1689.]

A HERO.

25

have advised with him, in vain. He invited no popu

The only Tory chief who tell his friends that he set

larity; he courted no party. spoke with him, came back to "little value on a crown." The strife, the heat, the violent animosity, the doubtful success-all which in these celebrated debates seemed to affect his life and fortune-moved him not. He desired nothing to be concealed from him; he said nothing to his informants. This only was known: he would not hold his Crown by the apron-strings of his wife. He would not reign but as an independent sovereign. "They are an inconstant people, Marshal,” he quietly observed to Schomberg.

III.

WILLIAM THE THIRD.

1689-1702.

HERE, then, in the prince who now ruled over England, was a man who also could stand ALone. Here was a king for such a subject as De Foe. We may not wonder that the admiration conceived of him by the citizen merchant deepened into passion. He reverenced him, loved, and honoured him; and kept as a festive day in his house, even to the close of his life, that great day in the month of November which is so remarkably associated with his name. On that day, exclaimed De Foe with enthusiasm, he was born; on that day he married the daughter of England; on that day he rescued the nation from a bondage worse than that of Egypt, a bondage of soul as well as bodily servitude! Its first celebration was held at a country house in Tooting, which it would seem De Foe now occupied; and the manner of it afforded, in itself, some proof of what we hardly need to be told, that the resolute, practical habits of this earnest, busy man, were not unattended by that genial

1702.]

MARRIAGE AND ILL-FORTUNE.

27

warmth of nature which alone gives strength of character such as his, and without which never public virtue, and rarely private, comes quite to its maturity. In this village, too, in this year of the Revolution, we find him occupied in erecting a meeting-house; in drawing together a Nonconformist congregation; and in providing a man of learning for their minister. It was an object always near his heart. For every new foundation of that kind went some way towards the rendering Dissent a permanent separate interest, and an independent political body, in the State; and the Church's reviving heats made the task at once imperative and easy. Wherever intemperate language, and overbearing arrogant persecution, are characteristics of the highest churchmen, should we marvel that sincere church-goers turn affrighted from the flame they see incessantly flickering about those elevated rods, which they had innocently looked to for safe conductors?

But, in the midst of his labours and enjoyments, there came a stroke of evil fortune. He had married some little time before this (nothing further is known on that head, but that in the course of his life he had two wives, the first named Mary, and the second Susannah); and, with the prospect of a family growing up around him, he saw his fortune swept suddenly away by a large unsuccessful adventure. One angry creditor took out a

Commission of Bankruptcy; and De Foe, submitting meanwhile to the rest a proposition for amicable settlement, fled from London. A prison paid no debts, he said. "The cruelty of your laws against debtors, without distinction of honest or dishonest, is the shame of your nation. It is not he who cannot pay his debts, but he who can and will, who must necessarily be a knave. He who is unable to pay his debts at once, may yet be able to pay them at leisure; and you should not meanwhile murder him by law, for such is perpetual imprisonment." So, from himself to his fellow-men, he reasoned always. No wrong or wretchedness ever befell De Foe, which he did not with all diligence bestir himself to turn to the use and profit of his kind. To what he now struggled with, through two desperate years, they mainly owed, seven years later, that many most atrocious iniquities, prevailing in the bankrupt refuges of Whitefriars and the Mint, were repressed by statute;* and that the small relief of

* The extent of this service could only be measured for the reader by a description, for which this is no fitting place, of the atrocities and knaveries of every kind practised in those privileged haunts of desperate and outlawed men. Well warranted was the pride with which he remarked in his old age:— "I had the good fortune," says he, "to be the first that complained of this encroaching evil in former days, and think myself not too vain in saying, my humble representations, in a day when

1702.]

THE SUNDAY GENTLEMAN.

29

William's act was at least reluctantly vouchsafed. He had pressed the subject with all his power of plain strong sense, and with a kind of rugged impressiveness, as of the cry of a sufferer.

His place of retreat appears to have been in Bristol. Doubtless he had merchant friends there. An acquaintance of his last excellent biographer, Mr. Walter Wilson, mentions it as an honourable tradition in his family, that at this time one of his Bristol ancestors had often seen and spoken with "the great De Foe." They called him the Sunday Gentleman, he said, because, through fear of the bailiffs, he did not dare to appear in public upon any other day; while on that day he was sure to be seen, with a fine flowing wig, lace ruffles, and a sword by his side, passing through the Bristol

I could be heard, of the abominable insolence of bankrupts, practised in the Mint and Friars, gave the first mortal blow to the prosperity of these excesses." To this I will add, from another of his writings, an illustration of the "excesses" of dishonesty to which their facilities tempted men :-" Nothing was more frequent than for a man in full credit to buy all the goods he could lay his hands on, and carry them directly from the house he bought them at into the Friars, and then send for his creditors and laugh at them, insult them, showing them their own goods untouched, offer them a trifle in satisfaction, and if they refuse it, bid them defiance: I cannot refrain vouching this of my own knowledge, since I have more than many times been served so myself."