Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World by Leo Damrosch

Author:Leo Damrosch [Damrosch, Leo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2013-11-06T05:00:00+00:00

57. Sir Robert Walpole. The artist has tactfully suggested Walpole’s massive girth. Though not a tall man, he weighed 280 pounds.

Walpole often turns up in Swift’s poems, too, with a blank for his name that the rhyme makes obvious.

How the helm is ruled by ——,

At whose oars, like slaves, they all pull. . . .

But why would he, except he slobbered,

Offend our Patriot, great Sir R——?22

But unlike Bolingbroke and Pope, who dreamed of a virtuous Tory opposition that could restore integrity to politics, Swift now regarded politics as degrading if not corrupting. When he came to write Gulliver’s Travels in the 1720s, he gave the nobly rational Houyhnhnms a republic, not a monarchy. The foul Yahoos, on the other hand, obey a vicious leader whom they turn against the moment they get a chance.

This leader had usually a favourite as like himself as he could get, whose employment was to lick his master’s feet and posteriors, and drive the female Yahoos to his kennel, for which he was now and then rewarded with a piece of ass’s flesh. This favourite is hated by the whole herd, and therefore to protect himself keeps always near the person of his leader. He usually continues in office till a worse can be found; but the very moment he is discarded, his successor, at the head of all the Yahoos in that district, young and old, male and female, come in a body and discharge their excrements upon him from head to foot. But how far this might be applicable to our courts and favourites and ministers of state, my master said I could best determine.23

THE ATTERBURY DISASTER

The final chapter in the Tories’ downfall came in 1722, when Oxford was back in the House of Lords and Bolingbroke about to return from exile. Francis Atterbury, bishop of Rochester, was the leader of the High Church wing that sought to establish the Church as separate from the monarchy, not subordinate to it. It now emerged that he was still negotiating with the Pretender.

Atterbury and his fellow conspirators exchanged heavily coded letters, which were intercepted by the government, and in which references to a dog named Harlequin supposedly furnished a damning clue. Swift wrote, but didn’t publish, a mocking poem called Upon the Horrid Plot Discovered by Harlequin, the Bishop of Rochester’s French Dog:

I asked a Whig the other night

How came this wicked plot to light;

He answered that a dog of late

Informed a minister of state.24

A dog from France did exist, though Atterbury never actually had it. It had arrived in England lame after an accident in transit, and was being cared for by the landlady of one of the minor conspirators, who said under interrogation that it was intended “for the Bishop of Rochester.” That wouldn’t have proved anything in itself, but in the letters the dog’s owner was referred to as a certain T. Illington, who suffered from gout as Atterbury did, was away from London at just the times Atterbury was, and was distressed that a dog being sent from France had broken its leg.

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