10 11
It was probably natural that his statements in regard to his
discovery should be repeatedly copied ; all accounts of The English Mercurie and all allusions to it are to be traced directly
to this account. But in 1839, in a slender pamphlet of sixteen pages entitled A Letter to Antonio Panizzi on the Reputed Earliest Newspaper, “ The English Mercurie, 1588 ," Thomas Watts con
clusively showed , by exhaustive proofs, that the newspaper was not genuine. He returned to the same subject in 1850 and in an article entitled “ Authorship
of the Fabricated ' Earliest
English Newspaper"," 6 he showed that the fabrication was evidently the work of Philip Yorke, second son of Lord Hard wicke.
It still further remained for D . T . B . Wood ' to give the final
history of the fabrication - it can not in any sense now be called a forgery — and to show that the long-famed English Mercuries were the youthful pranks of two young Englishmen 8 who found diversion in this form of literature, as college students are to -day wont to find diversion in writing parodies and imita
tions, and they had themselves probably not expected to be taken too seriously. An interesting modern illustration of the same spirit was
found when the Harvard Lampoon issued a fake number of the Harvard Crimson , “ delicately enough caricatured to fool all 5 Isaac Disraeli gives more than a page to The English Mercurie for which “ we are indebted to the wisdom of Elizabeth and the prudence of Burleigh ." Curiosities of Literature , I, pp . 155 – 160. After eleven editions of the work had been published , a foot-note nearly as long as the original notice explains
the forgery. Benjamin Disraeli gives the note “ that it may remain a memo
rable instance of the danger incurred by thehistorian from forged documents; and a proof that multiplied authorities add no strength to evidence, when all are to be traced to a single source.”
6Gentleman 's Magazine, May, 1850, n . s ., 33: 485 -491.
7 " The True History of the Fabrication of the ‘Armada Mercuries '," Nineteenth Century and After , February , 1914, 75 : 342- 354 . 8 The proof rests on the correspondence between Philip
Yorke and
Thomas Birch between 1740 and 1745. The letters are in the British Mu seum .
The authormakes the interesting suggestion that the publication in 1740
of the so -called Acta Diurna may have given the young authors the idea of fabricating an early English newspaper.
Much interesting and valuable information in regard to early newspapers , especially the fabricated “ Earliest English Newspaper ,” is given in Biblio graphical Notes, edited by A . C . Bickley, in the Gentleman 's Magazine Library edited by G . L .
