From History Today, Volume 75 Issue 11 November 2025:
The ancestor of the London Gazette was launched on 16 November 1665, surviving its bitter rival to become the oldest newspaper in the English-speaking world still in print.
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....
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