Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in 1792 into an aristocratic family and stood to inherit a fortune which would have ensured him a comfortable life. Instead he was sent down from Oxford for claiming the mind cannot believe the existence of God and that matter was infinite.

His father, Sir Timothy Shelley MP intervened and his son would have been re-instated, had the young man not insisted on his belief. This led to his being disinherited and ultimately, to the tragic instability that culminated in his early death by drowning off Viareggio. The poet remained a political radical for the rest of his life.

Shelley's happy childhood

Yet why did Shelley depart so much from the Anglican faith? Shelley spoke well of his childhood tutor, the Rev Even Evans, curate of St Margaret’s, Warnham. Until Oxford, he had no conflict with his father, who was a more liberal Whig than some. Before going to Eton, the young Shelley went to a school in Brentford with his friend Medwin, where he is alleged to have sleepwalked. A clever and sensitive boy, he was impressionable.

A cruel school crossing

The route from his family home in Horsham crossed the infamous Hounslow Heath. The wilderness was so prone to attacks by highwaymen that an array of gibbets used to line the Staines Road down which the young Shelley travelled. Evidence that the gibbets were well- known right up to the Nineteenth Century comes from many sources. The practice was only abolished in 1843. The Bell Inn Hounslow stands on the spot where one of the gibbets stood. Its reputation to be haunted is still reported.

Shelley refers to this grisly sight in an early poem, Zainab and Kathena. Zainab, pictured in some vague, coastlined “Cashmir” laments the kidnapping of his beloved Kathena by Christian pirates. Through bribery, Zainab is able to reach England and finds himself on a heath. Suddenly he comes across the body of Kathena on a gibbet. To be united in death, he hangs himself there. The description of the gibbet leaves little to the imagination, especially its height. Of course he was sensitive to the oppression he saw all round him, but this symbol of unjust rule seems to have made a deep impression.

A childhood romance sours

In later life, Shelley returned to the theme of punishment. In Swellfoot the Tyrant Act 1, lines 205 to 210, the figure of Mammon is held to say

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