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 have
unanimously declared his pamphlets to be treasonable, and that one of
them, on his pleading that they were ironical, should have told him it
was a kind of irony for which he might come to be hanged, drawn, and
quartered, is not so easy to understand, unless we suppose that, in
these tempestuous times, judges like other men were powerfully swayed by
party feeling. It is possible, however, that they deemed the mere titles
of the pamphlets offences in themselves, disturbing cries raised while
the people were not yet clear of the forest of anarchy, and still
subject to dangerous panics--offences of the same nature as if a man