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CHAPTER 1

Swifts and Temples

Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, there is a man child conceived. Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it. Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it; let a cloud dwell upon it; let the blackness of the day terrify it.
     Job (3.3-5)
     Jonathan Swift’s incantation on his birthday

It is not necessary to consider, nor is it to be wondered at, that the life of a highly gifted writer born in the seventeenth century need be one of spotless virtue. A writer may not turn out on close examination to be someone we would wish to invite home to tea – even for the pleasure of the conversation. Jonathan Swift lived a difficult and controversial life and is not admired much on general grounds of morality, character and good behaviour. However, the very qualities of a troublesome nature are those that created the writer so admired today: a very great satirist, whose insights into human nature were judiciously allied with the satirical gift to suggest the truth and falsity of things. The biographical task is, as always, to reveal the man and to present the reader with the circumstances and chances Swift had in life and an account of what he did with them.
     A start must be made in explaining Swift’s life at its extraordinary beginning. It is said that Jonathan Swift recited the above passage from Job on every anniversary of his birth. Even for a man of his great passion and complexity, it was a remarkable thing to do and seemingly not justified by anything his numerous biographers relate in explaining his origins.
     It is accepted by most Swift biographers over the past century that the exact circumstances of Swift’s birth are mysterious but that nevertheless there are brisk and commonsense explanations.
     These origins are explained as follows. While there is no extant registration of his birth, it is said, on Swift’s own words, that he was born in Dublin on the November, 30 1667. His father, a practicing Dublin solicitor, was also called Jonathan and some twenty-five years of age. He had come to Dublin in 1658 seeking work. Jonathan, senior married Abigail Errick, a Leicestershire woman, by Special Licence issued by the Prerogative Court of the Archbishop of Armagh in 1664. A Special License is an expensive and unusual method of getting married and often chosen by people anxious to avoid accountability to others for the place and time of their union. A daughter, Jane, was born to them on May 1, 1666. Some time during her second pregnancy Jonathan Swift, senior died. The son produced by Abigail is the man known to posterity as Jonathan Swift.
     What was not known, previous to my own research, is that at the time of this union Jonathan Swift, senior already had a wife and his ‘marriage’ to Abigail was not legal in the full sense of the term.
     A clue to the existence of his legal wife Anne was provided by Sybil Le Brocquy, an earlier biographer. She found a record of the death of a Thomas Swift in the church of St Andrews, Northborough, Northamptonshire dated December 3, 1738 to which the vicar had added in his own handwriting the words, ‘ Brother to Dr Jonathan Swift Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral’. This Thomas Swift, I discover, is the son of a John/Jonathan Swift (as a John, I regard these two names as interchangeable, as I believe did Jonathan Swift).
     Thomas Swift was born in Frisby on the Wreake, Leicestershire on February 3, 1660. John /Jonathan Swift, senior died there on January 2, 1681 and not as Swift tells us in Dublin in 1667.
     There is a wedding record for son Thomas. He married a Mary Groococke, a local girl, on February 11, 1683 in Birstall, close to Frisby. John and Anne Swift had another child, a son William, who was born on  March 17, 1666 and two further sons, Robert and John whose births are not recorded but who are mentioned in their mother Anne’s will. It can be seen, therefore, that Anne was alive at the time of Jonathan’s marriage to Abigail in Dublin in 1664. She was buried in Frisby on April 24 1691.
     It follows that it is highly unlikely that Jonathan, senior could have fathered Jane in Dublin and William in Leicestershire since their birthdays were only six weeks apart, although it is known that Jonathan Swift absented himself from King’s Inn in Dublin where he worked and so could have gone home to England where Anne conceived William.
     There is no believable evidence of how Jonathan, senior came to Ireland and previous biographers have been unable to find a record of his death. For the evidence of a death in 1667 biographers have relied on Swift’s own words and those of his mother Abigail when she claimed money she regarded as due to her deceased husband from his employer King’s Inns, in Dublin.
     On April 25, 1667 Abigail Swift petitioned King’s Inns as ‘a disconsolate widow’ for £120 owed to her ‘late husband’ and asked that her brother in law William Swift be authorised to collect the money. This petition was granted on the same day. However, Abigail petitioned again in January, 1668 stating her poverty, her desire to pay the funeral expenses [for a ‘death’ that took place ten months previously] and praying that the society do pay her arrears. The Inns had reduced the claim of £120 to £12. There is no evidence that it was paid.
     Accounts of this episode have an air of unreality. Abigail needed only to provide proof of the death of her husband to claim the money she was entitled to as a widow. She could not do it. He wasn’t dead. The members of the Inns may have known he was not dead or only that he had abandoned his post. The ‘proof of the pudding is in the eating’. King’s Inns did not pay.

Writing in 1959, that is before Irvin Ehrenpreis wrote his fine biography, Denis Johnston argued that Jonathan, senior was first known to be in Ireland around 1658 and that he scrapped for employment before he obtained administrative work at the Inns of Court in Dublin. His appointment as Steward had been signed by Sir John Temple.
     Johnston carried out a detailed and imaginative examination of the Black Book of King’s Inns where Jonathan wrote the minutes and accounts of the benchers meetings. These meetings show that the terms were short and the vacations long.
     There is a gap of six months running from mid-November, 1666-April, 1667. When recommenced the minutes are a different hand from Jonathan’s. Consequently, Johnston argues that Jonathan, senior died between November 1666 and April 1667 Only if Jonathan Swift, senior had died in March/April 1667 could he have been the father of the child born on November 30, 1667 known as our Jonathan Swift.
     One can see from Johnston’s analysis, and within the terms of his argument, that the probability is that Jonathan Swift, senior was not the father, for only two months in a six month gap was available for him to become so during which time, Johnston argues, he was active on the Spring Circuit. Johnston could not square his circle. However, he was right in his principal contention. It is the unanswerable logic of my analysis that Jonathan Swift, senior was not in Ireland at all because he was with his wife in Leicestershire.
     It was necessary for Jonathan Swift at various times and circumstances to satisfy others on the date and place of his birth. Trinity College, for example, demanded dates of birth in any application for a place. When Swift applied, what was he to do? It is said that he searched the Dublin registers for the recording of his birth. He did not find it. It has never been found. He settled on November, 30. This date was consistent with one of the stories (the most common) Swift told of the event of his father’s death, the story of his father having died on the Spring Circuit in 1667, and consistent with his mother’s application to King’s Inns for financial relief. But when Trinity College recorded Swift’s place of birth they wrote that he was born in the  County of Dublin. It is suggested that this could have been a clerical error. It may have been. However, in my experience, when clerical errors are supposed, it usually turns out that the clerks were right after all.
     There is no evidence, other than Swift’s word, for Jonathan, senior falling sick in 1667. Swift spoke of his father’s sickness to others. Laetitia Pilkington in her Memoirs said that Swift had often said that his father died suddenly, poisoned by mercury he took for the ‘itch’ contracted on the Spring Circuit. The ‘itch’ might have been some common ailment such as scabies; however, it is a general description also of venereal disease. If this is so, the story is implausible in itself. If Jonathan, senior was suffering from syphilis he would not have wanted to father a child who could have been disfigured or genetically weakened. Jonathan Swift was a healthy child.
     There is existing evidence which supports my conclusion that Jonathan Swift, senior had returned to England. It was reported that Jonathan bought a lifetime annuity for Abigail in England that gave her an income of £20 per year. It would require a considerable capital outlay to buy such an annuity. It does not seem likely that it was bought with Jonathan's own money. It is conceivable that the money came from whosoever wished to cast him in the role of a father of the children born to Abigail Errick. It might well be the case that a purchase of an annuity was one of Jonathan’s conditions for agreeing to ‘marry’ Abigail and that he had no wish to be legally responsible for maintaining her.
     The knowledge that Jonathan, senior lived in Leicestershire and that he was linked to the Errick family is consistent with the evidence that there were transport and other links between the Swifts of Herefordshire, where the Swift family originated, and the Swifts and Erricks of Leicestershire.
     Victoria Glendinning writes:

The name Swift frequently occurs along with Errick, in the parish registers of the village of Frisby on Wreake, where Abigail’s brother [Thomas] was vicar. Thirteen babies were born to couples named Swift between 1699 and 1745. A John Swift was church warden there in 1700 and a William Swift in 1711.

 Jonathan Swift had brothers named John and William and these appointments, by an Errick, could well have been them. Victoria Glendinning strengthens the link when she continues her narrative as follows:

There is one curious survival. In the book recording the marriages in the parish of Frisby and Wreake [there are notes and scribbles] Richard Winman, the vicar until 1755, wrote the following at some time between 1751-4. From Miss Vanhomrigh T Dr Swift Declaring her passion for him:
     And complaining of his neglect of her
     Believe me it is with him.
     Vicar of Frisby in the County of Leicester
     Richard Winman Vicar.

Did Winman know of the connection between the Swift family he knew so well and Jonathan Swift? Did a family member have a letter from Vanessa and ‘believe me it is with him’ refers to it? Had she written to a brother in desperation to get a response from Jonathan? It is impossible to say, but what does appear clear is that Winman is recognising that his family Swift was Jonathan Swift’s.
     It is my contention there was a deal of some kind between the Temple family in Dublin and Jonathan Swift, senior covering up the illegitimacy of Jane and Jonathan Swift. It is, therefore, my belief that there is no coincidence in Thomas Errick becoming Vicar of Freake in 1664, the year that his sister Abigail ‘married’ Jonathan Swift, senior in Dublin; a Dublin ‘marriage’ of Thomas’s sister to a Leicestershire parishioner who lived locally with a wife Anne and a burgeoning family.

The confusion about exactly where Swift was born gets swept up in his need to suggest one. To some of his contemporaries Swift stated that he was born in England and to others at 7 Hoeys Court, Dublin that he would point out to them when passing it. Victoria Glendinning writes boldly that ‘it [no.7] belonged to Swift’s prosperous uncle Godwin Swift, who took his pregnant widowed sister in law Abigail under his wing.’ There is no convincing evidence that Godwin Swift owned this house or that Abigail ever lived there; although credence to the supposition that it was his birth place is given by Swift’s obituary notice in Faulkner’s Dublin Journal dated October 22, 1745 that reads as follows: ‘…born in the parish of St Werburgh’s, Dublin, November 30, 1667, at his Uncle, Councellor Godwin’s house, in Hooey’s Alley, which in those times was the general residence of the chief lawyer.’
     However, Deane Swift, the son of one of Jonathan’s cousins, and a Swift biographer was to write:

Sometimes he [Swift] would declare, that he was not born in Ireland at all; and seem to lament his Condition, that he should be looked upon as a Native of that Country; and would insist, that he was stolen from England, and brought over to Ireland in a Band-box.
     Hawkesworth wrote, ‘It has been generally believed that Swift was born in England.’ Spence in his Anecdotes wrote (in what seems to be something of a confusion) that JS told his friend Pope that he was born in Leicester, and that his father had been the Incumbent of a Parish in Herefordshire.
     It can be seen then, at this point, that many of the assertions made by previous biographers about the circumstances of Jonathan Swift’s birth are contradictory, false or confused. Given the evidence that Jonathan Swift, dissembled about his origins it is best to be sceptical at this point. Questions need to be asked about what else of Swift’s supposed birth, parentage and siblings is false?

[The author is engaged here in an intricate proof of the kind much loved by learned people. I understand his reasoning for this for a great deal of ink has been spilt falsely asserting misinformation about Swift’s origins. If, as I hope, you are one of these learned people you may find it persuasive, if tedious. However, you might find that a no-nonsense account common to the good Doctor’s friends and relatives would be helpful. Swift was a Temple brought up by Swift’s. Since Temple was English, Jonathan Swift was English too. He became involved with his niece in ways others might find reprehensible and that according to his Church he should not have done. He dissembled and confused all but the most knowledgeable about his origins. As the good Dr Samuel Johnson remarked of Swift’s confusions, ‘The question[s] may, without much regret, be left in the obscurity in which he delighted to involve it’. John Partridge. ]

The questions remain. Who was Jonathan Swift’s father and where was he born? And how can what is asserted be proved? There are real difficulties in naming Swift’s biological father beyond any reasonable doubt: if it were easy, it would already have been accomplished.
     One approach to these doubts is to ignore them. Ehrenpreis and other recent biographers have expressed incomprehension about all attempts to rewrite Swift’s start in life. Ehrenpreis wrote magisterially, ‘…Swift has not only misled us as to the effects of his forebears upon him; he has even misled us as to plain facts of his ancestry; and several earlier biographers have deepened the darkness by assertions and conjectures which can now be dismissed.
     What purpose is served by raising doubts once again? And where, it is asked, are the ‘smoking guns’?
     Surely, they say, a man such as Swift would have made many enemies anxious to reveal illegitimacy and any other dark secrets? Is it not likely that someone at the time would have known about the circumstances of his birth if they were otherwise than they seemed? People who had been the victim of Swift’s satire would have taken their opportunity to bite back.
     The short answer to these questions is that all the disagreeable facts (distasteful to Swift) I uncover were known to contemporaries of Swift and there are written records to confirm them: biographers have ignored the evidence because it is inconvenient to their scripts. These records exist despite the powerful economic reasons for relatives and acquaintances to keep quiet about the ‘unfortunate’; they had their jobs and their families to maintain and they looked to the possibilities of further patronage.
     Notwithstanding, there are extant written records: parish entries of births, deaths and marriages and correspondence which show awareness. For example, the existence of Swift’s elder ‘brother’ Thomas was known within and outside the Temple family.
     Jonathan Swift became the secretary to Sir William Temple and part of his establishment at Moor Park, Surrey. Lady Martha Giffard, William Temple’s sister, who shared Temple’s home at Moor Park,  with him, wrote a letter to Lady Berkeley in which she said:

I had an answer today of the question I told you I asked in my last about the secretary’s money. He says [the secretary Jonathan Swift, who was working for Sir William at the time] he has accounts for £25.00 but by accounts of other years signed by his brother’s hand he thinks he has pretence for several sums for journeys [Italic mine] and other things which when he knows more exactly he will tell me.

By ‘brother’ it has been assumed by biographers that Lady Giffard is really referring to Jonathan’s cousin Thomas who had worked for Sir William in Jonathan’s absence in Ireland. This explanation has plausibility. However, Martha Giffard seems peevish and tetchy about the matter and she could be referring to journeys which involved ‘his brother’ for which she felt he should not seek recovery.
     According to John Nichols Jonathan Swift had a long association with two relatives, John and Thomas Swift who operated a transport business between Leicestershire and Herefordshire and London. He wrote, ‘It is an anecdote not generally known in the life of the Dean that his relations John and Thomas Swift were, in conjunction with James Lee and Thomas Bass, the owners of the stage-wagons from Leicester to London.’ The will of Anne Swift, Jonathan’s wife in Leicestershire, discloses that apart from Thomas and William, for whom there are baptism records, there were two other sons, John and Robert. All these boys were putative ‘half-brothers’ of Jonathan Swift. Lady Giffard could then be right in calling Thomas Jonathan’s ‘brother’, for an expense involving transport (Italic mine).
     There is ambiguity also in a letter Swift wrote to Lord Bolingbroke. He writes:
     Dublin, 31st October 1729.
     …My birth, although from a family not undistinguished in its time, is many degrees inferior to yours. All my pretensions upon person and parts, infinitely so. I am a younger son of younger sons. You are born to a great fortune…
     How could Swift be the younger son of younger sons? Surely, it would only be possible by having an elder ‘brother’. But if we take the conventional story of his parentage he was the only son. If we assume that he refers to the Leicestershire family of Jonathan Swift he is younger than brother William. If he is referring to the Temple family he is younger to Sir William’s son John. I am inclined to believe that he means that he was born a Temple and became a Swift and that even then he only ranked second.
     Sybil Le Brocquy, in a much neglected biography, has argued that Jane Swift, Swift’s putative sister was fathered by a member of the Temple family. She demonstrated that not only did Jane become a member of Martha Gifford’s household in Moor Park, Surrey and in London but that she was supported financially by the Temples throughout her life. She has argued that Jonathan Swift received money to pass on to her in Dublin from a Mr Hatch a manager for the Temple family. There is no adequate reason for the Temple family to support Jane financially over a life-time other than acceptance of their obligation to support a family member.
     Jonathan Swift’s relationship with his sister has puzzled biographers over the years. It is thought that he did not like her, disapproved of her marriage to a Dublin tanner and tended to avoid her. Once when she came to visit him he refused her entry. There is a reason for his attitude to her: his guilt. On one occasion Mr Hatch rebuked Swift for not passing on money to his sister. Swift may have been receiving regular sums of money from the Temple family that he was inclined to use as his own. When reminded of his obligation to pass it on to Jane he became indignant. Jane was more enthusiastic to see Jonathan than he was to see her because she wanted her money; his wish to avoid her was because he had spent it. Swift may have resented the intrusion of Jane’s husband Joseph Fenton because it might have been suggested to him by the Temples that their money to Jane should be passed by them directly to Fenton and not to Jane through Swift.
     Mr Hatch supported on behalf of the Temple family rather more people important to this story than Jane Swift. In 1736 Swift pleaded with Sir John Temple, jnr for financial support for Dingley. It opens the door to whether it was Sir John Temple, upon the behalf of the Temple family, who had been previously supporting Stella. Perhaps, the regular money that Swift contributed to Stella, and which he seemingly continued to contribute to Dingley following Stella’s death, was not his money at all but came from the Temples. If so it would have come from Sir John Temple, junior, Sir William Temple’s nephew by his brother John who had inherited the estate at Moor Park. When Stella died in 1728 there was no Temple money to be had because the Temple obligation to support her had ended.
     In 1710 and as soon as he was in London, as shown by his Journal, Swift became agitated by the problems of collecting money from Lady Giffard that she was holding on Stella’s account. In the end he received £500 pounds in bills from Lady Giffard. It is probable that this was money arising from the rent of land set aside for her by Sir William Temple in his will.
     Why would this money be possessed by Lady Giffard twelve years after the event? The episode suggests that the land in Ireland set aside to pay Stella an income was Lady Giffard’s. She received rent that she passed on to Stella through Swift. As the income is substantial, it is interesting to speculate about the period of time over which it had accumulated. In his exchanges with Stella about this money, Swift did not hesitate to express his wish to invest it to make money while he was in England. It may well have been the case that he was going to turn it to his own use; perhaps, to cover his expenses while in London.
     It is little commented upon, but in the very last item of her will, Stella left ten guineas to a Mrs Jane Temple. There was only one relevant Jane Temple within Sir William’s family alive at the time. This Jane was a spinster daughter of Sir Henry Temple, Sir John Temple, jnr’s son by Anne Houblon. She was born in 1704 and died shortly after Stella in 1728.
     There could have been no relationship between Stella and Jane Temple while Stella was living at Moor Park. It could only have been established later in their lives.
     There would not seem to be any obvious reason for a relationship between the two women unless both were Temples. It is possible that they had an illegitimate status to each other – of ‘aunt’ to ‘niece’ and that this created a bond. What is missing here and at other stages in Stella’s life are her own words – there is no written evidence arising from letters she must have written.
     There were two other Jane Temple’s alive at the time but neither are relevant. Sir John Temple, jnr, had a daughter called Jane. She married the third Baron Berkeley of Stratton, and when he died, she married again to William Bentinck, Ist Lord Portland in 1700. Bentinck was richly rewarded by William III who showered him with gifts of various kinds including 135,000 acres of land in Ireland. Bentinck died in 1709 leaving substantial property and other wealth to his widow. Jane Temple then adopted the title the Dowager Countess of Portland. Jane Temple had produced six children in the nine years of this marriage but none of them were called Jane.
     The widow Jane Temple, Sir John Temple’s wife, died in 1708 and there is a mention of her in Swift’s Journal. In her life as a widow she was called Dame Jane Temple. She was a rich and remote figure to Stella and Jonathan
     I have considered whether after the death of her husband, Jane Fenton, Swift’s putative sister, adopted the use of the name Temple? In a will it is important to name a beneficiary exactly as they are known publicly at the time to avoid confusion of identity. However, Jane Fenton used her husband’s name in her will?

Le Brocquy suggests that both Jane and Jonathan Swift were children by Sir John Temple, who was Master of the Rolls in Dublin at the time of their births. She relies on the evidence unearthed by Denis Johnston who argues the case for it.
     I share with both these imaginative and inventive biographers their belief that Jonathan Swift was the son of Sir John Temple by Abigail Erick. However, I cannot be dogmatic about Stella’s parentage. There are, I believe, several candidates for the position and evidence for them all. It is for readers to make up their own minds. I state my preference from the outset, however, that Stella was an illegitimate daughter of Sir John Temple, junior and thus niece to both Sir William Temple and Jonathan Swift.
     Among the various considerations that support the theory that Stella was a Temple, the clincher is money. Swift stated that Stella had no more than £1,500 when she travelled to Ireland to ‘join him’ and it is usually assumed that this sum was a computation of the value of the income from the lease bequeathed to her by Sir William Temple. It is not likely that this sum was money saved by her out of wages and it was not as inconsiderable as Swift pretends. It is not known whether the legacy was restrictive in any way or limited in time. However, there is little doubt that it was valuable. It is very difficult to explain the legacy at all if it is assumed that Stella was the ‘servant of his sister Martha’ as she is described in Sir William’s will, and within his household, even assuming that he liked her. Martha Giffard, Sir William’s sister and Stella’s aunt, also left Stella money in her will. When considered in the round this lifelong commitment by the Temples to Stella is best explained as a family matter.
     These relationships are at the heart of the issue of whether Swift married Stella; and, if he didn’t, the reasons why he did not. It is a continuing subject of controversy. There is a simple answer. He could not legally marry Stella because, under the consanguinity rules governing permissible marriage at the time, the relationship between them was too close to permit a legal marriage. The consequences of a marriage, if it became public knowledge, would have been Swift’s disgrace and expulsion from any church living. But I accept that there may have been other reasons.
     Even a ‘common law’ marriage, which many of his contemporaries believe was the truth of their union, was too much for Swift. He was as careful as he possibly could be to ensure that he was never seen living – by any one who mattered - under the same roof with Stella and her companion Rebecca Dingley.
     That having been said, the demonstration of this ‘true’ state of affairs on Swift’s family origins and relationship with Stella to the satisfaction of all Swift’s legion of commentators and biographers, and beyond any reasonable doubt, which is a biographical duty owed to Swift, is not easy.
     But I do not intend to dodge the issues or discount them unfairly: it is too important to an understanding of Swift to do that. Nor is it reasonable to follow Ervin Ehrenpreis in dismissing the mounting evidence of Swift’s illegitimacy while not being able to prove other and more conventional beliefs about his origins. Not that Ehrenpreis was alone in doing so. Herbert Davis, a distinguished literary critic, for example, had his doubts about Swift’s birth. He never voiced them publicly but in a letter to Sir Harold Williams, he confessed that he had always shied away from these biographical problems.
     It was not a disaster to be born a Swift. The Swift family in Ireland were gentlemen. They owned land, occupied valuable properties, and made a good living from the law. They were adventurers who did well in Ireland at a time when to be rapacious and unprincipled were advantages.
     Four Swift brothers came to Ireland between 1658 and 1674 to find work and to take part in the land grab initiated by Charles II following the Restoration in 1660. They were the sons of the Revd Thomas Swift, the Vicar of Goodrich, Herefordshire, who, Swift claimed, suffered at the hands of Cromwell’s troops during the English Civil War. Thomas Swift’s house and most of his land survived a Puritan Republic and he succeeded in passing on his church livings. The Hertforshire branch of the Swift family could boast a number of distinguished members. Swift was particularly proud to be the cousin of the poet Dryden who married Elisabeth Swift.
     The Swift family were beneficiaries of English patronage by the mighty already in Ireland. Sir John Temple the Master of the Irish Rolls in Dublin was a key figure in the allocation of Irish land and the preferment of solicitors. The Swift boy who gained most at the outset from the Temples patronage was Godwin Swift, Jonathan’s uncle; but Jonathan, senior, the least economically successful of the Swift family migrants – if he was one at all - might well have owed his first preferment as a Steward of the King’s Inns in Dublin to Sir John Temple.
     The Temple family was of a much higher social standing then the Swifts. Sir John Temple was a successful lawyer and politician while Sir William was a highly successful diplomat who had earned the gratitude of William III by his important role in negotiating William III’s marriage to Mary. Despite these differences their shared interests in the practice of law in London and in the making of money by legal means may have thrown the two families together when both John Temple and Godwin Swift were practicing law there. These two men remained close for much of their lives.
     The Temples were aristocratic and rich. They owned property and had family establishments in London, Surrey, Leicestershire and Dublin. It would be probable that Swift-Temple family links established first in London were consolidated and then exported to Leicestershire and Dublin. The evidence I disclose suggests strongly that this is what happened.

After the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the legal position of the owners of Irish property, ill-protected by Irish law, became precarious. Stuart monarchs took the view that the entire island of Ireland had been confiscated. The Act of Settlement,1662 divided the land into thirds: one third was held to revert to the native Catholic landlords; a third to establish Protestant landlords more securely; and the balancing third was given to newcomers, who were to include the Swift family on the make.
     The most powerful of the Swift brothers was Godwin, the eldest. Godwin led a colourful life. He had four wives and ten surviving children by them. One of his wives was a daughter of the Duke of Ormonde, a grandee of ancient Anglo-Irish origin. Ormonde had lost out in the Civil War but following the Restoration he seized the opportunity to reclaim lost property and to gain new land. Godwin Swift was useful to Ormonde and he was grateful. Ormonde saw that Godwin was appointed to the powerful position of Attorney General of Tipperary, a position he held for three years. Jonathan Swift was well aware of his powerful uncle’s qualities. As befits a satirist he described him as being ‘a little too dextrous in the subtle parts of the law.’
     Young Jonathan found himself in Ireland as the potential beneficiary of two contrasting and powerful patronage circles: the Ormonde's, who were long-established in Ireland, and the Temples, who regarded themselves as part of the ruling elite of a newly created colony.
     In his autobiographical fragment, written in 1728, Swift describes himself and his family as English. He writes,’ The Family of the Swifts was ancient in Yorkshire’. He could reach back only to the first half of the seventeenth century, however, in naming a ‘Caveilero Swift, a man of wit and humour’ who was made an Irish peer, by King James or K.Charles1 but was never in that kingdom’. He mentions his grandfather the Rev. Thomas Swift who married Elizabeth Dryden.
     Such a description of his family background would suggest that Jonathan Swift was maintaining the story that his father was Jonathan Swift, senior. In contrast, however, eighteenth century biographers of Jonathan Swift had little doubt that he was the illegitimate son of Sir William Temple. Sir William was to become Jonathan’s patron and a key figure in his political, religious and literary development when Swift was in his twenties. Much of the written evidence which these biographers draw upon is no longer extant and is disregarded today. There is an insuperable difficulty to Sir William being Jonathan Swift’s father for he was absent abroad on a diplomatic mission at the crucial time of inception.
     Denis Johnston has shown that when Sir John Temple was restored to his office of Master of the Rolls in 1657 he lived with his two sons John and Henry in a property in Damaske Street, Dublin. He had been deprived of his last source of household support in 1653 when his mother Martha died. Johnston speculates that he would have employed a housekeeper, and that this woman could have been Abigail Errick. Johnston suggests that John Temple might have become aware of her when he was in residence in the Temple homes in Leicestershire or in London. Abigail might have been recommended to him as a housekeeper. Johnston conjectures that Sir John Temple was an active but lonely man and that in these circumstances it would not be surprising or unusual for him to have required intimacy from his housekeeper.
     How persuasive is Johnston’s theory? Johnston writes as follows: ‘…there is no direct evidence that this is how Abigail Erick first came to Dublin…[or that Temple] should acquire the services of a young woman in her middle twenties to perform these duties…’. However, he adds a powerful supporting argument: that it was difficult to believe that when Abigail sent her son to Sir William Temple’s home in Sheen, Surrey in 1689, she did not already know the man she was recommending to her son. How could she have known William Temple? It is difficult to comprehend how and when she could have done so, if not during his residence with his father in London or in Ireland.
     Sir John Temple’s sons, Henry and John, living with him in Dublin, must have known what was going on with their father. All his life Swift made efforts to avoid John Temple socially although he did record meetings with Henry when others were present. If they knew some of his dark secrets it must have been worrying to him that at any time any sort of social engagement would cause him intense embarrassment.
     While the reasoning I have advanced to this stage is plausible, it cannot be stated with complete confidence that those who would wish to think otherwise are without all reasonable grounds.

Some of the objectors to the evidence put forward to date will continue to argue that it amounts to only conjecture and does not constitute a conclusive case based on unimpeachable documentation for Sir John Temple being Jonathan’s biological father. Some will think that more is required. Are their objections reasonable? It is not likely that ‘golden bullets’ and ‘smoking guns’ ever existed? But to persist in other conjectures that have very little plausibility and explain very little is far more unreasonable? The alternative to insisting on a ‘smoking gun’ is the steady accretion of evidence to the point at which it is unreasonable to assume otherwise.
     There is a further confusion. In reasoning about the past, it is a common error of even the most distinguished biographers to read the present into it: to assume that the values and behavioural norms of a different age must, in essence, have been much as their own. In the consideration of the life of Jonathan Swift these predilections inhibit the disclosure of unpalatable truths. For example, it might be thought that a bigamous marriage in Dublin or elsewhere would be rare. Not so, not at this time. I have, for example, demonstrated that Daniel Defoe, a contemporary of Swift, had three ‘wives’ simultaneously in three different locations and had children by them all.
     Swift lived in an age of confused personal identities, of the callous treatment of women and children, of harsh differences between the social classes, and of the assertion of masculinity in relationships between men, of men with women, and between adults and their children. Behaviour that today would be regarded with acute concern as abusive was considered to be normal in the late seventeenth century.
     Earlier biographers, drawing upon contemporary accounts of the life Swift led, and with their different understanding of the values of the recent past, got many things right about Jonathan Swift. They were astute in understanding that Stella was related to the Temple family: they believed that most probably she was the illegitimate daughter of Sir William by a maid servant, Mrs Bridget Johnson, for whom one of his stewards acted out the part of the putative father, or by his sister Martha Giffard who lived with the Temple family at Moor Park. Stella shared the dark good looks of Martha and Sir William in marked distinction to her putative mother and siblings who were fair-headed.
     There is contemporary evidence also about Stella’s parents. It was generally assumed to be true both by contemporaries and then by biographers writing in the first one hundred years of his death that Stella was Sir William’s daughter.
     On Swift’s death, he was immediately subject to criticism for his character and behaviour. Among these criticisms it was alleged that he had married Stella and in refusing to recognise her publicly had behaved shabbily. Lord Orrery, who knew Swift well, was seen as a mouthpiece for some of these critics. Swift’s relative, Deane Swift, and an early biographer, sought to come to Swift’s defence but in doing so appeared to endorse much of what Swift’s detractors had maintained. Deane Swift states that Stella was not the daughter of Sir William’s menial [man] servant and, further, that Stella and Mrs Dingley her companion and friend who accompanied her to Ireland, were both related to Sir William Temple. In a letter to Sheridan dated Sept 2, 1727 (no longer extant) Swift himself is said to have affirmed this latter statement in his own writing at the bottom of the letter.
     For Swift’s ecclesiastical acquaintances, with an ear for cloister gossip, and from general anecdotes, it was assumed to be true that Stella was Sir Williams’s daughter. For example, in a letter from the Bishop of Meath to Archbishop Wake on the  July 27, 1723 on the occasion of Vanessa’s death and in which he talks of a clandestine marriage of Swift to Stella, the Bishop states that Vanessa became aware that, D, was married to Mrs Johnson (anll.Daughter of Sir William Temple, a very good woman)….
     In Courtney’s Life of Temple, a Mr de Cros is quoted as follows, ‘I shall enlarge no further, that I may not engage myself to publish the misfortunes of Sir William’s Family, which I suppose would not be like a gentleman. I have no reason to complain, neither of this lady, nor of his son, nor of his daughters (Italic believed to be in the original). Temple had one natural daughter, Diana, who died in 1684 and it can be assumed with de Cros that Stella was the other.
     Some modern biographers have played with the idea that Martha Gifford was Stella’s mother. But Swift’s correspondence with Stella in his Journal disproves this. Swift made an important and crucial visit to London in September 1710. On the ninth he wrote Stella a letter in which he wrote the following sentences: I hear my Lady Giffard is much at Court, and Lady Wharton was ridiculing it t’other day: so I have lost a friend there. I have not yet seen her, nor intend it; but I will contrive to see Stella’s mother.’
     Swift often writes in the third person but with correct grammar. So what does this statement mean?
     Who was the friend lost? It could be Lady Giffard or more likely Lady Wharton whose attitude to Lady Giffard could not be supported. But the other subject of the first sentence is surely the person who must be seen: that is, Stella’s mother. Stella’s putative mother is Mrs Bridget Johnson who was in the service of Lady Giffard at this time and there is a record of Stella’s baptism which shows her so. If so Stella’s mother is Mrs Johnson and Sir William (or some other member of the Temple family) remains as a putative father.
     The enquirer needs to be careful. The terms used for family relationships in the seventeenth century are elastic in meaning. It is clear that Bridget Johnson was the mother in situ but it does not follow necessarily that she was Stella’s biological mother.

The family circumstances as I have described them, and believe to be true, must have been deeply disturbing to Swift. But the complications of the Errick family to which his mother belonged were just as troubling for him in their own way.

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