The Real Shelley. New Views of the Poet's Life. Vol. 1 (of 2)

by John Cordy Jeaffreson

To rely in this affair on the whilom littérateur and cavalry officer, is to believe that the poet was a lineal descendant of Sir John Shelley of Maresfield Park, who was created a baronet in 1611; to believe that this Sir John Shelley’s son (William) was a Justice of the Common Pleas; and to believe that the poet’s great-grandfather (Timothy Shelley, of Fen Place, Co. Sussex) was a lineal descendant, in the ninth descent, of the aforesaid baronet of James the First’s time. ‘I will only say,’ Medwin remarks lightly, ‘that Sir John Shelley, of Maresfield Park, who dated his Baronetage from the earliest creation of that title in 1611, had besides other issue, two sons, Sir William, a Judge of the Common Pleas, and Edward; from the latter of whom, in the seventh descent, sprung Timothy, who also had two sons, and settled—having married an American lady—at Christ’s Church, Newark, in North America.’

Medwin is wrong in all the really important allegations of the brief statement. Sir John Shelley of Michelgrove (the baronet referred to) had two sons; but neither of them was named Edward; neither of them became a Justice of the Common Pleas; neither of them was in any way or degree accountable for Percy Bysshe Shelley’s appearance on the earth’s surface. The poet was no more descended from Sir John Shelley, the first of the Michelgrove baronets, than he was descended from the man in the moon. How could the poet’s great-grandfather (Timothy, born in 1700 A.D.) be the eighth in descent from the first Michelgrove baronet, the seventh in descent from either of the baronet’s sons? Human generations do not come and go at the rate of seven to a century.

To pass for a moment from Tom Medwin (of whose egregious mis-statements something more must be said) to the present Lady Shelley, the poet’s daughter-in-law. ‘At the close of the last century,’ says this lady in her Shelley Memorials: from Authentic Sources, ‘the family of the Shelleys had long held a high position among the large landholders of Sussex. Fortunate marriages in two generations preceding the birth of the poet considerably increased the wealth and influence of the house, the head of which was a staunch Whig.’ Lady Shelley’s book from authentic sources contains several statements of no authenticity. For each of the principal statements of the above-quoted words, she had, however, good authority. But instead of coming to her from a single authentic source, the facts embodied in the quotation were drawn from two different authentic sources, the archives of the Michelgrove Shelleys, and the archives of the Castle Goring Shelleys; and by cleverly combining the two sets of facts, Lady Shelley conveys to her readers a very erroneous impression respecting the condition of the poet’s seventeenth-century ancestors. Unquestionably, the Sussex Shelleys, at the close of the eighteenth century, had long held a high position among the large landowners of the county. But these fortunate Shelleys were not the family of which the poet was the brightest ornament. They were the Michelgrove Shelleys; whereas the poet came of people, differing greatly from the Michelgrove people in social quality. He was of the Castle Goring Shelleys—a family that, instead of being merely enriched, was created and established by the fortunate marriages to which Lady Shelley refers. Before the first of those marriages, wedlock had done much for the advantage of these inferior Shelleys. For instance, the marriage, in 1692, of John Shelley, of Fen Place, jure uxoris, with Helen, co-heir of Roger Bysshe, of Fen Place, Co. Sussex, had reclaimed the poet’s direct male ancestors from a state of territorial vagrancy, and given them a permanent, though modest, abiding-place. But for a considerable period after that marriage, the direct ancestral precursors of the Castle Goring Shelleys were no such house as the readers of Lady Shelley’s book are likely to imagine. The Michelgrove Shelleys were one ‘house,’ the Castle Goring Shelleys were quite another house; though it has for some time been the fashion of biographers to mix the two houses, and speak of them by turns as one house, or as branches of the same house. The Michelgrove Shelleys were an ancient house. The Castle Goring Shelleys were a mushroom family, disdainfully regarded by the Michelgrove people, at the opening of the nineteenth century.

Something more must be said of the older of these houses. The Michelgrove Shelleys are said, for reasons no longer discoverable, to have entered the country with the Conqueror. They may have done so. There is better evidence that they had lands in Kent in the times of Edward I. and Edward II., before they established themselves in Sussex; and still better testimony, that one of the clan (John Shelley) was Member of Parliament for Rye from 1415 to 1428. With this parliamentary personage, the house, or rather the family from which the house proceeded, comes into the clear light of history. Two long generations later (generations so lengthy that one has reason to suspect a failure of the record) the house acquired a dignity, which gave it an enduring place amongst the historic families of the realm.

Bred to the law, William Shelley (the grandson, or maybe the great-grandson, of the afore-mentioned Member for Rye) became Reader of the Inner Temple in 1517, and after holding successively the office of a Judge of the Sheriff’s Court and the office of Recorder of the City of London, rose to be a Judge of the Common Pleas somewhere about the beginning of 1527. Before mounting to this eminence he had represented the City in Parliament, and practised for six years as a Serjeant-at-law in Westminster Hall. Those who know Cavendish’s Wolsey do not need to be reminded of the part taken by this fortunate lawyer in the negotiations that closed with the Cardinal’s surrender of York House to Henry the Eighth. ‘Tell his Highness,’ said the fallen Cardinal to the Judge of the Common Pleas, ‘that I am his most faithful subject and obedient beadsman, whose command I will in no wise disobey; but will in all things fulfil his pleasure, as you the father of the law say I may. I therefore charge your conscience to discharge me, and show His Highness from me that I must desire His Majesty to remember there is both heaven and hell;’ a message which the judge probably forgot to deliver, as he lived to entertain the King at Michelgrove, and was continued in his office till Henry’s death. Surviving the sovereign, whom he served on the bench of the Common Pleas for twenty years, Sir William Shelley served Edward the Sixth in the same capacity, to the day of his own death, which occurred between November 3, 1548 (the date of his last fine), and May 10, 1549, the date of his successor’s appointment.

Fortunate in his professional career, Sir William Shelley was no less fortunate in his domestic affairs. Marrying an heiress, he had, with other children, John, the grandfather of the first Michelgrove baronet, and Sir Richard Shelley, the last English Prior of St. John of Jerusalem.

Not much less than a century wrong in assigning the legal eminence of Henry the Eighth’s judge to the eldest son of James the First’s baronet, Medwin wrote under a general impression that the Shelleys to whom he was related, had somehow or other descended from the Michelgrove house, an impression which the poet seems also to have cherished, and imparted to his college-friend and biographer, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, who writes in serio-comic vein of Sir Guyon de Shelley and Sir Richard Shelley (the Knight of Malta), as though the Grand Prior of the sixteenth century and the Paladin with the three conchs were veritable forefathers of the Castle Goring Shelleys.

That these Shelleys of the junior house were no family of singular antiquity or overpowering dignity, is shown by the pedigree of Percy Bysshe Shelley, published in the first volume of Mr. Forman’s edition of the poet’s prose works. A pedigree of only nine generations, beginning with mention of Henry Shelley, of Worminghurst, Co. Sussex, who died in 1623, this evidential writing puts it beyond question that the poet, of whose ancestral grandeur so much has been written, was no man of noble or otherwise splendid lineage; puts it beyond question, that whether regard be had to the number of its generations, the antiquity of the earliest dates, or the importance of the persons commemorated in its entries, it is (from the date of Henry Shelley’s death temp. James I. to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s birth in 1792) nothing more than such a pedigree as could be displayed by the majority of the gentle families of the middle way of English life, who never for a moment think of rating themselves as families of patrician worth.

One or two rather awkward matters excepted, this pedigree is a fair and honest record of the births, marriages, and deaths, of nine successive generations of gentle people; but as an exhibition of familiar grandeur, it is no more impressive than any pedigree one would regard as a matter of course in the muniment room of a country gentleman, tracing his descent from a gentle yeoman of the Elizabethan period. It mentions eight of the poet’s forefathers in the direct right line. Describing some of these eight individuals as ‘esquires,’ and some of them as ‘gentlemen,’ the record shows that no one of them bore any hereditary honour, or even the dignity of knighthood before the poet’s birth. It shows that no one of them married a woman of higher quality than the degree of a simple gentlewoman. Doubtless they were (with a single exception) gentlewomen in the heraldic sense of the term,—daughters of gentlemen bearing arms,—but to use an old-world phrase, no one of them was ‘a woman of quality.’ The record shows, that at the time of the poet’s birth, no one of his eight male ancestors in the direct right line had served the State with distinction, won a foremost place in one of the learned professions, or attained to any social eminence higher than a place in a Commission of the Peace.

Such is the evidence of the document of which Mr. Forman justly remarks, ‘the pedigree speaks for itself to any careful reader.’ And this evidence is the more impressive, because the carefully elaborated record is the pedigree deposited at the Heralds’ College on 6th March, 1816, by Mr. John Shelley Sidney (the poet’s uncle by the half-blood), at a moment when he was especially desirous of figuring to the best possible advantage in the esteem of heralds and their employers. Regard being had to this gentleman’s character and social ambition, and his pride in his descent from the Sidneys, it cannot be questioned that he made his genealogical record showy and impressive to the utmost of his ability,—that he would fain have driven it back another generation,—that could he have demonstrated a connection between the Castle Goring and Michelgrove Shelleys, he would not have omitted to prove them two branches of the same tree.