‘A Vast Ill Nature’: Roger L'Estrange, Reputation, and the Credibility of Political Discourse in the Late Seventeenth Century

Abstract

IIn 1684 a Catholic silversmith, Miles Prance, published the following triplet:A Little Wit, joyn'd with a Vast Ill Nature,And qualify'd for Lyes, as well as Satyr;May easily Commence an Observator.These lines were targeted at Roger L'Estrange, the Surveyor and a Licenser of the Press during the reigns of Charles II and James II. Throughout the late 1670s and early 1680s, the period of the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis, L'Estrange was engaged in an ongoing battle in print with Prance - one of the principal King's Witnesses in the plot - occasionally criticising him in his many pamphlets, and consistently attacking him in his half-sheet serial publication the Observator. L'Estrange began the Observator in April 1681, producing between two and four editions every week until the final edition in March 1687. In 1684 he gathered 470 editions together in a single volume and Prance took this opportunity to reply to L'Estrange's attacks in his 20-page pamphlet A Postscript to the Observator's First Volumn. Or the Answer of Miles Prance to Several of those Papers, Wherein he finds himself most Traduced and Slandered. This is where the above triplet appears, and Prance went on to complain that L'Estrange had been responsible for 'the blasting of [his] Reputation, spoiling of [his] Trade, and the Ruin of [his] Family'. He was fighting back against what he claimed was 'the malice' of the Observator's 'falsities ... and idle Tales', the product, he argued, of L'Estrange's 'cankered spleen'.1This essay will examine L'Estrange's alleged 'Vast Ill Nature' and how he was himself 'traduced' by Miles Prance and other contemporaries. It will consider L'Estrange's projection of his public image and defence of his reputation. L'Estrange was a prolific writer of pamphlets in defence of the government and he continually attempted to maintain a credible authorial persona in order that his publications and their contents retained some credibility. This was particularly important in the pamphlet exchanges of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis in which L'Estrange was so heavily involved, and this fashioning of an authorial persona was a continual process: he did so rhetorically, pictorially with portraiture, through alignment with humanistic predecessors, and also with the physical artefact of the book, that object which became the focus of his later life and which occupied so much of his time.2 Indeed, L'Estrange's self-awareness with respect to the printed book and what their material forms could signify to readers provides us with fascinating insights into the production, circulation, and reception of political discourse in the late seventeenth century. As a gentleman writing cheap, popular pamphlets, and such a large amount of them, he was aware that there was a tension between this format and quantity of publication on the one hand, and his background and social status on the other, and he was therefore a somewhat compromised figure, as his contemporary adversaries were never slow or remiss in pointing out.This essay also looks at L'Estrange's subsequent reputation from the late seventeenth century to the present day as Prance's hostile characterisation of L'Estrange, and his reductive view of his motivation, have to a large extent endured. Why this is so needs analysis and is related to his positions as the Surveyor and a Licenser of the Press (which involved the attempted suppression of books and pamphlets) during the reigns of Charles II and James II, to his robust support of the King and the established Church of England, and to his prolific writing output, often with an uncompromising rhetoric.There is though a broader reason for the enduring negative evaluation of L'Estrange which this essay will seek to explore: this is the problematic notion of the credibility of printed political discourse in the late seventeenth century, but in particular during the final years of Charles II's reign. …