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On January 1, 1684, Daniel Defoe married Mary Tuffley. The economy of England at this time resembled that of what is now called a developing nation. In his The Compleat English Tradesman, Defoe gave ample enough illustrations of the ways in which a business might fail. Defoe mentioned the Monmouth Rebellion sparingly. Somehow, perhaps by managing to flee the country or by going into hiding, Defoe escaped the vicious reprisals that followed the failure of the rebellion. James II wanted the rebels hanged for all to see, and with the aid of his Chief Justice, Sir Robert Jeffreys, men were hunted down throughout the region. In An Appeal to Honour and Justice, he described his disagreement with many among the Dissenters who believed that James II ought to be trusted as his second disagreement with his fellow Nonconformists became known after he had upbraided them for supporting the Turks during the siege of Vienna.

Almost everything Daniel Defoe published provoked attacks upon him and his ideas. He was now a public figure, and if he had some right to complain about slanders concerning him and his life, he also had to expect them. Defoe also had his defenders. William Colepepper, his lawyer in the trial over The Shortest Way, had been threatened with bodily harm by friends of Sir George Rooke, and he eventually took legal action against them. Naturally enough, Defoe came to his friend’s defence. As he did with the beginning of the Review, he began by attacking the quality of other newspapers, including the Review itself. His commitment to fighting the enemies of the Dissenters may be seen in his ongoing exchanges with Charles Leslie, one of the most effective representatives of Jacobite views in England. Some time during the summer of 1704, Robert Harley decided that Defoe would be more useful as a collector of information within England than as an agent on the Continent.

Some time in 1724 Henry Baker, an aspiring poet with a unique ability to teach deaf children to speak and to give them a general education, began a journey from Enfield to Stoke Newington where he stayed with a local family. Baker states that Daniel Defoe first sought him out here. If this is so, Baker met with Defoe for almost three years before he began his courtship of Defoe’s younger daughter, Sophia, on August 11, 1727. The story that Baker wanted to tell involved the difficulties entailed in the courtship — difficulties caused by Defoe’s unwillingness to provide what Baker considered a satisfactory dowry. Before the great deistic offensive of the 1720s, two important controversies (scandals might be the better word) attracted Defoe’s attention, one within the Church of England and the other among the ranks of the Dissenters. Defoe’s first full-length attack upon the position of the deists appears to have been An Essay upon Literature, which, according to John Robert Moore, appeared in April or May 1726.

There was an intimate relationship between Daniel Defoe’s fiction and his way of thinking about the world. His claim to gentility during the crisis over The Shortest Way with the Dissenters had been rudely brushed aside by the government. His willingness to raise a regiment to fight under Marlborough received not a flicker of response, and while he printed his coat of arms under the portrait that accompanied his Collected Worksof 1703 and Jure Divino some five years later, it must have seemed like a distant vision to the embattled journalist of the early years of the reign of George I. Few journalists had suffered so notoriously from the charge of libel and the vagueness of the laws against it as Defoe, who complained about laws against libel that gave no notion of the limits of free speech. At the end of 1721 and the beginning of 1722, Defoe was embroiled in journalism. In France, a plague was raging around Marseilles that threatened to cross the Channel. He was to report the developments with fascination.

In his letter of July 12, 1703, to William Penn, Daniel Defoe pointed out that he had been urged by some friends to take advantage of his bail to flee. He apparently thought that he might yet avoid the pillory, and urged Penn to continue his services. The government had succeeded in punishing the body of Defoe, but his images of a type of persecution that most people in England were no longer willing to accept had blunted the attack upon the Dissenters. Defoe was to tell the story of his release in moving terms in Appeal to Honour and Justice. He was attempting to explain his sense of gratitude toward Robert Harley and Queen Anne as a justification for his loyalty to both of them from that point forward. This was not exactly the way Defoe became a secret agent for the Queen and a propagandist for Harley. Defoe probably had difficulty getting Harley to provide exact orders about the kind of propaganda he wanted.

Daniel Defoe was to continue his plea for harmony between those forces for unity and moderation in the nation and his attack on the Tories and the High Church in two works that had been drafted earlier but not entirely finished until 1705. In the Review of May 10, 1705, Defoe wrote an essay on the tumultuous scenes in Coventry at the time of election for Parliament. The author of The Memorial of the Church of England also accused the ministers, and particularly Sidney Godolphin, of leading Queen Anne astray. Robert Harley thought Defoe would make a useful observer of the nation’s mood, and sent him out to gather information as he had done for the eastern counties before. Up to this point, we have seen that the chief influences on Defoe’s poetry were John Dryden, John Wilmot Rochester, and Andrew Marvell.

In a series of essays in the Review beginning June 17, 1710, Daniel Defoe expressed his despair over what he saw to be the coming downfall of the Whigs and the triumph of the Tories and High Church. Queen Anne had just dismissed Charles Spencer Sunderland as Secretary of State, and Defoe could read the writing on the wall as well as his biblical prophetic namesake. He took the opportunity to mend fences with his enemy, John Dyer. Of course, he was incapable of staying away from politics entirely. On July 17, 1710, Defoe decided that he would try to work with the new Tory administration. He wrote a letter to Robert Harley suggesting that the future Chancellor of the Exchequer and Lord Treasurer would be the ideal person to steer between the extremes of party. From the first letter to Harley to the end of the year, Defoe engaged in producing a whirlwind of pamphlets intended to boost Harley’s position and to destroy the forces behind Henry Sacheverell.

Daniel Defoe chose to retain his identity as a Whig while accepting the policies of what was looking more like a Tory government with each passing day. A crucial moment came with the attempted assassination of Robert Harley by Antoine de Guiscard. In pursuit of his duty, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was wounded by a French spy, and all of the concern about Louis XIV’s attempts to assassinate William III, about French perfidy, and about the safety of Queen Anne created an outpouring of sympathy for Harley that restored his power, brought him the post of Lord Treasurer, which had remained vacant after Sidney Godolphin’s resignation, and raised him to the peerage as Earl of Oxford and Mortimer. Henry St John, whose behaviour during the assassination attempt was equivocal, received a setback in his pursuit of power that was to prove fatal to his career. The possibility that Guiscard had intended to poison the Queen gave a new strength to her friend Harley and to his group of court Tories and court Whigs.

Whigs such as John Dunton were intent to have Robert Harley executed for treason and all who served him punished. In defending Harley, Defoe was also protecting himself. Henry St John Bolingbroke had apparently hoped to make the Tories so dominant that the Whigs and other opposition groups would be powerless, and now the Whigs were attempting a similar move to power. Although the transition from Queen Anne to the reign of George I had gone relatively smoothly, there had been some disturbances, most notably in Bristol. There had also been a series of provocative acts throughout England during the summer of 1715, and with the rebellion begun in Scotland in September, the real battle seemed ready to take place. Staunch as he was for the Hanoverian succession, Defoe was not going to remain silent even when threatened by prosecution. The passage of the Schism Act, with its resemblance to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, seemed destined to destroy the Dissenters.

It was not until August 24, 1717 that Read’s Weekly Journal noted Daniel Defoe’s apparent control over a large number of journals and particularly over what was the most forceful anti-government newspaper, the Weekly Journal, sometimes called Mist’s Weekly Journal after the nominal editor, Nathaniel Mist. Defoe appears to have struck up a brief relationship with Edmund Curll, the renowned publisher of pornographic works such as Onanism Display’d. Between Defoe’s letter to Robert Harley on September 28, 1714, asking for assistance with the Anglesey case, and the fascinating explanation to Charles de la Faye on April 26, 1718, the only extant letter from Defoe is one to Samuel Keimer, the printer of Defoe’s ‘Quaker’ tracts. If 1716 was a quiet year for Defoe as he settled into performing his tasks for the government, he was soon to be back in the thick of the journalistic controversies of the time. Abel Boyer renewed his battle with Defoe in the summer of 1717.

From a political standpoint, Daniel Defoe was already what was called a ‘Court Whig’ by the middle of the 1690s, and he retained that identification proudly into the reign of Queen Anne. As Reed Browning has suggested, the Court Whigs argued in favour of a standing army when it was to be used in the service of a monarch who was trying to protect English liberties. Defoe’s proposal for a military academy is sandwiched modestly between his projects for two other academies. Two other sides of religion involved Defoe at this time. The first involved a movement for reform under the broad heading of ‘reformation of manners’. Equally filled with the spirit of reform is the section of An Essay upon Projects that treats the English habit of swearing. If Defoe began finding his public voice as a writer on politics and moral reform, he also began to assume a role as a spokesman for the concerns of the Dissenters. Defoe began with a historical account — this time of the history of Dissent in England.

On February 15, 1700, Daniel Defoe celebrated the coming of the new century by publishing a poem, The Pacificator, on the state of wit and poetry in England. The poem is actually about the politics of poetry, since the literary quarrels that had divided the nation were often allied to political and social disputes. Defoe borrowed from Sir Richard Blackmore the opposition of the ‘rich Sense’ that dominates genuine satire from the ‘empty Malice’ that lies behind the products of the Wits. Everything that Defoe wrote during 1701 was directed toward getting England involved in what was to be called the War of the Spanish Succession. In January 1701 Defoe published The True-Born Englishman, his first popular success and the most frequently reprinted poem of the reign of Queen Anne. Defoe went on to state that it was this work which brought him to the attention of William III.

When William III died in March 1702, Daniel Defoe knew that he had lost a patron of a character he would never see again. In his autobiographical Appeal to Honour and Justice of 1715, Defoe expressed his sense of abandonment in what may seem like an accent of self-pity. For Defoe, William was the living embodiment of the Glorious Revolution in every way: toleration for Dissenters, rights and liberties for every Englishman clearly stated and firmly established, a Protestant succession for England forever. Defoe’s satire carries him to a variety of topics, including a fierce attack upon slavery and the colonialism practised by the early Spanish conquistadors. Dissenters would have to be regarded as parody in the neutral sense of pure ventriloquism, but clearly much more was intended. In July, he appeared in court to be charged with libel. The indictment stressed his action in writing and publishing The Shortest Way with the Diseenters as a direct affront to Queen Anne.

Daniel Defoe stayed in Edinburgh to engage in keeping the lines of communication open between England and Scotland and in defending the Union against those, such as the minister James Webster, who had suddenly turned against it. He wrote to Robert Harley on January 27 and again on February 2 that there might be anger if the treaty were returned to Scotland for further consideration: it might not be approved. The Defoe who had passed through the excitement of the Edinburgh mobs was not unchanged by his experience. He, who had depended so strongly on the popularity of his positions in his battles against Parliament, and who had escaped from the usual sufferings at the pillory through an appeal to the crowd, had experienced popular tumults directed against what he considered a good cause. The Scottish Parliament had simply ignored what were supposed to be popular petitions against the Union. In his poem celebrating the New Year of 1707, A Scots Poem, he attacked the intrusion of mobs into the real business of government.

Free from the obligations of his journalism, Daniel Defoe might have been able to nurse his ailing body and wander in the garden of his house at Stoke Newington contemplating the ‘Chequer-work’ of events that had been his life, but such an ending was hardly compatible with his restless spirit. The engagement between Henry Baker and Defoe’s daughter Sophia began to founder over questions involving the extent of her dowry. What Defoe said about trade as a form of crime without morality seems to have applied to his dealings over Sophia’s dowry. It seems clear that once the marriage became a matter of business, of money and property, Defoe treated it without decent feeling. As if his relations with Sophia and Henry Baker were not sufficient cause for him to worry about the vicissitudes of marriage, Defoe had been writing about the role of women in marriage for a number of years. Defoe left two works unpublished at his death, The Compleat English Gentleman and Of Royal Education.

Daniel Defoe’s personal letters were preserved by the Baker family, including those wrangling over Sophia’s dowry. But in the letters of June 9, 1729, and August 12, 1730, Defoe wrote as a father about his illnesses, his anger, and his despair. Most of all, he wrote about his love for his family. The June letter is about love and the misunderstandings arising from family intimacy and disagreements. He had felt betrayed by a remark made by Sophia, probably having to do with the quarrel between her father and her husband, Henry Baker. During the last six months of his life, Defoe was once more in hiding. He had been fighting a lawsuit filed against him by Mary Brooke since 1727. It was in London that Defoe died on April 24 or 25, 1731, in his sleep of what was perhaps a relatively mild stroke.

On February 19, 1704, Daniel Defoe brought out his first issue of a newspaper entitled A Weekly Review of the Affairs of France: Purg’d from the Errors and Partiality of News-Writers, and Petty Statesmen of All Sides. Though most of Defoe’s productions had been very serious indeed, his contemporaries appreciated the wit of his lampoons, and he thought he would attract readers by creating a mythical society to deal with errors of other newspapers and with various subjects, some light and some fairly serious. By getting his readers to understand the reasons for the greatness of France, Defoe would enable them to make the kinds of distinction about foreign policy that, in turn, would enable the government to conduct the war in a proper fashion. In November 1703, the month Defoe was released from prison, he apparently made plans for writing an account of a week-long storm that struck England on November 24. While Defoe was writing on such subjects, he did not abandon his attacks against the enemies of the Dissenters.

Daniel Defoe left for Scotland on September 13, 1706. If his letters to Robert Harley are any indication of his state of mind, he had spent much of the summer trying to pacify his creditors and to get the new bankruptcy Act to work for him. Defoe engaged in a number of controversies during these months, particularly with the High Church. He maintained that 8,000 Dissenters died in prison during ‘the Days of that Merciful Prince King Charles the Second’. He also engaged in a running discussion of political theory with Charles Leslie, answering the Tory challenge to the ideas expressed in Jure Divino. He was now in a country where his religion did not make him a Dissenter from the beliefs of the majority, and where his work for the Union of England and Scotland would bring him into contact with some of the most distinguished members of the Scottish nobility. In addition to his pamphlets and his work as a ‘true spy’, Defoe broke into poetry over Scotland and the prospect of the Union.

The success of Robinson Crusoe did not appear to change Daniel Defoe’s reputation very much with his fellow authors. Prose fiction was not yet a respectable genre, and Charles Gildon had already expressed his contempt for Robinson Crusoe. Defoe’s eventual shift toward fiction and toward works focused on voyages to distant lands, on economic geography, and on the occult certainly reflected his interests, but he was surely responding to what he thought to be the tastes of the reading public. The Anatomy of Exchange Alley, Defoe’s first substantial attack upon the South Sea Company, was published on July 1, 1719. The South Sea Company had been approved by Queen Anne on June 12, 1711, and was part of Robert Harley’s plan to diminish the power of the Bank of England and the Whigs who supported it. Another work, Memoirs of a Cavalier, looked back to the military memoirs that Defoe partly wrote and partly edited during the previous five years.