1816; the year without a summer

In April 1815 the volcano Tambora, in what is now Indonesia, began to erupt, and continued to do so for several weeks. This was the greatest eruption in recorded history, ten times the magnitude of Krakatoa. Its immediate effects were witnessed by Sir Stamford Raffles, the colonial official who founded the port of Singapore, who was at that time lieutenant-governor of Java. He described three immense columns of flame rising into the sky, detonations loud enough to be heard in Sumatra, 1600 kilometres away, three days of total darkness in Java, rocks as big as his head falling 10 kilometres from the volcano, and nearer the scene, total devastation.


Apart from several thousand immediate casualties, at least 80,000 local people were to die of starvation and disease as ash buried their crops and contaminated their drinking-water. But the impact of Tambora was to be far greater than that. Modern research suggests that at least ten cubic kilometres of material was flung into the atmosphere as the top third of the mountain blew itself off, leaving a gigantic crater.

200 million tons of sulphurous gases from the volcano quickly circled the globe, combining with water in the atmosphere to form droplets of sulphuric acid, blocking out the sunlight and causing a sharp fall in global temperatures over the next couple of years (as much as ten degrees in some places), with disastrous changes in weather conditions. It is possible that the eruption helped cause the unseasonal torrential rain in Belgium in the summer of 1815; reducing the fields to quagmires for the Waterloo campaign and forcing Napoleon to postpone his attack on Wellington’s position till the afternoon, with fatal consequences for himself. But the full effect of Tambora was felt the next year.

1816 was “the year without a summer” in Western Europe and North America. In Canada the ice never melted. There was frost in Connecticut in June, and snow in Quebec, New York state and Maine. Crops failed and livestock died. Things were even worse in Europe. Switzerland experienced its coldest summer for 500 years; in many areas peasants tried to subsist on boiled grass and thousands fled to the towns in search of food. Perhaps 200,000 died of famine all told.

In Britain the end of the Napoleonic wars caused the profound economic dislocation inevitable at the conclusion of long conflicts, with thousands of soldiers demobilised, munitions industries closing, and thus a sudden rise in unemployment. Grain prices had risen to unprecedented heights during the war (a load of wheat cost far more in the Napoleonic wars than in the First World War, even before we allow for inflation over the intervening century!), and after the war prices were kept artificially high by the “Corn Laws” which protected British farmers against cheap imports. Not that there would have been any cheap continental grain available in 1816! The result was several years of hunger and social disturbance, which was met with governmental repression culminating in the notorious “Peterloo massacre” in Manchester in 1819.



In Ireland the potato crop failed two years running, and there was a famine that was a preview of the disasters of the 1840s. A typhus epidemic swept Europe, and a new strain of cholera appeared in India and quickly spread worldwide. In the old school textbooks these years were always labelled the time of “distress and discontent”, but I don’t recall the Tambora eruption ever being mentioned as a contributory factor.

There were even artistic consequences. The lurid skies resulting from the volcano are said to have influenced in Turner’s paintings. Byron, Shelley and his wife were on holiday in Italy, and being confined indoors by the bad weather, occupied their time writing ghost stories. Mary Shelley (the daughter of the radical writer William Godwin and the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft) was inspired to write “Frankenstein”; a not unfitting tribute to this terrible year.

Christmas

It always amuses me to think how archaeologists in the distant future would be surprised to discover evidence that the inhabitants of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa celebrated a midsummer festival that featured an elderly gentleman dressed in furs suitable for wintry weather, riding a sleigh pulled by an alien species of deer; when people exchanged cards depicting unseasonal snowy scenes populated by alien fauna and flora. It would not be hard for the archaeologists to deduce that this was clearly a cult imported from the nortern hemisphere, but they might wonder why no attempt had been made to adapt it to local conditions. (My suggestion would be Santa Claus dressed in beach gear, arriving on a surfboard, perhaps with attendant dolphins)

Every year we hear of primary school teachers getting into trouble for telling their little charges that Santa Claus doesn't exist. It think this is quite right: after all, these days Santa Claus is probably the only supernatural being some children are brought up to believe in. He is an ideal icon for the present age; his entire raison d'etre is consumerism (where would shops be without him, and the obligation to buy presents?), and he contains no trace whatsoever of Christianity, being therefore equally suitable in our multi-cultural times for Moslems, Hindus and even atheists. His cult embodies the famous schoolboy definition of faith: believing what we know to be untrue; so adults pretend to believe in Santa Claus for the sake of their children, and the children, once they have reched a certain age, pretend to go along with it.

It is significant that in the old Soviet Union the Communists managed to scap most public aspects of Christmas, but they never managed to abolish Santa Claus, who was reincarnated in the transparently thin disguise of "Grandfather Frost".

The real Santa Claus

Most people know that Santa Claus is derived from Saint Nicholas, but who exactly was Saint Nicholas, and how did he become the old gentleman with a white beard, dressed in red and white, who appears at Christmas?

Not a great deal is known about Saint Nicholas, apart from the fact that he was a bishop at Myra, in what is now south-western Turkey, in the 4th century A.D. He is supposed to have attended the Council of Nicaea in 325, when several crucial doctrines of the Christian church were established, and it is said that he was so horrified by the beliefs of the arch-heretic Arius (who maintained that God the Son must logically have come later than, and be lesser than, God the Father) that he clouted Arius in the face, but there appears to be no foundation for this story. At any event, by the 6th century Nicholas had become a very popular saint, with several churches dedicated to him, and he became the patron saint of sailors, merchants, pawnbrokers, children and others. Many legends were attached to him, the most famous being as follows:
There was a certain poor man in Myra who had three daughters. This was an affliction to him, because he was too poor to provide them with dowries, which meant no-one would want to marry them, and the only solution he could think of was to sell them as prostitutes. Nicholas got to hear of it, and to save them from this fate he secretly dropped three bags of gold through their window at night, to provide them with the necessary dowries. He thus became associated with the giving of gifts, and his sign was three money-bags, or balls of gold.

But Nicholas is now known as Saint Nicholas of Bari, which is in Apulia in south-eastern Italy, a long way from Myra. How could this be? What happened was that in 1087 the city fathers of Bari decided their city needed a tourist attraction to bring in the punters and raise necessary revenue; and in the Middle Ages this meant the relics of a famous saint. So a party of grave-robbers was sent to Myra, and succeeded in taking Nicholas’s remains from their tomb. The sweet smell that arose from the opened coffin told them that the saint was happy about this! The robbers conveyed his body back to Bari, where it was entombed with great splendour. The whole project was a tremendous success; pious pilgrims flocked to Bari to worship, and the city became immensely prosperous as a result. But the city fathers double-crossed the grave-robbers, and refused to pay them the reward agreed for their work!

But how did Saint Nicholas of Bari become Santa Claus? Nicholas’s feast-day was December 6th, and it became a day for giving presents, so it is easy to see how this was postponed for a few days until Christmas. As for the name: this is Dutch in origin, derived from the early Dutch settlers in New York (originally New Amsterdam), where Saint Nicholas in the local dialect became “Sinte Klaas”. There is no doubt that Santa Claus is an American importation, and did no reach Britain until the late 19th century at the very earliest: there is no trace of him in Charles Dickens, for instance. His reindeer all have German names, and his costume of red robes trimmed with white fur only become standardised in the 20th century. Why red and white? The widely accepted answer is; because they are the Coca-cola colours!


The above picture is an early painting by Raphael, known as the Ansidei altarpiece, which can be seen at the National Gallery in London. The figure on the left is John the Baptist, but the bishop on the right is Saint Nicholas of Bari! This is not Santa Claus as we are used to seeing him!
As they might say on Star Trek: "It's Santa Claus, Jim; but not as we know him!"

Silly Russsian names

In 1895 the great Russian playwright Anton Chekhov visited Sakhalin, an island with a very harsh climate north of Japan, which was being used as a settlement of convicts and political exiles. As well as being famous as a dramatist and writer of short stories, Chekhov was a qualified doctor, and he produced a detailed report on the numbers of people living on Sakhalin, their standard of living, working conditions, diets and diseases, as well as observations on the native tribes of Gilyaks and Ainu. He was struck by the peculiar surnames of many of the convicts, and listed the following:-
"Fingerless, Limper, Stomach, Godless, Yawner, Not-remembered, Nameless (several versions of this), Family-forgotten, Buried, River, Grey-mare, Fetter, Behind-walls, Yellow-foot".
One suspects that many of these were nicknames given to a man's serf ancestor by his owner, and others were simply something written down by a court official for a peasant who genuinely didn't know his surname.

An unusual metaphor

A while ago I was in a bar whilst someone was holding forth on the alleged bisexuality of Michael Portillo, a topic much hinted at in the press. One splendid old chap, a retired major I think, overheard this and was moved to ask, "Do you mean to say he's one of these 'round-the-wicket' fellows?". I thought this was such a splendid remark that it merited being preserved.

Jonathon Swift's Writings

In the previous post I attempted to place Swift within the context of his times, especially as regards political events. I would now like to make some comment about some of his writings, and what they reveal about his personality.

Swift was disappointed that his political services to the Tory party were not rewarded with a Bishopric, supposedly because Queen Anne was shocked by the scatological nature of much of his work. It has to be said that Swift, although a most intelligent and learned man, as well as a brilliant writer, would not under any circumstances be allowed to serve as a clergyman nowadays, because he was, by any definition, seriously weird. George Orwell in his essay on Swift calls him a “Tory anarchist”, presumably impotent as far as normal sex is concerned, with an exaggerated horror of human dung. This last characteristic keeps emerging in “Gulliver’s Travels”, as will be mentioned later. It must be left to psychiatrists to speculate how far Swift’s peculiarities can be attributed to the fact that he was an orphan who never knew either of his parents. I want here to outline a few of Swift’s pamphlets as well as his solitary book. (It might be noted that all but one of them were published anonymously or under a pseudonym. The only one which earned any money directly was “Gulliver’s Travels”, which brought Swift £200: approximately ten years’ pay for the average English household at the time)

“A Tale of a Tub”, which is said to have particularly shocked Queen Anne, was written around 1696 but published in 1704. It is a religious allegory, taking the form of a story about a man who has bequeathed his three sons a coat each, on the condition that the garments are left forever unaltered. The coat, of course, represents the Gospel, and the three sons, whose names are Peter (the Roman Catholic church), Jack (the Calvinists) and Martin (the Church of England), inevitably ignore their father’s wishes and subject their coats to unsuitable fashionable changes. As we might have anticipated, Martin comes in for the least degree of criticism, whereas Peter and Jack are roundly mocked and abused.

“An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity” (1708) sees Swift at his most sarcastic and ironic. The result is not only very funny, but curiously contemporary in application. He begins by saying it is clear that nobody believes in Christianity any more, which has been “for some time laid aside by general consent, as utterly inconsistent with all our present schemes of wealth and power”. Political parties nowadays, he says, are motivated purely by personal ambitions rather than by principles. We once suffered from “foolish notions of justice, piety, love of country”, but modern education has ensured “not the least tincture left of those infusions, or strings of those weeds”, so it might be thought that there is now no need to abolish Christianity. But then again, if Christianity is abolished, what will there be for satirists and wits to make fun of? And even worse, he has been reliably informed that if Christianity was ever to be abolished, there might be a fall in share prices on the Stock Exchange! All this goes along with gratuitous asides attacking Jesuits, Quakers, freethinkers and others of his favourite targets

“A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Ireland from being a Burden to their Parents or Country” was written in 1729, very late in Swift’s career. He was over sixty and was no doubt feeling depressed and bitter: his beloved Stella had just died, and his enemies the Whigs seemed permanently entrenched in power in London. He had been exiled in Ireland (“the rat-hole”, he called it) for the past 15 years, but this exile had made him aware of the poverty, misery and exploitation of the country and its peasant population. He had already denounced British policy towards Ireland in his “Drapier’s Letters”; when he had attacked a proposal from a businessman named Wood to issue copper coins for Ireland and thereby make a huge profit. (The scheme was nicknamed “Wood’s ha’pence”, and the patent for it had allegedly been obtained by bribing the mistress of King George I. Swift’s polemic was so vehement that the scheme was abandoned). The “Modest Proposal” is an angry piece, that goes beyond mere irony. In it Swift draws attention to the large number of children in Ireland whose poverty-stricken parents cannot afford to raise them. The solution, he suggests, is cannibalism! A year-old child, he has been informed, will provide very tasty food if sold to the gentry, their skin can make gloves, and his scheme will have the dual advantage of reducing the surplus population (especially of Catholics, who tend to have the most children) and earning their parents the money to pay the rent. This is Swift at his most savage.

Finally, what is there new that can be said about “Gulliver’s Travels”? It is another product of Swift’s later years (published 1726), and reveals many of his obsessions as well as the limitations of his mind. Everyone knows about Gulliver’s first voyage, to the midget kingdoms of Lilliput and Blefuscu (representing England and France). His second voyage takes him to Brobdingnag, the land of giants, his third to Laputa and four other islands, and his fourth to the land of the Houyhnhnms, intelligent horses, who are plagued by filthy, squalid, hairy humanoids called Yahoos. As a climax to this last voyage, Gulliver (i.e. Swift?) realises that he himself is a Yahoo, and is filled with such disgust for the human race that on his return home he cannot bear the company even of his wife and family.
A few general features can be noted. Swift’s horror of human dung is manifested several times. In Lilliput, Gulliver puts out a conflagration in the palace by urinating on it, thereby earning the undying hatred of the Empress. In Laputa he discusses how examination of a man’s excrement might reveal whether he is plotting insurrection, and on his last voyage the Yahoos smother him with their dung. His lack of political imagination is shown by the fact that he cannot imagine any governmental system other than absolute monarchy, entirely dependent on the character of the king and his advisors. In Lilliput and Laputa they are corrupt and stupid, in Brobdingnag and Blefuscu much better. The Houyhnhnms have no government: they live in a Platonic republic taken to its logical extreme, where conformity has become so general that everyone thinks exactly alike and no coercion is ever needed.
Swift cannot envisage any social movement. In Lilliput there is no education provided for the children of cottagers and labourers; “Their business being only to till and cultivate the earth, and therefore their education is of little consequence to the public”. The Houyhnhnms are thoroughbred horses; the lesser breeds of horse (“nags”) act as their servants, and accept their station in life without question. Swift’s upbringing as an orphan make his ideas on education strange. Both the Lilliputians and the Houyhnhnms raise their children on communal lines as outlined in Plato’s “Republic”: the Houyhnhnms show no affection for their colts, and the Lilliputians are forbidden by law to give presents to their children.
Swift is very pessimistic about humanity in general, and believes the human race is degenerating, both morally and physically. The magicians in Glubbdubdrib on Gulliver’s third voyage conjure up the Senate of ancient Rome so that he can compare it with a modern Parliament. “The first seemed to be an assembly of heroes and demigods, the other a knot of pedlars, pickpockets, highwaymen and bullies”. Particularly he hates England under its detested Whig government. After Gulliver has described the English governmental system to the King of Brobdingnag, the King replies, “I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth”. On the island of Balnibarbi on the third voyage there is a strange discourse on how the most innocent of letters can be construed to indicate treasonable intentions, so that we almost seem to be in the midst of Stalin’s purge trials. This was probably provoked by the so-called “Atterbury Plot” of 1722, where a Tory bishop, whom Swift must have known personally, was forced to flee abroad under accusations of treason. In case anyone didn’t get the message, Swift refers to “the kingdom of Tribnia, by the native called Langden ….. where the bulk of the people consisted wholly of discoverers, witnesses, informers, accusers, prosecutors, evidences, swearers”, and the authorities first select their victims and then seize them and manufacture evidence against them. Swift’s readers would hardly need to be great brains to decipher in “Tribnia” and “Langden” anagrams of Britain and England!

Swift was certainly a genius, but he was a twisted and embittered man. What hope did he hold out for the future? None whatsoever, it would appear.

Jonathon Swift and his times

A quick summary of the dates to start with.(The entries marked with an asterisk* refer to Swift in person. Those with quotation marks" refer to his published writings)

1667 *Swift born; an orphan, brought up by his uncle
1686 *Graduates from Trinity College, Dublin
1688 *Leaves for England; enters service of Sir William Temple. The Glorious Revolution: James II deposed, William III King
1690 Battle of the Boyne; defeat of Catholic forces in Ireland
1691 Treaty of Limerick ends Irish war
1692 *M.A., Hertford College, Oxford. *Ordained Anglican priest
1693 National Debt established
1694 *Parish priest at Kilroot, Antrim. Triennial Act. Bank of England chartered
1696 *Returns to Englnd; begins to write many books and pamphlets
1699 *Death of Temple. *Returns to Ireland as vicar of Laracor, Meath
1701 Act of Settlement gives succession to Hanoverians. Death of exiled King James II; Louis XIV recognises his son, James Edward Stuart (The Pretender) as King
1702 Death of William III; accession of Anne. War of Spanish Succession begins: Britain, Austria and Holland against France *Doctor of Divinity from Trinity College, Dublin
1704 Tories sacked from govt. Marlborough-Godolphin-Harley triad in power.
Battle of Blenheim
“Battle of the Books” and “Tale of a Tub”, both written earlier
1706 Battle of Ramillies
1707 Act of Union with Scotland.
*Visit to London to press claims of Irish clergy
1708 Attempted French-Jacobite landing in Scotland. Battle of Oudenarde.
Harley sacked from government. Whig election victory
“Argument Against Abolishing Christianity”
1709 Allied defeat in Spain. Bloodbath at battle of Malplaquet
1710 *Begins to work for Harley. “Journal to Stella. Sacheverall trial. Whig ministers sacked. Harley forms Tory government; wins landslide election
1711 “Conduct of the Allies”. Marlborough dismissed; replaced by Ormonde.
Britain begins to pull out of the war
1713 *Scriblerus Club; with Pope, Gay and Arbuthnot
*Appointed Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin
Peace of Utrecht. Another Tory election win
1714 Tory ministers sacked. Death of Anne; accession of George I
*Returns permanently to Ireland
1715 Jacobite rising
1719 Declaratory Act for Ireland
1720 South Sea Bubble
1722 Atterbury Plot.
1724 “Drapier’s Letters”, attacking proposal known as ‘Wood’s Ha’pence’
1726 “Gulliver’s Travels”
1728 *Death of Stella
1729 “A Modest Proposal …”
1742 *Suffers a stroke; health never recovers
1745 *Swift dies

Jonathon Swift was born in Dublin in 1667. He was an orphan child, who would never have known either of his parents, but was fortunate enough to be brought up by an uncle, who financed his education at Trinity College Dublin, an entirely Anglican institution which was the only university in Ireland. In those days, the only way a young man of abilities but no money could fulfil his ambitions would be to enter the church and attach himself to a great man. Many did both, since most church patronage was controlled by the great nobility; and this was the path followed by Swift. He left Ireland in 1688, thus avoiding the violent conflicts there over the next few years, graduated from Oxford University, and was ordained a Church of England minister. He also joined the service of Sir William Temple, a retired diplomat with contacts at the very highest levels: through him, Swift was even able to meet the new King, William III. Equally important to Swift on a personal level was his position of tutor to a young girl called Esther Johnson, the fatherless daughter of a servant in Temple’s household. They remained the closest of friends for the next forty years: Swift called her “Stella” and wrote to her incessantly. There are even stories that they may have been married, but if so, they never lived together.

Thanks to Temple and other influential contacts, Swift was appointed a parish priest in County Antrim back in Ireland, and a few years later obtained a better living at Laracor in County Meath. Since there were hardly any Anglicans in Ireland, Swift’s parishioners numbered no more than about fifteen; so he was left with plenty of time to write his earliest pamphlets: “The Battle of the Books” and “The Tale of a Tub” were both composed at this period. He was also able to travel back frequently to England.

This was an age of tremendous political turbulence and ferocious rivalry between the political parties, all played out against the greatest war Britain had fought for centuries. King William III had died in 1702, and was succeeded by his sister-in-law, Anne; but before his death William had forged a “Grand Alliance” of Britain, Holland, the Austrian Empire and various small states to resist the overweening ambition of Louis XIV of France in the War of the Spanish Succession. Now John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, was sent to the continent to command the allied armies, and was to prove himself the greatest general of the age. In 1704 Marlborough led his forces down the Rhine and across Bavaria to the Danube, where he annihilated the French at the battle of Blenheim. It is difficult nowadays to fully appreciate the impact of Blenheim: it was the first battle English armies had won on the continent since the Middle Ages, and the first defeat suffered by the French for a century. The myth of French invincibility was broken. Marlborough the returned to the Netherlands, where he won two more great victories over the French; at Ramillies in 1706 and Oundenarde in 1708. Queen Anne granted him the land and the money to build the gigantic palace in Oxfordshire that is named after his most famous achievement.

But on the political front things were not necessarily going smoothly. There were two political parties at the time: the Whigs and the Tories. Their original division had been over religious matters: the Tories were above all the party of the Church of England; hostile to any further concessions to the nonconformist churches: the Presbyterians, Baptists and Quakers; whereas the Whigs were the party of religious toleration. Now further divisions emerged. Originally all politicians except a few of the most extreme Tories had supported the war. Marlborough had commanded the armies, his brother-in-law Lord Godolphin, the Lord Treasurer, had raised the necessary funds, and a moderate Tory, Robert Harley, had managed the House of Commons. But as the war dragged on, doubts began to surface on the Tory side. It was not just a question of bloodshed, but also of money. Godolphin was financing the war with borrowed money, through the medium of two recent innovations: the Bank of England and the National Debt. An entirely new phenomenon emerged: the great money-men of the City of London, who were raising the money for the war. Soon the National Debt was running at over £50 million, thirteen times the government’s annual revenue from taxation; and this at a time when the entire non-military expenditure of the government was not more than £1 ½ million. The country squires who made up the Tory party in Parliament wondered how these debts could ever be settled. Should not a compromise peace be signed before the country became irretrievably bankrupt? Conversely the Whigs, with their enthusiasm for fighting to total victory, were seen as the party of the City wide-boys with their dubious financial practices. In 1708 Harley, sensing the mood of the country was changing, left the government and began to campaign against the war.

By 1709 the war party was in serious need of another Marlborough triumph to rally support. What they got instead was an appalling bloodbath at Malplaquet; the fourth and least satisfying of the Duke’s victories. It was a preview of a First World War battle, where the Allied armies slammed head-on into a strongly-defended French position. Almost 30,000 men were last in a single day, the majority being on the Allied side. At the same time Allied forces were expelled from Spain, leaving only Gibraltar in British hands. Now Queen Anne decided she had seen enough; she sacked her Whig ministers and appointed Robert Harley in their place, with the aim of negotiating a peace treaty. Next year the great Duke of Marlborough himself was sacked from command of the Allied armies, with a letter from the Queen that was so rude that he threw it on the fire. He spent the rest of the reign in exile, fearing prosecution for corruption.

All this sparked an unprecedented wave of political pamphleteering, involving the finest writers of the times. Daniel Defoe gave his services, Addison and Steele backed the Whigs, but it was Swift who proved himself the great master of propaganda. He was a Tory in sentiment, and he attached himself to Robert Harley. He wrote for, and for a while edited, a Tory periodical, “The Examiner”, denouncing the Whigs and revealing vicious hatred of Marlborough. His most famous pamphlet, “The Conduct of the Allies” was published in late 1711, and sold 11,000 copies in the first month. In it he denounced the stupidity of not making peace earlier, but instead continuing the futile war in Spain. He denied that Britain was gaining anything from the war; it was being fought purely for the benefit of the Austrians and particularly the Dutch, whom he especially despised. Undoubtedly this struck a chord in the country, and was enormously influential. He further served the cause with pamphlets like “The Public Spirit of the Whigs”, and with personal attacks on the Whig leaders. Swift was rewarded for his political services by being appointed Dean of St. Patrick’s cathedral in Dublin. He would have hoped for a Bishopric, but it is said that this was vetoed by Queen Anne, who was shocked by the scatological nature of much of Swift’s writing.

The new Tory government, with Harley (now Earl of Oxford) as Lord Treasurer, and another friend of Swift, Henry St. John (Viscount Bolingbroke) as Secretary of State, won huge majorities at two successive General Elections and set about negotiating peace with France, which finally bore fruit in the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, and set the European frontiers for a generation. But it was a murky business, for Britain’s allies were not consulted, and indeed their troops were left holding the front line against the French when the British army was secretly ordered to withdraw.
This created new problems for the ministers, because among the allies involved was George, Elector of Hanover, and he was furious. Queen Anne was now in poor health, and she had no surviving children. Under the Act of Settlement of 1701, George was heir to the English throne, which specifically laid down that under no circumstances could a Catholic become King; thus excluding James Edward Stuart, son of King James II who had been driven from the throne in 1689, and now a client of Louis XIV of France. James’s supporters were known as Jacobites (from “Jacobus”, the Latin version of James). The Tory party had always had a Jacobite wing, but James’s Catholicism had proved an insuperable obstacle to winning mass support. Now the ministers had every incentive to turn Jacobite, and secret overtures were made to James. Undoubtedly Swift knew nothing about this: he was never a Jacobite, and he hated Catholics. The plans came to nothing, for James refused to change his religion. The government began to disintegrate under the pressure, with the leaders trading public insults. Finally at the end of July in 1714 Queen Anne had had enough: she sacked her ministers, and moderate Whigs and neutrals were appointed in their place. Two days later the Queen died, and without any fuss George was invited to come to England and accept the crown. Next year, unsuccessful Jacobite risings in Scotland and northern England finally discredited the Tories.

The fall of the Tory government marked the end of any hopes Swift might have had for any further Church preferment. He returned to Ireland, to live “like a rat in a hole” as he sourly put it, and thenceforth seldom visited England. But he continued to write as vigorously as ever. Many of his later works specifically deal with the problems of Ireland, such as the “Drapier’s Letters” and the “Modest Proposal”; but of course there was also “Gulliver’s Travels”, published anonymously (like almost all his writings) in 1726. It was an immediate hit, being quickly translated into several languages, and was the only work which earned Swift any money. It is safe to predict that its fame will continue as long as books are read.

Swift must have been devastated by the death of his beloved “Stella” in 1728. His own health declined from the late 1730s, and his behaviour caused many people to think he had gone mad (he probably suffered from Meniere’s disease). He died in 1742, by which time he must have seemed a relic from a bygone age.

(The next Blog entry will examine some of Swift's writings)