Contemporary observers of Jacobean England thought that an appetite for news was one of the distinctive attributes of their age. Asking after news, preached Thomas Lushington, was “the common preface and introduction to all our talk.” Since the 1980s, historians and literary critics have shared that fascination; as David Coast observes in his useful new book, News and Rumour in Jacobean England, news culture has arguably become “an independent research agenda for the political history of early modern Britain” (3).

Coast's work is based on close study of the Trumbull correspondence, an immensely rich resource that Thomas Cogswell called “the basic starting place for any study of Jacobean England” (The Blessed Revolution, 1989, 324). Surprisingly few historians have really exploited these papers, perhaps a tribute to just how immensely rich they are. William Trumbull, the Stuart agent in Brussels, received weekly newsletters from multiple, well-placed correspondents in England and abroad. Thanks to the survival of these papers, the second half of James I's reign is incomparably better documented than the first, or indeed than most of his son's. Coast has not used the entire archive, but he has read the material from 1618 to 1624 (supplemented by material from the State Papers) and explicated them with care and imagination. For anyone hoping to get a sense of what is in these newsletters, how they worked, and what can be done with them, Coast's book will be essential.

The newsletters that form the basis of News and Rumour in Jacobean England have particular characteristics. They are almost all from minor functionaries and other figures on the fringes of the Jacobean central regime to diplomats or agents representing that regime abroad. They are, therefore, less a measure of “public opinion” than of what Coast calls the “voice of the court”: what the middling and lower ranks of the central regime apparatus thought the upper ranks were doing. Coast accordingly expends little effort making arguments about the “public” or “plebian” use of news, concentrating instead on building an immensely persuasive case that court, government, and diplomatic life was structured by news, gossip, and rumor. As a result, any student of Jacobean court politics will find in Coast's work a revealing, nuanced study. A 1623 quarrel between Secretary Conway and Secretary Calvert finds the supposedly pro-Dutch Conway suspected of encouraging a rift between James and the Dutch, and the supposedly pro-Spanish Calvert struggling to maintain the alliance (22–24). As Coast shrewdly suggests, it was because their reputations tilted one way that their conduct in office had to tilt the other. Rather than reading dispatches as simple statements of faction or ideology, Coast shows that diplomats tried to inflect their dispatches with all the care they could muster: Trumbull worried that his passions on behalf of the Palatine cause would render him suspect at court, and he worked to moderate his discourse; Sir Dudley Carleton worried that his letters so resembled Trumbull's that the pair would be accused of collusion, and he tried to find daylight between them (34–37).

Coast's command of his sources and attention to detail gives his book a feel for the internal mechanics of the Jacobean court that eludes most specialists. It is also a great introduction to the structural confusion of Jacobean kingship: an attempt to raise funds for repairing the decrepit Saint Paul's Cathedral, for example, was judged by some to be a hidden scheme to raise money for war against Spain and by others as a Spanish scheme to divert money from the same war (64).

For Coast, news and rumor are not simply ambient conditions but rather fields of action. Nor is news distributed equally to all: for Coast, the essential fact is relative position. Those closer to or farther from the source, those at the center or at the periphery of a news network, not only saw different news but were also presented with different problems and different possibilities. King James, for example, occupied a position that was at once privileged and vulnerable: he was both the center of a news network created by formal and informal diplomacy, and was himself the object of speculation and gossip, which meant he could survey and sometimes try to manipulate the flow of information. Simultaneously, his heavy reliance on his informers and advisors left him vulnerable to their strategies.

Coast is also interested in rumor, which he defines (somewhat tendentiously) as uncertain news. Rather than stressing the wide availability of political knowledge, as post-revisionists have tended to do, Coast traces the limits of that knowledge: identifying tendencies toward error, recounting confusions of names and places, and watching reports contort through the vagaries of transmission. At times the taxonomy of error Coast supplies feels a bit conjectural, much of it supplied by readings in psychological literature and substantiated through anecdote. This is not always persuasive. For example, Coast explains false rumors concerning the death of prominent persons (87–88) by arguing that all rumors tended toward simplicity and making possibilities into certainties: thus rumors of illness, which implied the possibility of death, became rumors of death. Maybe so, but perhaps just as common was a second kind of false rumor, that dead people were in fact alive and that the death reports had themselves been mistaken. Anecdotally, both kinds of error were common. Only a more rigorous analysis—that would, say, look at all the errors made in a set period of time—would help nail down which kind of error was more common and, therefore, which of all possible psychological tendencies were actually operating in early modern news reception.

Just as he is occasionally overcommitted to psychological functionalism, Coast is not always clear in disentangling his own theories of rumor from early modern theories of rumor. Coast tells an anecdote about a French soldier who attacked an officer in the guards named Rouët (85). Through misunderstanding, the attack on Rouët became an attack le roi, and then a false report of the king's death. For Coast, this is a neat example of the dangers built into news transmission, but in fact, the whole episode was itself a rumor, culled by Coast from a newsletter. Instead of proving that rumors changed in the course of transmission, this anecdote proves only that early modern news writers thought they did, and used that fact to explain a confusing event.

Slips of fact are very infrequent and very minor (for example, John Williams is once described as lord chancellor, though he was in fact lord keeper), and Coast is impressively careful. Overall, News and Rumour in Jacobean England is a well-researched and judicious piece of scholarship, will prove a useful contribution to debates on early modern news, and presents an important perspective on Jacobean court politics.