Marchamont Nedham, also Marchmont and Needham (1620 – November 1678), was a journalist, publisher and pamphleteer during the English Civil War who wrote official news and propaganda for both sides of the conflict.
A "highly productive propagandist",[1] he was significant in the evolution of early English journalism, and has been strikingly (if hyperbolically) called the "press agent" of Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell.
However, when Nedham began to launch attacks on the personality of the king and mock his stammer he drew censure from the House of Lords from members who felt he had gone too far.
Despite his history of writing parliamentary propaganda, he was commissioned to print a Royalist periodical, Mercurius Pragmaticus, starting in September 1647 and continuing for two years.
The triumph of the Parliamentarians in the Civil War led to Nedham's incarceration in Newgate Prison in June 1649; he gained his release in November by switching sides again.
The result was perhaps his most significant enterprise, the weekly periodical Mercurius Politicus, which he used as a platform for the Commonwealth regime (Nedham received a government payment of £50 in May 1650, probably to start this venture).
[10] With the royalist faction suppressed or in exile abroad, Nedham turned away from his previous scurrilous reporting and aimed to educate his readers in political principles of humanism and republicanism.
As the early radicalism of the Commonwealth began to wane, the revolutionary ideas expressed in Politicus also softened, with a greater emphasis on the merit of a stable state.
[14] The motive for these seems to have been simply money; but he used the occasion to renew his attacks on Presbyterianism, and his final pamphlet before his death in 1678, a call for war against the French, was probably sincere.
Nedham's particular style and philosophy can be summarised by his proposal for Mercurius Politicus in 1650:the design of this pamphlet being to undeceive the people, it must be written in a jocular way, or else it will never be cried up: for those truths which the multitude regard not in a serious dress, being represented in pleasing popular airs, make music to the common sense, and charm the fancy, which ever sways the sceptre in vulgar judgement, much more than reason.
[17] In the 18th century, Nedham's theories of republicanism were severely criticised by American Founding Father John Adams in the third volume of his A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787–88).
[19] Nedham's later reputation was coloured by the apparent cynicism and opportunism of his wavering allegiances, and by hostility towards his republicanism from subsequent generations of English critics.