From History,com: How Coffee Fueled Revolutions—And Revolutionary Ideas

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Sultan Murad IV decreed death to coffee drinkers in the Ottoman Empire. King Charles II dispatched spies to infiltrate London’s coffeehouses, which he saw as the original source of “false news.” During the Enlightenment, Voltaire, Rousseau and Isaac Newton could all be found talking philosophy over coffee. The cafés of Paris sheltered revolutionaries plotting the storming of the Bastille and later, served as the place authors like Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre plotted their latest books.

. . . Pasqua Rosée opened the first coffee house in London in 1652, prompting a revolution in London society. “British culture was intensely hierarchical and structured. The idea that you could go and sit next to someone as an equal was radical,” says Markman Ellis, author of The Coffee House: A Cultural History. The defining feature of English coffee houses were communal tables covered with newspapers and pamphlets where guests would gather to consume, discuss and even write the news. “Coffeehouses were the motor of the news industry in 18th-century London,” Ellis explains.

King Charles II’s father, Charles I, had been decapitated during the English Civil War, so he was understandably paranoid about his subjects gathering to talk politics. On June 12, 1672, Charles II issued a proclamation to “Restrain the Spreading of False News, and Licentious Talking of Matters of State and Government,” which read in part: “men have assumed to themselves a liberty, not onely in Coffee-houses, but in other Places and Meetings, both public and private, to censure and defame the proceedings of State by speaking evil of things they understand not."