Although originally a radical supporter of the French Revolution , Southey followed the trajectory of his fellow Romantic poets Wordsworth and Coleridge towards conservatism . Embraced by the Tory establishment as Poet Laureate , and from 1807 in receipt of a yearly stipend from them , he vigorously supported the Liverpool government . He argued against parliamentary reform ( " the railroad to ruin with the Devil for driver " ) , blamed the Peterloo Massacre on an allegedly revolutionary " rabble " killed and injured by government troops , and spurned Catholic emancipation . In 1817 he privately proposed penal transportation for those guilty of " libel " or " sedition " . He had in mind figures like Thomas Jonathan Wooler and William Hone , whose prosecution he urged . Such writers were guilty , he wrote in the '' Quarterly Review '' , of " inflaming the turbulent temper of the manufacturer and disturbing the quiet attachment of the peasant to those institutions under which he and his fathers have dwelt in peace . " Wooler and Hone were acquitted , but the threats caused another target , William Cobbett , to emigrate temporarily to the United States
Peterloo Massacre
Peterloo Massacre
Robert Southey