Drapier's Letters

Drapier's Letters (1724–5), seven pamphlets attacking Wood's Halfpence, published by Swift under the pseudonym ‘M.B., Drapier’. The first three are concerned primarily with the mechanics of the scheme. However number four, To the Whole People of Ireland (22 Oct. 1724), refers back to Molyneux, rejects the Declaratory Act as an illegitimate exercise of force, and argues that Ireland and England, though ruled by the same monarch, have an identical right to be governed by laws of their own making. The government issued a proclamation against the author and arrested the printer, John Harding, but was humiliated when two successive grand juries resisted pressure from William Whitshed (1679–1727), chief justice of the King's Bench, to find that the Seasonable Advice to the Grand Jury (14 Nov. 1724), in which Swift called for Harding's acquittal, was a seditious libel. Swift nevertheless dropped plans to publish under his own name a more cautiously worded defence of the Drapier's stand in A Letter to the Lord Chancellor Midleton. A Letter to … Lord Viscount Molesworth (31 Dec. 1724) was a mock apology by the Drapier, insisting that he had only followed the principles of the ‘real Whig’ or commonwealth school to which Molesworth himself belonged. An Humble Address to Both Houses of Parliament called on MPs to hold back finance bills until the coin was withdrawn and outlined other grievances requiring attention. It was abandoned when Wood surrendered his patent, it and the letter to Midleton being published only in 1735.