Meet Marchamont – bigamist, doctor, turncoat and journalist!
Nigel Hastilow
Ex-Birmingham Post editor Nigel Hastilow (pictured) has “brought to life” the world’s first hack – the Piers Morgan of the Civil War – in his new book “The Man Who Invented the News.”
August 22nd marked the 380th anniversary of the day King Charles I declared war on Parliament in 1642. He raised his standard at Nottingham Castle. It blew down overnight.
The English Civil War – which I like to think of as Brexit with swords – was the undoing of the poor King. But it was the making of 22-year-old Marchamont Nedham (1620-78), the Piers Morgan of the era.
Nedham (it’s pronounced Needham despite the spelling), an Oxford graduate who tried teaching, the law and medicine before being recruited into the propaganda war between King and Parliament, was more or less universally loathed by the time Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660 and faced with execution.
His first newspaper (they were called newsbooks in those days) was the misspelt Mercurius Britanicus, which backed Parliament against the Royalists. It cost one penny and was sold on street corners around St Paul’s and distributed to the provinces. Though adult literacy in London was about 50 per cent, newsbooks flourished partly because they were read by large groups of people, especially in the competing armies.
From the safety of Marchamont’s London office, he issued propaganda and news reports against the King. It was an era of invective. Nedham was accused of having “a public brothel in his mouth” and of “being he that first found the way to make a fart sound in paper.”
He gave as good as he got. The King was a “tennis ball of passion” ruled by his wife, “the petticoat Machiavelli.” He was “a Tyrant. Traitor. Murderer, and a public Enemy to the Nation.”
Cornwall was “the very arse of Christendom,” Scotland was “a country which sticks like a scab upon the fair body of this unfortunate island.” Lawyers were “the excrement of Justinian.” The French were “the monkeys of mankind.” And a Royalist rival, Sir John Birkenhead, was “a quibbling prick-louse, a known notorious odious forger” and “an underling pimp to the whore of Babylon.”
After being jailed for insulting the King by pointing out he had a Scottish accent and a stutter, Marchamont kissed Charles’s hand, swore allegiance to the King and set up a new Royalist publication, Mercurius Pragmaticus.
This illegal paper was widely read. It campaigned on behalf of Charles I during the last two years of his life.
It continued for a few months after Charles’s execution in 1649 and began to campaign for his son, Charles II, until Marchamont was arrested during a long lunch in London and thrown into Newgate Prison as a traitor.
On the advice of his friend the Puritan propagandist John Milton, Marchamont wrote a couple of grovelling books in support of the Commonwealth, arguing that the power of the sword was not worth fighting – better to accept the new regime than die a martyr to a lost Royalist cause.
This was not just enough to get him out of jail. Also he was recruited to set up a new newspaper, Mercurius Politicus, dedicated to the support of the Commonwealth and Oliver Cromwell – even though a few months earlier he had been promising to have him executed.
Marchamont wrote and edited “Prag” for almost a decade, enjoying a near-monopoly of the news business and making a good living. In 1658, Cromwell died and, after 18 months of political chaos, the world changed again.
As Charles II arrived from Holland to take his throne, Marchamont fled in the opposite direction. He was afraid he would be hanged, drawn and quartered – and plenty people hoped that was what would happen.
Instead, he bought his freedom by bribing various courtiers and returned to England. He was banned from journalism – a monopoly had been given to Henry Muddiman, once Nedham’s apprentice – and instead he earned his living as a doctor.
Nedham’s private life was as complicated as his political allegiances. As far as I can tell, his first wife was his cousin Lucy. He later married another Lucy, a Catholic, who died in childbirth in1650, making him a bigamist. Then, in 1663, he married for a third time – even though his first wife was still alive and they were not, apparently, divorced.
Historians still pay some attention to Nedham’s writings, which were invoked by American revolutionaries Josiah Quincy and John Adams. He gave the English language the name Levellers and the term New Model Army, and was arguably the first medical man to use the phrase “first do no harm.” But his journalistic career, as a newspaper editor, jobbing hack and “triple turncoat” has been sadly neglected.
It's a pity Nedham’s chequered career is still relatively unknown. He worked during the first era in which news, opinion and propaganda in the press played a central role in the fortunes of politicians who found, much to their disgust, that they needed to pay attention to public opinion.
And so I have written his autobiography for him, taking the known facts about Nedham’s career and trying to stitch them together by filling in the gaps. The result is his memoirs, published only 344 years after his death.
· This article was originally published in the September issue of The Oldie magazine
· The Man Who Invented the News is published by Halesowen Press
