At the start of his elegy "On the Death of a Late Famous General", Jonathan Swift expresses mock horror at the unnamed subjects demise: " His Grace! impossible! what, dead!/Of old age too, and in his bed!"
He quickly drops the pretence and is soon suggesting that the deceased had lived indecently long for a soldier: " Threescore, I think, is pretty high;/Twas time in conscience he should die!" Adding insult to injury, he then hints that the absence of weeping mourners at the funeral is a telling comment on the man:
" But what of that? his friends may say,/He had those honours in his day./
True to his profit and his pride,/He made them weep before he died."
And finally, the departeds reputation thoroughly traduced, Swift uses him to lecture others high and mighty: " Come hither, all ye empty things!/Ye bubbles raisd by breath of kings!/Who float upon the tide of state;/Come hither, and behold your fate!/Let pride be taught by this rebuke,/How very mean a things a duke;/From all his ill-got honours flung,/Turnd to that dirt from whence he sprung."
The particular target of the dubious tribute was John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, who died (aged three score and 12, in fact) in 1722. A very wealthy man, he had made much of his fortune during the War of the Spanish Succession: a conflict denounced in one of Swifts pamphlets as a Whig plot by Marlborough and his friends to enrich themselves at the expense of England.
That Swiftian broadside damaged the dukes standing for a time, and he was sacked from all public offices by Queen Anne. But he successfully refloated himself on “the tide of state” under King George 1, and indeed was given a state funeral in the end, before Swift added his satirical 21-gun salute.
If the elegys barbs were all intended for Marlborough and his likes, its bitter philosophical conclusion might equally have derived from the fate of one of Swifts heroes, Frederick Schomberg.
Schomberg was also a duke and a general, and he lived to be even older than Marlborough. There the similarities end, however, because he died far from his bed. And rather than old age, the cause of death was a bullet in the head: fired on this date – July 1st (in the old-style calendar) – in 1690, as he exhorted his Huguenot troops at the Battle of the Boyne.
Schomberg was buried with honour in St Patricks Cathedral, Dublin. But the honour was not initially matched by a monument: a fact that, almost 40 years later, greatly annoyed the cathedrals famous dean, the same Swift. So the latter wrote – politely at first – to the dukes granddaughter, one Lady Holderness, requesting the necessary funds.
She failed to pay, however: something Swift blamed on her tight-fisted husband, Lord Fitzwalter: “So avericious a wretch, that he would let his own father be buried without a coffin, to save charges”. Thus the dean resorted to blackmail: letting it be known that if the lord and lady did not cough up £50 for a proper monument, the cathedral would spend £10 for a modest one, whereon the relatives would be named and shamed.
Lest they claim the remains for a private (and cheaper) reinterment, Swift also asserted ownership of the bones and warned that he would counter any such attempt by reassembling the skeleton and mounting it in his office as “a memorial to their baseness for all posterity”.
No such claim was made, but no money was forthcoming either. And the dean was as good as his word: almost.
He stopped short of naming the relatives. But in 1731, on a no-frills plaque erected for £11 and five shillings, he informed the world in Latin that despite many requests, the family had failed to do the decent thing by their ancestor. Swifts epitaph to the old duke concluded: “The renown of his valour had greater power among strangers than had the ties of blood”.
The inscription caused a scandal at the time and, many years later, the poet (and Whig) Thomas Macaulay would call it a “furious libel”. But it stands to this day in St Patricks: serving both as a reflection on the transient nature of earthy fame, and a warning to cheapskates everywhere.
Much of Swifts work has inevitably suffered from the passage of 300 years. Yet some of his titles remain spectacularly up to date: none more so than “The Present Miserable State of Ireland”, an essay he wrote in 1727. His continuing relevance will be underlined by the annual Trim Swift Festival, which opens tomorrow in Co Meath and gets under way in earnest on Friday with events including a round-table discussion chaired by Vincent Browne on “The state were in, and how we might get out of it.”
Other events of the weekend will range from academic lectures to bouncy castles, with – somewhere in between – a 10km run in aid of the anti-depression charity, Aware.
The festival finishes on Sunday with a “Swift Summer Night”: an evening of literary and musical entertainment during which the Boyne Writers Group and Meath Writers Circle will go head to head in a Battle of the Books.
Further details are at trimswiftfestival.com