Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

by Leo Damrosch

  It would thus fire at whoever opened the box, no matter which side of it he happened to be on. To Stella, Swift commented, “I wonder how I came to have so much presence of mind, which is usually not my talent; but so it pleased God, and I saved myself and him, for there was a bullet apiece.”12

  The campaign to bring down Marlborough was entrusted to Swift, and he prosecuted it enthusiastically. He detested war, and often described it with revulsion. Stranded in a land of rational horses, Gulliver describes his reaction when his host wonders how human beings, who lack claws and sharp teeth, could ever do each other much harm:

  I could not forbear shaking my head and smiling a little at his ignorance. And being no stranger to the art of war, I gave him a description of cannon, culverins, muskets, carbines, pistols, bullets, powder, swords, bayonets, sieges, retreats, attacks, undermines, countermines, bombardments, sea-fights; ships sunk with a thousand men; twenty thousand killed on each side; dying groans, limbs flying in the air; smoke, noise, confusion, trampling to death under horses’ feet; flight, pursuit, victory; fields strewed with carcasses left for food to dogs and wolves and birds of prey; plundering, stripping, ravishing, burning, and destroying. And to set forth the valour of my own dear countrymen, I assured him that I had seen them blow up a hundred enemies at once in a siege, and as many in a ship, and beheld the dead bodies drop down in pieces from the clouds, to the great diversion of all the spectators.

  John Wesley quoted this passage and commented, “Is it not astonishing, beyond expression, that this is the naked truth?”13

  Marlborough was a military genius, not vulnerable to criticism of his battlefield decisions. “Nobody that I know of,” Swift acknowledged in the Examiner, “did ever dispute the Duke of Marlborough’s courage, conduct, or success.” What Swift did harp on was “the monstrous encroachments of exorbitant avarice and ambition,” reaping personal profit from a war that wouldn’t end. He also emphasized “the ungovernable rage, the haughty pride, and unsatiable covetousness of a certain person.” That was the Duchess of Marlborough.14

  At a time when the average income for a noble family was approximately ₤3,000 a year, the duke had an income of ₤55,000 and his wife another ₤9,000. Historians take seriously Marlborough’s defense that much of his income was intended to pay military costs that were his personal responsibility. Still, an admiring biographer acknowledges that “his thirst for wealth was remarkable even by the standards of the age.”15

  Seizing on Whig claims that the nation hadn’t shown the duke enough gratitude, Swift worked up a comparison of his gains by contrast with what ancient Rome gave victorious generals. The Roman would get a sacrificial bull worth ₤8, an embroidered garment worth ₤50, a laurel crown worth 2 pence, and so on, to a sum total of ₤994. Marlborough got Blenheim Palace, at ₤200,000 by this time and still unfinished, “employments” worth ₤100,000, and other plums in addition to these that added up to ₤540,000. “So that upon the whole,” Swift concluded, “we are not yet quite so bad at worst, as the Romans were at best.”16

  Slyly, Swift added that he knew a highly favored servant who was expected to meet necessary expenses out of an allowance of ₤26, but managed to keep all but ₤4 of it for her own use. Multiplying these figures by a thousand, one gets the actual circumstances of the Duchess of Marlborough: as comptroller of the Privy Purse, she received ₤26,000 a year and held onto ₤22,000. Years later she handsomely acknowledged “the witty comparison that was made between me and the lady’s woman, who out of her mistress’s pin money of ₤26 put twenty-two into her own pocket.” She also said, “I could not help wishing that we had had [Swift’s] assistance in the opposition, for I could easily forgive him all the slaps he has given me and the Duke of Marlborough, and have thanked him heartily, whenever he would please to do good.”17

  On January 1, 1712, the House of Commons received an official report accusing Marlborough of misusing public funds, and the queen dismissed him from all his employments. She also sent the duke a letter so offensive that he flung it in the fire. No doubt he recalled that some months earlier, when Godolphin was commanded to break his white staff of office, he too threw the pieces in the fireplace. A few years later Swift commented with relish, “This Lord, who was beyond comparison the greatest subject [that is, nonruler] in Christendom, found his power, credit, and influence crumble away on a sudden.”18

  Swift took his final shot at Marlborough after the deposed general died in 1722. A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General is chilling in its contempt. It begins with casual chattiness, expressing surprise that the intrepid hero should have died peacefully:

  His Grace! impossible! what, dead!

  Of old age too, and in his bed!

  And could that mighty warrior fall?

  And so inglorious, after all!

  When the Last Trump sounds it will bode ill for Marlborough, and meanwhile all that remains is a bad smell:

  This world he cumbered long enough;

  He burnt his candle to the snuff,

  And that’s the reason, some folks think,

  He left behind so great a stink.

  By the end of this angry poem, Marlborough is dismissed as one of the hollow bubbles that “float upon the tide of state,” and his elevated rank furnishes a contemptuous rhyme:

  Let pride be taught by this rebuke

  How very mean a thing’s a Duke;

  From all his ill-got honours flung,

  Turned to that dirt from whence he sprung.

  The solemn language of the burial service—“Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return”—collapses into the nastiness of dirt.19

  Denigrating Marlborough was only part of the Tory strategy, though an essential part. The chief challenge was to justify the peace they were negotiating, whose anticipated terms were being denounced by the Whigs as a sellout. Behind the backs of Britain’s Dutch and Austrian allies, the ministry secretly negotiated a peace treaty with France that would drop the whole issue of Spain. Matthew Prior, Swift’s poet friend who was also a gifted diplomat, had carried out a covert mission to France, and Britain was about to renege on its commitment to the allies. What the Tories needed, therefore, was to argue that the allies themselves had done plenty of reneging already, while wasting British lives and money in a war that didn’t serve Britain’s interests at all. By implication, they had been so self-serving that they had lost the right to be consulted in negotiating peace.

  For two months in the fall of 1711, Swift labored nonstop at this task. Oxford and Bolingbroke fed him information that wasn’t yet public, reviewed his drafts, and went over everything in minute detail. By mid-November he was thoroughly fed up. “Something is to be published of great moment,” he told Stella, “and three or four great people are to see there are no mistakes in point of fact; and ’tis so troublesome to send it among them and get their corrections that I am weary as a dog.”20 Perhaps what wearied him most was serving as a mouthpiece for other people.

  47. Matthew Prior as a plenipotentiary.

  At the end of November the piece appeared at last, entitled The Conduct of the Allies. Sixty pages long in a modern edition, it made its case with what Trevelyan calls “cold, concentrated force.” The first printing sold out within hours, and within a few days a fourth edition was for sale. The compositors were working around the clock; they had to start from scratch for each new edition, since it was impossibly expensive to keep whole pages of type intact. By the end of January Swift could boast that “eleven thousand of them have been sold, which is a most prodigious run.”21

  Seventy years later Johnson thought that what made The Conduct of the Allies so effective was its details, not its intrinsic interest. “Surely whoever surveys this wonder-working pamphlet with cool perusal will confess that its efficacy was supplied by the passions of its readers; that it operates by the mere weight of facts, with very little assistance from the hand that produced them.” In conversation Johnson was still more dismissive: �
�Swift has told what he had to tell distinctly enough, but that is all. He had to count ten, and he has counted it right.”22 But by Johnson’s time the once-urgent issues had faded, and he was taken in by Swift’s cunning deployment of apparent common sense.

  The Conduct of the Allies was designed not to convert Whigs, but to encourage the rural squires who formed the power base of the Tories. And although Swift’s case was overstated, it was genuine. The war could have ended on advantageous terms two years previously, and the Whigs were insisting that it shouldn’t end even now. “After ten years’ war, with perpetual success,” Swift exclaimed, “to tell us it is yet impossible to have a good peace is very surprising.” So why did the war go on? Speaking for the Tories, Swift claimed it was to pay off“the moneyed men, such as had raised vast sums by trading with stocks and funds, and lending upon great interest and premiums, whose perpetual harvest is war.”23

  It was true that the national debt enriched investors who drew interest from it, but Swift deliberately exaggerated the gulf between peace-loving country gentlemen and warmongering financiers. In reality, many country gentlemen invested in stocks and bonds, and many financiers set up as country gentlemen. The Tory appeal was to a nostalgic picture of a simpler merry England that was allegedly being sold out. To some extent they actually believed in that picture, and were unable to conceive that a national debt could create wealth instead of draining it. Characteristically, Swift relied on homely domestic analogies: “It is obvious in a private fortune that whoever annually runs out, and continues the same expenses, must every year mortgage a greater quantity of land than he did before; and as the debt doubles and trebles upon him, so doth his inability to pay it.”24

  Tendentious or not, The Conduct of the Allies was indeed wonder-working, exploiting the psychological moment. And this Johnson did acknowledge: “The nation was then combustible, and a spark set it on fire.” Swift was never a bureaucrat like Addison, or a diplomat like Prior, but as a political writer he was unrivaled. Trevelyan’s verdict is impressive: “He had done more during three years’ residence in London to settle the immediate fate of parties and nations than did ever any other literary man in the annals of England.”25

  Throughout 1711 the Whig peers steadfastly resisted the campaign for peace, and for a time it looked as if the Tory ministry would fall. But to Swift’s bafflement, Oxford and Bolingbroke were perfectly calm. Their secret was that the queen had decided to break the impasse by creating twelve new members of the House of Lords. A Tory majority was thereby assured, and when Swift got the news he wrote exultantly from a coffeehouse, “I have broke open my letter, and tore it into the bargain, to let you know that we are all safe. . . . We are all extremely happy. Give me joy, sirrahs.” Four of the twelve new peers were “brothers” in the Club.26 The Whigs were furious, but they had to admit that the queen had the right to create as many peers as she wished.

  The negotiations that followed were protracted and bewilderingly complex. One Austrian participant commented that Oxford’s strategy was “to work up policy on two sides, so that he can choose the one which will involve him in least reproach from the nation, and to contrive matters so that he can always throw the blame on someone else.” When the Treaty of Utrecht was finally concluded in 1713, it was actually a series of separate treaties and impenetrably complicated. The Earl of Peterborough said that it was like “the peace of God, beyond human understanding.” Coincidentally, Archbishop King said the same thing.27

  The nation as a whole was overjoyed, and the peace was welcomed, Swift said, “with louder acclamations, and more extraordinary rejoicings of the people, than had ever been remembered on like occasion.”28 The consequences of the Treaty of Utrecht were profound and enduring. The threat of a monstrous Bourbon superstate, joining France with Spain and uniting the overseas colonies of both, had been dispelled. Nor would the Habsburgs of the Holy Roman Empire achieve dominance. Instead a stable balance of power was in place, and would remain even after the British-French wars of midcentury and after. It was Britain, whose own empire would grow rapidly in the coming decades, that could now lay claim to being the leading power on the globe.

  The Treaty of Utrecht did exact a dreadful human price for the future, though most people at the time would not have seen it that way. Until then the exclusive right to export slaves to South America had been held by France. It now went to Britain, and Oxford had a personal stake in securing it, since it would enrich the South Sea Company he had sponsored as a means of paying down the national debt. From now on the slave trade would play a central role in British imperial expansion. Under a treaty known as the Asiento (from asentir, to acquiesce or agree), British slave traders would eventually deliver a million and a half Africans to the Caribbean and American colonies.29

  Swift was among the minority who disapproved of slavery, but most people took it for granted, and Whig spokesmen like Defoe positively celebrated it. Robinson Crusoe is shipwrecked after setting out to collect a cargo of slaves. On his desert island he has a religious conversion, and begins to understand the message God is sending him. The message is not that it was wrong to go and get slaves—it’s that he should have sent someone else to get them.

  CHAPTER 17

  Tory Collapse

  OFFENDING THE QUEEN

  With the Peace of Utrecht concluded, the Tories were riding high, having ended what Bolingbroke called “such a war as I heartily wish our children’s children may never see.”1 But trouble lay ahead. He and Oxford were increasingly at odds, and not just because of personality differences. Oxford, the former Whig, was always seeking compromise, while Bolingbroke wanted to break the Whigs’ power forever.

  Support for Bolingbroke within their own party came from a group called the October Club that sought to punish the Whigs for the war taxation, which had fallen heavily on landowners. Swift described the October Club to Stella as “a set of above a hundred Parliament men of the country, who drink October beer at home, and meet every evening at a tavern near the Parliament to consult affairs, and drive things on to extremes against the Whigs, to call the old ministry to account, and get off five or six heads.” Bolingbroke wanted to use the club as leverage against Oxford, and they adopted a motto that alluded to Oxford’s family name, Harley—“We will not be harled.”2 Harl looks like a made-up word, but according to the OED it was in frequent use in the north of England and in Scotland. Either of its two meanings would apply very aptly to Harley: “To drag, usually with the notion of friction or scraping the ground,” and “to entangle, twist, or knot together; to ravel or confuse.”

  “The ministry is upon a very narrow bottom,” Swift said anxiously, “and stands like an isthmus between the Whigs on the one side and violent Tories on the other. They are able seamen, but the tempest is too great, the ship too rotten, and the crew all against them.”3 For Swift personally, time was running short. He had always refused to be paid for his work, but it was understood that he would get an English bishopric in due course. That would bring not only prestige and income, but also a seat in the House of Lords, making him a political insider and not just a government spokesman.

  But the queen’s health was failing, and the elector of Hanover was bound to come to the throne before long. Since the future George I was sympathetic to the Whigs, Swift’s hopes would then be at an end. It was now or never. He was close to Oxford, who saw the queen regularly, and to Abigail Masham, who spent most of every day with her. Surely they could get the thing done?

  Although it was difficult for an Irishman to become a bishop in England, it was not impossible; two of Swift’s Trinity classmates did. But the queen was determined not to make Swift a bishop in England—or in Ireland either. She was genuinely pious, and had never forgiven him for the Tale of a Tub. Swift probably had her hostility in mind, years later, when Gulliver quick-wittedly saves the Lilliputian palace from burning down, but outrages the tiny monarch because he does so by pissing on it. Unfortunately, a Lilliputian law forbids urina
ting within the royal precincts. Even though her palace has been saved, the empress is furious, “and in the presence of her chief confidants could not forbear vowing revenge.”4 The analogy is not altogether positive, of course. Urine is still urine.

  Reluctantly, Swift began to grasp just how low an opinion the queen had of him. Oxford and Bolingbroke “thought to mortify me,” he reported to Stella, “for they told me they had been talking a great deal of me today to the Queen, and she said she had never heard of me. I told them that was their fault and not hers, etc., and so we all laughed.” It must have been hollow laughter—the whole point was that she knew very well who Swift was and detested him. A couple of days later he did finally get into Her Majesty’s presence, joining twenty other people in her chamber, but it was an anticlimax. “She looked at us round with her fan in her mouth, and once a minute said about three words to some that were nearest her, and then she was told dinner was ready, and went out.”5

  Swift even turned down a chance to preach before the queen, which might have been a way to make a positive impression. “If it should happen,” he explained unconvincingly, “all the puppies hereabouts will throng to hear me, and expect something wonderful, and be plaguily balked; for I shall preach plain honest stuff.”6 Perhaps he thought that plain honest stuff would offend Her Majesty, and felt unwilling or unable to fake the kind of emotional piety she liked.

  As if the Tale of a Tub wasn’t damaging enough, Swift chose this moment to self-destruct. When the scheme of creating new peers was still secret and the ministry seemed certain to be thrown out, he produced a staggeringly abusive satire aimed at a particular favorite of the queen. Called The Windsor Prophecy and full of quaint black-letter Gothic type, this short poem purported to be a medieval prediction of future disasters. It was packed with allusions to contemporary people and events, and any reader would have gotten the point.