The Drapier's Letters

A kingdom is rarely freed by the arguments of its lawyers. More often it is freed, for a season, by a single voice pitched low enough that the shopkeeper in Meath Street hears it before the minister in Whitehall does, and recognises it as his own.

THE DEAN AT FIFTY-SIX

Jonathan Swift, Dean of St Patrick's since 1713, born in Hoey's Court within sight of his own cathedral, was by the spring of 1724 a man whose political career was thought finished. The Tory ministry he had served as pamphleteer had collapsed in 1714; his patron Bolingbroke was abroad; his hopes of an English bishopric had died with Queen Anne. He had withdrawn to the Liberties of St Patrick's, to his deanery, to the company of Esther Johnson whom he called Stella, and to a decade of accumulated grievance at what England had done to the kingdom of Ireland. The Woollen Act of 1699 had broken the wool trade. The Cattle Acts had broken the cattle trade. The Dublin Mint had been shut in 1701. The Declaratory Act of 1719 had asserted, in plain English, that the Westminster Parliament might legislate for Ireland as it pleased. Each measure had been received in Dublin with petitions and pamphlets, and each pamphlet had died on the desks of men who could not be reached.

Then, in July 1722, the Walpole ministry granted a patent to William Wood, a hardware merchant of Wolverhampton, to mint £108,000 of copper half-pennies and farthings for circulation in Ireland. The patent had been bought, it was said, from the Duchess of Kendal, the King's mistress, for ten thousand pounds. No Irish authority had been consulted. The coin was light, the quantity preposterous, and the profit was to leave the country in an English pocket. The Irish Parliament addressed against it. The Privy Council addressed against it. London replied that the patent stood.

THE SECOND OF MARCH

The upstairs room of the deanery looks north into the close. The light at twenty past ten on the morning of the second of March 1724 is the pale, even light of a Dublin spring before the leaf comes on the limes. On the desk lies The Dublin Gazette of the previous Tuesday, in which Lord Carteret has reissued the proclamation requiring the circulation of Wood's coin. Beside it, a half-sheet of foolscap; beside that, the inkstand and the quill cut the night before. The Dean is in his cassock. He has been awake since six. He has walked once round the choir and once round the chapter-house and has come up the stairs without speaking to the verger.

The argument has been made and made and made. By the Irish Commons in September, by the Lords in October, by every coffee-house pamphlet from Skinner Row to Crane Lane. The argument has been heard in London and set aside. He understands, with the cold clarity that has always been his, that no further argument addressed from Ireland to England in the ordinary forms will move the patent by a hair. The patent will be defeated, if it is defeated at all, not at Westminster but in the till of the grocer on Francis Street and the chandler on Thomas Street. The country must refuse the coin in its own hand. And the country, which has not acted as a body in living memory, must be brought to it by a voice it will recognise as one of its own.

THE DRAPIER

He weighs, in the space of the morning, the voice. His own name will not serve: he is known as a Tory clergyman, an English-born father's son, a satirist whose Tale of a Tub still offends bishops. The voice must come up from the street. It must belong to a man with a Bible and a little Roman history and a shop in the Liberties, a man who counts coin into a drawer at the end of the day and knows the weight of a true half-penny in his palm. It must be a draper. Drapers handle money for cloth, the one trade England has not yet entirely strangled. The draper will sign himself M. B. Drapier, the initials meaning nothing and therefore meaning the country. The pamphlet will be a letter, the oldest form of confidence between equals, addressed to the shopkeepers, tradesmen, farmers, and common people of Ireland.

He knows, picking up the pen, what the cost may be. The Whigs in London will, on the second pamphlet or the third, read the cadence and know whose it is; he has been their declared enemy these ten years. They will move against the printer, not against him, because the convention of the Dublin trade is that the printer holds his tongue. He calculates the printer: John Harding in Molesworth Court, a man who has held under questioning before. The convention will hold. If it does not hold, a deanery is no shelter from a charge of seditious libel; he has watched Atterbury go to the Tower. He is fifty-six. He has, by his own reckoning in the Journal to Stella, perhaps a decade of useful work left in him. He sets the calculation aside. The opening sentence will take the patriotic ground in the draper's voice, and the draper's voice cannot be too educated, and it cannot tremble.

At half past ten he writes, in his own hand: 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. The sentence is the founding line of modern Irish political journalism. He does not know this. He writes the rest of the morning. By evening the manuscript is at Harding's in Molesworth Court. By Friday the fifth of March it is on the stalls of the Liberties and at the booksellers in Dame Street. Within ten days, by Carteret's own report to Walpole of the twelfth, it has been read in every shop and farmhouse of the city.

THE SEVEN LETTERS

The campaign ran from March to December, seven pamphlets, each a step further onto the constitutional ground. The first spoke of the coin in the till. The second spoke to Harding the printer himself, as if the country had a printer of its own. The third spoke to the nobility and gentry. The fourth, the Letter to the Whole People of Ireland, came out in October and went past the coin entirely. Were not the people of Ireland born as free as those of England? the Drapier asked in plain print, and answered himself: all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery. It was a sentence Locke had written and the Drapier had taken up in a draper's voice, and in October 1724 in Dublin it was a sentence for which a man could hang.

Carteret had Harding arrested within forty-eight hours. Lord Chief Justice Whitshed, the same Whitshed who had pursued Swift's printer Waters in 1720, summoned a grand jury to find a true bill for seditious libel. The jury refused. He dismissed it and summoned another. The second refused. He summoned a third, and the third refused. On the thirtieth of October Carteret proclaimed a reward of three hundred pounds for the discovery of the Drapier's identity. The reward was, in the city of Dublin in the autumn of 1724, the price of a small estate. It was never claimed.

THE PRINTER'S SILENCE

Harding sat in the Marshalsea through November and into December. The grand juries had spared him a true bill but the Lord Chief Justice had not given up the file. He was questioned three times. He was a small man with a small shop and a wife and a press he did not own outright, and he had known, by his own later deposition of 1735, the Drapier's identity since the second letter. He named no one. The convention of the Dublin trade was that the printer of the country does not name the man, and Harding held the convention as one holds a creed. He came out of the Marshalsea in January 1725 a thinner man and went back to his press in Molesworth Court and printed the sixth and seventh letters as if nothing had passed. He died in April 1725. His widow Sarah set up the type for the collected edition.

THE PATENT WITHDRAWN

On the eleventh of August 1725 the Walpole ministry surrendered. The patent was withdrawn; Wood was compensated quietly out of the Irish establishment, which was an indignity the country chose to bear in exchange for the principle. Carteret returned to London with his reputation intact, having been the Lord Lieutenant under whom the thing had not been enforced, and having had the wit not to press it further. The coin sat in the warehouses at Bristol and was eventually melted. In Dublin the bells of St Patrick's were rung. The Dean had a pamphlet printed thanking the people of Ireland for their constancy, and signed it M. B. Drapier, and everybody in Dublin knew, and nobody in Dublin said.

THE RETURN

He lived twenty years more in the deanery on Mitre Alley. The freedom of the city was conferred on him in November 1729 in a gold box. He wrote Gulliver's Travels in the back of the same study, and A Modest Proposal, and the Verses on the Death of Dr Swift. Stella died in 1728 and was buried in the cathedral; he could not bring himself to attend the service and watched the candles from a back room. He declined steadily from about 1740, his memory going first and then the use of words, the savage indignation cooling into a long silence. He died on the nineteenth of October 1745 and was laid in the south aisle of St Patrick's beside her, ten yards from the high altar. He had written his own epitaph in Latin and cut it into the wall above: Ubi sæva Indignatio Ulterius Cor lacerare nequit, where savage indignation can no longer tear the heart. Abi Viator, Et imitare, si poteris, Strenuum pro virili Libertatis Vindicatorem. Depart, traveller, and imitate, if you can, this earnest champion of liberty.

A kingdom is freed, when it is freed, by the voice that the shopkeeper recognises before the minister does. The estate he left founded St Patrick's Hospital for the mentally ill, which opened in James's Street in 1757 and continues, on the same ground, as the psychiatric hospital of the country. The first-edition pamphlets of the Drapier's Letters, the seven small unbound quartos that John Harding pulled from his press in Molesworth Court in 1724, lie on permanent display a quarter of a mile away, in the Long Room of Trinity College Library, their paper foxed and their type still legible, signed at the foot M. B. Drapier.