Shelley: The Pursuit (19 page)

By the end of August the thunderstorm had occurred; he was in Edinburgh and married. Events had moved quickly. In late July Shelley had received letters from Harriet in London saying that her father had ‘persecuted her in the most horrible way’, and was forcing her to go back to school. He wrote back and urged resistance. Harriet became so upset that she now wrote to him, talking of suicide, and threw herself on Shelley’s ‘protection’. On Monday, 5 August, Shelley dashed to London by coach, but on arrival he could not persuade Harriet to take any decisive action. He put up at Charles Grove’s in Lincoln’s Inn for the weekend, anxious and perplexed. News that John Grove was proposing to his sister Elizabeth further disturbed him and he made a whirlwind visit to Field Place the following Thursday, 15 August. His note apprising Hogg of the disaster, and reassuring him that Elizabeth would not accept Grove went off the same day to York.

Meanwhile Harriet hung fire for a further ten days of intimate negotiations, undecided ‘not with respect to me but herself’ — as Shelley put it.
⁵⁶
But finally on the morning of Sunday, 25 August, Shelley and Harriet, abetted by Charles Grove, slipped away from Chapel Street in a Hackney carriage, and spent the day hiding in coffee houses near Cannon Street. The two elopers caught the night mail from the Green Dragon Inn, Gracechurch Street, bound for Edinburgh via York. Shelley had in his pocket ten pounds borrowed from Hogg, and twenty-five pounds from Tom Medwin’s father, the estate lawyer at Horsham. Behind him he left a diversionary note for his father, saying without explanation that he was making a sudden trip to Ireland via Holyhead, and asking for his ‘clothes papers gun &c’ to be forwarded to Charles Grove’s in London. The coup was complete. As with most of the crucial events of Shelley’s biography, his own version of the facts gradually became distorted. Two months later Shelley was writing to Elizabeth Hitchener, to explain that the whole thing had really occurred because of Harriet. Harriet had fallen in love with him, rather than vice versa; she had been made so ill and miserable by persecution that she had become suicidal and he had been forced, first to ‘promise to unite’ his fate with hers, and finally to contradict his whole anti-matrimonial position so far as to propose marriage. The protection of the woman was finally, he felt, an overwhelming argument in the case.
⁵⁷
His role thus became that of the rational Godwinian, who had unwittingly been caught up in Harriet’s circumstances, but had responded coolly and disinterestedly in a point-by-point fight for her freedom. Certainly Shelley came to believe this about himself.

The actual facts, as far as we can recover them, do not suggest this is the truth. The evidence seems to show that Shelley far more than Harriet was the instigator
of events, and it was he who pressed them to their final conclusion, even though this was not exactly what he had intended. In his last letter to Hogg from Cwm Elan, it is clear that he was already passionately involved with Harriet and determined to carry her off, though on the basis of free love if he could manage it. ‘We shall have £200 a year, when we find it run short we must live I suppose on love. Gratitude and admiration all demand that I should love her
forever
. We shall see you at York. I will hear your arguments for matrimonialism by which I am now almost convinced. I can get lodgings at York I suppose. . . . Your enclosure of £10 has arrived. I am
now
indebted to you £30.’
⁵⁸
This letter clearly shows that Shelley intended to carry off Harriet even before he left Wales. He went to London with the immediate intention of liberating her from Chapel Street and taking her to York to meet Hogg and get lodgings. Afterwards they might then argue about ‘matrimonialism’. When Shelley arrived in London and put his case, however, it did not work. Harriet refused. Far from abandoning herself to him and his ‘protection’, for more than two weeks she refused to leave Chapel Street at all.

Shelley’s note of about 14 August, some seven days after he had arrived in London, shows him perplexed and depressed in the middle of this unexpected predicament. ‘My arguments have been
yours
,’ he wrote to Hogg, ‘they have been urged by the force of the gratitude which their occasion excited — but I yet remain in London, I remain embarrassed & melancholy.’ Characteristically in this moment of reverse, he turned back to his old fondness for Hogg, continuing in the same note: ‘
Your
noble and exalted friendship, the prosecution of your happiness, can alone engross my impassioned interest.’ Reverting to the struggle to capture Harriet, he concluded: ‘I never was so fit for calm argument as now. This I fear more resembles exerted action than inspired passion.’
⁵⁹

The ‘arguments’ which Shelley keeps referring to here are the arguments for marriage as against free love. What seems to have happened, therefore, is that Harriet refused to leave on a free-love basis, and that Shelley had to talk himself into a proposal of marriage and her into an acceptance. To do this Shelley had to alter his plans radically. Discussions with Charles Grove, the only friend who was fully Shelley’s confidant at this point, revealed that such an elopement would have to be solemnized in Scotland in order to avoid lengthy qualifications and parental approvals. This necessitated abandoning the York plan, and obtaining further travelling money — which Shelley did under some pretext from Mr Medwin when he visited Sussex. In all this it is again clear that Shelley was the instigator. Although one may also feel that it was the elder and more ‘refined’ Eliza Westbrook who was shrewdly bargaining marriage into the Sussex aristocracy for the consummation of Shelley’s youthful passion. This was Hogg’s opinion, and also the explanation given by Shelley’s counsel during the
trial for custody of the children, six years later.
⁶⁰
If such was the case, by her own lights, Eliza did very well.

As the negotiations drew to a conclusion in the last week of August, Shelley seems to have had a slight sense of getting rather more than he had bargained for. There is a story that may be taken as a slight indication of Shelley’s mood at the actual moment of his elopement. The anecdote goes that as he and Charles waited for Harriet at a prearranged coffee house in Mount Street, the two young men breakfasted on oysters and then Shelley stood in the doorway distractedly skimming the empty shells across the street, repeating over and over to Charles with an ironic sigh: ‘Grove, this is a
Shelley
business!’
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Besides the mournful pun, he probably intended a reference to his grandfather’s marital exploits. It also seems from this account that Harriet was late.

Shelley and Harriet travelled non-stop, leaving a note for Hogg, requesting further money, as they went through York at midnight on Monday. They reached Edinburgh on the morning of Wednesday, 28 August 1811, and immediately took out a marriage licence, having been advised on the exact procedure by a Scottish lawyer they met on the coach. Shelley described himself in the marriage book as ‘Farmer, of Sussex’.
⁶²
They moved from the coaching inn to lodgings, and Hogg came up from York to join them, probably during the following weekend. It must have been some time before Hogg arrived that the wedding night incident occurred which Peacock later described, when Shelley drew his pistols on a party of well-wishers and threatened to shoot them if they crossed the threshold.

Altogether it is unlikely that Shelley was alone with Harriet for much more than seven days, three of which were spent in non-stop coach travel. It was a strange honeymoon
à trois
and showed from the outset Shelley’s disinclination to live entirely in the company of one woman for more than a few hours at a time. It was only gradually that Shelley came to accept this about himself, and ask what it was that caused it. Harriet, at this time, it must be remembered, was only just 16 years old, and still really a schoolgirl.

The Shelleys and Hogg spent the whole of September in Edinburgh. Hogg has many droll anecdotes, a few of which can be gingerly interpreted. Shelley had taken handsome lodgings on the ground floor of a house in George Street, and the moment Hogg arrived Shelley insisted that his friend must immediately have a bed in the same house. ‘ “We have met at last once more!” Shelley exclaimed, “and we will never part again! You must have a bed in the house!” It was deemed necessary, indispensable . . . the landlord was summoned, he came instantly; a bed in the house; the necessity was so urgent that they did not give him time to speak.’
⁶³

All three walked joyfully about Edinburgh, Shelley collecting regular letters
from the post office in ‘prodigious number’, and doting on large supplies of comb honey that they found in the shops. A special treat was to visit the dour Edinburgh kirks to hear the sermons, which caused Shelley an exquisite mixture of amusement and outrage. On one memorable and embarrassing occasion Shelley and Hogg attended a Presbyterian catechism class, in which the catechist got more and more angry as his pupils failed to answer the questions correctly. After interrogating them on the identity of Adam, and receiving no satisfactory reply, he went on to sterner stuff. ‘The indignation of the Catechist waxing hot, in a still louder and very angry tone he broke forth with: “Wha’s the Deel?” This was too much; Shelley burst into a shrieking laugh, and rushed wildly out of doors. I slowly followed him, thinking seriously of Elders, Presbyters, and Kirk Synods. However, nothing came of it; we were not cast into prison.’
⁶⁴
From this tale one may gather that both Shelley and Hogg were indulging in a priest-baiting game partly for their own amusement, partly out of genuine ideological outrage and partly no doubt for the benefit of the beautiful, simple and easily impressionable Harriet. On another occasion Shelley was reprimanded in the streets for giving vent to his piercing, fiendish laughter on the Sabbath.
⁶⁵

Shelley was now studying furiously once more, as he had done at Oxford. Hogg recalls how he managed to discover a source of free books in Edinburgh — either at the excellent circulating library, or possibly through the young lawyer whom he had met on the coach. Shelley was continually going out to get new ones. He read French philosophers of the Enlightenment, and discovered Buffon, one of whose treatises he began to translate in the evenings. Harriet fitted very well into this routine, and for her part took up a French romance which she translated and copied out with characteristic style, ‘without blot or blemish, upon the smoothest, whitest, finest paper, in a small, neat, flowing and legible feminine hand’.
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When not employed in this, Harriet used to read aloud to Hogg and Shelley, ‘remarkably well, very correctly, and with a clear, distinct, agreeable voice, and often emphatically’. She would keep this up for hours, well into the night, and Hogg implies that he appreciated this exercise rather more than Shelley who was inclined to grow drowsy and drop off to sleep on the hearthrug.

Shelley, immersed in the scientific speculations of Buffon, was particularly fascinated by the stars seen so clearly in the northern summer latitude, and the three of them would walk the night streets gazing upwards, talking of constellations, modern astronomy and Greek mythologies of the zodiac. For several nights the sky was marked by a startling comet.

Edinburgh itself gradually palled on Shelley and he was soon to refer to their being ‘chained to the filth and
commerce
’ of the Scottish capital.
⁶⁷
The chain that bound them was money, or rather, it was lack of money. Financial difficulties
began to occupy an important part in Shelley’s plans, and he was never really to be free of them for the rest of his life. At the time of his elopement with Harriet, Shelley was living on the £200 annuity from his father. His journey to Edinburgh, and much of his stay there, seems to have been subsidized by money from Captain Pilfold, who generously stuck by his wayward nephew at this time. Hogg also had lent his friend several small sums.

The day after his marriage at Edinburgh, Shelley attempted to secure the quarterly fifty pounds due to him from Timothy on 1 September. Realizing that once the news of his marriage reached Field Place his allowance would probably be cut, he hurried off an innocent filial appeal, explaining that he had (somehow, on his way to Ireland) been detained at Edinburgh ‘in consequence of having incurred a slight debt’, and anxiously awaited his allowance which could be sent through Graham in London. With the brisk calculation he had already decided upon in Wales, Shelley masked all reference to Harriet and wrote in a style of anxious and trusting respect: ‘My dear Father — I know of no one to whom I can apply with greater certainty of success when in distress than you. I must own that I am not so frugal as could be wished, but I know you are kind enough to enclose me a Dft for £50.’
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It is extraordinary, considering what had already taken place between him and his father, that Shelley did not realize — if nothing else — the transparent untruth of this address would alert his father. In the event, Timothy quickly had news of the elopement, stopped the allowance, and wrote an angry and distraught letter to Hogg’s father at Durham: ‘God knows what can be the end of all this disobedience.’
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