Newspapers

As we saw in Chapter 2, the development of a strong newspaper and publishing industry was one of the key elements in the development of Edinburgh at the turn of the eighteenth century, which set it apart from other British cities outwith London.

In 1661, the Episcopalian playwright and theatre manager Thomas Sydserf (1624–99) was responsible for the appearance of the newspaper the Mercurius Caledonius (The Caledonian Mercury), which reported the reinterment of the Royalist hero James Graham, Marquis of Montrose. There had been an earlier Mercurius Criticus in 1651–2 and a Mercurius Politicus in 1654, albeit these were Cromwellian imports. Edinburgh newspapers were an early innovation, and from the late seventeenth century were to pose a challenge to the imported ‘London-based newspapers’, as well as drawing on them extensively. The short-lived Mercury promised – again an innovative devel-opment indicative of the Scottish capital's national sense of itself – to cover ‘affairs in England and abroad’. Sydserf was the son of an Episcopalian bishop, and Pitcairne's mother, a Sydserf of Ruchlaw, was a relative. Sydserf, who took over management of the Tennis Court Theatre from 1667, was typical of the Restoration regime's crossover between creative thinking and the arts and the gentry and clergy of the Scottish capital, which was intensifying its grip on the country's intelligentsia. Sydserf's paper, which was ‘designed to appeal not only to a non-religious government, but to an elitist and conservative nobility’, was closed down as ‘irreverent’ by the Privy Council in 1661: it was to give its name to a more famous successor of similar political outlook.

The burgh authorities of Glasgow and Stirling appointed Edinburgh correspondents in the 1650s and 1660s; by the end of the seventeenth century, the burgh council of Montrose was ordering both London and Edinburgh papers. Newspapers began to be distributed seriously from 1680 onwards, with the appearance on St Andrew's Day of the anti-Covenanter Edinburgh Gazette, which was based on the London Gazette. Newspapers were left in coffee houses (the Gazette was also sold by ballad-criers), just as Act III of Sydserf's play Tarago's Wiles (1668) had been set in one, offering the heterophile and exotic flavour of London (where it was first performed) to the Scottish capital before its own first coffee house was open.