Daniel Defoe: King William's Pamphleteer and Intelligence Agent

Abstract

THE HUNTINGTON LIBRARY has an almost unique copy of a tract with a title page which reads: REFLECTIONS / Upon the LATE / Horrid Conspiracy / Contrived by Some of the / FRENCH COURT, / TO / Murther His MAJESTY / IN / FLANDERS: / And for which Monsieur GRAND/ VALL, one of the Assassinates, was / Executed. / LONDON: / Printed for Richard Baldwin, near the Oxford-Arms / in Warwick-Lane. 1692.'l The British Museum has another copy, and its General Catalogue of Printed Books questions this as possibly Defoe's. I have not met with the tract elsewhere, and it is not listed even in such an uncritically inclusive compendium as Morgan's Bibliography of British History. But it has special significance as the first known publication in which Defoe must certainly have been engaged as an accepted spokesman or agent for the national government. Readers of the present day often think of Defoe as the author of a group of fictional narratives published between April 25, 1719, and November 7, 1724 (a little over five and a half years). To many people he was the author of only one book-the Robinson Crusoe which has had so profound an influence on modem literature and which even recently has sold one hundred thousand copies in a Japanese translation. But for Defoe himself it is not unlikely that a more important achievement was in his work as a publicist and often as an intelligence agent for thirty-eight years, under many of the changing ministries of England and later of Great Britain. After his death the highest tribute paid to him in any London newspaper made no specific reference to his novels: