Daniel Defoe

“ What, then, is the signification to the people of Britain whether the person called the pretender be legitimate, or no? The son of King James, or the son of a cinder-woman? The case is settled by the queen, by the legislative authority, and we cannot go back from it; and those who go about as emissaries to persuade the commons of Great Britain of the pretender having a right, go about at the same time traitorously to tell the queen's good subjects that her majesty is not our rightful queen, but an usurper. ”

“ Why, first, if ye will preserve the succession, and keep it right, you must settle the peace of the nation: we are not in a condition to stand by the succession now, and if we go on we shall be worse able to do so; in his own strength Hanover does not pretend to come, and if he did he must miscarry: if not in his own, in whose then but the people of Britain? And if the people be a weakened, divided, and deluded people, and see not your own safety to lie in your agreement among yourselves, how shall such weak folk assist him, especially against a strong enemy ”

“ It attacks nature, and puts her upon a ferment to cast out what offends her; but remark it, I pray, when the patient vomits, he always vomits up the physic and the filth together; so, if the nation should take a vomit of popery, as when the pretender comes most certain it is that this will be the consequence, they will vomit up the physic and the filth together; the popery and the pretender will come all up again, and all the popish, arbitrary, tyrannical filth, which has offended the stomach of the nation so long, and ruined its digesture, it will all come up together ”

“ Unless you reconcile yourselves to one another, and bring things to some better pass among the common people, it will be but to banter yourselves to talk of the protestant succession; for you neither will be in a condition to bring over your protestant successor, or to support him on the throne when you have brought him; and it will not be denied, but to make the attempt, and not succeed in it, is to ruin yourselves; and this I think a very good reason against the succession of the house of Hanover. ”

“ On the other hand, are not the presbyterians in Scotland so exasperated at having the abjuration oath imposed upon them, contrary, as they tell us, to their principles, that they care not if he, or any else, would come now and free them from that yoke? What is all this but telling us plainly that the whole nation is running into popery and the pretender? Why then, while you are obliquely, and by consequences, joining your hands to bring in popery, why, O distracted folk! should you think it amiss to have me talk of doing it openly and avowedly? Better is open enmity than secret guile ”

“ Another argument relates something to the family of Hanover itself. Here the folk are continually fighting and quarrelling with one another to such a degree as must infallibly weaken and disable the whole body of the nation, and expose them to any enemy, foreign or domestic. What prince, think you, will venture his person with a party or a faction, and that a party crushed, and under the power of their enemy; a party who have not been able to support themselves or their cause, how shall they support and defend him when he comes? ”

“ No, no; when you begin to be sick, then we say, Oh, that is right, and then the vomit begins to work; and how shall the island of Britain spew out all the dregs and filth the public digesture has contracted, if it be not made sick with some French physic? If you give good nourishing food upon a foul stomach, you cause that wholesome food to turn into filth, and instead of nourishing the man, it nourishes diseases in the man, till those diseases prove his destruction, and bring him to the grave. ”

“ The animosities of this nation, should they go on, as it seems they go on now, would by time become to such a height, that all charity, society, and mutual agreement among us, will be destroyed. Christians shall we be called! No; nothing of the people called Christians will be to be found among us. Nothing of Christianity, or the substance of Christianity, viz., charity, will be found among us! ”

“ The name Christian may be assumed, but it will be all hypocrisy and delusion; the being of Christianity must be lost in the fog, and smoke, and stink, and noise, and rage, and cruelty, of our quarrel about a king. ”

“ And if they cannot be in a posture to defend and maintain him when they have him, how shall he be encouraged to venture himself among them? To come over and make the attempt here according to his just claim and the laws of the land, would be indeed his advantage, if there was a probability that he should succeed; otherwise the example of the king of Poland is sufficient to warn him against venturing while the nation is divided, and together by the ears, as they are here. The whole kingdom of Poland, we see, could not defend King Augustus against the Swedes and their pretender ”

“ In like manner, if you will bring the protestant successor into the government before that government have taken some physic to cleanse it from the ill digesture it may have been under, how do we know but the diseases which are already begun in the constitution may not be nourished and kept up, till they may hereafter break out in the days of our posterity, and prove mortal to the nation. Wherefore should we desire the protestant successor to come in upon a foot of high-flying menage, and be beholden for their establishment to those who are the enemies of the constitution? ”

“ If ye cannot set man and wife together, nor your sons and daughters together, nay, nor your servants together, how will ye set your horses together, think ye? And how shall they stand together twenty or thirty years, think ye, if the queen should live so long? ”

“ Come we in the conclusion of this great matter to one great and main reason, which they say prevails with a great part of the nation at this time to be for the pretender, and which many subtle heads and industrious hands are now busily employed all over the kingdom to improve in the minds of the common people, this is the opinion of the legitimacy of the birth of the pretender ”

“ If upon due inquiry it should appear that we are not fit to receive such a prince as the successor of the house of Hanover is, that we should maltreat and abuse him if he were here, and that there is no way for us to learn the true value of a protestant successor so well as by tasting a little what a popish pretender is, and feeling something of the great advantages that may accrue to us by the superiority of a Jacobite party; if the disease of stupidity has so far seized us that we are to be cured only by poisons and fermentations ”

“ If divisions weaken the nation; if whig and tory, even united, are, and have been, weak enough to keep out popery, surely then widening the unnatural breaches, and inflaming things between them to implacable and irreconcileable breaches, must tend to overthrow the protestant kingdom, which, as our ever blessed Saviour said, when divided against itself cannot stand. ”

“ Everybody submits to what they cannot escape. People! people! if ye cannot resist the French king, ye must submit to a French pretender. There is no more to be said about that. 3. Then some allies, who it might be thought would be able to lend you some help in such a case as this is, may pretend to be disgusted at former usage, and say they were abandoned and forsaken in their occasion by us, and they will not hazard for a nation who disobliged them so much before, and from whom they have not received suitable returns for the debt of the revolution. ”

“ Is it agreeable to the true interest of the nation? What must become of trade, of religion, of society, of relation, of families, of people? Why, hark ye, you folk that call yourselves rational, and talk of having souls, is this a token of your having such things about you, or of thinking rationally ”

“ France itself, as well by the acquisition of those princes who may have changed sides, as above, as by a time for taking breath after the losses they have received, may be raised to a condition of superior strength, and may be too much an overmatch for us to venture upon; and if he thinks fit to send us the person we call the pretender, and order us to take him for our king, and this when we are in no condition to withstand him, prudence will guide us to accept of him; for all people comply with what they cannot avoid ”

“ Now it is very proper to inquire in this case whether the nation is not in such a state of health at this time, that the coming of the pretender may not be of absolute necessity, by way of cure of such national distempers which now afflict us, and that an effectual cure can be wrought no other way? ”

“ There may be sundry other reasons given why we should not be for this new establishment of the succession, which, though perhaps they may not seem so cogent in themselves, have yet a due force, as they stand related to other circumstances, which this nation is at present involved in, and therefore are only left to the consideration of the people of these times. ”

“ I have heard wise people say the queen is not fifty years old, that she has no distemper but the gout, that that is a long-life disease, which generally holds people out twenty, or thirty, or forty years; and let it go how it will, the queen may well enough linger out twenty or thirty years, and not be a huge old wife neither. ”

“ If we go from the shop one story higher into our family, the ladies, instead of their innocent sports and diversions, they are all falling out one among another; the daughters and the mother, the mothers and the daughters; the children and the servants; nay, the very little sisters one among another. If the chambermaid is a slattern, and does not please, Hang her, she is a jade; or, I warrant she is a highflier; or, on the other side, I warrant she is a whig ”

“ This, then, is the present reason which the poor ignorant people are taught to give why they are against the protestant succession, and why they are easily persuaded to come into the new scheme of a popish pretender, though at the same time they are all heartily against popery as much as ever. ”

“ Exactly agreeing these things were with our succession, our pretender, our King William, and his design, by settling the succession for the propagating the revolution, which is the reformation of this day, as the reformation was the revolution of that day. After this formal settling of the succession the king (as kings and queens must) dies, and the lords of the council, as our law calls them, they were the same thing, suppose lords justices, they meet and proclaim their protestant successor, as they were obliged to do ”

“ Perhaps some princes and states in the world by that time, seeing the great increase and growth of French power, may think fit to change their sentiments, and rather come over to that interest for want of being supported before, than be willing to embark against France, and so it may not be possible to obtain a new confederacy in the degree and extent of it, which we have seen it in, or in any degree suitable to the power of France ”

“ Others add a yet farther reason of our probable inability in such a case, viz., that the enemies of Britain have so misrepresented things to some of the neighbouring nations, our good friends and allies, as if we Britons had betrayed the protestant interest, and not acted faithfully to our confederacies and alliances, in which our reputation, it is pretended, has suffered so much, as not to merit to be trusted again in like cases, or that it should be safe to depend upon our most solemn engagements. ”

“ King William, say they, promised in his declaration to have it referred to the decision of the English parliament, but when he obtained the crown he never did anything that way more than encourage the people to spread the delusion by scurrilous pamphlets to amuse the poor commons; have them take a thing for granted which could have no other thing made of it ”

“ No doubt but they may be as good protestants as the Suffolk men in Queen Mary's time were, and if they are brought to it, will go as far, and die at a stake for the protestant religion, and in doing this, no doubt, but it is their real prospect to die at a stake, or they would not do it to be sure. ”

“ Where pray observe in the allegory of physic; you heard before when you take a vomit, the physic given you to vomit is always something contrary to nature, something that if taken in quantity would destroy ”

“ Moreover, his being educated a papist in France, and continuing so, was a just reason why the people of England rejected him, and why they ought to reject him, since, according to that famous vote of the commons in the convention parliament, so often printed, and so often on many accounts quoted, it is declared, That it is inconsistent with the constitution of this protestant kingdom to be governed by a popish prince. Vid. ”