Part 7

The political situation was intricate in detail but simple in outline. King William, Prince of Orange, had involved his adoptive England with his native Holland in the Grand Alliance with Austria against France. There had for years been a war and there was still a war, of which some of the English were very tired. The victories of Marlborough abroad, though gratifying, were hardly as regular as the taxes at home. The landowners, who tended to be Tories, had begun to wonder whether they were not paying taxes to help the bankers and jobbers, who tended to be Whigs, reap enviable profits. Glory was something, but it cost money. Men muttered in country houses that the Duke had been riding his whirlwind a long time. They had noted that Godolphin, who as Lord Treasurer had furnished the war chest, was father to one of Marlborough’s sons-in-law; and that Sunderland, Secretary of State, was a son-in-law himself. They had noted, also, that the Duchess, Mistress of the Robes and, it was said, mistress of Godolphin, did more than anybody else to make up the Queen’s mind for her. Civil affairs, hardly less than military, were in the hands of Marlborough, who notoriously wanted to be Captain-General for life. A little more, and England would be mortgaged to the Marlboroughs.

Such a prospect ruffled and alarmed the Tories. Marlborough, veering like Godolphin with the Parliamentary wind, had formerly called himself a Tory, but now called himself a Whig. The Whigs must share the blame for the prolongation of the war, for the increase in taxes and prices. All that was insular in England resisted this burden laid upon it for the possible benefit of the Continent. The Whigs had been kind to the Dissenters to gain their support in Marlborough’s enterprises. All that was orthodox in England resented this comfort given to the sects which threatened the unity and authority of the Church. Finding itself on the dizzy brink of altruism and liberalism, England had shrunk back in a passion for its good old virtues, its stout old order.

The change had not come of itself or from the disinterested conclusions of philosophers, but had been contrived and forwarded by Harley and St. John. Both of them had owed much to Marlborough, who in 1704 had approved of Harley for Secretary of State and of St. John for Secretary at War. Under the wings of that eagle they had plotted against his feathers. St. John had gifts of eloquence and manipulation which made him incomparable in the House of Commons. Harley, enough duller than his colleague to be more widely trusted, was adroit on the backstairs. Through his cousin Abigail Hill (Mrs. Masham), for whom the Duchess of Marlborough, also a cousin to the lady, had obtained a post in the Queen’s bed-chamber, his whispers reached his sovereign. Marlborough and Godolphin, becoming aware of a secret influence against them, had in 1708 traced it to Harley and had forced him out of the cabinet, along with St. John. Harley had continued to whisper. The Queen, resenting the constant pressure from the Duke and Duchess, observing the popular unrest, and still listening to the whispers, had been convinced that the Whigs threatened the peace of the State and the safety of the Church. From this had come the overthrow of the Godolphin ministry and the sudden rise to power of the Tories under the whispering Harley and the glittering St. John. It was policy to win to their side the wit whom they most desired to have with them and most feared to have against them.

The arguments put forth may have been suggested by any of the three men. Of the three, however, only Swift can be credited with the high scorn, the grave ingenuity of this polemic. It was he who, though he thought Marlborough “as covetous as hell and ambitious as the prince of it,” kept his friends from pressing the Duke too hard. Swift had the tact to be content with pointing out how much it was to the interest of the commander-in-chief to have the war go on. Public cynicism might be trusted to do the rest.

Nor did Swift use only arguments. He hit upon the most insidious illustrations, such as his contrast between the rewards of a Roman conqueror and those of the Duke. British ingratitude, Swift figured out, had already been worth something over half a million pounds to the British general. Roman gratitude, “which a victorious general received after his return from the most glorious expedition, conquered some great kingdom, brought the king himself, his family, and nobles to adorn the triumph in chains, and made the kingdom either a Roman province or at best a poor depending state in humble alliance to that empire,” would have amounted to less than a thousand pounds: incense, a sacrificial bull, an embroidered garment, a statue, a trophy, copper medals, a triumphal arch and car, and a laurel crown worth twopence.

Ingenious and insistent, Swift continued to pluck the same string until the public could hear no other note when it heard of Marlborough. After a year Marlborough fell, and the Duke of Ormond, whom Swift ranked next to Oxford (lately Harley) and Bolingbroke (lately St. John) among his friends, was put in command of the armies.

Towards the Whigs at large Swift turned an attention which was no less masterly. They were, for him, only a brawling faction, hungry for profits, and not more than a tenth of England. The Whigs, having made their fortunes at the expense of the majority, meant to go on making other fortunes, and would stop at no lying, no plotting, no uprising, no overthrowing which might serve their factious ends. At the same time, Swift would not admit that he was partisan. “We are unhappily divided into two parties,” he said, “both which pretend a mighty zeal for our religion and government, only they disagree about the means. The evils we must fence against are, on one side, fanaticism and infidelity in religion, and anarchy, under the name of a commonwealth, in government; on the other side, popery, slavery, and the Pretender from France.” Between these two extremes of Whig and Tory Swift seemed to take his stand. Or rather, again, above both. He was still a clergyman, who put religion first among his concerns. He was not a politician, but the conscience of politicians. He was the conscience of England, tight in its island, deep in its prejudices, contemptuous of ideals and metaphysics, plain, sturdy, obstinate.

No position was so natural for Swift to take, as no position was so effective with the voters. Oxford and Bolingbroke might work out of sight with their intrigues. Swift never ceased to keep the eyes of the world upon their main purposes. British purposes, for the sake of British interests, through the exercise of British virtues. The Revolution was achieved. The Succession was established. It was time now to make peace with the Continent and to settle down to a British destiny. The change must not be too precipitate. Swift wrote as firmly against the ferocious Tories, demanding all places instantly for their party, as against the ousted Whigs. His variety was in his art, not in his argument. He could abuse, ridicule, hoax, lampoon, in grim prose or easy verse. He could parade the accomplishments of the Ministry in sober pamphlets or could raise clouds of bright dust to hoodwink the opposition. But always he was Swift, looking down from his peak at the whole race of mankind, only incidentally and temporarily supporting Oxford and Bolingbroke.

Throughout the Oxford administration Swift was loyal, less out of need than out of love. When his associates, disregarding the Grand Alliance, made a stealthy treaty of peace with France; when, insecure in the House of Lords, Oxford got the Queen to create a dozen Tory peers who would know why they were peers; when England, at the treaty of Utrecht, took the largest share of the spoils though she had tricked and abandoned the allies: even then Swift loved his friends. Passionately loyal, he could be affectionately blind.

In Oxford’s thick skin Swift saw a stoic dignity, and in Oxford’s procrastination something not too far from a noble patience. “Regular in life,” Swift described the Lord Treasurer to the Archbishop of Dublin, “with a true sense of religion, an excellent scholar and a good divine, of a very mild and affable disposition, intrepid in his notions and indefatigable in business, an utter despiser of money for himself yet frugal, perhaps to an extremity, for the public.” Nor about Bolingbroke, libertine in thought and habit, would Swift be squeamish. He admired that “graceful, amiable person” and that mind “which was adorned with the choicest gifts that God hath yet thought fit to bestow upon the children of men.” It was true that the Secretary had been “too great and criminal a pursuer” of pleasures which could “by no means be reconciled to religion or morals.” But, Swift explained, “he was fond of mixing pleasure with business, and of being esteemed excellent at both; upon which account he had a great respect for the characters of Alcibiades and Petronius.” Could Socrates resist the charm of Alcibiades, or Seneca the charm of Petronius?

Swift, moralist that he was, was little less susceptible to the dissolute Secretary than to the decorous Treasurer. His affection covered them with its flood. Bolingbroke hated Oxford, and Oxford suspected Bolingbroke. There was harmony between them only for a few months, if so long as that. Yet Swift, by nature so misanthropic, by experience so wary, set out with them in what he thought was a fellowship of love.

Though he learned better, he remained, to the end of his great episode, somewhat at the mercy of his love. It was, of course, the corollary of his hate. Hitherto alone with his pride in what seemed to him a prison, he had been able to hate all those whose neglect had kept him there. Such companions as Stella and Addison had been only alleviating visitors. But now half the circle of his enemies had turned friends, and had entreated him to help them. They had taken him, apparently, to their hearts. They had let him, apparently, into their minds. They had given him a tiger’s share not only in the battle but in the command. Swift, all of whose emotions were profound, responded with emotions which were simple: gratitude, fidelity, delight in effort, ardent comradeship. He was so exultant at being delivered from his prison that he did not notice that he had been brought out to be harnessed.

Oxford and Bolingbroke must have smiled at his generous tribute to their virtues. Others did. When Swift wrote to Peterborough, then in Vienna, that the ministers seemed “heartily to love one another” and that they loved him too, Peterborough, who had been sent on an embassy to get him out of the way of the intriguing pair, sceptically wondered how Swift had come “to frame a system--in the times we live in--to govern the world by love.” Oxford and Bolingbroke did not trouble themselves over the excess of Swift’s affection, any more than they minded his arrogance. They were men of the stormy world, determined to get places and keep them. They worked for profit. If Swift worked for love or hate, that was his business. He was not, perhaps, as indispensable as the backstairs Mrs. Masham, but he could hurt the Whigs. They gave him all the room they could spare and applauded his blows.

Loving too much, Swift hated too much, as in his attack on the Earl of Wharton. “He is,” Swift said, “without the sense of shame or glory as some men are without the sense of smelling; and therefore a good name to him is no more than a precious ointment would be to those....

“He seems to be but an ill dissembler and an ill liar, though they are the two talents he most practises and most values himself upon. The ends he has gained by lying appear to be more owing to the frequency than the art of them; his lies being sometimes detected in an hour, often in a day, and always in a week.... He swears solemnly he loves and will serve you, and your back is no sooner turned but he tells those about him you are a dog and a rascal. He goes constantly to prayers in the forms of his place, and will talk bawdy and blasphemy at the chapel door. He is a Presbyterian in politics and an atheist in religion, but he chooses at present to whore with a Papist. In his commerce with mankind his general rule is to endeavour imposing on their understandings, for which he has but one receipt, a composition of lies and oaths; and this he applies indifferently to a freeholder of forty shillings and a privy councillor, by which the honest are often either deceived or amused; and either way he gains his point.... With a good natural understanding, a great fluency in speaking, and no ill taste of wit, he is generally the worst companion in the world; his thoughts being wholly taken up between vice and politics so that bawdy, profaneness, and business fill up his whole conversation.... As some vain young fellows, to make a gallantry appear of consequence, will choose to venture their necks by climbing up a wall or window at midnight to a common wench, where they might as freely have gone at the door and at noonday; so his Excellency, either to keep himself in practice or to advance the fame of his politics, affects the most obscure, troublesome, and winding paths, even in the commonest affairs, those which would as well be brought about in the ordinary forms or which would proceed of course whether he intervened or no.

“He bears the gallantries of his lady with the indifference of a stoic, and thinks them well recompensed by a return of children to support his family, without the fatigues of being a father.

“He has three predominant passions which you will seldom observe united in the same man, as arising from different dispositions of mind, and naturally thwarting each other; these are love of power, love of money, and love of pleasure. They ride him sometimes by turns and sometimes all together.... He was never known to refuse or keep a promise.... But here I desire to distinguish between a promise and a bargain; for he will be sure to keep the latter, when he has had the fairest offer.”

There was, Swift insisted, nothing personal in his remarks. “Whoever were to describe the nature of a serpent, a wolf, a crocodile, or a fox must be understood to do it for the sake of others, without any personal love or hatred of the animals themselves.” Nor would Wharton take it personally. “When these papers are public ’tis odds but he will tell me, as he once did upon a like occasion, that ‘he is damnably mauled,’ and then with the easiest transition in the world ask about the weather or time of the day.” And in fact, when Swift encountered Wharton at White’s chocolate house after the character was published, “Lord Wharton saw me at the door, and I saw him but took no notice and was going away, but he came through the crowd, called after me, and asked me how I did.”

This was, as Swift said, “not a humour put on to serve a turn or keep a countenance, not arising from the consciousness of his innocence or any grandeur of mind, but the mere unaffected bent of his nature.” Yet few moralists could have carried themselves more justly under such abuse. Wharton needed no philosophy in the circumstances. Experience was enough to tell him that Swift, accusing him of so finished, so universal a villainy, had blamed him for what was remarkably near a virtue. The victim himself looked brilliant in this glare of wrath. Swift’s hate, in its white-hot excess, had grown creative and had shaped a monster which had an insolent animal beauty along with its human vices.

But not all of Swift’s victims had Wharton’s whistling unconcern. There was the Duchess of Somerset, the red-haired Mistress of the Robes after the Marlboroughs had gone from Court. She had disliked Swift before he joined the Tories. With Lady Giffard, Temple’s sister, she had resented the final volume of Temple’s memoirs in 1709. It contained reflections on certain of the Whig lords, and Swift had published it. The Duchess, friend to Whigs, decided that he was “a man of no principle, either of honour or religion.” Swift, knowing this, perversely circulated a lampoon in which he called her “Carrots” and brought up the old charge that she had connived in the assassination of her second husband. The Duchess, who though she had reached a third husband at fifteen had had no other for nearly thirty years, never forgave Swift. More than any of his enemies, more than the Archbishop of York, who inflexibly held the _Tale of a Tub_ against him, she stood between him and the favour of the Queen. He might serve the ministers as only he could, but he could not become a bishop without the Queen’s approval. That, while the angry Duchess lived, he could not get. And the Duchess outlived the Queen.

More love than he needed, more hate than he needed: these were what hampered Swift in politics. He was impatient of craft, of what he called “refinements.” “Whatever may be thought or practised by profound politicians, they will hardly be able to convince the reasonable part of mankind that the most plain, short, easy, safe, and lawful way to any good end is not more eligible than one directly contrary in some or all of these qualities. I have been frequently assured by great ministers that politics were nothing but common sense; which, as it was the only true thing they spoke, so it was the only thing they could have wished I should not believe.” Swift did believe it. His whole instinct was to frame clear policies and go the straight way to work with them. In this he resembled statesmen of the first rank. But he lacked, what statesmen of the first rank have, the touch of dispassion in his passion. He trusted his friends more than they deserved, because they were his friends. He worried and tore his enemies, even when nothing was to be gained by it, because they were his enemies. Zealous for order in the state, he could not keep order in himself. He had the excess and disproportion of genius.

Nor did his defects reduce him merely to the second rank of statesmen. They reduced him to the third. In the second were Oxford and Bolingbroke. They were neither clear in their policies nor straightforward in their methods, but they had the patience of guile, the persistence of selfishness, the pliability of talent. Moreover, they were men of rank and fortune, and they were in office. If at first they were afraid of Swift, and then came to treasure his virtues, they also found that they could, by dividing his love and hate, rule him. After his hate had sent him out against their enemies, his love brought him back to their leash. Let him hold himself to be their conscience. They knew how to deal with consciences.

There is a record, written about October 1713, which painfully, almost shockingly, places Swift in his true relations with the Ministry. The scene is the Queen’s antechamber at Windsor.

“Dr. Swift was the principal man of talk and business and acted as master of requests. He was soliciting the Earl of Arran to speak to his brother the Duke of Ormond to get a chaplain’s place established in the garrison of Hull for Mr. Fiddes, a clergyman in that neighbourhood who had lately been in gaol and published sermons to pay fees. He was promising Mr. Thorold to undertake with my Lord Treasurer that according to his petition he should obtain a salary of two hundred pounds per annum, as minister of the English Church at Rotterdam. He stopped F. Gwynne, Esq., going in with the red bag to the Queen, and told him aloud he had something to say to him from my Lord Treasurer. He talked with the son of Dr. Davenant to be sent abroad, and took out his pocket-book and wrote down several things as memoranda to do for him. He turned to the fire and took out his gold watch, and telling him the time of day, complained it was very late. A gentleman said he was too fast. ‘How can I help it,’ says the Doctor, ‘if the courtiers give me a watch that won’t go right?’ Then he instructed a young nobleman that the best poet in England was Mr. Pope (a Papist), who had begun a translation of Homer into English verse, for which, he said, he must have them all subscribe. ‘For,’ says he, ‘the author shall not begin to print till I have a thousand guineas for him.’ Lord Treasurer, after leaving the Queen, came through the room, beckoning Dr. Swift to follow him. Both went off just before prayers.”

Painful and shocking to see a genius so happy in his business, when it was such small business to be happy in. This was not the carriage of a man who, for all his sporadic arrogance, would force great rewards from his patrons.

Throughout 1711 and most of 1712 Swift worked too hard and too exultantly to have much time for hopes. He wrote often to Stella of his return to Ireland. Ormond might give him an addition to Laracor. He might get a Dublin parish. When Peterborough talked of bishops and deans Swift said his highest ambition was “to live in England, and with a competency to support me with honour.” It was nearly enough to be able to advance his friends. The ministers declared that Swift never came to them without a Whig in his sleeve.

But by the third winter of his power he had begun to starve on his diet of promises. The rumour that he had been made dean of Wells, when he had not, fretted him. The deaneries of Ely and Lichfield were vacant to no advantage of his. The Ministry must, he grumbled through the winter, do something for him or he would go back to Laracor. In January 1713 he wrote to Oxford: “I most humbly beg leave to inform your Lordship that the dean of Wells died this morning at one o’clock. I entirely submit my poor fortunes to your Lordship.” And Bolingbroke wrote to Swift with a rhythmic unction: “Though I have not seen you I did not fail to write to Lord Treasurer. _Non tua res agitur_, dear Jonathan. It is the Treasurer’s cause; it is my cause; it is every man’s cause who is embarked in our bottom. Depend upon it that I never will neglect any opportunity of showing that true esteem, that sincere affection and honest friendship for you which fill the breast of your faithful servant.”

It was a ministerial vow. That same month the bishopric of Hereford was filled, but not by Swift. In April, when the treaty of Utrecht had at last been signed and Swift considered his work done, there were vacant preferments on every tree: in England the deaneries of Wells, Ely, and Lichfield and the canonry of Windsor; in Ireland the bishoprics of Raphoe and Dromore. Not one of them fell to Swift. Oxford shuffled. Bolingbroke had Swift to dinner. The Archbishop of York shook his head. The Duchess of Somerset hissed. The Queen held out. She would not have Swift a dean or canon in England, or a bishop anywhere. Help came from the Duke of Ormond. If the present dean of St. Patrick’s in Dublin might be made Bishop of Dromore, Swift could have that deanery. The Queen consented.

Oxford suddenly became eager to keep Swift in England. Let him be prebendary of Windsor. “Thus,” wrote Swift, “he perplexes things. I expect neither. But I confess, as much as I love England, I am so angry at this treatment that if I had my choice I would rather have St. Patrick’s.” Did he remember that his old friend Robert Hunter, now governor of New York, had lately written that he wished Swift could come to be bishop there? No matter. The appointment was patched up, and Swift became, as he was to be for the rest of his life, the Dean of St. Patrick’s.

“All that the Court or Ministry did for me was to let me choose my station in the country where I am banished.” He was not even allowed to become Historiographer, to chronicle the reign which he no longer influenced.