22 April 1647
Pamphlet ‘Smear Attack’ on Winstanley
No less than four scurrilous pamphlets have been this morning nailed to the doors of prominent town churches, decrying the Digger leader Gerard Winstanley as various incarnations of the Dark Lord Satan.
The most prominent of these harbingers of the newes known as The Yearly Mail accused the Digger leader of strong links to Catholicism, claiming that in previous years as an ambassador on the continent, Winstanley had said that “we need to be more like the Catholicks” and had furthermore asserted that “the Catholicks had learn’t from their experiences and grown stronger as a result”.
To compound these allegations, The Uninvented Telegraph accused Master Winstanley of secreting in his mattress many tens of shillings worth of silks, slaves and spices from the Indies Companies. A Digger spokesman dismissed these allegations as ‘typical scaremongering’. The Roundhead spokesman Sir Thomas Fairfax was even inclined to venture that these attacks were little more than ‘Royalist smears, the type of which parliamentarians have faced for years, but which have no place in politicking these days’.
Although the Royalists have been keen to re-secure the backing of such pamphlets as The Trewe Lawe of Divine Monarckhies, A Poxe Upon Traytores and The Express’d Newes (which we find to be all too obsessed with the late Princess Elisabeth), such media friendly tactics have failed to play well with the public, as the good citizens of Devizes have refused the open their gates to the King’s cavalry.
Words: Simon George
