Vindication

by Lyndall Gordon

  That September, Imlay took off for London. Mary was to wait for him in Paris. She returned to the place where she and Imray had stayed: ‘I slept at St. Germain’s,’ she wrote to him, ‘in the very room (if you have not forgot) in which you pressed me very tenderly to your heart.–I did not forget to fold my darling [Fanny] to mine, with sensations almost too sacred to be alluded to.’

  She had been away for nine months. Paris in the meantime had turned against the Terror: the Jacobin Club was closed on 8 September; salons reopened; theatres filled; and the uniform of baggy trousers and red wool hats was now outré. Men changed into plain cloth coats and stout boots–no ruffles at the wrist, no silk stockings–copying the clothes of an English countryman who had never fluttered around a court. Women floated in white, unstructured gowns in flimsy fabrics like muslin–high-waisted robes en chemise– with heelless slippers, imitating the simplicity of ancient Greece. The naturalness of the naked body replaced panniers, stomachers, loops, layers and theatrical makeup. Tallien’s wife slit her gowns to the thigh. Mary’s nursing breasts and rounded figure would have been in fashion, as were the flowing curves of Venus; instead of tight lacing, women in 1795 adopted ‘corselettes’ only six inches long. It was done to stand out again: the author Mme de Staël (daughter of Necker and wife to the Swedish Ambassador) wrapped herself in stoles and turban. It was also fashionable to have suffered: there were balls for victims; widows cropped their hair and twined thin red ribbons around their necks to signify execution. Newspapers had been freed, Mary informed Imlay. But women’s protest was still suppressed, France was still at war with the monarchies of Europe, and foreigners, apart from Americans, were still the enemy–if anything, the laws against them were stricter.

  So Mary returned to find all the English gone. The Christies were back in London; I. B. Johnson, who had associated with Mary during her first months in Paris, and Thomas Cooper, Imlay’s backer, had escaped at the start of the Terror; and Helen Maria Williams had departed in April 1794 when the Committee of Public Safety had ordered foreigners to leave Paris and not return on pain of death. The Williams women had gone to ground near the village of Marly, sixteen miles away, and early in July had fled briefly to Switzerland. Paine still languished in prison after eight months. His plea to the new order shows the continued danger of being English, however revolutionary such a person might be, however insistent his adoption of American nationality:

  Citizen Representatives

  …When I left the United States of America in the year 1787, I promised to all my friends, that I would return to them the next year; but the hope of seeing a Revolution happily established in France, that might serve as a model to the rest of Europe…induced me to defer my return to that country, and to the society of my friends, for more than seven years. This long sacrifice of private tranquillity, especially after having gone through the fatigues and dangers of the American revolution, which continued almost eight years, deserve[s] a better fate than the long imprisonment I have silently suffered…

  It is perhaps proper that I inform you of the cause assigned in the order for my imprisonment. It is that I am a foreigner; where-as the foreigner, thus in prison, was invited into France by a Décret of the late national assembly, and that in the hour of her greatest danger when invaded by Austrians and Prussians. He was moreover, a citizen of the United States of America, an ally of France…

  Thomas Paine

  Luxembourg thermidor 19th 2nd year

  of the French Republic one and indivisible

  This plea failed. Paine was kept in prison until November 1794, when a new American Minister, James Monroe, came to his rescue. Paine had deteriorated during his year in prison, drowned his sorrows in drink, and become offensive to his friends. Though Monroe took him into his home to aid his recovery, he was less than delighted when Paine stayed two years.

  The Swiss Schweizers were still in Paris. Once, while Mary was composing a letter to Imlay, Madeleine Schweizer sat beside her reading his Topography of the frontier. ‘She desires me to give her love to you, on account of what you say about the negroes,’ Mary relayed.

  Count von Schlabrendorf, too, remained in Paris. He was charmed to meet again the woman who had come to comfort him in prison. He saw a face ‘so full of expression’ and a grace beyond any ordinary standard of beauty. Her glance, her voice, her movement, he said, ‘enthralled me more and more’. ‘Sinnvoll’, he called her, the most perceptive women he had met. It’s not certain what he meant when he said that she was ‘not to be judged as an Englishwoman’, but he liked her for being neither prudish nor licentious: ‘She was of an opinion that chastity consisted in fidelity.’ He was in love with her, something he realised only later. ‘Her unhappy union with Imlay prevented any closer bond.’

  Imlay wrote regularly from London, though sometimes in haste. He saw his conduct as responsible; Mary, on the contrary, saw in his long departures a denial of their love. This disturbed her the more because, unlike her father, he was not cruel. He was amiable and well intentioned: he tried to console her with ‘permanent views and future comfort’ and declared, ‘our being together is paramount to every other consideration!’ She could never quite relinquish her belief in his honesty, even though she was led to expect him each week, and each week disappointed. Of course, if he was, as suggested, some sort of secret agent–his Topography is the work of a collector and spinner of information who gives nothing of himself away–he would not have been as free to join her as she assumed, nor at liberty to explain his movements.

  Since the War of Independence, London was tense with the United States, keen to restore dominance, and seething with secret agents. The idea was to prevent new settlements in the American interior becoming dependent on France or Spain. Might the West separate off as an independent republic of Louisiana, stretching from the Mississippi to the Rockies, under the protection of Britain? Treaties of commerce and friendship would be welcomed. During the mid-1790s, General Wilkinson (calling himself ‘the Washington of the West’) devised a plot to bring together a band of settlers and ‘Indians’ who would capture Florida and those vast plains of the Louisiana Territory, with British support. Then there was talk of a joint US-British coup to be led by General Miranda in 1798. This British interest, replacing that of the French, stirs at a time when Imlay turns from Paris to London. He appeared the leading expert on the frontier–an expanded edition of his Topography came out in 1797. Could he have been an agent promoting interest at the London end? If so, it explains his prolonged stay in London–the repeated postponement of his return to Paris. At this time, Mary was still reverting to their plan for a farm on the frontier. It may sound deluded, given Imlay’s zest for commerce, but if he was secretly involved, once more, in a frontier venture, she was not far off from his dream of land. Only, where she thought in modest terms of pastoral retirement, he planned on a vast scale.

  When he postponed their departure for America, his excuse was the need to amass more funds.

  ‘The secondary pleasures of life are very necessary to my comfort,’ he said.

  ‘It may be so,’ Mary retorted, ‘but I have ever considered them as secondary.’

  Her doubts about his schemes and associates continued to rankle. ‘I would share poverty with you,’ she said, ‘but I turn with affright from the sea of trouble on which you are entering.’

  Imlay’s material support added to Mary’s unease: if he didn’t love her or was unfaithful, it relegated her to the mistress position she always feared. For a year following Fanny’s birth–so long as she breast-fed–she did not earn. Johnson published her French Revolution late in 1794, with a second printing the next year. It was his custom to pay her an advance, and this may have been the money he is known to have sent her in the spring and summer of 1793. By the winter of 1794–5 she had no funds of her own. Imlay had instructed an American contact in Paris to provide for her whenever she asked, but Mary shrank from doing so, for the contact would taunt her with talk of unex
plained commitments that would keep Imlay in London ‘indefinitely’. This unnamed man ‘inconceivably depressed’ her during the last days of December as he flexed a closer connection than that of the woman who called herself ‘Mrs Imlay’.

  ‘Yesterday,’ she writes again to Imlay on 10 February, ‘he very unmanlily exulted over me, on account of your determination to stay [in London]. I had provoked it, it is true by some asperities against commerce…’ Her sense of the two in league exploded in sudden disillusion with the nation she had most admired. She burst out: ‘I shall entirely give up the acquaintance of Americans.’

  Imlay tried to assure her their futures were knit. Mary brushed this aside with the urgency of a ‘fever that nightly devours me’. Breast-feeding seemed to deplete her further. Still, he did not come. Some see in this a confirmation of a familiar scenario. First scene: ambitious female shows true colours as sex-starved dupe. Second scene: fallen woman gives birth. Third scene: abandoned mother becomes clinging bore, to be shaken off with repeated excuses. But if Imlay was in the pay of US or British Intelligence, his commitment to Mary Wollstonecraft would have been an aberration in a secret life that didn’t admit of serious intimacy, least of all with a celebrity. What little can be discerned through the screen of the unnamed Paris agent–disapproval–may not be disapproval of Mary herself, but realistic caution. For if the Paris agent was in some sense a secret agent, there would have been a danger in Imlay’s involvement with a clever, probing partner. The shadows on the other side of the screen look (and declare themselves) more purposeful than what is so far conceived. Mary thought herself party to Imlay’s silver scheme, but there was much she didn’t know–including the fact that secret agents used inside knowledge to speculate. The two activities were linked.

  The winter of 1794–5 was one of the coldest on record. The Seine froze; so did the fountains. The Convention had abolished more price controls, the cost of bread rose, and the freezing of harbours like Le Havre on the Normandy coast prevented the import of emergency grain. People died of starvation; wolves howled at the gates of Paris; coal was scarce and queues lengthened. That February, Mary moved in with a German family who had a child Fanny’s age and shared Mary’s ideas on childcare. She began to think that if she died, her housemate would be a better person to rear Fanny than would her father. During those dark days she often thought of death, and almost regretted the intensity of her love for Fanny that tied her to life. Unable to bring herself to approach Imlay’s contact, she had to chop wood to keep them warm. At last she was driven by continued night sweats to reveal her reluctance to Imlay.

  ‘I have gone half a dozen times to the house to ask for [money], and come away without speaking–you may guess why.’

  She had so far had 3000 livres, and proposed to take a thousand more to pay for wood; and there her dependence must end. Her milk had always been abundant; now, her longing for Imlay seemed a curse, she told him, ‘that burns up the vital stream I am imparting’. At this, Imlay asked her to London. Mary was reluctant, for the invitation was complicated by a warning that he might find it necessary to return afterwards to Paris.

  ‘Is our relationship then to be made up of separations?’ she put it to him, ‘and am I only to return to a country…for which I feel a repugnance that almost amounts to horror, only to be left there a prey to it!’

  Her country had changed in the two years she had been away. The British government was fighting on two fronts: with its revolutionary neighbour across the Channel and with reformers at home who had roused the workers all over the country. There had been an influx of French aristocrats whose tales terrified the landed classes, while in 1794 the English army (made up of mercenaries and ‘pressed’ men) had been chased from Europe by the new French army of citizen soldiers. Defeat filled Prime Minister Pitt with fear of sedition. Talk of electoral reform and rights for the working class now took on the taint of treason. Late in 1794 Pitt had instigated Treason Trials for twelve members of the London Corresponding Society, though their aim was reform, not revolution or regicide. The association of reform with the excesses of the French Revolution led England into a phase of extreme reaction. One of Johnson’s radical authors was Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen. When the cartoonist Gillray pictured Priestley toasting the King’s head, a mob burned down his laboratory, papers and library in Birmingham. He emigrated to America, telling Vice-President Adams that all he wanted was refuge from his countrymen with ears bent to the lies of ‘illiterate’ informers. Pitt’s informers were indeed everywhere. One sent later to spy on Wordsworth and Coleridge famously overheard suspicious talk of ‘Spy Nozy’ (Spinoza).

  Women who asked for rights were now ‘Amazons’, in contrast to virtuous homebodies; to be ‘daring’ and ‘restless’ was to be ‘unprincipled’. The result was to polarise women in the old way as saints or sinners, wives or wantons, negating Wollstonecraft’s fusion of rights and domesticity. Burke aligned her with Mme Roland, Helen Maria Williams, Mme de Staël and Mme de Genlis, as ‘that Clan of desperate, Wicked, and mischievously ingenious Women, who have brought, or are likely to bring Ruin and shame upon all those that listen to them’. He implored mothers to ‘make their very names odious to your Children’. Women had to conform to the swing against equal rights if they were to survive as writers: ‘Do not…call me “a champion for the rights of women”,’ Maria Edgeworth says in her 1795 Letters for Literary Ladies. ‘Prodigies are scarcely less offensive to my taste than monsters.’

  A third cause for caution on Mary’s part was Imlay’s maxim: to ‘live in the present moment’. When he had not returned at Christmas, it had occurred to her that another woman–‘a wandering of the heart, or even a caprice of the imagination’–detained him. If so, she told him, ‘there is an end of all my hopes of happiness’. She begged for ‘the truth’. If she was wrong, she said, ‘tell me when I may expect to see you, and let me not be always vainly looking for you, till I grow sick at heart’.

  Next day she demanded his fidelity against the prevailing double standard: ‘such a degree of respect do I think due to myself’. Only a slave would open her arms to a sultan ‘polluted by half a hundred promiscuous amours during his absence’. Infidelity had to be an unacceptable betrayal of her belief that their extra-legal partnership would not grant him the customary advantage of master over mistress. ‘I could not forgive it, if I would.’ If he came back only to prove his rectitude, she made it clear he was not to come at all.

  Imlay tried to convince her that her suspicion was the result of her poor mental state.

  Though Imlay and Barlow had appeared as new men from the New World, respectful of women and tender as lovers, they practised the double standard as a matter of course. * Ruth came to accept that her husband would have ‘amours’ during their long separations. ‘I will be indulgent & only require you to love me best when with me,’ she assured him, promising on his return to ‘press you to my heart with as much ardour as the first day of our marriage–for you are every day more dear to me’. Such complicity was unthinkable for Mary Wollstonecraft.

  The Barlows remained in Hamburg over that winter of 1794–5. They lived in the adjoining area of Altona, rising above the River Elbe, the chief town of the Duchy of Holstein, then under the jurisdiction of Denmark. Ostensibly, Barlow worked as a shipping agent, but that particular winter the port froze, and shipping came to a standstill. Curiously, at this very time, he confides to his brother-in-law Senator Abraham Baldwin (the increasingly distinguished member of Ruth’s family who had not welcomed Barlow) that ‘pecuniaries’ are prospering. Some of his gains could have come from his membership of a secret network provisioning the French war effort and from ships like the Rambler, but there remains the question: what happened to the silver in the hold of the Margrethe?

  When the Barlows had left Paris with Joel and Imlay in cahoots in the spring of 1794, they had been in their usual financial straits. By the end of 1796, Joel Barlow had millions in today’s terms–an estate
valued at $126,000. No one so far knows how he made his fortune. Biographers who talk of ‘part-cargoes’ and the ‘percents’ he could levy as a shipping agent, forget the ice. Northern ports were impassable from the end of November 1794 until 11 March 1795. Gouverneur Morris, who wintered in Altona that same year, records in his diary that on 22 and 23 January 1795 many people who ventured out froze to death and frozen horses waiting in the street crashed over. Dealing did go on. Morris, for instance, managed to dispose of some silver on behalf of a French aristocrat, acting quickly, he explains, because it was dangerous to hold on to silver. Joel and Ruth spent that winter learning German, so they said; yet from the depths of the freeze, on 10 February 1795, Barlow informs Ruth’s brother that ‘pecuniaries’ will be bettered by this time in Altona. In the same breath he says that the Elbe has been shut to the mouth for near two months. Even after the port opened in March a traveller standing at the mouth of the Elbe saw ships ‘beat about by the Ice which still floats down the River in huge masses in a most frightful manner…I can almost from the appearance of the Sea conceive myself at Greenland.’ If Barlow did grow rich over that winter, whatever shipping made his fortune had to have happened before the freeze–before, that is, November 1794. Can it be that the Barlow fortune began in the hold of the treasure ship that sailed north in August?

  Mary made a new friend in Paris, Archibald Hamilton Rowan, aged forty-two, a commanding figure and refugee from County Kildare in Ireland. His first political act had been to challenge the clemency of the Viceroy in a case of an accessory to a rapist in high station. Though himself a wealthy landowner–a descendant of a sixteenth-century aristocrat–Rowan had joined the United Irishmen, a reforming coalition of radicals, Catholics, a few liberal aristocrats, and the politically sidelined professional and business classes. Rowan became Secretary, and then on 29 January 1794 was prosecuted for handing out seditious leaflets. Not only was he sentenced to two years in prison–he might have hanged when a government spy discovered that France had approached him to inform on Ireland. In fear for his life, he had escaped from Dublin Prison and fled to Paris. On arrival, he had been sickened by the blood that had literally washed his feet where he stood a hundred yards from the guillotine, witness to the orgy of executions that ended the Terror.