The following was taken from an advertisement for an item for sale on eBay. Unfortunately, I have no reference to the source or the eBay seller's address. However, it does encapsulate the spirit and character of Sir Roger L'Estrange.
"Following the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, there was a brief moment of relative press freedom in England while the king was busy finding the regicides who had publicly beheaded his father, Charles I, and giving them a closer look at the procedure. This allowed an interval for some political realignment by editors and a flurry of fresh newsbook publishing in London. However, once Charles II was comfortable on the throne he became as concerned as any of his predecessors about what was being said in "the public prints."
A writer of broadsides and pamphleteer, Sir Roger L'Estrange was appointed Surveyor of the Press in 1663 as a reward for his loyalty to the Royalist cause during and after the Civil War and his promoting the cause of the Restoration. L'Estrange immediately sought to take the maximum advantage of his good fortune by banning all contemporary newsbooks, other than his own two titles The Intelligencer, published every Tuesday and The Newes published each Thursday. L'Estrange was not an outstanding editor/journalist of the caliber of Marchamont Nedham or Henry Muddiman; he was more of a hired hack. In the first issue of The Intelligencer he set out his view of his obligations as an editor thus. "A Publick Mercury should never have my vote, because I think it makes the multitude too familiar with the actions and counsels of their superiors.". Nevertheless, his two-year reign as Surveyor and de facto sole proprietor of the English press, marks the end of the era of the first form of regularly published printed news, the newsbook, which had started in 1622. With the Plague in London and the rise of the Oxford (later London) Gazette, L'Estrange lost his monopoly and the age of the newsbook ended. However, he was called back after the Popish Plot of 1678 had introduced a new political/religious bias into the press, to berate the Protestant king's opponents whether Catholic or non-Conformist, which he took up with a vengeance in The Observator published in the form of a dialogue between a Printer and his Trimmer and later between a Whig and a Tory. Because of L'Estrange's unique position in the history of the development of the newspaper, original issues of his several works are a must for serious collectors. Since the death of Charles II on February 6, 1685 and the accession of his Catholic brother James, duke of York, as James II, the cunning Sir Roger had a new set of targets in anyone who had written anything anti-Catholic, which was almost everyone (including L'Estrange) during and after a recent Popish Plot scare."****
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