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LONDON:

REPRINTED BY CHARLES REYNELL, LITTLE PULTENEY STREET;

AND

PUBLISHED BY J. CLEMENTS, AT 21 AND 22, IN THE SAME STREET.

MDCCCXL.

APPEAL, &c.

I HOPE the time is come at last when the voice of moderate principles may be heard. Hith rto the noise has been so great, and the prejudices and passions of men so strong, that it had been but in vain to offer at any argument, or for any man to talk of giving a reason for his actions; and this alone has been the cause why, when other men, who, I think, have less to say in their own defence, are appealing to the public, and struggling to defend themselves, I alone have been silent under the infinite clamours and reproaches, causeless curses, unusual threatenings, and the most unjust and injurious treatment in the world.

I hear much of people's calling out to punish the guilty, but very few are concerned to clear the innocent. I hope some will be inclined to judge impartially, and have yet reserved so much of the Christian as to believe, and at least to hope, that a rational creature cannot abandon himself so as to act without some reason, and are willing not only to have me defend myself, but to be able to answer for me where they hear me causelessly insulted by others, and, therefore, are willing to have such just arguments put into their mouths as the cause will bear. As for those who are prepossessed, and according to the modern justice of parties are resolved to be so, let them go; I am not arguing with them, but against them; they act so contrary to justice, to reason, to religion, so contrary to the rules of Christians and of good manners, that they are not to be argued with, but to be exposed, or entirely neglected. I have a receipt against all the uneasiness which it may be supposed to give me, and that is, to contemn slander, and think it not worth the least concern; neither should I think it worth while to give any answer to it, if it were not on some other accounts of which I shall speak as I go on. If any young man ask me why I am in such haste to publish|| this matter at this time, among many other good reasons which I could give, these are

some:

to judge of, when I am no more in being to answer for myself.

2. By the hints of mortality, and by the infirmities of a life of sorrow and fatigue, I have reason to think I am not a great way off from, if not very near to, the great ocean of eternity, and the time may not be long ere I embark on the last voyage. Wherefore, I think I should even accounts with this world before I go, that no actions (slanders) may lie against my heirs, executors, administrators, and assigns, to disturb them in the peaceable possession of their father's (character) inheritance.

3. I fear-God grant I have not a second sight in it-that this lucid interval of temper and moderation, which shines, though dimly too, upon us at this time, will be but of short continuance, and that some men, who know not how to use the advantage God has put into their hands with moderation, will push, in spite of the best prince in the world, at such extravagant things, and act with such an intemperate forwardness, as will revive the heats and aninosities which wise and good men were in hopes should be allayed by the happy accession of the king to the throne.

It is and ever was my opinion, that moderation is the only virtue by which the peace and tranquillity of this nation can be preserved. Even the king himself-I believe his majesty will allow me that freedom-can only be happy in the enjoyment of the crown by a moderative administration. If his majesty should be obliged, contrary to his known disposition, to join with intemperate councils, if it does not lessen his security, I am persuaded it will lessen his satisfaction. It cannot be pleasant or agreeable, and I think it cannot be safe, to any just prince, to rule over a divided people, split into incensed and exasperated parties. Though a skilful mariner may have courage to master a tempest, and goes fearless through a storm, yet he can never be said to delight in the danger; a fresh, fair gale, and a quiet sea, is the pleasure of his voyage, and we have a saying worth notice to them that are otherwise minded, " Qui amat pe

1. I think I have long enough been made Fabula Vulgi, and borne the weight of general slander; and I should be wanting to truth, to||riculum, periebat in illo." my family, and to myself, if I did not give a fair

To attain at the happy calm, which, as I say,

and true state of my conduct, for impartial men is the safety of Britain, is the question which

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should now move us all; and he would merit to be called the nation's physician that could prescribe the specific for it. I think I may be allowed to say, a conquest of parties will never do it; a balance of parties may. Some are for the former; they talk high of punishments, letting blood, revenging the treatment they have met with, and the like. If they, not knowing what spirit they are of, think this the course to be taken, let them try their hands; 1 shall give them up for lost, and look for their downfal from that time; for the ruin of all such tempers slum-got, neither can forget; and whose memory I bereth not.

|| Englishman.' How this poem was the occasion of my being known to his majesty; how I was afterwards received by him; how employed; and how, above my capacity of deserving, rewarded, is no part of the present case, and is only mentioned here, as I take all occasions to do, for the expressing the honour I ever preserved for the immortal and glorious memory of that greatest and best of princes, and whom it was my honour and advantage to call master, as well as sovereign; whose goodness to me I never for

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never patiently heard abused, nor ever can do It is many years that I have professed my- so; and who, had he lived, would never have sufself an enemy to all precipitations in public fered me to be treated as I have been in the administrations; and often I have attempted world. But Heaven for our sins removed him to show, that hot councils have ever been in judgment. How far the treatment he met destructive to those who have made use of them. with from the nation he came to save, and whose Indeed, they have not always been a disadvan- || deliverance he finished, was admitted by Heaven tage to the nation, as in King James II's reign, to be a means of his death, I desire to forget for when, as I have often said in print, his precipi- their sakes who are guilty; and if this calls any tation was the safety of us all and if he had of it to mind, it is mentioned to move them to proceeded temperately and politicly, we had been treat him better who is now, with like principles undone. Felix quem faciunt. of goodness and clemency, appointed by God and the constitution to be their sovereign, lest he that protects righteous princes avenge the injuries they receive from an ungrateful people by giving them up to the confusions their madness leads them to.

But these things have been spoken when your ferment has been too high for anything to be heard; whether you will hear it now or no, I know not; and therefore it was that I said, I fear the present cessation of party arms will not hold long. These are some of the reasons why And in their just acclamations at the happy I think this is the proper juncture for me to give accession of his present majesty to the throne, I some account of myself, and of my past conduct cannot but advise them to look back and call to to the world; and that I may do this as effectu- mind who it was that first guided them to the ally as I can, being perhaps never more to speak family of Hanover, and to pass by all the popish from the press, I shall, as concisely as I can, give || branches of Orleans and Savoy; recognising the an abridgment of my own history during the just authority of Parliament in the undoubted few unhappy years I have employed myself, or right of limiting the succession, and establishing been employed, in public in the world. that glorious maxim of our settlement, viz., that it is inconsistent with the constitution of this protestant kingdom to be governed by a popish prince. I say, let them call to mind who it was that guided their thoughts first to the protestant race of our own kings in the house of Hanover; and that it is to King William, next to Heaven itself, to whom we owe the enjoying a protestant king at this time. I need not go back to the particulars of his majesty's conduct in that affair; his journey in person to the country of Hanover and the court of Zell; his particular management of the affair afterwards at home, perfecting the design by naming the illustrious family to the nation, and bringing about a parliamentary settlement to effect it; entailing the crown thereby in so effectual a manner as we see has been sufficient to prevent the worst designs of our Jacobite people in behalf of the Pretender; a settlement, together with the subsequent acts which followed it, and the union with Scotland, which made it unalterable, that gave a complete satisfaction to those who knew and understood it, and removed those terrible apprehensions of the Pretender (which some entertained) from the minds of others, who were yet as zealous against him as it was possible for any to be. Upon this settlement, as I shall show presently, I grounded my opinion, which I often expressed, viz., that I did not see it possible the Jacobites could ever set up their idol here, and I think my opinion abundantly justified in the consequences; of which by and bye.

Misfortunes in business having unhinged me from matters of trade, it was about the year 1694 when I was invited by some merchants, with whom I had corresponded abroad, and some also at home, to settle at Cadiz, in Spain, and that with offers of very good commissions. But Providence, which had other work for me to do, placed a secret aversion in my mind to quitting England upon any account, and made me refuse the best offers of that kind, to be concerned with some eminent persons at home in proposing ways and means to the government, for raising money to supply the occasions of the war then newly begun. Some time after this I was, without the least application of mine, and being then seventy miles from London, sent for to be accountant to the commissioners of the glass duty, in which service I continued to the determination of their commission.

·

During this time there came out a vile abhorred pamphlet, in very ill verse, written by one Mr Tutchin, and called The Foreigners,' in which the author-who he was I then knew notfell personally upon the king himself, and then upon the Dutch nation; and after having reproached his majesty with crimes that his worst enemy could not think of without horror, he sums up all in the odious name of FOREIGNER.

This filled me with a kind of rage against the book, and gave birth to a trifle, which I never could hope should have met with so general an acceptation as it did; I mean 'The True-born

But I am gone too far in this part. I return to my own story.

In the interval of these things, and during the heat of the first fury of high-flying, I fell a sacrifice for writing against the rage and madness of that high party, and in the service of the dissenters. What justice I met with, and, above all, what mercy, is too well known to need repetition.

This introduction is made that it may bring me to what has been the foundation of all my further concern in public affairs, and will produce a sufficient reason for my adhering to those whose obli

even when many things were done by them which I could not approve; and for this reason it is that I think it necessary to distinguish how far I did or did not adhere to, or join in or with, the persons or conduct of the late government: and those who are willing to judge with impartiality and charity, will see reason to use me the more tenderly in their thoughts, when they weigh the particulars.

This digression, as a debt to the glorious me- of the former were with very little justice pleased mory of King William, I could not in justice to run up afterwards to an extreme very perniomit; and as the reign of his present majesty iscious to both. esteemed happy, and looked upon as a blessing from heaven by us, it will most necessarily lead us to bless the memory of King William, to whom we owe so much of it. How easily could his majesty have lead us to other branches, whose relation to the crown might have had large pretences! What prince but would have submitted to have educated a successor of his race in the protestant religion for the sake of such a crown? But the king, who had our happiness in view, and saw as far into it as any human sight could penetrate; who knew we were not to be governed by inexperienced youths; that the protestant religion was not to be established by poli-gations upon me were too strong to be resisted, tical converts; and that princes, under French influence, or instructed in French politics, were not proper instruments to preserve the liberties of Britain, fixed his eyes upon the family which now possesses the crown, as not only having an undoubted relation to it by blood, but as being first and principally zealous and powerful assertors of the protestant religion and interest against popery; and, secondly, stored with a visible succession of worthy and promising branches, who appeared equal to the weight of government, qualified to fill a throne and guide a nation, which, without reflection, are not famed to be the most easy to rule in the world. Whether the consequence has been a credit to King William's judgment I need not say. not writing panegyrics here, but doing justice to the memory of the king my master, whom I have had the honour very often to hear express himself with great satisfaction in having brought the settlement of the succession to so good an issue; and, to repeat his majesty's own words, that he knew no prince in Europe so fit to be King of England as the Elector of Hanover. I am persuaded, without any flattery, that if it|| should not every way answer the expectations his majesty had of it, the fault will be our own. God grant the King may have more comfort of his crown than we suffered King William to have !

I am

The king being dead, and the queen proclaimed, the hot men of that side, as the hot men of all sides do, thinking the game in their own hands, and all other people under their feet, began to run out into those mad extremes, and precipitate themselves into such measures as, according to the fate of all intemperate councils, ended in their own confusion, and threw them at last out of the saddle.

The queen, who, though willing to favour the high-church party, did not thereby design the ruin of those whom she did not employ, was soon alarmed at their wild conduct, and turned them out, adhering to the moderate counsels of those who better understood, or more faithfully pursued, her majesty's and the country's interest. In this turn fell Sir Edward Seymour's party, for so the high men were then called; and to this turn we owe the conversion of several other great men, who became whigs on that occasion, which it is known they were not before; which conversion afterwards begat that unkind distinction of old whig and modern whig, which some

I will make no reflections upon the treatment I met with from the people I suffered for, or how I was abandoned even in my sufferings, at the same time that they acknowledged the service I had been to their cause; but I must mention it to let you know that while I lay friendless and distressed in the prison of Newgate, my family ruined, and myself without hope of deliverance, a message was brought me from a person of honour, who, till that time, I had never had the least acquaintance with, or knowledge of, other than by fame, or by sight, as we know men of quality by seeing them on public occasions. I gave no present answer to the person who brought it, having not duly weighed the import of the message. The message was by word of mouth thus:"Pray, ask that gentleman what I can do for him?" But in return to this kind and generous message, I immediately took my pen and ink and wrote the story of the blind man in the gospel, who followed our Saviour, and to whom our blessed Lord put the question, “What wilt thou that I should do unto thee ?" Who, as if he had made it strange that such a question should be asked, or as if he had said that I am blind, and yet ask me what thou shalt do for me? My answer is plain in my misery," Lord, that I may receive my sight."

And

I needed not to make the application. from this time, although I lay four months in prison after this, and heard no more of it, yet from this time, as I learned afterwards, this noble person made it his business to have my case represented to her majesty, and methods taken for my deliverance.

I mention this part, because I am no more to forget the obligation upon me to the queen, than to my first benefactor.

When her majesty came to have the truth of the case laid before her, I soon felt the effects of her royal goodness and compassion. And first, her majesty declared, that she left all that matter to a certain person, and did not think he would have used me in such a manner. Probaby these

words may seem imaginary to some, and the || nothing but what is for the public service, and speaking them to be of no value, and so they agreeably to your own sentiments of things; and would have been had they not been followed with besides, it is the queen you are serving, who has further and more convincing proofs of what || been very good to you. Pray, apply yourself as they imported, which were these, that her ma- you used to do; I shall not take it ill from you jesty was pleased particularly to inquire into my in the least" circumstances and family, and by my Lord Treasurer Godolphin to send a considerable supply to my wife` and family, and to send to me the prison money to pay my fine and the expenses of my discharge. Whether this be a just foundation let my enemies judge. Here is the foundation on which I built my first sense of duty to her majesty's person, and the indelible bond of gratitude to my first. benefactor.

Upon this, I went to wait on my lord trea surer, who received me with great freedom, and told me smiling he had not seen me a long while. I told his lordship very frankly the occasionthat the unhappy breach that had fallen out had made me doubtful whether I should be acceptable to his lordship. That I knew it was usual when great persons fall, that all who were in their interest fell with them. That his lordship knew the obligations I was under, and that I could not but fear my interest in his lordship was lessened on that account. "Not all, Mr De Foe," replied his lordship; "I always think a man honest till I find to the contrary."

Gratitude and fidelity are inseparable from an honest man. But, to be thus obliged by a stranger, by a man of quality and honour, and after that by the sovereign under whose administration I was suffering, let any one put him. self in my stead, and examine upon what prin- Upon this I attended his lordship as usual: ciples I could ever act against either such a and being resolved to remove all possible ground queen, or such a benefactor; and what must of suspicion that I kept any secret correspondence, my own heart reproach me with, what blushes I never visited, or wrote to, or any way corresmust have covered my face when I had looked ponded with my principal benefactor for above in, and called myself ungrateful to him that three years; which he so well knew the reason saved me thus from distress, or her that || of, and so well approved that punctual behaviour fetched me out of the dungeon, and gave my in me, that he never took it ill from me at all. family relief? Let any man who knows what principles are, what engagements of honour and gratitude are, make his case his own, and say what I could have done more or less than I have done.

I must go on a little with the detail of the obligation, and then I shall descend to relate what I have done, and what I have not done, in the case.

Being delivered from the distress I was in, her majesty, who was not satisfied to do me good by a single act of her bounty, had the goodness to think of taking me into her service, and I had the honour to be employed in several honourable, though secret services, by the interposition of my first benefactor, who then appeared as a member in the public administration.

I had the happiness to discharge myself in all these trusts so much to the satisfaction of those who employed me, though oftentimes with difficulty and danger, that my Lord Treasurer Godolphin, whose memory I have always honoured, was pleased to continue his favour to me, and to do me all good offices with her majesty, even after an unhappy breach had separated him from my first benefactor, the particulars of which may not be improper to relate; and as it is not an injustice to any, so I hope it will not be offensive.

When, upon that fatal breach, the Secretary of State was dismissed from the service, I looked upon myself as lost; it being a general rule in such cases, when a great officer falls, that all who came in by his interest fall with him; and resolving never to abandon the fortunes of the man to whom I owed so much of my own, I quitted the usual applications which I had made to my

lord treasurer.

In consequence of this reception, my Lord Godolphin had the goodness, not only to introduce me for the second time to her majesty, and to the honour of kissing her hand, but obtained for me the continuance of an appointment which her majesty had been pleased to make me, in consideration of a formal special service I had done, and in which I had run as much risk of my life as a grenadier upon the counterscarp; and which appointment, however, was first obtained for me at the intercession of my said first benefactor, and is all owing to that intercession, and her majesty's bounty. Upon this second introduction, her majesty was pleased to tell me, with a goodness peculiar to herself, that she had such satisfaction in my former services, that she had appointed me for another affair, which was something nice, and that my lord treasurer should tell me the rest; and so I withdrew.

The next day, his lordship having commanded me to attend, told me that he must send me to Scotland, and gave me but three days to prepare myself. Accordingly, I went to Scotland, where neither my business, nor the manner of my dis charging it, is material to this tract; nor will it be ever any part of my character, that I reveal what should be concealed. And yet, my errand was such as was far from being unfit for a sovereign to direct, or an honest man to perform; and the service I did upon that occasion, as it is not unknown to the greatest man now in the nation under the king and the prince, so, I dare say, his grace was never displeased with the part I had in it, and I hope will not forget it.

These things I mention upon this account, and no other, viz. to state the obligation I have been in all along to her majesty personally, and to my first benefactor principally; by which I But my generous benefactor, when he under- say, I think I was at least obliged not to act stood it, frankly told me that I should by no against them, even in those things which I might means do so; "For," said he, in the most engaging not approve. Whether I have acted with them terms, "my lord treasurer will employ you infarther than I ought, shall be spoken to by itself.

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