The following issue of the Gazette carried a revised and expanded version of the ad, which included what has since become a well-known description of Daniel Defoe the fugitive from justice:

St James’s, Jan. 10. Whereas Daniel de Foe alias de Fooe is charged with writing a Scandalous and Seditious Pamphlet, Entituled, The Shortest way with the Dissenters, Whoever shall discover the said Daniel de Foe, alias de Fooe, to one of Her Majesty’s Principal Secretaries of State, or any of Her Majesty’s justices of the Peace, so as he may be apprehended, shall have a Reward of 50 l. which Her Majesty has ordered immediately to be paid upon such Discovery:

He is a middle Sized Spare Man, about 40 years old, of a brown Complexion, and dark brown coloured Hair, but wears a Wig, a hooked Nose, a sharp Chin, grey Eyes, and a large Mould near his Mouth, was born in London, and for many years was a Hose Factor in Freeman’s-yard, in Cornhill, and now is Owner of the Brick and Pantile Works, near Tilbury-Fort in Essex.7

The arrests of Bellamy and Croome had already unsettled Defoe, but the wanted notice, with its detailed description (Cromwellian wart and all) and its reward offered in the name of the Queen herself, nevertheless came as a shock: £50 was a considerable inducement, more than enough for someone to live on for a year, and it was ten times the amount that was offered in the press for the capture of a deserting soldier. Even Jack Sheppard, the famous thief and prison-breaker, whose life story Defoe would later write up for the papers, was only worth a £20 reward. But a seditious author was regarded as a far greater menace than either a prison-breaker or a deserter, for it was as if he had publicly declared himself to be an enemy of the state, which is why the pursuit of Defoe came to occupy the attentions of some of the most powerful men in the land: Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, the Speaker of the House of Commons; Sidney Godolphin, First Earl of Godolphin, the Lord High Treasurer; and Daniel Finch, Earl of Nottingham, the Secretary of State for the Southern Region and an avowed enemy of the Whigs, to whom the responsibility of actually finding Defoe was given. ‘Don Dismal’, as Defoe went on to call the Earl of Nottingham, was to find this a difficult and exasperating task, and on 2.5 February 1703, given Defoe’s continuing evasion, he ordered that a copy of The Shortest-Way ‘be burnt by the hands of the common Hangman, tomorrow in New Palace Yard’.8 The sentence was carried out the next day, as instructed.

Defoe, meanwhile, had begun the negotiations which he hoped would soften his enemies. He sent his wife, Mary Tuffley, to face the Earl of Nottingham in person, but Don Dismal merely repeated his demand that Defoe give himself up to the authorities. Defoe then wrote him a pleading letter in which he drew what he hoped was an affecting picture of ‘the Cries of a Numerous Ruin’d Family’, and offered to answer written questions in return for a sentence ‘a Little More Tollerable to me as a Gentleman, Than Prisons, Pillorys, and Such like, which are Worse to me than Death’.9 He could hardly have expected Dismal Daniel to react to the letter with sympathy, but he ended it with an offer to serve the Queen ‘with my hand, my Pen, or my head’, which may well have roused the interest of his pursuers. They knew how effective Defoe had been in the service of William III, and there was no denying that his talents as a propagandist and a spy could be put to good use by the new administration. But they remained intent upon catching him first, and were not yet prepared to come to an arrangement with someone they had no reason to trust.

Defoe was finally captured on 21 May 1703, having been betrayed for the reward by an anonymous informer. When he was arrested, at a house in Spitalfields belonging to a French Huguenot weaver named Nathaniel Sammen, he had ‘many Libells and papers’ on his person, including, it was alleged, an obscene poem that he had written which described the knighting of Dr David Hamilton, physician to the Queen.10 It took the Earl of Nottingham several days to go through these various papers, but they turned out to contain nothing of any value to the government. Nevertheless, the government remained convinced that Defoe was in the pay of a group of Whig conspirators who were loyal to the ideals of the late King William, and that The Shortest-Way was one of their attempts to destabilize the new regime. It is unclear, even now, whether there were reasonable grounds for the Tories’ suspicion, but Defoe maintained throughout these events that his sermon had only ever been ironic in intention, not inflammatory. The fault, in other words, lay with the reader, not the writer, a defence which Defoe was soon to use again, in his next mock sermon, The Lay-Man’s Sermon upon the Late Storm, when he warns the reader that ‘he that expected it otherwise than it is tis his Fault, and not Mine’ (p. 186). As Defoe had just discovered, although not for the last time in his writing career, the problem with making irony seem real is that the irony is often lost on its audience.

As soon as he was arrested Defoe was committed to Newgate Prison, where he was interrogated for two days by the Earl of Nottingham, who demanded to know who had paid him for his work. Whether or not he had anything to confess, Defoe refused to answer any of Dismal’s questions, and on 5 June Nottingham had no choice but to release the prisoner on bail, ordering him to appear in court a month later to face charges. On 5 July he appeared as requested and was charged with seditious libel, the indictment going out of its way to stress that the publication of The Shortest-Way had been a ‘direct affront to Queen Anne’.11 Given the wording of the indictment and the obvious animosity of the judges who were appointed to the hearing two days later, Defoe was advised by his defence attorney that the best he could do was to plead guilty and ask for mercy. Defoe reluctantly did what he was told, and the Old Bailey trial, the result of nearly seven months of official investigation, was over in a matter of minutes.

Defoe’s sentence, however, was tougher than that which he had been led to expect: a fine of 200 marks (about £133), three days in the pillory, and a return to Newgate Prison for an unspecified period to await Her Majesty’s pleasure ‘till all be performed’. Given that he was then on the verge of bankruptcy, the payment of the fine was unlikely to be ‘performed’ for a very long time to come. He was also made to undertake to remain on good behaviour for seven years, which effectively translated into a vow of publishing silence: unthinkable for a writer as compulsive as Defoe. He referred to it, ironically, in his Essay on the Late Storm (1704), as his ‘sleep of legal Death’ (p. 211); ironically, because the period immediately following this sentence of silence was his busiest yet in terms of writing and anonymous publication. By the end of July 1704, only twelve months after the sentence was imposed, Defoe had written and published twenty new works, including the three which are reprinted here.

Defoe had managed to escape hanging or whipping, but he still had to face the prospect of ‘Prisons, Pillorys, and Such like, which are Worse to me than Death’. He felt, with some justification, that he had been punished not merely for The Shortest-Way, but for all the other satires he had written. The judges and politicians whom he had mocked in the past had taken their opportunity for revenge. So he appealed against his sentence, complaining that he had agreed ‘to give the Court No Trouble but to plead Guilty to the Indictment, Even to all the Adverbs, the Seditiously’s, the Maliciously’s, and a Long Rapsody of the Lawyers et Ceteras; and all this upon promises of being us’d Tenderly’.12 Defoe thus found himself being interrogated again, this time in the presence of the Queen herself, but his refusal to answer repeated questions about his part in a supposed anti-government conspiracy meant that his appeal was quickly turned down. His dates with the pillory were set for the last three days in July: the first outside the Royal Exchange on Cornhill, near where he used to manage his hosiery warehouse; the second at Cheapside, in sight of the still unfinished St Paul’s Cathedral; and the third at Temple Bar on Fleet Street, the future home, appropriately enough, of generations of his fellow libellers.

While awaiting his punishment back in Newgate Prison, Defoe responded in the only way that he had ever responded to a setback: by writing an attack in his defence. A Hymn to the Pillory, published on 29 July 1703, the first of his three days of public humiliation, was written specially to be sold to the crowds who came to witness his ordeal.