CHAPTER XII.

GREAT MARLOW.

The Misleading Tablet--House and Garden--Claire at Marlow--Shelley’s Delight in Claire’s Voice--_To Constantia Singing_--Source of the Name--Trips to London--_The Marlow Pamphlets_--_Rosalind and Helen_--Other Literary Work at Marlow--Mary’s Treatment and Opinion of Claire--Shelley makes his Will--Date of Probate--The Will’s various Legacies--Significant Legacies to Claire--Object of the Second Legacy of £6000--Did Shelley mean to leave Claire so much as £12,000?--Mr. Froude’s Indiscretion--His Ignorance of the Will.

Over the wall (towards the high road) of the house, inhabited for about a year by Shelley at Great Marlow, may be seen a tablet bearing this inscription, chiselled at the cost of a gentleman, whose intention to honour the poet was more creditable than his knowledge of the poet’s story:--

This Tablet was Placed A.D. 1867, At the Instance of Sir William Robert Clayton, Bart., To Perpetuate the Record that PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY Lived and Worked in this House And was Here Visited by Lord Byron.

‘He is Gone where all Things Wise and fair Descend. Oh, Dream not the Amorous Deep Will yet Restore him to the Vital air, Death Feeds on His Mute Voice, and Laughs at Our Despair.’ ADONAIS.

Byron having left England for ever long before Shelley entered the house, it is needless to say that the poets never exchanged words under its roof.

Regarded from the road, this house is, at the present time, a dingy and mean dwelling; but on entering it, the visitor is agreeably surprised by the magnitude of the rooms (one of them, _i.e._ Shelley’s library, being, in Peacock’s opinion, not in mine, large enough for a ball-room); and the rectangular garden in the rear of the building (a garden, at this present time, divided into four several plots of ground) is twenty-one yards wide and two hundred and twenty-five yards long. Readers may rely on the exactness of these particulars of the garden’s size, which were given to me for this work by my friend Mr. William Ford Langworthy.

The knavish gardener having lopt the fine holly to a bare pole, Shelley was at considerable cost in planting this garden with shrubs. About the same time the house (taken on lease for twenty-one years) was re-decorated and furnished at no small expense; the library (big enough for a ball-room) being fitted with shelves and books on terms, that were not otherwise than advantageous to the ‘unbiased’ Mr. Hookham, of Bond Street. Without meaning to live in this pleasant house ‘for ever,’ Shelley, no doubt, intended to make it his home, till he should succeed to estates A and B. Mrs. Shelley hoped the place would be her home till she should become Lady Shelley. But human creatures are less the rulers than the sport of circumstances. Little more than a year had passed since their settlement at Marlow when, yielding reluctantly to her husband’s solicitations, Mrs. Shelley went with him to Italy for the remainder of his days.

It has been the fashion of the Shelleyan partisans to speak of the Shelleys’ kindness to Claire as though she were a kind of fallen woman, whom they magnanimously sheltered from social opprobrium. That they were very kind to her when she needed their sympathy and care, is unquestionable; but in estimating their conduct towards Claire, the reader must remember, not only their familiar relationship to her, but also that, in her intimacy with Byron, Claire had done nothing to forfeit their respect. So soon after her marriage with the poet, under whose ‘protection’ she had been living for two years and a half, Mrs. Shelley could scarcely assume an attitude of virtuous superiority and condescension to her sister, who had lived in the same way with another poet for a shorter time. That Mrs. Shelley was altogether pleased to have Claire on her hands, in 1817 and afterwards, is not to be supposed. On the contrary, a letter of her writing shows that, some time elapsed after her return from Switzerland, in September, 1816, before she consented to receive Claire as a permanent inmate of her home. But circumstances constrained her to consent.

It would have been inhuman in the Shelleys to decline to shelter Claire during her accouchement. It is not wonderful that they gave her and her child a home at Marlow. It was necessary that Claire’s babe should be born under circumstances most likely to keep the affair from her mother and step-father, who had no knowledge or suspicion of their child’s _liaison_ with Byron. In providing Claire with the retreat, in which she gave birth to Allegra with the utmost secresy, and in afterwards providing her with a home, in which to cherish her infant with similar privacy, the Shelleys were actuated by care for themselves, as well as by affection for her. Mrs. Shelley had suffered too severely from her father’s displeasure, not to be very desirous of withholding from him matters which would, on coming to his and Mrs. Godwin’s knowledge, be sure to occasion its renewal. Now that the sisters had been pardoned by Skinner Street, and general harmony been re-established in the family circle, it was obvious that Claire must live for a while either at Marlow or under Godwin’s roof. On leaving her sister’s side, she could not keep away from her mother’s house without giving offence or provoking suspicion. Her return to Skinner Street would be followed quickly by disclosures, certain to result in a fresh outbreak of family dissension. On the other hand, so long as they knew her to be living with the Shelleys at Marlow, Mr. and Mrs. Godwin would not be uneasy or inconveniently curious about her. Out of her mother’s observation, she could nurse her child at Marlow in greater security from detection than anywhere else.

That Shelley found the dark-eyed and charming, though sometimes exasperatingly freakish, girl, upon the whole an agreeable inmate, and was, in some degree, rewarded for his hospitality by the delight coming to him from her faculty of song, may be inferred from Shelley’s poem ‘To Constantia Singing’ (1817), opening with the stanza,--

‘TO CONSTANTIA SINGING.

Thus to be lost and thus to sink and die, Perchance were death indeed!--Constantia, turn! In thy dark eyes a power like light doth lie, Even though the sounds which were thy voice, which burn Between thy lips, are laid to sleep; Within thy breath, and on thy hair, like odour it is yet, And from thy touch like fire doth leap. Even while I write, my burning cheeks are wet; Alas, that the torn heart can bleed, but not forget!’

Shelley left behind him fragments of two other poems, addressed to Claire under the name of Constantia. But why Constantia? Always sagacious in his suggestions respecting the poet, whose story he told with such admirable tenderness and fairness, Mr. Rossetti suggests that Constantia was a fancy-name, taken from Constantia Dudley, the heroine of Brockden Brown’s _Ormond_,--one of the several novels by a forgotten writer, which Shelley admired so greatly. None the less certain, however, is it, that the heroine of the poem was the Claire in whose singing Shelley delighted in later time, no less than in 1817, and for whose progress in the most effective of her several accomplishments he was thoughtful during their stay at Marlow. Of course, Claire was vastly delighted by her brother-in-law’s approval of her singing, and by the great compliment he rendered her, in giving poetical expression to the approval. The second Mrs. William Godwin’s daughter took strange liberties with her name. Christened Mary Jane (a homely name enough), she usually signed her letters ‘Claire,’ after inventing that agreeable designation for her bright and fascinating individuality; and she also caused herself sometimes to be described, as Clara Mary Constantia Jane Clairmont;--‘Constantia,’ in commemoration of her association with Shelley’s poetical achievements; and ‘Clara’ in commemoration of the fact, that Shelley’s daughter (born at Marlow on 3rd September, 1817) was named after her mother’s sister-by-affinity,--even as Byron’s Ada was in her other Christian name styled after her father’s half-sister. Described as Clara Mary Constantia Jane in a legal instrument, dated long after Shelley’s death, Claire figures as Mary Jane Clairmont in Shelley’s last will and testament.

Covering passages of wretchedness, that came to him from grief for his first wife’s fate, and from his rage against the Lord Chancellor, Shelley’s time at Marlow covered, also, some of the happiest weeks and months of his existence,--weeks and months of exciting literary labour; days spent agreeably with his wife’s father; and days passed, with livelier contentment, in the society of Peacock, Hogg, and the Hunts. Now on the water, and now on foot, he took much exercise in the open air. Sometimes by himself and sometimes with his younger friends, he walked to and fro between Marlow and London. In their pedestrian excursions to London (thirty-two miles distant from the Buckinghamshire village), it was usual for Peacock and Shelley to march to town in the day, stay two nights in the capital, and march back on the third day.

Holding little intercourse with his immediate neighbours of his own degree (who, no doubt, gossiped much, and pumped Mr. Furnivall, the surgeon, with small result, about the ladies and babies of the poetical household), he received visitors from a distance, together with two or three of the Marlow residents, and altogether led a more sociable life than at Bishopgate. His time at Marlow was also a time of great literary productiveness. In it he threw off the Marlow Pamphlets, (_a_) _A Proposal for putting Reform to the Vote throughout the Kingdom_, and (_b_) _An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte_, and published the _History of a Six Weeks’ Tour_--the book that gave Claire her place in the record of English literature as Shelley’s and Mrs. Shelley’s sister. It was also the period in which he wrote _Laon and Cythna, or the Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of the Nineteenth Century_. _In the Stanza of Spenser_; wrote the fragmentary _Prince Athanase_, and began _Rosalind and Helen_, the modern eclogue, which he finished in the summer of the following year (1818) at the baths of Lucca,--the three poems which, telling us so much of the poet’s romantic view of his own character and career, are so rich in the poetical egotisms, which have been so often handled as though they were reliable passages of unimaginative biography.

In studying the last-named of these poems, the reader will not fail to detect Shelley in Lionel (the name under which the poet figures in _The Boat on the Serchio_), Claire in Rosalind, and Mrs. Shelley in Helen, who says of her lost Lionel,--

‘To Lionel, Though of great wealth and lineage high, Yet through those dungeon walls there came Thy thrilling light, O liberty! And as the meteor’s midnight flame Startles the dreamer, sun-like truth Flashed on his visionary youth, And filled him, not with love, but faith, And hope, and courage mute in death; For love and life in him were twins, Born at one birth.’

It is thus that Shelley, the scion of a middle-class family, the great-grandson of a Yankee apothecary, boasted of his ‘lineage high,’ to the admiration of eulogists, who speak disdainfully of Byron’s pride in his Norman descent. Of her conjugal union to Lionel--a union effected in accordance with the ways and principles of Free Lovers--Helen says, in terms descriptive of Mary’s bondless marriage with her father’s familiar friend,--

‘And so we loved, and did unite All that in us was yet divided: For when he said, that many a rite, By men to bind but once provided, Could not be shared by him and me, Or they would kill him in their glee, I shuddered, and then laughing said-- “We will have rites our faith to bind, But our church shall be the starry night, Our altar the grassy earth outspread, And our priest the muttering wind.”’

A very delightful way of being married, no doubt; but in real life, marriages done thus lightly and elegantly, without church or chapel, priest or minister, officer or registrar, sometimes have inconvenient consequences.

Another thing to render _Rosalind and Helen_ interesting to students of Shelley’s story, is its evidence that Shelley wrote the poem with a hope, that it would tend to draw Mary and Claire still closer together, and weld their hearts into an indissoluble union by the strongest mutual affection. That it was Mary who induced Shelley, at the baths of Lucca in the summer of 1818, to finish the poem which had this obvious purpose, is a part of the evidence that she was then animated by affection for the sister-by-affinity, whom she had so recently styled her ‘sister’ in a published book. Yet we are assured by Mr. Kegan Paul that, in 1818, Mrs. Shelley ‘felt as strongly as Byron that Allegra’s mother was the worst person possible to train the child.’ Had I not on certain occasions caught Mr. Kegan Paul, passing from clear evidences to strangely erroneous conclusions, I should take it for granted that he had sufficient documentary evidence for so strong and startling a statement. But I am slow to believe that Mrs. Shelley thought so ill of Claire, either at Marlow (where she styled Claire her ‘sister’ in a published book), or in any term of 1818, prior to the time when she encouraged Shelley to resume work on _Rosalind and Helen_. Under the circumstances, I can conceive that Mr. Kegan Paul has inferred too much from some words, penned by Mrs. Shelley, in order to induce Byron to take personal charge of Allegra. In 1817 and 1818, the Shelleys put strong pressure on Byron, to rear Allegra under his own roof and eye, and in doing so declared the strongest opinion that he was the fittest person to have charge of the child. But to argue from any expressions of this opinion, that Mrs. Shelley regarded her ‘sister’ as a person from whose deleterious influence the child should be preserved, would be alike unjust to the Shelleys and to Claire; it being certain that Shelley wished Byron to receive _both_ the mother and the child; that he did his utmost to bring about an arrangement for Claire to have charge of her offspring _under_ Byron’s roof; and that he strove and hoped to bring about this arrangement, even _after_ Allegra’s transference to her father’s house.

I do not say that Mr. Kegan Paul cannot produce evidence to sustain his staggering statement. On the contrary, I have a feeling that he may be able to do so. But I do not hesitate in saying, that to produce any sufficient documentary evidence of Mrs. Shelley’s having written, or thought so ill of Claire in 1817 or 1818, would be to show how little William Godwin knew of his daughter’s real character, and to prove that she was the falsest little minx that ever wore petticoats. If, whilst she was bearing herself to the world with every show of sisterly affection for, and confidence in, her _sister_ (her ‘sister’ of the published _Six Weeks’ Tour_), Mrs. Shelley ever gave anyone to understand that Claire was unfit to discharge the maternal duties to her own child, she was a woman with two faces and a double tongue.

Enough has been said to show that, in 1817 and the earlier months of 1818, Claire had good reason for thinking she possessed her sister’s affection, and that Shelley had reason to believe his wife held Claire in sisterly regard. Enough also has been said to show that throughout this same period Shelley was affectionately disposed to his wife’s sister-by-affinity. My strongest evidence that Shelley was so disposed towards Claire has, however, still to be given.

Shelley was still at Bath when he instructed a London lawyer to make the will, which was in due course executed in London on 18th February, 1817, and proved as the poet’s last testament in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury on 1st November, 1844,--more than two-and-twenty years after his death. Lord Byron and Thomas Love Peacock were appointed executors of this will. The testator assigned a sum of 6000_l._ for a provision for his son (Charles Bysshe) by his first wife, another 6000_l._ for a provision for Ianthe (his daughter by the same wife), and a third 6000_l._ for a provision for his son (William) by Mary Godwin; the said three sums of 6000_l._ each being bequeathed to the said Lord Byron and Thomas Love Peacock _In Trust_ for the benefit of the said three children. After providing in this manner for his children, the testator (speaking of Claire, under the name of Mary Jane Clairmont) says,--

‘I give and bequeath unto Mary Jane Clairmont (the sister-in-law of my residuary legatee) the sum of six thousand pounds of like lawful money of Great Britain and I also give and bequeath unto the said George Gordon Lord Byron and Thomas Love Peacock their executors administrators and assigns the sum of six thousand pounds of like lawful money of Great Britain upon trust to lay out and invest the same in their names in purchase of an annuity for the term of the natural life of the said Mary Jane Clairmont and the life of such other person as the said Mary Jane Clairmont shall name (if she please to name one) and to stand possessed of the said annuity and the securities to be obtained for the same upon trust that they the said George Gordon Lord Byron and Thomas Love Peacock and the survivor of them and the executors administrators and assigns of such survivor shall and do during the natural life of the said Mary Jane Clairmont when and as the annuity hereinbefore by me directed to be purchased with the aforesaid sum of six thousand pounds shall be received by my said trustees or the trustee for the time being pay the said annuity into the proper hands of her the said Mary Jane Clairmont or unto her order to be signified by some note or writing under her hand from time to time after the quarterly payment of the same annuity for the payment of which such order shall be given shall have actually become due and payable but not otherwise to the intent that the same annuity may be for the sole and separate use of the said Mary Jane Clairmont independently of any husband with whom she may intermarry and to the intent that the said Mary Jane Clairmont may not either covert or sole make any appointment or assignment by way of anticipation of any unaccrued quarterly payment of the said annuity and the receipt or receipts of the said Mary Jane Clairmont or of the person or persons to whom she shall make such order or appointment as aforesaid shall alone be a good and sufficient discharge for the said annuity or for so much thereof as in such receipt or receipts shall be expressed or acknowledged to be received and from and after the decease of the said Mary Jane Clairmont in case the said annuity shall not then have run out my said trustees shall then stand possessed thereof in trust for such person or persons as the said Mary Jane Clairmont shall by deed or will appoint to receive the same and in default of appointment in trust for the executors or administrators of the said Mary Jane Clairmont I give and bequeath to Thomas Jefferson Hogg of the Inner Temple London Esquire the sum of two thousand pounds of like lawful money of Great Britain I give and bequeath unto the said George Gordon Lord Byron the sum of two thousand pounds of like lawful money of Great Britain I give and bequeath unto the said Thomas Love Peacock the sum of five hundred pounds of like lawful money of Great Britain I give and bequeath unto the said George Gordon Lord Byron and Thomas Love Peacock their executors administrators and assigns the sum of two thousand pounds of like lawful money of Great Britain upon trust to lay out and invest the same in their names in the purchase of annuity payable quarterly for the term of the natural life of the said Thomas Love Peacock and the life of such other person as the said Thomas Love Peacock shall name (if he please to name one) and to stand possessed of the said annuity and the securities to be obtained for the same upon trust that they the said George Gordon Lord Byron and Thomas Love Peacock and the survivor of them and the executors administrators and assigns of such survivor shall and do during the natural life of the said Thomas Love Peacock when and as the annuity hereinbefore by me directed to be purchased with the aforesaid sum of two thousand pounds shall be received by my said trustees or the trustee for the time being pay the same annuity into the proper hands of the said Thomas Love Peacock or unto his order to be signified by some note or writing under his hand from time to time after the quarterly payment of the same annuity for the payment of which such order shall be given shall have actually become due and payable but not otherwise to the intent that the said Thomas Love Peacock may not make any appointment or assignment by way of anticipation of any unaccrued quarterly payment of the said annuity and from and after the decease of the said Thomas Love Peacock in case the said annuity shall not then have run out my said trustees shall stand possessed thereof in trust for such person or persons as the said Thomas Love Peacock shall by deed or will appoint to receive the same and in default of appointment in trust for the executors or administrators of the said Thomas Love Peacock and I do hereby give devise and bequeath all and singular my manors messuages lands tenements hereditaments and real estate whatsoever and wheresoever situate both freehold and copyhold and whether in possession reversion remainder or expectancy and over which I have any disposing power and also all and singular my monies stocks funds and securities for money mortgages in fee and for years and the lands tenements and hereditaments therein comprised for all my estate and interest therein and all other my goods chattels and personal estate and effects whatsoever and wheresoever (but subject nevertheless and charged and chargeable as well my said real as personal estate with the payment of all my just debts funeral and testamentary expenses and the legacies given by this my Will and also such legacies as I may hereafter give by any Codicil or Codicils thereto) unto and to the use of my wife Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley her heirs executors administrators and assigns for her and their own absolute use and benefit for ever Provided always and my will is and I do hereby expressly declare that the several legacies hereinbefore by me given shall not be paid or payable until my said wife Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley her heirs or assigns shall be in the possession of my real estate under the devise to her and them hereinbefore contained and in that case if my said wife Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley shall regularly pay the interest of the several legacies after she obtains possession of my said real estate such legacies may remain unpaid for any time not exceeding the term of four years at the option of my said wife Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.’

Shelley assigned 6000_l._ to each of his three children, living at the time when he made the will; he bequeathed the same sum (6000_l._) to Claire, to be paid into her hands for her to deal with according to her pleasure. Had he done nothing more for her by his will, he would have dealt with her in the testament precisely as he dealt with his own children;--a sufficient proof that he felt more than an ordinary brother’s love for her. But in addition to this large legacy, he left her another 6000_l._, to be invested in an annuity for the term of her natural life, or for the lives of herself and ‘such other person’ as she should name. There is small room for doubt that, in making this direction, Shelley had Allegra in his mind, as the person whom Claire would name as her co-parcener in the annuity. I have no doubt that he wished to provide for her child even as he provided for each of his own children, and saw that to do so directly and openly, with mention of the child’s name, he must use language that would publish to the world one side of the child’s parentage, and, whilst exposing the mother to discredit, would raise a suspicion that he was the child’s father. Anyhow, he left Claire 12,000_l._ (say, a sixth or seventh of all he had to will away). A father and husband with three living children, and the prospect of having more children, he bequeathed this large sum to his wife’s ‘sister’; and yet we have been asked to believe that, at the time of making this bequest, he disliked Claire!

A good example of the inaccuracy with which Trelawny, in his old age, used to gossip of Shelley and his affairs, is afforded by what he said to Mr. Rossetti of this double legacy to Claire. In his _Talks with Trelawny_, _vide_ the _Athenæum_, 1882, Mr. Rossetti remarked, ‘Trelawny says that Shelley left Miss Clairmont, by will, no less a sum than 12,000_l._ He had left 6000_l._ in the body of the will, and then (whether by inadvertence or otherwise) he bequeathed another 6000_l._ in a codicil.’ There is no codicil to Shelley’s will. Both bequests were made in the body of the will. Inadvertence was in no degree accountable for the two several bequests. Quarrelling bitterly with Claire after her husband’s death on other matters, Mrs. Shelley also quarrelled with her bitterly about these bequests,--maintaining that Shelley never intended to leave her more than 6000_l._; insisting that a lawyer’s blunder was the cause of the enormity of the sum bequeathed to Claire; and arguing that Claire was bound in honour to forego the legacy of 6000_l._ and be content with the annuity,--a view of the case not taken by Claire. No lawyer will think a mistake was made by Shelley’s solicitor, or question that Shelley (a subtle user and reader of words, and a man by no means without aptitude for affairs of business) intended to bequeath both sums. The notion that he was guilty of inadvertence, and slipt in the matter through his lawyer’s blundering, is absurd.

There is, however, reason for thinking that Claire took more by the will than Shelley in his last months intended her to take by his last testament. That Mrs. Shelley had grounds for saying he meant to reduce some of the legacies of the will, and otherwise alter the instrument, I do not question. Believing that he made the second bequest of 6000_l._ mainly for Allegra’s benefit, I think it probable that, after Allegra’s death, in April, 1822, he intended to revoke the bequest for the purchase of the annuity. But he died without altering his will in any way. Hence, unless he told her of his intention to revoke the second legacy, or left clear evidence of his intention to do so, Claire was entitled in honour no less than in law to both legacies.

Anyhow, it is certain that on 18th February, 1817,--the February next following Allegra’s birth, and her mother’s residence with Byron and the Shelleys in Geneva--Shelley made the will in which he bequeathed to Claire, out of his moderate estate, no less than 12,000_l._ Is not this strong evidence of his affection and esteem for her? Is it conceivable that he would have left Claire so much money had he and Mary concurred in cordially disliking her? Mr. Froude insists that, regarding Claire with disapproval and aversion when they accompanied her to Geneva, they were no less unfavourably disposed to her, when they sheltered her at Bath and gave her bed and board at Marlow. Here are Mr. Froude’s words:--

‘The Shelleys, who had disliked her before, could not have been more favourably disposed to her; but they pitied her misfortunes, and allowed her to continue to reside with them.’

It is due to Mr. Froude to say that, when writing these words, he had not seen Shelley’s will; but he had before him my clear account of Shelley’s affectionate regard for Claire. He chose to deviate from my clear account, and to rely on the statements of other persons, and he must take the consequences of his imprudence.