Whereas the press played a sponsoring role in the performance of the royal touch in the early seventeenth century, under Charles II the press lost its magic. Thaumaturgy began to retreat into mysticism, the medical profession triumphed, and Charles had to try not to look like another quack. The third chapter takes as its theme the awkwardness of Charles's sexual identity, and the treatment of his promiscuity. Charles's sexual conquests were contrasted with his military failure in the second Anglo-Dutch war, and with the absolutist discipline of Louis XIV of France. Hence this chapter also finds a contradiction in a royal body.
Sexual performance leads to political underperformance, which is equated with emasculation.
Chapter four discusses the language of censorship as evidence for perceptions of public opinion, seeing in this language a rencounter between state and public. Weber offers an interestingly account of the history of censorship, tracing the shift in press control from proclamations to parliamentary acts. In this narrative authorial identity emerges not as offshoot of bourgeois subjectivity or the property rights of an emergent liberalism, but as the consequence of royal attempts to exert control over the press. Weber's evidence suggests how sensitive some readers were to the nuances of print, to its extended history in Britain, to the price, format and genres of books. Here, however, he is silent about the 1620s and the developments of 1640-42.