‘Gulliver’s Travels’ author Jonathan Swift had no love for Ulster Presbyterianism

Jonathan Swift, the author of ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ and the most famous dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, died on October 19, 1745.

One of the great paradoxes of Irish history, Swift had no family roots in Ireland and regarded his Irish birth as an unhappy accident.

He would have readily appreciated the Duke of Wellington’s witticism that being born in a stable does not make one a horse. Yet while insisting that England was his ‘own country’, he was a strenuous defender of the rights of Ireland.

In January 1695 he was appointed to the Prebendary of Kilroot. Swift lived there between March 1695 and May 1696. In addition to Kilroot, he was also responsible for Ballynure and Templecorran, parishes sparsely populated and overwhelmingly Presbyterian.

Swift found Ulster Presbyterianism disagreeable and, drawing on the Scottish experience, believed it was necessary to impose restrictions on Presbyterians who, if admitted to places of power and influence, would make Presbyterianism the Established Church in Ireland too. ‘A Tale of of a Tub’ (1704) may have been partially inspired by his experience at Kilroot, a ‘tub’ being a dissenting pulpit.

Kilroot was a run-down parish that Swift would have found soul-destroying on account of its poverty and implacable Presbyterianism.

According to tradition, on one occasion Swift collected stones and pebbles on the beach and carried them into the church. This stimulated the curiosity of the local Presbyterians who eventually followed him into the church to see what he was up to. When Swift calculated that he had something approximating to a decent sized congregation he bolted the doors and preached at them.

Swift stayed at Kilroot for approximately a year but he did not actually resign his living there until January 1698. It was during this period that he became romantically entangled with Jane Waring. Although a self-proclaimed misogynist, Swift throughout his life enjoyed female company. Jane was the daughter of a former archdeacon of Dromore and the sister of an old college friend. A letter from him survives, offering to remain if she would marry him and promising to leave and never return to Ireland if she refused. She presumably rejected him and this would explain why he left Kilroot and went to England in 1696. 

However, Swift did return to Ireland and spent most of the remainder of his life there. He became vicar of Laracor in Co Meath (which, unlike Kilroot, he loved) in 1700. Laracor came with a canonry in Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. In 1713 he was appointed dean of the cathedral.

Swift’s real ambition was to become an English bishop. Living in Ireland was largely the result of serious political miscalculation on Swift’s part. Before 1710 Swift was closely associated with the Whigs. In that year he became ‘spin doctor’ to Robert Harley, the Tory leader. The exclusion of the Tories from political power after 1714 meant he had no future in English politics.

Swift also had managed to antagonise Queen Anne. She made it abundantly clear that he would not have received the deanery of St Patrick’s if she could have prevented it. The deanery was one of the few plum ecclesiastical preferments the Crown did not control.

His interest in the rights of Ireland stemmed from the fact that he was obliged to live here. He identified selectively with the concerns of those around him and became as ‘the Hibernian Patriot’ a fierce controversialist on Irish issues.

For example, he dismissed the notion that Ireland could be a kingdom and yet subject to the authority of an English parliament. He contended that ‘a dependent kingdom is a modern term of art; unknown … to all ancient civilians and writers upon government’.

In ‘A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture’ (1720), he advocated a boycott of English goods. Its central thesis may be conveniently summarised by his injunction to burn everything English but their coal. The wretched condition of the weavers who lived in the immediate vicinity of the cathedral prompted the publication.

The ‘Drapier Letters’ (1724) were a series of seven pamphlets attacking ‘Wood’s Halfpence’. William Wood, a Wolverhampton ironmonger, was granted a patent to mint £100,800 worth of copper coin for Ireland. Opponents contended that the patent, allegedly purchased from the Duchess of Kendal, George I’s mistress, would flood Ireland with worthless coin. Swift posed as a shop-keeper to criticise the scheme and comprehensively undermined public confidence in it. Such was the success of Swift’s pamphlets that a reward was offered by the government to anyone disclosing the true identity of the author. Though scarcely a secret (on returning to Dublin after one of his trips to England, Swift was greeted with a banner, ‘Welcome Home, Drapier’), no one betrayed him.

His notorious satire, ‘A Modest Proposal’ (1729), was prompted by the famine of 1728-9. Swift suggested that Ireland should develop its one remaining economic resource by fattening its children for export and as food for the rich: ‘I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food ...’. He also suggested that Irish baby skins would make ‘admirable gloves for ladies, and summer boots for fine gentlemen’.

Although not an economist, Swift developed a keen interest in economics and believed something had to be done to transform the Irish economy. The formation of the Dublin Society, founded in 1731, to promote agriculture, manufacturing and the useful arts, was one response to this sentiment. Another was the publication of ‘The Querist’ (1735-7) by George Berkeley, the Anglican bishop of Cloyne.

Buried in St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, Swift composed his own epitaph (in Latin). In translation, it reads: ‘Here is laid the body of Jonathan Swift … where savage indignation can no longer tear his heart. Depart, wayfarer, and imitate if you can a man who to the utmost strenuously championed liberty.’