ABSTRACT
A royal proclamation issued by Charles II on Wednesday 29 December 1675 announcing the closure of the coffee-houses in twelve days’ time. In the estimation of the proclamation, coffee-houses were the ‘the great resort of Idle and disaffected persons’, a state of affairs that produced ‘very evil and dangerous effects’: tradesmen wasted valuable time when they should be employed about their ‘Lawful Callings and Affairs’; and their meetings meant that ‘divers False, Malitious and Scandalous Reports are devised and spread abroad, to the Defamation of his Majesties Government, and to the Disturbance of the Peace and Quiet of the Realm’. The proclamation declared that the ‘Coffee-houses be (for the future) Put Down and Suppressed’: all coffee-house keepers were commanded to desist from their trade from 10 January 1676. The proclamation further detailed the legal basis of the proclamation was to be the withdrawal of the coffee-men’s licences. Roger North later claimed that the Proclamation was ‘drawn and passed by a Party Favourite, Sir William Jones’ (1630–82), the attorney-general who North described as one of the ‘factious Heroes’ of the Country Party (Roger North, Examen … Together with some Memoirs … tending to vindicate the Honour of the late King Charles the Second (London, Fletcher Gyles, 1740), p. 141). Although confidently worded, the legal mechanism used by proclamation to close the coffee-houses was not legally robust, as subsequent events made clear. After the A Proclamation to Restrain the Spreading of False News of 1672 (see above pp. 89–92), government ministers continued to debate the suppression of the coffee-houses. On 2 May 1674 a further proclamation was published, also titled A Proclamation to Restrain the Spreading of False News, and Licentious Talking of Matters of State and Government, intended to punish all ‘Spreaders of false News, or promoters of any Malicious Calumnies against the State’ by considering them to be ‘Seditiously inclined’ (London, John Bill and Christopher 94Barker, 1674). In government circles, coffee-houses had become a short-hand for the malicious talk and rumour of ‘the town’. The King’s equerry, Sir Nicholas Armourer, wrote in October 1673 that London was besieged by ‘1000 coffee-houss reports and libells sans number’, each encouraging ‘our Great Ministers’ to be jealous of one another (Letters to Sir Joseph Williamson, ed. by W. D. Christie, 2 vols ([London], Camden Society, new ser. VIII and IX, 1874), vol. II, p. 24). Paradoxically, the coffee-house held an important part in the government’s news-gathering machinery: the secretary of state’s paid informers both collected news and disseminated the official version of the news through coffee-houses (Alan Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage in the Reign of Charles II, 1660–1685 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994)).The proclamation was published additionally and in full in The London Gazette, No. 1055, Monday 27 December 1675. Robert Hooke discussed the proclamation with a ‘company of 3 strangers’ in Jonathan’s Coffee-house in Exchange Alley on the evening of Thursday 30 December 1675 (Robert Hooke, The Diary of Robert Hooke, 1672–1800, ed. by Henry W. Robinson and Walter Adams (London, Taylor & Francis, 1935), p. 205). Writing on 1 January 1675/6, a private newsletter stated that: ‘Wee are now in a mutinous condition in this towne upon the account of coffee-howses. The suppression of them will prove a tryall of skyll. All wytts are at worke to elude ye Proclamation, this I am doubt-full they will doe it. If soe then the advice was ill, and if the Government shew itselfe to feare the people I suspect the people will hardly feare the Government’ (Hatton newsletter, 1 January 1675/6. BL Add. MS 29555, f. 288r).
