Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

by Leo Damrosch

  Bridget’s other two children, like herself, weren’t especially attractive, but Stella was beautiful. The other siblings were fair-haired whereas Stella was dark. Here is Geree’s description of the young Stella, with whom he was obviously smitten:

  Esther’s, or, as she was usually called in the family, Miss Hetty’s eyes and hair were of a most beautiful black, and all the rest of her features bore so strong a resemblance to those of Sir Wm T——that no one could be at a loss to determine what relation she had to that gentleman. And could the striking likeness have been overlooked, Sir William’s uncommon regard for her, and his attention to her education, must have convinced every unprejudiced person that Miss Hetty Johnson was the daughter of one who moved in a higher sphere than a Dutch trader. . . . Her shape was perfectly easy and elegant; her complexion exquisitely fine; her features were regular, with the addition of that nameless something that so often exceeds the most exact beauty, and which never fails to add to it when they meet together. Her teeth were beyond comparison; her eyebrows and hair, of the most glossy black; and her eyes—but those I pretend not to describe; her mien and air were equal to the rest of the piece. Such was her exterior appearance. Her mind was yet more beautiful than her person, and her accomplishments were such as to do honour to the man who was so happy as to call her daughter.

  Temple had black hair and was famously handsome.

  In 1757, at the age of eighty-five, Geree was addressing the widely read Gentleman’s Magazine to correct what he saw as errors in recently published biographies by Orrery and Delany. As for C.M.P.G.N.S.T.N.S, a cryptanalyst has surmised that the letters stand for cum paganis satanas, implying truth telling, whereas “the devil is with the pagans.”51

  Ehrenpreis was aware of the Gentleman’s Magazine letter, but its author had not been identified when the first volume of his Swift biography came out, and he understandably dismissed it. But he made no serious attempt to explain why Stella should have received such an enormous bequest. And, most unusually, he made a factual error as well: he asserted that Edward Johnson, Bridget’s deceased husband, “had been Temple’s steward in his time.”52 That is incorrect. Bridget did marry a steward of Temple’s, but not until after Temple’s death, and that husband’s name was Ralph Mose.

  So who was Edward Johnson? Here the detective work has been done by two Dublin writers, Denis Johnston and Sybil Le Brocquy. Like Elias, they were long ignored by Swift specialists because they weren’t Swiftian scholars, but they were able researchers and they came up with an arresting hypothesis. Their suggestion is that the intelligent, well-read, and charming Bridget Johnson was Temple’s mistress, and that Temple was Stella’s father. When Bridget got pregnant he would have arranged a suitable marriage for her (we don’t know the date), and the husband he found was Captain Edward Johnson, who traded regularly with Holland. Having lived for a long time in Holland himself, Temple could well have known Johnson there.

  We do know when Stella and her siblings were born, since baptisms for all three are recorded in the parish register at Richmond, close to the house at Sheen where the Temples were then living. Hester was born in 1681, Anne in 1683, and Edward in 1688. So here is the conjecture: Stella, the oldest of the three, was indeed Sir William Temple’s daughter. Anne and Edward, however, were the children of Edward Johnson, which is why Temple took no interest in them. Anne remained in London, where she married in 1700; Edward was put into a school in Farnham, close to his mother at Moor Park, and died young.53

  It was quite usual for an affluent gentleman to provide for his illegitimate children. James Boswell, when still in his early twenties, fathered two of them and provided honorably for their mother. And Temple, like Boswell, was known to be not only sexually adventurous but proud of it. A young diplomat reported in 1677, “He held me in discourse a great long hour, of things most relating to himself, which are never without vanity, but this most especially full of it; and some stories of his amours, and extraordinary abilities that way, which had once upon a time very nearly killed him.”54

  An anonymous reviewer of Orrery’s biography of Swift commented, “It is well known that Sir William Temple was a very amorous man, and much addicted to intrigue with various women; and it is not improbable that such a man as Sir William should take uncommon precautions to provide well for his natural children, without letting the public, or even themselves, know that they were such.” Ehrenpreis, though he dismisses without explanation the possibility that Temple was Stella’s father, does remark, “A man who enjoys such an indulgence at fifty does not sacrifice it at sixty-five.”55 Temple was in his mid-fifties when Stella was born.

  Another clue to Temple’s extramarital life comes in a criticism of him that a foreign diplomat published in 1693. He would refrain, he said, from mentioning discreditable information that he evidently had: “I shall enlarge no further, that I may not engage myself to publish the misfortune of Sir William’s family, which I suppose would not be like a gentleman. I have no reason that I know of to complain, neither of his lady, nor of his son, nor of his daughters.”56 This is a fine example of the rhetorical device of occupatio, in which you say you won’t draw attention to something and then proceed to do so. The hint in the plural “daughters” seems strong. Temple had only one legitimate daughter, Diana, and she had died in 1684.

  Until her death in 1694, Lady Temple spent most of her time in London, while her husband’s sister, Lady Giffard, presided at Moor Park. We don’t know exactly when Bridget and Stella arrived at Moor Park, but if Lady Temple was aware that Stella was Sir William’s illegitimate daughter, the girl’s presence after the suicide of their only son might well have provoked her to leave. And it was Lady Giffard, whom Denis Johnston accurately describes as Temple’s “managing, loyal sister, his standby throughout his life,” who took Bridget and then Stella into her service.57

  One piece of testimony may seem to undermine this theory, though it does confirm that gossip about Stella’s parentage was widespread. According to Orrery, “the general voice of fame” made Stella and Swift relatives by blood, but Swift’s sister, Jane, who spent some time as a Moor Park servant, always denied it. Jane assured Orrery that “Stella was the daughter of Sir William Temple’s steward. She was allowed by the Dean’s sister (a bitter enemy of hers) to be the very picture of her mother’s husband; and this, Mrs. Fenton [Jane’s married name] would insist on whenever she heard the aspersion of her being Sir William Temple’s daughter mentioned, because, as she expressed herself, ‘she ought to give the devil his due.’”58

  Jane probably did hate Stella, to whom her brother was obviously attached. But whomever Stella looked like—and Geree’s testimony carries more weight than what Orrery heard much later—it could not have been the steward Mose. And since Captain Johnson was dead before Bridget and Stella moved to Moor Park, there is no way Jane could have seen him. What is notable is that she felt obliged to repudiate the gossip “whenever” it came up, which was evidently often. It even reached friends of Swift’s in England who had never met Stella.59

  In short, the belief that Stella’s father was the steward might be yet another cover story of Swift’s, repeated over the years until it came to seem authoritative but with no real basis at all. And that could be the motive behind a curious comment he made in his memorial description of Stella: “She had little to boast of her birth.” That seems a strange sort of put-down, coming from a man heartbroken with grief—unless it was intended to forestall the suspicion that she had, in fact, very much to boast of.60

  Orrery, accepting the story that Stella was the steward’s daughter, said that Temple “bequeathed her in his will one thousand pounds, as an acknowledgement of her father’s faithful services.” Orrery can only have gotten this impression from Swift, who clearly wanted people to believe it. This too had to be a cover-up. The bequest wasn’t cash, it was property that was worth at least that much, and not just any property, but property in Ireland. This is what Temple’s will states: “I leave
a lease of some lands I have in Monistown, in the county of Wicklow in Ireland, to Esther Johnson, servant to my sister Giffard.”61 Was giving Stella land in Ireland, where she had never been, a way of inducing her to move there? And could there have been an understanding that Swift would accompany her there and take over Temple’s role as guardian?

  There is one further stunning piece of evidence that Stella was very likely Temple’s daughter. It has been ignored until now, so far as I know, because it was mentioned in a casual aside by someone studying the Temple family papers who didn’t make the connection with the question of paternity. This is a letter from Stella to a member of the Temple family, dated May 21, 1723. She was forty-two at the time and had been living in Dublin for over twenty years. This letter gratefully acknowledges receipt of the very large sum of ₤432.62 It looks very much as if the Temple family continued to provide her with financial assistance indefinitely, as though that had indeed been the wish of Sir William. Since the letter begins simply with the word “Sir,” we can’t be sure which Temple it was addressed to, but Sir William’s nephew Jack would be a good guess.

  And what about Ralph Mose, the steward whom Bridget did eventually marry? We don’t know how long he had been at Moor Park, since few records survive, but he was there no later than 1697. A year or two after that, his first wife died (she had been the cook) and he began importuning Bridget with proposals of marriage, which she repeatedly turned down. But then she accepted. Geree was told by a friend of Bridget’s “that she had heard Mrs. Mose, in her freer hours, declare that she was obliged by indispensable necessity to marry the man whose servile manners her soul despised.” What necessity could have been so decisive? Geree offered a plausible guess: “Mose might be privy to certain secrets that she was unwilling to have divulged, and therefore she might not dare to reject his proposals, for fear of drawing his resentment upon her.”63 Whether or not this guess is correct, there were clearly plenty of secrets, and a determination to keep them that way.

  ANOTHER MYSTERY

  During Swift’s lifetime and immediately afterward, there were persistent rumors in Dublin not only that Stella was Sir William Temple’s daughter, but that Swift was his son. “A torrent of scandal,” Deane Swift said, kept this notion alive.64 This was easily disproved by Swift’s first biographers, since they could verify that Temple was in Holland at the time when Swift was conceived in Dublin. But there is another possible paternity for Swift—far-fetched, unquestionably, but worth considering.

  It needs to be emphasized that, as a recent biographer says, “There is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that Swift was the son of anyone other than Jonathan Swift senior.”65 Still, there is little evidence about anything in Swift’s early years, and the official story is pretty far-fetched in its own right. If we accept that story, we must believe the following: a baby is abducted by his nurse from Ireland to England, with no reaction from the mother or her family for several years. Just when the child is brought back to Dublin, the mother herself departs for England. One of the child’s uncles thereupon gives him the best possible education, even though he can’t afford to do so for most of his own children. Despite this exceptional generosity, the child develops a lifelong resentment of the uncle. And finally, when he grows up, a distinguished Englishman willingly takes him on as a private secretary although he has never met him before.

  In his 1959 book In Search of Swift, Denis Johnston advanced a thought-provoking hypothesis, building upon suggestions he had first offered in 1941. Johnston was a Dublin playwright and broadcast producer who rose to a high position in the BBC, and he had a passion for painstaking research, especially in the records of the law courts where the Swift brothers were employed. His standards were high, as he scrupulously weighed evidence and commented on the suspicious absence of certain kinds of it. But as he acknowledged with ironic understatement, his argument would “possibly be unwelcome in some circles,” presuming as he did to enter a “heavily mined area.”66 He was right about that. The few professional Swift scholars who noticed his book at all denounced it as amateurish nonsense, and Ehrenpreis never once mentions it in the two thousand pages of his biography.

  Here is the scenario that Johnston puts forward. It is far more speculative than the hypothesis that Stella was Temple’s daughter. But Johnston’s theory would make sense of some of the mysteries that surround Swift’s early years, and at the very least it establishes that there are far more questions than answers.

  First, there is a matter of dates. We know that Jonathan Swift the elder died before the younger Jonathan was born. The son believed that his mother was two months’ pregnant when she became a widow. But there is no record of the father’s death, and Johnston suggests that it might have been a good deal earlier. He notes that the elder Jonathan Swift stopped making entries in a legal ledger known as the Black Book of King’s Inns in November 1666, a full year before the birth of young Jonathan. Might he have fallen ill at that time and died soon after? None of Swift’s biographers has addressed this gap in the record. We do know that on April 15, 1667, Abigail Swift submitted a petition to her late husband’s employers for financial assistance as a widow. What we don’t know is how long she waited after her husband’s death to do so.

  It is also remarkable that there is no baptismal record to confirm the younger Jonathan Swift’s date of birth. We have seen that he had a search made of the St. Werburgh’s church register (which no longer exists) and that no trace of his baptism was found. Swift’s friend Lyon ascribed the omission to “the carelessness of the then vestry clerk.”67 But what if the baptism did not take place at St. Werburgh’s at all? It could have been performed privately, in which case no parish record would have been made. For that matter, the birth too could have taken place elsewhere, if secrecy was important. Swift often told friends that he was born in Godwin’s house in Hoey’s Court, but even if he believed that, it might not have been true.

  It is possible, in fact, that Swift had serious doubts about the story he had been told. When he had the church register searched, he could have been hoping to establish the date when his father died as well as his own birth date. A reviewer of Orrery’s biography in 1751 made a telling point that later biographers ignored: Swift could have silenced rumors about his origins “by producing the necessary proofs and circumstances of his birth, yet we do not find that ever this was done, either by the Dean or his relations.”68

  Pondering these puzzles, Denis Johnston reviews what little we know about the elder Jonathan Swift. With no formal legal training, he spent several years doing odd jobs for the law offices that were known in Dublin, like those in London, as the Inns of Court. In his autobiographical sketch, the younger Jonathan says vaguely that his father “had some employments and agencies.” Finally, in late 1665 or early 1666, the elder Jonathan was appointed steward of the Inns. This was not a distinguished position. The duties were to keep routine records of billing for meals and to supervise the laundress, cook, and other servants. Wale, Swift’s predecessor, had been a butler before being promoted to steward. Yet the very day after Swift’s appointment, he was made an attorney, suddenly achieving a status that had eluded him for years, and that carried the likelihood of increased income in the future. This notation was entered into the Black Book: “The petitioner [the elder Jonathan Swift] for these six or seven years last past hath been much conversant about the said Inns, and is very well acquainted with the duty and employment belonging unto the steward thereof, he having assisted the said Thomas Wale in entering up the orders of your Honors, and in the settling and ordering other things belonging to the said employment.”69

  The story of Swift’s mother is likewise unclear. Ehrenpreis says, “I assume she was born in Dublin,” but he admits that there is no evidence. He also says she was twenty-four when she got married, the same age as her husband, but the alleged source for this “fact” is an obscure article by himself that actually says nothing at all about her age. And although he states that no
record of her baptism has been found in Leicestershire, that may not be true. As Johnston points out, a Leicestershire antiquarian did a search of parish registers and found that an Abigail Ericke was baptized on May 16, 1630, in the village of Wigston Magna, five miles south of the town of Leicester.70

  Ehrenpreis guesses that Abigail’s father was the Reverend James Ericke, who was expelled from an English church in 1634 for Puritanical leanings and then emigrated to Ireland. He acknowledges that Swift never mentioned the Reverend Ericke, which seems strange, since he would surely have told people if he knew that both grandfathers had been clergymen. Ehrenpreis surmises that he was so appalled by James Ericke’s religious attitude that he made a point of ignoring his existence. But perhaps Swift never mentioned him because there was no reason to. If his mother was the Abigail recorded in the Wigston Magna register, her father, Thomas Ericke (sometimes spelled Herrick), was a butcher there.

  Whoever Abigail was, we don’t know why she married an impecunious young clerk at the law courts, who may even have been ten years younger than herself. Nor we do we know why she made no effort to recover her son when his nurse spirited him off to England. But that whole story may be a fiction. There is no evidence whatsoever that after the alleged kidnapping she remained in the household of Godwin Swift, who already had more than enough people to support. She may well have gone home to Leicester at that point, not three or four years later at the very moment when her son was brought back to Dublin.