FROM
Daniel Defoe was born in London in 1659, the son of a butcher, and educated at a Non-Conformist academy. He joined Monmouth’s rebellion in the West Country in 1683, but managed to escape and was a volunteer trooper when William of Orange entered London after the Glorious Revolution. In 1698 he wrote an Essay on Projects with a number of proposals for institutional reforms, including military colleges, and an Argument for a Standing Army. Thereafter he was a prolific writer of pamphlets and of books.
In 1702 he was imprisoned, pilloried, and fined for a religious satire and after his release in 1704 was employed as a government agent in Scotland, working for Union. In 1715 he was again imprisoned for libel. Robinson Crusoe was published in 1719. He was violently assaulted in 1724 in mysterious circumstances and died in debt in 1731.
The Memoirs were widely believed to be authentic {by William Pitt, among others) but they were, in fact, one of the earliest historical novels.
Then I had the opportunity of seeing the Dutch Army, and their famous general Prince Maurice. It is true that the men behaved themselves well enough in action, when they were put to it, but the prince's way of beating his enemies without fighting, was so unlike the gallantry of my royal instructor that it had no manner of relish with me. Our way in Germany was always to seek out the enemy and fight him, and, give the imperialists their due, they were seldom hard to be found, but were as free of their flesh as we were.
Whereas Prince Maurice would lie in a camp till he had starved half his men, if by lying there he could but starve two-thirds of his enemies; so that, indeed, the war in Holland had more of fatigue and hardships in it, and ours had more of fighting and blows. Hasty marches, long and unwholesome encampments, winter parties, counter-marching, dodging, and intrenching.
Renaissance and Reformation
were the exercises of his men, and often time killed more men with hunger, cold and diseases than he could do with fighting; not that it required less courage, but rather more, for a soldier had at any time rather die in the field a la coup de mousquet, than be starved with hunger, or frozen to death in the trenches.
Nor do I think to lessen the reputation of that great general, for it is most certain he ruined the Spaniards more by spinning the war thus out in length, than he could possibly have done by swift conquest; for had he, Gustavus like, with a torrent of victory, dislodged the Spaniard from all the twelve provinces in five years (whereas he was forty years in beating them out of seven) he had left them rich and strong at home, and able to keep the Dutch in constant apprehension of the return of his power; whereas, by the long continuance of the war, he so broke the very heart of the Spanish monarchy, so absolutely and irrecoverably impoverished them that they have ever since languished of the disease, till they are fallen from the most powerful to be the most despicable nation in the world.