Abstract
JONATHAN SWIFT'S desire for preferment in the years he spent in London is familiar to scholars of eighteenth-century literature. One of the positions with which he has been associated is the Mastership of the Savoy Hospital, the grand and architecturally distinguished institution founded by Henry VII in 1509 as a charity for the poor but which by the time of Swift's birth had become a sinecure for its officers and whose precinct had decayed into a legal sanctuary for debtors. Is there any truth in the suggestion that the minister was to become the head of this society? The proposition arises from an entry in the Journal to Stella: There ⌈y say⌉ you hear I was going to the Bath, no such thing. I am pretty well, I thank God; the Town is now sending me to Savoy. fourty People have given me joy of it; yet there is not the least Truth that I know in it.
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