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Marc Mierowsky, "A Spy Amongst Us: Daniel Defoe's Secret Service and the Plot to End Scottish Independence" (Yale UP, 2026)
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Mark Morofsky about his book titled A Spy Amongst Us, Daniel Defoe's Secret Service and the Plot to End Scottish Independence, published by Yale University Press in 2026. Now, this book does. Does a whole bunch of things because it turns out Daniel Defoe, who we might know better for his literary work, we might talk about that is actually very much intertwined with all sorts of spying and secrecy going on in the English government and also involved in what happens to end Scottish independence and bring it into formal union with England. And those things are all sort of combined in intriguing ways through Defoe and through some other people that we're probably going to discuss. So clearly we have a lot to talk about. Mark, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [01:01]
B
Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
- [01:03]
A
Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
- [01:09]
B
Sure. I mean, I'm a lecturer in English lit at Melbourne Uni and I work mostly on late 17th, early 18th century literature and intellectual history. History of political thought, really. And I've always. I've worked in Defoe for quite a long time. He's sort of the writer I can't get rid of. Every time I try to start a project without him, he sneaks back in. And I've always been interested in the connection between his writing and his politics. It's really gritty. It's real world. It's not political theory that's unlived or unpracticed. His was a politics that was tested. It was, as you said, he was involved in all these clandestine secret actions and. And he's sort of. Sort of, yeah, it's a politics that sort of, sort of forged the foundry of real world experiences. And it's also the fact that his writing had quite a real world effect. And so I'd been interested in the fact that Defoe was a spy during the Anglo Scottish Union debates in 1706, 1707. But I'd never really had enough material to do more with that. So I ended up working on an edition of Defoe's Correspondence with Nick Seeger as the main editor. And after that, I'd gone and I'd read all his correspondence. I'd done quite a lot of archival work in Scotland and I thought, I finally have Material and method enough to tell this story properly, to reconstruct some spy networks, to tell. To talk about Defoe espionage, to talk about his sort of political action, and to talk about his secret service. And in a book that might have wider appeal than my typical academic work. And that was really the plan. I wanted to look at Defoe's secret service, look at how his politics were tested and forged, and I wanted to sort of look at what effect, if any, he had on this monumental sort of effort of statecraft. It's unusual to have such a prominent writer have such a sort of important role in something, or at least supposedly important role in something that still exists today, politically. So that's what really drew me to the book, to the idea of the book. And then, you know, as it always happens, many, many years later, here we are. Yes.
- [03:26]
A
No, Where a project starts is not always where it ends. But it's always interesting to hear about kind of those initial things that draw one to a project. And obviously a lot of the things you just mentioned there come through in the finished product. We're going to be talking about a number of those things. But I also want to clarify that this isn't really a biography. Like, yes, okay, there's a person's specific name on the COVID Right. And we do talk about him throughout, but this isn't a sort of he was born here and died there and kind of this is everything he got up to in the middle. Like, there's a, to my mind, kind of more interesting analysis that you're doing here that's about him and his work in these areas, but also wider questions around kind of what's happening with the British state and the sort of role of intelligence in creating maybe in some ways a more modern state or one we'd more recognize. So can we put those questions on the table as well?
- [04:18]
B
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it isn't, as you said, a standard cradle to grave biography. And for Defoe, we already have excellent biographies of that nature. Paula Backscheider's Defoe A Life and Max Novak's Defoe Master of fictions that really go into such detail. I mean, my method was more narrative history, but also group biography. Looking at Defoe and the other players within the, as you said, the emergent British state, but also within the espionage networks that help bring it into being. I'm really interested in something that may be a bit out of fashion in certain kinds of academic history, but that's the sort of personal relationships, motivations, you know, slights and insults, grudges held all these sort of nitty gritty little bits of. Of interpersonal intrigue. I mean, maybe I'm just drawn to the gossip, to be honest. But what it does, I think, is it gives me a little bit of an insight into what's happening at the political level at a wider sense, like what are the relationships that make up so the relationships that feed the actions that then go on to make up these sort of monumental, changing sort of political activities. So, I mean, at the broadest level, I think I'm interested in how power is maintained and exercised. I really want to know how those in government did this. And the particular moment I'm focusing on is a time when the people as a political entity are inserting themselves ever more prominently into the decisions of government. And so I wanted to know how political actors managed this. And one of the ways they did is to have people like Defoe, who are expert persuaders, who are writers of immense skill and energy, and deploy them as propagandists and agents. And really how that sort of. Sort of more prescient actors like Robert Harley, who were attuned to this before others, arguably in the British context, how the management of the people becomes central to a new kind of politics, and how that both reflects, but also feeds the development of what you said is a more modern kind of state. State. Defoe might not have been the most influential actor in these domains, in these political domains, but the record he left because he was such a prolific writer is really tantalizing. And through him, we get a history not just of ministers, but of the sort of ad hoc, tenuous, shadowy figures that exist at that one level below the ministers, their advisors, their agents, their spies. People who we might think of today more as political operatives, because these people have a vital role in implementing policy, in making certain things happen. And so with the kind of group biography dynamic where I look at Defoe not holistically, but at a particular moment in his life and who he's engaging with in those at that particular moment. I think this gives us new access to an important moment in history, but it also gives us a more personal access, a sort of a history of politics as it was both practiced, lived and lived, really, not just as it was theorized and implemented.
- [07:38]
A
Yeah, I think there's a lot of key sort of foundational elements to the book there that you've covered that we can then kind of build on in the rest of our discussion. But there is one element I think we want to make sure we cover a little bit more so that we can go into the details of exactly what happens, which is this sort of group biography element you've mentioned, mentioned a few times, who else is in the group, what is this group and what is their sort of relationships, networks. I mean, it's not as straightforward as saying kind of this one has this relationship to that one. So who is this group that we're focusing on?
- [08:12]
B
Right. And I mean, I think that's the question of the book, really. And maybe it's more accurate to say it's a groups biography, but I'm not sure that's going to work. So we have, at the top level, we have, as you mentioned, HA Lee, Marlborough, Godolphin, the three most important ministers and political figures. Marlborough's obviously a general of Queen Anne's reign. And I think they're important because they're trying to forge this new kind of politics. So with the three of them, we have three important nodes of power. Godolphin has control of the treasury. He's also very prominent in the House of Lords. Marlborough, as I said, is Queen Anne's captain general, the leader of the. The British, the allied forces in the War of the Spanish Succession, sort of pro Habsburg against the Bourbons, this pan European conflict that really defines the age. And Harley and those two were always friends. They'd been friends for years, even when they were on different sides of politics, as they were at times. They had a very strong personal relationship. They'd experienced loss together, the loss of Godolphin's first wife. Marlborough and his wife S. Sarah, were very instrumental in helping Godolphin come back from that. And they also shared a grandson so that their children were married. And Sarah, Marlborough's wife, the Duchess of Marlborough, is very important because she is, for a long period, Queen Anne's favorite. So she's the person who gives Marlborough and Godolphin greater access to the queen and brings them into sort of these positions of power. Well, helps bring them into this positions of power and helps maintain them. And Harley, at the start of their relationship, is the speaker of the House of Commons. Godolphin and Marlborough are looking for a better way to manage Parliament. And he's the person they seek out. Eventually they persuade him as well to take on the position of Secretary of State for the north. And he takes on the northern department, which includes, crucially for our, for the purposes of this book, Scotland. But basically, all three of these people who we come to know as the Triumvirate, they seek a kind of managerial independence. I mean, it's probably anachronistic to say it, but it's a kind of executive power, if we think of it in more modern terms, they want to run the government sort of above the partisan fray of Parliament. And basically what brings other figures into the book is the fact that Harley, as I said, is quite attuned to the importance of public image and public opinion. Quite early on and from fairly early on in the triumvirate, he's trying to persuade Godolphin to be on the lookout. I think I'm probably manually quote for a discreet right of the government's side who can set facts straight and to bring the populace back into the fold when they, as he puts it, for want of information. Godolphin is fairly skeptical. This is not how he thinks things should be done, but he gives Harley a bit of leeway. And so Harley starts building this network of writers and operatives and that becomes the. The other kind of group is Harley's ad hoc network of intelligence agents. So we have one group at those in power and then we have the second group, their agents, which includes Defoe, William Patterson, who I'm sure will come to talk about, as well as Harley's agents like John Ogilvy, who are on the continent, sort of actively addressing the threat of Jacobitism and the sort of European interference in British, well, sorry, English and Scottish politics before 1707. So basically the group biography is looking at the dynamics within each of these groups, but also between them, looking at how the principals manage their agents and how the agents are sort of managed up a bit, how that works and how through these channels of influence and dissemination, certain important, well, achievements of the major constitutional achievements of Queen Anne's age. And it is arguably the age that has the greatest impact on the sort of development of the quasi of these quasi constitutional acts that form this unwritten British constitution. So it's looking at those channels through these groups. Again, I'm interested in the intrigue and the gossip and I think it gives us quite a good way in to think about these broader, still ramifying political events and legal events really.
- [12:25]
A
And the way you look at them, these events is broad, right? We don't start off kind of jumping straight into the House of Lords and kind of who said what on a given, you know, the moment, for example, a treaty is created or signed. And in fact, we start somewhere that is a little bit surprising and intriguing. It's an interesting way into the book. We start in April 1703, discussing the water pipes underneath London.
- [12:52]
B
Why I Mean, it's an irresistible metaphor. And at the end of the day I am an English scholar, a literature scholar, so I can't resist a good metaphor. And I also had a wonderful day at the London Metropolitan Archives reconstructing the network of the Hampstead Water Company. But more so, it's an interesting, a great metaphor for the clandestine working of workings of state. This level just underneath the surface that I've been talking about, that we don't really see, but yet is so vital in disseminating information, in making things happen. And I thought the sort of, this nascent water system in London was such a great way of maybe it's too hand fisted, but of just signifying that or just suggesting that the other crucial figure that makes it, connects it to the wider story is the fact that one of the key planners and designers or projectors of the Hampstead Water Company was a man called William Patterson. William Patterson, who is remembered best for his sort of role in helping to propose the bank of England, but also for his role as a really lead projector and director of the failed Scottish colony at Darien. I think we'll probably come to that later, but for our purposes, he's also the man who brings Defoe to Harley's renewed notice at this precise period. So in April 1703, Patterson receives a letter. It's marked in covert and it comes from a man on the run. Readers can obviously, I mean listeners to this pod will obviously guess that that's Defoe. Defoe is on the run from the government. He's been charged with seditious libel. He's written this pamphlet in 1702 called the shortest Way with the Dissenters. So he essentially apes the rhetoric and the manner of a high church Tory preacher, suggesting that religious dissenters, those who fall outside the bounds of the Anglican communion, should be extirpated, should essentially be ethnically cleansed from the polity of England. When it's revealed that Defoe was the author and that Defoe himself was a dissenter, the hoax is sort of downs back upon him. People are too offended, having been, I think, lured to the logical ends of their own prejudices. But yeah, nonetheless it's, it's deeply offensive. It threatens the cohesion of church and state. And so he's charged with seditious libel and he goes on the run. While on the run, he really does not want to end up in prison. He's. So he writes to a number of distinguished people and less distinguished people. He writes to William Penn, who we know as the founder of the Pennsylvania Colony, a man who sort of intercedes and prisoners before he. He writes to the Duke of Nottingham, who is. He's the man who's actually pursuing him at Harley's direction. And he writes to Patterson because he suspects that Patterson has been sharing intelligence or at least working a little bit for people like Harley and Godolphin. And he's right on this. Patterson had been providing sort of minor intelligence, some stuff from his contacts in Europe about the War of the Spanish Succession. But he sort of implies an affinity between them, between himself, Defoe and Patterson, saying they are these kind of new kinds of actors who might gain prominence through their connections to someone like Harley. And he makes this sort of promise to Harley that if Harley will see to getting him pardoned or at least getting him out of this legal quagmire, Defoe will never not. Will only mention him in the most positive terms when he writes about him. It's a bit of a paltry promise, but it's really, I think. And the reason I sort of start with the pipes and the letters that come as after to Patterson is because it's sort of the foundational contract or premise of a kind of political operative that. A kind of new political operative that Defoe and Patterson represent. Someone who is known for their powers of persuasion, for their sort of policy advice, both with important economic thinkers, and someone who can also act as a kind of intermediary between Minister and this more amorphous reading public whose political power is ill defined, but yet people like Harley perceive it to be growing. So the pipes are really calling. The pipes start us off. And like I said, it's a metaphor for clandestine action. But it's also quite a concrete way to bring us into this network. Rather than starting with, you know, Dafoe's arrest or Defoe in prison, it starts here, just to think through the broader implications of those actions, the broader implications of Defoe's arrest and his promising a rising star like Harley to work for him in a certain kind of way.
- [17:36]
A
Okay, I mean, that definitely makes sense, explained that way. And as a fellow historian, having fun in the archives is definitely also a good reason to choose a fun starting point. But if we're talking. Yeah, no, it's very fun. And I've heard fabulous things about the London Metropolitan Archives, particularly to any historians looking for a good archive to engage with. If we're talking, though, about wider implications, can we make sure to discuss kind of the wider implications of why English control over Scotland is a particularly important question at this moment? In 1703.
- [18:09]
B
Yeah, no, that's. That's really important. So basically, it's a source of dynastic and geopolitical insecurity. Scotland. So listeners will be familiar that Scotland and England have shared a monarch since the accession of James the First of England in 1603. But from that period onwards they maintained separate parliaments. And so there's sort of these often competing sources of legislative power. And Scotland had a very long standing, they called old alliance with France, who during the War of Spanish Succession is England's greatest geopolitical foe. So it's a weak point in that way. It's a weak point. Those in power fear it as a. And rightly fear it as they were later would later be proven as a site for a potential invasion of the British Isles, a landing in Scotland that could then march an army downwards to England, you know, either drawing English forces away from their European theaters or actually threatening the cohesion of England itself. The other thing that's closely related is it's a source of dynastic insecurity. So the reason those in power are so worried about a potential invasion from France is that they suspect it might have Jacobites support. So Jacobites, those who supported the deposed James ii, who's. I'll say deposed, but James, there's conflicting views on this, but James ii, who. Who is in exile in. In. In France and still has quite a lot of support in Scotland, especially through the clan networks of the Highlands, there's a lot of support for the main line of the Stuarts, as they call them. Anne, Queen anne, who's James II's daughter at this stage, has no heirs and she doesn't succeed in having a living heir. So there's a lot of worry about who succeeds her and whether there'll be a reimposition of the Catholic James II from France, the. Backed by France drawing Jacobite support. And what happens in 1701 is the English Parliament passes the act of Succession, which passes the English throne onto the Electress of. Electress of hanover, Sophia. She's 58th in line to the throne, but most importantly, she is Protestant. And they did this without consulting the Scottish Parliament. So the Scottish Parliament had not yet accepted the succession. And in terms of keeping Britain cohesive, sort of the sort of, well, I'll call it Britain, but it's really this, the union of the crowns before it's the formation of a single Great Britain, they need to keep their dynastic politics in check. They need to ensure a Protestant succession. So they're worried about A Protestant succession, and they're worried about a Jacobite invasion. And these things really come to a head in the years after the act of Settlement, the. The act of 1701. So it's. It's sort of discontent is brewing. The Scottish Parliament is looking for ways to maybe. Which they do find in the following years, ways to assert their own succession that might deviate from what happens in Britain. And there's a lot of inner turmoil between. And people like Haley are. Are extremely worried about what this means, both for the cohes, the cohesion of the state that they manage, but also for the, The. The Pan European war and the potential threat of a new civil war in England. You know, this is only, what, like 50, 60 years? Don't make me do maths. After the Civil wars, the, the worry is present that there'll be another one spurred by a Franco Jacobite invasion. And so they really need better and more comprehensive control over, well, the Scottish Parliament over those figures in Scot, you know, the. Yeah, over those who are governing Scotland. They just need greater control, influence. And that's what comes to a head. Defoe at one stage says it's either going to be union or war. This might be a moment of Defoe in sort of hyperbole. And there's lots of those in the letters and there's lots of those in his political pamphlets. But I think he's not altogether wrong. There's a deep threat about what Scotland poses at this point, because, as I said, of its dynastic and it's geopolitical. Yeah, dynastic and geopolitical insecurities, really.
- [22:37]
A
Yeah. And I mean, just from what you've outlined there, obviously a threat only sort of manifests when, for example, in this case, the English Parliament want one particular outcome and there are others on the table.
- [22:48]
B
Right.
- [22:48]
A
There's all sorts of different alternatives that could happen and seem plausible enough that the kind of one the English Parliament wants are not happy. But as you mentioned earlier, this isn't just a question of kings and queens anymore. This is not even just a question of English and Scottish Parliaments. There's also a public opinion aspect to this. So where does, for example, Scottish public opinion fit into these debates?
- [23:14]
B
Right. That's quite a difficult one to answer. The best works on this are really by Karen Bowie, a Scottish historian who's done an amazing work reconstructing Scottish public opinion. We find, though, that Scottish public opinion is overwhelmingly against the union. The potential union. Well, I'll rephrase that. They overwhelmingly against an incorporative union. They're against the kind of union that would see the Scottish Parliament dissolved and Scottish members be absorbed into a new Parliament of Great Britain, but one that would nonetheless sit in London. So the sort of Scottish, the Scottish public, insofar as we can figure out what they were thinking at this time, were against incorporation and they didn't want centralized control from London. There's a strong history, centuries, deep history of invasion and counter invasion of Anglo Scottish animus. You can see why they wouldn't want to sort of cede their sovereignty in that way at this. At the early stage. The other potential solution on the table was a more federated union or a federal union, one whereby Scotland would retain its institutions like its Parliament, but seek a closer governing relationship with England. And this one actually is a lot more popular, at least with Scottish parliamentarians. And even Scottish parliamentarians who then came out so strongly against incorporation were willing to entertain federation. But this, as you said, this is not what the English Parliament wanted. And you know, as so often happens in these composite monarchies, the dominant power exerts its dominance. And so there were union commissioners in 1706 negotiating the particular form the treaty would take. Would it be incorporative or would it be federal? The problem was the Duke of Hamilton, another key figure in my book, had given, voted in the last minute and sort of proposed in Parliament at the last minute when they were in the Scottish Parliament, to allow the Queen to choose the commissioners from Scotland rather than the Scottish estates. So with a couple of exceptions, Lockhart of Con, with the noted Jacobite being the main amongst them, the Scottish commissioners who negotiated the treaty were overwhelmingly pro union. And so there's not as much public opinion determining the form the treaty would take at this stage. This is happening behind closed doors. We have some access to it a little bit because Defoe manages to befriend John Clark of Penakuic, the younger one, and he was one of the negotiators. And Defoe gets a bit of clandestine information that way, but it's not really taken to the public. The problem happens when the treaty goes north and Defoe follows shortly afterwards to the Scottish Parliament because it needs to be ratified once the commission is in in London. The English and the Scottish ones have agreed upon its form loosely. It has to be ratified. And this is when public opinion is brought to bear through addresses sort of and petitions against the Union, through riots, through armed uprising. And this is really where the English power brokers, Harley, even, even the sort of astute high, are absolutely shocked at the amount of Animus that's, that's directed at incorporation, and that's why they deploy so many agents north to try and, you know, keep the populace, if not on side, at least restive, at least less openly against an incorporating Union. And so I think we have, as I said, this is a particular period. The franchise is so limited that the actual mechanism for public opinion to have a direct role on the processes of politics is limited. But you still find that the public exerts the sort of amorphous entity of the public, exerts a will in a certain way that has the potential to shape the actions of those in power, those in the Scottish Parliament. And this is what Harley and eventually Godolphin and Marlborough come to really worry about, is that those in the street are going to shape, those in the House of Parliament to either scuttle or delay the ratification of the treaty or do something that threatens the sort of geopolitical situation of England. By this stage, the Scottish Parliament had proposed acts to choose their own successor to Queen Anne and acts to also have the power to declare peace and war. So sort of to reclaim aspects of sovereignty that were totally intolerable to the English Parliament, to the English government, really. And they also wanted the things they had over their. Their heads were sort of. The English government really wanted the Scottish Parliament to settle the succession. They also wanted them to pass the supply for the civil and military list in Scotland, which is something they controlled. So it's this back and forth and the politic, the Parliament, Terence, hold a lot of power. And the worry is that the absolute rejection of the Union treaty on the streets was going to shape a subsequent, if not rejection, at least a delay or a prevarication that would stop the sort of steamrolling towards union that the English hopes would have, or the sort of pro Union English hoped. I mean, I'm talking about a select group of English politicians. Not everyone in England was for Union. It was more popular than in Scotland, but it wasn't uniformly popular there either. But the focus of the book is really what I see as the main threat to the Union, which is the sort of movement that is trying to preserve Scottish sovereignty that I see shaping subsequent efforts to reclaim Scottish independence right up to this day.
- [29:11]
A
Yeah, no, that makes sense. If we're thinking then about kind of the interventions the English government is trying to make in this Scottish public opinion and parliamentary work you mentioned just there kind of Defoe goes north with the treaty. You know, he follows shortly after the treaty. And Harley is interested and surprised at this and kind of tries to do something about it. Let's make that more explicit. Like, Defoe's not just wandering up to Edinburgh after the treaty because he feels like it all by himself. Like, what is Defoe actually up to at this point? What are Harley's other operatives up to? And to what extent should we be thinking about this as like a coordinated effort that may or may not have been secret? Like, this isn't just Defoe off by on his lonesome, right?
- [29:54]
B
No. Although that is his cover story, that he is off to Scotland on his lonesome to pursue business opportunities and also because he's been threatened in England because of his writing and that he's worried about prosecution. The benefit of that cover story is it's loosely connected to the truth, so it's easier to maintain. The best cover is the one that's closest to fact, but it's not the whole fact, as you rightly suggest. You didn't just, you know, take the two week trek up to Edinburgh as a jaunt because he wanted to see a treaty being ratified in the Scottish Parliament. So he is eventually arrested. If we go back to 1703, he's eventually arrested in 1704 and ends up in Newgate Prison for seditious libel. He's pilloried three times. You know, this massive public disgrace, although it turns out not to be as disgraceful as otherwise. He manages to persuade the crowd not to sort of throw stones and mud to the extent they could. But Harley lets him stew in Newgate, but eventually does orchestrate his release secretly. So Dafoe is indebted to Harley and he becomes, from that point, one of Harley's agents. He wants a mission overseas because Defoe knows Harley runs agents in Europe and he really wants this posting mostly to get him. Defoe wants us to get out of the financial mire that he was in because he was sort of being dogged by creditors all across London. He wants to get as far as possible. Harley doesn't send him to London, doesn't send him overseas. Sorry. Before Defoe goes to Scotland, he undertakes these two tours. One that goes to the eastern counties and a more extensive one that goes as far north as Leeds and as far south as Plymouth. And what he's doing there is the one before the election. He's trying to get some polling, some sampling, what we would think of as opinion sampling, and to give the sort of political demographics of each separate seat that he's following. But he's also giving a postmortem of the election he's looking at who the power brokers are in certain counties, how they manipulate populations. The other thing he's doing is he's establishing a network of what we call distribution agents. These are people who can give Defoe up to the minute intelligence of their localities, but they can also serve as a hub for the dissemination of his writings. So rather than just having his writings pumped in London, Defoe can. Can distribute them across the entire length and breadth, most of the length and breadth of the country, using these, these particular agents as a way to, yeah, get his information out there. So it's. He. He's building this nascent intelligence network. It's both an intelligence and a propaganda network. It's doing two things, gathering information to know the people, but also seeding propaganda to shape their views. And the two are absolutely inextricably linked. The better, you know a constituency of readers, the better you can directly target your writing to shape their ideas. As we've discussed, Scotland becomes a major hot point for Harley and his colleagues. He's already sent agents north. He sent William Gregg, his clerk, who's eventually charged with treason, but that's later. And another story, I'm not sure we get to it, but a very interesting one at the end of that I discuss at the end of the book. But he sends Patterson north. He also has agents across on the continent, monitoring Jacobite networks, monitoring France, monitoring Versailles, but also monitoring Saint Germain, where the exiled course of James II and then his son and Mary of Modena is based. So he's got these networks all over, and it's within this broader context that he sends Defoe north to both monitor the Scottish Parliament and the various subcommittees and members of the Kirk as well, because the Kirk has immense power, but also to try and find out ways that they can maybe exert the same kind of persuasive capacity he's exerted across English. So in many ways it builds on what Defoe has done in England, which is to sort of make this. Defoe calls it a skeleton, this sort of network of bones and joints, really, to butcher Defoe's own metaphor that connects England both in terms of the flow of information to Harley, but also the flow of information from Defoe and Harley to shape those. So I think he set north to try and have the same effect in Edinburgh, to try and, you know, bring people and politicians on side. So, yeah, definitely not just Dafoe Willy nilly taking a horse, but also perhaps on the other side, not as coordinated as a modern intelligence network, a lot more ad Hoc. I mean, when Defoe started serving Harley, he wrote him a memorandum, and in this memorandum he urges Harley in the strongest possible turns, to professionalize intelligence gathering capacities of his office. You know, and this is not the first, you know, historians know, this is not the first use of spies in politics. It goes way back in, even in England, goes way back. But there is, aside from key figures like Walsingen, there's mostly in Harley's age and age before Harley, a little bit of a gentlemanly complacency in the way intelligence is managed. And Defoe's worry and the worry of others is that England is falling out of step of, say, France that has a much more. Put much more money into its intelligence networks. So Defoe is urging Harley to do the same. But Harley is slowly developing. It's a transition point, I think, from this ad hoc gentlemanly network to something more professional, but not. It's not MI5. Yeah. Defoe is not the father of MI5, as one historian put it a little bit too flatteringly.
- [35:55]
A
Yeah, no, it's a sort of in between transition phase. But that's always, of course, interesting and helpful to identify in history. So that's useful to understand. When we think, though, about what these goals are of sending him north, obviously, as you've mentioned, it's predicated on the fact he has done something like this successfully before. But in England, where. Yes, you mentioned, you know, not everyone's in favour of uni with Scotland, but it's not like as vociferous an opposition. I mean, you mentioned briefly earlier in Scotland, we're not just talking about some people kind of writing in pamphlets like, hey, this is maybe not a good idea. Like some of the opposition is quite intense and even violent. So when Dafoe and his colleagues are up in Edinburgh, like, A, are they able to do anything and B, how dangerous is it for them to try and make any of this happen?
- [36:47]
B
Right. So, I mean, crucially, Defoe wasn't. Hadn't done that much work persuading the English or he'd written a couple of essays to help bring the English onside to remove a national, what he calls a national prejudice to Scotland. But it wasn't, you know, it wasn't the main task of his network. It had been something he'd done amongst other issues. So I don't think it yet confronted the kind of animus he was going to think. How dangerous was it? Well, it's really hard to tell the quote from the. That the title of the book takes a spy Amongst us comes from John Clark of Penacurich. And he writes. I've got the quote exactly here. Daniel Defoe, who was sent to Scotland on purpose to give a fateful account from time to time of how everything passed there. He was there for a spy amongst us, but not known to be such other ways. The mob of Edinburgh was. Would have pulled him to pieces, had pulled him to pieces. So there is danger, I think. And Defoe confronts this directly during some of the riots, though it's very hard to tell because he is prone to exaggerating. He does have a novelist's temperament. And so we do get these vivid scenes and we. That don't always. Don't always sort of. They're not always corroborated by the letters or other accounts. They're true enough, but they're sort of. He exaggerates and he's prone to exaggerate the danger. So it's a difficult question to ask, to answer. Sorry. What they did is an interesting one. So Harley is very conscious of the danger that he's sending Defoe into and he urges him in. The one bit of instructions he gives Defoe is to sort of take care not to blow his cover. But, yeah. So basically his role is to monitor the Scottish Parliament, but also to try and infiltrate the various subcommittees to whom the Parliament had deputed key parts of the negotiation, including the economic and the religious aspects, the two key sort of contentious bones in Scotland about what. What threat the Union might pose. So, yeah, he needs to infiltrate these committees and he also needs to try and talk to people and publish works to try and get the people on site. And so he manages to do this with quite a high degree of sophistication. He manages to get in good with a lot of ministers of the Kirk and to keep some of them, not necessarily on side, but away from the worst, what England would have seen as the worst excesses of their sort of inflaming the populace. Because the Kirk had access through their presbyteries to a lot of. To all the people, essentially, to the Presbyterians, what they preached in their services could really have intense political effects. But the other people he gets in good with are those calculating the equivalent. And that's the one off payment that's going to compensate for the loss of Darien, but it's also going to pay Scotland to offset the burden they would have in assuming part of England's national debt. So gets in good with both the religious and the economic drivers of the treaty and is able to influence policy that way. But also to tell Harley what's happening in these committees, to try and have a node of control there. And he publishes quite a lot as well. Issues of the Review three times a week, lots and lots of pen. That's all written anonymously. Well, most of them written anonymously, so they can't pinpoint who's writing it. But he's very good at aping the voices of others to try and persuade certain constituencies of his points and to try and bring them in a sort of orchestrated heteroglossia. All these different voices all having enough points of agreement on the general tenor of what Harley defines as the national interest. And the impact that he had. I think you asked. It's really hard to assess, you know, what would have happened if he hadn't been there, is the kind of counterfactual that's hard to establish with any degree of precision. But I think through Defoe's career, we see that the Union wasn't a fait accompli, nor was it merely a political hack job effected through bribery. It was something between those. It was a complex negotiation that requires. Required the management of politics, economics, populace. And Defoe, I think, was a key node in that management.
- [41:17]
A
And this, I mean, what you are describing here is part of why he was a key node is some of the same skills, or maybe even exactly the same skills as what makes him a novelist, as we kind of, I think, most famously know him as. So can we talk about how we can understand the links between his spy work and his sort of fiction writing? Is it sort of two separate careers? It doesn't sound like it, no.
- [41:42]
B
It kind of chronologically feels like one. So we principally remember Defoe as novelists, as sort of one of these early novelists, found one of these sort of founding novelists, and we principally remember him for Crusoe, Moll Flanders, the Fortunate Mistress, which is Roxana Jogia. These sort of six main novels that he wrote he published another five years. We don't necessarily know if he'd been drafting them before, but he published them in the period directly after his final year as a spy in 1718. So there is a sort of chronological distinction, but there isn't a methodological or a political distinction, I don't think. I mean, the politics of the novels is way more ambiguous and complex. So it's not like a direct one to one translation. But what sort of interested me in a lot of ways is the crossover between novelist and spy. So he assumes all Defoe's novels are first person narratives. He assumes fully the guise of somebody else. He fully impersonates somebody. He takes on what could be thought of as a cover story, and he writes this. The other thing that I think is quite intriguing is one of Defoe's distribution agents and friends, John Frangham, called him a reader of mankind. He's alert to the sort of wants and needs of character, to the motivations of people. And is this not like the novelist's key skill, the sort of heightened observational skill? And there's a bit of a crossover, I think, in the fact that he uses his writing as a cover story in Scotland when he's sort of. When people are starting to really doubt that he's come north just on business or, you know, to try and get his son enrolled at the University of Edinburgh because he's running away from writing, you know, his troubles at home. The COVID story that he adopts is that he's writing the history of the Union, which he eventually does. And so the prose techniques from that carry on through to his novels as well. So there's a lot of crossover, I think. I think it's. He's lived such a varied life, and that varied life feeds the novels materially, but it also feeds them in terms of mode and way of writing. Yeah. So, you know, adopting a cover story is what a novelist does. And if we think about it, there's a lot of novelists who are spies into foe's own age. Just before Aphra Behn, we can think of Peter Matheson worked for the CIA. We've got John Le Carre, the most obvious one, Graham Greene. It's just there's a lot of novelists who began as agents of some kind. And I. And those are just the ones we know about. There might be, you know, there might be a lot of novelists who worked in the secret services before. I mean, now I'm sounding like I've got some conspiracy theory, but. But, you know, there is a crossover. And I think it's not just a crossover of material in defoeo's case, but a crossover of the way of looking at the world, of a kind of observation that's needed for spies and a kind of impersonation that's needed at Spies and Defoe. Those are the parts of spying that Defoe liked best. You could tell in his letter. He's absolutely thrilled about it. And I think that's really what makes him as a novelist.
- [44:50]
A
Yeah, no, that definitely comes through in some of the kind of quotations and details you have in the book. So I definitely think it makes sense to read his two careers, as it were, as very much intertwined. The other piece that you mentioned a little bit earlier that I want to maybe finish our discussion with is the ways in which this history is obviously interesting historically. Right. And the kind of questions we've discussed about the kind of transition into a more modern British state. There's all sorts of ways in which this history kind of helps us make sense of where we're at now. But there's, of course, the relevance that relations between Scotland and England and who should have what kind of power and sovereignty and where should decisions be made is also still relevant today. So do you see any particular links between this book that you've written and the history you've uncovered with it and that aspect of current politics?
- [45:41]
B
Yeah, I mean, this is the question that I think I'm going to keep getting, and it's maybe the question that a historian is probably the least comfortable with. As, you know, we get so immersed in our periods and our geographic focuses that sometimes it's hard to take a step back. But I think with the Union, what working on its formation has really told me is that it was never, as it is presented by some pro unions as the sort of stable, marmorial, set in stone kind of quasi constitutional act. It was from the get go, unstable, restless, up for debate, up for continual debate. Defoe was sent back after the treaty was ratified in both Parliaments, very soon thereafter because there was so much trouble in Scotland, he had to go and try and quell the population and make them accept what their Parliament had essentially done after the fact. And just looking at the broader history of the Union, there's always been this process of negotiation between those who want a greater Scotland, a greater sovereignty for Scotland, and those who want to maintain this composite Parliament, this incorporated mode of representation. And the negotiation, as you said, it sort of devolves back to the same sort of, or redounds back to the same terms on which the formation was discussed, the benefits for each place, what the losses would have, what the losses would be and whether those benefits persist, the supposed benefits. And I think, you know, the Union was not this sacred thing in a lot of ways. It was in many ways a very pragmatic compact. It gave key powerful Scots access to the trade of the British Empire, including the slave trade. And it gave more broadly this access to England's global connections to try and bring Scotland to try and pursue sort of an economically stagnant place, to sort of, to prompt the development to keep up with other countries in Europe. And that was the sort of the lure of this union. And I think that comes under increasing pressure as certain people in Scotland S and P. Alba mainly concede that Scotland might have better access to those things outside of the Union. I think, I mean, the elephant in the room is obviously Brexit. You know, can Scotland maintain its ties with Europe outside of the Union better than it can within it? That was a key argument of the unionists during the 2014 referendum that if Scotland goes independent, they'll lose their ties to Europe. Well, they were a bit wrong. It was a key argument during the actual Union formation that with a connection to England, Scotland would access all of England's global wealth and trade. It didn't really in the end, but it was a very compelling argument for a lot of the Scottish politicians who voted for ratification. So I think studying the early history of the Union and it's not just its formation, but the sort of early attempts to try and bring it down, which we see Defoe working against in the later half of my book as well, gives us a sense of its instability, gives us a sense, a sense of its negotiability as well. And I think that is crucial to bear in mind lest we approach the modern day argument with this idea that this thing is set in stone, that the status quo is, is sort of immemorial and indissoluble. I mean, I'm not taking a position on, on Scottish independence. I think I'm going to alienate half my, my audience no matter which way I go. I'm, as you said at the beginning, I'm Australian. I don't have any sort of personal connection to Scotland other than my intense sort of academic interest in the place. But I do think that, you know, we need, when we're discussing the future of the Union, we do need to have a very objective, disinterested, sort of dispassionate look at its formation because it wasn't this sort of transcendent, wonderful fait accompli. It was a much grubbier, a much more negotiated, cleverly negotiated by England, much more compromised geopolitical compact. And I think that we need to have that realistic idea if we're going to have a historically informed discussion of the future of this thing.
- [50:07]
A
Yeah, no, I mean, obviously as a fellow historian, I always think we need to know the real history in order to make sense of the present and future. And this book definitely helps with that when it comes to those political questions in terms Though of a more immediate future, your academic future. What may I ask, are you working on now that this project is done? You mentioned that Defoe kind of comes up in all of your work. So have you got more Defoe going or.
- [50:31]
B
Yeah, he just draws me back in. I'm a bit of both. You know, as. As is the typical academic practice, I'm just biting off more than I can chew. But I've been. I've got this long standing project and that's perhaps so the, the Aspire Amongst Us is, is a crossover book. It's designed to appeal to an educated general readership to introduce them to this history. But it'll also have, I hope, a lot of stuff in there that's going to introduce even Defoe special be of interest to Defoe specialists and then Scottish Union specialists as well. But my more academically sort of inclined book that I'm working on, more traditionally academic, is a history of Jewish naturalization, a literary history of Jewish naturalization throughout the British Empire. Looking at both the cultural factors and the legal factors that sort of change Britain's developing immigration policy. That's the sort of one that's ticking away. I'm working slowly at it. I'm doing my archival work. But the one, the Defoe that keeps bringing me back is that you talked a bit about the beginning that this is not a traditional biography. And again I've decided maybe I want to do a less than traditional biography as a follow up book. And so I've been also laying the ground to do a biography of Crusoe, a biography of Defoe's most famous characters. And arguably one of the characters that's had the most influence for ill and good over the way the world is ordered. Now the sort of, you know, this, this self sufficient, allegedly person who's become emblem of, you know, both Cold War liberals and modern day preppers, you know, building their own Crusoe's islands underground in New Zealand. I suspect that's just my Australian dig there. But yeah, so I'm working on two projects, just one on the sort of history of immigration, which draws on the sort of legal side of the union that I was working on. And it has a bit of Defoe in there as well. I can't get rid of him. I think I talk about the fortunate mistress in that book. And then I also want to write this biography of Crusoe. I mean, yeah, we'll see. The Crusoe one is in very early stages. I'm sort of putting it out there on this pod so that somebody might hold me to it, because I think it might be quite a might be quite a fun thing to both write and to read.
- [52:44]
A
Well, both of those projects sound very interesting, so best of luck with both of them. And, of course, while you're working on them, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled A Spy Amongst Daniel Dafoe's Secret Secret Service and the Plot to End Scottish Independence, published by Yale University Press in 2026. Mark, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [53:03]
B
No, thank you. That was really a lot of.