Jonathan Swift (Routledge Revivals)

Political Writer

Alan Downie

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317605782
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Historia británica

First published in 1984, this biography gives an account of Jonathan Swift's political ideas and provides a critical commentary on his major works. With its emphasis on Swift as a political writer, the title offers a revision of the prevailing view of Swift's politics and its application in the study of his works. Alan Downie argues that in terms of the party politics of the day Swift is neither a Whig nor Tory. Swift thought of himself as an 'Old Whig', and said he was 'of the old Whig principles, without the modern articles and refinements'. Downie shows how Swift's writings consistently make political points about society's deviation from an ideal. As Swift's views on morality, religion and politics are so closely linked, an understanding of his political ideas is vital; this reissue provides a detailed analysis of this aspect of Swift's writings and views, and as such will be of great interest to any students researching his satire.

Part One

Days of Deference, 1667–1700

1

Infancy

Men do not usually invent stories to explain the circumstances of their birth. Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin on 30 November 1667. And yet, complaining that ‘all persons born in Ireland are called and treated as Irishmen, although their fathers and grandfathers were born in England,’¹ he would often deny that he was an Irishman. His friends were encouraged to think of him as an Englishman to such an extent that many of them, including Pope, ‘imagined him a native.’² But on occasion Swift would go further. ‘Sometimes he would declare that he was not born in Ireland at all, and seem to lament his condition, that he should be looked upon as a native of that country; and would insist, that he was stolen from England when a child, and brought over to Ireland in a band-box.’³

Swift made many claims about his birth and childhood which were only half true, or not true at all. He had been born in Ireland of an English father, thus it was, in his own view, ‘a perfect accident’ which led to his life-long association with Ireland,⁴ and he took great care to emphasise his English background, down to spinning romantic stories minimising his contact in his infancy with the land of his birth. Swift was a posthumous child, named after his father. The elder Jonathan Swift had emigrated to Ireland soon after the death of his own father, Thomas, vicar of Goodrich and rector of Bridstow in Herefordshire, in 1658. The country was ‘at this Time almost without Lawyers’, and so he took up a career in law.⁵ He married Abigail Errick in the summer of 1664, and a daughter, Jane, was baptised on 1 May 1666.⁶ And then he died, quite unexpectedly, some months before the birth of his second child.

According to Swift, his father was ‘much lamented on account of his reputation for integrity with a tolerable good understanding’,⁷ but this did little to ensure his mother’s immediate security. For financial support, Abigail Swift was thrust upon the charity of her late husband’s family. The elder Jonathan Swift had five brothers, three of whom – Godwin, William and Adam – lived in Ireland. Godwin Swift apparently received his brother’s widow into his family ‘with great affection.’⁸ But Swift’s early reliance on the kindness of his closest relations created a deep and powerful impression which coloured his adult outlook, and he regarded his parents’ marriage as particularly irresponsible, as it was

on both sides very indiscreet, for his wife brought her husband little or no fortune, and his death happening so suddenly before he could make a sufficient establishment for his family: And his son (not then born) hath often been heard to say that he felt the consequences of that marriage not onely through the whole course of his education, but during the greatest part of his life.⁹

Neither the Swifts nor the Erricks were native Irish families. Although, in the marriage register, Abigail Errick was described as a spinster of the city of Dublin, ‘about two Years after her Husband’s Death, [she] quitted the Family of Mr. Godwin Swift, in Ireland, and retired to Leicester.’ We are unable to verify the assertion that this was ‘the Place of her Nativity’, but the Errick family certainly hailed from that area, her parents emigrating to Ireland in or around 1634.¹⁰ However, Swift did not accompany his mother to England. As a baby, he had a wet nurse. Her presence was urgently required in Cumberland when he was about a year old, and so, instead of consulting his relations, she ‘stole him on shipboard unknown to his Mother and Uncle, and carryed him with her to Whitehaven, where he continued for almost [two erased] three years.’ When the abduction was discovered, Swift’s mother ‘sent orders by all means not to hazard a second voyage, till he could be better able to bear it.’¹¹

And so, if we accept the tradition of Swift’s kidnapping to be true, he was separated from his mother in his infancy, and it is uncertain when next he saw her. After about three years, he was ‘brought into Ireland by his nurse’, and ‘replaced under the Protection of his Uncle Godwin.’ Subsequently, ‘he was sent at six years old to the School of Kilkenny.’¹² If this is true, then Swift spent virtually the whole of his childhood away from his mother. While he was in Kilkenny, she was on the other side of the Irish Sea. Swift is at pains to show that he was not neglected by his nurse. She was ‘so carefull of him that before he returned [to Ireland] he had learnt to spell, and by the time that he was three years old he could read any chapter in the Bible.’¹³ In the normal course of things, when children were brought up in the custody of nurses, even a mother’s personal concern in her child’s welfare could be quite limited. ‘The behaviour did not appear odd, as no early biographer of Swift picked it out for special comment,’ Irvin Ehrenpreis pertinently remarks. ‘He himself implies that his mother’s conduct seemed normal to him.’¹⁴ But he did call the circumstances of his abduction ‘very unusuall’,¹⁵ and whether or not Swift regarded as normal his relationship with his mother, the modern reader will hardly fail to be conscious of its peculiarities.

Perhaps the story of his kidnapping was merely one more elaborate fiction of Swift’s old age to extenuate the fact of his Irish birth. True, he was peculiarly fond of merchants from Whitehaven, whom he regaled when they visited Dublin.¹⁶ And yet he was inconsistent in the telling of his own story, for on another occasion he hinted that he had been sent to England when a year old.¹⁷ Orrery suggests that the ‘extraordinary event’ of Swift’s sojourn in England ‘made his return seem as if he had been transplanted to Ireland, rather than that he had owed his original existence to that soil’.¹⁸ This is a reasonable assessment of the probable effect of Swift’s alleged kidnapping on his infant mind. But he had a happy knack of altering his recollection of the past to fit in with his current prospect of things. As he was content to stress on many occasions in his adult life, Swift’s genius was not that of the infant prodigy, and yet here he is reading any chapter in the Bible when no more than three years old. Age plays tricks with memory, and Swift appears, at the last, to have had difficulty distinguishing the facts of his early years from the fictions he assiduously cultivated in his correspondence and conversation, and this may well have been the case with the strange tales he told about his birth and childhood.

The England into which Swift sometimes claimed to have been born had experienced seven years of the rule of the restored Charles II. It is far from clear exactly what had been restored in 1660, but the effect of the Great Rebellion on Swift’s mind must not be underestimated. He preached remembrance ‘of that excellent Kind and blessed Martyr CHARLES I. who rather chose to die on a scaffold than betray the religion and liberties of his people, wherewith GOD and the laws had entrusted him’,¹⁹ and his controlling ideas are clearly indicated in his insistence on religion and law as the safeguards of the ‘common Rights and Privileges of Brethren, Fellow-Subjects, and even of Mankind’. ²⁰ Without the security of liberty and property, in Swift’s view, men were reduced to slavery, and he recognised, ‘from [his] Youth upwards’,²¹ the threat posed by an encroaching executive. Not only could ‘the rise and progress of Atheism among us’ be traced back to the consequences of the Great Rebellion, but the decline in the virility of the nation’s natural leaders, the aristocracy, was in large part a result of the shedding of the ‘noblest Blood of England’ in the king’s defence. Thus their progeny ‘either received too much Tincture of bad Principles from those fanatick Times; or coming to Age at the Restoration, fell into the Vices of that dissolute Reign’.²²

The consequences of the Great Rebellion, then, were, in Swift’s opinion, tremendously far-reaching, tending to the overthrow of all moral rectitude, and the destruction of the mixed monarchy of King, Lords, and Commons. As Algernon Sydney put it, ‘Liberty cannot be preserved, if the manners of the people are corrupted,’²³ and in the loss of religion and the degeneration of the natural aristocracy, Swift saw ample reason to fear for the safety of the ‘ancient constitution’ in Church and State. He believed implicitly in a Golden Age, and decried the ‘vile and false moral’ that it was ‘but a Dream’.²⁴ True, he felt that there was ‘not virtue enough left among mankind’;²⁵ that was the problem. His response was the traditional response to the satirist who is always looking over his shoulder to halcyon times when an idyllic, paternalistic society existed under the auspices of a morally upright land-based nobility. In explaining the causes of the Great Rebellion, Swift observed that ‘power, which always follows property, grew to lean to the side of the people, by whom even the just rights of the crown were often disputed.’²⁶ The resulting imbalance of power between the three components of the body politic – King, Lords and Commons – led to the outbreak of hostilities in 1642.

But the Restoration of Charles II indicated, at the very least, that the political nation had reached a consensus of opinion on the question of the structure of society. Prior to the civil wars, and after a measure of stability had been achieved under Cromwell, society had been hierarchical – and hierarchical it was to remain. This meant monarchy, for even this basic assumption had been threatened during the hostilities, and a figure-head was needed at the social apex. Sir William Temple observed, in his Essay upon the Original and Nature of Government, that the pyramid was the ‘firmest’ social model. Swift agreed. The narrowing of the base of society only led to trouble, and in 1660 the ‘usurped powers’ had enjoyed no broad foundation in the affections of the nation.²⁷

This was one popular view of the Restoration. In the 1640s the heterogeneous Levellers had brought the rights of the less well-off – those whose property did not consist solely of land – to the forefront of affairs, whilst the Diggers or True Levellers, through the writings of Gerrard Winstanley, had put forward a radical if totally ineffectual manifesto which was communist or even anarchist in spirit. Indeed the unspoken assumption that only the propertied had a voice in the nation’s affairs had had to be enunciated at times by confused and frightened men – a signal illustration of the various pressures being exerted on the social fabric. ‘When we speak of the people’, Marchamont Needham explained, ‘we do not mean the confused promiscuous body of the people.’²⁸ It would be worthwhile to reflect that, as we have seen, when Swift refers to the ‘people’ in his writings, he almost certainly had this sort of unspoken distinction in mind.²⁹

The electoral system provides a practical view of the hierarchical concept at work. Out of a population of around million in England and Wales, no more than 300,000 had the right to vote – perhaps one adult male in four had a say of any sort in the affairs of the kingdom. The deciding factor was one of property. It should be stressed that while social divisions were quite clear and well-defined, there was none the less a healthy degree of social mobility. Writing of the century after 1688, Geoffrey Holmes notes that British society ‘enjoyed the advantages of rock-like solidity without the disadvantages of petrifaction’.³⁰ Even so, the hierarchical model which had been confirmed by the Restoration was jealously guarded by the political nation under the banner of ‘Liberty and Property’. The lesson of the Great Rebellion – ‘he who practiseth disobedience to his superiors, tea-cheth it to his inferiors’ – had been learnt, and learnt well. The bloodless character of the ‘Palace Revolution’ of 1688 is indicative of this new circumspection. A monarch was necessary, but he could be replaced without jeopardising the very fabric of society.

Swift approved of this new-found wisdom, appreciating the dangers of instability. And yet, however imperceptibly, and however loath contemporaries were to admit it, the balance of power had changed in 1660; not, indeed, between propertied and unpropertied, but between King and Parliament, and this is what perturbed Swift. True, monarchy had been restored, but its powers had been imprecisely yet indelibly redefined. The Triennial Act of 1664 encouraged the calling of a new Parliament every three years. It points to a new attitude towards this hallowed institution. It was emerging from the Middle Ages, when it had been dependent on the whim of the King, and was beginning to wield its own very considerable authority. The religious settlement, for instance, was dictated by Parliament. The Act of Uniformity of May 1662, which established the Church of England by law, also defined the precise nature of the Establishment. The King no longer decided the character of the national faith. By the 1670s Parliament was demanding the exclusion of the Roman Catholic, James, Duke of York, from the line of succession to the throne. With the Glorious Revolution, the monarchy became Parliamentary in name as in fact, and an Act of Parliament settled the Crown in the Protestant line. Hereditary title had ceased to be sufficient recommendation. Although the relative position of King and ‘people’ had been largely undefined in 1660, the Great Rebellion had undoubtedly left its mark. Things could never be quite the same again.

Although Swift’s adherence to the concept of not only a hierarchical society, but also an Established Church, was beyond dispute, the balance of the mixed monarchy of King, Lords, and Commons was of great concern to him. He never denied the right of the people to settle the succession by law. But he was worried lest the weakening of the power of the Crown would unsettle the delicate balance which was so crucial to the well-being of the ancient constitution. This was the line of argument he pursued against the House of Commons in his first political tract, A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions between the Nobles and Commons in Athens and Rome, with the Consequences they had upon both those States, in 1701. For the state to avoid corruption, no one element could be allowed to predominate. For this reason it was imperative that, as in ‘all well-instituted States’, the executive and legislative powers were ‘placed … in different Hands’.³¹ But with the curtailing of the powers of the Crown, it was a question how long this vital check on the power of the executive would remain viable, and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Chronological Table
• Part One Days of Deference, 1667–1700
• Part Two Friend of the Great, 1701–1714
• Part Three Hibernian Patriot, 1714–1745
• Appendix I: Swift’s Reputed Marriage to Stella
• Appendix II: Swift’s Alleged Jacobitism
• Abbreviations used in the Notes
• Notes
• Index