Why was Daniel Defoe prosecuted for The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters?

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Daniel Defoe Daniel Defoe, engraving by M. Van der Gucht, after a portrait by J. Taverner, first half of the 18th century.

Daniel Defoe was prosecuted for seditious libel in 1703 following the publication of his 1702 pamphlet, The Shortest-Way With The Dissenters.

Defoe, a Dissenter himself, wrote the work as an ironic satire intended to discredit "highfliers"—High-Church Tories who sought to suppress Dissenters by ending the practice of "occasional conformity." By adopting the persona of a highfliers extremist and reducing their arguments to absurdity, Defoe hoped to expose the intolerance of their position.

However, the irony backfired: both Dissenters and High Churchmen took the pamphlet’s extreme rhetoric literally. When the hoax was revealed, both groups were outraged. Defoe was subsequently arrested, fined, and sentenced to stand in the pillory. Historians suggest the prosecution was likely a politically motivated attempt to pressure Defoe into betraying Whig leaders, though the effort ultimately failed to break his resolve.1