Proclamations issued by Queen Elizabeth from time to time,[35] indicate the difficulty found in enforcing this monopoly and requirement of licensing, and a proclamation issued by Elizabeth[36] against “bringing into the realm unlawful books” indicates that the statute of Henry VIII[37] repealing the permission given in the reign of Richard III to import books from abroad[38] was being systematically disregarded. Attorney-general Popham gives witness to the same effect when in his speech before the Star Chamber in the prosecution of Sir R. Knightley and others he says, “Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, in her great wisdom, hath issued proclamations that no pamphlets or treatises should be put in print but such as should first be seen and allowed; and further, lest that were not sufficient, she ordained that no printing should be used anywhere but in London, Oxford, or Cambridge. Notwithstanding all this served not, but they would print in corners and spread abroad things unprinted: wherefore Her Majesty set forth a proclamation _in anno 25_ that all Brownist books, and such other seditious books should be suppressed and burnt.[39] The Star Chamber continued to exercise control over printing during the reign of James I, but with increasing difficulty, not lessened by the arbitrary and cruel ways in which it acted towards those whom it believed to be breaking its rules and regulations. The flood of books printed abroad continued into the reign of Charles I, and in 1637 we find a Star Chamber decree, “for reducing the number of master-printers, and punishing all others that should follow the trade, and for prohibiting as well the impression of all new books without license, and of such as have been licensed formerly without a new one, as the importation of all books in the English tongue, printed abroad, and of all foreign books whatever, till a true catalogue has been presented to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Bishop of London, and the books themselves had been received by their chaplains, or other learned men of their appointment, together with the masters and wardens of the Stationers’ Company.” A printer disobeying this order was to be fined, disabled from printing thereafter and the printing press forfeited.