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“fuimus Torys”: Swift and Regime Change, 1714–1718

Accounts of Swift’s life in the months and years following Queen Anne’s death (August 1714) stress his melancholic acceptance of the new world of Hanoverian rule: however unhappy he was about Whig ascendancy, he was unequivocally supportive of the Hanoverian accession and resigned to the Tory collapse. The extant evidence, however, suggests that Swift’s hopes for the Tory future died quite slowly and that his attitude toward the Hanoverian regime was not as conservative and innocuous as most scholars seem determined to believe. Though we have no reason to suppose that Swift was a committed Jacobite, neither are we wise to suppose that he was entirely innocent in his disaffection. Significantly, in autumn 1714 he transferred his allegiance from the Earl of Oxford to the Viscount Bolingbroke—in other words, from the moderate to the radical, from the man looking to join and temper a Whig ministry to the man wanting to challenge it. Swift’s correspondence in this period is frequently partially coded, and many incriminating letters were evidently burned by Swift and his friends, which means that we will never fully know what Swift thought or wanted in the first years of George I’s reign. But what is clear is that the dominant view of Swift’s politics—“Old Whig” despite his being a Tory in religion—does not satisfactorily encapsulate his multifaceted response to regime change in 1714–16.