Print, Political Innovation, and the Crisis of the Long Parliament

• In Event: Politics, Publishing, and Propaganda in Early Stuart England

Abstract

This paper examines the intersection between three realms that are usually treated in isolation — print, crowd politics, and political thought — in order to explore the process through which novel and disruptive politico-constitutional ideas, often working in tandem with radical religious thought, erupted into public discourse in the crisis leading up the English civil war. Focusing on the tumultuous period immediately after the king’s attempt on the five members on 4 January 1642, the paper analyzes four publications, which reveal the way that print propaganda, sometimes spread through crowds or street actions, was used to disperse new and in some cases influential ideas, raising the ideological stakes in the conflict between the king and parliament, while helping to drive Charles I from London and widening the breach between the monarch and his critics.

Author

• David R. Como, Stanford University