Frequently remembered as the legendary Irish patriot who rallied his people against Robert Walpole’s corrupt English regime, Swift cut his teeth as a political writer – no other phrase seems appropriate – in the service of English administrations. Defending the nation against self-interested coffee-house factions, he proved a thoroughly partisan enemy of party and faction. Asserting that he understood neither party labels nor the passions they aroused, he represented himself as a judicious independent while allying himself first with the Whigs and then with the Tories. A brilliant polemicist, he crafted for general readers deeply interested in politics a body of writing that now tests the scholarly mettle of specialists in remote partisan squabbles.
No wonder Swift mordantly satirizes political writers in his great narrative satires. A Tale of a Tub savages hacks who write for rival factions, as he would soon do. Gulliver’s Travels opens when Lemuel Gulliver is thirty-eight, just a little older than the Swift who published A Tale of a Tub to impress potential Whig patrons and only a little younger than the Swift who began editing the Tory Examiner in 1710. In Gulliver’s perpetual surprise that self-serving pettiness dominates court politics, Swift surely recalls his own political naiveté. Since Gulliver too wants to eliminate party and faction, Swift as surely recollects his own vanity of authorship when Gulliver complains that “after above six Months Warning, I cannot learn that my Book hath produced one single Effect according to mine Intentions” (PW XI: 6).
Yet we cannot ignore the activity Swift viewed so ironically. Politics were too important to him, and he was perhaps too important to politics. In what follows, I suggest some continuities, quickly outline Swift’s turbulent career as a propagandist, and then consider two different ways of asking, “How can we read this writing?” Asked one way, the question means something like this: “What do Swift’s political tracts mean in their original partisan context?” This question provokes illuminating but contradictory answers that represent Swift as some kind of Whig or Tory. Asked another way, however, the question addresses not what Swift said but the fact that he was saying it: “What does it mean that Swift engaged in this activity?” In answers to this question, Swift looks less like a man apart, a turncoat or principled ideologue. He resembles other writers of his generation, the talented men and women who scented opportunity in the inescapable dissensions between Whig and Tory.
Three patterns recur throughout Swift’s career as a political writer. First, political convictions foster but also test personal loyalties. Whig or Tory, Swift offered his considerable writing abilities to an uncommonly literate older man of formidable intellect, a powerful minister who coordinated public opinion for his party, and he then befriended remarkably capable fellow writers. In support of the Whigs, he especially addressed John, Baron Somers, and although the ties did not survive his defection, he formed strong friendships with Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and other Whigs. In his Tory phase, his political “father” was Robert Harley (called Oxford after being elevated to the peerage as Earl of Oxford). His Tory friends included both the statesman and writer, Henry St. John (later Viscount Bolingbroke), and John Arbuthnot, the impressive man of letters who was the Queen’s physician.
Second, Swift always writes as a clergyman serving a state church of which the monarch is head. To most people that arrangement seemed essential to political stability. Although a few people had hoped, at the Restoration, for a church structure sufficiently loose to include most Protestants, the church “by law established” made few concessions to those it blamed for the Civil War. Firmly episcopal in structure, it created a group of dissenters, Protestants disenfranchised for their opposition to church government by bishops. To evade restrictions, a few dissenters qualified themselves for public office by sometimes taking communion in the Church of England (or Anglican church), a hotly contested practice called occasional conformity. Staunchly Protestant, the church also disbarred Roman Catholics from office, and when the Catholic James II threatened the Restoration political settlement by appointing Catholics to various offices, he provoked the Glorious Revolution of 1688, forfeiting his throne to the Dutch Protestant William of Orange and Queen Mary. In 1701, Parliament passed an Act of Settlement restricting the throne to Protestant heirs. (Loyalists to the Catholic Stuart heir, or Pretender, were called Jacobites from the Latin for “James.”) Since this arrangement was at once religious and political, charges of Popery or godlessness invariably accompany accusations of absolutism or republicanism. As Swift notes in Examiner No. 25 (January 25, 1711),1 Tories are routinely accused by their opponents of supporting “Popery, Arbitrary Power, and the Pretender.” Just as routinely, Whigs are accused of “Views towards a Commonwealth [republic], and the Alteration of the Church” (PW III: 69).
Third, Swift invariably adopts an Irish perspective on English politics. This is obvious in the opposition tracts he wrote in Ireland, but it is also true of the government tracts he wrote in England. For he served not the Church of England but the Church of Ireland; that is, the Anglican church established by law in Ireland. He went to London in 1707 as an agent of the Irish church whose task was to secure, through his political connections, the remission of the First Fruits for the Church of Ireland. These were church taxes which Henry VIII had confiscated but which Queen Anne had recently restored to the Church of England, creating a fund for poor clergy that was known as Queen Anne’s Bounty. The Church of Ireland wanted the same benefit. With him, Swift carried a visceral hostility to dissent uncommon among his English Whig associates. It was born of his early experience as a minister in the north of Ireland, where Roman Catholics were thoroughly subjugated but Presbyterian congregations flourished while the established church languished.
These continuities did not hold Swift on a straight path. He caught the eye of the great with A Discourse of the Contests and Dissentions Between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome (October 1701), an anonymous tract defending an out-going Whig administration impeached by a Tory House of Commons. Written “in a few weeks,” it missed its occasion when Lords Portland, Oxford, Somers, and Halifax were acquitted. Bolstered with a generalizing final chapter, it appeared while Swift was safe in Ireland and promptly ran through two editions. When Swift returned to England in 1702, he acknowledged authorship with “the vanity of a young man” (PW VIII: 119). He dedicated A Tale of a Tub (1704) to Lord Somers, publishing it when he had renewed hopes for his patronage. Writings courting Whig favor include A Famous Prediction of Merlin (1709) – a poem with a prose commentary – and his preface to the third volume of Sir William Temple’s Memoirs. In A Letter from a Member of the House of Commons in Ireland to a Member of the House of Commons in England, Concerning the Sacramental Test (1708), Swift expresses his Irish antagonism to measures sympathetic to Dissent as well as the commitment to the established church also evident in A Project for the Advancement of Religion and the Reformation of Manners (1709).
Swift’s powerful Whig friends did not secure the remission of the first fruits for him, however, and when he returned to England from Ireland in 1710, they were losing power. Received coolly by Lord Godolphin but courted by Robert Harley, the shrewd leader of the Tory majority in the Commons, Swift lampooned Godolphin in a poem, “The Virtues of Sid Hamet the Magician’s Rod” (October 1710). In November, Swift assured his archbishop that Queen Anne would extend her bounty to the Irish church. Recognizing that gratitude offered a surer hold than anticipation alone on Swift’s loyalty, Harley had secured his ally. From November 2, 17102 until June 1711, Swift edited The Examiner, a weekly Tory paper stating the ministry’s position for a readership of squires and rural clergymen. (For other audiences, Harley employed other propagandists, notably Daniel Defoe, coordinating his various writers to achieve his political ends.) Swift’s change of allegiance was complete.
As Examiner and then chief Tory propagandist, Swift elaborated a few themes in a series of brilliantly reductive essays. Exploiting contemporary anxiety about the growing power of speculative capital, he disparaged the Whigs as a subversive faction serving the treacherous forces of godlessness (dissent) and credit. He rallied support for the Tory government’s policy of extricating Britain from the War of the Spanish Succession, a protracted foreign commitment financed by land taxes and alarming levels of government borrowing. He insisted that avarice tainted even the Duke of Marlborough, a national hero for his spectacular military success. After a general early tract, The Sentiments of a Church of England Man (1711), Swift addressed particular occasions in a variety of forms. His masterpiece, The Conduct of the Allies (November 1711), questioned the integrity of England’s continental allies, exploiting English war-weariness to mobilize opinion behind the Tory policy of negotiating for peace despite allied resistance. It was anticipated or bolstered by A New Journey to Paris (September 1711), which defended poet-diplomat Matthew Prior; Some Remarks upon the Barrier Treaty (February 1712), which commented on an earlier Whig treaty; Some Reasons to Prove that No Person Is Obliged by His Principles as a Whig to Oppose Her Majesty or Her Present Ministry: In a Letter to a Whig-Lord (June 1712); and A Letter from the Pretender to a Whig-Lord (July 1712), which provocatively reversed the Whig association of the Tories with Jacobitism.
Swift was relentlessly partisan and staunchly pro-Harley. In Some Remarks upon a Pamphlet, Entitled a Letter to the Seven Lords of the Committee Appointed to Examine Gregg (August 1711), he insinuated that a Frenchman who had stabbed Harley was doing just what the Whigs wanted. Alarmed by a Parliamentary set-back, he criticized the Queen’s confidante, the Duchess of Somerset, in The Windsor Prophecy (December 1711), a mock-prophecy foretelling Whig defeat. He urged extreme Tories to tolerate Harley’s moderation in Some Advice to the October Club (January 1712). In two poems and a prose lampoon – “An Excellent New Song, Being the Intended Speech of a Famous Orator against Peace” (December 1711), “Toland’s Invitation to Dismal, to Dine with the Calves-Head Club” (June 1712), and “A Hue and Cry after Dismal” (July 1712) – Swift attacked the Tory Earl of Nottingham, who had voted with the Whigs against the Tory peace negotiations in exchange for Whig support for an Occasional Conformity Bill. In another poem, “The Fable of Midas” (1712), he again attacked Marlborough’s avarice. In A Letter from My Lord Wharton to the Lord Bishop of St. Asaph (July 1712), he mocked a Whiggish bishop by ironically impersonating the Earl of Wharton, a politician he disparaged in his History of the Last Four Years of the Queen (1713; pub. 1758) as “overrun with every Quality which produceth Contempt and Hatred in all other Commerce of the World” (PW VII: 10). (Since Swift despised Wharton as a Lord Lieutenant of Ireland more sympathetic to dissent than to the church, Irish animosities energize this English satire.) In The Importance of the Guardian Considered (November 1713) and The Publick Spirit of the Whigs (February 1714), he denounced the comprehensive dullness of his compatriot and former friend Richard Steele. Now Member of Parliament for Stockton, Steele was raising fears of a threat to the Protestant Succession.
In the dying days of the Ministry he served, Swift was rewarded with the deanery of St. Patrick’s, a place in the gift of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Many felt, as Swift did, that his services merited even more. Unfortunately, A Tale of a Tub’s apparent irreverence and The Windsor Prophecy’s attack on one of her intimates apparently determined Queen Anne never to prefer the ambitious champion of the Irish church who coveted English deaneries in her gift. In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift recapitulates his position as a bumbling servant punished for his unclean expedients: when Gulliver puts out a palace fire by urinating on it, he wins not gratitude but the Queen of Lilliput’s anger. This may be Swift’s most ironic comment on his brilliant career as a government propagandist.
But what does Swift’s political writing mean? Partisan discourse invites partisan readings, so we can first ask whether, or in what sense, Swift was a Whig or a Tory. It is hard to save appearances while rationalizing Swift’s political convictions, so rival answers of comparable authority compete for acceptance. In his incisive survey of Swift’s English political writing, F. P. Lock reads Swift as Whiggish by nurture but Tory by nature.3 An underlying rugged pessimism – the gloom of a Tory satirist?4 – emerges more clearly in Lock’s Swift as political experience abrades the Whiggish opinions common among the Irish Protestant establishment and cultivated by Swift’s former patron, Sir William Temple. According to J. A. Downie too, a brilliant scholar of Harley’s press strategies, Swift’s apparent inconsistency masks a profound consistency. Downie’s Swift is a crag unmoved by seismic shifts of the surrounding rock. Downie emphasizes Swift’s unease with political labels, his occasional references to Revolution principles, and his awareness that modern Tories resembled old Whigs: “I AM not sensible of any material Difference there is,” wrote Swift in Examiner No. 33 (March 22, 1711), “between those who call themselves the Old Whigs, and a great Majority of the present Tories” (PW III: 111). Downie’s Swift is an Old Whig, a supporter of principles of the Glorious Revolution. As Whig and Tory positions changed around him, he found himself neither Whig nor Tory in the terms of Queen Anne’s reign.5
Although these views command wide assent, other scholars are fomenting revision. Ian Higgins rejects both Downie’s sturdy Whig and Lock’s relatively comfortable Tory for a more radical Tory. Swift’s political writing commonly reacts to an immediate occasion, as Edward Said has observed,6 and Higgins sensibly distrusts any tidy fit between writer and party ideology. Despite their rhetoric, political parties are commonly coalitions addressing urgent challenges. A new challenge can divide such factious groupings on tactics or even principle. Certainly nothing fretted Swift more than the intense competition for power between two Tories, Harley and St. John.
Higgins privileges the brute fact that the authorities scrutinized Swift’s correspondence for signs of Jacobitism after the Tory ministry fell. They may simply have suspected his correspondents, of course, but so many of Swift’s Tory allies opened lines of communication with the Stuart Pretender in France that “Tory” meant “Jacobite” for a half century after the accession of George I. Evidence of Whiggishness for Downie, Swift’s reluctance to call himself a Tory could just as easily reveal Jacobite prudence: fearing prosecution for treason, any sensible Jacobite might do the same. Whatever configuration we conjecture for the bedrock, Higgins suggests, we can approach Swift’s writing only over the boggy ground of Jacobitism.7
Such contradictory readings form the most precise engagements to date with Swift’s political thought. Every reader of Swift’s politics must place him somewhere on this contested terrain. The Gilbert-and-Sullivan principle that everyone is naturally a Whig or a Tory provides scant comfort, however, for anyone disentangling the intractable political alignments behind the obvious antagonisms.8 John Somers and Robert Harley both came from dissenting backgrounds, and Harley like Swift began as a Whig but later found himself a Tory. Of course, Harley was a Tory politician who distrusted political parties, a Tory who could employ both Swift and the decidedly Whiggish Defoe. But that hardly makes the simple party label more illuminating. Political labels puzzled even contemporaries.
Named by their enemies for Irish outlaws, the Tories are often thought of as the monarch’s party. But in complex circumstances, a common “principle” can lead to opposed actions. While some Tories supported the royal prerogative to the point of becoming Jacobites, Hanoverian Tories like Swift staunchly supported the Protestant succession. Tories had overwhelmingly supported the 1701 Act of Settlement that established Hanoverian succession. Although “passive obedience” was widely regarded as Tory doctrine, many Tories felt, as Swift argued in Examiner No. 33 (March 22, 1711), that subjects owed their obedience not to the monarch personally but to the supreme legislative power, the compound entity sometimes called the crown-in-parliament. In The History of the Four Last Years of the Queen, therefore, Swift dismisses with real exasperation Louis XIV’s “absurd Notion . . . of a Divine Right annexed to the Proximity of Blood, not to be controuled by any humane Law” (PW VII: 150). Swift’s position is not obviously Tory, but Louis’ monarchist prejudice was impeding the peace the Tories were negotiating. From Swift’s point of view, the French were straining at a gnat the English had swallowed in 1688.
In the rough and tumble of parliamentary politics, Tories readily opposed the king if their other oxen were being gored. A Tory attack on William III’s exercise of his royal prerogative in foreign affairs, for example, provoked Swift’s Whig counter-attack, A Discourse of the Contests and Dissentions Between the Nobles and Commons in Athens and Rome. Although William had acted well within his rights, otherwise royalist squires resented both overseas adventures and peacetime standing armies – costly expedients that kept taxes high. Tim Harris argues from their shifts of stance that Stuart Tories were not primarily royalist and potentially absolutist. Rather, they were authoritarian, “conservative legal-constitutionalists, deeply committed to the rule of law and the Anglican Church.”9 In his view, even the Glorious Revolution, that touchstone of Whig principle, has a Tory cast!
Derisively named for Whiggamores, fanatically anti-papist Scottish Covenanters, Stuart Whigs too formed fluid allegiances. Nominally champions of dissent, Whigs were generally not hostile to the Test acts that discriminated against Roman Catholics as well as dissenters, and they had softened their original anti-episcopalian rhetoric after the Glorious Revolution, for bishops sympathetic to them found places in the church hierarchy.10 And though they nominally championed the authority of parliament or “the people” in opposition to royal tyranny and Popery, Whigs could align themselves with the crown, as Lord Somers did in a tract he wrote on behalf of the Junto Whigs after the House of Commons imprisoned five Kentish petitioners in 1701.11 A “Country” opposition to a patronage-based government could unite Whig representatives of town corporations with Jacobite squires. The elastic term “Whig” could describe any patronage-based administration, including not only the Whig Junto Swift defended and then defected from but also the durable Whig oligarchy headed by Robert Walpole. It could describe both nostalgia for a stern agrarian virtue grounded in an idealized past and a forward-looking mercantile ethos like Defoe’s, an ethos that associated political freedom with commerce, progress, and politeness. Indeed, the historian J. G. A. Pocock locates a tension between agrarian and mercantile elements at the heart of Whiggism.12 In brief, the terms “Whig” and “Tory” were each contested by mutually hostile and self-divided groups. Each encompassed an array of opinions too broad to fix the political positions of Swift or one of his contemporaries.13 Neither aligns cleanly with a modern political party or with one of the political impulses we loosely call radical and conservative.
Harris argues that contemporary factions divide most consistently not over royal authority but over attitudes to dissent. This division fractures both the gentry and the established church. Observing their opportunistic alliances, some members of the church treat dissent and Rome as the dual faces of a common foe. On this principle, Jack (dissent) is frequently mistaken for Peter (Catholicism) in Swift’s Tale of a Tub. Yet others solidly within the church sympathized with their persecuted fellow Protestants outside it, directing the loaded if hazy charge of Popery against practices within the Church of England as well as against Rome. Apparently cohesive groups like the gentry and the church are as self-divided as political parties.
Such tensions have led some readers to view Swift as an amalgam, a Whig in politics and a Tory in religion.14 In “Memoirs, Relating to That Change Which Happened in the Queen’s Ministry in the Year 1710,” Swift describes his political views in a way that might seem to support such an assessment:
I talked often upon this subject with Lord Sommers; told him, that, having been long conversant with the Greek and Roman authors, and therefore a lover of liberty, I found myself much inclined to be what they called a Whig in politics; and that, besides, I thought it impossible, upon any other principle, to defend or submit to the Revolution: But, as to religion, I confessed myself to be an High-churchman, and that I did not conceive how any one, who wore the habit of a clergyman, could be otherwise . . .
(PW VIII: 120)
Clearly aware that popular opinion aligned the high-church position with the Tories, Swift nevertheless avoids calling himself a Tory. Positioning himself as a high-church Whig who supports both pillars of the political settlement, he sounds remarkably like one of Harris’ conservative legal-constitutionalists.
Swift’s not uncommon position seems inconsistent only if we accept the political stereotypes Swift did so much to foster. Since negative advertising, as we now call it, is as old as the influence of public opinion on politics, Swift thoroughly derided the Whigs once he agreed to defend a Tory government to an audience of squires. He represented the Whigs as a narrow monied interest opposed to the stability of land, as if Tory landlords commonly spurned speculative profits. Since they often sympathized with Dissent, he further denounced them as godless. In Examiner No. 38 (April 26, 1711), for example, he slyly refers to “Those among the Whigs who believe a GOD.” In No. 34 (March 29, 1711), he insists, perhaps sincerely, that his political caricature is not “Satyr” but clear-sighted penetration into a faction’s designs (PW III: 140, 117). Yet Swift was just as prone to stark caricature, and just as hostile to dissent, when he wrote as a Whig. The stridency of the rhetoric on both sides betrays an impulse to polarize along clean lines a complex and consequently unpredictable political situation.
We find familiar, even reassuring, a bipartisan competition for political power that is mediated by public opinion. In the aftermath of a destructive civil war, however, many saw only a threat to social order in the fierce partisan quarrels that provoked so many tendentious pamphlets. In the early 1690s, an English merchant deplored England’s fragmentation: “The Kingdom of England is made up of Papists and Protestants. The Protestants are divided, and of late years distinguished by the name of Tories and Whigs.”15 Swift too lamented religious and ideological divisions. In his “Thoughts on Religion,” he wrote that “Every man, as a member of the commonwealth, ought to be content with the possession of his own opinion in private, without perplexing his neighbour or disturbing the public” (PW IX: 261). He so cherished this view that in Gulliver’s Travels he assigned a similar opinion to the wise King of Brobdingnag (PW XI: 131). Yet in London he joined a community of writers, men and women with more talent than income, who sought preferment by voicing political opinions. We must ask what it means that Swift engaged so vigorously in an activity he so distrusted.
This paradoxical situation was exhilarating. Parliament had allowed the Licensing Act to lapse in 1695 so that it could appeal to public opinion without first seeking a license to publish. In the resulting paper wars, rival pamphlets contested controversial issues, sometimes from politically radical or free-thinking positions. Since skilled writers found themselves in demand, the struggle to control opinion fostered a remarkably vibrant community animated by competitive emulation among the wits. Baron Somers and Robert Harley, the political leaders to whom Swift appealed, were astute managers who quickly grasped the possibilities of public opinion and organized writers to support their parties. The circle around Somers and the Whigs in 1708 included William Congreve, like Swift a graduate of Kilkenny College and Trinity College, Dublin. Congreve already had his brilliant theatrical career behind him, but Swift also encountered a circle of writers who, like him, were still making their names and their fortunes. They included Richard Steele, the poet Ambrose Philips, and Joseph Addison, with whom Swift formed an intense friendship. Addison shared his reserve but won Whig preferment with a deftness he must have envied.
Swift and Addison associated closely with Steele, whose Tatler (April 12, 1709–January 2, 1711) became the model for many subsequent eighteenth-century periodicals. Traces of the friends’ interaction include poems and hints Swift contributed to The Tatler, notably his “Description of the Morning” and the pen name “Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq.,” which Steele took from Swift’s papers mocking the astrologer John Partridge. When Addison traveled to Ireland in 1709–10 as Secretary to the Earl of Wharton, the new Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, Swift and Addison continued their friendship even though Swift resented Wharton’s sympathy with dissent. This is the level at which Swift’s shift of political allegiance to Robert Harley mattered. Although he violated no political principle dear to him, he achieved remission of the first fruits and gained the political influence he sought only by placing himself in opposition to his Whig friends. He tried to put these friendships above the political strife that had fostered them, but he failed. He long protected Steele, for example, although he eventually attacked him with his customary partisan ferocity: “you are to suppose a Lad just fit for the University,” he claims in The Importance of the “Guardian” Considered, “and sent early from thence into the wide World . . . He hath no Invention, nor is Master of a tolerable Style” (PW VIII: 5–6). Above all, he deeply regretted his estrangement from Addison, a consequence of political differences that grieved and bewildered both men.
Among the Tories, Swift found a similar community. Ironically adopting a view opposite to his own, as he so often did, he celebrates his new associates in Examiner No. 26 (February 1, 1710): “there is one Thing never to be forgiven [Harley]; that he delights to have his Table filled with Black-Coats [clergymen], whom he useth as if they were Gentlemen.” He adds that St. John “hath clearly mistaken the true Use of Books, which he has thumbed and spoiled with Reading, when he ought to have multiplied them on his Shelves: Not like a great Man of my Acquaintance, who knew a Book by the Back, better than a Friend by the Face, although he had never conversed with the former, and often with the latter” (PW III: 80). Swift so valued these friendships that he was slow to recognize the destructive rivalry between Harley and St. John. Unwavering in his loyalty to Harley, he was nevertheless fascinated by the charismatic St. John. Before making Swift his principal propagandist, in fact, Harley firmly reminded him who was in charge: he eased him from editorship of The Examiner for pursuing a line too close to St. John’s extreme Toryism.16
Notwithstanding its unavoidable strains, the union of literature with secular power in a community of wit gratified Swift’s deepest longing. In the John Bull pamphlets, a series of Tory tracts after Swift’s own heart, his friend and collaborator John Arbuthnot domesticated the War of the Spanish Succession as a ruinous lawsuit involving rural neighbors.17 In the same spirit, Swift would later literalize the issue of the standing army, presenting Gulliver in Lilliput as a one-man expeditionary force whose appetite threatened to bankrupt the kingdom.18 This stimulating combination of politics with play likewise attracted Alexander Pope, John Gay, and others who joined Swift, Harley, and Arbuthnot in the Scriblerus Club, the social and literary collaboration most often associated with Swift. When Harley’s ministry disintegrated, the friends were scattered but the friendships survived. Their collaborations and correspondence provide enduring records of personal ties formed and tested by the political trials of the day.19
Friends and antagonists alike grappled with a discourse that both fostered and fragmented community. Since they expressed solidarity in collaborative publications or found themselves unexpectedly opposed in print, their friendships were public as well as private. J. G. A. Pocock characterizes their discourse as inherently ambiguous:
Swift, Davenant, Defoe – to go no further – were found in differing company at different times of their lives; and . . . these changes of front are best explained not by attempting to assess questions of commitment and consistency, venality and ambition, but by recognizing that they were employing a highly ambivalent rhetoric, replete with alternatives, conflicts, and confusions, of which they were very well aware and in which they were to some extent entrapped.20
This uncertain ground has become familiar to literary scholars. Historians of the novel note that contemporary discourse oddly confounds news (narratives allegedly true) with novels (narratives apparently fictional). They relate such questions of truth to the status of inconsistencies evident when ostentatiously wealthy stock traders and merchants jostle with impoverished offspring of the gentry. They scrutinize the changing legal status of authorship within this baffling discourse. They scrutinize the links among the emerging amatory novella, female personifications of authorship, and conventionally female personifications of Lady Fortune and credit.21 After all, political writers like Aphra Behn and Defoe wrote the earliest novels, creating from this ambivalent public rhetoric the typically modern literary form that mediates between public and private selves. No wonder Swift parodies the new form so incisively in the first-person narrative he attributes to Lemuel Gulliver. The literary and political interpenetrate.
Educated in a common classical tradition, friends and antagonists shared the conviction that led Shakespeare to explore power in both English and Roman history plays. English writers assumed that classical history illuminated English history, just as ancient historians had assumed parallels between the histories of Greece and Rome. Swift adopts the parallel history in A Discourse of the Contests and Dissentions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome (1701). Although a modern editor notes that Swift distorts his evidence, Swift asserts, “I am not conscious that I have forced one Example, or put it into any other Light than it appeared to me, long before . . .”22 Since his distortions would be as apparent to his original readers, Swift is not being disingenuous. Gentlemen gradually and thoroughly acquired their classical learning not as a scholarly accomplishment but to illuminate the present by the light of the past. Similarly, the poets Rochester and Pope both imitate Horace by finding contemporary equivalents for ancient situations. Like his appeal to “a Sincere Roman Love of our Country,”23 Swift’s literary form locates him in the mainstream of English political debate.
Even Swift’s image of himself as a principled man independent of politics draws on a classical precedent. Cato the Younger, the Roman embodiment of incorruptible republican virtue, appears in the “Sextumvirate” of worthies Gulliver admires in Glubbdubdrib (PW XI: 196). He also inspired a pair of Whig masterpieces. Addison’s tragedy Cato (1713) was staged to associate the out-of-power Whigs with incorruptible virtue in exile, but Tories cheered too. In the 1720s, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon wrote Cato’s Letters to criticize the standing army and corruption, twin evils that seemed the two faces of a single evil. The South Sea Bubble, a devastating stock market crash that ruined many investors, had made the danger of a corrupt monied interest all too palpable. Swift parts from this Cato on attitudes to the church, but his Tory opposition to Walpole’s government shares a common idiom with Trenchard and Gordon.
The differences that divided Swift and Addison are consequently discursive, more literary and temperamental than ideological. In the battle between the Ancients and Moderns, Swift is an Ancient. Author of The Battle of the Books, he locates wisdom, virtue, and authority in the classical past, lamenting humanity’s subsequent degeneration. Firmly in the Whig camp that situates political virtue in the agrarian past symbolized by Cato, he identifies the political nation with the Tory squires to whom he addressed The Examiner. Addison, by contrast, is a Modern. He celebrates the cultural refinement that results from increased commerce, praising even credit. In The Spectator, he represents the political nation as a club. Mr. Spectator associates with both the country squire Sir Roger de Coverley and the eminent London merchant Sir Andrew Freeport, not to mention a member of the Inner Temple, an army captain modeled on Steele, and (occasionally) a clergyman conspicuously less truculent than Swift. As calculated for a political end as Swift’s Examiner, Addison’s Mr. Spectator relies on politeness to contain differences of class and conviction within a flexible, shared discourse.
Where Swift divides to conquer, that is, Addison incorporates in order to subdue. Swift brilliantly masters a demotic political style, but the Discourse betrays his congenital intolerance for wits slower or Latin shakier than his own. His vigorous English prose brandishes Latin tags with an aggressive exuberance that anticipates A Tale of a Tub. Inevitably, he reminds even scholarly readers how narrowly birth and privilege inscribe the charmed circle about those few who can properly rule – or who can write with any propriety about public affairs. By contrast, Addison, like Trenchard and Gordon, thoroughly domesticates Cato in English. He prefers the dialogue to the lecture, making even literary criticism a supple instrument for building social consensus.24 A gentlemanly discourse not confined to gentlemen, Addison’s style proves an ideal instrument for “the management of a system of public finance by a class of great landed proprietors.”25 Addison strategically blurs the social boundaries that Swift sharpens.
Swift and his contemporaries shaped and were shaped by the public sphere, the emerging social institutions and practices through which public opinion is created. These institutions include journals and periodicals, clubs and coffee houses, various combinations of political agents or booksellers with printers or even with the hawkers of anonymous broadsheets; in brief, everything associated with the dissemination and social reception of “information,” especially its public debate. These emerging institutions are no more neutral than the bipartisan politics that they eventually contain and legitimate. Flattering himself outrageously in Examiner No. 22 (January 4, 1711), Swift impersonates a Whig reader frustrated by the journal’s independence of party: “But nothing is so inconsistent as this Writer; I know not whether to call him a Whig or a Tory, a Protestant or a Papist” (PW III: 53). Unhappily, this pose of impartiality is itself a partisan ploy. However desirable an independent press might be, The Examiner was directed at a Tory readership by a Tory government.
Political leaders relied on writers to mold public opinion because parliamentary debates could not be published. The voices crying most loudly for public attention served a fierce, partisan competition for parliamentary power. The Addisonian exchange of ideas in a coffee house provides a gentrified model of this turbulent discourse. Swift experienced, and evidently relished, something more like the slanging match before an indefinitely postponed brawl. When ministries changed, even cabinet ministers feared disgrace and imprisonment. St. John fled to France when the Tory administration that Swift served finally disintegrated. Impeached for treason, Harley spent two years in the Tower of London before he was acquitted by his peers in July 1717. The writers who served them were more vulnerable still. Notoriously, Defoe had been pilloried and imprisoned in 1703 for writing The Shortest Way with the Dissenters. The charges against her were later dismissed, but Delarivier Manley, who replaced Swift as editor of The Examiner, had been arrested and charged after she published The New Atalantis (1709), a scandal romance satirizing powerful Whigs. Responding to complaints, the queen put a price of £300 on the head of the anonymous author of The Publick Spirit of the Whigs, which Swift had written for Her Majesty’s Government. Even a writer who polished the Speech from the Throne could face arrest for something he had written.
For a writer of modest means, the promise of power and preferment offset the known risks. Even hirelings paid by the piece – the anonymous, barely literate hacks satirized in A Tale of a Tub – could eke out a living by their wits. Writers who could catch the mood of the town could combine a decent living with the exhilarating exercise of power. Defoe and Manley won influence as well as money, and the rewards were still greater at the upper level represented by Swift and Addison. When Swift brilliantly impersonated Isaac Bickerstaff to make the astrologer John Partridge a public laughingstock, he was flaunting his power in a medium newly opened to his talents and thereby raising his market value. By remaining a Whig, his former friend Addison eventually became an Under-Secretary and then Secretary of State.
Swift frequently registers his ambivalence towards the contentious discourse within which he established his power and authority. When he dismissed the Whigs in Examiner No. 26 (February 1, 1711) as “a routed Cabal of hated Politicians, with a dozen of Scribblers at their Head” (PWIII: 78), he was himself the chief scribbler for a Tory administration. Long editor of The Examiner and still a propagandist, he sneers in The Importance of the “Guardian” Considered that “Mr. Steele publishes every Day a Peny-paper to be read in Coffee-houses, and get him a little Money. This by a Figure of Speech, he calls, laying Things before the Ministry, who seem at present a little too busy to regard such Memorials” (PW VIII: 12). For he scrupulously distinguished his own services from those of a lower order of hacks. Hence his insulting reference to Steele’s need for money or the condescending sympathy with which he elsewhere spoke of his ally Manley. As a gentleman, Swift did not work for pay and was offended when Harley, early in their association, offered him £50. However, he did hope that his powerful friends would acknowledge his considerable services by offering him preferment in the church. He wanted what Lord Peterborough called “a Lean Bishoprick, or a fat Deanery” in England (C I: 219). He became Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin – second best, but still a prize. Swift and his less fortunate associates were all propagandists, professional writers rewarded for perplexing their neighbors and disturbing the public with opinions.
However convincingly he impersonates and parodies political hacks, Swift reflects on the power of the press only locally. His History of the Last Four Years of the Queen reads like an apologia for the ministry he served. He inscribes an absolute boundary between Tory and Whig, disinterested landed virtue and self-serving venality. In The Conduct of the Allies, he strategically circumscribes public debate within narrow limits:
IT is the Folly of too many, to mistake the Eccho of a London Coffee-house for the Voice of the Kingdom. The City Coffee-houses have been for some Years filled with People, whose Fortunes depend upon the Bank, East-India, or some other Stock: Every new Fund to these, is like a new Mortgage to an Usurer, whose Compassion for a young Heir is exactly the same with that of a Stockjobber to the Landed Gentry. At the Court-End of the Town, the like Places of Resort are frequented either by Men out of Place, and consequently Enemies to the Present Ministry, or by Officers of the Army . . .
(PW VI: 53)
Swift brusquely dismisses the self-serving parasites who throng a locality as narrow as their self-interest. These stock jobbers, parliamentary placemen, and army officers profit when high taxes and reckless borrowing against anticipated revenues finance an expensive war. Swift identifies himself with the nation itself, which he embodies in the landed gentry whose estates can be beggared by unscrupulous usurers ready to lend money to spendthrift heirs.
Most characteristically of all, Swift here distinguishes voice from echo, his own speech from his enemies’ chatter. Swift’s religion can make modern readers uncomfortable. When he writes as a clergyman, he so often addresses inescapable duties, clerical prerogatives, or parish revenues. Yet he thought his church came as close as possible to the primitive church. The Protestant minister of the Church Militant surely confesses his conviction that he serves only the living Word. In politics, this conviction conferred Swift’s certainty but deafened him to the plurality of voices even within his own party. He seems never to have grasped that his colleagues’ differences of opinion – including the delays and disagreements with which Oxford and Bolingbroke greeted the manuscript of The History of the Four Last Years of the Queen – are themselves the very stuff of history. A brilliant parodist, he rejected the inevitable plurality of political discourse even as he mastered it. The voice of his nation, he attacked what he called faction with a partisan vehemence unsurpassed even in a vehement and partisan age.
1. I treat dates as if the year began on January 1 rather than March 25, or the so-called Old Style; for Swift, this date was January 25, 1710.
2. Originally No. 14 but numbered 13 in subsequent collections, which omit the original No. 13, Atterbury’s defense of hereditary right; see Frank H. Ellis (ed.) Swift vs. Mainwaring: The Examiner and The Medley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. lxx.
3. F. P. Lock, “Swift and English Politics, 1701–14,” in Claude Rawson (ed.) The Character of Swift’s Satire: A Revised Focus (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1983), pp. 127–50.
4. Louis I. Bredvold’s enduring phrase; see “The Gloom of the Tory Satirists,” in James L. Clifford and Louis A. Landa (eds.) Pope and His Contemporaries: Essays Presented to George Sherburn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), pp. 1–19.
5. The argument of J. A. Downie, Jonathan Swift: Political Writer (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984).
6. Edward Said, “Swift as Intellectual,” The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 78.
7. Ian Higgins, Swift’s Politics: A Study in Disaffection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
8. See the song that opens Act II of Iolanthe, Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan (New York: Modern Library, 1940), pp. 266–67, where the poles are Liberal and Conservative.
9. Tim Harris, Politics under the Later Stuarts: Party Conflict in a Divided Society 1660–1715 (London and New York: Longman, 1993), p. 119.
12. See J. G. A. Pocock, “The Varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform: A History of Ideology and Discourse,” in Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 215–310.
13. David Nokes, Jonathan Swift: A Hypocrite Reversed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 57.
14. See J. A. Downie, Jonathan Swift: Political Writer, p. 81; Swift, PW VIII: 120.
15. Thomas Papillon, quoted in Craig Rose, England in the 1690s: Revolution, Religion and War (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 63.
16. J. A. Downie, Robert Harley and the Press: Propaganda and Public Opinion in the Age of Swift and Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 137–38.
17. For John Arbuthnot’s political writings, see Alan W. Bower and Robert A. Erickson (eds.) The History of John Bull (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).
18. See Christopher Fox, Introduction to Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Fox (Boston and New York: Bedford Books and St. Martin’s Press; London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 5.
19. The scope and nature of these relationships is the subject of Patricia Carr Brückmann’s A Manner of Correspondence: A Study of the Scriblerus Club (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997); on backgrounds, membership, and actual meetings, see the introduction to Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus, ed. Charles Kerby-Miller (1950; reprinted New York: Russell & Russell, 1966).
20. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 446.
21. See Lennard J. Davis, “News/Novels: The Undifferentiated Matrix,” Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 42–70; Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), chapter 4; Brean S. Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670–1740: “Hackney for Bread” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Catherine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: A Culture of Paper Credit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
22. A Discourse of the Contests and Dissentions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome, ed. Frank H. Ellis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. 161–62, 116; this edition cited throughout.
24. See Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism: From “The Spectator” to Post-Structuralism (London: Verso-New Left Books, 1984), pp. 29–43; see also Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England, pp. 145–91.
25. Pocock, “The Varieties of Whiggism,” p. 218.