Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  The news was certainly bad enough, and with the number of eye-witnesses and trained journalists on the spot, all the significant details had been available to the readers in the reports of the immediately following week of 17–22 August. The Times, the Manchester Observer and the Examiner were especially full in their coverage; the editor of the Observer was one of those in prison awaiting trial by the end of the autumn.[1] The St Peter’s Field meeting had been called by Henry Hunt and advertised in local papers several weeks in advance. The avowed and published intention was to consider and support ‘the propriety of adopting the most legal and effectual means of obtaining Reform of the Commons House of Parliament’.4 Upwards of 60,000 working people and union representatives arrived during the morning of 16 August from a region of some fifty miles’ radius. Many came in organized bands, marching in orderly groups, behind banners and flags, and led by ‘radical drill-sergeants’ whose experience had been gained during the Napoleonic wars. But all reports agree that the people were totally unarmed. Banner and flag mottoes recorded by the press give a clear indication of the issues and the strength of political feeling: — ‘Liberty and Fraternity’; ‘Parliaments Annual, Suffrage Universal’; ‘Unity and Strength’. Samuel Bamford noted several Women’s Suffrage banners, and the way the ‘handsomest girls’ placed themselves at key positions in the front of marching bands, and around the central hustings where Henry Hunt was to speak.5 He also remarked on the Lees and Saddleworth Union banner, notable for its stark-white lettering on a pitch-black cloth, ‘Equal Representation or Death’, with below, in red, two hands clasped and adorned with the word LOVE. This must be one of the very earliest recordings of the English anarchist colours, red and black, which for the next 150 years were traditionally associated with Manchester in protest demonstrations. For Shelley, it must have seemed as if certain scenes out of The Revolt of Islam had come alive, and that Demogorgon’s chariot was launched towards Jupiter.

  Jupiter however was armed and prepared. The magistracy had six troops of the 15th Hussars, several companies of the 88th, the whole of the 31st (Infantry) and one troop of Horse Artillery, stationed within ten minutes’ call. The whole detachment was under the military command of Colonel Guy L’Estrange.6 There was a prearranged plan with the Home Secretary Sidmouth to use local Yeomanry first to disperse the crowds and arrest Hunt, and only to put in the military if necessary.7

  Henry Hunt arrived at the hustings, wearing his white top-hat, in the early afternoon. Almost as soon as he began to speak, the local magistrates ordered a force of the local Manchester and Salford Yeomanry to ride into the dense crowd and arrest him. With much difficulty, they did so, Hunt being pulled off the hustings without resistance. Regrettably, however, they knocked down a woman as they charged, and trampled her child to death.8 The crowd surged, and while Hunt was escorted out to the magistrates’ house (he was clubbed on the way by a line of special constables, and the white hat ‘packed over his face’),9 the rest of the Yeomanry were isolated in the Field, hemmed in by a jeering crowd. They drew their swords. At this point the magistrates sent in the mounted Hussars to retrieve the Yeomanry and disperse the crowds. They went in with drawn sabres, at first sweeping only with the flat of the blade, according to training. The Yeomanry were incapable of such subtleties, but anyway in a few moments it was unnecessary. Bamford says the massacre only lasted ten minutes. At the end of this time the field was virtually deserted except for bodies, abandoned hats and flags, and dismounted Yeomanry wiping their swords and easing their horse girths.10 The afternoon light of August was orange with the dust.

  Lord Sidmouth, the whole of the Liverpool administration and the Prince Regent publicly endorsed the action, and praised the decision of the magistracy and the calm of the military. The total death-roll, including the child trampled by the Yeomanry, was eleven. Official committees authenticated 421 cases of serious injury sustained on the Field, including more than 100 women and children; in 162 individual cases these injuries were identified as sabre wounds. The unofficial number of injuries, and deaths caused by injury, was of course far higher.11

  Shelley plunged into his Scythrop’s tower. Words could not describe his feelings; or perhaps they could. On the 9th he wrote very briefly to Peacock, referring to the ‘terrible and important news’ from Manchester. ‘These are, as it were, the distant thunders of the terrible storm which is approaching. The tyrants here, as in the French Revolution, have first shed blood. May their execrable lessons not be learnt with equal docility! I still think there will be no coming to close quarters until financial affairs decidedly bring the oppressors and the oppressed together. Pray let me have the earliest political news which you consider of importance at this crisis.’12 At such a moment, the acuteness of Shelley’s observation on the decisive importance of the general economic situation is remarkable. For the next twelve days he wrote no letters. His attention was not concerned with letters. He had embarked, almost without realizing it, on the most intensely creative eight weeks of his whole life.

  In the first twelve days he wrote and clean-copied the ninety-one stanzas of The Mask of Anarchy. This is the greatest poem of political protest ever written in English. It also has claims to be considered as the most powerfully conceived the most economically executed and the most perfectly sustained piece of poetry of his life. With ‘Julian and Maddalo’, and Prometheus Unbound (Acts I and II), it ranks as the third of his four Italian masterpieces. It begins with unhesitating simplicity, in the very phrase and cadence of Shelley’s letter to Peacock, as if he had put pen to paper the moment he drew up his chair in the tower:

  As I lay asleep in Italy

  There came a voice from over the Sea. . . .13

  He found himself writing immediately in the colloquial ballad stanzas he had not used since 1812, except for the brief premonitory poem at Naples. The lines were terse, flexible, rapid, based on the simple four-stress verse of the broadsheets, sometimes end-stopping, sometimes running on unchecked for a whole stanza, using a bewildering variety of full rhymes, half rhymes, assonance, the curious minor-key of half-assonance, and sudden bursts of brutal, merciless alliteration. His images are drawn recognizably from almost all his previous political poems, right back to ‘The Devil’s Walk’, and the reader has the sense of a mass of unconsciously prepared material leaping forward into unity at a single demand. The dominant material comes from the pamphlet of 1817, On the Death of Princess Charlotte, and from the immediate news reports of the day. The most important single image Shelley took from the newspapers was that of the unarmed mother, whose child was trampled to death as the Yeomanry first charged.

  The ninety-one stanzas develop naturally in three sections. In the first thirty-four stanzas there is a viciously satirical picture of Lord Liverpool’s ministers riding the horses which trample down the English crowd. Each stanza is drawn in a single stroke. It is done with a unique combination of Coleridge and Cruikshank, that transcends both:

  I met Murder on the way

  He had a mask like Castlereagh —

  Very smooth he looked, yet grim;

  Seven blood-hounds followed him:

  All were fat; and well they might

  Be in admirable plight,

  For one by one, and two by two,

  He tossed them human hearts to chew

  Which from his wide cloak he drew.

  Next came Fraud, and he had on,

  Like Eldon, an ermined gown;

  His big tears, for he wept well,

  Turned to mill-stones as they fell.

  And the little children, who

  Round his feet played to and fro,

  Thinking every tear a gem,

  Had their brains knocked out by them.

  Clothed with the Bible, as with light,

  And the shadows of the night,

  Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy

  On a crocodile rode by.

  And many more Destructions played

  In this ghastly masquerade,
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  All disguised, even to the eyes,

  Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.14

  These distinguished members of the government and the Establishment are commanded by another, even more sinister figure on a horse, a figure out of a gothic engraving, or perhaps even out of Dante’s Hell:

  Last came Anarchy: he rode

  On a white horse, splashed with blood;

  He was pale even to the lips,

  Like Death in the Apocalypse.

  And he wore a kingly crown;

  And in his grasp a sceptre shone;

  On his brow this mark I saw —

  ‘I AM GOD AND KING AND LAW!’

  With a pace stately and fast,

  Over the English land he passed,

  Trampling to a mire of blood

  The adoring multitude.15

  The multitude, though trampled and killed, Shelley says, is adoring. Here is the first intellectual twist in a poem which underneath its hard, brilliantly active surface, contains a structure of complicated ideological reasoning. ‘Anarchy, the Skeleton’, who is the prize exhibit in the governmental masquerade of murderers, is also the insane deity who ‘bowed and grinned to everyone’ and leads the adoring multitude to an attack on the Palace, the Bank and the Tower

  And was proceeding with intent

  To meet his pensioned Parliament

  when he is halted. Shelley meant that Anarchy, a savage god outside any human law, is already the idol of the government’s train; he could easily become the leader of the people’s too. But Shelley halts him. He is halted by a woman who lies under the horses’ hooves,

  a maniac maid,

  And her name was Hope, she said:

  But she looked more like Despair,

  And she cried out in the air:

  ‘My father Time is weak and gray

  With waiting for a better day;

  See how idiot-like he stands,

  Fumbling with his palsied hands!

  ‘He has had child after child,

  And the dust of death is piled

  Over every one but me —

  Misery, oh, Misery!’

  Then she lay down in the street,

  Right before the horses’ feet,

  Expecting, with a patient eye,

  Murder, Fraud, and Anarchy.16

  The starkness and emotional clarity of this figure is very great. There is complete realism in that ‘patient eye’. As she lies there, something begins to materialize between her and Anarchy: at first a mist, then a vapour, then a cloud, then a storm anvil with lightning head until finally

  It grew — a Shape arrayed in mail

  Brighter than the viper’s scale

  and sweeps over the heads of the crowd and in an instant leaves Anarchy unhorsed and lifeless

  And the prostrate multitude

  Looked — and ankle-deep in blood,

  Hope, that maiden most serene,

  Was walking with a quiet mien17

  With this blinding deliverance, the first section of the poem ends.

  In the second section, between stanzas 34 and 63, the maid talks to the crowd and gives her description first of false freedom, and then of true political freedom. She talks of food, clothes, fire, a proper home:

  ‘For the labourer thou art bread,

  And a comely table spread

  From his daily labour come

  In a neat and happy home.

  ‘Thou art clothes, and fire, and food

  For the trampled multitude —

  No — in countries that are free

  Such starvation cannot be

  As in England now we see.

  ‘To the rich thou art a check,

  When his foot is on the neck

  Of his victim, thou dost make

  That he treads upon a snake. . . .’18

  To this she adds broader considerations: protection against exploitation by wealth; justice available without money; intellectual freedom from religious bigotry; national peace; voluntary expenditure of wealth to improve bad conditions, and ‘Science, Poetry, and Thought’.

  In the last section of the poem, the maid issues a celebrated call for a series of massive demonstrations of English working people to claim their political rights:

  ‘Let a great Assembly be

  Of the fearless and the free

  On some spot of English ground

  Where the plains stretch wide around. . . .

  ‘From the corners uttermost

  Of the bounds of English coast;

  From every hut, village, and town

  Where those who live and suffer moan

  For others’ misery or their own,

  ‘From the workhouse and the prison

  Where pale as corpses newly risen,

  Women, children, young and old

  Groan for pain, and weep for cold. . . .’19

  When faced with the ‘tyrants’ troops’, the artillery, the fixed bayonet, or the horsemen’s sabres

  ‘Stand ye calm and resolute,

  Like a forest close and mute,

  With folded arms and looks which are

  Weapons of unvanquished war. . . .

  ‘Let the laws of your own land,

  Good or ill, between ye stand

  Hand to hand, and foot to foot,

  Arbiters of the dispute,

  ‘The old laws of England — they

  Whose reverend heads with age are gray,

  Children of a wiser day;

  And whose solemn voice must be

  Thine own echo — Liberty!

  ‘On those who first should violate

  Such sacred heralds in their state

  Rest the blood that must ensue,

  And it will not rest on you . . .’20

  This heroic but yet stoic belief in the power of the mass demonstration, using passive resistance as an instrument of political change, is remarkable enough in itself, as far as the evolution of Shelley’s radical thought is concerned. There would be very few outside the circles of the working-class radical leadership who would have come anywhere near avowing such a policy publicly. Yet this is not quite the end of the poem. There is one more twist, which leaves it not on a note of stoicism, but one of triumphant solidarity with the underprivileged, oppressed and unrepresented, against the élite class in power. These are the last three stanzas, which refer back again to Peterloo itself:

  ‘And that slaughter to the Nation

  Shall steam up like inspiration,

  Eloquent, oracular;

  A volcano heard afar.

  ‘And these words shall then become

  Like Oppression’s thundered doom

  Ringing through each heart and brain,

  Heard again — again — again —

  ‘Rise like Lions after slumber

  In unvanquishable number —

  Shake your chains to earth like dew

  Which in sleep had fallen on you —

  Ye are many — they are few.’21

  Shelley worked hard on the poem, anxious to get it published in England as soon as possible. It was one of those crises which a writer must seize. On 21 September, in another short note to Peacock, he remarked merely: ‘What an infernal business this of Manchester! What is to be done? Something assuredly. Henry Hunt has behaved I think with great spirit & coolness in the whole affair.’22[2] He did not mention The Mask, though by now it was virtually complete.

  In fact Shelley seems to have been working largely in secret. Nothing shows Mary’s remoteness from him, busy with her own Mathilda, more than the emptiness of her journal at this time. There are references to Shelley reading Calderón, taking tea with Madame Merveilleux du Plantis and her daughter Zoïde, and discussing the move to Florence for Mary’s approaching lying in. The domestic life crept on.23 Afterwards, Mary wrote that she remembered hearing him sometimes in the house repeating the stanzas beginning ‘My Father Time is old and gray’, and admired them, although she did not know to wha
t poem they belonged.24

  Finally Shelley announced that he had a poem called ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ for posting to Hunt at the Examiner. Mary was given the manuscript to fair copy, and with Shelley’s corrections added at the last moment, it was taken to Florence on the 23rd and put on the mail. He took Charles Clairmont with him, and also arranged for them all to take lodgings for the winter in Madame du Plantis’s house, starting in October.

  Shelley returned to Villa Valsovano on Saturday, 25 September, tired, and feeling very unwell. Mary wrote that the weather was beginning to fluctuate: sometimes too hot to go out at midday, sometimes as cold as Christmas in England. The wind shifted, and came in from every side, and there were ‘no fireplaces & stone floors’. The Italians seem to take no precaution against the cold, ‘except holding a little earthenware pot with charcoal in it in their hands’.25

  During the last days at Villa Valsovano, Shelley again retired into his tower. Mary spent her time packing, and visiting Maria Gisborne. Mr Gisborne, much to her relief, had set out on a trip to England before the weather broke, intending to inquire after prospects in London for Henry. She warned the Hunts in a letter of his impending arrival, adding miserably that her own ‘life & freshness’ was lost to her, ‘on my last birthday when I was 21 — I repined that time should fly so quickly . . . now I am 22 . . . I ought to have died on 7th June last’.26 She did not show this letter to Shelley.27

  Three days later Shelley also wrote to the Hunts from his tower. He was in high spirits again. ‘Ollier tells me that the Quarterly are going to review me; I suppose it will be a pretty morsel, and as I am acquiring a taste for humour and drollery I confess I am curious to see it.’ He discussed the merits of Boccaccio at length, laughing and half approving of his system of love, and ending in a positive dumb-show of exclamation marks. ‘Boccaccio seems to me to have possessed a deep sense of the fair ideal of human life considered in its social relations. His more serious theories of love agree especially with mine . . . He is a moral casuist, the opposite of the Christian, Stoical, ready made and worldly system of morals. Do you remember one little remark or rather maxim of his, the application of which might do some good to the common narrow-minded conceptions of love? “Bocca baciata non perde ventura; anzi rinnuova, come fa la luna.” If you show this to Marianne give my love to her and tell her that I don’t mean xxxxx . . . — !!?? [sic]’ Of Mary, he wrote simply, ‘We expect Mary to be confined towards the end of October, and one of our motives in going to Florence is to have the attendance of Mr Bell, a famous Scotch surgeon, who will be there . . . The birth of a child will probably relieve her from some part of her present melancholy depression.’ The impersonal use of ‘we’ may have puzzled the Hunts.28