by Leo Damrosch
What follows is only Denis Johnston’s conjecture, and perhaps a wild conjecture at that. Still, it bears thinking about. Swift’s father could not have been Sir William Temple. But the persistent rumors to that effect might have sprung from a confused recollection of a different Temple. Sir William’s father was Sir John Temple, born in Ireland and educated at Trinity. When the Swift brothers arrived in Dublin in the late 1650s and early 1660s, Sir John was highly placed in their profession. He was a widower, for his wife had died in 1638 after giving birth to Sir William’s sister, whom we know as Lady Giffard.
The position Sir John Temple held was master of the rolls, an important appointment in charge of the “rolls,” or scrolled-up records in the Chancery court. He was also treasurer of King’s Inns, which is where Jonathan Swift the elder began to pick up odd jobs around 1658, and where he was eventually appointed steward. Jonathan the younger knew that Sir John “had been a great friend to the family.” In his letter of recommendation to Sir Robert Southwell, Sir William Temple himself said that the whole family of Swifts “were long known to me.” Deane Swift grew up hearing that his grandfather Godwin Swift and Sir John Temple “spent much of their time together, and as they frequently dined and passed the remainder of the day at each other’s houses, the whole family of the Swifts became intimately acquainted with that open, generous, disinterested man. . . . This friendship continued for many years without interruption, even to the last hour of Sir John’s life.”71
Sir John Temple had close connections with Leicester in England, for his friend and patron was the Earl of Leicester, whom he is known to have visited at his Leicestershire estate.72 Now, here is Denis Johnston’s hypothesis. Sir John met Abigail in Leicester, and at some point brought her to Dublin to act as his housekeeper, and probably as something more than that. Johnston suggests that Sir John, in his early sixties and concerned for Abigail’s future security, provided her with a husband in a young man to whom he could give a start in the legal profession.
Jonathan Swift the elder could have been the actual father of Jane, and of Jonathan the younger too. But if there was a sexual relationship between Sir John and Abigail, it might conceivably have continued after she was married. Another possibility is that the elder Jonathan was already ill with the disease that would kill him, and was no longer sexually active. In that case Sir John would know that the child was his own.
We will never know if these guesses are close to the truth. But if they are, then Sir John might well have provided for the education of his son, funneling the money through Godwin Swift. And it could make sense of another mystery, the story of the abduction by the nurse. If the child was born inconveniently late after the death of the legal father, the nurse might have been paid to take little Jonathan away, and Abigail too might have been advised to go back to England. Jonathan would have been brought back to Godwin’s house as a way station for Kilkenny College, which could explain why he entered the school at an unusually early age. As was only recently pointed out by an Irish Swift specialist, Sir John Temple spent a great deal of time at his country estate in Carlow. Carlow is twenty miles from Kilkenny.73
When young Jonathan was ten, in 1677, Sir John died, leaving a will that unfortunately no researcher examined before it was destroyed during the 1922 insurrection, when a massive explosion shattered the Irish Public Records Office. Johnston suggests that the will may have provided funds for Jonathan’s continuing education, which would then have been administered by Godwin Swift as a duty rather than as an expression of affection. Once Jonathan graduated from Trinity, Godwin would have felt that his obligations were at an end, and that it was high time for the Temples to do their part. After the young graduate rejoined his mother in Leicester in 1689, she sent him on to Sir William Temple, Sir John’s son and—just possibly—Jonathan’s half brother.74
Deane Swift had heard that the reason Abigail suggested that her son apply to Sir William Temple was that her family was distantly related to his. That may possibly be true, but again, one suspects an invention. If members of the Swift family were concerned to clear their famous relative from the suspicion that a Temple was Jonathan’s father, it might have been expedient to imagine some other kind of family obligation. Jonathan Swift himself, always proud of distinguished family connections, would probably have mentioned that he was related to the Temples if he had heard of it, but he did not.75
Unless further evidence should somehow come to light, this is where we must leave the question of Swift’s parentage. Denis Johnston never claimed to offer more than a hypothesis, and it may well seem improbable. Still, it’s not impossible, and something like it would certainly make more sense than the story Swift himself told.
CHAPTER 3
“Long Choosing, and Beginning Late”
STROLLING WITH THE KING
The profession for which Swift was most qualified was the ministry. He was in no hurry, though, to climb into the pulpit. Sir William was well placed to get him launched instead in politics or government service, and that track appealed to him strongly. He detested being financially strapped, and he was well aware that the clergy were deplorably underpaid. At the end of the eighteenth century the clergyman Sydney Smith lamented that a minister “is thrown into life with his hands tied, and bid to swim; he does well if he keeps his head above water.” If Swift did choose that route, his goal would be a bishopric, which would ensure prestige and a fine income for life. But for now, he awaited developments. As Milton said of himself in Paradise Lost, he was “long choosing, and beginning late.”1
It was a heady experience at first to meet friends of the Temples, whether at their London town house or at Moor Park. Their most eminent friends were none other than the newly crowned king and queen. William III had been close to the Temples in Holland, and he was a frequent visitor at Moor Park. As Macaulay says, he found there, “among the heath and furze of Surrey, a spot which seemed to be part of Holland, a straight canal, a terrace, rows of clipped trees, and rectangular beds of flowers and potherbs.”2
Remarkably, the unworldly young Dubliner found himself strolling in the garden with the king of England, since Temple was often laid up with the gout and His Majesty wanted someone to chat with. It was a very rare privilege for an obscure commoner to be on conversational terms with the monarch. Samuel Johnson, after he became famous and George III asked to meet him, experienced the privilege with awe.
There is no record, unfortunately, of what they said during these chats, or even what language they spoke. Swift was fairly good at French and the king preferred it to English; he almost certainly spoke French with Temple. In later life Swift did like to recall that the king showed him “how to cut asparagus (a vegetable which his Majesty was extremely fond of) in the Dutch manner.”3 This would have been in the garden, not at the table, and one can visualize the king taking out his penknife and bending over the plants. Asparagus is a perennial, and if too much of the stalk is cut off at one time, it will be weakened for the following year.
15. King William III. The artist has caught the stern demeanor of this able bureaucrat, diplomat, and warrior.
Personally, the king was somewhat off-putting. As Macaulay describes him, he had “a slender and feeble frame, a lofty and ample forehead, a nose curved like the beak of an eagle, an eye rivaling that of an eagle in brightness and keenness, a thoughtful and somewhat sullen brow, a firm and somewhat peevish mouth, a cheek pale, thin, and deeply furrowed by sickness and by care.” His discomfort speaking English may excuse the ponderousness of his attempts at wit; he told a clergyman named William King, “You and I have almost the same name—you are William King and I am King William.”4
Naturally, Swift was hopeful that this acquaintance would lead to an attractive appointment in public office or the Church, but Temple was reluctant to encourage it. Swift told his uncle William at the time, “I am not to take [holy] orders till the King gives me a prebendary; and Sir William Temple, though he promises me the certainty of it
, yet is less forward than I could wish, because I suppose he believes I shall leave him, and upon some accounts he thinks me a little necessary to him.” Swift’s expectation was that after putting in his time at Moor Park, he would be rewarded with the prestige and comfortable income of a prebend at Canterbury or Westminster. He might not even have to reside there, for a prebend was simply the income from a cathedral appointment, and its recipient, the prebendary, had no actual duties at the cathedral. (Confusingly, Swift and others used the terms prebendary and prebend interchangeably.) A historian says, “The attractiveness of the royal prebends lay primarily in their revenue,” typically about £300 per year, or fifteen times as much as the salary Sir William was paying Swift. A Canterbury prebend was worth £350, Oxford £400, and St. Paul’s Cathedral a spectacular £800.5
No prebend ever materialized, but King William did make Swift a surprising offer: to become a “captain of horse” in the army. Actually, this was not as bizarre as it must seem. Commissions in the army were often awarded through patronage, and the recipients might have no relevant experience at all. When Swift’s journalist friend Richard Steele left Oxford and became a cavalry officer, his first task was to learn to ride a horse.6
Johnson accurately remarked, “King William’s notions were all military.”7 The reason he took the huge risk of deposing James II was to strengthen the Dutch position against France. Louis XIV was determined to make himself master of the Continent, and the Low Countries were in grave peril. With Britain on their side, everything would change. It was only because William had married Princess Mary—a calculated move, of course—that this now became possible. Dynastic arrangements among royal houses could determine the course of history.
16. Queen Mary II. Given her rather stodgy later image, this portrait of Mary in her youth may seem surprising. She is depicted with the sultry expression and encouraging breasts of a Restoration court lady.
From 1689 onward, Britain would be at war for all but four years of the next twenty-four. The War of the League of Augsburg began in that year and continued for most of the time Swift was at Moor Park; from 1697 to 1702 there would be an interlude of peace; and then the tremendous War of the Spanish Succession would drag on until 1713. Endless fighting would play a key role in the political affairs that would engross Swift in the years to come.
Though the royal marriage had been politically expedient, it was much deeper than that. When the queen was dying of smallpox in 1694, William told a bishop who was attending her, “I was the happiest man on earth, and I am the most miserable. She had no fault, none; you knew her well, but you could not know, nobody but myself could know, her goodness.”8
Still, in that era it was not considered inappropriate for a monarch to have mistresses. On one occasion at the court of George I, the Countess of Dorchester, who had been a mistress of James II, happened to meet the Duchess of Portsmouth and the Countess of Orkney, who had been mistresses respectively of Charles II and William III. “Who would have thought,” she asked pleasantly, “that we three whores should have met here?”9
In fact King William’s sexual life was quite indiscriminate, and Swift found it distasteful. When he read much later in a history book that William “had no vice, but of one sort, in which he was very cautious and secret,” he commented in the margin, “It was of two sorts—male and female—in the former he was neither cautious nor secret.” And when another author referred to the Earl of Albemarle as “King William’s constant companion in all his diversions and pleasures,” Swift wrote, “Very infamous pleasures.”10
Spending time with the monarch gave Swift lasting immunity to hero worship, not that he was ever very susceptible to it. He once said in a sermon, “Princes are born with no more advantages of strength or wisdom than other men, and by an unhappy education are usually more defective in both than thousands of their subjects.” According to Orrery, “his aversion to kings was invincible,” and he was often heard to say that “he should be glad to see half a dozen kings dissected, that he might know what it was that stamped a greater value upon one prince than upon eleven millions of people.”11
Sir William did entrust Swift with one important mission. In 1693, fearing that King William was beginning to govern high-handedly, Parliament tried to pass a Triennial Act that would require him to call a new election no later than three years after the previous one, instead of only when he felt like it. The fear was that he might pack the House of Commons with paid dependents and then prolong its life indefinitely, avoiding fresh elections that might work to his disadvantage.
Temple understood that intransigence on this point could jeopardize the king, and he dispatched Swift to convey his arguments to King William. As Swift described it long afterward, with his usual fuzziness about dates, “Mr. Swift, who was well versed in English history although he were then under three and twenty years old [he was twenty-five], gave the King a short account of the matter, but a more large one to the Earl of Portland; but all in vain, for the King by ill advisers was prevailed upon to refuse passing the bill. This was the first time that Mr. Swift had ever any converse with courts, and he told his friends it was the first incident that helped to cure him of vanity.”12
The next year, however, the king relented and allowed the Triennial Act to pass. As with much else, it was a concession forced by his war policy. A guarantee that parliaments would meet regularly was the House of Commons’ price for voting the funds he needed to keep fighting the French.13 As it turned out, what ensued were the most frequent elections in British history, no fewer than ten in the next twenty years.
“THAT OLD VERTIGO IN HIS HEAD”
Even before Swift’s first arrival at Moor Park, when the Temples were at Sheen near London, Swift experienced some alarming physical symptoms. They turned out not to be dangerous, but they could be incapacitating, and he would suffer increasingly severe recurrences for the rest of his life. As he described it in his autobiographical sketch, “He happened before twenty years old, by a surfeit of fruit, to contract a giddiness and coldness of stomach that almost brought him to his grave, and this disorder pursued him with intermissions of two or three years to the end of his life.” At another time he said that he contracted the illness “by eating a hundred golden pippins at a time, at Richmond,” adding that the first attack of deafness came on several years later after he fell asleep outdoors. For a while the nausea and vertigo seemed to come on independently, but eventually they tended to coincide, and Swift was often tormented by “a hundred oceans roaring in my ears.”14 He became progressively deaf as well, first in one ear and later in both. The dizziness affected his balance, and he referred to it variously as “tottering” and “vertigo.”
Blaming too much fruit sounds absurd today, but it didn’t then. John Locke, who was a physician as well as a philosopher, wrote grimly, “Fruit makes one of the most difficult chapters in the government of health, especially that of children. Our first parents ventured Paradise for it, and ’tis no wonder our children cannot stand the temptation, though it cost them their health.” In the next century Sir Walter Scott could still say that professors of medicine thought an excess of fruit “in every respect adequate to produce such consequences.” It needed the common sense of Johnson to point out, “The original of diseases is commonly obscure. Almost every boy eats as much fruit as he can get, without any great inconvenience.” We know that Johnson thought well of Temple’s essays, and this may have been a recollection of what Temple himself had written: “All men will eat fruit that can get it.”15
So although Swift loved fruit, and would later emulate Sir William in planting fruit trees of his own, he forced himself to consume it sparingly. At the age of forty-four he lamented, “The peaches are pretty good, and there are some figs; I sometimes venture to eat one, but always repent it.” And again, “I envy people maunching and maunching peaches and grapes, and I not daring to eat a bit.” At sixty there was a recurrence of “my old disease of giddiness, a little tottering” and
he was sure that “cider and champagne and fruit have been the cause.” Six weeks after that he had a more severe bout, so nauseated that he threw up, and he resolved to be even more abstemious: “In the midst of peaches, figs, nectarines, and mulberries, I touch not a bit.”16
We tend to forget how primitive was what passed for medical knowledge until recent times. As a martyr to gout, Temple gave much thought to possible remedies for that affliction, and was sure he had found the answer:
The next specific I esteem to be that little insect called millipedes: the powder whereof, made up into little balls with fresh butter, I never knew fail of curing any sore throat. It must lie at the root of the tongue, and melt down at leisure upon going to bed. I have been assured that Doctor Mayerne used it as a certain cure for all cancers in the breast; and should be very tedious if I should tell here, how much the use of it has been extolled by several within my knowledge, upon the admirable effects for the eyes, the scurvy, and the gout; but there needs no more to value it, than what the ancient physicians affirm of it in those three words: Digerit, Aperit, Abstergit: It digests. It opens. It cleanses.17
The millipedes would certainly purge the digestive system, but they wouldn’t do much for gout, ailments of the eye, or breast cancer.
It is often hard to tell, from symptoms reported by eighteenth-century sufferers, just what were the diseases that afflicted them. In Swift’s case there can be no doubt, but no one then had the faintest idea of the truth. He recognized that his vertigo and nausea were symptoms of a single disease, but he was convinced that the deafness was entirely different. Actually, his Dublin physicians had the impressive intuition that all three apparently separate symptoms were interconnected. “The doctors here,” he told a friend in 1733, “think that both these ailments in me are united in their causes.” But since the disease is progressive and there is no deafness at first, he understandably disagreed with them.18
