, namely that Wild was tried under an ex post facto law, it demonstrates satirical prints’ reliance on rumour and misinformation. And by capturing the public anger at the prospect of Williams receiving a light sentence, it demonstrates satirical prints’ gift for capturing popular views. On the other hand, by detailing the artist’s deeply-felt hatred of the Monster, this design differs from many prints which treated the affair lightheartedly. This suggests how deeply the Monster affair could affect even hardened social commentators like caricaturists. In short, this design reflects contemporaries’ genuine moral outrage at the attacks. Women now feared men as potential ‘monsters’, and this changed the pattern of life in London. A male correspondent lamented: It is really distressing to walk our streets towards evening. Every woman we meet regards us with distrust, shrinks widely from our touch, and expects a poignard to pierce what gallantry and manhood consider as sacred.67 But was the changed atmosphere on the London streets really so dramatic? In fact, the Monster episode forms part of a larger trend of seeing women as vulnerable, needing male protection, and by extension, not fit to be walking the streets by themselves, especially at night.

11.5 Anxiety about women The Monster affair provides a window onto the complex position of middle-class women in eighteenth-century London. Such women were at once visible and invisible, free and fettered. The press played an important role in publicizing and shaping attitudes. Court testimony and newspaper reports reveal that young middle-class women like Anne Porter and her sisters enjoyed considerable independence, tempered by family supervision and assistance. As unmarried daughters of an apparently respectable and successful family, the sisters walked frequently – to balls and in St James’s Park – but never alone. They were accompanied by a female chaperone, male friend or relative on these expeditions. Moreover, while they enjoyed leisure opportunities denied to working-class women, they were excluded from some of the pleasures of elite society. The sisters attended the Queen’s Birthday Ball on 18 January as spectators, not participants, and watched the titled guests dancing from the gallery. (By comparison, Williams and his female co-workers spent most of the day toiling in a nearby workshop, creating artificial flowers to be sewn onto a gown

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for the popular comic actress Mrs Abington to wear to another ball.68) When the Queen retired early, the sisters faced a dilemma unknown to the more privileged guests: whether to wait an hour for their father to accompany them the short distance home on foot (they could not afford a carriage) or to brave the streets themselves.69 The fact that they chose the latter option suggests their own confidence in their ability – indeed right – to walk their neighbourhood streets at night. The subsequent attack highlighted concerns about street safety, but it also drew attention to middle-class women’s freedom of movement. Many young unmarried women spent much of their time out and about – even at night. The Monster affair also challenged such women’s claims to respectability. Rhynwick Williams and, in particular, his defence counsel Theophilus Swift, alleged that Anne Porter’s family was thoroughly unrespectable. Not only did the family home, Porter’s hotel, operate as a bagnio or elite brothel, but Anne herself was apparently no stranger to men. According to Williams, she had earlier rebuffed his sexual advances but had succumbed to those of another man.70 Whether this was true or not, it seems clear that their social worlds overlapped. The revelation that Porter’s friend (later husband), the up-and-coming fishmonger Mr Coleman, had earlier met the relatively well-educated but downwardly mobile factory worker Williams at a concert is instructive. It indicates how a shared interest (in this case music) could bring together apparent strangers, with varying claims to respectability and economic independence. While the details remain murky, it seems that neither Porter nor Williams was as socially isolated as the prosecution claimed. Clearly, differences in gender, class and reputation were not absolute barriers to people meeting and socializing in late eighteenth-century London. Had it not been for Williams’ arrest, he and Porter would probably have continued walking and meeting people (including each other) on the streets of London largely undisturbed. For Shoemaker, Porter’s accusation of Williams can be explained as the publicizing of what was essentially a private quarrel between two would-be lovers.71 But by detailing Porter’s encounters with men, the press not only uncovered a murky relationship between plaintiff and defendant, it drew attention to supposedly ‘respectable’ unmarried women’s sexual desires and experiences. In addition to seeing women as victims, then, the press coverage of the Monster affair suggested that women themselves were to blame for the attacks. Old prejudices about women’s deceitfulness and vanity were rehashed in new forms. Unlike the correspondent quoted above, most male eighteenth-century writers described women walking the London streets at night as neither fearful nor innocent, but rather prostitutes seeking customers.72 Indeed, a man who walked the streets of London ‘towards evening’ might well expect, and indeed desire, the women he encountered to touch him.73

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In short, the expectation that women on the streets of London at night would be fearful innocents was novel, and a reflection of changing attitudes. But the new, protective attitude towards middle-class women did not simply replace the old view. Old and new views of women coexisted, and competed with one another for attention in the press, as did lighthearted as well as serious discussions of the threat posed by the Monster. A spate of spoof reports of Monster attacks seem to have been largely perpetrated by elite observers for their own amusement. For example, the eccentric writer Lady Eglantine Wallace reported an attack, only to plead later that it was a joke.74 While such pranks were laughed off, particular horror was reserved for those women who pretended to be victims of the Monster in order to elicit male sympathy: ‘This is a new type of MONSTER!’75 So while aristocrats could get away with hoaxes, ordinary women could not. Such reports made it all the more difficult for genuine victims to come forward. While dismissive of John Julius Angerstein’s role in defending ladies from the Monster, Hester Thrale acknowledged the difficulty women faced in reporting attacks: Meantime many Women were cut in the Streets; some of whom being ugly, were ashamed to tell on’t, & others were wounded in odd Places, & said nothing for fear of Ridicule, the Poyson of which is certainly far worse than his Dagger who par Eminence was called the Monster.76 Satirical prints’ interest in female victims was often limited to depicting their semi-naked bodies. Many designs reflect male fantasies about semi-naked women, couched in the guise of reports of the Monster attacking his victims. In The Monster Cutting a Lady/Copper Bottoms to Prevent being Cut, for example, Isaac Cruikshank combines sympathy for an individual victim with male voyeurism as well as criticism of women’s vanity in general.77 The left panel illustrates an attack by the Monster, allegedly derived from victims’ reports. The Monster cuts a woman on a street, in front of the door of a house inscribed ‘Angersteein’[sic].78 This reminds viewers that women continued to be attacked despite the huge publicity and reward offered by Angerstein and his associates.79 The right panel depicts a young woman standing half-dressed in a workshop, where a brazier hammers a copper petticoat to protect her bottom from the Monster’s attack. Hanging from the ceiling are copper sheaths in three sizes: ‘for young Ladies of 15’, ‘Ladies of 30’ and ‘Very fat Ladies’, which allude to the depth of female fear – women of all ages, shapes and sizes seek protection. Women were frequently criticized in contemporary newspapers, magazines as well as satirical prints for wearing ‘cork-rumps’ and pads to enhance their busts and derrieres.80 Copper bottoms were the next logical step in women’s quest to make their bodies sexually appealing – and artificial. The sly look of the young woman and the workman indicate

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Fig. 11.2 Isaac Cruikshank, The Monster Cutting a Lady/Copper Bottoms to Prevent being Cut (1 May, 1790). BM Satires 7726.

that both enjoy the deception, which provides an opportunity to display her semi-naked body. So too, presumably, did male print customers, who could see her bare breasts reflected in the mirror. In both panels, men (Angerstein and the coppersmith) are rendered powerless. In the left panel, the Monster controls the situation, but in the second it is the potential victim herself who commands the scene. She appears as an artificial Monster, who will soon take to the streets of London showing off her enhanced bottom to potential (willing) victims. Such an image recalls the many contemporary prints of prostitutes as stage coaches or warships ‘armed’ for a night hunting their prey.81 So this print is as much concerned with censuring female behaviour as with warning women about the Monster. Such ambivalent responses were common in satirical prints. Indeed, several prints which ostensibly warned Londoners about the Monster actually used the affair to emphasize women’s voracious sexual appetite. In James Gillray’s Swearing to the Cutting Monster or a Scene in Bow Street, for example, a young woman reports her attack at the Bow Street Magistrates office.82 She is represented not as a humiliated victim of violent crime, but as the acquiescent object of men’s lust. The design recalls Gillray’s earlier ambivalent representation of the Countess of Strathmore in court.83 In both images Gillray casts doubt on the woman’s veracity by focusing on her overt sexual nature. While not intended to portray Anne Porter, Swearing to the

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Fig. 11.3 James Gillray, Swearing to the Cutting Monster or a Scene in Bow Street (20 May, 1790). BM Satires 7648.

Cutting Monster does suggest that women are not always innocent victims, a charge which was laid against both the Countess of Strathmore and Porter. The female victim looks surprised but not unhappy at her situation. Standing on a stool, with her skirts lifted to reveal her buttocks to the startled magistrates, her exposed position recalls the intense interest taken in Porter’s underclothes and body during Williams’ trial.84 The magistrates’ surprise is caricatured as much as the Monster’s apparent horror at seeing his victim. Such public viewing of ‘innocent’ women’s bodies was novel, and many observers, like the magistrates in this image, were not sure how to respond. These responses reflect the range of emotions, from amusement to bewilderment and concern, which the Monster affair inspired. Finally, this print illustrates another important response, namely the silliness of the ‘Monster’ affair. Gillray repeated this point in several designs, all ridiculing gullible people’s reactions to the Monster.85 In particular, women’s sexual nature and overactive imagination make them susceptible to the Monster. Gillray and others also used the Monster as a way of attacking unpopular figures. In Swearing to the Cutting Monster the Whig politician Charles James Fox appears as the Monster; in other images the Prime Minister William Pitt, and decadent society figures such as George Hanger and Louis Weltje (members of the prince of Wales’s circle) played this role.86

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Gillray’s scepticism reflected a wider view that the furore over the Monster, and particularly the conviction of Rhynwick Williams, was misplaced. As we have seen, both Hester Thrale and Georg Forster ridiculed the panic. Doubts about women’s judgement also surfaced in the public debates. Three days after Williams’ first conviction for assaulting Anne Porter, and two months after the debate comparing the Monster with African slavers, the managers of the ‘City Debates’ advertised the following debate: Did the late extraordinary Conduct ascribed to Rynwick Williams (commonly called the Monster) originate in an unfortunate Insanity – a diabolical Inclination to injure the fair Part of the Creation – or in the groundless Apprehensions of some mistaken Females?87 The question was ‘determined to come about because of a diabolical Inclination’. 88 A week later the same venue considered the question ‘Ought not the Legislature (in protection of the Ladies of Great Britain) immediately to pass an Act rendering the Crime of Rhynwick Williams, commonly called the Monster, a capital offense?’89 The response to this third debate was not recorded. The second debate, on the origins of the charge against Williams, suggests a more sympathetic attitude towards the defendant, as well as renewed doubt about women’s capacity for understanding. Two months earlier, women were seen wholly as victims in the affair, comparable with African slaves. By the second debate women’s testimony was treated more cautiously. Yet all three debates reveal a similarly limited view of women’s capacity: in the first and third debate women were assumed to need protection from the Monster, in the second from their own ‘groundless Apprehensions’. In all the debates, therefore, women were described as dependent on men. Debates provided women with a ‘safe space’ in which to be listened to as well as gazed at.90 This opportunity should not be exaggerated, however. Anne Porter’s own voice was only able to be heard during Williams’ first trial, and then only in response to questions asked by the male prosecutors, judge and defence counsel. While Williams accused Porter of milking the judge’s sympathy by exaggerated swoons, in fact her submissive role as female plaintiff left her little room for direct comment. Williams, however, was able to comment directly on his case in a subsequent pamphlet.91 So ironically the female plaintiff, who was vindicated in the trial, fell silent in accordance with social and judicial custom, while the convicted male defendant was left free to continue his remarks from jail. Whether Porter maliciously accused Williams or not, this case was less about women using the judicial system for their own ends than the press using it to publicize rules of conduct. All of this points to deep-seated fascination with, and anxiety over, women’s sexual assertiveness and visibility on the streets of London.

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11.6 Law and society In addition to shedding light on the press’s role in shaping attitudes to women and class, the Monster affair promoted discussion of the law’s role in society. The press discussed the need for more and better laws to combat violent crime, as well as improved performance from those charged with keeping the streets safe, namely night watchmen and magistrates. But the public and press also wanted more, direct involvement from ordinary citizens. The fear that the Monster inspired resulted in several proposals for better policing of the streets. One proposed the nightly patrol of the streets ‘of the South Division of St. Pancras’ by male residents, while another recommended that the residents of each street hire two ‘stout Patroles, well armed’ to do the job.92 Both were seen as major improvements on the existing system of parish watchmen, who were ridiculed as ‘tottering Pillars’.93 These measures received prominent attention in the newspapers and formed part of a wider campaign to reform the Night Watch. Indeed, Westminster, the area where the Porter attacks took place, was at the forefront of innovations in policing.94 The Monster affair also led to press scrutiny of the role of the Magistrates Office in Bow Street. Since the days of Henry and John Fielding, these magistrates, aided by the ‘Bow Street Runners’, had earned a growing reputation for their success in catching and prosecuting criminals.95 Yet the six-month delay in catching the Monster led to letters to the editor offering suggestions as to how the magistrates could better conduct their search. This in turn led Magistrates Sampson Wright and Nicholas Bond to defend their conduct in the same newspapers, a clear indication of the public pressure they were under to catch the villain, as well as the role of the press in exerting this pressure.96 This response well illustrates the general trend of rising public expectations of magistrates’ performance. The press also discussed the legal aspects of the case. Of particular interest was the unusual charge first brought against Williams. So great was the desire to punish the ‘Monster’ severely that prosecutors scrambled to charge him under a felony statute. This drew much press interest. The World, for example, devoted several paragraphs to the applicability of the statute, which reveals public interest in both the Monster affair and in finding appropriate punishment for criminals generally.97 Although reformers protested against the overuse of capital punishment, it remained popular with prosecutors, judges and the public.98 The Monster affair reflects a judicial system in transition, caught between old views of the need for brutal punishment and newer views about the rights of defendants, appropriate punishment and professional conduct. It also demonstrates the heightened influence of the press, which devoted many columns to detailing the search for the ‘Monster’, the examination of witnesses, arrest of suspects including Williams, his two trials and eventual conviction.

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Even commercial entertainments alluded to the legal issues involved. We’ve already noted that a public debate considered the issue of whether the Monster’s crime deserved to be made a capital offense. The entrepreneurial circus manager Philip Astley produced a musical entertainment based on the Monster, which made reference to two felony statutes (punishable by capital punishment) under one of which it was hoped Williams would be prosecuted: “When the Monster is taken in the fact, “We’ll have him tri’d by the Coventry Act, “The Black Act, “The Coventry Act.” This chorus allegedly ‘produced unbounded applause’, which suggests that the audience was familiar with the legal discussion.99 While neither act in fact applied in this case, it no doubt gave Astley’s audience great comfort to believe that the law had harsh penalties in store for the Monster. By celebrating these notorious pieces of legislation (the Black Act granted considerable powers to landowners while the Coventry Act was introduced to punish a political opponent), the public revealed its essential conservatism.100 Faced with the threat of a ‘Monster’, no punishment or curtailment of civil liberties seemed too severe. The law was also ‘performed’ beyond commercial entertainments. Curious members of the public attended the Magistrates Office to view suspects who had been arrested. On the street outside others demonstrated their keen interest in the case. According to one report, ‘It was after five o’clock before the prisoner could be brought out of the Office, as the immense crowd that were gathered in Bow-street was so exasperated, that they would probably have destroyed him’.101 This demonstrates how crowds still participated in the public performance of the law. While Shoemaker might argue that the crowds were acting as an audience rather than direct participants, it is perhaps more accurate to say that the form of public participation had changed. Like contemporary theatre audiences, who were generally – but not always – better behaved than their Restoration counterparts, late eighteenth-century crowds could, and did, make their voices heard. Williams’ first trial attracted a large crowd, and in many ways resembled the run of a hit play. A similarly diverse slice of London society attended, seeking entertainment. Members of the Royal family and the aristocracy, including the prince of Wales, duke of Cumberland, duke of York, Prince William of Gloucester, Lord Beauchamp, and Lord Essex watched the proceedings. Moreover, ‘a great number of persons were collected together’, both inside and outside the courtroom.102 As in the theatre, audiences were segregated according to their class status – privileged viewers sat inside the

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courtroom while more humble folk stood outside. Noblemen and commoners were both attracted to the trial by its mixture of curious crime and the glimpse of the perpetrator as well as his female victim. As was true of the theatre, watching the other members of the audience also provided fine courtroom entertainment. Newspapers and trial reports informed those who could not attend in person with the latest developments. Like theatrical reviews, press accounts reviewed the performance of the main actors, namely the prosecutor, judge, and, in particular, the plaintiff and the defendant. At his first trial, Williams expressed his confidence in ‘the justice and liberality of an English Jury, and hoped they would not suffer his fate to be decided by the popular prejudice raised against him.’103 While the sentiments of this speech were generally admired, his stutter, confusion and reliance upon written notes drew criticism. According to Williams, the reception accorded to the Porter sisters suggested that gaining the jury and audience’s sympathy counted for much more than telling the truth: On their representing great agitation, and shewing every sign of emotion, (except change of colour) It was, pray Madam, rest a little, compose yourself, don’t be discouraged, bring a glass of water, where’s the smelling salts, bring a chair, said one of their Counsel, shaking his wig, and making a long face at the Jury, sit down Miss Porter, don’t be afraid, remember the object which you alone pursue is public justice, &c. &c … . I was frequently hissed on attempting to speak on very important occasions …the Chairman told me several times, he never saw a prisoner behave so ill … I remarked the agitations which Miss Porter shewed in the Courts, were at the most convenient times … as soon as Miss Porter’s cause was over, her exquisitely tender feelings and emotions died with it. In addition to evoking their sympathy, Porter’s behaviour influenced the jury: ‘Who then can with truth say, all this had not a sensible and powerful effect, even an involuntary effect? It cannot but be admitt’d!’104 In other words, Anne Porter was a better actor, or at least played a more popular role (defenceless female victim) than Rhynwick Williams, who found himself cast, unfairly in his view, as the villain of the piece. While Williams’ conviction was greeted with relief by most observers, others felt that prejudice had swayed the jury. As had occurred both before and during both trials, observers wrote letters to the newspapers commenting on the legal process. ‘A.L.’ wrote to the editor of the Diary: ‘I think I may be justified in dissenting from the Jury, who pronounced Williams guilty. I am sensible I may be charged with presumption in arraigning their determination, but while I acknowledge the charge, let me observe, in vindication, that this may not be the only trial in which a determination has

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been given, which upon cool reflection has been wished to be retracted; and though Trial by Jury is the wisest and best of all human institutions, yet, as those who compose it are but men, they must be liable to prejudice-liable to error.’105 Through such letters we see the extent of public involvement in the justice process. Such comments illustrate public confidence that the legal process was open to criticism, and that, despite this individual mistake, the system as a whole worked well. For Williams, however, his convictions proved that the legal system was unduly influenced by popular prejudice and prominent individuals: That popular prejudice however often prevails improperly, cannot be doubted by any well-informed man, and the fury of the Public is easily excited to cry halloo! Mad dog! On any person on whom there is the slightest report of circumstantial guilt; and more particularly, if the offence is of an odious or horrible nature, the most trifling accidental incident is always magnified as it travels from ear to ear … When to this I add, that in any cause made a topick of public and private conversation, rich and powerful individuals are found to be officiously (though unnecessarily) exerting themselves to procure a Verdict, and establish a claim to popular approbation for supporting ambitious views. I ask, whose character, liberty, and life, shall not be in danger? … was this justice? Was this the spirit of English law?106 Williams’ description surely describes a moral panic, where public fear of a crime is magnified through press reports ‘as it travels from ear to ear’ and the involvement of moral entrepreneurs ‘rich and powerful persons … exerting themselves to procure a Verdict, and establish a claim to popular approbation for supporting ambitious views’.107 For him, such a panic endangered innocent people and betrayed English law. It also had legislative consequences. In 1792 the Middlesex Justices Act was passed, which provided for paid magistrates operating from seven offices throughout London. Scholars have placed this piece of legislation within a larger, piecemeal process of reform of the justices of the peace.108 Yet the act surely also reflects conditions in London in 1790. The Monster affair reinforced the need for a more attentive and proactive magistracy.109 It is significant that Sir Sampson Wright revived Sir John Fielding’s plan for a street patrol in April 1790. While the Home Office seems to have been worried about preventing the many robberies that had occurred during the previous winter, Wright was no doubt also thinking about the Monster.110 As we have seen, Wright suffered the ignominy of public criticism in the newspapers for the delay in catching the Monster. Establishing the patrol demonstrated Wright’s awareness of public concern and his willingness to act to calm their fears. In this way, public responses to the Monster affair influenced London authorities’ subsequent responses to crime.

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11.7 Conclusion The Monster affair was a variant of a classic moral panic about crime. Unlike most moral panics, it boasted two folk-devils. Transient men like Williams, and by extension his French employer Aimable Michelle, were blamed for ‘unnatural’ and indeed ‘un-English’ crimes against women. The second folk devil was women themselves. While the affair was in many ways ephemeral, it had larger consequences. The crisis provides valuable insight to life in London in 1790. In this large, crowded and often dimly lit city, it was easy to lose sight of people, especially men and women of the lower classes. Despite the long hours of factory work and the chaperoning of women, people of different classes, genders and reputations did meet – at concerts, public debates, in parks as well as in the streets. But only at rare moments such as during the hunt for the Monster, did details of these meetings attract public attention. Such extraordinary episodes can thus shed light on the rhythms of ordinary Londoners’ daily lives, and in particular the opportunities, as well as limitations, for interactions across class, gender and national lines. The press also provided an important way for citizens to ‘meet’ and exchange their views, hopes and fears. Press reports detail Londoners’ keen interest in the law, and in particular their ongoing efforts to make the streets safer. Anxiety about crime was matched by concerns about women’s respectability and public behaviour. Yet the press also demonstrated residents’ taste for humorous and titillating accounts of female ‘victims’. More generally, immigration, crime and punishment continued to create anxiety. Indeed, they became some of the most important issues discussed in the Victorian period. Such concerns would have existed without the Monster affair, but it undoubtedly helped to air them more widely. The affair reveals the contradictions of contemporary society: huge gulfs between the living standards and mores of rich and poor, respectable and unrespectable were complicated by the relative ease with which men and women met and engaged with each other on and around the London streets. Anna Clark argues that by the 1820s lower-class women as well as upper- and middle-class women were expected to conform to ‘respectable’ standards of conduct and not walk the streets alone or late at night; however many appear to have resisted this expectation.111 Such resistance to social convention is peppered throughout the Monster affair. Examining contemporary responses to the ‘Monster’ helps us to understand the complexity and contradictions of both the affair, and the society which produced it.

Notes I would like to thank David Lemmings and Simon Devereux for advice on researching eighteenth-century English legal history.

216 The ‘Monster’ and the Press 1. On the identity of the ‘Monster’ see Jan Bondeson, The London Monster: a Sanguinary Tale (Philadelphia, PA, 2001). 2. See Robert B. Shoemaker, The London Mob: Violence and Disorder in EighteenthCentury England (2004), 275–99; Darryl Jones, ‘Frekes, Monsters and the Ladies: Attitudes to Female Sexuality in the 1790s’, Literature and History, 4 (1995), 1–24; Barbara M. Benedict, ‘Making a Monster: Socializing Sexuality and the Monster of 1790’, in Helen Deutsch and Felicity Nussbaum (eds), ‘DEFECTS’: Engendering the Modern Body (Ann Arbor, MI, 2000), 127–53, and B. M. Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago, IL, 2001), 216–17, 229, 243–4; and Anna Clark, Women’s Silence, Men’s Violence: Sexual Assault in England, 1770– 1845 (1987), 117. 3. On moral panics see Kenneth Thompson, Moral Panics (1998), esp. ch. 1. This essay draws on a larger collaborative research project, ‘Moral Panics in EighteenthCentury England’, with Professor David Lemmings and Dr Claire Walker of the University of Adelaide. 4. Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, 20 September 1777, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, (ed.) George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, (Oxford, 1934), iii. 178. 5. The population of Westminster grew moderately during the century: see Elaine A. Reynolds, Before the Bobbies: The Night Watch and Police Reform in Metropolitan London, 1720–1830 (Stanford, CA, 1998), 7. 6. See Vic Gatrell, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (New York, 2006), 51–8. 7. My main primary source is the scrapbook of contemporary newspaper cuttings, pamphlets, posters, satirical prints and other ephemera assembled by Sarah Sophia Banks, British Library, shelfmark L.R. 301.h.3–11. See John Gascoigne, ‘Banks, Sarah Sophia (1744–1818)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004): http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/1301, accessed 1 Mar. 2008 (hereafter ODNB), and British Museum User’s Guide (1987), 82; also pamphlets and satirical prints held in the British Library and the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. 8. Hannah Barker, Newspapers, Politics, and Public Opinion in Late Eighteenth-century England (Oxford, 1998), 23. 9. Some prints and pamphlets did have larger print runs and/or higher prices, however. See Cindy McCreery, The Satirical Gaze: Prints of Women in Late Eighteenthcentury England (Oxford, 2004), ch. 1, esp. 19–30. 10. Barker, Newspapers, Politics, and Public Opinion, 23. 11. John Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England: 1660–1800 (Oxford, 1986), 233. 12. Reynolds, Before the Bobbies, 58–62, 74–5. 13. Shoemaker, London Mob, 295–99. 14. Bondeson, The London Monster, describes Porter’s attack, 8–16. 15. Bondeson, The London Monster, 90. 16. Anna Clark notes that many rapes went unreported in the late eighteenth century; see Women’s Silence, Men’s Violence, 15. Frank McLynn argues that servants were commonly raped by their employers but found it difficult to prosecute their attackers; see Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-century England (1989), 107–8. 17. Anna Clark discusses plebeian men’s violence towards their wives in The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley, CA, 1995), 73–77. 18. See Bondeson, The London Monster, 18–26. 19. Benedict, ‘Making a Monster’, 143. 20. Percy-Street Coffee House petition, BL, Banks scrapbook, ff. 46–47.

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21. World, 20 Apr., 5 May 1790. 22. Hester Thrale reported that the Monster was ‘proved to be Member of some unnatural Society, who hold Females in Abhorrence’, Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs Hester Lynch Thrale (later Mrs Piozzi), 1776–1809, (ed.) Katharine C. Balderston (Oxford, 1942), ii. 770. 23. Benedict, ‘Making a Monster’, 146. 24. Jones, ‘Frekes, Monsters and the Ladies’, 1–3, 11–12. 25. Oracle, 17 June 1790. 26. Bondeson, The London Monster, 90. 27. Shoemaker, London Mob, 295–99, sees the affair as proof of a significant change in public behaviour, with ordinary people leaving public justice to municipal authorities. 28. ‘Effects and consequences’, Part Three of Stanley Cohen and Jock Young, (eds), The Manufacture of News: Social Problems, Deviance and the Mass Media (rev. edn, 1981), 432–3. 29. Bondeson, The London Monster, 191, 193. He estimates that there were between ten and fifteen actual attacks on women, The London Monster, 200. 30. Georg Forster, Werke (Berlin, 1973), xii. 297–8: diary, 12 May 1790. Translated by Jan Bondeson and quoted in The London Monster, 46. 31. The authentic trial of Renwick Williams … (1790), 6. 32. For example ‘1713 J. Addison 11 July 2/1 These Monsters of Inhumanity’; Oxford English Dictionary Online, Draft Revision Mar. 2008, http://dictionary.oed.com, viewed 30/03/08. 33. World, 11 May 1790. 34. Anonymous poster dated 5 June 1790, BL, Sophia Banks Collection, reproduced in Bondeson, The London Monster, 64. 35. See for example the advertisement of a reward in Morning Herald, 16 Apr. 1790. 36. World, 11 May 1790. 37. Howard Becker coined the phrase ‘moral entrepreneur’; see Kenneth Thompson, Moral Panics, 12–13; Bondeson, The London Monster, 180. 38. Morning Herald, 9 May 1790. 39. Shoemaker, London Mob, 286. 40. Georg Forster, Werke, xii. 297–8, translated by Bondeson, The London Monster 52; The Times, 31 May 1790, cited in Bondeson, The London Monster, 53. 41. 17 June 1790, Thraliana, 770. 42. Thrale’s own dissatisfaction with her first husband, a wealthy brewer, may partly explain her dismissive attitude towards Angerstein: see William McCarthy, Hester Thrale Piozzi: Portrait of a Literary Woman (Chapel Hill, NC, 1985), 23. 43. Sarah Palmer, ‘Angerstein, John Julius c.1732–1823’, ODNB, accessed 30 Mar. 2008. 44. Morning Herald, 16 Apr. 1790. 45. World, 22 Apr. 1790; Bondeson, The London Monster, 41. 46. Theophilus Swift, The Monster at Large; or, the Innocence of Rhynwick Williams Vindicated (1790). See Bondeson, The London Monster, 119–30. 47. Bondeson, The London Monster, 97–104. 48. Michelle’s testimony, given via an interpreter, was criticized as unreliable by Judge Buller, and Lady Eglantine Wallace falsely accused the Frenchman of attacking her, see E. Hodgson, The Trial at Large of Rhynwick Williams (1790), 53–5, 31–2; and Bondeson, The London Monster, 105, 99–100. 49. Bondeson, The London Monster, 143.

218 The ‘Monster’ and the Press 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62.

63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81.

Shoemaker, London Mob, 278. Thraliana, 770. Reynolds, Before the Bobbies, 58. BL, Banks scrapbook, ff. 46–7, and see Bondeson, The London Monster, 41–4. Donna T. Andrew, London Debating Societies, 1776–1799 (London Record Society, 1994), pp. i–xiii. Andrew, London Debating Societies, 283, 827–89. The debates took place on 5 May, 12 and 19 July 1790. Daily Advertiser, 4 May 1790. Entry to the debate cost sixpence; Andrew, London Debating Societies, 283. Andrew, London Debating Societies, 283. See Anne Stott, Hannah More: the first Victorian (Oxford, 2003). Daily Advertiser, 4 May 1790. See Bernard Schissel, Blaming Children: Youth Crime, Moral Panic and the Politics of Hate (Halifax, N.S, c.1997), 30–1; 41–6 and Steve Macek, Urban Nightmares: the Media, the Right, and the Moral Panic over the City (Minneapolis, MN, c.2006), pp. xviii, 154–5. Gatrell, City of Laughter, 4. William Dent, A Representation of Rynwick alias Renwick Williams, commonly called The Monster, hand-coloured engraving, pub. William Dent, 12 July 1790 (BM 7730). Andrea McKenzie, ‘Wild, Jonathan (bap. 1683, d.1725)’, ODNB, accessed 24/12/07. César de Saussure, A Foreign View of England in the Reigns of George I and George II (tranls. and ed. by van Muyden, 1902), 132, cited in L. Radzinowicz, A History of Criminal Law and its Administration from 1750 (1948–86), i. 724. Cesare Beccaria, Of Crime and Punishment (first English edition 1767); Reynolds, Before the Bobbies, 69. Radzinowicz, A History of Criminal Law and its Administration, i. 39–40. Courier Chronicle, 15 May 1790. Bondeson, The London Monster, 100. Bondeson, The London Monster, 9. Swift, The Monster At Large, quoted in Bondeson, The London Monster, 127–8. Shoemaker, London Mob, 288. See n. 67. See John Gay, Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716), Book III, lines 267–84, in Walking the Streets of Eighteenth-Century London: John Gay’s Trivia (1716), ed. Clare Brant and Susan E. Whyman (Oxford, 2007), 201. The Times, 22 Dec. 1790, The Times Digital Archive, http://infotrac.galegroup.com, viewed 30/03/08. Oracle, 15 May 1790. 17 June 1790, Thraliana, 770. Isaac Cruikshank, The Monster Cutting a Lady/Copper Bottoms to Prevent being Cut, hand-coloured engraving, pub. S. W. Fores, 1 May 1790 (BM 7726). Palmer, ‘Angerstein, John Julius c.1732–1823’. But Bondeson points out that there were far fewer attacks reported after Williams’ arrest, The London Monster, 149. For example [?Rushworth], The Bum Shop, engraving, pub. 11 July 1785 (Lewis Walpole Lib.), 785.7.11.1, whose design is echoed in Cruikshank’s right-hand panel of The Monster Cutting a Lady. See my discussion in Satirical Gaze, 54–6; 60–2.

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82. James Gillray, Swearing to the Cutting Monster or a Scene in Bow Street, handcoloured engraving, pub. Hannah Humphrey, 20 May 1790 (BM 7648). 83. [J. Gillray], Andrew Robinson Bowes Esqr. as he appeared in the Court of Kings Bench, on Tuesday the 18th Novr. 1786, to answer the Articles exhibited against him, by his Wife, the Countess of Strathmore, engraving, pub. E. Jackson, 2 Dec. 1786 (BM 7012), reproduced in McCreery, Satirical Gaze, 177. The Countess of Strathmore alleged that her second husband had imprisoned and beaten her. Yet sympathy for the Countess was tempered by rumours of her own sexual deviancy, in particular the charge that she beat her stepson for her own sexual gratification. See McCreery, Satirical Gaze, 174–7, 195–6. 84. Porter’s undergarments were described in detail in the press and publicly displayed in court; E. Hodgson, The Trial at Large of Rhynwick Williams (1790), 9–12 and Bondeson, The London Monster, 92. 85. Examples include James Gillray, The Monster going to take his Afternoons Luncheon, hand-coloured engraving, pub. Hannah Humphrey, 10 May 1790 (BM 7727. A), reproduced in Bondeson, The London Monster, 58; and the anonymous Old Maids Dreaming of the Monster, hand-coloured engraving, pub. William Holland, 16 May 1790 (BM 7729), reproduced in Bondeson, The London Monster, 60. 86. For example, George Hanger appears as the Monster in Isaac Cruikshank, Glaucus and Scylla or the Monster in Full Cry, hand-coloured engraving, pub. S. W. Fores, 18 May 1790 (BM 7647). 87. World, 12 July 1790. 88. Andrew, London Debating Societies, 287. 89. Daily Advertiser, 17 July 1790, Andrew, London Debating Societies, 287. 90. World, 12 July 1790. 91. Rhynwick Williams, An Appeal to the Public by Rhynwick Williams, Containing Observations and Reflections on Facts relative to his very Extraordinary and Melancholy Case (1792), 20–1. 92. List of Subscribers, Percy Coffee House, 7 May 1790, in Banks Collection, reproduced in Bondeson, The London Monster, 42, and Poster in BL, Banks Collection, 4 May 1790. 93. Clipping from an unnamed newspaper, ‘May 4 G.’ in BL, Banks Collection. 94. Reynolds, Before the Bobbies, 7. 95. Reynolds, Before the Bobbies, 46–7. 96. See for example Morning Herald, 9, 10, 12 Apr. 1790. 97. World, 3, 8 July 1790. Williams was first tried and convicted under a felony statute, which was later ruled inapplicable. He was re-tried in December 1790 on a misdemeanour charge, convicted on three indictments, and ‘is sentenced to six years’ imprisonment in Newgate; and, at the expiration of that term, to enter bail for his good behaviour for the term of seven years, himself in 200l. and two sureties in 100l. each.’, World, 17 Dec. 1790. See also Bondeson, The London Monster, 85–6, 145. 98. See John Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London, 1660–1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror (Oxford, 2001), 470–5; Reynolds, Before the Bobbies, 69; Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 568–73. 99. World, 22 Apr. 1790; Bondeson, The London Monster, 49. 100. See E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: the Origin of the Black Act (Harmondsworth: 1977). 101. Oracle, 17 June 1790. 102. World, Morning Herald, 17 June 1790.

220 The ‘Monster’ and the Press 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108.

Trial of Rhynwick Williams, 19. An Appeal to the Public, 20–1. Diary, 27 July 1790. An Appeal to the Public, 15. An Appeal to the Public, 15. See David Philips, ‘A New Engine of Power and Authority’: The Institutionalization of Law-Enforcement in England 1780–1830’, in V. A. C. Gatrell, Bruce Lenman and Geoffrey Parker (eds),Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500 (1980), 155–89, esp. 168–71; Leon Radzinowicz, A History of English Criminal Law and its Administration from 1750 (1948–86), iii. ch. 5, esp. 123–7. 109. Patrick Colquhoun, Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, etc. (5th edn, 1797), 334, cited in Radzinowicz, A History of English Criminal Law, iii. 137. 110. Radzinowicz, A History of English Criminal Law, iii. 135. 111. Women’s Silence, 116–27.

12 The British Jacobins: Folk Devils in the Age of Counter-Revolution? Michael T. Davis

… the public mind cannot be long abused by delusions, supported only by the vague and unfounded assertions of a faction, however powerful. John Thelwall (The Speech of John Thelwall, at the Second Meeting of the London Corresponding Society … November 12, 1795 (1795), p. iii)

12.1 Introduction According to Edmund Burke, on 29 October 1795 the streets of London from St James’s Palace to the House of Lords were the stage for enacting a diabolical and dangerous performance. It was the day, he said, that ‘one of the most violent and dangerous seditions broke out …. menacing to the publick security, endangering the sacred person of the King, and violating in the most audacious manner the authority of Parliament’.1 As George III made his way to and from the opening of parliament, ‘a murderous yell’ reverberated through the crowded public thoroughfares along which the royal procession made its way.2 The ‘desperate Mob, consisting of the very dregs of the people’,3 greeted the king with impassioned shouts of ‘Down with George!’, ‘No King!’, ‘Bread, bread!’, ‘No Pitt!’. On several occasions, they turned their attention to the state coach, assailing it with mud, stones and other projectiles. One of these missiles made a small hole in a window of the king’s carriage, providing enough evidence to a nervous monarch that he had been shot at by an assassin. While nobody was arrested for the alleged attempt on the king’s life, despite the offer of a reward for information leading to the conviction of the regicide, the authorities concocted a range of charges to apprehend five men from the massive crowd of 150,000 to 200,000 people. One of the detainees was Kidd Wake, a twenty-seven-year-old journeyman printer, who was originally charged with high treason. After being examined before the sitting magistrates on 30 October 1795, the lack of evidence against Wake 221

222

The British Jacobins

Fig. 12.1

James Gillray, The Republican Attack (1795). BM Satires 8681.

was conceded by the law officers, and the felony charge was downgraded to ‘a misdemeanour in hissing and hooting the king in a riotous manner’.4 At trial, the defendant was found guilty and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment in Gloucester gaol, to stand in the pillory for one hour on market-day, and to find £1000 security for his good behaviour for ten years.5 Part of the evidence against Wake was witness testimonies that he had scowled at the king. However, Wake was not without exculpation. When he appeared before the Court of King’s Bench on 28 April 1796 to receive sentence, he tendered fourteen mitigating affidavits that ‘assigned as a reason for the horrid grimaces, which the witnesses on the trial stated that the prisoner made at the king, that he was near-sighted; and having left his glass behind him, he was apt to make wry faces on looking earnestly at any object’.6 The trial of Wake is an episode extraordinary and inconceivable in equal proportions. It is almost hilarious that a refractive defect of the defendant’s eyes causing him to squint could be construed as a disdainful and irreverent act against the king, bordering on treason, and be presented as circumstantial evidence in a criminal trial. How do we make sense of this collateral evidence against Wake? How does a society become hypersensitive to actions that would otherwise be considered benign in another time and place? The answer can be found in the social and cultural constructions of the time. The ‘wry faces’ evidence presented at Wake’s trial was reflective of deeper concerns in British society during the 1790s and, in sociological

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terms, symptomatic of an infliction of moral panic. A paradigm study of the cultivation of deviant identities through the construction of a moral panic is Folk Devils and Moral Panics by Stanley Cohen.7 In this work, which addressed the heightened responses to the ‘Mods and Rockers’ subcultures in Britain during the 1960s, Cohen outlined a conceptual model with broad empirical and heuristic utility for understanding constructions of deviance and societal reactions to cultural behaviour and conduct. The model identifies how societies ‘appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic’, during which time a ‘condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests’.8 A moral panic is not monolithic in its construction or application. Rather, as the social constructionist perspective of deviance suggests,9 it is the product of a process underpinned by several key stages of facilitation and sustenance: something or someone is identified as a threat; the panic is amplified by false and exaggerated distortions of the threat, especially in the media; public concern rapidly rises and self-appointed crusaders – what the sociologist Howard Becker calls ‘moral entrepreneurs’10 – campaign for increased social control; and the authorities respond, typically by strengthening the judicial apparatus. A critical part of the developmental cycle of a moral panic involves the identifying, labelling and defining of scapegoats, by which means a category of deviants come to personify evil and are stigmatized as folk devils. They become actors whom society disvalues and whose acts are not only considered offensive but also dangerous.11 Through a process of definition and stereotyping, folk devils come to symbolize a threat and, as labelled individuals, they are stigmatized, their identity spoiled and their interaction with society impeded by a disqualification from full social acceptance.12 Through the creation of folk devil stigmas, a process of marginalization is undertaken. Personas of ‘otherness’ are defined and cultivated, legitimizing folk devils as targets of fear, hostility and restraint. From this extend two important and mutually reinforcing derivative notions of the moral panic model: social cohesion and differential social power. At its most fundamental level, a moral panic is generated by concepts of differentiation – it is one’s deviation from an evaluated norm that constitutes deviance and sets the deviant apart from the rest of society. By defining and identifying acts that violate accepted norms, society is able to locate folk devils in the dark and rough terrain of the margins. Distinctions are drawn between the respectable ‘us’ and the unrespectable ‘them’, mapping the moral margins of society to define its core. Paradoxically, this process of division can foster social cohesion. Émile Durkheim, for instance, suggested that deviance was ‘normal’ in society and ‘that by defining what is deviant, societies also define what is not, and thereby help to create shared standards’.13 Other sociologists advance Durkheim’s position to assert that an expansion – even an arbitrary application – of definitions of deviance in times of stress help to promote

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social cohesion.14 By expanding standards of deviance, the ‘respectable’ core of society is made smaller and more definitive, while at the same time the act of identifying and restraining deviance produces cohesion as the non-deviant actors perceive themselves as part of a collective response to a shared problem. Indeed, the response itself may facilitate social cohesion by sending a message to the public that they are being served by a strong and dominant executive and judiciary. At another level, dominance during a moral panic is exerted through differential social power. By marginalizing folk devils, rule creators and rule enforcers attempt to disempower the deviant, while at the same time enhancing their own social power. As Patricia Adler and Peter Adler explain: When entire groups of people become relegated to a deviant status through their social condition … we see the force of inequality and differential social power in operation …. those who control the resources in society (politics, social status, gender, wealth, religious beliefs, mobilization of the masses) have the ability to dominate, both materially and ideologically, over the subordinate groups. Thus, certain kinds of laws and enforcement are a product of political action by moral entrepreneurial interest groups that are connected to society’s power base.15 During a moral panic, individuals positioned closer to the core of society, ‘holding greater social, economic, political, and moral resources, can turn the force of the deviant stigma onto others less fortunately placed’.16 In this sense, moral panics are an exercise of elite governance. Indeed, in Britain during the 1790s reactions to the putative threat of democratic politics can be seen, at one level, to conform to the classic model of a moral panic.

12.2 Panic in the 1790s The last decade of the eighteenth century was a qualitatively different period in British history that lends itself to deeper sociological investigation than that hitherto conducted. Society was faced by a number of convergent tensions: a burst of popular political activity and engagement; a war against revolutionary France; threats of invasion; periods of economic distress; and rural unrest. A new site of social anxiety emerged around these stressors, pushing Britain into the realm of a moral panic. If we are to believe some contemporaries, Britain was in danger of being overrun by a force so wicked and malicious it would drive the country into moral and political degradation, produce a nation of heretics and send the national economy into an irreversible downturn. As the French Revolution moved into a regicidal and sanguinary stage, British fears of the so-called French disease reached a peak, producing a heightened sense of uncertainty about the national and international political order. A sincere and continuous panic about the threat to personal and national security pervaded the discourses of government

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ministers, the judiciary, loyalist scribes and conservative sympathizers. The British public were terrified into believing that their world was on the brink of being turned upside down by an ominous and looming menace that was propagated on home soil. The enemy from within were none other than those seeking a reform of parliament and an extension of the franchise. In the 1790s, when politically conscious artisans and labourers formed the foundation for popular societies like the London Corresponding Society (LCS) to promote political reform was considered a violation of norms and therefore an act of deviance. As deviants, those advocating liberty and equality were labelled by conservative loyalists as part of the definitional cycle to construct a moral panic. Edmund Burke produced the cant phrase of the decade in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) when he referred to the democrats of the period as ‘a swinish multitude’. It was meant to define, denounce and dehumanize the reformers, at the same time alarming the public with the warning that the status quo ‘will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs’ of the porcine herd if the French example is followed in Britain.17 With characteristic wit and sarcasm, the radical satirist, Charles Pigott, pointed out that the ‘swinish multitude’ was as ‘an epithet applied … to the English people, because they tamely suffer their rights to be wrested from them, and their wrongs to remain unredressed’.18 In conservative parlance, Pigott notes, it was a phrase synonymous with the appellation ‘rabble’, a term of derision used to refer to ‘an assembly of low-bred, vulgar, and riotous people’.19 Consistent with the construction of a moral panic, these loyalist labels for reformers of the 1790s were broad and strikingly fluid. It was a reactionary lexicon sufficiently accommodating to allow for stereotyping: swinish multitude, rabble, democrats, levellers and republicans were all used in an injudicious and interchangeable fashion. Added to this nomenclature was the name ‘Jacobin’, which was ‘one of the most loaded terms in Britain’s political vocabulary’.20 Yet, as James Epstein and David Karr point out, it ‘remained dangerously unfixed’. The tag was applied with indiscriminate abandonment: ‘Jacobinism was simply a label for all that conservatives found detestable within society.’21 Robert Bisset, for example, articulated the subjective and almost boundless application of the name Jacobin when writing for the Anti-Jacobin Review in 1798: ‘Whoever is the enemy of Christianity and natural religion, of monarchy, or order, subordination, property, and justice, I call a Jacobin’.22 In the 1850s, Lord Henry Cockburn reflected on how the name Jacobin encompassed ‘everything alarming and hateful and every political objector …. No innovation, whether practical, or speculative, could escape from this fatal word’.23 Yet, as Cockburn pointed out, Britain ‘had wonderfully few Jacobins; that is, persons who seriously wished to introduce a republic into this country, on the French precedent. There were plenty of people who were called Jacobins’.24 The apparent paradox of Cockburn’s reflection highlights the sometimes incomprehensible nature of a moral panic. A moral panic could act to distort

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and misrepresent well-intentioned motives and strategies. Certainly the survival of the reform movement and the reformers themselves dictated the need for popular politics of the 1790s to be bound by notions of civility and constitutional conduct. So French ‘Jacobinism was not directly translatable to the political culture of British radicalism’25 and the label ‘Jacobin’ was, therefore, a misnomer. However, alarmed conservatives were not averse to applying the label and inflating the threat of democratic politics. Counter-revolutionary culture was underpinned by a sense of peril and crisis generated in the loyalist media.26 Passionate conservative propagandists were engaged in the moral enterprise of amplifying the threat of radicalism, of presenting the existing society as besieged by dangerous and revolutionary actors. John Reeves, founder of the loyalist Crown and Anchor Society in 1792, described in his Thoughts on the English Government (1795) a ‘new set of Reformers’ who ‘pretend to have no other object than Universal Suffrage and Annual Parliaments … because they know (and we know too) that should they succeed in carrying this point, the destruction of Monarchy must inevitably follow; and a levelling Republic may then be substituted according to the imaginations and will of this rabble.’27 Another writer spoke of the ‘low-minded men who had nothing to lose’ and who would ‘declare the King and Lords useless … and fabricate what they would call a Republic, but, in other words, a violent usurpation of all the lands and property of the kingdom, which would be at the disposal of them and their adherents’.28 Conservative reactionaries firmly believed that in the vulgar jargon of British Jacobins the word ‘Liberty is Licentiousness; Equality, Plunder, and the Rights of Man, a Right to commit every Crime of which Human Nature is capable’.29 These nefarious designs imputed to reformers were reinforced in anti-radical iconography. For instance, in The Tree of Liberty, with the Devil Tempting John Bull the artist plays upon the biblical story of the garden of Eden, with a flourishing English oak tree in the background, its trunk and branches representing justice, laws and religion and bearing the fruits of freedom, happiness and security. In the foreground, reformers are personified by the Whig politician, Charles James Fox, caricatured as the snaky Satan entwined around a decaying tree of liberty, its rotten apples laced with slavery, murder, atheism and impiety.30 Of a similar vein was The Contrast, which was probably ‘the most widely disseminated design of the whole anti-radical campaign’.31 Originally printed as an etching and reproduced on broadsides, mugs and jugs, it depicts a potent and evocative comparison of the virtues of British liberty and the horrors of French liberty. The female figure of Britannia symbolizes the strength and stability of the British state, holding the scales of justice and Magna Charta, and pictured above the righteous qualities of loyalty, morality, personal security, justice and national prosperity. The horrid alternative was the French-style of liberty, with its atheism, madness, murder and treachery. A medusa hag, her trident impaled with a severed head and two hearts, represented Jacobinism as a savage and alarming synthesis of killings, anarchy and cruelty.32

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Superimposing such grim and ghastly images on British reformers was an integral part of the construction of a moral panic. Yet, it was not enough to merely define and depict the threat; it also needed to be quantified. One characteristic of a moral panic is an exaggeration of the danger – the menacing capacity of the deviants is generally disproportionate to the capacity of their number. Thus, when Edmund Burke profiled ‘the British publick’, a political nation inhabited by about 400,000 persons, he believed that about one-fifth were ‘pure Jacobins; utterly incapable of amendment; objects of eternal vigilance; and, when they break out, of legal constraint’. Burke conceded that radicals were a minority of the British population, but he deflected any possible accusations of xenophobia and hysteria by denouncing them as a ‘force …. far superior to their numbers’.33 Burke and other loyalist actors had visions of a social, political and cultural ideal and their inflamed discourses were part of the moral enterprise of manufacturing a panic to represent the existing society as spoiled and to validate the charting of a new moral order. As actors in the deviance-making enterprise, loyalists were assuming the role of moral entrepreneurs, self-appointed ‘crusaders who believe that some members of the society are wilfully engaged in immoral and therefore damaging behaviour and are not being sufficiently punished for it. Something must be done, they believe, to discourage or eliminate such behaviour’.34 But, what was to be done to defeat the scourge of British Jacobinism? Burke believed the only way forward was a determined assault. In 1793, he ‘considered a general war against Jacobins and Jacobinism as the only possible chance of saving Europe (and England is included in Europe) from a truly frightful Revolution.’35 In typical reactionary style, the loyalist pamphleteer, William Atkinson, perceived the growth of reform activity as an ill omen and he predicted dire consequences if the activists were not quashed: ‘Should [their] … pernicious designs be accomplished for want of immediate and firm measures to frustrate them, probabilities can only be calculated, [and] it baffles human foresight to foretell the consequences’.36 These calls engendered what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called ‘the panic of property’,37 as decisive and sweeping moves were made against the British Jacobins by alarmed loyalists and the government. Informal and formal social controls formed a system of methods to deal with democratic protagonists; but the rules that regulated this system were boundless – anything was fair to eliminate the radical threat. William Windham, the parliamentarian who had become an opponent of parliamentary reform by the mid-1790s, articulated this approach when he declared that it ‘was natural, and even justifiable, for men to feel indignation against those who promulgated doctrines, threatening all that was valuable and dear in society’. If ‘redress by law’ was not an option or failed, he asserted, then ‘even violence would be justifiable’.38 And, at times, physical force was utilized, as a campaign of unofficial terror was instituted against reformers by a mobilized and often militant force of loyalist associations, the militia, and Church and King mobs.39 As this counter-revolutionary initiative progressed,

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the victimization started to impact on reformers. Some, like Joseph Priestley were combat fatigued and escaped into voluntary exile, while even the more intrepid radical, John Thelwall, was reputedly harassed into the neurotic public habit of only walking in the middle of the street and taking ‘special care never to go down back streets, for fear of assassins’.40 Despite such duress among the ranks of reformers, it was not enough for some moralizers. An editorial article in The Times on 17 October 1792, for instance, envisaged how the parliamentary reform movement was an impending threat to the ‘safety of Europe’. It was observed in the article that ‘Pickepockets are transported – highwaymen and murderers hanged, and petty larceners punished with imprisonment. Is our Law so defective, that men who seek to overturn our Constitution, by holding out the doctrines of the French, shall be permitted in safety to roam abroad?’ The rhetorical question was reinforced by a call for British Jacobins to ‘be made public examples’ and ‘for Executive Vengeance’ to be taken ‘against those internal Enemies’.41 In line with the construction of a classic moral panic, the call for something to be done was heeded. The government responded by progressively increasing the level of surveillance and suppression of popular political activity. In 1795, justified by the weight of reports from government spies and self-motivated informers, repressive laws were enacted against radicals, while charges for political crimes were brought before the British courts in record numbers during the course of the 1790s.42 This process of criminalizing and prosecuting radical expression and activity was an important juncture in the construction of a moral panic. It was in the courtroom that the conjectures and claims of moral entrepreneurs, who warned of the dark designs of radicals, were tested and explicated through the presentation of state evidence. Crown lawyers and, at times, even judges became actors in the process of elaborating the claims of moral entrepreneurs. As Mark Philp observes: ‘Scholars who have insisted upon the relatively moderate scale of prosecutions of radicals miss the point that loyalists’ arguments about the limits of legitimate discourse were backed up by sanctions – without those sanctions their claims would have been little more than sound and fury’.43 Indeed, legal sanctions not only provided the means for prosecuting transgression, they facilitated the processes by which notions of right and wrong, good and evil, were to be legitimated by proving to society that the source of the panic was real and significant. It is in this context that we must place the opening speech of the Attorney General, Sir John Scott, at the treason trial proceedings in 1794 against the founder of the London Corresponding Society, Thomas Hardy. The speech of some 100,000 words lasted nine hours.44 It was an exhausting and lengthy dialogue intended to reflect not only the extent and seriousness of the nominal charge against Hardy, but also the broader and deeper threat of Jacobinism of which the crime formed a part. The very act of conducting state prosecutions required a focus on convincing juries that seditious and treasonous

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conspiracies were not artificial but realities. Alarmist discourses pervaded prosecution cases, as judges and government lawyers interrogated the dangerous dynamics of the reform movement. Sir James Eyre, Lord Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, was one of the finest exponents of panic amplification in court. When the charge of high treason against Hardy, John Horne Tooke, John Thelwall and other leading democrats was presented to the Grand Jury in 1794, Eyre encouraged the use of imagination to inflate the plausibility of how a society for reform could become a revolutionary force: Let us imagine to ourselves this case. A few well meaning men conceive that they and their fellow subjects labour under some grievance; they assemble peacefully to deliberate on the means of obtaining redress; the numbers increase; the discussion grows animated, eager, and violent; a rash measure is proposed, adopted, and acted upon; who can say where this shall stop, and that these men, who originally assembled peacefully, shall not finally, and suddenly too, involve themselves in the crime of high treason? It is apparent how easily an impetuous man may precipitate such assemblies into crimes of unforeseen magnitude, and danger to the state; but, let it be considered, that bad men may also find their way into such assemblies, and use the innocent purposes of their association as the stalking horse to their purposes of a very different complexion. How easy for such men to practise upon the credulity and the enthusiasm of honest men, lovers of their country, loyal to their prince, but eagerly bent upon some speculative improvements in the frame, and internal mechanism of the government? If we suppose bad men to have once gained an ascendancy in an assembly of this description, popular in its constitution, and having popular objects; how easy is it for such men to plunge such an assembly into the most criminal excesses?45 At the trial of the alleged regicide, Tooke, Eyre’s imagination went into overdrive. He described the London Corresponding Society as ‘a political monster’ that spread ‘itself every hour from division to division, and each division producing its sub-divisions, those sub-divisions becoming divisions, and so on ad infinitum … it is of that nature which does certainly present a very alarming aspect to all those who have a regard to the peace, the happiness, and tranquillity of the country, for it is calculated to produce the most powerful combination that I think the world ever saw’.46 This was rhetoric designed to perpetuate sepulchral notions of the LCS as unhealthy and indeed, as John Barrell points out, it was representing the reform movement’s leading society ‘as a cancerous, self-replicating, uncontrollable growth …. The society divided because it grew. But to the alarmist imagination it grew because it divided’.47 Eyre, of course, was not alone inflating the panic bubble in the British courts. When Sergeant James Adair addressed the

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jury at Thelwall’s trial in 1794, he too was concerned with the dynamism of the reform movement. He described the LCS as ‘spreading itself on the very model of [the Jacobin Club] … in France’ and that its intention was to bring ‘blood and desolation’ to Britain.48 John Scott was no less Francophobic and dramatic in his portrayal of the intentions of reformers when he addressed the jury attending Hardy’s trial: [T]he intent was to constitute in London, with affiliated societies in the country, clubs which were to govern this country upon the principles of the French government, the alleged unalienable, imprescriptible rights of man, such, as they are stated to be, inconsistent in the very nature of them with the being of a king or of lords in a government—deposing, therefore, the moment they come into execution, in the act of creating a sovereign power, either mediately or immediately, the king, and introducing a republican government with a right of eternal reform, and therefore with a prospect of eternal revolution.49

12.3 Law solutions and anti-panics At another level, beyond the scaremongering, the prosecution of British reformers played an important regulating role during the Jacobin panic and functioned as a means of social control. The law operates as a normative agency and the application of legal sanctions was designed to enforce proscriptive and prescriptive norms. The prosecution of British Jacobins was a means of directing and discrediting behaviour to maintain social order, a crucial part of what sociologists call norm promotion.50 In this sense, criminalization can be interpreted as ‘the explicit use of power to impose the view of one specific symbolic-moral universe on other universes’.51 During the stress of the 1790s, it was seen as important that the strength and authority of the state was imposed on society. It was in this context that political trials operated within the climate of a moral panic as a technology of power to construct, as Michel Foucault puts it, ‘docile bodies’.52 Through prosecution, British Jacobins were meant to yield and become either compliant social actors or be eliminated by execution and transportation. In this enterprise, the state certainly had an advantaged position in Georgian Britain. Beyond the structures and symbols of the law’s dominance and gravity, radicals faced the anomalous workings of the criminal justice system with its packed juries, prosecution lawyers with endless Crown money to conduct a lawsuit, and scandalously biased judges. Even if they could successfully negotiate this hazardous legal terrain, they might find themselves stigmatized as ‘acquitted felons’,53 as did Hardy, Tooke and Thelwall. Indeed identities could be spoiled permanently as defendants were found morally, if not legally, guilty. A similar stain was also occasionally

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applied to radical sympathizers at trials, as the state flexed its judicial muscle to force democratic enthusiasts into submission. Such was the experience of five men who were arrested during the trial of Hardy for shouts and hisses during the presentation of the prosecution’s case. Their performances were said to disturb the course of public justice and they were subsequently tried and found not guilty for having riotously assembled at the Old Bailey.54 Not so lucky was a Mr Thompson, one of the spectators in the public gallery of the trial of William Stone for high treason in January 1796. The trial was presided over by Lord Chief Justice Kenyon, who was said to lean ‘heavily with all the lions of the law’.55 When Stone was acquitted ‘an unanimous shout was set up in the Hall’ and Thompson, who joined the celebrations, was immediately arrested. He apologized for his apparent indiscretion, ‘saying that his feelings on the joyful occasion were such, that if he had not given utterance to them, he must have died on the spot.’ To Kenyon such admission was no mitigation and he saw ‘it was his duty to suppress such tumultuous joy, which drew contempt on the dignity of the Court’.56 Thompson was fined £20 and, through such ‘strong arm’ actions, Kenyon was credited with helping prevent Britain falling into the ‘civil horrors, which desolated France’.57 According to some contemporaries, such indiscriminate application of the rule of law was meant to be passively accepted. In the throes of a moral panic, ‘docile bodies’ were not meant to question the legal authority of the state. This notion is given visual representation in Benjamin West’s print of December 1795, ‘Talk of an Ostrich! An Ostrich is Nothing to Him; Johnny Bull will Swallow Any Thing!’, which was produced after the passage of the so-called repressive Gagging Acts. It depicts a skinny William Pitt shoving one of the Acts down the throat of John Bull with the butt of a musket and proclaiming: ‘What it sticks in your Throat does it? Oh I’ll ram it down I warrant you, and when it is once past, you’ll easily digest it. You must not be obstinate, Johnny; when Laws are made you have nothing to do but to Obey them!’58 It was a sentiment reminiscent of Bishop Samuel Horsley’s notorious statement in the House of Lords on 11 November 1795: ‘The Mass of the People have nothing to do with the Laws but to obey them!’59 Such declarations underpinned a prosecutorial campaign against domestic dissent by an increasingly nervous British government, lending weight to what some historians have dubbed a ‘reign of terror’.60 Certainly some reformers believed they lived in an age of terror. The radical philosopher and novelist, William Godwin, for one, understood that ‘Terror was the order of the day’;61 while some years later Ebenezer Elliott, the so-called Corn Law Rhymer, reflected on the 1790s as the time of ‘the English Reign of Terror’.62 One school of thought, pioneered largely by E. P. Thompson and Douglas Hay, extends these reflections and holds that the law was designed primarily as a tool of class oppression, to root out a category of deviants. For Thompson, the political trials of the 1790s exposed an over-anxious government taking ‘halting

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steps’ away from ethical and legitimate control and moving towards a regime that sought to ‘dispense with the rule of law … and exercise power by force’ against the working class.63 Yet, this hypothesis has been challenged by historians who argue that the eighteenth-century criminal justice system was more pluralistic and permissive.64 The question, therefore, that arises is, were the British Jacobins able to exploit their legal engagements to rearticulate the components of the moral panic, to de-amplify the putative threat and to cultivate an anti-panic? Recent scholarship has constructed political trials of the 1790s as contested sites of radical negotiation and self-assertion, spaces within the countercultural world of the reform movement where the dominant discourses of the state were confronted and challenged.65 Through cultural practices that embraced discursive, symbolic and theatrical action, democrats sought to promote their agenda, decentralizing and manoeuvring the boundaries of political and judicial control. As James Epstein notes, prosecuted reformers relished the opportunity ‘to upend authority, to beat the government at its own game, [and] to turn the tables’.66 Yet, one of the most interesting and strategically important inversions engaged by radicals of the 1790s was aimed less at spreading the radical word and calculated more so to articulate an anti-panic. Crafty defence lawyers often cast the prosecution of reformers in the light of an overreaction by deluded and maniacal loyalists and government ministers. In social psychology terms, such arguments were ‘extropunitive defenses’, employed by stigmatized groups to deflect the blame from themselves onto the rejector or excluder.67 Social scientists have analysed such approaches as a self-protective property and one of the cognitive processes utilized by the stigmatized. By ‘attributing negative feedback to the prejudiced’ and, in the case of the 1790s, the excited ‘attitudes of others toward their group’, reformers were able simultaneously to ‘buffer their self-esteem from threat’ and deflate the panic bubble.68 The rhetorical question posed by the reformers was: if the menace of radicalism was bogus then what was all the fuss about? How could there be an alarm if there was nothing to be alarmed about? This was a rationale presented repeatedly both inside and outside the space of the courtroom. It was underpinned by the fundamental legalistic defence ‘that the charges were so far-fetched, so incapable of being supported, and yet so furiously pursued that they could be the product only of madness’.69 The Jacobin panic was cast in the light of being a myth, the phantom of deranged and frenzied imaginations. It was a point made at the trial of David Downie for high treason in Edinburgh in 1794, when counsel for the defendant concluded that ‘no treasonable design was ever seriously in view, and that the whole has been a mere imagination and chimera’.70 The conspiracy for which Downie was accused was nothing more than ‘a mere phantom … the mere dream of panic-struck minds’.71 Joseph Gerrald made a similar plea at his trial for sedition in 1794 where, in response to the suggestion that ‘the

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plan of universal suffrage is visionary and impracticable’, he argued that ‘this observation … must necessarily discharge from blame all those who have proposed it. For a nonentity like a phantom, is not to be dreaded, and a plan that is attended with no danger is certainly no object of legal prosecution’.72 The ‘phantom’, Gerrald asserted, was ‘conjured up to terrify the timid’; it was ‘the Medusa’s head, which is to petrify you all with horror and astonishment’.73 Gerrald’s fellow Scottish Martyr, Maurice Margarot, when he appeared before the High Court of Justiciary for sedition in 1794, was emphatic when he denounced the ‘public accuser’s business’ as one ‘to set forth, in the most lively colours, every crime, or imputed crime, which he states at the bar of this court’. Consistent with the inflation of threat that attends a moral panic, Margarot points out ‘the public prosecutor has found means to blend trials, crimes, criminals, various persons and various articles of accusation altogether, in order to make a sum total of such a size, as shall seize upon your imagination, and make you behold a mountain of guilt, where in fact, there is not even a molehill of imprudence’.74 These and many other representations of the British Jacobin threat as a sham were part of a deliberate exercise to dampen the heated societal reaction to the alarm by reconstructing the panic narrative and relocating it in the agitated and delirious minds of loyalists, government ministers and Crown lawyers. It was an angle taken by Thomas Erskine, advocate at the trial of Tooke in 1794, when he asserted that reformers were being subject ‘to the highest penalties inflicted by the law’ because of ‘the malevolent fancy of the accuser, and tortured by doubtful constructions,’ which are ‘transmuted into the deepest guilt’.75 Indeed, in this process of relocation, some went so far as to intimate that the panic was a deliberate artificial construction, underhandedly designed with an ulterior motive. Robert Watt, for instance, the government informer who was executed in 1794 as David Downie’s co-conspirator in an alleged plot to establish a provincial government in Edinburgh, was denounced as the ‘chosen agent’ of the Lord Advocate of Scotland, Robert Dundas. Watt was said to have carried out his deceit and ‘laboured to mature the rash and turbulent Meetings of a few individuals, for Parliamentary Reform, into a Treasonable Conspiracy’, with the one objective being to ‘keep up the false alarm’ in order to justify repressive measures against reformers.76 John Thelwall subscribed to this broader vision, appealing for forbearance at a meeting of the London Corresponding Society on 26 October 1795. The forces of despotism, he believed, were plotting to provoke reformers into inadvertent behaviour, to make ‘the friends of liberty, by plunging them into tumults and disorder, the instruments of their detestable machinations … because, without the pretences which tumult might afford them, it is impossible for them to introduce that military coercion necessary for the support of their rotten borough system of corruption, peculation, and monopoly, under the weight of which we groan’.77 The message that a real British Jacobin conspiracy did not exist and therefore the focus of the panic should be the ministerial conspiracy was even taken up

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in parliament by the marquess of Lansdowne, who declared that government ministers were sounding ‘the alarm-bell, to terrify the people into weak compliances.’ It was a scheme ‘planned and executed by ministers themselves, for the purpose of continuing their power, a power which drew the constitution into their own hands, and which he would not consider as safely lodged while in their possession’.78 Charles James Fox followed a similar line, complaining to his fellow MPs about ‘a miserable mockery held out of alarms in England which have no existence, but which are made the pretext for assembling the parliament in an extraordinary way, in order, in reality, to engage you in a foreign contest.’79 This was a message not lost by Charles Pigott, who intuitively connected ‘Edmund Burke’s prophecies, Mr. Pitt’s crusade’ and, sarcastically, ‘mild sentences for sedition’ to define the word ‘panic’.80 A moral panic was being facilitated by ‘miserable politicians’ who, ‘bewildered by apprehensions and fears for themselves,’ have ‘lost all sense of their duty towards the people, and have joined the conspiracy of courts against the interests of humanity’.81 In the language of the British Jacobins, ‘alarm’ was ‘the tocsin of delusion; plunging Englishmen into all the calamities of war, under the falsest pretence of their liberties and properties being endangered, to cover the real designs of hatred, jealousy, despotism, and revenge’.82 While deflecting the image of British Jacobinism as a dangerous threat and projecting the focus of fear on their accusers was important to the process of relocating and reconstructing the structures of the moral panic, an equally important strategy aimed at deamplification was to address directly the negative image imposed upon reformers. They were stigmatized as unrespectable, revolutionary conspirators whose evil plans were plotted behind a shroud of secrecy. However, through their trials as well as other arenas, reformers were able to articulate a counter-discourse to contest the negative trope and to construct an identity marked by respectable, constitutional and open conduct. In an attempt to impart legitimacy of their conduct and agenda, and thereby construct the British Jacobin panic as something about nothing, reformers often paralleled their activities with the Whig libertarian programme of the 1780s, when William Pitt and the duke of Richmond were considered reformers. It was this narrative framework that was used to connect Thomas Paine to the prime minister when the Rights of Man was prosecuted as a seditious libel. Part of Erskine’s defence revolved around the argument that the ‘same important truths’ that Paine espoused ‘were held out to the whole public … by the person now at the head of his majesty’s councils’.83 When Daniel Holt was tried in 1793 for publishing a seditious libel, his counsel ‘dwelt with particular force and energy on the singular cruelty of prosecuting a man for re-printing, in the ways of his business, a paper, sanctioned by the first characters of the age, and subscribed by the two first men in the present administration, viz. Mr. Pitt and the Duke of Richmond’.84 Thomas Muir made one of the fullest and boldest expositions of this argument when he defended himself on sedition charges before the so-called hanging judge, Robert McQueen, Lord

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Braxfield. He defiantly proclaimed to the court: ‘If I have been guilty of an atrocious crime, I shall not demand the protection of the dead, I shall not wander among the tombs, and cry for the support and the assistance of those who cannot hear me, but I shall loudly demand the protection of the living, of men high in rank, exalted in power, and who enjoy the confidence of their king’. Muir went on to trigger the memory of the jury: Can it ever be forgotten, that in the year 1782, Mr. Pitt was stained with the same guilt? Did not he preach up the necessity of a reform in the representation of the people? Did not he advise the people to form societies; and did not he countenance these societies, by his presence? … Beware how you condemn me. Beware how you brand me with the opprobrium of being seditious. At the same time you condemn the confidential minister of the king. Nay more, Sir, in bringing this charge against me, you accuse your sovereign; for can it be supposed, that he would permit a man to enjoy his confidence, who in the year 1782, by being a reformer, as I am in the year 1793, wished to precipitate this country into anarchy, desolation, and into all the horrors which you have described. But if the attempt to procure a reform in parliament be criminal, your accusation must extend far and wide. It must implicate the ministers of the crown, and the lowest subjects. Have you forgotten that in the year 1782, the duke of Richmond, the present commander of the forces, was a flaming advocate for the universal right of suffrage? … Shall what was patriotism in 1782, be criminal in 1793? You have honoured me this night, by the title of the pest of Scotland. And if the same offences merit the same appellations, you must likewise liberally bestow this epithet upon the first lord of the treasury, and upon the commander of the forces.85 Muir was on firm historical ground to argue for aligning the reformist demands of the 1780s and 1790s and, from this foundation, he denounced the charges against him as ‘false and injurious’ and proclaimed that his actions, ‘far from exciting people to riot and insurrection’, exhorted reformers ‘to pursue measures moderate, legal, peaceable, and constitutional’.86 In this way, British Jacobins were able to fend off accusations of being rabblerousers and desensitize fears of revolutionary conduct, which were central to constructing a moral panic, by drafting their politics in the tradition of British constitutionalism and in the spirit of calm and rational action. Margarot thus confessed before the High Court of Justiciary to be a law-abiding member of society: ‘I am for obeying, and every good citizen is for obeying and paying respect to the laws, and to nothing but the laws’. From this premise he extended his refutation of claims that he was involved in political action to overturn the state through the use of violence. However, he did not deny the objective to overawe parliament: ‘so we were’, he said, ‘but how? by argument, by sound reasoning’.87 This was alternative moral force,

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fitting for respectable reformers prepared to invest their cultural capital. Cast in the light of the duke of Richmond’s reform agenda, the point was made at Hardy’s treason trial, that such a force would surround parliament ‘NOT by armed men, or by importunate multitudes, but by the still and universal voice of a whole people CLAIMING THEIR KNOWN AND UNALIENABLE RIGHTS’.88 The affirmative action of reformers was not only peaceable, but it was conducted in complete openness. Far from conforming to the dastardly portrayal as shadowy and dark devils perpetuated by alarmists, British Jacobins were represented as proceeding ‘in the greatest publicity’.89 While such arguments might be predictable legal defences, they also had broader and deeper social as well as political implications that were integral to reconstructing the British Jacobin panic. By advancing notions of their respectability, rationality and openness as reformers, British democrats were locating themselves away from the margins on the map of civil culture. This map was used to promote or obstruct social inclusion, a distinction integral to the structure of a moral panic. As the sociologist, Jeffrey Alexander explains: ‘Actors are not intrinsically either worthy or moral: they are determined to be so by being placed in certain positions on the grid of civil culture. When citizens make judgments about who should be included in civil society and who should not, about who is a friend and who is an enemy, they draw on a systematic, highly elaborate symbolic code’.90 Alexander delineates a typology of codes – what he calls the democratic and counter-democratic – which societies use to cultivate identities of the profane and sacred, the respectable and unrespectable, of who should be included and who should be excluded, of worthy citizens and folk devils. According to this schema, the counterdemocratic code relates unrespectable actors to motives of irrationality, hysteria, disorderliness and secrecy. It was within this discursive framework that conservative loyalism attempted to construct the persona of the British Jacobin and formed the basis of a moral panic: The objects it identifies threaten the core community from somewhere outside it. From this marginal position, they present a powerful source of pollution. To be close to these polluted objects – the actors, structures, and processes that are constituted by this repressive discourse – is dangerous. Not only can one’s reputation be sullied and one’s status endangered, but one’s very security can be threatened as well. To have one’s self or movement be identified in terms of these objects causes anguish, disgust, and alarm. This code is taken to be a threat to the very centre of civil society itself.91 The cultivation of a respectable and calm demeanour was, therefore, a critical stage in the process of manufacturing an anti-panic. It was a cultural-symbolic inversion that challenged the British Jacobin stigma of being unruly folk devils, but it was not the only symbolic contest in which they engaged through

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their trials in an effort to reconstruct the panic. Erving Goffman, in his seminal study of spoiled identities, points out that ‘we believe the person with a stigma is not quite human’.92 Indeed, social psychologists have determined ‘that members of stigmatized groups are often regarded as “infrahumans”, in that they are viewed as lacking in the possession of distinctly human characteristics such as secondary emotions’.93 In turn, societies impose upon disvalued individuals ‘specific stigma terms … as a source of metaphor and imagery, typically without giving thought to the original meaning’.94 It was in this context that Burke’s ‘swinish multitude’ trope was not only a singular means of ridicule, but an element in the process of marginalizing British Jacobins.95 It was part of what Charles Pigott called the ‘prostitution of language’,96 its design being to dehumanize radicals, to make them submissive objects that are justifiable targets of derision, mockery and suppression. The response by radicals is fascinating and, at times, ambivalent. At one level, they adopted the terms of stigma applied against them. John Thelwall, for one, said he embraced ‘the term Jacobinism without hesitation’ purely and simply because ‘it is fixed upon us, as a stigma, by our enemies’.97 Similarly, ‘Burke’s vivid image’ of a swinish multitude ‘was transformed by radicals in the 1790s into a banner of popular pride and assertiveness’.98 In an unintended rearticulation, the porcine slight was used in print and other media to fertilize a rich radical counterculture. As one scholar points out: ‘By vividly defining a large part of the population as brutish and inarticulate, Burke provoked them into speech. The insult that embodied their social status as inadequate thinkers became the chosen mode for disproving the accusation by engaging in the act of writing’.99 However, at another level, reformers also attempted to reverse the process of dehumanization by implicitly inverting notions of them as infrahumans. At trial, prosecuted democrats often employed emotive defences not only to win sympathy with the jury but, by inference, also to emphasize their humanity and their distinctly human characteristic of emotional attachment. For instance, at the trial of Thomas Walker in 1794 for a conspiracy to overthrow the government, part of Thomas Erskine’s advocacy for his client appealed to Walker’s domestic relations: ‘I have been under his roof, where I have seen him the husband of an amiable and affectionate woman, and the happy parent of six engaging children; and it hurts me not a little to think what they must feel at this moment’.100 Alexander Whyte followed a similar line at his trial in July 1793 for publishing a seditious libel, when he painted a picture of how, if convicted, he would be ‘torn from a tender wife, a sick and infant family’ and that he would be emotionally reduced by ‘the cutting reflection of their distressed situation’.101 In this vein, Thomas Lloyd cultivated his humanness in a heart-felt address to the court before being convicted of a seditious libel in 1792: Behold the man whom thou hast torn from his weeping family! Do not the tears of his frantic wife, do not the cries of his starving babes, harrow

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up thy soul? Once they were happy, and kind imagination pictured to them scenes of future pleasure! The father, while he laboured for their provision, hung with parental fondness over his smiling infants, or pressed to his bosom the dear and faithful partner of his life. His toil became a pleasure, it was for them he toiled, and the public welfare by his labour was advanced. See now where he lies. His sunken cheeks, his haggard eye proclaim the misery of his soul. Shut up from liberty and day, confined with the refuse, the most abandoned of mankind, torn from all those he loved, and bankrupt in every view of life, he pines, he dies, the helpless victim of thine avarice.102 From such appeals, there was no mistaking the message that the British Jacobins were not, individually or as a group, an abstract infrahuman construction; that they were humans with emotions. However, when Margarot appeared before the High Court of Justiciary in 1794 and was observed as ‘a little, dark creature, dressed in black, with silk stockings and white metal buttons, something like one’s idea of a puny Frenchman’,103 perhaps part of the symbolic message was missed. Other radicals also consciously adopted an appearance that was considered provocative at the time. Joseph Gerrald, for example, attended court ‘with unpowdered hair, hanging loosely down behind – his neck nearly bare, and his shirt with a large collar, doubled over; so that on the whole he was not unlike one of Vandyck’s portraits. This was the French costume of the day’.104 Lord Cockburn believed that such cultural appropriations were ‘a ridiculous aping of French forms’.105 Indeed, scholars have generally interpreted the style of dress reformers chose in the 1790s as a non-verbal mode of communicating radical political sentiment.106 To be sure, in broad sociological terms: ‘choice of clothing styles constitutes means of self-expression often employed in the presentation of a preferred or idealized self to others …. Individuals can choose to conform to or challenge social norms through apparel’.107 Yet, style of dress is also an expression of individuality, which is an innately human condition: ‘The human species is distinctive precisely in the large role that individuality plays in the lives of every human being’.108 Thus, by emphasizing their individuality through corporeal differentiation, radicals were in fact attempting symbolically to debunk and diminish the stigma of being infrahuman that was engendered by the British Jacobin panic.

12.4 Conclusion It might seem extraordinary that individuals would need to cultivate notions of humanness, but it must be remembered that the 1790s was – all things considered – a remarkable era. A pervasive and extended moral panic was manufactured, making the putative threat of political reform and reformers one of the most serious and captivating issues facing British society. As a

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classic moral panic was manufactured, alarmist visions of wrongdoers, evil pedlars of sedition and treason at every proverbial corner resulted in a section of British society being denounced and stigmatized as folk devils. Their exorcism by law or by force was seen as the only way of settling a society haunted by anxiety. But, was there something to be anxious about? Not surprisingly, British Jacobins certainly did not believe so. Through their trials, reformers attempted to rearticulate the panic narrative by emphasizing their unfair stigmatization, their respectability and their common humanity. In retrospect, these were conspicuous arguments. However, in the heated atmosphere of the 1790s, society’s clear vision was blurred, as John Barrell puts it, by a ‘mist, which insinuates itself into every space, private as well as public, and obliges all those who inhabit it to feel their way through the action, warily guessing at dangers, deceiving themselves while hoping to deceive others, striking out blindly, groping for forms of words that might possibly protect or reassure them.’109 Kidd Wake, it seems, was not the only one with problems of vision in the 1790s. The only difference was some were squinting at the king, while others were squinting with him.

Notes I wish to thank David Lemmings for his careful reading and constructive comments on a draft of this essay. 1. Edmund Burke, The Writing and Speeches of Edmund Burke, (ed.) R. B. McDowell and William B. Todd (Oxford, 1991), ix. 62. 2. Ibid. For an account of the events that unfolded on 29 October 1795, see The New Annual Register, or General Repository of History, Politics, and Literature for the Year 1796 (1797), 9; Roger Wells, Wretched Faces: Famine in Wartime England, 1763–1803 (Gloucester, 1988), 140–1; and John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793–1796 (Oxford, 2000), 554–62. 3. True Briton, 30 Oct. 1795. 4. The Critical Review, or Annals of Literature (1796), 579. Wake’s age is referred to in John Ashton, Old Times: A Picture of Social Life at the End of the Eighteenth Century (1885), 32. 5. Wake produced a narrative of his case entitled The Case of K.W.: Being a Narration of His Sufferings, during Five Years Confinement!!! In Gloucester Penitentiary House for Hooting, Hissing and Calling Out No War! as His Majesty was Passing in State to the House of Peers (1801). 6. The Northampton Mercury, 30 Apr. 1796. I am grateful to Professor Michael Bennett for bringing this source to my attention. 7. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (1972). Also see Eric Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda, Moral Panics: The Construction of Deviance (Oxford, 1994); and Chas Critcher, Moral Panics and the Media (Buckingham, 2003). 8. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 9. 9. See Patricia A. Adler and Peter Adler, Constructions of Deviance: Social Power, Context, and Interaction (Belmont, 2000), 133–8. 10. Howard Becker, Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (New York, 1963).

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11. See Edward Sagarin, Deviants and Deviance: An Introduction to the Study of Disvalued People and Behavior (New York, 1975), 9; and Paul C. Higgins and Richard R. Butler, Understanding Deviance (New York, 1982), 3. 12. Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York, 1963). 13. Marshall B. Clinard and Robert F. Meier, Sociology of Deviant Behavior (10th edn, Fort Worth, TX, 1998), 12. See Émile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method (1895; repr. New York, 1982). 14. See Kai T. Erikson, Wayward Puritans (New York, 1965). 15. Adler and Adler, Constructions of Deviance, 137. 16. Ibid. 17. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. L. G. Mitchell (1790; repr. Oxford, 1999), 79. 18. Charles Pigott, A Political Dictionary Explaining the True Meaning of Words, ed. Robert Rix (1795; repr. Aldershot, 2004), 140. 19. Ibid., p. 109. 20. James Epstein and David Karr, ‘Playing at Revolution: British “Jacobin” Performance’, Journal of Modern History, 79 (2007), 495. 21. M. O. Grenby, The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge, 2001), 8. 22. Anti-Jacobin Review, 1 (1798), 223. 23. Lord [Henry] Cockburn, Memorials of His Time (Edinburgh, 1856), 82. 24. Ibid., 80. 25. Epstein and Karr, ‘Playing at Revolution’, 500. On the constitutional conduct and notions of civility in radical politics, see Michael T. Davis, ‘The Mob Club? The London Corresponding Society and the Politics of Civility in the 1790s’, in Michael T. Davis and Paul A. Pickering (eds), Unrespectable Radicals? Popular Politics in the Age of Reform, (Aldershot, 2008), 21–40. See also Benjamin Weinstein, ‘Popular Constitutionalism and the London Corresponding Society’, Albion, 34 (2002), 35–57. 26. On loyalist literary culture, see Kevin Gilmartin, Writing Against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790–1832 (Cambridge, 2007). 27. [John Reeves], Thoughts on the English Government. Addressed to the Quiet Good Sense of the People of England (1795), in Political Writings of the 1790s, ed. Gregory Claeys (1995), viii. 249–50. 28. The Englishman’s Political Catechism (Exeter, 1792), 8–9. 29. Ibid., 7. 30. On this print, see Mary Dorothy George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum (1942), vii. 449–50; Tamara L. Hunt, Defining John Bull: Political Caricature and National Identity in Late Georgian England (Aldershot, 2003), 148. 31. David Bindman, The Shadow of the Guillotine: Britain and the French Revolution (1989), 118. 32. On this image, see ibid., 118–21; Hunt, Defining John Bull, 141. 33. Burke, The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ix. 223–4. 34. Goode and Ben-Yehuda, Moral Panics, 80. 35. Burke, The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, viii. 404. 36. [William Atkinson], A Concise Sketch of the Intended Revolution in England; With a Few Hints on the Obvious Methods to Avert It (1794), in Political Writings of the 1790s, ed. Claeys, viii. 192.

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37. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions (1817), i. 210. 38. The Parliamentary History of England (1806–20), xxx. 135. 39. For an analysis of unofficial terror in the 1790s, see Michael T. Davis, ‘The British Jacobins and the Unofficial Terror of Loyalism in the 1790s’, in Brett Bowden and Michael T. Davis (eds) Terror: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism in Europe, 1605 to the Future (Brisbane, 2008), 92–113. Also see A. Mitchell, ‘The Association Movement, 1792–93’, Historical Journal, 4 (1961), 56–77; E. C. Black, The Association: British Extraparliamentary Political Organization 1769– 1793 (Cambridge, MA, 1963), 233–74; D. E. Ginter, ‘The Loyalist Association Movement of 1792–3 and British Public Opinion’, Historical Journal, 9 (1966), 179–90; J. R. Western, ‘The Volunteer Movement as an Anti-Revolutionary Force, 1793–1801’, English Historical Review, 71 (1956), 603–14; and Kevin Gilmartin, ‘In the Theater of Counterrevolution: Loyalist Association and Conservative Opinion in the 1790s’, Journal of British Studies, 41 (2002), 291–328. 40. Cited in The Politics of English Jacobinism: Writings of John Thelwall, ed. Gregory Claeys (University Park, Penn., 1995), p. xx. On the harassment of Thelwall, see E. P. Thompson, ‘Hunting the Jacobin Fox’, Past & Present, 142 (1994), 94–140. 41. The Times, 17 Oct. 1792. 42. See Clive Emsley, ‘An Aspect of Pitt’s Terror: Prosecutions for Sedition during the 1790s’, Social History, 6 (1981), 155–84; Clive Emsley, ‘Repression, “Terror” and the Rule of Law in England during the Decade of the French Revolution’, English Historical Review, 100 (1985), 801–25; Michael Lobban, ‘From Seditious Libel to Unlawful Assembly: Peterloo and the Changing Face of Political Crime, c. 1770–1820’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 10 (1990), 307–52; Michael Lobban, ‘Treason, Sedition and the Radical Movement in the Age of the French Revolution’, Liverpool Law Review, 22 (2000), 205–34; and Philip Harling, ‘The Law of Libel and the Limits of Repression, 1790–1832’, The Historical Journal, 44 (2001), 107–34. 43. Mark Philp, ‘Vulgar Conservatism, 1792–93’, English Historical Review, 110 (1995), 57. 44. See Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1979), 343. 45. A Complete Collection of State Trials, ed. William Cobbett and T. B. Howell (1816–22), xxix. 206. 46. Ibid., xxv. 731. 47. John Barrell, ‘London and the London Corresponding Society’, in James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin (eds), Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780–1840, (Cambridge, 2005), 104–5. 48. State Trials for High Treason, Embellished with Portraits. Path Third, containing the Trial of Mr. John Thelwall (1795), 13. 49. A Complete Collection of State Trials, xxiv. 270–1. 50. As Clinard and Meier explain: ‘Powerful groups expand the range of stratified social phenomena through a process of definition and influence. A generic term for this process, norm promotion, indicates an ability to successfully promote particular norms to the exclusion of other, competing norms’: Clinard and Meier, Sociology of Deviant Behavior, 14. 51. Goode and Ben-Yehuda, Moral Panics, 78. 52. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth, 1979), 138. 53. See Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death, 430.

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54. Morning Post, 13 Feb. 1795. 55. The Law Review; or Quarterly Review of Jurisprudence for February, 1837; and May, 1837 (1837), 284. 56. Ibid., 285. 57. Ibid., 284. 58. The British Museum number for this print is 8703. 59. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Plot Discovered; or An Address to the People, against Ministerial Treason (Bristol, 1795), in Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann (London and Princeton, 1971), i. 285. 60. See Emsley, ‘An Aspect of Pitt’s “Terror”’; Lobban, ‘From Seditious Libel to Unlawful Assembly’; H. T. Dickinson, British Radicalism and the French Revolution 1789–1815 (Oxford, 1985), 37, 40; and Jennifer Mori, William Pitt and the French Revolution 1785–1795 (Edinburgh, 1997), 278–9. 61. William Godwin, Things As They Are; or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams, ed. David McCracken (1794; repr. Oxford, 1982), 2. For a discussion of Godwin’s activities in relation to the treason trials of 1794, see Benjamin Pauley, ‘“Far from a Consummate Lawyer”: William Godwin and the Treason Trials of the 1790s’, in Ulrich Broich, H. T. Dickinson, Eckhart Hellmuth and Martin Schmidt (eds) Reactions to Revolutions: The 1790s and their Aftermath, (Berlin, 2007), 203–30. 62. Cited in E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1980), 199. 63. E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (Harmondsworth, 1977), 269. 64. See Peter King, Crime, Justice and Discretion in England, 1740–1820 (Oxford, 2000); Peter King, Crime and Law in England, 1750–1840: Remaking Justice from the Margins (Cambridge, 2006); J. M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800 (Princeton, NJ, 1986); and J. M. Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London, 1660–1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror (Oxford, 2001). 65. See Michael T. Davis, ‘“I Can Bear Punishment”: Daniel Isaac Eaton, Radical Culture and the Rule of Law, 1793–1812’, in Louis A. Knafla (ed.), Crime, Punishment, and Reform in Europe, (Westport, 2003), 89–106; Michael T. Davis, ‘Prosecution and Radical Discourse during the 1790s: The Case of the Scottish Sedition Trials’, International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 33 (2005), 148–58; and James Epstein, In Practice: Studies in the Language and Culture of Popular Politics in Modern Britain (Stanford, 2003), 59–82. 66. James Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual and Symbol in England, 1790–1850 (New York, 1994), 35. 67. Brenda Major and Collette P. Eccleston, ‘Stigma and Social Exclusion’, in Dominic Abrams, Michael A. Hogg and José M. Marques (eds), The Social Psychology of Inclusion and Exclusion, (New York, 2005), 72. Also see G. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (New York, 1954). 68. Major and Eccleston, ‘Stigma and Social Inclusion’, 72. See also J. Crocker and Brenda Major, ‘Social Stigma and Self-Esteem: The Self-Protective Properties of Stigma’, Psychological Review, 96 (1989), 608–30. 69. Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death, 411. 70. A Complete Collection of State Trials, xxiv. 148. 71. Ibid., xxiv. 150. 72. Ibid., xxiii. 956–7. 73. Ibid., xxiii. 977. 74. Ibid., xxiii. 711.

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75. Ibid., xxv. 311. 76. Morning Chronicle, 16 Oct. 1794. 77. John Thelwall, The Speech of John Thelwall, at the General Meeting of the Friends of Parliamentary Reform, called by the London Corresponding Society … October 26, 1795 (1795), 3–4. 78. Parliamentary History of England, xxxii. 155. 79. Ibid., xxx. 26. 80. Pigott, A Political Dictionary Explaining the True Meaning of Words, 96. 81. Ibid., 2. 82. Ibid. 83. A Complete Collection of State Trials, xxii. 465. 84. Ibid., xxii. 1203. 85. Ibid., xxiii. 193. 86. Ibid., xxiii. 129. 87. Ibid., xxiii. 761. 88. Ibid., xxiv. 915. 89. Cited in Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death, 410. The importance of open conduct for the London Corresponding Society is placed in the broader framework of the cultural codes of civil society in Davis, ‘The Mob Club?’, 34. 90. Jeffrey C. Alexander, ‘Citizen and Enemy as Symbolic Classification: On the Polarizing Discourse of Civil Society’, in Michèle Lamont and Marcel Fournier (eds), Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality, (Chicago, IL and London, 1992), 291. 91. Ibid., 296–7. 92. Goffman, Stigma, 5. 93. Major and Eccleston, ‘Stigma and Social Exclusion’, 65. On this point, see J. Leyens, et al., ‘The Emotional Side of Prejudice: The Attribution of Secondary Emotions to Ingroups and Outgroups’, Personality and Social Psychology Review, 4 (2000), 186–97; and J. Leyens, et al., ‘Psychological Essentialism and the Differential Attribution of Uniquely Human Emotions to Ingroups and Outgroups’, European Journal of Social Psychology, 31 (2001), 395–411. 94. Goffman, Stigma, 5. 95. For a discussion of the ‘swinish multitude’ trope see Don Herzog, Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders (Princeton, NJ, 1998), 505–45. 96. Charles Pigott, A Political Dictionary for the Guinea-less Pigs, or, a Glossary of Emphatical Words Made Use of by that Jewel of a Man, Deep Will (1795), preface. 97. John Thelwall, The Rights of Nature against the Usurpations of Establishments (1796), 32. 98. Robert Malcolmson and Stephanos Mastoris, The English Pig: A History (London and New York, 2001), 6. 99. Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791–1819 (Oxford, 1984), 81. 100. A Complete Collection of State Trials, xxiii. 1116. 101. Ibid., xxii. 1248. 102. Ibid., xxii. 349. 103. Henry Thomas Cockburn, An Examination of the Trials for Sedition which have Hitherto Occurred in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1888), ii. 25. 104. Ibid., ii. 43. 105. Cockburn, Memorials of His Time, 80. 106. See, for instance, Epstein and Karr, ‘Playing at Revolution’, 510–11. For a discussion of the use of dress as a mode of expression, see Leigh Eric Schmidt,

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‘“A Church-Going People Are a Dress-Loving People”: Clothes, Communication and Religious Culture in Early America’, Church History, 58 (1989), 36–51. 107. George Comstock and Erica Scharrer, The Psychology of Media and Politics (Burlington, 2005), 237. 108. Tibor R. Machan, Classical Individualism: The Supreme Importance of Every Human Being (New York, 1998), 88. 109. John Barrell, The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford, 2007), 2.

13 Conclusion: Moral Panics, Law and the Transformation of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England David Lemmings

Conservatives have always hated anything like an appeal to opinion outside the ruling class. Christopher Hill (‘The Many Headed Monster’, In Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, CT, 1991), 192) [N]o … given part of legislative right can be safely exercised without regard to the general opinion of those who are to be governed. That general opinion is the vehicle and organ of Legislative omnipotence. Edmund Burke (‘Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol … on the Affairs of America’ (1777), in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke: Vol. III, (ed.) W. M. Elofson and J. A. Woods (Oxford, 1996), 314–15) [The public sphere] was now casting itself loose as a forum in which the private people, come together to form a public, readied themselves to compel public authority to legitimate itself before public opinion. Jurgen Habermas (The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. T. Burger (1989), 25–6) As suggested in the introduction, comparison of the panics discussed in this book provides the opportunity to make some critical comments about the changing relationship between opinion, governance and law during the two centuries or so between the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. Jurgen Habermas’s seminal account of the bourgeois public sphere may provide useful conceptual assistance in this task, so I want to begin this final chapter by summarizing the main features of his theory. 245

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13.1 Habermas’s ‘transformation of the bourgeois public sphere’ For Habermas, the long eighteenth century was ‘a golden age of uncorrupted public opinion’.1 He identified the growth of the bourgeois public sphere as the development of continuous discussion among middling people who were rendered critically conscious about affairs of state that affected them by the development of the press.2 This was a crucial shift in governance because the newly constituted public represented a virtual collection of ordinary (i.e. non-official) people who rejected the normal status of mere subjection to authority in favour of rational criticism.3 Previously the public sphere had been a realm of authority wherein the monarch and state officials had simply projected their power and grandeur; now it was used to debate the business of governance.4 When, where and how did this transformation occur? Habermas regarded England in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the pioneer site of a public sphere wherein the reading public influenced political affairs. He gave particular attention to the metropolis of London, where the proliferating coffee houses became sites for reading and critical discussion of literature, philosophy and art, and ultimately economics and politics.5 But more generally he acknowledged the importance of the novel-reading middle-class family as the foundation for a subjective sensibility that broadened the subject-matter of governance beyond the administration of justice and the maintenance of international relations into the regulation of civil society according to their developing ideals.6 The principal vehicle for the institutionalization of public discussion about state and society was the development of journalism in the early eighteenth century, encouraged as it was by the end of censorship and the remarkable collaboration between political authors and literary politicians in several influential periodicals and magazines.7 It is important to understand some of the ideal principles of Habermas’s public sphere as he saw it crystallizing across eighteenth-century England and Europe. First, discussion in the bourgeois public sphere disregarded status: legitimate authority depended on victory in argument, not on social rank, as it had previously.8 Second, the new public assumed a right to be critical of government: there was both diminished deference to official opinion and at the same time higher expectations of governance, as the sphere of public interest expanded.9 In the third place, influence depended ultimately on rational exchange.10 Of course this does not mean that every contribution would be reasonable – that was obviously unrealistic – but rather that discussion was expected to reveal irrationality and result in a resolution that constituted the public good. Fourthly, and finally, such an emphasis on rational public discourse had significant implications for conceptualizing law. Habermas believed that a primary characteristic of the bourgeois public sphere was a concept of law that stresses the role of legislation as the

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legitimate product of rational discussion. In this sense truth not authority made law, and truth was necessarily the product of public opinion.11 Overall, therefore, the fulfilment of these principles in a society clearly signals the growth of what we would now call deliberative democracy. How does this relate to moral panics? Modern models of moral panics take the existence and influence of the public sphere for granted, because it is assumed that the panic is developed through the focussing of popular attention in the media, and there is a clear expectation that government is obliged to take account of the opinion generated: local and central authorities must address and fix the problem. Indeed modern governments are judged as competent and legitimate according to the extent that they acknowledge and satisfy public opinion. They actively interfere in the generation of opinion with the aim of developing ‘policy’ that will legitimize their authority. However studies of moral panics also emphasize the irrational and emotional elements of public opinion: the tendency for media attention to exaggerate the threat posed by the phenomenon, for the reaction to be disproportionate, and to serve the pre-existing political agendas of the authorities and specific interest groups, rather than representing the public at large.12 In this sense, according to much analysis of modern panics, whether constituted discursively or largely influenced by elite interests, the public sphere of commercial press reporting and comment is hardly a perfect environment for the ‘needs of society’ to influence public policy.13

13.2 Doubts: taking the public and the past seriously Having identified some principal features of Habermas’s theory about changing relations between opinion, governance and law in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and related them to scholarly ideas about moral panics, we can now deploy them to discuss how far the panics analysed in this book represented the growth of a modern public sphere where ordinary people had genuine influence in governance via rational discussion. However before proceeding to discussion of the substantive historical essays in this book it is important to consider the note of caution sounded in David Rowe’s chapter. Rowe’s analysis of critical reflections on the development of theory about moral panics draws attention to three issues that are very relevant to historians seeking to apply ideas about moral panics. First, it is important to take public anxieties seriously: as Cohen himself has pointed out, there is a tendency for sociologists who identify panics to assume that they are grounded in fantasy or media manipulation and leave it at that.14 Historians, of course, are not usually guilty of taking a patronizing attitude towards their human subjects; indeed studies of seemingly irrational events like witch panics demonstrate the extent to which they are prepared to work hard at understanding the past on its own terms. Certainly in his chapter on anxiety about

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puritans in the seventeenth century, Tim Harris makes the important point that the anti-puritan scares built on ‘socially-rooted’ prejudices and genuinely widespread anxieties about the threat that puritan controversialists seemingly represented to social and religious harmony as well as concerns about political and religious insubordination. Cindy McCreery’s analysis of the ‘Monster’ panic in London during 1790 seeks to read the panic for what it can tell us about popular anxieties that formed around street crime and especially the vulnerability of women in the context of a rapidly developing metropolis. Clearly, if they are treated sensitively, historical studies of moral panics promise to reveal complex layers of cultural reproduction, as well as the relations between public opinion and governance. Secondly, Rowe questions whether a conceptual model of moral panics derived from the specific historical circumstances of late twentieth-century Britain can be applied to quite different historical contexts. Here, following Critcher, he cautions against the determinism implicit in Cohen’s original model of development derived from the case of the Mods and Rockers. Rather than following a clear trajectory, the development of panics depends on the particular circumstances of existing moral discourses, especially the nature and role of the public sphere and the media who help to inform it. Again, this caution is apposite, but it surely reaffirms the very rationale of this book: the demand for sensitive comparative analysis of moral panics over a relatively long period, using the concept flexibly as a heuristic device to consider changes in the public sphere and news media, particularly their role in governance and legislative outcomes. Indeed, although cited frequently, the chapters in this book are hardly wedded to a rigid application of Cohen’s original thesis. Thus Randall McGowen’s study of forgery prosecutions in the eighteenth century draws attention to ways in which panics around these events deviated from the classical sociological model, particularly in expressing concern about the severity with which the offence was punished and representing sympathy with the accused. Davis’s discussion of the British Jacobins suggests a similar opportunity for ‘oppositional voices’ to make themselves heard.15 Thirdly, and finally, echoing Critcher and Thompson, Rowe draws our attention to the postmodern appreciation of panics as events arising from discourses that may originate from elite authorities and structures but are internalized and reproduced discursively in the public sphere, rather than being transmitted directly from government sources. As suggested previously, panics are usually related to wider anxieties, and in this book there is considerable discussion of broad concerns about sin, religious non-conformity, gender roles, wealth and national corruption, revolutionary ideas, and social change and disorder generally. The discourses around these semiperennial topics clearly helped to shape the rhetorical expression of several panics by delimiting the realm of what was permissible comment. Indeed most theorists agree that moral panics are unlikely to take hold among the

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public unless they relate to existing popular worries and satisfy the demand for a generalized re-assertion of normal values.16 The most successful panics clearly convey a single dominant discourse.17 However it remains to be seen to what extent the expression and progress of individual panics reproduces competing discourses and alternative attempts at regulation. Without these, it is difficult to identify the operation of the public sphere with the growth of deliberative democracy. In this connection it is important to consider whether the potential for arguments that contest the drift of opinion, and their very presence and power in the public sphere, depends on the fragmentation of news and comment typical of public communication via relatively individualized platforms, as opposed to the aggregation of readerships by modern newspapers with very broad circulation.

13.3 Mobilizing good and evil: sixteenth and seventeenth-century panics Anna Bayman’s discussion of the early seventeenth-century controversy sparked by James I’s 1620 injunction against cross-dressing draws attention to the influence of cultural traditions derived from the stage and literature that complicate the growth of the public sphere. In this case she identifies the survival in all the texts provoked by the king’s intervention of the Elizabethan literary and dramatic tradition for polyvocal narratives that simultaneously voiced and mocked moral outrage. That this was possible, despite the commands from the monarch himself, suggests that engrained popular discourse and commercial opportunism could cut across moral panic. Certainly the primary voice in these texts followed the king’s moral leadership by identifying masculine women as a growing problem that threatened the conventional gender order. However space was also provided for assertive cross-dressing women to make their own case on the grounds that noblewomen should have licence to distinguish themselves from their inferiors, and even that women in general should be free to depart from the restrictions of roles that were customary, rather than natural. Indeed the masculine women portrayed in these pamphlets turn out to be rhetorically more powerful than their detractors. At first glance it is doubtful how much influence these counter voices would have had on royal policy. However, Bayman’s recognition of influences from contemporary drama in the pamphlets’ transgressive women characters draws attention to the importance of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage as a powerful ingredient in a complex public sphere that encompassed both oral and printed media. The influence of popular dramatic traditions that allowed for multi-faceted representation and negotiation of moral positions must have blunted the impact of one-dimensional public campaigns, even if they were sponsored by the Crown. More particularly, some aspects of these publications were politically subversive,

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albeit generally in fairly subtle ways, for the pamphlets’ references to the Overbury affair of 1615 would have reminded readers of a public scandal at court that linked sartorial excess with sexual transgression and the murderous politics of royal favouritism. Bayman argues that one pamphlet went even further by referring to the problem of effeminate young men and their sartorial preferences in oblique ways that alluded critically to the duke of Buckingham, the king’s present favourite and probable homosexual partner. In these circumstances it is entirely possible that this pamphlet exchange contributed to James’s ultimate decision to compromise his attempts to control cross-dressing, since he ordered the dean of Westminster to refrain from banning from the Abbey women wearing yellow ruffs, most likely to avoid further reminders of the Overbury case. The pamphlets analysed by Bayman were most likely motivated mainly by commercial imperatives and irreverent instincts; they certainly aimed to entertain, as well as to instruct, and they were very alert to the changing fashions of consumption. Indeed this media environment has been aptly described as ‘the marketplace of print’.18 By contrast, in her chapter, Alexandra Walsham considers the public clamour over the mission of Jesuit priests to England in 1580–81, an event that sparked a vitriolic exchange, couched in apocalyptic terms. Whatever their differences, the various contributors were agreed this was a very serious matter. In the writings of their detractors, the Jesuits were represented as instruments of the devil; indeed the meaning of their presence was derived from an intellectual environment informed by providential anxieties and millenarian expectations, where good and evil were locked in a cosmic battle for the soul of humankind. Equally, the Jesuits themselves portrayed Campion and Persons as heralds and champions of the true religion who came to rescue the English Catholic community from the heresies and oppressions inseparable from the sinful Protestant Reformation. It is therefore immediately evident that, unlike the opposition to cross-dressing, anti-popery was a discourse whose eschatological tenor leant itself to the most ‘successful’ kind of panic, one that was able to represent the problem under attack as a matter of life or death for society and state.19 At least this was the case in the late sixteenth century: it will be important to consider whether later outbreaks of anti-Catholicism, and moral panics generally, may have been weakened in their salience and impact by the absence of a similar fundamentalist mindset. Walsham is rightly insistent that the language of the texts generated by the Jesuit mission should be taken as a faithful reflection of their authors’ sentiments and of popular anxiety generally at a time when the collective imagination of the English people was fired by the Bible and the vulnerability of the nation to foreign invasion. It is interesting, however, that while it certainly struck a popular chord, the anti-Jesuit panic was inspired and maintained largely by sermons, broadsheets and tracts derived from the established clergy and backed by the government: it was quickly intensified

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by a royal proclamation, legislative extension of the law against treason, and the public humiliation and execution of Campion. In the context of normal sixteenth-century politics the strong evidence for official origins certainly suggests that the Jesuit mission constituted an emergency, an exceptional moment when the authorities were impelled against their usual practice to appeal to the people in the name of the commonwealth and the protestant religion.20 As Walsham points out, although they disputed the veracity of the message, the Jesuits themselves maintained that the government was desperate, for they represented themselves as victims of a cynical propaganda campaign maintained by the Elizabethan regime, and cited such rank dishonesty as evidence for the irresistibly attractive power of their message among ordinary English men and women. Moreover, public concern about the Jesuits was whipped up at a time when the political elite were divided, and the puritan leaders at court were challenged by an incipient crypto-Catholic resurgence. In these circumstances it appears that Lake and Pincus are correct in regarding the Elizabethan period as characterized by the emergence of public spheres ‘largely orchestrated by central members of the regime and their clients’: insecure elements within the political elite were mobilizing the people as a bulwark against their enemies at court and the counter-Reformation.21 This evidence for government initiative hardly conforms to Habermas’s ideal of law representing the normal resolution of rational public opinion. It must be emphasized, nevertheless, that even when it descended into salacious caricature the anti-Jesuit campaign was maintained by argument about the national interest, rather than by an appeal to authority or status. Tim Harris’s contribution to this collection provides the opportunity to assess the origins and development of panics about puritans (or protestant non-conformists) across the seventeenth century. He demonstrates that a negative caricature of the puritan as socially and politically subversive was inherited from Elizabethan times, and elaborated on the stage, as well as in sermons and the pages of polemical tracts. It was subsequently revived by the Laudians under Charles I. The early literature on anti-puritanism had some of the polyvocal qualities of the texts discussed by Bayman, for puritans were represented as figures of ridicule, as well as threats to the harmony and good order of the commonwealth. Interestingly, however, as a panic about puritans was manufactured and gained traction in the crisis years of 1641–2 the dominant strain of the literature became suffused with anxiety and alarm, especially about the influence of the Godly among the common people. Like the anti-Jesuit campaign, this royalist appeal to right-thinking people about the threat of non-conformity built upon a pre-existing discourse: it was not manufactured out of ‘thin air’.22 However it too was instigated because the governing elite were bitterly divided and in extremis the protagonists sought to mobilize fear among the reading public. Certainly there is no evidence here that public opinion was a normal participant in the business of politics,

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or that policy and law – as opposed to prejudice – were being developed from below. On the contrary, as Harris points out, the legitimizing objective of re-imposing ‘law and order’ against what was represented as incipient puritan rebellion was derived largely from the royalists’ immediate concern to restore the authority of the Crown, rather than developed discursively. Indeed forty years later the same process can be observed from its genesis: Lord Chief Justice North’s candid memorandum about deploying the press to counter the popular anti-Catholic appeal of Popish Plot and Exclusion provides a revealing example of a late-Stuart government consciously convening a conservative reading, petitioning and informing public to legitimize an anti-Whig crackdown in the courts. In these cases the people were being asked to make a political judgement, but the agenda was carefully controlled by the government. By contrast, the witch-panic of 1645–7, discussed here by Malcolm Gaskill, appears genuinely to represent individualized grass-roots opinion and emotion translated into communal fear and lawful retribution. As Gaskill points out, before 1640 the institutions of government acted to restrain popular recognition of witchcraft; but with the collapse of central authority and censorship after the outbreak of civil war there was relatively unfettered opportunity for parochial divisions and discontents to morph into public accusation and in turn animate the administration of justice. In this unique situation the proliferation of cheap news media enabled sensational accounts of the apprehension and conviction of witches in East Anglia to spread fear across the south of England, and the popular clamour ultimately informed the prosecutions and forced confessions of at least a hundred hapless victims. However newspapers also sounded notes of rational doubt and caution; together with sceptical sermons and resistance from other authority figures these assisted some communities to resist the witch-craze and ultimately bring it to an end. It has been maintained that the 1640s and 50s marked a ‘transitional moment’ in the development of the public sphere’, and in some respects the characteristics of the mid-1640s witch panic support this assessment.23 Although the witch-finders Stearne and Hopkins were the primary ‘vectors of contagion’, the press clearly accelerated and broadened the transmission of news and legitimated popular action. In demanding that the authorities seek out and condemn followers of the devil, the witch panic demonstrated high popular expectations of decisive government action, as well as grassroots influence over the law. But its lasting impact was largely confined to the realm of inter-personal and communal relations, and even there it was mostly negative. Although the panic intruded into royalist against roundhead polemics, state policy was not affected. As Gaskill observes, in the seventeenth century, when the practice of representative government was relatively undeveloped, the central authorities were relatively uninterested in responding to popular fear: and as yet there appears to have been little

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recognition of scapegoating as a high political strategy. So despite the panic, popular opinion about witchcraft was denied significant agency in the public sphere. Moreover although the witch-finder Matthew Hopkins published The discovery of witches (1647) ‘for the benefite of the whole kingdome’, in the aftermath of the panic there was considerable discomfort and confusion about the results.24 In other words, ordinary people felt that they had been carried away on a tide of emotion, leaving reason behind. It is true that with the publication of John Gaule’s sermons, ‘oppositional voices’ had made themselves public, but they were clearly not powerful enough before mid-1646 to intimidate the witch-finders and stop the carnage. Indeed after 1640 the press had reinvigorated popular interest in demonology. Surveying the human consequences, it is tempting to regard this particular emanation of opinion as a step into darkness, rather than light. The royalist media campaigns around the crises of the 1640s and 1680s appear to demonstrate the growing media sophistication of politicians who were prepared to mobilize opinion when they had to, just as they ignored it at other times, especially if it represented plebeian prejudice. Of course they also reveal the continuing power of eschatological discourses derived from religion. In her chapter, Claire Walker demonstrates the enduring influence of anti-Catholicism in later seventeenth-century England, and its propensity to escalate rapidly into moral panic when events touched popular nerves. Certainly the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey in October 1678 was the catalyst for a panic around the Popish Plot reported by Titus Oates. Like the government-led anti-puritan campaigns analysed by Tim Harris, this panic was encouraged by sections of a bitterly divided political elite, in this case the Shaftesbury Whigs, who seized the opportunity to garner popular support for their objective of excluding the Catholic duke of York from succession to the throne. However Walker also demonstrates the peculiar aptitude for seventeenth-century news media quite naturally to satisfy the purposes of propagandists and their readers at the same time: for contemporary consumers of the press, the pulpit and the personal letter were all acculturated to take their news with large doses of moral judgement. Even relatively sophisticated readers therefore needed little encouragement to glimpse the spectre of malevolent popery behind accounts of Godfrey’s disappearance and murder. As Walker shows, the panic around the Plot, and Godfrey’s place in it, were represented, and most likely amplified, by commodities available for purchase, as well as popular street demonstrations. Plays also referred to the Plot, and at least one included elements of humour, therefore suggesting that the stage continued to provide opportunities to resist the dominant discourse. However the overwhelming impression left by her analysis is that the powerful synergy between elite manipulation from press and pulpit and ingrained popular prejudice created a panic that entirely overwhelmed the public sphere and drove the administration of justice for nearly two years,

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even against the resistance of the king. Indeed the panic fired the public’s imagination so strongly that at its peak fresh examples of Catholic plotting were manufactured out of relatively normal events, and the government was forced to respond by investigating and prosecuting the miscreants, if the accusation was plausible. And yet belief in the existence of the Popish Plot ultimately collapsed, and as Harris has shown, the government was able subsequently to galvanize opinion behind its campaign against the Whigs by appealing to fear of another puritan-republican revolution. It is true that panics could not be manufactured out of nothing, but these examples of the elite’s manipulation and counter-manipulation of the public sphere suggest that late seventeenth-century politicians were fast learners in the business of media management.

13.4 Middle-class mores, virtue and corruption and the demand side of governance: eighteenth-century panics Given that several of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century panics studied here conjured complex public spheres that among other things convey the enduring power of negative discourses around common perceptions of popery and puritanism, then at first glance we do not enter a wholly different world when we begin to look at eighteenth-century panics. Certainly my own essay about the causes espoused by The London Journal during the early 1720s draws attention to a measure of long term continuity, in so far as fear of Catholicism and its potentially treasonous associations was seen to be one ingredient in the mix of panics represented by the newspaper around this time. It should be noted that in the hands of Hoadly and Walpole, antiCatholic propaganda was much less eschatological in tone than it had been 140 years earlier, however, and the attempt to smear Atterbury with the supposedly authoritarian and subversive characteristics of modern European popery was not very successful. Although anti-popery remained a powerful prejudice among the common people, and the press sometimes encouraged it, the decline of fundamentalist perspectives on religious difference among the governing elite probably reduced its potential for mobilizing opinion from above. Indeed at the time of the Gordon Riots in 1780 the social and political establishment were horrified by what they saw as the irrational nature of popular anti-Catholicism.25 The essays and reportage of The London Journal in 1720–3 also reveal at least two relatively new sources of moral panic, first about public finance and secondly in the growing anxiety around street crime. It has been plausibly argued that the dependence of governments on mobile forms of finance and the consequent rise of political economy as a fresh subject of public discussion accelerated and entrenched the public sphere.26 In the new age of securities trading in joint-stock companies and public funding via parliamentary taxation and the national debt, the propertied public manifestly

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had an enhanced material stake in the business of government.27 Despite their social and political conservatism, Gordon and Trenchard clearly took the existence of this broad public interest for granted; their subtle opposition to ministers and their associates assumed that the public could not be ignored by the political elite. Indeed Cato’s strident call for legislative redress and the associated anti-ministerial criticism of The London Journal’s reportage suggests a degree of forthright assertiveness and self-confidence in the early eighteenth-century public sphere that appears to be unprecedented. Through its various comments, criticisms and recommendations for addressing the problems revealed by the crash the readers of this newspaper were exercising their right to share with parliament in a national debate about state policy; and they were clearly encouraged to shed the tradition of deference to ministers of the Crown.28 The London Journal’s sensationalist but ultimately re-assuring reportage of crime seems to mark further important departures from the sixteenth and seventeenth-century panics analysed previously. Firstly, in their emphasis on the randomness and injustice of the attacks – implicitly making the point that respectable and innocent people might be struck down at any time – as well as their gruesome attention to the details of violence, the reports of robbery and murder were helping to construct non-violence as a central norm of middle-class public opinion and identity.29 The discourse in the background here is not the universalist human story of providence and judgement; rather it is concerned with the particular threats that the anonymity of the modern city posed to the personal welfare and economic assets of the middle classes. It was a discourse of risk and social problems, constructed in the context of individual prosperity and subjective consciousness of social difference, rather than one of collective judgement for evil and sin. Secondly, it had a fresh political dimension, because the reflexive appeal to the authorities, and especially to parliament and the ministry for legislative redress, conveyed the clear expectation that the central government was ultimately accountable for solving these problems. As I have suggested, Cato’s letters about dealing with the South Sea crash showed that this growth in the demand side of governance could be used as a viable strategy of opposition; but in relation to Jacobitism and crime in 1722–3 it appears principally as a device for legitimizing and consolidating the Whig government. Indeed The London Journal’s regular representation of the forces of law and order as overcoming the spectre of crime in the city begs the question as to how much eighteenth-century criminal justice ‘policy’ generally was good politics as much as good governance. Randall McGowen’s study of public reactions to forgery shows that in the case of this offence published accounts of crime and punishment hardly conformed to the government’s preferred script, however. While the judges who presided at trials and the ministers who decided petitions for mercy were determined to treat the crime with severity by ensuring that convicted forgers were executed according to law, newspaper reports tended ultimately

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to sympathize with the unfortunate offenders and their grieving friends and families. As McGowen demonstrates, the reason for this unusually favourable treatment was that perpetrators of forgery tended to be respectably middleclass in their origins and associations. Their identity excited the curiosity of the reading public, and the cupidity of the press, whereby newspapers gave detailed accounts of their crimes, usually cast in the form of temporary and subsequently much regretted tragic lapses at times of personal financial crisis. Here then, the development of a distinctly bourgeois public sphere which reflected the sensibilities of the affective family cut across the imperatives of the state’s commercial interests. Frequently the result was a profoundly negative emotional reaction, an anti-panic located in deep public unease about the execution of the forger and the plight of his loved ones, as the press followed sympathetically every step in the progress of appeals for mercy. In cases of eighteenth-century forgery the subjects of public attention were broadly the same as those who were demonized by Cato’s letters in The London Journal: they were the stock-brokers, speculative bankers and other financial dealers who inhabited the money markets of the City of London. As we have seen, at the time of the South Sea crash people like this were usually portrayed stereotypically as dishonest sharpers whose stratagems for rapid capital accumulation were immoral and even un-English, and these images persisted.30 According to McGowen, there were traces of attitudes like these throughout the century among moralists and the officials who adjudicated forgery: they regarded the excesses of City culture as a threat to the social order, as well as a danger to the national economy. It is therefore interesting that by the middle of the century many newspapers appear to have been so relatively sophisticated and independent in their representation of individual forgers as weak but not vicious men who deserved public sympathy for their plight. Certainly the newspapers’ reactions to forgery reflect a measure of ambivalence in public opinion largely absent from earlier accounts of the monied men, for while the dominant register of their reports about individual cases was anguished sympathy, at the same time there was agreement that the crime itself was so insidious that the penalty of death was an appropriate deterrent. McGowen argues that initial reports of a forgery incident provoked conventional symptoms of moral panic in the form of exaggerated comments about the growing corruption of the times, and it was only with the conviction and representation of the offender’s identity and personal story that opinion shifted into reverse. So in the case of forgery the experience of moral panic was patterned by the development of the public sphere in accordance with bourgeois sensibility. Moreover a variety of voices made themselves heard. Indeed as the most famous forgery cases demonstrate, the newspapers’ commercial interest in the criminal justice system’s dramatic qualities and individuals’ remarkably easy access to the press gave middle-class defendants unprecedented opportunities to argue their cases before the court of public opinion.31

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The ‘doubt and sorrow’ characteristic of public opinion around forgery cases were generated by the plight of individuals caught up in the administration of justice, not concern about society or the state of the nation; and the commentary did not explicitly hold ministers or magistrates accountable. However public reactions to the South Sea crash, financial crime and the conspicuous influence of wealth and luxury generally are indicative of the ‘virtue and corruption’ paradigm that was one of the principal public discourses in eighteenth-century Britain.32 This largely negative mindset can be identified clearly in the writings of Gordon and Trenchard; as their Cato’s letters project demonstrated, it lent itself easily to criticism of the politicians in power as self-interested and morally corrupt. Indeed just as the religious discourse of heaven against hell was the pre-eminent driver of panics about popery and puritanism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, so in the eighteenth century the prevailing ideas and anxieties about the corrupting power of wealth helped to inform moral panics about government, society and crime. As Donna Andrew demonstrates in her chapter, public concern about avarice and consumption was especially evident in the early 1780s, and was associated with the perceived failure of the ministers and the political elite generally to provide moral, as well as political leadership. She notes how rising newspaper interest in the social consequences of gambling, and gambling at ‘EO’ tables particularly, reached a head in 1781–2, culminating in a campaign for the passage of a parliamentary bill empowering magistrates to suppress the practice. Criticism of gaming was hardly a novel development, but in the eighteenth century it was regarded as a corrupting disease of epidemic proportions, and newspaper commentary focussed on the social and political elite as the source of the corruption. Indeed Andrew notes that in singling out the secretary of state, Charles James Fox, as one of the worst offenders, the newspapers implicitly linked the social problem of gambling with corruption in politics, for they commented that while aristocrats and ministers like Fox were gambling away their fortunes, the nation’s prospects were also declining catastrophically, given the impending defeat of British arms in America. In this context gaming tables, and Fox especially, became the dominant symbols of a moral panic about national failure caused by the corrupting power of excessive consumption. The newspapers’ campaign against the EO tables conforms closely to the classic pattern of a moral panic: a plethora of reports and dramatic details of a few individual stories served to raise public sensitivity and amplify concern; the magistrates were urged to take action by raiding gaming establishments; and the campaign culminated in an attempt to outlaw the offending practice altogether by legislation. The stories also identify the immediate folk-devils, in the form of the keepers of EO tables and managers of gaming establishments. In its characteristics the panic suggests the growing power and self-confidence of the eighteenth-century public sphere. Certainly the

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newspapers’ willingness to criticize magistrates, condemn the social elite and target a minister shows that public deference was on the wane: Fox and other gambling aristocrats were folk-devils too. Indeed in the newspapers’ comments about the failure of the EO bill there are strong hints of authentically bourgeois public opinion; for the politicians were portrayed as a group whose culture of conspicuous excess and personal indulgence was alien to middle-class expectations of disinterested service in the cause of the nation. Their fecklessness, and the opportunism of the gaming managers, contrasts with the semi-tragic depiction of middle-class victims of gambling. The expression of opinion was complex and sophisticated, however, for as Andrew notes, at least one comedy was generated by the anti-EO campaign, and in the declining days of the panic there were two pantomimes and considerable newspaper coverage with an element of humour, centring on the notorious ‘Temple of Health’ established by Dr James Graham, and on caricature of Fox. In this case the panic seems ultimately to have been neutralized partly because some publishers and printers saw a market for rendering EO establishments and their clients as objects of ridicule, rather than moral corruption. It is also significant that although the London magistracy was galvanized into action against gambling dens, the panic did not succeed in establishing what appears to have been its principal demand: corrective penal law. Andrew interprets this as a temporary failure on the part of bourgeois public opinion to overcome the political establishment’s institutional power, hinting at greater political and cultural contests of this kind to come. It is certainly true that late eighteenth-century politicians ignored public opinion at their peril, for in Fox’s case his apparent contempt for middle-class sensibility surely contributed to the subsequent defeat of the Fox–North coalition and electoral failure in 1784. As a public bankrupt and ‘tutor in debauchery’ to the heir to the throne, the ‘Man of the People’ was hardly the darling of the bourgeoisie, and his career suffered accordingly, while his opponent George III benefited from striking the right tone of domestic respectability.33 Like the anti-EO campaign, the moral panic over the ‘Monster’ a decade later inspired minor themes of humour and ridicule underneath the dominant expression of opinion: in this case fear about the vulnerability of respectable women on the streets of London. In her discussion of the Monster affair Cindy McCreery draws special attention to the variety of alternative opinions represented in the satirical prints produced by Cruikshank, Gillray and others: while they were usually overtly sexually titillating, at the same time these cartoons made subtle but critical comments on female vanity and women’s sexuality, as well as the ridiculous gullibility of some sections of London’s population in their response to the sensational press treatment of the attacks. Together with the rich and varied newspaper reportage and the staging of public debates that tapped into popular interest in the affair, the production of these artefacts indicates the overwhelmingly commercial nature as well

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as the complexity of the public sphere at this time. As critics pointed out, whatever their particular perspective, the Monster was simply a gift to all the news-hungry editors, engravers and others who depended on exciting the public’s imagination to turn a profit. There are echoes of the commercialization apparent in the Popish Plot here. The main importance of McCreery’s chapter, however, is that like all the studies of eighteenth-century panics around crime, but in this case more explicitly, it draws attention to the challenges that the development of London as a great metropolis posed to the emerging norms of middle-class morality, as well as the fresh opportunities for political participation and agency presented by the growth of a broad commercial market for published news and comment. As she points out, in this exceptional environment Londoners came to know each other through the press, rather than in person, and there was vast scope for imaginative construction. Public reactions to the Monster attacks certainly suggest that the media images of a crazed man assaulting attractive and well-dressed women in the streets were both frightening and fascinating. Indeed the ability of the newspapers to drive the panic ahead of official and unofficial efforts to apprehend the Monster, and to focus and amplify genuine public alarm is indicative of the enhanced power of the media at this time.34 At the same time the unprecedented permeability of the public sphere permitted Angerstein, a man whose origins made his place in English society somewhat uncertain, to pose as the champion of respectable womanhood against the unnatural and unmasculine danger of the attacker. And the staging of public debates organized around the controversy enabled women as well as men to take a limited part in larger public conversations about abolishing the slave trade and changing the criminal law. In the Monster affair, therefore, it appears possible to identify layers of connected discussion and comment, variously rational and irrational, direct and indirect, but often intended to produce judicial and legislative outcomes. Certainly, as in the case of the 1640s witch panic, innocent people suffered as the legal process was simply overwhelmed by collective emotion, for Rhenwick Williams was doubtless not guilty of the assaults with which he was charged. However the paying customers of newspapers, prints and public debates were collectively demanding more permanent ‘law’ solutions to their anxieties, as well as constituting middle-class identity around perceptions of social problems arising from their particular urban environment. In her analysis of the Monster affair, Cindy McCreery has identified another moral panic that depended on widespread bourgeois participation in the public sphere of news and comment. While individuals had their own agendas, it is clear that this panic developed at the grass roots of London life, out of the discursive construction of opinion via the press and other media. In his chapter Michael Davis also considers a panic in the 1790s, this time arising out of elite concerns about ‘the British Jacobins’. At this time Edmund Burke, William Windham and their loyalist allies among the political establishment

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were genuinely alarmed by the growth of popular political radicalism, and they reacted with inflammatory comments in parliament and the press that exaggerated the numbers and intentions of the movement for reform, equating reformers with French revolutionaries and insisting that they threatened ‘all that was valuable and dear in society’.35 The alarm was picked up by conservative newspapers and ultimately reinforced by government intervention, both in the form of repressive legislation and criminal prosecution of leading radicals for seditious libel and treason. Here, according to Davis, one can identify a moral panic as an exercise in ‘elite governance’, whereby the political and judicial establishment sought to mobilize the reading public against people whose beliefs and actions were held to threaten the consolidated elite of property. At this stage readers of this book may have a sense of déjà vu, because the anti-Jacobin panic might easily be compared with the royalists’ campaigns against puritans in the 1640s and 1680s. Certainly all these panics appear to have been manufactured from above, although they built on ingrained anxieties among the people who were the targets of the propaganda. Moreover, in the 1790s as in the 1640s and 1680s, and against roughly the same context of revolutionary republicanism constructed as a social and political threat from below, the target of the panics was partly growth in the public sphere itself, in so far as popular movements for religious or political reform were represented as unleashing a hydra-headed monster whose subversive ambitions knew no bounds. According to this elitist and conservative tradition, the hierarchy in church and state existed to protect the propertied against the common people, and the latter therefore had no legitimate role in government.36 It has been argued that the ideal of polite and rational public exchange which developed in the early eighteenth century served as a reflexive control on popular involvement in public discussion, and in this sense the anti-Jacobin reaction may be represented as an elite attempt to use the language of civility to exclude ordinary people because of their tendency to credulity and enthusiasm.37 Certainly, as Davis shows, at the trials for treason of the leaders of the London Corresponding Society the lord chief justice and counsel for the Crown made their antipopulism quite explicit: they insisted that the contemporary combinations and associations of working people for political reform were dangerous and illegitimate because they tended inevitably to violent revolution on the French model. Indeed it is arguable that a panic around popular participation was rendered more plausible at the end of the eighteenth century simply because it was grounded concretely in the spectre of truly popular reform associations. Despite the parallels between the anti-Jacobin and anti-puritan panics, one very significant difference was the enhanced ability of the 1790s radicals to resist their stigmatization by intervening themselves in the wider public sphere generated by the commercialization of published news. Perhaps the

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crucial factor that empowered them was the increasing commodification of legal proceedings as news, already noticed in the case of forgery, but still more apparent in the context of political trials. Davis shows how at their trials the radical defendants and their counsel argued that their accusers had grossly misrepresented their activities and intentions, and alternatively presented themselves as orthodox constitutionalists who proceeded by rational and open argument. The widespread coverage of the newspapers allowed them to broadcast these messages. For example several London papers provided their readers with virtually contemporaneous detailed coverage of Thomas Hardy’s trial in October–November 1794, some printing extra editions to accommodate it.38 There were also separately published reports, including at least one of Erskine’s speech for the defence.39 The countermessage was clear. In their respectful treatment of Hardy his lawyers and sympathetic editors depicted him as a respectable but humble family man who endured his ordeal with courage, and who relied on English justice to produce a fair outcome, rather than a hot-headed revolutionary.40 Here was a strong ‘oppositional voice’ that arose out of the proliferation of the press serving a middle-class readership. In this sense, as McGowen suggested in his chapter, the antidote for a demonizing law and order moral panic was a story about real people caught up in the process. Indeed the representations of Hardy and his travails served this scenario well, whereas Rhenwick Williams – unmarried, unskilled and on the margins of respectability – was not quite appropriate for similar treatment. He was hardly an ideal subject for polite discourse.

13.5 Conclusion In the introduction to this collection I ended by asking three comparative questions. First, to what extent did the development of the press in early modern England, and especially after 1700, allow for deeper and more sophisticated public participation in state affairs. The second question was about the changing experience of fear and anxiety across the period generally, and was designed to elucidate some answers about the discourses that informed panics. Thirdly, I speculated whether the evidence of moral panics enables us to say anything about popular agency in government, particularly in regard to the rule of law. I want to conclude by summarizing the findings of this book in relation to these questions. The pamphlets analysed by Ann Bayman demonstrate that sophisticated public participation in state affairs was possible in the early seventeenth century, in so far as the pamphlet press did not simply follow the king’s lead. Moreover, Alexandra Walsham’s analysis of the anti-Jesuit propaganda shows that the complex appeal of protestant writers and preachers implied they expected at least some among their audiences to be broadly informed about current affairs and educated in scripture, to the extent that they would

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recognize signs of the world’s last days in the characteristics of the Familists, as well as the Jesuits. Alongside these relatively sophisticated appeals there were also crudely salacious and clichéd anti-Catholic caricatures. So sixteenth-century panics were not necessarily constituted around a single issue, or a homogenous target audience. Nevertheless, while they depended on the existence of complex and strongly-rooted popular discourses for their traction in society, the campaigns against cross-dressing, the Jesuits, the puritans and republicans were all clearly instigated by the government. As suggested previously, this succession of elite ventures into popular politics reflects an environment where involving the people in affairs of state was quite exceptional: there was as yet no fully institutionalized public opinion, and therefore no competition for elite dominance of politics. Indeed James I’s intervention against women’s fashions was in the nature of a monarchical injunction, rather than taking the form of argument designed to influence opinion. It is true that the witch-panic of 1645–7 developed at the grass roots, but the anxiety spread so quickly and was easily translated into judicial action because of the unique circumstances that prevailed during the 1640s. When censorship and the other checks and balances of seventeenth-century government were restored, expressions of popular opinion were muted; and one suspects that knowledge about conditions and events around the country diminished, thereby reducing the expectations for ‘policing’, in the sense of further active interventions against social problems like witchcraft.41 The 1640s witch-panic and the anti-popery campaign around the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey are important in the history of the public sphere because they demonstrate the growing capacity of print media in the constitution of demand for government to deploy the power of the state. In the eighteenth century newspapers appeared to take the demand side of the public sphere for granted: this book shows they insisted that parasitic financiers, robbers and rebels should be hanged, gaming dens should be shut down and socially offensive activities like gambling criminalized by legislation. Crucially, if magistrates and ministers failed to deliver these just deserts, they were likely to be tarred with the same brush as the primary delinquents, and the example of Charles James Fox shows that by the later part of the century they were explicitly held to account for their deficiencies. At the same time, these issues also generated significant bodies of reportage and commentary that contested whether the community’s judgement was correct: polite forgers inspired sympathetic treatment, and even the Monster had his defenders. Like Thomas Hardy in 1794, but with less success, they were beneficiaries of the public sphere’s increased permeability; with the proliferation of commercial presses and their search for a particular niche in the marketplace there was certainly greater opportunity for stories to be complicated by alternative points of view. It is interesting to consider and compare the discourses that informed our panics against the social context of their representation. Dagmar Freist has

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shown that the complexity of print output in the mid-seventeenth century, encompassing ballads, woodcuts and broadsheets, plays and poems, as well as more learned pamphlets, and partly reflecting the residue of a predominantly oral culture of communication, meant that a large proportion of contemporary news and comment on public affairs was cast in a popular idiom.42 As we have seen, appeals to religious discourse, especially apocalyptic accounts, formed a common thread among the variety of literature current around the time of the Jesuit mission to England: it appears that scriptural references and religious fears had meaning for all ranks of people. However Tim Harris’s chapter demonstrates that the Civil War period and its aftermath generated panics around the perceived threat that puritans posed to the social order: puritans and sectaries were stigmatized for encouraging upstart men and women to voice their opinions and act on them. So while the mainstream public discourse behind sixteenth and seventeenth-century panics was religious in substance, and frequently eschatological in tone, there is evidence from early Stuart times of anxiety about preserving the social, ecclesiastical and political hierarchy, and specifically excluding the ‘vulgar’, the ‘rabble’ or the ‘multitude’ from public influence.43 Harris interprets this anxiety around social power as the origin of several panics about the maintenance of ‘law and order’. His use of the phrase invites comparison with eighteenth-century concerns about street crime and violence. Certainly the later panics about these issues constructed ideas about social difference, but (with the significant exception of the anti-Jacobin panic) they were also less narrowly concerned with hierarchical notions of governance. Rather eighteenth-century law and order panics seem to represent the subjective consciousness of threats to the comfortable middle-class family and its values of private peace and prosperity, risks associated above all with the rise of society in the mass that was characteristic of London and other large cities. Increasingly, the government was expected to address these concerns. Indeed the normalization of public appeals to police and ultimately neutralize unruly elements of the community and the willingness of politicians to consider seriously the application of remedial penal legislation, demonstrates that the growth of the bourgeois public sphere had succeeded in incorporating the solution of ‘social problems’ into the business of governance. Finally, what about the rule of law? In modern times the benefits of law are located in a culture of deliberative democracy, and the concept of law therefore emphasizes guiding principles for the creation of legislation as much as the administration of justice. By contrast in early modern England the virtues of law were usually identified with the processes of the common law. A culture of grass-roots participation in legal processes determining issues of life and property was taken for granted and valued explicitly because it betokened freedom, consent and equity, virtues that respected the dignity and interests of ordinary people, as well as the imperatives of authority. I have argued elsewhere that active participation in courts and other institutions with judicial processes declined in the eighteenth century, and with the

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proliferation of legislation after 1689 law was probably most frequently experienced as parliamentary statute.44 So how did ordinary people engage with this transformed culture of law and governance? Of course in the context of the unreformed parliament direct influence over legislators was hardly widespread. However the growth of the public sphere constituted by the press made for an increase of vicarious popular participation in affairs of state, at least by those who spoke the language of politeness and bourgeois sensibility. The studies in this book suggest that engagement frequently took the form of moral panics that generated demands for enforced social discipline. While this finding sits uneasily with the Habermasian ideal of the eighteenth century as a period of uniquely open and rational public discussion, the sustained occurrence and changing characteristics of media-led panics in England during the two and a half centuries from the Elizabethan period onwards show that the magnitude and scope of public discussion about the state of the nation were increasing. It is true that the conversations were usually initiated and dominated by the centre before 1700, and even in the eighteenth century government prosecutions for libel and constructive treason demonstrate that ministers were uncomfortable with direct public criticism and popular initiative in politics. Moreover mediasavvy ministries like that of Robert Walpole were becoming aware of the potential for playing upon fear and scapegoats to manipulate the public into a law and order dialogue that legitimized their pre-determined political agendas (and there is evidence of these political strategies from the time of the Popish Plot). However even by mid-century no government could hope to control the press in all its commercial diversity, the public interest in high politics was recognized with the open reporting of parliamentary proceedings in the 1770s, and by the end of the eighteenth century moral panics around particular issues were increasingly likely to ramify into broader conversations and campaigns about (for example) the interesting morality of the slave trade, aristocratic culture and penal law. It is therefore appropriate to suggest that early modern moral panics helped to develop genuinely ‘public’ policy, and for better or worse, by 1800 the rule of law depended on discussion in the public sphere, even though much of it took the form of sensationalist reporting and commentary.

Notes 1. B. Cowan, ‘What was Masculine about the Public Sphere? Gender and the Coffeehouse Milieu in Post-Restoration England’, History Workshop Journal, 51 (2001), 129. 2. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Bourgeois Sphere, trans. T. Burger (1989), 24. 3. Structural Transformation, 24–5. 4. Structural Transformation, 27. 5. Structural Transformation, 32–3.

David Lemmings 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

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Structural Transformation, 50–2. Structural Transformation, 59–61. Structural Transformation, 36. Structural Transformation, 25–6, 36–7, 51–2. Structural Transformation, 27–30. Structural Transformation, 53–5, 82. For analysis of the development of panics along these lines see S. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (Oxford, 1972, 2nd edn, 1980); S. Hall, C. Critcher, T. Jefferson, J. Clarke and B. Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (1978); ‘Panic: Media, Morality, Culture’, ed. H. Wilson and P. B. White, Media International Australia, special issue, 85 (1997). Compare P. King, in ‘Moral Panics and Violent Street Crime 1750–2000: A Comparative Perspective’, in B. Godfrey, C. Emsley and G. Dunstall (eds), Comparative Histories of Crime (Collompton, Devon, 2003), 55. Compare Habermas, Structural Transformation, 30–1. See also Alexandra Walsham’s comments, above, Chapter 3. See King, ‘Moral Panics and Violent Street Crime’, 63. This idea is derived originally from Durkheim (K. Thompson, Moral Panics (1998), 23). C. Critcher, Moral Panics and the Media (Buckingham, 2003), 173. A. Halasz, The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1997). See Critcher, Moral Panics and the Media, 173. P. Lake and S. Pincus, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England’, Journal of British Studies, 45 (2006), 276–7. Lake and Pincus, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere’, 274. See above, p. 108. Lake and Pincus, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere’, 279–81. The full title is The discovery of witches in answer to severall queries, lately delivered to the judges of the assize for the county of Norfolk. And now published by Matthew Hopkins, witch-finder, for the benefite of the whole kingdome. See C. Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-century England: A Political and Social Study (Manchester, 1993), esp. 210–12, 226–7, 237–44. Lake and Pincus, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere’, 282–4. M. Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford, 2005), 14–15. This contrasts with petitions and addresses, whose language emphasised humility and loyalty (see Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation, 118). See Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, 67–8; J. M. Beattie, ‘Violence and Society in EarlyModern England’, in Perspectives in Criminal Law, ed. A. N. Doob, and E. L. Greenspan (Aurora, Ontario, 1985), esp. 54–60. Also, for statistical confirmation of the newspapers’ concentration on crimes of violence, see King, ‘Newspaper Reporting and Attitudes to Crime and Justice’, 88–93; S. Devereaux, ‘From Sessions to Newspaper? Criminal Trial Reporting, the Nature of Crime, and the London Press, 1770–1800’, London Journal, 32 (2007), 10–11, 19–21; E. Snell, ‘Discourses of Criminality in the Eighteenth-Century Press: the Presentation of Crime in The Kentish Post, 1717–1768, Continuity and Change, 22 (2007), 22–3, 25–6, 27. H. V. Bowen, ‘“The Pests of Human Society”: Stockbrokers, Jobbers and Speculators in Mid-eighteenth-century Britain’, History, 78 (1993), 38–53.

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31. See D. Andrew and R. McGowen, The Perreaus and Mrs. Rudd: Forgery and Betrayal in Eighteenth-century London (Berkeley, CA, 2001); G. Howson, The Macaroni Parson: The Life of the Unfortunate Doctor Dodd (1973). Rhynwick Williams and his counsel both published pamphlets on his case (above, pp. 201 and 210). 32. See J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge, 1985), 48. 33. See L. G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox (Oxford, 1992), 62, 69, 70; S. Ayling, George the Third (New York, 1972), 184–7; L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT, 1992), 206–7. 34. Cf. R. Shoemaker, The London Mob (2004), 286–7. 35. See above, p. 227. 36. Cf. C. Hill, ‘The Many-headed Monster’, in C. Hill, Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England (1974), 181–204. 37. Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain. 38. See e.g. London Recorder or Sunday Gazette; Oracle and Public Advertiser; Sun; Courier and Evening Gazette; Morning Advertiser; Morning Post and Fashionable World; Star; Morning Chronicle; True Briton. 39. See advertisements for Bell’s report of the full trial in Oracle and Public Advertiser, 1 Nov. 1794; and B. Crosby’s report of Erskine’s speech in Morning Post and Fashionable World, 5 Nov. 1794; Sun, 6 Nov. 1794. 40. Erskine said: ‘Look at the Prisoner, Gentlemen of the Jury, examine his countenance, what find you there, that should lead to suppose that he could, himself a mild and amiable character, meditate the taking away of the life of a Prince exemplary in his duties, a fond husband, and the father of a numerous and most promising progeny’ (Oracle and Public Advertiser, 3 Nov. 1794). See also Courier and Evening Gazette, 31 Oct. 1794: ‘Mr. Hardy’s behaviour is tranquil, without partaking of indifference, and firm, without being indecorous. He is extremely attentive to the evidence, and seems to rely, with perfect confidence, on the abilities of the Council who defend him, and on the integrity of the Jury who are to decide upon the charge adduced against him’. It was also reported that on his acquittal Hardy visited the grave of his wife, ‘who died heart-broke, in consequence of the imprisonment of her husband’, and viewed it ‘in silent agony for some minutes’ (Courier and Evening Gazette, 6 Nov. 1794). 41. For a later expression of the demand for policing represented by the witch panic see Joseph Hanway, The Defects of Police the Cause of Immorality and the Continual Robberies committed, especially about the Metropolis (1775). 42. D. Freist, Governed by Opinion: Religion, Politics, and the Dynamics of Communication in Stuart London, 1637–1645 (1997). 43. Cf. Freist, Governed by Opinion, 175–6. 44. See D. Lemmings, Law and Government in Eighteenth-Century England: From Consent to Command? (forthcoming).

Index ‘Account of the Burning the Pope …’ (1679) 127 Acquaviva, Claudio 54–5 Adair, Sergeant James 229 Addington, Mr. 187 Addison, Joseph 10 Adler, Patricia 224 Adler, Peter 224 Agazzari, Alfonso 48, 54 Alexander, Jeffrey 236 Allen, William, Cardinal 44, 50 America, USA 5, 25–6, 32 Salem 4, 87 war of independence 13, 176–7, 179–80, 183, 189–90, 245, 257 Anabaptists 103, 106 Anderson, Anthony 47, 52 Andrew, Donna 202, 257–8 Angerstein, John Julius 14, 199–201, 207–8, 259 anomie 34 Antichrist 46, 53, 80–1 Anti-popery, see Catholics, fear of anti-Semitism 141 apocalypticism 28, 49–54, 57, 140, 250, 263 Appellant controversy 56 Archpriest controversy 56 Armada, Spanish 117, 124 aristocratic leadership, failure of 178–9, 191, n. 9, 257 Arnauld, Antoine 56 Arundell, Charles 50, 54 assizes 49, 79, 80, 83, 85–6, 165 Bury assizes 86 Essex assizes 49 Home Circuit assizes 79 Oxford assizes 165 Somerset assizes 83 Astley, Philip 212 Atkinson, William 227 Atterbury, Francis, bishop of Rochester 8 Atterbury Plot 146, 148–52, 254 attributional model 32–3

Bagshaw, Christopher 56 Baker, William 164–5, 168 ballads 47–8, 53, 63, 102, 122, 263 Bank of England 159, 184, 190 Bank of Scotland 160 Barrell, John 229, 239 Bath 177 Batman, Stephen 52 Doome Warning all Men to the Judgemente (1581) 52 Bayman, Anna 249–51, 261 Beattie, John 13 Beccaria, Cesare 204 Beck, U. 26 Risk Society (1992) 26 Becker, Howard 223 Bedloe, William 120, 124, 128–30 Bee hive of the romishe church, The (1579) 44 Bellany, Alistair 64 Bennett, G. V. 139 Ben-Yehuda, Nachman 32–3, 81 Berkshire 149 Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 30 Bisse, James 47, 52 Bisset, Robert 225 Bluet, Thomas 56 Bond, Nicholas 211 Bondeson, Jan 14, 198 Boquin, Pierre 46 boundary crises 4, 87 Bow Street Magistrates Office 157, 186, 189, 197, 199, 208–9, 211–12 officers 186 runners 211 Boyle, Charles, earl of Orrery 146 Breton, Nicholas 41 England’s selected characters (1643) 41 Brief Narrative of … several Popish Treasons and Cruelties (1678) 124 Briggs, Robin 79

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Index

‘Britannicus’ (pseud.), see Hoadly, Benjamin British Jacobins 221–44, 248, 259, 260 anti-panic 231–4 attack on 227–8 counter-discourse of 234–8 and deviance 225 humanness of 237–9 legislation against 228 republicans 226 trials of 228–30 broadsides 14, 48, 195, 226 brothels, bagnios 67, 196, 206 Brownists 103–5 Buckingham, George Villiers, Duke of 72, 250 Bulger, Jamie 26 Burghley, William Cecil, Lord 47 Execution of Justice (1583) 47 Burke, Edmund 14, 221, 225, 227, 234, 237, 245, 259 Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) 225 Burnet, Gilbert 119 Bury St Edmunds 83–6 Byng, George 176 Cadogan, Lord William 146 Cambridgeshire 86 Campion, Edmund 42–8, 50–6, 250–1 ‘brag’ 44–5, 48, 55 Decem Rationes 44 Capp, Bernard 65 Catholics fear of 41–2, 50, 112, 118, 119, 121–2, 124, 130–33, 147, 152, 154, nn. 21, 29, 254 anti-Catholic discourse 42, 45–9, 133, 148 anti-Catholic pageants 125–7 anti-Catholic plays 127–8 anti-Catholic judicial rhetoric 128–9 anti-Catholic sermons 127 see also Godfrey, Sir Edmund; Jacobites, Jacobitism; Society of Jesus; Popish Plot Cato (pseud.) 139, 142–3, 146–7, 152, 255 see also Trenchard, Sir John; Gordon, Robert

Cato’s Letters 139, 141, 143, 145, 255–7 Cellier, Elizabeth 126 censorship, collapse of 6, 81, 83, 121, 252 Centlivre, Susannah 178 Gamester (1705) 178 Chamberlain, John 63–5, 72–3 Chandos, Duke of 184 Chardon, John 52 Charke, William 45, 51 Answere (1580) 45 Charles I 80 Charles II 118–20, 127–8, 130 cheap print 64, 74, 81, 87, 252 Chelmsford 83–5 Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of 167, 182 Church and King mobs 227 the city, corrupting pleasures of 67, 75, n. 8, 152, 168, 173 see also London ‘civilizing process’ 78 Clacton, Essex 5 Clark, Anna 215 Clarke, Elizabeth 81–2 Clerke, Sir P. J. 185 Clifton, Robin 121 Clutterbuck, Charles 186–8 Cockburn, Lord Henry 225, 238 coffee-houses 6, 121–3, 125, 130, 162, 202, 246 Cohen, Stanley 7, 11, 17, 22, 24–37, 81, 98, 223, 247–8 Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972) 22, 24, 26–7, 29, 223 Images of Deviance 24 States of Denial (2001) 29 Colchester 13, 86 Coleman, Edward 120 Coleman, John 197, 202, 206 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 78, 227 Collinson, Patrick 49, 100, 108 ‘Common Sense’ 189 complaint literature 66 ‘Constant Reader’ 181 Contrast, The 226 copper bottoms 207–8 Corbett, Richard, 102 Cornwall 84

Index Coronation of Queen Elizabeth, The (1680) 127 corruption and French Revolution 198 of London magistracy 185 moral 67, 160 political 178 popular 9, 152 public 143, 145, 146, 257 social 178–9 and wealth 257 of women 197 Couldry, N. 28 Coventry, Sir Henry 129 credit, system of 159–60 credulity, popular 200 Cressy, David 65, 73 crime and criminal justice see forgers, forgery; justice, administration of; moral panics; newspapers; print, print culture ‘criminal conversation’ cases 12 Critcher, Chas 22, 31–5, 248 Moral Panics and the Media (2003) 31 Cronulla Riots 23, 28 cross-dressing 63–77, 249–50, 262 campaign against 63–4, 65, 72–3 pamphlets on 65–72 Crouzet, Denis 53 Crown and Anchor Society 226 Cruikshank, Isaac 200, 207–8, 258 The Monster Cutting a Lady (1790) 200, 207–8 Culmer, Richard 107 cunning folk 80–1 Curll, Walter 105 Davis, J. C. 4, 57 Davis, Michael 248, 259–61 debates 202, 203, 210 Defoe, Daniel 160 Dekker, Thomas 71 The guls horne-book 71 deliberative democracy 247, 249, 263 Delumeau, Jean 80, 82 Dent, William 203–4 Representation of Rynwick … Williams (1790) 203–5 Dering, Sir Edward 132

269

deviance, delinquency 23, 25, 30, 36, 41, 46, 198, 223–4, 225 deviance making 226 dissent, dissenters 98, 147, 160 see also puritans, Whigs Dodd, Rev. Dr. William 169 Dolan, Frances 42 Dollimore, Jonathan 69, 73 Douglas, Tom 82 Downie, David 232–3 drama, Elizabethan and Jacobean 64, 72, 74, n. 2, 102, 249 see also pantomimes Draper, Sir William 182 Dryden, John 127 Dundas, Robert 233 Durkheim, Emile 34, 87, 223 East Anglia 81–9 Edinburgh 160, 232–3 Edward II 72 Effingham, Lord 184–5 Elderton, William 48 Elegie on … Sir Edmund-Bury Godfrey, Knight (1678) 123 Elias, Norbert 78 ‘civilizing process’ 78 Elizabeth I 49–50, 72, 127 anniversary of accession 125 Elliott, Ebenezer 231 Ely 86 emotion, emotions and forgery convictions 157, 165, 170 history of 78 and individual action 80 and the law 89 and popular opinion 253 see also fear English civil war 4, 80, 86, 88, 98, 108–9, 111–12, 118, 252, 263 English College at Rome 46, 54, 56 Enlightenment ‘dark side’ 139–53 print culture 140 EO Tables 176–90, 257 see also gaming Erikson, Kai 4, 87 Epstein, James 225, 232 Erskine, Thomas 11–12, 233–4, 237, 261 Essay on Gaming (1761) 182

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Essex 13, 49, 52, 85–6 Evelyn, Sir John 118–20, 127, 130–1 exclusion (of James II), Exclusion Crisis 97–8, 101, 111–12, 130, 252–3 Eyre, Sir James 229 Family of Love (Familists) 51, 53, 56, 103, 262 Farnham 150 Faversham 84–5 Fauntleoy 169 favourites 72, 250 fear commodification of 134 fearmongering 140, 152, 153 politics of 143, 147, 151 folk-devils 25, 26, 29–30, 34, 42, 56, 87, 98, 103–8, 139, 142, 152, 201, 204, 215, 223, 236, 239, 257 Fielding, Henry 8–9, 179, 211 Fielding, Sir John 185, 211, 214 Fires 124, 132–3 Fitzmaurice, James 51 Fleming, Abraham 53 Folk Devils 7, 22, 26–7, 29–31, 33–4, 36, 42, 56, 87, 98, 139, 141, 201, 204, 215, 221, 223 footpads 150 forgers, forgery 157–75, 178, 248, 255–7, 261–2 counter-panic 172–4 and capital punishment 157–8, 161, 170 and lawyers 161, 170, 172 and MPs 160–61 public significance of 157–8, 160, 161, 170, 171 and social identity 158–9, 161, 163, 168–9 sympathy for 163, 164–9, 170–71, 172–3 Forster, Georg 199, 210 Foucault, Michel 17, 33, 88, 230 Fox, Adam 1, 15 Fox, Charles James 8, 176, 179, 182–5, 189–90, 209, 226, 234, 257–8, 262 see also gaming France 50, 52, 107, 124, 130, 150, 176, 180, 198, 224–5, 230–31 Calais 150

French Revolution 14, 79, 84, 198, 224–5, 230–31, 260 Franklin, Andrew 201 Freeport, Sir Andrew 10 Freist, Dagmar 262 French Match 50, 52–3 Frith, Mary 64 Fulke, William 47 functionalism 30, 32, 87–8 Gadd, David 177–8 Gambling (1781) 181 gaming 176–90 addicts 178 advertisement 184 and American War of Independence 176–7, 179–80, 183, 190 comedies 178, 181 and corruption 178, 257 EO 177–8, 179, 182, 186–8, 257–8 EO Table Bill (1782) 176–7, 180, 183, 184–6, 257–8 and Fox 176, 179, 182, 183, 184–5, 189–90, 257 legislative regulation of 177–8, 182– 3, 186, 188 and London magistracy 180–81, 183–4, 185–6, 187–8 losses 179, 182, 186, 193, n. 29 managers 184, 186, 257 and MPs and peers 179–80, 184, 185, 190, 193, n. 37 and middle classes 186 and growth of newspapers 179 press attacks on 180–88 social ubiquity of 178, 181–82 and suicide 178, 182 Gaskill, Malcolm 252 Gaule, John 85, 253 gender roles 67, 68–70, 197–8 ‘Genius of Nonsense’ (1782) 187 Genuine Memoirs of the Life of Joshua Compton (1778) 157 George, prince of Wales 209, 212, 258 George III 221–2, 235, 258 Gerrald, Joseph 232–3, 238 Geveren, Sheltco a 52 Gillray, James 208–10, 222, 258 Swearing to the Cutting Monster (1790) 208–9

Index The Republican Attack (1795) 222 Glanvill, Joseph 80 Godbold, John 86 Godfrey, Sir Edmund Berry 117–134, 253, 262 commodification of 125 death of 117, 118–19, 120, 123–4, 124–5, 125–6, 133–4 funeral 124, 132 images of 124–5 Godwin, William 231 Goffman, Erving 237 Goldsmith, Oliver 177 Goode, Erich 32–3, 81 Goodricke, Sir John 157 Gordon, Robert 139, 142–4, 152, 255, 257 Gordon Riots 180, 221–2, 254 gossip and hearsay 48, 72, 83, 122, 129 Gouda, Nicholas de 43 governance, government demand side 255, 259, 262, 263 and discipline 17 and fear 153 and law and order 3, 5, 8, 98, 140, 142, 152 legitimization of 1–3, 14–15, 140, 255 and media 36 and moral panics 247, 255 participation in 17, 261–2, 263–4 and public opinion 247 rising expectations of 16, 252 and scapegoats 87, 152, 253 Graham, Dr James 187, 258 Gramscian theory 17, 32 ‘Great Fear’ (1789) 79, 82 Great Staughton 85–6 Grindal, Edmund, archbishop of Canterbury 49 Grove, John 128 Gunpowder Plot 117, 124–5, 127, 133, 142 Guthrie, Neil 1 gypsies 82 Habermas, Jurgen 10, 78, 112, 118, 140, 152, 245–7, 251, 264 Haec-Vir, or the womanish man (1620) 65–72 Hales, Robert 161

271

Hales, William 161 Hall, Stuart 30, 32, 81 Policing the Crisis (1978) 32–3 Hampshire 8, 140, 149–51 Hampshire Blacks 151 Hanger, George 209 Hanmer, Meredith 46, 51 The Jesuites banner (1581) 46 Hanoverian regime 142 ‘happy slapping’ 5 Hardwicke, Sir Philip Yorke, earl of 3, 11 Hardy, Thomas 228–31, 236, 261–2 Harington, Sir John 72 Harris, Benjamin 127 Harris, John 109 Harris, Tim 121, 125, 248, 251–2, 254, 263 Hastings, Hon. Theophilus, earl of Huntingdon 178 Hay, Douglas 13, 231 Hay, John 43, 48 Hayton, David 12 Hazard 182, 190 heresy 1, 44, 54, 108 Heywood, Jasper 45, 55 Hic Mulier, or the man-woman (1620) 65–72 High Commission, Court of 80 Higher Education Funding Council for England 23 highwaymen 150 Hill, Christopher 245 Hoadly, Benjamin, bishop of Hereford 139–40, 145–52, 254 Holt, Daniel 234 Holt, William 45, 55 homosexuality 72, 166, 198, 250 Hopkins, Matthew 81–6, 88, 252–3 The discovery of witches (1647) 253 Horne, Robert, bishop of Winchester 44 Horsley, Bishop Samuel 231 Howard, Frances 64 Howard, Lord Henry 50 Howard, John 23 Huguenots 160 Huntingdonshire 85

Immigration 26 Innes, Joanna 11

272

Index

Ipswich 86 Ireland 10, 43, 51, 64, 124, 133, 145 attempted invasion of 51 Ireland, William 128 Irish Popish Plot 133 irrationality, popular 15–16 ‘Jack the Chicken’ 181 Jacobins, see British Jacobins Jacobites, Jacobitism 5, 8, 145–51 plots 8, 139–40, 145–9, 154, n. 21 see also Catholics; Society of Jesus James I 63–5, 67, 71–4, 80, 84, 103, 105, 107, 110, 249–50, 262 Daemonologie 64 James II, James, duke of York 97, 121, 129–30, 133 Jesuits, see Society of Jesus Jews 82, 100, 104–05, 141–2, 160 Johnson, Edward 170–1 Johnson, Samuel 196 Jones, Darryl 198 Jonson, Ben 104 Bartholomew Fair 104 Judges, JPs, non-professional 83 and sentencing 11–12 justice, administration of and class oppression 231 consensual 88–9 exemplary 142, 147, 152 and moral panic 214 participation in 152–3, 212–14 punishment 211–12 and state power 230–31 ‘Justice Wright’s a Coming … ‘(1782) 189 Karr, David 225 Keltridge, John 47, 51–2 Kent 84–5, 132 Kenyon, John 119, 127 Kenyon, Lloyd, Lord Chief Justice 3, 11–12, 231 Keyston 85 King’s Bench, Court of 3, 80, 151, 222 King, John, bishop of London 63, 65 King, Peter 13, 177 Knight, Robert 144

Lake, Peter 4, 43, 102, 118, 251 Laudians 101, 105, 108, 110–11, 251 law, common 263–4 law courts see under assizes; Bow Street; High Commission, Court of; King’s Bench, Court of; Old Bailey Sessions; Star Chamber, Court of law, rule of 17, 99, 110, 231–2, 263–4 and private property 142 vicarious participation in 152 see also justice, administration of Layer, Christopher Layer conspiracy 146–7, 149, 152 Lefebvre, Georges 79, 82 legislation anti-Catholic 46 –7,147 anti-Jacobin 228 emergency 147 forgery 159, 161 gaming 177–8, 179 law and order 11, 142, 147, 152 omnipotence of 245 output of 10–11 policing 214 social policy measures 11 sovereign law 142, 148 Leicester, Robert Dudley, earl of 49–50 Lemmings, David 254, 263 Lennox, Charles, duke of Richmond 234–6 L’Estrange, Sir Roger 126 Lincoln 171 Livingstone, S. 28 Lloyd, Thomas 237 Lloyd, William 117, 124 Sermon at the Funeral of Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey (1678) 117, 124 London 2, 196–7 anonymity of 255 Bow 150 City of 139, 160, 187, 190, 196, 256 crime 196–7 Deptford 150 attractions of 2, 196 Lincoln’s Inn Fields 150 newspapers in 196 police 196, 211 prostitution 196 riots 180, 221–2, 254 social interaction in 215, 259

Index streets of 205, 206, 210 St James 196–7, 205 St James’s Palace 197, 221 St Pancras 202, 211 Westminster 181, 183–4, 190, 196, 211 Whitechapel 125, 150 London Corresponding Society 221, 225, 228–30, 233, 260 Lord, William 124 Several Tracts against Popery (1684) 124 Lowes, John 84 Loyola, St Ignatius 41, 43, 46 Lucipher's new Row-Barge (c. 1721) 144 McCoog, Thomas 50 McCreery, Cindy 248, 258–9 Macfarlane, Alan 87 McGowen, Randall 248, 255–6, 261 McLuhan, Marshall 24, 36 Understanding Media (1964) 24 McQueen, Robert, Lord Braxfield 234–5 Magna Charter 226 Manningtree 81 Mansfield, Hon. William Murray, earl of 170 Margarot, Maurice 233, 235, 238 Markham, T. 28 Marlowe, Christopher 68, 72 Edward II 72 Hero and Leander 68 Marotti, Arthur 131 Marsh, Chris 51 Marshall, Alan 134 Marprelate, Martin (pseud.) 64, 74, 101 massacres 64, 122, 124 Marx, Karl 17, 34, 87 neo-Marxism 17, 30, 33 masculinity 198 male voyeurism 207 Maxey, Anthony 107–8 Meal Tub Plot 125–6 media amplification in 26 concentration of 31 fragmentation of 27–8, 249 manipulation of 28–9, 254 and opinion 102, 252, 259

273

power of 259 tabloid 26 in transition 133–4 see also print, print culture; prints, satirical; news, newspapers media and cultural studies 26 media inventory 25 mediatized society 15–16, 27 Meighen, Richard 66 men, effeminate 68, 70–72 Mercurian, Everard 44, 50 ‘meth-mouth’ 5 Michelle, Aimable 201, 215 middle class consciousness 2, 9–10, 255 misogyny 66, 68 Mildmay, Sir Walter 47 Miller, T. 26 Mitchell, L. G. 176 Modernity 35 Mods and Rockers 5, 11, 22, 24–5, 28, 30–1, 81, 223, 248 Mohocks 1, 14 Moll Cutpurse 64, 70 ‘monied men’ 139, 141–2, 152, 160, 173, 256 Monster 14, 195–220, 248, 258–9, 262 Moore R. I. 1 moral commentary 9 moral entrepreneurs 9, 14, 25, 27–8, 118, 144, 152–3, 200, 214, 223, 227 moral panics anti-panic 172–4, 231–4, 256 anti-puritan 98–9, 100–101, 111 attributional model 32 in Australia 35 and British Jacobins 221–39, 259–61 ‘Britishness’ of 32, 35 and Catholicism 54–6, 118–19, 134, 253 concept of 1–2, 22–37, 42, 158–99, 177, 195, 198, 223–4 creating 27–8 and crime 2–3, 13, 145, 148–51, 157–74, 255 and cross-dressing 64–5, 74–5 discursive formation of 17, 33–4, 101, 248–9, 259 eighteenth-century 1–4, 12–15 and Exclusion Crisis 108–12

274

Index

moral panics (Continued) and forgery 157–74, 255–6 and functionalism 87–8 and gaming 176–90, 257–8 and government 3–4, 14–15, 97–8, 108–9, 140, 152, 224–5, 250–51, 251–2, 255, 260, 264 historical specificity of 31, 34–5, 248 and humour 65, 73, 77, n. 54, 99, 128, 181, 187, 258 interconnected 7–8, 16 and Jacobitism 145–9 law and order species of 2, 3, 12, 15, 101, 110, 152, 263 lawyers’ dramatization of 11–12 and legislative solutions 2, 10–11, 142, 147, 152 and manners 12 and media 24, 31–2, 38, n. 9, modern 5 and modernity 35, 98, 112, 195 and the Monster 195–215, 258–9 and newspapers 14 ‘oppositional voices’ 85–6, 201, 248, 253, 261, 262 and patriotism 143 and paedophilia 33 pejorative connotations of 23 and Popish Plot 118–19 popular origins of 42, 51–2, 57, 101–2, 108–9, 112, 121, 130–31 and postmodernity 36, 37, n. 6 processual models 32, 34 and the public sphere 247, 260 and puritans 97–112, 251–2 and rationality 15–16, 42, 153 scepticism 209–10 and seventeenth-century news 123 and sexuality 3, 12–13, 198 and sociology 35 and South Sea Bubble 139–40, 144, 255 stages of 25, 158 ‘successful’ 250 and witchcraft 81–8, 252–3 More, Hannah 203 More, Henry 55–6 Morgan, G. 34 Muir, Thomas 234–5

Muld Sacke: Or the apologie of Hic Mulier (1620) 66–7, 69, 70–74 Munday, Anthony 53 A View of sundry examples (1580) 53 Muslims 23, 28

Nash, Beau 177–8 National Deviancy Symposium 30 Niccoli, Ottavia 53 Newe secte of friars called Capichini, A, (1580) 48 Newgate 7, 150–1, 161–2 ‘Newgate Calendar’ 7, 162 Newington, William 162–3 News International Corporation 31 news, seventeenth-century 123 newspapers, magazines Anti-Jacobin Review 225 Bath Journal 168 Bon Ton Magazine 7 British Journal 145 Chelmsford Chronicle 13 Covent Garden Journal 185 crime reporting 6, 7–8, 150–52, 255 Daily Express 5 Daily Mirror 5 Daily Post 160 Daily Telegraph 5 Derby Mercury 162 Diary 213 eighteenth-century proliferation of 6 essayists in 8–9 and forgery 160–61, 163 and gaming 180–88, 191, 192, nn. 13, 17, 25 Gazetteer 180 Gentleman’s Magazine 167 Ipswich Journal 13 London Chronicle 186–7 London Courant 176, 181–2 London Gazette 6 London Journal 7, 139–153, 254–5 London Magazine 166, 180 Morning Chronicle 182, 186–7, 189 Morning Herald 176, 181–5, 188–9, 195, 198, 201 Morning Post 183 Newcastle Journal 8–9

Index Oracle 198 Oxford Magazine 185 Protestant Domestick Intelligence 133 Public Advertiser 180, 184 readership 6 reassuring 150–51 sexual scandal in 6–7 Spectator 10 Telegraph 5 Times 200, 228 Town and Country Magazine 7, 179 trial reports 147–8, 149, 153, 163, 213, 261 Universal Spectator 161 violence in 151 Weekly Journal or Saturday’s-Post 9, 141–2 Weekly Packet 140 World 198–9, 211 see also London; print, print culture; prints, satirical; public sphere Nichols, John 46, 55 Pilgrimage (1581) 46 Norfolk 83 Norris, Henry, Lord Norrris 45 non-conformists, religious, see dissenters North, Sir Francis 97–8 ‘Instructions For a treatise … about the late popish plott’ 97 North, Hon. Frederick, Lord North 8 North, Hon. Roger 118–21, 129–32, 134 North, Roger, Lord North 49 North, William, Lord North and Grey 146 Oates, Titus 118–21, 124, 127, 129–31, 133–4, 253 Old Bailey Sessions 7, 128, 166, 168, 171, 231 Old Bailey Sessions Papers 7 ordeal, trial by 84 Ordinary of Newgate 7, 162 Account of 7 Ormerod, Oliver 104, 106–8 Orton, Samuel 172 Osborne, Sir Thomas, earl of Danby 130 Overbury affair 64, 72–3, 77, n. 56, 250 Overbury, Sir Thomas 64, 72

275

Paine, Thomas 234 Rights of Man 234 panic-mongering 145, 146 pantomimes 187 Parker, Geoffrey 53 Parker, Henry 103 Parks, John 163 parliament patriotism of 148, 152 recourse to 149, 210, 255 reassuring 146 House of Commons 119, 120, 124, 129, 132–3, 146, 147, 180, 184 House of Lords 119,131, 149, 184 see also Popish Plot parliamentary sovereignty 147 Pasquier, Etienne 56 patriarchy 3, 65, 71, 74, 178 Perreaus (Daniel and Robert) 169 Perry, Curtis 72 Persons, Robert 42–6, 48–52, 54–5, 250 Brief Discourse 44 petitions, popular 110–11 Petty, William, marquess of Lansdown 234 Philip II 41–2, 53–4 ‘Philopatris’ (Benjamin Hoadly) 148 Philp, Mark 228 Pickering, Thomas 128 Pigot, Arthur 199 Pigott, Charles 225, 234, 237 Pincus, Stephen 4, 118, 251 Pitt, William the Younger 209, 221, 231, 234–5 Pius IV, Pope 43 ‘Plaine Protestante to the precise Puritan’ 99–101, 110 Plots 16, 41, 56, 97–8, 117–34, 139–40, 142, 145–9, 151–2, 233–4, 252–4, 259, 264 Poem on the Effigies of Sir Edmund-Bury Godfrey (1678) 117, 124 Pole, Cardinal Reginald 43 policing 196, 202, 211 see also Bow Street politics, Elizabethan 49–51 politics, Jacobean 72–3 poor, scapegoating of 9–10 Popish Plot 97, 117–34, 252–4 and Londoners 130–1

276

Index

Popish Plot (Continued) and parliament 120, 124 trials 120, 128–9 see also Godfrey, Sir Edmund Berry popular opinion 130–31 portents 53–4 Porter, Anne 196–7, 202, 205–6, 208–10, 213 Porter, Sarah 197, 202, 205–6, 213 Portsmouth 150 Powell, Mark 171 Poynting, S. 34 Prance, Miles 120, 124 Presbyterians 98, 101, 103, 106–7 Pretender 146, 151 Priestley, Joseph 228 Prince Rupert of the Rhine 83 print, print culture anti-Catholic 47–8, 53, 121 and commercial imperatives 73–4, 249, 250, 258 on crime and scandal 6–7 eighteenth-century 5–7 and the Monster 199–200, 201 overlap with other media 122–3 and opinion 15–16, 17, 83, 102, 121 permeability of 166–7, 256, 259, 261 see also London; newspapers; prints, satirical, public sphere prints, satirical 48, 200–01, 203–5, 207–9, 226 Privy Council 45, 49–50, 80, 120, 129, 165, 167 processual model 32, 34 protestants anti-propaganda of 45–6 see also puritans prostitutes 3, 16, 46, 196, 206, 208 providentialism 52, 53, 64 Prynne, William 56, 107 public opinion see public sphere public sphere 2, 3, 10, 78 bourgeois 256, 258 and civility 260 and debates 202–3 and deference 246, 255, 257–8 degradation of 156, n. 59 Elizabethan 43, 57 growth of 89 Habermasian 245–7

and legislation 246–7 and the middle-class family 246, 256, 261, 263, 266, n. 40 modern 247 and public finance 254–5 polyvocal 249 ‘pre-history’ of 4–5, 112, 118 and rational discussion 140, 153 see also London; newspapers; print, print culture; prints, satirical Pullyver, John 48–9 punk 25 puritans 97–112 anti-puritan stereotype 99–100, 101–3, 107–8, 109 Brownists 103–4, 105 as folk-devil 103–8 subversive 106–7 and witchcraft 80–81, 83 querelle des femmes 66 Questier, Michael 43 radicalism 226 Ranters 4, 57 rap 25 rave 25 Raymond, Joad 66, 123 Reeves, John 226 Thoughts on the English Government (1795) 226 Representation of the Popish Plot in 29 Figures (1681) 124–5 republican government 230 republican principles 143 see also virtue and corruption Resolution of the Round-Heads (1641) 109 Restoration (1660) 88, 98–9 Reynolds, John 127 Rice, John 169–70 Rich, Robert, earl of Warwick 83 rights of man 230 risk 26, 33–4, 36 in the eighteenth century 16, 255, 263 Rockingham ministry 176, 184 Rogers, Nicholas 6 Rogers, Thomas 52

Index Romes Follies or the Amorous Fryars (1681) 128 Rowe, David 247–8 Royal favourites 72, 250 Rye 84 Ryland, William Wynne 169 Salem witch-trials (1692) 4, 87 scapegoating 9–10, 82, 152 Scott, James C. 82 Scott, Sir John 228, 230 Scott, Jonathon 121 Scott, Sir Walter 78 Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830) 78 Scottish Martyrs 232–3, 235, 238 scribal transmission 15 Scribner, Bob 82 Scroggs, Sir William 128–30, 133 Secker, Thomas, bishop of Oxford 165 secularization 78 sentimental literature 171 sermons 47–8, 49, 65, 127 Seven Years’ War 169 sexuality, deviant 198 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of 120, 128, 253 Shagan, Ethan 48 sharpers 185 Shepherd, William 49 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 185 Shirley, James 178 Gamester, The (1637) 178 Shoemaker, Robert 198, 202–3, 206, 212 signification spiral 7 Silverstone, R. 36 Slavery 202–3 Smith, William 164, 166–9 ‘social problems’ 2–4, 8, 11, 12, 13, 263 and the media 25, 30 Society of Jesus (Jesuits) 41–62 apocalyptic readings of 51–4 as folk-devils 41–2, 117 English mission of 42, 44–9, 54–6 hostility towards 43–4, 117, 118, 119, 126, 127–9, 132 myth of 54–6 propaganda against 45–8 protestant critics of 56

277

see also Campion, Edmund, Persons, Robert ‘Solemn Mock Procession of the POPE … &c.’ (1680) 126 South Sea Bubble 139–45, 152, 160, 255–7 South Sea Company 140, 142, 144–6, 152, 159 Directors 142, 145, 152 ministerial complicity with 140, 142–3, 144, 154, n. 11 Southwold 85 Spanish Match 64 Spencer, Hon. Charles, duke of Marlborough 165 Staley, William 130 Stansby, Alice 86 Stapleton, Thomas 44 Star Chamber, Court of 80 statutes Act of Union (1801) 10 Coventry Act (1671) 212 Forgery Act (1729) 161–2 Gagging Acts (1795) 231 Gaming Acts (1739 and 1745) 177–9 Habeas Corpus Amendment Act (1679) 146, 149, 152 Hardwicke’s Marriage Act (1753) 12 Licensing Act (lapse of) 121 Middlesex Justice Act (1792) 11, 214 Riot Act (1714) 11 Septennial Act (1716) Transportation Act (1718) 11 Treason Act (1351) 142 Waltham Black Act (1723) 9, 11, 151, 212 Witchcraft Act (1563) 81 see also parliament Stearne, John 81–6, 88, 252 Steele, Sir Richard 10 stereotyping 82, 99–102, 104, 108–9 stock-jobbers 141–3, 147, 152, 160, 169, 173, 256 see also ‘monied men’ Stone, Lawrence 12 Stone, William 231 Stow, John 53 Chronicles (1580), 53 Strathmore, Countess of 208–9 street theatre 47

278

Index

Stubbe, John 50 Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf, The (1579) 50 Studley, Peter 105–8 succession, royal 97, 112, 130, 148 Suffolk 82–4, 86 suicide 182 sumptuary legislation 65, 75, n. 7 Sussex 84–5 Swetnam, Joseph 68 Swift, Theophilus 201, 206 The Monster at Large (1790) 201 tabloidization 31 Taylor, John 109–10 Differing Worship (1640) 109 Temple of Health 187, 258 testimony ‘T. G.’ 46, 53 Thatcher Government 25 theatre 41, 63–5, 67, 70–73, 101–2, 108, 123, 127–8, 178, 181, 187, 199–200, 249, 251, 253, 263 Thelwall, John 221, 228–30, 233, 237 Thomas, Sir Keith 87 Thompson, E. P. 231 Thompson, Kenneth 31–5, 111–12, 118, 248 Thompson, Mr. 231 Thrale, Hester 198, 200, 207, 210 Timely Advice, or a Treatise of Play (1640) 178 Tooke, John Horne 229–30, 233 torture 45, 80, 84 Tory, Tories propaganda 97–8, 111–12 reaction 98 Townson, Rev. Dr. Robert, dean of Westminster 64, 72–3, 250 treason 42, 46, 98, 107, 123–5, 130, 142, 145, 148–9, 221–2, 228, 229, 230, 251, 254, 260, 264 Trenchard, Sir John 139, 142–4, 152, 255, 257 Trundle, John 65–6 Turner, Anne 64, 72 Umpton, Sir Edward 45

Valois, Francis de, duke of Alençon 50 Vere, Edward, earl of Oxford 50 Vernon, James 129 virtue and corruption 152, 257 Wake, Kidd 221–2, 239 Wakeman Sir George, 129, 131 Walker, Claire 253 Walker, Thomas 237 Wallace, Lady Eglantine 207 Walpole, Edward 166 Walpole, Horace 200 Walpole, Robert 140, 144–8, 151–2, 254, 264 Walsham, Alexandra 121–2, 250–1, 261 Walsingham, Sir Francis 45, 50 Waltham Blacks 140, 148–51 ‘King John’ 149, 151 War on Terror 25–6 Watson, William 56 Watt, Robert 233 Weber, Max 32, 78 Wells, Paul 164–6 Weltje, Louis 209 West, Benjamin 231 ‘Talk of an Ostrich! ...’ (1795) 231 Whig, Whigs, 98 commonwealthmen 139 propaganda 119–20, 126, 130, 253 Whitbread, Thomas 128 Whyte, Alexander 237 Widdowes, Giles 106 Wild, Jonathan 151, 203–5 Williams, Renwick or Rhynwick 197–9, 201–6, 209–15, 259, 261 Williamson, Sir Joseph 129–30 Wiltshire, John 187 Windham, William 227, 259 Windsor Blacks 151 Wisbech stirs 56 witches, witchcraft 5, 64, 78–96 contemporary 89 and diabolic pacts 83, 85 and emotion 80 European 84 evidence of 79, 83, 84–5 history of 79 imps 83, 85

Index and law courts 80 and the press 83–4 and puritans 80 scepticism about 80, 83, 84–5, 85–6 witchfinders 81–2, 83, 85, 88 witch-hunts 85–9, 142, 143 witch-panic 81–6, 89 witch-trials 79–80, 86 Wolfe, David 43 women, agency of 210 anxiety about 205–10 aristocratic 67–8 changing attitudes towards 209 degradation of 197

dependence of 210 empowerment of 68–70 independence of 198, 205–6 and public debates 202, 210 reputation of 202 respectable 206 sexual appetite 208–9 vanity of 207–8 violence against 197 Woolf, Daniel 122 Wright, Sir Sampson 188, 211, 214 Young, Jock 24, 36 Zeal-of-the Land Busy 104

279