The standards of Day were not long maintained. There were a few good printers in the seventeenth century, but for the most part they were poor and the tendency was decidedly toward deterioration. Political and religious controversies broke out afresh in the reign of James I (1613–1625) and were continued with increasing bitterness until they finally broke into the storm of civil war which swept over England in the reign of Charles I. A natural result of these conditions was a tightening of the restrictions upon the press, which became more and more burdensome. The controversies called forth floods of literature, much of which had to be clandestinely printed. The restrictions, as we shall presently see, were almost unbearable and the market was greatly disturbed. The consequence was that English printing reached its low-water mark in the last half of the seventeenth century. The period which we are considering, however, shows one important invention which in its field was a distinct improvement. Copperplate engraving was introduced into England in 1540, but it was a long time before it came into general use. Later we find it used first for portraits, then for engraved title pages, some of which were of great beauty, and then for general purposes of illustration. James I strengthened the Company of Stationers by withdrawing several valuable privileges from private persons and giving them to the Company. This action was probably taken with a view to making the Company more reliable as the agent for the enforcement of the press laws, which were not materially changed during James’s reign. With the political and religious dissensions which followed the accession of Charles I in 1525 came renewed efforts to meet the rising tides of discussion and to dam up the flood of pamphlets, mostly badly printed, first by the more stringent enforcement of the old laws and then by the enactment of new ones. The Company’s registers at this time show a long list of penalties, including fines, cropping of ears, imprisonment, and expulsion from the Company. It is only just to King Charles, however, to say that he did attempt to foster learning and encourage good printing, provided the learning were politically and religiously orthodox according to King Charles’s standards and the printers were amenable to authority.