It was in January, 1710, that the first invitation of Bolingbroke to Swift to dine with him, had foreboded no good to the party whose weakened fortresses such generals in literature were to attack. Swift’s answer, with his wonted assumed independence and freedom, that “if the Queen gave his lordship a dukedom and the garter honours, and the Treasury just at the end of them, he would regard him no more than he would a groat,”—meant no more than that he intended to accept the invitation, and all the good things that might follow this token of favour.
It was in this year that a series of attacks on the former ministry was concerted between Bolingbroke, Swift, Atterbury, and Prior, in defence of the Tory party. They were published weekly, but were of short continuance, under the name of the “Examiner.” The essays contained nothing but political matter, very circumstantially and forcibly placed before the reader, and carried on with a subdued, but bitter irony, perhaps better calculated to influence the public mind than those bursts of indignant eloquence which startle the passions, and do not always convince the understanding.
Addison, writing to Swift at this period, declares, after expressing his wish again to eat a dish of beans and bacon in the best company in the world, (meaning his friend,) that he is forced to give himself airs of a punctual correspondence with Swift at St. James’s coffee-house, to those friends of Swift who have a mind to pay their court to the then Irish secretary:[[180]] yet Swift at that very time had satirised Lord Wharton, Addison’s patron, in terms so outrageous as to meet with the reprobation of the learned and moderate Dr. King, Archbishop of Dublin.
Such a paper as the “Examiner” had been, in the opinion of Swift, long required, to enlighten the public mind, and to disabuse the ignorant of those errors into which they had fallen respecting the late ministry; and, accordingly, one of its most elaborate papers is occupied in discussing the charge of ingratitude, made against the Queen and her advisers, for dismissing the Duke of Marlborough from his employments.
After a long enumeration of the benefits which had been conferred on the Duke, and stating, in a manner unparalleled for ingenuity and eloquence, the unexampled rewards and privileges he had received, he follows the attack upon the Duke by another, still more insidious, on the Duchess.[[181]]
“A lady of my acquaintance appropriated twenty-six pounds a year out of her allowance for certain uses which the lady received, or was to pay to the lady or her order, as was called for. But after eight years, it appeared upon the strictest calculation that the woman had paid but four pounds a year, and sunk two-and-twenty pounds for her own pocket; ’tis but supposing twenty-six pounds instead of twenty-six thousand, and by that you may judge what the pretensions of modern merit are, where it happens to be its own paymaster.”
From this hateful insinuation the Duchess amply cleared herself, in her Justification. Doubtless Swift was indebted to the female politicians who gave him such good information, for the dark hints which he threw out in so ungallant, so dastardly a manner, couched in terms to which it would be difficult to reply. Years afterwards, when most of the actors of those days except herself were in the grave, resting alike from political turmoils, and from the disturbances of their own passions, the Duchess met the accusations brought against her, and justified her character.[[182]] Her arguments, succinctly detailed in her Vindication, include the following observations.
At the time of her first disagreements with the Queen, she endeavoured, as she asserts, through a friend, to remove those impressions against her which Anne had imbibed. She wrote long accounts of the malice of her enemies, and stated her own grounds of justification. On one point only did the Queen vouchsafe an observation. “When,” says the Duchess, “I had set forth the faithfulness and frugality with which I had served her in my offices, and had complained of the attempts made by the agents of her new friends to vilify me all over the nation, as one who had cheated my mistress of vast sums of money, her Majesty, on this occasion, was pleased to say, ‘Everybody knows cheating is not the Duchess of Marlborough’s crime.’”
After seven-and-twenty years’ service, the Queen, when the question as to her offences was urged by the Duchess, alleged none but that of inveteracy against “poor Masham;” “yet,” says the Duchess, “the ready invention of others, who knew nothing of my conduct, but whose interest it was to decry me, could presently find in it abundant matter of accusation.”[[183]]
These gross calumnies, eagerly devoured by the credulity of party rage, determined the object of such unwarrantable censures, to write and publish something in her own justification, and produced a memorial, which for various reasons did not at that time see the light, but which the Duchess eventually wove into the form of that animated narrative, her “Conduct.”