The Origins of a Free Press in Prerevolutionary ... - Web Publishing

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yet exist in Great Britain. 11 The English Bill of Rights granted free speech only to
members of Parliament while in debate. 12 Printing in England was restricted to
only those with a license until Parliament allowed the Licensing Act to expire in
1695. Poet John Milton had argued unsuccessfully against licensing in
“Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing” to Parliament in
1644. He suggested that such prior restraint by the government did not work and
that it weakened character by preventing the study of opposing viewpoints. 13 For
Milton, the freedoms of printing, speech, thought, and religion were closely tied
together, “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to
conscience, above all liberties.” 14 At the beginning of the eighteenth century, after
the licensing of the press had expired, the government severely prosecuted seditious
libel in England. The ministry influenced newspapers and bribed journalists, and
Parliament did not freely allow public reporting of their debates. Far from being
the champion of unrestricted press freedom as he is sometimes held up to be,
Milton even suggested executing those who published anonymously and he
supported strong punishment for those who libeled church or state. 15 John Locke,
the champion of classical liberal theory, is today considered a supporter of free
press, but what Locke proposed was simply an end to licensing. He saw the
11 In 1682, printer William Nuthead and a press came to Jamestown but were forced to leave.
See Chapter 2. Orders to prohibit printing arrived the next year, and thus printing in Virginia did
not take hold until the 1730s. Hening, Statutes At Large, 2:511-517. McMurtrie, Beginnings of
Printing in Virginia 6-7.
12 [English] Bill of Rights, 1689, in Bernard Schwartz, ed., The Bill of Rights: A Documentary
History (New York: Chelsea House in association with McGraw Hill, 1971), 1:43. Also in
Fraleigh and Tuman, Freedom of Speech, 48.
14.
13 Milton (published without a license), quoted in Tedford and Herbeck, Freedom of Speech,
14 John Milton, Areopagitica and Of Education, ed. George H. Sabine (New York: Appelton-
Century-Crofts, 1951), 49.
15 Tedford and Herbeck, Freedom of Speech, 13-17.