War, the Salisbury Plain Poems, and The Borderers (1793–7)

Abstract

When France declared war on England on 1 February 1793 Wordsworth suffered an unprecedented shock; there could be no reconciliation between his patriotism and his conviction that the French Revolution, by freeing the common man from injustice and tyranny, represented a righteous cause; he had too much integrity to betray his principles. How strongly he felt may be seen in his response to a protest against the execution of Louis XVI which came from Richard Watson, an absentee bishop who lived at Calgarth Park near Windermere. Coupled with a panegyric on the British constitution, this had been hurriedly penned and added to a reprint of the bishop’s sermon on ‘The Wisdom and Goodness of God in having made both Rich and Poor’. Neither pleased Wordsworth, for the sermon was based on the assumption that within the ‘vast scale of Being’ there was a natural, hierarchical order which justified the socio-economic inequalities of the class system. Wordsworth’s reply, A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff, was written during February and March, but not pursued to the point of publication. The text at various points lacks final revision, and the ending has been lost. Perhaps Johnson, his publisher and a friend of radical authors, warned him of the danger of government action; perhaps Wordsworth realized, when uprisings and civil war in loyalist parts of France were reported in April, that his main argument had been undermined.