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Module type Thematic
Module code HIST0059
Module title Popular Politics in Early Modern Britain
Module tutor(s) Professor Jason Peacey
Assessment component (e.g., Essay 1) Coursework
Coursework assessment title ‘Libels and Ballads were more Popular than Political’.
or Discuss.
Exam question(s) attempted
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‘Libels and Ballads were more Popular than Political’. Discuss.

To say that either libels or ballads were more popular or political accepts a framework that is
problematic on three key counts. First, it implies that the ‘popular’ or public sphere is atomized from the
politicization within the political nation. This was increasingly not the case throughout the 17 th century,
negating the supposition of the question.1 Said supposition is firmly entrenched in the revisionist camp
of historiography, most prominent in the 1960s and 70s. Spearheaded by John Morrill, it upheld a ‘sea of
apathy’ about common political opinion in ‘Merrie England’.2 This school, although specious in its
attempt to subvert the teleology of the Whiggish and Marxist interpretations that came before it, is
reductionist on social history dimensions. It does not speak to the reality that there was an abundance
of printed material distributed to an unprecedented extent prior to 1640. 3 Through rejecting the
revisionism, the wider context of print culture becomes crucial. The outburst of ballad’s popularity in the
1680s around the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis can then be evinced inside the wider context of
bourgeoning print culture throughout the rest of the 17th century. The second tension in the question
lies in what is meant by ‘popular’: libels and ballads may be popular or unpopular about three key
dynamics: authorship, consumption, and the text itself. Therefore, it is difficult to say whether libels and
ballads are wholistically popular or not. Thirdly, libels and ballads will need to be analyzed in turn and
meaningfully differentiated to fully understand their cultural impact. Nevertheless, it seems prescient to
further the post-revisionist/ ‘cultural turn’ argument and wager that, particularly after the causes
célèbres of the Buckingham scandals in the 1620s, libels and ballads were both popular and political on
all three measures if to differing extents.4 This will require unravelling the normative loading of the term
‘popular’ and its misleading connotations, as only then will the political incisiveness of this print become
apparent. However, it is necessary to return to the context of this ‘print revolution’ first before looking
at ballads more specifically, and then the hermeneutics, so that the synthesis of the ‘popular’ and
‘political’ can be grounded contextually in the New Historicist fashion.

About the context, while scholars can never be sure how widely and in what material conditions these
libels and ballads were read and performed, contemporaries in the political sphere felt deeply
threatened by them. This indicates that the content of libel and ballad is political, else why would they
feel thus threatened? David Norbrook argues, libels and ballads should be seen as attack vectors which
cut vertically up power structures.5 Thus, even if the defamatory politics of libel and ballad were not
seen as a direct threat, the paranoia generated by this reactionary material was. This is evinced by Sir
Edward Coke’s ‘De Libellis Famosis’ (1606), which argued that libel was a direct subversion of the natural
order of things as all slander were indirect attacks on the king.6 Sir Francis Bacon argued that libel could
become a direct cause of sedition and Attorney General Heath described the overt proliferation of libel

1
Richard Cust, ‘News and Politics in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, Past and Present , 112 (1986), 66.
2
John Morrill, ‘William Davenport and the “Silent Majority” of Early Stuart England’, Journal of the Chester
Archaeological Society, 58 (1975), 115; Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (Viking, 1972), passim.
3
Glenn Burgess, ‘On Revisionism: An Analysis of Early Stuart Historiography in the 1970s and 1980s’, The Historical
Journal, 33: 3 (1990), 609.
4
Allistair Bellany, ‘Railing Rhymes Revisited: Libels, Scandals, and Early Stuart Politics’, History Compass, 5:4 (2007),
1156.
5
David Norbrook, ‘Areopagitica, Censorship, and the Early Modern Political Sphere’, in Richard Burt, (ed.), The
Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public Sphere (Minnesota, 1994), 7.
6
Bellany, ‘Railing Rhymes Revisited,’ 1151.

3
as ‘the epidemicall disease of those dayes’.7 About this ‘epidemic’, contemporaries’ apprehensions are
born out in the data: merchants of libel and ballad established their own markets in the Smithfield area
of London from the early 1600s, where they had not before. Similarly, merchants began selling on
London Bridge - establishing a broadside network that expanded into South London for the first time. 8
Therefore, the consumption of this material was not likely monolithic: it may have been popular in some
regions, not so much in others; it may have been read as political or entertaining depending on the
consumer. Nevertheless, that this is as amorphous in the present as it was to contemporaries is proof
enough that it was political: its underground nature made it threatening for the status quo. 9 Ballads also
could be incredibly subtle in content, the ballad ‘A Most Sweet-Song of An English Merchant- Man' for
instance, could be read as a saccharine love-ballad, or as a partisan story pitching the difference
between natural Christian morality and love against high politics.10 The argument that these libel and
ballads were both political and popular is further evinced as Lord Keeper Coventry argued for libel and
ballad to be tried in the assizes as opposed to the Star Chamber: it would cost less and be timelier. That
libel and ballad were tried in the Star Chamber, the personal strong-arm of the Stuart monarchs, is
tantamount to how serious an offence they considered it to be. Moreover, the fact that Coventry is
advocating reform reveals that libels and ballads were widespread enough to warrant a pragmatic and
less specialized trial.11 Libel was then political as far as it was popular, at least for its victims, but what of
the ballad conceptually, which seems, at least initially, less political than its libel counterpart? It is
necessary to examine the origins of these ballads and their political eventualities.

The significance of ballads conceptually has been understated historically. The rubric of these ballads
may have consequentially altered the meaning of the songs, notwithstanding that they have survived
effective mediation tout court: ‘much of this quasi-oral culture is lost’.12 As Christopher Marsh argues
about drumbeats, ’our knowledge of the precise rhythms is superficial,’ despite being ’one of early
modern England’s defining sounds’.13 Moreover, these balladeers simply did not have only colloquial
alehouse culture in their sights, often they were political middlemen circulating and distributing political
charges across a wider network. For instance, the song component of these ballads, despite being a part
of the ballad sine qua non, hardly played second-fiddle to more political and context-specific lyrics. This
is clear from how the Buckingham scandal of repeatedly failing vis-a-vis Cadiz and La Rochelle

7
Ibid.
8
‘Geography of the London Ballad Trade’, English Broadside Ballad Archive, at
https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/balladprintersite/LBP_main.html, Accessed 29th Nov 2023. N.B. London Bridge is a
particularly important location as it would become a fixture throughout the 17th century of broadside distribution.
9
Michelle O’Callaghan, ‘Performing Politics: ‘The Circulation of the “Parliament Fart”’, Huntington Library
Quarterly, 69:1 (2006), 130.
10
‘A Most sweet song of an English merchant-man born in Chichester to an excellent new tune’, Oxford Text
Archive, at https://ota.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/repository/xmlui/handle/20.500.12024/A51480, Accessed 24th Nov 2023.

11
Allistair Bellany, ‘Singing Libel in Early Stuart England: The Case of the Staines Fiddlers, 1627’ Huntington Library
Quarterly, 69:1 (2006), 182.
12
Allistair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair,
1603-1660 (Cambridge, 2007), 103; James Knowles, ’”To scourge the arse/Jove’s marrow so had wasted”: Scurrility
and the Subversion of Sodomy’, in Dermot Cavanagh and Tim Cook (eds.), Subversion and Scurrility: Popular
Discourse in Europe from 1500 to the Present (Aldershot, 2000), 83; Adam Fox, ’Ballads, Libels and Popular Ridicule
in Jacobean England’, Past and Present (Oxford, 1994), 47 (paraphrased).
13
Christopher Marsh, ’”The pride of noise”: drums and their repercussions in early modern England’ Early Music,
39:2 (2011), 203.

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(1625,1627) generated a steady growth in the popularity of these ballads from approximately 180 in
1620 to 250 in 1630.14 Moreover, the number of ballads with tunes to accompany them also grew from
180 to 240 in the same period, suggesting a growing entertaining and popular element in the print. 15

Textually, an example of music being formative is clear around Buckingham’s death: the ballad ’Come
Heare Lady Muses’ was played to the tune of ’The Tyrannical Wife,’ which resonated with preexisting
connotations suggesting that Charles was being cuckolded by Buckingham. Its lyrics were also changed
over time to ’now that thou art dead wee will rejoice’ -demonstrating that they were politically dynamic
and adaptable.16 They even inspired the celebration as John Felton was extolled a ‘little David‘ for
hunting this ‘great beast so fair in sight ‘.17 Thus, Buckingham‘s death acted as a paradigm shift so that
ballad particularly was finally successful in its long-standing political aim and was less localized and more
national in its content. There was more animosity in these ballads than before, as Angela McShane
observes, ’the 1620s ”good fellow” ballads were surprisingly antagonistic.18 Although ad hominem
political ballads predated Buckingham‘s infamy, they might not have captured public consciousness as
effectively as more colloquial ones. This can be seen in the ballad against George Hawkins of Evesham in
1605 where swathes of the town were inculpated in regulating local justice. 19 Thus, causes célèbres
around Buckingham galvanized popular politics through libel and ballad and drew effective
court/country lines. Indeed ‘new conceptions of opposition‘ entirely were created through the
medium.20

Now it seems important to redirect attention to the text of these ballads, as to unearth truths about
public consciousness through literary analysis. The term ballad has strong connotations of simplicity in
content, vulgar ‘ad hominem’ character analysis, and speaking to ‘common’ lore and folk tradition more
than ‘lofty’ politics. This crude mischaracterization speaks to modern misapprehensions about literary
traditions and makes it more likely that a ballad’s intent could be misread as being more private and
apolitical than it was. The epideictic and polemic forms of literature all display that terse content was
not seen to negate or limit truth in politics. These can be found listed in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, which
crossed the Mediterranean into Cicero’s Philippics and were unearthed consistently prior to the
Industrial period as showed by the political writings of Alexander Hamilton against John Adams. 21 Even
reductio ad absurdum character assassinations that had limited truth (if any,) to support them were fair
game in this genre. Also, in the Stuart context of the ’world turned upside down,’ the parameters are
expanded, as any insult was admissible, as it could be interpreted as an allegory for wider discontent. In
the context of sin and ’honor culture’, one character fault was interpreted as begetting a host of others.
Take William Laud for instance, base insults that do not have direct political consequences contributed
14
’Black Letter vs. White Letter’, English Broadside Ballad Archive, at
https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/visualization/ballad_form_trending.php, Accessed 29th Nov 2023.
15
’Ballads with Tunes vs. Ballads without Tunes’, English Broadside Ballad Archive, at
https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/visualization/tunes_no_tunes.php, Accessed 29th Nov 2023
16
Bellany, ’Singing Libel’, 190-192.
17
Bellany, ’Railing Rhymes’, 1161.
18
Angela McShane, ’Drink, song and politics in early modern England’, Popular Music, 35:2 (2016), 172.
19
Fox, ’Ballads, Libels’, 49-51.
20
Andrew McRae, ’The Literary Culture of Early Stuart Libeling’, Modern Philology 97:3(2000), 128.
21
Aristotle, Rhetoric (4th century BCE), trans. W. Rhys Roberts (Internet Classics Archive, 2000), XIX; Cicero, Cicero’s
Second Philippic (42 CE), trans. C. D. Yonge (London, 1903), passim; Alexander Hamilton, ’Letter from Alexander
Hamilton, Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams esq. President of the United States‘ , in
The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, vol.25, July 1800- April 1802, ed. Harold C Syrett (Columbia, 1977), 186-234.

5
to a complex wider system of a praise/blame dialectic that discredited his politics too, as seen by ’your
cheskake cap and magpy gowne made such strife in everie towne’.22 The political dimensions of these
ballads were not exclusively reactionary: they were part of a long-standing praise/blame tradition where
invective was read with the prognosis that every character fault or failing in politics is a form of a ’falling
off’, that ought to be corrected.23

Lyrical politics can be seen as less meandering as they were aiming at something overt enough to be
public, even if they were crafted in scholastic traditions in scholastic contexts. Oxford University had two
’Terrae Filii’ who delivered derisive speeches in official contexts for instance. 24 Though ballads were not
public as they were often written in learned contexts, they were political in aspect and popular in
outreach in the well-understood remit of contemporary ’honour culture’. This might explain the
emergence of the 1960s revisionist camp of historiography which blunted scandalous libel‘s potency in
historicism. The liberation of the sexual revolution abandoned ‘honour culture’ for the first time, making
it seem less relevant historically.25 Nevertheless, this personal side of the synthesis between the popular
and the political is seen in: ’A New Ballad of the Three Merry Butchers’. This is an indictment of this
’world turned upside down’, in which acting honorably gets punished. 26 By contrast, some ballads are far
less allegorical and seem unquestionably political and not always antagonistic towards the court, as
highlighted by ballads which encourage to ’hang up those traitors who love not the king’. 27 Thus, ballads
had political ramifications on complex levels: they were sometimes metaphorically instead of literally
political, and they were not always radical.

Libels and ballads were political and popular in the Early Modern period, particularly after death of
Buckingham which divided the court from the country and extrapolated local politics more nationally. It
would be expedient for scholarship to expand on the roles of hermeneutics in analyzing these ballads to
extract their political allusions and allegories. Furthermore, it would be sensible to cross-compare the
role of ballad and libel in politics transnationally to examine print outside its Anglo-centric context, to
see how far this kind of literature exerted its influence. It will be important in the long term to give back
agency to popular politics on a local level and to cease drawing arbitrary and revisionist lines in the sand
between what might be considered ‘common’ and ‘high politics’. From then, the power dynamics
between the government and the governed might be more accurately expressed, especially considering
how crucial print was in the Early Modern period and beyond.

22
’A Prognostication Upon W. Laud/ late bishop of Canterbury written Ano:Dom:1641:which accor:/dingly is com
to passe’, English Ballad Broadside Archive, at https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/36618/image, Accessed 28
Nov 2023.
23
David Colclough, ’Verse Libels and the Epideictic Tradition in Early Stuart England’, Huntington Library Quarterly
69:1 (2006), 18-19.
24
Ibid, 15.
25
Wilhelm Reich, ’The Sexual Revolution: Toward a Self-Governing Character’, (1949) (ed.) Theodore P. Wolfe
(Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1971).
26
’A New Ballad of the Three Merry Butchers, And Ten Highway Men’, English Broadside Ballad Archive, at
https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/35512/image, Accessed 28th Nov 2023.
27
’A Terror for Traitors Or, Treason Justly Punished’, English Broadside Ballad Archive, at
https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/31479/image, Accessed 28th Nov 2023.

6
2452 words, 1892 (exc. Footnotes)

Bibliography:

Primary Material:
‘A Most sweet song of an English merchant-man born in Chichester to an excellent new tune’, Oxford Text Archive,
at https://ota.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/repository/xmlui/handle/20.500.12024/A51480, Accessed 24th Nov 2023.

’A New Ballad of the Three Merry Butchers, And Ten Highway Men’, English Broadside Ballad Archive, at
https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/35512/image, Accessed 28th Nov 2023.

’A Prognostication Upon W. Laud/ late bishop of Canterbury written Ano:Dom:1641:which accor:/dingly is com to
passe’, English Ballad Broadside Archive, at https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/36618/image, Accessed 28 Nov
2023.

’A Terror for Traitors Or, Treason Justly Punished’, English Broadside Ballad Archive, at
https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/31479/image, Accessed 28th Nov 2023.

Secondary Material:

Aristotle. Rhetoric (4th century BCE), trans. W. Rhys Roberts (Internet Classics Archive, 2000).

Bellany, Allistair. ‘Railing Rhymes Revisited: Libels, Scandals, and Early Stuart Politics’, History Compass,
5:4 (2007), 1136-1179.

Bellany, Allistair. ‘Singing Libel in Early Stuart England: The Case of the Staines Fiddlers, 1627’
Huntington Library Quarterly, 69:1 (2006), 177-194.

Bellany, Allistair. The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury
Affair, 1603-1660 (Cambridge, 2007).

Burgess, Glenn. ‘On Revisionism: An Analysis of Early Stuart Historiography in the 1970s and 1980s’, The
Historical Journal, 33: 3 (1990), 609-627.

Cicero. Cicero’s Second Philippic (42 CE), trans. C. D. Yonge (London, 1903).

Colclough, David. ’Verse Libels and the Epideictic Tradition in Early Stuart England’, Huntington Library
Quarterly 69:1 (2006), 15-30.

Cust, Richard. ‘News and Politics in Early Seventeenth-Century England’ , Past and Present, 112 (1986),
60-90.

Fox, Adam. ’Ballads, Libels and Popular Ridicule in Jacobean England’, Past and Present (Oxford, 1994),
47-83.

7
Hamilton, Alexander. ’Letter from Alexander Hamilton, Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of
John Adams esq. President of the United States‘ , in The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, vol.25, July
1800- April 1802, ed. Harold C Syrett (Columbia, 1977), 186-234.

Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down (Viking, 1972).

Knowles, James. ’ ”To scourge the arse/Jove’s marrow so had wasted”: Scurrility and the Subversion of
Sodomy’, in Dermot Cavanagh and Tim Cook (eds.), Subversion and Scurrility: Popular Discourse in
Europe from 1500 to the Present (Aldershot, 2000), 73-91.

Marsh, Christopher. ’”The pride of noise”: drums and their repercussions in early modern England’ Early
Music, 39:2 (2011), 203-216.

McRae, Andrew. ’The Literary Culture of Early Stuart Libeling’, Modern Philology 97:3(2000), 364-392.

McShane, Angela. ’Drink, song and politics in early modern England’, Popular Music, 35:2 (2016), 166-
190.

Morrill, John. ‘William Davenport and the “Silent Majority” of Early Stuart England’, Journal of the
Chester Archaeological Society, 58 (1975), 115-129.

Norbrook, David. ‘Areopagitica, Censorship, and the Early Modern Political Sphere’, in Richard Burt,
(ed.), The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public Sphere (Minnesota,
1994), 3-33.

O’Callaghan, Michelle. ‘Performing Politics: ‘The Circulation of the “Parliament Fart”’, Huntington Library
Quarterly, 69:1 (2006), 121-138.

Reich, Wilhelm. ’The Sexual Revolution: Toward a Self-Governing Character’, (1949) (ed.) Theodore P.
Wolfe (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1971).

English Broadside Ballad Archive Data:

’Black Letter vs. White Letter’, English Broadside Ballad Archive, at

https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/visualization/ballad_form_trending.php, Accessed 29th Nov 2023.

’Ballads with Tunes vs. Ballads without Tunes’, English Broadside Ballad Archive, at
https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/visualization/tunes_no_tunes.php, Accessed 29th Nov 2023.

‘Geography of the London Ballad Trade’, English Broadside Ballad Archive, at

https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/balladprintersite/LBP_main.html, Accessed 29th Nov 2023.

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