regardless of size, were involved in a conscious effort to shape public opinion; even more, they were part of a reshaping of the public sphere itself.11 By the time that The Crisis became part of London’s political scene the expectation that opinion out-of-doors should play a role in shaping the policy made indoors at Whitehall and Westminster had grown increasingly insistent. The London coffeehouses, where so many newspapers were left for distribution and sale, grew in political importance as proceedings in the House of Commons were now being summarized regularly, whereas less than a decade before Parliament had banned such reporting.12 Still barred from reporting debates in the House of Lords, the press nonetheless leaked news of the proceedings there, as peers passed along notes, even speeches, as their colleagues in the Commons had been doing for years. Consequently, what has been said about the American press and the rise of colonial protest could also be said of the press in London: just as colonists developed a greater sense of danger through what essayists in the press claimed imperial policies portended for their future, Britons, too, came to worry about tyranny anticipated as much as tyranny experienced. It was that agitated state of mind that The Crisis sought to heighten.13
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The Crisis caught the attention of Parliament at the same moment as a just-published pamphlet with a similar title, The Present Crisis. Superficially they appear to be an odd pairing in parliamentary minds: The Crisis condemned the king and his men for doing too much, for oppressing the colonists with unconstitutional policies; The Present Crisis, by contrast, called on the king to do even more, to exercise his prerogative powers more aggressively and drive disobedient colonists back into line.14 The pamphlet offended one group in Parliament, the weekly another, but they concurred that these attacks on the crown could not be tolerated. The House of Lords led, and the Commons followed, in a joint condemnation of both publications. With the third issue of The Crisis as their evidence, they censured the weekly “as a false, daring, infamous, seditious, and treasonable Libel on His Majesty, designed to alienate the Affections of His Majesty’s Subjects from his Royal person and Government, and to disturb the Peace of the Kingdom.” They chastised The Present Crisis with equally harsh language, adding that it was “an audacious insult on His Majesty, tending to subvert the fundamental Laws and Liberties of these Kingdoms, and to introduce an illegal and arbitrary Power.”15
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To underscore their disgust, the Lords and the Commons had also agreed that the pamphlet and the offending issue of the weekly should be destroyed by the “common hangman.” Handbills circulated around London, announcing “The Last DYING SPEECH of the CRISIS,” which would be burned at the gate to the entrance of Westminster palace yard on the afternoon of March 6th, and the next afternoon in front of the Royal Exchange. The Present Crisis would join it in the blaze.
Authorities may have come away from the first staged display of governmental prowess feeling that they had made their point; not so the second. At Westminster, the sheriffs of the city of London and Middlesex County carried off their duties with no difficulties. The crowd of hundreds that gathered did nothing to disrupt the proceedings, beyond uttering some “Hissings and Shoutings.” The hangman stacked wood, started a fire, and tossed copies of the offending pamphlet and disreputable weekly on the little pyre, with a ring of constables forming a circle around it.16
The orderly affair of that day was followed by chaos the next. The Royal Exchange, site of the second burning, was located on Threadneedle Street in the heart of London, across from the Bank of England and close by the lord mayor’s mansion house. That was an area where crowds could more easily turn into mobs. Sure enough, events there were “abundantly more diverting,” as one newspaper put it wryly afterward. The crowd that gathered was larger than at Westminster, the number of constables, smaller. The hangman had difficulty getting a fire started because people interfered with him; insults were hurled, dead cats and dogs and other
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The Royal Exchange, as viewed from Cornhill Street in London. From a copper line engraving by John Green of the scene produced by painter and illustrator Samuel Wale. Originally printed in London and its Environs Described, 6 vols. (London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1761), where it appeared between pp. 280–81 in the fifth volume. Later removed and colored by hand. The attempt to burn a copy of the third issue of The Crisis here the day after another had been burned in the yard at Wesminster Palace produced a riot.
John Collyer’s engraving of Westminster Hall, as reproduced on copper plate for and printed in John Noorthouck’s A New History of London (London: R. Baldwin, 1773), p. 692. The third issue of The Crisis was publicly burned in the yard here without incident on 6 March 1775.
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debris were flung at anyone representing authority; one of the sheriffs was pulled from his horse and beaten; the stack of wood and tinder was broken apart before the offending pieces were fully burned, smoldering bits being scattered along the street; three men seized by the sheriffs or constables were freed by the crowd so that no one could be charged with creating a public disturbance. What was intended to be a demonstration of governmental resolve instead turned into embarrassing street theatre.17
With that, parliamentary action against The Present Crisis ceased. No legal case against it was pursued. The real test for The Crisis still lay ahead. Parliament exercised its authority to direct Attorney General Edward Thurlow to prosecute those responsible for it. That freed Thurlow from the need to seek a grand jury indictment, which he knew he was not likely to get in London anyway because any attempt to stifle the press would be unpopular with the public.
When the men behind The Crisis had claimed, in their very first issue, that freedom of the press was a bulwark of English liberty, they repeated a widely shared sentiment. “The liberty of the press is indeed essential to the nature of a free state,” wrote William Blackstone in his influential Commentaries on English law. Nonetheless, Blackstone’s notion of a free press differed from that of most printers and high court judges sided with him, not the printers. Printers believed that truth should be a mitigating factor in any defense; Blackstone limited press protection to freedom from prior restraint. As Blackstone explained it, “provocation, and not falsity” was the key issue. Any printer who published “what is improper, mischievous, or illegal” must accept “the consequence of his own temerity.” Any writing that demonstrated “a pernicious
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tendency” and threatened “good peace and order” ought to be held legally liable for any resulting public unrest, its instigators punished for any harm done; such could be “the only foundation of civil liberty,” Blackstone concluded.18
The use of prior restraint had ended by 1695, after Parliament allowed a licensing act that it first passed thirty-three years before to lapse. That 1662 act had expressed a concern that “heretical, schismatical, blasphemous, and treasonable books, pamphlets and papers” threatened the peace of the kingdom. Parliament therefore directed that no book be published without a proper royal license. It provided a second line of defense as well: no book concerning religion could be published without approval by the Archbishop of Canterbury; no book on the common law could be printed without first being reviewed by a lord chief justice.19 Those printers who published without a license from the crown faced the possibility of being tried for and convicted of seditious libel, which meant that in an extreme case they could receive the same sentence as those convicted of high treason: death.
In the years since the end of licensing, seditious libel had been gradually reduced from a capital crime to a relatively minor offense. Guilty verdicts would usually result in a judge’s sentence that involved jail time and possibly a fine rather than a long prison term or execution. Threat of prosecution for seditious libel nevertheless became the favored tool of government