The History and Remarkable Life of the Truly Honourable Colonel Jacque, Commonly called Colonel Jack

Shall any law be given to such wild creatures? Some beasts are for sport, and the huntsmen give them advantages of ground; but some are knocked on the head by all possible ways of violence and surprise.

I do not prescribe fire and faggot, but, as Scipio said of Carthage, Delenda est Carthago. They are to be rooted out of this nation, if ever we will live in peace, serve God, or enjoy our own. As for the manner, I leave it to those hands who have a right to execute God's justice on the nation's and the Church's enemies.

But if we must be frighted from this justice under the specious pretences and odious sense of cruelty, nothing will be effected: it will be more barbarous to our own children and dear posterity when they shall reproach their fathers, as we do ours, and tell us, "You had an opportunity to root out this cursed race from the world under the favour and protection of a true English queen; and out of your foolish pity you spared them, because, forsooth, you would not be cruel; and now our Church is suppressed and persecuted, our religion trampled under foot, our estates plundered, our persons imprisoned and dragged to jails, gibbets, and scaffolds: your sparing this Amalekite race is our destruction, your mercy to them proves cruelty to your poor posterity."

How just will such reflections be when our posterity shall fall under the merciless clutches of this uncharitable generation, when our Church shall be swallowed up in schism, faction, enthusiasm, and confusion; when our Government shall be devolved upon foreigners, and our monarchy dwindled into a republic.

It would be more rational for us, if we must spare this generation, to summon our own to a general massacre, and as we have brought them into the world free, send them out so, and not betray them to destruction by our supine negligence, and then cry, "It is mercy."

Moses was a merciful, meek man, and yet with what fury did he run through the camp, and cut the throats of three-and-thirty thousand of his dear Israelites that were fallen into idolatry. What was the reason? It was mercy to the rest to make these examples, to prevent the destruction of the whole army.

How many millions of future souls we save from infection and delusion if the present race of poisoned spirits were purged from the face of the land!

It is vain to trifle in this matter, the light, foolish handling of them by mulcts, fines, &c., – it is their glory and their advantage. If the gallows instead of the Counter, and the galleys instead of the fines, were the reward of going to a conventicle, to preach or hear, there would not be so many sufferers. The spirit of martyrdom is over; they that will go to church to be chosen sheriffs and mayors would go to forty churches rather than be hanged.

If one severe law were made and punctually executed, that whoever was found at a conventicle should be banished the nation and the preacher be hanged, we should soon see an end of the tale. They would all come to church, and one age would make us all one again.

To talk of five shillings a month for not coming to the sacrament, and one shilling per week for not coming to church, this is such a way of converting people as never was known; this is selling them a liberty to transgress for so much money. If it be not a crime, why don't we give them full license? And if it be, no price ought to compound for the committing it, for that is selling a liberty to people to sin against God and the Government.

If it be a crime of the highest consequence both against the peace and welfare of the nation, the glory of God, the good of the Church, and the happiness of the soul, let us rank it among capital offences, and let it receive a punishment in proportion to it.

We hang men for trifles, and banish them for things not worth naming; but an offence against God and the Church, against the welfare of the world and the dignity of religion, shall be bought off for five shillings! This is such a shame to a Christian Government that it is with regret I transmit it to posterity.

If men sin against God, affront His ordinances, rebel against His Church, and disobey the precepts of their superiors, let them suffer as such capital crimes deserve. So will religion flourish, and this divided nation be once again united.

And yet the title of barbarous and cruel will soon be taken off from this law too. I am not supposing that all the Dissenters in England should be hanged or banished, but, as in cases of rebellions and insurrections, if a few of the ringleaders suffer, the multitude are dismissed; so, a few obstinate people being made examples, there is no doubt but the severity of the law would find a stop in the compliance of the multitude.

To make the reasonableness of this matter out of question, and more unanswerably plain, let us examine for what it is that this nation is divided into parties and factions, and let us see how they can justify a separation, or we of the Church of England can justify our bearing the insults and inconveniences of the party.

One of their leading pastors,31 and a man of as much learning as most among them, in his answer to a pamphlet, entitled "An Inquiry into the Occasional Conformity," has these words, p. 27, "Do the religion of the Church and the meeting-houses make two religions? Wherein do they differ? The substance of the same religion is common to them both; and the modes and accidents are the things in which only they differ." P. 28: "Thirty-nine articles are given us for the summary of our religion; thirty-six contain the substance of it, wherein we agree; three, the additional appendices, about which we have some differences."

Now, if as by their own acknowledgment the Church of England is a true Church, and the difference between them is only in a few modes and accidents, why should we expect that they will suffer galleys, corporeal punishment, and banishment for these trifles? There is no question but they will be wiser; even their own principles will not bear them out in it; they will certainly comply with the laws and with reason; and though at the first severity they may seem hard, the next age will feel nothing of it; the contagion will be rooted out; the disease being cured, there will be no need of the operation; but if they should venture to transgress and fall into the pit, all the world must condemn their obstinacy, as being without ground from their own principles.

Thus the pretence of cruelty will be taken off, and the party actually suppressed, and the disquiets they have so often brought upon the nation prevented.

Their numbers and their wealth make them haughty, and that is so far from being an argument to persuade us to forbear them, that it is a warning to us, without any delay, to reconcile them to the unity of the Church or remove them from us.

At present, Heaven be praised, they are not so formidable as they have been, and it is our own fault if ever we suffer them to be so. Providence and the Church of England seem to join in this particular, that now the destroyers of the nation's peace may be overturned, and to this end the present opportunity seems to be put into our hands.

To this end her present Majesty seems reserved to enjoy the crown, that the ecclesiastic as well as civil rights of the nation may be restored by her hand. To this end the face of affairs have received such a turn in the process of a few months as never has been before; the leading men of the nation, the universal cry of the people, the unanimous request of the clergy, agree in this, that the deliverance of our Church is at hand. For this end has Providence given us such a Parliament, such a Convocation, such a gentry, and such a Queen as we never had before. And what may be the consequences of a neglect of such opportunities? The succession of the crown has but a dark prospect; another Dutch turn may make the hopes of it ridiculous and the practice impossible. Be the house of our future princes never so well inclined, they will be foreigners, and many years will be spent in suiting the genius of strangers to this crown and the interests of the nation; and how many ages it may be before the English throne be filled with so much zeal and can dour, so much tenderness and hearty affection to the Church as we see it now covered with, who can imagine?

It is high time, then, for the friends of the Church of England to think of building up and establishing her in such a manner that she may be no more invaded by foreigners nor divided by factions, schisms, and error.

If this could be done by gentle and easy methods, I should be glad; but the wound is corroded, the vitals begin to mortify, and nothing but amputation of members can complete the cure; all the ways of tenderness and compassion, all persuasive arguments, have been made use of in vain.

The humour of the Dissenters has so increased among the people, that they hold the Church in defiance, and the house of God is an abomination among them; nay, they have brought up their posterity in such prepossessed aversions to our holy religion, that the ignorant mob think we are all idolaters and worshippers of Baal, and account it a sin to come within the walls of our churches.

The primitive Christians were not more shy of a heathen temple or of meat offered to idols, nor the Jews of swine's flesh, than some of our Dissenters are of the Church, and the divine service solemnised therein.

This obstinacy must be rooted out with the profession of it; while the generation are less at liberty daily to affront God Almighty and dishonour His holy worship, we are wanting in our duty to God and our mother, the Church of England.

How can we answer it to God, to the Church, and to our posterity to leave them entangled with fanaticism, error, and obstinacy in the bowels of the nation; to leave them an enemy in their streets, that in time may involve them in the same crimes, and endanger the utter extirpation of religion in the nation?

What is the difference betwixt this and being subjected to the power of the Church of Rome, from whence we have reformed? If one be an extreme on one hand, and one on another, it is equally destructive to the truth to have errors settled among us, let them be of what nature they will.

Both are enemies of our Church and of our peace; and why should it not be as criminal to admit an enthusiast as a Jesuit? Why should the Papist with his seven sacraments be worse than the Quaker with no sacraments at all? Why should religious houses be more intolerable than meeting-houses? Alas, the Church of England! What with Popery on one hand, and schismatics on the other, how has she been crucified between two thieves!

Now let us crucify the thieves. Let her foundations be established upon the destruction of her enemies. The doors of mercy being always open to the returning part of the deluded people, let the obstinate be ruled with the rod of iron.

Let all true sons of so holy and oppressed a mother, exasperated by her afflictions, harden their hearts against those who have oppressed her.

And may God Almighty put it into the hearts of all the friends of truth to lift up a standard against pride and Antichrist, that the posterity of the sons of error may be rooted out from the face of this land for ever.

1

: Hours in a Library.

2

: Wilson's Memoirs of Defoe, London, 1830, III., p. 429.

3

: Defoe mentions the letter in his Review for August 11th, 1705.

4

: I was not called Colonel Jacque as at London, but Colonel, and they did not know me by any other name.

5

: He did not now talk quite so blindly and childishly as when he was a boy, and when the custom-house gentleman talked to him about his names.

6

: Here he showed him the horsewhip that was given him with his new office.

7

: So the negroes call the owner of the plantation, or at least so they called him, because he was a great man in the country, having three or four large plantations.

8

: To be drunk in a negro is to be mad; for when they get rum they are worse than raving, and fit to do any manner of mischief.

9

: He understood the plot, and took the opportunity to tell him that, to see what he would say.

10

: He understood him; he meant he would beg your honour for me, that I might not be hanged for offending you.

11

: This old proverb was quoted by Robert Burton in his "Anatomy of Melancholy" (1621), "Where God hath a temple the Devil hath a chapel" (Part III. sc. iv. subs. 1). It was also No. 670 in George Herbert's "Jacula Prudentium," first published in 1640, where it ran, "No sooner is a temple built to God but the Devil builds a chapel hard by." Defoe was the first rhymer of the proverb, and the rider to it is his own.

12

: William the Conqueror. [D.F.]

13

: Or archer. [D.F.]

14

: Dr. Sherlock, de facto. [D.F.]

15

: K. J. I. [D.F.]

16

: K. C. II. [D.F.]

17

: Lady Castlemaine, of the Italian-French family of Villars, was first known to Charles II. as Mrs. Palmer. Afterwards her husband was made Earl of Castlemaine, and in 1668 she was made Duchess of Cleveland. Of the cost of this woman Andrew Marvell wrote: – "They have signed and sealed ten thousand pounds a year more to the Duchess of Cleveland; who has likewise near ten thousand pounds a year out of the new farm of the country excise of beer and ale; five thousand pounds a year out of the Post Office; and, they say, the reversion of all the King's leases, the reversion of all places in the Custom House, the green-wax, and, indeed, what not? All promotions, spiritual and temporal, pass under her cognisance," &c. Charles II. had by her five children.

18

: Louise Renée de Puencovet de Queroualle came over to Dover as a maid of honour, and was created Duchess of Portsmouth in August 1673. She cost as much as Lady Castlemaine. Her son, Charles Lennox, was made Duke of Richmond. The Duchess of Portsmouth was living when this satire appeared. She died in 1734.

19

: Frederick de Schomberg, an old favourite of King William's, was made Duke of Schomberg on the 10th of April 1689. Another friend of the King's, William Bentinck, was created Earl of Portland on the 9th of April 1689. His son and heir was raised to a dukedom in 1716.

20

: The drunkard's name for Canary. [D.F.]

21

: "Mobile," applied to the movable, unstable populace, was first abridged to "mob" in Charles the Second's time.

22

: The Devil. – [D.F.]

23

: Dating from 1688-89, the Revolution and accession of King William III.

24

: Charles I., James II., William III.

25

: On the 16th of July, 1604, the Puritan clergy within the Church were required to conform on or before the 30th of November on pain of expulsion. On the 4th of December Whitgift's successor, Richard Bancroft, was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury. He strictly carried out this order, and declared every man, cleric or lay, to be excommunicated who questioned the complete accordance of the Prayer Book with the Word of God. On the 6th of September, 1620, the Mayflower left England with the first freight of English families that sought freedom of worship where they came to be the founders of a New England across the sea.

26

: Charles II. unconstitutionally suspended the penal laws against nonconformists and recusants in 1679.

27

: The story of the Rye House Plot was used for bringing Algernon Sidney and Lord William Russell to the scaffold.

28

: James II. unconstitutionally suspended the penal laws against nonconformists and recusants by Declarations of Indulgence in 1686 and 1688.

29

: The oath taken by Tories against the legal right of the Pretender to the crown was said to reserve the question of his divine right of succession. Divine right was unchangeable, but laws were liable to change-and so far as they go, what to-day is treason may be loyalty to-morrow.

30

: The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was signed on the 17th of October 1685. All Protestant churches were to be demolished, and their ministers who would not be converted were to leave France within a fortnight. Fugitive reformers who did not return within four months would have their property confiscated. Lay Reformers were forbidden to leave France, on pain of the galleys for men and confiscation of body and goods for women. Those who remained were exposed to cruelties of the soldiery. The King thought that his way of conversion by dragoons had reduced a million and a half of French heretics to twelve or fifteen thousand; but between the Revocation and the time when Defoe wrote this pamphlet, it has been estimated that 250,000 French Protestants left France to establish homes in England and elsewhere.

31

: John Howe, in his answer to Defoe's request for a statement of opinion from him on Occasional Conformity.