News and rumour in Jacobean England: information, court politics and diplomacy

摘要

'Which of you will stop / The vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks?' (2 Henry Ⅳ, prologue). Which of us indeed: as long as there are people to speak and others to hear, rumour and gossip will surely rival death and taxes as certainties of life. But how can something as fugitive as rumour be studied empirically? Regrettably, historians of political rumour in the Jacobean court are not able, like modern social psychologists, to monitor the whispers of courtiers in internet chat-rooms. Yet as David Coast shows in this stimulating monograph at least some evidence of the circulation of information, news and rumour in the Jacobean court can be gleaned from the archives: from both official sources such as state papers, diplomatic correspondence and newsbooks, and the more informal correspondence of newsgatherers such as John Chamberlain and the private papers and diaries of figures both in and outside of the court. Coast mines the relevant holdings in repositories from the British, Bodleian and Huntington Libraries and the National Archives, to county and city record offices in Cheshire, Kent, Northamptonshire, Somerset and Yorkshire, to piece together an account of not only 'what really happened' during the later years of James Ⅵ and I's reign, but 'what people thought was the case', and the role played by news and rumour in forming these perceptions.