Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  At Barmouth they discovered that travelling into Cardiganshire would be cheaper by boat than by following the tortuous coastal road which turns to follow the inlets and river mouths for several miles inland and snakes among the foothills of the Cader Idris range. Nothing daunted, they took to the sea again. The boat was open, but they had fine sparkling spring weather, and they slipped easily down the coast for thirty miles into the harbour at Aberystwyth. Later Shelley used the experience as the background for a rambling poem, ‘The Voyage’, which contains praise for the ‘peculiarly engaging and frank generosity of seafaring men’. Although Harriet and Eliza had spent their previous summer holiday there, Aberystwyth did not attract them. Shelley had finished with large towns for the time being. As he wrote feelingly in ‘The Voyage’:

  Lo! here a populous Town

  Two dark rocks either side defend,

  The quiet water sleeps within

  Reflecting every roof and every mast.

  A populous town! it is a den

  Where wolves keep lambs to fatten on their blood.

  Tis a distempered spot. Should there be one,

  Just, dauntless, rational, he would appear

  A madman to the rest.3

  So they pressed on, taking the eastern road that climbs away from the coast into the hills in a series of coiling hairpins, and catching a last glimpse of the sea, descended gradually into the rolling plains and valleys of Radnorshire. They reached Rhayader, where Shelley, knowing the district from the previous year, at last discovered that there was a house unoccupied no more than a mile from his cousin’s estate in Cwm Elan. He had come a full circle.

  They arrived at Nantgwillt, near Rhayader, on 14 April, and within forty-eight hours had begun negotiations to secure the lease, stock and grounds consisting of 200 acres of arable land and some woodlands. In the meantime the landlord allowed them to occupy the farm, as the Shelleys’ family name carried a respectable weight in the locality. Harriet and Shelley were suddenly overflowing with delight, gazing upon a place that might become their own, and they bubbled with plans for the coming summer. The farm land could be sub-let, thereby paying three-quarters of the annual rent on the whole property, which anyway was cheap, as Shelley said, at £98 a year. The £500 to purchase the stock could be borrowed in Sussex. There were enough rooms to put up not only Miss Hitchener, but the Godwins, and even Mrs Nugent if she could be persuaded to come. The largest room could be fitted out as a library of classical and radical texts — ‘this luxury is one that we are entitled to’.4 The whole place, with its beautiful views, its blue woodland full of spring flowers, and its ‘mountains & rocks seeming to form a barrier around this quiet valley which the tumult of the world may never overleap’5 might at last become the physical basis of the commune which they had so long desired to establish, both the ‘asylum of distressed virtue’ and more militantly, the ‘rendez-vous of the friends of liberty and truth’.6

  From this place of retirement and concealment, Shelley’s eye continued to play watchfully over the scenes of political development. He urged Miss Hitchener to distribute the Declaration of Rights to the houses of the Sussex farmers: ‘it was by a similar expedient that Franklin propagated his commercial opinions among the Americans’. He himself planned to circulate the Redfern letter in Wales.7 He observed that ‘Manchester, Carlisle, Bristol & other great towns are in a state of disturbance’, and cursed the Prince Regent for his demands of money from the people. ‘If the murderer of Marr’s family containing 6 persons deserves a gibbet, how much more does a Prince whose conduct destroys millions deserve it.’8 Later, however, seeing how the disturbance progressed, he was inclined to fear that ‘hunger is the only excitement of our English riotings’. This was a sharp disappointment, for, as he noted shrewdly, ‘the Local Militia that body of soldiery nearest approaching & immediately mingling with the character of citizen have been called out near Carlisle & other great towns to quell the populace. That the government has dared to call the Local into action appears to be an evidence that at least they do not think that disaffection to Government (except so far as directly connected with starvation) has any share in these tumults.’9 When the Prime Minister, Spencer Percival, was shot down in the lobby of the House of Commons, Shelley and Harriet could only wish that it had been Castlereagh who had been killed instead — ‘it had been better’.10

  Shelley was soon fully concerned with the immediate plans for the future of his own ‘little circle’, although Cwm Elan haunted him with memories of Harriet Grove and the time before his complete break with Field Place. ‘The ghosts of these old friends’, he wrote to Godwin, ‘have a dim and strange appearance when resuscitated in a situation so altered as mine is.’11 To Miss Hitchener he recounted his feelings in whimsical terms. ‘We are now embosomed in the solitude of mountains woods and rivers, silent, solitary, and old, far from any town, 6 miles from Rhayader, which is nearest. — A ghost haunts this house, which has frequently been seen by the servants. We have several witches in our neighbourhood, & are quite stocked with fairies, & hobgoblins of every description.’12 Yet in his present frame of mind, this merely added to the attractions of the house, and he was soon writing busily to Timothy Shelley and to T. C. Medwin in an attempt to raise loans or security on the £500 capital necessary to purchase the stock and furniture at Nantgwillt. To his father, he put the proposition with considerable diplomacy. ‘If you would advance [the £500] to me, I should at once by your means be settled where my yearly income would amply suffice, which would otherwise be dissipated in searching for a situation where it might maintain myself and my wife. You have now an opportunity of settling the heir to your property where he may quietly and gentlemanly pursue those avocations which are calculated hereafter to render him no disgrace to your family on a more extended theatre of action.’13

  Yet none of their optimistic plans were to mature. Unexpected setbacks met them from every quarter, and by the first week in June they were preparing to leave the lovely Cwm Elan valley.

  In the first place there was illness. Harriet had hardly been in Nantgwillt more than a few days when she showed signs of strain from their journeyings. She went down with a severe bilious attack, and this developed into an unpleasant fever, ‘intermittent’ but severe enough to make her too weak to walk about, or help properly with the domestic arrangements, or even to write letters. She was not properly recovered until the end of May, and during most of their residence at Nantgwillt she had relapses, perhaps brought on by the chill valley air, which sent her back to her bedroom or the library couch.14

  Moreover, the security for the farm was not immediately forthcoming as they had hoped. Timothy Shelley, on receiving his son’s request, sent a curt refusal through Whitton. Medwin showed more interest, but he discovered that the previous landlord, a Mr Hooper who had gone bankrupt, did not have it in his power to transfer the lease of Nantgwillt, and that an entirely new lease with many restrictive clauses would have to be drawn up with agents in Kingston. There were two immediate objections to this. In the first place, the new lease would not give Medwin the right to assign it to Shelley, legally a minor; Medwin would have to farm Nantgwillt himself, and maintain personal responsibility for it. In the second place, under closer appraisal it became clear from the Nantgwillt accounts that the value of the stock was not a mere £500, but a sum approaching very nearly £1,000. At this point, Medwin decided to consult with Shelley’s old friend and supporter, Captain Pilfold, and during May Shelley waited anxiously for the outcome of these negotiations in Sussex.

  Another misfortune, which was ultimately to endanger the whole communal scheme, concerned the large box of subversive propaganda material which had been sent from Dublin to Miss Hitchener, and which Shelley supposed had long ago reached Hurstpierpoint in safety. The box contained the Irish pamphlets and a long open letter from Harriet to Miss Hitchener in which the latter was addressed by the assumed name ‘Portia’. Harriet’s letter contained reference to two previous letters smuggl
ed illegally inside newspapers (at a much cheaper rate); sympathetic description of the popular discontent in Dublin and the possibilities of a rising when the Horse Guards were in the streets; and directions for Miss Hitchener to disperse the Declaration of Rights around Lewes. Altogether, it added up to what Harriet herself called ‘a large box so full of inflammable matter’.

  Shelley had only paid the carriage on this box as far as Holyhead, trusting that it would then be forwarded to Hurstpierpoint, where Miss Hitchener might pay the remainder. But the box lay for some days at the Holyhead customs house, and finally was opened to check what charges should be made. The surveyor of customs, Mr Pierce Thomas, was appalled by what he found. His opposite number, Mr William Fellowes, the post office agent at Holyhead, was immediately alerted, and together they examined the ‘inflammatories’. Both decided that the matter was serious enough to be reported direct to their superiors in London: Thomas wrote to the Secretary of State for the Home Department, and Fellowes wrote to the Secretary of the General Post Office in London. Copies of the pamphlet and Harriet’s letter were taken and enclosed. Fellowes’ letter reads in part: ‘[the box] contained, besides a great quantity of Pamphlets and printed papers, an open letter, of a tendency so dangerous to Government, that I urged [Mr Thomas] to write without further loss of time, a confidential letter, either to the Secretary of State, or to Mr Percival (the Prime Minister). . . .’15 On the government side, copies of the papers eventually reached the office of the Home Secretary in London, Lord Sidmouth, and the Department of the Secretary for Ireland in Dublin, Mr Wellesley Pole.16

  No prosecution was immediately forthcoming, and the papers were noted and returned. But the informal intelligence system of the Home Office was alerted. The papers reached the Earl of Chichester, joint Postmaster-General, in Sussex, and he set certain inquiries on foot which were reported to the General Post Office Secretary as follows. ‘I hear that [Mr Shelley] has married a Servant, or some person of very low birth; he has been in Ireland some time, and I heard of his speaking at the Catholic Convention. Miss Hitchener, of Hurstpierpoint, keeps a school there, and is well spoken of; her Father keeps a Publick House in the neighbourhood, he was originally a smugler, and changed his name from Yorke to Tichener [sic], before he took the Publick House. I shall have a watch upon the daughter, and discover if there is any connexion between her and Shelley.’17 This is the first definite evidence that Shelley’s activities had aroused the active attention of the Home Office and an agent had been especially assigned to watch his ‘connection’ with Miss Hitchener. The Postmaster-General’s letter is dated 5 April 1812. Hogg has suggested that Shelley had in fact left Ireland on a ‘hint’ from the police, but this earlier incident is not certain.

  The technique of identifying and then watching subversive groups, rather than immediately prosecuting them, was characteristic of government policy until the end of the Napoleonic War. From 1816 to 1820 it was to be more active, introducing agents provocateurs with the intention of catching treasonous schemes at a premature stage. The government thus hoped to draw the maximum publicity from them as part of its more severe campaign of repression in the deteriorating post-war social climate. The Pentridge Revolution and the Cato Street Conspiracy were results of this latter policy. But at this period the Home Office had very little administrative machinery, and Sidmouth himself only employed seven officials. It functioned effectively enough through personal communication between Westminster and local landlords, officials and JPS, relying on them for its often startling efficiency in gathering information and dealing with personae non gratae.

  As far as the Home Office was concerned, it was not so much the pamphlets as Harriet’s letter with its reflections on Irish discontent, and its instructions to distribute the Declaration in Sussex which aroused the greatest alarm. What did the Declaration consist of? It was printed as a broadsheet poster, in double column, with thirty-one Rights numbered and stated. These were mostly drawn from radical principles referred to in Shelley’s Irish pamphlets, recognizably influenced by Godwin and Paine. There was also a rather more vague and disturbing atmosphere of fundamentalism reflecting similar declarations by the revolutionary governments in France and America. Some of the more forceful and characteristically Shelleyan of the thirty-one Rights were as follows:

  1. Government has no rights; it is a delegation from several individuals for the purpose of securing their own. It is therefore just only so far as it exists by their consent, useful only so far as it operates to their well-being.

  6. All have a right to an equal share in the benefits and burdens of Government. Any disabilities for opinion imply, by their existence, barefaced tyranny on the side of Government, ignorant slavishness on the side of the governed.

  9. No man has a right to disturb the public peace by personally resisting the execution of a law, however bad. He ought to acquiesce, using at the same time the utmost powers of his reason to promote its repeal.

  12. A man has a right to unrestricted liberty of discussion. Falsehood is a scorpion that will sting itself to death.

  19. Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform; he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.

  26. Those who believe that Heaven is, what earth has been, a monopoly in the hands of favoured few, would do well to reconsider their opinion; if they find that it came from their priest or their grandmother, they could not do better than reject it.

  27. No man has a right to be respected for any other possessions but those of virtue and talents. Titles are tinsel, power a corrupter, glory a bubble, and excessive wealth a libel on its possessor.

  28. No man has a right to monopolize more than he can enjoy; what the rich give to the poor, whilst millions are starving, is not a perfect favor, but an imperfect right.

  30. Sobriety of body and mind is necessary to those who would be free; because without sobriety, a high sense of philanthropy cannot actuate the heart, nor cool and determined courage execute its dictates.

  What is perhaps most remarkable about this Declaration is the extreme variety or source, of tone and of implication. It seems to face in several different directions at once, and suggests the confused state in which the Dublin experience had left Shelley. The opening points, No. 1 and No. 6, are almost pure Paine, seditious but philosophical. Later points like No. 27 and No. 28 are aggressively egalitarian and clearly suggest a militant line of action reminiscent of the French intellectuals of the early Revolution.

  Point No. 9 seems in contrast a thoroughly law-abiding and expedient approach to the status quo. Points No. 19 and No. 26 are different again, with a sharp polemic edge deliberately aimed at arousing and provoking. Point No. 30 is a fine example of Shelley’s more quakerish, practical side, the tone of a man who has seen political action and faces realities. Altogether it is difficult to see what the farmers would make of it; but certainly there was enough to convince a government department during the Napoleonic War that Shelley was a trouble-maker to be watched.

  The Declaration ends with a curious piece of rhetoric, in which Shelley both exhorts and insults his reader to ‘think of thy rights’. ‘They are declared to thee’, he concludes, ‘by one who knows thy dignity, for every hour does his heart swell with honourable pride in the contemplation of what thou mayest attain — by one who is not forgetful of thy degeneracy, for every moment brings home to him the bitter conviction of what thou art. Awake! — arise! — or be forever fallen.’18 One can see here the double edge of his Dublin experience at work, aware simultaneously of the ideal possibility and the bitter reality. It is also the first time that Shelley consciously identified himself with the Satanic outcast, the angel who has rebelled against the government of the Almighty; for the final call to action comes from the first book of Paradise Lost, Satan calling the infernal host to gather themselves up from the burning lake where they lie prostrated after the Great Battle.

  This call to ‘awake’ — to stand up for your r
ights, to think for yourself, and to band together with your fellowmen — was to become for Shelley a central part of his mature political credo. It occurs here, like the Satanic identification, almost one feels by chance, a premonition of the attitudes which lived experience would make real and solid. The Declaration did manage to circulate among working-class radicals eventually, for it was printed complete in R. Carlile’s paper The Republican, the fifth number, published from 55 Fleet Street on 24 September 1819.

  The effect of the interference of central government in Shelley’s plans was to become apparent by the end of May.

  Apart from securing Nantgwillt as his base, Shelley’s other main objective was to get Elizabeth Hitchener to join them in Radnorshire. For months he had been planning to bring his most faithful and intimate correspondent, the Sister of his Soul, into the little circle. Two days after settling in Nantgwillt Shelley had already begun to plan the practical details of the arrangement. Miss Hitchener — ‘Portia’ in the commune dialect[1] — should come at the end of June. With the seven bedrooms of Nantgwillt, Portia’s father could come as well and manage the farm, which would be an amusement to him.19 This seemed to settle all personal difficulties, provided Portia would give up the little school she had worked so hard in establishing at Hurstpierpoint. Perhaps even she could bring some of her pupils with her, preferably ‘the little Americans’. Money of course was to be shared: ‘our income is by right, natural right, the property of all the members of our society, of which you are henceforth considered as one’.20