In the midst of his distress, the King, it appears, had applied for protection to a clergyman, who treated him with cool indifference. The fact is thus noticed by Defoe:
‘When the king was taken at Sheerness, and had fallen into the hands of the rabble, he applied himself to a clergyman who was there, in words to this effect: “Sir, it is men of your cloth who have reduced me to this condition; I desire you will use your endeavours to still and quiet the people, and disperse them, that I may be freed from this tumult.” The gentleman’s answer was cold and insignificant; and going down to the people, he returned no more to the king. Several of the gentry and clergy thereabouts,’ adds our author, ‘who had formerly preached and talked up this mad doctrine, (passive obedience,) never offered the king their assistance in that distress, which, as a man, whether prince or no, any one would have done: it therefore to me renders their integrity suspected, when they pretended to an absolute submission, and only meant that they expected it from their neighbours, whom they designed to oppress, but resolved never to practise the least part of it themselves, if ever it should look towards them.’
In another place, Defoe observes,
‘I never was, I thank God for it, one of those that betrayed him, or any one else. I was never one that flattered him in his arbitrary proceedings, or made him believe I would bear oppression and injustice with a tame Issachar-like temper; those who did so, and then flew in his face, I believe, as much betrayed him as Judas did our Saviour; and their crime, whatever the Protestant interest gained by it, is no way lessened by the good that followed.’
The same spirit of integrity and candour, the same desire to see fair play, and to do justice to all parties,—in a word, the same spirit of common sense and common honesty which marks this passage, runs through all Defoe’s writings; and as it raised him up a host of enemies among the abettors and abusers of power, so it left him neither friends nor shelter in his own party, to whose faults and errors he gave as little quarter; thinking himself bound to condemn them as freely and frankly. Hence he had a life of uneasiness,—an old age of pain. In reading the above description of James’s situation, the hand is passed thoughtfully over the brow, and we for a moment forget the crimes of the monarch in the misfortunes of the man. It is laid down by Mr. Burke, that none but mild, inoffensive princes, ever bring themselves to the condition of being objects of insult or pity to their subjects; and that tyrants, who deserve punishment, know well how to guard themselves against it, and ‘to keep their seats firm.’ Let us see how far this doctrine is made good in the case of James; or how far his own misdeeds brought their rare, but natural punishment upon his head. We will let Mr. Wilson speak to this point:—
‘The fate of James,’ he says, ‘would have been more entitled to pity, if he had not stained his character by so many acts of wanton and cold-blooded cruelty. That his merciless character was well known to the nation, appears by the intrepid retort of Colonel Ayloffe, who had been condemned to death, but was advised by James to make some disclosures, it being in his power to pardon. “I know,” says he, “it is in your power, but it is not in your nature, to pardon.” That compassion was a total stranger to his breast, no one can doubt who reads the following affecting narrative: Monsieur Roussel, a French protestant divine of great learning and integrity, and minister of the Reformed Church at Montpelier in France, having witnessed the demolition of his own place of worship, soon after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, ventured, at the desire of his people, to preach in the night-time upon its ruins, and was attended by some thousands of his flock. For this offence he was condemned, by the intendant of Languedoc, to be broke upon the wheel; but, having withdrawn from the place, it was ordered that he should be hanged in effigy. After encountering numerous hazards, he succeeded in effecting his escape from France; and reaching Ireland, was chosen pastor of the French church in Dublin. James, who, for the sake of courting popularity, had formerly affected a charitable disposition towards the French refugees, threw off the mask when he landed in that country, and was surrounded by French counsellors. Being no longer under any temptation to disguise his natural temper and his hatred to the reformed religion, he committed one of those breaches of good faith which must for ever consign his name to infamy. For, instead of protecting a stranger who had been persecuted in his own country for a conscientious discharge of his religious duties, and had sought an asylum under the laws of another, where he had lived for some years in peaceable exile, the base wretch delivered up this unoffending person to the French ambassador, Count D’Avaux, who sent him in chains to France, there to undergo the terrible punishment prepared for him by his inhuman murderers.[[34]] Such an action requires no comment; nor can any term of reproach be too strong to designate the monster who could lend himself to its perpetration.’
Yet many people, seeing the poor and forlorn figure which the exiled sovereign made with a few followers in the remote and silent court of St. Germain’s, wanted to have him back; thinking that, to curtail him of the power to repeat such acts as that just related, and to deluge a country with blood, was the last degree of hardship, and a sad indignity offered to a king! Defoe was not in the number of these sentimentalists; and he had enough to do after his countrymen’s ‘courage had been screwed to the sticking-place,’ to keep it there, and warn them against a relapse into Popery and slavery. One of his first publications had been an Address to the Dissenters, to caution them against accepting the terms of a general Toleration, which, on his accession to the throne, James II. had insidiously held out to all parties, and which was to include Papists as well as Dissenters. This was not a bait for Defoe’s keen jealousy and strong repugnance to the encroachments of power to be taken in by. There was, however, some danger that the Dissenters, from their timidity and love of ease, and their being habitually too much engrossed by themselves and their own grievances, might be tempted to purchase the proffered grace at the price of allowing the Papists the same liberty; which was (at this period), under the barefaced pretence of liberality, and a tenderness for scrupulous consciences, to throw open the flood-gates of the most unbounded bigotry and intolerance. But the hatred and dread of Popery was, at this time, the ruling passion, in which the Dissenters shared in its utmost rancour and virulence; and this old grudge and hereditary antipathy had the effect of counteracting their natural coldness and phlegm, and a certain narrowness and formality in their views. Some of the weakest among them were, notwithstanding, for running into the snare, and did not easily forgive Defoe for pointing it out to them. The Marquis of Halifax had written a pamphlet on the same side of the question, called, ‘A Letter to a Dissenter, upon occasion of his Majesty’s late Declaration of Indulgence, 1687.’ The title of Defoe’s work is not now known. In speaking of it himself, some years after, he says,
‘The next time I differed with my friends was when King James was wheedling the Dissenters to take off the penal laws and test, which I could by no means come into. And as in the first I used to say, I had rather the Popish House of Austria should ruin the Protestants in Hungary than the infidel House of Ottoman should ruin both Protestant and Papist by overrunning Germany; so, in the other, I told the Dissenters I had rather the Church of England should pull our clothes off by fines and forfeitures, than that the Papists should fall both upon the Church and the Dissenters, and pull our skins off by fire and faggot.’[[35]]
The allusion in the foregoing passage is to an early Piece of Defoe’s, (not reprinted among his tracts), in which he had drawn his sword (for his weapon would be out) in defence of the Pope against the Turks. The occasion was this: The Hungarian Reformers having been persecuted and proscribed by the Austrian monarch, had risen in arms against him; and the Turks, availing themselves of the opportunity, had marched to their assistance, and laid siege to Vienna. Most of the English Protestants (as men think the nearest danger greatest, and hate their old enemies most,) were inclined to rejoice at this tumbling of a Popish despot, and the success of their Hungarian brethren. But Defoe, who saw farther than others, (and perhaps took a little pride in doing so,) viewed the matter in a different light, and deprecated the possible triumph of the Crescent over the Cross, and the subjugation of all Christendom, which might be the consequence. Logically speaking, he was right; but prudentially, he was perhaps wrong. The powers of Europe took the alarm as well as he, and combined to rescue the Austrian monarch from the gripe of the Mussulman. They succeeded; but could obtain no terms for the Hungarian peasants. Had the Emperor been left to fight his own battles against the Turks, he might have been frightened into measures of moderation and justice towards his own subjects; and there was, in the meantime, little probability of a Mahometan army overrunning Europe.
Defoe’s first publication was a satirical pamphlet, called Speculum Crape-gownorum; intended to ridicule the fopperies and affectation of the younger clergy, as a set-off to some severe attacks on the mode of preaching among the Dissenters. This performance bears the date of 1682, when Defoe was only twenty-one, so that he commenced author very young. From that period he hardly ever ceased writing for the rest of his life; and a list of his works would alone fill a long article. The pasquinade just mentioned is attributed, by Mr. Godwin, in his Lives of the Philipses, to John Philips; but Mr. Wilson gives it to Defoe, on his own authority; and certainly his report is to be trusted, for he was a person of unchallengeable veracity. He was always a warm partisan of the Dissenters, (among whom he was born and bred,) and was ever ready to take up their quarrel either with wit or argument, for which he got small thanks. He was not, however, to be put off by their dulness or ingratitude. He was old enough to remember the times of their persecution and ‘fiery ordeal;’ and it is at this source that the spirit of liberty is tempered and steeled to its keenest edge. Defoe’s political firmness may, in part, also be traced to this union between the feelings of civil and religious liberty. An attachment to freedom, for the advantages it holds out to society, may be sometimes overruled by a calculation of prudence, or of the opposite advantages held out to the individual; but a resistance to power for conscience-sake, and as a dictate of religious duty, rests on a positive ground, which is not to be shaken or tampered with, and has the seeds of permanence and martyrdom in it. What Mr. Burke calls ‘the Hortus Siccus of Dissent’ is therefore the hotbed of resistance to the encroachments of ambition; and when, by long-continued struggles, the disqualifications of Dissenters are taken off, and the zeal which had been kept alive by hard usage and penal laws subsides into indifference or scepticism, we doubt whether there is any lever left, in mere public opinion, strong enough to throw off the pressure of unjust and ruinous power.