The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge. Adam Sisman
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he was tried in absentia, and after being found guilty by a packed jury, was declared an outlaw.* Demonstrations against him were promoted around the country. His effigy was burned, shot at, hanged, and pounded to smithereens with a sledgehammer. According to the undergraduate Samuel Taylor Coleridge, then making a rare visit to his home town of Ottery St Mary, the locals were very disappointed that Paine had not been ‘cut to pieces at Canterbury’.
Such was the atmosphere when Wordsworth returned to England: a dismaying contrast with the mood in France – and about to become much worse. On 21 January 1793 the former King of France went to the guillotine. The news horrified the British public. (In the Convention, Paine had tried to argue against the execution, only to be shouted down by Marat.) Radicals were already divided in their responses to the developing situation in France, and on the defensive against the new programme of government repression. Now public opinion hardened against them. Just as the radical cause in Britain had been boosted by the outbreak of the Revolution, so it was undermined by the killing of the King.
John Frost, secretary of the Corresponding Society, was among the country’s most prominent radicals. He had been one of the pair of delegates sent to Paris by the Society for Constitutional Information to assure the French Convention that the British people would never support a war against liberty. In this capacity he had been present at Louis XVI’s trial, and as a result he had been denounced by Burke as ‘the ambassador to the murderers’. Early in 1793 Frost was arrested on a charge of sedition, on the basis of an alleged conversation in Percy’s coffee house, Marylebone; he was supposed to have declared that he wanted ‘no king in England’, and that ‘the constitution of this country is a bad one’. (It seems that he was drunk at the time.) On these flimsy grounds Frost was struck off the attorney’s roll, imprisoned for six months, required to provide £500 as a surety of good behaviour for five years or face prolonged imprisonment until he did so, and made to stand in the pillory for an hour. (The latter was no small punishment; men had been mutilated or even killed as a result of blows received in the pillory.) Frost’s was one of a number of prosecutions for sedition promoted by the government in the spring of 1793 in an attempt to intimidate radicals.
On 29 January Wordsworth’s poems ‘An Evening Walk’ and ‘Descriptive Sketches’ were published by Joseph Johnson in two quarto volumes. If not quite his first appearance in print – a poem of his had been published in the European Magazine – these were, at the very least, an attempt to prove himself: ‘as I had done nothing by which to distinguish myself at the university, I thought these little things might shew that I could do something’.2 But his hopes fell flat. Reviews were cool and sales were slow. Given the timing, that was hardly surprising. Three days after the poems were published, France declared war on Britain. ‘Descriptive Sketches’, which concluded in a hymn of praise to the new Republic, could scarcely have appeared at a less propitious moment.
The coming of war increased Wordsworth’s sense of alienation. He loved his country deeply; and hated what his country was doing. For him, Revolutionary France was the hope of Mankind; now his own kin made war on her, in unholy alliance with the despotic emperors of central Europe. Even now these tyrants were carving up Poland between them, crudely annexing the territory of a free people. Wordsworth secretly rejoiced at news of British defeats, and in church sat silent among the congregation, ‘like an uninvited guest’, while prayers were offered up for British victories.
Oh, much have they to account for, who could tear
By violence at one decisive rent
From the best youth in England their dear pride,
Their joy, in England … 3
In France, Wordsworth had come to feel himself a patriot; in England he was made to feel a traitor. Moreover, war with France divided him from his mistress and his daughter, born in December and baptised in the cathedral at Orléans. It was, as he recognised, a profound shock to his moral nature:
… I felt
The ravage of this most unnatural strife
In my own heart; there lay it like a weight
At enmity with all the tenderest springs
Of my enjoyments. I, who with the breeze
Had played, a green leaf on the blessed tree
Of my beloved country – nor had wished
For happier fortune than to wither there –
Now from my pleasant station was cut off,
And tossed about in whirlwinds … 4
Since his return from France Wordsworth had been lodging with his elder brother Richard, a lawyer in Staple Inn.* According to De Quincey, his companions were forced to play cards with him every night, ‘as the best mode of beguiling his sense of distress’. Disaffected and resentful, he was indignant to read the strictures on the French Revolution by Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff. The Bishop’s remarks were written in response to the execution of Louis XVI, and rushed into print a few days afterwards as an appendix to a sermon delivered eight years earlier. The very title of the original sermon was provocative: ‘The Wisdom and Goodness of God in having made both Rich and Poor’. It was hard to take such stuff from anyone, least of all from a man renowned for his venality. But it was the new appendix that especially infuriated Wordsworth. Watson commended the British government’s measures against radicals, ‘the flagitious dregs of a nation’. When the Revolution began, Watson had given his ‘hearty approbation’ to the French attempts to free themselves from arbitrary power, just as he had sided with the American colonists – but recent developments in France had caused him to ‘fly with terror and abhorrence from the altar of liberty’. Pitt’s administration was right not to tolerate the ‘wild fancies and turbulent tempers of discontented or ill-informed individuals’. The British constitution might not be perfect, but it already provided as much liberty and equality as was desirable, and was far too excellent to be amended by ‘peasants and mechanics’. British courts were impartial and incorrupt; parliamentary reform was unnecessary; provision for the poor in Britain was so liberal as to discourage industry. ‘Look round the globe,’ urged Watson complacently, ‘and see if you can discover a single nation on all its surface so powerful, so rich, so beneficial, so free and happy as our own.’
Such opinions were not uncommon. The Scottish Lord Justice Clerk, Lord Braxfield, for example, held that the British constitution was perfect; and therefore that anyone proposing any change was prima facie guilty of sedition. But Watson’s words particularly irritated Wordsworth. Maybe it was because he read them at an especially vulnerable moment. And maybe it was the author himself, as much as what he wrote, that irritated him. Wordsworth and Watson had much in common. Like Wordsworth, Watson came from the Lakes, and indeed lived there still, on the banks of Windermere (far from Llandaff). Like Wordsworth, Watson was a Cambridge man. Until now he had been known as a levelling prelate, the Bishop of dissenters – which rendered his defection more grievous. He had risen from modest origins, a fact that made his condescending attitude to the poor even more unforgivable.
Wordsworth wrote a furious retort, which he entitled ‘A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff, on the Extraordinary Avowal of his Political Principles’. He defended the killings in France, including the execution of the King, as ‘a convulsion from which is to spring a fairer order of things’. Contrasting the Bishop of Llandaff with the Bishop of Blois, he quoted Grégoire’s words at the opening of the Convention, and repeatedly stressed the unanimity of twenty-five million Frenchmen as in itself legitimising acts carried out in their name. Declaring himself to be ‘an advocate of republicanism’, he argued the necessity of abolishing not just the monarchy, but the aristocracy too. This system of ‘fictitious superiority’ produced idleness, corruption, hypocrisy, sycophancy, pride and luxury. Poverty bred misery, promiscuity and prostitution. Britons