“The So-called Council of State” 1649–1652On June 23 the council asked Milton to “examine the papers of Pragmaticus,
and [report] what he finds in them to the Councell” (LR II, 256–7). Pragmaticus
was Marchamont Nedham, the most prolific, inventive, witty, satiric, and ideologi-
cally flexible of the writers involved with the numerous weekly “Mercuries,” or
newsbooks. Besides reporting domestic and foreign news more or less accurately,
these small pamphlets, often published without license and by underground presses,
flourished throughout the 1640s as potent propaganda instruments for several po-
litical positions: parliamentarian, royalist, Leveller, army.^40 Nedham’s several shifts
of allegiance had made him notorious. During the First Civil War he employed his
barbed and railing style to argue parliament’s cause in Mercurius Britanicus.^41 He was
briefly imprisoned in August, 1645 and again in May, 1646 for mocking and de-
nouncing the king as a tyrant with bloody hands at a time when parliament was
seeking accommodation with him. In September, 1647, moved perhaps by sheer
opportunism or perhaps frustrated by the government stalemate, he turned his coat,
made his peace with the king, and began to publish the witty, urbane, sexually
slanderous and politically devastating royalist newsbook, Mercurius Pragmaticus. Af-
ter publishing it for two years, sometimes sporadically, he was arrested on June 18
and imprisoned at Newgate. When Milton examined his papers (presumably issues
of Pragmaticus) he would have appreciated the very witty satire though not the
message: denunciation of the army, the Rump Parliament, and the regicide, and in
the last issues an open call for the return of Charles II.^42 Nedham escaped in August
but was soon recaptured. On November 14 he was set free – having agreed to
change sides again and write for the republic.^43 The fact that Milton and Nedham
became friends soon after this suggests that Milton may have helped in the effort to
recall Nedham to his earlier republican allegiance.^44
The crackdown on Nedham came while parliament was discussing and then
implementing a new Press Act, passed on September 20, 1649 and intended to stem
the flood of royalist and Leveller polemic.^45 The Act chiefly targeted the
antigovernment newsbooks, with their potent mix of accurate news, rumor, hear-
say, flagrant lies, scurrility, insult, and diatribe. It provided, under heavy penalties
and sureties from publishers, printers, binders, and booksellers, that no newsbooks
could be published without a license granted by designated officials.^46 Books per se,
save for foreign imports, were tacitly exempted from pre-publication licensing,
though serious penalties awaited writers, printers, and even possessors of books and
pamphlets later judged to be seditious or scandalous. This tacit exemption for books
- a significant change from the 1643 Ordinance Milton had denounced in Areopagitica
- may be due to his influence.^47 Sometime in 1650 Hartlib quoted Milton’s expla-
nation of the new law to him, in terms that accord with Areopagitica’s position:
“There are no Licensers appointed by the last Act so that everybody may enter in
his booke without License, provided the Printers or authors name bee entered that
they may be forth coming if required.”^48 Of course Milton had to realize that the
prescribed penalties for publications later found to be at fault would constrain print-