The English Press in the Eighteenth Century (Routledge Revivals) by Jeremy Black

Author:Jeremy Black [Black, Jeremy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Europe, Great Britain, Modern, 18th Century
ISBN: 9781136836299
Google: igGsAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2010-10-18T01:44:24+00:00

At least, unless thou’rt crooked, have a care,

Huge-headed cudgels now in fashion are;

Remember Wilkins and his rueful fate,

Is thine a safe, more privileg’d a Pate?

The following year the Daily Courant carried a vague threat about the Craftsman’s treachery meeting ‘that discipline which it deserves’.117 There were accusations at the time of the introduction of the Stage Licensing Act in 1737 that the ministry intended to extend prepublication censorship to the press, but these were unfounded. The publicity that several prohibited works enjoyed and the size of the editions of their scripts that were rushed into print were not a good advertisement for censorship, but on the other hand there was a surprising lack of opposition to the principle of censorship and by 1745 the theatre had largely withdrawn from politics, its opposition to the Act silenced.118 How-ever, it is unlikely that any such legislation would have been successful in the case of the press. Policing a small number of theatres was far easier than supervising the activities of a large number of presses, and the immediacy expected from news would have posed a major problem for any system of pre-publication censorship. There was simply too much to read too quickly. In addition, the difficulties that the French government had encountered in the early 1730s in seeking to suppress the illegal Parisian Jansenist newspaper the Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques was not a good augury. Burning by the common hangman was no substitute for the lack of a register of printing presses.119 The introduction of pre-publication censorship would have increased the number of unstamped papers at a time when the ministry was becoming increasingly aware of them as a problem, and would have extended political, often aristocratic, patronage to such papers. In the mid 1720s opposition material had been printed on a press in the London house of the Duke of Bedford.120 The prospect of raiding the houses of aristocrats such as the Duchess of Marlborough, the Duke of Argyll and the Earl of Chesterfield could not have appealed to any ministry. It would have violated an implicit principle of press regulation, namely that it entailed punishments for printers not politicians.

Such a policy would also have been a radical break from the Whig heritage, even the Whig ministerial heritage, justifying the Craftman’s attacks on their apostasy. Possibly Willes had as a young man during Queen Anne’s reign been saved from the pillory for ‘scribbling libels’ by Carteret.121 That would not have been any guide to his attitude later, but Yorke, ennobled as first Earl of Hardwicke and, as Lord Chancellor from 1737 to 1756, and a close ally of the Duke of Newcastle, the leading Whig legal expert, made clear his opposition to pre-publication censorship in 1739. A ministerial Whig apologist, Francis Hare Bishop of Chichester, a former writer of political works, recorded Hardwicke’s speech in the Lords on the subject:

My Lord Chancellor on this occasion made an excellent speech to explain the true meaning of the liberty of the press, which he said

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