The commitment of Charles I's government to press censorship and the rigour with which that censorship was enforced is the subject of the present essay. In 1627 Georg Rudolph Weckherlin, the Latin secretary to the privy council, became political licenser for the press. Over the next fourteen years he granted eighty-two licences and probably was responsible for many more. Drawing on his two office diaries, his personal correspondence, and the books and pamphlets to which he gave his imprimatur, this essay attempts a small portrait of a ‘royal censor’ in 1630s London. Although he occasionally allowed works implicitly critical of government policy, he appears to have been conscientious in his duties. (At least twice he approached Charles for his opinion about a licence.) Weckherlin's eventual loss of his licensing job to secretary of state Sir Francis Windebank's staff signalled the crown's interest in an even closer watch on printing and publishing. The evidence of Weckherlin's career suggests that in the decade before the Long Parliament Charles increasingly sought to curtail the power of the press.