At the beginning of his career as a writer for an English ministry, Swift arrived from Ireland as a vicar with a mission for his church. Welcomed by Robert Harley, the new premier minister, he rejoined but soon distanced himself politically from a circle of Whig friends that included the writers he most esteemed. At its end, his old mission for the church and a new political mission both accomplished, he departed for Ireland as a dean, distancing himself physically but not socially or politically from a new circle of Tory friends that included the writers he now most esteemed. He had found the political adjustment relatively easy, the estrangement from former friends wrenching. In the ministry's policy of ending the War of the Spanish Succession, he found a worthy cause. Disdaining coffee house chatter and affecting to speak for the nation, he put his mastery of Grub Street at the service of rural squires. In a series of brilliant essays and pamphlets attacking the personalities and institutions typical of the fiscal-military state, he extended A Tale of a Tub's analysis of venal modernity to discredit the former Whig ministry and, especially, the Duke of Marlborough. Despite painful divisions within the ministry and within the Tory ranks, he helped them achieve the Peace of Utrecht, offending Britain's allies but winning solid treaty benefits as well as ending the war. Thanks to his self-destructive habit of lashing out angrily in print when his ministry seemed threatened, he won only an Irish reward for his English service. Blinded by his confidence that his own High-Church, Old Whig politics was virtually universal, he failed to anticipate the disintegration of the ministry and the party during the succession crisis provoked by Queen Anne's physical decline and death in 1714. After three and a half years of unparalleled success, he returned to Ireland from a defeated ministry, closely associated with a party that was tainted by suspicion of the Jacobitism he had never taken seriously. A few months after forming the Scriblerus Club, the society of wits he had always yearned for, he was exiled (as it often felt) to the country of his birth.