"The law by which the Parliament of James had subjected the press to
the control of censors was still in force [~1690]; and, though the
officers whose business it was to prevent the infraction [0] of that
law were not extreme to mark every irregularity committed by a
bookseller who understood the art of conveying a guinea in a squeeze
of the hand, they could not wink at the open vending of unlicensed
pamphlets filled with ribald [1] insults to the Sovereign [William
III], and with direct instigations to rebellion.
But there had long lurked in the garrets of London a class of printers
who worked steadily at their calling with precautions resembling those
employed by coiners and forgers. Women were on the watch to give the
alarm by their screams if an officer appeared near the workshop. The
press was immediately pushed into a closet behind the bed; the types
were flung into the coalhole, and covered with cinders: the compositor
disappeared through a trapdoor in the roof, and made off over the
tiles of the neighbouring houses.
In these dens were manufactured treasonable works of all classes and
sizes, from halfpenny broadsides of doggrel verse up to massy quartos
filled with Hebrew quotations. It was not safe to exhibit such
publications openly on a counter. They were sold only by trusty
agents, and in secret places.
Some tracts which were thought likely to produce a great effect were
given away in immense numbers at the expense of wealthy
Jacobites. Sometimes a paper was thrust under a door, sometimes
dropped on the table of a coffeehouse. One day a thousand copies of a
scurrilous pamphlet went out by the postbags. On another day, when the
shopkeepers rose early to take down their shutters, they found the
whole of Fleet Street and the Strand white with seditious handbills."