12
Dangerous Talk in Dangerous Times

From the fifteenth century to the eighteenth, and no doubt most other times, the people and governors of England engaged in spirited public conversation. Multivocal, multilayered, and with many modulations, this conversation ranged over sensitive topics of subjecthood and citizenship, authority and obedience, deference and power. As we have seen, the common tongue was not always respectful or polite. Some utterances were hostile and abusive, demeaning to public authority, hostile to the crown. Others reinforced the established regime. People spoke unguardedly, recklessly or without reflection, and sometimes said things that could be judged scandalous, seditious, or even treasonable. The preceding chapters have introduced fragments of conversations that got people into trouble. This final chapter revisits material from across the period and ventures some general conclusions. It reviews examples of dangerous talk, the responses of auditors, and the excuses of those accused. It reconsiders the peril of law and the patterns of punishment for alleged offenders. And it questions the threat posed by crimes of the tongue to the security of early modern regimes.

Vocal Subjects

Despite conventional inhibitions, early modern people displayed an appetite for public information, and a propensity to discuss the affairs of the crown. All sorts of people spoke of things that official political culture prescribed off limits. Some of this chatter was disorderly, and veered towards dangerous territory by directly commenting on the qualities and character of the monarch. A tension resonated between the protection of arcana imperii and the energies of popular discourse. Different regimes responded to this problem through a combination of politics, administration, and law. They also depended on information from informants, and encouraged loyal subjects to report the speech transgressions of their neighbours. The state response changed over time, even as the background chatter remained incessant, because of alterations in political culture and in law. Over time, especially in the eighteenth century, the law became more lenient and the government more secure. Punishment for seditious speech became less savage, though times of political panic could see a stepped-up pressure. Every early modern regime had grounds for concern about the dutiful allegiance of its subjects, but most recognized that subversive threats and seditious challenges were more likely to stem from the culture of print than from the everyday activity of talking.

Preachers and magistrates, moralists and monarchs, nonetheless expressed horror and distaste at the torrent of unseemly discourse. Their own language deployed a host of pejorative adjectives to condemn the words that they disapproved. A powerful rhetoric of disapprobation countered and contained the most disruptive popular expressions. Henry VIII’s kingship was said to be exposed to ‘lewd, ungracious, detestable and traitorous’ speeches, and to ‘opprobrious, scandalous, vilifying and rebellious-sounding’ words. His successors Edward and Mary faced ‘horrible and slanderous’ verbal assaults, and expressions that were ‘malicious and traitorous’ or ‘lewd and seditious’. The Elizabethan regime coped similarly with ‘lewd, detestable, slanderous’ speech, and ‘false, scandalous and seditious’ words.¹ Councillors and justices chose these adjectives not just to express loathing, but also to echo the language of statutes and proclamations, and to highlight the offender’s exposure at law.

Their reactions were perhaps appropriate in the light of subjects who called Henry VIII a ‘tyrant’, a ‘whoremaster’, a ‘knave’, ‘a heretic, a thief and a harlot’, cursed ‘a vengeance on the king’, and offered to ‘play football with his head’. How else should one describe the language that labelled Queen Elizabeth a ‘whore’, a ‘quean’, a ‘jade’, a ‘bastard’, a ‘rascal’, and a ‘rogue’? It was surely scandalous for a Surrey woman to say in 1585 that ‘the queen is no maid, and she hath three sons by the Earl of Leicester’. It verged on treason to say, as one Catholic said in 1593, that ‘if mistress Elizabeth were dead we should have good sport’. From the viewpoint of the Tudor regime, such words were indeed detestable, arguably seditious, and deserving of punishment.

James I’s councillors likewise defended their king against ‘insolent and audacious speeches… of a most dangerous consequence’ and ‘disgraceful speeches… derogatory to his majesty and his royal blood’. Undutiful speech was still ‘opprobrious’, though few said worse of England’s first Stuart than that he was ‘an ass’ or ‘a fool’. More menacingly, a Middlesex man prophesied in 1611 that King James ‘would have his crown pulled about his head’, while others offered to burn, stab, or cut the king’s throat.² Though many of these disorderly voices might be counted as forms of resistance, among the weapons of the weak, they also suggest an intimacy with monarchy, as if his majesty was there to be mocked or rebuked. Much of the seditious speech concerning early modern rulers expressed hope that the king would govern better, not that kingship should be removed.

Charles I, we have seen, attracted a battery of derogatory commentary, from Hugh Pyne’s remark in 1625 that King Charles was like ‘a child with an apple’, to Joan Sherrard’s observation two decades later that ‘his majesty is a stuttering fool’. A Kentish man in 1634 called Charles I a ‘knave’ and said ‘it were no matter if the king were hanged’. ‘Is there never a Felton yet living?’ asked a London woman in 1644, invoking the memory of Buckingham’s assassin and wishing his sacred majesty dead. Not surprisingly, Caroline magistrates railed against words they deemed to be ‘high and heinous’, ‘factious and mutinous’, ‘wicked and malicious’, ‘undutiful and unjust’. Their rhetoric of vituperation waxed strong against speech they termed ‘opprobrious and scandalous’, ‘desperate and seditious’, ‘vile’, ‘impious’, ‘unsufferable’, ‘lewd’, ‘very dangerous’, and ‘fearfully ill-advised’.³

The mid-century revolution saw no abatement of derogatory speech against shifting centres of power. Oliver Cromwell, like the king he replaced, was labelled ‘a traitor’, ‘a rogue’, and ‘a rascal’, by people who ‘hoped to see him hanged’, while his supporters dubbed such speech ‘dangerous’, ‘scandalous’, ‘treasonous’, and ‘seditious’. Though political circumstances changed, the terms of the discourse proved remarkably durable.⁴

Charles II’s less loyal subjects called their king a ‘bastard’, a ‘traitor’, a ‘base knave’, a ‘bloody tyrant’, and a ‘rascally rogue’. Evil speakers used all sorts of ‘unmannerly and uncomely words concerning the king’s majesty’, calling him ‘a damned dog’ and ‘the veriest rogue that ever reigned’. Several wished his majesty stabbed, hung, burned, or beheaded, and more than one offered to ‘kill the king with his own hands’. Restoration authorities characterized such language as ‘desperate and dangerous’, ‘scandalous and treasonable’, or ‘treasonable and seditious’, though the words were no worse than in previous reigns.⁵

The barrage of hostility continued, with later Stuart subjects calling James II ‘a cheat’, ‘a rogue’, and ‘a papist dog’, William III ‘a damned Dutch usurper’, and Queen Anne a ‘brandy-nose bitch’. Their Hanoverian successors fared just as ill, with George I called a ‘usurper’, a ‘turd’, and a ‘cuckold’, George II derided as a ‘jack pudding’, and George III damned as a ‘villain’, a ‘rogue’, and a ‘liar’. One man in 1795 wanted King George stoned and his head set on Temple Bar. Another in 1800 offered to ‘rip his bloody guts out, and lay them on the floor’. Most contemporaries agreed that these were ‘scandalous, malicious, and dangerous’ expressions, but they could not be quieted. Words of this sort still stirred the authorities to action, but they were less likely now to result in convictions or grievous punishment. Eighteenth-century liberals claimed that ‘the birthright of an Englishman’ included freedom to speak one’s mind, no matter how coarse or undutiful the utterance, and this view has largely prevailed to the present.⁶ A desacralized monarchy had less at stake and could tolerate more than a regime of sacred kingship and divine right royal supremacy.

Sometimes the offensive expressions were too terrible to set forth in writing. Witnesses were reluctant to repeat them, and officials sought to prevent their circulation. The Yorkshireman Richard Keddye used ‘open, vile and threatening speech’ against Queen Elizabeth in 1577, but what he said is lost because the informant was ‘not only ashamed but afraid by word or writing to recite’ it.⁷ In 1596 the trial of Thomas Wenden for seditious speech against the queen was set aside because, a government lawyer argued, ‘it was too filthy a matter to be brought in open place’.⁸ James I himself judged it better in 1621 ‘to suppress such scandalous speeches than by punishment to blaze them further abroad’.⁹ The London schoolmaster Alexander Gill was tried in Star Chamber in 1628, but ‘because the speeches are so foul’ his most incriminating words were not read in court, and the official record is partially obliterated.¹⁰ The dangerous remarks of bishop Williams in 1632 were allegedly such that the informant ‘durst not repeat’.¹¹ But, despite this reticence, a wide array of opprobrious language resounds within the surviving records.

Tudor and Stuart statesmen thought seditious speech endangered society and the state. They frowned on words ‘of a high nature’, and expressed alarm at talk ‘of high consequence’. Scandalous speech dishonoured the crown, and turbulent tongues imperilled the regime. Treasonous speech, they said, undermined the framework of order and security. Elizabethan councillors argued that loose talk ‘maketh men’s minds to be at variance with one another’, and could sever ‘the bands and sinews of all government next under the ordinance of God’. Disrespect spawned sedition, they feared, with treason not far behind, risking ‘the ruin’ of the crown, the realm, and the law.¹²

Early Stuart administrators shared this anxiety. There was no excuse for ‘lewd and undutiful speeches’, remarked Secretary Conway in 1628, no ‘liberty of speaking rashly of the sacred person or life of the king’. It was the Devil’s work, he said, to stir up ‘undutifulness and disobedience’.¹³ William Laud agreed that the ‘sin of murmuring against the king’ was intolerable, and that none should ‘whet [their] tongues, or sour [their] breasts’ against the Lord’s anointed.¹⁴

Like its royal predecessors, the Cromwellian regime of the 1650s sought to guard itself against ‘dangerous words of most evil consequence against the government and public peace’.¹⁵ The view persisted, and was frequently reiterated, that verbal expressions had political consequence, and, if uncorrected, could undermine the state. Charles II’s councillors in the 1670s claimed that undutiful words tended to ‘the defamation of the government and disturbance of the peace of the realm’.¹⁶ In 1682 they urged that such words ‘require nimble prosecution to justice; for as long as the traitorous, saucy, and malicious tongues of the subjects are at liberty to scandalize his majesty, his royal highness and government, we cannot expect a well-grounded peace’.¹⁷

The constitution, though battered, withstood these verbal assaults. Later governments came to accept that alehouse chatter had little serious impact on the constitutional fabric, and coffee-house banter left structures of power intact. Seditious talk was treated more as an irritant to be endured than a crime to be punished. The Glorious Revolution energized political arguments and put ‘freedom of speech’ onto the national conversational agenda. Hanoverian authorities became broadly tolerant of verbal political abuse, though they still applied sanctions to words that would ‘lessen [the king] in the esteem of his subjects and weaken his government, or raise jealousies between him and his people’.¹⁸ As in many regimes past and present, a tension remained between national security concerns and the subject’s ‘freedom of expression’. Despite the scares of the French Revolution, few henceforth feared that words alone could jeopardize the fundamental stability of the kingdom. On the threshold of the modern era we hear much less about talk that imperilled the polity, and rather more about the impropriety of language that could cause a breach of the peace. Political conversation was as boisterous and irreverent as ever, but it was essentially decriminalized and removed from state surveillance.

Anxious Authorities

Despite the anxieties of councillors and moralists, the utterance of ‘dangerous speech’ generally proved more dangerous to the speaker than to the community to which he or she belonged. The hierarchical, monarchical society of pre-modern England disapproved of disorderly expression, but scandalous or undutiful talk, though reprehensible, did not seriously endanger the state. The fear that seditious words would erode the bonds of authority proved largely unfounded. Though malicious and uncivil chatter was endemic, some of it touching the crown, successive regimes survived largely unscathed. Once the words had been exposed to official scrutiny, they were more likely to redound to the discomfort of the person who had said them. Justices of the peace grilled suspects and witnesses, and magistrates pursued offenders at law. Those found guilty of sedition experienced humiliation, incarceration, mutilation, financial distress, or public ruin. Their punishment could include the noose, the knife, the whip, the pillory, the stocks, imprisonment, and fines. In extreme cases, if the law so provided, a speaker whose words were judged treasonous faced gory execution.

Whether they thought it deeply dangerous or merely undutiful, governors and magistrates long felt themselves obliged to root out seditious talk. Local authorities under Henry VIII were tasked to search out and punish ‘any such cankered malice’.¹⁹ Elizabethan justices knew their duty to report ‘any person being vehemently suspected of saying or reporting of any slanderous news or tales against her majesty’.²⁰ Offensive words, the Jacobean Privy Council insisted, ‘are in no way to be slighted nor passed over’.²¹‘No syllable escaping the mouth of any disloyal subject, or information touching my king and sovereign coming to my knowledge, should be passed or permitted without speedy certification to your lordships’, a magistrate assured his masters in 1606.²²

Charles I’s regime likewise took ‘care and providence’ to pursue suspected speakers of scandal and sedition, especially any whose utterances ‘so nearly and highly concern the sacred person and honour of his majesty’.²³ Caroline magistrates became especially diligent in investigating all ‘speeches against the king’s honour’. As the mayor and aldermen of Barnstable explained in 1626, with reference to an offensive speaker in Devon, they ‘could do no less than to lay hold of him and have him in safe custody’ until the Privy Council advised ‘what should become of him’.²⁴ Commending Sussex authorities in 1637 for reporting ‘certain desperate and treasonable speeches’, the Council advised that ‘too much caution cannot safely be used for the preventing of danger and punishing offenders in this kind’.²⁵ Conscientious officers would initiate the processes of the law whenever report arose of reckless or malicious talk. It was this solicitude that generated the letters, reports, case files, and legal records on which much of the present analysis is founded. Prosecutors of treasonous words in the later Stuart and Hanoverian eras likewise spoke of their duty to uphold and defend the established order.

Uncertain Laws

Changes and continuities in the censuring of seditious speech also reflected alterations in the law. The law governing speech that touched the crown was unstable, and its application mutable and uncertain. Despite the enduring gravity of the legislation of Edward III, and its augmentation by treason statutes under Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and Charles II, the power of the courts to punish people for words remained contestable. The law, as always, was subject to interpretation, and the savagery or lenience of its embrace varied with political circumstances. Words that in one era could take an offender to the gallows might lead only to the pillory a few decades later, or even be disregarded. The law of Edward III famously made it treason to ‘compass or imagine’ the death of the monarch. But whether such compassing could be done by words, and what those words should signify, was long unfathomable. Late medieval judges argued it was treason to induce subjects ‘to withdraw their cordial love from the monarch, thereby compassing his death’, and this could be accomplished by language.²⁶ Similar notions prevailed under the Tudors. In practice there was slippage between words identified as scandalous, seditious, or treasonable, with varying legal consequences.

Henry VIII’s Treason Act of 1534 specifically penalized the spoken word, making it treason to call the king a ‘heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel or usurper’, or otherwise harm his title or dignities.²⁷ The Elizabethan regime sought similar protection. By the statute of 1571 it again became treason, ‘by writing, printing, preaching, speech, express words or sayings’, to call her majesty a ‘heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel, or an usurper’.²⁸ Some of Elizabeth’s advisers favoured a wider-reaching law, to make it treason ‘to engender in the heads of the simple ignorant multitude a misliking or murmuring against the quiet government of the realm’.²⁹ Treason, declared the lawyer Thomas Norton, was ‘the crime of violating or abating of majesty’, a definition that lacked all statutory precision.³⁰

Early Stuart judges in Star Chamber asserted that libelling the king or the state was treason, though they were hard pressed to justify this in law.³¹ ‘What plot of treason can be more dangerous than that which doth draw the hearts of your people from you’, a loyal subject asked Charles I in 1629.³² Even Pyne’s case, which resolved that words by themselves could not be treason, did not completely clarify the matter. Prosecutors and politicians sometimes pushed harder than the law allowed, and threatened capital punishment for words that were merely scandalous or seditious. Their difficulty in determining the weight of such language is suggested by their reference to ‘words tending to treason’, words ‘which we conceive import high treason or are too near it’, and ‘dangerous and seditious words, bordering upon if not altogether treasonous’.³³ The Restoration treason statute again penalized ‘malicious and advised speaking’ against the monarch, and took several people to the scaffold.³⁴ But later in the seventeenth century Justice Holt made the distinction that courts had observed in practice for generations: ‘Loose words, spoken without relation to any act or project are not treason; but words of persuasion to kill the king are overt acts of high treason.’³⁵ Abusive political language remained actionable but would no longer raise the shadow of execution.

Lay opinion tended to imagine the law of treason to have been harsher and more comprehensive than most lawyers would concede. Time and again we hear of ordinary people describing certain expressions as ‘a hanging offence’, or claiming that ‘men have been drawn on a hurdle for less’. Reports to magistrates often began when one person observed of another, ‘he speaks treason’, prompting the accused to consider that he had but ‘a life to lose’.

When a Northamptonshire man declared it ‘a pity’ that Henry VIII was ever crowned, and ‘a pity that he hath lived so long’, a neighbour immediately warned him, ‘beware what thou sayest, for thou speakest treason’.³⁶ ‘Meanest thou to be hanged, or knowest thou what thou speakest?’ asked a Hertfordshire drinker in 1623 when his companion wished King James dead.³⁷ ‘I doubt you speak treason,’ a listener rebuked a Northumberland collier in 1636; ‘I will make report what you have said in discharge of my duty’.³⁸ A gentleman in Leicestershire rebuked a kinsman in 1637 for ‘dangerous words against that king…saying they were treason’.³⁹ ‘Take heed what you say, I have known men hanged for a less word,’ observed an Essex labourer in 163 8.⁴⁰ In Charles II’s reign a drinker said that his companion ‘deserved to be hanged for speaking such seditious and treasonable words’, that the king had sold out to the French.⁴¹ As late as 1719, long after such punishment for words had lapsed, one Middlesex woman warned another that ‘she might be hanged’ for damning King George and wishing him dead.⁴²

Statements made by witnesses report most of them to have been horrified at hearing abusive and transgressive expressions. Their examinations and depositions reinforced conventional prescriptions encouraging deference and silence. Whether frightened or collusive, they reaffirmed the protocols of the governance of the tongue. Many acknowledged it wrong to meddle in matters that did not concern them, and dangerous to speak against majesty and power.

‘I pray, John, turn your heart from any such seditious conversation,’ advised a commoner at Norwich in 1554 when talk turned against Queen Mary’s Spanish marriage.⁴³ ‘Take heed what you sayest… thou wilt repent these words when thou art sober’, warned an Essex artisan in 1560 when his companion declared that Dudley and Queen Elizabeth ‘played legerdemain together’.⁴⁴ In 1626 one man tried to silence another who spoke ill of the king, saying, ‘it is not fit for us to meddle with such matters’.⁴⁵ A London diner that year warned his table fellow to ‘forbear speaking such things’ when the topic verged on sedition.⁴⁶ ‘Take heed what you speak for you speak unadvisedly,’ warned another drinker when conversation turned to ‘the king’s business’.⁴⁷ Hearing talk that ‘the king was a dishonest man’, a Leicestershire woman in 1637 responded, ‘God forbid’, and another listener counselled that ‘the said words should be buried and never spoken of again’.⁴⁸ On another occasion, when a soldier in Worcestershire made speeches verging on sedition, his superior ‘bade him hold his peace for shame’.⁴⁹ Witnesses evinced a common interest in quieting risky exchanges, or at least in representing themselves as guardians of conventional conversational propriety.

Mitigations

Not surprisingly, the alleged speakers of dangerous words, when brought before authorities, often claimed to have been misheard or misconstrued. Streets and alehouses could be noisy places, where words disappeared in the wind. The most common excuse was that the speaker was so drunk at the time that he had no control of his speech and no recollection of what was said. Others claimed to be victims of malicious prosecution, enmeshed in the law by parties who had enmity or ‘spleen’ against them. Witnesses needed to be reliable before a prosecution could stand, and their own character and standing could be challenged.

Being drunk did not excuse bad behaviour. Inebriation was no defence at law. Nonetheless a procession of witnesses and defendants drew attention to the consumption of alcohol on occasions when dangerous words were uttered. Their statements show men and women in company together at various times of day and night, downing beer, wine, sack, punch, gin, or brandy. Juries sometimes showed lenience towards victims of excess drink, and magistrates too might be persuaded that words did less damage when the wine did the talking.

Margaret Chaunseler, notorious for calling Henry VIII’s Queen Anne ‘a goggle-eyed whore’, told her examiner that ‘she was drunk when she did speak… and that the evil spirit did cause her to speak… and she was very penitent for her offences’.⁵⁰ Edmund Brocke, who thought it no matter if Henry VIII were knocked on the head, likewise claimed ‘he was mad or drunk and wist not what he said’.⁵¹ One Elizabethan gentleman sought to excuse his rebellious words by claiming ‘that he was overcome by drinking that morning of a great deal of white wine and sack’. Another attributed his seditious outburst to ‘drink and heat’ and ‘excess of drink’.⁵²

‘Provoked by the devil’, a Warwickshire man in 1620 was said to be ‘so far in drink’ that he knew not what he said when he declared King James ‘a villain’. Neighbours testified that Hugh Drayton ‘hath a weak brain, by reason of many wounds given him in wars and otherwise on his head, whereby it comes to pass that a little drink doth distemper his brain, and makes him to speak and do at those times such things as he is sorry for afterwards’.⁵³ Other Jacobean offenders claimed that they ‘had with overmuch drinking bereft themselves of the true use of discretion and understanding’, though the authorities insisted that should not ‘be a privilege to them’.⁵⁴

A workman charged with speaking seditious words in 1635 explained that he ‘never held them in his heart’, had no remembrance of them, and after downing two pints of sack was ‘much afflicted’ and ‘much weakened in his mind’.⁵⁵ Another of Charles I’s subjects told authorities in 1640 ‘that he doth not remember any such words as are informed against him … neither is he of any such opinion as the words do import; but if any words of that purport did pass from him in his drink, he is heartily sorry for them’.⁵⁶ These were common responses, and some of them may even have been true.

At a time when serious punishment could accrue from a careless tongue it was, perhaps, convenient to offer the alcohol defence by way of exoneration. It helped lessen treason charges to the level of a misdemeanour, and recast sedition as mere disorderly conduct. By the Regency period under George III a magistrate could instruct a jury, ‘if you think that this was a drunken conversation, they not knowing what they said, you will acquit the defendant’,⁵⁷ although that ploy was not always effective. A Yorkshire prosecutor declared in 1813 ‘that the effects of liquor were not to suggest seditious thoughts, but merely to remove those restraints under which evil disposed men were held by the terrors of the law while in a state of sobriety’.⁵⁸

Other weaknesses or disturbances of mind could excuse or mitigate speech offences. An ironmonger gaoled in Cheshire for ‘slanderous speeches against the queen’s majesty’ was released in 1578 on information that he was ‘commonly troubled with a lunacy’.⁵⁹ Another man charged in 1596 with ‘very undutiful and disloyal speeches’ was said to be ‘lunatic at the time of uttering’ .⁶⁰ A Londoner in 1617, ‘being distract and mad’, was confined to Bedlam for his ‘lewd and scandalous words’ against King James.⁶¹ Another of James I’s ill-spoken subjects was deemed ‘distracted… mad… a kind of brainsick fellow’, and was dismissed with a whipping.⁶² The cleric Noah Rogers, in trouble in 1634 for seditious words against Charles I, sought exculpation by citing his distemper and melancholy, caused, he said, by ‘hard study and deep meditations’, and ‘upon his knees he beggeth pardon for it’.⁶³

Dozens of cases unravelled on report that the informer who brought the accusation did so to discredit an enemy. Even if the allegation were true, the case might founder on suspicion of the prosecution being malicious. The case against Margery Cowpland, who allegedly called Henry VIII ‘an extortioner and knave’ and his queen ‘a strong harlot’, stalled in 1535 because her accuser was also in dispute with her about property and money.⁶⁴ An alleged speaker of sedition in 1582 explained that his accuser bore a grudge against him, ‘upon some falling out at football play more than a month before’.⁶⁵ Another complaint of ‘scandalous and seditious words’ in 1619 lost credibility because the wives of the accuser and the accused had argued over church seating, and the charge appeared to be ‘devised and forged in malice’.⁶⁶ Reports of a Pembrokeshire man’s ‘impious, malicious and seditious speeches’ against Charles I also appeared less credible on evidence of ‘a plot to disgrace’ him by local enemies.⁶⁷ Any system of justice that allowed witnesses to be challenged was sure to generate charges and counter charges of this sort.

The same system took note of the status and gender of both accusers and accused. In 1596 Edward Francis attempted to discredit witnesses to his treasonable speech against Queen Elizabeth by dismissing them as ‘simple creatures’ and ‘base creatures of no credit’, mere women.⁶⁸ More successfully, reports of seditious speech at Ipswich in 1626 were dismissed as the ‘mutterings and private whisperings’ of ‘a man of mean note and unworthy of notice… a plain man whose tongue outran his wit’.⁶⁹ Hugh Pyne, the lawyer charged with treasonable words, claimed to be ‘unredeemably prejudiced… by the accusation and confederacy of ill disposed and unworthy persons’.⁷⁰ Other reports of ‘fearfully ill-advised words’ against Charles I in 1630 were discredited because they came from ‘persons of the very lowest and basest rank and conversation’, whereas testimony exonerating the accused came from ‘honest well-known neighbours’.⁷¹ A Restoration case collapsed because the witnesses included ‘women of ill fame’ as well as people with grudges against the defendant.⁷² On the other hand, being mean and marginal did not deflect the stern gaze of the authorities from those accused of speaking sedition. James Priest, who in 1629 spread false news ‘touching… the king’s person’, was ‘a very miserable poor man who … can neither read nor write’, but his lowly status did not exonerate him.⁷³ Nor was John Bumstead, described in 1636 as ‘a very poor silly fellow’, excused his ‘evil words and purposes to the king’.⁷⁴ Offenders across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries came from every social level, with witnesses from among their peers with whom they socialized.

The Politics of Everyday Speech

The material collected in the preceding chapters permits only the crudest gender analysis. Perhaps a quarter of all cases involved women. Yet gender involves themes as well as demographics. It was a running refrain in sixteenth-century England that queens were hobbled by their gender. Even women expressed the view that females should not rule. ‘We shall never have a merry world so long as we have a woman governor,’ declared one of Queen Elizabeth’s subjects.⁷⁵ ‘Let us pray for a father, for we have a mother already,’ remarked another.⁷⁶ Both male and female monarchs were drawn into the discourse of whoredom, being imagined or blamed for their sexual excesses. There was hardly an early modern ruler who was not called a ‘bastard’, and several were branded ‘cuckolds’. A few kings were challenged for their lack of masculinity, and many were blamed for being overly influenced by their mistresses or wives. The gender constraints of early modern society were also exposed by women prefacing a statement with ‘if I were a man’. ‘If I were a man, as I am a woman, I would help to pull him to pieces,’ declared a London woman of Charles I.⁷⁷ ‘I will put on the breeches myself to fight for the Duke of Monmouth,’ declared another woman a generation later.⁷⁸ ‘Oh, that I were a man,’ sighed the wife of a Middlesex tradesman in 1687, as she contemplated shooting James II.⁷⁹

Observations like these, and hundreds of comparable utterances, expose the politics of everyday speech. They invite the question ‘what is political?’ and suggest the answer ‘almost everything’. There was a politics of the alehouse, a politics of the churchyard, and a politics of the coffee shop, as well as a politics of the nation and the parish. Neighbours at a dinner table, travellers on the road, and loiterers at a shop-board negotiated the valencies of local hierarchy, status, age, wealth, discretion, and access to information. Whether or not they were privileged, literate, or enfranchised, a multitude of commoners passed judgement on their rulers and superiors. Some voiced strong religious opinions, some ventured into commonwealth theory, and some blundered into sedition. Official investigative responses only drew attention to casual remarks, and invested them with greater public significance. The demotic political voice was impossible to suppress, and eventually the state gave up trying.