1685.]

AUTHORSHIP.

15

that kinsman's prudent counsel; and with what generous anger, yet unshrinking spirit, he saw the men who could not answer Algernon Sydney's Book, erect a scaffold to take off his Head.

That was his first brave impulse to authorship of his own. In the year made infamous by the judicial murders of Russell and Sydney, he published his first political essay. It was a prose lampoon on High Church absurdities;* and, with much that would not bear present revival, bore the stamp of a robust new mind, fresh from the reading of Rabelais. It stirred the veteran libeller L'Estrange, and pamphlet followed pamphlet. It needs not to touch the controversy now. It is dead and gone. Oxford herself repudiates, with shame, the decree she passed in full Convocation on the day of Russell's execution; promulgating, on pain of infamy here and damnation hereafter, the doctrines of divine right and passive obedience; and anathematizing twenty-seven propositions from Milton, Baxter, and Godwin, Bellarmine, Buchanan, and Hobbes, as seditious, scandalous, impious, blasphemous, heretical, and damnable.

Having fleshed his maiden pen, the young merchant

* The allusion in the text is to the Speculum Crapegownorum; but since this Essay was written I have seen reason to doubt whether De Foe was really the author.

soon resumed it, in a cause again involving religious liberty; with a spirit in advance of his party; and with force, decision, and success. The reign of Charles was now setting, in a sullen, dire persecution. Chapels were shut; ministers dying in jail; congregations scattered. A man who would not take the sacrament was whipped or pilloried; a man who would not take it kneeling, was plundered or imprisoned. "See there!" cried the sharp strong sense of Daniel Foe, whom business had taken to Windsor, where he had sauntered into St. George's Chapel with a friend-" See that altar-piece! Our Saviour administers his Last Supper to his disciples sitting round the table; and, because we would copy that posture, the government oppresses us. Almost as he spoke, the end was approaching. Evelyn had seen the King the past Sunday evening, sitting and toying with his concubines, Portsmouth, Cleveland, and Mazarine. A French boy sang love-songs in a glorious gallery; and, round a table groaning with a bank of two thousand golden pieces, a crew of profligate courtiers drank and gambled. "Six days after, all was in the dust;" and caps in the air for James the Second.

Or the new monarch's greetings, the most grovelling were those of the churchmen and the lawyers. The Bishop of Chester preached the divinity and infallibility of Kings; the Temple benchers and barristers went to court with the assurance that high prerogative, in its fullest extent, was the subject's best security for liberty and property; and in every pulpit thanksgivings resounded. In the first months of the reign, our hosefactor of Freeman's Yard heard it publicly preached from one of these pulpits, that if the King commanded the subject's head, and sent his messengers to fetch it, the subject was bound to submit, and, as far as possible, facilitate his own decapitation. Close upon this came the sudden tidings of Monmouth's ill-fated landing; and, of a small band of daring citizens who took horse and joined him, Daniel Foe was one. Perhaps he thought his own head nearer danger than it was, and worth a stroke for safety. He knew, at any rate, but the better sides of Monmouth's character. He admired

his popular manners. "None so beautiful, so brave as Absolon." He had seen him among the people in their sports, at races and at games, and thought his bearing sensible and manly. What matter if Lucy Walters was his mother? He knew him to be a sincere Protestant, and a lover of civil freedom; and he remembered the more kindly his disgrace in the reign just passed, for having vainly striven to moderate Episcopal cruelties in Scotland, when he saw the first Scottish act of the reign just begun, in a law to inflict death on conventicle preachers. In a word, our incipient rebel made no nice balance of danger and success; he saw what seemed to him liberty on the one side, and slavery on the other, and he resolved, with whatever fortune, to strike a blow for the good cause. He mounted horse and joined the invaders; was with them in Bristol and at Bath; and very narrowly escaped the crash that followed.

There is little doubt that while Bishops Turner and Ken were prolonging Monmouth's agonies on the scaffold, for the chance of a declaration in favour of divine right and non-resistance; and while Jeffreys's bloody campaign, through the scenes of the late rebellion, was consigning his master and himself to eternal infamy; the young rebel citizen had effected a passage over seas. At about this time, he certainly was absent

1689.]

EXILE AND RETURN.

19

from England; as certainly had embarked some capital in the Spanish and Portuguese trade; and no one has questioned his narrow escape from the clutch of Jeffreys. The mere escape had been enough for other men;-his practical, unwearying, versatile energy, made it the means of new adventure, the source of a larger experience, the incentive to a more active life. He had seen Spain, Germany, and France, before he again saw Freeman's Court, Cornhill; and, when he returned, it was with the name he has made immortal. He was

now Daniel De Foe.

Whether the change was a piece of innocent vanity picked up in his travels, or had any more serious motive, it would now be idle to inquire. By both names he was known to the last; but his books, in almost every instance, bore that by which he is known to posterity.

He found a strange scene in progress on his return. The power of the King to dispense with the laws, had been affirmed by eleven out of the twelve judges; and he saw this monstrous power employed to stay the

as

monstrous persecution of Nonconformists and Dissenters. A licence purchased for fifty shillings had opened the prison doors of Richard Baxter; but the sturdy lovers of freedom who purchased that licence, acknowledged, in the act of doing it, that they placed the King above the laws. It was a state of things in