Jacobins and Jesuits: Wat Tyler and Other Ghosts

Abstract

Among the events of 1811 listed in the June issues of Leigh Hunt’s Examiner were the following: floods in Shropshire and Worcestershire, the failure of another motion for the relief of Irish Catholics, more than 100 bankrupt traders, and the suicide of a 17-year-old girl through an overdose of opium. Hunt would later look back to that summer when the prince regent had not only retained his father’s Tory ministers, but “had broken life-1ong engagements, had violated his promises, particular as well as general, those to Catholics among them, and led 1n toto a different political life from what had been expected” (Autobiography 2: 114–15). He was now greeted in public with hisses rather than with the customary cheers. The Examiner’s attacks on the prince regent would soon land Hunt in prison (Roe 160–89). The sense of gloom was not alleviated by Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s poem, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, published in February 1812. Mrs. Barbauld (née Aikin) was from a Unitarian family and was a friend of John Prior Estlin, Unitarian minister of the Presbyterian congregation at Lewin’s Mead, Bristol, where Coleridge worshipped in the 1790s. She wrote the memoir prefixed to Estlin’s posthumously published Lectures (1818). Estlin had responded to Paine’s Age of Reason with Evidences of Revealed religion (1796), while his Bristol sermons on the Nature and causes of Atheism (1797) carried an epigraph from Coleridge’s Destiny of Nations.