Roger L'Estrange and the Making of Restoration Culture

Beth Lynch, Anne Dunan-Page, Anne Dunan-Page

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351902656
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: History
• Categoria: World History

Roger L'Estrange (1616-1704) was one of the most remarkable, significant and colourful figures in seventeenth-century England. Whilst there has been regular, if often cursory, scholarly interest in his activities as Licenser and Stuart apologist, this is the first sustained book-length study of the man for almost a century. L'Estrange's engagement on the Royalist side during the Civil war, and his energetic pamphleteering for the return of the King in the months preceding the Restoration earned him a reputation as one of the most radical royalist apologists. As Licenser for the Press under Charles II, he was charged with preventing the printing and publication of dissenting writings; his additional role as Surveyor of the Press authorised him to search the premises of printers and booksellers on the mere suspicion of such activity. He was also a tireless pamphleteer, journalist, and controversialist in the conformist cause, all of which made him the bête noire of Whigs and non-conformists. This collection of essays by leading scholars of the period highlights the instrumental role L'Estrange played in the shaping of the political, literary, and print cultures of the Restoration period. Taking an interdisciplinary approach the volume covers all the major aspects of his career, as well as situating them in their broader historical and literary context. By examining his career in this way the book offers insights that will prove of worth to political, social, religious and cultural historians, as well as those interested in seventeenth-century literary and book history.

Chapter 1

Rhetoricating and Identity in L’Estrange’s Early Career, 1659–1662

Beth Lynch

From his first broadside of 1659, Roger L’Estrange’s career evolved as rapidly as the public sphere in which he continually and determinedly involved himself.¹ Between the assumed appearance of ‘The Declaration of the Men of Westminster’ in mid-to late-1659, and the end of January 1666 – when his first newsbook ceased publication – L’Estrange emerged into a series of increasingly public roles. The anonymous author of ephemeral negotiations with moderate puritan interests, in the run-up to the Stuart Restoration, became the most vociferous apologist for the Clarendon regime, his name synonymous with a viciously personalised brand of conformist polemic.² The voluntary Cavalier activist became unpaid Surveyor, and then salaried Surveyor and a Licenser, of the Press – a position which also endowed him with a monopoly on the government newsbooks. The pamphleteer who temporarily and pragmatically affected sympathy with the Presbyterians became the most obsessive persecutor of actual or imagined nonconformity and, in effect, the antagonistic architect of nonconformist identity.

But if the public trajectory of his career during these years seemed progressive, one cannot overstate the sheer volatility of L’Estrange’s situation at this stage: political circumstances, not to mention the future Surveyor’s enigmatic past, made this an experimental period in many senses. In the anonymous printed manoeuvrings of 1659–60, he hedged his political bets, at once reacting to, and attempting to influence, the chaotic course of events at a time when the Restoration was far from certain. When the return of Charles II seemed inevitable in early 1660, L’Estrange’s intensifying polemical campaign against republicans assumed a more actively and openly Royalist complexion. His efforts to represent himself as a staunch Royalist, however, were dogged by rumours, fuelled by a burgeoning cohort of enemies, centring on his questionable activities and allegiances during the Civil Wars. Despite his concerted and self-publicising efforts in the Royalist cause, L’Estrange did not find immediate favour with the Restored government; quite the contrary.

Two key considerations underlie this formative phase of L’Estrange’s career. Firstly, the evident difficulty with which this most persistent Cavalier both secured, and maintained, official authority within the Stuart state seems at odds with his unstinting devotion to the conformist cause. Secondly, and perhaps concomitantly, L’Estrange’s activities and output throughout these years and beyond are characterised by an acute sense of motivation. One might argue that his assiduous campaigning in the conformist cause was a function of pragmatism, of jockeying for preference; yet the vitriol with which he acted and published against dissenters intimates a certain degree of personal – as opposed to purely strategic – investment. Dorothy Turner and Harold Love have written of L’Estrange’s ideological sincerity, and his ‘genuine and lifelong’ hatred of ‘hypocrisy and ingratitude’.³ To speculate on the subjective motives underlying his outspoken abhorrence of dissent would be to attempt the impossible – yet the ‘aggressive subjectivity’ which Nicholas von Maltzahn identifies in L’Estrange’s polemical written style precisely captures the sheer sense of an elusive inwardness.⁴ L’Estrange’s animus towards dissenters is unremittingly documented by his oeuvre, but his subjective motivation – while intuited – can only be the subject of speculation. In any case, as I will suggest below, the absolute inimicality which pitted L’Estrange – armed with pen and search warrant – against the broad church of non-Royalists arguably made the very question of identity a function of rhetoric, or persuasive discourse.

In his recent biography of Daniel Defoe, John Richetti reflects on the challenges posed by ‘the biographical subject we call Daniel Defoe’, another prolific polemicist whose authorial persona is as elusive as L’Estrange’s seems manifest.⁵ Considering ‘Defoe’s essentially rhetorical strategy whereby writing strictly speaking evokes a subject bound up with the demands of the printed page’, Richetti suggests, ‘We know “Defoe” through his writing, through his unceasing and nearly lifelong articulation of words upon words’ (pp. 29–30). In comparison to Defoe’s oeuvre, L’Estrange’s writings seem, after the pragmatic manœuvrings of 1659, ideologically consistent; as such, they might readily be construed as the unmediated utterance of L’Estrange the subject. Yet for all of its demonstrable rancour, and its frequent recourse to the autobiographical mode of apology, L’Estrange’s authorial identity is, this essay will argue, equally bound up with the demands and the possibilities of print. Far exceeding the confines of the printed page, these imperatives informed every aspect of the future Licenser’s attempts to establish himself within, and shape, a nascent public sphere. The following analysis will trace L’Estrange’s negotiation of his public role during this formative phase of his career. His gradual ‘professionalisation’, from maverick pamphleteer to Licenser and (less illustriously, it transpired) King’s Journalist entailed a concerted process of printed representation, of himself and of his antagonists. Just as his rhetorical and inquisitional campaigns aggravated the definition of nonconformity proposed by the 1662 Act of Uniformity, L’Estrange’s conformist fervour arguably overreached itself.⁶ Whether this zeal – L’Estrange’s own flexible term – was a function of duty, loyalty, self-interest, pragmatism, passionate conviction or visceral prejudice, is tellingly immaterial.⁷ The means by which he created and arguably exceeded his professional mandate, making himself somehow more conformist than the Conformists, paradoxically qualified his hard-won acceptance into the Clarendon administration. They also, perhaps, exceed the differentiating frameworks of personal and political, private and public, through which we might expect to understand his career and œuvre.

For someone who came to exert such influence as the enforcer of Restoration printing laws (haphazard though they were), and as the author of hyper-Royalist propaganda, L’Estrange’s relationship to the Stuart establishment throughout this period was, and remained, remarkably marginal. While his early biography is shrouded in malicious rumour and defensive autobiography, the sketchy and often biased information – much of it provided by his own apologies and counterblasts – suggests that his career in the 1640s and 1650s was indeed questionable.⁸ He fought for the Royalists in the early stages of the Civil War. In 1644, executing a royal warrant to secure King’s Lynn through bribery, he was betrayed, court-martialled and sentenced to death for spying. Although his death sentence technically held until its annulment seven years later, L’Estrange was in practice imprisoned in Newgate, where he penned various appeals, and whence he escaped, or was allowed to escape, in 1648.⁹ He next turned up in Kent, where he agitated zealously in a Royalist uprising, but faltered in his convictions when confronted with the prospect of military engagement. Having lost credibility with his own side, he fled to the Continent, returning from exile in 1653 under Cromwell’s policy of accommodation; that Cromwell intervened personally to annul his death sentence would come back to haunt him later. An inheritance from his father in 1654 enabled him to live in London; it is around this time that, in an episode that is notorious both in itself and in the extreme bias of its subsequent interpretation, L’Estrange (by his own account) happened to be playing in an impromptu viol consort at Whitehall when Cromwell walked in.¹⁰ The death of Cromwell in 1658, and the reinstatement of the Rump Parliament in May 1659, mark the end of what Masson eloquently described as L’Estrange’s ‘vague intermediate life’; it precipitated him into an energetic pamphleteering campaign against the radical and enthusiastic Rump, and against perceived radicals and enthusiasts in general.¹¹

N.H. Keeble describes the year between the restoration of the Rump and the return of Charles II to England, in May 1660, as a time of ‘constitutional uncertainty and administrative disorder while political thinking strove to catch up with events’.¹² As events piled up – the Rump struggling with the army for control of the country; the politically enigmatic Monck negotiating the reinstatement of secluded MPs; and the final process of restoration – L’Estrange intervened at every juncture with a cumulative corpus of anonymous broadside ephemera and pamphlets.¹³ These texts lambasted the Rump; petitioned for free parliaments; appealed to Monck’s moderating capacities; and, despite the author’s inveterate antipathy towards puritanism, courted the Presbyterians with a view to playing them off against the Rump and thus preempting a potentially lethal anti-Royalist alliance.¹⁴ Meanwhile, he embarked upon a sustained and vitriolic pamphlet campaign to discredit republican authors such as Marchmont Nedham and John Milton.¹⁵ As soon as the Restoration seemed inevitable, he nailed his colours firmly to the Stuart mast. On 6 June 1660, scarcely two weeks after Charles’s landing at Dover, L’Estrange collected these anonymous, reactive writings together and published them, with contextualising and revisionist narrative links, as L’Estrange His Apology.¹⁶ The costly red ink which links the words ‘L’ESTRANGE’, ‘APOLOGY’ and ‘CHARLS … II’ on the title page, firmly identifying as mutual the interests of pamphleteer and monarch, could not be less anonymous or less ambiguous.

Later in 1660, in the brief preface to A Short View of Some Remarkable Transactions, under which title the remaining sheets of L’Estrange His Apology appeared, L’Estrange recounts the publication of His Apology in a tone of equanimity which was a function possibly of hindsight, and probably of expedience:

Upon the Blessed Return of his Sacred Majesty, I found my self under a Censure of Betraying him: This put me upon the publishing of divers scattered Papers to acquit my self, which (alltogether) were entitled my Apology.

To make the folly the more pardonable, I shaped it like a little Story, tracing the whole course of Affairs then in motion by the best Method I could give it, …¹⁷

Shaped ‘like a little Story’, both His Apology and A Short View develop what was to become an ongoing process of narrative recontextualisation, not only of L’Estrange’s printed works, but also of his biography.¹⁸ They also exemplify the ‘apologetic’ mode of writing that characterised so many of his early publications. If His Apology was something of a curriculum vitae, representing its author as an ardent Royalist worthy of favour within Clarendon’s regime, it was premised upon defensiveness. The Apology sets out to demonstrate his ‘Innocence’ in the face of rumours – precisely when he needed impeccable Royalist credentials – that he was ‘an Instrument of Cromwells: his Pensioner; and a Betrayer of his Sacred Majesty’s Party, and Designes’.¹⁹ L’Estrange insists, in his preface, that he has ‘Subjected all private Injuries, and ...