Defoe’s conduct while the political balance was rocking, and after the Whig side had decisively kicked the beam, is a curious study.  One hardly knows which to admire most, the loyalty with which he stuck to the falling house till the moment of its collapse, or the adroitness with which he escaped from the ruins.  Censure of his shiftiness is partly disarmed by the fact that there were so many in that troubled and uncertain time who would have acted like him if they had had the skill.  Besides, he acted so steadily and with such sleepless vigilance and energy on the principle that the appearance of honesty is the best policy, that at this distance of time it is not easy to catch him tripping, and if we refuse to be guided by the opinion of his contemporaries, we almost inevitably fall victims to his incomparable plausibility.  Deviations in his political writings from the course of the honest patriot are almost as difficult to detect as flaws in the verisimilitude of Robinson Crusoe or the Journal of the Plague.

During the two months’ interval between the substitution of Dartmouth for Sunderland and the fall of Godolphin, Defoe used all his powers of eloquence and argument to avert the threatened changes in the Ministry, and keep the Tories out.  He had a personal motive for this, he confessed.  “My own share in the ravages they shall make upon our liberties is like to be as severe as any man’s, from the rage and fury of a party who are in themselves implacable, and whom God has not been pleased to bless me with a talent to flatter and submit to.”  Of the dismissed minister Sunderland, with whom Defoe had been in personal relations during the negotiations for the Union, he spoke in terms of the warmest praise, always with a formal profession of not challenging the Queen’s judgment in discharging her servant.  “My Lord Sunderland,” he said, “leaves the Ministry with the most unblemished character that ever I read of any statesman in the world.”  “I am making no court to my Lord Sunderland.  The unpolished author of this paper never had the talent of making his court to the great men of the age.”  But where is the objection against his conduct?  Not a dog of the party can bark against him.  “They cannot show me a man of their party that ever did act like him, or of whom they can say we should believe he would if he had the opportunity.”  The Tories were clamouring for the dismissal of all the other Whigs.  High-Church addresses to the Queen were pouring in, claiming to represent the sense of the nation, and hinting an absolute want of confidence in the Administration.  Defoe examined the conduct of the ministers severally and collectively, and demanded where was the charge against them, where the complaint, where the treasure misapplied?