The Restoration government needed to manage the news. In 1663 it gave the job to its censor, Roger L’Estrange. It was not a good fit. The news, he wrote, ‘makes the multitude too familiar with the actions and counsels of their superiours’. His indifference made him careless. In one issue of L’Estrange’s The Newes, His Highness the Duke of York, a Catholic, was referred to as ‘His Holiness’.
L’Estrange’s principal rival, meanwhile, Henry Muddiman, had built a lucrative subscriber list for handwritten newsletters. L’Estrange fought back: ‘I found him very short of intelligence’, he wrote to the secretary of state, Joseph Williamson, who disagreed. It helped that Muddiman had followed the court to Oxford as it fled the plague.
Muddiman’s Oxford Gazette was launched on 16 November 1665. Sold for a penny, it was an immediate success. Three presses ran simultaneously to meet demand. ‘No publick intelligence to this day ever received so general an applause’, a civil servant wrote. Some remained sceptical. ‘The Gazett news, is not like to bee all true’, mused the antiquary Elias Ashmole. But Muddiman was journalist enough to care about the integrity of his plain, factual copy.
Now the London Gazette, it remains in print today.
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