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no advertisements placed by others. It had to compete for readers in a city bustling with printers and publishers. Imperial affairs, and their implications for Britons, had become increasingly prominent in the press, with some writers—anonymously, as was the fashion—defending government as vigorously as others condemned it. As an anti-government weekly The Crisis followed in the wake of John Wilkes’ The North Briton and, later, The Whisperer.6 Failed attempts to silence them probably only added to their readership and emboldened those who eventually brought out The Crisis.
Important, too, were the bi- and thrice-weekly newspapers that carried essays critical of government policy. These essays were necessarily briefer than what appeared in a free-standing weekly like The Crisis because they had to be squeezed into the columns of four-page sheets, where usually half of the overall space was given over to advertisements. Still, those newspaper essays could deploy their fewer words to equal effect. Most notable among these stood the “Junius” series that
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ran in the Public Advertiser.7 Earlier essayists like Richard Steele had been no less didactic, but much more deferential. Nonetheless, caustic as “Junius” or John Wilkes or The Whisperer could be, none were as unrelentingly strident or as witheringly personal as what would be printed in the pages of The Crisis.
London, on the eve of the American rebellion, with its population of nearly a million, had just under twenty papers. Boston, by comparison, with a population of fewer than twenty thousand, had five weekly newspapers—an indication of higher literacy rates and a higher standard of living in the provincial town’s laboring classes than in the imperial capital. The divisions that marked pro- and anti-government newspapers were not quite as pronounced in London as in Boston,8 and yet there were tendencies in the London press that would distinguish a Public Advertiser (which had run “Junius”) or St. James Chronicle from the more staid London Gazette.9 None printed more than thirty-five hundred copies per issue; most printed far fewer than
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that. The Crisis, with its weekly output of around two thousand, stood somewhere near the middle.10
All, regardless of size, were involved in a conscious effort to shape public opinion; even more, they were part of a reshaping of the public sphere itself.11 By the time that The Crisis became part of London’s political scene the expectation that opinion out-of-doors should play a role in shaping the policy made indoors at Whitehall and Westminster had grown increasingly insistent. The London coffeehouses, where so many newspapers were left for distribution and sale, grew in political importance as proceedings in the House of Commons were now being summarized regularly, whereas less than a decade before Parliament had banned such reporting.12 Still barred from reporting debates in the House of Lords, the press nonetheless leaked news of the proceedings there, as peers passed along notes, even speeches, as their colleagues in the Commons had been doing for years. Consequently, what has been said about the American press and the rise of colonial protest could also be said of the press in London: just as colonists developed a greater sense of danger through what essayists in the press claimed imperial policies portended for their future, Britons, too, came to worry about tyranny anticipated as much as tyranny experienced. It was that agitated state of mind that The Crisis sought to heighten.13
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The Crisis caught the attention of Parliament at the same moment as a just-published pamphlet with a similar title, The Present Crisis. Superficially they appear to be an odd pairing in parliamentary minds: The Crisis condemned the king and his men for doing too much, for oppressing the colonists with unconstitutional policies; The Present Crisis, by contrast, called on the king to do even more, to exercise his prerogative powers more aggressively and drive disobedient colonists back into line.14 The pamphlet offended one group in Parliament, the weekly another, but they concurred that these attacks on the crown could not be tolerated. The House of Lords led, and the Commons followed, in a joint condemnation of both publications. With the third issue of The Crisis as their evidence, they censured the weekly “as a false, daring, infamous, seditious, and treasonable Libel on His Majesty, designed to alienate the Affections of His Majesty’s Subjects from his Royal person and Government, and to disturb the Peace of the Kingdom.” They chastised The Present Crisis with equally harsh language, adding that it was “an audacious insult on His Majesty, tending to subvert the fundamental Laws and Liberties of these Kingdoms, and to introduce an illegal and arbitrary Power.”15
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To underscore their disgust, the Lords and the Commons had also agreed that the pamphlet and the offending issue of the weekly should be destroyed by the “common hangman.” Handbills circulated around London, announcing “The Last DYING SPEECH of the CRISIS,” which would be burned at the gate to the entrance of Westminster palace yard on the afternoon of March 6th, and the next afternoon in front of the Royal Exchange. The Present Crisis would join it in the blaze.
Authorities may have come away from the first staged display of governmental prowess feeling that they had made their point; not so the second. At Westminster, the sheriffs of the city of London and Middlesex County carried off their duties with no difficulties. The crowd of hundreds that gathered did nothing to disrupt the proceedings, beyond uttering some “Hissings and Shoutings.” The hangman stacked wood, started a fire, and tossed copies of the offending pamphlet and disreputable weekly on the little pyre, with a ring of constables forming a circle around it.16
The orderly affair of that day was followed by chaos the next. The Royal Exchange, site of the second burning, was located on Threadneedle Street in the heart of London, across from the Bank of England and close by the lord mayor’s mansion house. That was an area where crowds could more easily turn into mobs. Sure enough, events there were “abundantly more diverting,” as one newspaper put it wryly afterward. The crowd that gathered was larger than at Westminster, the number of constables, smaller. The hangman had difficulty getting a fire started because people interfered with him; insults were hurled, dead cats and dogs and other
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The Royal Exchange, as viewed from Cornhill Street in London. From a copper line engraving by John Green of the scene produced by painter and illustrator Samuel Wale. Originally printed in London and its Environs Described, 6 vols. (London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1761), where it appeared between pp. 280–81 in the fifth volume. Later removed and colored by hand. The attempt to burn a copy of the third issue of The Crisis here the day after another had been burned in the yard at Wesminster Palace produced a riot.
John Collyer’s engraving of Westminster Hall, as reproduced on copper plate for and printed in John Noorthouck’s A New History of London (London: R. Baldwin, 1773), p. 692. The third issue of The Crisis was publicly burned in the yard here without incident on 6 March 1775.
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debris were flung at anyone representing authority; one of the sheriffs was pulled from his horse and beaten; the stack of wood and tinder was broken apart before the offending pieces were fully burned, smoldering bits being scattered along the street; three men seized by the sheriffs or constables were freed by the crowd so that no one could be charged with creating a public disturbance. What was intended to be a demonstration of governmental resolve instead turned into embarrassing street theatre.17
With
