Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  This Mr Leeson had been heard to say that he was determined to drive us out of the country. He once happened to get hold of a little pamphlet which Mr S. had printed in Dublin; this he sent up to Government. In fact, he was forever saying something against us, and that because we were determined not to admit him to our house, because we had heard his character and from many acts of his we found he was malignant and cruel to the greatest degree.

  The pleasure we experience at reading your letter you may conceive, at the time when everyone seemed to be plotting against us. When those whom we had […manuscript torn …] the horrible suspicion […] from the task when called upon in a moment like that. Pardon me if I wound your feelings by dwelling on this subject. Your conduct has made a deep impression on our minds, which no length of time can erase. Would that all mankind were like thee.

  This, even as it stands, shows in a candid light the Shelleys’ distrust of people like the Nanneys and Williams as a result of their failure to prosecute investigations. The manuscript, as it now exists in the Bodleian, has had a quarter of the last leaf torn out, effectively destroying several sentences. But that one phrase alone, ‘horrible suspicion’, suggests the degree of feeling and sense of betrayal. Hogg silently suppressed this phrase in his printing of the letter.52 Hogg himself claims to have had a ‘precisely similar’ letter from Harriet, but lost it. This is doubtful. He admits that although he saw them both in London within a matter of weeks, ‘neither Bysshe nor Harriet ever spoke to me of the assassination; and the lovely Eliza observed on this subject, as on all others, her wonted silence’.53 Altogether, this shows Hogg’s complete unreliability as a witness in the case, as he was neither Shelley’s confidant, nor was he honest with what evidence he did hold.

  Peacock, with his suppression of the Leeson references, is little better. He is more damaging though, for while Hogg is frequently untrustworthy, Peacock is usually not only reliable, but psychologically perceptive. His own statement of denial on the matter, which has been very influential, concludes the physical evidence.

  I was in North Wales in the summer of 1813, and heard the matter much talked of. Persons who had examined the premises on the following morning had found that the grass of the lawn appeared to have been much trampled and rolled on, but there were no footmarks on the wet ground, except between the beaten spot and the window; and the impression of the ball on the wainscot showed that the pistol had been fired towards the window, and not from it. This appeared conclusive as to the whole series of operations having taken place from within. The mental phenomena in which this sort of semi-delusion originated will be better illustrated by one which occurred at a later period. . . .54

  Thus Peacock originated the ‘hallucination’ theory.

  Peacock’s objections, by themselves so apparently complete, disappear at once when they are placed in context. Since ‘torrents of rain’ had been pouring down all night, a single set of footprints across a lawn made at about 11 p.m. would certainly have disappeared by daylight eight or nine hours later. Besides, Tan-yr-allt was — and still is — flagged on three sides by large paving stones nearly six feet broad which make up the floor of the verandah. There was nothing to prevent the intruder from dodging around the corner of the house on these flagstones and plunging into the shrubbery without trace.

  The impression of the ball on the wainscot is explained by the layout of the house. It appears that Peacock was shown a bullet mark on the wainscot below one of the windows, and he concluded that the pistol had been fired by Shelley at that window. On the contrary, the layout of the windows in this corner room is such that if a shot were fired directly through one of the eastern windows it would — unobstructed — cross the room diagonally and go out of the southern window. The shot in this case was fired through the eastern window, on a downward trajectory, holed Shelley’s nightgown, and passing through the curtains of the southern window finally embedded itself just below in the wooden wainscot. This is the mark that Peacock saw. In effect then, Peacock’s evidence, far from discrediting Shelley’s story, actually goes to prove in detail how the shooting occurred: precisely as Shelley himself stated, ‘the ball of the assassin’s pistol…penetrated my nightgown and pierced the wainscot’.55

  Both Peacock and Hogg claimed that ‘persons acquainted with the localities and the circumstances’ did not believe any shooting had taken place. In particular Peacock seems to imply by ‘persons who had examined the premises on the following morning’, the Embankment manager John Williams. (He was however, like Hogg, studiously careful to avoid all names.) This claim was allowed to stand, and was assumed to be true by all biographers until in 1961 conclusive evidence to the contrary was obtained.56 There is an undated letter from William Madocks to Williams, which internal evidence shows was probably written from London in the late spring or early summer of 1813. After referring to various business matters, Madocks wrote: ‘How could Shelly [sic] mind such a contemptible trick as had been played off on him to get him out of the Country on account of his liberal principles. Whoever the hoxters are, it is a transportable Offence, if discovered. I will write fully in a day or two after Monday, when the Committee of Creditors meet again.’ This letter not only shows conclusively that Madocks believed an attack had occurred (which Medwin later denied57), but much more important, it shows that his manager John Williams, the chief man on the spot, had sent a full account of the affair, also believing in it at the time. The one discrepancy seems to be in the reported seriousness of the matter, for Madocks calls ‘a contemptible trick’ what was clearly a murderous attack in the second instance. Probably Williams had implied that the shooting had been meant as an attempt to frighten, thus starting in embryo what gradually became the fully fledged joke of the ‘ghost’ at Tan-yr-allt.[17] Nevertheless, Madocks realized that what had occurred was ‘a transportable Offence, if discovered’. In his last caveat, the conspiracy hunter might perhaps find a hint from Madocks to his manager that things would be best smoothed over.

  The ‘hoxters’, needless to say, have never been discovered. Circumstantial evidence, and the undoubted suspicion of the Shelleys, point towards some kind of sortie organized either by Leeson himself or those within his sphere of influence. There is also the possibility that Home Office agents were involved, though these speculations are very far from proof. What does emerge is the certainty that an intrusion, and then a murderous attack did take place at Tan-yr-allt on the night of 26 February 1813, and that these were motivated by personal and political hostility to Shelley’s radicalism. It is my own belief that Harriet’s letter is substantially accurate on all points, except for the details of the exchange of shots during the first intrusion.

  It also seems possible that Shelley was not only shot at during the second encounter, but was taunted and terrified by some deliberately contrived theatrical ‘apparition’. Because it succeeded to a great degree, he and Harriet may have chosen to suppress reference to this side of the affair, although imaginatively the experience remained with him. Certainly something horrific entered a number of his poems and was later to colour his account of the affair as he gave it in Italy when ‘the scene at the inn in “Count Fathom” was hardly surpassed in horror by the recital Shelley used to make of the circumstances’.58

  In April, from Dublin, Eliza Westbrook, who always insisted that the shooting had been ‘a frightful fact’,59 wrote to Williams herself. ‘My good friend though disappointed you cannot be surprised at our not returning, the unpleasant scenes which occurred there, would ever make that situation disagreeable, lovely as is the spot by nature, the neighbourhood is too corrupt for us ever to take delight in Tan-y-rallt [sic] again, particularly as a fixed residence.’60 Even as Eliza signed and directed this letter from Cuffe Street, Harriet was sealing up the last of their baggage, Shelley was scrawling a note, and the coach was drawn up at the door ready to whisk them to Killarney.

  Later, resting in their hidden lakeside cottage, in the windy March days, Shelley had time to look
over the last twelve unstable months of their lives, with all its sudden arrivals and hasty departures, its schemes and its failures and its alarms. Above all, he brooded over the Tremadoc project, the moral and political corruption of this ideal progressive community, and the terrifying sequel of revenge that the tyrants of the community had unleashed upon him, almost costing him his own life — not to mention the threat to Harriet’s. Moreover, it was more than his and Harriet’s lives at stake now; there was the unborn child to be considered. Gradually, the centre of his mental gravity was shifting. It was one of the decisive changes of his life. He wanted to settle down again; the draw of London, the draw of the centre, the draw of Godwin and Hookham’s bookshop, the draw of a reconciliation with his family even, became stronger and stronger. He felt he wanted to have done with travel, exile, missionary schemes. He wanted to work, to project reform and to write. He wanted security for his wife and child. He wanted no more terrors in the night. Political activism, the direct action of Dublin and Lynmouth and Tremadoc, had lost its attraction and its force. His radicalism was becoming more tempered, more sophisticated, more patient, more oblique. In conformity with the great principle he recognized in material nature around him, he himself was changing according to Necessity. The real importance of the Tan-yr-allt affair, its final reality, lay in the painful force with which all these considerations were brought home to him.

  Their effect was lasting. For the next twelve months, in complete contrast to the previous twelve, Shelley’s life was to centre fundamentally on London and the Home Counties. Not until another spring came round did the old restlessness finally reassert itself. As for political activism, he never again returned to it. His interest in politics, his commitment to the radical cause and his relentless drive to publicize subversive viewpoints, were established and consecrated for the rest of his life. But from now on Shelley regarded himself as a mouthpiece rather than as an instrument for political change. In a famous later phrase, he became the ‘trumpet of a prophecy’, but not the sword. Though his old Illuminist belief in the political force of the small, radical community, the commune of like spirits, did not slacken — in fact it increased steadily — his trust and confidence in the larger democratic community was shaken. It came to depend very much on his personal mood; when he was well and optimistic he trusted it implicitly; but when he was, as so often, ill or depressed, he regarded it and its leaders with distrust, and a cynicism close to despair.

  [1]Robert Leeson was the second son of the third marriage of the First Earl of Milltown, the great landowner of County Wicklow.

  [2] Those adhering to the total hallucination theory include Hogg (1858), Peacock (1858) and White (1940). Jeaffreson (1885) and Cameron (1950) believe the events were fictional in a different sense: deliberately staged to extricate himself from the Embankment scheme and his Tremadoc debts. Dowden (1886), Blunden (1945) and J. Overton Fuller (1968), with a characteristically English kind of compromise, prefer to believe in an indefinite mixture of fantasy, fact and stage managing. The decisive reinterpretation was by H. M. Dowling (1961), who first recognized and explored the tense political and social circumstances at Tremadoc. For full details of all these works, see References.

  [3] It was at this time, when he was still suffering from shock, that Shelley was supposed to have drawn the picture of the ‘devil’ which attacked him. He then apparently tried to burn it. For a ‘copy’ of this drawing, see plate 13.

  [4] Taken perhaps twenty or thirty years after: Dowden, I, pp. 354–5.

  [5] The ghost theory was elaborated and then ‘explained’ by reference to a local farmer, ‘Old Robert Pant Evan’, in Margaret L. Croft’s article, ‘The Century Magazine’, October 1905. A letter from Captain S. Livingstone-Learmonth, the present owner of Tan-yr-allt, to the author, (1971), further elaborates on the family tradition of a haunting.

  [6]His disturbed state is confirmed by Shelley’s own letter of 13 March 1813. Letters, I, No. 230, p. 360.

  [7] The main bedrooms are still directly above the main parlours at Tan-yr-allt.

  [8] This is a clear indication of the nature of the expected crisis precipitated by the arrival of Dan at Tremadoc.

  [9] At this stage it is vital to notice that Shelley is dealing not with an assassin, but an intruder who is trying to escape. An intruder could only have two motives: to steal valuables, or to gather incriminating papers and pamphlets. Shelley specifically discounted the first motive; after all the household was in debt. The second motive would explain why the intruder moved from the parlour to the ‘office’, where Shelley’s paperwork was presumably kept. We know who was interested in Shelley’s paperwork at Tremadoc.

  [10] This was evidently outside the glass door, on the lawn.

  [11] We notice that the intruder’s instinctive language is English, not Welsh; and that he is aware of the relationships within the household, though he muddled Eliza’s sisterhood, and transferred it to Shelley. The stilted melodrama of the words is faintly ludicrous because of the contrasting sobriety of Harriet’s account. Some commentators have suggested that this was Shelley’s alter ego expressing his subliminal desire to murder Harriet and rape Eliza.

  [12]This caveat concerning Dan implies that in Shelley’s or Harriet’s opinion he could not have had anything to do with the attack. The fact that he continued in the household for several months after confirms this.

  [13]The evidence of the nightgown is elaborated in Shelley’s letter of 6 March 1813. Letters, I, No. 228, pp. 358–9. The hole in the curtain is not mentioned elsewhere, but if Harriet was correct in hearing only one shot, both holes must have been caused by the same bullet.

  [14]There is no reason to dispute this misfire, if Harriet heard only one report. Shelley had probably reloaded his pistols in a hurry after the first incident; the second pistol was presumably with Dan.

  [15] There is a tradition that Shelley used to practise his sabre cuts on a beech tree outside on the east lawn; for many years after it was said to have carried deep scars. The present beech tree is too young to remember.

  [16] This seems to imply that Dan caught a glimpse of Shelley and the assailant struggling on either side of the smashed window, with the latter just getting the upper hand. Some commentators have felt that Dan discovered Shelley wrestling with his doppelgänger. Dan himself left no known written record.

  [17] H. M. Dowling has followed up some interesting letters where the reward for the ‘Tan-yr-allt ghost’, dead or alive, was humorously discussed: but these all date from several years after, like the best legends. Talking of ghosts, however, one recalls Leeson’s propensity for amateur theatricals.

  Illustrations: Section I

  1. Field Place, south façade: Shelley’s windows are on the first floor, to the right (photograph by Adrian Holmes)

  2. Sir Bysshe Shelley by Sir William Beechey

  3. Sir Timothy Shelley by George Romney

  4. Lady Elizabeth Shelley by George Romney

  5. Margaret and Hellen Shelley by an unknown artist

  6. ‘The Nightmare’ by Henry Fuseli

  7. Robert Southey in 1804 by H. Edridge

  8. T. L. Peacock by R. Jean

  9. Lynmouth, Devon: harbour and village. The site of Shelley’s house is on the extreme left

  10. Tan-y-rallt, Tremadoc: general view from the south

  11. Tan-y-rallt, the east windows and lawn

  12. Assailant’s target-view diagonally across drawing-room, from the east window to the south

  13. Copy of a drawing Shelley supposedly made of his Tan-y-rallt assailant. First published in (Century Magazine) 1905 — a myth in the making

  14. William Godwin by James Northcote

  9. A Poem and a Wife: Queen Mab 1813

  Shelley’s reveries were suddenly interrupted towards the end of March by the arrival of a note from Hogg, who had come to Dublin, and was impatiently awaiting them at Lawless’s. His old friend Hogg, and the lights of the metropolis, suddenly looked infinitely at
tractive. Leaving Eliza with Dan to follow at a more normal pace, Shelley and Harriet seized a chaise and horses and set out on the evening of the 28th. Without Eliza’s matronly presence it was quite like a second elopement. Driving through the night, they reached Cork at 1 a.m. on the 29th,1 and without pausing for sleep took their seats on the Dublin mail that Tuesday morning. By 3 o’clock on Wednesday afternoon they had reached the city, only to find that Hogg had himself departed for London the previous day. Shelley roundly blamed ‘the inconceivable blindness and matter of fact stupidity of Lawless’ — ‘had you stayed one day longer, you would have heard the words of sincerity and friendship from my own lips’.2 It appears that in his anxiety to cover his tracks, Shelley asked Lawless to keep his Killarney address secret from all inquiries — and had forgotten or omitted to except Hogg. Shelley was not in the mood to be obstructed by minor considerations of time and distance. He borrowed ‘a small sum of money’, arranged a sea-passage for Harriet and himself, and sailed out of Dublin on Friday morning, 2 April. Eliza, Dan, books and luggage were all forgotten, left to make there own journey to England by the Freight Route from Cork to Bristol.3 Ahead of him raced a message: ‘. . . Tomorrow evening we embark for Holyhead. . . . Of course you will not write to us here. Above all do not send, or dream of procuring for us any money; we will do these matters very well. The property of friends at least is in common. On Monday evening we shall be in London. . . . My dear friend, all happiness attend you.’4