houses. While he waited, impatient, for a single minister to listen to
his business of the First Fruits, he amused his idleness with a hoax
that ran through the town like a scandal. He predicted, in a burlesque
almanac, that the astrologer John Partridge, who was a cobbler as
well as a quack, would “infallibly die upon the 29th of March next,
about eleven at night, of a raging fever.” When the time came Swift
no less circumstantially announced the death, though it had, he said,
occurred four hours earlier than he had calculated. Partridge, still
as much alive as ever, complained. The coffee houses laughed. There
were other pamphlets on the hoax, in one of which Congreve had a hand.
For more than a year Swift now and then worried his victim. Richard
Steele thought the joke so good, and the name of Isaac Bickerstaff,
which Swift used, so noted, that he made the imaginary Bickerstaff the
apparent editor of the _Tatler_. Another of Swift’s hoaxes had a small
success. Reading to the Countess of Berkeley, he had grown tired of the
pompous commonplaces which soothed her in her favourite author, and had
relieved his boredom by tricking her with a meditation which he had
written upon a broomstick. Now the story got out, and the wits laughed
at the trick and at the parody, which was seen in manuscript and may
have been printed.
In both hoaxes the delighted wits felt not only Swift’s comic skill
but the imperious insolence which lay behind it. Here was a man whose
lightest words left a mark wherever they touched. Here was a learned
clergyman who, as the _Tatler_ said, “writes very like a gentleman and
goes to heaven with a very good mien.”
Much of Swift’s life during this stay in England was off the stage of
the wits, nearer officials or drawing-rooms. When he first arrived he
lived in Leicester Fields at the house of Sir Andrew Fountaine, who had
been in Ireland with Pembroke and had found Swift the best pastime of
that wilderness. Afterward in lodgings in the Haymarket, Swift might
have letters sent to him at the St. James’s coffee house or at Steele’s
office in the Cockpit, but when he was kept indoors, as he once was by
broken shins, even Somers came to visit him. During 1708 he was a guest
of both Berkeley and Pembroke in the country. After the hot summer in
town he spent six weeks in Kent and at Epsom, where the Court then
retired to drink the fashionable waters.
In town he was often--much too often for his future peace--at the house
of Mrs. Vanhomrigh, the widow of a former lord mayor of Dublin, who
had come to London about the same time as Swift. She had a daughter
Esther, who claimed to be two years younger than she was, and to have
been born, as she probably had not, on St. Valentine’s day. Through the
Vanhomrighs, friends of Fountaine, Swift met other women, ladies of the
Court, toasts of the clubs, whom he fascinated by his grave impudence.
He insisted that each lady who desired to know him should make the
first advances. When Anne Long, toast of the Kit-Cat club, protested
and held out, Swift drew up a formal treaty of which the plain terms,
with whatever circumlocutions, were that she must within two hours make
“all advances to the said Doctor that he shall demand ... purely upon
account of his great merit.” The lady yielded. Swift might be resisted
when he worked, not when he played.
He had the further comfort that Stella and Rebecca Dingley were in
England for a part of his stay. “Mrs. Johnson,” he wrote to Ireland,
“cannot make a pun if she might have the weight of it in gold.” He
did not introduce her to his new acquaintances, the one Esther to the
other, any more than he told the world his moody secrets. Stella was
his secret. Though he saw her in London and wrote to her after she
returned to Ireland, there are no records of her in his letters except
a mention of her dog. “Pug is very well, and likes London wonderfully,
but Greenwich better, where we could hardly keep him from hunting down
the deer.”
What came nearest to satisfying Swift in 1708 was Addison. When last
Swift had been in London, in the winter of 1703-1704, he had been
still unknown, and Addison, just back from his travels, had been,
thanks to the bad fortune of the Whigs, in eclipse. Swift, leaving his
satires behind him, had gone off to his banishment. Addison, writing a
panegyric on Marlborough on account of Blenheim, had stayed to become
famous over night. When now they met in February, Swift was still
without any influence except that of his own genius, and Addison was
an under-secretary of State. But there was no difference in their
affections. Addison was seldom vain with Swift, whom he called “the
most agreeable companion, the truest friend, and the greatest genius of
his age.” Swift was seldom proud with Addison. “If,” he later wrote,
back in Dublin, “you will come over again, when you are at leisure, we
will raise an army and make you king of Ireland.”
They met like princes, with exchange of gifts. Swift gave Addison,
along with Steele, some of his moral fury, which they tempered to
moral irony in the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_, preferring to laugh, not
scourge, virtue into fashion. Addison gave to Swift some of his smooth
taste with which to revise the story of Baucis and Philemon which Swift
had written in his gruff exile. Too proud to be stubborn about his
verses, Swift, as he loosely said, let Addison “blot out fourscore, add
fourscore, and alter fourscore” of the lines. The poem suffered, but
Swift did not. He would, and did, write more smoothly if it were more
pleasing to Addison. In time Swift came to be aware of Addison’s vanity
and caution, but for months he had no reservations. Addison was Swift’s
first equal friend. Temple had been his teacher, Stella his pupil, his
friends in Ireland mere accidental comrades, the Whig lords and bishops
too great to be easy with. Addison had wit, charm, learning, virtue,
“worth enough,” Swift said, “to give reputation to an age.”
All the spring and summer of 1708 they often dined together, at
different taverns, frequently with Steele or Congreve, with Ambrose
Philips, Addison’s little Whig poetical friend, or with Robert Hunter,
the friend of Swift who was going to be governor of Virginia and who
threatened to make Swift his bishop in a country even more desolate
than Ireland. But it was best when the two could, as Swift wrote to
Hunter, “steal to a pint of bad wine, and wish for no third person but
you.” When Addison went off to Ireland as secretary to Wharton, with a
salary of two thousand pounds a year and a sinecure worth four hundred
more, Swift, still without promotion or much hope, felt no envy. In
Ireland, when he had gone there in June 1709, he buried himself with
Stella at Laracor and left it for Dublin, with its abominable Lord
Lieutenant, only to see Addison.
IV
MAN IN POWER
1
Fortune prefers to turn its wheel to the advantage of men with the
talent for success, but now and then the geniuses, uncompromising,
wilful, audacious, swing upward in the sun. A revolution of the wheel
in London called Swift back in September 1710.
He did not know when he went what he was going to. He was almost
resigned to Laracor and Dublin. “I never went to England with so little
desire in my life,” he wrote to Stella the day after he landed. “I am
perfectly resolved to return as soon as I have done my commission,
whether it succeeds or no.” He had less hope as to the success of his
errand, which again was the First Fruits, than the Irish bishops who
this time had authorized him. Still, there was a chance. Sunderland
and Godolphin had been shaken from their posts by an upheaval among
the Whigs, and Wharton had hurried over to serve his party with his
gift for wheedling and rounding up the voters. Other ministers might
be more favourable to Swift’s embassy. Other friends might help him to
promotion.
At London he found everything “turning upside down; every Whig in
great office will, to a man, be infallibly put out; and we shall have
such a winter as has not been seen in England.” It was already such a
September as Swift had never seen. “The Whigs were ravished to see me,”
he wrote within two days of his arrival, “and would lay hold on me as a
twig while they are drowning, and the great men making me their clumsy
apologies” for their former negligence.
But Swift had come into a new world of new men. Somers was about to be
dismissed. Halifax had only his sinecure. Pembroke was in retirement.
Wharton was to lose his place to the Duke of Ormond. Sunderland had
given way to Henry St. John (later Viscount Bolingbroke) as principal
Secretary of State. Godolphin had yielded the rank of first minister
to Robert Harley (later Earl of Oxford), Chancellor of the Exchequer
though not yet Lord Treasurer. The men of Swift’s old world were now
able to do for him as little as they had been willing to do before.
Only the hated Wharton “affected very much to caress” him. Somers was
merely plausible. Halifax moved too slowly. Godolphin, whom Swift saw
at once, was so “short, dry, and morose” that the suitor was enraged.
On his third day in London Swift spent the evening at the St. James’s
coffee house with a friend. “For an hour and a half we talked treason
heartily against the Whigs, their baseness and ingratitude. And I
am come home rolling resentments in my mind and framing schemes of
revenge.”
In spite of the drowning Whigs, and in spite even of Addison, again
in England and at first as affectionate as ever, Swift began to look
towards the Tories. A week, and he was dining with his old friend
of Kilkenny and Trinity, Francis Stratford, a merchant who, “worth
a plumb,” was “lending the government forty thousand pounds.” Two
weeks later, and Swift expected any day to be taken to Harley by
one of Stratford’s friends, Erasmus Lewis, who was one of Harley’s
favourites. “I am already represented to Harley,” Swift told Stella,
“as a discontented person that was ill used for not being Whig enough;
and I hope for good usage from him. The Tories dryly tell me I may make
my fortune if I please; but I do not understand them, or rather, I do
understand them.”
Halifax asked Swift to dinner at Hampton Court and “would have kept me
tomorrow to show me his house and park.... Lord Halifax began a health
to me today. It was the resurrection of the Whigs, which I refused
unless he would add their reformation too.” The next night “after I had
put out my candle ... my landlady came into my room with a servant of
Lord Halifax, to desire I would go dine with him” the following day.
“But I sent him word I had business of great importance that hindered
me.... And today I was brought privately to Mr. Harley, who received
me with the greatest respect and kindness imaginable. He has appointed
me an hour on Saturday at four, afternoon, when I will open my business
to him.”
Exactly a month after Swift reached London he handed Harley his
memorial regarding the First Fruits. “Mr. Harley came out to meet me,
brought me in, and presented me to his son-in-law ... and his own son
and, among others, Will Penn the Quaker. We sat two hours, drinking ...
good wine ... and two hours more he and I alone.” Harley read Swift’s
memorial “and put it in his pocket to show the Queen; ... told me he
must bring Mr. St. John ... and me acquainted; and spoke so many things
of personal kindness and esteem for me that I am inclined half to
believe what some friends have told me, that he would do everything to
bring me over.... He has desired me to dine with him on Tuesday, and
after four hours being with him set me down at St. James’s coffee house
in a hackney coach. All this is odd and comical if you consider him
and me. He knew my Christian name very well.... And now I am going in
charity to send Steele a _Tatler_, who is very low of late.”
Swift, writing that night to Stella, thought that even the _Tale of a
Tub_ might no longer be held against him, as he guessed it had been.
“They may talk of the _you know what_; but, gad, if it had not been for
that I should never have been able to get the access I have had; and
if that helps me to succeed, then that same thing will be serviceable
to the Church.”
Odd and comical, Harley, no more concerned about the bounty of the
First Fruits than about the orthodoxy of the _Tale_, had set out to
seduce the most lively and deadly wit in England. At the price of a
thousand pounds a year, cut out of the Queen’s income, Swift would be a
bargain for her minister.
The minister did not lag in his pursuit. On Tuesday, presenting Swift
to Sir Simon Harcourt, the Attorney-General, Harley said he had
broached the matter of the First Fruits to the Queen, and asked Swift
to dinner on Sunday. On Sunday Harley said the Queen had consented to
the grant. Matthew Prior, a better poet than Addison, dined with them.
After dinner, when Lord Peterborough had come in, the talk shifted to
“a paper of verses” on Godolphin which had just been printed. “Lord
Peterborough would let nobody read them but himself; so he did; and Mr.
Harley bobbed me at every line to take notice of the beauties. Prior
rallied Lord Peterborough for author of them; and Lord Peterborough
said he knew them to be his; and Prior then turned it upon me, and I on
him. I am not guessed at all in town to be the author.” Lucky Tories,
to blunder into such a moving compliment? Or wily Tories, used to poets?
There was some formal delay in the execution of the grant, but Harley
was still, Swift wrote, “so excessively obliging that I know not what
to make of it, unless to show the rascals of the other party that they
used a man unworthily who had deserved better.” St. John, using Swift
“with all the kindness in the world,” said he had never read anything
so good as certain verses by the Tories’ new poet which Swift himself
did not “reckon so very good neither”; and pleased Swift further by
telling him that “Mr. Harley complained he could keep nothing from me,
I had the way so much of getting into him.” Erasmus Lewis tactfully
hinted that Swift, not quite comfortable at leaving his old friends,
might save Steele his post as commissioner of stamps. Swift went to
Addison, as the discreeter person, but “party had so possessed him that
he talked as if he suspected me, and would not fall in with anything I
said. So I stopped short in my overture, and we parted very dryly....
When shall I grow wise? I endeavour to act in the most exact points of
honour and conscience, and my nearest friends will not understand it
so.”
It was not in Swift to be patient. Two weeks later he inquired of
Stella: “Why should the Whigs think I came to England to leave them?
Sure my journey was no secret. I protest sincerely I did all I could
to hinder it ... although now I do not repent it. But who the devil
cares what they think?... Rot ’em for ungrateful dogs. I will make them
repent their usage before I leave this place.” He had already begun
to punish them. Before the end of October he had accepted the secret
editorship of the _Examiner_, the Tory weekly which he edited, and
wrote, until the following June, when, “my style being soon discovered,
and having contracted a great number of enemies, I let it fall into
other hands.”
The step cost Swift his Whig friends. In six weeks: “Mr. Addison and
I hardly meet once a fortnight.” In another month: “I called at the
coffee house, where I had not been in a week, and talked coldly a while
with Mr. Addison. All our friendship and dearness are off. We are
civil acquaintances, talk words of course, of when we shall meet, and
that’s all.” Not even the great affection between the two could hold
Swift to the Whigs. He had never been entirely a Whig, as he was not
now entirely a Tory. He was a churchman, and the Tories had done for
his Church what the Whigs had not done. He was hot for power, and the
Tories had taken him into their councils, as the Whigs had not. At last
he had found something better for him than hopes: work that seemed to
him important, recognition that seemed to him his due. For the first
time in his life his pride was asked to what he considered fit company.
Harley’s dinners were for Swift a sign that his fortunes finally stood
beside his ambition. Nor was he required to argue for principles he did
not believe in. The Tories were, it was easy for him to think, more
truly than the Whigs the party of order in Church and State. When he
had spoken his mind about the Sacramental Test a year before, the Whigs
had turned away from him, as if he were a Tory, and the Archbishop of
Dublin had written to ask “by what artifice did you contrive to pass
for a Whig.” Perhaps he had been a Tory. He would be a Tory. It was
enough for Swift, as it had been enough when he took orders, that he
was assigned a post in a cause which he thought good. He gave to his
cause all his passion, intensity, genius.
2
When Swift closed with Harley there commenced a chapter singular in
history. No other man of affairs has ever made such use of a man of
letters. At the outset Harley so misgauged his pamphleteer that after
three months he could send him a banknote for fifty pounds. It was as
if the squire had tipped the bishop. Swift was furious at “both the
thing and the manner.” He returned the money, refused to dine with
Harley the next day, and demanded satisfaction. “If we let these great
ministers pretend too much,” he wrote to Stella, “there will be no
governing them.” A week later, still unreconciled, he went to the lobby
of the House of Commons, found Harley, and sent him into the House to
call St. John, “to let him know I would not dine with him if he dined
late.” The Chancellor of the Exchequer, soon to be Lord Treasurer, ran
the errand to the Secretary of State for the vicar of Laracor. The
next day Swift told Stella he had “taken Mr. Harley into favour again.”
On Saturday of that week Swift was asked to dine with Harley in the
company of St. John and Harcourt, now Lord Keeper, and became a member
of the group which, meeting every Saturday except when the Queen was at
Windsor, informally concerted the government of the realm. Swift did
not come humbly to this cabinet. “Lord Rivers was got there before me,
and I chid him for presuming to come on a day when only Lord Keeper,
the Secretary, and I were to be there; but he regarded me not. So
we all dined together, and sat down at four; and the Secretary has
invited me to dine with him tomorrow. I told them I had no hopes they
could ever keep in but that I saw they loved each other so well, as
indeed they seem to do. They call me nothing but Jonathan; and I said I
believed they would leave me Jonathan, as they found me.”
Bullying, rallying, Swift took and kept his seat in their councils.
Together they planned the steps that were to be taken to oust the
Whigs, to get rid of the Duke of Marlborough, to bring about the peace.
The ministers devised the necessary intrigues. It was left to Swift
to master and direct public opinion with the _Examiner_ and with the
pamphlets and lampoons with which he entertained, infuriated, aroused,
and reassured the public.
The political situation was intricate in detail but simple in outline.
King William, Prince of Orange, had involved his adoptive England with
his native Holland in the Grand Alliance with Austria against France.
There had for years been a war and there was still a war, of which
some of the English were very tired. The victories of Marlborough
abroad, though gratifying, were hardly as regular as the taxes at
home. The landowners, who tended to be Tories, had begun to wonder
whether they were not paying taxes to help the bankers and jobbers, who
tended to be Whigs, reap enviable profits. Glory was something, but
it cost money. Men muttered in country houses that the Duke had been
riding his whirlwind a long time. They had noted that Godolphin, who
as Lord Treasurer had furnished the war chest, was father to one of
Marlborough’s sons-in-law; and that Sunderland, Secretary of State, was
a son-in-law himself. They had noted, also, that the Duchess, Mistress
of the Robes and, it was said, mistress of Godolphin, did more than
anybody else to make up the Queen’s mind for her. Civil affairs, hardly
less than military, were in the hands of Marlborough, who notoriously
wanted to be Captain-General for life. A little more, and England would
be mortgaged to the Marlboroughs.
Such a prospect ruffled and alarmed the Tories. Marlborough, veering
like Godolphin with the Parliamentary wind, had formerly called himself
a Tory, but now called himself a Whig. The Whigs must share the blame
for the prolongation of the war, for the increase in taxes and prices.
All that was insular in England resisted this burden laid upon it for
the possible benefit of the Continent. The Whigs had been kind to the
Dissenters to gain their support in Marlborough’s enterprises. All that
was orthodox in England resented this comfort given to the sects which
threatened the unity and authority of the Church. Finding itself on the
dizzy brink of altruism and liberalism, England had shrunk back in a
passion for its good old virtues, its stout old order.
The change had not come of itself or from the disinterested conclusions
of philosophers, but had been contrived and forwarded by Harley and
St. John. Both of them had owed much to Marlborough, who in 1704
had approved of Harley for Secretary of State and of St. John for
Secretary at War. Under the wings of that eagle they had plotted
against his feathers. St. John had gifts of eloquence and manipulation
which made him incomparable in the House of Commons. Harley, enough
duller than his colleague to be more widely trusted, was adroit on the
backstairs. Through his cousin Abigail Hill (Mrs. Masham), for whom
the Duchess of Marlborough, also a cousin to the lady, had obtained a
post in the Queen’s bed-chamber, his whispers reached his sovereign.
Marlborough and Godolphin, becoming aware of a secret influence
against them, had in 1708 traced it to Harley and had forced him out
of the cabinet, along with St. John. Harley had continued to whisper.
The Queen, resenting the constant pressure from the Duke and Duchess,
observing the popular unrest, and still listening to the whispers,
had been convinced that the Whigs threatened the peace of the State
and the safety of the Church. From this had come the overthrow of the
Godolphin ministry and the sudden rise to power of the Tories under the
whispering Harley and the glittering St. John. It was policy to win to
their side the wit whom they most desired to have with them and most
feared to have against them.
The arguments put forth may have been suggested by any of the three
men. Of the three, however, only Swift can be credited with the high
scorn, the grave ingenuity of this polemic. It was he who, though he
thought Marlborough “as covetous as hell and ambitious as the prince of
it,” kept his friends from pressing the Duke too hard. Swift had the
tact to be content with pointing out how much it was to the interest of
the commander-in-chief to have the war go on. Public cynicism might be
trusted to do the rest.
Nor did Swift use only arguments. He hit upon the most insidious
illustrations, such as his contrast between the rewards of a Roman
conqueror and those of the Duke. British ingratitude, Swift figured
out, had already been worth something over half a million pounds to
the British general. Roman gratitude, “which a victorious general
received after his return from the most glorious expedition, conquered
some great kingdom, brought the king himself, his family, and nobles
to adorn the triumph in chains, and made the kingdom either a Roman
province or at best a poor depending state in humble alliance to that
empire,” would have amounted to less than a thousand pounds: incense,
a sacrificial bull, an embroidered garment, a statue, a trophy, copper
medals, a triumphal arch and car, and a laurel crown worth twopence.
Ingenious and insistent, Swift continued to pluck the same string until
the public could hear no other note when it heard of Marlborough. After
a year Marlborough fell, and the Duke of Ormond, whom Swift ranked next
to Oxford (lately Harley) and Bolingbroke (lately St. John) among his
friends, was put in command of the armies.
Towards the Whigs at large Swift turned an attention which was no less
masterly. They were, for him, only a brawling faction, hungry for
profits, and not more than a tenth of England. The Whigs, having made
their fortunes at the expense of the majority, meant to go on making
other fortunes, and would stop at no lying, no plotting, no uprising,
no overthrowing which might serve their factious ends. At the same
time, Swift would not admit that he was partisan. “We are unhappily
divided into two parties,” he said, “both which pretend a mighty zeal
for our religion and government, only they disagree about the means.
The evils we must fence against are, on one side, fanaticism and
infidelity in religion, and anarchy, under the name of a commonwealth,
in government; on the other side, popery, slavery, and the Pretender
from France.” Between these two extremes of Whig and Tory Swift
seemed to take his stand. Or rather, again, above both. He was still
a clergyman, who put religion first among his concerns. He was not a
politician, but the conscience of politicians. He was the conscience of
England, tight in its island, deep in its prejudices, contemptuous of
ideals and metaphysics, plain, sturdy, obstinate.