'A Defendant as Rhetorically Capable as Swift'

Invective smartly written and deployed with surgical precision is always a joy to read, especially when the target is deserving, and Jonathan Swift is the master of such verse-as-weapon. Among his most pleasingly effective assaults is “Whitshed’s Motto on His Coach” (1724), which begins:

“Libertas et natale solum:

Fine words! I wonder where you stole ’em.”

The Latin translates as “Freedom and my native country” but the solum/stole ’em rhyme was too good to pass up. William Whitshed (1679-1727) was a politician, Lord Chief Justice of Ireland and an ambitious man. In 1720 he was presiding judge at the trial of Edward Waters for seditious libel. Waters had printed Swift’s pamphlet “On the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture,” and was found guilty after the jury tried nine times to bring in a verdict of not guilty. Swift then launched his campaign of mockery at Whitshed (even his surname is appropriately comic).

In 1724, the Crown again attacked Swift, his time indirectly, arresting John Harding, the printer of Drapier’s Letters, seven pamphlets written anonymously by Swift to rouse public opinion in Ireland against a privately minted copper coinage. Swift’s authorship was an open secret. Whitshed was enlisted to persuade a grand jury to find the documents seditious. He was thwarted when the jury refused to return a guilty verdict. As John Stubbs writes in Jonathan Swift: The Reluctant Rebel (2016): “On the governmental side, the prospect of a very public trial for sedition with a defendant as rhetorically capable as Swift was nothing to be savoured.” Swift was a hero in Ireland. The poem is doubly effective because the Latin motto cited by Swift actually appeared on Whitshed’s family coach. It reappears at the end of the poem: 

“Now, since your motto thus you construe,

I must confess you’ve spoken once true.

Libertas et natale solum:

You had good reason, when you stole ’em.”