by Leo Damrosch
8. Holyhead in 1742. At anchor below the church are two of the packet boats that plied between Wales and Ireland, with a third setting out to sea.
Swift liked Leicester, and in later years he kept a map of it in his bedroom.4 It was a market town of modest size on the river Soar, nothing like the manufacturing center it would become after the Industrial Revolution, and its history went back to Roman times. The legendary King Lear was supposedly buried by the river, and Richard III’s remains were flung into it after his defeat nearby at the battle of Bosworth Field.
When Abigail was growing up, Leicester had been rather backward, overshadowed by Nottingham twenty miles away. A visitor in the 1670s called it “an old stinking town situated upon a dull river,” and a historian says that even in the eighteenth century “our main impression of the streets of the town would probably have been smell and dirt.” That would have been true almost anywhere, though, and a 1741 map of Leicester shows spacious gardens all through the town and open countryside close by. By the time Swift arrived it had a thriving industry of knitted wool stockings, and was relatively prosperous.5
For the first time we hear of romance, or flirtation at least. As Swift recalled forty years later, he got so interested in a clergyman’s daughter, Betty Jones, that “my prudent mother was afraid I should be in love with her.” What prompted that memory was a letter from a young woman who turned up in Dublin in 1729 when he was out of town, claiming to be Betty’s daughter and asking for a loan. He thought her story sounded dubious, but he asked his vicar to interview her, and if she seemed honest to give her £5 “on account of her mother and grandmother, whom my mother used to call cousin.”6
9. Leicester in 1741. There were about seven thousand inhabitants. Leicester still has the street pattern shown here, but almost none of the buildings from Abigail’s time.
A trace of this amour, if that’s what it was, may survive in a letter Swift wrote in 1699 to a friend who was packing up some papers for him: “I remember those letters to Elisa; they were writ in my youth. You might have sealed them up, and nobody of my friends would have opened them. Pray burn them.”7 If Swift gave Elizabeth Jones the poetical name Elisa, as he gave names to other women later, this could be the same person.
One other letter—the first by Swift that we have—may refer to this Betty, or else to another Leicester acquaintance. A clergyman who had married a cousin of his wrote to inquire what his intentions were toward an unnamed young woman. Swift replied that he had no thought of getting married until he was better established in the world, and that anyway the relationship with what he called “the woman in hand” wasn’t serious. “I could remember twenty women in my life,” he said, “to whom I have behaved myself just the same way, and I profess without any other design than that of entertaining myself when I am very idle, or when something goes amiss in my affairs.”8 It’s not clear why flirtation would be provoked by something going amiss—as a distraction, perhaps. We do know that all his life Swift loved to tease and flirt. Perhaps it had already begun when he was at Trinity.
In his autobiographical sketch Swift says that he stayed in Leicester “for some months.” Then he acquired a patron, and an exceptionally distinguished one: Sir William Temple, a retired diplomat who lived near London. The connection was made by Abigail Swift, though we know nothing about the terms under which Temple agreed to take Jonathan on. What we do know is that Temple’s father, Sir John, had been an important figure in the Dublin legal establishment and was close to the Swifts. Jonathan later called him “a great friend to the family,” and as we shall see, there is reason to suspect that Sir John Temple may have been much more than a friend to Abigail herself.9 At any rate, it was a great stroke of luck for Swift to receive this appointment. He was interested in a career in politics or government, and Sir William was well known to be a close friend of King William III.
It was a journey of 220 miles from Leicester to London, on truly terrible roads. They were unpaved, of course, and deep in mud when it rained. Roads throughout the country were maintained only by the farmers whose land happened to adjoin them, and deep jolting ruts were the norm. Not only were the roads bad, they were anything but direct. “Straight lines were not prominent in the landscape,” Trevelyan remarks. Chesterton made a John Bull virtue out of it:
Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.10
Difficult the journey may have been, but Swift probably enjoyed it all the same. In later life he liked to recall that as a young man he possessed boundless energy. Deane Swift the younger, one of the few relatives he liked, heard that “he was prodigiously fond of rambling,” and that his stamina, which remained impressive right into old age, had been extraordinary then. “He ran like a buck from one place to another. Gates, stiles, and quicksets [hedges] he no more valued than if they had been so many straws.”11
Swift’s friend and biographer Lord Orrery, a snob if ever there was one, said that “he often went in a wagon, but more frequently walked from Holyhead to Leicester, London, or any other part of England. He generally chose to dine with wagoners, hostlers, and persons of that rank, and he used to lie at night in houses where he found written over the door ‘Lodgings for a Penny.’ He delighted in scenes of low life. The vulgar dialect was not only a fund of humour for him, but I verily believe was acceptable to his nature.” The point about wagons was that he ought to have traveled in respectable stagecoaches. A French visitor called the wagons “great carts, covered in, that lumber along but very heavily; only a few poor old women make use of this vehicle.” Samuel Johnson suggested that the real reason Swift traveled that way was “a passion which seems to have been deep fixed in his heart, the love of a shilling.” But one of his friends remembered being told that he liked to disguise himself as an ostler, waiter, or shoemaker “to get into the knowledge of their professions.”12
SIR WILLIAM AND HIS DEVOTED ENTOURAGE
Swift’s destination was Sir William Temple’s pleasant country house, known as Moor Park, near Farnham in Surrey, forty miles southwest of London. Temple was the first employer he had ever had, and although he was paid a very modest ₤20 per year, there was reason to hope that this opportunity would be the start of a brilliant career. In the days before competitive exams and interviewing committees, positions of all kinds were in the gift of the patrons who bestowed them. More than half of the seats in the House of Commons were controlled by private individuals or by government ministers; parish priests were appointed to their “livings” by local landowners; and bishoprics, for the few clergymen who rose that high, were in the gift of the Crown.13
The word patronize didn’t yet have the negative connotations that it would later acquire. Joseph Addison, for example, wrote in the Spectator that a good man “patronizes the orphan and widow, assists the friendless, and guides the ignorant.”14 Likewise, condescend was positive in meaning; Johnson defines it as “To depart from the privileges of superiority by a voluntary submission; to sink willingly to equal terms with inferiors.” Temple himself didn’t have positions to bestow, but he had very highly placed friends who did, above all the king. Swift was counting on Temple to condescend and patronize, and his failure to do so would provoke enduring resentment.
Sir William represented a type that Swift had probably never encountered before. He was urbane, cosmopolitan, fluent in French, well read in the classics, and a gentleman of leisure who had retired after a distinguished diplomatic career. He was exceptionally good-looking as well.
10. Sir William Temple in his youth.
Temple’s career had begun back in the 1660s, when Charles II entrusted him with important negotiations in Holland. Two important treaties were the result, but after a while Temple realized that although he was supposed to be promoting England’s alliance with Holland against France, the king was actually colluding secretly with Louis XIV in return for secret subsidies. It was a betrayal. “My wings are c
ut,” Temple lamented in a letter, “and that frankness of my heart which made me think everybody meant as well as I did is much allayed.”15
Deeply disillusioned, Temple nevertheless continued with diplomacy for a few more years, during which he developed a close friendship with the Dutch prince William of Orange and negotiated his marriage with King Charles’s niece, Princess Mary. But in 1681, at the age of fifty-three, he renounced his career and settled with his wife in the village of Sheen (now part of Richmond), close to London. There they were joined by William’s younger sister Martha. She had married Thomas Giffard in 1662 when she was twenty-three, but lost her husband to a sudden illness just two weeks later. Lady Giffard never remarried, and remained her brother’s close companion for the rest of his life.
When the Revolution of 1688 ejected James II, Temple’s friends William and Mary ascended the British throne. The new king invited him to become secretary of state, one of the highest positions in the governing ministry, but he declined, holding to his resolution to live as a simple country gentleman. In memoirs that he left for Swift to publish after his death he declared, “I take leave of all those airy visions which have so long busied my head about mending the world, and at the same time, of all those shining toys or follies that employ the thoughts of busy men; and shall turn mine wholly to mend myself.”16
The Temples’ marriage had been a love match. They fell for each other in 1648, when William was twenty and Dorothy Osborne nineteen. Though they were both highly independent spirits, their engagement dragged on for six years because they weren’t rich, and both families wanted them to marry other people who had more money. The lively, intelligent letters Dorothy wrote during their separation were published in 1888 and became famous (Virginia Woolf admired them).17 It should be noted, however, that Sir William was a notorious ladies’ man, and he probably saw marriage as no obstacle to sexual liaisons. One that may well have occurred will shed light on some of the mysteries at Moor Park.
Infant mortality was dreadful, since there was no real protection against infectious disease. Seven Temple children died in infancy, and a beloved daughter was fourteen when she succumbed to smallpox. But a son named John grew to adulthood. When John was thirty-two, King William came to the throne and gave him a government post. There, John immediately gave some advice that backfired disastrously. He persuaded the king to release an Irish officer, Richard Hamilton, from the Tower of London so that he could go to Ireland and negotiate the surrender of the rebels. As soon as Hamilton got to Ireland, however, he went over to the rebels himself, and commanded James II’s troops at the infamous siege of Derry.
Disgraced, young Temple filled his pockets with stones and jumped from a boat into the Thames. On the seat he left a heartbreaking note: “’Tis not out of any dissatisfaction with my friends [the term could imply “family” in those days], from whom I have received infinitely more kindness and friendship than I deserve, I say it is not from any such reason that I do myself this violence, but having been long tired with the burden of this life, ’tis now become insupportable. From my father and mother I have had especially of late all the marks of tenderness in the world.” On this scrap of paper his mother wrote: “Child’s paper he writ before he killed himself.” In a memoir after Sir William’s death, his sister Lady Giffard said, “This cruel blow brought a cloud upon the remainder of his life, and a damp upon the good humor so natural to him that nothing could ever recover.”18
THE GARDENS OF EPICURUS
When the Temples acquired their new home in 1686, the brick Elizabethan house was known as Compton Hall. They renamed it Moor Park after a house in Hertfordshire where they had spent their honeymoon. The name was appropriate since it stood at the edge of a great expanse of heath land, full of gorse and bracken and scraggly pines. Less than two miles from the bustling town of Farnham, it remains isolated to this day, surrounded by woods and reachable only by a narrow lane. A Swiss visitor when Swift lived there called it “a pleasant retreat, far enough from town to be protected from visits, the air wholesome, the soil good, the view limited but pretty, a little stream which runs near making the only sound to be heard; the house small, convenient, and appropriately furnished. . . . I saw Monsieur Temple healthy and gay, and though he is gouty and getting on in years, he tired me in walking.”19
11. Moor Park in Temple’s time.
Temple laid out his garden in the rectangular style that he had gotten to know in Holland. In front of the house he arranged to have a placid little river—“chalky Wey, that rolls a milky wave,” Pope called it—channeled into a long, straight canal. Temple’s great passion was raising fruit, in which he became expert. He also enjoyed writing relaxed, conversational essays, and in one of them, called “Upon the Gardens of Epicurus,” he specified that “the only good nectarines are the Murry and the French; of these there are two sorts, one very round, and the other something long; but the round is the best.”20
Indeed, Epicureanism was Temple’s chosen philosophy of life. Its critics thought the term was synonymous with insatiable pleasure seeking; one of them said that synonyms for Epicurean were “godless, voluptuous, sensual, bestial, beastly, dissolute, vicious, wallowing, swinish, self-pampering, self-pleasing.”21 Some seventeenth-century Epicureans were indeed like that, the rake-poet Rochester, for instance, but Temple was not. He was what the French would call a libertine in the sense of being liberated from cares, living according to nature and enjoying tranquil pleasures. Temple ended his memoirs with a vow to pursue “that old and excellent counsel of Pythagoras, that we are, with all the cares and endeavours of our lives, to avoid diseases in the body, perturbations in the mind, luxury in diet, factions in the house, and seditions in the state.” He also said that the things of the world were mere baubles in comparison with “old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to converse with, and old books to read.”22
12. Moor Park today. The house, now divided into private apartments, stands where it always did, but with a façade completely altered since Swift lived there. The immense cedar tree was planted after his time, a reminder of just how long ago that was. In the foreground is a surviving vestige of Sir William’s canal.
Sir William enjoyed an attentive female support system at Moor Park. It included Lady Temple; Lady Giffard, Sir William’s widowed sister; John Temple’s widow, together with her mother and two daughters; the housekeeper, Bridget Johnson, and her young daughter, Hester; and Lady Giffard’s waiting woman, Rebecca Dingley. We know little about Swift’s relations with any of these, with two exceptions. Hester Johnson, now best known as Stella, was nine years old when he arrived and would become his lifelong closest friend. Rebecca Dingley would be Stella’s inseparable companion.
AN EXACTING MASTER
Temple had hired Swift as a secretary, one of several he engaged over the years.23 Among other duties, he was asked to read aloud to Temple, a task for which his excellent command of Latin was an advantage. He may have helped to keep the household accounts, though there was a steward whose job that probably was. But the chief duty was to work with Temple on preparing his essays and correspondence for eventual publication. Swift read aloud from earlier drafts, took down changes as directed, and wrote out the revised texts in fair copies suitable for sending to a printer.
Figure 13 shows an example of Swift’s labors. In his careful secretarial hand he has written out a preliminary draft of Temple’s Some Thoughts upon Reviewing the Essay on Ancient and Modern Learning. Considering it, Temple toned down the self-praise in “perhaps more distinguisht by his Writings than by the great Employments he has had or refused” by crossing out “distinguisht” and replacing it with “knowne.”
13. A page of Swift’s work as secretary to Sir William Temple.
What was the relationship between Swift and Temple? Ehrenpreis takes it for granted that Swift had been yearning for a father and found one in Temple, to whom he surely listened “with eager attentiveness.” Under “Temple” in Ehrenpreis’s in
dex there are three separate entries for “father-son relation.” Yet it’s quite clear that Temple was, to quote a recent writer, “a self-important old pontificator,” and Swift detested pontificators.24 There is no evidence at all that Temple became a father figure for Swift, and even less that Swift was like a son to Temple. How could a newly arrived stranger replace the son who had so recently killed himself?
Our information about the whole decade of the 1690s is sparse, but what there is of it suggests a very different picture. Thirty years ago A. C. Elias published a scrupulously researched investigation, Swift at Moor Park. This book was ignored at first because although Elias was a gifted scholar, he was not an academic Swiftian. But gradually his findings have found acceptance, and they confirm Thackeray’s judgment that Swift’s Moor Park years were full of bitterness, “as that of a great genius bound down by ignoble ties, and powerless in a mean dependence.” The indelible image of a helpless Gulliver, tied to the ground by tiny ropes, reflects an all too frequent experience in Swift’s life. Macaulay put it still more robustly: “Little did Temple imagine that the coarse exterior of his dependent concealed a genius equally suited to politics and to letters, a genius destined to shake great kingdoms, to stir the laughter and the rage of millions, and to leave to posterity memorials which can perish only with the English language.”25
Of course, Swift’s humble status made it easy for Temple to take him lightly. Half a century later Jean-Jacques Rousseau also worked as a secretary, doing laborious research for wealthy patrons who were would-be writers. When he afterward burst on the literary scene as a major thinker, one of them cheerfully acknowledged that she was amazed: “But tell me, Monsieur Rousseau, who would have suspected it of you?”26 Temple apparently saw Swift as nothing more than an intelligent secretary, and Swift would spend the rest of his life proving how wrong Temple had been.
