The Drapier's Letters

It is twenty past ten on the morning of the second of March 1724, in the upstairs writing-room of the Deanery of St Patrick's Cathedral, in the close on Mitre Alley off Patrick Street, in central Dublin, in low pale March light. He is fifty-six years old. He is Jonathan Swift, Dean of the Cathedral and Liberty of St Patrick's since 1713, born at 7 Hoey's Court (a hundred and fifty yards from where he is sitting now) on the thirtieth of November 1667, son of the late Jonathan Swift the elder (an attorney who had emigrated from Yorkshire to Dublin in 1666 and died at twenty-eight, seven months before Jonathan junior's birth), Master of Arts of Trinity College Dublin and Doctor of Divinity of the same.

On the desk in front of him is the copy of The Dublin Gazette of last Tuesday, in which the Lord Lieutenant Lord Carteret has reissued the proclamation requiring the circulation of William Wood's copper coinage in Ireland. The coinage has been minted at Wolverhampton under the patent granted to Wood by the Walpole ministry in July 1722. The terms of the patent give Wood the right to mint £108,000-worth of half-pennies and farthings; the Irish mint had not been operating since the close of the Dublin Mint in 1701.

He thinks: the political question of the country is the English commercial domination. The English commercial domination has, in the past forty years, taken the wool trade (the Woollen Act of 1699), the cattle trade (the Cattle Acts of 1666 and 1681), and the linen trade. The English commercial domination has now come for the coinage.

He thinks: the constitutional position of the country is, by the Act of Renunciation of 1719, that the Westminster Parliament has the right to legislate for the kingdom of Ireland. The Act of Renunciation is, by every careful Irish reading of the constitution, an unconstitutional usurpation of the kingdom's legislative right.

He thinks: the English commercial domination cannot be argued out of by Irish constitutional argument alone. The English commercial domination has to be made commercially impossible by the country.

He thinks: if the country can be brought, in a few months, to refuse the Wood's coinage as a body, the patent collapses and the Walpole ministry has to withdraw it. The country has not been brought to anything as a body in the past forty years.

He thinks: the country will be brought to it by a series of pamphlets in the draper's voice. The draper's voice is the trader of the Dublin Liberties, a small shopkeeper with a Bible and a Roman-history education and the fear of the bad coin in his till. The voice is the voice the country will read.

He thinks: the voice cannot be mine. The voice must be a fictitious figure. The form of the pamphlet has to be the letter from the fictitious M. B. Drapier. The pamphlet has to be published anonymously.

He thinks: the Whigs in London will, on the second or third pamphlet, know it is mine. The Whigs have, since the Tory ministry fell in 1714, treated me as the political enemy. The Whigs will, on confirmation, prosecute. The prosecution will be of the printer, not of me.

He thinks: the Dublin print trade will hold. The convention of the Dublin print trade is that the printer does not name the author. The convention has held under every prosecution since 1701. The convention will hold under this one.

He thinks: the first letter is to be in the form addressed to the shop-keepers, farmers, and common people of Ireland. The opening sentence has to take the patriotic ground in the draper's voice. The draper's voice cannot be too educated.

He picks up the pen at half past ten. The opening sentence is, in his own hand at his desk on the second of March 1724, the founding line of modern Irish political journalism: Brethren, friends, countrymen, and fellow-subjects, what I intend now to say to you, is, next to your duty to God, and the care of your salvation, of the greatest concern to yourselves and your children.

He writes through the rest of the morning. The first pamphlet (A Letter to the Shop-Keepers, Tradesmen, Farmers, and Common-People of Ireland concerning the Brass Halfpence coined by Mr. Woods) is at the printer John Harding's in Molesworth Court by the evening. It is on sale at the booksellers of Dublin and the pamphlet-stalls of the Liberties on Friday the fifth of March. Within ten days, by the report of Lord Lieutenant Carteret to Walpole in London on the twelfth of March, the pamphlet has been read in every shop and farm-house in the city.

The campaign of the Drapier's Letters ran from March to December 1724, seven pamphlets in total. The fourth pamphlet (the Letter to the Whole People of Ireland, October 1724) was the politically critical one; it argued the constitutional position that the legislative authority of the Westminster Parliament over Ireland was, by the principle of natural right, illegitimate. Lord Lieutenant Carteret had the printer John Harding arrested within forty-eight hours of publication. The grand jury of the city of Dublin, summoned by the Lord Chief Justice William Whitshed in November to find a true bill against Harding, refused on three successive sittings to do so. Carteret issued a proclamation of three hundred pounds reward for the Drapier's identity on the thirtieth of October 1724. The reward was never claimed.

The Walpole ministry withdrew the Wood's coinage patent on the eleventh of August 1725. The political effect was the most successful Irish-popular political campaign of the eighteenth century. The political reputation of Jonathan Swift in Dublin, having been a controversial Anglican Tory clerical figure of the previous decade, was thereafter the patriotic-Irish position. The freedom of the City of Dublin was conferred on him in November 1729. The tradition of the print trade held until his death in October 1745: the printer Harding, by his own deposition in 1735, had known the Drapier's identity from the second pamphlet onwards, and had never named him under examination on three occasions in 1724 because the printer of the country does not name the man.

Swift continued as Dean of St Patrick's until his death on the nineteenth of October 1745. He died of senile dementia and depressive illness, having declined steadily from about 1740. He left his estate to found St Patrick's Hospital for the mentally ill, which opened in James's Street in 1757 and continues today as the psychiatric hospital of the country. He is buried in St Patrick's Cathedral, ten yards from the high altar, beside his lifelong companion Esther Johnson (Stella). The Latin epitaph he wrote for himself is cut on the wall above the tomb: Hic depositum est Corpus IONATHAN SWIFT S.T.D. Hujus Ecclesiæ Cathedralis Decani, Ubi sæva Indignatio Ulterius Cor lacerare nequit. Abi Viator Et imitare, si poteris, Strenuum pro virili Libertatis Vindicatorem. (Here is laid the body of Jonathan Swift, Doctor of Sacred Theology, Dean of this Cathedral Church, where savage indignation can no longer tear his heart. Depart, traveller, and imitate, if you can, this earnest and dedicated champion of liberty.) The Drapier's Letters in their first-edition pamphlet form are in Trinity College Library in Dublin, on permanent display.