Vindication (50 page)

‘There is the gentleman who visits the young lady!' the servant cried.

Fitzgerald dashed from the house, pursued by Mary's brother Colonel Robert King, the second of the Kingsborough sons, who then challenged Fitzgerald to a duel. (It was the customary way to settle differences, especially in Ireland where a young man who had not ‘blazed away' was rather looked down on in Dublin society.) The duel, with pistols, took place on Sunday 1 October near the Magazine in Hyde Park, even though Fitzgerald was unable to find a second. We need to pause at this surprising fact. Why would no fellow-officer support him? A sexual escapade was hardly unusual. Kingsborough, after all, was a copulating rabbit. His eldest, Big George, had whisked a Miss Johnstone to the West Indies and produced
three illegitimate children before he came back to marry Lady Helena Mount Cashell. So, we might ask, is Fitzgerald cast out because of the superior status of Lady Mary, or because he betrays the family who took him in? Is it the power game of the outsider–the adopted son–to inseminate a girl of the true line? If Henry Fitzgerald had been loved and looked up to as an older brother, elements of emotional incest and exploitation would explain the level of public shock. What is certain is that this was no gentlemanly duel: it was rage of brother against brother.

The duel ended with no injury to either side. Fitzgerald refused to grant he was in the wrong. Meanwhile, Mary's maid was dismissed and the girl restored to her mother, who carried her off to Mitchelstown Castle. Her father followed after warning Fitzgerald: ‘If you ever presume to appear where I or any part of my family may happen to be, depend upon it the Consequences will be Fatal.'

Undeterred, Fitzgerald, disguised, followed the girl in December. He put up at the King's Arms, a hotel near the Castle's gate. Barry, the innkeeper, became suspicious of a man who left his room only at night. Scenting danger, Fitzgerald then moved to the Kilworth Hotel, seven miles from the Castle and close to where Mary's eldest sister Margaret now lived, at Moore Park. It's hard to be invisible as a stranger in a village. A hint of his presence brought Kingsborough and Robert hotfoot to the hideout. On the night of 11 December they forced Henry's door and burst in. As he reached for his pistol and Robert grappled for it, Kingsborough shot Henry dead.

‘God!' he exclaimed to Margaret. ‘I don't know how I did it; but I most sincerely wish it had been by some other hand than mine.' Margaret later spoke of the family's ‘ horror'. Kingsborough was duly arrested. Just then, his father died, and he succeeded to the title as the 2nd Earl of Kingston. As a peer he could claim a trial by fellow-peers in the Irish House of Lords. This celebrated trial, decked out with pageantry, took place on 18 May 1798. The prisoner was brought in from the Castle, with the axe carried before him. Dressed in black for the relative he had killed, he knelt to hear the charge. There were no witnesses for the prosecution, and the assembled peers gave a unanimous verdict of not guilty.

One of those present, Bishop Percy, passed on Dublin gossip to his wife
together with a copy of Godwin's
Memoirs
, ‘a curious Life of a woman who was governess to Lady Kingsborough's…Daughters[,] who professed to discharge the Marriage Duties, without submitting to the Marriage Ceremonies. This was exactly what her Ladyship's unfortunate Dau
r
did with her seducer.–They say she lives concealed in this Town, where she has been brought to bed of a Daughter.–Lady K. is said to have discharged the governess after one year's trial, because she wanted to discharge the Marriage Duties, with that lady's husband–such is the report.
*
–However Lady M[oun]t C[a]sh[e]ll the eldest Dau
^r
[
née
Margaret King] glories in having had so clever an Instructress, who had freed her mind from all superstitions…' He adds that Margaret Mount Cashell ‘made violent complaints', as well as a caricature, of a fellow-bishop who warned against Mary Wollstonecraft in a sermon.

Mary King's baby was disposed of. She was sent to Wales under an assumed name, and placed in the care of a clergyman. Her conversational powers made her a favourite. In 1805 she married George Galbraith Meares of Meares Court, Clifton, and had two daughters. Nothing further is known of her life beyond the fact that she died young, in 1819. It was pure chance that Godwin's memoir was reviewed in the period between the murder in December 1797 and the trial the following May. Sooner or later, the wider public was going to connect Mary Wollstonecraft with the Earl's scandalous daughter.

‘A female unrestrained by the obligations of religion, is soon ripe for licentious indecorums,' growls the
European Magazine
in April 1798. Mary Wollstonecraft, it reports,

It followed that her conduct ‘must consign her name to posterity…as one whose example…would be attended by the most pernicious consequences to society; a philosophical wanton, breaking down bars intended to restrain licentiousness'.

How easy to find a scapegoat for the Earl's murder of his adoptive son in a one-time governess.

 

Scandal necessitated a revised edition of the
Memoirs
in June 1798. Godwin had to omit the names of Wollstonecraft's contacts who wished to dissociate themselves: the Gascoynes, who had been the Wollstonecrafts' neighbours in Barking, Essex; the Easts in Berkshire; and even Mrs Cotton. Amazingly, Mr Wollstonecraft, alive at the time, is still the ‘despot'; and Imlay is still named, on the grounds that Mary's identity as ‘Mrs Imlay' could not be concealed. Godwin handles ‘Mr. Imlay' with velvet politeness. The effect is rather distantly flat. Wollstonecraft's journal, the
Analytical
, regretted ‘the paucity of [Godwin's] means of information', as well as his emphasis on Mary's emotions at the expense of her mind. There was ‘no correct history of the formation of Mrs. G's mind. We are neither informed of her favourite books, her hours of study, nor her attainments in languages and philosophy.' The
Analytical
foresaw the scandal, and blamed Godwin. There was too little use of her letters as a corrective to the seeming ‘versatility of her attachments'; those who read her letters would ‘stand astonished at the fervour, strength and duration of her affection for Imlay'.

Johnson continued to act for Fanny after her mother's death. In April 1798, he shamed Imlay with a ‘remonstrance', and began to investigate whether Imlay had an ‘attachment' to a mistress unsuited to act as Fanny's mother. The uncertainty of Fanny's future would explain why Johnson was looking into her father's private life. Johnson pursued his enquiries through Imlay's London associate, Mr Cowie, and made him an offer.
Godwin, who wished to keep Fanny, called on Cowie on 16 April. He thought of Fanny as a child his wife ‘left behind her who has no friend upon whose heart she had so many claims as upon mine'. Imlay agreed on condition Godwin took over financial responsibility. In February Imlay had lost a court case in Gloucestershire in which he had sued for a residue of £1750 owing to him as dividends from a West Country coal mine he had leased. (The defendant had turned on Imlay with a counter-claim for unpaid promissory notes.) After Imlay and Mary had parted when Fanny was four months old, Mary had tried to stir a father's feeling–in vain, it seems, though Imlay always did acknowledge his duty to support the child. That duty had to do with shame–Mary's last resort when she had placed Fanny in front of him at the Christies. For, as we have seen, Imlay prided himself as an ‘upright' citizen.

‘I beg you will let the bearer have the trust deed
*
of Imlay's,' Johnson asked Godwin. ‘No satisfactory information from Mr. Cowie respecting an attachment.'

Imlay made a plea to Johnson not to shame him further, and Johnson sent this on to Godwin, on 22 April, with an acid comment that Imlay's letter was ‘the most intelligible one that I have seen from that quarter':

Here, for a moment, Imlay stands out in the light, as he fights to return to the shadows. Most telling is his claim to ‘upright conduct' without a thought for his child–except to save himself the cost of a bond. We see the defensive wall, the false logic (‘what is done is irremediable'), the irrepressible buoyancy he shared with Barlow. It may soothe us to isolate Imlay as scoundrel, but increasing information about the spins and swindles of commerce shows that Imlays, alas, are always with us.

On 14 April 1798 Dorothy Wordsworth notes in her journal that ‘Mary Wollstonecraft's life, &c., came'. The weather was stormy, so that evening sister and brother ‘staid indoors', perhaps reading Godwin's
Memoirs
. In 1799 Wordsworth composed a poem, ‘Ruth', about the contest for the soul of an American in England. If this bears on Imlay, it's more open than Godwin to the ambiguity of the American entrepreneur turning on his moral axis.

In part he is linked with frontier scramblers; in part he retains a ‘high intent' that wins Ruth's love. But her beautiful man ‘to whom was given/ So much of earth–so much of heaven,/ And such impetuous blood' is corrupted by his associates, whom he corrupts in turn. In Ruth's company he is restored; then his ‘better mind' would vanish: ‘low desires' and ‘new objects did new pleasure give,/ As lawless as before'.

Ambiguity is more disturbing than a confirmed scoundrel. So, too, the real Imlay. Additions to a third edition of his
Topographical Description of the Frontier
in 1797 show the influence of Mary Wollstonecraft was not forgotten. Smuggling corrupts the morals, Imlay concedes, and commerce has taken too deep a root in America ‘as in some instances to militate to the injury of philosophy, and the happiness of mankind'. He bears out Dr Price's warning to the Founding Fathers of the United States. Mary Wollstonecraft's protest against fraud when she acted as Imlay's agent makes her the front-runner of present-day protesters in the name of the millions over the globe who are defrauded by corporate greed.

The Imlay–Barlow–Brissot plot to wrest Louisiana from Spain, initiated by Imlay in December 1792, did eventually transpire, though not in an undercover Imlay way. France did regain the territory, and then, in 1803, Napoleon allowed President Jefferson to make the Louisiana Purchase.
Imlay's old associate General Wilkinson, who had once dreamed of a separatist empire in the West, now took possession of these lands–home to several nations of native Americans–in his capacity as commander of the Western Army. He reigned supreme as governor in St Louis, the new capital of the vast territory of Louisiana.

Imlay continued to buy up frontier land. On 19 November 1810 he was granted a deed for 3400 acres in Kentucky. Unlike others in the old records, he gives no place of residence. The burial of one Gilbert Imlay aged seventy-four in 1828 is recorded in the parish register at St Brelade's on the isle of Jersey. As he grew old, did he recall Mary Wollstonecraft's warnings that commerce would wither his heart? ‘In the solitude of declining life, I shall be remembered with regret,' she had said. After he gave up his child to Godwin, Imlay disappears from sight. An edge fading from sight is where he had his habitations: the Kentucky frontier; the borders of neutral territory during the European war; and last, the border world of an island lying between France and England, a smugglers' haven. It was a dodging, risky life in which home, wife and child had no place. Rarely seen to act, he worked through agents–including Mary Wollstonecraft.

Imlay's Finnish agent, Elias Backman, found himself rewarded. On 27 February 1797, in the year ‘of the Independence of the United States of America the twenty-first', Washington (in his last months as President) and Timothy Pickering as Secretary of State, appointed Backman Consul for the port of Gothenburg and adjacent areas–the first American Consul in Sweden. His ship, the
Margrethe
, once Imlay's, continued to sail until 1798. That year it was destroyed by a French privateer in a Spanish harbour. Again, Backman had access to high-level diplomacy, but though he lobbied for years, compensation was denied–Talleyrand, acting on behalf of France, dismissed him curtly. A new American Consul was appointed in 1804, when Backman was declared bankrupt. He even had to resign his status as burgess. Some comfort came much later when Sweden crowned a French general, Bernadotte (or Carl XIV Johan, as he was called): Backman's three sons (who had once opened their nursery to little Fanny Imlay) became court officials–the third son secretary to Queen Desirée and eventually to Oscar I.

Another of Imlay's agents, Barlow, who had prospered from his dealings in Hamburg, returned to Paris in October 1797. A further $6000 was due to him for his time in Algiers, where he had successfully represented American (and his own) interests. In 1798 he bought the Hôtel de la Trémoïlle for 430,000 francs. It had a frontage of a hundred and forty feet opposite the Luxembourg Gardens, at 50 rue de Vaugirard. There were eleven bedrooms, cellars that could hold five hundred barrels of wine, and stables for twelve horses. Its courtyard could accommodate five carriages. The front gate was the most magnificent he had seen in Paris and is now a historical monument. Another fortune-hunter, Richard Codman from Boston, who had visited Imlay and Mary Wollstonecraft in Le Havre in the spring of 1794, bought the historic Château de Ternes in 1800. Every so often the Barlows talked of returning to America, but President Adams thought Barlow a ‘wretch' and talked of his ‘blackness of heart'. So the Barlows stayed on in France, as Napoleon became First Consul and crowned himself Emperor. Barlow's return to America and his later return to France as American Ambassador to Napoleon is another story, marking his triumph over what he termed ‘malicious calumnies' in American papers, and marking too an increasing distance from the mirror of Imlay he had been in his Louisiana and silver-ship days. Ruth Barlow, that intelligent and warm-hearted friend who used to breakfast
à deux
with Mary Wollstonecraft and was her confidante while she lived with Imlay, would have known–had Godwin approached her–facts about Imlay and his business with Joel Barlow at the time Mary Wollstonecraft handled the silver in 1794.