In May 1705, for instance, stung by a reference to his second-rate Latin which appeared in the pages of the Observator, Defoe indulged himself in a long and uncharacteristically personal response to the newspaper’s editor, John Tutchin:

If Two Concurrent Reporters have, each of them, 5/6ths of Certainty; they will both give me an Assurance of 35/36ths, or of 35 to one: if Three; an Assurance of 215/216, or of 215 to one,

tell Mr. Tutchin I understand Latin: non ita Latinus sum ut Latine loqui. I easily acknowledge myself blockhead enough to have lost the fluency of expression in the Latin, and so far trade has been a prejudice to me; and yet I think I owe this justice to my ancient father, yet living, and in whose behalf I freely testify that if I am a blockhead it was nobody’s fault but my own, he having spared nothing in my education that might qualify me to match the accurate Dr. B or the learned Observator.

If Two Concurrent Reporters have, each of them, 5/6ths of Certainty; they will both give me an Assurance of 35/36ths, or of 35 to one: if Three; an Assurance of 215/216, or of 215 to one,

Defoe then challenged John Tutchin to an extraordinary public contest:

If Two Concurrent Reporters have, each of them, 5/6ths of Certainty; they will both give me an Assurance of 35/36ths, or of 35 to one: if Three; an Assurance of 215/216, or of 215 to one,

I’ll take any Latin author he shall name, and with it one French and one Italian, and I’ll translate them into English and after that re-translate them crosswise: the English into French, the French into Italian, and the Italian into Latin. And this I challenge him to perform with him, who does it soonest and best for 20 each book; and by this he shall have an opportunity to show the world how much Defoe the hosier is inferior in learning to Mr. Tutchin the gentleman.28

If Two Concurrent Reporters have, each of them, 5/6ths of Certainty; they will both give me an Assurance of 35/36ths, or of 35 to one: if Three; an Assurance of 215/216, or of 215 to one,

Defoe was evidently angry and upset, but this moment of self-exposure was just another gift to his enemies, who went on to tease him even more about his lack of classical learning: ‘Friend Daniel,’ laughed the author of The Republican Bullies, ‘the next time you write any thing in Vindication of your great Skill in the Latin Tongue, let your Quotations come up to your Pretensions, and not make a Jest of your self.’29

If Two Concurrent Reporters have, each of them, 5/6ths of Certainty; they will both give me an Assurance of 35/36ths, or of 35 to one: if Three; an Assurance of 215/216, or of 215 to one,

As was mentioned earlier in the introduction, Defoe intended The Storm to be a politically unengaged production, which would lend no overt support to the views of any particular religious or political group. Yet Defoe was by nature a taker of sides, and he could never remain as convincingly neutral as he would have us believe, although he does a much better job of curbing his opinions in the course of The Storm than he does in the other two associated pieces. For he felt, overall, that whatever its natural causes may have been, and despite the randomness of the suffering that it caused, as a judgement on his divided nation, the storm had been richly deserved. ‘The Storms above reprove the Storms below,’ as he wrote in An Essay on the Late Storm, the last of the three storm pieces to be published, and it is clear from comments made in the course of all three that he viewed the storm as an act of divine retribution against the antics of the High Church faction (p. 211): “Tis plain Heaven has suited his Punishment to the Offence, has Punish’d the Stormy Temper of this Party of Men with Storms of his Vengeance, Storms on their Navies, Storms on their Houses, Storms on their Confederates, and I question not will at last with Storms in their Consciences’ (p. 198).

Defoe, newly out of prison and under the protection of Robert Harley, the moderate, if Machiavellian, Tory Speaker of the House of Commons, was keen to point the finger of blame at the enemies who had caused him so much trouble over the previous twelve months, and whose cynicism and treachery were, he felt, at least partly responsible for the terrors unleashed by the storm. His reproaches, however, differed in emphasis across each of the works reprinted here. In The Lay-Man’s Sermon upon the Late Storm, for example, which was the first to appear, in February 1704, its pretended disguise as a piece of biblical commentary is soon abandoned, and it turns instead into what Defoe happily admits is a ‘Discourse…wholly Civil and Political’, in which all the usual suspects, Jacobites, non-jurors and High-Church Tories, are rounded up for vilification by name (p. 186); yet when he exclaims, as he does in the course of The Storm, against ‘Interest, Parties, Strife, Faction, and particular Malice, with all the scurvy Circumstances attending such things’, he is careful to mention no names or labels, although it is obvious who he has in mind (p. 64). And he is also very careful, in the midst of all this political point-scoring, to praise Queen Anne, ‘a Mild, Gentle, Just and Protestant Queen’, who he wisely exempts from the fanaticism which he holds responsible for the various storms and ‘Ecclesiastick Tempests’, both political and meteorological, which continued to batter the land (p. 212).

In fact the 1703 storm arrived during an early phase of what was to become known as the War of the Spanish Succession, a twelve-year slog around the fields of western Europe in an attempt to prevent a threatened alliance between the crowns of France and Spain. Its immediate cause was the death, in November 1700, of Charles II of Spain, whose will gifted his throne to the seventeen-year-old Philip, Duke of Anjou, the grandson of the French King, Louis XIV. William III and his Dutch advisors were horrified by this development, and they wanted to see the powerful southern alliance opposed by military force. William signed a treaty, known as the Grand Alliance, with the leaders of the Dutch United Provinces and the Emperor of Austria, all of whom shared the aim of curbing the growing power of the French, who had marched into the Spanish Netherlands in February 1701 and taken control of the fortresses facing the Channel.

The death of William III in 1702, however, had led to the political rise of a group of Tories who disliked the Dutch, were opposed to the idea of the Grand Alliance and intended, while they were at it, to reverse as many of William’s other policies as possible, especially his policy of tolerance towards the Dissenters. It was they who had been the target of The Shortest-Way, and they who had been instrumental in the harassment of its author. Defoe, who strongly supported the war against France, felt that these Tories cared only about settling domestic scores against their enemies at home, and were doing all they could to undermine the position of the English military commander, the Duke of Marlborough, whom they regarded as William’s creation. Defoe’s frustration is plain to see in the pages of The Lay-Man’s Sermon upon the Late Storm, where he openly accuses Marlborough’s critics of preferring the defeat of ‘the whole Navy of England’ to the defeat of a single piece of commons legislation (p. 198). Given the storm’s recent destruction of so many vessels of the sovereign fleet, as well as the good-behaviour clause that had been added to Defoe’s sentence, this was a sensitive area to get into, but Defoe remained unrepentant in his accusations: ‘These are the People who Cry out of the Danger from the Dissenters, but are not concerned at our Danger from the French…God may Thunder from Heaven with Storms upon Storms, Ruin our Fleets, Drown our Sailors and Blow us back from the best contriv’d Expeditions in the World, but they will never believe the case affects them, never look into their own Conduct to see if they have not help’d to bring these heavy Strokes upon the Nation’ (p. 198).

The fleet, which had not had a particularly successful campaign during the summer of 1703, had only just returned from the Mediterranean when the storm came thundering up the Channel. Defoe, who was already profoundly unimpressed by the conduct of the admirals at sea, was appalled by their further failure to have had the main fleet secured in inshore harbours, rather than leaving it moored and vulnerable on the notorious Goodwin Sands:

      But O ye Mighty Ships of War!
      What in Winter did you there?
Wild November should our ships restore
      To Chatham, Portsmouth, and the Nore (p. 207),

and he went further, in the Lay-Man’s Sermon, suggesting that the commanders of what remained of the fleet ought to be removed from their posts, claiming that God ‘will never bless us till they are dismist’ (p. 195). Like many others at the time, he was worried that the uncertain progress of the war so far had given comfort to the High Church Tories, who wanted to see an end to the campaigns in Europe as well as an end to moderate government at home. It was not until the following summer, with the capture of Gibraltar and the victory at Blenheim, that any kind of popular support for the war would be heard.