The London newspaper was already forty years old when Charles II returned to England in 1660, to reign over his people for the next quarter of a century. During the Civil War there had been a vigorous growth of weekly news-books; that is periodicals in small quarto size of eight pages. I have not dealt with these here because they have been fully treated by Joseph Frank in his lively and well-informed work, The Beginnings of the English Newspaper (1960). It is with the next forty years that my own study is mainly concerned. Although I have called it The Restoration Newspaper, I have felt free to take account of the small number of newspapers that made a brief appearance in the winter of 1688–9, during the uncertain weeks preceding and following the flight of James II to France, and of the new generation of papers that began to appear in the last five years of the seventeenth century. With the foundation of the Oxford Gazette in 1665, the format of the Restoration newspaper was a folio half sheet, printed on both sides in double columns.

The year 1660 did not inaugurate a new age of freedom for the periodical press: the King and his ministers disliked and distrusted newspapers, and did everything they could to get rid of them. A new Licensing Act in 1662 was the first step to their eventual suppression.