London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd

Author:Peter Ackroyd
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: London, British History, Biography
ISBN: 9780385497718
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 2000-01-01T15:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 44

What’s New?

The crowd lives upon news and upon rumour. Elizabeth I recalled that, as a princess, she had asked her governess, “What news was at London?” On being told that it was rumoured she was about to marry Lord Admiral Seymour, she replied, “It was but a London news.” So in the sixteenth century “London news” was considered to be fleeting and inaccurate but, even so, the object of much curiosity. In King Lear the “poor rogues / Talk of Court news … who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out.” Shakespeare also invoked “the newes / Of hurly burly innovation” in Henry IV, Part One as well as “the new newes at the new Court” in As You Like It. It was often observed that, on entering a coffee house, the first and immediate enquiry was “What news? What news?”

The city is the centre of scandal, slander and speculation; the citizens are rumourmongers and backbiters. In the sixteenth century there were handbills and pamphlets and broadsheets devoted to the more sensational events of the day, and the street-sellers ensured that they were reported from door to door. In 1622 a weekly pamphlet of news was published in London, under the rubric of “Weekly Newes from Italy, Germanie, Hungary, Bohemia, the Palatinate, France and the low Countries etc.” Its success was such that it provoked the publication of many other weekly pamphlets which went under the common title of “Corantos.” The “news” was treated with great suspicion, however, as if the reports of London were based on faction or fractiousness. It was not an honest city and the editor of the Perfect Diurnal, Samuel Peche, was described in the 1640s as being “constant in nothing but wenching, lying and drinking.” He was, in other words, a typical Londoner.

There was one other aspect of London “news” which did not escape the attention of Ben Jonson. In his The Staple of Newes (1625) he suggests that news ceases to be “news” when it is printed and distributed; its essence is intelligence given in whisper or rumour, the kind of report that in the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries could permeate all London within a very short period. Jonson had his own view, then, of the “stationer” or publisher of news, who

knows Newes well, can sort and ranke ’hem

And for a need can make ’hem.

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