Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

by Leo Damrosch

  Up until then it was taken for granted that the peers governed Britain, with the support, of course, of the House of Commons. That was why Harley and St. John expected to become peers as soon as they gained power. Walpole was the first to govern the nation from the House of Commons.19 He didn’t even become Sir Robert until 1725, and by then he was established as his country’s first true prime minister.

  Walpole liked to play the role of a bluff country squire, entertaining lavishly at his estate in Norfolk. One guest recalled, “We used to sit down to dinner a little snug party of about thirty odd, up to the chin in beef, venison, geese, turkeys, etc., and generally over the chin in claret, strong beer, and punch.” Walpole had six different wine suppliers, and his bill with one of them for a single year was ₤1,118 (6,480 empty bottles were returned). He also laid on extravagant feasts for the money men of the City, as a newspaper ballad reported:

  For pipes by gross and wine by ton they called with might and main;

  They smoked and drank, and drank and spewed, and spewed and drank again.20

  Walpole’s total mastery exasperated the Tories, and their apologists satirized him ceaselessly. Pope targeted him in poem after poem, Gay made him an underworld chieftain in The Beggar’s Opera, and Swift put him into Gulliver’s Travels as Flimnap, the Lilliputian lord treasurer. Flimnap dominates the political competition of leaping and creeping, jumping over a horizontal pole and crawling under it. On one occasion he takes a tumble, and “would have infallibly broke his neck if one of the King’s cushions, that accidentally lay on the ground, had not weakened the force of his fall.” This is thought to refer to a mistress of George I.21

  57. Sir Robert Walpole. The artist has tactfully suggested Walpole’s massive girth. Though not a tall man, he weighed 280 pounds.

  Walpole often turns up in Swift’s poems, too, with a blank for his name that the rhyme makes obvious.

  How the helm is ruled by ——,

  At whose oars, like slaves, they all pull. . . .

  But why would he, except he slobbered,

  Offend our Patriot, great Sir R——?22

  But unlike Bolingbroke and Pope, who dreamed of a virtuous Tory opposition that could restore integrity to politics, Swift now regarded politics as degrading if not corrupting. When he came to write Gulliver’s Travels in the 1720s, he gave the nobly rational Houyhnhnms a republic, not a monarchy. The foul Yahoos, on the other hand, obey a vicious leader whom they turn against the moment they get a chance.

  This leader had usually a favourite as like himself as he could get, whose employment was to lick his master’s feet and posteriors, and drive the female Yahoos to his kennel, for which he was now and then rewarded with a piece of ass’s flesh. This favourite is hated by the whole herd, and therefore to protect himself keeps always near the person of his leader. He usually continues in office till a worse can be found; but the very moment he is discarded, his successor, at the head of all the Yahoos in that district, young and old, male and female, come in a body and discharge their excrements upon him from head to foot. But how far this might be applicable to our courts and favourites and ministers of state, my master said I could best determine.23

  THE ATTERBURY DISASTER

  The final chapter in the Tories’ downfall came in 1722, when Oxford was back in the House of Lords and Bolingbroke about to return from exile. Francis Atterbury, bishop of Rochester, was the leader of the High Church wing that sought to establish the Church as separate from the monarchy, not subordinate to it. It now emerged that he was still negotiating with the Pretender.

  Atterbury and his fellow conspirators exchanged heavily coded letters, which were intercepted by the government, and in which references to a dog named Harlequin supposedly furnished a damning clue. Swift wrote, but didn’t publish, a mocking poem called Upon the Horrid Plot Discovered by Harlequin, the Bishop of Rochester’s French Dog:

  I asked a Whig the other night

  How came this wicked plot to light;

  He answered that a dog of late

  Informed a minister of state.24

  A dog from France did exist, though Atterbury never actually had it. It had arrived in England lame after an accident in transit, and was being cared for by the landlady of one of the minor conspirators, who said under interrogation that it was intended “for the Bishop of Rochester.” That wouldn’t have proved anything in itself, but in the letters the dog’s owner was referred to as a certain T. Illington, who suffered from gout as Atterbury did, was away from London at just the times Atterbury was, and was distressed that a dog being sent from France had broken its leg.

  The conspirators knew, of course, that their letters were likely to be opened, and they always took pains to deliver them by private means. So why were the three letters mentioning “Illington” and his dog sent by ordinary mail? Handwriting might have identified the writers decisively, but all the government presented was copies, claiming that the originals had been sent on to their addressees. Furthermore, there were blunders and errors of fact that the alleged senders would have been unlikely to make. The letters were probably forgeries, made necessary because without them there would have been no evidence at all.

  For this reason, the government didn’t dare to risk a judicial trial, fearing acquittal, and Atterbury was tried instead by the House of Lords. The Lords voted a special act—a most irregular law targeting a single individual—that imposed “pains and penalties” by which Atterbury was deposed from his bishopric and denied “any office, dignity, promotion, benefice, or employment in England.” He went to France and died there nine years later.

  A few years after his initial poetic reaction, Swift followed it up with a trenchant reprise in Gulliver’s Travels.

  It is first agreed and settled among them what suspected persons shall be accused of a plot; then, effectual care is taken to secure all their letters and papers, and put the owners in chains. These papers are delivered to a set of artists very dexterous in finding out the mysterious meanings of words, syllables, and letters. For instance, they can discover a close stool to signify a privy council; a flock of geese, a senate; a lame dog, an invader; the plague, a standing army; a buzzard, a minister; the gout, a high priest; a gibbet, a Secretary of State; a chamber pot, a committee of grandees; a sieve, a court lady; a broom, a revolution; a mouse trap, an employment; a bottomless pit, the treasury; a sink, a c——t; a cap and bells, a favourite; a broken reed, a court of justice; an empty tun, a general; a running sore, the administration.25

  Even the lame dog is there, with the Pretender as the would-be invader. Atterbury is of course the “high priest” with the gout. The members of the House of Lords are the tame geese who went along with the administration’s demands. The “close stool” and chamber pot evoke the Privy Council that advised the king and its special committee that conducted the investigation. By a sly allusion, its name becomes literal, since some of the government’s documents had actually been retrieved from the bishop’s privy. As for “c——t,” no doubt it means “court,” but since Swift had already used just that word without disguising it, other possibilities exist. It could suggest the undue influence of politicians’ mistresses.

  Atterbury’s persecutors tried to put the best face on what they had done by claiming that a trial in a court of law would have imposed a more serious punishment than the Lords did, and they got King George to declare, “It is with pleasure I reflect that the justice of Parliament had been so tempered with mercy, that even those who are resolved to be dissatisfied must acknowledge the lenity of your proceedings.”26

  After Gulliver tries in vain to reconcile Lilliput with its rival island Blefuscu, a stand-in for France, he is convicted of treason. The Lilliputian ministry then demands that he be put to death as painfully as possible, possibly by sprinkling his clothes with a poisonous juice that will make him tear his own flesh and die “in the utmost torture.” By the king’s generosity, however, a milder punishment is decreed. “Your friend the Se
cretary will be directed to come to your house and read before you the articles of impeachment, and then to signify the great lenity and favour of his Majesty and Council, whereby you are only condemned to the loss of your eyes, which his Majesty does not question you will gratefully and humbly submit to; and twenty of his Majesty’s surgeons will attend, in order to see the operation well performed, by discharging very sharp pointed arrows into the balls of your eyes as you lie on the ground.”27 The allusion to George I’s speech about lenity and mercy is unmistakable, but the effect is chilling even for readers who have never heard of the bishop of Rochester.

  CHAPTER 20

  The Irish Countryside

  SWIFT ON HORSEBACK

  Swift enjoyed riding, chose his horses with care, and generally traveled on horseback, whereas his friends preferred carriages. He loved to be in motion, and in Ireland he could pass in a short time from one kind of world to another. “I have often reflected,” he remarked, “in how few hours, with a swift horse or a strong gale, a man may come among a people as unknown to him as the Antipodes.”1

  When in Dublin, Swift took long rides on the broad sandy beaches, as he was doing when he had his confrontation with Lord Blayney. When he was away from town, visiting friends at their country houses or just commuting back and forth from Laracor, a servant with the luggage would follow on a second horse. On longer journeys there would be two servants.

  On his return to Ireland in 1714, Swift brought over from England a horse he had named Bolingbroke. The name may have been facetious, implying that if he could never get the man Bolingbroke to listen to his advice, he could at least control the horse. But this Bolingbroke too proved a disappointment. First he had to get over an illness, and even afterward, “he is very fat and well, but I hate riding him.”2

  Shortly after Christmas 1714, a contretemps occurred. A footman named Tom showed up late and drunk at a ferry where he was supposed to retrieve Bolingbroke. It was like Patrick in London all over again, but this time there was a rearing, uncooperative horse to deal with. Tom mounted the horse, rode him wildly into the sea, fell off, and started fighting when Swift and a couple of passersby tried to wrestle the bridle out of his hands. Eventually they succeeded and Tom staggered away.3

  58. Swift on horseback. A satiric print from a 1714 parody of the Tale of a Tub, showing Swift outside the deanery in his customary clerical gown. It’s not clear what is going on; a post boy is galloping off, blowing his horn, and a second clergyman is riding away.

  Swift was well versed in the elaborate equipment that horses required, and he also understood that these encumbrances were aggravating and made long training necessary. Among the rational horses, Gulliver says, “I described, as well as I could, our way of riding; the shape and use of a bridle, a saddle, a spur, and a whip; of harness and wheels. I added that we fastened plates of a certain hard substance called ‘iron’ at the bottom of their feet, to preserve their hoofs from being broken by the stony ways on which we often travelled.” His equine master reacts with “great indignation.”4

  To have a convenient place where his horses could graze, Swift leased a three-acre field and enclosed it with a brick wall nine feet high. Along the south-facing wall, which got the most sunlight, he planted fruit trees in imitation of Moor Park. The name he gave this plot was Naboth’s Vineyard, and the allusion is disturbing. Close to King Ahab’s palace, Naboth had a vineyard that he declined to sell because it had belonged to his forefathers. Ahab’s queen, the infamous Jezebel, solved the problem by bribing two sons of Belial to testify falsely that Naboth was a blasphemer, after which he was stoned to death. The prophet Elijah was then sent by the Lord to warn the king: “In the place where dogs licked the blood of Naboth shall dogs lick thy blood, even thine.”5 In adopting this name, Swift was alluding once again to bearers of false witness.

  Normally frugal, Swift could be extravagant once a project got going. He threw himself obsessively into this one, with much bullying of the workmen. “When the masons played the knaves, nothing delighted me so much as to stand by while my servants threw down what was amiss. I have likewise seen a monkey overthrow all the dishes and plates in a kitchen, merely for the pleasure of seeing them tumble and hearing the clatter they made in their fall.” The eventual cost of the construction was a staggering ₤600, and Swift told his Laracor curate that he had “half ruined myself by building a wall, which is as bad as a lawsuit.”6

  COUNTRY HOUSE GUEST

  Over the years, Swift grew accustomed to spending long visits, months on end at times, at the country houses of his friends. There were many of these, including the Grattans’ Belcamp close to Dublin, Knightley Chetwode’s Woodbrook in Queen’s County (renamed County Laois after Irish independence), Charles Ford’s Woodpark in County Meath, and Robert Rochfort’s Gaulstown, also in County Meath.

  At some point he wrote out detailed instructions for servants on the road. These were at least as detailed as his “laws” at the deanery. A servant should: ride no more than forty yards beyond the master; inquire along the way for the best inn at that day’s destination; attend to stabling and feeding the horses (not removing saddles and bridles until they cool down); stand by while a smith repairs any loose horseshoes; keep an eye on the dinner while it is being prepared; make sure the master’s room is well aired; look under the bed “lest a cat or something else may be under it”; dry any damp bedclothes before a fire; lay out the master’s belongings as they would be at home; sample the ale or wine to make sure it isn’t sour; keep track of all expenses; “learn to have some skill in cookery, that at a pinch you may be able to make your master easy”; wake the master up an hour before departure time; and pack his belongings, taking care “that no two hard things be together, and that they be wrapped up in paper or towels.”7

  59. Naboth’s Vineyard. St. Patrick’s is at the top, and Naboth’s Vineyard at bottom right, showing Swift’s fruit trees along two of the walls.

  In a poem called The Journal Swift related the events of a single day (the root meaning of journal, as in “diurnal”) when he was a guest at Gaulstown. It begins with his taking charge, as he could never resist doing:

  At seven, the Dean in nightgown dressed

  Goes round the house to wake the rest;

  At nine, grave Nim and George facetious

  Go to the Dean to read Lucretius.

  At ten, my Lady comes and hectors,

  And kisses George, and ends our lectures,

  And when she has him by the neck fast

  Hauls him, and scolds us down to breakfast.

  George and John Rochfort were the sons of the baron and his lady; “Nim” was so called in allusion to Nimrod, the great hunter of the Bible, and indeed Swift says that he “brings us hares when he can catch them.”8

  The day unfolds in a series of minor mishaps. Dan Jackson, a mutual friend, liked to fish in the thousand-foot canal that the baron had constructed, and Swift remarks that a really full account would relate

  How Dan caught nothing in his net,

  And how his boat was overset;

  For brevity I have retrenched

  How in the lake the Dean was drenched.

  There are too many guests for the modest size of the house, and some of them are extremely tedious. Years later, William Percival, dean of Emly, was offended when the poem was published and he came upon this account of himself:

  I might have told how oft Dean Percival

  Displays his pedantry unmerciful,

  How haughtily he lifts his nose

  To tell what every schoolboy knows.

  The wounded Percival published verses of his own in reply, denouncing Swift as an ungrateful guest:

  Sometimes to Gaulstown he will go

  To spend a month or two or so,

  Admires the Baron, George and ’s spouse,

  Lives well, and then lampoons the house.9

  Swift seems to have left Gaulstown abruptly without saying why, and when he got back to Dublin he told Da
n Jackson, “I had no mind to load you with the secret of my going, because you should bear none of the blame. I talk upon a supposition that Mr. Rochfort had a mind to keep me longer, which I will allow in him and you, but not one of the family besides, who I confess had reason enough to be weary of a man who entered into none of their tastes, nor pleasures, nor fancies, nor opinions, nor talk.” Rather proudly, Swift added an account of his return journey that confirms his remarkable stamina: “I baited [spent the night] at Clancurry, and got to Leslip between three and four, saw the curiosities there, and the next morning came to Dublin by eight o’clock, and was at prayers in my Cathedral. There’s a traveler.”10

  QUILCA

  The place where Swift stayed oftenest and longest, though he also enjoyed lampooning it, was a little house in County Cavan that the Sheridans called by the Gaelic name of Quilca. Both spouses came from Cavan, and Elizabeth inherited the house from her family. It stood by a boggy lake in the middle of nowhere, fifty miles northwest of Dublin and eight miles from the town of Kells, which Swift mentioned as “the nearest habitable place.” The surrounding area was known as the Great Bog, useless for farming.11

  Thomas Sheridan the younger called the house “as inconvenient a cabin, and as dreary a country, as could anywhere be met with.” In her illuminating book on Swift and landscape, Carole Fabricant says that he “seems to have had a love-hate relationship with Quilca; he was simultaneously attracted to and repelled by its unadulterated rusticity and primitive conditions, its severe climate, and its harsh, angular beauty.” He wrote from there, “I live in a cabin, and in a very wild country, yet there are some agreeablenesses in it, or at least I fancy so, and am leveling mountains and raising stones and fencing against inconveniencies of a scanty lodging, want of victuals, and a thievish race of people.” As always, Swift liked to take charge. It should not be assumed that he was actually doing the work with his own hands. The weather being too wet to go out on horseback, “I have been forced for amusement to set Irish fellows to work, and to oversee them.” It’s unlikely that the Irish fellows enjoyed leveling mountains and raising stones in the rain, which fell virtually every day that year from May through August. “The harvest was spoiled,” a Dublin official recorded, “and most of the fruit and vegetable productions of the earth.”12