[152b] Esther Johnson lodged opposite St. Mary’s in Dublin.
[152c] This famous Tory club began with the meeting together of a few extreme Tories at the Bell in Westminster. The password to the Club—“October”—was one easy of remembrance to a country gentleman who loved his ale.
[153] “Duke” Disney, “not an old man, but an old rake,” died in 1731. Gay calls him “facetious Disney,” and Swift says that all the members of the Club “love him mightily.” Lady M. W. Montagu speaks of his
“Broad plump face, pert eyes, and ruddy skin,
Which showed the stupid joke which lurked within.”
Disney was a French Huguenot refugee, and his real name was Desaulnais. He commanded an Irish regiment, and took part in General Hill’s expedition to Canada in 1711 (Kingsford’s Canada, ii. 465). By his will (Wentworth Papers, 109) he “left nothing to his poor relations, but very handsome to his bottle companions.”
[154] There were several Colonel Fieldings in the first half of the eighteenth century, and it is not clear which is the one referred to by Swift. Possibly he was the Edmund Fielding—grandson of the first Earl of Denbigh—who died a Lieutenant-General in 1741, at the age of sixty-three, but is best known as the father of Henry Fielding, the novelist.