From a Tory newspaper of the nineteenth century via Wikipedia via Balloon Juice:
Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned, now he knows whether there is a God or not.
It’s so brutal and childish, so vindictive, but also so straightforward. “Hey Shelley, how about it. You see God now?” I like it that the notice doesn’t assume God really exists and that Shelley must be meeting his deserts in the afterlife. He’s dead, and that’s enough to make the guy who wrote the notice happy. The fellow, whoever he was, may not have cared much about God’s existence or nonexistence; possibly what he condemned was just “infidel” opinions, the foppishness of free thinking. If so, this strikes me as a very Tory combination of attitudes.