I could; because, as I am inclined and obliged to value the friendship he professes for me, so he is a person whose favour I would engage in the affairs of the First Fruits....  If it became me to give ill names to ill things and persons, I should be at a loss to find bad enough for the villainy and baseness of a certain lawyer of Ireland [Speaker Brodrick, afterwards Lord Midleton], who is in a station the least of all others excusable for such proceedings, and yet has been going about most industriously to all his acquaintance of both houses towards the end of the session to show the necessity of taking off the Test clause in Ireland by an act here, wherein you may be sure he had his brother’s assistance.  If such a project should be resumed next session, and I in England, unless your grace send me your absolute commands to the contrary, which I should be sorry to receive, I could hardly forbear publishing some paper in opposition to it, or leaving one behind me, if there should be occasion.”  In August of the same year the agitation for the repeal was renewed, and in December Swift published his “Letter on the Sacramental Test,” writing as if from Dublin and as a member of the Irish House of Commons.  When he writes to King in the following month he makes a mild attempt to convince the Archbishop that the pamphlet was not of his authorship.  “The author has gone out of his way to reflect on me as a person likely to write for repealing the test, which I am sure is very unfair treatment.  This is all I am likely to get by the company I keep.  I am used like a sober man with a drunken face, have the scandal of the vice without the satisfaction.”  But King was not deceived.  In his reply to Swift he simply remarks:  “You need not be concerned:  I will engage you will lose nothing by that paper.”  Swift, however, lost more than the Archbishop thought; for “that paper” led to his severance from the Whigs, and, in after life, to much contumely cast on his character for being a political renegade.  Because “he was not Whig enough;” because he would not forsake his Church for his party, critics and biographers have thought fit to make little of him, and to compare him to his discredit with contemporaries whose intellects he held in the palm of his hand, and to whom he might have stood as a moral exemplar.

Swift refers to this tract in his “Memoirs relating to the change in the Queen’s Ministry,” as follows:—­“It was everybody’s opinion, that the Earl of Wharton would endeavour, when he went to Ireland, to take off the test, as a step to have it taken off here:  upon which I drew up and printed a pamphlet, by way of a letter from a member of parliament here, shewing the danger to the Church by such an intent.  Although I took all care to be private, yet the Lieutenant’s chaplain, and some others guessed me to be the author, and told his Excellency their suspicions; whereupon I saw him no more until I went to Ireland.”