Shelley: The Pursuit (41 page)

But around his own fireside, all was well. Shelley had even grown quite complacent about his family at Field Place, and his inheritance. ‘I do not see that it is in the interest of my Father to come to terms during my nonage, perhaps even not after. — Do you know I cannot prevail upon myself to care much about it. — Harriet is very happy as we are, & I am very happy.’ The regularity of retired country life seemed to suit him, and he mocked Hogg gently for his unhealthy existence. ‘I continue vegetable. Harriet means to be slightly animal until the arrival of spring. — My health is much improved by it, tho partly perhaps by my removal from your nerve racking & spirit quelling metropolis.’
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He was teaching Harriet Horace, and made Hogg promise to bring with him a copy of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
for her; in the meantime she had a ‘bold scheme’ of writing Hogg a Latin letter.
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But before their schemes for self-improvement, and for uniting the little circle, could come to fruition, circumstances once again overwhelmed them.

February was a time of increasing tension at Tremadoc, for it was the month of the high spring tides. The previous year, the first winter of the completed Embankment, the disastrous breach had occurred on 14 February. Another breach this year would probably have been fatal for Madocks, who was already deeply in debt, and he would have been forced to declare himself bankrupt and abandon his whole North Wales scheme. It was absolutely essential that the workmen manned the Embankment, and kept up running repairs, with complete dedication and loyalty. Any form of labour unrest was anathema. John Williams, Leeson and the Ellis-Nanneys were all in a state of intense nervous expectation, as was the whole community. Matters were so tense that Mr Ellis-Nanney, on hearing vague rumours that part of the Embankment was improperly finished, had his wife write to Williams. Williams’s reply still exists,
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repeatedly reassuring them that nothing possible had been left undone: ‘God Forbid that he should have any such an idea,’ as Williams put it.

But it was just at this time that Shelley, excited by other events elsewhere in
England made a most inopportune display of his violent radical sympathies, which were greeted, in the circumstances, with more than usual outrage and horror. At the end of January, the newspapers carried reports of the execution of fourteen frame-workers, who were convicted at York for Luddite activities. Among the local gentry, such news was naturally greeted with deep satisfaction; and at Tremadoc especially there was appreciation of stern punishment meted out to mutinous labourers. But Shelley, on the contrary, was furious. No doubt he aired his views publicly at Tremadoc, and he soon decided to go further than this. On 31 January Harriet wrote to Hookham, with Shelley’s direction: ‘I see by the Papers that those poor men who were executed at York have left a great many children. Do you think a subscription would be attended to for their relief? If you think it would, pray put down our names and advertise it in the Papers. Put down my Sister’s name, Mr Shelley’s and mine for two guineas each; if this meets with your approbation we will enclose the sum.’
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Although this was not a direct expression of solidarity with the Luddite cause, it made Shelley’s sympathies only too clear.

On top of this, Shelley now began to distribute his Irish pamphlets to those he regarded as ‘likely’. We do not know how far this dangerous process went, except in one vital instance. Copies were given to John Williams, whom Shelley persisted in regarding as friendly to all his ideas. From Williams, at least one pamphlet got into the hands of Leeson. We know this from the one letter surviving of an exchange between Shelley and Leeson. Leeson wrote: ‘I beg to tell you that [the pamphlet] was not given to me by Mr Ashstone, nor taken by him from John Williams’s house, —
but
was handed to me by John
Williams
with a remark that it contained matter dangerous to the State, and that you had been in the practise of haranguing 500 people at a time when in Ireland. So much for your friend.’
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The fact that such inflammatory material reached Leeson, particularly with his own personal interest in Ireland and the Tremadoc labour-force, may have produced the decisive polarization of feeling within the neighbourhood. It seems clear that Leeson, presumably after serious consultation with other important figures in the district like Evans and the aforesaid Mr Ashstone, must have come to the conclusion that Shelley should be forced out of the district as rapidly as possible. There is no definite evidence for such a consultation, but subsequent events strongly substantiate it. Whether Williams himself knew anything of this, it is difficult to say; but in his position as Madocks’s manager, it is easy to see how he might have had to play a double part. His essential loyalty was always to the Embankment, and not to any clique or individual. Equally, it is easy to see the motives of the Leeson faction, who disliked Shelley both in his person and in his principles, distrusted his financial promises, and feared his influence on the embryo labour movement in the
village. Leeson’s first move was strictly correct. He sent Shelley’s pamphlet ‘up to Government’, together with the circumstances of the case.
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It was the Barnstaple situation all over again.

Shelley had not learnt caution, however. As always, sensing opposition, he plunged forward. On 15 February he discovered another radical cause to champion. He had been following throughout the winter the case of the Hunt brothers, John and Leigh, who had been prosecuted for libel as the result of an attack on the character of the Prince Regent in the
Examiner
for 22 March. The case had been defended by Brougham, and Shelley had already voiced a trenchant opinion on the liberal side to Hogg: ‘[Brougham] was compelled to hesitate when truth was rising to his lips; he could utter that which he did utter only by circumlocution and irony. — The Solicitor General’s speech appeared to me the consummation of all shameless insolence. & the address of Ld. Ellenborough, so barefaced a piece of timeservingness, that I’m sure his heart must have laughed at his lips as he pronounced it.’
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Now he learnt that the Hunts had each been imprisoned for two years, fined £500 and ordered to supply £750 securities for good conduct over the next five years. Once again he felt required to commit himself in the most public way possible. The letter he wrote to Hookham, with its high, lashing, unshakeably righteous tone, gives us as clear an indication as anything of his mood in the last ten days at Tan-yr-allt. The violent uncompromising manner was the same, both in his letters to London and his dealings at Tremadoc; he was at bay, and he knew it.

My dear Sir, I am boiling with indignation at the horrible injustice and tyranny of the sentence pronounced on Hunt and his brother, & it is on this subject that I write to you. Surely the seal of abjectness and slavery is indelibly stamped upon the character of England. — Altho I do not retract in the slightest degree my wish for a subscription for the widows and children of those poor men hung at York yet this £1000 which the Hunts are sentenced to pay is an affair of more consequence. — Hunt is a brave, a good, & an enlightened man. — Surely the public for whom Hunt has done so much will repay in part the great debt of obligation which they owe the champion of their liberties & virtues or are they dead, cold, stonehearted & insensible, brutalized by centuries of unremitting bondage? . . . Well. — I am rather poor at present but I have £20 which is not immediately wanted. — Pray begin a subscription for the Hunts, put my name for that sum, & when I hear that you have complied with my request I will send it to you. — Now if there are any difficulties in the way of this scheme of ours, for the love of liberty and virtue overcome them.
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Liberty and, characteristically, Virtue were now the watchwords. On second thoughts Shelley, ignoring his grocery bills, suggested a public advertisement in
the papers, and enclosed a twenty-pound note for good measure, a daring piece of generosity.
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With Shelley in this mood, the tides at their peak, Leeson and his friends acutely sensitive to the least shift of opinion in Tremadoc and conscious that the defence of the social order lay completely in their hands, the least incident would have been enough to bring matters to a crisis.

The week of Sunday, 19 February, blew dark and stormy; gale-force winds came in from Caernarvon Bay, and rains lashed the roads into rivers of mud. Water poured through the gullies and clefts from the surrounding mountains; communications virtually closed down; and the
North Wales Gazette
reported that a coach-driver had been blown off the top of the Capel-Curig to Shrewsbury mail.
⁴⁰
The papers in February also carried another notice which either Shelley or Leeson might have observed: ‘Associations for the Prosecution of Felons’ were being formed in several Caernarvonshire districts, as a defence against the increasingly unsettled state of the county. Rewards for arrest were advertised, the highest of which was five guineas for information concerning ‘Feloniously Breaking and Entering any Dwelling House, in the night time.’

On Friday, 26 February a triggering incident occurred. It was of an unexpected kind. Dan Healy arrived in Tremadoc, fresh from his six months’ sentence in Barnstaple gaol for posting unlicensed and seditious papers. He must have been very dedicated to travel in such weather. The Shelleys welcomed him with open arms, and in Tremadoc, the story spread that Shelley’s personal servant, an ex-convict, had arrived to abet his master’s activities. Whether Dan himself had suspicions that the authorities had trailed him from Devon to Wales, or whether Shelley simply feared the reaction of the Leeson faction, is not known. But it is certain that Shelley expected immediate repercussions, and prepared for trouble. When he went upstairs to bed that stormy night with Harriet, he took his pair of pistols, and he loaded them.
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What happened next has been one of the most fiercely disputed points in Shelley biography. Afterwards, Shelley’s closest friends, Peacock and Hogg, both concluded that he was suffering from hallucinations, one of the ‘thick-coming fancies’ which they found so convenient to cover up those parts of his career which they did not know, did not approve of, or which they simply did not understand. Their evidence is obviously partial, but they successfully distorted all subsequent interpretations.
[2]

The external events seem clear. During the night the house was twice disturbed; several shots were fired; at least two, and possibly more, of the large glass windows on the ground floor were smashed; the lawn outside the east front of the house was trampled and Shelley rolled in the mud; Shelley’s nightgown was shot through; and one pistol ball was found embedded in the wainscot under one of the windows in the main drawing-room. By the next morning the whole household was in a state of terror and exhaustion. Shelley especially was in a state of severe nervous shock, amounting to something like nervous breakdown, and his stomach seems to have been strained or kicked during a violent struggle.
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John Williams was called, and the Shelleys moved at once some seven miles out of Tremadoc to stay with the Solicitor General, Ellis-Nanney; they moved the same day (Saturday) without waiting for the weather to abate, or their things to be packed. Shelley wrote the following partially coherent note as they left, to Hookham. ‘I have just escaped an atrocious assassination. — Oh send the £20 if you have it. — you will perhaps hear of me no more, friend Percy Shelley.’
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To this Harriet appended a hurried explanation. ‘Mr Shelley is so dreadfully nervous today from having been up all night that I am afraid what he has written will alarm you very much. We intend to leave this place as soon as possible as our lives are not safe so long as we remain. — it is no common Robber we dread but a person who is actuated by revenge & who threatens my life & my Sisters as well. — if you can send us the money it will greatly add to our comfort.’
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The Shelleys stayed with the Solicitor General and his wife between 27 February and 6 March.
[3]
During this time Shelley slowly recovered; he was increasingly anxious to obtain money to get himself out of Wales, and in vain he attempted to have proper inquiries into the affair instigated. But under no circumstances would he himself go back to Tan-yr-allt. One surviving letter from these ten days, to Williams, reads: ‘I am surprised that the wretch who attacked me has not been heard of. — Surely the inquiries have not been sufficiently general or particular? Mr Nanney requests that you will order that some boards should be nailed against the broken windows of Tanyrallt.’ He also asked Williams for a loan of twenty-five pounds. All report of the attack was suppressed from the local papers, despite the fact that their columns were showing great interest in such night incidents. By 6 March Shelley was ready to leave for Ireland. He had recovered his health, but he was now convinced that some kind of conspiracy of silence was being organized, and he had little hope of justice. News that Leeson, who was putting about a story that Shelley was only
trying to avoid paying his bills, had originally obtained the Irish pamphlet through John Williams only confirmed his worst suspicions.
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