The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge. Adam Sisman
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a state of inferiority to our oppressors, that they were sent into the world to scourge and we to be scourged. Accordingly we see the bulk of mankind actuated by these fatal prejudices, even more ready to lay themselves under the feet of the great, than the great are to trample upon them.
Wordsworth’s use of the first person plural identified him with the oppressed, the ‘swinish multitude’ of Burke’s notorious sneer. ‘Redress is in our power’ – but the popular mind had been ‘debauched’.
Left to the quiet exercise of their own judgment do you think the people would have thought it necessary to set fire to the house of the philosophic Priestley, and to hunt down his life like that of a traitor or a parricide; – that, deprived almost of the necessaries of existence by the burden of their taxes, they would cry out as with one voice for a war from which not a single ray of consolation can visit them to compensate for the additional keenness with which they are about to smart under the scourge of labour, of cold, and of hunger?
Wordsworth deplored the ‘infatuation with war, ‘which is now giving up to the sword so large a portion of the poor and consigning the rest to the more slow and painful consumption of want’. Drawing on his own experience of the Lonsdale lawsuit, he condemned ‘the thorny labyrinth of litigation’, ‘the consuming expense of our never-ending process, the verbosity of unintelligible statutes, and the perpetual contrariety in our judicial decisions’. In a bitterly sarcastic finale he thanked the Bishop for his ‘desertion’ from the friends of liberty, ‘conscious that an enemy lurking in our ranks is ten times more formidable than when drawn out against us’.5*
Wordsworth’s arguments were made with passionate fervour. In them one can trace the influence of the seventeenth-century Puritans, republican writers like Sidney, Marvell and Harrington, as well as that of Paine and the French orators whose debates he had heard so recently.6 But primarily this was a very personal piece of writing, the fierce heat of the author’s emotions blazing on the page. It is beyond question that Wordsworth wanted to blast Watson. Yet his diatribe was not published. Why not?
It is suggestive that the surviving manuscript of the ‘Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff’ is not in Wordsworth’s hand. Perhaps he had a fair copy made as a first step towards publication, and then something prevented him from proceeding? It may have been difficult to find a publisher willing to risk publishing such an intemperate pamphlet in such a combustible climate. There was also a considerable risk to Wordsworth himself, even if he published it anonymously. To sign yourself ‘a Republican’ at such a moment, as Wordsworth had done, was provocative; it implied approval of Louis’s execution. ‘The very term is become one of the most opprobrious in the English Language,’ Priestley was quoted as saying in February 1793. The author of such a pamphlet would be notorious if identified; he might well face prosecution, like Frost; he could certainly abandon any hopes he might still cherish of preferment in the Church, or in any other profession. Some years later Gilbert Wakefield would be sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for writing what was deemed to be a seditious pamphlet,* in response to another effusion of Watson’s. Wordsworth’s elder brother may have urged him to suppress the work. Perhaps prudence triumphed over passion.
Whatever happened, the letter to the Bishop did not appear in print. Wordsworth remained angry and frustrated.
If Wordsworth had been in any doubt about the risks of publishing his ‘Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff’ at such a time, he needed to look no further than his old university, where proceedings were beginning against William Frend, a Fellow of Jesus College, for publishing what was in most ways a much more innocuous pamphlet. Its title, Peace and Union,† does not sound particularly provocative. But early in 1793 ‘peace’ was a dirty word.
Cambridge attitudes to the Revolution reflected those of the country as a whole. The university had welcomed its early manifestations; there had been a proposal to hold an annual dinner to mark the fall of the Bastille. The young men were encouraged to write on the subject. In September 1790 one of them delivered a prize-winning speech in Trinity College chapel in memory of William III, hero of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, making an explicit comparison with recent events in France: ‘Liberty has begun her progress, and hope tells us, that she has only begun.’7
Subsequent developments across the Channel had divided opinion in Cambridge, as they had divided opinion everywhere. Many of the older men recoiled from the violent disturbances that ensued as the French authorities lost control of events. In the summer of 1792 they signalled their feelings by sending a loyal address to King George. But not all of them concurred. Radicals and reformists sympathetic to the revolutionaries constituted an intellectually active minority within the university, centred on Frend’s college, Jesus. Many of these were more or less openly nonconformist (particularly Unitarian). Though in theory it was impossible to take a degree or to obtain a college Fellowship without subscribing to the Thirty-Nine Articles (the measure of conformity to the Church of England), in practice there was a degree of toleration. Nonconformists were not permitted to teach, but they were usually allowed to retain their Fellowships and to reside in college.
Among the undergraduates, the developing Revolution stimulated impassioned debate. Younger men were much more open to change, much less wary of turmoil. Some zealots relished Revolutionary violence as a necessary purge; others justified it in the service of a greater good. Revolutionary rhetoric made a compelling appeal to the young; the high ideals of the revolutionaries contrasted strongly with the cynical corruption omnipresent in British society. The Revolution stressed abstract virtues: liberty, fraternity and equality. Its reactionary opponents seemed negative in their reliance on tradition, caution and stability. The revolutionaries believed in the nobility of man – though not of course in that of certain criminal individuals – and what young person does not believe in the nobility of man? The Revolution was the future, or so it seemed. To the intellectually curious, this experiment in humanity could not but be fascinating.
Moreover, it was hard not to feel moved by the events in France. Who could fail to be stirred by the heroic defence of the Republic against seemingly insuperable odds? Professional armies of mercenaries had been beaten back by untrained boys. In Paris, barely-armed citizens, men and women alike, had prevailed time and again against the organised musketry of soldiers. The Convention itself was a theatre, its theme the fate of mankind, its principals men like Marat and Robespierre, distinguished not by the pedigree of their bloodlines but by their strength of character, their courage, their conviction, their purity.
As tension increased between Britain and France, so divisions at home became deeper and the debate more heated. In Cambridge, as in the rest of the country, positions were hardening. There were riots in the city that winter: a dissenters’ meeting house and several shops were attacked. Tom Paine was burned in effigy on the last day of 1792. A hundred and twelve local publicans solemnly pledged to report to the magistrates treasonable or seditious conversations, books, or pamphlets. Nonetheless, ‘pamphlets swarmed from the press’. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was then in his second year at Jesus, and according to his fellow undergraduate and former schoolmate Charles Valentine Le Grice, his room was ‘the constant rendezvous of conversation-loving friends’. There was no need for the other undergraduates to read the latest pamphlets, because Coleridge had read them all on the morning they appeared; ‘and in the evening, with our negus,* we had them viva voce gloriously’.8
One such pamphlet was Fox’s Letter to the Westminster Electors, which followed the line he had taken in Parliament in attempting to soothe the ‘false alarm’ raging in the country. Fox believed the government to be deliberately stirring up animosity towards reformists and dissenters, using rumour and hearsay in support of its repressive policies.