by Leo Damrosch
But now he’s grown a King, God wot,
I fear I soon shall be forgot.11
To Henrietta, Swift was more blunt. Shortly before leaving Twickenham, he sent her a trenchant Character of Mrs. Howard. Pope commented, with something like awe, “You have a desperate hand at dashing out a character by great strokes, and at the same time a delicate one at fine touches.” According to Swift, Mrs. Howard was exceptionally gifted at interpreting motives, and so subtle that “she can gather early intelligence without asking it, and often when even those from whom she hath it are not sensible that they are giving it to her.” She knew how to make people believe that “all present proceedings” were exactly as they should be, “and the danger is that she may come in time to believe herself.”12
Bitterly, Swift describes an otherwise worthy person who has sold out, in hopes of gaining power in the new court. “In all offices of life except those of a courtier she acts with justice, generosity, and truth. She is ready to do good as a private person, and I would almost think in charity that she will not do harm as a courtier, unless to please those in chief power. . . . If she had never seen a court, it is not impossible that she might have been a friend.” With withering irony, Swift foretells what will happen to her good qualities now: “Her private virtues, for want of room and time to operate, will be laid up clean (like clothes in a chest) to be used and put on whenever satiety, or some reverse of fortune, or increase of ill health (to which last she is subject) shall dispose her to retire. In the meantime it will be her wisdom to take care that they may not be tarnished or moth-eaten, for want of airing and turning at least once a year.”13
When this piece found its way into print after Swift’s death, Mrs. Howard had become the Countess of Suffolk, her estranged husband having succeeded to the title. She protested to a friend, “It is very different from that which he sent me himself, and which I have in his own handwriting.” No doubt she wanted to believe that, but the original letter has survived, and in fact the changes were trivial. As for Pope, he was more charitable than Swift, and was convinced that she simply didn’t have much influence. “But after all, that lady means to do good, and does no harm, which is a vast deal for a courtier.”14
Meanwhile, John Gay, who like Swift had been encouraged to have great expectations, was fobbed off with an appointment as gentleman usher to a two-year-old princess. Walpole regarded it as a huge joke, and Gay indignantly declined. From then on Swift complained to friends that Lady Suffolk had betrayed their trust, although Lady Betty Germaine told him repeatedly to stop imagining that she ever had that much power. Indeed, Caroline was now making a point of humiliating her rival. Lady Suffolk’s biographer believes that this was the reason Gay was offered such an insulting position, and notes also that although Swift never forgave Henrietta for not getting him a position, Gay soon did, and remained on cordial terms with her. As for the downfall of the Whigs, that never happened. Walpole had shrewdly cultivated Caroline but not Henrietta all along, and he now boasted that he had the right sow by the ear.15
Lady Suffolk herself sent Swift a challenging rebuke. “You seem to think that you have a natural right to abuse me because I am a woman, and a courtier. I have taken it as a woman and as a courtier ought: with great resentment, and a determined resolution of revenge.” She was speaking ironically: far from exacting revenge, she loyally defended Swift when he was falsely accused of writing a forged letter that offended the queen. Lady Suffolk ended her letter with one more attempt at reconciliation: “Am I to send back the crown and plaid, well packed up in my own Character? Or am I to follow my own inclination, and continue very truly and very much your humble servant?” Swift sent back a stiff reply, affirming that he knew she had good qualities, but that he could never again regard her as a friend. “If you are weary of your Character,” he added, “it must lie upon my hands [that is, there was no one else to send it to], for I know no other whom it will fit.”16
A couple of years later Swift got in a fresh dig at the queen in Directions for a Birthday Song, alluding to the odes that the poet laureate was expected to produce for royal birthdays. Unlike his father, George II could speak English when he came to throne, but Swift enjoyed sneering at German names, while urging poets to make the most of the mellifluous “Caroline.”
A skilful critic justly blames
Hard, tough, cramp, guttural, harsh, stiff names. . . .
In vain are all attempts from Germany
To find out proper words for harmony;
And yet I must except the Rhine,
Because it clinks to Caroline. . . .
Three syllables did never meet
So soft, so sliding, and so sweet.
Nine other tuneful words like that
Would prove ev’n Homer’s numbers flat.
Behold three beauteous vowels stand
With bridegroom liquids hand in hand,
In concord here forever fixed,
No jarring consonant betwixt.17
Swift’s final salvo against Henrietta and Caroline was written in 1731 but not published until 1739. In Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, he imagines what people will say about him when he’s gone.
Kind Lady Suffolk, in the spleen,
Runs laughing up to tell the Queen.
The Queen, so gracious, mild, and good,
Cries “Is he gone? ’Tis time he should.
He’s dead, you say? why let him rot;
I’m glad the medals were forgot.
I promised them, I own, but when?
I only was the Princess then;
But now, as consort of the King,
You know ’tis quite a different thing.”18
An English friend named William King (coincidentally, the same name as the archbishop of Dublin), to whom Swift had entrusted the manuscript, wrote to say that he deleted these lines before publication “because I durst not insert them, I mean the story of the medals. However, that incident is pretty well known, and care has been taken that almost every reader may be able to supply the blanks.”19 Swift was indignant, and got George Faulkner to publish a corrected version in Dublin. Even then, however, it had to be riddled with blank spaces.
In the copy of the poem shown here, the gaps were filled in by someone who was clearly familiar with Swift’s manuscript, which he was accustomed to show to his friends (figure 82). The long footnote was by Swift himself: “The medals were to be sent to the dean in four months, but she forgot them, or thought them too dear. The dean, being in Ireland, sent Mrs. Howard a piece of Indian plaid made in that kingdom; which the queen seeing, took from her, and wore it herself, and sent to the dean for as much as would clothe herself and children, desiring he would send the charge of it. He did the former. It cost thirty-five pounds, but he said he would have nothing except the medals. He was the summer following in England, was treated as usual, and she being then queen, the dean was promised a settlement in England, but returned as he went; and instead of favour or medals, hath been ever since under Her Majesty’s displeasure.”20
82. A page from Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift.
THE GATHERING GLOOM
Beyond professional and political disappointment, Swift dreaded a terrible personal loss. Each of his two visits to England was cut short by messages from Sheridan warning that Stella seemed to be close to death. However, the thought of actually being with her when she expired was more than Swift could bear. “I would not for the universe be present at such a trial of seeing her depart. She will be among friends that upon her own account and great worth will tend her with all possible care, where I should be a trouble to her and the greatest torment to myself.”21
Toward the end of 1726 Stella seemed on the mend, and Swift was able to report, “Mrs. Johnson is much recovered since I saw her first, but still very lean and low.” The respite was temporary. In 1727, back in England, he wrote to Sheridan that he feared “the most fatal news that can ever come to me, unless I should be put to death for some ignominio
us crime.”22
Four days later Swift wrote again to Sheridan to say that he had kept his latest letter (now lost) unopened for an hour, “with all the suspense of a man who expected to hear the worst news that Fortune could give him.” With her usual callousness, Fortune was allowing the trivial Rebecca Dingley to live on. “I brought both those friends over [to Ireland] so that we might be happy together as long as God should please. The knot is broken, and the remaining person, you know, has ill answered the end, and the other who is now to be lost was all that is valuable.”23
Swift was incapacitated just then by an onslaught of vertigo, which may well have been exacerbated by stress, but as soon as he was well enough to travel he set out for Chester. No ship there was ready to sail, so he pressed on and reached Holyhead three days later after an exhausting journey, up at four every morning and on horseback until nightfall. When he and his new servant, Watt, got close to Holyhead, both of their horses lost shoes and they had to proceed on foot with the horses limping along. As a result, they arrived just too late to catch a ship for Dublin.
The next day the wind had shifted and no ships could sail. The only option was to hang around waiting. To pass the time Swift began keeping a grumpy record now known as the Holyhead Journal, mentioning that when they arrived, “I walked on the rocks in the evening, and then went to bed, and dreamt I had got 20 falls from my horse.”24
It was impossible to have laundry done, lest it be left behind in the hurry, which meant that “I am in danger of being lousy, which is a ticklish point.” The inn had no wine, since a previous party had drunk it all. Worst of all, Swift was obliged to exchange grudging civilities with strangers, something he always hated. “In short, I come from being used like an emperor [that is, at court], to be used worse than a dog at Holyhead.” Yet in a strange way this tiresome place was a refuge from the frustrations at home. “Here I could live with two or three friends in a warm house, and good wine—much better than being a slave in Ireland.”25
83. The road to Holyhead. In those days what travelers needed was reliable route maps to specific destinations. This one, published during Swift’s time at Moor Park, shows the final thirty-six miles of the route from London to Holyhead; the full sequence fills twenty-two of these strips.
Not knowing whether Stella was alive or dead, Swift vented his feelings in pungent verse:
Lo here I sit at Holy Head
With muddy ale and mouldy bread;
All Christian vittles stink of fish,
I’m where my enemies would wish. . . .
But now, the danger of a friend
On whom my fears and hopes depend,
Absent from whom all climes are cursed,
With whom I’m happy in the worst,
With rage impatient makes me wait
A passage to the land I hate.26
Swift recorded a memorable dream in the Holyhead Journal, one that was deeply suggestive, although he always denied that dreams have any meaning—“all are mere productions of the brain, / And fools consult interpreters in vain.”
Last night I dreamt that Lord Bolingbroke and Mr. Pope were at my Cathedral in the gallery, and that my Lord was to preach. I could not find my surplice, the church servants were all out of the way; the doors were shut. I sent to my Lord to come into my stall for more conveniency to get into the pulpit. The stall was all broken; they said the collegians had done it. I squeezed among the rabble, saw my Lord in the pulpit. I thought his prayer was good, but I forget it. In his sermon, I did not like his quoting Mr. Wycherley by name, and his plays. This is all, and so I waked.27
As Michael DePorte says, this is “a nightmare of impropriety, violation, and loss.” The irreligious Bolingbroke has commandeered Swift’s pulpit, and after somehow managing a suitable prayer, starts quoting from racy Restoration comedies instead of the Bible. Meanwhile Swift can’t locate his clerical vestments or his church attendants, and he squeezes in among the “rabble” down below, noticing meanwhile that rowdy Trinity College undergraduates have been up to their usual tricks. In his own days at Trinity he was disciplined for causing “tumults” and insulting the authorities. Perhaps this dream is a message from Swift’s anarchic hidden self, defying the proprieties he normally had to preach and observe. Bolingbroke, the unbeliever, impersonates Swift like an alter ego expressing his repressed thoughts, while Swift himself is displaced and merges into the crowd.28
Swift’s concern for propriety is startlingly evident in a letter to John Worrall, his trusted subordinate at the cathedral. “By Dr. Sheridan’s frequent letters I am every post expecting the death of a friend with whose loss I shall have very little regard for the few years that Nature may leave me. I desire to know where my two friends lodge.” In other words, are Stella and Dingley still in the deanery, where they were accustomed to stay when he was away, or somewhere else? If it’s the former—and then Swift switches to Latin for discretion: “I gave a caution to Mrs. Brent that it might not be in domo decanus, quoniam hoc minime decet, uti manifestum est, habeo enim malignos, qui sinistrè hoc interpretabuntur, si eveniet (quod Deus avertat) ut illic moriatur.” What he warned his housekeeper was that Stella’s death “might not be in the deanery, since that would be most improper, as is evident, for I have enemies who will give it an evil meaning if it happens (which God forbid) that she should die there.”29 It’s unlikely that Mrs. Brent understood Latin, but Sheridan or Lyon would translate it for her. Swift was making sure that prying eyes wouldn’t grasp his meaning.
Since Stella regularly stayed in the deanery when Swift was known to be away, it is far from clear why it would be scandalous for her to die there. As Sybil Le Brocquy says, “It is obviously impossible to reconcile the man, who so genuinely loved and valued a woman over many years, with the dean, whose chief concern was lest her death cause him embarrassment by taking place in his deanery.”30 If propriety was involved, perhaps it was Stella’s reputation rather than his own that concerned Swift. And there may have been emotional anguish as well. If Stella should die in the deanery, he would have to live ever after in a house haunted by her ghost.
STELLA DIES
In 1721 Stella had written a poem for Swift’s fifty-fourth birthday that ended,
Long be the day that gave you birth
Sacred to friendship, wit, and mirth;
Late dying may you cast a shred
Of your rich mantle o’er my head,
To bear with dignity my sorrow,
One day alone, then die tomorrow.31
Since she was fourteen years younger than Swift, Stella could imagine that she would outlive him. But it was not to be.
By 1725, Stella was wasting away, possibly from tuberculosis. No more jokes about fatness now, as a poem called A Receipt to Restore Stella’s Youth acknowledges:
Meager and lank with fasting grown,
And nothing left but skin and bone.32
No annual birthday poem has survived for 1726, and 1727 saw the last, more somber than any before:
This day, whate’er the fates decree,
Shall still be kept with joy by me;
This day, then, let us not be told
That you are sick, and I grown old. . . .
From not the gravest of divines
Accept for once some serious lines.
The divine doesn’t suggest that the prospect of eternal bliss will help Stella to face death. Instead, he encourages her to remember the past. She can have no regrets, at least, about how she has conducted her life.
Say, Stella, feel you no content,
Reflecting on a life well spent?
In the end the poem turns to Swift himself:
Me, surely me, you ought to spare,
Who gladly would your suffering share,
Or give my scrap of life to you
And think it far beneath your due;
You, to whose care so oft I owe
That I’m alive to tell you so.33
In October, Swift composed a prayer:
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Restore her to us, O Lord, if it be thy gracious will, or inspire us with constancy and resignation to support ourselves under so heavy an affliction. Restore her, O Lord, for the sake of those poor, who by losing her will be desolate, and those sick, who will not only want [that is, lack] her bounty, but her care and tending; or else, in thy mercy, raise up some other in her place with equal disposition, and better abilities. Lessen, O Lord, we beseech thee, her bodily pains, or give her a double strength of mind to support them. And if thou wilt soon take her to thyself, turn our thoughts rather upon that felicity which we hope she shall enjoy, than upon that unspeakable loss we shall endure.
“Better abilities” must imply someone with as good a heart as Stella, but more money with which to do good. Ehrenpreis observes that he probably read this prayer in Stella’s presence.34
By December it was obvious that the end was near. Writing to a Dublin clergyman’s wife who had recently lost a child, Swift said bleakly, “Life is a tragedy, wherein we sit as spectators awhile, and then act our own part in it. . . . I fear my present ill disposition, both of health and mind, has made me but a sorry comforter.”35
Stella died in her own lodgings, probably with Sheridan at her side, six weeks short of her fortieth birthday. The news was brought to Swift as he was entertaining friends in the deanery. Apparently he permitted them to stay on until the usual time, and then sat down to begin the memoir entitled On the Death of Mrs. Johnson: “This day, being Sunday, January 28th, 1728, about eight o’clock at night, a servant brought me a note with an account of the death of the truest, most virtuous and valuable friend that I, or perhaps any other person, ever was blessed with. She expired about six in the evening of this day, and as soon as I am left alone, which is about eleven at night, I resolve for my own satisfaction to say something of her life and character.”36
The tone of this memoir is tender and generous, and it gives no hint of an extraordinary exchange that may have occurred shortly before Stella died. There are two versions of the story, both derived at secondhand from Dr. Sheridan. His son’s version is the more sensational: