tim fulford So the wide waters, open to the power, The will, the instincts, and appointed needs Of Britain, invite her to cast off Her swarms, and in succession send them forth; Bound to establish new communities On every shore whose aspect favours hope Or bold adventure Your Country must complete Her glorious destiny Begin even now (The Excursion, Book IX, ll 375–408)12 Wordsworth foresaw a global anglicization as British people carried their values to “savage” lands – a process already under way in North America, since a high proportion of the army comprised Welsh, Scots and Irish, many of whom remained in the colonies after their term of service or just plain deserted to live and trade with Indians Having been an opponent of Britain’s commercial empire, Wordsworth had now become a chief proponent of settlement colonization How had this change come about? One of the principal causes was compassion: Wordsworth thought emigration the only hope for the rural laborers against whose eviction and impoverishment in Britain he protested But another factor in changing his mind was the Napoleonic Wars From 1798, France embarked on a series of imperial conquests, invading Egypt, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Russia, and the Swiss cantons, and threatening Britain itself Faced with an expanding martial France, even Britons who had initially welcomed the French Revolution realized it was taking a different course from its American predecessor Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth were increasingly suspicious of Napoleon, a crucial issue being his reimposition of slavery in the French colonies and his edict removing people of color from France In 1802, Wordsworth registered his disgust in two powerful sonnets, “Toussaint L’Ouverture” (in which he sympathized with the black liberator of Haiti who had been betrayed by French duplicity and left to rot in prison), and “The Banished Negroes” (in which he places the reader face to face with a black refugee, torn first from her homeland and then from her adopted France) Hatred of despotism pushed Romantic poets to an accommodation with the established British order of which they had been so critical Afraid of being colonized by the French, they added their weight to a defense of the realm – and, following from this, a defense of the British Empire, whose wealth and strength helped resist French advances Moreover, in 1807 it became easier to defend Britain’s empire because Parliament abolished the slave trade This historic act, the culmination of the campaign that had helped turn Coleridge and Southey into poets, further reconciled one-time 184 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008