In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 1 "That Great and Immoderate Liberty ofLying" Freedom ofopinion is afarce unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute. In other words, factual truth informs political thought. -Hannah Arendt Now this ill-wresting world is grown so bad, Mad slanderers by mad ears believed be. -Shakespeare, Sonnet140 In 1641 the licensing system that had been set up under the Tudors collapsed, and despite intermittent efforts to reimpose some sort of controls, the press remained effectively unregulated for the next two decades. In his noblest and most influential prose work, Milton celebrated this new freedom, and to later generations his defense seemed to voice the aspirations and ideals of emergent modernity. Yet, whatever Areopagitica's subsequent significance, it did not speak for its own historical moment. Very few other contemporary responses to the collapse of censorship resemble Milton's or construe it in remotely the same terms. Almost all those who applauded the change imagined it as renovating, not ending, state censorship. Thus in his own mock-oration to Parliament, Thomas Mocket praises the Commons for having"opened the press for publishing the good and profitable labors of the godly; and inhibited popish books and pamphlets tending to reconcile us and Rome."l Most commentators, however, expressed acute reservations about the new regime of print, and almost always for the same reasons. In Religio Medici (1643), Thomas Browne thus protests that "almost every man [has] suffered by the press"; not only has "the name of his Majesty [been] defamed ;' but "the honour of Parliament depraved, [and] the writings of both "That Great and Immoderate Liberty" 13 depravedly, anticipatively, counterfeitly imprinted."2 The year before, Thomas Fuller lodged a similar complaint: «They cast dirt on the faces of many innocent persons, which dried on by continuance oftime can never after be washed off.... The pamphlets of this age may pass for records with the next (because publicly uncontrolled) and what we laugh at, our children may believe."3 Twenty years later, Samuel Parker succinctly described the restoration of the licensing system as a measure to suppress "that great and immoderate liberty of lying."4 Fuller, Browne, and Parker were royalist authors, but the same concerns about falsehood and forgery recur across the political spectrum. The anonymous 1642 tract A Presse Full ofPamphlets denounced the torrent of "scurrilous and fictitious pamphlets;' printing "rumors mixt with falsity and scandalism;' to disgrace "even the proceedings of the High Court of Parliament ' and the worshipful members thereof."s The Cromwellian John Rushworth gave a similarly negative assessment in his Collections of Private Passages ofState (1659). He compiled his massive archival history, Rushworth explains, as a corrective to the pervasive mendacity of the Interregnum press; for some men's fancies were more busy than their hands ... printing declarations, which were never passed; relating battles which were never fought, and victories which were never obtained; dispersing letters, which were never writ by the authors.... [Thus] the impossibility for any man in after-ages to ground a true history, by relying on the printed pamphlets in our days, which passed the press whilst it was without control, obliged me ... whilst things were fresh in memory, to separate truth from falsehood.6 Some such publications had provoked Fairfax's angry letters to Parliament in the late summer of 1647, defending the army from the falsehoods printed "daily to abuse and deceive the people;' and requiring that the pamphlets in question "and all of the like nature may be suppressed for the future."? Even from the radical camp, there were calls for suppression. In 1645, the Levellerspokesman and lifelong political agitator John Lilburne thus castigated Parliament for allowing the press "to print, divulge and disperse whatsoever books, pamphlets and libels they please, though they be full of lies."8 The context suggests that the "lies" Lilburne would have suppressed were political views "tending to the ruin of the Kingdom and Parliament's privileges," not factual untruths. But the other writers quoted above are troubled by precisely such untruths: by forged documents, libelous allegations, the misrepresentation of persons and events. Their concerns, moreover, are 14 Chapter 1 re-echoed through the Interregnum; virtually all the surviving comments on«the Press whilst it was without control" center on the problems of fabrication and libe1.9 Milton, however, mentions such issues only in passing, which may be one reason they have played such a minor role in subsequent histories of censorship. Seditious Books and Bulls: The Elizabethan Proclamations...

Share