A History of Britain, Volume 3

by Simon Schama

  But while Mary was writing these things she was also becoming seriously infatuated with one of Johnson’s regulars: the middle-aged, eccentrically voluble Swiss artist Henry Fuseli. Weird and wonderful best describe Fuseli, whose work encompassed neo-classical histories; startling pre-Freudian ‘Nightmares’ of ash-pale virgins draped over yielding beds, upon whose loins squatted goblin-like succubi; Shakespearean phantasmagoria (Macbeth’s witches and Bottom’s new head); and, not least, a steady output of pornographic prints and drawings, featuring impractically phallic coiffures – for women. The model for many of these fantasies was Sophia Rawlins, whom Fuseli, hitherto a confirmed bachelor, had married in 1788. The peculiarity, not to mention the compulsiveness, of his erotic obsessions, often notoriously revelled in out loud, ought to have excluded Fuseli as a partner for Mary Wollstonecraft since A Vindication singles out sexual desire as the root of corruption in the relations between men and women; the source of romantic self-delusion; the destroyer of reason and friendship. But perhaps Mary saw Fuseli more as a detached analyst than as an accomplice of desire. At any rate, whether from desperation or from principle she flirted with him, offering herself as an intimate companion, a soulmate, rather than as a lover. Fuseli seems to have been disconcerted by her persistence, but in the summer of 1792 the odd foursome of Johnson (very definitely no womanizer), Mary, Fuseli and Sophia planned a six-week trip to France. By the time they got to Dover, Paris was in the grip of the fighting that ended the monarchy. The news was of bloody chaos. The party turned back and, dejected by this anti-climax, Mary became impulsive, knocking on Sophia’s door to announce to the understandably astonished young wife that the three of them must establish a household together: ‘As I am above deceit, it is right to say that this proposal arises from the sincere affection, which I have for your husband, for I find that I cannot live without the satisfaction of seeing and conversing with him daily.’ She had no claims on him as a husband – those she would generously cede to Sophia – but mentally they had to be together. Sophia’s horrified reaction was to slam the door after forbidding Mary ever to cross the threshold again.

  Baffled, wounded and miserable, Mary Wollstonecraft decided to make the trip to France by herself. Although she made light of the risks, describing it as a romantic adventure (‘I am still a Spinster on the wing. At Paris, indeed, I might take a husband for the time being, and get divorced when my truant heart longed again to nestle with its old friends’), she knew that even in ordinary times this would have been a brave, not to say foolhardy, journey. But these were extraordinary times. By early December 1792, when Mary finally crossed the Channel, the Revolution was entering its beleaguered and paranoid phase. It had escaped a Prussian occupation of Paris only by the skin of its teeth and the mobilization, thanks to the furious rhetoric of one of the Jacobin leaders, Georges Danton, of the entire Republic’s human and material resources. In the knife-edge climate of elation and terror, today’s heroes could be tomorrow’s traitors; those who showed themselves most demonstrative in their loyalty to the Republic might find their professions of revolutionary ardour taken as a smokescreen for espionage. The position of the foreign communities in Paris was becoming especially precarious. Unless they showed themselves passionate enthusiasts for the war of national defence and liberation, more republican than the republicans, they were vulnerable to charges of being a ‘fifth column’. It was this jumpy atmosphere that Wordsworth had decided to escape and in which Mary now found herself. The White’s Hotel gang all helped to soften the shock. But Mary struggled with spoken French, discovering, like so many, that the thoughtful translations she had made in England had been no preparation for making one’s way through the streets of Paris. She lodged with Aline Fillietaz, the newly married daughter of a schoolmistress acquaintance from London. The Fillietaz house was on the rue Melée in the Marais, which put it not only in the heart of one of the most militant revolutionary districts of the city, seething with clubs and pikes, but also directly along a main route from revolutionary prisons to one of the places of execution.

  So, whether she wanted it or not, Mary had a ringside view of the drama of mass death and retribution. A few weeks after her arrival she saw Louis XVI being taken to his trial and, astonished at the dignity of his composure, confessed to Joseph Johnson that ‘I can scarcely tell you why, but an association of ideas made the tears flow insensibly from my eyes.’ But the letter shook with trepidation.

  Nay, do not smile, but pity me; for, once or twice, lifting my eyes from the paper, I have seen eyes glare through a glass-door opposite my chair, and bloody hands shook at me. Not the distant sound of a footstep can I hear … I wish I had even kept the cat with me! – I want to see something alive; death in so many frightful shapes has taken hold of my fancy. – I am going to bed – and for the first time in my life, I cannot put out the candle.

  This was not the revolution, nor the life, Mary had expected. By the spring of 1793, Britain and France were at war with each other. French military reverses in the Netherlands and the defection of generals prompted the inevitable accusations of betrayals from within. The apparatus of summary ‘revolutionary’ justice was established. The fatal rhythm of denunciations, arrests and beheadings began. And it was precisely those republican politicians with whom the White’s Hotel crowd had the closest relations – Condorcet and the moderate group known as the Girondins, many of whom had voted against condemning Louis XVI to death – who were now identified by the Jacobin revolutionary government as false patriots, enemies in fact to the patrie. By extension the British – whether they liked it or not, natives of an enemy country – were now, starting with Tom Paine, deeply suspect.

  The most famous vote cast against the execution of the king was indeed Paine’s, and many of those who wanted clemency actually invoked Paine as an example since, as he had said himself, his republican credentials were impeccable. Nonetheless Paine – who expressed the wish that the French Republic would abolish the death penalty altogether, perhaps the summit of his unrealistic optimism – argued eloquently that Louis ‘considered as an individual’ (rather than an institution) ‘was beneath the notice’ of the Republic; and that the Revolution owed compassion to its enemies as much as to its friends. To the Jacobins this was so outrageous an apostasy that their most militant spokesman, Jean-Paul Marat, shouted that the interpreter must be mistranslating Paine’s words. When they were indeed confirmed, he declared that since Paine was ‘a Quaker’ and thus opposed to the death penalty on principle (his parentage was indeed Quaker), he ought not to be allowed to vote.

  Paine voted anyway, but after the revolutionary government and the apparatus of the Terror was established in the summer of 1793, Paine found himself in the unusual position of being demonized as an enemy of the state in both monarchist Britain and republican France! The British Club had broken up shortly after the king’s trial, but once its French patrons and friends had been purged from the National Convention, imprisoned, put on trial and executed, it seemed only a matter of time before the Britons would share their fate. One of Paine’s fellow-lodgers, William Johnson, became so unhinged at the prospect that he attempted to commit suicide on the staircase of their hotel, stabbing himself in the chest and rolling operatically down the steps. After the British navy took Toulon in late August, occupying the naval base and town, any kind of association with Britain was a deadly liability. Paine was arrested, along with Helen Maria Williams and some other members of the club, and incarcerated in the Luxembourg, once a royal palace. He missed his date with the guillotine only by a fantastic stroke of luck. Cell doors were marked to indicate the intended victims of the next day’s executions. His were by accident left open. In haste the mark was made on the inside and, when the doors were later slammed shut, became invisible. Or so Paine’s version of the story goes.

  Just as bad for Mary, the bête noire of A Vindication – Jean-Jacques himself – was everywhere. The image of the patron saint of the Republic of Virtue appeared on plac
ards, on drinking glasses and on patriotic pamphlets. The women’s clubs that had agitated for their inclusion in the franchise and for legal rights were shut down by the Jacobins and their leaders arrested or beaten up on the streets if they opened their mouths. The duties of women to the Fatherland were exactly as Rousseau had prescribed: indoctrination in the arts of ‘tenderness’; a solace for citizen-soldiers, breast-feeders for the enfants de la patrie.

  Mary had no choice but to play by the rules of the enemy; to find some sort of refuge from fear and insecurity. It materialized in the good-looking shape of the American revolutionary soldier and author, Gilbert Imlay. Imlay was now in the business of selling revolutionary happiness, or more specifically the real estate on which happiness could be planted in farming settlements and small towns. His Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America (1792) was, like Imlay himself, an attractive thing of many parts: travelogue, land survey and commercial promotional literature. He certainly understood the power of romance and something drew him towards the alternately exuberant and insecure Mary Wollstonecraft. A love affair began, which quickly turned serious. As ‘Mrs Imlay’, Mary’s status as an American citizeness protected her from the hostility and suspicion directed at the British, subjects of a king with whom the Republic was at war. By June she was settled in a cottage at Neuilly on the western outskirts of the city, tending a garden and cooing over the soupers à deux she was sharing with Imlay. The author of A Vindication, who had made such a powerful case against the delusory and destructive nature of romantic passion, was now in the rhapsodic throes of it. Sensing, already in August, Imlay’s reservations about being smothered in so much emotional intensity, she wrote to him with the note of imploring desperation that she had despised in sentimental novels: ‘Yes I will be good, that I may deserve to be happy; and whilst you love me, I cannot again fall into the miserable state, which rendered life a burden almost too heavy to be borne.’ Mary Wollstonecraft had become a dependant.

  By January 1794 she was pregnant, and became anxious and weepy whenever Imlay disappeared on business trips. The more clinging she became, the more regularly he disappeared, leaving her overwhelmed by despondency at the ebbing of ‘tenderness’. Only the prospect of the baby pulled her out of this morbid brooding. Determined to go through a modern pregnancy, she made sure she had regular exercise and when her girl, named Fanny, was born in May, Mary horrified the midwife by getting up from her bed the next day, refusing the purification ritual of covering herself in ashes, and resuming, almost immediately, her routine of country walks. Needless to say, she nursed Fanny herself – even though, as she wrote frankly to Ruth Barlow, her ‘inundations of milk’ were sometimes inconvenient. But Imlay was away a lot, and when he wasn’t he fell sick. And the little life added to hers had given Mary a fresh aversion to the tide of death running through France. ‘My blood runs cold and I sicken at the thought of a Revolution which costs so much blood and bitter tears.’

  With the fall of Robespierre and his execution in reaction to the Jacobin Terror, there was a little more breathing room. Tom Paine and the rest emerged from prison, permanently changed by their ordeal. Now that travel around the country was easier, Imlay took advantage of it to see to his shipping business in Normandy. Swooping up and down between love-sick euphoria and suicidal gloom, Mary followed him to Le Havre with the baby only to find him crossing the Channel repeatedly. Trying to calm her, Imlay wrote from London that she should perhaps come home. Despite writing that ‘England is a country which has not merely lost all charms for me, but for which I feel a repugnance’ she made the crossing, only to have her worst fears confirmed. Imlay would not turn himself into a husband and father, not least because he had a new love interest. Mary took an overdose of laudanum. Although shocked by the attempted suicide, Imlay was not shocked enough to want to resume their old life. Instead, he came up with the perverse plan of distracting her by sending her off to Norway on business to track down a missing shipment of silver.

  Of all the roles she chose to assume in her wandering life, Mary Wollstonecraft, commercial investigator, was the oddest. But off she went with little Fanny and a maid as her only companions, making her way through Sweden and Norway, trying, and not surprisingly failing, to track down her feckless partner’s cargo of bullion. In an inn built of logs, painted red and yellow and overlooking the dark sea, Mary, who had been so brutally manhandled by politics and passion, did at last find something akin to a state of grace in nature. She swam, sat on the rocks in the windy northern sunlight and jotted in a journal. In the ‘Letters’ she planned to publish as a meditation on the times, she wrote that the Norwegian fishermen were indeed the children of nature she had been searching for: instinctively, artlessly free, without the need of ranting philosophy to instruct them in their liberation.

  The restoration of her sanity, however, was only temporary. Returning to London, she discovered that Imlay’s reluctance to set up house did not extend to establishing a ménage with an actress, his new mistress. One night in October 1795 she went out in a torrential rainstorm, meaning to drown herself. Battersea Bridge, chosen for the jump, proved somehow disconcertingly public, so she paid a boatman to row her up-river to Putney. She walked up and down for half an hour to make sure her dress was saturated enough to sink her, then paid her halfpenny toll to get on the bridge, climbed on to the railing and jumped. ‘Let my wrongs sleep with me!’ she had written in the suicide note addressed to Imlay. ‘When you receive this, my burning head will be cold … I shall plunge into the Thames where there is the least chance of my being snatched from the death I seek.’

  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 evid
ence. 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’.