The outline of the essay, begun in Radnorshire, was filled in as the writer made his leisurely progress to North Devon, where he put the last touches to the Letter to Lord Ellenborough, occasioned by the Sentence which he passed on Mr. D. I. Eaton, as Publisher of the Third Part of Paine’s Age of Reason,—an essay which in respect to literary style, is a great advance on the author’s previous prose writings, without containing a single passage to justify the praise lavished by the poet’s idolaters on the perverse performance. The epistle having been touched in to his satisfaction, and most likely read to Portia (I adhere to Harriett’s way of spelling the name), Shelley took the manuscript to Barnstaple and requested Mr. Syle, the principal bookseller and printer of the borough, to put it in type and furnish him with a thousand copies. The matter, which the bookseller was thus commissioned to make into a printed pamphlet, was a strenuous and pungent libel on the Lord Chief Justice. Whilst the pamphlet was passing through the press, it appears from Mr. Chanter’s Sketches of the Literary History of Barnstaple, that Shelley came from time to time to Mr. Syle’s place of business, for the purpose of correcting proofs and revises. That Shelley journeyed to and fro between Lynton and Barnstaple for this purpose, there is no doubt in the mind of the present writer, who knows too much of his good friend, Mr. John Roberts Chanter, to be capable of questioning the accuracy of his written statements. The work, that was intended to cover Lord Ellenborough with historical infamy, seems to have been corrected for press to the last point as early as 16th August, 1812. Anyhow, on the 18th of that month the author dispatched from Lynmouth fifty copies of the Letter to his friend Mr. Hookham, of London, the Old-Bond-Street bookseller; saying with his pen, ‘I enclose also two pamphlets which I printed and distributed whilst in Ireland some months ago (no bookseller daring to publish them). They were on that account attended with only partial success, and I request your opinion as to the probable result of publishing them with the annexed suggestions in one pamphlet, with an explanatory preface in London.’ Had Shelley been so much more truth-loving than other men, as his idolaters declare him, he would have told Mr. Hookham that the failure of the two Irish pamphlets had been complete, instead of representing they had achieved a partial success. The statement that the pamphlets had been in some degree successful was a petty untruth, which is more than slightly offensive, from being told to the bookseller who was asked to reprint the two failures. The Shelley, who wrote on this matter of business to Mr. Hookham, was the same Shelley who planted the Victor-and-Cazire piracies on Mr. Stockdale.
Before Mr. Hookham received the fifty copies of the Letter to Lord Ellenborough, much had taken place at Barnstaple. There was commotion in the ‘metropolis of North Devon,’ the fishing village beneath Lynton, and the petty townlets of the intervening seventeen miles. On a previous page a doubt was expressed whether Daniel Hill (alias Healey) attended the trio from Dublin to Holyhead. Whether the Irish lout accompanied the trio to Radnorshire, waited upon them at Nantgwillt House, and travelled at their heels to North Devon viâ Chepstow, is questionable; but he certainly was in Shelley’s service at Lynton soon after the three wanderers settled there. Certain also it is that Daniel Hill was employed by Shelley to distribute in North Devon the various literary performances, by which he hoped to revolutionize quietly the down-trodden, and far-too-contented peasants of that charming part of England, viz.:—(1) The comparatively innocuous Proposals for an Association, which had been composed for revolutionary use in England as well as Ireland; (2) The Devil’s Walk, the poetical broadside (printed perhaps in Dublin) designed to bring the Prince Regent and his sycophants into universal contempt; and (3) the Declaration of Rights broadside, demonstrating sententiously that everyone has a plenitude of rights, with the exception of the Government, which is declared in the first four words of the Declaration to have no rights whatever.
Whilst the Letter to Lord Ellenborough was in Mr. Syle’s hands, Daniel Hill found his chief occupation in distributing copies of these three publications. At the same time Daniel Hill, in the faithful execution of Shelley’s orders, posted some of the broadsides on convenient walls and hoardings. It was Shelley’s intention that Daniel Hill should in like manner distribute copies of the Letter to Lord Ellenborough. But it is not for every man to accomplish his intentions. Before he had been entrusted with copies of the libel on Lord Ellenborough, the Barnstaple magistrates laid Daniel Hill by the heels in the borough gaol on the 19th of August, whilst the fifty copies of the Letter were on the way to Mr. Hookham’s shop in Old Bond Street.
It being Shelley’s practice to be abundantly communicative respecting his birth, parentage, education, and quality, to all persons showing any curiosity in his proceedings, he had not been a fortnight in North Devon, before it was generally known in Lynmouth and Barnstaple that he was young Mr. Shelley, son of Mr. Timothy Shelley, M.P. for New Shoreham, and immediate heir (as honest Jack Lawless put the case) to one of the first fortunes of England. The proceedings of a young gentleman of such superior quality were of course fruitful of much gossip in the parishes visited by Daniel Hill, whose pamphlets and broadsides were the more interesting to mechanics, farmers, and justices of the peace, because he was known to be the young gentleman’s servant. Whilst gossips clacked to one another about the young gentleman’s Declaration of Rights and The Devil’s Walk, he was known to be in communication with Mr. Syle, of Barnstaple, and to have commissioned that enterprising bookseller to print something even more racy than those piquant broadsides. Compositors at press, in a small provincial town, who seldom work at ‘copy’ more diverting than auctioneers’ catalogues or tradesmen’s lists of prices, are apt to grow excited and loquacious when they are employed to put in type a smart electioneering squib, or a pamphlet for the discomfiture of a local dignitary. It was not in the nature of Mr. Syle’s provincial journeymen and apprentices to be silent to their neighbours about the stinging letter to the Lord Chief Justice, which they were ‘setting up.’ Before the author had seen a first proof, the Letter was talked about in the parlours of the two contiguous taverns, where the political leaders of the borough met every evening of the week to confer on matters of Imperial or local politics. At the Whig tavern, feeling went in some degree with the youthful author of the daring essay; but at the adjoining house, where Tories held council, it was urged and agreed that measures should be taken promptly for the maintenance of social order, and the timely stay of seditious practices. By the chiefs of both parties it was agreed that young Mr. Shelley, even though he were the son of half-a-dozen Members of Parliament and heir to half-a-hundred baronetcies, should not be allowed to break the law in North Devon with impunity. Hence the arrest of the young gentleman’s Irish servant.
From evidence preserved at The Record Office, it appears that the Barnstaple authorities acted in this business under guidance and instructions from the Solicitor to the Treasury. The publications being seditious, it was of course competent for the Ministry to proceed against Shelley, as the author and actual promulgator of the writings. That he was not proceeded against in his own name and person may have been due, in some degree, to regard for his father’s feelings and respectability. Consideration also for the offender’s youthfulness may have determined the powers to forbear from prosecuting the erratic stripling. But other considerations doubtless operated with the legal advisers of the Crown. It might be difficult to produce legal proof that Shelley was the author of the writings, or even that he was their publisher. If it could not be proved to a jury that he was the actual instigator and director of his servant’s political activity, the proceedings against him would result in miscarriage, discreditable to those who instituted them. Moreover, if his conviction could be secured, to prosecute him would magnify him into a martyr and make far too much of his puerile sauciness. To act as though the reputation of the Lord Chief Justice could be affected by a schoolboy’s pen would not tend to stimulate the general reverence for the majesty of the law. Under these circumstances it was thought best to proceed only against the servant; but, whilst affecting to take no notice of the culprit in the background, to deal with the servant in such a manner that his youthful master should be punished.
Some of the seditious compositions, posted or otherwise dispersed by Daniel Hill, bore no printer’s name; and it was provided by 39 George III. c. 79, section xxvii. that ‘... every person, who shall publish or disperse, or assist in publishing or dispersing, either gratis or for money, any printed Paper or Book, which shall have been printed after the passing of this Act, and on which the name and place of abode of the person printing the same shall not be printed as aforesaid, shall, for every copy of such paper so published or dispersed by him, forfeit and pay the sum of twenty pounds.’ By the same statute it was further provided that every person convicted under it, who should neither pay the penalties nor be possessed of goods on which they could be levied, should forthwith be sent to prison ‘for any time not exceeding six calendar months, nor less than three calendar months.’ Hence it was possible to punish Daniel Hill, and through him to punish his master, without making too much of the dangerous character of the writings. Convicted in the Mayor’s Court at Barnstaple, of publishing and dispersing Printed Papers in violation of 39 George III. c. 79, the Irish servant was sentenced to pay fines amounting to 200l. or go to prison for six months.
‘Daniel Hill,’ the town-clerk of Barnstaple wrote to Lord Sidmouth, when the case had been dealt with in this manner, ‘has been convicted by the Mayor in ten penalties of 20l. each, for publishing and dispersing Printed Papers, 39 George III. c. 79, and is now committed to the common gaol of this Borough for not paying the penalties, and having no goods on which they could be levied.’
When the servant was fined thus heavily, the Mayor and other acting magistrates assumed that the penalties would be paid by Shelley,—at once and on the spot, if he had so much money in hand; or in a few days should it be necessary for him to communicate with his father or lawyer, in order to put his servant at large. At the trial, Daniel Hill’s defence was that he had meant no harm in posting the bills in accordance with the directions of ‘the gentleman,’ who had given him the broadsides for that purpose, and paid him 2s. 6d. for the job. Everyone in court, of course, smiled at the poor fellow’s attempt to make the magistrates believe, that the ‘gentleman’ was a stranger whom he had come upon accidentally between Lynton and Barnstaple, and that the day’s work which had brought him to trouble was a solitary ‘job’ of casual employment; it being known alike to the Justices on the bench and the public in the body of the court, that the gentleman, who had set Daniel Hill to disperse the seditious bills, was Mr. Shelley, the Lynton lodger.
That young Mr. Shelley could not pay so large a fine at a moment’s notice can have caused the borough magistrates no surprise. That Daniel Hill should pass a few days under penal discipline, whilst his master should be getting the money needful for his liberation, was probably desired by the municipal authorities, to whom it may well have appeared no less salutary than reasonable that, instead of going from the dock scot-free, he should endure for a week or so the wholesome rigour of offended justice. But for a few days, neither to the powers of the bench nor to the multitude living under their sway, did it appear probable that the servant would remain in durance for six calendar months, whilst the gentleman who had brought him to trouble escaped with perfect impunity. In bare justice to all that was generous in his faulty nature, it should be taken for certain that could he have paid them, either at once or by drawing money for the purpose from any source at his command, Shelley would have paid the cumulated fines as quickly as possible, even though they had amounted to 2000l. But he was no more able to lift Lynton in his palm and pitch it down upon Lynmouth, than to open the gate of Barnstaple’s common gaol to his Irish varlet. What could he do for such a purpose? Instead of having 200l. at his command he could not just then have laid his hand on as many shillings, even though Harriett and Eliza, and the incomparable Portia, had given him the contents of all their several pockets, to the last sixpence. Next quarter-day, when he hoped to ‘recover his financial liberty’ (his own elegant Micawberism), the young gentleman, of enterprises so disproportionate to his means, would come into possession of 100l. minus what he should have spent in the interim on his necessities. Already in debt to Mr. Syle of Barnstaple for printing the Letter to Lord Ellenborough, he was for the moment in such a stringent state of financial bondage, that he must either withdraw from the Lynton lodging-house at the end of the current week, or run in his landlady’s debt for room-rent, bread, butter, milk, and vegetables. Over and beyond the several sums to be paid to the most urgent of his local creditors, should he linger in North Devon till Michaelmas, enough might remain to him of his next quarterly hundred pounds, to cover the charges of travelling to London and living till Christmas 1812. This was the extent of the ‘financial liberty’ for which he was longing. To whom could he apply for the money wherewith to pay the 200l. and costs? To his father?—his father’s solicitor? He could not write for help to Hogg, whom he suspected, or at least had recently believed guilty, of trying to seduce Harriett. For failing to do what was completely out of his power, he is less to be blamed than commiserated. The poet’s historian wishes he could record that in his inability to protect his servant with his purse, he stood by him manfully, declaring that the ignorant fellow had only obeyed his employer’s order, and avowing himself the actual culprit; but this chivalric course was not taken by Shelley. He cannot be imagined to have found much enjoyment at Lynton, whilst Daniel Hill was undergoing punishment. On the contrary, regard being had to his sensibility and his mode of dealing with certain of its consequences, it may be assumed that he suffered from mental and bodily distress, which had an effect on the petty-cash receipts of the nearest dealer in laudanum.
When it appeared that the young gentleman, who had brought the ignorant Irishman into trouble, would altogether escape punishment, local sentiment passed to warmer indignation against the misdemeanant of superior social condition. Unmindful of his sentimental distress, ‘society’ came to the very wrong conclusion that he suffered nothing at all. Whilst Daniel Hill lived in the popular imagination as a poor fellow undergoing the rigour of prison discipline, the young gentleman was supposed to be enjoying himself at Lynton. It was whispered that the magistrates had not acted rightly in dealing so hardly with the poor and ignorant man, whilst they allowed the rich and educated one to go scot-free. Though they had acted with the best intentions and under the best advice, the magistrates felt there had been a serious miscarriage of justice. To some of them it was consolatory to reflect that measures could still be taken for the punishment of the youthful libeller of the Lord Chief Justice.