Swift, Utrecht and Ireland

34Eighteenth-Century Ireland 30 (2015)

Swift, Utrecht and Ireland

MATTHEW GERTKEN

Swift’s foreign policy is a topic rarely given concentrated treatment and generally assumed to be limited to his advocacy of the peace policy pursued

by Oxford and Bolingbroke culminating in the Treaties of Utrecht.1 But he was not silent on the subject prior to meeting Oxford and joining the Tories in 1710. His early writings, as we will see, suggest that he held a fairly typical Anglo-Irish Whig perspective on foreign policy down to around 1708-9, when he started to contemplate something different as part of a general drift away from the Whigs due primarily to their tolerationist church policies.

Swift’s initial stance can be assessed by reference to his first major prose work, A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome, with the Consequences they had upon both those States (1701).2 While most scholars recognize the centrality of balance of power to this work, few have examined the international application of that principle, and

* An early version of this paper was presented to the Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society at its conference on ‘Ireland and Geopolitics’ for the tercentenary of the Treaty of Utrecht, NUI Maynooth, Ireland, June 8, 2013. I would like to express my gratitude to the ECIS, the University of Texas at Austin, the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Dr. Christopher Fox and Professor Ian McBride for their generous support.

1 The main studies are Jeremy Black, ‘Swift and Foreign Policy Revisited’, in Reading Swift: Papers from the Second Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift, ed. by Richard H. Rodino and Hermann J. Real (Munich, 1993), pp. 61-70; J. A. Downie, ‘The Conduct of the Allies: The Question of Influence’, in The Art of Jonathan Swift, ed. by Clive T. Probyn (New York, 1978), pp. 108-28; Angus Ross, ‘The Grand Question Debated’: Swift on Peace and War’, in Swift: The Enigmatic Dean: Festschrift for Hermann Josef Real, ed. by Rudolf Freiburg et al (Tübingen, 1998), pp. 247-62; Heinz-Joachim Müllenbrock, The Culture of Contention: A Rhetorical Analysis of the Public Controversy about the Ending of the War of the Spanish Succession, 1710-13 (Munich, 1997), pp. 85-114; Hermann J. Real, ‘‘The Most Fateful Piece Swift Ever Wrote’: The Windsor Prophecy,’ Swift Studies 9 (1994), 76-99. Brendan Simms somewhat overstates the prevalence of such discussions in ‘The Connections between Foreign Policy and Domestic Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, The Historical Journal 49 (2006), 605-24 (pp. 607-8).

2 For discussion of this work, see Mark Goldie, ‘Situating Swift’s politics in 1701’, in Politics and Literature in the Age of Swift: English and Irish Perspectives, ed. by Claude Rawson (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 31-51; Ashley Marshall, Swift and History: Politics and the English Past (Cambridge, 2015), pp. 15-19, 77-9, 182-3; David Oakleaf, A Political Biography of Jonathan Swift (London, 2008), pp. 39-47; J. A. Downie, Jonathan Swift: Political Writer (Boston, 1984), pp. 73-8; F. P. Lock, Swift’s Tory Politics (Newark, 1983), pp. 146-61; Edward Rosenheim, ‘The Text and Context of Swift’s Contests and Dissensions’, Modern Philology 66 (1968), 59-74.

SWIFT, UTRECHT AND IRELAND 35

none in depth.3 Both the substance and the style of the foreign policy arguments here are essential to a fuller understanding of his evolution under the Tories, when he turns balance-of-power rhetoric against the Austrian and Dutch allies and incorporates foreign trade into his analysis of power politics. As David Womersley has suggested, Swift, looking back on this Whiggish pamphlet as a Tory in 1714, may have recollected his stance on the war ‘most awkwardly of all’ other stances.4 It is significant, as I will show, that Swift simultaneously claimed to have conceived the work from a specifically Irish perspective.5

What exactly such a perspective might mean can be explored by turning to Swift’s ‘political letters’ with Archbishop William King of Dublin from 1711-13.6 Their correspondence is well known but has never been examined with a view to their contrasting opinions on the substantial foreign policy questions surrounding Utrecht.7 It reveals Swift’s most candid reasons for supporting the peace, particularly on the questions of French power, the Dutch alliance and British finances. It also raises another factor: the difference in Irish and English perceptions of France and the Jacobite threat. King notices the misrepresentations of Protestant alarmists in Ireland, but comes to share with them the belief that Utrecht threatens the Protestant succession; Swift dismisses all such fears as disconnected from the realities of English and European politics, and blames the disconnection, at least to some extent, on Ireland.

From 1690-1714, Swift saw Ireland both as a political wilderness and as a potential threat to England, particularly if it should operate on a ‘different Scheme of Politicks’ (Corr., I, 572). In his Whiggish youth the threat was primarily military and strategic, relating to the consolidation of the Revolution, but as he matured and joined the Tories the threat became ideological, relating to what he saw as the radical and dissenting Whig perversion of the Revolution. In both cases, however, when he was not dismissing or deriding Ireland’s importance, he

3 Notable exceptions include James Drake, The Source of Our Present Fears Discover’d (1703) in A Discourse of the Contests and Dissentions, ed. by Frank H. Ellis (Oxford, 1967), pp. 228-42 (pp. 228-32); Swift: Selections from his works, ed. by Henry Craik (Oxford, 1892), I, 365-6; Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age, 3 vols (Cambridge, MA., 1967), II, 53-5; Oakleaf, p. 40; M. S. Anderson, ‘Eighteenth-Century Theories of the Balance of Power’, in Studies in Diplomatic History: Essays in Memory of David Bayne Horn, ed. by Ragnhild Hatton and Anderson (Archon, 1970), pp. 183-99 (pp. 183-4 and n. 3); David Womersley, ‘Now Deaf 1740’: Entrapment, Foreboding, and Exorcism in Late Swift’, in Politics and Literature in the Age of Swift, ed. by Claude Rawso, pp. 162-84 (pp. 176-82).

4 ‘Now Deaf 1740’, p. 181. 5 Angus Ross, ‘The Hibernian Patriot’s Apprenticeship’, in The Art of Jonathan Swift, ed. by

Probyn, p. 99, seeks evidence of ‘Irish experience in his English political pieces’, and cites the Discourse, but misses Swift’s claim about writing the work from impressions received in Ireland.

6 Quoted in The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, D.D., ed. by David Woolley, 4 vols (New York, 1999), I, 407. Future quotations will be cited by Corr., with volume and line number in my text.

7 But see Marshall, pp. 128-43; Ehrenpreis, II, 597-606; III, 10-25; Christopher J. Fauske, Jonathan Swift and the Church of Ireland 1710-1724 (Portland, OR, 2002), pp. 35-54. Brief mention in A. Norman Jeffares, ‘Aspects of Swift as a Letter Writer’, Hermathena: A Literary Celebration 1592-1992 (Dublin, 1992), pp. 21-2. A study of the relationship can be found in Andrew Isdell Carpenter, ‘Archbishop King and Dean Swift’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University College Dublin (1970).

36 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY IRELAND

thought it capable of playing a troublesome role in England’s maintenance of the European balance of power.

Ireland and Swift’s Early Views on Foreign PolicyUntil around 1708-9, Swift’s view of international affairs was fairly typical of a Revolution-era Anglo-Irish Protestant Whig. From the earliest evidence available, an ‘Ode to the King, On His Irish Expedition and the Success of his Arms in General,’ written circa 1690-1, during or after a trip to Ireland, he associated William III’s victory there with a new period of English clout in Europe that would result in Louis XIV’s defeat:

Howe’er it be, the pride of France Has finished its short race of chance, And all her boasted influences are Wrapped in the vortex of the British star.8

Ireland is not considered a distraction from the Revolution but rather as essential to the consolidation of William’s rule, which Swift considered legitimate.9 From this time forward Swift would remain attentive to the ways that Irish political difference threatened England’s international interests.10 He formed his idea of the latter, and of modern European relations in general, under the tutelage of Sir William Temple, a fellow Anglo-Irishman and prominent Restoration diplomat.11 In a draft preface to Temple’s Letters (1700) written in the late 1690s he claimed to seek immediate publication because he feared crossing the Irish Sea with Temple’s manuscripts, ‘for I am sure that in them may be learnt the true Interest of our Nation both at home and abroad; as well as those of the Neighbors we are most concerned in.’12 King William had secured Ireland as a stepping-stone to British security in Europe, but Swift spoke as if it still threatened the formation of political knowledge that undergirded that security.

It is well known that Swift’s Irish identity informed his politics, but it remains to be seen how or to what extent it informed his foreign policy thinking. First and

8 Lines 136-9 in Jonathan Swift: The Complete Poems, ed. by Pat Rogers (New Haven, 1983), p. 46. See p. 601 on composition and dating.

9 Swift repeatedly defended William’s legitimacy and the right to resist tyranny, e.g. his letter to Pope, Corr., II, 359. He was a realist on the right of crowns, e.g. Corr., II, 176. For this debate and the poem see Lock, pp. 88-9; Downie, pp. 35-41; Marshall, pp. 162-3; Ian Higgins, Swift’s Politics: A Study in Disaffection (Cambridge, 1994), p. 48ff.

10 Later in life Swift referred to the Revolution as a time ‘when the contention of the British empire was, most unfortunately for us, and altogether against the usual course of such mighty changes in government, decided in the least important nation’, The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. by Herbert Davis et al, 16 vols (Oxford, 1939-74), XII, 132. Future quotations from this edition will be marked PW with volume and page number, unless available from the new Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift (Cambridge, 2010-), marked as CW in my text.

11 Ehrenpreis, I, 123ff; Downie, Jonathan Swift, pp. 31-2; Goldie, p. 32. 12 Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge, MS Rothschild 2254. Reprinted in PW, I, xix. I would

like to express my gratitude to the Wren Library and Trinity College, Cambridge for permission to study the Rothschild manuscripts, and Jonathan Smith for his assistance.


foremost, there is every reason to believe that he shared the consensus view that France posed the paramount threat to the three kingdoms. From Temple he would have learned not only of the general danger of ‘universal monarchy’ (hegemony in Europe) but also of the specific danger of France’s newfound ‘greatness at sea.’13 He would have known that the French navy landed James II in Ireland and threatened to trap William III there, or disrupt his convoys, during the war.14 He certainly shared contemporary concerns about the possibility of French invasion to some degree. He captured it, and the accompanying fear of Ireland (or perhaps Scotland) being split off from England, when he characterized Louis XIV, in 1701, as ‘some Prince in the Neighbourhood, of vast Power and Ambition […] hovering like a Vulture to devour, or at least, dismember its dying Carcass.’15

He saw that Ireland could not claim to exercise an independent foreign policy, that Scotland could try, and that both were becoming locked into an increasingly centralized British state.16 He alludes to this dyamic in The Story of the Injured Lady (wr. 1707; pub. 1746), an allegory of the Anglo-Scots union in which he exposes, among other things, what he sees as an ‘invincible Hatred,’ ‘Aversion’ and ‘Abhorrence’ at the heart of relations between the three kingdoms, partly innate and partly as a result of sectarian and political differences (PW, IX, 4, 10). In particular he warns of Scotland’s dalliances with France:

I cannot but have some Pity for this deluded Man, to cast himself away on an infamous Creature, who, whatever she pretendeth, I can prove, would at this very Minute rather be a Whore to a certain Great Man, that shall be nameless, if she might have her Will. (PW, IX, 8)

13 The Works of Sir William Temple, Bart., 4 vols (1770), II, 546-9; IV, 362. 14 George Warter Story, A true and impartial history of the most material occurrences in the kingdom

of Ireland (1691), pp. 66, 87, and A Continuation of the Impartial History of the Wars of Ireland (1693), pp. 21-2; Samuel Mullenaux, A Journal of the Three Months Royal Campaign of His Majesty in Ireland (1690), p. 11; R. B., The History of the Kingdom of Ireland (1693), p. 154; J. S., A True History of All the Memorable Transactions that have happen’d in England, Scotland, Ireland, Flanders (1696), pp. 60; Josiah Burchett, Memoirs of Transactions at Sea during the War with France (1703), pp. 58-60.

15 Ellis, Discourse, p. 118. Quotations of Swift’s Discourse come from this edition and henceforth will be cited by page number in my text. A useful discussion of the invasion threat can be found in James Kelly, ‘Disappointing the boundless ambition of France’: Irish Protestants and the fear of invasion, 1661-1815’, Studia Hibernica 37 (2011), 27-105 (pp. 30-47). Compare Swift’s point to the general view (pp. 30-1) that French strategy envisioned Ireland’s ‘detachment’ from the composite monarchy. Some critics have overlooked Swift’s early concern for invasion; see Pat Rogers, ‘Swift and Bolingbroke on Faction’, Journal of British Studies 9 (1970), 71-101 (p.86) and Marshall, p. 57.

16 For an excellent overview see Ian McBride, Eighteenth-Century Ireland: Isle of Slaves (Dublin, 2009), pp. 25-50; John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1783 (New York, 1989), pp. 13-14; Black, Parliament and Foreign Policy in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 2004), p. 38; John Robertson, ‘Empire and Union: Two Concepts of the Early Modern European Political Order’ in Theories of Empire, 1450-1800, ed. by David Armitage (Brookfield, VT, 1998), pp. 11-36 (pp. 42-3); Deana Rankin, Between Spenser and Swift: English Writing in Seventeenth-Century Ireland (Cambridge, 2005), p. 43 and n. 39.


Meanwhile he forswears the possibility that Ireland would ever think of that man’s ‘Alliance,’ or ‘other Matches.’ He thus emphasizes Ireland’s loyalty at Scotland’s expense to dispel any notions of the former’s Popish kinship with France, although in doing so he calls attention to the abiding foreign policy problem that Ireland posed to the British state.17

In 1708, upon reports that the Pretender would soon invade with a French fleet (actually targeting Scotland), Swift complained from London to a friend in Ireland that ‘the Dissenters have made very good use here of your frights in Ireland upon the intended invasion,’ a hint at what would later become his chief preoccupation. But he also showed concern for Ireland’s security, writing to Archbishop King, ‘I do not wonder at all, that Ireland was found in so ill a Posture for defence’, and hoping Lord Lieutenant Pembroke will make improvements (Corr., I, 180, 187, 185). And he recognized that France threatened to destroy British and Irish trade as much as to invade – hence the ‘Company of Rogues,’ in the Injured Lady, prowling the Irish Sea – even as he penned his earliest criticisms of England for restricting Irish trade (PW, IX, 6).18

Of course, the above also shows that Swift was by no means an alarmist. He would hardly have claimed, like Defoe at the outset of the Spanish war, that it would be worse for France and Spain to unite than ‘to give the French the whole Kingdom of Ireland.’19 But he did not live in daily apprehensions of a repeat of the Williamite war. By philosophy and vocation he saw himself as a champion of peace. His early writings show him inspired by the ‘dove-muse,’ glorifying Temple as a master of the art of peace, and satirizing war in A Tale of a Tub and the Battel of the Books.20 Like all other forms of human organization, he considered military alliances or ‘confederacies’ as fatally vulnerable to passions and corruptions (PW, V, 22). He supported the ministry through most of the Spanish war because it seemed unavoidable and necessary, and not only in 1701 when he published the Discourse. Several years later, in the Bickerstaff Papers (1708-9), his faux-astrologer predicts numerous allied victories and the sudden death of prominent enemy leaders, implying the desire for peace (CW, II, 49-53). These parodies, along with his correspondence from early 1708, reveal the earliest

17 McBride, pp. 32-3; Kelly, ‘Fear of Invasion’, pp. 27-33; William Palmer, The Problem of Ireland in Tudor Foreign Policy 1485-1603 (Woodbridge, CT, 1994), pp. 71-2. For an interesting discussion of the Injured Lady’s place in Anglo-Irish unionist thought, see Jim Smyth, ‘No remedy more proper’: Anglo-Irish unionism before 1707’ in British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, 1533-1707, ed. by Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 301-320 (p. 302).

18 Swift’s comments on the 1708 invasion and privateers fit with the general trend outlined in Kelly, ‘Fear of Invasion’, pp. 40-51. Note also that Lock, p. 95, suggests that Swift wrote the Sentiments of a Church-of-England Man in part to defend Tories from imputations of Jacobitism after the 1708 invasion.

19 Two Great Questions Further Considered (1700) in Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, ed. by P. N. Furbank, 6 vols (London, 2000), V, p. 55.

20 Complete Poems, ‘Ode to the Athenian Society’, l. 16; ‘Ode to the Honourable Sir William Temple’, l. 70-134; see also CW, I, 107, 113, 137, 265; Ross, ‘Grand Question’, pp. 250-3.


signs of war-weariness, which he shared with the general public (Corr., I, 171).21 And yet he still supported the ministry, from which he sought favours for the Irish church and himself. He cheered for the Duke of Marlborough and prayed for victory during the Siege of Lille (Corr., I, 173-4, 169, 198, 203).

His stance began to change in 1708, however, when the Whigs sought to repeal the sacramental test in Ireland. The test, which prevented nonconformists from taking public office, was deeply intertwined with Swift’s belief that propagating religious dissent would lead to civil strife.22 At the time he was in London lobbying for the remission of the first fruits and twentieth parts to the Irish church. He resented the suggestion that the first fruits required complicity in repealing the test. He especially disliked the ministry’s repeated excuses that the 1708 ‘Invasion’ and the general ‘Time of War’ prevented them from dealing with church concerns (Corr., I, 192, 194; cf. CW, II, 131-2). Indeed, such excuses suggested something sinister about the Whigs that Swift already believed of the dissenters: they were simultaneously pro-war and anti-church.23

Around this time Swift begins to speak of Ireland as posing little threat to British security. In the Letter from a Member of the House of Commons of Ireland […] concerning the Sacramental Test (wr. 1708, pub. 1709) he argues that Catholicism can coexist with free states, that the Pope and France have separate interests, and, most notably, that Irish Catholics will not ‘join in any considerable Numbers with an Invader.’ He grounds this argument on the ‘ill Success’ of the Jacobites in the Williamite war, which must always have served as a reason for his lack of alarmism about the French threat, but he also implies that any future rebels will lack ‘such mighty Aids from the French King’ as they received then, which seems to reflect the lessons of the 1708 invasion.24 Most interestingly of all, his general suspicion of military alliances merges into a criticism of the Presbyterians for threatening to withhold, whether in 1688 or in future, their support in defending against ‘Popish Insurrections at Home, or Popish Invasions from Abroad.’ Here his language anticipates his later Tory tracts, particularly in claiming that the Presbyterians betray an aggressiveness that simultaneously neglects the soundest justification for war: self-defence (‘pro Aris & focis’) (PW, II, 114, 120, 124; cf. CW, VIII, 49).

21 Rumbold, ‘Burying the Fanatic Partridge’, in Rawson, p. 86, notes that Bickerstaff does not predict the death of Philip V of Spain. She reads this absence as a satire on John Partridge and the dissenting Whigs who insisted on overthrowing Philip, with the implication that Swift already dreamt of peace without Spain. This reading is plausible; but the predictions are so overwhelmingly positive for the allies as to imply peace on allied terms, which in 1708-9 meant removing Philip from Spain.

22 Ian Higgins, ‘A Preface to Swift’s Test Act Tracts’, in Reading Swift: Papers from the Sixth Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift, ed. by Kirsten Juhas et al (Munich, 2013), pp. 234-7. For Swift’s attitude toward the Whigs and church affairs at this time, see Fauske, p. 34; Louis A. Landa, Swift and the Church of Ireland (Oxford, 1954), p. 56; Oliver W. Ferguson, Jonathan Swift and Ireland (Urbana Champaign, 1962), pp. 34-8.

23 Ehrenpreis makes a similar observation, II, 256. 24 Kelly, ‘Fear of Invasion’, p. 51.


The Whig leader whom Swift most despised was Thomas, Earl of Wharton, and in 1710 he penned a ferocious attack on him and his conduct while Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, including numerous examples of embezzlement relating to the war (PW, III, 231-40).25 The Short Character of his Excellency Thomas Earl of Wharton begins with an idiosyncratic but telling overview of Ireland’s relationship to England and the world. For ‘some Years past,’ he claims – whether referring to the Revolution, the Woollen Acts, the Anglo-Scottish Union, or some other event – Irish affairs ‘have been either so insignificant, or so annexed to those of England,’ as to be unimportant to history. The Anglo-Irish gentry have contributed notably to the army, but ‘in the War, Ireland hath no Share but in Subordination’ to England. Meanwhile Irish ‘Factions’ are merely an extension of England’s – a view that fits with his belief that the attempt to repeal the sacramental test in Ireland was a step toward repealing it in England (PW, II, 112-13).

Of particular note in these pamphlets is the discrepancy between perceptions in the Irish periphery and English centre of power. It is important to remember that Swift knew firsthand the story of how Temple’s son John committed suicide after misadvising William III to send Richard Hamilton over to Ireland to convince the Earl of Tyrconnell to join the Revolution; instead both Hamilton and Tyrconnell sided with James. This story was fraught with accusations of misinformation from Tyrconnell’s agents via Sir William Temple – and Swift would later defend Temple on that count.26 A similar problem emerges in Swift’s criticism of Wharton. Irish politics, he claims, are ‘inconsiderable to the last Degree, however it may be represented at Court by those who preside there, and would value themselves upon every Step they make, towards finishing the Slavery of that People, as if it were gaining a mighty Point to the Advantage of England’ (PW, III, 177). The idea of enslaving Ireland is here associated not only with the Whig Junto but also with misleading representations they receive, namely that the Irish strategic threat is yet to be subdued. Swift is even more explicit in the Letter concerning the Sacramental Test, where he complains to his fictitious English interlocutor of ‘strange Representations made of us on your Side of the Water,’ and explains how the dissenters and their Whig defenders would combine memories of 1641 with contemporary fears of foreign intervention by promulgating stories like that ‘of a Priest newly arrived, from Abroad, to the North-West Parts of Ireland, who had publickly preached to his People, to fall a murthering the Protestants’ (PW, II, 111-12). These complaints confirm the impression that he no longer gives much credit to threats from the ‘Great Man’ or ‘Vulture’ in the neighbourhood. Instead he

25 Ross, ‘Hibernian Patriot’s Apprenticeship’, pp. 94-8, provides a useful discussion of this text in the Irish and English political contexts.

26 Gilbert Burnet describes Tyrconnell’s use of deception and intimidation to send false reports to England as follows: ‘Those, who were employed by Tyrconnell to deceive the prince, made their applications by Sir William Temple, who had a long and well established credit with him’, History of His Own Time, 6 vols (The Hague, 1725-34), III, 1357-8. To this remark Swift, in his marginalia, writes, ‘A lie of a Scot: for Sir William Temple did not know Tyrconnell’. For an account of John Temple’s suicide see Abel Boyer, Memoirs of the Life and Negotiations of Sir W. Temple (1714), pp. 414-18; Ehrenpreis, I, 101.


suspects the Whigs and dissenters of manipulating fears to justify the imposition of their rule. Swift was clearly on a new trajectory with regard to foreign policy and Ireland’s place within it.

Finally, Swift probes the international valence of the Whig-dissenting alliance in one of his finest short satires, An Argument against Abolishing of Christianity (wr. 1708, pub. 1711). At the conclusion the speaker warns that an official policy of atheism would scare away not only Britain’s Christian allies but also any potential heathen allies like the Turks. ‘For, as [the Grand Visier] is too remote, and generally engaged in War with the Persian Emperor; so his People would be more scandalized at our Infidelity, than our Christian Neighbours’ (PW, II, 38). Presumably all alliances require basic human faithfulness, rooted in natural law and belief in God, a common assumption in contemporary literature,27 and hence the alleged Whig policy of atheism would render Britain a pariah among nations.

The satire is multifarious, but these statements include a coherent train of foreign policy thinking that has been overlooked. The prideful, ‘bigotted’ Christian ally is probably the Empire, often accompanied with those epithets; the implied opposition with Turkey reinforces this supposition, since their enmity was proverbial. The same alignment of states would also imply atheist Britain allying with France. Louis XIV was widely seen as the ‘ancient Allie [of] the Turk,’ specifically to ‘ruine the German Empire’ – he was mocked as ‘the most Christian Turk of Versailles’ on account of his various overtures to the Ottomans.28 Meanwhile by predicting that ‘Trade’ and the ‘East-India Stock may fall,’ Swift suggests that the Dutch are the other allies that would be disobliged by an atheist England. Scholars are well aware that church concerns prompted Swift’s turn against the Dutch around this time, but it is important to see this turn as one sign, albeit an important one, of a broader change in attitude toward the outside world.29

Swift’s implied position remains Whiggish, but he was ironically contemplating an inversion of foreign policy as part of a general reversal of national policies consequent upon the state’s official adoption of atheism. He came up with a sort of inchoate Tory foreign policy (the Tories were generally more skeptical of the Grand Alliance and less hostile to Turkey), while implying that Whig tolerationism would push the country into even more outlandish territory than that. As we will see, upon changing parties he would advocate a foreign policy programme not much different than that entertained here. His famous foreign policy tract, The Conduct of the Allies, and of the Late Ministry, in Beginning and Carrying on the Present War (1711), would go so far as to question whether Britain should

27 Tony Claydon, Europe and the Making of England, 1660-1760 (Cambridge, 2007), p. 148. 28 The Dangers of Europe, from the Growing Power of France (1702), p. 7; John Wolf, The

Emergence of the Great Powers: 1685-1715 (New York, 1962), p. 30; for a discussion of this theme see Claydon, pp. 172-83.

29 J. Kent Clark, ‘Swift and the Dutch’, Huntington Library Quarterly 17 (1953-4), 345-56 (pp. 349-52). For further discussion, see Joseph Rosenblum, ‘Gulliver’s Dutch Uncle: Another Look at Swift and the Dutch’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 24 (2001), 63-76 (p. 65); Ellen Douglass Leyburn, ‘Swift’s View of the Dutch’, PMLA 66 (1951), 734-45 (pp. 734-5).


have joined the war in the first place and whether France had ever posed a direct threat. At the same time he would support a Britain with a resurgent national church turning against its allies in the same way he had imagined they would turn against an atheist Britain. And the moral repugnance he showed toward financial markets would now become one element in a broader rejection of the Dutch and their trade empire.

In sum, while it is well known that Swift’s concerns for the church, most immediately in Ireland, drove him into the arms of the Tories, the change entailed a foreign policy conversion that predates his meetings with Harley and contrasts with the Whiggish stance adumbrated in his earlier writings – and this stance is partly attributed to ‘strange Representations’ of Ireland in England.

Swift and the Tory Balance of PowerOn the rare occasions that scholars address Swift’s views on foreign policy, they naturally refer to his advocacy for the Utrecht peace under the Oxford ministry.30 But if we wish to examine the development of his thinking we must begin with the Discourse, which, as mentioned, contains his most substantial early remarks on the topic. The theme of that work is the ‘Balance of Power, either without or within a State’ (Discourse, 84). This concept and its antithesis, ‘universal Monarchy,’ have a central place in contemporary foreign policy rhetoric, and indeed balance of power became so popular in the 1690s-1700s that some scholars have mistaken this period for its initial efflorescence in the three kingdoms.31 Swift’s Discourse participates in the post-Revolution debate over the proper application of the term to foreign affairs as well as to constitutional disputes. As such, it provides a standard from which to assess his later thinking.

There is no need here to rehearse Swift’s treatment of constitutional balance in the Discourse – it is a well-known feature of his political theory. The international balance, however, has not been fully appreciated. Of course scholars are aware of the relevance of the Partition Treaties and the outbreak of war to the occasion of the pamphlet, and they have noted Swift’s domestic-international analogy.32 But the chief interpretive oversight lies in treating French hegemony as a marginal concern when in fact it constitutes the very worst of the ‘Consequences’ of internal division warned about in the work’s title. Not only does Swift warn of

30 See note 1 above; cf. Ehrenpreis, II, 236; Joseph McMinn, ‘Swift’s Life’, in The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift, ed. by Christopher Fox (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 14-30 (p. 21); Higgins, Swift’s Politics, p. 37; Marshall, pp. 120-5, 136-7. W. A. Speck, ‘Swift and the Historian’, in Proceedings of the First Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift, ed. by Hermann Real and Heinz J. Vienken (Munich, 1985), pp. 257-68 (pp. 260-65).

31 Claydon, p. 194, claims balance of power ‘had airings in the seventeenth century’ but became the ‘key discourse’ in the 1690s. Cf. Furbank, ‘Introduction’, p. 9. Aside from the circulation of European texts on statecraft, such characterizations dramatically underrate the influence of, among many others, Herbert of Cherbury, Sir Walter Raleigh, William Camden, Francis Bacon, James Howell, Sir William Temple and George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, in popularizing balance-of-power thinking in the seventeenth century.

32 See note 3 above.


invasion and dismemberment but also, in the conclusion of the main argument, he suggests that England can take advantage of the ‘universal Fear and Apprehension of the Greatness and Power of France,’ and King William’s leadership, to set the constitutional balance ‘a little more upon an Equality’ and thus unify and protect the nation (Discourse, 118, 125). In this way Swift calls particular attention to the ambivalence of power and the interdependence of internal and external balances.

Thus while it is true that Swift prioritizes the constitutional balance in the pamphlet as a whole – he harps on France less than many Whiggish, and even some Tory, pamphleteers in 170133 – nevertheless his conclusion forces the reader to face the tremendous international risks of domestic dissensions. His emphasis with regard to the Commons is not on the ‘Right of Impeachment,’ which he concedes, but on whether exercising that right is ‘prudent’ in a given situation – and in this regard he claims the Commons have a poor history of predicting ‘the Consequences of such Impeachments upon the Peace of the State’ (Discourse, 112). International concerns even prompt him to recognize, however grudgingly, that the democratic element of the constitution has virtues as well as vices – a point frequently overlooked. The ‘People in general seem to be very much and justly possess’d’ of the fear of France, he claims – and he condones their ‘unpresidented Proceeding’ in supporting the impeached ministers and intimidating the members of the Commons (most likely a veiled reference to activities like the Kentish Petition and Legion Memorial), which in turn warned the Commons to drop their impeachments and vote preparations for war.34 For the same reason he refers to the people as the ‘Masters’ of their wayward MPs, whom he likens to ‘Myrmidons’, an unmistakable combination of the Whig assertion of the people’s rights in this debate and its connection to national safety and foreign policy (Discourse, 124-5).

Taking these specific arguments along with the international dimension of his theoretical description of balance of power, it can be seen that Swift follows classical thinkers like Aristotle and Polybius, and moderns like Temple and George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, in making foreign affairs integral, not merely parallel, to his constitutionalism.35 His emphasis on the internal workings of the constitution

33 See e.g. Defoe’s The Two Great Questions Further Considered (1700) and The Danger of the Protestant Religion (1701) in Political and Economic Writings, pp. 52-5, 67, 73-4. For a Tory attack on France, see Charles Davenant’s Essays upon I. The Ballance of Power. II. The Right of Making War, Peace, and Alliances. III. Universal Monarchy (1701), esp. the last essay; cf. the two Whig answerers in Animadversions on a late Factious Book, Entitled, Essays upon, I. The Ballance of Power (1701), esp. pp. 25, 33, 72.

34 Contrast Womersley, ‘Now Deaf 1740,’ p. 178; Goldie, pp. 43-4; Marshall, pp. 77-9.35 Aristotle, Politics, 1265a, 1307b, 1324b-1328b in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. by

Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols (Princeton, 1984), II, 2007, 2076, 2100ff. Polybius excludes external politics from his famous constitutional discussion in Book VI (chp. viii) but does not do so in the body of his Histories, e.g. I, lxxxiii, II, xlix; in The Histories of Polybius, trans. by Evelyn S. Shuckburgh (Bloomington, IN, 1962). Swift recommended Aristotle for understanding foreign relations (Corr., I, 615), and Polybius is a pervasive influence in Swift’s works. For Temple, see esp. Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and A Survey of the Constitutions and Interests of The Empire, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Holland, France, and Flanders with Their Relation to England in the 1671 in Works, II and III. For Halifax, see The Character of a Trimmer


is an effect of analytical priority, not insular thinking. When he warns of those who ‘employ so much of their Zeal […] for upholding the Balance of Power in Christendom, at the same time that by their Practices they are endeavouring to destroy it at home,’ he is not dismissing the relevance of external affairs but emphasizing the primacy of internal unity amid external conflict (Discourse, 88).36

The foregoing should be borne in mind when reading Swift’s Tory tracts in defence of Oxford and Bolingbroke’s foreign policy from 1710-14. It is well known that the principle of balance of power was considered essential to the momentous Utrecht peace; it featured prominently in various treaty provisions and has since become a standard association in international relations theory.37 Scholars have shown that the rival Tory and Whig interpretations of balance in the peace debate reflected underlying philosophical and ideological differences – for instance, whether balance should be conceived as a natural or mechanistic phenomenon, as the Whigs tended to do, or as a humanistic or moral phenomenon, as with the Tories – and that, above all, the metaphor was versatile, ideologies often overlapped, pamphleteers were idiosyncratic, and political expediency was the cardinal rule.38

Through the Tory tracts, of course, Swift became the premier spokesman for a ‘speedy, honourable Peace,’ which entailed negotiating directly with France while effectively dissolving the Grand Alliance.39 While the Discourse associated the French with the destruction of balance and imposition of universal monarchy, the Conduct of the Allies attributed such fears to Whig rhetoric. Swift even takes a moment in the latter work to review the contours of the 1701 debate. At that time, he claims, the Tories observed that the allies would be, ‘upon the Balance, weaker by One hundred and twenty thousand Men,’ and therefore hesitated to engage in a new war. But the Whigs argued there would be no ‘hopes of preserving

in The Works of George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, ed. by Mark N. Brown, 3 vols (Oxford, 1989), I, 223-45.

36 It is for good reason believed that Swift glances at Davenant’s Essays upon I. The Ballance of Power with this comment; see e.g. Ehrenpreis, II, p. 54 and Ellis, Discourse, p. 131. Nevertheless the comment applies to the whole Tory party in the impeachment crisis, and it is characteristic of Swift to emphasize domestic politics even within foreign policy debates. Cf. his remark on Steele, CW, VIII, 275.

37 Tractatus pacis & amicitiæ inter Serenissimam ac Potentissimam Principem Annam (1714), pp. 6, 52; A general collection of treatys of peace and commerce, renunciations, manifestos, and other publick papers (1732), pp. 472-3. For an earlier treaty with the phrase, see M. S. Anderson, The Rise of Modern Diplomacy 1450-1919 (London, 1993), p. 155. For discussion see Michael Sheehan, Balance of Power: History and Theory (New York, 1996), pp. 16-17, 76; Richard Little, The Balance of Power in International Relations: Metaphors, Myths and Models (Cambridge, 2007), p. 67; Edward Vose Gulick, Europe’s Classical Balance of Power: A Case History of the Theory and Practice of One of the Great Concepts of European Statecraft (New York, 1955), p. 35; Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations (New York, 1978), p. 217.

38 See in particular Black’s work, e.g. Parliament and Foreign Policy, pp. 196-7; ‘Foreign Policy and the Tory World in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies 37 (2014), 285-97 (p. 287); Debating Foreign Policy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Farnham, 2011), pp. 6-11; see also Claydon, pp. 194-208.

39 Examiner No. 21 in Swift vs Mainwaring: The Examiner and The Medley, ed. by Ellis (Oxford, 1985), p. 116, and No. 35, p. 331. Cf. PW, VII, 17.


the Balance of Europe’ if Philip V controlled Spain and that Louis XIV would then ‘have a better Opportunity than ever of pursuing his Design for Universal Monarchy’ (CW, VIII, 56-7). In other words, the peace camp looked at the basic military arithmetic while the war camp got carried away with rhetoric and grand ideas. Swift may allude here to any number of pamphlets from the Whig or Tory side, but he can also be seen revising his own stance in the Discourse in light of new circumstances and loyalties, and his rhetoric shifts accordingly. And this is not the only example of a change in his handling of balance of power – throughout the pamphlet his usage is mercurial.40

Why should Swift stand aloof from balance-of-power rhetoric? One highly significant effect is to distract from France. Thus the only time Swift employs the phrase straightforwardly in the Conduct he refers to the ‘Balance of Power in the North,’ the Great Northern War between Sweden and Russia, suggesting that Charles XII’s return could distract the Empire from the war and leave Britain in the lurch (CW, VIII, 105; cf. PW, VII, 148). Elsewhere he uses this tactic to advance the general Tory agenda of emphasizing Austria’s hegemonic pretensions over France’s, as with the ‘Balance of Power in Italy,’ where the Emperor loomed larger.41 In The Publick Spirit of the Whigs (1714), he claims: ‘there is a Prospect of more Danger to the Balance of Europe […] from the Emperor over-running Italy, than from France over-running the Empire’ (PW, VII, 43; CW, VIII, 275). Swift was by no means the first to suggest that Europe contains multiple balances of power, but his usage challenges the popular equation of the balance of Europe with the relative strength of France and the allies (or the Habsburgs and Bourbons).42

Another effect is to characterize the Dutch in the language of universal monarchy. Scholars have long observed his adoption of Bolingbroke’s and the High Tories’ hostility toward the Dutch.43 In Some Remarks on the Barrier Treaty (1712), the sequel to the Conduct, he reminds the reader of Dutch superiority in East Asia, comparing them to a ‘vast powerful Common-wealth, like that of Rome’ and Queen Anne to a ‘Petty Prince’ (CW, VIII, 124). This reversal of perspectives recasts the Dutch rather than the French as the exorbitant power in

40 A likely source in Swift’s review of the 1701 debate is Defoe’s Reasons against a War with France (1701) in Political and Economic Writings, pp. 94-8. As for Swift’s usage in the Conduct, compare CW, VIII, 93 to PW, VI, 167. See also his descriptions of phenomena associated with balance of power without using the term; CW, VIII, 49-50, 58-9.

41 Swift’s handling of Austria does not support Müllenbrock, Culture of Contention, pp. 91, 110, that the Tory attempt to recast Austria as the new universal monarch declined after 1711 and was ‘essentially […] temporary.’ In fact the Tories sought a thorough change with regard to Austria, and their policy toward it is also embedded in arguments relating to the Northern War and the Mediterranean.

42 For the various balances of power, see e.g. Thomas Overbury, Observations in his Travails […] in 1609 (1626) in Stuart Tracts, 1603-1693, ed. C. H. Firth (Westminster, 1903), pp. 227-32. Quoted in Sheehan, ‘The Development of British Theory and Practice of the Balance of Power before 1714’, History 73 (1988), 24-31 (p. 27).

43 Douglass S. Coombs, The Conduct of the Dutch: British Opinion and the Dutch Alliance during the War of Spanish Succession (The Hague, 1958), pp. 277-91; Claydon, p. 199; Clark, p. 352.


the Low Countries – the Dutch will be ‘entirely Masters of the richest Part of all Flanders’ and ‘absolute Sovereigns of all Flanders’ (CW, VIII, 126-7).44 But since the Dutch could not possibly be painted as a greater military threat to Britain than France, this technique also required altering the objects of power-political analysis from military to commercial strength: ‘they will engross the whole Trade of those Towns, exclusive to all other Nations’ and ‘shut out all other Nations from Trading to Flanders’ (CW, VIII, 128-9). Swift’s new commercial focus is obviously not incidental: his purpose is to justify the Tories’ diplomatic effort to deprive the Dutch of an overly expansive barrier or too great a share in French and Spanish trade concessions.45 Swift’s rhetorical shift from the foreign policy of the Discourse is once again pronounced – that work does not allude to the Dutch and treats property as a matter of landed wealth within the constitutional order, virtually ignoring international trade (e.g. Discourse, 89, 98).

None of the above should suggest that Swift now rejected the balance-of-power principle itself. In his candid Some Free Thoughts upon the Present State of Affairs (wr. 1714; pub. 1741), for instance, he claims the utmost skill is needed in ‘watching the severall Motions of our Neighbours and Allyes, and preserving a due Ballance among them’ (CW, VIII, 291). Rather, his usage suggests that he sought to undermine the Whig use of the term to justify waging war until an absolute military superiority over France could be achieved. To this purpose he subordinates balance concepts to a Grotian framework of international law, arguing that the allies could only justify the war to ‘check the overgrown Power of some ambitious Neighbour’, that is, merely to check it, or to defend each other or themselves, i.e. not to pursue the campaign further into France (CW, VIII, 49, 52).46 There may be other reasons for Swift’s oblique handling of the term, notably stylistic,47 but his usage reinforces the broader Tory propaganda effort. Various treaties and parliamentary addresses (though not the initial treaty reviving the Grand Alliance) had linked the balance of Europe with the restoration of Spain to the Habsburgs. Oxford needed his ministerial propaganda to redefine the term so as to accommodate peace without Spain, which became easier after Emperor Joseph’s death positioned Archduke Charles to rule both Austria and Spain.48 The

44 Scholars have observed this point; see Ehrenpreis, II, 498; Müllenbrock, Culture of Contention, pp. 89-91.

45 Coombs, pp. 298-306; Steve Pincus, ‘Addison’s Empire: Whig Conceptions of Empire in the Early 18th Century’, Parliamentary History 31 (2012), 99-117 (p. 108).

46 See esp. Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, ed. by Richard Tuck (Indianapolis, 2005), II, i, 17. Swift owned and annotated Grotius’s works; see The Library and Reading of Jonathan Swift: A Bio-Bibliographical Handbook, ed. by Dirk F. Passmann and Heinz J. Vienken, 4 vols (New York, 2003), I, 758ff. He recommended De Jure Belli ac Pacis to John Gay as one of a few essential texts on foreign relations (Corr., I, 615). In Gulliver’s Travels he follows Grotius even more closely than in the Conduct by implying that war merely to reduce a neighbor’s superior power is unjustified; see CW, XVI, 150, 364 and n. 16.

47 He often joked with clichés of foreign policy, e.g. ‘exorbitant Power’ in CW, VIII, 283 and ‘balance of Europe’, PW, V, 94-5.

48 Reflections upon the Examiner’s Scandalous Peace (1711) contains a string of examples from official documents; see esp. pp. 10-14. For the Oxford ministry’s redefinition of the term, see


Tory balance of power would entail the division of France and Spain between different kings and heirs, but not necessarily an equality of Habsburg and Bourbon power, as the Whigs now demanded.49

Another way of putting Swift’s foreign policy views and rhetoric into focus is by examining his underappreciated debate over the Utrecht negotiations with Archbishop William King from 1711-13. The Swift-King correspondence is interesting in a variety of ways, but we turn to it now because it reveals some of Swift’s most candid thinking on the peace while also revealing how he distrusted the Irish perception of European affairs during this time.

Archbishop King and the Whig Balance of PowerSwift and King corresponded frequently because King was Swift’s superior in the church, and Swift acted as a sort of ecclesiastical ‘ambassador’ from London during his time there.50 Their letters are candid and offer invaluable insight into the clash of opinions between two highly intelligent, independent, opinionated, and politically astute Anglo-Irish churchmen in a period of rapid change. It is impossible to do justice here to their correspondence or relationship as a whole. All I aim to do is to call attention to how the letters cast light on Swift’s foreign policy thinking and the place of Ireland within it. And in this regard it should be noted that while they are often quoted in relation to Swift’s History of the Four Last Years, which has considerable overlap in both composition and conception, the content of their debate on the peace has not been analyzed closely.

Franco-Spanish union formed the crux of the peace controversy, and both Swift and King acknowledged it as the basis for debate in their letters. ‘I confess I agree with your Grace,’ writes Swift, thinking the treaty all but completed, ‘that the great Difficulty was about the Danger of France and Spain being united under one King’ (Corr., I, 445). King initially favored the peace, but turned against it when deaths in the Bourbon family made it so that only the dauphin Louis, a sickly infant, stood between the Spanish King Philip and Versailles. ‘I reckon’, writes King, ‘as soon as the peace is settled, the Dauphin will be taken out of the way, and then France and Spain will fall into one hand’ (Corr., I, 388). In retrospect we

The Ballance of Europe; Or, An Enquiry into the Respective Dangers of giving the Spanish Monarchy to the Emperour as well as to King Philip (1711), pp. 6, 8, 35-6; Defoe, The Succession of Spain Consider’d (1711) in Political and Economic Writings, pp. 122-3. Ehrenpreis, II, 498; Müllenbrock, Culture of Contention, p. 89-91; Claydon, p. 196, sees the Whigs rather than Tories as the party having to adapt to balance-of-power rhetoric during the peace controversy.

49 Arthur Maynwaring, A Vindication of the Present M--y, from the Clamours rais’d against them upon Occasion of the New Preliminaries (1711), pp. 34, 37, argued that ‘if the Allies were a tolerable Ballance against France without us, then it would always be in our Power to turn the Scales, and we should be Arbitrators of Europe in earnest’. Cf. The Ballance of Power: Or, A Comparison of the Strength of the Emperor and the French King. In a Letter to a Friend (1711), pp. 13-14; and a mercantilist version of the argument, A Letter to a Member of the October-Club: shewing, that to yield Spain to the Duke of Anjou by a Peace, wou’d be the Ruin of Great Britain, second edn (1711), pp. 25, 41-2.

50 J. C. Beckett, ‘Swift as an Ecclesiastical Statesman’, in Essays in British and Irish History in Honour of James Eadie Todd, ed. by H. A. Cronne et al (London, 1949), pp. 134-51 (p. 143).


know that the dauphin would enjoy a long life and reign as Louis XV, but at the time King’s view seemed probable, and Swift agreed (Corr., I, 423). In general, however, the Tories took advantage of the inscrutability of fortune, and Swift later told King, ‘France is likely to have a long Minority’ (Corr., I, 461). Later, when Richard Steele warned that Utrecht gave France a longer sword than Britain, Swift responded that length did not matter ‘if such a Sword happens to be in the Hands of an Infant, or struggled for by two Competitors’ (CW, VIII, 267). He considered the dauphin’s survival a bonus but did not rest his case on it, insisting instead on the Tory securities in the event of the dauphin’s death: the French and Spanish renunciations.

The success of the Tory plan depended not merely on the French and Spanish princes renouncing any title to each other’s thrones but on the enforceability of such renunciations. King denied that France would follow through with mere words and pointed to Philip’s advantage in the French succession both according to Salic Law and Bourbon interests (Corr., I, 425). Swift, by contrast, called Philip’s renunciation an ‘effectual Expedient, not out of any Regard he would have for it, but because it will be the Interest of every Prince of the Blood in France to keep him out, and because the Spaniards will never assist him to unite the two Kingdoms’ (Corr., I, 427). To this King did not mince words. ‘I cannot believe that you imagine that the two obstacles you mention can hinder it’, he writes, claiming that Louis XIV would devote his final years to acquiring Spain, the dauphin would die, Philip would offer more to France than the other French claimants (the riches of America), and the Spanish court could not prevent the French from doing what they wanted (Corr., I, 430).

Swift’s response to this letter is revealing. He admits that the renunciations constitute the ‘weakest Side’ of the peace, especially because of France’s ‘little Credit’ in those kinds of agreements, but with regard to Spain’s weakness he emphasizes that Madrid will not be the only enforcer of the treaty: ‘all the Allies must be Guarantees. If you still object, that some Danger still remains, what is to be done?’ (Corr., I, 445). In other words, when pressed in private to defend the core feature of the Tory peace – the proof that they would achieve a balance of power on their own terms – Swift argued that the same logic upon which the war had been waged would apply in future to preserve the peace. He repeats this argument in the History of the Four Last Years, claiming that the renunciations are ‘armed with all the Essential Circumstances that can fortify such an Act’, i.e. not the ‘Faith of Princes’ but the shared interests of ‘every Prince in Europe’ in preventing Franco-Spanish union (PW, VII, 151). It is impossible to know whether King’s objections informed Swift’s argument in the History; Swift obviously debated the matter with a range of people, though he did confess to King that most of his discussions at the time occurred within Tory circles (Corr., I, 459-60).

The question at bottom was whether France would continue the aggressive behavior that had characterized Louis XIV’s reign, as King believed, or whether a new era had begun in which a chastened, post-Louis XIV France would abide by a peace treaty, as Swift believed. It is significant that Swift’s position on this


critical assessment changed over the course of his time with the ministry. He initially warned of France’s financial and military resilience in the Examiner and the Conduct, but by January 1713 he told King that France had been sufficiently curbed: ‘while that mighty Kingdom [France] remains under one Monarch, it will be always in some Degree formidable to its Neighbours. But we flatter ourselves it is likely to be less so than ever, by the Concurrence of many Circumstances too long to trouble you with.’ Specifically he pointed to France’s likely weakness under a regency and its rising internal unrest (CW, VIII, 101-2; Corr., I, 459-61).51

It is understandable why King rejected this argument. Swift wanted to trade the current Grand Alliance and its existing advantages on the battlefield for an uncertain settlement, yet justified the deal by saying that a similar alliance and advantages could be produced in future if necessary. In other words, the peace treaty would prevent the union because a future war could prevent it. The argument is not strictly circular, but it has a whiff of wishful thinking and ministerial decree, even though it ended up being right. And Swift’s deferential concessions to his superior seemed only to weaken his case: he admitted that one additional campaign would probably force France into ‘great Extremes’, yet insisted that he would still advise the queen to make peace if he were the top minister (Corr., I, 460). King saw this simply as poor bargaining: ‘if the French had been soundly beaten, we might at any time have turned to them and they would have embraced us on any terms whatsoever’ (Corr., I, 463).

There is, of course, a coherent explanation for Swift’s reasoning – balance of power. The idea that a check alone was justified and sufficient, that no power should be utterly removed from the political system, and hence that France should not be pursued to total surrender, is characteristic of balance-of-power reasoning, in Swift’s Discourse and in much contemporary literature.52 Obviously Swift’s claim that an alliance of states would prevent France from assimilating Spain is characteristic of this kind of thinking too. Yet while Swift makes no mention of balance of power or universal monarchy, King relies explicitly on these terms to argue, along with the Whigs, for France’s utter defeat. King’s first letter in the debate, for instance, defines the peace dilemma as a question of balance, and defines balance in a tripartite manner that echoes contemporary thinking, including Swift’s Discourse:

I believe, the death of the Emperor makes a lasting peace much more difficult than before. That depends on a ballance, and to that three things seem so necessary, that any two may stop the third; but now all is reduced to two. (Corr., I, 388)

51 Examiner No. 14 in Ellis, Swift vs Mainwaring, pp. 8-9. 52 E.g. Defoe’s Review, 19 April 1709 in The Best of Defoe’s Review: An Anthology, ed. by William

L. Payne (New York, 1951), p. 156. This perspective was frequently emphasized with relation to France in the Utrecht controversy, see e.g. Thomas Wentworth, Lord Strafford to Electress Sophia, 27 August 1712 cited in George Macaulay Trevelyan, England under Queen Anne, 3 vols (New York, 1934), III, 76n. For a contemporary theoretical explanation of it along the lines of social contract theory, see The Analysis of the Ballance of Power: wherein its necessity, origin and history is examin’d (1720), pp. 33-4.


Archduke Charles’s accession to the imperial throne means that either the Bourbons or the Habsburgs will acquire Spain; King sees no comparable third option like Swift and the Tories proposed. Later King claims that France will prefer Philip over the Duke of Berry for the French crown because Berry’s ‘removal would be so fair a step to the universall monarchy’ (Corr., I, 425). The phrase is, as usual, a by-word for Franco-Spanish union. Finally, at a heated point in the correspondence, King asks ‘whether the Dutch or French are most in interest engaged to preserve the balance of power in Europe, and which have broke their faith and treatys oftenest and in prudence trusted them’ (Corr., I, 463). One cannot conclude anything from Swift’s silence alone, but the interchange confirms what we observed above from Swift’s formal foreign policy works: though he maintained the principle of balance of power, he often avoided deploying the term straightforwardly in his Tory tracts.53

As an opponent of the peace King’s use of balance rhetoric is not surprising, but his invocation of Sir William Temple puts a fine point on the rhetorical difference. After describing French treaties as ‘delusions’, King feigns naivety and asks Swift, ‘I am told there is a book writ by your friend Sir William Temple called Memoirs that talks at this rate, and gives an account of the peace of Nimeguen, which they say was treated the same way.’ King hardly could have missed that Swift himself had published the third (really second) installment of the Memoirs only a few years before. And Temple’s account of Nijmegen depicted France outnumbered by all the powers of Europe and yet dividing and outwitting them in the negotiations.54 King probably implies that Swift has forgotten his mentor’s lessons. Of course, Temple’s views, and Swift’s relationship to them, were more complex than the pro-war crowd wanted to admit; but on the surface (that is, ignoring the dramatic evolution of events from the 1670s to 1710s) Temple’s foreign policy remained that of the Whigs. King made use of him in this way, and Swift responded curtly, well aware of the Nijmegen precedent: ‘Sir William Temple’s Memoirs, which you mentioned, is his first Part, and was published twenty Years ago; it is chiefly of the Treaty of Nimeguen, and was so well known, that I could hardly think your Grace hath not seen it’ (Corr., I, 448-9, 461). In sum, then, the Swift-King correspondence shows King praising the balance of power and the Dutch, warning against French universal monarchy, and invoking Temple’s authority to do so. Meanwhile Swift condemns the Dutch, downgrades the French threat, and says little about Temple. The distance he has traveled since 1701 is clear.

As a final point, Swift’s reticence on balance of power coincides with the shift away from exclusively military-political reasoning and toward an emphasis

53 Note that Swift more than once joked about Archbishop King’s personal and ecclesiastical ambitions in terms of universal monarchy; see Corr., I, 226; III, 663-4.

54 See e.g. Temple, Works, II, 451-5. It is worth noting that Temple also narrated how the Dutch worked with France to conclude a separate peace at Nijmegen to England’s detriment. Thus Swift’s description of how the Dutch aimed to be ‘at the Head of a Treaty of Peace’ should not be read exclusively in the context of Tory ideology but also in the context of broader foreign policy thinking (Corr., I, 460).


on fiscal and economic arguments for peace. Readers are familiar with these arguments within the context of Swift’s Tory tracts;55 but the correspondence with King suggests that Swift viewed them as a sort of final, incontrovertible justification for immediate peace. Indeed, by March 1713, the month of the peace treaty’s signing, frustrated by his inability to satisfy King’s arguments about wily French diplomacy, he resorted to bare assertion about the nation’s finances:

I will not undertake to defend our Proceedings against any Man, who will not allow this Postulatum, that it was impossible to carry on the War any longer; which, whoever denies, either has not examined the State of the Nation with respect to its Debts, or denies it from the Spirit of Party. (Corr., I, 472; cf. 460).

Swift elaborated on the fiscal reasoning in the History of the Four Last Years – it was not a rhetorical ploy but one of his chief concerns.56 King, for his part, initially agreed with the fiscal necessity of peace, at least with respect to conditions in Ireland (Corr., I, 417). Yet by the time Swift laid down his ‘Postulatum,’ King stated that few of his acquaintances in Ireland would accept it – instead Britain could reduce its outlays, demand more from the allies, and continue fighting (Corr., I, 477). Thus King prioritized the struggle abroad and subordinated the fiscal concerns he knew to be real, while Swift prioritized the fiscal concerns and subordinated the external struggle, essentially hoping that France would be unwilling to risk another war over Spain.

Fears of JacobitismSwift’s time with the Oxford ministry was perhaps the most Anglocentric time of his life. He lived in London, moved in the highest circles of English power, advocated stridently English policies, and wrote with a view to gaining a permanent settlement in England. His direct involvement in Irish affairs has been called ‘trivial’, with some exceptions like his attempt to quash a tax on Irish yarn.57 And, as one would expect, Ireland played a minor role in his writing on European politics. The most telling example occurs in the Conduct, where British restrictions on Irish trade reinforce his theme of the dangers of the Dutch trade empire:

The Dutch will, in effect, be entire Masters of all the Low-Countries […] and in that fertile Country may set up all sorts of Manufactures, particularly the Woollen,

55 Pincus, pp. 111-12; Goldgar in CW, VIII, 4; Moore, Swift, The Book, and the Irish Financial Revolution (Baltimore, MD, 2010), p. 40; Patrick Kelly, ‘Swift on Money and Economics’ in The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift, ed. by Christopher Fox, pp. 128-45 (p. 128); Downie, ‘Conduct of the Allies’, pp. 117-18, 121-5; Ehrenpreis, II, 498; C. B. Wheeler, ‘Introduction’ to The Conduct of the Allies (Oxford, 1916), pp. xxxvii-viii.

56 Marshall, p. 130, rightly highlights the importance of the economic argument but claims he sought only to create the ‘appearance of exactitude and factual solidity’ (her emphasis). Ehrenpreis, II, 600, merely notes the ‘long digression’ without according it special relevance to Swift’s thought.

57 Ferguson, pp. 39-41.


by inviting the disobliged Manufacturers in Ireland, and the French Refugees, who are scattered all over Germany. (CW, VIII, 70)

Here we see Swift’s abiding concern for Irish trade but only within the context of greater concerns for ‘the People of England’ and their trade. He specifically dismissed Irish perspectives on the peace. As he wrote to Dean Stearne, ‘they tell me, you in Ireland are furious against a peace; and it is a great jest to see people in Ireland furious for or against any thing’ (Corr., I, 408).

Despite such pretensions, however, he necessarily remained engaged in Irish church affairs and politics. One of the recurrent themes of his correspondence is the traffic of rumors and misinformation between the two islands that we observed in the Letter concerning the Sacramental Test and Short Character of Wharton. The problem re-emerged during Swift’s time with the Oxford ministry, so that he now emphasized Ireland’s false impressions of England rather than vice versa. An early instance involves Archbishop King, who got off on the wrong foot with the ministry in April 1711 for allegedly hinting, with a quote from Tacitus, that Harley might have conspired with Guiscard, the man who attempted to assassinate him.58 Swift defended King despite his own doubts and blamed the affair on the Irish inability to comprehend ‘Raillery’ (Corr., I, 344, 380).59 He also inveighed against the ‘infamous Rascals, of which there never wants a Set in that Kingdom, who make it their Business to send wrong Characters here’ (Corr., I, 352). From this point onward the ministry authorized Swift to act as censor for ‘any Thing relating to Ireland’ to be published in the Tory Post-Boy (Corr., I, 343). Archbishop King, for his part, treaded carefully thereafter, and praised the ministers fairly regularly, though by the following year his view of the ministry had soured.

Individual reputations were not all that was at stake in the cross-channel flow of information, however, and Irish information and perception would prove central to Swift’s disagreement with King over the ministry’s peace policy. King warned repeatedly that Irish Protestants needed greater assurances than their English neighbors both of the Tory ministry’s good intentions and of security against Jacobitism. As he told Swift, ‘there really needs but one thing to quiet the people of Ireland, and it is to convince them, that there is no eye to the Pretender.’ Such fears were partly legitimate, he claimed, given the scars of the Williamite wars, but they also arose from the ‘great industry […] used to bugbear [the Irish Protestants] with that fear’ (Corr., I, 375). Like Swift, King saw the dissenters and radical Whigs as having an interest in stoking these embers. In early 1712, he remained optimistic that the ministry would overcome the alarmists: ‘when the falseness of their surmises once appears all Ireland will be unanimous for the new Ministry, for they are well convinced that the other had ill designs’ (Corr., I, 416).

58 Corr., I, 344-5, n. 1; 353, n. 1; Philip O’Regan, Archbishop William King of Dublin (1650-1729) and the constitution in church and state (Dublin, 2000), p. 184.

59 Cf. Journal to Stella, 25-28 April 1711, in CW, IX, 192-4.


The pro-church reaction that drove the Whigs from power remained in effect; Jacobitism was, it seemed, an exaggerated risk.60

Nevertheless, King clearly shared these concerns to some extent. His frequently reprinted The State of the Protestants of Ireland under the late King James’s Government (1691) was an ‘authoritative account’ of Protestant Ireland’s dangers in the 1680s and a constant reminder that the protection of Ireland and England from James II ‘concerned all Europe’ and formed the basis of the ‘Confederacy’ against France. King grounded his discussion of international relations in that work on the idea that James wished to tyrannize over his people, which gave sanction to other princes and nations (William III and the allies) to interpose: both to defend the English and Irish people from oppression and to defend themselves by maintaining the divinely ordered balance among ‘several Principalities and Dominions.’61 The same logic held in the 1700s with James III seeking a return – only now the Grand Alliance was in jeopardy. Needless to say King never shared Swift’s absurd, Bolingbrokean hope that ‘Ireland will soon be equally convinced’ with England that the only remaining Jacobites lurk among the Whigs (Corr., I, 383). Indeed in response to King’s aforementioned letter on false alarms, Swift disavows any knowledge of treasonous activity in the ministry as if King had expressed his own fears and not those of the general public:

For some Weeks past, we [in England] have heard less of the Pretender than formerly. I suppose it is, like a Fashion, got into Ireland, when it is out here: But, in my Conscience, I do not think any one Person in the Court or Ministry here, designs any more to bring in the Pretender, than the great Turk. (Corr., I, 420)

The reassurance is not so reassuring, since Swift merely dismisses the problem: Ireland is behind the times and Jacobitism no longer a national concern. From here the gap in perception between the two churchmen would only widen.

Usually Swift and King discussed the Pretender separately from Utrecht, but obviously they were inseparable. Take the Duke of Ormond and the matter of Dunkirk. King admired Ormond’s personal qualities but came to distrust him during his lord lieutenancy on account of his suspected Jacobite leanings and associations (Corr., I, 387).62 Swift by contrast sang Ormond’s praises for the way he managed the allies and took control of Dunkirk and other barrier towns upon the ceasefire with France (PW, VII, 126, 142). Dunkirk was of course a launching pad for Jacobite invasions as well as French privateers. It appeared, at the time, that Tory diplomacy would ensure its destruction, which would be a signature achievement and a bulwark against Whig accusations.63 When Swift wrote to tell

60 Kelly, ‘Fear of Invasion’, pp. 48-51, notes that Archbishop King saw Ireland as relatively secure during and after the experience of 1708 but that popular fears did not abate.

61 King, State of the Protestants of Ireland, pp. 6-12; see also Kelly, ‘Fear of Invasion’, pp. 38-9. 62 O’Regan, p. 175. 63 John Robert Moore, ‘Defoe, Steele, and the Demolition of Dunkirk’, Huntington Library

Quarterly (1950), 279-302 (p. 282); Paul Hyland, ‘A Breach of Peace: The Controversy over the


King the latest news, and noted the rise in tensions with the Dutch as Ormond moved across Flanders, King diminished it by contrasting the one port with the entirety of Spain: ‘I reckoned the securing Spain to the House of Bourbon was of such moment that the King of France had been inexcusable if he had stuck at ten Dunkirks to obtain it’ (Corr., I, 427, 430). Later, in his pamphlet duel with Richard Steele, Swift would claim that the Whigs belittled the importance of Dunkirk before turning it into their call to arms – certainly King had done so (CW, VIII, 225). Over the course of the peace debate, King came to see the Jacobite threat as intensifying.

The information disparity made matters worse. King complains, ‘perhaps no negotiations were ever managed with so much secrecy as this’, which he thought sapped what little public confidence remained in the ministry and peace (Corr., I, 425). Swift by contrast had always believed that those out of power should keep to their own business, and as Tory propagandist he frequently resorted to arguments from authority, state secrets and the queen’s prerogative. In his final, somewhat flustered letter on the peace, quoted above, he declared:

We have been forced to conceal the best Side, which I agree has been unfortunate and unpopular; but you will please to consider, that this Way of every Subject interposing their Sentiments upon the Management of foreign Negotiations, is a very new Thing among us, and the Suffering it, has been thought in the Opinion of wise Men, too great a Strain upon the Prerogative. (Corr., I, 472)

Of course, this suspicion of the democratization of foreign policy, by no means unique to Swift or even the eighteenth century, needs to be taken alongside Swift’s intention in the long run, for which these letters are better known, to write a history that would reveal ‘the whole Story of these two last intriguing Years’ and ‘unriddle […] many a dark Problem.’64 Still, having seen the damage the opposition press could do to the ministry’s image, particularly in coordination with foreign ministers who had access to peace preliminaries and other inside information, Swift was far from accepting King’s complaints about secrecy (e.g. PW, VII, 103-5). Similarly, in the dispute with Steele he would explicitly adopt the posture of a literary critic to avoid dealing with the embarrassing questions about the postponement of Dunkirk’s demolition (CW, VIII, 219). In short, especially with respect to foreign affairs, he claimed that government knows best, and Ireland knows nothing.

No surprise then that King remained unconvinced of the ministry’s success when the peace treaty was signed. ‘If there be sufficient security ag[ain]st the Pretender,’ he tells Swift, ‘the people of Ir[e]l[an]d will receive it gratefully and not trouble their minds about any thing else, but the fear of him put them almost out of their witts and hurrys them into many inconveniencys.’ The statement

Ninth Article of the Treaty of Utrecht’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 22 (1999), 51-66 (pp. 52-3).

64 Marshall, pp. 133-4, 181-2.


appears neutral, but he goes on to say that France has ‘notoriously overreached’ England in every negotiation ‘for the last four hundred years’ (Corr., I, 477). King, writing from Dublin, no longer gave the Tories the benefit of the doubt; Swift, in London, believed he simply knew better.

King was also more in tune with popular feeling in Ireland. Along with the peace, Anglo-Irish relations had provoked his turn against the ministry. The mayoral dispute, over the course of which King took sides with the Whig aldermen of Dublin in opposition to the high-flying ministerial appointee Lord High Chancellor Sir Constantine Phipps, had begun before Swift concerned himself in the ‘Affairs of Ireland’, but in 1713 it merged into the general backlash against the Jacobite peace (Corr., I, 572).65 Swift was on friendly but not intimate terms with Phipps, and intimate but not always friendly terms with King; he defended both men to their detractors (Corr., I, 574).

Phipps had particularly antagonized the Whigs by arranging for the courts to nullify charges against the Jacobite-sympathizing printer Edward Lloyd for republishing the Memoirs of the Chevalier de St. George (1712) while simultaneously prosecuting the Whig writer Dudley Moore (Lloyd’s newsletter had even published attacks on Moore).66 Moore’s offence had been to read the banned prologue written by Samuel Garth for Nicholas Rowe’s Tamerlane in one of the performances of the play to celebrate King William’s birthday and landing. The play allegorizes William III as the great Mongol warlord destined to defend the world against the tyrannous Ottoman sultan Bajazet (Louis XIV). The play pictures Tamerlane as the defender of his neighbours and liberty everywhere, so the analogue was inherently unpleasant for an administration that seemed to be abandoning the field to the Turks. But Garth’s prologue explicitly engages in foreign policy commentary – ‘Assert lost rights, an Austrian Prince alone / Is born to nod upon a Spanish throne.’67 Phipps, speaking before the lord mayor and aldermen in January 1713, called it ‘a Prologue that […] invites Her Majesty’s Subjects to make War against those with whom Her Majesty thinks fit to make Peace.’ He denounced the prologue’s demand to ‘send Anjou back to France’ on the grounds that it would ‘rob her Majesty of that Part of Her Prerogative which was always allowed Her […] the Power of making Peace and War.’68

65 O’Regan, pp. 183-200; David Hayton, ‘The Crisis in Ireland and the Disintegration of Queen Anne’s last Ministry’, Irish Historical Studies 22 (1981), 193-215 (pp. 193, 198).

66 O’Regan, p. 186; Daniel Beaumont, ‘Lloyd, Edward’, Dictionary of Irish Biography, ed. by James McGuire and James Quinn (Cambridge, 2009) <http://dib.cambridge.org/viewReadPage.do?articleId=a4856> [accessed 21 July 2015].

67 Quoted in William Smith Clark, The Early Irish Stage: The Beginnings to 1720 (Oxford, 1955), p. 130; see also Helen Burke, Riotous Performances: The Struggle for Hegemony in the Irish Theater, 1712-1784 (Notre Dame, 2003), pp. 19-51, who reads the Phipps-Moore controversy in the context of proto-nationalist trends rather than Whig anti-Catholic and anti-Jacobite activism against Phipps, the ministry and Utrecht (p. 43); Hayton, ‘Crisis in Ireland’, p. 197.

68 Richard Helsham, A Long History of a Certain Session of a Certain Parliament, in a Certain Kingdom (Dublin, 1714 [1730?]), p. 65.


Tory balladeers echoed the argument from ‘Prerogative Royal.’69 Swift defended Phipps to King, one of his chief rivals, saying, ‘the Chancellor’s Speech on that Occasion hath been transmitted hither, and seems to clear him from the Imputation of prejudging’ (Corr., I, 574).

Later the Whig majority in the Irish Commons issued an Address to Queen Anne alerting her to Phipps’s threat to the succession and fomenting of partisanship. They promised to support the Hanoverian succession and ‘your Majesty’s most undoubted Title to the Crown of these Realms, against all Your Enemies, either at Home or Abroad.’70 For Swift ‘such Professions […] signify no more than if they were penned by my Lord Wharton, or Mr. Molesworth’, Ireland’s radical, anticlerical, pro-war Whig icons (Corr., I, 573).71 True to the warmongering stereotype that Swift so tirelessly promoted, the Whig Commons had approved of military force to suppress Tory rioters at the polls. ‘A Man was killed’, Swift tells King, relating the ministry’s point of view; ‘such a Thing would, they say, look monstrous in England’ (Corr., I, 574).

Swift probably disapproved of Phipps’s aggressive tactics. There is much truth to the claim that what he really disliked was Ireland’s operating on a ‘different Scheme of Politicks’ from England,72 primarily because it portended a Whig resurgence. He had underestimated King’s warnings of an anti-Jacobite backlash until it was too late. Now, as he had done with the sacramental test, he saw the Whig manouveres in Ireland as a step toward what was to come in England (Corr., I, 572-3).

ConclusionReflecting back on the last four years of Queen Anne’s reign, Swift, writing from Ireland in October 1714, recounted his entrance into politics with the publication of the Discourse. He claimed to have formulated the pamphlet’s argument on the Whig impeachments from an Irish perspective: ‘the same manner of proceeding, at least as it appeared to me from the views we received of it in Ireland, had ruined the liberties of Athens and Rome’ (PW, VIII, 119). On the surface this statement simply reflects his time as chaplain to the Earl of Berkeley, the social milieu of Berkeley’s household and Dublin Castle, and his Whiggish party affiliation at that time.73 But as we have seen, Swift in 1714 had no high regard for how things

69 A New Song on the Whiggs Behaviour at the Play House on the 4th of this Instant, November 1712, at a Play call’d TAMERLAIN, in Lloyd’s Newsletter for 11 Nov 1712. Qtd in Clark, pp. 131-2; Burke, p. 19.

70 To the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty: The Humble Address of the Knights, Citizens, and Burgesses in Parliament Assembled (Dublin, 1713), p. 2.

71 Swift criticized Molesworth at this time for insulting the clergy, see CW, VIII, 249-50. King was allied to Molesworth against the ministry and the peace; see Molesworth to King, 28 September 1714 in A Great Archbishop of Dublin: William King, ed. by Sir Charles Simeon King (London, 1908), pp. 168-9.

72 Ehrenpreis, II, 722. 73 Berkeley corresponded with a range of leading Whigs and Tories during Swift’s time in his

household, including Lord Somers, the Earl of Pembroke, Gilbert Burnet, the Earl of Jersey


‘appeared’ in Ireland, or for the accurate transfer of political information between the islands.

Rather, to attribute the Discourse to an Irish perspective was probably a way of distancing himself from the precise stance he took in the work. Obviously he had many reasons to do so. Then he wrote in defence of the Whig junto, now he wrote as a Tory and a bitterly discomfitted victim of Whig resurgence. Then he defended the use of bribery in elections, now he redacted that passage from his revised version in Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (1711).74 He was not ashamed of the Discourse as a whole, as his decision to republish it shows, but he had good reason to back away from some of its positions.

We should note, however, that Swift’s alliance with the Tories did not entail a change in outlook on the constitutional balance of power. His Tory tracts elevate the importance of other internal balances – church and state, landed and moneyed interests, civil and military power – but still give constitutional balance priority. He justified the ministry and its diplomacy on the basis of Queen Anne’s constitutional authority to choose her ministers and govern foreign policy, the same reasoning underlying his support for King William and the Whig ministers in the Discourse. In 1701 he defended the king and nobles against the commons; in 1710-14 he defended the queen and commons against the nobles. The central idea that any one power should yield to the agreement of two others (despite its ability to obstruct) remained intact. Events challenged this principle but did not break it. He defended Oxford’s dozen, which was technically constitutional, explicitly in balance-of-power terms, though he recognized the precedent could harm the constitution if abused (PW, VII, 20-1; VIII, 150). Similarly he defended the queen’s dismissal of Marlborough in terms of reducing ‘the overgrown Power of any particular Person’, and yet, despite the undoubted constitutionality of it, worried that ‘Posterity, without knowing the Truth of Things, may perhaps number us among the ungrateful Populace of Greece and Rome’ for removing the great commander – almost a direct nod to the Discourse (CW, VIII, 175). Thus when Swift in 1714 looked back on the politics of the Discourse, he could hardly have regretted its constitutional theory – more likely he looked back on his party affiliation and its political, sectarian, socio-economic and foreign policy ramifications.

The war drew all these issues together. Swift argued relentlessly from the Conduct to the History of the Four Last Years that prolonging the war meant prolonging the financing of it that favored the Whig-Dutch alliance, which

and the Earl of Rochester. He was friendly with Arthur Moore, a Tory MP who supported the impeachments, and wrote to him the month before he and Swift returned to England. See James Woolley, ‘Swift and Lord Berkeley, 1699-1701: Berkeley Castle Swiftiana’, in ‘The First Wit of the Age’: Essays on Swift and his Contemporaries in Honour of Hermann J. Real, ed. by Kirsten Juhas et al (New York, 2013), pp. 31-68 (pp. 34-7, 46, 65-7, 65 n. 147); Paula Watson and Perry Gauci, ‘Moore, Arthur’, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1690-1715, ed. by Cruickshanks et al <http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1690-1715/member/moore-arthur-1666-1730> [accessed 21 July 2015].

74 See Ellis, Discourse, pp. 125-7, 186.


accorded greater influence to republican and tolerationist elements – this is his so-called ‘conspiracy thesis’ (PW, VII, 23, 68-70).75 As both Swift and King observed, Irish Whigs were on the whole more fearful of France and the Pretender than their neighbors because of the legacy of the Williamite wars. Indeed, while Swift’s animosity toward the House of Commons in the Discourse arose in great part from his resentments over its role in the Civil War in England, his Irish background exacerbated these feelings. He blamed the Irish Rebellion of 1641 on the English Commons, which ‘held the King’s hands, while the Irish Papists here were cutting our grandfathers throats’ (PW, IX, 223).76 Yet because both the international concerns and the putative Irish perspective of the Discourse have been overlooked, the full implications of this insight have gone unexplored. The Discourse is not concerned only with impeachments or constitutional disputes but cases ‘when a Concurrence of many Circumstances, both within and without, unite towards [the state’s] Ruin’ (Discourse, 117). The worst of these is invasion and territorial dismemberment by a foreign power. French universal monarchy was an abstraction that stood for a concrete set of threats. For Swift, in 1701, they were as likely to manifest in Ireland as in Scotland or England, given the country’s geopolitical situation and potential for Jacobite rebellion. By the time he wrote his Memoirs he believed even more firmly than before, through his contact with the ministry, that this threat had dissipated.77

The unpopularity of the Utrecht peace in Ireland exemplified what Swift saw as that kingdom’s distorted, Whiggish perspective on the Tories, the church, England and Europe. That perspective is what he sought to distance himself from in the Memoirs of 1714. Obviously his view of the Anglo-Irish relationship would continue evolving after his return to Dublin. In a few years he would revive the colonial patriotism of the Injured Lady, inveigh against the maritime ‘Maxims of British Policy’ that he had defended, denounce colonialism, and demand freer trade for Ireland (CW, VIII, 63).78 But even then he would insist that Irish economic wellbeing remain subordinate to English security, i.e. that Irish free trade does not extend to ‘countries engaged in a war with England’ (Corr., II, 643; cf. PW,

75 Downie, ‘Conduct of the Allies’, p. 112; Speck, ‘The Examiner Examined: Swift’s Tory Pamphleteering’, in Focus: Swift, ed. by Claude Rawson (London, 1971), pp. 138-54 (p. 140).

76 Oakleaf, p. 43, quotes the same passage with the caveat that ‘an Irish example has no place in this English tract.’ Otherwise it is an oft-quoted passage unassociated with the English political tracts. See S. J. Connolly, ‘Old English, New English and ancient Irish: Swift and the Irish past,’ in Politics and Literature in the Age of Swift, ed. by Rawson, pp. 255-70 (p. 258); Carole Fabricant, ‘Swift as Irish Historian’, in Walking Naboth’s Vineyard: New Studies of Swift, ed. by Christopher Fox and Brenda Tooley (Notre Dame, IN, 1995), pp. 40-72 (pp. 60-3).

77 Note Erasmus Lewis’s dispatches to Swift on the country’s security from invasion (Corr., II, 38; Corr., II, 244). Swift did not dismiss the 1715 rising but afterwards viewed invasion attempts as unsubstantial (Corr., II, 150; Corr., II, 301). See also Ehrenpreis, ‘Swift’s History of England’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 51 (1952), 177-85 (p. 184). Kelly, ‘Fear of Invasion’, pp. 52-5, shows that popular fears in Ireland were slow to ebb even after the Utrecht peace, the Hanoverian succession, the death of Louis XIV and the Anglo-French alliance.

78 Pincus, pp. 104-5, 105n. 33, observes that the anti-imperialism in Gulliver reflects a change of position from that of Swift’s tracts for the Oxford ministry.


XII, 8). And of course he would continue to see Whiggism and dissent as greater dangers to the three kingdoms than Jacobitism and France – not only because he thought the Jacobites incapable of generating enough popular support to succeed in changing the regime, as he famously professed to Alexander Pope, but also because he thought peace with France and Spain, a new arrangement with the Dutch and Austrians, and the consequent revival of trade and fiscal streamlining would be in the nation’s best interests (Corr., II, 358; PW, IX, 31). That is why he was able to proclaim so unabashedly in The Publick Spirit of the Whigs, ‘I do seriously think, the Most Christian King to be a much better Friend of Her Majesty’s than Mr. St[ee]le, or any of his Faction’ (CW, VIII, 275).

Documents

Swift, Utrecht and Ireland