of a Protestant State among the great Catholic Powers of Europe.  The point of the last pamphlet of the series was less distinct; it suggested the possibility of the English people losing their properties, their estates, inheritance, lands, goods, lives, and liberties, unless they were clear in their own minds what course to take in the event of the Queen’s death.  But none of the three Tracts contain anything that could possibly be interpreted as a serious argument in favour of the Pretender.  They were all calculated to support the Succession of the Elector of Hanover.  Why, then, should the Whigs have prosecuted the author?  It was a strange thing, as Defoe did not fail to complain, that they should try to punish a man for writing in their own interest.

The truth, however, is that although Defoe afterwards tried to convince the Whig leaders that he had written these pamphlets in their interest, they were written in the interest of Harley.  They were calculated to recommend that Minister to Prince George, in the event of his accession to the English throne.  We see this at once when we examine their contents by the light of the personal intrigues of the time.  Harley was playing a double game.  It was doubtful who the Queen’s successor would be, and he aimed at making himself safe in either of the two possible contingencies.  Very soon after his accession to power in 1710, he made vague overtures for the restoration of the Stuarts under guarantees for civil and religious liberty.  When pressed to take definite steps in pursuance of this plan, he deprecated haste, and put off and put off, till the Pretender’s adherents lost patience.  All the time he was making protestations of fidelity to the Court of Hanover.  The increasing vagueness of his promises to the Jacobites seems to show that, as time went on, he became convinced that the Hanoverian was the winning cause.  No man could better advise him as to the feeling of the English people than Defoe, who was constantly perambulating the country on secret services, in all probability for the direct purpose of sounding the general opinion.  It was towards the end of 1712, by which time Harley’s shilly-shallying had effectually disgusted the Jacobites, that the first of Defoe’s series of Anti-Jacobite tracts appeared.  It professed to be written by An Englishman at the Court of Hanover, which affords some ground, though it must be confessed slight, for supposing that Defoe had visited Hanover, presumably as the bearer of some of Harley’s assurances of loyalty.  The Seasonable Warning and Caution was circulated, Defoe himself tells us, in thousands among the poor people by several of his friends.  Here was a fact to which Harley could appeal as a circumstantial proof of his zeal in the Hanoverian cause.  Whether Defoe’s Anti-Jacobite tracts really served his benefactor in this way, can only be matter of conjecture.  However that may be, they were upon the surface written in Harley’s