"A Trunk, without an Head adorn'd": Monster News and Political Propaganda in Pamphlets of the English Civil Wars

Monster news are a staple of the early modern market in printed news. As Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park show in /Monsters and the Order of Nature/ (1998), reports of monsters were typically published during political and religious crises across Europe. In England, the popularity of monster news peaked during the (first two) English civil wars, when the figure of the headless monster repeatedly appeared in broadsides and pamphlets. As I argue in this article, headless monsters provide ideologically shaped lenses for interpreting the religious, social and cultural upheavals that marked the years 1642-1649. I discuss the following three pamphlets: /A Declaration of a Strange and Wonderfull Monster: Born in Kirkham Parish in Lancashire/ (1646), /Craftie Cromwell: or, Oliver Ordering our New State/ (1648), and /Mistris Parliament Brought to Bed of a Monstrous Childe of Reformation/ (1648). Tapping into the tradition of early modern news of ‘monstrous births’, each of these pamphlets uses a headless monster to link its specific political propaganda to early modern discourses of female sexuality, gender and procreation. With its report of the birth of a headless (i.e. 'monstrous') child /A Declaration/ negotiates parliamentarian anxieties about royalist military campaigns in the north-west of England in early 1646. I will complement my reading of the pro-parliamentarian /A Declaration/ with a discussion of the royalist agenda shared by the other two pamphlets. The representations of headless monsters in /Craftie Cromwell/ and /Mistris Parliament/ serve, in 1648, to vilify the notion of a republican England as a political monstrosity many months before Charles I was executed, the monarchy was abolished, and England became a republic.