ABSTRACT
A royal proclamation addressed at the control of the press and the dissemination of anti-court news in coffee-houses. Ministerial opinion in Charles II’s court debated the legality and polity of tolerating discussions of affairs of state amongst the common people. All such discussions were regularly described as false news (that is, news that did not originate in the court and its letter office, even when it was true) or seditious libel (that is, a written or published statement inciting disaffection towards the state) or licentious talking (that is, public debate on affairs of state conducted in common). In this proclamation, Charles II invokes the authority of the Licensing Act of 1662 (13 Car. II), which acted against the publication of seditious pamphlets (cited here), applying it to ‘men [who] have assumed to themselves a liberty, not onely in Coffee-houses, but in other Places and Meetings, both publick and private, to censure and defame the proceedings of State, by speaking evil of things they understand not, and endeavouring to create and nourish an universal Jealousie and Dissatisfaction in the minds of all his Majesties good subjects’.Proclamations were issued on the authority of the King in Council, as an act of the executive authority operating outside Parliament. During the lengthy periods in which Charles II attempted to rule without calling Parliament, proclamations were one of the few ways the executive could act. After the abolition of the Star Chamber in 1641, there was no tribunal that could punish a breach of a proclamation, unless the conduct ordered or forbidden by it was illegal. In consequence, proclamations in this period tended to become exhortatory, such as warnings to obey laws already in operation, or were used to regulate the price of certain articles and services such as wine, coal or the postal system, whose price or taxation was controlled by pre-existent legislation (W. S. Holdsworth, A History of English Law, 2nd edn, 12 vols (London, Methuen, 1937), vol. VI, pp. 303–12). The proclamation was published by the King’s publisher in the Savoy, a former palace on the Strand in Whitehall. Proclamations were conventionally printed in black letter.
