Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

by Leo Damrosch

  Swift’s message was that since England was never going to treat the Irish fairly, their best hope of resisting exploitation was to boycott English goods. Even though they were prohibited from selling their cloth abroad, no one could stop them from wearing it at home. “Let a firm resolution be taken, by male and female, never to appear with one single shred that comes from England; and let all the people say, amen.” The italicized phrase is the conclusion of Psalm 106, which says a few verses earlier, “Their enemies also oppressed them, and they were brought into subjection under their hand.”11

  This was a voice the Irish public had not heard before, straightforward and persuasive, but with an undercurrent of controlled anger—and sometimes more than an undercurrent. “I heard the late Archbishop of Tuam mention a pleasant observation of somebody’s, ‘that Ireland would never be happy till a law were made for burning everything that came from England, except their people and their coals.’” In a sentence that was softened in later editions, Swift added, “Nor am I even yet for lessening the number of those exceptions.” The clear implication was that it might be a good idea to burn the English themselves. The anger was directed not against England only, but also against the Irish themselves for importing luxuries and contributing to their own exploitation. “I would now expostulate a little with our country landlords, who by unmeasurable screwing and racking their tenants all over the kingdom, have already reduced the miserable people to a worse condition than the peasants in France, or the vassals in Germany and Poland; so that the whole species of what we call substantial farmers will in a very few years be utterly at an end.”12

  The reference to “vassals in Germany” was a loaded one, since George I was a German and had vassals back in Hanover. And the publication of Swift’s Proposal was timed to coincide with celebrations for the king’s sixtieth birthday, when the privileged class would dress up in the imported finery that Swift was deploring. “I hope and believe,” Swift said with deadpan irony, “[that] nothing could please his Majesty better than to hear that his loyal subjects, of both sexes, in this kingdom celebrated his birthday (now approaching) universally clad in their own manufacture.”13

  This was a subject that Swift would be speaking out about for years to come—the crushing rents charged by landlords, many of whom lived in England and allowed greedy middlemen to skim off their own share. But the ultimate implications were far broader. He was helping to create a new national self-awareness, from which the Republic of Ireland would eventually emerge. “The pamphlet is written,” Orrery said thirty years later, “in the style of a man who had the good of his country nearest his heart; who saw her errors, and wished to correct them; who felt her oppressions, and wished to relieve her; and who had a desire to rouse and awaken an indolent nation from a lethargic disposition that might prove fatal to her constitution.” In 1947, Ehrenpreis mentioned to an attendant in the National Library in Dublin that he was working on a biography of Jonathan Swift. “Oh, yes,” was the reply, “burn everything English but their coal.”14

  The Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture was about economics, but it was about politics too. A recent legal case had provoked stern reaction from England. By the terms of Poyning’s Law, which went all the way back to 1495, the sole function of the Irish Parliament was to accept or reject bills that had already been approved by the English Privy Council. Now, in 1720, the Irish House of Lords had tried to reverse the judges’ decision in a lawsuit and were overruled by the British Parliament, which proceeded to pass a Declaratory Act stating that the kingdom of Ireland was “subordinate and dependent upon the imperial crown of Great Britain.”15 In addition to reaffirming the right of the English Parliament to legislate for Ireland, this new act made it the court of final appeal in law as well. At this stage of history, Irish independence was never considered by either side. What Swift and other Irishmen wanted was that their own parliament be recognized as equal in authority to the one in London. That was what the Declaratory Act denied.

  Irish resistance was based not on an appeal to fairness, which would have been ignored by England, but by a constitutional claim: ever since the Middle Ages Ireland had been a distinct kingdom within Great Britain, not a dependent colony like the ones in North America and the Caribbean. This argument was energetically stated by William Molyneux in 1698, in The Case of Ireland’s Being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England Stated. “Do not the kings of England,” Molyneux asked, “bear the style of Ireland amongst the rest of their kingdoms? Is this agreeable to the nature of a colony? Do they use the title of kings of Virginia, New England or Maryland?”16

  Was Ireland in fact a colony? The question is still debated, because it depends upon how one defines one’s terms. So far as the constitutional argument went, Molyneux’s case was pretty flimsy, which he no doubt knew. The historical claim was really just a rhetorical fiction, one argument among many that Molyneux deployed lawyer fashion in the hope that something might stick. In the past it might have made sense to see Ireland as an independent nation, though loyal to the British Crown. But with the emergence of modern politics, it was really the party in power that had to be obeyed, not the king in whose name it acted. The historian S. J. Connolly says that the argument Swift invoked was “a political blind alley, depending on a rigid distinction between crown and parliament that was already unrealistic in the 1720s.” He adds, “Few Irish Protestants shared Swift’s taste for pushing an argument to its confrontational limit.”17

  Still, the larger issue was that whatever the legal justification might be, England did indeed exploit Ireland. And whereas colonists in America were to a large extent self-governing, separated by months of sailing from the mother country, Ireland lay nearby and was easily micromanaged from London. In Connolly’s summary, it was “too physically close and too similar to Great Britain to be treated as a colony, but too separate and too different to be a region of the metropolitan culture.”18 Much more was thus at stake than correct interpretation of constitutional issues. Ireland was awakening to a sense of its existence as a nation, and Swift’s brilliant rhetoric was a major catalyst in bringing that about.

  The implications of Swift’s Proposal were not lost on the authorities, and a grand jury denounced the pamphlet as “false, scandalous, and seditious.” It was widely suspected that he had written it, but no one would formally denounce him, and the printer Waters was arrested instead. Swift described with relish what happened next: “After his trial the jury brought him in not guilty, although they had been culled [that is, chosen for their docility] with the utmost industry. The Chief Justice sent them back nine times, and kept them eleven hours, until being perfectly tired out they were forced to leave the matter to the mercy of the judge, by what they call a special verdict. During the trial the Chief Justice, among other singularities, laid his hand on his breast and protested solemnly that the author’s design was to bring in the Pretender; although there was not a single syllable of party in the whole treatise.”19

  The government soon realized that it was creating a martyr in Waters, and backed off. He was released from prison, and when a new lord lieutenant arrived he had the case dropped altogether. From this moment forward, the dean of St. Patrick’s would be a hero in the land he still claimed to despise.

  “HEWERS OF WOOD AND DRAWERS OF WATER”

  Swift’s four-month journey after Vanessa’s death in 1723 took in much of Ireland. He got as far as Cork and Skibbereen in the south and southwest, and Ennis and Clonfert in the west. When he said that he traveled “without one companion,” he must have meant “without one friend,” for as usual he didn’t travel alone. There were two servants with him, as we know from an alarming incident that he described to Delany. At Carberry Rocks on the south coast, he stretched out at full length to peer over a precipice, and suddenly began to slide forward, “which obliged him to call in great terror to his servants who attended him (for he never traveled, or even rode out, without two attendants) to drag him back by the
heels; which they did, with sufficient difficulty and some hazard.” The experience inspired an uncharacteristically romantic poem in Latin, Carberiae Rupes, on the steep cliffs and roaring waves.20

  The trip gave Swift a visceral understanding of how dreadful the poverty was in regions far from Dublin. In part the cause was natural; large areas of Ireland are rocky or boggy, ill suited to agriculture. But much of the suffering was due to a combination of incompetent management and cynical exploitation.

  Politically, the huge Catholic majority was victimized by the so-called Penal Code, which wasn’t really a code, but instead a series of repressive laws that were enacted over the years after the revolution. Catholics were excluded from the university, had no vote, and were not permitted to be lawyers, judges, or military officers. It was even illegal for them to keep a school, act as private tutors, or send their children to be educated abroad. The intention was to force them into Protestant schools, and as Lecky says, “The alternative offered by law to the Catholics was that of absolute and compulsory ignorance or of an education directly subversive of their faith.”21

  As a result of the Penal Code, most land was owned by Protestants, and Catholics could only lease it from them. If a Catholic did still own property, the law required it to be divided equally among his heirs when he died. As a result, the size of individual Catholic holdings continually shrank. The ultimate motive of the laws was to coerce Catholics to convert to the Church of Ireland. If they did so, their estates could pass intact to their eldest sons. There were many such prudential conversions as time went on. Edmund Burke’s father was a convert in 1722, while his mother continued to practice Catholicism discreetly. When Burke entered politics he became an eloquent advocate of Catholic emancipation, calling the penal laws a system “as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man.”22

  The Catholic Church itself was driven underground. Bishops, monks, and friars were banished from Ireland. Parish priests were permitted to stay—there were nearly nine hundred at the start of the eighteenth century—so long as they did not worship openly. Some bishops did return, operating undercover. The laws were not always strictly enforced; their real purpose was intimidation, and they succeeded in that. If anything, however, these repressive measures strengthened allegiance to Catholicism. By providing a common bond for a population deprived of political rights, the Catholic Church filled the role that politics normally would. As a historian says, it became for the people “the one representative organization they had.”23

  Throughout his journey in the south and west, Swift saw the consequences of these policies in neglected farms and miserable hovels. The plain of Tipperary, so verdant and rich today, was “like the rest of the whole kingdom, a bare face of nature, without houses or plantations—filthy cabins, miserable, tattered, half-starved creatures, scarce in human shape. . . . There is not an acre of land in Ireland turned to half its advantage, yet it is better improved than the people, and all these evils are effects of English tyranny.”24

  The same diagnosis appears in Gulliver’s Travels, where Lord Munodi invites Gulliver to visit his country estate. Along the way, Gulliver observes, “I never knew a soil so unhappily cultivated, houses so ill contrived and so ruinous, or a people whose countenances and habit expressed so much misery and want.” Approaching Munodi’s estate, however, “the scene was wholly altered. We came into a most beautiful country: farmers’ houses at small distances, neatly built; the fields enclosed, containing vineyards, corn-grounds, and meadows. Neither do I remember to have seen a more delightful prospect.”25

  This sounds very much like Swift’s perception of his friend Robert Cope’s estate at Loughgall, County Armagh, in the north, where he stayed in the summer of 1722. He wrote to Charles Ford from Loughgall, “The people, the churches, and the plantations make me think I am in England. I mean only the scene of a few miles about me, for I have passed through miserable regions to get to it.”26 Cope was a Tory member of Parliament who had been arrested as a suspected Jacobite in 1715.

  Even to call the peasant huts “cabins” makes them sound more substantial than they were. The walls were of sod or mud, and there were no windows, so that it was always dark inside. The roof would be thatched with bracken or heath, making the dwelling almost indistinguishable from the bog land around. There would be one single room, and a hole in the roof to serve as a chimney. It wasn’t very efficient, and one writer says, “The smoke was often seen to rise up like a cloud from every inch of the roof, percolating through as the thatch grew old and thin.”27

  The native Irish were often described, for example by the lord chancellor in 1706, as “poor, insignificant slaves, fit for nothing but to hew wood and draw water.” The allusion is to the Gibeonites, whom Joshua promised not to kill before he discovered that they were secret enemies. Obliged to honor his oath, he did the next best thing: he enslaved them. “Now therefore ye are cursed, and there shall none of you be freed from being bondmen, and hewers of wood and drawers of water for the house of my God.” Swift picked up the allusion bitterly in a sermon on “causes of the wretched condition of Ireland”: “The first cause of our misery is the intolerable hardships we lie under in every branch of our trade, by which we are become as hewers of wood and drawers of water to our rigorous neighbours.”28

  THE TRIUMPH OF THE DRAPIER

  Swift’s experience as a political pamphleteer in England had given him the rhetorical weapons that he was now ready to use. His six years of enforced silence, watching close friends persecuted or driven into exile, had embittered him against the land he once identified with so strongly. For years his mail had been opened by the authorities, and he knew that the Whig ministry in London sought evidence to prove he was a seditious Jacobite. He was spoiling for a fight, and what he needed was an issue.

  Swift’s call for a boycott of imports never got any traction among his countrymen, since it demanded an improbable commitment to self-denial for the common good. Similarly, the cruelty of rural poverty didn’t interest members of the Anglo-Irish landlord class, because they were helping to create and profit from it. A more promising issue would concern the condition of Dublin artisans and the national economy as a whole. In 1724 an obscure English industrialist unexpectedly provided the subject.

  The affair started with William Wood, an “ironmaster” in the English Midlands who produced and worked with metal. Wood paid the king’s mistress, the Duchess of Kendal, ₤10,000 to obtain a royal patent that would allow him personally to furnish Ireland with halfpence. There was nothing unusual about empowering a private citizen in this way, since the government minted only gold and silver. But copper coins, which the new halfpence would be, were not legal tender, and therein lay the crux. The value of coins was based on the metal they were made of, so that if they were melted down they would still be worth just as much. For this reason, coins from countries all over Europe were widely used, regardless of the governments that issued them. But if Wood’s halfpence were debased, he would get rich while bad money drove out good. As for paper money, governments didn’t issue that at all. Banknotes came from private banks, and people who accepted them had to rely on the good faith of the bank in question. Even the great Bank of England, founded in 1694, was a private company, although the government granted it wide powers. It was not nationalized until 1946.

  The crisis evolved with many twists and turns, too complicated to narrate here. Archbishop King and his associates realized that they needed a protest campaign, and they knew that Swift was highly skilled at publicity. Accordingly, Swift began to issue a series of pamphlets under the pseudonym of a cloth merchant who signed himself “M.B., Drapier” (Swift probably pronounced it “Draper”). The initials may have been an allusion to Marcus Brutus, the Roman patriot who brought down the tyrant Caesar, and whom Swift elsewhere praised for “the most consummate virtue, the greatest intrep
idity and firmness of mind, the truest love of his country.”29

  Swift’s cathedral was in the heart of the weavers’ district in Dublin, already hit hard by the Woolen Act, and now experiencing the effects of a deep economic depression. Skilled workers in his neighborhood were begging for bread. “We have got a fund [for poor relief],” Archbishop King wrote, “which I hope will amount to near fifteen hundred, but what will this be amongst so many?” The allusion was to the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, when the disciple Andrew said to Jesus, “There is a lad here which hath five barley loaves, and two small fishes, but what are they among so many?”30 By implication, it would take another miracle to rescue Dublin’s poor.

  Although Swift and King had not been entirely comfortable with each other until now, their common cause brought them to a complete rapprochement. Seventeen years older than Swift and a fellow graduate of Trinity, King was a man of high intelligence and absolute probity. The son of a tenant farmer, he had risen to eminence by his own abilities, which was highly unusual, and he was one of the few Irish bishops seriously committed to reforming the Church. By 1720 a mutual acquaintance was able to report to the archbishop of Canterbury, “The Archbishop and the Dean are now joined in great unity.” Swift especially admired King’s optimism. He once told King that the world was divided into “those that hope the best and those that fear the worst,” and that he himself was always in danger of falling into the second category.31

  In due course there were five long Drapier’s Letters, plus two others that were not published until later, and they fill an entire volume in Swift’s collected works. The first was addressed “to the tradesmen, shopkeepers, farmers, and country people in general of the Kingdom of Ireland,” and a sequel targeted “the nobility and gentry.” By posing as a cloth merchant, Swift could use a pithy, commonsense style to reach a wide audience. Before long it was widely assumed that he was the real author, but as usual he left no paper trail that could provide evidence for prosecution.