As the trio knew he could not leave York, it was impossible for Hogg to regard their invitation as sincere or flattering. Moreover, he could not be indifferent to the signal affront they had offered him in running away without a word of farewell. That the incident was Miss Westbrook’s work he had no doubt; that Mrs. Shelley was an accomplice in her sister’s scheme for his humiliation he may well have suspected. Nor could he acquit Shelley of being a partner to the insult. It is thus that human schemes miscarry, and human hopes perish into disappointments. For months Shelley had looked forward to the pleasure of settling in York, and living there ‘for ever,’ with his incomparable Hogg and his dearest Harriett. What was the end of this scheme for perpetual felicity? After so brief a stay in the ancient city, Shelley was posting to Richmond with his wife and sister-in-law, in order to get away from the friend whom he had been so quickly taught to think a dangerous companion for his childish wife.
In the absence of conclusive testimony, the known circumstances of the flight admit of several different explanations, provoke many curious conjectures. One may imagine that Shelley, Harriett, and Miss Westbrook, were confederates on equal terms, and in perfect mutual confidence, for Hogg’s humiliation. Or one may conceive Shelley was not admitted to the confidence of the ladies, until they had arranged all the particulars of the departure. Readers are at liberty to imagine no deception was practised by the trio, or any person of the trio, on Hogg, when he was informed the departure would be made twenty-four hours later. It is conceivable the suddenness of the departure was no less real to the fugitives than apparent to Hogg. Possibly no one of the three was aware two hours before the departure that they would sleep the next night at Richmond. Shelley may have been looking for days to the particular hour at which his chaise eventually rattled out of Blake Street, as the particular hour at which he would start from York. His taste for making mysteries about nothing would countenance an opinion that he misled Hogg as to the pre-appointed day. It makes little for the contrary opinion that, writing ten days or so later from Keswick, he declared himself to have had no part in concerting the departure from York, or the later departure from Richmond. On the other hand, it is conceivable he was carried off at a moment’s notice and in high excitement from York by his clever and irresistible sister-in-law. There are divers other points of this business, in respect to which the ingenious reader may be left in the free exercise of his imagination, and at perfect liberty to think what he pleases.
My own hypothetical view of the business is, that Shelley was kept almost to the last moment in ignorance of the time appointed for the departure; that on this matter he was in the confidence neither of his sister-in-law nor of his wife during the last days of his sojourn at York; that, in respect to this affair, Harriett submitted to the judgment and will of her elder sister, who was for the moment the controlling member of the trio; and that in thus concealing part of her intentions from Harriett’s boyish husband, Miss Westbrook was actuated partly by malice against Hogg, and partly by prudent regard for the difficulties she might reasonably anticipate in tearing the incomparable Hogg and the incomparable Shelley asunder, when the moment for severance should arrive. Playing her game no less cautiously than boldly, Miss Westbrook (whilst at York) could not venture to do more for the severance of the friends, than to hint to Shelley that Harriett had been placed in a false and embarrassing position towards Hogg, that one consequence of this false position was Hogg’s inordinate and inconvenient admiration of Harriett, that, without doing anything distinctly culpable (Harriett’s goodness precluding any such contingency), Hogg had been too demonstrative of a far too affectionate interest in his friend’s wife. The sum of the maiden lady’s case against her ‘enemy’ at York was, that he had been wanting in discretion and delicacy and chivalric self-control. At York she could not go much beyond this in her statements to Hogg’s discredit, without inspiring her pupil with suspicions of his wife’s delicacy and discretion; and to urge only thus much in support of her counsel for prompt withdrawal from Hogg’s society, was to forbear from stirring Shelley to resentments, that would at once put it out of his friend’s power to keep him at York in opposition to her wish and purpose. Hence, Miss Westbrook had reason to apprehend Shelley might even at the last hour decline to quit York, unless she eventually effected her object in his friend’s absence, and with an abruptness for which neither of the young men was prepared. It is therefore conceivable that four-and-twenty hours before he intended to leave the city, Shelley was surprised by his sister-in-law with an announcement that Harriett’s nerves required them to clear out of York instantly. To the execution of such a coup-de-main, the aggrieved and angry lady would also be strongly moved by a desire to inflict sharp annoyance on her adversary. This hypothesis accords with Shelley’s emphatic assertion that the flight from York was no affair of his arrangement.
That Shelley did not leave York in any mood of vehement animosity against Hogg, or with any disposition to accuse him of serious misconduct towards Harriett, is shown by the affectionate warmth with which he wrote from Keswick to his incomparable friend. ‘You were surprised,’ he wrote immediately after his arrival at Keswick, ‘at our sudden departure; I have no time, however, now either to account for it or enter into an investigation which we agreed upon.—With real, true interest, I constantly think of you, believe me, my friend, so sincerely am I attached to you.’
A few days later Shelley wrote to his friend at York:—‘We all greatly regret that “your own interests, your own real interests,” should compel you to remain at York. But pray, write often; your last letter I have read, as I would read your soul.... Yours most affectionately, most unalterably, ...’ In another of his undated letters from Keswick to his friend at York, Shelley writes in this vein of affectionateness:—‘If I thought we were to be long parted, I should be wretchedly miserable,—half mad!... Cannot you follow us?—why not? But I will dare to be good,—dare to be virtuous; and I will soon seize once more what I have for a while relinquished, never, never again to resign it.’ In another letter, Shelley says to his friend at York:—‘I did not concert my departure from Richmond, nor that from York. Why did I leave you? I have never doubted you,—you, the brother of my soul, the object of my vivid interest; the theme of my impassioned panegyric.’ In another letter he writes to his friend:—‘I do not know that absence will certainly cure love; but this I know, that it fearfully augments the intensity of friendship.’ These passages from letters which, though undated, were obviously written in the time between the future poet’s first arrival at Keswick and his visit to Greystoke,—letters affording evidence that, during the earlier weeks of the residence at Keswick, Hogg was writing to Harriett with her husband’s cognizance and approval, epistles which she submitted to his approval.
Possibly the trio would have tarried a few days longer at York, had they not felt it would favour their designs on Greystoke Castle that they should be at Keswick, when the Duke’s reply to Shelley’s appeal (of October 28th) should come to their hands. Knowing the Duke would be journeying to Cumberland in the course of the next month (November, 1811), the trio had reason for hoping his Grace would propose to see them on his way through York. On receiving this expression of the ducal pleasure, it would be well for them to be already at Keswick, so that the meeting should take place in the neighbourhood of Greystoke, if not at the Castle itself. Anyhow, they were at Keswick when the Duke’s offer (7th November, 1811) to see Shelley at York came to the hands of the conspirators, whose reply (dated from Keswick) may be said to have forced the Squire’s patron to invite them to his Cumberland place—barely twelve miles from that town. That the Duke, on the 23rd of November, invited the trio to meet him at the Castle appears from his diary; but this first invitation seems to have been regarded by the adventurers as nothing more than an invitation to dinner. ‘We dine,’ Shelley wrote to Mr. Medwin, of Horsham, on 26th November, 1811, ‘with the Duke of N. at Graystock this week.’ A few hours later he received the letter from Greystoke, which enabled him on the last day of the month to write to the same correspondent:—‘We visit the Duke of N. at Graystock to-morrow. We return to Keswick on Wednesday.’
Coming to them at a time when they had reason to be thankful for small mercies, the Duke’s second invitation may be supposed to have cheered the trio, whose spirits had been already raised from the deepest dejection by another reassuring incident. Influenced possibly by prompt intelligence that his daughters had been invited to the Duchess of Norfolk’s dinner-table, Mr. Westbrook had sent his son-in-law a few pounds. The gift may have been accompanied (as Shelley, in his letter of November 30th to the Horsham attorney, avers it to have been) with an intimation that it was not to be regarded as the first of a series of similar benefactions; but, however guarded and qualified it may have been with cautious words, the remittance was an occasion for thankfulness to the trio, who had for several days needed money for their immediate necessities. Enabling them to pay their few debts in Keswick, the gift enabled them to go to Greystoke, albeit (to use the future poet’s words) the visit was paid almost with their very last guinea.
Going to the Castle on Sunday, 1st December, 1811, for three nights, the trio stayed there for eight or nine days;—an extension of the visit which, whilst certainly indicative of the Duke’s growing disposition to befriend the young couple, may also be thought to indicate that he and the Duchess were favourably impressed by John Westbrook’s daughters. Seeing in her rare beauty a palliation of the youngster’s reckless act, the host and hostess must have been surprised by the charm of Harriett’s simplicity, the music of her voice, the refinement of her tone. At a glance it was obvious to them she was no saucy barmaid. Before the Sunday dinner was over, they saw she was one of those girls of lowly origin, who under auspicious influences may win the confidence and love of the high-born. Though she lacked her sister’s manifold charms, it was no less manifest to the Duke and Duchess that, instead of being such a young woman as the mere knowledge of her father’s calling had predisposed them to find her, Miss Westbrook was a person of education and cleverness who might figure creditably in the drawing-rooms of the subordinate Sussex gentry. And in their judgment of Shelley’s womankind, the Duke and Duchess had the concurrence of the several other gentle people who were staying in the Castle,—of Lady Musgrave, of Edenhall and Hartley Castle, Co. Cumberland; James Brougham, brother of Henry, the future Lord Chancellor; and Mr. Calvert, of Greta Bank, near Keswick, a Cumberland squire, who, differing widely from Mr. Timothy Shelley in mental and moral characteristics, seems to have stood towards the Duke of Norfolk in Cumberland somewhat in the same relation in which the Sussex Squire stood to his Grace in the southern county.
Why did the Duke of Norfolk show so much concern and take so much trouble in the domestic affairs of Field Place? This question should be answered precisely, as the extravagant notions of the poet’s ancestral quality are mainly referable to misconceptions respecting the nature of the intercourse of the ducal Howards and the Castle Goring Shelleys. Having taken Sir Bysshe and the Squire of Field Place under his protection, and in a certain sense into his familiar friendship, the Duke was doubtless moved to trouble himself about the Squire’s dealings with the future poet, by a genuine desire for Mr. Timothy Shelley’s welfare. Nor can it be questioned that the powerful noble was influenced at the same time by affectionate interest in the youth, whose cordial looks and bearing, ever conciliatory to strangers and slight acquaintances, were none the less pleasing to the Duke, because the boy’s manner towards his father’s patron was gracefully expressive of ingenuous reverence for the age, experience, and rank of so august a personage. But it would be a mistake to suppose his Grace’s treatment of the Shelleys was chiefly due to these amiable and altogether disinterested motives. A keen politician, who was charged by his enemies with sacrificing his religious convictions to his political interests, the Duke cared for men in proportion as he saw they might be serviceable to his ambition. Having raised the Shelleys to a higher grade of local quality, because they could be useful to him, the Duke continued to cherish them for the same end. The mushroom house, which he had dignified with the bloody hand, was dear to the Duke as an instrument for advancing his own greatness, and promoting the grandeur of the Howards. To such a patron the estate, which at any moment might devolve on the Member for New Shoreham, represented money and influence that would be employed by the second baronet at elections for the advantage of the Norfolk connexion. The estate that might come to-morrow to the Squire of Field Place was so much social power that, two or three years later, might, by a gun-accident, a fall in the hunting-field, a violent and fatal illness, pass from Sir Bysshe’s son to the unruly boy, who under the new circumstances might be no less serviceable to the Howards than his father promised to be. In Squire Timothy the Duke had a loyal adherent and thorough Whig partisan; in the Squire’s boy, who had come to grief at Oxford and made a runaway match with an innkeeper’s daughter, the Duke saw a youngster who, after running through the fever of red-republicanism, and surviving his freakish infidelity, would take sober views of politics and religion, and settle down into as good a Whig as his father, and on nearing middle-age be more desirous of ranking with the peers than with the poets of his country. Hence the pains taken by his Grace last spring to mediate between the father and son, to induce the former to give his boy a sufficient allowance, and to talk the latter into a disposition to live quietly and with due regard for his ultimate interests, until he should be of an age to enter Parliament and sit there like a sensible fellow for a pocket-borough. Hence also the Duke’s readiness to act again as mediator between the angry sire and contumacious son. The same view must be taken of the Duke’s condescension,—and, an even more remarkable fact, the Duchess’s condescension,—in asking John Westbrook’s daughters to Greystoke Castle.
As he lived at Greta Bank, less than a mile from the town of Keswick, and was at home when the trio became his near neighbours, it is not surprising that Mr. Calvert had made Shelley’s acquaintance before meeting him at the Duke of Norfolk’s table. An observant and energetic man, ever vigilant of the life, and keenly interested in the improvements, of his neighbourhood, the Squireen of Greta Bank was certain, under any circumstances, to hear of the arrival of so singular a party of tourists within a fortnight of their coming to the town, at so inclement a season. It is, however, probable that the Duke of Norfolk’s useful neighbour at Keswick was the sooner cognizant of the strangers and their proceedings, because he had been asked by his Grace to be on the look-out for them. Circumstances indeed warrant something more than a suspicion that Harriett and her sister were not invited to Greystoke till the Duke had learnt from Mrs. Calvert that John Westbrook’s daughters had the looks and manners of gentlewomen. Anyhow Shelley and Harriett had encountered Mr. Calvert on the hills about Keswick before meeting him at the Castle; and on talking with him at Greystoke it was soon apparent to the future poet that much of his private affairs had come to the knowledge of his new acquaintance. The ‘elderly man,’ whose looks impressed Shelley so agreeably, may be presumed to have gained his surprising knowledge of the youngster’s concerns from the Duke of Norfolk. Other circumstances indicate that, before the Shelleys came to Greystoke, the Duke and his useful neighbour had conferred together on what had better be done for the suitable entertainment of the adventurers from Southern England.