ABSTRACT
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.
