“Managing Dutch Advices: Abraham Casteleyn and the English Government, 1660–211681343ya”, 2016-09-15 ():
This article examines late 17th-century news management through the lens of the [Dutch] Haarlem journalist, Abraham Casteleyn [married to Margaretha van Bancken]. Its aim is to challenge the idea that ‘foreign’ news was of minor importance in Restoration England, by examining how contemporaries responded to titles such as the Haarlem Courant, and to show that Dutch news was integral to domestic politics.
It examines the demand for Dutch news by English readers, Whig activists and government officials; explores the ways in which Casteleyn’s newspaper caused concern within the regime because of its potential to be exploited for nefarious political ends.
It explores how the Stuart regime responded by devising subtle methods for managing Dutch news.
[Not subtle enough: the Stuarts would fall 7 years later, in 1688, in the Glorious Revolution.]
[Keywords: early modern, news management, Anglo-Dutch relations, restoration, Abraham Casteleyn, print culture]
[Newspaper business] …although the Haarlem Courant [now the Haarlems Dagblad] was far from being the only Dutch newspaper in the decades after 1660, it was certainly pre-eminent, reflecting Casteleyn’s aim of producing something that was concise and far from comprehensive—it usually consisted of two quarto sides of tightly packed intelligence from across Europe—but that was well-informed and authoritative. Casteleyn explained that he sought to ‘write for special news from the most important towns in Europe’, even though this involved ‘some trouble and expense’, and he clearly sought to develop a widespread network for the exchange of information across Europe, not least involving powerful individuals.8 In 1677, for example, Casteleyn was supplying news to men such as Giovanni Salvetti, resident of the Duke of Tuscany in London, as well as to his colleague Carlo Antonio Gondi, in order that he might receive news from them in return.9 His value to such men lay in the quality of the news that he could supply, and in 1675 it was alleged that the diplomat Abraham de Wicquefort paid Casteleyn 1,000–1,200 guilders a year for intelligence, ‘supposing Casteleyn had as particular knowledge of the secretest affairs … as any whatsoever within this whole land’.10
[Spies/dissidents] More importantly, Casteleyn’s news was highly sought after among a much wider community within England. By the late 1670s those who sought to secure regular supplies of his newsletters included dissidents such as Dr Edward Richardson, and the Haarlem Courant was evidently being read fairly widely across London.11 Its information was incorporated into private correspondence, and it was also supplied to the proprietors of London’s coffeehouses. A report from August 1677, therefore, provided a list of customers who sought regular supplies of the ‘Harlemer’, including Mr Knight, Mr Booker, Mr Bruen, Mr Gurney, Mr Yorcke, Mr Roberts, Mr Garroway, Mr Chillenden, Mr Scott, Mr Wallington, Mr Mason and Mr Cotton, each of whom sought between one and8 copies of every issue that appeared.12 At least some of these men—such as Henry Wallington and Edmund Chillenden—are known to have been ‘coffeemen’, and indeed to have been on the regime’s radar, and the government was concerned not just about the association between coffeehouses and news, but also about the particular way in which such establishments became associated with Dutch gazettes and pamphlets. In 1673, for example, the earl of Arlington’s attention was drawn to Mrs Whitt’s coffeehouse, at the sign of the Dove in Threadneedle Street, as well as to the shop—appropriately called the Amsterdam Coffeehouse—which was run by Mr Kid in Bartholemew Lane, ‘who every post has the prints of Amsterdam’.13
What made such activity particularly troubling was that it involved dissidents who sought to circumvent the government monopoly on news. Edmund Chillenden, for example, who was accused of publishing ‘false news’, was a former associate of the Leveller, John Lilburne and an army agitator who had participated in the Putney debates in 1647.14 As such, there seems to have been a fairly clear link between reading Dutch gazettes such as the Haarlem Courant and attempts to disperse Whig news, both at home and abroad.15 Thus, in his account of the newsletter writers who were active in London in October 1683, William Cotton not only noted that some such individuals worked within the Post Office (Mr Sauteil and Mr Leeson), or were involved in the coffee trade (Mr Coombes and Mr Monckreive), but also that newsmongers such as Robinson, Pike and Bill wrote for, and sent letters to, an ‘abundance of coffeehouses’, both within London and beyond. He also noted that, in addition to preparing accounts of parliamentary and court news, such men reported on European affairs, and even that one Mr Blackhall served coffeehouses and private customers ’with the Haarlem Courant translated’.16 Indeed, by the early 1680s, Whig newspapers—of the kind that began to emerge after the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1679—were also using Casteleyn’s paper as one of their main sources. In May 1682, for example, the controversial Whig publisher, Richard Janeway, confessed that the editors of the Impartial Protestant Mercury—Thomas Vile and Henry Care—‘procured commonly the Latin Cologne news, the Haarlem Courant and the Brussels gazette’.17
What also became clear, however, was that English newsmen sought not just to capitalize on the Haarlem Courant, but also to develop a working relationship with Casteleyn. In December 1683, therefore, one anonymous Londoner who sought to set up a newsletter service, and who already had regular access to the Haarlem Courant, as well as to other gazettes from Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris, explained that he would ‘gladly correspond with Casteleyn’, and that he would willingly ‘leave off’ these other suppliers ‘if Casteleyn be punctual with me’. The aim was to develop an exchange of news, and to ‘give him every post what occurs here for what is foreign’, and this particular newsmonger added that ‘if he approves the proposal we will try for a month or more’. That this was a Whig venture, moreover, seems clear from the fact that mention was made of getting Dutch material from notorious booksellers in the United Provinces such as Mrs Swart and the widow Browning, as well as from the fact that the intention was to conduct correspondence with Casteleyn surreptitiously—using a cover address of Mr Stephen Jackson at the Grafton’s Head in Whitefriars—‘for I am abused at the post house’.18 Indeed, it is possible that the news writer in question was Giles Hancock, the most important intelligencer identified by Cotton, who had ‘great intelligence both from court and council’, who tended to get the best intelligence earliest, and who had ‘a great many customers’, each of whom paid £5 or £6 per year. Hancock, after all, already seems to have been involved in supplying Casteleyn with news from England.19
Finally, English fascination with Dutch news of the kind that Casteleyn supplied, as well as the association between Dutch news and English Whigs, resulted in attempts to print English translations of the Haarlem Courant and other Dutch gazettes.
[Leaks] …Such evidence reveals that Dutch news, and Casteleyn’s Haarlem Courant, lay at the heart of official concerns regarding Restoration news culture, most particularly in the years surrounding the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–31682342ya. Thus, while it is well known that Charles II’s government became increasingly worried about the rise of coffeehouses, the development of newsletter services and the emergence of unlicensed newspapers, and about the extent to which ‘the itch of news’ had become ‘a disease’, much less attention has been paid to the fact that Casteleyn’s news was central to such phenomena, and thus to the problem of news management.23
…the government showed real signs of being worried about Casteleyn’s newspaper (and others), not just in terms of the way in which it reported on European affairs, but also in terms of the stories that it printed about English political events.32 This can sometimes be seen from the existence within official archives of extracted passages from specific issues. In July 1667, for example, notes were made on issues 58 and 59 of the Rotterdam gazette, including a report from London that affairs were growing ‘worse and worse, so that … all will be in confusion’; that ‘they begin here to cry out for a commonwealth government’ and that ‘England was happier under Cromwell’.33 At other times, complaints about European newspapers were expressed to the Dutch ambassadors in England. In April 1671, for example, Johannes Boreel referred to a complaint made to him about a story from Rome which had appeared in Amsterdam’s French gazette, and which claimed that an ambassador was expected from England, ‘to acknowledge the supremacy of the papal chair’. On this occasion, Boreel—who advocated punishing ‘this freedom of writing’, and who seemed amazed that ‘gazetteers should be permitted to insert such extravagancies and illations’—noted that Casteleyn had written about the story ‘with more prudence’, and ‘without entering into particulars’.34 On other occasions, however, Boreel reflected that Casteleyn too was guilty of writing things ‘very ungrateful to princes’ ears’, and there is certainly evidence that Casteleyn was also criticised by English politicians and diplomats.35
…The problem raised by such stories was not just that Casteleyn’s own views might be problematic, but also that he was too obviously able to gain access to material that unsettled the English government. Sometimes this was thought to involve leaks from within the English government, and Downing repeatedly complained that newsletters he received from men such as Williamson appeared ‘word for word’ in Casteleyn’s gazette.38 Another troubling scenario, however, involved Casteleyn forging contacts with, and coming under the influence of, English Whigs. In December 1683, for example, Sir Roger L’Estrange expressed concern about the popularity of the ‘last paper’ (ie. scaffold speech) by the republican martyr, Algernon Sidney, noting not just that ‘abundance of manuscript copies of it are up and down the town’, but also that the text was reported to have appeared ‘at length’ in the Haarlem Courant.39 Indeed, in early 1678, the government claimed to have identified an extract from Casteleyn’s paper—reporting a ‘private order’ of the Privy Council to raise an army under the Duke of York—that was sent to him by Charles Vassaire and Giles Hancock, notorious Whigs who had contravened official orders for the suppression of coffeehouses and the suppression of illicit news mongering
…One way of managing Casteleyn involved complaining about his coverage, sometimes fairly directly. In the spring of 1681, therefore, consul William Carr explained that
I have been with Abraham Casteleyn who prints the Haarlem Courant, to let him know that if he continues printing such lies as he hath lately done of His Majesty’s affairs in England, that the States General will silence him if not get him punished.
[Double agents] …More intriguing, however, is evidence that Casteleyn too became an important supplier of intelligence for the English government. Indeed, within the extensive government archive of newsletters from the Low Countries, Casteleyn’s letters are amongst the most numerous. For example, in a volume covering 1667–1668356ya—a crucial year following the decisive Dutch raid on the Medway which brought an ignominious end to the second Anglo-Dutch war—there are no fewer than 119 (unsigned) letters to Williamson in Casteleyn’s distinctive hand, many of which have annotations naming him as the author.48 That Williamson took these letters very seriously is clear not just from the fact that they sometimes informed policy discussions, but also from the care taken to translate them, and on 35 of the letters 1667–1668356ya key passages have been added by Williamson’s clerks in English.49 What also emerges, moreover, is that Casteleyn’s often weekly letters, which were sometimes very brief—anywhere between a few lines and a single side of elegant and not very compressed handwriting—and which were very different from the richly descriptive commercial newsletters that were produced by Englishmen like Henry Muddiman, nevertheless contained extremely high-grade intelligence and comment. Casteleyn was able to offer Williamson material relating to debates and resolutions within the States General, diplomatic discussions and disputes between different provinces, based on ‘talk’ within the elite political circles to which Casteleyn had access.50 In other words, Williamson not only became one of those people to whom Casteleyn was prepared to send news, but also one of those sources from which English government newsletters were constructed, and this explains the similarity between Williamson’s official letters and the text of the Haarlem Courant. This relationship, in other words, involved an exchange of material, with Williamson seeking not just to receive useful intelligence but also the ability to influence the content of a Dutch gazette that was clearly integral to news management strategies in England.