‘A Patriot’s Furrow’d Cheek’: British Responses to the 1794 Kościuszko Uprising

Abstract

In an 1831 article of reminiscences, the poet and novelist Amelia Opie described a remarkable 1802 encounter with Tadeusz Kościuszko. While enjoying an evening at the Paris home of an Irish countess, Opie and her husband, the painter John Opie, spotted the celebrity: ‘I took my husband’s arm,’ she writes, ‘and accompanied him to get a nearer view of the Polish patriot, so long the object to me of interest and admiration’ (Memorials 105). For the Opies, as for any other Britons attending the soirée, the meeting had been preceded by numerous literary and visual substitutes. Since the mid-1790s, Kościuszko’s unsuccessful insurrection against the partitioners of Poland had been the subject of newspaper articles, poetry, and engravings. Opie herself lamented the fate of Poland in her early poem, ‘Ode on the Present Times, 27th January 1795’:

Whence yonder groans? O wretched land!

Poland, from thee, alas! they came,

A despot speaks, and lo! a band,

Blaspheming pure Religion’s name,

Bid cold deliberate murder live,

And death’s dread stroke to helpless thousands give.

(19–24)

In her memoir she quotes a line from Thomas Campbell, ‘While Freedom shriek’d as Kosciusko fell,’ and mentions owning an image of the patriot: ‘I had so often contemplated a print of him in his Polish dress, which hung in my room, that I thought I should have known him anywhere’ (105–6).

… to have seen Kosciusco would have been something to talk of all the rest of one’s life.

Robert Southey, June 1797 (Collected Letters)