Historical Characters in the Reign of Queen AnneOliphant, Mrs. (Margaret)
History
Historical Characters in the Reign of Queen Anne
Oliphant, Mrs. (Margaret)
Addison, Joseph, 1672-1719; Anne, Queen of Great Britain, 1665-1714; Defoe, Daniel, 1661?-1731; Swift, Jonathan, 1667-1745
DRAWN BY HARRY FENN. ENGRAVED BY H. E. SYLVESTER.]
warmth that appeared in the clergy, and openly professed that such a man
as Sacheverell and his brethren would blow up the foundations of the
church”; the dissenters who were at once insulted and alarmed by the
extraordinary threats thus set forth against them--all alike turned upon
the perpetrator of the hoax when he was discovered. Some “blushed when
they reflected how far they had applauded,” some labored to prove that
it was “a horrible slander against the church.” The government, sharing
the general commotion, placed Defoe in the position of a revolutionary
leader who, “by the villainous insinuations of that pamphlet, would have
frightened the dissenters into another rebellion.” Defoe himself seems
to have had a moment of panic, and fled. He was proclaimed in the
“Gazette,” and a reward offered for his discovery. His biographers in
general assert that he gave himself up with some generosity to save the
printer and publisher, who had been arrested, but there are public
documents which seem to prove a different procedure, showing how “My
Lord Nottingham hunted him out,” and how “the person who discovered
Daniel Foe” claimed and was paid the reward of fifty pounds offered for
the offender, described as a “middle-aged, spare man, about forty years
old, of a brown complexion and dark brown colored hair (but wears a
wig), a hooked nose, a sharp chin, gray eyes, and a large mole near his
mouth.” However that might be, he was arrested and committed to Newgate
in the spring of 1703, and the obnoxious publication--“this little book,
a contemptible pamphlet of but three sheets of paper,” as he describes
it--was burned by the common hangman. It was not, however, till the
summer, three or four months after his arrest, that he was tried, and
that period he seems to have spent in Newgate in perfect freedom, at
least for literary productions, since he filled the air with a mist of
pamphlets explaining that he meant nothing but a harmless satire at one
moment, at another exhorting the dissenters to be content with
spiritual freedom, and again bursting into the rude but potent strains
of the “Hymn to the Pillory.” He was sentenced to fine and imprisonment,
as well as to that grotesque but sometimes terrible instrument of
torture; but the pillory was no torture to Defoe. On the last three days
of July--once before the Royal Exchange in Cornhill, where his shop had
been, and where no doubt everybody knew him, once in Cheapside, and
again at Temple Bar--he stood aloft with the crowd surging round and
performed his penance. The crowd in those days was not a soft or civil
one when it indorsed the sentence pronounced by law. Its howls and
cries, its missiles and its curses, made the punishment horrible. But
the crowd had by this time found time to take in the joke,--banter, when
it is broad enough to be intelligible, always pleases the general,--and
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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