Historical Characters in the Reign of Queen Anne

and large, loquacious mouth. Better be fined and silenced than let in popery to burn you into the bargain. Better stand fast in all those deprivations and hold your faith in corners, than accept suspicious favor from such a source, and help to bring in again the Jesuit and the Pope. While Penn, with his plausible speech and amiable temper, drew his Quaker brethren into a strange harmony with the courtier’s arts, and presented addresses to James, and accepted his grace, the young tradesman would be pressing his very different argument upon the suspicious somber groups far from St. James’s, where there was no finery, but a great deal of determination. And when in the disturbed and confused wretchedness of the time, no man knowing what was about to happen, but sure that some change must come, young Monmouth set up his hapless standard, could it be Defoe’s own impulse, or the catch of some eddy of feeling into which he had been swept, which carried him off into the ranks of the adventurer? It is said that three of his fellow-students at Newington figure among the victims of the Bloody Assize. Defoe would always be more disposed to talk than fight. He must, we cannot help thinking, have thought it a feeble proceeding to put yourself in the way of getting your head cut off, when you could use it so much more effectually in convincing your fellow-creatures. His mind, ever so ready to slip through every loophole, carried his body off safely out of the clutches of Jeffreys. Probably when he turned up at home against all hope after this unlucky escapade, his friends were too thankful to thrust him into the hosier’s warehouse, where no doubt he would give himself the air of having sold and bought hose all his life.

There is, however, nothing to build any account of his life upon in these earlier years. The revolution filled him with enthusiasm, and King William gained his full and honest support—a support both bold and serviceable, and with nothing in it which was not to his credit. But apparently a man cannot be so good a talker, so active a politician, and follow the rules which he himself laid down for a successful tradesman at the same time. Most likely his mind was never in his hose, and the world was full of so many more exciting matters. Seven years after he had been set up in business he “broke,” and had to fly, though no further than Bristol, apparently, where he made an arrangement with his creditors. He would seem to have failed for the large sum at that time of seventeen thousand pounds, which he honestly exerted himself to pay, and so far succeeded in doing so that he reduced in a few years his debts to five thousand pounds in all; and, what was still more, finding certain of the creditors with whom he had compounded to be poor, after he had paid his composition fully, he made up to them the entire amount of his debt—an unlooked-for and exceptional example of honorable sentiment. Some years later, when Defoe had got into notoriety, and was the object of a great deal of violent criticism, a contemporary gives this fact, on the authority indeed of an anonymous gentleman in a coffee-house only, but it seems to have been generally received as true. The writer was in a company “where I and everybody else were railing at him,” when “the gentleman took us up with this short speech:

“‘Gentlemen,’ said he, ‘I know this Defoe as well as any of you, for I was one of his creditors, compounded with him and discharged him fully. Several years afterward he sent for me, and, though he was clearly discharged, he paid me all the remainder of his debt, voluntarily and of his own accord, and he told me that, as far as God should enable him, he intended to do so with everybody. When he had done he desired me to set my hand to a paper to acknowledge it, which I readily did, and found a great many names to the paper before me, and I think myself bound to own it.’”

This has a suspicious resemblance to Defoe’s own style, but the fact seems to be generally received as true.

Neither his business nor his failure, however, kept him from the active exercise of his literary powers, which he used in the service of King William with what seems to have been a most genuine and hearty sympathy. Pamphlet after pamphlet came from his pen with an influence upon public opinion which it is difficult to estimate nowadays, but which was certainly much greater than any fugitive political publications could have now. He wrote in defense of a standing army, the curious insular prejudice against which was naturally astonishing as well as annoying to the continental prince who had become king of Great Britain. He wrote in support of the war, which to William was a vital necessity, but which England was somewhat slow to see in the same light. And, most effectively of all, he answered the always ready national grumble against foreigners, which was especially angry and thunderous against the Dutchmen, by the triumphant doggerel of “The True-born Englishman,” the first of Defoe’s works which takes a conspicuous place. In this strange and not very refined production he held up to public admiration the pedigree of the race which complained so warmly of every new invasion, and held so high an opinion of itself. “A true-born Englishman ’s a contradiction,” he cries, and sets forth, step by step, the admixtures of new blood which have gone to the formation of the English people—Roman, Saxon, Dane, Norman.

 
From this amphibious, ill-born mob began
That vain, ill-natured thing, an Englishman.
 

It is not a very delicate hand which traces these, and many another wave of strange ancestors. “Still the ladies loved the conquerors.” But Defoe’s rude lines went straight to the mark. The public had no objection to a coarse touch when it was effective, and Englishmen are rarely offended by ridicule; never, we may say, when it is home-born. The stroke was so true that the native sense of humor was hit. Perhaps England did not, on account of Defoe’s verses, like the Dutchmen any better, but she acknowledged Tutchin’s seditious assault upon the foreigners to be fully answered, and the universal laugh cleared the air. Eighty thousand copies of this publication were sold, it is said, in the streets, where everybody bought the “lampoon,” which, assailing everybody, gave no individual sting. It also procured for Defoe a personal introduction to the king. Whether it was to this or to his former services that he owed a small appointment he held for some years, it is difficult to say, but evidently he did not serve King William for nothing. In the mean time Defoe resumed his business occupations, and set up a manufactory of pantiles at Tilbury, where he employed a hundred poor laborers, and throve, or seems to have thriven, in his new industry, living in something like luxury, and paying off, as described, his previous debts. His head was full of the projects upon which one of his most successful pamphlets was written, and he recommended many sweeping schemes and made many bold suggestions on all subjects, from the institution of an income tax to that of an academy like the French. It was a period when the air was swarming with schemes, and Defoe was not necessarily original in his suggestions; but his brain was teeming with life and energy, and there is no saying which was absolutely his own thought, and which the thought of others. He was a man to whom ideas came as he was writing, and were flung off into the air, to fly or fall as they might. One thought, one fancy, suggested another. For instance, after arguing long and well in favor of the war with France, which was the object of King William’s life, and the only thing that could save—according to the ideas of his party on the Continent, and eventually of most sound Protestants in England—the Protestant faith, Defoe, with a sudden whimsical perception of certain possibilities on the other side, came out with a pamphlet entitled, “Reasons Against a War with France,” which was founded on the suggestion that a war with Spain instead would be very profitable, and that the Spanish Indies were a booty well worth having: a sudden dash into new fields which must have brought up the public which he had persuaded to fight France with a certain gasp of breathless inability to follow this rapid reasoner in the instantaneous change of front, which meant no real change of opinion, but only the flash of a sudden happy thought.

When William died, however, and the times changed, the High Church came back with Anne into a potency which had been impossible in the unsympathetic reign of that Dutchman. Defoe had written some time before against the practice of occasional conformity; that is, the device by which dissenters managed to hold public offices in despite of existing tests, by kneeling now and then at the altars of the established church, and receiving the communion there. Defoe took the highest view of principle in this respect, and denounced the nonconformists who thus secured office to themselves by the sacrifice of their consciences, “bowing in the House of Rimmon.” There seems no reason, in fact, why a moderate dissenter should not do this, except that any religious duty specially performed for the sake of a secular benefit is always suspect and odious. Yet the obvious argument that a man who could reconcile it with his conscience to attend the worship of the church should not be a dissenter, was unquestionably sound and unassailable in point of logic. Defoe had deeply offended the dissenters, to whom he himself belonged, by his protest; but this did not prevent him from rushing into print in defense of the expedient of occasional conformity as soon as it was threatened from the other side. There is little difficulty in following the action of his mind in such a question. It was wrong and a deflection from the highest point of duty to sacrifice one’s conscience, even occasionally, for the sake of office; but, on the other hand, it was equally wrong to abolish an expedient which broke the severity of the test, and made life possible to the nonconforming classes. The views were contradictory, yet both were true, and it was his nature to see both sides with most impartial good sense, while he felt it to be, if a breach of external consistency, no wrong to defend or assail one side or the other, as might seem most necessary. He allowed himself so complete a license on this point that it is curious he should be found the public champion of the higher duty. No doubt his utterance to his dissenting brethren on that question was to himself no reason why he should not defend their right to use the expedient if they had a mind. But this is too fine a distinction for the general intelligence.

The discussions on this subject were the occasion of one of the most striking episodes in his life. When the bill against occasional conformity was introduced, to the delight of the High Church party, from the queen downward, and when the air began to buzz around him with the bluster, hitherto subdued by circumstances, of the reviving party, who would have made short work with the dissenters had their power been equal to their will, a grimly humorous perception of the capabilities of the occasion seems to have seized Defoe. Notwithstanding that he had angered all the sects by his plain speaking, he was a dissenter born, and there is no such way of reconverting a stray Israelite as to hear the Philistines blaspheme. He seized upon the extremest views of the high-fliers with characteristic insight, and, with a keen consciousness of the power of his weapon, used it remorselessly. The “Shortest Way to Deal with Dissenters” is a grave and elaborate statement of the wild threats and violent talk in which, in the intoxication of newly acquired power, the partizans of the church indulged, with noise and exaggeration proportioned to the self-suppression which had been forced upon them by the panic of a papal restoration under James, and by the domination of the more moderate party during William’s unsympathetic reign. They were now at the top of the wave, and could brandish their swords in the eyes of their adversaries. Their talk in some of their public utterances was as bloodthirsty as if they intended a St. Bartholomew. Defoe took up this frenzied babble, and put it into the form of a grave and practical proposal. As serious as was Swift when he proposed to utilize the superabundant babies of the poor by eating them, Defoe propounded the easy way to get rid of the dissenters and the necessity of settling this question forever. “Shall any law be given to such wild creatures? Some beasts are for sport, and the huntsman gives them advantages of ground, but some are knocked on the head by all possible ways of violence and surprise.” He says:

’T is vain to trifle in this matter. The light, foolish handling of them by mulcts, fines, etc., ’t is their glory and their advantage. If the gallows instead of the counter, and the galleys instead of the fines, were the reward of going to a conventicle to preach or to hear, there would not be so many sufferers. The spirit of martyrdom is over. They that will go to church to be chosen sheriffs and mayors would go to forty churches rather than be hanged. If one severe law were made and punctually executed, that whoever was found at a conventicle should be banished, the nation and the preacher be hanged, we should see an end of the tale. They would all come to church, and one age would make us all one again.

To talk of 5s. a month for not coming to this sacrament, and 1s. per week for not coming to church, this is such a way of converting people as never was known. This is selling them a liberty to transgress for so much money. If it be not a crime, why don’t we give them full license? And if it be, no price ought to compound for committing it, for that is selling a liberty to people to sin against God and the government.

If it be a crime of the highest consequence, both against the peace and welfare of the nation, the glory of God, the good of the church, and the happiness of the soul, let us rank it among capital offences, and let it receive a punishment in proportion to it.

We hang men for trifles and banish them for things not worth naming. But an offence against God and the church, against the welfare of the world, and the dignity of religion shall be bought off for 5s.—this is such a shame to a Christian Government that ’tis with regret I transmit it to posterity.

If men sin against God, affront his ordinances, rebel against his church, and disobey the precepts of their superiors, let them suffer as such capital crimes deserve: so will religion flourish, and this divided nation be once again united.... I am not supposing that all the dissenters in England should be hanged or banished, but as in cases of rebellions and insurrections, if a few of the ringleaders suffer, the multitude are dismissed; so a few obstinate people being bad examples, there’s no doubt but the severity of the law would find a stop in the compliance of the multitude.

The reader will perceive by what a serious argument the hot-headed fanatic was betrayed and the wiser public put upon their guard. The mirror thus held up to nature, with a grotesque twist in it which made the likeness bewildering, gave London such a sensation as she had not felt for many a day. The wildest excitement arose. At first all parties in the shock of surprise took it for genuine. “The wisest churchmen in the nation were deceived by it,” and while some were even so foolish as to receive it with unthinking applause, which was the case, according to Oldmixon, “in our two famous Universities,” the more sensible reader of the church party was first indignant with the high-flyers for expressing such opinions, and then furious with the satirist who had insulted the church by putting them into her mouth. Nobody indeed saw the joke. The fellow of Cambridge who thanked his bookseller for packing up “so excellent a treatise” along with the books he had ordered, and considered it “next to the Sacred Bible and Holy Comments the best book he ever saw”; the “soberer churchman” who “openly exclaimed against the proposal, condemned the

warmth that appeared in the clergy, and openly professed that such a man as Sacheverell and his brethren would blow up the foundations of the church”; the dissenters who were at once insulted and alarmed by the extraordinary threats thus set forth against them—all alike turned upon the perpetrator of the hoax when he was discovered. Some “blushed when they reflected how far they had applauded,” some labored to prove that it was “a horrible slander against the church.” The government, sharing the general commotion, placed Defoe in the position of a revolutionary leader who, “by the villainous insinuations of that pamphlet, would have frightened the dissenters into another rebellion.” Defoe himself seems to have had a moment of panic, and fled. He was proclaimed in the “Gazette,” and a reward offered for his discovery. His biographers in general assert that he gave himself up with some generosity to save the printer and publisher, who had been arrested, but there are public documents which seem to prove a different procedure, showing how “My Lord Nottingham hunted him out,” and how “the person who discovered Daniel Foe” claimed and was paid the reward of fifty pounds offered for the offender, described as a “middle-aged, spare man, about forty years old, of a brown complexion and dark brown colored hair (but wears a wig), a hooked nose, a sharp chin, gray eyes, and a large mole near his mouth.” However that might be, he was arrested and committed to Newgate in the spring of 1703, and the obnoxious publication—“this little book, a contemptible pamphlet of but three sheets of paper,” as he describes it—was burned by the common hangman. It was not, however, till the summer, three or four months after his arrest, that he was tried, and that period he seems to have spent in Newgate in perfect freedom, at least for literary productions, since he filled the air with a mist of pamphlets explaining that he meant nothing but a harmless satire at one moment, at another exhorting the dissenters to be content with spiritual freedom, and again bursting into the rude but potent strains of the “Hymn to the Pillory.” He was sentenced to fine and imprisonment, as well as to that grotesque but sometimes terrible instrument of torture; but the pillory was no torture to Defoe. On the last three days of July—once before the Royal Exchange in Cornhill, where his shop had been, and where no doubt everybody knew him, once in Cheapside, and again at Temple Bar—he stood aloft with the crowd surging round and performed his penance. The crowd in those days was not a soft or civil one when it indorsed the sentence pronounced by law. Its howls and cries, its missiles and its curses, made the punishment horrible. But the crowd had by this time found time to take in the joke,—banter, when it is broad enough to be intelligible, always pleases the general,—and there must have been some bonhomie about the sufferer, some good repute as a merry fellow and one who loved a jest, which conciliated the populace. Instead of dead cats, they flung him nosegays; they gathered about his platform under the low deep arch which once made a mock gate to the city, and behind the bustling ’Change, and between the shops of Cheapside, holding a series of impromptu festivals, drinking his health, shouting out his new verses, which were sold by thousands in the streets:

 
Hail, hieroglyphic state machine,
Contriv’d to punish fancy in;
Men that are men, in thee can feel no pain,
And all thy insignificants disdain;
Exalted on thy stool of state,
What prospect do I see of sovereign fate.
 

The bold satirist, looking through those “lofty loops,” recalls all the good men that have stood there, reminding himself that even the learned Selden had the pillory in prospect, and that, had he “triumphed on thy stage,” no man could have shunned it more. Contempt, “that false new word for shame,” has no power where there is no crime, he declares. The lines are rough, but the sentiments are manly and full of honest scorn, which here and there reaches a high tone. From his platform where he stood in all the emancipation of feeling that the worst had happened, he throws a bold glance upon the disorders of the time, political and social, and summons to this post of scorn the firebrands, the cowards, the failures of the age. One can imagine those keen gray eyes inspecting through the loops the hoarse and roaming groups, not sure perhaps what his reception was to be, gathering courage as the shouts became intelligible and turned into hurrahs for Defoe. No doubt he marked the fluctuating crowd as keenly as if he had been a careless spectator at a window, and saw Colonel Jack and his brother pickpockets threading devious ways among the multitude, with here and there a gallant from St. James in his long curled periwig fluttering on the edge, and the tradesmen, half curious, half unwilling to join in the riot, looking on from their doors. A pillory is a coign of vantage when the man upon it has eyes like Defoe’s. “Tell ’em,” he says, apostrophizing his platform contemptuously—

 
Tell ’em the men that placed him here
Are friends unto the times,
But at a loss to find his guilt,
They can’t commit his crimes.
 

Mr. Burton, in his “Reign of Queen Anne,” quotes from manuscript authority a statement that Penn had been commissioned by Defoe to offer “an account of all his accomplices in whatsoever he has been concerned,” on condition that he should be freed from the pillory, which is a very confusing statement, since it seems impossible to understand what accomplices he could have had. This, according to the same authority, was considered important enough to call for a special meeting of the cabinet council; but “the Queen seems to think that his confession amounts to nothing.” Another account is that Nottingham visited him in prison and offered him his liberty if he would say who set him on to do it. Thus this jeu d’esprit—the first exercise of Defoe’s special and most characteristic gift, that of endowing a fictitious production with every appearance of reality—set the world aflame. It is almost a more astonishing feat than the narratives which look so like literal transcripts of experience; for the subtle power which, by a cunning fitting together of actual utterances, could thus indicate the alarming tendency and danger of a great party, is more wonderful than to create an imaginary man and trace his every action as if he were a real one. The art may be less noble, but it is more difficult. Indeed, the “Shortest Way” is about the only example of such an extraordinary achievement. Swift’s tremendous satire was more bitter, more scathing, and treated not so much the exaggerated opinions of a class as the cruel and callous indifference of human nature to the sufferings of its slaves and victims.

This curious episode once more ruined Defoe. It is to be supposed that when he went into hiding his business had to be abandoned, and all his affairs got into confusion. The official document already quoted describes him as “living at Newington Green with his father-in-law, who is a lay elder of a conventicle there.” This description, however, is evidently drawn up by an enemy, since his previous bankruptcy is spoken of as fraudulent, an assertion made nowhere else. His biographer, Wilson, informs us that though he had “kept his coach” before this period, the pantile works had now to be broken up, and his business was ruined. He had, though there is no information about her, a wife and six children—perhaps supported by the elder at Newington, who very likely thought, like his brethren, but badly of Defoe.

He lay in Newgate for nearly a year, without, however, to all appearance, losing any opportunity for a pamphlet during the whole time, and laying in grist for his mill amid the strange and terrible surroundings of an eighteenth-century prison. Mr. Minto, in the admirable sketch of Defoe which he has contributed to the “English Men of Letters” series, seems to think that his hero must have enjoyed himself in this teeming world of new experiences, and that “he spent many pleasant hours” listening to the tales of his fellow-prisoners. No doubt there must have been some compensation to such a man in making acquaintance with a new aspect of life, but it is, perhaps, going too far to attribute a possibility of enjoyment to any undegraded man in the pandemonium described in so many contemporary narratives. Defoe did, however, what, so far as we are aware, no other man before or after him has ever done (except, perhaps, Leigh Hunt, in whose case we have a vague recollection of similar activity): he originated, wrote, and published a newspaper in his prison. “The Review,” so called, “of the Affairs of France”—that is, of the affairs of Europe and the world—that is, of any political subject that might be uppermost—was published twice a week, and appeared during the whole time of his imprisonment. A brilliant, familiar, graphic commentary upon all that was happening, a dialogue between the imprisoned spectator of life and the busy world outside, in which he was both questioner and answerer, pouring out upon the country with the keenest understanding of other people’s views, and the most complete mastery of his own, his remarks and criticisms, his judgment and advice. A newspaper in those days was not, of course, the huge broadsheet which it has now become. The “Review” was a sheet of eight, but afterward of only four small quarto pages. It was no assemblage of paragraphs, trivial or important, the work of many anonymous persons whose profession it is to manufacture a newspaper, but one man’s eager and lively conversation with his countrymen, full of the vigor of personal opinion and the unity of an individual view. A keener intelligence was never brought to the treatment of public affairs, nor a mind more thoughtful, reasonable, and practical. His prejudices were few—too few, perhaps. Granted that the aim was good, Defoe was disdainful of punctilio in the way of carrying it out. He was not above doing evil that good might come, but he had a far higher refinement of meaning than could be embraced by any such vulgar statement in his subtle faculty of discovering, and all but proving, that what might have seemed evil to a common intelligence was in reality a good, if not the best, way of carrying his excellent purpose out. Up to the moment of his leaving Newgate, however, there was nothing equivocal in the use he made of his extraordinary faculties. He was a free man discussing boldly on his own responsibility, and without any arrière pensée, the affairs of England. If he had first keenly assailed the dissenters, who were his own people, in respect of the compliances by which they made themselves capable of bearing office, and then exposed to grimmest ridicule the adversaries who aimed at rendering them altogether incapable, there was in this no real inconsistency. His championship of King William had been honest and thorough. If he loved to have a finger in every pie, and let loose his opinion at every crisis, there was no contemporary opinion which was better worth having. But now this unwearying critic, this keen observer, this restless, brilliant casuist, this practical man of business, had come to the turning-point of his life.

His liberation from Newgate followed closely upon the advent of Harley to power. When this event happened, it is said that one of the first things the new minister did was to send a message to Defoe in prison: “Pray ask that gentleman what I can do for him.” Whether it was in direct sequence to this question, or whether the Queen had formed an independent intention of freeing the prisoner, we need not inquire; but he was set free, Queen Anne furnishing the means of paying his fine. She is said also to have taken an interest in his family, and contributed to their support during his confinement. He declared himself to be liberated on the condition of writing nothing (further modified as nothing “which some people might not like”) for some years; a condition which he immediately fulfilled by publishing an “Elegy on the Author of the True-born Englishman,” to tell the world so, and took no further notice of the prohibition, so far as appears. The real meaning of this curious statement would seem by all evidence to have been that Defoe there and then accepted the position of a secret servant of the government, a writer pledged to support their measures and carry out their views. At the moment, and perhaps in reality during the greater part of his career, their measures were those which he approved; and certainly at this period of his history he has never been accused of writing against his conscience. Even when, after eager championship of peace, he was obliged by political changes to veer into what looked like support of war, he was never without the strong defense to fall back upon, that he demanded peace only after securing certain indispensable conditions, and that war might be, and was, the only means of gaining them—an argument most simple and evident to his mind.

Harley has never appeared in history as a great man, but when we consider that he was able thus to subjugate and secure to his own service two of the greatest intelligences of his time, it is impossible not to respect his influence and judgment. The great and somber genius of Swift, the daring, brilliant, and ever-ready intellect of Defoe, became instruments in the hands of this ordinary and scheming statesman. Once more, with a curious parallelism, these two men stand before us—no friends to each other. “An illiterate fellow, whose name I forget,” says Swift, with the almost brutal scorn which was part of his character; while Defoe replies to the taunt with angry virulence, setting forth his own acquirements, “though he wrote no bill at his door, nor set Latin on the front of his productions,” a piece of pretension, habitual to the time, of which the other was guilty. But Harley, who was not worthy, so far as intellect went, to clean the shoes of either, had them both at his command, serving his purposes, doing his bidding. Which of them suffered most by the connection it is not easy to say. It turned Swift’s head, and brought into humiliating demonstration the braggart and the bully in his nature. Defoe had not the demoralizing chance of being the lord treasurer’s boon companion; but Harley made a dishonest partizan, a paid and slippery special pleader and secret agent, out of the free-lance of politics. From this moment the defenders and champions of Defoe have to turn into casuists, as he himself did. They have to give specious explanations to suppress and account for his shifts and changes, though at first they were sufficiently innocent. The evil grew, however, so that toward the end of his career even the apologist must keep silence; but this is the nature of all evil.