ABSTRACT
At the end of October 1680, Roger L’Estrange disappeared from his London home. Traversing muddy roads and wintry seas, he first joined the Duke of York in Edinburgh and then set sail for The Hague. There he informed Thomas Ken, the almoner of the Princess of Orange and the future Bishop of Bath and Wells, that he intended to take communion at Ken’s Anglican service.2 This was one way to escape charges of crypto-Catholicism.3 Another was to make himself scarce. On his return, L’Estrange rehearsed some of the accusations that had prompted his flight: Miles Prance and Lawrence Mowbray had testified that in 1677, he had been seen ‘three or four times’ at Mass in Somerset House; the physician Richard Fletcher reported that L’Estrange had confessed, in the Half Moon Tavern in Cheapside, to being a Catholic; the dissenting printer Jane Curtis said L’Estrange had refused to license anti-papist books. Meanwhile, on 10 December, Joseph Bennett, a printer of Bloomsbury, linked L’Estrange to Captain Samuel Ely who had tried to get Simpson Tonge to depose against his father.4
