“Treason and Loyalty go Hand in Hand”: Moral Politics and Radical Whiggery in Defoe’s Jure Divino (1706)

Abstract:Daniel Defoe’s Jure Divino is a generic oddity, a twelve-book poem in heroic couplets devoted to dense political theorizing, labeled by its author a “Satyr.” Accounts of Jure Divino suggest a work of would-be great heroic poetry communicating straightforward mainstream Whig ideology—but we have not fully understood the radical nature of the statement Defoe makes about resistance and the limits of political obligation. Jure Divino amplifies John Locke’s anticlericalism; reflects Defoe’s commitment to advancing Protestant politics and the Reformation project against the dark politics of the high church; represents a reversal of the High Tory argument about the sinfulness of rebellion; and desanctifies claims about divine right government and hereditary succession. The poem represents a reminder that we have not fully understood Defoe’s role in the religiopolitical controversies of late Stuart Britain.