Chatterton and Rowley - a podcast by Roy H. Williams

Everything I’m about to share with you happened in England and France during the lifetime of Thomas Jefferson, while America still had its “new baby” smell.

The English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge gave us “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in 1798, while Napoleon sailed to Egypt to fight the Battle of the Pyramids and famously discover the Rosetta Stone.

Coleridge died of heart failure due to his opium addiction.

Wordsworth gave us “The Rainbow” in 1802, while the people of France enthusiastically approved a new constitution that elevated Napoleon to dictator for life.

Wordsworth died of a lung infection.

Shelley gave us “Ozymandias,” the tale of a fallen and forgotten emperor, in 1818, while Napoleon languished in exile on the island of Saint Helena in the Atlantic.

Shelley died in a boating accident at the age of 29.

Keats gave us “La Belle Dame sans Mercy” in 1819, while Napoleon continued to languish on Saint Helena.

Keats died of tuberculosis at the age of 25.

“Le Belle Dame sans Mercy” in English means “The Beautiful Girl without Mercy,” but you and I know her as Fame and Fortune.

You’ve often heard the names of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, but did you know that each of these English Romantic poets was inspired by an imaginary 15th-century monk named Thomas Rowley?

But imaginary through he was, Thomas Rowley re-ignited the flames of romantic literature in England during the colorful years that he lived in the mind of an adolescent boy in poverty.

That boy, Thomas Chatterton, was born 15 weeks after his father died in 1752, when Thomas Jefferson was just 9 years old. Napoleon would not be born for another 3 years.

Little Thomas spent his days with his uncle, the sexton of the church of St Mary, Redcliffe, where he would crawl through the attic of that vast, ancient building, examining the contents of oak chests stored there since 1185, where documents as old as the War of the Roses lay forgotten.

By the time he was 6, young Thomas Chatterton had learned his alphabet from the illuminated capitals of those documents. By the time he was 11, Thomas had become so well-versed in the language and legends of earlier centuries that he began sending poems to “Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal,” claiming they were transcribed from the writings of a monk named Thomas Rowley who had lived 300 years earlier.

Aside from the hundreds of poems written by this imaginary monk, Chatterton wrote political letters, song lyrics, operas and satires in verse and in prose. He became known to the readers of the Middlesex Journal as Decimus, a rival of Junius, that author of the forever infamous Letters of Junius. Chatterton was also a contributor to Hamilton’s Town and Country Magazine, and the Freeholder’s Magazine, political publications supportive of liberty and rebellion.

While the brilliant submissions of Thomas Chatterton were happily accepted by editors across England, he was paid little or no money for them.

On the 17th of April, 1770, 17-year-old Thomas Chatterton penned a satire he called his “Last Will and Testament.” In it, he hinted that he was planning to end his life the following day.

That famous poem by John Keats, “La Bella Dame sans Mercy,” may well have been written with Thomas Chatterton in mind. For the beautiful, merciless girl in that poem is a fairy – let us call her Fame & Fortune – who makes love to a medieval knight in his dreams, then leaves him sick and dying on a cold hillside when she...

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