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English Newsbooks And The Outbreak Of The Irish Rebellion of 1641 [1]

On Monday, 29 November 1641, The Heads of Severall Proceedings in this Present Parliament was published in London. Printed in small quarto, it consisted of a title page, a blank verso and six pages of text, which conveyed a scant chronicle of what had transpired in Parliament during the previous week to a nation hitherto starved of such intelligence. A second issue of Heads of Severall Proceedings appeared on 6 December, and with this the first periodical to communicate domestic news in England had been born [2]. Sixteen separate serials were in operation by January 1642, and the introduction that month of issue numeration and consecutive pagination from one week to the next helped consolidate the concept of periodical news. No doubt the emerging political crisis in England between Charles I and Parliament created an unprecedented demand for news, but the Irish rebellion, launched on 22 October 1641, was perhaps the catalyst in the birth of Heads of Severall Proceedings and subsequent periodicals at this time. Over the next several months, the attention awarded by these publications to this uprising helped ensure that Ireland remained a principal source of public concern. Indeed, approximately 92% of all serials printed between the outbreak of the rebellion and the onset of civil war contained news that related to Irish affairs [3]. As England moved progressively toward armed hostilities the periodicals became increasingly belligerent toward the court, and in this context, they often implied that the rebellion was part of a much larger conspiracy designed to effect the destruction of English Protestantism. Such fears were heightened by reports coming from Ireland of countless massacres being perpetrated by the Irish against the Protestants in that kingdom. Nonetheless, although Joseph Frank claimed in his pioneering study of English newspapers during the civil war era that these works maintained regular coverage of the atrocities in Ireland, in relation to the outbreak of the rebellion, he couldn’t have been further from the truth [4]. Rather, this article will suggest that the manner in which the periodical press addressed the outbreak of the rebellion, particularly the notorious massacres of English and Scottish settlers, did not always imitate other news publications of the period. Printed news that addressed domestic affairs during the late Tudor and early Stuart era was a rare commodity. From the mid-sixteenth century the Crown (with the assistance of the Stationers’ Company of London) sought to regulate all manner of information intended for public consumption, particularly news, the control of which was considered within the prerogative of the Crown. This did not mean that the populace remained completely sheltered from newsworthy events. When it served the Crown’s interests, Elizabethan pamphlets, for example, chronicled religious conflicts on the Continent.