presses in the colony, the Government of Massachusetts, following the example of the mother country, appointed a licensor of the press, and in 1664 a law was passed permitting printing only in Cambridge, and then only by those licensed.
In the time elapsing between the sailing of the Mayflower and the establishment of the censorship, a little more than forty years, the folks in the colonies had been hearing of strange happenings at home. Journalism in England had been born. The first newspaper. The Weekly Newes, had appeared, but at a time when authors, printers and importers of prohibited books were being subjected to the most barbarous persecutions, treatment that recalled to the Pilgrims the conditions that had driven them to Holland.
Despite all persecutions, the fight in England was on in bitter earnest. More than thirty thousand political pamphlets and "newspapers "were issued between 1640 and the Restoration, two thousand bound volumes of which are now to be found in the British Museum.[1]
While Charles the Second was a less vindictive persecutor of the press than either his grandfather or his father had been, he had to deal with a refractory Parliament, without which the beginning of journalism would never have been written in the seventeenth century. It was a period, too, which saw the rise of political parties in England, the Whigs and the Tories. Both upheld the monarchy, but the Whigs stood for the limitation of authority within the law, while the Tories were for absolutism in both Church and State.[2]
It was in his desire to cope with the growing evil of
