* * * * *
Notes.
"THAT SWINNEY."
Junius thus wrote to H. S. Woodfall in a private note, to which Dr. Good
has affixed the date July 21st, 1769 (vol. i. p. 174.*)
"That Swinney is a wretched but dangerous fool. He had the impudence to
go to Lord G. Sackville, whom he had never spoken to, and to ask him
whether or no he was the author of Junius: take care of him."
This paragraph has given rise to a great deal of speculation, large
inferences have been drawn from it, yet no one has satisfactorily answered
the question, who was "that Swinney?"
That neither Dr. Good nor Mr. George Woodfall, the editors of the edit. of
1812, knew anything about him, is manifest from their own bald note of
explanation, "A correspondent of the printers." Some reports say that he
was a collector of news for the _Public Advertiser_, and subsequently a
bookseller at Birmingham, but I never saw any one fact adduced tending to
show that there was any person of that name so employed. Others that the
Rev. Dr. Sidney Swinney was the party referred to: and Mr. Smith, in his
excellent notes to the _Grenville Papers_, vol. iii. p. lxviii., _assumes_
this to be the fact. I incline to agree with him, but have only inference
to strengthen conjecture. What may be the value of that inference will
appear in the progress of this inquiry, Who was Dr. Sidney Swinney?
Reports collected by Mr. Butler, Mr. Barker, Mr. Coventry, and others, say
that the Doctor had been chaplain to the Russian Embassy, chaplain to the
Embassy at Constantinople, and chaplain to one of the British regiments
serving in Germany. Mr. Falconer, in his _Secret Revealed_, p. 22., quotes
a paragraph from one of Wray's letters to Lord Hardwick with reference to
the proceedings at the Royal Society:
"Dr. Swinney, your Lordship's friend, presented his father-in-law
Howell's book."
Swinney's father-in-law, here called Howell, was John Zephaniah Holwell, a
remarkable man, whose name is intimately associated with the early history
of British India, one of the few survivors of the Black Hole imprisonment,
the successor of {214} Clive as governor, and a writer on many subjects
connected with Hindoo antiquities. Swinney enrols him amongst his heroes,
"Holwell, Clive, York, Lawrence, Adams, Coote,
Of Draper, Bath-strung for his baffled suit."