Swift returned to Ireland in August 1714 to take his oaths to the new monarch, resume his role as vicar of Laracor, and assume his duties as Dean of St Patrick's, Dublin. Now he was in exile, not simply enjoying a voluntary retreat. The disintegration of Harley's ministry had ended his career as an English propagandist. Worse, the incoming Whig ministry acted, and some of his friends then reacted, as if they wanted to confirm Swift's deep conviction of human fractiousness and factiousness. He returned under suspicion, tarred by the actual or apparent Jacobitism of some of his closest associates. Government spies now scrutinized his correspondence for evidence of his or his friends’ treasonable involvement with the Pretender and his agents. St Patrick's Cathedral rather than the nation was now the centre of his responsibilities. In every sense, he lived at the margin of his old world, locked in opposition to the new order that had displaced it. He lived in Ireland, not England. He opposed the ministry in London rather than speaking for it. Even when he eventually adopted an Irish voice, he commonly found himself speaking from the margins of power to those who ruled Ireland. He could easily have settled into clerical inconsequence, busying himself with administration of the cathedral, skirmishing with his archbishop, dining out on tales of his glory days, and generally lamenting the unfulfilled promise of his youth. A decade of near silence suggested as much. But the author of A Tale of a Tub and The Conduct of the Allies found in his mid-fifties that he could not avoid meddling in Irish politics. If ‘mad Ireland hurt [Yeats] into poetry’, as W. H. Auden said, it angered Swift into prose. About the time he began work on his deeply political masterpiece, Gulliver's Travels, he published his first political tract since 1714, A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture (1720), provoking a hostile administration to arrest his printer. Spurred by political developments, he interrupted work on Gulliver's Travels in 1724 to write his most brilliant and successful political tracts, later collected as The Drapier's Letters (1724–5).