Defoe and the Limits of Jacobite Rhetoric

Defoe's first published poem, "A New Discovery of an Old Intreague," is more a comment on London politics than an attack on Jacobites. In his rhetoric and imagery, Defoe develops Jacobites as ambiguous entities, amphibious creatures, ambodexters in both religion and politics, who had forsworn the necessarily mutually exclusive loyalty to state and church because they had confused state with church.