with legal privileges, having the twofold object of protecting the
book trade and controlling writers. All publications were required, to
be registered in the register of the company. No persons could set
up a press without a licence, or print anything which had not been
previously approved by some official censor. The court, which had
come to be known as the court of Star-chamber, exercised criminal
jurisdiction over offenders, and even issued its own decrees for the
regulation of printing. The arbitrary action of this court had no
small share in bringing about the resistance to Charles I. But the
fall of the royal authority did not mean the emancipation of the
press. The Parliament had no intention of letting go the control which
the monarchy had exercised; the incidence of the coercion was to be
shifted from themselves upon their opponents. The Star-chamber was
abolished, but its powers of search and seizure were transferred to
the Company of Stationers. Licensing was to go on as before, but to be
exercised by special commissioners, instead of by the Archbishop and
the Bishop of London. Only whereas, before, contraband had consisted
of Presbyterian books, henceforward it was Catholic and Anglican books
which would be suppressed.

Such was not Milton's idea of the liberty of thought and speech in a
free commonwealth. He had himself written for the Presbyterians four
unlicensed pamphlets. It was now open to him to write any number, and
to get them licensed, provided they were written on the same side.
This was not liberty, as he had learned it in his classics, "ubi
sentire quae velis, et quae sentias dicere licet." Over and above this
encroachment on the liberty of the free citizen, it so happened that
at this moment Milton himself was concerned to ventilate an
opinion which was not Presbyterian, and had no chance of passing a
Presbyterian licenser. His _Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce_ was