Vindication (30 page)

‘I could not sleep.–I turned to your side of the bed,' she wrote to him when he was away, ‘and tried to make the most of the comfort of a pillow, which you used to tell me I was churlish about; but all would not do.'

Mary asked Ruth Barlow to send her
Le Journal des débats et des décrets
(the Debates and Decrees in the National Assembly) and, if possible, her books. When Richard Codman passed through Le Havre en route to London, she gave him a package for Johnson: part of her
Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution
. A ‘View' is what it is, not a full-scale history obedient to the institutional language of the dominant order. Soon after, Jane Austen likewise questions the supposed objectivity of institutional history (‘the quarrels of popes and kings, the men all so good for nothing and hardly any women at all'). More specifically, Wollstonecraft questions the spectator habit induced by court government. Monarchy is entertainment. It's theatre for those it rules. Drama, the great cultural achievement of the reign of Louis XIV, was so pervasive that even the wars of that long reign seemed like spectacles. If the Terror, too, was theatre–and here Wollstonecraft concurs with Burke–this taste for theatre was carried over from the
ancien régime
.

In her critique of theatricality as a mode of existence, Wollstonecraft authenticates a character who appeared ten years before she was born. Clarissa (in Richardson's novel) resists the theatricality of Lord Lovelace, who expects to dazzle her with verbal flourishes, ingenious plots and amusing disguises. When these fail he rapes her. Clarissa's vindication of her integrity made her the most popular heroine of the century. Her story
exposes the stale props of a rake who looks back to plots of woman's complicity, the lusty, conniving image of woman promoted by the Restoration comedies of the previous century. Lovelace proves an anachronism in 1748, beside the new independence of a literate woman. Clarissa's pen confounds Lovelace; her rational language takes us to conclusions that close his show. For Wollstonecraft's generation of the 1770s and '80s, the anachronism was no longer the rake, but the theatre of royalty propped by the parade of courtiers. Mary Wollstonecraft's Clarissa voice offers reason in place of stupid awe at the glamour of privilege, for reason is ‘the image of God planted in our nature'.

A View
discerns the workings of character at the heart of public events. ‘The lively effusions of mind', characteristic of the French, provoke ‘sudden gusts of sympathy' which evaporate as new impressions come from another quarter. It's an English critique of susceptibility and brilliance in favour of solidity: ‘Freedom is a solid good, that requires to be treated with reverence and respect.' Freedom is also female–a mother bird who had shown her ‘sober matron graces' in America, promising ‘to shelter all mankind' beneath her ‘maternal wing'. Wollstonecraft was not content to expound the history of the old order; she explores the psychology of servility ‘destroying the natural energy of man' while it ‘stifles the noblest sentiments of the soul'. The result is ‘a set of cannibals [revolutionaries], who have gloried in their crimes; and tearing out the hearts that did not feel for them, have proved, that they themselves had iron bowels'. Her cool conclusion is that the retaliation of slaves is always terrible, and that the ferocity of Parisians–‘barbarous beyond the tiger's cruelty'–was a consequence of bent laws, nothing but ‘cobwebs to catch small flies'.

Wollstonecraft worked on this
View
throughout her pregnancy, and finished it during her ninth month. Soon after, the
Grande Terreur
set in, as Robespierre pushed through the Law of 22 Prairial, depriving the accused of counsel or witness, with verdicts limited to acquittal or death. The acknowledged aim was to encourage denunciation. For the next forty-seven days, citizens of Paris went to the guillotine at a rate of thirty a day; as Wordsworth put it: ‘never heads enough for those that bade them fall'.
With daily raids on the Luxembourg, Paine fell into a semiconscious fever–jail fever or typhus–and was reduced to a skeleton unable to speak. It was only a matter of time for his name to appear on the list of the condemned; one dawn a turnkey chalked the door of his cell. Since Paine was perspiring with fever, the door had been allowed to remain open. It opened outwards, so that the chalk mark was on the
inside
of the door which Paine's cellmates, claiming a change of temperature, got permission (from another turnkey) to close. The mark now faced inwards. At eleven that night they heard the guards with lanterns trained on each door, approach and stop, approach and pass, and the fading screams down the passage as others were hauled to execution. ‘My God, how many victims fall beneath the sword and Guillotine!' Mary groaned to Ruth. ‘My blood runs cold, and I sicken at thoughts of a Revolution which costs so much blood and bitter tears.'

 

As Mary expanded into her last month of pregnancy, she asked Ruth to send her dress fabric: white dimity or calico or printed cotton–the new simplicity in reaction against brocade and satin. Just after she turned thirty-five, Mary gave birth, on 10 May 1794. She was attended by a midwife, a sensible choice in France where midwives were properly trained. Mary had taken against the displacement of midwives by doctors plying their forceps (designed in the seventeenth century, lost sight of, then reintroduced in the 1730s). Doctors tended to treat women's bodies like ill-designed machines that required their intervention. The danger of forceps to the foetus was satirised in
Tristram Shandy
, where Dr Slop sets a series of disasters in train when he manages to crush the nose of the emerging hero. Mary, by contrast, practised what we call ‘natural' childbirth: an informed, matter-of-fact attitude; home surroundings; support from the father; and an experienced midwife. The pains, though fierce enough, were not prolonged; and, against the custom of ‘lying in' for weeks, Mary was up the following day. The baby was registered as ‘Françoise', born in the legitimate marriage of ‘Guilbert' Imlay and ‘Marie' Wollstonecraft his wife. She was to be known as Fanny, after Fanny Blood. Mary described her labour to Ruth:

When the carrier of this letter was delayed three days, she added a postscript: ‘I am now, the 10th day, as well as I ever was in my life–In defiance of the dangers of the ninth day, I know not what they are, entre nous, I took a little walk out on the eighth–and intend to lengthen it today.–My little Girl begins to suck so
manfully
that her father reckons saucily on her writing the second part of the Rts of Woman.'

Mary Wollstonecraft had always been an advocate of breast-feeding. ‘The suckling of a child…excites the warmest glow of tenderness,' she had said after watching Fanny Blood. ‘I have even felt it, when I have seen a mother perform that office.' During the 1780s only about thirty per cent of Parisian mothers breast-fed their babies; the rest, mainly those who
could afford it, packed them off to a wet-nurse. For centuries the Greek physician Galen was believed when he said that sex and nursing were incompatible: ‘carnal copulation troubleth the blood, and so by consequence the milk'. In the
Rights of Woman
, Mary Wollstonecraft took the baby's part: ‘There are many husbands so devoid of sense and parental affection that, during the first effervescence of voluptuous fondness, they refuse to let their wives suckle their children.' Wet-nursing was often fatal: in France one in two babies died. For those who survived, the custom of suspending babies from the rafters of cottages was hardly beneficial to their emotional and mental development: infants hung there unchanged, sluggish with inactivity, their mouths crammed with rotting rags. Mary Wollstonecraft insisted on the free exercise of the child's body, and its need to be held and touched. She played with Fanny, fed, kissed and hugged her, and confided to Imlay that her initial sense of duty was giving way to love, warmed as much by Fanny's ruddy cheeks, vigour and intelligence as by nursing. Motherhood did bear out her belief that the vital education in tenderness begins at the breast.

Her unorthodox methods caused talk amongst the women of Le Havre, who called her the ‘raven mother'. When asked what this meant, she replied: ‘They all thought I was not worthy of having such a child.'

At the age of three months, Fanny went down with the dread disease of smallpox. Mary's common sense told her to distrust doctors with their bleeding, purging and other potentially fatal interventions. She always put hygiene first, in contrast with the superstition of certain reputable members of the Royal Society like Robert Boyle who had advised blowing dried and powdered human excrement into the eye as a remedy for cataract, and Robert Hooke who had taken medicines made up of powdered human skull. Mary Wollstonecraft could have picked up Dr Haygarth's sounder advice on cleanliness in a book on smallpox published by Joseph Johnson. She tended Fanny herself and washed the child's pustules in warm baths twice a day. Within a few weeks Fanny recovered her bloom and vivacity–‘our little Hercules', her mother crowed.

I
n the summer of 1794 Imlay launched a treasure ship. Its mysterious course would eventually send Mary to Scandinavia in its wake. The need for that journey starts in this quiet domestic period when Mary was nursing her newborn baby and apparently inactive. At this early stage of motherhood she accepted her dependence on Imlay–a little rueful about the clinging tendrils she was growing. But it turns out that the spring and summer of 1794 were not quite as quiet as they appear. It's now clear that Mary played an active part in a sequence of events
before
the treasure left Le Havre, and that buried in this run-up time lie obscure, disparate, but crucial clues–old shipping records, communications sent in cipher, and, most telling, a newly discovered letter from Mary Wollstonecraft herself–to questions long unanswered. Why should she make her way to a remote, craggy region of Norway where there were no roads, only small towns reached by boat? How much of the mystery surrounding this treasure did she know? And more important for her future peace of mind: what
didn't
she know?

This is no fiction: there is no certainty where this story began. We might say it began with Gilbert Imlay's frontier character, or with French needs in time of war. A convenient starting-point could be when Barlow, the only American in Europe with the standing of honorary French citizen, began dealings with a new three-man Commission des Substances, in charge of
provisions. In need of grain, beset with enemies and a British blockade, France was sending out commissioners to neutral ports–Copenhagen, Gothenburg, Hamburg–with sixty million livres to spend on supplies. The commissioners saw the export of frowned-on luxuries as one means of feeding the army and Paris: suppliers could be paid from storehouses crammed with exquisite silverware, glassware and other goods seized from émigrés and those condemned to death. Here is an unacknowledged link between the Terror and American profiteers. Naturally, men like Barlow and Imlay would have deplored the Terror, as Tom Paine did, as Mary Wollstonecraft did, yet commercially they benefited. This may be a rational source for Mary's dislike of what she called Imlay's ‘commercial face': she caught sight of something she could not condone, without knowing quite what it was that he did.

Imlay's contact in Gothenburg was Elias Backman, a Finn of Swedish extraction who exported grain, gunpowder and alum to France. Imlay conceived a plan of paying for such commodities with French silver and bullion–a trove that would multiply his shipping profits–and he may have approached Backman to receive a first consignment. For, in March 1794, Backman sent a petition to the Swedish Crown, asking leave to import gold and silver worth 172 million
riksdaler
, to be carried by an English cutter called the
Rambler
, lighter and swifter than any Swedish vessel. The French trove was to sail under the cover of a Swedish owner (Backman) and neutral Swedish flag. Permission to go ahead was granted.

‘The successful outcome of this valuable transport depends on its secrecy,' Backman warned.

Secrecy was not always preserved. The British already had intelligence of traffic between Sweden and Le Havre, and intercepted a letter from Le Havre to a Swedish merchant: ‘Whatever merchandise you send to this place will be gratefully received, but particularly provisions and military stores; name your own price, it will be paid–mention any house of Amsterdam, where you choose that the money should be placed…' This is the way Imlay spoke, the persuasive imperatives very like those in a letter to Wollstonecraft. She, too, slipped up, even when she tried to be secret, and clues lurk in her letters.

One to Ruth Barlow refers to a ‘disappointment' for the Barlows early in February 1794: this is when France rejected the Louisiana coup that Barlow and Leavenworth had tried to relaunch the previous November. It left the Barlows with no means to escape the Terror and return home, as Ruth had begged. An alternative plan–agreed with Imlay–was their move to Hamburg. France's rejection of the coup was formally announced on 6 March. By the 10th the Barlows were ready to leave, a date that coincides with Swedish permission to import the
Rambler
's bullion. In Hamburg and its environs–a free port and an increasingly lucrative commercial centre–Joel was to handle ships and cargoes in transit. The following month Mary Wollstonecraft, writing to Ruth from Le Havre, mentions the joint enterprise of Imlay and Barlow. This letter slips through the silence preserved by their menfolk:

Worse plague and delay followed, only three days after Mary gave birth: the British capture of the armed
Rambler
on 13 May as it sailed from Sweden to pick up its cargo in France. A court case in London challenged Swedish neutrality, and Imlay's London agent, Mr Cowie, reported to the Swedish authorities. Nothing was proved because the captain had taken the precaution of keeping no papers on board. Supported by a cover story from Sweden–denying the French destination–the
Rambler
could not be convicted, but its release took a while. It was therefore not until the autumn that the ship finally carried that treasure of gold and silver out of France. On the last lap of this voyage, it sailed from Glückstadt (a Holstein port on the Elbe, downstream from Hamburg) for Gothenburg, where it finally arrived on 25 October 1794.

The capture and delay of the
Rambler
is crucial to Imlay's plan for an interim treasure ship, to sail in August. It has come to light that Mary involved herself in this scheme to the extent of dispatching the treasure herself on its precarious journey through the British blockade.

 

Thirty-six silver platters, rumoured to carry the Bourbon crest, came somehow into Imlay's hands. The plate, together with thirty-two silver bars, was said to be worth £3500. With the
Rambler
held up for an indeterminate time, Imlay meant to ship this hoard separately. He approached a Norwegian captain, a young man of twenty-five called Peder Ellefsen, who journeyed two or three times to Paris to collect the silver and bring it to Imlay in Le Havre. These journeys took place during the first half of June 1794, at the height of the Great Terror when Paris was a blood-soaked fortress. To arouse suspicion was death. Though Ellefsen would have had passes secured by Imlay (with the same know-how, we can assume, as ensured Mary Wollstonecraft's safety when she had passed out of Paris six months earlier), it took some courage for a stranger to enter that ever more suspicious fortress and exit with secret goods. Ellefsen would have known how to keep quiet, and Imlay must have had reason to trust his nerve and honesty. At Le Havre, Imlay lodged him and the silver with a merchant, probably the Englishman Wheatcroft from whom Imlay and Mary rented their house. Mary's long-lost letter reveals that she herself
inspected the treasure–the forbidden fleur-de-lis gleaming on royal plates–in Ellefsen's room.

It was Ellefsen who pointed out a ship for their purpose. On 18 June (when Fanny was a month old), Imlay bought this oak three-master named the
Liberté
. The question was how to transport the treasure through a British blockade raring to teach the Swedes a lesson. Imlay had to take the precaution of dissociating his new ship from Backman and all things Swedish. This interim treasure was to be more secret than the first: the cargo small enough to hide; the crew unaware of its presence; and its destination disguised. The
Liberté
was to sail as a Norwegian ship. Its papers named Ellefsen as the owner, carrying only ballast. His mate was a New Englander called Thomas Coleman who took down the
Liberté
's tricolour flag and draped it like a scarf about his waist, in the fashion of seamen. He was the only other man aboard to know of the silver.

Their plan appears to have been twofold. First, to evade the British navy as well as Algerian pirates along the north German and Danish coasts, it would have made sense for Ellefsen to sail for his native shore, taking a northerly route along the coast of Norway. The ship could dodge its way in and out of fjords familiar to Ellefsen, and then follow the Swedish coast south to the trading port of Gothenburg.

The second part of the plan had to be a private agreement (signed on 12 August) between Imlay and Ellefsen: that though Ellefsen was officially the owner of the ship, the true owner was Imlay. Ellefsen renamed the ship
Margrethe
, after Marie de Fine Fasting who became his wife, and after his mother Margrethe, a wealthy woman of statuesque beauty whose seven sons would row her from her estate to the local town of Arendal on the southern shore of Norway.

Ellefsen and the mate, Coleman, quietly loaded the silver at the back of the hold. Ellefsen signed a receipt for it, which Mary and the merchant Mr Wheatcroft checked. The latter witnessed Ellefsen's signature. The receipt was then enclosed in a letter, dated 13 August, to Elias Backman. It appeared to be a letter of introduction, written in English. Should the ship and its treasure, like the
Rambler
, fall into English hands, this letter was designed to confirm that it was not carrying a cargo destined for
Sweden, and that Imlay and the Swedish merchant were strangers who might find it convenient to do business at some later date. Backman was not informed of the silver on its way, and one reason for this could be the danger that such a communication could be intercepted.
*

Since Imlay had to set out for Paris, it was Mary Wollstonecraft who gave Ellefsen his last orders. On 14 or 15 August the silver ship sailed out to sea, bearing Mary's hope that it would bring Imlay the fortune he had always wanted–in her mind, a fortune that would free him to stop scheming and stay with her. She did put probity before money. ‘The fulfilling of engagements appears to me of more importance than the making of a fortune,' she had said to Imlay that summer when he was stressed (presumably by the capture of the
Rambler
) to the point of sickness. Yet events will show that, for all her professed aversion to dealing, Mary did have some investment in the silver ship. Money itself meant little to her beyond a means to pursue a new kind of life, but this silver had come to stand for a future with Imlay, who had become an inextricable part of that life, and all the more so since the birth of their child, now three months old and dearer to her mother every day.

The
Margrethe
reached Norway after nine days at sea. Then it vanished. The captain was rumoured to be back home. It was said that there had been a plan to sink the ship near Arendal, the coastal base of the Ellefsen family, only twenty miles west of Peder's own coastal home at Risør. He denied a cargo of silver. Had Ellefsen betrayed Mary's and Imlay's trust? This mystery would take months–in a fuller sense, centuries–to solve.

 

Meanwhile, a political upheaval took place in Paris. On 27 July 1794 Robespierre fell. Next day he was guillotined with Saint-Just, followed in the next two days by eighty-three members of the Commune of Paris. As each head fell, the mob roared ‘
À bas le Maximum!
', hailing the end of price
controls. Jean-Lambert Tallien, a political moderate, came to power, and the Terror was over. A fortnight later, Imlay left for Paris.

Barlow, too, visited Paris from Hamburg at this time. It's inconceivable that the two did not converge to review their joint enterprise. As the silver ship sailed northwards, and before it disappeared, Mary adds a coda to a letter she sent to Imlay from Le Havre: ‘I will not mix any comments on the inclosed (it roused my indignation) with the effusion of tenderness, with which I assure you, that you are the friend of my bosom, and the prop of my heart.' Her indignation over what appears to be a business enclosure is easy to overlook, buried in a love-letter, but ‘indignation' reappears in the opening of her next letter the following day, 20 August, together with intimations of betrayal by a person whose name is left as a blank.

‘I want to know what steps you have taken respecting——. Knavery always rouses my indignation–I should be gratified to hear that the law had chastised——severely; but I do not wish you to see him, because the business does not now admit of peaceful discussion, and I do not exactly know how you would express your contempt.'

Had this ‘knavery' to do with the silver ship? If so, it is worth noting that the knave was in Paris, while Ellefsen–the apparent culprit–was at this date still at sea. A little over a month later, on 28 September, when Mary writes from Paris to Imlay in London, she again encloses business letters from——. ‘I want to hear how that affair finishes,' she adds, ‘though I do not know whether I have most contempt for his folly or knavery.' We can assume from the pattern of repeated words–‘knavery', ‘contempt'–that she refers to the same betrayal. Clues to the vanished treasure may have lain all along in Mary Wollstonecraft's letters. What can we deduce from them?