De facto freedom, de facto authority: press and parliament, 1640–1643

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 1641 a century-long partnership of the crown and the London Stationers collapsed, leaving state control of the press and the Stationers’ interest in copyright in an extremely vulnerable situation. Tentatively at first and with growing assertiveness by 1642, the Lords and Commons revised and restated in their own interest the old partnership of the state and the Stationers; for their part, the Stationers worked hard to demonstrate their utility to the new regime and to preserve the privileges that allowed them to control the book business. The result of their joint efforts was the licensing ordinance of 1643, which critics, including John Milton, thought to be scarcely distinguishable from the Star Chamber decree of 1637, the high-water mark of the old regime. But the ordinance proved only partially successful. In the interim between regimes, there emerged a vigorous if vulgar tabloid journalism avant la lettre, sustained by an underclass of undisciplined elements of the Stationers’ Company, non-company interlopers and hawkers, and often youthful scribblers, several of them Cambridge drop-outs. Such engaging rascals no less than moralists like Milton had their share in acclimatizing the English to a press practically free of prior restraint.