Cambridge University Press

978-1-107-10176-0 - Swift and History: Politics and the English Past

Ashley Marshall
Excerpt
More information

Introduction

Why write a book on Swift and history? Swifts attempts to do history

were few, and scholars have uniformly judged the results to be unimpres-
sive, unworthy of serious attention. They have regarded his grasp of history
as limited, and his bid for the Historiographer Royal post as embarrassingly
delusory. Neither his temperament nor his talents, Swifts students have
concluded, that way lie. The earliest extensive discussion of Swift and
history was offered by John Robert Moore in 1952, and consisted of a
catalogue of Swifts shortcomings meant to show that he had little con-
ception of historical truth.1 Moore and others have pointed to Swifts
carelessness with small details, his subjectivity, his naivety, his tendencies
toward irony and exaggeration and caricature. Both Irvin Ehrenpreis and
W. A. Speck have faulted Swift for his basic misunderstandings of how
history happens, for his psychological interpretation of events and his
reduction of history to the drama of personalities.2 The most recent
pronouncement is S. J. Connollys: Jonathan Swift had little interest in
history.3 Connollys predecessors might take exception to that statement,
but few would advocate further exploration into Swift and history.
Almost without exception, Swifts interest in and desire to contribute to
historiography has been dismissed, lamented, or ridiculed.4 The conten-
tion of this book is simply that history, particularly political history, did
matter to Swift, and that if we fail to reckon with this fact then we cannot
appreciate some of the fundamentals of his life and outlook.

****
Swift was not a brilliant and effective historian, but history was important
to him. Scholars have routinely observed that his library was dominated by
history more than 350 different chroniclers are represented and that his
polemical writings teem with allusions to classical history in particular.5
Beyond his manifest interest in historiography and his allusions to favour-
ite writers, what are the issues involved in a study of Swift and history?
1

in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press
978-1-107-10176-0 - Swift and History: Politics and the English Past
Ashley Marshall
Excerpt
More information

2 Introduction
One of Swifts earliest ventures as a writer was an account of the reigns of
William the Conquerors four successors, a project started c. 1700 but
abandoned. While at Moor Park, Swift was in some fashion involved in
Sir William Temples Introduction to the History of England (1694), which
terminates with the death of William the Conqueror and therefore repre-
sents a kind of prequel to Swifts efforts. Temples admiring amanuensis,
Ehrenpreis and others have insisted, was eager to please his patron, and
conceived his history as a continuation of the Introduction.6 About this
venture scholars have had little to say, except to call attention to Swifts
unoriginality, his easy concurrence with Temples historical and political
outlook, and his dropping of the project, the last usually taken as an
indication that he knew himself to be unqualied for the job. I will return
to these Reigns in Chapter 2, but two points need to be made here. The
rst is that, though they are hardly neglected masterpieces, they do not
deserve the derision they have received. Second observation: the relation-
ship of Swifts enterprise to Temples is more complicated than has been
realized, and too much has been assumed about Swifts motives both in
taking up the pen and in abandoning the venture.
The only other piece of history-writing in Swifts oeuvre is the History
of the Four Last Years of the Queen (wr. 171213 but not published in his
lifetime). Much odium has been heaped upon the History, which purports
to be objective but is manifestly subjective, a partisan defence of the
Oxford ministry and of the events leading to the Treaty of Utrecht and
the end of the War of the Spanish Succession. The perceived shortcomings
of Swifts account its bias, its caricatures of leading Whigs, its distortion
of evidence have been largely responsible for its authors reputation as a
failed historian. In fact, the Four Last Years is not history proper, nor was
meant to be. As I seek to demonstrate in Chapter 4, it is instead a piece of
Tory propaganda whose aims have never been properly understood. This is
especially signicant because Swift was deeply emotionally invested in his
History: it is not just a minor polemic but perhaps the most psychically
signicant work he ever produced. Well after Annes death, he obsessed
about getting the History into print: his nal effort was in 17378, roughly a
quarter century after the occasion for which it was meant. To no other
work in his canon does Swift show such lasting commitment, something
derisive critics of that volume have not bothered to try to explain.
Swifts eagerness to write an account of Annes last ministry was very
real. The Four Last Years was presumably meant to bolster his qualications
for the Historiographer Royal position, which if secured would give him
access to the documents he needed to produce the chronicle he had in

in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press
978-1-107-10176-0 - Swift and History: Politics and the English Past
Ashley Marshall
Excerpt
More information

Introduction 3
mind. His rather frantic desire to be named Annes ofcial historiographer
has been roundly mocked by scholars, who have ridiculed his presumption
in thinking himself worthy of the post. Swifts belief that his propaganda
should demonstrate his ability to do true history has been called incon-
gruous if not grotesque.7 This verdict, I shall argue in Chapter 4, reects
an unfortunate misunderstanding of what the Historiographer Royal
position actually entailed. Overt partisanship was, in fact, requisite. The
court historian was, from the inception of the post, presumed to be a
committed loyalist, not a lofty intellectual. As Daniel Woolf explains, none
of the early occupants of the station produced original historical work,
and they were instead selected principally for their polemical skills or for
their literary reputation and connections with the powerful.8 That Swift
thought himself qualied to be an advocate for Annes last ministry is
neither surprising nor preposterous: it was the natural next step for the
regimes chef de propagande. On this point, the judgement against Swift
owes itself not to his innocence but to the confusion of some of his modern
students.
Swift remained xated on the 171014 period throughout his compos
mentis life, and he continued to hope that he would be able to tell the story
of those years. The obvious explanation for this obsession is that his time
serving Oxford represented the high point of his life true enough, but
only a part of Swifts rationale. From his perspective, the end of Annes
reign was a critical point in English history. In May 1719, he declares
to Bolingbroke that there never was a more important [period] in
England than that which made up the four last years of the late Queen
(Corr., ii:299), an opinion that does not appear to have changed. The great
tragedy of Annes ill-timed demise, and especially of the collapse of the
Tory party, was (as Swift saw it) that it represented the end of a brief epoch
of improvement, a moment in which history could have gone differently.
Whoever is a true Lover of our Constitution, he proclaimed in The
Examiner for 28 December 1710, must needs be pleasd to see what
successful Endeavours are Daily made to restore it in every Branch to its
antient Form, from the languishing Condition it hath long lain in (125).
This is a prejudiced view, to be sure, but one Swift apparently sincerely
(and lastingly) held. His loyalty to the Oxford ministry was such that he
remained desperate to publish his Four Last Years as a preemptive strike
against hostile Whig historians who would, he feared, misconstrue or
misrepresent the events of 171014. To presume that Swift saw history as
a neutral enterprise and just could not muster enough objectivity to be
successful is to miss the mark by a considerable distance.

in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press
978-1-107-10176-0 - Swift and History: Politics and the English Past
Ashley Marshall
Excerpt
More information

4 Introduction
Not only, then, did Swift do a lot of looking backward, drawing on
history for the present; he also looked forward, sometimes obsessively, in
historical terms. Where he explicitly worries about posterity, he is usually
expressing anxiety about conveying a bit of history in which he partici-
pated; his concern does not tend to be safeguarding his literary reputation.
While drafting the Four Last Years in 1712, he was simultaneously working
on his Proposal for Correcting the English Tongue, partly because he was
afraid that language would change so signicantly that this important
historical moment would be incomprehensible to future ages. At the end
of his writing life, he entreated Bolingbroke (not for the rst time) to
produce a chronicle of his life and times, observing wistfully that while he
would not live to see the viscounts history in print, he remained vain
enough to wish that [his] name could be squeezd in among the few
Subalterns (Corr., iv:536). Far from being indifferent to historiography,
Swift was painfully aware of how much was at stake both in learning from
the past and in preserving and transmitting the climacteric events of the
present to posterity.
The case against taking Swift seriously as a student of history rests
principally on his supposed misres in historical writing, but also on
what has been called his lack of regard for history as an intellectual
pursuit.9 In one sense this is a fair observation: the idea of studying history
for its own sake no doubt struck Swift as mere pedantry, a verdict with
which many of his contemporaries would have concurred. Few historians
of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries conceived of history as an
intellectual pastime. For Clarendon and Burnet and Abel Boyer, as for
Polybius and Tacitus and a host of others, history was a matter of political
didacticism. It was practical and ideologically loaded, not philosophical
and academic. When Swift depicts Renaissance chroniclers as several
Bodies of heavy-armed Foot in The Battel of the Books (153), he is not
dismissing history or even modern history wholesale. Connolly contends
that Swifts disdain for historians stemmed partly from a healthy scepti-
cism as to the reliability of their work, citing Lemuel Gullivers disgust
with modern History (298),10 but Gullivers Travels is the product of
Swifts exile. Given his acute fear of Whig misrepresentation of recent
events, the attempt to discredit history as a partisan endeavour should be
read as emphatically topical not a good basis on which to generalize about
Swifts attitude toward the study of the past.
Swifts disparagement of history, scholars have argued, is also reected in
an observation made in the Thoughts on Various Subjects (wr. c.1706?).
He there remarks that

in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press
978-1-107-10176-0 - Swift and History: Politics and the English Past
Ashley Marshall
Excerpt
More information

Introduction 5
Whatever the Poets pretend, it is plain they give Immortality to none but
themselves: It is Homer and Virgil we reverence and admire, not Achilles or
neas. With Historians it is quite the contrary; our Thoughts are taken up
with the Actions, Persons, and Events we read; and we little regard the
Authors. (PW, i:242)
Connolly uses this passage to substantiate his claim that Swift was
dismissive of the enterprise of writing history: poets are immortalized
and historians forgotten.11 This seems to miss the point of Swifts observa-
tion, which is discriminating between rather than evaluating authorial roles
and modes. The poet is self-serving, the historian self-effacing. We should
remember, too, that a few years after penning this aphorism, Swift was
aspiring to become the countrys ofcial historiographer. If he did believe
that historians were mostly destined for obscurity, then perhaps that
tells us something about the nature of his ambitions. At the beginning of
his career, he tried his hand at history-writing, and c.171014 he was
committed to a very different historical pursuit. Should we assume that
between these two episodes Swift briey changed his mind about history,
or that he valued writerly fame and glory less than scholars have tended
to believe?

****
Chapter 1 is devoted to Swifts historiographical inheritance. The object is
largely cartographic: who are the historians, ancient and modern, on whom
Swift drew, and what is the nature of their methods and ideology? What
such a survey demonstrates is that the most relevant ancient historians
tended to be conservative; their politics were fear-based; they valued mod-
eration and balance, but were (like Swift) primarily anxious about too much
popular involvement in government, so they stress resignation rather than
resistance to autocratic regimes. Greco-Roman historiography is predomi-
nantly political and contemporary, the story of the relatively proximate
past. Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Tacitus, and others (Livy is the
exception) were players in the drama they recorded, and took for granted
that history should be written by statesmen for statesmen. Their concept of
history-writing was inherently ideological. Most seventeenth- and early
eighteenth-century historians inherited this notion of politic history, but
in the polarized, contentious milieu of post-civil war England, history
became even more overtly and aggressively partisan. Swifts contemporaries
did not understand the job of chronicling the past to be an academic task; it
was widely assumed to be polemical. The boundaries between history and
propaganda boundaries modern scholars regard almost as sacrosanct

in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press
978-1-107-10176-0 - Swift and History: Politics and the English Past
Ashley Marshall
Excerpt
More information

6 Introduction
were distinctly blurred in Swifts lifetime. This chapter is an attempt to map
what history meant to Swift and his coevals, but it has another related aim
namely, to challenge the negative verdicts on Swifts understanding of and
engagement with the past. What his modern students have pointed to as
failings turn out to be features of contemporary political history as practised
in his lifetime.
Chapter 1 also serves to contextualize the inuence on Swift of Sir
William Temple, the Moor Park patriarch for whom the young Irishman
served as secretary off and on in his twenties and early thirties. That
relationship is the subject of Chapter 2. Following Ehrenpreis, most
modern Swiftians have pointed to Temple as the source for Swifts attitude
toward history and have not looked much further. One object of Chapter 2
is to contest the notion that Swifts historicopolitical mindset was essen-
tially a version of Sir Williams. Another is to dispute the standard
characterization of Swifts early history of England as merely a feeble
attempt to follow (and impress) the great statesman of Moor Park.
Temples inuence on Swift, we shall see, has been considerably exagger-
ated; the invocation of Sir William in discussions of Swifts ideology is if
anything a distraction.
The third chapter moves from general issues of ideological inuence and
outlook to more specic borrowings from historians in Swifts polemical
canon. The object is not exhaustively to trace individual references but to
explore the ways Swift uses history more generally. His allusions to histor-
ians in some of the major works are familiar, and the notes in some of the
modern standard editions are illuminating. Swifts argument from analogy
in Contests and Dissentions has received much attention, as have the famous
portraits in The Examiner (e.g., Marlborough as Crassus, Wharton as
Verres). Chapter 3 is devoted to a systematic analysis of Swifts use of
history in polemical and otherwise topical writing, including some of his
more revealing correspondence. Swift invokes Polybius in an ideologically
loaded but cryptic 1715 missive to Bolingbroke, for example, in a way that
gives us insight into his outlook at a moment of political crisis. This
chapter is concerned both with Swifts telltale allusions to history at critical
junctures and with his use of history as an argumentative weapon. It also
addresses the subject of the relationship between Swifts historical and his
satirical impulses.
Chapter 4 is a contextual analysis of Swifts History of the Four Last Years
of the Queen, which has been much disparaged but little read. Only if we
situate the History in the specic political milieu in which it was written can
we have anything like a clear understanding of the aims and motives that

in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press
978-1-107-10176-0 - Swift and History: Politics and the English Past
Ashley Marshall
Excerpt
More information

Introduction 7
inspired it. The conation of the events of 1712 and 1713 with Annes death
and the Tory collapse have caused scholars to overlook the positive purpose
behind Swifts History which is not the bungled work of an innocent
would-be historian but the shrewd propaganda of a Tory apologist addres-
sing a specically Tory audience. This chapter will also consider Swifts
later, frustrated attempts to peddle his History in the 1720s and 1730s, the
last coinciding with the preparation of Verses on the Death for print. The
History and Verses are obviously very different enterprises, but one argu-
ment of Chapter 4 is that both represent politically toxic denunciations of
the Whigs in power under the Hanoverian regime.
The subject of Chapter 5 is Swift and authority. Its premise is that any
account of Swifts historical outlook becomes a study of his politics. Swifts
political commitments have been hotly debated; excellent, learned, careful
scholars have disagreed about whether he is a Whiggish defender of
individual liberties against absolutism or a Tory most afraid of popular
encroachments. Chapter 5 attempts to explain Swifts complex and evolv-
ing attitudes toward political power. His opinions about the major events
of the recent English past and his sense of how history is unfolding in his
present tell us a great deal about his attitude toward authority. Chapter 5
is therefore devoted in part to his verdicts on three crisis points in
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English history: the civil wars of the
1640s, the Revolution of 16889, and the regime change of 1714 and its
tumultuous aftermath. The second half of the chapter surveys Swifts
comments on the monarchy and the royal prerogative, tyranny, the pop-
ular role in government, parliamentary representation, obedience and
rights of resistance, and the nature and limits of proper political liberty.
Swift was by temperament an authoritarian, more inclined to stress pop-
ular obedience than just deance of monarchical overstepping. Before 1714,
he was cheerfully authoritarian, but in the Whig-dominated world of
Hanoverian rule, his natural instincts were rendered problematic by his
revulsion to king and court. The authoritarian was compelled by historical
circumstance into the uncomfortable role of opposition satirist and advo-
cate of political liberties. What this means is that we cannot afford to
generalize about Swifts politics on the basis of either relatively early
works (see the 1701 Discourse) or later exemplars such as The Drapiers
Letters or Gullivers Travels. Most students of Swifts politics have assumed
continuity of commitment, early to late, and have seen little conict in his
position at any point. Chapter 5 is an argument for appreciating both
discontinuity and fundamental internal discord between authoritarian and
oppositional impulses.

in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press
978-1-107-10176-0 - Swift and History: Politics and the English Past
Ashley Marshall
Excerpt
More information

8 Introduction
The appeal to history for present political debate was of course com-
monplace, and I make no claims for Swifts originality in applying the
lessons of the past to interpretations of or interventions in current con-
troversy. What I wish to suggest is that for Swift history came before
politics: his reading clearly had a major inuence on his outlook, and by
the time he entered the fray of contemporary politics, his attitudes toward
power and authority had been pretty well established. This is not to say
that his responses to particular occasions throughout his life reect a single,
coherent, unwavering political outlook on the contrary but that he is
essentially backward-looking.

****
Quite a lot is at stake in reckoning with Swifts historical outlook. His
self-denition as an author, especially from c.171314 on, is heavily inu-
enced by his frustrated desire to be Historiographer Royal. The work of his
to which he seemed most uncharacteristically committed over several
decades was the so-called History of the Four Last Years of the Queen. His
most direct expressions of anxiety about posterity occur when he is reect-
ing on how the 171014 period will be remembered, and whether his small
role in shaping history will be part of the permanent record. Looking
backward and looking forward, Swift absolutely cared about history. His
historical mindset is also inextricably connected with his political prin-
ciples. Each chapter of this book will have its own conclusions, but one
general observation is worth making at the outset: if we do not recognize
the importance of history to how Swift understood the world, if we do not
appreciate the degree to which his mindset is essentially historical, then not
only are we not getting him we are getting him seriously wrong.

in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press
978-1-107-10176-0 - Swift and History: Politics and the English Past
Ashley Marshall
Excerpt
More information

chapter 1

Swift and the historians, ancient and modern

Swifts historiographical inheritance is as richly complex as it is vast.

The object of the present chapter is to map the historical landscape as
it appeared to Swift and his contemporaries. Much scholarship has
been published on late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century
notions of history, and on the theory and practice and classical inu-
ence on history-writing. I draw freely on my predecessors in what
follows, but without rehearsing their arguments and ndings.1 My
focus will be on the mode of political history most relevant to Swifts
life and concerns. This material has received little attention from most
Swiftians, many of whom suppose (following Ehrenpreis) that Swift
derived much of his attitude toward the past from Sir William Temple.
The precise nature of Swifts ideological debts to Temple is an issue
to which we will return in Chapter 2, but let me say here that Sir
Williams inuence is not as profound as most scholars have presumed,
and that at the very least it needs to be contextualized one aim of the
present chapter.
More broadly, the purpose of this survey is to provide orientation, to
sketch the methodology and especially the ideology of the historical fore-
bears Swift most relied upon. The rst section issues a brief reminder about
the prominence of history and historians in Swifts library and about the
importance of his reading upon his view of the world. The second section is
devoted to a descriptive analysis of some of Swifts primary classical
sources. The third section offers a prcis of dominant trends of (mostly
political) historiography during his lifetime; discusses the nature of his
engagement with two particularly important historians, Clarendon and
Burnet; and briey addresses his most substantive marginalia in other
history books. By way of conclusion, I will attempt to identify some of
the ways in which Swift appears to have been drawing on his historiogra-
phical predecessors, but the issue of Swifts specic engagement with and
use of history in his writing will be the subject of Chapter 3. Most of the

in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org

Cambridge University Press
978-1-107-10176-0 - Swift and History: Politics and the English Past
Ashley Marshall
Excerpt
More information

10 Swift and the historians, ancient and modern

present chapter is cartographic and orientational. What did history mean
to Swift and his contemporaries?

Swifts reading and sources

That Swift read widely in history is well known. In his library were the
works of more than 2,100 authors, of whom 358 were historians.2 Volumes
of history classical and continental and English far outnumber those of
imaginative literature as we now conceive it. With good reason, Brean
S. Hammond concludes that Swifts library was not primarily that of a
literary man.3 Much of Swifts historiographical reading was done in the
rst half of his life; an incontestable virtue of his time at Moor Park was
that it gave him access to Temples library and leisure to read voraciously
from it.4
Allusions to histories abound in Swifts polemical writings and corre-
spondence, though not all of the historians of whom he knew were
equally useful or meaningful to him. He possessed or otherwise encoun-
tered many volumes that he probably never read, lightly skimmed once,
or mined for particular details. His library included, for example, the
thirteenth-century Byzantine Annales of George Acropolita and the
slightly later Arabian history of Ismail ibn Ali neither of which appears
to have mattered a jot to his thinking. His collection is eclectic: he
owned a late seventeenth-century French history of Sweden, Jean
Lgers 1669 Histoire of the Piedmontese Protestants, John Seldens
History of the Tythes (1618), several ecclesiastical histories, three editions
of Sarpis History of the Council of Trent. Among his holdings are tomes
produced by Italian, German, Scottish, Spanish, Byzantine, Welsh,
Flemish, Belgian, Dutch, Icelandic, and Armenian historians. The
full extent of Swifts borrowing we will never know his inheritance
is broadly ideological, not just a matter of particular concepts and
quotations and we have no reason to believe that he studied (or even
looked at) everything he had. He also read much that was not a perma-
nent part of his library.5 Swift borrowed rather than bought Burnets
History of His Own Time (172434), the work of a man he regarded as
the worst qualied for an historian that ever I met with.6
Only where we have extensive marginalia can we track Swifts
actual engagement with a text, but there are a number of historians with
whose work he was manifestly quite familiar. The roster of Swifts major
historiographical models looks much like one would expect it to: among
Greco-Roman authors, the ones Swift mentions most frequently are

in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org