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CHAPTER IX

A JOURNALIST SPY-1716-1718

URING the year 1716 Defoe, so far as we know, published scarcely a book and only a moderate number of pamphlets. There is evidence, however, that he was writing for certain newspapers, and in May he began the publication of his monthly organ, Mercurius Politicus, which was designed to be the Tory counterpart of the better known Political State, edited by Abel Boyer, a French refugee important in the journalism of the day. As the Mercurius Politicus was mainly a compilation, we may presume that as soon as he got it fairly started, Defoe was able to prepare a number without great trouble, either alone, or with the assistance of some of his children, or of a hired amanuensis, and hence that sufficient time was left on his hands for the large amount of writing he managed to do during the years 1717 and 1718. It should be added that now more than ever Defoe needed to maintain anonymity as completely as possible, and that, as a rule, his productions of this period are to

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be determined only through charges of authorship made by hostile journalists and through internal evidence of his handiwork furnished by the books and tracts themselves. Obviously under such conditions students must exercise great caution in their ascriptions, but just as obviously an astonishing amount of work has been identified as indisputably his. One method of tracking him is comparatively easy. He had become so inured to his profession that he was almost certain to take sides-often both sides-in any controversy that interested the public. Hence search in the newspapers of the time for advertisements of pamphlets and examination of the bound volumes of tracts so numerous for the period is sure to result in the discovery of many contributions made by him to the debates, political, economic, theological, which occupied the attention of that contentious age. For example, in the spring of 1716 he wrote several pamphlets on the much discussed Triennial Act, which prolonged the life of the Parliament then sitting, and in 1717, he put his rapid pen almost literally to a gallop in his contributions to the once famous Bangorian Controversy, which raged around a sermon on the relations of Church and State preached by Benjamin Hoadly, the low-church bishop of Bangor. As a Presbyterian and a social outcast Defoe seems to have taken special delight in whetting on the Church combatants and in impudently attacking, safe under

his mask of anonymity, dignitaries who would have scorned him as an antagonist.' Then, human chameleon that he was, he would solemnly write a tract deploring the evil effects of those dissensions among Christians which he was doing his best to foment.

It is impossible to give here even in outline an account of all the phases of Defoe's activity during the year 1717. He had a violent political controversy with the Deist John Toland and with Abel Boyer, which resulted in serious charges against his own morality as a journalist. Our hero defended himself with great disingenuousness and anger, partly in order to keep his editorship of Mercurius Politicus from becoming widely known, partly in order to discredit Boyer's shrewd suspicion that a certain book purporting to be the Minutes of the Negotiations of the late French diplomat Mesnager had been entirely forged by Defoe in order to give a favorable view of Lord Oxford's conduct at the time of the making of the Treaty of Utrecht. It seems practically certain that this book was the forgery Boyer thought it, and that Defoe was the forger, but it is at least clear that the latter did not cherish an implacable enmity to the patron who had disowned him. We may also set over against this rather rascally performance the exemplary Memoirs of the Church of Scotland, which our tireless

1 See the selection given at p. 165.

2 See the selection from Mercurius Politicus given at p. 158.

journalist had published some months before. Yet one doubts whether such attempts at balancing are warranted, when, at the close of 1717 and the beginning of 1718, one finds Defoe, the controversies with Boyer and Toland and about rather than with the supporters and opponents of Hoadly having subsided, plunging blithely into another pamphlet war begun by Matthew Tindal on the occasion of the break of Walpole and Townshend with Sunderland and Stanhope. A journalistic Ishmael one may call him, but perhaps his methods of pamphletfighting and his motives for engaging in such squabbles prompt one rather to compare him with a rebel Mexican brigand of the present day.

More real importance attaches, however, to the assistance Defoe at this period rendered the Jacobite printer Nathaniel Mist than to the controversies he waged with many distinguished people. This is because the "Letters Introductory" he began to write in Mist's Weekly Journal; or Saturday's Post were not only good essays which showed how well Defoe could profit from the lessons given him by Steele and Addison, but were also the prototypes of the leading editorials we now read in our newspapers, The other journalists of the age affected to despise Defoe as a turn-coat and an ignoramus, but his knowledge was plainly far more varied and practical than theirs, he added new features to the papers he founded or wrote for, and rivals and suc

cessors saw that it was wise to follow in his footsteps.

With regard to Defoe's personal relations with Mist himself we are not very fully informed. The printer, who had been a sailor, was evidently a rash, choleric man whose Jacobitism was continually getting him into trouble with the authorities. Like Defoe he had to undergo the pillory, and he was much oftener and much longer in prison than the man who now became his chief contributor and adviser. Defoe's business was to soften the Jacobitism of the Weekly Journal and, in consequence, to keep Mist out of the clutches of the law, but on at least one occasion it seems as if the man whose duty it was to restrain his employer really pushed him forward in a very dangerous affair. On the whole, however, Defoe, with some intermissions, was a most useful editor to Mist during three years, 17171720, and even after he transferred his services to another Tory printer, John Applebee, he was kind to Mist, when the latter was in prison, and on one occasion he may even have spared that irascible person's life.

This occasion is assigned by Defoe's biographer Lee to the year 1724, and is said to have been due to Mist's discovery at that late date that Defoe, while editing the Weekly Journal, had been in secret relations with those authorities who had so often arrested and imprisoned Mist himself. The

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