41


NYPL RESEARCH LIBRARIES
3 3433 07479596 8
THE
HERMIT OF
OF MARLOW
BY
H BUXTON FORMAN
London
PRINTED FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION
MDCCCLXXXVII


1. Mance (Shelley, PB)


NCC
(Shelle
Forman





THE HERMIT OF MARLOW





Of this Book
Twenty-five Copies only have been printed









T
100DDD
ALBION HOUSE, MARLOW, BUCKS,
SHELLEY'S RESIDENCE IN 1817.
Fac-simile of a Woodcut published in
"The Mirror of Literature, Amusement,
and Instruction," for Saturday the
2nd of March 1833, No. 593,
Vol. XXI, p. 129.


THE
HERMIT OF MARLOW
MARLOW
A
CHAPTER
IN THE
HISTORY OF REFORM
BY
H BUXTON FORMAN
MAGNE
London
PRINTED FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION
1887
}....


* ME NEW YORK
PELIC LIBRARY
327947B
SR, LENOX AND
POLLEN FOUNDATIONS
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All
ME
Tharp-101
THE HERMIT OF MARLOW,
A CHAPTER IN THE
HISTORY OF REFORM.
Read before the SHELLEY SOCIETY, April 13, 1887.
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,-The few remarks I have
to offer you this evening are intended to form an
introduction to the Shelley Society's forthcoming
facsimile of the poet's manuscript of his political
pamphlet entitled A Proposal for Putting Reform to
the Vote throughout the Kingdom. The first lecture
delivered to this Society after the Inaugural Address of
the Rev. Stopford Brooke was one which I gave on the
Vicissitudes of Queen Mab, and which was described as
a chapter in the History of Reform. The same descrip-
tion would fit more or less nearly the paper which I
read to you on the 9th of February last, concerning The
Mask of Anarchy; and indeed many of our subjects.
during the next few years must perforce come within the
scope of such a title. Our subject for this evening, at all
events, is before all things a chapter in the History of
Reform; and I fear you will not find in it even so
much variety as there has been in previous chapters.
In the year 1817 the wretchedness and unrest of the
lower classes in England had taken a form sufficiently
marked to be the occasion of grave disquietude on the
part of the government and the privileged and pre-
datory classes, while, to the liberal-minded and tender-
hearted, the need for some alleviation of a general kind
B


IO
THE HERMIT OF MARLOW.
for the wide-spread misery and oppression was fast
becoming more and more visibly urgent. To make
matters worse, the year 1816 had been a bad year for
the farmers. There were countless mechanics and
labourers who had been thrown out of work in con-
sequence of the introduction of machinery, and the
already growing power of foreign nations to compete
with us in trade and manufacture. Then, as now,
there were plenty of demagogues engaged in stirring
up the people to rash action; and then, as not now,
there were government spies who earned a good living
by mixing with the disaffected, inciting them to
acts and utterances which could be construed into
sedition or treason, and then betraying their poor dupes
to the gaol or even the gallows. The people were
practically unrepresented in Parliament, and were to a
great extent at the mercy of those who had no mercy,
the shameful Liverpool administration,-Castlereagh,
Sidmouth, Eldon, and Company. Moreover, in the
previous year, 1816, the working classes, ignorant
though honest in the main, had been sufficiently rash
and tumultuous in their agitations for reform to create
a strong feeling against them in the great and powerful
middle class; and the last complete year which Shelley
passed in his own country was marked by a positive
decline of the cause of reform. It is true the people
had still their staunch and hardy advocates of several
kinds and degrees. Major Cartwright and Sir Francis
Burdett and the Honourable Douglas Kinnaird were
their strong and bold supporters among public men;
William Cobbett and William Hone were performing
rough literary labour in the popular cause; Leigh Hunt,
whose nature fitted him better for the purlieus of dilet-
tantedom, had thrown himself into the hurley-burley
of the same cause, and was doing good work in The
Examiner; and there was altogether a goodly and
growing "cloud of witnesses for the rights of
the people. And yet, when Shelley passed his
latest Christmas at an English fire-side, the year was
closing in utter blankness as to any public good which
had been accomplished. The reform meetings and
""


THE HERMIT OF MARLOW.
II
petitions had for the moment failed; an attempted inter-
ference with the legal robbery carried on by the holding
of sinecures had ended in smoke; and the popular
cause was for the moment as a stream returning towards
its source. It may possibly have been a perception of
this retrograde tendency in the politics of his country
that called into fresh and strengthened activity the
reforming spirit of Shelley, and goaded him not merely
to produce the two essays in concrete politics which
mark the year 1817, but also to compose his largest
work, that daring Laon and Cythna whereby he hoped
to awaken the better classes of his countrymen and
countrywomen from their apathy, and startle them into
a moral and intellectual fermentation calculated to bring
about reform in all departments, radical, sweeping, and
conclusive. But I think he can hardly have perceived
the retrogression so early as February, when his reform
pamphlet was probably written, for at that time the
great crusade that was going on in the early part of the
year, the crusade of the reform meetings held by
influential people, and numberless petitions for reform.
addressed to the House of Commons, had not yet
failed of its object. I think he must have been urged to
issue this particular pamphlet by a wise perception that
some of the most prominent reformers were asking not
only what it was next to impossible to grant, but what
the people were not ripe to exercise-universal suffrage.
It was certainly not that he had nothing particular to
do just then, no urgent personal cares to occupy him,
no members of his own more intimate circle claiming
help and active sympathy, no dreadful memories of
recent events to harass him, and no impending
disasters to struggle against. On the contrary, the
year 1816 had not only seen the death of Harriett
Shelley and Fanny Godwin by suicide, incidents un-
speakably harrowing to him,-not only did the close
of that year witness the beginning of his troubles about
Harriett's children; but the fiery planet Byron had
come into the Shelleyan sphere and left him with the
charge of Claire Clairmont, about to become the mother
of Allegra Byron; while Godwin, Leigh Hunt, and


12
THE HERMIT OF MARLOW.
Peacock, with their "large claims of general justice,"
were never far off.
During the first two months of 1817 Shelley was
greatly occupied with preparations for the Chancery
suit, which eventually deprived him definitely of the
charge of Ianthe and Charles; and in January Claire's
little Allegra was born at Bath, Mary Shelley being also
there, and Shelley in London. Shortly Mary joined
him in London; and it was seemingly during the busy
time immediately preceding their settlement at Marlow
that the political situation appeared to him so pressing as
to call forth A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote
throughout the Kingdom: it was apparently while the
Chancery suit was still pending; for the pamphlet came
out about the middle of March, and Lord Eldon's
decision on the suit was not given till the 27th.
The house which Shelley had taken at Marlow, to
оссиру "for ever" with Mary and her child, if not with
Claire and the little Allegra and many regular or
desultory camp-followers, bore the propitious name of
"Albion House." The household migrated to Marlow
"in the last week in February," says Professor Dowden,¹
"before the house was ready." Shelley was back in
London before taking possession, and finally "seems to
have entered the house in the week March 9-16."2 This
perpetual residence was secured, it seems, just in time to
yield a pseudonym for the poet, who was then suffering
keenly from the baleful effects of two early works filed by
the Westbrooks in the Court of Chancery, in support of
allegations made to deprive him of the custody of his
children. The fact that Queen Mab and the Letter to
Lord Ellenborough had been used against him, though
with results not then disclosed, may have influenced him to
conceal his authorship of the reform pamphlet; for, though
moderate compared with much writing of the period
on the Liberal side, the Proposal was still sufficiently
daring, and would, in the eyes of Lord Eldon, the
Westbrooks, and other magnates and nobodies, have
added to his religious and social enormities a definite
1 Life of Shelley, vol. ii, p. 110.
2 Ibid.


THE HERMIT OF MARLOW.
13
-----
attempt at political agitation. For whatever reason, he
elected to place upon the pamphlet no author's name,
and to let it go out to the world as from " The Hermit
of Marlow," a designation which it pleased him to
keep during the greater part of his residence in that
primitive Buckinghamshire town on the banks of the
Thames, though it must be confessed that "Albion
House," albeit not then cut up into tenements and turned
in part into a public-house as it is now, was not in any
respect like a hermitage. It stood, as it stands to-day.
right on the roadside (West Street is the name of
the road; but it is still not much like a street); and
solitude was not a marked characteristic of the con-
ditions of residence at Marlow. Whether Shelley's
friends knew him in 1817 as "The Hermit," I cannot
say; but he himself brought out the title for use again.
in November, when he issued his second political pam-
phlet of 1817, ostensibly An Address to the People on the
Death of the Princess Charlotte, but really an eloquent
appeal against the iniquitous execution of Brandreth,
Turner, and Ludlam, the victims of the government spy
Oliver and one of those bogus conspiracies which were
an ugly feature of the anti-popular tactics in those days
of "Murder, Fraud, and Anarchy."
But to return to the Hermit's first Marlow pamphlet,
-the same good fortune which, as we shall see anon,
attended the scheme of reform there advocated, attended
also the tangible substance incorporating that scheme,-
that is to say if preservation is to be regarded as a
thing to be desired. Unlike the Hermit's other
pamphlet, of which no manuscript, or proof-sheet, or
copy of the original issue is known to be extant, the
Proposal is preserved in all three stages. Not only have
copies of the extremely rare print come down to us, but
the proof-sheets revised by Shelley, and bearing sketchy
drawings from his pen, were preserved by Leigh Hunt,
and are now in the collection of Sir Percy and Lady
Shelley; while the manuscript sent to the printer, roughly
and rapidly written, full of erasures and corrections, and
probably the only copy written out by Shelley, remained
in the hands of Mr. Ollier, the publisher, whose family, in
с


14
THE HERMIT OF MARLOW.
the fulness of time, sold it. This took place in July
1877; and I refrain now from any textual examination
of the manuscript, because Mr. Francis Harvey of St.
James's Street, who bought this holograph at auction in
the ordinary way of business, gave me, with exemplary
courtesy and generosity, full opportunity to, exhaust the
subject when I reprinted the pamphlet in my edition of
Shelley's Prose Works (4 volumes, 1880). I believe the
foot-notes to the Proposal give all that can be given in
the way of variorum readings and cancelled passages;
and it is a pleasure to me to think that Mr. Harvey, of
whom I had no previous knowledge, and on whom I
certainly had no claim, entertained an angel unawares.
Not that I ever was an angel, or expect ever to be one;
but it was the record of the particulars of the manuscript
in my notes that eventually found Mr. Harvey a customer
for his costly treasure in the person of Mr. Wise, who
has allowed it to be facsimile'd for the Shelley Society's
Extra Series.
But the luck of preservation connected with the Pro-
posal goes further yet. As far as I know, there is but one
reference to the Princess Charlotte pamphlet in all the
extant Shelley correspondence. Mrs. Shelley's diary
records that he began a pamphlet on the 11th of
November and finished it on the 12th; and there is a
little note to Ollier, dated the 12th, sending a part of the
manuscript for press.¹ These are doubtless references to
the Address; but in the case of the Proposal we have
Shelley's instructions to his publisher in some detail.
The following letter is undated, un-post-marked, and, I
believe, unpublished :—
DEAR SIR,
I inclose you the Revise which may be put to press
when corrected, and the sooner the better. I inclose
you also a list of persons to whom I wish copies to be
sent from the Author, as soon as possible. I trust you
will be good enough to take the trouble off my hands.-
1 Dowden's Life of Shelley, vol. ii, p. 158.


THE HERMIT OF MARLOW.
15
Do not advertise sparingly: and get as many book-
sellers as you can to take copies on their own account.
Sherwood Neely & Co, Hone of Newgate Street,
Ridgeway, and Stockdale are people likely to do so
-Send 20 or 30 copies to Messrs. Hookham & Co
Bond Street without explanation. I have arranged
with them.
Send 20 copies to me addressed to Mr. Hunt, who
will know what to do with them if I am out of town.-
Your very obedient Sert
P. B. SHELLEY
P
The list which Shelley sent to Mr. Ollier in the fore-
going letter was a pretty considerable one, designed to
dispose of fifty-seven copies of the pamphlet, besides the
forty or fifty referred to in the letter; and the instructions
as to advertizing and so on indicate regular publication.
According to entries made on the list, thirty-one copies
were sent out "from the Author." A copy also appears
to have reached either Southey or The Quarterly Review;
for in the heading to his article on "The Rise and Pro-
gress of Popular Disaffection,"¹ the title of Shelley's pam-
phlet figures, though the Proposal is not alluded to in the
text of the article. On the whole the pamphlet ought
not to be so extremely rare; and the Shelley Society
will probably stir up hiding-holes and bring copies
to light.
In another extant letter to Mr. Ollier, written at
Marlow on the 14th of March 1817, the Hermit asks
"How does the pamphlet sell?" Of the answer we know
nothing; but it was probably the negative to which he was
already well accustomed; and in this case the incongruity
between the bold title and the shy retiring pseudonym
might not unnaturally have deterred from purchase even
the very elect of reformers.
When one wants to form an idea of the influences
working from without, at a particular time, on a man
vitally interested as Shelley was in the progress of
1 Quarterly for January 1817, published the following April.


16
THE HERMIT OF MARLOW.
public affairs, it is no bad plan, leisure permitting, to
consult a file of some contemporary daily newspaper
and the relative volumes of Hansard's Parliamentary
Debates. In default of leisure or opportunity for bring-
ing this cumbrous apparatus to bear on the present
subject, I will ask you to accompany me in imagination
while I turn over the leaves of a weekly newspaper
of 1817 instead; and how can we do better than
take Leigh Hunt's ultra-radical print, The Examiner,
with its audacious "Leontian" leaders, its excellent
parliamentary and other reports, and its varied and
multitudinous notes of news? Moreover, this paper
for 1817 is not unembellished by the genius of many
of the Shelley circle; and it is a pleasure to glance
over pages in which we are conscious of the presence
of Leigh Hunt passim, stumble upon sonnets by
Keats, meet once and again Haydon and Hazlitt,
fall in with dear delightful Horace Smith, and even
get a taste of the quality of Shelley himself, who
was a contributor of Hunt's as well as a constant
reader.
Before we take to our Examiner, it will be worth
while to glance down that list of persons to whom
Shelley ordered his publishers to send the Proposal for
Putting Reform to the Vote. This list is printed in The
Shelley Library, Part I, page 67; but I will read it to
you now, because it includes the names of most of the
persons marked by liberal views on whose track we shall
presently come in our radical newspaper. The list is
as follows:-
Sir Francis Burdett M.P.*
Mr. Peters of Cornwall
Mr. Brougham M.P.*
Lord Grosvenor *
Lord Holland *
Lord Grey *
Mr. Cobbett *
Mr. Waithman *
Mr. Curran
Hon. Douglas Kinnaird *
Hon. Thos. Brand M.P.*
Lord Cochrane M.P.
Sir R. Heron M.P.
The Lord Mayor*
Mr. Montague Burgoyne
Major Cartwright *
Messrs. Taylor Sen. & Jun. of
Norwich
Mr. Place, Charing Cross *
Mr. Walker of Westminster
Lord Essex *
Capt. Bennet M.P.*


THE HERMIT OF MARLOW.
17
The Birmingham Hampden
Club (5 copies)
Mr. I. Thomas, St. Albans,
Mon.
Mr. Philipps, Whitston, Mon.
Mr. Andrew Duncan, Provost
of Arbroath
Mr. Alderman Goodbehere **
Mr. Jones Burdett *
Mr. Hallet of Berkshire (5
copies)
The London Hampden Club
(10 copies) *
The Editors of the Statesman *
the Morning Chronicle* and
the Independent Whig*
Mr. Montgomery (the Poet) of
Sheffield
Mr. R. Oven of Lanark
Mr. Madocks M.P.
Mr. George Ensor
Mr. Bruce
Mr. Sturch (of Westminster) *
Mr. Creery M.P.
Gen'. Sir R. Ferguson M.P.*
Against some of these names, distinguished by
asterisks, the word sent was written in the original list,
and not by Shelley. I presume this was done at
Messrs. Ollier's office, and that copies were really sent
to the persons thus indicated.
To turn, now, to our Examiner,-the year opens pro-
pitiously for us; for on New Year's Day the patriarchal
reformer Major Cartwright took the chair at a meeting of
the Westminster Electors at the Crown and Anchor,
convened to receive from their popular and gallant repre-
sentative in Parliament, Lord Cochrane, his answer to an
address which they had voted him in assurance of their
continued confidence and admiration. Lord Cochrane's
manly reply alludes to the support and protection he
has had from liberal Westminster during three years of
persecution for those well-known attacks on naval abuses
to which his position in the navy had given the sting of
truth. "After many strong and interesting statements,"
says the report, "he recommended to the Meeting to
continue to support Parliamentary Reform, for without it
the people of England would remain oppressed, per-
secuted, enslaved, and starving." In the course of the
proceedings a Mr. Wells was hissed for proposing so
weak a measure of reform as triennial parliaments: he
explained that he really wanted annual ones, but thought
"if that object could not be obtained, it were better to go
step by step until they could obtain it." A Mr. Walker,
D


18
THE HERMIT OF MARLOW.
"C
doubtless the gentleman of that suggestive name
mentioned in Shelley's "free list," remarked that he
'was for arriving at the wished-for object at once";
and then the redoubted Major delivered his conviction
that triennial parliaments could not be beneficial if
obtained. He mentioned as evidence of the exertions
then being made that he had five hundred petitions in his
house to present at the meeting of Parliament, and had
issued three hundred more forms to be filled up: he
named 2,400 as the total number of petitions likely to
be presented; and he concluded by emphatically stating
that annual representation was the only cure for existing
evils.
Five days after this meeting in Westminster, Shelley
may, for anything I can hear to the contrary, have
attended a huge meeting at Bath. Claire was certainly
in that city; and Shelley and Mary had secured places
in the coach, for the 1st of January, to join her: it was still
early in January when he left the two ladies at Bath, to
return to London on his Chancery business; and if, as I
think, he was at Bath on the 6th, he would hardly have
missed the occasion to attend a meeting of upwards
of 6,000 people to petition Parliament for a redress
of grievances and particularly for
and particularly for parliamentary
reform. On this momentous occasion "large bodies
of military, both horse and foot, were in readiness in
case of a riot; and most of the principal inhabitants
were sworn in special constables on the occasion,"
when "Orator" Hunt was "to the fore," and made a
long speech in his usual rough and ready, pugnacious
style, specially condemning the attempt of the
authorities to intimidate the assembly.
Turning the page again, we find our Examiner re-
cording that four sailors, on the day after this meeting,
were hung for stealing ships; and here was another
call for reform which must have seemed desperately
urgent to our tender-hearted and tolerant poet.
To The Examiner for the 19th of January he con-
tributed his Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, of which, by
the by, I am pretty sure he must have revised a
proof; and immediately after his signature comes the


THE HERMIT OF MARLOW.
19
word REFORM at the head of a report of a "Select
Meeting of Independent Gentlemen, friends of
economy, public order, and reform,"-which had been
held on the 17th of January. The most prominent
names on this occasion are those of Curran, Alderman
Waithman, and Alderman Goodbehere, names which,
you will remember, are all in Shelley's list of persons
to whom his pamphlet was to go.
to go. Curran made
a capital speech, wherein he remarked that parlia-
mentary reform did not "consist in breaking windows
or getting drunk in the streets,”—a remark not wholly
inapplicable to some of the so-called reformers of our
own day.
The report of this meeting is followed by one of a
meeting held at Dublin on the previous Monday, the
13th of January, under the eye, as one of the speakers
(O'Connell) observed, "of ten regiments of soldiers
under arms, and two troops of artillery ready for
immediate action." This meeting, described as "a
vast concourse of people," dispersed and "returned
in the greatest order to their homes," after passing
several resolutions, and agreeing to a thoroughly
representative petition, the terms of which must, I think,
have been familiar to Shelley.
This petition set forth that the House of Commons
did not, in any constitutional or rational sense, represent
the Nation; that, when the people have ceased to be
represented, the constitution is subverted; that taxation
without representation is a state of slavery; that there
is no property in that which can be taken from the
people without their consent; that these ills could only
be remedied by the election of a free Parliament; and
that the substitution of the system of corrupt usurpa-
tion of popular rights for genuine representation was
to blame for the state of permanent poverty and distress
inflicted on Ireland by the Legislative Union. The
petitioners therefore prayed for popular representation
coextensive with taxation, for equal distribution of
seats, and for annual elections.
Proceeding with our Examiner, we find that, the day
after this Petition was adopted at Dublin, a boy whose
327947B


THE HERMIT OF MARLOW.
patronymic was Dogood, but who was evidently re-
garded by those in authority as a "ne'er-do-weel,"
was sent to prison in London for tearing down some
bills posted in Long Acre, headed "Mr. Hunt hissed
out of Bristol." The animus of the authorities
against the "Orator" and the cause he represented
is obvious.
20
On the 22nd of January another reform meeting took
place at the Crown and Anchor,-William Cobbett,
Henry Hunt, and Major Cartwright being the most
prominent speakers. Mr. Jones Burdett (another of the
gentlemen of Shelley's "free list,") brought word from the
London Hampden Club that he and Major Cartwright
were deputed by that Club to lay before the Reform
Delegates assembled at the meeting the heads of
a bill to be submitted to Parliament. The material
principles recognized by this bill were (1) house-
hold suffrage, (2) division of counties and cities
into electoral districts, each returning one mem-
ber, according to population, and (3) annual
elections. Major Cartwright said that, though in
favour of universal suffrage, he must admit that many
"sound reformists entertained other opinions on the
ground of practicability." Cobbett spoke most con-
temptuously of the Club, but excepted from his de-
nunciation Sir Francis Burdett, Mr. Jones Burdett,
Major Cartwright, and "that sound patriot Mr. Hallet
of Berks." It is worth while to note in passing that
this same gentleman, "Mr. Hallet of Berkshire," was
to receive five copies of the Reform pamphlet according
to Shelley's list, and that the London Hampden Club
was to receive ten. I suppose "Berkshire," was not a
sufficiently definite address for Mr. Ollier, no copies
having apparently been sent to Mr. Hallet. Henry
Hunt, while endorsing Cobbett's contemptuous view
of the Club, managed to carry, against him, a reso-
lution in favour of "representation co-existent with
taxation." A skirmish between the "Orator and
the reporters of The Morning Chronicle and The British
Press gave variety to the proceedings: Hunt, always
in hot water, accused the daily press of systematic
"}


THE HERMIT OF MARLOW.
21
misrepresentation of reform meetings; and the two
reporters resented the insult and denied the charge.
One day later (23 January 1817) Alderman Good-
behere and Alderman Waithman took a prominent
part in a reform meeting of the Common Council of
London, at which the resolutions were very significant
and well drawn.
The Court resolved to lay before Parliament a
representation tracing almost all the ills that flesh is
heir to back to a long course of extravagance in the
expenditure of the public money-to a profusion of
useless places, sinecures, and unmerited pensions-to
an enormous and unnecessary standing army in time
of peace and to the want of that vigilance and con-
stitutional control over the executive government,
which can only spring from a free, equal, and pure
representation of the people in Parliament. They
determined to point out that the decay of trade,
manufactures, and agriculture, the depreciation in the
value of property, and the enormous and vexatious
weight of taxation, whereby a large portion of the
population were compelled to seek charity, or to take
refuge in a workhouse, had chiefly arisen from the
corrupt and inadequate state of the representation,
and that all attempts at remedy, without reform in
Parliament, would prove delusive; that as extravagance
and corruption in governments had been the des-
truction of all free States, so it was impossible that a
system, which had proved fatal to other States, should
be innocently pursued in this; and that it was essential
to the public welfare to shorten the duration of parlia-
ments, bring about a fair and equal distribution of the
elective franchise among all freeholders, copyholders,
and householders paying taxes, and enforce such regu-
lations as would preserve the purity and integrity of
the Members, and render the House of Commons an
efficient organ of the people.
The Court of Common Council therefore resolved
that petitions should be presented to Parliament, for
the abolition of all sinecures and unmerited pensions,
the reduction of the enormous standing army, the es-
E


22
THE HERMIT OF MARLOW.
tablishment of a general system of retrenchment and
economy, and such a reform in the Commons House
of Parliament as would restore to the people their just
and fair weight in the legislature.
Turning to other parts of our Examiner for the 26th
of January, we come on some occult allusions of Leigh
Hunt's to Shelley's Chancery case, and on an inaccurate
little report, taken from The Morning Chronicle, of the
proceedings on Friday the 24th of January in the
matter of Westbrook v. Shelley. "His Lordship is to
give judgment on a future day," says the report. On
the same page begins the report of the trial of a sailor
named Cashman and others in the matter of the musket-
stealing connected with certain riots of historic note
which had taken place two months earlier. Cashman
was found guilty and condemned to death.
On the 28th of January the Prince Regent opened
Parliament: on his way back to the palace he got
hooted and pelted; and the windows of his carriage were
broken. On the following Sunday The Examiner was of
course full of the attack and the opening of Parliament.
On the 29th Lord Cochrane began the reform petition
campaign by presenting a petition from Bristol signed
by over 50,000 people; and, after a full parliamentary
report, we find in The Examiner for the 2nd of February,
in an appropriate setting of reform paragraphs, an
editorial correction of inaccuracies in the report of
Westbrook v. Shelley, immediately followed by Horace
Smith's sonnet, commencing with the line
"Eternal and Omnipotent Unseen!"
Shelley's battle to regain possession of his children was
of course regarded in his immediate circle not only as
a personal question of desperate interest, but as an
important issue in the general question of fundamental
reform. The issue was indeed momentous-being no
less than a dispute as to the right of a father, of
what opinions soever in religious, moral, and social
questions, to control and educate his own children. Note
that in this, as in most of the reform battles fought in
the reign of Eldon, Castlereagh, Sidmouth and Co., the


THE HERMIT OF MARLOW.
23
popular party, the party of freedom and equal laws,
failed grievously and utterly.
But we must keep to our Examiner a little longer.
On the 3rd of February, as reported in the paper of
the 9th, the reform petitions to Parliament were varied
by one from the boy Dogood, who had been sent
to prison for tearing down scurrilous posters about
"Orator" Hunt. That petition was rejected; and the
boy was referred to the Law Courts.
Sir Francis Burdett and Lord Cochrane now appear in
constant collision with Lord Castlereagh, Mr. Vansittart,
or some one else of the kind,-every petition brought
forward being subjected to obstruction, and Brougham
frequently rising to put in a pregnant word for the
petitioners.
66
The Examiner of the 10th of January has the agree-
able variety of a sonnet from Keats, that to Kosciusko,
flanked by reports of Henry Hunt's vulgarity at a
reform meeting and of a discreditable fracas between
him and Morley the hotel keeper. Perhaps this blunder-
ing coarseness, which was characteristic enough of the
Orator," prevented Shelley from sending him the pam-
phlet: at all events his name is conspicuous for its
absence from the list, though two years later, àpropos
of "Peterloo," Shelley commended his conduct. The
same day's paper has a report of a meeting in Palace
Yard, Westminster, on the 13th of February, to vote an
address of the inhabitants of Westminster to the Regent
concerning the attack on his carriage. As usual, Sir
Francis Burdett, Major Cartwright, Lord Cochrane, and
Henry Hunt were in the van. The address voted was a
clever, sarcastic document, really, with mock humility,
making light of the attack, and inculcating on his
royal highness the urgent need for reform.
From The Examiner for the 23rd of February we gather
in passing that, at that time, seventy-three men and fifteen
women were lying under sentence of death in Newgate
gaol. A Mr. Bennet used this fact for an indirect attack
in Parliament on Lord Eldon; and Lord Castlereagh
"deemed the Hon. gentleman's speech very inflammatory,
and directed against high legal officers. The delay," he


24
THE HERMIT OF MARLOW.
said, "did not rest with the Chancellor." Mr. Bennet s
object seems to have been to force the Chancellor and
the Secretary of State to prepare a list of these wretched
people for the Prince Regent, with a view of getting
their miseries abridged either one way or another. It
appears there was hope that the majority would not
really suffer the penalty of death. The only Member of
Parliament of the name of Bennet that I can trace in
1817 is the Hon. H. G. Bennet. Shelley's list includes
Captain Bennet, M.P., to whom a copy of the pamphlet
seems to have been sent; and I suppose this was the
gentleman who had attacked Lord Eldon. Turning
from the disgraceful business which was the subject of
his attack to another page of the paper, we find relief
(and let us hope Shelley did) in Keats's sonnet
"After dark vapors have oppress'd our plains"
One more leaf turned, and we meet "Orator" Hunt in
the Court of King's Bench before Shelley's old bugbear
Lord Ellenborough, urging, but without any satisfactory
result, the case of the boy Dogood, whom Parliament
had referred to the Law Courts.
...
The accounts of reform meetings, and of the proceed-
ings in Parliament about the petitions occupy a great deal
of space in The Examiner. We know that Shelley was a
regular reader of the paper; and the chances are that
he read every word of what we have been glancing at,
and a vast deal more on these subjects. The petition
phenomenon seems to have struck Mrs. Shelley; for, in
a letter to Leigh Hunt inviting him to Marlow, she says,
"You shall never be serious when you wish to be
merry, and have as many nuts to crack as there are
words in the Petitions to Parliament for Reform-a
tremendous promise."1
Now Shelley's small contribution to this reform agita-
tion is a really practical and not impracticable one.
Seeing how the contest raged in Parliament, how little
real impression on that corrupt chamber and insolently
1 Dowden's Life of Shelley, vol. ii, p. 112.


THE HERMIT OF MARLOW.
25
unprincipled administration was being produced by the
fiery onslaughts of Sir Francis Burdett, the frank and
gallant pertinacity of Lord Cochrane, the logical incisive-
ness of Henry Brougham, the cool, consistent, decisive
hammering of Major Cartwright, at the close of his forty
years' experience in popular agitation; seeing behind the
parliamentary spectacle the great surging ocean of misery
and agitation; and hearing the repeated question, “İs
parliamentary reform the will of the people," he said
"Let us see.” How? By taking the sense of the people.
The object of Shelley's pamphlet was to hold a meet-
ing in order to organize a deliberate plébiscite, and to
abide by the result. If reform should prove to be the
will of the majority, Parliament must grant it or be
deemed in rebellion against the people. If only a
minority demanded reform, it would rest with them to go
on petitioning till they attained their end by attraction
and accretion.
Not only was this proposal for a meeting at the Crown
and Anchor tavern a reasonable and practicable one;
but the Hermit was ready to give a tenth of his year's
income towards the expenses of the plébiscite. More-
over, he expressed surprisingly moderate views. Major
Cartwright's position in claiming universal suffrage he
admitted to be logically impregnable; but he also
pointed out that, logically, the preeminent advantages
of a republic could not be disputed. He did not think
England ripe either for republican government or for
universal suffrage, because the men of the lowest class
had been rendered "brutal and torpid and ferocious by
ages of slavery." He therefore thought that "none but
those who register their names as paying a certain small
sum in direct taxes ought, at present, to send members
to Parliament." As to annual elections, he endorsed
unhesitatingly the views of Cartwright and Cobbett.
In the long run, Shelley's reputation had the advan-
tage proper to the moderate and sagacious tone of this
pamphlet; for, as Mr. Rossetti says, at page 80 of his
Memoir of the poet, “The whirligig of time has brought
in many revenges to Shelley, and this amongst others-
that the Tories found it their interest and necessity to
F


26
THE HERMIT OF MARLOW.
pass in 1867 almost the very scheme of Reform which
the poet and 'dreamer,' the atheist and democrat, had
suggested in 1817; for it makes little difference whether
we speak of a payment of money in 'direct taxes' or in
'rating.'" We may not unprofitably note another of
Time's revenges: a great poet in 1817 advocates a
scheme of reform carried out by the Conservatives in
1867; and then an admirable poet still among us charac-
terizes the year, the deed, and the men, especially the
late Lord Beaconsfield, thus:-
"In the Year of the great Crime,
When the false English nobles and their Jew,
By God demented, slew
The Trust they stood thrice pledged to keep from wrong, .
"1
This trust, you will observe, was the enslavement of
the people. Meanwhile, passing by the measure of
reform wrung by pressure of circumstances from "the
false English nobles and their Jew," we may profitably
bear in mind that the leading ideas of that gallant Major
whom Shelley regarded as unanswerable, and who was
one of the most influential politicians of his land and
day, still await fulfilment. Indeed, although the rushing
wheels of our civilizing machine are fast driving out
of any living place in our memory men whose work, like
that of Cartwright and Burdett, is not of a form and visible
substance to command integral preservation, I cannot
leave John Cartwright without a few more words.
It is difficult for us to realize at the present day the
importance of the position which he occupied in 1817,
as well as earlier and later. When Shelley wrote his
Proposal, the mere reference to Major Cartwright was
sufficient to carry with it four clear and very advanced
ideas, to wit, universal suffrage, equal representation,
vote by ballot, and annual parliaments: it was as the
"firm, consistent, and persevering advocate" of those
principles that he was described at the base of a statue
of him erected in Burton Crescent just before the
Reform Bill of 1832 was passed. This was under.
1 (Odes, by COVENTRY PATMORE, 1868.)
*


THE HERMIT OF MARLOW.
27
the administration of Earl Grey, who was an old
adherent to the principles of Major Cartwright, however
much it may have been found expedient to water down
those principles in the work of 1832, so as to give the
power to the middle class and not to the people.
This "firm, consistent, and persevering advocate" of
righteous views, whereof some yet await fulfilment,
had been a genuine force in England: born far back
in the eighteenth century, his eventful and philanthropic
life was drawing to its close when Shelley became con-
vinced of the need to retrench those magnificent schemes
of reform. They were good men, these Cartwrights:
the Major was brother to that Edmund Cartwright who
invented the power-loom; and another brother, George,
was the intrepid navigator who made six voyages to the
coast of Labrador, passed in all nearly sixteen years
there, and published in 1793, in three quarto volumes, a
Journal of Transactions and Events during that long
residence in an inhospitable country.
As for Major Cartwright, we should do well to re-
member that his Reasons for Reformation, published in
1809, and another book issued a year later, entitled The
Comparison, in which Mock Reform, Half Reform, and
Constitutional Reform, are considered, were familiar far
and wide in 1817, and that they had succeeded a long
array of political pamphlets, treatises, and essays; so
that Shelley would doubtless have thought it as im-
pertinent as it was unnecessary to particularize the
views and arguments to which he alludes in A Proposal
for Putting Reform to the Vote. That Proposal, sagacious
and sound as it is, was a poor little tract compared with
Cartwright's achievements, the whole tale of which the
world has quietly relegated to the dust-bin of oblivion.
But we must take the world as we find it; and the world
will take into account, even in appraising this pamphlet, the
splendour of Shelley's intellectual and literary gifts, the
wonder of what he wrought in verse and of all that vast
apocalyptic golden age that he saw spreading landscape-
like beyond his day, beyond our day. More, even, than
these things, perhaps, the fascination of his unique per-
sonality, makes it natural for us to attempt to gather,


28
THE HERMIT OF MARLOW.
investigate, and illustrate all he ever did. But the true,
honest men who only worked hard for the enfranchise-
ment of their less fortunate fellow men, only gave their
lives, their hearts, their heads, and their energies, must be
deemed fortunate if allowed even to sit on the lowest
steps of the temple of fame, while the upper steps are
reserved for the men of genius, some of whom are
already beginning to be crowded and jostled out of the
inner sanctum.


London:
Printed by Richard Clay & Sons, Bread Street Hill.
April, 1887.


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