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This article studies the politics of The Convention of Cintra (1809), William Wordsworth's prose tract on the notorious Convention between the British and French armies in Portugal during the Peninsular War. In Cintra, I argue, Wordsworth adumbrates a ‘Gothic’ politics that mediates between his past radical and his future loyalist political sympathies. I begin with an account of how the Peninsular War came to be conceived in specifically ‘Gothic’ terms by Wordsworth and his contemporaries. I then offer a reading of Cintra as a rehearsal of the pamphlet war between competing accounts of the ‘Gothic’ state in the 1790s; setting the tract against Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Tom Paine's Rights of Man (1791-2), John Thelwall's Rights of Nature (1796), and Wordsworth's unpublished Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff (1793). I argue that in Cintra Wordsworth develops the ‘Gothic’ language of reform coming out of Spain for the purposes of domestic reform. I conclude with a discussion of the presence behind Cintra of John Milton; a presence that I suggest links the ‘Gothic’ politics worked out in Cintra to the Recluse project—that ‘gothic Church’, as Wordsworth called it, of a poetic enterprise.

IN March 1798 Wordsworth placed '1300 lines' of blank verse within his plan for a master-poem called The Recluse.1 As a recent critic has shown, 'he did so as a convert to the philosophical system of the One Life', inspired by Coleridge to project 'an updating and expansion of Religious Musings'.2 But The Recluse, like Religious Musings, is grounded in a larger, Unitarian reformation of radical thought: Wordsworth's epic, and the poetry written for it in 1798, are the most significant products of Coleridge's opposition to Godwinian atheism. The zeal in promoting an 'Answer to Godwin' seen in the 1795 Lectures extends more widely, and more diversely, than has been recognized. From the time of his declaration, '[Southey] is Christianizing apace' (CL i. 153), and on through his later relations with Wordsworth, Coleridge consistently helped to subvert allegiances to Political Justice.3 Further, he gave Dissenters a language in which to express their Christian antipathy to its atheism. Coleridge's anti-Godwinism, at once associationist and Unitarian, is visible in the work of several of his contemporaries. The ways in which he proselytized friends and correspondents, of surprisingly different sympathies, reveal The Recluse as itself originating in his wish to generate an 'Answer to Godwin'. Though complicated by his friendship with Southey (who 'all but worshipped' the philosopher4), Coleridge's own attitude to Godwin emerges in the overtly 'complimentary sonnet'5 of December 1794

PUBLICATION of the first separate scholarly edition of Home at Grasmere, Book I of The Recluse (as Wordsworth called it in I8o6),' seems a good excuse for looking again at accepted views about when and why the poetry was written. To begin at the beginning. It is well known that for most of his life Wordsworth imagined himself to be writing a great philosophical work called The Recluse, which was never completed, but which in some way or other included The Prelude and Excursion. From time to time he made statements about his intentions that sound nice and clear, and show the scheme getting bigger and bigger, less and less probable. The major block to his progress was of course that he lacked a system that could justify his (and Coleridge's) millenarian sense of purpose, and which could provide material for the poem's central philosophical section: The Prelude and Excursion could be written, but not the centrepiece that they were intended to be supporting. From the first there is an uncertainty as to what The Recluse is really going to be about, a reliance on grandiose phrases that say so much that they say very little. 'I have written I300 lines of a poem', Wordsworth writes on 6 March 1798, 'in which I contrive to convey most of the knowledge of which I am possessed. My object is to give pictures of Nature, Man and Society.' And as if this were not vague and capacious enough, he feels the need to go on: 'Indeed I know not any thing that will not come within the scope of my plan.'2 The bulk of the 1300 lines that are referred to must consist of The Ruined Cottage, written as the 'Story of Margaret' the previous summer, and now adapted to take in a characterstudy of the narrator-Wordsworth's first major autobiographical poetry. We cannot know how The Ruined Cottage was supposed to fit, or grow, into The Recluse, but it is significant that the inserted lines on the Pedlar take over from Coleridge a broadly Unitarian philosophy: 'in all things | He saw one life, and felt that it was joy.'3 It was this that enabled Wordsworth in March 1798 to talk so pompously of the knowledge of which he