Chapter 3 ‘I harde yow once saye yow loved forryne newes’: women news readers

Women in the history of news reading and consumption are generally conspicuous only by their absence. Kate Loveman and David Randall have demonstrated the importance of news reading to a seventeenth-century gentleman’s identity, examining the importance of news to masculinity, but the same is rarely done for femininity.¹ Richard Allestree gives perhaps the only mention of news reading in The Ladies Calling, asking his readers that ‘this Discourse may not be taken only as a Gazet for its newness, & discarded as soon as read’, and instead suggesting they return to his book year after year, in order to better absorb its lessons.² This shows a general disdain for the fleeting nature of news reading (as printed news is discarded as soon as it is read), but does not appear to be particularly gendered – there is no clear suggestion that news was an inappropriate genre for women readers.³

The absence of representations of women reading the news has perhaps led to a misapprehension that they did not do so.⁴ In an article about manuscript transmission of the news in the seventeenth century, Ian Atherton suggested that ‘it is possible that women may have been less interested in the news. Female correspondents very rarely included even a line of news in their letters, where their male counterparts rarely let a letter pass without some mention of the events of the day’.⁵ He does then go on to acknowledge a problem inherent in discussions of early modern news, the ‘tendency to call reports from men “news” and those from women “gossip”’, and that women had a role in producing, selling, distributing and reading the news, but his statement reflects a common assumption about women’s lack of interest in the news; or the fact that there is a lack of evidence for that interest, at least in comparison to male news readers.⁶

However, there is a multitude of evidence that women were dedicated and regular readers of the news in the seventeenth century. They received letters from friends and family detailing current affairs, they subscribed to printed and manuscript news, and they acted as key participants in epistolary news networks, reading and transmitting the news in their correspondence. This chapter will consider the many and varied examples of women reading the news, demonstrating that there is evidence for a keen and continued interest in seventeenth-century current affairs among gentry women. This shows the effort they made to engage with political events both in England and overseas, despite being physically removed from places and institutions of political power, and it was a key way in which they could participate in the political sphere.

Women’s interactions with politics have long been recognised in other areas of early modern history. Scholars have shown that women’s writing often engaged with ‘news-worthy’ themes, and that women’s political participation often occurred behind the scenes.⁷ Women prophets have received attention for their intervention in the public sphere, as have Quaker women, whose effective use of print has been demonstrated by Kate Peters.⁸ Historians such as Ann Hughes have examined women’s more explicit political participation in the Civil War period, demonstrating the extent to which women had an active role in the conflict, taking part in military operations, defending their homes and influencing the political discussion.⁹ Moreover, the political influences and interests in the works of Delarivier Manley, Aphra Behn and Mary Astell, and the political actions of women such as Lucy Hutchinson, Anne Halkett and Ann Fanshawe, have all demonstrated the relationship that women had with politics in the seventeenth century.¹⁰

These women writers and actors must have acquired their information about contemporary events and politics from somewhere, and it seems a very reasonable assumption that they all consumed the news in some form or other. This may have been through oral networks, but it may also have been in either manuscript or print. Jason Peacey, when looking at the private circulation of printed news, argues convincingly that ‘gentry women were enthusiastic readers and distributors of topical material, who gained access to “printed papers” even in remote parts of the country’, suggesting that they often received such material from their husbands.¹¹ This was a significant way in which women accessed information; however, I want to build on this to argue that women not only received their news through the mediation of other family members but were also frequently recipients themselves, and that news reading should be fully integrated into the history of early modern women and politics.

The idea that women were absent from news culture has been challenged by a number of scholars in recent years. Women’s roles in the production and distribution of news have been illuminated by scholars such as Paula McDowell, Claire Walker and Marcus Nevitt.¹² Nevitt in particular has recognised that women read newsbooks, citing Lucy Hutchinson and Brilliana Harley in particular, but has otherwise largely focused on women’s roles in the production, rather than consumption, of the news.¹³ The developing public sphere of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, where news was consumed and discussed (particularly in coffee houses), has traditionally been seen as masculine, both rhetorically and in terms of physical space.¹⁴ However, this model has been increasingly complicated by historians who have argued that women could and did participate in coffee-house culture.¹⁵ There is increasing recognition that women were interested in the news, and were able to be active participants in many areas of seventeenth-century news cultures. This still leaves room, however, for a discussion of women’s roles as readers and consumers of the news.¹⁶ Coffee houses are of course an important area of research for exploring early modern women and news culture, but less attention has been paid to how women engaged with the news at home, often far from London. In this chapter, I focus on seventeenth-century women news readers in domestic spaces and consider how women read the news.

Determining how people read the news can be challenging, particularly given the general absence of marginalia or other readers’ marks from printed news. The lack of annotation of news publications has been commented on by several scholars, with a distinction often drawn between news-reading habits and the ‘goal-oriented’ reading of other texts.¹⁷ This, however, overlooks the aim of intellectual development; the desire to gain knowledge about the world must have been at least a partial motivator behind news reading, as would, presumably, the desire to be able to discuss current affairs, at least in certain circles. Both of these aims could be considered as examples of ‘active’ reading. The fact remains, however, that news, whether manuscript or print, rarely bears readers’ marks. Perhaps this is more indicative of a lack of repeated reading than anything else. News reading is, by its very nature, immediate and often short-lived: it is unlikely that one would go back to newsletters or newsbooks for multiple readings over a long period of time, as we saw happening with the Bible in Chapter 1.¹⁸

A much-discussed phenomenon of seventeenth-century news culture is the plurality of texts open to readers. There was, as has been mentioned above, a rise in print news publications in the 1640s and readers had plenty of choice in the news marketplace, at least during periods when the Licensing Act was not in place. One of the most striking things about the scholarship on seventeenth-century news, however, is the division between manuscript and print genres. In the focus on the rise of new genres and the attempt to both trace and complicate the origins of the newspaper, the manuscript transmission of news has often been somewhat separated from print news.¹⁹ It is worth, therefore, considering all the ways in which news was transmitted in the seventeenth century, to examine if women interacted with any forms in particular and how they were approached. From my research, the two forms that emerge most concretely are letters containing news, sent by friends, family or acquaintances; and the manuscript newsletter. The absence of other forms does not necessarily mean that women were not consuming them (there are several references to printed news publications in the sources I discuss here), but rather that we have less evidence thereof. These two genres have often been overlooked by scholars focused on the explosion of print news in the seventeenth century, but there is increasing recognition of their continued importance in the early modern period, despite the influx of new forms of news transmission.

This mix of manuscript and printed sources is important when considering how people read and received the news. As will be demonstrated below, there is plenty of evidence that news was gathered from a multiplicity of sources, both manuscript and print.²⁰ King has discussed the interplay between different forms of communication in the news marketplace of the late seventeenth century, arguing that ‘written and printed media worked in tandem and in addition to the traditional oral circulation of news, offering users a range of communicative options rather than replacing or overriding each other’, in a form of ‘extensive’ reading.²¹ In gathering knowledge about current affairs, seventeenth-century readers, both male and female, relied on a variety of different sources to keep them informed, using both manuscript and print throughout the seventeenth century.

Women received the news in letters from friends and family, and in formalised documents such as newsletters, newsbooks and corantos. I will explore examples of letters sent to and from women such as Joan Barrington, Elizabeth Mordaunt and Jane Cornwallis Bacon, to consider the ways in which women participated in epistolary news networks among friends and families, and manuscript newsletters sent to women such as Anne Pole and Barbara Clopton, which demonstrate women’s interest in serial news consumption. What emerges is a picture of reading in which gentry women consumed the news in print and manuscript form, often absorbing multiple accounts of the same event or using different publications to acquire knowledge of different events. This does not appear to be markedly different from the way in which men read the news, challenging the traditional divisions that have been put in place between male and female participation in the public news sphere.

Women’s reading as a form of political participation has often been overlooked. Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker have argued for viewing ‘reading as political experience and performance’.²² They also connected this political reading to questions of identity, suggesting that the process of reading was one of identity creation (be that political or religious identity), concluding that ‘we are what we read’.²³ This, surely, is an important form of political engagement. We do not always know for certain that women read the news that they received, but, as Amanda Vickery has argued, ‘possessions [are] crucial props in self-fashioning’.²⁴ Therefore, in receiving the news, whether through personal letter, newsbook or manuscript newsletter, these women were creating an identity for themselves, something which is in itself a form of political activity.

The examples of news reading considered here fall roughly into three chronological periods, corresponding with periods of change in news culture more generally. The late 1620s and early 1630s, with the rise of corantos and serials, is the context for the news reading of figures such as Joan Barrington and Jane Cornwallis Bacon, who received news from their friends and family. Brilliana Harley, Elizabeth Mordaunt and Mary Hatton Helsby were reading the news in the context of the Civil War and Restoration, when a significant number of new printed forms were available to the reading public. Barbara Clopton and Anne Pole were receiving newsletters in the 1680s and 1690s, when news saw another spike alongside the context of the Glorious Revolution and the Rage of Party. These are all recognised as significant moments in the development of printed news, while the evidence collected here is largely manuscript, in the form of personal letters or scribal newsletters. However, there is evidence throughout that these women were reading printed news forms as well, demonstrating the significance of the rise of the news genre not only for the male public sphere but also for women, who often lived at a remove from the political centre of the country.

Letters of news

There are numerous examples of women discussing news in epistolary form throughout the seventeenth century.²⁵ This correspondence is often with male family members or acquaintances, usually based in London and updating their female relatives on the news from the capital. There are, however, also examples of women sharing news in their letters to each other. Letters can also give evidence of other forms of news reading, as newsbooks, corantos and broadsides were often sent by friends and family, alongside letters. The examples gathered here, ranging from the 1620s to the 1690s, demonstrate several women’s interest in news reading and participation in seventeenth-century news transmission. The case studies here have been chosen because they explicitly discuss political or international news. Not all women’s letters do this (although it appears to be more likely in times of political upheaval or war, as is perhaps unsurprising) and there is certainly room to expand this study by considering a much broader definition of ‘news’. However, for the purposes of this chapter I have chosen women who, through their epistolary interactions with friends and family, demonstrated very clearly their appetite for current affairs.

Many women received detailed news in letters from their male family members, often their husbands, sons or sons-in-law, who were in London and could report on events in the capital. The letters sent to Joan Barrington and Jane Cornwallis Bacon (née Meautys, 1580/1–1659), the gentry woman and letter-writer, reveal a great deal about their news-reading habits and interests. Both received letters from a variety of family members and acquaintances, who updated them, often in great detail, on important items of both foreign and domestic news.

Barrington was at the centre of an epistolary network within her family.²⁶ The family’s letters are held in the British Library. Those in the volume edited by Arthur Searle come from the years 1628–1632, when a large number of letters were sent to Barrington after the death of her husband, Sir Francis Barrington.²⁷ Various family members and acquaintances sent Barrington updates about current affairs, and her interest in the news appears to have been common knowledge, at least within the family. This was in the midst of the Thirty Years’ War. Richard Cust has argued that there was a great deal of interest in foreign and domestic news at this time, with the public following the conflict on the continent, the Spanish match and parliamentary politics, citing the fact that there is a ‘marked increase in the survival of newsletters and “separates”’ after 1620.²⁸ This increased interest in foreign (mostly continental) news is certainly echoed in Francis Harris’ remark to his aunt that ‘I harde yow once saye yow loved forryne newes.’²⁹

Barrington was clearly also interested in domestic news, however. Her sons often sent her news of Parliament, or other political news from London. On January 28, 1629, her son Robert wrote:

I cannot now have tyme to relate how many excellent speeches were made both yesterday and this day in the cause of religion and against both popery and arminianisme. We are to goe to the king to morrow to receave his gratious answer upon the petition of both houses for a generall fast, which we make no doubt of being graunted. Forraigne newes I heare none, only there is a speech that the Hollanders have taken more shippes of late and surprized the convoy that as comeing with money to pay the souldiers in the archduchess’ country.³⁰

This was concerning the ongoing condemnation of Arminianism by Parliament in the 1620s, and the petition for a general fast, which was a common response to outbreaks of disease in England.³¹ The whole letter was taken up with political news, with only scant mention of personal matters, or Robert’s welfare. These matters would, however, have been personally important to him, as he was describing his professional life. When seen within the context of family intimacy, this complicates the idea of a public/private divide, demonstrating that women often necessarily had close links to political proceedings due to their family members’ professional positions. Letters such as these were frequent, often sent every few days, allowing Barrington to stay as up to date as possible with the affairs of the day.

However, her sons often took on a distinct editorial role, seemingly based on what they thought would interest their mother. In one letter from 1630, John Barrington wrote to his mother, ‘I heare of no newes in this towne worthy of your knowledge.’³² This idea of ‘no newes’ demonstrates the editorial role her correspondents could take. John Barrington clearly put a premium on certain kinds of news, and was discerning in what he sent to his mother. It also indicates the role family members played in deciding what news was relayed to women, and what not to communicate. There is a similar example in 1693, when Margaret Grey received a letter from her son William Grey.³³ William wrote, ‘I read over the news[letter] just now but can find nothing worth writing.’³⁴ Grey appears to have relied on her son to digest the news for her, reading the newsletter and deciding what content may or may not interest his mother. While it is very possible that Grey had other news sources, whether printed or manuscript, the role of male family members in processing and editing news for their female family members is evident.

Jane Cornwallis Bacon similarly received news in various letters from her male family members. Her second husband, Nathaniel Bacon, wrote to her detailing the news of the Thirty Years’ War from mainland Europe, in a similar style to manuscript newsletters:

for news here is very little, but some hopes that the strong report of the King and Prince’s death of Polonia may prove untrue, for here has lately arrived a ship out of these countries, which relates no such thing; and besides, the Spanish ambassador has no such intelligence. The report is also of an ambassador out of Spain for the Low Countries, to treat of peace; for whose entertainment there is there great preparation. A confirmation also of the sea fight betwixt the French King and the Rochellers, 6 of the King’s ships being sunk, and 3 taken; and also of the other news I last wrote, of another navy of ships is also preparing, the intent unclear, some sat for Spain, the match proceeding according to the common report.³⁵

This letter gives a detailed overview of the various events across the continent, referencing the difficulty people had in confirming news reports or reconciling conflicting information. Moreover, it is implied that this is a regular correspondence: Nathaniel Bacon mentioned ‘the other news I last wrote’, suggesting that this was not a one-off communication, and that he had relayed news to her before.

Bacon’s cousin, Thomas Meautys, gave her updates on the news from London, including the events at Parliament and the accompanying political intrigue and manoeuvring. In one letter he wrote, ‘our Parliament was this day adjourned till Thursday next. The Upper House is not satisfied with the reasons of the King’s detaining my Lord of Arundel from them, and are resolved to press it further’.³⁶ This refers to Charles I’s arrest of Thomas Howard, the Earl of Arundel, after his son eloped in 1626 with Lady Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of the Duke of Lennox and the king’s ward. The House of Lords protested his detention as one of their members, and adjourned Parliament until Arundel was released.³⁷ Meautys later wrote, ‘I am the shorter in news, because I understand by your last that you want not our Parliament news from better and readier hands.’³⁸ She also was clearly able to read in at least two languages, and her family were therefore able to send her additional materials and reports to add to her reading. In June 1628, Meautys wrote, ‘the enclosed, for those few words which are in French, and for which you want no interpreter, was the King’s answer to our petition; the rest was somewhat which he spoke before and after the answer given’.³⁹ Bacon’s understanding of the news was drawn from multiple places, as she clearly had several news sources in different languages.

She was also apparently concerned with the truthfulness and accuracy of the reports she received, as Sir Ambrose Randolph, a cousin and close friend, at one point wrote to her:

I knowing your love to the truth of news, rather than first or common report of it, shall, as you wishes me, send you a relation of the King of Sweden’s great victory, the 7^th September, as it was told by him that brought the news to our King since my coming to town; an Englishman, who the King has now knighted, his name Sir John Castell.⁴⁰

This was the Battle of Breitenfeld, one of King Gustavus Adolphus’ most significant victories in the Thirty Years’ War, and the rest of the letter is taken up with a very detailed account of the conflict. The similarity to Harris’ reference to Barrington’s ‘love’ of the news is striking; both women were keen to keep well informed, and utilised their large network of friends and family to help them do so, despite any physical distance they might have from London political circles.⁴¹ Their news reading broadened their political and cultural horizons, allowing them to intellectually engage with current affairs.⁴²

Evidence of extensive reading, mixing both manuscript and print genres, is present in Barrington’s family letters. Her correspondents frequently sent her copies of the latest newsbooks, keeping her up to date on events that way. Her son-in-law, William Masham, wrote in 1631: ‘we have noe domesticke newes, only some whispers at Parliament. When the booke of newes comes forth I will send it you; as yet I cannot heare of any this weeke’.⁴³ Masham again, a month later, wrote, ‘I have sent you this week’s curranto and I hope the next will make things more certaine’, after reporting the foreign news in his letter.⁴⁴ There also appears to have been an expectation that Barrington would have read English corantos and serials. Given the lack of annotations or other readers’ marks on most print news publications, particularly for women, references such as these to the consumption of print news genres are very useful. While there are few sources which give as much evidence for women reading newsbooks and other print publications as the Barrington family letters, such references do crop up in other women’s letters from across the seventeenth century. In the 1690s, Elizabeth Packer, a friend of the Evelyn family, wrote in a letter to Mary Evelyn: ‘I was told from the publick news letter of the danger M^r [?] had been in but knew not the particulars till y^r letter.’⁴⁵ This gives an impression not only of women discussing the current events but also, again, of the mix of manuscript and print transmission of the news.

Brilliana Harley, the parliamentarian and third wife of Sir Robert Harley, is often included in studies of women during the Civil War period for her defence of her family home, Brampton Bryan.⁴⁶ She similarly received both letters containing news and other records of current affairs from her family members. In her affectionate correspondence with her son, Edward (Ned) Harley, she frequently refers to texts sent to her by either him or her husband. He sent her copies of various declarations and Acts of Parliament to keep her up to date with news from the capital. On one occasion, she wrote to her son, ‘I thanke you for the acts of parlament, and for doctor Dowing booke.’⁴⁷ This probably refers to Calybute Downing, a clergyman and author who wrote several tracts and sermons in the early 1640s legitimising resistance to the king and promoting Presbyterianism.⁴⁸ Harley displayed a keen interest in following current affairs, and implied a reliance on her correspondents for this information gathering: in another letter to her son, she wrote, ‘your letter by the post and by the carrier are both very wellcome to me; for besides the knowledge you giue me of the publicke affaires, the assurance of your health is very deare to me’.⁴⁹ Harley here distinguishes between different types of news, public and personal, but suggests they are both of value to her; there is no suggestion that one is more appropriate to her.

While the majority of these letters communicating news to women appear to be from male correspondents, there is some evidence of women passing and discussing news with other women.⁵⁰ On one occasion, Judith Barrington, Joan Barrington’s daughter-in-law, added in a postscript to her letter, ‘I have made bould to send you the booke of news.’⁵¹ It is not clear whether this phrasing indicates some sort of transgressive element to Judith sending the newsbook or whether it might simply be a form of social politeness between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law.⁵² Judith was not the only woman to send news to Joan. Joan St John, Barrington’s granddaughter, wrote to pass on news from her husband, acting as a conduit for the information, writing, ‘my husband comands me to tel you there shal be a parlament; you may beleve it for it cam from my Lord Treseure who told it my Lord Bedford of a sertain. Whither it be cause of joy or sorow, the sucses will shew’.⁵³ She added, later in the letter, ‘I have sent you the book of nus with a map which is new printed.’⁵⁴ Barrington’s female correspondents may have talked about news less than their male counterparts, but they did still participate in this exchange of news.⁵⁵ This disparity is perhaps due to situational constraints. Barrington’s male family members primarily sent her news they came across through their acquaintances, or which they witnessed themselves; perhaps the infrequency of news in women’s letters is more indicative of the fact that they could not participate in the political sphere in the same way than it is of lack of interest in the news.

Some women clearly also played important roles in transmitting the news, taking their place in extended epistolary news networks between friends and family. Anne Finch, wife of the Earl of Nottingham and daughter of Christopher, Viscount Hatton (1632–1706), relayed news to her father based on news that she herself had received and read.⁵⁶ For example, she wrote him an account of the Battle of Steenkerque, fought on August 3, 1692, as part of the Nine Years’ War:

This morning came the Flanders letters that were written Tuesday last w^ch bring a fuller account of the battle then anny we had before for now every body has had time to writte to there friends. The Duke of Ormond is not killed but slightly wounded and a prisoner and the Duke of At Albans not mention so I suppose not killed, & by the Imagination of the man y^t came from the Duke of Wirtennberg several other officers were killed w^ch now prove to be alive for there is not one Collonel killed some slightly wounded but none dangerously escept Comte Solmes and they doe not say if he be dead.⁵⁷

Finch here showed a familiarity with the conflict on the continent that implies regular news reading, and we can speculate that her information came from a newsbook or newsletter. This communication to her father puts her in a position of knowledge and authority: he would have to trust her interpretation and re-telling of events, particularly if he received no other news source.

Mary Hatton Helsby displayed a similar interest in and willingness to discuss the news when writing to her father, Peter Hatton, in 1660. Her letter contains an insightful analysis of the contemporary political situation during the Restoration, as Charles II and Royalist courtiers returned to England from the continent, and the resulting fears about the influence of European Catholicism. The letter is worth quoting at length:

It will be a gaine full thing me thinks for the countrey when all is settled, but there be some that fear that the manner of ye new Court will be full of the outlandishe breeding of so many in forreine parts for all these years among popishe people. Tis certaine that some do think religion the the [sic] only medicine for ye times we have had after so much bleeding, & to stay any more of such breakings forth out of the body politicke. But methinks too many doctors will be as bad as too few; but tis so easie in seasons of tryall to make ye people beleive in the pleasant doctoring of them that thinke their churche is every thing & the people nothing, which is true enough perhapps of all those that followe such beliefe. I fear me we have much yet to go through if they aim at this, namely, that the popes men shall helpe ye King to governe. Tis not a comfortable thought for any but expecially for ye ffamilyes of those men them selves in after times, who then may live to curse their own fathers & helpe more than any freshe risings & warrings through out ye land.⁵⁸

Hatton Helsby showed no reticence about expressing her opinion here, and she was evidently very well informed about the political upheaval. Her predictions about the future of the country reflect a confidence perhaps born of familiarity with the conflict, perhaps gained through reading newsletters or newsbooks. She was obviously very comfortable about expressing her opinions with such authority to her father, and there is no hint that this was a subject that was unsuitable for her.

This type of communication did not only happen within families. A letter from Jael Boscawen (née Godolphin) to John Evelyn in 1685 demonstrates her role in passing news along:

I imagine when y^u see a letter from me, y^u will expect newes, w^ch is y^e chief reason I have not write to y^u sooner, having soe little of any certainty besides what y^u will see in y^e Gasette perhaps as soon as y^u have this, w^ch is y^t S^r John Cochran & his son are both taken in Scotland & Argyle beheaded, y^e Rebells in y^e west pop up and down in y^e close countrey between Bridgewater & Taunton, they plunderd Wells last week, & there was great suspitions that they intended to march towards Exter, where y^e Duke of Albemarle is w^th y^e Malitia of Devonshire, & likewise my Lord of Bathe w^th some of his new raised men.⁵⁹

This addresses the Argyll rebellion, led by Scottish lords against James II and VII, which took place shortly before the Monmouth rebellion.⁶⁰ Not only does Boscawen clearly play a role in sending him news that the Gazette is lacking, but this also appears to have been a standing arrangement, as she references him expecting to receive news from her. Boscawen obviously read the Gazette, but combined it with other sources, likely both print and manuscript, to get a fuller picture of events. Moreover, the fact that she was loath to simply repeat what was reported in the Gazette implies a certain authority, and suggests that Evelyn saw her (or she saw herself) as a useful source of news in her own right.

Often these communications indicate some sort of political involvement or action on a woman’s part. Elizabeth, Lady Mordaunt (née Carey) played her part in an extended news network, as the letterbook of her husband, John Viscount Mordaunt, makes clear.⁶¹ She received and wrote many letters from her husband, other members of her family and various friends and acquaintances, which often consist of in-depth discussions of Royalist affairs in the late 1650s. Mordaunt was deeply involved in the Royalist cause and with her husband’s efforts to set up a Presbyterian–Royalist alliance. She often gave advice to her correspondents, and was a key participant in the transmission of news within the network.⁶²

Her correspondents often asked her to pass along information or instructions to others. Nicholas Armorer, a Royalist conspirator, for example, wrote to her in October 1659 with news from Bordeaux, and a request for her to pass on news to another correspondent, Colonel Newgent, in his stead:

I should have writ to Collonel Newgent this day, but I must loose my occasion of going if I doe. Pray, Madame be pleased to send to let him know if he receives no orders from the duke of Yorke, then he has no other thing to doe but to keep his friends right, and to strengthen them as much as may be, untill such time as he have orders from the person most concerned, which he will have with all imaginable speede.⁶³

Armorer’s letter demonstrates his trust in Mordaunt, allowing her to speak and even give strategic orders on his behalf. There are many such letters within the collection demonstrating Mordaunt’s influence: she corresponded in French with General Schomberg, who was the Duke of Schomberg and a marshal of France, and received several letters from Charles II. Her husband clearly relied on her, at one point writing:

I have so very much to discourse, that you must not chide me if I give you general orders what to doe. In the first place, keep up the designe of Dunkirk. Assure Count Schomburg the warr is begun, and both armies upon their march, Lambert conducts this, and this day we heare nothing but drums and trumpets. 4 regiments march from hence to joyne with the others in Lincolnshire. Monck is come into England with 15 regiments, 9 of foot, 4 of horse, and 2 of dragoons, he has taken Carlisle and Berwick, and marches to Newcastle. I feare Lambert will be too soone distroyed. And if the King loose this opportunity, he will loose both his reputation, and his crown’s.⁶⁴

The importance of Mordaunt’s role in this communication network is evident, both from the breadth of her correspondence and from the in-depth strategic and political discussions in which she engaged. However, as with many of the women mentioned here, these discussions largely took place in letters from men; there are a few letters between Mordaunt and other women, but these do not contain similar discussions of politics or current affairs.

Mordaunt, Hatton Helsby, Finch and others clearly participated in these epistolary discussions of the news with authority, despite many historiographical claims that women’s reading habits, and indeed their lives, were confined to matters of religion and the home. There does not appear to be any hesitation on the part of the women surveyed here to read or report the news, and their male correspondents do not display any condemnation of their interest. Just as the gendered nature of the space of the public sphere has been questioned, so too should the gendering of the genre of news that is so key to the separate-spheres model. By looking at readers, as well as producers, of the news, we can complicate ideas about who could participate in early modern politics.

Manuscript newsletters

Women received the news from more formalised sources, as well as relying on private correspondence. Manuscript newsletters were a popular form of news communication in the seventeenth century and continued in popularity into the eighteenth century, despite the rise of printed news forms. There are not many clear examples of women receiving such newsletters, but there are certain significant collections that attest to women’s engagement with and consumption of newsletters as both a conduit of information and a commercial product. I will discuss two such collections here: a small group of letters sent to Barbara Clopton in 1688–1689 and the much larger Pole newsletter collection (c. 1690–1710).

The Beinecke Library holds a letterbook of newsletters to Lady Clopton from 1688 to 1689, imparting information about the ongoing Glorious Revolution.⁶⁵ Barbara Clopton was the daughter of the Royalist Edward Walker, Garter King of Arms from 1645 to 1677 and wife of Sir John Clopton.⁶⁶ There is no address on the newsletters but they were probably sent to the family seat of Clopton House, near Stratford-upon-Avon. It appears that these newsletters were commissioned specifically to follow the political events surrounding the revolution, as they only cover a short period of time. On the last letter in the volume Clopton’s husband, John, has written: ‘News lett.^{rs my} wife had of M^r Hamon from K. James his goeing away.’⁶⁷ This note makes Lady Clopton’s ownership of the newsletters clear, independent of her husband. It also underlines her interest in politics and contemporary news. They give the impression of Clopton having a specific interest in a moment of history, rather than a general desire to stay up to date with current affairs, but her ownership of them (and therefore the information they contained) is emphasised, and hints at a deeper awareness of the significance of the period. The letters are almost completely focused on the progress of the Glorious Revolution; they do not include any international news, and few domestic matters unrelated to the political upheaval are mentioned. They do not seem to favour either the Jacobite or the Williamite cause, but go into detail about the negotiations and political manoeuvrings surrounding William and Mary taking the throne.

The Pole newsletter collection, also held partially at the Beinecke Library, is one of the largest extant newsletter collections belonging to an early modern woman.⁶⁸ Between 1690 and 1710, Anne Pole of Radbourne, Derbyshire, received hundreds of manuscript newsletters from London. Pole lived in the hamlet of Radbourne, a few miles away from Derby. She was born Anne Newdigate, daughter of Sir Richard Newdigate, the politically and religiously moderate lawyer and landowner.⁶⁹ In 1650, she married Sir German Pole (1626–1683) and lived at the Pole family seat of Radbourne Hall until her death in 1710. German was admitted to Gray’s Inn in 1647 and acted as patron for his father-in-law when Newdigate became a serjeant-at-law in 1654.⁷⁰ German went on to become High Sheriff of Derbyshire in 1679.⁷¹ After German died in 1683 without issue, the estate passed to Samuel Pole, his closest male relative. Anne remained at Radbourne for the rest of her life, and this appears to be when she first subscribed to the newsletters.

Pole’s news reading gives us clues as to her place in the family, and her relationships within both her childhood and marital homes. It is not clear how Pole developed her appetite for current affairs. It was, however, a family pursuit. She came from a political family, albeit one that was not always consistent about its allegiances. Her father, Sir Richard Newdigate, first baronet, was a moderate parliamentarian, serving somewhat reluctantly under Cromwell as serjeant-at-law, a position he was persuaded to take by Royalist friends.⁷² Pole’s brother Richard, the second baronet, was an avid collector and reader of news, something Barber attributes to him spending a great deal of time at the family estate in Warwickshire rather than in London.⁷³ Newdigate had a short-lived political career in Westminster, but his Whig leanings and his ‘tangential’ connection to the Rye House Plot in 1683 led to his early retirement from public life, remaining at Arbury Hall almost constantly from 1681 until his death in 1710.⁷⁴ A significant collection of manuscript newsletters belonging to the Newdigate family, numbering nearly 4,000 items, is now held in the Folger Shakespeare Library, shows Newdigate’s continued passion for the news.⁷⁵

Pole evidently shared her brother’s interest. She even received her own newsletters when she was visiting her family at Arbury, despite Richard’s own subscription to scribal newsletters.⁷⁶ Perhaps she preferred her own particular newsletter, or wanted to ensure she received her news independent of her brother. Pole had to inform the scribe of her change of address, although this information did not always get through in time. On one occasion the scribe added a note, saying, ‘Madam. Being absent I rec^d your Letter of the 28 yesterday so my Thursdayes Letter went for Radbourn, & my next will goe to Arbury, if I doe not rec^d your order to the contrary.’⁷⁷ The effort she made to redirect her newsletters, even for a short trip, are one of the best indications that she took an active interest in them and did read them regularly, as it seems unlikely that she would have them sent to Arbury if they were only a status symbol or occasional pursuit.

The siblings were not receiving identical newsletters. For example, on September 1, 1694, when Pole was staying with her brother, they both received letters. They were, however, written by different scribes, and were not replicas of each other. Pole’s newsletter, for example, began, ‘this afternoon arrived 2 fforeign Mailes with these following paragraphs’, and went on to report news from Madrid and Vienna.⁷⁸ The letter to Richard, however, began with news from Edinburgh.⁷⁹ This is probably because they were receiving newsletters from different providers. Newdigate was receiving newsletters from John Dyer, amongst others, a successful newsletter writer who appealed to Tories and high churchmen, although who nonetheless attracted readers from across the political spectrum.⁸⁰ Pole does not appear to have patronised Dyer, although there are similarly tentative glimpses of her political allegiance: from 1695 she subscribed to The Post Boy, sent alongside her manuscript newsletters (see below), which was one of the main Tory news publications in a print market dominated by the Whigs.⁸¹

There are letters to two other of Pole’s family members in the collection held at the Clark Library. Three newsletters addressed to German Pole, Anne’s husband, are included, dating from the early 1680s. They were sent in 1682 and 1683, just before German’s death. There are also thirteen newsletters addressed to Samuel Pole, German’s heir, in the Clark Library collection, dating between 1704 and 1706.⁸² It is probable, then, that Samuel and Anne Pole were both receiving newsletters at the same time, although there are no extant newsletters addressed to Anne for the same dates as those addressed to Samuel. She did not receive newsletters at the same time as her husband, possibly indicating that they did share the letters, or that her own interest in the news was not sparked until several years after his death.

While there may be relatively few traces of Pole’s response to the newsletters, there is some evidence of her life before she was widowed. She and her husband appear to have had a close, loving relationship. She frequently wrote to him when they were apart, always opening her letters with ‘Deare love’.⁸³ On one occasion in 1653 Anne, staying in London at the time, wrote to German, ‘I often wish wee were together.’⁸⁴ Her letters to him are full of affection, giving him news of the family’s health; however, there are no discussions of political matters or national news. Indeed, German’s own politics are hard to determine. He was only sixteen when the Civil War broke out and there are no records of him playing a significant part in the conflict, unlike men from neighbouring gentry families such as the (initially) parliamentarian Sir John Gell or the Catholic Royalist Rowland Eyre.⁸⁵ He did later become involved with local politics and governance, however, acting as High Sheriff of Derbyshire. Given their affectionate relationship, and German’s evident interest in the news during his lifetime, it is possible that Pole decided to take the newsletters as a reminder of her late husband. However, she did not start receiving them (or did not start preserving them) until eight years after his death. She did not simply continue his subscription but instead took out one of her own, independent of her husband’s interests.

This independence is somewhat unusual in the historical record, and underlines the importance of Pole in the history of news reading. Jason Peacey, when looking at the private circulation of printed news, argues convincingly that ‘gentry women were enthusiastic readers and distributors of topical material, who gained access to “printed papers” even in remote parts of the country’, suggesting that they often received such material from their husbands.⁸⁶ This is certainly true of the many letters we saw earlier in the chapter, where women such as Barrington were sent newsbooks by their male relatives, but it does overlook the role they played in transmitting the news. This was a significant way in which women accessed information; however, women not only received their news through the mediation of other family members but could also be recipients in their own right, as in the case of Anne Pole. While it is possible (I would argue probable) that Pole read news received by her father, brother and husband earlier in her life, once she was widowed, she began to subscribe under her own name.

Her widowhood is key to her news reading. Many scholars have seen women ‘operating at [their] most independent’ following the death of a spouse, as they became legal entities in their own right.⁸⁷ Pole did not subscribe to the newsletters until eight years after German’s death, when she was living alongside Samuel Pole and his wife (also called Anne, née Mundy), and crucially she took out a subscription in her own name. As a widow, she would have had more leisure time, relieved of her duties in running the household when Samuel took possession of the estate. She was also a more independent figure. The fact that the newsletters address her specifically is significant – these letters, and the information contained within them, belonged to her. Whatever her reasons for subscribing to the newsletters, Pole was surrounded by politically engaged family members. The Newdigates’ interest in following the news is well documented, and the Poles were no doubt similarly aware of the need to remain up to date with current affairs. This may also have played into Pole’s identity construction: the newsletters represented her social status and her family’s values, providing a link to her father, brother and husband.

Newsletters could also provide evidence of social status beyond the family, with the circumstances surrounding their production and their content conferring a level of socio-economic cachet. The business of manuscript newsletter writing was booming by the late seventeenth century. It is difficult to determine how many newsletter writers were operating in this period, as they rarely signed their work, but there was a significant increase in the number of newsletters circulating in the years of the Popish Plot.⁸⁸ Joseph Williamson and Henry Muddiman were key figures in the establishment of The London Gazette, but were also heavily involved in the lucrative business of the confidential private newsletter.⁸⁹ These manuscript newsletters had a large number of subscribers. Among them, according to James Sutherland, were ‘peers and members of parliament, postmasters and country booksellers, clergymen and doctors, army officers, merchants, innkeepers and other, mostly living in England, but some in Scotland and Ireland, and even a few abroad’.⁹⁰ They were so popular with certain social groups that Sutherland notes that many gentlemen continued receiving manuscript news even after the expansion of the newspaper press under Queen Anne, as they believed they were able to receive some news not permitted in the printed version.⁹¹

Manuscript newsletters were often perceived to provide news that printed sources could not – even if this is not entirely true, the perception was important. Scholars have posited that their manuscript, epistolary nature kept them from being censored in the same way as the printed press in the earlier seventeenth century, although it is debated how effective and influential these regulations were in the latter half of the century.⁹² Alex Barber has noted that ‘elite participants read scribal news to attain information about government, court and parliament’ that could not be found in many forms of printed news, which had to focus on events abroad due to censorship laws.⁹³ This was aided by an assumption that they were essentially private documents.⁹⁴ The perception of privacy and the subsequent freedom from censorship meant that they were a prized commodity, conferring a specialised knowledge to the subscriber that could not be found elsewhere.

This is particularly evident in the Pole collection through references to printed news publications, often The London Gazette, the paper published twice weekly from 1665 by the office of the Secretaries of State.⁹⁵ The Gazette had a long relationship with manuscript newsletters, as Natasha Glaisyer has demonstrated; it was often sent alongside scribal newsletters and acted as a ‘shared point of reference’ for many correspondents.⁹⁶ The newsletter frequently supplements or corrects the account given in the Gazette with its own information, displaying an evident reliance on Pole reading the newspaper as well.⁹⁷ Erin Keating has argued that this way of referencing printed publications indicates the position of the manuscript newsletter within the news genre, and the social status of their readers. She has suggested that the newsletter writers ‘clearly position their information as supplementary to the public news, as information meant for a more elite class of reader who can be trusted with sensitive details both with respect to the political events outlined in the papers but also with respect to the gossipy anecdotes’.⁹⁸ In choosing to subscribe to manuscript news, therefore, Pole was ensuring that she was provided with information only available to a select group. Not only was she making an effort to stay up to date with current affairs, but she was also accessing a level of knowledge not open to most readers of newspapers and pamphlets.

The relationship between Pole and the newsletter writers also underlines the more elitist nature of the newsletters. There were multiple scribes acting at different times, as several different scribal hands appear. The direct communication between them and Pole, although infrequent, was always marked by a level of deference. There was evident concern to keep Pole updated, and to ensure that she was getting a good product for her money. Methods of payment were discussed, showing some of the mechanics behind the newsletter-writing business. In January 1694 one John Sims (the only time that the scribe is named) addressed Pole directly, discussing the terms of his employment in a note added on to the end of the letter:

Madam I was ordered by M^r Smith to send you this Letter allso acq^t you that 4^l p[er] annum is the price that all men have that desire to live and perform their buisness dillegently I shall continue the Letter unless I receive an order to the contrary pray order y^r Letter directed for me to be left at the Widow Humphreys Coffee house in S^t Peters alley Cornhill I am y^r Ladyshipps most humble servant – John Sims.⁹⁹

This is the only evidence we have in the whole collection as to the writer’s identity, and while we do not know anything more about John Sims, it gives an insight into his profession and the cost of doing his job. It seems that the newsletter writer could negotiate directly with individual recipients about his fee, indicating a degree of autonomy, although the reference to Mr Smith suggests that Sims was in someone else’s employ. There was clearly no physical space to house the business, but instead payment was sent to a coffee house in Cornhill, a ward in the City of London and a popular location for the city’s coffee houses.¹⁰⁰ This indicates the link between coffee houses and scribal newsletters writers, who often had rooms above coffee houses in which to write, allowing them to make use of the gossip and news exchange going on below. In early eighteenth-century slang, newsletter scribes were even referred to as ‘coffee-men’.¹⁰¹ ‘Widow Humphreys’ was probably one of several women who took over their husband’s coffee house after their death, such as in the case of Bowman’s coffee house, which Widow Bowman took on in the early 1660s.¹⁰² It was probably a small establishment in comparison to well-known coffee houses such as Bowman’s or Garraway’s, as there are few references to it in contemporary sources.¹⁰³ The price of £4 per annum was around the norm for manuscript newsletters, with Henry Muddiman charging £5 a year for his newsletters.¹⁰⁴ This is certainly more expensive than the price of the Gazette, for example, which was sold at around 1d per copy in the mid-1690s.¹⁰⁵

Most of the scribes addressed Pole directly at some point, primarily regarding postage problems, but also discussing payment (as above) and occasionally offering seasonal greetings, but they always maintained a deferential tone.¹⁰⁶ The newsletter on December 25, 1693 began by saying, ‘Madam, I pray yo^r Ladysp to excuse the Brevity by reason of the day.’¹⁰⁷ A few days later, he wrote in a note in the bottom left-hand corner of the last page to thank her for his payment: ‘Madam I have rec^d my quarterage & humbly thank yo^r Ladye wishing you a happy new year.’¹⁰⁸ Evidently Pole paid the scribes quarterly, and it appears to have been common practice to write and thank her for the payment. In October 1694 Sim added similarly on the back of the newsletter, ‘M^dm I received y^e mony and return you humble thanks.’¹⁰⁹

Another writer excused himself for illness at one point, detailing his afflictions in a very apologetic manner:

Madame? [sic] The sudden Indisposition which this day was seauennight by stoppadge of urine violent ague, a great paine in the side &^did put a stop to my duty in serueing you with my letter these holly dayes for which I begg your favourrable excuse, & haveing got God be thanked this day some reliefe I hoape I will recover my strength as to be able to serve you, as formerly if you please.¹¹⁰

This and all other direct addresses to Pole make clear the hierarchical relationship between newsletter writer and reader. Pole is clearly in the position of power, with the scribes providing a service for her, and that relationship is reinforced through all their communication to her. Newsletters such as these were more expensive than broadsides or newsbooks, and could be a marker of status. Indeed, Harold Love has suggested that some newsletter writers ‘enjoyed circulations that would have justified printing, if it were not necessary to maintain the supposed exclusivity and hence the high price of the product’.¹¹¹ The newsletters for Pole, then, could act as a marker of status, something reaffirmed by the relationship between her and the scribes.

The fact that the newsletters were addressed specifically to ‘Madam [or Lady] Pole’ most clearly highlights her identity as a possessor and reader of the items. As discussed previously in this book, an autograph signature on the title page of a book could function as a claim to the knowledge held within the text.¹¹² This can be applied to Pole’s newsletters. In naming herself as the recipient of the newsletters, she was laying claim to their specialised knowledge, and fashioning an identity for herself that was highly informed and political.

There is a clear expectation in the newsletters that the reader would be knowledgeable about contemporary politics, and that they would have the reading skills and habits necessary to understand events fully. As mentioned above, there was a symbiotic relationship between printed and manuscript news, and the reliance on information provided by the Gazette is evident in these newsletters. In many cases, understanding the context of the news presented would have depended on reading multiple news sources. In June 1692, for example, the newsletter writer reported: ‘[w]ee rec^d yesterday 2 fforraine Mailes of the 10^th & 12^th ins^t which give many particulars of the proceeds of the seige of Namour, but I shall give (without whats mentioned in the Gazett) as briefe an acc^t as I can’.¹¹³ If the reader of this passage was not familiar with the Gazette’s reporting of the siege, then it is unlikely that the newsletter would have made as much sense. There is clearly an underlying assumption that the recipient of the newsletter would also be reading the Gazette. Whether Pole did so or not, we do not know, but it seems likely, given the frequency with which the newsletters cross-reference reports from the publication. Indeed, even if she did not originally read the Gazette, she may have been encouraged to by the newsletters, in order to follow the stories properly.

This reading is extensive; Joad Raymond has pointed out that this necessity to cross-reference when reading, either with different publications or referring back to previous newsletters to follow the story, relies on the reader actively engaging with the news being presented and having to develop certain reading skills in order to do so.¹¹⁴ The interested consumer would have to be fully engaged with all forms of the genre and make an effort to keep up to date, varying their reading habits and reading critically and carefully to understand the news fully. This process was streamlined somewhat by Pole’s newsletter writers in the second half of the 1690s, when a hybrid print-manuscript newsletter appeared. Most of the newsletters after about 1695 consist of print publications, either The Post Boy or The Post-Man: And the Historical Account, &c, with manuscript additions.¹¹⁵ The printed text covers two sides, and the notes are written on the blank back page, sometimes spilling over to the verso of that sheet, above the address. The two sections supplement each other: the print publication deals with mostly foreign news, while the manuscript letter generally focuses on domestic events.

The manuscript section, being written after the printed publication, could also provide more up-to-date information. In the manuscript notes on the edition of The Post Boy from August 31 to September 3, 1695, the scribe has included an item of news that was not present in the printed sheet (see Figure 3.1). He wrote, ‘23 Roman Catholick Lords and Gentlemen are Indicted at the Old Baily in an order to an Outlawry to seize their Estates among them are the Lords Griffin Castlemain, Middleton, Stafford S^r Edward Hales &c.’¹¹⁶ This item of news is then reported in the next edition of The Post Boy, covering September 3 to 5, which records:

Last week at the Sessions held at the Old-bayley, there were bills of High Treason found by the Grand Jury against the Earls of Midleton, Stafford, Castlemaine, and the Lord Griffin. The Duke of Berwick Lieutenant General Hamilton, Sir Edward Hales, Sir William Walgrave, and many others to the number of 23, upon an Account of their being in France with the late King James, and if they do not come back into England, and surrender themselves they will be Outlawed, and their Estates confiscated.¹¹⁷

Both accounts were referring to a prosecution of Jacobite politicians and courtiers opposed to the Williamite regime. The latter account is more detailed, but it is clear that receiving the newssheet with the manuscript additions could give the reader a much more up-to-date picture of events, which could then be expanded on several days later.

The imagined reader in the newsletters, then, appears to be one with significant reading skills and highly informed about events at home and abroad. There is clearly an assumption of a certain level of knowledge about current affairs, international relations and parliamentary politics. Events are usually reported with little to no explanation of their significance. However, on occasion the writer does provide some explanatory details, for example when discussing the outcome of a court case. He wrote that, ‘Mr Croone is now repreived sine die, which is the next door to a Pardon.’¹¹⁸ Sine die is a legal term meaning that no day has been assigned for a hearing, so that the defendant essentially is reprieved through lack of a trial. The writer’s explanation shows an awareness that the reader may not have much legal knowledge (sine die was a standard term). Conversely, there are other occasions where Latin terms have not been translated, such as when new regulations are introduced for the East India Company. The newsletter reports: ‘[t]he Regulations, which the K. has made for the E. India Company, are now passed the seales & are in substance the same as were agreed by the H. of Coms & are not for any time of years but Durante Regis Beneplacito’.¹¹⁹ The writer does not explain the Latin phrase, which means ‘for the duration of the king’s pleasure’, assuming either a level of Latin comprehension or of common political terms. It is not clear if Pole had either, but this level of knowledge was at least assumed by the newsletter writer.

This contrasts to a newsletter from earlier in the seventeenth century, sent to Elizabeth Tollemache, which reveals a very different relationship between scribe and recipient. Tollemache was born Elizabeth Stanhope, daughter of Sir John Stanhope, and married Lionel Tollemache, the MP and Privy Councillor to both James I and Charles I. Their family home was Helmingham Hall in Suffolk. The letter was written in 1619 by one Arthur Grant, whose connection to the family is unclear. He was probably a professional newsletter writer, similar to the scribes who wrote to Pole, but he appears to have had a closer, or more personal, relationship with his reader. Instead of assuming a level of knowledge of the places and events he was describing, Grant wrote Tollemache: ‘there is much news abroad but what I send shalbe [sic] true … if yo^r Ladye^sp please to send mee word, of what you doe not understand, because you shall read of strange countres, men and towns I shall in writtinge discribe them’.¹²⁰ This concern for Tollemache’s comprehension, and the obvious exchange of letters between the two, contrasts with Pole’s more detached, business-like interactions with her scribes. Perhaps this suggests that Grant was operating on a smaller scale than the almost mass-produced newsletters that Pole received, something which developed in the later seventeenth century.

In the Pole collection, the writer does occasionally outline hypothetical outcomes of certain events. In February 1691, he wrote that ‘[t]here is a hott report, that the L^d Prestons pardon is passing the seales, which if true, will convince the world, y^t he has made a Confession, that deserves the same’.¹²¹ This refers to Richard Graham, Viscount Present, the Jacobite politician due to be executed for treason but whose confession granted him a pardon. On another occasion the writer intimated the potential consequence of the death of the king of Denmark, writing, ‘By a Vessell arrived in the North from denmark wee heare y^t that King is dead, which if true, & true also, y^t his eldest & not second son is in ffrance, some strange things wee may expect to heare upon it.’¹²² However, most of the time the consequences of political manoeuvrings or international events are left to the reader’s imagination. To discern the significance of these events would rely on a working knowledge of international relations, perhaps one that readers were expected to gain through frequent reading of various news publications.

However, this readerly identity is at odds with the gendered expectations for news readers, which is made obvious through some textual clues. The newsletters appear to have been mass produced to an extent, with a writer creating the same letter for numerous recipients. In the Pole collection the scribes often headed their letters with the word ‘S^r’, despite being addressed on the back to ‘Madam’ or ‘Lady Pole’.¹²³ There are a few newsletters which are headed ‘M^dm’ in the Pole collection, but this is relatively rare.¹²⁴ The reason for this occasional change is unclear – perhaps the writer simply forgot, most of the time, to use the female address. There is even one occasion where the scribe originally wrote ‘S^r’, but then crossed it out and replaced it with ‘Madam’.¹²⁵ It is evident from this and from the direct messages from the scribe discussed above that they did know they were writing to a woman, but the newsletter writer clearly had a male reader in mind. This suggests either that men made up a significant part of their market or that the ideal audience was thought to be male, irrespective of to whom they were writing. This may have contributed to a general assumption in the historiography that men were the primary readers of newsletters. Most extant large collections of newsletters were addressed to men, although that does not necessarily mean that Pole was unusual in her habits; perhaps many addressed to women were not preserved.¹²⁶ Whatever the make-up of their audience, however, the letters are gendered from when they were first written, and in reading them, Pole was subverting expectations.

The newsletters that Anne Pole received would have given her, had she read them diligently, a thorough and detailed knowledge of the political, economic and intellectual developments across early modern Europe, along with a passing familiarity with events in the Americas and the Middle East. She may have been a very well-informed woman, engaged with events far beyond her rural Derbyshire home. She also would have been encouraged to draw on both manuscript and print news sources, reading widely to gain a fuller understanding of events.

The Pole collection is, as stated earlier, unusual in its size and scope, at least for newsletters addressed to a woman in this period. However, we should not assume that she was an outlier among her peers. As demonstrated briefly here, there are other examples of women reading manuscript newsletters, stretching from Elizabeth Tollemache in the early seventeenth century to Barbara Clopton in the 1680s and 1690s. Women in early modern England clearly did and could consume the news, often paying a significant price to receive the more coveted form of the manuscript newsletter. Moreover, their news reading was distinct from the men in their life. Clopton’s husband clearly marked her newsletters as ‘hers’, not his. Pole was receiving her own newsletters at the same time as several male family members were, including her brother and the new owner of Radbourne, Samuel Pole. Pole was choosing to subscribe to newsletters in her own name, despite the fact that others were available in the house at the time. Both women were staking a claim to their own knowledge about current affairs and showing their dedication to following politics.

Conclusion

We can draw several conclusions about women’s news reading from the sources gathered here. Firstly, they were very reliant on manuscript sources, be they scribal newsletters or personal letters containing news. Many clearly supplemented this with printed news media, such as Joan Barrington receiving newsbooks from her friends and family members. However, there is no clear evidence for printed news being their primary source of information. This may be because individuals were less likely to leave evidence of reading printed news, but there are no collections of women’s newsbooks comparable to that of Narcissus Luttrell or George Thomason.

Women’s news reading, however, relied on networks. These may have been small, professional networks (such as Pole subscribing to her manuscript newsletter), but often they were large, epistolary networks composed of friends and family members. These could form interpretative communities, allowing members to discuss the news at length, as well as giving individuals an editorial role when transmitting information. There was frequently concern for getting the ‘truth’ of reports and ensuring that they had the most up-to-date and accurate version of events, whether receiving letters or more formalised newsletters. They also received news from multiple sources, relying on a number of informants and types of news media, allowing them to compare, contrast and assess information.

Moreover, news reading could form an important part of a gentlewoman’s identity, especially a woman who, like Pole, was socially and financially independent, either in widowhood or having never married. Owning and reading manuscript newsletters, therefore, could allow a woman to highlight certain parts of her character; to demonstrate her independence, her social standing as a member of the gentry and her political allegiances – something which should certainly be considered a political action, if we are to follow Sharpe and Zwicker’s suggestion that reading should be seen as political performance.

It is clear, therefore, that more work has to be done to illuminate women’s place as consumers of the developing news genre. The assumption that they were not keen news readers overlooks the many women in this chapter who had a clear and demonstrable interest in following the news, and doubtless many more women who are yet to be considered. The examples given here suggest that news reading may have been much more widespread than we have previously acknowledged, even if the archival records are patchy. This will develop not only our view of the news genre but also our understanding of women’s participation in early modern politics. News, whether carried in familial letters or in more formalised sources such as newsletters or newsbooks, allowed women to participate in the political sphere, despite often living at some distance from London. Exploring how women consumed the news, and how widespread this practice was, allows us to add another dimension to our understanding of early modern women and politics, showing that even those women who were not openly involved in political matters were far from disinterested in or removed from the early modern political world, but instead viewed it as a crucial part of their identity.

Notes

1. Kate Loveman, Samuel Pepys and His Books: Reading, Newsgathering, and Sociability, 1660–1703 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); David Randall, ‘Joseph Mead, Novellante: News, Sociability, and Credibility in Early Stuart England’, Journal of British Studies 45 (2006): 293–312.
2. Richard Allestree, The Ladies Calling. In Two Parts. By the Author of the whole Duty of Man, The Causes of the Decay of Christian Piety, and The Gentlemans Calling (Oxford: Printed at the Theater, 1673), 235.
3. There is a reference in Ben Jonson’s poem ‘Epigram on the Court Pucell’ to the titular women spreading news, framing it as rumour produced by a ‘Tribade lust’ and written in an ‘Epicoene fury’. See Jongsook Lee, ‘Who Is Cecilia, What Was She? Cecilia Bulstrode and Jonson’s Epideictics’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 85, no. 1 (1986): 30. I am grateful to Michelle O’Callaghan for this reference.
4. There have been studies of news readerships and some aspects of news reading, but none have considered women readers in any depth. See, for example, Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–1649 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005); Michael Frearson, ‘The Distribution and Readership of London Corantos in the 1620s’, in Serials and Their Readers, 1620–1914, ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1993), 1–25; Jason Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
5. Ian Atherton, ‘ “The Itch grown a Disease”: Manuscript Transmission of News in the Seventeenth Century’, in News, Newspapers, and Society in Early Modern Britain, ed. Joad Raymond (London: Frank Cass, 1999), 49.
6. For more on early modern gossip and gender, see Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Heather Kerr and Claire Walker, ed., Fama and Her Sisters: Gossip and Rumour in Early Modern Europe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015).
7. Elaine Chalus has done valuable work on women’s many and varied ways of participating in politics in eighteenth-century England, arguing for a re-framing of the ‘political’ arena. See, for example, Elaine Chalus, Elite Women in English Political Life, c.1754–1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005).
8. For work on prophecy, see Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992); Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing, 1646–1688 (London: Virago, 1988); Diane Watt, Secretaries of God: Women Prophets in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1998); Manfred Brod, ‘Politics and Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England: The Case of Elizabeth Poole’, Albion 31, no. 3 (1999): 395–412; Katharine Gillespie, Domesticity and Dissent in the Seventeenth Century: English Women’s Writing and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). For work on Quaker women and politics, see Kate Peters, Print Culture and Early Quakers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Catie Gill, Women in the Seventeenth-Century Quaker Community: A Literary Study of Political Identities, 1650–1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).
9. Ann Hughes, Gender and the English Revolution (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012).
10. Ruth Herman, The Business of a Woman: The Political Writings of Delarivier Manley (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2003); Derek Hughes and Janet Todd, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Jacqueline Broad, The Philosophy of Mary Astell: An Early Modern Theory of Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Susan Wiseman, Conspiracy and Virtue: Women, Writing, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Helen Wilcox, ‘Private Writing and Public Function: Autobiographical Texts by Renaissance Englishwomen’, in Gloriana’s Face: Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance, ed. S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 47–62.
11. Peacey, Print and Public Politics, 69.
12. Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678–1730 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998). Claire Walker has done work on the role of nuns in Royalist news networks. See Claire Walker, ‘Crumbs of News: Early Modern English Nuns and Royalist Intelligence Networks’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42, no. 3 (2003): 635–655.
13. See, for example, Marcus Nevitt, ‘Women in the Business of Revolutionary News: Elizabeth Alkin, “Parliament Joan”, and the Commonwealth Newsbook’, in News, Newspapers, and Society in Early Modern Britain, ed. Joad Raymond (London: Frank Cass, 1999), 84–108; Marcus Nevitt, Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England, 1640–1660 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).
14. This was not only true of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Ann Hughes has explored the intrinsic association of the public and the masculine in the Civil War period, but notes that their private lives were also key to their political identities. See Ann Hughes, ‘Men, the “Public” and the “Private” in the English Revolution’, in The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England, ed. Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 191–212.
15. Steven Pincus, ‘ “Coffee Does Politicians Create”: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture’, Journal of Modern History 67, no. 4 (1995): 807–834; Brian Cowen, ‘What Was Masculine about the Public Sphere? Gender and the Coffeehouse Milieu in Post-Restoration England’, History Workshop Journal 51, no. 1 (2001): 127–157.
16. Helen Berry has explored serial publications and the public sphere through examining the Athenian Mercury, which appears to have had both male and female readers, and has examined the gendering of that readership. She has also argued that certain women were present in coffee houses, although she noted that they might be there for different reasons to men; notably upper-class women attending social events and women of the lower classes being employed in such establishments. Helen Berry, Gender, Society and Print Culture in Late-Stuart England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); Berry, ‘ “Nice and Curious Questions”: Coffee Houses and the Representation of Women in John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury’, The Seventeenth Century 12, no. 2 (1997): 257–276.
17. Raymond sees it as reflective of a lack of advice on how to read the news; there were books advising how to read and annotate other genres, but this did not exist for news publications, leading him to suggest that a lack of training made people unwilling to annotate their newsbooks and newspapers. He has argued that the method of reading the news was different to the traditional humanist model of active, goal-oriented reading: that people read the news diligently, but without any particular outcome in mind. Joad Raymond, ‘Irrational, Impractical and Unprofitable: Reading the News in Seventeenth-Century Britain’, in Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 204. Atherton, on the other hand, has argued that the lack of annotation was due to the circulation of news publications among friends and family, and an unwillingness to impose one’s own interpretation of the news upon subsequent readers. This is not wholly convincing, given early modern readers’ complete lack of scruples about annotating other texts that might be passed around family and friends. Atherton, ‘The Itch grown a Disease’, 51. For recent work on annotation practices, see Katherine Acheson, ed., Early Modern English Marginalia (London: Routledge, 2019).
18. There are few examples of news media being collected in the same way that books were in the early modern period, although there are significant exceptions to this in the form of George Thomason and Narcissus Luttrell. For more on contemporary collecting culture, see Marjorie Swann, Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Daniela Bleichmar and Peter C. Mancall, ed., Collecting across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). For more on pamphlet collecting, see Michael Mendle, ‘Preserving the Ephemeral: Reading, Collecting, and the Pamphlet Culture of Seventeenth-Century England’, in Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies, ed. Jennifer Anderson and Elizabeth Sauer (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 201–216. For more on news collecting, see Noah Millstone, ‘Designed for Collection: Early Modern News and the Production of History’, Media History 23, no. 2 (2017): 177–198.
19. There has been some excellent work on manuscript news, including Alex W. Barber, ‘ “It is Not Easy What to Say of our Condition, Much Less to Write It”: The Continued Importance of Scribal News in the Early 18th Century’, Parliamentary History 32, no. 2 (2013): 293–316; Rachael Scarborough King, ‘All the News That’s Fit to Write: The Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Newsletter’, in Travelling Chronicles: News and Newspapers from the Early Modern Period to the Eighteenth Century, ed. Siv Gøril Brandtzæg, Paul Goring and Christine Watson (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 95–118.
20. Oral transmission of news is also an important facet of this discussion, but not one I plan to explore further here, as I will be focusing on how individuals read the news.
21. Rachael Scarborough King, Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 25. This method of reading widely is often explored in relation to the idea of the ‘reading revolution’ that scholars have outlined for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by which ‘intensive’, in-depth reading of a small number of (primarily religious) texts was replaced by ‘extensive’ reading of a broad number of (largely secular) works. This idea was first coined by Rolf Engelsing, but has been repeated, revised and challenged by many scholars since. See, for example, Ian Jackson, ‘Approaches to the History of Readers and Reading in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, The Historical Journal 47, no. 4 (2004): 1041–1054; Reinhard Wittman, ‘Was There a Reading Revolution at the End of the Eighteenth Century?’, in A History of Reading in the West, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 284–312. This has not often been considered by historians of early modern news, apart from King and Atherton; Atherton has argued that ‘Newsletters had to be read extensively. A large volume of news was demanded by the discerning and wise because it was recognized that even the best reports might be uncertain, temporary judgements in need of later confirmation or denial.’ Atherton, ‘The Itch grown a Disease’, 45.
22. Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker, ‘Introduction: Discovering the Renaissance Reader’, in Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 18.
23. Sharpe and Zwicker, ‘Introduction’, 23.
24. Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), ch. 4, accessed December 15, 2020, www-jstor-org.libproxy.york.ac.uk/stable/j.ctt5vkxx9.
25. James Daybell has recognised that ‘the treatment of news of all varieties … was commonplace in women’s letters’ in the Tudor period, examining their place in manuscript news networks. James Daybell, Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 152.
26. As Arthur Searle has noted: ‘the quantity of letters to Lady Joan Barrington at this period, as well as their content, indicate that she was the focal point of the extended family, the dowager and respected matriarch on a recognisable early seventeenth-century pattern’. Arthur Searle, ed., Barrington Family Letters, 1628–1632, Camden Fourth Series Volume 28 (London: The Royal Historical Society, 1983), vii.
27. Searle has focused on this period in order to demonstrate Joan Barrington’s place at the centre of an epistolary network, but has included all letters from the collection in chronological order within that date range.
28. Richard Cust, ‘News and Politics in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, Past & Present 112, no. 1 (1986): 69. ‘Separates’ were a form of manuscript newsletter.
29. Letter 204, October [?] 1631. Searle, Barrington Family Letters, 206–207. There is no sense of disapproval in Harris’ remark, despite the fact that there was a lot of rhetoric about the problem of people becoming passionate about reading the news in the seventeenth century. Joad Raymond has argued that ‘in the increasingly commercialised marketplace of print the mass of injudicious readers threatened to engulf the studied and disciplined few’, and that passionate or emotional reactions to the news were seen as disruptive and an ‘enemy to reason’. Instead, Harris seems to admire his aunt’s taste. See Raymond, ‘Irrational, Impractical and Unprofitable’, 186, 188.
30. Letter 23, January 28, 1629. Searle, Barrington Family Letters, 50–51.
31. Hillel Swartz, ‘Arminianism and the English Parliament, 1624–1629’, Journal of British Studies 12, no. 2 (1973): 41–68; Lori Anne Ferrell, ‘Preaching and the English Parliaments in the 1620s’, Parliamentary History 34, no. 1 (2015): 142–154.
32. Letter 116, February 19, 1630. Searle, Barrington Family Letters, 134.
33. Margaret and William Grey’s biographies are unclear, although they were ancestors of Sir Charles Grey (1785–1865), a colonial governor in India, whose family papers are held in the Bodleian Library.
34. Letter from William Grey to his mother Margaret Grey, February 23, 1693, Grey Family Correspondence, 1691–1788. MS. Eng. c. 6812, f4r, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
35. Letter 74, October 26, 1624. Joanna Moody, ed., The Private Correspondence of Jane Lady Cornwallis Bacon, 1613–1644 (London: Associated University Presses, 2003), 122.
36. Letter 105, 1626. Moody, The Private Correspondence of Jane Lady Cornwallis Bacon, 148–149.
37. Mark Kishlansky, ‘Charles I: A Case of Mistaken Identity’, Past & Present 189 (2005): 55.
38. Letter 123, April 1628. Moody, The Private Correspondence of Jane Lady Cornwallis Bacon, 176.
39. Letter 128, June 11, 1628. Moody, The Private Correspondence of Jane Lady Cornwallis Bacon, 181.
40. Letter 169, November 3, 1631. Moody, The Private Correspondence of Jane Lady Cornwallis Bacon, 211.
41. Jason Scott-Warren has examined how letters containing news addressed to Thomas Cornwallis allowed him to keep in touch with the wider world, and how news acted as a commodity or gift in such epistles, creating bonds of intimacy between himself and his correspondents. See Jason Scott-Warren, ‘News, Sociability, and Bookbuying in Early Modern England: The Letters of Sir Thomas Cornwallis’, The Library 7th series, 1 (2000): 377–398.
42. Susan Wiseman has done work on how seventeenth-century women engaged with politics through writing. See Wiseman, Conspiracy and Virtue. Elizabeth Clarke has also looked at letter-writing as a form of political engagement for women: see Elizabeth Clarke, ‘Beyond Microhistory: The Use of Women’s Manuscripts in a Widening Political Arena’, in Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450–1700, ed. James Daybell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 205–221.
43. Letter 209, October 28, 1631. Searle, Barrington Family Letters, 211.
44. Letter 216, November 1631. Searle, Barrington Family Letters, 218.
45. Elizabeth Packer to Mary Evelyn, October 21, 1693, Add MS 78436, f83r, British Library, London. The name here is illegible.
46. See, for example, Jacqueline Eales, Puritans and Roundheads: The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
47. Letter 128, Brilliana Harley to Edward Harley, July 16, 1641. Thomas Taylor Lewis, ed., Letters of the Lady Brilliana Harley, Wife of Sir Robert Harley, of Brampton Bryan, Knight of the Bath (London: Printed for the Camden Society, 1854), 140.
48. Barbara Donagan, ‘Downing, Calybute’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2010, accessed May 26, 2019, www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-7980?rskey=45ypi8&result=1.
49. Letter 149, Brilliana Harley to Edward Harley, May 6, 1642. Lewis, Letters of the Lady Brilliana Harley, 157.
50. For more on women’s letters and female alliances and friendships, see Amanda Herbert, Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014).
51. Letter 213, November 5, 1631. Searle, Barrington Family Letters, 215.
52. A similar phrase was used by Lady Mary Eden, when she wrote to Barrington, ‘I have made bould to send you a token, a payer of gloves to dress you in’. Letter 6, August 13, 1628. Searle, Barrington Family Letters, 34.
53. Letter 221, December 1631. Searle, Barrington Family Letters, 222. This letter references the uncertainty surrounding Parliament during Charles I’s period of personal rule, following the assassination of the Duke of Buckingham in 1628. See Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).
54. Letter 221, December 1631. Searle, Barrington Family Letters, 223.
55. Of the forty letters sent to Lady Joan Barrington by other women, only six contain items of what we might deem ‘political’ news – they were much more likely to give information on the health and wellbeing of family and friends.
56. For more on the Hatton family and book collecting, see Nicola Stacey, ‘Antiquarian Patronage in the 17th Century: Sir Christopher Hatton’s Library at Kirkby Hall’, English Heritage Historical Review 9, no. 1 (2014): 66–81.
57. Anne Finch to Christopher Hatton, [?] 1692, Add MS 29596, f114r-f114v, British Library.
58. Mary Helsby to Peter Hatton, May 1, 1660, X.d.493 (1), Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC.
59. Jael Boscawen to John Evelyn, July 6, 1685, Evelyn Papers, Vol. CXLII, Add MS 78309, f92r, British Library. Jael’s sister-in-law, Margaret Godolphin, was a close friend of Evelyn’s.
60. See, for example, A. Kennedy, ‘Rebellion, Government and the Scottish Response to Argyll’s Rising of 1685’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 36, no. 1 (2016): 40–59.
61. Mary Coate, ed., The Letter-Book of John Viscount Mordaunt 1658–1660, Camden Third Series, vol. 66 (London: Offices of the Royal Historical Society, 1945).
62. Nadine Akkerman included a chapter on Elizabeth Mordaunt in her book, examining Mordaunt’s political activities. See Nadine Akkerman, Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in Seventeenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
63. Letter 123. Coate, The Letter-Book of John Viscount Mordaunt, 91.
64. Letter 123. Coate, The Letter-Book of John Viscount Mordaunt, 81. This refers to the army led by General George Monck, Duke of Albemarle, from Scotland into England in support of Charles II.
65. 25 letters of news relative to the abdication of K. James 2 to Lady Clopton, from Mr. Hamon, 1688–1689. Osborn fb210, Beinecke Library.
66. A. M. Mimardière, ‘CLOPTON, Sir John (1638–1719), of Clopton, Stratford-on-Avon, Warws’, History of Parliament Online, accessed June 6, 2021, www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1660-1690/member/clopton-sir-john-1638-1719.
67. Osborn fb210, f358v. Beinecke Library.
68. This collection has been explored by Rachael Scarborough King. King has used Pole as an example of women’s participation in a news community; however, I would argue that this moves beyond parliamentary politics, and that a case can be made for women as political actors in a broader sense. King, ‘ “Sir Madam”: Female Consumers of Parliamentary News in Manuscript Newsletters’, Parliamentary History 41, no. 1 (2022): 119–134. Also see King, ‘The Manuscript Newsletter and the Rise of the Newspaper, 1665–1715’, Huntington Library Quarterly 79, no. 3 (2016): 411–437; King, Writing to the World.
69. The identification of ‘Madam Pole’ as Anne Newdigate Pole is somewhat speculative, as there were other Anne Poles alive at the time, but given the fact that the newsletters stop almost exactly at the date of her death, and that there is extensive evidence of her visiting the Newdigate seat of Arbury Hall, she seems by far the most likely candidate. For more on the Newdigate family, see Steve Hindle, ‘Below Stairs at Arbury Hall: Sir Richard Newdigate and His Household Staff, c.1670–1710’, Historical Research 85, no. 227 (2012): 71–88; Vivienne Larminie, ‘Fighting for Family in a Patronage Society: The Epistolary Armoury of Anne Newdigate (1574–1618)’, in Early Modern Women’s Letter-Writing, 1450–1700, ed. James Daybell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 94–108; Larminie, ‘Marriage and the Family: The Example of the Seventeenth-Century Newdigates’, Midlands History 9, no. 1 (1984): 1–22.
70. Joseph Foster, The Register of Admissions to Gray’s Inn, 1521–1889, together with the register of marriages in Gray’s Inn Chapel, 165–1754 (London: Hansard Publishing Union, 1889), 243; Vivienne Larminie, ‘Newdigate, Sir Richard, first Baronet’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004, accessed December 10, 2020, www-oxforddnb-com.libproxy.york.ac.uk/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-20002?rskey=dlDYzJ&result=1.
71. ‘A List of the Sheriffs of the several Counties appointed for the Year ensuing’, The London Gazette, issue 1355, November 11, 1678, 2.
72. Larminie, ‘Newdigate, Sir Richard, first Baronet.’
73. Barber, ‘ “It is Not Easy What to Say of our Condition”’, 297.
74. Hindle, ‘Below Stairs at Arbury Hall’, 71.
75. Newdigate family collection of newsletters, Folger.MS.L.c.1-3950, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC.
76. See, for example, August 28, 1694, box 3, folder 67, OSB MSS 60, James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
77. September 2, 1693, box 1, folder 80. MS.1951.021, Clark Library.
78. September 1, 1694, box 3, folder 68, OSB MSS 60, James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
79. Newsletter received by Richard Newdigate, Arbury, September 1, 1694. L.c.2366. LUNA: Folger Digital Image Collection.
80. Barber, ‘It is Not Easy What to Say of our Condition’, 303.
81. Barber, ‘It is Not Easy What to Say of our Condition’, 299.
82. Box 2, folders 89–98, 106, 112; box 5 folder 9, MS.1951.021, Clark Library.
83. Letters written by Madam Pole. D5557/2/18/1-49, Derbyshire Record Office, Matlock.
84. D5557/1/18/1, Derbyshire Record Office.
85. See, for example, Rosamond Meredith, ‘A Derbyshire Family in the Seventeenth Century: The Eyres of Hassop and their Forfeited Estates’, British Catholic History 8, no. 1 (1965): 12–77. There is relatively little correspondence remaining from the Pole family for the Civil War years. A letter from German to his mother in 1647 only communicates news about friends and family members, not touching on political matters. See D5557/2/4, Derbyshire Record Office.
86. Jason Peacey, Print and Public Politics, 69.
87. Sandra Cavallo and Lyndan Warner, ‘Introduction’, in Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Cavallo and Warner (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 1.
88. James Sutherland, The Restoration Newspaper and Its Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 8.
89. Andrew Pettegree, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know about Itself (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 239.
90. Sutherland, The Restoration Newspaper, 7.
91. Sutherland, The Restoration Newspaper, 8.
92. Sabrina A. Baron, ‘The Guises of Dissemination in Early Seventeenth-Century England: News in Manuscript and Print’, in The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe, ed. Brendan Dooley and Sabrina A. Baron (London: Routledge, 2001), 47. This suggestion of greater freedom from censorship has been convincingly disputed by King, but the perception of a more exclusive product is the key point here. See King, ‘The Manuscript Newsletter and the Rise of the Newspaper’, 420.
93. Barber, ‘It is Not Easy What to Say of our Condition’, 296; Atherton, ‘The Itch grown a Disease’, 42; Joad Raymond, ‘Introduction’, in Making the News: An Anthology of the Newsbooks of Revolutionary England 1641–1660, ed. Joad Raymond (Witney: The Windrush Press, 1993), 3.
94. Sabrina Baron has suggested that it was possible that newsletters ‘could not be divorced from the fact that they were formatted and transmitted in the same way as all letters, making them personal rather than public’. Baron, ‘The Guises of Dissemination’, 47.
95. Natasha Glaisyer, ‘ “The Most Universal Intelligencers”: The Circulation of the London Gazette in the 1690s’, Media History 23, no. 2 (2017): 256.
96. Glaisyer, ‘The Most Universal Intelligencers’, 262.
97. Glaisyer has noted that this expectation was a common feature in manuscript newsletters. See Glaisyer, ‘The Most Universal Intelligencers’, 262.
98. Erin M. Keating, ‘The Role of Manuscript Newsletters in Charles II’s Performance of Power’, Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700 41, no. 2 (2017): 38.
99. January 25, 1693/4, box 3, folder 55, OSB MSS 60, James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University. Pole clearly did not issue any contradictory orders about pay, as Sims continued writing to her until 1695.
100. Brian Cowen, ‘The Rise of the Coffeehouse Reconsidered’, The Historical Journal 47, no. 1 (2004): 33.
101. Barber, ‘It is Not Easy What to Say of our Condition’, 305.
102. Markman Ellis, The Coffee House: A Cultural History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004).
103. Several of the most prominent coffee houses are mentioned in ‘Old and New London’, including Garraway’s and Bowman’s, but there is no mention of Widow Humphreys or indeed any other coffee houses in St Peter’s Alley. See Walter Thornbury. ‘Cornhill, Gracechurch Street, and Fenchurch Street’, in Old and New London: Volume 2 (London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin, 1878), 170–183. British History Online, accessed December 16, 2020, www.british-history.ac.uk/old-new-london/vol2/pp170–183. ‘Humphrey’s Coffee-House’ was mentioned in The Flying Post in 1697 as a place where people could buy Mr Read’s ‘Cathartick Pills’, which purported to cure a diverse array of ailments – see ‘News’, The Flying Post, or the Post-Master, issue 401, December 7, 1697.
104. Sutherland, The Restoration Newspaper, 8.
105. Glaisyer, ‘The Most Universal Intelligencers’, 265.
106. There are a series of letters in the Clark Library collection from the 1700s that reference ongoing problems with postage, specifically postage charges. See, for example, box 5.
107. December 25, 1693, box 2, folder 46, OSB MSS 60, James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
108. December 30, 1693, box 2, folder 46, OSB MSS 60, James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
109. October 27, 1694, box 3, folder 71. OSB MSS 60, James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
110. January 4, [?], box 2, folder 54, OSB MSS 60, James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University. It is unclear why the writer placed a question mark after the word ‘Madame’, which heads the letter, but one could speculate that it indicates an uncertainty about the recipient’s gender.
111. Harold Love, ‘Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 9, no. 2 (1987): 141.
112. Rebecca Laroche, ‘ “To take in hand the practice of phisick”: Early Modern Women’s Signatures in Print Medical Texts’, in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, IV, ed. Michael Denbo (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2008), 271.
113. June 7, 1692, box 1, folder 21, OSB MSS 60, James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
114. Raymond, ‘The Newspaper, Public Opinion, and the Public Sphere’, 132.
115. This was an amalgamation of two publications: The Post Boy, With Foreign and Domestic News, established in May 1695, and The Historical Account, &c, which then became The Post-Man in October 1695 after the original print of The Historical Account withdrew. See Stanley Morison, The English Newspaper: Some Account of the Physical Development of Journals Printed in London 1622–1932 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), 57–59.
116. August 31 to September 3, 1695, box 3, folder 34, MS.1951.021, Clark Library.
117. September 3 to 5, 1695, box 3, folder 34, MS.1951.021, Clark Library.
118. Undated, box 1, folder 2, OSB MSS 60, James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
119. November 14, 1693, box 2, folder 40, OSB MSS 60, James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
120. Arthur Grant, Autograph Letters signed to Elizabeth Tollemache, 1615–1619, Misc Mss, Clark Library.
121. February 28, 1691, box 1, folder 4, OSB MSS 60, James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
122. July 21, 1692, box 1, folder 24, OSB MSS 60, James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
123. King has observed a similar habit in the Hobson/Newey newsletters, which were sent to either Mrs Hobson or Mrs Newey, but were frequently headed with ‘Sir’. King, ‘All the News That’s Fit to Write’, 115; King ‘Sir Madam’.
124. January 1693/4, box 3, folder 55, OSB MSS 60, James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
125. December 21 to 24, 1695, box 3, folder 38, MS.1951.021, Clark Library.
126. The Folger finding aid for the Newdigate papers has lists of similarly significant collections of newsletters; of these, the Pole collection is the only one specifically addressed to a woman. However, as demonstrated in this article, there are a number of smaller collections of newsletters addressed to women. See ‘Newdigate Family Collection of Newsletters’, Folger Finding Aids, accessed January 20, 2019, https://findingaids.folger.edu/dfonewdigate.xml.

Chapter 4 Women reading science and philosophy: medical, culinary and philosophical knowledge

Notes

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Chapter 3 ‘I harde yow once saye yow loved forryne newes’: women news readers

Letters of news

Manuscript newsletters

Conclusion

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