Swift on false witness.(Critical Essay)

Publication: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900

Publication Date: 22-JUN-04

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I

In the first book of The "Art" of Rhetoric, Aristotle discusses the relative reliability of various kinds of witnesses in proving a judicial case, distinguishing first between ancient and recent witnesses, and then between "well-known persons who have given a decision on any point" and "those who share the risk of the trial if they are thought to be perjurers." The latter are only competent as to "whether an act has taken place or not," while on questions of quality, "witnesses from a distance are very trustworthy" and "ancient witnesses are the most trustworthy of all, for they cannot be corrupted." (1) Nearness to the event, a positive factor in an empiricist assessment of credibility, is negative in Aristotelian thinking. (2) Those near to a crime scene may be involved, interested, or open to bribery; the credibility of direct witness to fact must therefore be guaranteed by punitive sanctions, such as the risk of being brought to trial.

To Jonathan Swift and his friends in Hanoverian Britain, classical skepticism about direct witness would have been pertinent. Until organized police forces came into existence in the nineteenth century, convictions for felony relied heavily on the evidence of professional informers, as--so it was believed--did prosecutions for the upper-class crimes of sedition and treason. Few informers were "well-known persons," i.e., possessed of reputations solid enough to guarantee credibility; many were--certainly in Swift's eyes--quite disreputable. In any case, even the honest could bend under pressure. Not only did those who gave the Whig ministry "informations" against Tories and Jacobites not risk being put on trial for giving false evidence; they also risked arrest if they did not give such evidence. Printers especially were vulnerable to government pressure to inform on authors, since "any 'reflection' or criticism, whether true or false" could be prosecuted as libel. (3)

This is the subject of the section that follows, which deals with Swift's experience of the gathering and use of "informations" in the immediate aftermath of the Hanoverian succession. The second section analyzes his most systematic response to the phenomenon, the sermon "On False Witness" of 1715. Subsequently, I touch on poems written for friends who had fallen victim to informers. I turn finally to Gulliver as both victim and perpetrator of false witness, an eyewitness narrator who both unwittingly and consciously exposes the unreliability of his tribe, of the epistemology on which his testimony is based, and of the modern literary genres, such as the novel, which entrust such witnesses with authority and truth.

II

In the winter of 1707-08, William Gregg, a clerk in the office of the secretary of state, Robert Harley, was found to have been selling military secrets to the French. Condemned to death, he was repeatedly offered his life in exchange for inculpating Harley. He refused, insisting that the secretary knew nothing, and eventually went to the scaffold. (4) Six years later, in January 1714, Joseph Addison attacked the Tory ministry in The Crisis, to which Swift anonymously replied with The Public Spirit of the Whigs. The House of Lords offered a reward of [pounds sterling]500 for discovery of the author, and took the publisher, Joseph Morphew, and his printer, John Barber, into custody and questioned them. They refused to supply a name, but were saved from imprisonment by a Tory ruse.

Swift was to remember the treatment of Gregg, and the "uneasy Business" over his own pamphlet may have been one factor in his deciding to withdraw from London politics. (5) Another may have been the contacts between Tory ministers and the Pretender's Court at St. Germains. If Swift knew of these contacts, it might have made him all the more vulnerable to judicial pressure, because he would not have been convinced of the innocence of those against whom he might be asked to testify. When questioned later by Archbishop William King about his time as chief propagandist for the Tories, Swift denied that there had been any Jacobite designs. But he also said that if he had discovered any, he was "not sure I should have turned Informer"; he would rather have "dropt some generall Cautions, and immediately have retired." (6) That was exactly what he had done, the archbishop astutely noticed: "you retired, which agrees with what you say you ought to have done in that case." (7)

Judicial harassment was only one of the means by which the early modern governments obtained information about their subjects. Since the 1660s, the English government had been investing increasingly in domestic intelligence. There were six main sources: spies recruited ad hoc; professional informers; casual informers, often paying off old scores; county and parish officers; the Post Office; and networks of diplomatic and other sources under the secretary of state. (8)

Interception of correspondence was a constant worry to Swift, forcing him to keep to "a most cursory Style"; nothing he wrote was "the least secret, even to a Whig footman," he warned recipients. (9) The tone is unmistakably snobbish, but not shocked. Swift seems to have regarded leniently the Whig Isaac Manley--Postmaster General in Ireland, and suspected by Tories of intercepting letters--for the mere fact that he was a friend of Stella's. (10) It was, in any case, not only the Whigs who used covert methods of gathering information. During his term as secretary of state, Harley had built up, in addition to the usual semi-official sources, "an elaborate network of spies and agents," who in turn recruited their own informers. (11) Daniel Defoe bragged to the secretary about his many pensioners, and that "'tis the Easyest thing in the World to hire people here to betray their friends." (12) If Swift knew about his friend Harley's spies, he may well have regarded them as necessary while continuing to despise them socially. With the fall of the ministry, however, Tories found themselves at the mercy of, rather than in control of, such instruments.

Swift was not personally involved in the climactic events of August 1714. By the end of the month, with Anne dead, George I on the throne, and most of the Tory ministers out of office, he had returned to Dublin to take the oaths to the crown promptly, "to prevent accidents." (13) The Oath of Abjuration contained a promise which is of special interest: "And I will do my best Endeavour to disclose and make known to His Majesty and his Successors, all Treasons and Traiterous Conspiracies, which I shall know to be against him or any of them." (14)

One could not be too prudent in this political climate. Having eliminated the Tories from office and taken control of Parliament in the autumn of 1714, the Whigs initiated a phase of judicial revenge. In January 1715, the papers of Thomas Wentworth, third Earl of Strafford, and Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, were seized, followed by the seizure of Matthew Prior's papers. Impeachment proceedings were initiated against Bolingbroke in April, by which time he had fled to France, to be followed by Ormonde in July. In that month, Harley too was impeached and committed to the Tower, first for "high crimes and misdemeanours," then for high treason. (15)

Before leaving England, Swift had burned all letters received from ministers in recent years, and later hid other compromising papers. However, in May 1715, pamphlets sent him by the Duchess of Ormonde's chaplain were intercepted, and Archbishop King claimed to have had to intercede to prevent his arrest. (16) On 21 June, Swift told his Jacobite friend, Knightley Chetwode, about the interview with King: "I said ... that if I had been called before them [the government], I would not have answered one syllable or named one person. He said that would have reflected on me. I answered I did not value that, and that I would sooner suffer more than let anybody else suffer by me, as some people did." (17) He had already been "named in many papers as proclaimed for five hundred pounds," and a week later there were rumors that Swift was to be sent to England "to be examined upon these impeachments." (18) On 7 July, he reported hearing that "the Parliament resolves to carry matters to the highest extremes," and that Prior was under pressure "to force him to accuse Lord Oxford though he declares he knows nothing, and that it is thought he will be hanged if he will not be an evidence." Prior's plight naturally reminded Swift of poor William Gregg. (19)

Meanwhile, members of Trinity College were being expelled for disloyalty, and one, Swift heard, was to be whipped or pilloried for "speaking some words." Opportunities for eavesdroppers were expanding, as he found when, to counteract the rumors about himself, he had gone "to the Courts on purpose to show I was not run away. I had warning given me to beware of a fellow that stood by while some of us were talking. It seems there is a trade going of carrying stories to the government and that many honest folks turn the penny by it." (20) The situation Swift describes is one of community breaking down, the "trade in stories" undermining civic life.

The Jacobite rebellion of the autumn of 1715 raised the temperature even further. On 20 November, the King's Chaplain, Thomas Greene, preached in Canterbury Cathedral a ranting sermon on The Great Wickedness of Perjury, and of the Present Rebellion. For the benefit of those in public office, including the clergy, he recited in full the text of the Oath of Abjuration, with its promise to "disclose and make known." He then denounced not only those who had "actually engag'd in this Rebellion," but also "others that ... shew no Abhorrence ... and ... say not one hard Word of it, but are as calm and easy under...

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