On the morning of 29 July 1703 a bankrupt London tradesman of forty-three was locked into a wooden frame at Cornhill, beside the Royal Exchange, with his head and hands held fast and a paper above him naming his crime. The next day he stood in Cheapside, the day after that at Temple Bar. His name was Daniel Defoe. Sixteen years later he would publish Robinson Crusoe, and in the years between he would work for the government he had been convicted of libelling, travelling under false names and sending home reports on the political temper of two kingdoms.
The pillory is usually told as a colourful anecdote about a great novelist. It is better understood as the hinge. Everything Defoe became afterwards, including the technique that produced the first English novel, follows from the bargain he struck to get out of Newgate.
The pamphlet the government read straight
In December 1702 an anonymous pamphlet appeared in London under the title The Shortest Way with the Dissenters. It proposed, in the confident voice of a High Church Tory, that Protestant nonconformists be dealt with by hanging their preachers and transporting their congregations. The reasoning was brisk, the tone was reasonable, and the conclusion was extermination.
Defoe was himself a Dissenter, educated at a nonconformist academy because Oxford and Cambridge were closed to men like him. The pamphlet was a hoax written to make High Church rhetoric sound like what he believed it was.
It worked far too well. High Churchmen praised it before they discovered the author, and Dissenters were alarmed before they discovered the joke. Both sides then turned on him. He was hunted by proclamation, arrested in May 1703, and tried at the Old Bailey for seditious libel. The sentence was a fine of two hundred marks, three days in the pillory, and imprisonment during the Queen’s pleasure.
There is a lesson in this that has not aged. Irony survives only where the audience already agrees about the target. Given to strangers, it is indistinguishable from advocacy.
The poem sold beneath the scaffold
While awaiting the sentence Defoe wrote A Hymn to the Pillory, a long verse address to the instrument itself, arguing that it punishes the wrong men and honours those it holds. Copies were printed and hawked in the street around him while he stood.
That single decision tells you what kind of man was in the frame. He had no way to prevent the punishment, so he took control of its meaning instead, and sold the interpretation to the crowd that had come to watch. Modern reputation management has produced nothing sharper in three centuries.
The flowers, and what the record actually supports
Every retelling includes the detail that Londoners pelted him with flowers rather than filth and drank his health beneath the pillory. It is a good story and it may be true in outline. It is also the part of the account that historians treat with most caution, because the flower-throwing enters the record through later, admiring biographers rather than through anything written at the time.
What is not in doubt is the outcome. He came out unhurt, which was not guaranteed, since men had been blinded and killed in the pillory. His pamphlets sold. His reputation among Dissenters rose rather than fell. Whether or not there were posies, the punishment failed on its own terms.
The minister who bought him out
Prison did what the pillory could not. Defoe owned a brick and tile works at Tilbury, and it collapsed while he sat in Newgate. He had already been bankrupted once, for seventeen thousand pounds, in the early 1690s. By late 1703 he was ruined a second time, with a wife and six children.
Robert Harley, then Speaker of the House of Commons and soon Secretary of State, arranged his release in November 1703 and settled his debts. Harley did not do this out of literary enthusiasm. He had identified the most effective pen in England and acquired it at a moment when its owner could not refuse.
What Defoe actually did for Harley
He wrote, first. From 1704 to 1713 he produced The Review, a periodical appearing up to three times a week, almost entirely written by himself, arguing the ministry’s line on trade, war and union while sounding like an independent tradesman thinking aloud.
Then he travelled. Harley sent him through England and later into Scotland, and Defoe submitted proposals for a standing system of correspondents in the counties who would report on opinion, discontent and the strength of factions. In Edinburgh from 1706 he lived under assumed names, among them Alexander Goldsmith, presenting himself variously as a merchant, a man interested in the fisheries, and a writer of a history of the Union.
He was a Presbyterian Dissenter, so the Kirk received him as a friend. He advised on the terms of the Union of 1707, argued for it in print and in conversation, reported to Harley on who could be moved and who could not, and by his own later account did the work in a city where a mob would have killed him had it known.
Father of the Secret Service, or something more interesting
He is often called the founder of British intelligence. The claim needs a little dismantling before it can be given its due.
Britain’s formal service dates from the Secret Service Bureau of 1909. As for the older tradition of state espionage, Sir Francis Walsingham was running agents against Spain a century and a quarter before Defoe stood in the pillory. Defoe founded no institution and commanded no service.
What he did was narrower and, for a writer, far more remarkable. He set out on paper a working method for gathering political intelligence at home in peacetime, recruited and paid correspondents to feed it, and operated for years in the field under cover with a plausible occupation and a false name. The intelligence officer as we picture him, unarmed, well informed, employed by a minister rather than a general, and reporting in prose, is closer to Defoe than to any earlier English model.
The reports became the novel
Robinson Crusoe appeared in April 1719, when Defoe was approaching sixty, and it did something no English book had done. It made a man up and then presented him with such circumstantial patience that readers took him for real, down to the inventory of salvaged goods and the count of days.
That technique is not a literary invention. It is what a good agent’s report looks like. Plain first-person narrative, ordinary detail supplied in quantity as proof of presence, no rhetoric, nothing that reads as argument. Defoe had spent fifteen years writing documents whose entire value lay in being believed by a sceptical reader who could not go and check.
The pillory made the spy, and the spy made the novelist. It is a straight line, and it starts on a July morning at Cornhill with a paper nailed above a man’s head.
Where to read it
The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702), the pamphlet itself, short and still uncomfortable.
A Hymn to the Pillory (1703), written in the shadow of the sentence and sold under it.
A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-1727), the travels of the agent turned into the best survey of the country in the century.
Robinson Crusoe (1719), read with the reports in mind.
Defoe died in 1731 in lodgings in Moorfields, away from his own house and, according to the usual account, avoiding a creditor. He had been bankrupt twice, imprisoned, pilloried, employed by two ministries, and disowned by most of the causes he served. The gravestone raised over him later carries the name he gave himself as a young man, with the particle he added to Foe when he decided who he intended to be.
