During the dissensions, in the last days of the Queen which broke up the Tory Ministry, Mercator was dropped.  Defoe seems immediately to have entered into communication with the printer of the Whig Flying Post, one William Hurt.  The owner of the Post was abroad at the time, but his managers, whether actuated by personal spite or reasonable suspicion, learning that Hurt was in communication with one whom they looked upon as their enemy, decided at once to change their printer.  There being no copyright in newspaper titles in those days, Hurt retaliated by engaging Defoe to write another paper under the same title, advertising that, from the arrangements he had made, readers would find the new Flying Post better than the old.  It was in his labours on this sham Flying Post, as the original indignantly called it in an appeal to Hurt’s sense of honour and justice against the piracy, that Defoe came into collision with the law.  His new organ was warmly loyal.  On the 14th of August it contained a highly-coloured panegyric of George I., which alone would refute Defoe’s assertion that he knew nothing of the arts of the courtier.  His Majesty was described as a combination of more graces, virtues, and capacities than the world had ever seen united in one individual, a man “born for council and fitted to command the world.”  Another number of the Flying Post, a few days afterwards, contained an attack on one of the few Tories among the Lords of the Regency, nominated for the management of affairs till the King’s arrival.  During Bolingbroke’s brief term of ascendency, he had despatched the Earl of Anglesey on a mission to Ireland.  The Earl had hardly landed at Dublin when news followed him of the Queen’s death, and he returned to act as one of the Lords Regent.  In the Flying Post Defoe asserted that the object of his journey to Ireland was “to new model the Forces there, and particularly to break no less than seventy of the honest officers of the army, and to fill up their places with the tools and creatures of Con.  Phipps, and such a rabble of cut-throats as were fit for the work that they had for them to do.”  That there was some truth in the allegation is likely enough; Sir Constantine Phipps was, at least, shortly afterwards dismissed from his offices.  But Lord Anglesey at once took action against it as a scandalous libel.  Defoe was brought before the Lords Justices, and committed for trial.

He was liberated, however, on bail, and in spite of what he says about his resolution not to meddle on either side, made an energetic use of his liberty.  He wrote The Secret History of One Year—­the year after William’s accession—­vindicating the King’s clemency towards the abettors of the arbitrary government of James, and explaining that he was compelled to employ many of them by the rapacious scrambling of his own adherents for places and pensions.  The indirect bearing of this tract is obvious.