(_Defoe wrote an enormous number of pamphlets; for great part of his
life he might almost have been described as a pamphleteer pure and
simple. In the vast lists of publications which his biographers and
bibliographers have compiled, partly by industry and partly by
imagination, by far the larger number of entries is of the pamphlet
kind. Indeed, as most people know, Defoe did not take to the
composition of the fiction which has made his name famous till very
late in life. Born in the year 1661, he began pamphleteering when he
was scarcely of age, and continued in that way (with occasional
excursions into work larger in scale, but not very different in style
or matter) for nearly forty years before the publication of _Robinson
Crusoe_. His two most famous and most effective pamphlets were the
so-called _Legion Letter_ and _The Shortest Way with the Dissenters_
(given here), to which may perhaps be added the _Reasons against War
with France_. All these, with many others, appeared within the
compass of the years 1700-1702. The three together touched upon the
three most burning questions of the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries--parliamentary factiousness, an aggressive policy
abroad, and toleration at home. Little or no annotation is required
for their comprehension, but the reader may amuse himself if he likes
by meditating whether the _Shortest Way_ is irony or not. My own
opinion is that it is not; being a simple statement of the actual
views of the other side. The anecdotic history of the piece--how it
was taken for serious by both sides, was prosecuted by Government, the
author proclaimed, and a reward offered for his detection; how, the
printer and publisher being arrested, Defoe surrendered, was tried,
pleaded guilty, was fined, pilloried, and imprisoned--may be read in
the biographies. His imprisonment lasted till August 1704, when Harley
let him out, and he entered upon a course of rather mysterious service
as a Government free-lance, which was continued under various
ministries, and has not on the whole brought him credit with
posterity. For many years, his remarkable _Review_, a political
journal which he conducted single-handed, served as his chief organ;
but he never gave up writing pamphlets till his death in 1731, though
he never approached either the merit or the effect of that here
given._)
Sir Roger L'Estrange tells us a story in his collection of fables, of
the cock and the horses. The cock was gotten to roost in the stable
among the horses, and there being no racks or other conveniences for
him, it seems he was forced to roost upon the ground. The horses
jostling about for room, and putting the cock in danger of his life,
he gives them this grave advice, 'Pray, gentlefolks, let us stand
still, for fear we should tread upon one another.'
There are some people in the world, who now they are unperched, and
reduced to an equality with other people, and under strong and very
just apprehensions of being further treated as they deserve, begin,
with Æsop's cock, to preach up peace and union, and the Christian
duties of moderation, forgetting that, when they had the power in
their hands, these graces were strangers in their gates.
It is now near fourteen years that the glory and peace of the purest
and most flourishing Church in the world has been eclipsed, buffeted,
and disturbed by a sort of men whom God in His providence has suffered
to insult over her and bring her down. These have been the days of her
humiliation and tribulation. She has borne with invincible patience
the reproach of the wicked, and God has at last heard her prayers, and
delivered her from the oppression of the stranger.
And now they find their day is over, their power gone, and the throne
of this nation possessed by a royal, English, true, and ever-constant
member of, and friend to, the Church of England. Now they find that
they are in danger of the Church of England's just resentments; now
they cry out peace, union, forbearance, and charity, as if the Church
had not too long harboured her enemies under her wing, and nourished
the viperous brood till they hiss and fly in the face of the mother
that cherished them.
No, gentlemen, the time of mercy is past, your day of grace is over;
you should have practised peace, and moderation, and charity, if you
expected any yourselves.
We have heard none of this lesson for fourteen years past. We have
been huffed and bullied with your Act of Toleration; you have told us
that you are the Church established by law, as well as others; have
set up your canting synagogues at our church doors, and the Church and
members have been loaded with reproaches, with oaths, associations,
abjurations, and what not. Where has been the mercy, the forbearance,
the charity, you have shown to tender consciences of the Church of
England, that could not take oaths as fast as you made them; that
having sworn allegiance to their lawful and rightful King, could not
dispense with that oath, their King being still alive, and swear to
your new hodge-podge of a Dutch Government? These have been turned out
of their livings, and they and their families left to starve; their
estates double taxed to carry on a war they had no hand in, and you
got nothing by. What account can you give of the multitudes you have
forced to comply, against their consciences, with your new sophistical
politics, who, like new converts in France, sin because they cannot
starve? And now the tables are turned upon you; you must not be
persecuted; it is not a Christian spirit.
You have butchered one king, deposed another king, and made a mock
king of a third, and yet you could have the face to expect to be
employed and trusted by the fourth. Anybody that did not know the
temper of your party would stand amazed at the impudence, as well as
folly, to think of it.
Your management of your Dutch monarch, whom you reduced to a mere King
of Clouts, is enough to give any future princes such an idea of your
principles as to warn them sufficiently from coming into your
clutches; and God be thanked the Queen is out of your hands, knows
you, and will have a care of you.
There is no doubt but the supreme authority of a nation has in itself
a power, and a right to that power, to execute the laws upon any part
of that nation it governs. The execution of the known laws of the
land, and that with a weak and gentle hand neither, was all this
fanatical party of this land have ever called persecution; this they
have magnified to a height, that the sufferings of the Huguenots in
France were not to be compared with. Now, to execute the known laws
of a nation upon those who transgress them, after voluntarily
consenting to the making those laws, can never be called persecution,
but justice. But justice is always violence to the party offending,
for every man is innocent in his own eyes. The first execution of the
laws against Dissenters in England was in the days of King James the
First; and what did it amount to truly? The worst they suffered was at
their own request: to let them go to New England and erect a new
colony, and give them great privileges, grants, and suitable powers,
keep them under protection, and defend them against all invaders, and
receive no taxes or revenue from them. This was the cruelty of the
Church of England. Fatal leniency! It was the ruin of that excellent
prince, King Charles the First. Had King James sent all the Puritans
in England away to the West Indies, we had been a national, unmixed
Church; the Church of England had been kept undivided and entire.
To requite the lenity of the father they take up arms against the son;
conquer, pursue, take, imprison, and at last put to death the anointed
of God, and destroy the very being and nature of government, setting
up a sordid impostor, who had neither title to govern nor
understanding to manage, but supplied that want with power, bloody and
desperate counsels, and craft without conscience.
Had not King James the First withheld the full execution of the laws,
had he given them strict justice, he had cleared the nation of them,
and the consequences had been plain: his son had never been murdered
by them nor the monarchy overwhelmed. It was too much mercy shown them
was the ruin of his posterity and the ruin of the nation's peace. One
would think the Dissenters should not have the face to believe that we
are to be wheedled and canted into peace and toleration when they know
that they have once requited us with a civil war, and once with an
intolerable and unrighteous persecution for our former civility.
Nay, to encourage us to be easy with them, it is apparent that they
never had the upper hand of the Church, but they treated her with all
the severity, with all the reproach and contempt that was possible.
What peace and what mercy did they show the loyal gentry of the Church
of England in the time of their triumphant Commonwealth? How did they
put all the gentry of England to ransom, whether they were actually in
arms for the King or not, making people compound for their estates and
starve their families? How did they treat the clergy of the Church of
England, sequestered the ministers, devoured the patrimony of the
Church, and divided the spoil by sharing the Church lands among their
soldiers, and turning her clergy out to starve? Just such measure as
they have meted should be measured them again.
Charity and love is the known doctrine of the Church of England, and
it is plain she has put it in practice towards the Dissenters, even
beyond what they ought, till she has been wanting to herself, and in
effect unkind to her sons, particularly in the too much lenity of King
James the First, mentioned before. Had he so rooted the Puritans from
the face of the land, which he had an opportunity early to have done,
they had not had the power to vex the Church as since they have done.
In the days of King Charles the Second how did the Church reward their
bloody doings with lenity and mercy, except the barbarous regicides of
the pretended court of justice? Not a soul suffered for all the blood
in an unnatural war. King Charles came in all mercy and love,
cherished them, preferred them, employed them, withheld the rigour of
the law, and oftentimes, even against the advice of his Parliament,
gave them liberty of conscience; and how did they requite him with the
villanous contrivance to depose and murder him and his successor at
the Rye Plot?
King James, as if mercy was the inherent quality of the family, began
his reign with unusual favour to them. Nor could their joining with
the Duke of Monmouth against him move him to do himself justice upon
them; but that mistaken prince thought to win them by gentleness and
love, proclaimed an universal liberty to them, and rather
discountenanced the Church of England than them. How they requited him
all the world knows.
The late reign is too fresh in the memory of all the world to need a
comment; how, under pretence of joining with the Church in redressing
some grievances, they pushed things to that extremity, in conjunction
with some mistaken gentlemen, as to depose the late King, as if the
grievance of the nation could not have been redressed but by the
absolute ruin of the prince. Here is an instance of their temper,
their peace, and charity. To what height they carried themselves
during the reign of a king of their own; how they crept into all
places of trust and profit; how they insinuated into the favour of the
King, and were at first preferred to the highest places in the nation;
how they engrossed the ministry, and above all, how pitifully they
managed, is too plain to need any remarks.
But particularly their mercy and charity, the spirit of union, they
tell us so much of, has been remarkable in Scotland. If any man would
see the spirit of a Dissenter, let him look into Scotland. There they
made entire conquest of the Church, trampled down the sacred orders,
and suppressed the Episcopal government with an absolute, and, as they
suppose, irretrievable victory, though it is possible they may find
themselves mistaken. Now it would be a very proper question to ask
their impudent advocate, the Observator, pray how much mercy and
favour did the members of the Episcopal Church find in Scotland from
the Scotch Presbyterian Government? and I shall undertake for the
Church of England that the Dissenters shall still receive as much
here, though they deserve but little.
In a small treatise of the sufferings of the Episcopal clergy in
Scotland, it will appear what usage they met with; how they not only
lost their livings, but in several places were plundered and abused in
their persons; the ministers that could not conform turned out with
numerous families and no maintenance, and hardly charity enough left
to relieve them with a bit of bread. And the cruelties of the parties
are innumerable, and not to be attempted in this short piece.
And now to prevent the distant cloud which they perceived to hang over
their heads from England, with a true Presbyterian policy they put in
for a union of nations, that England might unite their Church with the
Kirk of Scotland, and their Presbyterian members sit in our House of
Commons, and their Assembly of Scotch canting long-cloaks in our
Convocation. What might have been if our fanatic Whiggish statesmen
continued, God only knows; but we hope we are out of fear of that now.
It is alleged by some of the faction--and they began to bully us with
it--that if we won't unite with them they will not settle the crown
with us again, but when Her Majesty dies, will choose a king for
themselves.
If they won't, we must make them, and it is not the first time we have
let them know that we are able. The crowns of these kingdoms have not
so far disowned the right of succession but they may retrieve it
again; and if Scotland thinks to come off from a successive to an
elective state of government, England has not promised not to assist
the right heir and put them into possession without any regard to
their ridiculous settlements.
These are the gentlemen, these their ways of treating the Church, both
at home and abroad. Now let us examine the reasons they pretend to
give why we should be favourable to them, why we should continue and
tolerate them among us.
First, they are very numerous, they say; they are a great part of the
nation, and we cannot suppress them.