Preface

This book examines dangerous talk among ordinary people in England from the late Middle Ages to the present. Its central focus is on the early modern era, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. It sets out to eavesdrop on lost conversations, to recover the expressions that got people into trouble, and to follow the fate of some of the offenders. It shows how casual speakers collided with the law, how their words became treason or sedition, and what sanctions or punishments followed. It is possible to do this because a record-keeping culture set down in writing some of the words that people were said to have uttered. In a world before tape recording or electronic surveillance we cannot listen to historical voices or hear the actual expressions that alarmed the authorities; but we can read Privy Council reports or judicial transcripts that claimed that such or such a person made scandalous, undutiful, or treasonable remarks. And, if that person was arrested and interrogated, or sent to trial, we may read the testimony of the accused and statements of witnesses admitting, denying, or offering excuses for the incriminating or offending words. Sources containing information of this sort are in fact abundant, though they have been little exploited by historians. The documentary evidence for the chapters that follow comes from law reports, official correspondence, parliamentary papers, assize records, and the proceedings of quarter sessions. From the end of the seventeenth century the record is augmented by newspapers. Contemporary sermons, tracts, pamphlets, and treatises round out the picture.

Most of the modern scholarship on popular politics and the state focuses on published writings. Discussions of liberty, citizenship, and censorship deal primarily with written expression. Recent historical study has exposed the surreptitious circulation of manuscripts and libels, but still it concentrates on the written word. This project, by contrast, seeks to incorporate a more elusive body of utterance, including words that were never intended to be written down. Although actual spoken language was lost to the wind, the historical record yields redactions, quotations, and representations of what was purportedly said. Even allowing for scribal interventions and lapses of memory, we find fragments of forgotten conversations, reports of words spoken in carelessness, in anger, or in drink. The evidence is often compromised, frequently opaque, and occasionally stunning. Anyone interested in the ideas and opinions of ordinary people, as well as the responses of the elite, does well to pay attention to this hidden transcript.

‘Words are but wind’ was a popular expression, but speech could hurt as hard as sticks and stones. The social, political, and religious history of early modern England was filled with the debris of discourse. Malicious tongues caused dispute between neighbours. Seditious words endangered the state. Scandalous and impious language disturbed the community of believers. ‘It would make a man’s heart to bleed’, wrote the Elizabethan Calvinist William Perkins, ‘to hear… how swearing, blaspheming, cursed speaking, railing, slandering, chiding, quarrelling, contending, jesting, mocking, flattering, lying, dissembling, vain and idle talking, overflow in all places’. ‘Lamentable and fearful’ were these abuses of the tongue.¹

While considering all kinds of transgressive utterance, the emphasis here is on talk that concerned the state. Certain kinds of speech could be treasonous or seditious, though lawyers disputed the criteria for ‘treason by words’. To call the king a fool or to describe the queen as a whore was certainly unwise, but was it also a crime? To declare that a particular monarch had no right to the throne, or was unfit to govern, had dangerous political implications. Such words cut to the heart of the polity, demeaning and dishonouring royal government and challenging its legitimacy. How the state responded to such verbal assaults reflects the composure or vulnerability of changing political cultures. Successive regimes, from the house of Plantagenet to the house of Hanover, coped variously with disruptive or seditious language, and found different ways of monitoring dangerous talk. At one time an offender could be hung, drawn, and quartered for treasonous expressions. At other times similar words could be dismissed with a shrug. Changing political circumstances prompted different conversations, and led to changing reactions by councillors and courts.

Nobody could know for certain who was listening or who might construe conversations as dangerous. Magistrates and officials policed an escalating register of speech offences, from defamation to slander, sedition to treason, with punishments that ranged from moderate reprimand to public execution. Enforcement depended on hearsay, reportage, and the examination of witnesses and offenders. Loyal listeners claimed to have responded: ‘take heed what you say of kings’, ‘it is not fit for us to meddle with such matters’, and ‘many a man hath been laid upon an hurdle for less’. It was unclear in practice what limits applied to spoken expression, and how the regime might react.

The dominant dynamic of English history has been the relationship between the crown and people, rex and grex, the governors and the governed. We occasionally learn what kings thought of their people, but rarely can we hear what ordinary people said about their kings. This book offers a selection. Rather than claiming these voices to be representative, I recognize them as the disorderly sounds of a minority. Nonetheless, the kind of speech captured here touched a raw political nerve, prompting centuries of state retaliation. Some governors may have feared the prophetic power of cursing, as if wishing ill to the monarch could bring about that effect. Most worried that seditious talk might prove contagious, and undermine allegiance at large. The response, over time, involved a mixture of policing and propaganda, monitoring and surveillance, judicial and political intervention, and the crafting of new legislation.

Every generation remade its politics, but the courts also drew on statute, precedent, and legal memory. Edward III’s treason statute of 1352 governed cases beyond the eighteenth century. Precedents established in the 1460s and the 1620s shaped outcomes a century or more later. Several of the episodes discussed in the following chapters exercised legal theorists from the age of the first Queen Elizabeth to the second.

‘Freedom of speech’, a topic of enduring concern, has changed its meaning over centuries. In Tudor times ‘freedom of speech’ was something to apologize for, an outspoken or uninhibited expression, whether sharp or blunt. By the seventeenth century the phrase was associated with politics, especially parliamentary politics, referring to the privilege of counsel and commentary in the House of Commons. The 1689 Bill of Rights guaranteed ‘that the freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of parliament’. This became generalized to cover writing and printing as well as vocal expression, and by the eighteenth century it extended to the rights of the subject, no longer constrained as privilege but integral to ‘the birthright of an Englishman’. Modern discussion of ‘freedom of speech’ is bound up with the politics of censorship, civic rights, and notions or charters of ‘liberty’. This book traces some of the bumps along the road.

My aim, wherever possible, is to reconstruct the circumstances of speech offences and the personal dynamics and ideological frictions that may have underlain them. By examining depositions, answers, and rebuttals, as well as letters, indictments, accusations, and commentary, I hope to calibrate the weight and force of dangerous utterances. Research of this sort is slow and frustrating, with gems of information among many dead ends. But piece by piece it reveals the workings of English justice, the relationship of crown and subjects, and the political force of everyday language. It contributes, I hope, to an integration of social and political history, historical socio-linguistics, and the history of law.

Chapter 1 examines ‘sins of the tongue’ and restraints on political conversation. It contrasts prescriptions against ‘meddling’ discourse with the recognition that plebeian speech was irrepressible. Chapter 2 reviews the variety of ‘abusive words’ and the circumstances of their expression. It examines the language of insult between parties, and the damage done by rumour and false news. Chapter 3 deals with the medieval law of treason and its development to the mid-sixteenth century. It reviews case histories from the reign of Henry VI to the reign of Philip and Mary, with extended analysis of treasonous words in the reign of Henry VIII. Chapter 4 uses judicial records and government correspondence to capture seditious voices from the reign of Elizabeth I, including attacks on the queen’s gender and sexuality. Chapter 5 follows subjects who called James I a fool. Chapter 6 presents a detailed case history from the 1620s in which Hugh Pyne, a lawyer, called Charles I ‘as unwise a king as ever was’. Pyne’s case produced an important judgment on the law of treason by words. Chapter 7 offers many more instances from the reign of Charles I in which subjects demeaned, derided, or even offered to kill their monarch. Chapter 8 traces similar sentiments in the revolutionary decades of the mid-seventeenth century, and shows seditious language reverberating against parliament and Protector Cromwell. Chapter 9 follows anti-monarchical speech in the reign of Charles II, when the law was tightened to punish treasonous expressions. Chapter 10 shows the difficulty of policing popular sentiments from the reign of James II to the time of Queen Anne. Chapter 11 looks at the loosening of restraints on political conversation in the eighteenth century, and renewed assaults on seditious speech in the later Hanoverian period amidst calls for reform and revolution. A final section brings the story to the present, showing how speech that once led to trial and punishment became ‘the birthright of an Englishman’. The concluding chapter reviews the cultural politics of anti-authoritarian speech, community responses, excuses, and consequences, across the early modern era. Spelling and punctuation have been modernized, except in the titles of printed sources. All printed works were published in London unless otherwise noted. Dates are given ‘old style’, though the year is taken to begin on 1 January.