The ever-choleric Mr. Timothy Shelley was furious for several days, for some few weeks, at these proposals from the young gentleman whom he had hoped, with ‘Palley’s’ help, to bring round to religious orthodoxy; and in his wrath, he said and did foolish things after the wont of extremely angry fathers. He vowed he would ‘stop the supplies,’ and so far as his own pocket was concerned, he did stop them for some few weeks; during which time the naughty boy lived comfortably enough on money lent him by Hogg (who was in funds), money sent to him by his sisters, and money given to him by his uncle, Captain Pilfold. On 18th April, 1811, when his father was in the purple stage of his fury, Shelley received a present of money from his mother, which, however, he returned from some scruple of delicacy or dignity. ‘Mr. Pilfold,’ he wrote on that day from Poland Street to Hogg, ‘has written a very civil letter; my mother intercepted that—sent to my father, and wrote to me to come, inclosing the money. I, of course, returned it.’ The ‘stopping of the supplies’ from the paternal purse made them flow in all the more plentifully—from irregular sources. The exile from his home was therefore in easy circumstances so far as money was concerned. The pictures of the future poet languishing in penury, and menaced with starvation, whilst his wealthy father fared sumptuously, may be tossed aside with other biographic fictions.
Whilst he received no money from his father, the exile of 15 Poland Street was also under order to keep away from Field Place and its inmates,—an order that may perhaps be referred rather to the Squire’s wrath, no less than to a sincere belief that the youngster’s presence there would do his sisters any serious injury; though, doubtless, Mr. Shelley the Elder attributed the prohibition to the more creditable motive. It is also conceivable how the Squire explained the apparent inconsistency of his conduct in forbidding the boy to do at the end of April, what he had wished him to do a fortnight earlier. At the beginning of the month, when he hoped to find his son comparatively docile and tractable after his humiliating misadventure at Oxford, the Member for New Shoreham doubtless imagined the scapegrace (out of respect to a paternal injunction to that effect) would refrain from talking with his sister Elizabeth on religious questions. His son’s defiance of parental authority, in respect to his intercourse with Hogg, may have caused his father to assume he would be no less unwilling to respect parental orders touching his intercourse with his eldest sister,—an assumption that would put Mr. Timothy Shelley in the way to argue that he was only actuated by care for his daughter, in forbidding her brother to approach her. If the Squire of Field Place put the matter thus to his own conscience, he only contrived to deceive himself as resentful gentlemen are wont to deceive themselves. Anyhow, he was determined for a few weeks to keep the brother and sister apart.
The order to keep away from Field Place and from his sister, of course, made Shelley desirous of visiting them. In no hurry to return home, whilst his father wished him to go there quickly, Shelley had no sooner been commanded to refrain from entering Field Place than he resolved to go there.
On hearing that, if he tried to visit his sister at Field Place, she would be removed from home, the young gentleman declared he would follow her, whithersoever she should be taken. Jubilant over an assurance that ‘the estate was entailed on him,’—totally out of the power of ‘the enemy’ (i.e. his father) he declared his intention of entering the enemy’s dominions (i.e. Field Place) as soon as he wished to do so. He would walk into Field Place, whether his father liked or disliked it. And on this point he was as good as his word: for returning to the place something sooner than the Squire wished to see him there, he chuckled over the inefficacy of his father’s arrangements for putting restrictions on his intercourse with his eldest sister.
The quarrel of the father and son was at its fiercest heat when, on 24th April, 1811, they met one another in the passage of John Grove’s house, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields; a scene occurring which (if Shelley reported it truthfully to Hogg) was creditable to neither of them, but far more discreditable to the good feeling of the son than to the good sense of the sire. If the father did ill in returning an inquiry for his health with a look as black as a thundercloud, the son did worse by answering the look with a bow, whose extreme lowness rendered the formal show of obeisance a mere act of insult.
That even in his wrath the Squire of Field Place was not wholly unreasonable is shown by the shortness of the time that had elapsed since he ‘stopt the supplies,’ when he consented to make his son an allowance of 200l. a-year. Only five days after the exchange of offensive greetings in John Grove’s passage, the future poet was in high hope that his father would forthwith allow him 200l. a-year.
Sixteen days later (15th May, 1811), the arrangement was made on conditions that left Shelley free to live and go wherever he liked, so long as he kept away from York, whither Hogg had gone for twelve months, to read law and acquire the rudiments of legal draughting in a conveyancer’s chambers. The scapegrace of Field Place had reason to exult at the liberal terms, for which he was indebted no less to his father’s placability than to the Duke of Norfolk’s influence over the Member for New Shoreham. So soon did the cruel and parsimonious father renew the current of ‘supplies,’ after stopping it in a season of fierce anger. No more than seven weeks and two days had passed since his expulsion from Oxford, when the future poet was enjoying a sufficient income, granted on no ignominious conditions.
The smallness of this allowance having been often adduced in evidence of Mr. Timothy Shelley’s niggardliness to his eldest son, readers should recall what they have already been told respecting the pecuniary circumstances of the Squire of Field Place up to the date of his father’s death, till which event he was by no means wealthy for his social position. Dependent on his father, who, loving money more passionately as his fingers grew more feeble, was incessantly bickering with his heir-apparent about the excesses of his expenditure, Mr. Timothy Shelley (with several children on his hands) could not make his son a larger allowance. Two hundred a-year was a far better bachelor’s income seventy years since than it is now-a-days. Thirty years later it was still regarded as more than a sufficient allowance for a briefless barrister. Shelley was still only eighteen years old when it was allotted to him. Moreover at the time of the arrangement, it was not contemplated that it would be his only means of subsistence; for it was made in anticipation that he would be a frequent visitor at his father’s house. Had he from early boyhood lived harmoniously with his father, and been a loving and dutiful son, Shelley in his nineteenth year could not reasonably have looked for a larger income from his father during his grandfather’s life. Getting so handsome an allowance from his father so soon after his expulsion from Oxford, he was treated in money-matters with liberality by the father, who is generally conceived to have treated him with vindictive stinginess.
These are the facts of the matter about which Lady Shelley writes in these words:—
‘Exasperated by his son’s refusal to conform to the orthodox belief, he’ (i.e. Timothy Shelley) ‘forbade him to appear at Field Place. On the sensitive feelings of the young controversialist and poet, this sentence of exclusion from his boyhood’s home inflicted a bitter pang; yet he was determined to bear it, for the sake of what he believed to be right and true.’