Mucky Books

The remarkably sexual and sexualized contents of the newsbooks have ensured that scholars have traditionally believed them to be unworthy of serious historical research. When Mercurius Melancholicus attacked the Presbyterian Assembly of Divines he portrayed it as ‘a whore … opening her empty quiver’ to the ‘golden shafts’ of the Parliament for ‘foure shillings a day’. In June 1648 another title carried a story about a soldier of the New Model Army who had been arrested for ‘Buggering of a Mare’. The offender was indicted, Elencticus said, and brought before the future regicide John Bradshaw, who asked him ‘what he could say for himselfe’. The soldier replied that he was ‘a Servant to the State, and the Mare was for the States service, and in that she was his owne proper goods he conceived he might use of her as he pleased’. The soldier could have been sentenced to death for bestiality, but his rather strange defence, with its distorted fealty to the ‘State’, was allegedly enough to persuade Bradshaw to release him without charge. In a similar fashion, The Man in the Moon, which was written during 1649 and 1650 by a conventional adherent of the traditional Church ‘as by law established’, contains a graphic story about a member of a religious sect who ‘dreamed that he was in heaven, and there he had carnall copulation with the Virgin Mary, her Son standing and looking on’.

All those who opposed the Stuarts were considered to be legitimate targets for similarly framed libellous attacks. In July 1649, for example, Mercurius Elencticus claimed that an obscure ‘assertor of the parliaments honour’ named Hawford in Doncaster was an ‘Hermaphrodite’. In April 1648 Mercurius Melancholicus told of a soldier from the New Model Army who kidnapped a woman and stole more than £300 from her. The Puritan allegedly said to his prisoner, The ‘honest Lady’ hated ‘the very thought of so vile an act’ and refused to comply, ‘Whereupon he stripped her to the very skin, pulled her by the hare of the head, and offered such incivility to her, that my pen blushes to reveale it.’