The Earl of Pembroke remained in Ireland less than a couple of years, playing at governing, and amused by Swift. The post of Lord High Admiral was more to his liking, and he gladly resigned the viceroyalty to take it up. Swift acted as chaplain to Pembroke, but his principal duty appears to have been that of amusing the earl with humorous doggerel or by his caustic criticisms of Dublin's leading citizens, official and otherwise. The punning correspondence with the viceroy was the forerunner of a habit that lasted through Swift's life, and gained him a reputation for wit which, fortunately for the dean, was supplemented by something more recondite. During several viceroyalties he exercised considerable influence, and although Swift hotly repudiated the title of Irishman, at times he rendered some service to the country in which he was born. The Earl of Wharton was sixty when appointed Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland on November 25, 1708, and there were forty years of profligacy behind him. He was an atheist, unscrupulous, licentious, witty, contemptuous, and absolutely without fear. From the first he had been an opponent of James II., and the invitation to William was suggested by {130} Wharton. To send this man to Ireland to settle the religious question and maintain the supremacy of the Protestant party was a matchless piece of irony; but Wharton, who could insist upon an elaborate ritual of household prayers in his own home, undertook the task, undeterred by the sneers of his opponents, the amazement of his friends, and the bitter invective of that disappointed office-seeker, Jonathan Swift. [Illustration: Lord Wharton] Wharton had done considerable service to the cause of William by the writing of a single song that proved to be worth an army to the Orange party. Like most of the English nobility, Wharton had been vastly amused by Tyrconnel's elevation to the viceroyalty. In his opinion the position was one for a gentleman, and not a bully with Irish leanings and unrepentantly Catholic. The famous song, set to music by Purcell, and known as 'Lilli Burlero, Bullen-a-la,' was the result, and, whistled and sung from one end of the country to the other, it ridiculed Tyrconnel out of existence. That was Wharton's first contribution to the history of Ireland. His second took the form of a law declaring that all property held by Catholics must be inherited by their Protestant heirs--a statute which was declared to do more towards stamping out Popery in three months than all others had done in three years. The viceroy, however, took no pains to please anybody but himself. He lived in Dublin as he lived in London, and, when satiated with the pleasures of the Irish metropolis, he crossed over to London, following the example of his {131} predecessors, who never became too fond of Dublin to prefer it to London.