An Order of the Lords and Commons Assembled in Parliament. London,
1643.
The early modern English crown recognized the printing press as a powerful instrument in forming and stimulating public political opinion, and from the earliest days of printing in England, recognized also that the output of the press needed regulation. But it was less clear to the crown what form such regulation should take and who should carry it out.
Over the century and a half leading up to the 1643 Licensing Act, the crown had tried a number of solutions with varying success. It had the most success with requiring authors to obtain an official license for their printed works prior to publication. This method had been instituted by Henry VIII. It was reformulated and reinforced over the course of the sixteenth century through various proclamations, injunctions, acts of the Privy Council, and decrees of the Star Chamber, notably that of 1586. This system--which was ad hoc at best--was in place through the reigns of James I and Charles I until it started to face serious challenges.
Increasingly, authors, printers, and publishers involved in the production of printed matter considered seditious by the crown offered the defense that the regulations were unknown and confused. Such a defense was actually a rather accurate assessment of the situation in the mid-seventeenth century. In the early 1630s, Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud and his zealous colleague Sir John Lambe (the ecclesiastical authorities responsible for conducting most pre-publication licensing and for punishing violators) set out to clarify the rules in conjunction with the officers of the Stationers' Company. By 1637, Lambe's research was complete, and Laud propagated a new decree that year for the regulation of printing in the Star Chamber. Laud's new set of regulations never really had a chance to be tested, however, as Charles I was soon involved in putting down a rebellion in Scotland. This stretched his tenuous financial situation to the breaking point. Domestic political grievances dominated Charles' attention in the next few years. In 1641, the pre-publication licensing system fell apart altogether, when the Long Parliament abolished the Ecclesiastical High Commission and the Star Chamber, the two central institutions by which the crown regulated the press.
For a brief time, English authors, printers, and publishers experienced their first real freedom to produce whatever they chose. But even the members of the new parliamentary government who had not approved of the old methods of press regulation recognized that print publication could not go on indefinitely unfettered. Their various experiments at control were no more successful than those employed by the crown, and in 1643, Parliament passed the act depicted here, regulating printing. In doing so, Parliament rolled the clock back to 1637 by reinstituting pre-publication licensing and other clauses contained in the 1637 decree. The act remained in force until 1647 when the ineffective regulations were once more revamped by Parliament.
Folger Call No. 134929.
