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Having illuminated the production of polemical print to great effect in his first monograph, Politicians and Pamphleteers, Dr Peacey addresses its appropriation in his second, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution. As he notes at the beginning of this important study, contemporaries were acutely aware of both a 'popular'-or participatory-'turn' (p. 2) in mid 17th-century politics, and the pivotal role that cheap print played in this development. Thus in 1640 commentators immediately recognized the novelty and importance of the phenomenon that historians have termed the 'explosion of print'. While some dismissed this textual tsunami, picturesquely, as mere 'bum fodder' (p. 2), many were alarmed that it would precipitate popular participation in the political process and, inevitably, social dislocation if not dissolution. Alongside such alarmist rhetoric, Peacey identifies alternative dispositions; practical engagement, admittedly often no more than pragmatic, but also principled defences of print's pedagogical value. Regardless of their stance on the 'print revolution', however, contemporaries were 'united in trying to grapple with what it might do to political life and popular participation' (p. 6).

This article explores the attitude to the press on the part of Oliver Cromwell and his chief ministers in terms of press control and propaganda and in terms of the theory and the practice of government policy. It examines whether the regime sought and whether it was able to achieve strict press control through pre-publication censorship and swift and severe punishment of malefactors as well as effective and pervasive propaganda, which was centrally organized, controlled, funded, and distributed. It argues that between 1653 and 1659 profound changes were implemented regarding intelligence-gathering, press censorship and propaganda in the deployment of resources and bureaucratic efficiency, not least by centralizing power in the hands of the secretary of state, even if the regime sought to exert its power in only some areas of print culture rather than to achieve a complete press monopoly.

THAT THE 1640S SAW THE EMERGENCE of mass popular print culture is now widely acknowledged. The explosion in the market for printed opinion and newsreflecting both an unprecedented interest in politics and disarray in the control over the print industry-ensured that cheap print was profitable. With money to be made and little effective authority to police the presses, however, the situation was also ripe for fakes and forgeries. If the period saw the emergence of something resembling a "public sphere," then the free market in pamphleteering and propaganda was bedeviled by those interested in literary hijacking. And although Civil War newsbooks have long fascinated scholars,' the phenomenon of counterfeit journals is more often recognized by bibliographers than studied by historians.2 One of the most important of these newsbooks was the royalist paper Mercurius Pragmaticus (1647-50), as may be measured by the energetic opposition it inspired: one contemporary decried it as "the court jester, the cavalier's fool, the chief squib-crack, arch pamphlet puppy," and it even spawned a short-lived title on the Parliamentary 1

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