In 1622, Joseph Mead wrote a letter to a gentleman named Sir Martin Stuteville. Within the letter he included “A letter from one of Spanish Garrison in Creusnach in the Palatinate,” and Mead himself commented that “I pray God this news be true as I hope it is.” At the end of the letter, its author signed himself “your faithful Novellante Joseph Mead.”Footnote ¹ By this signature as novellante (i.e., news writer), Joseph Mead boldly identified himself as a participant in the news revolution sweeping through early modern Europe; a country cousin of the hacks of Grub Street, though not for hire himself, he paid some hacks to send him news, and he read the writings of other hacks with an avid eye.Footnote ² Yet he was also firmly embedded in the traditional sociable networks that constituted gentle England, and his actions as a “faithful Novellante” themselves helped constitute those networks.Footnote ³ In his fused capacities as newsman and gentleman, he was a listener and a reader of news, a buyer and a giver of news, a writer of news and a conveyer of printed news, and a judger of the credibility of all these forms of news. In the trove of news letters sent from Joseph Mead to Sir Martin Stuteville between 1621 and 1631, we may examine in detail how these essentially traditional sociable networks formed and adapted to the news revolutions in early Stuart England.Footnote ⁴

This article examines Joseph Mead's news letters to show how he functioned as an individual news writer (or novellante) who dynamically adapted his sociable practices to incorporate the effects of the news revolutions of Elizabethan and early Stuart England. News had been given from one gentleman to another, either in conversation or in letters sent from a known correspondent to a known recipient; by the early seventeenth century, news was becoming, ever more frequently, an anonymous report bought from the vulgar printers and publishers of Grub Street, who wrote commercial manuscript news letters, printed news pamphlets, or (beginning about 1620) printed “corantos,” the immediate ancestors of the English newspaper. Formerly, news had been judged credible or incredible by the personal honor of the news writer, but, as news became anonymous, it was increasingly judged by details within the text or by the extensive reading of multiple items of news. These broader changes in early Stuart England are all visible in Joseph Mead's reading and writing, yet, although the nature of the news was transforming in ways that undercut the traditionally oral and personal assumptions of sociability, Mead's newswriting was flexible enough to incorporate the transformed news within the norms of sociability.

This article also explores the implications Mead's sociable newswriting has for Habermasian public sphere theory.Footnote ⁵ Several scholars have argued cogently that, contrary to Habermas's chronology dating the birth of the English public sphere to the end of the seventeenth century, an English public sphere—defined as much by oral, ritual, and manuscript communication as by communication in print—began to emerge between late Elizabethan times and the British Civil Wars.Footnote ⁶ Mead's practice not only corroborates that chronology but significantly complicates our understanding of how the public sphere emerged. Mead's newswriting, in which private sociability persistently conveyed ever more public news, indicates and exemplifies a transitional stage in the evolution of the English public sphere that Habermas did not describe. Furthermore, Mead's practice, marked by active and extensive news reading, also illuminates for us a world of “gentle opinion,” similarly transitional, that preceded the world of “public opinion” described by Habermas. Habermas notes that in England “public opinion” evolved from “public spirit”; in Mead's sociable novellantizing, itself strongly infused by the ideals of public-spiritedness, we find the halfway house between the two.Footnote ⁷

Joseph Mead, of course, cannot be taken as typical of England as a whole. Mead belonged to a select group of seventeenth-century news junkies, which included such men as John Chamberlain, Thomas Crosfield, Simonds D’Ewes, John Rous, William Whiteway, and Walter Yonge, whose participation in the news circuits was undoubtedly far greater than either the average Englishman's or the average English gentleman’s.Footnote ⁸ Mead himself, as a Cambridge don, was at the center of sociable networks of national (and even international) scope and therefore extraordinarily well favored with opportunities to combine sociability and newsmongering. The intensity of Mead's sociable news gathering was certainly rare, possibly unique.

That said, many aspects of Mead's biography are similar to those of his news-gathering peers. What was the profile of a typical news writer in early Stuart England? Most, with rare exceptions such as Ladies Judith and Joan Barrington, were male. Socially, they ranged from the lower peerage to the lower gentry, including past and future noblemen and MPs such as the Barringtons, Simonds D’Ewes, Walter Yonge, or Dudley Carleton; members of the urban patriciate such as William Whiteway; clergymen such as Thomas Crosfield and John Rous; a leisurely gentleman such as Joseph Chamberlain; and those decayed gentlemen working as intelligencers in London, John Pory and Thomas Gainsford. Many of Mead's newswriting peers possessed beliefs within the spectrum of attitudes variously denominated as hot Protestantism, antipopery, godliness, or Puritanism, although Crosfield, Chamberlain, and Rous did not. Indeed, to be interested in news of foreign wars throughout the 1620s and early 1630s, as so many news writers so passionately were, was itself usually a mark of Puritan sympathies, as it was English Puritans in particular during those decades who sympathized with and interested themselves in the fates of Reformed believers and polities throughout the continent, which were nerve-rackingly dependent during the Thirty Years' War upon the fortunes of each battle and siege. Geographically, most of Mead's newswriting peers resided at a certain distance from London—during the 1620s and early 1630s, the Barringtons lived in Essex, Crosfield in Oxford and Cambridge, Rous in Suffolk, Whiteway in Dorchester, and Yonge in Devon. To some extent, this indicates that such gentle newswriting was a “country” activity; this also reflects the fact that news in London could be passed on orally with greater ease and hence was less likely to be written down and to survive than was news communication in the country.Footnote ⁹

Joseph Mead himself (1586–1638) was born into a gentle family in Essex. A member of the clerical world, he spent much of his adult life as a fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, where he was a lecturer in Greek. He was a man of wide knowledge, with particular interest in the Apocalypse, and on terms of friendly acquaintance with men such as Lancelot Andrewes, Samuel Hartlib, and William Chappell. Religiously, Mead was sufficiently Puritan in his sympathies that he was passed over several times before receiving a Cambridge fellowship in 1613, but he was sufficiently moderate and conforming that he had no later difficulties with Archbishop Laud's efforts to enforce church discipline. In sum, Joseph Mead was a country gentleman of mildly Puritan views with a keen interest in foreign wars and thus fairly typical of the news writers we know of in early Stuart England.Footnote ¹⁰

This article focuses on Mead's treatment of items of foreign military news: Mead, reading, writing, and judging the credibility of foreign military news, acted almost purely in his capacity as a novellante. In early Stuart England, it was possible to some extent for Englishmen to verify by extratextual means most categories of news—the dying speeches of murderers, floods, two-headed babies, and so on—either by talking with witnesses or by comparing the reported events to similar events in their own experience. In the case of military news, however, this process of personal verification could not operate normally. There was no war in England itself in this decade, and, however difficult it was for a Kentishman to verify news from Yorkshire, it was exponentially more difficult for any Englishman to verify news of a battle in Flanders—much less a battle in the Palatinate, or Mantua, or Poland. Military news, uniquely nonverifiable by extratextual means, highlights the forces revolutionizing news readers such as Joseph Mead in early Stuart England.

Joseph Mead acquired news from the marts of London and passed it further on into the country. He seems to have paid John Pory and Samuel Hartlib, among others, for commercial manuscript news letters, and he wrote a weekly news letter in turn for Sir Martin Stuteville of Dalham, Suffolk (1569–1631), from 1621 until about the time of Stuteville's death.Footnote ¹¹ Mead and Stuteville were also friends, and Mead spent a fair bit of time visiting at Dalham during those eleven years.Footnote ¹² The tone of Mead's letters is somewhat deferential; the fact that Mead was seventeen years Stuteville's junior largely explains this tone, but it also indicates some disparity in their social statuses. Mead's newswriting must be understood, in part, as a service done for a social superior; Stuteville was both a friend and a patron to Mead.Footnote ¹³

Mead performed a service for Stuteville by his newswriting, but it is crucial to note that he did so as a “courtesy,” as a matter of pleasure rather than of business. So in November 1630, Mead wrote of the sociability that lay behind his letters to Stuteville: “It is somewhat tedious methinks, when others importune me to this kind of courtesy [writing news], but to your self it is a recreation, and at this time a disburdening of a [x] of melancholy.”Footnote ¹⁴ Here, as elsewhere, sociable exchange remained the preferred manner for gentlemen such as Mead and Stuteville to order their lives. Goods and services were not meant to be bought and sold between strangers but to be given in exchange among kin and friends, and within the patronage networks formed around these bonds. Wherever possible, commerce among men was cast as the exchanges of friends and cemented by accompanying social courtesies. Sociability, as a means of structuring gift exchange, underpinned much of the economics and society of early modern England.Footnote ¹⁵

Most groups in English society valued sociability, but it was particularly valued by the English gentle classes. This was because the gentle classes’ exercise of sociability was bound up with conceptions of honor. Gentlemen's mutually recognized honor helped constitute both their communal identity and their justification of their rule over England; to engage in similarly mutual sociability with other members of the gentle class confirmed one's membership in the honorable ruling class. To engage in commerce or (significantly for the news) to have one's words appear in print was to endanger that membership. There was a distinct political charge to the gentle classes’ desire to keep their newswriting within sociable bounds.Footnote ¹⁶

At the same time, and very much because of its political connotations, gentle sociability still operated mostly in the private realm. To act in public constituted an (at least implicit) challenge to monarchical sovereignty, and so gentle sociability still operated away from public forums (away from the “public sphere,” to use Habermas's terminology). Hospitality and gift exchange ideally took place in private locations, among private subjects, not in public, and without a public charge. Taverns and fairs, among other places, did associate sociability and publicity with the news, but they were not the dominant institutions of news sociability that coffeehouses would become in Restoration and Augustan England. Letters such as Mead’s, precisely because they were private, remained a preferred means by which to exchange news sociably.Footnote ¹⁷

And, indeed, in Mead's writings we can see that news itself could be perceived as a gift of information, meant to be exchanged either for different information or for other gifts.Footnote ¹⁸ He repeatedly evokes the sociability of his news reading and newswriting and the role of gift exchange in these processes. In February 1621, Mead wrote that “a friend of mine one of the clergy in the city whom I had lately begun to employ for the getting of the Cologne Coranto … writes to me as followeth.”Footnote ¹⁹ In February 1622, he wrote that “I hope, the Palatine is well, though one or two asked me suspiciously if I heard nothing and because I had not they would not tell anything.”Footnote ²⁰ When Mead passed on news, he asked in a friendly way for the return of some of his materials: in April 1622, when he sent Stuteville the Latin original and an English translation of a letter by the emperor (Ferdinand II), he asked to have the Latin copy returned “if you have not much use of it.”Footnote ²¹ In the same letter, Mead told Stuteville that “I send you diverse books and corantos looking for to have none again but Count Mansfelds Apology.”Footnote ²² Some years later, in November 1629, Mead passed on an account of the surprising of Wesel, with the sociable circumstances that had accompanied it: he had heard the news “on Tuesday at night [when] I supped at Dr Wards with Gerardus Vossius a professor in the Low Countries whom his majesty for his merits hath made a prebend of Canterbury.”Footnote ²³ For Mead, news and sociability were fused.

Sociability, which depended so much on personal presence, also reinforced the predominantly oral nature of the news. Mead wrote his news to Stuteville; but, despite the inroads of writing and print, both in news and in English culture at large, Mead and Stuteville lived in a world where news was, in the first instance, oral. Oral news in all its forms still thrived, and it strongly conditioned the contexts in which written and printed news were produced and read.Footnote ²⁴ A chain of communication from mouth to ear, mouth to ear, could stretch across Europe; so in December 1625 Mead reported as news that “a German gentleman, and friend of mine, tells me, from the mouth of the prince palatine's resident secretary, that St. Lucar's is taken.”Footnote ²⁵ Likewise, in May 1621, he reported that “An hour since, A gentleman my old friend was with me, who landed but yesternight from the Hague, and saith that a week ago a messenger came to the King from Silesia with news.”Footnote ²⁶ In October 1625, Mead wrote, “The Swede slew of the Polacs, in Liveland, as Dr. Weemes tells me, from his ambassador's (Sir James Spenser, a Scottishman born) own mouth, 17,000.”Footnote ²⁷ In April 1626, Joseph Mead received more foreign military news by word of mouth: “Some Dutchmen come from the Hague told us here this week, that he [Count Mansfield] had taken in the Principalitie of Anholt.”Footnote ²⁸ In October 1626, Mead wrote that “I hear again of the King of Denmarks second encounter by such as come from Lynne where they report he went off with the better.”Footnote ²⁹ When Mead did pass on reports of written news, they often came embedded within an oral context. In February 1621, Mead transcribed the report of one of his London correspondents that there was “no Coranto from Cullen; but the old gentlemen to whom they used to be written saw a letter from Cullen and heard of some others written from Prague and Vienna to this purpose. That Silesia was not revolted; but that Bucghoy coming to defend the revolted in Moravia, was encountered by Bethlem Gabor so fiercely, that he lost 6000 men.”Footnote ³⁰ Later that month, Mead transcribed the report of another of his London correspondents, who wrote that his news came “from one John Warrom at Lipsich, Factor to Mr Wadson. … As near as I can I will set it down word for word, as I heard it and am assured it is written.”Footnote ³¹

Even the language of news was inescapably oral. Mead put it to Stuteville in November 1625 that the (incorrect) report “that our fleet hath taken Cadiz, with the loss of 400 men” was “the news talked this week at London.”Footnote ³² Such talk, such oral news, was generally given sociably by one known man to another. Mead not only gave news to Stuteville but informed Stuteville that a chain of similar gifts, ideally oral and face-to-face, lay behind his own news. By such means he attempted to preserve the sociability of the news.

Furthermore, Mead's judgment of the credibility of the news he read and passed on depended on a judgment that it was sufficiently oral, sufficiently personal—sufficiently embedded in a sociable context.Footnote ³³ In May 1622, Mead thought news of a victory in the Palatinate in May 1622 more likely because “Mr Hurst says he heard Dr Meddus tell it in the open street for joy: for he supped that night at one of the Doctors neighbors who was also come from Exchange and had seen the letters.”Footnote ³⁴ Where oral communication was not possible, Mead preferred the fewest possible intermediary links to the original source and an eyewitness account wherever possible.Footnote ³⁵ In April 1628, Mead wrote to Stuteville, “Though our letters on Saturday last contained some German news; yet having the original of a letter written from Hambrough of date March 22, I will rather transcribe it.”Footnote ³⁶ In September 1629, Mead wrote to Stuteville that “though the taking of Wesell be stale news yet having seen the copy of a letter from Mr Dineley Tutor to the Prince Palatine now eldest son to Sir H Wotton thereabout; I will exscribe his relation of the manner thereof, though the letter be of an old date.”Footnote ³⁷ In September 1626, Mead took care to mention to Stuteville that he was not himself an eyewitness to the letters reporting Tilly's defeat of Christian IV: “The ill news of the King of Denmarks overthrow partly intimated partly expressed in the enclosed (but then scarce believed) is mightily increased this week at the Fair. Their letters I have not seen nor how this agrees with the former report, or whether that were wholly talk, or whether, if true, this ill success hath fallen out since, I know not.”Footnote ³⁸ Mead's relatively positive analysis of Ré in December 1627 was based on the separate he had just transmitted, “a particular Relation of our Defeat at Re by an eyewitness.”Footnote ³⁹ Mead established his credibility as a novellante for Stuteville by frequent reiteration of the oral and sociable nature of the news he conveyed.

But of course the news of Mead's day was not solely oral and sociable but, as so much else in early modern England, increasingly a thing to be sold between buyer and seller rather than exchanged as a gift among friends.Footnote ⁴⁰ Mead, as a novellante, had to acknowledge that an increasing amount of the news he forwarded to Stuteville sociably had not itself been acquired sociably. Mead himself was an interface between commercial and sociable news, for he subscribed to and paid for John Pory's manuscript news service, then transcribed Pory's news to send on sociably to Stuteville. Every such transcription both subverted the sociable nature of his news and reinscribed within the norms of sociability the commercial news Mead had acquired; the two effects are inseparable. Beyond this, Mead also explicitly registered within his newswritings the increasingly commercial sources of his news. In June 1625, Mead wrote that “on Wednesday were 18 letters upon the Exchange that Breda was surrendered,” and in September 1626 Mead told Stuteville that news of Tilly's defeat of Christian IV of Denmark was “mightily increased this week at the Faire.”Footnote ⁴¹ Commerce mixed oddly with sociability in Mead's own news-gathering activities. In March 1623, Mead commented that he had to buy news from his usual vendors regularly, regardless of his personal interest, so as to be sure of getting a continual supply: “I sent you a Coranto but it is nothing but an old repetition of the Holland conspiracy. But because I am a customer I must refuse nothing they send me.”Footnote ⁴² Mead, sending on to Stuteville the commercial information he had received, or the purchased coranto itself, unavoidably inflected his own sociable activity as a novellante with a commercial strain.

Furthermore, Mead participated in the transformation of the news from sociable news sent from a known writer to a known reader to impersonal news sent from an anonymous writer to an unknown reader. This process was strongly associated with the commercialization of news, but it was not identical; it was to some extent an unavoidable consequence of the shift in emphasis from oral news to written news in early modern England, which by its nature allowed an unknown writer to address an unknown audience.Footnote ⁴³ So, while Mead himself was of course personally known to Stuteville, he transcribed news for Stuteville provided by other novellantes of increasing degrees of anonymity. Sometimes he specifically identified his sources—names he mentioned to Stuteville include Isaac Barrow, John Warrom, and Gerardus Vossius.Footnote ⁴⁴ In February 1623, however, Mead wrote to Stuteville both the name of one of his informants and the request that this informant be kept anonymous to anyone beyond Stuteville in the news circuits: “I must desire you always to conceal Mr Boswell's name from others, though I give you a note whereby you may know it yourself. For he often admonishes me, that when I write news, I should not say it was his; and if you should tell it, he might quickly hear of it in Suffolk.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In this circumstance, Stuteville could not himself act as a sociable news writer; were he to spread Mead's news further, it could only be with the unsociable attribution of “anonymous.” The limitations on Stuteville's ability to become a sociable news writer were even greater as regards Mead's London correspondents; very often they are not named in Mead's transcriptions, and (so far as the textual evidence goes) they would be necessarily anonymous to Stuteville.

Other elements of the news Mead transmitted sociably to Stuteville were by authors unknown even to Mead. His London correspondents included a great many reports of news from anonymous informants. Mead himself transcribed many anonymous separates—among others, “A Relation of the manner of the loss of Prague by an English Gentleman there and then present Dated November 21 stylo veteri. 1620,” “A letter from one of Spanish Garrison in Creusnach in the Palatinate,” “A Copy of a letter sent from beyond sea containing a true Relation of the Battle between the King of Denmark and Tilly, &c.,” “A Relation of the manner of the defeat of our men in the Isle of Ree. 1627,” and “A Relation of the surprise of Wesell.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Coranto news was, almost universally, anonymous.Footnote ⁴⁷ Mead's sociable newswriting was as unavoidably inflected with anonymity as it was with commerciality.

So far as the coranto news goes, we have some evidence that Mead was not entirely comfortable with the anonymity inherent to the genre and that he tried to personify the corantos. If we look at the details of language, it is significant that in September 1621 Mead wrote of “my Corrantoer Archer” and that in May 1622 he referred to the coranto Mercurius Gallobelgicus as “he.” Yet in October 1629 he referred to a coranto as “he” and “it” in turn, crossing each out, and finally left the sentence without a pronoun.Footnote ⁴⁸ Mead clearly remained uncertain as to exactly how personified the news should be, and how much the news could be separated from the news writer, but the drift of his pronouns was toward the recognition of impersonal, defamiliarized news. In effect, they registered the parallel drift of his actions as a sociable news writer toward the incorporation of anonymous, asociable news.

The anonymization of the news also correlated strongly with a shift in the medium of the news; news was increasingly becoming a thing of writing. This is in some sense obvious; Mead, after all, was writing to Stuteville rather than speaking with him. To be sure, his writing was often meant as a substitute for conversation, drawing upon oral communication for its fundamental credibility. However, Mead's newswriting became progressively shorn of its oral roots. A large amount of the material Mead passed on was copies of letters, and copies of copies of letters: news read and never heard. Not only did Mead pass on numerous copies of anonymous, written news (see above); he also began to refer to his sources not as people, but as letters. In April 1628, Mead ascribed his German news to “our letters on Saturday”; and in December 1630 Mead wrote that “the last week, our merchants letters reported the great fight between the Imperialists and the King of Sweden.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Mead himself emphasized that he was a writer of news: in November 1630 he wrote to Stuteville that “I took my pen on Saturday [x] to write according to my custom unto Dalham. Such is the force of so long a continued course, which is almost become another nature in me.”Footnote ⁵⁰ When he chose a medium other than writing, it required explanation. In February 1630, he wrote that “being scared with the look of what I had to write if I should transcribe all I had to send: I chose rather to save a labor by sending you the originals.”Footnote ⁵¹ Mead continued to write sociable news even as his newswriting revealed a drastic attenuation in the presumption of oral communication that had originally underpinned sociable news.

Indeed, Mead attempted to incorporate printed news into his sociable newswriting, although printed news was almost by definition anonymous, unsociable, and commercial.Footnote ⁵² But since printed news did depart from all the canons of sociable news, for Mead to include printed news in his newswriting, whether news pamphlets or corantos, was an inherently problematic activity. Consequently, Mead displayed in his newswritings significant doubt about the reliability of printed news. In January 1626, Mead wrote that “for the taking of Tilly, it was Coranto news and not seconded by our letters and therefore I wrote it not. I send you a later Coranto which will inform you as much as I know of that business.”Footnote ⁵³ In September 1626, Mead transcribed his London correspondent's happy contradiction of the coranto news: “Tilly is not besieged in Gottingen as the Corantier would persuade us. But thanks be to God that King (Denmark) is Master of the field and that is generally believed.”Footnote ⁵⁴ In September 1627, Mead wrote to Stuteville, “I have no more yet but the enclosed: which I have corrected or enlarged out of a new Coranto of September 26 which I saw yesterday.”Footnote ⁵⁵ By correcting or enlarging the corantos, Mead expressed doubts about their credibility. By articulating these doubts to Stuteville, Mead distinguished the printed news he included from his own, more purely sociable news and thereby reaffirmed his own news’ superior reliability.

Alongside such doubts, Mead displayed increasing familiarity with printed news and increasing confidence in his ability to incorporate printed news into his own writing. It should be emphasized here that Mead assimilated corantos into his sociable newswriting with remarkable speed. While printed news pamphlets had existed in England for more than a century and had been increasingly common since the late sixteenth century, corantos had appeared in England only in 1619. Yet within a few years, Mead began to transcribe printed corantos for Stuteville, just as he transcribed letters of news.Footnote ⁵⁶ Mead also inserted entire corantos into his letters to Stuteville. Six of these enclosed corantos still survive in Stuteville's collection of Mead's newsletters.Footnote ⁵⁷ Mead mentioned this practice frequently—in April 1623 Mead announced that he was enclosing to Stuteville “Coranto Number 25,” and in February 1630 he wrote that he was sending Stuteville “a Coranto, of the most material advisos that I have seen many a day, and containing whatsoever we had in any other of our letters concerning foreign affairs.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Mead's incorporation of printed news into his newswritings could lead quite literally to mixed media; in June 1622, Mead wrote that “I send you now what last Saturday afforded the written news is sewed into the books which you shall herewith receive.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Again in October 1622, he wrote that “the news we had since my last, you shall find in the book I send and leaves sewed in the end thereof.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Furthermore, Mead was sufficiently familiar with the corantos, and sufficiently confident of Stuteville's familiarity with them, that he wrote casually about details such as their enumeration: in January 1623, Mead wrote that “I spoke with one or two that had read the last coranto-book Number 12, but could not see it,” while in November 1627 he relayed to Stuteville “Out of the Coranto November 13” that “Tilly (though with some loss) hath taken Rensberg in Dishmarse and goes on finding no great resistance; the Danes being busy to fortify their Islands.”Footnote ⁶¹ Mead also read different foreign corantos and confidently compared their virtues: in February 1621, Mead described the one from Cologne as “not so continual yet better” than the one from the Hague.Footnote ⁶² The above examples severally indicate Mead's success in assimilating printed news into his sociable newswriting.

Mead was sometimes dismissive of the corantos and their credibility, sometimes casually indifferent as to whether a source of news was oral, written, or printed, and sometimes ascribed an absolute and distinct credibility to the corantos. All these reactions overlapped with one another, essentially simultaneously.Footnote ⁶³ As early as February 1621, Mead wrote indifferently of oral, written, and printed news: “The last week D. M. wrote not, neither received I any coranto nor hear of any man that had news.”Footnote ⁶⁴ By February 1626, Mead seemed to have no doubts as to the reliability of the corantos: “For other news such as we had of Germany or France you shall find all in the Coranto I send you.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Likewise, in October 1626, he wrote that “the new Coranto of October 11 which I have seen tells us in diverse letters of a great victory obtained by the Austrian Husbandmen against the Imperialist or Bavarians upon the 19 and 20 of the last month.”Footnote ⁶⁶ In the same letter, he explicitly described the corantos in credible terms: “All this I have from the Coranto and according to the modestest relations.”Footnote ⁶⁷ In November 1627, without comment, Mead wrote to Stuteville “Out of the Coranto November 13” that “Tilly (though with some loss) hath taken Rensberg in Dishmarse and goes on finding no great resistance; the Danes being busy to fortify their Islands.”Footnote ⁶⁸ In February 1630, he wrote that he was sending Stuteville, “a Coranto, of the most material advisos that I have seen many a day, and containing whatsoever we had in any other of our letters concerning foreign affairs.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Mead's practice of sociable newswriting, therefore, was flexible enough that it came fairly rapidly to include printed news. This adaptation was not so supple that the change came without comment or discomfort on Mead's part, but the change did come.

But such an incorporation implied certain consequences. To include written and printed news also meant that Mead had to change the standard of credibility by which he had previously judged the news. The standards of personal knowledge and eyewitness had been formed around the conventions of oral news; they were unfitted for the essentially anonymous character of written news and printed news, which relied upon the intermediation of pen and printing press to bring the event to the reader. Crucially, Mead began to read the news by different standards of credibility, adapted to an age of writing and print. To begin with, Mead began to regard personal knowledge and eyewitness with a skeptical eye, examining such accounts for bias and inaccuracy rather than taking them as guarantors of credibility. In October 1626, he noted that a report of a battle won by the king of Denmark was “Holland news,” with the implication that it was likely to be biased in favor of the Protestant cause.Footnote ⁷⁰ In December 1627, Mead wrote to Stuteville that “I send you now in the enclosed as much as our intelligence will acquaint us with concerning the manner of the disaster at Ree. I doubt that some of our Novellantes have either some interest in the honor who are said to have done foully or dare not relate what they know. For we have had 2. weeks letters from some of them, and yet not a word of the cause or the manner of this shameful overthrow, though we desired it.”Footnote ⁷¹ Mead came instead to make his judgments as to the veracity of the news more by an examination of the text of the news reports. In September 1626, Mead analyzed a rumor that Flushing was surprised and Sluys besieged and determined that it was unlikely to be entirely true by means of a textual analysis: “by the manner of their relation they should seem to be mistaken in both; but some thing it is like there is, which we shall understand today.”Footnote ⁷² In 1627, Mead transcribed a report by his London correspondent, who, by an extended examination of the details of the conflicting reports about the retreat from Ré, had extracted what he judged to be the truth. The correspondent doubted the “report very general, that at the last defeat there was not above a 3 or 400. slain.” He then logically inferred that “whereas a man would think by the great number of commanders slain and taken prisoner, there should have miscarried 3. 4. or 5 thousand seeing almost all the officers of 5 Regiments were taken or slain; and there is a talk but of 2000 or not many more of the Landmen returned.”Footnote ⁷³ Several days later, Mead was still looking for sufficient details to make his own judgment: “I can yet hear nothing to purpose of the manner of this disaster.”Footnote ⁷⁴ His first concern was to find many detailed sources of news rather than to seek out one particularly honorable news writer. The text had assumed primary importance in Mead's judgment of credibility.

Indeed, Mead even began to make his judgment of the news not only by the intensive analysis of a single text but also by the practice of extensive news reading, whereby a news reader examined numerous essentially partisan and flawed reports, compared and judged them against each other, and so came up with his own judgment of the actual, credible truth from his flawed sources. In February 1621, Mead forwarded a report from Bohemia of the Battle of the White Mountain; the victory of the Catholic Hapsburgs over the Protestant rebels was so overwhelming that it made Mead suspect that sorcery was needed to explain it. The Catholic victory could “hardly be imputed to any other means but sorcery and witchcraft. I am almost persuaded they consulted with the oracle of the bottomless pit.” The proof he adduced and provided, however, came from the examination of a different text entirely, from a different country: “for the probability of which suspicion, I call to mind what Mr Boswell sent me in a paper of printed news from Paris July 26 though it came late to my hands which I will escribe verbatim as it is in the French.”Footnote ⁷⁵ In June 1625, Mead avouched the news that Breda had surrendered to the Spanish army by referring to “18 letters upon the Exchange.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Mead, in these revolutionary moments, had become a modern news reader.Footnote ⁷⁷

This change to a standard of extensive credibility also had important effects upon the ethics of news reading. Traditional news reading and newswriting had been bound up not only with gentle sociability, honor, and social status but also with a tradition of public-spiritedness. News was written to worthy recipients and meant to be worthy of them.Footnote ⁷⁸ More broadly, gentlemen were supposed to possess (and the vulgar to lack) perceptual competence: the ability to assess evidence with sense, intelligence, and reason.Footnote ⁷⁹ The news reader was supposed to have, essentially, a form of Stoic virtue. English Neostoicism sought to inculcate public-spiritedness, steadiness, fortitude, calm and persevering service for the commonwealth, so as make a person a good citizen of the English (monarchical) republic. These ideals align remarkably well with the assumptions of sociable, public-spirited news reading, and I judge it very likely that in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries Neostoicism had an influence upon the practice of news reading.Footnote ⁸⁰ Practicing constancy and refraining from emotion in pursuit of virtuous goals, the properly Stoic news reader would not be too easily moved by rumor, would wait for multiple reports to come in, judge them slowly and steadily, and transmit news only if he believed that public knowledge of it would benefit the commonwealth. Bad news would be acknowledged only privately, whether to one's own soul or to other men capable of self-control, who could withstand news of defeat without despairing. Self-controlled reason was meant to overcome the passions; self-controlled news reading and newswriting were likewise meant to be an exercise in reason that controlled both one's own passionate reading and the passionate reading of others.Footnote ⁸¹

Mead frequently showed himself to be traditionally public-spirited in his practice. In May 1621, he related that “Dr Meddus his letter to Dr Chadderton the last week contained something not fit to be made common. Whereupon I was content to be partaker of so much as he pleased to read unto me not inquisitive into the rest.”Footnote ⁸² Mead was also careful about what he sent to Stuteville: in February 1630, he forwarded one of John Pory's newsletters “gelded, where I thought fitting, since it was to go out of mine own hands.”Footnote ⁸³ Reading slowly and carefully, and eager to believe the best, Mead was careful not to believe dismal reports unreservedly. In April 1621, he wrote that the news of Silesia surrendering to the emperor “is otherwise confirmed as most true.” He noted that the revolt against Bethlen Gabor in Hungary “is also believed, at least in part,” but the treasonable surrender of some Bohemian towns “some deny.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Mead was at times an imperfect Stoic in his novellantizing, and he occasionally surrendered himself to emotion and despair. In April 1621, he finished his report to Stuteville with a most unhopeful prayer: “God send us a good year, though my heart misgives me this is not the worst.”Footnote ⁸⁵ In July 1622, Mead described the previous three weeks as “wholly spent either in manifest disasters or fears of as bad to ensue.”Footnote ⁸⁶ In September 1627, he passed on to Stuteville his London correspondent's remarkably detailed fears that, given a few more Protestant reverses on the continent, “it is probable that Spinola out of Flanders may attempt Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex. The French King, Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, Dorsetshire, and Somersetshire: The Spaniard Devonshire and Cornwall.”Footnote ⁸⁷ But on the whole, Mead kept to the public-spirited tradition of self-controlled reading.

Yet the principles of extensive news reading cut directly against this ethic. As credibility began to derive from the accumulation of multiple accounts, any interference in the accumulation of news impinged upon its credibility; a novellante's public-spirited practice of regulating the transmission of news for the public good found itself at increasing cross-purposes with a system of credibility that required unregulated news transmission. Mead's style of sociable newswriting, however, allowed for a transformation of public-spiritedness to fit the norms of extensive credibility and extensive news reading. After all, where news was written sociably, from one gentleman to another, each gentleman was assumed to have the judgment both to discern credibility himself and to know whether to check the further transmission of the news. Mead could shift toward an extensive reading of presumptively biased, anonymous sources—but by deferring these judgments to Stuteville, he incorporated a radically new form of reading within the preserved norms of gentlemanly sociability and public-spiritedness.

So, in February 1621, Mead was willing to pass on his London correspondent's “rumor in London,” which he noted was “too good to be true yet I have heard it reported, but fear to believe it. For they say that the garrisons of Pilsen conspired with the citizens of Prague to massacre the Emperors soldiers therein, and so themselves being entered, to defend them from foreign attempts.”Footnote ⁸⁸ The correspondent had been careful to identify it as rumor, specifically disavowed his own belief in it, yet hoped it would be true and passed it on to be judged by Mead himself. Mead, by repeating his words, gave Stuteville the same option. In October 1622, Mead wrote the following marvelous study in ambivalence about rumor: “I care not to add any more upon report because I find them commonly corrupted in the telling. Yet Dr Chad. told me on Thursday that he heard by one that came from Court …”Footnote ⁸⁹ Even what was acknowledged to be the most unlikely news got passed on for Stuteville's own judgment: in September 1626, Mead transcribed his London correspondent's report that “Mansfeild and Bethlem are met as I am absurdly told.”Footnote ⁹⁰ When in January 1627 Mead passed on to Stuteville the report of another of his London correspondents that the Danish king was hard-pressed by Tilly, “as I heard it from a Scottish Gentleman come from that King to levy 3000 Scotes more with all possible speed,” Mead added, “I suppose the Scottish gentleman who tells it doth somewhat hyperbolize, the better to further his business at court for a supply from hence, which he comes for.”Footnote ⁹¹ He still forwarded the original letter so that Stuteville might judge for himself. Mead himself wrote to Stuteville “Out of these relations of persons (as you can see) differently affected I leave you to gather or guess as you shall see most likelihood. For we know not here whom to believe.”Footnote ⁹² Mead, at any rate, did not presume to tell Stuteville what he believed or to check the extensive processes by which Stuteville gained sufficient information to make his own decisions. Mead had deferred to Chadderton's public-spirited silencing of the news; now he deferred to Stuteville's need to read the news extensively. Extensive news transmission could still be accommodated and regulated within a new form of collective gentlemanly judgment. Writing and print, anonymity and extensive reading, might severally undermine the assumptions of sociable news, but, at least for the duration of Mead's decade-long correspondence with Stuteville, shared judgment and shared editorial capacity allowed their traditionally sociable newswriting and sociable news reading to assimilate the radical innovations implicit in the news revolutions.

Joseph Mead's writings reveal, alongside the continued assumptions and practices of oral and personal news, a largely successful incorporation of anonymous, commercial, and written or printed news into his activities as a novellante. Even Joseph Mead's ways of reading the news and judging its credibility stretched from a simple judgment of the honor of a known news writer to include an extensive reading of multiple texts by unknown, presumptively dishonorable news writers. Yet Joseph Mead's sociable newswriting had sufficient resources to accommodate these quite dramatic changes the news revolution brought to early Stuart England—at least for the length of his career as a novellante. Mead's practice was a strange amalgam of the old and the new: complex, in some ways self-contradictory, and sometimes displaying symptoms of strain but overall conducted with considerable success. This is an achievement worthy of note, for it illustrates the strength of the intertwining of sociability and the news in early modern England.

Mead's achievement has considerable implications for the larger history of sociability. His swift incorporation of corantos into his sociable news and equally swift shift in his method of reading show that early modern English sociability could adapt to changed circumstances within a very few years. This conclusion points both to a need to study not only the fine-grained changes of sociability within short periods of time but also the dynamic nature of sociability that allowed such swift changes to occur. It also indicates that these changes in sociability generated further changes in areas of English life ranging (at least) from the reception of the news revolution to changing standards of credibility.

The facility with which Mead used a traditional, private sociability to communicate newer forms of news significantly modifies Habermasian theory. Habermas describes a radical opposition between the private authority of the nobleman and the public sociability of the coffeehouse, narrates a swift transformation from one stage to the other, and defines such public sociability as a prerequisite for the public sphere.Footnote ⁹³ But just as Habermas does not seem entirely aware of the social category of the English gentleman, neither strictly noble nor strictly bourgeois, so he does not seem entirely aware that a Joseph Mead could incorporate public, commercial news into a traditional and private genre of sociability, itself neither strictly noble nor strictly bourgeois in character but, rather, as gentle as Joseph Mead.

Indeed, Mead's practice may also indicate that public forms of sociability such as the coffeehouse were neither prerequisite for nor central to the English public sphere. Mead's communication of news by means of gentle sociability helped constitute the public sphere of early Stuart England, when there were no coffeehouses, and we may presume that latter-day Meads continued to help constitute the public sphere by means of gentle sociability in late Stuart, Augustan, and Hanoverian England. Their roles were perhaps diminished in relative importance but were not insignificant. Indeed, private, gentle sociability may have been as characteristic a means as the coffeehouse of communicating news and constituting an English public sphere at least as much gentle as bourgeois until far into the eighteenth century, or beyond, and not just in its formative stages. If this claim is too broad, we may state safely that Mead's practice shows that, pace Habermas, public forms of sociability such as the coffeehouse were a response to the news revolutions but not a necessary response.

Moreover, Mead's incorporation of public-spiritedness and extensive reading gives us new insight into the formation of public opinion in early modern England. Habermas associates “public opinion” with reason and critical thought applied to texts.Footnote ⁹⁴ Mead's active reading, reliant on textual analysis and extensive comparison, is either the prerequisite for such textually applied reason and critical thought or the same things under another name.Footnote ⁹⁵ In the history of reading, we find an analogue to the history of the public sphere. Furthermore, while Mead's active reading did not operate in public or affect public opinion as such, its incorporation of extensive reading and its shift of emphasis from regulated toward unregulated transmission of news operated in a remarkably open and uncensored gentle world and provided the material for the operation of a “gentle opinion” that was the immediate precursor of and model for the public opinion that would soon emerge.

It is worth looking back at Joseph Mead's biographical profile at this point and noting that he represents a type that would soon be known more for making the news than for reading it. The Puritan country gentleman was not the image of the nation; but, in the decades to come, he did not fail to remake all England in his own image for lack of trying. The general Habermasian argument has specific implications for the political narrative of seventeenth-century Britain. It is plausible to argue that the revolutionary reading habits of England's Joseph Meads are associated with, and perhaps helped precipitate, the revolutionary political culture of the British Civil Wars.

Finally, Mead's achievement also indicates that news history might profitably continue to shift its focus from changes in news production to changes in news reception, from the mechanics of London commerce to the quid pro quos of gentle sociability. Corantos were revolutionary objects in themselves, but it may matter more that they were also subtle catalysts to transformation within traditional means of sociable newswriting and news reading. When we look at Mead's writing, it emphasizes the contention that news history is not only a story of technological and political revolution but also a story of cultural and intellectual evolution. As we look at more Meads throughout early modern England, quietly reading and quietly writing, news history may come to be seen primarily as a history of the behaviors and beliefs of news readers and news writers, rather than primarily as a history of newspapers.