Shelley: The Pursuit (113 page)

A real portrait which gave Shelley much pleasure at this time, was a long-requested one of Leigh Hunt. This finally arrived from London in the third week of August.
³⁴
The thought of Hunt and his family, and the great support they had been to him in the crisis of the winter of 1816, helped Shelley considerably during the solitary hours in the tower at Villa Valsovano. Shortly after receiving the picture, Shelley propped it in front of his desk and wrote the letter which dedicated
The Cenci
to Hunt. He concluded it on a heroic note:

In that patient and irreconcilable enmity with domestic and political tyranny and imposture, which the tenor of your life has illustrated, and which, had I the health and talents, should illustrate mine, let us, comforting each other in our task, live and die.
³⁵

He dated it from Rome, where the play had first been conceived and drafted. Hunt did not read this generous dedication until an edition of 250 copies had been printed in Leghorn during October and shipped in unbound sheets to Peacock at Stamford Street in London.
³⁶

Together with Hunt’s picture, more books, reviews and the first of a steady stream of
Examiners
had arrived in August. Shelley took these up to his Scythrop’s tower, and many days at the end of August were spent catching up on English political and literary news, and musing on the loneliness of his self-imposed Italian banishment. In a letter to Peacock of the 24th, he launched into a long fantasy about living again in England. ‘I most devoutly wish that I were living near London. — I don’t think I shall settle so far off as Richmond, & to inhabit any intermediate spot on the Thames would be to expose myself to the river damps, not to mention that it is not much to my taste — My inclinations point to Hampstead, but I dont know. . . .’

Here Shelley appeared to break off the letter, and walk round his glass tower, looking westwards over the bay, and northwards across the
maremma
between Livorno and Pisa to the distant Apennines. For a moment it all seemed unreal to him, as if he was only half-awake and dreaming. He picked up his pen again and wrote rapidly: ‘All that I see in Italy — and from my tower window I now see the magnificent peaks of the Apennine half enclosing the plain — is nothing — it dwindles to smoke in the mind, when I think of some familiar forms of scenery little perhaps in themselves over which old remembrances have thrown a delightful colour. How we prize what we despised when present! So the ghosts of our dead associations rise & haunt us in revenge for our having let them starve, & abandoned them to perish.’
³⁷
Peacock would know how literally this was to be interpreted. The mood hung on in Shelley’s mind, and deepened in September as the summer sun blazed on and on, and life seemed to move more and more slowly, and only the nights were cool.

22. The West Wind: Florence 1819

Up in the glass tower, Shelley leafed through the reviews and journals that the Gisbornes took from Paris. The impression he had already gained from Hunt’s
Examiner
pieces about the state of English politics was strengthened. A crisis comparable to, or even greater than, those of 1812 and 1817 seemed to be in the making, though it was difficult to be sure. ‘England seems to be in a very disturbed state, if we may judge by some Paris Papers,’ he mused to Peacock. ‘I suspect it is rather overrated, but when I hear them talk of paying in gold — nay I dare say take steps towards it, confess that the sinking fund is a fraud &c. I no longer wonder.’ He reverted briefly to the old Whig-liberal
sententiae
: ‘But the change should commence among the higher orders, or anarchy will only be the last flash before despotism. I wonder & tremble.’ Yet no political change Shelley could foresee at that moment could ever touch Peacock in the East India Company: ‘
You
are well sheltered.’
¹

The mood of permanent summer siesta, and the long solitary mornings spent reading and musing, were suddenly broken by dramatic news from England. Peacock had especially posted a set of English papers by the coach mail from London which only took two weeks. These arrived on 5 September, and almost entirely swamped the appearance of a long-awaited box from Ollier, containing a first edition of
Rosalind and Helen
, and Keats’s
Endymion
, the same day.

The news from England concerned politics: on 16 August at St Peter’s Field, on the outskirts of Manchester, a public meeting of some 60,000 working men and women had been brutally attacked and dispersed by mounted militiamen. The result had been a massacre of unarmed civilians which went down in history as Peterloo. It looked like the beginning of the English Revolution.

There was not much Whig-liberalism in Shelley’s immediate reaction to Ollier on the 6th: ‘The same day that your letter came, came news of the Manchester work, & the torrent of my indignation has not yet done boiling in my veins. I await anxiously to hear how the Country will express its sense of this bloody murderous oppression of its destroyers. “Something must be done . . . What yet I know not.”’
²
In his fury, he had quoted from his own
Cenci
, where Beatrice first conceives the assassination of her father. The passage continues: ‘. . . something which shall make The thing that I have suffered but a shadow In the dread lightning which avenges it; Brief, rapid, irreversible, destroying The consequence of what it cannot cure.’
³

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: