The early essay in English was a fluid and malleable form. It was thus ‘fugitive’: it could be deeply topical, fleeting, and perishable, taking up the ephemeral and the occasional, and could easily travel across media from reader to reader given its portability. This chapter studies how writers exploited the affordances of the essay, first in seventeenth-century newsbooks and pamphlets, and then in early eighteenth-century periodicals. It retraces the origins of the English newsbook in a highly regulated media ecology, and examines the essayistic writings of Marchamont Nedham as a case study in stylistic innovation and rhetorical self-fashioning. During the era of licensing (1662–95) and the first decades of the eighteenth century, essayists continued to adapt the form, finding in the emergent print media of this period a ready site for politics and polemic.

Chapter 3 revisits the republicanism of the free state. Historians have disagreed about the extent and nature of republican thinking during the free state. Some historians have attached little importance to republicanism, claiming that it was inconspicuous, that ‘republican ideology played only a minor role’ and that it only properly emerged after the free state. Other historians have challenged such arguments and have accentuated the republican arguments in favour of the free state. Taking its cue from such historians, the chapter demonstrates that republican defences of the free state were loud and clear from the beginning of 1649 until 1652. It was repeatedly argued that only a free state could guarantee liberty. The chapter also points out the seriousness with which many royalists, Presbyterians and other enemies of the free state took its republicanism. They questioned every aspect of republicanism; for them, a free state was a disastrous form of state and, more importantly, the idea that it safeguarded liberty was a hollow sham.