"The counterfeit silly curr": Money, Politics, and the Forging of Royalist Newspapers during the English Civil War

Abstract

(' THAT THE 1640S SAW THE EMERGENCE of mass popular print culture is now widely acknowledged. The explosion in market for printed opinion and newsreflecting both an unprecedented interest in politics and disarray in control over print industry-ensured that cheap print was profitable. With money to be made and little effective authority to police presses, however, situation was also ripe for fakes and forgeries. If period saw emergence of something resembling a public sphere, then free market in pamphleteering and propaganda was bedeviled by those interested in literary hijacking. And although Civil War newsbooks have long fascinated scholars,' phenomenon of counterfeit journals is more often recognized by bibliographers than studied by historians.2 One of most important of these newsbooks was royalist paper Mercurius Pragmaticus (1647-50), as may be measured by energetic opposition it inspired: one contemporary decried it as the court jester, cavalier's fool, chief squib-crack, arch pamphlet puppy, and it even spawned a short-lived title on Parliamentary