Bibliographie
Primary Sources
A Briefe Relation of some affaires and transactions, Civill and Military, both Forraigne and Domestique (October 1649 – October 1650).
Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy. 5th ed. Oxford, 1638.
Eikon Basilike: The Portraiture of his Sacred Majestie in his Solitudes and Sufferings. London, 1649.
Firth, C. H. & R. S. Rait, eds. Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642-1660. London, 1911.
Horace. The Lyrick Poet, Odes and Satyres Translated out of Horace into English Verse, By J. S. London, 1649.
The Man in the Moon, discovering a world of knavery vnder the sunne (April 1649 – June 1650).
Mercurius Elenticus. Communicating the unparallell’d proceedings at Westminster, the Head-Quarters, and other places (November 1647 – January 1649).
Mercurius Melancholicus: Or newes from Westminster (September 1647 – November 1648).
Mercurius Pragmaticus. Communicating intelligence from all parts (September 1647 – May 1649).
Montaigne, Michel de. The Essayes or Morall, Politike and Millitarie Discourses. Trans. John Florio. London, 1603.
Morton, A. L., ed. Freedom in Arms: A Selection of Leveller Writings. Berlin: Seven Seas Publishers, 1975.
Quarles, John. Regale Lectum Miseriae: Or, A Kingly Bed of Miserie, 1649.
Secondary Sources
Achinstein, Sharon. “Texts in conflict: the press and the Civil War.” Writing of the English Revolution. Ed. N. H. Keeble. Cambridge: CUP, 2001. 50-68.
Frank, Joseph. The Beginnings of the English Newspaper 1620-1660. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1961.
Gargarino, Alex. “Mourning the Headless Body Politic: the Regicide Elegies and Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’.” Exemplaria 15.2 (2003): 509-50.
McElligott, Jason. “John Crouch: A Royalist Journalist in Cromwellian England.” Media History, 10.3 (2004): 139-55.
McElligott, Jason. “The Politics of Sexual Libel: Royalist Propaganda in the 1640s.” Huntington Library Quarterly, 67 (March 2004): 75-99.
McElligott, Jason. Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England. Woodbridge: The Boydell P, 2007.
Nelson, Carolyn, & Matthew Seccombe. British Newspapers and Periodicals 1641-1700. A Short-Title Catalogue of Serials Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, and British America. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1987.
Potter, Lois. Secret Rites and Secret Writing – Royalist Literature 1641-1660. Cambridge: CUP, 1989.
Raymond, Joad. The Invention of the Newspaper. English Newsbooks 1641-1649. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996.
Underdown, David. “The Man in the Moon: Loyalty and Libel in Popular Politics, 1640-1660.” A Freeborn People: Politics and the Nation in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996. 90-111.
Williams, J. B. A History of English Journalism to the Foundation of the Gazette. London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1908.
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Notes
The heyday of royalist journalism was the spring and summer of 1648, which produced ephemerals with suggestive titles like Mercurius Aquaticus, Mercurius Fidelicus, Mercurius Gallicus, Mercurius Insanus Insanissimus and Mercurius Psitacus. Established royalist newspapers included Mercurius Elenticus, from November 1647 to January 1649, Mercurius Melancholicus, from September 1647 to November 1648, and Mercurius Pragmaticus, from September 1647 to May 1649.
The surrender of Colchester on 28 August 1648 after a long siege spelt doom for the royalists defeated by the New Model Army at Preston on 19 August. Royalist risings in Wales had been suppressed as early as June 1648.
Mercurius Elenticus was published intermittently after the regicide. It was briefly revived from May to November 1649 but its day of publication was changed.
England was declared a “Commonwealth and Free State” on 19 May 1649 with supreme authority vested in the House of Commons. Ireland was a hotbed of royalist activism. Cromwell was commissioned to raise an army to invade Ireland in March 1649 but he and his troops did not land at Dublin until August. When Cromwell left Ireland in May 1650, the subjugation of the island was almost complete. New Model Army soldiers’ anger over Parliament’s refusal to settle pay arrears caused unrest within the army in the spring of 1649, when troops were to be raised for the expedition to Ireland. The Levellers capitalised on soldiers’ discontent and encouraged mutinies. The suppression of the Burford mutiny in May 1649 signalled the end of Leveller activity in the Army. There was one last bout of radical agitation in England with the high-profile trial of the Leveller leader John Lilburne in October 1649 when he was acquitted of a charge of high treason against the Commonwealth.
The “Act for Subscribing the Engagement” (Firth 325-29) was passed on 2 January 1650 in a bid to contain dissent. It sparked a pamphlet war which questioned the nature of oaths.
The radical weekly The Moderate berated the new government; the not so radical Presbyterian newsbook The Moderate Intelligencer also adopted a critical stance at times.
The “Act against unlicensed and scandalous Books and Pamphlets, and for better regulating of Printing” was passed on 20 September 1649. It proved to be more effective than previous printing laws.
The other one was Mercurius Pragmaticus (for King Charles ii), which ran from April 1649 to May 1650.
Authorship of The Man in the Moon, like that of many royalist newsbooks, is a vexed issue. It has been attributed to John Crouch. Civil War newspapers, in particular royalist weeklies, were often collaborative publications. For clarity’s sake, this paper identifies John Crouch as the author of The Man in the Moon, this attribution being supported by textual evidence, such as puns on the name “Crouch.”
The Man in the Moon owed its bad reputation to early twentieth-century historians of Civil War journalism, deeply shocked by what they regarded as its vulgarity. Since then it has received relatively little attention from scholars, who have mostly studied royalist newsbooks as illustrations of Civil War print culture. One such study is Lois Potter’s Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature 1641-1660. Only recently did a historian, Jason McElligott, give the royalist press its due in his Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England. McElligott analyses The Man in the Moon as a historical object but, unlike this paper, does not address stylistic issues. The Man in the Moon is shortened to MM in citations. (Mis)spelling and italics have been retained in extracts from the newsbook.
It is impossible to identify the readers of The Man in the Moon in terms of numbers or sociological profile. There are no print-run figures. It is unlikely that royalist newsbooks were profitable business ventures, especially after the regicide, as unfavourable political conditions took their toll.
There were occasional occurrences of “Ha, ha, ha” in other royalist newspapers, but these were scarcer than in The Man in the Moon, as in this address to readers: “Come Royalist, laugh with me. Ha, ha, ha, ha” (Mercurius Pragmaticus no 46, 13-20 March 1649).
Cromwell and his army embarked for Ireland in August 1649 in order to subdue the royalists there. By the time this issue of The Man in the Moon came out, the storming and massacre of Drogheda had taken place, and Cromwell’s troops were making significant headway. Crouch appears to be twisting the news to boost the morale of English royalists.
The 1649 translation of Horace’s Satires has: “Although a laughing man the truth to tell what doth forbid?” (Horace 137).
Both “Nol” and “Snout” were nicknames for Cromwell.
Mercurius Pragmaticus adopted an especially scathing tone after the regicide.
The radical newsbook The Moderate, for instance, featured editorial inserts, especially in its spring 1649 issues, but these were clearly signposted, italics being used as a rule, and thus stood out from the news proper.
Bedlam referred to the Hospital of St Mary of Bethlehem in London, an infamous asylum that accommodated the mentally ill. In its mid-seventeenth century extended usage the word designated a madhouse. Mercurius Democritus, which Crouch authored from 1652 to 1654, was subtitled “Published for the right understanding of all the Mad-merry-People of Great-Bedlam.” Crouch may well have borrowed the image of universal madness as a metaphor for contemporary England from Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, in whose preface to the reader the author’s persona, Democritus Junior, the laughing philosopher, satirises a world gone mad. Burton also suggests the name “the Man in the Moon” as an alternative identity to Democritus (1) and as a personification of madness, the link between the moon and lunacy – as etymology shows – being common currency in early modern culture.
This inscription appeared only in the first issue, but was dropped in all the following numbers. It may have been intended as a satiric comment on astrology.
Crouch is punning on his own name.
“Towzer” was a common name for a large dog. “Surreverence” has two meanings here: great reverence and excrement. Independents were members of the parliamentary faction that gained power after Pride’s purge of the House of Commons in December 1648.
See MM no23 (19-26 September 1649) and no57 (29 May – 5 June 1650). Crouch’s satire of parliamentary newsbook writers was especially targeted at Henry Walker, the author of Perfect Occurrences, but all of them received their due, in particular when the Man in the Moon rejoiced in the suppression of their “weekly legends of lies” after the passing of the Licensing Act in September 1649.
Satire was a polymorphous genre. The Man in the Moon cannot be said to borrow from one kind of satire rather than another. Its satire was as much Juvenalian as it was Horatian and Menippean. The genre was popular in the 1640s to the point that new editions of the works of Latin satirists were published, particularly Juvenal, either in Latin or in English translations.
A series of bad harvests had sent food prices soaring and famine was rampant in rural areas in 1648-49.
Members of the Rump Parliament also received a fair share of abuse. The House of Commons was frequently dubbed “the House of rebels” or “the House of robbers.” Neologisms were also part of Crouch’s arsenal when it came to castigating Commonwealth officials. Isaac Dorislaus, for example, fell prey to Crouch’s satire. As legal adviser to the High Court of Justice, he had helped to draw up charges against the King. He was murdered by a group of English royalists in The Hague in May 1649, within a few days of his appointment there as Commonwealth envoy to the States General of Holland. Crouch turned his name into a verb which he used as a synonym for “to murder” as in: “The Counsel of State being informed by the Man in the Moon of a dangerous PLOTT intended against them at Darby-house, have adjourned to White-hall, where they may keep a stronger Guard upon their Persons, for fear of being Dorislow’d” (MM no7, 21-30 May 1649).
The “Act for discharging from imprisonment poor prisoners unable to satisfy their Creditors” was passed on 21 December 1649 (Firth 321-24). Crouch puns on “fisgig,” a frivolous woman and a small firework. The subtext is that the Act on debtor relief was no more than a damp squib. Belittling parliamentary work was an ingredient of Crouch’s satire.
William Lenthall was Speaker of the House of Commons from 1640 to 1660. Although he supported the Independents against the Presbyterians, he was known for his moderation, and would have been happy with a form of bounded monarchy. John Bradshaw, however, presided over the trial of Charles i and pronounced the death sentence on him. He was appointed first President of the Council of State, the Commonwealth’s executive body, in March 1649. Crouch dismisses the rumour of a Leveller-Royalist plot to have Lenthall removed from office and replaced by Bradshaw as a mere fancy since Bradshaw was not likely at all to advance the interests of monarchy in England.
Such pamphlets, for example, were England’s New Chains Discovered, published in January and February 1649, as a result of which Leveller leaders were committed to the Tower of London, The Legal Fundamental Liberties of the People of England, dated June 1649, and The Levellers Vindicated, dated August 1649, which stated that subjection to a king was preferable to enslavement under the republic: “We will chuse subjection to the Prince, chusing rather ten thousand times to be his slaves then theirs, yet hating slavery under both” (Morton 314).
A mock-petition by The Man in the Moon addressed to “the Right Honorable JOHN BRADSHAW, Pedler, and the rest of the Counsell of ESTATES, sitting at White-hall” may be found in MM no7, 21-30 May 1649. Crouch wrote a parody of the Act for the sale of the late King’s lands, “Ordered by the Man in the Moon and his Dog,” in MM no13 (4-11 July 1649). He also made much of the lack of news as to Ireton’s whereabouts in Ireland in the summer of 1649, as he included a parody of an announcement for a missing animal in one of the newspaper issues: “If any manner of man or Woman, in Town, City or Country, can tell any tale or tidings of the Commissary General of the Army, a tall black Thief, with bushy curl’d haire, a meagre Envious face, sunk hollow eyes, a Complection between Choler and Melancholly, a four-square Machiavillian head […], let them bring word to the Supream Authority alias Iuncto, and they shall have their Delinquency remitted, their fine taken off, and be otherwise well rewarded for their pains” (MM no16, 1-8 August 1649). Petitions and Acts of Parliament were common fodder for parliamentary newspapers; announcements for missing animals that offered rewards were not infrequent in some of them, so that parodying these news items was also a way for Crouch to disparage parliamentary journalism.
The expression is borrowed from a tract published in the 1640s and taken up by the late Marxist historian Christopher Hill in his book on sectarian radicalism, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, first published in 1972.
The phrase “was ever laughter like mine?” is adapted from Quarles’s “was ever grief like mine?” (3), itself inspired by the Book of Lamentations and used as a leitmotif by the Anglican poet George Herbert in “The Sacrifice.”
These, among others, included An Elegy Sacred to the Memory of […] King Charles (London, 1649), Stipendiae Lacrymae (1649) and The Scotch Souldiers Lamentation upon the Death of the most Glorious Illustrious Martyr, King Charles (London, 1649). See Gargarino 509-10.
The full title was Eikon Basilike: The Portraiture of his Sacred Majestie in his Solitudes and Sufferings. John Gauden, King Charles’s confessor, claimed to have written it but authorship is still disputed.
In one of the issues of the newsbook, Crouch undertook to write an elegy for King Charles: “Since the Regicides are so liberall in the distribution of other mens goods amongst themselves, I shall be so liberall, as to bestow an Elegy on that glorious Saint and Martyr that they have both murdered and robb’d.” These are the opening lines of his poem: “Ha! Is the King dead, and are we yet alive?” (MM no11, 20-27 June 1649), with the onomatopoeia “ha!” expressing the author’s sighs and offering a counterpoint to “ha, ha, ha!” used to express laughter. Elegies were very much in favour with royalist circles in the late 1640s: for example, the collection of elegies mourning the untimely death of Lord Henry Hastings assembled by Richard Brome and entitled Lachrymae Musarum, or the elegies in manuscript for Lord Francis Villiers, to whose memory Andrew Marvell also contributed “An Elegy Upon the Death of My Lord Francis Villiers.”
Crouch’s homage to Eikon Basilike was accompanied by an attack on “that Long Gualter Frostiface in his last weeks Legend of lies [who took] upon him to bespatter the Kings Meditations, calling it reverend Idoll. [...] The more such doggs bark against this Picture of King Charls, the more veneration will be given it” (MM no29, 7-14 November 1649). The object of Crouch’s criticism was Walter Frost and his official Briefe Relation, one issue of which featured an advertisement for Milton’s Eikonoklastes, a pamphlet intended to open readers’ eyes so that they “may see the gold taken off from that Idol” (no9, 13-20 November 1649).
For other items of Christological writing, see MM no21 (5-12 September 1649), no30 (14-21 November 1649), and no51 (10-26 April 1650).
Examples are the mock-epitaphs for Robert Lockier, the Leveller ringleader of a New Model Army mutiny in April 1649, ironically glorified as “a Saint departed not long since” (MM no4, 30 April – 7 May 1649), and for the Commonwealth envoy in The Hague Isaac Dorislaus “written on him by a friend of his, known by the Name of the man in the Moon” (MM no10, 13-20 June 1649).
Mercurius Democritus, continued as Laughing Mercury, appeared from April 1652 to February 1654.
Crouch’s reference is to Macbeth 3.4.135-37.
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