Hostname: page-component-7b7567c8c-2n9c9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-15T04:59:55.833Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘Very Knaves Besides’: Catholic Print and the Enforcers of the 1662 Licensing Act in Restoration England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 May 2020

Chelsea Reutcke
Chelsea Reutcke*
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews
*
*School of History, University of St Andrews, 71 South St, St Andrews, Fife, KY16 9QW. E-mail: creutcke@gmail.com.
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article explores the motivations of three enforcers of the Licensing Act of 1662 in regard to their treatment of the illicit Catholic book trade in London during the Restoration. As censors, the Stationers’ Company, the Surveyor of the Press, Roger L'Estrange, and the bishop of London, Henry Compton, were intended to unite the concerns of the book trade, the state and the church. However, each used the Licensing Act to pursue their own interests. Contemporaries and historians have both viewed the act as being unsuccessfully enforced; this article explores whether full enforcement was ever the goal. Using the case of Catholic print, it posits that it was precisely the act's flexibility that encouraged its repeated renewals. Moreover, exploring the print of the Catholic minority in London highlights the differences between the written law and the enforced law. Finally, this article suggests that at times there existed an informal toleration for the printers and booksellers engaged in Catholic book production that enabled books to escape detection and the Catholic book trade to continue despite the Licensing Act.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 56: THE CHURCH AND THE LAW , June 2020, pp. 288 - 305
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2020

In July 1676, wardens of the Stationers’ Company seized Anthony Lawrence for printing a Catholic book, The Great Sacrifice of the New Law.Footnote 1 Upon delivering Lawrence to the Privy Council, one of the wardens, Samuel Mearne, informed the printer that ‘if he had not behaved saucily to him and the other officers of the Company, they would not have brought him before the King and Council’.Footnote 2 Mearne had every right to apprehend Lawrence under the terms of the Licensing Act of 1662, which required that all pamphlets and books receive an official licence in order to prevent the spread of ‘seditious and heretical’ material. The Great Sacrifice, clearly, had no such licence; promoting a faith outside the Church of England automatically rendered it seditious. Lawrence, a bookseller and registered recusant since 1674, provided an easy target.Footnote 3 The act enabled random searches to be carried out on any printing house or bookshop. However, Mearne's motives in arresting Lawrence were neither legally nor ethically based; less than a year later Mearne was censured for reselling The Great Sacrifice on the Oxford black market for a tidy profit.Footnote 4 Instead, his comment indicates a more complex relationship between the written law and the enforced law, one framed around personal motivations and relationships.

This article explores how the enforcers of Restoration censorship viewed Catholic texts printed in London by examining how the enforcers’ personal interests were reflected in the ways they prosecuted those texts.Footnote 5 Their varied interests provide insight into when Catholic books were prosecuted, when and why authorities chose to enforce the law, and when (if ever) Catholic print was permissible. Exploring these interests is critical not only to understanding when and why certain works were prosecuted but also to recognizing how books could escape detection. The Licensing Act, or the ‘Act for preventing the frequent abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed Books’, provides the lens through which these topics are viewed.Footnote 6 The article analyses the three main London enforcing bodies from 1662 to 1678: the Stationers’ Company, the Surveyor of the Press and the bishop of London. It then turns to the period from 1679 to 1684, when the main censorship law lapsed, to show how press regulation changed when these interests disappeared, leaving it governed only by the king's preferences.

Renewed every few years from 1662 until it lapsed in 1679, and reinstated in 1685 and again renewed regularly until 1695, the Licensing Act was the dominant censorship law during the Restoration.Footnote 7 It represented the fulfilment of earlier Stuart press regulation and established the rules for licensing, importation and prosecution.Footnote 8 Although the act ostensibly forbade ‘offensive’ print in England or ‘any other His Majesties Dominions or in the parts beyond the Seas’, it dealt principally with the London book trade, as London was by far the largest centre of book production in Britain.Footnote 9 To ensure the book trade's conformity to the act, in 1663 Charles II officially named Roger L'Estrange as Surveyor of the Press.Footnote 10 To enforce the act, L'Estrange and the Stationers’ Company wardens were to conduct searches, the secretary of state to issue warrants, and the bishop of London and the archbishop of Canterbury to evaluate and dispose of seized writings.Footnote 11 Each had their vision of censorship shaped by financial, political or ecclesiastical motives, to which were added the interests of the king. The new act expanded the distribution of responsibility between the book trade, the state and the church, and augmented the king's influence by empowering his messengers to conduct searches alongside representatives of the Stationers’ Company.Footnote 12

Whilst the act was about licensing, its stated purpose was to guard against anything ‘contrary to … the Church or the Government or Governors of the Church State or Common wealth’, and the dangers of ‘seditious and heretical pamphlets’.Footnote 13 Although religious concerns were at its core, to meet this challenge the act targeted all unlicensed print. Proving a lack of a licence was far simpler and faster than proving sedition or heresy or the comparable crime of scandalum magnatum. This afforded the state a great deal of flexibility. It could apply the act against any unlicensed work and then tailor the punishment to the transgressor.Footnote 14 For instance, in 1666, unlicensed texts were discovered at the shops of Thomas Leach, John Darby and Thomas Milburn. Stationers’ Company wardens arrested Darby and Milburn for printing a Quaker and a Catholic book respectively, and seized their presses, but they took no action against Leach for his pamphlet on the Great Fire of London.Footnote 15 The language of the Licensing Act left plenty of room for manoeuvre for state or personal agendas to shape how it was actually enforced.

Until now, most appraisals of Restoration censorship have focused on its persecution or its inefficiency. However, Catholic print had a varied and ever-changing relationship with the censors. At times royally endorsed and rarely targeted with the same vigour as Dissenting print, Catholic books continued to be produced. While enforcers opposed the threat of popery and policy makers legislated against it, it was not always practicable to pursue every case, particularly against those who did not embody the stereotypical traits of hidden, foreign or proselytizing Catholicism. As the following will show, the institutionalized intolerance of the written statute was paired with flexibility of enforcement, thus providing a parallel to the rigid penal laws and daily coexistence described by historians of Catholicism and toleration.Footnote 16 The flexibility derived from the differing interests of the Stationers’ Company, secretary of state and church, who all played distinct roles in enforcement. Awareness of that flexibility also enabled these parties to serve their unique interests. Regulation of the press should be viewed by scholars as a necessary formal position (helpfully) mitigated by different interests and the actual experience of toleration.

By evaluating the interests of the enforcers of the Licensing Act in terms of their relationships to Catholic print, this article offers a new method of viewing the censorship law in practice and raises the profile of Restoration Catholic print culture. Control of the press has received significant attention from book historians, who focus on the enforcers of censorship and the continual circulation of unlicensed print.Footnote 17 Although the resulting studies address the causes of unlicensed print, almost always blaming the Stationers’ Company for infringements of the laws, they do not consider fully whether this ineffectiveness was bad or resulted in a necessary balance to the market.

Moreover, censorship studies tend to focus on case studies of Dissenting or radical presses. These case studies demonstrate a severe state censorship programme.Footnote 18 However, a focus on Catholic books and bookmen complicates this view; the level of persecution of Catholic print was continually changing during the reign of Charles II. This focus reveals that while there continued to be anxieties over the illegal importation of Catholic books printed abroad, Catholicism also had a strong presence in the capital,Footnote 19 and this extended beyond the traditional elite and clerical circles.Footnote 20 Moreover, Catholic books were not just overseas products; they were also domestically produced, mostly in London, by Protestants and Catholics alike.Footnote 21 This is important given London's position as a visible centre of anti-popish sentiments, particularly in the house of Commons, which frequently brought forth proposals to limit the ‘growth of popery’.Footnote 22

While persecution of Catholic print networks occurred, this persecution needs to be placed within the context of a wider censorship system that often chose not to pursue these networks. In line with the evidence of recent studies calling into question the strength of anti-popery or the enforcement of the penal code, personal tolerance was often apparent.Footnote 23 While maintaining social control required the existence of harsh laws on the books, people could view the crimes of their neighbours more leniently, especially if it served their own interests or the harmony of the whole. I shall investigate how religious beliefs affected the enforcement of secular laws and how they interacted with other values and interests.

Keith Wrightson described seventeenth-century English laws governing moral behaviour as ‘a conflict between the concept of order … embodied in legislation and the somewhat broader area of behaviour permitted’, that is, in practice by the law enforcers.Footnote 24 This observation also pertains to the Licensing Act. Every party empowered by the act looked to their own interests and interpreted their role as an enforcer in the light of them. These interests were often in conflict and as a result the act failed to prevent the circulation of unlicensed print throughout London and beyond.Footnote 25 Simply put, ‘licensing as a system … was certainly not successfully enforced’, as Treadwell recognizes,Footnote 26 but that did not mean that all enforcers would have seen it as failing, or regarded it as failing in the same way.

The Stationers’ Company

The first of the groups tasked with regulating the print industry, the Stationers’ Company, bore principal responsibility for hunting down unlicensed books. However, they were reluctant to act unless doing so benefited themselves. Few possessed the time, means or desire to seek out seditious or heretical texts. They focused on works that infringed their own patents, namely foreign English-language imports and pirated editions.Footnote 27 For instance, John Hetet's study of the accounts of the Stationers’ Company found that in 1663 they ‘only hounded printers of pirated primers’ for which the company held the official monopoly.Footnote 28 When the company did pursue seditious works, they often resold the books and loose sheets seized during raids, which meant that they were not actually removed from circulation.Footnote 29 In addition, the high prices commanded by illicit Catholic works prompted many stationers to engage in the black market trade. This was the case for Mearne, as described in the introduction, who was nevertheless remembered as a ‘zealous seeker-out of illegal presses’.Footnote 30

The Stationers’ Company was unable to overcome the financial incentives of illicit print. One printer described works ‘treasonable and seditious, and most profitable for sale’.Footnote 31 In his autobiography, the Carmelite Walter Joseph Travers recalls that whilst publishing an English translation of the life of St Teresa of Avila, ‘the bill for printing was very heavy, owing to the risk the printer, a Protestant, ran in publishing a forbidden book’.Footnote 32 On top of this, unlicensed printers (those operating outside the company) continued to set up printing houses, and this opened the market for the publication of illicit and difficult-to-trace work.Footnote 33 The Catholic queen, Catherine of Braganza, employed an unlicensed master printer, John Winter, to produce a devotional work, A Liturgical Discourse of the Holy Sacrifice of the Masse, despite having legal permission to acquire books for her chapel.Footnote 34 If members of the Stationers Company could not resist printing unlicensed books for profit, they could hardly be expected to curb the practice.

The other branches of press regulation were well aware of the shortcomings of the Stationers’ Company, which Bishop Compton of London referred to as ‘a Company of malicious persons and of very knaves besides’.Footnote 35 In a bid to increase his own control over the press, L'Estrange explained the failure of censorship based on the actions of the Stationers’ Company: ‘They are both Parties and Iudges … they are Entrusted (effectually) to search for their own Copies; to Destroy their own Interests; to Prosecute their own Agents, and to Punish Themselves: for they are the Principal Authors of those Mischiefs which they pretend now to Redress.’Footnote 36

L'Estrange wrote from a highly biased position, hoping to commandeer the company's role in enforcing censorship, but, as already observed, his complaint had merit. Many stationers operated as both booksellers and printers and relied upon the networks of bookmen and intermediaries. They often lacked the motivation to prosecute their own. Even the king's appointee, Richard Royston, used his position to forewarn John Crook to remove copies of Fiat Lux, a Catholic text, before the wardens could conduct a search of Crook's shop.Footnote 37 Business relations between colleagues frequently trumped adherence to the law.

Those who assisted the stationers in these searches could also be swayed. In 1669, Barden, a constable, was apprehended for refusing to seize popish books from Johnson, a printer and bookseller.Footnote 38 Another report describes a constable, probably the same one, acquiring and returning these same books to Johnson.Footnote 39 Several years later, a ‘government official’ caught a Protestant in the act of printing the new translation of the life of St Teresa for Abraham Woodhead and Walter Joseph Travers. Travers recorded: ‘we were in danger of losing everything that had already been done, and being heavily fined besides’, but after a few weeks the official returned the confiscated sheets.Footnote 40 No report of the discovery was submitted by any party. Although in neither case were the searchers’ motivations clear, Barden's semi-public actions must have jeopardized his career.

On other occasions when the company took action against Catholic print, their efforts were thwarted not by their own men, but by the royal family. In 1669, the company used the crime of printing a Catholic book to harass John Winter.Footnote 41 Over the course of the previous six years, the company had endeavoured to annexe Winter's printing house; this Catholic book provided the justification for seizing his presses.Footnote 42 However, the queen declared that she had commissioned the work from Winter and demanded his release, to which the company grudgingly acceded.Footnote 43 A similar situation occurred seven years later, when the king halted the prosecution of Anthony Lawrence for printing The Great Sacrifice.Footnote 44 Hindrances to enforcement of the act thus came both from within and from above the company.

In the print trade, economics, family ties and business relationships, as much as religion, motivated action. The company's fierce protection of its privileged status guaranteed its intervention whenever its various patents were threatened, but the bonds among stationers, the importance of the patrons and the financial gains of illicit print similarly ensured that its policing of the book trade could never be complete. As a result, the Stationers’ Company earned a reputation for being unreliable. Nevertheless, its influence and the authority it traditionally exercised over the presses ensured that it remained the authority best situated to police printers without overhauling the book trade.

The Surveyor of the Press

With the half-hearted efforts of the Stationers’ Company, regulation of the press next fell to the secretary of state. However, the majority of the secretary of state's duties relating to the press, including the licensing of books, passed via warrant to the Surveyor of the Press, a post held by Roger L'Estrange from 1663 until 1679 and again from 1685 to 1688.Footnote 45 As surveyor, L'Estrange received assistance from Messengers of the Press, appointed by the crown with approval from the Stationers’ Company.Footnote 46 He viewed himself as the supervisor of the company, leading to friction between it and himself.Footnote 47 Like his patron, the earl of Arlington, L'Estrange was a firm royalist working to suppress any work that insulted the royal family or defended the regicide of Charles I.

As the Restoration took shape, L'Estrange released several vitriolic pamphlets against Presbyterians and in support of the old royalists.Footnote 48 On his appointment as Surveyor of the Press, L'Estrange compiled a list of seditious pamphlets to be suppressed.Footnote 49 He sorted these titles by category, including works proposing that ‘the Duty of the Subjects [is] but Conditional’ or that ‘The King has no Power to Impose in Ecclesiastical Affairs’.Footnote 50 While the inclusion of a large number of nonconformist works is unsurprising, it is striking that none of the titles or categories in L'Estrange's catalogue referred to Catholicism. L'Estrange's focus on Dissenting works, and his lack of concern with Catholic printing, continued throughout his career.Footnote 51

Neither the crown nor the secretary of state attempted to diminish or restrict L'Estrange's powers, giving little indication that they might have disapproved of his priorities. However, he was not invulnerable. In 1663, L'Estrange licensed and advertised a book by a Catholic, Philanax Anglicus, which claimed that the nature of Protestant ideology had resulted in Charles I's execution by his Protestant subjects.Footnote 52 In response, the Nonconformist pamphleteer Ralph Wallis warned that Catholic interests had corrupted licensing regulation.Footnote 53 Despite L'Estrange's express opposition to legal toleration, his informal tolerance of Catholicism opened him up to accusations that he was a crypto-Catholic,Footnote 54 and this suspicion increased in 1679, when L'Estrange supported the duke of York's claim to the succession against those who sought his exclusion.Footnote 55 Resentment of his practices forced L'Estrange to flee during the Popish Plot of 1678. However, L'Estrange never openly converted, nor did he describe himself as a Catholic, even under James II when it became popular to do so. L'Estrange seems to have been an Anglican who placed loyalty to the crown and royal prerogative above religious persecution.

There can be little doubt that L'Estrange's actions closely aligned with the desires of the crown or that he permitted Catholic books when the king desired it. In the first decade of the Restoration, with the memory of the Interregnum still fresh, the government's focus was primarily on the suppression of Nonconformist and anti-monarchical print.Footnote 56 Quaker printers were frequent targets during these years, which saw the arrests of leading figures such as Anna Brewster, Francis Smith and Susannah Calvert.Footnote 57 In comparison, English Catholics, many of whom had demonstrated their loyalty on the battlefield or at the exile courts, were viewed as a lesser threat. Indeed, in the early years of the Restoration, Catholic loyalist works such as Thomas Blount's Boscobel, which described how Catholics had aided Charles II's escape after the Battle of Worcester in 1651, circulated freely.Footnote 58 In addition, L'Estrange's persecution of Dissenting authors and printers had the potential to aid Catholics by hampering their chief counter-polemicists. However, L'Estrange's toleration went beyond the tenuous position adopted by Charles II's government.

Later, while serving under James II, L'Estrange recorded in his history that ‘the Scandal is not to be Born; not to be Defended; and never to be Forgiven, to Charge Roman Catholicks with Vndutifullness to their Sovereign’.Footnote 59 The ‘dutifulness’ and loyalty of Catholics distinguished them from other nonconforming groups in L'Estrange's mind. His stance was to protect the reputation of the crown, and, for the most part, he did not view Catholic works as damaging to either church or state, especially when compared to those of Dissenters and parliamentarians. When they were discovered, unlicensed Catholic works were still often prosecuted. However, to L'Estrange, (English) Catholicism was not the main source of the ‘seditious and heretical pamphlets’ against which he had been commissioned to guard. He held a more ideological stance, less affected by the economic imperatives of the Stationers’ Company but driven by concern about radical Protestant sedition.

The Bishop of London

The priorities of the Stationers’ Company and of L'Estrange as Surveyor of the Press often (perhaps unintentionally) enabled the continuation of Catholic printing. In contrast, the ecclesiastical authorities were not as permissive. They were tasked with assessing the content of printed works. The Licensing Act called for most genres of books to pass through the hands of the bishop of London or the archbishop of Canterbury to receive a licence. Moreover, these two men often determined the fate of any seized unlicensed religious texts. The bishop of London exerted this control in the capital, where the vast majority of works were printed. Unlike the Stationers’ Company, and even (to an extent) L'Estrange, the bishop's income did not derive from the book trade, and he did not have its functioning interests in mind. His task was to defend the church and ensure conformity in print, and this separated him from the ecosystem of the marketplace.

While Humphrey Henchman, bishop of London from 1663 to 1675, had taken a moderate approach to his role in overseeing the press, his successor, Henry Compton, reached beyond his mandate to target, prosecute and destroy Catholic works. In this case it is apparent that the rigour of censorship depended on personal convictions, rather than just on institutionally determined interests. A known opponent of the Roman Catholic Church, Compton viewed Catholicism, foreign and domestic, as the greatest threat facing England.Footnote 60 In the 1660s, he had twice anonymously published anti-popish and anti-Jesuit tracts.Footnote 61 Compton thus represented a counter-balance to L'Estrange, advocating a somewhat accommodating stance towards Dissenters while believing that the full force of church and state was required to stamp out the growing Catholic threat.Footnote 62

However, Compton's view of censorship required him to act beyond the remit of the Licensing Act. In theory, the bishop's role in punishing publishers of unlicensed print only came into play after L'Estrange and the Stationers’ Company had fulfilled their parts and delivered seized books to him.Footnote 63 However, Compton demanded search warrants from the secretary of state or Privy Council following any rumour of a Catholic book. It was Compton who drew attention to The Great Sacrifice, and he ordered the wardens of the Stationers Company to confiscate the work.Footnote 64 In 1676, he called for a search of the queen's residence, Somerset House, after hearing that ‘Popish and unlicensed Books were lodged in three warehouses over the stables’; this was carried out.Footnote 65 He bullied and frustrated those around him, especially the royal family, as he sought to impose what he understood to be appropriate levels of censorship. However, he also tried to bypass the proper authorities. In 1679, he ordered the Customs House to seize all copies of the pro-Catholic The Increase and Growth of the Popish Religion, without first informing the Privy Council.Footnote 66 Compton was the instigator of a number of similar investigations and initiatives, and the political and religious climate of the mid- to late 1670s made it expedient for the government to comply.

However, Compton could not bypass the king or the judiciary. As in the case of the Stationers’ Company, the king and the courts proved able to prevent, or at least reduce, punishment inflicted on printers or booksellers found in Compton's searches. As indicated above, the king forbore to prosecute Lawrence. Likewise, none of the men suspected of hiding books at Somerset House, Moor, Turner and Dod, appear in the London Sessions Records.Footnote 67 Whilst Compton was able to seize many Catholic books, he had less success in obtaining severe punishments against Catholic booksellers.

It is important to give Compton credit for his role in press regulation. Anti-popery had increased since Charles II's Declaration of Indulgence in 1672 and the revelation the following year of the duke of York's conversion to Catholicism. However, it was not until Compton's appointment in 1675 that confiscations of popish print markedly increased. He influenced all the major prosecutions of Catholic bookmen in the late 1670s.Footnote 68 Similarly, under Compton, more pamphlets underwent the process of damasking, or defacing in such a way as to render the text unreadable. Damasking may well have signalled ‘a concern to see that proscribed print work did indeed get cancelled’, as Juliet Fleming suggests; however, state-ordered damasking was rare and over half of the orders for it came from Compton.Footnote 69 He enacted more destructive punishments as well. During the Popish Plot, Compton ordered the books and papers of the Catholic publisher James Thompson ‘to be publicly burnt at the Old Exchange’.Footnote 70 For contemporaries, this would have been a counterpart to the bonfires lit in the context of mock papal processions, which aimed to stir up anti-popish sentiments by reminding the public of the secretive and scheming nature of Catholics.Footnote 71 These actions went far beyond what was expected of Compton in fulfilling his role as the bishop responsible for censorship in London. The fervour with which he attacked Catholic print seems to have stemmed from his own hatred of the religion.

Like L'Estrange, Compton lost his influence over the regulation of the press when the Licensing Act lapsed in 1679. As a result, prosecutions against Catholic printers and booksellers also ceased, though the bishop continued to hold book burnings for texts previously seized under the act. Compton represented the extreme end of censorship against Catholicism. He pushed against, or went beyond, the boundaries of his role as stated in the Licensing Act, to the frustration of the royal family and many tories. However, in the late 1670s he had public fear of popery on his side. Given that Compton's position was considered extreme, it follows that the standard approach to censorship was more lenient.

The role of individual interests under the Licensing Act becomes clear by looking at what happened when it expired and the king took a more direct role in censorship. When the act lapsed in 1679, the archbishop of Canterbury and bishop of London, the Stationers’ Company and the secretary of state the (and therefore the Surveyor of the Press) all lost their mandate to intervene. Charles II turned to older sedition laws to make cases against Dissenting printers, then pressured the judges in those trials to extend his own prerogative in their sentences. After the third trial, he achieved a court ruling that ‘permitted the Crown to prohibit unlicensed publications of news without a statute’.Footnote 72 This also led to a change in the types of Catholic books that were prosecuted. During the previous two decades, those appearing in the records had been educational or devotional in content. These were mass books or manuals of daily prayers, which served to maintain an established community without access to priests. However, after 1679, the prosecuted Catholic works all related to the Popish Plot, its resulting trials and the various plots that followed. The most infamous of these books was the earl of Castlemaine's Compendium, which attacked the state for arresting Catholic lords and executing priests.Footnote 73 Content that criticized the government, rather than sympathy shown for Catholics, made books like these targets.

Reports of seized Catholic books are sparse during the final years of Charles II's reign, but non-political Catholic books did not vanish. In 1684 the Catholic bookseller Matthew Turner advertised books of contemplation and devotion.Footnote 74 That same year the tory printer Nathaniel Thompson included three Catholic ballads published during the Popish Plot (which could be categorized as news) in his collection of loyalist ballads.Footnote 75 The government did not attempt to categorize these as seditious or damaging to the crown, as it had done with Dissenting works in three trials in the preceding years. Moreover, Thompson's inclusion of the ballads embedded them in royalist rhetoric. They served both tory and Catholic audiences, blaming whigs and Dissenters for the late troubles while offering sympathy for the sufferings of Catholics. The ballads embodied the alignment between pro-tory and pro-Catholic print brought on by the exclusion crisis which emphasized loyalty to the crown above all else.

The strongest demonstration of the alignment between tory and pro-Catholic stances emerged in 1680 with a new edition of Thomas Blount's Boscobel, that same Catholic book that had openly circulated in 1660.Footnote 76 Henry Brome, principal royalist bookseller and ally of L'Estrange, sold both the first and the new edition. The new edition followed the indictment of the duke of York as a recusant and offered a royalist show of support for coexistence with Catholics.Footnote 77 The political climate and the interests of the king now actively endorsed a Catholic book. In the king's mind, there were good and bad Catholics, and the defining feature of the former was absolute loyalty to the crown. Catholic books that fitted this message could receive an official licence.

Conclusion

In Restoration England, religion was one of many motivations that drove the enforcers of censorship. Economics, political affiliations and business relations all played their role. The empowering of a trade guild, a private citizen and ecclesiastical leaders to regulate the London press produced this fracturing diversity. Yet parliament continued to renew the Licensing Act without alteration until it lapsed in 1679, a victim of the exclusion crisis. Something about this ‘inefficient’ system clearly met the needs of censorship. This article posits that, like the penal codes, the Licensing Act could not be, and was not meant to be, regularly enforced. What might be seen as corruption by personal interests provided room for the type of discretion needed to maintain ties within a community. Meanwhile, the simplicity of proving a lack of licence made it an ideal tool to harass Dissenting and Catholic printers during moments of political tension. These tensions were embodied most significantly in the actions of L'Estrange against Nonconformists and Compton against papists. Their influence waxed when the public or king agreed with them and waned when this support evaporated.

Regulatory authorities permitted or restricted Catholic works according to their political and economic interests. By and large, Catholic books did not affect Stationers’ Company monopolies, but they did provide useful avenues of illegal revenue. When Catholic books promoted a much-desired call for loyalism, press regulators pursuing the king's interests saw them as advantageous, or at least non-threatening. When the Popish Plot unfolded, informal toleration vanished, and more informers reported on Catholic book activity to the enforcers.Footnote 78 These years also demonstrate the numerous social levels at which grudging acceptance had been the rule, from the court to the bookmen's neighbours who now reported them. Popish anxieties again gained precedence. However, it should be noted that Compton was the only one of the three main regulators actively to target Catholic print.

Imperfect regulation and irregular enforcement of laws were not unique to the book trade; indeed, these were common themes in the early modern period. However, exploring the enforcement of the Licensing Act demonstrates the restraints and allowances under which Catholic bookmen operated in late Restoration London. This new understanding of how the state attempted to regulate England's book trade alters our perspective on whether censorship succeeded or failed and helps us assess how Catholics negotiated these regulations. As with the penal laws, official intolerance sat alongside practical coexistence. In both cases, religion was not the only interest when it came to enforcing laws; however, it was always a factor.

Footnotes

1 McKenzie, Donald F. and Bell, Maureen, A Chronology and Calendar of Documents relating to the London Book Trade 1641–1700, 3 vols (Oxford, 2005; hereafter: CCLBT), 2: 21 July 1676 (references are presented using the dates given in these volumes); James Dymock, The Great Sacrifice of the New Law ([London], 1676). Dymock's work was an English translation of the Roman mass; Wing gives the place of publication of the 1676 edition as Antwerp (Wing D2972), but the CSPD (cited in CCLBT) clearly describes it as being printed in London. There may have been a separate, unlisted edition, part of it may have been printed abroad, or Wing may have been incorrect about the location.

2 CCLBT, 2: 20 December 1676.

3 John Cordy Jeaffreson, ed., Middlesex County Records, 4: 1667–88 (London, 1892), British History Online, December 2014, online at: <http://www.british-history.ac.uk/middx-county-records/vol4/pp45-57>, accessed 15 May 2018.

4 CCLBT, 2: 7 March 1677.

5 London operated as the centre of the English book trade and surpassed the Scottish and Irish markets. The comparatively small number of presses operating in the English provinces and in Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Dublin resulted in far less centralized organization or regulation. The Stationers’ Company attempted to regulate the Scottish and Irish presses throughout the late seventeenth century, with limited success. Outside London during the latter half of the seventeenth century, the king, local bishops or privy and town councils carried out ad hoc censorship. Meanwhile, the university presses of Oxford and Cambridge largely regulated themselves, although they could not grant their own licenses without royal permission. Attempts to increase this regulation occurred after the Restoration, usually involving the appointment of London-based stationers or censors. For instance, after 1670, the crown attempted to increase regulation in Ireland by forming a printing guild constituted by members of the Stationers’ Company. Most books available in Wales came from London or Oxford, and Wales did not have a specific regulatory or censorship system: see Mann, Alastair, ‘The Anatomy of the Printed Book in Early Modern Scotland’, SHR 80 (2001), 181–200, at 193–6; Barnard, John, ‘The English Provinces’, in idem and McKenzie, D. F., eds, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 4: 1557–1695 (Cambridge, 2002; hereafter: CHBB), 665–86, at 665–6; Robert Welch, ‘The Book in Ireland from the Tudor Re-conquest to the Battle of the Boyne, ibid. 701–18, at 716–17; Philip Johnes, ‘Wales’, ibid. 719–34, at 721, 729–30; Treadwell, Michael, ‘Lists of Master Printers: The Size of the London Printing Trade, 1637–1723’, in Myers, Robin and Harris, Michael, eds, Aspects of Printing from 1600 (Oxford, 1987), 141–70, at 142–8.

6 ‘Act for preventing the frequent abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed Books’, 14 Car. II c.33, in John Raithby, ed., Statutes of the Realm, 5: 1628–80 (London, 1819), 428–35.

7 Parliament failed to renew the Licensing Act in 1679 amidst debates over the exclusion crisis. It was revived at James II's accession (1 Jac. II c.17 §15) before lapsing permanently in 1695: Raymond Astbury, ‘The Renewal of the Licensing Act in 1693 and its Lapse in 1695’, The Library 5th series 33 (1978), 296–322.

8 Crist, Timothy, ‘Government Control of the Press after the Expiration of the Printing Act in 1679’, Publishing History 5 (1979), 219–38, at 220–1. This included the Star Chamber decrees of 1586 and 1637 restricting trade to London, Cambridge, Oxford and York.

9 See n. 5 above.

10 CCLBT, 1: 15 August 1663.

11 While the act established a detailed pre-publication licensing system, this article focuses on its provisions for unlicensed works that escaped this system.

12 Michael Treadwell, ‘The Stationers and the Printing Acts at the End of the Seventeenth Century’, in Barnard and McKenzie, eds, CHBB, 4: 755–76, at 765.

13 14 Car. II c.33 §1.

14 Footnote Ibid. The act stipulated fines, seizure and destruction of goods and presses, and imprisonment as punishments but did not provide further specification.

15 CCLBT, 1: [undated] 1666. The text Darby printed was unnamed, but Milburn was charged with printing Roger Castlemaine's English Catholicke Apologie, and London's Flames was found at Leach's shop.

16 Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester, 2006); William J. Shiels, ‘“Getting on” and “getting along” in Parish and Town: Catholics and their Neighbours in England’, in Benjamin Kaplan et al., eds, Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain and the Netherlands c.1570–1720, Studies in Early Modern European History (Manchester, 2009), 67–83; Gabriel Glickman, ‘The Church and the Catholic Community 1660–1714’, in Grant Tapsell, ed., The Later Stuart Church, 1660–1714: Politics, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain (Manchester, 2012), 217–42.

17 Walker, J., ‘The Censorship of the Press during the Reign of Charles II’, History 35 (1950), 219–38; Hamburger, Philip, ‘The Development of the Law of Seditious Libel and the Control of the Press’, Stanford Law Review 37 (1985), 661–765; Treadwell, ‘Stationers and Printing Acts’; Myers, Robin and Harris, Michael, eds, Aspects of Printing from 1600 (Oxford, 1987); Anne Dunan-Page and Beth Lynch, eds, Roger L'Estrange and the Making of Restoration Culture (Burlington, VT, 2008); Maureen Bell, ‘Offensive Behaviour in the English Book Trade 1641–1700’, in Robin Myers, Michael Harris and G. Mandelbrote, eds, Against the Law: Crime, Sharp Practice and the Control of Print (London, 2004), 61–79.

18 Stephen Bardle, The Literary Underground in the 1660s: Andrew Marvell, George Wither, Ralph Wallis, and the World of Restoration Satire and Pamphleteering (Oxford, 2012); Kate Peters, Print Culture and the Early Quakers (Cambridge, 2005).

19 The Licensing Act also regulated imports.

20 For ‘elite’ Catholics, see Gabriel Glickman, The English Catholic Community, 1688–1745: Politics, Culture and Ideology, Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History 7 (Woodbridge, 2009); Geoff Baker, Reading and Politics in Early Modern England: The Mental World of a Seventeenth-Century Catholic Gentleman (Manchester, 2010). For lay metropolitan Catholics, see Francis Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Notre Dame, 2005); Penny Richards, ‘A Life in Writing: Elizabeth Cellier and Print Culture’, Women's Writing 7 (2000), 411–25.

21 For examples of cross-confessional book production, see CCLBT, 1: 8 June 1669; 2: 27 October 1678.

22 See Roger Flexman, ed., A General Index to the Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Volumes of the Journals of the House of Commons (London, 1780), 49–50, for a list of speeches given against recusants.

23 Scott Sowerby, ‘Opposition to Anti-Popery in Restoration England’, JBS 51 (2012), 26–49; Peter Walker, ‘Leicestershire and the Three Questions: James II's Canvass of the Gentry on the Question of Repeal of the Test Acts and Penal Laws in 1688’, Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society 87 (2013), 207–24; Walsham, Charitable Hatred, 300–6.

24 Keith Wrightson, ‘Two Concepts of Order: Justices, Constables and Jurymen in Seventeenth-Century England’, in John Brewer and John Styles, eds, An Ungovernable People: The English and their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1980), 21–46, at 21.

25 Crist, ‘Government Control’, 224.

26 Treadwell, ‘Stationers and Printing Acts’, 765.

27 Bell, ‘Offensive Behaviour’, 68.

28 John Hetet, ‘The Wardens’ Accounts of the Stationers’ Company, 1663–79’, in Robin Myers and Michael Harris, eds, Economics of the British Book Trade 1605–1939 (Cambridge, 1985), 32–59, at 36.

29 CCLBT, 2: 20 December 1676.

30 Howard M. Nixon, English Restoration Bookbindings: Samuel Mearne and his Contemporaries (London, 1974), 10.

31 Anon., The London Printers Lamentation, or, the Press opprest, and overprest (London, 1660), 4.

32 Walter Joseph Travers, ‘Autobiography of Father Bede of St. Simon Stock (Walter Joseph Travers)’, in Benedict Zimmerman, ed., Carmel in England: A History of the English Mission of the Discalced Carmelites, 1615 to 1849 (London, 1899), 171–307, at 243.

33 Walker, ‘Censorship’, 220–2.

34 Angelus à Sancto Francisco [Richard Mason], A Liturgical Discourse of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, 2 parts ([London], 1669–70); CCLBT, 1: 15 October 1669.

35 CCLBT, 2: 27 March 1677.

36 Roger L'Estrange, 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), 24.

37 Hetet, ‘Warden's Accounts’, 43.

38 CCLBT, 1: 5 June 1669.

39 Footnote Ibid.: [June 1669?].

40 Travers, ‘Autobiography’, 243.

41 CCLBT, 1: 7 June 1669, 4 October 1669.

42 Treadwell, ‘Lists of Master Printers’, 145–50.

43 CCLBT, 1: 15 October 1669, 7 March 1670.

44 Footnote Ibid. 2: 13 September 1676.

45 Footnote Ibid. 1: 15 August 1663; Tim Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (London, 2006), 72. This post derived its powers from the Licensing Act; when that lapsed in 1679, the position lapsed with it. In 1685, the renewal of the act prompted a new warrant from James II restoring L'Estrange's former powers.

46 Leona Rostenberg, ‘Robert Stephens, Messenger of the Press: An Episode in 17th-Century Censorship’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 49 (1955), 131–52.

47 CCLBT, 2: [before 20 February 1677].

48 Roger L'Estrange, A Caveat to the Cavaliers (London, 1661); idem, Interest Mistaken, or, The Holy Cheat (London, 1662).

49 Idem, Considerations and Proposals.

50 Footnote Ibid. 19, 21.

51 Peter Hinds, ‘The Horrid Popish Plot’: Roger L'Estrange and the Circulation of Political Discourse in Late Seventeenth-Century London (Oxford, 2010), 34–5.

52 Sir Henry Janson, Philanax Anglicus (London, 1663); Bardle, Literary Underground, 54; Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Milton's Of True Religion and the Earl of Castlemaine’, Seventeenth Century 7 (1992), 53–69, at 57–8. Philanax Anglicus was sold by the queen's bookseller in ordinary, Thomas Sadler.

53 Bardle, Literary Underground, 54.

54 Hinds, Horrid Popish Plot, 163–6.

55 Roger L'Estrange, The Case put, concerning the Succession (London, 1679).

56 Walker, ‘Censorship’, 230.

57 Footnote Ibid. 227–35.

58 Thomas Blount, Boscobel: Or, the History of His Sacred Majesties Most Miraculous Preservation after the Battle of Worcester (London, 1660).

59 Roger L'Estrange, A Brief History of the Times (London, 1687), 14.

60 Andrew M. Coleby, ‘Compton, Henry (1631/2–1713)’, ODNB, 3 January 2008, online at: <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-6032>, accessed 15 August 2018.

61 Edward Carpenter, The Protestant Bishop: Being the Life of Henry Compton, 1632–1713, Bishop of London (London, 1956), 60, 67–9.

62 Coleby, ‘Compton’.

63 It should be noted that the bishop and archbishop were responsible for issuing licences for texts outside the fields of common law, history, affairs of the state and heraldry or books produced by the university presses: 14 Car. II c.33 §2.

64 Carpenter, Compton, 67.

65 Footnote Ibid.; CCLBT, 2: 9 September 1676.

66 CCLBT, 2: 3 January 1679.

67 Hugh Bowler, ed., London Sessions Records, 1605–1685, CRS 34 (London, 1934).

68 My doctoral work on late Restoration English Catholic print culture will show this in more detail.

69 Juliet Fleming, ‘Damask Papers’, in Andy Kesson and Emma Smith, eds, The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England (London, 2013), 179–91, at 182.

70 CCLBT, 2: 28 October 1678.

71 Odai Johnson, ‘Pope-Burning Pageants: Performing the Exclusion Crisis’, Theatre Survey 37 (1996), 35–57.

72 Hamburger, ‘Seditious Libel’, 684–8.

73 Roger Palmer, The Compendium, or, A Short View of the Late Tryals in relation to the present Plot against His Majesty and Government (London, 1679); CCLBT, 2: 26 September 1679 n. 24, quoting from the Domestic Intelligence.

74 Le sieur Combes, An Historical Explication of what there is most remarkable in that Wonder of the World, the French King's Royal House at Versailles (London, 1684), 141–4.

75 Thompson, Nathaniel, A Choice Collection of 120 Loyal Songs (London, 1684), 139–41, 148–55, 248–50.

76 Blount, Thomas, Boscobel: or The compleat History of His Sacred Majesties Most Miraculous Preservation after the Battle of Worcester, 3 Sept. 1651 (London, 1680).

77 Turner, Dorothy, ‘Royalism, Romance, and History in Boscobel: or, The History of His Sacred Majesties Most Miraculous Preservation’, Prose Studies 22 (1999), 59–70, at 67.

78 CCLBT, 2: 11 November, 4, 28 December 1678.

Ibid
Ibid
Ibid
Ibid
Ibid
Ibid
Ibid