Making its way to Switzerland at roughly the same time as Byron was what it is convenient to call the Shelley party. This consisted of the young poet himself, still only twenty-three, and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who would not become Mrs Shelley until the former Harriet Westbrook, Shelley's abandoned first wife, had made that possible by committing suicide later in the year. With Shelley and Mary was their baby son William, who had been born in January, and also Mary's sister Claire. To many the four adults were an object of scandal, and not merely because Shelley and Mary were as yet unmarried. Sent down from Oxford for publishing a pamphlet provocatively entitled ‘The Necessity of Atheism’, Shelley had then added insult to injury, as far as the political establishment was concerned, by privately publishing a poem called Queen Mab in which he trumpeted his belief in revolutionary politics, reaffirmed his hostility to Christianity, and also declared himself an opponent of marriage and an advocate of free love. He was a married man when he made this declaration but his first wedding had been a reluctant concession to social pressures (as indeed his second would be). Shelley's libertarian approach to sex, and the fact that he was travelling with two young women rather than one, inevitably caused questions to be raised about sleeping arrangements; and since the two women concerned were sisters, there were also whispers of incest, that word having a loose meaning in his time. But as Byron, who had reasons of his own for being particularly sensitive on the incest issue, was later to insist, there was in fact no blood relation between Mary and Claire.