What could be more plausible?  What conduct more truly patriotic?  Indeed, it would be difficult to find fault with Defoe’s behaviour, were it not for the rogue’s protestations of inability to court the favour of great men, and his own subsequent confessions in his Appeal to Honour and Justice, as to what took place behind the scenes.  Immediately on the turn of affairs he took steps to secure that connexion with the Government, the existence of which he was always denying.  The day after Godolphin’s displacement, he tells us, he waited on him, and “humbly asked his lordship’s direction what course he should take.”  Godolphin at once assured him, in very much the same words that Harley had used before, that the change need make no difference to him; he was the Queen’s servant, and all that had been done for him was by Her Majesty’s special and particular direction; his business was to wait till he saw things settled, and then apply himself to the Ministers of State to receive Her Majesty’s commands from them.  Thereupon Defoe resolved to guide himself by the following principle:—­

“It occurred to me immediately, as a principle for my conduct, that it was not material to me what ministers Her Majesty was pleased to employ; my duty was to go along with every Ministry, so far as they did not break in upon the Constitution, and the laws and liberties of my country; my part being only the duty of a subject, viz., to submit to all lawful commands, and to enter into no service which was not justifiable by the laws; to all which I have exactly obliged myself.”

Defoe was thus, as he says, providentially cast back upon his original benefactor.  That he received any consideration, pension, gratification, or reward for his services to Harley, “except that old appointment which Her Majesty was pleased to make him,” he strenuously denied.  The denial is possibly true, and it is extremely probable that he was within the truth when he protested in the most solemn manner that he had never “received any instructions, directions, orders, or let them call it what they will, of that kind, for the writing of any part of what he had written, or any materials for the putting together, for the forming any book or pamphlet whatsoever, from the said Earl of Oxford, late Lord Treasurer, or from any person by his order or direction, since the time that the late Earl of Godolphin was Lord Treasurer.”  Defoe declared that “in all his writing, he ever capitulated for his liberty to speak according to his own judgment of things,” and we may easily believe him.  He was much too clever a servant to need instructions.