had sealed the Hanoverian family upon the
throne, Queen Anne, who had always, as a
born Stuart, been coquetting more or less
openly with the Jacobites and Tories, and
other friends of her exiled father, had left
a Tory ministry in power when she died.
The new king, replaced it by a Whig
administration; and dismissed from public
office, great or small, every person who had
been appointed by the ministers of his
predecessors. whether those ministers were
Whig, Tory, or Coalition. Among the number
Defoe lost his employ in the secret
service of the court, and was reduced to
depend, as at an earlier period of his literary
career, wholly upon his pen for his daily
bread. He was growing old by this time,
not so much by the pressure of years, he
was but fifty-four, as by the pressure of
hard work and anxiety, and he could not
labour so diligently as of old. Early in the
king's reign, and within a few months of the
loss of the certain source of income which
he had long enjoyed, the strong brain of the
ready writer was smitten with apoplexy.
For six weeks he lay in a precarious
condition, but ultimately recovered so far as to
take once more the keen interest in public
affairs which he had always exhibited. The
Jacobites, seeing no longer the chance of
favour from George the First that they
had enjoyed from Queen Anne, began to
plot the rebellion, which soon afterwards
culminated in Scotland, under the leadership
of the Pretender, called by his English
friends James the Third, and by
his Scottish friends James the Eighth.
Bishop Atterbury published at this juncture
his well-known pamphlet, English
Advice to the Freeholders of England, in
which he all but openly advocated
rebellion; spoke disrespectfully of the king;
denounced the new ministers; and branded the
whole body of the Whig and liberal party,
as enemies to the Church, and the best
interests of the nation. A proclamation offering
a reward of one thousand pounds for
the discovery of the author, and of five
hundred pounds for the arrest of the printer,
was speedily offered. Atterbury fled to
avoid the consequences. Defoe, who had
scarcely recovered from the severe attack
which had prostrated him, wrote and published
a reply to that Traitorous Libel (so he
cailed it), in which there was no falling off
of his literary energy, no diminution of his
logical power, no cooling of his warm spirit
of patriotism. This pamphlet, and one or
two others of less note, written under the
pseudonym of One of the people called
Quakers, have hitherto been considered the
last political works of Defoe, before he
retired finally to the pleasanter and quieter
fields of general literature.

And this brings us to the accidental
discovery in 1864, in the State Paper Office,
of six previously unknown letters of Defoe,
in his own handwriting, and undoubtedly
genuine, addressed to Charles De la Faye,
Esq., private secretary to the Lords Justices
of Ireland in 1715, and confidential secretary
to the Secretary of State in 1718.
These letters range from the 12th of April
to the 13th of June, 1718, and prove, on the
decisive testimony of Defoe himself, that he
was once more taken into the secret service
of the government; that he again received
a salary, or as he calls it "capitulations;"
and that his pen, so far from being quiescent
on party and political topics, and so wholly
engrossed with fiction and general literature
as had hitherto been supposed, was as
active as ever on all the party polemics of
his day. Not, it would appear, without the
suspicion of his contemporaries.

It were to be wished that the service
had been as honourable as the mission
he had undertaken for the ministers of
William the Third and Queen Anne; and
that a man of such high character had not
towards the close of his career done evil that
good might come. Defoe himself explains
his task to Mr. De la Faye in the second
letter of the series. "My Lord Sunderland, to
whose goodness I had many years ago been
obliged, when I was in a secret commission
sent to Scotland, was pleased to approve
and continue this service and the appointment
annexed; and with his lordship's
approbation I introduced myself in the
disguise of a translator of the foreign
news, to be so far concerned in this weekly
paper of Mist's, as to be able to keep it
within the circle of a secret management,
also to prevent the mysterious part of it,
and yet neither Mist, nor any of those
concerned with him to have the least guess
or suspicion by whose direction I do it."
And Defoe, the Whig par excellence, not
only committed this deception upon Mist,
the proprietor of the leading Tory and
Jacobite paper of the day, but upon the
proprietors of two other Tory papers, equally
unsuspicious of treachery, Dormer's News
Letter and the Mercurius Politicus. "Upon
the whole, however," adds Defoe in the
same confidential letter to Mr. De la Faye,
so unexpectedly brought to light; "this
is the consequence, that by this management
the Weekly Journal (Mist's), and