Throughout his life L'Estrange was frequently mired in controversy and acted as a staunch ideological defender of King Charles II's regime during the Restoration era.

Perhaps his best known polemical pamphlet was An Account of the Growth of Knavery, which ruthlessly attacked the parliamentary opposition to Charles II and his successor James, Duke of York (later King James II), placing them as fanatics who misused contemporary popular anti-Catholic sentiment to attack the Restoration court and the existing social order in order to pursue their own political ends.

[5] L'Estrange spent the first two years of the Restoration settling old scores against figures associated with the previous regime and bolstering his credentials as a Royalist writer and courtier.

A typical pamphlet of this phase in his career was A Rope for Pol, a lengthy diatribe attacking Marchamont Nedham, who had edited the official newsbook from 1655 under Cromwell's Protectorate.

[10] As Licenser and Surveyor, L'Estrange was charged with the prevention of the publication of dissenting writings, and authorised to search the premises of printers and booksellers on the merest suspicion of dissension.

"[11] His careful monitoring and control of nonconformist ideas and opinions succeeded not only in checking seditious publications,[12] but also in limiting political controversy and reducing debate.

Under L'Estrange, the antennae of state censorship prickled at the very mention of the monarch and he famously objected to the following lines from Milton's Paradise Lost, Book I: In 1668, William Lilly, the astrologer and occultist, had commented on the connection between comets and the death of princes in a draft to his 1670 almanac: comets indicated, wrote Lilly, "some dreadful matter at hand," and were "a prediction of the fall of kings and tyrants."

[15] In addition to these duties as press censor, L'Estrange began his journalistic career in earnest in 1663, when he was granted control over the official periodicals The Public Intelligencer and The News.

[7] Within the periodicals he acted in favour of the Court's increasingly intolerant policy towards Nonconformity, with frequent and lengthy attacks on Nonconformist writers coupled with demands for information with regards to 'libellous' printing.

[16] The Second Anglo-Dutch War led to a huge increase in demand for accurate and detailed news reporting from the literate public, which L'Estrange failed to satisfy.

In particular he spent much time acting as a conduit between the Worshipful Company of Stationers, who had extensive censorship duties, and the House of Lords in formulating press regulation policy and repressing 'libellous' prints.

[19] The Licensing of the Press Act lapsed at a dangerous time for the Restoration regime, which now contended with the twin crises of the Exclusion Crisis and the hysteria generated by the fabricated Popish Plot.

[2] His most striking work was Popery in Masquerade which directly adopted the language of Whig anti-Catholicism by depicting Nonconformists as agents of the Pope who sought to attack the existing social order and introduce their own tyrannical regime, invoking memories of the Rule of the Major-Generals.

[22] In Citt and Bumpkin he directly appealed to provincial English patriotism, accusing London-based Whigs of using sophistry to attack the Crown to which loyal Englishmen owed their allegiance.

L'Estrange had damaged his case with works such as Citt and Bumpkin which employed the language of anti-Court rhetoric for his own ends, and ultimately a 1680 Council of State hearing focused more on his reputation than on the substance of the Popish Plot.

[27] The dialogue format lent itself to being read aloud in public spaces, while the aggressive diatribes amused an audience who above all revelled in the drama and vitriol of Restoration politics.

The execution in 1681 of the hardline Whig pamphleteer Stephen College filled L'Estrange with ill-concealed glee and emboldened him to settle old scores as Titus Oates was increasingly the prime subject of his attacks.

His obsession with detecting subliminal messages in print between plotters and earlier assertions of a 'Presbyterian Plot' directed by shadowy cliques finally seemed proven correct.

[1] L'Estrange now turned to writing again, and published translations of Seneca the Younger's Morals and Cicero's Offices, besides his master-work of this period, Fables of Aesop and Other Eminent Mythologists (1669).

After her death in April 1694, he wrote to his grand-nephew: "Play and gaming company have been the ruin of her wretched self, her husband, and her family, and she dies with a broken heart...but...after all, never any creature lost a dearer wife.