interest.  The warning and caution was expressly directed against the insinuations that the Ministry were in favour of the Pretender.  All who made these insinuations were assumed by the writer to be Papists, Jacobites, and enemies of Britain.  As these insinuations were the chief war-cry of the Whigs, and we now know that they were not without foundation, it is easy to understand why Defoe’s pamphlets, though Anti-Jacobite, were resented by the party in whose interest he had formerly written.  He excused himself afterwards by saying that he was not aware of the Jacobite leanings of the Ministry; that none of them ever said one word in favour of the Pretender to him; that he saw no reason to believe that they did favour the Pretender.  As for himself, he said, they certainly never employed him in any Jacobite intrigue.  He defied his enemies to “prove that he ever kept company or had any society, friendship, or conversation with any Jacobite.  So averse had he been to the interest and the people, that he had studiously avoided their company on all occasions.”  Within a few months of his making these protestations, Defoe was editing a Jacobite newspaper under secret instructions from a Whig Government.  But this is anticipating.

That an influential Whig should have set on foot a prosecution of Defoe as the author of “treasonable libels against the House of Hanover,” although the charge had no foundation in the language of the incriminated pamphlets, is intelligible enough.  The Whig party writers were delighted with the prosecution, one of them triumphing over Defoe as being caught at last, and put “in Lob’s pound,” and speaking of him as “the vilest of all the writers that have prostituted their pens either to encourage faction, oblige a party, or serve their own mercenary ends.”  But that the Court of Queen’s Bench, before whom Defoe was brought—­with some difficulty, it would appear, for he had fortified his house at Newington like Robinson Crusoe’s castle—­should have unanimously declared his pamphlets to be treasonable, and that one of them, on his pleading that they were ironical, should have told him it was a kind of irony for which he might come to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, is not so easy to understand, unless we suppose that, in these tempestuous times, judges like other men were powerfully swayed by party feeling.  It is possible, however, that they deemed the mere titles of the pamphlets offences in themselves, disturbing cries raised while the people were not yet clear of the forest of anarchy, and still subject to dangerous panics—­offences of the same nature as if a man should shout fire in sport in a crowded theatre.  Possibly, also, the severity of the Court was increased by Defoe’s indiscretion in commenting upon the case in the Review, while it was still sub judice.  At any rate he escaped punishment.  The Attorney-General was ordered to prosecute him, but before the trial came off Defoe obtained a pardon under the royal seal.