As his title suggests, Jason Peacey asserts that political leaders, acting in concert with polemical writers, put together astute arguments designed to sway public opinion. It appears to have been commonplace for major players on all sides to get help in spinning their claims in print to the maximum degree of persuasiveness. Charles I had his proclamations edited for him prior to publication. Sometimes grandees gave writers under their hire access to government records and private papers. A famous example of this practice was Parliament's sending William Prynne to confiscate and study Laud's papers in order to aid in his developing a series of printed pieces aimed at exacerbating public condemnation of the archbishop prior to his trial. Many grandees, such as the earls of Essex and Clarendon, readily patronized writers—Henry Parker and Clement Spelman respectively—they thought would put forth good arguments against their enemies. The Interregnum regimes were, generally speaking, more inclined to commission printed works than were the royalists. During the early 1650s the Council of State paid writers and newspaper editors to produce pamphlets invoking allegiance to the new republic, a process that Peacey calls “the gradual movement towards salaried propagandists” (186). Parliament came to pay “pens for hire” well for their services as “professional polemicists.” The Rump awarded John Dury, for example, £200 per year for life as a result of his published support of the Engagement Oath. Another, John Hall, received a salary of £100 a year, starting in 1649, to respond to anti-Commonwealth pamphlets.

An impressive amount of research went into making this book. Peacey devotes an entire chapter, for instance, to the licensing system. In it he modifies the long-standing conclusion that the authorities in any given Civil War era government were not able to bridle the press. The licensing committees of the 1640s and 1650s worked closely with the Company of Stationers to limit access to publication. The turnover of licensers, from Laudian to Presbyterian to Independent, witnessed also a shift in who had access to the official press. Governments began to keep closer records of those licensed to publish, thus affecting both who were sanctioned go to print and who were not. Peacey does not argue that dissenters were muzzled, but that the state came to devote considerably more time, attention, and resources to making sure that the national readership was aware of what constituted the official word.

There are problematic aspects to Peacey's arguments. One has to do with the slippery term “propaganda.” Pinpointing its unique features as well as its origins is difficult. Positing that the Civil War witnessed the practice whereby grandees hired writers to communicate to the literate public on their behalf does not necessarily amount to a result deserving to be labeled propaganda. Some, for example, have argued that baroque art was propaganda for the Catholic Reformation. Does this make Bernini a professional propagandist, a “chisel for hire” working at the behest of religious grandees? Second, some of Peacey's observations are not as original as he claims in his epilogue. For example, historians have long known that early modern authors working in an age prior to copyright protection sometimes wrote for pay, sometimes to put forth personal opinions, and sometimes to get the attention of potential patrons. That pamphleteers of the Civil War period did also is not a surprise. And, conversely, the notion that political leaders, for their part, tried to influence readers by secretly employing writers seems only logical. Third, Peacey admits that often his evidence tying writers to patrons in these clandestine relationships is at best circumscribed and indirect.

The strengths of this book, however, generally outweigh its weaknesses. It serves to remind us that the flood of argumentative publications may have had a greater role in determining the causes, course, and consequences of the Civil War than has been normally assumed, and that overtly slanted contentious sources—now that we are less willing to take a primary source at its face value but instead deconstruct even what were once considered relatively unbiased documents, looking for meaning in subtext—are mines as rich in historical information as official papers. Peacey also reminds us that we should continue to rethink the old Victorian perspective relegating a degree of high-mindedness to our ancestors, since lost, and instead acknowledge how politicians and writers in any age sometimes succumb to the temptation to deceive people and profit by the deceit. Given the prodigious amount of research mentioned above, the long-term utility of this book may be as a reference work. Few polemical writers and no secondary sources appear to have been left out.