Vindication (52 page)

Their first stop, from late September to late November 1801, was London. Margaret wrote to Godwin in advance. ‘It would give me great
pleasure to see your two little girls, a gratification I shall hope for.' She made half a dozen visits to the Polygon, where she would have met Fanny aged seven and a half and Mary just four. It's not known to what extent she was aware of a change in their life.

Four months back, a woman had leaned from the neighbouring balcony at the Polygon, and said: ‘Do I behold the immortal Godwin?'

He turned and saw a dark-haired woman in green glasses, calling herself Mrs Clairmont. She was supposedly a widow of French extraction–her family name was Vial–and she had a son, Charles, born of a Swiss father called Charles Gaulis (who had died in 1796), and a daughter, Clara Mary Jane (‘Jane' at home, later ‘Claire'), of indeterminate paternity. Jane, born in 1798, was eight months younger than Mary Godwin. Mrs Clairmont's history has remained shady. Might she have taken her charming name from the title of a gothic novel,
Clermont
(1799), popular enough to be amongst those devoured for their far-fetched terrors in
Northanger Abbey
?

From early June 1801, Godwin's diary begins to record weekly and sometimes daily dinners and teas with his neighbour. Mrs Clairmont worked for the well-established children's publisher Benjamin Tabart as editor of his series of nursery stories, and she also earned her living as a translator; but the main attraction for Godwin was that her expressiveness reminded him of Mary Wollstonecraft. On 11 July he reread his wife's
Travels
before supping with Mrs Clairmont. Later, he spelt out to her his sense of the similarity of her letters. ‘…The same sensibility irradiated them, the same warmth of feeling, the same strength of affection, the same agonising alarm, the same ardent hope, as I trace with such unspeakable delight in the letter before me.' Godwin and Mary Jane Clairmont married in December 1801, soon after Margaret's visits to the Polygon. Deep currents, welling from the life of Mary Wollstonecraft, ran between these lives with far-off repercussions for Margaret Mount Cashell, Fanny Imlay, Mary Godwin and their new stepsister, Jane Clairmont.

 

In Paris, Margaret looked up Mary Wollstonecraft's old associates, Joel Barlow, Tom Paine, Thomas Holcroft and Helen Maria Williams. Helen, still living with Stone, conducted a bi-weekly salon in the library of her
hôtel
. The guests were literary lions, senators and members of the National Institute in blue, embroidered coats. Helen combined an eager welcome with sophisticated languor, ‘like an invalid' to an Irish ear. She appeared in perpetual mourning for a sister, in black with a gauzy black veil thrown over her head and reaching to her feet. Margaret looked ‘like a frosty moon' amidst the rouged French ladies. She and Miss Wilmot felt like trussed fowls in their stays and straight pelisses, compared with the floating drapery of French fashion–unseen for a decade. The Parisians were wearing diaphanous fabrics to give the effect of Greek statues, with circlets across their brows. A portrait of Margaret in Paris shows off her profile with an aquiline nose, and hair circled and caught up in the Greek manner. Joel Barlow visited her frequently in May–June 1802, when she was eight months pregnant. ‘…Every other night now, [we are] very thick together,' he told Ruth, ‘that is, she is very thick, & [your] hub is not thin.' He entertained her with American stories and thought her ‘certainly a most excellent woman, manages her family with the greatest dignity & least affectation'.

At the end of June, Barlow slipped into England, incognito, on a secret mission. He was not too occupied to peek at the absurd shape of stays in Bond Street: ‘long, labored, stiff, & armed with ribs of whale. It is a frightful to think of. They don't walk so handsome as our ladies do.' Public walks were filled with white chip hats (made out of thin strips of wood)–‘why you might as well look into a bleach-field–quelle différence!' One day, he ran into Joseph Johnson who saw through Barlow's disguise and seized his hand, swinging affably from side to side.

‘Well, you could not get me hanged,' Johnson laughed. ‘You tried all you could.'

Barlow, nervous to be identified with such ease, declined Johnson's invitation to dine.

He returned to Paris to find that Margaret had produced her sixth child, Richard–‘another little republican Lord', as Barlow put it to Ruth on 4 July. On his first visit to Margaret after the birth, he sized up her mismatch with Mount Cashell.

‘He is an aristocrat, & has not a great deal of sense, and what is worse for
him, he seems to know it–& what is worse still
she
seems to know it–& what is worse than all, she seems to try to make her friends know it.'

In the Paris of the day women liked to dress as men. Dressed as a Turk, Margaret tried this out at a masquerade at the Opéra. Her six-foot height, extended with a turban, made her manliness so convincing that a gallant commiserated with Miss Wilmot's ‘subjection' as the Turk's wife, and proposed to snap her chains.

Through Miss Wilmot's admiring eyes, we see Margaret's performance of her society role, so at odds with the burgeoning successor to Mary Wollstonecraft. Short, brusque General Berthier, the Minister of War, has tall Lady Mount Cashell on his arm at the American Embassy. Beautiful in black crepe and diamonds, Lady Mount Cashell is entertained by the First Consul, Napoleon, at a banquet in the Tuileries. He puts himself out to charm, smiling, in plain clothes, while Josephine blazes in purple under a canopy. The British Ambassador hands her ladyship in to dinner, while Miss Wilmot has to make do with Talleyrand whose paunch, she comments, led the way, and whose cunning expression repelled her almost as much as his greed. His mouth did not close for two hours, she observes. ‘Oh! such a cormorant.'

In Ireland, the Mount Cashells would have been perceived as Protestant English; in France they were Irish. Wherever they went, crowds gathered about their coach with ‘a kind of republican homage', for the Irish aristocracy was thought friendly to the French republic. Lady Mount Cashell gave a ball for her new friends, and a
thé à la française
for sixty people. Another scene at the American Embassy: Lady Mount Cashell as guest of Robert Livingston, Jefferson's newly arrived Ambassador who was to bring off the Louisiana Purchase the following year–a diplomatic alternative to the coup planned by Imlay, Barlow and Leavenworth a decade earlier.

As the English filled Paris, they packed Helen Maria Williams's salon, now held nightly for thirty, forty or fifty visitors–soirées so breathy with mouth-to-mouth banalities that Barlow began to tire. He was popular with Helen and Margaret and often chosen to sit with them at supper. At Helen's he met the Swiss banker Schweizer and his wife Madeleine (who had sat out the Terror along with Mary Wollstonecraft). Every second
evening Barlow spent in more select company at the Mount Cashells. There, in August, he met Opie and his wife Amelia–‘a woman of
beaucoup d'esprit
, and Opie is very proud of her'. Mrs Opie inscribed a copy of her
Poems
(1802) for Margaret. Come September, and Fuseli arrived in Paris. Each month seemed to bring more of the Wollstonecraft past, as though her milieu reconstituted itself during that brilliant Parisian summer while Margaret moved in her shadow.

The Mount Cashells lingered for nine months, unlike many of the English who, according to Barlow, were restless: ‘The glare of the arts that they find here soon satiates.' Not so for Margaret and Miss Wilmot, who were agog at the ballets of Vestris, and startled by the speed and brilliance of the pirouette, in contrast with the eighteenth-century ‘moderation of grace', as they understood the ways of the body. Used to the chatter of English theatres, they were struck by the rapt silence of the French audience.

They wintered in the Italian states, travelling between Florence, Rome and Naples. From Florence, in April 1803, they made an excursion to the old trading port of Livorno (Leghorn, as it was called by the English), where they visited a synagogue and the small English cemetery. The latter was full of women who had died in childbirth far from home, and children who had died of exposure to unaccustomed ills in the course of their parents' adventures. On their way back, the Mount Cashells stopped for three or four hours in Pisa, a town renowned for its medical school. That spring, baby Richard had measles, and Margaret a period of debility that went on for a long time. Although she appeared ‘brawny', her health was poor. Mary Wollstonecraft, who had nursed her through a fever at fifteen, had feared Margaret could be tubercular, and had tried to protect the girl from her mother's exactions. Margaret herself ascribed her weakness to extended breast-feeding. She followed Wollstonecraft's teachings on the value of mother's milk to set up infants' constitutions and initiate their crucial education in tenderness. Yet frequent births had meant that she had been feeding almost continuously for eleven years.

On 1 June, war broke out again. France was again out of bounds, and Miss Wilmot returned to Ireland via Germany, while the Mount Cashells
and their children turned south for another stay in Rome. Their British circle never mixed with Italians, and seldom left the area of the Piazza di Spagna. Margaret found them as closed-off as Henry James would find his compatriots eighty years later, when he called Rome ‘the American village'. But in 1804 the dullness of expatriate society was broken by the arrival of a reading and thinking man.

Margaret was thirty-one and pregnant with her seventh child when she met George William Tighe, aged twenty-eight. He was a friend of her husband, and came from the same Ascendancy circle. His family traced its descent from Edward III, but the titles had been in the female line and so not passed on. Tighe had been at Eton with Margaret's brother Henry King (both had entered the school in 1785, which means that Tighe had been there–though not in Prior's house–when Mary Wollstonecraft had stayed at Eton in 1786). When he had appeared in Dublin society in the mid-1790s, a captain in the 7th Dragoon Guards, he was thought a ‘very handsome man & a great Beau'. Margaret fell in love. Her passion was overwhelming in a woman who had never expected to feel desire. Tighe called her ‘Laura', after Petrarch's beloved. She called him ‘Vesuvius'. ‘Laura' and ‘Vesuvius' wrote ardent poems to each other. Laura writes of a man who has ‘taught my heart unknown delights'. ‘High beats that heart at thy renewed embrace:/ Whilst present joys the past once more retrace.'

They belonged to a class (extending through the European aristocracies) where, once an heir was born, discreet adultery was almost
de rigueur
. Lady Oxford, for instance, produced six children of miscellaneous parentage, known to the wits of London as ‘the Harleian Miscellany' (after a collection of manuscripts inherited by her husband). This is where Margaret broke with her class. She took sex seriously. Tighe was ‘Beloved beyond existence, health and fame', and though at first he echoed her willingness ‘to abandon friends & fame' for ‘vagrant ways', he was stirred even more by a classicist's passion for the land of ‘Tully's wisdom' and ‘Maro's strains'.
*
The love affair, for him, was a consummation of the Grand Tour. Margaret
was uneasily aware that Tighe's passion fell short of her own, and she longed for convincing words.

In the summer of 1805 she remained with four of her children in the German principalities, while the Earl departed for England, having agreed to place their three eldest sons in school. To have gone part of the route with her husband means that Margaret was, at this point, still attached–if not to her husband, certainly to her children. She made excuses about her health and, for about nine months, hesitated. Should she return to Moore Park, or do something else with her life? If she didn't act now, at thirty-four, she would go back to more pregnancies and increasing debility. Should she return to the health-giving climate of the Italian states–and Tighe? But could she part with her children? These were her ‘days of adversity'. As she continued to waver in the spring of 1806 a ‘fit of illness' decided her to go south, and to send Helena (aged eleven), Jane (nine) and ‘precious' Richard (four) to join their father in London. She parted from them in Dresden.

Mount Cashell allowed it now to be known that he was furious. He ordered his wife to return in order to sign papers of separation. Divorce was not discussed. Expense would not have been an issue for aristocrats–the only class who could afford it–but divorce still required an Act of Parliament, with public airing of intimacies and two witnesses to adultery. Mount Cashell then demanded that his wife give up their last child, Elizabeth, who was almost two. If she did not, he would stop the money and take the child by force. The law was on his side. Margaret asked her Irish lawyer Denys Scully if a mother did not have the right to keep a child until the age of seven. The answer had to be no. (Such a right would not become law until 1839.) An alternative was to return to Italy, under Napoleon's rule, where Margaret might hold on to her ‘dear little Elizabeth' beyond her husband's reach.

‘I am resolved', she said, ‘that nothing shall force me to relinquish the performance of this duty but death.'

Margaret's mother Caroline, the Dowager Countess of Kingston, urged her daughter to return, making light of her ill-health, while the philandering and torturing George, having inherited the title of 3rd Earl, rebuked
his sister for her folly. During the second half of 1806 Margaret remained in doubt about access to her children. She saw her husband as ‘a very weak man' whose friends had convinced him ‘that his character would rise on the ruins of mine. Whether he really intends to shut my own doors against me & separate me from my children I know not, but nothing shall prevent me from endeavouring to be of use to them for whose sake I have endured more than anyone has notion of, in the way of petty tyranny and trifling opposition.'