ABSTRACT
If the licensing system, and its exploitation, was the bedrock of civil war and Interregnum propaganda, then the superstructure was provided by much closer cooperation between political grandees and individual authors. Licensing reflected approval of particular works, but in seeking to understand the nature of civil war literature it is necessary to understand more than just the ways in which tracts and treatises received official sanction. It is also important to analyse the processes by which works were written, printed and published, and thus to explore evidence of political involvement in the commissioning and composition of polemical works, and evidence that political forces provided not merely the impetus to write and publish, but also logistical and financial assistance. The aim of this chapter is to analyse the ways in which politicians adopted a proactive approach to a range of literary forms, and moved beyond relying upon works which had been submitted to publicly appointed authorities in order to secure an official seal of approval. It demonstrates how efforts were made to exploit publishing opportunities which presented themselves, to encourage and support the publication of particular tracts and pamphlets, and to commission new works from authors with whom grandees were more or less intimately associated. This chapter is concerned, in other words, with the highest level of political involvement in the business of engaging with the public through the medium of print, and with works that most clearly conform to the strictly defined notion of propaganda with which this book is concerned. As with the licenser’s imprimatur, which was sometimes very prominently displayed, official support and sanction could be made explicit, and readers could be informed that books had been ‘ordered to be printed’, or published by ‘special command’. However, in the same way that understanding official licensing required more than simply analysing which books wore their seal of approval publicly, consideration of political involvement in composition and publication requires recognising the possibility that such support may have been hidden from public view. While visual signals help to conceptualise the methodology of political involvement in the press, it is necessary to delve much deeper into the archives in order to unearth evidence of the more or less surreptitious methods and mechanisms by which the appearance of polemical literature was inspired.
