pursuance of this plan, he deprecated haste, and put off and put off,
till the Pretender's adherents lost patience. All the time he was making
protestations of fidelity to the Court of Hanover. The increasing
vagueness of his promises to the Jacobites seems to show that, as time
went on, he became convinced that the Hanoverian was the winning cause.
No man could better advise him as to the feeling of the English people
than Defoe, who was constantly perambulating the country on secret
services, in all probability for the direct purpose of sounding the
general opinion. It was towards the end of 1712, by which time Harley's
shilly-shallying had effectually disgusted the Jacobites, that the first
of Defoe's series of Anti-Jacobite tracts appeared. It professed to be
written by An Englishman at the Court of Hanover, which affords some
ground, though it must be confessed slight, for supposing that Defoe had
visited Hanover, presumably as the bearer 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;