Abstract
In 1727 Jonathan Swift published a poem, ‘To His Grace the Archbishop of Dublin’.1 The two men had enjoyed a long, if at times fractious, relationship, while King was Archbishop of Dublin (from 1703) and Swift Dean of St. Patrick’s (from 1713). Swift always doubted whether King had fully appreciated his Dean: in May 1727 he complained of King ‘giving me all sorts of uneasiness, without ever giving me, in my whole life, one single mark of your favour, beyond common civilities’.2 But Swift was unstinting in his poem saluting King’s opposition to the British government’s decision to grant a monopoly to William Wood to mint coinage for Ireland:
‘Great, good and just’ was once applied
To one who for his country died;
To one who lives in its defence,
We speak it in a higher sense.
O may the fates thy life prolong!
Our country then can dread no wrong:
In thy great care we place our trust,
Because thou’rt great, and good, and just.
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Notes
Pat Rogers, Jonathan Swift: The Complete Poems (London: Penguin Books, 1989), p. 278.
Swift to King, 18 May 1727, in Harold Williams (ed.), The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift (5 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), Vol. III, 1724–1731, pp. 209–11.
J. C. Beckett, ‘Swift: The Priest in Politics’, in Confrontations: Studies in Irish History (London: Faber, 1972), pp. 111–122.
Andrew Carpenter, ‘William King and the Threats to the Church of Ireland during the Reign of James II’, Irish Historical Studies, 18 (1972), pp. 22–8.
For a brief and penetrating discussion of Hooker’s thought see Christopher Morris, Political Thought in England: Tyndale to Hooker (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 172–98.
Ian McBride, ‘Presbyterians in the Penal Era’, in Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal, 1 (1994), pp. 73–86.
For the late seventeenth-century background, see John D. Neville, ‘Irish Presbyterians under the Restored Stuart Monarchy’, Eire/Ireland, XVI (1981), pp. 29–42.
Dissenters were particularly strong in Dublin, and one of their most effective pamphleteers, Dr. Joseph Boyse, English born, was a Dublin Presbyterian cleric (Thomas Gerard Doyle, ‘The Politics of Protestant Ascendancy: Politics, Religion and Society in Protestant Ireland’ (Ph.D. University College Dublin, 1996), p. 233).
For an appreciation of Boyse, see Thomas Witherow, Historical Memorials of Presbyterianism in Ireland, 1623–1731 (Belfast and London: William Mullen, 1879), pp. 79–87.
For a calculation of dissenters’ numbers in this period see T.C. Barnard, ‘Identities, Ethnicity and Tradition among Irish Dissenters, c. 1650–1750’, in Kevin Herlihy (ed.), The Irish Dissenting Tradition, 1650–1750 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1995), p. 33 and fn. 19. Barnard’s conclusion is that ‘only in Ulster, Dublin and a few larger towns were Dissenters regularly to be met’, and in Ulster, only Presbyterians. Elsewhere only Quakers were found. But in Irish politics, obsessed with political and religious arithmetic, the question of numbers was rarely considered in a calm frame of mind. For the treatment of dissenters in the reigns of Charles II and James II,
see Richard L. Greaves, ‘“That’s no good religion that disturbs government”: the Church of Ireland and the Nonconformist Challenge, 1660–88’, in Alan Ford, James McGuire and Kenneth Milne (eds.), As by Law Established: The Church of Ireland since the Reformation (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1995), p. 135. Ian McBride makes the point that when King arrived in Derry in 1691 the city was under siege, but from Presbyterians, not Papists. Dissenters formed a powerful party in the corporation. King tried, unsuccessfully, to prevent the election of nonconformists to the post of mayor. The Test Act of 1704 resolved these disputes by excluding Dissenters from such offices
(Ian McBride, The Siege of Derry in Ulster Protestant mythology (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997), pp. 25–6.
Sir Charles Simeon King (ed.), A Great Archbishop of Dublin: William King, D.D., 1650–1729, his Autobiography, Family and a Selection from his Correspondence (London: Longman, 1906), pp. 36–7.
For a general discussion of religious intolerance see Mark Goldie, ‘The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England’, in Ole Peter Grell et al. (eds), From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 333–4.
A.P. Isdell Carpenter, ‘Archbishop King and Dean Swift’ (Ph.D., National University of Ireland 1970), pp. 341–2.
Mark Goldie, ‘Political Thought of the Anglican Revolution’, in R. Beddard (ed.), The Revolutions of 1688 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 129.
J.G. Pocock, ‘Religious Freedom and the Desacrilisation of Politics: From the English Civil Wars to the Virginia Statute’, in Merrill D. Peterson and Robert C. Vaughan (eds), The Virginia Statute for Religous Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 43–73.
Robert H. Murray, Revolutionary Ireland and Its Settlement (London: Macmillan, 1911), p. 309.
J.C. Beckett, Protestant Dissent in Ireland, 1687–1780 (London: Faber, 1948), p. 36.
Louis Landa, Swift and the Church of Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), pp. 53–67.
Ibid., p. 67: Harold Williams (ed.), Swift, Journal to Stella, Vol. II (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), pp. 677–80.
King to the Archbishop of Canterbury, 24 March 1715, T.C.D., King MSS, 2533/160–71. King used his efforts to carry a bill through the Irish House of Lords confining the indemnity to the past (W.E.H. Lecky, History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (London: Longman, 1906), Vol. I, pp. 434–5). The Commons contented itself with a resolution that anyone prosecuting a dissenter for accepting a commission was an enemy of the Protestant interest (Connolly, Religion, Law and Power, p. 165). For King’s continuing anxiety about the state of the Protestants, and their danger from Catholics, even after 1714 and the Hanoverian succession, see ibid., pp. 279–80, 288.
Ian Higgins, Swift’s Politics: A Study in Disaffection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 21.
Thomas Gerard Doyle, ‘The Politics of the Protestant Ascendancy: Politics, Religion and Society in Protestant Ireland, 1700–1710’ (Ph.D., University College Dublin, 1996), p. 260.
David Hayton, ‘The Stanhope/Sunderland Ministry and the Refutation of Irish Parliamentary Independence’, English Historical Review, CXIII (1998), pp. 610–36. It is pertinent to note that in this context the government considered using the Declaratory Act to introduce relief for dissenters (pp. 633–5).
Ibid., pp. 111–12. For the Drogheda incident see I Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, His works and the Age, Vol. II, Dr. Swift (London: Methuen, 1967), p. 255. For Brodrick’s activities, see ibid., pp. 264–5.
Swift to Alexander Pope, 10 January 1721, in Williams, Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, Vol. II, p. 367. In his fourth Drapier’s Letter, published in October 1724, Swift thought better of the Irish parliament; perhaps he had to. Oaths, affability and dinners; promises, threats and warnings: these ‘and the like Methods, would, in corrupt Times, have been taken to let in this Deluge of Brass among us: and I am confident, would even then not have succeeded’. (Herbert Davis (ed.), The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift: The Drapier’s Letters and Other Works, 1724–1725. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1941), p. 60.)
Herbert Davis (ed.), The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. 10, The Drapier’s Letters and Other Works, 1721–1728 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1941), pp. xix–xx.
Ibid., p. xxix. For King’s attitude to the controversy, see I. Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, his Works and the Age, Vol. III, Dean Swift (London: Methuen, 1983), pp. 266–7, 275, 312–14.
Patrick McNally, ‘Wood’s Halfpence, Carteret, and the Government of Ireland, 1723–6’, Irish Historical Studies, 30 (1997), pp. 354–76.
For which see Patrick McNally, ‘“Irish and English Interests”: National Conflict within the Church of Ireland Episcopate in the Reign of George I’, Irish Historical Studies, 29 (1995), pp. 295–314.
Ibid., pp. 341–2. King’s reference to the character of the bill arose from the fact that the Irish Toleration Act was similar to that of Scotland ‘partly by the assistance of some English bishops’, despite King’s efforts to reduce it to the limits of the English Act. It was accompanied by an Indemnity Act securing from prosecution nonconformists holding civil or military office (W.E.H. Lecky, History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (London: Longmans, 1906), Vol. I, p. 435). Brodrick’s bill exempted dissenters and ministers from the penalties still in force for non-attendance at church and officiating without proper authority. Attempts to expand the scope of the bill were voted down by large majorities (Connolly, Religion, Law and Power, p. 165). The English Act, introduced by Earl Stanhope and entitled a ‘bill for strengthening the Protestant interest in these Kingdoms’, restored the legal position of dissenters to that of mid-1689. A clause to remove civil disabilities on dissenters was abandoned (Nicholas Tyacke, ‘The “Rise of Puritanism” and the Legalizing of Dissent, 1571–1717’, in Grell, From Persecution to Toleration, p. 49). For the English dissenters’ position then see B. R. White, ‘The Twilight of Puritanism in the Years before and after 1688’, in ibid.’, pp. 314–15. The Toleration Act of 1689 was not a law tolerating dissent, but one suspending some penalties for the benefit of some dissenters.
It is true that the Wood’s Halfpence affair has been regarded by some historians (and contemporaries) as (in the words of Archbishop Hugh Boulter of Armagh) uniting ‘people of every religion, country and party here’, even encouraging ‘intimacies’ between Catholics and Jacobites, and the Whigs ‘who before had no correspondence with them’ (J.L. McCracken, ‘The Rise of Colonial Nationalism, 1714–1760’, in T.W. Moody and W.E. Vaughan (eds), New History of Ireland, Vol. IV, Eighteenth Century Ireland, 1691–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 114. But this is not an unknown phenomenon in Irish politics; it did not alter the fundamental contours of the relationship between the religious communities, nor did Swift intend that it should.
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Boyce, D.G. (2001). The Road to Wood’s Halfpence and Beyond: William King, Jonathan Swift and the Defence of the National Church, 1689–1724. In: Boyce, D.G., Eccleshall, R., Geoghegan, V. (eds) Political Discourse in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Ireland. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403932723_4
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