Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift had a warm friendship with Charles Mordaunt, Earl of Peterborough. They first became close when they both moved in political circles and supported Robert Harley, later Lord Oxford, a powerful government minister. They also had mutual friends who were interested in literature including Alexander Pope.
Swift, who was a cleric, had hoped for a church appointment in England, but Queen Anne had taken a dislike to him, and he had to accept that the best position he could secure was the Deanery of St Patrick’s in Dublin which was not in her gift. And so, in 1713, he returned reluctantly to ‘exile’ in Ireland. He had been a frequent guest at Parsons Green, Peterborough’s London home, but from then on, the relationship between them was largely maintained through correspondence, and some of those letters have survived.
Swift admired Peterborough but could not entirely supress the sarcastic wit which was so much a part of him. He described his friend affectionately as “the ramblingest lying rogue on earth”. He also wrote a poem called Mordanto, about the period when the earl was engaged in diplomacy in Europe. He had complained that he could not send letters to him and rather had to send letters at him.
Mordanto fills the trump of fame,
The Christian world his deeds proclaim,
And prints are crowded with his name.
In journeys he outrides the post,
Sits up till midnight with his host,
Talks politics, and gives the toast.
Knows every prince in Europe's face,
Flies like a squib from place to place,
And travels not, but runs a race.
From Paris gazette a-la-main,
This day arriv'd, without his train,
Mordanto in a week from Spain.
A messenger comes all a-reek
St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin
He left the town above a week.
Next day the post-boy winds his horn,
And rides through Dover in the morn:
Mordanto's landed from Leghorn.
Mordanto gallops on alone,
The roads are with his followers strewn,
This breaks a girth, and that a bone
Peterborough obviously knew his friend well for when Gulliver’s Travels was published anonymously, he wrote a teasing letter to him, full of allusions showing that he knew full well the identity of the author.
In 1732 he wrote a letter to Pope expressing the wish that Jonathan Swift might see Bevois Mount but, unfortunately, his friend was never able to take up his longstanding invitation to the earl’s Southampton home. In one of his last letters to Peterborough, Swift pleads:
“Pray, my Lord, write to me, that I may have the Pleasure, in this enslaved Country, of going about, and showing my depending Parsons a Letter from the Earl of Peterborough”.
Ally Hayes