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Updated: June 13, 2025
An author who was determined to print, and could not obtain the sanction of the licenser, must employ the services of needy and desperate outcasts, who, hunted by the peace officers, and forced to assume every week new aliases and new disguises, hid their paper and their types in those dens of vice which are the pest and the shame of great capitals.
Considerations and Proposals in order to Regulating of the Press, for which he was appointed Surveyor of Printing-Presses and Licenser of the Press, and received a grant of the sole privilege of printing public news. His first newspaper, The Intelligencer, appeared in the same year, and was followed by The News and the City Mercury, or Advertisements concerning Trade.
Parliament, in fact, assumed the dictatorship of literature, and exercised supreme jurisdiction over author, printer, publisher, and licenser. Either House separately, or both concurrently, assumed the exercise of this power; and, if a book were sentenced to be burnt, the hangman seems always to have been called in aid.
Bohun the licenser was brought to the bar of the house, and discharged upon his own petition, after having been reprimanded on his knees by the speaker.
It was also resolved, without a division, that the King should be requested to remove Bohun from the office of licenser. The poor man, ready to faint with grief and fear, was conducted by the officers of the House to a place of confinement. But scarcely was he in his prison when a large body of members clamorously demanded a more important victim.
And the reason evidently is that the press, which had been fettered during the earlier half of his reign, was free during the latter half. While the censorship existed, no tract blaming, even in the most temperate and decorous language, the conduct of any public department, was likely to be printed with the approbation of the licenser.
The printer dares not go beyond his licensed copy; so often then must the author trudge to his leave-giver, that those his new insertions may be viewed; and many a jaunt will be made, ere that licenser, for it must be the same man, can either be found, or found at leisure; meanwhile either the press must stand still, which is no small damage, or the author lose his accuratest thoughts, and send the book forth worse than he had made it, which to a diligent writer is the greatest melancholy and vexation that can befall.
This amendment was rejected; and the bill passed, but not without a protest signed by eleven peers who declared that they could not think it for the public interest to subject all learning and true information to the arbitrary will and pleasure of a mercenary and perhaps ignorant licenser.
When every acute reader, upon the first sight of a pedantic licence, will be ready with these like words to ding the book a quoit's distance from him: I hate a pupil teacher, I endure not an instructor that comes to me under the wardship of an overseeing fist. I know nothing of the licenser, but that I have his own hand here for his arrogance; who shall warrant me his judgment?
Up betimes, and an hour at my viall, and then abroad by water to White Hall and Westminster Hall, and there bought the first newes-books of L'Estrange's writing; Born 1616. He was Licenser of the Press to Charles II. and James II.; and M.P. for Winchester in James II.'s parliament. L'Estrange was knighted in the reign of James II., and died 1704.
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