The History of England, from the Accession of James the Second - Volume 1, Thomas Babington Macaulay [ebook pc reader txt] 📗

infraction

of his monopoly; and the courts of law decided in his favour.159


The revenue of the Post Office was from the first constantly

increasing. In the year of the Restoration a committee of the

House of Commons, after strict enquiry, had estimated the net

receipt at about twenty thousand pounds. At the close of the

reign of Charles the Second, the net receipt was little short of

fifty thousand pounds; and this was then thought a stupendous

sum. The gross receipt was about seventy thousand pounds. The

charge for conveying a single letter was twopence for eighty

miles, and threepence for a longer distance. The postage

increased in proportion to the weight of the packet.160 At

present a single letter is carried to the extremity of Scotland

or of Ireland for a penny; and the monopoly of post horses has

long ceased to exist. Yet the gross annual receipts of the

department amount to more than eighteen hundred thousand pounds,

and the net receipts to more than seven hundred thousand pounds.

It is, therefore, scarcely possible to doubt that the number of

letters now conveyed by mail is seventy times the number which

was so conveyed at the time of the accession of James the

Second.161


No part of the load which the old mails carried out was more

important than the newsletters. In 1685 nothing like the London

daily paper of our time existed, or could exist. Neither the

necessary capital nor the necessary skill was to be found.

Freedom too was wanting, a want as fatal as that of either

capital or skill. The press was not indeed at that moment under a

general censorship. The licensing act, which had been passed soon

after the Restoration, had expired in 1679. Any person might

therefore print, at his own risk, a history, a sermon, or a poem,

without the previous approbation of any officer; but the Judges

were unanimously of opinion that this liberty did not extend to

Gazettes, and that, by the common law of England, no man, not

authorised by the crown, had a right to publish political

news.162 While the Whig party was still formidable, the

government thought it expedient occasionally to connive at the

violation of this rule. During the great battle of the Exclusion

Bill, many newspapers were suffered to appear, the Protestant

Intelligence, the Current Intelligence, the Domestic

Intelligence, the True News, the London Mercury.163 None of these

was published oftener than twice a week. None exceeded in size a

single small leaf. The quantity of matter which one of them

contained in a year was not more than is often found in two

numbers of the Times. After the defeat of the Whigs it was no

longer necessary for the King to be sparing in the use of that

which all his Judges had pronounced to be his undoubted

prerogative. At the close of his reign no newspaper was suffered

to appear without his. allowance: and his allowance was given

exclusively to the London Gazette. The London Gazette came out

only on Mondays and Thursdays. The contents generally were a

royal proclamation, two or three Tory addresses, notices of two

or three promotions, an account of a skirmish between the

imperial troops and the Janissaries on the Danube, a description

of a highwayman, an announcement of a grand cockfight between two

persons of honour, and an advertisement offering a reward for a

strayed dog. The whole made up two pages of moderate size.

Whatever was communicated respecting matters of the highest

moment was communicated in the most meagre and formal style.

Sometimes, indeed, when the government was disposed to gratify

the public curiosity respecting an important transaction, a

broadside was put forth giving fuller details than could be found

in the Gazette: but neither the Gazette nor any supplementary

broadside printed by authority ever contained any intelligence

which it did not suit the purposes of the Court to publish. The

most important parliamentary debates, the most important state

trials recorded in our history, were passed over in profound

silence.164 In the capital the coffee houses supplied in some

measure the place of a journal. Thither the Londoners flocked, as

the Athenians of old flocked to the market place, to hear whether

there was any news. There men might learn how brutally a Whig,

had been treated the day before in Westminster Hall, what

horrible accounts the letters from Edinburgh gave of the

torturing of Covenanters, how grossly the Navy Board had cheated

the crown in the Victualling of the fleet, and what grave charges

the Lord Privy Seal had brought against the Treasury in the

matter of the hearth money. But people who lived at a distance

from the great theatre of political contention could be kept

regularly informed of what was passing there only by means of

newsletters. To prepare such letters became a calling in London,

as it now is among the natives of India. The newswriter rambled

from coffee room to coffee room, collecting reports, squeezed

himself into the Sessions House at the Old Bailey if there was an

interesting trial, nay perhaps obtained admission to the gallery

of Whitehall, and noticed how the King and Duke looked. In this

way he gathered materials for weekly epistles destined to

enlighten some county town or some bench of rustic magistrates.

Such were the sources from which the inhabitants of the largest

provincial cities, and the great body of the gentry and clergy,

learned almost all that they knew of the history of their own

time. We must suppose that at Cambridge there were as many

persons curious to know what was passing in the world as at

almost any place in the kingdom, out of London. Yet at Cambridge,

during a great part of the reign of Charles the Second, the

Doctors of Laws and the Masters of Arts had no regular supply of

news except through the London Gazette. At length the services of

one of the collectors of intelligence in the capital were

employed. That was a memorable day on which the first newsletter

from London was laid on the table of the only coffee room in

Cambridge.165 At the seat of a man of fortune in the country the

newsletter was impatiently expected. Within a week after it had

arrived it had been thumbed by twenty families. It furnished the

neighboring squires with matter for talk over their October, and

the neighboring rectors with topics for sharp sermons against

Whiggery or Popery. Many of these curious journals might

doubtless still be detected by a diligent search in the archives

of old families. Some are to be found in our public libraries;

and one series, which is not the least valuable part of the

literary treasures collected by Sir James Mackintosh, will be

occasionally quoted in the course of this work.166


It is scarcely necessary to say that there were then no

provincial newspapers. Indeed, except in the capital and at the

two Universities, there was scarcely a printer in the kingdom.

The only press in England north of Trent appears to have been at

York.167


It was not only by means of the London Gazette that the

government undertook to furnish political instruction to the

people. That journal contained a scanty supply of news without

comment. Another journal, published under the patronage of the

court, consisted of comment without news. This paper, called the

Observator, was edited by an old Tory pamphleteer named Roger

Lestrange. Lestrange was by no means deficient in readiness and

shrewdness; and his diction, though coarse, and disfigured by a

mean and flippant jargon which then passed for wit in the green

room and the tavern, was not without keenness and vigour. But his

nature, at once ferocious and ignoble, showed itself in every

line that he penned. When the first Observators appeared there

was some excuse for his acrimony. The Whigs were then powerful;

and he had to contend against numerous adversaries, whose

unscrupulous violence might seem to justify unsparing

retaliation. But in 1685 all the opposition had been crushed. A

generous spirit would have disdained to insult a party which

could not reply, and to aggravate the misery of prisoners, of

exiles, of bereaved families: but; from the malice of Lestrange

the grave was no hiding place, and the house of mourning no

sanctuary. In the last month of the reign of Charles the Second,

William Jenkyn, an aged dissenting pastor of great note, who had

been cruelly persecuted for no crime but that of worshipping God

according to the fashion generally followed throughout protestant

Europe, died of hardships and privations at Newgate. The outbreak

of popular sympathy could not be repressed. The corpse was

followed to the grave by a train of a hundred and fifty coaches.

Even courtiers looked sad. Even the unthinking King showed some

signs of concern. Lestrange alone set up a howl of savage

exultation, laughed at the weak compassion of the Trimmers,

proclaimed that the blasphemous old impostor had met with a most

righteous punishment, and vowed to wage war, not only to the

death, but after death, with all the mock saints and martyrs.168

Such was the spirit of the paper which was at this time the

oracle of the Tory party, and especially of the parochial clergy.


Literature which could be carried by the post bag then formed the

greater part of the intellectual nutriment ruminated by the

country divines and country justices. The difficulty and expense

of conveying large packets from place to place was so great, that

an extensive work was longer in making its way from Paternoster

Row to Devonshire or Lancashire than it now is in reaching

Kentucky. How scantily a rural parsonage was then furnished, even

with books the most necessary to a theologian, has already been

remarked. The houses of the gentry were not more plentifully

supplied. Few knights of the shire had libraries so good as may

now perpetually be found in a servants' hall or in the back

parlour of a small shopkeeper. An esquire passed among his

neighbours for a great scholar, if Hudibras and Baker's

Chronicle, Tarlton's Jests and the Seven Champions of

Christendom, lay in his hall window among the fishing rods and

fowling pieces. No circulating library, no book society, then

existed even in the capital: but in the capital those students

who could not afford to purchase largely had a resource. The

shops of the great booksellers, near Saint Paul's Churchyard,

were crowded every day and all day long with readers; and a known

customer was often permitted to carry a volume home. In the

country there was no such accommodation; and every man was under

the necessity of buying whatever he wished to read.169


As to the lady of the manor and her daughters, their literary

stores generally consisted of a prayer book and receipt book. But