Defoe and the Limits of Jacobite Rhetoric

Obviously, Defoe was not a Jacobite, and commentary on the issue, sparse, old, and empty of novelty, suggests that the topic does not deserve any thorough or serious examination. ¹ But the subject turned out to be more complicated, the conclusion less obvious than I initially thought. Thus, while I cannot say that, on the subject of the Jacobites and Jacobitism, Defoe “has a melody all his own”—Rudolph Stamm’s phrase—he does present a position that is distinctive, that makes him something more than another echoing voice in the crowd. ²

First, the issue of definition. Defoe attempts precision. George Harris Healey, the scholarly editor of Defoe’s Letters, identified Rev. Charles Leslie for his readers as “an author of the Tory journal, The Rehearsal.” ³ More likely Defoe would have accepted Paul Monod’s identification as currently correct: “James III’s chief Nonjuring spokesman.” ⁴ (Bishop Hoadly, it could be noted, judged him to be an “Ecclesiastical Jacobite.” ⁵ ) In the Introduction to his study Monod admits the complexity of the issue. His definitions enable me to fine-tune Defoe’s rhetoric of Jacobitism.

“The Jacobite journals were thoroughly Tory, and imbued with a High Church religiosity.” ⁶ Monod’s position makes the High Flier of the day synonymous with Tory extremism, linking him with a party that plotted assassinations and invasions to help a Stuart return to the throne of England. He later writes that “whether or not they were active in the cause, the Nonjurors were Jacobites by definition”; later Toryism and Jacobitism become synonymous. ⁷

What I would call attention to here is a sort of slippage, from a political preference construed as treasonous at its base, to a party ideology reflecting a legitimate political program, to a distinctive religious faith. I note these obvious distinctions because they appear to be the differences, the subtle distinctions, that I see Defoe himself making in much of his pamphlet propaganda through the three reigns of William and Mary, Anne, and George I.

His first published poem, A New Discovery of an Old Intreague (1691), is more a comment on London politics than an attack on Jacobites. Though local, derivative, and personally abusive, it hints at the pattern of his later tracts when he imagines King James’s four-year reign as “A Protestant Body with a Popish Head.” ⁸ Unnatural unions and Janus faces devoid of metaphor will dictate his response to the Jacobite enemy. In fact, one could remark that the closer Defoe comes to personal abuse, sly invective, and vituperative commentary, the less useful, the less insightful he is about the issues of the moment. ⁹ As an anonymous nineteenth-century reviewer concluded: “He seems to us to have been, next to Milton, the first Englishman who had an adequate sense of the power of PUBLIC OPINION, and of the use to which that opinion might be put.” ¹⁰ The best of Defoe’s tracts against the Jacobites provide the reader with information. Education primarily, not denunciation, distinguishes his finest polemical works.

In his political tracts contributed to the standing army controversy of the 1690s, Defoe assailed William’s parliamentary enemies because their actions and designs reinforced the hands and plots of English Jacobites. They introduce the refrain that becomes more pronounced in the writings of the next decade, that English Jacobites have been tricked by Louis XIV into believing that aid for the restoration of the Stuarts would be forthcoming from France. Defoe, despite his respect for French power, knew that England could only be corrupted by her internal enemies. English Jacobites were not exactly quislings collaborating with the enemy; they were the enemy. The prescribed service for the Fifth Day of November in the Book of Common Prayer gives thanks to God for bringing William of Orange to deliver Church and Nation from “Popish Tyranny and Arbitrary Power,” from “open tyranny and oppression.” For Defoe, that tyranny was covert, the oppression not foreign but domestic.

Another theme introduced by Defoe that generally anchored his rhetoric against the Jacobites is that wars, allegiances, treaties are matters of policy and interest in...