The complex phenomena often subsumed under the term “Popish Plot,” a critical moment in English history during the late 1670s and early 1680s, tend to resist the type of linear narrative required to make sense of the plot itself. This may explain why, since the publication of John Kenyon's account in The Popish Plot (London: Heinemann, 1972), historians keenly interested in the subject have framed their more analytic studies in terms of “public opinion,” “political crisis,” or “political instability” rather than adopting the Popish Plot itself as their governing framework. As historical interest has broadened from the direct political and judicial consequences of Titus Oates's allegations of a Catholic plot to assassinate Charles II in 1678, it has generated what might be described as a “plot era” in late Stuart history that includes among its key developments an expansion of the demand for political news of all kinds, a sustained partisan activism culminating in the first political parties, and the transformation of accumulated grievances into major structural conflicts in the Restoration regime. This convergence of interests has also made the study of the late 1670s and early 1680s a lively focus for historiographic discussions concerning general issues of continuity and discontinuity in English politics and religion during the seventeenth century.

Peter Hinds makes a valuable contribution in his study of the voluminous work of Roger L'Estrange, Surveyor of the Press under Charles II, and its multifarious influences on this market for political news or “discourse” in a variety of forms during the plot era. Hinds uses approaches drawn from the analysis of political culture, literary criticism, and histories of the book and reading to support a strongly argued case for L'Estrange's importance among the political satirists of the late seventeenth century. L'Estrange has been a neglected figure, laboring for one of history's lost causes on the types of ephemera that later characterized much of Daniel Defoe's political writing, with the sheer volume of L'Estrange's scribbling in the Observator, a periodical published in multiple weekly issues from 1681 to 1687, obscuring the daring, perhaps courageous, satiric work behind it. Hinds stresses the principled views of Church and succession behind L'Estrange's early forays against the absurdities of the plot, attacking the lies of Oates and the other King's Witnesses when it was highly dangerous to do so. In this view, L'Estrange employed his notorious gifts for ad hominem satire, not in the service of the vast malice often ascribed to him by his detractors, but in the pursuit of truth, because this type of satire offered the most effective means of playing and winning the traditional game of destroying the credibility of false witnesses. Hinds recounts L'Estrange's decision to address the final volume of his Brief History to posterity, hoping for “a time when truth shall be believed, and the witnesses of it justified” (397). Because the views of his anti-Catholic enemies carried the historical field, and because he did not pen his satire in Augustan verse, L'Estrange's contemporary prominence did not lead to lasting historical or literary recognition of his role in the important political and publishing battles of the era. Hinds restores principled dynamism to the work of this soldier in the Stuart cause and persuasively reconstructs the interrelated spheres of politics and publishing in which L'Estrange had a decisive contemporary impact.

Hinds presents his study as “a self-contained rendering of the Plot,” and part of the promise of such a rendering, focusing on the circulation of political information, lies in its potential further to qualify John Kenyon's view of the plot as an expression of “mass hysteria” or “mass hypnotism,” “a classic panic” characterized by “paranoiac fear” of Catholics, a political culture of “continual conspiracy,” and “popular fury” resulting from “almost total ignorance” of reliable political news (Kenyon, Popish Plot, 5, 9, 13, 111, 115–16, 202, 272–73. Writing in 1972, Kenyon conceded that he was discussing “a London underworld of which we know next to nothing.”). Kenyon acknowledged that the “panic” did not last long, and more than a generation of work has disclosed a rational, principled politics of petitions and formal requests for investigations of the plot, even in late 1678 and early 1679, that must now be considered alongside the “night riders” of popular political stereotype (see Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–1681 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994], 16–28; and Gary S. De Krey, London and the Restoration, 1659–1683 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005], 157–66). But the environment of late summer and early autumn 1678, when information about the plot first began to circulate, remains an intriguing challenge to this view of popular politics. As Hinds observes early in his analysis, “We need to look at how, once the details [of the plot] began to emerge, they were received so readily by so many, despite their sometimes extraordinary nature” (81). But the subsequent discussion of the plot's early “authority” and “credibility” (81–86) depends almost entirely on information that was not available in print until late March or early April 1679. These are the polished narratives published by Oates and the other King's Witnesses, persuasively analyzed by Hinds for their significance in the politics of credibility at the time of their publication, but highly dubious as standards for the kind of information making the rounds when Christopher Kirkby and Israel Tonge first spoke to the earl of Danby about the plot in August 1678, or when Oates and Tonge revealed the details to the council in late September. In the absence of a more systematic survey of the range and quality of “political discourse” available between early August and late October 1678, we cannot discount Kenyon's view of popular politics during the crucial months in which a plot, if not necessarily the plot, acquired its authoritative hold over a broad swath of English political opinion.