Censorship and Cultural Sensibility

The Regulation of Language in Tudor-Stuart England

Debora Shuger

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780812203349
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Renaissance History
• Index: History

In this study of the reciprocities binding religion, politics, law, and literature, Debora Shuger offers a profoundly new history of early modern English censorship, one that bears centrally on issues still current: the rhetoric of ideological extremism, the use of defamation to ruin political opponents, the grounding of law in theological ethics, and the terrible fragility of public spheres. Starting from the question of why no one prior to the mid-1640s argued for free speech or a free press per se, Censorship and Cultural Sensibility surveys the texts against which Tudor-Stuart censorship aimed its biggest guns, which turned out not to be principled dissent but libels, conspiracy fantasies, and hate speech. The book explores the laws that attempted to suppress such material, the cultural values that underwrote this regulation, and, finally, the very different framework of assumptions whose gradual adoption rendered censorship illegitimate.Virtually all substantive law on language concerned defamation, regulating what one could say about other people. Hence Tudor-Stuart laws extended protection only to the person hurt by another's words, never to their speaker. In treating transgressive language as akin to battery, English law differed fundamentally from papal censorship, which construed its target as heresy. There were thus two models of censorship operative in the early modern period, both premised on religious norms, but one concerned primarily with false accusation and libel, the other with false belief and immorality. Shuger investigates the first of these models—the dominant English one—tracing its complex origins in the Roman law of iniuria through medieval theological ethics and Continental jurisprudence to its continuities and discontinuities with current U.S. law. In so doing, she enables her reader to grasp how in certain contexts censorship could be understood as safeguarding both charitable community and personal dignitary rights.

Chapter 1

“That Great and Immoderate Liberty of Lying”

Freedom of opinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute. In other words, factual truth informs political thought.

—Hannah Arendt

Now this ill-wresting world is grown so bad, Mad slanderers by mad ears believed be.

—Shakespeare, Sonnet 140

In 1641 the licensing system that had been set up under the Tudors collapsed, and despite intermittent efforts to reimpose some sort of controls, the press remained effectively unregulated for the next two decades. In his noblest and most influential prose work, Milton celebrated this new freedom, and to later generations his defense seemed to voice the aspirations and ideals of emergent modernity. Yet, whatever Areopagitica’s subsequent significance, it did not speak for its own historical moment. Very few other contemporary responses to the collapse of censorship resemble Milton’s or construe it in remotely the same terms. Almost all those who applauded the change imagined it as renovating, not ending, state censorship. Thus in his own mock-oration to Parliament, Thomas Mocket praises the Commons for having “opened the press for publishing the good and profitable labors of the godly; and inhibited popish books and pamphlets tending to reconcile us and Rome.”¹ Most commentators, however, expressed acute reservations about the new regime of print, and almost always for the same reasons. In Religio Medici (1643), Thomas Browne thus protests that “almost every man [has] suffered by the press”; not only has “the name of his Majesty [been] defamed,” but “the honour of Parliament depraved, [and] the writings of both depravedly, anticipatively, counterfeitly imprinted.”² The year before, Thomas Fuller lodged a similar complaint: “They cast dirt on the faces of many innocent persons, which dried on by continuance of time can never after be washed off.... The pamphlets of this age may pass for records with the next (because publicly uncontrolled) and what we laugh at, our children may believe.”³ Twenty years later, Samuel Parker succinctly described the restoration of the licensing system as a measure to suppress “that great and immoderate liberty of lying.”⁴

Fuller, Browne, and Parker were royalist authors, but the same concerns about falsehood and forgery recur across the political spectrum. The anonymous 1642 tract A Presse Full of Pamphlets denounced the torrent of “scurrilous and fictitious pamphlets,” printing “rumors mixt with falsity and scandalism,” to disgrace “even the proceedings of the High Court of Parliament, and the worshipful members thereof.”⁵ The Cromwellian John Rushworth gave a similarly negative assessment in his Collections of Private Passages of State (1659). He compiled his massive archival history, Rushworth explains, as a corrective to the pervasive mendacity of the Interregnum press; for some

men’s fancies were more busy than their hands ... printing declarations, which were never passed; relating battles which were never fought, and victories which were never obtained; dispersing letters, which were never writ by the authors.... [Thus] the impossibility for any man in after-ages to ground a true history, by relying on the printed pamphlets in our days, which passed the press whilst it was without control, obliged me ... whilst things were fresh in memory, to separate truth from falsehood.⁶

Some such publications had provoked Fairfax’s angry letters to Parliament in the late summer of 1647, defending the army from the falsehoods printed “daily to abuse and deceive the people,” and requiring that the pamphlets in question “and all of the like nature may be suppressed for the future.”⁷ Even from the radical camp, there were calls for suppression. In 1645, the Leveller-spokesman and lifelong political agitator John Lilburne thus castigated Parliament for allowing the press “to print, divulge and disperse whatsoever books, pamphlets and libels they please, though they be full of lies.”⁸

The context suggests that the “lies” Lilburne would have suppressed were political views “tending to the ruin of the Kingdom and Parliament’s privileges,” not factual untruths. But the other writers quoted above are troubled by precisely such untruths: by forged documents, libelous allegations, the misrepresentation of persons and events. Their concerns, moreover, are re-echoed through the Interregnum; virtually all the surviving comments on “the Press whilst it was without control” center on the problems of fabrication and libel.⁹ Milton, however, mentions such issues only in passing, which may be one reason they have played such a minor role in subsequent histories of censorship.

Seditious Books and Bulls: The Elizabethan Proclamations

The premises of Milton’s argument—the difficulty of discerning good from evil, the inseparability of expressive and religious freedoms—were also those of continental censorship, although Milton draws the opposite conclusion. We will return to this in Chapter 2. But in England, from the Elizabethan period on, political censorship tended to be conceived in the same un-Miltonic terms used by the majority of Interregnum commentators, whose concerns centered not on individual or Christian liberty but on forgery, falsity, and, in general, the “Liberty of Lying.” These are the dominant concerns of the Elizabethan proclamations, which target the handful of books the state viewed as clear and present dangers and so forbade totaliter. A 1570 proclamation issued in the wake of the Northern Uprising thus denounces certain unnamed books as fraught with “untruths and falsehoods, yea, with divers monstrous absurdities to the slander of the nobility and council of the realm.”¹⁰ Three years later, another proclamation, “Ordering Destruction of Seditious Books,” in particular, John Leslie’s Treatise of Treasons, describes the works in question as “infamous libels” defaming Elizabeth’s chief councilors by “most notorious false assertions.” Despite the authors’ best efforts to alienate the queen from her loyal advisors “by false calumnies,” the proclamation continues, the queen knows firsthand “that all the particular matters wherewith the said libelers labor to charge the said councilors as offenses be utterly improbable and false.”¹¹ Similar language recurs in subsequent proclamations. A 1576 one condemns the “infamous libels full of malice and falsehood spread abroad and set up in sundry places about the city and court”; in 1579 Stubbs’s Gaping Gulf is denounced as a “fardel of false reports, suggestions, and manifest lies.” With the Armada approaching England, the government issued a proclamation against Cardinal Allen’s Admonition to the Nobility and People of England, which the Spanish fleet had stocked for English distribution upon landing. Like earlier proclamations, this one decries the outlawed texts as “most false, slanderous, and traitorous libels,” using “abominable lies” to incite readers to flock to the side of the Spanish, betraying their country to a foreign power.¹² As this final observation implies, works like Allen’s Admonition were forbidden because they seemed dangerous. Their danger was inseparable from their untruth, inasmuch as they used lies and slander precisely in order to foment mischief; the misrepresentations were intended to have an effect hors texte.

Not all the censorship proclamations, it should be added, invoke the language of factual falsity to condemn the works they prohibit. The 1573 censure of the puritan Admonition to the Parliament denounces it as an attempt to “make division and dissension in the opinions of men”; in 1583 the writings of two Protestant radicals are banned for “false ... doctrine,” which is something quite different from factual untruth.¹³ The 1589 proclamation ordering destruction of the Marprelate publications describes them as “containing in them doctrine very erroneous” as well as “other matters notoriously untrue,” including slanders against “the persons of the bishops,” all expressed “in railing sort and beyond the bounds of all good humanity.”¹⁴ This seems a reasonably accurate description. The specific charges made by the proclamations are not, that is, merely formulaic, like the fixed wording of a common-law writ. Nor is their insistence on the mendacity of most of the works condemned the standard rhetoric of early modern censorship. As we shall see in Chapter 2, papal censorship justified its prohibitions on wholly different grounds. The emphasis on lies and libel is a distinctive feature of Tudor-Stuart high-stakes political censorship: the censorship, that is, of what the period generally termed “scandalous” or “seditious” libel.

In part, this emphasis derives from the laws governing the regulation of language in England, a subject the ensuing chapters will discuss in detail, but it also responds to the nature of the oppositional literature itself. In Elizabethan England, the majority of works forbidden by proclamation as libels were products of the English Catholic exile community on the Continent. Yet by no means all English Catholic writings were banned by proclamation. Although works of controversial theology by Catholic apologists could not per se be published in England, many of them did in fact appear in licensed English editions, since the protocols of Tudor-Stuart theological controversy required confutants to reproduce their adversary’s text in full. Thus, for example, Whitaker’s 1581 response to Campion’s Rationes decem, published earlier the same year, reprints the Jesuit’s work verbatim; like Campion, Whitaker writes in Latin, but in 1606 a London minister, Richard Stocke, translated Whitaker, and therefore the full text of Campion’s work, into English—according to the title page “at the appointment and desire of some in authority.”¹⁵ Nor was there any prohibition against owning or reading contemporary Catholic theology, so that Walton can report, without the slightest suggestion of illegality, Donne’s undertaking in the early 1590s “to survey ... the body of divinity, as it was then controverted betwixt the Reformed and the Roman Church.”¹⁶

The Catholic texts banned by proclamation as seditious were subject to far more stringent censorship. They did not get answered in print, and those in possession of the offending works were generally required to turn them over to the authorities.¹⁷ They were not refuted but suppressed. Not all forbidden books were condemned by proclamation—Leicester’s Commonwealth, for example, was not—but the proclamations provide invaluable evidence of the kind of material that the state sought to suppress. For our purposes, this material is crucial since, without a reasonably clear sense of the nature of the problem that censorship was intended to deal with, one cannot begin to grasp why virtually no one in early modern England defended freedom of the press as either a right or a good.

The Forbidden Books of Elizabethan England

This Catholic oppositional literature, all of which was printed abroad, has received little attention, although, as Clancy’s Papist Pamphleteers observes, because such “critique descended to particulars and named names, this was the class of political writings most eagerly read in England and most strictly proscribed by the government”; indeed these works represent “the largest corpus of contemporary protest” against the Elizabethan regime.¹⁸ It is worth summarizing a couple of them in some detail, beginning with the most electrifyingly incendiary: the 1588 Admonition to the Nobility and People of England ... By the CARDINAL of Englande, William Allen.¹⁹

As Christ’s vicar, Allen begins, the pope has the right to yield up an heretical nation to “invasion, wars, wastes, and final destruction,” although he reassures the reader that no one need fear the Armada except “some such few as will not follow this offer of God’s ordinance.”²⁰ Addressing the nobility, he urges them to use their “sword and knighthood,” by which “our country hath often been delivered from the tyranny ... of divers disordered insupportable kings,” to assist the invaders in regaining “the ancient honor and liberty of our church and country” (7–8). The English have been compelled to accept the Reformation only “by force and fear,” not “lawful consent yielded thereunto” (4). Moreover, Elizabeth’s “horrible crimes” are such that no reasonable person can question the pope’s right to “deprive this tyrant of her usurped state.” Indeed, “no commonwealth by law of nature, neither would nor might justly suffer any such, to rule or reign over any human society, though neither Christ, Pope, faith, nor religion were known” (8).

Elizabeth, to begin with, was never “lawfully possessed” of the crown, being merely the “supposed” child of Henry VIII, an “incestuous bastard,” and offspring of “an infamous courtesan” (8–11); moreover, “by force she intruded” (9), and has subsequently filled England’s coastal towns with atheists, heretics, rebels, and “innumerable” strangers of the worst sort—impoverishing the locals in the process—to provide her with a private army against her own people, “this being taken to be certain, that the number and quality of them is such, that when time may serve and favor them, they may give a sturdy battle to the inhabitants of the realm” (16). Furthermore, Elizabeth has exalted Leicester “only to serve her filthy lust.” To facilitate their amours, Leicester “(as may be presumed, by her [Elizabeth’s] consent) caused his own wife cruelly to be murdered,” and later, as “is openly known,” made away with the Earl of Essex “for the accomplishment of his like brutish pleasures” with this nobleman’s wife (18). In addition to her relationship with Leicester, Elizabeth has also “abused her body” with “divers others ... by unspeakable and incredible variety of lust.” Although “the principal peers of the realm” and “deputies from the whole parliament” have begged her to forsake such incontinence, she has scorned them, responding in contempt of all laws of chastity, that “none should so much as be named for her successor during her life, saving the natural, that is to say bastard born child of her own body”—to wit, “her unlawful long concealed or feigned issue” (19–20). Having thus become “notorious to the world” for her unchastity, she “deserveth not only deposition, but all vengeance both of God and man” (19).

The sexual slanders that Allen retails are not original with him. An anonymous letter of 1570 mentions rumors that “my Lord of Leicester had ii children by the Queen” and that Cecil was “the Queen’s darling.” Two years later, another rumor added Hatton’s name to the list. Throughout the reign, gossip told of various “long concealed” love-children from these illicit unions. The “infamous libels” condemned in a 1576 proclamation included a rep...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 “That Great and Immoderate Liberty of Lying”
• 2 The Index and the English: Two Traditions of Early Modern Censorship
• 3 Roman Law
• 4 The Christian Transmission of Roman Law Iniuria
• 5 The Law of All Civility
• 6 Defendants’ Rights and Poetic Justice
• 7 Hermeneutics, History, and the Delegitimation of Censorship
• 8 Intent
• 9 Ideological Censorship
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments