Charles Molloy Westmacott (c. 1788 - 1868) was a British journalist and author, editor of The Age, the leading Sunday newspaper of the early 1830s. He sometimes wrote under the pseudonym Bernard Blackmantle.
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Born in 1787 or 1788, Westmacott claimed to be the illegitimate son of the sculptor Richard Westmacott the Elder, although his political enemies claimed he was the son of a chimney sweep from Drury Lane. He was educated at St Paul's School and the Royal Academy. In 1827 he became editor of The Age, a Sunday newspaper which had started in 1825 and which specialized in scurrilous and satirical gossip about celebrities of the day.[1]
Westmacott was savagely portrayed as the unprincipled gossip-monger 'Sneak' in Edward Bulwer's England and the English, and has been dubbed "the principal blackmailing editor of his day".[2] While he did accept money to suppress publication of stories, this was legal until the 1843 Libel Act, and a recent treatment has argued that these practices were "incidental rather than central to the Age."[1]
In the 1840s Westmacott moved to Paris, where he died in 1868.