Daniel Defoe: the whole frame of nature, time and providence

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Daniel Defoe: The Whole Frame of Nature, Time and Providence

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Daniel Defoe: The Whole Frame of Nature, Time andProvidence

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10.1057/9780230599529 - Daniel Defoe, Katherine Clark

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Daniel DefoeThe Whole Frame of Nature, Time andProvidence

Katherine Clark

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© Katherine Clark 2007

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP.

Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publicationmay be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 2007 byPALGRAVE MACMILLANHoundmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010Companies and representatives throughout the world

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdomand other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the EuropeanUnion and other countries.

ISBN 13: 978–0–333–97136–9 hardbackISBN 10: 0–333–97136–1 hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturingprocesses are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of thecountry of origin.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Clark, Katherine, 1959–Daniel Defoe: the whole frame of nature, time and providence /Katherine Clark.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN-13: 978–0–333–97136–9ISBN-10: 0–333–97136–1

1. Defoe, Daniel, 1661?–1731–Political and social views. 2. Defoe, Daniel,1661?–1731–Religion. I. Title.

PR3408.P6C63 2007823�.dc22 2006051555

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 116 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07

Printed and bound in Great Britain byAntony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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Contents

Acknowledgements viii

List of Abbreviations x

Introduction 1

1 Establishing a Voice: Defoe’s First Steps from Failed Tradesman to Successful Author 14

i. Introduction 14ii. War, merchants, and the projecting age: the argument of

Defoe’s Essay upon Projects 16iii. William III: patron of polite learning 21iv. William III: patron of military science 25v. ‘This pen and ink war’: Defoe and the standing army

controversy 28

2 ‘The Mushroom and the Oak’: Dissent and the Church of England, 1697–1705 34

i. Introduction 34ii. Occasional conformity: the principled stance of an orthodox

Dissenter 36iii. Occasional conformists and the instability of language 42iv. Denominational competition: Defoe’s novel rationale for

religious pluralism 46

3 Jure Divino: Defoe, Locke and Milton, and Political Theory 51

i. ‘Arguing by my own Light, not other Mens’: how a Lockeianidentity was attributed to Defoe 51

ii. ‘Tyrant SIN’: the real philosophical foundation of Jure Divino 56iii. Idolatry and conquest: the origins and history of ius divinum

and kingship 62iv. ‘The whole frame of Nature, Time, and Providence’: Defoe on

God’s intentions for mankind 70v. Conclusion 77

4 Defoe and the Union of 1707: Constructing a British Identity 78

i. Introduction 78ii. Pre-union polemics and the development of Defoe’s historical

thought 79

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iii. Plurality, exchange, and the premises of union 84iv. Fundamental law, majority rule, and the Kirk 88v. Defoe’s discourses and the new national identity 92

5 Correspondence, Credit, and Commerce: Defoe and the Instability of Meaning, 1709–1713 95

i. Introduction 95ii. ‘What all people are busy about, but not one in forty

understands’: the decline of meaning and the rise of credit 97iii. Trading rudeness for refinement: the scenario of Defoe’s

A General History of Trade 103iv. Conclusion 111

6 Robinson Crusoe: Orthodox Penitent 113

i. Introduction: Robinson Crusoe and Defoe’s orthodox agenda 113ii. Contextualizing Crusoe: Hoadly, Toland, and Defoe’s

Turkish Spy 115iii. Trinitarianism and the Crusoe trilogy 122iv. Conversions: orthodoxy and redemption for Crusoe, Friday,

Will, and Mary 125v. Iconoclasm: Crusoe’s campaign against idolatry 128

vi. Christianity and the civilizing process 130vii. Crusoe’s condemnation of heterodoxy 133viii. Conclusion: ‘a religious Application’ 136

7 The Perils of Consumption and the Decline of Family Government 138

i. Introduction 138ii. The Calico and South Sea crises: Defoe’s journalistic response 141

iii. Commerce and the decline of family government: Defoe’s historical analysis 148

iv. Trading the shop apron for a wig and sword 155v. Conclusion 158

8 Defoe’s Historical Vision: Commerce and Gentility in the 1720s 160

i. Introduction: social polemic and the development of historicalanalysis 160

ii. The historical dynamic of conquest and commerce: Defoe’s Tour and General History of Discoveries and Improvements 164

iii. The benefits of princely prudence: the pivotal role of King Henry VII 171

iv. Historical analysis in Defoe’s Compleat English Gentleman 178v. Conclusion 183

vi Contents

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9 The Devil and Daniel Defoe: History in a Heterodox Age 185

i. Introduction 185ii. Satan and magic in the ancient world: from the creation

to Christ 187iii. Satan and magic in the modern world: from Christ to the

Beau Monde 196iv. Remedies for ‘this enlighten’d Age’ 205v. Conclusion 208

Conclusion 209

Notes 211

Select Bibliography 245

Index 264

Contents vii

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Acknowledgements

This book was almost entitled Daniel Defoe: ‘Writing History by Inches’, aphrase Defoe himself used to describe what he thought he was doing asauthor of the Review, but in the end I decided against it. It did not ad-equately convey the sacred framework in which Defoe conceptualized boththe past and his present. It also seemed all too ironical a comment on thisbook’s gestation for I have been thinking about Defoe for a long time now,a process which first began while an undergraduate at Duke University. I amespecially grateful for the tutelage and encouragement I received from twoof my professors there, Charles S. Maier, now at Harvard, and the late JohnW. Cell.

As a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, I was privileged to besupervised by Professor John Pocock whose powers as an historian arematched only by his patience and humanity as a mentor. His influence firstled me to the theme of the development of Defoe’s historical vision, and hisadvice and friendship sustained me as this book took shape.

Other Johns Hopkins faculty to whom I am indebted include ProfessorsToby Dietz, Jack P. Greene, and Ronald Paulson. A thoughtful cohort ofHopkins graduate students added to an environment full of intellectualstimulation and cherished camaraderie, including Tommaso Astarita, EdithBershadsky, Trevor Burnard, Lige Gould, Philip Hicks, William Kuhn, KurtNagel, Rina Palumbo, Michael Schaffer, and especially Rene Marion, whosecapacity for friendship and historical insight are treasured by all who knowher.

I also wish to thank Nicholas Phillipson and John Robertson for invitingme to participate in seminars they directed under the auspices of the Centerfor the History of British Political Thought at the Folger Institute inWashington, DC. Participation in these seminars helped me to think moreclearly about this project. An earlier version of Chapter 4 appeared in avolume of essays, edited by John Robertson, entitled A Union for Empire: theUnion of 1707 in the History of British Political Thought (Cambridge, 1995).I am grateful to Dr Robertson for inviting me to contribute to this volumeand to Cambridge University Press for permission to reprint a revised ver-sion of my essay here.

Defoe studies have led me to many libraries and to new friends and col-leagues on both sides of the Atlantic. I wish to thank the librarians of theBodleian Library, the British Library, the Folger Library, the HuntingtonLibrary, the Johns Hopkins University Library and the Spencer ResearchLibrary at the University of Kansas. My appreciation and understanding of

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English culture and of early modern history and historiography have beenenhanced by conversations with Victor Bailey, Pamela Edwards, JeremyGregory, Sarah King, Larry Klein, Steve Pincus, Richard Sharp, Leslie Tuttle,and Martina Zwieflhofer. Various aspects of this project have been presentedto audiences at the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association,the Midwest and Pacific Coast Conferences on British Studies, and to semi-nars at Harvard University and the Hall Center for the Humanities at theUniversity of Kansas. I am grateful to fellow participants for their helpfulcomments and questions. I also wish to thank Jonathan Clark, AlisonGames, and Howard Erskine-Hill for their advice, encouragement, andcomments on earlier drafts of this book.

I am indebted to a host of Defoe scholars whose work has been the foun-dation on which I have built. Sometimes I have agreed, at other times dis-agreed, with aspects of their analyses but my debt to their achievements isgratefully acknowledged here: I have in mind especially Paula Backscheider,Peter Earle, P. N. Furbank, J. Paul Hunter, Maximillian Novak, W. R. Owens,John Richetti, G. A. Starr, and Manuel Schonhorn.

My work on Defoe has been generously supported by a number of insti-tutions, and I acknowledge with gratitude the award of fellowships by theJohns Hopkins University, the Folger Library, the Institute for HumaneStudies, the New Faculty Research Fund of the University of Kansas, theHuntington Library, and the British Academy. I also wish to thank SandeeKennedy, Jane Pearce, Pam Lerow, and Paula Courtney for all they do tohelp faculty in tasks large and small.

Friends and family deserve special thanks for their forbearance andencouragement. They have often heard me say, ‘yes, I’d love to … when Ifinish the book’. From an early age, my parents fostered my curiosity aboutthe past and supported my education throughout. Finally, I wish to thankmy husband, who has been the most understanding and encouraging of all.

Acknowledgements ix

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List of Abbreviations

Backscheider, Defoe Paula Backscheider, Daniel Defoe:His Life (Baltimore, 1989)

Bolam, English Presbyterians C. G. Bolam, Jeremy Goring, H. L. Short and Roger Thomas, The English Presbyterians: FromElizabethan Puritanism to ModernUnitarianism (1968)

Defoe, A True Collection Daniel Defoe, A True Collection ofthe Writings of the Author of the True Born English-man. The SecondEdition Corrected and Enlarg’d byhimself (1705)

Defoe, A Second Volume Daniel Defoe, A Second Volume ofthe Writings of the Author of theTrue-Born Englishman. Some Whereof never before printed (1705)

Downie, Harley J. A. Downie, Robert Harley and thePress: Propaganda and Public Opinionin the Age of Swift and Defoe(Cambridge, 1979)

ECS Eighteenth Century Studies

ELH English Literary History

Healey, Letters George Harris Healey (ed.), The Letters of Daniel Defoe (Oxford,1955)

HJ The Historical Journal

Hoppit, Land of Liberty? Julian Hoppit, A Land of Liberty?England, 1689-1727 (Oxford, 2000)

HLQ Huntington Library Quarterly

Hunter, Reluctant Pilgrim J. Paul Hunter, The ReluctantPilgrim: Defoe’s Emblematic Methodand Quest for Form in RobinsonCrusoe (Baltimore, 1966)

x

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Jacob, Newtonians Margaret Jacob, The Newtonians andthe English Revolution 1689-1720(Ithaca, 1976)

JBS Journal of British Studies

Novak, Defoe Maximillian E. Novak, DanielDefoe: Master of Fictions (Oxford,2001)

Pocock, Machiavellian Moment J. G. A. Pocock, The MachiavellianMoment: Florentine Political Thoughtand the Atlantic Republican Tradition(Princeton, 1975)

Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce,and History: Essays on PoliticalThought and History, Chiefly in theEighteenth Century (Cambridge,1985)

Schonhorn, Defoe’s Politics Manuel Schonhorn, Defoe’s Politics:Parliament, Power, Kingship andRobinson Crusoe (Cambridge, 1991)

Note: Defoe’s writings are cited here in short-title form. The full titles canbe obtained from www.copac.ac.uk or P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe (1998). The place of publication,unless otherwise noted, is London.

List of Abbreviations xi

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Introduction

As one of the most innovative writers in the expanding world of printculture in eighteenth-century London, Daniel Defoe was both an activeparticipant in and chronicler of profound structural changes which, duringhis lifetime, transformed and united the kingdoms of England andScotland into the nation-state of Great Britain. An increasingly enlightenedand commercialized Britain witnessed the birth of a burgeoning statebureaucracy dependent upon a national debt to wage its wars, the growthof media-centred politics, a consumer society transforming both mannersand morals, and de facto religious diversity demanding principled plural-ism. Defoe’s name has become so synonymous with what was later charac-terized as the forces of ‘modernity’ that scholars have dubbed him ‘Citizenof the Modern World’ and labelled the period in which he lived and wroteas ‘The Age of Defoe’.1 Indeed Defoe was more than a prolific and wide-ranging writer: he has about him a phenomenal quality. As a commentatoron almost every aspect of early eighteenth-century life and thought, hehimself was part of the story of the transformation of his age. He can bestbe compared with writers like Thomas Paine, William Cobbett, WalterBagehot, and George Orwell, yet in some ways his stature exceeded theirs.It has been said of Robinson Crusoe that only the Bible has been translatedinto more languages.

This book is not an attempt to rescue an author from neglect. The launchof a new 44-volume collection of Defoe’s writings, several biographies, thepublication of a number of monographs and countless articles all attest the brisk business of Defoe studies in recent years. However, with somenotable exceptions, many scholars have continued to be influenced byolder work which read Defoe for clues to ‘the rise of the novel’ or ‘the riseof the middle class’ and its bourgeois world-view. A second group of schol-ars has used Defoe to substantiate postmodern discussions of colonialismand related issues of primitive capitalism.2 A more securely historical inter-pretation identifies Defoe as a spokesman for the world-view of courtWhigs, defined against that of the civic humanists.3 This last interpretation

1

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has been influential for the present author, and is acknowledged here, butthis book seeks to offer a range of different insights and to define Defoe byhis own most important intellectual commitments. Although a number ofstudies have located Defoe’s fiction in the context of various Puritangenres,4 this is the first to emphasize one key aspect of Defoe’s religion, hisTrinitarianism, the eschatology that this entailed,5 the centrality of Defoe’sChristology for understanding his works, both fictional and non-fictional,and his emerging historical vision.

Perhaps the most critical aspect of Defoe’s identity was that he was aDissenter, but he adhered to ‘Old Dissent’, a very different phenomenonfrom the later Dissenting traditions of men like Richard Price (1723–91) orJoseph Priestley (1733–1804): Defoe and his Presbyterian co-religionistsendorsed the idea of a national church, wished to be comprehended withinit, and accepted exclusion and toleration as only second best. Also unlikePrice and Priestley, he was committed to the doctrine of the Trinity. ForDefoe, a framework of sin, repentance, and Atonement informed his under-standing of time, and therefore of history. He conceptualized the universein terms of an orthodox soteriology: man’s time on earth was time torepent. That time on earth was understood within another related provi-dential framework. Defoe believed that commerce was the key to thedivinely ordained moral and material advance of human society within thesecular realm. Contrary to conventional wisdom which postulated God’screation of a perfect orb and its subsequent fragmentation after the Flood,Defoe instead believed that God had created the world in its broken state inorder to promote navigation and trade. Different parts of the world wereendowed with different natural resources so that each had enough tosurvive but not enough to satisfy its wants. The material world contained aprovidential logic of cooperation and improvement as people were led toexchange and communicate with each other. Defoe extended this theory toargue that just as God had created a geographically divided world toencourage trade for the mutual benefit of everyone, so he had admittedecclesiastical divisions in order to promote the Christian virtues of forbear-ance and charity. Via his education in a Nonconformist academy, Defoeimbibed the principles of Baconian ‘new science’ and the idea that thephysical world was also the realm in which man could exercise and develophis natural desire for knowledge.6 These principles encouraged him toadvocate the application of reason for discovery and improvement in thephysical world while privileging faith and revelation over reason in under-standing the spiritual world.

Despite the possibilities for improvement contained within these intel-lectual frameworks, Defoe’s vision of commerce and the application ofhuman reason was not an entirely sanguine one. Over the course of hiscareer, he found himself having to reconcile his belief in the sanctity ofexchange with the realities of new luxuries and ideas which confronted

2 Daniel Defoe

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market man and woman. Defoe often voiced his concern that in a world ofincreasing consumption and speculation, the tokens of exchange – namelywords and money – were subject to corruption and needed to be protectedlest they lose their true representative meaning. He also discovered otherdrawbacks to commerce, exchange, and the use of reason. Commerce andcredit depended upon probity and honesty, but he worried about howthese and other virtues could continue to thrive in a world in which peoplewere losing their fear of divine judgement and belief in the promise of ever-lasting life, a promise dependent upon their own repentance and Christ’sAtonement. The growth of Socinian, Arian, Deistic, and atheistic opinionthus posed a threat to Christian orthodoxy and to its associated social andeconomic benefits. How could society expect to thrive, Defoe repeatedlywondered, when it was influenced, even led, by those who ‘can arguethemselves out of all the Restraints of Virtue and Religion?’7 Defoe came tosee that despite its divine sanction, commerce was enticing people intoemulative consumption, eroding household government, and distractingpeople from the true business of life – the preparation of one’s soul for sal-vation. By the end of his career, Reason, whose powers he once celebrated,had become heterodoxy’s new ‘magic’, bewitching society with the grossestof idolatries: the human mind worshipping itself.

These concerns lead inescapably to the theme of Enlightenment. Partand parcel of this theme, as defined by historians of ideas, is the develop-ment of a modern historical consciousness. Recognition of a transitionfrom an age of conquest to an age of commerce, John Pocock has argued,constituted one of the major building blocks of an ‘enlightened historiog-raphy’ which sought to define a new epoch in British and European historywhich was both ‘post-feudal’ and ‘post-ecclesiastical’. As Pocock hasdefined it, enlightened historiography, however steeped in Christian theol-ogy, nevertheless sought to develop a ‘culture of the mind’ which might‘function independently’ from it.8 For Defoe, however, both the explana-tion for and the solution to the challenges of a post-feudal, commercialmodernity lay squarely within orthodox Christian theology and notoutside it. Defoe was one of the first thinkers to articulate the view that hisage was one in which commerce was supplanting conquest as an historicalforce. Although he identified technological change and the policies ofHenry VII as primary catalysts for this transformation in the early modernperiod, he also understood commerce to be part of God’s providential planand conquest as part of the Devil’s strategy to corrupt mankind.

Defoe’s ideas were not systematically developed but emerged during fourdecades of journalistic contributions to the political, religious, economic,and social debates of his day. In his quotidian engagement with a growingpopulation of readers of news, commentary, and fiction, Defoe frequentlyturned to historical argument. He used the past for polemical purposes, todefend his own ideas about particular issues and to attack those of his

Introduction 3

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opponents. Most of his works do not conform to our usual understandingof what constitutes a work of history, though some of his texts do containthe word ‘history’ in their titles. When he set out to write history system-atically, as he did in his History of the Union of Great Britain (1709), hisinsights were less compelling. Defoe’s historical sophistication, as we shallsee, lay less in the way he reconstructed the past than in the way he usedvarious historical arguments to make sense of the dramatic intellectual andcultural changes taking place in his own present. This study argues that thehistorical insights embedded in Defoe’s journalism rose above the level ofpolemic and that he should be considered one of the most important his-torical thinkers in Britain between James Harrington (1611–77) and DavidHume (1711–76).

Defoe’s role as an historical thinker has been overshadowed by hiscurrent reputation as both a novelist and journalist. As Pocock has longargued, historical thought is not the same thing as historical writing andthe historical consciousness of an age can be found in many other kinds oftexts.9 This interpretation therefore fits Defoe into a scenario of intellectualdevelopment different from another important one described by PhilipHicks – the attempt by various contemporaries of Defoe to write a narrativeof great men and great actions to rival the works of Thucydides, Livy, or Tacitus.10 It relates Defoe instead to a tradition of structural historicalanalysis pioneered by authors like Sir John Davies (1569–1626) and James Harrington that was later to be labelled ‘philosophical history’ in thehands of such authors as Adam Ferguson (1723–1816) and John Millar(1735–1801).11 This book is, however, not about the development ofgenres, whether history or the novel.12 It is about the centrality of Defoe’sTrinitarianism for understanding his views on a great variety of issuesincluding his understanding of the past and its relationship to the present.It seeks to correct the image of Defoe as a spokesman for modernity, manyaspects of which he found disturbing and dangerous, though in writingabout them he may have ironically contributed to their viability.

This is the first study by an historian in many years to examine thewhole of the Defoe canon. Its evidential base is, deliberately, the full rangeof Defoe’s writings although even a much longer monograph could notmention, let alone adequately address, every one of Defoe’s works. Themethod employed is the exegesis of texts in their chronological succession;each chapter focuses on Defoe’s writings on an event or cluster of events,and the ways in which they shaped his thoughts. This method is associatedwith the ‘Cambridge school’ in the history of ideas. Part of the aim of thisbook is to provide a methodological bridge between discourse analysis, nor-mally applied only to a few selected texts, and the social history of popularculture expressed more appropriately in the vast range of less famous con-temporary writings. Scholarly writing on the history of political thought inparticular has moved from a focus on ‘great thinkers’ and ‘key texts’ to the

4 Daniel Defoe

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retrieval of contexts and the discerning within them of languages or dis-courses. Thanks to these methodological developments, it is argued here,Defoe has emerged from being a figure held to be emblematic of what were(often wrongly) taken to be the characteristics of his age to stand partlyoutside them and often to be a critic of them. No apology is offered for anapproach that is characteristic of an historian rather than of other dis-ciplines. Instead, it is hoped that this study may be able to contribute tothe work of scholars in other fields, for example by showing the inappro-priateness of seeing John Locke under every bed and of tracing concernswith credit primarily to the development of capitalism.

Nor does this study prioritize the same texts or methods privileged by literary scholars. Here Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and The FortunateMistress (Roxana) feature as three works among many, and not as peaks ofachievement to which all other of Defoe’s writings must be related. Thetexts discussed here are the ones that best show how, in dealing withchange, Defoe came to conceptualize historical development in new ways.This book is also written in the wake of the contribution to Defoe studiesmade by P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens in slimming down the distendedcanon of anonymous writings previously attributed to Defoe over the yearson inadequate grounds.13 It is possible to disagree with some of their de-attributions but this study deliberately draws from the canon as narrowlydefined by these two scholars. Before their work, the inflated nature of thecanon provided some scholars with reasons to see Defoe as essentiallyunprincipled; as a man so proud of his journalistic gifts that he was willingto write on both sides in many controversies;14 as a proof, therefore, of thepriority of new commercialism over old principle. It is certainly true thatDefoe was an active journalist at a time of rapid expansion of the newspa-per and periodical press.15 It is also the case that in navigating throughrather choppy political waters, especially in the wake of the Treaty ofUtrecht, he had to trim his sails. This was the exception rather than therule and, as we appreciate more clearly exactly what Defoe wrote, itbecomes possible to recover the nature of the principled commitmentsfrom which he never retreated. This study contributes to that endeavour.

These remarks on academic method should not suggest that Defoeaddressed an academic audience. In the 1680s, Defoe, a London Dissenterin his twenties, seemed set on a career as a merchant; only gradually was hedrawn into a parallel, then separate career as a polemical writer as thewidening conflicts initiated by the Glorious Revolution caught up area afterarea of English life. Defoe had already been made acutely conscious of thethreats James II posed to his world.16 James’s use of his royal prerogative asa means of granting religious toleration not only failed to assuage Defoe, italarmed him. He was aware that the king’s chosen methods of politicalmanipulation, including the resumption of corporate charters, posed athreat to the City of London in which Defoe the merchant hoped to make

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his career. To such a man, the Revolution of 1688 could only appear notmerely as a defence of England’s limited constitution, but as a Protestantmiracle. William III naturally stepped into the role of a Biblical warriorking, one that perfectly fitted Defoe’s conceptions about kingship itself andEngland’s place in the world. Far from being a champion of democraticprinciples, Defoe embraced the Old Testament ideal of the warrior king,peopling his pantheon with figures like David and Gustavus Adolphus.17

Indeed the whole Defoe oeuvre is in some way a commentary on what wasthenceforth known as ‘the Revolution’; and, as historians are beginning toappreciate, that event was often seen in the widest eschatological, and evensometimes apocalyptic, terms.18

Chapter 1 looks at Defoe’s contribution to the proliferation of economicliterature in the 1690s and re-examines his role in the standing armydebate of 1697–8. It argues that his concern for the state of England’s mili-tary forces first focused on the navy rather than the army. In his Essay uponProjects (1697), he argued that shipping losses in the war against France haddriven many merchants into unwise speculative ventures and contributedto the great projecting fever of the age. Emphasizing the difference betweenproper projecting, or real inventions, and mere financial speculation, heblamed the growth of the latter on the previous Stuart regime. He looked toWilliam III not only as the providential deliverer of 1688 but as a socialreformer, able to cure England’s ills by his role as royal patron of such pro-jects as an academy of learning and a military academy. Partly this schemeexpressed Defoe’s concern at the innovations in language that were threat-ening the foundations of a faith grounded on unchanging meanings, butthe problems these academies would address were also problems associatedwith the failings of the English elite. Defoe argued that the gentry had notadapted to the demands of professional soldiering or to the cultural imper-atives associated with ‘politeness’ and the ‘reformation of manners’, butmight still do so.19 Only at the very end of his career, in The CompleatEnglish Gentleman, would he accept that the gentry had conclusively failedto accept new responsibilities in a post-feudal age.

The early sensitivity to technological and social change reflected in theEssay upon Projects was more fully expressed in Defoe’s contributions to thestanding army debate. After the death of Prince Rupert in 1682, Defoe sawproper projecting as a orphan, in need of a father figure; this William couldbe, but only if the nation were properly defended. Opponents of the stand-ing army, men like John Trenchard, had another defining demerit inDefoe’s eyes: from this early stage he identified them as Socinians.20 Thisperception initiated a determining element in Defoe’s thought, for untilthe end of his life his commitments on a host of social and economic ques-tions, and his perception of the motivations of his opponents, were drawnfrom theological analysis. Even now, he displayed a capacity for linkingsocial and economic changes to those in moral behaviour. Defoe had not

6 Daniel Defoe

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yet worked out these themes into an historical system, but his theologicalpreoccupations were already dominant; so too was the tension between hisdesire to preserve the eschatological framework of Old Dissent and todefend it by using more modern kinds of historical argument that meshedwith his Baconian belief that exploration, discovery, exchange, andimprovement were part of God’s providential design for mankind. The‘redemptionist tone’ that has been found in Baconianism had a clear reso-nance for Defoe, the orthodox Dissenter, the believer in the compatibilityof providentialism and the new science. Yet this new world, unfolding forDefoe, was suddenly challenged before it had time to gel by William III’sdeath in 1702. A Tory backlash seemed to call all in question again. Byunderstanding that original sin, repentance, and the Atonement providedfor Defoe the very structure of human history, one can better see why occa-sional conformity, the subject of Chapter 2, was such a vital issue to him.Defoe now extended his providential perspective on trade and improve-ment to the religious sphere. As his hopes for ‘comprehension’ (the widen-ing of the Church of England’s terms of membership to include orthodoxDissenters) receded, he turned instead to a commercial metaphor: denomi-nations should peacefully coexist and compete only in piety. For severalreasons, he urged, occasional conformity (the practice whereby Dissentersoccasionally took Anglican communion in order to qualify themselves for office) served Dissent badly. Although his condemning this practiceangered many of his co-religionists, Defoe sought to preserve the moralhigh ground for orthodox Dissent. His campaign revealed his principledcommitments: his premises were Trinitarian and even Erastian in acknowl-edging the validity of an established Church, but resolutely against some ofits practices.

He deplored the way in which the practice of occasional conformity wasnot only inexpedient but literally sinful. It also added to the underminingof meaning and reliability that he saw around him. Communion, taken forpolitical reasons, could only imply a misuse of language, the necessarymedium for human exchange. It was a commitment, again, that allied himwith the ‘new science’ and its concern for accuracy of expression. Defoe’sconcern with epistemological stability was thus made even more manifest:occasional conformity threatened not just the numbers of his denomina-tion, but meaning itself. His term for this was ‘non-signification’, and itechoed concerns first expressed in his Essay upon Projects of 1697. Stirred to passion, he published his most bitter satire, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, landed in prison, and was rescued from it by a politician,Robert Harley, in whose service he now emerged as a polemical writer parexcellence.

Yet he was a polemical writer with principled commitments that hadconsiderable consistency throughout his career. Chapter 3 reassesses JureDivino, Defoe’s most important statement of his political philosophy. This

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takes the unexpected form not of a treatise but of an epic poem, and theinterpretation offered here helps to explain why. It would have been oddfor Defoe to express his position in verse had it been based on Locke’s TwoTreatises, as recent scholarship has taken it to be; but as a sacred drama ofdivine right monarchy, the result of sin and the Devil, an epic poem makesmuch more sense. It shows Defoe’s conception of secular history to havebeen set within the divine history of the world, and therefore shows hisconception of political rights and duties to be profoundly related to hisexegesis of God’s designs for man in the present and hereafter. Jure Divinotherefore owes more to John Milton than to John Locke, and the contrastsbetween Defoe and Locke, which were greater than the similarities, areexplored in this chapter. The early twentieth-century view of Locke as asecular contractarian can hardly be reconciled with the world-view ofDefoe the Dissenter. Yet the most recent scholarship on Locke21 also provesa fundamental incompatibility between these two authors since Locke’sSocinianism placed him at the opposite end of a spectrum to Defoe’sTrinitarianism. To set out his vision in Jure Divino, Defoe was drawn not toa Lockeian state of nature but to a long historical retrospect that includedliteral historical consideration of the Devil’s role in instituting idolatry andtyranny together.22 He saw the doctrines of divine right and passive obedi-ence as human inventions, encouraged by the Devil and contradicting thedivine design. This design embraced man’s whole life on earth, seen byDefoe as man’s opportunity not only to prosper but to repent. Divine rightmonarchy, by threatening life, was not just a mortal peril: it threatened theability of men to develop their spiritual life to achieve salvation and theirduty to take responsibility for their own government.

Such lofty sentiments did not release Defoe from his daily duties as apolitical writer and agent; on the contrary, his service to Harley took himto Scotland and the debate over union with England that raged there in1706–7. Defoe realized that the Union would have to be not merely a tradetreaty, not merely an arrangement of legislatures, but an Erastian accom-modation on the grandest scale between two national churches. Defoe wasenthusiastic about making this ecclesiastical accommodation work.Chapter 4 thus highlights his goal of building a pan-Protestant alliance, anideal present throughout his writings. His rationale for the preservation of aseparate Scottish Church similarly expressed his previously developed beliefin the merits of competition between denominations. However, his mostoriginal insights appeared not in his folio History of the Union (1709), but ina series of pamphlets. As a journalist, Defoe addressed a newly central‘public sphere’, but it was not the rational public sphere as identified byJürgen Habermas, rather a sphere identified by competing claims of ulti-mate values.23 As we shall see, books entitled Histories are not the obviousor best sites for the development of historical thinking, certainly for Defoeand perhaps for his age; in this book the growth and refinement of his his-

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torical vision are traced in a wide range of works, often produced in theheat of controversy.

Commerce and conquest provided another dialectic for Defoe and illumi-nated the problems that the Union sought to overcome. For Defoe, an ageof conquest was giving way to an age of commerce, which was itself anexpression of the divine order. Where (as Defoe would argue in A GeneralHistory of Discoveries and Improvements) the growth of the wool trade underHenry VII had pointed England to an escape from feudalism, Scotland stillbuilt its national identity around a martial tradition and a baronial culturewhich had to be renounced if progress was to be achieved. This was, then,an application to Scotland of Defoe’s repudiation of the civic humanistideal in the English debate over standing armies. Unique among the Uniondebaters, Defoe sought to construct a shared British identity which wasboth commercial and Protestant. Defoe’s vision of a free, Protestant, com-mercial world order, depending centrally on Protestantism, was an intellec-tual formation that has recently been acknowledged to characterize aunified British empire as it emerged in the wake of the Union,24 but forDefoe this common purpose could only be expressed if both nationalchurches were Trinitarian.

On his return from Scotland, Defoe did not enter an eirenic realm of reli-gious cooperation, but one more bitterly polarized than ever by the reac-tion for and against the firebrand Anglican clergyman, Henry Sacheverell.His provocative sermon on 5 November 1709 and subsequent impeach-ment by the Whig ministry at the bar of the House of Lords leads us toChapter 5, which reaches forward to Defoe’s defence of the Treaty ofUtrecht (1713) and his General History of Trade (1713). Sacheverell’sinflammatory language in his sermon, explicitly an attack on religious tol-eration but implicitly a condemnation of the Revolution itself, and hisexplaining away that language at his trial, raised again for Defoe theproblem of preserving the stability of meaning that lay behind words.Chapter 5 explores how credit too became an issue in these years as Whigsthreatened that public credit depended upon their being in power andTories sought to end a war which they argued was benefiting the ‘moniedinterest’ at their expense. Defoe sought to defend the non-partisan natureof credit, its necessity for prosecuting war against France and for keepingthe wheels of commerce running smoothly. He expressed his concern, ashe had done in the 1690s, that speculation in stocks and bonds was divert-ing investment away from the manufacture of and trade in real goods.

The polemical purpose behind Defoe’s General History of Trade was thesupport of a treaty of commerce with France associated with the Treaty ofUtrecht. The chapter explores the continuing development of Defoe’s his-torical thinking as he presented trade as the primary vehicle for drivingsocieties from rudeness to refinement, language we associate with philo-sophical history and enlightened theories of progress. The text explores the

Introduction 9

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greater and lesser impact that Rome and Phoenicia had on the British Islesbut in 1713 Defoe had not yet reached the point in his analysis, which wasto come in the 1720s, in which Rome represented the evils of conquestwhile Carthage fulfilled the divine mandate of commercial expansion andexchange.

Chapter 6 focuses on Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), emphasizing thefierce theological debates which furnished its most important contexts andthe Trinitarian doctrine this most famous of Defoe’s works was designed todefend. Apart from the furores triggered by Arthur Bury’s The Naked Gospel(1690), John Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious (1696) and MatthewTindal’s writings in the 1700s, challenges to Trinitarianism from Socinians,Arians or Deists had been intermittent; yet from the 1710s, assaults onrevealed religion, the divinity of Christ, miracles, and the titles of churchesassumed a significant and growing importance.25 The chapter considersDefoe’s debate with Toland in 1717, a chief spokesman for natural religion.The major controversy of the moment, however, was that triggered by, and named after Benjamin Hoadly, Bishop of Bangor, who later that year preached before the new king a sermon that seemed to abdicate forAnglicanism any claim to divine authority. Toland and Hoadly were widelyseen as offering rationales for a programme of Whig reform that wouldabandon the Athanasian Creed and the doctrine of the Trinity as criteria ofacceptability. In this, the established Church had the most to lose, but theoffensive cut at the very Trinitarianism that Defoe saw as essential commonground with Dissent. Religion, for Defoe, was not to be reduced to the levelof ‘opinion’. One response was his Continuation of Letters written by aTurkish Spy (1718), which included a sustained series of attacks on the idol-atries of Roman Catholicism and the idolatries Defoe associated with thefreethinkers’ worship of reason. The Church of England survived the chal-lenges of heterodoxy but Defoe’s own religious community was perma-nently damaged. The controversy over religious subscriptions to objectivestatements of belief came to a head in his denomination at the Salters’ Hall conference in 1719, and resulted in schism among the ranks ofPresbyterians.

Scholars have often attended to the role of religion in Robinson Crusoe,but have usually chosen to focus on Providence and various Puritan literarygenres which helped to shape Defoe’s story. This chapter accepts theseapproaches but supplements them. It points instead to the novel’sChristological centre, the triumph of revealed over natural religion and theworship of false gods, and the triumph of Providence in leading Crusoe toChristian redemption. These themes are even more unavoidable when thefirst volume of Robinson Crusoe is read with the second and third volumesof the trilogy, although these volumes were once influentially dismissed byscholars as afterthoughts by Defoe and as his attempts to capitalize on thesuccess of the first volume.26 The analysis offered here goes beyond the

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recent tendency to see religion in internal or psychological terms, impor-tant especially for literary scholars in their treatment of the rise of thenovel, and recaptures Defoe’s own understanding of the issue of redemp-tion as an objectively theological one, dependent especially on the doctrineof the Trinity, under explicit and fraught challenge from this decadeforward. Providence is a central theme in Robinson Crusoe, but it makes themost sense as a series of divine warnings pointing man in the direction ofrepentance. These preoccupations explain the prominence given involumes 2 and 3 to the theme of idolatry and Crusoe’s attempts to deni-grate and destroy idols, which stand in these cases for natural religion andthe superstitions to which Defoe believed they led. Defoe wrote the Crusoetrilogy in defence of the doctrine of the Trinity, the historical framework of revelation and redemption, and to apply this moral not to a remote tropical island but to his own.

Defoe’s fears for the disintegration of meaning in public discourse anddisplay were confirmed yet again by the calico controversy and the SouthSea Bubble, subjects of Chapter 7. This chapter also explores Defoe’s analy-sis of two more historical changes that took place in his own lifetime, themonetization of family relationships and the breakdown of family govern-ment. Moll Flanders and Roxana, one saved, the other damned, exemplifyin fiction two possible responses to the challenges of the world Defoe nowperceived around him. His Complete English Tradesman also embodies theseconcerns, including the way in which impersonal social forces were pro-moting vice through the spread of the consumption of luxuries, theerosion of family government, and the declining notion of one’s providen-tial ‘calling’ or station. As Defoe sought ways of understanding thesetrends, he developed increasingly sophisticated ideas in a mode which wemight recognize as social and economic history. Here again, Defoe was notquite the herald of ‘the modern’ that he was once pictured as being. He sawhistorical change but wanted to invoke his religious belief against it, atension evident throughout this book.

As in the 1690s, when he saw the gentry failing under William III, so inthe 1720s Defoe expressed the same critique, but now set against a muchmore historically developed sense of the changes that the gentry werefailing to respond to, a theme developed further in Chapter 8. This chapteraddresses commerce and gentility, especially in relation to obvious andgrowing social mobility. These observations and concerns about emulativeconsumption were not unique to Defoe; but he was special in the evolu-tionary historical analysis he developed in response to them. Defoe’s TourThro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6) began as a Baconian history,but revealed his preoccupation with structural change in the present andthe historic origins of that change. His Plan of the English Commerce (1728)set out a scenario for the development of English economic history dif-ferent from that of the civic humanists; they pointed to the decline of

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military tenures, Defoe to the state-sponsored rise of manufactures. Before,the gentry had had a military purpose; in the new order, the gentry hadnot discovered a new role, as he complained in The Compleat EnglishGentleman. From his reliance on the human agency of William III as aninstigator of social reform in the 1690s, Defoe had slowly turned to a senseof broad, historically explained social trends that were transforming theworld in which the ‘born gentleman’ and the ‘bred gentleman’ acted. Fromsuch present-day concerns, we again see Defoe anticipating the kind of ‘philosophical history’ that was to be a leading component of Enlighten-ment thought. However, to reconcile land and trade involved, for Defoe,not just showing their interaction since the reign of Henry VII, but con-vincing the gentry that trade was part of Britain’s providential destiny. Themere veneration of gentility was, to Defoe, a sort of idolatry.

The novels for which Defoe is so justly famous, especially RobinsonCrusoe, Moll Flanders, and Roxana, were published between 1719 and 1724.He continued to be a prolific writer until his death in 1731 but non-specialistshave tended to ignore his later works because it is assumed he wrotenothing of equal stature to the fictions which continue to be read to thisday. The writings Defoe produced in the last years of his life, however, areboth voluminous and crucial to understanding the preoccupations whichhad driven him throughout his career. Not surprisingly, they shed light onmany of the themes in the novels themselves; but they also demonstrateDefoe’s sophistication as an historical thinker. Chapter 9 examines Defoe’sreactions to the continued growth of heterodoxy in the 1720s and how heconceptualized the past in order to understand and combat this develop-ment. It focuses on four 400-page books, hitherto categorized as Defoe’swritings on ‘the occult’ but rightly understood, in the interpretive frame-work posed here, as sacred history, accounts of the Devil’s dealings withmankind down the ages. Here Defoe had to balance between dispellingsuperstitious images of Satan and conveying the Devil’s role as a force inhuman history. Where God encouraged commerce and exchange in theworld, the Devil encouraged conquest and idolatry.

Defoe laboured to hold on to providential interpretations of humanhistory, but the scenarios of long-term socio-economic development thathe produced in order to do so paradoxically helped to promote the verythings against which he fought. This tension between modes of explana-tion is one of the key themes in Defoe’s intellectual biography and onereason for his fascination. Defoe’s accounts of the history of his own daywere located within a much larger framework which linked the lives of hiscontemporaries with biblical history and with the whole frame of God’sprovidential intentions for mankind. Defoe accepted an idea of progressbecause he believed in the Baconian project of the discovery of nature’ssecrets (God’s secrets buried in nature) and the improvement of the world.God intended man to engage with the world in this progressive enterprise.

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However, this appreciation of exchange, trade, communication, sociability,and improvement was, for Defoe, located not in the freethinking realm ofopinion but within the older Dissenting understanding of God’s design forman. Defoe’s aims throughout his career, then, were to defend revelationand redemption and the eschatological order which encouraged exchangeand enrichment in this world and the promise of life everlasting in thenext. This eschatological order was the abiding architecture of his mentalworld.

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1Establishing a Voice: Defoe’s FirstSteps from Failed Tradesman toSuccessful Author

i. Introduction

From its inception, the Revolution of 1688–9 attracted public debate.Within a generation of the civil war, English men and women once againfound themselves needing to explain, defend, or denounce a series of dra-matic events by which one head of their body politic had come to bereplaced by another. Historians ever since have continued to debate thepolitical and constitutional meanings of the ‘Glorious Revolution’,1 butrecent scholarship suggests a greater degree of agreement about its eco-nomic and financial consequences.2 The Revolution had committed theEnglish people to a series of expensive and protracted wars against France,in part because the king they had just ousted, James II, had put himselfunder Louis XIV’s protection, and in part because the king they had justcrowned, William III, was determined that his new kingdoms should assisthim militarily in his role as the guardian of Protestant Europe against theambitions of Catholic France. The increasing demands of modern warfarestimulated various industries, provoked high levels of taxation, and neces-sitated financial experimentation and speculation by both individuals andthe state.

For Defoe, a London Dissenter, the Revolution of 1688–9 was not just asecular political adjustment, but a providential delivery. He and most of hisco-religionists had been sceptical of James II’s offer of religious tolerationby royal prerogative,3 concerned about the king’s pro-Catholic policies, andalarmed by the crown’s increasing interest and interference in their politi-cal liberties. In his twenties, Defoe had thought the threat of popery andtyranny real enough to risk participating in the Duke of Monmouth’sabortive rebellion in 1685. Not surprisingly, the expectations he attachedto Monmouth were soon transferred to a more plausible incarnation of abiblical warrior king, William III.4 Defoe believed the accession to thethrone of William and Mary in 1689 would open a host of religious, politi-cal, and economic possibilities for England and for himself. As war dragged

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on and opposition to the new regime grew, many of these possibilitiesremained frustratingly unfulfilled but Defoe’s worship of William asEngland’s and Europe’s Protestant deliverer never diminished.

Others did not share Defoe’s optimism. Fuelled by the belief that awartime economy was multiplying the channels of crown patronage andinfluence, thereby threatening the balanced constitution, a ‘Country inter-est’ quickly began to coalesce. Its anxieties about corruption intensifiedwith the founding of the Bank of England in 1694. Although the govern-ment experimented with many financial schemes to fund the war includ-ing lotteries, the issuing of bonds guaranteed by future government taxrevenues has rightly been seen as an iconic moment.5 It provided themeans by which military expenditure could be exponentially increased butit also meant that the Bank’s investors had entered into a new kind offinancial partnership with the state. For the security of the nation to haveto depend upon an edifice of public credit was seen by many of Defoe’scontemporaries as new, disturbing, and revolutionary. In practical terms, tomany of the gentry it appeared that the increase in land taxes wasfinancing in perpetuity a national debt and an army of dangerous propor-tions, headed by a regime of dubious legitimacy, for the benefit of a newand vile monied interest.

However self-interested this anxiety may seem, the arguments attackingthe nexus of court, army, and creditor, and the vehemence with whichthey were made, cannot be fully explained without understanding the cul-tural tradition of civic humanism which helped inform them, a traditionclassically formulated by John Pocock. Idealizing the Roman republicancitizen and accepting the feudal freeholder as his native counterpart, thistradition asserted that liberty was best exemplified and preserved by thosemen whose propertied independence and virtu enabled them to defend thecommonwealth, with arms when necessary. The crisis of authority betweenCharles I and Parliament had compelled the previous generation to do justthat. Now the landed gentry, the natural heirs to this tradition, feared thatWilliam’s standing army, financed by new and more dependent forms ofwealth, might permanently tip the constitutional balance in the king’sfavour, making their political role obsolete.

By 1697, war had exhausted William’s troops and the country’s willing-ness to pay for them. While Parliament had been able to push the king toan early peace, William, convinced of the continued threat posed by LouisXIV, did not wish to disband his entire force. A sophisticated politicaldebate, known as the ‘standing army controversy’, ensued, carried onwithin parliamentary doors and without in the newly emancipated andvolatile world of the press.6 In a dextrous campaign, the opposition party,aided by a club of writers with republican sympathies, argued that standingarmies were a threat to liberty and that the English nation was bestdefended by county militias mustered by the landed gentry. In late autumn

Establishing a Voice: Defoe’s First Steps 15

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of 1697 Defoe published the first of three pamphlets attacking the opposi-tion and defending William’s need to maintain a professional fightingforce. In this context, Defoe has appeared as a modern court Whig, who, incontradistinction to the civic humanists, argued that historical changeshad made standing armies imperative and political liberty a reality.

This role, however, does not fully explain Defoe’s own preoccupations.Nor was country adherence to the ideal of ancient and gothic libertydefended by a citizen-militia the chief stimulus to his developing historicalsensibilities. It was, in fact, the inadequacy of England’s naval rather thanits land forces which first sparked Defoe’s historical and sociological specu-lations in the 1690s and these appeared in his first full-length book, AnEssay upon Projects, published in January 1697, almost a full year before thestanding army controversy. His previous publications consisted of only twopamphlets, one concerning the position of his fellow Dissenters underJames II, the other about misconduct in a London mayoral election, butlike the Essay upon Projects these were published anonymously.7 In 1697Defoe had not yet established himself as a writer: if he had any publicreputation at all, it was that of a failed businessman.

War had made the 1690s a decade of unprecedented financial innovationbut also one of greater risk and instability in trade. In the first years of King William’s war, the English fleet was ill-prepared to meet the chal-lenges posed by French forces at sea. A major naval defeat in 1690 hadgiven Louis XIV’s fleet control of the Channel and French privateers andwarships harassed English merchants around the globe. The year before,Defoe had joined other merchants in petitioning their new king to sendfrigates ‘for the Security of these Coasts and subduing the French at Canadaby sea’.8 His fears were realized some weeks later when a French man-of-warcaptured a ship in which he had a financial interest. The delay of otherships and other cargoes took their toll, forcing Defoe into court, into debt,and into increasingly desperate ventures in an attempt to keep his sinkingcredit afloat. Eventually, the once-promising young tradesman, liveryman,and freeman of the City broke to the tune of £17,000 and entered debtor’sprison in October 1692. The risks of wartime shipping were not wholly toblame. Inexperience and careless, even shady, transactions were at theheart of his failure. It is unknown to what extent he acknowledged this inprivate; in public, Defoe hoped for relief under a proposed ‘MerchantInsurers’ bill, citing losses incurred during the war with France.9

ii. War, merchants, and the projecting age: the argument ofDefoe’s Essay upon Projects

Some time during his desperate days in 1692, Defoe began writing whatfive years later would become his first book-length publication, An Essayupon Projects, though much of the text was completed between 1694 and

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1696.10 Crises in public, corporate, and private credit, a massive recoinageprogramme, and the establishment of the Bank and the Board of Trade hadgenerated not only a projecting fever but a deluge of tracts on these andother economic issues. The Essay began with an analysis and history of thewrong kind of projecting followed by a number of Defoe’s own ideas forprojects of the right sort, ones designed to benefit the nation and the livesof its citizens. His schemes for improving England’s financial, social, andeducational infrastructures were directed towards preserving the fabric ofsociety in an age of war and economic dislocation. Premised upon a reasser-tion of older forms of communitarian and statist paternal support, theseproposals also revealed strikingly modern assumptions about the degree towhich society and the state were constructable or projectable.

Defoe’s publisher, Thomas Cockerill, was one of a community of pub-lishers located in The Poultry, a street near the stock market, which was dis-tinguished by ‘a remarkable density of Presbyterian and Nonconformistconnections’.11 Committed to publishing Nonconformist works, the Poultrystationers became commercial innovators as well (in part because of theirneed to adopt various cost- and risk-sharing practices) and may have beenparticularly responsive to the growing demand for economic literature inthe 1690s.12 Defoe was a Presbyterian of orthodox and mainstream Calvinistviews. This position had economic consequences as inescapably as did thetheological commitments of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuryevangelicals.13 Presbyterianism was, however, also compatible with otherintellectual influences, most prominently in Defoe’s case with the newscience and natural law theory.14

The work of Ilse Vickers has convincingly established Defoe’s pedigree asa ‘third-generation Baconian’. Defoe imbibed Baconian principles as astudent at Charles Morton’s Dissenting Academy, principles which contin-ued to inform Defoe’s works throughout his life.15 Defoe’s debt to thisintellectual tradition was revealed at length in later publications, but wasdisclosed for the first time in the Essay upon Projects. The Essay’s proposalsreflected a Baconian insistence on numerical calculation, the importance ofexperimentation and testing, and a belief that advancements in learningand technology should contribute to public benefit and the general good ofmankind. Honest projects were those that resulted in the invention of atangible product from which the projector could and the nation shouldprosper. Defoe was keen to distinguish these sorts of endeavours from mereprojecting, or speculation, which created no real product but ‘rais’d thefancies of Credulous People to such a height, that meerly on the shadow ofExpectation, they … part with their Money for Shares in a New-Nothing.’16

The Essay also maintained the basic Baconian classification which dividedthe world of trade into products of nature, or the search for and procure-ment of raw materials, and products of manufacture, or the refinement ofraw materials into finished goods.17 Direct investment in discoveries or


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improvements was therefore a valid endeavour. Speculating in stocks andshares, the tokens of direct investment, did not fit easily into Bacon’sbinary system and this may be one reason why thinkers like Defoe regardedstock-jobbing as a pernicious practice. Rather than erect a more modernframework to incorporate these new forms of exchange, however, Defoeclung to the old model, using Bacon’s classifications even more explicitly,for example, in his General History of Trade (1713) and General History ofDiscoveries and Improvements (1725–6).18 Investment and credit, Defoeinsisted throughout his career, were necessary, even to be encouraged;driving their price up or down for profit was not.

Although some historians believe providentialism was a spent force bythe time of the Restoration, it has recently been argued that the newscience ‘sustained rather than undermined’ it by bolstering the concept offirst and second causes, helping people to clarify their understanding of therelationship between the spiritual and material worlds.19 Defoe explainedthe connection in a pamphlet of 1701 warning the nation not to expectanother miraculous delivery but to prepare for war:

’Tis true God governs the World; and in his government of the World hehas ordered that we should govern ourselves by Reason. God has sub-jected even the ways of his Providence to Rational Methods, andOutward Means agree to it. The great Chain of Causes and Effects is notinterrupted, even by God himself, if it be, it is on ExtraordinaryOccasions, which we call Miracles.20

The world may not have been entirely predictable, but it was projectable;with rational planning and faith in God, one could improve one’s chancesfor peace and prosperity within it, a rule applying to individuals and tosociety as a whole. The practical optimism which makes Defoe’s economicgeneralizations seem over-confident, and his fictional characters so attrac-tive, stems from this core assumption about the omnipresence, but ratio-nality, of Providence. The clearest development of this idea in the Essayupon Projects emerged in a chapter entitled ‘Of Friendly Societies’ in whichDefoe acknowledged the ‘Controverted Point of Predestination’ but insistedthat human beings lived in a world of ‘Second Causes’ and, accordingly,must rationally plan their lives.21

The opening lines of the Essay reveal not only Defoe’s early ability tomake complex theory accessible to a broad spectrum of readers but also theway in which natural law informed his ideas about economic behaviour.‘Necessity, which is allowed to be the Mother of Invention’, he remarked,‘has so violently agitated the Wits of men at this time, that it seems not atall improper, by way of distinction, to call it The Projecting Age.’22 Defoe’sadage spoke to a contemporary debate which resulted in what historianshave identified as a ‘neo-Machiavellian’ theory of political economy.23 It

18 Daniel Defoe

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has been suggested that with the writings of men like William Temple andCharles Davenant trade became recognized as a discourse of raison d’état.Necessity was at the root of both Temple’s analysis of the Dutch miracleand Davenant’s prescription to restrict Irish trade in light of English inter-ests.24 Yet, although Defoe was familiar with Temple’s work and would laterknow of Davenant’s, their works derived from a ‘sceptical humanist’ orMachiavellian tradition while his argument was emphatically a natural lawone.25 Nature, Defoe asserted, had provided other creatures with the meansand instinct for survival but God gave human beings only Reason, whichdid not always guarantee their self-preservation. In times of distress ordanger, men and women might have few options: they might despair andchoose suicide, or turn to crime, breaking civil laws in order ‘to satisfy thatgeneral Law of nature’. More positively, they could choose to struggleagainst adversity and survive by their wits.26 Natural law explained whywar and distress stimulated human ingenuity but it did not delineate theconditions which normally channelled that ingenuity towards the honestinvention of real products and away from speculation born of misplacedconfidence, downright dishonesty, or both. Unhappily for his own age,Defoe concluded, speculative ventures were outnumbering authenticinventions.27 To explain why this might be so and offer a solution, Defoeturned to sociological and historical analysis.

Dissociating himself from the growing opinion that William’s war hadimpoverished the nation at large, Defoe countered, ‘on the contrary, [it] wasnever Richer since it was inhabited’. He blamed not the war, which though‘Dangerous … [was] most Just and Necessary’, but the early ‘Ill Conduct ofMerchants themselves’ who, underestimating the risks, continued to tradebefore the Admiralty could coordinate adequate protection for them. TheHouse of Commons, he added, had acknowledged the problem in its pro-posed bill for the relief of Merchant Insurers.28 In France, he explained, theburden of war fell ‘chiefly on the Poorer sort of People’ while its ‘Gentry andmore capable sort’ found army commissions in times of distress. In England,the victims of war and the ‘more capable sort’ were one and the same, namelyits tradesmen and merchants. Their livelihoods had been most disrupted bywar and, Defoe proclaimed, it was ‘the Merchandizing Part of the World whoindeed may more truly be said to live by their Wits than any people whatso-ever’. Often underrated as commonplace and pedestrian, commerce in factdemanded both creativity and intelligence:

a Merchant sitting at home in his Counting-house, at once converseswith all parts of the known World. This, and Travel, makes a True-bredMerchant the most Intelligent Man in the World, and consequently themost capable, when urg’d by Necessity, to Contrive New Ways to live.And from hence, I humbly conceive, may very properly be deriv’d theProjects, so much the Subject of the present Discourse.


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Reduced, sometimes ruined, by maritime disasters, English merchants,‘prompted by Necessity, [had] rack[ed] their Wits for New Contrivances,New Inventions, New Trades, Stocks Projects, and any thing to retrieve thedesperate Credit of their Fortunes.’29 The chief cause of the general project-ing frenzy of the age was sociological: it was the instinctive response of thatvery segment of English society both hardest hit by wartime losses and dis-tinguished by its routine reliance upon the faculties of calculation andimagination.

Perhaps because he was reluctant to blame the proliferation of unrealisticor fraudulent practices on the desperation of merchants alone or uponwhat he considered a just and necessary war against the forces of poperyand tyranny, Defoe looked to the past in order to discover the origins ofthe wrong sort of projecting, especially its most pernicious variant, stock-jobbing. He traced these origins, predictably enough, to the previous Stuartera. Modern research has documented the way in which Elizabethan use ofpatents to stimulate new industries degenerated into royal favouritism andthe protection of existing concerns under the Stuarts.30 The Essay’s refer-ence to Charles I’s ‘Raising Money without a Parliament, Oppressing byMonopolies, and Privy Seals’ suggests Defoe had some understanding ofthis development but it was not the focus of his analysis.31 Instead, he‘trace[d] the Original of the Projecting Humour that now reigns’ and ‘itsBirth as a Monster’ to the year 1680 and the death of Prince Rupert.32

Rupert had been a successful general, admiral, inventor, and Fellow of theRoyal Society. Despite his Stuart blood, he was also rumoured to have hadstrong Protestant and Whig sympathies. In short, Rupert was just the sortof man Defoe idolized and he credited him with providing England withthe kind of leadership which, in this period, entrepreneurship andadvances in the applied sciences required if they were to benefit the nation.The Essay’s selective retrospect on the 1670s and 1680s also highlightedtechnologies and projects which presented a challenge of one sort oranother to James, Duke of York. Defoe’s conception of technological andcommercial progress was clearly politicized.33

For all its optimistic proposals, the Essay suggested that there needed tobe a renewal of leadership if real improvement and a spirit of genuine inno-vation were to be revitalized. As succeeding chapters will emphasize,Defoe’s religious and Baconian principles encouraged him to conceptualizethe history of the world as a narrative of commerce and improvement.There was a redemptionist tone to much Baconian writing about trade andtechnology and it is not surprising in the 1690s to find Defoe looking toWilliam III to deliver the nation not just from popery and tyranny butfrom its present economic and social difficulties as well. Williamites likeDefoe believed their new king had been chosen by Providence to upholdProtestantism and defend English liberties. Throughout William’s reign, thecourt organized a multimedia campaign depicting the king as a godly

20 Daniel Defoe

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champion who waged war abroad and sponsored moral reform at home.34

Defoe contributed to the creation of this Davidic image and it, in turn,shaped the role which Defoe projected for William in the Essay. This rolewas one which combined the attributes of the Christian warrior king andpatron of the advancement of learning and the return of projecting proper.The Essay’s many proposals for social and economic reform included thecreation of three different academies.35 Defoe’s idea for an academydevoted to women’s education has received the most scholarly attentionbut the two other academies speak more directly to his central preoccupa-tions. The first was a society to encourage ‘Polite Learning’, inspired by theAcademy of Paris but with an added emphasis on moral rectitude; thesecond was an academy for ‘Military Studies’, which he deemed ‘the mostNoble and useful Proposal in this Book’.36 Both of these academies, asDefoe envisioned them, had William III as their chief benefactor.

iii. William III: patron of polite learning

A number of important discourses converge in Defoe’s proposal for Williamto establish a society for the cultivation of language and learning inEngland. First, Defoe’s call for royal patronage suggests a Baconianconfidence in the state sponsorship of learning, although, given the appli-cation of science and experimentation to the art of war, William’s role asBaconian patron is perhaps more conspicuous as head of the militaryacademy. Second, the proposal may also be seen as part of a Nonconformistcampaign for the ‘reformation of manners’ which had begun as anAnglican condemnation of ‘profaneness and immorality’ in the Restorationbut became increasingly associated with Dissenting initiatives for reform inthe 1690s.37 Nonconformity also informed Defoe’s refashioning of theDavidic king as patron of military and moral learning. Third, many aspectsof the proposal demonstrate Defoe’s appropriation of the cultural paradigmknown as ‘politeness’, another discourse associated with Restoration Toryculture which was transformed into a Whig idiom by the third Earl ofShaftesbury and by journalists and men of letters in the late seventeenthand early eighteenth centuries.38 Politeness was an ethos for gentlemen andits central preoccupation in this period became the refinement of discourse,especially in conversation.

Defoe began his chapter ‘Of Academies’ by lamenting the small numberof them in England, a situation he attributed not to a lack of public interestbut to a lack of public leadership. The Royal Society had been founded in1660 but its focus was the natural sciences and it lacked a state endow-ment. In contrast, he noted, France enjoyed an illustrious academy, sup-ported by royal patronage, and dedicated to both the sciences, arts, andliterature which had helped to establish French as the universal language inChristendom.39 On one level, his choice of the Academy of Paris as the


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epitome of learning was part of a wider recognition of French culturalhegemony in this period. Like other English men and women, he couldcondemn French popery, wooden shoes, and the ambitions of universalmonarchy in one breath and grudgingly admire the achievements of LouisXIV and Richelieu in the next. In fact, Defoe named Richelieu as anotherexample of the kind of leader or ‘Genius’ he had in mind. Like Rupert,Richelieu had demonstrated that projects of national importance, in what-ever field, required encouragement from the top. A national academy oflearning patronized by the king, he asserted, would give William as greatan ‘Opportunity to darken the Glory of the French King in Peace, as he hasby his daring attempts in the War’.40

It was not unusual to consider the court as the promoter of politenessand learning but by the end of the seventeenth century this view hadevolved into a kind of cultural royalism championed by Tories in order toimpugn Whig enthusiasm and boorishness. Whigs countercharged thatcourt culture was not only absolutist but artificial: inimical to both libertyand true sociability. Like Shaftesbury, Defoe identified flattery as the court’schief affliction but whereas Shaftesbury sought to erect a ‘post-courtly’culture,41 Defoe was content to rely on the court-oriented system as long asit was in safe hands. William had already proven himself ‘by the Steps ofdangerous Virtue’ and was ‘above the Touch of Flattery’.42

Defoe’s suggestions regarding the academy’s aims, activities, and mem-bership reveal some of his central cultural concerns. The purpose of thesociety, he explained, was

to encourage Polite Learning, to polish and refine the English Tongue,and advance the so much neglected Faculty of Correct Language, toestablish Purity and Propriety of Stile, and to purge it from all theIrregular Additions that Ignorance and Affectation have introduc’d; andall those Innovations in Speech, if I may call them such, which someDogmatic Writers have the Confidence to foster upon their NativeLanguage, as if their Authority were sufficient to make their own Fancylegitimate.43

Specifically, he advocated a programme of lectures and essays on all aspectsof writing and speaking which would encourage ‘Propriety, Purity, and …Politeness’ and banish ‘Pride and Pedantry’. With sufficient authority andreputation, an English academy might ‘preside with a Sort of Judicatureover the Learning of the Age’, censuring those writers who ranged beyondthe bounds of good taste and good sense.44

Royal patronage would naturally endow the academy with great author-ity and reputation but its prestige and vitality would also depend upon thequality of its members. Defoe suggested that membership be ‘whollycompos’d of Gentlemen’, with twelve places reserved for the Nobility,

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twelve for ‘Private Gentlemen’, and a ‘Class of Twelve to be left open formeer Merit, let it be found in who or what sort it would’ as long as theyhad ‘done something eminent to deserve it’. Tellingly, he recommendedthe academy restrict or exclude from membership ‘meer Learned Men andGraduates in the last Degree of Study, whose English has been far fromPolite, full of Stiffness and Affectation, hard Words, and long unusualCoupling of Syllables and Sentences … In short, There should be room inthis Society for neither Clergyman, Physician, or Lawyer.’45 Defoe was quickto acknowledge these professions as ‘Honorable’ and their practitionerslearned – a few of them even ‘Men of Stile and Language, Great masters ofEnglish’ – but their disciplines ‘prescribe Habits of Speech to them Peculiarto their Practice, and prejudicial to the Study I speak of’.46 An importantgoal of the campaign for politeness, especially for Shaftesbury, was torescue philosophy and learning from the control of the Church whoseauthoritarian ideals inhibited equality and sociability.47 The scholars, grad-uates, and professionals Defoe disparaged were the products of those twogreat Anglican preserves, Oxford and Cambridge, and ‘tho’ much might besaid here concerning Universities in general’, Defoe confined himself toremarking ‘the two great Seminaries we have, are without comparison theGreatest, [though] I won’t say the Best in the World’.48

Polite discourse excluded clerical pedantry and professional jargon butwhat about the perspiring prose of a tradesman-cum-pamphleteer trying tomake ends meet? Defoe was not a gentleman but a ‘cit’ whose Londonlandscape was one of warehouses in its mercantile core, not townhouses inits fashionable, more genteel West End. Like other discourses, politenesscould be appropriated and it is not surprising to find Defoe, so to speak,crashing the philosophical party. More striking is the fact that Defoe, thechampion of commercial specialization in the standing army debate a yearlater,49 was, in the passage quoted above, participating in the polite cam-paign against specialization. Defoe is too often accused of inconsistency oropportunism: the crucial difference here lies in the perception of what spe-cialization threatened. Defoe denied the civic humanist charge that itundermined liberty but he worried that it could thwart communicationand understanding.

The Essay provided an early example of the occasional anxiety Defoeexpressed throughout his career about developments he believed imperilledthe meaning of words. He had too much sense to wish for the petrificationof the English language but he did yearn for some kind of influential forcewhich would curtail fads and conventions that he considered alarming. AnEnglish academy, he hoped, would possess the authority and discretion tosuppress the frivolous innovations of ‘Dogmatic Writers’, ‘Young Authors’,and ‘Translators’. A society of sufficient stature could guarantee that‘’twould be as Criminal to Coin Words, as Money’.50 The correlation betweenwords and money was a theme Defoe would continue to develop. As tokens


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of exchange it was imperative they be protected from corruption lest theylose their representative meaning. To jeopardize the link between thesignifier and its object or idea was to risk the very capacity which distin-guished human beings from other creatures:

Custom is allow’d to be our best Authority for Words, and ’tis fit itshould be so; but Reason must be the Judge of Sense in Language, andCustom can never prevail over it. Words, indeed, like Ceremonies inReligion, may be submitted to the Magistrate; but Sense, like theEssentials, is positive, unalterable, and cannot be submitted to anyJurisdiction … Words, and even usages in Stile may be alter’d by Custom… But there is a direct Signification of Words, or a Cadence in Expression,which we call speaking Sense; this, like Truth, is sullen and the same,ever was and ever will be so, in what manner and in what Languagesoever ‘tis express’d. Words, without it, are only Noise, which any Brutecan make as well as we, and Birds much better; for Words without Sensemake but dull Musick.51

Though jargon and innovation were serious threats to polite discourse,Defoe reserved his greatest derision for ‘that Inundation Custom has madeupon our Language and Discourse by Familiar Swearing’. Dissenters claimedto find swearing and the debasement of oaths particularly offensive and anattack on profanity was an important component of the reformation ofmanners crusade in the 1690s.52 Defoe did not argue on the familiargrounds that swearing was sinful, quipping, ‘let the Parson … tell you that’.Instead, he based critique upon the tenets of politeness. Swearing, heasserted, ‘is of all Vices the most foolish and senseless; it makes a man’s Conversation unpleasant, his Discourse fruitless, and his LanguageNonsense’.53 Because they were so customary, curses and imprecations‘signif[ied] little to bind a man’s Intention’ and were therefore ‘fruitless’ intheir failure to render his statements more convincing. Above all, profani-ties were ‘the Spoilers and Destroyers’ of discourse, turning it into ‘perfectNonsense’. To further expose the senselessness of the custom, Defoe con-trasted it to other vices which had obvious, if ignoble, objectives. Swearinggratified no lust, garnered no gain, satisfied no revenge. Because ‘neitherPleasure nor Profit’ could be attained, it was therefore ‘a Contrary upon theCourse of Nature’. ‘Folly acted for the sake of Folly’, Defoe pointed out, wassomething Satan himself did not practise.54

Swearing, Defoe stated, was a ‘Masculine Vice’ but he also insinuated itwas especially widespread within certain groups: ‘Go among the Gamesters’and ‘Sportmen’, Defoe complained, and ‘nothing is more frequent than,God damn the Dice, or … God damn the Hounds’. Whether the squirearchy oruniversity-trained elite, Defoe seemed to be taking general aim at largelyTory elements of society. His biases became even more apparent in a 1698

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pamphlet, The Poor Man’s Plea, in which he blamed the ‘Lewdness,Prophaneness, and Immorality of the Gentry’ as ‘the main cause of theGeneral Debauchery of the Kingdom’. Though Protestantism had initiateda reformation of manners in the reigns of Edward VI and Elizabeth,national virtue had been in a steady decline ever since. It was not polite-ness which had begun to flower under successive Stuart reigns, as Tory roy-alists claimed, but various species of vice. Luxury was introduced in thecourt of King James, licentiousness in Charles I’s, and lewdness anddebauchery in Charles II’s. Habits of the court spread to the country fami-lies of the gentry and nobility who, in turn, set a poor example for the restof the nation. The interregnum offered no respite as ‘Liberty of Soldiery’encouraged profaneness throughout the kingdom. William and Mary hadhelped to reverse this trend by setting a virtuous and sober royal examplebut unless the nobility, gentry, and clergy followed suit, a reformation ofmanners could not be achieved. Whereas the ‘Vices of a Poor Man affectonly himself’, Defoe argued, ‘the Rich Man’s Wickedness affects all theNeighbourhood … If my own Watch goes false, it deceives me and noneelse; but if the Town Clock goes false, it deceives the whole Parish.’ Thegentry, clergy, and ‘very benches of justice’ were infected with drunken-ness, swearing, and whoring; and the poor resented being punished bymen as guilty as themselves.55

The radical tone of The Poor Man’s Plea suggests the pamphlet was intendedfor a different audience than the Essay upon Projects with its emphasis onpoliteness, but Defoe’s analysis was largely the same. Throughout the 1690sreformers pressed for parliamentary bills to combat vice and profaneness;but Defoe put little faith in law or legislation to reform manners despite hissupport of and participation in societies devoted to its cause. Parliamentaryacts and proclamations against immorality were mere ‘Cobweb Laws, inwhich the small Flies are catch’d, and the great ones break through’.56

In the Essay’s condemnation of swearing, he insisted, ‘It must be Example,not Penalties, [which] must sink this Crime, and if the Gentlemen ofEngland wou’d once drop it as a Mode … ’twould soon grow odious and out of fashion.’57 As an arbiter of taste and learning, an English academysponsored by King William could set the proper example and discourageimpolite discourse.

iv. William III: patron of military science

As Defoe firmly believed and the court sought to advertise, it was William’smilitary as well as his moral leadership which qualified him to assume themantle of Davidic kingship. Particularly at the beginning of the war, ascampaigns in Ireland demonstrated, William’s own military credentialscontrasted starkly with those of his new subjects. England’s long peace hadcome at the cost of not acquiring experienced officers and soldiers.


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Defending William from criticism that he had favoured foreign officers andengineers, Defoe explained that when he ‘took Possession of this Kingdom,and … began to regulate his Army, he found but very few among the wholeMartial Part of the Nation fit to make use of for General Officers’. Allocatingsixteen regiments to English gentlemen, William sought to give them ‘all theEncouragement imaginable’ and seven years of war had given them much sea-soning. Furthermore, unlike seamen, who were ever-prepared for naval serviceby virtue of commercial sailing, ‘Soldiers, Horsemen, Engineers, Gunners andthe like, must be bred and taught; men are not born with Muskets on theirShoulders, nor Fortifications in their Heads.’ Though war was ‘the bestAcademy in the World, where men study by Necessity, and practice by force’,no nation could afford to enter one with inexperienced forces. Hoping toavert this problem in the future, Defoe proposed that William found and thepublic support an academy for military studies.58

Before offering details about the academy itself, however, Defoeexplained that during England’s recent respite from war, technologicalchanges had so revolutionized the nature of fighting that ‘the Maxims ofWar … differ as much from what they were formerly, as Long Perukes dofrom Piqued Beards’. Only a generation ago, he pointed out, armies in thefield, whether or not they had the advantage, expected to do battle andmake the best of it. Then even the weakest troop of men were eager toengage with the enemy but ‘Now ’tis frequent to have Armies of Fifty thou-sand men of a side stand at Bay within view of one another, and spend awhole Campaign in Dodging, or as ’tis genteely call’d, Observing oneanother, and then march off into Winter-Quarters.’ New technologiesdemanded new strategies so that the old maxim, ‘Whereever [sic] you meetyour Enemy, fight him’ had been replaced by new ones: ‘Never Fight without amanifest Advantage. And always Encamp so as not to be forc’d to it.’ War hadreached a stage in which opposing generals might postpone battleindefinitely. That armies had developed new defensive strategies of delay toprotect themselves from the ever-increasing destructive capacity of modernweaponry did not surprise him; history made plain that ‘the Defensive Artalways follows the Offensive’.59 In fact, in the Introduction to the Essay,Defoe had listed a whole range of ‘New Inventions which want Names …new sorts of Bombs and unheard-of Mortars’ as verification of the project-ing spirit of the day.60

Improved artillery necessitated improved defensive measures but thismost recent phase in the evolutionary pattern of war produced repercus-sions far beyond the battlefields:

I grant that this way of making War spends less Blood than former Warsdid; but then it spins Wars out to a greater Length … I think ’tis plain inthe present War, that ’tis not he who has the longest Sword, so much as hewho has the longest Purse, will hold the War out best. Europe is all engag’d

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in the War, and the Men will never be exhausted while either Party canfind Money; but he who finds himself poorest, must give out first.

Equating the ‘longest sword’ with the ‘longest purse’ would become standardissue in Defoe’s discursive arsenal. Here, in its first deployment, it providedDefoe with both an explanation for Louis XIV’s interest in a negotiated peaceand with an historical basis for his promotion of a military academy. Despitenumerous advantages over the Allies, Louis XIV had wished to avoid thefinancial burden of a long war and, from its start, intermittently engaged ininformal peace negotiations. In the late summer of 1696, a few months beforethe publication of the Essay, Louis XIV’s lack of money meant that Frenchrepresentatives once again were pursuing a diplomatic solution. The power ofthe purse, in this new tactical age of dodge and defend, meant that the ‘Frenchking … finds his Exchequer fail[ing], his Kingdom drain’d … [and] whateverhis Armies may do, his Money won’t hold out so long as the Confederates; andtherefore he uses all the means possible to procure a Peace’. England wouldneed a long purse to fund the academy Defoe had in mind. Even he acknow-ledged that Parliament would need to provide the crown with a large yearlyrevenue to cover the costs of the institution which he estimated would be£90,000 per annum.

Although Defoe’s plan for a military academy was broadly conceived, likethe academy of polite learning, it betrayed a certain preoccupation on hispart with perceived deficiencies of the English gentry in a modern age. Theacademy would consist of four separate colleges, each providing its owncurriculum and open to different social and economic ranks. While makingno mention of potential disciplinary problems among the young cadets ofthree of the colleges, he itemized specific articles of behaviour for thecollege reserved for gentlemen students. They must abide by all rules of res-idency and leave and ‘perform all the College-Exercises … without dispute’.Those who quarrel or use ‘Ill Language’ will be fined; those who fight orduel will be publicly ‘declar’d no Gentleman’, expelled from the college,and ‘pump’d as a Rake’ if they dare to appear within the walls of the collegeagain.61 These rules suggest Defoe’s concern to build up a proficient corpsof gentlemen officers without capitulating to their robust and impoliteindependence or to their traditional codes of honour. It was not only tech-nological advance which changed ‘the old Temper of the English’ after thecivil wars; as Norbert Elias suggests, the period following civil war often sawthe court demanding a curtailment of ‘warlike habits and pleasures’ insociety’s military elite. That elite, in turn, responded by using the practiceof the duel as a symbol of its own autonomy against ‘increasing statecontrol that tends more and more to subject all citizens to the same law’.62

In this context, Defoe’s perception that the civil war represented a pro-found divide took on a new dimension. His depiction of William as warriorking and patron of the military arts, his call to curb the truculence of the


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landowning classes, and, as we shall see, his defence of the court’s desire tomaintain a standing army all suggest that Defoe welcomed the growingmonopolization of physical force by the state. Tamed and schooled as pro-fessional officers by a military academy, polished by a national academy forpolite learning, England’s elite would be better equipped to lead the nationin a rapidly changing world.

Though his proposal for a military academy was formally completed,Defoe followed it with an addendum. Again his analysis began with thequestion of technological change and his solution to the problems it posedhinged, in large part, upon William’s leadership and a willingness on thepart of the gentry, as principal players in the social order, to keep up withthe forces of modernity:

When our Military Weapon was the Long-Bow … the meanest Countrey-Man was a good Archer; and that which qualifi’d them so much forService in the War, was their Diversion in Times of Peace …

Since our way of fighting is now alter’d; and this destructive Engine, theMusquet, is the proper Arms for the Soldier, I could wish the Diversion alsoof the English would change too, that our Pleasures and Profit might corre-spond. ’Tis a great Hindrance to this Nation, especially where Standing-Armies are a Grievance, that if ever a War commence, men must have atleast a Year before they are fit to face an Enemy … [and] to handle theirArms … To help this, at least in some measure, I would propose, That thePublick Exercises of our Youth shou’d by some Publick Encouragement …be drawn off from the foolish Boyish Sports of Cocking, and Cricketing,and from Tipling, to shooting with a Firelock.

If a military academy, like the one Defoe had just proposed, provided instruc-tion in marksmanship to the gentry ‘at the King’s Charge’, then, he argued,‘the Gentry in return of that Favour shou’d introduce it among the Countrey-People’. This could easily be accomplished ‘if every Countrey-Gentleman,according to his degree’ would sponsor regular shooting contests in whichlocal citizens would compete for prizes. Such competitions would encourage‘all the Young Men in England’ into becoming ‘Marks-men’.63 In defining his‘Projecting Age’, it seems Defoe concluded that the age of inventiondemanded the invention of tradition. In the months that followed the publi-cation of his Essay upon Projects, however, he would discover the tenacity ofcertain ideological traditions in the face of historical change.

v. ‘This pen and ink war’: Defoe and the standing army controversy

By 1697 war weariness had made an early peace attractive to all combat-ants. Both William III and Louis XIV were reluctant to engage in another

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season of fighting. With English and Dutch public opinion urging a settle-ment and the increasing risk of minor allies forsaking the cause in pursuitof separate peace, as Savoy had done the year before, William III did nothave much choice. Despite recent French successes along the Catalan fron-tier, even Louis XIV thought the cost of continued campaigning too high.64

Envoys discussed terms and reached an agreement by September but theink on the Treaty of Ryswick was hardly dry before English politicians andpolemicists drew their own ideological battle lines over what to do aboutWilliam’s forces. The ensuing controversy resulted in a series of parliamen-tary votes drastically to reduce the size of the army and helped to make thelast four years the most politically contentious ones of William’s reign. Assuggested in the introduction to this chapter, it also revealed a culturalfissure in which modern notions of specialization and exchange challengedclassical and humanist concepts of liberty and citizenship.

Most scholars since Caroline Robbins have examined these competingparadigms by comparing Defoe’s contributions to the debate with that ofAndrew Fletcher. In recent years, historians have singled out these twoauthors because, unlike contemporaries such as John Trenchard who uti-lized the past as a ‘mere catalogue of examples, good and bad’, their analy-sis of the merits and flaws of professional armies and citizen militiasdepended upon a sophisticated understanding of long-term historicalprocesses and structural change.65 Though the importance of focusing onFletcher and Defoe cannot be overstated, titles, publication dates, and pub-lishers’ advertisements make it clear that each of Defoe’s three major essaysdefending the maintenance of a standing army was written in directresponse to Trenchard pamphlets attacking such a plan and that bothDefoe and Trenchard, if unsure as to exact identity, regarded the other ashis chief opponent in print.66 Initially, Defoe had only a hazy impressionof the opposition’s profile and, given that he stood on the verge of estab-lishing his own notoriety as a controversialist, expressed a surprising degreeof distaste for the direction in which political journalism was moving. By1698, Defoe was still dismayed by the increasing influence of propagandaupon parliamentary debate but he had pieced together a shrewd sketch ofhis anti-army adversaries – men of republican and Socinian principles who,hiding behind a populist stalking horse named ‘Liberty’, sought to bringdown a king and his government for denying them place and preferment.67

By redirecting the focus of investigation from a Defoe/Fletcher to aDefoe/Trenchard-centred debate, under-explored contexts, such as the roleof religion, re-emerge and our understanding of prevailing contexts isrefined.

Trenchard is usually credited with initiating the debate by publishinganonymously An Argument Shewing that a Standing Army is inconsistent witha Free Government in October 1697.68 Though the possibility exists that thispamphlet was in part an answer to issues Defoe raised in his Essay upon


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Projects, published earlier that year, the publication of An Argument was cer-tainly responsible for instigating the uproar in London over this issue.Trenchard also served throughout the controversy as the ‘chef de propagande… coordinat[ing] the writing, printing and publishing of all the importantcontributions’ for the opposition side. In these efforts he was aided byRobert Harley, the parliamentary leader of the ‘country party’, a group ofWhigs and Tories who opposed court corruption and standing armies asthe primary threats to England’s balanced constitution. Despite rumours tothe contrary, Defoe probably acted as a ‘lone wolf’ and not as a court-spon-sored pamphleteer.69 Trenchard’s connections and Defoe’s lack of themreinforce present understanding of the divisions between Whigs in thedecade following the Revolution as well as the inadequacy of attempts tocharacterize Defoe’s politics as an expression of what has been termedLondon ‘radical Whiggism’.70

Trenchard’s essay began with a four-page encomium to England’s excep-tionalism. Nature had endowed England with ‘numerous Commodities forTrade and Commerce’ and the sea afforded not only an easy means toconduct it but also a barrier to the ‘perpetual War’ of the continent. Ahardy sea-faring ‘manner of Life’, he added, even allowed the nation someimmunity from ‘Luxury it self, which has been the Bane and Destruction ofmost Countries where it has been predominant’. Most importantly,though, the English stood apart ‘as Freemen and not Slaves in thisunhappy Age, when an universal Deluge of Tyranny has overspread theface of the whole Earth’.71 The English enjoyed liberty because their gov-ernment was ‘an Empire of Laws’ from which no man, not even the king,was exempt and because its constitution was a ‘limited mix’d Monarchy’formed by a ‘due ballance between King, Lords and Commons’, the absenceof which resulted in ‘an Actual Dissolution of the Constitution’. This polit-ical balance, Trenchard argued, depended upon the maintenance of aHarringtonian or ‘Gothic Ballance’ between property and power, ‘an Unionof the natural and artificial Strength of the Kingdom’ in which the defenceof the nation was never entrusted to an army of paid soldiers but remainedin the hands of a militia consisting ‘of the same Persons as have theProperty, or otherwise the Government is violent and against Nature, andcannot possibly continue’.72 This, in a nutshell, was Trenchard’s argument,a core of commonwealth beliefs shared by many of his contemporaries.Following this manifesto, Trenchard cited numerous examples of biblical,classical, and modern nations he claimed either preserved their liberty bymaintaining a citizen-militia or lost it by employing professional soldiers.

Defoe quickly responded with Some Reflections upon Trenchard’s Argu-ment. While he accepted ‘without any trouble’ Trenchard’s openingremarks in praise of English trade, English liberty, and the beauty of theEnglish constitution, Defoe pounced upon his initial statement of con-tention that

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no Nation ever preserved its Liberty, that maintained an Army otherwiseconstituted within the Seat of their Government: and let us flatter ourselves as much as we please, what happened yesterday, will come to passagain; and the same Causes will produce like Effects in all Ages.73

‘Nothing is more frequent’, retorted Defoe, ‘than for the same Causes toproduce different Effects; and what happened yesterday may never happenagain while the World stands.’ He chided Trenchard repeatedly for hisremark by employing a like causes–like effects formula with witheringsarcasm.74

As was the case with his historical assumptions, Defoe found Trenchard’suse of historical facts fallacious as well. Apologizing for any chronologicalerrors of his own because he lacked the ‘time to consult History’ whiledrafting his response, Defoe, nevertheless, attacked Trenchard for his omis-sions, mistakes, misinterpretations, and prejudicial use of historical evi-dence. In response to Trenchard’s argument that no ‘Nations whilst theykept their Liberty were ever known to maintain any Souldiers in constantPay’, Defoe pointed out that he failed to give a single example of anymodern nation which having established an army out of necessity lost itsliberty as a consequence. As for his examples from antiquity, they ‘werefirst establish’d Commonwealths, not Monarchies’ but that ‘when theybecame Regal’ they acquired armies: ‘Nay, God himself, when the Israeliteswould have a King, told them this would be a Consequence … that aMilitary Power must be made use of with a Regal Power; and as it mayfollow no King, no Army, so it may as well follow, no Army no King.’75 Thebiblical image of a warrior king, so central to Defoe’s defence of theRevolution, was also an ideological cornerstone of his support of a standingarmy. His second pamphlet, An Argument, shewing, that a Standing Army,with Consent of Parliament, is not Inconsistent with a Free Government, &c.,showcased the following quotation from the second book of Chronicles onits title-page: ‘And King Solomon had four thousand Stalls for Horses andChariots, and twelve thousand Horsemen; whom he bestowed in the Chariot-Cities, and with the King at Jerusalem.’76 Defoe also recognized the rhetoricaladvantage of associating an image of England as Israel with the pro-armyposition and the spectre of England as commonwealth with the anti-armycampaign. His opponent, on the other hand, had ‘like God Almighty,divided the World, and has set the Sheep on his right hand, and the Goats onhis left … with all the Monarchal [sic] Governments in the World … cursedinto the most abandon’d Slavery … and all the Commonwealths … blessedinto freedom from Kings, standing Armies’.77

Because Parliament was likely to vote to reduce rather than to eliminateWilliam’s forces altogether, Trenchard was at pains to demonstrate thateven the smallest army was a threat to constitutional liberties and even tothe established government itself. Caesar, he argued, had seized Rome with


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five thousand troops and decided the ‘Fate of the World’ at Pharsalia withonly twenty-two thousand; small bands of Pretorian guards and court janis-saries had caused ‘most of the Revolutions of the Roman and OttomanEmpires since’; and Oliver Cromwell seized power with an army of seven-teen thousand men.78 Throughout the debate, Defoe challengedTrenchard’s statistics, accusing the anti-army side of manipulating numbersto suit their argument while providing readers with his own figures on thesize of various armies of the past.79 By December 1697, Parliament was con-sidering an Act to reduce the army to ten thousand troops; William wouldbe allowed a small force at best. In his second pamphlet, Defoe had toconcede that ‘since no army and a great army are extreams equally danger-ous’ the question was ‘what medium can be found … to make such anArmy serviceable for the Defence of us and our Allies, and yet not danger-ous to our Constitution’.80

Given the notice paid by modern scholars to the historical acumen dis-played by Defoe in this debate, it may be instructive to see what hethought of Trenchard’s use of the past. Defoe’s most acute criticism of theanti-army campaign was its utter failure to recognize that even thestrongest cultural edifices were vulnerable to erosion in the ebb and flow ofhistory. Trenchard’s essays seemed to argue from history but his aim was toglean examples, especially from antiquity, in order to reinforce the idea ofthe danger of standing armies as a timeless truth. Defoe was thereforecareful to challenge many of these examples point by point and to rebukeTrenchard for what he considered erroneous methodological assumptions.

Defoe was not part of the club of ‘Old Whigs’ who met at the GrecianCoffee House frequented by Trenchard, Toland, Moyle, and Robert Harley.Defoe struggled to identify his opponents, at first simply identifying themas ‘Male-contents … Angry that they were not preferr’d, and envying allthat were’.81 He identified the strategy of seeking preferment by becoming acritic whom the court would wish to silence as a phenomenon whichappeared long before the formation of Whig and Tory party politics.82

Defoe, however, soon became more specific, charging the club with espous-ing republican principles. Ironically he also complained about the tacticsadopted by his future patron Robert Harley who met at the Grecian to coor-dinate propaganda in order to turn the complaints of country gentlemeninto an effective opposition.83 Their attacks ‘against the Army’, Defoecharged, ‘were tim’d to appear just at the opening of the Parliament, and soindustriously handed about, that they have been seen in the remotestcountries of England before they were publish’d in London’.84 Clearly, theopposition was adopting new tactics as well as perfecting old ones in itsattempt to discredit William and disband his forces.

Defoe was clearly indignant about the tactics adopted by the ‘OldWhigs’. He also hoped to discredit the club’s anti-army ideology by attack-ing the publishing activities of Toland:

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Much about the same time, from the same people, came out into theWorld, two Volumes of Ludlow’s Memoires; in all which the Conduct of the Parliament against the King is exceedingly magnified; theGovernment of a single Person opposed covertly, under the Person ofO[liver]. C[romwell]. but in general, of any single Person whatever; andall the Common-Wealth-Principles advanced and defended.85

This was coupled with the publication of Algernon Sidney’s DiscoursesConcerning Government, a work Defoe appreciated for its attack on Filmerbut scorned in this context because ‘one of the Publishers had the impu-dence to say it was the best Book the Bible excepted, that ever came abroadin the World’.86 Defoe’s greatest scorn, however, was reserved for the club’sreligious principles. ‘While they would disarm us to protect our Liberties’,Defoe sarcastically complained, by publishing Socinian tracts as well, they‘strike a fatal Stroke at our Religion, which I confess, I ought not to expectthey should value, because I know their Principles to be both Irreligiousand Blasphemous’. All of them, Defoe charged, were ‘maintainers of themost infamous Heresie of Socinus, they bid defiance to the Son of God onone hand, and to the King and Government on the other’.87 It was notonly Defoe’s historiographical sophistication and admiration for warriorkings which set Defoe apart from other Whigs, it was his Trinitarianism aswell.


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2‘The Mushroom and the Oak’:Dissent and the Church of England,1697–1705

i. Introduction

Before the standing army debate had reached its climax in the autumn of1698, Defoe became embroiled in what would be the first of several religiouscontroversies of his age.1 One of the most important of these, and the focus ofthis chapter, was the debate over occasional conformity, the practice by whichProtestant Dissenters from the established Church of England occasionallytook Anglican communion in order to qualify legally for public office whilenormally worshipping in a Dissenting congregation. Scholarship has tendedto focus on Defoe’s most infamous contribution to the debate, The ShortestWay with the Dissenters (1702), his use or misuse of irony in the pamphlet, andthe unfortunate consequences its publication had for his personal life andpublic reputation, rather than on the entire debate and the light it sheds uponhis political, historical, and religious understanding. As we have seen inChapter 1, Defoe’s interest in the widely respected campaign for a reformationof manners and his contempt for Socinianism were established componentsof his previous writings. Now added to these was his passionate, if complex,stance against both the practice of occasional conformity and legislativeattempts to criminalize it as Occasional Conformity Bills were introduced, andfailed, in the parliamentary sessions of 1702–3, 1703–4, and 1704–5. His posi-tion not only complicated his standing among his fellow Dissenters but madehim the chief target for resurgent High Churchmanship during the first yearsof Queen Anne’s reign. The consequences of these engagements turned Defoeinto a full-time polemicist who would be drawn into successive religious dis-putes for the rest of his life. This role proved to be much more dangerous thanhe had expected as the Shortest Way landed him in prison and pillory in 1703.His release in November by the Speaker of the House of Commons, RobertHarley, who saw in Defoe a potentially valuable agent, began his career as agovernment writer.

One of his first tasks in this new role was the establishment of a weeklyserialized essay to promote and defend ministerial policies. Lax supervision

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and Defoe’s own power as a writer, however, soon made the Review his own. Itquickly expanded to a thrice-weekly publication lasting from 19 February1704 to 11 June 1713 and became one of the most successful projects in early eighteenth-century journalism. Defoe assumed many personae in thisexpanding world of print culture. In an age of partisanship, for Mr. Reviewto maintain the position of a moderate man, independent of party, wasdifficult enough; for an avowed Presbyterian, it proved impossible. Con-ventional opinion associated Dissent with Whig principles. To High Church-men these principles meant rebellion, republicanism, and regicide. Defoe, the champion of Trinitarian Dissent, would become branded as Defoe, the Lockeian rebel, and by later ages as Defoe, the Lockeian liberal. The intention in this chapter is to free him from these retrospective dis-tortions.

Perhaps his most important assignment as a ministerial employee involvedthe collection of intelligence and dissemination of propaganda to garnersupport, especially that of his fellow Presbyterians, for the Act of Unionbetween England and Scotland in 1706–7 (the subject of Chapter 4). Defoereturned to London from this Scottish mission full of optimism about theharmonious coexistence of denominations in the new Britain. His euphoriaquickly evaporated when the Sacheverell affair of 1709–10 shattered theprospect of Christian charity in an Erastian polity.2 If Defoe was alarmedthat the trial of Dr Sacheverell in 1710 posed a threat from High Churchman-ship, the Bangorian controversy of 1717–19 soon supplied another if lessdramatic challenge to Defoe’s middle ground from the opposite wing ofextreme Low Church and perhaps heterodox Anglicanism. Although Defoe’secclesiological position overlapped somewhat with the Bishop of Bangor’s,he had always resented Benjamin Hoadly’s pressure on Dissenters to conform, and could blame the bishop’s controversial sermon of 17093

for robbing Dissenters of the prospect of increased toleration after theHanoverian accession. Throughout these controversies, Defoe’s positionwas principled, staunchly Trinitarian, Erastian in its acceptance of an established Church, but vociferous in its defence of religious toleration asguaranteed by the 1689 Act of Toleration. For reasons important but differ-ent from those of the Church of England, Defoe held that toleration wasnot to be extended to anti-Trinitarians. Nevertheless, his search for thepeaceful coexistence of denominations paralleled his view that the materialvariety found in the world was providentially designed to encourageexchange and improvement. At the same time, Defoe abhorred the use ofreligious oaths for secular purposes, a requirement which he believedencouraged instability in politics, identities, and the meaning of words –the necessary components for practical cooperation and exchange. Defoe’sreligious commitments, like his Baconian outlook, welcomed a plurality in the coexistence of things as long as each thing was univocal in meaning.

Dissent and the Church of England, 1697–1705 35

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ii. Occasional conformity: the principled stance of an orthodox Dissenter

On two successive Sundays, 31 October and 7 November of 1697, the newLord Mayor of London, Sir Humphrey Edwin, a Dissenter, ostentatiouslytook communion at St Paul’s Cathedral in the morning before attendinghis usual meeting-house service in the afternoon. This practice, known asoccasional conformity, was open to different interpretations. Prior to 1688it was often adopted by Dissenters hoping for an eventual comprehensionwithin the established Church.4 After 1689, although some of the irenicmotivation remained, the practice became more controversial since it wasthought Nonconformists were merely seeking to qualify themselves forpublic office under the terms of the 1689 Act which granted religious toler-ation to Trinitarian Dissenters. Edwin’s public performance was not widelyseen as controversial until Defoe published a pamphlet with a preface to the Lord Mayor entitled An Enquiry into the Occasional Conformity ofDissenters. According to legend, Defoe nailed a copy of his text to the doorof St Paul’s in emulation of Martin Luther’s apocryphal action of protest.Whether this legend is true or not, it captures the drama of Defoe’s intervention and made a principled controversy inescapable.5 In 1700when another dissenter, Thomas Abney, also conformed in order to qualify himself for the office of Lord Mayor, Defoe republished his Enquiry, this time with a preface to John Howe, Abney’s pastor, engagingthe prominent Dissenting divine, and by extension the Dissenting com-munity, in a moral debate.6 Later tracts and Review articles defending his co-religionists against the Church of England consistently reiterated the arguments first pitched to his fellow Dissenters: that occasional con-formity was sinful in nature and harmful to the cause of Nonconformity ingeneral.

The decision to separate from the established Church, Defoe believed,was a grave one: ‘Schism from a True Establish’d Church of Christ is a greatSin; and if I can conform, I ought to conform.’7 However, he explained, ifin ‘consulting his Bible and his Conscience’ a man were to discover ‘someThings in the Establish’d Way of Worship which do not seem to corre-spond with the Rule he has found out in the Scripture’ then dissent wasjustified; it was even incumbent upon him, as every Christian had an‘Obligation … to seek the best Guides for his Soul’.8 According to Defoe,Scripture revealed that the Church of England, as it was presently estab-lished, could not be the ‘best Guide’:

1. On account of the Episcopal Hierarchy, Prelatical Ordination, andSuper-intendancy.

2. On account of their imposing things owned to be indifferent [to salvation] as terms of Communion.

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3. On account of their imposing things own’d to be otherwise indiffer-ent, as made necessary by the Command of the Civil Magistrate.9

As a Presbyterian, Defoe accepted some measure of Church government but‘the Episcopal Hierarchy’, he argued, needed ‘to be Reduc’d to such a Pitch ofAuthority, as may be justified by the Scripture, and to no other; and we areready to enter into an Examination with them, what that Particular of Poweramounts to and how far it extends’.10 That examination had been undertakenat various times since the Reformation without success, though, in severaltracts, Defoe expressed his own preference for ‘Arch-bishop Usher’s Model’ fora synodical scheme.11 In the imposition of things indifferent, Defoe listed anumber of practices which he considered optional, including the use of afixed liturgy, the surplice, the cross and rules regarding kneeling andbowing.12 In these and in his acceptance of ‘all the Fundamentals of Doctrine,and … 36 of … 39 Articles of Faith’, Defoe’s ecclesiology represented what hadbeen the Presbyterian mainstream.13 I ‘heartily wish I could conform whollyto the Church’, Defoe conceded; but he did not ‘divide in Communion forTrifles’, which was the perfidy of occasional conformity.14 Nor could Defoe seean escape for the occasional conformist from this charge:

he who Dissents from the Establish’d Church, except from a True Principle ofConscience, is guilty of a great Sin.… he who Conforms to the Establish’d Church against his Conscience, isguilty of a great Sin.… he who both Dissents and Conforms at the same time and in the samePoint of Religion, must be guilty of one of these great Sins.… he who has committed either of these Sins, ought not to be receiv’d again oneither side on any other Terms than as a Penitent.15

‘If I occasionally conform’, he argued, ‘by Conforming I deny my Dissentbeing lawful, or by my Dissenting I damn my Conforming as sinful.’ Thosewho dissented or conformed for any other reason than ‘a real principle ofConscience’ were merely being ‘Politic’, concerned with ‘Publick Advance-ments, and Glittering Gawdy Honours of the Age’, a far cry from their‘Zealous, Conscientious, and Constant’ peers who suffered ‘Reproaches andinconveniences … nay, Persecution and loss of Estates and Liberty for theCause’. To those who defended their actions by pleading a desire to servetheir country and protect their liberties, he retorted, ‘these are Patriotsindeed, that will damn their Souls to save their Country’.16 Though agreeingwith the principle that ‘the Compass and Extent of Humane Laws do notreach to bind … in Matters of Conscience’, no conscience was com-promised ‘if no Preferments [were] sought, no Honours accepted’.17 Qualifyingfor public office meant taking the sacrament for civil purposes, an actionDefoe described as ‘playing Bo-peep with God Almighty’.18


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There were other reasons to be concerned. Occasional conformists notonly jeopardized their own souls but the cause of Nonconformity itself.Contrary to Anglican fears, the overall number of Dissenters probablydeclined in the early eighteenth century. This was certainly true of Defoe’sown sect, the English Presbyterians, who since the Restoration had contin-ued to divide over a number of ecclesiological issues.19 Defoe worried thatoccasional conformity made permanent conformity more likely or at thevery least prepared ‘Posterity to Conform totally, to what their FathersConform’d to Occasionally’.20 Not only did the practice arouse Anglicanire, but the ‘Coveting [of] Offices’ which motivated it brought ‘Dishonourand Shame’ upon the community as a whole.21 Dissenters, he warned,could not continue to claim the moral high ground if occasional con-formists escaped the internal censure which he had hoped importantDissenters like John Howe might provide. Howe was to disappoint him aswere other Dissenting ministers like James Owen who tried to mollifyobjections to occasional conformity by de-emphasizing the differencesbetween Dissenters and churchmen.22 This tactic was a dangerous one,Defoe maintained, because by lessening the ‘Reasons for a SchismaticalSeparation’, Owen lessened the basis for dissenting in the first place.23 Theywere ‘bound to justifie their Separation’ from the Church of England, orelse ‘their whole Constitution falls to the Ground’. This justification restedsolely upon conscience and ‘Purity of Worship’, and Dissenters could illafford to have these claims sullied by less than virtuous men or by their lessthan vigilant ministers.24

Defoe was not unique in his condemnation of occasional conformity as asin and a peril to the cause of Dissent but a crucial component of hisprotest has escaped scholarly analysis. The contradictions involved in thispractice threatened Defoe’s sense of epistemological stability. From theoutset of the controversy in 1697, these contradictions were vividly cap-tured in the series of images and analogies he employed in order to articu-late his anxiety:

But there is a sort of Truth, which all Men owe to the Principles theyprofess, and generally speaking, all men pay it; a Turk is a Turk zealouslyand entirely; an Idolater is an Idolater, and will serve the Devil to a Tittle:None but Protestants halt between God and Baal; Christians of anAmphibious Nature, who have such preposterous Consciences, as canbelieve one way of Worship to be right, and yet serve God another waythemselves? This is a strange thing in Israel! All the Histories of Religion inthe World do not shew such a Case: ’Tis like a Ship with her Sails hal’dsome back and some full: ’Tis like a Workman that Builds with one Hand,and pulls down with t’other: ’Tis like a Fisherman, who catches Fish withone Hand, and throws them into the Sea with another: ’Tis like every thingwhich signifies nothing.25

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Defoe’s objections went deeper because the practice of occasional confor-mity was not only morally compromising but destructive of meaning itself.The same preoccupation with the problem of non-signification is seen inAn Essay upon Projects published in 1697, the same year as An Enquiry. Inthe Essay, it will be recalled, he described projects as ‘Abortions of theBrain’, which intimate the substantive but ‘come into the air, and dissolve’,projecting and stock-jobbing as selling ‘Shares in a New-Nothing’. HisBaconian Academy of Learning was proposed, in part, to prevent the‘Signification of Words’ from being turned into ‘Nonsense’.26 Defoe’s per-sonal links with the Baconian tradition through his Dissenting Academytutor, Charles Morton, his esteem for the new science, and his consciousefforts to achieve a ‘plain style’ in his own writings are well established.27

His discomfort with the nonsensical nature of occasional conformity, likehis complaints about the ‘Age of Projecting’, reflected the ‘general mistrustof language in circles connected with the new philosophy’,28 a distrustshared by many seventeenth-century Puritans. In seeking to ameliorate thedepravity of natural man and to understand the mysteries of the naturalworld, Puritan reformers and the new scientists aspired to a purity ofexpression. It therefore should not surprise us to find Defoe expressing hiseconomic, political, cultural, and religious concerns in linguistic terms.This sensitivity to the relationship between word and meaning appears inDefoe’s participation in subsequent religious controversies as well. Ratherthan get ahead of the story at this point, however, we need to go back intime to the Restoration and the roots of occasional conformity.

The failure to find a mutually agreeable formula for comprehension in the early 1660s made the breach between English Presbyterians andAnglicans a permanent one. It was also to cause a rift in the Presbyterianfold as well. As the restored Anglican hierarchy began imposing increas-ingly restrictive laws upon Nonconformists in an attempt to eliminateseparatism altogether, Presbyterians, at first united in their hopes for reac-ceptance and reform within the established Church, fell into more or lesspessimistic camps about the prospect of reconciliation in the future. Whenthe Five Mile Act of 1665 demanded yet another oath of loyalty fromDissenting ministers, the older, more well-connected ones (who were prob-ably more optimistic about eventual comprehension) complied while manyof their younger, less established associates refused. The two groups becameknown as the ‘Dons’, for their supposedly supercilious nature, and the‘Ducklings’, for their willingness to venture further on schism’s chillywaters.29 The ‘most prominent’ of the so-called Ducklings was SamuelAnnesley, a man with a reputation for great piety and courage; he was alsothe Foe family’s beloved pastor and died in 1696, the year before Defoe’sAn Enquiry was first published.30 Several leaders emerged from the Dons’party, most notably Richard Baxter and John Howe, the ‘Mr How’ Defoeaddressed in the preface to the republished An Enquiry and in A Letter to


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Mr How in 1701. Whether optimism or a lack of it encouraged further dif-ferences of opinion is hard to say, but the Dons and Ducklings diverged onother matters as well. The Dons eventually came to be known as ‘Reconcilers’or ‘Comprehensionists’: they were increasingly Arminian in doctrine, ratio-nalist in their approach to questions of theology, and tolerant of diverse,even heterodox opinion within the fold. They more readily accepted occa-sional conformity as a sign of tolerance and as a means of rapprochementwith the Church. Although never achieving the comprehension for whichthey so ardently hoped, the immediate future of Presbyterianism was theirs:in the Salters’ Hall controversy of 1719, their party held the majoritythough Presbyterianism in England eventually lost definition as a distinctsect with the growth of what has come to be known as ‘rational Dissent’.31

The Ducklings became known as ‘Tolerationists’. By comparison, theyremained more Calvinist in doctrine; eschewed reason as inferior to faith inreligious matters; and took a more militant stance against heterodoxy. To the strict Tolerationist, occasional conformity was backsliding. Beforereturning to Defoe’s views, there is one more important fact to consider:Dissenting academies often reflected these divisions. Independents (orCongregationalists) and, it seems, young Ducklings were inclined to attendCharles Morton’s Academy at Newington Green where the curriculum washeavily influenced by John Wilkins’ views on language.32

Something of the flavour of the socio-economic tension between theDons and Ducklings can be detected in Defoe’s skirmish with Howe.Defoe’s first address to Howe in the Preface to An Enquiry of 1701 was a def-erential supplication for the prominent divine to exercise his influence overthose ‘who wear the Gay Cloathes, and the Gold Ring’ in order to curb the‘Stumbling’ emulation of the ‘weak and irresolute [who] are led aside bythe Eminency and Frequency’ of occasional conformity among their superi-ors. Howe’s response was non-committal and reproachful, referring toDefoe as a ‘poor prefacer’, of levelling principles, and the ‘stingy, narrowSpirit’ of the ‘Primitive English Puritans’.33 In his rebuttal, Defoe repeated hisentreaty that Howe state his position and take action; his deference thistime was laced with wounded sarcasm, but A Letter to Mr How rose abovethe level of petty bickering as Defoe’s arguments converged upon a centralpoint of theological and epistemological dispute.

Howe had argued, reasonably enough, that he personally demurred fromthe dubious task of judging the motivations and consciences of others; thatcircumstances surrounding the practice were varied; and that the differ-ences between Dissenters and Anglicans were so small that occasional com-munion could do no harm. Being reasonable, however, was precisely whatwas wrong with Howe’s approach and his equivocation regarding the sinfulnature of occasional conformity exasperated Defoe who declared thatHowe’s tract

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requires not that I shou’d Reply to the Argument; for I see none, butthat drawing back the Curtain which you have spread over the Subject, Ishou’d set it in a True Light, that all men may judge by their ownConsciences, and the Scripture-Rule, and take care they be not distin-guish’d out of their Reason and Religion by the Cunning Artifice ofWords.34

Human beings should possess both ‘Reason and Religion’ but the formerwas insufficient and inappropriate when applied to the latter. Presbyteriansof Howe’s and Richard Baxter’s ilk accepted reason as an important com-ponent of religion, a position compatible with that of Anglicans like John Tillotson (1630–94) and other rationalists or latitudinarians whosetheology had been shaped by the influence of the Cambridge Platonists.35

Defoe’s position was, on one level, a Calvinist one: although God gavehuman beings the capacity to reason, it was negligible in the face of hisawesome power and useless in their salvation which was determined bygrace alone. Arminian theology allowed the free will and rational nature ofhuman beings a wider role in this process. If carried to its logical extreme,however, religious rationalism led to Socinianism and while ArminianPresbyterians sought to maintain Baxter’s ‘Middle Way’ along this rational-ist continuum, it became increasingly hard to do so.36 Reason, which Defoecelebrated in conjunction with all worldly endeavours, had no bearing, hebelieved, on religious matters. This was not solely a theological preferencebut was reinforced by the Baconian agenda which had sought sharply toseparate the natural and supernatural worlds. The natural world was acces-sible to reason, the Godhead to faith alone. Limiting the mind to sensoryperception and the realm of the empirical was also a way of closing it offfrom dangerous speculation and heterodoxy. Howe had thought the issueof religious ceremonies too abstruse for the common reader, to whichDefoe sharply responded:

Indeed, Sir, I believe as you say, that taking which side you will, you may puzzle the most of plain people, who are but of ordinaryUnderstandings in the Controversie about Ceremonies: And give meleave to add, That such is the Subtilty and Nicety of SophisticalReasonings, that Men may almost Distinguish themselves in, and out ofany Opinion, and some People, who are Masters of the Art of NiceArguing, too often lose both Themselves and their Religion in theLabyrinths of Words: School Divinity and Practical Christianity are Twothings, and seldom understood by the same Heads.37

This elasticity of language and religious rationalism, thought Defoe, endan-gered religion for everyone, whether they be plain person or eminentdivine.


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iii. Occasional conformists and the instability of language

With this history of Presbyterian disputation in mind it should no longer bepossible to find it ‘ironic’ that a Dissenter should have ignited the eighteenth-century melee over occasional conformity, though Defoe’s action in 1697may be considered ‘transitional in the sense that it was the last major attackon occasional conformity by a Dissenter’.38 The practice only became a liveissue for High Churchmen after 1702 with the accession of Queen Anne andthe subsequent rejuvenation of the Tory party which gave them the politicalstrength to do something about it. Tory efforts to enact a Bill outlawing thepractice of occasional conformity provided ‘the central political issue of1702–04’.39 In these changed political circumstances, many Dissenters heededthe prosaic wisdom about airing family linen and refrained from engaging inany internecine debate. To their consternation and his own, Defoe now sawhis arguments being parroted in the High Church press.40 Thus he foundhimself in the intricate and wearisome predicament of simultaneously havingto denounce both the practice of occasional conformity and a series of legisla-tive attempts designed to stop it.

The real irony of the whole controversy was not that it was sparked byDefoe, the Dissenter, but that Defoe, the inheritor of a dual mistrust in theambiguities and instabilities of language, chose in December 1702, as partof his polemic campaign, to impersonate, in print, a rabid supporter of theBill to prevent occasional conformity. His intention was to vilify the Billwithout condoning the practice; his methods were irony and satire –rhetorical techniques inherently inverting and subverting of the face-valueof words. The pamphlet, entitled The Shortest Way with the Dissenters,public reaction to it, and the maelstrom it was to make of Defoe’s life andcareer comprise a familiar episode in Grub Street history, but a brief outlinewill satisfy present purposes. Presented as a tract written in support of theestablished Church, The Shortest Way championed the Occasional Con-formity Bill but with such vitriolic hyperbole that it became a manifesto forthe wholesale eradication of Dissent and even of Dissenters themselves.Contemporaries of every stripe, including Defoe in his subsequent explana-tions of his actions, recorded that the pamphlet initially caused an uproaras many people took it literally. As they came to realize the hoax, thosewho had been duped, from coffee-houses to Whitehall, became enraged.Political and judicial wheels were set in motion: the pamphlet was burnedon the orders of the House of Commons and its author was charged withseditious libel. After five months of hide and seek, Defoe was captured. Fivemore months in Newgate prison were punctuated by court appearancesand three days in the pillory until Robert Harley, Speaker of the House andone of the first politicians to appreciate the potential power of the press,secured Defoe’s release and, thereby, the services of a first-rate propagandistand the abject loyalty of a man rescued from desperate circumstances.41

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Fortune had intervened but not before Defoe’s fledgling fame as a populistversifier and pamphleteer was reduced to that of a notorious troublemaker.

Given that this was an age when a writer perceived to have gone too farrisked a sentence of prison, pillory, corporal punishment, even all three, orbeing the victim of mob or gang violence, and given his ingrained appre-hension of the volatility of words, why did Defoe depart from the morestraightforward approach of his earlier pamphlets?42 First, because of thedouble game Defoe had to play against both occasional conformity andTory bigotry, irony and satire may have been the most pliable literarydevices for castigating supporters of the punitive legislation and mildlyreproving his wayward Dissenting brethren at the same time. Secondly,Backscheider surmises that the success Defoe enjoyed from his contribu-tions to the paper war of 1701 and especially from his best-selling poem,The True-Born Englishman, of that same year ‘gave him too high an opinionof himself’.43 The most important factor, however, was the year-longcrescendo of High Church and Tory invective and the momentum it gaveto the first Occasional Conformity Bill which easily passed the House ofCommons in November and was due for its first reading in the House ofLords on 2 December 1702, the day after Defoe published The Shortest Way.

That crescendo began in the first months of 1702, a year which openedwith discussion of an Occasional Conformity Bill in Convocation, but itwas not until after the untimely death of William III in March and QueenAnne’s speech in May that the High Church smelled blood. The Queen’sannounced partiality for those with the ‘truest zeal’ for the Church ofEngland uncorked a resentment toward Nonconformists, latitudinarians,and Whigs which had been building since the Revolution.44 Only days afterthe Queen’s speech, Henry Sacheverell, whom Defoe dubbed ‘the OxfordFirebrand’ and ‘Generalissimo of the Oxford Squadron’, preached and pub-lished his infamous sermon, The Political Union, in which he called uponthe zealous to ‘Hang out the Bloody Flag, and Banner of Defiance’ againstoccasional conformists, against ‘These Shuffling, Treacherous Latitudinar-ians’, against the ‘Ignorant, Mean, and Unworthy Ministry, that wouldBetray Their Own Church’, and against Dissenters, guilty of having joinedwith ‘Papists … Both in their Arms and Counsels, as well to Extirpate OurGovernment, as to Subvert our Church’.45 While Sacheverell could inflamethe passions of those in box pews as well as the galleries, the former werejust as likely to have their opinions honed by a number of other pamphle-teers who made the Church’s case. A number of influential tracts capturedpublic attention throughout that election summer and as the newParliament convened in the autumn, were to sound the ‘church in danger’bell in successive editions. The most important of these appeared inNovember, two anonymously published tracts, The Establishment of theChurch, the Preservation of the State and The Poetical Observator, together withCharles Leslie’s The New Association, which set out to paint in vivid hues


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what many churchmen had imagined in dim contour: the existence of aconspiracy between moderate churchmen and Whigs to overthrow theestablished Church and the government.46 Preoccupied earlier in the yearwith debt problems, Defoe, in a rearguard action, hurried two pamphletsinto press which defended the great body of Nonconformists from chargesof fanaticism and hypocrisy and denounced the Bill against occasional con-formity.47 The Shortest Way was hatched in the realization that these tractswere too little, too late. In the first of many accounts of his actions, Defoewrote:

The Sermon Preach’d at Oxford, the New Association, the PoeticalObservator, with numberless others; have said the same thing, in termsvery little darker, and this Book stands fair to let those Gentlemen know,that what they design can no farther take with Mankind, that as theirreal meaning stands disguis’d by the Artifice of words; but that when thePersecution and Destruction of the Dissenters, the very thing they drive at,is put into plain English, the whole Nation will … Condemn … [them].48

This was explaining away irony with irony for the ‘Artifice of Words’ hadtaken the shortest way with Defoe and not his adversaries.

If the strategy of exposing High Church intolerance through satire hadfailed him, there were other ways for Defoe to play his double game. Theturbulent history of the Stuart dynasty had generated a series of allegiancecontroversies making the question of oaths a central feature of the period’spolitical life and debate.49 Dissenters’ views about oaths, from the mostmoderate Presbyterians to Quakers on the tolerable fringe, ranged fromregarding them as mildly distasteful to entirely detestable.50 Even if oath-taking was permissible to most, almost all Dissenters found perjury andprofanity especially offensive.51 Defoe acknowledged the general practice ofoath-taking to be scripturally sound, remarking, ‘’Tis true, an oath, which is a calling to God to witness is an Action both Civil and Religious, but still that was appointed and instituted to that end, as expressly notes,Heb[rews].’ It was perfectly legitimate, for example, to swear an oath inchurch for religious purposes or an oath in court for secular ones. Kneelingwas another action designed to be either civil or sacred, as one might kneelbefore a king or before God. ‘Some religious actions’, however, were ‘so entirely’ religious, Defoe believed, ‘that they cannot without a horridinvasion of the Sovereignty of the Institutor be appropriated to any otheruse; and such are in especial manner, the Two Sacraments instituted byChrist.’52 Thus, Defoe condemned those Dissenters who ‘deserted … [theirbrethren] upon the occasion of Preferment, and have made the SacredInstitutions of Christ Jesus, become Pimps to their Secular Interest’.53 Thequestion of sacred oaths, however, could also be used to criticize theauthority which instituted them for civil purposes in the first place. By

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making Anglican communion ‘a Term of Qualification for Civil Imploy-ment’, Defoe argued, Church and crown were ‘levelling the Sacred to theCivil, and making the Holy Ordinances and Institutions of Christ Jesus,Attendants to Politick Projects, Pages to Secular Interests, and Accidents toMatters of Government’. Not only was he unable to ‘conceive that … theSolemn Ordinances of God’s Worship … [could] be made Civil Actions byany End, Design, Will, or Intention of Man whatsoever’, but why attemptto impose such a thing, he asked, if it was so obviously detrimental to the‘Publick Peace … and Prosperity’ of the kingdom?54 Sacraments represented‘the most Sacred of Oaths’ and ‘are things appropriated by the DivineInstitution of God himself, as things which have no other Signification orImport but what is Divine’.55 Again, one sees Defoe insisting upon a sharpdivide between the natural and supernatural worlds lest ‘signification’become corrupted.

Defoe’s solemnity regarding oaths also explains his attitude towards Non-jurors and Jacobites. It was possible to regard the former as the mostimplacable enemies to the revolution settlement and yet, throughoutDefoe’s works, Non-jurors were granted a modicum of respect whereasjuring Jacobites, whose loyalty to the Stuarts may have been far more luke-warm, received his greatest scorn. In a pamphlet of 1701, examining therepercussions of James II’s recent death, Defoe extended ‘a kind Invitation’to Non-jurors to return to the fold and he went so far as to acknowledgethe suspicions and hardships they had endured for conscience’s sake.Throughout the Review, Defoe adhered to ‘the Opinion, That a Non-Juror, aProfess’d Jacobite, is by far a better Man than he that Swears to the[present] Government, and yet Declares and Acts for the former’.56 EvenPapists ‘act[ing] in Conformity to the Principles they profess’ were lessobjectionable than the Jacobites, ‘Men of Treason and Falsehood … Dangerand Delusion’ who deserved no better than Newgate or the gallows.57

If Defoe’s attitude towards occasional conformists and ‘Jurant-Jacobites’reflected a symptomatic Puritan disdain for trivializing oaths, it alsobetrayed his aversion to the obfuscation of categories. The phenomenon ofDissent, whether from Church or state, was tolerable if it was open andclear-cut. Bacon’s experimental philosophy called for precision in theclassification of the natural world, in the construction of categories, and inthe assignment of words to things. This mandate was extended by men likeBishop Wilkins in his desire to construct a philosophical language, aproject which he believed ‘could settle religious and political controversiesby eliminating linguistic misunderstandings and errors’.58 Two patterns inDefoe’s vocabulary demonstrate a kind of nominative reluctance on hispart to allow impure examples bearing the name of a particular phenome-non to stand without further clarification. The first was his penchant forassigning compound titles to such cases. Occasional conformists were not‘Dissenters’ but ‘State Dissenters’ or ‘Politick Dissenters’.59 Though the word


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‘Jacobite’ is used throughout the Defoe corpus, he often coupled the termwith prefixes such as ‘Jurant’ or ‘Conforming’ to emphasize malevolence.60

In his verse satire, Reformation of Manners, he labelled corrupt Justices of thePeace ‘Justice-Merchants’; and in the eponymous novel, Moll Flanders’profligate, albeit attractive, second husband was branded a ‘Gentleman-Tradesman’, a hybrid role difficult to achieve and maintain.61

A second feature in Defoe’s lexicon was his use of the words ‘amphibious’and ‘ambo-dexter’ as disparaging terms. In modern usage, these termsconnote adaptability or versatility; Defoe used them to denote ambiguity,duplicity, or corruption. He did so frequently, referring, for example, tooccasional conformists as ‘Ambo-Dexters in Religion’ and its practice as ‘thisScandalous Ambo-dexter Conformity’.62 Defoe’s sensitivity to consistency anduniformity within a single concept may be one reason why he was able tosatirize the notion of the ‘True-Born Englishman’ with such success; theopening and closing lines of the following verse from the poem illustratehis characteristic use of these two sets of distinctions:

From this Amphibious Ill-born Mob beganThat vain ill natur’d thing, an Englishman.The Customs, Sirnames, Languages, and Manners,Of all these Nations are their own Explainers …Whose Relicks are so lasting and so strong,They ha’ left a Shiboleth upon our Tongue;By which with easie search you may distinguishYour Roman-Saxon-Danish-Norman English.63

Using these rhetorical strategies, Defoe communicated to churchmen andoccasional conformists alike that the latter did not merit, without consider-able qualification, the title of ‘Dissenter’.

iv. Denominational competition: Defoe’s novel rationale forreligious pluralism

The concept of Dissent in general necessarily implies something to whichone cannot in good faith conform. Since 1660, the year Defoe was born,that something had been the restored Anglican establishment. Extendingtheir belief in the central role played by the Church in the ‘spiritual well-being of the community’, Presbyterians presumed that the spiritual well-being of the nation depended upon the existence of a national Church.64

They had waged a long but unsuccessful campaign to be part of thatnational establishment, splitting their ranks in the process. Though raisedin that camp which acquiesced more easily in its division from the Church,Defoe, like many ‘tolerationists’, never quite abandoned the communitar-ian ideal which a national Church embodied. The Toleration Act of 1689

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had secured all that tolerationist Presbyterians had asked for: freedom ofconscience to worship as they saw fit beside an Anglican regime. Defoe sawadvantages in maintaining the Anglican establishment, despite his objec-tions to the Corporation and Test Acts which politically handicapped hisco-religionists. Without ever seeking disestablishment, he underscoredthose objections during moments when an extension of Church powerbeyond the bounds of toleration into persecution seemed imminent. Oncea crisis was averted, he reasserted the Church’s position as a national insti-tution and true Church of Christ, urging Nonconformists to advance theircause by godly example rather than political agitation. Despite these minortactical variations, Defoe’s support of the Church’s status was ultimatelyprincipled, not provisional.65 Though his ideas were worked out in thecontext of the highly charged occasional conformity debate, it was faith inthe providential nature and power of exchange and not journalistic expedi-ency which led Defoe to make his distinctive case. He called for denomina-tional competition as the path to religious truth, an appeal which in manyaspects anticipated nineteenth-century liberalism’s defence of the freemarket of ideas as the means to intellectual progress.

In the summer of 1703, imprisoned and racked by worry and self-recrimination, Defoe could find solace in the fact that, in February, theHouse of Lords, albeit on a technicality, had quashed the passage of theOccasional Conformity Bill which he had fought in such foolhardyfashion. While in Newgate, he continued writing pamphlets in defence ofNonconformists. In July, he published The Shortest Way to Peace and Union,which featured a proposal, ‘compos’d some years ago’, to bring about ‘aUnion of Affection, as should make us One People, with one Heart, andone Interest’ under an ‘untouch’d, unalter’d Constitution’.66 The proposal,Defoe attested, was premised upon a fair characterization of both Dis-senters and churchmen by discounting the minority of extremists in eachgroup, specifically, the few sectarians who espoused ‘AntimonarchicalPrinciples’ and the ‘hot violent’ churchmen who wished Nonconformists ‘aworse Fate than [that of] the French Hugonots’.67 Its central supposition,‘that ’tis the True Interest of the Dissenters in England, to be govern’d by a Church of England Magistracy’, he admitted, would not please his co-religionists; nor would ‘the first Reason’ he gave in its defence: ‘viz. Thatthey are not qualified to be trusted with the Government of themselves’.Having exploded his bombshell, Defoe proceeded to make his case. He wasquick to dismiss Tory shibboleths which proclaimed Dissenters to be con-genitally rebellious kingkillers or the eternal sons of ’41. Nor was it a ques-tion of the form of government they would choose for love of theconstitution, collective wisdom, and their own interests would oblige themto choose a monarchy. Divisiveness was the root of their problem: ‘TheGeneral body of the Dissenters are compos’d of Four sorts, and those Fourso opposite in their Temper, Customs, Doctrine and Discipline, that I am of


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opinion ’tis as probable all Four should Conform to the Church of England,as to one another.’68 Independents and Anabaptists would never toleratePresbyterian government, Presbyterians would never countenance thereverse, all three would dismiss Quaker rule as an impossibility: each per-mutation resulted in a negative. Nor was any one sect strong enough tomaintain power:

In Case therefore of the Government being to be tendred to theDissenters, they would never agree among themselves who should haveit; and if any one Party obtain’d it without the consent of the Other, hewould never be able to hold it; and the Nation would be expos’d toinevitable Confusions and Distractions.69

A third disqualifying factor, Defoe contended, was the Dissenters’ lack of a‘Governing Temper’, especially the qualities of ‘Penetration and Generos-ity’, which he attributed to their temperament and socio-economic status;in general, they were not ‘Politicians’ or members of the ‘Gentry’.70

Most Dissenters, Defoe believed, already understood, at some level, thevalidity of these points; the more recalcitrant only needed reminding of thegeneral satisfaction Nonconformists felt under the established Churchduring William’s reign. An open avowal, by the Dissenting community,that its interests were, in fact, best served under a tolerant Anglican regimewould engender a ‘mutual Confidence’ essential to the core of Defoe’sproposal. The resulting decline in the party jealousies of occasionalconformists and defensive churchmen would produce

a Communion of Charity and Civility between the Parties; this wouldmake way for a right Understanding; and tho’ there are differences inReligion, there need be none in Affection, in Society, in Neighbourhood;People may be good Neighbours, good Friends, and united in Interest,tho’ one goes to the Church, and ’tother to the Meeting-House; let theStrife be who lives Best, and the Contention of the Clergy who shallPreach Best, and by this make as many Parties and Factions as theyplease; let them Preach one anothers Hearers away, and Increase andDecrease according to the Genuine, Honest Lives and Doctrines of theParty, then the best Church will be the biggest Church; they who PreachBest, and Practice Best, will have the most of their side; and that Churchwhich has the most of its side, will soon have the upper Hand, forNumber always prevails.71

Here again, the contexts of trade, Baconian science, and politeness play an important role in illuminating Defoe’s complex attitudes towards theworld which the exchange of goods and opinions was creating. Just as we improve ourselves by material trade, this passage suggests, so we can

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improve ecclesiastical institutions by a competitive exchange betweenchurches. The assumption here, as it was in Defoe’s analysis of the scissilenature of Nonconformity, was that mutual agreement and competitionwould produce the best national Church, not an equality of disestablish-ment for all denominations. His argument, therefore, was not for a divisionof the ecclesiastical pie but the awarding of it to the most morally persua-sive and numerically successful institution. The Church of England waswelcome to retain its privileges if Dissenters could enjoy toleration andthereby be enabled to compete as religious bodies. At the outset of theoccasional conformity debate, Defoe had argued that national churches ‘byattracting so many painted Hypocrites’ were often victims of their ownsuccess. In fact, he concluded, ‘the whole Ecclesiastical History, from thefirst century of the Christian Church, is full of Instances to confirm this,That the Prosperity of the Church of Christ has been more fatal to it, thanall the Persecutions of its Enemies’.72 Competition might also keep anational Church from resting on its laurels. Defoe understood that the con-sequences of his proposal extended beyond the nature of ecclesiasticalarrangements. Competition would encourage the morality of society ingeneral as every individual, as a representative of his or her denomination,would be encouraged to demonstrate his or her probity. Rather than‘pushing at Power, and making Interest by Parties about Religion’, politicswould be left out of religious dispute so that ‘the Lives and Doctrines’would be determinate and ‘they who have the best Principles, and live bestup to them’ would prevail.73

Though Defoe’s sanguine picture of competition, especially one centredon religion, seems naive, he clearly believed that exchanges within a plu-rality of denominations would result in the emergence of religious truth, ‘aright Understanding’, and that the best church was that which satisfied thegreatest number. Much of what Defoe had to say in The Shortest Way toPeace and Union was echoed by a later generation of Dissenters and by polit-ical theorists in the nineteenth century. Without constructing a genealogyof liberalism directly linking Defoe to Bentham and Mill, it is neverthelesspossible to suggest an additional, or perhaps alternative, line of influencebetween the religious disputes of the early eighteenth century and liberaland democratic doctrines emerging a half-century later. It has often beenargued by others that freedom of thought in England derived chiefly froman attempt in certain Dissenting circles to justify Freethinking, or from theassertion of Socinianism against Trinitarian Anglicanism. Defoe was aTrinitarian who, at every opportunity, vehemently denied the applicabilityof reason to matters of faith. Christologically and theologically, Defoe’sbeliefs were diametrically opposed to the growing rationalist predispositionof future Dissenters like Joseph Priestley, whose ‘fundamental assumption[was] that Christianity is and ought to be capable of being “properly under-stood”’.74 What Priestley was to share with Defoe was a Baconian providen-


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tialism and strikingly similar views both about Dissenters as a group andabout the contribution of sectarian pluralism to the common good.Priestley argued that ‘a multiplicity of sects’ was ‘beneficial to the state’ andthat ‘the good and happiness of the members, that is the majority of themembers of any state, is the great standard by which every thing relating tothat state must finally be determined’. ‘It was this passage’, according toAnthony Waterman, ‘that inspired Jeremy Bentham’.75 Given John StuartMill’s Benthamite education, it may be that his theory that truth was onlyachieved by the free exchange of a plurality of opinion has a DissentingBaconian heritage. Less speculatively, it is almost certain that any connec-tions between Defoe and modern liberalism are more likely to lie in thisarea of investigation than in those which seek to fit Defoe into a Lockeianliberal scheme. Why it is a misconception to explain Defoe as a Lockeianwill be explored in more depth in Chapter 3.

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3Jure Divino: Defoe, Locke and Milton,and Political Theory

i. ‘Arguing by my own Light, not other Mens’: how a Lockeianidentity was attributed to Defoe

Despite Defoe’s own denials and ample evidence to the contrary, both historians and literary critics maintain the position that Defoe’s politicalprinciples were ‘distinctly Lockeian’ and, in general, credit him with popu-larizing and ‘propagating the ideas in the Second Treatise’.1 It is easy to seewhy the works of these two authors might be linked. Defoe and Locke weretwo of the most famous writers of the late-Stuart age – though their fame aspolitical writers, hypothetically isolated from their roles as philosopher andnovelist, was probably enhanced by the exaggerated ideological linkbetween them. Both Locke and Defoe served men who were arguably thetwo most important politicians of their respective ages, Shaftesbury andHarley; and both were said to have had prickly personalities and habits ofsecrecy. Locke, however, was a member of the gentry and mingled with thegreat; Defoe was a tradesman and journalist. Both men wrote extensivelyabout economic matters though neither advocated the kind of possessiveindividualism or bourgeois capitalism attributed to them.2 As staunch sup-porters of the Revolution of 1688, both men shared a set of basic politicalassumptions: the popular origins of sovereignty, the right to resist tyrantsand the concomitant dissolution of government, the sanctity of property,the supremacy of the laws, and the constitutional superiority of a limitedmonarchy – but they were certainly not unique either in these beliefs or intheir advocacy of them. They shared a Calvinist upbringing but whileLocke was publicly Anglican and privately Socinian in his beliefs, Defoewas a vociferous Nonconformist and Trinitarian. Though it is thequalifications of these similarities which are important, not the similaritiesin themselves, the image of Defoe as Lockeian acolyte persists, perpetuatingthe conventionally exaggerated picture of Locke’s influence upon eigh-teenth-century discourse and obscuring the true content and context ofDefoe’s political convictions.

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In July 1706 Defoe published Jure Divino, the most complete statement ofhis political philosophy. The form of this text, a verse essay of heroic coupletsin twelve books, sold by subscription for ten shillings and published in folio,certainly attests the project’s importance to its author.3 Begun in 1703 duringhis public and private crises over occasional conformity, imprisonment, andbankruptcy, the poem attacked the doctrines of divine-right kingship andpassive obedience which were enjoying something of a renaissance in thepress during the first years of Queen Anne’s reign. Jure Divino has beendescribed by one scholar as a five-year project, ‘the literary effort of a lifetime’,and interpreted as a rendition of the Second Treatise in verse form.4 Defoe’sown remarks about its writing and publication actually suggest an eighteen-month to two-year period of composition. Although it defended liberty, prop-erty, and the right of resistance, the work was informed by principles Lockerejected. Jure Divino was not an exercise in Lockeian or timeless liberal general-ities but Defoe’s response to specific issues within particular polemical con-texts, contexts whose theological dimensions have often been ignored.

The first person to link Defoe’s political views with those of Locke wasthe Nonjuror Charles Leslie, one of the eighteenth century’s principal pro-ponents of Filmerian politics and High Church doctrine and one of Defoe’smost able and abiding adversaries in print. It was a standard tactic of bothTories and Whigs to discredit their opponents’ ideas by imposing disrep-utable intellectual genealogies upon them; by accusing Defoe of propagat-ing the ideas of Locke, Algernon Sidney, Milton, and others, Leslie wasattempting to malign his Whig antagonist by placing Defoe in the notori-ous company of republicans, regicides, and enthusiasts. As MartynThompson has pointed out, however, this charge was to have unforeseenconsequences for the Tory party. Over succeeding generations, Locke’s rep-utation as a dangerous political radical gave way to that of the greatEnlightenment philosopher whom the Whigs were proud to claim as theirown. The Tories, in essence, had been hoisted by their own Lockeianpetard.5 For the most part, Defoe eschewed the tactics of ideological labelsand pedigrees though he recognized their popularity and the problemsthey posed, especially for Dissenters:

as this too much divided Nation has always been compos’d of two contending Parties, those Parties have been distinguish’d … by Names of contempt; and tho’ they have often chang’d them on either side, as Cavalier and Roundhead, Royalists and Rebels, Malignants andPhanaticks, Tories and Whigs, yet the division has always been barelythe Church and the Dissenter, and there it continues to this Day.6

Blaming the divisiveness of English politics upon high-flying priests whosought to anathematize moderate churchmen and Dissenters, he singledout Sacheverell and Leslie as key culprits.7 Whether read from the pulpit or

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disseminated in print, Sacheverell’s sermons were histrionic and were easilyattacked as such; Leslie’s pamphlets were bitingly effective in their capacityto put the supporters of Whig and Dissenting causes on the defensive. Withthe exception of the 1705 High Church tract, The Memorial of the Church of England, arguably ‘the most famous single pamphlet from 1702 to 1710’,a series of pamphlets by Leslie, and their successive editions, comprised amain force shaping the debate.8

In November 1702, in the midst of parliamentary consideration of the firstBill to prevent occasional conformity, Leslie published The New Association. Itwas this pamphlet which Defoe sought to satirize in his Shortest Way andwhich he singled out, two years later, as the chief agent behind the promo-tion of Occasional Conformity Bills, the politicization of the clergy, and theperversion of religion into ‘the Pimp of a Party’.9 In March 1703, as part of theHigh Church rally following the defeat of the first Occasional Conformity Bill,Leslie published The New Association. Part II. The many subtitles advertising its contents explicitly included Defoe among its targets.10 The pamphletidentified the new ‘Scotch-Covenanters’, English Dissenting academies, andDefoe’s pamphlets as agents of faction and sedition, intent upon destroyingboth episcopacy and monarchy, leaving ‘Imagination … our only Rule’ in reli-gion and the licentious, vulgar multitude to rule the state.11 These chargeswere followed by several chapters on the theme ‘Forty One Remember’d’, and a Supplement containing ‘A full Answer to Mr. LOCK’s Two Treatises ofGovernment’.12 Though James Owen’s Moderation a Vertue was his next primetarget, Leslie’s The Wolf Stript of His Shepherd’s Cloathing, published during par-liamentary debate over the second Occasional Conformity Bill, railed againstwhat he labelled a ‘Society of Writers … Propagat[ing] their Abhorr’dPrinciples of Schism and Rebellion’.13 The three writers he singled out, Owen,Davenant, and the ‘Notorious’ and ‘Undaunted’ Defoe,14 attacked each otheras often as not but the image of a coordinated Whig campaign was an easyone for Leslie and his readers to adopt. More importantly, The Wolf Stript haddirectly coupled the cause of occasional conformity with that of popular sov-ereignty and Defoe’s name with Locke’s. Despite these efforts, the House ofLords threw out the second Occasional Conformity Bill and the cycle of pro-paganda between the Church and the Whigs began anew in 1704. Leslie pub-lished two more lengthy pamphlets on the same themes that June.15 InNovember the House of Commons attempted to pass a third OccasionalConformity Bill by tacking it to the supply Bill of that year. It too failed andthe tacking strategy was strongly criticized by many, including Defoe.

Individual pamphlets were not the only means by which Leslie defendedthe Church and divine-right monarchy. In March 1704, he launched hisown weekly newsletter, The Rehearsal of the Review and Observator to combatthe Whiggish viewpoints offered by Defoe and John Tutchin in theirrespective serials.16 Both Harley and Defoe had been visionary in under-standing and innovative in encouraging the potential power of the press.

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In the summer of 1704 and again in 1705, Harley dispatched Defoe tosouthwest England and to counties surrounding London to sound outpublic opinion and to explore ways to establish distribution networks bywhich to influence it.17 The two had been aware of the popularity whichthe Tory John Dyer’s manuscript newsletter had in the provinces but,much to his annoyance, Defoe discovered the extent of the Rehearsal’sinfluence as well. Mr. Review and Mr. Rehearsal became regular sparringpartners. In November 1705, a spate of Reviews described the ways in whichHigh Church propaganda was now being disseminated. Defoe identifiedthe pulpit, the tongue or common discourse, and the press as the threetools of the High Church party. The ‘inferiour clergy’, Defoe opined,‘meddle in the Pulpit with matters of State … Buffoon the Authority theyswear to, and stir up all manner of Disrespect in the People against theirRulers’.18 Thanks to their sermons, ‘every Street, every Town, every Part ofthe Nation … abound with horrible Language’ and the ‘Mob sing Balladsand Lampoons against the Government’.19 Promoting government policyin provincial towns was proving impossible; ‘to argue with them’, Defoecarped, ‘is to talk Gospel to a Kettle Drum’.20 The true source of all thisfurore, Defoe believed, was Charles Leslie and the ‘Bundles of inveterateRehearsals’ being ‘Hugg’d, Applauded, handed about, given for God sake, byour Gentlemen of the Inferiour Clergy’ while copies of his own Review werebeing stolen from coffee houses to prevent them from being read.21 ThoughLondon readers, ‘here at the center of National Knowledge’, were sophisti-cated enough to dismiss Leslie’s ‘Church in Danger’ rhetoric, Defoelamented its recent success in the countryside.22

The most significant direct exchange between Mr. Review and Mr. Rehearsaloccurred in the summer of 1706, an exchange about which scholars havemistakenly failed to take Defoe at his word. After months of delay in publi-cation and what Defoe described as ‘open War with the Booksellers’ oversubscriptions, Jure Divino finally appeared in print in July.23 It was an ambi-tious work: the philosophical verse essay was a more traditional and ele-vated genre than Defoe’s usual journalistic modes and one which he hopedmight neutralize High Church attacks and perhaps establish his reputationas a serious writer.24 Leslie, however, was doing his best to establish Defoeas the new champion of Locke, Sidney, and Milton. That same month, anexasperated Defoe notified his Review readers that although he had exposedthe ‘inconsistent Nonsense’ of Leslie’s ‘Jure Divino Principles, in the Bookbearing that Title’, his incessant ‘railing Accusations … Bullying andSophistry’ compelled him to again address a series of questions posed byMr. Rehearsal about ‘the Subject of Government, its Divine Original, Right,and Descent’.25 In a number of issues that summer, Defoe denied the valid-ity of divine right, hereditary monarchy and passive obedience, anddefended the rights of property and resistance to tyrants. These ideas, ofcourse, were not original to Locke or Defoe but were part of England’s sev-

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enteenth-century political lexicon. In fact, the three most innovativeaspects of the Second Treatise – the individual’s power to execute justice inthe state of nature, which Locke had called his ‘Strange Doctrine’ in orderto emphasize its originality,26 the labour theory of value, and the role ofthe invention of money in creating the conditions for civil society – are theonly ideas we can identify as distinctly Lockeian: none of them, as will beshown, appeared here or in any of Defoe’s works, including his so-called‘Lockeian’ Jure Divino.

Defoe also sought to correct, once and for all, the attributions Leslie hadfoisted upon him and to assert his own intellectual independence: ‘I know,what Mr. Lock, Sidney and others have said … and I must confess, I neverthought their Systems fully answer’d – But I am arguing by my own Light,not other Mens; and therefore my Notions may be new, yet I beg theFavour to be heard’. Where Locke denied ‘innate ideas’ and creditedmankind in a state of nature with a genuine choice whether or not to enterinto civil society (so making civil society an artificial, purely human, con-struct), Defoe was explicit that government had a ‘Divine Original’:

Government is an Appendix of Nature, one of the first rational Dictatesto Man from his Understanding; ’tis form’d in the Soul, and therefore ofDivine Original; he would cease to be rational, when he ceased to liveregularly; and if twenty Men born in the dark, and that had neverknown Men or things, were set on Shore in an Island, where they hadno body to imitate, and nothing to do but to live; the first thing theywould apply to by the Light of Nature after Food, would be to settleGovernment among them.27

He was not defining the settlement of government as a right, nor a conse-quence solely derived from property, nor a development arising from thenecessity to regulate social interaction in a world complicated by the inven-tion of money; it was a rational instinct placed in the human soul by God.It is this conception of government as a ‘rational Dictate’, of divine origin,a dictate ‘founded in Nature and Reason, Principles in Man immediatelyinfused by his Maker with his Life’, one ‘as natural as their Apetites [sic] toeat and drink’ that animated Defoe’s Jure Divino.28

Many of the so-called similarities between Jure Divino and the TwoTreatises consist in reality of words and phrases which any two politicaltracts of the period might share. Great importance, for example, has beenattached to the fact that both works support the notions of ‘Faith inReason’, ‘consent of the governed’, the ‘binding nature of laws on mon-archs’, and the dissolution of government under tyranny,29 but these con-cepts were hardly exclusive to the Two Treatises. Jure Divino was also heavilyannotated with footnotes citing various authors and offering additionalcommentary on their contributions or particular verses in the text. Grotius,


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Pufendorf, Milton, Tyrrell, and Sidney were the names most frequently andfavourably mentioned; Defoe referred to Locke only once, without com-ment and in the company of Sidney and Harrington. It was Paradise Lostand not the Two Treatises which provided Defoe with the starting point forhis discussion of the origins of government. Both the preface and contentsof Jure Divino establish that the work was primarily premised not upon thetheoretical state of nature per se but upon the conditions of original sinand redemption. In one footnote Defoe acknowledged his debt to Milton,stating ‘I cannot do too much Honour to the Memory of so Masterly aGenius’ whose poem ‘forms to me the best Ideas of the Matter of OriginalCrime, of any Thing put into Words in our Language’ (IV, p. 14).30 The TwoTreatises were published in defence of the Revolution, but it is now estab-lished that Locke wrote them earlier with another purpose in mind.Although Jure Divino can also be said to defend the Revolution, Defoe madeseveral statements in the poem’s preface indicating that it too was origi-nally conceived for a different purpose, a purpose which Locke’s anti-Trinitarian and epistemological views would never have permitted him, asa Socinian empiricist, to countenance.

ii. ‘Tyrant SIN’: the real philosophical foundation of JureDivino

Although scholars have wrongly interpreted Jure Divino as a fundamentallyLockeian text, they have rightly recognized it as the fullest statement of hispolitical philosophy. The text also provides us with the clearest testamentof Defoe’s most fundamental religious principles. Its Preface reveals chal-lenges to the cause of orthodox Dissent were coming from all sides, not justfrom resurgent High Churchmanship. In acknowledging the Church ofEngland’s disavowal of religious persecution, Defoe wished to stress thatthe toleration now enjoyed by his co-religionists did not depend upon the‘meer Grace and Bounty of the Church’. Nor did it stem from the kind of‘precarious illegal Liberty’ offered them by King James, founded upon the‘Dispensing Power’. It was the result of an agreement or treaty madebetween Dissenters and churchmen, supported and guaranteed by William‘upon his coming over’, and ‘settled by Act of Parliament’. Defoe expressedhis frustration that although toleration was now an established ‘CivilRight’, many people still viewed it as a gift or privilege which the Dissentersmust perpetually prove themselves worthy of receiving. On the one hand,mainstream Anglicans continued to expect obeisance, and on the other,more controversial Christian thinkers like William Stephens and JohnToland were pressing orthodox Dissenters to agitate for ‘UniversalToleration’ because in factiously denying toleration to others, they werenot worthy of it themselves.31 While the High Church searched for ways tocircumscribe the Act of Toleration through tactics like the Occasional

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Conformity Bill, Toland had gone so far as to send an epistolary appeal toleaders of the main Dissenting sects advising them to accept all religiousopinions as the best way to shed their collective reputation as a ‘People of a persecuting Temper’. Of course, such conflicting demands highlightedthe increasingly difficult political position of orthodox Dissenters andDefoe urged them to avoid any public declarations on the toleration question. In answer to Stephens and Toland, Defoe bewailed, ‘will nothingentitle me to a Toleration of my sound and orthodox Opinion, but beingwilling to Tolerate another Opinion that is Hetrodox [sic], Blasphemous orHeretical?’ (Preface, pp. xviii–xxiii).

Scripture provided the answer on how to proceed in such matters. Citingthe biblical examples of Ephesus, Sardis, and Laodicea, Defoe declared thatas long as individual congregations were ‘Sound in Doctrine’ they were notdenied ‘a Name among the Churches’. If their members failed to live up tothe teachings of sound doctrine, then they were ‘admonished to repent’.Scripture enabled him to positively assert that

Christians of what Denomination soever, being Orthodox in Principle,and Sound in Doctrine, have a Native Right to Liberty of Serving God,according to the Dictates of their own Consciences, and ought to beTolerated, provided they behave themselves peaceably under theGovernment, and obedient in all other things to the Civil Magistracy ofthe Country in which they live.

No such scriptural foundation existed for the toleration of heterodox opin-ions, however. As to the question of what constituted orthodoxy, Defoe’sanswer is worth quoting at length because it is the most precise testamentof his belief to be found in all his works:

the few things which serve to declare the difference between anOrthodox Christian and a Heretick, are so plain, so visible in Scripture,so explicit in our Creeds and Confessions of Faith, in which allOrthodox Christians agree; that we need go no farther; the Scripture isallow’d by all Christians to be the Rule of Faith, sufficient to Instruction;the Christian Confessions of Faith are a Collection of the fundamentalHeads of our Religion, deduc’d from the said Scriptures, composed ofplain, indisputable Truths, unto which whoever agrees, tho’ in theAddenda and Circumstances of Order, Discipline and Manner, he maydiffer, he is in the Sense of all Christians, an Orthodox Believer.

But if a Man denies the Nature, Being, or Attributes of God, the Resur-rection of the Body, Futurity of Rewards and Punishments; the Divinity,Conception, Birth, Death, Resurrection, Ascension and Intercession of our Redeemer; his delegated Power of Judgment and Retribution; the Power, Operation and Efficacy of the Holy Spirit, and the Mystical


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Union of the Trinity; if any Man denies the Necessity of Faith andRepentance, and the Salvation of a Soul, only by the Purchase andMerits of a Redeemer, and the like essential Points of the ChristianReligion; such a Man is a Disciple of that Jezebel, who calls her self aProphetess, and who ought not to be suffered, that is Tolerated, in theChurch of Christ to teach and seduce his People to commit Fornication,&c. Rev. 2.20. (Preface, p. xxi)

This passage proclaims several aspects of orthodox theology which informedalmost all of Defoe’s writings. Scripture’s authority as the revealed word, thelegitimacy of confessional statements of faith, God’s awesome righteous-ness, the hypostatic union of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the centrality offaith and repentance to the Christian life, and salvation through Christ’sAtonement would all be challenged in a variety of religious disputes over the course of Defoe’s life. It is a central thesis of this book that Defoeremained committed to each and every one of these positions. They werecentral, as this chapter will explain, to Defoe’s understanding of thepurpose of human life and to the proper relationship between subjects andsovereigns.

Belief in these doctrines was essential in order to qualify for toleration.After his own extraordinary deliverance from Newgate in November 1703,the animosity caused by the tack, and its robust defeat in January 1705,Defoe believed the cause of toleration had won the day. The year aheadwould nevertheless not be a peaceful one: new elections, the controversysurrounding the sensational, highflying pamphlet, The Memorial of theChurch of England, and the continued presence of men like Leslie andSacheverell renewed the cries of ‘church in danger’, ‘passive obedience’,and ‘non-resistance’. Alarmed by a ‘World … going mad a second time withthe[se] Error[s]’ and believing it ‘impossible to reconcile the Principles ofPassive Obedience with the whole Proceeding of the Late Revolution’,Defoe readied the Jure Divino manuscript for publication (Preface, pp. i, iii).When it appeared in July 1706, the twelve books of verse satire alsoincluded a Dedication to Reason, an invocation ‘To the Author’, a letter toQueen Anne, and a lengthy Preface which outlined the polemical contextsin which Defoe saw himself operating as well as some hints about the workas he had initially conceived it.

Defoe acknowledged that the published volume differed substantiallyfrom its original design. He confessed to having ‘laid by a Second Volume’which had been ‘the first in Action’, one containing observations relevantto the published volume but which, coming from his pen, might ‘giveOffense’. In a later passage he offered an alternative explanation, statingthat a satire on tyranny might be expected to examine ‘Ecclesiastical as[well as] Civil Tyranny’ but that he had ‘wav’d this unpleasant task formany Reasons’. Popery no longer threatened England from within, the

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Church had recently renounced ‘the Doctrine of Persecution, as a thing con-trary to her Doctrine, and contrary to the Principles of the Christian Religion’,and party politicians had failed in their attempts to destroy the principlesof toleration established in 1689. This much is clear: the original workcomprised two volumes but Defoe decided against publishing the secondone. He anticipated that readers of the volume he did publish might findhis argument ‘incompleat’ and that they might expect him to address theproblem of ‘Church-Tyranny’. He declined this task because religious perse-cution was no longer a live issue in England. Not all of Defoe’s enemies hadbeen vanquished, however, and he feared reprisal. Though he had failed todo so ‘in other Cases’, most obviously in publishing The Shortest Way, thistime he would act prudently (Preface, pp. iii–iv, xvi–xvii). In any event, itappears that the first-written but unpublished volume was an attack onecclesiastical tyranny and religious persecution, subjects which had animmediacy for Defoe given that he began the work while imprisoned forsatirizing the High Church campaign against occasional conformity.

The same faction of the Church of England so eager to prosecute Defoefor seditious libel was prone to ‘tax other People with Rebellion andDisloyalty’ while asserting its own faithfulness to the crown. Defoedivided his ideological opponents into two camps. The first group weretrue believers in divine-right monarchy as demonstrated by both theirutterances and actions. They argued that kings were sacred persons,accountable to God alone, commanding obedience under any and all conditions, even if those conditions were tyrannical and merited onlypassive obedience. They decried both the events of 1641 and 1688. Defoeaddressed the main text of Jure Divino to these divine-right purists: ‘theSatyr is theirs’, he commented. The Preface and his greatest censure,however, were reserved for those churchmen who, while espousing thedoctrines of divine-right monarchy and passive obedience, denounced the civil war but accepted the Revolution of 1688. They too had beenresponsible for inflating the ambitions of James II with notions of divine-right kingship but turned against him when royal aims conflicted withtheir own. They were a group keener ‘to talk of Loyalty than perform it’and hid behind the spurious distinction between de jure and de factomonarchy. Kings were not invested with absolute authority by divineright, Defoe repeatedly stated, and ‘when they break the Laws, trample onProperty, affront Religion, invade the Liberties of Nations, and the like,they may be opposed and resisted by Force’(Preface, pp. i, iii, ix). In attack-ing the hypocrisy of many of his High Church and Tory opponents, Defoewent a step further with the provocative argument that the ‘dry martyr-dom’ these men had helped to impose upon James II was worse than the‘wet’ one suffered by Charles I. Charles at least knew his advisers hadremained loyal, that thousands of his subjects had been willing to die inhis service, and many of his enemies had come to regret their actions.


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In the end, dignified death brought him release from intolerable pressures.James, by contrast, saw himself betrayed and abandoned by those verymen who ‘had sworn to a Passive Absolute Submission, and taught it toothers’, flattered him with the divinity of his own person, and encouragedhis own children to replace him on the throne. In many ways, banish-ment and the need to rely on foreign courts for subsistence was a worsefate than his father’s (Preface, pp. xi–xiii).32

Having blamed the High Church party for infecting king and countrywith notions of divine-right kingship in the1680s and for their more recentattempts ‘to bring the same obsolete abdicated Principle in play again’,Defoe turned to advance the central thesis of Jure Divino. First, he assertedthat it had ‘never been the Opinion of the People of England’ that kingscould operate above the laws and against the welfare of their subjects.Given this fact, then divine-right theory was a ‘Piece of Inconsistence inReasoning’ and ‘Monster’ whose origins and history merited attention. Itsintrusion into ‘Modern Politics’ in England may have been new but itspedigree was an ancient one. The doctrine of divine right originated as

A meer Device, and politick Invention, furnish’d from the Fountain ofMischief, viz. Man’s corrupt yet fruitful Imagination, prompted by theAuthor of all Mischief, the Devil; calculated for the erecting, and foundout by such as purposed to introduce Tyranny and absolute Governmentin the World. (Preface, pp. xiv–xv)

The invocation of Jure Divino began by reminding readers that when reli-gious idolatry corrupted the ancient Near East, God had sent Elijah andGideon to convey his truth to the tribes led astray by the worship of Baal.Just as prophets and angels in past ages denounced religious idolatry, themuse instructs Defoe that he must attack ‘State-Idolatry’, ‘Non-resistingNotions’ and ‘Despotick Power’ in order to reveal that their origins werenot divine, as theorists like Filmer had claimed, but, in fact, demonic. Ledby a ‘Powerful Muse’, the author charges himself with the task of exposingthe Devil’s ‘Native Ugliness’ and ‘hideous’ influence on human politics.Defoe considered Satan to be a real historical agent and his engagementwith mankind was certainly a subject more suited to the genre of the verseessay than a recent and controversial work of political theory, Locke’sSecond Treatise. Given Defoe’s remarks about putting aside an earlier vol-ume, it may be that Jure Divino was originally conceived as a poetic accountof the Devil’s role in human history, the earlier, unpublished volumetracing his encouragement of ecclesiastical tyranny and the published textexplaining his help in instigating civil tyranny. Throughout his life, Defoeconsidered Satan’s influence on human affairs an important subject and hewould explore it at length again in his 400-page prose work, The PoliticalHistory of the Devil, published in 1726.33

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Defoe may have dedicated Jure Divino to Sovereign Reason, the Empressof all that was good in humankind, but the very first lines of the poemreveal that her reign was subject to the ever-present threat of usurping sin:

NATURE has left this Tincture in the Blood,That all Men would be Tyrants if they cou’d:If they forbear their Neighbours to devour,

’Tis not for want of Will, but want of Power;The General Plague Infects the very Race,Pride in his Heart, and Tyrant in his Face …

The only Safety of Society,Is, that my Neighbour’s just as proud as I;Has the same Will and Wish, the same Design,And his Abortive Envy ruines mine. (p. 1)

These lines constituted more than a rhetorical exordium. The themes oforiginal sin and diabolical intervention in profane affairs were interwoventhroughout the poem’s introduction and first ten books (the last two bookswere essentially encomiums on William, Anne, and several Whig politi-cians) but receive their fullest treatment in Books VII–X. In these books,Defoe traced the origins and growth of civil tyranny back to Satan’s corrup-tion of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the garden:

The Captive Man subdued the Fortress quits,And all his Soul to Tyrant SIN submits;There Arbitrary Government begins,And he’s a Slave, as soon as e’er he sins.

In ensuing footnotes Defoe further explained that ‘the beginning of allBondage, is seen in Man’s first Bondage to Sin’. As an additional conse-quence of the Fall, ‘the Powers, or Faculties of his Soul were contracted intheir Operations’ so that ‘Man became an enquiring Creature, that wantedInstruction, and stood in need of Experience’ in order to improve himself(VII, p. 5).

From this point forward, Defoe believed, man’s sinful and often foolishnature vied with his divinely endowed reason, with consequences for theindividual soul and for the course of human history as a whole. It was notsurprising, he commented, ‘that the Fall of Man having made him a Slaveto the Devil, Man grew something Diabolical himself, and strove to prac-tice a synonimous [sic] Power over his fellow creatures’ (VII, p. 10) Asimportant scholarship has made clear, Locke was moving away fromCalvinist views regarding original sin and redemption as early as 1680 andcomposition of the Two Treatises may have accelerated this retreat towardSocinianism even before his extensive investigation of heterodox works


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during his exile in Holland. Nothing in the Two Treatises suggested thathuman vices were the result of the Fall and not simply part of human expe-rience which could be avoided through the exercise of reason and free will,and Satan made no appearance at all in Locke’s text.34 Despite his develop-ing capacity to explain past and present events as the outcome of social,economic, and political processes, Defoe was still disposed to seeing thecourse of human history, writ large, as an epic drama in which, guided by reason, man’s better nature struggled against his proclivities for sin,passion, and folly. This again was a theme entirely suited to the verse essay.

iii. Idolatry and conquest: the origins and history of iusdivinum and kingship

Failure to worship the one, true God was the worst consequence of the Fall.For many early-modern thinkers, the early history of mankind was sub-sumed in the story of the growth of false religion. Defoe’s understanding ofthe growth of idolatry was informed by patristic theories of its demonicorigins and by the theory of euhemerism which attributed the origins ofthe gods of classical antiquity to the deification of historical persons. Thiswas the historical and theoretical context in which Defoe located theorigins of belief in divine-right monarchy. Whereas many euhemeristicaccounts focused on the deification of dead heroes and good kings, Book Iof Jure Divino argued instead that the Devil had deluded nations intomaking idols of ‘Tyrant Kings, and more than commonly Wicked Men’ (I,p. 1, 7–8). It satirized a host of figures from Bacchus and Jove who had been‘fabled into Deities’ to the ‘Bacchanalian King’, James I, apotheosized onthe painted ceiling of the Banqueting House (p. [xxix]; I, p. 25).

Books VII–X of Jure Divino chronicled the way in which the activities ofthe Devil combined with man’s corrupt nature to create and sustain a doc-trine that was not only false but blasphemous. Following Greek mythology,Defoe named Ninus, son of Belus or Baal, as the world’s first tyrant to claimauthority by divine right. Through Satan’s cunning and Ninus’s ambition,the father, who had been a good and just prince, was deified in order tosanctify his son’s tyrannic rule. ‘This was Hell’s Master-piece for Idolatry’,Defoe acknowledged (VIII, p. 1). Conspiring with a tyrannic son who hap-pened to have a powerful father afforded Satan the opportunity to establishidolatry and cloak despotism with the mantle of hereditary divine right inone stroke:

Satan and (a) Ninus thus began to reign,And (b) Brother Monarchs, Brother Crimes maintainThe well matcht Kings, their well matcht Projects joinIdolatry and Tyranny alike Divine.Belus the Father, Ninus now the Son;

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This Idol-Gods, that Idol-Kings begun…Thus Ninus early Monarchy erects,Concurring Hell, the new Design protects…Tyrannick Power’s an Idol in the State,And High-Church-Idols Tyranny create:The high Alternate Mischiefs well combin’d;This blasphemes God, and that insults Mankind. (VII, p. 23)

Like other writers of his period, Defoe tried to reconcile Christian historywith the myths of classical antiquity. He accepted the theory that the earli-est Greek gods were simply mythologized representations of the Noachicline. Belus, he explained, ‘was the Original of the Idol Baal’ who deludedthe Israelites and Ninus was also Nimrod, the biblical figure first associatedwith conquest, empire, and oriental despotism (I, pp. 3, 6; VIII, p. 1).

Either in conscious conspiracy with Satan or flattered into believing intheir own divinity, by utilizing all the trapping of idolatry, ancient kingsconvinced their subjects to reject reason in favour of superstition andshrouded their tyranny in religion. Eventually their crimes would come tobe veiled by custom as well. Defoe understood the force of custom andappeal to prescription but dismissed these as inferior to the laws of naturewhich, as we shall see, he believed contradicted divine-right theory (IV, pp.1–4). Even more powerful than the force of custom on human belief andbehaviour, however, was the imprimatur of divine authority and this hadbeen grossly abused over the centuries. ‘Nothing’, he lamented, ‘could sowell have reconcil’d us to the Absurdities of Arbitrary Power, as to back thePreposterous Notion with strange Suppositions of a Sacred Stamp upon theRoyal Thing imposing, as a proper handle to prepare our Subjection to whaton no other Terms, or by no other Method we could be brought to’(Preface, p. xv). The use of this method first appeared with Ninus orNimrod but Satan was its true author:

The Cheat’s a Manufacture of the Deep,Contriv’d to lull the Wheedl’d World asleep;From Hell deriv’d, a meer Original,And Providence is not concern’d at all;Mankind’s drawn in by Pious Fraud of WordsTo make them quit their Senses, and their Swords;To tell us Tyrants act by Power Divine,And must be suffred for the Sacred Line. (III, p. 23)

The most recent ‘Pious Fraud of Words’ to hoodwink mankind was thatwhich prompted Defoe to publish Jure Divino, namely the doctrine ofpassive obedience, prevalent in the 1680s and rejected in 1688 until itsrecent revival by the likes of Leslie and Sacheverell. Just as Ninus or Nimrod


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had developed the cult of Belus or Baal to sanctify his rule, James II relied onHigh Church propaganda to rationalize his absolutist ambitions. Instead ofcastigating James II, as he had done in numerous pamphlets during William’sreign, however, Defoe now placed the blame on those clergymen, especiallyBishop Compton, who adulated the king in order to enhance the politicalpower of the Church only to turn on him when their own interests werethreatened.35 Too often, Defoe observed, ‘Court-Parasites, and Men of Design’flatter themselves into the grace and favour of princes ‘who would otherwisehave been tolerably sober, swelling their Thoughts with the Fancy of beingGod’s Vicegerents, and accountable to none but him; and all, by the Hypo-critical Promises of that blind Obedience on their own Parts, which they neverdesig’nd [sic] to pay’. The High Church aggrandized the ‘Doctrine of absoluteundisputed Obedience’ to such an unprecedented degree that ‘the King’sCommand extended even to the Lives and Liberty, as well as the Estates of hisSubjects’, insisting that ‘his Attempts must not be resisted, but submitted to asa Judgment from God’ (IV, pp. 14, 16). To suggest that ‘Kings can be account-able to none’ smacked of Popery:

King-Craft in State, and Priest-Craft in the Church,This does our Faith, and that our Sense debauch …

The personal Independency of Kings,Is meer State-Popery in several Things:That Kings have absolute Command of Fate,Is Transubstantiation in the State.

Like the doctrines of transubstantiation and papal infallibility, the doc-trines of divine right and passive obedience were, in Defoe’s opinion,invented ones. Comparing the acts of ‘Consecration’ in Roman Catholicmass and the ‘Coronation of Princes in other Countries’, he argued thatpriests falsely claimed to transform both bread and kings into divine sub-stances (VI, pp. 8–9).

Because the principle of divine-right kingship and passive obedience hadbeen promoted as the word of God, Defoe contended, king, clergy, andcommons had been persuaded to embrace these ‘Sacred Lyes’ (IV, p. 14).The light of reason and nature, though, was impossible to extinguish;sooner or later the law of self-preservation was bound to prevail. Eventuallyit led ‘the Passive Swearing Clergy up in Arms/Defending Glebe, and Deanand Chapter Farms’ to cry out in defence of ‘Liberty and Property’ (IV, p. 6).Defoe could hardly blame these men for coming to their senses though hedid think some members of the Church had espoused doctrines they knewto be false and took oaths they had no intention of keeping themselves.Defoe had already expressed his abhorrence of the use of sacred oaths forsecular purposes in the context of the occasional conformity debate butknowingly to commit perjury in the process was ‘a Horrid Deceit’, requiring

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‘some new-made Word’ which could convey the full treachery of thiscrime. By preaching the doctrine of passive obedience the High Churchhad not only seduced James II into a fateful course but had also cozenedpeople to ignore nature and reason and therefore to neglect their duty toGod. Every beguiled subject

forfeits all the Title to his Sense,And quits his Claim to Heaven and Providence,When he betrays the Freedom of his Life,And holds his naked Throat to the Tyrannick Knife. (VI, p. 17)

If the origins of the theory of divine-right monarchy could be traced to theDevil’s work and subsequently to the connivance of clergy and kings, theorigins of kingship itself, Defoe believed, were first the product of humanconvenience. Denying the Filmerian position that all authority was patriar-chal in nature, Defoe nevertheless believed that ‘First Government wasNat’ral all and Free/And fixt in Patriarchal Majesty’ but in this ‘PaternalRight no Man could reign/Farther than his own Household did contain’ (II, pp. 16, 3).36 Providence had foreseen that

While in the Infant-Ages of the KindNature to first Paternal Rule confin’d;The Men untainted, and their Number few,The Patriarchal Government might do. (II, p. 4)

Defoe conjectured that this mode of authority lasted at least through the timeof the Deluge because he could not imagine that a more organized society,one which enjoyed ‘the Power of Magistrates and Laws’, would have ever ‘runinto such Enormities, of which God Almighty was oblig’d to purge the Worldby an Universal Punishment’ (II, p. 4). As long as these heads of families were‘just and few’, this most basic socio-political structure was sufficient but‘Patriarchal Power was not adapted to Rule great Nations’ because ‘infiniteFeuds and Petty Wars’ eventually ended ‘in Conquest and Monarchy’ (V, p. 1;II, p. 5). Despite Locke’s overwhelming objective to demolish patriarchalism,Peter Laslett noted that he made considerable concessions to it in his acknow-ledgement that in sparsely populated areas, like those which existed inAmerica or during the early ages of man, it was easy to imagine how ‘theFather of the Family’ became ‘the Prince’ of the region ‘but that this was not by any Paternal Right, but only by the Consent of his Children’.37

‘Undisputed Obedience’ rather than consent characterized clan authority inthe western highlands of Scotland where, Defoe alleged, ‘Patriarchal Powerseems to retain its Original and the Nature of it is display’d’ (II, p. 6).

Both Locke and Defoe deduced that population pressure was a factor inthe progression from patriarchal societies to polities based on consent, or as


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Defoe put it from ‘Families to Nations’ (II, p. 3). However, whereas Lockehad argued that it was this ‘Increase of People and Stock [coupled] with theUse of Money’ which prompted these communities to settle boundaries andcreate laws,38 Defoe underscored the role of sin in this historical transfor-mation:

But men and Crimes, as they in Numbers grew,Old Rules laid down, and Vice directed new;Pride and Ambition hand in hand invade,Nations, by equal Seeds of Crime betray’d …

Thus Pride brings Strife, and Wars to Strife succeed,Truth yields, and Falshood governs in his stead …

Hence Tyrants, and from these Infected Springs,Flows the best Title of the best of Kings …The first Oppression’s the produce of Sin,And always follows where our Crimes begin. (II, p. 8)

Once there was competition for territory, ambition compelled some leadersto invade their neighbours’ lands; reason and nature directed those neigh-bouring families to band together in self-defence. Sin and ambition werenot part of this scenario as depicted by Locke.

As patriarchal families found their only safety in banding together, ‘theycontinue[d] thus United’ by electing a captain, later called a duke or king,to command the defence of inhabitants and their properties (II, p. 16).Property ownership conferred the right of election because nature directedmen to preserve themselves and therefore the means to self-preservation aswell. The connection between men’s property and their elective rights,Defoe asserted, was thus a ‘Law they find within their own Breasts’ (II, p.17). In these new arrangements ‘all the Kinds of Government began’including kingship:

Here, and here only Monarchies begin,Such Governments as these are all Divine:The Person the Proprietors erect,All the Proprietors are to protect;His Person’s Sacred, and his rightful Crown,No Men, but they that gave it, may pull down:Nore they, unless he proves to be unjust,And then they all not only may, but must. (II, p. 18)

Sacred history provided additional proof that kings were human and notdivine in origin. Defoe recounted the story of how Saul came to be Israel’sfirst king, pointing out the people’s crucial role and the need for Saul to bea warrior as well as a king. Despite the prophet Samuel’s warnings, the

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Israelites prayed to God to provide them with a king. Though ‘Heav’n theDesign abhorr’d/And left his High Dislike upon Record’, God relented and, ‘inAnger’, chose Saul to be their king (II, pp. 23–4). Saul accepted the crown,according to Defoe, under conditions imposed by the people and recordedby Samuel. Though appointed by God, anointed by Samuel, and sanc-tioned by the people, Saul proved to be a ‘Bashful Boy for Crown and Powerunfit’, causing Israel to reject its new king until he proved himself. Insteadof punishing the Israelites, Defoe explained, God, recognizing theirjustifiable disappointment in so callow a king, enabled Saul, throughmiracle, to earn his subjects’ obedience through military victory over theAmmonites. Saul may have had God’s help in battle but scripture made itclear, at least to Defoe, that it was the people who declared him king (II,pp. 27–30). If the story of Saul was open to conflicting interpretations, thefact that ‘God justified the Revolt of the Ten Tribes, for the Tyranny ofRehoboam’ was proof positive of the people’s right and duty to resist arbi-trary oppression:

The Sacred Story stands upon Record,Voucht by the High, Divine, Immortal Word:When Israel’s Tribes from Judah’s Scepter stray’d,And Laws of Nature, not of Kings, obey’d. (V, pp. 19–21)

Scriptural history of the Median and Persian monarchies demonstrated thattheir leaders understood that their powers were not absolute and thus ‘theLimitation of Power and Superiority of Laws in matters of Government,have an Original in the very early Ages of the World’ (VIII, pp. 8–10).

Urging Satyr onward to ‘less remote Examples’, Defoe thought itsuperfluous to give a complete account of Rome’s tyrants for ‘no Man[today] can pretend they had any Divine Right’ though the emperors madesuch claims for themselves (VIII, p. 19). Power continued to be the onlysource of authority in post-Roman Europe as the leaders of barbarousnations founded each new throne in Christendom in Roman fashion, bythe sword (VIII, p. 24). During this period of violence and conquest,however, Defoe discerned the indomitable workings of ‘Nature’ and‘Reason’ and the emergence of his own social structure:

Soldiers the conquer’d Countries divide,And Properties the Rights of Rule decide:The Leaders by the Tenure of their Lands,Had Honours suited to their High Commands:Nobility upon Behaviour stood,Commenc’d in Merit first, and not in Blood.The Captains form’d the Gentry of the Land,Did now the Farm, as once the Troop command:


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The Gen’rals of superior Rank and Fame,Grew Lords and Princes, only chang’d their Name:The Legionary Soldiers fell to Trade,And all were Freemen and Freeholders made.

The mighty leading, All-Commanding Thing,Govern’d the Whole, and gain’d the Name of King:A Name indeed, for Laws of his Command,He shar’d with them, with whom he shar’d the Land;And if he ceas’d his due Respect to pay,To stated Rules, they quickly ceas’d t’obey …

These were the Gothick Rules of Government,On Reason built, and fixt in general Consent. Nature first taught Men Schemes of Life to draw,In order live, and call’d that Order LAW. (VIII, pp. 27–8)

Kings who ignored the rule of law could expect men of reason to protestand rebel against them if necessary:

’Twas always natural for Men opprest,Whene’er the Occasion offers, to resist;’Tis not enough to say they may, ’tis just,But strong Necessity commands they must;They’re Traytors else to the Entails of Sense,And Rebels to the Laws of Providence. (VIII, p. 30)

The claim that people have not only a right but a duty to resist oppressionis made in several places throughout Jure Divino and received its fullestexplication in Book III. As the penultimate stanza in Book VIII, the abovequotation is followed by one more heavily annotated stanza which pro-vided an expeditious inventory of popular uprisings against tyrantsthroughout medieval Europe, before a review of the English monarchy, thesubject of Books IX and X.

Defoe began Book IX by reasserting that monarchy originated not indivine mandate but in the vagaries of human history. Even if such a sacredfoundation had existed, dynastic bloodlines were so corrupted that no ruler could claim hereditary title to it through an unbroken line of succes-sion:

all our Royal Lines are so decay’d,By Bastardy and Blood precarious made;That no Successions can their Title clear,To make a Crown’d Divinity appear:For how can that Descent be call’d Divine,Where Whores and Bastards interrupt the Line. (IX, p. 2)

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He was careful to add that Britain’s present royal family was as illustrious asmost but its true authority derived from ‘the Revolution, and ParliamentarySettlement, from which, who ever reigns in England, has without doubt, aDivine Right to the Crown, and possesses it by the best Tenure in the World’(IX, p. 4). The secular origins of monarchy in conquests and compactsmade it ‘subject to Contingencies of Fate’ as the island’s earliest historymade abundantly clear (IX, p. 5). Were the rights of kings ‘sacred in them-selves, and of Divine Original, they would never be subject to Changes andInterruptions, as we always see them, but permanent and durable, like theirOriginal’ (IX, p. 5). Citing James Tyrrell’s General History of England as hismain source,39 Defoe recounted how Britain endured centuries of invasionsby the Romans, Picts, and Saxons and its natives ‘fought to the last Gasp,for their Liberty and Country’ (IX, p 14, fn (d); p. 11, fn (b)). Warrior com-manders eventually established a heptarchy but it was rooted in ‘Robberyand Blood’ (IX, p. 15). The Saxons had ‘subdued, but never conquer’d’ theancient Britons who ‘always insisted on their Right’ and, like conquerersthroughout history, used religion to legitimate their authority. As thisabuse of religious authority was ‘first in Hell contriv’d’, Defoe moralized, itsuccumbed to its own logic of violence and pretended divinity (IX, p. 19).Petty Saxon kings fell prey to their own ambitions and usurpation, fratri-cide, and bastardy characterized the Saxon line of succession. Like Defoe’sTrue-Born Englishman, the earliest English kings were a ‘mixt’ and ‘BlackRace’ whose ‘intangl’d Line’ eventually died out, leaving the throne up forgrabs (X, pp. 7–9).

The history of the ‘usurping Race’ of Normans who succeeded was notmuch different with one crucial exception. Defoe accepted the convenientfiction that William the Conqueror only accepted the crown at the request,by the election, and subject to the conditions of the people (X, p. 11). Thehistory of the sceptre through Norman and Plantagenet hands enabledDefoe to show that disputed succession, and not the orthodoxy of divineright, determined the course of events and this continued to hold truethrough the Wars of the Roses between the Houses of Lancaster and Yorkwhen ‘Usurpers by Usurpers are pull’d down/And Tyrants make a Foot-ballof the Crown’ (X, p. 24). If his own age of standing armies proved thelongest purse was the longest sword, then England’s baronial past provedthat in

the lofty Pedigree of Kings,The longest Sword the longest Scepter brings …The Right of Conquest’s all our Right Divine,And while the Line can keep it, keeps the Line. (X, p. 4)

Defoe was quick to point out any royal acknowledgement of the people’srights as in the cases of William I and King Stephen. He also pointed out


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that however strong the usurper, his right to rule remained incompletewithout the people’s consent.

Though Defoe emphasized that compact and conquest were the productsof historical contingency, other forces were at work. In order to impeachthe doctrine of divine-right monarchy he had emphasized that

Conquest, or Compacts, form the Rights of Kings,And both are humane, both unsettled Things;Both subject to Contingencies of Fate,And so the Godship of them proves a Cheat. (IX, p. 5)

Nevertheless, the fact that usurpers were often usurped themselves sug-gested to him that the world was not left entirely to human folly as‘Heaven[’s] due Vengeance on Ambition shows/One ravish’d Crown,another overthrows’ (X, p. 25). The surfeit of worldly ambition which madeindividuals dissatisfied with what they had and nations prone to tyrantswas one of the many symptoms of original sin and therefore an indicationof Satan’s influence upon human affairs as well. It was, however, ‘the Handof Heaven’ which ultimately permitted tyranny, war, and suffering tohappen so that one had to accept ‘the blackest Parts of Villany … in thisabstracted Sense/Are all the stated Works of Providence’ (IX, p. 14). Defoe’sanswer as to why God permitted such things lies at the core of his theoriesabout the laws of nature, the origins of government, and the right to resist.Before examining this answer it is important to note that Defoe was alsocareful to stress that just as the laws of reason, nature, and God demandedthat people defend themselves against tyrants, they also required people toobey lawful kings for ‘He that Resists, and dares to Disobey/Insults his Maker,and demands to Dye’ (III, p. 26). The rule of just and virtuous kings receiveddivine sanction as did the reigns of their successors as long as they tooruled by law. Because the High Church had been so successful in associat-ing arguments for limited monarchy with republicanism, Defoe felt com-pelled to declare that ‘nothing in this Book is design’d, or can be construedto Decry or Expose Monarchy, or the Sovereignty of Government by Kings;but to prove that they have no Powers immediately Deputed from Heavensuperiour and unsubjected to the Good of those they govern; and thatwhen they assume such a Right, they become Tyrants, Invaders of Right,and may be Deposed by the People they Govern’ (II, p. 2).

iv. ‘The whole frame of Nature, Time, and Providence’: Defoe on God’s intentions for mankind

In dedicating his verse satire to ‘REASON: First Monarch of the World …[and] The Almighty’s Representative and Resident in the Souls of Men’,Defoe placed his text squarely in the natural law tradition, a position

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confirmed and explained in several stanzas and numerous references toGrotius and Pufendorf. The most fundamental law of nature affirmed theinstinctual right of self-preservation for all creatures:

The Laws of God, as I can understand,Do never Laws of Nature countermand;Nature Commands, and ’tis Prescrib’d to Sense,For all men to adhere to Self-defence:Self-Preservation is the only Law,That does Involuntary Duty Draw;It serves for Reason and Authority,And they’ll defend themselves, that know not why. (III, p. 10)40

By virtue of their capacity to reason human beings were superior to othercreatures. ‘Man was their Master by their Maker’s Law’ and yet, despiteman’s ‘undeniable Right’ of dominion ‘over the Creation’, it did not over-rule the instinct for survival in the animal kingdom (III, p. 15).41 Thoughsuperior to other creatures, human beings were equal to each other throughsharing in the divine attribute of reason, described by Defoe in commonmetaphorical terms as ‘The Light of Heaven which shining in the Soul/Instructs the Parts, and Luminates the Whole’. Reason was the foundationfor the two conventions human beings used to order their world, govern-ment and language:

Reason’s the Sovereign Guide of Humane Things,Which Leads the Subject, and Commands their Kings …The Arbitrator of the Grand Dispute,Betwixt the Humane Nature and the Brute;The Dignity and Honour of the World,Without it all’s a Chaos ——…

The Faithful Councellor in all Debates,The Test of Law, the Charm a Tyrant hates;The Frame of Peace, and Shape of Government,Essence of Speech, and Test of Argument. (III, pp. 5–6)

Like Defoe, Locke too had premised his arguments upon the tenets thatself-preservation was the first law of nature and that God directed menthrough their ‘Senses and Reason’ and ‘inferior Animals by their Sense, andInstinct’, but here the direction and goal of the two men’s argumentsdiverged.42 There are forty-one references to reason scattered throughoutthe Two Treatises, many of them general statements about the rationalnature of man. Twenty-one of these, however, cluster around three argu-ments crucial to Locke’s project but immaterial to Defoe’s. The first con-cerned Locke’s desire to disprove Filmer’s notion of absolute patriarchal


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rule by arguing that it was parental, not political, and limited to thecommand parents had over their children until they reached the age ofreason.43 The second argument concerned man’s right to property whichwas dictated by both ‘Revelation’ and ‘natural Reason’. God did not giveexclusive dominion of the world to Adam and his heirs in succession asFilmer had argued but ‘to Mankind in common’ and reason directed mento those things ‘Nature affords for their Subsistence’. Locke went on to citereason and revelation in support of his labour theory of value. In grantingman dominion over the earth, God ‘commanded Man also to labour, andthe penury of his Condition required it of him’. Because ‘every man has aProperty in his own Person’ and in ‘the Labour of his Body’, Locke argued,private property was also divinely sanctioned and rationally confirmed.44 Athird spate of references to reason appeared in Locke’s most extreme con-tention that any king who made war on his people ‘makes a forfeiture ofhis Life. For quitting reason, which is the rule given between Man andMan, and using force the way of Beasts, he becomes liable to be destroyedby him he uses force against, as any savage ravenous Beast.’45 AlthoughDefoe shared Locke’s belief in the divinity of reason, the lack of any paralleldevelopment of argument from this premise in Jure Divino discredits thepresumption of any link between that text and the Two Treatises. The ideathat tyrants may be treated like beasts of prey appeared only in a footnoteand was not germane to Defoe’s own justification of resistance. Locke’sfocus on the age of reason as the precondition of freedom and his labourtheory of value, two central features of his attack on patriarchy, received noattention in Jure Divino or any other work of Defoe’s. It is also interesting tonote that in a footnote citing Sir Robert Filmer as ‘the Great Champion’ ofthe doctrine of passive obedience and divine-right patriarchal monarchy,Defoe identified ‘Algernoon Sidney’, not John Locke, as Filmer’s greatestcritic.46 Sidney’s text, Defoe stated, ‘exploded’ Filmer’s doctrine so com-pletely as to be ‘unanswerable’, an odd endorsement for such a ‘thoroughlyLockeian’ work as Defoe’s has been claimed to be (IV, pp. 27–8).

As he had insisted in his debate with Charles Leslie in the weeks that fol-lowed the publication of Jure Divino, Defoe had found both Locke’s andSidney’s accounts ultimately inadequate and went on to explain his beliefthat government was instinctual and based upon the human need to ‘liveregularly’ and impose order in the world.47 Though God had imposed amoral order upon the universe, the construction of the political order wasleft for men to realize:

Th’immortal Laws of Moral Right were giv’n,As Guides of Conduct by indulgent Heaven …The Rules of Worship and Subjection set,What things we ought to do, and what omit …

But as to Government, he left him Free,

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Nature directed: Rules of Politie …Why did not Heaven prescribe the Laws of Life,

As when to eat, or Sleep, or kiss his Wife;But that directed Nature knew its Law,And faithful Instinct wou’d Performance draw …

Society to Regulation tends,As naturally as means pursue their Ends;The Wit of Man could never yet invent,A Way of Life without a Government. (II, pp. 9–10)

In response to the patriarchal line promoted in Leslie’s Rehearsal, Defoeattempted to clarify this very point by stating categorically that there wasnever a time when man was ‘without Government’ because ‘he had theQuality infus’d with his Life’. Equally important, the right to act upon thistrait, namely ‘Dominion of Property’, was also ‘given [to] him immediatelyat his Creation’. Government, Defoe explained, was as natural an activityas breathing and rearing children.48 Defoe had no conception of a timebefore government and therefore no need to employ the theoretical state ofnature – no need, in other words, to mention, let alone rely upon, Locke’s‘Strange Doctrine’ which argued that individuals exercised retributivejustice in their own name until at some later date (which Locke neverrelated to the Fall) mankind entered into civil society.49

Locke too had argued that human beings had a duty to preserve them-selves but he grounded his argument in the notion that as God’s creation,human beings were products of his labour, and therefore his property.50

Defoe accepted the argument that God was entitled to the ‘Obedience ofMankind, as he is their Maker’ but this acknowledgement appeared in afootnote to his discussion of property rights in Book V and played no partin his own argument that self-preservation was not just a right but a duty(V, p. 4). A look at Jure Divino’s reproof of suicide provides the startingpoint for understanding the cosmic implications of passive obedience andresistance as Defoe understood them. Defoe variously described life onearth as a ‘Debt’, a ‘Gift’, and a ‘High Trust’, given to us by God not only ‘toimprove and propagate’, but also to repent. By committing suicide ordeclining the duty of self-preservation one became

A Traitor to the Laws of Common Sense,And Contradicts the Ends of Providence;Rebels against his Reason, and Defies, The Rules of Life, and puts out Nature’s Eyes.

If no Man then may his own Life destroy, But what Heaven gives, it binds him to enjoy …And still as clear the meaning must extend, That what he mayn’t Destroy, he must Defend:


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He’s Damn’d without Retrieve, if he lets goThe Reins of Life, and Nature Tells him how, With Hand and Tongue his Life he shou’d maintain,Or else his Hands and Tongue are given in vain:Self-murther’s punish’d by the forc’d EventHe can’t be pardon’d, ’cause he can’t repent. (III, 16–17)

Suicide was so abhorrent, Defoe explained, because ‘the very act it selfcarries us beyond the Space and Time allotted for Repentance; and the Factis no sooner finish’d, but the Man is Launch’d into the Ocean of an irre-trievable State’ (III, p. 17). Because divine-right monarchy was a threat topeople’s lives, it was also a threat to each individual’s opportunity for therepentance of sin and the possibility of eternal life through Christ. As such,it contradicted the purpose of the secular realm, that ‘Space and Time’created by God in which human beings could develop their faith in orderto rejoin their creator. Jure Divino was not the only text in which Defoe pre-sented his vision of the world. During the period in which he was compos-ing his verse satire, an Irish MP named John Asgill published a pamphlet inwhich he argued that it was possible for believers of unusually strong faithto be translated to heaven without enduring bodily death. Such an opinionwas heterodox in the extreme, not least because it suggested that theredemption of certain souls was beyond Christ’s power. Defoe, as a staunchTrinitarian, lambasted this notion: ‘God has prescrib’d Ways and Methodsof attaining to Eternal Life, the time for which is the space of Life, and ifChrist should have pray’d [to] the Father that all should have been takenout of the World, the whole frame of Nature, Time and Providence hadended.’51

Defoe’s view of the world as God’s spatial and temporal provision forrepentance was in perfect accord with his view of human history as thestruggle between the forces of reason and faith, sin and passion. BecauseGod had given human beings world enough and time to reside and repent,the demand to surrender these gifts to a king was to place secular abovedivine authority. It was both a ‘Universal Rule’ and the ‘Practice of allChristian Ages’ to affirm that ‘all Humane Laws are subject to the Divine;and if a Law is made by Humane Power, which contradicts the laws of God,it is void in Nature’. Passive obedience, Defoe concluded, was ‘a thing[which] gives Human Power a Superiority over the Divine Law, and raisesWar and Rebellion against God in the World’ (IV, p. 23). To argue that Godhad given monarchs the power of life and death over their subjects wasakin to rewriting the physical laws of the universe:

Can they make Fire and Water correspond, Couple the Poles, measure the Pathless Round;Untie the Bond of Nature, and explain,

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The hidden Fluxes of the fluid Main? …When they can these, and such as these Dissect,Then, Satyr, let them Solve what we Object: How the Immortal Justice can invade, And Ruin the Creation he has made …

If Kings may Ravish, Plunder, and Destroy,Oppress the World, and all their Wealth enjoy;May Harass nations, with their Breath may kill,And limit human Life by Human Will;Then Nations were for Misery prepar’d, And God gave Kings the World for their Reward …But to believe that Heaven in vain Creates, And give up what he loves, to what he hates …’Tis horrid incoherent Blasphemy,Gives Nature, Sense, and Soveraign Truth the Lye:It Contradicts the Notion of a God,And all the Rules by which he’s understood. (III, pp. 9–10)

Defoe also subjected the precepts of passive obedience and divine-rightmonarchy to his own Baconian rules of understanding. Things were evalu-ated according to their utility; they provided the means to achieve a greatergood but were not to be valued above that greater good. Monarchy was oneof several political arrangements men made to provide themselves withsecurity and convenience; but as a means to these ends, kings could not beconsidered more important than the goals of government themselves:

He that to Arbitrary Power Inclines,Subjects the End of things below the Means;Inverts the World, and Crosses Providence,And mingles mighty Cause with Consequence …

All things on proper Causes do depend, Kings are the Means, ’tis Government’s the End. (III, pp. 22–3)

To those defenders of divine-right monarchy and passive obedience whoasked why God allowed absolute monarchs, and even tyrants, to exist ifthey posed such a threat to human salvation and the divine order, Defoeresponded: ‘the Reason’s plain, and may be eas’ly known/ ’Tis not Heaven’sproper Bus’ness, but our own’ (II, p. 18). God left the responsibility of gov-ernment to human beings, leaving them ‘Masters of themselves, andFree/And trusted them with their own Liberty’. Though God was theprimary cause of all things, Providence left politics to the realm of ‘latentCause and Consequence’ (V, p. 6). God endowed human beings withreason and instinct, instilling in them the need for self-preservation andorder, but government itself was human in origin and responsibility. It was


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not absolute monarchy that was in accord with the creation but the rightof resistance. Resistance was not only ‘just’, it was a ‘must’; otherwise menwere ‘Traytors … to the Entails of Sense, And Rebels to the Laws ofProvidence’ (IX, p. 30). Discharging this fundamental responsibility, fur-thermore, entailed active protest and rebellion:

The Gift he gives he looks that we maintain, And till we strive, we Cry to Heaven in vain:Prayers and Tears no Revolutions make, Pull down no Tyrants, will no Bondage Break;Heaven never will our faint Petitions hear,Till Just E[n]deavours supersede our Prayer. (II, pp. 18–19)

Christians, Defoe warned, must not expect Miracles, even in the mostextreme situations. It was not that he undervalued the ‘Agency of Prayer’,but he wished to emphasize that one must join prayer with endeavour (II, p. 19; III, p. 4).

God had left human beings ‘Masters of themselves, and Free/And trustedthem with their own Liberty’ but he also ‘left them to be by their ownFollies curst’ (V, p. 6). For Defoe, as for Milton, politics was ‘a public projec-tion of the war waged between reason and passion within every soul’.52

Man’s ‘corrupted Nature’ frequently got the better of him with potentiallydire consequences not only with respect to his own salvation but to thepolitical community in which he lived as well (V, p. 15). Thus, the cam-paign for the reformation of manners was a crucial component in thestruggle to maintain life and liberty. A society which failed to curb vice pro-vided fertile ground for the seeds of tyranny. Though a minor motif in JureDivino, during its composition the reformation of manners remained animportant theme in the Review and many other works. In one of the mostBaconian projects of his career, Defoe had sought to provide a completeaccount of the great storm of 1703, soliciting and compiling observationsfrom around England. Such an event invited both scientific and moralspeculation. Defoe combined the two by adding to his prose report asection of didactic verse in which he connected the theme of reform withthe hypocrisy of passive obedience:

Let me be where I will I heard the Storm, From every Blast, it eccho’d thus, REFORM …And every Blast proclaim’d aloudThere is, there is, there is a GOD …They say this was a High-Church Storm, Sent out the Nation to reform;But th’ Emblem left the Moral in the Lurch,For’t blew the Steeple down upon the Church.53

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Whether expressed in terms of the choice between active responsibility orpassive obedience, the strain between man’s rational and sinful instincts, orthe struggle for reform against widespread vice and corruption, the lessonof Jure Divino was that tyranny was contrary to the will of God and thatindividuals were responsible for the proper maintenance of the temporalsphere whatever the providential or diabolical forces that might be operat-ing within or upon it.

v. Conclusion

Defoe believed the High Church, by preaching the doctrines of passive obe-dience and divine-right kingship, was guilty of both hypocrisy and hetero-doxy: its own actions in 1688 proved the former; the redemptive purposesof secular time and space the latter. If government was about preservingboth order and liberty, Defoe believed it was also about perpetuating andshaping a world in which post-lapsarian man could recover his moral andmental capacities, a view of politics he shared not with John Locke butwith John Milton and Francis Bacon.54 The heated dispute about theorigins and nature of political authority between Defoe and Leslie in thesummer of 1706, however, was put on hold when Robert Harley dispatchedDefoe to Edinburgh in September to drum up support for the Treaty ofUnion between England and Scotland, the first of two successive assign-ments in Scotland on behalf of the government. He returned again as aninformant and propagandist during the elections of 1708. Defoe had reset-tled in London less than a year when the public spectacle surrounding thetrial of Henry Sacheverell reoriented public debate once more around thepolitics of church and state, an event which made Defoe’s 1704 depictionof swelling loyalty around High Church priests who ‘disturb the state’sound almost prophetic.


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4Defoe and the Union of 1707:Constructing a British Identity

i. Introduction

Defoe left London in September 1706, posing and, for the most part,passing as an English businessman in search of economic opportunity inEdinburgh. The guise was a necessary and credible one; in the present crisisover the Anglo-Scottish union, habitually peevish relations between thetwo kingdoms had deteriorated into rash belligerence. Defoe’s recentignominy as a debt-ridden entrepreneur helped to divert attention from hisgreater reputation as a trenchant political pen and from the real purpose ofhis expedition – to advance the cause of union. He spent fifteen months inScotland, writing tracts in support of the treaty both before and after itsratification, gathering intelligence for the English ministry and materialsfor his lengthy History of the Union of Great Britain, and pursuing actualcommercial ventures once political urgency and the pressing need for histalents had subsided.1

Defoe described the part he played in the passage of the Act of Union invarious ways: to his Review readers he rejoiced in being an instrument ofGod’s Providence; to readers of his History of the Union, he proclaimed hisstatus as an ‘Eye Witness to much of the General Transaction’ with specialaccess to documents furnished by ‘the best Hands’ as well as the ‘publickregisters’; to his sometime and secret patron, Robert Harley, he compared hisoperations to those of Cardinal Richelieu and confessed a Pauline devotionin being ‘all to Every one That I might gain some’.2 Though, in their propercontexts, these statements may best be explained respectively as measures offaith, historiographic convention, and subservience, modern historians havedelighted in diminishing the importance of such a self-promoting actor.More notably, historians have also dismissed the role of ideologists and theirtexts in the founding of the entity known as the United Kingdom.3

Revisionist analyses which affirm a Scottish political system subverted bymagnate factionalism, patronage, and corruption have superseded thebenign story of progressive English gesellschaft, but historical scrutiny

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throughout has remained steadily focused on parliamentary dynamics‘within doors’.4 Emphasis on Scottish patrimonial politics neither explainsnor explains away the function of political thought as represented by thedebate ‘out of doors’.

During the decade preceding union, the Scottish Privy Council was ableto maintain tight control of news dissemination while in England legisla-tive ineptitude and the opportunism of factional politics, increasingly ram-pant in frequent general elections, combined to revolutionize print culture.An explosion of news publications and fiction, voraciously consumed by anever-widening literate populace, created a sphere of public opinion whichtransformed political discourse and political conduct.5 As one of London’spioneering propagandists, Defoe brought an unmatched professionalism tothe subsequent frenzy of opinion unleashed by the union controversy.In the 1701–2 paper war, in the bitter 1705 electoral campaign, and aseditor of the Review, Defoe had advanced the coordination of propagandadirected both in and out of parliamentary doors, the organization of intelli-gence and distribution networks, and the production of sustained, serial-ized commentary – methods he then employed in support of the union.This chapter will demonstrate that Defoe’s contributions to the uniondebate reflect more than his talents as a polemicist. They convey a wholeset of beliefs about the value of the concept of exchange within a pluralityof cultures, polities, and economies – a world-view essential to understand-ing the development of historical thought in the early Enlightenment.

ii. Pre-union polemics and the development of Defoe’shistorical thought

As its title and length suggest, Defoe’s History of the Union, published in1709, represented his most sustained attempt to place the events of 1706–7in broad historical context.6 Centuries of stability, state action, and statedocumentation fostered an acute historical consciousness in England, and,as antiquarian activities and historical scholarship progressed in thisperiod, men of all parties and opinions increasingly and instinctively‘turned to the past in order to discover … a solution to the problems of thepresent’.7 It was not just the classically minded who considered history themost respected of prose genres, and to Defoe’s mind the union meritedattention. As the elegant folio size and subscription list of the workattested, Defoe conceived of his History as a proper history which in thisperiod still meant political history – written by and about great menengaged in public affairs.8 Within the conventions of this neo-classical tra-dition, the union qualified as subject matter even if Defoe, who sought towrite a political history but was not a ‘great man’, did not. An assembly ofrelevant documents, minutes, and historical narrative in the tradition ofWhitelocke and Rymer, the History presented Anglo-Scottish relations from

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the reign of Edward I to Queen Anne as a prolonged chronicle of ‘Proposalsfor Union between these Kingdoms, [which] met with their particularObstructions from Popery, French-Interest, Home-Tyranny or Court-Intrigues; These were the only Enemies of Union … AND SO IT IS NOW.’9

This was done in part to assure sceptics that union ‘was not a new idea inthese nations’ histories’ but also to drive home his central message that,despite various anti-union interests, ‘concurring Providence, like the Wheelwithin all their Wheels, center’d them all, in Uniting the Nations’.10 In hisunswerving pursuit of Jacobites under any and every partisan bed, how-ever, Defoe’s polite intentions dissipated and the purpose and power of hisprovidential thesis declined into Whiggish cliché.11

It may seem at first surprising that Defoe’s most penetrating historicalanalyses appeared not in his History but in pamphlets more intentionallypolemical and more sparing in scholarly pretence. Public opinion com-pelled the journalist to address a range of union issues beyond the politicalhistorian’s ken: debate over complex socio-economic questions allowedDefoe to develop more fully the rationale behind his providential argu-ment. It is worth emphasizing that Defoe’s Scottish sympathies and pro-union stance were forged in the crucible of shrill factionalism. During thefirst years of Anne’s reign, as relations between Scotland and Englandsoured, Defoe had emerged bloodied but unbowed from prison and pilloryto which he had been sentenced for his Shortest Way with the Dissenters(1702). With his new success as ‘Mr. Review’, he expanded his reputation asthe irrepressible, Whiggish bête noire of High Churchmen enraged by occa-sional conformity and of Tories irritated by the cost of war against France.Among such opponents, arch-Anglicanism combined with blue-water biasin attempts to impede various ministerial objectives including an incor-poration with neighbours maligned by many English men and women fortheir Presbyterianism and poverty. By urging strict and even military mea-sures to impose the Hanoverian settlement upon Scotland, politicianscould appear to support the union or the Protestant succession whilehoping to undermine them. High Church Tories hoped that talk of armedconflict might exacerbate Anglo-Scottish prejudices and prevent an alliancebetween English Dissenters and Scottish Presbyterians. Jacobites calculatedthat real military engagement would divert English troops from the conti-nent, freeing French forces for a Stuart invasion. Indeed, Scottish intransi-gence over the succession coupled with Louis XIV’s defiant support of thePretender had increased the possibility of a French-backed Stuart restora-tion in the north. Despite the fact that Anglo-Scottish tensions couldjeopardize national security, there were politicians, both Jacobite and non-Jacobite, in Westminster as well as in Edinburgh, who were willing toexploit them.

The Tory Lord Haversham was one such party player. Defoe’s engage-ment with him is illustrative of precisely how and why certain discourses,

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originally marshalled in factional dispute, became part of the larger histor-ical perspective that Defoe brought to bear on the union. In November1705, Haversham denounced the amelioration of England’s pugnaciousAlien Act, attacked the uncooperative Scots and avaricious Dutch fortrading with France in wartime, and suggested that the HanoverianElectress reside in England to secure the succession. The speech itself wasmeant to embarrass the Whigs and manipulate court supporters inParliament onto weaker ground, but its printing was a direct bid to agitatepublic opinion against the conduct of war on the continent and to aggra-vate English bigotry against the Scots. Defoe condemned the speech as onein which ‘some Snake lies hid in this Grass’ and used the Review to defendboth the Scots and the practice of wartime trade.12 The Scots are ‘Too muchand Too little united to us for their own prosperity’, Defoe warned, and theEnglish should neither be surprised by nor feel the right to ‘hinder … theirtaking their Decaying Body into a Course of State Physick, in order torestore it to its Health, Vigour, and Capacity, of acting for itself’.13 At theclimax of the quarrel, he countered a second Haversham pamphlet withone of his own, in which he asserted that a union by force was antitheticalto the principles of a free nation:

our being Superiour to Scotland in Power, does not singly give us a titleto suppress them … a Law to force them to declare the Succession oftheir Crown with ours, Only because we think we can do it, has no Maximof State in it, but what will justifie the French King in all those Invasionsof the Liberties of Europe, and the rights of his Neighbors, for which wethink fit to declare War against him.

The Justice of Government, has no manner of Dependence upon thePower of it, and our being superior to the Scots in Strength, tho’ thatPresumption once cost the Lives of 30,000 English Men, is far from beinga reason, why they should not have an Act of Security, nor why theQueen should not pass it; and [for Godolphin] to have advised HerMajesty against it, had been indeed to show the Politician, but toconceal the honest man.14

The allusion was to England’s defeat at Bannockburn, but in conjuringadditional historical contexts Defoe went beyond a simple appeal to theEnglish constitutional tradition.

The juxtaposition of English and European civil liberties with Frenchabsolutism was part of his wider invocation of the historical forces of com-merce and conquest, a dialectic he had used in the past to deflect criticismslevelled at England’s ministry. Scottish violations of the Navigation Actspiqued those who, in their aversion to Godolphin and Marlborough’s taxesand troops, preferred to check French aggression through the ‘Police [of]Trade with our wooden walls’.15 Haversham’s castigation of the Scots for


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trading with the French sprang from this thicket of country, Tory, andHigh Church opposition to the court. Defoe was quick to grasp the nettle,exposing this coalition’s indignation as rooted not only in faction but ineconomic folly as well. Only some ‘Party Cause’ could explain the hypo-crisy of using naval force to prevent the Scots from trading with Francewhile allowing the Dutch to do so; only blindness to national interestcould explain why the English did not trade with the French themselves.16

Just six months earlier Mr. Review had snapped at Mr. Observator, JohnTutchin, Haversham’s former creature, that England’s hallowed ‘woodenwalls’ resonated with the echoes of a previous controversy – namely ‘theDispute about Standing Armies, in the time of King William’.17 In thatdebate, as we have seen in Chapter 1, Defoe had argued that the forces ofcommerce had revolutionized military technology and empowered thecommons at the expense of a vitiated baronage. He therefore condemnedreliance upon the militia and any notion of gothic liberty in favour of astanding army, one subject to the pay of Parliament and command ofWilliam, the warrior prince and chief hero in his Protestant pantheon.18

The point of departure for his critique was that characteristically ‘modern’move, the historicization of his opponents’ central and supposedly tran-scendent categories. Now, in confronting an entrenched mercantilism andnaval chauvinism, Defoe once again found himself exhorting men likeHaversham to relinquish comforting national mythologies in the light offundamental structural change. For the Romans, as for the Goths andVandals in their turn, poverty had been a ‘Spur to their Valour’, and there-fore a condition of military success in the ancient world. In this age ofcommerce, however, ‘The Art of War has Conquer’d the Bravery of theWarriour’, reiterating his favourite maxim, ‘’tis the longest Purse, and notthe longest sword that conquers Nations’. Because victory now belonged tothose who could ‘bear the Expence of the War the longest’, a nation mustnot only build a robust economy but also inflict costly punishment uponan enemy through offensive campaigns. Louis XIV, ‘who fain’d Victoriesenough [in] the last war to have subdu’d two Worlds, was oblig’d at last, bythe meer Expence of the War, to think of making an end of it’.19 Thus, therise of commerce, which had made obsolete a defensive strategy basedupon faith in the county militias, held the same fate for one based solelyupon the navy; trade could be borne but not liberated by the toweringtimber of ‘fair Windsor’.20

Since 1698, when Defoe had pictured the French menace in terms ofinfantry and artillery, he had developed both his historical theories andjournalistic rhetoric. In 1705, he depicted French power:

We have Talk’d long of the French aiming at Universal Monarchy, andwe have, with the Divine Assistance, given them lately a blow in theirProgress that way. But I see no body observes, or at least concern’d about

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the Measures they take, and the Designs they have laid at an UniversalTrade … [and this] visible growing Greatness of the French Trade … [is]not the least Article, in the Foundation of the immense Greatness oftheir Power … the Conquests made by the French upon our Trade, tho’they do not make an equal Noise in the World; yet like a slow Poison,they are equally Fatal to our Prosperity, with the greatest Victories they obtain; and will in Time, if not prevented, as certainly work in Destruction of these Nations, as it if was wrought by immediate force.

And what is still more Unhappy to us, the Mischief of this Encroach-ment is not discern’d; ’tis a Silent Evil, that creeps upon insensibily, likeDust upon our Cloaths, or Chronical Diseases upon the body, whichconsumes as surely tho’, not so violently, as Fractures and Contusionson the Members and Feavours in the Blood.21

Most recently, Louis XIV’s plan to ‘engross the Trade and the Wealth of theWorld’ was manifested in the growing throng of French ships in Spanishharbours as the mercantile interests of the two Catholic and now dynas-tically linked nations conspired to supplant English merchants in theirlucrative exchange of wool manufactures for new world bullion. Navalwarfare might be able to protect East India Company trade (and thereforeTory investments) but it could not dislodge French merchants and apuppet-king from Spain in order to save a commercial enterprise whichDefoe and others deemed far more essential to the vigour of England’sinland economy and war chest.22 Whatever role mercantilist theory mayhave played in the conceptualization of a universal commercial monopoly,certain mercantilist policies were now suspect. As a defence of ProtestantEurope against the latest manifestation of ‘Universal Monarchy … and thetyranny of the House of Bourbon’, the Dutch and Scots understood, asHaversham and his ilk did not, that wartime embargoes were as ineffectiveas ‘a Hedge about the Cookoo’.23

Embargoes were ineffective and even obscurantist, for, to Defoe’s mind,the defence of commerce was not only a practical aim, but one of provi-dential proportions. In fact, the ‘Subject of Trade’ had been the intendedtheme of the Review’s second volume until interrupted by the ‘Violence ofParties … and the Subject of Tacking’, in which the Haversham skirmishserved as denouement.24 In resuming his launch ‘into the boundless Oceanof Public Negoce’ immediately thereafter, Defoe proclaimed his belief inthe sacred nature of trade itself:

the Wisdom and Direction of Nature Natureing, which I call GOD, pro-duced such differing Species of things, all of them in their kind equallyNecessary, or at least Useful and Desirable; as insensibly preserves theDependence, of the most Remote Part of the World upon one another;


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and at least makes them useful to each other, and Contributing to oneanothers Convenience, Necessity, or Delight.

The Variety, both of the Produce and Manufactures … are the Founda-tions of Trade, and I Entitle Providence to it; not only as it is found inNature, but as it is found in Customs and Consequences of things; forGOD in whose Infinite foreknowledge, all the Accidents of Time arealways present … must be suppos’d to foreknow that Natural Causesconsider’d, and to Natural Causes, he had in his Infinite Wisdom by Laws ofNature, submitted all the Variety of Consequences; the Generations of theWorld, could not subsist in the Manner prescib’d, without the MutualAssistance, and Concurrence of one another.25

Implicit in this understanding was the expectation that trade not only ledto mutual assistance but also to mutual advancement. Defoe’s Baconian-ism, discussed in Chapter 1, was central to this predilection for a concept ofhuman progress based upon the industry and exchange of men and womenengaged in the pursuit of liberty and property.26 Because trade was the keyto the divinely ordained moral and material advance of human history,Louis XIV’s bid for a universal monarchy of commerce constituted a directthreat to God’s order.

The Review itself had begun in 1704 as a serialized investigation of therise of French power. Its flexible format enabled Defoe to make explicit, at amoment’s notice, any of a number of implicit themes, including the partypedigree and geopolitical naivety of a blue-water strategy. Haversham’sattack on the Scots certainly prompted Defoe’s consideration of their plightbut his defence of their trade with France was decidedly part of his long-standing crusade to instruct a discordant nation to accept its responsibil-ities as the defender of a free, Protestant, commercial world order. Whatremains to be examined is the way in which Defoe defended the Anglo-Scottish union as a linchpin to that order, and how the ensuing debatecontributed to the developing ideas of plurality, exchange, and sovereigntyinherent within it.

iii. Plurality, exchange, and the premises of union

Until the treaty commissioners convened in London in April 1706, Defoe’sobservations on Scotland and union matters had been sympathetic butintermittent, a subtext in his disputes with Tories over trade, toleration,and war. Although the debate over union had by no means cooled in thefirst months of 1706, with the demise of the tacking Parliament and itscoalition of High Church and blue-water extremists, Defoe turned hisattention to other matters. In May, however, he began to focus almostexclusively upon the union question, publishing the first in a series of sixessays aimed ‘at Removing National Prejudices against a Union with

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Scotland’. Ironically, Defoe’s tenure as England’s primary pro-union pam-phleteer commenced in the employ of Scottish negotiators who had beenfavourably impressed with his ‘understand[ing] of trade and the interest ofnations’.27 That understanding had been shaped by Defoe’s faith in thevirtues of plurality and exchange and by his sensitivity to the structuralchanges through which commerce had supplanted conquest as the basis ofnational power. Talk of an English conquest of Scotland, though, was pre-cisely what the recent exploitation of Anglo-Scottish hostilities for politicalgain had encouraged. In hiring Defoe, the Scots had found a public voicesufficiently voluble to combat it.

Defoe responded to the increasingly belligerent tone of English publicopinion by attacking the parochialism upon which it fed. The raillery hehad used to satirize native xenophobia in his best-selling poem of 1702,The True-Born Englishman, gave way to an excoriation of ‘National Prejud-ices’ in both kingdoms as ‘the worst sort of Humane Antipathies’. Since thereign of Edward I, their sorry legacy to the island of Britain had been one ofdepredation and bloodshed at home resulting in missed opportunities anda diminished stature abroad.28 In one respect this opening was a cautionarytale, a response to the reciprocal provocations and bellicose rumours of thepast year. Even pamphleteers decidedly sceptical of union, notably GeorgeRidpath and James Hodges, made efforts sanely to steer their readers awayfrom the polemics of men like William Atwood and from notions ofanother Anglo-Scottish armed conflict.29 But Defoe’s affective rhetoricreified their more conventionally expressed warnings. The master of veri-similitude invited his readers to reflect upon the ‘Consequences of Armiesranging [over] an open and defenceless Country’, to hear the groans ofwidows and children, and to picture ‘the Despair of flourishing Families …with their Fields over run, their Barns and Houses plunder’d and burnt, theirCattle driven away, and their whole Substance destroy’d’. On both sides ofthe Tweed, ploughshares frequently unearthed the skeletal, ‘miserableAntiquities of eternal Feuds’, and he goaded more genteel readers to con-sider ‘what noble Branches of their Ancestors spilt their Blood on the deso-late Borders’ who now lay ‘buried [and] blended with the Carcasses of theCommon People’.30 No doubt Defoe’s arduous ride through the northerncounties some weeks later fortified his historical imagination as the firstReviews dispatched from Edinburgh continued to rue the days when ‘theBorders were the Courts of Judicature’ and ‘the Rights of Families andNations were tryed by the unequal Decision of the Sword’.31

Beneath his depiction of this barbarous and reproving landscape,however, lay Defoe’s bedrock belief in a providential theory of materialprogress. This first Essay unveiled Defoe’s dogged attempt, unique amongthe union debaters, to construct a corresponding British identity, which hetermed ‘a New National Interest’, predicated upon England’s and Scotland’sshared commercial future and Protestant past.32 Other aspects of their past,


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therefore, were subject to revision: Bannockburn again was cited, alongwith Flodden, Musselborough, and Dunbar, with the intended messagethat these battles should not be remembered as respective national victo-ries, but lamented as blots upon a British escutcheon. Moving from the his-torical to the statistical, Defoe then cited the trebling of land values, whichthe island’s most recent irenic interval had brought to England’s northerncounties, in order to demonstrate the ‘Security and quiet Possession of …Wealth and Improvements’ which union would afford the ‘common man’on both sides of the Tweed.33

This conceptualization of a national identity founded upon materialrather than military achievement marked Defoe’s participation in two crit-ical Scottish cultural controversies of the period: the conceit of its martialheritage and the feudal and futile nature of its agrarian system. ‘Men neverseek Bread by Arms’ until ‘Want … renders them a little desperate’, heremarked. This became especially true around 1500, a date which Defoe,like Andrew Fletcher, had identified as the point when the growth of tradeand luxury in Europe had induced the decline of armed baronial indepen-dence. In England, this historical trend was accompanied by the expansionof a prosperous freehold tenantry, the ascendancy of the House ofCommons, and the need for a standing army – all of which Defoe hadspelled out in 1698. But in Scotland, want and desperation were the legacyof a nobility who, in abandoning their gothic tastes but not their gothicconstitution, had rack-rented their estates, thereby creating a discouragedpeasantry and dysfunctional economy. Obliged to seek opportunity else-where, Scottish yeomen made their way as mercenaries abroad, where atfurther ‘Expense of their Country’s Impoverishment, [they] gain the emptyReputation of being the best Soldiers in the World’.34 Possessing formidableprowess and pride but an empty purse, the Scots were ‘only valued asRegiments in Pay, not as a Nation’.35 In 1698, Defoe had challenged thecivic humanist ideal which defined personal liberty and identity in terms ofone’s public military and political capacity. Now, in the union debate,Defoe sought to extend the scope of his critique in order to expose theliteral and cultural bankruptcy of liberty and national identity if predicatedupon a martial heritage and upon political and legal institutions madeincreasingly obsolete in a commercial world.36

Lest the English resist union on the grounds that Scotland’s difficultieswere innate to its land or people, Defoe repeatedly emphasized that histor-ical circumstance and hypocrisy had created the imbalance of wealthbetween the two neighbouring kingdoms. As he had tried to persuadeHaversham, the Scots were not solely to blame for their economic plight.Since the union of crowns under James I, the English had ‘remov’d theirCourt, Engross’d their Trade, drawn off their Gentry, and thus, theirCapital is Destroy’d; they wither under our Shade, and we not only keepthe Sun-beams of Prosperity from them, but we drop a sort of bitter Water

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upon them’.37 The Essay also acknowledged Scottish complaints thatEnglish policies ‘exclude[d] them in Advantages as Aliens, and use[d] themas Natives in Cases to their Loss’, as exemplified by the Navigation Acts andDarien fiasco. Union would mend these injustices, Defoe argued, by guar-anteeing a ‘Freedom of Trade’ throughout Britain and by instituting‘English Articles of Possession’ between Scottish landlords and theirtenants, thereby ensuring prosperity and improvement for the entireisland.38 Should his English readers fear the burden to be imposed by fair-ness to the Scots, a second Essay at Removing National Prejudices assuredthem of redoubled benefits, both for England’s colonial and inland com-mercial development, and for London’s pre-eminence as the ‘Emporium ofBritain’, the centre of wealth where ‘all Circles will meet’.39

Although the first two essays devoted more space to economic matters,Defoe did identify objections to the coexistence of two establishedchurches within one polity as perhaps the ‘greatest Obstruction’ to unionand he examined the various components of the problem.40 He cited theDutch and Swiss unions as successful (if not entirely apt) examples of com-posite settlements in order to refute the contemporary axiom which heldreligious pluralism to be incompatible with political stability. In keepingwith the controlling theme of the essay, he blamed ‘Party-prejudice’, andhigh Anglican, anti-Presbyterian rhetoric in particular, for arousing popularjealousies with regard to Church and Kirk.41 In response to fears, primarilyScottish ones, that incorporation might jeopardize the religious status quo,he argued that the union was ‘not to ALTER, but to CONFIRM’ the presentsettlement in both kingdoms.42 Above all, Defoe tried to emphasize thecommon bond of Protestantism between the two kingdoms: ‘The Differ-ence in both Nations is not of Religion, but in Religious Circumstance;both are Protestant, both Orthodox in Principle, and equally opposite toPopery, and Antichristianism.’43

In the present crisis over union, however, Anglicans and Presbyterianswere nursing their differences, not the pan-Protestant ideal which hadinspired their forebears and which Defoe was trying to promote in his con-struction of a British national consciousness. Circumstances demanded thatthe treaty preserve the division of British Protestantism in perpetuity.Defoe’s defence of this arrangement represented a novel application of thelogic of exchange and improvement to the traffic of mental and moral, aswell as material, goods. While wishing that those ‘worshipping the sameGod’, and sharing the ‘same faith, and the same redeemer’ might agree onthe ‘same terms’, he submitted to the fact that ‘inscrutible [sic] Providencehas directed otherwise’, concluding:

Perhaps these things are suffer’d in the Church of Christ, for the Exerciseof Charity, Forebearance, and mutual Temper, of Christians to preventworse Inconveniences, which from the Pride of Prosperity, the Power


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and Glory of an United Church, might in Conjunction with HumanInfirmity, have risen in the World.44

This was no mere rationalization on Defoe’s part but an argument with acomplex etiology at once both Baconian and Ciceronian. Defoe, as we haveseen, embraced Bacon’s programmatic sense that the natural world was tobe fully explored in order to put it to use. The contention that Providenceadmitted ecclesiastic plurality in order to promote the exercise of Christianvirtues paralleled his argument, cited above, that God had created a worldof diverse resources to encourage ‘Trade’, ‘Dependence’, and ‘MutualAssistance’.45 Also implicit in this argument was the idea that individualsimproved their moral personalities through the process of correspondenceand conversation – an ethos of ‘politeness’, or ‘sociability’, generallyascribed to the third Earl of Shaftesbury, and more broadly associated withthe works of Addison and Hume.46 Because it might lead to conversationsabout the Deity, however, the trajectory of ‘politeness’ had a Socinian end-point unwelcome to Trinitarians like Defoe: hence his occasional critiquesof Arians and Deists and his repeated use of the word ‘orthodox’ to accentthe Trinitarianism of both Church and Kirk throughout the course of thedebate. Far more palatable to Defoe were the ecclesiastical implicationscontained in the agendas set forth by Bacon and the new scientists. Theysought experiential knowledge of the natural world in order to disting-uish it more clearly from the supernatural, the territory of enthusiasm. This sharp separation of the natural and supernatural worlds fostered an Erastianism which was entirely compatible with the sort of settle-ment demanded by the union: the toleration of Trinitarian Non-conformists and the acceptance of two established churches within onepolity.

iv. Fundamental law, majority rule, and the Kirk

The ‘Charity, Forebearance and mutual Temper’ which Defoe had hopedfor were not in evidence during the summer of 1706. Correspondence withhis patron, Robert Harley, reveals a growing awareness by both men thatScottish Presbyterians had been campaigning against the treaty both athome and in England. In September, Harley dispatched Defoe to Edin-burgh.47 He arrived in early October to find the Scottish Parliament alreadyin session and mobbed daily by anti-union protesters outside; ‘The Churchmen … goeing mad’; and his own two Essays, written to cool English pas-sions, now reprinted and circulated to fuel Scottish ones.48 Even before thisfirst-hand experience with Scottish discontent, though, Defoe had intro-duced to the debate another weapon from his discursive arsenal.

Adapting quickly to its author’s changes in rhetoric and residence, theReview, in late September, presented its readers with a doggerel salute to

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‘Peace and Union’ whose presence brought nations happiness, and whoseabsence, their destruction:

UNION is Nature’s strong Cement;The Life of Power, and Soul of Government:Without it, all the World’s a Mob;Confusion’s Universal Monarch of the Globe …Even Government it self must dye,In Wild Uncultivated Anarchy.49

At this stage, the rhetoric simply warned readers that another Anglo-Scottish conflict would result in the dissolution of government. But aspublic apprehension of union by force shifted to that of union by ratifiedtreaty, so too did Defoe’s use of this discourse.

As early as 1703, the Presbyterian minister and propagandist, JamesHodges, had argued that a united British Parliament would not adhere totreaty provisions which protected Scottish interests. By 1706, the Scots hadcome to doubt completely the safety of the Kirk in the hands of a parlia-mentary majority composed of bishops and staunchly Anglican MPs.Probably in September, pamphlets by Ridpath and Fletcher appeared whichreiterated this distrust.50 It must also be noted that all three writers madethis point in the context of promoting various schemes for a federal unionwhich would preserve both the Scottish Parliament and Kirk. While accept-ing a Presbyterian push for added insurance in an Act of Security, Defoeattacked notions that incorporation would threaten the religious settle-ment of either nation. In a third Essay at Removing National Prejudices,Defoe argued that should any power, including a united British Parliament,tamper with the treaty or the rights of either church, then

the Union is Broke, the Constitution is Overthrown … The fundamentalis destroy’d, the Government dissolves, and the whole Island becomes aMob, one Universal Rabble. Just as in the case of a Tyrant, dispensingwith the Laws and Setting up Arbitrary Power, Property ceases, Authoritydissolves, Constitution suffocates, and the National Capacity dyes.51

To argue that some future Parliament would risk such an action was to‘say a Parliament may be mad’ enough to ‘annihilat[e] their own Body’.52

The language reminds us that Defoe was a man of ‘Revolution Principles’,willing to invoke dissolution theory even after most Whigs had settledupon less radical discourses by which to explain changes in governmentand power. Even more significant, though, is the fact that, in responding topublic opinion at large and to challenges made by other able pamphleteers,Defoe had elevated the Treaty of Union to the status of fundamental law.Conversely, commentators seeking a federal union argued that in accepting


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the treaty, the Scottish Parliament was, in fact, violating fundamental law.The idea that a foedus might become, in effect, a social contract was a polit-ically explosive one. In an important sense, it terminated the status of theScots as a people in a way that Defoe’s attempts to forge the idea of aBritish people – as Protestant, free, commercial, and improving – had not.

At the heart of the matter was the problem of the relationship betweenthe represented and their representatives. Both Ridpath and Hodges hadpublished pamphlets arguing that the abolition of separate parliamentschallenged the fundamental law of the original rights of freeholders.Consequently, the Scottish Parliament could not ratify the present treatywithout first appealing to the freeholding electorate.53 In response to thisline of argument, Defoe agreed with its first premise:

the Right of a Freeholder is an Original, ’tis claimed by his Possession,which is to be trac’d back to God Almighty’s first Donation, when hegave Man Possession of the Earth to him and his Heirs … from whence’tis easy to deduce the Right of all Government in the World.54

But he went on to say that the treaty did not alter those rights, only theircircumstances. The right to change those circumstances, to reapportionrepresentation, rested squarely with Parliament. It could alter the terms ofrepresentation for counties, towns, and corporations without their specialconsent and had done so on numerous occasions in the past. The treatywas merely the exercise of that authority writ large. The argument betrayedan assumption on Defoe’s part that Parliament was not just an expressionof the people’s will but an embodiment of their original right. Like hisdescription of the dissolution of government, cited above, Defoe’s defenceof the rights of freeholders has the Lockeian ring we have been conditionedto expect in his writings. But rounding up the usual suspects will not do ifwe wish to understand his emphasis upon the idea of Parliament as amystical incorporation.

Putting aside Defoe’s theoretical beliefs for a moment, it is important tonote that he blamed alternative conceptions of Parliament for creating aseries of practical hazards in the ratification process. Unionists successfullyavoided the first of these by rejecting early calls by the opposition for aparliamentary recess so that members could consult their constituents about the various articles. Such a delay, Defoe later reflected, might have‘furnish[ed] a Variety of Accidents to disappoint the whole’.55 At this junc-ture, Hodges’ third treatise against incorporation had appeared, which Defoewrote to Harley ‘has done more Mischief than a thousand men’.56 Not onlydid it incite the ‘poor people’ by posing ‘the dark Side of everything’ andconcealing ‘the true Sense of things’; it and other anti-incorporating pam-phlets encouraged constituents to turn their ‘private Letters into PublickAddresses, and those [in turn] introduc’d Mobs, Tumults, Insultings of

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Magistrates … and all manner of Popular Disorders; Till, at last, it came todownright Insurrection’.57 However monocausal this was as an explanation,Defoe clearly linked freeholder demands that representatives act as agentsaccountable to the voters’ beck and call with the stream of addresses ofprotest to Parliament and with wider public unrest. In reviewing State of theControversy, Defoe could not hide his contempt for its author’s assertion that‘By the Constitution of Parliaments, the Laws are to have their Rise from theWill and Humour of the People, signified by the Lords and Commons.’ Suchremarks, Defoe grumbled, insulted ‘Parliamentary Dignity’ and ‘endeavour’dto stir the People to Mob, Clamour and Tumult’.58

Defoe too, in his day, had been accused of insulting Parliament andinciting faction, most notably after his infamous 1701 petition Legion’sMemorial and after his 1702 Original Power of the Collective Body of the Peopleof England, a rejoinder to a Tory MP.59 Both of these pamphlets containDefoe’s most overt defences of the right of a people to hold their represen-tatives to account. As explained in Chapter 3, the Nonjuring polemicistCharles Leslie was the first to tar these works with a Lockeian brush andDefoe’s political thought has been linked with that of Locke ever since.Conal Condren has shown, however, that the Original Power displays a con-siderable debt to George Lawson’s Politica sacra et civilis. Indeed, in spite ofits assertions of popular sovereignty, the Original Power, like the Politica,propounded a corporate conception of the people and their representa-tives.60 This Lawsonian legacy helps to explain Defoe’s belief that theScottish Parliament, as the embodiment of freeholder rights, had the powerto transfer representation of those rights to another institution, namely aunified British Parliament. There is, however, an even more direct connec-tion between Defoe’s Original Power and his union activities.

While Defoe had described members of Parliament as ‘an abridgement ofthe many volumes of the English Nation’, he often elided the concept of acorporate people with that of the majority.61 His watered-down corporatetheory made him very aware of the power of forms of public opinionwhich appeared to speak for that majority, as had his Legion’s Memorial.Thus he expended a great deal of effort to minimize and even denigrate thequality and quantity of addresses to the Scottish Parliament lest they betaken, especially by the English, as ‘universal’, or as proof of ‘a rootedAversion in the Generality of the Scots Nation against the Union’.62 Conse-quently, he frequently portrayed addresses as either orchestrated andsigned primarily by Jacobites, or as representing only poor and insignificantparts of the nation, or as generally exaggerated in number.63 His overallcampaign to repudiate both the forms and theory behind Scottish protestsgoaded the Jacobite, Patrick Abercromby, into republishing some of Defoe’searlier arguments in an avowal of Scottish rights and Scottish expression.64

Put on the defensive, Defoe reaffirmed the right of freeholders to opposeassaults on their fundamental rights but denied that Parliament’s


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ratification of the treaty invaded those rights in any way. Moreover, heexplicitly located original right in the opinion of ‘the majority’, a bodywhose numbers were easy to manipulate but difficult to gauge. He was,however, certain that no majority of freeholders had yet appeared to con-strain the House against union.65 In 1701, Defoe’s Legion’s Memorial and hisoffer to append the petition with the signatures of 200,000 Englishmen wasclearly intended and understood as a symbolic representation of thepeople. But his conception of the collective body, ambiguously presentedin the Original Power, would further weaken when employed in the uniondebate. In Defoe’s navigation through the various streams of unionopinion, the language of popular sovereignty had inched a step closertowards becoming the language of majority rule.

v. Defoe’s discourses and the new national identity

As England’s chief pamphleteer for the union of 1707, Defoe was an activeagent in, and chronicler of, negotiations which transformed two kingdomsinto an imperial power with a political and economic destiny. The regimeof William III had introduced England to a new military and financialreality and had committed its people to a greater role in protecting theEuropean balance of power against the ‘mighty Nimrod’, the aspiringuniversal monarch, Louis XIV. Much of Defoe’s pro-union writing demon-strates his ability to perceive the rapidly changing relationship betweeneconomics and politics. For the most part, Defoe accepted these develop-ments as necessary, if not progressive, but they demanded correspondingchanges in Anglo-Scottish relations which would give new meaning to theconcept of a British imperial state. In urging the English and the Scots toaccept the union, he was also encouraging them to accept a new nationalidentity. The new British nation needed to embrace its providentiallyordained and historically inevitable role as champion of a free, Protestant,and commercial world order.

The subject of identities is a sensitive one, all the more so when insiders per-ceive that an outsider is defining one for them, and the Scots mounted a vig-orous campaign of their own to defend their sovereignty and culturalintegrity. In one of the more famous defences of Scottish independence, JohnHamilton, Lord Belhaven, implored his fellow members in the EdinburghParliament not to sign the union treaty: ‘I think I see our Ancient MotherCALEDONIA … attending the Fatal Blow, and breathing out her last … Nonecan destroy Scotland save Scotland’s self; hold your Hands from the Pen.’66

Defoe had certain grasp of his own pen. Months of Reviews, many essays,shorter pamphlets, and poems, as well as his History attest to a massive politi-cal and literary effort on behalf of the Treaty of Union.

Defoe had two strategies: one to address anti-union propaganda and theother, to promote a compelling vision of a united British nation. He con-

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ducted his assignment in three sets of discourses – providential, Baconian,and natural law – which developed in compelling ways themselves. His useof providential rhetoric, including both its inscrutable and progressivevariants, placed the union either in the path of God’s direct intervention orwithin the indirect but divinely inspired unfolding of time. Defoe’sBaconian arguments also betrayed a providential logic of improvement.Although he made occasional reference to continental thinkers during thecourse of the debate, this chapter has focused on a subset of the natural lawtradition known as ‘Revolution Principles’ and on Defoe’s English politicalinheritance. All three discourses represent a central feature of Defoe’sPresbyterian world-view in that each in its own way could be said tosupport a Dissenting ideology which stressed that man should exercise hisreason to understand both divine will and the world around him. At theirmost basic level, all three traditions accepted nature as the continuousmanifestation of God’s will and perceived change in the physical world as asign of this process. They could therefore be used to explain or even justifychanging material conditions in society and to argue that human relations,including political ones, would naturally develop accordingly and/orshould be encouraged to do so. In choosing these discourses to defend theunion, Defoe adopted an historical scheme which argued that socio-economic process determined the validity of political arrangements. Hecould also argue that the expansion of commerce was part of the divineorder. What is epistemologically significant in this is that the process ofexchange, both material and moral, figured prominently in developingsocial theories during the eighteenth century, including those associatedwith the Scottish Enlightenment. In his union writings, we can see Defoe,the journalist, participating in the efforts to understand mutuality, experi-ence, and the historical process as principles in themselves.

Ratification of the Treaty of Union in January 1707 may have representedthe culmination of Defoe’s original mission but it did not end his Scottishsojourn. Instead, Defoe remained in Scotland awaiting further instructionsfrom Harley and hoping to be rewarded for his efforts with a governmentpost in the new United Kingdom. When neither of these materialized,despite his repeated pleas, Defoe occupied himself as best he could.67

He continued to write the Review and pamphlets about subjects relating tothe union and began working on his full-length history of the event.He dabbled in various investments and business ventures in Scotland,joined the Society for the Reformation of Manners in Edinburgh, and keptHarley informed of persistent Scottish reservations about the treaty.68 Forthe most part, however, Defoe spent the year fretting about his financesand feeling abandoned by Harley. Relief finally came in November in theform of much-needed funds and instructions to return to London.

Defoe’s homecoming was short and not so sweet. Political infighting ledHarley to resign as Secretary of State in February 1708. A despondent Defoe


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remained loyal to Harley and wrote to his patron to express his ‘Desire tobe The Servant of your Worst Dayes’, but Defoe’s future activities now fellunder the direction of Godolphin, Lord Treasurer and Harley’s ministerialrival.69 Following an attempted landing by the Pretender, Godolphin calledupon Defoe’s skills as an informant and propagandist, sending him back toScotland in March. The invasion was abortive but it had stoked northernJacobite sympathies and union antipathies, potentially jeopardizing a Whigelection victory.70 After the government’s successful, if seamy, managementof the 1708 general election, Defoe remained in Scotland working on hisHistory of the Union, returning to London in December.71

Personal rather than political reasons obliged Defoe to make his next tripto Scotland. In the autumn of 1709 he enrolled his son, Benjamin, in theUniversity of Edinburgh which unlike Oxford and Cambridge was open toEnglish Dissenters. He stayed on through November probably to check upon investments and interests he had established in various Scottish news-papers. It is ironic perhaps that interests in the business of Scottish publicopinion caused England’s premier journalist to miss the beginning of oneof the greatest causes célèbres to captivate English public opinion – the trialof Dr Sacheverell.

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5Correspondence, Credit, andCommerce: Defoe and the Instabilityof Meaning, 1709–1713

i. Introduction

The fifth of November has proved to be a momentous date in the history ofBritain. For English Protestants the date commemorated the foiling of aCatholic plot to blow up Parliament in 1605. For Whigs it became theanniversary of William of Orange’s landing in 1688 and the commence-ment of the Glorious Revolution. For Tories and High Churchmen itbecame a day of deliverance thanks to Henry Sacheverell’s celebratedsermon, The Perils of False Brethren, preached in St Paul’s Cathedral on5 November 1709. The printed text quickly became a bestseller. Sache-verell’s sermon, show trial, minimal sentence, and subsequent celebratorytour did not just serve as a rallying point and electoral bonanza for a polit-ical party – it transformed the political climate of a nation.1

For Defoe, the affair was a bitter reminder of the far harsher experiencesof prison, pillory, and ruin he had endured in 1703 for ridiculing by parodythe very sentiments which Sacheverell fulminated from the pulpit and thendisavowed at his trial.2 Sacheverell’s apostasy before the bar and the subse-quent flood of insincere addresses to Parliament and Queen Anne seekingto capitalize on the whole Sacheverell spectacle provided Defoe with addi-tional evidence that various forms of speech associated with ‘the mostSolemn Actions in the World’ were becoming debased. The corruption oflanguage once again became a central theme in his writings. Oaths,addresses, promises, common speech, the very ‘Meaning of Words’ and‘visible Construction of Mens Actions’ were being devalued to the point of‘NON-SIGNIFICATION’.3 Defoe now contemplated a world in whichsignifiers might start to lose their meaning. It was a disturbing insight andpessimistic comment for one who saw the exchange of ideas, signified bywords, as part of God’s providential plan for man’s improvement.

In once again raising the ‘Bloody Flag and Banner of Defiance’ againstreligious toleration, Sacheverell had repudiated Defoe’s innovative hopethat interactions between churches in an Erastian polity could constitute

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an additional realm of exchange and improvement. This prospect wasintroduced during the occasional conformity controversy when Defoe re-iterated his acceptance of the established Church of England as long asDissenters were granted toleration, thereby enabling them to compete asreligious bodies. He expressed his belief that amicable competition wouldencourage all ministers and their congregations to prove and improve theirmoral worth. In trying to quell English and Scottish fears during the uniondebate, Defoe employed the same logic by suggesting that the maintenanceof both Church and Kirk as established ecclesiastical bodies would encour-age Christian charity and improvement while simultaneously preventingthe growth of theological heterodoxy. Defoe’s hopes proved illusory whenthe hysteria Sacheverell generated incited the Tories to declare open seasonon Dissenters, Whigs, and those segments of society impugned as ‘themonied interest’.

All three of these categories were associated with the most obviousrealms of exchange, trade, and credit. By 1710, a decade of war and therevolutionary steps taken to pay for it had brought into being a world offinancial speculation which only confirmed those cultural anxieties firstexpressed by the anti-army writers of the 1690s.4 During Queen Anne’sreign, the mechanisms of both public and private credit had becomeincreasingly more sophisticated and indispensable.5 Since its inception,when the government authorized the newly chartered Bank of England tosell £1,200,000 worth of stock on the security of future tax revenues, theNational Debt had swollen from £6.1 million in 1694 to £21.4 million by1710.6 Through public credit, the state had discovered the means by whichexponentially to increase military expenditure, enabling it to wage a pro-tracted war and secure a favourable peace, the terms of which would becrucial to Britain’s future colonial expansion and commercial strength.Domestically, however, unprecedented levels of taxation, inflation, andmassive public debt also increased party strife, exacerbated religious divi-sions, and stimulated passions, fantasies, and opinions at every level ofsociety. Although barter and cash transactions occurred, both inland andforeign trade were largely conducted by credit – through the exchange ofvarious commercial documents like promissory notes and bills of exchange.Government securities were also traded, their value fluctuating accordingto the public’s confidence in the state. The signs or tokens of this crediteconomy were various forms of scrip – tickets, tallies, bills, bonds, andshares – and they too were subject to discounting and devaluation.Numerous prints and cartoons from the period depict a society awash inmeaningless paper.7 In 1720–1 South Sea Company stock balloonedbeyond shareholders’ imaginations only to be rendered practically worth-less when the bubble burst. In Colin Nicholson’s words, ‘the seemingly per-verse and unpredictable relationship between opinion and fantasy andbusiness confidence began to assume the dimensions of a social power’.8

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Defoe’s concern about signs losing their meaning was at its most intenseat times of instability in the Stock Exchange, as in 1710 and 1720 whenpoliticians sought to manipulate the national debt for partisan purposes. ForDefoe, this had an epistemological significance beyond political tactics. Hefervently believed in the idea of the exchange of goods, material, moral, andmental, as a route to improvement. The inherent danger in this scheme wasthat the tokens which made exchange possible might lose their meaning. Ina world increasingly dependent upon representations, religious and politicaltoleration became necessary in new ways: to prevent factionalism fromdevising oaths which people could not keep and making addresses they didnot believe (so emptying words of their meaning) or manipulating credit forparty reasons (so emptying money of its meaning). Just as he had sought todefend the innovations of a standing army and the formation of a singlepolity with two established churches, Defoe justified the rise of commerceand credit as historical developments using the discourses of Providence, theNew Science, and natural law as well as a variety of rhetorical, affective, andfunctionalist strategies which, as a seasoned journalist, he continued todevelop.

ii. ‘What all people are busy about, but not one in fortyunderstands’: the decline of meaning and the rise of credit

Because he was in Edinburgh during the autumn of 1709, it was a monthbefore Defoe’s first published responses to the uproar over Sacheverell’ssermon appeared. As Mr. Review, he apologized for departing from his usualstance as a man of moderation, explaining that because of Sacheverell andthe High Church party, ‘I suffer’d the Overthrow of my Fortune andFamily, and under the Weight of which I remain as a banish’d Man to thisDay’. Nevertheless, Defoe was grateful that ‘the Wonders of RetaliatingProvidence’ would bring the doctor and his faction to justice and that his portrayal of them in his Shortest Way had been vindicated.9 Howevermuch abuse he received for accusing ‘High-Flyers … [of] bloody Designs’,he felt the world could not fail to believe him now that ‘they have it from the Pulpit, from the very Mouth of the Oracle of that Party’. He wasalso grateful for such transparent, if evil, enemies in an ‘Age of Plot andDeceit, of Contradiction and Paradox … [in which] it is very hard, under allthese masks, to see the true Countenance of any Man’, who willingly‘throw off their Disguises, and tell us what they are, and what they mean’.The greatest danger to Dissent, he argued, had always been posed by morecircumspect opponents.10 Once again he expressed his distaste forhypocrisy, the confusion of categories, and the ‘ambo-dexters’ of reli-gion and politics – occasional conformists, juring Jacobites, intolerant tol-erationists, and all others whose actions contradicted their professedbeliefs.

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Most people read The Perils of False Brethren as an attack on the Revolutionsettlement and an affront to the Queen and her ministers for failing todefend the Church adequately, and this view was the basis for the articles ofimpeachment. Defoe returned to London in late January 1710, confidentthat the High Church had ‘effectually pull[ed] Vengeance, both human andDivine, upon their own heads’ but his assumptions were premature.11 As theprosecution began presenting its case on 27 February, pro-Sacheverelldemonstrations and riots broke out in the City. On 1 March, mobs attackedDissenting homes, sacked meeting houses, and threatened the Bank ofEngland. High Church tracts proliferated, some of them directly attackingDefoe. Sacheverell, proving himself more of an ‘ambo-dexter’ than Defoehad thought, denied the charges and, in his speech before the Lords,reversed himself on many of the positions he had taken in his sermon.A divided Whig leadership found Sacheverell guilty but lost its resolve in theface of declining national support and gave him the lightest of sentences.No propagandizing by Defoe or anyone else could make this into a Whigvictory, even a hollow one; it was a disaster. Sacheverell was soon‘enveloped … in an atmosphere of popular delirium which today would bethe envy of any pop idol’s public relations team’.12 In April the Tory partybegan an orchestrated campaign to inundate Queen Anne and Parliamentwith anti-Whig, anti-Dissent addresses which called for a new ministry ledby true supporters of the Church and crown. Ignoring insinuations made byWhig directors of the Bank of England that a change in government woulddamage public credit, the Queen sacked her Whig ministers and proroguedParliament. In the autumn Sacheverell’s apotheosis delivered an electorallandslide for the Tories who would dominate the last four years of Anne’sreign.

Troubled by Sacheverell’s insincere acceptance of Revolution Principles athis trial and by the extreme royalism of recent Tory propaganda (which onthe surface seemed to compliment the Queen but hinted at Jacobitism)Defoe wrote A New Test of the Sence of the Nation (1710). This tract has beeninterpreted as an optimistic, bantering pamphlet, ‘full of fun’,13 but thismisses the point. The burden of this 91-page denunciation is Defoe’s pre-occupation with the betrayal of meaning itself and the way in which lan-guage, from common conversation to the most sacred oaths, was beingemptied of any correspondence with people’s actions. In contrast to hisanalysis of language in the Essay upon Projects (1697) in which he declaredthat custom was the ‘best Authority for Words … but Reason must be theJudge of Sense in Language, and Custom can never prevail over it’, A NewTest of the Sence of the Nation warned readers of ‘a new Tyranny of Custom,which is now invading us with Exotick Significations of Words’ and wasrendering all ‘Oaths, Abjurations, [and] Associations’ meaningless.14 In1697, Defoe had argued that ‘Words … like Ceremonies in Religion’ weresubject to the ‘Magistrate’ of Custom, but ‘Sense, like the Essentials’ of reli-

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gion was ‘Truth … sullen and the same, ever was and ever will be’.15 Now,it seemed, custom had established an ‘indefeizible Title’ to be ‘The Sence ofthe Nation’ and ‘by her absolute Authority in the Kingdom of Speech, hasfull Power to cause what Constructions she pleases to be put upon Words,and to cause them to be understood as best may serve to her Royal Ends andPurposes’.16

Defoe proceeded ironically to recommend that the people of Britainaccept the tyranny of custom which made words meaningless because itwas the only way to understand the politics and manners of the day. The‘Great Usefulness and Convenience … Reasonableness, and indeed,Necessity of Submitting’ to the new tyranny of meaningless words, heargued, was best explained by comparing it to ‘the Copernican System ofPhilosophy’. Like the heliocentric model, it too contained anomalies, defiedcommon sense, and could not be proved, but one accepted it because itexplained so many other things. By employing this new model, premisedon the idea that words were meaningless, Defoe promised his readers theywould be able to understand ‘all the strange Phenomena in our Politicks’.It would help explain, for example, the contradiction of ‘Abjuring thePretender, and yet Acting for his interest’ and help to reconcile the‘Doctrine of Hereditary Right, and Non-resistance, with the Act of Succes-sion and the Revolution’. In fact, many contradictory words and beha-viours could be understood, thereby implicitly exculpating people from awhole range of charges – profanity, prevarication, perjury, even treason. Byaccepting the fact that custom had rendered words meaningless, one mighteven absolve High Churchmen from the charge that they had purposely setout to deceive James II by their flattering addresses; rather, James had mis-takenly read their ‘customary Piece[s] of Extravagance’ as a true indicationof his power and their devotion.17

Oaths of political allegiance, abjurations, and political addresses providedthe ‘best illustration’ that language had been overrun with non-signifi-cation. The oath of God had been hijacked ‘to serve Parties and publickInterests, and therefore, contrary to its Institution, [had been] plac’d as a Testof Civil Distinction, a Key … to Civil Preferments, and Introduction topublick Employment, a Support to Parties, and a Property to Hypocrits’; butbecause ‘it is received without Thinking [and] administered withoutMeaning’, it too now ‘signifies Nothing … and stands for a Cypher’. Customhad left ‘the Good People of England … [with] no other Testimony of theirSincerity and Honesty, either to God, their Sovereign, or themselves, thanthat they had no Meaning at all in what they said’. Even the ‘CommonConversation of Men’, Defoe lamented, had become like ‘Froth upon yourDrink’ or ‘meer Vapour, without any Signification’. A man who would notdare perjure himself in court might, nevertheless, ‘swear a Thousand Street-Oaths in an Hour, to the Truth of a Thing which he knows nothing of, orto do something he never intends, or that he did something he never


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thought of, and yet remain a Man of Honour’. Meaning might still cling towords in a court of law, notwithstanding Sacheverell’s recent performance,but it had disappeared from everyday speech. People, Defoe explained, hadcome to rely upon these ‘Non-Entities of Speech … to fill up the Vacanciesof Elocution … assist the Passions’, and take the place of ‘Sincerity’. Thesenon-signifying words once considered the ‘Excrement of the Passions’,custom and the new ‘sence of the nation’ now dictated be accepted as pas-sions’ harmless replacements.18

In a postscript, Defoe admitted to being completely ‘Ironical’ in recom-mending that people accept custom’s tyranny over language. His intentionwas to show that the present ‘tumultuous Way of Mobbing our Govern-ment by Addresses, has no Manner of Good in it, but a great deal of Evil’. Itwas his aim, he declared, ‘to exhort the People of Britain, to leave off thissimple, nothing-meaning Way’ of conducting public affairs. By flatteringthe queen with false professions of loyalty, the Tories were ‘playing Bo-peepwith their Sovereign’. It was imperative, he concluded, to restore ‘Vertueand Signification’ to political speech and to elect ‘Men of Meaning, [and]Men of Sence’ to Parliament.19 The forthcoming general election of 1710was indeed the immediate context in which this text was written but Defoecould have chosen a number of strategies to counter the Tory campaignwhich had saturated the public realm with addresses in order to force theWhigs out of office. The pamphlet instead reflected Defoe’s growing per-ception that it was not just common vice and the increasing jargon of theprofessional classes which was corrupting language, as he had hypothesizedin the 1690s, but the ferocity of party politics and religious factionalism ofthe last decade in particular.

In the midst of the summer ministerial reshuffle, Harley was madeChancellor of the Exchequer and the next year, Earl of Oxford and LordTreasurer. After the general election, Harley’s primary political objectiveswere to negotiate a lasting and favourable peace with France and to keep hismore high-flying colleagues in check. By employing two of the greatestwriters of the age, Defoe and Swift, as his star propagandists, Harley used thepress to an even greater extent than he had when last in power and cer-tainly more effectively than any other politician of the day.20 Defoe’s firstassignment from the queen’s new leading minister was to restore publicconfidence in credit. Even though the Bank’s implied threat to the queenhad failed to save the government and a Tory landslide had swept theWhigs out of office, party magnates went ahead and ‘manipulated the stocksto create a credit crisis which would, at the very least, embarrass the newadministration, at worst, emasculate it’.21 That summer and autumn Defoeused the Review to address the Whigs, primarily to chastise them, and wrotehis Essay upon Public Credit and Essay upon Loans to convince the public atlarge that credit was beyond the power of any one party or minister, includ-ing the recently dismissed Whig, Godolphin, to control.22

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As Mr. Review, Defoe had written about credit at length in the past andhad been addressing the recent slump in stocks since June, most notably inhis depictions of credit as money’s coy younger sister, potentially powerfulbut often fickle and fearful, courted by all yet beholden to none.23 FromJohn Pocock’s reading of credit as a reincarnation of the goddess Fortuna,to feminist arguments that she typifies the problematic portrayal of thetransgressive female body, the allegory of Lady Credit has become some-thing of an eighteenth-century locus classicus for scholars. In recent years,however, an interpretive divide seems to have developed between histor-ians and literary scholars as to whether Defoe wished to ground credit inthe realm of probability and experience or in that of fiction and imagina-tion.24 There is no reason why Lady Credit could not have her feet in bothcamps or move between the two, but Defoe certainly sought to ground herin the realm of experience and he did this by appealing to history and tonatural philosophy. Credit in itself, Defoe argued, was based upon an estab-lished material history and was a necessary feature in a world designed fortrade by God’s providential wisdom. It was stock-jobbers who injected andinflated materiality to the point of unreality, turned soap into soapbubbles. By bubbling the price of a stock they turned it into ‘Air … and theworst sort of Air too, for it is ten times a more convectible Element thanthat we breath in. ’Tis an Element GOD never made, and ’tis a Trade henever bless’d.’25 Credit was natural and divinely sanctioned; what stock-jobbers did was not.

Lady Credit did not make an appearance in either of Defoe’s 1710 essaysbut this did not prevent Defoe from addressing the fascinating and perplex-ing nature of the issue, a subject ‘all people are busy about, but not one inforty understands’. ‘Like the soul in the body’, he began in the Essay uponPublic Credit, ‘it acts all substance, yet it is itself immaterial; it gives motion,yet itself cannot be said to exist; it creates forms yet has itself no form’.26

In fact, Defoe admitted, revealing his predilection for New Sciencemethods, it was easier ‘to describe its operations, rather than define itsnature’. This approach yielded a number of analogies to the natural world:

Credit is a consequence, not a cause; the effect of a substance, not a sub-stance; ’tis the sunshine, not the sun; the quickening something, call itwhat you will, that gives life to trade, gives being to the branches andmoisture to the root; it is the oil of the wheel, the marrow in the bones,the blood in the veins, and the spirits in the heart of all the negoce,trade, cash, and commerce in the world.27

Credit was also an important development in the history of trade whichbegan in that crucial age of conjectural history when the population of theancient world had expanded to the point at which nations or tribesencountered neighbouring peoples and discovered the benefits of mutual


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exchange or barter. From this period of its infancy, Defoe explained, com-merce ‘extend[ed] every way into all the corners of the world’ including theBritish Isles whose ancient inhabitants ‘exchange[d] their block-tin withthe Phoenician merchants for spices, wines, and oils, even long beforeJulius Caesar set his foot upon this island’. As trade increased, however, it‘found itself unsufferably streightened and perplexed for want of … amedium to supply the defect of exchanging’ when the quality and/orquantities of bartered goods differed. Thus, first money and then creditbecame ‘the great mediums of universal commerce, the vehicle in whichtrade is preserved or administered through the world’. Gold and silverbecame the most convenient forms of specie increasing commerce to sucha degree that ‘all the specie in the world could not answer the demand, orbe ready just at the time trade called for it’ and thus the world came to relyupon credit.28

The history of public credit, or ‘Lending Money to the present Govern-ment’, Defoe left to his Essay upon Loans. With the exception of ‘a smallInterval of an unsetled and Impolitick Peace’, he stated, the nation hadbeen at war for almost twenty-two years. In this most remarkable militaryengagement, Britain had spent more years, more money, more blood, andhad more ‘Famous … Successes and unheard of Victories’ against ‘the mostPowerful Enemies’ than since Roman times.29 When the war first began, thenormal forms of taxation – land tax, polls, excise, and customs duties –kept pace with expenses. Occasionally ‘borrowing Clauses were added tothe Bills of Aid’ but these were paid off within a few months and ‘the Yeargenerally supported its own Demands’. As the burden of the war becametoo great for annual revenues, new methods were devised for meeting itscosts – the establishment of government funds and annuities. Unfortun-ately, as taxable income declined more government securities were issued,creating a problem when those holding annuities demanded payment. Theheart of the problem lay not in the idea of public funds or their misman-agement by Treasury officials but with Parliament for failing to supplementthe funds at crucial moments causing ‘intolerable unheard-of discounts’ ofthose funds ‘to the ruin of all that we called credit’.30 These developments,Defoe explained, coinciding with the great recoinage which had alreadyreduced the supply of ready cash, encouraged the discounting of exchequerbills and promoted ‘the Art and Mystery of Stock Jobbing’.31

This situation was remedied when the government took steps which‘secure[d] the Loan of Money, and yet lower[ed] the Advantages given tothe Lenders’ and Parliament erected a ‘punctual, just, and fair Managementof the Payments’. Public debt had become a fact of national life but as longas the government preserved its credit through punctual payments, noparty, whether Whigs, Tories, City, court, banks, or East India Company,could pose a real threat, and this was Defoe’s central message.32 As long asthe government was willing to pay interest no one party could prevent

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men from wishing to make money. Men’s ‘Zeal to their Families’ wouldalways prevail over their ‘Zeal to Party’. What difference did it make ‘ifthere is either Whig or Tory in a good Bargain; Churchman or Dissenter in agood Freight; high Church or Low Church in a Good Adventure; if a Shop-keeper sees a good Penny-worth, a Scrivener a good Mortgage, a Money’dMan a good Purchase; Do they ever ask what Party he is of that parts withit?’ Business was and should be conducted ‘in spight of Party Aversions’and it was foolish and potentially dangerous to suggest otherwise.33

Credit did not rest upon intelligent management in the Treasury but ulti-mately upon ‘the care, conduct, and vigilance’ of Parliament and thequeen; it was, in short, not just ‘the effect of this or that wheel in the gov-ernment, moving regular and just to its proper work; but of the wholemovement, acting by the force of its true original motion, according to theexquisite design of the director of the whole frame’.34 While this systemenabled the country to persevere against France, it was also a great advan-tage to certain individuals and institutions who, some had charged, hadacquired wealth and power sufficient to influence public affairs. Whatbothered Defoe was that because the hazards of war discouraged foreigncommerce, ‘the high Premios … and Interests’ of government securitiesturned previously constructively engaged men of trade ‘to dr[a]w hometheir Effects’ and ‘embrace the Advantage’ of stocks. ‘This’, Defoe com-plained, ‘turn’d the whole City into a Corporation of Usury, and theyappear’d not as a Bank, but rather one general Society of Bankers.’35

To remove one’s self from the productive exchange of things merely toinvest in stocks was, in effect, to wind down the springs of God’s greatdesign; to engage in stock-jobbing or manipulate credit for party purposeswas to throw a spanner in his works.

iii. Trading rudeness for refinement: the scenario of Defoe’s A General History of Trade

Defoe’s view of the divine nature of commerce was most forcefullyexpressed in his General History of Trade, published in four monthly instal-ments from June to September 1713 during a heated debate over commer-cial agreements relating to the Treaty of Utrecht.36 Anglican zealotry hadbeen one reason the Tories had swept into office in 1710; growing rancourabout the protracted war against France also contributed to their landslide.Landowners increasingly felt their taxes were no longer funding a struggleto preserve the balance of power in Europe but underwriting Whig exploi-tation of war finance and the vainglory and greed of the Duke ofMarlborough, the Allies’ captain-general, and his family. Whig opposition,ministerial intrigue, and an attempt on his life, did not prevent Harley fromdelivering peace. After months of secret negotiations the Congress openedat Utrecht in January 1712 and by April 1713 the main treaties were signed.


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Controversy, however, erupted over the eighth and ninth articles whichwould have established most-favoured-nation relations between Britain andFrance. Opposition to this agreement arose because it would have contra-dicted England’s trade agreements with Portugal and because the Whigs sawan opportunity to attack the ministry for what many considered a Torytrade bill. It is generally agreed that Bolingbroke was the driving forcebehind these agreements and that Harley’s ‘attitude to the proposed treatywas equivocal’.37 Defoe’s own equivocal views about the peace haveprompted contemporaries and modern scholars to charge that in supportingthe agreements, he was acting as nothing more than a hired hack. We mustseparate his views about the peace itself from the commercial articles of thetreaty which followed. It is possible to read Defoe’s writings on the latter asa principled, if qualified, defence of commercial agreements needing somemodification.

Defoe discussed the issue at length in the Review and in another news-letter, the Mercator, which he established, with government support, as hisand the reading public’s interest in the Review waned.38 He also wroteseveral pamphlets explaining the pros and cons of the treaties as written.Importing wines had been one of the many trades in which Defoe hadbeen involved, and in Considerations Upon the Eighth and Ninth Articles of theTreaty of Commerce and Navigation he outlined the ramifications that theimportation of French wines would have upon the wine trade withPortugal, which under the Methuen Treaty of 1703 had enjoyed a reducedrate of tariff. Defoe also explained how granting most-favoured-nationstatus to France might affect the wool trade and domestic production ofsilk cloth. France was a populous, wealthy state and a potentially valuabletrading partner. If amendments to the treaties were to address British con-cerns, he concluded, it was in the nation’s best interest to trade with bothPortugal and France, indeed with any and all countries if it was advanta-geous.39 Defoe’s Considerations was not his most exciting pamphlet but itstechnical nature and frankly expressed concerns are not necessarily indica-tive of any hypocrisy on Defoe’s part.40 Although the bill was defeated inthe House of Commons on 18 June, the controversy continued to rage,confirming Defoe’s statement to Harley that those who opposed the treatyhad ‘fallen into This Clamour about Trade Not from Their Zeal for ourCommerce but for a Handle, and to Raise a Party Against the Ministry’.41

It seems that Defoe’s failure to win support for or amendments to the arti-cles of commerce by examining them in detail inspired him to undertake amore theoretical justification for the expansion of British commerce.

Although Defoe claimed that his purpose in writing the General History ofTrade was to investigate ‘Trade, abstracted from all the separate Interest ofPoliticks, and the Concerns of Nation’ (II, p. 40) it is clear that debate overthe commercial treaties with France was the polemical context for his seri-alized text; the fourth and final instalment specifically addressed the issue.

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The immediate purpose of the text as a whole was to convince readers thatit was in the nation’s best interest

to Trade with every Part of the World, where our Manufactures, or theGrowth and Production of our Land or Labour can be receiv’d; if therebe any Objections to be raised against their over ballancing us byReturns, that is our Business to prevent; but to prevent it by stoppingthe Exportation of our own Growth, that is all Ruin and Destruction toCommerce, and putting out our own two Eyes, to put out one of ourNeighbours. (III, p. 44)

The context reminds us that Defoe was putting together historical materialto advance a specific cause but the kinds of information he selected, theways in which it was assimilated, and the discourses he used to historicizethe question of trade shed light on the relationship between polemicalargument and developing eighteenth-century historical sensibilities.

In many ways Defoe’s General History of Trade fits squarely in the seven-teenth-century tradition of Baconian trade histories produced by exponentsof the New Science, Hartlib, Petty, and Boyle, to name a few.42 Baconianhistories were not narrative explanations of past events so much as compre-hensive catalogues of nature and nature wrought by human arts and manu-factures. Such compendia, it was believed, advanced the state of knowledge,empowered the kingdom, and improved the well-being of its subjects. AGeneral History of Trade was premised upon the Baconian belief that throughsystematic investigation, experimentation, and classification of the materialworld, human beings can uncover nature’s secrets, discover the naturalorder, and make use of these findings to better the human condition.Echoing Bacon’s dictum that what human beings could know or dodepended entirely on nature, Defoe believed a ‘necessary Consequence’ ofhis work would be ‘to restore the just Veneration due to Original Nature, onwhom all of that mighty thing called Art depends, and without which,Improvement and Manufacturing’ would have been ‘impossible’ (I, p. 8).Throughout the work Defoe employed a Baconian system of classification,dividing commodities into two basic categories of nature and naturewrought: raw materials, or items which are ‘compleated by Nature for theimmediate use of Mankind’, and those goods which required human beingsto ‘transform them into other shapes … by the help of Labour, Industry, Art,and the Application of other Materials … which we call Manufacturing’(III, p. 4).

The physical frame of the globe as well as the multiplicity and irregulardispersal of commodities throughout it were a clear indication of thenatural order revealing God’s purpose. ‘The wise Creator has most evi-dently shewn to us, that [he] had design’d the World for Commerce’, asevery part of the globe, Defoe reflected, had resources useful to its denizens


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and/or desirable to inhabitants of other regions (I, p. 10). In his SacredTheory of the Earth, Thomas Burnet had theorized that the earth, a divinely perfect sphere at its creation, had been disfigured by the Deluge,leaving an irregular surface characterized by fissures and protuberances anddivided by bodies of water large and small43 – a theory Defoe was eager tocorrect:

the uneven Shore here, the high and projected Promontories there; lowand flat Shores here, Shoals and sand lying off there; Inlets, Gulphs,Bays, Firths, deep Channels of Rivers, and the like, they seem to presenta Kind of Confusion, distort the Figure of the Earth, and look like aDeformity of Parts, making the Earth look, as Dr. Burnet observes in hisTheory, like a great Ruin …

Yet has all this Confusion and appearing Dislocation the greatestBeauty and Harmony imaginable in it, if we consider how all these aredirected before hand, by the secret Power who foreknew the Occasion:how without these, Navigation, which was to be the great medium ofCommerce, in the World, would be impracticable. (II, pp. 31–2)

This argument from design was not uncommon, but no one expressed itmore frequently or fervently, or applied it more imaginatively, thanDefoe.44 It is certainly consistent with Baconian philosophy, but Defoe’spassion for providential explanation owed something to his Nonconform-ing inheritance. By dispersing the necessary and valuable products ofnature throughout the world, the ‘Wise Disposer’ had left it to the‘Industry of Men’ to navigate, propagate, plant, and correspond in order toretrieve them (II, pp. 25–6). It was also ‘Labour and Industry [which] … wecall Manufacturing’ which ‘set so many Nations to Work’ to transform thematerials of nature into useful objects thereby making ‘the Rich …beholden to the Poor’ and ‘the Poor … behold[en] to the Rich’, or as it wasoften put, each useful in his station. The ‘Harmony’ between rich and poor,‘and their Dependance [sic] upon one another’, Defoe moralized, ‘makes upthe Beauty and Glory of God’s Creation’ (I, p. 29). As trade had fostered anincrease in consumption it may have encouraged new levels of vice andluxury but the same trade ‘raises Families, lifts the Poor up from the lowand necessitous way of living, to subsisting comfortably and plentifully ontheir Labour; this again prompts and encourages Diligence, Application,and Adventure on the one hand, and encreases the Consumption of thoseImports which Commerce supplies on the other’ (II, p. 27). Thus commerceenabled the truly industrious to improve their station. Although the NewScience was predicated on advancement, in these passages the language ofindustry and improvement has a rather pious ring to it. In keeping withDefoe’s belief in religious exchange, he remarked ‘How even Religion itselfhas been propagated by Trade, and the Common business of the World

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made Subservient to the Glorious Design of God, in spreading theKnowledge of the Truth into the Darkest Corners of the Earth’ (I, p. 24).

As each instalment’s subtitle indicated, Defoe’s General History of Tradewas more British (and, at times, more English) than general in scope. As wehave seen, Defoe conceptualized the British nation-state primarily inBaconian, providential, Protestant, and commercial terms and, in thisrespect, this text was no exception.45 ‘No Nation in the World’, Defoedeclared, ‘has been equally furnished by Nature with the Principles ofManufacture, and the Advantages of Commerce, as this Island of Britain, inwhich we live, is furnish’d’ (III, p. 7). Enhancing the power of the state andthe welfare of its people through the advancement of learning had beenone of Bacon’s primary goals and Defoe sought to make the connection aswell. By examining the history of Britain’s advancement through trade,Defoe declared his intention ‘To move you to farther Improvements then,and to farther Discoveries in Trade, is to move you to do your Countrygood, and yourselves also; to move you to make your selves Rich, and theNation Great, Populous and Strong in it self, and terrible to its Neighbours’(III, p. 10). Britons owed it ‘to themselves and to their Posterity’ to‘Improve the Advantages God and Nature’ had given them that they ‘may,nay they MUST Encrease to such a Degree as to be Superior in Wealth andstrength to all the Nations of the World’ (III, p. 7). In order to drive thispoint home, in all likelihood to those who opposed trade with France, headded, ‘this, I hope will be an acceptable Doctrine to all Parties among us,to move, perswade, and instruct us, with Diligence and Application, tomake use of the Advantages, which, it is manifest we enjoy, beyond anyparticular part of the World’ (III, p. 8). Throughout his career Defoe hadwarned his countrymen not to take the blessings of Providence, in revolu-tion, in war, and in trade, for granted.46 He once again expressed his beliefthat

due Observations of the Wisdom, Foreknowledge, and Omnipotence ofGod, should run through all our Discourses of Civil Affairs, and be theConstant Application of every Branch, as well of our Writings asConversation. This is not only our Debt to the Glory of the Creator, anda natural duty in all People to do; but it is the most profitable and usefulway of conveying Sacred Knowledge and improving both our selves andothers. (I, pp. 24–5)

In making these sorts of arguments Defoe was employing several dis-courses he had used in the past but A General History of Trade also showsDefoe developing modes of argument associated with philosophical historyand enlightened theories of progress. In tracing the history of commerce inthe British Isles from its earliest beginnings to his own time, he intended toprove that trade had been the driving force behind Britain’s transformation


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from a ‘Rude and Barbarous Nation’ to its present state of ‘Greatness andOpulency’ (III, pp. 13, 7). Like some later historians of the ScottishEnlightenment who viewed the process of history as one of ‘birth, infancy,maturity, and decline’,47 Defoe analogized the growth of trade to humanmaturation, emphasizing the natural and gradual qualities of the process.Trade did not ‘grow up’ all at once ‘any more than a Man is born at his fullStature, and his Faculties and Intellectuals compleat and fitted for Exercise’but had its period of ‘Infancy’. The nation’s economic potential was therebut required ‘the work of Ages’ to develop. As it learned to tap into itsnatural wealth ‘so the nation grew more and more considerable’ and conse-quently its ‘Fame, Power and Figure in the World, encreased’ (III, pp. 9–10).In the transition from rudeness to refinement, material enrichment was thefirst step in the development of a nation’s capacity to exercise its will in theworld and in the acculturation of its people.

Defoe’s description of the initial conditions of Britain’s earliest inhabitantsconcurred with other Enlightenment depictions of the savage state. Thepeople were ‘wild and barbarous’ and lived in ‘desperate circumstances’.They did not live in a Hobbesian or Rousseauan state of nature as indi-viduals, either aloof and self-sufficient or at each other’s throats, but in socialgroups. They were, however ‘unacquainted with the World’, knew nothingof urban or even village life, and ‘lived like Wild Beasts in Woods, Bogs,Dens and Caves’ (I, p. 14). Before commerce, ancient Britons ‘had no Art, noImprovement, no Application to … make a due use of the Materials Naturehad furnished them with, for enriching them and making them great; but allthese lay hid as a Treasure, which nature had laid up for Ages of moreKnowledge, and for Wise and Industrious nations that were to come afterthem’ (III, pp. 15–16). Because nature had generously endowed the region,Britain eventually attracted the attention of merchants from more advancedsocieties, first and most notably, the Phoenicians. Phoenicia had been thecentre of commerce in the ancient world and most early-modern historicalaccounts credited its merchants as the first to establish trade with Britainbefore the arrival of Julius Caesar. Landing in Cornwall, they were the first todiscover tin mining but, according to Defoe, these merchants ‘could not cul-tivate or improve the manners and way of living of the Britains [sc. Britons],because they were not powerful enough to Settle and Plant among them’ (III,p. 11). Without regular commerce, the British remained a ‘Savage People,not conversible, or capable to receive impressions of Civility and GoodManners from the knowing part of the World’ (III, p. 17).

Defoe drew a number of comparisons between Phoenicia and eighteenth-century Britain. Both nations were the leading trading powers of their day.Both peoples were intrepid: in the ancient world sailing around the BritishIsles was considered as distant and dangerous as British voyages to the NewWorld or South Seas. It was true, Defoe conceded, that ‘the Phoeniciansused our Britains as we lately used the poor Indians in Africa and America,

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they brought Feathers and Baubles, Brass Wares, Toys and Trinkets, andsold them to the Britains, for their more substantial Blocks of Tin’ (III,p. 11). Just as ancient Britons coined Phoenician brass in exchange for theirmore valuable tin, the Africans traded their gold with Britain for ‘Cowriesand Glass Beads’ to use as currency (III, p. 18). Defoe did not viewPhoenician and modern British practices as exploitation so much as sharpdealing. Over time, he surmised, the Africans, like the ancient Britons,would grow wiser through commerce. As commerce advanced wisdom,wisdom would further advance commerce, the ‘only Foundation of thePower and Wealth of this Kingdom, and by which it has arrived with thelength of time, and in just Degrees to the Posture and Figure in the Worldwhich we make at this time’ (III, p. 11).

The intellectual process by which nations grew wiser through commercewas outlined in an important passage, cited below, in which Defoe com-pared the ancient Britons to contemporary Africans, whom Defoe charac-terized as the eighteenth-century’s least commercial people, and therefore‘entirely unconversible and incapable of being Civilized’ (II, p. 7). The lackof a diverse array of material goods rendered ancient Britons and Africansof his own day incapable of significant advancement in the civilizingprocess. Because all manufactured goods derived from raw materials, thekey step in the process of diversifying one’s material world was ‘the Growthand Produce of the Land’. Agriculture provided the raw materials necessaryfor manufacturing and trade. Both of these activities increased the goodspeople were able to enjoy and consequently the impressions they receivedand the ideas they formed. Without advances in the variety of materialstimuli

all the Wit and Invention of men had been nothing; no, not so much asa meer Speculation. Man’s utmost extended Capacity does not allowhim to Conceive of any thing which is not, but by something that is; Hecan form no Ideas of what he has not seen, but upon the foundation,and by the Form of something which he has seen, or which has beendescribed to him: This is manifest in the Amusement which we give our-selves concerning the state of our Souls after death; concerning whichwe can form no Conceptions either of Happiness or Misery, but whatagree with, not our Sences only, but even with the Shape and Texture ofHuman Body, as if the Spirit of a Man in his exalted glorified State, wastied down to Human Form; nay even the Heavenly Angels are imaginedof by us as we describe them here, with Wings, Bodies, Hands and Feet,tho’ we have no Foundation in matter of Fact for that Conception, andmight as well take upon us to distinguish them into Sexes, and to repre-sent them as Young or Old, suitable to the Occasion of our Fancy

… all the Power of man’s Invention and Understanding, could nothave conceiv’d any thing of what we call Manufacturing, had not the


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Materials been furnished by the Author of Nature, which, as it were, ledour Forefathers by the Hand to the Improvements of those Materials …

But nature having laid down these first Principles for the Wit andInvention of men to work upon, Art has carried on so many Wonders ofImprovement from them, that the Necessity of those first Principlesseems to appear less to us than it did before. (I, pp. 6–8)

Because people’s material and mental worlds were now so richly varied, theyhad forgotten the obvious fact that without material objects, human beingswere not only incapable of manufacturing new things, they were incapable ofimagining new things. Through the multiplication of goods, human beingsmultiplied their ideas. Without the material prerequisites, first brought aboutby agriculture and then by trade, societies would not generate new ideas.Without increasing trade, advanced societies might stagnate. By designing theworld for commerce, God had designed it for enlightenment.

The discovery of materials in nature and the generation of new thingsand ideas might still take place without trade but it was a painstakinglyslow process, accelerated in Britain’s case by Roman colonization.48 Contactwith the Phoenicians had been too limited to effect any great changesamong the ancient Britons but during the Romans’ long dominion, ‘thecivilized State of the nation was established, Christianity was planted, the barbarities of the Savage Britains quite worn out, and the Nationbecame an Improved Trading Country’. The Britons followed examples setby the Romans in the colonies and cities. They no longer went naked orlived in the woods but ‘built Houses and Towns, as the Romans did’(III, p. 20). This new way of living increased the trade of certain necessitiesfor clothing and furnishing. With the adoption of some of the civilizedhabits of Roman dress, furnishing, and accommodation, material comfortand overall trade advanced but these did not increase exponentially, Defoeargued, until the Britons embraced agriculture:

the great Improvement and addition of Wealth, which the Romansbrought to this Island, consisted in the teaching the Natives the Arts ofHusbandry, and Cultivation of Land, Economy and Family Government,Industry and Application to business; which by Planting themselvesamong the Britains, became natural to them …

By this means the Lands became Improv’d and Enclosed, Towns to beregularly built; the Fruitfulness of the Soil encouraged the Husbandman,the numbers of people consumed the Produce, and as Food encreased,the Mouths of those encreased that eat it; and here began the InlandCommerce, which we see now arriv’d to so great a Head. (III, pp. 20–1)

It is interesting to note that in his account of this civilizing process,Defoe, the Londoner and former tradesman, seemed to reverse the tradi-

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tional sequence of events in which agriculture emancipated a certain por-tion of the population from searching for food, enabling it to focus onother crafts. The Roman establishment of large colonies ‘like so manyCapital Cities’ demanded greater food production so that cities begatagriculture, at least in Roman Britain.

During the several hundred years of barbarian invasions which followedthe period of Roman occupation, ‘these Improvements suffer’d GreatDestruction and Loss’ but eventually ‘after those Saxons becoming Chris-tians, and by consequence of being civilized by a long Series of quiet pos-session, they fell naturally into the very same methods of Living andTrading, which the Romans, who were the first Instructors of the People,had left behind them’ (III, p. 23). Progress in Anglo-Saxon England, itseems, resumed a far more gradual and normal pace than the precipitousrate of change experienced in Roman times through the tutelage of a moreadvanced civilization. If the Roman period was key to establishing inlandtrade, foreign trade was much increased during the later Anglo-Saxon andNorman periods, especially the wool trade with Flanders. In this text Defoecredited Edward III for prohibiting the export of raw wool which allowedthe English instead of the Flemish to grow rich turning English wool intocloth. Importantly, as we shall see in Chapter 8, by the 1720s Defoe wouldbe crediting Henry VII for instituting this policy. By dating this changefrom the Tudor rather than Plantagenet period, Defoe was able to arguethat the growth of trade and manufactures had freed the English peoplefrom the feudal miseries of vassalage and villeinage.

iv. Conclusion

Defoe’s immediate concern in writing A General History of Trade was tojustify new trading agreements with France in the wake of peace talks atUtrecht. Because it supplied the inborn everyday needs and desires ofhuman beings, Defoe described commerce as a ‘Natural Principle’. In hishistorical overview, commerce was also presented as the necessary condi-tion for the growth of civility. Given the large role played by the Romansand Edward III in establishing agriculture and trade, at least in England, itis clear that Defoe’s historical explanation depended heavily upon theintervention of lawgivers which Scottish Enlightenment historians, in theirsearch for the natural and typical mechanisms of progress, sought to avoid.Still, Defoe was able to make the case that Britain’s material, mental, andeven moral wealth depended upon commerce. In earlier works, he hadargued that trade created the opportunity for various kinds of exchanges.People coming into contact with one another shared information and ideasas well as a desire to profit materially. In A General History of Trade, Defoewas able to extend this belief by arguing that the process of civilization, thegrowth and learning of manners, and the exercise of human intervention


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and imagination were all dependent upon the increase and exchange ofmaterial goods. In the wake of the Sacheverell trial, the Whigs’ failedattempt to use credit as a political weapon, and his own increasinglyawkward position as a propagandist for the Tory government, Defoe wasalso more aware than ever of the distortions that party politics could inflictupon money and meaning.

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6Robinson Crusoe: Orthodox Penitent

i. Introduction: Robinson Crusoe and Defoe’s orthodox agenda

While many of Defoe’s works are now largely forgotten by all but special-ists, the story of his resourceful, penitent, shipwrecked mariner, RobinsonCrusoe, is still read or at least recognized by the general public and contin-ues to generate a great volume of scholarly explication.1 Crusoe’s materialadvancement, as hunter and gatherer, pastoralist and planter, manufacturerand merchant, capitalist and colonizer, has invited many socio-economicinterpretations. Crusoe’s transformation from spiritual rudeness to refine-ment has also generated important scholarly comment. By imposing hisown will on the natural world and by learning to submit to God’s overarch-ing will within it, Crusoe becomes Everyman. He learns, as Defoe wishedhis readers to do, that the natural world, and one’s place within it, canmake no sense without acceptance of the supernatural in the shape of reve-lation and redemption.

In recognizing the importance of religion in Robinson Crusoe, however,scholars have most often dealt with the general theme of Providence, orexplained the text, in relation to the Puritan genres of spiritual autobiogra-phy, pilgrim allegory, and guide literature.2 These approaches are valuablebut they have tended to emphasize the internal, subjective, and emotionalaspects of redemption as personal pilgrimage, which, in turn, has formed amajor part of a generation of scholarship that linked the rise of the indi-vidual with the rise of the novel.3 We need to see redemption as Defoewould have seen it, in the context of fierce polemical debates and as a con-sequence of what he regarded as the objective doctrine of the Trinity, a doc-trine increasingly under attack in the early eighteenth century. This doctrinehe vigorously sought to defend, not only in pamphlets but also in RobinsonCrusoe and its two sequels.4 Whatever else the Crusoe myth may have com-municated, Defoe’s central concern was to defend an eschatological orderdependent upon revelation and redemption, breaking a few false idols andattempting to restore his own island’s culture in the process.

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Within the Church of England and among Dissenting sects, a minorityof Socinian, Arian, and Deist voices had been heard for some decades. Inthe first years of George I’s reign, however, major theological disputeserupted in which men publicly questioned the legitimacy and power ofecclesiastical structures, the authority of revealed religion, the existence ofmiracles, and the divinity of Christ. The so-called Bangorian controversyconsumed Anglican public debate in and after 17175 while the Salters’ Halldispute of 1719 permanently damaged the cause of English Presbyterian-ism, Defoe’s own religious community.6 During the reigns of William IIIand Anne, Deist publications had created the occasional public furore, butby the 1720s these had escalated into what Maximillian Novak has called a‘great deistic offensive’.7 In their search for a rational, natural religion ofmankind, Deists dismissed much orthodox Christian teaching as idolatry.Defoe, in turn, used the term ‘idolatry’ to condemn heterodox Christianopinions, non-Christian forms of worship, and many other aspects ofEnglish society which he found disturbing or dangerous.

As Ronald Paulson has remarked, ‘the first quarter or third of the eigh-teenth century in England was a period regarded by both Whig and Tory ascharacterized by the worship of a “false idols”’. Far from being confined toreligious dispute, the rhetoric of idolatry betrays a much deeper ‘mentalityof iconoclasm’, a cultural response to the Reformation and ‘to the greatestof all English acts of iconoclasm, the beheading of the king’. Seeking toreorient the study of eighteenth-century aesthetics away from the patronsand towards the actual producers of art and literature, Paulson argues thatartists and writers responded to the religious and political iconoclasm ofthe seventeenth century and to contemporaneous instability, transgression,detritus, and doubt within a paradigm of ‘breaking and remaking’. Inpoetry, prose, and painting, Pope, Hogarth, and Reynolds demolished thehollow idols of their own age, utilizing these shards, along with the brokenor abandoned ideals of ages less tarnished than their own, in order toreconstitute those ideals or to transform them into something new.8

Although he purposely excludes the novel from his study, Paulson brieflysuggests how both the form and content of Robinson Crusoe exemplify histhesis:

The pilgrimage of the hero toward a conversion experience no doubtpleased Defoe’s more pious readers, but what gave him the extraordinar-ily large public he enjoyed then and has enjoyed ever since, was prob-ably the how-to-do-it plot of building a house with salvaged materialson a remote island … The Adam who is cast out of Eden is for Defoesomeone who tries to rebuild this lost world … out of the fragments athand. The essential part of the myth that Defoe created, it has alwaysbeen apparent, is not the fall of man but his isolation after the fall andhis attempt to bring order out of unfamiliar and minimal materials …

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The paradigm, as Defoe’s case attests, is most plainly carried out in thatmakeshift genre, itself a Crusoe’s island of need and reconstitution, thenovel.9

Defoe had many opportunities to reflect upon and write about various sortsof instability and doubt in the decade before he published Robinson Crusoe.Paulson’s model is a useful one for understanding religious and politicaldebate as well as cultural production in this period. This chapter acceptsthat model, but seeks to go further in attempting to show how Defoe’s reli-gious commitments shaped his perceptions of what was broken and whatneeded to be remade.

ii. Contextualizing Crusoe: Hoadly, Toland, and Defoe’s Turkish Spy

After the fall of Harley and the Tories, the accession of George I, and thereturn of the Whigs to government in 1714–15, Defoe remained loyal to hisold patron Harley but his return to the Whig fold was a complicated one.His own journalistic activities gave rise to criticisms of him as a merely mer-cenary pen and the Whigs themselves became a divided party.10 Increasinglyunhappy with George I’s subordination of English interests to Hanoverianones, Walpole and Townshend went into opposition in 1717. This leftcontrol of the ministry to Stanhope and Sunderland until Walpole’s consol-idation of power, his own and his party’s, in 1720. In addition to supportingGeorge I’s so-called ‘German’ policies, the Stanhope–Sunderland ministryadopted a platform for major reforms in Church and state, includingmeasures to extend religious toleration. They first sought to expunge theOccasional Conformity and Schism Acts, those high-water marks of HighChurch Anglicanism passed in the last years of Anne’s reign; even the TestAct now seemed vulnerable to repeal. Far from being dependable allies oforthodox Dissenters like Defoe, the government was drawn to supportingand being supported by figures like Benjamin Hoadly and John Toland.Toland was commissioned to write what was essentially a manifesto for thenew Whig programme, publishing The State Anatomy of Great Britain inJanuary 1717.11 On 31 March, Benjamin Hoadly, who had been placed onthe Whig promotional fast-track for his extreme latitudinarian principlesand recently consecrated Bishop of Bangor, delivered in the Chapel Royal asermon on The Nature of the Kingdom or Church of Christ. Intending toprovide the theological underpinnings for Whig reform, Hoadly’s sermoninstead ignited a firestorm, asserting the principle of unlimited privatejudgement in the place of the corporate authority of the visible Church.12

Over the years Defoe had campaigned for the removal of civil penaltiesagainst Protestant Dissenters arguing that the Test Act, originally designedto combat Catholicism in the reign of Charles II, had instead been

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employed against Nonconformists by the Tories and even by the Whigsthemselves when it had been politically expedient to do so.13 He was alsovehemently opposed to the use of sacred oaths for political purposes.14 Hedid not, however, ever argue for the disestablishment of the Church ofEngland or for unlimited toleration which for important Christologicalreasons would have meant the same thing. Not only was the Church ofEngland an integral part of the constitution by law established, it was also avisible institution of Christ’s authority on earth, even if, to Dissenters likeDefoe, aspects of its ceremonies and episcopal administration were notsanctioned by scripture. To extend toleration to those who denied the doc-trine of the Trinity would be to deny Christ’s continuing presence in thisworld.15 Defoe’s stance towards the Church of England remained that of‘Old Dissent’: he wanted comprehension within it, not destruction of it.Furthermore, as we have seen in Chapter 3, the doctrine of the Trinity wascentral to the eschatological order as Defoe understood it. To deny redemp-tion through Christ was to unhinge ‘the whole frame of Nature, Time, andProvidence’.

This is why Defoe saw great danger in basing any relief for orthodoxDissenters on the heterodox principles articulated by Toland and Hoadly in1717. Since their initial argument over standing armies in 1698, Defoe andToland had engaged in many hostile exchanges. Responding to the StateAnatomy, Defoe dismissed his old enemy as a man ‘as heterodox in poli-ticks, as he is in religion’ and castigated the Whig ministry for proposing a‘destructive universal Toleration’ and for attempting to ‘frame a new con-stitution’. Defoe suggested that if Toland ‘publickly renounced his Socinianand Arian Heresies’ then he could ‘join freely in acknowledging thatConscientious Difference should not destroy Christian Charity’.16 Thenature of Christ, however, was not something about which one could havean opinion. Addressing himself to Hoadly in the mask of an honestQuaker, Defoe chided the bishop to abandon his episcopal title, his seat inthe ecclesiastical courts, and those ‘prophane Ensigns of Idolatry’, hislawnsleeves. If Hoadly really did believe that civil laws ‘ought not to preserveMen in Opinions’ or ‘be laid upon Mens Consciences, to bind them to or from …Judgement or Practice in Religion’, then it was hypocritical of him to remainin the Church of England. Defoe ended his Declaration of Truth to BenjaminHoadly by explaining that although ‘Friend Benjamin’ might find a Quakermeeting house a congenial home for his opinions, he would not be wel-come in a Presbyterian chapel. Like the Church of England, the Presbyter-ians subscribed to specific ‘Articles of Faith’ and these doctrines weresubject to ‘Humane Authority’ because they believed that Jesus had, in fact,sanctioned a church magistracy.17

The reduction of faith to opinion had concerned Defoe for some timeand he feared that party politics had only encouraged the growth ofheterodoxy:

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the Plant, Religion, has been quite rooted up by the Hand of Strife, andmeer Opinion planted in its Room: which comes up so thick, and growsso rank, that Religion itself, a nice and tender Plant, is choakt, can takeno Root, or have space to spread its Branches; so it withers, hangs itHead, and at last dies.18

It seemed that politicians were either too busy looking after their own self-interests or were even willing to exploit religious controversies formundane party gains. Just before the Whig split in January 1717, hewarned the ministry that now was not the time to ‘temporize … withIdolatry’ as divisions between them might still encourage French andJacobite interests just as factions in the court of Edward VI had jeopardizedthe Reformation. ‘Court divisions’ were caused by the ‘Avarice and Envy …[of] Great Men engrossing Places of vast Profit’ and he implored ‘if the Eyesthat should watch for the publick Safety, are employed in an enviousGlancing at one another … what will become of the publick Interest?’19

Part of Defoe’s anger over Toland’s proposal to extend the toleration restedon his understanding that Stanhope and Sunderland were hoping to shoreup their support among Dissenters just as James II had tried to woo themthrough his dispensing powers. In Anne’s reign the High Churchmen dideverything they could to ‘preserve their Places, as is usual with Courtiers andStatesmen of all Parties’ and the Whigs were no exception: ‘their ownGrandeur, Gain, and unsatiable Desire of Power and Profit is the Pole Starby which they steer; the center of their Designs, and the Point in which allthe Lines of their Practice meet’.20

By the summer of 1717, the Bangorian controversy had become so vitri-olic that Defoe took refuge behind the mask of a Muslim, Armenian mer-chant to explain it. In The Conduct of Christians made the Sport of Infidels,Defoe condemned English Christians of every stripe for their blasphemousbeliefs and factious behaviour. Clearly, Defoe found the persona of aMuslim who could comment on the follies and faithlessness of ChristianEurope a serviceable one for in August 1718 he published A Continuation ofLetters Written by a Turkish Spy at Paris, a 300-page work which has receivedlittle scholarly attention. Using the format of an earlier eight-volume workattributed to a French writer, Defoe’s version retained the character of the correspondent and spy, Mahmut, and the original setting of lateseventeenth-century Paris to address several nagging concerns includingFrench military power, various forms of Christian idolatry, and the polit-ical and religious ignorance which allowed these threats to persist.Although Maximillian Novak acknowledges the religious aspects of thiswork, he has categorized it as another ‘anti-Jacobite tract’, albeit one, hebelieves, that should be of special interest to literary scholars given Defoe’sportrayal of Mahmut’s ‘alienation and loneliness’ just eight months beforethe publication of Robinson Crusoe.21 Defoe, however, devotes very little


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space to the theme of Mahmut’s homesickness in contrast to his far morefrequent and lengthy attacks on Catholic, Socinian, Deist, and atheistviews and practices – religious themes which indicate an even strongerconnection to a central message in Robinson Crusoe, namely, the triumphof salvation and redemption over natural religion; a theme found in thefirst volume and defended more explicitly through the doctrine of theTrinity in the two Crusoe sequels.

What made Defoe’s use of the Muslim mask even more timely was thepublication in the same month of John Toland’s main contribution to theBangorian controversy, his tract Nazarenus, an attack on orthodox Chris-tian history which had existed in manuscript for some years. Premised onheterodox histories by men like Spinoza, the Unitarian thinker HenryStubbe, and Toland’s own polemical use of the medieval forgery, the Gospelof Barnabas, Nazarenus argued for the existence of a natural religion of man,manifested by the early monotheisms of Jews, Muslims, and Gentiles. Thisnatural religion was used for political and social purposes by Moses,Mahomet, and Christ (all temporal leaders and nothing more according toToland) and thereafter became corrupted as it was mixed with various idol-atries and philosophies of the Graeco-Roman world.22 Whether Defoe wasresponding to these ideas in their published, privately circulated, or morebroadly discussed forms, he clearly used his Continuation of Letters Writtenby a Turkish Spy to offer an alternative view of the historical relationshipbetween Muslims, Jews, and Christians in the ancient Near East and toattack specifically the rabbinical, Spinozan, and Socinian scholarship uponwhich Toland relied.23 While preserving the persona of the Muslim corre-spondent, Mahmut, Defoe presented a decidedly orthodox and Protestantaccount of the spread of religion and learning in biblical times.

Throughout his correspondence, Mahmut made a number of negativecomments about Christians in general including the greater incidence ofatheism in Christian Europe than in the Muslim world. He blamed this, inpart, upon the fact that the ‘Nazareens’, as he called them (implying Tolandand his kin), had ‘phylosophyz’d so long about their God … that they havequite lost him, and are daily questioning among one another whether therereally is any such thing or no in the World’.24 Defoe’s Protestant prejudiceswere further revealed in Mahmut’s observations about the ‘IdolatrousPractices’ of the Catholics, especially their worship of ‘a Piece of Bread as aGod, suggesting that a few Words of a Common Dervice [sic; sc. Service] caneffectually transmutate the Species of Bread into the Substance of their cru-cified Messiah; an idolatry horrible and detestable!’25 In addition to severalattacks on the doctrine of transubstantiation, Mahmut condemned theCatholic idolatry of Mary, the use of sacred relics, and other ‘miraculousFripperies’. He castigated the Pope as a great imposter and ‘religious … Pick-Pocket’, cited Huguenot descriptions of the papal throne as ‘the Seat of theBeast’, and dismissed ‘the whole System of the Papacy a meer Piece of politi-

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cal Pageantry, carried on to support the Pride and Luxury of the Clergy, andwhich is in it self nothing at all but a Bubble of Air and Emptiness’.26

Toland would have relished this colourful indictment of Catholicism butnot Defoe’s even more effective deployment of a Muslim voice to criticizethe Socinian scholarship that dealt with Islam. In having Mahmut adoptan amused tone when describing the Nazareens’ love of fictions, forgedhistories, and fables about Mahomet, Defoe was specifically criticizingToland’s use of the Gospel of Barnabas. In Nazarenus, Toland expounded aview put forth by a number of Socinian thinkers that the Nazarenes, anearly Judaeo-Christian sect, had retained the natural religion of mono-theism, accepting Christ as a temporal Messiah only, not as the Son ofGod. Once, however, Christ’s divinity and the doctrine of the Trinity wereestablished as orthodoxy by the Council of Nicea in 325, the pure faith ofthe Nazarenes survived only in the ‘Turkish’ or Islamic regions of the NearEast. Toland and his circle of Socinian friends emphasized this Islamic con-nection, saw themselves as the heirs in the West of ‘pristine’ monotheism,and condemned the doctrine of the Trinity as ‘the historical font of allChristian corruption’.27

Defoe accepted the unified human history set out in biblical chronology,explaining Islamic monotheism as part of the Noachic inheritance of theSemitic peoples. In several letters, Mahmut complained to various corre-spondents that Western literati were quite ignorant about Arabic history.If one wanted information on ‘the Classicks’ of Greece and Rome, then‘this is the fittest Place’ but as ‘for the Eastern Learning … Enquiry after it isas good as dropt’.28 Christians were especially ignorant in thinking thatonly the Hebrews received divine knowledge. In having Mahmut repeat-edly assert the close genealogical and intellectual links between Jews andArabs as the sons of Shem and offering a different account from Toland’s ofthe transmission of sacred and profane knowledge in the Islamic world,29

Defoe achieved two objectives. He enhanced the realism of the text byendowing Mahmut with the cultural pride his readers would expect fromsuch a figure; more importantly, he sought to undermine Toland’s use ofIslam as a vehicle for attacking orthodox Christianity.

Defoe’s Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy also reveals how heand Toland fundamentally differed in their treatment of the role of Moses,the origins of Jewish laws and practices, and the status of rabbinical schol-arship. Influenced by Spinoza’s biblical historical criticism, Toland viewedMoses as a civil legislator who developed a moral code for the new Hebrewnation, a code merely couched in divine language and comforting ritualsfor a people who had become accustomed to various sorts of idolatryduring their Egyptian bondage. Yet if Moses were merely a secular legisla-tor, so, by implication, would be all recent law. Defoe, in contrast, fiercelydefended the orthodox position that the laws of Moses were the divinecommands of God and that they were given to Moses in written form.


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In several letters, Mahmut attacked the kind of rabbinical or Talmudicscholarship which Toland had used, accusing ‘Dogmatick rabbis’ and thechaotic conditions of the Jewish diaspora with corrupting ‘the pure Lawdeliver’d to them by Moses’ by introducing various ‘Innovations’.30 Defoealso suggested several other explanations for the continued degeneration ofdivine knowledge as it spread through the Mediterranean world. In a letteraddressed to an Arabian student interested in the Graeco-Roman pantheon,Mahmut proposed that evil, the euhemeristic tendencies of the ancientGreeks, and the passage of time had turned the creation and the realhistory of mankind into ‘Romance’ and ‘Heathen Fiction’, heroic men intogods, and ‘Knowledge of the true One God’ into ‘Idols and Images’. It waseasy to see, for example, how Adam became Saturn, Cain became Jupiter,and biblical events were transformed into mythic tales.31

It was not the revival of Greek mythology, however, which Defoe andother orthodox writers felt compelled to address but the revival of aspectsof ancient philosophy in heterodox thought, often via the influence ofSpinoza. In one letter, Mahmut recounted hearing in his youth a debatebetween a learned Jew and learned Arabian on the issue of ‘a first Cause inNature’. When the discussion turned to the ‘Being of Man, the Jew urged anArgument which I now find much in Use in this Nation of Atheists andDeists, among whom I live (viz.) Of Man being his own Maker’, which theArab scholar vigorously refuted by arguing that any being capable of creat-ing life must also be capable of preserving it and therefore eternal, anattribute of God but not of mankind. As man was mortal, so too was natureitself. It was not an emanation of God but a ‘Machine’ put in motion by‘the first great Cause’, destined to run only ‘as long as the Hand which first put it together appointed it to go’. Those philosophers who ‘follow theold Notion of Epicurus, that the World was made, or rather made it self by meer chance’ failed to extend their analysis to ask ‘who first gave Beingto those Atoms’, an omission, Defoe wished to emphasize, fatal to theirsystem.

This debate reminded Mahmut of the myth of Prometheus; he ended hisletter with a recent English poem which challenged this ‘ancient Principleof Atheism’, a verse Defoe would quote again in his Serious Reflections ofRobinson Crusoe:

The great Promethean Artist, Poets say,First made the Model of a Man in Clay;Contriv’d the Form, of Parts, and when he had done,Stole vital heat from the Prolifick Sun:But not a Poet tells us to this Day,Who made Prometheus first, and who the Clay;Who gave the great Prolifick to the Sun,And where the first Productive Work begun.

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Wondering how people as learned as these Nazareens could entertain the‘brutish Notion … of ‘denying the Being of a God, and all the subsequentNotions of the World’s Eternity, Man’s self-existent Power, and the like’,Mahmut was only able to conclude that the proliferation of priestly absurd-ities and ‘all the false Glosses of the Clergy’ caused too many Christians todismiss all their teachings as a ‘meer Bundle of Nonsense … and then notbeing enlightened from Heaven with the sacred Knowledge of the true ONEGod, it leads them into a Contempt of all principles, and their Religiondwindles away to nothing; they begin in ridiculing their own Profession,and then go on to the great Extream of denying even God himself’.32

The orthodox defence of God as the ‘first cause’ was, as Margaret Jacobhas shown, aided by Newtonian science and Baconian experimental philo-sophy which encouraged investigation of the world of ‘second causes’ andtheir laws and properties while denying that human reason could fullyunderstand the nature of the universe or perceive God’s essence.33 Defoe’sacceptance of these limits is perfectly illustrated in one of Mahmut’slaments about the loneliness of foreign exile. In describing the difficulty oflife without a friend to confide in, Mahmut considered the enormousburden of passions imprisoned in ‘the narrow Bounds of his ownThoughts’. These might overwhelm a man to the point where ‘Life it selfmust sink under the[ir] Weight, and the Soul would hasten the nearest waythro’ that Abyss to pass to the Regions of Light, of which she her self is aNative’. Mahmut then turned to consider the heavens filled with ‘celestialConstellations of Light. Planets … Millions of Miles from this lower Planetthe Earth, and … the Commets … moving in Parabolas’ beyond which thesoul would travel after death. What disturbed him were those philosopherswho, having accepted the vastness of space, now doubted the ability of adeparted soul to make such a huge journey, and sought to know exactlyhow the soul was conveyed, in what direction, and at what speed. ‘All theseEnquiries and suggested measurings of Space, Motion, and Time’, he stated,‘have a Tincture of those horrid Crimes of Atheism and Scepticism, forwhich these Nazareens are as eminent as infamous, and in which theyencrease every Day.’34

Writing in the masks of a learned Muslim, pious Quaker, or in his ownvoice, Defoe may have scored polemical points against Toland, Hoadly, andthe radical Whig regime which had hoped to pass legislation extendingliberty of conscience to those who would not subscribe to the AthanasianCreed or the doctrine of the Trinity. The Test and Corporation Acts,defended by a militant Church of England, were to survive, though thegovernment was able to repeal the Occasional Conformity and Schism Actsin the autumn of 1719. For the general cause of orthodox Dissent inEngland, however, this relief may have been too little too late. Earlier thatyear, English Presbyterianism found itself permanently divided and dimin-ished in a bitter debate over these same issues. At Salters’ Hall that spring,


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Presbyterian ministers had met to discuss, among other things, recent casesin which parishes had contested the ordination of one minister and ejectedothers from livings because of their unorthodox views on the doctrine ofthe Trinity. Defoe’s own parish of Stoke Newington had recently felt it nec-essary to eject a minister for his Socinian views. By a slim majority, theministers at Salters’ Hall voted to rely on scripture alone, abandoning sub-scription to specific articles of faith such as the Trinity as a test of ortho-doxy. Siding with the Trinitarian minority, Defoe surely realized that thissplit between the so-called Subscribers and Nonsubscribers meant that hisown theological views were now profoundly challenged even within theranks of his co-religionists and that the viability of his religious communityitself was therefore in doubt.35 While the Presbyterians quarrelled, Defoewas busy creating his most famous mask, Robinson Crusoe, whose life’sstory would illustrate that ignoring the providential power of the Lord andthe redemptive power of his Son led to peril; proper faith in them wouldguide one to a rewarding life in this world and an everlasting one in thenext.

iii. Trinitarianism and the Crusoe trilogy

In some ways, the Salters’ Hall controversy is now acknowledged as animportant context for understanding Defoe’s preoccupations as he wrotethe first volume of Robinson Crusoe, published in April 1719. Yet the fullsignificance of that controversy has not been grasped. Despite Defoe’sprobable authorship of a pamphlet, published in May, denouncing theDissenters for casting doubt on the ‘very first and principal Article of Faith,viz. The Union of the Godhead’, scholars have variously argued that ‘whatprincipally annoyed Defoe was not the heresy so much as the politicalindiscretion of the controversialists’, and that ‘hav[ing] lost much of hisrespect for the Dissenting clergy’ Defoe displayed an increasing ‘ecumeni-calism’ which left him ‘searching for a Christianity purified from thecontroversies among the clergy’.36 The conclusion of recent scholarshipseems to be that the controversy’s most important legacies for Defoe were,first, the author’s growing disgust at a bickering clergy and, second, theanti-clerical message of his text which ‘dramatizes the conversion of twopersons – Robinson Crusoe and Friday – to Christianity by Scripture alone,without the aid of any creeds, dogmas, or priests’.37 Clearly Crusoe’s obser-vations that ‘there is Priestcraft, even amongst the most blinded ignorantPagans in the World’ and that the true meaning of God’s word was avail-able to all through the reading of scripture without the need for humanintercession convey mainstream Protestant thinking:

the bare reading the Scripture made me capable of understandingenough of my Duty, to carry me directly on to the great Work of sincere

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Repentance for my Sins, and laying hold of a Saviour for Life andSalvation, to a stated Reformation in Practice, and Obedience to allGod’s Commands, and this without any Teacher or Instructer; I mean,humane.38

These observations may even reflect an exasperation with current Presby-terian conflicts. The heart of the matter at Salters’ Hall, however, was thedoctrine of the Trinity and, as we have seen, the standoff between Sub-scribers and Nonsubscribers was only the most recent in a spectacular seriesof challenges to that doctrine which had consumed public debate. Fewreaders today can be unaware that Robinson Crusoe has a religious messagebut its Christological core is often marginalized or ignored.

Defoe’s preoccupation with the defence of the Trinity becomes evenmore clear if one considers the three Crusoe volumes as a whole. This hasseldom been done,39 but as Maximillian Novak has suggested, Defoe prob-ably began writing the sequel, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,before the first volume was even printed. He rightly advised that the SeriousReflections ‘ha[s] to be regarded as part of the Crusoe fiction’ even thoughthis third volume consists of a series of essays in which Defoe had Crusoeopine on a number of religious and moral questions.40 A distinctionbetween the first two Crusoe ‘novels’ and the third volume of essays is evenharder to sustain if one accepts the recent and important scholarship of IlseVickers, Robert Mayer, and Geoffrey Sill.41 Each makes a strong case, alongsimilar but far from identical lines, for reading Robinson Crusoe and otherfictionalized works of Defoe’s as histories rather than trying to shoehornthem into the genre of the novel which for various formalist reasons hasalways been something of an uncomfortable fit.42 Ronald Paulson’s aes-thetic model of breaking and remaking applies to Robinson Crusoe regardlessof whether we consider it a novel or a history: in either case, Defoe wasmanipulating various literary conventions to suit his own purposes.

Centuries of tradition had allowed the incorporation of fictional materialin historical discourse, and although the accepted norms of historiographywere changing in the early-modern period Defoe was happy to borrow andbend any literary forms at hand. Most of Defoe’s contemporaries acceptedCrusoe’s story as a history – that is, as a structured narrative of particularevents, purporting to have taken place in the past, which imparted generallessons, practical, moral, or both. Charles Gildon, one of the earliest criticsof Robinson Crusoe, attacked the veracity of the story but Gildon had flirtedwith Deism and his objections probably had more to do with the book’scontent than its form;43 in other words, with the doctrinal implications ofDefoe’s portrayal of a providential world and the superiority of revealedover natural religion.44 Defoe responded in the Preface to the SeriousReflections by having Crusoe urge his critics to consider the three volumesas a unified whole and his story as a history:


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As the design of every Thing is said to be first in the Intention, and lastin the Execution; so I come now to acknowledge to my Reader, That the present Work is not merely the Product of the two first Volumes, but the two first Volumes may rather be called the Product of this: The Fable is always made for the Moral, not the Moral for the Fable … I Robinson Crusoe … do hereby declare, their Objection is an Inventionscandalous in Design, and false in Fact; and do affirm, that the Story,though Allegorical, is also Historical; and that it is the beautifulRepresentation of a Life of unexampled Misfortunes … sincerely adaptedto, and intended for the common Good of Mankind, and designed atfirst, as it is now farther apply’d, to the most serious Uses possible …Besides all this, here is the just and only good End of all Parable orAllegorick History brought to pass, viz., for moral and religiousImprovement.45

From its first design to its farthest application, then, Crusoe’s ‘AllegorickHistory’ was intended to perform ‘the most serious uses possible’ and in thewake of recent religious disputes, nothing was more serious to Defoe thanthe defence of orthodox Christianity. Two of the most important tenetsbeing challenged by heterodox writers were the divinity of Christ and thedoctrine of special providence which asserted God’s direct and continuingrole in human history. As Crusoe’s story illustrates, the central aim ofspecial providence was not to demonstrate God’s controlling powers over the physical universe but to urge mankind towards repentance andsalvation.46 God’s role in creating the world, governing it, and guidinghuman beings through it towards eternal salvation meant that the doc-trines of special providence and the divinity of Christ were inextricablylinked. In one of his clearest affirmations of a scriptural basis for the doc-trine of the Trinity, Defoe has Crusoe explain the connection betweenthem:

Listening to the Voice of Providence, is my Subject … I am writing to thosewho acknowledge the two grand Principles upon which all Religiondepends. 1. That there is a God, a first great moving Cause of all things,an eternal Power, Prior, and consequently Superior to all Power andBeing. 2. That this eternal Power, which I call God, is the Creator andGovernour of all things, viz., of Heaven and Earth.

To avoid needless Distinctions concerning which of the Persons in theGod-head, are exercised in the creating Power, and which in the govern-ing Power, I offer that glorious Text, Psalm xxxiii. 6, as a Repulse to allsuch cavilling Enquiries, where the whole Trinity is plainly entitled tothe whole creating Work, by the WORD (God the Son) of the LORD (Godthe Father) were the Heavens made, and all the Host of them, by theBREATH (God the Holy Ghost) of his Mouth.47

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Given Defoe’s belief in scriptural justification of the Trinity, he must havefound the Salters’ Hall dispute especially galling because, to his mind, itwas predicated upon a false distinction between belief in the Trinity andbelief in scriptural authority alone. In Defoe these beliefs were one and thesame.

The providential theme of the Crusoe story is undeniable and much hasbeen written about it, including its function as a riposte to Deists who hadquestioned God’s continuing intervention in the daily operations of hiscreation. As the above quotation shows, Defoe also wished to make it clearto Socinians and Arians that Christ was no junior partner in the providen-tial ordering of the universe. Four other aspects of the Crusoe trilogy furtherdemonstrate Defoe’s Trinitarian commitments. Like the providentialtheme, the first two – the conversion episodes and Crusoe’s association ofChristianity with civilization – have been widely commented upon but notwith respect to Defoe’s Trinitarianism. The last two – Crusoe’s physical andverbal attacks against idolatry and his lengthy diatribe against varieties ofblasphemy – make no sense outside the context of Defoe’s Trinitarianbeliefs and therefore have received little scholarly attention.

iv. Conversions: orthodoxy and redemption for Crusoe, Friday,Will and Mary

Crusoe’s own conversion, of course, provides the primary theme and struc-ture for the first volume.48 In highlighting the necessity of scripture forconversion, after several years in which we see Crusoe merely following hisinstincts and rationalizing his actions and beliefs, Defoe sought to drama-tize the supremacy of revealed over natural religion and refute claims madeby Deist writers that human beings, either intuitively or through the use ofreason, may achieve true spiritual knowledge. Restless and dissatisfied withhis lot in life, the nineteen-year-old Crusoe leaves home and quickly dis-covers the truth of the adage that worse things happen at sea. Deliverancefrom storms, enslavement, even shipwreck leads to only the most tempo-rary repentance and superficial appreciation of God’s mercy. After ninemonths on the island, however, a fevered dream induces a period of serioussoul-searching and a proper realization of both God’s omnipotence and hisown sinfulness. Through prayer, scripture reading, and a concoction of rumand tobacco, Crusoe begins to recover physically but the end of his spirit-ual crisis only occurs when a biblical passage leads him to embrace Christas his Saviour and thereby to understand the true depths of God’s mercy:‘I threw down the Book, and with my Heart as well as my Hands lifted upto Heaven, in a Kind of Extasy of Joy, I cry’d out aloud, Jesus, thou Son ofDavid, Jesus, thou exalted Prince and Saviour, give me Repentance!’ Onlythrough revelation does Crusoe redirect his focus from God the omni-potent Father to God the merciful Son, from asking, as the children of


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Israel did, for deliverance from the wilderness to begging for forgiveness, ashe finally realizes that ‘Deliverance from Sin [is] a much greater Blessing,that [sc. than] Deliverance from Affliction’.49 For the first time in his life he experiences true peace of mind and the island ceases to be his prison.50

Defoe deliberately reinforced the Christocentrality of Crusoe’s new-found faith and the doctrine of the Trinity by having Crusoe reiterate his desire for ‘Mercy … through Jesus Christ’ on his first anniversary on the island and express thanks for the offices of the Holy Spirit on hissecond:

I gave humble and hearty Thanks that God … could fully make up tome, the Deficiencies of my Solitary State, and the want of HumaneSociety by His Presence, and the Communications of his Grace to mySoul, supporting, comforting, and encouraging me to depend upon hisProvidence here, and hope for his Eternal Presence hereafter.51

Crusoe continues to suffer the occasional spiritual setback, notably uponhis discovery of the footprint and again in the Farther Adventures, but hisdays of spiritual bankruptcy are over.

Defoe also used Friday’s conversion as an opportunity to denouncenatural religion and defend Christian orthodoxy.52 Prompted by Crusoe’squestioning and instruction, Friday is only too happy to surrender hisnative beliefs in a deity named Benemuckee and his priestly caste of elderlycommunicants in order to worship an obviously much more powerful,inclusive, and benevolent Christian God. Crusoe reports that Friday‘receiv’d with Pleasure the Notion of Jesus Christ being sent to redeem us’, and listened to his explanations of the Devil’s battle with God forcontrol over human souls, but that at this point his evangelizing efforts hit a snag. Friday cannot understand why an omnipotent God does not kill the Devil to end his wickedness or, failing that scenario, why the Devil should not repent and be pardoned like everyone else. Crusoe’s frustrated response to Friday’s questions neatly encapsulates Defoe’s views on the limits of natural religion, the necessity of revelation, and thetripartite nature of God, as the Father or ‘supreme Being’, as the Son or‘Mediator of the new Covenant’, and as the Holy Ghost or ‘Guide andSanctifier’:

Here I was run down again by him to the last Degree, and it was aTestimony to me, how the meer Notions of Nature, though they willguide reasonable Creatures to the Knowledge of a God, and of a Worshipor Homage due to the supreme Being, of God as the Consequence of ourNature; yet nothing but divine Revelation can from [sc. form] theKnowledge of Jesus Christ, and of a Redemption purchas’d for us, of aMediator of the new Covenant, and of an Intercessor, at the Foot-stool

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of God’s Throne; I say, nothing but a Revelation from Heaven, can formthese in the Soul, and that therefore the Gospel of our Lord and SaviourJesus Christ; I mean, the Word of God, and the Spirit of God promis’d forthe Guide and Sanctifier of his People, are the absolutely necessaryInstructors of the Souls of Men, in the saving Knowledge of God, andthe Means of Salvation.

After praying to God to assist him in instructing Friday, Crusoe finds thewisdom to explain that because Christ had taken upon himself the natureof mankind but not the nature of angels, fallen angels like the Devil couldnot share in his redemption. Like Augustine, Crusoe’s prayers to God forguidance make him both a better teacher and a better Christian himself.Reflecting upon his role in helping Friday ‘know Christ Jesus’, Crusoebegins to see himself as God’s instrument. His soul is infused with ‘a secretJoy’, and from this moment on he ‘frequently rejoyc’d that ever I wasbrought to this Place, which I had so often thought the most dreadful of allAfflictions that could possibly have befallen me. In this thankful Frame Icontinu’d all the Remainder of my Time.’53 Although Crusoe apologizes forhis lack of theological expertise, Defoe makes him unerringly identifyTrinitarianism as the basis of soteriology and of an understanding of God’sprovidential care of the world.

Less well known but equally pointed as a defence of orthodoxy was theconversion episode of Will Atkins and his wife in the Farther Adventures ofRobinson Crusoe. Returning to his island, Crusoe lays the foundations for atolerant but decidedly Christian commonwealth with its growing numberof inhabitants. Atkins, one of the reprobate mutineers left on Crusoe’sisland at the end of the first volume, becomes the model penitent in thesecond. Fearing that his own wicked past has put him beyond redemption,Atkins must be convinced that no sins are beyond the reach of ‘Christ and the Merit of his Passion’. This deep sense of his own sinfulness, we are told, makes his repentance all the more genuine.54 Atkins then aids in the conversion of his native concubine who, like Friday, abandons her faith in Benemuckee to become a Christian. Crusoe is so moved by theconversions of Will and Mary Atkins that he makes a written record ofthem and describes the day of their marriage as ‘the most pleasant, agree-able Day to me that ever I passed in my whole Life’.55 Significantly, Mary’sbaptism and the Atkins’ conversions and Christian marriage are carried out by a French Catholic priest whose truly pious and tolerant natureinspires Crusoe to think that ‘if such a Temper was universal, we might be all Catholick Christians, whatever Church or particular Profes-sion we join’d to, or join’d in’.56 By 1719, Defoe, who was no friend of popery, was nevertheless finding atheism, heterodoxy, paganism, andidolatry more worrisome than Catholicism.57 Catholics were, at least,Trinitarians.


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v. Iconoclasm: Crusoe’s campaign against idolatry

It is true that the paganism of Friday and Will’s wife seems relativelybenign but the reader can infer that Benemuckee is both an amoral and adistant deity. In the first volume Defoe certainly utilized the trope of new-world cannibalism to invoke old-world revulsion at the native society thatworshipped him. In the second and third volumes, however, Crusoe’sabhorrence for idolatry becomes far more vitriolic and obsessive as herecounts and then reflects upon his voyages to Brazil, Madagascar, theMiddle and Far East, and his overland journey through China and Muscovybefore his eventual return to England. The rhetoric of idolatry was pervasive: it infused religious and political debate in the early eighteenthcentury. This rhetoric, it has been argued, was not only polemically useful,it was symptomatic of a deeper mentality of iconoclasm in which artistsand writers sought to revive or reshape various ideals from the hollow andbroken forms which littered their cultural landscape. In the Crusoe trilogy,idols of natural religion litter the globe and often assume the most heinousshapes.

Crusoe describes one idol he sees worshipped in Peking and Nanking as‘an incongruous Monster’ and a ‘mangled, promiscuous-gendered Cre-ature’. He views Confucian maxims as nothing but ‘a Rhapsody of MoralConclusions’ which fail to reach even the theological sophistication of thatfound in the Americas. Whereas the learning of the ancient Greeks andRomans at least led them to make heaven the seat of their gods and toworship celestial objects as ‘Representations of superiour Virtues’, Crusoesees the Chinese ‘groveling in the very Sink and Filth of Idolatry; their idolsare the most frightful monstrous Shapes, not the Form of any real Creature,much less the Images of Virtue, of Chastity, of Literature; but horrid Shapesof their Priests Invention’. The people of Japan too worship the ugliestmanmade objects, proving themselves to be ‘overwhelmed in an Idolatryrepugnant to Common-Sense, even to Nature’.58 Joining a caravan of Polishmerchants travelling from Peking to Moscow, Crusoe traverses the land ofthe Tartars ‘whose Idols are almost as hideous as the Chineses, and whoseReligion is all Nature; and not only so, but Nature under the greatestDegeneracy, and next to Brutal’. Again, he is struck by the fact that ‘noneof the People look Up for their Gods, but Down; by which it came into myMind, that even in Idolatry itself, the World was something degenerated,and their Reason was more hoodwink’d than their Ancestors’. At least theRomans, he reiterates, ‘look[ed] up among the Stars for their Idols’ andworshipped ‘like Men’, a far more rational idolatry to adopt when one is‘without the Helps of Revelation’. Disgusted, Crusoe instead finds himselfamong people who ‘look down among the Brutes, form Idols to themselvesout of the Beasts, and figure things like Monsters, to adore them for theirUgliness and horrible Deformity’.59 Contrary to Deistic assumptions about

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natural religion, Defoe was asserting that, at best, reason and nature mighthave led Confucian and Roman literati to construct a system of politicaland educational precepts or a pantheon of sky gods. At worst, reason andnature kept the vast majority of humanity in the grip of superstitious andoften degrading idolatries.

After years of travelling outside Christendom Crusoe is at first relieved toreach Muscovy, a land at least nominally ruled by Christians, and he isreminded how blessed he is to have been born in a country ‘where theName of God, and of a Redeemer is known, worship’d and ador’d’. Chris-tianity, however, is thin on the ground at the Czarist frontier. Discoveringa group of people sacrificing before a huge wooden idol, Crusoe bewails thesight of ‘God’s most glorious and best Creature … vested with a reasonableSoul … adapted both to honour his Maker, and be honoured by him, sunkand degenerated to a Degree so more than stupid, as to prostrate it self to afrightful Nothing’. Enraged, he blames the Devil for deluding these peas-ants ‘into such gross, surfeiting, sordid and brutish things, as one wouldthink should shock Nature it self’.60 Crusoe attacks the idol with his swordand then devises an elaborate plan to blow it up after capturing all the vil-lagers, an escapade which both delays and endangers the entire caravan.This lengthy and seemingly peculiar episode makes no sense in relation tothe usual priorities of Defoe scholarship and it seems to have escapedcomment altogether. However, read in the context of a cultural paradigmin which opponents were conceptualized as idolaters and the creativeprocess as one of breaking and remaking, and read in the context of thedebate over natural religion, Crusoe’s battle with the giant wooden idolmust be seen as a set piece in Defoe’s war against heterodoxy.61

As the caravan proceeds west, Crusoe hopes to find more evidence ofChristian civilization but is dismayed to discover ‘the same Tokens ofPaganism and Barbarity … Rudeness of Manners, Idolatry, and Multi-theism’. Instead of whole villages or regions worshipping one giant idol, hereports seeing ‘Idols in every Hutt and in every Cave’ and peasant under-standing of the natural world so limited that ‘almost every Element, everyuncommon thing, sets them a sacrificing’.62 Even at the edge of Europe,countryside ‘Houses and towns [are] full of Idols’ and the lives of thepeople ‘barbarous’ and ‘little better than the Savages of America’. Here thecities are full of Greek Orthodox Christians but Crusoe deems ‘theirReligion mingled with so many Reliques of Superstition’ that it is hard todistinguish it ‘from meer Sorcery and Witchcraft’.63 Russian OrthodoxChristians, he later reflects, may be ‘wonderfully devout’ but ‘our LordJesus Christ [is] made so much a meaner Figure among them thanSt. Nicholas, that I concluded Religion was swallow’d up of Superstition’.64

When Crusoe at last returns to England to begin the more retiring and reflective phase of his life, he recounts a conversation with an elderly gentlewoman about the ‘proper Business of old Age’. She begins the


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discussion by asking Crusoe what his travels around the world had taughthim about the principal business of mankind in general. Crusoe answersthat after fulfilling their basic needs, human beings busied themselves bypreying on each other, citing only the various forms of ‘Speech andIdolatry’ as the chief differences among them. When the gentlewomanexpresses her hope that surely religion was ‘the principal apparent End ofLife and the Employment of Mankind’, Crusoe admits that almost allnations acknowledged some sort of supreme power but ultimately he found‘much more Adoration than Supplication’ in the world.65

In the end, even nations blessed by the revealed word needed to be vigi-lant against new forms of idolatry which presented themselves as sophis-ticated concepts rather than crude wooden statues. Disturbed by theincreasing use of the concept of chance which threatened the providentialparadigm as an explanatory model of the universe, Defoe felt compelled todiscredit it.66 Attributing something to luck or chance, Crusoe argues, is likeattributing it to ‘an empty Idol of Air, or rather an imaginary nonsensicalNothing, an Image more inconsistent than those I mention’d among theChineses’. Chance was ‘a Name without being a miscall’d, unborn, nothing… that is to say, a Name put upon the Medium, which [people] set up intheir Imagination, for Want of a Will to acknowledge their Maker’.67

Whatever the ‘critical Annotators’ might argue, ‘Natural Religion’ might leadone to accept the providential creation and guidance of the physical worldbut only ‘reveal’d Religion proves … beyond Contradiction’ that ‘Providencemanifests a particular Care over, and Concern in the governing and directing [of]Man, the best and last created Creature on Earth’. Crusoe’s allegoric historywas predicated upon the need for human beings to accept the wisdom andsuperintendency of Providence, ‘observe its Motions, obey its Dictates, andlisten to its Voice’ for their own practical and spiritual benefit.68

vi. Christianity and the civilizing process

In addition to discrediting natural religion, Defoe used Crusoe’s encounterswith various peoples to establish a link between Christianity and the civil-izing process. As the examples above demonstrate, wherever idolatry domi-nates a society, Crusoe finds barbarism, rudeness, and an absence oflearning, technology, and commerce. One might expect Defoe to character-ize the nomadic peoples of Eurasia as primitive but he also took great painsin both the Farther Adventures and Serious Reflections to denigrate the com-mercial and technological achievements of the Chinese whose exports wereso sought after by eighteenth-century English men and women. Whateverpraise his countrymen had for ‘the Power, Riches, Glory, Magnificence, andTrade of the Chinese’, Crusoe had seen for himself that ‘they were a con-temptible Herd … of ignorant, sordid Slaves, subjected to a Governmentqualified only to rule such a People’.69 Boasting that ‘Our City of London

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has more Trade than all their mighty Empire’ and ‘A million of their Foot[soldiers] could not stand before one embattled Body of our Infantry’,Crusoe dismisses China’s buildings and cities, commerce and science asinferior to Europe’s.70 Even their prized porcelain, he claims, owes more tothe quality of their clay than their craftsmanship. Chinese technology maybe superior to that of other pagan nations, Crusoe admits, but only becausetheir ‘first Ideas of Mechanic Arts were probably receiv’d by them from thePersians, Assyrians, and the banish’d transplanted Israelites’.71 Just as he hadlinked Arab learning to a Noachic inheritance in the Continuation of Lettersof a Turkish Spy, Defoe asserted Chinese dependency upon Near Easternknowledge to defend the unitary scheme of human history found in scrip-ture against pluralist historical schemes proposed by many Deists.

Though the Chinese may have acquired technical knowledge, theyappear to have forsaken or failed altogether to adopt any form of NearEastern monotheism and this explained their cultural inferiority:

where-ever Christianity has been planted or profess’d nationally in theWorld, even where it has not had a Saving Influence, it has yet had aCivilizing Influence: It has operated upon the Manners, the Morals, thePolitics, and even the Tempers and Dispositions of the People: It hasreduc’d them to the Practice of Virtue, and to the true Methods ofLiving, has wean’d them from the Barbarous Customs they had beenused to, infusing a Kind of Humanity and Softness of Disposition intotheir very Natures; civilizing and softning them, teaching them to love aRegularity of Life, and filling them with Principles of generous Kindnessand Beneficence one to another; in a Word, it has taught them to livelike Men, and act upon the Foundations of Clemency, Humanity, Love,and and [sic] good Neighborhood, suitable to the Nature and Dignity ofGod’s Image, and to the Rules of Justice and Equity, which it instructsthem in.72

Admirers of classical antiquity might argue that the Greeks and Romans‘were fill’d with Notions of Virtue and Honour’ but Crusoe protests thatonly Christianity eradicated their barbarous and cruel customs and sports.73

Monotheism was a crucial step in the advance of any society and, needlessto say, Defoe believed that Christianity, especially orthodox Protestantism,ran far ahead of its competitor creeds in the civilizing stakes. Unlike the‘haughty, imperious, insolent’ Chinese or the ‘false, cruel, and treacherous’Japanese, whose main Christian contacts had been the Jesuits, Crusoe findsthe people of Formosa, for example, to be ‘very courteous and civil … [and]dealt very fairly and punctually with us’. He attributes their politeness tothe ‘Remains of Christianity, which was once planted here by a DutchMissionary of Protestants’.74 Catholic priests had achieved some success inthe New World, even on his own island, but ‘History and Experience’


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taught Crusoe that the development of a ‘meek [and] merciful Dispositionextends more among Protestants, than among the Papists’.75

That was not to say that Protestants and Catholics could not cooperatewith each other and ‘subdue the barbarous and idolatrous Nations of theWorld; in Order to suppress the[ir] Worshipping the Devil’. Whereas theuse of force against Christians for sectarian purposes was never justified,Crusoe accepts that the use of force to convert heathens constituted a‘lawful and just War’.76 He explains that while individual European nationswielded an extraordinary influence around the globe by virtue of theirmilitary and commercial powers, this had not translated into ‘the Gospelbe[ing] heard to the End of the Earth’. Such a day will come, Crusoebelieves, but the exaltation of Christ’s kingdom above all nations might be‘a little too apocalyptical, or visionary for the[se] Times’.77 In the mean-time, if the nations of Europe would put as much effort into spreadingChristianity as they did into projecting their commerce around the world,‘the savage Part of Mankind would in one Age, be brought to bow theirKnees to the God of Truth, and would bless the Enterprise … as the bestThing that ever befel them’. Imagine the good that would be achieved, hesuggests, if a European joint venture raised the necessary funds, fleets, footsoldiers, and missionaries ‘to conquer Heathenism and Idolatry’ andthereby enable the revealed word to reach millions of people.78

Converting and civilizing the rest of the world did not, however, trans-late into salvation at home and the Serious Reflections also includes Crusoe’simpressions of places which though blessed by the ‘clear Light of GospelRevelation’ were still bedevilled by superstition and enthusiasm. InPortugal, Italy, and the German principalities, people suffered under thecruelties of inquisition and the ‘Pomp and Glory’ of clerical and courtlyelites who feared religious reform because it threatened the power andluxury they enjoyed. Protestant communities had their problems too.Conversation with ‘a Quietist’ who professed that ‘all Religion was internal’leads Crusoe to quip that this man was ‘so wrapp’d up in his Internals’ thathis religion was nothing more than ‘Meditation without Worship, Doctrinewithout Practice, Reflection without Reformation, and Zeal withoutKnowledge’. Protestants in Poland had been so infected by Socinianismthat ‘our Lord Jesus Christ was reduc’d here to little more than a good Mansent from Heaven to instruct the World, and far from capable of effectingby the Influence of his Spirit, and Grace, the glorious Work of redeemingthe World’. Lutherans embraced ‘Popery and no Popery’. They supportedconsubstantiation rather than transubstantiation and their services are sofull of ‘Trumpets, Kettle-Drums, Fiddles, Hautboys, & all the merry Part ofthe Popish Devotion’ that superstition seems to exceed their piety. Crusoehears that many French Huguenots, fearing persecution, ‘go to Mass withProtestant Hearts’ in much the same vein as his occasional conforming co-religionists attended Anglican services. Thus ‘even where there are right

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Principles at Bottom, and where there is a Profession of the OrthodoxFaith’, religious practices seldom measured up.79

Crusoe realizes that the best religion was still to be found at home inEngland but piety and practice there too are far from perfect. In a masterfulvignette, Defoe has Crusoe attend the Te Deum in celebration of England’svictory at Ramillies, held at St Paul’s in December 1706.80 Crusoe is heart-ened to see the London crowds throng to the service but soon realizes thatnine-tenths of them ‘came there only to see the Queen, and the Show, andthe other tenth Part, I think, might be said to make the Show’. At first sightthe clergy are grave and impressive but in the intervals between their litur-gical duties, they seem more interested in ‘taking Snuff, adjusting theirPerukes, [and] looking about at the fair Ladies’ who also have more on theirminds than the solemnities of church and state. ‘The Star and Garter of afine young Nobleman’, Crusoe observes, ‘drew the Eyes of so many Womenoff of their Prayer Books’ that it would have been better if he had simplyleft the cathedral. After the service, ‘the Thanksgiving was adjourned fromthe Church to the Tavern … and instead of the Decency of religiousTriumph, there was indeed a Triumph of religious indecency, and theanthems Te Deum and Thanksgiving of the Day ended in Drunkenness, theBonefires, and the Squibs and Crackers of the Street’. Crusoe is left wonder-ing why his fellow English men and women, at such an important momentand in such a solemn space, should profanely jostle each other for a betterroyal view and ‘make the Queen an Idol’.81 Even with the blessing ofRevelation, it seems, human beings were too often drawn from supplica-tion to sanctimony and spectacle.

vii. Crusoe’s condemnation of heterodoxy

Whether one is inclined to regard the Crusoe trilogy as a fictionalizedhistory or as a multi-volume novel, this account of the Ramillies Te Deumillustrates Defoe’s genius for creating, or recreating, a telling scene but itwas not the only strategy he employed to convey his central message.While maintaining the Crusoe mask throughout the final volume, Defoewrote the Serious Reflections in the form of six essays on religious topicswith a concluding account of Crusoe’s visions of an angelic world. As previ-ous chapters of this study have shown, Defoe’s political and religiousworries often manifested themselves as anxiety about the corruption of lan-guage and the third essay of the Serious Reflections is another good example.Entitled ‘Immorality of Conversation and Vulgar Errors in Behavior’, theessay focuses almost solely upon blasphemy, especially the wickedness anddangers associated with sceptical views of the Trinity.

The essay begins with Crusoe’s observations on the trend towards inde-cent and blasphemous conversation in contemporary society. The problemof lewd language is briefly discussed but it is the growing fashion for


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heterodox opinions that Defoe was really seeking to condemn. When ‘thebeaux talk blasphemy’, Crusoe complains, ‘the rest will set up for atheists,and deny their Maker’. In an effort to appear equally witty and learned,‘tradesmen’ mimic their social superiors by questioning and doubtingthings beyond not only ‘their affected capacities’ but beyond the power ofhuman reason itself:

Hence come Heresies and Delusions. Men affecting to search into whatis impossible they should clearly discover, learn to doubt, because theycannot describe, and deny the Existence because they cannot explainthe Manner of what they enquire after; as if a thorow impossibility oftheir acting by their Sense upon Objects beyond its Reach, was anEvidence against their Being. Thus because the Trinity cannot appear totheir Reasoning, they oppose their Reasoning to its Reality; they willdivest the Son of God of his Divinity, and of the hypostatick Union ofthe Godhead in the Person of Christ, because they cannot distinguishbetween the Actions done by him in his Mediatorial Capacity, in Virtueof his Office, and those Actions, which he did in Virtue of his Omni-potence and Godhead.82

Just as little children tell ‘feigned Stories’ and then begin to believe them,men who banter about the fundamentals of religion begin to believe theirown blasphemous jests ‘till they by Custom learn to espouse and defendthem’. It would be one thing, Crusoe states, if our ‘Town Fopperies’ wereconfined to ‘little Excursions of Dress and Behaviour’ because one coulddismiss them with ‘pity or laugh[ter]’ but the problem of blasphemy was farmore serious:

when Wit is set on work, and Invention rack’d to find out Methods, howthey may be more than superlatively wicked, when all the Endowmentsof the Mind and Helps of Art, with the Accomplishments of Educationare rang’d in Battel against Heaven, and joyn’d in Confederacy to makeMankind more wicked, than ever the Devil had the Impudence to desireof them; This calls out aloud for the Help of all the Powers of Govern-ment, and all the Strength of Wit and Virtue to detect and expose it.83

Crusoe plays his part in exposing this wickedness by delineating thevarious strains of heterodoxy infecting the English body politic. At the topof his list was atheism, not because it was the most prevalent but because itwas the most pernicious. By refusing to acknowledge any superior power,atheists revealed a level of hubris and folly previously unimaginable. Fewgroups in human history, not even the Devil himself, failed to acknow-ledge ‘a first Cause of all Things’. Second on Crusoe’s list came the Deistswho ‘acknowledge a God, but he must be such a one as they please to make

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him; a fine well bred, good natur’d, Gentleman like Deity, that cannot havethe Heart to damn any of his Creatures to an Eternal Punishment, norcould not be so weak as to let the Jews crucify his own Son’. The Deistsaccepted the Bible as ‘a good History in most Parts, but the Story of ourSaviour they look upon as a meer Novel, and the Miracles of the NewTestament as a Legend of Priestcraft’. Lastly, Crusoe identifies ‘the Ariansand Socinians, the disciples of an ancient Heretick’ who disowned ‘theGodhead of Jesus Christ’. Defoe seems to have been especially annoyed bythe atheists’ and Deists’ use of ridicule, one of the favourite rhetorical toolsof eighteenth-century sceptics, because Crusoe repeatedly lashes out attheir ‘ridiculous shifts’, their constant ‘banter or foolish pun[s] upon reli-gion’, and the way they ‘expose religion, and all the doctrines of repen-tance, and faith in Christ … as a matter of banter and ridicule’.84

The problem of blasphemy – and by extension, heresy – was now sowidespread that it extended from ‘the Court to the Plough-tail’ and Crusoeurges the court and the gentry to set better examples for the rest of society.Realizing that arguments from ‘Scripture or Providence’ will not sufficebecause ‘I am supposed to be talking to Men that doubt or deny themboth’, he appeals instead to his readers’ pretensions to politeness and learn-ing.85 It was irrational to think that ‘a Man can’t be bright, unless he iswicked’.86 Vices and ‘vicious habits of Conversation’, Crusoe argues, dis-honour and can even destroy a man’s ‘Senses, Estate, and Reputation’.Language and behaviour ‘so Unnatural, so Unruly, so Ingenteel, so Foolishand Foppish’ could never be justified to either a man’s ‘own Reason, or theMemory of his Ancestors’.87 An active supporter of societies for the refor-mation of manners during the reigns of William III and Queen Anne, by1720 Defoe began at least to consider more forceful means of stiflingheterodox opinions. In the beginning of his essay, Crusoe states that ‘Lawsand Proclamations are weak and useless Things’ unless coupled with socialpressures because they failed to affect ‘those whom no Laws can reach’,echoing populist sentiments Defoe had expressed early in his writingcareer. Later in the essay, however, Crusoe doubts that any reform is possi-ble so long as ‘the debauching the religious Principles of the Nation, goeson with an unrestrain’d Liberty’. How could the government rationalizeputting people in the stocks for drunkenness or swearing while allowingthem to dispute and ridicule ‘the very Sum and Substance of the ChristianDoctrine’? It seemed insupportable that

If a Man talk against the Government, or speak scurrilously of the King,he is had to the Old Bayly, and from thence to the Pillory, or Whipping-Post, and ’tis fit it should be so: But he may speak Treason against theMajesty of Heaven, deny the Godhead of his Redeemer, and make a Jestof the Holy Ghost, and thus affront the Power we all adore, and yet passwith Impunity.88


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Crusoe condemns society for failing to ‘show our Resentment when wehear the Honour and Essence of God slighted and denied’,89 but the essayclearly shows Defoe’s increasing pessimism about the power of social pres-sure to contain heterodox opinion. If anything, fashion, aided by the pol-icies of the Whig regime of Stanhope and Sunderland, seemed to beencouraging religious scepticism.

Like many of his contemporaries, Defoe worried that his age was one ofgeneral moral decline.90 If left unchecked, he feared that the proliferationof heresy and vice would enervate the moral energies of each individualand endanger the very soul of the nation. Atheism, Deism, Arianism andSocinianism are, Crusoe states, citing Job, ‘Iniquities … to be punished by theJudges’. They were the cause of ‘the Ruin of the Nation’s Morals’ because‘no Method can be so direct to prepare People for all Sorts of Wickedness,as to perswade them out of a Belief of any supreme Power to restrain them;make a Man once cease to believe a God, and he has nothing left to limithis Appetite but meer Philosophy’.91

viii. Conclusion: ‘a religious Application’

Robinson Crusoe was the first of Defoe’s books among those clearly identi-fied to us as ‘novels’, and this poses particular problems in interpreting itscentral purposes. The apparent absence of earlier such works from Defoe’spen leads later scholars to assimilate Robinson Crusoe to what they hold tobe the genre – the novel – that the book seemingly did so much to found.At one extreme, one modern editor of this work was tempted to explain thewhole of Defoe’s life up to 1719 as ‘a preparation for writing the works ofimagination, produced in the last twelve years of his life, which gave himlasting fame’.92 In this view, his Nonconformist education at NewingtonGreen is reduced to a par with his commercial experience: both wereimportant for yielding the knowledge of mankind on which Defoe coulddraw in his novels. Indeed, as this editor explained, ‘Defoe’s views onreligion, tolerant and more or less rational, had an economic basis’.93 Formany such scholars, the point of Defoe’s religion for his fiction was at mostthe Puritan impetus it gave him to minute introspection about humanactions.

Yet to read Robinson Crusoe as a tale of nascent capitalism, as a sketch ofstadial development, or as an anticipation of the novel of sentiment andcharacter is to read it timelessly, taken out of its specific setting. In the late1710s Defoe was not chiefly concerned by the dynamism of economic life,the possibility of recreating it from first principles, or the privileged posi-tion of the emotions. As we have seen, Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe at atime when his overriding preoccupations were the threats posed to Trini-tarian religion. For Defoe, Crusoe’s survival of shipwreck and his success inestablishing himself as a farmer, manufacturer, and master were not com-

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placent economic allegories. The material circumstances of Crusoe’s lifemattered to the story because they were integral props and scenery in asacred drama that involved the redemption of Crusoe and Friday alike; theextension of this scenario for mankind from a desert island to the island ofBritain; and the extrapolation of it to provide a framework for humanhistory that Defoe explicitly and didactically applied to China, Muscovy,and continental Europe. The interpretation offered here, then, shows thepoint of Defoe’s own account of the purpose of the book in the Preface toRobinson Crusoe. Recent students, preoccupied with the nature of fictional-ity, notice Defoe’s implausible disclaimer: ‘The Editor [i.e. Defoe] believesthe thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance ofFiction in it.’ But this disclaimer was only to shield from scepticism themanifesto with which the author immediately preceded it:

The Story is told with Modesty, with Seriousness, and with a religiousApplication of Events to the Uses which wise Men always apply them(viz.) to the Instruction of others by this Example, and to justify andhonour the Wisdom of Providence in all the Variety of Circumstances,let them happen how they will.94


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7The Perils of Consumption and theDecline of Family Government

i. Introduction

In August 1719 Defoe published the second volume of his Crusoe trilogy,The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. As explained in the previouschapter, all three volumes must primarily be understood as part of Defoe’senergetic response to a series of challenges to orthodox Christianity butthey also reveal his views on a host of social and economic issues. Crusoe’sexperiences had led him to become a devout, even militant Christian, onewho fully embraced the providential power of God and the redemptivepowers of his Son. They had also made him rich enough to buy a farm onhis return to England and become a ‘meer country gentleman’, one finallycapable of appreciating that ‘middle station of life’ which his father hadrecommended all those years ago. Defoe thus began the Farther Adventuresby having to explain why, after thirty-five years of misadventure Crusoeshould want to leave the prosperous, happy, and settled life he had enjoyedfor the last seven years. ‘One blow from unforeseen Providence’, the deathof his wife, Crusoe grieved, had ‘unhing’d’ him. Without her steadyinginfluence, a restless passion for adventure once again compelled him to sea,but not before Defoe afforded his protagonist the opportunity for a littlesocial commentary:

I saw the World busy round me, one Part labouring for Bread, and theother Part squandring in vile Excesses or empty Pleasures, equally miser-able, because the End they propos’d still fled from them; for the Man ofPleasure every Day surfeited of his Vice, and heap’d up Work for Sorrowand Repentance; and the Man of Labour spent their [sic] Strength indaily Strugglings for Bread to maintain the vital Strength they labour’dwith, so living in a daily Circulation of Sorrow, living but to work, andworking but to live.1

These observations led Crusoe to remember and decide to revisit his otherisland kingdom – a place, he noted by contrast, in which human material

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needs were generously met but not exceeded, a place which had thus givenhim the time to contemplate the true meaning and purpose of life. Thisnarrative device accomplished several things: it reinforced the centraltheme of repentance and redemption, reminded readers of the positiveaspects of Crusoe’s life on the island, and gave Defoe the excuse to takehim back there. As a socio-economic snapshot of contemporary England, itcaptured the taxonomy of early Hanoverian moral debate: the turpitude ofthe luxury-loving haves, the plight of the labouring have-nots, and agrowing preoccupation with the have-some but want-mores.

During the roughly two-year period in which Defoe wrote and publishedthe Crusoe trilogy, the problems and failings of the poor, the rich, and theaspiring were thrown into high relief by two critical economic episodes.The South Sea Bubble has long been recognized by historians as ‘a definingmoment of early financial capitalism’ and by literary scholars as an eventwhich profoundly shaped both the form and content of literature in theearly Hanoverian period.2 A subject of more parliamentary debate in its daythan the South Sea crisis (if less scholarly attention today), however, wasthe controversy surrounding the importation of printed Indian calicoes andchintz. In 1719 silk and wool weavers in London and other cities rioted inthe streets and campaigned in the press for relief from this growing fashionand perceived threat to their livelihoods. If the South Sea crisis epitomizedthe problem of credit, the calico conflict highlighted questions about con-sumption. It was understood that both consumption and credit stimulatedcommerce but, associated as they were with emulation and avarice, theygenerated much anxiety and negative commentary. Parliament respondedto both the South Sea and calico crises with protective legislation whichdid something to satisfy particular interest groups but nothing to quellgrowing fears that political corruption as well as the forces of consumptionand credit were damaging the nation’s moral and social fabric.

In his earliest and most journalistic responses to the South Sea and calicocontroversies, Defoe examined the problems of consumption and credit inmuch the same way that other moralists of the period did. Condemninggreedy stock-jobbers, fashion-conscious women, and others for their selfishand irresponsible behaviour in the marketplace, he identified avarice, emu-lation, social mobility, political corruption, and the growth of heterodoxopinions as hallmarks of the age. Defoe, however, moved beyond moraloutrage as a thinker and beyond the confines of the pamphlet and period-ical as a writer. Experimenting with various generic forms, he began toexamine social institutions such as domestic servitude, marriage, thehousehold economy, and gentility to see how new sources of commercialwealth and the ever-expanding nexus of cash and credit had influencedattitudes and behaviours in England during his lifetime. His two mostfamous female protagonists, Moll Flanders and Roxana, may be said toembody the economic and moral issues raised in these debates.3

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South Sea Company speculation and East India Company importationsrepresented two of the last controversies in which Defoe would immersehimself in the quotidian world of journalism and reflect these polemics inthe creation of full-length fictions. He continued to write the occasionalpamphlet on a variety of matters in the 1720s but increasingly concen-trated his efforts within other genres which gave him more scope forhistorical reflection. Perhaps the daily grind of grub-street was less enticingto a man in his sixties whose writing had finally given him some financialsuccess. It is possible that Defoe was encouraged by changes in the publish-ing industry and by a growing market of readers to produce longer works.4

One could also argue that the consolidation of Whig power during thisdecade allowed Defoe to turn his attention away from party conflicts andpolitical change towards socio-economic conflicts and structural change.What is certain is that these two economic controversies helped to stimu-late in Defoe an increasingly sophisticated analysis of the role of commercein his own society and throughout the wider world. He chose to addressboth the positive and negative aspects of commercial culture through thewriting of conduct manuals, Baconian histories of trade, and book-lengthessays examining the history of religion and what we might call the super-natural realm.5 Within these various genres, Defoe operated within severalchronological frameworks which led him to grasp even more fully thatlong-term socio-economic forces were at work in the world and thathuman values and political arrangements were not impervious to them.Commerce had made England strong as a nation but it had also made itspeople more inclined to neglect their duties towards family, nation, andGod. This did not shake Defoe’s belief that trade was part of God’s provi-dential design. It did, however, cause him to think about when and whymen and women had become more susceptible to corrupting vices andopinions.

Defoe’s initial interventions in the South Sea and calico debates revealsome interesting similarities. In response to each of these controversies, hewrote three substantial pamphlets and launched a new periodical betweenthe years 1719 and 1721.6 In their castigation of the pernicious relationshipbetween stock-jobbing and parliamentary politics and in their attacks onthe gentry for their failure to act as moral exemplars, these works echo,sometimes verbatim, Defoe’s contributions to the 1701 ‘paper war’ and thecampaign for the reformation of manners during William’s reign.7 Thenand now, be they projectors, brokers, jobbers, company directors, or politi-cians, Defoe criticized anyone promoting shares in schemes that were, atbest, unrealistic and, at worst, fraudulent. Then and now he railed againstvice and the sins of avarice and pride. What seems to have changed in theintervening period was Defoe’s willingness to entertain the idea that thegrowth of sin and vice were not just the function of man’s fallen nature butwere partially the consequence of the growth of commerce and the progres-

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sive availability of luxury at every level of the social hierarchy. Throughconsumption men and women could pretend or aspire to be what theywere not, thus blurring social boundaries which had seemed more rigidonly two decades before. Consumption was creating illusions of substancein the social realm just as credit was creating them in the financial realm.

ii. The Calico and South Sea crises: Defoe’s journalistic response

In defending the wool and silk weavers’ cause against the importation ofEast India Company calicoes, Defoe voiced some of his own conservativeeconomic attitudes. His first foray into the debate in August 1719, The JustComplaint of the Poor Weavers, was a response to a pamphlet, The Weavers’Pretences Examined, which championed free-market theories and the abilityof the marketplace to support a range of goods at a range of prices.8

Its author asserted the right of companies to import goods and exportspecie, attacked the government for enacting prohibitive duties in efforts toprotect domestic manufacturers and support the public debt, and blamedthe weavers for selling more apprenticeships than their trade couldsupport. Although Defoe condemned the mobbish behaviour of the riotingweavers, he argued that their cause was just because the nation had a dutyto support those home industries which consumed more domestic rawmaterial, employed more people, and exported manufactured goods eitherfor specie or for those goods which could not be obtained at home. It wasperfectly appropriate, he argued, for the state to attempt to regulate com-merce which enriched East India Company shareholders at the expense ofEnglish workers. He also pointed to the success of measures enacted in1701 against calicoes and to other consumption laws against French wineand brandy.9 It was vital that Britain defend not just the Spitalfieldsweavers but ‘all the Manufacturers of Wool and Silk in the Kingdom uponwhose Trade not only some Millions of People depend, but in whoseProsperity in short all the Nation is concern’d’.10

The Just Complaint’s mercantilist arguments are perhaps less interestingthan the moral and social comments interspersed between them for theseobservations were the ones which would stimulate Defoe’s historicalthinking about commerce. Defoe reasoned that quality and price alonewere not wholly responsible for the calico craze. He blamed ‘the Folly ofour Women’ for creating a ‘Trade-Plague among us’, causing ‘the Home-Consumption of our own Manufactures [to] languish and decay in such amanner, as bids fair to starve our Poor, and put the whole Woollen Trade ofthis Nation … into the utmost Confusion’.11 Although they could affordthe finest silk damasks and wool broadcloths, ladies of quality were choos-ing to wear imported chintz and painted calicoes and this encouragedservant girls to do the same. If the better sorts of children in boardingschools were all wearing calicoes then the meaner children in the streets


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followed suit. It was therefore critical that gentlewomen set the rightexample by wearing English cloth ‘for as there is an invincible Pride in theordinary People, of being counted what they are not, they are almost ledinto all their Fashions in Imitation of the Gentry’.12 Both Moll Flanders(1722) and Roxana (1724) often used clothing to feign levels of solvencyand status they did not possess. Whether it was true or not that it hadbecome ‘a hard Matter to know the Mistress from the Maid by their Dress’,as Defoe would assert in a pamphlet of 1725 on servants, calicoes repre-sented a social and moral as well as an economic threat.13 They obscuredsocial markers and boundaries by enabling servant women especially todress and therefore potentially to act above their station.

Defoe was not against all social mobility and much of his writing in the1720s attempted to distinguish between reckless social emulation and well-deserved advance in rank. In A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain,for example, he described the Somerset region’s ‘truly noble Manufacture’of broadcloth which employed many poor people and raised numerousmanufacturing families into the ranks of the gentry. By creating ‘a vastMagazine of Wool for the rest of the Nation’, employing ‘Multitudes’ in thestocking-weaving industry, he exclaimed, Leicestershire’s ‘Grasiers are sorich, that they grow Gentlemen’.14 Because these clothiers and sheepfarmers had risen through their own industry and encouraged the industryof others, their success was to be celebrated. Although the manufacture ofwool cloth had been central to Britain’s economic growth in the early-modern period, by the eighteenth century its dominance was on the wane.Defoe nevertheless retained an anachronistic reverence for the Englishwool industry, and as we shall see in Chapter 8, it was central to Defoe’sanalysis of England’s transformation from a feudal to a commercial society.

In all his works Defoe praised both the communal and industrious natureof those who engaged in woollen manufactures. It provided work for men,their wives, children, and neighbours and so he was especially incensedwhen the anonymous author of The Weavers’ Pretences Examin’d challengedthis image of a wholesome household economy. The ‘grand Cause of theWeavers wanting Work’, that pamphlet asserted, was not competition fromEast India Company goods but ‘Covetousness of both Masters and Journey-men’ for lucrative apprentice fees and the ‘easier Work, and greater Wages’which London offered vis-à-vis the rest of the country. Moreover, duringtheir seasonal flush of work in the spring, weavers spent as much time in‘Ale-houses, drinking and gaming away their Money’ leaving their familiesin need when business ebbed.15 Defoe condemned all of these charges asfalse. Devoting some attention to the weavers’ practices regarding employ-ment, he explained that if a master weaver took on any apprentices orjourneymen at all, it was a ‘Son or near Relation’ involved in the tradesince boyhood and paying little or no fee.16 Six years later, Defoe wouldexamine the relationship between tradesmen, rather than manufacturers,

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and their apprentices, concluding that ever-increasing apprentice fees haddamaged the moral economy of the household.17

One last aspect of the debate over the importation of East IndiaCompany calicoes deserves attention and it too contributed to Defoe’shistoricization of commercial society. The author of The Weavers’ PretencesExamin’d began his pamphlet with a brief tribute to Britain’s happy geo-graphic and climatic situation and to the ‘Liberty and Property that we sojustly boast of’ which he defined as ‘the liberty of eating and drinking, orwearing what we please, and thinking or believing what we please’.18 Thiswas an unconventional definition to say the least and it raised Defoe’s sus-picions. It was clear to Defoe that his adversary in print was not only a ‘trueLibertine’ but ‘a Free-Thinker too’ for why else would he comment about‘thinking or believing what we please’ in a ‘Dispute about Weavers wantingWork, Women wearing Callicoes, and the Like’?19 It is unclear whetherDefoe knew the precise identity of the author but he concluded by sayinghis own tract was directed less towards the author than towards the‘worthy Persons that employ’d him, who are better known than he is; and … seem to join with his Scandals’.20 Defoe may indeed have knownwho the author was, since the publisher of this pamphlet, John Roberts ofWarwick Lane, published Defoe also. Defoe cannot have been unaware thatRoberts published a gallery of the leading Deist, Arian and Socinianauthors, including John Asgill, Thomas Chubb, Thomas Gordon, ThomasMorgan, Matthew Tindal, John Toland, John Trenchard, William Whiston,and Thomas Woolston.21 Appropriately, the anonymous author of A FurtherExamination of the Weavers’ Pretences (also published by Roberts) accusedDefoe of using the labels ‘Libertine and Free-thinker’ to ‘prejudice hisReaders against me’ and ‘swell … his Pamphlet to a Sixpenny Bulk’. In anattempt to clarify his position, the author stated his ‘Meaning was nothingelse than the Liberty that every man has, or ought to have, of enjoying hisown Opinion, in speculative Matters in General’, and blamed Defoe forattaching a religious meaning to this claim.22 This was hardly a disavowalof Defoe’s charge and perhaps a tacit admission of its accuracy.

Defoe had no doubts about the heterodoxy of his next opponent in printwhen his second pamphlet in defence of the weavers, A Brief State of theQuestion, between the Printed and Painted Callicoes, was answered by thenotorious John Asgill, expelled from both the Irish and English Houses ofCommons for financial misconduct and for his blasphemous beliefs whichDefoe had condemned in 1704.23 In a fifteen-page appendix to the thirdedition of his A Brief State of the Question, Defoe dismissed as ‘trifling andunfair’ the arguments of ‘Mr. Asgill, a Pen’ he sneered, ‘so often employ’din sublimer Matters’.24 Defoe never had positive views of the East IndiaCompany and certainly realized the propaganda value of discrediting itssupporters as heretical libertines. More importantly, though, he tookAsgill’s participation in the debate and the position taken in The Weavers’


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Pretences Examined that people should eat, drink, wear, and believe whatthey please as instances of a comprehensive and growing challenge to theidea that moral rectitude should restrain individual liberty.

The freedom of believing what one liked was acted out by society to analarming extreme over the next few months of 1719–20 when men andwomen, through their own credulity and avarice, and encouraged by thedeceit of others, deluded themselves into thinking that rapidly inflatingshares of South Sea stock were really a solid investment. Defoe understoodthat systems of both private and public credit were essential to the prosper-ity of individuals and the nation at large and, on the whole, the Englisheconomy benefited enormously from them. When these systems workedproperly, Defoe grounded his explanations of them in experience. He cele-brated, for example, the way in which credit facilitated the prodigiousvolume of trade at the annual Sturbridge fair. Here, he observed in the firstvolume of the Tour, chapman, retailers, and wholesalers, ‘transact theirBusiness wholly in their Pocket-Books’, receive payments and take orders‘chiefly in Bills … exceed[ing] by far the Sales of Goods actually brought tothe Fair’. When credit systems succumbed to periodic crises, as they wereprone to do in the eighteenth century,25 he explained their malfunction interms of fiction and fantasy, as he did in the speculative frenzy of 1719–20.

For Defoe, the major problem with credit lay in the commodification ofmoney and shares themselves. In his Complete English Tradesman of 1725,Defoe admitted that ‘the force of credit is not to be describ’d by words’.26

Of course this never stopped him from trying to do so and it was essentialthat his target audience for this work, the young tradesman, understandthat credit was ‘next to real stock … the foundation, the life and soul ofbusiness’, a ‘tradesman’s blessing’ and ‘choicest jewel’, and ‘an impregnablefortification, either for a nation, or for a single man in business’.27 It was,however, next to real stock, not real stock itself. Credit could act as both aconduit for or stimulus to real commerce but it could not replace it. Defoe’svain hope that paper credit remain a medium of exchange rather than oneof speculation was also reflected in the contrasting investment styles ofRoxana and her virtuous husband, the Dutch merchant. By castingSir Robert Clayton, the radical Whig politician and Restoration wheeler-dealer as her financial adviser, Defoe condemned Roxana, not only formaking her fortune through prostitution but also for seeking to augmenther ill-gotten gains through avaricious investing. Clayton had also been afriend of John Toland’s and was a reputed freemason.28 In contrast, thescene in which Roxana and her virtuous husband review their assetsemphasized the fact that his stocks and bills of exchange were kept withjewels and gold in lock boxes which took some effort to retrieve from agoldsmith’s office.29 They were certificates to be stored, paying respectabledividends as they matured, creating wealth through the quiet magic ofcompound interest. They were not speculative slips of paper kept close at

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hand to be discounted, puffed, or jobbed in frequent and feveredexchanges in hopes of ever higher rates of return.30

If the marketing of shares seemed to overshadow the purpose of theshares themselves as accurate representations of profits based on real tradeor tax revenues which were already extant or reasonable to expect, thenDefoe became uneasy. Regular dividends were fine but if shares were grosslyinflated or deflated, then he lashed out, accusing investors of avarice andjobbers and brokers of tampering, not just with the economy, but with thepolitical and social order as well. When the South Sea Company was firstproposed in 1711 as a Tory alternative to the Whig-dominated Bank ofEngland, Defoe had proposed that part of the funds it generated be investedin real trading and colonizing initiatives in South America. Instead theCompany became a corrupt, speculative venture which enriched an innercircle of the few and the lucky at the expense and ruin of many naiveinvestors. In the summer of 1719, a full year before South Sea stock maniareached its height, Defoe published, anonymously, The Anatomy of ExchangeAlley, his most comprehensive attack on stock-jobbing. The trade itself was a‘compleat System of Knavery … founded in Fraud, born of Deceit, andnourished by Trick, Cheat, Wheedle, Forgeries, Falshoods, and all sorts ofDelusions’. Its leading practitioners may have been ‘Friends to the Govern-ment’ and ‘hearty Whigs’ but Defoe did not shrink from calling them‘hearty Knaves’ who stopped at nothing in their ‘vehement Pursuit of …Profits’.31 He also denounced three wealthy financiers who had been instru-mental in orchestrating the South Sea scheme as the ‘true Triumverate ofmodern Thieving’, each of them ‘resolving to be rich at the Price of every Manthey can bubble’. Exchange Alley itself, that tiny parcel of the City easilyencompassed in a ‘Minute and a half’[s] walk, ‘throngs with Jews, Jobbers,and Brokers, their Names are needless, their Characters dirty as theirEmployment’.32 Their tactics included ‘Coining false News, this way good,that way bad; whispering imaginary Terrors, Frights, Hopes, Expectations,and then preying upon the Weakness of those, whose Imaginations theyhave wrought upon’.33 Defoe even recommended his readers not to paybrokers who had led them by deception into disadvantageous transactions,‘and as the Devil’s Broker, Whiston, said to Parson Giffard, tell them you areall of a Trade’.34 Even in Exchange Alley, Defoe could not forget the threatto religion posed by William Whiston and the freethinking tradition that hepersonified.35

Defoe had condemned this same game as it unfolded in France underJohn Law’s Mississippi Company which assumed public debt and thenfalsely promised real colonial investment financed by hyper-inflationaryand ultimately worthless shares. It was in fact the Mississippi and not theSouth Sea Company which stimulated Defoe’s most vivid indictment of theillusion of substance upon which so many projects and schemes seemed tobe based. In a pamphlet of 1719 entitled The Chimera, Defoe predicted that


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Law’s scheme would end in a spectacular collapse ‘since there is noFoundation equal to the Structure that now stands upon it’. With Law’sguidance, the French government had, at least temporarily,

rais’d an inconceivable Species of meer Air and Shadow, realizing theFancies and Imaginations, Visions and Apparitions, and making themeer Speculation of Things, act all the Parts, and perform all the Officesof the Things themselves; and thus in [a] moment their Debts are allvanish’d the Substance is answer’d by the Shadow; and the People ofFrance are made the Instruments of putting the Cheat upon themselves,the name of the thing is made an Equivalent to the Thing it self.

Early investors who had to be repaid in order to boost public confidence inthe scheme and bubble the price of the stock scarcely believed the reality oftheir returns. Defoe claimed that one such investor, anxious to safeguardhis windfall, procured

an Iron Chest … and put the Money into it, then drove Posts into theGround in his Cellar, and chain’d the Iron Chest down to the Stakes,then chain’d it also to the Wall, and Barricaded the Doors and Windowof the Cellar with Iron, and all for fear, not of Thieves to Steal theMoney, but for fear the Money, Chest and all should fly away into theAir; For he said he could never believe it was Money.36

The most disturbing aspect of France’s financial experiments for Defoewas the fact that they seemed to nullify ‘the Great and perhaps the onlyAdvantage that England had over them in the War’, namely a viable systemof public credit. Because Louis XIV had ‘the property of every Man …intirely at his Dispose’ and could cancel debts at will, he had been unsuc-cessful in wooing ‘this Coy Mistress, call’d Credit’, and thus, ‘ArbitraryGovernment … destroyed the very Reason and Nature of Public Credit’.Conversely, the British government had always paid its creditors, provingthat the ‘Limited Power of Great Britains Crown, [with] the Strings of thePurse being in the hands of Parliament … has been the Reason andFoundation of such an immense, boundless Credit’. Law’s scheme, how-ever, had been so ingenious that ‘for once in the World, Tyranny has thewhip hand of Liberty’, at least temporarily. Defoe assured his readers thatno such scheme could work in Britain unless Parliament decided to ‘takeinto their hands the same Absolute Power which it is their business toRestrain … and injure … the People whom they Represent’.37

It was little wonder then that Defoe should be so exercised about theincestuous relationship between Westminster politicians and ExchangeAlley financiers. It was now quite common, he reported, to see statesmen‘at the Offices in the Morning, at the P[arliament] House about Noon, at

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the Cabinet at Night, and at Exchange-Alley’ at all the intervals in between,warning his readers that ‘when Statesmen turn Jobbers the State [itself] maybe Jobb’d’. A decade before, Defoe had relied on the vigilance of Parliamentand Queen Anne to keep the Whigs from using their control of the Bank ofEngland to advance their party’s interests; a decade before that, he hadwarned freeholders about the corrupting influence of the rivalry of the twoEast India Companies on the election of 1701. Now, however, stock-jobbershad a ‘new acquir’d Capacity of intermeddling with the Publick’, onewhich might threaten not just the party in power but the nation itself, asthe Whigs especially had repeatedly proved willing to exploit any oppor-tunity for profiteering, including threats of either a Jacobite or Spanishinvasion, by running up or down shares in public credit for their ownprivate advantage. ‘Stock-jobbing, as it is now practis’d’, he concluded,‘is neither less or more than High-Treason in its very Nature, and in itsConsequences.’38

Although The Anatomy of Exchange Alley presented political corruption asthe greatest danger posed by the stock market, it also called attention to itscorrupting effects on the social hierarchy. Warning the middling ranksagainst the stock-jobber’s snare, Defoe suggested ‘when a forward youngTradesman steps out of his Shop into Exchange-Alley, I say ’tis ten Thousandto one but he is undone’ but even more advice was offered to young menof higher rank. The pamphlet included a cautionary tale about a younggentleman enticed by a jobber into buying South Sea stock at a vastlyinflated price which ended with the jobber getting the estate, the brokertwo or three hundred guineas, while ‘the Esquire remains at Leisure to sellhis Coach and Horses, his fine Seat and rich Furniture’, unable even then todischarge his debts completely.39 Five years later, the effects of the SouthSea Bubble on the social fabric were clearly visible in Defoe’s Tour. Thescandal had touched, and in some cases bankrupted, ‘many, if not most ofthe Great and Flourishing Families in England’ and ruined ‘innumerableWealthy City Families’ as well. Having ‘once bewitched the Nation almostto its Ruin’, the stock-jobbing trade had recently diminished but it was ‘stilla Negotiation, which is so vast in its Extent, that almost all the Men ofSubstance in England are more or less concerned in it’. The increasingimportance of the stock market to family fortunes and the ‘Knavery ofBrokers and others’, Defoe argued, obliged the nobility and gentry to spendmost if not all of the year in London, swelling the metropolis and itsnearby villages and towns to monstrous proportions. He predicted, wronglyof course, that eventually peace would reduce the national debt and thevolume of trade in stocks, allowing the nobility and gentry to ‘return againto their Country Seats’ and ‘this overgrown City’ to resume more naturalproportions.40

As the introduction to this chapter has suggested, by the time Defoe hadpublished the first volume of his Tour in 1724, he was moving away from


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committing himself to frequent pamphlets, periodicals, and full-lengthfictions, gravitating instead towards genres which allowed greater scope forhistorical analysis. Such a distinction is hard to draw given the fluid natureof generic categories in this period – recent scholarship’s reclassification ofDefoe’s novels as histories is just one example of this difficulty.41 To illumi-nate the ways in which Defoe’s views about commercial society developedin the wake of the calico and South Seas crises, we may analyse the workswritten in the last years of his life in terms of a steadily expanding histor-ical framework of decades, centuries, and millennia. This categorizationwas not present in Defoe’s mind at the outset of the 1720s and it is wrongto think of the various chronological schemes he worked within as a set ofRussian dolls or as a premeditated move from journalism to universalhistory. However, as the implications of an increasingly commercial societybecame clearer to him, Defoe sought to anchor his views about both thepositive and negative aspects of commerce within the wider contexts ofEuropean and world history. Before examining his contributions to thesehistoriographies, it seems best to start with Defoe’s comments about con-sumption, credit, exchange, and the effects he believed they had on impor-tant social institutions within his own lifetime.

iii. Commerce and the decline of family government: Defoe’shistorical analysis

Given the overall positive tone of many of Defoe’s well-known works of the1720s – the celebration of Britain’s greatness in the Tour, the Baconian opti-mism of A General History of Discoveries and Improvements, the happyendings of Moll Flanders and Colonel Jacque – it is important to recognizethat most of his writings in this period reveal a man frequently despairingover the depravity of his age. They betray an endemic use of the phrases‘this age’ and ‘these times’ which he routinely described as extravagant,luxury-loving, vicious to the point of having ‘engrossed the vices of all pre-vious ages’ and irreligious to the point of outsinning the Devil himself.42

This begs the question as to what time frame Defoe meant by ‘this age’ andalthough he was often vague on this point, his most specific remarkssuggest he meant roughly the previous half-century, beginning a few yearsafter the Restoration. Contemporaries often blamed the debauched court ofCharles II for setting the nation a bad example and it is no accident thatDefoe situated Roxana in that context. He made this argument himselfearlier in his career, but by the 1720s he had developed altogether moresophisticated reasons for England’s moral decline.43 While Defoe continuedto believe that God had designed the world for trade and in Britain’s iden-tity as a trading nation, the growth of commerce had presented a funda-mental challenge to some of society’s basic structures as the effects ofgreater national wealth percolated down the social hierarchy. As will be dis-

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cussed in the next chapter, Defoe had much to say about the role of com-merce in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries andindeed over the course of human history but he believed that one of themost important changes wrought by commercial expansion had been thedecline of ‘family government’ within his own lifetime.

By ‘family government’ Defoe meant the household economy of anextended family in which the male head of the house or master, supportedby his wife, assumed the responsibility for both the material and moral careof their children, servants, and any apprentices or journeymen under hiscare. This understanding of the ‘family’ as including all resident under oneroof, including servants and living-in labourers, was conventional at thetime Defoe wrote.44 Equally accepted was collective family religious practiceas a locus for evangelical piety from the early seventeenth century to thelate eighteenth.45 Although proper relations between masters and theirdependants was an important theme in contemporary moral literature,Defoe was one of the first authors working within the traditional genre ofthe religious advice manual who, while exhorting his readers to preservethe moral economy of family government, was beginning to analyse itsdecline from a socio-economic perspective. In 1715 Defoe published thefirst of three volumes of The Family Instructor, each of them a series of dia-logues designed to highlight the importance of religious instruction in thehome. Initially written as a response to the Schism Act of 1714 which out-lawed Dissenting schools, Defoe also found the format useful for outliningthe basic tenets of faith, repentance, and Trinitarian theology in the face ofgrowing heterodoxy. Mined by social and economic historians for the inti-mate if fictionalized picture they present of the early-modern family,46 theyhave perhaps been less appreciated for the insights they provide intoDefoe’s own developing sense of historical enquiry.

Defoe introduced his first volume of The Family Instructor with the verdictthat he and his readers lived in age which knew its duties but failed to prac-tise them. One dialogue, however, between the father of an apprentice andhis decent but religiously inattentive master, suggested that perhaps theseduties were no longer so well understood. In response to the father’sreproof that when ‘I put him Apprentice to you, I committed him to yourGovernment entirely, Soul and Body’ and that he expected his son toreceive moral as well as professional training, the tradesman replied, ‘Thosethings are out of Doors long ago; prithee do you think I’ll trouble myself withmy Apprentices at that rate? … Apprentices now-a-days, are not like whatthey were when you and I were Apprentices; now we get a hundred Pound,or two or three hundred Pound a piece with them; they are too high forReproof and Correction.’ Custom, the father argued, may have made suchallowances but ‘I am sure the Rule is not alter’d’ and he warned his son’smaster that he would have to ‘answer to God for the Souls committed toyour Charge’.47 Eventually, guided by the example of a truly religious


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neighbouring tradesmen and by his wife who provided him with supportand scriptural evidence of the duties of the heads of households, the negli-gent master instituted family worship and religious instruction for both hischildren and servants and thus became a model example for his town.

By 1718, with George I on the throne and the Whigs in power, theDissenters had fair hopes for the repeal of the Schism Act but Defoe seemsto have regarded the decline of family government as a matter in evengreater need of public attention. In the Preface to his second FamilyInstructor he remarked that ‘it must be own’d by all … that as on the onehand there are great Mistakes committed in the Government of themselvesand their Families, by Parents and Masters, so there is perhaps less saidupon these necessary Heads in publick than upon any other; even the bestWriters … have seemed to be wholly silent upon this Subject’.48 Like thefirst volume, the second schooled its readers on the importance of estab-lishing good family government and the difficulties for both spouses, chil-dren, and servants when this was not done from the outset. The firstvolume emphasized the difficulties experienced by older children who hadbeen ‘bred up with Gayety and Gallantry’ and were used to greater degreesof liberty and luxury, when religious practices were introduced into thehousehold.49 The second volume made the same point about parents them-selves who, having begun their married life in the gay, luxurious, and irreli-gious home of a relative, failed to institute good family government oncethey moved into their own house and thus condemned themselves to livesof quarrel and recrimination.

In his Religious Courtship of 1722, another advice manual on the impor-tance of choosing spouses who are both devout and compatible in their reli-gious beliefs, Defoe added an appendix recommending that families seek orencourage these same qualities in their servants. Servants, he explained,were ‘less apt to submit to Family Regulations, and good HouseholdGovernment than ever’.50 In one dialogue between two maids, one devoutand the other not, the latter complained of her employer’s enquiries abouther absence from church: ‘I won’t be tied up to her religious Trumpery, notI; if I do her Work, what has she to do with what Religion I am of, orwhether I have any Religion, or no? ’tis no Business of hers.’ She especiallyresented seeing young ladies of the house ‘all asleep at Prayers many a time,when I am sure they had not so much more need to be sleepy than I hadthat work hard, nor so much neither’.51 Eventually, the complaining maidwas dismissed, with the mistress of the house admitting that it was hard tomaintain a religious household when ‘Religion is so much made a Jestamong Masters’.52 Families could not expect religious servants unless theyset a proper example themselves. There is no doubt that Defoe’s primarymotivations for writing these advice manuals were religious ones but thecomments they contain about the lure of frivolity and luxury and about thechanging expectations of masters, apprentices, and servants would become a

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more developed analysis of excessive consumption, social emulation, andthe monetization of relations within the traditional family economy in hisComplete English Tradesman published in 1725.

There has been in recent years some debate as to how one should ‘read’Defoe’s Complete English Tradesman: whether and how it might be cat-egorized in terms of genre, and what, if any, relevance it may have to themeaning and production of fictional literature.53 In terms of genre, onewould certainly not label the text a history and yet it is a valuable indicatorof the emergence of a new kind of historical thinking in the eighteenthcentury. Whatever other meanings and didactic merit the text may havehad, it was the product of a thinker who was deciding there was such athing as social and economic history and it was read by contemporariescoming to the same conclusion. Defoe’s prefatory remark that this age waswitnessing ‘something different and more dangerous and fatal in thecommon road of trading, and Tradesmen’s management now, than everwas before’ was no mere device to promote sales of his book, but an histor-ical assessment. As he explained, if tradesmen and their families werefailing at a greater rate than ever before while the opportunities for com-mercial success were never more promising, then ‘Something extraordinarymust be the case’. That something, he concluded, was to be found in the‘temper of the times’ which made it impossible for tradesmen to ‘live asTradesmen in the same class [as they] used to live’. Family expenses weremuch greater than they used to be primarily because custom now com-manded that the young tradesman ‘live as others do, or lose the credit ofliving, and be run down as if he was broke: In a word, he must spend morethan he can afford to spend, and so be undone, or not spend it, and so beundone’.54 These emulative pressures also made it easier for tradesmen toneglect the duties of family government, leaving apprentices and servantswithout the moral instruction they needed and deserved.

Had Defoe’s analysis ended here, then his voice would not have beenvery different from other moralists of the day who preached against avariceand luxury, the irresponsibility of young men, and the aspirational spend-ing of the lower and middling ranks.55 Defoe too complained about thesephenomena but he also explained them as the direct consequence ofseveral socio-economic factors: the increasing cost of goods, wages, andtaxation, the monetization of relations within the household economy andits consequent decline as a institution of frugality and restraint, and the rel-atively fluid social boundaries (vis-à-vis other European countries) betweenEngland’s landed and mercantile elites which encouraged conspicuousspending on the part of both as a means of demonstrating their socialposition.

Although it was not the most significant part of his analysis, Defoeacknowledged that leaving aside the problem of growing extravagance,ordinary household expenses had increased. Since 1689 the nation’s tax


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burden had ballooned as a result of the wars with France and althoughcomplaints against the rise in land taxes ring loudest in the historicalrecord, Defoe and his readers keenly felt ‘a weight of taxes upon almost allthe necessaries of life’ thanks to greater customs duties and excise taxes.While inflation was not a significant problem in the early eighteenthcentury, Defoe also cited the higher cost of basic provisions, rents, and ser-vants’ wages.56 Of all these price increases, Defoe paid the most attention tothe last for the changing relationship between masters and servants, likethat between masters and apprentices, indicated a shift in traditional socialarrangements and values brought on by commercial forces.

Servants, Defoe argued, were not only demanding much higher wages,they were doing less work for them, necessitating the hire of even more ser-vants, if one could afford to do so. He blamed the problem on growingpride, especially among maids. In a pamphlet published three monthsbefore the Complete English Tradesman, Defoe inveighed against their pride,insolence, and extravagance, paying particular attention to their clothing.These days one’s kitchen maid eschewed ‘her poor scanty Linsey-WolseyPetticoat’ for ‘a good silk one … in short, plain Country-Joan is now turn’dinto a fine London-Madam’.57 Such emulative consumption by female ser-vants damaged both the woollen industry and the social hierarchy for itencouraged even greater extravagance at each successive rung on the socialladder. Reluctant to spoil their silk finery with housework, maids turnedtheir attention to seducing sons and male guests instead. However, the‘greatest Abuse of all’, according to Defoe, was that ‘these Creatures arebecome their own Lawgivers’. The custom of having to pay a month’s sev-erance upon notice, the fear of having one’s family affairs gossiped about,and servant loyalty to co-workers rather than to the master or mistress ofthe house meant that servants had now ‘united themselves into a formida-ble Body, and got the whip Hand of their Betters’.58

Defoe’s proposed solutions to this problem suggested that as far as lesserservants were concerned, the household economy might well be beyondrepair as the mistress/servant relationship was now better understood asthat of employer/employee. While not giving up on the rule of family gov-ernment and the importance of religious uniformity in the household,Defoe suggested a number of market-oriented recommendations. If maleservants wore liveries, perhaps female servants should wear some kind ofuniform as well. Instead of relying on servant loyalty and the paternalisticcustom of severance pay, employers should reward longstanding servantswith higher wages instead. They should also draw up proper contracts withexpiration dates. Servants who fulfilled their contractual obligations couldbe given certificates as proof of their professionalism and anyone withoutthis kind of authentication should be considered a vagrant.59 Because mis-tresses especially were reluctant to give bad references and deprive servantsof a living, Defoe also looked favourably upon a proposal to create two

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kinds of certificates, one which would attest the servant’s entire behaviourand performance, and the other, a kind of second-class certificate, whichwould vouch for his or her honesty and sobriety only.60

Even more important than the relationship between master and servantin a tradesman’s household was the relationship between master andapprentice, that aspect of family government which Defoe had touchedupon in The Family Instructor of 1715 but now formed a central part of theanalysis in his Complete English Tradesman. Apprenticeship, Defoe argued,had changed in recent years so that it was no longer a state of ‘servitude’ oreven ‘subjection’ but one in which apprentices behaved ‘more like gentle-men than tradesmen; more like companions to their masters, than like ser-vants’. He attributed this change to masters themselves who ‘seem to havemade over their authority to their apprentices’ in the wake of ever increas-ing apprenticeship fees.61 Originally, Defoe explained, these premiums werenot ‘a condition of indenture’ but a ‘customary present to the tradesman’swife’ to encourage her to show special kindness and ‘motherly care’ toyoung men apprenticed in her household. Over time, however, ‘this com-pliment or present became so customary as to be made a debt’, or require-ment. Even then the charge ‘was kept within bounds, and thirty or fortypounds was sufficient to a very good merchant, which now is run up to fivehundred, nay to a thousand pounds with an apprentice; a thing which for-merly would been thought monstrous, and not to be named’.62

Once apprentices began to pay ‘exorbitant sums of money … as thepresent or condition of their apprenticeship’, it made them ‘a kind of a dif-ferent figure in the family … above the ordinary class of servants hired forwages’; it ‘exempts him from all the laws of family-government’, and ofinterest to the master only as they related to his business. This monetiza-tion of the household relationships, Defoe lamented, was ‘all to the dis-advantage of the present age, viz. in the last age, that is to say, fifty or sixtyyears ago, for it is not less, servants’, and by this he meant apprentices aswell as waged servants, ‘were infinitely more under subjection than theyare now, and the subordination of mankind extended effectually to them;they were content to submit to family-government and family-religion alsohad some sway upon them’. As part of the family, apprentices heededhousehold rules, attended household prayers, and even stepped in to readthe prayers for a master indisposed or ill. Nowadays though, apprenticesentering households upon payment of large premiums scorned these prac-tices, regarding themselves as the master’s equal if not superior.63

It was not only the haughty assumptions of servants and apprenticeswho deemed themselves ‘above the government of their masters’ andbeneath their dignity to submit to family government and the moral andreligious guidance of their masters. Defoe argued that masters themselves‘seem to have given up all family-government, and all care or concern forthe morals and manners … [or] religion’ of their servants. Like the master


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portrayed in The Family Instructor, as long as ‘their business be but done,and their shop or warehouse duly look’d after’, they thought themselves‘under no obligation to meddle with those things’. Defoe now went a stepfurther: such was the self-regard of today’s tradesmen that many of themthought that the duties of family government ‘to be a low step, andbeneath the character of a man in business, as if worshipping God were adisgrace, and not an honour to a family, or to the master of a family’.Indeed, Defoe claimed to have heard that the practice ‘keep[ing] Chaplains,as other persons of quality do … is already begun in the city’ where somesuperior tradesmen hired parish readers to conduct evening prayers in thehousehold for them, thereby extending the monetization of householdgovernment. Eventually, he feared, the practice of household worshipmight cease altogether.64

The ‘loose, wild, and ungovernable’ behaviour of too many apprenticesand servants in this age demonstrated the potentially disastrous conse-quences which the decline of family government had for religion andsociety. A master’s failure in these duties meant the ‘letting loose hisapprentices to levity and liberty in that particular critical time of life, whenthey have the most need of government and restraint’. ‘As a Christian, andas a trustee for his parents’, a master was obligated to give his youngapprentice moral and religious as well as vocational training. ‘To leave ayouth without government’ was in ‘Scripture words … to lead him intotemptation’ and indeed ‘deliver him over to Satan’. With ‘few mastersconcern[ing] themselves with the souls, nay, scarce with the morals of theirservants’ and ‘few servants concern[ing] themselves in a conscientiousdischarge of their duty to their masters’, Defoe feared, ‘the great law of sub-ordination is destroy’d’.65

Given that servants had been more sober and trustworthy in the pastwhen family government was the norm, Defoe thought it foolhardy that somany tradesmen in his own day should regularly leave their shops in thehands of their apprentices. Tradesmen themselves, he claimed, gave tworeasons for this growing practice. Their first explanation, that apprenticecontracts provided them with certain ‘securities’, Defoe dismissed becausewhile security against theft, for example, was always part of an apprentice’scontract, security against negligence and idleness was not now and neverhad been covered in such arrangements. The second reason given, namely‘greater premiums’, Defoe endorsed as a reality, as we have just seen, butbecause higher fees contributed to the decline in the reliability of appren-tices, he regarded them as a reason for tradesmen to spend more time intheir shops, not less.66 There was, he believed, another explanation for thegrowing negligence of their businesses, and that was the desire on the partof too many people in the middling ranks to emulate the gentry throughover-consumption and the pursuit of pleasures inappropriate to their prov-idential station.

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iv. Trading the shop apron for a wig and sword

However much higher prices, wages, and taxes had impinged upon ordi-nary household expenditure in the early eighteenth century, it was concernabout extravagant and luxurious spending which saturated contemporarycommentary and The Complete English Tradesman was no exception. In oneof his favourite expressions, Defoe denounced the present age as a ‘time ofgallantry and gaiety’, replete with more temptations for financial andmoral ruin than had ever been seen before. Custom had ‘introduced ageneral … inclination among all sorts of people, to an expensive way ofliving … an unconquerable aversion to any restraint; so that the poor willbe like the rich, and the rich like the great, and the great like the greatest –and thus the world runs on to a kind of distraction at this time: where itwill end, time must discover’. Although Defoe believed ‘the whole nationare more or less [caught up] in the crime’ of emulative extravagance, heaccepted that ‘this expensive way of living began among the tradesmenfirst; that is to say, among the citizens of London; and that their eagerresolv’d persuit of that empty and meanest kind of pride, call’d imitation,viz. to look like the gentry, and appear above themselves, drew them into it’.67

This ‘city vanity’ first appeared with the ‘sort of tradesmen, who scorningthe society of their shops and customers’ began to frequent courts andplays, ‘kept company above themselves’, and happily became accustomedto the lifestyle of the West End, for which, interestingly, Defoe used theterm ‘abroad’. Dissatisfied with merely visiting the haunts of men of qual-ity, tradesmen began ‘living like them at home’, adopting the habits of‘costly furniture, rich clothes, and dainty tables’, whether or not they couldafford them. These days, Defoe complained, ‘shopkeepers … are seen withtheir long wigs and swords, rather than with aprons on’ and even olderapprentices were guilty of the same folie de grandeur. So many Londonshopkeepers and tradesmen now kept footmen, often in blue liveries, Defoesuggested that ‘few gentlemen care to give blue to their servants for thatvery reason’. Citizens’ tables were ‘now the emblems, not of plenty, but ofluxury, not of good housekeeping, but of profusion’. For some merchants,the desire to emulate became a drive to exceed: ‘if men of quality lived likethemselves, men of no quality would strive to live not like themselves: ifthose had plenty, these would have profusion; if those had enough, thesewould have excess; if those had what was good, these would have what wasrare and exotic … and consequently dear. And this is one of the ways thathave worn out so many tradesmen before their time.’

As proof of this growing problem, Defoe invited his readers to considerthe plethora of announcements for commissions of bankruptcy each weekin the Gazette and the increasing number of parliamentary acts for therelief of insolvent debtors. But perhaps he conveyed the problem best in


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the voice of a fictional customer complaining about the new breed of negli-gent tradesmen. The old owner of a well-located, well-stocked shop hadbeen a ‘true shopkeeper’ who worked long hours, ‘throve accordingly …[and] left a good estate behind him’ but the new owners had succumbed tothe temper of the times. While one partner frequented the Mall and courtin his wig and sword, the other ‘lies a-bed till eleven … just comes into theshop and shews himself, then stalks about to the tavern … then to Child’scoffee-house to hear the news … then to the tavern’ until too drunk to gethome without the help of the night watchman. Consequently, with‘nobody to serve but a ’prentice-boy or two, and an idle journeyman’, theshop now attracted more ‘thieves and shop-lifters’ than customers andwould surely fail. Wives were often crucial to the success of a family busi-ness but now too many of them, Defoe complained, ‘scorn to be seen inthe compting-house, much less behind the counter; despise the knowledgeof their husband’s business, and act as if they were asham’d of being trades-mens wives, and never intended to be tradesmens widows’. In formertimes, he pointed out, a widow might keep the family business going, atleast until a son could take over or its sale could be arranged but ‘now theLadies are above it’ and would not ‘stoop to the mechanick low step ofcarrying on a trade’.68

Avoiding the perils of absentee-ownership and idleness, along with otherrecommendations which Defoe made, may seem like timeless advice but aspassage after passage in the Complete English Tradesman made clear, Defoewas concerned not just about a lack of industry but about its cause – anincreasing willingness among the middling ranks to sacrifice their eco-nomic self-interest, their dignity, and even their souls in an attempt to apegentry fashions. He warned any would-be ‘Sir Fopping Flutter’ that

Trade is not a ball, where people appear in masque, and act a part tomake sport; where they strive to seem what they really are not, and tothink themselves best drest when they are least known: but ’tis a plainvisible scene of honest life, shewn best in its native appearance, withoutdisguise; supported by prudence and frugality; and like strong, stiff, clayland, grows fruitful only by good husbandry, culture, and manuring.

A young tradesman might dress up in his long wig and ‘go to the ball’ buthe was ‘like a piece of counterfeit money … brass wash’d over with silver,and no [true] tradesman will take him for current’. Cash in hand, he mightcontinue some correspondence, but he could only be regarded by real mer-chants as a ‘tradesman in masquerade’. ‘When I see’, Defoe confessed,‘young shop-keepers keep horses ride a hunting, learn dog-language, andkeep the sportsmens brogue upon their tongues, I will not say I read theirdestiny, for I am no fortune-teller; but I do say, I am always afraid for them.’Very few things in life were evil in themselves, he explained, but many

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things were ‘circumstantially evil’. There were pleasures which were ‘lawfulto other men, yet are criminal and unlawful’ to the tradesman. For ‘gentle-men of fortunes and estates, who being born to large possessions … ’tis cer-tainly lawful to spend their spare hours on horseback, with their hounds orhawks’. No one objected to a tradesman ‘taking the air for health, and for arecess to the mind’ but ‘immoderate liberty’ was ‘too much the ruin of thetradesmen of this age’. Pleasures innocent in themselves or appropriate forother men became criminal when they interfered with ‘that which is thedue and just employment’ of one’s own life.69

In other words, trade was ‘not a sport or game’ but a ‘calling’ and how-ever important the previous half-century was in terms of Defoe’s analysis ofsocio-economic change, a second historical time frame, an eschatologicalone, also underpinned The Complete English Tradesman. It has been rightlysuggested that this text, like many of Defoe’s works, belongs to the tradi-tion of guide literature, a genre often directed towards the young andunderlining the importance of finding or accepting marriage partners andvocations appropriate to their social station.70 As will be made clear, Defoedid not wish to deny all movement within the social hierarchy but he con-demned the kinds of emulative consumption and pursuit of pleasureswhich stood in defiance of the concept of providential calling. In advisingthe young tradesman on the best way to structure his life, Defoe urged himto see his daily choices as part of the wider framework of nature, time, andProvidence:

The life of man is or should be a measure of allotted time; as his time ismeasured out to him, so the measure is limited, must end, and the endof it is appointed.

The purposes, for which time is given, and life bestow’d, are verymomentous; no time is given useless, and for nothing; time is no moreto be unemploy’d, than it is to be ill employ’d. Three things are chieflybefore us in the appointment of our time, 1. Necessaries of nature.2. Duties of religion, or things relating to a future life. 3. Duties of thepresent life viz. business and calling.

None of these duties, Defoe warned, should interfere with one another. Theman who pursued relaxation at the expense of business, or business at theexpense of prayer, or even prayer at the expense of business, ‘turns naturebottom upwards, inverts the appointment of providence, and must accountto himself, and afterwards to a higher judge for the neglect’.71

Occasionally Providence did call men and women out of the station inwhich they were born and he cited several tradesmen who had risen topositions of wealth, political prominence, and honour. He was quick to addthough that these were ‘instances of men call’d out of their lower spherefor their eminent usefulness, and their known capacities, being first known


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to be diligent and industrious men in their private and lower spheres; suchadvancements make good the words of the wise man, Seest thou a man dili-gent in business, he shall stand before princes; he shall not stand before meanmen.’ This age provided the tradesman with many opportunities to succeedbut until he had proved himself, his ‘proper business is in his shop or ware-house, and among his own class or rank of people’. Unmindful of thewisdom of Providence, the young man in a hurry who found his chiefpleasure in the consumption of luxuries and company of men above hisown station, robbed his business, family, and creditors of time and capitaland himself of that ‘peace’ and ‘calm of soul’ which a more honest andindustrious man could call upon in times of distress. Instead of building anestate, he would accumulate a storehouse of reasons to repent.72

Defoe was keenly aware that avenues of social mobility were not one-waystreets: The Complete English Tradesman addressed the issue of gentry fam-ilies intermarrying with the mercantile classes and their practice of sendingyounger sons into trade. Insensitive perhaps to the greater dependence of awoman’s status upon her husband’s, he chastised those ‘Ladies of goodfamilies … but of mean fortune’ who dismissed merchants as ‘Mechanicks’and scorned marriage with even the wealthiest of them, while ‘Gentlemenof quality’, rich in honours but poor in fortune, enthusiastically sought tomarry daughters of successful merchants and tradesmen. Even worse werethe ladies who did marry tradesmen but continued ‘carrying themselvesabove that station, in which Providence has [now] placed them’ by refus-ing to assume the duties and demeanour appropriate to their new cir-cumstances.73 Defoe’s concern stemmed in part from his advocacy forcompanionate marriage and the crucial role he believed wives played in thehousehold economy but it also reflected his resentment of the gentry’sprejudice against trade and his belief in their continuing failure to provideleadership in critical areas of British life.

v. Conclusion

In one of the last letters, or chapters, of the Complete English Tradesman,Defoe defended England’s identity as a trading nation, the dignity of tradeas a calling, and the contributions which commerce had made to indi-vidual prosperity and to the aggregate wealth and power of the nation.He denounced the ‘understandings’ of ‘those refin’d heads’74 who refusedto accept Britain’s commercial sector as the chief reason for the nation’seconomic success at home and growing stature abroad and who continuedto insist upon the gentry’s separate and superior nature to the ‘mechanic’classes. The connections between the landed and mercantile classes, Defoebelieved, went far deeper than securing apprenticeships for younger sons orwealthy brides from the City for impecunious gentlemen in order to revivea few flagging estates. Commerce, he argued, had been the means by which

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many English landed families had established their fortunes in the firstplace. In focusing upon gentry prejudice, the origins of landed wealth inEngland, and the role of commerce as a source of national power and great-ness, this letter anticipated many of the themes which preoccupied Defoein the last four years of his life – years which were to see a flowering of hishistorical vision. It thus makes sense to examine this latter part of theComplete English Tradesman in the company of works which were to followit and in the widening historical contexts in which Defoe sought to justifytrade and tradesmen as the inheritors of the earth and the purveyors ofGod’s providential plan.


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8Defoe’s Historical Vision: Commerceand Gentility in the 1720s

i. Introduction: social polemic and the development ofhistorical analysis

However much Defoe disapproved of improvident spending on luxuriesand any premature pretence to gentility on the part of tradesmen, he didnot wish to deny the historical reality of social mobility. Families andnations might be swept to greatness by the tides of commerce but theymight also be waylaid in its concomitant pools and eddies of luxury. Whendecline was apparent, he sought to understand its causes and correct them.If emulative consumption could ruin a young tradesman, self-justifyingextravagance might sink an ancient family into debt and obscurity. When,however, pre-eminence or advance were deserved, he celebrated them.Defoe’s highly successful, three-volume Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of GreatBritain reveals the delight he took in surveying the economic and socialsuccess achieved by early-modern captains of finance and industry – thehandsome villas they built along the Thames, the estates they rescued fromdecay, the social, political, and marital alliances they made with the gentryand nobility. Social mobility, however, did not mean social revolution.Although Defoe believed that merit should be recognized and evenrewarded, he was not trying to eliminate the gradation of rank. Too often,readers of the Tour fail to acknowledge Defoe’s deferential praise of virtuousancient and noble families, their houses and parks, collections and con-noisseurship, even their ‘Patriarchal’ care of estates and local communities,themes which appear throughout the text.1 Some recent commentatorshave read Defoe’s Tour to establish an image of him as egalitarian and mod-ernist.2 This chapter offers an alternative vision.

It is tempting, perhaps, to speculate on the extent to which Defoe’s owntrading background and aspirations to gentility animated those workswhich address questions concerning social mobility, gentility, and thebehaviour, good and bad, of Britain’s elite. By the 1720s, he had achieved ameasure of commercial success through his writings, occupied a gracious

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house in Stoke Newington, and purchased a long lease on a farm inColchester. The polite and learned literati though never let him forget thathe was a former hosier without a classical education, a low man but onewith friends in high places able to extricate him from legal and politicaldifficulties when his writings got him into trouble. Certainly, Defoe’s mostfamous protagonists aspired to improve their social position. This may helpto explain the verve of texts like Moll Flanders and Colonel Jacque as well asthe occasionally bitter tone of works like The Compleat English Gentleman,Defoe’s most trenchant critique of gentry attitudes and behaviours. It doesnot explain how and why Defoe developed a sophisticated historical visionthrough which he might understand the origins and evolutionary nature ofthe social structure in which he lived. In articulating this vision, some partof Defoe may have hoped to ameliorate those prejudices which begrudgedhis talents and social aspirations but his real objectives were far more ambi-tious. By situating his society in secular and sacred time frames, he soughtnothing less than a reformation of attitudes and behaviours which hebelieved deleterious to the prosperity of society as a whole and to the salva-tion of its members.

Defoe’s historical analysis was never systematic but his writings in the1720s, taken together, suggest that as England’s wealth as a nation contin-ued to expand, various ranks of society had not always risen to the occa-sion as new freedoms and luxuries, large and small, came within theirreach. As explained in the previous chapter, inklings of Defoe’s concernthat commercial forces were undermining family government and religiousinstruction in the home appeared in the didactic dialogues of his FamilyInstructor and Religious Courtship manuals. This suspicion that some of theeffects of doux commerce might be less than sweet was reinforced by the vio-lence and frenzy of the calico controversy and South Sea Bubble in1719–20. Although these crises did not shake Defoe’s fundamental beliefthat, on the whole, commerce was a good thing, its capacity to distractpeople from the proper business of life with material luxuries and the falsehope of easy advancement underpinned almost every aspect of practicaladvice he offered in the Complete English Tradesman of 1725.

History had shown, however, that those tradesmen who resisted thesedistractions, honoured their calling through industry and honesty, andtook their religious duties seriously, might indeed achieve levels of prosper-ity, experience, and expertise to qualify them for a different sort of life.Sufficient wealth and a lifetime of practical knowledge could give one boththe leisure and the capacity to serve the public good, in other words, to bea gentleman. Unfortunately, Defoe believed, far too many members of thelanded gentry had sought to deny this historical reality and had redefinedwhat it meant to be a gentleman. Their actions and discourse suggestedtheir definition of a gentleman was no longer that of a man fit for responsi-bility but that of a man free from any. They had embraced as well the

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spurious belief that gentility was a sanguinous property, that ‘gallantry ofspirit, greatness of soul, and … generous principles’ were inherited quali-ties, not to be found in ‘the low mixtures of a mechanick race’ liketradesmen.3

In one of the last letters of his Complete English Tradesman, Defoeaddressed the central role that commerce had played in shaping England’ssocial hierarchy and attacked the gentry’s resistance to the idea that theboundary between the mercantile and landed orders was a permeable one.In other ages, in other nations, he argued, families had ‘rais’d themselvesby the sword’ but in England ‘Trade and Learning have been the two chiefsteps, by which our gentlemen have rais’d their relations, and have builttheir fortunes’. The last war was a prime example: it was true that somemen had raised their families by ‘great actions abroad’ but many more hadraised theirs and amassed great estates ‘by the attending circumstances ofthe war’– clothing, paying, and victualling the army and navy, supplyingloans, and investing in the banks and companies which funded the publicdebt. He cited the names of several men with mercantile backgrounds whohad acquired noble estates and social prominence within his own lifetimewhile pointing out that many ancient families had been worn out by thecurrent ‘disease’ of ‘excessive high living’, ‘time and family misfortunes’and debt.4 Trade could keep estates from stagnating by creating a virtuouscycle of better wages, population growth, an increase in the consumptionof necessities, and therefore higher rents and land values, all of whichDefoe summed up in his favourite metaphor, ‘an Estate’s a pond, but aTrade’s a spring … an inexhausted current, which not only fills the pond,and keeps it full, but is continually running over, and fills all the lowerponds and places about it’.5 Commerce, not war, had ‘peopled this nationwith gentlemen’ and enabled Britain to cut a greater figure on the worldstage than ever before. Britain had neither diminished other nations norincreased her own possessions militarily. If anything, past wars had tornthe nation to pieces, ruined its richest families, and temporarily destroyedthe monarchy. ‘These things’, Defoe asserted, ‘prove abundantly that therising greatness of the British nation is not owing to war and conquests, toenlarging its dominion by the sword, or subjecting the people of othercountries to our power; but it is all owing to trade, to the encrease of ourcommerce at home, and the extending it abroad.’ He predicted that just asEngland’s military men were now esteemed around the world, its trades-men would ‘in a few years be allow’d to rank with the best gentlemen inEurope; and as the Prophet Isaiah said of the merchants of Tyre … hertraffickers were the Honourable of the earth’. The book of Ezekiel too hadshown that trade had made Tyre the emporium and envy of the ancientworld and had noted that ‘her Merchants were Princes’.6

All of these arguments, Defoe realized, would need to be made at greaterlength and with greater force in order to convince the landed ranks that

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their own glory as well as the nation’s rested on commerce rather than con-quest and the acquisition and application of learning and experience ratherthan birth or bloodline. Within a month of the publication of the CompleteEnglish Tradesman, Defoe published the first of four monthly instalments ofhis General History of Discoveries and Improvements, a work, like his GeneralHistory of Trade of 1713, in which he was drawn to write a history of tradeand technological advance in the widest chronological setting in order tounderstand it for polemical purposes.7 Scripture and the principles ofBaconian science informed Defoe that God had spread the gifts of naturethroughout his creation in order to foster human discovery, exchange, andimprovement of them. As people of commerce, the Phoenicians hadembraced this divine mandate; as people of conquest, the Romans hadignored it. After Rome’s decline, Defoe asserted, the spread of Christianitythroughout Europe had encouraged the virtues of probity and honesty onwhich commerce would once again thrive. The re-establishment of com-mercial networks on the scale once achieved by the Phoenicians, whosereach had extended to Africa and even to the Americas, was greatly encour-aged in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by that classic Baconian triadof discoveries, the compass, gunpowder, and printing press. In the thirdinstalment of the text Defoe touched upon England’s own infancy as atrading nation in this period but this subject was more fully explored inother works, primarily in his Plan of the English Commerce published in1728.

Despite its title, Defoe’s Plan of the English Commerce was as much ahistory of the subject as it was a list of proposals for its present and futureencouragement. Tracing the origins of commercial society in England backto the early sixteenth century, Defoe credited Henry VII with unleashingEngland’s trading potential and those forces which led to the monetizationof feudal relations and the eventual end of the era of baronial conflict. Hedid so in part, as this chapter will explain, for different reasons than Bacon,Harrington, and later Hume and Millar did, and with different objectives inmind; but Defoe’s name deserves to be placed alongside theirs for he toocontributed to a growing historiography which postulated that the transi-tion from feudal to commercial society had been a Europe-wide phenome-non and thus constituted a new epoch in its history. This ‘Revolution ofTrade, brought about a Revolution in the very Nature of Things’, Defoeargued, including the transformation of dependent vassals into an inde-pendent gentry and servile villeins into independent labourers, craftsmen,and tradesmen.8 But whereas many of the gentry used their greater measureof economic independence to indulge lives of leisure and luxury in imita-tion of the great baronial lords, the commoners improved their lessermeasure through industry and good husbandry with predictable results.Over time, profligate families had to sell their estates to more prudent oneswho, in turn, became the new squirearchy, a process, Defoe argued, which


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continued to his own day but one which had begun generations beforepresent complaints about the new monied interest.

The same year that Defoe published his Plan of the English Commerce, hewas almost certainly at work on his most sustained exploration of the rela-tionship between commerce, social mobility, and the concept of gentility,The Compleat English Gentleman, though this unfinished text was not pub-lished until long after Defoe’s death in 1731. Interleaved in this manuscriptwas another unfinished work entitled ‘Of Royall Education’. The unifyingtheme of both manuscripts was the importance of education, for the gentryand for princes respectively. In both texts Defoe made clear his belief thatGod intended human beings to cultivate their capacities to reason, thatparents owed their children what education they could provide them, andthat adults owed it to themselves to continue improving their own minds.The purpose of these texts, however, was to demonstrate the importance ofa good education for those born to higher stations as their families and thenation derived many benefits from their learning and suffered the conse-quences of their ignorance. In terms of his historical vision, both worksconfirmed that Defoe believed that an age of commerce, science, and thearts had superseded an age of military conquest. The pivotal figure in thistransition had been Henry VII and from his reign forward the real worth ofa gentleman or a prince, after his duty to God, was to be measured by theextent to which he understood and embraced this new world order.

ii. The historical dynamic of conquest and commerce: Defoe’sTour and General History of Discoveries and Improvements

A General History of Discoveries and Improvements of 1725–6 was Defoe’smost thorough exploration and exploitation of the historical dynamic ofconquest and commerce but this dynamic was also present, though moreelliptically expressed, in his Tour, the first volume of which appeared in1724. While Defoe probably conceptualized his Tour as a Baconian history,that is as an objective and useful account of the present state of thekingdom (its natural and manmade components), based upon the mostreliable sources and ‘Eye-witness’ testimony,9 another kind of historicalunderstanding emerges from its pages. Two of the most readily apparentcharacteristics of the Tour were, first, Defoe’s explicit emphasis on accu-rately recording the flux of the present rather than the past, on the state ofthings ‘not as they have been, but as they are’,10 and, second, his obviouspreoccupation with the nation’s trade over its agricultural and even indus-trial sectors. The effect of these presentist and commercial themes intandem over the course of three volumes was to suggest that Britain hadentered a new era in which commerce was daily changing the countenanceof the kingdom. When the past did surface in Defoe’s narrative, it oftenappeared as a relic or reminder of more tumultuous times – as the sites of

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old encampments or the ruined remains of a castle, or perhaps as a briefdigression into the fate of a family or town in the wake of the late rebellion– suggesting that an age of martial exploit had given way, if only recently,to an age of material improvement.

The Tour acknowledged the many natural advantages for commercewhich the island kingdom enjoyed but if Britain was to fulfil its providen-tial destiny as a commercial world power, Defoe believed a reconciliationbetween land and trade was required. Defoe often introduced readers of theTour to a location with brief remarks about its social structure. Tellingly, hereacted most favourably to those towns and regions with an active andcompanionable mix of gentry and merchants who engaged each other andthe wider world with ‘polite conversation’, ‘good manners’, and ‘Sociable-ness’.11 His attention to the arts and manners of a given area as well as toits economic activities suggests that his preoccupations were not solely dic-tated by a Baconian agenda. As explained in Chapter 5, Defoe’s methodalso had much in common with what was later called ‘philosophicalhistory’, that speculative attention to wider cultural and intellectual devel-opments which came to characterize English and Scottish historiography ofthe mid and late eighteenth century. Defoe professed to deal only with the‘Present State of the Country’, with ‘Novelty’ rather than ‘Antiquity’ in hisTour.12 Yet if he was to reinforce his support of commerce and convince thegentry of the truth of his position, he had to show that commerce was aprovidential historical force and that Britain’s social structure and thegentry’s place within it were the products of historical circumstance.

With the exception of the calico controversy, public debate about tradein the first decade of George I’s reign had been largely overshadowed byother issues such as the European balance of power, the threat of Jacob-itism in the wake of plots in 1715 and 1722, and the South Sea Bubble.Everyone was certainly in favour of trade. Whatever prejudices he mightharbour against the mechanic classes, even the most hidebound squire, atsome level, realized that the recovery of land values and agricultural prices,depressed in the early Hanoverian period, depended in part upon thehealth and vitality of the manufacturing and mercantile sectors to refinehis goods and sell them at home and abroad. Not everyone could agree,however, on the best ways to increase trade, not even the merchants them-selves who were less a unified lobby than a collection of diverse and oftencompeting interests. By 1725, however, increasing numbers of peoplebelieved that the government could be doing more to promote British com-merce. In Parliament and the press, complaints were multiplying thatnations large and small, allied and adversarial, were violating trade agree-ments, erecting protectionist legislation, and engaging in other activitiesdetrimental to British commercial interests. Austrian, French, and Spanishactions especially, it was argued, necessitated government action in orderto secure or enhance British trade in the East Indies, Africa, and the


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Americas. Government response to these complaints was ambivalent.Inconveniences experienced by British merchants and manufacturers wereless important to George I than problems relating to Hanover and theEuropean balance of power. The king’s ministers claimed to support tradeand were not averse to helping the commercial sector but they were alsonot willing to sacrifice other diplomatic and political objectives in order todo so. Commercial and colonial considerations did not always dominateBritish foreign policy in the eighteenth century as some historians havesuggested and as Defoe might have wished.13

Like his General History of Trade published in 1713 in support of commer-cial articles associated with the Treaty of Utrecht, Defoe’s General History ofDiscoveries and Improvements was both a political act and an act of historicalreflection. As acts of historical reflection, both works may be characterizedas hybrids: universal in their attempt to examine human history from itsbeginnings in a providential framework, Baconian in their focus on unlock-ing the secrets of nature, improving the lot of mankind, and enhancing thepower of the state, and philosophical in trying to draw connectionsbetween material change and the civilizing process. The General History ofDiscoveries and Improvements advocated one basic principle of policy andrecommended two specific applications of it. History, Defoe believed,amply demonstrated that new initiatives in trade required not just publicneutrality but public support. By corollary, commerce created both privateand public wealth which, in turn, encouraged the arts and sciences buthere too governments had to be proactive: ‘NOTHING makes Arts andScience thrive more than their working on a public Purse; no private Mancan reward as the public can; and Kings therefore are applauded as theencouragers of Learning.’14 By surveying mankind’s past accomplishments,Defoe hoped to encourage this age to rediscover gains once made but nowlost and to make new discoveries in commerce, the arts, and sciences.

If the British government was serious about promoting trade and thediscoveries and improvements it engendered, then two opportunitiespresented themselves. First, Britain and Europe’s other maritime powersshould band together to expel the Moors from North Africa. In living ‘likeBeasts of Prey upon the Spoils of their innocent and industriousNeighbours’, the Moors were both ‘Enemies to God and … Enemies toMankind’ and Defoe lamented that Britain and France had been unwillingto help Spanish forces in their attempt to do something about the problemin 1722. By replacing this den of piratical and murdering thieves with moresober, industrious and Christian colonists, the region might be broughtback into the fold of commercial and civilized nations. At the very least, bypushing the Moors fifteen or twenty miles inland, the European powerscould reduce their naval and maritime insurance costs by rooting outpiracy in the Mediterranean. At best, proper colonization could restore theregion to the prosperity it had not enjoyed since the Carthaginians,

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encouraging the spread of commerce and civilization throughout the entireAfrican continent.15 Defoe elaborated upon the civilizing effects of such anendeavour in his Plan of the English Commerce in 1728. His proposal, hebelieved, could ‘change and alter the very people themselves’. Exposed toChristian beliefs and civilized habits, Africans would ‘with their Mannerschange the very Nature of their Commerce, and fall in upon the Consump-tion of the European manufactures’, just as native Americans had.16

A second plan proposed by Defoe in the General History of Discoveries andImprovements was the planting of a British colony along the Patagoniancoast. Notwithstanding more than two centuries of European explorationand colonization, the Americas still afforded enormous opportunities.Citing favourable reports of the area, Defoe exclaimed this temperate grass-land was ‘singled out for Englishmen’, provided the government waswilling to supply the colony with sufficient resources and protection frompotential attacks from the natives and Spanish. A thriving colony and civi-lized natives would establish a new market for British manufactures.Eventually the colony could extend into Chile, enabling Britain to secure aharbour for trade in the South Seas.17

Grandiose and impractical as these schemes might have been, there wasnothing simplistic about the historical analysis in which they were embedded. From the Noachic to the Newtonian age, A General History ofDiscoveries and Improvements surveyed and assessed various nations andempires based upon the extent to which they fulfilled God’s desire thatpeople explore, discover, exchange, and improve the bounties of hiscreation. This divine mandate was largely ignored until the confusion oftongues when God forced a diaspora and the posterity of Noah’s sons,Ham, Shem, and Japhet, went their separate ways. The history of Ham’sdescendants who settled in the Near East proved most instructive forDefoe’s purposes since they were the first race to make discoveries in thearts and sciences. Unfortunately, with the Devil’s connivance, they werealso the first race to turn from useful studies like astronomy and mathemat-ics to wicked ones like magic, divination, and other forms of idolatry.18

Thanks to Ham’s grandson, Nimrod, they also discovered ‘the Art ofTyranny … subdued Nations, and began Empire’.19

One branch of Ham’s family, though, followed a different path. Ham’sson, Canaan, and his son, Sidon, had migrated furthest west. Whereas theenergies of most peoples in the biblical Near East were becoming absorbedby idolatry and imperial conquest, the Canaanites and Sidonians turnedtowards the sea, enriching themselves and other peoples through naviga-tion, exploration, and trade. They established the great city of Tyre inPhoenicia whose growing wealth became too tempting for neighbouringtyrants to ignore. ‘Naturally industrious, and addicted to commerce’, the‘Phoenix-like’ Phoenicians were able to regroup in the wake of Israelite,Assyrian, and Alexandrian onslaughts, by founding or fleeing to colonies,


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thus extending trade and learning wherever their navigational skills couldtake them. The Arabians and Chaldeans may have been the great inventorsof the biblical world, Defoe admitted, but ‘the Phoenicians were theEnglishmen of that Age … improv[ing] what others invented’ and introduc-ing these improvements to others. They were responsible for the greatestadvances in navigation until the discovery of the loadstone. Althoughknowledge of writing was imparted directly to Moses by God,20 the Phoeni-cian prince Cadmus developed a simplified alphabetical system which heintroduced to the Greeks. They were skilled in a host of other arts and tech-nologies. Eliding scriptural explanations as to why Providence saw to theireventual destruction, Defoe merely concluded that the Phoenicians, ‘whilethey remain’d a people … were patterns of all commendable Virtues’, espe-cially in ‘establishing Nations, encreasing the Felicity of Mankind, peoplingdesolate Countries, and furnishing the Nations they planted with all thingsboth needful and pleasant for Life’. In these respects, they ‘obey[ed] theDirections their Maker gave them at first, namely, to replenish the Earth’.21

Phoenicia’s most important colony, Carthage, inherited this ‘Genius forCommerce’ creating a global network for the production, consumption,and exchange of both staple and luxury goods and fostering all theemployment which these activities generated. When Rome destroyedCarthage in the last Punic War, it eradicated the taproot of a Mediterraneaneconomic system whose trading tendrils extended to the coastal regions ofIndia, Persia, and Africa. Corn, once a notable commodity of Carthaginiantrade, was now simply shipped as tribute under Roman rule. A populousand industrious North Africa was made desolate, too weak to resist futureinundations of rapacious Vandals, Saracens, and Moors. Regular channelsof trade with India and Persia dissipated in the desolation of war. Cut offfrom Carthage, new settlements and colonies along the west African coastfell into irrecoverable decay and a continent ripe for improvement was leftto poverty. The discovery of America, made by Carthaginians sailing fromthese outposts, though admittedly tenuous, was soon forgotten. By destroy-ing the city of Tyre and the Carthaginian republic, Alexander the Great andScipio Africanus ruined ‘the only two Governments in the World whichwere qualified to make all the rest of Mankind great and happy’. These menwere not glorious heroes, argued Defoe, but ‘two Furies of the World, thatoverwhelm’d Commerce in the rubbish of their Conquests; and neverconcern’d themselves with the loss which all the World felt by their Follyand Rage; nay, which we may say, some of the World feels to this Day’.22

Harvesting the easiest parts of the Carthaginian empire and leaving therest to die on the vine, the Romans delivered a serious blow to the generalprogress of mankind. Unlike the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, theRomans were addicted to military glory but indifferent to ‘the true gloriesof Peace, the improvement of the industrious, the employment of the Poor,the encrease of Navigation and Commerce or the making new Discoveries,

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in order to the better cultivating abandon’d Countries, or planting un-peopled Kingdoms in the World’.23 Defoe briefly acknowledged Romanachievements. They were skilled orators and poets, architects and builders.Their laws and regular government made property and people more secure,a necessary condition if trade was to flourish. Rome was primarily,however, a civilization based on conquest, not on commerce, and gettinghis readers to understand the importance of this distinction was one of hisprimary objectives:

it’s worth observing here, and it is one of the Reasons why I have enter’dso far into this particular; I say, ’tis worth observing how War, Tyranny,and Ambition, those Enemies to all peaceable Dispositions have contin-ual[ly] persecuted Trade; and how often the industrious trading part ofthe World has been beggar’d and impoverish’d by the violence and furyof Arms.

As Trade enriches the World, and Industry settles and establishesPeople and Nations, so War, Victory, and Conquest, have been thedestroyers of every good thing; the Soldier has always been the plun-derer of the industrious Merchant.

Instead of immortalizing men and praising nations for their militarism,Defoe argued that their names should ‘stink in the Nostrils’ of posterity,24 arather harsh and contradictory statement for one who championedWilliam III as a warrior king.

Almost half of A General History of Discoveries and Improvements wasdevoted to proving why it was not the conquering Romans but the com-mercial Phoenicians and Carthaginians who had established the greatestcivilization of the ancient world. This half of the text certainly betrays theinfluence of Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World, a work which Defoecited several times and probably owned. Both Raleigh’s and Defoe’s histo-ries were providential at their core, polemical in their praise of Carthageover Rome, and unfinished in their executions.25 Raleigh’s narrative endedbefore the birth of Christ; Defoe’s extended into the modern age butpetered out before the seventeenth century. Both writers were unusual inreversing the value signs traditionally ascribed to Rome and Carthage,ignoring tropes of Roman virtu and Carthaginian greed and perfidy. Byjuxtaposing his account of an ancient North Africa which had been bothrich and urbane with its present reputation as a desolate and lawless lair,Defoe hoped to make the case that the British government had to takeaction against Mediterranean piracy. At the same time, he was making hisstrongest claim to date of the superiority of commerce over conquest. Itcould be argued that taking action against the Moors of North Africa was infact an act of conquest, one that Christian Europe had no right to take.This objection might have validity, Defoe argued, if the Moors stopped


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preying upon their European neighbours; otherwise using military force tosuppress piracy constituted a defence of commerce, not an act of conquest.

The second half of A General History of Discoveries and Improvements pri-marily focused on how European trade and learning slowly recovered fromthe sorry conditions created by Roman apathy towards commerce and ulti-mately Roman imperial decay, a recovery process aided by the spread ofChristian virtues, the principles of liberty, and the discoveries of thecompass, gunpowder, and printing press. Though merchants in parts ofEurope continued to trade under Roman rule, Defoe claimed that a lack ofcommerce weakened the empire as a whole. When the Romans plantedcolonies, as they did in Britain, it was not to encourage trade per se but tosupply their armies. The Romans ‘planted for Conquest’, Defoe remarked,adding ‘we [English] planted for Commerce; they planted to extend theirDominion, we to extend our Trade’.26 Here he exaggerated Rome’s commer-cial backwardness. Roman rule did provide peace and protection but whatreally stimulated trade, Defoe wished to emphasize, was the spread ofChristianity. Early Christianity, Defoe pointedly remarked, did not tolerateall the vices which now infected Christian nations but instead

infus’d principles of Honesty and Plain-Dealing; it recommended ageneral rectitude of the Mind, a known integrity of Principle, a just andupright Conduct under the awe of an invisible Being, who inspected theminutest Actions, and wou’d call to account for the most secretconceal’d Wickedness; so that in short, where the Christians becameTraders, or engaged in Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, there, whoever dealt with them were sure to find … a general probity and exacthonest procedure govern’d all their Dealings; and this we cannot doubtencourag’d Trade.

Roman liberty which preserved property, coupled with the Christian reli-gion which provided people with the ‘Rules of all moral Virtues … the aweand fear of a divine Power, a righteous Judgment, and a futurity of Reward’,became the ‘Foundations [upon which] the World became more habitablethan before’.27

Roman liberty protected property but so too did gothic liberty. TheGoths who pushed into Spain ‘brought principles of Liberty with them (forGothic Governments, which are the very same upon which the BritishLiberties are formed, were all such as establish’d Government on the foun-dation of Property)’ and these principles, coupled with an early introduc-tion to Christianity, made them ‘a most diligent and industrious people’.28

Outright necessity or particular natural resources were lesser factors in stim-ulating commerce. Barbarians drove the Venetians to an island refuge andseafaring existence; herring called the Dutch to sea; abundant naval storesencouraged shipbuilding among the Teutonic Germans.

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Despite having the benefits of the Christian religion, the principles ofgothic liberty, proximity to the sea, and a wealth in wool, the English were‘very little acquainted with Commerce’ until the fifteenth century. Englishkings were perpetually at war while the people were obliged to serve thenobility either as foot soldiers in the field or as labourers on their lands.29

Defoe’s criticism of medieval England echoed his criticism of ancientRome. When war and conquest preoccupied emperors, kings, and elitesthen trade could not thrive. England first experienced the kind of leader-ship necessary to encourage commerce under Henry VII. Because several ofDefoe’s works examined Henry VII’s importance more fully, it makes senseto discuss his comments about his reign in this text alongside these otherworks.30 Henry’s reign, however, coincided with fundamental technologicalimprovements and these received their fullest treatment in A GeneralHistory of Discoveries and Improvements.

The fourth and final instalment of Defoe’s history celebrated the explo-sion of scientific, technological, and geographical discoveries made duringthe fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when the world experienced a ‘generalpossession or rather Inspiration to spread Knowledge through the Earth,and to search into every thing that it was possible to know’. Asking rhetor-ically, ‘WHAT was the World before?’, he answered it was an age in which‘War and the Sword was the great Field of Honour’, an age of Nimrods, not‘Sir Walter Raleighs, the Verulams, the Boyls, or Newtons’. Defoe praisedCopernicus and Brahe but much of his narrative focused on the impactmade by the printing press, gunpowder, and compass. Lavishing most ofhis attention on the last of these, he devoted an entire chapter to thesubject of magnetism, summarized the history of modern maritime explo-ration, and assured his readers that vast regions of the new world awaiteddiscovery as did ‘an Ocean of Commerce, and a Sea of Wealth’.31 If the firsttwo instalments of A General History of Discoveries and Improvements set thehistorical stage for recovery of what the ancients once had, namely a thriv-ing North Africa, the last two depicted a panorama of new opportunitiesfor modern discoverers to pursue, including a British colony in SouthAmerica.

iii. The benefits of princely prudence: the pivotal role of King Henry VII

The historical figure to receive the most attention in A General History ofDiscoveries and Improvements was not Scipio Africanus whose actions againstCarthage, according to Defoe, represented the most significant setback forhuman happiness and disregard of God’s divine plan in ancient or moderntimes. Nor was it any one of the great maritime explorers or new scientistsof the modern age who had done so much to extend mankind’s knowledgeof the physical world and the natural laws which governed it. Rather, in


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that text, and in his Plan of the English Commerce of 1728, another lengthywork which was part historical reflection and part political persuasion, theone actor whose motivations, actions, and impact Defoe thought especiallyimportant to record was Henry VII. During his several decades as a writer,Defoe had mentioned Henry VII from time to time but now, at the end ofhis career, the reign of the first Tudor king captured his historical imagina-tion as never before, both in these two major works and in lesser works ofthis period.32

Earlier English historians, most notably, Francis Bacon and JamesHarrington, believed that Henry VII had instigated fundamental historicalchange by using parliamentary statutes to curtail noble retinues andwealth, policies which resulted in a massive shift of power – economic,political, and military – to the commons. Defoe, no doubt, had read theiraccounts of Henry’s reign,33 but he developed his own analysis of thedecline of feudalism and the catalytic role Henry VII played in that process.Rather than focusing on royal suppression of baronial power, Defoe high-lighted the king’s systematic encouragement of English manufacturing andtrade which both enriched the kingdom and undermined the old order ofvassalage and villeinage, a social system which had kept both the squire-archy and commons at the beck and call of bellicose barons and princes.This interpretation was useful in more than one polemical context. In thelate 1720s Defoe’s was one of many voices calling for the government to domore to encourage British commerce and his account of Henry VII’s perspi-cacity and perseverance regarding the wool industry set the perfectexample for king and Parliament to follow. Secondly, by emphasizing theextent to which both land and status had changed hands in Tudor times,Defoe added an historical dimension to his ongoing efforts in the press toshow that successful tradesmen did become gentlemen and that the nobil-ity and gentry were not a race apart.

Between the Norman conquest and the reign of Henry VII, English kingsand their subjects experienced too much war and too little commerce andculture. It was a ‘meerly military’ age in which ‘the drum and the trumpet… drown’d the music of the Muses’ and progress in the arts and scienceswas negligible. Absorbed in continual warfare with other princes, the typicalmedieval king had a helmet on his head rather than a book in his hands.34

The great barons and religious houses had vast lands but these were taxed topay for various ‘ruinous Wars’ in France, the Holy Land, Flanders, andBrittany, taxes which fell most heavily on the gentry and clergy. When not‘exhausted by foreign Wars, peel’d and pol’d by their tyrant Princes’, thebarons ‘ravag’d and wasted’ each other in ‘civil Dissentions’.35 Royal andbaronial warfare ensnared the commoners too. Their ‘whole employ seem’dto be to wait upon the Nobility, and be at their beck, as we call it, to laquy itafter them to the War, which took up the first, or to till and plow the Land,and do the drudgery of the Husbandman, and this took up the last’. For

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want of work, they were too often willing to follow ‘Priests and Priest-riddenPrinces, ala Santa Terra, to find Graves in the Arabian Desarts’. With thesame ‘blind Subjection’, they followed the lord of the manor and ‘at hisCommand they would rebel against their King, and take up the Bow andArrow against whomever he commanded them’.36

During these centuries, Defoe lamented, the English knew little abouttrade and even less about manufacturing. Wool was the chief form ofwealth in the kingdom but estates were also sources of lead and tin. Outsidethe system of feudal obligations, rents were paid in sacks of wool, as weretaxes to the king. Vast amounts of English wool were exported annually,filling the coffers of the king and landed magnates and giving both thewherewithal to fight in foreign wars or against each other. But if the exportof lead, tin, and raw wool enriched the English baronage and crown, thetransportation and manufacturing of these goods, especially wool, made the merchants and citizens of Flanders and the Hanseatic towns far richer.While the people of the Low Countries grew rich and industrious turningEnglish wool into cloth, the export of wool kept most of the English popu-lation destitute and trapped within the manorial system:

The people were divided into Master and Servant; not Landlord andTenant, but the Lord and the Vassal; the Tenant paid no Rent, but heldhis Lands in Vassallage; that is, for Services to be performed …

The under People to these Tenants held by Villenage; that is theLabourers, those we now call Husbandmen and Cottagers, these did theDrudgery, were Grooms to look after his Horses, drive his Teams, fell hisWoods, Fence, Hedge, Ditch, Thresh, and in a Word, do all servileLabours; and for this they had their Bread; that is, they had a poorCottage, scarce to good as a tolerable modern Hogstye to live in, theydrank at the Pump, and eat at the Kitchen Door, Beggar like …

This was the Case, even in this flourishing Nation of England, tillTrade came in to make the Difference; and give me leave to assume somuch, I insist upon it, that Trade alone made the Difference; and theClimax is very remarkable.37

Henry VII was the first to see the folly of England’s exportation of rawwool and he ‘open’d the Nation’s Eyes to see into it also’.38 According toDefoe, Henry was quite a different prince than ‘the untaught race of kings’who preceded him. Those monarchs may have been glorious warriors andmagnanimous persons but Henry had the learning and experience his pre-decessors lacked. While in exile, he had educated himself with books atcourts in Brittany and France.39 More importantly, having lived as ‘a kindof Refugee in the Court of his Aunt the Dutchess of Burgundy’ and havingtravelled in Flanders, Henry had both heard about and seen for himself thefavourable effects of commerce and manufacturing in these regions. Their


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merchants were great, their burghers rich, their cities populous, and theirpeople industrious and prosperous. Furthermore, it could not escape hisnotice that all these benefits were largely derived from turning Englishwool into cloth. ‘To a Prince of such Penetration’, Defoe stated, ‘it couldnot but occur after he came to the Crown, that certainly England was muchin the wrong, to let their Wool go out of the Country thus unmanufac-tur’d, and to let Strangers be made rich by the working of it, while his ownPeople sat idle and unemployed … In short, he resolved, that if he couldprevent it, Strangers should no longer eat the Bread out of the Mouths ofhis own Subjects’.40 Henry understood, as no English king before him had,that ‘the strength of a kingdom consisted in the wealth of the subjects, aswell as in their numbers, that a king of beggars was fitt for nothing but tobe a king of thiev[e]s and plunderers’ and that ‘a wise king of wealthycowards would be more potent than a weak king of the most martialnacion in the world’.41

Henry was thus an ‘avaritious tho’ politic Prince’, one who had beendeeply affected by the plight of his poorer subjects and soon applied his‘superior Genius for matters of Improvement’ towards bettering their con-dition as well as his own.42 If his kingdom was to grow rich then his sub-jects must stop exporting their raw wool and finish it themselves. Thiswould provide much-needed employment and increase the value of Englishexports. Realizing the magnitude and diplomatic ramifications of such apolicy, Henry acted with prudence and caution. He did not immediatelyprohibit the export of wool but secretly invited over several master crafts-men from the Low Countries to instruct the English in every aspect of thewoollen industry. It was soon apparent that the English could spin woolbetter and more cheaply than Flemish workers and England began export-ing yarn. When the Flemish threatened to prohibit or tax English yarn,Henry got Parliament to temporarily stop the export of English wool,forcing the Flemish to ‘rumage the whole World for Wool to carry on theirBusiness’.43 In the end, the quantity and quality of English wool proved toogreat for the Flemish to ignore and they accepted the new trading condi-tions which Henry’s policies had created. As one improvement generallyleads to another, Defoe explained, the English soon began to engage inmore advanced aspects of the woollen industry. Realizing that it would besome years before his kingdom could acquire the manufacturing capacityto finish all its own wool, Henry willingly allowed trade to continue withthe Flemish rather than ‘destroy a Commerce, which he knew would oneTime or other be his own’. Within a hundred years, Defoe boasted, Englandbecame the centre for woollen manufactures. Elizabeth helped make thishappen for she too seized opportunities ‘for opening the Sluices of Trade toher Subjects’ by encouraging manufacturing at home, navigation, andexploration and the planting of colonies. It was, however, Henry VII whohad set the nation’s rise to commercial greatness in motion. In being cau-

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tiously proactive about England’s trade, ‘the King acted like a wise andwarlike Prince, beseiging a city, who tho’ he attacks the Garrison, andbatters the Out-works with the utmost Fury, yet spares the Inhabitants, andforbears as much as he can ruining the City, which he expects to make hisown’.44

The reign of Henry VII demonstrated that a king could take effectiveactions to improve trade and enrich his nation without necessarily ruiningcommerce or risking war with a trading partner or diplomatic ally. Defoeacknowledged recent ‘loud Complaints among us of the Decay of our Trade’thanks to various protectionist policies enacted by other European powers.Rather than focus on the consumption of British goods ‘in this or that PettyProvince’ or upon ‘Imitations of them’ produced by other European coun-tries, however, Defoe’s Plan called for ‘encreasing our Trade in other Placeswhere those Prohibitions and Imitations cannot reach’, namely in Africa andthe Americas. Despite arguments to the contrary, the government coulddevise policies which would promote British trade and colonization inthese areas, policies which might displease Spain or France but fall short ofprovoking serious reprisals, either commercial or military. The public, itseemed to him, had lost that ‘Trading Genius … and adventuring Temper’so characteristic of earlier ages and it required political leadership to revivethat spirit and to support ventures which might only bear fruit in the longterm. His plan was therefore ‘humbly referr’d to the Consideration of theKing and Parliament; they are Things worthy of a King, and worth[y] of apowerful Legislature to consider of; no Power less than that of King, Lordsand Commons, can put these Wheels of Improvement into due Motion’.Defoe was adamant that the lessons of history not be lost on the presentking or his ministers. The example set by Henry VII, he asserted, was ‘per-fectly fitted to fire the Breast of any succeeding Monarch, who desires theGood of his Subjects with the same Paternal Warmth for the generalImprovement; and for this End I mention it, and for this End these Sheetsare thus addressed to the supreme Powers of the British Government’.45

If Defoe intended these lessons of history to engage the minds of policy-makers in Whitehall and Westminster, he also hoped they might reformgentry prejudices throughout the country at large. Henry VII’s promotionof the wool industry had resulted in significant changes in the nation’ssocial structure, changes which Defoe believed contradicted the gentry’scherished assumptions about the antiquity of their families, the purity oftheir blood, their role in society, and the true foundation of their wealth.According to Defoe, the decay of feudalism did not result from Henry VII’slegislation regarding the alienation of noble estates and the keeping ofarmed retainers, as Bacon and Harrington had thought. Rather, Defoe’sargument anticipated the works of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, DavidHume and John Millar. Hume argued that the barons jettisoned feuding forthe more refined forms of competition and emulation made available by


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the growth of commerce and culture. But if Hume’s history highlighted thenobility’s gravitation towards luxury and the arts, Defoe’s focused on pro-duction first – on the increased opportunities which trade gave to bothvilleins and vassals and the monetization of feudal dues and land tenures.Only then did he treat the question of consumption, luxury, and theireffects on the economic and moral agency of property owners and uponthe redistribution of property itself. Keith Wrightson has argued that ‘withJohn Millar’s Historical View of the English Government (1787) the establishedthemes of English economic and social development were drawn into anew configuration’ as his analysis focused on woollen cloth productionrather than aristocratic consumption.46 It is, in fact, Defoe we must creditfor first emphasizing, almost sixty years earlier than Millar, the centralimportance of woollen manufactures as a catalyst for social change in early-modern England.

In Defoe’s historical scheme, thanks to the prudence of Henry VII, theEnglish ‘tasted the Sweets of Commerce’ and soon supplanted the Flemingsand Esterlings by finishing and shipping woollen manufactures themselves.The effects throughout the countryside, he argued, were profound:

As to the Country, the Revolution of Trade, brought a Revolution in thevery Nature of Things; the Poor began to work, not for Cottages andLiveries, but for Money, and to live, as we say, at their own Hands: TheWomen and Children learnt to spin and get Money for it, a Thingentirely new to them, and what they had never seen before. The Menleft the Hedge and the Ditch, and were set at Work by the Manufacturersto be Wool-Combers, Weavers, Fullers, Clothworkers, Carriers, and innu-merable happy Labours they perform’d, which they knew nothing ofbefore.

Once the English learned these skills from the Flemish manufacturersbrought over by Henry VII, they began to spread this knowledge andemploy each other:

Villains and Vassals were taken Apprentices to the Manufactures, tillcoming to be Masters, the Name, nay the very Things themselves call’dVassalage and Villanage grew out of Use. The Vassals got Money byTrade, and the Villains by Labour; and the Lords found the Sweets of ittoo, for they soon buy off the Services, and bring the Lords to takeMoney. Thus the Cottagers growing rich, bought their little Cotts withright of Commonage for their Lives, renewable so and so, as they couldagree, and this was called Coppy-hold. On the other hand, the Vassalsand Feuholders, as they are call’d to this Day in the North, growing rich,lump’d it with the Lords, and for a Sum of Money bought off theirslavish Tenures, and got their Leases turn’d into Free-holds; and to finish

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the great Fabrick, the Farmers of Lands were now enabled to take themat a Rent certain, and the Gentry got a Revenue in Money, which theyunderstood nothing of before.

Thus the domestic manufacture and export of wool cloth also wrought anew social ‘Fabrick’ no longer made up of dependent vassals and villeinsbut of independent freeholders and copyholders, rentiers and tenants.Production began these momentous changes but consumption continuedto transform English society. Defoe immediately continued:

I might enlarge here upon the differing Effects of Luxury and Frugality,which became more than ordinarily visible upon this Change of Affairs:namely, that as the frugal Manufacturers, encourag’d by their Success,doubled their Industry and good Husbandry, they lay’d up Money, andgrew rich; and the luxurious and Purse proud Gentry, tickl’d with thehappy Encrease of their Revenues, and the rising Value of their Rents,grew vain, gay, luxurious, and expensive: So the first encreas’d daily, andthe latter, with all the new encreas’d and advanc’d Revenues, yet grewpoor and necessitous, till the former began to buy them out; and have sobought them out, that whereas in those Days, the Lands were all in theHands of the Barons; that is to say, the Nobility, and even the Knightsand Esquires who had Lands, and were call’d the Gentry, held them byservile Tenures, as above: Now we see the Nobility and ancient Gentryhave almost every where sold their Estates, and the Commonality andTradesmen have bought them: So that now the Gentry are richer thanthe Nobility, and the Tradesmen are richer than them all.47

Thus, according to Defoe, few of the truly ancient class of knights had beenprudent enough to hang on to their estates and those that had done soowed both their estates and their emancipation to the forces of commerce.The assimilation of wealthy tradesmen into landed society may have accel-erated in recent years but the phenomenon was as old as the landed gentryitself.

Defoe’s account of the reign of Henry VII reflected his lifelong faith inthe divinity of trade and the blessings he believed a wise and virtuous kingcould bestow upon his subjects. While acknowledging that his account ofthe growth of commerce and the consequent demise of vassalage andvilleinage had sketched out the process in England only, Defoe assertedthat his observations held true for ‘all the trading Nations of Europe’.Wherever commerce had advanced, ‘the Miseries of the People ha[d]abated’ and the value of lands had increased. Moreover, ‘the Climax does notend here’, for as the value of land increased so too did a nation’s tax rev-enues and military potential. Since it was now a well-known maxim that‘’tis the longest Purse that conquers now, not the longest Sword’, he argued


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that it was foolish to blame other European countries for endeavouring toincrease their own manufactures or restrict the import of British goods.48

Even if the longest purse had recently enabled Britain to pay for largearmies, it was perhaps wiser to develop new markets than to wage war overold ones. If ‘our Trade is the Envy of the World’ and the Spanish, French,or Austrians were seeking to block or copy it, then it was incumbent uponthe British government and people to reawaken that spirit which had onceled the likes of Drake, Cavendish, Smith, Raleigh, and others to make newdiscoveries and ‘raise new Worlds of Commerce’.49

iv. Historical analysis in Defoe’s Compleat English Gentleman

Raising new worlds of commerce, Defoe realized, called for the razing of oldgentry prejudices against the trading sector of society, a problem headdressed in his Plan of the English Commerce but explored most fully in hisunpublished Compleat English Gentleman, the second most probably writtenin the months following the publication of his Plan in March 1728. Prideand ignorance encouraged the gentry to divide the world into two camps:first, ‘Gentlemen’, whom they distinguished by their descent from theancient barons though ‘with some Difficulty’ they also included the clergy,the soldiery, and men of learning; and second, ‘Mechanicks’ by which theymeant everyone else including tradesmen, whom ‘they divest of all Dignity,as well as of Degree; and blend together under one general, or rather com-mon Denomination’. Gentry contempt for tradesmen offended Defoe onseveral levels. It was a personal affront to be sure but it also contradicted hisdeeply held beliefs that Britain was a trading nation and that God’sprovidential purpose for man involved commerce and exchange. If publicopinion was ever going to be rallied to support new and ambitious colonialendeavours then a cultural reconciliation between land and trade wasneeded. Defoe seemed to take satisfaction in pointing out the frequent inter-changes between these two groups, especially the ready willingness of thegentry to restore or augment their economic position ‘by what they call CityFortunes’. Declining gentry families anxious to secure merchant heiresses tomarry or apprenticeships for younger sons, he pointed out, convenientlyforgot their scruples about mixing with the mechanic race if such alliancesheld out the prospect of reviving exhausted estates. Trade not only restoredflagging ancient families, it also planted new ones. Examples of wealthy cit-izens retiring from trade and buying estates abounded. Defoe estimated thatwithin the past two generations 500 great estates within a hundred miles ofLondon had been purchased by men who made their fortune in trade.50

The rise and fall of families in general seemed to Defoe a natural processbut one that had accelerated during his lifetime and he addressed thereasons for this in his Compleat English Gentleman. Writing in the guise of agentleman of ancient lineage himself, Defoe explained that ‘All family

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honour begins some where, either in trade, virtue, [or] favour of the prince,all assisting to the advance of fortune.’ Every previous age, he suggested,has witnessed the decline of a few ancient families and the rise of new oneswho, in a generation or two, were accepted as bona fide gentry. However, inthis age

Law, trade, war, navigation, improvement of stocks, loans on publicfunds, places of trust, and abundance of other modern advantages andprivate wayes of getting money … have rais’d a great number of familyesto not only prosperous circumstances, for that I am not speaking of, butto immense estates, vast and, till of late, unheard of summs of moneyamass’d in a short time and which have, in the consequence rais’d suchfamilies to a stacion of life some thing difficult to describe and not lessdifficult to giv[e] a name to.51

As the word ‘gentleman’ had come to mean a man whose familyhonours, house, and lands were his own ‘by prescription and usage timeout of mind’, people were reluctant to bestow that title upon men withnew fortunes. However, enquire too deeply into an ancient lineage, Defoeargued, and it soon collapsed ‘like a Rope of Sand’ revealing baser originsand less antiquity than current vanity would ever admit.52 The idea thatgentility was an inherited quality of the blood ‘as if there were some differ-ing Species in the very Fluids of Nature’, he treated with sarcasm.53

Although he discounted ancient lineage and bloodlines, Defoe did notwant to reduce the idea of gentleman to mean a man of ‘generous princi-ples’ alone, a definition useful for moral instruction perhaps but one which‘will not do for our purposes’. Nor did he wish to deny the concept of gen-tility altogether. ‘The Design of this Work is not at all to level Mankind, toblend the Low and the High together, and so make a meer Mob of thePeople’, he explained. Divine wisdom had provided for ‘differing Ranks andClasses in every Part of the Creation’ and he acknowledged a gentleman ‘tobe the Glory of the Creation, the exalted head of the whole Race, thatdemands Honour and Distinction from the rest of the World’. The goal ofthis work was rather to show the gentleman ‘how to place himself in therank which God and Nature design’d for him’.54

The central premise of the Compleat English Gentleman was that therewere really two sorts of gentlemen, the ‘born’ and the ‘bred’. The qualifica-tions of both should include sufficient wealth to support an estate and ageneration’s remove from the employment which created that wealth inthe first place. The independence which these first qualifications provided,moreover, must be used to good effect – to develop one’s mental and moralcapacities in order to become a man worthy of responsibility and emula-tion.55 This, Defoe believed, was exactly what the born gentlemen of hisgeneration were failing to do while their counterparts, the bred gentlemen,


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regularly demonstrated themselves to be men of learning, responsibility,virtue, and manners. At least while writing in the persona of a born gentle-men, Defoe was willing to overlook the first generation of a rising familybut the next was a different case:

I am willing to giv[e] up the first money getting wretch, who amass’dthe estate. Purse-proud, insolent, without manners, and too oftenwithout sence, he discovers his mechanick quallifications on all occa-sions; the dialect of the Alley hangs like a brogue upon his tongue, andif he is not clown clad in his behaviour, ’tis generally supplied with theusuall aire of a sharper and a bite …

But when I say I thus giv[e] up the founder of the house, I must yetopen the door to the politer son … Call him what you please on accountof his blood, and be the race modern and mean as you will, yet if he wassent early to school, has good parts, and has improv’d them by learning,travel, conversation, and reading, and abov[e] all with a modest courte-ous gentlemen-like behaviour: despise him as you will, he will be a gen-tleman in spite of all the distincctions we can make, and that not uponmoney onely … but upon the best of all foundations of families, I meana stock of personall merit, a liberal education, a timely and regular disci-pline and instruccion, and a humble temper early form’d and made therecepticle of the best impressions and subjected to the rules and laws ofbeing instructed.56

It appears the bred gentleman was to be the focus of the second part ofDefoe’s text, which remained unfinished. The first part, focused on the fail-ings of the born gentleman, was a subject which had attracted his attentionsince his earliest days as a writer.

Their failings, Defoe believed, were numerous but not irreparable for theywere chiefly the result of the nobility’s and gentry’s indifference to ordisdain for learning, particularly when it came to educating their eldestsons. Ladies more concerned with being fashionable than nurturing, placedthe responsibility for rearing their children in the hands of wetnurses,nannies, and tutors. They considered their sons to be too grand to attendschool where they might be hectored by sorry schoolmasters and mix with‘the rabble of every trades-man’s boys’. Tutors, as Defoe perceived them,were often fearful for their places and therefore apt to become ‘play-fellow[s]’ rather than instructors, encouraging a love of pleasure rather thanlearning in their young charges. Many gentlemen believed that educatingtheir heirs would be superfluous at best and dangerous at worst, rationaliz-ing that ‘reading and book knowledge did but serv[e] to form vast designsin men’s heads, sent them up to court, embark them in politicks, embroilthem with partyes, and by placeing them at the head of factions in theState, involv[e] them in frequent mischiefs, and some times bring them to

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ruine and distruccion’. As far as their own lack of education was concerned,some gentlemen lamented it, some acknowledged but ignored it, otherswere boastful, arguing their natural capacities and estates were ‘ornamentenough’ for a gentleman. For every gentleman who regretted his own lackof learning, Defoe claimed there were twenty who bragged about it.57

Defoe found this contempt for learning despicable in both its assump-tions and effects. While his fellow countrymen were always ready to com-plain about royal tyranny and arbitrary government they ignored the kindof paternal tyranny which allowed ‘absolute power in the head of thehouse to doom his subjects, that is his children, to be fools or wise men byhis meer arbitrary will’. Ignoring a child’s education was to commit a‘personal violence and injustice to the child’ and a ‘violence upon Nature,which I call an insult on Heaven’ as God intended that our reason andunderstanding be ‘cultivated and improv’d’. An ‘untaught, unpolish’d gen-tleman is one of the most deplorable objects in the world’, he argued. Thesoul of such a man was like a ‘lyon in a cage’, which has all its strength,beauty, and courage but ‘surrounded with impassable barrs’, unable to exer-cise its magnificence in the world as nature intended. The English nobilityand gentry should be ‘the envy … and the example of all the gentry inChristendome’: they enjoyed fine estates, secure property rights, a balancedconstitution, and ‘examples of the benefits of learning on their doorstep’thanks to the achievements of men like Newton, Locke, and Boyle. Instead,their disregard for learning exposed them to the contempt of their inferiorsat home and their equals abroad.58

A lack of education among the gentry, especially among eldest sons, hadimportant practical consequences. Luxury, extravagant spending, and adesire to emulate those above one’s own social station had infected everylevel of society but was, Defoe believed, particularly prevalent among thegentry. Ancient but perhaps less wealthy families especially felt a pressureto ‘live expensively’ in order to ‘look like other people’ thus spending morethan they could rationally afford. Years of borrowing often meant that‘what is left to the eldest son is a callamity, not an estate’. Defoe blamedthis false sense of pride and the poor financial decisions which supported itspecifically on a lack of education.59 A more educated gentry would have agreater sense of self-worth and more financial acumen than to fritter awaytheir inheritances for the sake of keeping up appearances. Extravagance andindolence had wider economic consequences as well. These habits kept thegentry from improving their estates which might give employment to thepoor and benefit the nation as a whole, a point Defoe explored more fullyin his Tour and Plan of the English Commerce.60

These ramifications extended into the political realm as well because anuneducated and profligate nobility and gentry could be more easily mani-pulated and corrupted by courtiers and politicians. Defoe expressed concernthat the nation might not be able to count on these men to defend its liber-


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ties should Britain ever again face a ruler or ministry determined to under-mine them. Ignorant and indebted gentry could be more easily ignored, toodim and distracted even to notice their own marginalization in the manage-ment of public affairs. Worse than being marginalized, they might also bemade the actual ‘engines and instruments’ of politicians bent on destroyingtheir own rights and privileges. Far from supporting the argument made bysome gentlemen that educating their sons might lead them into politicswith all its dangers, Defoe countered that education was necessary to keepgentlemen out of political danger. Although they might claim that posts andplaces were ‘civil badges of human drudgery’ compared to the rewards ofhereditary possession and the private life, bribes and pensions were all tooattractive to gentlemen burdened by reduced estates and addicted to‘thoughtless luxury’. Uneducated gentlemen, Defoe warned, could only bebuffoons at court and easy targets for factions and parties. If through briberyand influence they happened to be elected to the Commons, they couldnever act as effective leaders of a solid country opposition to the court’s par-liamentary managers.61

It seemed to Defoe that in denying the value of education, the gentrywere denying a responsible role for themselves in contemporary society.When asked about the proper role for gentlemen, Defoe claimed many ofthem insisted that ‘their dogs and horses, their sport, and their bottle arethe proper bussiness of a gentleman … that Heaven gave them estates toenjoy them … to satiate their souls with good, and to remove them fromall the dull unpleasant part of life called bussiness and application’. In theface of fundamental historical change, the gentry had happily acceptedemancipation from the military duties incumbent upon them in the feudalage but refused to accept any new social responsibilities in this age of com-merce and improvement. In conversations about war, they amused them-selves by scoffing ‘let beggars and mercenaries be knock’t on the head forwages’ as they now had money to pay for soldiers. As for commerce andimprovement, it was the usurer’s job to make money and the gentleman’s‘calling’ to spend it; learning remained ‘good, dull, poreing work for theparsons and pedants’. The unlearned gentleman, Defoe argued, was alsoincapable of assuming the role of moral exemplar, either for his posterity orfor society at large. Taught to love pleasure rather than learning from anearly age, he spends his youth ‘wallowing in sensuality, sloth, and indo-lence’ and his mature years ‘wearyed with … wanton excesses’, until hisdeath which ‘makes room for the untaught heir to live the horrid sceneover again’.62

It was easy to criticize the squirearchy as countless satirical depictions ofthe period make clear, but Defoe was also interested in the psychology ofan otherwise intelligent body of men deprived of learning by mere socialconvention. Young heirs, he remarked, ‘learn to kno’ they are gentlemenlong before they learn that they are men’. As their pride increased, their

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sense diminished until they learned to be proud of the fact they had noeducation. While Defoe could be scathing in his criticisms of the gentry hetook pity on gentlemen who could

neither look in, or look out, or look up; if they look’d in, they would seewhat empty, what weak, what unform’d things they are; if they look’dout, that is, look’d round them, they would see how bright, how beauti-full learning rendred other men, and what they might have been, if theyhad had justice done them in their educacion; as to the last theirlooking up, they that cannot look in can seldome look up: They that cannot contemplate themselves can very ill contemplate their Maker.63

Without any claim to merits of their own, they clung all the more firmly tothe idea that family pedigree alone exalted them above ordinary men. Thegentleman coming to terms with himself or with other uneducated gentle-men thus became ‘embarrasst in an inextricable labrinth’. On the onehand, the ‘law of nature’ compelled a rational mind to recognize thefoolish aspect of a person with more pride than sense. On the other,‘the rules of decency, which is nature in a gentleman’, obliged the indi-vidual to see himself and other gentlemen as superior creatures.

In this ‘particularly perplexing’ contradiction, Defoe saw the veneration ofform without substance, or in the cultural idiom explored in earlier chapters,idolatry. Society had come to worship the gentlemanly ideal purportedlypresent in the born gentleman but absent in reality like an ‘idol when thedeity is absent, as when our people bow to the candles upon the altar whenthey deny the Reall Presence, a sort of popery that every body may not thinkof’. Intellectually one accepted that many gentlemen had no real personalmerit but socially one still paid them deference. Of course there were sometrue ‘idolators’ who believed in the real presence of superiority simply uponseeing ‘escutcheons and trophyes’ and the ‘blazonry’ of gentlemen’s housesand Defoe knew that his text would invite their criticism. Nevertheless hewanted to show that the born gentleman, ‘abstracted from other Merit’, wasan ‘exalted Creature of our own forming … an Idol of our own, [and] likeNebuchadnezzar, we would have all the meaner World fall down and worshiphim’. He was willing to honour ‘ancient lineage as much as possible [but]without idolatry’ so long as the established gentry and nobility admitted that‘vertue, learning, a liberal educacion, and a degree of naturall and accquir’dknowledge, are necessary to finish the born gentleman; and that withoutthem the entitul’d heir will be but the shaddow of a gentlemann’.64

v. Conclusion

In writing The Compleat English Gentleman, Defoe sought to break andremake the hollow idol of a gentleman or, perhaps more accurately, he


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wished to suggest that, thanks to the forces of commerce, this iconoclasticprocess was now under way.65 As a young man during the reign of WilliamIII, Defoe had hoped for a regeneration of society in general and of thegentry in particular. Then he had put his faith in the reformation ofmanners initiatives and grand schemes for the establishment of nationalacademies of learning and military science like the ones he proposed in hisEssay upon Projects published in 1697. By end of his career, Defoe appears tosuggest that historical changes might eventually sweep aside ‘born’ gentle-men if they failed to find responsible roles for themselves in this modernage. The ‘bred’ gentlemen, or ‘modern gentry’ would, in time, ‘bring learn-ing and good educacion so much in fashion’ that they would ‘shame’ theancient gentry out of their ignorance and indolence and into becomingmore informed and useful members of society. Gentlemen who neglectedor refused to accept this new standard, Defoe asserted, would eventually be‘voted infamous, be hiss’d off the stage of life … and be no more rank’tamong the gentry: a happy time, which I have good reason to think is notvery farr off’.66

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9The Devil and Daniel Defoe: Historyin a Heterodox Age

i. Introduction

Commerce and gentility were central issues to Defoe until his death in1731 but his greatest intellectual preoccupation during the last decadeof his life was the rise of heterodoxy. In 1726–7, he produced a number oflengthy works to combat what Maximillian Novak has termed the ‘greatdeistic offensive of the 1720s’.1 Although John Toland, the most notoriousDeist of his day, had died in 1722, there were plenty of other writers whosechallenges to various aspects of orthodox Christianity Defoe felt compelledto address. Chief among these was William Whiston who succeeded IsaacNewton in the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics but was expelled from it in 1710 for heresy. By the 1720s Whiston had established himself as a kindof ‘entrepreneur of natural philosophy’, projector for various longitudeschemes, and promoter of Unitarian ideas.2 Another target was Whiston’sfriend and fellow Unitarian, Thomas Emlyn, whose Arianism and doubtsabout the authenticity of certain scriptural passages Defoe was especiallykeen to discredit.3 Defoe also responded to the Deistic content of the worksof Toland’s anti-standing army compatriot, Walter Moyle, which wereposthumously published in 1726. Other writers and provocations could beadded to this list. Directly or indirectly, Defoe’s defence of orthodoxy was acontinuation of his response to the Bangorian and Salters’ Hall controver-sies of the previous decade, discussed in earlier chapters, and to influentialheterodox publications by men like Samuel Clarke and Anthony Collins.4

In response to these writers and events, and to a perceived growth in irre-ligious attitudes and behaviours around him, Defoe produced a remarkableoutpouring of titles in which he reaffirmed the historicity of scripture, therole of special Providence, the reality of both demonic and angelic spirits,the limits of human reason, and the centrality of Trinitarian soteriology forregulating one’s conduct in this world and preparing one’s soul for thenext. This chapter will focus on four major works, each several hundredpages in length, which Defoe published between May 1726 and September

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1727. The first three, The Political History of the Devil, A System of Magick,and An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions, focused respectivelyon the precise nature and history of Satan, a survey of mankind’s preten-sions to supernatural powers, and the role of angels and apparitions inhuman affairs, though there was considerable thematic overlap betweenthem. Although most scholars acknowledge some seriousness in theseworks, there has been a tendency to minimize their intellectual importanceby describing them as ‘jocular’ in tone and more entertaining than edifyingin purpose, or by reading them as evidence of Defoe’s lifelong preoccupa-tion with the ‘occult’, itself a telling word.5 Rather they were specific, evenurgent, attempts to answer recent challenges to Christian orthodoxy byexamining them in the widest chronological context possible. The fourthwork, A New Family Instructor, is often read in the context of Defoe’s earlierdidactic manuals or for insights into his fictional methods but it too wasanother volley in his campaign against heterodoxy as well as his last state-ment on the truth of the Protestant religion and the doctrine of the Trinity.

Defoe ranged over the whole of human history in all four works, mostexplicitly in The Political History of the Devil and A System of Magick whichhe designed as two-part investigations into ancient (pre-Christian) andmodern (Christian) manifestations of their subject matter. The division ofthese texts into two parts, focusing on the interaction between humanityand the spiritual world before and after the birth of the Messiah, reinforcedDefoe’s message that original sin and Christ’s Atonement were the concep-tual bookends which held the volumes of secular time in place; removal ofeither of them threatened the meaning and order of human history as heunderstood it. Both doctrines, however, were being increasingly questionedby critics of revealed religion. Many of these thinkers promoted the idea ofnatural religion, a belief system available to all human beings by virtue oftheir inherent goodness and capacity for rational thought. The increasedacceptability of this kind of argument indicated to Defoe that he was nowliving in a time which, if not constitutive of a post-Christian age, was out-rageous enough in its intellectual hubris to differ from preceding periods.A comparison of Defoe’s attitude towards human reason in 1706 with histreatment of it by 1726 demonstrates the extent to which two decades ofcontentious public debate about natural and revealed religion had chas-tened him. In 1706, Defoe had dedicated Jure Divino, his other lengthyexploration of the Devil’s role in human affairs, to ‘REASON: First Monarchof the World’ and ‘The Almighty’s Representative and Resident in the Soulsof Men’.6 By 1726 Defoe believed he was witnessing the unwelcome end-point of an overweening faith in the power of human reason – an increasein religious scepticism and a concomitant decline in morality.

One example of the problem, as Defoe perceived it, was revealed by thefrustration he expressed in having to ‘direct … my story to an age, whereinto be driven to Revelation and Scripture-assertions is esteem’d giving up

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the dispute; people now-adays must have demonstration; and in a word,nothing will satisfy the age, but such evidence as perhaps the nature of thequestion will not admit’.7 This did not stop him from relying on the Bible,still early-modern Europe’s most important source for ancient history, buthe had come to realize that scriptural arguments were less efficacious thanthey had been a generation before; when he began his career as a propa-gandist, there had been no need to defend their use. Suspicion of scripturalproof, he noticed, had become not just a matter of questioning this specificsource of evidence but one which demanded a new intellectual style:

Unhappy Times! where to be serious, is to be dull and grave, and conse-quently to write without Spirit. We must talk politely, not religiously;we may show the Scholar, but must not show a Word of the Christian;so we may quote prophane History, but not sacred; and a Story out ofLucan or Plutarch, Tully, or Virgil will go down, but not a Word of Mosesor Joshua.

Well, we must comply however; the Humour of the Day must prevail;and as there is no instructing you without pleasing you, and no pleasingyou but in your own Way, we must go on in that Way.8

Defoe proceeded to do again what he had done in a lifetime of writing –he instructed his readers by entertaining them, giving himself licence touse humour and even sensationalism to defend orthodox positions whilecondemning heterodox thinkers, particularly those among the ‘polite’, foraddressing the most solemn subjects with ridicule and frivolity. He knewwhat sold books and laced these works with magicians’ tales, Faustianfables, and ‘Chimney-Corner Histories’ about Satan appearing in variousshapes, upsetting furniture and crockery.9 He also knew that by presentingthese stories against the far more dramatic background of sacred history, hemight replace his readers’ cloven-hoofed characterizations of the Devil as atrickster who made things go bump in the night with a serious appreciationfor Satan as an historical agent. If legends and ghost stories had trivializedthe real role that demonic and angelic spirits played in human affairs,thereby diminishing people’s understanding of the ultimate purpose of cre-ation, Defoe would remind them of the real drama of human history andthe true mystery of the Atonement, by which Christ alone releasedmankind from its fatal enslavement to the Devil.

ii. Satan and magic in the ancient world: from the creation toChrist

Satan was surely an evil force in history but there were limits to hisinfluence and even to his malevolence. First, as a seraphic spirit, the Devilhad considerable powers but, Defoe assured his readers, these were not as

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great as some of ‘the brain-sick heads of our Enthusiasticks’ suggested. TheDevil could not foretell the future; nor could he act ‘in the ordinarymanner as bodies do’ upon physical objects. He did, however, exercise the‘secret art or capacity of insinuation, suggestion, accusation, &c … bywhich he deludes and betrays mankind’.10 He was also assisted by manyspiritual agents who filled the air like insects in a ‘Beam of Evening Sun’.11

There were also innumerable benevolent spirits who communicated withmankind. The nature of this spiritual world was not well understood andalthough Defoe believed mankind might benefit from a greater understand-ing of it, those magicians who claimed to have special access to it werefooling themselves and others.12 Secondly, he pointed out, the Devil was‘a believer’ who ‘fears God’ and therefore has ‘more religion than some ofour men of fame’. The most despicable sins of this age – the atheist’s denialof God and Socinians’ and Arians’ diminishment of Christ’s divinity – wereones the Devil himself did not commit, enabling Defoe to traduce hetero-dox thinkers of his day for outsinning Satan himself.13

Satan’s fall from heaven was not merely a convenient place to begin hishistorical narrative but an issue with immediate relevance. The most cele-brated account of this event in the eighteenth century was undoubtedlyMilton’s Paradise Lost and here again a comparison between Defoe’s JureDivino and A Political History of the Devil is instructive. In 1706 Defoe couldcelebrate Milton as a ‘Masterly … Genius’ but by 1726 he felt compelled toexpose the Arian theology he saw as embodied in Milton’s epic poem.14

He contested Milton’s account on several grounds, most notably the text’slack of clarity about the coeval and co-equal nature of Father, Son, andHoly Ghost. Defoe dismissed the excuse of poetic licence for such a solemnmatter, pronouncing that ‘Mr. Milton is not orthodox in this part, but laysan avow’d foundation for the corrupt Doctrine of Arius’. Conceding thatParadise Lost was ‘a fine poem’, he nevertheless denounced it as ‘the Devil ofa History’ because it made ‘a meer je ne scay Quoi of Jesus Christ … jostleswith Religion, and shocks our Faith in so many points necessary to bebeliev’d’.15 It was perfectly correct, Defoe added, to recognize Satan’s prideas the cause of his expulsion but beyond that, conjecture, poetic or other-wise, was fruitless. No one could explain how an evil like the sin of prideentered heaven in the first place. To the question unde malum?, Defoeanswered that human beings must be content with ignorance until theyreached the ‘other side [of] the Blue-blancket, and then we shall know thewhole Story’, a modesty of mind, he believed, most heterodox thinkerslacked.16 In his counter-offensive against them, he thus continually stressedthe limits of human reason while confidently asserting Trinitarian theologyas a truth supported by solid scriptural evidence.

After the expulsion of Satan and his fellow rebel angels, Defoe explained,God took steps to replenish his heavenly host through the Creation.God’s new creature, man, was mean in appearance but ‘seraphic’ in spirit.

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Endowed with a soul and the capacity to know good and evil, he was ulti-mately ‘made in the very Image of God’ and destined, after a probationaryperiod on earth, ‘to enjoy that very Glory and Felicity, from which Satanand his Angel’s had been expell’d’. Because God had created mankind inorder to repopulate heaven, the Devil became humanity’s envious andimplacable enemy, determined to render men and women unworthy, as hewas, of paradise. Satan was not jealous of Christ, as Milton had suggested,but of his rival and replacement, man.17 By corrupting Adam and Eve, thecommon parents of mankind, the Devil had enjoyed considerable successbut he could never achieve ultimate victory because eventually ‘thePromise of Grace … purchased by the Messiah’ would save enough souls tofill the vacancies in heaven. ‘The World may be said to be upheld and con-tinued for the Sake of those few [souls]’, Defoe asserted, ‘since till theirNumber can be compleated, the Creation cannot fall, and more than, thatwithout them, or but for them it would not have stood.’18

Although the Devil had successfully introduced a fundamental taint intohuman nature, malice against his Maker and envy of his rival, man, com-pelled Satan to aggravate mankind’s compromised moral condition at everyopportunity. Encouraging neglect or defiance of God’s expressed com-mands seems to have been the primary strategy for his initial and contin-ued corruption of the first generations of mankind. Satan had, for example,tempted Eve to eat from the forbidden tree of knowledge. By appealing toher desire for divine wisdom, not to her physical vanity or appetite forpower, Defoe explained, the Devil had ‘set her Head a maddening afterDeism’, a decidedly polemical way to describe original sin. Defoe’s chrono-logy included other key events in the corruption of the earliest generationsof man. Satan goaded Cain into jealous fratricide, appealing to his preten-sions of ‘divine Right’ entitlement to God’s favour as the eldest Son ofAdam, an argument which resonated with attacks Defoe made againstdivine-right monarchy and the arrogance of eldest sons in other works.He tempted Seth’s godly sons to intermarry with the ‘Daughters of Men …the curs’d Race of Cain’ and prompted Canaan, the son of Ham, to makesport of Noah’s drunken nakedness.19

Defoe, like many orthodox thinkers, combined this kind of doctrinaldemonology with secondary causes to explain man’s continuing depravity.The most popular explanatory schemes included a general physical decay ofthe universe and the negative effects of human and environmental diversityon religion as the race of man intermarried, multiplied, and moved aroundthe globe.20 As discussed in previous chapters, Defoe rejected notions ofuniversal degeneration, believing instead that the world’s broken surfaceand regional diversity were part of God’s providential design to encouragehuman correspondence, discovery, and improvement. He also rejected theidea of travel and human dispersion as corruptive forces for the samereason. After the Fall and the Deluge, the destruction of Babel was the next


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biblical episode to generate historical conjecture in the early-modern period,an event crucial to Defoe’s increasingly sophisticated defence of commerceas a providential force in human history.

For many writers Babel represented yet another fall from grace formankind. Some speculated that the dispersal of humanity from the plainsof Shinar led people to lose touch with the sources of divine knowledgethus creating the conditions for religious pluralism and idolatry. Still otherstheorized that this dispersion led not just to religious degeneration but tocultural and even physical degradation as a once-settled population scat-tered around the globe. Some segments, it was true, soon settled down intothe promising patterns of agriculture and urbanization but other peopleswandered further afield, regressing into nomadism and savagery, a decid-edly backward step in the stadial schemes of enlightened historiography. Incontrast, a minority of writers, Defoe among them, took a more positiveview of human diffusion in the biblical world. The tower of Babel, Defoeposited, was not a literal staircase to heaven but an allegorical account ofthe timidity and folly of Noah’s descendants. Under Satan’s influence, theyhad ignored ‘God’s command’ to ‘replenish the Earth … spread theirHabitations over it, and People the whole Globe’, choosing instead to con-centrate all human and material resources into the building of one stupen-dous city.21 As Defoe explained the previous year in his General History ofDiscoveries and Improvements, such a plan was not ‘practicable’; Providencehad foreseen the need for global expansion, trade, and discovery if thehuman race was to sustain itself.22 By confusing their speech, God forcedthe separation of people into families, tribes, and nations, a train of eventswhich Defoe described as ‘the first Disappointment that I find the Devilmet with, in all his Attempts and Practices upon Mankind’. God had com-plicated Satan’s task by forcing him, as well as man, out of the cosilycircumscribed arena in which they had previously operated and into‘a thousand new scenes of Action’.23 The dispersion of humanity not onlyensured its material well-being, it held out hope for greater success in itsstruggle against the Devil as well.

The destruction of Babel soon remedied peoples’ initial refusal to re-populate the earth but ensuing developments ‘presented Satan with anOpportunity to break in upon their Morals at another Door (viz.) theirPride’. The confusion of tongues encouraged the formation of tribes or lan-guage groups and their development into flourishing nations. However,population pressure soon stimulated competition for land which the Devilexacerbated by encouraging pride within these groups and envy betweenthem. Even though there was still plenty of ‘Elbow-room’ in the world, asDefoe termed it, ‘Nations and Tribes began to jostle with one another …and so began Oppression, Invasion, War, Battle and Blood, Satan all thewhile beating the Drums, and his Attendants clapping their Hand[s], asMen do when they set Dogs upon one another’. Thenceforward, Defoe

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explained, goading nations into war ‘would take up a great Part of theDevil’s History’, a strategy he employed not only by provoking the collec-tive pride of peoples but also by arousing the individual ambitions of theirpolitical leaders. From Nimrod, grandson of the cursed Ham, to Louis XIV‘and many a mighty Monarch between’, Satan ‘has plaid upon the Frailtyof Princes’ by inflaming their ‘dreams of Empire’ and ‘universal Monarchy’.If conquest and tyranny were diabolical in origin, then so too were thosemilitary and aristocratic codes of honour which dismissed prudence on thebattlefield as ‘Cowardice’ and demanded satisfaction of one’s honour viathe duel. Equating ‘imaginary Things call’d Bravery and Gallantry’ with‘Virtue and Honour’ was all part of ‘the Devil’s new Management’. In orderto justify murder and conquest, Satan had ‘wheedled Mankind into strangeunnatural Notions of Things’ according to ‘Rules which God neverappointed’ and which Nature and Reason could not sanction.24

Taken by itself, it could be said that this account of the origins of con-quest and empire in the ancient Near East was more informed by Defoe’sprejudices against absolute monarchy and the persistence of feudal assump-tions than by any careful consideration of biblical chronology. The analysispresented in these works on the spiritual world, however, must also be readin the context of Defoe’s other historical narratives. Only six monthsbefore, in his General History of Discoveries and Improvements, Defoe hadchampioned the Phoenicians as the maritime and commercial exceptionwhich proved the rule, attested by Scripture, that the history of the ancientNear East had been largely dominated by a succession of conquests andland-based empires – Babylonian, Assyrian, Macedonian, and finallyRoman. In three decades of almost daily engagement with public opinionabout matters foreign and domestic, Defoe had developed a view of historyin which God’s providential design favoured commerce and the growth ofknowledge as the route to human fulfilment on earth. War and conquestwere negations of these human potentialities, a corollary most fullyexplained in his General History of 1725, and now rearticulated in 1726 as achief component of Satan’s design to undo mankind.

After sabotaging relations between men by encouraging warfare and con-quest, Satan next sought to destroy relations between men and their Makerby leading them into idolatry. Defoe made a point of denying Deistic argu-ments that idolatry was either a primitive manifestation of natural religionor some corrupted version of it at ‘one remove’ from the original. His ownexplanation relied on a patristic theory of the demonic origins of idolatrybut he was willing to augment this with the kind of euhemeristic argu-ments being developed by both orthodox and heterodox thinkers of theperiod. Echoing the thesis he initially set out in Jure Divino, Defoe arguedthat idolatry first appeared when men sought to sanctify their own politicalpower. Satan’s first ‘Hero’, Nimrod, feared as the mighty hunter of men inlife, idolized as the mighty Belus or Baal in death, became the founding


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father of both empire and euhemerism in the ancient world. Satan, Defoereiterated, ‘proceeded politically and by Degrees’, encouraging men first todeify and worship other dead heroes and kings, then to venerate ‘Statuesand Bustoes representing their Persons’, and eventually ‘to adore everyBlock of their own hewing, and to wor[ship] Stocks, Stones, Monsters,Hobgoblins, and every sordid frightful Thing, and at last the Devil himself’.Political ambition and the Devil’s cunning had led men down the perni-cious path towards idolatry but cultural conditions also contributed to thisprocess. The lack of written records, Defoe conjectured, facilitated thetransformation of fact into fable and fabrications into sacred objects. ‘Oraltradition, and the Tongues and Memories of fallible Men’ turned pastactions into deeds of ‘Miracle and Wonder’ and dead kings who performedthem into demigods. Satan provided additional motivation by insinuatingthat the true God was such a ‘dreadful, unapproachable Being’ that worshipof him was impossible without ‘the Interposition of some Medium whichmight receive their Adorations in his Name’.25 The notion of a purelyvengeful God, this passage suggested, was a diabolical invention, not anecclesiastical one as heterodox thinkers often charged.26

By leading men away from peaceful correspondence into war and fromworship of the one true God into a panoply of idolatrous practices, the Devilsucceeded in further debauching mankind. So complete was Satan’s victorythat God was obliged to undertake a ‘new kind of Creation … and call a selectNumber out from among the rest, who he himself undertook should own hisGodhead or supreme Authority, and worship him as he requir’d’.27 As God’schosen people, the Jews proved to be Satan’s toughest challenge in theancient world but they too succumbed to sin and the demonic pressures ofwar and idolatry. As summarized by Defoe, their story simply confirmed whatDeistic writers sought to deny, namely the continuing intervention in humanhistory by both a destructive Devil and a righteous and omnipotent God.

Many heterodox thinkers dismissed demonic explanations for idolatryand emphasized priestly rather than royal ambition as the key factor in itsrise. Deists like Toland and Collins argued that natural religion had beenco-opted and corrupted by the priestly castes of antiquity who invented ahost of superstitious practices and beliefs, including the notion of originalsin, as a means of social control.28 Defoe partially accepted a historical sce-nario in which priestcraft came to flourish but denied the premise that anatural theology, accessible to all human beings through reason alone, hadbeen corrupted. Religious truth, he repeatedly asserted, could only be ascer-tained through the gift of divine revelation. As we shall see, Defoe soughtto condemn rational religion as a new cult of reason and its proponents asmodern magicians. He therefore sought to explain the rise of priestcraft asthe consequence of man’s natural but misdirected quest for knowledge anddesire to maintain social status. Then, as now, he argued, this combinationcould lead people in foolhardy, even dangerous, directions.

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Although ancient men and women had lost much of Adam’s understand-ing of the world, they did possess ‘a vehement and inflam’d Desire afterKnowledge, planted in their Minds by Nature it self’, a sense ‘of a vastTreasure hidden in Nature apt for Discovery’, and a ‘vast capacious Under-standing fitted for that Search’. In the ancient world, he explained, theword ‘magician’ originally referred to scholars and men of science, learnedfigures either schooled in the knowledge of previous authorities or menwho ‘studied Nature … made Observations … and were Masters of perhaps alittle experimental Philosophy’. Esteemed in an ignorant age for theirextraordinary wisdom, they were soon revered by the common people anddrew the praise and patronage of princes and kings. Though government atthis time was patriarchal, some of these wise men, like Cadmus andPrometheus, became political leaders in their own right. As the world grewmore knowledgeable, however, these learned men had to preserve theirsuperiority and status by learning more, by ‘searching farther and fartherinto the Arcana of Nature’. Three strategies presented themselves. Theycould delve into the study of astronomy and mathematics, as the magi whofollowed the Star of Bethlehem had done. They could pursue ‘experimentalPhilosophy’ and become, among other things, physicians and naturalists.They could also pursue ‘the Study of Reason (viz.) Natural Homage, and theWorship of the Gods’. The first two options enabled these magicians to pre-serve their dignity and usefulness. The third way, however, was the door to‘all the wicked things, which have since … given a black Character to thevery Name of a Magician; for under the shelter of Religion, the worst andmost Diabolical things were practis’d’.29 Defoe’s Baconian sensibilities hereare unmistakable. God had intended mankind to use reason to improvehuman existence through discovery and improvement of the natural worldbut religion was a matter of faith and revelation.30

Defoe wished to make it clear that not all wise men in the ancient worldwere magicians and that the transformation of some of them into diabolicalsorcerers was a ‘long Progression of Studies’. The key phase in this transi-tion, he believed, took place in Egypt, regarded as an especially superstitiousand idolatrous place, and happened sometime between the eras of Josephand Moses.31 An Egyptian mix of philosophy, idolatry, and priestcraft thenspread throughout the Near East and Mediterranean world. While somepagan priests willingly deceived the vulgar in order to preserve their ownpower and status, many may have come to believe they possessed specialaccess to the gods. In this belief, however, they themselves had beendeceived by the Devil, who was more than happy to use them as agents ofidolatry. Satan strove to keep as much of the ancient world as possible miredin various forms of paganism. Even the Jews, and the Christians after them,who found special favour with God, were not inoculated from the attrac-tions of idolatry and spectacle, as the history of Israel and RomanCatholicism were to prove.


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Defoe admitted that convincing his readers to associate pagan idolatrywith the Devil was a difficult task while other writers were busy extollingpaganism, in whole or in parts, for its principles of justice, morality, dedica-tion to the public good, and homage to a ‘Divine Being’ or ‘first movingCause of Life’.32 A System of Magick contains a lengthy attack on NumaPompilius, whom he identified as a favourite of these writers, and onRoman paganism, a move which alerts us to an important but hithertounappreciated context for understanding Defoe’s text. In the early monthsof 1726, The Works of Walter Moyle were posthumously published. This two-volume edition included Moyle’s celebrated Essay upon the Constitution of theRoman Government, a tract widely circulated in manuscript in the wake ofthe standing army controversy of 1697–8. Moyle had been an importantparticipant in that debate, a learned polemicist and man of letters and acompanion of John Trenchard and John Toland, two of Defoe’s most impor-tant adversaries in print. Moyle’s Essay, a key text in the history of Englishrepublican thought, has justly attracted the attention of historians of polit-ical thought for its Harringtonianism and analysis of Rome’s civil con-stitution.33 What most attracted Defoe’s attention, however, was Moyle’sanalysis of Rome’s ecclesiastical constitution.

Moyle praised Numa, successor to Romulus, for perfecting a system ofworship based upon ‘the Common Principles of Religion all Mankind agreein’. Numa did not ‘enjoin the belief of Contradictions and Impossibilities’or ‘clog … it with Creeds and Catechisms, and endless Niceties about theEssence, Properties, and Attributes of God’. Nor did he ‘require the belief ofmany Articles of Faith, which create Schisms and Heresies’. He institutedspecific forms of worship but tolerated dissent from them and ‘did notextend to regulate the Opinions or Devotions of private Men’. He pro-moted belief in the ‘Doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul’, not because itwas an accepted truth but because it was on par with other ‘Fables’ whichwere ‘of great use and service to the state’. In compliance with vulgaropinion of the day, Moyle asserted that Roman elites paid lip service to ‘theGodhead in the plural number’ while privately and solemnly believing in‘the Unity of the Godhead’ themselves. He added that although Romanpriests may have originally had considerable power, they eventually cameunder full control of the state, which greatly contributed to republicanliberty.34

Moyle’s reverence for the lawgiver Numa was, in part, an attack onTrinitarian Christianity and a manifesto for natural theology framed within a civil religion, and Defoe certainly recognized it as such. He hadbeen condemning commonwealthmen for their heterodoxy for decades:Trenchard in the 1690s, Toland in the 1700s and 1710s, and now Moyle inthe 1720s. Reminiscent of Robinson Crusoe’s impassioned destruction of the giant wooden idol in the Farther Adventures, Defoe set upon Moyle’spraise of Roman paganism with blistering prose.35 For all his ‘Sincerity

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and Piety’ Numa’s religion amounted to little more than a ‘confus’d Mass of idolatrous Ceremonies’ and ‘a Scheme of pompous Paganism’. He may have acknowledged a ‘supreme Power, a God of all the Earth, a great first Cause of Life’, but he filled his city ‘with Temples and Altars, to innumerable and unknown Deities’, established inhumane games andgladiatorial sport ‘in Honour of the[se] Gods’, deified the stars, and createdserried ranks of priests to offer sacrifices to ‘Stocks and Stones, the Work oftheir own Fingers, and the Idols of their own Brain[s]’.

The Romans, Defoe continued, ‘were the most civiliz’d Heathens thatthe World ever saw; their Government had in it all the Appearance ofJustice and Moderation’ and their people honoured virtue, love of coun-try, courage, ‘Temperance, Eloquence, Learning and Philosophy’. And yettheir augurs, soothsayers, and priests were nothing more than ‘Magicians’and ‘Dealers with the Devil … in the worst Sense’. Their games, sacri-fices, and rituals designed ‘for appeasing the angry Gods, were the most horrid and barbarous Pieces of Ignorance, or hellish Cruelty andBrutality, that could be imagin’d’, entirely ‘unworthy of God’ and ‘inconsistent with his Nature’. The Romans may have ‘erected Temples toJustice, to Honour, to Virtue, and to Peace’ but they also ‘studied all possible ways, by War, and Blood, to amass Treasures, and enlarge their Empire, ’till, as the Roman Histories confess, they left no Nationunsubdued, except such as they found it not in their Power, or worth theirwhile to Conquer’. It was not only the rabble of Rome who had beendeluded by this system but its ‘Philosophers … Poets [and] Men of themost exquisite Parts, and the most polite Knowledge’. Barbarism on thisscale, with its veneer of civility and religiosity, Defoe concluded, had tohave been aided by ‘the Magick and Artifice of the Devil and hisInstruments’.36

Other authors had praised other heathen lawgivers – Solon, Lycurgus,Confucius – for their morality, justice, and ‘natural Principles of Religion’.Like Numa, whatever their wisdom and piety, Defoe argued, these exam-ples were insufficient proof that true religion could be ascertained withoutthe gift of divine revelation:

God for wise Ends did not think fit to accept these little Emanations ofNatural Light, or to reveal himself to the Persons; however sincere theymay be said to be in the pursuit of Divine Light … those naturalReasonings were not sufficient to inform the Mind of Man concerningGod; But … for want of farther Illuminations, the Devil was suffer’d tochop in, and confound all their brightest Ideas of Worship, with a horridRhapsody of complicated Idolatry.

The fact that the wisest and most virtuous men in human history wereincapable of perceiving God should have been sufficient to


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crush the notions which our more Polite Gentlemen now advance …that the humane Judgment is in its self infallible, and therefore in somemanner equal to the divine Being … [and] which, if rightly cultivatedand improv’d … guides the Soul to understand things in a superior way;This they say is Magick … and this, say they, duly follow’d, would fromthe Beginning have made Men be, as the Serpent told them they shouldbe, viz. like Gods, knowing Good and Evil.37

Unfortunately, Defoe believed, the polite world’s worship of reason, ‘likeour late South-Sea Stock’, had become a ‘general Infatuation’ which defiednature and common sense, and threatened the moral order of society.Reason, like credit, was a marvellous faculty but it had to be properlygrounded and managed for the individual and society alike to reap itsbenefits.38 War, conquest, and idolatry, Defoe maintained, had been Satan’sprimary means for rendering men and women of the ancient world unfitfor heaven. That world, and Satan’s overwhelming success within it,changed dramatically when God made his most important intervention inhuman history in the person of the Son.

iii. Satan and magic in the modern world: from Christ to theBeau Monde

If the Satan of the ancient world was enraged by the prospect of humanbeings taking his place in heaven and instituted warfare and idolatry tostop it, Satan in modern times became apoplectic upon ‘seeing Man …placed in a State of Recovery’ by Christ’s perfect sacrifice, a promise ofRedemption not offered to the Devil and ultimately beyond his power toprevent. In answer to the question as to why Satan would bother to corruptmankind in the face of ultimate defeat, Defoe had simultaneously to assertthat although the Devil had always understood Christ to be the Son of God(pace Milton and other Arians), he was ignorant of the future and did notfully understand ‘the Mystery of the Incarnation’. By encouraging Judas tobetray Jesus, for example, the Devil did not realize that through his death,Christ would rescue the repentant and fulfil all scriptural prophecy.39

Satan thus remained determined to encourage his rival man to sin ratherthan repent, fomenting war and idolatry where possible while developingnew strategies when these older methods proved less effective in aChristianizing world.

One of these new strategies, religious persecution, quickly proved to beineffective. Despite the Devil’s arming the whole Roman Empire againstthe Christians, their numbers continued to increase. The Church’s verysuccess, however, eventually provided Satan with new opportunities to takeadvantage of man’s corrupt nature as the institution’s growing wealth andpower encouraged greed and ambition among its churchmen. Not surpris-

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ingly, Defoe characterized the growth of the papacy’s spiritual and tem-poral powers as Satan’s own ‘Restoration’, a new ‘Epocha’, and his mostimportant victory over mankind since the Fall. It was largely through thepapacy that the Devil continued to employ his favourite methods of idol-atry and warfare in Europe. By introducing ‘so many Gewgaws’ and ‘devil-ish Principles’ into the Christian faith, the Catholic clergy turned Christianworship into idolatry.40 By ‘empower[ing] every Priest to make a God for’em with a half Ounce of Meal’ and then turning the eating of this god into‘Part of their most solemn Idolatry’, popery had surpassed ‘all the Magickof Paganism, and all the Conjurations of Hell’ which preceded it.41

Through his ‘alliances with Rome’ Satan had also been able to embroilEuropean nations in a ‘long list of massacres, wars, and expeditions inbehalf of religion’. From the first Crusades in the Holy Land to the last ofthe Wars of Religion in Europe the papacy had spent sickening sums of blood and treasure, to Satan’s rather than God’s great satisfaction.42

While the papacy and its allies had frequently resorted to war in order tofurther their aims in the past, Defoe commented that commercial competi-tion and cultural developments had made a permanent, unified Catholicfront against Protestantism impossible. Defoe now offered some ‘comfort[to] those faint-hearted Christians among us who cry out the Danger of areligious War in Europe’. The immediate context for these cries had beenthe formation of a diplomatic and commercial alliance between Austriaand Spain the previous year. What some took as evidence of a unitedCatholic conspiracy designed to aid the Jacobites, recapture Gibraltar, andundermine British trade in the Far East, Defoe was inclined to dismiss asHapsburg bluff.43 The inability of Spain, Austria, or France to effect any per-manent offensive alliance, he argued, was an unintended consequence ofthe Devil’s influence over Europe during the middle ages. While Satan hadfostered ecclesiastical unity under the Whore of Babylon, he had simulta-neously encouraged the personal jealousies and ambitions of feudal lords.Over time, regional differences in climate, commerce, and manners calci-fied the fluid divisions of feudal warfare into permanent national bound-aries. Discord between the Christian princes of Europe had served the Devilwell when it prevented unified action against ‘the growing power of theTurk’ in the fifteenth century but spectacularly backfired against him bythe sixteenth when it prevented sustained and unified action against the Reformation. Britain need not fear a coordinated Catholic militaryoffensive:

Jarring Humours may be reconcil’d, but jarring Interests never can: Theymay unite so as to make a Peace, tho’ that can hardly be long, but never soas to make Conquests together; they are too much afraid of one another,for one to bear, that any Addition of Strength should come to theother.44


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Spain and Austria might well take measures to improve their commerce butconquest was a different story. These comments were a remarkable foretasteof what John Pocock has called ‘the Enlightened narrative’ which positedthat Europe was emerging from an era of confessional strife into a new agein which concerns about commerce and the balance of power dominatedrelations between nation-states.45 Instead of pursuing this line of argumentfurther, however, Defoe demurred. After the lines quoted above, he added,‘But this is a Digression. We shall find the Devil mistaken and disappointedtoo on several other Occasions, as we go along’ and he returned to discussSatan’s latest methods for influencing actors ‘on that Stage of Life we callthe State’.46 Regardless of Defoe’s own increasing consciousness that thestate itself was operating within a novus ordo seclorum, his campaign againstheterodoxy was premised upon an even grander narrative, the problem ofsin and redemption within that new world order.

If persecution and religious warfare had been less efficacious in theChristian era than the Devil had hoped, Defoe suggested that ‘Liberty inReligion’ and ‘the sowing [of] Error and Variety of Opinion’ had been theDevil’s best strategy for corrupting men and women in modern times.Satan first put ‘this new foot of Politicks’ forward in the fourth century byencouraging Roman civil authorities to support the heresiarch Arius againstAthanasius, orthodox Bishop of Alexandria. History provided many exam-ples of the Devil’s success in promoting heresy and of the danger that reli-gious liberty posed to the true faith, not least to Defoe’s own co-religionistswhom he admitted were

evidently weaken’d by the late Toleration: Whether the Devil had anyhand in baiting his Hook with an A[ct] of Parliament or no, History issilent, but ’tis too evident he has catch’d the Fish by it; and if the honestChurch of England does not in Pity and Christian Charity to theDissenters, straighten her Hand a little, I cannot but fear the Devil willgain his Point, and the Dissenter will be undone by it.47

As explained in Chapter 2, although Defoe’s principled stance against thepractice of occasional conformity complicated his relationship with theDissenting community he had also been an even more vociferous critic ofAnglican animosity towards his co-religionists. It may therefore seem odd tofind him calling for more Church stricture but such was the despondency ofOld Dissent by the mid-1720s. As a young man during the reign of James II,Defoe had scorned to accept any liberty of conscience he believed wasdependent upon the dispensing power of an arbitrary and papist prince. Inthe wake of the Glorious Revolution, he had happily embraced the limitedtoleration guaranteed by Parliament and held out hope for future compre-hension within the national Church or at least for peaceful coexistencealongside it. That optimism was tempered by renewed Church militancy

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under Queen Anne and all but extinguished by Presbyterian divisiveness atSalters’ Hall in 1719. English Presbyterianism was a dying sect and its fateillustrated Defoe’s own belief about man’s struggle against Satan: the realdanger came from the ‘Treachery of the Garrison within’.48

That danger was manifest not just within Defoe’s own splinteringDissenting community but in the heart of the religious, social, and politicalestablishment of England. Defoe still insisted that the Devil and his agentscommunicated with mankind using the ‘soft still Methods’ of persuasion,suggestion, and the gratification of corrupt desires but he asserted that thenature of human desires had changed:

as Men in general seem to have alter’d their Manner, and … move in a higher and more exalted Sphere, especially as to Vice and Virtue; so the Devil may have been obliged to change his Measures … As thetaste of Vice and Virtue alters; the Devil is forc’d to bait his Hook withnew Compositions; the very Thing call’d Temptation is alter’d in itsNature.

As ‘the World is improv’d every Day’ and with the ‘encrease of Knowledgeand Discovery’, men and women were less motivated by fear than by ‘Wit,Beauty, and gay Things’. They had become ‘too much Devils themselves’ tobe afraid of Satan, who happily accepted his rivals’ growing capacity to dohis work for him.49 Treating God with ‘Indolence and Negligence’ and theDevil with ‘Complaisance’, they believed themselves ‘wise Men’ but were,in fact, ‘Fools’.

The nation’s elite, Defoe argued, were not only doing the Devil’s work for him but surpassing him in their wickedness by denying either someaspect of God’s divinity or his existence altogether. The Devil now seemedto have ‘no Business but to sit still and look on’ while men became ‘Agentsin their own Destruction’.50 The ‘Beau mond[e]’, whom Defoe fre-quently castigated for their failure properly to educate themselves or their children, nevertheless seemed to be idolizing the powers of humanreason, embracing it not simply as a spark of the divine within man but asa faculty capable of determining what constituted the divine itself.Suddenly men who had previously eschewed learning of any sort were noweager to

dip into Polemicks, study Michael Servetus, Socinus, and the most learnedof their Disciples; they shall reason against all Religion, as strongly as aPhilosopher, blaspheme with such a Keenness of Wit, and Satyrise Godand Eternity, with such a Brightness of Fancy, as if the Soul of a Rochesteror Hobbs was transmigrated into them; in a little length of Time morethey banter Heaven, burlesque the Trinity, and jest with every sacredthing.


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It was bad enough, Defoe thought, that so many ‘Men of Quality … whoseupper Rooms are not extraordinarily well furnished in other Cases’,believed their own minds superior to revealed truth and religious authoritybut these men had become ‘so very witty in their Wickedness’ as to ‘gatherAdmirers by hundreds and thousands’.51 Many gentlemen, he charged,espoused heterodoxy because it provided morally easier alternatives to atheology which promised eternal punishment for sin. He also realized,however, that more pernicious than the self-serving rationalizations ofeven a large number of libertines was the promulgation of ‘damnableDoctrines in Religion … by Men of apparent Sanctity’ and reputation.Dissenting or Anglican, seemingly reputable men were spreading dis-reputable ideas, harbouring ‘Blasphemy against the Holy Ghost … anddenying the Godhead of him who is God blessed for ever’.52

Via emulation or indoctrination, English men and women were follow-ing the heterodox examples and lessons set by their lay and clerical super-iors. Defoe was aware of the more clandestine channels in whichheterodoxy spread – infamous aristocratic drinking clubs and secret soci-eties in which gentlemen ‘go a mobbing among those meanest of madthings called freemasons’.53 More obvious to him, of course, were thepublic sites in which ideas were exchanged and promoted. The most impor-tant of these was the pulpit, as the Bangorian and Salters’ Hall controver-sies had made clear.54 If one were to punish those who were now ‘dividingthe Trinity, and unsanctifying the Holy Ghost’, Defoe exclaimed, what‘Church, Chappel, Meetinghouse or Congregation’ existed which ‘wouldnot be divided against it self’? What ‘Inns of Court, Palace, College, orUniversity’ would not be decimated?55 Realizing the less sanguine aspectsof doux commerce, however, Defoe paid even greater attention to new com-mercial and sociable venues of communication. In the parlance of modernscholarship, one might say that Defoe was essentially criticizing the elitesfor creating an amoral and heterodox public sphere. This was not thepublic sphere of Habermasian rational debate,56 however, but one in whichthe pretence of reason was worshipped and glorified. He condemned agrowing culture in which ‘Fops are the Men of Weight’, the Tatler and ‘theeternal Clang of Tea-Table Tattle’ had become the arbiters of morality andmanners, and booksellers catered to customers who bought the most andread the least, those ‘Sir Timothy Title-Page[s]’ who knew ‘the first Leaf ofevery thing’ thereby covering their ‘Ignorance of the Inside of any thing’.57

It was a world in which women participated ‘infinitely more so than waspossible in former Ages’ but they did so largely through ‘three new-invented Colleges’ of which Defoe had frequently expressed his dis-approval. At the ‘Tea-Table, the Assembly, and the Masquerade’, ladieslearned, respectively, to be ‘Light-headed … Light-hearted, and … Light-heel’d’.58 There was ‘Money to be got’ by entrepreneurial freethinkers likeWilliam Whiston who delivered lectures ‘for the Instruction of young

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Magicians’ in various London coffee-houses after his ejection fromCambridge for Arianism.59

Defoe identified the extreme rationalism of heterodoxy as a new form ofmagic and the historical analysis he presented in his works of 1726–7 wasshaped to make this point. The heterodox fops and wits of his own day hadtheir antecedents in the astrologers and magicians of antiquity whom theDevil had invited ‘to search after more Knowledge than Nature couldinstruct them in’.60 A dominant message of these works was that hetero-doxy had entered a new phase which saw no limits to the powers of thehuman mind and refused to accept ‘any such thing as an Incompre-hensible’. The attitude of ‘some of the politest Men in this Age’ nowseemed to be that all things should be ‘measured … as it were by scale andcompass’ and that unless they could be ‘see[n] with their Eyes, and Fe[lt]with their Hands’, all doctrinal mysteries should be repudiated. Defoeacknowledged that there were different levels of disbelief. Arians andSocinians, by denying the coeval and co-equal nature of the Son with theFather, reduced the status of ‘their Saviour’ to one ‘below the Devil’.61

Sceptics accepted the notion of God but divested him of those attributeswhich made him the object of adoration, homage, and affection. Deistsreduced God ‘to a Level with our Reasoning … robbing him of the Power ofRewards and Punishments, and making him so good, so kind and gracious,that they do not leave him room to be Just’. Atheists surpassed all forms ofChristian heterodoxy and pagan heathenism too for ‘instead of worship-ping many Gods, [they] save themselves the trouble of Idolatry, andworship no God at all’.62

Such a taxonomy was not unusual but Defoe extended his argument toconsider recent defences of atheism and these variants of heterodoxy notmerely as greater or lesser examples of unbelief but as symptomatic of a newkind of enthusiasm. While his readers might believe that ‘all Enthusiasms,Heresies, and mysterious things in Religion’ were ‘in the same Class’, Defoewould demonstrate that this ‘kind of thinking rightly call’d Free’ did notoriginate in the depths of hell but in ‘the Height[s] of human Imaginationand Invention’. Atheists will tell you, Defoe claimed, that through their owninquiries and meditations

they come out transform’d into a new kind of Species, they tell you thatthey are arriv’d to a compleat Knowledge of the Eternal Mysteries; thatGod is nothing but the Sum of human Desires, the Ecstacy of an exaltedSpirit, carry’d up into the Regions of eternal Calm and Quiet, where theSoul is in Raptures of Joy and Love. This they resolve by the light of therefin’d sublime Judgment to be the Perfection of Happiness, and that isGod …

They tell you farther, to descend to the Personality of a God, is talkingwildly and immethodically, and what is inconsistent with Nature; that


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God is a Quality, rather than a Being, that cannot be describ’d by Words,any more than it can be limited by Space; that the supreme Essence is an inconceivable Spirit of Light and Glory, and the Soul receives anassimulating Light and Knowledge, even by the Contemplation of it, by the Rays of a communicable Effulgence; so that having been onceilluminated, it continues enjoying a full Lustre of eminent Glory for everafter.

This unintelligible Stuff is all Magick to me, and I believe we may trulysay it is so to us all … and if this be the Discovery that Magick makes tothe Mind, the Magicians will have small cause to boast of theirImprovement, I presume it shall leave the Mind darker than it finds it.63

This new kind of magic would ‘have all Heaven resolv’d into Nature, allReligion into Reason, and all God into Philosophy’. It went ‘infinitelybeyond all the Enthusiasm and religious Frenzy’ the world had previouslyknown. Enraptured by the possibilities of its own powers, the mind wasfree to create ‘a new Scheme of Nature, new Notions of Being, of Life, ofMotion, of past, present, and future’.64

The arrogance of these new magicians extended beyond their self-proclaimed sophistication regarding theology. Defoe resented their claimsto moral superiority. They ‘talk in a kind of Cant … representing them-selves as a kind of angelick People’ who see themselves ‘act[ing] in a higher Sphere … endow’d with superior Light’ and ‘liv[ing] beyond theordinary Rate of their Fellow-Creatures’. We shall see, he chided, if theseare ‘Illuminations from Heaven, or Delusions of Hell’. One would expectsuch superior beings to exert themselves in doing good, charity,beneficence, and reform but on the contrary, freedom of thought, moreoften then not, engendered freedom from moral restraint. Those mostdemanding of rational proof in matters of faith were more than willing to make do with the weakest of arguments to justify their own corruptinclinations.65

It was ‘not many Years ago’, Defoe claimed, that people talked of beinginspired by ‘good Spirits, if such there are, [which] dictated things of Valueto the Minds of Men’, a time when ‘they convers’d in the very Confines ofthe mysterious World’. By this, he wished to make clear, he did not meanthe kind of enthusiasm associated with ‘Raptures and Agitations’ but thetext suggests he had trouble articulating exactly what he did mean.Nowadays, he remarked,

Every man seems to me to have his Daemon of a particular kind, properand separate to himself, by which he either governs himself, or isgovern’d, I know not well which to call it; and so he walks on in hisown way, follows no body, and leads no body; but is a Principle, aDoctrine, a Governor, nay, a God to himself.66

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Was Defoe struggling to identify both a sense of disenchantment and oneof alienation? These are anachronistic words and yet they seem to fit bothDefoe’s mood and his analysis of what was happening in his society andtherefore deserve exploring.

If by disenchantment one means a world in which people no longerbelieve in supernatural or spiritual interference, Defoe had to walk a fineline. He wanted people to eschew superstition and to be sceptical aboutindividuals who claimed to have special access to supernatural truth orpowers, whether diabolical or heavenly. At the same time, he wished toaffirm that both God and Satan communicated to human beings, throughinvisible spiritual means, messages which men and women often exper-ienced as inklings, intuitions, and dreams. This kind of spiritual interven-tion in the world had been denounced by Deists like Anthony Collins.67

Defoe had visited this issue before. Crusoe learned to heed the voice ofProvidence and the reader presumes his ultimate salvation; Roxana suc-cumbed to the Devil’s soft suasions and she and we expect her damna-tion.68 In the Serious Reflections, Defoe attempted to explain the workings ofthe spiritual realm more fully in Crusoe’s ‘Visions of the Angelic World’.For Defoe the invisible world of spiritual communication was proof of the‘great superintendency of divine Providence in the minutest affairs of thisworld’.69

The unhappy image, cited above, of the man ‘separate to himself’ who‘follows no body, and leads no body’ certainly suggests a process of alien-ation, if by that term we mean a dissociation from aspects of one’s commu-nity, identity, or personality. In former times, Defoe pointed out, hereticsat least attracted communities of followers and were able to judge thesuccess of their messages by the quantity and quality of their disciples.Even the Jews asked if any of their elders or rulers believed Jesus. ‘But now’,he exclaimed,

God save us! so many Men, so many Maggots … every Man broaches hisown Opinions, preaches them to himself, is his own Convert; his Soul isthe Disciple of his Fancy, and his Senses the Pulpit of his Humour; as forother People, as he teaches no body, so he scorns to be taught by anybody, and bids God da … him, if he had not rather go to the Devil, thannot go to Heaven his own way.

Thus we live in a general Disguise, and like the Masquerades, everyMan dresses himself up in a particular Habit, not two appear a-like inthe whole Place; … as the Habits are not alike, so they are always par-ticularly remarkable for being directly opposite to the Person they cover;the Phlegmatic dresses à la Sanguine, the Sober mimicks the Drunkard,the Chaste chuses to dress à la Courtisane, the Atheist puts on theReligieuse, the Christian has the Vest and the Turban, and the Quaker aHabit from the Theatre.70


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Subject only to the authority of his own fancy in matters of religion,heterodox man absolved himself of the responsibilities to refine his opin-ions in light of those held by others or to guide others in the shaping oftheirs. There was no need to moderate one’s religious views in light ofthose of the community or test the strength of them through exchange andcompetition for disciples if every individual opinion was equally valid. ForDefoe, community and civility coalesced around centres of common belief,not around disparate strands of doubt. His concerns contradicted the hopesof a growing number of thinkers who, in the wake of two centuries of reli-gious strife, had begun to argue that rational scepticism, not confessionalconviction, was more likely to produce peace and prosperity at home andabroad.71 To Defoe, this stance was loaded with irony rather than irenicism.Among his own co-religionists, the claims of rational theology produced abitter public dispute which permanently weakened the institution ofEnglish Presbyterianism.72 In society at large, especially among the ‘polite’,it had led to a variety of heterodoxies which challenged the efficacy and/orexistence of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and therefore, he believed,threatened the moral order. He found it ironical that members of thegentry, whose disdain for learning and books he had so often criticized,had developed a taste for abstruse theological debate and the worship ofreason. By emphasizing this ‘polite’ enthusiasm for rational religion, Defoewas criticizing the intellectual pretensions and moral turpitude of a certainsegment of society, not the ethos of politeness itself. As previous chaptershave shown, Defoe believed in the reformation of manners and the civiliz-ing process which the exchange of goods and opinions promoted. Therewere some opinions unworthy of exchange, namely those that questionedthe Godhead, but otherwise commerce was a central component of God’sprovidential plan. That said, the freethinker who ‘bids God da[mn]’ toeveryman did not bode well for a society hoping to cement its communalbonds through the virtues of sociability entertained in Addison’s Spectatoror those institutionalized through a civil religion as envisioned by repub-lican thinkers like Moyle and Toland.73

If freethinking liberated one from any communal imperative to refineand reform one’s religious views, the excerpt quoted above also suggestsestrangement from one’s self as well as one’s society. In that passage Defoeproceeded without explanation from the example of freethinking theo-logical independence to the disintegration of social identities. Modernscholarship has regarded these as separate and unrelated phenomena, butfor Defoe they were intrinsically linked. If religion was reduced to privateopinion, outward expression of identity became a matter of choice, oftheatre, and of deceit. Toland’s Islamic studies gave rise to a Christian in aturban; the conversion that summer of the atheist rake, the Duke ofWharton, to Roman Catholicism was one more opportunistic twist in ascandalous career; Quakers were suspect, not for their inner light, but for

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their outward appearance.74 The issue for Defoe was not one of auto-nomous ‘self-fashioning’ but rather the logical consequence of a theo-logical position in which the human mind came to worship itself.

iv. Remedies for ‘this enlighten’d Age’75

In September 1727, Defoe published A New Family Instructor, another volleyin his campaign against heterodoxy and his last and most complete state-ment on the righteousness of the Protestant religion and the doctrine ofthe Trinity. In returning to the didactic genre of guide literature, Defoe wasrevisiting a formula which had brought him success in the past, one whichalso enabled him to reaffirm some of his most fundamental beliefs and tooffer families some practical advice on the best methods for combating ‘theDecay of Christian Knowledge’ and the ‘fashionable Madness’ of doubt.76

Divided into two main parts and ending with a blank verse poem entitled,‘Trinity: or the Divinity of the Son’, the text dispensed its advice through aseries of dialogues between a devout father, his children, and the occa-sional family visitor or friend. The first part addressed the problem ofpriestcraft as the family coped with the eldest son’s conversion to poperyand his attempts to convert his adolescent siblings. Thanks to their father’sreligious instruction, the children resisted their brother’s papist argumentsand eventually he too returned to the Protestant fold. The second partaddressed the problems of enthusiasm and atheism as the father providedhis children with arguments proving the divine authority of scripture, theidentity of Jesus as the Messiah, and the coeval and co-equal nature of Godthe Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Besieged by fashionable heterodoxy whenever they socialized – ‘we meetwith it in all our Conversation’ – the children expressed a keen intellectualinterest in and gratitude for their father’s pedagogy. Acknowledging thathis earlier Family Instructors had focused on the educational needs ofyounger children, Defoe emphasized that older children, and parents too,benefited from religious instruction in the home because it was impossibleto avoid ‘those Enemies of all serious Religion … in an Age so bold in Erroras this is’.77 One remedy for the ills of the age, Defoe believed, was theproper exercise of ‘Family Government’, by which he meant fathers takingresponsibility for the religious education of their children, apprentices, andservants. In earlier instruction manuals, especially The Complete EnglishTradesman, Defoe focused on the decline of this institution and sought itsexplanation in the growth of luxury, emulative consumption, and themonetization of master/apprentice relationships.78 In the New FamilyInstructor, Defoe chose instead to present a family in which both grand-father and father were model heads of their household – prosperous inbusiness, well informed about religion, loved by their children, andrespected by the wider community. Children were required to read the


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Bible and attend ‘Family Worship’ daily. These were supplemented withreligious ‘Table-Talk’ and evening catechism. In all these exercises, Defoepointed out the importance of making religious instruction pleasant anddiverting and free from ‘heavy and troublesome ceremony’. Although reli-gion was paramount, the father of these dialogues also taught his childrenother subjects such as modern history and geography so that ‘his Familywas a little College’.79

Despite his excellent upbringing, however, the eldest son converted toRome and only a brush with death and the assiduous efforts of his familywon him back. Having attended university and developed his tastes inbooks and learning, the son informed his father of his desire to go abroad.Mindful of ‘how many well-read Atheists, and learned Hereticks’ emergedfrom the universities, the father insisted his son spend several monthsimproving his grasp of the doctrinal differences between popery andProtestantism and of the history of Christianity from its beginnings throughthe Reformation. What is especially striking about the first dialogue is theway in which Defoe emphasized the dangers of Catholic luxury and soci-ability to young men travelling abroad. The father knew the Church’s tem-poral possessions, magnificent buildings, vast libraries, and pomp and gloryof Rome made ‘a great impression on the Mind’.80 He depicted Catholicpriests who befriended strangers not as rude proselytizers but as paragons ofpoliteness:

they offer you all imaginable Civilities, give you the utmost Respect,shew you every thing that is rare and curious, wait upon you to yourApartments, officiously serve you with the greatest Diligence, and withsuch inimitable Courtesy, so faithful, so assiduous, so apparently dis-interested, ’tis impossible not to be obliged by them.81

Priests made a point of showing strangers not only their charity and pietybut also ‘how agreeably they live’, entertaining visitors with wine, sweet-meats, and books. They arranged letters of introduction and refectorydinners in any country one might wish to visit and even loaned gentlemenmoney. Thus, the father warned his son, they ‘bring you, first, into lovewith their Persons, and at last with their Principles’.82

In the remaining six dialogues of Part I, Defoe refuted the principles ofpopery by having the father fortify his other children against their papistbrother’s attempt to convert them. The father used his knowledge of his-tory to show how the early Church ‘reduc’d their Primitive Purity of Prin-ciples into one great Mass, or Bulk of Idolatry and Superstition’. Influencedby the Devil, sullied by the incorporation of pagan practices, and corruptedby power both given and taken from temporal rulers, the Church of Romebecame the ‘greatest Seminary of Degeneracy and Apostacy, that ever wasin the World’. As their power grew, priests and bishops became factious,

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raising ‘Divisions in the Church … and Tumults in the State’. One of themost dangerous divisions, the Arian heresy, confirmed that ‘Liberty has notalways been an advantage to the Christian Religion’.83 While priestcraftand enthusiasm were often conceptualized as opposite extremes of religiouserror, Defoe had the father express how the two might meet in the personsof Catholic saints. Men like St Francis mistook ‘the turbulent Motions oftheir own Spirits to be the immediate Dictates of the Holy Ghost; and theTempest of the Brain to be divine Inspiration’. Deluded into thinking their‘extravagant Undertakings’ and ‘Excess in good Desires’ were evidence of‘sacred Perfection’, their enthusiasm surpassed that of the ‘grossest’ andmost ‘whimsical’ of English sects, including the Adamites, Sweet-Singers,and Family of Love. Veneration of these saints then became another formof Catholic idolatry. By inculcating the fallacies of Catholicism and thetruth of Protestantism in his children, the father made them ‘an Over-match for their Brother’. Eventually, weakened by illness and disenchantedwith the trinkets, trappings, and idolatry of his new religion, the brotherreturned to the family and his Protestant faith, remarking, ‘Popery was agay Thing Abroad, and ’twas a mighty Way of going on through Life, butthere was nothing in it to go through Death’.84

Defoe began Part II of the New Family Instructor by explaining that thefather’s lessons about popery encouraged his children to seek his views on avariety of other religious disputes which regularly confronted them. Thefather believed that each of these disputes was connected, in one way oranother, to the growing number of Christians willing to question the divinityof Christ. This, he warned, was ‘the Foundation upon which Atheism ismaking its New Fortification, and entrenching itself in order to resist GospelRevelation; and as it unhinges our Faith, and makes way for all manner ofLooseness in Principle, so ’tis time we should attack it with our utmost Force’.In various dialogues, he praised scripture for its ‘Divine Authority’ and powerto captivate the mind and elevate the soul. He examined several passages withhis children in order to elucidate Christ’s dual nature as person, mediator, andservant and as the Messiah, the Word, and the Lord. He explained the missionof the Holy Ghost as the Father, the Comforter, and the Spirit. He reaffirmedthe ‘hypostatick Union’ and the ‘glorious Mystery of the Holy Trinity’. In each of these exercises, he also disparaged Arians, Socinians, Deists, Atheists,Sceptics, and Free-thinkers for their resistance to the complexities of orthodoxtheology – to the ideas that the scriptures could have been recorded by menbut inspired by God, that God himself could show both mercy and righteousvengeance, and that Christ could be both human and divine. Ultimately, itdid not follow that something ‘cannot be, because they, who are given up toUnbelief, cannot comprehend it’.85

It is significant that the father’s final discussion with his children con-cerned the so-called ‘Johannine Comma’, an interpolation in the text of1 John 5:7, indicated below in italics:


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For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, andthe Holy Ghost, and these Three are One. And there are three that bear witnessin earth, the Spirit, and the Water, and the Blood, and these three agreein one.

While claims that the New Testament provided ample evidence of the doc-trine of the Trinity were increasingly challenged, most comprehensively bySamuel Clarke’s Scripture-doctrine of the Trinity, published in 1712, theauthenticity of the Johannine comma was specifically challenged byThomas Emlyn in a series of pamphlets between 1715 and 1722. Over halfof the last dialogue in the New Family Instructor rehearsed the orthodoxpoints made by Emlyn’s opponent in this debate, David Martin, a ministerat the French church in Utrecht.86 Defoe concluded his text with the fatherleaving his children a copy of one of Martin’s texts with marked passagesand his own blank verse poem on the Trinity.

v. Conclusion

We return, then, to the themes of commerce and gentility mentioned atthe outset of this chapter. A tradesman’s son, schooled in the new science,witnessing his nation’s economic development, Defoe celebrated the prin-ciples of discovery, improvement, and commerce throughout his longcareer. These trends nevertheless brought, in Defoe’s eyes, unexpected andunwelcome outcomes. At the end of his life, we can see in his historicalanalyses the unease he felt as he came to perceive that his age was one inwhich the commerce of goods and opinions, in the forms of luxury andheterodoxy, was transforming human consciousness. Even the elites of hisday were willing to dupe themselves and the masses by worshipping theirown powers of reason. Defoe had identified the extreme rationalism ofheterodoxy, not in its own terms as the extension of a benign or even asecular Reason, but as a new form of magic. For Defoe, such themes couldbe explored, and morals enforced, within the arena of a single family. Justas Robinson Crusoe is not best understood as a reflection of nascent capital-ism or imperialism, so A New Family Instructor was no anticipation of theworld view later attributed to ‘the bourgeoisie’. That text once more revealsa Defoe not only well informed about, but preoccupied with, a Trinitariansoteriology and its practical meaning for a tradesman’s family. If the Devilwas a world-historical figure, he might still meet his match, in Defoe’svision, at the hands of English Nonconformist piety. At stake, in Defoe’swords, was nothing less than the ‘whole frame of Nature, Time, andProvidence’.87

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Conclusion

It is fitting that Defoe’s Christian name should have been Daniel, for likethe biblical prophet of the same name, much of Defoe’s vision wasexpressed in the text which predicted that ‘many shall run to and fro’, andknowledge shall be increased’.1 This book has examined Defoe’s capacity toperceive funadamental historical change and long-term social process inthe light of his observations on liberty, property, commerce, warfare, man-ners, and religious belief. It establishes Defoe as a crucial link in the evolu-tion of eighteenth-century theories of civil society, political thought, andmodern historical understanding: that is, as a link between the intellectualworlds of John Locke (a world preoccupied with natural rights and scrip-tural history) and later Scottish Enlightenment historians (a world preoccu-pied by the new social norms of ‘politeness’ and the civilizing process).

Defoe’s writings were expressed primarily in the established discourses ofprovidentialism, Baconian optimism, and Whiggism. His works reveal atension between a reality based upon transition, specialization, toleration,and exchange against an older value system which stressed stability,authority, and conformity. Because Defoe saw these competing views ashistorical products in themselves, this book has examined the growth of amodern sense of history as a consequence of the tension between thedevelopment of commercial values and the persistence of traditional insti-tutions and belief systems in the eighteenth century.

Defoe’s output was enormous, and much of it was published anonymously;there is a real problem in grasping the totality of Defoe’s thought. Yet a sys-tematic study of Defoe as a serious historical and social thinker has not hith-erto been undertaken for more profound reasons than the canonical problemsof attribution and magnitude. Defoe was neither an historian nor a theorist bydesign or temperament, but he helped to stimulate a distinctively social formof analysis within a wide variety of genres. All of his thoughts were negotiatedthrough communication with a consumer public, whose increasing impor-tance represents just one of the central structural, social, and historicalchanges which he so forcefully articulated and helped to create.

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This study challenges the conventional identification of Defoe as a Lockeianthinker, an egalitarian, a spokesman for a rising middle class, and an architectof a new and secular national identity. Such images too often derive from theneed of modern scholarship to find ancient antecedents for present-day posi-tions and to depict major authors as spokesmen for, or prophets of, a new age.Those images and interpretations seldom arise without at least some cause,and their prevalence in a range of important recent scholarship has justifiedthe close study of Defoe’s texts that this book has offered. Yet if a new Defoeemerges from these pages, it must follow that new questions in turn arise thatcall for further research and further reflection.

One such set of questions relates to how Defoe now stands in relation to apreoccupation of scholars in many disciplines, the Enlightenment. It is estab-lished in this book that Defoe was not trying to escape from Christian theol-ogy, as the received account of ‘the Enlightenment’ ought to require; rather,that he was trying to shore up a faith and a religious practice derived from lateseventeenth-century Nonconformity. What does it mean that Defoe couldarrive at the historical explanations set out in this book while still desperatelyholding on to orthodox theology and its authority, an authoritative and liter-alist approach to religion which Enlightened thinkers, in the accepted inter-pretation, wanted either to distance themselves from, or to destroy?

This book has had at least two leading themes: the centrality of Trini-tarianism to Defoe’s thinking, and the importance of Defoe’s developinghistorical analysis. But the key assertion of this book has been that thesetwo themes were related. And if that relationship was a reality, this newvision of Defoe has important consequences for the received view ofEnlightenment as an attempted escape from Nicene theology as well as forthe received view that eighteenth-century British historiography was devel-oping in an idiom in which any relation between sacred and secular timewas less and less important.

The reader will now appreciate why a chronological and not a thematicstructure has been chosen. It has been the intention of this book to showthe development of Defoe’s historical thought over time. He intended towrite on religion, trade, Revolution Principles, and other domestic andforeign matters of the moment, but through this daily polemic he pro-duced a vision of his world that fascinated Marx and continues to fascinatepostmodernists. Defoe was sensitive to ideas we normally associate withpostmodernism, notably the unstable relationship between language andmeaning. This raises questions about the essential novelty of postmod-ernism itself, and also about how a new historical understanding of Defoebears on the relation between postmodernism and the ‘modernism’ ofwhich he has long been held to be emblematic. Such issues as these seemcertain to keep Defoe near the centre of academic attention for many yearsto come.

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Notes

Introduction

1. John Robert Moore, Daniel Defoe: Citizen of the Modern World (Chicago, 1958); for‘Defoe’s England’ see G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History (1942); Peter Earle,The World of Defoe (1976).

2. The current domination of Defoe studies by these research strategies is clearfrom online databases such as Historical Abstracts and Expanded AcademicASAP.

3. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and theAtlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975), p. 459.

4. This study does not dissent from the view that Puritan forms of writing wereinfluential in shaping Defoe’s novels; see J. Paul Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim(Baltimore, 1966) and G. A. Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (Princeton,1965). It does, however, offer a corrective to the dismissive approach to Defoe’sreligion offered by Ian Watt who influentially argued that what mattered inDefoe’s treatment of religion was its ‘subjective and individualist’ pattern, soproviding access to the hero’s inner life. The ‘relative impotence of religion inDefoe’s novels’ was Watt’s theme; ‘indeed the heritage of Puritanism is demon-strably too weak to supply a continuous and controlling pattern for the hero’sexperience’; Crusoe’s religion has ‘curiously little’ effect on his behaviour;Defoe’s ‘religious upbringing forced him from time to time to hand over a bril-liant piece of narrative by a star-reporter to a distant colleague on the religiouspage who could be relied on to supply suitable spiritual commentaries quicklyout of stock. Puritanism made the editorial policy unalterable; but it was usuallysatisfied by a purely formal adherence’; indeed ‘Defoe’s own religious beliefschanged a good deal, and he expressed in his writings the whole gamut of doc-trines, from intransigent predestinarianism to rational deism’: Ian Watt, The Riseof the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957), pp. 75–6, 80–2.

5. Eschatology: the branch of theology dealing with death, judgement, heaven andhell, and the final destiny of mankind.

6. Ilse Vickers, Defoe and the New Sciences (Cambridge, 1996). 7. [Defoe], Conjugal Lewdness: or Matrimonial Whoredom (1727), p. 400.8. J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, Vol. I, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon,

1737–1764 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 8. 9. J. G. A. Pocock, pp. 152–65, in L. P. Curtis, Jr (ed.), The Historian’s Workshop:

Original Essays by Sixteen Historians (New York, 1970).10. Philip Hicks, Neoclassical History and English Culture from Clarendon to Hume

(1996). 11. Sir John Davies, A Discovery of the True Causes why Ireland was never entirely

Subdued, nor brought under Obedience of the Crowne of England, until the beginning ofHis Maiesties happie Raigne (1612), for which see J. G. A. Pocock, The AncientConstitution and the Feudal Law: a Study of English Historical Thought in the17th Century (Cambridge, 1957; 2nd edn, 1987); J. G. A. Pocock (ed.), The PoliticalWorks of James Harrington (Cambridge, 1977); Adam Ferguson, An Essay on theHistory of Civil Society (Edinburgh, 1767); John Millar, Observations Concerning the

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Distinction of Ranks in Society (1771); idem, Historical View of the EnglishGovernment (1787).

12. Some scholars wish to reframe Defoe’s novels as ‘histories’, e.g. Robert Mayer, History and the Early English Novel: Matters of Fact from Bacon to Defoe (Cambridge 1977); Vickers, Defoe and the New Sciences; Geoffrey M. Sill, The Cure of the Passions and the Origins of the English Novel (Cambridge, 2001).

13. P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, The Canonization of Daniel Defoe (1988); idem,Defoe De-Attributions: a Critique of J. R. Moore’s Checklist (1994); idem, A CriticalBibliography of Daniel Defoe (1998).

14. ‘The key to the interpretation of Defoe’s character seems to lie rather in this –that he knew he was a great writer who could write to more effect on mosttopics than any of his contemporaries; and that he saw no reason why the worldshould be deprived of the fine writing which he could give it. He could and didwrite on both sides in many controversies. He wrote both for and against theSeptennial Act. He espoused both parties in the Bangorian controversy. Hisjustification, if there was need of it, would be that his pamphlets represent thebest work on both sides’: Laurence Hanson, Government and the Press, 1695–1763(Oxford, 1936), p. 94.

15. From a large literature see, for example, J. A. Downie, Robert Harley and the Press:Propaganda and Public Opinion in the Age of Swift and Defoe (Cambridge, 1979);James Sutherland, The Restoration Newspaper and its Development (Cambridge,1986); C. John Sommerville, The News Revolution in England: Cultural Dynamics ofDaily Information (New York, 1986); Jeremy Black, The English Press in theEighteenth Century (Beckenham, 1987); Hannah Barker, Newspapers, Politics andEnglish Society, 1695–1855 (Harlow, 2000); Mark Knights, Representation andMisrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford,2005).

16. For a scholarly restatement of the interpretation of the later Stuart monarchy asa threat to liberty that Macaulay depicted, see Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles IIand His Kingdoms, 1660–1685 (2005) and idem, Revolution: the Great Crisis of theBritish Monarchy, 1685–1720 (2006).

17. For which see especially Tony Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution(Cambridge, 1996); idem, William III: Profiles in Power (2002); Manuel Schonhorn,Defoe’s Politics: Parliament, Power, Kingship and Robinson Crusoe (Cambridge, 1991).

18. Warren Johnston, ‘Revelation and the Revolution of 1688–1689’, HJ, 48 (2005):351–89; idem., ‘The Patience of the Saints, the Apocalypse, and ModerateNonconformity in Restoration England’, Canadian Journal of History, 38 (2003):505–20.

19. For the theme of politeness see especially Lawrence B. Klein, Shaftesbury and theCulture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early EighteenthCentury Britain (Cambridge, 1994) and ‘Politeness and the Interpretation of theBritish Eighteenth Century’, HJ, 45 (2002): 869–98; Markku Peltonen, ‘Politenessand Whiggism, 1688–1732’, HJ, 48 (2005): 391–414; Nicholas Phillipson, Hume(1989), pp. 17–34.

20. The central Christian doctrine of the Trinity explained the Godhead in terms ofthree persons or modes of being, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Socinians (namedafter Fausto Sozzini, 1539–1604) denied the divinity of Christ and interpretedhim as a merely human teacher. The ‘Trinitarian controversy’ was anotherimportant debate of the 1690s.

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21. E.g. John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility (Cam-bridge, 1994); idem, ‘Locke, Socinianism, “Socinianism” and Unitarianism’, inM. A. Stewart (ed.), English Philosophy in the Age of Locke (Oxford, 2000).

22. There has been a reluctance to take seriously Defoe’s writing on Satan. SimonSchaffer, for example, treats Defoe’s use of the ‘the devil’ as metaphor:‘The Devil was a construct which Defoe used to describe the source of the socialillusions which prevented the establishment of a creditable British polity …Defoe invented a figure to treat this difficulty of trust and its social manifesta-tion: the Devil’: ‘Defoe’s Natural Philosophy and the Worlds of Credit’, in JohnChristie and Sally Shuttleworth (eds), Nature Transfigured: Science and Literature,1700–1900 (Manchester, 1989), pp. 13–44, at pp. 13, 24, 31–2.

23. For problems with the Habermasian conception of a ‘public sphere’ see forexample, Andrej Pinter, ‘Public Sphere and History: Historians’ Response toHabermas on the “Worth” of the Past’, Journal of Communication Enquiry, 28(2004): 217–32; Christian Thorne, ‘Thumbing Our Nose at the Public Sphere:Satire, the Market, and the Invention of Literature’, Proceedings of the ModernLanguage Association, 116 (2001): 531–44; Harold Mah, ‘Phantasies of the PublicSphere: Rethinking the Habermas of Historians’, Journal of Modern History, 72(2000): 153–82; J. A. Downie, ‘The Making of the English Novel’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 9 (1997): 250–66.

24. David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000).25. Key texts were Samuel Clarke’s The Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity (1712), which

reached a second edition in 1719, and Anthony Collins’s A Discourse of Free-Thinking: occasion’d by the rise and growth of a sect call’d free-thinkers (1713), thelatter published without the names of author or printer. The accession of GeorgeI in 1714 created a climate in which such debate could flourish.

26. Watt, The Rise of the Novel, p. 89.

1 Establishing a Voice: Defoe’s First Steps from Failed Tradesman to Successful Author

1. See most recently, Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century EnglishPolitical Instability in European Context (Cambridge, 2000); Eveline Cruickshanks,The Glorious Revolution (Basingstoke, 2000); Tim Harris, Revolution: the Great Crisisof the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (2006).

2. P. G. M. Dickson’s The Financial Revolution in England, 1688–1756 (1967) providesthe classic account. John Brewer’s The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the EnglishState, 1689–1783 (1989) charts the growth of Britain as a ‘fiscal-military state’.The creation of a credit economy and culture has also captivated the collectiveimagination of many literary scholars in recent years.

3. Mark Knights, ‘“Meer religion” and the “church-state” of Restoration England:the Impact and Ideology of James II’s Declarations of Indulgence’, in AlanHouston and Steve Pincus (eds), A Nation Transformed: England after the Restora-tion (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 41–70.

4. For the best exploration of Defoe’s preoccupation with the idea of biblical king-ship and a powerful corrective to reading Defoe as a prophet of modern liberal-ism, see Schonhorn, Defoe’s Politics.

5. This paragraph and the next two attempt to summarize, in brief, the ideology ofcivic humanism explored in the works of J. G. A. Pocock. See his MachiavellianMoment and Virtue, Commerce, and History.

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6. Lois G. Schwoerer, ‘No Standing Armies!’ The Anti-Army Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Baltimore, 1974). Alan Downie analyses the debate within thecontext of public opinion in Harley, ch. 1.

7. [Defoe], A Letter to a Dissenter from his Friend at the Hague (1688); A New Discoveryof an Old Intreague (1691).

8. Backscheider, Defoe, p. 48; Defoe’s early financial dealings are discussed in detail,pp. 41–67.

9. The bill passed the House of Commons but was defeated in the House of Lords.10. In the Preface, Defoe wrote that he had ‘kept the greatest part of it by me for

near Five Years’: [Defoe], An Essay upon Projects (1697), p. iii. Other internal evi-dence suggests that some of Defoe’s proposals were responses to the creation ofthe Bank of England and the Million Lottery in 1694 and to debates taking placein 1695–6: Joyce D. Kennedy, Michael Seidel, and Maximillian E. Novak (eds), The Stoke Newington Daniel Defoe Edition [of] An Essay upon Projects (New York,1999), pp. xx, xliii (endnote 4). The Essay is cited in this chapter from the 1697edition.

11. There is much more to be said about Defoe’s connections with Poultry publish-ers, especially John Dunton: N. H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity inLater Seventeenth-Century England (Leicester, 1987), pp. 121–5, at p. 125.

12. See also Julian Hoppit, ‘Attitudes to Credit in Britain, 1680–1790’, HJ, 33 (1990):305–22, at pp. 308–10; Peter Laslett, ‘John Locke, the Great Recoinage, and theOrigins of the Board of Trade: 1695–1698’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser.14 (1957): 369–402. Joan Thirsk suggests that debate about projects at the end ofthe seventeenth century may reflect the delay between long-term economictrends and reflection about them: Economic Policy and Projects: the Development ofa Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1978), pp. 8–10.

13. For which see especially Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: the Influence ofEvangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought 1795–1865 (Oxford, 1988).

14. For the relationship between Protestantism and the new sciences see CharlesWebster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform, 1626–1660 (1975)and Margaret Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689–1720(Ithaca, NY, 1976). Maximillian Novak explores Defoe’s use of natural lawtheory in Defoe and the Nature of Man (1963).

15. Ilse Vickers, ‘The Influence of the New Sciences on Defoe’, Literature and History,13 (1987): 200–18, at p. 214. A much fuller treatment of Bacon’s influence onDefoe’s thought is found in her Defoe and the New Sciences (Cambridge, 1996).Vickers addresses the Essay upon Projects in passing but it does not receive theextended attention she gives to other Defoe texts. This study acknowledgesVickers’ important work and seeks to take it further.

16. [Defoe], Essay upon Projects, pp. 11–12.17. William Petty, another admirer of Bacon’s, whom Defoe cited in the Essay,

expanded Bacon’s system into a tripartite system, distinguishing between goodsfinished by hand and those finished by tools or machines. See Vickers, ‘Influenceof the New Sciences on Defoe’, p. 203.

18. For discussion of these works, see chs. 5 and 8. 19. John Spurr, ‘“Virtue, Religion and Government”: the Anglican Uses of Provi-

dence’, in Tim Harris, Paul Seaward, and Mark Goldie (eds), The Politics of Religionin Restoration England (Oxford, 1990), p. 31. Michael McKeon, The Origins of theEnglish Novel (Baltimore, 1987) and J. P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: the Politicsof Party 1689–1720 (Cambridge, 1977), underestimate providentialism’s continu-ing relevance.

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20. [Defoe], The Danger of the Protestant Religion Consider’d from the Present Prospect ofa Religious War in Europe (1701), p. 32.

21. [Defoe], Essay upon Projects, p. 119.22. Ibid., p. 1.23. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 423–5.24. Temple’s theory that a nation’s industry or idleness was based upon the ratio

between land and population explained both Dutch prosperity and Irish stasis.Davenant sought to justify English control of Irish trade: Istvan Hont, ‘FreeTrade and the Economic Limits to National Politics: Neo-Machiavellian PoliticalEconomy Reconsidered’, in John Dunn (ed.), The Economic Limits to ModernPolitics (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 41–120, pp. 51–7, 81, 88.

25. Hont, ‘Free Trade and the Economic Limits to National Politics’, p. 51, fn. 12.Necessity as the mother of invention appeared several times in Defoe’s works.Maximillian Novak suggests that Defoe ‘took his theory from John Asgil[l], whowent beyond Temple in asserting that “All the Improvements in the World havebeen produced from the Necessity of Men, putting them upon Invention”’:Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (Berkeley, 1962), p. 50. Asgill was alawyer who occasionally wrote on economic matters and was part of Locke’scollege (see Laslett, ‘John Locke, the Great Recoinage’). Defoe cited Asgill’sSeveral Assertions prov’d, in Order to Create another Species of Money than Gold andSilver, in the Essay upon Projects, p. 67. As explained in Chapters 3 and 7, Defoelater attacked Asgill for his religious ideas and other economic writings.

26. [Defoe], Essay upon Projects, pp. 31–5.27. Ibid., pp. 1–2. Modern research confirms Defoe’s impressions: see Christine

MacLeod, ‘The 1690s Patent Boom: Invention or Stock-Jobbing?’ EconomicHistory Review, 39 (1986): 549–71.

28. [Defoe], Essay upon Projects, pp. x, 4–5. 29. Ibid., pp. 6–8.30. Christine MacLeod, Inventing the Industrial Revolution: the English Patent System,

1660–1800 (Cambridge, 1988). 31. [Defoe], Essay upon Projects, p. 24.32. Prince Rupert actually died in 1682. Defoe’s date of 1680 supports Henry

Roseveare’s contention that England’s financial revolution began in the reign ofCharles II and not in the wake of 1688 as argued in Dickson, The FinancialRevolution.

33. Defoe’s selective review of Restoration projects and their relation to James II isexplored more fully in K. R. P. Clark, ‘“The Whole Frame of Nature, Time, andProvidence”: Daniel Defoe and the Transition from Rights to Politeness inEnglish Political Discourse’, PhD thesis (Johns Hopkins University, 1998),pp. 90–100.

34. Stephen B. Baxter, ‘William III as Hercules: the Political Implications of Court Culture’, and W. A. Speck, ‘William – and Mary?’ in Lois Schwoerer (ed.), The Revolution of 1688–1689: Changing Perspectives (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 95–106, 131–46; Tony Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution(Cambridge, 1996).

35. For other proposals at this period for an academy to reform the English lan-guage, see Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable, A History of the English Language(5th edn, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2002), pp. 253–71.

36. [Defoe], Essay upon Projects, pp. 233, 252. In the chapter ‘Of Academies’, p. 282,Defoe attacked the ‘barbarous Custom’ of ‘deny[ing] the advantages of Learningto Women’.

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37. See John Spurr, ‘Virtue, Religion, and Government’, passim, and Henry Horwitz,Parliament, Policy and Politics in the Reign of William III (Manchester, 1977), p. 238.

38. See Lawrence B. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse andCultural Politics in Early Eighteenth Century Britain (Cambridge, 1994) and Nicholas T.Phillipson, Hume (1989), ch. 2. For two assessments of the continuing importanceof this discourse in recent scholarship, see Lawrence B. Klein, ‘Politeness and theInterpretation of the British Eighteenth Century’, HJ, 45 (2002): 869–98; MarkkuPeltonen, ‘Politeness and Whiggism, 1688–1732’, HJ, 48 (2005): 391–414.

39. [Defoe], Essay upon Projects, p. 228.40. Ibid., p. 231.41. Klein, Shaftesbury, p. 9 and passim.42. [Defoe], Essay upon Projects, p. 232.43. Ibid., pp. 232–3.44. Ibid., pp. 236–7.45. Ibid., p. 234.46. Ibid., p. 235.47. Klein, Shaftesbury, ch. 8.48. [Defoe], Essay upon Projects, pp. 227–8.49. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 432–6; idem, Virtue, Commerce, and History,

pp. 230–7.50. [Defoe], Essay upon Projects, pp. 233–7.51. Ibid., pp. 243–5.52. T. C. Curtis and W. A. Speck, ‘The Societies for the Reformation of Manners: a

Case Study in the Theory and Practice of Moral Reform’, Literature and History, 3(1976): 45–64.

53. [Defoe], Essay upon Projects, pp. 238–40.54. Ibid., pp. 247–8.55. [Defoe], The Poor Man’s Plea (2nd edn, 1698), pp. 4–5, 9–10, 16, 18.56. Ibid., p. 9.57. [Defoe], Essay upon Projects, p. 249.58. Ibid., pp. 253, 252–4, 260.59. Ibid., p. 255–7.60. Ibid., pp. 2–3.61. Ibid., pp. 257–60, 268–9.62. Norbert Elias, The Court Society (New York, 1984), pp. 239–40. Defoe continued

to condemn the practice of duelling. See, for example, issues of the Review forthe following dates: 29 April–23 May 1704; 5 December 1704; 14 December1710; 29 November 1712. See also Victor Kiernan, The Duel in European History(Oxford, 1992).

63. [Defoe], Essay upon Projects, pp. 279–81.64. For a general account of foreign relations and their economic dimension, see

D. W. Jones, War and Economy in the Age of William III and Marlborough (Oxford,1988); Jeremy Black, European Warfare: 1660–1815 (New Haven, 1994); idem,A System of Ambition? British Foreign Policy, 1660–1793 (1991).

65. Andrew Fletcher, A Discourse upon Militias (Edinburgh, 1698); Pocock, Machia-vellian Moment, pp. 423–36; John Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and theMilitia Issue (Edinburgh, 1985), p. 29.

66. See, for example, the advertisement placed at the end of the second edition ofAn Argument in which Trenchard denies the charge that he ‘artificially hired oneMr. D. T. to write Reflexions upon’ his tract, presumably to draw additionalsupport. The initials ‘D. T.’, a misprint in the first edition of Defoe’s SomeReflections on a Pamphlet lately Publish’d Entituled, An Argument, were corrected to

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‘D. F.’ in the second edition. At one point in the debate, it must be noted, Defoeremarked that Trenchard’s An Argument, An Argument … Part Two, and AndrewFletcher’s Discourse upon Militias ‘seem to me to be wrote by the same Hand’:[Daniel Defoe], An Argument, shewing, that a Standing Army, with Consent ofParliament, is not Inconsistent with a Free Government, &c. (1698), p. 1. Defoe’sknowledge of the opposition authors is further discussed below. See also LoisSchwoerer, ‘Chronology and Authorship of the Standing Army Tracts, 1697–1699’, Notes and Queries, new series, 13 (1966): 382–90.

67. Defoe’s account matches that of Mark Goldie, ‘The Roots of True Whiggism,1688–1694’, History of Political Thought, 1 (1980): 195–236.

68. Schwoerer, ‘No Standing Armies!’, p. 175.69. Downie, Harley, pp. 32, 34 and ch. 1, passim.70. For divisions within the Whig party, see Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History,

chapter 11; Goldie, ‘The Roots of True Whiggism’. Trenchard was certainly acentral figure in the commonwealth milieu that Goldie skilfully reconstructs.Goldie’s brief mention of Defoe in this essay may have encouraged others toinclude Defoe in this distinct group of London reformers. One must caution thatDefoe’s appearance in Charles Mordaunt’s City regiment during the Lord Mayor’sShow to honour William III in 1689 does not alone give Defoe radical credentials.See, for example, Laurence Dickey, ‘Power, Commerce, and Natural Law in DanielDefoe’s Political Writings, 1698–1707’, in John Robertson (ed.), A Union forEmpire: Political Thought and the Union of 1707 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 67, 70;Richard Ashcraft and M. M. Goldsmith, ‘Locke, Revolution Principles, and theFormation of Whig Ideology’, HJ, 26 (1983): 773–800. Manuel Schonhorn’sDefoe’s Politics offers a useful corrective to Defoe’s ‘radical’ image.

71. [Trenchard], An Argument, pp. 1–2.72. Ibid., pp. 3–4.73. [Defoe], Some Reflections On a Pamphlet lately Publish’d, Entitulted, An Argument

Shewing that A Standing Army Is inconsistent with A Free Government (1697), p. 2;[Trenchard], An Argument, p. 5.

74. [Defoe], Some Reflections, p. 3; see also pp. 4, 7.75. [Trenchard], An Argument, p. 7; [Defoe], Some Reflections, p. 5.76. [Defoe], An Argument, shewing, that a Standing Army … is not Inconsistent.77. [Defoe], Some Reflections, p. 6.78. [Trenchard], An Argument, pp. 14–15.79. See, for example, [Defoe], Some Reflections, pp. 8–11, 25–6.80. [Defoe], An Argument, shewing, that a Standing Army … is not Inconsistent, p. 8.81. [Defoe], A Brief Reply to the History of Standing Armies in England (1698), p. 23.82. Ibid., pp. ii–iii.83. Downie, Harley, ch. 1.84. [Defoe], A Brief Reply to the History of Standing Armies in England, p. 25.85. Ibid., p. 24.86. Ibid., p. 25.87. Ibid., pp. 20, 24.

2 ‘The Mushroom and the Oak’: Dissent and the Church of England, 1697–1705

1. See below, Chapters 5, 6, and 9. Mark Knights, in ‘Occasional Conformity andthe Representation of Dissent: Hypocrisy, Sincerity, Moderation and Zeal’,Parliamentary History, 24 (2005): 41–57, argues that the occasional conformity

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controversies demonstrate how ‘religious conflict was seen in terms of a strugglefor secular power … contemporaries saw politics – the use of state power forprivate or partisan ends – as being conducted under the guise of religion’, so that‘Religious language was … consciously viewed as a veneer covering private, sec-tional or group ends’ (pp. 44–5); and he cites Defoe to establish the primacy ofpolitical over religious goals (pp. 41, 46–7, 49). Although charges of opponents’insincerity were rife in this controversy, it is shown here that Defoe’s positionon occasional conformity was indeed built on consistent religious principles.

2. See below, Chapter 5.3. Henry Sacheverell, The Perils of False Brethren, both in Church, and State (1709).4. J. Ramsbottom, ‘Presbyterians and “Partial Conformity” in the Restoration

Church of England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 43 (1992): 249–70.5. For a cogent summary of the controversy see John Flaningam, ‘The Occasional

Conformity Controversy: Ideology and Party Politics, 1697–1711’, JBS, 17 (1977):38–62. The story of Defoe’s Lutheran-style protest is often repeated in the litera-ture without citing its probable source. In 1697 the 30 November–2 Decemberedition of The Postman remarked on a ‘foolish pasquil, reflecting on the LordMayor’ which was ‘fixed upon the door of St. Paul’s’ before Sir Humphreyattended a Thanksgiving Day service at the cathedral on Thursday, 2 December:Roger Thomas, ‘Presbyterians in Transition’, in Bolam, English Presbyterians,p. 124, n. 1.

6. [Defoe], An Enquiry into the Occasional Conformity of Dissenters, in Cases ofPreferment, with a Preface to Mr. How (1700); John Howe, Some Considerations of aPreface to an Inquiry Concerning the Occasional Conformity of Dissenters (1701);[Defoe], A Letter to Mr. How (1701).

7. [Defoe], A Letter to Mr. How, in Defoe, A True Collection, p. 330.8. [Defoe], An Enquiry into Occasional Conformity (1702), p. 10; [Defoe], A Letter to

Mr. How, in Defoe, A True Collection, p. 332; [Daniel Defoe], The Sincerity of theDissenters Vindicated (1703), p. 15.

9. [Defoe], A Letter to Mr. How, in A True Collection, p. 334.10. [Defoe], The Dissenters Answer to the High-Church Challenge (1704) in Defoe,

A Second Volume, p. 197.11. [Defoe], The Sincerity of the Dissenters Vindicated, p. 17. Citing Edmund Calamy’s

An Abridgement of Mr. Baxter’s History of His Life and Times (1702), Defoe adoptedthe position that the Church of England’s refusal to accept a proposal in 1660‘that Bishop Usher’s Reduction of Episcopacy unto the Form of the SynodicalGovernment received in the ancient Church’ be ‘the Ground-work of an Accomoda-tion’ was the straw that broke the conciliatory back of the Presbyterians; Defoetherefore considered that Anglican obstinacy was responsible for their ultimateseparation. See Defoe, The Dissenters Answer to the High-Church Challenge inDefoe, A Second Volume, pp. 197, 200–5. For accounts of the views of RichardBaxter and James Ussher and for the failure of negotiations in 1660, see RogerThomas, ‘The Rise of the Reconcilers’, pp. 60–7 and C. G. Bolam and JeremyGoring, ‘The Cataclysm’, pp. 73–9, in Bolam, English Presbyterians.

12. Defoe rehearsed the true justifications for Dissent on numerous occasions. See, for example, [Defoe], The Sincerity of the Dissenters Vindicated, p. 15; [Defoe],The Dissenters Answer to the High-Church Challenge in A Second Volume, pp. 196–7;Review, II, Bk. 5, No. 112 (22 November 1705).

13. [Defoe], More Short Ways with the Dissenters (1704) in Defoe, A Second Volume,p. 283. Presbyterians disagreed about a number of other issues. Defoe’s positionon other disputed matters is discussed below.

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14. [Defoe], The Sincerity of the Dissenters Vindicated, p. 16.15. [Defoe], A Letter to Mr. How, in A True Collection, p. 332.16. [Defoe], An Enquiry (1697), pp. 9–11.17. [Defoe], An Enquiry … Shewing that the Dissenters Are no Way Concern’d in it, p. 11;

An Enquiry (1697), pp. 10–13.18. [Defoe], An Enquiry (1697), p. 11. 19. The grounds for these various divisions are discussed below. For a general history

of Nonconformity see Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters (Oxford, 1978) andBolam, English Presbyterians. For the view of English Presbyterianism as ‘a DyingCause’, see Jeremy Goring, ‘The Break-up of Old Dissent’, in Bolam, EnglishPresbyterians, esp. pp. 175–6. See also Flaningam, ‘Occasional ConformityControversy’, p. 41, n. 7.

20. [Defoe], The Sincerity of the Dissenters Vindicated (1703), p. 2.21. Ibid.; see also [Defoe], The Shortest Way to Peace and Union (1703) in Defoe,

A True Collection, p. 452.22. [James Owen], Moderation a Virtue, Or Occasional Conformity Justify’d from the

Imputation of Hypocrisy (1703).23. [Defoe], The Sincerity of the Dissenters Vindicated, p. 3.24. [Defoe], An Enquiry (1701), pp. 31–4.25. [Defoe], An Enquiry (1697), p. 9.26. [Defoe], An Essay upon Projects (1697), pp. 4, 12, 243–5.27. See Chapter 1 above; see Review, Introduction, by A. W. Secord, and [Defoe], The

Complete English Tradesman (1726 [for 1725]), chs. 2 and 3, esp. pp. 22–3, 32–3,for instances of Defoe’s overt claims to effect a plain style.

28. Brian Vickers (ed.), English Science, Bacon to Newton (Cambridge, 1987), p. 16.29. Bolam and Goring, ‘The Cataclysm’, in Bolam, English Presbyterians, p. 87.30. Roger Thomas, ‘Parties in Nonconformity’, in Bolam, English Presbyterians, p. 96;

also pp. 103–12. For more on Annesley and his relationship with Defoe’s familysee Backscheider, Defoe, ch. 1 and passim; and [Defoe], The Character of the LateDr. Samuel Annesley (1697).

31. See Watts, The Dissenters, and Knud Haakonssen (ed.), Enlightenment and Religion(Cambridge, 1997).

32. David L. Wykes identified Newington Green as an academy for Congregational-ists; see his ‘The Contribution of the Dissenting Academy to the Emergence ofRational Dissent’, in Haakonssen (ed.), Enlightenment and Religion, p. 104. Back-scheider notes that the curriculum included writings from a wide range oftheologians and speculates that Annesley may have directed Defoe there: Defoe,pp. 14–20. Tim Cruso, a classmate of Defoe’s, was a ‘tolerationist’ Presbyterian;see Roger Thomas, ‘Presbyterians in Transition’, in Bolam, English Presbyterians,p. 120. For Wilkins’s influence on Charles Morton and the curriculum atNewington Green, see Ilse Vickers, Defoe and the New Sciences (Cambridge, 1996),pp. 46–50.

33. [Defoe], An Enquiry (1701), Preface; [Howe], Some Considerations of a Preface,pp. 30–2, 24; [Defoe], A Letter to Mr. How, in Defoe, A Second Volume, p. 342.

34. Ibid., p. 329.35. Thomas, ‘Parties in Nonconformity’, in Bolam, English Presbyterians, pp. 103–12.

See also Jacob, Newtonians. In trying to minimize the importance of divisionswithin the church, Charles Leslie queried, ‘And are there not Differences of thissort too among the Dissenters? Is not their Famous How an Arminian?’: Leslie, TheWolf Stript of His Shepherd’s Cloathing, In Answer to a late Celebrated Book Intitul’d,Moderation a Virtue, Wherein The Designs of the Dissenters against the Church: And

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their Behaviour towards Her Majesty both in England and Scotland are laid open. Withthe Case of Occasional Conformity Considered (3rd edn, 1704), p. 14.

36. Thomas, ‘Presbyterians in Transition’, in Bolam, English Presbyterians, pp. 134–40.37. [Defoe], A Letter to Mr. Howe, in Defoe, A Second Volume, pp. 332–3.38. Flaningam, ‘Occasional Conformity Controversy’, pp. 43–4. It has become con-

ventional to see Defoe’s role in the debate as ironic. 39. J. R. Jones, Court and Country: England, 1658–1714 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), p. 322.40. For example, in his influential diatribe, The Wolf Stript of His Shepherd’s Cloath-

ing, a chapter by chapter refutation of James Owen’s Moderation a Vertue, CharlesLeslie used some of Defoe’s arguments as ammunition, pitting Dissenter againstDissenter for his own purposes: see The Wolf Stript, pp. 31, 46.

41. For a full account of Robert Harley and his importance to eighteenth-centuryjournalism, see Downie, Harley.

42. For some cases of which Defoe was probably aware, see Backscheider, Defoe,p. 101. In September 1707, John Tutchin, editor of The Observator, was beaten upand later died from his injuries.

43. Backscheider, Defoe, p. 81.44. Cited in J. P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: the Politics of Party 1689–1720

(Cambridge, 1977), p. 91.45. Oxford was the bastion of High Churchmanship: [Defoe], Review, II, Bk. 4, No. 56

(12 July 1705); [Defoe], A New Test of the Church of England’s Honesty (1704) inDefoe, A Second Volume, p. 257; Henry Sacheverell, The Political Union. A DiscourseShewing the Dependence of Government on Religion In General: And of The EnglishMonarchy on The Church of England in Particular (Oxford, 1702), pp. 17, 45, 55, 59.

46. [Anon.], The Poetical Observator (1702); [anon.] The Establishment of the Church,the Preservation of the State: Shewing the Reasonableness of a Bill against OccasionalConformity (1702) which Backscheider states (Defoe, p. 95) provided Defoe withthe subtitle to The Shortest Way. [Charles Leslie], The New Association: Of thoseCalled, Moderate-Church-Men, with the Modern-Whigs and Fanaticks, to Under-Mineand Blow-Up the Present Church and Government (1702).

47. [Defoe], An Enquiry into Occasional Conformity (1702); [Defoe], The Opinion of aKnown Dissenter On the Bill for Preventing Occasional Conformity (1702).

48. [Defoe], A Brief Explanation of A late Pamphlet, Entituled, The Shortest Way with theDissenters (1703) in Defoe, A True Collection, p. 442.

49. David Martin Jones, Conscience and Allegiance in Seventeenth Century England: thePolitical Significance of Oaths and Engagements (Rochester, NY, 1999).

50. Roger Thomas describes ‘moderates like Baxter’ as having ‘no great liking foroaths but … a profound distaste for perjury’; see his ‘Parties in Nonconformity’,in Bolam, English Presbyterians, p. 82. Quakers found the imposition of oaths tobe sacrilegious and refused to take them.

51. Proposing his academy of learning, participating in campaigns for the reforma-tion of manners, and decrying profanity in the Review were some of the waysDefoe tried to curtail its practice.

52. [Defoe], An Enquiry (1697), pp. 15–17.53. Ibid., p. 24.54. [Defoe], Review, II, Bk. 5, No. 111 (20 November 1705); An Enquiry (1697), p. 15.55. [Defoe], An Enquiry (1697), pp. 15–16.56. [Defoe], The Present State of Jacobitism Considered (1701), Preface, p. 11. Review, II, Bk.

5, No. 78 (1 September 1705); see also II, Bk. 4, No. 33 (19 May 1705).57. Review, II, Bk. 5, No. 125 (22 December 1705); III, Bk. 8, No. 122 (12 October

1706).

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58. Vickers, Defoe and the New Sciences, p. 47.59. [Defoe], An Enquiry (1701) in Defoe, A True Collection, p. 312 and An Enquiry …

Shewing, that the Dissenters are no ways concerned in it, ibid., p. 389.60. [Defoe], The Consolidator: Or, Memoirs of Sundry Transactions From the World in the

Moon (1705), pp. 186–7.61. [Defoe], Reformation of Manners, A Satyr (1702) in Defoe, A True Collection, p. 81;

I owe the example from Moll Flanders to Manuel Schonhorn who also remarks,to different ends, on ‘the oxymoronic categories that appear often in Defoe’sperhaps unique vocabulary’. See his ‘Defoe and the Limits of Jacobite Rhetoric’,ELH, 64 (1997): 871–86, at p. 873.

62. [Defoe], Reformation of Manners in Defoe, A True Collection, p. 93; An Enquiry …Shewing, the Dissenters are no ways concern’d in it, ibid., p. 400.

63. [Defoe], The True-Born Englishman: A Satyr (1700 [for 1701]) in Defoe, A TrueCollection, pp. 5–6.

64. Roger Thomas, ‘The Rise of the Reconcilers’, in Bolam, English Presbyterians,pp. 59–60.

65. It has been argued that the occasional conformity debate was important chieflyfor the emergence of a pragmatic rhetoric of moderation: Sandra J. Sarkela,‘Moderation, Religion and Public Discourse: the Rhetoric of OccasionalConformity in England, 1697–1711’, Rhetorica, 15 (1997): 53–79. It is argued inthis chapter that Defoe’s opposition to occasional conformity was much moreprincipled that Sarkela allows. Indeed her claim that Defoe changed his mindand defended occasional conformity in his pamphlet Peace Without Union (1704)rests on a misreading of Defoe’s text: Sarkela, ‘Moderation’, p. 67. Her quotationfrom that source is immediately preceded in the original by Defoe’s explanation:‘If any Man ask me now, whether I am pleading for Occasional Conformity,I freely Answer no, nor do I Approve of it in itself, but when made use of for amere Qualification, I abhor both the Practice and the Persons’: [Defoe], PeaceWithout Union in Defoe, A True Collection, II, pp. 243–71, at p. 264.

66. [Defoe], The Shortest Way to Peace and Union (1703) in Defoe, A True Collection,pp. 447–8.

67. Ibid., p. 450.68. Ibid., pp. 455–6.69. Ibid., pp. 458–9.70. Ibid., p. 459.71. Ibid., pp. 465–6.72. [Defoe], An Enquiry (1701) in Defoe, A True Collection, p. 310.73. [Defoe], The Shortest Way to Peace and Union, p. 466.74. For Priestley’s opinions about Dissenters, I have relied on A. M. C. Waterman,

‘The Nexus between Theology and Political Doctrine in Church and Dissent’, in Haakonssen (ed.), Enlightenment and Religion, pp. 193–218; see especiallypp. 209–16.

75. Waterman, ‘The Nexus between Theology and Political Doctrine in Church andDissent’, pp. 212, 216; Watts, The Dissenters, p. 478.

3 Jure Divino: Defoe, Locke and Milton, and Political Theory

1. Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government(Princeton, 1986), p. 565; Paula R. Backscheider, ‘The Verse Essay, John Locke,and Defoe’s Jure Divino’, ELH, 55 (1988): 99–125, p. 119 (see also Backscheider,

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Defoe, p. 81). J. P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: the Politics of Party 1689–1720(Cambridge, 1977), p. 57 (‘markedly Lockeian in tone’); Ashcraft, RevolutionaryPolitics, p. 222 (‘Defoe later stated the [Lockeian] point poetically’).

2. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke(Oxford, 1962) and Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: the Politics ofNostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, Mass., 1968).

3. An engraved portrait of Defoe was included for the price of thirteen shillings butpirated editions sold for much less.

4. The phrase is a chapter title in Backscheider, Defoe: see pp. 159–94 and herarticle, ‘The Verse Essay, John Locke, and Defoe’s Jure Divino’, p. 119 and passim.For a closer analysis of the problems with her approach, see K. R. P. Clark, ‘“TheWhole Frame of Nature, Time and Providence”: Daniel Defoe and the Transitionfrom Rights to Politeness in England Political Discourse, 1688–1731’, PhD thesis(Johns Hopkins University, 1998), pp. 175–91.

5. Martyn P. Thompson, ‘Daniel Defoe and the Formation of Early Eighteenth-Century Whig Ideology’, in Gordon J. Schochet (ed.), Politics, Politeness, andPatriotism, Proceedings of The Folger Institute Center for the History of BritishPolitical Thought, 5 (Washington, DC, 1993), pp. 109–24.

6. [Defoe], A New Test of the Church of England’s Loyalty (1702), p. 4.7. [Defoe], A Challenge of Peace, Address’d to the Whole Nation (1703), pp. 3–4;

[Defoe], A New Test of the Church of England’s Honesty (1704) in Defoe, A SecondVolume, pp. 300–2.

8. Downie, Harley, p. 7 and ch. 4. Leslie’s pamphlets saw several editions: The NewAssociation (1702) reached a third edition the same year, and The NewAssociation. Part II (1703) a third edition in 1704. The Wolf Stript saw only oneedition (1704) but was followed by The second part of the Wolf stript (1707).Cassandra (1704) went to a second edition in 1705.

9. [Defoe], A Serious Inquiry into this Grand Question: Whether a Law to Prevent theOccasional Conformity of Dissenters, Would not be Inconsistent with the Act ofToleration, And a Breach of the Queen’s Promise (1704), p. 23.

10. [Charles Leslie], The New Association. Part II. With farther Improvements. AsAnother and Later Scots Presbyterian-Covenant, Besides that mention’d in the FormerPart. And the Proceedings of that Party since. An Answer to some Objections in thePretended D. Foe’s Explication, In the Reflections upon the Shortest Way. WithRemarks upon Both. Also an Account of several other Pamphlets, which carry on, andplainly Discover the Design to Undermine and Blow-up the Present Church andGovernment. Particularly, The Discovery of a certain Secret History, Not yet Publish’d.With a Short Account of the Original of Government, Compar’d with the Schemes ofthe Republicans and Whigs (3rd edn, 1704).

11. [Leslie], The New Association. Part II, pp. 3–5, 6–8, 18, 29, and passim.12. [Leslie], The New Association, p. [ii].13. [Charles Leslie], The Wolf Stript of His Shepherd’s Cloathing (1704), p. 3.14. Ibid., p. 46.15. [Charles Leslie], Cassandra. (But I Hope not) Telling what will come of it. In Answer

to the Occasional Letter. Numb. I. Wherein The New-Associations, &c Are Considered.Numbers I and II (1704).

16. [Charles Leslie], A Rehearsal of the Observator and Review (August 1704–March1709).

17. For more on this see Downie, Harley, pp. 65–71.18. [Defoe], Review, 10 November 1705, II, Bk. 5, No. 107, p. 427.19. [Defoe], Review, 3 November 1705, II, Bk. 5, No. 105, pp. 418–19.

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20. Ibid., p. 419.21. [Defoe], Review, 8 November 1705, II, Bk. 5, No. 106, p. 423; 13 November 1705,

II, Bk. 5, No. 108, p. 431; 28 February 1706, III, Bk. 6, No. 26, p. 104.22. [Defoe], Review, 8 November 1705, II, Bk. 5, No. 106, pp. 422–3.23. [Defoe], Jure Divino. A Satyr. In Twelve Books. By the Author of The True-Born

Englishman (1706), p. xxvi. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 24. See Backscheider, Defoe, pp. 161–72, at 161.25. [Defoe], Review, 13 July, 1706, III, Bk. 7, No. 84, p. 333; 10 September 1706, III,

Bk. 7, No. 108, p. 429.26. Peter Laslett (ed.), [John Locke], Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge, 1994),

II, #9, p. 272. All citations and pagination from Laslett’s edition. Paragraphnumeration is Locke’s. The First and Second Treatise are distinguished by ‘I’ and‘II’, respectively.

27. [Defoe], Review, 10 September 1706, III, Bk. 7, No. 108, pp. 429–31.28. [Defoe], Review, 15 August 1705, III, Bk. 7, No. 98, pp. 389–90.29. Backscheider, Defoe, pp. 169–72. 30. Only later, it seems, did Defoe express doubts about Milton’s belief in the

Trinity: see below, Chapter 9. 31. Many people, Defoe included, believed Stephens was the sole author of a Letter

to the Author of the Memorial of the State of England (1705), a response to theeponymous pamphlet by John Toland published earlier that year, which itselfwas a riposte to the extremely influential ‘church-in-danger’ pamphlet, TheMemorial of the Church of England. For an excellent discussion of this controversy,see Downie, Harley, pp. 80–100.

32. Defoe’s argument about wet and dry martyrdoms, first put forward in the Review,had already caused considerable outrage which would resonate for some time to come. During Sacheverell’s trial in 1710, Sir Simon Harcourt referred toDefoe’s ‘abominable distinction’ in order to denigrate his client’s Whig accusersand their cause. See Geoffrey Holmes, The Trial of Dr. Sacheverell (1973), pp. 186–7.

33. The Political History of the Devil is discussed in Chapter 9.34. John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility (Cambridge,

1994), pp. 140–6, 346 and passim. Locke’s position on original sin was unclearin the Two Treatises. He seemed to suggest that God’s curse upon Adam and Evemay have applied to them alone and not to mankind in general. While Filmerinterpreted God’s grant of dominion to Adam alone, Locke argued, Filmer con-strued God’s curse upon Adam to apply to all of mankind. In communicatingwith human beings, Locke explained, God had to ‘condescend to theirCapabilities’ and would not therefore confuse matters by ‘crossing the Rules oflanguage’ or using it inconsistently. It was therefore hard to believe that ‘Adam’was to be understood as singular and particular in some scriptural passages andas a generic term for all of mankind in others, as Filmer’s interpretations wouldhave required. However, because Locke himself read God’s donation of theearth to Adam as a donation to the whole of mankind, according to his ownlogic, the curse applied to mankind in general as well. Then again, this may beone reason why he placed more emphasis on other factors which justify use ofthe earth such as self-preservation and the labour theory of value (I, #45–6,pp. 172–3). See Marshall, Locke, p. 424 for the insignificant role which Satanplayed in Locke’s writings prior to his paraphrases published posthumously in1707 as A Paraphrase Upon the Epistles of St Paul to the Romans, Galatians,Ephesians and Colossians.

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35. For an example of condemnation of James II by Defoe, see [Defoe], A Letter to aDissenter from His Friend at the Hague, Concerning the Penal Laws and the Test([1688]).

36. For the importance of this concept in early-modern English political thought,see Gordon J. Schochet, The Authoritarian Family and Political Attitudes in 17thCentury England: Patriarchalism in Political Thought (2nd edn, Brunswick, NJ,1988).

37. [Locke], Two Treatises, II, #74, #105–12, pp. 316–17, 336–44; Laslett’s Introduction,pp. 68–70.

38. [Locke], Two Treatises, II, #45, p. 299.39. James Tyrrell, The General History of England, as well ecclesiastical as civil (3 vols,

1696, 1700, 1704).40. For additional examples of Defoe’s natural law beliefs, see also the following

issues of The Review: II, Bk. 4, No. 3 (6 March 1705); II, Bk. 4, No. 37 (29 May1705); II, Bk. 4, No. 40 (5 June 1705); III, Bk. 6, No. 29 (7 July 1706).

41. There are no pp. 11–14 in Jure Divino Book III and the mispagination continuesto its end. Correct pagination resumes with Book IV.

42. [Locke], Two Treatises, I, #86, p. 205; #58, p. 182.43. [Locke], Two Treatises, I, #52–63, pp. 303–9.44. [Locke], Two Treatises, I, #25, pp. 285–6; #32, p. 291; #27, p. 287.45. [Locke], Two Treatises, I, #181, p. 389. See also #10–11, pp. 273–4; #16, p. 279;

and #172, p. 383.46. For Sidney’s importance see Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the English

Republic, 1623–1677 (Cambridge, 1988) and Algernon Sidney and the RestorationCrisis, 1677–1683 (Cambridge, 1991).

47. A confusing footnote citing Oceana appears in conjunction with the followingpassage from the poem which seems to add Harrington’s name to Locke’s andSidney’s as exponents of ‘the Laws of Nature and Humane Understanding’, buttypographical errors make the point of the footnote unclear (Jure Divino, II, p. 10).

48. [Defoe], Review, 10 September, 1706, III, Bk. 7, No. 108, pp. 430–1.49. See [Locke], Two Treatises, II, ch. II and ch. VIII. 50. [Locke], Two Treatises, II, #6, p. 271. 51. [Defoe], An Enquiry into the Case of Mr. Asgil’s General Translation (1704) [for

1703]), p. 25. 52. Blair Worden, ‘English Republicanism’, in J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie (eds),

The Cambridge History of Political Thought: 1450–1700 (Cambridge, 1991), p. 456.53. [Defoe], The Storm (1704), pp. 90–101. 54. Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform, 1626–1660

(London, 1975); Ernest Lee Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia: a Study in theBackground of the Idea of Progress (Berkeley, 1949).

4 Defoe and the Union of 1707: Constructing a British Identity

1. A fellow unionist and Scottish acquaintance of Defoe’s remarked that had Defoebeen discovered as ‘a Spy amongst us, but not known to be such, otherways theMob of Edin. had pulled him to pieces’: John M. Gray (ed.), Memoirs of the Life ofSir John Clerk of Penicuik, Scottish Historical Society Publication, 13 (Edinburgh,1892), pp. 63–4. Spiro Peterson examines the gradual fraying of Defoe’s cover in‘Defoe in Edinburgh, 1707’, HLQ, 38 (1974): 21–33. For additional biographical

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details of Defoe’s financial difficulties and life in Scotland, see Backscheider,Defoe; idem, ‘Defoe and the Clerks of Penicuik’, Modern Philology, 84 (1987):372–81; idem, ‘John Russell to Daniel Defoe: Fifteen Unpublished Letters fromScotland’, Philosophical Quarterly, 61 (1982): 61–77. A useful introduction andselection of Defoe’s most important writings on the union can be found inD. W. Hayton (ed.), The Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe: Unionwith Scotland, in W. R. Owens and P. N. Furbank (eds), The Works of Daniel Defoe,4 (2000).

2. [Defoe], Review, 1 February 1706, III, Bk. 8, No. 170, p. 678. Throughout I haveused the Facsimile Text edited by Arthur Wellesley Secord (Columbia UniversityPress, 1938). Volume, number, and page are original to Defoe’s serialization. Thebook number refers to the volume of Secord’s edition, included as a conveniencefor the reader. Hereafter cited as Review; Defoe, History of the Union of GreatBritain (1709), ‘Of the Last Treaty, Properly Called The Union’, p. 1 and ‘Preface’,p. 6; see also Review, 21 January 1706, III, Bk. 8, No. 165, p. 658. Defoe [to RobertHarley], 26 November 1706; Defoe to Robert Harley, 18 March 1706/7, inHealey, Letters, pp. 159, 211.

3. William Ferguson, Scotland’s Relations with England: a Survey to 1707 (Edinburgh,1977) and more categorically, P. W. J. Riley, The Union of England and Scotland(Manchester, 1978).

4. One historiographical exception is the volume of essays in which an earlierversion of this chapter appeared: John Robertson (ed.), A Union for Empire: theUnion of 1707 in the History of British Political Thought (Cambridge, 1995).

5. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 423; idem, Virtue, Commerce and History(Cambridge, 1986), ch. 2.

6. Defoe, The History of the Union of Great Britain (Edinburgh, 1709), xxxii, 116, 76,273, 131 pp. The pagination is irregular and varies between copies.

7. D. C. Douglas, English Scholars, 1660–1730 (2nd edn, 1951), p. 14.8. For the importance of the role of the classical historian in the eighteenth

century, see Philip Hicks, ‘Bolingbroke, Clarendon, and the Role of the ClassicalHistorian’, ECS, 20 (1987) and Neo-Classical History and English Culture: FromClarendon to Hume (1996). For Defoe’s own call for a ‘great man’ to write aboutthe union see Review, 26 September 1706, III, Bk. 8, No. 115, p. 458; and ‘TheMatter deserves a History by it self’: Review, 6 February 1706, III, Bk. 8, No. 172,p. 685.

9. Defoe, History of the Union, ‘A General History of Unions in Britain’, p. 30.10. Defoe, History of the Union, p. 4; ‘Of the Last Treaty’, p. 2.11. The History was being printed at the time of the attempted Jacobite invasion in

1708; Defoe felt compelled to add a preface which summarized the events andreinforced his argument.

12. The Lord H[aver]sham’s Speech in the House of Peers, November 15, 1705 (1705);Review, 24 November 1705, II, Bk. 5, No. 113, p. 452.

13. Review, 11 December 1705, II, Bk. 5, No. 120, pp. 478–9.14. [Defoe], A Reply to a Pamphlet Entituled, the L[or]d H[aversham]’s Vindication of his

Speech, &c. (1706), p. 3. Defoe knew John Thompson in the 1690s. For his ser-vices to William, Thompson was made the first Baron Haversham and a lord ofthe admiralty in 1699. By 1704, however, he had jettisoned his Whig identity.Ever loyal to William’s memory and to the Whig cause, Defoe’s fortunes hadbeen more mixed, prompting him to remark in his Reply ‘Fate … makes Footballsof Men, kicks some up Stairs and some down … and no man knows whether hisCourse shall issue in a PEERAGE or a PILLORY’, p. 8.

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15. Review, 3 November 1705, II, Bk. 5, No. 105, p. 419.16. Review, 11 December 1705, II, Bk. 5, No. 120, p. 478.17. Review, 12 May 1705, II, Bk. 4, No. 30, p. 118. For the relationship between

Haversham and Tutchin, see Downie, Harley, p. 97.18. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 432–5. For Defoe’s attachment to the idea of a

warrior king, see Schonhorn, Defoe’s Politics.19. Review, 19 April 1705, II, Bk. 4, No. 20, p. 78.20. ‘Thy Trees, fair Windsor! now shall leave their Woods, And half thy Forests rush

into my Floods’: Alexander Pope, ‘Windsor Forest’, in John Butt (ed.), TheTwickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope (10 vols, 1961), I, p. 189.

21. Review, 23 January 1705, I, Bk. 3, No. 93, pp. 385–6.22. Review, 3 November 1705, II, Bk. 5, No. 105, p. 419. Defoe used the Review to

examine a range of issues concerning the effects of the War of SpanishSuccession. For his views on the importance of England’s trade with Spain, seeespecially, 12 December 1704–30 January 1705: I, Bk. 2, Nos. 81, 83, 87, and 88and II, Bk. 3, Nos. 89, 94, and 95.

23. Review, 6 January 1705, I, Bk. 2, No. 88, p. 366.24. Review, 1 January 1706, III, Bk. 6, No. 1, p. 1.25. Review, 3 January 1706, III, Bk. 6, No. 2, p. 6.26. Ilse Vickers, Defoe and the New Sciences (Cambridge, 1996).27. Cited in Backscheider, Defoe, pp. 207–8.28. [Defoe], An Essay at Removing National Prejudices against a Union with Scotland,

Part I (1706), p. 11.29. [George Ridpath], The Reducing of Scotland by arms, and annexing it to England as a

province considered (1705); [James Hodges], War betwixt the two British kingdomsconsider’d, and the dangerous circumstances of each with reagard thereto lay’d open; bya full view of the consequences of it on both sides (1705); [William Atwood], Thesuperiority and direct dominion of the imperial crown of England, over the crown andkingdom of Scotland … asserted (1704).

30. [Defoe], An Essay at Removing National Prejudices … Part I, pp. 18–19.31. Review, 26 October 1706, III, Bk. 8. No. 128, p. 510.32. Defoe, History of the Union, ‘Of the Last Treaty’, p. 29.33. [Defoe], An Essay at Removing National Prejudices … Part I, pp. 19–21.34. Ibid., pp. 27–8.35. Review, 19 April 1705, II, Bk. 4, No. 20, p. 78.36. See Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation

of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689–1830 (Cambridge, 1993).37. Review, 11 December 1705, II, Bk. 5, No. 120, p. 480.38. [Defoe], An Essay at Removing National Prejudices … Part I, pp. 17–21.39. [Defoe], An Essay at Removing National Prejudices Against a Union with Scotland,

Part II (1706), pp. 31–2.40. [Defoe], An Essay at Removing National Prejudices … Part I, p. 23. Religion was ‘the

most Dangerous Rock of Difference, on which this Union could Split’: Defoe,History of the Union, ‘Of the Last Treaty’ p. 1.

41. [Defoe], An Essay at Removing National Prejudices … Part I, pp. 12–15. Technically,the United Provinces and Swiss cantons represented tolerant confederations andnot an incorporated, dual-confessional state with a single monarch as proposedby the union treaty.

42. [Defoe], An Essay at Removing National Prejudices … Part I, pp. 24–5.43. Ibid., p. 17.44. Ibid., p. 23.

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45. See n. 24 above.46. Lawrence B. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and

Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-century Britain (Cambridge, 1994); NicholasPhillipson, Hume (1989), ch. 2.

47. For Defoe’s reports of Presbyterian machinations in London and his specificinstructions to allay fears about the Kirk, see Healey, Letters, pp. 124–8.

48. Healey, Letters, p. 137 and passim.49. Review, 28 September 1706, III, Bk. 8, No. 116, p. 463.50. [James Hodges], The rights and interests of the two British monarchies, inquir’d into,

and clear’d; with a special respect to an united or separate state. Treatise I (1703);[George Ridpath], Considerations upon the union of the two kingdoms: with anaccount of the methods taken by ancient and modern governments, to effect an union(1706); [Andrew Fletcher?], State of the controversy betwixt united and separateParliaments ([?Edinburgh], 1706).

51. [Defoe], An Essay at Removing National Prejudices, against a Union with England.Part III (Edinburgh, 1706), p. 12.

52. Review, 12 November 1706, III, Bk. 8, No. 135, p. 538. Of course, this line maynot have swayed many Scots who believed that, in accepting incorporation,their own Parliament was destroying itself.

53. [George Ridpath], Considerations upon the union of the two kingdoms … (1706);[James Hodges], The Rights and Interests of the two British Monarchies, with a specialrespect to an united or separate state. Treatise III (1706).

54. [Defoe], A Fourth Essay at Removing National Prejudices; with some reply to Mr.H[o]dges and some other authors, who have printed their objections against an unionwith England (Edinburgh, 1706), p. 11. See also Review, 19 December 1706, III,Bk. 8, No. 151, pp. 602–3.

55. Defoe, History of the Union, ‘Of the Carrying on of the Treaty in Scotland’, p. 3.

56. Healey, Letters, p. 153.57. Defoe, History of the Union, ‘Of … the Treaty in Scotland’, pp. 15–22.58. [Fletcher?], State of the Controversy, p. 7. Review, 23 November 1706, III, Bk. 8, No.

140, p. 559.59. Defoe’s Legion’s Memorial claimed to represent the protest of 200,000

Englishmen.60. Conal Condren, George Lawson’s Politica and the English Revolution (Cambridge,

1989), pp. 166–9.61. [Defoe], The Original Power of the Collective Body of the People of England, in Defoe,

A True Collection, p. 139.62. Review, 10 December 1706, III, Bk. 8, No. 147, p. 586.63. See for example Review, 26 November 1706, III, Bk. 8, No. 141, pp. 562–3;

10 December, III, Bk. 8, No. 147, p. 586.64. [Patrick Abercromby], The Advantages of the Act of Security, compar’d with these of

the intended union: founded on the revolution principles publish’d by Mr. Daniel DeFoe (Edinburgh, 1706).

65. [Defoe], A Fifth Essay, at Removing National Prejudices: with a reply to some authors, who have printed their objections against an union with England (Edinburgh?,1707).

66. The Lord Beilhaven’s Speech in Parliament, in Defoe, History of the Union. 67. Healey, Letters, pp. 196–247.68. Backscheider, Defoe, pp. 226–52.69. Defoe to Harley, 10 February 1708, in Healey, Letters, pp. 250.

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70. For an account of the Jacobite invasion in 1708 see John S. Gibson, Playing theScottish Card: the Franco-Jacobite Invasion of 1708 (Edinburgh, 1988).

71. For an account see Alan J. Downie, ‘Daniel Defoe and the General Election of1708 in Scotland’, ECS, 8 (1974–5): 315–28.

5 Correspondence, Credit, and Commerce: Defoe and the Instability of Meaning, 1709–1713

1. The most complete account of the Sacheverell affair is Geoffrey Holmes, TheTrial of Dr. Sacheverell (1973). For a review of the literature surrounding the con-troversy see F. F. Madan, A Critical Bibliography of Dr. Henry Sacheverell, ed.W. A. Speck (Lawrence, Kansas, 1978).

2. [Defoe], The Shortest Way with the Dissenters. See also Chapter 2 above.3. [Defoe], A New Test of the Sence of the Nation: Being a Modest Comparison Between

The Addresses To The Late King James, And Those to Her Present Majesty. In Order toObserve, How far The Sence of the Nation may be judg’d of by either of them (1710),pp. 3, 7, 13.

4. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 440, 448–9; Virtue, Commerce, and History,pp. 111–3. See Chapter 1, above.

5. The following paragraph is based upon P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolutionin England: a Study of the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756 (1957) and EricKerridge, Trade and Banking in Early Modern England (Manchester, 1988).

6. B. R. Mitchell and Phyllis Deane, Abstract of British Historical Statistics(Cambridge, 1976), p. 401.

7. Tim Clayton, The English Print, 1688–1802 (New Haven, 1997).8. Colin Nicholson, Writing and the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early

Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1994), p. 5.9. [Defoe], Review, Vol. VI, Bk. 16, pp. 454–9 (27 December 1709). Ironically, Sir

Simon Harcourt, attorney general for the queen in 1703, whose speech atDefoe’s trial in 1703 made leniency impossible, was Sacheverell’s defence lawyerin 1710.

10. [Defoe], A Letter to Mr Bisset (1709), pp. 6–7, 11–12.11. Ibid., p. 15.12. Holmes, The Trial of Dr. Sacheverell, p. 243. 13. Backscheider, Defoe, p. 271.14. [Defoe], An Essay upon Projects (1697), pp. 243–5, and see above, Chapter 1;

A New Test of the Sence of the Nation, p. 4.15. [Defoe], An Essay upon Projects, pp. 243–5.16. [Defoe], A New Test of the Sence of the Nation, pp. 4–5.17. Ibid., pp. 4–5, 14–16. For Defoe’s views that High Church flattery contributed to

James II’s absolutist pretensions, see Chapter 3 above. 18. Ibid., pp. 2, 8, 10–12.19. Ibid., pp. 79, 87–8.20. Downie, Harley, chs. 6–8.21. Downie, Harley, p. 117.22. Defoe stated that Mr. Review’s rebuke showed ‘The Notion is general, at least

among themselves, that the Gross of the Cash is with the Whigs’ but in this he(and they) were mistaken. See [Defoe], An Essay upon Loans (1710), p. 19.

23. See, for example, Review, Vol. III, No. 5, pp. 17–20 (10 January 1706); Vol. III,No. 6, pp. 20–3, (12 January 1706); Vol. VI, No. 31, p. 124 (14 June 1709);

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Vol. III, No. 32, pp. 126–7 (16 June 1709); Vol. VII, No. 57, p. 222 (5 August1710); Vol. VII, No. 116, p. 463 (21 December 1710); Pocock, MachiavellianMoment, p. 452; idem., Virtue, Commerce, and History, pp. 99, 113; CatherineIngrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: aCulture of Paper Credit (Cambridge, 1998); Sandra Sherman, Finance andFictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe (Cambridge, 1996),pp. 40–54.

24. In contending that readers had to give fictions a measure of credit and thatbuyers and sellers read bills of exchange as fictional narratives, Sandra Sherman,for example, argues that fiction and credit were homologous co-creators of anepisteme of instability. Aligning herself with Foucault and the New Historicism,she attempts to refute Pocock’s argument that Defoe sought to ground opinionand passion upon experience rather than imagination. She also denies theimportance of the New Science’s notions of verifiability in Defoe’s approach tothe question of credit: Sherman, Finance and Fiction, p. 38. For a more nuancedapproach, albeit one that also seems to underestimate experience in contextual-izing credit, see Colin Nicholson, Writing and the Rise of Finance, Preface, esp.p. xii.

25. [Defoe], Review, Vol. VI, Bk. 14, No. 30, p. 119 (11 June 1709).26. [Defoe], An Essay upon Publick Credit … By Robert Harley, Esq. Printed 1710, in

Sir Walter Scott (ed.), Somers Tracts (13 vols, 1809–15), p. 28.27. Ibid., p. 29.28. Ibid., pp. 28–9.29. [Defoe], An Essay upon Loans, pp. 4–6.30. [Defoe], An Essay upon Publick Credit, p. 31.31. [Defoe], An Essay upon Loans, pp. 7–10.32. Ibid., pp. 12–15.33. Ibid., pp. 16–17.34. [Defoe], An Essay upon Publick Credit, pp. 31–2.35. [Defoe], An Essay upon Loans, p. 12.36. [Defoe], A General History of Trade (1713). Each of the four monthly instalments

(June, July, August, September) had its own subtitle. Hereafter cited in the textwith Roman numerals I–IV referring to each month respectively.

37. Downie, Harley, p. 17.38. The first issue of the Mercator was published on 26 May 1713. The last issue of

the Review appeared on 11 June after nine years of continual publication.39. [Defoe], Considerations upon the Eighth and Ninth Articles Of The Treaty of

Commerce and Navigation (1713). Defoe’s view that any trade should be under-taken if economically advantageous was consistent with his disapproval ofwartime embargoes, as he had argued against Lord Haversham in 1706; seeChapter 4. See also [Defoe], An Essay on the Treaty of Commerce with France(1713) and [Defoe], Some Thoughts upon the Subject of Commerce with France(1713).

40. The distinction between the peace and the treaty’s eighth and ninth articlesrelating to commerce, loyalty to Harley, and disgust at the Whigs’ complicity in a new Occasional Conformity Bill, do not entirely acquit Defoe of venality in writing for the Tories in this period, but they help us see his motivations were more than mercenary ones. For a fair, if slightly harsher, assessment ofDefoe’s activities in this period see P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, A PoliticalBiography of Daniel Defoe (2006), pp. 103–35. See also Backscheider, Defoe, pp. 343–4.

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41. [Defoe to Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford], 19 October 1713: Healey, Letters,pp. 417–24.

42. See Ilse Vickers, Defoe and the New Sciences, ch. 5. Vickers is correct in identifyingcertain elements of the text as Baconian but she does not examine the moreimmediate context or other important ideas and discourses operating within thetext.

43. Thomas Burnet, The Theory of the Earth: containing an account of the original of theearth, and of all the general changes which it hath already undergone, or is to undergo,till the consummation of all things (1684–90), published in 1719 as The SacredTheory of the Earth.

44. See also A General History of Trade, I, p. 25; II, p. 26.45. See Chapters 1 and 4, above.46. See Chapters 1 and 2, above.47. H. M. Höpfl, ‘From Savage to Scotsman: Conjectural History in the Scottish

Enlightenment’, JBS, 17 (1978): 38. 48. In A General History of Discoveries and Improvements (1725–6), Defoe emphasized

the Roman empire’s disinterest in commerce in contradistinction to thePhoenician empire’s contributions to trade; see Chapter 8 below.

6 Robinson Crusoe: Orthodox Penitent

1. [Defoe], The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York,Mariner (1719); here cited from the first edition.

2. Hunter, Reluctant Pilgrim; George A. Starr, Defoe & Spiritual Autobiography(Princeton, 1965); idem, Defoe & Casuistry (Princeton, 1971); James S. Preus,Explaining Religion: Criticism and Theory from Bodin to Freud (New Haven, 1987).

3. Ian P. Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (1957).4. [Defoe], The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe; Being the Second and Last Part of

his Life (1719) and [Defoe] Serious Reflections during the life and surprising adven-tures of Robinson Crusoe: with his vision of the angelick world (1720), cited herefrom the first editions.

5. The ‘Bangorian Controversy’ followed a provocative sermon by BenjaminHoadly, Bishop of Bangor, delivered on 31 March 1717, which denied theApostolic basis of the authority of the Church of England: see especially AndrewEdward Starkey, ‘The Bangorian Controversy, 1716–1721’ (Cambridge UniversityPhD thesis, 2003).

6. The point at issue in the Salters’ Hall controversy was whether Nonconformistdenominations could enforce subscription to written creeds; by a majority offour, the vote went against requiring subscription. An earlier but relatedcontretemps occurred when Daniel Wilcox, a London Presbyterian minister, dis-missed his assistant for Arminianism. Wilcox defended his action in an anony-mous pamphlet, The Duty of holding fast the Form of sound Words (1717); ittouched on an important area of Defoe’s concern, the stability and certainty ofmeaning. One estimate suggests that English Presbyterian ministers dividedagainst subscription by 48 to 27: Roger Thomas, ‘The Salters’ Hall Watershed’, inBolam, English Presbyterians, pp. 151–74, at p. 163 and R. Thomas, ‘The Non-Subscription Controversy amongst Dissenters in 1719: the Salters’ Hall Debate’,Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 4 (1953): 162–8. Defoe’s alarm at the conse-quences for his own denomination was understandable.

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7. Maximillian Novak, ‘Defoe, the Occult, and the Deist Offensive During theReign of George I’, in J. A. Leo Lemay (ed.), Deism, Masonry, and the Enlightenment(Newark, 1987), p. 94.

8. Ronald Paulson, Breaking and Remaking: Aesthetic Practice in England, 1700–1820(New Brunswick, 1989), pp. 7, 34–5.

9. Ibid., pp. 9–10.10. See P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, A Political Biography of Daniel Defoe (2006),

pp. 136–74, for the various political complexities in which Defoe operated in thelatter part of the decade.

11. For Toland’s association with the Stanhope–Sunderland ministry, see JustinChampion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture,1696–1722 (Manchester, 2003), introduction and ch. 6. The State Anatomy ofGreat Britain went through nine editions in 1717 and was followed by a supple-ment, The second part of the State Anatomy, that same year. Defoe responded tothese with An Argument Proving that the Design of Employing and En[n]oblingForeigners, is a Treasonable Conspiracy (1717) and A Farther Argument againstEnnobling Foreigners (1717).

12. Norman Sykes, ‘Benjamin Hoadly, Bishop of Bangor’, in F. J. C. Hearnshaw (ed.),The Social and Political Ideas of Some English Thinkers of the Augustan Age,1650–1750 (1926), pp. 112–55 and Church and State in England in the EighteenthCentury (New York, 1975), p. 426.

13. [Defoe], The Question Fairly Stated (1717); see also The Weakest Go to the Wall(1714) and An Essay on the History of Parties and Persecution in Britain (1711).

14. See Chapter 2 for Defoe and the occasional conformity debate. 15. For the best explanation of the relationship of politics, Christology, and the

Church of England, see J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Within the Margins: the Definitions ofOrthodoxy’, in Roger Lund (ed.), The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing andCultural Response, 1660–1750 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 33–53.

16. [Defoe], An Argument Proving that the Design of Employing and Ennobling Foreigners,is a Treasonable Conspiracy (1717), pp. 7–8, 43, 74–5. Defoe’s title refers to theWhig ministry’s proposal to give peerages to two of George I’s Hanoveriancourtiers in defiance of the Act of Settlement of 1701.

17. [Defoe], A Declaration of Truth to Benjamin Hoadly (1717), pp. 7–8, 19–24, 28–9. 18. [Defoe], Eleven Opinions about Mr H[arle]y (1711), p. 9.19. [Defoe], The Danger of Court Differences (1717), pp. 12, 28, 43–4.20. [Defoe], The Old Whig and Modern Whig Revived (1717), pp. 7, 17.21. For the history of [Giovanni Paolo Marana], Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy (8 vols,

1692–4 and later reprints) and the relation of Defoe’s volume to his develop-ment as a novelist, see Novak, Defoe, pp. 528–36.

22. Justin Champion (ed.), John Toland, Nazarenus (Voltaire Foundation, Oxford,1999). See also Champion’s The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: the Church of Englandand its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge, 1992), ch. 4 and his Republican Learning,ch. 6.

23. Defoe had to have been working on the Letters before the publication of Toland’sNazarenus but the work’s epistolary format might have given him great flexibil-ity to insert new material.

24. [Defoe], A Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy at Paris (London, 1718),Preface and p. 98. To most orthodox Christians, the Nazarenes were a hereticalsect and their name became a term of opprobrium but Toland and othersapproved of the Nazarene faith.

25. Ibid., pp. 39–40.

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26. Ibid., pp. 35, 39, 203, 221.27. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, pp. 109–10.28. [Defoe], A Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy at Paris, p. 126. 29. Ibid., pp. 81–4, 127–30. 30. Ibid., pp. 60, 121, 124–5; see also pp. 129, 152, 155, and 162. Defoe explored

this theme again in A General History of Discoveries and Improvements (1725–6),p. 84, discussed in Chapter 8 and in An Essay upon Literature (1726).

31. [Defoe], A Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy at Paris, pp. 152–6.32. Ibid., pp. 218–21.33. Margaret Jacob, Newtonians and The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons

and Republicans (1981). 34. [Defoe], A Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy at Paris, pp. 110–12.35. Although unattributed by Furbank and Owens, Maximillian Novak and others

cite the following works as part of Defoe’s direct response to the Salters’ Hallcontroversy: A Letter to the Dissenters (1719) and Some Remarks upon the LateDifferences among the Dissenting Ministers and Preachers (1719).

36. [Defoe], A Letter to the Dissenters (1719), cited in Geoffrey Sill, The Cure of thePassions and the Origins of the English Novel (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 70–1; Novak,Defoe, p. 655. Although Novak does not delve deeply into questions of Christologyand its relationship to Defoe’s eschatology, his scholarship has been crucial inestablishing the threat Defoe felt from the rising tide of heterodoxy in this period.

37. Sill, The Cure of the Passions, pp. 70–1. In these conclusions, Sill echoes those ofPaula Backscheider, Defoe, pp. 402–3, 417–18.

38. [Defoe], Robinson Crusoe, pp. 257, 261–2: ‘we had here the Word of God to read,and no farther off from his Spirit to instruct, than if we had been in England’.

39. Ian Watt, in his hugely influential The Rise of the Novel, p. 89, argued that theSerious Reflections ‘cannot, as a whole, be taken seriously as part of the story’.

40. Novak, Defoe, pp. 555, 562. 41. Ilse Vickers, Defoe and the New Sciences (Cambridge, 1996); Robert Mayer, History

and the Early English Novel: Matters of Fact from Bacon to Defoe (Cambridge, 1997);Sill, Cure of the Passions.

42. For other critiques of the ‘rise of the novel’ thesis and its application to workslike Robinson Crusoe, see J. A. Downie, ‘The Making of the English Novel’,Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 9 (1996–7): 249–66; Homer Obed Brown, Institutions ofthe English Novel: From Defoe to Scott (Philadelphia, 1997).

43. See Hunter, Reluctant Pilgrim, p. 20.44. Charles Gildon, The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Mr. D___ De F____ in

Paul Dottin (ed.), Robinson Crusoe Examin’d and Criticised (1923).45. [Defoe], Serious Reflections, Preface, n.p. 46. See Hunter, Reluctant Pilgrim, p. 69. 47. [Defoe], Serious Reflections, pp. 206–7.48. Although Crusoe’s Trinitarianism is not an issue for Hunter, his account of

Crusoe’s conversion is the best treatment of this crucial episode. See his ReluctantPilgrim, chs. 7 and 8.

49. [Defoe], Robinson Crusoe, p. 113.50. John Richetti, Defoe’s Narratives: Situations and Structures (Oxford, 1975), p. 46.51. [Defoe], Robinson Crusoe, pp. 121, 132.52. For an excellent discussion of Friday’s natural religion see Timothy C. Blackburn,

‘Friday’s Religion: Its Nature and Importance in Robinson Crusoe’, ECS, 18 (1985):360–82.

53. [Defoe], Robinson Crusoe, pp. 257–61.

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54. [Defoe], Farther Adventures, p. 165.55. Ibid., p. 188.56. Ibid., p. 171.57. Novak, Defoe, p. 561. 58. [Defoe], Serious Reflections, pp. 133–6.59. Ibid., pp. 142–4. 60. [Defoe], Farther Adventures, pp. 177–82.61. Crusoe remarks that some geographers believed Tartary to be the location of the

book of Revelation’s Gog and Magog, two powers under Satan’s thrall (FartherAdventures, p. 328). The giant idol may have been inspired by the fourteen-footwooden grotesques of Gog and Magog in Guildhall which as a Londoner Defoewould certainly have heard about if not seen. According to medieval legend,Gog and Magog were the last of a race of giants in Albion who were brought inchains to the palace of Brutus, now the site of Guildhall, to serve as the Trojanking’s porters. The original statues were destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 andreplaced in 1708. Children of London were told that when the clock of St Paul’sstruck twelve, the giants feasted in the hall. The 1708 statues were destroyed inthe fire of 29 December 1940.

62. [Defoe], Farther Adventures, pp. 345–6.63. Ibid., p. 365.64. [Defoe], Serious Reflections, p. 153.65. Ibid., pp. 120–6.66. Vincenzo Cioffari, ‘Fortune, Fate and Chance’, in Philip P. Wiener (ed.),

Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New York, 1973–4), II, pp. 225–36; KennethClatterbaugh, The Causation Debate in Modern Philosophy 1639–1739 (New York,1999); Lorraine Daston, Classical Probability and the Enlightenment (Princeton,1988); Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge, 1990); Barbara J. Shapiro,Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth Century England: a Study of the Relationshipsbetween Natural Science, Religion, History, Law and Literature (Princeton, 1983);idem, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 (Ithaca, 2000).

67. [Defoe], Serious Reflections, p. 234.68. Ch. 5, ‘Of Listening to the Voice of Providence’, in [Defoe], Serious Reflections,

pp. 204–38, at pp. 207–9. In addition to this chapter, Crusoe’s advice to heed the‘secret Dictate’, the ‘secret Hints and Notices’ of Providence is repeated through-out the first and second volumes. See, for example, Robinson Crusoe, pp. 207–8,296 and Farther Adventures, pp. 218–19, 286.

69. [Defoe], Farther Adventures, pp. 297–8.70. Ibid., p. 298.71. [Defoe], Serious Reflections, p. 139.72. Ibid., p. 129.73. Ibid., p. 130. 74. [Defoe], Farther Adventures, pp. 273, 292, 301.75. [Defoe], Serious Reflections, p. 131.76. Ibid., pp. 253, 255.77. Ibid., pp. 239–40.78. Ibid., pp. 261, 263.79. Ibid., pp. 147, 149–50, 152, 155, 161.80. The May victory at Ramillies was celebrated at St Paul’s on 31 December 1706.81. [Defoe], Serious Reflections, pp. 163–6.82. Ibid., pp. 88–9.83. Ibid., p. 89.

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84. ‘Of Atheistical and Prophane Discourse’, ibid., pp. 96–102, at pp. 97, 101–2. Forthe use of ridicule in heterodox thought see James A. Herrick, The RadicalRhetoric of the English Deists: the Discourse of Skepticism, 1680–1750 (Columbia,South Carolina, 1997), p. 7. See also John Redwood, Reason, Ridicule, Religion: theAge of Enlightenment in England, 1660–1750 (1976).

85. [Defoe], Serious Reflections, pp. 90, 94 and passim.86. Ibid., p. 81.87. Ibid. pp. 94–5.88. Ibid., pp. 87, 102–3.89. Ibid., p. 104.90. For the general sense of moral decline in the 1710s and 1720s, see Hoppit, Land

of Liberty?, pp. 439, 473.91. [Defoe], Serious Reflections, p. 102.92. Angus Ross, ‘Introduction’, in Defoe, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

(Harmondsworth, 1965), p. 9. This, the widely available Penguin edition, maystand for much academic writing of its time.

93. Ross, ‘Introduction’, p. 10.94. [Defoe], Robinson Crusoe, pp. [ii–iii]; italics and Roman reversed.

7 The Perils of Consumption and the Decline of Family Government

1. [Defoe], The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), pp. 8–9. See RobinsonCrusoe, pp. 28–9 for a similar appraisal of the condition of life in the lower, mid-dling, and upper ranks of society. In the first volume, all providential signs wereintended to countermand Crusoe’s wanderlust; in the second, Crusoe rational-ized his wanderlust as a challenge which Providence demanded he embrace, oneof several reasons why some critics accused Defoe of using Providence to suit hisnarrative purposes.

2. Hoppit, A Land of Liberty?, p. 338. The most important historical studies includeJohn Carswell, The South Sea Bubble (1960); P. G. M. Dickson, The FinancialRevolution in England: a Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756 (1967);Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History; Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: theCulture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (1998); Julian Hoppit,‘Attitudes to Credit in Britain, 1680–1790’, HJ, 33 (1990): 305–22. For emphasisgiven by literary scholars, see Novak, Defoe, pp. 575–6; Colin Nicholson, Writingand the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge,1994); Liz Bellamy, Commerce, Morality and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge,1998); Catherine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: a Culture of Paper Credit (Cambridge, 1998); James Thompson,Novels of Value: Eighteenth-century Political Economy and the Novel (Durham, NC1996); Gary Hentzi, ‘“An Itch of Gaming”: the South Sea Bubble and the Novels ofDaniel Defoe’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 17 (1993): 32–45; Robert Markley, ‘“SoInexhaustible a Treasure of Gold”: Defoe, Capitalism, and the Romance of theSouth Seas’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 18 (1994): 148–67.

3. See [Defoe], The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (1721), here-after cited as Moll Flanders; [Defoe], The Fortunate Mistress (1724), hereafter citedas Roxana; John F. O’Brien, ‘The Character of Credit: Defoe’s “Lady Credit”, TheFortunate Mistress, and the Resources of Inconsistency in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain’, ELH, 63 (1996): 603–31.

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4. See, for example, Novak’s point about the formation of congers, or publishinggroups in this period, in Defoe, pp. 566–7.

5. Whereas this chapter focuses on Defoe’s views about commerce and historicalchange during his own lifetime, Chapter 8 examines Defoe’s views about com-merce in the ancient and modern world, and especially in England since thereign of Henry VII. Defoe’s ideas about the relationship between commerce andreligion are discussed in Chapter 9.

6. For Defoe’s views on public credit, stockjobbing, and the South Sea Bubble inparticular during this period see his pamphlets The Anatomy of Exchange Alley: or,a System of Stock-Jobbing (1719); The Chimera: or, the French way of Paying NationalDebts, laid open (1720); The Case of Mr Law, Truly Stated (1721). Defoe was alsolargely responsible for The Director, a twice-weekly periodical which he took oversoon after its inception on 5 October 1720. It ran until 16 January 1721. ForDefoe’s contribution to the debate on calicoes, see his The Just Complaint of the Poor Weavers truly represented (1719); A Brief State of the Question, between thePrinted and Painted Callicoes and the Woollen and Silk Manufacture (1719); The Tradeto India Critically and Calmly Consider’d (1720). Commissioned by the LondonCompany of Weavers, Defoe published eighty-six issues of The Manufacturer, aperiodical which ran from 30 October 1719 to 9 March 1721.

7. Quotations from The Freeholder’s Plea against Stock-Jobbing Elections of ParliamentMen (1701), for example, appear in The Anatomy of Exchange Alley (1719). For adiscussion of Defoe and the reformation of manners, see Chapter 1.

8. The Weavers’ Pretences Examin’d (1719). 9. [Defoe], The Just Complaint of the Poor Weavers (1719), p. 19 and passim.

10. Ibid., p. 37. See also [Defoe] A Brief State of the Question, between the Printed andPainted Callicoes and the Woollen and Silk Manufacture (1719), Introduction, p. 24and passim.

11. Ibid., pp. 6–7.12. Ibid., pp. 24–5.13. Andrew Morton, Every-Body’s Business, is No-Body’s Business (1725). During the

1720s Defoe published several pamphlets in the guise of the curmudgeonlypersona of ‘Andrew Morton’.

14. Daniel Defoe, A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, ed. G. D. H. Cole(2 vols, 1968), pp. 280–2, 488.

15. The Weavers’ Pretences Examin’d (1719), pp. 11–13.16. [Defoe], The Just Complaint of the Poor Weavers, pp. 29–30. 17. See below, pp. 149–50, 153–4. 18. The Weavers’ Pretences Examin’d, p. 6.19. [Defoe], The Just Complaint of the Poor Weavers, p. 11.20. Ibid., p. 38. 21. Roberts published some works by authors of other persuasions, including Francis

Atterbury and William Wake. Nevertheless, he was involved as printer or book-seller with a remarkable list of freethinkers in these years: John Asgill, The Succes-sion of the House of Hanover Vindicated (1714); Thomas Chubb, The Supremacy ofthe Father Asserted (1715); idem, Two Enquiries (1717); Thomas Gordon, TheCharacter of an Independent Whig (1719); Thomas Morgan, The Grounds andPrinciples of Christian Communion Consider’d (1720); idem, A Refutation of the FalsePrinciples (1722); Matthew Tindal, The Defection Consider’d (1717); idem,A Defence of our Present Happy Establishment (1722); John Toland, The State-Anatomy of Great Britain (1717); idem, Nazarenus (1718); idem, Tetradymus(1720); John Trenchard, A Collection of Cato’s Political Letters (1721); William

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Whiston, A Vindication of the Sibylline Oracles (1715); idem, The Cause of theDeluge Demonstrated (1716); idem, Mr. Whiston’s Account of Dr. Sacheverell’sProceedings (1719); Thomas Woolston, The Exact Fitness of the Time, in whichChrist was Manifested in the Flesh (1722). Roberts also published titles on theSalters’ Hall controversy.

22. A Further Examination of the Weavers Pretences (1719), pp. 10–11. 23. [Defoe], A Brief State of the Question, between the Printed and Painted Callicoes

(1719); [John Asgill], A Brief Answer to A Brief State of the Question (1719). ForDefoe’s earlier views on Asgill, see Chapter 3.

24. [Defoe], An Appendix, In Return to Mr. Asgill’s Tract, Entitled A Brief Answer, &c. inA Brief State of the Question, between the Printed and Painted Callicoes (3rd edn,1720), pp. 41–2. It was rumoured that Asgill was also the author of the period-ical, The British Merchant, with which Defoe engaged.

25. [Defoe], Tour, p. 81. Scholars determined to use episodes like the South SeaBubble to condemn credit economies in general would do well to examine thefar greater instability of economies lacking mechanisms of credit.

26. [Defoe], The Complete English Tradesman (1726 [for 1725]), p. 409. 27. Ibid., pp. 225–6, 408–9. 28. See Justin Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian

Culture, 1696–1722 (Manchester, 2003), pp. 99–100, 107; Jacob, Newtonians,p. 221.

29. David Blewett (ed.), Daniel Defoe, Roxana: the Fortunate Mistress (New York,1987),pp. 207–12, 301–3. For the view that the novel reflected a ‘reconceptualization of money from treasure to capital’ see Thompson, Models of Value, p. 2 andpassim.

30. For an insightful reading of other aspects of finance and its cultural meanings inRoxana, see D. Christopher Gabbard, ‘The Dutch Wives’ Good Husbandry:Defoe’s Roxana and Financial Literacy’, ECS, 37 (2004): 237–51.

31. [Defoe], The Anatomy of Exchange Alley … by a Jobber (1719), pp. 3, 15, 26–7. Thefinanciers Defoe cited by their initials were Jacob Sawbridge, Sir George Caswell,and Elias Turner.

32. Ibid., pp. 35, 37–8, 41. 33. Ibid., pp. 3–4. 34. Ibid., p. 10.35. For Whiston, see especially Chapter 9 below.36. [Defoe], The Chimera (1719), pp. 5–6, 61–2, 76.37. Ibid., pp. 1–7.38. [Defoe], The Anatomy of Exchange Alley, pp. 13, 16, 42, 46–7.39. Ibid., pp. 5, 45.40. [Defoe], Tour, pp. 90, 160, 338–9. 41. Robert Mayer, History and the Early English Novel: Matters of Fact from Bacon to

Defoe (Cambridge, 1997).42. [Defoe], The Compleat English Gentleman, ed. Karl D. Bülbring (1890), p. xiii;

[Defoe], A System of Magick (1726), pp. 235–6. 43. For Defoe’s earlier analysis see Chapter 1. 44. Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eightenth-Century England: Household,

Kinship and Patronage (Cambridge, 2001).45. Andrew Cambers and Michelle Wolfe, ‘Reading, Family Religion, and Evangel-

ical Identity in Late Stuart England’, HJ, 47 (2004): 875–96.46. See, for example, Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England,

1500–1800 (1977). For a critique of Stone’s use of Defoe’s Family Instructors, see

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Laura A. Curtis, ‘A Case Study of Defoe’s Domestic Conduct Manuals Suggestedby The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture,10 (1981): 409–28.

47. [Defoe], The Family Instructor (1715), pp. 1–2, 258, 260–1.48. [Defoe], The Family Instructor In Two Parts … Vol. II (1718), pp. iii–iv.49. [Defoe], The Family Instructor [Vol. I], p. 84. 50. [Defoe], Religious Courtship (1722), p. 290. 51. Ibid., pp. 296, 299. 52. Ibid., p. 306. 53. For two among many sharply differing approaches to this text, see Peter Earle,

The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London,1660–1730 (Berkeley, 1989) and Sandra Sherman, Finance and Fictionality in theEarly Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe (Cambridge, 1996), ch. 3.

54. [Defoe], Complete English Tradesman, pp. vi–viii.55. Hoppit, Land of Liberty?, pp. 316, 439; Earle, Making of the English Middle Class,

pp. 8–13, 269–301.56. [Defoe], Complete English Tradesman, pp. 134–6. 57. [Defoe], Every Body’s Business is No Body’s Business (1725), p. 7.58. Ibid., pp. 13–14.59. Ibid., pp. 15–23. 60. [Defoe], Religious Courtship, pp. 354–5. 61. [Defoe], Complete English Tradesman, p. 20. 62. Ibid., p. 193.63. Ibid., pp. 185–90. 64. Ibid, pp. 190–6.65. Ibid., pp. 185–6.66. Ibid., pp. 191–6.67. Ibid., pp. 128, 134–6, 143–4. 68. Ibid., pp. 56–7, 68, 348–52.69. Ibid., pp. 119–20, 127–8, 143.70. For the importance of the guide literature tradition in Defoe’s works, see Hunter,

Reluctant Pilgrim, p. 45 and idem, Before Novels: the Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-century English Fiction (New York, 1990).

71. [Defoe], Complete English Tradesman, pp. 61, 64. 72. Ibid., pp. 48–9, 152.73. Ibid., pp. 365–6.74. Ibid., pp. 368–72, 386–7.

8 Defoe’s Historical Vision: Commerce and Gentility in the 1720s

1. [Defoe], A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6), ed. G. D. H. Cole(1968). There are many examples of this; the best, perhaps, is his praise ofWilton and the Earl of Pembroke, pp. 193–6. Of course Defoe would haveapproved of Pembroke, ex President of the Royal Society and Commissioner ofthe Treaty of Union, 1707.

2. One scholar appeals to Benedict Anderson’s idea of nations as ‘imagined com-munities’ but nevertheless advances a much older picture of the Tour as ‘avehicle advancing and articulating the transition from one cultural system toanother – from a dynastic conception of nationhood to a geographically based con-

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ception, from a vertical and hierarchical world-view to a horizontal and hencemore egalitarian one, and, on the political plane, from an ideology of royal abso-lutism as expressed, for example, in Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha … to one of republi-canism as expressed in John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1690)’; Defoe‘celebrates … a Lockean and egalitarian landscape’: Terence N. Bowers, ‘GreatBritain Imagined: Nation, Citizen, and Class in Defoe’s Tour Thro’ the Whole Islandof Great Britain’, Prose Studies, 16 (1993): 148–78, at pp. 150, 152, 161. Anotherwriter similarly invokes Benedict Anderson to claim that Defoe presents a commu-nity that ‘downplays the importance of existing social stratification and economicinequalities, focusing on the ostensibly egalitarian participation of every individualin the whole’: Betty A. Schnellenberg, ‘Imagining the Nation in Defoe’s A TourThro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain’, ELH, 62 (1995): 295–311, at p. 296. SuchWhiggish interpretations, however theorized, can no longer be sustained followingthe work of historians of political thought in recent decades.

3. [Defoe], The Complete English Tradesman (1726 [for 1725]), p. 377. 4. Ibid., pp. 368–73.5. Ibid., pp. 375–6, 386.6. Ibid., pp. 380–3. Defoe conveniently neglected to mention that Ezekiel’s remarks

about the glory of Tyre were made in the context of prophesying its ruin: Ezekiel26–8.

7. The first three instalments of A General History of Discoveries and Improvements(1725–6) were published in October, November, and December of 1725 with thefourth instalment appearing in May 1726. The work was republished as a wholewith an index in December 1726.

8. [Defoe], A Plan of the English Commerce (2nd edn, 1730); Facsimile Text Edition,Reprints of Economic Classics (New York, 1967), p. 48.

9. [Defoe], Tour, p. 3; see also Ilse Vickers, chapter 8: ‘Defoe’s Tour: a Naturalhistory of Man and his Activities’, in Defoe and the New Sciences (Cambridge,1996), pp. 151–76.

10. [Defoe], Tour, p. 3.11. Ibid., pp. 49, 114–17, 186.12. Ibid., p. 1.13. Jeremy Black, British Foreign Policy in the Age of Walpole (Edinburgh, 1985), espe-

cially pp. 93–117.14. [Defoe], A General History of Discoveries and Improvements, III, p. 164; II, p. 92. 15. Ibid., pp. 134–5 and ch. 12, pp. 133–52, passim. 16. [Defoe], Plan of the English Commerce, pp. 337–41. 17. [Defoe], A General History of Discoveries and Improvements, p. 294 and ch. 22,

pp. 287–8, passim.18. These themes are further explored in Chapter 9.19. [Defoe], A General History of Discoveries and Improvements, p. 28. 20. For theological reasons, more fully explored in his An Essay upon Literature

(1726), Defoe was deeply committed to the notion that the art of writing wasgiven to Moses directly by God.

21. [Defoe], A General History of Discoveries and Improvements, pp. 42, 68, 78–9;chs. 1–8 passim.

22. Ibid., pp. 99, 104, 125–6, chapters 8–11 passim. In his Plan of the English Commerce,Defoe repeated his condemnation of the Romans, calling them ‘those Destroyersand Enemies of all Improvement, Commerce, and Navigation’, p. 314.

23. [Defoe], A General History of Discoveries and Improvements, p. 124. 24. Ibid., p. 123.

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25. Charles G. Salas has argued that Raleigh used his pro-Carthaginian account ofthe Punic wars to criticize James I, his political enemies Charles and ThomasHoward, and England’s policies toward Spain and later France. See his ‘Raleghand the Punic Wars’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 57 (1996): 195–215.

26. [Defoe], A General History of Discoveries and Improvements, p. 169. 27. Ibid., pp. 171–3. 28. Ibid., p. 186. 29. Ibid., pp. 205–6. 30. See section iii below. 31. [Defoe], A General History of Discoveries and Improvements, pp. 237–8, 294. 32. For earlier references see, for example, the Review (24 January 1706 and

26 February 1709); later analyses appear in A Brief Deduction of the Original,Progress, and Immense Greatness of the British Woollen Manufacture (1727) and hisunfinished manuscript, Of Royall Education.

33. Earlier works of Defoe’s contained citations to Bacon’s Historie of the Raign ofKing Henry the Seventh and Harrington’s Oceana. The sale catalogue of Defoe’slibrary suggests that he owned several works by both Bacon and Harrington.Oceana was not listed but two copies of Bacon’s Historie were.

34. Karl D. Bülbring (ed.), Of Royall Educacion: a Fragmentary Treatise by Daniel Defoe(London, 1895), p. 15. This unfinished work was probably composed after June1727 and left in manuscript at Defoe’s death in 1731.

35. [Defoe], A Plan of the English Commerce, pp. 47, 121. 36. [Defoe], A General History of Discoveries and Improvements, pp. 205–6, 210; A Plan

of the English Commerce, p. 46. 37. [Defoe], A Plan of the English Commerce, pp. 45–6.38. [Defoe], A General History of Discoveries and Improvements, p. 211. As discussed in

Chapter 5, in A General History of Trade (1713), Defoe had credited Edward III forbeing the first king to prohibit the export of raw wool.

39. [Defoe], Of Royall Educacion, pp. 45, 32–3. 40. [Defoe], A Plan of the English Commerce, pp. 126–7. 41. [Defoe], Of Royall Educacion, p. 43. 42. [Defoe], A General History of Discoveries and Improvements, pp. 208–10. 43. Ibid., p. 212. 44. [Defoe], A Plan of the English Commerce, pp. 130–2. 45. Ibid., pp. xiii–xv, 128. 46. Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early-Modern Britain (Yale,

2000), pp. 5–6.47. [Defoe], A Plan of the English Commerce, pp. 48–50. 48. Ibid., pp. 50–5. 49. Ibid., pp. ix–xiv. 50. Ibid., pp. 6–13, 80–5. 51. Karl D. Bülbring (ed.), The Compleat English Gentleman by Daniel Defoe (1890),

pp. 257, 262.52. Ibid., pp. 13, 257.53. Ibid., pp. 16–18. 54. Ibid., pp. 6, 12, 20–1.55. Ibid., pp. 3, 268. 56. Ibid., p. 258.57. Ibid., pp. xvi, 7, 10, 85–90, 101, 119, 237.58. Ibid., pp. 60–9, 110, 147–9. A less damaging assumption but one which perhaps

affected Defoe most personally was the status accorded to classical versus modern

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learning. It was true that some gentlemen had been schooled in Greek and Latinand Defoe did not wish to disparage these subjects. He did complain though thatsomeone with widespread knowledge of philosophy, history, geography, and divin-ity but no schooling in the ‘ancient heathen writers’ (someone like himself it maybe added) was considered ‘NO SCHOLLAR’ while men who could quote a few Latinphrases often were: ibid., pp. 197–231, at pp. 200, 223. The ‘battle of the books’ wasmerely a skirmish in Defoe’s larger campaign to make the gentry more meritocratic.

59. [Defoe], Compleat English Gentleman, pp. 174–7, 248, 253.60. Defoe emphasized this point in the Tour’s survey of Scotland. See for example

pp. 734–5, 786–7; see also Defoe, Plan of the English Commerce, pp. 89–90. 61. [Defoe], Compleat English Gentleman, pp. 174–9.62. Ibid., pp. 8, 64–6.63. Ibid., p. 90.64. Ibid., pp. 3–5, 16–17, 42–3.65. As Ronald Paulson has argued, the iconoclastic process of the early eighteenth

century involved the use of ‘ugly’ or ‘transgressive’ materials in the ‘re-enliven-ing of dead matter’, adjectives which fit gentry conceptions of those wealthymerchants and tradesmen anxious to enter their ranks. See his Breaking andRemaking: Aesthetic Practice in England, 1700–1820, pp. 7, 19.

66. [Defoe], Compleat English Gentleman, pp. 18, 145.

9 The Devil and Daniel Defoe: History in a Heterodox Age

1. Maximillian Novak, ‘Defoe, the Occult, and the Deist Offensive during the Reignof George I’, in J. A. Leo Lemay (ed.), Deism, Masonry, and the Enlightenment:Essays Honoring Alfred Owen Aldridge (Newark, 1987), pp. 93–108.

2. Stephen D. Snobelen, ‘Whiston, William (1667–1752)’, Oxford Dictionary ofNational Biography (Oxford, 2004). As a fixture in London’s coffee-house scene,Whiston became a far greater irritant to Defoe than he might have been had heremained at Cambridge. Defoe’s curiously negative attitutude towards solvingthe problem of calculating longitude can only be explained by the fact thatWhiston was behind many efforts to do so. See [Defoe], A General History ofDiscoveries and Improvements (1725–6), p. vii.

3. Especially important was Emlyn’s debate with David Martin about the authen-ticity of the Johannine Comma. This was an interpolation in the text of 1 John5:7 intended to give support to the doctrine of the Trinity. Defoe sided withMartin in defence of this passage in his New Family Instructor (1727). His accep-tance of the Johannine Comma is another indication of Defoe’s fiercely ortho-dox position about the Trinity. See pp. 207–8.

4. Two of these authors’ most controversial publications were Samuel Clarke, TheScripture-Doctrine of the Trinity (1712) and Anthony Collins, A Discourse of Free-thinking (1713).

5. See Backscheider, Defoe, pp. 520–5. Rodney Baine’s study, Daniel Defoe and theSupernatural (Athens, GA, 1968), acknowledges the Deistic debate of the 1720sbut it emphasizes Defoe’s interest in the supernatural as a Puritan preoccupationwith shoring up the belief in special providence and ignores soteriology. Novakrightly identifies the immediate polemical context in which these texts werewritten (‘Defoe, the Occult, and the Deist Offensive during the Reign of George I’)but confusingly suggests that Defoe ‘may have been as much concerned with themoral issues raised by the deists as with religious principle’ (Novak, Defoe, p. 655).

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6. Defoe, Jure Divino (1706), Dedication. This work is the subject of Chapter 3.7. [Defoe], The Political History of the Devil (1726), p. 46. 8. [Defoe], An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (1727), p. 42.9. [Defoe], Political History of the Devil, p. 321.

10. Ibid., pp. 48–52. 11. Ibid., p. 226.12. This was the central thesis of Defoe’s History and Reality of Apparitions. Defoe had

earlier explored the importance of learning to listen to the world of angelicspirits in the Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of RobinsonCrusoe (1720), discussed in Chapter 6.

13. [Defoe], Political History of the Devil, pp. 3–4, 150.14. Defoe, Jure Divino, Bk. VII, p. 14. Milton’s fame would certainly have been

known to Defoe since childhood. For the last eleven years of his life, Miltonlived a few hundred yards from the Foe household; he died in 1674 when Defoewas a boy of fourteen. Christopher Hill credited Defoe with being ‘theologicallysophisticated enough to spot the anti-Trinitarianism in Paradise Lost whichmost critics failed to notice for another 200 years, and which some still obstinately deny’. See his ‘Robinson Crusoe’, in History Workshop Journal, 10(1980), 6–24.

15. [Defoe], Political History of the Devil, pp. 69–75.16. Ibid., pp. 64–8.17. Ibid., pp. 57–8, 88–93.18. Ibid., pp. 110–12.19. Ibid., pp. 103–6, 115, 134–40. 20. For an excellent summary of these schemes, see Peter Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the

Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1990). 21. [Defoe], Political History of the Devil, p. 142.22. [Defoe], A General History of Discoveries and Improvements, pp. 12–15.23. [Defoe], Political History of the Devil, p. 145.24. Ibid., pp. 146–53. 25. Ibid., pp. 151–7. 26. See for example, Anthony Collins, A Discourse of Freethinking (1713); William

Wollaston, The Religion of Nature Delineated (1722).27. [Defoe], Political History of the Devil, p. 159 [mispaginated as p. 157]. 28. Toland made this charge against priestcraft in his Christianity not Mysterious

(1696) and numerous other works as did Anthony Collins, for example, inPriestcraft in Perfection (1709) and An Historical and Critical Essay, on the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England (1724).

29. [Defoe], A System of Magick (London: J. Roberts, 1727 [for 1726]) here cited fromthe reissue (London: Andrew Millar, 1728), pp. 1–2, 7, 44, 46, 48.

30. For Defoe’s Baconian credentials see Introduction and Chapter 1. R. K. Webb hasargued that this Baconian separation of matters of science from matters of faithwas a minority opinion by the end of the seventeenth century. See his ‘TheEmergence of Rational Dissent’, in Knud Haakonssen (ed.), Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-century Britain (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 18–19 and passim.

31. Defoe, System of Magick, pp. 52–3, 62. Contrasting the wording of Genesis 41:8and that of Exodus 7:8, Defoe drew significance from the fact that the firstpharaoh called on the aid of his magicians and wise men while the laterpharaoh (Ramses II) summoned wise men and sorcerers.

32. Defoe, System of Magick, p. 194.

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33. Thomas Sergeant (ed.), The Works of Walter Moyle, none of which were Ever beforePublished (1726). See Chapter 1 for my discussion of Defoe, Trenchard, and thestanding army debate. Toland is discussed in Chapters 1, 3, and 6. For a modernedition of Moyle’s Essay showing its importance to the republican tradition, seeCaroline Robbins, Two English Republican Tracts (Cambridge, 1969). Moyleemployed James Harrington’s dictum that the balance of dominion changeswith the balance of property.

34. Moyle, Essay, in Sergeant (ed.), Works, pp. 11–24. See also Blair Worden, ‘ClassicalRepublicanism and the Puritan Revolution’, in Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie Pearl,and Blair Worden (eds), History and Imagination (Oxford, 1981). Attention to thereligious dimension of republicanism in the eighteenth century is explored in J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1660–1832 (Cambridge, 2000) and Justin Champion,The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: the Church of England and its Enemies, 1660–1730(Cambridge, 1992), especially chs. 6 and 7.

35. For explanation of the significance of this episode, see Chapter 6 above.36. Defoe, System of Magick, pp. 198–9, 202.37. Ibid., pp. 195–6.38. Ibid., p. 237. For Defoe’s views on the South Sea Bubble, see Chapter 7.39. [Defoe], Political History of the Devil, pp. 195–6, 210. 40. Ibid., pp. 200–2. 41. Defoe, System of Magick, pp. 352–3. Though heterodoxy within the Anglican and

Protestant Dissenting communities remained his chief target in the 1720s, Defoewas keen to maintain his criticism of popish idolatry as well.

42. [Defoe], Political History of the Devil, pp. 5–6.43. Spain and Austria signed the First Treaty of Vienna in March 1725, a move

which provoked the British into hastily arranging the Alliance of Hanover thatSeptember. See Jeremy Black, British Foreign Policy in the Age of Walpole(Edinburgh, 1985). Defoe addressed the actions of Spain and Austria in thisperiod in The Evident Approach of a War (1727) and The Evident Advantages toGreat Britain and its Allies from the Approaching War (1727). As his Plan of theEnglish Commerce also makes clear, Defoe was more interested in the benefitsthat war might bring to British trade in the New World than in using it toprotect British commercial interests in Europe. For Defoe’s views about war andtrade in the 1720s, see Chapter 8.

44. [Defoe], Political History of the Devil, pp. 231–4.45. J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, II, p. 2 and passim.46. [Defoe], Political History of the Devil, p. 234. 47. Ibid., p. 198. 48. Ibid., p. 363. 49. Ibid., pp. 338–9, 387. 50. Ibid., pp. 225, 333–5, 389. 51. Ibid., pp. 336–7, 353, 387. 52. [Defoe], System of Magick, pp. 79–80.53. [Defoe], Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions, p. 44. For the origins and

importance of Freemasonry in this period, see Margaret Jacob, The RadicalEnlightenment (London, 1981) and her Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry andPolitics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York, 1991). In The Political History of theDevil (pp. 3–4), Defoe referred to the ‘red hot club’ of the Duke of Wharton, themost notorious libertine of his day. Before fleeing for the continent in 1725,Wharton founded the Hellfire Club (not to be confused with Francis Dashwood’seponymous group) which was reputed to engage in satanic rituals. See Lawrence B.

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Smith, ‘Wharton, Philip James, Duke of Wharton and Jacobite Duke of Northumberland (1698–1731)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004).

54. Tony Claydon, ‘The Sermon, the “Public Sphere” and the Political Culture ofLate Seventeenth-century England’, in Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCulloch(eds), The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600–1750(Manchester, 2001), pp. 208–34.

55. [Defoe], System of Magick, pp. 124–5.56. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), trans.

Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA, 1989). There is agrowing critical literature about the accuracy of Habermas’s analysis ofeighteenth-century Britain. See, for example, Christian Thorne, ‘Thumbing ourNose at the Public Sphere: Satire, the Market, and the Invention of Literature’,PMLA, 116 (May 2001): 531–44; J. A. Downie, ‘The Making of the EnglishNovel’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 9 (1997): 250–66. In The Social Life of Coffee:the Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven, 2005), Brian Cowan adopts asceptical and nuanced approach to the Habermasian public sphere.

57. Defoe, System of Magick, pp. 337–8. 58. Ibid., pp. 339–40. Defoe frequently condemned these arenas as corrupting of

youth, especially young ladies. See, for example, his Tour, pp. 52, 69, 87, 128,186, 217, 638. By ‘light-heeled’ Defoe may have meant ‘light-footed’ or gracefulin dancing but in this context his meaning was probably more akin to theexpression ‘round-heeled’ indicating an inability to remain upright or a ten-dency to sexual availability.

59. Defoe, System of Magick, pp. 55–6. In this passage, Defoe also refers to ThomasEmlyn, one of the first Unitarians, who was active in Whiston’s Society forPromoting Primitive Christianity. Defoe’s frequent comments about astronomy,oracles, and other matters in both The Political History of the Devil and A System ofMagick confirm that Whiston was one of his primary targets.

60. [Defoe], Political History of the Devil, p. 343.61. [Defoe], System of Magick, pp. 56, 243. 62. Ibid., pp. 235, 241. 63. Ibid., pp. 237, 239, 242. 64. Ibid., p. 243.65. Ibid., pp. 245–6. 66. Ibid., pp. 335–6.67. See, for example, Anthony Collins, A Discourse of Free-Thinking (1713). 68. Brett C. McInelly and David Paxman argue that there are formal, rhetorical, and

thematic links between this novel and The Political History of the Devil in ‘Datingthe Devil: Daniel Defoe’s Roxana and The Political History of the Devil’, Christianityand Literature, 53 (2004): 435–55.

69. [Defoe], Serious Reflections, p. 325.70. [Defoe], System of Magick, pp. 336–7.71. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, I, p. 7. 72. For Defoe’s reactions to Salters’ Hall, see Chapters 6 and 7.73. For a survey of the historiography of politeness, see Lawrence E. Klein, ‘Politeness

and the Interpretation of the British Eighteenth Century’, HJ, 45 (2002): 869–98.For a concise description of Addison’s conception of sociability, see J. G. A.Pocock, ‘The Varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform’, in Virtue, Com-merce, and History, pp. 236–7. For republican civil religion, see Justin Champion,The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken (Cambridge, 1992), especially ch. 6.

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74. In July 1726, in order to marry a Spanish maid of honour, Wharton converted toRoman Catholicism, adding another suspect footnote to a life of political,financial, and moral scandal. See above, n. 53. For Toland’s interest in Islam, seeChapter 6.

75. [Defoe], A New Family Instructor; in Familiar Discourses between a Father and hisChildren, On the most Essential Points of the Christian Religion (1727), p. vi.

76. Ibid., pp. ix, 4. For a discussion of the first two volumes of the Family Instructor,see Chapter 7. This had been a successful genre in the past for Defoe. Ten edi-tions of the first Family Instructor (1715) were published before Defoe’s death in1731 and over twenty editions appeared in the eighteenth century, includingfour editions in America. The Family Instructor, Volume II (1718) was less popularbut A New Family Instructor (1727) sold well. Although this last volume was setamong family of a ‘Substantial Tradesman’ in London, Laura Curtis has sug-gested Defoe intended these manuals not just for Dissenting Londoners but theAnglican squirearchy as well: Laura Curtis, ‘A Case Study of Defoe’s DomesticConduct Manuals Suggested by The Family Sex and Marriage in England,1500–1800’, in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 10 (1981): 409–28.

77. [Defoe], New Family Instructor, pp. 254, 1. In several dialogues the father andchildren expressed their annoyance at the frequency with which they were con-fronted by heterdox opinions. See pp. 279, 281, 286.

78. For a discussion of Defoe’s analysis of the decline of household government, seeChapter 7. A New Family Instructor hints at the problem by suggesting that theapprentices often resisted the twice-weekly evening catechism: p. 5.

79. [Defoe], A New Family Instructor, pp. 11–14.80. Ibid., pp. 30–1, 180.81. Ibid., p. 21. 82. Ibid., p. 25.83. Ibid., pp. 61, 63–4, 113.84. Ibid., pp. 174–9, 227, 240. 85. Ibid., pp. 260, 279, 292–3, 330, 333–6.86. Since 1715 Emlyn had actively disputed the authenticity of the Johannine Comma

in several pamphlets, engaging with a number of divines on this issue and withDavid Martin specifically in 1719. See especially, Thomas Emlyn, A Full Inquiry intothe original authority of that text, 1 John v. 7 … Humbly addressd to both Houses ofConvocation now assembled (1715); An answer to Mr. Martin’s Critical Dissertation on 1 John v. 7 … (1719); A reply to Mr Martin’s Examination of the answer to his Dis-sertation on 1 John v. 7 (1720); and David Martin, A Critical Dissertation upon theseventh verse of the fifth chapter of St. John’s First Epistle … translated into English(1719); An Examination of Mr. Emlyn’s Answer to the Dissertation … (1719); TheGenuineness of the Text of the First Epistle of Saint John, Chap. v. 7, There are Three inHeaven, &c … Translated from the French (1722). The importance of scholarship con-cerning the Johannine Comma in the early-modem period is discussed, forexample, in Joseph M. Levine, ‘Erasmus and the Problem of the JohannineComma’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 58 (1997): 573–96.

87. See above, Chapter 3.

Conclusion

1. Daniel 12:4.

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Select Bibliography

The place of publication is London unless otherwise noted. Since full titles cannow easily be found on www.copac.ac.uk, and since Defoe titles are also available inP. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe (1998), shorttitles only are provided here for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts. Workscited as by Defoe are either signed by or convincingly attributed to him.

Primary sources

[Abercromby, Patrick], The Advantages of the Act of Security, compar’d with these of theintended union: founded on the revolution principles publish’d by Mr. Daniel De Foe(Edinburgh, 1706)

Addison, Joseph, The Evidences of the Christian Religion (1730)Addison, Joseph, The Free-holder (1716)[Anon.] The Establishment of the Church, the Preservation of the State: Shewing the

Reasonableness of a Bill against Occasional Conformity (1702) [Anon.], A Further Examination of the Weavers Pretences (1719)[Anon.], Reflections upon the Late Great Revolution (1689) [sometimes attributed to Defoe][Anon.], Remarks upon a Late Pamphlet intitul’d, The Two Great Questions Consider’d

(1700)[Anon.], Some Further Considerations about a Standing Army (1699)[Anon.], The History of the Kentish Petition, Answer’d Paragraph by Paragraph (1701)[Anon.], The Old Whig and Modern Whig Truly Represented (1702)[Anon.], The Weavers’ Pretences Examin’d (1719)Asgill, John, A Brief Answer to A Brief State of the Question (1719)Asgill, John, An Argument Proving, That … Man may be translated from hence into that

Eternal Life without passing through Death (1700; repr. 1715)Asgill, John, Several Assertions prov’d, in Order to Create another Species of Money than

Gold and Silver (1696)[Asgill, John], A Brief Answer to A Brief State of the Question between the printed and

painted callicoes (1719)[Atwood, William], The Superiority and Direct Dominion of the Imperial Crown of

England, over the Crown and Kingdom of Scotland … asserted (1704)Bacon, Sir Francis, The Historie of the Raigne of King Henry the Seventh (1622)Burnet, Thomas, The Theory of the Earth: containing an account of the original of the

earth, and of all the general changes which it hath already undergone, or is to undergo,till the consummation of all things (1684–90), republished in 1719 as The SacredTheory of the Earth

Calamy, Edmund, An Abridgement of Mr. Baxter’s History of His Life and Times (1702)Chubb, Thomas, The Supremacy of the Father Asserted (1715)Chubb, Thomas, The Supremacy of the Father Vindicated (1718)Chubb, Thomas, Two Enquiries (1717)Clarke, Samuel, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (1711)Clarke, Samuel, A Letter to Mr. Dodwell (1706)Clarke, Samuel, The Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity (1712)

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[Clement, Simon], Faults on Both Sides (1710)Clerk, Sir John, Memoirs of the Life of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, ed. John M. Gray,

Scottish Historical Society Publication, 13 (Edinburgh, 1892)Collins, Anthony, A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729)Collins, Anthony, A Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion

(1724)Collins, Anthony, A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (1717)Collins, Anthony, An Essay Concerning the Use of Reason in Propositions (1707)Collins, Anthony, An Historical and Critical Essay, on the Thirty-nine Articles of the

Church of England (1724)Collins, Anthony, Priestcraft in Perfection (1710)Collins, Anthony, The Scheme of Literal Prophecy Consider’d (1726)[Collins, Anthony], A Discourse of Free-Thinking: occasion’d by the rise and growth of a

sect call’d free-thinkers (1713)Davenant, Charles, Essays upon I. The Ballance of Power. II. The Right of Making War,

Peace, and Alliances. III. Universal Monarchy (1701)Davenant, Charles, Essays upon Peace at Home, and War Abroad (1704)Davies, Sir John, A Discovery of the True Causes why Ireland was never entirely Subdued,

nor brought under Obedience of the Crowne of England, until the beginning of HisMaiesties happie Raigne (1612)

Defoe, An Account of the Conduct of Robert Earl of Oxford (1715)Defoe, An Account of the Great and Generous Actions of James Butler ([1715])Defoe, The Address (1704)Defoe, The Advantages of Peace and Commerce (1729)Defoe, Advice to All Parties (1705)Defoe, Advice to the People of Great Britain (1714)Defoe, The Anatomy of Exchange-Alley (1719)Defoe, And What if the Pretender should come? (1713)Defoe, An Answer to a Question that No Body thinks of (1713)Defoe, An Appeal to Honour and Justice (1715)Defoe, An Argument Proving that the Design of Employing and Enobling Foreigners (1717)Defoe, An Argument Shewing, that a Standing Army, with Consent of Parliament, is not

Inconsistent with a Free Government (1698)Defoe, Augusta Triumphans (1728)Defoe, A Brief Account of the Present State of the African Trade (1713)Defoe, A Brief Deduction of the Original, Progress, and Immense Greatness of the British

Woollen Manufacture (1727)Defoe, A Brief Explanation of a Late Pamphlet, entituled, The Shortest Way with the

Dissenters (1703)Defoe, A Brief Reply to the History of Standing Armies in England (1698)Defoe, A Brief State of the Question, between the Printed and Painted Callicoes (1719);

and idem, ‘An Appendix, In Return to Mr. Asgill’s Tract, Entituled A Brief Answer,&c.’ in Defoe, A Brief State of the Question (3rd edn, 1720)

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(1697 [for 1698])Defoe, An Essay at a Plain Exposition of that Difficult Phrase A Good Peace (1711)Defoe, An Essay at Removing National Prejudices against a Union with Scotland … Part I

(1706)Defoe, An Essay at Removing National Prejudices against a Union with Scotland … Part II

(1706)Defoe, An Essay, at Removing National Prejudices against a Union with England. Part III

([Edinburgh], 1706)Defoe, An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (1727)Defoe, An Essay on the History of Parties (1711)Defoe, An Essay on the Regulation of the Press (1704)Defoe, An Essay on the South-Sea Trade (1712 [for 1711])Defoe, An Essay on the Treaty of Commerce with France (1713)Defoe, An Essay upon Buying and Selling of Speeches (1716)Defoe, An Essay upon Literature (1726)Defoe, An Essay upon Loans (1710)Defoe, An Essay upon Projects (1697)Defoe, An Essay upon Publick Credit (1710), in Sir Walter Scott (ed.), Somers Tracts

(13 vols, 1809–15) [there misattributed to Robert Harley]Defoe, An Essay upon the Trade to Africa (1711)Defoe, Every-Body’s Business, is No-Body’s Business (1725)Defoe, The Evident Advantages to Great Britain and its Allies from the Approaching War

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Defoe, The Family Instructor. Vol II (1718)Defoe, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719)Defoe, A Farther Argument against Ennobling Foreigners (1717)Defoe, The Felonious Treaty (1711)Defoe, A Fifth Essay, at Removing National Prejudices ([Edinburgh, 1707])Defoe, The Fortunate Mistress (1724)Defoe, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (1721 [for 1722])Defoe, A Fourth Essay, at Removing National Prejudices ([Edinburgh], 1706)Defoe, The Free-Holders Plea against Stock-Jobbing Elections of Parliament Men (1701)Defoe, A Friendly Epistle by way of Reproof (1715)Defoe, A Friendly Rebuke to one Parson Benjamin (1719)Defoe, A Further Search into the Conduct of the Allies (1712)Defoe, A General History of Discoveries and Improvements ([1725–6])Defoe, A General History of Trade (1713)Defoe, Giving Alms no Charity (1704)Defoe, The Great Law of Subordination Consider’d (1724)Defoe, The High-Church Legion: or the Memorial Examin’d (1705)Defoe, An Historical Account of the Bitter Sufferings, and Melancholly Circumstances of

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1722])Defoe, The History of the Kentish Petition (1701)Defoe, The History of the Union of Great Britain (1709)Defoe, A Humble Proposal to the People of England (1729)Defoe, A Hymn to Peace (1706)Defoe, A Hymn to the Mob (1715)Defoe, A Hymn to the Pillory (1703)Defoe, A Hymn to Victory (1704)Defoe, Imperial Gratitude (1712)Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)Defoe, Jure Divino (1706)Defoe, The Just Complaint of the Poor Weavers (1719)Defoe, The Lay-Man’s Sermon upon the Late Storm (1704) Defoe, The Layman’s Vindication of the Church of England (1716)Defoe, [Legion’s Memorial] ([1701])Defoe, Legion’s New Paper (1702 [for 1701])Defoe, A Letter from Captain Tom to the Mobb (1710)Defoe, A Letter to a Dissenter from his Friend at the Hague (1688)Defoe, A Letter to Mr. Bisset (1709)Defoe, A Letter to Mr. How (1701)Defoe, A Letter to the Dissenters (1713)Defoe, A Letter to the Whigs, Expostulating with them upon their Present Conduct (1714)Defoe, The Letters of Daniel Defoe, ed. George Harris Healey (Oxford, 1955)Defoe, Lex Talionis (1698)Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719)Defoe, The Life, Adventures, and Pyracies, of the Famous Captain Singleton (1720)Defoe, The Livery Man’s Reasons (1701)Defoe, Memoirs of a Cavalier ([1720]) Defoe, Memoirs of Count Tariff (1713) Defoe, Memoirs of the Church of Scotland (1717) Defoe, Mere Nature Delineated (1726)




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Edition, Reprints of Economic Classics, New York, 1967)Defoe, The Political History of the Devil (1726)Defoe, The Poor Man’s Plea (2nd edn, 1698)Defoe, The Present State of Jacobitism Considered (1701)Defoe, The Present State of the Parties in Great Britain (1712)Defoe, The Quarrel of the School-Boys at Athens (1717)Defoe, Queries upon the Bill against Occasional Conformity (1704)Defoe, The Question Fairly Stated (1717)Defoe, Reasons against a War with France (1701)Defoe, Reasons against Fighting (1712)Defoe, Reasons against the Succession of the House of Hanover (1713)Defoe, Reasons Concerning the Immediate Demolishing of Dunkirk (1713)Defoe, Reasons why this Nation Ought to Put a Speedy End to this Expensive War (1711)Defoe, Reformation of Manners (1702)Defoe, Religious Courtship (1722)Defoe, Remarks on the Bill to Prevent Frauds Committed by Bankrupts (1706)Defoe, Remarks on the Letter to the Author of the State-Memorial (1706) Defoe, A Reply to a Pamphlet entituled, The L___d H___’s Vindication of his Speech

(1706)Defoe, A Reply to the Scots Answer, to the British Vision ([Edinburgh, 1706])Defoe, The Representation Examined (1711)Defoe, The Review, ed. Arthur Wellesley Secord (9 vols, New York, 1938)Defoe, Royal Religion (1704)Defoe, A Seasonable Expostulation with, and Friendly Reproof unto James Butler (1715)Defoe, A Seasonable Warning and Caution against the Insinuations of Papists and

Jacobites (1712)Defoe, A Second Volume of the Writings of the Author of the True-Born Englishman

(1705)Defoe, The Second-Sighted Highlander (1713)




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Defoe, The Second-Sighted Highlander. Being Four Visions of the Eclypse (1715)Defoe, The Secret History of the October Club (1711)Defoe, The Secret History of the October-Club … Part II (1711)Defoe, The Secret History of the Secret History of the White Staff, Purse and Mitre (1715)Defoe, The Secret History of the White Staff … Part II (1714)Defoe, The Secret History of the White Staff … Part III (1715)Defoe, The Secret History of the White-Staff (1714)Defoe, A Serious Inquiry into this Grand Question (1704) Defoe, Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

(1720)Defoe, A Sharp Rebuke from one of the People called Quakers (1715)Defoe, A Short View of the Present State of the Protestant Religion in Britain (Edinburgh,

1707)Defoe, The Shortest Way to Peace and Union (1703)Defoe, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702)Defoe, The Sincerity of the Dissenters Vindicated (1703)Defoe, The Six Distinguishing Characters of a Parliament-Man (1700 [for 1701])Defoe, Some Considerations on a Law for Triennial Parliaments (1716)Defoe, Some Reflections on a Pamphlet lately Publish’d, entituled, An Argument Shewing

that a Standing Army is Inconsistent with a Free Government (1697)Defoe, Some Remarks on the First Chapter in Dr. Davenant’s Essays (1704 [for 1703])Defoe, Some Thoughts of an Honest Tory in the Country (1716)Defoe, Some Thoughts upon the Subject of Commerce with France (1713)Defoe, The Spanish Descent (1702)Defoe, A Spectators Address to the Whigs (1711)Defoe, The Storm (1704)Defoe, The Succession of Spain Consider’d (1711)Defoe, The Succession to the Crown of England, Considered (1701)Defoe, A System of Magick (1727 [for 1726])Defoe, A Tour thro the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6), ed. G. D. H. Cole (2 vols,

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Salters’ Hall Debate’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 4 (1953): 162–8Thomas, Roger, ‘The Rise of the Reconcilers’, in Bolam, English Presbyterians, pp. 60–7Thomas, Roger, ‘The Salters’ Hall Watershed’, in Bolam, English Presbyterians, pp. 151–74Thomas, Roger, ‘Presbyterians in Transition’, in Bolam, English Presbyterians,

pp. 113–74Thomas, Roger, ‘Parties in Nonconformity’, in Bolam, English Presbyterians,

pp. 93–112Thompson, James, Novels of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel

(Durham, NC 1996)Thompson, Martyn P., ‘Daniel Defoe and the Formation of Early Eighteenth-Century

Whig Ideology’, in Gordon J. Schochet (ed.), Politics, Politeness, and Patriotism,Proceedings of The Folger Institute Center for the History of British PoliticalThought, 5 (Washington, DC, 1993), pp. 109–24.

Thorne, Christian, ‘Thumbing Our Nose at the Public Sphere: Satire, the Market, andthe Invention of Literature’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, 116(2001): 531–44

Tinkler, John F., ‘Humanist History and the English Novel in the EighteenthCentury’, Studies in Philology, 85 (1988): 510–37

Trevelyan, G. M., English Social History (1942)Tuveson, Ernest Lee, Millennium and Utopia: a Study in the Background of the Idea of

Progress (Berkeley, 1949)Vickers, Brian (ed.), English Science, Bacon to Newton (Cambridge, 1987)Vickers, Ilse, ‘The Influence of the New Sciences on Defoe’, Literature and History, 13

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Abercromby, Patrick, 91Abney, Thomas, 36Acts: Corporation (1661) and Test

(1673), 47, 115, 121; Navigation(1651, 1660 etc.), 81, 87; Five Mile(1665), 39; Toleration (1689), 35–6,46, 56, 198; Settlement (1701), 99,231 n. 16; Occasional Conformity(1711), 115, 121; Schism (1714),115, 121, 149–50; Septennial(1716), 212 n. 14

Adam, 72, 114, 120, 189, 193, 223 n. 34Addison, Joseph, 88, 204Adolphus, Gustavus, 6Alexander the Great, 168Anne, Queen, 42–3, 52, 58, 61, 80–1,

95–6, 98, 100, 114, 117, 133, 135,147, 199

Annesley, Samuel, 39, 219Arians, Arianism, 3, 10, 88, 114, 116,

125, 135–6, 143, 185, 188, 196, 198,201, 207

Asgill, John, 74, 143, 215 n. 25, 235 n.21, 236

Athanasius, 198atheists, atheism, 134, 136, 188, 201,

203–7Atwood, William, 85

Baal, 60, 62–4, 191Bacchus, 62Bacon, Francis, 171–2, 175Bangorian controversy: see Hoadly,

BenjaminBank of England, 15, 17, 98, 100, 145,

147, 214 n. 10Baxter, Richard, 39, 41, 218 n. 11, 220

n. 50Belhaven, John Hamilton, Lord, 92Belus, 62–4, 191Bentham, Jeremy, 49–50Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, 1st

Viscount, 104Boyle, Robert, 105, 171, 181

Brahe, Tycho, 171Britons, ancient, 69, 102, 108–10Burnet, Thomas, 106Bury, Arthur, 10

Cadmus, 168, 193Cain, 120, 189Calamy, Edmund, 218 n. 11Cambridge Platonists, 41Canaan, 167, 189Carthage, 10, 166, 168–9, 171, 239 n. 25Catholics, Catholicism, 118–19, 127,

131–2, 193, 197, 204–7Charles I, King, 15, 20, 25, 59Charles II, King, 25, 115, 148Chubb, Thomas, 143, 235 n. 21Cicero, 88, 187civic humanists, 1, 9, 11, 15–16, 18–19,

23, 30, 86Clarke, Samuel, 185, 208Clayton, Sir Robert, 144Cockerill, Thomas, 17Collins, Anthony, 185, 192, 203, 241Compton, Henry, bishop, 64Confucius, 195Copernicus, 171Cromwell, Oliver, 32–3

Davenant, Charles, 19, 53, 215 n. 24David, King, 6, 21, 25Davies, Sir John, 4Defoe, Benjamin, 94Defoe, Daniel

and academies, 21–3, 26–8, 39, 184and Baconian science, 2, 7, 11–12,

17–18, 20–1, 35, 39, 41, 45, 48,50, 75–7, 84, 88, 93, 97, 101,105–7, 121, 140, 148, 163–6, 193,208–9, 229 n. 24, 239 n. 33

and the Calico controversy, 11,139–43, 161, 165

and chance, 130and commerce, 2–3, 5, 9, 11, 17–21,

82–4, 86–8, 93, 96, 101–2,

264

Index

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104–12, 140, 148–9, 158–9, 162,165–6, 168–71, 173–8, 184,190–1, 200, 208

and credit, 96–103, 139, 141, 144,146, 196, 229 n. 24, 236 n. 25

and the Devil, 3, 8, 12, 60–3, 65, 70,126–7, 129, 134, 145, 148, 154,167, 186–205, 208, 213 n. 22

and disenchantment, 203and (the) Enlightenment, 3, 12, 52,

79, 93, 108, 110–11, 198, 209–10and epistemological stability, 7, 9, 11,

23–4, 35, 38–9, 41, 45–6, 95–103,210, 229 n. 24, 230 n. 6

and family life, 11, 110, 138–59,205–8, 244

and fundamental law, 89–90historical vision of, 3–5, 7–9, 11–12,

16, 19, 28–33, 62, 66, 68, 79–85,93, 105, 111, 118, 142–3, 148–9,151, 160–84, 190–1, 201, 208–10

and idols, idolatry, 128–30, 132–3,167, 190, 195, 197, 206–7, 233 n.61

interpretations of, 1, 5, 12, 16, 23, 35,51, 113, 117, 122–3, 136, 151,160, 209–10, 211 n. 4, 212 n. 12,213 n. 22, 217 nn. 70, 1, 220 n.38, 221 n. 1, 229 n. 40, 232 n. 39,237 n. 2, 240 n. 5

and kingship, 6, 8, 14–15, 20–2, 25,27, 31, 51–77, 82, 169, 213 n. 4,224 n. 35

and magic, magicians, 3, 12, 140, 167,188, 193, 195–7, 200–2, 240 n. 5,241 n. 31

and national identity, 46, 84–8, 90,92–4, 107, 210, 237 n. 2

and natural law, 18–19, 55, 63, 67,70–1, 93, 97, 183, 224 nn. 40, 47

and Nonconformity, 2, 5, 7, 10, 13,16–17, 21, 36–50, 97, 106, 116,121–2, 136, 149, 198–9, 204, 208,210, 218 n. 12, 232 n. 35

and Nonjurors, 45and oaths, 44–5, 64, 95, 98–100, 116and occasional conformity, 7, 34–50,

96, 132, 198, 218, 221 n. 65, 229n. 40

and patriarchy, 65–6, 71–3, 160

and projecting, 6, 18, 20–1, 26, 28, 39,215 n. 33

and Providence, 2, 7, 10–12, 14, 18,20, 35, 47, 50, 65, 68, 70, 73,75–8, 80, 83–5, 87–8, 92–3, 95,97, 101, 103, 106–7, 110, 113,122–7, 130, 135–8, 140, 154,157–9, 165–6, 168–9, 178–9, 185,189–91, 203–4, 209, 233 n. 68,234 n. 1

and reformation of manners(politeness), 6, 21, 23–5, 76–7, 88,93, 130–3, 135, 140, 184, 187

and religion, 2–3, 5, 8, 10–12, 17,33–50, 51–77, 87, 93, 113–37,143, 149, 154, 157, 161, 170, 183,185–210, 211 n. 4

and standing army debate, 6, 9,15–16, 23, 28–33, 82, 86

and state of nature, 73, 108and subscription controversy, 10and suicide, 74and Trinitarianism, 2, 4, 7–11, 33, 35,

49, 58, 74, 88, 113, 116, 118,121–7, 133, 135–6, 149, 185–6,188, 194, 199–201, 204–5, 208,210, 240 n. 3

Defoe, Daniel, writings of:The Anatomy of Exchange-Alley, 145,

147, 235–6An Appendix, in Return to Mr. Asgill’s

Tract, 236An Argument Proving, 231An Argument, Shewing, that a Standing

Army, 31, 217A Brief Deduction of the Original, 239A Brief Explanation of a Late Pamphlet,

220A Brief Reply, 217A Brief State of the Question, 143,

235–6The Case of Mr. Law, 235A Challenge of Peace, 222The Character of the Late Dr. Samuel

Annesley, 219The Chimera, 145, 235–6The Compleat English Gentleman, 6, 12,

161, 164, 178–83, 236, 240The Complete English Tradesman, 11,

144, 151–3, 155–9, 161–3, 205,219, 236, 238

Index 265

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The Conduct of Christians Made theSport of Infidels, 117

Conjugal Lewdness, 211 n. 7Considerations Upon the Eighth and

Ninth Articles, 104, 229The Consolidator, 221A Continuation of Letters written by a

Turkish Spy, 10, 117–19, 131,231–2

The Danger of Court Differences, 231The Danger of the Protestant Religion

Consider’d, 215 n. 20Declaration of Truth to Benjamin

Hoadly, 116, 231The Director, 235The Dissenters Answer, 218Eleven Opinions about Mr. H[arle]y, 231An Enquiry into the Case, 224An Enquiry into the Occasional

Conformity of Dissenters, 36, 39,218–21

Essay[s] at Removing NationalPrejudices, 87–9, 226–7

An Essay on the History and Reality ofApparitions, 186, 241–2

An Essay on the Treaty of Commercewith France, 229

An Essay upon Literature, 232, 238Essay upon Loans, 100, 102, 228–9An Essay upon Projects, 6–7, 16–30, 39,

98, 184, 214 n. 10, 215–16, 219,228

An Essay upon Public Credit, 100–1, 229Every-Body’s Business, 237The Evident Advantages to Great Britain,

242The Evident Approach of a War, 242The Family Instructor, 149–50, 153–4,

161, 237The Farther Adventures of Robinson

Crusoe, 123, 126–7, 130, 138, 194,230–4

A Farther Argument, 231The Fortunate Mistress [Roxana], 5,

11–12, 139, 142, 144, 148, 203The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the

Famous Moll Flanders, 5, 11–12,46, 139, 142, 148, 161

A General History of Discoveries, 9, 18,148, 163–78, 190–1, 230, 232,238–41

A General History of Trade, 9, 18,103–11, 163, 166, 229, 239

The History of … Col. Jacque, 148, 161

The History of the Union, 4, 8, 78–80,92, 94, 225–7

Jure Divino, 7–8, 51–77, 186, 188, 191,223, 241

The Just Complaint of the Poor Weavers,141, 235

Legion’s Memorial, 91–2, 227A Letter to a Dissenter from his Friend at

the Hague, 214 n. 7, 224 n. 35A Letter to Mr. Bisset, 228A Letter to Mr. How, 39–40, 218–20The Life … of Robinson Crusoe, 1, 5,

10–12, 113–37, 203, 208, 230–4The Manufacturer, 235More Short-Ways with the Dissenters,

218A New Discovery of an Old Intreague,

214 n. 7A New Family Instructor, 186, 205–8,

240, 244A New Test of the Church of England’s

Honesty, 220, 222A New Test of the Church of England’s

Loyalty, 222A New Test of the Sence of the Nation,

98, 228The Old Whig and Modern Whig

Revived, 231The Opinion of a known Dissenter, 220The Original Power of the Collective

Body of the People of England, 91,227

Peace Without Union, 221A Plan of the English Commerce, 11,

163–4, 167, 172, 175, 178, 181,238–40, 242

The Political History of the Devil, 60,186, 188, 241–3

The Poor Man’s Plea, 25, 216 n. 55The Present State of Jacobitism

Considered, 220The Question Fairly Stated, 231Reformation of Manners, 46, 221Religious Courtship, 150, 161, 237A Reply to a Pamphlet Entituled, the

L[ord] H[aversham]’s Vindication,225

266 Index

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The Review, 35, 45, 54, 76, 78–85, 88,92–3, 97, 101, 104, 216 n. 62,218, 220, 222–3, 225–9, 239

Of Royall Education, 164, 239A Serious Inquiry, 222Serious Reflections … of Robinson

Crusoe, 120, 123, 130, 132–3, 203,230–4, 241

The Shortest Way to Peace and Union,47, 49, 219, 221

The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters, 7,34, 42–4, 53, 59, 80, 97

The Sincerity of the DissentersVindicated, 218–19

Some Reflections on a Pamphlet, 30, 216n. 66, 217

Some Thoughts upon the Subject ofCommerce with France, 229

A System of Magick, 186, 194, 236,241–3

Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of GreatBritain, 11, 142, 144, 147–8, 160,164–5, 181, 235–7, 240

The Trade to India, 235The True-Born Englishman, 43, 46, 69,

85, 221Deism, Deists, 3, 10, 88, 114, 118, 120,

123, 125, 128, 131, 134–6, 143, 185,189, 191–2, 201, 203, 207, 240 n. 5

Dissent: see Defoe, and Nonconformity;Presbyterians

Dyer, John, 54

Edward I, King, 80, 85Edward III, King, 111, 239 n. 38Edward VI, King, 25, 117Edwin, Sir Humphrey, 36Elijah, 60Elizabeth, Queen, 25, 174Emlyn, Thomas, 185, 208, 240, 243 n.

59, 244 n. 86Epicurus, 120Ezekiel, 162, 238 n. 6

Ferguson, Adam, 4Filmer, Sir Robert, 33, 52, 60, 65, 71–2,

233 n. 34, 237 n. 2Fletcher, Andrew, 29, 86, 89, 217 n. 66

George I, King, 114–15, 150, 166Gideon, 60

Gildon, Charles, 123Godolphin, Sidney, 1st Earl of, 81, 94,

100Gordon, Thomas, 143, 235 n. 21Goths, 82, 86, 170–1Grotius, Hugo, 55, 71

Ham, 167, 189, 191Hanover, Sophia Electress of, 81Harcourt, Sir Simon, 223 n. 32, 228 n. 9Harley, Robert, later Earl of Oxford, 7–8,

30, 32, 34, 42, 51, 53–4, 77–8, 88,90, 93–4, 100, 103–4, 115

Harrington, James, 4, 30, 56, 163, 172,175, 194, 224 n. 47, 239 n. 33, 242n. 33

Hartlib, Samuel, 105Haversham, Lord, 80–4, 86, 225 n. 14,

226 n. 17, 229 n. 39Henry VII, King, 3, 9, 12, 111, 163–4,

171–7, 239 n. 33Hoadly, Benjamin, bishop, and

Bangorian controversy, 10, 35,114–15, 118, 121, 185, 200, 212 n.14, 230 n. 5

Hobbes, Thomas, 199Hodges, James, 85, 89–90Hogarth, William, 114Howe, John, 36, 38–41Hume, David, 4, 88, 163, 175–6

Isaiah, 162

Jacobites, Jacobitism, 45–6, 80, 91, 94,97–8, 117, 147, 165, 197, 225 n. 11

James I, King, 25, 62, 86, 239 n. 25James II, King, 5, 14, 16, 20, 45, 56,

59–60, 64–5, 99, 117, 198, 224 n.35, 228 n. 17

James Francis Edward Stuart, 80, 94, 99Johannine Comma, 207–8, 240 n. 3,

244 n. 86Joseph, 193Joshua, 187Jove, 62Jupiter, 120

Law, John, 145–6Lawson, George, 91Leslie, Charles, 43–4, 52–4, 58, 63, 72–3,

77, 91, 219 n. 35, 220 n. 40

Index 267

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liberalism, 49–50Livy, 4Locke, John, 5, 8, 35, 50–6, 60–2, 65–6,

71–3, 77, 90, 181, 209–10, 221, 233n. 34, 238 n. 2

Louis XIV, King, 14–16, 22, 27–8, 80,82–4, 92, 146, 191

Lucan, 187Ludlow, Edmund, 33Lycurgus, 195

Marana, Giovanni Paolo, 231Marlborough, John Churchill, 1st Duke

of, 81, 103Martin, David, 208, 240 n. 3, 244 n. 86Medes, 67Methuen treaty, 104Mill, John Stuart, 49–50Millar, John, 4, 163, 175–6Milton, John, 8, 52, 54, 56, 76–7, 188–9,

196, 241 n. 14Mississippi Company, 145modernity, idea of, 1, 4, 28Monmouth, James Scott, 1st Duke of, 14Mordaut, Charles, 217 n. 70Morgan, Thomas, 143, 235 n. 21Morton, Charles, 17, 39–40, 219Moses, 119–20, 168, 187, 193Moyle, Walter, 32, 185, 194, 204, 242 n.

33

Newton, Sir Isaac, 171, 181, 185Nimrod, 63, 92, 167, 171, 191Ninus, 62–3Noah, 167, 189–90Normans, 46, 69, 111Numa Pompilius, 194–5

Owen, James, 38, 53

Persians, 67, 131Petty, Sir William, 105, 214 n. 17Phoenicia, Phoenicians, 10, 102,

108–10, 163, 167–9, 191, 230 n. 48Picts, 69Plantagenets, 69, 111Plutarch, 187Pope, Alexander, 114postmodernism, 210Presbyterians, Presbyterianism, 2, 10,

17, 35, 37–41, 46–8, 80, 87–9, 93,

114, 116, 121–3, 199, 204, 218 n.11, 230 n. 6

Price, Richard, 2Priestley, Joseph, 2, 49–50Prometheus, 120, 193public sphere, idea of, 8, 200, 213 n. 23,

243 n. 56Pufendorf, Samuel von, 56, 71Puritans, Puritanism, 2, 10, 39–40, 45,

113, 136, 211 n. 4

Quakers, 48, 116, 121, 203–4, 220 n. 50

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 169, 171, 178, 239n. 25

Ramilles, 133Revolution of 1688, 5–6, 9, 14, 51, 58–9,

69, 77, 89, 95, 98–9, 198Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 114Richelieu, Cardinal, 22, 78Ridpath, George, 85, 89–90Roberts, John, 143, 235Rochester, John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of,

199Rome, Romans, 10, 15, 31, 67, 69, 82,

102, 110–11, 128–9, 131, 163,168–71, 191, 194–5, 230 n. 48, 238n. 22

Romulus, 194Royal Society, 21Rupert, Prince, 6, 20, 22, 215 n. 32Rymer, Thomas, 79Ryswick, treaty of, 29

Sacheverell, Henry, 9, 35, 43, 52–3, 58,63, 77, 94–5, 97, 100, 112, 223 n.32, 228 n. 9

Salters’ Hall, 10, 40, 114, 121–3, 125,185, 199–202, 230 n. 6

Samuel, 66–7Saul, 66–7Saxons, 46, 69, 111Scipio Africanus, 168, 171Scotland, 8–9, 77–94, 108, 111, 175Servetus, Michael, 199Seth, 189Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper,

1st Earl of, 51Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper,

3rd Earl of, 21–3, 88

268 Index

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Sidney, Algernon, 33, 52, 54–6, 72, 224n. 47

Sidon, 167Socinianism, Socinians, 3, 6, 8, 10, 29,

33–4, 41, 49, 51, 56, 61–2, 88, 114,116, 118–19, 122, 125, 132, 135–6,143, 188, 199, 201, 207, 212 n. 20

Solomon, King, 31Solon, 195South Sea Company, South Sea Bubble,

96, 139–40, 144–5, 161, 165, 196,236 n. 25

The Spectator, 204Spinoza, Baruch, 118–20Stanhope, James, 1st Earl, 115, 117, 136Stephen, King, 69Stephens, William, 56–7, 223 n. 31Stubbe, Henry, 118Sunderland, Charles Spencer, 3rd Earl

of, 115, 117, 136Swift, Jonathan, 100

Tacitus, 4The Tatler, 200Temple, William, 19, 215 n. 24Thucydides, 4Tillotson, John, Archbishop, 41Tindal, Matthew, 10, 143, 235 n. 21Toland, John, 10, 32, 56–7, 115, 117–21,

143–4, 185, 192, 194, 204, 223 n.31, 235 n. 21, 241 n. 28, 244 n. 74

Tories, Toryism, 7, 9, 21–2, 24–5, 30, 32,42–3, 47, 52, 59, 80, 82–4, 91, 95,98, 100, 102–4, 112, 115–16, 145

Townshend, Charles, 2nd Viscount, 115

Trenchard, John, 6, 29–33, 143, 194,216 n. 66, 217 n. 70, 235 n. 21

Tutchin, John, 53, 82, 220 n. 42, 226 n.17

Tyre, 167–8, 238 n. 6Tyrrell, James, 56, 69, 224

Union of 1707, 8–9, 35, 77–94Ussher, James, Archbishop, 37, 218 n.

11Utrecht, treaty of, 5, 9, 103–4, 111, 166

Verulam, 1st baron, 171–2 see Bacon,Francis

Virgil, 187

Walpole, Sir Robert, 115Wars of the Roses, 69Wharton, Phillip, 1stt Duke of, 204, 242,

244Whigs, Whiggism, 1, 9–10, 16, 20–2, 30,

32, 35, 43–4, 52, 80–1, 94, 98, 100,102–3, 112, 115–17, 121, 136, 140,144–5, 147, 209

Whiston, William, 143, 145, 185, 200,236 n. 21, 240 n. 2, 243 n. 59

Whitelocke, Bulstrode, 79Wilcox, Daniel, 230 n. 6Wilkins, John, bishop, 40, 45, 219William I, King, 69William III, King, 6–7, 11–12, 14–16,

20–2, 25–9, 33, 43, 48, 56, 61, 64,82, 92, 95, 114, 135, 140, 169, 184,217 n. 70

Woolston, Thomas, 143, 236 n. 21

Index 269

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Daniel Defoe: the whole frame of nature, time and providence

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