Does a paper war have real casualties, or is it only play-fighting? For writers in late seventeenth-century England, from the Restoration of 1660 to the Hanoverian succession of 1714, this was an active question. The recent civil wars continued to loom large in the public imagination, and the emergence of Whig and Tory political parties in the 1680s made printed texts a battleground of sorts. The texts of broadsheets, pamphlets, and other printed ephemera kept the civil wars alive in virtual form, as partisan writers adopted idioms associated with Roundhead and Royalist and printers reissued work from earlier in the century. This virtual war kept pace with ongoing military conflict in the wars with the Dutch Republic (1665-1667, 1672-1674) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714). Contentious claims in print resembled a kind of weaponry, reminiscent of the use of propaganda for rousing the public to take up arms.

The term ‘paper war’ denotes an event that occurs when the contest to influence public opinion through the medium of print leads to the proliferation of pamphlets and other textual materials. The back-and-forth of competing pamphlets gave paper form to this contest, and periodic lapses in the licensing acts served as an accelerant. Notable among such events were the Exclusion Crisis of the early 1680s and the Sacheverell Controversy of 1710-1711. In a broader sense, ‘paper war’ also serves to denote partisan exchange more broadly, as indicated by the anonymous writer of A Vindication of Dr. Henry Sacheverell (1710), when he remarked: ‘I have no desire to enter into a Paper War with so Weak and Trifling an Adversary’.