Jonathan Swift's writings on Ireland explosively combine the perspectives of priest, patriot, and Tory polemicist. The priest locates the cause of what he called 'the Wretched Condition of Ireland' in the vices of the Irish themselves. The patriot blames English oppression for Irish poverty. The disaffected Tory identifies the English Whig government and its Irish Whig clients as authors of Ireland's ruin. This paper considers the political character of A Modest Proposal. Swift's notorious pamphlet of 1729 on the Irish poor and their oppressors has a particular anti-Whig aspect and Tory political bite.

Many contemporaries viewed Swift's Irish writings as primarily the work of a Tory or 'Church Party' partisan rather than as the work of a true patriot. His incendiary pamphleteering was seen as a partisan attempt to open a popular front against Walpole and the Hanoverian regime in Ireland. Contemporary Whigs located the 'origin of Swift's patriotism for Ireland' in the Tory party's proscription from office after the Hanoverian accession in 1714 and in Swift's disappointed personal ambition. The Dean's Irish writings were received as a continuation of his Tory polemic transplanted to Ireland.

The contemporary Whig view of Swift's Irish writings as primarily party-political in provenance was also put forcefully by later Whig commentators, such as Francis Jeffrey. Reviewing Sir Walter Scott's edition of Swift's Works for the Edinburgh Review in 1816 Jeffrey wrote sharply: 'A single fact is decisive upon this point. While his friends were in power, we hear nothing of the grievances of Ireland'. Swift wrote on behalf of Ireland against English oppression but the Irish patriot was a High Churchman first. When James Butler, the Second Duke of Ormonde, a High Church Tory, is Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (1703-1707 and 1710-13) Swift makes no public complaint about England's treatment of Ireland. But he erupts into print against English Whig administrations perceived to be sympathetic to the claims of Protestant Dissenters for relief from persecution by statute.

Further, Swift was more than willing to accept English laws when the Sacramental Test Act was imposed in Ireland in 1704. The Test clause inserted in the Irish Popery Act of 1704 by English High Church Tories excluded from public office all who would not take communion according to Anglican rites. Revealingly, it is in opposition to attempts by the anti-clerical wing of the English Whig party to remove the Test in Ireland that Swift first articulates his claims for Irish legislative independence more famously made in the later Drapier's Letters. In A Letter from a Member of the House of Commons in Ireland to a Member of the House of Commons in England, Concerning the Sacramental Test, published in 1708, Swift condemned Alan Brodrick, a leading Whig and afterwards Lord Chancellor in 1714, for agitating to have the Sacramental Test in Ireland repealed by an Act of Parliament in England. The Test in Ireland was a national matter, Swift writes, and supposed patriots like Brodrick ought to know 'the Injustice of binding a Nation by Laws, to which they do not consent'.

From 1714 Swift was certainly disaffected from the Anglo-Irish establishment to which he belonged by ethnicity and confession. He reported in 'A Letter to Mr Pope' (1722) that the principles of Whig rule in Ireland 'consisted in nothing else but damning the Church, reviling the Clergy, abetting the Dissenters, and speaking contemptibly of revealed Religion'. The 'whiggish or fanatical Genius so prevalent among the English of this kingdom' was to be accounted for 'by that number of Cromwell's Soldiers, adventurers established here, who were all of the sourest Leven, and the meanest birth, and whose posterity are now in possession of their lands and their principles'.

This fanatical whiggish genius was, in part, Swift liked to point out, a genius for massacre. Swift finds that Protestant sectarians have a hand even in the massacres committed by Catholics. Swift wrote that 'the Puritans …joining with the Scotch Enthusiasts, in the Time of King Charles the First, were the principal Cause of the Irish Rebellion and Massacre, by distressing that Prince, and making it impossible for him to send over timely Succours' (Queries Relating to the Sacramental Test (1732)). In 'A Sermon Upon the Martyrdom of K. Charles I. Preached at St. Patrick's' in 1726, Swift said that 'the Irish rebellion was wholely owing to that wicked English parliament. For the leaders in the Irish Popish massacre would never have dared to stir a finger, if they had not been encouraged by that rebellious spirit in the English House of Commons' which disabled the King from helping his Protestant subjects in Ireland. The 'murderous Puritan-parliament' had 'held the King's hands, while the Irish Papists here were cutting our grandfathers throats'.

Swift wrote that the posterity of the schismatics who rebelled against and murdered their King now possessed the lands formerly owned by the Catholics who were loyal to King Charles I and that the Rump Parliament and Cromwell had murdered thousands of Catholic Irish in order to dispossess them. Swift's irony in Reasons Humbly Offered to the Parliament of Ireland, For Repealing the Sacramental Test, in Favour of the Catholicks (1733) does not preclude sympathy for a Catholic project during the Cromwellian regime for foreign invasion of Ireland as a means of ending the murder and enslavement of the Irish and restoring the lawful monarchy. (In his unpublished 'Thoughts on Religion' Swift did approve of one thing about Cromwell in Ireland, and that was 'Cromwell's notion' of 'liberty of conscience' which was to suppress the public expression of it.)

Although Swift's satire of Roman Catholicism in A Tale of a Tub earned him a place in the Vatican's Index of prohibited books, Swift deplored the Erastian and anti-Episcopal character of the Protestant Reformation and so much so that he sometimes seems barely within its pale. In an unfinished pamphlet of 1736 entitled 'Concerning that Universal Hatred, Which Prevails Against the Clergy', Swift writes that: 'the reformation, in every country where it was attempted, was carried on in the most impious and scandalous manner that can possibly be conceived. To which unhappy proceedings we owe all the just reproaches that Roman Catholics have cast upon us ever since.' In 'the Protestant monarchies abroad, little more than the shadow of Episcopacy is left; but, in the republics, is wholly extinct'. (Swift was a lifelong and strident defender of Episcopacy though he rarely has a kind word for bishops.) For Swift the extirpation of the Episcopal Church was the real project of the republican Puritan posterity in contemporary Ireland, and massacring the Irish was an aspect of their genius. Animus against the established Episcopal Church and appetite for massacre are traits of Swift's most infamous fictional character.

In A Modest Proposal For Preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to their Parents, or the Country, and for making them Beneficial to the Publick, Swift personates the 'whiggish or fanatical Genius' of the established settler class in the unspeakable 'Modest Proposer'. A Modest Proposal identifies the Hanoverian Whig establishment in Ireland with a genocidal proposal to exterminate the poor. The putative author's modest proposal, as is eventually revealed after some opening paragraphs on the problem of Irish poverty, is that the solution to Irish poverty is infanticide and cannibalism. He recommends processing the children of the poor into a financial, nutritional and culinary asset by eating them.

The putative author, the 'Modest Proposer', reveals himself to be a Protestant Whig member of the established settler class. He is fanatically anti-Jacobite, indeed paranoid about the Stuart Pretender, and is sympathetic to Protestant Dissenters from the established Church of Ireland. The Modest Proposer, for instance, complains that the Catholic Irish 'leave their dear Native Country, to fight for the Pretender in Spain' . Yet he also complains that the Irish stay in Ireland, 'on Purpose, with a Design to deliver the Kingdom to the Pretender, hoping to take their Advantage by the Absence of so many good Protestants, who have chosen rather to leave their Country, than stay at home, and pay Tithes against their Conscience, to an idolatrous Episcopal Curate' . That phrase 'idolatrous Episcopal Curate' signals that the Modest Proposer is a sympathizer with Ulster Scots Presbyterianism.

He uses the kind of language found in the published sermons of the Presbyterian Kirk, as in, for example, James Fraser's Prelacy an Idol and Prelates Idolaters of 1713. It can be noted here too that the Modest Proposer attributes Ulster Scots Presbyterian emigration not to the economic distress of poor harvests and livestock mortality but solely to the tithes demanded by the Episcopal clergy. Certainly Presbyterians in the 1720s complained about the tithes but the Modest Proposer is extreme in attributing emigration to this factor alone. He is Swift's Whig fanatic blaming everything on the Church of Ireland clergy. A Modest Proposal was certainly understood by Swift's English Tory friends, Lord Bathurst and the second Earl of Oxford, as a disaffected attack on the English Whig administration which was said to be devouring Ireland and would soon consume an impoverished England. The trope of a devouring Whig government was familiar in the Opposition political press of the period. A Jacobite ideologist (Andrew Michael Ramsay) had even put the case of a sovereign who forced his people into cannibalism as one in which the removal of the king would be justifiable.

The word 'Modest' in the title of Swift's pamphlet might well have given an ironic hint to contemporaries that they were about to read some immodest, immoral monstrosity of Whig provenance. The anti-clerical Whig, Bernard Mandeville, had scandalized conventional morality with a proposal for the toleration of prostitution and establishment of state-controlled brothels entitled A Modest Defence of Publick Stews (1724). A Modest Proposal, of course, is concerned with stews of a different kind. Swift had already parodied another of Mandeville's memorable titles (The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1714)) when he told Archbishop King in 1721 that a proposal for an Irish bank 'was for private advantage and public mischief'. Swift exhorted the Irish from the pulpit to prefer 'the public interest to their present private advantage'.

Swift was a searing satirist of the phenomenon known in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as 'privatization' and relentlessly exposed cases where he felt the public interest had been sacrificed for private advantage, as Daniel Eilon has shown. The final irony in A Modest Proposal is in the ethical proof offered by the Modest Proposer for the public-spirited motives behind his homicidal scheme. At the end of the pamphlet, the Modest Proposer claims to be without private views: 'I have no Children, by which I can propose to get a single Penny; the youngest being nine Years old, and my Wife past Child-bearing'.

However, the Modest Proposer does have an eye on his own posterity. There is a hint that he feels he deserves to have 'his Statue set up for a Preserver of the Nation'. The Modest Proposer also rejects a proposed refinement on his cannibal project, put forward by a fellow patriot, which was to use 'the Bodies of young Lads and Maidens, not exceeding fourteen Years of Age, nor under twelve' as substitutes for venison, since gentlemen have over-hunted and destroyed all the deer. The Modest Proposer rejects this refinement, he says, because of the toughness of the flesh of the males and because of the 'Loss to the Publick' of a capital asset in destroying females just as they are about to become 'Breeders'. The objection of 'Cruelty' is also entertained and dismissed. However, the Modest Proposer's late disclosure that he has a nine-year old child hints at his private motive for rejecting the shooting of early adolescents: he is not prepared to put in place a scheme in which he would be sacrificing his own child in the near future. The Modest Proposer exemplifies Whig hegemony: private self-interest and public evil.

Swift wrote that the 'whiggish or fanatical Genius' among the English interest in Ireland derived from the time of Cromwell and it is the raw memories of Cromwellian massacres of the native Irish and of the selling of the survivors into slavery in the West Indies that Swift's pamphlet, in part, invokes. The Modest Proposer is a fanatical Whig genius planning to massacre the starving native Irish poor. Swift's satire is of course exploiting an old imputation that was succinctly described by Charles Wogan, an Irish Catholic Jacobite exile, in a letter to Swift of February 27, 1733. Wogan wrote: 'Our English ancestors dispatched into Ireland, and their descendants, have taken effectual care to fasten this bugbear upon their mother country, and represent the Irish as monstors and cannibals, in order to justify their own more barbarous oppressions upon that people'. Swift's satiric pamphlet imputes cannibalism to the barbaric oppressors, the English settler class, as well as, conventionally, to the 'savage' Irish poor.

The Modest Proposer's willingness to enslave the Irish is another reflection of the Cromwellian and Whig genius of the English settler class for whom he speaks. Noting that the only current prospects for the Irish poor are to 'turn Thieves for want of Work', to join the Jacobite regiments abroad, or to 'sell themselves to the Barbadoes' , the Modest Proposer had thought of turning the children of the Irish poor into slaves rather than food, however, in the end, eating them is calculated to be more economical.

In his sermon on the 'Causes of the Wretched Condition of Ireland', Swift refers to 'that Ægyptian Bondage of cruel, oppressing, covetous Landlords, expecting that all who live under them should make Bricks without Straw …by which the Spirits of the People are broken, and made for Slavery'. In A Short View of the State of Ireland, first printed in 1728, the year before the publication of A Modest Proposal, and reprinted in part in the crypto-Jacobite Tory Mist's Weekly Journal in London, it is England and the Hanoverian king who are the slave masters. Ireland is denied liberties enjoyed by 'the meanest Prince in the German Empire' and the Irish are imaged as the Israelites suffering under their Pharoah. Swift had written that it was under the administration of the extreme Whig Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Thomas, Earl of Wharton, in 1708-1710, that steps were taken towards completing 'the Slavery of that People'. In his virulent Short Character of Wharton, 'collaterally' is a Wharton word. The Modest Proposer regards the Irish as slaves and speaks of the 'Collateral Advantage' of his cannibal scheme in 'lessening the Number of Papists among us'.

While this violent satire certainly gives vent to Swift's own animus against the vicious and improvident Irish poor who contribute to their slavery, as Claude Rawson has shown, Swift did express esteem for the Irish Jacobite diaspora, praising Jacobite soldiers in Spanish service abroad, the very men who represented the only military option for overturning Whig oppression in Ireland. He counted such men among his friends and correspondents. The Modest Proposer by contrast is scandalized that some of the Irish 'leave their dear Native Country, to fight for the Pretender in Spain' .

Swift said that the general satirist should always have particular persons in view (see, for example, his Examiner of 9 November 1710). The satire of A Modest Proposal has particular Whig personalities in its sights. The Allens, a Dublin merchant family who were staunchly Williamite and Hanoverian Whig in politics, are a particular target in A Modest Proposal, as elsewhere in Swift's writing. In his poem 'Traulus', an attack on Joshua, second Viscount Allen, Swift satirized the Whig family as butchers and wrote that the Viscount 'draws his daily food, / From his tenants' vital blood'.

The punishment of 'Traulus' meted out by the satirist in a pamphlet of 1730 is to imagine him flayed and dissected alive and the carcase put on display for threepence. Allen's grandfather was a Lord Mayor of Dublin and an exporter of salt meat. In places the Modest Proposer seems to be addressing the Whig grandee when he outlines the benefits of his cannibal scheme: 'a well-grown fat yearling Child… roasted whole, will make a considerable Figure at a Lord Mayor's Feast, or any other publick Entertainment'. In a passage where Swift palpably erupts from behind the ironic pose of the Modest Proposer, pro-English salt meat exporters are reassured about the human meat trade: 'we can incur no Danger in disobliging ENGLAND: For, this Kind of Commodity will not bear Exportation; the Flesh being of too tender a Consistence, to admit a long Continuance in Salt; although, perhaps, I could name a Country, which would be glad to eat up our whole Nation without it' .

It is assumed by the Modest Proposer that the only objection readers will have to his cannibal proposal is a culinary one, and the Modest Proposer, significantly, is au fait with French dishes: 'a young healthy Child, well nursed, is, at a Year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome Food; whether Stewed, Roasted, Baked, or Boiled; and, I make no doubt, that it will equally serve in a Fricasie, or Ragoust'.

This black humour is more than just a satire on the luxury of the rich. Its topical target is the gourmandizing grandees of the Hanoverian Whig government who were 'devouring' Ireland. The Whig first or prime minister Robert Walpole employed a French cook. A sign of English Whig power was its culinary style and among the elite dishes upon which the Whig ministers notoriously fed were the olio, fricassee and ragout, as Gilly Lehmann has shown. Attacks on Whig French luxury (and emphasis on the Stuart Pretender's love of plain English fare, even though he was exiled in Italy) were staples of Jacobite opposition propaganda. In A Modest Proposal the sign of Whig hegemony in Ireland is its obscene cuisine. It is insinuated that the Whig court and ministry might even refine their taste further in line with oriental cruelty. Citing as his authority 'the famous Salmanaazor, a Native of the Island Formosa' (in fact a notorious French imposter who claimed to be a Formosan), the Modest Proposer reports that 'the Body of a plump Girl of fifteen' was a 'prime Dainty' sold to the Formosan 'Imperial Majesty's prime Minister of State, and other great Mandarins of the Court, in Joints from the Gibbet, at Four hundred Crowns'. Swift's satire, however, pans from the cannibal imperial court and ministry to sear the court's victims also. It would not be a bad thing if 'several plump young girls' in Dublin with a fetish for foreign clothes were eaten.

The Modest Proposer is the latest avatar of the 'whiggish and fanatical genius' and the satiric black humour of this unthinkable proposal was designed to arrest attention to the horror of Hanoverian Ireland. Swift wrote another tract in the character of the loyal Whig Modest Proposer. The work is called The Answer to The Craftsman (written in 1730). In it the Modest Proposer, who is now said to have been born in England, looks forward to Ireland becoming 'a new Arcadia' under Whig government policies: the depopulated colony in the British archipelago, with no Established Church, entirely dependent on England, and inhabited by a few vegetarians grazing export cattle for the English Whig butchers.

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