A History of Britain, Volume 3 (11 page)

But she hadn’t reckoned with the ubiquitousness of modern philanthropy. The Royal Humane Society had been set up, subsidized by public money, specifically to reward boatmen who pulled would-be suicides from the river. The Thames was full of rowers just waiting for a jumper. Mary
was
duly rescued and taken to the Duke’s Head tavern in Fulham to recover. Mortified and wretched, she lost no time proposing to Imlay that they live together in a
ménage à trois
, so that at least their daughter would know her father. For a moment Imlay wondered, and brought Mary to see their house before (in all likelihood) the actress put her foot down.

Mary Wollstonecraft was 37 and seemed to have lost everything except her child: her faith in the liberating humanity of revolution; in a marriage based on friendship rather than passion; in the possibility of a truly independent woman’s life. As for the benevolence of nature, it must have seemed a cruel joke. A letter to Fuseli asking for her letters back became a cry of pain: ‘I am alone. The injustice, without alluding to hopes blasted in the bud, which I have endured, wounding my bosom, have set my thoughts adrift into an ocean of painful conjectures. I ask impatiently what – and where is truth? I have been treated brutally; but I daily labour to remember that I still have the duty of a mother to fulfil.’

Her friends, especially the long-suffering Johnson, who published Mary’s
Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark
(1794–5), did what they could to help. But then they had other things on their minds than the personal fate of Mary Wollstonecraft. The same week that she jumped into the Thames saw a huge demonstration of at least 100,000 people against Pitt, the war with the French and ‘famine’. Britain seemed closer than it had ever been to revolution.

Through the spring of 1794 the British government had been bringing prosecutions against those whom it deemed to be the writers, publishers and purveyors of seditious literature. Its object was to employ the usefully vague medieval charge of ‘compassing the death of the king’ to make into an act of outright treason publications and discussions on the concept of a republic or even on manhood suffrage (for how would
that
be accomplished, one prosecutor argued, without the overthrow of the lawful constitution?). Testimony given by a government witness (later discredited as a drunk and a perjuror) that Thomas Walker, the Manchester radical, had been heard to say ‘Damn the King’ was the kind of thing taken seriously as evidence. In almost all the cases the accused were defended by Thomas Erskine, one of the genuine champions of British freedom, whose name deserves to be better known. Erskine put his fortune and reputation on the line to insist on the principle that utterance or publication alone (without any evidence of a conspiracy to commit ‘tumult’ much less regicide) could not be incriminating, and especially not retroactively after the government established ever broader categories of sedition and treason. In May 1794 Thomas Hardy, John Thelwall, John Horne Tooke and 11 other members of the London Corresponding
Society
were arrested. The right of habeas corpus (no imprisonment without trial) was suspended the same month, and by late in the year 2000 people were being held without due process. A mass meeting at Chalk Farm just north of London declared that Britain had ‘lost its liberties’.

Thelwall, Hardy, Horne Tooke and the rest – perhaps in keeping with the medievalism of the charges – were incarcerated in the Tower of London. Traumatized by Hardy’s imprisonment, fearful that he would pay with his life for the ‘treason’, his wife miscarried and died. Thelwall was kept in solitary confinement for five months before being taken to the ‘dead hole’ of Newgate, which, deprived of almost all light and air, was even worse. On 25 October the prisoners were formally arraigned for ‘conspiring to overthrow the government and perpetrate the king’s death’. Three days later the first trial, that of Thomas Hardy, opened. Jostling crowds surrounded the Old Bailey. They weren’t there to cheer on the prosecution. For nine hours the Attorney-General, Sir John Scott, laboured to stitch together shreds of circumstantial evidence into a treasonable conspiracy to depose and kill the king. ‘Nine hours!’ shouted the fat ex-Lord Chancellor Thurlow when he heard. ‘Then there is no treason, by God!’ And the government’s case did indeed rest almost entirely on analogies with France in respect, for example, of what had been meant by a ‘Convention’.

At the end of the week’s proceedings Erskine responded for the defence with a mere seven-hour speech. Echoing a pamphlet published by William Godwin, he insisted that whatever had been said (by Hardy, for example – and he had said a lot) had to be proved to be an actual plot to kill the king in person, not just complaints about parliament or even the monarchy as an institution, since that had still been protected as free political debate. By such unconscionably elastic definitions of treason Hardy was being tried for his life on account of activities that were undoubtedly peaceful and lawful. ‘I hope,’ said Erskine, brilliantly throwing back at the prosecutors the imputation of disloyalty, ‘never to hear it repeated in any court of justice that peacefully to convene the people on the subject of their own privileges, can lead to the destruction of the king; they are the king’s worst enemies who use such language.’ At the end of his heroic oration he croaked to the jury: ‘I am sinking under fatigue and weakness,’ and then indeed sank. Appreciative of great theatre, the jury applauded. Hardy was acquitted and spoke to the roaring crowds outside: ‘My fellow countrymen, I return you my thanks.’ The crowd untethered the horses from the carriages of the accused and pulled them down the Strand, past the Palace of Westminster and along Pall Mall. When the subsequent trial of Horne Tooke opened on 17 November and that of
Thelwall
on 1 December, the verdicts seemed hardly in doubt before they got under way, although Horne Tooke played it safe and pleaded – disloyally but not incorrectly – that he had been a moderate compared to other indicted firebrands. Thelwall had prepared not so much a defence as a manifesto of British Rights of Nature and was about to give it his oratorical all until Erskine buttoned his lip. Miffed at the loss of an opportunity to address posterity he published it in 1796.

The bitter winter of 1794–5 only made Pitt’s government more feverishly defensive. The war was going badly. French armies occupied first the Austrian Netherlands; then the Rhineland and finally the Dutch Republic, where an old ally, the Stadholder William V, was deposed in favour of a new revolutionary Batavian Republic. Harvests were disastrous, sending the price of wheat rocketing by 75 per cent. At the same time an export slump caused lay-offs in the textile industry. In London, the population responded with violent action. The steam-powered Great Albion Flour Mill was attacked by rioters. In the summer mass meetings were held at St George’s Field. On 28 October 1795 another – said by the London Corresponding Society to be 200,000 strong, although others put it at between 40,000 and 100,000 – assembled in a field by the Copenhagen House tavern in Islington to hear the 22-year-old Irishman John Binns attack the war and denounce the Pitt government. The chant was ‘Peace! Bread! No Pitt! Down with George.’

On the following day the coach taking George III to open parliament was mobbed in the Mall by an angry crowd, some of them holding bread loaves wrapped in black crepe and shouting, ‘No war, no famine!’ In Parliament Street the coach was pelted with mud and stones, smashing its windows. At some point on the journey a projectile made a small hole that the king thought had been caused by a bullet. When he reached the House of Lords he is said to have stammered, ‘My Lords, I … I … I have been shot at.’ His route back to St James’s Palace was no friendlier, with more missiles and broken windows. The state coach was abandoned and torn to pieces when spotted in Pall Mall; one of the royal grooms fell under its wheels, breaking his thighs and dying of the injuries. When the king tried to reach Buckingham House in a private coach, he was recognized (no one else, after all, looked like George III). The coach ground to a halt in the mêlée, and it was said that someone opened a door and attempted to drag the king from it. Only the appearance of the Horse Guards riding to the rescue saved the situation from becoming even uglier. The threat to lay hands on the king was taken especially seriously, since the previous year there had been a ‘pop-gun plot’ (probably a fiction invented by spies) to fire a poisoned dart at him from a custom-designed
air-gun.
Stories were also rife of other plots for a revolutionary coup, to take place simultaneously in London, Dublin and Edinburgh, in which the magistracy and judges would be locked up, aristocrats put under house arrest and parliament liquidated.

The mobbing of the royal coach was, of course, a godsend to Pitt’s government, so much so that suspicious radicals speculated Pitt and the Home Secretary, the Duke of Portland, might have orchestrated it themselves (although their coaches were roughly treated as well). Riding the tidal wave of loyal addresses of indignation and loyalist passion, in December Pitt introduced two bills for the protection and policing of the realm. The first made meetings of more than 50 people illegal. If an assembly refused to disperse when ordered, those present could be charged with a capital crime. The second enlarged the scope of sedition still more broadly to encompass any advocacy of changes to the government, other than by acts of parliament. In other words: no pamphlets, no petitions, no meetings, no reform. Wordsworth, who on returning to England had published in 1793, in the form of a letter to the Bishop of Llandaff, a ferociously Paine-ite assault on the hereditary principle, would now have to keep his peace. Up in Newcastle Thomas Bewick – no Paine-ite revolutionary democrat – gritted his teeth. Later he remembered this as a scoundrelly time when ‘Knaves and their abettors appeared to predominate in the land; and they carried their subserviency to such a length that I think, if Mr Pitt had proposed to make a law to transport all men who had pug noses, and to hang all men above 60 years of age, these persons … would have advocated it as a brilliant thought and a wise measure.’

Not surprisingly, the combination of propaganda, gang intimidation, genuinely patriotic volunteer militias, censorship, political spying and summary arrests succeeded in stopping the momentum of democratic agitation. Critics and reformers like William Godwin who had come to the aid of the accused in the treason trials now withdrew from direct political action, and tried to reflect on social utopias away from the furore. In any case, Godwin had come to mistrust any proposals that made the state the agency of betterment. His
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice
(1793) was the perfect tract for the disillusioned, since it argued that the only obligation for reasoning individuals was the realization of their own freedom and happiness. Any institutions that got in the way needed removing; so no religion, no system of government, no criminal law (it was, Godwin believed, hypocritical for societies to punish crimes it had generated itself), no systematic education, no accumulation of property beyond what was required to satisfy individual needs, and especially no marriage, an institution that held couples hostage to their transient passions.

That last sentiment was perhaps the only opinion that he held in common with Mary Wollstonecraft. He remembered her, not particularly warmly, as the person who wouldn’t shut up when he had wanted to listen to Tom Paine at one of the Johnson dinners. But when Godwin read the Scandinavian letters he declared that ‘If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book.’ Love and Mr Godwin, short, earnest, pedantic, almost inhumanly cerebral, had not kept close company. Yet women – actresses, writers whom he called ‘the Fairs’, some of them hot with romance – set their cap at him. But it was Mary who melted his chilly soul. And he in turn made her a more reflective, quieter person. After all the miseries she had inflicted on herself through the years of torment with Imlay, Godwin’s mixture of coolness and clumsiness seemed positively winning. She relaxed in the growing certainty of his feeling, and the woman who had gone on record as mistrustful of sex now took shameless pleasure in initiating Godwin, reassuring his anxieties: ‘If the felicity of last night has had the same effect on your health as on my countenance, you have no cause to lament your failure of
resolution
: for I have seldom seen so much live fire running about my features as this morning when recollections – very dear, called forth the blush of pleasure, as I adjusted my hair.’

Mary became pregnant. In March 1797 William Godwin, the sworn enemy of marriage and churches, got married to ‘Mrs Imlay’ (her first union being considered merely a republican civic convenience and thus not binding) at St Pancras Church. Mary was satisfied that she had not ‘clogged my soul by promising obedience’, and the two of them let it be known that they would not continuously cohabit, but continue to respect each other’s independence and see others of the opposite sex, sharing lodgings some of the time but keeping their own respective places. It was bravely said. But as Mary’s belly grew, Godwin found himself unaccountably enjoying the small pleasures of domesticity and companionship. Theirs was growing into exactly the kind of intimate conjugal friendship that Mary – without ever having experienced anything like it – had prescribed as the formula for enduring married happiness.

Which is what made the end so unbearably sad. When the time came for her labour, on 30 August, she called a local midwife. But after the baby, another girl (the future author of
Frankenstein
), was born, the placenta failed to descend down the birth canal, threatening sepsis. A physician, hurriedly summoned from Westminster Hospital did what he could, but the placenta ruptured in fragments as Mary lay haemorrhaging in agony.

Eventually the bleeding stopped. Mary was strong enough to tell Godwin that she would never have survived had she not been determined
to
continue sharing her life with him. The next day she felt much better and was happy to have her old, best mentor, Joseph Johnson, visit. The following day she seemed better still and Godwin thought it was safe enough for him to take a walk. When he got back he found her convulsed with shivering fits and obviously running a high fever. She never got better. A week later, on 10 September 1797, Mary Wollstonecraft died of septicaemia.