Shelley: The Pursuit (36 page)

At this juncture, Sidmouth had all the relevant papers passed along to his legal department, the standing council who advised on matters of public prosecution. The last note in the Records Office collection is addressed from a Mr Litchfield, at Lincoln’s Inn on 18 September, and states the result of a legal conference on the Shelley affair. One of the factors which must have played an important role in the decision was Shelley’s legal minority. Counsel advised not to prosecute, but to have Shelley closely followed and observed. Mr Litchfield wrote: ‘It did not appear either to Mr Becket or himself that any steps could with propriety be taken with respect to Mr Shelley, in consequence of his very extraordinary and unaccountable conduct; but that it would be proper to instruct some person to observe his future behaviour, and to transmit any information which might be obtained respecting him.’ A note on this memorandum adds: ‘Write to the Mayor of Barnstaple accordingly.’
⁷⁵

In view of events the following winter in Wales, it is important to see these exchanges, and the final instructions, in their full perspective. The Home Office had now received information on Shelley’s subversive and possibly seditious activities on three separate occasions: from Dublin, from Holyhead and from Barnstaple. They also knew a good deal about his Sussex background, his ‘unsuitable’ marriage, and his ‘connection’ with Miss Hitchener. He was politically suspect, and there was no hope of curbing him through his family. Prosecution had been considered, but he was a minor. The temporary solution to this dilemma was typical of Sidmouth’s policy of establishing a network of spies and informers during this period. Addresses of his correspondents must be noted and filed, and Shelley’s activities must be closely observed. The difficulty now was that Shelley had successfully disappeared. The security system, though surprisingly quick and efficient locally, had one outstanding weakness; it was not co-ordinated nationally. The chances of trailing Shelley after Swansea were negligible. The Home Office had therefore, for the time being at least, lost their contact. Two possibilities now remained. Either Shelley would be informed on yet again, from whatever new locality he settled in. Or else, failing this, in five months’ time, when Dan Healy was released, the servant would unwittingly lead the authorities’ spies to his new residence. But one way or the other, Shelley’s pursuing shadows would eventually catch up with him.

Meanwhile, what had happened to Shelley and his three ladies? Almost immediately after returning from seeing Dan in Barnstaple, they had started discreet preparations for leaving. For transport, a boat to Wales was the obvious answer. But as Henry Drake discovered, the fishermen at Lynmouth would not cooperate, and in the end they had to bargain for a boat further up the coast at Ilfracombe. Money was also difficult, but here they were more lucky. The lady at Hooper’s Lodgings, who did their domestic work, had befriended them. Shelley managed to borrow twenty-nine shillings directly from her, and through her good offices, a further three pounds from a helpful neighbour. Shelley also borrowed a further small sum from one of the Lynmouth people, but how much is not known.
⁷⁶
In exchange, he left a surely rather optimistic draft on ‘the Honourable Mr Lawless’. The tiny amounts here involved suggest Shelley was very nearly penniless, and one wonders how he was even able to leave fifteen shillings a week to keep Dan in necessary comforts during his six months’ imprisonment. However, it was not quite as bad as it seemed, for Shelley had received through the post one half of a large banknote (in the usual manner of splitting large denominations for safe keeping), and it was merely a question of waiting for the other half. This banknote was probably one of the quarterly payments of fifty pounds due from either Timothy or Mr Westbrook on 1 September. When they got to Ilfracombe, the split banknote was apparently cashed, and Shelley faithfully returned all the borrowed money.
[12]
It is clear that whatever the general hostility of the Lynmouth population, Shelley had, as ever, charmed at least’ a few of its poorer residents. When questions were asked in Lynmouth, Shelley’s domestic lady gave little information beyond the fact that they had left for Ilfracombe and would be ‘in London within a fortnight’.
⁷⁷
This was clearly a diversion, for the Shelleys went north, not east. The actual date of Shelley’s departure remains a mystery: somewhere, at any rate, between 28 and 31 August. From Swansea, they hurried north deep into the mountains of Wales, and steering clear of Rhayader, they headed for the long rolling valley of Llangollen, a strategic spot on the main connecting route between North Wales and London. They could then decide what to do next.

Much of the detail of Shelley’s rapid and secretive departure has reached us by a strange irony. For William Godwin had at last decided to visit the Shelleys himself, and after writing to them on 31 August, he set out on 9 September on a autumn tour of the South-West, via Bristol and Tintern Abbey, which eventually brought him to Lynmouth at 3 o’clock in the afternoon of the 18th. To his great surprise and disappointment he found: ‘The Shelleys are gone! They have
been gone these three weeks . . . . I have been to the house where Shelley lodged, and I bring good news. I saw the woman of the house, and I was delighted with her. She is a good creature, and quite loved the Shelleys . . . the best news is that the woman says they will be in London in a fortnight.’
⁷⁸
[13]
Godwin thereafter continued his tour in a leisurely fashion via Salisbury and Stonehenge, and arrived back at Skinner Street in time for tea on Friday, 25 September, confidently expecting his peripatetic friends to appear at any moment on his doorstep.

[1]
Samuel Bamford (1788–1872), Manchester weaver and poet, author of the classic
Passages in the Life of a Radical
(1841). William Lovett (1800–77), Cornish carpenter, radical leader and author of
Life and Struggles in Pursuit of Bread, Knowledge and Freedom
(1871). Richard Carlile (1790–1843), publisher, polemicist, editor of the
Republican
, and one of the great figures in the history of the struggle for a free press in England. From 1821 he was to play an important role in the publishing and popularizing of Shelley’s writing.

[2]
The forerunner of classical nineteenth-century physics, chemistry and botany.

[3]
First published in Germany in 1800; later translated into French; finally published in England by Thomas Hookham in 1811.

[4]
Shelley’s voice was actually far from ‘solitary’; both Cobbett and Hunt roundly attacked the trial in their papers and the
Examiner
reported that when Eaton appeared for his statutory two hours in the public pillory, he was greeted by a barrage of cheers and applause.

[5]
The
Letter to Lord Ellenborough
reappeared twice on its own merits as part of later campaigns against blasphemous libel. In New York, 1897, when the editor of the
Truth Seeker
was imprisoned for thirteen months; and in London, 1883, when the editor and staff of the
Free Thinker
suffered similar persecution.

[6]
These essays mostly remained in his MS Notebooks during his lifetime, and they are still the least known or appreciated part of his work. They are often difficult to date, since the surrounding poems and notes were written at different times, sometimes quite haphazardly, in margins, upside down, and even occasionally right across the original entry. Shelley seems to have seized whatever notebook was nearest. Several early notebooks were re-used years later in Italy, e.g. Bod. MS Shelley Adds. e. 8; and Bod. MS Shelley Adds. e. 11.

[7]
A letter of 19 December 1812 which Shelley wrote from London appears to show that he borrowed a further thirty pounds from Mrs Hooper, of which twenty pounds was only then being returned. But the dating and provenance of this note are uncertain. See
Letters
, I, No. 207, p. 331.

[8]
Neither Godwin at this moment, nor Hogg much later, were fully informed of Shelley’s political activities at Lynmouth, or the real reasons for his sudden flight. Their understanding of Shelley’s political fears and commitments, and how serious they were, suffered in consequence.

[9]
Miss Hitchener, after considerable thought had chosen it herself. As Harriet said: ‘I do not like the name you have taken but mind only the
name
.’ Subsequently Portia became ‘Bessy’, an apt indicator that she had passed her perihelion.

[10]
Lord Edward Fitzgerald (1763–1804) who headed the military committee of the United Irishmen.

[11]
The question of Shelley’s ill-health is a problematic one, and becomes increasingly important after 1815. It seems to have three elements: hysterical and nervous attacks after periods of great strain and emotional upheaval; the spasmodic symptoms of a chronic disease associated with his kidneys and bladder; and a shadowy, psychosomatic area in which the two inter-reacted and fed upon each other’s symptoms. In general, Shelley was healthy when he was happy; none the less in Italy he became subject to periods of nephritic spasms which caused the most acute physical pain, and probably required surgical treatment. The first medical description we have of Shelley dates from 1816, where he is described as ‘consumptive’. As a young man, he showed traces of hypochondria and undoubtedly cultivated the pose of ill-health for the benefit of such as Godwin; his childhood was certainly
not
‘a series of illness’.

[12]
Booksellers at this time performed a wide range of functions: publishing their own and private editions; mail order; organizing extensive circulating libraries which often reached as far as the Continent; and functioning as author’s post office and coffee shop.

[13]
Fanny (Imlay), Mary Wollstonecraft’s child by the American in Paris, and Godwin’s eldest stepdaughter.

[14]
Notably the egalitarian communities of New Harmony in Indiana, and Orbiston in Scotland, 1825–8. For a detailed account of these Utopian experiments, which throw considerable light on Shelley’s communal ideas at this time, see J.F.C. Harrison,
Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America
(1969); and W.H.G. Armytage,
Heavens Below: Utopian Experiments in England 1560–1960
(1961).

7. The Tan-yr-allt Affair

But from Llangollen the Shelleys had travelled east, deeper and deeper into Wales. Passing by the famous traveller’s inn and bridge of Dolgelley, on the edge of Merionethshire, and still hearing of no suitable accommodation, they moved northwards into the wilds of Caernarvonshire and forded the great tidal estuary of Treath Bach. They were now in desolate country, of rocks and heather and sea, with a few tiny farmsteads and villages. Welsh, not English, was universally spoken. Ahead of them lay the Caernarvon peninsula, barely inhabited, which stretched out dividing Caernarvon Bay from Cardigan Bay, thus forming the upper claw of the Welsh seacoast. At the end of the peninsula lay Hell’s Mouth and Bardsey Island. It was a bleak moment, and the Shelleys felt that they were beyond civilization. At this very time, rumours were flying from village to village of the savage murder of a young farmhouse maid, Mary Jones, which had recently been committed in the area. She was found hacked to death with a pair of sheep-shears. The assailant was said to be a giant man, well over six foot, who was known locally as ‘the King of the Mountains’. In late August and early September, armed bands were enlisted to protect the scattered populace and search out the killer.
[1]

Crossing a second, sand-bound estuary, Treath Mawr, they discovered themselves to be on the site of an enormous building operation, involving nearly a hundred workmen, who were reinforcing a massive embankment across the mouth of the estuary to the little port of Portmadoc, and draining and clearing the land behind it. Continuing some two miles inland, they found themselves in the main street of a trim, newly built grey-stone village, with a central market
square, two chapels, several shops, a tavern and a surprisingly imposing town hall with a classically pillared portico. All these buildings were geometrically arranged on a spacious T-shaped ground plan, and were clearly part of a harmonious and integrated design. The head of the T, formed by the town hall and the tavern, faced southwards down the length of the village, and was set flushly up against the base of a dramatic cliff of rocks and undergrowth which rose several hundred feet above the village, ending in jagged tips and pinnacles, beyond which, far out of sight, lay a stony upland moor and a natural reservoir.
¹
They had fallen by chance on the site of one of the most advanced community and commercial experiments of the period. They put up at the tavern, which was called the Madoc Arms. The village was the contemporary ‘wonder of Wales’, the brain-child of William Alexander Madocks, Foxite Whig, reformer and speculator, and its name was, naturally, Tremadoc. Moreover, there was a house for sale.

In 1794, Madocks had rebuilt a little cottage high up on the mountainside above Tremadoc known as Tan-yr-allt (Under-the-hill). The new design was simple and delicate: a set of large, gently vaulted south-facing parlours, with bedrooms above, commanding a magnificent view across the Treath and into Merionethshire. Madocks had added a new slate roof, not conventionally steep and square, but hipped outwards in a gentle flare which formed a ground floor verandah on three sides, supported by an elegant colonnade of carved wood and lattice work. The refurbished windows were not conventional sash, but unexpectedly large casements, opening in a series of glass doors or French windows on to the verandah, and filling the rooms with air and light. To offset the bleak and mountainous aspect of its position, the house was surrounded by freshly planted lawns, vines and a rich vegetable garden, sheltering behind sun-trap walls. The verandah was encircled with thousands of old-fashioned roses (according to Madocks’s specification), and the lattice-work clothed in honeysuckle, clematis and other clambering blossoms. Tan-yr-allt had originally been intended as the throne from which Madocks could watch his Great Scheme unfold in the valley below. But in 1812, threatened by accumulated debts, he was forced to sell the lease to a creditor, Girdlestone, and the house was now unoccupied.
[2]
Shelley instantly applied for the property.