Roger L'Estrange

Early life

Roger L'Estrange was born in Hunstanton, Norfolk, the youngest son of Sir Hamon L'Estrange. Sir Hamon 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.

In 1639, both father and son fought in the Bishops' Wars against the Scots. They later fought the Royalist side in the English Civil War. In 1643, the two led a failed conspiracy whose purpose was place the town of Lynn under control of the king. 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.

In 1653, he returned to England, with a special pardon by Oliver Cromwell and lived quietly, maintaining a low profile. By 1659, however, he was 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 pamphlet titled No Blinde Guides.

Restoration years

As a reward for his propaganda, 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 Imprimery (Printing Press) 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. The latter was not, however, a continuous appointment. At one time, L'Estrange was deprived of his post as Licenser by Joseph Williamson; but when anti-Royalist pamphleteering began to turn the city against the king, L'Estrange was recalled to this position.

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.

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, Book I:

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.

In 1663, L'Estrange had ventured into newspaper publishing with The Public Intelligencer and The News, but the unpopularity brought him by his position, coupled with dissatisfaction with his product and intrigues to wrest away his monopoly, eventually led to the loss of his favoured position. In the later years of the reign, he was once again involved in writing for the Court. The Whigs were actively engaged in the publishing of tracts critical of Charles and his ministers; L'Estrange countered by comparing the divisiveness of the Whigs with the Parliamentarians on the eve of the Civil War. He also sought to calm the popular hysteria arising from the Popish Plot in pamphlets questioning the truthfulness of Titus Oates' allegations. At this period too, he helped Thomas Britton found his concert series, playing the viol at the first event in 1678.

Toward the end of 1680, he was forced to flee the country by the political opposition but on his return the next year he started another paper called The Observator, a single sheet printed in double columns on both sides. It was written in the form of a dialogue between a Whig and a Tory (later Trimmer and Observator), with the bias on the side of the latter. During the six years of its existence, L'Estrange wrote with a consistent fierceness, meeting his enemies with personal attacks characterised by sharp wit. One of his main targets was Titus Oates, whose increasingly extreme allegations eventually brought about his conviction for perjury in 1685.

Family life

L'Estrange married Anne, daughter of Sir Thomas Dolman of Shaw, Berkshire. After her death in April 1694, he wrote to his grand-nephew: "Play and gaming company have been the ruin of her wretched self, her husband, and her family, and she dies with a broken heart...but...after all, never any creature lost a dearer wife.' Only two of their children survived into adulthood: Roger (who survived his father by just three months) and Margery, an 'addle-headed and stubborn' child (her cousin, Nicholas L'Estrange, writing of "Her ignorant, rude and ill-behviour both to her father and to myself ..." in 1700). In February 1702/3 her father wrote to a friend, Sir Christopher Calthorpe, concerning the departure of Margery from the church of England to the church of Rome: "It wounds the very heart of me, for I do solemnly protest in the presence of Almighty God that I knew nothing of it. As I was born and brought up in the communion of the church of England, so I have been true to it ever since, with a firm resolution with God's assistance to continue in the same to my life's end."

Later life

In 1685, L'Estrange was knighted by King James II and became a member of parliament for Winchester from 1685 to 1689. However, though a fierce Tory and High Anglican, he opposed the religious toleration of Catholics, which put him at odds with the policy of the new king. After the revolution in favour of William III, he lost all his offices and was arrested several times on suspicion of involvement in plots against him.

L'Estrange now turned to writing again, and published translations of Seneca the Younger's Morals and Cicero's Offices, besides his master-work of this period, Fables of Aesop and Other Eminent Mythologists (1692). This notably included nearly all of the Hecatomythium of Laurentius Abstemius, among several other fabulists. The style is racily idiomatic and each fable is accompanied by a short moral and a longer reflection, which set the format for fable collections for the next century.

In 1702, he completed his acclaimed English translation of The works of Flavius Josephus. Additionally he wrote a 'Key' to Hudibras, a 17th-century satire by Samuel Butler on the English Civil War, which was included in several 18th century editions of the work.