"Some Unknown Man, Unheard Of": Wordsworth and the English Regicide

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In Book I of Wordsworth's Prelude stand these inscrutable lines:

  ... Or I would record
  How, in tyrannic times, some unknown man,
  Unheard of in the chronicles of kings,
  Suffered in silence for the love of truth ...
  (1805 I, 201-204)

Who is the "unknown man"? Floods of ink have been spent on the identity of the "semi-Quixote" in The Prelude book on Books, and on tethering the romance of Vaudracour and Julia to its biographical origins, but this literary ghost, both intimate and unidentifiable, has gone unnoticed. (1) But Wordsworth's "unknown man" invites enquiry, positioned as a sort of human riddle, simultaneously actual and universal; unknown, unheard of, but suffering. Purged out of the historical record in proportion as his action is historical, indeed, agonizingly temporal in character, the "unknown man" raises the question of history at the outset of Wordsworth's poem on the history of his own mind. Moreover, it seems unlikely to be an accident that the "unknown man" stands at the exact mid-point of a sequence that is all about the porous boundary between historical record and mythology. The sequence in question is Wordsworth's catalogue of rejected themes for an epic poem, beginning with a thumbnail sketch of the Gothic conquest of Rome:

  Sometimes, more sternly moved, I would relate
  How vanquished Mithridates northward passed,
  And, hidden in the cloud of years, became
  That Odin, Father of a race by whom
  Perished the Roman Empire ...
  (I. 185-189)

Here is an historical action (Pompey's defeat of Mithridates) precipitating a mythical transformation ("Mithridates ... became ... Odin"), which leads into another historical action (the fall of Rome to Alaric's Goths), which then ushers in the supposed medieval relapse into darkness. This sequence sets the pattern for the following thirty-odd lines, in which Wordsworth accumulates examples of similar cases of the interfusion of history and mythology, including the "fifteen hundred years" survival of the "soul of liberty" brought …