Defoe’s knowledge of the irritation caused among the Dissenters by his Shortest Way, did not prevent him from shocking them and annoying the high Tories by similar jeux d’esprit.  He had no tenderness for the feelings of such of his brethren as had not his own robust sense of humour and boyish glee in the free handling of dangerous weapons.  Thus we find him, among his eulogies of the Grand Monarque, particularly extolling him for the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.  By the expulsion of the Protestants, Louis impoverished and unpeopled part of his country, but it was “the most politic action the French King ever did.”  “I don’t think fit to engage here in a dispute about the honesty of it,” says Defoe; “but till he had first cleared the country of that numerous injured people, he could never have ventured to carry an offensive war into all the borders of Europe.”  And Defoe was not content with shocking the feelings of his nominal co-religionists by a light treatment of matters in which he agreed with them.  He upheld with all his might the opposite view from theirs on two important questions of foreign policy.  While the Confederates were doing battle on all sides against France, the King of Sweden was making war on his own account against Poland for the avowed purpose of placing a Protestant prince on the throne.  Extreme Protestants in England were disposed to think that Charles XII. was fighting the Lord’s battle in Poland.  But Defoe was strongly of opinion that the work in which all Protestants ought at that moment to be engaged was breaking down the power of France, and as Charles refused to join the Confederacy, and the Catholic prince against whom he was fighting was a possible adherent, the ardent preacher of union among the Protestant powers insisted upon regarding him as a practical ally of France, and urged that the English fleet should be sent into the Baltic to interrupt his communications.  Disunion among Protestants, argued Defoe, was the main cause of French greatness; if the Swedish King would not join the Confederacy of his own free will, he should be compelled to join it, or at least to refrain from weakening it.

Defoe treated the revolt of the Hungarians against the Emperor with the same regard to the interests of the Protestant cause.  Some uneasiness was felt in England at co-operating with an ally who so cruelly oppressed his Protestant subjects, and some scruple of conscience at seeming to countenance the oppression.  Defoe fully admitted the wrongs of the Hungarians, but argued that this was not the time for them to press their claims for redress.  He would not allow that they were justified at such a moment in calling in the aid of the Turks against the Emperor.  “It is not enough that a nation be Protestant and the people our friends; if they will join with our enemies, they are Papists, Turks, and Heathens, to us.”  “If the Protestants in Hungary will make the Protestant religion in Hungary