[105] L’Estrange was a censor of the press. In the Record Office, Dom. Charles II., may be found Williamson’s authority to “Roger L’Estrange, surveyor of the press, to act as one of his deputies in the licensing of books,” dated Whitehall, February 5, 1674–5.
In 1684 L’Estrange commenced a periodical entitled The Observator, which he carried on until 1687. He there upholds the Royal dispensing power, and ridicules Protestant excitements, the right to liberty of conscience, the Long Parliament, and Nonconformists of all kinds, pronouncing Dissent a political schism. He published the paper irregularly, sometimes twice, sometimes thrice a week. It is written after the manner of a dialogue between The Observator and its opponents. I have met with three or four large volumes of the publication, in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. They justify the strong language I have used.
[106] State Trials, 1683. The judgment was that the franchise and liberty of the City of London should be taken and seized into the King’s hands.
[107] The Act for annulling Russell’s attainder, in the first year of William and Mary, justly declared that “he was, by undue and illegal return of jurors, having been refused his lawful challenge to the said jurors, for want of freehold, and by partial and unjust constructions of law, wrongfully convicted, attainted, and executed for high treason.”
[108] The charges against Russell and Sidney, of being engaged in negotiations with the French Court, and of the latter receiving pay from that quarter, belong to the political history of England. I must refer the reader to Hallam, Mackintosh, and especially to Earl Russell’s Life of Lord William Russell. Supposing that Sidney accepted money from France, I am not at all disposed to regard his conduct so leniently as do the first two of the above-named writers; but, after pondering what Earl Russell says, I feel some doubt respecting the truth of Barillon’s reports, and the accuracy of his accounts. As to Lord William Russell’s conduct, his biographer says it “was not criminal, but it would be difficult to acquit him of the charge of imprudence.”—p. 107.
[109] “Much discourse hath been about the apparition of Lord William Russell’s ghost in Southampton square, July 27 (1683), about twelve o’clock at night.”—Entring Book, Morice MSS., Dr. Williams’ Library. The above notice of Russell’s execution is almost entirely drawn up from Earl Russell’s life of this illustrious person, 337, et seq.
[110] Tillotson’s Life, 109.
[111] Collier, ii. 903. Filmer’s writings were most in vogue with the partisans of despotism. See Hallam’s Const. Hist., ii. 156, on the subject.
[112] Orme’s Life of Owen.
[113] Howe’s Case of Protestant Dissenters; Life, 247. In a letter which Howe wrote in the year 1685 from the Continent, when he was travelling with Philip Lord Wharton, to escape the persecution of the times, he uses the following words, which indicate, more than any laboured description, the reign of terror he had left behind him in England:—“The anger and jealousies of such as I never had a disposition to offend, have of later times occasioned persons of my circumstances very seldom to walk the streets.”—Life by Rogers, 225.