Nathaniel Mist

Where other opposition papers would defer, Mist's would explicitly attack the government of Walpole and the entire House of Hanover.

He was a Jacobite of strong convictions and pugnacious determination who employed various authors writing under pseudonyms, from Lewis Theobald to Daniel Defoe, and was frequently tried by the government for sedition.

Professor Arne Bialuschewski also showed that Mist probably wrote under the pseudonym "Captain Charles Johnson" to create A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates.

He would discuss current scandals, literature, and events frankly, but when the subject was political or touching the affairs of the peerage, he would employ allegory or fictional history.

He would publish an account of famous regicides, where the king was a tyrant, and imply that the public needed to take action against the Hanoverian "usurper."

Informative stories about how pirates organize their ships would be an analogy to Walpole's running of the British House of Commons.

Eleven months later, he called George I "a cruel ill-bred uneducated old Tyrant, and the drivelling Fool his Son" and was imprisoned for not revealing the author of the libel.

In September 1728 another issue again made too explicit an attack on the Walpole ministry and the royal family, and so the presses were destroyed.

In 1730 he set up a joint venture with Charles Molloy to ship wine from France to England, and to use these shipments as a way of passing secret messages.