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

by John Cordy Jeaffreson

(12) Through the wetness of the ground about the house, the assassin could not have approached the parlour window for the accomplishment of his deadly purpose, or after the second futile attempt at murder, without leaving clear footprints on the soaking-wet lawn. There were marks of footsteps on the grass, to which the investigators paid particular attention. On visiting Tremadoc and Tanyrallt in the summer of 1813, when all the circumstances of the alleged assaults were fresh in the memory of the people in those parts, Peacock received information, that years afterwards caused him to write these words:—‘Persons who had examined the premises on the following morning had found that the grass of the lawn appeared to have been much trampled and rolled on, but there were no footmarks on the wet ground, except between the beaten spot and the window.’ Why was the lawn thus trampled and rolled upon at some distance from the parlour window? To give the ground an appearance that would accord with some account given by Shelley of his final struggle with the assassin, other than the account given of the contention in Harriett’s well-known letter on this subject? Who had trampled and rolled about on the wet grass, so as to give it the appearance of having been the scene of a struggle? Shelley? or Daniel Hill? or both of them? As there were no footmarks on the wet ground, except between the beaten spot and the window, it was, of course, obvious to the investigators, that the persons, accountable for the hard usage of the turf in one particular spot of the lawn, had entered the house and remained there, after so trampling and disordering the surface of the sward; and also, that no persons had been about the garden during the night, with the exception of persons of the house. Of course, the investigators narrowly scrutinized the footprints, which certainly occupied much of their intention. Doubtless the Solicitor-General satisfied himself whether any of the footprints corresponded with the soles of Shelley’s shoes, the soles of Daniel Hill’s boots, the soles of boots and shoes worn by the women of the house. Of the particulars of the Solicitor-General’s conclusions respecting these damnatory marks on the wet grass there is no record. There is no reason to regret the absence of such particulars from the record. It is enough to know that the investigators examined the footprints, and came to the conclusion that they were made by no foreigner to the household.

(13) But it still remains to state the most remarkable matter of evidence that came under the notice of the investigators. On coming to Shelley in the parlour immediately after the second of the alleged attacks, Mrs Shelley perceived that the window-curtain and her husband’s flannel night-shirt had been penetrated by a bullet. Shelley told her that this injury had been done to the curtain and his night-dress by the ball of the pistol that had been fired at him by the assassin,—firing from the window into the room. The mark of this ball was found by the inquisitors in the wainscot near the window; the position and character of the mark showing that the pistol, instead of being fired from, had been fired towards the window;—that, instead of being fired by the assassin outside the window, the pistol had been fired by Shelley from the interior of the room.

This piece of dynamical evidence satisfied the inquisitors that Shelley’s baffled assassin was an imaginary caitiff. Till it can be shown that a ball, issuing from a pistol pointed due south, must necessarily take a course due north, Shelley (all his superb poetry notwithstanding) must be held to have said what was directly the reverse of the fact, when he told his wife that the bullet, which, after passing through his flannel shirt and the window-curtain, penetrated the wainscot near the parlour window, was shot from the window in the direction of the opposite wall. The discovery of that bullet-mark gave the coup-de-grace to whatever remained of the favourable regard in which Shelley had been held by the people of Tremadoc.

It is probable that Peacock first hit upon his curious term ‘semi-delusions,’ after reviewing all the facts that came to his knowledge about this singular affair in the summer of 1813. How much of Shelley’s chief part in the strange affair should be attributed to hallucination? How much to deceptive intention? I would fain attribute the whole of it to delusion. But I cannot do so. In previous pages prominence has been given to every consideration, that may be produced honestly, in order to dispose the reader to think delusion chiefly accountable for the poet’s final escapade at Tanyrallt. There is no positive evidence that he was seriously out of health, or under the dominion of morbid fancy, or taking laudanum with extraordinary freedom at this particular time; but for his reputation’s sake I have been careful to adduce every matter favourable to the opinion that his action in what is usually called ‘the Tanyrallt mystery,’ should be referred to nervous derangement rather than to moral obliquity. In a previous chapter especial notice was taken of his imaginary escape at Keswick from the grasp of an imaginary robber—a delusion which seems to have been in no degree complicated with deceitful designs—in order that the incident should be remembered to his advantage, when the readers of this work should be invited to decide for themselves how far he was deluded, and how far false, in this Tanyrallt business.

Notwithstanding the numerous and obvious reasons for thinking he acted dishonestly throughout the whole affair, it is conceivable that he was under the influence of delusion in the earlier passages of the drama. In loading the pistols before he went to bed, and declaring a fear that he would have occasion to use them before the morning, he only did and said what has been done in nervous apprehension by countless men, whose honesty has never been called in question. In leaving his bed so soon after his retirement to the couch, and going downstairs with his weapons to look for a housebreaker, he displayed only the alarm that was likely to ensue from the anticipation of disturbance. The nervous man, who passes at night through dark passages in search of a burglar, is apt to imagine he sees the intruder for whom he is looking. All the imaginary incidents of the imaginary encounter in the little room are reconcilable with the theory that Shelley acted sincerely in the whole affair. It was natural for the author of Zastrozzi to imagine himself addressed by the imaginary assassin in such language, as might have proceeded from any one of the villains of that marvellous romance. In spite of the suspicious circumstance that he sent Daniel Hill out of the room before seeing the assassin again at the window of the parlour, I can just conceive it possible that Shelley really believed he saw the villain at the window.

But at this point my ability to imagine, that he may have acted and spoken from misconception, comes to an end. His pistol may have exploded accidentally, though it is more reasonable to think he fired it with design;—intending that the ball should pass through his night-dress, and holding the flannel well out from his body with the left hand, so that the bullet in passing through the night-dress should not graze the skin of his body. But it is inconceivable that he attributed the explosion of his own pistol to the imaginary weapon of an imaginary assassin. As the ball of Shelley’s weapon struck and pierced the wainscot of the window, it cannot be supposed to have smashed the window. To Shelley’s muscles, acting upon glass and frame in Daniel Hill’s absence, it must be attributed that the window was injured in a manner, accordant with what he a few minutes later told Mrs. Shelley of his conflict with the assassin. The old sword, which the imaginary assassin was alleged to have tried to wrest from him, seems to have been used by Shelley as an instrument for smashing the window.

Even by those, who can believe the poet imagined himself struggling desperately with an assailant on the other side of the window frame whilst he was thus smashing the window, it will be conceded that the indications of struggling, put subsequently on the wet grass of the lawn at a considerable distance from the house, must have been put on the turf for evidential ends, and with a deceptive purpose. The turf cannot have been trampled upon, stamped down and rolled upon, in order to keep a nocturnal assailant out of the house. The grass must have been so treated in order to give it a show of having been the scene of a violent struggle between persons, alternately wrestling with and rolling over one another:—a show that should on the morrow accord with Shelley’s original account to the Solicitor-General, which seems to have differed materially from his account of the struggle to Harriett. Shelley cannot be imagined to have gone out of his house at an early hour of a cold February morning, immediately after a night of alarm and wakefulness, and to have danced and rolled upon the grass of his wet lawn for mere amusement. Nor are servants wont to act in so insane a fashion for the mere fun of the thing. For what end, but the one already stated, can the grass have been thus danced, trodden, and rolled upon? Whether the signs of a struggle were put upon the grass by Shelley himself, or by some other person or persons of his household, the work of disordering the turf’s surface must be regarded as his work.

But though the evidence is so conclusive that Shelley was not attacked by an assassin at Tanyrallt on the night of 26th February, 1813, and that he with his own pistol shot through the flannel night-dress the bullet, which he declared to have been shot through it by another person, his wildest idolaters insist that he was so attacked and shot at. Lady Shelley says, ‘Yet this continual beneficence could not save Shelley from an attempt on his life of a most atrocious and extraordinary kind.’ Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy wishes us to believe that the baffled assassin was no other person than Miss Hitchener’s father.

Assuming that the first quarterly allowance of Miss Hitchener’s stipend was not paid; assuming that ineffectual demands had been made to Shelley for payment of the money; assuming that Miss Hitchener’s account of Shelley’s treatment of her had caused much angry talk against him in her father’s tap-room; assuming that this angry talk incensed Miss Hitchener’s papa against the Shelleys; assuming that Miss Hitchener’s papa (formerly a smuggler) journeyed from his Sussex village to Carnarvonshire, in order to wreak his wrath on the hateful trio; Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy argues that Miss Hitchener’s papa was the villain who tried to shoot Shelley in the little room opening into the shrubbery, and who, some hours later, appeared at the parlour window and shot the bullet through Shelley’s flannel shirt:—a bullet that, according to Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy, must have passed from the window, through the window-curtains, and through Shelley’s flannel-shirt, and then turning round in the parlour have come straight back to the wainscot on the window side of the room. Positively Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy has given this explanation of the Tanyrallt mystery, and been cordially applauded by Shelleyan enthusiasts for the sagacity and reasonableness of his way of showing, that Shelley was shot at in the manner declared by him. This is the way in which Shelley’s biography has been dealt with by a ring of gentlemen, of whose acuteness and discretion Mr. James Anthony Froude has the highest opinion.

It is not surprising that Shelley hastened in a few days from the scene of his humiliating exposure. He would have left Carnarvonshire sooner, had he not been detained by want of money. To get the means of flight the young gentleman, who a few days earlier sent 20l. to Mr. T. Hookham for the relief of the Hunts, now wrote a hasty note to Mr. T. Hookham for the restoration of the money, in order that he might have the means of getting away from Tremadoc. To this brief note by the excited poet Mrs. Shelley added a postscript in somewhat less agitated style:—