by Leo Damrosch
Swift had to find a way to avoid fulsome flattery, and his characteristic solution was praise by ironic understatement. “To ply the world with an old beaten story of your wit, and eloquence, and learning, and wisdom, and justice, and politeness, and candor, and evenness of temper in all scenes of life; of that great discernment in discovering and readiness in favouring deserving men; with forty other common topics; I confess I have neither conscience nor countenance to do it.”12 Swift regarded himself, of course, as one of those “deserving men.”
No doubt Swift believed that the entire Tale would appeal to Somers and his colleagues, since it embodied a cynical wit very congenial to the style of the rakish grandees. In the lengthy “Apology” that Swift published six years later, he explained with evident embarrassment, “The author . . . was then a young gentleman much in the world, and wrote to the taste of those who were like himself; therefore, in order to allure them, he gave a liberty to his pen which might not suit with mature years or graver characters.” “Liberty,” with a positive spin, was a Whig slogan, and in hindsight Swift must have realized that it was a political faux pas to dedicate to Somers.13
Right from the start, there were obvious ways in which Somers’s principles differed from Swift’s. He had close ties with City financiers, whom Swift deeply distrusted, and he strongly supported toleration for Dissenters. That didn’t stop Swift from seeking his help in getting a cushy Church position, though his own worldly demeanor was becoming an obstacle. He later recalled what happened when Somers recommended him to the archbishop of Canterbury: “His Grace said he had heard that the clergyman used to play at whisk and swobbers; that as to playing now and then a sober game at whisk for pastime, it might be pardoned, but he could not digest those wicked swobbers.”14 “Whisk” was whist; as for “swobbers,” Johnson, citing this passage from Swift, defines them as “four privileged cards that are only incidentally used in betting at the game of whist.” His Grace clearly thought that a clergyman shouldn’t gamble. Swift went right on playing for small sums for the rest of his life.
IRELAND ONCE MORE
It soon became obvious that the First Fruits campaign was going nowhere, so by the end of 1704 Swift returned to Ireland, and there he would remain for the next three and a half years. The expenses of London had forced him to live beyond his means, so that he badly needed to retrench. And Archbishop King took a dim view of absentee clergymen. If the First Fruits mission wasn’t succeeding, he expected Swift to come home.15
The period from 1704 to 1707 is a biographical blank. All we know is that Swift divided his time between Laracor and Dublin, and got increasingly involved in the affairs of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He played a role, for example, in complicated maneuvering that went into getting his friend John Stearne appointed its dean.16 He remained on good terms with Dublin Castle, too, becoming close to the Duke of Ormonde, the last Irish-born lord lieutenant in the eighteenth century, and after that to Ormonde’s successor, the Earl of Pembroke.
The Complete Peerage says of Pembroke that his reputation for “humour and oddness” was “remarkable and indeed most extraordinary.”17 He was just the kind of person, in fact, whom Swift liked. Pembroke enjoyed punning and wordplay, as did a young aide of his named Sir Andrew Fountaine, who would later be a favorite companion of Swift’s in London. Also in the social circle were the three Ashe brothers, Thomas, Dillon (“Dilly”), and St. George, Swift’s former tutor who was now bishop of Clogher.
On one occasion Swift came up with a brilliant multilingual pun. A lady who was swirling her gown unluckily swept a fine violin off a table and smashed it. Swift exclaimed, “Mantua ve miserae nimium vicina Cremonae!” Virgil’s line means “Mantua, alas! too close to unfortunate Cremona”—Mantua was Virgil’s birthplace, and land in Cremona had been confiscated for settlement by army veterans. The pun depends on knowing that Stradivarius made his great violins in Cremona, and that a mantua was a loose gown worn over other clothing.18
Swift’s most important relationship during these years was with Stella, but it left no paper trail. We have seen that his cousin Thomas Swift wondered in 1707 “whether Jonathan be married,” but whatever people expected, there was no marriage at this point, or perhaps ever.
At some point Swift’s mother came over from Leicester for a visit. She evidently shared her son’s love of playful imposture, for when she checked in at her Dublin boardinghouse, she pretended she was there for an assignation with a lover. Only after Swift appeared did she explain to the landlady that he was her son.19 This little anecdote was recorded after Swift’s death by one of his friends, who must have heard it from him. But like many of the stories about Swift, it raises curiosity without satisfying it. Did mother and son treat each other flirtatiously, or was Abigail just having fun with a credulous landlady?
Swift was in the habit of jotting down aphorisms, somewhat in the style of the great Rochefoucauld, whom he admired, and he wrote the collection Thoughts on Various Subjects in the year 1706. A number of aphorisms speak directly to his own experience, particularly this one: “It is a miserable thing to live in suspense; it is the life of a spider. Vive quidem, pende tamen, improba, dixit.”20 The allusion is to Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “Live then, but hang, presumptuous one.” Having woven a tapestry superior to one made by Minerva (whom the Greeks called Athena), the country girl Arachne rashly exults in her victory. Her punishment is to grow a tiny head, big belly, and slender legs, and to hang forever after in her web. Stuck in Ireland and once again seemingly going nowhere, Swift apparently saw himself bleakly as the spider of the Battle of the Books instead of as the productive bee.
THE UNION WITH SCOTLAND
In 1707 a momentous event carried profound implications for Ireland. This was the union of England and Scotland, symbolized by combining the crosses of St. George and St. Andrew in the Union Jack. But although Scotland was now fully integrated, Ireland continued to be ruled as a dependent colony, and it would be nearly a century before Ireland too would join the Union, with the cross of St. Patrick added to the flag.
Swift wrote bitterly at this time,
The Queen has lately lost a part
Of her entirely-English heart,
For want of which, by way of botch,
She pieced it up again with Scotch.
This was an allusion to the queen’s well-known declaration that she had “a heart entirely English.”21 The part she lost was the Irish part. Swift never published this little poem; to do so would have jeopardized his hopes for advancement.
Another comment that Swift didn’t publish was a prose allegory called The Story of the Injured Lady, Written by Herself. It’s a slight piece of work, but valuable for the insight it gives into his ambiguous position as an Anglo-Irishman. The lady is grieving because a neighboring landowner who had seduced her, “half by force and half by consent, after solemn vows,” has deserted her and is now about to marry another neighbor instead. When The Injured Lady was eventually published after Swift’s death, the publisher added a subtitle: Being a True Picture of Scotch Perfidy, Irish Poverty, and English Partiality.
Scotland, the neighbor who has gained the landowner’s hand, is represented as “tall and lean, and very ill-shaped; she hath bad features and a worse complexion; she hath a stinking breath, and twenty ill smells about her besides, which are yet more insufferable by her natural sluttishness, for she is always lousy, and never without the itch.” As for Ireland, she is still beautiful, although “pale and thin with grief and ill-usage.” She is compelled to employ servants who belong to her faithless lover, and to sell her produce to no one but him.22 Yet her heart is true and she loves him still.
The reason Swift’s position was ambiguous is that he was speaking both for Ireland as a whole and for the ruling Anglo-Irish Ascendancy to which he belonged. Future Irish patriots would characterize their history as a rape, rather than as an engagement to be married. But Swift couldn’t do that, because his own class had committed the rape.23 This funda
mental ambiguity—a spokesman for Ireland who didn’t necessarily speak for the people as a whole—would haunt his writings even after he became a national hero.
As a member of the Church of Ireland, Swift had another reason for alarm. In Scotland the Presbyterian Church now enjoyed the status of the official establishment (to this day, when the monarch visits there, he or she worships as a Presbyterian). Swift was convinced that if the Test Act, requiring all officeholders to take Communion in an Anglican church, was ever repealed, the Church of Ireland would be shoved aside in the same way by the energetic, militant Presbyterians. “We are verily persuaded,” he wrote in 1709, “the consequence will be an entire alteration of religion among us, in no great compass of years.”24 Defending the Test Act would remain an idée fixe of Swift’s.
Archbishop King, willing to try once more to tackle the First Fruits issue, agreed at this point to send Swift back to London on the old quest. No doubt Swift implored him to do it. When Lord Pembroke sailed for England in November of 1707, Swift went with him.
CHAPTER 11
The War and the Whigs
MRS. MORLEY AND MR. AND MRS. FREEMAN
The overwhelming concern of British public life for over a decade, from 1701 to 1713, was the War of the Spanish Succession. The Whigs were an enthusiastic war party, and their hero was the charismatic general-in-chief of the allied armies, the Duke of Marlborough.
Marlborough wasn’t always a duke, or even a peer. He was born John Churchill in 1650, son of Sir Winston Churchill, ancestor of the twentieth-century Sir Winston. This Sir Winston had fought for Charles I in the civil wars, and was well placed for rewards when Charles II recovered his throne. John Churchill was handsome, charming, and a dashing ladies’ man. When he was twenty he began a protracted affair with Lady Castlemaine, ten years older than himself, even though she was the mistress of King Charles II. On one occasion the king turned up and Churchill escaped detection by leaping from her second-story bedroom window. But in 1675, when he was twenty-five, he fell passionately in love with a fifteen-year-old maid of honor named Sarah Jennings. In 1677 they married, and he remained in her thrall for the rest of his life. His sister Arabella, incidentally, who has been described as a person of “considerable intelligence and rampant sexuality,” was a mistress of James II.1
Churchill was a canny political survivor, always landing on his feet through the vicissitudes of five reigns. Queen Anne’s biographer comments dryly, “Churchill’s family motto was ‘Faithful but Unfortunate,’ but his whole career was to belie it. He intrigued against every English monarch from James II to George I, while managing to amass the largest private fortune in Europe.”2 Over the years he kept accumulating titles, usually as rewards for choosing the winning side. In 1682 he became Lord Churchill of Eyemouth, and was raised to Baron Churchill three years later when he helped to put down a rebellion against the newly crowned James II. In 1689 it was James’s turn to go, and for deserting him at a crucial moment Churchill became the Earl of Marlborough. In 1702, after his first victories on the Continent, Queen Anne made him a duke, the highest rank in the peerage, and his military glory also brought him the titles of prince of the Holy Roman Empire and prince of Mindelheim, a tiny Bavarian principality that he visited only once, but of which he was very proud.
Marlborough’s career was sustained not only by his personal abilities, but by his relationship with the queen. When Sarah Churchill was nineteen, she and then Princess Anne became fast friends. Sarah was a maid of honor to Anne’s stepmother, and was beautiful, brilliant, and a controlling personality. The shy and awkward princess developed a powerful crush, and it is sometimes suggested that they were in love. In the long run, however, their temperamental difference would prove fatal to the relationship. In the beginning, Princess Anne was “a willing slave,” in Macaulay’s words, “to a nature far more vivacious and imperious than her own.”3 When Anne became queen she delighted in pretending to be an ordinary citizen, and insisted that her friends use private names: Queen Anne was “Mrs. Morley” and the Marlboroughs were “Mr. and Mrs. Freeman.” Lord Godolphin, whose son was married to the Marlboroughs’ daughter, also had a pet name, “Mr. Montgomery.”
34. The Duke of Marlborough.
As her reign continued, however, Anne began to resist being pushed around by the imperious Sarah. Sarah, in turn, grew more dictatorial than ever and refused to back off, even though her husband begged her to. Swift’s assessment of the duchess’s character is severe but accurate: “Three furies reigned in her breast, the most mortal enemies of all softer passions, which were sordid avarice, disdainful pride, and ungovernable rage.”4 He didn’t know either the duke or duchess personally, however; it was their inordinate influence over national affairs that he despised.
35. The Duchess of Marlborough.
THE PROGRESS OF THE WAR
The stakes were very high in the War of the Spanish Succession, which had begun in 1702. If Louis XIV could control Spain, together with its territory in the Spanish Netherlands, every other nation in Europe would be in grave danger. Accordingly, England joined a “Grand Alliance” whose other members were the United Provinces of Holland and the Habsburg Empire, which comprised most of Germany, Austria, and Hungary. The Duke of Marl borough was named commander in chief of the combined forces.
Marlborough proved to be a tactician of genius, able to grasp intuitively the progress of a battle, carry out deceptive feints, and strike decisively at the critical place and time. His courage was exceptional. During one victory he was swinging his leg across his horse’s saddle when a cannonball passed under his leg and decapitated the officer assisting him. Another officer wrote afterward that he had “fulfilled that day all the parts of a great captain, except that he exposed his person as the meanest soldier,” and the incident was celebrated in a pack of playing cards whose ten of diamonds showed Marlborough in the saddle and the dead officer standing beside him with blood spouting from his headless trunk.5
That was far from all. Marlborough was also a superb planner, able to organize and deploy huge forces under several different allied commanders (only nine thousand of the fifty-six thousand men in the army were British). He was a gifted diplomat too, and needed to be. The alliance was unwieldy in the extreme, and given to exasperating delays, because the Dutch had the most to lose in defeat and were predisposed to caution. There were no fewer than seven separate governments in the United Provinces of Holland (Holland itself was just one of them), and even when they could agree on a policy, it didn’t always suit the emperor in Vienna. In addition, Marlborough had to coordinate his campaigns with a partner, the gifted Prince Eugene of Savoy, with whom he fortunately formed a warm friendship.
After a couple of years of inconclusive fighting, the great turning point was the battle of Blenheim in 1704, which stopped the French in their tracks and ranks with Agincourt and Waterloo as a pinnacle of British military achievement. Blenheim (properly Blindheim) was a Bavarian village on the Danube, around which the engagement was desperately close fought. The carnage was appalling. In Trevelyan’s words, “With the darkness, sheets of rain descended in pitiless brutality on the maimed and dying men, gathered from all the four quarters of Europe to perish together on that tragic hill.”6 Blenheim ended Louis’ dreams of conquest, and from then on, a negotiated peace was inevitable, though it would take nearly a decade to bring it about.
On the back of a tavern bill Marlborough scribbled a note to his wife: “I have not time to say more, but to beg you will give my duty to the Queen, and to let her know her army has had a glorious victory. M. Tallard and the two other generals are in my coach.”7 That last line was arresting: Tallard was the French commander in chief.
It was more than a week before anyone in England knew what had happened. For four days a Colonel Parkes galloped day and night across the face of Europe, and then adverse winds kept him from sailing for another three days. At last, on August 10, he reached London, gave the Duchess of Marlborough her husband�
��s note, and hastened on to Windsor to inform the queen. The duchess spread the news, and within minutes the cannons in the Tower of London were booming salutes, bells were ringing in all the churches, and people were pouring into the streets. Not long afterward the queen, overjoyed at her dear friend’s triumph, got Parliament’s consent to grant him the royal manor of Woodstock in Oxfordshire, with sixteen thousand acres and funding to build a grandiose palace.8
Joseph Addison, a former Oxford fellow and minor poet who was hoping to make a career in government service, saw a wonderful opportunity. He hastened to bring out a poem called The Campaign, which has been called “a sensational propaganda success.”9 Marlborough was now an epic hero:
Rivers of blood I see, and hills of slain,
An Iliad rising out of one campaign. . . .
In vengeance roused, the soldier fills his hand
With sword and fire, and ravages the land:
A thousand villages to ashes turns,
In crackling flames a thousand harvests burns.
That was an elegant way of saying that at Blenheim the French lost thirty-four thousand men and the allies fourteen thousand (only twenty-two hundred of whom were British). In an analogy that became famous, Marlborough was nothing less than an agent of divine wrath:
And, pleased th’ Almighty’s orders to perform,
Rides in the whirlwind, and directs the storm.10
The poem made Addison’s career, and before long he was an undersecretary of state.
Further allied victories followed, mostly in the Low Countries now—Ramillies in 1706, Oudenarde in 1708. The French were ready to reach an accommodation, but the Whig ministry was not. It had become clear that it would be impossible to eject the Bourbons from Spain, but Marlborough and the Junto felt obliged to honor their commitment to the Austrian emperor to keep trying. They also feared that if they abandoned their campaign in Spain, it would expose the incredible wastefulness of the war. So their slogan became “No Peace without Spain.”