Lon­don in 1665 was an unhap­py place. Bubon­ic place was sweep­ing Lon­don killing 100,000 peo­ple — then a quar­ter of Lon­don’s pop­u­la­tion — over 18 months. King Charles II fled Lon­don for Sails­bury, but when cas­es of the Plague were found in Sail­bury the King, his Court and fam­i­ly moved to Oxford in Sep­tem­ber 1665.

News sheets could come from Lon­don but Charles was keen not to han­dle papers that had come from the plague-rid­den city. He ordered that a new­pa­per be print­ed at the Uni­ver­si­ty Press.

The paper was print­ed under the author­i­ty of Lord Arling­ton, a states­man who had fought for Charles and, in 1665 was the Sec­re­tary of State for the South­ern Depart­ment. This role was respon­si­ble for South­ern Eng­land, Wales, Ire­land, but also the US Colonies and Roman Catholic and Mus­lim coun­tries of Europe. While print­ed under Arling­ton’s author­i­ty, the effort of the enter­prise was del­e­gat­ed to Joseph Williamson, one of Arling­ton’s under-Sec­re­taries.

This day the first of the Oxford Gazettes come out, which is very pret­ty, full of newes, and no fol­ly in it. Wrote by Williamson.

Diary of Samuel Pepys, 22 Novem­ber 1665

The paper was a sheet 11″ × 6″ print­ed on both sides, with the back page of that first issue was print­ed by Leonard Litch­field who was Print­er to the Uni­ver­si­ty, but pre-dat­ing the first cen­tral­ly-pro­vi­sioned print­ing works for the Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Press. It was pub­lished twice a week on Mon­days and Thurs­days.

The Gazette was nev­er intend­ed for gen­er­al cir­cu­la­tion and with a tar­get of offi­cials, the legal pro­fes­sion and mer­chants. Cir­cu­la­tion was around 6,000 by 1704 and copies pur­chased for Gov­ern­ment use out-num­bered those sold to the pub­lic.

The Gazette drew its con­tents from gen­tle­men, trades­men, provin­cial offi­cials, and lat­er from the Privy Coun­cil, the Trea­sury, the Admi­ral­ty and the War Office. Although news came from many quar­ters, it some­times was doc­tored or ​‘masked’.

James Thomas, The Local His­to­ri­an, 1982

By Feb­ru­ary 1666, the name had changed to the Lon­don Gazette for issue 24 onwards.

The Lon­don Gazette is still pub­lished today as the offi­cial jour­nal of record, with a require­ment for over 450 types of notice to be record­ed in the Gazette. The Gazette makes the claim that theirs is the old­est con­tin­u­ous­ly pub­lished news­pa­per in the UK, with Berrow’s Worces­ter Jour­nal being the next-rel­a­tive new­com­er from 1690.

Location

Oxford

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