by Leo Damrosch
There the controversy died. The ministry cleverly pretended to share in the Whigs’ indignation, and stole the initiative by prosecuting Barber themselves. Not surprisingly, no informant appeared to make conviction possible, and that was the end of it.
Meanwhile, things were falling apart. Swift wrote to the Earl of Peterborough, who was abroad, “My head turns round, and after every conversation I come away just one degree worse informed than I went.” He had believed he was a privileged insider, but he now admitted bafflement. “I thought myself twenty times in the right, by drawing conclusions very regularly from premises which have proved wholly wrong. I think this, however, to be a plain proof that we act altogether by chance; and that the game, such as it is, plays itself.”31
The game wasn’t playing itself, but Oxford and Bolingbroke had been poor teammates for a long time, and now they had lost control altogether. If compromise had ever been possible, it wasn’t now. A couple of months previously Peterborough invoked a pithy proverb: “Betwixt two stools the arse goeth to the ground.”32
Long afterward Swift recalled his hopelessness at this point, and his decision to get away before the crackup.
He labored many a fruitless hour
To reconcile his friends in power;
Saw mischief by a faction brewing
While they pursued each other’s ruin.
But finding vain was all his care,
He left the court in mere despair.33
On the last day of May, Swift left London for the village of Letcombe Bassett in Berkshire, not far from Oxford. His host there was the Reverend John Geree, his friend from Moor Park days.
It was a relief to escape the political whirlpool, but Swift’s claim to love rural obscurity rang hollow. Bolingbroke told him so. “I never laughed, my dear Dean, at your leaving the town. On the contrary, I thought the resolution of doing so, at the time when you took it, a very wise one. But I confess I laughed, and very heartily too, when I heard that you affected to find within the village of Letcombe all your heart desired.”34
Swift had sent ahead a case of French wine that Bolingbroke had given him, which Geree called a “noble present,” but he served it only sparingly, and life in the Letcombe rectory was a dismal contrast to London. After a week Swift wrote to Vanessa, “I am at a clergyman’s house, an old friend and acquaintance whom I love very well, but he is such a melancholy thoughtful man, partly from nature and partly by a solitary life, that I shall soon catch the spleen from him. . . . We dine exactly between twelve and one, at eight we have some bread and butter and a glass of ale, and at ten he goes to bed. Wine is a stranger, except a little I sent him, of which one evening in two we have a pint between us. . . . I read all day, or walk, and do not speak as many words as I have now writ in three days.”35
To cheer Swift up, Pope and Parnell came over for a visit, after which Pope reported to Arbuthnot that Swift “talked of politics over coffee with the air and style of an old statesman who had known something formerly, but was shamefully ignorant of the last three weeks.” Pope added that Swift kept a magnifying glass by the window and amused himself by burning holes in paper with it. “We chanced to find some experiments of this nature upon the votes of the House of Commons. The name of Thomas Hanmer, Speaker, was much singed, and that of John Barber entirely burned out. There was a large gap at the edge of the Bill of Schism, and several specks upon the proclamation for the Pretender.”36
These attentions by Swift do not suggest ignorance of affairs. An enormous reward of £5,000 had been proclaimed for anyone apprehending the Pretender in his expected invasion; Bolingbroke was about to force passage of a Bill of Schism making it illegal for Dissenters to be teachers (part of his effort to embarrass Oxford, who was relatively tolerant of Dissent). Why Swift deleted the name of his friend and printer Barber isn’t clear—presumably to express resentment at the way Barber had been treated.
Meanwhile the queen dismissed Oxford at last. She had good reason. His right-hand man Lewis glumly told Swift that “he neglected all business; that he was seldom to be understood; that when he did explain himself she could not depend upon the truth of what he said; that he never came to her at the time she appointed; that he often came drunk; that lastly, to crown all, he behaved himself towards her with ill manner, indecency, and disrespect.”37 By now Oxford was a confirmed alcoholic, barely able to carry out his responsibilities.
Bolingbroke, of course, thought his lucky day had arrived when his rival fell, but his hopes were quickly dashed. Just four days after she discharged Oxford, Queen Anne departed this life at the age of forty-nine, probably from complications of gout. At the end she endured violent convulsions, and Dr. Arbuthnot, who was in attendance, told Swift, “I believe sleep was never more welcome to a weary traveler than death was to her.” Psalms of rejoicing were sung in Dissenting chapels, and the Whig head of St. John’s College, Oxford, ordered grateful prayers for King George. When he was told that the queen might not really be dead yet, he replied, “Dead! She’s as dead as Julius Caesar.”38
Bolingbroke wrote to Swift, “The Earl of Oxford was removed on Tuesday; the Queen died on Sunday. What a world is this, and how does Fortune banter us!” Swift himself said that her death left “all our schemes broke to shatters.” For all his shrewdness and suspicion of motives, he was at bottom an idealist, and this catastrophe broke his heart. “His ideal order was the Roman Senate,” a character in one of Yeats’s plays says of Swift, “his ideal men Brutus and Cato. Such an order and such men had seemed possible once more, but the moment passed and he foresaw the ruin to come.”39
While he was waiting for the end at Letcombe, Swift wrote (but didn’t publish) a piece called Some Free Thoughts upon the Present State of Affairs, in which he lamented the ruin his friends were bringing down on themselves. Their disagreements, he said, “have been, for some time past, the public entertainment of every coffee house,” and he compared their conduct to “a ship’s crew quarreling in a storm, or while their enemies are within gunshot.”40
Also at Letcombe, Swift composed an apologia called The Author upon Himself, which alternates between wry realism and furious resentment. The realism comes in acknowledging that he was never the sort of clergyman who gets promoted:
Swift had the sin of wit, no venial crime:
Nay, ’twas affirmed he sometimes dealt in rhyme;
Humour and mirth had place in all he writ;
He reconciled divinity and wit.
He moved and bowed and talked with too much grace;
Nor showed the parson in his gait or face.
That is genial enough, but the anger is just below the surface:
By an old red-pate, murdering hag pursued,
A crazy prelate, and a royal prude. . . .
Now Madam Konigsmark her vengeance vows
On Swift’s reproaches for her murdered spouse;
From her red locks her mouth with venom fills,
And thence into the royal ear distills.41
Swift always personalized his troubles, and this was one more kick at Archbishop Sharp and the Duchess of Somerset. He blandly ignored the fact that A Windsor Prophecy was outrageously libelous, since there was never any evidence that the duchess had conspired to murder her second husband. And she was never Madam Königsmark, either. Königsmark was the rejected suitor who organized the murder.
It was time to leave for Ireland. Swift had thirty-one years still to live, and during all that time he would be in England only twice, for six months each time. Long afterward he told Bolingbroke, “I was 47 years old when I began to think of death, and the reflections upon it now begin when I wake in the morning, and end when I am going to sleep.” At another time he told Pope, “As to mortality, it hath never been out my head eighteen minutes these eighteen years.” Both references are to 1714. Giving up England was a kind of death.42
Preparing to depart, Swift sent sad farewells, and Arbuthnot returned a moving reply. “Dear friend, the last sentence of
your letter quite kills me. Never repeat that melancholy tender word, that you will endeavour to forget me. I am sure I never can forget you, till I meet with (what is impossible) another whose conversation I can delight so much in as Dr. Swift’s; and yet that is the smallest thing I ought to value you for. That hearty sincere friendship, that plain and open ingenuity [that is, ingenuousness], in all your commerce, is what I am sure I never can find in another, alas. I shall want often a faithful monitor, one that would vindicate me behind my back and tell me my faults to my face. God knows I write this with tears in my eyes.”43
CHAPTER 18
Reluctant Dubliner
THE DEAN
For the first thirty years of his life Swift had been an outlier. He never felt at home among the Swifts in Dublin, and at Moor Park he was treated as a mere employee. Then came the intoxicating years in London, with Laracor nothing more than a pleasant retreat whenever he was in Ireland. Still, the Church of Ireland was Swift’s institutional home, and it was in that context that he saw himself as an Irishman at all. His long campaign to secure the First Fruits, as Trevelyan perceptively observes, was “a small act of justice to the island he hated and the Church he loved.” The initial period as dean, in 1713, had been too brief to amount to anything, but now he buckled down to the job. He clearly liked the title, for in his poems he refers to himself as “the Dean” over 170 times.1
The two Dublin cathedrals, Christ’s Church and St. Patrick’s, looked much as they do today. Relics of medieval Catholicism, they were reminders of an ecclesiastical empire that now lay mostly in ruins, with roofless abbeys all over the country. St. Patrick’s was located on marshy ground between two branches of the river Poddle, a site called by a later dean “extraordinarily unsuitable for a great building.” It was apparently chosen because a well, known as St. Patrick’s Well, was there and believed to have miraculous curative powers. The Poddle itself, which flows beneath the streets today, is variously described by historians as “an unfortunate little river” and “a miserable trickle.”2
48. St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The cathedral as Swift knew it, except that the pointed spire was added after his time.
Some brilliant clergymen in those days became famous preachers or theologians. Swift’s interests and talents didn’t run that way. His gift was as an administrator: running a big establishment efficiently, expanding its influence in the city and nation, and helping the needy poor who inhabited the immediate neighborhood. By his own estimate he had to manage a budget of ₤10,000 a year. It has been said of Samuel Pepys, the civil servant who played a major role in shaping the Royal Navy, “He had the mental powers, the physical vitality, and the love of order which go to the making of a great administrator.” Exactly the same is true of Swift.3
Swift took his responsibilities very seriously. He attended services three times every Sunday, his own in the morning and evening, plus an afternoon service with a congregation of French Huguenot refugees. Holy Communion was celebrated every Sunday, as happened at no other church in Dublin. That was a sign of High Church allegiance; the usual frequency was once a month in city parishes, and less often than that in the country.4
Swift made sure that the cathedral choir was first rate. When the wife of a lord lieutenant recommended a singer, he replied that only the best could be considered. According to Dr. Delany, he told the lady, “I know nothing of music, madam; I would not give a farthing for all the music in the universe. For my own part, I would rather say my prayers without it. But as long as it is thought by the skilful to contribute to the dignity of the public worship, by the blessing of God it shall never be disgraced by me, nor, I hope, by any of my successors.”5
It was well known that Swift would be in the pulpit every fifth Sunday, and according to Dr. Lyon, a large audience would show up. In an often-quoted comment, Ehrenpreis says that Swift’s “entire career can be described as the partnership of a clown and a preacher.”6 But both terms are reductive. Although his writings usually have a message, they are never didactic and preachy. And as for his wit, so varied and brilliant, to call it clowning suggests a determination to amuse that is very far from his style.
49. St. Patrick’s choir stalls and altar.
50. Swift’s movable pulpit. Swift preferred this pulpit to the remote and massive one at the east end of the cathedral, no doubt because it brought him closer to his listeners.
Unfortunately, Swift’s delivery left something to be desired. Dr. Delany said that his voice was “sharp and high-toned rather than harmonious,” and that he had an ear for rhythms of language “but not for harmony of sounds.” But if his manner was a bit grating, he made sure that the language was easy to understand. “A divine hath nothing to say to the wisest congregation of any parish in this kingdom,” he advised young clergymen, “which he may not express in a manner to be understood by the meanest among them.”7
Visiting preachers at the cathedral found Swift intimidating, since he monitored their performance closely. “As soon as anyone got up into the pulpit,” Delany recalled, “he pulled out his pencil and a piece of paper, and carefully noted every wrong pronunciation or expression that fell from him. Whether too hard, or scholastic (and, of consequence, not sufficiently intelligible to a vulgar hearer), or such as he deemed in any degree improper, indecent, slovenly, or mean; those he never failed to admonish the preacher of, as soon as he came into the chapter house.”8
There was a large audience for published sermons, and some preachers made a lot of money from them. Swift not only didn’t publish his sermons, he burned most of them, dismissing them as “rubbish.”9 The few that survived were rescued by Dr. Sheridan, who said he wanted to save labor by preaching them himself.
When Swift became dean, he inherited a large and fractious body of clergy who were attached to the cathedral in various ways. Many were prebendaries, as he himself had been at Laracor, with no real duties but a right to vote on cathedral business. It took Swift several years to force them all into line, but he did it. By 1721 he could say with satisfaction, “It is an infallible maxim that not one thing here is done without the Dean’s consent.”10
There were also two very able subordinates, who became close friends as well as colleagues. One was Archdeacon Thomas Walls, master of the cathedral school, and the other was John Worrall, director of music and a gifted financial manager as well. Whenever Swift was away from Dublin, he relied on the two of them to manage affairs in his stead.
Swift not only presided over the cathedral, he effectively ruled the surrounding neighborhood, known as the liberties. The term denoted a section of the city that had originally been exempted from municipal government and was subject only to the king. The Liberty of St. Patrick’s occupied nine acres around the cathedral and was a haven in which debtors were safe from arrest.11
THE DEAN AT HOME
Swift’s deanery (he spelled it “deanry”) was close to the cathedral and adjacent to the grand archbishop’s palace. He never cared for it much, and liked to describe himself as an exile in his own domain, “sitting like a toad in a corner of his great house.” Shortly after settling in he told Pope, “I live in the corner of a vast unfurnished house,” with a “family” (the term included everyone living there) of “a steward, a groom, a helper in the stable, a footman, and an old maid, who are all at board-wages.” At about the same time Swift wrote gloomily in verse:
On rainy days alone I dine
Upon a chick and pint of wine.
On rainy days I dine alone
And pick my chicken to the bone.
51. The Cathedral precincts. The deanery, shaped like an inverted “L,” lies just below the center of the open space labeled “St. Sepulchres.” That was the name of the huge archbishop’s palace to the right. Swift said, “He lives within 20 yards of me, our gardens join.”
It rains a lot in Ireland. An English visitor in 1728 commented that “the French have named it le pot de chamber du Diable, i.e. the Devil’s piss pot, seldom dry, but o
ften running over, the rains falling down so frequently as if the heavens were a wounded eye perpetually weeping over it, or the clouds dropping sponges.”12
The deanery as Swift knew it no longer exists, having burned down in 1781, leaving only the stone-vaulted kitchen in the cellar.13 It is remarkable how much of his world has vanished. One can still visit Samuel Johnson’s birthplace in Lichfield, and the house in London where he worked on his Dictionary. In Dublin only the cathedral remains from Swift’s many years there. His deanery is gone, and so are his house and church in Laracor.
Stella and Rebecca must have visited the deanery often, and according to their friends, whenever Swift was away they would move in and live there. They had various different Dublin addresses over the years; at this time they lodged with their good friends Archdeacon Walls and his wife in Queen Street, just beyond the Liffey.
Swift believed that wine helped to relieve his vertigo, and although he drank it in moderation, it added up to a considerable expense. He ordered six hogsheads a year from France, each containing sixty-three gallons, and got a signed contract each time guaranteeing replacement if the wine should turn out sour.14 It was decanted as needed into bottles, and of course often shared with friends.
When a bemused Houyhnhnm asks Gulliver why the British import expensive wine when they could drink water instead, he explains that “it was a sort of liquid which made us merry, by putting us out of our senses; diverted all melancholy thoughts, begat wild extravagant imaginations in the brain, raised our hopes, and banished our fears; suspended every office of reason for a time, and deprived us of the use of our limbs, until we fell into a profound sleep; although it must be confessed that we always awaked sick and dispirited, and that the use of this liquor filled us with diseases which made our lives uncomfortable and short.” Swift had no desire to experience extravagant imaginations, impaired motor skills, and painful hangovers. But he very much desired to banish melancholy thoughts and fears. He drank, he said, “to encourage cheerfulness,” and he would have appreciated Oscar Wilde’s remark that he drank to keep body and soul apart.15