A Proposal for an Act of Parliament, to Pay Off the Debt of the Nation, Without Taxing the Subject

Summary

Headnote

Probably composed early 1732; published February 1732; copy text 1732a (see Textual Account).

First published in Dublin in February 1732, and reprinted in March in London, this was a contribution (in ironic mode) to Swift's campaign against the two recent bills put forward by bishops in the Irish Parliament: the first ‘more effectually to enable the clergy … to reside upon their respective benefices’, and the second ‘for continuing and amending an act … for the real union and division of parishes’. The residence bill had been introduced into the Lords in December 1731 as ‘heads’, and, having been approved by both the Irish and British privy councils had been returned to the Lords on 10 Feb. 1732. The parishes bill had originated in the Irish privy council and had been brought into the Lords as a bill on 17 Feb. Both were passed by the upper house and sent down to the Commons on 21 Feb. and 24 Feb. respectively. But opponents (including Swift) were able to arouse opinion sufficiently for the Commons not to proceed. Taken together, the two bills sought to deal with the problem of non-residence among the parish clergy in an authoritarian manner by empowering bishops to force any incumbent of a benefice worth more than £100 p.a. to build a manse house; and also to divide large parishes without the incumbents’ consent. Swift pursued the subject without irony in the contemporaneous On the Bill for the Clergy's Residing on Their Livings, and Considerations upon Two Bills (Davis, vol. XII, pp. 179–202). He was acutely aware of the financial difficulties of the lower clergy, caused by the poverty of many livings, the impropriation by laymen of glebe land and either the impropriation of tithes or the resistance of tithe-payers (see above, Introduction, pp. lxiv–lxviii). He was also suspicious of the arbitrary power which the bills would have given the bishops, especially with regard to the potential division of parishes which he feared would multiply opportunities for patronage and result in the creation of a horde of ‘beggarly clergymen’ dependent on their episcopal superior. (See Landa, pp. 111–23; D. W. Hayton, ‘Parliament and the Established Church: Reform and Reaction’, in D.W. Hayton, James Kelly and John Bergin (eds.), The Eighteenth-century Composite State: Representative Institutions in Ireland and Europe, 1689–1800, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp. 91–2.)