Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 4.djvu/412

398 post of secretary was transferred to the duke of Newcastle, and Townshend and Walpole remained in undisputed ascendancy.

The domestic serenity of the realm was, however, greatly disturbed at this moment by dean Swift, who seized on an occasion at once to avenge himself on the whig ministry for the defeat and punishment of his party, and especially of his great friends and patrons, Oxford and Bolingbroke. Swift, deprived of all hopes of a mitre, had for ten years been living in what, to his ambitious mind, appeared a state of exile and obscurity, in the deanery of St. Patrick, at Dublin He hated Irelamd and the Irish, and all the more so because, though born of English parents, he had the accident to be born in that country, and was, accordingly, claimed by the Irish as a countryman. Always overflowing with spleen, and reckless on whom he poured it out, he had long been in a state of superlative acerbity, from the forced banishment in which he regarded himself as living in an odious country. The opportunity which now presented of relieving himself of his pent-up bile, would not have been perceived except by a man of quick fancy and unprincipled temper. It was simply this:

There had long been a great deficiency of copper coin in Ireland. Probably this coinage had never been fully restored since James II. exhausted it in payment of his forces, and endeavoured to supply its place by halfpence minted from old pans and kettles. The deficiency was so great that manufacturers and shopkeepers were compelled to pay their workmen and give change to their customers in bits of cardboard bearing their seal and signature. The government undertook to remove this pressing want of so useful a medium, and they set about it in an honest and honourable manner as it regarded the quality of the coin. Tenders were issued, and various offers received for the coining of farthings and halfpence to the value of a hundred and eight thousand pounds The proposal of Mr William Wood, an iron and coppor founder, of Wolverhampton, was accepted; but the quality of the coin, both as to weight and fineness, was determined by the advice of Sir Isaac Newton, then master of the Mint, and Wood was bound under heavy penalties to furnish it according to this stipulation. Every means were used by the ministers and the solicitor and attorney-general to insure the supply of a much better copper coinage than Ireland had ever possessed before

There were somo circumstances, however, which came out that created considerable suspicion and displeasure in Ireland. Wood had given a bribe to the king's mistress, the duchess of Kendal, to procure him the contract, and the government had ordered the coinage without paying the Irish privy council and lord-lieutenant the compliment of consulting them on this occasion. Swift saw these errors, and seized on them for his own purposes. He did not stop to inquire whether, after all, the proposed coinage would not, under any circumstances, be much better than the present distressing scarcity of copper money, and whether the farthings and halfpence might not turn out as good, though they were contracted for. It was enough for him that there was a cause of discontent which he could fan into a flame against the English government. He threw all his spiteful soul into it. The public mind was inflamed by the industrious circulation of representations that the English were going to enrich a stranger at the expense of the whole of Ireland, and that a universal robbery was about to be committed on the nation by means of a base and worthless coin. The irritation grew; the Irish parliament met full of resentment, and both houses passed addresses to the king, declaring that Wood had not kept to the terms of the patent; that even if he had, the loss to the country by the coinage would be a hundred and fifty per cent.! that now it would be still more monstrous. The lord lieutenant, the duke of Grafton, was a man wholly incompetent to direct such a crisis; "a fair-weather plot," as Walpole called him, "who knew not what he had to do when first the storm arose; "and the lord chancellor, Allan Broderick, viscount Middleton, was an enemy both to Grafton and Walpole, and secretly fomented, by his son, his secretary, and other connections and dependents, the discontent. "Walpole received the addresses to present to the king, and he did not hesitate to declare that the assertion, that the copper coinage would cause a loss to the nation of a hundred and fifty per cent., was equally monstrous and untrue. He showed that it was an excellent coin, and of a due value.

Still, by Walpole's advice, a mild answer was returned by the king to the addresses. It declared the king's concern at the idea entertained by his Irish subjects of the inferior character of the coinage; and that, to ascertain whether it really deserved the suspicion, a strict inquiry should be instituted. Accordingly, a committe of the privy council was appointed to make a strict scrutiny into the matter, and Sir Isaac Newton was ordered to assay the new coin with all care. He returned for answer as the result of his assay, that the coins in goodness and fineness, so far from falling short, even exceeded the conditions of the contract; that although, on account of the difference of exchange betwixt the two countries, it was necessary to make the Irish halfpence rather less in weight, yet that this difference was more than made up in fineness, which was superior to that of the English.

This report would have been enough to allay all irritation, but it did not in the least deter Swift. He continued his onslaught on the coin, the patentee, and the English government with only the greater virulence and audacity; he attacked Wood and his halfpence in poetry and prose; he launched forth ballads and lampoons of the most popular and at the same time unscrupulous character; he represented Ireland as about to be plundered and ruined by a system of the most impudent robbery: — The halfpence are coming, the nation's undoing, There's an end of your ploughing, and baking, and brewing, In that you mnst all go to rack and to ruin! On an ignorant and most excitable people, the effect of this style of address was amazing, and he followed it up by a series of letters called "The Drapier's Letters." This draper represented himself as a poor but independent-spirited man-who did not mean to be ruined without a good, hearty outcry; "a poor, ignorant shopkeeper, utterly unskilled in law." In language admirably adapted to such a character, he uttered the most reckless falsehoods, quite sure that his hot-blooded readers would never give themselves the trouble to inquire into the truth of his allegations. He told them that the patent was iniquitous, that wicked as its conditions