St. Leon. A Tale of the Sixteenth Century was written by William Godwin. Godwin (1756-1836) was a British novelist, political theorist, biographer, historian, and generalist. Godwin taught many of the Romantics and was a leading figure in the British liberal movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He is best-known for Caleb Williams (1794), one of the most important early novels about crime (see: Proto-Mystery).

St. Leon was Godwin’s attempt at writing a Gothic, although St. Leon is as much a historical novel as it is a Gothic. Set in Europe in the sixteenth century, St. Leon is about Reginald St. Leon, the child of a noble French family. After returning from the Italian wars he raises a family, but when he takes his son Charles to Paris to attend the university there, Reginald gives in to weakness and gambles away his son’s tuition and his own inheritance. Reginald and family move to Switzerland and begin life anew as farmers, but an earthquake wipes out their farm. They recover and start again, but then a poor stranger calling himself “Francesco Zampieri” appears and asks Reginald for sanctuary. Zampieri is grateful enough to Reginald that he offers to tell Reginald a great secret if he agrees to discuss it with no one, not even his wife Marguerite. Reginald eventually agrees to this, though not without qualms, and the stranger, who wants nothing more than to die, tells Reginald the secret: how to make gold and how to make the elixir of life.

But the central theme of St. Leon is that money does not bring anyone happiness, and Reginald enjoys nothing but misery from the use of the two secrets. By not telling Marguerite about the source of his newfound wealth Reginald brings unhappiness into his marriage. The authorities are curious about the source of Reginald’s new wealth as well as the cause of Zampieri’s death, so they throw Reginald into prison. Reginald buys his way out jail and flees to Pisa with his family, but Hector, the family servant, tells his unfaithful lover about Reginald’s mysterious wealth, and this ruins the St. Leons’ reputation. The Pisans believe that Reginald is an alchemist and necromancer, and the St. Leons family become social outcasts. The Pisans eventually turn hostile and the St. Leons are forced to flee to Spain. Marguerite dies soon after the family arrives in Barcelona, and Reginald is forced to assume a new identity. Eventually his wealth comes to the attention of the Inquisition, and St. Leon is captured and imprisoned. He is their prisoner for a dozen years and escapes the auto-da-fé only by luck. Reginald moves on to Hungary and sets himself up as a philanthropist, determined to put his inexhaustible wealth to good use and to make the war-ravaged country into a good place to live. At first he has success and for a while is beloved by the Hungarians, but eventually his wealth causes inflation and he leaves the Hungarian peasants no better off than they were before he arrived. Worse, Reginald is forced to constantly bribe the Turkish bashaw who is in charge of Hungary. The bashaw puts his army at the service of Reginald, but that only makes the Hungarians hate Reginald the more, for they see him as an ally of the Turks. Eventually Reginald’s friend, the gigantic misanthrope Bethlem Gabor, kidnaps Reginald and holds him prisoner in Gabor’s castle. When the castle is attacked Reginald escapes, but he is quickly discovered by the troops of Reginald’s son Charles. Charles and an incognito Reginald become friends, but Reginald’s attempt to ensure Charles’ marriage to his fiancée backfires, and Charles becomes convinced that his fiancée Pandora is cheating on him with Reginald. When Charles learns about Reginald’s Hungarian adventure he declares his hatred for Reginald, who he sees as an enemy of Christianity. Reginald flees again and becomes a Wandering Jew figure, similar to Francesco Zampieri when St. Leon met him, and there the story ends.

In St. Leon Godwin attempts to express various themes: immortality is a curse; wealth can bring only unhappiness, and attempts to help others through the use of wealth will calamitously backfire; the honesty and love of a marriage are worth far more than immortality and wealth; intolerance—religious, philosophical, and cultural—alienates the well-meaning and drives away those who would attempt to uplift their fellow men and women; the Rosicrucians are right. Godwin also adds a large amount of historical detail to St. Leon, so that the novel is considerably more historically accurate than most Gothic novels. Godwin’s Inquisition is terrible but realistic, unlike the cartoonishly evil Inquisition of most Gothics.

But for all of that St. Leon is a bore. It is a typically sluggish and stilted Gothic. The speeches are endless, often turgid maunderings, the emotion and characterization are overblown, and Godwin’s themes are hammered home with no subtlety whatsoever. The only real point of interest for the modern reader is the figure of Bethlem Gabor, who was based on the Transylvanian prince Gabor Bethlen (1580-1629). Godwin’s Gabor, a mutilated colossus, lost his wife and family to violence and hates mankind. He is a vengeful misanthrope, and Reginald sees in him “the sublime desolation of a mighty soul.”¹ At first Gabor is friendly toward Reginald, but Gabor eventually changes his mind and decides to hate him, because Reginald’s inability or unwillingness to blame mankind for his misfortunes strikes Gabor as contemptible. The figure of Gabor and his friendship with and then enmity toward Reginald may have inspired Godwin’s daughter, Mary Shelley, when she was conceiving of the Creature in Frankenstein. In his Romantic alienation and isolation Reginald may also have provided some inspiration for Victor Frankenstein’s Creature. Some critics have even seen an influence of Reginald on the titular character of Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer:

In St. Leon, Godwin grappled with themes that stimulated the imaginations of many of the writers who followed him: the conflict between the pursuit of wealth and the domestic affections, the relationship between historical circumstances and the formation of individual character, the consequences of superhuman knowledge, the disadvantages of immortality, and the plight of a would-be philanthropist in a benighted world. Marie Roberts [in Gothic Immortals: The Fiction of the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, Abingdon: Routledge, 1990] persuasively argues that St. Leon inaugurated a series of Rosicrucian novels, including Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer: A Tale (1820), and Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Zanoni (1842). The novel’s protagonist is, moreover, the forerunner of scores of literary and cinematic Frankensteins, melancholy immortals, and monsters, including the eponymous villain of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), another highborn alchemist who discovers the secret of eternal life.²

Another point of interest in St. Leon is Hector, the servant of the St. Leons. Hector is a positive black character, something not just unusual but unique among Gothic novels. Hector is articulate, compassionate, and kind. He is also innocent and naive, but Godwin makes plain that these are his character traits, rather than something inherent to his ethnicity. Hector is a welcome change from the all-too-common racism of many early nineteenth century works.

William Brewer, “Introduction,” in St. Leon. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Editions, 2006.

^{^[1]} William Godwin, St. Leon. A Tale of the Sixteenth Century (London: Bentley, 1850), 401.

^{^[2]} William Brewer, “Introduction,” in St. Leon (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Editions, 2006), 38-39.