Abstract
In 1804 William Pitt commissioned an impressive series of squat Martello towers along the south coast to guard against invasion. Wordsworth’s contributions to national defence, in the political sonnets of 1802–3, were similarly rounded, and like some of Pitt’s, they addressed vulnerable points to landward as well as seaward. Daniel Stuart, who published some of them in the Morning Post, described them as each forming ‘a little Political Essay, on some recent proceeding’ (Moorman, 1: 571) and Wordsworth himself told Lady Beaumont, when he published the sonnets in Poems in Two Volumes, that they made up a collective poem ‘on the subject of civil liberty and national independence’—a poem ‘likely to have few parallels in the Poetry of the present day’ (MY 1: 147).
The genuine dignity of the nation grows as its history gathers, and there is a moral power in the mere memory of an heroic age. The spirit of a people must be fed with its historic associations; its natural food is the story of the good and great men of their blood; deprived of that it languishes and dies.
—Henry Reed, Lectures on English History1
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Notes
Henry Reed, Lectures on English History and Tragic Poetry as Illustrated by Shakespeare (London: 1856), 32.
Shelley’s Prose: The Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark (London: Fourth Estate, 1988), 255.
I have avoided detailed discussion of the political alignment of the sonnets, taking the ‘old historicist’ case for granted. E. P. Thompson’s ‘Disenchantment or Default: a Lay Sermon’ (first delivered as a lecture from a Methodist pulpit in Grasmere) in Power and Consciousness, ed. C. C. O’Brien and W. D. Vanich (London and New York, 1969), 149–81 remains the most interesting treatment. I share Thompson’s view that Wordsworth’s turning away from ‘deraciné Godwinist intelligentsia’ was at the same time a turning ‘toward the common people’ (150); that the Wordsworth who wrote the political sonnets in 1802 is still the same man who offered to house John Thelwall at Alfoxden in 1798 (161); that one has to understand someone who, after a decade or more as an inner emigré opts to ‘rejoin’ his nation (172); and that Wordsworth’s post 1815 apostasy is less remarkable than his keeping the faith at least until the Cintra pamphlet. ‘If the social context makes all insertion seem impossible—if all objective referents for these hopes are cruelly obliterated … if fraternité produces fratricide, égalité produces empire, liberté produces liberticide—then aspirations can only become a transposed interior faith’. (174). One is, however, entitled to complain that he did not follow up the passion of the Cintra with a similar public critique of The Congress of Vienna (176), of which he was, in fact, privately critical.
William Frend, Patriotism: or, the Love of Our Country; an Essay … dedicated to the Volunteers of the United Kingdom (London: J. Mawman, 1804), 86.
‘Paine throws light upon a revolution betters than he concurs in the making of a constitution… for cool discussion in a committee, or the regular labours of a legislator, I conceive David Williams infinitely more proper than he … A deep thinker, and a real friend to mankind, he appeared to me to combine their means of happiness, as well as Paine feels and describes the abuses which constitute their misery…. How is it possible, said he, for men to debate a question, who are incapable of listening to each other?’ Marie Jeanne Roland de la Platiere, An Appeal to Impartial Posterity by Citizenness Roland (London: J. Johnson, 1795), 42.
David Williams, Regulations of Parochial Police, Combined with the Military and Naval Armaments to produce the Energy and Security of the Whole Nation, Roused from its general Torpor by the Prospects of the Disorder, Pillage, Crimes and all the Desolation and Horror which, without such regulations, may be the Consequences of the determined and repeated Efforts of France to Invade Great Britain and Ireland (London: J. Owen, 1797), 5.
According to David Williams, every Parish, or in London boroughs, every large street and square, should ‘be charged with its own Security; and be empowered to register its inhabitants; to confine [or] expel all vagabonds; to take cognizance of the characters and conduct of domestics…; to visit all public and lodging houses [registering occupants]’ and to involve all householders in forming a police. (28) Clubs of domestics should be proscribed (33–35), and Parochial committees should ensure that arms are removed from those who are not required to bear them by the Committee (38).
Monthly Literary Revelations, July 1807, Woof 169.
Sertorius, Mithridates, Dominique de Gourges, Gustavus, and Wallace.
At about the moment Wordsworth wrote this sonnet Napoleon was refusing to meet Pestalozzi on the grounds that he could have no interest in a man who taught children. See my ‘“Knowledge not purchased with the Loss of Power’: Pestalozzi and the spots of time’, European Romantic Review, 8:3 (1997) 231–61.
See Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785, 219–23 and passim. Wilson summarises the Reverend John Brown of Newcastle, in his Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Time as attributing military defeats to ‘the luxurious and effeminate Manners in the higher ranks, together with a general defect of principle’, 187 n.
From a review published in John Scott’s The Champion, in May 1815, of Memoirs of Lady Hamilton (Coburn, 1815). Scott (1783–1821), a schoolfellow of Byron, was later editor of The London Magazine, to which Lamb and Hazlitt contributed. He died in 1821 from wounds received in a pistol duel. Wordsworth said of his book Paris Revisited in 1815 by way of Brussels (1816) ‘every one of your words tells’. The Champion belonged later to Thelwall.
Moorman, 2: 63. See Eric C. Walker, ‘Wordsworth, Wellington, and Myth’, in History and Myth: Essays on English Romantic Literature, ed. Stephen C. Behrendt (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990) 100–115 for Wordsworth’s refusal to engage in panegyric for Wellington, and for his ‘antonomastic strategies’ whereby Wellington’s name is suppressed in every poem on Waterloo.
James K. Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature, 43–44.
Wordsworth not unnaturally borrows from the great orator, and as Chandler shows, he was undoubtedly studying Paine, Rousseau and Burke, side by side, when penning the Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff in 1793 (Chandler, 20–25).
On mendicancy see David Simpson, Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination, 167–74.
See Deirdre Coleman, ‘Re-living Jacobinism: Wordsworth and the Convention of Cintra’, The Yearbook of English Studies, Volume 19, 1989, The French Revolution in English Literature and Art, ed. J. R. Watson, 144–61, 151.
Gordon K. Thomas, ‘Wordsworth’s Iberian Sonnets: Turncoats Creed’, TWC 131 (1982) 31–34, 33.
Cited Coleman, 159.
William Hazlitt, ‘On Patriotism’, The Round Table, ed. Catherine M. Maclan, London: Dent, 1964, 67.
Wordsworth to John Scott: ‘The Cortes were what Lord Castlereay describes them, and worse. They thirsted after the independence of their country, and many of them nobly laboured to effect it; but as to civil liberty and religious institutions, their notions were as wild as the most headstrong Jacobins of France’ (MY, 2: 280).
Burke, Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace (London: 1796), 16–17.
‘Wordsworth’s championing of the voice of the common people as the inspiration of a nation’s true greatness runs directly counter to Burke’s belief that this greatness can only ever devolve “from above”’, Coleman, 152.
See Evan Radcliffe, ‘Revolutionary Writing, Moral Philosophy, and universal benevolence in the Eighteenth Century, Journal of the History of Ideas, 54: 2 (1993) 221–240, and Nicholas Roe, The Politics of Nature, passim.
Henry Crabb Robinson on Book and their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley, 3 vols., Dent 1938, 1, 182.
Titled October, 1803 in the Sonnets to Liberty, but later removed to ‘Memorials of a Tour in Scotland, 1803’ as Sonnet in the Pass of Killikranky (PW, 3: 85). Peter Manning’s comment on this poem that it ‘transforms the [Jacobite] Highlanders from the dangerous enemies of English order into the epitome of English courage’ (Reading Romantics, 263) seems unusually wide of the mark. Their irregular Scottish courage is a markedly tribal challenge—tribal on Wordsworth’s part—to England’s ‘mechanic battle’. Wordsworth moderated his irresponsibly romantic opinion in 1816 when recommending military colleges: ‘Admirable officers, indeed, have been formed in the field, but at how deplorable an expense of the lives of their surrounding brethren in arms, a history of the military operations in Spain ... would irresistibly demonstrate’. Thanksgiving Ode, January 18, 1816, viii.
Sonnet 29 of ‘Sonnets dedicated to Liberty, Part Second’ (P2V, 1815, 2: 255)—sonnet 31 in PW; 3.
SPK, 511. See also Prelude, 1805, 1.189–201.
The image of leaves ‘rent from the tree’ looks back to Wordsworth’s figuring of himself in 1793, at the start of the war, as ‘a green leaf on the blessed tree/Of my beloved country… cut off,/And tossed about in whirlwinds’ (1805, 10.254–8).
The odes include an Ode on the Disinterment of the Remains of the Duke d’Enghien, the Ode, Composed in January 1816, in which St George descends to bless the triumphant isle and compares her deeds with Marathon (later called Ode 1814 as if written to welcome Napoleon’s earlier setbacks), and a further visionary Ode which rewrites France: an Ode. Again Shelleyan in manner (it is odd how much Shelley’s style of 1819 resembles Wordsworth’s in 1815) this Ode relates how the spirit of 1789 ‘rises on the banks of Seine’ only to become ‘a terror to the earth’.
Dove Cottage: DC WLMS a/Scott, John/3, 29 May 1816, my italics. This and subsequent quotations from Scott are cited by kind permission of the Wordsworth Trust.
SPK, 185, Thanksgiving Ode lines 163 ff; PW, 3: 151, Ode 1815, line 1.
Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 156.
The Diary of Joseph Farington 7: 2785, cited Gill, 274.
The factors may include critical derision for his poetic experiments from Napoleon’s fellow-travellers; principled contempt for the Whigs; a belief that Whig magnanimity had been assumed by the Tories; ideological assimilation by Mary, Dorothy and his Rydal neighbours; the example of Coleridge; and appreciation of the decency of Southey, the patronage of Lord Lonsdale, and the culture of Sir George—at whose home some of the earliest political sonnets were written.
F. M. Todd, Politics and the Poet (London: Methuen 1957), 157.
Compare his more detailed letter to James Losh, 4 December 1821.
John Scott, Paris Revisited in 1815 by way of Brussels: including a Walk on the Field of Battle at Waterloo (London, 1816), 197.
PrW, 1: 251, 259. ‘I have found nothing more mortifying in the course of my life than those peeps behind the curtain, that have shown me how low in point of moral elevation stand some of those men who have been the most efficient instruments and machines for public benefit that our age had produced.’ (MY, 2: 280).
Walker, 111–12, 104.
The note of 1807 which temporarily associated Nelson with the Character of the Happy Warrior was never reprinted, and his appearance alongside Epaminondas, Sidney and Washington in the Cintra (256) is strikingly qualified.
Champion, No 123, May 12, 1815, reviewing Memoirs of Lady Hamilton. No 127, Sunday June 11, 1815, echoes Wordsworth’s opinion of the restoration of Ferdinand: ‘It was at a former restoration of this court, that Nelson assisted in a manner so infamously unjust and cruel, that its shame will live in the latest records of history…. If the abominations of the foulest corruption, and the lowest superstition are also to be restored in Naples … will not England be deeply and heavily responsible?’
DC WLMS a/Scott, John/1, 7 February 1816.
DC WLMS a/Scott, John/3, 29 May 1816
McFarland, chapter 4.
See Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, 109–4, and John Williams, ‘Salisbury Plain: Politics in Wordsworth’s Poetry’, Literature and History 9:2 (1983) 164–93, 185–9.
Stephen Roberts and Dorothy Thompson, Images of Chartism (London: Merlin Press, 1998), 32.
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© 2003 Richard Gravil
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Gravil, R. (2003). National Pieties; or, the Road to Waterloo. In: Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation, 1787–1842. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230510333_12
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