Dean Swift: The Politics of Satire

A Symposium on Jonathan Swift and the Politics in his Age

Conducted at The Deanery of St. Patrick's, Upper Kevin Street, Dublin 8, on 18 October 2003, with Dr Robert Mahony in the Chair

Swift, The Wild Boy of Hanover, and Queen Caroline

Christine Gerrard

[Christine Gerrard is CUF Lecturer on the Faculty of English at Oxford University and Tutor and Lady Margaret Hall.  She is the author of The Patriot Opposition to Walpole, 1725-1742 (OUP, 1994), Aaron Hill: The Muses' Projector, 1685-1750 (OUP, 2003), and Eighteenth Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (with David Fairer, 1999, 2nd edition, 2004). She is currently editing the first two volumes of Samuel Richardson's correspondence, a volume of Swift's political writings, and The Blackwell Companion to Eighteenth Century Poetry.]

 

In early March 1726, Swift set sail for England, full of anticipation. His visit was designed to do more than to catch up with his old Scriblerian friends Pope, Arbuthnot and Bolingbroke. He carried with him the manuscript of Gulliver's Travels, published by Benjamin Motte that October.  And he also came with a political mission. The recent success of the Drapier's Letters had made him a hero in Ireland and a redoubtable political player. During this stay in England Swift planned to seek audiences with important court and ministerial figures to advance the cause of Ireland and Irish economic affairs. In early April he dined with Robert Walpole, not, as some suspected, to negotiate for himself an English bishopric, but in order 'to represent the affairs of Ireland to him in a true light'.  The maverick Tory Bolingbroke, conscious of his friend’s new political stature, tried to recruit him to another cause – his new offensive again the Walpole ministry. Bolingbroke, alongside the dissident Whig William Pulteney, had just launched The Craftsman, a major propaganda tool in the war against Walpole, and hoped to persuade Swift to write for it .The opposition to Walpole found a focal point in the heir to the Hanoverian throne, George, Prince of Wales. Prince George, later George II, had long been at war with his father.  He and his wife, the clever and ambitious Caroline of Anspach, held high-spirited gatherings at Leicester House, their winter residence, an attractive focus for opposition politics. Leicester House became a magnet for the politically disaffected who hoped for an end to Whig oligarchy in the new reign. Out of office Tories and discontented Whigs were welcome there, as Prince George flattered their hopes that on the death of George I, he would dismiss Walpole and offer the Tories a share in power.

 

Swift was one of many drawn to the Hanoverian court-in-waiting, with its hopes of the 'reversionary' interest. Today I want to talk about Swift's complicated relationship to that court, particularly Princess Caroline and her lady-in-waiting, Henrietta Howard, also Prince George's mistress. Despite Bolingbroke's best efforts, Swift was less interested in participating in opposition politics than in using the royal connection to advance the Irish cause. He tried to inveigle Mrs Howard, and through her, Princess Caroline, publicly to champion Irish manufacture. He commissioned some Dublin weavers to make an especially fine Irish plaid or poplin, woven after the fashionable Indian manner, which he sent as a gift to Mrs Howard, hoping that the fashion would catch on at court.  To his delight Princess Caroline also wanted some - what better advertisement for Irish wares than to see Irish dresses worn by the numerous little princesses? ‘Are you determined to be national in everything', asked Pope, 'even in your civilities?'.  There were also deeper personal factors woven into Swift’s relationship with these two women. He was undeniably attracted both to Mrs Howard, a charming, witty woman, ‘a most unconscionable dealer’ who had learned the consummate courtier's art of knowing how to please, and to Princess Caroline herself, whose boundless energy, intelligence and sense of humour drew many admirers. Caroline could take a joke against her own husband. On reading Gulliver's Travels she 'laughed heartily' at the account of the hobbling prince in Lilliput, a representation of Prince George's ungainly efforts to keep a foot planted in both the Tory and Whig camps.  Princess Caroline's attentions flattered Swift’s personal vanity and revived his latent ambition for royal recognition and a superior living in England.  He enjoyed playing hard to get with the Princess, boasting that she had had to send for him eleven times before he would obey the royal summons. He described his exchanges with her involving 'Civility' on her side and a roguish 'Freedom' or familiarity on his own.  It is precisely this easy intimacy which he vaunts in his Pastoral Dialogue between Richmond Lodge and Marble Hill, in which the two houses, one owned by Caroline, the other by Mrs Howard, talk about imminent changes in their situation on the coronation of 1727. Swift depicts himself 'tattling' in the gardens with the future queen, 'stunning her Royal Ears with talking; / His Rev'rence and her Highness walking'.   

 

Yet Swift's attitude to courts and power was always deeply ambivalent.  Despite his early admiration for Queen Anne, he never forgot that, offended by his indecency, she had failed to reward him for his efforts promoting the Treaty of Utrecht: 'The Queen, a royal Prude / Incens'd by him, his services forgot'.  And Caroline, who belonged to an alien 'foreign' dynasty, was perhaps, despite her apparently good inclinations, to be viewed with greater suspicion. There is a teasing parallel between Swift’s relationship to Caroline’s court and that of another foreign ‘visitor’ who arrived in England the month before he did, in February 1726.  This was Peter, the so-called 'wild boy' of Hanover.  Peter, a feral child, had first been seized in a forest near Hamelen in Germany in the summer of 1724. Aged, at a guess, somewhere between 11 and 15, he was found wearing the remains of a shirt, living off raw vegetables, grass and sap. Alert and suspicious in the early days after his captivity, he was unable to speak and moved at times on all fours, like a dog.  In October 1725 he was sent to Hanover, then in February 1726 to London as a 'guest ' of George I's court.  His care entrusted to Swift's friend Dr Arbuthnot, the royal physician, by April Peter had become annexed to Princess Caroline's court. Swift recorded that

 

 … he is in the keeping of Dr Arbuthnot, but the king and court were so

entertained with him, that the Princess could not get him till now.  I can

hardly think him wild in the sense they report him. 

 

Peter created an enormous stir in England.  His 'freakshow' status, half-man, half-beast, made him one of the most celebrated 'rareties' flooding mid-18th Century London, second only to Mary Tofts, the woman who apparently gave birth to live rabbits.  He also fuelled contemporary philosophical debates concerning man's superiority to beasts, and the true nature of 'savage' or natural man - debates which inform Swift's own Gulliver's Travels particularly Book 4, with its account of the Houyhnhms and Yahoos.  Swift was fascinated by wild Peter, recognising a kind of kinship with him.  He recalled 'I was informed she [Princess Caroline] loved to see odd persons, and that having sent for a wild boy from Germany, she had a curiosity to see a wild dean from Dublin'. The parallels between Germanic and Irish 'wildness' are provocative. Swift is here, just for once, claiming to have imbibed some of the 'wildness' or savagery of the Irish.  Irish 'wildness' supplies a healthy antidote to court dependency and political sycophancy: the 'wild Dean' is the antithesis of the 'tame' Dean.  The 'taming' of Peter the wild boy becomes a trope for Swift's anxieties about his proximity to the new Hanoverian court.  Swift recognised in his comparison that Peter was a 'curiosity', one of the 'odd persons' or objects collected by Queen Caroline, who was acquiring a reputation as a virtuoso, or collector of arcana and rarieties - coins, shells, busts.  She 'took up' Peter just as she was later to 'take up' Stephen Duck, the untutored Wiltshire farm boy and poetic genius who became her tame grotto keeper at Richmond park.  Peter's relationship to the court was, at one level, one of humiliating dependence.  Prodded, measured and scrutinised, his wildness was gradually emasculated. Soon after the coronation of George and Queen Caroline in early 1727 the court seems to have tired of his novelty value: Peter was pensioned off to live with one of Caroline's chamber women and later with a farmer in Hertfordshire. His very limited acquisition, or perhaps reacquisition of language, marked him as a cast-off royal dependent.  Peter's neighbours in later years, the novelist Maria Edgeworth and her father, noted that he 'had all his senses in remarkable perfection', but could 'only articulate imperfectly a few words', in particular 'Ki Scho' [King George] and 'Qui Ka' [Queen Caroline], which words he always accompanied by an imitation of bells, which rang at the coronation of George II'. 

 

Yet some contemporaries viewed Peter in a different relationship to the court – not as a humble dependent, grateful recipient of the maternal royal bounty, but as a standing rebuke to courtly sophistication and decadence.  This was the tenor of at least five satirical pamphlets inspired by Peter’s presence at court. His 'wildness' becomes a sign not of barbarism, but of moral integrity and independence. The 1726 poem 'The Savage' describes Peter as an 'innocent and free' creature in danger of being contaminated by courtly vice. True 'savagery' - backbiting, treachery, cruelty - belongs to the 'civilised' world he encounters.  The liveliest of these pamphlets, It Cannot Rain but it Pours; or, London Strew'd with Rarities, was once thought to have been written by Swift's friend and Peter's mentor Dr Arbuthnot, but recent evidence points to Swift himself.  Its subtitle once again draws analogies between Peter and Swift, including among its promised descriptions of London 'rarities' an 'Account of the Arrival of a White Bear, at the House of Mr. Ratcliff in Bishopsgate-Street …  And of the Copper-Farthing Dean from Ireland. And Lastly, Of the wonderful Wild Man that was nursed in the Woods of Germany by a Wild Beast, hunted and taken in Toyls; how he behaveth himself like a dumb Creature, and is a Christian like one of us, being call'd Peter; and how he was brought to Court all in Green, to the great Astonishment of the Quality and Gentry.'  The pamphlet bears striking similarities to Gulliver's Travels. The depiction of Peter is politically loaded. An ironic foil to throw into relief the benefits of ‘civilisation’, Peter borrows elements of the Yahoo and the Houyhnhm. In a play on the Lockeian idea of the untutored mind as a tabula rasa, we are told that Peter 'receiv'd his first Impressions at Court: His Manners are, first to lick People's Hands, and then turn his Breech upon them; to thrust his Hand into every body's pocket; to climb over Peoples Heads; and even to make use of the Royal Hand, to take what he has a mind to … these are manifest tokens of his innate Ambition; he is extremely tenacious of his own Property, and ready to invade that of other People'.  Yet the mode of irony switches, and Peter becomes a 'naif' whose arrival at court becomes a catalyst for dissolute mores. The young ladies-in-waiting await his entrance with a frisson of sexual anticipation: but his 'being so young was the Occasion of the great Disappointment of the Ladies, who came to the Drawing-Room in full Expectation of some Attempt upon their Chastity: So far is true, that he endeavoured to Kiss the young Lady W---le, who for that reason is become the envy of this circle'. One recalls the young Brobdingnagian ladies-in-waiting 'playing' with a naked Gulliver. The fantasy of sex with a savage other highlight the sexual innuendo surrounding Princess Caroline's circle of pretty young ladies-in-waiting, a 'fast set' who had already earned a reputation for lewdness. Above all, Peter's 'naturalness' is a foil for court affectation. He acquires a primitive, figurative language which penetrates social facades: he calls a young lady a 'peacock', 'old women magpyes and owls', 'a beau with a toupee a monkey', 'blue, red and green ribbons [colours of the Orders of Merit] he calls Rainbows, an Heap of Gold, a Turd'.  Just like the Houyhnhms first encountering a clothed Gulliver, he at first believes clothes to be 'the natural skins of the creatures that wore them'.  Above all, Peter, like Gulliver on his return to England, prefers equine to human company: 'He takes vast Pleasure in Conversation with Horses … He expresseth his Joy most commonly by Neighing'. 

 

Which version of Peter – the ‘tamed’ court dependent or the ‘wild boy’ – did Swift opt for in the end? George I died suddenly and unexpectedly in Osnabruck on 12 June 1727, and Bolingbroke persuaded Swift to stay on England with a kind of breathy anticipation that everything was about to change, and that Swift was set to be given an English bishopric. But the splendid coronation which transformed Prince George to George II, and Princess Caroline to Queen Consort, dashed opposition hopes that Walpole would be replaced by a new administration embracing Tories as well as Whigs. Swift's hopes that Caroline might do something on behalf of Irish affairs, and for him personally, came to nothing.  He rapidly distanced himself from Mrs Howard, and his admiration for Caroline turned to an emotion far more bitter and intense than the indifference he feigned. In a letter to Gay, who had recently been offered, and declined, the lowly court of a post as Gentleman Usher to the two-year old Princess Louisa, Swift wrote 'I always told you Mrs Howard was good for nothing but to be a rank Courtier, I care not whether she writes to me or no, she may go hang herself, and so may her -->'  -- presumably 'Her Majesty'. The Verses on the Death of Dr Swift, written between 1731-3, finally published in 1738, harp endlessly on Caroline’s failure to reward him for his gift to her of Irish plaid. This small episode -- blown up to epic proportions in over sixteen lines of footnotes detailing the exact cost of the fabric, Swift’s refusal of payment, Caroline’s promise of a medal and her forgetting to give it to him -- points to his deep-seated grudge against royal ingratitude, as well as to a characteristic self-pity.   'Instead of Favour or Medals, [he] hath been ever since under her Majesty's displeasure'.  Swift imagines Lady Suffolk’s malicious, and Caroline’s brutally frank reaction to the news of his death. 

 

                        Kind Lady Suffolk in the Spleen

                        Runs laughing up to tell the Queen.

                        The Queen, so gracious, Mild, and Good,

                        Cries, "Is he gone? 'Tis time he shou'd.

                        He's dead you say; why let him rot;

                        I'm glad the Medals were forgot.

                        I promis'd them, I own, but when?

                        I only was the Princess then;

                        But now as Consort of the King,

                        You know 'tis quite a different thing".

 

And Swift returns the compliment in his satirical account of fawning court panegyrics, 'On Poetry, a Rapsody'. He starkly juxtaposes anodyne poetic fictions of royal immortality with the brutal physicality of an imagined, even wished for, royal death. 'May Caroline continue long / Forever young and fair - in Song. / What though the royal carcass must/ Squeezed in a coffin, turn to dust'.  Whereas Peter, the former ‘wild boy of Hanover’, retired uncomplaining to suburban obscurity, Swift, the ‘wild Dean’ of Dublin, refused to be tamed by any king, queen or court.   

 

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