20, 1649 (Bradshaw's Press Act of the first year of the Commonwealth), and the renewal of the same Jan.

7, 1652-3.

Had this been all, one might have inferred nothing more than one of those occasional panics about Press licentiousness from the recurrence of which even Milton's reasoning had never been able to free the Government with which he was connected.

But at the same meeting it was referred to Lord Fleetwood, Lord Wolseley, Lord Pickering, Lord Jones, Lord Desborough, Lord Viscount Lisle, and Lord Strickland, or to any two of them, "to consider of fit persons to be added for licensing of books and to report the names of such persons to the Council." This was distinctly retrogressive; and the regret of Milton must have been none the less because four of the Committee that were to find the new licensers were men he had named in his _Defensio Secunda_ as heroes of the Commonwealth, and because, as appears from a marginal jotting to the minute as it stands in the Council Order Books, the man thought of at once for one of the new licensers, or as the person fittest to be first consulted in the business, was Marchamont Needham.

After all, it may have been, like some of the previous movements for press-regulation, only a push from Paternoster Row in defence of the legitimate book-trade, and the main intention of the Council itself may have been against pamphlets like _Killing no Murder_ or publications of the indecent order.[1] [Footnote 1: Council Order Books of dates, and Nickolis's _Milton State Papers_, 143-144 (the last for Malyn's Letter about Nayler).
For previous Press Acts referred to by the Council, see ante Vol.
III.