ABSTRACT
When the late Gerald Ford − then still a congressman − first learned that President Richard Nixon kept an ‘enemies list’ he is said to have remarked that ‘Anybody who can’t keep his enemies in his head has too many enemies.’1 The thought that one might have too many enemies appears never to have troubled Roger L’Estrange in the least. Much of his professional life as Surveyor of the Press was spent generating and maintaining such lists, whether they were of people or books or ideas. Over a third of his Considerations and Proposals in Order to the Regulation of the Press (1663), for example, is taken up with a catalogue of treasonous and seditious pamphlets that ought to be suppressed. What is striking, however, is that while L’Estrange does identify a few of the authors concerned − singling out for mention nonconformist ministers like Edward Bagshaw, Richard Baxter, Edmund Calamy and Thomas Manton − the margins of the pamphlet are crammed with the names of those who printed and sold these subversive works: Thomas Brewster, Henry Bridges, Giles and Elizabeth Calvert, Livewell Chapman, Thomas Creek, Simon Dover, Thomas Parkhurst and Francis Tyton. In L’Estrange’s world it would seem that stationers rather than authors were the real agents of sedition.
