The civil-war newsbook the Scotish Dove, which appeared weekly from the London press of Laurence Chapman between October 1643 and the end of 1646, has recently been described as the voice of the Scottish interest and even as the “first Scottish newspaper.” It prompted “a consistently and resolutely Scottish perspective,” and one of its prime aims was to “describe, defend, celebrate and when necessary apologise for” the Scots and the army of the covenant. Commentators agree that this involved “cloying piety” and “unpleasantness,” and that its author was “a blue nose, a Puritan in the worst sense of the word,” even if they might not all go so far as to suggest that it was the mouthpiece for the Scottish commissioners in London or that it represented “effective public relations” for the Scottish political and religious agenda.Footnote 1 It has proven to be tempting, in other words, to see the Dove as part of a wider story that centers upon the Scots as aggressive appropriators and exploiters of print culture and as being peculiarly interested in, and capable of, using texts to reach out to different groups in different countries. According to this version of the “print revolution,” the “explosion” of print that occurred in the mid-seventeenth century involved “a forest fire, started in Edinburgh” and one of “the most systematic and concerted campaigns hitherto attempted by a foreign power to bombard a separate kingdom with propaganda, thereby using the printed word to manipulate political opinion and fundamentally to alter the political process of another nation.”Footnote 2 As such, the story of the Scotish Dove seems to encapsulate the idea that Scottish Covenanters were in the vanguard of the English revolution, and to fit with a certain kind of approach to the “British problem,” in which the Scots are regarded as a kind of deus ex machina, or at the very least as a “billiard ball” that crashed powerfully and decisively into the English body politic.Footnote 3
This article accepts that the Scotish Dove is useful for addressing a serious lacuna in recent work on early modern political culture, but it does so for rather different reasons. It is based upon the idea that, amid all of the scholarly interest in, and debates about, the emergence of a “public sphere,” whether Habermasian or not, two issues have remained insufficiently explored: first, the ways in which texts moved across state boundaries in order to engage with multiple constituencies or “publics”; and second, the possibilities that existed for promoting trans-territorial publics––communities with shared aims and collaborative intentions––that could be mobilized, brought into being, and given expression by printed means. The aim here, then, is to analyze attempts to exploit, foster, enlarge, and sustain a British public—a constituency of people across England, Scotland, and perhaps Ireland—that did or might support attempts to promote Anglo-Scottish union not just through church reform but also through state building and cross-border political institutions. Such a public does not need to be conceived of as being separate from official political bodies—“the state”—in a Habermasian sense. Rather, it was intended to be a social reality, albeit one which might need to be promoted by political elites (and others) through the medium of print, and one whose real or intended ideals and attitudes could also be expressed in a range of official and non-official texts.Footnote 4 As such, the purpose of this article is partly to rethink the historiography relating to the dynamics of British history, by challenging assumptions that the “British problem” involved discrete polities and publics, and partly to move beyond unhelpful debates about “Anglo-centricity” and “Scottish moments” which assess whether the political initiative lay with the Scots or the English. Indeed, the aim is to rethink the story of Anglo-Scottish relations during the 1640s, relations that are too easily portrayed as revolving around three issues: Scottish attempts to influence English affairs; parliamentarian attempts to persuade the Scots to join a military campaign against Charles I; and a difficult alliance that subsequently faltered over conflicting views of church reform before collapsing over the terms of a political settlement during 1646–1648.Footnote 5 Challenging this picture will not necessarily involve dismissing the substantive religious issues at stake, but it will mean placing greater emphasis than is usual on the possibility for federal political union, and it will certainly entail focusing on the ways in which cooperation took place and was promoted. And it will involve suggesting that, by focusing on Anglo-Scottish print culture—texts created in England and Scotland for audiences that extended across both countries and that reflected on Anglo-Scottish relations—it is possible to recover evidence of cross-border collaboration and cooperation that was fostered both within and beyond official circles, and then to relate this to the constitutional changes that accompanied the revolution, not least the creation of the Committee of Both Kingdoms. It is also possible to suggest that the mid-seventeenth century reveals a relationship between developments in print culture and changes in institutional structures that was symbiotic in nature.Footnote 6 Firstly, British state formation was partly responsive to the existence of what might be called a preexisting British (or Anglo-Scottish) public, which involved a constituency of opinion about political as well as religious reform and which was fostered by and expressed in print. Secondly, the development of “British” institutions made it increasingly important to engage with a wider community of citizens, by discussing and defending political cooperation. Finally, print was also central to the process of navigating tensions between Covenanters and parliamentarians, including in relation to institutional change, and indeed to the fracturing of this public. As such, this article's argument is that cross-border print culture was central not just to the rise and fall of an Anglo-Scottish public but also to both the achievement and the ultimate failure of British union in the 1640s.
Covenanter Propaganda and Anglo-Scottish Cooperation
Given the zeal with which the Covenanters are known to have employed printed propaganda, there is little reason to question the idea that they were “creative communicators,” who had deliberately set about creating a “Covenanter public,” or indeed to doubt the effectiveness of their propaganda strategies and practices for making an impact on English audiences. Nevertheless, the first goal of this article is to argue that the nature of this campaign has been analyzed in rather narrow ways, by focusing almost exclusively on Scottish attempts to insert printed texts into the English public domain.Footnote 7
What is well known is that the campaign to distribute Scottish texts across England involved considerable energy and resources. In noting that the Covenanters “aimed an intense propaganda barrage at England,” David Stevenson long ago pointed out that their printer, Robert Bryson, was paid £166 (Scots) “for his expenses, service and hazard in going in through England with the said books.”Footnote 8 It is also widely recognized that such efforts had a significant effect in England; copies of texts were widely dispersed and provoked both concern and action on the part of the authorities. John Castle, for example, informed the earl of Bridgewater that Covenanters had “cast and spread abroad into this kingdom above 10,000 printed copies” of their “pestilent pasquil,” thus “making their cause to be common,” and in March 1640 it was discovered that the Scots planned to distribute as many as two thousand copies of An Information from the Estates into England, “to make their cause good and their grievances intolerable.”Footnote 9 As English officials became worried about the impact of such texts, Charles I sent an urgent circular to deputy lieutenants, denouncing “wicked and traiterous” pamphlets that had been “clandestinely sent into this our kingdom and spread in sundry parts thereof,” while loyal JPs across the country sent up to London copies of Scottish texts that had been discovered and handed in.Footnote 10 Little could be done, however, to prevent the Scots from becoming boastful about the impact of their propaganda on English public life.Footnote 11
In examining Covenanter attempts to promote Anglo-Scottish unity and a shared public sphere, however, there is a tendency to overlook the role of the Covenanters’ friends and sympathizers within England; a genuinely holistic approach to Covenanter propaganda must recognize the importance of Anglo-Scottish cooperation. We must thus attend to Englishmen who were involved in distributing such material, like Mr. Guard and Thomas Audley, as well to the enthusiastic readers who devoured it. These included men like the schoolmaster of King's Norton, Thomas Hall, and the Northamptonshire lawyer and Puritan, Robert Woodford. The latter was appalled by the prospect of the Bishops’ Wars, devoured news and rumors about events in Scotland, and read texts by and about Covenanter “brethren.” Woodford, indeed, had “much discourse” about “the Scottish business,” not just with Englishmen who had recently been north of the border but also with Scottish leaders like Alexander Henderson and Archibald Johnston of Wariston when they visited England. However, it also included humble soldiers and troopers, like those whose stories emerged during an investigation into reports that copies of Information from the Scottish Nation had been found hidden in a churchyard in Braintree (Essex) in the summer of 1640. What emerged on this occasion was the existence of a clandestine communication network that spread such texts and that brought together humble and semiliterate clothiers and carpenters as well as soldiers who were billeted in the area, not least in local inns and taverns, where information about the whereabouts of illicit texts could circulate with ease.Footnote 12
Moreover, while it would be wrong to discount the significance of Covenanter printing in the Low Countries, which clearly provides a fascinating example of the relationship between printed texts and state borders, here too Anglo-Scottish cooperation proved to be important. As David Como has demonstrated, the so-called Cloppenburg press—upon which key Covenanter pamphlets like the one found in Braintree were printed—actually operated in London rather than in the Dutch republic as a secretive and collaborative venture by various Londoners. Indeed, what is intriguing about the Cloppenburg press, like other printing that did take place in the Dutch republic, is that it involved a mixture of English and Scottish texts—by Henry Burton, William Prynne, John Bastwick, and Henry Parker as well as by George Gillespie and Robert Baillie—and a nexus of English clerics, printers, and booksellers (John Canne, Matthew Simmons, Richard Whitaker, and Thomas Crafford), as well as exiled Scottish ministers.Footnote 13 Finally, too little attention has been paid to the fact that from late 1636 to early 1638 one of the things that concerned men like Archbishop William Laud was evidence that English Puritan texts—by William Prynne and John Bastwick—were being sent into Scotland to encourage the Covenanters.Footnote 14
This all points to the existence and development of an Anglo-Scottish community—the geographical reach and social depth of which has not been properly assessed—that was based on cross-border cooperation and shared interests. This was a community that helped to foster the existence of a meaningful constituency—an Anglo-Scottish public—and that operated and thought collaboratively. It involved both a discursive space (that is, texts that reflected on shared interests and goals) and a social reality, and it is possible to observe both texts and arguments that reflected on shared interests and goals, as well as individuals who were interested in promoting collaborative efforts in the peculiar politico-religious conjuncture that existed in England and Scotland during the late 1630s and early 1640s. This was a conjuncture, moreover, that involved not merely ideas and debates about church reform and about the possibility of creating a shared Presbyterian church but also ideas about federal political union and new civil institutions. Thus, rather than thinking simplistically about an English audience for Scottish propaganda that was intended to promote a Presbyterian religious agenda, attention ought to be paid to cross-border cooperation between committed “brethren.” Such cooperation involved mobilizing as much as creating support for action across Britain that would promote both church reform and political action against Stuart policies, including through institutional reform. It makes sense, in other words, to think about this “public” as a body of people across Britain whose support was being courted and also as a preexisting cross-border godly community that was being mustered, rather than conjured, with the help of “covenanter” texts.
The recovery of this more complicated picture of Anglo-Scottish print culture provides a means, as Como has shown, of challenging the claims made by “revisionists”—and some Scottish historians—about the nature of the British problem and of the political dynamic within the British Isles before 1642.Footnote 15 However, it is also possible to suggest that this Anglo-Scottish public provided foundational support for enhanced cross-border cooperation and state building thereafter in the conditions of civil war. Here, too, in other words, there are grounds for thinking more deeply about the relationship between print and political borders and about the light that can be shed on contemporary political culture more broadly by highlighting the English—rather than merely Scottish—voices who advocated closer political cooperation. This is a process that can be detected from the earliest weeks of the war, when Henry Parker's Generall Junto offered a somewhat discrete means of providing English support for confederal union, and indeed one that would be British rather than merely Anglo-Scottish.Footnote 16 It also became much more notable in the wake of the Solemn League and Covenant (1643), the weeks following the signing of which saw authors like Edward Bowles advocating “a speedy and firm union with the counsels and strength of Scotland” and Hezekiah Woodward promoting the idea of Three Kingdoms Made One.Footnote 17
Anglo-Scottish Print Culture
More importantly, the move toward institutional union, with the creation of specific federal bodies like the Committee of Both Kingdoms in February 1644, can be shown to have increased the need for a cross-border community or public, thereby ensuring that print became a vital tool for nurturing and fostering support for Anglo-Scottish cooperation. Here, too, in other words, there are reasons for exploring the relationship between print and state borders and for arguing that covenanter propagandizing in England was only part of the story, by scrutinizing, among other factors, both the practices and the messages involved in addressing an Anglo-Scottish public. Analysis of printing processes, therefore, reveals the complexity of Anglo-Scottish propaganda, and evidence that texts moved in both directions, in different ways and for different reasons.Footnote 18
The two-way traffic in print between England and Scotland can be demonstrated, firstly, through the audited accounts of the Covenanter printer, Evan Tyler, between 1642 and 1647, which itemize over 100 different items, involving 130,000 sheets of paper and a claim for £13,000 (Scots), or almost £1,100 (English).Footnote 19 It is intriguing not just that Tyler was an English printer, whose Scottish presses were—at least from 1647—controlled by the Stationers’ Company in London, but also that he was primarily involved in producing English texts for Scottish readers. These included 1,000 copies of what he described as “some proceedings betwixt the king and Parliament” and statements by the “dissenting brethren” and the Westminster Assembly, as well as texts by the English parliament in their paper war with the king, pronouncements by the House of Lords in response to London Presbyterian petitioning in 1646, and parliamentary declarations directed toward Scottish authorities.Footnote 20
Secondly, Tyler's republishing of official parliamentarian texts represented only a fraction of the English material that made its way to Scotland. While the extent of the cross-border movement of texts from south to north is difficult to establish with certainty, it clearly involved not just official attempts to export such material but also Scottish demand for English pamphlets and newsbooks, which were printed and sold commercially. Thus, while some texts flowed through official channels, including texts produced by the Westminster Assembly of Divines, it also seems that works by English authors such as Francis Quarles (the royalist poet) and George Wither (the parliamentarian poet), as well as some early newspapers, were produced in Scotland in a more entrepreneurial fashion by printers like James Lindsay and booksellers like Andrew Wilson.Footnote 21
Thirdly, while it is clear that some of Tyler's Edinburgh texts made it to London (they ended up in George Thomason's collection), a much more significant way in which Scottish pamphlets reached English audiences involved English presses operated by a select band of the Covenanters’ friends, allies, and accomplices in London.Footnote 22 The most notable of these was Robert Bostock, a considerable proportion of whose time was spent reprinting official Covenanter texts—by the Convention of Estates and the General Assembly of the Kirk—that had earlier appeared from Tyler's press in Edinburgh.Footnote 23 Indeed, Bostock had Presbyterian sympathies and worked closely with the Scottish commissioners in London, from whom he evidently received many of the texts—including news—that he published.Footnote 24 Bostock was not alone, however, and other London stationers who formed part of the Covenanters’ English network included Ralph Smith and another prominent London Presbyterian, John Bellamy, both of whom reprinted Covenanter manifestos.Footnote 25 Crucially, moreover, the Scots also developed significant ties to other Englishmen who were associated with the press, such as the minister and press licenser James Cranford.
Fourthly, the development of the Anglo-Scottish public involved efforts on the part of the English authorities as much as it did the work of Scottish Covenanters. The English Parliament devoted considerable resources to bringing the two publics together, and its official printer, Edward Husband, regularly reprinted Scottish texts that Tyler had first produced in Edinburgh.Footnote 26 Similarly, the City of London's official printer, Richard Cotes, produced new versions of texts that the Covenanter regime had sent to the civic authorities, while Bostock, like the partnership of Bellamy and Smith, also produced a series of Scottish texts upon the direct orders of Parliament.Footnote 27 Another bookseller, Edward Brewster, produced Scottish texts that received the imprimatur of English licensers, even if he did not work directly for Parliament.Footnote 28 Whether directly or indirectly, in other words, officials at Westminster played an important role in ensuring that Covenanter literature was made available to readers south of the border.
Moreover, while it is possible that other printers may also have worked covertly for the authorities in Whitehall and Westminster or for the Scots’ commissioners, the volume of material that emerged in England and the sizeable cast of characters involved make it hard to avoid the conclusion that London's presses were commercially motivated as well as politically manipulated. Thus, while Thomas Underhill—who reprinted certain papers of the Convention of Estates as well as works by Robert Baillie—had connections with the English parliament, he was not an official printer;Footnote 29 on other occasions, documents from the authorities in Edinburgh as well as speeches and papers by the Scottish commissioners in London were printed and reprinted in ways that suggest either entrepreneurial or ideological motives by a range of stationers like Gregory Dexter, Henry Overton, Samuel Gellibrand, Richard Whitaker, Hugh Perry, Lawrence Chapman, Thomas Paine, Matthew Simmons, Ralph Austin, and Humphrey Tuckey, as well as Elizabeth Purslowe.Footnote 30
In other words, unless we are to believe that the work of this somewhat diverse range of stationers—many of whom were relatively minor players in London publishing circles—was being coordinated by political authorities in Edinburgh and London, it would seem likely that such activity indicates a widespread interest in, and determination to discuss, Anglo-Scottish affairs and perhaps even spontaneous support for Anglo-Scottish cooperation within England. As such, the process whereby Scottish texts appeared before English audiences can be thought not just to have been inspired by cross-border political cooperation and the creation of the Committee of Both Kingdoms but also to have involved something more than merely the export of texts from Scotland to England or an effort by Scots to propagandize to an English audience. Rather, it involved a much more complex situation in which texts moved in both directions through the efforts of both Englishmen and Scotsmen, either to capitalize on interest in the new political conjuncture or to express a sense of common purpose.
Publicizing Anglo-Scottish Cooperation
However, just as important as the channels through which such material flowed is what the rhetoric of such texts reveals about the nature of the Anglo-Scottish public. In part, this involves recognizing how the movement of texts across borders blurred the distinctions between Scottish and English audiences. Texts such as The Scotch Counsellor, for example, were framed as—and may genuinely have involved—correspondence between friends in Scotland and England. The latter were sometimes portrayed as needing to be persuaded to remain loyal to Parliament, by invoking “the great comfort and content that we have received each from other these many years.”Footnote 31 Pamphlets initially used to address Scottish readers, meanwhile, took on new and interesting meanings when they were reprinted in London; references to “the subjects of this kingdom” or to “all estates and degrees of persons throughout the land” became stripped of straightforward national or geographical connotations.Footnote 32
Acknowledging the importance of political rhetoric, however, also involves recognizing the degree to which Anglo-Scottish print culture focused on the workings and viability of the Anglo-Scottish alliance. This is important because of a lingering sense within the historiography that the most well-known aspects of Anglo-Scottish discourse in the early 1640s—relating to church reform, Presbyterianism, Independency, and sectarianism—might be thought to emphasize the degree to which Anglo-Scottish relations revolved around a distinctively Scottish perspective coming into conflict with determined English resistance to Scottish ideas, including over church reform.Footnote 33 Looked at in another way, however, a somewhat different picture emerges. To a very large degree, therefore, the aim behind a considerable body of Anglo-Scottish material was to promote the idea that the new kind of political structures and relationships that emerged during the 1640s were workable and profitable. Occasionally, this involved joint statements by Covenanters and parliamentarians, which were ordered to be printed in both London and Edinburgh.Footnote 34 At other moments it involved copies of sermons by Scottish ministers that were delivered before the English Parliament—giving thanks for Anglo-Scottish military success—being printed semi-officially both in London and Edinburgh.Footnote 35 In addition, the Scots clearly used English friends like John Bellamy and Ralph Smith to provide evidence of cooperation between Parliament, the Convention of Estates, and the General Assembly. They also used men like Robert Bostock to reveal evidence about the activities of both the English commissioners in Scotland and the Scots commissioners in London, as well as about the functioning of the Committee of Both Kingdoms as a vehicle for Anglo-Scottish cooperation.Footnote 36 However, this message also emerged from any number of other pamphlets, produced more or less independently by London presses, which painted a picture of an effective relationship and of friendly discussions involving the General Assembly and the Westminster Assembly.Footnote 37
Beyond such references to official cooperation, a range of texts also expressed the harmony of interests between Englishmen and Scotsmen, as well as mutual respect and admiration. From October 1643 onward, therefore, the English Parliament repeatedly used print to stress that “the more speedy ending of these unhappy differences” depended on “the willingness of our brethren the Scots to stand up with them in the defense of the Protestant religion, our laws and liberties, against the desperate designs of papists and other ill-affected persons,” as well as to encourage financial support for the Scottish army, and to explain how English taxes (assessments) would be used to fund Covenanter forces.Footnote 38 Texts originating in Scotland, moreover, stressed the importance of “joint counsels and assistance of both kingdoms, against the common enemies of both nations.”Footnote 39 In May 1646, meanwhile—following the king's surrender to the Scots and the suggestion that the “disposal” of the king was exclusively a matter for the English parliament and that the Covenanter army should be disbanded—the City of London arranged for the printing of its “humble remonstrance and petition” to Parliament, which expressed the hope of Presbyterians that “we may not … forget our brethren of Scotland.” This particular tract was subsequently republished by Bellamy, moreover, at the behest of Presbyterians in both the City and Parliament, complete with a response in which members of the House of Lords insisted on “the continuance of that union between us and our brethren of Scotland.”Footnote 40 On the orders of the City authorities, meanwhile, Richard Cotes published a response to the remonstrance by the Scottish General Assembly, which likewise reflected on the importance of “union” rather than merely on the need to deal with the threat posed by the sects.Footnote 41
More important still were efforts to publicize evidence about the impact of the Anglo-Scottish alliance as a result of the mobilization of Scottish forces. Parliament, therefore, ensured that Edward Husband produced evidence about the steps taken by the Scottish estates to raise loans and taxes “for the maintenance of an army of ten thousand men,”Footnote 42 while many of the Scottish texts that appeared in England stressed “brotherly affection,” their zeal for “carrying on the war” and for a “firm and lasting peace,” and their determination to “live and die with their brethren of England.”Footnote 43 Indeed, the Covenanters used Bostock to convince English readers that Scottish officials recognized “the necessity of our speedy marching to the assistance of our brethren in England” and to provide evidence about The Readinesse of the Scots to Advance into England. This meant demonstrating that they were intent on providing meaningful military support, by ensuring that Bostock reprinted the legislation by which the Convention of Estates planned to raise money to supply their forces and put Scotland “into a posture of defence, for strengthening the army, and providing of arms and ammunition to the kingdom.”Footnote 44 It also meant printing evidence about the mobilization of Scottish forces, as demonstrated by their rendezvous near Berwick in December 1643, “with a body of 25,000 horse and foot.”Footnote 45
Bostock, indeed, went to great lengths to ensure the publication of positive news about the Scottish army. During 1644, therefore, he produced a numbered series of news pamphlets with the assistance of a minister, Edward Bowles, in order to demonstrate the activity of the Committee of Both Kingdoms and the zeal of the Scottish army, and also to report on their advance into England, complete with details about the composition of Covenanter forces and intelligence regarding their progress.Footnote 46 In February 1644, the English Parliament used Bostock's press to publicize orders for a day of thanksgiving for God's “great goodness in sending so seasonably to our aid our brethren of Scotland, and in giving so great an absolute victory under the forces for the parliament, near Nantwich in Cheshire.”Footnote 47 In April 1645, meanwhile, Bostock was responsible for the appearance of An Extract of Severall Letters from Scotland, involving evidence secured from the Scottish commissioners in London which related to “the defeat given to the rebels” under the earl of Montrose.Footnote 48 Husband then quickly recycled such evidence alongside an official order for a day of thanksgiving “for the great blessing God hath given our brethren of Scotland.”Footnote 49 Similar texts also emerged from Bostock's press during the months that followed, particularly in the wake of the Covenanter victory over Scottish royalists at the Battle of Philiphaugh and the defeat inflicted on English royalists by Scottish forces at Hereford. In February 1646, for example, Bostock drew further attention to Covenanter zeal by relating the story of Treason and Rebellion and the execution of “several traitors and rebels” in Edinburgh.Footnote 50
Of course, this effort on both sides to stress the importance and effectiveness of the Anglo-Scottish alliance was made necessary in part by nervousness that support for the Scots within England might be fragile. It would thus be rash to deny that texts from all sides can be identified which sought to correct “mistakes and prejudices” concerning the honesty of the Covenanter regime and the effectiveness (and behavior) of their troops.Footnote 51 The Scots certainly felt compelled to explain the reasons for their delayed mobilization and slow military progress. Some of Tyler's texts that were carried into England addressed the issue of complaints regarding “many insolencies and wrongs done … by foot companies and horse-troops, their officers and soldiers, under pretext of taking quarters,” and also publicized the steps taken to prevent such abuses.Footnote 52 For much the same reason, Tyler also produced another text, which Bostock then reprinted, containing the Scottish version of the Articles and Ordinances of Warre, for the present expedition of the army of the kingdome of Scotland, while Tyler produced Scottish acts against unnecessary or over-burdensome free quarter.Footnote 53 Nevertheless, there is clear evidence that the Anglo-Scottish alliance that emerged in the wake of the Solemn League and Covenant, and that was cemented by the creation of the Committee of Both Kingdoms, witnessed considerable efforts by both parliamentarians and Covenanters to convince both English and Scottish audiences of the value of “union,” whether religious or political.
The Fracturing of the Anglo-Scottish Relationship
The problem with the idea of using print to reflect on the Anglo-Scottish alliance, however, was that as time passed more and more effort needed to be expended in addressing tensions between English and Scottish brethren, over the desirability of either a unified Presbyterian church or federal political institutions. This meant that print came to be central to more than just the promotion of an Anglo-Scottish public, and it was also employed to deal with the difficulties involved in cross-border political cooperation and state building. Ultimately, indeed, printed texts became integral to the process by which the alliance fractured and became acrimonious.Footnote 54
First, a number of texts produced by Robert Bostock and Ralph Smith revealed how the Scots and their sympathizers felt compelled to respond to “the mis-representation of our affairs at a distance, and the mis-constructions of such as want affection,” which “might possibly beget a misunderstanding of the reality and sincerity of our intentions and desires.”Footnote 55 They sought to offer “satisfaction against any aspersions” that had been “vented against the sincerity, candour and integrity of the proceedings of that army in the North,” adding that “What God hath joined let no man separate.”Footnote 56 They also bemoaned “such groundless suspicions and needless jealousies” that “bad instruments” had been “inventing and suggesting” out of “their envy of our common happiness, and for their own private ends,” and they sought to counter claims which were said to have been made by “the sons of slander and perdition,” to the effect that the Scots had come “to fish in the troubled waters of England.”Footnote 57 The Scottish commander, David Leslie, claimed that “it doth exceedingly grieve me to hear there are so many false reports spread of the carriage of this army,” and he protested about “the calumnies and misinformations invented and spread against our army, which I dare say do proceed for the most part from the activeness, industry and malice of our enemies, of purpose to render us hateful to our friends, and to divide … the kingdoms.”Footnote 58 And the Scots pleaded with English readers to resist attempts to foment “jealousies” within and between the two kingdoms and to try instead to prevent misunderstandings and differences. They referred, therefore, to “the faithful and careful endeavours of the Committee of Estates” for preserving “peace and amity” and “the happy union” as well as to the need for stronger institutional ties.Footnote 59
Secondly, and perhaps more obviously, the need to address mounting tension was driven in no small part by a determination to respond to problems posed and objections raised by English Independents, rather than merely by royalists. This makes it clear, moreover, how far the Anglo-Scottish public that had been imagined, conjured, and fostered had always been fragile and far from unified. Sometimes these responses involved English authors reflecting on “our brethren of Scotland,” as with a work from June 1646 entitled The Love and Faithfulnes of the Scottish Nation to the covenant and union. This not only referred to how “tongues and pens” were being “employed to work division … between kingdom and kingdom” but also explicitly framed itself as a response to “speeches of several Independent brethren.” It also involved quoting previous parliamentarian declarations and speeches that had promoted “nearer association,” “more strict union,” and “the blessed union of two nations.”Footnote 60 However, as the Scots became animated about “rumours” and “divers things murmured” against them, about the danger posed by “the enemies of this cause and covenant,” and about overt criticism regarding the conduct of their troops, they too complained about the lack of promised resources from England and about “the pressing and unsupplied necessities of our army.”Footnote 61 By 1646, indeed, as attention turned more obviously to the question of peace and settlement, the Scots were forced to discuss the circumstances surrounding the king's arrival within their quarters and to insist that they were “exhorting His Majesty to give satisfaction to the joint desires of both kingdoms” rather than pursuing their own independent settlement.Footnote 62
The problem facing the Scots, however, was that the existence of an Anglo-Scottish public sphere necessitated discussing such problems regarding the alliance very publicly. The problem with doing so, however, was that it raised serious issues not just about the problems of cross-border political cooperation but also about the nature of the British public sphere itself. This is demonstrated by the furor surrounding the increasingly outspoken Scottish commentator, David Buchanan, who prefaced a volume of official Scottish papers in October 1645 by denouncing the strategies of “false-hearted and by-ended men,” and by lamenting how the “simpler” sort were “deluded, and … led by the nose by the more specious lies of crafty and deceitful men.” As the bookseller George Thomason recognized, Bostock printed this pamphlet in London and, although Buchanan's preface was quickly “forbidden” by the Scottish commissioners, even the more innocuous version by which it was replaced referred to “the many complaints against our army in this kingdom,” to their attempt to unmask those responsible, and to their determination to “silence the clamours of the people, and bring them to a more charitable judgment.”Footnote 63
Buchanan went much further than this, however, by offering a detailed critique of how the “union” worked in practice, and once again he did so in a highly public fashion. In one pamphlet, therefore, he complained about how the Scots were sidelined in the Committee of Both Kingdoms, and kept in the dark about sensitive intelligence, saying that “in the council of state the Scots have a long time been crossed in a high measure, by those who were against their incoming.” He also complained about how the Scots were misrepresented in the press, and about how these things were “believed by the simpler sort,” and he critiqued the “cunning” Independents and their attempts to undermine the Scots, who “must be cried upon as idle and lazy.” At one point, he even exclaimed that “men must be persuaded, induced and forced to come unto the Parliament with complaints against the Scots.”Footnote 64 In another work, Buchanan reflected fondly on the early days of the Committee of Both Kingdoms, “wherein the Scots have a negative voice,” where nothing was done “without their knowledge and consent” and where “all play[ed] overboard, and clandestine dealing being forbidden to both equally, upon the reason of the common interest of both.”Footnote 65 The problem, on his account, was that this had proved difficult to sustain because of the actions of those who mistrusted the Scots and resented the idea of joint councils; people who took steps toward “weaning them from their old friends in the City” and who withheld key intelligence (including intercepted letters) and then established a sub-committee from which the Scots were excluded. For Buchanan, therefore, the problem was that things were increasingly “carried in hugger mugger, to the prejudice of the public service,” part of his wider critique of the appropriation of money and power by the Independent faction.Footnote 66
What is striking about Buchanan's account, however, is not just that he did not really offer a clear vision of what cross-border co-operation was supposed to look like but also that, to the extent that he did so, his response to such problems involved stressing the importance of greater political openness. He justified aggressive Scottish print tactics by emphasizing the need to make public the proceedings of those acting in the service of the common cause so that “it may be made manifest what good you have done alone, either by counsel in the Houses, or by action in the field.” Indeed, he explicitly addressed the question of secrecy, publicity, and “the mysteries of state,” and he opposed unnecessary attempts to keep things “in a mist by a mysterious prudency.”Footnote 67 Moreover, this attitude became manifest not just in Buchanan's incredibly frank discussions of factional politics and parliamentary processes but also in his increasingly provocative attempts to publicize Scottish demands. This involved disregarding parliamentary privilege and covering up the fact that he was working through friendly English stationers, although men like Thomason quickly realized that Bostock had produced tracts like Some Papers given in by the Commissioners in London even though they purported to have been printed in Edinburgh by Tyler.Footnote 68 Ultimately, Buchanan felt compelled to revert to promoting a national rather than a confederal agenda, stressing that the Covenanters were “the cause of the assembling of the parliament, of the continuance of it … and of the preservation of it.”Footnote 69
Such evidence suggests that Scots like Buchanan were being forced to confront the difficulties involved in speaking a common political language with their English allies. However, it also indicates that national interests had never entirely been removed from the covenanting agenda (or perhaps were apt to reappear when things were going badly), that the Scots were uncomfortable with the kind of “public sphere” that they may have helped to conjure, and that it may never have been their intention to “normalise uncontrolled public debate.”Footnote 70 The problem with the tactics that men like Buchanan deployed, however, was at least twofold. First, the Scots provoked responses from English commentators on substantive issues relating to the proper nature and management of cross-border cooperation. In an explicit response to Buchanan in April 1646, Edward Bowles insisted that the Scots were the “occasion” rather than the “cause” of the Long Parliament and made a series of points which raised rather different concerns regarding the nature of the union.Footnote 71 He pointed out, therefore, that while the Scots had been granted a constitutional role in England (that is, on the Committee of Both Kingdoms) the English were not invited to participate in Scottish institutions. In Scotlands Ancient Obligation, meanwhile, William Prynne warned the Scots not to insist on their entitlement to determine the fate of the captive Charles I. In Prynne's case, this was done in the interest of preserving a union, and he cited a biblical passage about the need to create “one nation” with “one king,” even if he referred to “our Scottish brethren's deep engagements to our nation heretofore.” He referred, indeed, to “a most strict obligation to them inviolably to maintain that ancient league of friendship … when so many seek to divide and dash us one against another … without giving the least just occasion of jealousie or complaint unto our nation by speech, action or violating the least title of their covenant and articles of agreement with the parliament.”Footnote 72 Independents like Thomas Chaloner and Henry Marten, on the other hand, discussed the business of how to “dispose” of the king to rather different ends, with repeated and forthright denunciations of the Scots. By far the most explosive of these was even called An Unhappy Game at Scotch and English, and it represented a “full answer from England to the Scots papers of Scotland, wherein their Scotch mist and their fogs, their sayings and gain-sayings, their jugglings, their windings and turnings … their breach of covenant, articles of treaty, their king-craft present design … their plots and intents for usurpation and government over us and our children.” Such things, the author claimed, were “detected, discovered and presented to the view of the world,” as a “dreadful omen, all-arme and warning to the kingdom of England.”Footnote 73 Among radical Independents, therefore, the increasingly aggressive tone that men like Buchanan deployed provoked an equally provocative espousal of an explicitly English voice.
The second problem raised by the behavior of men like Buchanan was that English responses to the Scots raised questions about the legitimacy of Scottish tactics, including the propriety of using cross-border tactics to advance Scottish interests in the English public sphere. This was evident, for example, in Parliament's response to the Scots’ tendency to print their papers as a means of explaining their views on the nature of the Anglo-Scottish alliance, on the nature of Anglo-Scottish treatises, and on the issues in dispute between the two partners.Footnote 74 Such pamphlets generated not just official responses from Parliament but also official censure of both Buchanan's Truth its Manifest and his edition of the Scots’ papers.Footnote 75 However, such disgruntlement is also clear in pamphlets by other English commentators. By pointing out that it was not just the Scots who were the victims of press criticism, and by highlighting “the very diurnalls which bespatter everybody,” Edward Bowles noted that, whereas the Scots kept a tight control on the press at home, they were much freer with print in England.Footnote 76 Indeed, Bowles also contrasted the Scots’ demands for tighter control over English presses with Buchanan's demands for political transparency, denying that the Scots had been required to give an account of themselves in public and insisting that the Scots commissioners were “men in public employment, and should not be bandied by a private pen.”Footnote 77 Bowles also added that “those that hate Independency in the church should not affect popularity in the state,” and drew attention to the now-famous incident in June 1645 when the Scots had persuaded the English minister and press licenser, James Cranford, to publicize allegations against leading Independent grandees in relation to the Committee of Both Kingdoms.Footnote 78 Finally, a series of tracts by radical Independents made mocking reference to Scottish print tactics, with the claim that Independent pamphlets were printed in Edinburgh “as truly printed by Evan Tyler … as were the Scotch papers.”Footnote 79
In other words, the story of the 1640s is one that involved not only calls for both political and religious union, but also fairly clear opposition to at least some of these ideals (especially relating to church reform) and a lack of clarity over what union would look like and how it might work in practice. Inevitably, therefore, tensions emerged between English and Scottish voices over both the idea of union and the nature of any plausible collaboration, and on issues like cross-border cooperation and state building rather than just church reform. As this happened, and as the Scots felt compelled to respond to skepticism regarding their role and performance, the Covenanters found themselves exposing and critiquing constitutional arrangements and provoking similar reflection on the part of their English allies. At this point there was a real risk that, even if there remained some kind of cross-border constituency that supported the idea of union, it was all too easy for politicians and commentators on either side to expose the nature of such a union to ever closer scrutiny and ultimately to revert to the language of national interests. When this happened, moreover, both sides also began to raise questions about the nature and workings of a cross-border public sphere, one of the very cornerstones upon which the Covenanter-parliamentarian alliance had been built.
The Scotish Dove and the Formation of a British Public
It would be possible to take this story forward into 1647–1648 and to observe how a rather different cross-border alliance—between Covenanters and English Presbyterians—led to abortive attempts to create a somewhat different Anglo-Scottish public; how the Scots’ Engagement with Charles I was aggressively justified in the English public sphere; and how both pro- and anti-Engager Scots fought their battles in print through London's presses. It would also be possible to show how such tactics led English authors—like Marchamont Nedham—to produce anti-Scottish texts which appear to have been directed at Scottish audiences.Footnote 80 However, at this point it is possible to work toward a conclusion by returning to the Scotish Dove, a close examination of which reinforces the picture developed thus far. Its author, George Smith, was pro-Scottish, pro-covenant, and pro-union, and supportive of the Committee of Both Kingdoms, and he placed great faith in “our brethren the Scots,” worked to ensure the success of the Anglo-Scottish alliance, and strove to “knit” brethren together “in a more perpetual bond” of “union,” adding that “we are with them, and they with us, sworn to live and die together.”Footnote 81 Even in November 1646, in the context of mounting criticism of the Scots in print, Smith insisted that “this is a time for brethren to unite, not to dispute in orations.”Footnote 82 Nevertheless, while Smith's paper was consistently critical of religious sectaries, it also rejected jure divino Presbyterianism and questioned the value of Presbyterian petitioning. Moreover, while it made a clear effort to smooth over differences between Presbyterians and Independents, it could not help but to acknowledge their existence.Footnote 83 Indeed, while Smith reassured readers about the military value of the Scots, defended them from critics and publicized their printed papers, he was not blindly supportive and was certainly prepared to acknowledge the frustrations caused by their delayed entry into England and to criticize the conduct of their army.Footnote 84 Indeed, while Smith defended the Scots to the last, even if this meant increasingly desperate attempts to bolster the alliance and to support their demands for money, the king's flight to the Scots in 1646 provoked doubts about whether the latter would honor the covenant. The Dove thus opined that “I hope our brethren of Scotland will remember their covenant as well as urge it to us; we shall surely never break with them, nor must the Parliament forbear to tell them they must not break with us.”Footnote 85 Moreover, while Smith insisted that “[t]hey that are brethren will surely keep covenant and articles, or they must be held perfidious,” he seemed less than fully convinced, adding that “I hope the former, and cannot suppose the latter can be,” while also acknowledging “cause of fear.”Footnote 86
More importantly, Smith was an English author who was loyal to the “rights of the English nation,” and his rhetoric about the eponymous “dove” is highly revealing.Footnote 87 Smith insisted, therefore, that “my Dove is Scotish, but myself English,” adding that his was an English newspaper that had merely adopted the motto of the Covenanter army and that “the Dove is bound to love the Scottish nation for England's sake, so long as they love England.”Footnote 88 Smith's conceit, indeed, was that the Dove was “sent out” as an intelligencer “between” England and Scotland; that she was an “innocent” who “flies between, to bring intelligence / from thence to us, and unto them from hence”; and that she was “impartial in her praises and dispraises.”Footnote 89 Indeed, Smith responded to the claim that the Dove was a “perfect Scotist” by pointing out that some readers accused him of being a “factious sectary.”Footnote 90
Such evidence makes it clear that, rather than being a Covenanter newspaper, the Scotish Dove embodied the kind of British voice that was so important to harnessing and fostering a collaborative cross-border community or public, and to the development of the cross-border political alliance. The Dove thus highlights the way in which print was used as means of fostering a sense of brotherly unity and of responding to the problems that emerged during the 1640s. Smith both embodied the possibilities for creating an Anglo-Scottish public and the difficulties that such a project faced, and in the end he was an imperfect “Scotist.” Moreover, the fact that the paper's run came to an end in late 1646 reflected not so much an attempt by the Independents to undermine the Scottish alliance—Smith's run-ins with Parliament in 1646 involved its treatment of the French—as the fact that an Anglo-Scottish constituency of opinion (or public) proved difficult to sustain in the face of challenges to cross-border cooperation and state building that had been manifested in print.Footnote 91
The Scotish Dove thus neatly encapsulates what can be learned by rethinking the relationship between print culture and political borders in the early modern period. Rather than simply being exported from Scotland to England, printed texts were produced and distributed—both collaboratively and independently—by both English parliamentarians and Scottish Covenanters, and flowed in both directions. Examined closely, such texts reveal less the existence of discrete publics than the importance of overlapping and interlocking cultures in England and Scotland, and this provides a means of challenging historiographical claims about the importance of “British history” that rest on shaky assumptions about the interaction between separate polities and peoples, as well as unhelpful debates about the relative importance of Scottish Covenanters and English parliamentarians in forging the English revolution. Sensitivity to the practices and rhetoric of Anglo-Scottish print culture, in other words, reveals cross-border attempts to develop a joint agenda and a shared enterprise rather than the imposition of a Scottish agenda upon an English public sphere during some sort of “Scottish moment.”
More broadly, such evidence also reveals the symbiotic relationship between developments in public culture and the process of state formation. This makes it possible to think about Anglo-Scottish political cooperation and British state building as things that involved being responsive to and building upon the foundations provided by a nascent British constituency or public and to recognize that the development of something approaching a constitutional union between England and Scotland British made it vital to engage with a wider community of citizens. At the same time, focusing on the role of print culture in fostering, enlarging, and sustaining this kind of British public after 1642 also makes it clear that print and publicity inevitably became the means by which contemporary commentators navigated the tensions between Covenanters and parliamentarians, such that when Anglo-Scottish interests—a workable union—looked like giving way to national sentiments, powerful resistance emerged to both the legitimacy of using print as a cross-border device as well as to the cooperation that it was intended to promote. As such, exploring the connection between cross-border print culture and British state building makes it clear just how powerful the print medium had become as a means of intensifying contemporary debates, first in the process of fostering union and then as part of the process by which the union fractured.
Finally, this study demonstrates not only that cross-border cooperation in the realm of print culture was both possible and observable but also that it was difficult to sustain in the face of differences over substantive policies, institutional processes, and political style. In addition to tensions over church and state, therefore, English and Scottish “brethren” struggled to remain united around a common language and a shared political culture, and differing views about the role and utility of print culture ensured that pamphlets and newspapers became tools not just for reflecting and promoting collaboration but also for drawing attention to and exacerbating tensions, like those which emerged amid experimentation regarding institutional arrangements. As such, the print practices associated with a putative Anglo-Scottish public may actually have played a part in fueling the political tensions that eventually resulted in the Cromwellian “conquest” of Scotland (1650–1651). However, it might also be worth speculating whether the experience of the 1640s fostered habits of thought and practice about public politics that informed and enhanced cross-border cooperation, collaboration, and even conspiracy in the decades after the Restoration, when English Whigs and Scottish Covenanters once again had the opportunity to focus on what they had in common rather than on what divided them.
