pincus 1995 coffee popiticians does create

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Modern History.

http://www.jstor.org

"Coffee Politicians Does Create": Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture Author(s): Steve Pincus Source: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 67, No. 4 (Dec., 1995), pp. 807-834Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2124756Accessed: 02-08-2015 20:25 UTC

REFERENCESLinked references are available on JSTOR for this article:

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2124756?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents

You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sun, 02 Aug 2015 20:25:24 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

"Coffee Politicians Does Create": Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture*

Steve Pincus University of Chicago

"Every man is now become a state man," the marquis of Newcastle warned Charles II before his Restoration. He consequently recommended that the king-in order that his subjects "be ever ready to serve your Majesty" should radically restrict the availability and circulation of "either domestic or foreign news" so that "all our discourse will be of hunting and hawking, bowling, cocking and such things." 1 Newcastle's hopes, however, were not realized. Not much more than a year after Charles II's return to his native land, the Oxford antiquary Anthony Wood observed that "nothing but news and the affairs of Christendom is discoursed of, and that also generally at coffeehouses."2 Almost two decades later coffeehouses were full of discussions "of religion and government," for "'tis all the discourse now, from the Lord to the fiddler, all are grown states-men."3 On the eve of the Glorious Revolution the marquis of Halifax averred that "the world hath of late years never been without some extraordinary word to furnish the coffee-houses and fill the pamphlets. "4

The rise of the coffeehouses, and the failure of Charles II's government to restore the marquis of Newcastle's world of bucolic pleasures, has prompted the German social theorist Jurgen Habermas to argue that "a public sphere that functioned in the political realm arose first in Great Britain at the turn of the eighteenth century."5 By public sphere Habermas means specifically an

* I am grateful for the comments, criticism, and encouragement of Sharon Achinstein, Bernard Bailyn, Tom Cogswell, Raine Daston, Gary De Krey, Adam Fox, Tim Harris, Derek Hirst, Alan Houston, Newton Key, Peter Lake, Peter Miller, David Norbrook, Bill Novak, Lynn Sanders, Nicholas Von Maltzahn, and Molly Whalen.

' Thomas P. Slaughter, ed., Ideology and Politics on the Eve of Restoration: Newcastle's Advice to Charles II (Philadelphia, 1984), p. 56.

2 Andrew Clark, ed., The Life and Times of Anthony Wood (Oxford, 1891), 1:423 (hereafter cited as Wood, Life and Times).

3 Crackfart & Tony; or the Knave and Fool: in a Dialogue over a Dish of Coffee ([London?], 1680), p. 1.

4 Marquis of Halifax, "The Anatomy of an Equivalent," in The Works of George Savile Marquis of Halifax, ed. Mark N. Brown, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1989), 1:265.

5 Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger with assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), [The Journal of Modern History 67 (December 1995): 807-834] ? 1995 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/95/6704-0002$01.00 All rights reserved.


808 Pincus

arena for public discussion, a space created for the "people's public use of their reason."6 "The political task of the bourgeois public sphere," he suggests, "was the regulation of civil society (in contradistinction to the res publica)"; it was to offer a social space for public criticism of the state. While Habermas acknowledges the origins of the coffeehouse-for him an arche- typal public space-in mid-seventeenth-century England, he nevertheless insists that the true emergence of the public sphere occurred only "after the Glorious Revolution."8 This dating allows Habermas to claim that "early finance and trade capitalism" were the motors driving the construction of "a new social order."9 The public sphere arises in Britain, Habermas insists, because of the "new conflict of interests between the restrictive interests of commercial and finance capital on one side and the expansive interests of manufacturing and industrial capital on the other."'10

Habermas, along with those Whig historians who substantively support his account, strictly delimits the area allowed for the public exercise of reason. The most elegant of Whig historians, Thomas Babington Macaulay, contrasts the richly textured intellectual life of the London coffeehouses, "in which the public opinion of the metropolis vented itself," with the backward and entirely separate existence of "the rustic Englishman." Coffeehouses, it is frequently

p. 57. I should emphasize that in this piece I am not concerned with the actual existence of Habermas's idealized public sphere-whether critical rational discourse ever occurred-but with his historical account of the transformation of the public and with the growing public acceptance of the public sphere as essential for the functioning of civil society. I am interested in delineating and locating ideologically the notion that a public exercising its critical rational faculty is both feasible and beneficial. The historian Peter Fraser also isolated Charles II's reign as the period when "an organized public opinion; that is to say, a widespread public constantly interested in politics and the course of events, and having means for exchanging opinions and combining to put pressure on the government," first came into existence. Peter Fraser, The Intelligence of the Secretaries of State and Their Monopoly of Licensed News, 1660-1688 (Cambridge, 1956), p. 114.

6 Habermas, p. 27. 7 Ibid., p. 52. 8 Ibid., p. 32. Prior to that moment, apparently, "literature and art served the

representation of the King-." Craig Calhoun posits that it was critical for Habermas that "the national-level political opposition shifted away from the resort to violence" toward party politics only "after the Glorious Revolution." Craig Calhoun, "Habermas and the Public Sphere," in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), p. 14.

9 Habermas, p. 14. 10 Ibid., p. 58. David Zaret has rightly taken Habermas to task for his chronology

and his economic determinism in "Religion, Science, and Printing in the Public Spheres in Seventeenth-Century England," in Calhoun, ed., pp. 215-17. If one accepts a mid-seventeenth-century emergence of the public sphere, there could have been no conflict between finance and manufacturing capital driving its emergence.


Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture 809

claimed, existed only in greater London." Coffeehouse society, and consequently the entire public sphere, was also gender specific: women were specifically excluded. "For the first time in history the sexes had divided," the historian of the English coffeehouse, Aytoun Ellis, has argued, "since women were not allowed in coffee houses."'12 Coffeehouses and the public sphere were also socially exclusive: for David Zaret, "the liberal model of the public sphere" was "an elite response to the radicalism and sectarianism that flourished during the English Revolution." 13 Others have insisted that the coffeehouses were "an upper class institution," 14 a gathering place for "prosperous middle-class Londoners,"'15 a locale restricted to men "of the upper or middle class.'6 Above all, coffeehouses and the public sphere had

"' Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England (New York, 1855), 1:276. The suggestion that coffeehouse culture was limited to the metropolis was also made by Habermas, pp. 32-33; William Connor Sydney, Social Life in England from the Restoration to the Revolution (New York, 1892), p. 411; and J. R. Jones, "Main Trends in Restoration England," in his The Restored Monarchy, 1660-1688 (London, 1979), p. 26. Such a view is partly excusable given the encyclopedic list of coffeehouses in the metropolis produced by Bryant Lillywhite (London Coffee Houses [London, 1963]).

12 Aytoun Ellis, The Penny Universities: A History of the Coffee Houses (London, 1956), p. 88; Habermas, p. 33; Calhoun, p. 43. Both Habermas and Ellis apparently base their assessment on their readings of two pamphlets attacking coffeehouses, which were ostensibly written by alewives. Below I will argue that both of those pamphlets were part of the high church cultural construction of the coffeehouses as neopuritan places of sedition. The assessment of Habermas and Ellis is echoed by Lois G. Schwoerer when she claims that coffeehouses were places where "men from all .classes could congregate to listen to and exchange news of domestic and foreign affairs" ("Liberty of the Press and Public Opinion: 1660-1695," in Liberty Secured? Britain before and after 1688, ed. J. R. Jones [Stanford, Calif., 1992], p. 211; my emphasis). It was "men," according to Stephen B. Dobranski, who "began meeting over coffee into the early hours of the moming" (" 'Where Men of Differing Judgements Crowd': Milton and the Culture of the Coffee Houses," Seventeenth Century 9 [Spring 1994]: 38).

1' Zaret, p. 224. 14 Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History, 1200-1830 (London, 1983),

p. 13. While Clark is actually describing taverns, he clearly implies that coffeehouses in the seventeenth century competed with taverns for the elite clientele. Only in the eighteenth century did "ordinary coffee houses" lose their "wider appeal to the well-to-do" (pp. 13-14).

lS John E. Wills, "European Consumption and Asian Production in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London, 1993), p. 141. See the similar assessment in Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth, 1971), p. 22.

16 Macaulay, 1:276. See also Calhoun's explication of Habermas (n. 5 above), p. 3. There have been some who have noted the social diversity of the coffeehouse. See Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II (Cambridge, 1987), p. 29; Ellis, p. 45; and Edward Forbes Robinson, The Early History of Coffee Houses in England


810 Pincus

a specific ideological locus. "The public sphere in politics," Zaret contends, was "initially delineated by the early Whig theorists." 17 The coffeehouse, according to Edward Robinson, "assimilated some of the best elements of Puritanism" and was thus a Whig "political institution which came into collision with the tyrannical government of the later Stuart kings."1'8 It is precisely these sorts of limitations on the notion of the public sphere that have led the philosopher and social critic Nancy Fraser to conclude that the public sphere was "a masculinist ideological notion that functioned to legitimate an emergent form of class rule." 19

Recently a group of historians of seventeenth-century England has sought to challenge these Whig and Marxisant notions of the expansion of the realm of politics and of the transformation of the public sphere in later Stuart England. In his study of the Restoration, Ronald Hutton has contended that the reimposition of the Licensing Act successfully eliminated "the atmosphere of free debate, the sense of plurality of possible futures, the discussion of fundamental issues from all points of view, the hope that governments might be converted by force of argument, which had made most of the two previous decades so exciting and disturbing."20 Even most members of Parliament, suggests the most prolific of Restoration historians, J. R. Jones, had extremely "limited mental horizons," knowing little and caring less about "Europe and the wider world," engaging only in the limited and local discussions

(London, 1893), p. 106. Peter Burke has recently emphasized the social exclusiveness of early modem conversation in general: The Art of Conversation (Ithaca, N.Y., 1993), p. 92. This emphasis on class and gender exclusivity should serve to remind us that Whig historiography was not only progressive (the element most often criticized by revisionists) but also aristocratic.

17 Zaret, p. 226. It is unclear whether Peter Burke is endorsing this notion when he claims with remarkable imprecision that while French conversation had "the odour of the court," that of England "still had a whiff of the country" (p. 114). Despite Burke's insistence that English conversation was only critically examined in the eighteenth century, he does admit that coffeehouses were one of the "new social institutions" supporting the new art of conversation that arose in the mid-seventeenth century (pp. 116-17).

18 Robinson, pp. vi, 140. Aytoun Ellis makes a similar point, though he acknowledges that the coffeehouses opposed "the military dictatorship of Cromwell" as well as "the profligacy that characterized the court of the Restoration period" (p. xv). Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer have also vaguely linked coffeehouses "with the spread of [religious] Dissent and the new philosophy" (Leviathan and the Air Pump [Princeton, N.J., 1985], p. 292). It is not clear to me whether Shapin and Schaffer mean that this was an invariable link. Dobranski similarly claims that coffeehouses had a "Puritan character" (p. 39).

19 Nancy Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy," in Calhoun, ed. (n. 8 above), p. 116.

20 Ronald Hutton, The Restoration: A Political and Religious History of England and Wales, 1658-1667 (Oxford, 1985), p. 157.



concerning "their shires and neighborhoods." 21 Jonathan Scott, who has been more willing to allow for the existence of ideological disputes in the Restoration, has nevertheless insisted that the "events, structures and issues of the reign of Charles II ... are almost xerox [sic] copies of events, structures and issues of the early Stuart period." This political continuity-the decided absence of a public sphere in Restoration England-"is hardly surprising," according to Scott, because "the re-establishment" of the early Stuart regime "was precisely the purpose of the Restoration settlement itself."22 John Morrill-despite his acknowledgment of "some of the failings of revision- ism," especially with respect to the later seventeenth century in which he has "no investment"-has also emphasized "the basic continuity of seventeenth- century politics."23

Against these interpretations of later seventeenth-century English political culture, I will argue that a public sphere in the Habermasian sense did emerge in later seventeenth-century England, precipitated largely by a thirst for political discussion and a desire to preserve English liberties.24 This public sphere was not limited to the metropolis, not gender or class exclusive, and not defended or used exclusively by Whig ideologues. Instead, I will claim that coffeehouses were ubiquitous and widely patronized in Restoration England, Scotland, and Ireland and that they and the notion of the public sphere were defended by political and religious moderates as well as by more committed Whigs. The widespread acceptance of the value of public opinion represents a new conception of political and social space, a conception constitutive of the public sphere.

I

Soon after the first coffeehouse opened in Oxford "about the year 1650," coffee drinking became all the rage.25 By the 1670s, "all the neighborhood

21 J. R. Jones, Britain and the World, 1649-1815 (Glasgow, 1980), p. 12. 22 Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677-1683 (Cam-

bridge, 1991), p. 6. 23 John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (London, 1993), pp. 250, 392. 24 I am suggesting that this thirst developed during the English Revolution and am

thus sympathetic to the arguments advanced by David Norbrook in "Areopagitica, Censorship, and the Early Modern Public Sphere," in The Administration of Ethics, ed. Richard Burth (Minneapolis, 1995), pp. 3-33, though I remain to be persuaded by his claim that "the ideological motivation of these developments had been to a consider- able degree religious rather than secular" (p. 6).

25 Anthony Wood's diary, 1663, Bodleian MSS Wood's diaries 7, fol. 4r. John Houghton claims that the first coffeehouse was opened in London by a Greek named Pasqua in 1652, but he may well have been referring to the first London coffeehouse (Husbandry and Trade Improv'd [London, 1727], 3:125-26). For the development of


812 Pincus

swarm [to the coffeehouses] like bees, and buzz there like them too."26 One poet was convinced that coffee has so much "credit got / [that] he's no gentleman that drinks it not."27 During the Exclusion Crisis it was estimated that throughout England 100 tuns of coffee were consumed per year.28 Coffee had "so generally prevailed" within three decades of its introduction "that bread itself, though commonly with us voted the staff of life, is scarcely of so universal use." One pamphleteer marveled that "the dull planet Saturn has not finished one revolution through the orb since coffee-houses were first known amongst us, yet 'tis worth our wonder to observe how numerous they are already grown, not only here in our metropolis, but in both universities and most cities and eminent towns throughout the nation."29

London did in fact quickly become the host to hundreds of coffeehouses. By the late 1650s the Londoner Thomas Rugge claimed that coffee was "sold almost in every street."30 In May 1663 there were over eighty coffeehouses in the city alone.31 Even during the height of the devastating London plague of 1665-66 new coffeehouses opened, and old ones were "very full."32 The virtuoso Robert Hooke filled his diary with excursions to and discussions in London coffeehouses, visiting over sixty different establishments in the 1670s.33 There were, of course, many coffeehouses in Westminster and the

the coffeehouse institution in the medieval near east, see Ralph S. Hattox, Coffee and Coffeehouses (Seattle, 1985).

26 The Ale-Wives Complaint Against the Coffee-Houses (London, 1675), p. 2. 27 [James Howell], Two Broad-Sides Against Tobacco (London, 1672), p. 60. 28 An Answer to a Paper Set Forth by the Coffee-Men (London, [168?]). This was

a truly prodigious amount since one pound of coffee beans was reckoned to produce two and one-half gallons of coffee, and since all of the contemporary references suggest that a single cup of coffee was usually nursed for two or three hours. It also seems as if seventeenth-century coffee sellers were not averse to reusing their "footes" or grounds. See Sir John Finch's notebook, January 15/25, 1678, Historical Manu- scripts Commission, Finch MSS, vol. 2, pp. 144-45. See also Houghton, 3:130-31. By his estimates, based on the numbers presented in the Exclusion Crisis, ?61,740 worth of coffee was sold per year. This would be enough to enable 15,500 people to drink one cup of coffee every day of the year. Since many entered coffeehouses who drank nothing, or drank tea, chocolate, sherbets, cock-ale, or cider instead, or smoked tobacco, the numbers who visited the coffeehouses must have been extremely large.

29 Coffee-Houses Vindicated (London, 1675), pp. 2-3. 30 William L. Sachse, ed., The Diurnal of Thomas Rugg, 1659-1661, Camden

Society Third Series, vol. 91 (November 1659; London, 1961), p. 10. 31 R. Latham and W. Matthews, eds., The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 11 vols. (Berkeley

and Los Angeles, 1970-83), 10:70 (hereafter cited as Pepys, Diary). 32 George Davenport to Wijliam Sancroft, December 4, 1666, Bodleian Library,

Tanner MSS 45, fol. 125r; Pepys, Diary, February 16, 1666, 7:45. 33 Henry W. Robinson and Walter Adams, eds., The Diary of Robert Hooke,

1672-1680 (London, 1935) (hereafter cited as Hooke, Diary).



suburbs as well. In 1672, for example, fifteen Westminster coffeehouse owners were indicted for illegal sale of coffee-a number certainly dwarfed by the number of merchants plying their trade with a license.34 One historian has concluded that by the end of the century there were over two thousand coffeehouses in greater London.35 No wonder John Houghton thought that "there are few trades in London that employ more houses, and pay greater rents," than coffeehouses.36

Far from being limited to London, the coffeehouse was an institution that quickly spread to the provinces, as well as to Scotland and Ireland. The eighteenth-century provincial coffeehouse so carefully described by John Brewer had its origins in the reign of Charles I1.37 John Row opened the first coffeehouse in Edinburgh near the Parliament House in 1673.38 That same year Colonel Walter Whiteford established a coffeehouse in Glasgow.39 Lionel Newman had already opened a coffeehouse in Dublin by 1664.40 England's two university towns quickly sported a variety of coffeehouses. In Oxford coffeehouses, observed Anthony Wood, who himself seems to have whiled away many hours sipping coffee, "most scholars retire and spend much of the day in hearing and speaking of news.",41 In Cambridge, it "is become a custom after chapel to repair to one or other of the coffee houses (for there are divers), where hours are spent in talking, and less profitable reading of newspapers, of which swarms are continually supplied from London."42 Entrepreneurs opened coffeehouses in a variety of larger English towns. There was a coffeehouse in York by 1669.43 Coffeehouses in Bristol were already a

John C. Jeafferson, ed., Middlesex County Records (September 1672; London, 1892), 4:36. For other Westminster and suburban coffeehouses, see also The Western Wheele Turned Round to the Last Spoke [broadside] (London, 1660); James Long to Henry Oldenburg, October 22, 1663, in The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, ed. A. Rupert and Marie Boas Hall (Madison, Wis., 1966-67), 2:121.

35 Ellis (n. 12 above), p. xiv. 36 Houghton (n. 25 above), 3:132. It should be noted that this part of Houghton's

work was written no later than 1701. 37 John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III

(Cambridge, 1976), pp. 150-51. 38 James Grant, Cassell's Old and New Edinburgh (London, n.d.), 1:178. 39 George Eyre-Todd, History of Glasgow (Glasgow, 1931), 2:365. 40 Ellis, p. 200. 41 Wood, Life and Times (December 1674; n. 2 above), 2:300. Wood's account

books record frequent expenditures at the coffeehouse. See, e.g., MSS Wood's diaries 7, April 15, 1663, fol. 16r; MSS Wood's diaries 8, entries for July 10, July 26, October 23, November 5, November 13, and December 18, 1664.

42 Peter Millard, ed., Roger North: General Preface and Life of Dr John North (Toronto, 1984), p. 115.

43 George Benson, An Account of the City and County of York 2 vols. (York, 1925), 2:62.


814 Pincus

cause for political concern by the mid-1670s.44 The center of Exeter had a number of coffeehouses by the end of the century.45 Many more humble towns also had their own coffeehouses. The fire at Tunbridge Wells in 1687 is known to have destroyed that resort's coffeehouses.46 One Slater at Nottingham ran a coffeehouse noted for its "liberty of speech" and distribution of "intelligence. 47 The merits and demerits of William III's invasion were hotly contested in Preston's coffeehouse in 1688.48 Plymouth's coffeehouse hosted a learned debate as to whether "wounds of the brain were curable" in the early 1680s.9 On the eve of the Exclusion Crisis Dorchester already had at least two coffeehouses.50 Harwich and Yarmouth both had coffeehouses as early as the 1660s.' One William Jenkins was licensed to sell coffee in Buckingham- shire, perhaps at High Wycombe, during the Exclusion Crisis.52 Dudley Pennard used his coffeehouse at nearby Amersham to support Algemon Sidney in his campaign for a parliamentary seat in 1680.53 Thus the Exclusion era pamphleteer was accurately describing the new institution's phenomenal proliferation when he noted that "most of the cities and boroughs of the nation" had their own coffeehouses.54

Not only were Restoration coffeehouses widely distributed throughout the country but they also appear to have welcomed everyone regardless of gender, social status, or political outlook. "A coffee-house is free to all comers, so they have human shape," remarked one early commentator; "boldly therefore

44 Jonathan Barry, "The Politics of Religion in Restoration Bristol," in The Politics of Religion in Restoration England, ed. Tim Harris, Paul Seaward, and Mark Goldie (Oxford, 1990), p. 175; Jonathan Barry, "The Cultural Life of Bristol, 1640-1775" (D.Phil. diss., Oxford, 1985), pp. 100, 117; Ellis (n. 12 above), p. 207. Ellis claims there were already four coffeehouses in Bristol by 1666.

45 Robert Newton, Eighteenth Century Exeter (Exeter, 1984), p. 24; W. G. Hoskins, Industry, Trade and People in Exeter, 1688-1800 (Exeter, 1968), p. 24.

46 Ellis, p. 213. 47 J. Cooper (Newark) to Joseph Williamson, July 27, 1667, PRO, SP 29/211/28. 48 Anthony Hewitson, ed., Diary of Thomas Bellingham (November 1688; Preston,

1908), p. 27 (hereafter cited as Bellingham, Diary). 49 F. N. L. Poynter, ed., The Journal of James Yonge (1647-1721), Plymouth

Surgeon (1682; Hamden, Conn., 1963), p. 186 (hereafter cited as Yonge, Journal). 50 Charles Herbert Mayo, ed., The Municipal Records of the Borough of Dorchester,

Dorset (May 2, 1679; Exeter, 1908), pp. 710-11; David Underdown, Fire from Heaven (London, 1992), p. 250.

5' Richard Bower (Yarmouth) to Williamson, October 21, 1667, PRO, SP 29/220/93; Sir William Batten (Harwich) to Samuel Pepys, May 14, 1665, PRO, SP 29/121/49.

52 William Le Hardy, ed., County of Buckingham Calendar of Session Records (October 7, 1680; Aylesbury, 1933), 1:61.

53 Scott (n. 22 above), pp. 177-78. 54 Ursa Major & Minor (London, 1681), p. 47.



let any person who comes to drink coffee set down in the very chair, for here a seat is to be given to no man. That great privilege of equality is only peculiar to the Golden Age, and to a coffee house."55 The playwright and newsletter- writer Thomas St. Serfe set a scene of his play Tarugo's Wiles in "a coffee-house, where is presented a mixture of all kinds of people."56 A "coffee-man," according to Samuel Butler, "keeps a coffee market where people of all qualities and conditions meet, to trade in foreign drinks and news, ale, smoke, and controversy. He admits of no distinction of persons, but gentleman, mechanic, lord, and scoundrel mix, and are all of a piece, as if they were resolved into their first principles."57 In a coffeehouse, agreed another pamphleteer, "each man seems a Leveller, and ranks and files himself as he lists, without regard to degree or order; so that oft you may see a silly fop, and a worshipful justice, a griping rook, and a grave citizen, a worthy lawyer, and an errant pickpocket, a reverend Nonconformist, and a canting mountebank, all blended together."58

There is little warrant for the claim that women were excluded from coffeehouses. It is true, of course, that three pamphlets published in the period claimed to voice female criticism of the new venue of sociability. But there is no evidence that they were written by women. More important, their celebration of alehouses and critiques of Nonconformity suggest that they were enunciating a high church rather than a specifically female ideological outlook.59 There is every reason to believe that women frequently attended the newly fashionable coffeehouses, places that celebrated sober discourse rather than inebriated play, cultural exchange rather than social status. Indeed, The Mens Answer to the Womens Petition Against Coffee ridiculed the gendered claims of that pamphlet, suggesting that "the Turkish Women," the ubiquitous symbol of the coffeehouse, "are but emblems of what is to be done for your

55 M.P., A Character of Coffee and Coffee-Houses (London, 1661), pp. 1, 5-6 (hereafter cited as A Character of Coffee and Coffee Houses). See also A Description of the Academy of the Athenian Virtuosi (London, 1673), p. 9; and The Character of a Coffee-House ([London?], 1665), p. 2 (hereafter cited as The Character of a Coffee- House [1665]).

56 Thomas St. Serfe, Tarugo's Wiles: Or, The Coffee-House (dedicated to George Marquesse of Huntley) (London, 1668), sig. A4v.

57 Charles W. Dawes, ed., Samuel Butler, 1612-1680: Characters (Cleveland, 1970), pp. 256-57.

58 The Character of a Coffee-House (approved April 11, 1673) (London, 1673), p. 3, hereafter cited as The Character of a Coffee-House (1673). See also The Character of a Coffee-House (1665), pp. 3-4; and The Women's Petition Against Coffee (London, 1674), p. 4.

59 The pamphlets are The Women's Petition Against Coffee; The Maiden's Com- plaint Against Coffee (London, 1663); and The Ale-Wives Complaint Against the Coffee-Houses (n. 26 above). I will discuss the ideological tropes they enunciate below.


816 Pincus

conveniences."60 When Thomas Bellingham, for example, visited his favorite haunt in Preston to gather information about recent political developments, he met "with several women at the coffee house." 61 Robert Hooke dined with Robert Boyle and his sister Lady Ranelagh at Man's Coffee House in London.62 So respectable a woman as Sir William Temple's sister, Martha Lady Giffard, was known to be a habitue of coffeehouses.63 "City ladies and citizens wives" were said to relish the opportunity for political discussion the coffeehouses provided.64 Not only were women welcome; the surviving records provide evidence that women also owned and ran coffeehouses in London, Yarmouth, Dorchester, and Oxford.65

Nor were the coffeehouses politically exclusive. While it is true that republicans, radicals, and Whigs had their favorite coffeehouses,66 theirs were not the only points of view expressed. During the second Anglo-Dutch War, the naval administrator Sir William Batten sought to "publish" Dutch atrocity stories "at the coffee houses," where he was confident they would "spread like a leprosy."67 John Dryden, a fierce critic of radicals and Dissenters and already the regime's poet laureate, was confident that "the coffee-wits" would assume their "proper business" and "damn the Dutch."68 In fact, there was a long royalist tradition of frequenting coffeehouses. During the Interregnum it was at Arthur Tillyard's coffeehouse hard by All Souls College in Oxford that a group of young royalists, including Matthew and Christopher Wren, Peter Pett, John Lamphire, and Anthony Wood, met to discuss politics and literature.69 Samuel Butler and John Dryden, two of the fiercest critics of political and religious radicalism, were always to be found at Will's coffeehouse in Covent Garden.70 Unsurprisingly, it was at Will's coffeehouse that a

60 The Mens Answer to the Womens Petition Against Coffee (London, 1674), pp. 2-3.

61 Bellingham, Diary, January 19, 1689 (n. 48 above), p. 44. 62 Hooke, Diary, October 2, 1675 (n. 33 above), p. 184. 63 Julia G. Longe, ed., Martha Lady Giffard: Her Life and Correspondence

(London, 1911), p. 251. 64 City and Country Mercury, July 8-11, 1667 (unpaginated). 65 Middlesex County Records, September 1, 1672, p. 32; Richard Bower (Yarmouth)

to Williamson, October 21, 1667, PRO, SP 29/220/93; Underdown, Fire from Heaven (n. 50 above), p. 250; M. G. Hobson, ed., Oxford Council Acts, 1665-1701 (July 16, 1677; Oxford, 1939), p. 98.

66 Tim Harris, Politics under the Later Stuarts (London, 1993), pp. 60, 84; J. A. I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and Its Enemies, 1660-1730 (Cambridge, 1992), p. 7.

67 Sir William Batten to Samuel Pepys, May 14, 1665, PRO, SP 29/121/49. In fact, they did. See the discussion in my Protestantism and Patriotism (Cambridge, in press), pt. 4.

68 John Dryden, The Indian Emperour (London, 1667), p. 112. 69 Wood, Life and Times (March 1656; n. 2 above), 1:201. 70 Pepys, Diary, February 3, 1664 (n. 31 above), p. 37; Yonge, Journal, 1678 (n. 49

above), pp. 156-57.



rump steak (referring to the Rump Parliament, 1649-53), the covenant, and green ribbons-the most potent and readily recognizable symbols of political radicalism-were publicly burned during the Exclusion Crisis.71 Even Papists were known to frequent coffeehouses and to distribute "seditious books" there.72 The author of A Character of Coffee and Coffee-Houses was not exaggerating by much, then, in claiming that "a coffee-house, like logic, the lawyer, and the Switzer will maintain any cause."73

II

Why did coffeehouses suddenly become so fashionable? Why did English men and women all over the country, of all social classes and ideological proclivities, begin swarming to coffeehouses during the Interregnum and Restoration?

One explanation is that in an age of rising beer prices coffee provided a cheap alternative.74 "In regard of easy expense," one of coffee's defenders pointed out, "a tavern reckoning soon breeds a purse-consumption. In an ale-house you must gorge yourself with pot after pot, sit dully alone or be drawn in to club for others' reckonings, be frowned on by your landlady as one that cumbers the house and hinders better guests. But [in a coffeehouse] for a penny or two you may spend 2 or 3 hours, have the shelter of a house, the warmth of a fire, the diversion of company and conveniency if you please of taking a pipe of tobacco, and all this without any grumbling or repining."75 "Many serious and hopeful young gentlemen and tradesmen," admitted a critic of coffeehouse culture, "under pretense of good husbandry, to avoid spending above one penny or two pence at a time, have got to these coffee houses."76 Another pamphleteer highlighted another economy. "He that comes often" to the coffeehouse "saves two pence a week in Gazettes, and has his news and his coffee for the same charge."77

Others highlighted the beneficial effects that coffee, as opposed to ale, had on the labor force and commercial relations. " 'Tis found already that this coffee drink hath caused a greater sobriety among the nations," enthused James Howell, "for whereas formerly apprentices and clerks with others, used

71 Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II (n. 16 above), p. 170. 72 Wood, Life and Times (November 1666; n. 2 above), 2:93; Thomas Dangerfield,

Particular Narrative of the late Popish Design to Charge those of the Presbyterian Party with a Pretended Conspiracy (London, 1679), p. 17.

73 A Character of Coffee and Coffee-Houses (n. 55 above), p. 7. 74 Clark (n. 14 above), p. 208 (for the rise in beer prices, and alehouse profit

margins). 75 Coffee-Houses Vindicated (n. 29 above), p. 3. 76 The Grand Concern of England Explained (London, 1673), p. 24. 77 The Character of a Coffee-House (1673), p. 1.


818 Pincus

to take their morning draught in ale, beer, or wine, which by the dizziness they cause in the brain, make many unfit for business, they use now to play the good-fellows in this wakeful and civil drink."78 Similarly, coffeehouses provided a preferable locale to conduct business. It had become "almost a general custom amongst us, that no bargain can be drove, or business concluded between man and man, but it must be transacted at some public house." The liquors provided at alehouses and taverns only rendered the negotiators "drowsy and indisposed for business," whereas "having now the opportunity of a coffeehouse, they repair thither, take each man a dish or two ... and so dispatching their business, go out more sprightly about their affairs than before."79

While cost-effectiveness and sobriety might account for why some people began to frequent the new establishments once they were established, these advantages hardly explain the wild popularity and remarkable efflorescence of this new institution in a society noted more for its conservative tastes than for its cultural innovations. Contemporaries, however, were not perplexed. Men and women of all ideological stripes knew full well that coffeehouses had become so popular because they specialized in the circulation of news.

Recently early Stuart historians have demonstrated that the revisionist conception of the insular and localist country gentry was too pessimistic an assessment of the quantity and quality of information available for their consumption. In fact, more than enough newsletters and separates were distributed for many outside London to develop sharp ideological critiques of the Caroline regime. However, the public sphere, the arena for the public exercise of critical reason, was still severely restricted. Those bustling and vibrant London centers of political discussion, Paul's Walk and the Exchange, depended exclusively on oral communication for the dissemination and distribution of news.80 Indeed, both F. J. Levy and Richard Cust have concluded that "most news still spread by word of mouth."'81 That the distribution of news depended on an " 'underground' network" meant that it was limited to those sufficiently substantial to be connected.82 That news,

78 James Howell to William Rumsey, in William Rumsey, Organon Salutis (London, 1657), sigs. b2-b3. See also The Vertues of Coffee (London, 1663), p. 8.

79 Coffee Houses Vindicated (n. 29 above), pp. 3-4. See also Crackfart & Tony (n. 3 above), p. 2.

80 Thomas Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621-1624 (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 20-26; Richard Cust, "News and Politics in Early Seventeenth-Century England," Past and Present, no. 112 (August 1986), p. 70; Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1993), pp. 193-94.

81 F. J. Levy, "How Information Spread among the Gentry, 1550-1640," Journal of British Studies 21 (Spring 1982): 24; Cust, p. 65.

82 Thomas Cogswell, "The Politics of Propaganda: Charles I and the People in the 1620s," Journal of British Studies 29 (July 1990): 190. Levy, in his most optimistic



ideas, even criticism of the government was widely available did not make it constitutive of a public sphere.83 "Political awareness of the sort engendered by the news did not necessarily lead to open discussion of political issues," Richard Cust has reminded us. "At a provincial level, the interest shown in political news rarely translated into public debate. Letter-writers and local politicians-at least before 1640-tended to reserve their opinions for the relative security of private conversation or an entry in their 'news-diary.' ,84 After 1640, of course, political pamphlets, poems, newspapers, and broadsides became ubiquitous. Politics, religion, and culture were constantly being discussed. It was this very public political atmosphere that Restoration coffeehouses succeeded in perpetuating.85

As soon as a customer set foot in the coffeehouse, the coffee master greeted him or her familiarly, asking, "What news have you, master?" or, more poetically, "What news from Tripoli? Do the week's pamphlets in their works agree?" or proclaiming, "Here's fresh news from all parts."86 Upon entering the rooms one was "not thrust into a box, / as taverns to catch the fox."87 Instead one sat at "a table of an acre long covered with nothing but tobacco-pipes and pamphlets."88 Not only pamphlets but also a "store of mercuries [newspapers]," "the last coffee letter," and the latest "lampoons and satyrs" could be found both in city coffeehouses and "in the country too."89 Indeed, one Londoner claimed that "there's nothing done in all the

conclusion, allows "that the ideas borne by the word of mouth affected the minor, local gentry as their grander cousins" (p. 34). This fails Habermas's test for the public sphere: for him the public sphere existed "only once the regular supply of news became public," emphasizing that "the irregularly published reports of recent events were not comparable to the routine production of news" (Habermas [n. 5 above], pp. 16-17).

83 Here I disagree with Norbrook, who claims that "there was a significant expansion in the political public sphere, especially from the 1620s onwards" (n. 24 above), p. 7. There was more political discussion, but that was not constitutive of a public sphere.

84 Cust, pp. 88-89. 85 Love has made a similar point about the emergence of the public sphere

(p. 195). 86 The Character of a Coffee-House (1673; n. 58), pp. 2-3; St. Serfe (n. 56 above),

p. 24; A Cup of Coffee: Or, Coffee in its Colours [broadside] (London, 1663). See also The Transproser Rehears'd (Oxford, 1673), pp. 35-36 (describing Andrew Marvell in a coffeehouse).

87 The Character of a Coffee-House (1673), pp. 3-4. 88 John Phillips, A Pleasant Conference Upon the Observator and Heraclitus

(London, 1682), pp. 4-5. See also Knavery in all Trades: Or, The Coffee-House (London, 1664), sig. D3r.

89 The Coffee-House Scuffle, Occasioned By a Contest Between a Learned Knight and a Pitiful Pedagogue (London, 1662), sig. A2v; Anthony Wood to William Fulman,


820 Pincus

world, / From monarch to the mouse; / But every day or night 'tis hurl'd / Into the coffee-house."90 The coffeehouse was truly "the mint of intelligence," the "exchange where haberdashers of political small-wares meet. "91

The coffeehouse was not only the place where one went to collect intelligence; it was also the site of learned discussions about a wide variety of issues. Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Henry Oldenburg, and other members of the Royal Society could often be found in coffeehouses, particularly Garra- way's, discussing "philosophy."92 Poets, dramatists, and literary critics frequently congregated in the coffeehouses to discuss the latest production at "the Duke's" or to give a new scene its first reading.93 But, above all, coffeehouses were places to discuss politics. "The best statesmen sit in the coffee house," sneered the high churchman Dr. Peter Mews.94 "It was reported in the time of the Rump-Parliament, that few walked Westminster Hall without a form of government of their own making in their pockets," recalled one journalist, "but we are grown so expert now, 'tis needless to write; for there's no man comes [to a coffeehouse] but he's a master in state affairs, and can ex tempore dictate any thing (as he thinks) worthy to be acted by a Council or Parliament."95 Samuel Butler thought coffeehouses were "a kind of Athenian school," leading him to wonder whether coffee was the drink "Lycurgus himself used when he compos'd his laws."96 "Each coffee-house is fill'd with subtle folk," wrote Thomas Shadwell from his own experience, "who wisely talk and politickly smoke."97 No wonder one poet was

March 1, 1674, Corpus Christi College MSS 310, fol. 16r; Remarks upon Remarques: Or, A Vindication of the Conversation of the Town (London, 1673), p. 60.

90 Thomas Jordan, The Triumphs of London (performed October 29, 1675; dedicated to Sir Joseph Sheldon) (London, 1675) p. 23. See the similar language in "Upon the Proclamation for Suppressing Coffee Houses," 1675, Huntington Library MSS EL 8789.

91 John Phillips, Montelions Predictions, or the Hogen Mogen Fortune Teller (May 11, 1672; London, 1672), p. 8; The Character of a Coffee-House (1673), p. 1.

92 Henry Oldenburg to Robert Boyle, October 6, 1664, Oldenburg Correspondence (n. 34 above), 2:249; Hooke, Diary (n. 34 above).

93 Thomas Otway, Alcibiades: A Tragedy (dedicated to Charles Earl of Middlesex) (London, 1675), sig. A3r; The Complaisant Companion (London, 1674), sig. A2r; Thomas Duffett, The Amorous Old-Woman (London, 1674), sig. A4r; John Beale to John Evelyn, March 9, 1681, Christ Church, Evelyn MSS letters 145. For the last reference I am grateful to Nicholas Von Maltzahn, Milton scholar and fellow trawler among the Evelyn papers.

94 Peter Mews to Williamson, July 19/29, 1667, PRO, SP 84/183, fol. 35r. 95 City and Country Mercury (n. 64 above). See also The Grand Concern of England

Explained (n. 76 above), p. 24; Montague Summers, ed., The Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell, 5 vols. (London, 1927), "The Miser," 1672, 2:21 (hereafter cited as Shadwell, Works).

96 Samuel Butler: Characters, ed. Charles W. Davis (Cleveland, 1970), p. 257. 97 Shadwell, "The Woman-Captain," 1679, in Works, 4:15-16.



convinced that "coffee politicians does create."98 Throughout the Restoration, coffeehouses hosted all sorts of political

discussions. Far from limiting themselves to British or Britannic issues, the coffeehouse denizens frequently felt free to gossip about and comment upon the affairs of Europe and the wider world. In coffeehouses one could "hear the state-affairs of all nations adjusted" and discussions of "the right of empires; the management of peace and war."99 Developments in each Dutch War were revealed in coffeehouses, just as the merits and demerits of those conflicts were hotly debated.100 Even after the English withdrew from the continental conflict, the coffeehouses were full of speculations about, and recommenda- tions for, European affairs.101 Coffeehouse gossips speculated on when Parliament would meet and on which ministers would be dismissed or recalled. 102 During the Exclusion Crisis, as is well known, each political move that was made, and some that were not, was revealed, debated, celebrated, and vilified in the coffeehouses.'03

So politically au courant, so ideologically up-to-date, so accurate a gauge of public opinion were the coffeehouses that they were the places that politicians and journalists went to collect news and opinions. When he was secretary of state, the earl of Arlington had agents collecting coffeehouse gossip. 104 Henry

98 Poetry Commonplace Book, ca. 1680s, Cambridge University Library, Add. MSS 5962, fol. 4r.

99 A Learned Discourse on Various Subjects (January 4, 1678; London, 1685), p. 10; Shadwell, "Sullen-Lovers," 1668, in Works, 1:1. See also The Character of a Coffee- House (1673), pp. 3-4; Remarques on the Humours and Conversation of the Town (Lon- don, 1673), pp. 126-27.

100 The Character of a Coffee-House (1665), p. 5; Pepys, Diary, January 3, 1665 (n. 31 above), p. 3, May 24, 1665, p. 108; Captain George Cock to Williamson, August 24, 1665, PRO, SP 29/131/1 1; Sir Ralph Verney to Edmund Verney, November 25, 1672, Princeton University, Firestone Library, Vemey MSS, Reel 25 (unfoliated); Henry Ball to Williamson, June 13, 1673, in W. D. Christie, ed., Letters Addressed from London to Sir Joseph Williamson, 2 vols. (London, 1874), 1:39, Ball to Williamson, July 4, 1673, 1:88, and Ball to Williamson, September 5, 1673, 2:13.

1O0 See, e.g., Francis Benson to Sir Leoline Jenkins, September 11, 1677, Hunting- ton Library, MSS HM 30314 (unfoliated).

102 Pepys, Diary, July 29, 1667, 8:304; Dr. Peter Mews to Williamson, May 24/June 3, 1667, PRO, SP 84/182, fol. 139r; Ball to Williamson, May 23, 1673, in Christie, ed., 1:7; William Coventry to Thomas Thynne, July 13, 1673, Longleat House, Thynne MSS 16, fol. 147v; James Hickes to Williamson, February 13, 1674, in Christie, ed., 2:152.

103 So much is known about this, and so much more is revealed in Mark Knights's Politics and Opinion in the Exclusion Crisis, 1678-81 (Cambridge, 1994) that I will provide only three examples: Halifax to Thomas Thynne, July 31, 1679, Longleat House, Thynne MSS 15, fol. 3; Thomas Thynne to Halifax, June 22, 1680, British Library (BL), Althorp MSS C5 (unfoliated); Dr. Gilbert Burnet to Halifax, April 3, 1680, BL, Althorp MSS C18, fols. 37-38.

'04 See, e.g., Information to Secretary Bennet, March 9, 1665, PRO, SP 29/114/90.


822 Pincus

Coventry, when occupying that same post, admitted that "we are without news but what the coffee houses make." 105 The radical M. P. Colonel Birch, like Thomas Shadwell's London alderman Sir Humphrey Maggot, had to gad about to coffeehouses "to be informed." 106 Thomas St. Serfe was probably among the "groups of journalists" that the Florentine nobleman Lorenzo Magolotti observed in the London coffeehouses, for he often admitted he filled his newsletters with stories "from the coffee house." 107

Cheap and sobering the coffeehouses certainly were. But all the contemporary evidence suggests that Restoration Britons flocked to the coffeehouses in droves because it was there that they could gather news or political gossip and criticize or celebrate the actions of the government. "The main end of going thither," one disgruntled alewife reputedly observed, "is perusing of news and holding of arguments." 108 The coffeehouse flourished in Restora- tion Britain precisely because it provided the architecture for the emergence of the public sphere.

III

Not everyone, however, appreciated the sociability and public discussions of the coffeehouses. Charles II's government considered the possibility of regulating or suppressing the coffeehouses during the latter stages of the second Dutch War, and again in 1672, before actually issuing a proclamation for their suppression on December 29, 1675.109 Why was the government so concerned about the coffeehouses? Why were public spaces, centers of

105 Henry Coventry to Sir William Swann, March 20, 1674, Longleat House, Coventry MSS 82, fol. 139v. Joseph Williamson's secretary, James Hickes, was later forced to admit his political ignorance because he did not visit "coffee houses, nor do I converse with any person that do" (James Hickes to Joseph Williamson, July 21, 1673, in Christie, ed., 1:112).

106 Colonel Birch, February 8, 1678, in Anchitell Grey, Debates of the House of Commons From the Year 1667 to the Year 1694 (London, 1763), 5:120; Shadwell, "The Scowrers," 1690, in Works (n. 95 above), 5:94.

107 W. E. Knowles Middleton, ed. and trans., Lorenzo Magalotti at the Court of Charles II: His "Relazione d'Inghilterra" of 1668 (Waterloo, Ont., 1980), p. 124; Thomas St. Serfe's newsletter, December 5, 1665, Library of Congress, MSS 18124, vol. 1, fol. 1Or.

108 The Ale-Wives Complaint Against the Coffee-Houses (n. 26 above), p. 5. '09 Edward Hyde, The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon (Dublin, 1760), p. 357

(hereafter cited as Clarendon, Life); newsletter, July 30, 1667, Bodleian MSS Don c. 37, fol. 34r; newsletter from London, February 20, 1672, Library of Congress, MSS 18124, vol. 3, fol. 154r; A Proclamation for the Suppression of Coffee-Houses (December 29, 1675; London, 1675).



discussion rather than armed insurrection, perceived to represent such an ideological menace?

Much of the answer lies in the government's perception that they perpetu- ated the cultural divisions between cavalier and puritan.'10 Coffeehouses, the most enthusiastic supporters of the restored monarchy and the Church of England maintained, were in competition with the traditional English and loyal recreations of church-ales, cockfighting, and lawn bowling. They drew people away from alehouses and taverns. Coffee masters, it was claimed, "debauched the old virtue of good fellowship," making "men forsake the primitive practice of ale-drinking to run a whoring after your pernicious inventions." 1 l l One poet complained that "by this Arabian berry, / Comes the neglect of Malago and Sherry." 112 It was said that "an honest drunken cur"-a common Restoration type 13-_"hates coffee as Mahometism, and thinks it a lesser sin to be drunk, than to drink to make him sober." 114 In this context it is hardly surprising that at least one alehouse ditty began with the proud assertion that "we coffee defy." 115

Just as puritans were vilified for their failure to participate in traditional English pastimes, so coffeehouse denizens were ridiculed for their abstention from traditional masculine recreations. While alehouses accentuated gender distinctions-indeed, were celebrated for the sexual escapades they hosted-

110 For a description of the two cultures in the early seventeenth century, see David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603-1660 (Oxford, 1987). In this regard it is also significant that alehouses were severely curbed during the Interregnum: Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion, pp. 241-42; Clark (n. 14 above), pp. 177-78. Rachel Weil has recently pointed out that "Charles II was presented as having rescued England from a decade of repression; in effect, as having stolen Christmas back from the Grinch. The new regime associated itself in its own propaganda with fruitfulness, bounty and sensual pleasure" ("Some- times a Scepter Is Only a Scepter: Pornography and Politics in Restoration England," in The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500- 1800, ed. Lynn Hunt [New York, 1993], p. 137). See also Steven N. Zwicker, "Virgins and Whores: The Politics of Sexual Misconduct in the 1660s," in The Political Identity of Andrew Marvell, ed. Conal Condren and A. D. Cousins (Aldershot, 1990), pp. 87-88.

11 The Ale-wives Complaint Against the Coffee-Houses, pp. 2-3. See also The Maiden's Complaint Against Coffee (n. 59 above), p. 4. I hope the evidence presented has suggested the probable high church sympathies of the authors of these pamphlets.

112 A Satyr Against Coffee [broadside; n.p., 1679]. 113 Edward Bury (ejected minister of Great Bolas in Shropshire), England's Bane or

the Deadly Sin of Drunkenness (London, 1677), sig. A2r; Matthew Scrivener (Anglican Divine), A Treatise Against Drunkennesse (London, 1680), pp. 8-9.

114 Poor Robins Character of an Honest Drunken Curr (London, 1675), p. 7. 115

"The Tavern Huff," in Wit at a Venture (London, 1674), pp. 77-78.


824 Pincus

coffeehouses were said to eliminate any difference between the sexes. Shadwell's comic butler Hazard was enunciating a commonplace when he proclaimed that "drinking and wenching went hand in hand." 116 One defender of alehouse culture proudly retold a recent visit to an alehouse "in Petty-France, where after a bottle or two, I grew so strong, that I call'd for a more convenient room, went up stairs, had a fresh bottle, flung [the barmaid] on the bed, and gave her as good a meal's meat as ever she ate since the prime of her understanding." Such triumphs could never be had in a coffeehouse, he lamented, "for that curs'd liquor disables the most valiant hectors in the universe." 117 "If thou dost swear, drink healths, or curse, / Most men will like thee ne'er the worse," rhymed one mythical high church cleric, "When thou do'st see a handsome maid, / To court her then be not afraid. / We count that this no scandal brings, / Most of us love such pretty things."''18

Coffee drinkers, by contrast, were said to have lost all of their sexual drive, to have become effeminate. Coffee, one self-proclaimed alewife lamented, "dries up the radical moisture to the present prejudice of the [coffee drinkers'] wives and future disadvantage of posterity." 119 It was because of "pernicious coffee" that English men "are grown as impotent as age, as dry and as unfruitful, as the deserts of Africa."'120 It was "the excessive use of that newfangled, abominable, heathenish liquor called coffee," lamented the author of The Womens Petition, which "has so eunuched our husbands, and crippled our more kind gallants, that they are become as impotent as age, and as unfruitful as those deserts whence that unhappy berry is said to be brought." 121 "The coffee-houses have dried up all our customers like sponges," moaned one of the "wandering whores"; "lust and lechery were never in less repute since that liquor came up." 122 It was precisely this contrast between masculinity and effeminacy that was delineated in ballads like "The Good Fellow's Song": "Discard the man who maidenlike sips / And

116 Shadwell, "The Miser," 1672, in Works (n. 95 above), 2:42. 117 The Maiden's Complaint Against Coffee, p. 5. 118 S. R., The Blind Man's Folly Discovered (London, 1666), pp. 6, 11. See also

Bury, pp. 18, 20. 119 The Ale-wives Complaint Against the Coffee-Houses (n. 26 above), p. 5. See also

The Coffee-House Scuffle (n. 89 above), sig. A4v. I think it quite unlikely that the first pamphlet cited was in fact written by an alewife.

120 A Character of Coffee and Coffee-Houses (n. 55 above), pp. 3-4. 121 The Womens Petition Against Coffee (n. 58 above), pp. 2-3. See also The

Maiden's Complaint Against Coffee (n. 59 above), pp. 3-4. 122 The Wandering Whores Complaint for Want of Trading (London, 1663), p. 4.

Harris has shown that the attack on the bawdy houses in 1668 pitted those of Nonconformist sympathies against high church clerics and papists (see Harris, London Crowds [n. 16 above], pp. 82-91).



scarcely wets his modest lips / Effeminately formal / The glasses' size our sex decries / And proves us female or male." 123

Not only did coffeehouse culture emasculate its customers but it also encouraged them to forgo the traditional English practice of political loyalty. Drinking English ale and English beer, by contrast, proved the ultimate litmus test for royalists. At the Restoration, Gilbert Burnet remembered, drinking "healths, particularly the King's" was "set up by too many as a distinguishing mark of loyalty." 124 "He that denies the brimmer / Shall banish'd be this isle," proclaimed one balladeer at the Restoration, "Quakers and Anabaptists / We'll sink them in a glass.... For he that can't be merry / he can't at heart be sound." 125 The high churchman and future bishop of Bath and Wells, Peter Mews, knew that ale was "a good friend" to "the church and religion" and that those who frequented alehouses were "good men and quiet, no dangerous plotters in the Common-weal." 126 Alexander Brome's alehouse cavaliers "lay aside plotting and thinking, / And meddling with matters of state, / Since we have the freedom of drinking, / Tis a folly to scribble or prate." 127 Another pamphleteer was confident that the alehouse denizen "is one of the quietest subjects his Majesty has, and most submissive to monarchical government: he would not be without a king, if it were for no other reason than merely drinking his health." 128

In this the contrast with the new coffeehouses could not have been greater. "The coffee-houses" were responsible for turning "every carman and porter" into "a statesman," lamented one of Joseph Williamson's correspondents. "It was not thus when we drank nothing but sack and claret, or English beer and ale."9129 Lord Keeper Finch was said to declare that "when men did their affairs / At the Crown, the Three Tuns, and the Mitre / They drank the King's health / Ne'er named Commonwealth / But their hearts and their heads were both lighter." 130

123 "The Good Fellow's Song," ca. 1670, Commonplace Book, Regenstein Library,

University of Chicago, MSS 550 (unfoliated). 124 Gilbert Burnet, The Life and Death of Sir Matthew Hale (London, 1682), p. 9. See

also A Warning-Piece to all Drunkards and Health-Drinkers (London, 1682), sig. A3r. 125 The Courtier's Health [broadside] (1660). 126 Peter Mews, The Ex-Ale-Tation of Ale (London, 1671), pp. 9, 13. 127 Alexander Brome, "The Murmerers," in Songs and Other Poems (London,

1668), p. 43. 128 Poor Robins Character of an Honest Drunken Curr (n. 114 above), p. 7. 129 Sir Thomas Player to Williamson, November 10, 1673, in Christie, ed. (n. 100

above), 2:68. 130

"Upon the Proclamation for Suppressing Coffee Houses," 1675, Huntington Library, EL 8789. I am grateful to Jenny Stine for pointing me toward this poem.


826 Pincus

In the Anglican Royalist imagination coffeehouses had the worst of all possible pedigrees. History's greatest rebels were said to have imbibed coffee before committing their heinous crimes.131 Coffee, many commentators pointed out, came from the Levant and was often sold under the sign of the Turk's Head.132 This was the means by which the Great Sultan, still very much a pretender to universal monarchy in high church rhetoric, could undermine the English polity by perverting English religiosity. "When coffee once was vended here, I The Al Koran shortly did appear," ran one poem, "For (our reformers were such widgeons) I New liquors brought in new religions." 133 More immediate and more pernicious for the Anglican Royalist was the coffeehouse's associations with England's radical past. Coffee was brought into England, squib after squib pointed out, "when the palates of the English were as fanatical as their brains."'134 One even claimed that the regicide Colonel John Hewson was "the first inventor of this liquor."'135 Others reminded their readers and auditors that James Harrington's Rota Club, "the politic speculatists of the roundtable," met in a coffeehouse, where they wreaked havoc with "Bodin, Machiavelli and Plato." 136 Anglican Royalists claimed the institution was never severed from its first principles. Coffee- houses, thought one, "resemble Amsterdam," where so many of the religious and political radicals fled at the Restoration. 137 In coffee rooms one could still hear "a continued noise of Arcana Imperii and Ragioni di Stato," leading one commentator to conclude that "Machiavel the Florentine was born in a coffee house." 138 "There are another sort / Infect the coffee house, as they haunt the

131 Knavery in all Trades (n. 88 above), sig. D2v. Includes Brutus, Cataline, Guy Faux, and Cromwell among the great coffee drinkers.

132 The Ale-Wives Complaint Against the Coffee-Houses (n. 26 above), p. 2; The Character of a Coffee House (1665; n. 55 above), p. 2.

133 The Character of a Coffee-House (1665), title page; A Cup of Coffee (n. 86 above). For the Turkish aspirations to universal dominion, see, e.g., Paul Rycaut, The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (dedicated to the Earl of Arlington) (London, 1668).

134 A Character of Coffee and Coffee-Houses (n. 55 above), p. 1; The Ale-Wives Complaint Against the Coffee-Houses, pp. 2-3; The Women's Petition Against Coffee (n. 58 above), p. 4.

135 The Maiden's Complaint Against Coffee (n. 59 above), p. 4. 136 St. Serfe (n. 56 above), p. 20; [Samuel Butler?], The Censure of the Rota

(London, 1660), p. 14. 137 A Character of Coffee and Coffee-Houses, p. 7. For association of the Dutch

with English republicanism and Nonconformity, see my Protestantism and Patriotism (n. 67 above), pts. 3, 4, "Popery, Trade and Universal Monarchy: The Ideological Context of the Outbreak of the Second Anglo-Dutch War," English Historical Review 107 (1992): 1-29, and "From Butterboxes to Wooden Shoes," Historical Journal 38 (June 1995): 333-61.

138 The Transproser Rehears'd (London, 1673), p. 36.



court," rhymed one Anglican poet, "A sort of rascals, in whose tainted veins / The blood of their rebellious fathers' reigns." 139 No wonder one controver- sialist concluded that "a coffee-house is a lay conventicle, good-fellowship tum'd Puritan." 140

Given this background and this deep association with the principles of rebellion, it was hardly surprising that Anglican Royalists knew the coffeehouses to be nurseries of sedition. Not only did the coffeehouse serve as "midwife to all false intelligence" but it also spawned all sorts of political conspiracies.141 "Where are states so censur'd, so new-model'd, as at certain of our refectories, places that are made merely for men to spend their time in which they know not what to do with?" asked the high church cleric and Oxford divinity professor Richard Allestree of the coffeehouses. "At those tables our superiors are dissected; calumny and treason are the common, are indeed the more peculiar entertainments of those places." 142 In a coffeehouse "they set like a thousand Jews / And talk treason for news." 143 The scent of coffee was said to enter "into the noddle of a sniveling lay elder" where "commonly it fixes till it has dissolved all the ligaments of loyalty." 144 That most bitter of Anglican Royalists, Roger North, thought it "as unseemly for a reasonable, conformable person to come [to a coffeehouse], as for a clergyman to frequent a bawdy house."145

IV

The Anglican Royalists' contempt for coffeehouses, their assimilation of coffeehouses with puritan and republican culture, goes a long way toward explaining their frequent attempts to have them suppressed. Why, however,

139 "Satyr," 1670s, Victoria and Albert Museum, Forster and Dyce Collection, MSS

D25F37, p. 10. 140 The Character of a Coffee-House (1673; n. 58 above), p. 1. 141 A Satyr Against Coffee (n. 112 above); Thomas Duffett, "Prologue to a Play

Acted Privately," in New Poems, Songs, Prologues and Epilogues (London, 1676), p. 69.

142 Richard Allestree (chaplain to Charles II), A Sermon Preached Before the King at Whitehall (November 17, 1667; London, 1667), p. 13. The same language is echoed in Clarendon, Life (n. 109 above), p. 357. Significantly, the Lord Chancellor thought much of the danger lay in the very public nature of the coffeehouses, in that they brought together "a people who knew not each other."

143 "On the Coffee Houses," 1670s, BL, Add 34362, fol. 52r. See also the claim made by Shadwell's Miranda in "the Virtuoso," 1676, in Works (n. 95 above), 3:154.

144 St. Serfe (n. 56 above), p. 18. One coffee man, appropriately called Mahoone, was said to ask, "Ver come de plotters, de men of design, but to de coffee-owse?" (Knavery in all Trades [n. 88 above], sig. B4v).

145 Roger North, Examen (London, 1740), p. 141.


828 Pincus

were their wishes finally satisfied in 1675? What gave the Anglican Royalists the political capital necessary to push through their long-cherished proposal?

Certainly the government had good reason to be especially concerned about the coffeehouses in 1675. After an unsuccessful parliamentary session, a session before which Secretary of State Henry Coventry freely admitted that "the safety and welfare of this nation is like to depend upon the success of this next session of Parliament," Charles II and his government were faced with an angry and resourceful opposition.'46 Since 1672 it was in the coffeehouses that France and popery were most violently denounced, so viciously in fact that one friend of the government dared "not write half what is spoken in public in every coffee-house."'147 So close had the association between coffeehouses and Francophobia become that William Petty found "that the air which I have breathed" in a Dublin coffeehouse provoked him to write prolifically "against the Pope and King of France." 148 It was this sentiment that the earl of Shaftesbury, earl of Salisbury, Thomas Papillon, Samuel Barnardiston, and their friends organized from their base in John's coffeehouse.'49 This group actively distributed the Francophobic and antiepiscopal A Letterfrom a Person of Quality to his Friend in the Country (1675), which may have been written by John Locke, "in all the coffee houses."' 50 Other libels were spread throughout the city, so much so that "great complaints were daily made" of the "license that was taken in coffee houses to utter most indecent, scandalous and seditious discourses."''5' It was "about this time," Roger North recalled, that "the faction began to form a method of propagating seditious lies, and misrepresentations of all the government did." These

146 Henry Coventry to Clement Fisher, Sir Humphrey Winch, Sergeant Jones, Simon Fox, Sir Henry Vernon, Sir Francis Compton, and Sir Thomas Hammer, April 3, 1675, Longleat House, Coventry MSS 83, fol. 79v.

147 Ball to Williamson August 29, 1673, in Christie, ed. (n. 100 above), 1:194. 148 William Petty (Duolin) to Robert Southwell, April 8, 1679, in Marquis of

Lansdowne, ed., The Petty-Southwell Correspondence, 1676-1687 (London, 1928), p.73.

149 Narrative of Joseph Williamson's Conversations with Shaftesbury, February 15, 1676, Calendar of State Papers Domestic, 17:559; notes by Williamson, February 17, 1676, CSPD, 17:562, and February 18, 1676, CSPD, 17:562-63.

150 A Pacquet of Advices and Animadversions (London, 1676), pp. 6-7. This was certainly the strategy attributed to "the old cunning statesman" in F. K., The Present Great Interest both of King and People (n.p., 1679), p. 2. I have discussed the ideological content of A Letter from a Person of Quality in "The English Debate over Universal Monarchy," in A Union for Empire, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 48-50.

151 Lady Christiana Hastings to Earl of Huntingdon, November 1675, Huntington Library, MSS HA4685; Williamson's Newsletter, January 4, 1676, Bodleian, MS Don c. 38, fol. 70.



stories, pamphlets, and squibs, "wherever at first invented, were delivered out to be dispersed abroad, among all sorts of people, by the means of coffee houses." It was "by that means the coffee houses began to be direct seminaries of sedition, and offices for the dispatch of lying." 152 "The people of England," White Kennet explained with rather more sympathy, were "so jealous of the growth of popery and the French power, that they took the liberty of reflecting on the King and his ministry to such a high degree, that it was thought fit to put down all coffee houses by proclamation." 153

The political will was not lacking. And for the first time the Anglican Royalists had the political means to issue a proclamation against the coffeehouses. In 1666 and in 1672, when suppression had been floated, Anglican Royalists did not control the government. However, in the mid- 1670s, as Mark Goldie has shown, "an episcopal incubus descended upon the government." 154 Government, the earl of Shaftesbury announced, was in the hands of the "High Episcopal Man and the Old Cavalier." 155 This high church monopoly in government was only fortified in December 1675 when the committed Anglican Heneage Finch was promoted from Lord Keeper to lord chancellor and that hammer of Dissent Henry Compton was translated from his see in Oxford to that of London.156

High churchmen were no friends of the public sphere. They were extremely skeptical of the human capacity to reason critically and were convinced that all claims to defend conscience, whether in politics or religion, were mere expressions of pernicious will. Miles Barne preached before the king at just this moment that if "reason be not managed by prudent guides, 'tis apt to grow wild, and extravagant, to hurry us on to a belief of the foulest impostures, to a practice of the grossest iniquities, which either the prevalency of the world, the domineering enmity of the flesh, or the implacable malice of Satan, can

152 North (n. 145 above), pp. 138-39. 153 White Kennet, A Complete History of England (London, 1706), 3:336. 154 Mark Goldie, "Danby, the Bishops and the Whigs," in Harris, Seaward, and

Goldie, eds. (n. 44 above), pp. 81-82. 155 Earl of Shaftesbury's speech in Two Speeches (Amsterdam, 1675), pp. 10- 11; A

Letter from a Person of Quality to his Friend in the Country (n.p., 1675), pp. 7-8. There is circumstantial evidence to suggest that the duke of Lauderdale, who experienced something of a political conversion at the Restoration, was among those who advocated "the persecution of tongues in and about London in coffee houses and elsewhere these diverse months past" ("The Apology of the Duke of Lauderdale," in Bodleian, MSS Don b. 8, p. 24).

156 Newsletter, December 2, 1675, Library of Congress, MSS 18124, vol. 4, fol. 431r; Henry Coventry to Sir William Temple, December 21, 1675, Longleat House, Coventry MSS 88, fol. 99v; newsletter, December 21, 1675, Library of Congress MSS 18124, vol. 4, fol. 439r; London Gazette, December 16-20, 1675, [p. 2].


830 Pincus

propound to be believ'd or practis'd."''57 William Cave, another of Charles II's chaplains, was persuaded of "the weakness and degeneracy of the human understanding," convinced "that the minds of men are easily impos'd upon in matters of greatest moment," leading them down "paths immediately destruc- tive both of their nature and their happiness." 158 An understanding so easily misguided would easily be perverted in the atmosphere of the coffeehouse. It was the weakness of human reason that had given rise to "an anarchical looseness," a "remissness and slackness of the reins of rule and government," the dean of Peterborough James Duport warned, which threatened "the ruin and dissolution both of church and state, if not timely prevented." The time, he insisted, had come to put an end to "that universal neglect and contempt of authority."' 159 "Be the means never so pungent and dreadful," cleric after cleric thundered, "if they be by experience found necessary for the prevention of greater mischiefs, they are to be thankfully receiv'd." 160

It was this "new High-Church movement" that was just coming to maturity that spearheaded the attack against coffeehouses and the public sphere, just as it led the charge against toleration.16' Coffeehouses were no less dangerous to the fragile human understanding than the Nonconformist conventicle. Coer- cion was necessary in both cases to prevent a descent into iniquity. No wonder Henry Coventry thought the "proclamation against coffee houses" was "in imitation of the Parliament's making an act against conventicles."'162 It was the historian James Ralph, however, who most fully understood the intellectual program underlying the two government actions. The goal, he thought, was "to extinguish the light of reason, [and] subdue the power of reflection."'63

157 Miles Bame (fellow of Peterhouse Cambridge, chaplain to Charles II), A Sermon Preached Before the King at Whitehall October 17 1675 (London, 1675), pp. 24-25.

158 William Cave (chaplain to Charles II), A Sermon Preached Before the King (January 23, 1676; London, 1676), pp. 1-2.

159 James Duport (dean of Peterborough and Master of Magdalen), Three Sermons Preached in St. Maries Church (London, 1676), pp. 26-27.

160 Thomas Cartwright (chaplain to Charles II), A Sermon Preached Before the King at Whitehall (January 9, 1676; London, 1676), pp. 29-30. See also John Cook (rector of Luckstone in Kent), A Sermon Preached December 19th 1675 at Bow- Church (dedicated to Sir Joseph Sheldon Lord Mayor of London) (London, 1676), pp. 20-21, 35.

161 Mark Goldie, "The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England," in From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England, ed. Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan Israel, and Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford, 1991), p. 334, passim.

162 Henry Coventry to William Temple, December 31, 1675, Longleat House, Coventry MSS 88, fol. 98r.

163 James Ralph, The History of England, 2 vols. (London, 1744), 1:297.



V

Coffeehouses did not succumb to the newfound political might of the high churchmen. Indeed, the proclamation for their suppression was withdrawn in less than a fortnight.164 What prompted this political about-face? Had former cavaliers and roundheads once again lined up against one another, as predicted by the high church cultural construction and as retold by revisionist historio- graphical imagination?

In fact, the available evidence suggests that the coffeehouses, and by implication the public sphere, had much broader support than either the king or the Parliament had in 1642. The political world was not evenly divided on the issue of coffeehouses. While it is true that future Whigs celebrated the usefulness of disputes in "the politics, mystery and secrets of government, both in church and state," they were not the only ones to do so. 165 Sir William Coventry, a man with an impeccable loyalist pedigree, had defended the coffeehouses in the 1660s on the grounds that they "had been permitted in Cromwell's time, and that the King's friends had used more liberty of speech in those places than they durst in any other." 166 On January 7, 1676, Coventry's cousin and fellow political moderate, George Savile Marquis of Halifax, was removed from the Privy Council because he and Denzil Holles "had endeavored to champion the cause of the coffee sellers." 167 These were no doubt the sort of men whom one critic of the coffeehouses meant when he denounced some "hypocritical loyalists" who frequented and defended the coffeehouses. 168

These were not just the sentiments of moderates at Whitehall. The center of English political opinion had apparently shifted in favor of the public sphere.

164 An Additional Proclamation Concerning Coffee-Houses (January 8, 1676; London, 1676); Henry Thynne to Thomas Thynne, January 8, 1676, Longleat House, Thynne, MSS 13, fol. 12r; newsletter, January 8, 1676, Library of Congress MSS 18124, vol. 5, fol. 3.

165 A Letter from a Person of Quality (n.p., 1675), p. 33. 166 Clarendon, Life (n. 109 above), pp. 357-58. 167 Andrew Browning, Thomas Osborne Earl of Danby and Duke of Leeds

1632-1712 (Glasgow, 1951), 1:195; Henry Coventry to Sir Edward Wood, January 7, 1676, Longleat House, Coventry MSS 85, fol. 65v. It should be noted that these doubts within the Privy Council prompted Charles II to seek advice as to the legality of his proclamation. While the results were ambiguous-and the attorney general, William Jones, made it clear that he would not have advised such action-David Hume was quick to note the political significance of Charles II's queries. "Such an act of power, during former reigns, would have been grounded entirely on the prerogative"; after the Restoration this was no longer possible. David Hume, The History of England (Indianapolis, 1983), 6:296.

168 Quoted in Love (n. 80 above), p. 205.


832 Pincus

The coffeehouse poet who announced that "unto me / It reason seems that liberty / Of speech and words should be allowed I Where men of differing judgments crowd," was enunciating a widely held opinion.169 "People generally believed," confided the earl of Clarendon disapprovingly, "that those houses had a charter of privilege to speak what they would without being in danger to be called in question." 170

In the wake of the proclamation to suppress the coffeehouses, these deeply felt convictions quickly translated into action. The government perceived that "a convulsion and discontent would immediately follow" if the proclamation were not rescinded. 171 "When they take from the people the freedom of words / They teach them the sooner to fall to their swords," warned one poet menacingly; "let the city drink coffee and quietly groan / They that conquered the Father won't be slaves to the son." 172 Threatened with a unanimity of his subjects-a unanimity not expressed over religious issues-the bishops and their sovereign had to back down. "The King," wrote David Hume, who understood full well the significance of this event, "observing the people to be much dissatisfied, yielded to a petition of the coffee-men ... and the proclamation was recalled." 173

Radicals and centrists, Nonconformists and moderate Anglicans, former roundheads and former cavaliers, were so unanimous on this point precisely because they were no longer convinced that public discussion led ineluctably to rebellion. Far from spawning political radicalism, coffeehouses provided a locale for extremist ideas to be vented and publicly criticized. Coffee, insisted one pamphleteer, was a "harmless and healing liquor which indulgent providence first sent amongst us, at a time when brimmers of rebellion, and fanatic zeal had intoxicated the nation, and we wanted drink at once to make us sober and merry." 174 "How can any one in reason think that a coffee-house is dangerous to the government, that seeds of sedition are here sown?" asked another polemicist incredulously. The coffeehouse had always been "a friend to monarchy." It was here that "the principles of a popular government at the Rota were weakened, and rendered contemptible." Indeed, this defender of coffeehouses concluded, people "of such contrary judgments as here meet, cannot justly be feared to agree in a conspiracy." 175

Instead of sedition, many argued, coffeehouse sociability gave rise to civility, to the refinement of critical reasoning. In coffeehouses "the vain

169 The Character of a Coffee-House (1665; n. 55 above), p. 6. 170 Clarendon, Life, p. 357. 171 North (n. 145 above), p. 141. 172

"A Dialogue Between Two Horses," December 1675, BL Add. 34362, fol. 41r. 173 Hume, 6:296. 174 The Mens Answer to the Womens Petition Against Coffee (n. 60 above), p. 2. 175 A Character of Coffee and Coffee-Houses (n. 55 above), p. 8.



pratings" of "ridiculous pragmatics" were "over-balanced by the sage and solid reasonings" of "experienced gentlemen, judicious lawyers, able physi- cians, ingenious merchants, and understanding citizens." Because the "most civil" and "most intelligent society" frequented these establishments they could not "but civilize our manners, enlarge our understandings, refine our language, teach us a generous confidence and handsome mode of address." 176 "The coffee house is the citizens' academy," agreed the author of The Mens Answer to the Womens Petition. 177 "So great an university, / I think there ne'er was any;" rhymed a participant in the Lord Mayor's show of 1675, "In which you may a scholar be, / For spending of a penny." 178 "Coffee-houses make all sorts of people sociable, the rich and the poor meet together, as also do the learned and unlearned: it improves arts, merchandise, and all other knowledge," wrote John Houghton of the Royal Society at the end of the century. He confided that "a worthy friend of mine (now departed) who was of good learning" was convinced that the "coffee houses had improved useful knowledge as much as" both universities.179

English political culture in the later seventeenth century, then, was not a photocopy of that of the early Stuart period. The oral dispersion of news in Paul's Walk and at the Exchange was now supplemented by discussions in a vast number of coffeehouses throughout England, Scotland, and Ireland. These were places where one could go not only to hear the latest gossip but also to read the most recent newspaper, newsletter, pamphlet, or manuscript poetry collection. No longer did those interested in the latest developments feel compelled to confide their thoughts to news-diaries and commonplace books or feel restricted to discussing them in the company of friends in the safety of their own private homes. The new coffeehouses provided a venue for public political discussion. The proliferation of coffeehouses in Interregnum and Restoration England did signify a qualitative improvement as well as a quantitative expansion of the opportunities for public discussion. Coffee- houses provided the social and cultural locus for an early modern English public sphere.

This public sphere, however, was not as severely circumscribed as Habermas and Whig historians have claimed. Coffeehouses existed not only in the metropolis but also in the universities, county towns, and trading centers throughout the three kingdoms. That coffee and associated beverages were relatively inexpensive meant that coffeehouse sociability was available to

176 Coffee Houses Vindicated (n. 29 above), p. 5. 177 The Mens Answer to the Womens Petition Against Coffee, p. 5. 178 Jordan (n. 90 above), p. 23. 179 Houghton (n. 25 above), 3:132 (reprinting his 1701 article). The above evidence

suggests that this line of argument was just as typical of the 1670s as it was of the 1700s.


834 Pincus

those of quite humble social status. This meant that a shopkeeper in Preston, or an apprentice in Dorchester, did not depend upon the communication networks of the local clergy or gentry for news. It was now possible for them to visit the coffeeh

pincus 1995 coffee popiticians does create

Documents

jstor terms

jstor archive

eve of restoration

terms conditions of

utcall use subject

political realm

marquis of halifax

decades later coffeehouses