generally coincided with those of the moderate Whigs. A
limited monarchy, the destruction of France's commercial empire,
liberty of conscience for Dissenters and Nonconformists, and a
Protestant (that is, Hanover) Succession were the imperatives which lay
behind much of his political and economic thinking and writing. From as
early as 1694 he had served William III as a pamphleteer-propagandist
for the vigorous prosecution of the war with France. After his
five-month imprisonment in 1703 for writing _The Shortest Way with
Dissenters_, Defoe was employed as an agent and pamphleteer of the
Government. First, in the service of Robert Harley, Godolphin's
Secretary of State during the early moderate years of the Godolphin
Administration (1704-08), and thereafter working for Godolphin himself,
Defoe's _Review_ preached the gospel of national unity above party
faction. When Harley replaced Godolphin as Treasurer in 1710, Defoe
returned to his service.

Although it may appear from this that Defoe's pen was for hire by
whichever party was in power, in point of fact, Defoe's political views
were remarkably congruent with those of both Harley and Godolphin. All
three were staunch supporters of England's commercial interests, the
Hanoverian Succession, liberty of conscience for Dissenters and
Nonconformists, and the terms of the Revolution Settlement. It must be
remembered that Godolphin and Harley were both moderates, each trying
to chart his course between the extremes of the parties. They, like
Daniel Defoe, saw their loyalty being to England and to the Queen, not
to a party. Like Defoe, they both discovered that politics often make
strange bedfellows. Godolphin, faced with a large Whig majority in the
House of Commons after the General Election of 1708, found that his
fortunes were bound to those of the Junto. Harley, after the General
Election of 1710, discovered the necessity of courting the High-Church
Tories far more than he would have liked.

Argyll's slate of Scottish peers for the November election included men
who were even more extreme in their Toryism than the majority of
High-Church English Tories. Most of the sixteen were High-Church, many
had strong Catholic leanings; all of them were against increasing the
religious liberties of the Scottish Presbyterians (and thus those of
the English Dissenters and Nonconformists). Several of these peers had
been openly professed Jacobites and all were, in some degree,
sympat