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A Trellis of Roses

It had probably been as well for Hazlitt’s temper, as he and his wife walked home from the Lambs’, that he could not see into the offices in Maiden Lane on the north side of the Strand where that Sunday’s Examiner was being put to bed. On a good Sunday the newsboys would have collected their bundles an hour ago, but at times of crisis such as these, when foreign intelligence from Paris and the Low Countries was crowding home news off its sixteen, tight-crammed pages, the printers would be working deep into the early hours in a rush to get the paper on to the streets.

It had been a busy week both in and out of Parliament – the Budget; the annual loan; Wilberforce’s Slave Registration Bill; the Rosebery divorce; Lord Elgin’s petition for the purchase of his Greek marbles; the last Sunday of the Royal Academy exhibition; violence in Ireland, the usual slew of bankruptcies, an art robbery, the birth of a son to the Countess of Albemarle – but it was a small paragraph tucked away at the bottom of the third page that would have attracted Hazlitt’s ire. ‘The writer who is at present supplying our Theatrical Department,’ it read, ‘closed some masterly observations on Comus last week, with an attack on the tergiversation of some living poets, from which as far as Mr Wordsworth is concerned, we are anxious to express our dissent. If Mr WORDSWORTH praises any body, whom upon the whole neither the writer in question nor ourselves might think worthy of the panegyric, we are quite convinced, by the whole tenor of Mr WORDSWORTH’S life and productions, that he does it in a perfectly right spirit.’

If the disclaimer might have annoyed the ‘writer in question’, it would not have surprised him, because no two men who had so much in common could have been so far apart in temperament as William Hazlitt and James Henry Leigh Hunt. The Examiner and its editor were every bit as sceptical of Tory politics and placemen as Hazlitt himself, but Leigh Hunt was a Cavalier to Hazlitt’s Roundhead, a Suckling and not a Hampden, a poet of gentle, airy graces and high spirits, of fine and unworldly impulses, whose virtues and vices had yet to atrophy into the calculated helplessness that Dickens made such lethal use of in his portrait of Henry Skimpole.

Even at his angriest Hunt was a mocker not a ‘hater’. Where Hazlitt was all angry principle, Hunt was all exquisite feeling, a febrile, nervy creature, strung like some Aeolian harp to vibrate to the joys and sorrows of the world. In another century Hazlitt would have been found in the stocks with the Leveller John Lilburne or on the pyre with William Tyndale, but the hypochondriacal Hunt was not the stuff of which martyrs are usually made. It is one of the rummer ironies of the age that this Sunday, while the driven, misanthropic Hazlitt was free to add another brace of enemies to his score, the ‘mawkish, unmanly namby-pamby’ editor of The Examiner was still paying with his shattered health for the oddest, most whimsical stand ever made against Tory tyranny and mediocrity.

Hunt had not been strong enough to bring in his own copy to the offices this Sunday – two years in prison had left him an agoraphobic wreck too frightened to leave the safety of his own rooms – but The Examiner still, as ever, bore the imprint of his personality. The paper unquestionably owed its business stability and probity to the character of his brother John, but when any reader thought of The Examiner – the townsfolk of the young Thomas Carlyle’s Ecclefechan, for instance, who would queue excitedly for the mail-coach that brought the weekly edition to them – if anyone recalled its campaigns against army flogging, or the sale of army commissions to boys like Keppel, or the abuses of the theatre, then it was Leigh ‘Examiner’ Hunt and the distinctive, accusatory symbol of the pointing index finger with which he signed his articles that he thought of.

The Examiner had been in existence for seven years by 1815 – 18 June was Edition Number 390 – and in that time the Hunts had turned it into London’s and the country’s leading Sunday newspaper. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the Observer, the first of the ‘Sundays’, had declined into little more than a government propaganda rag, and for anyone looking beyond William Cobbett or such partisan heavyweights as the Whig Edinburgh Review or John Murray’s Tory Quarterly, the ‘impartial opinion’ on politics, theatre, literature or the arts promised by Leigh and John Hunt’s Examiner provided a new, fair and commanding voice in British public life.

In the political climate of the day, however, such success had its dangers. In their original prospectus the Hunts had proudly trumpeted their independence of all ‘party’, but Lord Liverpool’s was not a government to brook anything that even remotely smacked of opposition, and in 1812 a series of legal skirmishes over Examiner articles had finally come to a head with a libel trial provoked by Leigh Hunt’s attack on that ‘Adonis in loveliness’ and ‘Conqueror of Hearts’, the bloated and painted fifty-year-old Prince Regent. ‘What person, unacquainted with the true state of the case, would imagine,’ Hunt had demanded in response to an absurd panegyric on Prinny trotted out in the government press, ‘in reading these astounding eulogies, that this Glory of the People was the subject of millions of shrugs and reproaches! That this protector of the Arts had named a wretched Foreigner his Historical Painter … That this Maecenas of the Age patronised not a single deserving writer! … In short, that this delightful, blissful, wise, pleasurable, honourable, virtuous, true and immortal PRINCE, was a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in debt and disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps, a man who has just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country or the respect of posterity.’

For an ‘artless’ and retiring soul who knew nothing of politics, as his counsel, the Whig politician Henry Brougham, insisted at his trial, Leigh Hunt had chosen his target well, and the government in their turn did all they could to turn him into a martyr. The verdict had been a foregone conclusion even before the two brothers came to trial, and in the February of 1813 they were sentenced to two years imprisonment, John Hunt to the House of Correction at Cold Bath Fields in Clerkenwell, and Leigh to the Surrey gaol in Horsemonger Lane, Southwark, where nine years before Colonel Despard and his fellow conspirators had been hanged and beheaded for high treason.

Horsemonger Lane was not Leigh Hunt’s first experience of prison. His earliest memories were of the family’s room in the King’s Bench where his father had been incarcerated for debt, and imprisonment brought out that odd mixture of resilience and whimsy that was the hallmark of his character. He had been housed on arrival in a garret with a view – if he stood on a chair – of the prison yard and its chained inmates, but it was not long before a doctor had him moved to an empty room in the infirmary and there, in the midst of all the human hopelessness and despair that a London gaol was heir to, he turned his back on reality and created his own Arcadian retreat. ‘I turned [it] into a noble room,’ he wrote in his Autobiography, ‘I papered the walls with a trellis of roses; I had the ceiling coloured with clouds and sky; the barred windows I screened with Venetian blinds; and when my bookcases were set up with their busts, and flowers and a pianoforte made their appearance, perhaps there was not a handsomer room on that side of the water … Charles Lamb declared there was no other such room, except in a fairy tale.’

His wife and child had been allowed to move in with him – another child would be born in the prison – and Hunt had not stopped at the Venetian blinds. There was a small yard outside his room that he shut in with green palings, and there in his own small and hidden kingdom, he planted his flowers and saplings and apple tree and entertained Lord Byron and Tom Moore as if some poor wretched country girl, guilty of infanticide, was not waiting execution only yards away.

Byron and the Irish poet, Tom Moore, were not the only visitors, and for the two years that Leigh Hunt and his long-suffering family were in Horsemonger Lane, the Surrey gaol enjoyed a celebrity comparable with anything that Lamb or Holland House had to offer. The government had set out to teach the Hunts a lesson that all radical London would heed when they sent the brothers to prison, and instead they had turned a minor poet and journalist into a hero of the left, and the old infirmary washroom into a literary salon where you were as likely to meet Jeremy Bentham or James Mill as Lord Byron, the scowling William Hazlitt as the self-effacing Mary Lamb, the novelist Maria Edgworth and the painters David Wilkie and Benjamin Haydon as a politician like Henry Brougham, or the future editor of The Times, Thomas Barnes.

Although it seems somehow typical of the born survivor he was that, while John languished in a cell sixteen feet by nine without books, pens, paper or company, Leigh Hunt entertained and wrote sonnets and read Italian poetry, it was not all roses and trellises at Horsemonger Lane. In the years ahead Hunt’s stock would plummet with many of those who had supported him through these years, but for the younger generation of Romantics such as Keats and Shelley, his painted idyll, set in the heart of the massive walls of a prison synonymous with government tyranny, was not a piece of escapist whimsy but a symbolic gesture of political defiance, an assertion of the freedom of the imagination, the independence of the word, the integrity of the arts, of everything in fact that The Examiner stood for and for which Lord Chief Justice Ellenborough – the champion of the pillory, the judge who sentenced Despard to death, and the perennial scourge of the liberals – had condemned the Hunts to gaol.

A liberal metropolitan elite were not the only ones who saw it in this way, and long before the Hunts left gaol, The Examiner’s 2,000 subscribers had trebled and quadrupled in number, with the printers unable to keep up with demand. The government had believed that with the brothers locked up the paper would fail, but the Hunts had somehow managed to keep it going and in February 1815 – just a month before Bonaparte’s escape from Elba – they had emerged from their separate prisons unreformed, uncowed and unrepentant in their determination to find the Prince Regent as ludicrous as ever.

If gaol had been the making of Leigh Hunt and The Examiner, elevating him to a place in the literary and moral life of the country that nothing he would do could hope to sustain, it had also taken an inevitable toll. In a series of essays written from prison he had wistfully imagined himself mingling with the London crowds beyond the prison walls, but once he was free again all those sights and sounds of outside life he had clung on to through two long, bitterly cold winters – the companionable crush of the theatre-bound coach, the smell of links, the ‘mudshine’ on the pavements, the awkward adjusting of ‘shawls and smiles’, the first jingle of music, the curtain, the opening words; London, in short, in all the heaving variety of the city that intoxicated Lamb – all filled him with an agoraphobic dread that he never entirely overcame.

‘In sooth, I know not why I am so sad’ – there would have been a time, in prison, when he would have given anything to hear that line and see the curtain rise on Shakespeare’s Venice and Kean’s Shylock and now he could no more have accepted Lord Byron’s offer of his box than he could have gone back to his first garret cell in Surrey gaol. In the middle of February 1815, he had forced himself to see the new enfant terrible’s Richard III, but the only place he pined for was his old painted washroom, the only freedom he could actually enjoy – hidden away in his Maida Vale retreat, in the little white-and-green study, his ‘box of lilies’, he had made for himself – was that freedom of ‘Fancy’ that not even an attorney general ‘could commit … to custody’.

In a brutal way, too, events had left him behind, because while Leigh Hunt had never been a Bonapartist in the way that Hazlitt was, the bloodlust of the ‘war-whoopers’, the cant of the Tory press, the self-defeating madness of driving the French people into Bonaparte’s arms, the horror of war and the prospect of another and stupider Bourbon tyranny succeeding to that of the ‘Great Apostate from Liberty’, left him stranded in a no-man’s land of despair. In this Sunday’s Examiner he wrote his usual sanely decent piece, but with dawn already breaking over the sodden and freezing armies in Belgium, and public opinion polarised between the Bonapartist ferocity of Hazlitt and Godwin and the baying of the bloodhounds, Hunt sounded not so much like a prophet crying in the wilderness as an escapist shut away in his Maida Vale hideaway.

He had come out of prison at the wrong time: ‘Examiner Hunt’s’ finger could point where it liked, the world was going its own way. The old campaigning Hunt, with his lightness of touch, and debonair spirit was not entirely silenced, however. As the printers finished setting the last page of Edition Number 390, and the newsboys, working on the one day of the week on which they could hope to see their families before nightfall, waited impatiently to begin their rounds, it would have been odd if they had not paused over a small item beneath the announcement that the Countess of Albemarle, George Keppel’s mother, had given birth to another son – an item so at odds with the paper’s avowed, high-minded policy of avoiding gossip and society news that it bears the imprint of Leigh Hunt’s ironic sense of incongruities: ‘Capt. Bontein, of the Life Guards, son of Sir G.B. to the daughter of Sir E. Stanley,’ it read. ‘The parties rode out from Lady Bontein’s to take an airing before dinner; they took post chaise and four at Barnet, and proceeded to Gretna Green, whither they were unsuccessfully pursued by Lady Stanley. The only objection to the match was, it is said, the age of the bride, who is under fourteen, and has a handsome fortune. The Parties have since been remarried in London.’

Huddled up with their horses in the freezing rain south of Brussels, Captain Bontein’s friends in the Life Guards would enjoy that. It was, though, another item that would interest the navy operating off the French coast: one relating to Thomas Cochrane, the country’s most famous sailor since Nelson. ‘It is well known that many respectable persons have all along believed LORD COCHRANE to be perfectly free from any concern in the wretched fraud practised by De Berenger and others on the Stock Exchange,’ The Examiner announced. ‘This opinion, we are informed, will soon be shown to be the correct one … and that his Lordship had not the slightest knowledge of their dirty schemes.’