ABSTRACT

The stirring days before Christmas 1688 marked an ending for Stuart royalism, a beginning for Jacobitism and, in at least one respect, the end of the beginning for modern journalism. On the night of Monday 17 December, James II and VII got his final marching orders from William of Orange, by which time that archetypal Tory hack Sir Roger L’Estrange had already received his own, having been committed to Newgate Gaol earlier in the day by London’s Court of Aldermen. The events of that day (and night) were recorded by Roger Morrice, who had earlier noted in his Entring Book that James was so isolated ‘it is said Sir Roger Le Strange only did adheare and side with [him] in all things’. He recounted how L’Estrange had been brought to book by a Mr Baker, a lawyer ‘very active against such publick enemies to the kingdom as Sir Roger is’, being accused of ‘writing and publishing scandalous reflections against the Government’. Usually the soberest of reporters, Morrice came close to a note of glee in describing the moment when L’Estrange, having refused to admit authorship of the Observators gathered as evidence, proceeded to expound on what he meant to say in writing various condemned passages. The Recorder Sir George Treby happily seized on the ‘confession’, although authorship was hardly in doubt, set bail high ‘lest a prisoner accused of such great publick crimes should make his escape’, and the 72-year-old polemicist returned to Newgate – almost half a century after he was incarcerated in the same prison for his civil war royalism.1 L’Estrange hoped the changing times, so ‘unkind to my politicks’, marked a ‘Temporary Eclipse’; but the

1 Morrice Q376-7. The only book-length biography remains George Kitchin, Sir Roger L’Estrange (1913). Some of the themes of this chapter are introduced in Geoffrey Kemp, ‘Ideas of Liberty of the Press, 1640-1700’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge,

sun had set on his career as a political writer. After a lifetime of loudly professed loyalty to successive kings he now appeared, in Morrice’s accusatory formula, as a public enemy in a double sense: a man who had undermined the state, the ‘publick weal’, in a particularly overt and visible manner.