A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

stockings, and made a quick fortune. Extravagance and bad management led to bankruptcy, and he
was forced to flee from his creditors. He went to Bristol, where he became known as ‘the Sunday
Dentleman’, that being the only day he dared to venture out of his lodgings without fear of arrest.
By this time, William of Orange was on the throne of England. ‘Dutch Billy’ was not a popular
king; he was a lonely, introverted man who seemed to have a knack of getting himself disliked. The
poet Dryden was offered a large sum of money to dedicate his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid to the
king, but preferred to issue it without a dedication. But Daniel Foe saw his chance and offered his
services to the government as a pamphleteer. The first result was a tract, issued in 1694, defending
the unpopular war with France, which William was losing, ‘and serving King William and Queen
Mary and acknowledging their Right’. William, whose popularity was lower than usual because of
the treacherous massacre of the MacDonalds at Glencoe, was glad of a supporter, and Foe was
given a profitable government post. He also took advantage of the new fashion for Dutch tiles to
start a tile factory at Tilbury, and was finally able to pay off all his creditors.
In 1701, Foe issued a poem called The True Born Englishman, which enjoyed enormous success;
its argument was that it was unfair to abuse Dutch Billy for being a foreigner, since all Englishmen
are a compound of nationalities - Celts, Saxons, Vikings, Normans and Picts. Unfortunately,
William of Orange died in the following year, and Foe found himself temporarily without a patron.
In The True Born Englishman he sneers at people who pretend their family came over with William
the Conqueror. But shortly thereafter he began signing himself D. Foe, then De Foe, then Daniel De
Foe. When he next came to public notice, a year later, he was Daniel Defoe. The occasion was a
pamphlet called The Shortest Way With Dissenters, although this was not actually signed. Under
William of Orange, dissenters had been allowed to hold public office, provided they were willing to
pay occasional lip-service to Anglicanism. After the king’s death, reactionaries - known as ‘high
fliers’ because of their high principles - began to demand that dissenters should be banned from
public office. Oddly enough, Defoe agreed with the high fliers; he thought the kind of dissenters
who were willing to compromise were a poor lot. His pamphlet satirised the high fliers by
suggesting that all dissenters should be banished or hanged. It was rather as if an American liberal
wrote a book suggesting that all negroes should be sent back to Africa, and that those who refused
to go should be burned alive, and signed it with the name of some well-known reactionary. Many
high fliers were taken in and greeted the pamphlet with enthusiasm - one clergyman said he valued
it above all books except the Bible, and prayed that Queen Anne would carry out its suggestions.
The dissenters were at first terrified - haunted by visions of being burnt at the stake. Then it leaked
out that this was one of Defoe’s hard-hitting jokes, and everyone was furious. Parliament issued a
warrant for Defoe’s arrest on a charge of libelling the high fliers by making them out to be
bloodthirsty maniacs. Defoe went into hiding and tried to apologise, but it was no good; he had to
give himself up. In July 1703, he was sentenced to stand in the pillory for three days and to be
detained during the queen’s pleasure.
It was, in fact, his best stroke of luck so far. Overnight, he became a popular hero. The crowds who
gathered at the pillory shouted ‘Good old Dan’ and threw bunches of flowers. There would be
nothing like it for another fifty years, when John Wilkes would find himself a popular hero through
a similar accident.
Defoe was then confined in Newgate for a year, where he mingled with pickpockets and footpads -
accumulating material for future novels - and continued to write pamphlets. He was now so popular
that no government could silence him. He started his first newspaper in jail - it was called The