Paragraph No. 12.—‘Much has been said upon the fact that these children are of tender years. I have already explained, in the course of the hearing, the grounds upon which I think that circumstance not so material as to require me to pronounce no order.’—No word here about either principles or conduct.
Paragraph No. 13.—‘I add, that the attention which I have been called upon to give to the consideration, how far the pecuniary interests of these children may be affected, has not been called for in vain. I should deeply regret if any act of mine materially affect those interests. But to such interests I cannot sacrifice what I deem to be interests of greater value and higher importance.’—No word in this paragraph about either Shelley’s principles or conduct.
Paragraph No. 14.—‘In what degree and to what extent the Court will interfere in the case against parental authority, cannot be finally determined till after the Master’s Report.’
Paragraph No. 15.—‘In the meantime I pronounce the following Order:’
This Order, forbidding Shelley to take possession of the children or meddle in any way with them, was dated on 17th March, 1817.
It appears, therefore, that in no single paragraph does the Lord Chancellor refer to Shelley’s principles, without at the same time referring to the conduct referable to those principles. What was the conduct thus steadily kept in view? The answer can be given briefly. The petition set forth the circumstances of Shelley’s marriage, withdrawal from his wife’s society, and cohabitation with Mary Godwin; representing also that in thus withdrawing from his wife and cohabiting with Mary Godwin, he was in 1814, and from that year till his wife’s death, acting on the principles set forth in 1813, in the anti-matrimonial Note to Queen Mab, which was one of the Petitioner’s principal ‘exhibits.’ This was the conduct or misconduct the Lord Chancellor kept so steadily in view. Given in a nutshell the Lord Chancellor’s judgment was this, ‘Mr. Shelley in Queen Mab and the anti-matrimonial note attached thereto, printed in 1813, declared himself an enemy of lawful marriage; in the summer of 1814, Mr. Shelley acted on his avowed disregard for the obligations of marriage; Mr. Shelley’s action and conduct on his avowed disregard for the obligations of marriage, makes me believe he will educate these children to hold his views respecting marriage, if they are committed to his care; taking this view of his conduct to his wife I decree that the two children shall be withheld from his control.’ The judgment was based wholly on consideration of the poet’s conduct to his wife, regarded as the result of his zealous adoption of the views of the anti-matrimonial innovators.—Yet the Edinburgh Reviewer says that Shelley’s paternal claim to his offspring was ‘rejected by Lord Eldon on petition, on the ground not of Shelley’s misconduct to his wife, but of the opinions expressed in his writings.’
From the substance of the petition, the affidavits supporting the allegations, the chief ‘exhibit,’ and the terms of the judgment, it is certain, that the whole suit from petition to decree ‘went’ on what may be called Free Contract considerations,—the evidence that Shelley had avowed himself a vehement enemy of lawful marriage in 1813, and acted on the avowal in 1814 and afterwards:—on the evidence of conduct, in accordance with, and consequent on the views, set forth in the book, printed when he was only twenty years of age.
How came the Lord Chancellor to speak of the principles of Queen Mab as ‘avowed at nineteen,’ when the book, though doubtless begun in the poet’s twentieth year, was mainly written as well as printed in his twenty-first year? The Lord Chancellor antedated the avowal at least by a fraction of a year, whilst giving Shelley’s full number of years at the delivery of the decree. Was the Lord Chancellor’s slight inaccuracy as to the date of Queen Mab, a slip for which he was solely accountable? He may have miscalculated the time between the date of the book’s title-page and the day on which he was delivering judgment. Or he may have considered that the author of a work printed in his twenty-first year might be assumed to have held and avowed, in his twentieth year, the opinions set forth in the book. It is however conceivable, and on the whole more probable, that he merely accepted a date given him in Shelley’s reply (written by himself) to the petition. There being no copy of that reply in existence, nor any record of its substance, to speak of its contents is to speak conjecturally. But in such a paper Shelley could hardly have omitted to refer to the time when he wrote the book, of which so much had been urged to his disadvantage by Mr. Westbrook’s counsel; and as he would see his interest in inducing the Lord Chancellor to regard it as a boyish performance, not to be accepted as evidence of his present opinions, it may be reasonably assumed that, in his reference to the important exhibit, Shelley put its composition as far back as possible. At Pisa, towards the close of his career, he wrote of the book as a thing proceeding from his pen when he was only eighteen years old. In the Court of Chancery he could scarcely ascribe it to so early a time of his existence as his nineteenth year, but he may be imagined to have assigned its composition to his twentieth year. To discover a copy of the lost reply would probably be to discover evidence, that in 1817, the poet assigned to his twentieth year the poem which in the summer of 1821 he represented himself to have written ‘at the age of eighteen.’
It is certain that the Chancellor was not referring to the Necessity of Atheism, when he referred to principles avowed by Shelley at the age of nineteen. The Necessity of Atheism was notoriously published when the poet was eighteen; and it proclaimed no principles, on which he had acted in the particular conduct, set forth in the petition to which the Chancellor referred.
The judgment having been delivered, it was ordered that Shelley should contribute a portion of his income towards the maintenance and education of his children. How much of his income was he required to spend in this way? Primâ facie this question would seem one which Lady Shelley, with the Field Place Papers about her, could not fail to answer correctly, if she undertook to answer it at all. Lady Shelley answers the question with curious inaccuracy. She says precisely, ‘He was forced, however, to set aside 200l. a-year for their support; and this sum was deducted by Sir Timothy from his son’s annuity.’ What are the facts? (1) Shelley was not required to contribute 200l. a-year to the education of his children; he contributed only 120l. a-year, in equal quarterly payments. (2) Sir Timothy Shelley did not deduct 200l. a-year, or any sum of money whatever from the 250l. which he paid every quarter to his son’s bank-account. The curious part of this achievement in blundering is that Lady Shelley publishes in her book the documents which disprove the statements of her text. The letters that passed between Shelley and Horace Smith, in March and April, 1821 (a body of correspondence published by Lady Shelley herself in her Shelley Memorials), show that Sir Timothy paid the 1000l. a-year to Shelley without any deduction; that Dr. Hume, the custodian of the children, received only 120l. for his care of the two children; that instead of looking to Sir Timothy, the Doctor looked to Shelley for the payment of this sum; that the Doctor was empowered to draw on Shelley’s London bankers for 30l. a-quarter; and that with the exception of an additional trifle for postage and other extras, 120l. per annum was the whole sum of Shelley’s contribution to the maintenance of the children. It is thus that Lady Shelley deals with facts from her authentic sources.