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When Daniel Defoe published one of the three pamphlets that brought him so much grief, An Answer to a Question that No Body Thinks of, Vi?. But What if the Queen Should Die?, Queen Anne’s health was clearly failing. At this time, succession was already in everyone’s mind. The Whigs were struggling violently to succeed the Tories, and within the government, Henry St John Bolingbroke was struggling mightily to take over power from Robert Harley. The Queen died on August 1, but not before approving the choice of the Duke of Shrewsbury as Lord Treasurer and assuring the Protestant succession and the transition from the House of Stuart to the House of Hanover. But before that event, party quarrels, the battle over the nature of English trade, the continuing controversy over the Peace of Utrecht and its provisions, and renewed legislation against the Dissenters created divisions in society seldom matched in the history of England.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The eighth chapter describes the lowest point of the Marlborough-Godolphin partnership. The Allied army in Spain is defeated at Almanza, Sarah is supplanted at court by her poor relation (and Harley’s cousin) Abigail Masham, and the Whigs turn against the government because the queen refuses to consult them over senior Church appointments (‘the bishoprics crisis’). Marlborough says he would be better able to serve in a military capacity only, while Harley tells the queen that the partnership has become a dangerous concentration of power: the Treasury should be put into commission and the war be brought to an end on realistic terms. Marlborough’s loyalty to Godolphin seems to waver. Then the discovery that one of Harley’s clerks, William Gregg, is a spy forces a premature confrontation. Marlborough obliges the queen to part with Harley and goes over to try to ‘get Spain by France’.

The eleventh chapter traces the downfall of the partnership between Marlborough and Godolphin. The public trial of the High Church demagogue Dr Henry Sacheverell reinforces the perception of a dangerous alliance between an ambitious general and an anti-monarchical party. Marlborough opens the campaign vigorously, but both his operations and the peace negotiations at Gertruydenberg come to nothing. Under Harley’s guidance the queen begins to rid herself of the Whigs. With the public credit in decline Marlborough and Godolphin accept that they can’t make peace or war as they are. They and the Whigs effectively abandon one other, though Marlborough and Godolphin reaffirm their partnership. When Harley finally induces the reluctant queen to dismiss Godolphin, he urges Marlborough to stay on to give the new ministry a chance to establish itself and achieve peace. Marlborough is obliged to procure his wife’s resignation, although he is able to keep her from being publicly disgraced.

This chapter explores why slavery and the slave trade came to be accepted as crucial to England’s national interest by focusing on the asiento, the exclusive contract to supply the Spanish American colonies with slaves. Britain won the contract as part of the Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the War of Spanish Succession in 1713. Queen Anne gave the contract to the South Sea Company, which had been established in 1711 by Lord HighTreasurer Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, with the explicit purpose of managing the asiento. In order to meet the contract’s terms, the South Sea Company turned to the Royal African Company and its decades of experience in the slave trade. The African Company viewed the asiento as a political and economic lifeline at a particularly desperate time. The chapter explores the political divisions between Whig and Tory that were behind the founding of South Sea Company, as well as the imperial implications of the arrangement. Although the terms of the contract would never be filled, winning the asiento set the ideological stage for Britain to dominate the slave trade for the remainder of the eighteenth century.

The fourth chapter shows the Marlborough-Godolphin partnership challenged by Nottingham for control of grand strategy. The expansion of the war into Portugal, Spain, the Mediterranean, and the Americas makes Godolphin anxious about over-extension of resources. He also has to bring about the union of England with a violently nationalist Scotland to fulfil the queen’s desire and safeguard the Protestant succession. Marlborough is prevented by the Dutch from following up his success in the Low Countries and the Holy Roman Empire comes under threat from France. But Godolphin’s rigorous management of the Treasury gains the confidence of the City, thus lowering the interest rates for public credit, enabling him to pay subsidies to the Allies, exercise control over strategy, and fund Marlborough’s secret plan to save Vienna. With the aid of Robert Harley, Marlborough and Godolphin use the parliamentary contest over Occasional Conformity to divide the Tory opposition.

The tenth chapter describes how peace slips from the Allies’ grasp. Louis XIV refuses to join in driving his grandson out of Spain; Marlborough refuses to mediate between the Dutch and the Habsburgs; and the Whig financiers reject a separate peace with France with a campaign to get Spain afterwards. Another battle at Malplaquet fails to solve the impasse. Marlborough withdraws from his diplomatic and ministerial roles. Godolphin, having completed his bargain with the Whigs by getting Orford into the Admiralty, feels himself master of them, but Marlborough contests control of the army with the queen (the Essex regiment crisis) and tries unsuccessfully to use the Whig majority in Parliament to drive Abigail Masham from court. The queen, advised by Harley behind the scenes, is now convinced Marlborough is a threat to her and has turned completely against his wife, though Godolphin retains her confidence.