r 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 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