Delphi Complete Works of William Godwin 1st ed. (2022), page 219
part #1 of Delphi Classics Series
Each of the Montagus received a slight wound in our midnight-encounter. Clifford alone was unhurt. He bore a charmed life. The blotches and stains which crusted his moral character, were no less sure a defence to him, than the cloud in which Juno is said to have carried off her favourite Turnus. Let fall your blades on vulnerable crests; for none of women born shall damage Clifford! Of all appalling and maddening ideas, undoubtedly the cardinal one is the impassiveness with which hell sometimes dowers her votaries.
It was otherwise with me. I had received a deep and perilous gash, the broad brand of which I shall not fail to carry with me to my grave. The sight of my left eye is gone; the cheek beneath is severed, with a deep trench between. My wound is of that sort, which in the French civil wars got the name of une balafre. I have pleased myself, in the fury and bitterness of my soul, with tracing the whole force of that word. It is cicatrix luculenta, a glazed, or shining scar, like the effect of a streak of varnish upon a picture. Balafré I find explained by Girolamo Vittori, by the Italian word smorfato and this again -1 mean the noun, smorfia – is decided by ‘the resolute’ John Florio, to signify ‘a blurting or mumping, a mocking or push with one’s mouth’. The explanation of these lexicographers is happily suited to my case, and the mark I for ever carry about with me. The reader may recollect the descriptions I have occasionally been obliged to give, of the beauty of my person and countenance, particularly in my equestrian exercises, when, mounted on my favourite horse, I was the admiration of every one that beheld me. What was I now? When I first looked in my glass, and saw my face, once more stripped of its tedious dressings, I thought I never saw any thing so monstrous. It answered well, to the well-worded description of Florio. The sword of my enemy had given a perpetual grimace, a sort of preternatural and unvarying distorted smile, or deadly grin, to my countenance. This may to some persons appear a trifle. It ate into my soul. Every time my eye accidentally caught my mirror, I saw Clifford, and the cruel heart of Clifford, branded into me. My situation was not like what it had hitherto been. Before, to think of Clifford was an act of the mind, and an exercise of the imagination; he was not there, but my thoughts went on their destined errand, and fetched him; now I bore Clifford and his injuries perpetually about with me. Even as certain tyrannical planters in the West Indies have set a brand with a red-hot iron upon the negroes they have purchased, to denote that they are irremediably a property, so Clifford had set his mark upon me, as a token that I was his for ever.
Cloudesley (1830)
A TALE
First published in three volumes by the London booksellers Colburn and Bentley on 4 March, 1830, Cloudesley was an immediate hit and sold out quickly. Through the aid of Godwin’s admirer and friend Washington Irving, an American publication, a two-volume edition by Harper and Bros., New York, appeared the same year. The major source for the novel came from the true story of the celebrated legal case of James Annesley (1715-60), an Englishman that had been cheated out of his aristocratic title and inheritance by his uncle Richard Annesley. Godwin had read Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman (1743) and the Trial of James Annesley v. Richard Earl of Anglesey (1744) in his research.
The plot concerns William Meadows, the son of the curate of Epworth in North Lincolnshire, who is sent to sea as a boy after his father’s death. He finds himself ill-suited to a nautical life and leaves the ship at Archangel in Russia in the final years of the reign of Peter the Great. Meadows falls foul of John Ernest Biren, the principal minister of Empress Anna, who had ruled Russia from 1730 to 1740, and so the young man returns to England. There he secures employment as secretary to the fifty-year-old widower Lord Danvers at Millwood Park, who has one remaining son, Lord Bardsley, aged 11. Lord Danvers is a solitary and melancholy man, who reveals to Meadows his intriguing history.
At one time he was merely Richard Herbert, a younger son with minor prospects, compared to his brother, Arthur, who was destined to inherit the earldom from their cousin, Robert. However, Arthur had unexpectedly died in a duel and his wife, Irene, died shortly after giving birth. Richard had decided to conceal the identity of his infant nephew. Arthur's servant, Cloudesley, had taken the child to Italy and married the servant of the boy's mother, Eudocia. The rightful heir was now called Julian Cloudesley. Richard in time married Selina and they had four children. All but one of them died at the age of eleven, before the wife died too. The servant Cloudesley tried to convince Richard that he should reveal his secret and restore the boy to his rightful position, but he refused. Eventually, the errant Cloudesley joined a group of bandits, unaware of his true status.
Learning the full history of Lord Danvers, Meadows is requested to find Julian, who is now twenty-one years old. The bandit is about to be executed with the rest of his band. Meadows implores the consul-general to intervene, but he is only prevailed upon to do so when Lord Danvers arrives to confess his guilt. Danvers is dangerously ill and has recently lost his last child. But will he be in time to save Julian from execution?
The novel received high praise by most reviewers, including the author’s daughter Mary Shelley in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, who noted that “old age had neither affected Godwin’s skills as a storyteller nor as a provoker of thought.” A new admirer, the novelist Edward Bulwer, was also impressed with Cloudesley, which he stated could be “read as the work of a younger man,” as he told the readers of New Monthly Magazine. Bulwer described the novel as “full of a loveliness and an enthusiasm of sentiment, a bloom of mind, that rarely outlives the keen autumn of experience”. The reviewer from Fraser’s Magazine argued that Cloudesley was a “truer philosophy” than Caleb Williams and that there was more to be learned from it than in any of Godwin’s previous novels. William Hazlitt bemoaned how the novel was in many ways “a dissertation on remorse” in The Edinburgh Review. Although Hazlitt deemed Cloudesley as much better written than Caleb Williams, he likened it to “a polished mirror without a wrinkle”, he felt there was little substance to it, as though it sought to “build a palace of words on nothing.”
The first edition’s title page
CONTENTS
ADVERTISEMENT
PREFACE
VOLUME I.
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
VOLUME II.
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
VOLUME III.
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CONC LUSION
James Annesley was an Irishman with a claim to the title Earl of Anglesey, one of the wealthiest estates in Ireland. The dispute between Annesley and his uncle Richard was infamous in its time, but his story is perhaps best known today as a possible inspiration for the nineteenth-century novel ‘Kidnapped’ by Robert Louis Stevenson and Godwin’s earlier novel ‘Cloudesley’.
ADVERTISEMENT
THE FOLLOWING TALE is built upon a fact that occurred about the middle of the last century. I have changed the personages, and endeavoured to clothe the story with the colours of the imagination When I wrote Caleb Williams, I considered it as in some measure a paraphrase on the story of Bluebeard by Charles Perrault. The present publication may in the same sense be denominated a paraphrase on the old ballad of the Children in the Wood.
January 30, 1830.
PREFACE
I FEEL INCLINED in the following eight or ten pages, to attempt to illustrate a proposition which has been stated before, but which has not yet perhaps received so full an explanation as might be given to it.
History – the history of masses of men – may be regarded under two points of view – as it relates to the vicissitudes of nations, their rise and fall, their progress in refinement and corruption, their literature, their habits and customs, their philosophy and their religion, in a word, all that belongs to men in the aggregate – and as it relates to the conduct of those who occupy a considerable place in the scene. Of all and each of the former we may undoubtedly attain to some knowledge; but of the character of individuals almost nothing.
It is under the latter of these heads, that, however paradoxical it may seem, fictitious history is more true and to be depended upon, when it has the fortune to be executed by a masterly hand, than that which is to be drawn from state-papers, documents, and letters written by those who were actually engaged in the scene.
I do not say this to dissuade my fellowmen from the study of what we call real human characters. We cannot, if we would, refrain from speculating on the motives, and endeavouring to penetrate into the inmost thoughts of Cromwell and Hampden, of Burleigh and Elizabeth, of Cicero and Cæsar. And, since this will infallibly be done in some manner, it is certainly desirable that profound and ingenious persons should employ their leisure upon these problems, that what will be done well or otherwise, may be done in the way which shall be most skilful.
But, when all is ended, individual history and biography are merely guesses in the dark. The writer collects his information of what the great men on the theatre of the world are reported to have said and done, and then endeavours with his best sagacity to find out the explanation, to hit on that thread, woven through the whole contexture of the piece, which being discovered, we are told,
no prodigies remain,
Comets are regular, and Wharton plain.
But man is a more complex machine, than is ‘dreamed of in our philosophy’: and it is probable that the skill of no moral anatomist has yet been consummate enough fully to solve the obscurities of any one of the great worthies of ancient or modern times. A thousand incongruities are to be found in the characters which we seem best to understand; the same man often appears to be not the same, but different; and the explanations which are furnished by a Tacitus or a Machiavel, will not fit all his actions. It may be affirmed without a paradox, that no man thoroughly understands himself: how then is it to be expected, that the historian, who looks at him through a narrow aperture, and sees but a small part of his thoughts, his words and his actions, should arrive at a sounder result?
When I have studied a historical character with the most patient research, I can only make an approximation to the estimating it truly, and often not that. The most shewy virtues are frequently not those which would best abide the heat of temptation, or the severity of adverse fortune. Many men stand out to the eye of their fellows for better, and many for worse than they are. The folds of the human heart, the endless intermixture of motive with motive, and the difficulty of assigning which of these had the greatest effect in producing a given action, the desire each man has to stand well with his neighbours, and well with himself, all render the attempt to pass a sound judgment upon the characters of men to a great degree impossible.
Analysis is in this respect a science more commensurate to human faculties than synthesis. When the creator of the world of imagination, the poet, or the writer of fiction, introduces his ideal personage to the public, he enters upon the task with a preconception of the qualities that belong to this being, the principle of his actions, and its necessary concomitants. He has thus two advantages: in the first place, his express office is to draw just conclusions from assigned premises, a task of no extraordinary difficulty: and secondly, while he endeavours to aid those conclusions by consulting the oracle in his bosom, the suggestions of his own heart, instructed as he is besides by converse with the world, and a careful survey of the encounters that present themselves to his observation, he is much less liable to be cribbed and cabined in by those unlooked-for phenomena, which, in the history of an individual, seem to have a malicious pleasure in thrusting themselves forward to subvert our best digested theories. In this sense then it is infallibly true, that fictitious history, when it is the work of a competent hand, is more to be depended upon, and comprises more of the science of man, than whatever can be exhibited by the historian,
long and dark,
Drawn from the musty rolls of Noah’s ark.
In the drama it is a different thing. Whatever is offered there, must be expected to be sketches scarcely half made up, and human passions and character distorted, to fit a plot, and chime in with an abrupt and violent catastrophe. But the writer of fictitious history has leisure to ripen his materials, and draw out his results one by one, even as they grow up and unfold themselves in the ‘seven ages’ of man. He is not confined, like the dramatist, to put down the words that his characters shall utter. He accompanies the language made use of by them with his comments, and explains the inmost thoughts that pass in the bosom of the upright man and the perverse. This is his peculiar and enviable prerogative. – Among dramatists Shakespear is the exception. His conceptions are drawn from the profoundest abysses of thought; they seem to be supplied to him by the plastic principle to which the universe is indebted for its harmonies; and he had therefore comparatively little need, like inferior artists, to proceed step by step in unfolding the seeds of character, and to watch with timid and cautious observation the modes in which they expand themselves, and the peculiarities by which they are divided.
Add to which, the characters of the drama, such as they are ordinarily found, are abstractions, or rather diagrams, and not pictures; the finishing and the reality are wanting. It is as if the shadows and first hints of men, drawn by a novice, walked out of their frames, before the substance and filling out of a man were added to give them reality; or as if the figures of Prometheus were made to act their parts on earth, without waiting till the fire from heaven came to inform them with a living soul.
They mock our eyes with air.
These are black vesper’s pageants. With a thought
The rack dislimns them, makes them indistinct
As water is in water.
VOLUME I.
CHAPTER I
THE STORY WHICH I now take up the pen to relate, derives no interest from myself. I was born in the middle, or I might rather say, the humbler walks of society, and should probably, as far as relates to my own rank and that of my parents, and to any intrinsic qualities I possess, have been born and die, like the herbage of the field, which to-day is, and to-morrow falls under the scythe of the great mower, who cuts down whole fields of the common growth of the soil at his pleasure. But, though insignificant in myself, and uncharacterised by those vehement passions or that inordinate ambition, which places some men on the roll of the distinguished, and perpetuates their memory to honour or to shame, it has been my lot to be connected with persons whose story has a more substantial claim on the curiosity of mankind. It is their adventures, and not my own, that I am about to relate.
My father was the curate of Epworth in the isle of Axholme, where he reared a family of children with such advantages in point of education, as his small means enabled him to bestow. His name was Meadows; and I was myself, who was called after my father William, his sole male progeny that reached years of maturity. He discovered in me a sound understanding and a tractable disposition, and therefore resolved to impart to me such rudiments of learning as he himself possessed. I read with him the works of Virgil, some odes of Horace, and a considerable portion of the Greek Testament. He could have wished that, after himself, I should have become a teacher of the gospel agreeably to the mode of the church of England; but to accomplish this far exceeded his powers. Even the slender advantages I might have derived from being introduced on the stage of the world under his protection I was deprived of, as he died when I was in the fifteenth year of my age.
I was always greatly devoted to the admiration of such wonders of nature and art as placed themselves before my sight; and even the obscure corner of the world where I was bred, was not destitute of such objects. Not far from Epworth existed the remains of a monastery of Carthusians, called the Priory in the Wood. And, when I went sometimes farther from home to visit my mother’s relations at Barton, where is the noted horse-ferry to Hull, six miles over the Humber, I delighted to spend hours together in wild reveries and romantic imaginations, as I saw and heard the dashing of the waters of this magnificent river.
It was more than a century before, that the three sons of lord Sheffield of Butterwicke had been drowned in passing this river, at a ferry farther from the mouth at which it empties itself into the sea. But the nearness of the geography of the scene counterbalanced with me the distance of time at which the event had occurred. They were all young men. The eldest was already married; and the son of that marriage afterwards succeeded to the family honours. There was something singularly melancholy and striking in so sweeping a catastrophe. I seldom resorted to the shore of the river without the event recurring to my memory. And, especially when the winds were high, the tempest rose, and black and threatening clouds were hurrying along the sky in a December evening, I seemed to myself to see their faces indistinctly discovered from time to time in the atmosphere: they appeared even in the dawn of opening life, just as they had been in the hour that they perished. At other times I heard wailings and shrieks in the wind, which I interpreted as the voice of the genius of the stream, mourning for the dishonour that befel her in that fatal hour.
