d Throne and Constitution. From their
seclusion in the Lakes, Southey and Wordsworth praised the royal family
and celebrated England as the home of freedom; while Thomson wrote
"Rule, Britannia," as if Britons, though they never, never would be
slaves to a foreigner, were to a home-grown tyranny more blighting,
because more stupid, than that of Napoleon. England had stamped out the
Irish rebellion of 1798 in blood, had forced Ireland by fraud into the
Union of 1800, and was strangling her industry and commerce. Catholics
could neither vote nor hold office. At a time when the population of the
United Kingdom was some thirty millions, the Parliamentary franchise was
possessed by no more than a million persons, and most of the seats
in the House of Commons were the private property of rich men.
Representative government did not exist; whoever agitated for some
measure of it was deported to Australia or forced to fly to America.
Glasgow and Manchester weavers starved and rioted. The press was gagged
and the Habeas Corpus Act constantly suspended. A second rebellion
in Ireland, when Castlereagh "dabbled his sleek young hands in Erin's
gore," was suppressed with unusual ferocity. In England in 1812 famine
drove bands of poor people to wander and pillage. Under the criminal
law, still of medieval cruelty, death was the punishment for the theft
of a loaf or a sheep. The social organism had come to a deadlock--on
the one hand a starved and angry populace, on the other a vast
Church-and-King party, impregnably powerful, made up of all who had
"a stake in the country." The strain was not to be relieved until the
Reform Act of 1832 set the wheels in motion again; they then moved
painfully indeed, but still they moved. Meanwhile Parliament was the
stronghold of selfish interests; the Church was the jackal of the
gentry; George III, who lost the American colonies and maintained negro
slavery, was on the throne, until he went mad and was succeeded by his
profligate son.

Shelley said of himself that he was

"A nerve o'er which do creep
The else unfelt oppressions of this earth,"

and all the shades of this dark picture are reflected in his life and
in his verse. He was the eldest son of a Sussex family that was loyally
Whig and moved in the orbit of the Catholic Dukes of Norfolk, and the
talk about emancipation which he would hear at home may partly explain
his amazing invasion of Ireland in 1811-12, when he was nineteen