L'Estrange, SIR ROGER

L'Estrange, SIR ROGER, a busy royalist pamphleteer under Charles II., was born at Hunstanton in Norfolk in 1616. He narrowly escaped hanging as a spy for a plot to seize Lynn in 1644, and was instead imprisoned in Newgate, whence he escaped after four years. Pardoned by Cromwell in 1653 through personal entreaty, he lived quietly till the Restoration made him licenser of the press. He carried out his functions rigorously, but it should be remembered that such were his instructions. He fought in all the quarrels of the time with a shower of pamphlets, vigorous, and at least not coarser than those of his antagonists; and he holds a place in the history of journalism by his successive papers, The Public Intelligencer, The London Gazette, and The Observer. In the intervals of controversy he showed that he was not without a taste for better things by translating Æsop's Fables, Seneca's Morals, Cicero's Offices, the Colloquies of Erasmus, Quevedo's Visions, and Josephus. He died in 1704.