“Against you I have but one reproach, that when I was last in England, and just after the present King’s accession, I resolved to pass that summer in France, for which I had then a most lucky opportunity, from which those who seemed to love me well, dissuaded me by your advice. And when I sent you a note, conjuring you to lay aside the character of a courtier and a favourite upon that occasion, your answer positively directed me not to go at that juncture; and you said the same thing to my friends who seemed to have power of giving me hints, that I might reasonably have expected a settlement[78] in England, which, God knows, is no great ambition considering the station I should leave here, of greater dignity, which might easily have been managed to be disposed of as the Crown pleased....
“I wish her Majesty would a little remember what I largely said to her about Ireland, when before a witness she gave me leave, and commanded me to tell here what she spoke to me upon that subject, and ordered me, if I lived to see her in her present station, to send her our grievances, promising to read my letter, and do all good offices in her power for this most miserable and most loyal kingdom, now at the brink of ruin, and never so near as now.
“As to myself, I repeat again that I have asked nothing more than a trifle as a memorial of some distinction, which her Majesty graciously seemed to make between me and every common clergyman; that trifle was forgot according to the usual method of princes, although I was taught to think myself upon a footing of obtaining some little exception.”[79]
Whether Mrs. Howard laid this letter before the Queen, as the dean evidently intended her to do, or spoke to the Queen on the subject, is not known; in any case Swift would have done better to have written directly to the Queen herself, or if that were impossible, to have chosen some more congenial channel of communication than Mrs. Howard. The Queen was jealous of her influence, and Mrs. Clayton, who disliked Swift, had been taught to think that ecclesiastical recommendations were especially within her province. For Mrs. Howard to have asked the Queen for the meanest curacy for one of her favourites would have been resented. So it came about that after Swift had waited a few years longer, heart-sick with deferred hope, he turned on Mrs. Howard as well as her mistress, though in the former case he was not only ungrateful but unjust, for the poor lady had not the power, though she had the will, to help him. But Swift in his Irish exile could not be expected to know the true inwardness of affairs at Court. “As for Mrs. Howard and her mistress,” he wrote, “I have nothing to say but that they have neither memory nor manners, else I should have had some mark of the former from the latter, which I was promised about two years ago; but since I made them a present it would be mean to remind them.” He was extremely sensitive to slights, and he resented the Queen’s forgetfulness about the medal almost as much as the fact that she omitted him from her list of preferments. Years after, in a poem which he wrote on his own death, the old grievance of the medals crops up again:—
From Dublin soon to London spread,
’Tis told at Court “the Dean is dead,”
And Lady Suffolk in the spleen
Runs laughing up to tell the Queen.
The Queen, so gracious, mild and good,
Cries: “Is he gone? ’tis time he should.