4 - Legislation in the Late Seventeenth Century: Matthew Tindal, Francis Gregory and the Press

Summary

John Toland was not just a religious radical. He was a skilled editor, adeptly repackaging the works of Edmund Ludlow, reshaping his image from regicidal republican of the mid-century to a Commonwealthman, who shared the anticorruption interests of the country politicians of the 1690s. With less editing, Toland also attempted to transform the reputation of John Milton. He provided a prefatory biography to a new edition of Milton's prose works, likely under the supervision of the printer John Darby, whilst other authors in the ‘Calves-Head’ circle completed the editing. Much like Ludlow, rather than a regicidal radical, Milton was transformed into a moderate man of letters, suited to combatting clerical claims to power in the 1690s and fighting religious and civil corruption. Milton's Areopagitica was central to the project. Again, with Toland's skilled intervention, the most famous text of the freedom of the press was made a republican critique of tyranny, in which censorship was dishonourable. In the new words of Toland, any attempt to reassert press control was ‘more dangerous even than a standing army to civil liberty’.

Many authors objected to Toland's new project. The rehabilitation of John Milton, a man with a reputation for being a traitorous regicide, elicited a number of replies. One author, the anonymous ‘R.E.’, looked beyond the anticlericalism and anti-Scriptural attacks of Toland's book and, instead, took it as axiomatic that the unhindered republication of John Milton was just another example of why the press must be further controlled. The recent publication of a number of virulent ill-natured pamphlets was a conspiracy amongst Catholics, Socinians and republicans, dedicated to retarding the advance of reformed religion and destabilising the peace of the nation. According to R.E. the conspiracy to maintain the divisive power of the press was proved by the opposition of Jacobites and Commonwealthmen to the passage of the Blasphemy Bill. Only further legislation against the press could possibly hope to bring the nation back to peace and advance further reformation. Another anonymous author was clear that the republication of Milton's works was an example of the resurgent revolutionary threat to the Williamite government. The Commonwealthmen were now supplemented by new incendiaries, ‘Libertines, Deists, and Socinians’, who had recently ‘vomited out odious heresies’.