Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (44 page)

There are, however, less charitable explanations for Jane’s conduct. Once she returned to London she discovered that her friendship with Shelley made her an important personage, and that his admirers were eager to learn of his final months from someone who presented herself as his chief companion. In denigrating Mary, she was able to exaggerate the role she had played in Shelley’s emotional and intellectual life and to suggest that it was she, rather than Mary, who had access to Shelley’s most private feelings. Her determination to present herself as the central figure in the final part of Shelley’s story may have been in part due to the fact that she was jealous of Mary, the daughter of a famous father, the author of a successful book, with the prospect of an income from Sir Timothy Shelley. (Shelley’s executors, Byron and Peacock, were both initially confident that Sir Timothy would agree to support his daughter-in-law and grandson.)  Jane, in contrast, had no right to grieve publicly for Shelley, and no way of supporting herself. So she convinced herself that in blackening Mary’s reputation she was correcting the record of Shelley’s final months. After all, he had written her poems which encouraged her to think that she and Edward had provided him with support and companionship he no longer received from Mary, poems in which her own talent and beauty was celebrated.

Matters were made worse by the fact that Jane masked her resentment with sweet affection, which made her behaviour all the more devastating when Mary eventually became aware of the truth several years later. None of Mary’s friendships with women was straightforward, and the closest female relationship of her life – that with Claire – was fraught with tension from the moment that they condemned themselves to a shared future by running off to Europe with Shelley.  Nevertheless, Mary thought of Jane as her closest friend in the world, and it took her several years to recover from the realisation that Jane did not return her devotion.

Perhaps more surprisingly, Hunt also behaved badly towards Mary after Shelley’s death, treating her with outright hostility well into the spring of 1823. He chose to believe Jane’s accusations, despite the fact that he had known Mary for years and Jane for only a few weeks. Hunt was a kind man; and the reasons for such uncharacteristically cruel behaviour towards Mary appear to stem from the depth of his devotion to Shelley, which became more obsessive as the months passed. He regarded Shelley as his greatest, most brilliant and closest friend. Wrapped up in his own loss, he seems to have convinced himself that he was more dedicated to Shelley’s memory than Shelley’s widow. Like Jane, he appears to have believed that he was Shelley’s greatest confidant, and, again like Jane, he resisted the suggestion that Mary had the greater claim to sympathy. He believed himself to be the rightful custodian of Shelley’s reputation and he saw in Jane’s version of events an excuse to assert himself as mourner in chief. Shelley had probably told Hunt something of Mary’s depression during their brief meeting in Pisa, and he now elected to interpret Mary’s air of reserve as proof that she did not feel Shelley’s loss as deeply as he. Mary was distressed and mystified by Hunt’s coldness towards her. She had no idea that Jane was casting aspersions on her relationship with Shelley, nor that Hunt and Jane thought her unfeeling. None of them understood that the disputes about Shelley’s memory and the quarrel over his heart were really about who should assume responsibility for enshrining his image for future generations; in short, about who should be keeper of the flame.

Mary later wrote that the events of the summer of 1822 transformed her circle from Keats’s ‘web . . . of mingled yarn’ into ‘a broken chain’.
¹²
By the end of September, Shelley’s Pisan community had disintegrated. Jane and Claire left Italy; Mary, Byron and the Hunts left Pisa. Jane returned to England with her two children, armed with the tiny amount of money raised by the sale of her furniture and letters of introduction to the Novellos (provided by Hunt) and to Hogg (from Mary). In London she took particular comfort from the presence of Hogg, who proved to be an assiduous companion. Hogg, like the rest of Shelley’s London friends, heard of his death via letters sent by Hunt to Bess, John Gisborne and John Hunt. Peacock received a ‘dreadful’ letter from Mary,
¹³
and it was he who conveyed the news to Sir Timothy Shelley that his son and heir was dead. Godwin received the news from an employee at the
Examiner
office. His response was to write angrily to Mary that no one – not even Claire – had thought to inform him of Shelley’s death. He could not bring himself to write eulogies for the son-in-law with whom he had fought about money so bitterly, but he exhorted his daughter to keep her spirits up and to remember that she was a woman of talent and resource. But most of Shelley’s friends were unanimous in their praise of him, and letters passed back and forth which lamented his passing as an unparalleled calamity. One dissenting voice was that of Benjamin Haydon, who recorded the news in his diary.  Haydon never forgave Shelley for taunting him about Christianity. ‘There certainly is something in Shelley’s death!’ he wrote, smugly. ‘When one considers his early writings, his rash unbelief, and his writing
αθεος
*
on Mont Blanc, there is something in his being whirled off in that way into eternity, awful & mysterious.’
¹⁴
The same sentiment was expressed, rather more bluntly, by the
Courier
, which reported Shelley’s death in an article which proclaimed ‘Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry has been drowned;
now
he knows whether there is a God or no.’
¹⁵
 Other similarly self-righteous notices of Shelley’s death appeared elsewhere in the Tory press. Some of these notices conceded that Shelley was a poet of some promise, but their tone was overwhelmingly unfavourable.

Claire remained with Mary until the end of the summer, but with Shelley dead it was not possible for the stepsisters to stay together, even if they had wished to do so. Mary had no independent means of support, and for some time it looked as if Sir Timothy Shelley would refuse even to pay her Shelley’s allowance for the quarter in which he died. Although Byron tried hard to get Sir Timothy to help Mary, it was clear that, in the meantime, she was going to have to earn her own living and live as cheaply as possible in order to survive. Supporting Claire as Shelley had done was out of the question. In one way, therefore, Shelley’s death freed Mary and Claire from one another.

Before Claire left Pisa, she and Trelawny had one perfect day together, in which he appears to have declared his love for her. Neither of them ever wrote about this day, but they both remembered it in years thereafter and Claire marked it with a blank entry in her diary. Trelawny sent Claire many passionate letters in the months that followed, but she never seems to have seriously considered his offer of protection. Perhaps she realised that Trelawny was too absorbed in the constructed drama of his own life to provide any real shelter from the emotional storms she had endured; perhaps she recognised, quite sensibly, that Trelawny’s passionate declarations of love were largely predicated on her unavailability. Still, this was yet another proposal Claire refused. She had declined Peacock’s offer of marriage – an offer made even though he knew the truth about Allegra’s parentage – and she was similarly uninterested in the attentions of Maria Gisborne’s son Henry Reveley, who also knew something of her past. Claire’s refusal to accept the support of men whom she could not love was a further sign of her independent streak. When she turned down Trelawny’s rather vague proposals she had no funds of her own, Byron having refused to pay for a translation of Goethe she had done for him at Shelley’s instigation. Mrs Mason was of the opinion that Byron, the original cause of Claire’s troubles, should assume responsibility for her support, and wrote to him accordingly. But Byron disagreed, so Claire was left with no option but to begin work as a governess. She decided to do so in Vienna, where her brother Charles was teaching English.

Despite the prospect of a reunion with Charles, it was hard for Claire to leave Pisa. She was only twenty-four at the time of Shelley’s death, and Italy was not only the country where Allegra had died, but the place where she had lived for most of her adult life. During the journey to Austria she ‘remembered how hopelessly I had lingered on the Italian soil for five years, waiting ever for a favourable change instead of which I was now leaving it, having buried there everything I loved’.
¹⁶
She tried to focus her attention on the scenery, but was unable to prevent herself dwelling on memories of Allegra. As a result, she later told Mrs Mason, ‘it was all in vain – I saw not mountains or vallies, woods or rushing streams . . . I only saw my lost darling.’
¹⁷
Although she could write of her pain to her friends, she would not accept any further assistance from them. Both Mrs Mason and Mary tried to give her money, but their offers were refused.

In Vienna Claire moved into lodgings found by Charles, and began the difficult process of making an independent life for herself. She wanted to find work as a governess, but fell ill and was forced to rely on the charity of others. Just as she began to recover, she and Charles discovered that further obstacles lay between them and gainful employment.  When officers of Austria’s police state discovered the presence of two members of Godwin’s family in their midst, they made their lives as uncomfortable as possible.  Charles ‘Claremont’, Viennese police records stated, was a subversive who had come to Vienna to incite revolution, rather than to teach English. In February 1823 Charles wrote to Mary of their ‘Police adventures’, and of the ‘perpetual state of uncertainty’ which characterised their residence in Vienna.
¹⁸
Secret files reported that he was the ‘son of the authoress of the “rights of Women” – his father was prosecuted in England some years ago for sedition – his sister married Shelly – the author of Queen Mab Shelly was a deist – was deprived of his rights of a father by the Lord Chancellor of England – was the intimate of . . . Lord Byron’.
¹⁹
As Marion Kingston Stocking has noted, Charles and Claire had unwittingly made powerful enemies. Metternich, Austria’s Imperial Chancellor, was deeply opposed to the revolutionary movements sweeping Mediterranean Europe (observed by Claire in Italy and by Charles in Spain) since these movements threatened the power base established by the allied powers at the end of the Napoleonic wars. Austria was a key beneficiary of the distribution of Napoleonic territory which took place at the Congress of Vienna and Metternich was determined that the revolutions which were destabilising other European nations should not be allowed to infect his country. To this end, he imposed stringent controls on foreigners, oversaw widespread press censorship and ran ‘an administration marked by arbitrariness and secrecy’.
²⁰
The case against the Clairmonts was built entirely on rumour and innuendo, but this did not stop the Viennese authorities temporarily withdrawing Charles Clairmont’s residency permit. Although the permit was eventually reinstated, the whole episode left both Claire and Charles disenchanted with Vienna and Austrian society. ‘I believe it is the only civilized country in the world where foreigners have no legal protector’, Charles told Mary. ‘I am sick of this place and of the manner of living.’
²¹

Claire shared her brother’s low opinion of Vienna. She was deeply unhappy during the months she spent in Austria, her low spirits brought about by a combination of illness, the unwelcome attention of the authorities, memories of the past and separation from her friends. So, in early 1823, with the same bravado which originally led her to offer herself to Byron, she took drastic action to improve her situation. She accepted a position as governess to the children of the Countess Zotoff, a Russian aristocrat who was returning to St Petersburg. Claire’s friends were horrified when they heard she was planning to go to Russia. Trelawny wrote several letters in which he begged her to return to her old life in Florence and declared that her refusal to do so made him deeply miserable. ‘I would give up every other hope in life to have you near me, – you say it would not ultimately tend to our happiness – I know not that – nothing can be more outcast and wretched than we are now.’
²²
Claire remained impervious to Trelawny’s pleas. On 22 March 1823 she began what he termed her ‘compulsive emigration to the north’.
²³
Nothing more was heard from her for over a year. She seemed simply to disappear into a snowbound Russian wilderness.

Back in Pisa, the community of exiles dwindled still further. By the end of September only Charles Brown, recently arrived from England, remained in the city. Mary’s departure came about because of a decision by the authorities to exile Teresa Guiccioli’s father and brother from Tuscany. The Gambas were allowed into Tuscany on sufferance after their exile from Romagna, on condition that they lived quietly, without disturbing the authorities or inciting public disorder. Both the Masi affair and the brawl between Byron’s servants and Pietro Gamba contravened this condition and the Gambas were instructed to leave the state. In order for Byron to remain close to Teresa he had to go too. This forced the Hunts to leave Pisa in his wake, because they were entirely dependent on him and
The Liberal
for their survival. Byron decided to move his household to Genoa, and the Hunts had little option but to follow him there.