The Role of Manuscript Newsletters in Charles II's Performance of Power

Addressing Sir Richard Newdigate on November 29, 1677, a newsletter dispatched from Whitehall imparts the following piece of gossip: "Capt Lloyd advises me that Mr Palmer is dash't out of ye Rolle of Justices by ye Kings Imediate hand. ye reason I presume I need not tell your Worp."² A reader familiar with Charles II's court would have known the reason to which the newsletter writer, likely Henry Muddiman, alludes—Mr. Palmer being the recalcitrant husband of the king's former mistress, Barbara Palmer, Duchess of Cleveland and, thus, not an individual in line in any way for the king's favor.³ What is interesting about this piece of gossip is the way that it reveals the greater privilege allowed to the manuscript newsletters to convey private information (in comparison to the printed gazettes), yet simultaneously demonstrates the writer's need to resort to innuendo and implication when touching on sensitive matters, such as evidence of a king's petty jealousy and insinuations of a mistress's influence in political appointments.⁴ Like scandalous rumors whispered between friends, Muddiman's rhetorical subterfuge serves to affectively shape a privileged community of readers imaginatively linked to the king and his inner circle of friends and advisors.

Muddiman's evocation of "ye Kings Imediate hand"—an image of a swift, decisive response but also of immediacy and closeness to the person of the king—complements the gossipy tone of the item, bringing the reader into a shared sense of 'true' understanding of the intimate motives of the king while grounding that intimacy in the king's physical body, the hand that held the quill that "dash'd" out Mr. Palmer's name. The twin elements of seeming proximity to the king's thoughts, motives, and feelings, and an awareness of his physical presence are activated in the brief moments in which the newsletters take the monarch as their subject. This affective intimacy is enabled by the unique cultural space occupied by the manuscript newsletters during the 1670s—acting as a literal supplement to the printed news offered in the official paper, The London Gazette, and, through this supplementarity, imaginatively shaping an elite readership and figuratively connecting that readership to the person of the king by tracing his movements between London and the many places (Newmarket, Woolwich, Windsor, Portsmouth) where he travelled in his active pursuit of pleasure.⁵

As we shall see, Charles's cultivation of the "Merry Monarch" persona—pleasure seeking, easy-going, accessible—reinforced the illusion of his availability suggested by these newsletters written during the 1670s. Historian Brian Weiser, by contrast, has documented the king's increasing withdrawal from the public and increasingly secretive behavior towards his inner circle of advisors during these years.⁶ In the pages that follow, I will demonstrate how these manuscript newsletters contributed to Charles's paradoxical performance of elusiveness/availability through their supplementarity, the dual nature of which, as Jacques Derrida reminds us, is to act both as "surplus" and as something which "adds only to replace … interven[ing] or insinuate[ing] itself in-the-place-of."⁷ Both the medium and the content of these letters combined to contribute to a new form of political representation underwritten by the monarch's physicality—both the sexuality that Kevin Sharpe describes as integral to Charles's representations of power and the vigor demonstrated through his love of physical pastimes—and his performance of the contradictory qualities of strength/vulnerability, sanctity/profanity, and singularity/typicality that enable public intimacy.⁸

That manuscript newsletters which circulated throughout Europe played an important role in the spread of information during the seventeenth century and to the rise of the printed newspaper is a critical commonplace; they also continue to be an important source of historical data for modern historians. However, what has not been explored is the role that the manuscript newsletters written from Whitehall played in the creation and perpetuation of an image of Charles II as a monarch available to his common subjects, an availability that carried both positive and negative connotations. Along with...