In sketching Wordsworth's life, two portraits might be drawn, almost as mirror images of one another. The first would present a child who was orphaned by the age of thirteen, and to whose family the first Lord Lonsdale refused to pay the substantial debt (over £4500) that was owing to Wordsworth senior at his death; a boy who rebelled against his guardians, slashed through a family portrait with a whip, and failed, first to gain anything more than an unclassified BA (from St John's College, Cambridge, 1791), and then to take orders or enter one of the professions; a graduate who in 1792 travelled to revolutionary France, where he was converted to its cause and fathered an illegitimate child; a 'vagabond' who returned to England and several years of apparently aimless roving, leading, in 1796, to some kind of nervous breakdown; a young 'democrat' who kept dubious, if not actually dangerous company, and in 1798 was thought worthy of surveillance by a government spy; a republican who laid plans for a radical monthly called the Philanthropist, and may have been involved in a liberal London weekly of that name, which ran for forty-two issues, 1795-6; an author of oppositional political tracts, the unpublished Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff (1793), written in defence of the regicide in France and rights of man at home, and The Convention of Cintra (1809), which accepted that fighting imperialist France constituted a just war, but was highly critical of the deal by which a Spanish revolt ended with Britain allowing the defeated French army to evacuate Portugal without loss; a 'Semi-atheist' whom Coleridge persuaded into an unspecific form of Unitarianism, and who in 1812 still had 'no need of a Redeemer'; a would-be populist who argued that poetry was not the exclusive property of the middle and upper classes, and attributed to his own work the polemical purpose of showing that 'men who do not wear fine cloaths can feel deeply' (letter to Charles James Fox, 14 January 1801); a financially insecure poet who until his mid-forties lived in relative poverty, adopting a lofty defensiveness against an uncomprehending 'public' and the diffuse notoriety provided by hostile Tory critics, among whom he was synonymous at once with childishness and insubordination.