Daniel Defoe, Spy
Winning Hearts and Minds in the Early Eighteenth Century
Much like his contemporary Jonathan Swift, splenetic creator of Gulliver’s Travels, Daniel Defoe is famous for one Big Thing: writing Robinson Crusoe. Again like Swift, Defoe is also known for a number of Lesser Things (Tale of a Tub and “A Modest Proposal” in Swift’s case, Moll Flanders and Journal of the Plague Year in Defoe’s).
But what Defoe is not famous for at all is his illustrious career in espionage, despite its being a Major Thing in his long and varied life.
His intelligence career, which lasted roughly between 1704 and 1717 (with a few breaks), saw him embark on three highly successful missions, so let’s take a gander, shall we?
Recruitment
But first, when did he get his spook start? We can date Defoe’s entry into secret service pretty precisely. It came after a Very Bad Year in which he (a Protestant Nonconformist) had published a screed, The Shortest Way With Dissenters, that had antagonized the wrong people. In 1703, as a result, he was charged with seditious libel, then declared a fugitive, captured, and hauled in for interrogation.
Some time ago, they found the records of these workovers. The good news was that Defoe had been clever enough not to keep anything incriminating and he gave nothing away. The bad was that his interrogators were so annoyed at his recalcitrance that he received the severe punishment of the pillory and a large fine, followed by being jailed until he could pay off the debt—which he, a bankrupt, couldn’t.
Nevertheless, Defoe’s doughtiness attracted the eye of Robert Harley, the Secretary of State and a man as devious as he was secretive. The fact that he’s a historical footnote compared to his famous predecessor, the Elizabethan spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham, speaks volumes as to his obsessive reticence.
As the de facto head of intelligence, Harley saw in Defoe a supremely talented man who could be used. A discreet meeting was arranged, the upshot of which was that Harley deployed “Her Majesty’s Secret Service moneys” to pay the fine in exchange for Defoe’s agreeing to work for him. In short order Defoe became his most enthusiastic spy.
If nothing else, Defoe was a quick learner. He started by reading Giovanni Paolo Marana’s serialized novel, The Turkish Spy, Who Lived Five and Forty Years at Paris Undiscover’d [between] 1637 and 1682, probably for the same reasons that people today read John Le Carré to pick up tradecraft tips and spy lingo. Then he graduated to John Stow’s Chronicles and William Camden’s Annales, which discussed the uncovering of the Babington Plot against Queen Elizabeth I and Walsingham’s triumphal role in it. After which he devoured Le Clerc’s Life of the Famous Cardinal-Duke De Richelieu (1695). In both Walsingham’s and Richelieu’s cases, he discovered, they had a thirst for information and had expertly leveraged it against their sovereigns’ enemies.
Defoe, in short, was thinking deeply about the practice of intelligence before he actually practised it. For him, intelligence, in the form of secret information, had to be kept clean and not dirtied by one’s prejudices, politics, and imagination. Defoe here was adamant that neutral reporting and impartial observations were key to ensuring accurate intelligence for his masters, who would then decide policy based on cold facts rather than on their personal inclinations.
So confident was Defoe that he submitted a lengthy memorandum to Harley on the nature of clandestine work in the summer of 1704: “A Scheme of Generall Intelligence.” It was in this remarkable document that Defoe described, among many other innovative things, the necessity of organizing conflicting streams of information to allow for analysis and evaluation.
Instead of all the various scraps from unverified sources being thrown willy-nilly into a folder, Defoe proposed collating lists of prominent people, keeping profiles of politicians and leading merchants, drawing moral sketches of bishops and clergymen, making maps of trade routes, and tracing shifting party alliances. By extracting this Hard Data from a mass of material, you could, according to Defoe, connect dots that no one had connected before.
He was kind of a one-man Palantir, I guess.
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Mission 1: The Tour
As part of his effort to collect this Hard Data, Defoe’s first mission was to travel throughout England and to talk to people. Admittedly, that doesn’t sound very James Bond, but it was bleedingly cutting-edge for the time. The reason why is that “intelligence” was then undergoing a reformation in how it was conceived, practised, and organized.
The British version of intelligence evolution can be divided into three periods. There was the early modern period (1500-c.1720), the pre-modern (c.1720-1909), and the modern (1909-today). That year 1720 marks a transition point and more or less coincides with Defoe’s activities.
He was in the forefront of what could be called, “political intelligence,” in order to distinguish it from “political news.” A century earlier, the two terms, “intelligence” and “news,” had been almost synonymous. A report covering “intelligence recently arrived from France”—say, about the death of King Louis—was essentially the same thing as a news item.
By Defoe’s time, however, intelligence connoted not just news, but secret news. It was the news behind the news, the inside scoop, the real story hidden from sight and thus possessing mystique and power. As such, the only person who was supposed to have access to all this arcane knowledge was the sovereign.
Aside from a natural desire to look omniscient, kings had to know secret things before anyone else did in order to ensure stability. The seventeenth century had been a tumultuous, bloody one of civil wars and rebellions; no one wanted a repeat. So to head trouble off at the pass it had become critical to acquire intelligence of what people were thinking or thinking of doing before they actually did it. There was nothing inherently sinister about this; it’s what smart politicians do everyday: They sniff the wind, get early warning of an issue annoying voters, and then announce a policy to mitigate it before it dogs them in some upcoming election.
The difference is that kings could exploit a then-new weapon: public opinion. Until the rise of the Press, which includes pamphlets, broadsides, tracts, and other ephemera, what commoners thought hadn’t mattered. In an aristocratic society, what merchants and clergymen had thought of the Great Events Of The Day was irrelevant. Decisions were made by the sovereign and his coterie of favored courtiers and that was that.
But now that educated people could read and congregate in the new coffee-houses to talk about what they had read and then write letters to other people to relay what they had heard and read, public opinion began to matter a great deal. Knowing in advance what people were thinking via “intelligence” and then trying to influence them before they translated Bad Thought into Adverse Action could be achieved by manipulating the news to massage public opinion your way.
Which meant that Defoe’s job of opinion-gathering was an important one. Over the summers of 1704 and 1705, he rode the length and breadth of England, travelling for five to seven hours each day and staying only a night in each town and village. In the evenings, he hung around inns chatting to local dignitaries to get a feel for their views, listening to the gossip, arranging for them to send him interesting pamphlets, and distilling it all for Harley.
Over time, he identified the most prominent men, created a network of correspondents, and even compiled a list of useful worthies most susceptible to bribery (Lord John Somers: “Such a Man Can Not be bought too Dear”), just as he had proposed in his “Scheme of Generall Intelligence.”
Mission 2: The Union
During his first mission, Defoe had posed as an undercover friendly, but for his second he upped the stakes by infiltrating enemy territory. In the years before the Union of England and Scotland in 1707, there were significant numbers of influential Scots who wanted to remain constitutionally independent, or at least autonomous. Harley accordingly despatched Defoe to Edinburgh in 1706 to penetrate the opposition and soften them up a bit.
Defoe’s past as a Dissenter, his conviction for seditious libel, and his time in the pillory came in immensely useful when he arrived in Scotland. Claiming to be a member of a “persecuted minority” who had fled across the Border to find refuge from debts and jail, Defoe was quickly welcomed into the anti-English bosom.
For such an ally and friend, doors were opened. Defoe, always an enterprising soul, was invited to invest in several enterprises (wine, linen, brass, wool) and to join numerous trade and religious associations. Each connection he made linked to someone higher up the pole. Once established, he set himself up as a newspaper publisher and shortly thereafter was influencing opinion with subtly pro-Union arguments couched in anti-Union rhetoric.
His great coup was to have himself officially commissioned to write a History of Scotland, a post which granted him access to the closed government registers and parliamentary minute books. Finally, Harley had someone on the inside who could tie together the impenetrable web of family and financial alliances among the Scottish elite—who were essentially financing Defoe to spy on them.
As Defoe chortled to his masters in London in 1707:
“In my Management here I am a perfect Emissary. I act the Old part of Cardinall Richlieu. I have my spyes and my Pensioners In Every place, and I Confess tis the Easyest thing in the World to hire people here to betray their friends. I have spies in the Commission, in the parliament, and in the assembly, and Undr pretence of writeing my hystory I have Every Thing told me. I am in Dayly Conferences with the Ministers.”
Pretty impressive, it has to be said. Almost as impressive as how much money Defoe was making. Aside from his business interests and his commission payment, Defoe was being generously compensated by the secret service.
We don’t have all the transactions but to give some idea of the amounts involved, in 1710, 1712, and 1714, when Defoe returned to Scotland and toured the country under the alias “Claude Guilot,” he was paid £850.
It’s notoriously difficult to “price” Ye Olde Money into current amounts, but very roughly speaking that figure equates to $225,000 in today’s dollars. And he certainly didn’t pay much tax.
Mission 3: The Tory
For his last mission, Defoe returned to London to tackle a new enemy: Tory Jacobites, or those who hankered to restore the exiled (Catholic) Stuarts to the throne and oust the Whig-led governments of the Hanoverian King George I (reigned 1714-1727). It’s a bit more complicated than that, of course, but let’s keep details to a minimum.
Defoe’s own politics had originally been Tory, but by this time he had trimmed his views to suit the prevailing winds. Just as his past as a Dissenter had once gained him entrée into Scottish opposition circles, his Tory background now stood him in good stead.
At the time, 1715-16, England was in a tumultuous state. At George I’s coronation there had been violent protests, the balance of Parliament had swung heavily away from the Tories to the Whigs, habeas corpus was temporarily suspended, the Riot Act was passed to break up unlawful assemblies, and several Tory ministers were impeached. The Tories, it was clear, were cornered and might be dangerous. Above all, there were widespread fears of Jacobite machinations to bring back their “King Across the Water” to spark another civil war, this time between dueling dynasties.
Defoe’s task was, as his instructions stated, to ensure “That the Poison of a Factious spirit May Not Spread Among The [Tories].” To do this, Defoe took a lead from his Scottish sojourn and established several journals and newspapers disguised as moderate Tory outlets to attract middle-of-the-roaders towards Whiggism and away from the radicals. At one point, he was running at least five, always promoting accommodation with the Whigs but writing in the best Tory style. Still, he had to associate with the more extremist elements among the “Papists, Jacobites, and Enraged High Tories” whom “My Very Soul abhorrs,” and worse, had to hear their treasonous remarks “and Smile at it all as if I Approv’d it.”
After a few years, the country calmed down and Defoe left secret service. Harley had long since gone and Defoe was annoyed at having to reestablish repeatedly his credentials with his successors. Besides which, he’d had an idea for a novel about a shipwrecked sailor that he thought might sell a few copies . . .
Further Reading: P.R. Backscheider, “Daniel Defoe and Early Modern Intelligence,” Intelligence and National Security, 11 (1996), 1, pp. 1-21; J.A. Downie, “Secret Service Payments to Daniel Defoe, 1710-1714,” Review of English Studies, 30 (1979), 120, pp. 437-41; K. Ellison, “Intelligence, Espionage, and the Ethics of Surveillance in Defoe’s Writings,” in N. Seager and J.A. Downie (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), pp . 382-99., pp. 382-99; A. Marshall, “Robert Harley as Secretary of State and his Intelligence Work: 1702-1708,” History, 108 (2023), 381, pp. 328-52; J.R. Moore, “Daniel Defoe: King William’s Pamphleteer and Intelligence Agent,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 34 (1971), 3, pp. 251-60.