Part 6

Swift, learning on this visit to England that the great are not always to be trusted by the proud and truthful, should have become finally aware that he was not a Whig, perhaps that he was not a Tory. As a churchman he stood not so much between the parties as above them both. “I should think,” he said in one of the pamphlets in which he stretched the muscles which the ministers would not let him use, “that ... to preserve the constitution entire in Church and State, whoever has a true value for both would be sure to avoid the extremes of Whig for the sake of the former and the extremes of Tory on account of the latter.” Arbitrary power he still hated and looked upon “as a greater evil than anarchy itself; as much as a savage is in a happier state of life than a slave at the oar.” Yet his passion was, as always, for order. The legislature, he thought, could not be placed in too many hands; the administration, however, not in too few. Sects might indeed be tolerated in a state, but “a government cannot give them too much ease nor trust them with too little power.” Order, as he understood it, was the consequence of virtue among the people, and therefore a higher concern than politics could reach to. It was the natural concern of the Church.

Like a churchman, like a magistrate, Swift proposed that manners be reformed by the advancement of religion. If the Queen should make stricter demands upon all who came near her, “morality and religion would soon become fashionable court virtues, and be taken up as the only methods to get or keep employments there; which alone would have mighty influence upon many of the nobility and principal gentry.” The example of the Court would go far to reform the town, and the town the rest of the kingdom. “How ready ... would most men be to step into the paths of virtue and piety if they infallibly led to favour and fortune!” Swift could even contemplate “something parallel to the office of censors anciently in Rome,” which in England he believed “could be easily limited from running into any exorbitances.” British Catos could reduce the vices of the army, the universities, the law courts, the public service, the press, the taverns. And the Church could provide the Catos if clergymen, ceasing to live so largely to themselves and with each other, would “make themselves as agreeable as they can in the conversations of the world.”

Nor did Swift stop with arguing soberly like a parson. He went on to irony, like a wit. He could not feel sure, he said, that Christianity had to be abolished, as the world thought. He meant, of course, “nominal Christianity, the other having been for some time wholly laid aside by general consent.” Nominal Christianity had its uses. It gave men a God to revile, when otherwise they might abuse the government. It furnished each parish with at least one person who could read and write. It kept ten thousand men so poor that they were healthy, and good for the breed. It set one day in seven aside for pleasure, extra business, gallantry, and sleep. It made certain kinds of behaviour, because they were forbidden, more enticing. It gave the vulgar various pleasant superstitions with which to amuse the children and to shorten tiresome winter nights. It sustained the spirit of opposition, of eccentricity, of fanaticism. However, Swift ended, if Christianity was to be abolished, so ought every vestige of religion for fear there might still be some restraint laid on human nature. Let freedom come, even though bank stocks might fall one per cent.

5

No matter what grave words he used, Swift had to set them to witty tunes. They came, it seems, so effortlessly that he undervalued them, overlooking them in the thunder of his will. He valued only what he did not have: influence at a Court he despised, power over men he hated. Addison could call him, for his wit, “the greatest genius of his age.” Swift wanted, as Addison had elsewhere rhetorically put it, to ride in the whirlwind and direct the storm. There was no help for his charging desire. His will was as truly his nature as his wit was.

Yet it was by his wit that he won his hearing, and from the coffee houses. While he waited, impatient, for a single minister to listen to his business of the First Fruits, he amused his idleness with a hoax that ran through the town like a scandal. He predicted, in a burlesque almanac, that the astrologer John Partridge, who was a cobbler as well as a quack, would “infallibly die upon the 29th of March next, about eleven at night, of a raging fever.” When the time came Swift no less circumstantially announced the death, though it had, he said, occurred four hours earlier than he had calculated. Partridge, still as much alive as ever, complained. The coffee houses laughed. There were other pamphlets on the hoax, in one of which Congreve had a hand. For more than a year Swift now and then worried his victim. Richard Steele thought the joke so good, and the name of Isaac Bickerstaff, which Swift used, so noted, that he made the imaginary Bickerstaff the apparent editor of the _Tatler_. Another of Swift’s hoaxes had a small success. Reading to the Countess of Berkeley, he had grown tired of the pompous commonplaces which soothed her in her favourite author, and had relieved his boredom by tricking her with a meditation which he had written upon a broomstick. Now the story got out, and the wits laughed at the trick and at the parody, which was seen in manuscript and may have been printed.

In both hoaxes the delighted wits felt not only Swift’s comic skill but the imperious insolence which lay behind it. Here was a man whose lightest words left a mark wherever they touched. Here was a learned clergyman who, as the _Tatler_ said, “writes very like a gentleman and goes to heaven with a very good mien.”

Much of Swift’s life during this stay in England was off the stage of the wits, nearer officials or drawing-rooms. When he first arrived he lived in Leicester Fields at the house of Sir Andrew Fountaine, who had been in Ireland with Pembroke and had found Swift the best pastime of that wilderness. Afterward in lodgings in the Haymarket, Swift might have letters sent to him at the St. James’s coffee house or at Steele’s office in the Cockpit, but when he was kept indoors, as he once was by broken shins, even Somers came to visit him. During 1708 he was a guest of both Berkeley and Pembroke in the country. After the hot summer in town he spent six weeks in Kent and at Epsom, where the Court then retired to drink the fashionable waters.

In town he was often--much too often for his future peace--at the house of Mrs. Vanhomrigh, the widow of a former lord mayor of Dublin, who had come to London about the same time as Swift. She had a daughter Esther, who claimed to be two years younger than she was, and to have been born, as she probably had not, on St. Valentine’s day. Through the Vanhomrighs, friends of Fountaine, Swift met other women, ladies of the Court, toasts of the clubs, whom he fascinated by his grave impudence. He insisted that each lady who desired to know him should make the first advances. When Anne Long, toast of the Kit-Cat club, protested and held out, Swift drew up a formal treaty of which the plain terms, with whatever circumlocutions, were that she must within two hours make “all advances to the said Doctor that he shall demand ... purely upon account of his great merit.” The lady yielded. Swift might be resisted when he worked, not when he played.

He had the further comfort that Stella and Rebecca Dingley were in England for a part of his stay. “Mrs. Johnson,” he wrote to Ireland, “cannot make a pun if she might have the weight of it in gold.” He did not introduce her to his new acquaintances, the one Esther to the other, any more than he told the world his moody secrets. Stella was his secret. Though he saw her in London and wrote to her after she returned to Ireland, there are no records of her in his letters except a mention of her dog. “Pug is very well, and likes London wonderfully, but Greenwich better, where we could hardly keep him from hunting down the deer.”

What came nearest to satisfying Swift in 1708 was Addison. When last Swift had been in London, in the winter of 1703-1704, he had been still unknown, and Addison, just back from his travels, had been, thanks to the bad fortune of the Whigs, in eclipse. Swift, leaving his satires behind him, had gone off to his banishment. Addison, writing a panegyric on Marlborough on account of Blenheim, had stayed to become famous over night. When now they met in February, Swift was still without any influence except that of his own genius, and Addison was an under-secretary of State. But there was no difference in their affections. Addison was seldom vain with Swift, whom he called “the most agreeable companion, the truest friend, and the greatest genius of his age.” Swift was seldom proud with Addison. “If,” he later wrote, back in Dublin, “you will come over again, when you are at leisure, we will raise an army and make you king of Ireland.”

They met like princes, with exchange of gifts. Swift gave Addison, along with Steele, some of his moral fury, which they tempered to moral irony in the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_, preferring to laugh, not scourge, virtue into fashion. Addison gave to Swift some of his smooth taste with which to revise the story of Baucis and Philemon which Swift had written in his gruff exile. Too proud to be stubborn about his verses, Swift, as he loosely said, let Addison “blot out fourscore, add fourscore, and alter fourscore” of the lines. The poem suffered, but Swift did not. He would, and did, write more smoothly if it were more pleasing to Addison. In time Swift came to be aware of Addison’s vanity and caution, but for months he had no reservations. Addison was Swift’s first equal friend. Temple had been his teacher, Stella his pupil, his friends in Ireland mere accidental comrades, the Whig lords and bishops too great to be easy with. Addison had wit, charm, learning, virtue, “worth enough,” Swift said, “to give reputation to an age.”

All the spring and summer of 1708 they often dined together, at different taverns, frequently with Steele or Congreve, with Ambrose Philips, Addison’s little Whig poetical friend, or with Robert Hunter, the friend of Swift who was going to be governor of Virginia and who threatened to make Swift his bishop in a country even more desolate than Ireland. But it was best when the two could, as Swift wrote to Hunter, “steal to a pint of bad wine, and wish for no third person but you.” When Addison went off to Ireland as secretary to Wharton, with a salary of two thousand pounds a year and a sinecure worth four hundred more, Swift, still without promotion or much hope, felt no envy. In Ireland, when he had gone there in June 1709, he buried himself with Stella at Laracor and left it for Dublin, with its abominable Lord Lieutenant, only to see Addison.

IV

MAN IN POWER

1

Fortune prefers to turn its wheel to the advantage of men with the talent for success, but now and then the geniuses, uncompromising, wilful, audacious, swing upward in the sun. A revolution of the wheel in London called Swift back in September 1710.

He did not know when he went what he was going to. He was almost resigned to Laracor and Dublin. “I never went to England with so little desire in my life,” he wrote to Stella the day after he landed. “I am perfectly resolved to return as soon as I have done my commission, whether it succeeds or no.” He had less hope as to the success of his errand, which again was the First Fruits, than the Irish bishops who this time had authorized him. Still, there was a chance. Sunderland and Godolphin had been shaken from their posts by an upheaval among the Whigs, and Wharton had hurried over to serve his party with his gift for wheedling and rounding up the voters. Other ministers might be more favourable to Swift’s embassy. Other friends might help him to promotion.

At London he found everything “turning upside down; every Whig in great office will, to a man, be infallibly put out; and we shall have such a winter as has not been seen in England.” It was already such a September as Swift had never seen. “The Whigs were ravished to see me,” he wrote within two days of his arrival, “and would lay hold on me as a twig while they are drowning, and the great men making me their clumsy apologies” for their former negligence.

But Swift had come into a new world of new men. Somers was about to be dismissed. Halifax had only his sinecure. Pembroke was in retirement. Wharton was to lose his place to the Duke of Ormond. Sunderland had given way to Henry St. John (later Viscount Bolingbroke) as principal Secretary of State. Godolphin had yielded the rank of first minister to Robert Harley (later Earl of Oxford), Chancellor of the Exchequer though not yet Lord Treasurer. The men of Swift’s old world were now able to do for him as little as they had been willing to do before. Only the hated Wharton “affected very much to caress” him. Somers was merely plausible. Halifax moved too slowly. Godolphin, whom Swift saw at once, was so “short, dry, and morose” that the suitor was enraged. On his third day in London Swift spent the evening at the St. James’s coffee house with a friend. “For an hour and a half we talked treason heartily against the Whigs, their baseness and ingratitude. And I am come home rolling resentments in my mind and framing schemes of revenge.”

In spite of the drowning Whigs, and in spite even of Addison, again in England and at first as affectionate as ever, Swift began to look towards the Tories. A week, and he was dining with his old friend of Kilkenny and Trinity, Francis Stratford, a merchant who, “worth a plumb,” was “lending the government forty thousand pounds.” Two weeks later, and Swift expected any day to be taken to Harley by one of Stratford’s friends, Erasmus Lewis, who was one of Harley’s favourites. “I am already represented to Harley,” Swift told Stella, “as a discontented person that was ill used for not being Whig enough; and I hope for good usage from him. The Tories dryly tell me I may make my fortune if I please; but I do not understand them, or rather, I do understand them.”

Halifax asked Swift to dinner at Hampton Court and “would have kept me tomorrow to show me his house and park.... Lord Halifax began a health to me today. It was the resurrection of the Whigs, which I refused unless he would add their reformation too.” The next night “after I had put out my candle ... my landlady came into my room with a servant of Lord Halifax, to desire I would go dine with him” the following day. “But I sent him word I had business of great importance that hindered me.... And today I was brought privately to Mr. Harley, who received me with the greatest respect and kindness imaginable. He has appointed me an hour on Saturday at four, afternoon, when I will open my business to him.”

Exactly a month after Swift reached London he handed Harley his memorial regarding the First Fruits. “Mr. Harley came out to meet me, brought me in, and presented me to his son-in-law ... and his own son and, among others, Will Penn the Quaker. We sat two hours, drinking ... good wine ... and two hours more he and I alone.” Harley read Swift’s memorial “and put it in his pocket to show the Queen; ... told me he must bring Mr. St. John ... and me acquainted; and spoke so many things of personal kindness and esteem for me that I am inclined half to believe what some friends have told me, that he would do everything to bring me over.... He has desired me to dine with him on Tuesday, and after four hours being with him set me down at St. James’s coffee house in a hackney coach. All this is odd and comical if you consider him and me. He knew my Christian name very well.... And now I am going in charity to send Steele a _Tatler_, who is very low of late.”

Swift, writing that night to Stella, thought that even the _Tale of a Tub_ might no longer be held against him, as he guessed it had been. “They may talk of the _you know what_; but, gad, if it had not been for that I should never have been able to get the access I have had; and if that helps me to succeed, then that same thing will be serviceable to the Church.”

Odd and comical, Harley, no more concerned about the bounty of the First Fruits than about the orthodoxy of the _Tale_, had set out to seduce the most lively and deadly wit in England. At the price of a thousand pounds a year, cut out of the Queen’s income, Swift would be a bargain for her minister.

The minister did not lag in his pursuit. On Tuesday, presenting Swift to Sir Simon Harcourt, the Attorney-General, Harley said he had broached the matter of the First Fruits to the Queen, and asked Swift to dinner on Sunday. On Sunday Harley said the Queen had consented to the grant. Matthew Prior, a better poet than Addison, dined with them. After dinner, when Lord Peterborough had come in, the talk shifted to “a paper of verses” on Godolphin which had just been printed. “Lord Peterborough would let nobody read them but himself; so he did; and Mr. Harley bobbed me at every line to take notice of the beauties. Prior rallied Lord Peterborough for author of them; and Lord Peterborough said he knew them to be his; and Prior then turned it upon me, and I on him. I am not guessed at all in town to be the author.” Lucky Tories, to blunder into such a moving compliment? Or wily Tories, used to poets?

There was some formal delay in the execution of the grant, but Harley was still, Swift wrote, “so excessively obliging that I know not what to make of it, unless to show the rascals of the other party that they used a man unworthily who had deserved better.” St. John, using Swift “with all the kindness in the world,” said he had never read anything so good as certain verses by the Tories’ new poet which Swift himself did not “reckon so very good neither”; and pleased Swift further by telling him that “Mr. Harley complained he could keep nothing from me, I had the way so much of getting into him.” Erasmus Lewis tactfully hinted that Swift, not quite comfortable at leaving his old friends, might save Steele his post as commissioner of stamps. Swift went to Addison, as the discreeter person, but “party had so possessed him that he talked as if he suspected me, and would not fall in with anything I said. So I stopped short in my overture, and we parted very dryly.... When shall I grow wise? I endeavour to act in the most exact points of honour and conscience, and my nearest friends will not understand it so.”

It was not in Swift to be patient. Two weeks later he inquired of Stella: “Why should the Whigs think I came to England to leave them? Sure my journey was no secret. I protest sincerely I did all I could to hinder it ... although now I do not repent it. But who the devil cares what they think?... Rot ’em for ungrateful dogs. I will make them repent their usage before I leave this place.” He had already begun to punish them. Before the end of October he had accepted the secret editorship of the _Examiner_, the Tory weekly which he edited, and wrote, until the following June, when, “my style being soon discovered, and having contracted a great number of enemies, I let it fall into other hands.”

The step cost Swift his Whig friends. In six weeks: “Mr. Addison and I hardly meet once a fortnight.” In another month: “I called at the coffee house, where I had not been in a week, and talked coldly a while with Mr. Addison. All our friendship and dearness are off. We are civil acquaintances, talk words of course, of when we shall meet, and that’s all.” Not even the great affection between the two could hold Swift to the Whigs. He had never been entirely a Whig, as he was not now entirely a Tory. He was a churchman, and the Tories had done for his Church what the Whigs had not done. He was hot for power, and the Tories had taken him into their councils, as the Whigs had not. At last he had found something better for him than hopes: work that seemed to him important, recognition that seemed to him his due. For the first time in his life his pride was asked to what he considered fit company.

Harley’s dinners were for Swift a sign that his fortunes finally stood beside his ambition. Nor was he required to argue for principles he did not believe in. The Tories were, it was easy for him to think, more truly than the Whigs the party of order in Church and State. When he had spoken his mind about the Sacramental Test a year before, the Whigs had turned away from him, as if he were a Tory, and the Archbishop of Dublin had written to ask “by what artifice did you contrive to pass for a Whig.” Perhaps he had been a Tory. He would be a Tory. It was enough for Swift, as it had been enough when he took orders, that he was assigned a post in a cause which he thought good. He gave to his cause all his passion, intensity, genius.

2

When Swift closed with Harley there commenced a chapter singular in history. No other man of affairs has ever made such use of a man of letters. At the outset Harley so misgauged his pamphleteer that after three months he could send him a banknote for fifty pounds. It was as if the squire had tipped the bishop. Swift was furious at “both the thing and the manner.” He returned the money, refused to dine with Harley the next day, and demanded satisfaction. “If we let these great ministers pretend too much,” he wrote to Stella, “there will be no governing them.” A week later, still unreconciled, he went to the lobby of the House of Commons, found Harley, and sent him into the House to call St. John, “to let him know I would not dine with him if he dined late.” The Chancellor of the Exchequer, soon to be Lord Treasurer, ran the errand to the Secretary of State for the vicar of Laracor. The next day Swift told Stella he had “taken Mr. Harley into favour again.”

On Saturday of that week Swift was asked to dine with Harley in the company of St. John and Harcourt, now Lord Keeper, and became a member of the group which, meeting every Saturday except when the Queen was at Windsor, informally concerted the government of the realm. Swift did not come humbly to this cabinet. “Lord Rivers was got there before me, and I chid him for presuming to come on a day when only Lord Keeper, the Secretary, and I were to be there; but he regarded me not. So we all dined together, and sat down at four; and the Secretary has invited me to dine with him tomorrow. I told them I had no hopes they could ever keep in but that I saw they loved each other so well, as indeed they seem to do. They call me nothing but Jonathan; and I said I believed they would leave me Jonathan, as they found me.”

Bullying, rallying, Swift took and kept his seat in their councils. Together they planned the steps that were to be taken to oust the Whigs, to get rid of the Duke of Marlborough, to bring about the peace. The ministers devised the necessary intrigues. It was left to Swift to master and direct public opinion with the _Examiner_ and with the pamphlets and lampoons with which he entertained, infuriated, aroused, and reassured the public.