Living in Ireland after the publication of A Tale of a Tub, Swift busied himself with his parish and the chapter of the cathedral. A clergyman opposed to the very idea of parties, he also seems to have thought through, pragmatically as well as more reflectively, how he might further his acquaintance with the Whig statesmen who had responded so encouragingly to his Discourse. That he returned to London as what we would call a lobbyist on behalf of his Church shows how practically he was able to combine his political connections with his clerical office. The essays he produced so rapidly after his return to London place his Church at the centre of his political thought. Swift could engage in partisan politics only as a High-Churchman committed to the Revolution settlement and the Protestant succession, a position that limited but certainly did not eliminate political choice. To readers today, this High-Church stance reveals Swift at his most unappealing – jealous of the rights of the legally established church, protective of his own clerical privileges, and intolerant of any deviation from orthodoxy. What some might call his Anglo-Irish sectarian bigotry – English prejudices about the Irish too have a long history – deserves to be read in the context of contemporary European politics, where it seems less extreme than it does today. Swift also reveals compassion for the straitened conditions in which many clergyman struggled to fulfil their duties and a shrewd grasp of their origins in the very Reformation that created the national Church he served.

In London as an agent of that church, he renewed his acquaintance with the Whig lords and, much more gratifying, found himself part of a circle of wits, writers who like him scented opportunity in the strife of party. The most important of them were Joseph Addison and through Addison, his friend Richard Steele. Just as he was displaying his own ability to catch the taste of the town as Isaac Bickerstaff, Swift gratifyingly found himself intimate with, and valued by, the writers whose periodical essays in the Tatler and later the Spectator would give the definitive expression to that taste.