Chapter III: Part 3

But Somers and Halifax were not in office. Swift went back to Ireland, unrewarded, for another year of rueful banishment.

When he once more returned to England late in 1703, he seemed, to his own pride, to have done nothing in the world. Yet he had an honourable profession. He had an income for life. He had a mistress, of a kind, who was young, beautiful, witty, and devoted. He had ruling friends in Ireland and was beginning to have others in England. He was the author of the most brilliant prose satire so far written in English, and the master of the best prose of his age. Something boundless in him, however, or something perverse, kept him from more than brief satisfactions. Content to be a clergyman, he could not wait to be a bishop. Untroubled by debts, he longed for a fortune. Happy with Stella for a friend, he would not commit himself to her in marriage. A scholar, a clergyman, and a wit, he cared little for the company of his fellows. He thought the scholars pedantic, the clergymen dull and tattling--

“_And deal in vices of the graver sort,
Tobacco, censure, coffee, pride, and port_”--

the wits frivolous and feeble. His satires had remained for half a dozen years unpublished. He could be at ease only among the great, and even there he did not lend himself wholly to their purposes. He stood solitary on the peak of his own nature, his scornful eyes raking mankind.

From this height he flung down his _Tale of a Tub_ early in 1704. Mankind at large took no notice. Mankind at large has no eyes to read with, no skin to feel a lash with. As Swift himself said in his preface, “Satire, being levelled at all, is never resented for an offence by any, since every individual person makes bold to understand it of others, and very wisely removes his particular part of the burden upon the shoulders of the world, which are broad enough, and able to bear it.” Nor did the pedants and wits flinch at his thrusts much more sharply, since he named few of them, than the nameless run of men. The pedants might grumble, but the wits, who also liked to sting, could take a craftsman’s pleasure in the accurate rapture of his stinging.

Swift of course pricked no active folly and stabbed no active vice by his satires. Fools did not read him. Wise men were only confirmed in their wisdom. His hatred caused less reformation than delight. The delight which men felt in his arguments and allegories, so cutting, so copious, so downright, so fanciful, was the delight which men feel when one of them uses words as most of them have not the gift to do, only the bursting desire. Swift, who scorned to be a man of words, was accepted for his words. Somers, to whom the book was dedicated, and Halifax, who knew how to put such skill as Swift’s to use, repeated their promises. They did not tell him it was not his counsel that they needed.

Yet while he was making friends he was also making enemies. Mankind was not a sensitive body, able to feel in any of its parts any indignity to the whole. The pedants or the wits were not. The Church was. It thought of itself as marked off from the world, like its consecrated altars, to be approached with reverence. There were, as Swift contended, abuses of religion which called for satire, and which could be satirized without any hurt to true religion. But the line between the uses and the abuses of religion was often faint. One man’s devotion could be another man’s fanaticism. Firmness could become stoniness and never know it. Laughter, even when aimed at what was false, could wound in two directions. Swift, high on his peak of scorn, let his laughter fall with a harsh inclusiveness.

When, for instance, he touched the doctrine of transubstantiation, he traced its origin to a noisy episode in the career of the Catholic among the three brothers of the allegory. Peter, having no mutton for his dinner, served up a brown loaf to Martin and Jack. He told them it was mutton. They refused, at first politely and then heatedly, to believe him. “‘Look ye, gentlemen,’ cries Peter in a rage, ‘to convince you what a couple of blind, positive, ignorant, wilful puppies you are, I will use but this plain argument: By G----, it is true, good, natural mutton as any in Leadenhall market; and G---- condemn you both eternally if you believe otherwise.’ Such a thundering proof as this left no farther room for objection.”

Here was rough language to use so near the communion table, no matter what the precise beliefs of the bystanders regarding the disputed miracle. A total unbeliever could not have spoken more gratingly. Even in that vigorous age a clergyman had to watch his voice if he was to become a bishop. Swift might please the lords temporal with his originality and force, but he could not please the lords spiritual without orthodoxy and decorum. Within the Church he was always, from the time _A Tale of a Tub_ was understood to be by him, a churchman suspected of irreverence--or, as he phrased it, “the sin of wit.”

This dangerous book, published with mystifying stealth, Swift never acknowledged, though after a scuffle of ascriptions it settled down at his door. The authorship was first his humorous and afterwards his cautious secret. When, having published the satires, he followed his letter to Tisdall back to Ireland, he was still barely known in London for his genius. There are almost no records of where he had lodged, of how he had spent his days and nights. A dim figure, flashing seldom out of the dark.

One anecdote, of the many which have gathered about his magnetic reputation, may tell something like the truth. For days after his earliest appearance at the St. James’s coffee house, the story goes, he did not speak. He would come in, lay his hat on a table, walk conspicuously up and down the room for an hour, take up his hat, pay his money at the bar, and leave without a word. At last, one evening, he looked several times at a man in boots, who seemed to have just come from the country. The mad parson, as he was already called, went up to the booted stranger and said abruptly: “Pray, Sir, do you remember any good weather in the world?” The man stared but said he thanked God he could remember a great deal of good weather. “That is more,” said Swift, “than I can say. I never remember any weather that was not too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry. But, however God Almighty contrives it, at the end of the year ’tis all very well.” Then again he took his hat and left.

The next three and a half years in Ireland saw him more at ease with more companions. At Laracor he planted, besides willows, holly, apple, cherry trees. He fished for eel and pike and trout. “I carry double the flesh that you saw about me at London,” he wrote to John Temple, who had invited him to revisit Moor Park in 1706; though Swift insisted that he had, to such a sign of fortune, “no manner of title, having neither purchased it by luxury nor good humour.” His congregation might be no more than fifteen persons, “most of them gentle and all simple,” but he had numerous friends in the region of Laracor.

In Dublin he could talk clerical politics with the Primate of Ireland and the Archbishop of Dublin, both Swift’s friends, and secular politics with the Lord Lieutenants to whom he was chaplain. At the Castle he was cheerful with the successive households of Ormond and Pembroke. With a small circle of Pembroke’s intimate guests he punned tumultuously and infectiously. He drank wine, took snuff, and gambled for trifling stakes. He was often at the house of the dean of St. Patrick’s, who gave good dinners to bishops and to clergymen willing to become bishops. There was also a sort of club with which various women, Stella among them, met on Saturday evenings, for dinner and ombre or picquet. Stella was liked and admired by Swift’s friends. If he was lonely and restless he had his genius to blame.

4

He was lonely and steadily more restless. The idyl of Laracor was too mild to hold him. The work and play of Dublin were too small. Just before his fortieth birthday he left Ireland, in the party of Lord Pembroke, again to try at fortune on fortune’s own ground. He had at least the advantage, now, of being on an official errand to the great men whose favour he personally needed. Commissioned by his Archbishop, he was to act as lobbyist in the matter of the First Fruits. Queen Anne, devoted to the interests of the Church, had given up her right to the first year’s income of every ecclesiastical benefice in England. The Irish Church hoped she would extend the same bounty to Ireland. The whole sum at issue was not above a thousand pounds a year. Swift, proud as a mountain, took up the little cause. It brought him a new experience of the delaying, forgetting, bargaining habits of politicians.

He had to move softly to avoid the jealousy of Pembroke, who as viceroy of Ireland was the proper channel for any such appeal to the Crown. At first Somers, though influential with the Ministry, was still out of office. He referred Swift to Sunderland, son of Swift’s former friend, son-in-law of Marlborough, and a Secretary of State. Sunderland said he would go with Swift to Godolphin, Lord Treasurer, but ended by merely making an appointment. Godolphin declared “he was passive in this business,” which was really Pembroke’s responsibility. Swift consulted Pembroke, and was told that everything depended on the Queen. Passed shiftily from hand to hand, Swift saw that none of the great men was interested, though none of them would take the trouble to tell the truth. After a year he heard from Pembroke that the grant had been made, and a little later learned that Pembroke had lied. But the Earl of Wharton had been appointed Lord Lieutenant. Swift went to Wharton, “which was the first attendance I ever paid him.” Wharton had nothing for him but cloudy excuses and windy promises. “I took the boldness to begin answering those objections, and designed to offer some reasons; but he rose suddenly, turned off the discourse, and seemed in haste; so I was forced to take my leave.” At a subsequent meeting at Somers’s house Wharton “received me as dryly as before.”

Thereafter Swift hated Wharton as he never hated another man. All the exasperations of a wasted year came together into a single fury which, when Swift had a chance, poured itself out into the abuse which has made Wharton better known for it than for all he ever did himself.

Lobbying for the First Fruits, Swift looked out also for his own advancement. But he went through his visit to England always in suspense and never satisfied. First he hoped to be chosen Bishop of Waterford. He believed he had the favour of Somers and possibly of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Queen. Another clergyman of the Pembroke circle was preferred. “Now I must retire to my morals,” Swift wrote a friend, “and pretend to be wholly without ambition and to resign with patience.... And after this if you will not allow me to be a good courtier, I will pretend to it no more. But let us talk no further on this subject. I am stomach-sick of it already.” Then he hoped to be sent as secretary to Vienna, if Lord Berkeley should go as ambassador. “I shall be out of the way of parties until it shall please God I have some place to retire to a little above contempt.” The Ministry promised Swift the post, but Berkeley’s age and ill health kept him in England. Swift would have accepted a Dublin parish which had been proposed to him; the living did not fall vacant. He might have been expected to be chaplain to Wharton, as he had been to Ormond and Pembroke; he was not chosen. He was urged by the Archbishop of Dublin to try for the deanery of Down; Wharton’s chaplain became dean. On the day, after Swift’s return to Ireland, when the Bishop of Cork was dying of spotted fever Swift wrote to Halifax asking for his interest with Somers, now Lord President, for this bishopric. Wharton, according to Swift, engaged his credit to get the place for a clergyman who had married a “cast wench” of Wharton’s--although the Queen, indeed, prevented such a scandal. To make the story as complete as a farce, the clergyman in question may have been that junior dean of Trinity College before whom, on his knees, Swift on his twenty-first birthday may have had to beg pardon for being contemptuous and contumacious.

Yet towards the close of his cycle of anxiety Swift could write ingratiatingly to Halifax: “I must take leave to reproach your Lordship for a most inhuman piece of cruelty, for I can call your extreme good usage of me no better, since it has taught me to hate the place where I am banished, and raised my thoughts to an imagination that I might live to be some way useful or entertaining if I were permitted to live in town.... I have been studying how to be revenged of your Lordship, and have found out the way. They have in Ireland the same idea with us, of your Lordship’s generosity, magnificence, wit, judgment, and knowledge in the enjoyment of life. But I shall quickly undeceive them by letting them plainly know that you have neither interest nor fortune which you can call your own; both having been long made over to the corporation of deserving men in want, who have appointed you their advocate and steward, which the world is pleased to call patron and protector. I shall inform them that myself and about a dozen others kept the best table in England, to which because we admitted your Lordship in common with us, made you our manager, and sometimes allowed you to bring a friend, therefore ignorant people would needs take you to be the owner.... Pray, my Lord, desire Dr. South to die about the fall of the leaf, for he has a prebend of Westminster which will make me your neighbour, and a sinecure in the country, both in the Queen’s gift, which my friends have often told me would fit me extremely.”

And Halifax could magniloquently answer: “I am quite ashamed for myself and my friends to see you left in a place so incapable of tasting you; and to see so much merit and so great qualities unrewarded by those who are sensible of them. Mr. Addison and I are entered into a new confederacy, never to give over the pursuit, nor to cease reminding those who can serve you, till your worth is placed in that light where it ought to shine. Dr. South holds out still, but he cannot be immortal. The situation of his prebendary would make me doubly concerned in serving you, and upon all occasions that shall offer I will be your constant solicitor, your sincere admirer, and your unalterable friend.”

Handsome compliment, handsome acknowledgment, and no real confidence between the writers. What Swift actually thought of Halifax was that he gave deserving men “only good words and dinners; I never heard him say one good thing, or seem to taste what was said by another.” What Halifax actually thought of Swift must be guessed at. But no patron used to “soft dedication all day long” could quite relish a follower so bound to lead. Swift would never be as remote from politics as Newton, whom Halifax had made Warden and then Master of the Mint, nor as obliging and grateful in the midst of politics as Addison, who through Halifax had entered the busy circle where few men went long without places. Halifax and Somers and Pembroke no more than Godolphin and Sunderland and Wharton by this time could imagine in Swift’s hand the supple, obedient pen which they required.

There was proof to support their doubts. They had been willing to bargain with him, or through him with the Irish Church, about the First Fruits. Let the Church consent to the repeal of the Sacramental Test which excluded Dissenters from office. The Whigs, standing to gain votes from the pleased Dissenters, would then be better able to persuade the Queen to widen her bounty. The repeal would mean only the surrender of a principle, and it would save the Irish clergy a thousand pounds a year. Swift, without a thought of accommodating the ministers or even of earning their possible rewards, had instead written too vigorously, and not surreptitiously enough, against the repeal. He saw it as a selfish experiment which England wanted to try first on Ireland before trying it nearer home. “If your little finger be sore,” he said to England with a snarling humility, “and you think a poultice made of our vitals will give it any ease, speak the word and it shall be done.” Somers, Lord President, and Wharton, Lord Lieutenant, from that moment must have known that Swift was not their man. The sin of wit they could forgive, and indeed encourage. They could neither encourage nor forgive the sin of such independence. Braver statesmen than they might have hesitated to keep a tiger on the hearth.

Swift, learning on this visit to England that the great are not always to be trusted by the proud and truthful, should have become finally aware that he was not a Whig, perhaps that he was not a Tory. As a churchman he stood not so much between the parties as above them both. “I should think,” he said in one of the pamphlets in which he stretched the muscles which the ministers would not let him use, “that ... to preserve the constitution entire in Church and State, whoever has a true value for both would be sure to avoid the extremes of Whig for the sake of the former and the extremes of Tory on account of the latter.” Arbitrary power he still hated and looked upon “as a greater evil than anarchy itself; as much as a savage is in a happier state of life than a slave at the oar.” Yet his passion was, as always, for order. The legislature, he thought, could not be placed in too many hands; the administration, however, not in too few. Sects might indeed be tolerated in a state, but “a government cannot give them too much ease nor trust them with too little power.” Order, as he understood it, was the consequence of virtue among the people, and therefore a higher concern than politics could reach to. It was the natural concern of the Church.

Like a churchman, like a magistrate, Swift proposed that manners be reformed by the advancement of religion. If the Queen should make stricter demands upon all who came near her, “morality and religion would soon become fashionable court virtues, and be taken up as the only methods to get or keep employments there; which alone would have mighty influence upon many of the nobility and principal gentry.” The example of the Court would go far to reform the town, and the town the rest of the kingdom. “How ready ... would most men be to step into the paths of virtue and piety if they infallibly led to favour and fortune!” Swift could even contemplate “something parallel to the office of censors anciently in Rome,” which in England he believed “could be easily limited from running into any exorbitances.” British Catos could reduce the vices of the army, the universities, the law courts, the public service, the press, the taverns. And the Church could provide the Catos if clergymen, ceasing to live so largely to themselves and with each other, would “make themselves as agreeable as they can in the conversations of the world.”

Nor did Swift stop with arguing soberly like a parson. He went on to irony, like a wit. He could not feel sure, he said, that Christianity had to be abolished, as the world thought. He meant, of course, “nominal Christianity, the other having been for some time wholly laid aside by general consent.” Nominal Christianity had its uses. It gave men a God to revile, when otherwise they might abuse the government. It furnished each parish with at least one person who could read and write. It kept ten thousand men so poor that they were healthy, and good for the breed. It set one day in seven aside for pleasure, extra business, gallantry, and sleep. It made certain kinds of behaviour, because they were forbidden, more enticing. It gave the vulgar various pleasant superstitions with which to amuse the children and to shorten tiresome winter nights. It sustained the spirit of opposition, of eccentricity, of fanaticism. However, Swift ended, if Christianity was to be abolished, so ought every vestige of religion for fear there might still be some restraint laid on human nature. Let freedom come, even though bank stocks might fall one per cent.

5

No matter what grave words he used, Swift had to set them to witty tunes. They came, it seems, so effortlessly that he undervalued them, overlooking them in the thunder of his will. He valued only what he did not have: influence at a Court he despised, power over men he hated. Addison could call him, for his wit, “the greatest genius of his age.” Swift wanted, as Addison had elsewhere rhetorically put it, to ride in the whirlwind and direct the storm. There was no help for his charging desire. His will was as truly his nature as his wit was.

Yet it was by his wit that he won his hearing, and from the coffee 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.

No position was so natural for Swift to take, as no position was so effective with the voters. Oxford and Bolingbroke might work out of sight with their intrigues. Swift never ceased to keep the eyes of the world upon their main purposes. British purposes, for the sake of British interests, through the exercise of British virtues. The Revolution was achieved. The Succession was established. It was time now to make peace with the Continent and to settle down to a British destiny. The change must not be too precipitate. Swift wrote as firmly against the ferocious Tories, demanding all places instantly for their party, as against the ousted Whigs. His variety was in his art, not in his argument. He could abuse, ridicule, hoax, lampoon, in grim prose or easy verse. He could parade the accomplishments of the Ministry in sober pamphlets or could raise clouds of bright dust to hoodwink the opposition. But always he was Swift, looking down from his peak at the whole race of mankind, only incidentally and temporarily supporting Oxford and Bolingbroke.

Throughout the Oxford administration Swift was loyal, less out of need than out of love. When his associates, disregarding the Grand Alliance, made a stealthy treaty of peace with France; when, insecure in the House of Lords, Oxford got the Queen to create a dozen Tory peers who would know why they were peers; when England, at the treaty of Utrecht, took the largest share of the spoils though she had tricked and abandoned the allies: even then Swift loved his friends. Passionately loyal, he could be affectionately blind.

In Oxford’s thick skin Swift saw a stoic dignity, and in Oxford’s procrastination something not too far from a noble patience. “Regular in life,” Swift described the Lord Treasurer to the Archbishop of Dublin, “with a true sense of religion, an excellent scholar and a good divine, of a very mild and affable disposition, intrepid in his notions and indefatigable in business, an utter despiser of money for himself yet frugal, perhaps to an extremity, for the public.” Nor about Bolingbroke, libertine in thought and habit, would Swift be squeamish. He admired that “graceful, amiable person” and that mind “which was adorned with the choicest gifts that God hath yet thought fit to bestow upon the children of men.” It was true that the Secretary had been “too great and criminal a pursuer” of pleasures which could “by no means be reconciled to religion or morals.” But, Swift explained, “he was fond of mixing pleasure with business, and of being esteemed excellent at both; upon which account he had a great respect for the characters of Alcibiades and Petronius.” Could Socrates resist the charm of Alcibiades, or Seneca the charm of Petronius?

Swift, moralist that he was, was little less susceptible to the dissolute Secretary than to the decorous Treasurer. His affection covered them with its flood. Bolingbroke hated Oxford, and Oxford suspected Bolingbroke. There was harmony between them only for a few months, if so long as that. Yet Swift, by nature so misanthropic, by experience so wary, set out with them in what he thought was a fellowship of love.