Abstract: This paper is a reply to an article written by Irving N. Rothman, Rakesh Verma, Thomas M. Woodell, and Blake Whitaker—“Defoe’s Contribution to Robert Drury’s Journal: A Stylometric Analysis” (2017). That study claimed to support the consensus of traditional attribution studies that Madagascar; or, Robert Drury’s Journal (1729) is a collaborative work to which Defoe contributed. This paper points out the many flaws of the Rothman group’s attribution study—flaws not only in the non-traditional authorship attribution experimental plan but also in the eighteenth-century literary and editorial production aspects of their paper. Rothman et al.’s work was based on Stieg Hargevik’s non-traditional authorship study of Memoirs of an English Officer which in turn was based on Alver Ellegård’s non-traditional authorship work on the Junius Letters. This paper also explicates the errors carried over by the Rothman group from the Hargevik and Ellegård studies. The conclusion of this paper is that the Rothman group’s results are not valid.

Keywords: Defoe, Authorship Attribution, Statistics, Stylistics, Accountability

And even if some studies have proved faulty, the vigorous discussion of their shortcomings is a resource for those who follow. (Craig 287)

IN APRIL 2017, I was asked by The Scriblerian to review an article titled, “Defoe’s Contribution to Robert Drury’s Journal: A Stylometric Analysis” written by Irving N. Rothman, Rakesh Verma, Thomas M. Woodell, and Blake Whitaker and published in the Festschrift for Jim Springer Bork, An Expanding Universe. The article is in the area of my ongoing studies—non-traditional authorship attribution (non-traditional meaning making use of statistics, and stylistics).¹ The review was published in 2018 (“Review”). I concluded the review by recommending that a proper “ripost” to the Rothman et al. study be undertaken.² The more time that went by without a ripost, the more I felt that I myself should take on this necessary but personally unpleasant task, since their article has the potential to misguide scholars and researchers not knowledgeable in the nuances or even the basics of non-traditional authorship studies. This task was made more complicated by the death in 2019 of the principal investigator, Irving N. Rothman. Rothman was a pre-eminent scholar and writer—especially knowledgeable and widely published in the area of eighteenth-century literature and all things Daniel Defoe. I had started to correspond with Rothman about their paper but had to shift the correspondence to Rakesh Verma who graciously, promptly, and completely answered my questions. I would ask the reader to bear in mind while reading the following article that Irving Rothman is not able to defend his experimental plan. ³

I. Overview

When I have had to criticize particular methods or scholars it has not been without respect for the courage with which they have addressed themselves to significant problems in a collective enterprise in which failure has often been as instructive as success. (Love 13)

The task will be approached with such modesty as we can muster, for nothing is more instructive in surveying the errors of others than the salubrious suspicion that we ourselves are likewise fallible. (Ashley 8)

As the title of the Rothman et al. article indicates, they attempted to establish what contributions Defoe may have made to Madagascar; or Robert Drury’s Journal (1729). The first third of the article presented a thoroughly researched and well written overview of the traditional authorship attribution studies that look at Defoe’s involvement with the production of the Journal. The Rothman group reported that the consensus of these studies is that the Journal is a collaboration. They also reported that their stylistic study comes to the same conclusion—the Journal is a collaboration, with sections attributable to Defoe. Unfortunately, there is no consensus in the literature as to what type of collaboration it is, who the collaborators were, or what parts are collaborative.⁴ This first third of their paper provides much needed background for what followed in their article—a non-traditional authorship attribution study of the Journal using Stieg Hargevik’s experimental design and techniques based on his 1972 dissertation. Rothman’s multi-disciplinary group at the University of Houston consisted of an eighteenth-century literary scholar and Defoe specialist, Rothman; a computer scientist, Verma; a linguist, Woodell; and a graduate student in the English Department, Whitaker. The Rothman group’s article and the Hargevik book are difficult reads, both because of their technical aspects and their many errors. Appendix A of this paper looks at what may be considered incidental errors—errors introduced or not detected in the production process by the authors, the reviewers, or the copy editors. Some of these errors have the potential to undermine the correct creation of the various corpora used in the Rothman group’s experiment.

What follows is a discussion of several problems that bring into question the validity of the entire study. Problems of omission and commission are explicated, and this includes the carrying over of the Hargevik errors.

II. Synopsis of the Hargevik Techniques

So even if my shortcomings are many and my method is unacceptable to some readers, I think it is high time this nest was stirred. (Hargevik I, 2)

Stieg Hargevik set out to determine if Daniel Defoe was the author of the 1728 tract The Memoirs of an English Officer. Hargevik’s study was influenced by Alvar Ellegård’s 1962 work, A Statistical Method for Determining Authorship: The Junius Letters. Without going into great detail, the following (distilled from Hargevik 21-32) makes up the Hargevik experimental plan:

1. Select and gather the Defoe Corpus: A one-million-word sample using first editions if possible. (Corpus o
2. Select and gather the non-Defoe control corpus: A one-million-word sample of writings not by Defoe, using first editions if possible. (Corpus two)
3. Obtain Memoirs of an English Officer with a text length of about 75,252 words. (Corpus three)
4. Compile Defoe’s favored words and phrases. (From corpus one)
5. Compile rare Defoe words and phrases. (From corpus one)
6. Search for and list all favored and rare items. (In the three corpora)
7. Analyze the data and determine if the Memoirs is by Defoe.

It is interesting (and telling) to note that aside from some earlier Rothman work (Rothman, “Stylometric Study” and “Defoe De-Attribution Scrutinized”) and the current work by the Rothman group, the only other non-traditional authorship attribution study using the Hargevik criteria was done by Richard Newsome on the continuation of Roxana.⁵ Newsome found the method wanting:

But in attempting to replicate them [Hargevik’s results] I find that they do not provide an answer to the question of whether an unsigned work was written by Defoe or not. (5)

The results of (4) and (5) of the Hargevik experimental plan make up the bulk of the 709 basic words and phrases (and permutations) that he determined to be unique to Defoe’s style. Hargevik carried out this phase of the study in three ways: (1) he compiled all words that begin with the letter i and the prefixes dis- and ex- (because he reasoned that these words are rare in Anglo-Saxon vocabulary); (2) he gathered marker words that other stylistic studies used (e.g., those of Ellegård and of Mosteller and Wallace); (3) however, Hargevik compiled the bulk of his stylistic markers by carefully reading the two million words in his corpora in the hope of finding items that Defoe liked and disliked to use (Hargevik 31-32). Hargevik told us that “[a]fter memorizing the preliminary testing list … I re-read all the 267 text portions forming the two million [word]-samples, recording as carefully as possible the occurrences of the different items in the testing list” (36). This “testing list” consisted of 709 items and their permutations each of which could be either (1) individual words, (2) whole phrases, (3) collocations, (4) orthographical oddities in spelling, or (5) frequently occurring phrases in foreign languages. Referring to item (6) in the experimental plan, Hargevik states:

The result of this operation would, at best, be (1) a list of items more rarely used by Defoe than by most of the writers in the comparative sample, and (2) a list of items which could be regarded as characteristic of Defoe, because they occur more frequently in texts by him than in texts by the majority of contemporary writers. (24)

Another major Hargevik carryover problem I would like to point out is that using only his memory, he read through two million words noting the occurrences of the items from the preliminary testing list. Think about thi—he read one million words of Defoe and one million words of non-Defoe and determined Defoe’s favorite expressions! Hargevik knew he had a problem: “It would be unwise and presumptuous to pretend that all the occurrences of the items concerned were listed, for it is quite obvious they were not” (36). He was not even able to calculate a systematic error: “At various times I checked my own performance in order to estimate the rate of occurrences missed out. This attempt was balked, however, as my efficiency varied at different times of the day” (36).⁶ Hargevik justified the continuation and publication of his study by this quote from Elegård: “To a large extent, however, the mistakes cancel each other out by affecting both plus and minus expressions. The consistency of the results is a guarantee that the occurrences missed through inadvertence have not seriously affected the classification” (qtd. in Hargevik 36). A computer was available to Hargevik to do this sorting and counting but he did not use it. He determined that he could get “similar results but at a smaller cost and with less labor” without a computer (31). The Rothman group should have compiled their own list of plus and minus Defoe words not from the two-million-word Hargevik corpora but from valid corpora of their own construction. The Rothman group chose to use Hargevik’s fatally flawed corpora and style markers rather than redo the initial compilation. This problem alone is enough to question the validity of the entire Rothman group undertaking.

 III. The Primary Data —the Input Texts

Most investigators of similar stylo-statistical problems do not divulge how their samples were built up, or how sample size was estimated. It is, certainly, very sensible to leave out such compromising matter, for any attempt to lay down principles in these cases is liable to attract criticism. (Hargevik 28)

Keep this quotation in mind as you read the rest of this paper. It advocates deception by exclusion—something that Hargevik does much too often.

The first major problem of the Rothman group’s study is the Hargevik selection and subsequent Rothman group adoption of the two input corpora: the one-million-word Defoe corpus and the one-million-word non-Defoe corpus. It is crucially important that all texts in non-traditional authorship attribution studies be of absolutely certain authorship. Hargevik used ten anonymous selections in his one-million-word non-Defoe control group. This is ~75,000 words (7.75%). He knew this but chose to ignore it.⁷ And more damning, as Hargevik admitted, “it is of course also possible that one or two of these anonymous texts were written by Defoe himself” (27). Hargevik was aware that some of the Defoe texts were of questionable authorship: “Defoe’s production is vast, and there is a great deal of uncertainty as to the authorship of several texts ascribed to him” (22). But again he did nothing about this crucial problem. Hargevik is guilty of cherry picking his samples and only from the low-hanging branches.⁸ In his one-million-word Defoe sample (90 selections) my count is that ~467,000 words (46.7%) were de-attributed by Furbank and Owens—their count for this is 449,500 words (464). Obviously Hargevik did not know this. However, any study done since Furbank and Owens must delete these questionable texts from the Defoe sample before style markers are selected—even if the practitioner disagrees with the de-attribution. Rothman was aware of this and even lists some of the de-attributed Defoe works in his earlier PBSA publications but doesn’t do anything about it in the Rothman group paper (Rothman, “Defoe De-Attribution Scrutinized” and “Response”). Furbank and Owens called this “an extraordinary fallacy” (464). As I have noted elsewhere in my scholarship, any study of Defoe’s style will be degraded by each inclusion of a text not of certain Defoe authorship (Rudman, “Unediting” 7). This problem alone is enough to question the validity of the entire Rothman group undertaking.

Another problem with the Hargevik input corpora is that they do not distinguish among works of different genres.⁹ The consensus of non-traditional attribution practitioners is that genre trumps authorship—many of an author’s style markers that are consistent within a genre are not consistent across genres. The practitioner must stick to the genre of the questioned text. Hargevik recognized this problem but did not control for it. He even was aware of the problems caused by not eliminating sub-genres: “Defoe’s texts often contain dialogue, and it is well-known that the spoken language of any period differs from the written language” (22). Hargevik conflated nine genres in his control sample: essays; speeches and debates; sermons; histories; novels; journals and diaries; letters; dictionaries and lexicons; and play reviews. Think about this: Hargevik did not conflate just two genres but at least nine. He equated the style of such disparate genres as dictionary compilation with novel writing—play reviews with sermons. And it is important to know if Hargevik selected and analyzed only one side of a printed debate. Hargevik mixed at least four genres in his one-million-word Defoe sample: essays, histories, novels, and letters. The Rothman group was also aware of the problems caused by mixing genres but like Hargevik chose to ignore it.¹⁰ The genre in the corpora should all be what the Rothman group called “seventeenth- and eighteenth-century terrestrial and sea journeys” (Rothman et al. 95). This problem alone is enough to question the validity of the entire Rothman group undertaking.

The next major problem with the input corpora is chronological overextension. A suggested chronological range for non-traditional authorship studies is ± five years from the date of the questioned work.¹¹ The tighter the chronological span, the better. This is to control for an author’s change of style over time, the zeitgeist style change over time, and the change of a genre’s style over time. The Hargevik corpora both span thirty years (1700-1730). His questioned tract, Memoirs of an English Officer was published in 1728. The Rothman group’s questioned work, Robert Drury’s Journal, was published in 1729. The chronological range of the two corpora should be from 1723 to 1731 (1731 being the year of Defoe’s death). This would eliminate most of the two million words in the Defoe and control corpora. This problem alone is enough to question the validity of the entire Rothman group undertaking.

Two other problems with the two corpora are (1) non-random sampling—Hargevik chose his samples by availability and convenience (non-random sampling has the potential to cause problems in the statistics and to introduce experimental bias); and (2) not always using first editions. Hargevik tried to locate first editions but was not always successful: “It is, unfortunately, possible that where later editions were used the results of the investigation were affected” (29). The Rothman group did use first editions for the several tracts they used in their analysis. But they did not tell us where they obtained all of their texts, if they were in electronic form, or if not in electronic form how they were entered. Nor do they report what types of errors and how many errors were introduced in the process.

IV. Unediting, De-Editing, Editing

When preparing a corpus for analysis, it is essential to attend to three elements of the process: unediting, de-editing, and editing. I have previously defined these terms this way:

Unediting—The Process of removing everything that has been added to the author’s manuscript over the ages by editors, printers, or other like “commentators;”

De-editing—The removal of any and all “extraneous” text (e.g. quotations, foreign languages) that would interfere with a valid non-traditional attribution study;

Editing—In this context, the encoding, regularizing, and lemmatizing of the text. (Rudman, “Unediting” 6)¹²

However, the Rothman et al. article does not tell us what they unedited, de-edited, or edited in any of their corpora. They do tell us some of what Hargevik excised:

He eliminates titles of “texts and headings,” “simple ranks and titles in direct apposition, e.g.: King William and Lord Galway,” but others were counted when they bore special titles or titles that, if eliminated, would distort the narrative image, such as “the Earl of Peterborough, the King of France.” He excludes abbreviations except viz. and counted pronouns in two words as one—“every thing” or “some body.” He omitted “numerals in the names of regents (e.g., Henry the Eighth),” “passages in foreign languages,” although he retained words in common usage, such as “en passant,” and he omitted questions [sic, read quotations] because Defoe seldom used quotation marks. He also eliminated “Proper names of persons and places,” although he counted “names of months, festivals, and similar phenomena.” “When in a quandary,” he writes, “I omitted such passages altogether.” (108; emphasis mine)

And since the Rothman group followed the Hargevik criteria we can assume they followed suit. But in another study, Rothman advocated removing “tagwords” such as “mother” and “father” as speaker designations so as not to distort Defoe’s average sentence length. He also advocated removing Latin quotes but not biblical quotes (“Stylometric Study”). We can guess but do not know if Rothman continued removing those items in the Rothman group study. However, a few problems remain: Did Hargevik also excise the word the along with Eighth in “Henry the Eighth”? The last sentence of the above quote (in bold) actually refers to Hargevik’s comments about quotations, not “similar phenomena.” Since Hargevik excluded quotations, why did the Rothman group include them? Did the Rothman group eliminate the 666 separate words and phrases of the native Madagascan languages from the texts? Did the Rothman group eliminate the 27 word paragraph on page 241 of the Journal that is in a native language and/or did they eliminate the 39 word translation of the prayer that immediately follows (Drury 1729, 241-242)? Why did the Rothman group not quote Hargevik’s comments about his treatment of hyphenation? On this point, Hargevik had written that

Hyphenation presented a major problem. I followed Yule’s system: “familiar and accepted instances were entered as single nouns … but compound words made up for the nonce … were divided.” (Yule, The Statistical Study …, p. 125) Needless to say, consistency is feasible only with immense labour. (29)

I would also like to add something else Hargevik said that the Rothman group left out. When discussing foreign languages he writes that “in these cases, the choice between inclusion and exclusion was of necessity very subjective” (29). Hargevik’s statement that he “excluded items which appeared to be over-represented in certain texts and thus caused disproportion between the two million-samples” (36) is obviously subjective. But worse, he did not tell us what they are—making it impossible to replicate his study.

As we have seen, Hargevik was not always successful in obtaining first editions. And he realizes the problems this can cause: “Defoe’s language has been changed in a most arbitrary way by certain editors … e.g., the word ‘further’ occurs twice in the first edition and twenty seven times in Aitken’s edition” (30). The Rothman group talked about using “The Stoke Newington Daniel Defoe Edition[s] published by AMS Press” (111) based on first editions but did not tell us what they did about changes made by the editors. We can assume that both Hargevik and the Rothman group excised catchwords and signatures—but they were silent on this.

Again, it is of vital importance that we know the exact makeup of the final input text—both studies are based on the number of words in the texts and the number of words in their study blocks. Both Hargevik and the Rothman group knew this but did not let us know exactly what they excised. But they do let us know how difficult and subjective these choices can be. This problem alone is enough to question the validity of the entire Rothman group undertaking.

V. The Rothman Group Experimental Plan

The Rothman group set out to determine if there were sections of the Journal that could be attributed to Defoe. Their “procedure conceptualized an analysis of four types of text in Robert Drury’s Journal as the basis for an assessment of authorship” (107). These four types of text are listed below in Appendix A.

To make sure that I understood how closely the Rothman group followed the Hargevik experimental plan, I asked Verma to confirm the following statements:

1. The study used the same exact one-million-word sample of Defoe’s works that Hargevik used.
2. The study used the exact one-million-word sample of the control group.
3. The study used the same Defoe 709 basic words and phrases Hargevik identified.
4. The study used the same Defoe rare words and phrases that Hargevik identified.

Verma confirmed all of the statements, adding that Rothman “wrote to, and even visited, several libraries in the USA and Britain to get hold of the exact editions that Hargevik used” (Verma 2019). This shows to what extraordinary lengths Rothman went to so that he would exactly duplicate the Hargevik criteria. This highlights the fact that Rothman was an exemplary traditional scholar.

The Rothman group then basically followed the Hargevik experimental plan but changed the text from Memoirs of an English Officer to that of Robert Drury’s Journal. Rather than the four selections, the entire Journal should have been subject to analysis; the entire text must be subjected to analysis to avoid experimenter’s bias. The Rothman group might have avoided this problem by using David Kaufer’s Docuscope techniques that use over 40 million English language patterns that are classified into over 100 rhetorical functions that found collaboration in the Federalist papers (Collins et al.) or other techniques such as Eder’s rolling stylometry that look for interpolations in texts by breaking the text into equal and overlapping blocks for analysis. By pre-selecting sections, an experimenter’s bias was introduced. This problem alone is enough to question the validity of the entire Rothman group undertaking.

VI. Replication and Duplication

In stylometric analysis, as for any other experimental method, a study’s results must be replicable if they are to be considered valid. As I have previously explained, replication “means to follow the experimental plan of the original study in every detail without the slightest deviation”; this is distinct from duplication, which “means to reproduce the results using a different experimental plan, such as different style markers, different statistical tests, different control groups” (Rudman, “Shakespeare’s Canon” 311). Neither the Hargevik nor the Rothman et al. study can be replicated. We do not know the input data (the texts). If Rothman were still alive, I am sure that all questions about the study would have been answered. I asked Verma for a few pages of the “log” that they referenced in their paper. He sent a file that, “contains all the matches using the Monoconc software for the Group 4 plus queries of Hargevik on the 11K word extract from Drury’s Journal” (Verma 2017). And Verma is willing to answer other questions, which shows the group’s willingness to be as transparent as possible. We do not know enough to duplicate the study. However, the problems of creating a valid Defoe sample and a valid control sample are (as we have seen) indomitable. There is a reason that non-traditional authorship attribution scholars in the main do not tackle the Daniel Defoe canon.

VII. Conclusion

The conclusion of the Rothman et al. article was that Defoe authored some sections of the Journal but not others. These sections are specified in figure 1. Defoe is identified as the author of two sections: selection two—the 8,889 word passages on religion; and selection three—the 2,965 word Drury’s second voyage. The group identified two other sections as not by Defoe: selection one—the 11,254 word initial narrative—and selection three—the 4,917 word speeches or stories. They concluded that the Journal should remain in the Defoe canon, “with the understanding of the limitations of Defoe’s authorship” (114). The conclusion of this paper is that the results of the Rothman et al. article are not valid and are not to be believed.¹³ Many problems may result from non-vetted articles published in a well-respected venue: the results may be incorporated into an author’s canon, and the techniques and methodologies (although fatally flawed) may be incorporated into other studies. The following quote from Hargevik is telling:

Mistakes may breed mistakes if one text is accepted on too loose grounds as written by Defoe and then other texts are then assigned to Defoe on the basis of the first assignment. It appears to be necessary … to establish methods of defining authorship which are as unaffected by human prejudice and subjective thinking as possible. (4)

This is why I felt a pointed critique was in order. By following Hargevik’s choice of corpora and his choice of marker words, the Rothman group’s study was doomed from the outset. I write this essay in part to warn Defoe scholars to ignore the results of these studies and to warn non-traditional attribution practitioners to use more modern techniques, letting Hargevik’s work take its place as a flawed historical step on the road to acceptable practices.

I would be remiss if I did not compliment the work of Woodell (a linguist) and Verma (a computer scientist). They did an admirable job of taking Hargevik’s 709 words and permutations into “more than 7,000 terms to query” (Rothman et al. 104) and analyzing the staggering mountains of data. It is understandable that they would accept Rothman’s lead on the corpora construction and other areas of the Hargevik criteria. Rothman was aware of the many pitfalls facing practitioners of non-traditional authorship attribution studies that are listed above. He cited two articles that discussed the problems (Rudman, “State of Authorship Attribution Studies” and “Unediting”) but chose to ignore the caveats.

 Appendix A: Editing and Production Errors

Many if not most of the production problems that appear in the Rothman at al. article can perhaps be attributed to the state of the AMS press in its waning years—the volume containing the Rothman group’s article was one of the last publications of the press before bankruptcy and liquidation. The AMS press sat on some of the submissions for this volume for almost ten years. The Rothman group article “was submitted to the Festschrift in 2007-08, I believe” (Verma 2019). There was little or no anonymous peer reviewing of the articles. There was little or no copyediting by the press near its end. According to Verma, “As far as I know, there were no interactions with a copy editor” (2019). The startling number of typographical and other minor errors in the essay tend to confirm that it received very little editorial attention. The authors and guest editors were left in the dark for a good portion of the publication process.¹⁴ But it is important to keep in mind as you read this paper that the Rothman group had not seen their initial submission for over ten years and that it was published before they had a chance to correct or modify it. They had no chance to read any reviewers’ comments and suggestions. Much of the turmoil in this esteemed press was caused by the declining health of its founder and operator, Gabriel Hornstein. His contributions to eighteenth-century studies cannot be overstated. Sadly, he passed away on February 17, 2017—a week before the publication of An Expanding Universe. This does not completely exonerate the editors or the authors but explains how the undetected errors could slip through. However, the other essays in the volume do not evidence the kind of errors found in the Rothman et al. article.

The first problems to be pointed out have to do with the presentation of the four sections of the Journal that the Rothman group selected to be tested to see if any or all of them were written by Defoe—problems with identification and pagination. The four times that these selections are printed in the paper are listed below in figs. 1 through 4.

Problem: Inconsistency in listing the content of the four selections. Note that the Rothman group transposes selection 3 and 4 in figs. 1 and 2. They then go back to the original order of fig. 1 in fig. 3. However, they again transpose selection 3 and 4 in fig. 1 and fig. 4 (observe that they also change from Arabic numerals to letters in fig. 4).

Problem: Incorrect inclusive page and line numbers for the four selections (in fig. 3). In the first selection the page and line numbers are given as 39:1-71:11. The actual numbers are 1:1-56:20. It did not take long to determine that the 39:1-71:11 numbers are from a different edition—the 1890 edition that was edited and expurgated by Pasfield Oliver even though the Rothman group stated that these numbers are from the 1729 edition (112). There are two sections that make up their second selection. They got the first of the two correct. The second of the two they gave as 230:8-88. The numbers should be 230:8-256:9. The ‘88’ is a mystery—it is not the page number, the number of pages, nor the number of lines. The numbers of the third selection are correct. The fourth selection has three sections. The first two are correct. The third one is given as 105:17-105:37. The actual numbers are 105:17-115:25. There are no pages of the 1729 edition of the Journal with 37 lines.

Problem: There are other (perhaps inconsequential) irregularities and inconsistencies. In fig. 1 under Selection 1 and Selection 2, “a” should be “an.” In fig.3 under 2 note that there are no quotation marks before “He” or after “them.” Also in fig. 3 under 4 note that the phrase “enter’d the Country without Opposition” is extraneous and should not be there. In fig. 4 under C, “words” should be singular.

However, there are serious problems with these four selections. The Rothman group re-used the “Sam’s Story’s” seven pages from selection one. They were included in selection four (see fig. 1). This duplication is not obvious from reading the Rothman group article because of the errors in the page numbers. It only becomes obvious when you look at the correct page numbers and read the selections. We do not know what that does to the results for selection one but it does cast a cloud over the results. The Rothman group also tainted selection four by including some explanatory material before their third part of selection four, part three (see Selection 4 of fig. 1). Furthermore, this selection is by the narrator (which is not a “different voice” as advertised). This also taints the selection.

Fig. 1 —From Rothman et al. 1. Note: I changed Rothman et al.’s word “corpus” in this figure to “selection” in order to avoid confusion with their other uses of the word corpus.

 

Fig. 2 —From Rothman et al. 112

 

Fig. 3 —From Rothman et al. 113

 

Fig. 4 —From Rothman et al. 113

Of course, most of the problems highlighted in this appendix do not invalidate the results of their study—it is the rare scholar who has not seen an error creep into a published work (and I will not cast the first stone). However, the errors are frustrating as the reader tries to understand the authors’ methods. And these many errors do give rise to the specter of other undetected errors in the reporting of the experimental plan, the analysis, and the results.

Carnegie Mellon University

Notes

¹ See Holmes for a good basic overview. For two encyclopedia entries that give an overview of the topic, See Rudman, “Authorship Attribution” and “Stylometrics.” Also, see Rudman, “State of Authorship Attribution Studies” and “State of Non-Traditional Authorship Attribution” for two more comprehensive articles.

² The term ripost is used in the non-traditional authorship attribution community to refer to the totality of a multi-faceted pointed critique of a non-traditional attribution experiment.

³ The scope of this paper does not allow for an up-to-date general survey of the field of non-traditional authorship attribution studies. Nor does it allow for a complete presentation of a proper experimental plan for a valid way to do a non-traditional study of the Defoe canon. At the time of publication, this Zotero group offers a searchable bibliography of about 4,000 entries of non-traditional studies, as well as a list of suggested readings for those new to the field. For two truncated exempla of Defoe experimental plans see Rudman, “Non-Traditional Authorship” and “Unediting.”

⁴ See Rudman, “Shakespeare’s Canon” for a more complete treatment of the collaboration concept.

⁵ The Furbank and Owens (“Stylometry and the Defoe Canon”) vs Rothman (“Defoe De-Attribution Scrutinized,” “Response”) give and take that took place in The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America covered some of the same problems with the work of Ellegård and Hargevik that are explicated in this paper.

⁶ See Beers for a detailed treatment of Hargevik’s errors.

⁷ I compiled the numbers and percentages about the texts from Hargevik, Appendix I (pp. I-VIII) and Appendix II (pp. IX-XVIII).

⁸ See Rudman, “Cherry Picking” for a more complete treatment of cherry picking.

⁹ Genre is an important variable in non-traditional authorship attribution studies. It must be controlled for. If genre cannot be controlled for, the practitioner must calculate a systematic error and fold it into the final result. The studies that come closest to questioning this are ones where the genres follow similar linguistic rules, such as tragicomedy and comedy. No one questions the need to separate sonnets from essays. Another point to keep in mind is that genre separation must also include separating sub-genres—e.g., poetry within a novel, a song within a drama.

¹⁰ The Rothman group was aware of my 2005 paper that had the following comment on genre:

It has been shown empirically that style-markers vary significantly over different genres (Karlgren and Cutting) (Stamatatos, Fakotakis and Kokkinakis). Burrows has shown that stylistic differences are greater among the various genres written by the same author than they are between different authors writing in the same genre. He has a telling graph that “shows a complex pattern in which genre transcends authorship” (Burrows 101-102). Binongo reinforces this: “When the essays and plays are brought together into one picture…the differences in genre predominate over other factors (Binongo 114).

¹¹ This suggested range was arrived at by looking at all of the studies that determined a stylochronological change—e.g., Boyd 7, Evans 128, Bramer and Miltos, Stamou, Hoover, Pennebaker and Stone.

¹² See Rudman, “Unediting” and “Shakespeare’s Canon” for a more complete treatment.

¹³ Note that this paper does not discuss Hargevik’s “distinctiveness groups” or the way his statistics determine authorship. This essay’s focus is on the validity of the Rothman team’s results. If the input data (the texts) are invalid, the results of any tests would be invalid.

¹⁴ This information was garnered from conversations with James E. May, who published a chapter in the volume, and Kevin L. Cope, one of the volume editors.

Works Cited

Ashley, Leonard R.N. Authorship and Evidence. Librairie Droz, 1968.

Beers, Yardly. Introduction to the Theory of Errors. Addison Wesley, 1958.

Binongo, J.N.G. “Stylometry and Implementation by Principal Component Analysis.” 2000. University of Ulster, Ph.D. Dissertation.

Boyd, Ryan. “Mental Profile Mapping: A Psychological Single-Candidate Authorship Attribution Method.” PLoS ONE vol.13, no. 7, 2018, pp. e0200588. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0200588.

Bramer, Max, and Miltos Petridis. “Stylochronomerty: Timeline Prediction in Stylometric Analysis.” Research and Development in Intelligent Systems XXXII, edited by Carmen Klaussner and Carl Vogel, Springer, 2015, pp. 91-106.

Burrows, John. “Not Unless You Ask Nicely: The Interpretive Nexus Between Analysis and Information.” Literary and Linguistic Computing, vol. 7, 1992, pp. 91-110.

Carleton, George. The Memoirs of an English Officer: who serv’d on the Dutch war in 1672. To the peace of Utrecht, in 1713. London, 1728.

Collins, Jeff, et al. “Detecting Collaborations in Text: Comparing the Authors’ Rhetorical Language Choices in The Federalist Papers.” Computers and the Humanities, vol. 38, no. 1, 2004, pp. 15-36.

Craig, Hugh. “Stylistic Analysis and Authorship Studies.” A Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman et al., Blackwell, 2004, pp. 273-288.

Drury, Robert. Madagascar; Or, Robert Drury’s Journal, During Fifteen Years’ Captivity on That Island; And a Further Description of Madagascar by the Abbé Alexis Rochon, edited by Pasfield Oliver. Macmillan Co., 1890.

—. Madagascar: Or, Robert Drury’s Journal, During Fifteen Years Captivity on That Island. London, 1729.

Eder, Maciej. “Rolling Stylometry.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, vol. 31, no. 3, 2016, pp. 457-469.

Ellegård, Alvar. A Statistical Method for Determining Authorship: The Junius Letters. Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1962.

Evans, Melanie A. “Style and Chronology: A Stylometric Investigation of Aphra Behn’s Dramatic Style and the Dating of The Young King.” Language and Literature, vol. 27, no. 2, 2018, pp. 103-132.

Furbank, Philip N. and W. R. Owens. Defoe De-Attribution: A Critique of J. R. Moore’s Checklist. The Hambledon Press, 1994.

Hargevik, Stieg. The Disputed Assignment of Memoirs of an English Officer to Daniel Defoe. Vol. 1, Almqvist & Wiksell, 1974.

Holmes, David. “The Analysis of Literary Style—A Review.” The Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (Series A [General]), vol. 148, no. 4, 1985, pp. 328-341.

Hoover, David. “Corpus Stylistics, Stylometry, and the Styles of Henry James.” Style, vol. 41, no. 2, 2007, pp. 174-203.

Karlgren, Jussi and Douglas Cutting. “Recognizing Text Genres With Simple Metrics Using Discriminant Analysis.” In Proceedings of COLING 94, The 15^th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, August 5-9, 1994, pp. 1071-1075.

Love, Harold. Attributing Authorship: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Mosteller, Frederick and David L. Wallace. Applied Bayesian and Classical Inference: The Case of The Federalist Papers. Springer Verlag, 1984.

Newsome, Richard. “An Investigation into the Authorship of the 1745 Continuation of Defoe’s ‘Roxana.’” 10 June 1987. Author’s collection.

Owens, W. R. and P. N. Furbank. “Stylometry and the Defoe Canon: A Reply to Irving Rothman.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 96, no. 3, 2002, pp. 463-465.

Pennebaker, James, and Lori D. Stone. “Words of Wisdom: Language Use Over the Life Span.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 35, no. 2, 2003, pp. 291-301.

Rothman, Irving N. “A Response to P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 96, no. 3, 2002, pp. 465-469.

—. “Defoe De-Attribution Scrutinized under Hargevik Criteria: Applying Stylometrics to the Canon.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 94, no. 3, 2000, pp. 375-398.

—. “A Stylometric Study of the Variant Styles of Daniel Defoe.” South Central Society for Eighteenth Century Studies Convention, 25 Feb. 1999, Shreveport, LA. Conference Presentation.

Rothman, Irving N., et al. “Defoe’s Contribution to Robert Drury’s Journal: A Stylometric Analysis.” An Expanding Universe: The Project of Eighteenth-Century Studies, Essays Commemorating the Career of Jim Springer Borck, edited by Kevin L. Cope and Cedrick D. Reverend II, AMS, 2017, pp. 93-116.

Rudman, Joseph. Review of ‘Defoe’s Contribution to Robert Drury’s Journal: A Stylometric Analysis, by Irving N. Rothman et al. Scriblerian, vol. 51, no. 1, 2018, pp. 10-11.

—. “Non-Traditional Authorship Attribution Studies of William Shakespeare’s Canon: Some Caveats.” Journal of Early Modern Studies, vol. 5, 2016, pp. 307-328.

—. “The State of Non-Traditional Authorship Attribution–2012: Some Problems and Solutions.” English Studies, vol. 93, no. 3, 2012, pp. 259-274.

—. “Stylometrics.” Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences, edited by P. C. Hogan, Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 817-819.

—. “Authorship Attribution: Statistical and Computational Methods.” Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, edited by K. Brown, Elsevier, 2006, pp. 611-617.

—. “Unediting, De-Editing, and Editing in Non-Traditional Authorship Attribution Studies: With an Emphasis on the Canon of Daniel Defoe.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 99, no. 1, 2005, pp. 5-36.

—. “Cherry Picking in Non-Traditional Authorship Attribution Studies.” Chance, vol. 16, no. 2, 2003, pp. 26-32.

—. “Non-Traditional Authorship Attribution Studies in Eighteenth Century Literature: Stylistics Statistics and the Computer.” Jahrbuch für Computerphilologie, vol. 4. 2002, pp. 151-166.

—. “The State of Authorship Attribution Studies: Some Problems and Solutions.” Computers and the Humanities, vol. 31, 1998, pp. 351-365.

Stamatatos, E., N. Fakotakis, and G. Kokkinakis. “Text Genre Detection Using Common Word Frequencies.”  Proceedings of COLING 2000, The 18^th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, July 31 – August 4 2000, vol. 2, pp. 808-814.

Stamou, Constatina. “Stylochronometry: Stylistic Development, Sequence of Composition, and Relative Dating.” Literary and Linguistic Computing, vol. 23, no. 2, 2007, pp. 181-199.

Verma, Rakesh. E-mail to the author. 23 Sept. 2019.

—. E-mail to the author, 18 Aug. 2017.

Yule, G. Udny. The Statistical Study of Literary Vocabulary. Cambridge University Press, 1944.

Abstract: The article revisits a relatively neglected novel in the Defoe canon, Memoirs of a Cavalier. It argues that whilst the Cavalier’s political affiliations were certainly not accidental, they could be said to be incidental. And, moreover, that this was a deliberate strategy on the part of the author, designed to undercut any simpler political or cultural affinities which might be found elsewhere in myriad similar “memorials” published in the early years of the eighteenth-century. In short, Defoe presents his readers with a Cavalier who is anything but cavalier. The article first revisits Defoe’s literary politics, in order to contextualize the Memoirs, before proceeding to re-read the narrative itself. More closely still it explores the extent to which the narrative realizes the particular aspiration stated in its Preface, to “correct” Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion. It closes reflectively, wondering about the possibility that the Cavalier somehow ended up fighting on the wrong side, and perhaps writing on it too.

Keywords: Memoirs of a Cavalier, Clarendon, Gustavus Adolphus, King Charles I, Marvell

THERE are a handful of images of Daniel Defoe. Two in particular tend to be ubiquitous, though the provenance of both remains contested. It is a shadiness that seems somehow apt for a novelist who spent much of his middle years working as a government agent. An engraving by Michael Vandergucht “after” Jeremiah Taverner, from around 1706, and a portrait presently attributed to an “artist unknown, in the style of Sir Godfrey Kneller.”¹ The comparison intrigues. Powdered, wigged and slightly podgy of face in the Vandergucht, a fair bit thinner, and rather more sober, in the “style of Kneller.” The intervening couple of decades had been wearying, and, provenance permitting, it shows. There is report that the younger Defoe had been a little dandyish in his tastes.² He certainly liked a good wig. But in neither image can he be said to look particularly cavalier. Back in 1703 the London Gazette had published an advertisement offering a reward of £50 to “whosoever shall discover” the said Daniel Defoe, together with a brief description of a “middle siz’d spare man, about forty years old, of a brown complexion, and dark brown-coloured hair, but wears a wig; a hooked nose, a sharp chin, and a large mole near his mouth” (West, Defoe, 75). Hardly cutting much of dash then.

It seems apposite, for this article is about Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier, a relatively neglected novel in the canon.³ Like so many of Defoe’s writings, the Memoirs is a rather elusive piece; the closer it is read, the more it unsettles expectations—not least in the presentation of its eponymous protagonist, who does not, on closer inspection, seem to be particularly cavalier either.⁴ It will be argued that Defoe made his protagonist a “cavalier” for reasons that were incidental, rather than simply accidental. Accidents happen, incidents are measured, more commonly devised. Physicists project intersections in lines or beams of light, epidemiologists calculate the probabilities which attach to alternative strategies of medical intervention, economists model the consequences of targeted taxation policies. None of them leave incident to chance.

And the same is true of writers, whether conceiving a novel or scripting a history. The writing rationalizes, giving coherence and meaning to contingencies various imagined, in the process fashioning incidents from seeming accidents. Richard Rorty refers to contingent “ironies,” fashioned by situated, essentially narrative, selves (5-6). As we will see, at various points in the Memoirs, Defoe will insinuate that his “cavalier” might have fought for either side in the various wars through which he stumbles. But that does not make his choices accidental. It simply means that they were shaped by the context of their author in his moment. In this way incidental histories, whether purporting to be fictional or otherwise, betray their peculiarly historicist prejudice.⁵ It can be argued that no English novelist has evinced a greater sensitivity to this prejudice than Daniel Defoe, a writer whose own politics can be notoriously difficult to pin down (see Richetti 20-2, 70-84, 126-7). No English novelist indeed better fits the mould of the Rortian ironist, constantly adjusting to contingent political conditions, seeing how incidental “encounters go” and poeticizing their consequence (Rorty, 60-1). And no novel that Defoe wrote evinces this sensitivity more acutely than the Memoirs of a Cavalier.⁶

In the first part of this article, we will explore further the moment in which Defoe conceived and wrote his Memoirs. It was, as we will see, an exercise in ironic self-fashioning. We will then turn to the text itself, investigating its pretended provenance, its notably sceptical commentary on war and its intriguing comparison of two differently warring kings, Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden and King Charles I of England, before contemplating the place of religion in the mind of Defoe’s cavalier. The final section is more speculative still, wondering not least if the eponymous anti-hero ended up fighting on the wrong side in the English civil war. We will also wonder the extent to which the Memoirs might be considered a history and, if so, of what?

I. The Moment

Memoirs of a Cavalier was published in 1720, early in what was Defoe’s third career. A first, as a hosiery and woollen factor, had failed by the closing years of the seventeenth century. It would be followed by a necessarily tendentious foray into the world of party-political journalism, working as Robert Harley’s spin-doctor.⁷ A position he secured as an inadvertent consequence of publishing a brilliant satire entitled The Shortest Way with Dissenters at the end of 1702, the closer subject of which was “occasional conformity.” The consequence of publication for Defoe was prosecution for seditious libel, three days in the pillory, and a rather unflattering advertisement in the London Gazette. ⁸

Harley fell from power in summer 1714, taking Defoe with him. Six years of rather eclectic writing would follow, scattered pieces on domestic manners, “stock-jobbery,” and Scottish Church history.⁹ Before the appearance, in 1719, of a first novel, Robinson Crusoe, to be followed the next year by two more, Captain Singleton and Memoirs of a Cavalier. Three novels sharing some evident similarities. Three very masculine heroes embarking on journeys of discovery, not least within themselves, each of which melded picaresque adventure with the classic redemption story.¹⁰

And, in the case of the Memoirs, something else too. For the Memoirs is also a historical novel, its protagonist journeying back into a still-recent past to remind readers of what England used to be like not that long ago. For this reason, the Memoirs can be categorized with Defoe’s slightly later Journal of a Plague-Year. Both texts were designed to be didactic.¹¹ In the case of the Journal, it was to advise the possible consequence of another plague.¹² In the case of the Memoirs, it was to warn of prospective Jacobite insurgencies, a fear heightened only a year earlier by another abortive uprising in Scotland; itself only four years after the more concerted rebellion in support of the “Old Pretender.”¹³

Both rebellions might have been repelled, but their spectres remained to haunt the London imagination. Something emphasized by Edward Thompson in his brilliant study of the so-called “Black” Acts. The closer purpose of the Acts might have been to tighten anti-poaching legislation in Waltham and Windsor forests, but their enactment spoke to far broader anxieties regarding prospective Jacobite insurgencies in the “home” counties (Thompson 67-72). It was these same anxieties which, as Defoe well knew, would fuel the sales of his Memoirs of a Cavalier. And continue to do so. Two years after publication, Walpole’s government would suspend the Habeas Corpus Act, as a caution against rumours of another Jacobite uprising across the south of England.¹⁴

The Memoirs were then both didactic and fashionable. The previous twenty years had witnessed a stream of histories and “memorials,” of the English civil wars especially, facilitated, in part at least, by the lapse of the Licensing Act regulations in 1695. Amongst the more cavalier could be counted the Memoirs of Sir Philip Warwick, personal secretary to the martyred King Charles, and those of Sir Thomas Herbert, who pretended to have been the same King’s best mate. Rounder-headed alternatives included the Memorials of Bulstrode Whitelock, The Shorter Memorials of Thomas Lord Fairfax, the Memoirs of Denzil Holles, the Discourses of Algernon Sidney and the Life of John Milton. And the Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow. We should pause here for a moment, for there is something importantly odd about Ludlow’s “memoirs.”

Former parliamentary war hero and commissioner at the trial of King Charles I, Ludlow had escaped to the town of Vevey, near Bern, in 1660, where he was visited, shortly before his death in 1692, by his old friend, Slingsby Bethel. Bethel returned a few months later with a draft manuscript entitled The Voice from the Watchtower. A very big manuscript, it transpired, unlike the published Memoirs, which appeared in three volumes in 1698-99, and was shorter by three quarters of a million words. The shorter Memoirs also told a rather different life.¹⁵ Ludlow the fierce puritan had become Ludlow the champion of revolution “principles.” Quite who took a knife to the original draft remains uncertain. Bethel possibly, but more likely the publisher John Toland, already busy writing up Fairfax, Holles and Milton. Editing, in effect, a serialised prequel to the “glorious” revolution, fashioned as a set of “memoirs.”¹⁶

We can only conjecture, but it is reasonable to assume that Defoe was familiar with most, if not all, of these histories. The Memoirs certainly intimates a reading of Whitelock and Ludlow. It has been suggested that Defoe was writing against their politicization, seeking to present a history uncorrupted by “Faction,” and that his choice of genre was intended to facilitate this (Seager, 481-4, 489, 500). A “Romance the likest to Truth that I ever read,” as the editor of the second edition would hazard half a century on (Seager, 480, 491). We will return to matters of genre and provenance shortly, as we will the narrative of the Memoirs. We should, though, pause to contemplate a particular insinuation written into the Preface.

An allusion to what would become the most influential of all the “memoirs” of the civil wars. The History of the Rebellion, written by Sir Edward Hyde, later Lord Clarendon. Or at least mainly written by Sir Edward, for there was again some editorial interference, this time on the part of Sir Edward’s son Lawrence, who composed a cautionary preface for the second edition, which appeared in early 1703. It should be remembered, Lawrence told his readers, that in an “an age when so many memoirs, narratives, and pieces of history come out as it were on purpose to justify the taking of arms against the King, and to belittle, revile and ridicule the sacred majesty of an anointed head,” only half a century ago a dreadful “murder” had been “committed on a pious prince.”¹⁷

And a dreadful injustice inflicted on Lawrence’s father. The History of the Rebellion was, first and foremost, a history of its author. The published version of the History, which had finally appeared a year before, incorporated draft sections of a Life by Himself. Something which could only add to the testamentary, and exculpatory, tone. A greatest hits album, selected by the artist himself and his son. Not that it was billed as such. On the contrary, the History promised a “full and clear narration,” without any “mixture of private passion or animosity,” the integrity of which was enhanced by the simple fact that it only contained accounts of what the author had personally experienced.¹⁸

The integrity of the account also depended, of course, on Sir Edward’s reputation: a man of “innate goodness and justice,” as well as “wonderful tenderness,” ever motivated to “maintain the government and preserve the law”; the epitome of the “honest and wise” councillor, to whom the late King had so often cause to express “thanks” for his many “good services” (Clarendon 1843, 933-7, 992-3); and a historian whose word could not be doubted, who had recorded events with “all faithfulness and ingenuity,” attesting the “faults and infirmities of both sides,” and cherishing the central tenet of this faith, that the “love of truth” is the “soul of history.” Only the historian who admits this, and does this, “deserves to be believed.” Like Sir Edward: “I know myself to be very free from any of those passions which naturally transport men with prejudice towards the persons whom they are obliged to mention and whose actions they are at liberty to censure” (Clarendon, 1).

Peculiarly well-placed, then, to write a definitive history of the “great rebellion.” Purposed to entertain, of course, but also to counsel, as Laurence emphasized, so “that posterity may not be deceived,” to make “visible” how easily “all foundations of law and liberty” might be destroyed (Clarendon, 1). The intimation was plain enough; time to start paying attention to the still “perplexed condition of our times” or the same might happen again. Small wonder that Queen Anne made her displeasure known.¹⁹ Lawrence editorialized his father’s History for much the same reason as Toland took his scalpel to Ludlow’s Memoirs. Refurbishing the past, to make the present seem familiar.

This is precisely what Defoe set off to do when he resolved to write his Memoirs in the necessary shade of Edward Hyde and his History, like pretty much everyone else who, over the coming century, would venture to write a history of the “rebellion.”²⁰ The Preface to the Memoirs confirmed that it was published as a corrective: “In a Word, this Work is a Confutation of the many Errors in all the writers upon the Subject of our Wars in England even in the extraordinary History written by the Earl of Clarendon” (3). Except that, on second glance, it is difficult to see precisely what the Cavalier is really correcting.

II. The Memoirs

The Memoirs of a Cavalier is structured in two parts, telling the story of the protagonist’s participation in successive military campaigns. The subtitle of the original edition was A Military Journal. The first part follows our hero to the continent, starting with some scattered adventures in France and Italy, before he wanders, almost inadvertently, into the Thirty Years War, ending up fighting in the army of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. He then returns to fight in the English civil wars on the side of King Charles. Understandably, the Memoirs can, as a consequence, read like a very long list of battles and sieges, something that would be of evident value to military historians, but less interesting, perhaps, to anyone else. Unless, that is, they dig a little deeper under the surface, at which point it becomes apparent that nothing is quite what it seems.

Provenance

Starting with the matter of provenance. The question of veracity arose early in the publishing history of the Memoirs, the editor of the second edition wondering the extent to which they were more “romance” than “history.” The Preface addresses the matter head-on. Unavoidable, given that they were intended as a “corrective” to all the other “memoirs” flooding the market, but in so doing hardly adding much by way of assurance. The very first sentence is designed to unsettle. The “Memorials” have been discovered by “great Accident” and might have been “written many Years ago” (1). Or maybe not.

Another editorial tease follows, confirmation that the manuscript was found amongst the “Plunder” after the battle of Worcester in 1651, and fell into the possession of the narrator’s father, a Major in a Parliamentarian “Regiment of Horse.” And apparently untouched, or maybe just tidied up, or scalped à la Toland? Who knows. But before anyone starts to worry too much about any of this, Defoe is quick to point out that history will be the poorer if pedants are allowed to distract themselves, and everyone else, with such matters. The “Actions here mentioned have a sufficient Sanction from all the Histories of the Times to which they relate” (1). Of which two are much the most obvious: For the first part of the Memoirs, William Watt’s The Swedish Intelligencer, published in 1632; for the second, Hyde’s History.

The circulating conversation of history. Not that the reader discovers the identity of the conversationalist who has written up his Memoirs. A “Concern” which the Preface also addresses, assuring the reader that “no small Labour has been thrown away” in trying to find out who he might be, but to no avail. A Shropshire gentleman, born in 1608, is all we are told. ²¹ An evasion that is reminiscent, of course, of the similarly nameless chronicler in the Journal of a Plague Year. Evasive protagonists are hardly unusual in a Defoe novel, but they matter more where there is a greater pretence to experiential authenticity. The narrator, as the Preface urges, has been “present in every Action here related” (2).

Accordingly, there is only brief comment on the death of Gustavus at the battle of Lutzen, because “it is not my Design to write a History of any more of these Wars than I was actually concerned with” (110). And the same is true for the rather different death of Charles I, and its consequence. The “History of the Times will supply the Particulars which I omit, being willing to confine my self to my own Accounts and Observations.” Having taken oath not take up arms again, and not wishing to be “hanged,” the Cavalier takes no part in the second civil war in summer 1648, for which reason he is “now no more an Actor, but a melancholy Observator of the Misfortunes of the Times” (270, 279). We will revisit these particular “misfortunes” shortly.

Meanwhile, we can speculate some reasons for Defoe’s refusal to name his protagonist. First, it was fashionable to hide identities, even in published “memoirs.” It might even have added a sense of verity, rather than just making up a name. A further layer of mystery too, paradoxically, and, of course, if written to type, there was no real need. Except that, as we will discover, the Cavalier is another of Defoe’s protagonists who does not play to type. He should be “Wrong but Wromantic,” but turns out to be neither really.²² A chastened Cavalier, in the end, haunted by self-doubt, who ends up writing a “memorials” which, if not quite puritan, is a long way from being cavalier. Which, of course, makes the story so much more human and believable. A young man, more restless than idealistic, who drifts off to the continent in search of adventure and ends up becoming a soldier. And then, by dint of what Defoe liked to term “hard Fate,” begins to wander.

The Experience of War

The idea that Memoirs of a Cavalier might be read as a redemption-novel hardly comes as a surprise.²³ It is only the context which shifts from one Defoe “adventure” to another; Robinson Crusoe on a desert-island, Bob Singleton lost at sea, the chronicler of the “plague-year” wandering the streets of a dystopian London. Each enduring their fate with a commendable stoicism, all, in the end, coming back to their God. For the Cavalier, it is an experience inscribed on the battlefield.

He sets out for the Continent aged just twenty-two, suitably impressionable. A few months spent confirming what all of Defoe’s readers would have known, that France was a country full of conmen and papists, and most of Italy too, and prone to civil unrest as a consequence. So violent that it leaves the young Cavalier with an “Aversion to popular Tumults all my Life after” (21). Departing Italy, he wanders into Germany, encountering the Imperial army at the siege of Magdeburg. Horrified by the atrocities which follow the capture of the city, he decides to join the Saxon army instead, after which he will move on to the Swedish. Wandering armies, much as he wanders countries, almost a mercenary. The Cavalier does not speak too much of fighting for money, but he lives by it.²⁴ At least he ends up on the right side, on this occasion, fighting for the right king, Gustavus Adolphus. One who is not only a military genius, but who also appreciates that wars, contrary to more romantic imaginings, are not at all “pleasant” (58-9).

As yet, the Cavalier is too young to properly appreciate this wisdom. He will need to fight, and lose, another war, and the losing streak has, in fact, already started. Following Gustavus’s death, the Protestant armies suffer a series of reversals, and, all the fun draining away, the Cavalier decides to move on. A leisurely trip through the Low Countries and then back to England for the next adventure. Unable to express anything other than “secret Joy” on hearing that a different Protestant prince, Charles Stuart, would like him to accept a “Commission” in his army, he ventures north to defeat the perfidious Scots:

I have often reflected since, that I ought to have known better, that had seen how the most flourishing Provinces of Germany were reduced to the most miserable Condition that ever any Country in the World was, by the Ravaging of Soldiers, and the Calamities of War (121-2).

Here again, though, it is not a wisdom which the Cavalier presently enjoys. Even as he discovers, on arriving in Northumberland, the most “despicable Appearance of Men in Arms to begin a War” that he has ever seen in his “Life” (123). A sobering portent.

When the English civil wars break out, the Cavalier stays with the King, for no better reason than he likes fighting. An incidental choice, in other words. The collateral question of why he picked the King’s “Side” is something to which we will return. Here again, older and wiser, the Cavalier will reflect on his decision to fight at all:

I went as eagerly and blindly about my Business, as the meanest Wretch that listed in the Army; nor had I the least compassionate Thought for the Miseries of my native Country, ’till after the Fight at Edgehill.

And again, a few pages later, having recounted the course of the battle, overcome by a “strange secret and unaccountable Sadness upon my Spirits to see this acting in my own native Country” (165). No war, as the Preface confirms, is so “unnatural” as a civil (3). But still, in the moment, there is no question of retiring from the fray. The Cavalier will fight on, for another four grim years.

He will later wonder if his experiences in Germany had not, in fact, inured him against the “inhuman Barbarity” of war:

Whether this had hardened me against the natural Tenderness which I afterwards found return upon me, or not, I cannot tell; but I reflected upon my self afterwards with a great deal of Trouble, for the Unconcernedness of my Temper at the approaching Ruin of my native Country. (125)

Myriad incidents of such “ruin” litter the ensuring narrative; “the ravishing of Women, and the murthering of Men,” the “Rudeness” of soldiers on both sides (226). Along with the same recurring tone of regret:

It grieved me to the Heart, even in the Rout of our Enemies, to see the Slaughter of them; and even in the Fight to hear a man Cry for Quarter in English, moved me to Compassion which I had never been used to… Here I saw my self at the cutting of the Throats of my Friends; and indeed some of near Relations. (165)

But still he keeps fighting and making excuses. Trying to blame the sacking of Leicester in early 1645 on the recalcitrance of the defenders, recounting that he personally ordered his troops to attack one house in the city on the grounds because he needed to “make them an Example” (242). A modern jurist might recognise a war crime. As did contemporaries. When King Charles was put on trial at Westminster in January 1649, the siege of Leicester was presented as a heinous example of the breaches of the “laws of war.” Otherwise, though, the Cavalier breezes through the sacking, leaving just a few statistics behind.

The account builds. Riding through Lincolnshire, his Dragoons commit “some Disorders” and treat the locals “very coarsly” (252) before riding off towards Huntingdon to do the same. The sense of unease might be growing, but for now the Cavalier is still unable, perhaps unwilling, to desist.²⁵ He will fight to the bitterest of ends, after which it will be time to atone—in part, by writing up a “Memorials,” for the edification of later generations. A “corrective” to Clarendon on its face, perhaps, but, primarily, a corrective to his former self.

A Tale of Two Kings

In terms of tally, the Cavalier wins one war, and loses another. The reasons might be various, but one matters most. The Cavalier enjoys a series of victories in his first war because the King of Sweden is a military genius, and he suffers a sequence of debilitating defeats in his second war because the King of England is not. So much is given away at the very outset, the Preface advising the reader that they will shortly be invited to compare the “great Actions of the glorious” Gustavus Adolphus with the recurring “Mistakes” of Charles Stuart, which end up with the “Overthrow of his Armies, the Loss of his Crown and Life, and the Ruin of the Constitution” (3). Nothing new here, of course, except that the Cavalier is peculiarly well-positioned to inform the reader, having met both kings, with Charles indeed, recalling “frequent Discourses” (247).

Cloying accounts of Gustavus were au courant. The “Caesar and Alexander of our times,” Watt proclaimed in his Intelligencer. The young Cavalier’s audience with the Swedish king leaves him suitably “overcome with the Goodness of his Discourse” (59). So much to admire, as commander-in-chief and man: the sobriety, the shared distaste for whoring and ill-discipline, the restraint which he demands of his soldiers in the wake of their various, stunning victories. If there is any quality which really shines, aside from the innate humanity, it is the decisiveness.²⁶ If only every Protestant prince was like Gustavus Adolphus.

And not only Gustavus Adolphus. Various other pen-portraits in the Memoirs serve to reinforce the sense that Charles Stuart was an oddly uninspiring prince. The French “Queen Mother,” for example, Marie de Medici. If she had been “at the Helm of England” in 1642, there would probably never have been a civil war.²⁷ He is hardly sympathetic to her politics, but the young Cavalier is very impressed by how she quells the “mutinous people of Lyons” (21). And then, later in the narrative, comes a laudatory sketch of the parliamentarian commander-in-chief, Sir Thomas Fairfax: “He was a compleat General, strict in his Discipline, wary in Conduct, fearless in Action, unwearied in the Fatigue of the War, and withal, of a modest, noble, generous Disposition” (238). The English Gustavus.

Charles Stuart, in comparison, lacks pretty much all of this. There is a kind of modesty, but it is the wrong kind. The crippling shyness which inhibits decision-making, and which Clarendon indeed acknowledges. A prince so readily “prevailed” upon, brought down ultimately by the “irresolution and unsteadiness of his own counsels” (Clarendon, 540). Charles lacks presence, both metaphorically and figuratively. A king “seldom seen amongst us,” too closeted, too persuadable, too easily “bullied” (126-7). The King, in short, whose tragedy centres the History of the Rebellion, a “good king,” but blighted by “infirmities and imperfections” (Clarendon, Preface, 5).

Which are now reinvested by the Cavalier:

I cannot, without Regret, look back upon the Misfortune of the King, who, as he was one of the best Princes in his personal Conduct that ever reigned in England, had yet some of the greatest Unhappiness in his Conduct as King, that ever Prince had, and the whole Course of his Life demonstrated it. (137)

A weakness of character which was never more brutally exposed than when going into battle. Recalling Edgehill, the Cavalier cannot but compare Charles with “my old Heroe” Gustavus (156). A man of decision, who knew precisely when to attack an unsuspecting enemy. Unlike Charles who, as Clarendon confirmed, dithered until late afternoon on the day of the battle, before deciding to take the initiative, and then afterwards, wasting the chance of pressing on towards London.²⁸ Not that it was entirely his fault. The chance of securing a decisive “victory” at Edgehill “vanished” when Prince Rupert charged off into the middle of nowhere (Clarendon, 308-12). A recurring habit, as Clarendon’s depiction of the battle of Naseby confirmed. Clarendon did not much rate Rupert, and neither does the Cavalier. Not just reckless, but negligent too, repeatedly allowing his soldiers to inflict “Cruelties” and “great Spoil among the Country People” (167).

We will, very shortly, contemplate the rather breathless conclusion to the Memoirs. So rushed, indeed, that the narrator has little time to say anything about the trial of the King in January 1649. “In this Hurry they sacrificed their King,” the Cavalier writes hurriedly (270). The reason, of course, is the pretence to experiential veracity. The Cavalier was not at the trial, and so is unable to add much to existing reports. The “History of the Times,” as we have already noted, will be left to “supply the Particulars.” Not that they were to be discovered in much greater detail in Clarendon’s History, and for much the same reason. A page and a half on the trial itself, mainly the “insolences” suffered by the King in Westminster Hall, followed by another on his “character.” Enough to confirm the King as a “lover of justice,” and to reiterate his lack of “resolution,” a man who “abhorred all debauchery” but was not “very enterprising” (Clarendon, 695-8). Hardly a cavalier of the dashing variety, or any other.

Instead of dwelling on the “sad” events of January 1649, the Cavalier leaves his readers with a summative commentary on how things came to such a pass. In essence, a recount of what Charles Stuart got wrong. He notes two errors in particular, both of which are once again identified in Clarendon’s History: First, the stubborn refusal to negotiate, even as the reality of defeat loomed. The most conspicuous example being his failure to properly engage parliamentary commissioners at Newcastle in summer 1646. Second, the foolish sanctioning of a second civil war in 1648. Hardly an excuse to slaughter God’s anointed, but still, when the reckoning is done, there was really only one person to blame for the mess that Charles Stuart got himself into.

A Man of God

Something else that is conspicuous in its absence in the Memoirs is talk about religion. Curious for a variety of reasons, not least because religion was so important to Defoe, even if it became more so in its secular expression. The fear of popery never really left an early eighteenth-century dissenter. In a reprise of the Shortest Way, published in the Review in 1705, Defoe slyly alluded to the Church assuming once again its “Coercive Power, by the Regency of her own Ecclesiastical Instruments.”²⁹ This fear assumed more threatening proportions at particular moments, as rumours of Jacobite insurgencies swirled, of atrocities in Ireland, the death of a childless monarch.

But if the English civil wars were indeed “wars of religion,” as modern historians like to suppose, it is not much apparent in the Memoirs.³⁰ Any more than it was in the various “memorials” that Toland was busy editing. Or in Clarendon’s History, wherein might be found an appreciation that the “brawls which were grown from religion” contributed to heightened tensions during the 1630s and early 1640s, along with the succinct observation that there was nothing in Church “ornaments” that was “worth the charge” of a civil war (Clarendon, 929).

And an attitude which again chimes with Defoe’s cavalier:

For my part, I confess I had not much Religion in me, at that time; but I thought Religion rightly practiced on both Sides would have made us all better Friends; and therefore I began to think, that both the Bishops of our Side, and the Preachers on theirs, made Religion rather the Pretence than the Cause of the War. (165)

The fact that the younger Cavalier was disinclined to speculate more deeply is no surprise, nor is the fact that he ended up recommending a broad toleration. It is what his creator would have wanted.

There are nevertheless limits to tolerance, which most certainly did not extend to popery. A distaste affirmed in the Cavalier’s early experience of Rome, the “Empire of Priests,” and high-class prostitutes, and then again with his brief flirtation with the Imperial army, which turns out to be full of blood-thirsty sociopaths. In comparison with the improbably disciplined Swedes, marching off to battle, sword in one hand, Testament in the other. A “new model” army, in all but name, characterised by “their exact Discipline, their Order, the Modesty and Familiarity of their Officers, and the regular living of the Soldiers,” and, just as importantly, absent the “Regiments of Whores and Rags as followed the Imperialists” (51).

Notably, whilst the young Cavalier is distinctly unimpressed with Rome, he is very admiring of the Venetian Republic, for reason of the “Civil Authority having a visible Superiority over the Ecclesiastical” (34). This supposes that he would not have been very sympathetic to the Laudian reforms presently being implemented back in England. No more than Clarendon, whose History famously opens with an account of an early audience with Laud in 1630. Clarendon never doubted the archbishop’s piety, but very quickly doubted the consequence of his zeal. Only one year into the “personal rule” of Charles I, but Star Chamber was already gearing up. Later that year the Scottish Presbyterian James Leighton would be convicted of sedition, pilloried, whipped, and have his nose slit and ears cropped.³¹ Defoe might have felt his shame.

The meddling “priests” motif runs through the narrative, alongside the King’s naivety in listening to them (126). The “Heat of the Clergy, to whom” the King “was exceedingly devoted, and for whom he ruined himself” (137). Indeed, it is Laud who gets the blame for going to war in the first place. Later in the narrative, the Cavalier joins those urging the King to accept the terms offered in the draft Treaty of Uxbridge, but “foresaw the Clergy would ruine all” (227).³²

There is little in the text which hints at any closer religious affinity on the part of the Cavalier. A later aside, which suggest that a “Catholic Gentleman of Lancashire” was a family friend teases, but probably no more (272). The same might be said of the list of “strange” coincidences which brings the Memoirs to a close; inspired by the same “Gentleman.”³³ Providential certainly, but hardly a Catholic preserve. Or indeed a Presbyterian, which is another possibility. The “memorials” evince some sympathy for those Presbyterians who, by 1648, would have “gladly joined the Royal Party,” whilst, at the same time, casting an obvious aspersion, culpable in realising “their Error when it was too late” (270-1). This leaves Anglicanism of the more moderate variety, the affinity of Edward Hyde indeed. And the incidental faith, we can reasonably infer, of so many other young men not much animated by faith.

Loyalties

The temptation to over-read authorial presence is unavoidable, with any writer, whatever they write, and Defoe is certainly no exception; whether it is religious affinity or cultural or, of course, political. Before we indulge some more whimsical reflections on the Cavalier’s loyalties, we might see if we can discern some clues in the text of the Memoirs. What reasons, in short, does the Cavalier give for his decision to fight for the King?

Evidently not principle. There was anyway, as he later muses, “something to be said on both sides” of the argument (192). But in the moment of choice, the argument barely registers at all:

I confess, when I went into Arms at the Beginning of this War, I never troubled my self to examine Sides: I was glad to hear the Drums beat for Soldiers; as if I had been a meer Swiss, that had not car’d which Side went up or down, so I had my Pay. (125)

The allusion to “Pay” is supposed to convince the reader that it was not that. As we noted before, the Cavalier prefers not to talk about money.

So not principle, and not pay. Sentiment perhaps, gut-instinct, flattery maybe; the King invites him to renew his “Commission.” A lifestyle choice, a natural cavalier? It has been surmised that Defoe might have had the fated Viscount Falkland in mind when he conceived his Cavalier. Or at least Clarendon’s Falkland, the young man of such “humanity and goodness to mankind” who, in apparent despair, rides off into a hail of musket-shot at the first battle of Newbury (Novak, 591). Maybe. But there is not much that is evidently idealistic about the Cavalier, less still that might be said to be poetic.³⁴

Another possibility is kinship. Some families, like the Verneys famously, would find themselves “by the sword divided.” But family affinities were more commonly binding. The Cavalier’s family, as the text repeatedly confirms, was royalist. His father even raises a regiment for the King, as “old as he was” he “would not leave his royal Master” (148). An aligned religious affinity too, perhaps; though hardly compelling, as we have just noted. Simple nationalism seems to play a part, repulsing successive Scottish armies. A visceral dislike of the plebs too. The Cavalier is repelled by “popular Heats” wherever he comes across them, and is horrified at the prospect of a “new Parliament tyranny” founded on the same, a settled constitution “sacrificed to the Fury of the Rabble” (21, 142-3).

Here again, there are sharp resonances with Clarendon. Not just fear of the “rabble,” but the collateral accusation that it was Parliament which, in nurturing popular discontent, was most responsible for upsetting the “happy Constitution of his Nation.” The “mixarchy” for which Clarendon had spent the 1630s and the first part of the 1640s arguing, before the King succumbed to the hotter heads. Modern historians call it “constitutional royalism,” the kind which the celebrated Jacobean Lord Chief Justice, Sir Edward Coke, had fiercely recommended: the King ruling “in parliament,” and in accordance with the common law. ³⁵ At a variant, the Aristotelian idea of “harmonious” governance recommended a generation earlier by Richard Hooker in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (146-7). The affinity of commonwealth and common law which defined the English in the poetry of Shakespeare, Spenser and Milton. There is nothing in his “memorials” to suggest that the younger Cavalier spent much time in the library, but if he had alighted across Hooker’s Laws, or indeed any of Coke’s Reports, there is equally little to suppose that he would have found much to his distaste.

III. Whimsies

It is reasonable to suppose that Defoe wanted his readers to be intrigued by his creation, to spot the incidents, the incongruities, and the evasions. The art of the picaresque.³⁶ And, as a consequence, to engage some more whimsical reflections, some “virtual” history, to use a fashionable phrase. It is in the spirit of incidental or “contingent” history, playing along the diminishing margins of the factual and the fictive.³⁷ We will contemplate three whimsies; each of which is teased in the Preface to the Memoirs. The first wonders what the Cavalier did next. The second asks if he might not, somehow, have fought on the wrong side. The third invites us to think more closely about how we might, as historians, read his “memorials.”

          What next?

The Memoirs finishes in something of a rush. The Preface wonders the possibility that there might be a later volume of “Memorials” somewhere, awaiting discovery. But then thinks not, surmising instead that the Cavalier would be so appalled by the “Dissentions and Factions” of the Restoration that he would not have cared “to trouble himself.” He might even have gone “abroad again,” like Clarendon, in the end, or Ludlow (4). Or he might not. Leaving the reader to speculate: what did he do?

Fifty-two at the time of the Restoration, a good age, especially for a professional soldier. Retirement is a possibility. We might imagine him as Andrew Marvell described Sir Thomas Fairfax in later middle age, retiring to his gardens at Appleton, turning over borders and digging in tubers. Evenings spent musing together on the “pricking leaf” of conscience which “shrinks at every touch.”³⁸ Sunlight evening in Shropshire then, chatting with his father, writing up his “memorials,” and salving his own conscience in the process? Maybe, though he hardly seems the retiring type.

A couple of other possibilities occur, better suiting the cavalier temperament. A “knight of the road,” perhaps, roaming heathlands terrifying unwary travellers with threats of unscheduled dance routines. Macaulay included a famous account of the legendary highwayman, Claude Duvall, in his celebrated History of England. How he had “stopped a lady’s coach, in which there was booty of four hundred pounds; how he took only one hundred, and suffered the fair owner to ransom the rest by dancing a coranto with him on the heath.”³⁹ The “knights” were very much a Victorian invention, commonly associated with dispossessed “cavaliers” like Duvall. The renowned society-artist William Powell Frith devoted 1859 to painting Duvall and his “fair” lady. William Harrison Ainsworth famously made a picaresque hero of Dick Turpin.⁴⁰ The real Turpin was a sociopathic thug who passed his spare evenings beating up farmers and raping their maids.

A harsher reality, which might make us hope that Defoe’s Cavalier found something else to do in his semi-retirement. Go to sea perhaps? A life on the ocean waves, looking for treasure, adopting parrots and drinking copious amounts of rum. Defoe was fascinated by pirates. By the time that the Memoirs appeared, he was already plotting out his pirate-novel, Captain Singleton.⁴¹ Again, though, the reality of pirate-life was rather different, as readers of both would discover. Day after day sat in the scorching sun, mending sails and eating broiled turtle.

The realism, as ever with Defoe, militates against the romance. The extent to which Defoe fits the mould of the picaresque writer remains a matter of critical conjecture, uneasily dependent on whether there is a mould. The tendency to set up romantic heroes, only to bring them crashing back to the ground, presents a problem. We might even conjecture something of a revisionist in Defoe, albeit borrowing a term that would have meant nothing in the moment: the Cavalier as an anti-hero, ending up disillusioned with war, with the King and his cause, with the very idea of a being a cavalier?⁴² Which bring us to our next whimsy.

The Incidental Cavalier?

Put plainly, did Defoe’s Cavalier fight on the wrong side in the English civil war? He could hardly be said to be an accidental cavalier. But he might be supposed to be an incidental one, who ended up fighting for the King as much by chance as conviction.⁴³ If, we might wonder, his dad had been a parliamentarian, might the Cavalier have fought under Fairfax instead? Probably. He would have been just as happy, likely happier. We have already noted his broader indifference to matters of political principle, and his admiration for the “puritan” militancy of the army of Gustavus Adolphus. We might, in this circumstance, join our Cavalier on three particular evenings.

Starting on October 22, 1642, the day before the battle of Edgehill, where the Cavalier would have fought beside Lord George Stuart, 9^th Seigneur D’Aubigny and cousin to the King. George is the subject of one of Antony van Dyck’s most renowned cavalier paintings, dressed as a shepherd, with the inscription “Love is Stronger than Me.” George had two brothers, John and Bernard, subject of a still more renowned van Dyck, also painted in 1638.⁴⁴ Hard to imagine any more romantic-looking cavaliers, with their ringlets, satins, natty boots, and a suspicion of gingling too.⁴⁵ George probably quartered in Banbury that evening, like many officers in a local tavern, including our Cavalier. We might imagine a chance encounter, and a conversation, excitable, hopeful, inebriate. A drink to the health of the King, whose inadequacies as a military commander were not yet apparent, at least not for another twenty-four hours.

Very different three years later, on 13 June 1645, the evening before the battle of Naseby. All three Stuart brothers were dead. George did not survive Edgehill. John was disembowelled at the battle of Cheriton in March 1644. Bernard, who commanded the King’s Lifeguard, was shot to death a couple of months later at the battle of Rowton Heath. A lost generation of extremely well-dressed young men, dying hideously. It is poetic license which saves Defoe’s Cavalier from the same fate. A hardened man by summer 1645, as we have already noted, and perhaps a more questioning man too. A moment for sober reflection, then, as news arrived that Fairfax’s army was rather nearer than first thought, and considerably larger. Staring into a campfire, we can only wonder if the Cavalier, Stoic even then, had doubts—about the cause for which he was fighting, and the King, and his chances of surviving the day.

Just a mile away sat thousands of New Model troopers, some of whom would no doubt have been contemplating similarly. Most, though, would have been assured that God was on their side and that victory was certain; as it had been for most of the previous twelve months. And, most intriguingly, of course, thinking as Defoe would surely have thought, had he been alive in that moment. It is hard to imagine a young Defoe enlisting in any army other than the Parliamentarian in summer 1642. Facing down his Cavalier, and his King, at Edgehill perhaps? At the least, marching out to Turnham Green a few weeks later, having joined one of Philip Skippon’s “Trained Bands,” along with thousands of other eager young London apprentices.⁴⁶ Legend has it that Defoe left London in spring 1685 to join the Duke of Monmouth’s fated West Country uprising against King James II, similarly eager. Which, if true, suggests that he was up for an adventure, as well as a scrap.

Our third evening takes us to the balmier surroundings of the French Riviera. Montpellier to be precise, some time in spring 1668. The home, in that moment, of the recently exiled Sir Edward Hyde. Given time to make a reasonably graceful exit, pending impeachment charges, Hyde had left England the previous November. He spent the best part of three years in Montpellier, much of it bringing together drafts of his Life and History. Lawrence does not appear to have made it to Montpellier, though he did get as far as Moulins, where his father moved in 1670.

Sadly, few of Sir Edward’s family, and fewer friends still, appear to have made the same effort. So, if the Cavalier did, he might have expected a warm welcome, an opportunity to reminisce together, over a glass of port or three.⁴⁷ They were of an age; Sir Edward was born just a few months after the Cavalier, and had, after all, fought on the same side (insofar as Sir Edward had actually gone to war, as opposed to spending his time desperately advising his King not to). Pushed ever further from the King’s ear, Hyde had ended up serving as tutor to Prince Charles, accompanying him into exile in early 1646, at which point he started writing up a History. ⁴⁸

They would, surely, have talked about the King, his mistakes mostly. They might, at the Cavalier’s prompting, have made comparison with Gustavus, Fairfax too, Oliver Cromwell even. The Cavalier does not have much to say about Cromwell. But Hyde’s History did, in studiously compromised terms, describing a man of undoubted “mischief,” but also of “courage, industry and judgment” (Clarendon, 861-4). They would surely have talked about how the war had been lost too, and the consequences for both of them. Sage nodding at the thought that the King’s greatest failing was not heeding their counsel. The Cavalier claims that he only “once” made a “Proposition to his Majesty,” recommending the urgent consolidation of forces after Naseby, which was ignored (247). Sir Edward cast the entire History around the same theme: always ignored when it really mattered.

They would have discussed the Restoration too, the themes of fate and ingratitude, and presumably a fair bit on how to write a “memoirs.” How hard should they try to write a “true” account; to what extent could they import their own impressions and prejudices? At what point might their respective “memoirs” drift over the murky line which purports to define the historical from the fictional? They might, in passing, have wondered about the wisdom of writing the kind of Preface that Lawrence would add in 1703. Sir Edward might have appreciated the filial gesture, even if it went against his deeper instinct, not to aggravate a monarch. The Cavalier might have expressed greater doubts, of the kind which have encouraged some Defoe scholars to wonder if the Memoirs were written less to confute the History than its Preface.⁴⁹ This brings us to our final whimsy, to wonder the extent to which our incidental Cavalier might also have been an incidental historian.

          The Incidental Historian?

The “great seventeenth-century time,” as Dickens termed it, retained its fascination. It can be credibly argued that the shaping of English historical writing was, in large part, animated by histories of this moment. Whig history was all about cherishing the “great and glorious” revolution, and its prequel, the English civil war. And romanticizing it. There is no better example than Macaulay’s History of England, the first volume of which was published, by no coincidence, in 1848, the “year of revolutions.” This was in large part to convince middle England that, unlike their continental counterparts, they did not need another revolution. At the very centre of the History is the famous account of the coronation of William and Mary, on February 13, 1689. Macaulay invites the reader inside Westminster Abbey to witness the moment when Lord Halifax offers the crown, on terms. And then back out to join the cheering crowds and wonder at such a “peculiar” revolution thus “consummated” (Lord Macaulay, 286-7). We might surmise Defoe amongst their number; he certainly took part in the Lord Mayor’s pageant a few months later.⁵⁰

It was precisely this conversational tone which made coming generations of revisionists shake their heads in despair. Thomas Carlyle, S.R. Gardiner, C.H. Firth, each revisiting the same “great” time, to make it reassuringly duller. None would have seriously countenanced the possibility that the Memoirs of a Cavalier could be read as history. Neither, most certainly, would Herbert Butterfield, whose Whig Interpretation of History was perhaps the most brutal of all revisionist critiques. Butterfield was not against historians engaging the “imaginative sympathy” of readers, but he was against history written as if by “strolling minstrels and pedlars of stories.”⁵¹ Historians are not storytellers.

Or maybe they are. The reinvestment of history as art, as a matter of writing truths, as well as trying to discover them. History as the “description” of possibilities, an expression of “poetic justice” indeed, just as likely found in Shakespeare or Dickens or Defoe.⁵² Trying to reconcile the more and less poetic, Richard Evans deploys a nice metaphor in his Defence of History. There is a path for the historian to follow in the pursuit of facts, but there is also time to pause and have a poke about in the “verges and ditches,” to see what might have been cast aside (Evans, 244).

Searching out incidents, we might say, and peculiarly resonant for the historian of the eighteenth-century, certainly for anyone familiar with the related art of the picaresque and the petite histoire, as epitomized at the end of the century by Horace Walpole. “I write casual memoirs,” Horace once proclaimed, “I draw characters, I preserve anecdotes, which my superiors, the historians of Britain, may enclose into their weighty annals or pass over at the pleasure.”⁵³ Horace knew the difference, and he knew it was contrived. A historian who loved nothing better than poking about in the “verges,” Horace was the supreme “self-fashioner,” not just in how he wrote his history, but in how he lived his life as a historian.

Precisely the same is true of Daniel Defoe, another historian who, as Tom Paulin supposes, appreciated that history is an art-form precisely because it is written from the imagination, derived from “anecdote, petite histoire, lodged in the memory,” and then re-shaped to write the narrative (Paulin, xv). John Richetti, too, recognizing in Defoe a writer who worked “from particular anecdote and vividly remembered experience outwards towards generality” (36). In a slightly different context, Defoe termed it “Writing History by Inches.” ⁵⁴ Smaller stories writing bigger histories.

Which is exactly what the Preface to the Memoirs advertises: a history which is “embellished with Particulars which are nowhere else to be found, that is the Beauty we boast of.” Thus, the exciting accounts of munitions-raids near Nuremberg, and mad scrambles across Bramham Moor trying to evade Parliamentarian search-parties. The “Particulars” of these stories “so preserved, so nicely, and so agreeably describ’d” (4). A compromise, of course, having made so much of provenance, and the integrity of the author and his “memorials,” but justified in the simplest of terms. For “do those Relations,” discovered in texts such as the History of the Rebellion, “give any of the beautiful Ideas of things formed in this Account?” (3). A question of the more leading variety. And probably one best avoided that balmy evening in the south of France.

 Newcastle University

Notes

¹ The latter is held in the National Maritime Museum in London.

² For a commentary on Defoe’s slightly dandy-ish traits, see West, 13 and 74.

³ The place of the Memoirs in the canon is the subject of some familiar speculation, but few seriously dispute Defoe’s authorship. In their Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe, Furbank and Owen conclude, at 193, that Defoe’s authorship is at least “probable,” despite the fact the Memoirs was first attributed to Defoe by the “rascally” Francis Noble in 1784.

⁴ For contrasting views here, see Backscheider, 124, and Novak, 591.

⁵ The critical history on “new” historicism and cultural materialism is vast. An original statement is found in Greenblatt.

⁶ The Memoirs is not the only “historical” novel that Defoe wrote, of course. There is also, obviously, The Journal of a Plague Year. For a discussion of the Journal as an “incidental” novel that speaks not just to its moment but to ours, see Ward, “Henry Foe’s Dilemma,” 175-95.

⁷ The first tabloid journalist it has been surmised, working for the first “prime minister” who appreciated the need for a “spin-doctor.” See West, xvi, 93.

⁸ Pilloried on three occasions in July 1703, at Cornhill, Cheapside and Temple Bar. Before an impressed Harley paid Defoe’s bail. The essay went to the darkest edge of satire, recommending some “gentle and easy methods” with which the “contagion” of dissent might be “rooted out,” including the execution or banishment of the “ring-leaders.” In Defoe, The True-Born Englishman and Other Writings, 141-3.

⁹ The Memoirs of the Church of Scotland appeared in 1717, two years after The Family Instructor.

¹⁰ For this affinity in Defoe’s novels, see Gladfelder, 33-8.

¹¹ See MacNeill, 1-2, and also Seager, 481, 505.

¹² In the moment Defoe was particularly worried by reports of plague in Marseilles.

¹³ The 1715 rebellion is well-documented. The 1719 rebellion was something of a damp-squib. Comprising some scattered Jacobite levies and a small Spanish expeditionary force, which landed at Stornoway. It all ended a few weeks later with a comprehensive defeat at the battle of Glen Shiel. For the Memoirs as an anti-Jacobite novel, see Armstrong, 29; Alker, 46, and Mayer, 198-9.

¹⁴ The Atterbury plot, named after its chief protagonist, Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester and Dean of Westminster. Atterbury, along with other Jacobite Tories, hatched a plan to seize the Hanoverian royal family, along with the Tower and the Mint and various other buildings, in the hope of stimulating a popular rebellion. Easily uncovered by Walpole’s agents, Atterbury ended his days in exile in France.

¹⁵ As would become apparent three centuries later, when the original draft was recovered; or at least one part, covering the years 1660-1677. The definitive account of Ludlow’s make-over is found in Worden, chapters 1-4.

¹⁶ The conclusion reached by Worden, 117-21.

¹⁷ Preface to Lord Clarendon, vol.1, 4-5.

¹⁸ Preface, 4. A “personal vindication,” as Brian Wormald puts it in his Clarendon: Politics, History and Religion 1640-1660, (Cambridge UP, 1989), at xxxvi.

¹⁹ A ridiculous editorial “vanity,” according to Anne. Lawrence was shortly after relieved of his duties as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and advised to keep his distance from Court.

²⁰ Hume would famously read a Tory-glossed prologue to the “glorious” revolution, a text which “pleases us at the same time as we disapprove it.” Too prejudicial, but still evincing “imagination and sentiment” (Hume, 154). Burke similarly. Even Catharine Macaulay. Hardly sympathetic to the politics, but acknowledging that there was no more “faithful account of the facts” of the “great rebellion.” See Hill, 27.

²¹ An edition published in 1750 would suppose that they were the “memoirs” of Colonel Andrew Newport, a royalist. The real Newport was, though, only a child in the 1630s, when the Memoirs begin.

²² To be contrasted with the “Right but Repulsive” roundheads. Phrases taken from Sellar and Yeatman, 75. Silly in one sense, brilliantly perceptive in another.

²³ See here Walkden, 1066-7.

²⁴ Various “skirmishes” about plunder and booty interject the narrative (68, 70). It is noticeable that the Cavalier prefers to receive his plunder by proxy, leaving others to do the pillaging. There is an oblique reference to mercenaries later in the text when the Cavalier reflects on why he fought for the King in the civil wars. Likening himself to a “Swiss, that not car’d which Side went up or down, so I had my Pay” (125).

²⁵ See Alker, 61, noting the “slippage from observer” to “perpetrator of atrocity.”

²⁶ Made most explicit, perhaps, in the “Design” to capture the “magazine” at Freynstat (102-3).

²⁷ Second wife of Henry IV, Marie would eventually be retired by her son Louis XIII. In 1630, though, very much at the height of her powers.

²⁸ Instead being persuaded to wander back into the East Midlands to lay siege to a couple of castles, most notably Lord Say’s house at Broughton.

²⁹ In Richetti, Defoe, 93.

³⁰ For the definitive statement, see Morrill, chapters 2 and 3.

³¹ Leighton had published a treatise entitled An Appeale to Parliament, or Sion’s Plea Against Popery.

³² The Uxbridge negotiations were conducted during the first three weeks of February 1645. By which time, as the Cavalier appreciates, the military situation for the King looked precarious. The parliamentary demands were stringent, and included the King taking the Solemn League and Covenant. His counter-proposals were drafted by, amongst others, Sir Edward Hyde, and offered instead a bill for the easing of “tender consciences.” The negotiations failed.

³³ An “odd” conclusion intended to unsettle the reader, and cast a larger doubt over the ‘credibility’ of the ‘memoirs’, according to Alker (66).

³⁴ See Walkden, 1063-4 and 1076-7, suggesting that, if anything, Defoe was ironizing the chivalric ideal.

³⁵ See D. Smith.

³⁶ Characteristic of the “criminal” picaresque in particular, according to Gladfelder, 33-8.

³⁷ See White, 27-9, 107-11, and Rorty, 5-6.

³⁸ Marvell, lines 57-8, in Kermode and Walker, 64. For a longer account of Marvell at Appleton House, see N. Smith, 96-101.

³⁹ Quoted in Sharpe, 38. Duvall operated around north London and the “home” counties during the later 1660s. He was hanged at Tyburn in 1670.

⁴⁰ In his 1834 novel Rookwood: A Romance. Which contained the famous account of Turpin’s overnight ride from London to York. Which did not happen, and could not have happened. The idea, interestingly, came from an account of the similarly legendary highway-man, “Swift Nicks,” which Ainsworth discovered in Defoe’s Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, which appeared between 1724 and 1726.

⁴¹ It is possible that he went on to write a very large History of the Pyrates, though authorial provenance is contested. See here Grasso, 21-3.

⁴² Or at least the idea of being a cavalier of the “heroic” variety. See here MacNeill, 5-8, suggesting that the Memoirs might be read as a critique of shifting perceptions of the cavalier as a “gentleman.”

⁴³ See Seager, 496, suggesting that the Cavalier’s choice of affiliation was as much a result of “circumstances.”

⁴⁴ Entitled Lord John Stuart and his brother Lord Bernard Stuart.

⁴⁵ Gingling referred to sound made when a spur spun around; an affectation commonly associated with overly-dashing cavaliers.

⁴⁶ Arrayed to deter the King’s march on London. A “shameful” moment, the Cavalier recalled, of the King’s ensuing decision to turn back (173-4).

⁴⁷ Clarendon had a fine “palate,” as the History confirms, and was riddled with gout from middle age.

⁴⁸ The itinerary took them from the Scilly Isles, to Jersey, and then France. Lawrence confirmed that Clarendon began drafting his History whilst in Jersey.

⁴⁹ See here Walken, 1071-2.

⁵⁰ As a member of a Royal Regiment of “Volunteer Horse.” The same Regiment formed part of the guard of honour when William first entered London in December 1688.

⁵¹ Butterfield, 11-13, 39-41, 64.

⁵² See Nussbaum and Rorty, 5-6.

⁵³ In Mowl, 257. Walpole developed his liking of the petite histoire following a tour round France, during which he met Voltaire.

⁵⁴ In an essay on French foreign policy. See Richetti, 93.

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