Putting Out the Fire in Her Imperial Majesty's Apartment: Opposition, Politics, Anticlericalism, and Aesthetics

In 1960, in the second volume of his biography of Sir Robert Walpole, J. H. Plumb wrote that Gulliver’s Travels was “one of the most remarkable and virulent satires ever to be written against Walpole.” ¹ The only trenchent allusion in Gulliver’s Travels to Walpole (aside from general references to ministers as well as princes) was in the third voyage to his unsuccessful attempt to impose Wood’s copper coinage on the Irish, and this was mostly removed before publication. ² Bertrand Goldgar in 1976 made the point that anti-Walpole satire was only read into Gulliver’s Travels after the fact by the opposition; that Swift’s general satire on ministers and princes was only made particular by factious readers of 1726–27. ³

Gulliver was published on 28 October 1726. The first political reading was A Key, being Observations and Explanatory Notes, upon the Travels of Lemuel Gulliver, a pamphlet announced on 5 December, which connects Townshend and Walpole with Flimnap and Reldressal and the purple, yellow, and white threads of the Lilliputians with the orders of the Garter, Thistle, and Bath (13, 16). ⁴ These references probably do, as the author of the Key claims, reflect Swift’s intention as he was finishing Gulliver in 1725–26, in the year following the Drapier’s Letters and the scandal of Wood’s Halfpence. But closer to the original intention of the “Voyage to Lilliput” is the Key’s reading of “the Conditions upon which [Gulliver] was set at Liberty” after being pinioned by the Lilliputians to the earth: “The Opposition made to Lemuel’s Enlargement being almost as considerable as what some English Peers struggled with before they could get out of the Tower. . . . And the Severities threatned against poor Lemuel,” the author continues, “some have resembled to the late Earl of O——d’s Sufferings” (17, 26), that is, to Oxford’s imprisonment in the Tower between 1715 and 1717. Two conclusions then are drawn by the author of the Key from the “Voyage to Lilliput”: “that the Emperor himself is too much governed by Flimnap” and that the story of “the Severities threatned against poor Lemuel” offers a retrospect on “the four last Years of the Reign of a late Princess” (25).

As this pamphlet recognizes, the “Voyage to Lilliput” was in fact essentially an allegory of the last four years of Queen Anne, focused on the Peace of Utrecht—the war and peace settlement with Blefuscu—and had little directly to say about the Walpole regime of 1721–26. Although the author of the Key identifies Gulliver with Oxford, Swift would at least equally have intended Bolingbroke, the actual architect of the Peace, who fled certain retribution into exile in France/Blefuscu, as Gulliver did. On the other hand, Irvin Ehrenpreis, in the final volume of his biography of Swift (1983), notes of the “Voyage to Lilliput” that “The dispelling of Gulliver’s illusion as he learns more and more about the imperial court evokes the enlightenment Swift suffered during the years 1711–14,” and so shifts our attention from Oxford and Bolingbroke to Swift himself. ⁵

Figure 1.

Hogarth, The Punishment of Lemuel Gulliver (first state); etching and engraving; 7 7/16 x 12 1/2 in.; December 1726; courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum, London.

None of the Swift scholars, however, charting and distinguishing what the “Voyage to Lilliput” meant to Swift and was made to mean by his first readers, has taken cognizance of a publication that clearly did reinterpret Gulliver’s Travels as a topical anti-ministerial satire—and was the first to do so: William Hogarth’s print, The Punishment of Lemuel Gulliver (fig. 1), which was announced as “speedily to be published” in the Daily Post of 3 December and as published in the Daily Post of the 27th. ⁶

The earliest indications of an organized campaign of opposition to Walpole were during the summer of 1726 in the meeting at Bolingbroke’s country estate of Dawley—and...