Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

by Leo Damrosch

  The more experienced of the two leaders was Robert Harley, six years older than Swift, who had been speaker of the House from 1701 to 1705, and secretary of state from 1704 to 1708. The queen trusted him, and at a time when personal connections mattered so much, his cousin Abigail Masham was her faithful nurse, companion, and confidante. It was often through Mrs. Masham, rather than in direct conversations of his own, that Harley influenced the queen. Harley now held the office of lord treasurer, and his partner Henry St. John (pronounced “Sinjin”) was secretary of state. Essentially, the lord treasurer was responsible for domestic affairs and the secretary of state for foreign.

  42. Robert Harley, Lord Oxford. Harley carries the white staff, emblematic of the office of lord treasurer, and wears on his left shoulder the emblem of the Order of the Garter, which he received in 1712, together with the title of the Earl of Oxford.

  Swift had much in common with Harley, who was a great reader and collector of manuscripts (eventually bequeathed to Oxford as the Harleian Miscellany), and also a firm supporter of the Anglican Church. Indeed, Harley never lost the rather puritanical values of his upbringing, trusting in divine providence in times of stress. At a critical juncture he wrote to his father, “I pray God direct and keep a poor worm sensible of his weakness.”17

  Harley appreciated Swift’s charm and wit, and liked to call him Martin for the character in the Tale of a Tub; also, as Swift told Stella, “because martin is a sort of swallow, and so is a swift.” In return Swift nicknamed Harley the Dragon—“so called by contraries,” he explained, “for he was the mildest, wisest, and best minister that ever served a prince.” They even shared a physical disability. Like Swift’s, Harley’s left ear was deaf: “He always turns to the right, and his servants whisper him at that only.”18

  Even after Harley was raised to the peerage as the Earl of Oxford, he treated Swift as an equal. Years later Swift recalled, “I often said, when we were two hours diverting ourselves with trifles, vive la bagatelle.” And after his friend had been dead for many years, Swift wrote to his son, “I knew your father better than you could at that time, and I do impartially think him the most virtuous minister, and the most able, that ever I remember to have read of. . . . I loved my Lord your father better than any other man in the world.”19

  Harley had defects, however. One that didn’t bother Swift, but did get in the way of political leadership, was that he couldn’t express himself clearly. “Lord Oxford,” Pope said, “was huddled in his thoughts, and obscure in his manner of delivering them. He talked of business in so confused a manner that you did not know what he was about, and everything he went to tell you was in the epic way, for he always began in the middle.” Pope thought that this awkwardness, rather than any intention to insult, explained a comment Harley once made. He advised a playwright named Nicholas Rowe that it would be a good idea to learn Spanish, which Rowe naturally took as a hint that he might receive a diplomatic appointment. When he came back later to report that he could speak Spanish, Harley said, “Then, sir, I envy you the pleasure of reading Don Quixote in the original.”20

  Harley was also a procrastinator, maddeningly so. Even when he was a boy, his mother complained, “He is sometimes extremely lazy so that I have been near whipping him,” and in 1712 a colleague told him, “If I had that sloth in my temper that you have, I would on purpose keep a man to pull me by the sleeve to remember me of things that I was to do.” Swift was once given, as a present, an elaborately decorated Venetian snuffbox. He showed it to Harley, who teased him by noting the image of a goose on the bottom and suggesting that it represented the clergy. Swift’s riposte was that “the goose is there drawn pecking at a snail, just as I do at him, to make him mend his pace.” As Deane Swift heard the story, Harley replied, “That is severe enough, Jonathan, but I deserve it.”21

  Harley was also exasperatingly secretive about his plans. In part this was because he preferred improvisation to long-range strategy. “He thinks it a more easy and safe rule in politics,” Swift noted, “to watch incidents as they come, and then turn them to the advantage of what he pursues, than to pretend to foresee them at a great distance.” But his detractors were convinced that the secrecy was a calculated policy. One of them said that Harley loved trickery “even where not necessary, but from an inward satisfaction he took in applauding his own cunning; if any man was ever born under necessity of being a knave, he was.” A modern historian believes that “behind the obese, mumbling, lethargic bulk of the Earl of Oxford lurked cunning, weasel-toothed, sharp-sighted Robert Harley, watching patiently, taking his decisions suddenly and craftily.”22 Swift too, of course, was in his own way a secretive man of masks.

  Policy or not, Harley certainly loved secrecy. His second marriage took place privately, after which he returned to his office without mentioning where he had been, and his own father learned of it only secondhand. In later years he took to keeping notes in a code of his own invention, and when Abigail Masham was giving him information about the court, they used a code in which entire messages purported to be about Harley’s family in Herefordshire. Abigail was Cousin Kate Stephens, the queen was Aunt Stephens, and the Tories were Cousin Palmer. More peculiarly, “courage” was Ready Money, “victory” was Lawsuit, and “peace” was E. M. Barnett.23

  Henry St. John (called Harry by his friends) was fifteen years younger than Harley, and in every way Harley’s opposite. He was an eloquent writer and spellbinding orator, a political thinker with long-range views, and temperamentally rash and impulsive; he was widely known as “the man of mercury.”24 As for religion, he supported the Church of England because, like the Tories generally, he regarded it as essential for social order. But he was a freethinker, and it amused Johnson in his Dictionary (using St. John’s later title of Lord Bolingbroke) to define “irony” as “a mode of speech in which the meaning is contrary to the words; as, ‘Bolingbroke was a holy man.’”

  43. Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke. These are the parliamentary robes he wore after being created Viscount Bolingbroke in 1712.

  From the moment Swift met St. John, who was thirty-two in 1710, he was bowled over. He told Stella, “I think Mr. St. John the greatest young man I ever knew; wit, capacity, beauty, quickness of apprehension, good learning, and an excellent taste; the best orator in the House of Commons, admirable conversation, good nature, and good manners; generous, and a despiser of money. His only fault is talking to his friends in way of complaint of too great a load of business, which looks a little like affectation; and he endeavours too much to mix the fine gentleman and man of pleasure with the man of business.” The encomium is almost an echo of Hamlet’s “in apprehension how like a god, the beauty of the world!” Swift did go on to say, “What truth and sincerity he may have I know not.”25 The caution was well advised. Beneath his air of frankness, St. John could be just as cunning as Harley. And although he had to defer to the older and more established Harley for the time being, he was watching for an opportunity to displace him.

  Sir William Temple had been proud of declining the office of secretary of state, and as Swift continued to spend time with St. John, the analogy with Temple brought back disagreeable memories. “One thing I warned him of, never to appear cold to me, for I would not be treated like a schoolboy; that I had felt too much of that in my life already (meaning from Sir William Temple); that I expected every great minister, who honoured me with his acquaintance, if he heard or saw anything to my disadvantage, would let me know it in plain words, and not put me in pain to guess by the change or coldness of his countenance or behavior.” St. John took the rebuke in good part, said Swift “had reason,” and explained that he seemed distant only because he was worn down by “sitting up whole nights at business, and one night at drinking.”26

  Swift was surprisingly tolerant of St. John’s well-known lifestyle as a rake. He mentioned casually to Stella that when he and Harley were strolling on the Mall, “Mr. Secretary met us and took a turn or two, and then stole
away, and we both believed it was to pick up some wench; and tomorrow he will be at the cabinet with the Queen. So goes the world.” With evident relish, Swift passed on to Stella some verses that a friend had given St. John at a time when he claimed to be finished with public life:

  From business and the noisy world retired,

  Nor vexed by love, nor by ambition fired;

  Gently I wait the call of Charon’s boat,

  Still drinking like a fish, and —— like a stoat.

  Swift added, “I think the three grave lines do introduce the last [line] well enough.” Perhaps he secretly envied St. John’s ability to gratify his appetites with impunity. Ehrenpreis splendidly calls him Swift’s “super-id.”27

  What did greatly worry Swift, always a temperate drinker himself, was his colleagues’ debauches. Harley was a borderline alcoholic and often neglected his responsibilities. St. John managed better, but not all that well, as Swift remarked with one of the pseudo-proverbs he liked to make up: “I dined with him, and we were to do more business after dinner. But after dinner is after dinner—an old saying and a true, Much drinking little thinking.”28

  In one way Swift identified deeply with St. John: they both paid a high price for being more intelligent than other people. Years later, when his friend was permanently out of politics, Swift told him that he had been too sharp for his own good: “Did you never observe one of your clerks cutting his paper with a blunt ivory knife? Did you ever know the knife to fail going the true way? Whereas if he had used a razor or a penknife, he had odds against him of spoiling a whole sheet.” At another time Swift critiqued the middle-of-the-road discretion that allows mediocrities to weather any storm: “It will carry a man safe through all the malice and variety of parties, so far that whatever faction happens to be uppermost, his claim is usually allowed for a share of what is going.”29

  ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT

  In March of 1711 an extraordinary incident occurred, frightening at the time and very helpful to Harley’s prestige afterward. A Frenchman calling himself the marquis de Guiscard, which was probably not his real name, had worked his way into St. John’s confidence; they both had illegitimate sons by the same mistress. Chronically short of money, Guiscard began spying for the French and smuggling information out in the diplomatic pouch of the British ambassador to France. After a while the ambassador grew suspicious and detected what was happening. Guiscard was accordingly called before the Cabinet Council for interrogation. Swift, who knew him, happened to pass him in the street on his way there, “and I wondered he did not speak to me.”30

  After trying at first to bluff it out, Guiscard rushed at Harley and stabbed him with a penknife that he had picked up from a table on his way in (in the days of quill pens, penknives were in use everywhere). Harley was wounded in the chest, but saved by luck. Because the anniversary of the queen’s coronation had just been celebrated, he was wearing several layers of elegant formal clothing that partly cushioned the first blow. The tip of the blade broke off against his breastbone, and the second blow, which would otherwise have pierced his heart, caused only a nasty bruise.

  Several of those present drew swords and rushed at Guiscard, wounding him severely. Harley, maintaining astonishing composure, called out that he should be allowed to live since it was important to put him on trial. It seemed to some people that St. John, who joined in the attack on Guiscard, was particularly eager to dispatch him then and there. Certainly St. John had reason to fear that under interrogation too much might be revealed about his own secret activities—he was never a wholehearted Jacobite, but he did have feelers out to the Pretender in case he should ever regain his throne.

  In the event, Guiscard’s condition deteriorated and he died before he could be tried. Meanwhile, St. John claimed that it was really he, and not Harley, who had been the intended target, but nobody believed that. Guiscard certainly knew that Harley was the biggest obstacle to the Pretender’s return. It was also noted that Guiscard seemed to have free run of the court, had made odd inquiries in the royal kitchen, and was found to have a bottle of poison in his pocket. His ultimate intention may have been to kill the queen, in the hope that the country would turn to the exiled James III rather than accept the Hanoverian George I.

  Swift wasn’t present at the attack, but he described it to Stella immediately afterward and was deeply upset. “My heart is almost broken. . . . Pray pardon my distraction; I now think of all [Harley’s] kindness to me. The poor creature now lies stabbed in his bed by a desperate French Popish villain. Good night, and God preserve you both, and pity me. I want it [that is, need it].” Ehrenpreis speculates, “I cannot help wondering whether Swift’s identification of Harley with his own parent did not go so far that he felt the guilt of a resentful son over a father’s near-death.” It’s not obvious that he felt guilty in that way, but he did acknowledge a kind of filial grief. He told Archbishop King that Harley “hath always treated me with the tenderness of a parent,” and that his “violent pain of mind” was the greatest he had ever felt in his life.31

  It turned out that Harley was never in real danger, once it was clear that gangrene wouldn’t set in. He let it be thought, however, that he might be at death’s door, and made the most of his slow recovery. Much to the disgust of Bolingbroke, who had been working covertly to supplant him, he was hailed everywhere as a martyr. Matthew Prior, a poet and diplomat with whom Swift was friendly, hastened into print with a poem that Swift charitably called “handsome”:

  The sharp point of cruel Guiscard’s knife

  In brass and marble carves thy deathless name.32

  In the Examiner Swift himself saw an opportunity to boost Harley’s reputation by describing his behavior as an extraordinary instance of magnanimity—the word still meant, as Johnson defines it, “greatness of mind; bravery; elevation of soul.”

  After the wound was given, he was observed neither to change his countenance, nor discover any concern or disorder in his speech. He rose up, and walked along the room while he was able, with the greatest tranquility, during the midst of the confusion. When the surgeon came he took him aside, and desired he would inform him freely whether the wound were mortal; because in that case, he said, he had some affairs to settle relating to his family. The blade of the penknife, broken by the violence of the blow against a rib, within a quarter of an inch of the handle, was dropped out (I know not whether from the wound, or his clothes) as the surgeon was going to dress him. He ordered it to be taken up, and wiping it himself, gave it somebody to keep, saying, he thought “it now properly belonged to him.” He showed no sort of resentment, or spoke one violent word against Guiscard, but appeared all the while the least concerned of any in the company—a state of mind which in such an exigency nothing but innocence can give, and is truly worthy of a Christian philosopher.33

  Ten days later Swift reported to Stella, “We have let Guiscard be buried at last, after showing him pickled in a trough this fortnight for two pence apiece. . . . ’Tis hard our laws would not suffer us to hang his body in chains, because he was not tried, and in the eye of our law every man is innocent till then.”34

  There was one thing in the Examiner version of the story that Swift soon came to regret. He had been taken in by the claim that Guiscard, under interrogation, revealed that it was St. John whom he intended to stab, and that “not being able to come at the Secretary as he intended, it was some satisfaction to murder the person whom he thought Mr. St. John loved best.” This turned out to be a shamelessly self-serving story invented by St. John himself, who hoped that by getting it into print through Swift, he could make himself the hero and Harley just an accidental victim. A Whig critic took pleasure in highlighting Swift’s embarrassment: “He has repented of that passage; he cannot blot it out.”35

  At some later time Harley made Swift a present of the macabre relic, which Deane Swift said he saw several times. “It was a common ordinary penknife with a tortoise-shell handle, and when it was shut was just about
the length of a man’s little finger. But as the blade was broken within half an inch of the handle by the violence of the blow against one of the ribs of the Earl, the Doctor had a hole drilled through that part of the blade which was broken off, and another hole through that piece which remained in the handle, and by that contrivance they were both held together by a little silver chain.”36

  One would suppose that those details carry complete conviction, but maybe they don’t, which highlights the slipperiness of most evidence about Swift. After Deane Swift published some remarks critical of Patrick Delany, Delany responded indignantly, “I knew Dr. Swift fifty times better than you did.” Delany was certain not only that the knife was an ordinary one, not able to be closed up and never broken, but that Guiscard’s weapon remained in Lord Oxford’s family and was never given to Swift.37

  Soon after Harley’s recovery he received a double reward from Queen Anne. He had been serving until then as chancellor of the exchequer, and was now made lord treasurer in title as well as fact. In addition, he was raised to the peerage as the first Earl of Oxford, the name by which we will now refer to him.

  St. John got no peerage at this point, since he was needed to manage debates in the House of Commons while Oxford went on to the Lords. And when he did get one a year later, he regarded it as an insult. His new title was Viscount Bolingbroke (pronounced “Bullenbrook”), and viscounts were outranked by earls. Swift heard that the lower rank was due to the widespread stories about his sexual escapades, which Her Majesty found offensive. “The Queen could not be prevailed with, because, to say the truth, he was not much at that time in her good graces, some women about the court having infused an opinion into her that he was not so regular in his life as he ought to be.”38

  HOW MUCH POWER DID SWIFT HAVE?

  Swift was now at the center of political power, its valued spokesman, but that doesn’t mean that he made policy or was privy to many secrets. After the first heady rush of excitement he admitted as much. Both Oxford and Bolingbroke permitted him to speak his mind freely, but as he later acknowledged, “I have known many great ministers ready enough to hear opinions, yet I have hardly seen one that would ever descend to take advice.” On one occasion, when Bolingbroke asked to be left alone with Oxford, “I said it was as fit I should know their business as anybody, for I was to justify [that is, in print]; so the rest went and I stayed.” As it turned out, the issue wasn’t so mighty after all: “It was so important I was like to sleep over it.”39