of dissension. L'Estrange excelled at this, hunting down hidden presses and enlisting peace officers and soldiers to suppress their activities. He soon came to be known as the "Bloodhound of the Press." His careful monitoring and control of nonconformist ideas and opinions succeeded not only in checking seditious publications, but also in limiting political controversy and reducing debate. There were, however, notable excesses. Under L'Estrange, the antennae of state censorship prickled at the very mention of the monarch and he famously objected to the following lines from Milton's Paradise Lost, Book I: As when the Sun new ris'n Looks through the Horizontal misty Air Shorn of his Beams, or from behind the Moon In dim Eclips disastrous twilight sheds On half the Nations, and with fear of change Perplexes Monarchs. In 1668, William Lilly, the astrologer and occultist, had commented on the connection between comets and the death of princes in a draft to his 1670 almanac: comets indicated, wrote Lilly, "some dreadful matter at hand," and were "a prediction of the fall of kings and tyrants." The latter comment was removed from the draft by L’Estrange. In addition to these duties as press censor, L'Estrange began his journalistic career in earnest in 1663, when he was granted control over the official periodicals The Public Intelligencer and The News. L'Estrange lacked Berkenhead's independence and owed his position to Bennet's patronage. Within the periodicals he acted in favour of the Court's increasingly intolerant policy towards Nonconformity, with frequent and lengthy attacks on Nonconformist writers coupled with demands for information with regards to 'libellous' printing. His diatribes gave free publicity to Nonconformist printers, but he also achieved some success in suppressing the prints after around 1664, particularly after the Nonconformist publishers Thomas Brewster and Nathan Dover died in prison. The Second Anglo-Dutch War led to a huge increase in demand for accurate and detailed news reporting from the literate public, which L'Estrange failed to satisfy. His publications were dominated by anti-Nonconformist rants and advertising, with readers believing his use of a large typeface covered up a lack of substance. This left him vulnerable to an intrigue by Joseph Williamson and Henry Muddiman, who wrested him from this lucrative post. Muddiman had worked under L'Estrange and used his free use of the postal service to send copies of his unofficial newsletters alongside the two official titles. The diarist Samuel Pepys noted approvingly that