Sir Roger L'Estrange (17 December 1616 – 11 December 1704) was an English pamphleteer, author, courtier and press censor. Throughout his life L'Estrange was frequently mired in controversy and acted as a staunch ideological defender of King Charles II's regime during the Restoration era. His works played a key role in the emergence of a distinct 'Tory' bloc during the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–81. Perhaps his best known polemical pamphlet was An Account of the Growth of Knavery, which ruthlessly attacked the parliamentary opposition to Charles II and his successor James, Duke of York (later King James II), placing them as fanatics who misused contemporary popular anti-Catholic sentiment to attack the Restoration court and the existing social order in order to pursue their own political ends. Following the Exclusion Crisis and the failure of the nascent Whig faction to disinherit James, Duke of York in favour of Charles II's illegitimate son James, 1st Duke of Monmouth, L'Estrange used his newspaper The Observator to harangue his opponents and act as a voice for a popular provincial Toryism during the 'Tory Reaction' of 1681–85. Despite serving as an MP from 1685 to 1687 his stock fell under James II's reign as his staunch hostility to religious nonconformism conflicted with James's goals of religious tolerance for both Catholics and Nonconformists. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the collapse of the Restoration political order heralded the end of L'Estrange's career in public life, although his greatest translation work, that of Aesop's Fables, saw publication in 1692.
Early life Roger L'Estrange was born at Hunstanton Hall, Hunstanton, Norfolk, the youngest son of Alice L'Estrange and Sir Hamon L'Estrange. His mother ran the estate and his father served as Sheriff and Deputy Lieutenant of Norfolk, and was allied to the dukes of Norfolk, serving as a Member of Parliament in a seat under their control. He was probably home-schooled for a time before attending Eton College and then Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, with his time spent being home-schooled acting as a major formative influence which generated his interest in Humanistic literature and his lifelong passion for playing the viol.
In 1639, both father and son fought in the Bishops' Wars against the Scots. They later fought for the Royalist side in the First English Civil War. In 1643, the two led a failed conspiracy whose purpose was place the town of King's Lynn under Royalist control. Roger L'Estrange's subsequent activities as a Royalist conspirator lead to him spending time in prison under sentence of death. He later played a leading role in the 1648 Royalist uprising in Kent. This was defeated by parliamentarian troops and he fled to the Continent, finding refuge in Holland.
Following the Act of General Pardon and Oblivion 1652 L'Estrange returned to England where he was strictly examined by the Council of State on the 7 Sept. 1653. On 31 Oct, following a personal interview with Cromwell he was released from further attendance upon the court. L'Estrange's precise conduct during this interview and his subsequent relationship with the Lord Protector would become a source of acrimonious controversy after the Restoration. His detractors claimed that he had discredited his old principles by associating on friendly terms with Cromwell. This included, by his own admission, once having performed in concert for him at the house of the organist John Hingston. This earned for him the unfriendly nickname of 'Oliver's Fiddler' or 'Old Nol's Fidler', which was to follow him for the rest of his life.
L'Estrange lived quietly in Norfolk until Cromwell died in 1658. By 1659, however he was already making his presence as a Royalist known. He printed several pamphlets supporting a return of Charles II and attacked various Commonwealth writers, including John Milton in a 1660 pamphlet titled No Blinde Guides for his role in philosophically justifying the regicide of King Charles I.
Restoration years – 1660–79
L'Estrange spent the first two years of the Restoration settling old scores against figures associated with the previous regime and bolstering his credentials as a Royalist writer and courtier. A typical pamphlet of this phase in his career was A Rope for Pol, a lengthy diatribe attacking Marchamont Nedham, who had edited the official newsbook from 1655 under Cromwell's Protectorate.
He also waged a struggle for official titles and courtly influence with the journalist Sir John Berkenhead during this period. They acted as proxies for a wider courtly struggle between Henry Bennet, 1st Earl of Arlington and Edward Nicholas who contended for influence in the regime under Edward Hyde, 3rd Earl of Clarendon, with L'Estrange coming under Bennet's patronage. The failure of Berkenhead to stem the tide of Nonconformist printing after the Great Ejection of 1662 which purged the Church of England of its Presbyterian ministers led to Berkenhead's downfall to L'Estrange's benefit. Likewise, Nicholas was subject to an involuntary early retirement at the expense of Bennet who became a favoured statesman of Charles II.
As a reward for his propaganda and his alignment with Bennet's rising star, L'Estrange was granted a warrant to seize seditious books or pamphlets in 1662 and in recognition of his Considerations and Proposals in Order to the Regulation of the Press he was appointed Surveyor of the PressSurveyor of the Imprimery the following year. Thereafter, also appointed Licenser of the Press, he retained both positions until the lapse of the Licensing of the Press Act in 1679.Anne Dunan-Page and Beth Lynch (eds), Roger L'Estrange and the Making of Restoration Culture (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2008), , p.1
As Licenser and Surveyor, L'Estrange was charged with the prevention of the publication of dissenting writings, and authorised to search the premises of printers and booksellers on the merest suspicion of dissension. L'Estrange excelled at this, hunting down hidden presses and enlisting peace officers and soldiers to suppress their activities. He soon came to be known as the "Bloodhound of the Press." His careful monitoring and control of nonconformist ideas and opinions succeeded not only in checking seditious publications, but also in limiting political controversy and reducing debate.Joad Raymond, 'The Literature of Controversy', in A Companion to Milton, ed. Thomas N. Corns (Blackwell, 2003), p. 209
There were, however, notable excesses. Under L'Estrange, the antennae of state censorship prickled at the very mention of the monarch and he famously objected to the following lines from Milton's Paradise Lost: As when the Sun new ris'n Looks through the Horizontal misty Air Shorn of his Beams, or from behind the Moon In dim Eclips disastrous twilight sheds On half the Nations, and with fear of change Perplexes Monarchs.Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 173
In 1668, William Lilly, the astrologer and occultist, had commented on the connection between comets and the death of princes in a draft to his 1670 almanac: comets indicated, wrote Lilly, "some dreadful matter at hand," and were "a prediction of the fall of kings and tyrants." The latter comment was removed from the draft by L'Estrange.Ken Simpson, 'The Apocalypse in Paradise Lost', in Milton and the Ends of Time, ed. Juliet Cummins (UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 215
In addition to these duties as press censor, L'Estrange began his journalistic career in earnest in 1663, when he was granted control over the official periodicals The Public Intelligencer and The News. L'Estrange lacked Berkenhead's independence and owed his position to Bennet's patronage. Within the periodicals he acted in favour of the Court's increasingly intolerant policy towards Nonconformity, with frequent and lengthy attacks on Nonconformist writers coupled with demands for information with regards to 'libellous' printing. His diatribes gave free publicity to Nonconformist printers, but he also achieved some success in suppressing the prints after around 1664, particularly after the Nonconformist publishers Thomas Brewster and Nathan Dover died in prison.
The Second Anglo-Dutch War led to a huge increase in demand for accurate and detailed news reporting from the literate public, which L'Estrange failed to satisfy. His publications were dominated by anti-Nonconformist rants and advertising, with readers believing his use of a large typeface covered up a lack of substance. This left him vulnerable to an intrigue by Joseph Williamson and Henry Muddiman, who wrested him from this lucrative post. Muddiman had worked under L'Estrange and used his free use of the postal service to send copies of his unofficial newsletters alongside the two official titles. The diarist Samuel Pepys noted approvingly that Muddiman's new titles included 'no folly' in contrast to L'Estrange's works.
From late 1665 to 1679 L'Estrange's polemical and literary output was limited. The 'satire boom' of the late 1660s took up much of his time in censorious duties, while he remained a prominent figure at Court. In particular he spent much time acting as a conduit between the Worshipful Company of Stationers, who had extensive censorship duties, and the House of Lords in formulating press regulation policy and repressing 'libellous' prints.
At this period, too, he helped Thomas Britton found his concert series, playing the viol at the first event in 1678. The viol remained a lifelong love and throughout his career L'Estrange was known as 'Noll's Fiddler' after accusations he had played music for Oliver Cromwell before 1658, with the implication he was an unprincipled 'hack'.
Crisis and reaction – 1679–85 The Licensing of the Press Act lapsed at a dangerous time for the Restoration regime, which now contended with the twin crises of the Exclusion Crisis and the hysteria generated by the fabricated Popish Plot. With no official post to censor 'libels' or attack critics of the Court, L'Estrange returned to polemic. Writers such as Andrew Marvell attacked what they saw as growing Catholic and tyrannical tendencies at Court. Marvell coined the phrase 'Popery and Arbitrary Government' in a 1677 polemic which argued that excessive Catholic influence at court would lead to a 'Catholic' system of government based on superstition and tyrannical repression. This played on contemporary Anglo-Scottish worldviews which relied on a construction of Catholicism as essentially foreign, tyrannical, and irrational or superstitious. The failure of Charles II's foreign policy in the Third Anglo-Dutch War and the ensuing rapprochement with the Netherlands aligned English politics against France, while figures like Marvell feared Charles II saw Louis XIV of France as a role model for absolutist rule. Marvell and like-minded figures coalesced into the Whig faction during the Exclusion Crisis and advocated the removal of James, Duke of York, an open Catholic, from the royal succession in favour of the Protestant illegitimate son of Charles II, James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth.