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Consentir à la Restauration: signes, récits, performances

Silencing the Press/Censors during the English Revolution and the Early Restoration

Laurent Curelly

Résumés

Cet article étudie la façon dont les auteurs de journaux se mesurèrent à la censure pendant la Révolution anglaise du milieu du xviie siècle et le début de la Restauration. Il affirme qu'il n’existe pas de corrélation nécessaire entre l’imposition des lois sur la censure et le développement de l’écriture des nouvelles comme pratique politique et littéraire. Il considère les périodiques comme des organismes vivants qui interagissaient avec leur environnement politique et social et, le cas échéant, s’adaptaient à lui. Cette contribution examine en premier lieu les diverses lois visant à verrouiller la presse pendant et juste après la Révolution, et identifie les périodes de crise aiguë où les journaux étaient particulièrement réprimés par les autorités. Elle explore ensuite les différentes stratégies éditoriales utilisées par les auteurs pour contrer cette offensive répressive, tentant ainsi de mettre en lumière les dynamiques relatives au journalisme anglais au xviie siècle.

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Mots-clés :

journalisme, censure, mercure
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  • 1 To avoid repetition, the words “newspaper”, “newsbook” and “periodical” are used interchangeably he (...)

1The mid-seventeenth-century English Revolution gave rise to an unprecedented news revolution. It generated the development of cheap print and was fostered by it at the same time, as paper polemic mirrored and expressed political antagonism. Newspapers circulated on a large scale1 even though print-runs were still relatively low by today’s standards. Only educated guesses can be made as to the print-run of early modern newsbooks. Figures vary between 250 and 1,250, but these are only estimates (Frank 57; Cotton 8-14; Raymond 1996, 235). They were not insignificant, not to mention the fact that periodicals were frequently passed on from one reader to another, not least in correspondence, or read out to an audience, as testified by intra-textual evidence – notably when correspondents in the provinces mentioned newsbooks having come their way. It is little wonder that, more often than not, state authorities took umbrage at a medium that they deemed potentially damaging and, as a result, they sought to keep it in check or, alternatively, they sponsored titles.

2This contribution examines the way newspaper authors engaged with censorship during the mid-seventeenth-century English Revolution and the early Restoration period and argues that there is no necessary correlation between the imposition of licensing laws and the development of news writing as a political and literary practise. Not all authors fell victim to state censorship, but a number of them drew upon an array of editorial strategies to evade it or to flout the rules. They resorted to “oblique strategies of communication” (Patterson 58), which evolved over the revolutionary decades as authors adjusted to political circumstances and as journalism became more mature.

  • 2 The radical newspaper The Moderate, for example, included editorials that supported popular soverei (...)

3Newspapers of the English Revolution are still relatively understudied as non-canonical forms of writing, although a number of them include purple patches of political theory and yet others feature compelling bits of literature, mostly of a satirical nature.2 J. B. Williams’s and Joseph Frank’s histories of early modern English newspapers are general surveys. These have been complemented by studies of specific aspects of the press, such as thorough analyses of individual newspapers (Curelly 2017; Macadam), the business of news (Peacey 2006), the issue of forgery (Curelly 2003; Peacey 2004), the role of newspapers in the formation of a shared political culture (Peacey 2012; Zaret), and international news networks (Raymond and Moxham). Following Raymond’s pioneering study, The Invention of the Newspaper, early modern periodicals are increasingly investigated as literary artefacts that interact with their political context and also, sometimes simultaneously, engage with literary traditions and conventions (Curelly 2013, 2021). Their authors made editorial choices that took account of political circumstances as well as existing codes of news writing, some of which were shaped by material constraints. This contribution is a further exploration of editorial dynamics when authors had to reckon with censorship.

4The news market was especially flourishing during the English Revolution, in particular during the Civil Wars in the 1640s – a time of growing polarisation, severe bouts of violence and intense political, religious and social debating. Political wrangles and army clashes were accompanied by the news revolution of the 1640s, whose magnitude and innovative potential were unheard of. Although, admittedly, pamphlets were more numerous than newsbooks, the sheer number of titles testifies to the vitality of the press. It is a fact that this news storm abated somewhat in the 1650s and came to an end at the time of the Restoration. Arguably, this was only partly the result of more effective licensing policies; more significantly, it was linked to the re-imposition of established norms.

5Censorship policies in early modern England have been the object of extensive research, but relatively little of it addresses newspapers. Frederick Siebert’s whiggish history of censorship, which claimed that the early modern English state exercised absolute control of printed material, has been challenged since its publication at the height of the Cold War. Historians now tend to agree that state structures were rather weak and that, as a result, control of print was generally ineffective. Jason McEligott convincingly argues that the authorities’ efforts to suppress underground royalist mercuries were often thwarted by their authors’ ingenious strategies to evade censorship. This contribution follows up on McEligott’s argument, but concentrates on editorial, rather than material, mechanisms. While Robertson analyses the literary craft used by writers to outwit censors, his corpus does not include newspapers. This paper also borrows from Peter Lake and Steve Pincus’s narrative of the public sphere in early modern England, an account that is both divested of Habermasian Marxist overgeneralisations and critical of revisionist historians’ tendencies to bracket off the 1640-1650 revolutionary period. The two authors’ discussion of the “post-revolutionary public sphere”, with the emergence of “a single unified public sphere as opposed to multiple public spheres” (279-280), is especially convincing.

6This contribution proposes to bridge a gap in the existing scholarship regarding news writing and censorship. It first studies the various pieces of legislation aimed at curtailing the press and identifies specific times when newspapers bore the brunt of repressive policies, and shows that those were times of heightened crisis. It then explores various editorial strategies used by authors to fight off this repressive onslaught or ignore it altogether, in an attempt to shed further light on the dynamics of English seventeenth-century journalism. It thus argues that, despite repeated efforts to impose censorship, newspaper authors found ways of making sure that whatever news they had to offer would not remain unwritten.

Silencing the press

  • 3 These are respectively: An Act for preventing the frequent Abuses in printing seditious treasonable (...)
  • 4 An Act for preventing the frequent Abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed Books an (...)
  • 5 There is no question that the mid-seventeenth-century English Revolution was as much of a religious (...)

7State authorities recurrently tried to bring the press under control during the English Revolution and the early Restoration period. The most significant licensing law of the early Restoration was the Licensing of the Press Act of 1662, which received the Royal Assent on the 19th of May. The fact that it was enacted at the same time as the Act of Uniformity is not a mere coincidence.3 Both pieces of legislation were part of a package aimed at restoring the Church of England as it was before the Revolution, that is to say an episcopalian Church with a liturgy enshrined in a new Book of Common Prayer. The renewed Church did not take up Charles i’s and Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud’s anti-Calvinist prescriptions, but it favoured a return to a form of religious order undermined by the Puritans who had had the upper hand during the Revolution. The revived Church was not to be contested in writing, with the licensing act preventing the dissemination of dissenting opinions. It was mostly “heretical schismatical blasphemous […] Books Pamphlets and Papers” that were under scrutiny as they were likely to include “seditious and treasonable” material liable to “endanger the peace of these Kingdomes and raise a disaffection to His most Excellent Majesty and His Government.” 4The troubles that had begun in the early 1640s and ultimately led to the King’s demise were characterised as much by their religious nature and as by their political implications.5

  • 6 For example this provision: “No person or persons whatsoever shall presume to print, or cause to be (...)

8There is relatively little in the 1662 Licensing act about newspapers, apart from the mention of the word “Papers”, which refers to newsbooks. Arguably, this piece of legislation marks a return to a Star Chamber decree of 1637, with some of its provisions being re-enactments of earlier provisions.6 The 1637 decree tightened control of the press but did not mention newsbooks, for the simple reason that the delivery of news then in the form of corantos had been banned.

  • 7 There was radical agitation in the early 1660s, not least Thomas Venner’s rising in January 1661. V (...)
  • 8 The mid-seventeenth-century English Revolution has been labelled variously: Edward Hyde, Earl of Cl (...)
  • 9 Mercurius Politicus was the longest-running newspaper of the English Revolution. Following a Counci (...)
  • 10 Arguably, the newspapers of the mid-seventeenth century English Revolution fell into two categories (...)

9If the 1662 act is more concerned with books and pamphlets, those penned by sectarian radicals – like the Fifth Monarchists or the Quakers7 – than with newspapers, it is because in July 1660 the Privy Council had issued a general ban on publication of news other than two official papers, which forced unofficial newsbooks out of the market. However, Roger L’Estrange, who was appointed Surveyor and Licenser of the Press in 1663 and was granted control over two official periodicals, lumped together pamphlets and newsbooks in his Considerations and Proposals in Order to the Regulation of the Press to castigate “that Spirit of Hypocrisie, Scandal, Malice, Error and illusion, that Actuated the late Rebellion” (A3).8 In this pamphlet, L’Estrange provided “instances of Treasonous and Seditious Pamphlets” (11), to use his words, in an effort to back up his call for the press to be regulated. He duly mentioned Mercurius Politicus, the long-standing official newspaper of the Commonwealth and the Protectorate published from 1650 to 1660, and none other, as the archetypal example of sedition in print (12). In a pamphlet with a polemical thrust to it, A Rope for Pol, published in 1660, he had already excoriated Mercurius Politicus and its author, Marchamont Nedham, censuring his “scurrilous pamphlets flying every Week into all parts of the Nation” and arguing that “’tis incredible what influence they had upon numbers of unconsidering Persons, who have a strange presumption that all must needs be true that is in Print. This was the Goliath of the Philistines, the great champion of the late Vsurper [i.e. Cromwell]” (“An Advertisement to the Reader,” n.p.). His assessment of Mercurius Politicus as a scurrilous newspaper is somewhat off the mark as there was little vituperation in this periodical, except perhaps when it began publication in the early days of the Commonwealth in 1650. But this may be what L’Estrange meant as he quoted the programmatic editorial in the very first issue of Politicus, with Nedham exclaiming “Why should not the Commonwealth have a Fool as well as the King had?” (1).9 This jocoserious tone that was emblematic of mercuries, satirical newspapers written by the royalists, soon gave way to serious editorialising and then to a rather sober way of conveying news characteristic of most parliamentarian diurnals.10 It cannot be ruled out that L’Estrange had some old scores to settle with Nedham, who kept changing sides during the Revolution. Interestingly, L’Estrange as a licenser frowned upon scurrility as a mode of news writing that had been the hallmark of royalist journalism, anchored in a long tradition of satire writing, and which he then aimed to suppress.

  • 11 It was named An Ordinance for the Regulating of Printing and was passed on 14 June 1643.
  • 12 Its title is An ordinance of the Lords & Commons assembled in Parliament, against unlicensed or sca (...)
  • 13 Common soldiers held meetings in June and July 1647, at which they signed pledges of allegiance to (...)

10Thus, the 1662 Licensing of the Press Act was designed as a way to counteract the Interregnum press but, significantly enough, it borrowed from the licensing policies of the Revolution and from bans that had been implemented during the Interregnum. Four major licensing laws were passed during the Revolution. The House of Commons passed a resolution on 28 March 1642 which provided that unlicensed newsbooks would be punished. But then, the House responded to a specific case, and the resolution had little effect (Raymond 1996, 137-140). The first significant licensing law was the 1643 ordinance, which established pre-publication censorship and famously caused Milton to produce his Areopagitica.11 It did not target newspapers specifically, unlike the September 1647 ordinance that spelt out the publications under scrutiny, all sorts of publications actually: books, pamphlets, treatises, ballads, libels, “sheets of News.”12 The first Civil War had come to an end but there was yet no political settlement; passions were running high in Parliament with increased tension between the Presbyterians and the Independents; moreover, the period was characterised by the radicalisation of the New Model Army, whose soldiers were beginning to hold their officers to account and to express their grievances more openly.13 Not to mention the fact that, although the royalists had been defeated on the battlefield, the royalist press came onto the market unabashedly, as authors hoped to capitalise on divisions in Parliament and to whip up support for the royalist cause. The new royalist mercuries featured an innovation that was to influence future royalist periodicals – the inclusion of poetic snippets, and notably a poem of a satirical nature on the front page. From then on, royalist journalists turned satire into a political weapon; this poetry was especially abusive and abrasive, and it used incendiary rhetoric to lampoon Parliament and make fun of internecine divisions. Poetry as part of a shared culture became a rallying cry for royalists, and cheap print came to sport this sign of belonging (Curelly 2021). It is little wonder that Parliament sought to silence newspapers.

  • 14 The Rump Parliament came about as a result of Colonel Pride’s purge in December 1648. The Presbyter (...)
  • 15 This piece of legislation was called An act against unlicensed and scandalous books and pamphlets, (...)
  • 16 The Moderate was not a Leveller organ per se, but rather a radical newspaper that espoused the poli (...)
  • 17 These were, for instance, An act for suppressing the detestable sins of incest, adultery and fornic (...)
  • 18 The full name of this act is An act for reviving of a former act, entituled, an Act against unlicen (...)

11The blow that forced most licensed newsbooks out of the market was dealt by the Rump Parliament and the political authorities of the newly born republic, the Commonwealth.14 The Licensing act of September 1649 tightened control of the press in general, but especially cracked down on newspapers. It criticised “the ignorance and assumed boldness of the weekly Pamphleteers [that is to say news writers] [who], without leave or due information, [took] upon them to publish, and at pleasure to censure the Proceedings of Parliament and Army, and other affairs of State” (534).15 This comment did not so much target royalist authors, who even after the regicide had resumed their attacks on the Commonwealth, as it did licensed newsbook writers, some of whom kept taking the new leaders to task for failing to live up to expectations and supposedly behaving as tyrannically as the king. The authorities feared that such disgruntled authors would make common cause with the radicals at a time when there was growing unrest in the army. The Moderate is a good example of a legally published newsbook that fell out with the Commonwealth. In the autumn of 1648, it supported the Independents and the army, including the officers, against the Presbyterian majority in the House of Commons. It embraced a more radical agenda in the spring of 1649 and remonstrated with the Commonwealth leaders, notably Cromwell, while lending its full support to the Levellers, a radical sect whose leaders had been imprisoned on the order of the government. The newspaper included army petitions and Leveller pamphlets, thus giving media exposure to what may be regarded as a “revolt within the Revolution” (Hill 15).16 It was precisely that opposition that the licensing act of 1649 meant to eradicate, while attempting to control morality and to restore social norms that were increasingly falling by the wayside. Several acts against blasphemy and licentious behaviour were passed in the following months.17 The authors of the 1662 Licensing of the Press Act mentioned “the general licentiousness of the late times” as a rationale for this legislation. This recalls Milton’s caveat in his Areopagitica, when he pointed out that his defence of free speech and his opposition to pre-publication censorship could be misconstrued: “lest I should be condemn’d of introducing licence, while I oppose Licencing” (4). The preservation of social order was also one of the reasons for the passing of the licensing act of 1653, which formally revived the 1649 act: “lewd Pens and Presses” were to be kept in check, owing to the “Artifice and Subtility of restless Spirits, unwilling to be confined within the limits of orderly government” (1923).18 In August 1655, following the imposition of the highly unpopular rule of the Major-Generals, an ordinance was passed under the instigation of Oliver Cromwell that introduced new regulations concerning printing and all but caused the licensed press to disappear (Williams 156-157; Raymond 1998). Cheap print, including newspapers, was potentially dangerous not only because it was liable to express adverse political views, but also because it was prone to go against the grain, whether the grain was of a monarchical or a republican nature. News could become viral and destabilise political, social and religious order, as well as undermine the moral codes associated with it, hence the various, though sometimes unsuccessful, attempts at silencing the press.

Silencing the censors?

  • 19 The ban concerned all newspapers, except The Parliamentary Intelligencer, which changed its name to (...)
  • 20 Both these newsbooks were closely monitored by John Thurloe, Cromwell’s Postmaster General and chie (...)

12Silencing newspapers was unsuccessful at times because enforcing licensing laws was a challenge to the censors, but also – this is what this paper argues – because some authors adjusted to the regulations imposed on them and found ways of engaging with censorship. This section looks at the licensing dynamics from the perspective of the periodicals that ran the risk of being knocked out of the market. Censorship was effective in a number of cases and caused many newspapers to cease publication, but its overall impact on news writing is difficult to measure with any degree of accuracy. The 1662 licensing law mostly enshrined a policy that had been going on since the July 1660 ban on the publication of newspapers other than official periodicals,19 and it targeted sectarian pamphlets rather than newsbooks. The 1649 licensing act did put an end to licensed periodicals but failed to silence royalist journalism, even though there were fewer mercuries on the market. The 1653 law maintained the status quo, but then again failed to deal royalist mercuries a fatal blow, as testified by the lasting presence of Mercurius Democritus, which will be discussed below. However, the Majors-Generals, who ruled England from August 1655 to January 1657 under Cromwell’s authority, seem to have been able to control the press more effectively. Political order seemed to have been restored as the Major-Generals, aided by local militias, were successful in enforcing the law. From November 1655 to March 1659, there were next to no ventures onto the news market. Only the two state-sanctioned newsbooks Mercurius Politicus and The Publick Intelligencer, both authored by Marchamont Nedham, were printed,20 with the exception of Nouvelles ordinaires de Londres, which advertised the Commonwealth and the Protectorate on the European Continent. With the forced resignation of Richard Cromwell in May 1659, a number of newspapers entered the market, including a royalist title like Mercurius Democritus, which took advantage of political instability to advertise the royalist cause. As for the September 1647 licensing ordinance, it had very little effect, if the number of titles, especially royalist ones, is anything to go by. With the outbreak of the second Civil War in 1648, a flurry of newspapers came off the presses – more than twenty different titles were printed in May 1648, for instance. These contributed to the war effort.

13What comes from all this is that there is no necessary correlation between the passing of laws aimed at silencing newspapers and their actual silence. Sometimes these laws were not strictly enforced, sometimes they were. This may sound like a self-evident truth, but there is more to it. Irrespective of licensing laws, the publication of newspapers, not least when titles were numerous, pointed to times of crisis within the English Revolution, times when political, social and religious order was weak or actually collapsing. Whether that order was the old royalist order or the newer republican or Protectoral order was irrelevant. Those were times when newspaper authors entered the fray, ignoring censorship in the process, or perhaps more accurately engaging with it.

  • 21 The other two long-standing and successful royalist mercuries were Mercurius Melancholicus and espe (...)

14This argument may be backed up by a few examples of authors, not just trying to evade censorship physically by removing their presses, but textually negotiating and interacting with the censors. Four different strategies will be presented here. The first one consisted in satirising censorship legislation. Royalist mercury writers were especially adept at that. For instance, Mercurius Elencticus, one of the longest-running royalist mercuries, came to life immediately after the licensing ordinance of 1647, and literally taunted those who had passed it: “Roome for another Mercury, one Ile warrant you that was better bred than to tell Lyes, or startle at the noyse of a squirting Ordnance. Or that values not a Forty shillings fine, nor feares a Forty dayes Captivity” (Mercurius Elencticus no.1, 29 October – 5 November 1647, 1). This was clearly written in defiance of Parliament’s licensing regulations, and Elencticus aimed at fighting it out with the House of Commons and the New Model Army. In addition, by including a motto borrowed from Horace, it sported satire as a badge of authority, and, by including poetic bits, it meant to perpetuate a form of royalist culture that many in the House of Commons would have been happy to subdue, if not eradicate altogether. It, together with two other long-standing mercuries,21 ushered in a golden age of royalist journalism, one that actually never really ceased to exist and was even revived with the demise of Richard Cromwell, but ironically came to an abrupt end after the 1660 ban on newspapers. But then again, royalist polemic in newspapers was no longer needed, or perhaps even wanted, when the restored monarchy had to deal with fiery sectarian pamphlets.

  • 22 These words are taken from the title of the short-lived The Laughing Mercury while Mercurius Democr (...)
  • 23 The episcopalian Church of England was abolished in 1646 with the passing of an ordinance that dism (...)

15Another strategy and another way for royalist authors to interact with censorship, especially during the Commonwealth and early Protectorate, was to subvert the codes of news writing by offering mostly nonsensical news, sometimes in parodic form. John Crouch’s mercuries are good examples of this attempt at ridiculing not only the censors but also the political and social order that had made the licensing laws possible and that they upheld in turn. The very titles are revealing of a world turned upside down that Crouch made fun of and tried to redress with his satirical quill. The Man in the Moon, Mercurius Democritus, The Laughing Mercury and Mercurius Fumigosus made a point of purveying “true and perfect news from the Antipodes […] for the right understanding of all the Mad-merry-People of Great-Bedlam” (The Laughing Mercury no. 22, 25 August-8 September 1652, 169),22 Bedlam being a reference to the notorious London lunatic asylum. In the first issue of The Laughing Mercury Crouch describes his troubles with the censors while justifying his journalistic endeavours. This extract from the opening poem clearly reads like a legitimisation of his own writing: “Democritus must write no more / since some he doth offend […]/ Free Mirth is all I aime to write / to laugh down Lyes and Folly”. Crouch added: “Exit poor Democritus as dead as a dround Mouse; and Enter the Merry Mercury his onely Son and Heir, that intends nothing more then Mirth; to please all, and to offend none” (The Laughing Mercury no.22, 25 August – 8 September 1652). The Laughing Mercury was in fact a mere continuation of Mercurius Democritus; it featured more or less the same nonsensical stories. This newspaper, together with its later incarnation Mercurius Fumigosus, survived the 1653 licensing act. Crouch’s mercuries have been variously described as frivolous, smutty or pornographic (Curelly 2013). It is a fact that they typically featured scatological and salacious gossip and, in that respect, they probably meant to challenge the Puritan order that the Commonwealth and the Protectorate were keen to set up rather than provide readers with news.23 There is some irony in the fact that Crouch’s revived version of Mercurius Fumigosus at the time of the Restoration in 1660 fell silent after a few issues had been published.

16Even the author of the official Mercurius Politicus seems to have tampered with censorship, and this is a third example of how authors engaged with the censors. He did so in the early months of 1657, when debates arose about the potential evolution of the Protectorate towards a monarchy, thanks to the adoption of the Humble Petition and Advice, which advocated the establishment of a constitution-based regime applied to Cromwell, who was given the right to appoint his own successor. Such a change was to spell doom for the short-lived republic. Nedham used a form of displacement to convey his political views, as did Crouch, but in a significantly less outrageous or provocative fashion.

17After a fairly long period of rather dull journalism, Nedham resumed the publication of editorials in Mercurius Politicus in the early months of 1657. There were five of them. What characterised these editorials was a return to the codes of mercury writing, even though Politicus, with its foreign news and some domestic information, arranged chronologically, remained quintessentially a diurnal. These pieces read like a parodic correspondence featuring a fictional letter writer, who pretended to be a “Utopian,” of the race of the founders of the Commonwealth of Utopia as conceived by Thomas More. In order to legitimise this formal shift, Nedham claimed a literary kinship with the author of Utopia: “the famous Sir Thomas More having been the founder of this our Republick […], his motto being Ioco-serio, Betwixt Jest and Earnest” (Mercurius Politicus no. 352, 5-12 March 1657, 7642).

18Nedham’s recommendation to prefer humor to seriousness, “to live in jest, and never be in earnest” (ibid.) is certainly not deprived of irony. While he mocked political theory and claimed to distance himself from debates on the nature of governments, he adopted a Hobbesian position when arguing that the stability of the State in the name of the collective good must take precedence over individual freedoms. Acting as a champion of security, condemning anarchy and factionalism, he asserted that monarchy offers more freedom than other forms of government: “So a Free State may be no less, and many times much more, in that which Men call Monarchy, than in any other Form” (Mercurius Politicus no. 354, 19-26 March 1657, 7675). His ideal of government was probably to be found on the island of Utopia, with its king and Senate accountable to the people, unless a possible return to monarchical order was simply required by reason of state: “‘Tis never dishonour nor scandal, by following right Reason, to shift through every Form, and after all other Experiments made in vain, when the ends of government cannot otherwise be conserved, to revert to the old bottom and Foundation” (Mercurius Politicus no. 355, 26 March-2 April 1657, 7692).

  • 24 Marchamont Nedham kept switching allegiance during the 1640s and 1650s. He began his career as the (...)

19Perhaps these lines should be read as a justification of political opportunism and adaptation to historical contingencies. Nedham may have favoured a kind of middle-of-the-road journalism, which concealed seriousness behind humour, but abstained from the ferocious satire claimed by some mercuries, like Crouch’s or, to a certain extent, those to whom Nedham had lent his own pen.24 Be it as it may, Nedham soon scrapped his jocoserious editorials, but why he did so is anyone’s guess. It cannot be ruled out that he censored himself for fear of facing public reproof. By including fictional letters from Utopia, Nedham allowed a form of geographical and generic displacement to take place. Arguably, this editorial strategy was a way to engage with censorship. As historian Blair Worden put it, “[Nedham] made brinkmanship a literary art” (27).

  • 25 The kingship debates refer to the agonising discussions surrounding Parliament’s offer to make Oliv (...)

20The last example of interaction with licensing laws worth discussing had to do with periodicals coming onto the news market in times of acute crisis, as in they did in 1659 and 1660 on the eve of the Restoration. Newspaper writers thus took advantage of the downfall of the Protectorate and the chaotic attempts to revive the English republic to print news in defiance of existing licensing regulations – although these were possibly not as strictly enforced – and they did so with a vengeance. They advertised their political views, thus sparking a form of confrontation in print, of a polemical nature, just as their predecessors had done during the Civil Wars in the 1640s. For instance, The Faithfull Scout, which was to last for slightly more than a year, featured a statement in its first issue that called on readers to “faithfully carry on that Good Old Cause” and on God “to discloud these gloomy Dayes” (no. 1, 22-29 April 1659, 2). The phrase “Good Old Cause”, which first appeared in an army petition of October 1654, was a byword for good government as opposed to Oliver Cromwell’s tyrannical rule. It had become a rallying cry for those who were disgruntled with the Protectorate and gained further currency at the time of the kingship debates in 1657.25

  • 26 This newspaper was a revived version of its namesake, published between December 1650 and September (...)

21It did not seem to matter that the Commonwealth had been far from popular among soldiers and that mutinies had been ferociously put down by the army upon order of Commonwealth authorities. By conjuring up vague images of the good old days, the “republican” diurnals that began publication in 1659, including The Faithfull Scout, The Weekly Post or The Weekly Intelligencer of the Commonwealth, aimed to bring back to life a sort of golden age that the Protectorate had supposedly defiled. The Weekly Post made a point of “perpetuating the memory of the Protectoral government’s perfidious practices” and of recovering “our Birth-rights and Liberties, which in these gloomy years have been so sadly Eclipsed” (no. 1, 3-10 May 1659, 2). As for The Weekly Intelligencer of the Commonwealth – the title speaks volumes about the author’s intentions26 – it insisted that a government by a single person ran counter to the army’s Engagements, in other words, the declarations made and the oaths taken by soldiers at the time of the radicalisation of the New Model Army in 1647 (no. 1, 3-10 May 1659, 1-2). Calling back images of the Commonwealth served an immediate purpose for republican-minded journalists – justifying the Good Old Cause and making possible a return to the post-regicide pre-Protectorate order.

  • 27 The author’s claim that “Mercury” as a genre could not die – and that only specific titles could di (...)

22Royalist mercuries were also produced in those years of political crisis, but they were revived at a slightly later time than diurnals, as their publication chimed with the restoration of the monarchy in the spring of 1660. There was one notable exception to this – the revival in 1659 of Mercurius Democritus that had appeared on the news stage between 1652 and 1654, but then again, the news it conveyed was much in the same vein as previously: mostly nonsensical and parodic news, which reflected a topsy-turvy world but hardly engaged with immediate political debates. This periodical would fall into the second category of newspapers negotiating with censorship as defined above. The mercuries of the 1640s and the 1650s ran the gamut of forms, ranging from polemical writing, before and following the regicide, to parodic writing verging on the absurd in the late years of the Commonwealth and the early years of the Protectorate. When protectoral order collapsed, they became politically charged again, with authors aiming their satire at specific targets. They were thus following in the tracks of their illustrious predecessors – the three major royalist mercuries that had come to light in 1647 and that served as templates for later publications, with their typical title-page poems and epigrammatic pieces of poetry interspersed with the news. Mercurius Phanaticus, for example, fashioned itself as part of a long-lived tradition of mercury writing. Its author defined his programme thus: “Gentlemen, You may wonder that since the world hath put to silence those Famous Writers Democritus, Aulicus, Melancholicus, there should be one so hardy as to dare assume their Stile and Elocution; tis time they were the Torches in their time, whose blaze lighted you out of the Cells of Melancholy to the pleasant Chamber of Delight” (no. 2, 14-21 March 1660, 10). Not only did he commend his predecessors, but he erected a memorial to mercury writing in the process. He aimed “to shew the world that Mercury cannot dye, though Democritus may, or Brittanicus may” (10).27 The memorial to mercury writing he meant to erect had as much to do with the celebration of an innovative literary genre, to which poetry was central as of 1647, as with the glorification of royalist polemic. It is no little irony that this editorially innovative and rhetorically vibrant form of journalism should have gone silent at the very time when monarchical order was revived. It was able to defy censorship, but it failed to break through after the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy had been completed and the norms associated with kingship were re-established.

23What emerges from these examples is that the relationships between news writers and state authorities were especially tense during the English Revolution and the early Restoration period, whether the state was a monarchy, a republic or a regime like the Protectorate. The state passed licensing laws or revived and complemented previous licensing legislation, and sometimes sponsored official periodicals as was the case in France with Théophraste Renaudot’s Gazette. These laws were not quite effective as they failed to gag the press once and for all. From that perspective, they were often counter-productive as they ironically encouraged regular ventures, with authors sometimes attacking them straightforwardly, sometimes devising innovative editorial strategies to express dissent. In many cases, newspaper writers continued plying their trade and made censorship a redundant regulatory practice, especially at times when the state apparatus was weak.

24It seems that it was rather the revival of established order and norms at some point during the Protectorate and during the Restoration after Charles II and his government had taken back control of the state that silenced newspapers more effectively. As Frank pointed out, “the straightjacketed press of the 1660s and most of the 1670s announced that the storms of the Interregnum were over but never registered the building up of new ones” (268). Arguably, the various attempts at silencing the press tended to make authors more vocal and the temporary or less temporary establishment of political, social and religious order, coupled with various kinds of repressive legislation, was much more successful in silencing pens. Early modern newspapers, just like modern-day periodicals, may be likened to living organisms: they were born in a specific environment, interacted with it, and very often adjusted to it. I suggest that this repression-transgression dynamics regarding newsbooks was especially indicative of the revolutionary spirit that had taken over England in the mid-seventeenth century and of the role played by the press in such an environment.

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Bibliographie

Primary sources

A Decree of Starre-Chamber, Concerning Printing, Made the eleventh day of July last past. 1637. London, 1637.

An act for reviving of a former act, entituled, an Act against unlicensed and scandalous books and pamphlets, and for better regulating of printing: with some additions and explanations. London, 1653.

An act against unlicensed and scandalous books and pamphlets, and for better regulating of printing. London, 1649.

An Act for preventing the frequent Abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed Books and Pamphlets and for regulating of Printing and Printing Presses, 14 Cha. 2. c. 33, 1662.

An ordinance of the Lords & Commons assembled in Parliament, against unlicensed or scandalous pamphlets, and for the better regulating of printing. 28 September. 1647. London 1647.

L’Estrange, Roger. A Rope for Pol. Or, a Hue and Cry after Marchamont Nedham, the late Scurrilous News Writer. Being a Collection of his horrid Blasphemies and Revilings against the King’s Majesty, his Person, his Cause, and his Friends; published in his weekly Politicus. London, 1660.

L’Estrange, Roger. Considerations and Proposals in Order to the Regulation of the Press Together with Diverse Instances of Treasonous, and Seditious Pamphlets, Proving the Necessity thereof. London, 1663.

Mercurius democritus, or, A true and perfect nocturnall, Communicating many strange wonders, out of the world in the moon, the Antipodes, Maggy-land, Tenebris, Fary-land, Green-land, and other adjacent countries; published for the right understanding of all the mad-merry-people of Great-Bedlam / The Laughing Mercury, Or, true and perfect Newes from the Antipodes, Communicating many strange Wonders, Out of the World in the Moon, Maggy-land, Tenebris, Fary-land, Egypt, Green-land, and other adjacent Countries. Published for the right understanding of all the Mad-merry-People of Great-Bedlam. April 1652-February 1654.

Mercurius Elencticus. Communicating the unparallell’d proceedings at Westminster, the Head-quarters, and other Places, discovering their Designes, reproving their Crimes, and advising the Kingdome. November 1647-January 1649.

Mercurius Phanaticus. Or Mercury Temporizing. March 1660.

Mercurius Politicus, Comprising the Sum of all Intelligence with the Affairs now on foot in the three Nations of England, Scotland and Ireland / Comprising the Sum of Foreine Intelligence, with the Affairs now on foot in the three Nations of England, Scotland and Ireland. June 1650-April 1660.

Milton, John. Areopagitica; a speech of Mr. John Milton for the liberty of vnlicens’d printing, to the Parlament of England. London, 1644.

The Faithfull Scout / National Scout / Loyall Scout: Impartially Communicating The most remarkable Intelligence, and Chief Occurrences, from all Christian Kings, Princes, States, and Common-Wealths. April 1659-July 1660.

The Weekly Intelligencer of the Commonwealth: Faithfully communicating the affaires of these three Nations. As also, the most remarkable Transactions both Civil and Millitary, of all other Nations beyond the Seas. May 1659-July 1660.

The Weekly Post: Truly Communicating The Chief Occurrences and Proceedings, within the Common-wealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland: And an Account of Affairs from several Christian Princes, and Common-wealths in Europe. May 1659-June 1660.

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Curelly, Laurent. “‘Ha, ha, ha’: Modes of Satire in the Royalist Newsbook The Man in the Moon.” XVII-XVIII 70 (2013): 73-90. http://journals.openedition.org/1718/510

Curelly, Laurent. “Is the Pen Really Mightier than the Sword? Poetic Fragments and Politics in Civil War Ephemeral Newspapers.” Le Sens des formes dans l’Europe d’Ancien Régime. Ed. Paloma Bravo, Charlotte Coffin, and Séverine Delahaye-Grévois. Études Épistémè 39 2021.
http://journals.openedition.org/episteme/11105.

Curelly, Laurent. “Mind your U’s and V’s! Counterfeiting Newspapers in Civil War Britain.” Faking It. The Performance of Forgery in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Ed. Philip Lavender and Matilda Amundsen Bergström. Leyden: Brill, 2023. 199-230.

Curelly, Laurent. The Moderate: An Anatomy of an English Radical Newspaper (1648-1649). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017.

Dahl, Folke. A Bibliography of English Corantos and Periodical Newsbooks, 1620-1642. London: The Bibliographical Society, 1952.

Frank, Joseph. The Beginnings of the English Newspaper, 1620-1660. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961.

Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down – Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. 1975. London: Penguin Books, 1991.

Lake, Peter, and Steve Pincus. “Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England.” Journal of British Studies 45.2 (2006): 270-292.

Macadam, Angela E. J. “Mercurius Britanicus: Journalism and Politics in the English Civil War.” 2005. University of Sussex, PhD dissertation.

McElligott, Jason. Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2007.

Patterson, Annabel M. Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.

Peacey, Jason. “‘The counterfeit silly curr’: Money, Politics, and the Forging of Royalist Newspapers during the English Civil War.” Huntington Library Quarterly 67.1 (2004): 27-57.

Peacey, Jason. “The Management of Civil War Newspapers: Auteurs, Entrepreneurs and Editorial Control.” Seventeenth Century 21.1 (2006): 99-127.

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Zaret, David. Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

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Notes

1 To avoid repetition, the words “newspaper”, “newsbook” and “periodical” are used interchangeably here. “Newsbook” or “book of news” was commonly used by contemporaries to refer to these weekly periodicals which are now known as newspapers. The first newspapers produced in the British Isles, in the early 1620s, were called corantos. These broadsheets, which featured foreign news, gained currency and popularity during the Thirty Years’ War, as they kept English readers abreast of developments on the European Continent. A Star Chamber decree issued in 1632 banned them. The abolition of the Star Chamber caused the revival of the English press in late 1641, with a domestic focus this time as well as a new format (Raymond 1996, 5-13; Dahl).

2 The radical newspaper The Moderate, for example, included editorials that supported popular sovereignty while the official publication of the Commonwealth and Protectorate Mercurius Politicus featured political theory at some point in its history – these were pieces that its author Marchamont Nedham, in one case, compiled into a full-blown treatise and, in another case, copied with some variations from another treatise of his. As for satire, it was mostly found in royalist mercuries.

3 These are respectively: An Act for preventing the frequent Abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed Books and Pamphlets and for regulating of Printing and Printing Presses, and An Act for the Uniformity of Publique Prayers and Administration of Sacraments & other Rites & Ceremonies and for establishing the Form of making ordaining and consecrating Bishops Preists [sic]and Deacons in the Church of England.

4 An Act for preventing the frequent Abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed Books and Pamphlets.

5 There is no question that the mid-seventeenth-century English Revolution was as much of a religious nature as of a political or socio-economic nature. Even a Marxist historian like Christopher Hill, one of the founding members of the Communist party Historians’ Group, produced a narrative of the Revolution that took full account of the religious aspect.

6 For example this provision: “No person or persons whatsoever shall presume to print, or cause to bee printed […] any seditious, scismaticall [sic], or offensive Bookes or Pamphlets, to the scandal of Religion, or the Church, or the Government” (A Decree of Starre-Chamber Bv-r).

7 There was radical agitation in the early 1660s, not least Thomas Venner’s rising in January 1661. Venner, the last leader of the Fifth-Monarchy Men, and a number of his men unsuccessfully conspired against the king. The Quakers were still active then. Occasional rebellions together with the publication of seditious tracts caused state authorities to rein in dissent.

8 The mid-seventeenth-century English Revolution has been labelled variously: Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, and other royalist authors called it the “Great Rebellion”, while Whig and some Marxist historians came to refer to it as the Puritan Revolution. It is generally known today either as the British Civil Wars or as the English Revolution. I argue for the latter label, which offers a clearer indication of what it was in essence. The print revolution that accompanied it is one manifestation of its nature, its scope and its dynamics.

9 Mercurius Politicus was the longest-running newspaper of the English Revolution. Following a Council of State order, it began publication in June 1650, and was banned in April 1660 when Charles II’s return to power was underway. It started off as a mercury, that is to say, a satirical weekly, but it soon became much more sober, featuring serious editorials for several months and innovating with the inclusion of advertisements.

10 Arguably, the newspapers of the mid-seventeenth century English Revolution fell into two categories: diurnals and mercuries. The former were parliamentarian newsbooks, with news typically arranged in chronological order. Their style may be perceived as dull, but the writing was not necessarily uncontroversial. Mercuries, on the other hand, were satirical periodicals. Most of them were royalist, even though parliamentarian authors occasionally took up the gauntlet and produced them, as well.

11 It was named An Ordinance for the Regulating of Printing and was passed on 14 June 1643.

12 Its title is An ordinance of the Lords & Commons assembled in Parliament, against unlicensed or scandalous pamphlets, and for the better regulating of printing. 28 September. 1647.

13 Common soldiers held meetings in June and July 1647, at which they signed pledges of allegiance to one another, “engagements” as they were called, and elected Agitators to represent them in negotiations with their officers. This bout of radical activism culminated in the Putney Debates of October and November 1647.

14 The Rump Parliament came about as a result of Colonel Pride’s purge in December 1648. The Presbyterian members of the House of Commons were ousted.

15 This piece of legislation was called An act against unlicensed and scandalous books and pamphlets, and for better regulating of printing.

16 The Moderate was not a Leveller organ per se, but rather a radical newspaper that espoused the political agenda of the New Model Army. It came to embrace the Levellers’ cause, especially in the spring of 1649 (Curelly 2017, 199-201).

17 These were, for instance, An act for suppressing the detestable sins of incest, adultery and fornication, passed in May 1650, and An act against several atheistic, blasphemous and execrable opinions derogatory to the honour of God, and destructive to human society, passed in August 1650.

18 The full name of this act is An act for reviving of a former act, entituled, an Act against unlicensed and scandalous books and pamphlets, and for better regulating of printing: with some additions and explanations. The fact that the world had lost its bearings was a commonplace, as testified by a 1646 broadside ballad and a 1647 pamphlet entitled The World Turned Upside Down. True, these texts served royalist polemic but they are revealing of a widespread feeling regarding moral and social norms. Commonwealth authorities were also concerned about the preservation of social order and hierarchies.

19 The ban concerned all newspapers, except The Parliamentary Intelligencer, which changed its name to The Kingdomes Intelligencer at the beginning of 1661, and Mercurius Publicus. These periodicals duplicated each other (Frank 265). Henry Muddiman, their author, thus had a monopoly on news writing.

20 Both these newsbooks were closely monitored by John Thurloe, Cromwell’s Postmaster General and chief spy. The Publick Intelligencer, published on Mondays, was almost a verbatim repetition of Mercurius Politicus, published on Thursdays (Frank 254-255).

21 The other two long-standing and successful royalist mercuries were Mercurius Melancholicus and especially Mercurius Pragmaticus, which introduced an editorial and textual template that a number of ephemeral mercuries, including parliamentarian mercuries, adopted.

22 These words are taken from the title of the short-lived The Laughing Mercury while Mercurius Democritus, its alias, purported to publish “Wonderfull News Out of the World in the Moon,” Mercurius Fumigosus meant to share “Darke and hidden Newes Out of all Obscure Places in the Antipodes […] for the right understanding of all the Mad Merry People in the Land of Darkness,” and the forerunner of them all, The Man in the Moon, intended to uncover “a World of Knavery Vnder the Sunne.”

23 The episcopalian Church of England was abolished in 1646 with the passing of an ordinance that dismantled the existing church organisation and hierarchy. The Westminster Confession was to replace the 39 Articles of the Elizabethan Church. But there was no agreement as to what kind of church should be set up instead. Various brands of Puritans pursued their own agenda: Presbyterians and congregationalists were at loggerheads, while radical sects only added fuel to the fire of rampant discord. Commonwealth and Protectorate authorities strove to secure a compromise that would keep sects at bay and social order intact.

24 Marchamont Nedham kept switching allegiance during the 1640s and 1650s. He began his career as the author of the parliamentarian newsbook Mercurius Britanicus. He then authored the royalist weekly Mercurius Pragmaticus, before serving the Commonwealth and the Protectorate with Mercurius Politicus. He published his Pragmaticus liminal poems in a collection of verse in 1661, entitled A Short History of the English Rebellion, in an attempt to ingratiate himself with the authorities of the revived monarchy.

25 The kingship debates refer to the agonising discussions surrounding Parliament’s offer to make Oliver Cromwell king of England. After two months of equivocation and debate in the spring of 1657, Oliver Cromwell rejected the title of king and the crown. The Humble Petition and Advice gave him enhanced powers but, in essence, maintained the republican form of government.

26 This newspaper was a revived version of its namesake, published between December 1650 and September 1655. Together with Mercurius Politicus, it was a state-sanctioned publication.

27 The author’s claim that “Mercury” as a genre could not die – and that only specific titles could disappear – proved to be wrong. Such newspapers did not generally survive the Restoration, but, with the Exclusion crisis in the 1ate 1670s, the genre was briefly revived.

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Laurent Curelly, « Silencing the Press/Censors during the English Revolution and the Early Restoration  »XVII-XVIII [En ligne], 82 | 2025, mis en ligne le 31 décembre 2025, consulté le 16 mars 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/1718/15899 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15ffk

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Auteur

Laurent Curelly

Laurent Curelly is Professor of early modern English history and literature at Université de Haute-Alsace in Mulhouse. He has published extensively on the Civil War press as well as on sectarian radicalism. His most recent publications include a translation, with Mickaël Popelard, of Digger leader Gerrard Winstanley’s political pamphlets (Gerrard Winstanley – Pamphlets politiques, Éditions Zones Sensibles, 2023), a revised translation of Marxist historian Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down (Le monde à l’envers, Éditions Sociales / Klincksieck, 2025) and a translation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Valley of Fear (La Vallée de la peur, in Sherlock Holmes, Éditions La Pléiade – Gallimard, 2025). He served as editor in chief of XVII-XVIII between 2019 and 2024, and is now editor in chief of Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique, as well as President of CRECIB (Centre de Recherches en Civilisation Britannique). He is Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities (FLSH).

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