Independent Presses: The Politics of Print in England During the Late 1640s

Abstract

The regicide of King Charles I on 30 January 1649 dramatically caught the imagination of three Cambridge students, John Fidoe, Thomas Jeanes, and William Shaw. It so inspired them that they decided to take time away from their studies that cold winter to write a small pamphlet explaining why Parliament was justified in taking the kings life. However, the students did not have the mechanism to publish the pamphlet themselves, so they contacted bookseller Giles Calvert at his shop at the sign of the Black Spread Eagle at the west end of St Paul's Cathedral's courtyard in London. Calvert found a printer for them, and by 27 February 1649 the book collector George Thomason bought the pamphlet at Calvert's shop so that he could learn what these Cambridge students thought about Charles's execution.1This series of events was very typical in the London print trade during the late 1640s. Many individuals felt the obligation to express their political and religious views in print, and the London printers and booksellers gladly assisted them. But why did the obscure Fidoe, Jeanes, and Shaw choose Giles Calvert to sell their pamphlet celebrating the unpopular regicide?2 Further, what does this reveal about the relationship between politics and the press in the late 1640s? The answers to these questions help us understand important dynamics of the Civil War era: under what conditions authors, booksellers, and printers operated during the period, their relationship to ideologies and political factions, and the status of the 'public sphere' in mid-seventeenthcentury Britain. These issues have all merited rather substantial scholarly attention. For instance, there has been a spirited debate about how free the press was in the 1640s and the relative impact of censorship prior to and after the outbreak of the Civil Wars. While this discussion continues, most commentators agree that there is little doubt that during the 1640s many more titles and copies came off the presses than in the 1630s or any time since the advent of printing.3 Then scholars have argued over the ideological reasons, if any, that motivated men to fight in the Civil Wars. There is some consensus that there were two serious problems contemporaries argued over: what type of Protestantism should exist in England, and the nature of the legal contract between the government and the people. Individuals' views on the appropriate religion-which ranged from an Episcopal church structure to a Presbyterian one, to more loosely controlled independent churches, or even to religious toleration, often, but not always, overlapped with their hope for a political settlement - from royalism all the way to republicanism. Yet this fluidity of opinion, and the fact that over the course of the Civil Wars people's views changed, has led to a great deal of scholarly debate about the existence of political parties. Historians have argued over the nature of the Independents and Presbyterians in the House of Commons, the place of the Levellers in the political structure, and how these groups dealt with the Royalists.4Finally, historians have disagreed on how the explosion of print, coupled with raging political and religious debates, helped foster a public sphere. The notion of the public sphere, where individuals publicly, freely, and rationally discussed political issues in print without government censorship, was first identified by Jurgen Habermas as a development of eighteenth-century Britain.5 This concept is useful when discussing the seventeenth century too, some historians now claim, as people read, discussed, and argued about the merits of the thousands of printed documents that debated England's political and religious future during the 1640s.6 Yet the notion that English people rationally and rigorously interrogated the information they read in the press in order to reach a political consensus is seen as very problematic for other scholars. Some suggest the press was primarily a ground for emotional manipulation. …