Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

by Leo Damrosch

  67. Archbishop William King.

  Historians sometimes assert that there was nothing wrong with Wood’s coins. It’s true that Sir Isaac Newton, who was in charge of the London mint, supervised an assay that found they had full value. But since Wood was allowed to choose which coins to submit for the assay, he naturally sent ones that would pass inspection. In Ireland, however, when four different lots of Wood’s coins arrived, they varied markedly in size and weight, and three were definitely debased.

  Other things looked suspicious, too. When private citizens were authorized to issue money, they were normally required to replace it with legal currency on demand. This stipulation was omitted in the patent granted to Wood. Furthermore, he was licensed to produce the astounding sum of ₤100,000 in copper halfpence, four or five times as much as Ireland could conceivably need, and a sure pathway to inflation.32

  Swift seized the opportunity to personalize the controversy by demonizing Wood. As Ehrenpreis says, “We are roused more quickly to hate a man than an idea.” For the most part Swift stuck to sober arguments, but there were characteristic flights of fantasy as well, taking expressions literally so as to make them absurd. Picking up on a report that Walpole “hath sworn to make us swallow his coin in fireballs,” Swift objected solemnly that unfortunately the project wasn’t practical:

  Now, the metal he hath prepared, and already coined, will amount to at least fifty millions of halfpence to be swallowed by a million and a half of people; so that allowing two halfpence to each ball, there will be about seventeen balls of wildfire apiece to be swallowed by every person in the kingdom; and to administer this dose, there cannot be conveniently fewer than fifty thousand operators, allowing one operator to every thirty; which, considering the squeamishness of some stomachs, and the peevishness of young children, is but reasonable. Now, under correction of better judgments, I think the trouble and charge of such an experiment would exceed the profit.

  In addition, if the halfpence ever got into circulation, they would depreciate so drastically that enormous quantities would be required: “They say Squire Conolly has sixteen thousand pounds a year. Now if he sends for his rent to town, as it is likely he does, he must have two hundred and fifty horses to bring up his half year’s rent, and two or three great cellars in his house for stowage.”33

  But, as Swift explained, it was perfectly legal to refuse Wood’s coins. The patent stated that his halfpence should “pass and be received as current money, by such as shall be willing to receive the same.” But that meant that no one who was unwilling to receive them could be forced to do so. “Therefore, my friends, stand to it one and all, refuse this filthy trash. . . . The laws have not left it in the King’s power to force us to take any coin but what is lawful, of right standard, gold and silver. Therefore you have nothing to fear.”34

  Swift’s reference to “Squire Conolly” was a deliberate taunt. As speaker of the Irish House of Commons, he was Walpole’s favored instrument in managing Irish affairs, and as chief revenue commissioner he had amassed an enormous fortune. Thought to be the richest man in Ireland, he was building a great mansion known as Castletown in Celbridge, very close to where Vanessa had lived. Since he came from a family in the west that had only recently converted to Protestantism, Swift regarded him as a parvenu and referred to him as a “shoeboy” who was “wholly illiterate and with hardly common sense.” By “illiterate” he meant ignorant of Latin. The Swifts, of course, were parvenus themselves.35

  Wood was stung into publishing a lengthy defense, which Swift contemptuously dismissed as “the last howls of a dog dissected alive.” As for Walpole, who was the real target of the Drapier’s Letters, he was slow to grasp what a mess had been created. Apparently he genuinely believed that the Irish were being obstreperous about nothing. At this point the English Privy Council escalated the crisis by bringing the underlying constitutional issue into the open. It ordered the Irish commissioners of revenue to accept Wood’s coins as legal tender, and the commissioners refused. The struggle now wasn’t just between Ireland and William Wood, it was between Ireland and England.36

  To bolster the Irish cause, Swift and his allies appealed to Molyneux’s Case of Ireland. The fourth of the Drapier’s Letters was addressed not to a particular class but “to the whole people of Ireland.” Invoking “the famous Mr. Molineaux, an English gentleman born here”—a description that Swift would have applied to himself—he declared, “In reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery; but in fact, eleven men well armed will certainly subdue one single man in his shirt. But I have done. For those who have used power to cramp liberty have gone so far as to resent even the liberty of complaining; although a man upon the rack was never known to be refused the liberty of roaring as loud as he thought fit.”37

  The lord lieutenant at the time was the clueless Duke of Grafton, whom Swift once described as “almost a slobberer, without one good quality.” Realizing belatedly that Grafton was no use, Walpole recalled him and sent over a much abler man, Lord Carteret, as his replacement. Swift greatly admired Carteret, who was an old friend, and Carteret in turn was anxious to defuse the crisis. He had to go through with a show of force, however. The Irish Privy Council declared the pamphlet treasonable and secured a vote to have the printer arrested, meanwhile announcing a reward of ₤300 for anyone who would establish the identity of the Drapier.38

  This was the second time a price had been put on Swift’s head, and as in London in 1713, no one betrayed him. A remarkable confrontation did occur, though. Robert Blakely, Swift’s butler, had been employed to copy out the Drapier’s Letters (so that Swift’s handwriting would not appear) and to deliver them to the printer. When Blakely stayed out unusually late one night, Swift feared that he had turned informer, and ordered the deanery doors to be locked. As soon as Blakely showed up the next morning, Swift ordered him to strip off his livery. “What, you villain,” he exclaimed, “is it because I am in your power you dare take these liberties? Get out of my house, you scoundrel, and receive the reward of your treachery!”39

  Stella, who was present, was greatly alarmed, and sent for Sheridan to intervene. Sheridan found Blakely in tears. “What grieves me to the soul,” he told Sheridan, “is that my master should have so bad an opinion of me as to suppose me capable of betraying him for any reward whatever.” When Swift heard this he not only restored Robert to favor, but offered him a position as cathedral verger, the assistant responsible for making services go smoothly. Robert replied that the greatest favor he could receive was to be allowed to continue as Swift’s butler.40

  The printer of the Drapier’s Letters, John Harding, courageously refused to provide evidence. A grand jury was impaneled to interrogate him, at which point Swift published an impudent pamphlet called Seasonable Advice to the Grand Jury, declaring again that Ireland was not a “depending kingdom.” Since it was illegal to try to influence a jury, this pamphlet too became the target of the investigation, which may be what Swift intended, since it deflected attention from Harding. But when the chief justice instructed the jurymen to find Seasonable Advice seditious, they refused. He then dismissed them and called for a new grand jury, which was exceeding his proper authority, and as Ehrenpreis says, “the farce dragged on.”41

  Swift decided to renew the attack yet again, in a letter addressed to Lord Chancellor Middleton. This time he signed the letter not “M.B., Drapier” but “J.S., Deanery House.” He held off on publication, however, until Archbishop King could show the manuscript to Carteret, who was working behind the scenes to make peace. They both warned Swift to drop the idea, and he agreed to keep the Middleton letter to himself. It didn’t appear in print until 1735, when the affair had long blown over.42

  In any event, there was no need for another volley. Walpole finally yielded to the inevitable and withdrew Wood’s patent. For once in his life Swift had achieved total victory. He told his friend John Worrall with satisfaction, “The work is don
e, and there is no more need of the Drapier.”43

  In later life Swift always remembered the Drapier episode as his pinnacle of success.

  Fair LIBERTY was all his cry;

  For her he stood prepared to die;

  For her he boldly stood alone;

  For her he oft exposed his own.

  Two kingdoms, just as faction led,

  Had set a price upon his head,

  But not a traitor could be found

  To sell him for six hundred pound.44

  The first ₤300 was the reward offered in 1713 for exposing the author of The Public Spirit of the Whigs.

  When Parliament assembled in Dublin in 1782, the patriot Henry Grattan declared, “I found Ireland on her knees; I watched over her with an eternal solicitude; I have traced her progress from injuries to arms, and from arms to liberty. Spirit of Swift! spirit of Molyneux! your genius has prevailed! Ireland is now a nation!” On another occasion Grattan said, “Swift was on the wrong side in England, but in Ireland he was a giant.”45

  When he addressed “the whole people of Ireland,” Swift may have been thinking primarily of his own Anglo-Irish caste, but he was honored by all as a hero fighting the common oppressor. A Bible quotation was widely repeated: “And the people said unto Saul, Shall Jonathan die, who hath wrought this great salvation in Israel? God forbid: as the Lord liveth, there shall not one hair of his head fall to the ground, for he hath wrought with God this day. So the people rescued Jonathan, that he died not.” Carteret’s secretary reported that this text “has been got by rote, by men, women, and children, and, I do assure you, takes wonderfully.”46

  Indeed, the Drapier’s message cut right across class and religious boundaries. King commented, “I never saw the kingdom so universally averse to anything as they are to these halfpence, from the herb women to the nobles.” And Archbishop Boulter of Armagh, Walpole’s handpicked representative, lamented to a member of Walpole’s cabinet, “People of every religion, country and party here are alike set against Wood’s halfpence, and their agreement in this has had a very unhappy influence on the state of this nation, by bringing on intimacies between Papists and Jacobites and the Whigs, who before had no correspondence with them.” Swift himself relished the irony by which “money, the great divider of the world, hath, by a strange revolution, been the great uniter of a most divided people.” From this time forward there were annual celebrations, with bell ringing and bonfires, to commemorate Swift’s birthday on November 30.47

  National hero though he had become, Swift continued to occupy a deeply ambiguous position, just as he had when he wrote The Story of the Injured Lady. In that little allegory, Ireland had been jilted by her En glish lover, but Swift himself belonged to the Ascendancy that did the jilting. And now, although he spoke for “the whole people of Ireland,” he had no interest whatever in emancipating the Catholic majority, who still spoke their own language and were loyal to their own religion. In much the same way, when Archbishop King referred to “the people of Ireland,” he meant Protestants; when he had Catholics in mind he called them simply “the Irish.” King wrote at this time to the archbishop of Canterbury, “The Protestants of Ireland are sensible that they have no other security for their estates, religion, liberty or lives but their union to England and their dependence on the crown thereof; and therefore, in all events that have happened since the Reformation, they have ever stuck close to it, and ever will and must, whilst there are six or seven Papists for one Protestant in it.”48

  William Wood landed on his feet, of course. In return for giving up his patent, he received a pension of ₤24,000. The Walpole administration was careful to manage this transaction in secrecy, and the funds—drawn from Irish taxes!—were issued to a nonexistent “Thomas Uvedale, Esq.”49

  68. Lord Carteret.

  A final echo of the affair does Swift honor. He had mentioned in passing someone named John Browne as belonging to “the race of suborners, forgers, perjurers and ravishers.” Browne later wrote to say that he was sure Swift’s intentions were good, but that he had been misled by false reports and had ruined Browne’s reputation. “The cause for which you undertook my ruin was the cause of my country. It was a good cause, and you shall ever find me of that side. You have carried it [that is, been victorious] and I know you will no longer be my enemy. But alas, sir, as long as your works subsist, wherever they be read even unto the end of time, must I be branded as a villain?” In the 1735 edition of Swift’s works the unkind reference to Browne disappeared, and a grateful Browne later erected a monument to Swift.50

  As for Carteret, Swift never blamed him for doing what he was required to do, especially since he did it diplomatically and was instrumental in resolving the crisis. Delany reports an occasion when Carteret was mounting a strongly reasoned argument and Swift exclaimed, “What the vengeance brought you amongst us? Get you gone, get you gone—pray God Almighty, send us our boobies back again.” Five years after Carteret’s term as lord lieutenant ended and he was back in England, he wrote prophetically to Swift, “As for futurity, I know your name will be remembered when the names of kings, lords lieutenant, archbishops, and parliament politicians will be forgotten.” And long after that, when he hadn’t seen Swift for many years, he asked a mutual friend to tell Swift “that he loved and honoured you, and so you should find on all occasions, and that he toasted your health.”51

  In his London days, Swift had looked down from above as a champion of those in power, the Tory ministry and the established Church. Now he was still defending the Church, but otherwise he was looking up from below. In the past, he could never have predicted that one day he would make himself the voice of Ireland. Yet he was discovering now that he identified strongly with his country. In the voice of the Drapier, he called Ireland his mother: “It is a known story of the dumb boy whose tongue forced a passage for speech by the horror of seeing a dagger at his father’s throat. This may lessen the wonder that a tradesman, hid in privacy and silence, should cry out when the life and being of his political mother are attempted before his face, and by so infamous a hand.” Yeats put it well: “Swift found his nationality through the Drapier’s Letters.”52

  CHAPTER 24

  The Astonishing Travels

  “COUNTRIES HITHERTO UNKNOWN”

  At the time he was writing the Drapier’s Letters, Swift was nearing completion of Gulliver’s Travels, his first full-length work since A Tale of a Tub. He intended it to be a major achievement, and he took his time, beginning in 1721, five years before eventual publication. “I am now writing a history of my Travels,” he told Ford, “which will be a large volume, and gives account of countries hitherto unknown; but they go on slowly for want of health and humor.”1 The first two of the four books were finished by the end of 1723, and the fourth early the next year. We know, incidentally, from an allusion in one of her letters, that Vanessa read the first two. Book 3, which probably incorporates some old material from Scriblerian days, was done in the fall of 1725.

  As the story evolves, Lemuel Gulliver sets forth on four sea voyages, first as a ship’s doctor and eventually as a captain. The voyages all end in disaster, each worse than the one before. First a storm causes a shipwreck; next Gulliver is abandoned by shipmates when a terrifying giant appears; then pirates board his ship and set him adrift in a small boat; and finally his own crew maroons him on what they assume is a desert island. Each time he goes ashore, Gulliver encounters remarkable inhabitants: miniature people in Lilliput; colossal ones in Brobdingnag; people who rule the territory of Lagado from a flying island above it; and intelligent horses called Houyhnhnms whose beasts of burden are apelike humanoids.

  Swift loved books of travels and owned numerous volumes, including the huge Elizabethan anthologies of Hakluyt and Purchas. Some of his books still exist, for example, a 1634 volume by Sir Thomas Herbert called A Relation of Some Years Travaille, through Divers Parts of Asia and Africke. Its glossaries are very suggestive of the languages Swift inve
nted for his own narrative: Choggee shoechoro whoddaw in Persian means “Well I pray God,” and bedil besar in Javanese is “a great torment.” But Swift was a critical reader. On the first page he wrote, “If this book were stripped of its impertinence, conceitedness, and tedious digressions, it would be almost worth reading, and would then be two-thirds smaller than it is. 1720. J. Swift.”2

  With Gulliver’s Travels Swift reached a new pinnacle as a writer, and he knew it. What exactly that pinnacle was is another question. In an era that often used the word invention where we would say originality, a commentator said it was “founded in the utmost wantonness of invention.” Pope did use “original,” telling Orrery that Swift’s writings were “absolutely original, unequaled, unexampled.” The book is usually classified as a satire, but it’s much more than that too—it’s a novel, and an antinovel, and a fantasy, with parody and science fiction mixed in. As he developed it, Swift must have felt as Robert Louis Stevenson did when he wrote Treasure Island: “It seemed to me original as sin.”3

  Critics tell us that Gulliver’s Travels can’t be a novel because Gulliver is sometimes shrewd but sometimes naïve, and because he learns very little from his experiences until the end, when he learns too much. They also point out that he is often a mouthpiece for Swiftian irony, earnestly praising European warfare and legal systems that Swift despised. Obviously it’s not like a novel by Jane Austen or Henry James, but that’s irrelevant. Novels like theirs hadn’t been dreamt of yet. When Steele mentioned “novelists” in 1710, he was referring to newspaper journalists, who report what is new and therefore novel.4

  The appeal of travel writing during this period was that it seemed to show that truth was stranger than fiction. In an age that valued factuality, voyagers were encouraged to describe wonders in a matter-of-fact way. Swift alludes to this expectation when he makes Gulliver say, “I could perhaps, like others, have astonished thee [the reader] with strange improbable tales, but I rather chose to relate plain matter of fact in the simplest manner and style, because my principal design was to inform and not to amuse thee.”5