Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 33.djvu/129

Rh with favour at court. In March 1680 he was made a justice of the peace for Middlesex, and he received secretly a gift of 100l. (Secret Services of Charles II and James II, p. 42;, i. 39).

Meanwhile L'Estrange was subjecting to very searching criticism all the evidence adduced in the law-courts to prove the existence of a ‘Popish Plot,’ and he sought to moderate the storm of fanaticism against the Roman catholics excited by the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey in October 1678, and by Titus Oates's alleged revelations. In the ‘History of the Plot’ (1680, fol.), he merely reported at length the trials of seventeen persons convicted of complicity, but in ‘A further Discovery of the Plot, dedicated to Dr. Titus Oates’ (1680), he freely expressed the opinion that Oates and his witnesses were unworthy of belief. In ‘A Letter to Miles Prance’ L'Estrange ascribed Godfrey's death to suicide, and the testimony of Prance, which had secured the conviction of three men for the alleged murder of Godfrey, was, he insisted, wholly false. Oates's friends were at first content to counteract L'Estrange's strictures by issuing a pamphlet called ‘Discovery on Discovery, in Defence of Titus Oates;’ but finding this expedient unavailing, they took a bolder step. A young man named Simson Tonge, son of Ezerel Tonge [q. v.], a friend of Oates, and author of ‘Jesuits Assassins,’ 1680, and of other works in behalf of the plot, was in the autumn of 1680 arrested on a charge of having publicly expressed doubts of Oates's good faith. In order to mollify his prosecutors, Tonge readily agreed, at Oates's suggestion, to swear falsely that L'Estrange had given him one hundred guineas to defame Oates and his friends (cf. The Narration of J. Fitzgerald, 1680, fol.). Prance and his friends backed up Tonge's charges by filing affidavits stating that L'Estrange was a papist, and had worshipped at the Queen's Chapel in Somerset House in June 1677. Accordingly, in October L'Estrange was summoned before the council. Tonge alone gave evidence. He showed that L'Estrange had some previous acquaintance with him. L'Estrange had refused to license a book called ‘The Royal Martyr,’ by Tonge's father (The Shammer Shammed), and the young man had sought an interview with him as a justice of the peace in order to swear a deposition against Oates, but L'Estrange had shown reluctance to take Tonge's testimony. But Tonge's directly incriminating evidence was so confused, and the king was reported to have expressed himself so strongly in L'Estrange's favour, that he was at once acquitted (, i. 57). The state of public opinion, however, rendered his position dangerous, and in November he fled the country (Hist. MSS. Comm. 11th Rep. pt. ii. pp. 167–246). The government, bowing to the storm, seems to have removed him from the commission of the peace. Before leaving England he replied to his accusers in a pamphlet, ‘L'Estrange's case in a Civil Dialogue betwixt Zekiel and Ephraim;’ and in ‘A short Answer to a whole Litter of Libellers,’ chiefly aimed at Edmund Hickeringill [q. v.] A sarcastic ‘Letter out of Scotland from Mr. R. L. S.’ (10 Jan. 1680–1), represented that he had escaped to that ‘cold country,’ and was learning the bagpipes; but he soon made his way to the Hague. While in Holland he printed a letter addressed to Ken (1 Feb. 1680–1), chaplain to the Princess Mary of Orange, in which he announced his intention of taking the sacrament at Ken's hands the next day, and a postscript added that he fulfilled his intention.

On 17 Nov. 1680 he was burnt in effigy by the London mob, who gave him the sobriquet of ‘the Dog Towzer,’ apparently in reference to reports of L'Estrange's immoralities. In ‘The Solemn Mock Procession of the Pope, Cardinalls, Iesuits … 17 Nov. 1680,’ he is depicted in a woodcut as a dog holding a violin and bow, and the figure is labelled ‘Old Nol's Fidler.’ In ‘Strange's Case strangely altered’ (dated October 1680), he is similarly represented; and in an appended mock ‘Hue and Cry’ it is said of him, ‘He has a thousand dog tricks, viz., to fetch for the Papists, carry for the Protestants, whine to the King, dance to Noll's Fiddle, fawn on the courtier, leap at their crusts, wag his tail at all bitches, hunt counter to the Plot, tonguepad the evidence, and cring to the crucifix, but above all this he has a damn'd old trick of slipping the halter’ (cf. A new dialogue between Heraclitus and Towzer, 1681?; A New Year's Gift for Towzer, 1682; The Timeservers … a dialogue between Tory, Towzer, and Tantivee, 1681; Towzer's Advice to the Scriblers, 1681; and Dialogue upon Dialogue, or L'Estrange no Papist nor Iesuit, but the dog Towzer, 1681). The appellation of ‘the dog Towzer’ was long remembered. Defoe, writing in 1703, complained that a portrait prefixed to a pirated edition of his works no more resembled him than ‘the dog Towzer’ resembled L'Estrange. On 21 Feb. 1680–1 appeared in the form of a newspaper what purported to be the first number of a periodical, called ‘News from the Land of Chivalry, containing a Pleasant and delectable History, and the wonderful and strange Adventures of Don Rogero de Strangemento, Kt. of the Squeaking Fiddlestick.’ Twenty-