4 - Swift, Oldisworth, and St. John: The High Toryism of The Examiner

Summary

Between 2 November 1710 and 14 June 1711, Jonathan Swift contributed thirty-three weekly issues of The Examiner, a ministerial journal that most contemporaries understood ‘to be writ by the Direction, and under the Eye of some Great Persons who sit at the helm of Affairs’. Queen Anne had changed her ministry in August 1710, and one of The Examiner's principal aims is to defend the new leaders (Robert Harley and Henry St. John) and lambaste the old (the Whig junto led by Sidney Godolphin and the Duke of Marlborough). That Swift was writing at the ministry's ‘Direction’ is undeniable, but the position of Mr. Examiner vis-à-vis the administration was not uncomplicated. Scholars have stressed the fundamental disagreements between Harley and St. John about what the government's objectives and policies should be. Harley called for moderation and was determined to achieve shared governance between Whigs and Tories; St. John pushed for more radically high-Tory measures and the exclusion of all Whigs. Mr. Examiner, critics have argued, had to be either Harley's or St. John's man. As W. A. Speck concludes, this conflict is what ultimately led to Swift’s decision not to carry on in this capacity: ‘The Examiner began to justify St. John's proceedings more than Harley's until Swift came to realise that he was caught in the firing line between the rival ministers, and stopped contributing … when the end of the Parliamentary session gave him a convenient excuse’. J. A. Downie has more explicitly attributed Swift's abandonment of the examining role to Harley, who dismissed him when the paper became too much a vehicle for St. John's extremism.

Is this a fair representation of what happened with Swift and The Examiner? In this chapter, I want to revisit the common story about Swift's instalment as Mr. Examiner and his stepping down from that role. The bulk of my discussion will be devoted to an analysis of The Examiner in its entirety – that is, the paper that existed before Swift took over and (with a brief lapse) ran for three years after he ceased being the sole author. Scholars have had singularly little to say about the pre- and post-Swift phases of the journal, despite the fact that Swift evidently continued to participate in – perhaps even direct – it between December 1711 and July 1714.