Vindication

by Lyndall Gordon

  ‘Did these [men] plan the murder of the King, and the assassination of the royal family?’ Godwin demands. ‘ Where are the proofs of it?’

  Like a lawyer for the defence, he switches from logical rigour to withering eloquence: ‘It may be doubted whether, in the whole records of the legal proceedings of England, another instance is to be found, of such wild conjecture…and dreams so full of sanguinary and tremendous prophecy.’ What he means by sanguinary dreams is reserved for the end, where he turns to address ‘you’, the accused, in the name of the Lord Chief Justice, were he to speak plainly: You had no warning that your attempts at reform were treason; you went to your beds in the happy conviction that you had acted in accordance with your country’s legal code. And for this, ‘the Sentence of the Court [but not of the law] is “That you, and each of you, shall be…hanged by the neck, but not until you are dead; you shall be taken down alive, your privy members shall be cut off, and your bowels shall be taken out and burnt before your faces…”.’ It was largely due to the power of Godwin’s pen that the case collapsed.

  Afterwards, at a dinner in London, the acquitted philologist Horne Tooke pressed Godwin repeatedly whether it was he who had written ‘Cursory Strictures’.

  Godwin at last said carelessly, ‘I believe it was.’

  ‘Give me your hand,’ Tooke said, and when Godwin rose from the table to do so, Tooke put that hand to his lips, saying, ‘I can do no less for the hand that saved my life.’

  A week after Godwin had tea with ‘Wolstencraft’, his diary notes that ‘Imlay calls’ on Friday 22 April 1796 and that the following day he, in turn, called on ‘Imlay’. It’s always assumed that ‘Imlay’ meant Mary, but since this is the only occasion Godwin uses the name in his diary, it’s worth considering whether this visitor could be Gilbert Imlay. It would mean that within a week of Mary’s approach to him, Godwin saw Imlay on her behalf, with the support of her friends Mary Hays and Rebecca Christie. Over consecutive days there was intensive contact between these four. Godwin also includes ‘Imlay’ amongst twelve friends at a dinner at his lodgings, with food brought in from a nearby coffee-house. He later remarked that Mary had come to him in trouble, and that he had not hesitated to help her. Mary’s final discussion with Imlay had to do with the practical matter of maintenance for Fanny. She had been too proud to go back on her word and become his dependant, even if, as ‘Mrs Imlay’, she was entitled to support. On 22 and 23 April 1796 her friends, representing social opinion, may have taken it upon themselves to press Imlay to help her after all. If they did act in this way, it would have been a step towards easing her mind.

  Amongst those present at Godwin’s dinner-party was the actress, novelist and dramatist Mrs Inchbald, remembered now for Lovers’ Vows, the play that rouses the wrong heartbeats in Mansfield Park. Mrs Inchbald had been a widow from the age of twenty-six. A speech impediment had been a bar to stardom on the stage. She had lived in mean lodgings, worn a shabby gown in the midst of finery, and controlled her attraction to worldly men who would not take an actress for a wife. She did want to marry again, and in the meantime made her way with a combination of charm and prudence, cultivating the innocent air of a milkmaid–the modish form of femininity in the 1780s. She was a beauty skilled at wars of words who chose to smile on Godwin. He liked clever women, and was incapable of consorting with anyone he could not respect. * Godwin did not blame Mary for her unmarried plight. He believed (as she did) that marriage is ‘law and the worst of all laws…Marriage is an affair of property, and the worst of all properties.’

  To Mary, returning to her country in the repressive aftermath of the Treason Trials, the English seemed ‘to have lost the common sense which used to distinguish them’. This was a country at war, cut off from travel, filled with soldiers, and draining the poor who were near starvation. When George III rode through London after opening Parliament on 29 October 1795, watchers hissed and threw stones at his coach with cries of ‘Bread!’ and ‘No war! No war!’ An Act of Parliament suspended the law of habeas corpus, and Pitt’s Combination Acts outlawed trade unionism. Two Whigs, the playwright Sheridan and Lord Holland, were the only important politicians to oppose these Acts. Fox and fellow-Whigs did move motions in Parliament for the reform of rotten boroughs, but were voted down by great majorities who looked on them as eccentric seditionists in sympathy with France–saved only by the respect the English feel for the well-connected. Spies were rife, men against whom there was no evidence were kept in prison for years, and public meetings were not allowed.

  Though Mary tried to bestir herself with thoughts of a return to France or a fresh start in Italy or Switzerland, she remained still locked in depression. Disillusion with Imlay infected her with misanthropy: ‘ceasing to esteem him’, she realised, ‘I have almost learned to hate mankind’. She gives out this dark thought as late as 13 May 1796.

  The minister in Godwin responded with measured counsel. Injustice had set Mary, as she put it, ‘adrift into an ocean of painful conjectures. I ask impatiently what–and where is truth?’ It seemed to her that she had ‘ceased to expect kindness or affection’ and wished to tear from her heart ‘its treacherous sympathies’. Godwin talked directly to the soul without fudging: here are your strengths; here your flaws. There was more to this eloquent creature than to any of the lovelier women in his milieu. Hers was no transient feminine beauty; she carried the permanent stamp of nature. As he drew nearer to this nature he was coming to know, he wanted to know it better. Reason ensured that anything could be communicated so long as it was perfectly true–both lived by the Enlightenment ideal. When Godwin admonished, he did so without rancour–that absence of rancour is extraordinary, above the smiting gods, because the feeling’s pure. He told Mary later, ‘I found a wounded heart, &, as that heart cast itself upon me, it was my ambition to heal it.’ We can’t know what else he said, but a letter survives where he counsels another woman in a similar state, waking her to the damage she does herself by trying to break through to a man as dense as rock. He pointed to the ‘morbid madness’ of the persistently lovelorn Hays when Mary’s infection returned–as it did in her low times.

  She had meant to slough off women’s weakness, and had been confounded by her failure. For all her resilience, she could not recover a sense of purpose that had been undermined by the very person she had chosen to promote it. Godwin was sure that no one, especially the great of soul, finds it easy to evade castle-builders of the Imlay sort. ‘The whole scene of human life may at least be pronounced a delusion!’ he said philosophically. Mary must accept that she had made the mistake of ‘imputing to [Imlay] qualities which, in the trial, proved to be imaginary’. In this clarifying way, he addressed that part of her that still clung to delusion, hoping against hope that Imlay might be restored to the man she had believed him to be.

  Godwin took an altogether tougher line on suicide: he wanted her to see how ‘by insensible degrees’ she could come to stake her life upon the consequences of her error. Error, he said. Not love. If love can be recategorised as ‘error’, it will shrink to nonentity ‘when touched by the wand of truth’. It was irrational, Godwin argued, to consign herself ‘to premature destruction’ for the sake of a man ‘so foreign to the true end’ of her cultivation–a cultivation ‘so pregnant…with pleasure’ to herself ‘and gratification to others’. She was ‘formed to adorn society’ and, through her books, ‘to delight, instruct, and reform mankind’. Godwin’s respect reflected her able self, while his cool (though not cynical) acceptance of human nature relieved her of the self-hatred that is the most intractable part of depression. He said that no one would kill herself if she could believe, as it often proved, that years of enjoyment lay ahead. A disappointed woman should try to construct happiness ‘out of a set of materials within your reach’.

  Over the next few months their friendship grew, in Godwin’s words, ‘by almost imperceptible degrees’. At first, they met about once a fortnight. ‘Dined at H[olcroft]’s with Wolstencr
aft,’ Godwin’s diary records on 15 May, and again, ‘sup at Wolstencraft’s’ on the 28th. He was ready to offer a response that could meet the risk she took in being true, and so restore her trust in mankind. ‘Nor was she deceived,’ he said with justifiable pride. She was not the only one to gain his help, but with Mary alone Godwin did something utterly uncharacteristic. This matter-of-fact man wrote a poem.

  Her tart reply is the first sign of release from depression: it marks a return of the humour that had failed since she began to suspect Imlay’s infidelities. The poem, which does not survive, must have been a set-piece, for it reminded Mary of a couplet from Samuel Butler: ‘Shee that with Poetry is won/ Is but a Desk to write upon.’ In such love poems a woman serves as a prop for rhetorical extravagance. Mary had a cure of her own to propose: Godwin should sensitise himself to the play of character in genuine passion, as in Rousseau’s novel Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761):

  July 1, 1796

  I send you the last volume of ‘Heloïse,’ because, if you have it not, you may chance to wish for it. You may perceive by this remark that I do not give you credit for as much philosophy as our friend [Rousseau], and I want besides to remind you, when you write to me in verse, not to choose the easiest task, my perfections, but to dwell on your own feelings–that is to say, give me a bird’s-eye view of your heart. Do not make me a desk ‘to write upon,’ I humbly pray–unless you honestly acknowledge yourself bewitch’d.

  Of that I shall judge by the style in which the eulogiums flow, for I think I have observed that you compliment without rhyme or reason, when you are almost at a loss what to say.

  On the same day as Mary laughed off the poem, Godwin arrived to say goodbye before leaving for three weeks to visit his mother and his friend Dr Alderson in Norwich. From there, he affects to have a go at heartfelt words: ‘Now, I take all my Gods to witness…–but I obtest & obsecrate them all–that your company infinitely delights me, that I love your imagination, your delicate epicurism, the malicious leer of your eye [with slight paralysis of the lid], in short every thing that constitutes the bewitching tout ensemble of the celebrated Mary.’ Her spontaneity seems to draw out a playfulness, untapped till now by Godwin’s ministerial gravitas. He continues to send up romance: ‘Shall I write a love letter? May Lucifer fly away with me if I do! No, when I make love, it shall be with the eloquent tones of my voice, with dying accents, with speaking glances (through the glass of my spectacles)…’

  He also challenged her attachment to an increasingly militarised France. ‘Shall I write to citizenness Wolstencraft a congratulatory epistle upon the victories of Buonaparti?’ If it would rejoice the cockles of her heart he was prepared to pass in review before her the art treasures, like Raphael’s St Cecilia, which ‘that ferocious freebooter’ had recently stolen from Italy.

  By now, Mary had given up all thought of returning to the Continent. She took her furniture out of storage and moved to 16 Judd Place West (situated at what is now the front gate to the British Library, and around the corner from Godwin’s lodgings). No mean inducement was his offer to look at her work. Since Mary chose to write ‘for independence’, and since she had to support Fanny when maintenance from Imlay failed to appear, she did have bits and pieces of work in progress. In January she had put together a stage play based on her experiences in Paris–a comedy, of all things–which she had offered to managers without success. Godwin had read it on 2 June–without encouragement. As summer came on, she was making stabs at a second novel, on the wrongs of women. During July, she reworked her manuscript and began to seek out friendships in Godwin’s circle, a rather belated encounter with sophisticated women of the capital. She dined with Godwin’s recent acquaintance Mary (‘Perdita’) Robinson, once an actress and mistress of the Prince of Wales, now a writer whom Mary had reviewed. She dined also with Sarah Siddons, the foremost actress of the day (famous for her performance as Lady Macbeth), who declared that no one could have read Wollstonecraft’s Travels with ‘more reciprocity of feeling, or more deeply impressed with admiration of the writer’s extraordinary powers’. Mary, in turn, admired the ‘dignified delicacy’ of Mrs Siddons in Nicholas Rowe’s tragedy, The Fair Penitent. Calista’s line about hearts that were ‘joined not matched’ spoke to her own sufferings with Imlay. *

  Then there was Dr Alderson’s daughter, Amelia. Before they met, Amelia had let her know that ‘as soon as I read your letters from Norway, the cold awe which the philosopher has excited, was lost in the tender sympathy called forth by the woman. I saw nothing but the interesting creature of feeling and imagination.’ After they met, Amelia declared that whatever she had seen had always disappointed her ‘except Mrs Imlay and the Cumberland lakes’. Mrs Imlay appeared to her another Cleopatra, reminiscent of her ‘Princess’ character with George Blood. Until this time, Mary’s ties with intelligent women had been intense but few: her sisters; Jane Arden in Yorkshire; Fanny Blood; her pupil Margaret King; and more recently Ruth Barlow.

  Though Mary’s friendship with the Barlows had appeared to end during their period in Hamburg, they, at least, did not forget her. In the summer of 1796 Joel Barlow was acting as American agent in Algiers–in his words, an ‘abominable sink of wickedness, pestilence and folly’–when the plague broke out. With victims dropping on every side, on 8 July he warned Ruth, far away in rue du Bac in Paris, that he had to expose himself to the disease if he was to rescue American citizens and board as many as possible on ships leaving the country. In case of his death, she was to know that he was leaving her what he considered their joint property of about 120,000 dollars (equivalent to about three and a half million today), with bequests to be made at her discretion. The most interesting part of this letter is his concern for Mary Wollstonecraft, who was the only non-American and the only non-member of the Barlow family (apart from the loyal Blackdens) whom Barlow thought of when death came close:

  Mary Woolstonecraft,–poor girl! You know her worth, her virtues and her talents; and I am sure you will not fail to keep yourself informed of her circumstances. She has friends, or at least had them, more able than you will be to yield her assistance in case of need. But they may forsake her for reasons which to your enlightened and benevolent mind would rather be an additional inducement to contribute to her happiness.

  We have seen a Barlow whom Mary had sized up in London as one ‘devoured by ambition’; and we have seen the confidence man of the Scioto scam; and possibly Mary’s unidentified ‘knave’ in the business of the silver ship. Yet Joel Barlow can rise to a hero’s action, and risk his life when rescue is needed. His duality mirrors Imlay who can save Mary Wollstonecraft from the Terror and yet be the same person to dodge inconvenient obligations. Barlow, though, remains visible, while Imlay manages to vanish, leaving no trail–only creditors. Frustration and rage are left to fill up the place where he has been. His voice leaves no sound; his name is rarely on paper. His associates–including Barlow and Mary Wollstonecraft–sustain his secrecy, as when Barlow tells Ruth that Mary has a sweetheart. Both times when Barlow puts this on paper, he gives no name: the man is ‘of Kentucky’. The frontier cover must suffice. Despite their business partnership and network of the same contacts, there is no mention of Imlay in Barlow’s papers–no more than a note at the end of 1795 to the effect that Imlay had marked out seven Parisian cafés. For what purpose? This still remains unknown, but much about Imlay, especially his unshakable sense of himself as a man of ‘principle’, could fall into place were he part of a new secret service, run by the President himself.

  Barlow, too, may have played a part for the man who sent him to Algiers and his immediate boss during his tour of duty there was Colonel David Humphreys, a Yale buddy, once a fellow-member of the Connecticut Wits, then appointed as special secret agent to Europe in 1790. Outwardly he served as a US representative in Portugal, then as American Minister in Spain. Can it be relevant that September 1795 sees him operating in Le Havre? While Wollstonecraft was advancing into the heart of the
‘fraud’ she uncovered in Hamburg and refusing Imlay’s further instructions, Barlow, in Paris, was conducting a cryptic correspondence with Humphreys. They dwell on an ‘object’ that, throughout, remains unnamed, and Humphreys is reminded to ‘instruct’ Barlow before leaving Le Havre. Barlow jots down a memo about Imlay’s seven cafés in Paris–a rare mention of Imlay by name. A sea captain called O’Brien roves between Algiers, Lisbon, London and the seat of government in Philadelphia. There, O’Brien conveys the situation in Algiers to no less a person than the President.

  Washington was prepared to draw on his massive Intelligence fund in order to ransom American captives in Algiers, while Barlow negotiated with the capricious Dey, Hassan Bashaw, who maintained Turkish rule over Moors and Jews and harboured pirates to whom nations paid annual tribute–bar Britain with its formidable navy. So long as the American states had been colonies, they had come under the protection of the British navy, but in the 1790s US trade in the Mediterranean was disrupted, and numbers of American sailors enslaved. Barlow had the help of a Jew called Baccri who understood how to proceed–the tactic was to avert the Dey’s threats, before they were made, by tickling his greed with gifts and promises. Barlow promised an American frigate, and then had to cope with a gathering storm when delivery was–deliberately–delayed. Master-spy Humphreys let Barlow know that Washington wished him to extend his stay in North Africa. Barlow, who had left Paris and Ruth at the end of December 1795, would not return until October 1797.