A Political Biography of Daniel Defoe

P N Furbank, W.R. Owens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781851968107
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317315667
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Furbank and Owens attempt to disentangle the story of Daniel Defoe's political career, as journalist, polemicist, political theorist and secret agent. They argue that this remarkable career calls for a good deal of rethinking, not least because biography and bibliography are here inextricably intertwined.

CHAPTER 1

POETRY, PAMPHLETEERING AND THE PILLORY

Daniel Defoe’s upbringing was, it might be suggested, an almost sure recipe for the forming of a Whig; and as a Whig is certainly how, throughout his tangled political career, he would always regard himself, though it was not invariably the picture his enemies would form of him. He was born into a Dissenting family, of strict religious principles, living in the London parish of St Stephen Coleman Street. The Defoe family worshipped in the congregation of a distinguished Presbyterian preacher, the Rev. Samuel Annesley, whom Defoe would later regard as a personal friend and whose death in 1697 he commemorated in a poem. Initially the idea was that he should become a Dissenting minister, and at the age of sixteen or thereabouts he entered a Dissenting academy at Newington Green, run by the Rev. Charles Morton. It was an untraditional establishment in which the teaching was done in English and students were given grounding in physical science and political theory.

Precisely why, or when, he gave up the idea of the ministry is not known. At all events, in 1684 he married Mary Tuffley, daughter of a well-to-do citizen and cooper of London, and with the aid of her very substantial dowry (£3,700) he set up as a wholesale merchant, with a house and warehouse in Freeman’s Yard, Cornhill.

Defoe’s father James Foe, a successful butcher and tallow-chandler, was a freeman and liveryman of the City of London, as in due course Daniel himself would be, and it was in the political struggle between King Charles II and the City that Defoe had his first experience of tyranny, the theme that would dominate his political philosophy. The City was a stronghold of militant Protestantism, with many rights and privileges. It enjoyed the right (until King Charles succeeded in suspending it¹) to elect its own sheriffs and justices of the peace, and it controlled appointments to the lieutenancy of the militia. It had also been a strong supporter of the Exclusion Bill, designed to exclude the King’s brother, the Roman Catholic Duke of York, from the succession. Defoe would recall, years later, the terrors he and his fellow Dissenters felt at the threat of ‘Popery, and its Introduction into this Kingdom, Hand in Hand with Slavery’, and how they set to work to copy out the Bible in shorthand, in case they were not allowed the use of it under the new regime.² The City was in the habit of plaguing King Charles with petitions, for instance calling on him to summon a new Parliament; and it was partly for this reason that he convened his fourth and last Parliament in Oxford rather than London. Charles, in his designs for absolute monarchy and attempts to impose his own candidates in shrieval or mayoral elections, found the City a troublesome and formidable antagonist.

From the opening years of Charles II’s reign Dissenters had been subjected to various severe religious and civic disabilities. The Conventicle Act of 1664 prohibited more than five persons meeting together for any form of worship not recognised in the Prayer Book; the Five Mile Act of 1665 forbade any Dissenting minister from coming within five miles of any place where he had preached or taught since 1660; and the Test Act of 1673 precluded all but members of the Church of England from accepting any civil or military office. In practice these laws had – to use Defoe’s own words – ‘not been much insisted on till about the Year 82 and 83’.³ But in the last few years of Charles’s reign they were applied in full force, and it became altogether a time of persecution for Dissenters. Government spies and informers were busy everywhere; many Dissenters perished in prison; and Charles Morton felt compelled to emigrate to America.⁴

With the accession of the King’s Roman Catholic brother James to the throne in February 1685, and the threat that he posed, not so much to the Dissenters as to Protestantism in general, matters quickly rose to a climax. It had been rumoured for some time that the Duke of Monmouth, an illegitimate son of Charles II, at present in exile in Holland, was contemplating invading England, with a view to dethroning his uncle James II. Monmouth was a Protestant, and for this reason, as well as for his winning looks and personality, he was a hero for many ordinary English citizens. Thus when he put his plan into action, landing at Lyme Regis on 11 June 1685 with a small party of armed companions, he was joined within days by several thousand supporters from the country round about. They described themselves as ‘in arms for the defence and vindication of the Protestant religion’, and their cry was ‘Fear Nothing but God’.⁵

Reactions in the City of London seem to have been somewhat less whole-hearted. So at least Defoe suggested years later in the Review.

I remember, how boldly abundance of Men talk’d for the Duke of Monmouth when he first Landed; but, if half of them had as boldly joyn’d him Sword in Hand, he had never been routed at Kings-sedgmoor, and as they kept their Hands off from acting, so when he was defeated, we heard but little of their Tongues neither afterwards.⁶

Whatever the truth of this, several of Defoe’s classmates from Morton’s academy joined Monmouth’s army and were executed as rebels, and Defoe himself took up arms on Monmouth’s behalf. The fact is well attested, for not only do we have his word for it, he is named in a royal pardon dated May 1687.⁷ Beyond that, however, nothing whatever is known about his part in the rising, and – perhaps because of Monmouth’s ignominious behaviour after his defeat and capture – he does not seem to have made a cult of him. What has a certain interest, however, is that, much later, he claimed Monmouth to be the popularizer of the term ‘Whig’. Monmouth had in 1681 been sent to subdue a Scottish rising at Bothwell Bridge, but instead of thanks for his success he was abused for treating the rebels too mercifully.

D[uke] Lauderdale told King Charles, with an Oath, That the Duke had been so Civil to the Whigs, because he was a Whig himself in his Heart. – This made it a Court Word, and in a little while all the Friends and Followers of the Duke, began to be called Whigs.⁸

The reign of James II, even more than that of his brother Charles, would be the dominant influence on Defoe’s political thinking, and it would, over the ensuing years, be his text for innumerable analyses and homilies. It was here he acquired his contempt for the High Tory doctrines of the ‘divine right’ of monarchs and the sin of ‘resistance’ and that he explored the evils of oath-imposing and oath-taking. His claim, made many years later, was a true one.

For my part, I thank God, that when he [James II] was King I never own’d him, never swore to him, never pray’d for him (as King), never paid any Act of Homage to him, never so much as Drank his Health, but look’d upon him as a Person who being Popish, had no Right to Rule.⁹

Much can be learned about a person from a study of his heroes, and this is certainly true of Defoe. Highest among his idols would be King William, but there were also one or two from the past: the great Gustavus Adolphus, champion of Protestantism in the Thirty Years’ War,¹⁰ and a certain Alderman William Love, of the reign of Charles II. What he will write about Love in the Review for 12 June 1705 tells us much about Defoe himself. He relates a speech, made in Parliament in 1673, by ‘that truly English Roman, Mr. Alderman Love’, which, he says, ought to be ‘wrote in Letters of Gold, and remember’d, to the Honour of his Family, as long as Citizens and Parliaments remain’. The King had issued a proclamation granting liberty of conscience to the Dissenters, who ‘Greedily and Unwarily Embrac’d their Liberty, Rejoyc’d, Built Meeting-Houses, and Throng’d to them in Publick’, but when this dispensing of the law by Charles came up for debate in the House of Commons, Love vigorously opposed it and wanted it declared arbitrary and illegal. This provoked a testy rebuke from a member of the Court party: ‘Why, Mr. Love, you are a Dissenter your self, it’s very Ungrateful, that you that received the Benefit, should object against the Manner’. To this Love replied:

I am a Dissenter, and thereby Unhappily Obnoxious to the Law; and if you catch me in the Corn, you may put me into the Pound; the Law against the Dissenters, I should be glad to see repeal’d by the same Authority that made it; but while it is a Law, the King cannot Repeal it by Proclamation; and I had much rather see the Dissenters suffer by the Rigour of the Law, tho’ I suffer with them, than see all the Laws in England Trampled under the Foot of the Prerogative in this Example; and, I hope, the Dissenters understand their Liberty as English Men, better than to accept of it in an Illegal manner.¹¹

Love’s reasoning here, taking the high ground and rejecting an easy advantage in the cause of a wider good, would become a favourite with Defoe. It is at work in much of his writing about the Dissenters – frequently to their resentment – though he would employ it in many other contexts too.

This leads us neatly to the beginnings of Defoe’s career as a writer. His first known pamphlet, published with a fictitious imprint in 1688, was A Letter to a Dissenter from his Friend at the Hague, Concerning the Penal Laws and the Test.¹² It was an appeal to his fellow Dissenters not to swallow the bait of James II’s offer to repeal the Test Act; and, in its contrariness, it was a characteristic début. He would always love to show his independence of those who, conventionally, would have been considered to be his friends. Very probably this is the pamphlet he refers to in the Review for 24 November 1711, where he describes the offence he caused to his Dissenting brethren ‘when, in print, I oppos’d at the utmost hazard, the taking off the Penal Laws and Test’.¹³ It was not the last time he would fall out with his fellow Dissenters.

Three years later, following the ‘Glorious Revolution’, when James had fled to France and been replaced by William and Mary, Defoe was to make a larger-scale venture into politics with a lengthy satirical poem, A New Discovery of an Old Intreague (1691).¹⁴ It is a strange affair, oddly discontinuous in its style (its phrasing in places seems grammatically only half-formed), and stiff with ephemeral and, at least for the modern reader, almost impenetrable allusions.¹⁵ Yet on the other hand it contains a number of memorable lines and passages, some of which he would re-use in later poems.¹⁶ Its subject is City politics, in particular the nefarious handling of City elections and appointments to the lieutenancy of the militia, during and after the Restoration. More immediately, it is a response to a petition presented to Parliament on 2 December 1690 by 117 Common Councillors, complaining that the present Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Pilkington, and several aldermen were holding offices they were not entitled to. The petitioners, so Defoe is at pains to imply, are all Tories and Jacobites (covert or otherwise), and include a number of the jurymen who sentenced to death the Whig martyrs Lord William Russell and Henry Cornish.

The poem gives a burlesque depiction of England’s defenders, the City militia, with their weighty baggage-train of provender to sustain them on their long day’s march, being reviewed by Queen Mary in Hyde Park on 21 July 1690, a day of great peril for England, the English and Dutch fleets having just been defeated by the French at Beachy Head; and it goes on to present a series of savage lampoons of certain of the petitioners. Or rather, it would appear, that was the form the poem took, when on 1 January 1691 there came the sensational news of the discov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Poetry, Pamphleteering and the Pillory
• 2 Defoe and the Dead King
• 3 The Author of the Review
• 4 Propagandist for the Union
• 5 ‘Maintaining a Counter Correspondence’
• 6 1710: The Fateful Step
• 7 Defoe and the Whig Split
• 8 The Return of the Prodigal
• Appendices
• Notes
• Index