96 The Poetry of Mary Robinsonsympathy in the hope that, regardless of politics, “every impartial
eye has a tear for her sufferings” and that justice—in the form of the
Queen’s release from prison—will prevail (128). According to Judith
Pascoe, Robinson presents Marie Antoinette “as first and foremost
a wronged woman and thus ignores her status as an avatar of aristo-
cratic frivolity” (53). Robinson, in this regard, would seem to have
little in common with Wollstonecraft, who despised Marie Antoinette
as a monarch and as a woman.^15
Despite her previous affiliation with Merry, Robinson, during these
early years of the war when she was still doing business with Bell,
remains politically ambivalent at least in public. Moreover, despite
having written the pro- Revolution poem Ainsi va le monde in 1790,
by 27 November of 1793, nearly a year into the war, the Ministerial
Tr u e B r iton, having been converted from the radical Argus into a tool
of Pitt’s government, hailed “Mrs. Robinson” “as the first Poet now
living.” This praise from a newspaper affiliated with newly elected
MP George Canning (by a rotten borough), the future founder and
primary writer of the ultra- conservative Anti- Jacobin, makes a stark
contrast with Gifford’s later comment on Robinson in the 1811 edi-
tion of The Baviad and Mæviad: “This wretched woman, indeed, in
the wane of her beauty fell into merited poverty, exchanged poetry for
politics, and wrote abusive trash against the government at the rate of
two guineas a week, for the Morning Post” (56n). The exchange of
“poetry for [radical] politics,” to use Gifford’s terms, would not take
place until after the end of Robinson’s relationship with Bell, and
her radicalism would become more public after her personal relation-
ship with Tarleton permanently dissolved early in 1797. But how does
Robinson go from pra ising t he Revolut ion in 1790 and 1791 to being
celebrated by a Treasury- bought newspaper at the end of 1793?
The simplest answer is that Robinson’s friend John Taylor, who
had been oculist to the King, was one of the proprietors of the Tr u e
Briton and of the Sun, having “turned ultra- Tory at the beginning
of the French Revolution” (Adams, “Robert Merry” 32). That fall,
Robinson had dedicated to him her long poem Sight, her first in blank
verse. It was published by Evans as a slim volume with two other
poems, “The Cavern of Woe,” a Spenserian allegory, and “Solitude,”
also in blank verse. Taylor was a propagandist on the Treasury pay-
roll, as the ledgers indicate (Werkmeister, Newspaper 29–30). As a
government spy, Taylor also gave evidence against John Thelwall in
the government’s trial of him for treason (Barrell, Imagining 393).
Taylor, later, was also one of those, like Boaden and Reynolds, who
engaged in the destruction of Merry’s posthumous reputation, writing9780230100251_04_ch02.indd 969780230100251_04_ch02.indd 96 12/28/2010 11:08:30 AM12/28/2010 11:08:30 AM
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