It’s one of the odder ironies of English letters that Sir John Harington, courtier, poet, and godson to Elizabeth I, is remembered not for his verse but for his privy. Not his own privy parts, mind you, but the contraption he nicknamed the ‘Ajax’ – a flushing water-closet that, in its mechanical elegance, promised to rescue civilisation from the stench of its own excrement. Harington clothed this invention in words as grandiose as Ovid’s transformations: The Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596), a mock-epic that elevates the good old bog to the rank of Olympus. Yet in doing so he also dared to lampoon the court itself, turning his satire into a chamber-pot aimed directly at the great and powerful.
Harington’s genius was not the toilet – the Romans had mastered running water centuries earlier – but rather the marriage of sanitation and satire. To write of privies in Renaissance England was already a provocation; to dress the privy in classical allusion, as though Jupiter himself required a cistern, was absurdist theatre. Like Rabelais, whose Gargantua revelled in bodily functions as a means of mocking pompous authority, Harington revelled in the comic tension between high style and low subject. The very word ‘Ajax’ – punning on ‘jakes,’ the slang for the loo – embodies that collision, a noble warrior of Homeric fame reduced to a hole in the ground.
Yet Harington wasn’t content with scatology alone. His privy was a mirror for the realm. The cesspit, he argued, was the true likeness of court politics: a noisome stew of vanity, flattery, and corruption, with courtiers bobbing like so many turds in the flow. It’s a brutal metaphor, and I can’t help but imagine Elizabeth, who tolerated wit but not insolence, narrowing her eyes as her saucy godson read aloud his comparisons. For what’s a monarch’s court if not the most gilded of privies – a chamber where the foulest of odours is concealed beneath perfumed airs?
In this way, Harington anticipated the modern satirist’s craft. His book isn’t merely about plumbing; it’s about purgation. The Ajax is a device to flush away filth, but it’s also an allegory for reform: to rid the body politic of corruption, one needs more than perfumes and hangings – one needs a cistern and a sluice – I once almost came to blows with a man over the purchase of a sluice, believe it or not, though that’s another story.
It’s no accident that Scripture too makes its metaphors of cleansing – ‘Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow’ (Psalm 51:7). For Harington, sanctity and sanitation were of a piece. What’s sin but moral sewage? And what’s grace but a flushing out of the foulness that clings to human nature?
There’s something almost existential in Harington’s choice of subject. To write about toilets is to confront the great leveller of humanity. Kings and beggars alike must obey the bowels. ‘How dieth the wise man? As the fool’ (Ecclesiastes 2:16). How relieveth the wise man? As the fool also. In that humble act, all illusions of grandeur dissolve. Harington’s satire therefore restores perspective: it drags the loftiest down to the earthy truth that we are, quite literally, full of it.
But for all his wit, the consequence was exile. Elizabeth found the book indecorous and sent Harington away from court for a season – proof that no monarch enjoys being compared to the product of a privy. Yet posterity has been kinder. Harington is remembered as the inventor of the modern flush toilet, his name forever twinned with porcelain thrones. His satire, meanwhile, stands as a reminder that laughter often achieves what sermons cannot: it forces us to acknowledge the absurdity of our pretensions, even as we pull the chain to wash them away.
If Swift later reduced humanity to ‘Yahoos’ and Pope lampooned dunces, Harington was there first, baptising the court in the waters of his Ajax. And perhaps there’s wisdom in that descent. For a society that forgets its privies is a society destined to choke on its own filth. Civilization, like the soul, depends not only on lofty ideals but also on the unromantic discipline of cleansing. Or as Harington himself might have said: the state is never so near collapse as when its drains are blocked.
A Coda
Sir John, they say, once read a portion of his Metamorphosis to the Queen, who replied with her usual sharpness:
“Godson, methinks thou hast dealt too much in privy matters.”
To which Harington, without missing a beat, answered:
“Madam, I deal only where all your subjects daily do.”
The joke, like the Ajax itself, is double-flushed: first in the laughter it drew, and then in the punishment it earned him. Yet I can’t help admiring his nerve. For who else could turn the royal presence into a chamber of ease and escape alive?
And so, whenever we sit upon the modern toilet, we are, in some sense, paying homage to Harington’s wit. Each gurgle of the cistern is a reminder that satire, like sewage, is never truly suppressed; it finds its channel, rushes forth, and leaves the place a little cleaner than before.
In this respect, Harington may claim a nobler title than knight or courtier. He’s the patron saint of necessary relief – both bodily and political. And if canonisation proves elusive, he may at least be installed in our bathrooms, where his invention speaks more eloquently than sermons.
For after all, what better epitaph could there be than this?
“Here lies he who taught us all,
That every rise must end in a fall,
And every man, of high or low estate,
Must sooner or later sit upon Harington’s seat.”
Wording 