The Restraint of the Press in England, 1660–1715: The Communication of Sin, by Alex W. Barber

The Licensing of the Press Act (1662–79 and 1685–95) had a bark that was worse than its bite. As a product of the Caroline settlement of 1660–62, it aimed at strict pre-publication licensing with a view to ensuring religio-political conformity. Yet Roger L’Estrange’s reign as press censor did not bring an end to unlicensed printing, which in turn added a further layer of complexity to negotiating the propagation of ideas at the margins of orthodoxy. An uncontrollable press brought the Exclusion Crisis (1678–83) to fever pitch. After the Revolution of 1688–91, High Church Tories wondered how they had lost the authority promised by their Arminian-Royalist forebears just three decades earlier, while Low Church Whigs were forced to grapple with the challenges of appealing to a qualified unity in diversity within Protestantism. Such psychodramas fuelled a polymorphous debate about the nature of ‘dissent’ that was in some measure fixated on a belief that a free press would unbridle heresy, atheism and blasphemy: a fear that was only exacerbated by the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695. However, contemporaneous arguments about sinful heterodoxy and divine orthodoxy were shaped by polemical judgements that were contingent upon both religio-political events and evolving forces of intellectual authority in not just philosophy and theology but erudition, rhetoric, satire, historiography, print culture, etc. These and other related matters have been explored (albeit without a single focus on the Licensing Act) by both historians and literary scholars: Martin Dzelzainis, Isabel Rivers, Mark Goldie, Ian Higgins, Geoff Kemp, Tony Claydon, John Spurr, Neil Keeble, Jason McElligott, Kate Loveman, John West, George Southcombe, Joseph Hone and this reviewer, among others. The present book, by Alex W. Barber, shows much of interest but struggles to do justice to the nuance of existing scholarship.

This monograph, which has its origins in a 2010 doctoral dissertation, has a misleading title. The book is really a study of the aftermath of the lapse of the Licensing Act in the 1690s and 1700s. The preface and introduction try to suggest that what follows vanquishes a lingering whiggish history of ‘emerging freedom in opposition to control’ (p. 9). While this move is not without credibility in a narrow sense, it is broadly problematic for at least three reasons. One, the premise that a ‘liberal interpretation of the press and its methodological basis has retained its hegemony in historical scholarship of the early modern period’ (p. xi) can only be sustained by an unduly selective reading of the secondary literature. Two, the process of eschewing an historical teleology of liberalism and once again trying to problematise Habermasian claims about the rise of ‘democracy’ and ‘modernity’ is dated and now, in the 2020s, does something of a disservice to both instrumentalist and historicist approaches to studying the past. Three, repeated uncritical references to the Glorious Revolution and an emphasis on the import of the response to the end of the Licensing Act after 1695 risk signalling an interest in a strain of the very whiggish history that the book seeks to repudiate. The underlying problem here appears to be methodological. The book references, but does not implement effectively, a contextualist method in intellectual history (p. 14, n. 64). An opportunity was missed to engage critically with the cultural, material and theological ‘turns’ in the interdisciplinary scholarship. The book may be understood within the parameters of the politics of religion, but a limited sense of method does compromise the credibility of its evaluative claims.

With all that said, the book is at its best in presenting how concerns about press freedom were disputed, not just in the shadow of various attempts at legislative control but through pragmatic and ideological filters as the power to define religio-political ‘dissent’ shifted between clergy and laity, Low Church Whigs and High Church Tories. Chapter One explores the interplay between ‘the theological understanding of the problems caused by errant expression, the Trinitarian disputes and the lapse of licensing’ in the 1690s (p. 27). While the assessment suffers from a one-dimensional appreciation of relevant contexts, the point that debates about heterodoxy ‘were not defined by freedom and restraint’ is well put (if rather obvious), and helps to understand the renewal and then lapse of the Act in 1693 and 1695, respectively (p. 51). Chapter Two develops a case-study on John Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious (1696). Pushing against an open door, it is noted that Toland ‘did not propose a free press’ but instead argued that public debate about truth must be ‘free from clerical interference’ (p. 69). Chapter Three helpfully teases out the nature and significance of Francis Atterbury’s 1697 argument that ‘it was clerics—both individually and acting together in a synod—who were jurisdictionally and intellectually best suited to control the spread of pernicious ideas’ (p. 101). Chapter Four considers the shaping of and responses to Matthew Tindal’s claims about how a free press would ‘establish civil religion and political stability’ and even ‘allow each individual to establish truth and achieve salvation’ (p. 124). Tindal is affirmed as the author of the anonymously penned Letter to a Member of Parliament (1698): an attribution tacitly presented as an original discovery (pp. 121–5), despite the fact that it was made by Laurence Hanson in 1936 and has long since been recorded as such by the ESTC. Chapter Five addresses how contrasting interventions by Daniel Defoe, Matthew Tindal, and Francis Bugg kept the debate alive by questioning ‘the practical inefficiency of pre-publication restraint and its capricious possibilities’, but again the context here is limited (p. 157). Chapter Six gives attention to the idea that ‘redemption could only be attained by correctly restraining and publishing those who perpetrated sin’ to highlight the import of Henry Sacheverell’s attacks on ‘publishing unorthodox religious literature’ (p. 197). Chapter Seven expounds how ‘Whig politicians and their supporters in the Church readily accepted restraint of ideas, when they considered it expedient, or they felt their long-held support of toleration and the Protestant succession were under threat’ (p. 208). The eighth and last chapter deals with the pros and cons of Robert Harley’s policy of privately warning wayward clerics before presenting the Sacheverell trial as ‘an attempt to confirm the cry of “Church in Danger” illegal and to settle the contested limits of religious orthodoxy’ (p. 258).

Barber brings to life a niche set of debates that followed the lapse of the Licensing Act, and the last three chapters are both illuminating and richly evidenced; but whether the book’s scope and evaluative claims adequately engage with the full complexity of either the history or the historiography is a rather different matter.