Between February 1704 and June 1713, Daniel Defoe wrote some four million words as Mr. Review, the moralising commentator on the state of the English nation and on the balance of power in Europe. Over the course of these nine years, The Review unceasingly championed ‘PARTY-PEACE’ at home, the Protestant Succession in England, toleration of dissent, and the Protestant interest in Europe. Equally consistent are Defoe's encouragement of trade, impatience with the landed gentry’s insularity, and pontifical sponsorship of the ‘Reformation of Manners’. What is not stable is the paper's essential political outlook: it begins as moderate Tory, and until 1708 preaches against party warfare, scarcely mentioning ‘Whigs’ and ‘Tories’; between 1708 and 1710, Mr. Review is aggressively anti-Tory and anti-High Church; after 1710, according to the standard account, Defoe writes as an apologist for his benefactor Robert Harley, which means recommending Tory policies out of sync with his own values.

Scholars have explained these changes in straightforward ways. The best work on The Review is that of J. A. Downie, whose characterisation of the journal still represents the general consensus: Defoe ‘consistently propounded the government line, however obliquely’, even when that meant endorsing views other than his own. Defoe, in other words, was always writing a pro-government journal, but he had to change his emphasis as the makeup of Anne's administration shifted from moderate to Whig to Tory. Before 1710, ministerial advocacy posed little problem for Defoe, who had merely to promote first moderation (until 1708) and then his actual, aggressively Whig views. After 1710, however, as Harley's ministry became more and more Tory, Defoe found himself awkwardly situated, a spokesman for causes that in his heart of hearts he opposed: ‘he had burnt his boats to embark with Harley’, James Sutherland concludes, ‘and he must stick to him now whatever course the minister might steer’.

This last period of The Review, the problematic Harleyite phase of 1710–1713, is my principal concern here. Downie describes The Review as a ministerial organ under Harley, addressed to a Whig audience and therefore complementing the Tory-oriented Examiner of which Jonathan Swift was in charge from November 1710 to June 1711.