Daniel Defoe's first notable publication had been…
November 1703 CE
Daniel Defoe's first notable publication had been An Essay upon Projects, a series of proposals for social and economic improvement, published in 1697.
He had defended the right of King William III to a standing army during disarmament after the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697 ended the Nine Years' War.
His most successful poem, The True-Born Englishman (1701), had defended the king against the perceived xenophobia of his enemies, satirizing the English claim to racial purity.
Defoe, flanked by a guard of sixteen gentlemen of quality in 1701, had presented the Legion's Memorial to the Speaker of the House of Commons, later his employer, Robert Harley.
It demanded the release of the Kentish petitioners, who had asked Parliament to support the king in an imminent war against France.
The death of William III in 1702 had once again created a political upheaval as the king was replaced by Queen Anne, who immediately began her offensive against Nonconformists.
Defoe's pamphleteering and political activities, a natural target, result in his arrest and placement in a pillory on July 31, 1703, principally on account of a pamphlet entitled The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters; Or, Proposals for the Establishment of the Church, purporting to argue for their extermination.
In it, he ruthlessly satirizes both the High church Tories and those Dissenters who hypocritically practice so-called "occasional conformity", such as his Stoke Newington neighbor Sir Thomas Abney.
Though published anonymously, the true authorship had been quickly discovered and Defoe had been arrested and charged with seditious libel.
After a trial at the Old Bailey in front of the notoriously sadistic judge Salathiel Lovell, Defoe had been found guilty.
Lovell had sentenced him to a punitive fine, to public humiliation in a pillory, and to an indeterminate length of imprisonment which would only end upon the discharge of the punitive fine.
According to legend, the publication of his poem Hymn to the Pillory caused his audience at the pillory to throw flowers instead of the customary harmful and noxious objects and to drink to his health.
The historicity of this story is questioned by most scholars, although John Robert Moore later said that "no man in England but Defoe ever stood in the pillory and later rose to eminence among his fellow men". (Richetti, John J. The Life of Daniel Defoe. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.) (Thomas Cochrane, the 10th Earl of Dundonald and famous Royal Navy officer, was sentenced to the pillory but was excused for fear his popularity would cause a riot.)
Defoe after his three days in the pillory had gone into Newgate Prison.
Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer, brokered his release in exchange for Defoe's co-operation as an intelligence agent for the Tories.
In exchange for his cooperation with the rival political side, Harley had paid some of Defoe's outstanding debts, improving his financial situation considerably.
Within a week of his release from prison, Defoe will witness the Great Storm of 1703 that rages from November 26 to 27.