A few days later, in England, the poet William Wordsworth was crossing Morecambe Bay after visiting the grave of his former schoolteacher. Like his compatriot, the agronomist Arthur Young, Wordsworth had travelled in France on the eve of the Revolution, and he too had been to Arras in 1789:
I paced, a dear companion at my side,
The town of Arras, whence with promise high
Issued, on delegation to sustain
Humanity and right, that Robespierre
He who thereafter, and in how short a time!
Wielded the sceptre of the Atheist crew.
Wordsworth resented that memory of joy and hope in the streets of Arras. It seemed to mock him in the wake of all the horror and bloodshed that the Revolution brought with it. Wordsworth had seen some of it for himself. He was there watching at the Convention in 1792 when Louvet rose like a spectre before the tribune and said, ‘Yes, Robespierre, it is I who accuses you!’ He wrote about it afterwards, and about the storming of the Tuileries palace, the royal prisoners in the Temple tower, the September massacres, the war and the Revolutionary Tribunal. It is all in Book 10 of The Prelude.1 It was in Morecambe Bay that he heard the news of Robespierre’s death:
As I advanced, all that I saw or felt
Was gentleness and peace. Upon a small
And rocky island near, a fragment stood
(Itself like a sea rock) the low remains
(With shells encrusted, dark with briny weeds)
Of a dilapidated structure, once
A Romish chapel, where the vested priest
Said matins at the hour that suited those
Who crossed the sands with ebb of morning tide.
Not far from that still ruin in the plain
Lay spotted with a variegated crowd
Of vehicles and travellers, horse and foot,
Wading beneath the conduct of their guide
In loose procession through the shallow stream
Of inland waters; the great sea meanwhile
Heaved at a safe distance, far retired. I paused,
Longing for skill to paint a scene so bright
And cheerful, but the foremost of the band
As he approached, no salutation given
In the familiar language of the day,
Cried, ‘Robespierre is dead!’…
Wordsworth uttered a hymn to everlasting justice on those open sands. He was among the first to get Robespierre completely wrong. How could he call him, of all things, the leader of ‘the Atheist crew’? How could he not know that the small, ruined, shell-encrusted chapel would have moved the Incorruptible? Robespierre too would have liked the procession of simple working or travelling people, their horses and their motley vehicles. He, like Wordsworth, might have longed to sketch the scene. For he too loved nature in all its majesty – even though, so far as we know, he never once saw the splendour of the sea.