Defoe ‘was too fond of the right to pursue the expedient;’ and had much too dry, hard, and concentrated an understanding of the truth, to allow of any compromise with it from courtesy to the feelings or opinions of others. This kept him in perpetual hot water. It was a virtue, but carried to a repeated excess. It set the majority against him, and turned his dearest friends into his bitterest foes. If you make no concessions to the world, you must expect no favours from it. Our author’s blindness and simplicity on this head, amount to the dramatic. He went on censuring and contradicting all sects and parties, setting them to rights, recommending peace to them, praying each to give up its darling prejudice and absurdity; and then he wonders that ‘a man of peace and reason,’ like himself, should be the butt of universal contumely and hatred. If an individual differs from you in common with others, you do not so much mind it—it is the act of a body, and implies no particular assumption of superior wisdom or virtue; but if he not only differs from you, but from his own side too, you then can endure the scandal no longer; but join to hunt him down as a prodigy of unheard-of insolence and presumption, and to get rid of him and his boasted honesty and independence together. While, therefore, the author of the True-born Englishman, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, and the Legion Petition, thought he was deserving well of God and his country, he was ‘heaping coals of fire on his own head.’ Nothing produces such antipathy in others as a total seeming want of sympathy with them. Defoe was urged on by a straight-forwardness and sturdiness of feeling, which did not permit him to give up a single iota of his convictions; but it was ‘stuff of the conscience’ with him; there was nothing of spleen, malevolence, or the spirit of contradiction in his nature. Still, we consider him rather as an acute, zealous, and well-informed partisan, than as a general and dispassionate reasoner. He was a distinguished polemic, rather than a philosopher. Though he exercised his understanding powerfully and variously, yet it was always under the guidance of a certain banner—in support of ‘a foregone conclusion.’ He was too much in the heat of the battle—too constantly occupied in attacking or defending one side or the other, to consider fairly whether both might not be in the wrong. He asked himself, (as he was obliged to do in his own vindication,)—‘Why am I in the right?’ and gave admirable reasons for it, supposing it to be so; but he never thought of asking himself the farther question,—‘Am I in the right or no?’ This would have been entering on a new and unexplored tract, and might have led to no very welcome results. As an example of what we mean—Defoe, though a most strenuous and persevering advocate for the rights of conscience and toleration to those dissenters who, in his view, agreed with the church in the essentials of Christianity, was, notwithstanding, far from being disposed to extend the same indulgence to Socinians, Anabaptists, or other heretical persons. Of course, he would conceive that he, and those with whom he acted in concert, were not criminal in excluding others from the privilege in question; but he did not enlarge his views beyond this point, so as to change places with those who entirely differed with him; and in this respect fell short of the philosophical and liberal opinions of Locke, and even Toland, who placed toleration on the broad ground of a general principle, whatever exceptions might arise from particular circumstances, and urgent political expediency. We should, therefore, hardly be warranted in admitting Defoe into the class of perfectly free and unshackled speculative thinkers; though we certainly may rank him among the foremost of polemical writers for vigour, and ability of execution.
It will be easily conceived, that in the variety of subjects of which his author treated, and in the number and importance of the events in which he took part, either in person, or with his pen, Mr. Wilson, whose industry and patience seem to have increased with the field he had to traverse, is at no loss for materials either for reflection or illustration. The only fault is, that the life of Defoe is sometimes lost in the history of the events of his time, like a petty current in the ocean. Nevertheless, the writer has traced these events and their causes so faithfully and clearly, and with such pertinent reflections, that we readily pass over this fault, and can forgive the slowness of a pencil that only drags from the weight of truth and good intention.
Mr. Wilson has extracted from Defoe’s Review (7. p. 296,) his account of the origin and application of the far-famed terms—Whig and Tory; and it is so curiously circumstantial, that we shall lay it before our readers, though some of them, no doubt, are already well acquainted with it.
‘The word Tory is Irish, and was first made use of there in the time of Queen Elizabeth’s wars in Ireland. It signified a kind of robber, who being listed in neither army, preyed in general upon the country, without distinction of English or Spaniard. In the Irish massacre, anno 1641, you had them in great numbers, assisting in every thing that was bloody and villainous; and particularly when humanity prevailed upon some of the Papists to preserve Protestant relations. These were such as chose to butcher brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, the dearest friends and nearest relations; these were called Tories. In England, about the year 1680, a party of men appeared among us, who, though pretended Protestants, yet applied themselves to the ruin and destruction of their country. They began with ridiculing the Popish plot, and encouraging the Papists to revive it. They pursued their designs, in banishing the Duke of Monmouth and calling home the Duke of York; then in abhorring, petitioning, and opposing the bill of exclusion; in giving up charters, and the liberties of their country, to the arbitrary will of their prince; then in murdering patriots, persecuting dissenters, and at last, in setting up a Popish prince, on pretence of hereditary right, and tyranny on pretence of passive obedience. These men, for their criminal preying upon their country, and their cruel, bloody disposition, began to show themselves so like the Irish thieves and murderers aforesaid, that they quickly got the name of Tories. Their real god-father was Titus Oates, and the occasion of his giving them the name as follows—the author of this happened to be present: There was a meeting of some honest people in the city, upon the occasion of the discovery of some attempt to stifle the evidence of the witnesses [to the Popish plot], and tampering with Bedloe and Stephen Dugdale. Among the discourse, Mr. Bedloe said, he had letters from Ireland, that there were some Tories to be brought over hither, who were privately to murder Dr. Oates and the said Bedloe. The Doctor, whose zeal was very hot, could never after this hear any man talk against the plot, or against the witnesses, but he thought he was one of these Tories, and called almost every man a Tory that opposed him in discourse; till at last the word Tory became popular, and it stuck so close to the party in all their bloody proceedings, that they had no way to get it off; so at last they owned it, just as they do now the name of High-flyer.
‘As to the word Whig, it is Scotch. The use of it began there when the western men, called Cameronians, took arms frequently for their religion. Whig was a word used in those parts for a kind of liquor the Western Highlandmen used to drink, whose composition I do not remember,[[33]] and so became common to the people who drank it. It afterwards became a denomination of the poor harassed people of that part of the country, who, being unmercifully persecuted by the government, against all law and justice, thought they had a civil right to their religious liberties, and therefore frequently resisted the arbitrary power of their princes. These men, tired with innumerable oppressions, ravishings, murders, and plunderings, took up arms about 1681, being the famous insurrection at Bothwell-bridge. The Duke of Monmouth, then in favour here, was sent against them by King Charles, and defeated them. At his return, instead of thanks for the good service, he found himself ill-treated for using them too mercifully; and Duke Lauderdale told King Charles with an oath, that the Duke had been so civil to Whigs, because he was a Whig himself in his heart. This made it a court-word; and in a little time, all the friends and followers of the Duke began to be called Whigs; and they, as the other party did by the word Tory, took it freely enough to themselves.’
The cruelties of this reign, and the sufferings of the people, for conscience and religion, on this and so many other occasions, formed a striking contrast to the voluptuous effeminacy and callous indifference of the court; and this insolent and pampered want of sympathy, by adding wanton insult to intolerable injury, undermined all respect for the throne in the minds of a numerous class of the community, and took away all pity for its fall in the succeeding reign. Charles, however, who seemed to oppress his subjects only for his amusement, and played the tyrant as an appendage to the character of the fine gentleman, did not proceed to extremities, or throw off the mask, whatever his secret wishes or designs might be, by openly attacking large masses of power and opinion. James was a true monk,—a blind, narrow, gloomy bigot; and did not stop short in his mad and obstinate career, till he drove the country to rebellion, and himself into exile. As the French wit said of him, seeing him coming out of a Popish chapel abroad, ‘There goes a very honest gentleman, who gave up a kingdom for a mass.’ By great good luck he succeeded, for it turned upon a nice point at last. On James’s accession to the throne, addresses of loyalty and devotion poured in from all quarters, notwithstanding his well-known principles and designs. An address from the Middle Temple expressed the sentiments of that body of scholars and gentlemen, in a strain of fulsome servility. The University of Oxford promised to obey him ‘without limitations or restrictions;’ and the king’s promise, in his speech from the throne, (says Burnet,) passed for a thing so sacred, that those were looked upon as ill-bred who put into their address, ‘our religion established by law, excepted.’ The pulpits resounded with thanksgiving sermons, and the doctrine of passive obedience and non-resistance; and the clergy were forward in tendering the unconditional surrender of their rights and liberties for themselves, their fellow-subjects, and their posterity. If James did not before think himself God’s vicegerent upon earth, he must have thought so now. But he no sooner took them at their word, and proceeded to appoint papists to be heads of colleges, and to induct them to protestant livings, and to send the bishops to the Tower for refusing to set their seal to his arbitrary mandates; that is, he no sooner alarmed the clergy for their authority spiritual, and their revenues temporal,—so that judgment began, as Dr. Sherlock expressed it, in the house of God,—than they turned round, and sent their loyalty and their monarch a-packing together. Had it not been for this attack on the Church of England, the People of England might have been left to struggle with the hand of power and oppression how they could; and would have received plenty of reproofs and taunts from orthodox pulpits, on their refractory and unnatural behaviour in resisting lawful authority. Mr. Wilson has quoted an eloquent passage from Defoe, in which he admirably exposes the indifference of the nation, at this period, to principles, and their short-sightedness as to consequences, till they actually arrived. We give the passage, both for the sense and style. It alludes to the favourers of the Exclusion Bill.
‘How earnestly did those honest men, whose eyes God had opened to see the danger, labour to prevent the mischiefs of a Popish tyranny? How did they struggle in Parliament, and out of Parliament, to exclude a prince that did not mock them, but really promised them in as plain language as actions could speak, that he would be a tyrant; that he would erect arbitrary power upon the foot of our liberties, as soon as he had the reins in his hands? How were the opposers of this inundation oppressed by power, and borne down in the stream of it? And when they were massacred by that bloody generation, how did they warn us at their deaths of the mischiefs that were coming? Yet all this while, deaf as the adder to the voice of the charmer, stupid and hard as the nether millstone, we would not believe, nor put our hand to our deliverance, till that same Popery, that same tyranny, and that very party we struggled with, were sent to be our instructors; and then we learnt the lesson presently. Tyranny taught us the value of liberty; oppression, how to prize the fence of laws; and Popery showed us the danger of the Protestant religion. Then passive pulpits beat the ecclesiastical drum of war; absolute subjection took up arms; and obedience for conscience-sake resisted divine right. And who taught them this heterodox lesson? Truly, the same schoolmaster they had hanged us for telling them of, the same dispensing power they had enacted, and the same tyranny they had murdered us for opposing.’
Defoe gives a very curious account of the insults offered to James II. after his fall, and of which he was an eyewitness.
‘The king (after the Prince of Orange had entered London) had proceeded to the Kentish coast, and embarked on board a vessel with the intention of going to France; but being detained by the wind, Sir Edward Hales, one of his attendants, sent his footman to the post-office at Feversham, where his livery was recognised. Being traced to the vessel, it was immediately boarded by some people from the town, who, mistaking the king for a popish priest, searched his person, and took from him four hundred guineas, with some valuable seals and jewels. The rank of the individual treated with so much indignity was not long undiscovered; for, there being a constable present who happened to know him, he threw himself at his feet, and, begging him to forgive the rudeness of the mob, ordered restitution of what had been taken from him. The king, receiving the jewels and seals, distributed the money amongst them. After this, he was conducted to Feversham, where fresh insults were heaped upon fallen majesty.’—‘While there, he found himself in the hands of the rabble, who, upon the noise of the king’s being taken, thronged from all parts of the country to Feversham, so that the king found himself surrounded, as it were, with an army of furies; the whole street, which is very wide and large, being filled, and thousands of the noisy gentry got together. His majesty, who knew well enough the temper of the people at that time, but not what they might be pushed on to do at such a juncture, was very uneasy, and spoke to some of the gentlemen, who came with more respect, and more like themselves, to the town on that surprising occasion. The king told them he was in their hands, and was content to be so, and they might do what they pleased with him; but whatever they thought fit to do, he desired they would quiet the people, and not let him be delivered up to the rabble, to be torn in pieces. The gentlemen told his majesty they were sorry to see him used so ill, and would do any thing in their power to protect him; but that it was not possible to quell the tumult of the people. The king was distressed in the highest degree; the people shouting and pressing in a frightful manner to have the door opened. At length, his majesty observing a forward gentleman among the crowd, who ran from one party to another, hallooing and animating the people, the king sent to tell him he desired to speak with him. The message was delivered with all possible civility, and the little Masaniello was prevailed with to come up stairs. The king received him with a courtesy rather equal to his present circumstances than to his dignity; told him, what he was doing might have an event worse than he intended; that he seemed to be heating the people up for some mischief; and that as he had done him no personal wrong, why should he attack him in this manner; that he was in their hands, and they might do what they pleased; but he hoped they did not design to murder him. The fellow stood, as it were, thunderstruck, and said not one word. The king, proceeding, told him he found he had some influence with the rabble, and desired he would pacify them; that messengers were gone to the parliament at London, and that he desired only they would be quiet till their return. What the fellow answered to the king I know not; but as I immediately enquired, they told me he did not say much, but this—“What can I do with them? and, what would you have me do?” But as soon as the king had done speaking, he turned short, and made to the door as fast as he could to go out of the room. As soon as he got fairly to the stairhead, and saw his way open, he turns short about to the gentlemen, to one of whom he had given the same churlish answer, and raising his voice, so that the king, who was in the next room, should be sure to hear him, he says, “I have a bag of money as long as my arm, halloo, boys, halloo!” The king was so filled with contempt and just indignation at the low-spirited insolence of the purse-proud wretch, that it quite took off the horror of the rabble, and only smiling, he sat down and said, “Let them alone, let them do their worst.”’
It seems the man was a retired grocer; and Defoe, in his Complete Tradesman, (says his biographer,) relates the circumstance, to show, that to be vain of mere wealth denotes a baseness of soul, and is often accompanied by a conduct unworthy of a rational creature.