by Leo Damrosch
RELIGION AND SOCIAL ORDER
During the first decade of the eighteenth century Swift wrote often about religion, confirming that doctrine mattered to him only in institutional terms. Remembering the chaos of the civil wars, he thought that an established state church was the essential bedrock of a stable society. To keep it secure, a legal sanction was required, and such a sanction existed. Hated by Dissenters but energetically defended by Swift, it was the Test Act of 1673, still very much in force.
When Swift makes Peter insist that a loaf of bread is really mutton, he is parodying the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, according to which sacramental bread and wine retain their outward appearance but are literally the body and blood of Christ. It’s doubtful that Swift cared much about transubstantiation as such. In Gulliver’s Travels he deplores the fact that “difference in opinions hath cost many millions of lives; for instance, whether flesh be bread or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine.”10 What he did care about was the usefulness of transubstantiation as a litmus test for political loyalty.
Under the title “An act for preventing dangers which may happen from popish recusants,” the Test Act required every holder of civil or military office to receive Communion in the Church of England at least once a year, and to take this oath: “I do solemnly and sincerely, in the presence of God, profess, testify and declare that I do believe that in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper there is not any transubstantiation of the elements of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, at or after the consecration thereof by any person whatsoever; and that the invocation or adoration of the Virgin Mary, or any other saint, and the sacrifice of the Mass, as they are now used in the Church of Rome, are superstitious and idolatrous.”11
Swift regularly used the term “popish,” not “Catholic,” because the Anglican Church regarded itself as embodying the authentic Catholicism from which Rome had strayed. But Swift had utter contempt for the founder of his Church, Henry VIII. Mad for power, Henry “cut off the head of Sir Thomas More, a person of the greatest virtue this kingdom ever produced, for not directly owning him to be head of the Church.” In addition, by confiscating the vast wealth of the Church, Henry gravely weakened it. The margins of Swift’s copy of a biography of Henry VIII are filled with imprecations: “Bloody inhuman hell-hound of a king”; “Dog, villain, king, viper, devil monster”; “Nero was emperor of Rome, and was a saint in comparison of this dying dog Henry”; “I wish he had been flayed, his skin stuffed and hanged on a gibbet, his bulky guts and flesh left to be devoured by birds and beasts for a warning to his successors forever. Amen.”12
“We have just religion enough,” Swift once wrote, “to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.” For that very reason he thought it essential to enforce conformity. It wasn’t really Catholics that he was worried about, since their rights had been severely curtailed after 1688. It was dissenting Protestants, especially since the Whigs were eager to extend toleration by repealing the Test Act. Swift did claim once that he was in favor of “a proper indulgence to all Dissenters,” but that only meant that they would be left alone so long as they shut up. In one of his unpublished Thoughts on Religion, he said that although we have a right to “our own thoughts and opinions,” they must not provoke political unrest. “Liberty of conscience, under the present acceptation, produces revolutions, or at least convulsions and disturbances in a state.”13
What it came down to was that you were free to believe what you liked but not to say so. The king of Brobdingnag tells Gulliver, “He knew no reason why those who entertain opinions prejudicial to the public should be obliged to change, or should not be obliged to conceal them . . . for a man may be allowed to keep poisons in his closet, but not to vend them about for cordials.” And in the religion of Lilliput there is bitter doctrinal fighting over which end of an egg is proper to break. The Lilliputian Bible, however, directs only “that all true believers shall break their eggs at the convenient end; and which is the convenient end seems, in my humble opinion, to be left to every man’s conscience, or at least in the power of the chief magistrate to determine.” (Swift himself, as it happens, broke neither end. He had his eggs hard-boiled, and cracked the shells on his plate.)14
Swift’s polemical energy was focused on rival Christian sects, but there was also another threat to his position—“freethinking,” also known as deism or natural religion. This was the claim that human reason was capable of figuring out everything worth knowing about religion. An intelligent and well-meaning creator—the deus of deism—must have been responsible for the orderly structure of the universe, but there was no evidence that he loves us, or punishes us for sin, or will reward good behavior with eternal life.
Swift thought deism so obviously wrong that his attempts to confront it are often weak. He succeeds best with offhand jabs, like this one at a freethinking clergyman:
He shows, as sure as God’s in Gloucester,
That Jesus was a grand imposter;
That all his miracles were cheats,
Performed as jugglers do their feats.
God was proverbially at home in Gloucester in the Middle Ages, when that county was supposedly swarming with monks.15
“LAUGH US INTO RELIGION”
Irony served Swift better than polemics, and the controversy over the Test Act inspired one of his most brilliant satires, a short piece entitled An Argument to Prove that the Abolishing of Christianity in England May, as Things Now Stand, Be Attended with Some Inconveniencies, and Perhaps Not Produce Those Many Good Effects Proposed Thereby. What Swift was discovering was that he could make his points most forcefully, and at the same time delight his readers, through a deadpan impersonation of somebody else.
An Argument against Abolishing Christianity, as it’s commonly known, critiques a totally imaginary bill in Parliament. Swift’s targets include freethinkers who did want to get rid of Christianity, and also Socinians—later to be called Unitarians—who rejected the Trinity. But the immediate occasion was the Whig agenda to abolish the Test Act, so that Dissenters could be eligible for public office.16
Swift adopts the voice of a man of the world who despises “daggle-tail parsons” like Jonathan Swift, and it becomes apparent that he is a member of Parliament as well. With modest tact, he urges, “I do not yet see the absolute necessity of extirpating the Christian religion from among us.” What makes the Argument great is that it rises above specific issues to make the point that “nominal Christianity” is all that really exists any more.
I hope no reader imagines me so weak [as] to stand up in the defense of real Christianity, such as used in primitive times (if we may believe the authors of those ages) to have an influence upon men’s belief and actions. To offer at the restoring of that would indeed be a wild project; it would be to dig up foundations; to destroy at one blow all the wit and half the learning of the kingdom; to break the entire frame and constitution of things; to ruin trade, extinguish arts and sciences with the professors of them; in short, to turn our courts, exchanges, and shops into deserts.
Swift the moralist wasn’t always identical to Swift the politician. From the point of view of the moralist, even if the Church was invaluable as a bulwark of social order, it had forgotten its true mission, to recover the Christianity that once influenced people’s lives. “If, notwithstanding all I have said, it shall still be thought necessary to have a bill brought in for repealing Christianity, I would humbly offer an amendment: that instead of the word Christianity, may be put religion in general . . . which, by laying restraints on human nature, is supposed the great enemy to the freedom of thought and action.”17
In the years to come Swift would return often to this mode of impersonation, which evidently satisfied a psychological need. It was a way of standing outside himself, inhabiting someone else’s mind and then subverting it from within. And getting the joke was pleasurable to readers in a way that preaching couldn’t be. “He ju
dged rightly,” Orrery said, “in imagining that a small treatise, written with a spirit of mirth and freedom, must be more efficacious than long sermons or laborious lessons of morality. He endeavours to laugh us into religion, well knowing that we are often laughed out of it.” Scott, in the next century, called the Argument “one of the most felicitous efforts in our language to engage wit and humour on the side of religion.”18
CHAPTER 10
First Fruits
SWIFT AS A POLITICAL PLAYER
In 1704 Swift’s story starts to gather momentum again, and in fact this was the turning point of his career. It hinged on a financial issue that was of marginal significance even at the time. This was an ancient law, a tax on the income of the clergy, established in the Middle Ages, with the arcane name of the First Fruits and Twentieth Parts. When a minister took up a new position, he had to pay the state the equivalent of a year’s income. That was the First Fruits, so called from a biblical text, “Honour the Lord with thy substance, and with the first fruits of all thine increase.”1 Each year thereafter the tax was 5 percent of income, hence the Twentieth Parts.
In England, where most clergymen were very badly paid, the law was obviously unjust. Queen Anne recognized that, and in 1704 she diverted its proceeds to assist the neediest of the clergy. Yet the British government continued to collect the tax in Ireland, where the clergy were even worse off than in England. As vicar of Laracor, Swift felt the financial pinch personally. Beyond that, he and his colleagues saw the issue as fundamentally important: was the impoverished Church of Ireland just an emaciated cash cow, or did it have a right to its own resources?2
The newly appointed archbishop of Dublin was William King, a valiant defender of his Church and a worthy collaborator (if sometimes antagonist) for Swift. King realized that Swift was well suited to argue the Irish case in London, since he was a persuasive speaker and had made useful contacts there. When the clergy assembled in their annual meeting, they accordingly authorized Swift to negotiate on their behalf.
Unfortunately, there was a catch. The Whig ministry in London did indicate a willingness to remit the First Fruits, but only on a condition that was utterly unacceptable to the Irish. The quid pro quo they demanded was abolition of the Test Act in Ireland, where it had only recently become law. The Test Act excluded Dissenters from a wide range of public employment, and the Church of Ireland leaders regarded it as an essential bulwark against both Presbyterianism and Catholicism. For them, the Test Act was nonnegotiable. So negotiations on the First Fruits would drag on for years, and Swift would be exasperated by a series of politicians who promised support and then reneged. King flatly called one hopeful prediction “a mouthful of moonshine.”3 But in a larger sense Swift was in his element at last, a significant player in the public world, and he was paving the way for deeper involvement in the future.
THE STATE OF PLAY IN POLITICS
Since the queen had the power to appoint and dismiss members of the cabinet, and since she attended its meetings every week, her concerns mattered greatly.4 Though Swift never had an opportunity to meet her personally, it must have seemed auspicious to him that she was devoted to the Church and took seriously her title of Defender of the Faith. She was the last British monarch to “touch for the King’s Evil,” a laying on of hands that could supposedly cure the lymphatic disorder known as scrofula. When Samuel Johnson was a little boy he contracted a tubercular condition from infected milk, and his mother took him on a long journey to London to be touched by Queen Anne.
Unlike her brother-in-law, the masterful William, Anne was ill at ease and temperamentally depressive. Her longtime friend, the Duchess of Marlborough, said that “there was something of majesty in her look, but mixed with a sullen and constant frown, that plainly betrayed a gloomy soul and a cloudiness of disposition within.” The duchess added that although the queen had an extraordinary memory, “she could, whenever she pleased, forget what others would have thought themselves obliged by truth and honour to remember, and remember all such things as others would think it an happiness to forget.”5
32. Queen Anne. The inscription is the text of the Great Seal of England, identifying her as queen of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland. By her time, of course, the French part was wishful thinking.
Relatively young though she was—thirty-seven when she ascended the throne in 1702—the queen was in poor health. By 1707 a Scottish diplomat described her as “under a very severe fit of the gout, ill dressed, blotted in her countenance, and surrounded with plasters, cataplasms, and dirty rags.”6 Her depression would deepen after her royal consort died in 1708. He was Prince George of Denmark and Duke of Cumberland, a mild and ineffectual figure who had been selected as a spouse when England needed Scandinavian support against the Dutch. Notwithstanding this arrangement, Anne was devoted to Prince George and distraught at his death.
At this stage in history, the two houses of Parliament were in theory equal, though since the Commons controlled finances it often had the upper hand. But the House of Lords could reject legislation passed by the Commons, which meant that peers continued to hold great power. Their number was held down by the rule of primogeniture, which allowed only the eldest son to inherit a title. In 1688 there were just 160 lords temporal, the peers with hereditary titles, and in addition 26 lords spiritual, Church of England bishops who likewise sat in the House of Lords.7
Swift knew and admired many peers, but like Edmund Burke after him, he had no illusions about the intellectual and moral qualities of the peerage as a whole. In Gulliver’s description, “A weak diseased body, a meager countenance, and sallow complexion, are the true marks of noble blood; and a healthy robust appearance is so disgraceful in a man of quality that the world concludes his real father to have been a groom or a coachman. The imperfections of his mind run parallel with those of his body, being a composition of spleen, dullness, ignorance, caprice, sensuality, and pride. Without the consent of this illustrious body, no law can be enacted, repealed, or altered; and these nobles have likewise the decision of all our possessions, without appeal.”8
Orwell thought it an obvious defect in Swift that “he does not seem to think better of the common people than of their rulers.” That is true, but he didn’t think worse of them, either. And it’s important to recognize that there was nothing democratic about the House of Commons. The electorate was small, since only one man in seven (no women, of course) owned enough property to vote. It was usual to bribe electors, and since there was no secret ballot, it was easy to verify the results. Many “pocket boroughs” were personally controlled by big landowners, and some were so unrepresentative that they became known as “rotten boroughs.” The worst was Old Sarum, near Salisbury, which had two members of Parliament but no inhabitants at all. Its handful of voters would show up from other places and solemnly conduct an election in the empty fields where there had once been a town.9
The governing ministry was the coalition of Whig noblemen known as the Junto. Its members had sonorous titles: the Earl of Halifax, Baron Somers, the Earl of Wharton, Earl Cowper, the Earl of Orford, and the Earl of Sunderland. A seventh peer, holding the influential office of lord treasurer, gradually acquired more power than the rest. This was Sidney, Earl Godolphin, who had the good fortune to be related by marriage to the Duke of Marlborough, currently winning battles abroad, and his duchess, Queen Anne’s intimate friend. (Godolphin’s son had married the Marlboroughs’ eldest daughter in 1698.)
To many people the Junto looked like a secretive and manipulative cabal, but in historical hindsight it was a necessary response to the evolving needs of party government. The queen might think of the cabinet as simply a group of her personal advisers, but since ultimate power lay with Parliament, that was no longer a practical way to govern. For the first time, it became usual to draw the cabinet from the majority party rather than from able men of both parties. There was, as yet, no formal office of prime minister, but the lord treasurer increasingly assumed that role.
The Junto ministers had reason to be well disposed to Swift, since Orford, Halifax, and Somers were among the peers whose impeachment Swift had condemned in The Contests and Dissensions in Athens and Rome. Eventually he would break with them all, and Wharton, in particular, would excite his withering scorn. But at this point they represented his best chance of getting a distinguished appointment in the Church of England, and he placed his highest hopes in Somers.
John, Lord Somers, fifty-three years old, fully deserved Swift’s admiration. He was acknowledged to have the most brilliant legal mind in England, and he had been the principal author of the Declaration of Rights that limited William III’s powers. Somers fascinated Swift by combining intense emotion with severe self-control. “No man is more apt to take fire,” Swift later wrote, “upon the least appearance of provocation; which temper he strives to subdue with the utmost violence upon himself, so that his breast hath been seen to heave, and his eyes to sparkle with rage, in those very moments when his words and the cadence of his voice were in the humblest and softest manner.” Swift probably identified personally with Somers’s achievement in rising to “the greatest employments of the state, without the least support from birth or fortune.”10
33. Lord Somers.
Since Somers was literate and witty, Swift had a bright idea. In 1704 A Tale of a Tub was about to be published, and he would dedicate it to Somers. Dedications in those days were overt bids for patronage, and Macaulay comments, “Books were frequently printed merely that they might be dedicated.” The great Dryden wrote dedications, Johnson said, “in a strain of flattery which disgraces genius, and which it was wonderful that any man that knew the meaning of his own words could use without self-detestation. . . . When he has once undertaken the task of praise he no longer retains shame in himself, nor supposes it in his patron.”11