[Rarebooks] fa: ROGER L'ESTRANGE - APPEAL TO THE KING AND PARLIAMENT 1681 - re. POPISH PLOT &c.

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, July 21. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/ngnhewj

Thanks,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.


[Roger L'Estrange:] L’Estrange His Appeal Humbly Submitted to the Kings most Excellent Majesty and the Three Estates Assembled in Parliament. London: Printed for Henry Brome at the Gun in S. Pauls Church-yard, 1681. FIRST EDITION. Small 4to (19.5 cm); [2] + 37 + [1] pp. Wing L1202; ESTC R13428.
Disbound from a nonce volume with remnants of early leather binding on the spine; light toning to the edges of the text block; tiny bit of marginal worming near the gutter of the first six leaves, small chip missing from bottom fore-corner of last leaf (neither flaw affecting any text); otherwise very clean and crisp; binding tender but leaves secure.

The indefatigable L'Estrange defends himself (and hence, the Honour of the Nation and the very Security of the Government) from the "Swarms of Libells" directed against him. The pamphlet deals extensively with the infamous Popish Plot (1678-81), a fictitious but widely credited conspiracy, concocted by Titus Oates, in which it was alleged that Jesuits were planning the assassination of King Charles II. News of the conspiracy and the subsequent murder of a Westminster magistrate, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, gave rise to popular panic and frenzied anti-Catholic demonstrations, resulted in the execution of at least twenty-two men, and precipitated the Exclusion Crisis, before the "plot" was debunked and Oates convicted of perjury. L'Estrange, like Charles II himself, was always skeptical of the plot, and repeatedly sought to counter the hysteria. In a number of acidly ironical pamphlets, he attacked the truthfulness of Oates and his fellow accusers.

Roger L'Estrange (1616-1704), was a publisher, editor, prolific pamphleteer and pugnacious controversialist, one of England's earliest true journalists and a key figure in the Restoration period. Above all, he was an arch-Royalist and Tory, his fortunes rising and falling with the House of Stuart throughout his long life. Exiled after the English Civil War, he flourished during the Restoration, starting two separate newspapers and receiving a royal appointment as Surveyor of the Imprimery, or censor of the press, a post in which he executed his duties with a ruthless zeal that did not endear him to everyone; he took a seat in Parliament as member for Winchester and was knighted by James II in 1685. With the Glorious Revolution and the coming of William III, however, he lost his influence and offices, was arrested several times, and eventually found it safer to recede from public life and devote his talents to translating foreign works.