The Conduct of the Allies, Tory politics, and the Barrier Treaty

On 8 September 1711 Swift, in a letter to his friend Charles Ford, remarked casually of Queen Anne, ‘I find no body expects she can live long; and that is one great Reason why they would hasten a Peace.’ Then he adds, ‘’Tis thought by State Astronomers that we shall have a scribbling Winter; but perhaps I shall then be far enough off’, and finally, before his adieu, ‘I am at least twice oftner with th[e] M—rs than when you was here, yet You see nothing comes of it’ (Woolley, Corr., vol. I, p. 381). These lines can all serve in some ways as keynotes for his life that autumn. Whatever the Queen's health, the movement towards Peace which would culminate in the treaty of Utrecht in 1713 was on its way; it was indeed a scribbling winter with Swift as a major scribbler; and though his familiarity with the chief ministers Harley and St John had not yet produced the preferment he was hoping for, what did come of it was his place as the most successful political writer of the Queen Anne period, a period dominated in its final years by the two overriding issues of the peace and the Succession.

Swift was ready for an important new task. On 7 June he had published the last Examiner paper totally his own, a review of the accomplishments of the Tory Parliament which was to end five days later; and though there was no announcement that he would be succeeded by another hand, Swift did say that the main design he had had in writing those papers had been now ‘fully executed’ (Ellis, Examiner, p. 470). Though perhaps he did not know it in June, by September he had an important new assignment. On the next day after writing to Ford, in fact, Swift in his Journal mentions to Stella that he had hoped to stay atWindsor a week ‘to be at leisure for something I am doing’ (Williams, JSt, p. 356). The nature of that ‘something’ was made very clear in his comments to her over the next month. On the 28th he wrote to her, ‘We have already settled all things with France, and very much to the honour and advantage of England; and the queen is in mighty good humour.