ABSTRACT
The bedrock of political involvement in the press in the 1640s and 1650s was the system of licensing, by which books were required to secure the approval of some publicly appointed authority – whether clerical, legal or political – at manuscript stage. This was a fundamental necessity for preventing the appearance of seditious and scandalous literature, and represented a form of prepublication censorship. However, licensing represented an attempt to exert positive as well as negative influence on the press. Press censorship was intimately associated with political propaganda, and an exploration of licensing practices provides a way of demonstrating that the two were part of the same process. Although largely constrained by the nature of the surviving evidence to analysis of parliamentarian rather than royalist licensing, it is nevertheless possible to indicate general trends common to both sides in the civil wars. These concern the ways in which content could be altered by licensers, by adding and removing key passages, and the ways in which systematic bias could be used in the selection of works to be approved. They also concern the way in which authorities worked with grandees of the publishing industry, in the form of the Stationers’ Company; the extent to which contemporaries were made aware of the approved status of individual books and pamphlets; and the ways in which the licensing process became factionalised in the 1640s. Exploration of press licensing serves, therefore, as a means of shedding light upon important themes with which this book is concerned. It demonstrates the extent to which propaganda was a priority for politicians during the civil wars and Interregnum; the means by which such propaganda could be organised; and the strengths and weaknesses of such mechanisms. More importantly, scrutiny of the way in which licensing worked and developed during this period serves to draw attention to the dynamic nature of propaganda, and the way in which it was transformed by political developments at Westminster and Oxford, not least the factionalism which bedevilled both Parliament and the royalist court. The systems established to enforce press control and exploit propaganda mirror political developments, and they reflect the very nature of governmental authority during the course of the upheavals.
