[...] Now surely we are on the track of something. The Temples are a distinguished family, coming originally from Leicestershire. Their patrons were the Sidneys, and the Sidneys were Earls of Leicester. Where have we heard of Leicester before? Abigail Erick, the butcher’s saughter from Wigston Magna, who is found, oddly enough, in Dublin, and who somehow manges to obtain a husband ten years her junior, and a small settlement into the bargain, when just on the threshold of middle age. And what does the husband get at almost the same time? His first regular [93] - the Stewardship of King’s Inns. And from Sir John Temple! You see how it all begins to fit in? Where more naturally would a Leicestershire woman be found in Dublin than in the household of one of the Temples? The Temples were a distinguished family, but they were far from being a celibate family - as we have already seen over in Richmond. Sir John Temple was a widower for the last forty years of his life. It is not improbable that, like his son, he had some comfort in his loneliness. But lax as they may have been, the Temples were a humane family. They did not leave their female dependants at the mercy of the world. And what would be more likely than that at the age of 66, Sir John would look around for some means of settling in respectability somebody who might be in that relationship to him? And what better vehicle for such a proceeding than a young ne’er-do-well of respectable parentage, hanging round the Inns of Court picking up jobs - the young brother, in fact, of his friend Godwin Swift? And how ready the young man would be to oblige the Master of the Rolls by bestowing the protection of his name upon an ageing lady - for a consideration. In the long run it might even have turned out to be a successful match (they actually did have a daughter) if he had not up and died so suddenly. And what more natural than that the widow in her distress should turn for temporary comfort to her old protector once again?

But perhaps most significant of all, the Temples were a literary family. The first of them to come to Ireland had been old William Temple, in whose arms Sir Philip Sidney had died at Zutphen - you probably remember the famous picture. He was a classical scholar of repute and became fourth Provost of Trinity College. His son, Sir John, the Master of the Rolls, was author of a History of the Rebellion of 1641, and the next of the line, Sir William of Sheen and of Moor Park, was a voluminous writer whose works Swift edited. Since that time the family has produced three First Lords of the Treasury, two Secretaries of State, two Keepers of the Privy Seal, four First Lords of the Admiralty and an Archbishop, including the famous Lord Palmerston and the present Archbishop of York. The Swifts, on the other hand, in whose nest we find the strange cuckoo, are represented solely in the halls of fame and of letters by a recent Police Magistrate in the City of Dublin and by the late Mr. J. G. Swifte [sic] McNeill. If inherited genius speaks for anything this, too, calls for some comment.

Now one cannot deny that a good deal of this is speculation. There is no positive evidence left to prove that what I suggest actually took place. But one can say this, that alone of all the explanations that have been offered it squares and up fully with every fact that we do know, d that once one accepts it everything else [94] falls neatly into place: Abigail’s presence in Dublin; her marriage to a penniless young man ten years her junior; the special prerogative licence; the ceremony performed in private rather than in any of the parish churches; the birth of the son so long after the husband’s death; and, most pointedly of all, the fact that the infant was so promptly shipped out of the country to Whitehaven and not brought back until after the mother had gone and the circumstances were largely forgotten. It accounts for the boy’s first-rate education, and it acquits him of any ingratitude towards the supposed uncle who was merely the conduit pipe through which it was paid for. In fact it accounts for much of his venom towards this man who knew his secret and who doubtless patronised him with an ill grace. It accounts for the responsibility later assumed towards his career and education by Sir William Temple, and, in return, his own feeling of responsibility towards Sir William’s natural child.

But, one may ask, how was it all so effectively lost to the public memory? Surely some local gossip would have survived connecting the wife of the Steward of King’s Inns and her celebrated son with the Temples? The answer is, that it did. Up to the middle of the eighteenth century it was common gossip that Swift was a Temple, and that this was why he never married Stella. But it must be remembered that from the time that Abigail Erick bade farewell to Dublin till the return of her son as a public figure, over thirty years elapsed - thirty years that spanned the Revolution of 1689 and the wars that culminated in the Battle of the Boyne. Of the multitudes who fled to England many never returned, and when the voice of scandal was revived, a new generation had forgotten the old Master of the Rolls and connected Swift with the son instead of with the father. In this form the story survived until after the Dean’s death, when investigation proved conclusively that he could not have been Sir William’s child, and it was dropped altogether. In short, the truth was killed by that most effective of all weapons of concealment - an unsustainable half-truth.

The stage is now set for the great tragedy of Swift’s life, arising almost inevitably from the impossible relationship in which he ultimately found himself with his two women.

First there was his friend Stella. She obviously at one time expected him to marry her - a desire that he had not at first anticipated. And so he must have disclosed his secret to her in order to explain why this could never be. For if he was Sir John Temple’s child, she must be his own niece. She accepted the inevitable with a good grace and paid him the honour of choosing to remain his friend and companion rather than marry anybody else. This was a very great compliment for a woman to pay a man, [95] but it was alsoa fatal decision for Swift, as he duly found out when in the couse of years he reached the point when he wanted to get married himself.

For consider the appalling position then. He could not marry Vanessa without publicaly disclosing the true facts of his relationship with Stella. His name was inextricably mixed up with hers. For years their friends had been tacitly assuming their mariage, and now for him to marry anybody else would throw Stella open to scandal and insinuations of a kind that she could not possibly permit. He could not even tell Vanessa why he would not marry her or even whether he was married already, for whichever answer he gave would involve him in acute periol. Yet he wanted Vanessa, and could not resist her pitiable advances, until in the end the isolubale situation drove her into her grace - now lost and neglected under the paving of the church of St. Andrew.

Is it any wonder4 that Archishop King said of him: “You have just seen the most unhappy many in al the world. Bu on the subject of his unhappiness you must never ask a question.” [...]

He did no wrong to Stella, and that is why, in spite of her knowledge of the existence o fthe other woman, she never showed any resentment and never appeared to expect anything more from the situation tha what she got. It was all very well for their friends to imagine them to be man and wife, but the slightest suggestion that they were living together might lay them both open to blackmail by some forgotten servant or relation who might still remember the 166O’s. Swift had many political enemies who would have been glad to snatch at any opportunity to ruin him, and it must be remembered that marriage or intercourse with a niece was and is not only contrary to the Canon Law of the Established Church, but was also an indictable offence as incest in the ordinary Criminal Courts of the land. This fear, ever present in his mind, was not merely a theological or religious scruple, but was based on the very tangible possibility of criminal proceedings should any enemy be in a position to make use of it. This was the reason for that nauseating prudery which prevented him from ever seeing Stella alone - the prudery which filled him in her last moments not so much with desolation at her approaching death, as with fear that she might die in the Deanery - “a very improper thing,” as he wrote. Personally I was never able [96] to forgive Swift for such a revolting piece of priggishness at such a moment until I saw it in the light of the true facts. Most of all, I was never able to stomach those prayers for Stella, in which he asked the Almighty for forgiveness for her sins, until I realised that he was not quite such a hypocrite in the sight of God as his words would have us believe.

The one whom he did wrong was Vanessa. But he wronged her not as the monster that he seems to be, but through his need for her, through his inability to be cruel without hatred - the only thing that could have saved her. In short, through that same demonic pity that was the keystone of his whole character.

There is a tendency amongst his later biographers to give up the struggle to understand Swift, and to plead the excuse that we have no right to inquire into his private life at all, that what he wished to remain a secret ought to be allowed to remain a secret to the last. This might be so were it not for the fact that everything Swift wrote is so personal and so intimately mixed up with his life, that the one is quite incomprehensible except in the light of the other. Thanks to Vanessa’s exposure of his correspondence with her, we now know too much about him and yet not enough. If he was a monster of hypocrisy and cruelty, if he was a man tormented merely by jealousy and conceit, we are entitled - in fact we need to keep this fact in mind when we are reading his works to-day. If, on the other hand, there was a reasonable and valid cause for his distemper we surely owe it to his memory to show that he was not - in the verdict of the nineteenth century - “an apostate politician, a ribald priest and a perjured lover,” for which verdict even the most friendly of biographies gives ample evidence. Those who are averse to any investigation of his origins are content that he should remain so, and I have no patience whatever with the brand of suburban gentility that can look with greater equanimity on the spectacle of his wantonly driving a woman into her grave than on the suggestion that, through no fault of his own, he was illegitimate.