The tragic scandal of Buttermere

Press, 18 February 1989, Page 27

The tragic scandal of Buttermere

The Maid Of Buttermere. By Melvyn Bragg. Sceptre Paperbacks, 1987. » 478 pp. $14.95. (Reviewed by Diane Prout) “The Maid Of Buttermere” is a love story of epic proportions, based on one of the most notorious British scandals and court cases of the early nineteenth century. In prose as elegantly wrought as any of the great essayists of the. period, Melvyn Bragg unfolds the fatal attraction of John Hatfield, alias Alexander, Augustus Hope, Colonel, Member of Parliament for Linlithgowshire and brother to the Earl of Hopetoun, for Mary Robinson, the Beauty of Buttermere. Bigamist, seducer, charlatan and conman, the charismatic Hatfield is physically and spiritually enslaved by the gentle Mary whose modesty and charm were later immortalised by Wordsworth in, "The Prelude.” In spite of conscience and the imminent presence of The Law, Hatfield marries his Mary for the absolution he so desperately seeks only to find himself betrayed by his past and brought to trial for the capital offence of forgery. * Bragg evokes the grandeur and

power of the Lake District with the same sense of inexorability that Hardy brought to the Wessex countryside. The fells, the lakes, and the cyclic rhythms of the year are the backdrop for a tragedy of two lovers caught in the crossfire of two centuries of social thought. The idealism of the French Revolution has given way to the comtemplation of Natural Beauty as a solace and substitute for political ills. “The licentious, bawdy, rational eighteenth century” is forced to cede to the ninteenth,” romantic, sentimental, increasingly strapped in a rigid public morality with its consequent hypocrisy.” Hatfield is its sacrificial victim. In a compelling narrative, which combines imaginative reconstruction of the sensual and self-deluding character, Hatfield, with documentary reportage of the events of the trial, Bragg draws out the strands of deceit, cowardice, lust, and revenge with the resonance of echoes from his Cumbrian mountains. Interwoven with the lives of Hatfield and Mary Robinson are those of the Lake poets: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose accounts of “The Romantic

Marriage” published in “The Morning Post” in 1802 were instrumental in bringing the Keswick Seducer to trial; Wordsworth, De Quincey, and Charles Lamb all have some part to play in the destinies of these two scapegoats for social snobbery. Hatfield himself was a prolific writer both in and out of prison where he set about putting his theories of social reform into practice while awaiting trial. His eventual death by hanging on Friday, September 2, 1803, for the fraudulent franking of letters, was the result of media persecution and the moral outrage of a prurient public avid for sensation at a time when hostilities with France were at a temporary lull. Donald Reiman in an epilogue compares the reaction to that of the kidnapping of the infant son of Charles Lindbergh or to the assassination of John Lennon (“The Beauty Of Buttermere as Fact and Romantic Symbol”).

“The Maid Of Buttermere" is a fascinating piece of historical deduction, literary biography, sociological analysis, and romantic fiction.