I bridle in my struggling Muse with pain, That longs to launch into a bolder strain.
Richard Steele was not content with learning to be bold. Eager, at that turning point of her national life, to serve England with strength of arm, at least, if not with the good brains which he was neither encouraged nor disposed to value highly, Steele's patriotism impelled him to make his start in the world, not by the way of patronage, but by enlisting himself as a private in the Coldstream Guards. By so doing he knew that he offended a relation, and lost a bequest. As he said of himself afterwards,
'when he mounted a war-horse, with a great sword in his hand, and planted himself behind King William III against Louis XIV, he lost the succession to a very good estate in the county of Wexford, in Ireland, from the same humour which he has preserved, ever since, of preferring the state of his mind to that of his fortune.'
Steele entered the Duke of Ormond's regiment, and had reasons for enlistment. James Butler, the first Duke, whom his father served, had sent him to the Charterhouse. That first Duke had been Chancellor of the University at Oxford, and when he died, on the 21st of July, 1688, nine months before Steele entered to Christchurch, his grandson, another James Butler, succeeded to the Dukedom. This second Duke of Ormond was also placed by the University of Oxford in his grandfather's office of Chancellor. He went with King William to Holland in 1691, shared the defeat of William in the battle of Steinkirk in August, 1692, and was taken prisoner in July, 1693, when King William was defeated at Landen. These defeats encouraged the friends of the Stuarts, and in 1694, Bristol, Exeter and Boston adhered to King James. Troops were raised in the North of England to assist his cause. In 1696 there was the conspiracy of Sir George Barclay to seize William on the 15th of February. Captain Charnock, one of the conspirators, had been a Fellow of Magdalene. On the 23rd of February the plot was laid before Parliament. There was high excitement throughout the country. Loyal Associations were formed. The Chancellor of the University of Oxford was a fellow-soldier of the King's, and desired to draw strength to his regiment from the enthusiasm of the time. Steele's heart was with the cause of the Revolution, and he owed also to the Ormonds a kind of family allegiance. What was more natural than that he should be among those young Oxford men who were tempted to enlist in the Chancellor's own regiment for the defence of liberty? Lord Cutts, the Colonel of the Regiment, made Steele his Secretary, and got him an Ensign's commission. It was then that he wrote his first book, the 'Christian Hero', of which the modest account given by Steele himself long afterwards, when put on his defence by the injurious violence of faction, is as follows: