News and Rumour in Jacobean England: Information, Court Politics and Diplomacy, 1618–25, by David Coast

Abstract

‘News’ encompasses a great deal for early modern historians, and this useful study from David Coast illuminates one of its more neglected elements: the circulation of information at the highest levels of politics and diplomacy. Its focus is unapologetically on the elites, and on the few years at the end of James I’s reign when tensions over foreign policy in particular made the manipulation of information an essential political skill. The book starts at the top, with the flow of information to and from James I, through courtiers and diplomats. In the first chapter, Coast argues that the ‘reversionary interest’ gained greater control over the gathering of information in James’s last years, while James retained control of decision-making (and was less manipulated than Elizabeth I had been). It is suggestively argued that James was a clever manipulator of information himself, making use of his servants’ deviations from his instructions and creating plausible ambiguity around his intentions. In Chapter Two, Coast addresses the question of whether there was a ‘crisis of counsel’ in the 1620s (finding it to have been ‘overstated’), looking further at the king’s own efforts to control the flow of news and (in a theme which recurs throughout) to shape perceptions of himself and his policies through ‘outward shows’. He demonstrates that James deliberately withheld information, attempted to prevent news from reaching the public sphere and made intentionally misleading informal hints and gestures in order to cloak his intentions with regard to Europe in particular, which permitted him to court all sides. James’s efforts could not completely quell the flow of news, however, and other sources sometimes leaked the information which he sought to contain. Contemporary commentary noted James’s attempts to foster ambiguity, and Coast argues that, while it was accepted that some matters were arcana imperii, people became suspicious of the king’s intentions and scrutinised the news, assuming that it may well have been intended to mislead. Here it is particularly frustrating that the case-studies are not set into a wider context, as surely the high tension of Elizabethan politics, news and rumour in the 1580s and 1590s (which has been very well served in the historiography) played its part in fostering the suspicion and paranoia which Coast seems to ascribe wholly to this short period of James’s reign. The third chapter’s case-studies of political rumour offer little to surprise, but a wealth of examples of how rumours circulated and how people sought to manipulate them. The focus, as throughout, is at an elite and largely metropolitan level: where ‘popular opinion’ enters the story it is essentially as something in which the political classes might have been interested. A section challenging commonly-held models of how rumour worked (suggesting that sometimes rumour could be deliberately manipulated to political ends) seems slightly at odds with the thrust of the rest of the chapter; more suggestive is the section on attempts to influence the king through the report, or spreading, of rumours. The most promising elements of this chapter are developed in the subsequent one, on rumour in court politics: Coast is at his most compelling when forensically dissecting the operation of court politics, and, while there may be no grand revision here (we know that it was fraught in James’s later years), there is a fine collection of detail. James’s personal style of rule gave rumour considerable power at court; while this was less distinctive of James’s court than Coast suggests (the Elizabethan background could add much here), he shows effectively how even lesser attendees at court could influence the rise and fall of others through gossip, rumour, ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’.