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Swift and Bolingbroke on Faction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2014

Extract

The text for this essay comes from Sir Lewis Namier. “One has to steep oneself in the political life of a period,” so the decree reads, “before one can safely speak, or be sure of understanding, its language.” This article is an attempt to supply, not a complete grammar of Augustan politics, but a minor lexicographical entry. Historians sometimes talk as though the most urgent need were for an advanced glossary. The assumption behind this essay is that a more elementary gradus is required. The two key words under review, “party” and “faction,” have always occupied neighbouring berths in the British synonymy. Unfortunately, in the eighteenth-century vocabulary of politics, they became overlapping concepts. Or rather — this is the trouble — they sometimes merged, partially or completely; sometimes they did not; and sometimes they were even employed as antonymous terms. Examples of all these contrary applications are found in the work of Swift and Bolingbroke. As with other lexicographical enquiries, then, usage and abusage must be considered, as well as the simple dictionary definition of these terms.

I

Edmund Burke is still, in some quarters, valued more highly as a prophet than as a political thinker. His forecasts of the likely course of the Revolution have brought him a reputation for the occult among those who hold his moral views in little esteem, even though he may be regarded, most unfairly, as a sorcerer's apprentice who was engulfed by his own charmed vision.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1970

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References

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14. Mallet, , Works of Bolingbroke, III, 11, 18–21, 2931Google Scholar. It is worth recalling that the phrase “His Majesty's Opposition” dates from as late as 1826 and that Johnson records no political sense of the word “opposition” in his dictionary. Carswell, John, The Old Cause (London, 1954), p. 20Google Scholar. See also Bolingbroke's remarks on an earlier “Factions Cabal” in his Letter to the Examiner (1710)Google Scholar.

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17. Swift's well-known confession that he was thoroughly disenchanted by the squabbles between the Earl of Oxford and Bolingbroke occurs in his poem, “The Author upon Himself.” See Williams, Harold (ed.), The Poems of Jonathan Swift (Oxford, 1937), I, 191–96Google Scholar.

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35. Ibid., III, 102-03. The idea of a mythological genealogy of faction was not new. See the opening of [Sackville Tufton], The History of Faction (London, 1705)Google Scholar, where Rebellion and Self-Interest are the parents. Similarly, William Shippen's “Faction Displayed” refers to “Faction, a restless and repining Fiend … offspring to Chaos, Enemy to Form.” See A New Collection of Poems (London, 1705), p. 570Google Scholar. In John Bull, by Dr. Arbuthnot, Discordia is the daughter of Mrs. Bull (Parliament).

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37. To take a single instance, the Whig author, John Oldmixon, makes scathing reference to Robert Harley's apostacy from the sound principles of his ancestors; in addition, Oldmixon presents Harley as socially ambitious and a pretender to taste. See the following works by Oldmixon, John: Memoirs of Wharton (London, 1715), pp. 1011Google Scholar; Memoirs of North Britain (London, 1715), p. 25Google Scholar; False Steps of the Ministry (London, 1714), p. 25Google Scholar; The History of England (London, 1735), pp. 34, 122, 208, 219, 461Google Scholar; The Secret History of Europe (London, 1715), IV, 71Google Scholar. On Sir Richard Steele's exploitation of the same line of attack, see Winton, Calhoun, Captain Steele (Baltimore, 1964), p. 193Google Scholar.

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41. For an examination of the mutual relationship of the two journals, see Rogers, Pat, “The Whig Controversialist as Dunce” (Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge, 1967)Google Scholar.

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44. Sherburn, , Correspondence of Pope, I, 220.Google Scholar To rail against party was, of course, a universal sport at this epoch, as it has been in every age. Daniel Defoe, who was scarcely a Tory humanist, was anxious to absolve himself from the charge of writing for party in the Mercator. See Novak, Maximilian E., Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1962), p. 28Google Scholar. Gay was another writer who professed to care not “one Farthing” for a man's politics. Burgess, C. F. (ed.), The Letters of John Gay (Oxford, 1966), p. xviCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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49. Douglas, David, English Scholars 1660–1730 (2nd ed.; London, 1951), p. 14Google Scholar; Feiling, Keith, The Second Tory Party 1714–1832 (London, 1938), p. 2Google Scholar.

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