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"The Deepest Designs of a Discontented Party"
The "anagrammatic method" is a key to unearthing the secrets of Gulliver's Travels. Henrion and I have cracked over half of the more than 100 words in anagram in Gulliver's Travels. So there is much more to be done.
Scriblerus Origins
Much of the satire in the Travels, and perhaps the anagrams themselves, seem to originate in Swift's friendly criticism of Bolingbroke's philosophizing. Certainly Bolingbroke was in some danger after the death of Queen Anne, and the anagrams could have originated in a secret code to be used among friends and Scriblerians.
My feeling is that "the anagrammatic method" originated with Dr. John Arbuthnot, a mathematician, Fellow of the Royal Society, and Queen Anne's personal physician. Arbuthnot wrote the first work on "probability" published in English - indeed he invented the word - and saw mathematics as a method of freeing the mind from superstition. He hosted the meetings of the Scriblerus Club at his own house. Because Houyhnhnm is an anagram of Arbuthnot, and Swift said of him, "there does not exist a better man," we should turn much of our focus on Arbuthnot and the Scriblerus Club.
Masonic Origins
![Masonic Symbol. The Monad [top] is male, and the Duad [bottom] is female. Their union produces the Triad [#3], represented by the letter 'G', the generative principle.](/wiki/index.php/Image:Freemasons.jpg)
Arbuthnot's good friends Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope were certainly two of the first British Grand Lodge Freemasons. They belonged to the lodge called "Goat-at-the-Foot-of-the-Haymarket", No. 16, London. [1]
Arbuthnot was also in close contact with one of the leading lights of Freemasonry - some say its founder - Jean Theophile Desaguliers (1683-1744), a French-born inventor and scientist, who was experimental assistant to Sir Isaac Newton and Curator of the Royal Society. Desaguliers designed a project to heat salt-boilers and similar vessels by steam rather than fire. He added a safety valve to Thomas Savery's steam engine, which along with an internal water jet, condensed the steam in the displacement chambers, improving the design.
In the beginning, the Order did not have the three degrees, but only the first two - Apprentice and Fellow. Desaguliers established the third Master degree in about 1725, the year before the publication of Gulliver's Travels.
Swift and Solomon's Temple
After the formation of the first Grand Lodge of England (GLE) in London in 1717, Swift published an anonymous pamphlet in Dublin which claimed to have been sent by the Grand Mistress of the Society of Female Free-Masons. In it he linked the original old Scottish lodge of Kilwinning with the Branch of the lodge of Solomon's Temple, later known as the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem and the Brother Order of the Templars. In this pamplet, Swift lampooned a work called The Grand Mystery of Freemasons Discovered, published in 1724, whose writer was claiming to have exposed the secrets of Freemasonry.
During this period, Swift was a member of Dublin Lodge #16. The Grand Lodge of Ireland was founded in Dublin in 1725, just before the appearance of Gulliver's Travels in 1726.
Some writers feel that Swift's pamphlet is directly responsible for the popular mythology that linked the famous old Scottish lodge of Kilwinning with the Branch of the lodge of Solomon's Temple, later known as the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem and the Brother Order of the Templars.
- "On 26th December 1736, after a Masonic meeting, a banquet was held in a Parisian restaurant in the rue du Paon. At the banquet after the ceremony, a Scotsman by the name of Andrew Michael Ramsay[2], spoke of the great aim of the Order, that of uniting all virtuous men of enlightened minds, who possessed a love of the fine arts, science and religion, so that the interests of the Fraternity shall become those of the whole human race. He likened the Craft to the mystery societies of the ancient world and claimed the mystic rites performed at these festivals, concealed traces of the unpolluted religion of Noah and the Patriarchs. He stated that the Order was revived during the crusades before being brought back to England by King Edward I, whereupon it made its way to Scotland. There, he claimed, "James, Lord Steward of Scotland, was Grand Master of a Lodge established at Kilwinning in the West of Scotland in 1286, shortly after the death of Alexander III, King of Scotland, and one year before John Balliol mounted the throne." "
- "It was largely from this much celebrated oration that the popular belief grew that Freemasonry had somehow descended from a religious military order of crusader knights, a myth that resulted in the creation of many new Masonic rites and one which still resonates today."
Sir Isaac Newton and The Royal Society
Newton's religion was Arian, holding that Christ and God were not of one substance, which was considered heretical within the Anglican Church.
Newton was so convinced of his supernatural powers that he once constructed an anagram of his name - Isaacus Neutonus - in terms of “God’s holy one” (Jeova sanctus unus). His position as a fellow of Trinity College and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge (a chair held by Stephen Hawking), his role as Master of the Mint, and his knighthood from Queen Anne should have required him to adhere to the Anglican Church, or even be an ordained minister. Yet Newton's brillance and domineering nature let him sidestep the problem throughout his life. Only on his deathbed in 1727 did his true religion emerge, when the 85 year old refused to accept the last rites of the Church of England. Even then, Newton was given a lavish state burial in Westminster Abbey, and a mammoth monument was unveiled to his memory in 1731. [3]
A case can be made that some of Newton's alchemical experiments, kept secret from all but a few intimates, may have inspired Swift and Arbuthnot to craft the satire on projectors featured in Book III of Gulliver's Travels. But I think it is more likely that Arbuthnot, as chief editor of the Royal Society, told Swift about some of the more ludicrous experiments proposed to the Society, which held public lectures at the time.
Arbuthnot was clearly in on the joke. Swift wrote to Pope on November 17, 1726, that "Dr. Arbuthnot likes the Projectors [of Lagado] least - Because he understood it to be a satire on the Royal Society."
Official Secrets?
Our other option is that the amagrams may have originated in a personal or diplomatic cypher used by Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, to contact his allies and friends after the death of Queen Anne and the fall of the government.
Swift and Arbuthnot were both members of the Brothers Club, also called "The Society", a social club for the Tory party established by Bolingbroke in 1711, when he was Secretary of State.
Other colleagues of Bolingbroke like the Duke of Ormonde were forced to flee to France, and Robert Harley, Lord Oxford was also sent to the Tower of London for a time. In 1716, two Jacobite lords were executed for plotting a return of the Catholic Stuarts to the throne. Bolingbroke had dealings with James Stuart in secret, and was even apppointed his Secretary of State, but soon withdrew when The Pretender refused to renounce the doctrine of divine right and his Catholicism. The death of Louis XIV on September 1 removed the last prop of the falling jacobite cause. Bolingboke eventually returned to England and supported George I and the Hanoverians. But the taint of his jacobite dealings meant that he would never again hold power.
John Arbuthnot's family had been active Jacobite supporters. In the 1689 Jacobite uprising in Scotland, his brother Robert Arbuthnot joined Bonnie Dundee's army and fought against General Hugh Mackay at the Battle of Killiecrankie. That August the Scottish resistance was crushed at the Battle of Dunkeld and Robert Arbuthnot fled to France. In September, Arbuthnot's father, Rev. Alexander Arbuthnot, refused to sign an oath to the rulers William and Mary who had been victorious over the Jacobites, and he was dismissed from his parish for refusing to conform to the Presbyterian system.
Arbuthnot attended Queen Anne during her last illness, and was with her when she died on August 1, 1714. After her death, and upon the accession of George I, he lost his place at court. He joined friends in France for a time, but eventually returned to England to practice medicine.
Bolingbroke, who had close dealings with France during the Oxford ministry, was not pardoned until 1723. Swift named his best horse in Ireland, "Bolingbroke".
Suggestions Welcome
There is much hard work to be done by those who know Eighteenth Century history and the workings of Swift's mind. As Sir Charles Firth wrote,
- A critic who seeks to explain the significance of Gulliver's Travels may be guilty of too much ingenuity, but he cannot fairly be charged with exaggerated curiosity. He is searching for a secret which Swift tells us is hidden there, and endeavoring to solve riddles which were intended to exercise his wits. [4]
For those who enjoy anagrams and acrostics, I recommend the anagrams of Gulliver's Travels as a real challenge, and will happily post any credible new solutions in these pages, giving credit where credit is due.
Notes
- ↑ Mackey's Encyclopedia of Freemasonry. The number of lodges in London exploded after 1717, to 52 in 1723.
- ↑ Ramsay was a member of the Parisian Club de l'Entresol - a gentleman's literary club- in the company of Rene-Louis Argenson, Lord Bolingbroke and Montesquieu. In 1737, Cardinal Fleury banned all Masonic meetings in France.
- ↑ The movement to erect this monument was led by Alexander Pope, who was also involved in the erection of a monument to William Shakespeare. Pope's poetry had made him wealthy, and I suspect he paid for the monuments out his own money.
- ↑ "The Political Significance of Gulliver's Travels", Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. 9, 1919, page 1.
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