Mercury-Women and Britain’s Early News Wars

“I have heard him [Napoleon] say, oftener than once…that four hostile newspapers were more to be feared than a hundred thousand troopers in battle array.”

-from Evenings with Prince Evenings with Prince Cambacérès, Second Consul, Archchancellor of the Empire, Vol. 2, by Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon (1837)

The very distant ancestors of today’s press, though constantly in danger of imprisonment and extermination, were nevertheless a force to be reckoned with. Like privateers, many early newsmongers craftily trod a fine line between licit and illicit activities. In the British Isles, most notably in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such persons served as public skirmishers in a perpetual war of ideas.

As ancillaries to both warmongers and peacemakers, pamphleteers, printers, and their distributors operated openly and in secret. In their recourse to what Alastair Bellany and Stephen Foster have called a literary “underground”, these purveyors of information, such as the “publishing terrorist” Michael Sparke and the roisterous polemicist Thomas Edwards, struck at the heart of what they saw as the depraved power structures of the day.

Somewhat like today’s internet provocateurs who pontificate in forums, podcasts, and Youtube channels, these controversialists had the best technology at their fingertips. They published at lightning-speed, and their words resounded like cannon-fire in the minds of their readers. “We are informers of the public,” they thundered from their broadside-pulpits, “lend us your ears!” Their efforts both revolutionised and decentralised the news, turning it into a quasi-ubiquitous weapon for myriad religious and political factioneers and spies.

The Jesuits were just one of many subversive groups who used the printing industry to their advantage. As personas non grata in the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline eras, they covertly published treatises in order to evangelise Protestants and minister to isolated recusants. In 1580, a few of the order’s most temerarious leaders crossed into England and established a samizdat printing press at Stonor Park, a manor in the woodlands north of Henley.

Over the next few months, Stephen Brinkley (the project’s director) and his assistants hurriedly published two treatises: Rationes Decem (1581) by Edmund Campion, and A Discoverie of J. Nichols Minister, misreported a Jesuite (1581) by Robert Parsons. Copies of the texts were subsequently smuggled into London via the nearby Thames river. Despite the best efforts of Brinkley and his team, their sub rosa printing operation was terminated in August 1581, when a task force of pursuivants and Privy councillors swooped down on the estate and arrested members of the Stonor family.

In London, countless other intriguers and dissidents jostled for power and influence. Here the atmosphere, a world away from rural Henley, was unrelentingly combative, an ever-shifting battleground of contesting opinions. This was especially evident in the 1630s and 1640s, when extreme anti-clericalist and anti-Puritan conspiracy theories, long peddled by highly creative and media-savvy agitators, began to take root in the public mind.

One person who appears to have fallen victim to these theories was, according to Jason Peacey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud.  In his essay “The Paranoid Prelate”, Peacey argues that Laud (who was often caricatured in the press as a pro-Catholic stooge) was convinced that a combined cabal of Puritan plotters was planning to overthrow the episcopate. Peacey suggests that one of the ways Laud dealt with the presumed threat was by censoring and destroying Puritan works.

While Laudian crackdowns were taking place, London continued to be, to use the words of Ethyn Kirby, author of William Prynne: A Study in Puritanism, a city of “literary buccaneering”, a “world of unlicensed presses smuggled books, suppressed tracts, silenced ministers, libels, and counter-libels”. To evade the functionaries of the law and the much-feared Star Chamber, printers organised like hell, hiding their presses in places like closets, garden sheds, and coffee houses. These chambers of secrets—hiding the most dangerous of texts—were sometimes only accessible by a series of trapdoors.

Printers got the word out by hiring teams of business-minded, street-smart locals—many of whom were women.  These “Mercury women”—as they were called—acted as wholesalers and occasional “hawkers” (street vendors) of books and pamphlets.  In her book The Women of Grub Street (1998), Paula McDowell writes that by the 1700s a few mercury-women, such as Elizabeth Nutt and Anne Dodd, owned a “cluster of shops” at the Royal Exchange and Temple Bar. McDowell contends that their businesses went on to become “the most important media outlets of the eighteenth-century press.”

The Civil War and Interregnum, however, tested both the wits and resolve of mercury-women who dared to get on the bad side of those in power.  On 9 October 1643, the Common Council of London passed a resolution prohibiting the sale of libellous pamphlets and books. The new act declared that hawkers and mercury-women who sold unlicensed materials would be apprehended and brought before the city’s Justices of the Peace. This law was later updated in 1649 by The Council of State, which gave the Company of Stationers the authority to make arrests and stated that offenders would be whipped “like common rogues”.

Apparently, some devil-may-care mercury-women, perhaps too accustomed to the hustle, were reluctant to close shop. Consequently, they were hunted by warrant-wielding beadles like Joseph Hunscot and detained in prisons like Newgate, Peterhouse, and Bridewell. While in custody, the women were whipped and interrogated until they revealed the names of their collaborators.  Pregnant women, like Abigail Rogers, were sometimes let off the hook, but others, such as Eleanor Passenger, were punished to the fullest extent of the law.

Notably, the same legal system that provided for the penalisation of “mercuries” also allowed for the prosecution of overly zealous officers. Adrian Johns, in his The Nature of the Book (1998), has made note of at least two cases where printers sued or threatened to sue stationers who went too far. Remarkably, some people took matters into their own hands. For example, an issue from the June 1649 edition of Mercurius Pragmaticus describes how one mercury-woman stood her ground against a City of London alderman and his myrmidons in the midst of the Royal Exchange.

According to the newsbook’s “credibly informed” author, “Faith” refused to comply with the orders of alderman Thomas Atkins when he attempted to “search for her bookes”. The woman tore his shirt and tussled with her attacker until he called for his officers. As soon as his backup arrived, a crowd joined the fray, liberated Faith, and sent the lawmen flying. Beaten but not defeated, the men later accosted the “Amazonian Damsell in a more private place” and imprisoned her in Bridewell.  The author concluded the account by mentioning that Faith’s supporters had prepared a “petition in her behalfe” to secure her speedy release.

Clearly, mercury-women played a significant part in early modern Britain’s wars of words. Like the well-winged god to whom they owed their name, they relayed messages between the people and their rulers by serving as the couriers of those propagandists who variably criticised and praised the government and the monarchy. With their shrewd and market-minded dissemination techniques, mercury-women helped influence the agora of ideas that both gave rise to and put the kibosh on the Commonwealth. Similar to today’s publishers and journalists, mercuries profited because they knew how to doggedly navigate the complex social and cultural unrest of their times. In doing so, they both satisfied the public’s hunger for knowledge and laid the foundation for the modern news business.

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