by Leo Damrosch
He may also have been exacting revenge against his own temptation to indulge in expensive books. “I itch to lay out nine or ten pounds for some fine editions of fine authors,” he told Stella after viewing a library that was about to be sold. When the auction was held he couldn’t afford to buy much, and “laid out one pound seven shillings, but very indifferently, and came away, and will go there no more.” Two days later, though, he was back. “I went to the auction of Barnard’s books, and laid out three pounds three shillings, but I’ll go there no more; and so I said once before, but now I’ll keep to it.”29
It was at this time that Swift went public with his love of impersonation, concocting a hoax that had everyone laughing. He published a brief pamphlet entitled Predictions for the Year 1708, under the name of Isaac Bickerstaff, which he had noticed on the sign at a locksmith’s shop. This was a sly, deadpan parody of popular almanacs based on astrology. The specific target was John Partridge, who had been turning out an almanac called Merlinus Liberatus for several decades, always with predictions too vague to be proved mistaken. Swift picked on him for two reasons: his attacks on the Church of England, and the radical politics that he covertly promoted in his almanacs.
“Bickerstaff” poses as a genuine astrologer who is disgusted by phonies like Partridge, and proceeds to mount an earnest defense of his art. Then comes a shocker: “My first prediction is but a trifle, yet I will mention it, to show how ignorant those sottish pretenders to astrology are in their own concerns. It relates to Partridge the almanac-maker. I have consulted the star of his nativity by my own rules, and find he will infallibly die upon the 29th of March next, about eleven at night, of a raging fever; therefore I advise him to consider of it, and settle his affairs in time.”30
Swift’s pamphlet was published early in the year, allowing lead time for this ominous claim to hang in the air. The rest of his predictions were highly specific, including the virtual extinction of the royal family of France. A follow-up pamphlet pulled the trigger. It was dated March 29 and published the next day, just in time to serve as an April Fool’s joke.31
Readers were now informed that the fatal prediction had been fulfilled. A purported friend of Partridge’s describes him on his deathbed, where he earnestly repudiated his life’s work. “I then asked him why he had not calculated his own nativity, to see whether it agreed with Bickerstaff’s predictions? at which he shook his head, and said, ‘Oh! sir, this is no time for jesting, but for repenting those fooleries, as I do now from the very bottom of my heart.’” Partridge goes on to acknowledge his Dissenting leanings, and his end is related with novelistic realism:
On his deathbed he declared himself a Nonconformist, and had a fanatic preacher to be his spiritual guide. After half an hour’s conversation I took my leave, being almost stifled by the closeness of the room. I imagined he could not hold out long, and therefore withdrew to a little coffee house hard by, leaving a servant at the house with orders to come immediately and tell me, as near as he could, the minute when Partridge should expire, which was not above two hours after; when, looking upon my watch, I found it to be above five minutes after seven: by which it is clear that Mr. Bickerstaff was mistaken almost four hours in his calculation. In the other circumstances he was exact enough.32
Partridge, of course, proclaimed that he was very much alive, but Bickerstaff published an answer in which he refused to believe it. The most he would concede was that “if an uninformed carcass walks still about, and is pleased to call itself Partridge, Mr. Bickerstaff does not think himself any way answerable for that.”33 And if Merlinus Liberatus should continue to be published under Partridge’s name, Swift could plausibly say that that proved nothing, since almanacs often kept the names of deceased founders. As it happens, Partridge’s almanac did shut down for several years, and it used to be believed that the Stationers’ Company that revoked his license had been taken in by Swift’s hoax. In fact it had to do with an unconnected financial dispute.
Swift’s deeper point was that whether Grub Street authors used their real names or not, they were nothing more than names to their readers. The blustering Partridge seemed hollow and insubstantial, even though he really existed, while the articulate Bickerstaff seemed convincingly real. And indeed, Bickerstaff got a new lease on life when Steele borrowed the name for the Tatler, deftly making the same point about virtual authors: “I have in another place, and in a paper by itself, sufficiently convinced this man that he is dead; and if he has any shame, I don’t doubt but that by this time he owns it [that is, admits it] to all his acquaintance. For though the legs and arms and whole body of that man may still appear and perform their animal functions; yet since, as I have elsewhere observed, his art is gone, the man is gone.”34
With brazen effrontery, Swift even drafted An Answer to Bickerstaff, in which he hinted that Bickerstaff was in reality the same man who wrote the Tale of a Tub. As Ehrenpreis says, “Here is Swift pretending to be a man who sees through a man whom Swift is pretending to be.”35 But he evidently realized that it would be most unwise to come out openly as author of the Tale, and the piece wasn’t published until after his death.
Partridge never did figure out who his opponent was. “The principal author of it,” he told a friend, “is one in Newgate, lately in the pillory for a libel against the state. There is no such man as Isaac Bickerstaff; it is a sham name, but his true name is Pettie.” A pamphleteer named Pittis was indeed in Newgate Prison, but he had nothing to do with Bickerstaff. Partridge seems to have suspected him because he was a High Church pamphleteer whose politics resembled Swift’s.36
Meanwhile, Swift’s First Fruits negotiations continued to be stalled, but change was at last at hand, for Swift and for the nation. The next four years would find him welcomed unexpectedly at the very summit of power.
CHAPTER 13
At the Summit
THE DOWNFALL OF THE WHIGS
At the beginning of 1709 Swift was still calling himself a “moderate Whig,” though Archbishop King teased him about it: “Pray, by what artifice did you contrive to pass for a Whig?”1 But momentous changes were just beyond the horizon, and soon he would be a Whig no longer.
There was a personal loss just at this time. In April 1710, Abigail Swift died in Leicester, while Swift was still at Laracor. He wrote on a blank page in his account book, “I have now lost my barrier between me and death; God grant I may live to be as well prepared for it as I confidently believe her to have been! If the way to Heaven be through piety, truth, justice, and charity, she is there.” The sentiments are appropriately pious, but very general, and Ehrenpreis is just guessing when he claims that Abigail’s death “shook and depressed him profoundly.” And as Nokes says, the conditional “if” is thought provoking. Could there be any doubt that a good life is the way to heaven?2
Despite the butchery of Malplaquet in September of 1709, the Whigs remained committed to continuing the war. Rumors spread that the Duke of Marlborough was getting rich from it and would never allow it to end. But Queen Anne’s trust in the duke was waning, even as his duchess grew more and more imperious. Likewise Godolphin, the Marlboroughs’ relative by marriage, was beginning to lose his grip on power. Once he had been the queen’s intimate friend as “Mr. Montgomery”; he was her intimate no longer.
An unexpected crisis blew up in November of 1710. The spark that ignited it was a Guy Fawkes Day sermon, In Perils among False Brethren, preached at St. Paul’s Cathedral by Henry Sacheverell. Invoking memories of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot that sought to blow up Parliament, Sacheverell called Dissenters a “brood of vipers” and a menace to church and state. He also invoked the old divine-right doctrine that forbade resistance to the Lord’s anointed king, and the Whigs saw a chance to smear the Tories as closet Jacobites. So in February of the next year they launched a show trial of Sacheverell in the House of Lords.
The Tory defense was brilliantly managed by Francis Atterbury, dean of Carlisle Cathedral and soon to be bishop of Roches
ter. He argued that Sacheverell was entirely loyal to the Protestant succession and an innocent victim of Whig persecution. The Whigs did secure conviction by a narrow margin, but it was followed by a mere slap on the wrist. Sacheverell was suspended from preaching for three years, and the offending sermon was publicly burned.
Sacheverell was widely hailed as a martyr. There were violent riots in his support, and he received a hero’s welcome when he went to Shropshire to take up a new parish. The excitement there was so contagious that the three-year-old Samuel Johnson insisted on mounting his father’s shoulders to see him in Lichfield Cathedral.3
The Whigs had overreached, and Queen Anne decided that it was time for Godolphin to go. He possessed great abilities, but what had kept him at the top was his close relationship with her and the Marlboroughs. And at this point, the Marlboroughs too lost the queen’s trust completely. The duke demanded to be appointed general-in-chief for life, which looked disturbingly like a bid for dictatorship. And the duchess finished things off by claiming that her successor as Queen Anne’s confidante, Abigail Masham, was the queen’s lesbian lover. Infuriated, the queen never spoke to the duchess again.
Godolphin’s dismissal was carried out, as Swift later said, “in a manner not very gracious.”4 Godolphin had a right to be bitter. He had overseen the financing of a great war that established Britain as a world power. He had also managed a union with Scotland that created a genuinely united kingdom. And now the queen wouldn’t even discharge him face-to-face, but sent the chief groom of her stables to tell him to break his white staff of office. As Swift heard the story, “Mr. Smith, Chancellor of the Exchequer, happening to come in a little after [the Queen’s message was delivered], my Lord broke his staff and flung the pieces in the chimney, desiring Mr. Smith to be witness that he had obeyed the Queen’s commands.”5
Just a year previously, in a preface to the final volume of Sir William Temple’s writings, Swift had praised Godolphin for serving as lord treasurer “with such universal applause, so much to the Queen’s honour and his own, and to the advantage of his country.” But times were changing fast. When Swift arrived from his stay in Ireland in September of 1710, he immediately found himself “equally caressed by both parties,” as he told Archbishop King, since he could provide an able pen in this public relations emergency. “I was to visit my Lord Godolphin,” he continued, “who gave me a reception very unexpected, and altogether different from what I ever received from any great man in my life, altogether dry, short, and morose.”6 It is not clear whether Swift knew yet that Godolphin was on the way out.
On the day of this meeting, Swift told Stella, “My Lord Treasurer received me with a great deal of coldness, which has enraged me so, I am almost vowing revenge.”7 The revenge was a clever poem, in a newly adopted style of brisk couplets just right for Swift’s satiric voice. Its odd title was calculated to provoke interest: The Virtues of Sid Hamet the Magician’s Rod. Godolphin’s first name was Sidney, and the name Sid (or Cid) Hamet appears in Don Quixote, one of Swift’s favorite books.
With inventive glee, Swift finds one analogy after another for the lord treasurer’s staff. First it’s Moses’s rod, which turned into a serpent when he put it down. With Sid’s rod it’s just the opposite: the moment he lets go of it, its powers are gone.
Our great magician, Hamet Sid,
Reverses what the prophet did.
His rod was honest English wood
That senseless in a corner stood,
Till metamorphosed by his grasp
It grew an all-devouring asp:
Would hiss, and sting, and roll, and twist,
By the mere virtue of his fist;
But when he laid it down, as quick
Resumed the figure of a stick.8
In rapid succession the staff becomes a witch’s broomstick, a divining rod useful for locating gold, the soporific rod of Hermes with which a passive House of Commons is drugged to sleep, a fishing rod for catching politicians with bribes, a magician’s wand that draws a circle for “mischievous spirits” to congregate in, and a schoolmistress’s rod with which the queen has meted out Godolphin’s punishment. But after the playfulness, the poem turns harsh:
For since old Sid has broken this,
His next will be a rod in piss.9
Swift was playing on the expression “a rod in pickle,” a term for a schoolmaster’s cane, kept ready to administer beatings. Having had his fun with Godolphin, he dismisses him with a coarse sarcasm.
Swift had the poem published—anonymously, as he nearly always did—as a single-page broadsheet, and it was an immediate hit. As usual, he took pleasure in hearing people speculate as to who might have written it. “My lampoon is cried up to the skies, but nobody suspects me for it except Sir Andrew Fountaine; at least they say nothing of it to me.”10 Fountaine knew Swift so well that he could recognize his work.
HARLEY AND THE TORIES
Robert Harley, the former secretary of state, was now making his move. After being dropped from the cabinet in 1708, he had left the Whigs and joined the Tories. That was not really a drastic defection, since party lines were blurred and he was always committed to moderation. When he became chancellor of the exchequer in 1710, he knew that he needed an able writer and that Swift would be perfect for the role. Meanwhile, Swift was ready to change sides too. In 1709, in A Letter concerning the Sacramental Test, he had denounced the Whig policy of toleration for Dissenters. The “test” was the requirement that every officeholder take Communion at least once a year in an Anglican church, and the Whigs tried repeatedly to get it repealed.
Although this Letter was published anonymously, the Whig ministers strongly suspected that Swift had written it. They didn’t forgive. “I have been assured,” he said two years later, “that the suspicion which the supposed author lay under for writing this Letter absolutely ruined him with the late ministry.”11
So it was time to listen to Harley. At the end of September Swift wrote to Stella, “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.” He was being coy because he needed more than hints before he would change sides openly. Soon, however, the courtship was irresistible. The Whig grandee Halifax invited Swift to dine and he declined. Harley invited him and he accepted. “Today I was brought privately to Mr. Harley,” he reported a week later, “who received me with the greatest respect and kindness imaginable.” Four days later, Harley “knew my Christian name very well”—a great mark of familiarity—and when Swift proposed meeting at his public levee “he immediately refused, and said that was not a place for friends to come to.”12
Next, Harley put Swift in touch with his chief colleague: “I dined today, by invitation, with the Secretary of State, Mr. St. John.”13 The youthful, dazzling Henry St. John was more of an ideologue than either Harley or Swift, and far less willing to work constructively with the Whigs. But for a time his partnership with Harley would flourish, and Swift would be deeply involved behind the scenes.
No sooner did Swift agree to come on board than Harley got him the prize he had sought in vain for so long. The queen, Harley reported, had promised to grant the remission of the First Fruits to the Church of Ireland. “I believe never anything was compassed so soon,” Swift told Stella exultantly, “and purely done by my personal credit with Mr. Harley, who is 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.” As for the Whigs, “I have done with them, and they have, I hope, done with this kingdom for our time.” At court in November Swift saw the queen pass by “with all Tories about her—not one Whig.”14
Swift had been told not to announce his First Fruits triumph until it became official, and at this very moment Archbishop King wrote to warn that he might not be the right man to keep up the negotiations, since he was “under the reputation of being a favourite of the late party in power.” But before tha
t discouraging message arrived, the queen’s decision was made public. “A certain pride seizeth me,” Swift told the archbishop, “from very different usage I meet with” in London as contrasted with Ireland, where the bishops refused to give him the least credit for his achievement. To this King replied generously, with an apt classical quotation: “I acknowledge you have not been treated with due regard in Ireland, for which there is a plain reason, praegravat artes infra se positas, etc.” The allusion is to Horace’s Epistle to Augustus Caesar: “A man scorches with his brilliance who outweighs merits lowlier than his own.”15
It might seem that there was no longer any reason for Swift to stay in London, but he told the archbishop that the new administration had something important in mind for him. “I beg to tell your Grace in confidence that the ministry have desired me to continue here some time longer, for certain reasons that I may sometime have the honour to tell you.”16 It had been decided that he should promote Tory policies in a new periodical to be called the Examiner.
THE ODD COUPLE
The new Tory administration was headed by a pair of politicians who were unfortunately different in every way, from temperament to policies. There would be serious tensions between them from the start, and within a few years their partnership would collapse. Swift liked them both, however, and was trusted by both, which encouraged him to imagine that he had more influence than he actually did.