A Noise of Swallows
Some weeks ago there came into my hands a pamphlet of four pages entitled The English Mercurie. No. 50.: a 1942 reprint of what purports to be a circular issued in London when the first news of the engagement with the Spanish Armada was received in July 1588. The pamphlet was found between the leaves of a book bought at auction in Sherbrooke in 1943; it has not been possible to trace the origin of the pamphlet further back than that. The reprint, one supposes, was issued for purposes of propaganda; though why in 1942 rather than in 1940 is less easy to guess. A facsimile of the title is printed below.
The English Mercurie. No. 50
Publifhed by AUTHORITIE
For the Prevention of falfe Reportes.
The text of the pamphlet is made up with three reports. The first, dated “Whitehall, July 23rd, 1588”, opens with the sensational statement that
EARLIE this Morninge arrived a Meffenger at Sir Francis Walfingham's Office, with Letters of the 22d from the Lorde High Admirall on board the Ark-Royal, containinge the followinge materiall Advices.
And a circumstantial report of the first engagement extends almost to the middle of p. 3. The second report, dated “Ostend, July 27th N.S.” gives in some detail an account of the invasion being mounted along the Dutch and Belgian coasts and ends with the hope that
“the Lorde Admiral Howard will prevent the Spanish Navie from being in a Condition to raise the Blockade.” The third report, dated “London, July 23rd”, tells in a dozen lines how “The Lord Mayor, Aldermen, Common-Council and Lieutenancie of this greate city wayted upon her Majestie at Westminster this afternoone, with Assurances of their hearty and unanimous Resolution, to stande by and support her Majestie at this critical Juncture”, and how “The Queene received them very graciously, and assured them she did not coubte their zealous Endeavours to serve theyr Country on the present very important Occasion.” The pamphlet ends with the single line:
“Imprinted at London by Christ. Barker, her Highnesse’s Printer, 1588.”
The English Mercurie led me to consider the incidence of the sound of naval gunfire in English literature, other than in set battle-pieces such as The Last Fight of the Revenge, to see whether any distinct reason could be found for issuing a pamphlet For the Prevention of false Reportes. Two instances will suffice.
The beginning of Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy quietly unfolds against the sound of distant gunfire. We catch a vivid glimpse of the effect of that sound upon 17th century London.
It was that memorable day, in the first summer of the late war, when our navy engaged the Dutch [3rd June 1665]; a day wherein the two most mighty and best appointed fleets which any age had ever seen, disputed the command of the greater half of the globe, the commerce of nations, and the riches of the universe. While these vast floating bodies, on either side, moved against each other in parallel lines, and our countrymen, under the happy conduct of his Royal Highness, went breaking, by little and little, into the line of the enemies; the noise of the cannon from both navies reached our ears about the city, so that all men being alarmed with it, and in a dreadful suspense of the event, which they knew was then deciding, every one went following the sound as his fancy led him; and leaving the town almost empty, some took towards the park, some cross the river, others down it; all seeking the noise in the depth of silence.
In the excitement Dryden met his patron, Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst (Eugenius of the dialogue) and two other cultured companions. Before the well-bred and incisive discussion of dramatic poetry begins, we follow the four interlocutors down the river.
Taking then a barge. . .they made haste to shoot the bridge, and left behind them that great fall of waters which hindered them from hearing what they desired: after which, having disengaged themselves from many vessels which rode at anchor in the Thames, and almost blocked up the passage towards Greenwich, they ordered the watermen to let fall their oars more gently; and then, every one favouring his own curiosity with a strict silence, it was not long ere they perceived the air to break about them like the noise of distant thunder, or of swallows in a chimney: those little undulations of sound, though almost vanishing before they reached them, yet still seeming to retain somewhat of their first horror, which they had betwixt the fleets. After they had attentively listened till such time as the sound by little and little went from them, Eugenius, lifting up his head, and taking notice of it, was the first who congraulated to the rest that happy omen of our nation’s victory: adding, that we had but this to desire in confirmation of it, that we might hear no more of that noise, which was now leaving the English coast.
Eugenius and his three companions were lucky enough to be within earshot of the battle and to be able to draw an accurate conclusion for themselves. But Eugenius's hope “that we might hear no more of that noise” was not to be fulfilled.
On 29 July 1667 Samuel Pepys noted in his diary:
Many guns were heard this afternoon, it seems, at White Hall and in the Temple garden very plain; but what it should be nobody knows, unless the Dutch be driving our ships up the river. To-morrow we shall know.
If on die next day he discovered the reason for the gunfire he made no note of it in his diary; but there was reason for the touch of bitterness in his laconic phrase about the Dutch. In those days Pepys, as Clerk of the Acts, was working industriously within sound of the guns, ordering fireships, trying to spur to action a navy debilitated, undermanned and poorly equipped in order to avoid a repetition of the squalid disaster still fresh in his memory. In June the Dutch had sailed up the Thames and, meeting with little opposition, broke through the Medway boom and burned as much of the deserted English fleet as was within reach. The ships could not be saved: the dockyard men, too busy moving their own belongings to safety, refused to tow the ships away. The episode was a disgraceful one; but when we take up Pepy's account we find the incident significant.
On 12th June Pepys wrote in his diary:
After dinner, my wife out by coach to see her mother; and I in another, being afraid, at this busy time, to be seen with a woman in a coach, as if I were idle, towards Tho. Turner’s; but met Sir W. Coventry’s boy: and there in a letter find that the Dutch had made no motion since their taking Sheernesse; and the Duke of Albemarle writes that all is safe as to the great ships against any assault, the bomb [boom] and chaine being so fortified; which put my heart into great joy. When I come to W. Coventry’s chamber, I find him abroad; but his clerk, Powell, do tell me that ill news is come to Court of the Dutch breaking the Chaine at Chatham; which struck me to the heart.
The most lethargic imagination can conceive the currents of rumour seething through the City. Pepys himself moved in circles where news was official and reasonably reliable. His action on that occasion is revealing: it is the action of a shrewd clear-headed man who knew what London was like in a crisis; it is the action of the man who, it is considered, was personally responsible for bringing the Fire of London under control the previous year. On the night of 12th June, when everybody else was in bed he explained to his wife and father behind closed doors the conclusion he had reached: the Navy, and probably the country, was doomed. All they could do was to try to save their money. Next morning before it was light Elizabeth and John Pepys left by coach for the country, taking £1300 in gold in their night-bag. They had been given strict and detailed instructions about burying it. Will Hewer was sent early to Backewell's to withdraw another £500 before the inevitable run on the banks started, and a messenger was sent with this money to overtake the coach. Bryant's compression of the diary tells the story of the rest of the day.
All day long people kept coming in and out of the office, all with various rumous and all in alarm – the King and Duke of York among them. Meanwhile the public alarm grew. Travellers from Chatham bore tidings of burning English warships, of unmanned English guns, of English seamen who stood on Dutch decks and shouted to their countrymen on shore that they had fought hitherto for tickets [pay tokens which were difficult to redeem] but now they would fight for dollars. And in the streets of Wapping seamen's wives cried aloud that such things were a punishment for not paying their husbands. The City was in a panic, and rich men everywhere were moving their money-bags.
In 1667 the situation though critical was not fatal. The Dutch were in possession of Sheerness but did not seem to know what to do next; yet the City was in panic, and the panic in Whitehall involved even the King and the Duke of York. In the summer of 1588 London was expecting invasion, disaster even. The possibility of panic crippling all concerted action was not slight. We turn to The English Mercurie to see how the matter was handled.
A mud-spattered horseman arrives in London with the news from the fleet of the successful initial engagement with the Armada. The threat of invasion is not past. Panic must be avoided. Information is so easily distorted when passed by word of mouth. So a pamphlet is printed by the Queen's printer, Published by AUTHORITIE. For the Prevention of false Reportes, and, no doubt, circulated free of charge. Very neat, very effective.
It is precisely that quality of neatness and complete sufficiency that first makes one suspect the authenticity of the pamphlet; and as we examine it in closer detail our suspicions deepen.
The colophon is the obvious starting-point. Christopher Barker could have printed The English Mercurie. He died in 1599 and had been printing books since 1576; also he had stopped spelling his name Barkar in about 1578. In 1577 he bought from Sir Thomas Wilkes extensive patents bearing upon the printing of Bibles, and was thus appointed Queen’s printer; but he did not gain exclusive rights to print official documents until 1589, and even then complained bitterly of the unremunerative duty of printing Proclamations. In his complaint (printed in part in The Dictionary of National Biography) he states that in 1582 he had “the printing of the olde and new testament, the statutes of the Realme, Proclamations, and the book of common prayer . . . " From 1588 onwards Barker conducted his business by deputy. Certainly The English Mercurie does not look much like a Proclamation; and the phrase “her Highnesse’s Printer” is suspicious. The evidence of the colophon is, however, far from conclusive.
The catch-word title is much the most suspicious feature. In the history of English journalism there are no catch-word titles until 1621: The Courant, a translation by Nathaniel Butter of a foreign newsletter. The first true native English news-letter appears to have been Mercurius Aulicus, 1643; and in the same year we find the titles Wednesday’s Mercury, The Scottish Mercury and The Welch Mercury. But even in the case of single periodicals the title is rarely stable. Also the name Mercurius, or its anglicised form Mercury, is not the name of the news-letter but the name of the writer. The Star Chamber was not absolved until 1641. At its overthrow censorship in the strict Tudor sense disappeared and journalism as such emerged. Before the appearance of the name Mercurius, the most common word on the title page of a newsbook was Diurnall (1641 approx.); and before that the word Current, Corant, Corante, or Courante (1622) all translations of foreign news-letters. The Gazetta of Venice, an official news-sheet, began to be circulated in manuscript early in the sixteenth century and, with other foreign pioneers such as the Cologne Gallo-Belgicus, found its way into England. But until 1641 the rigid Tudor laws against unlicensed printing restrained all periodical literature except for stray news-pamphlets and news-ballads, many of which were printed in defiance of authority and privilege. These pamphlets generally bore a descriptive title and none of them bear serial numbers. The titles of these pamphlets make good reading; the contents are even better. A few samples, drawn from the representative list in The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, will suffice.
Items of news published by the State before the appearance of real news-papers have descriptive titles, such as A Declaration of the causes mooving the Queene of England to give aide to the people in the Loee Countries. 1585. Three broadsides by T[homas] D[eloney] on the subject of the Armada have survived and are reprinted in A.F. Pollard's Tudor Tracts. Three other items referring to the Armada are listed as published in 1588; but their titles are a bit cumbersome for citation. The most enchanting titles deal with matters of domestic curiosity, of which the following are representative:
C. R.: The true discription of this marveilous straunge fish. [A black-letter ballad]. 1569.
Abraham Fleming: A Straunge and terrible Wunder wrought in the parish Church of Bungay. [1577].
A notable and prodigious Historie of a Mayden who neither eateth, drinketh, nor sleepeth, and yet liveth. 1589.
Newes from Scotland of Doctor Fian a notable Sorcerer. [1591].
John Darrell: A true Narration of the Vexation by the Devil, of 7 persons in Lancashire. 1600.
A certaine Relation of the hog-faced Gentlewoman. 1640.
Murther, Murther, or, a bloody relation how Anne Hamton murthered her husband. 1641.
We come incongruously upon our word Mercury in a news-sheet too late for our purposes, in
The Marine Mercury. Or a true relation of the straunge appearance of a Man-Fish in the river Thames. 1642.
Convinced that The English Mercurie. No. 50 was a forgery, I was interested to find out whether it was an old or a recent effort. Mr. A. D. Banfill has very neatly solved the matter by drawing my attention to the following note in H. R. F. Bourne's English Newspapers: Chapters in the History of Journalism:
The English Mercurie, of which four drafts in manuscript and three printed numbers are in the British Museum, and which latter purported to have been ‘imprinted at London’ in 1588 and to have been ‘published by authority, for the suppression [sic] of false reports’, accepted as genuine by Chalmers and other antiquaries, was in 1839 shown by Thomas Watts to be a clumsy forgery.
I am not informed of the origin of the text of The English Mercurie. No doubt a scholar of Elizabethan history could say whether it is drawn from authentic letters or a journal of 1588.
That the experts on propaganda and morale should be prepared to snap their fingers in the face of scholarship by reissuing a pamphlet which had been recognised as a forgery for over a century, is an interesting reflection upon the gravity of the situation between 1940 and 1942.
NOTE: Just as this article was going to press I came across the following statement in a letter printed in John o’ London’s Weekly of 3 May 1946:
The old newspapers acquired by Roy Willyams constitute an interesting ‘find’. May I, however, make the following comments? 1. The English Mercurie, dated 1588, was a fake, published about eighty years later. To discover a copy of this fake was, of course, a notable antiquarian achievement.
There is no new thing under the sun.