The Life
and Adventures of
WILLIAM COBBETT
RICHARD INGRAMS

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

INTRODUCTION

1 A Sweet Old Boy

2 Off to Philadelphia

3 England Revisited

4 A Convert to Reform

5 Behind Bars

6 America Revisited

7 Queen’s Counsel

8 Rural Rider

9 The Final Prosecution

10 A Great Event

11 Member for Oldham

12 End of the Journey

EPILOGUE

REFERENCES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PRAISE

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

INTRODUCTION

IN HIS Old Man’s Diary (1984) A.J.P. Taylor writes: ‘Every now and then someone asks as a sort of parlour game, “Who do you think is the greatest Englishman?” I have never been at a loss for an answer. Samuel Johnson of course … Johnson was profound. He was moral. Above all he was human … still I have a qualm. There comes to my mind not perhaps the greatest Englishman but certainly the runner-up. This is William Cobbett.’

Yet it is undeniable that Cobbett, nominated for second place by the most readable, most popular historian of our day, is a little-known figure. Some people know him vaguely as the author of Rural Rides. A great many more have never heard of him. Politics aside, you might expect him to be held up to schoolboys as an example of how to write fine, clear English. But he is not. I myself had never read a word of his until I was in my thirties, and then it was thanks to G.K. Chesterton. His short biography published in 1926 inspired me to seek out Cobbett’s books, but it proved a difficult task, Rural Rides being the only one that was easily available. I was helped in my search by a friendly bookseller, the late David Low (recommended to me by another lover of Cobbett, Michael Foot), who supplied me with a number of books and, when he retired, gave me his copy of the invaluable bibliography by M.L. Pearl, which is much more than just a list of books and contains a huge amount of information about Cobbett’s life and times. Thanks to these acquisitions I was able to compile an anthology of Cobbett’s agricultural writing, Cobbett’s Country Book, published in 1974 by David & Charles (in the person of the late James MacGibbon).

More recently I have been greatly assisted by Brian Lake of Jarndyce Books, with the result that I have been able to do my researches for the present book mainly at home. I could not, however, have managed without that great institution the London Library, which stocks in its basement all eighty-eight volumes of Cobbett’s Political Register. Though most of the Register, like all topical journalism, is of little interest to modern readers, it still contains buried in its pages much of Cobbett’s best and most lively writing.

The bulk of Cobbett manuscripts, including family letters, is held by Nuffield College, Oxford, and I am grateful to the Warden and Fellows for permission to quote from this material.

In addition my thanks are due to the following for their assistance: Tariq Ali, John Bradburne, David Chun and Molly Townsend of the Cobbett Society, Clare Cowan, Charles Elliott, Michael Foot, Paul Foot, Rose Foot, Chris Hillier of the Museum of Farnham, Peter Jay, William Keegan, Hilary Lowinger, Sharon Maurice of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Lucy Mulloy, Nick Parker, Helen Richardson, Chris Schuler, Bridget Tisdall, E.S. Turner and A.N. Wilson. My thanks are due to Lady Lathbury for permission to reproduce the portrait of Nancy Cobbett and the silhouette of her daughter Anne. I am especially grateful to my friends Jeremy Lewis and Piers Brendon, both of whom read the manuscript in draft form and made a great many helpful corrections and suggestions.

Lastly I would like to thank Deborah Bosley, not only for her typing skills, but for her continual encouragement and support.

RICHARD INGRAMS

January 2005

1 A SWEET OLD BOY

‘I MYSELF ONLY SAW this extraordinary character but once,’ a contributor to Blackwood’s Magazine wrote. ‘He is perhaps the very man whom I would select from all I have ever seen if I wished to show a foreigner the beau ideal of an English yeoman. He was then, I shall suppose at least fifty years of age but plump and as fresh as possible. His hair was worn smooth on his forehead and displayed a few curls, not brown then but probably greyish by this time, about his ears. His eye is small, grey, quiet and good-tempered – perfectly mild. You would say “there is a sweet old boy – butter would not melt in his mouth.” I should probably have passed him over as one of the innocent bacon-eaters of the New Forest.’¹

A very similar picture is painted by a better-known witness, William Hazlitt: ‘The only time I ever saw him he seemed to me a very pleasant man: easy of access, affable, clear-headed, simple and mild in his manner, deliberate and unruffled in his speech, though some of his expressions were not very qualified. His figure is tall and portly: he has a good sensible face, rather full with little grey eyes, a hard, square forehead, a ruddy complexion, with hair grey or powdered: and had on a scarlet broad-cloth waistcoat, with the flaps of the pockets hanging down, as was the custom of gentleman farmers in the last century, as we see it in the pictures of Members of Parliament in the reign of George I.’²

The best likenesses of Cobbett confirm the picture given by these two acute observers. The cartoonist John Doyle, who did many drawings of him – they are not really caricatures – shows him (in old age) a kindly-looking, half-smiling, slightly stooping figure. No one looking at these drawings or reading the descriptions quoted would guess that this ‘sweet old boy’ was one of the most extraordinary characters in English history, the most effective, most savage and most satirical political journalist of his or any other age.

Cobbett himself is almost our only source for his earliest years. In 1796, when he was living in Philadelphia, he wrote an account of his origins to counter allegations being put about by his enemies that he was a British spy. Though the memoir had a political purpose, it is an honest, straightforward story, as one would expect from someone who always considered himself to be a happy man. There may be some omissions, but there are no deliberate falsehoods.

William Cobbett was born at Farnham in Surrey in March 1763, the third of four sons of George Cobbett, a farmer (and at one time the landlord of the Jolly Farmer Inn, which still stands on the A289 road, now renamed the William Cobbett). He never met his paternal grandfather, but one of his earliest memories was of staying with his widowed grandmother: ‘It was a little thatched cottage with a garden before the door. It had but two windows; a damson tree shaded one, and a clump of filberts the other. Here I and my brothers went every Christmas and Whitsuntide to spend a week or two and torment the poor old woman with our noise and dilapidations. She used to give us milk and bread for breakfast, an apple pudding for our dinner and a piece of bread and cheese for supper. Her fire was made of turf, cut from the neighbouring heath, and her evening light was a dish dipped in grease.’

Cobbett’s physical and mental energy, his eagerness to be always doing something, would seem to have been with him from the beginning. ‘I do not remember the time,’ he writes, ‘when I did not earn my living. My first occupation was driving the small birds from the turnip seed and the rooks from the peas. When I first trudged a field with my wooden bottle and my satchel swung over my shoulders, I was hardly able to climb the gates and stiles and at the end of the day to reach home was a task of infinite difficulty. My next employment was weeding wheat and leading a single horse at harrowing barley. Hoeing peas followed and hence I arrived at the honour of joining the reapers in harvest, driving the team and holding the plough. We were all strong and laborious and my father used to boast that he had four boys, the eldest of whom was but fifteen years old, who did as much work as any three men in the Parish of Farnham. Honest pride and happy days.’

Cobbett was not quite such an obedient and dutiful son as this account suggests. His elder brother Tom, who later recounted his memories to Cobbett’s third son James Paul, remembered him as a lively, rather rebellious boy – ‘the foremost in enterprise when anything was on foot, not remarkable for plodding, but rather the contrary, with great liveliness of spirit having a proneness to idle pursuit and to shirk steady work and an obstinate resolution for what he was bent on … He must have promised to turn out rather an ungovernable than a tractable youth. When sent to mind the pigs he would throw off a part of his upper clothes and stray away after some business that better suited his taste.’³

Tom also remembered that Bill (as he called him) used to like listening to their father reading bits out of the newspaper of an evening. Cobbett’s daughter Anne records: ‘It was tiresome for the other three boys to have to keep quiet the while but Bill used oftentimes to listen and pay attention to the reading and the others wondered how he could do it. And I’ve often thought it all very dull work, sitting there in their chimney corner obliged to refrain from their own fun.’ Bill was especially interested in speeches from Parliament, and would remind his father of who the various speakers were. Anne also remembered her father telling her how he used to make speeches aloud when by himself, ‘And go out after dark and do so. He said he recollected being on the Common, waving his arms about, and making speeches to the furze bushes.’⁴

It is tempting to read something into the fact that in his own account of his boyhood Cobbett makes scarcely any mention of his mother. The explanation is that to an exceptional degree Cobbett was from the beginning self-centred and self-sufficient. Most of us rely on others close to us, whether friends or family, for help, advice and support. But even as a boy Cobbett did not seem to need other people. Throughout his life he depended almost entirely on his own impressions, his own judgement, his own researches and conclusions. So, in his little autobiography Cobbett is the only character in full colour; the others are monochrome, sometimes not even named. The fact that he makes no mention of his mother and cannot remember his three brothers’ ages is an indication of how little they impinged on his thoughts and needs.

Cobbett left home three times in the course of his boyhood, according to his own account, from no other motive but a love of adventure. His brother Tom, however, suggested that their father was partly to blame. ‘George Cobbett,’ James Paul recorded, ‘was not of a gentle disposition, but subject to violent fits of temper, and we have reason to believe that the harshness of the parent was the cause of the son’s first quitting home.’ More than once in Rural Rides Cobbett refers, in a light-hearted way, to his father’s having beaten him – he told how once, as ‘a very little boy’ he had seen a cat ‘as big as a middle-sized spaniel dog go into a hollow elm tree, for relating which I got a great scolding, for standing to which I at last got a beating, stand to which I still did’. (It seems as if the father had got into the habit of picking on Bill, perhaps because he was the most daring of the four brothers. ‘One summer evening,’ James Paul writes, ‘he and his brothers being all together in their sleeping room, one of them noticed the figure of a crocodile printed in the corner of a large map which their father had hung against the wall and exclaimed “How ugly he looks”. William said “Aye, don’t he? I’ll cut his head off.” The others called out “No, Bill, don’t, father will be so angry.” But that did not stop him. He jumped out of bed, took his knife from his pocket and made a dash at the map, cutting into it right across the crocodile’s neck. Their father, when he came to see, said whichever of them did the mischief he was sure “Bill had a hand in it.”’)

Cobbett was only eleven when, inspired by what a fellow gardener told him while they were working together in the grounds of Farnham Castle, he set off on foot to see Kew Gardens ‘with only thirteen half pence in his pocket’. It was as he was trudging through Richmond on his way to Kew that he caught sight of Swift’s Tale of a Tub (price 3d*) in a bookseller’s window. ‘The title was so odd that my curiosity was excited. I had the 3d, but, then, I could have no supper.’ He bought the book, went without his supper and read on until it grew too dark. There was something about it which made an indelible impression upon him, so much so that he carried it with him wherever he went, and when he lost it some years later in a box that fell into the sea on his way to North America, the loss gave him ‘greater pain than I have ever felt at losing thousands of pounds’. Why should this satire of Swift’s, directed at the various Christian Churches, have made such an impact on this half-educated farmer’s son, aged only eleven? It is, like all Swift’s work, highly sophisticated – even abstruse – full of subtleties, Latin tags and literary allusions which must have gone over the boy’s head. One can only surmise that what so impressed him, causing what he later called ‘a birth of intellect’, was simply the flow – even the flood – of words, phrases piled on top of one another, broken up with digressions and parentheses, all producing a kind of verbal intoxication, the effect of which was later to bear fruit in Cobbett’s own writing, similarly vigorous and fluent but more direct and down-to-earth, unencumbered by Swift’s vast baggage of learning.

Did Cobbett remember in later life one particular passage from this book which had such a special bearing on his own career?

It is but to venture your lungs, and you may preach in Covent Garden against foppery and fornication, and something else; against pride and dissimulation, and bribery, at Whitehall; you may expose rapine and injustice in the inns of court chapel; and in a city pulpit be as fierce as you please against avarice, hypocrisy and extortion … But on the other side, whoever should mistake the nature of things so far as to drop but a single hint in public, how such a one starved half the fleet, and half poisoned the rest; how such a one, from a true principle of love and honour, pays no debts but for wenches and play; how such a one has got a clap and runs out of his estate; how Paris, bribed by Juno and Venus, later to offend either party, slept out the whole cause on the bench; or, how such an orator makes long speeches in the senate, with much thought, little sense, and to no purpose; whoever, I say, should venture to be thus particular, must expect to be imprisoned for scandalum magnatum; to have challenges sent to him; to be sued for defamation; and to be brought before the bar of the house.

In the autumn of 1782, when Cobbett was nineteen, he went to stay with an uncle who lived near Portsmouth. Here, from the top of Portsdown, he saw the sea for the first time – ‘and no sooner did I behold it than I wished to be a sailor. I could never account for this sudden impulse, nor can I now,’ he wrote. ‘Almost all English boys feel the same inclination: it would seem that, like young ducks, instinct leads them to rush at the bosom of the water.’ (It is perhaps worth noting that Tom Paine, whose career in so many ways prefigured Cobbett’s, felt the same urge, and like Cobbett was rescued before he signed away his freedom.)

Luckily for Cobbett, when he managed to board a ship in Portsmouth dock the captain, the Hon. George Berkeley, assuming that he was running away from a pregnant girlfriend, persuaded him ‘that it was better to be led to Church in a halter to be tied to a girl that I did not like, than to be tied to the gang-way or, as the sailors call it, married to Miss Roper’. Cobbett blushed at this, which only confirmed Berkeley’s opinion. But it was not enough to deter Cobbett, and when he was on shore again he applied to the Port Admiral to be enrolled. However, his request was turned down – ‘and I happily escaped, sorely against my will, from the most toilsome and perilous profession in the world’. But the experience had given him a glimpse of another world beyond the farm, and he was never able afterwards to resume his work there with equanimity.

Cobbett called his little autobiography The Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine, an indication that he saw some similarity in his early career to a traditional romance or fairy tale, at the beginning of which the young hero sets out from home in search of fame and fortune. ‘It was on the sixth of May 1783,’ he writes, ‘that I, like Don Quixote sallied forth to seek adventures. I was dressed in my holiday clothes in order to accompany two or three lasses to Guildford fair. They were to assemble at a house about three miles from my home, where I was to attend them; but, unfortunately for me, I had to cross the London Turnpike Road. The stage-coach had just turned the summit of a hill and was rattling down towards me at a merry rate. The notion of going to London never entered my mind till this very moment, yet the step was completely determined on, before the coach came to the spot where I stood. Up I got and was in London about nine o’clock in the evening.’ (The account is contradictory as, according to the second sentence, Cobbett had not originally set out to seek adventures but with the more mundane intention of going to Guildford fair – which suggests that his leaving home was possibly not so impulsive as he would like us to believe.)

Looking back on his life, Cobbett records in two separate contexts that he had always been not only happy, but also lucky. So, arriving in London without baggage and only the small amount of money he had saved for the fair, he was befriended by a hop-merchant who had had dealings with his father and who had travelled up to London with him on the coach. This benefactor, whose name Cobbett (typically) omits, took him into his own house and in the meantime wrote to Cobbett Senior, who in turn wrote to his son ordering him to return home at once. ‘I am ashamed to say,’ Cobbett writes, ‘that I was disobedient. It was the first time I had ever been so, and I have repented of it from that moment to this. Willingly would I have returned, but pride would not suffer me to do it. I feared the scoffs of my acquaintances more than the real evils that threatened me.’

Cobbett’s friend the hop-merchant reluctantly accepted that the young man was not going home, and eventually got him a job working for a lawyer acquaintance in Gray’s Inn (he is identified only by his surname of Holland). ‘The next day,’ Cobbett writes, ‘saw me perched upon a great high stool in an obscure chamber in Grays Inn, endeavouring to decipher the crabbed draughts of my employer.’ He was to work nine months in the lawyer’s office, ‘from five in the morning till eight at night and sometimes all night long’. In the process he acquired the ability to write quickly and neatly in a clear hand – something that was to stand him in good stead later on (considering the speed at which he wrote, his manuscripts are not only legible but invariably clean, with minimal corrections). He was also able, thanks to this legal training, to write in a beautiful copperplate script.

It was the only benefit of his brief spell in Gray’s Inn. Otherwise he looked back on it as the least pleasurable period of his life. The office was gloomy and dark and the hours long. Sunday was the only break, and it was on a Sunday that when walking in St James’s Park he saw a poster appealing for recruits to the Royal Marines. Once again he acted on impulse, and without saying anything to his friends reported to Chatham where he accidentally enrolled not in the Marines but in the 54th Regiment, commanded by Lord Edward Fitzgerald and bound for service in New Brunswick, a province of Canada.

The pay was poor (2d a day) and the food barely adequate, but Cobbett enjoyed the army life mainly because he liked soldiers, and he formed many close friendships in the ranks (it was as a result of defending soldiers that he would be imprisoned in 1810). In addition, while stationed at Chatham he had time to embark on a crash course of self-education. He read voraciously all the books in the local library – novels, history, poetry and plays – and in the process absorbed enough knowledge of literature to be able, when the time came for him to write, to quote widely and to good effect. He learned by heart Oliver Goldsmith’s Deserted Village and The Traveller. From the start, his journalism is studded with references to the Bible, the plays of Shakespeare, the poems of Milton, Pope and many others, all of which he must have read during his army days. But stylistically it was Swift who most influenced him, as he influenced Paine and Hazlitt. Following Swift, these writers broke with the Johnsonian tradition of writing only for an educated audience (Swift used to read his books to his servants to make sure they were intelligible to the ordinary man). After his obsessive reading of A Tale of a Tub Cobbett must have read most of Swift’s works. It is no accident that his autobiography begins with an admirable quotation from Swift which he applies to himself: ‘The Celebrated Dean of St. Patrick somewhere observes that a man of talents no sooner emerges from obscurity than all the blockheads are instantly up in arms against him.’ Cobbett would also seem to have studied mathematics and geometry to a level at which he was able, when in Canada, to write a handbook on those subjects for teaching soldiers.

But it was the nowadays neglected subject of English grammar that especially absorbed him during his time at Chatham. Thanks to skills acquired in Gray’s Inn, Cobbett was taken on as a copyist by the Commandant of the Garrison Colonel (later General) Hugh Debbieg. Cobbett does not say as much (and does not even spell his name correctly), but Debbieg (1731–1810) was a very distinguished engineer and soldier who had served in France and Canada and had been in charge of the defences of all public buildings during the Gordon riots in London in 1780. Recognising Cobbett’s exceptional abilities, he urged him to improve himself in the business of writing, promising him promotion in exchange. Debbieg gave him a popular handbook, A Short Introduction to English Grammar by Robert Lowth, and he proceeded to learn the entire book by heart, by writing it out three times, reciting it to himself in its entirety when on guard duty. ‘The edge of my berth, or that of the guard-bed was my seat to study in; my knapsack was my bookcase; a bit of board lying in my lap was my writing desk … I had to read and to write amidst the talking, laughing, singing, whistling and brawling of at least half a score of the most thoughtless of men, and that too in their hours of freedom from all control.’

Cobbett eventually won his promotion from Debbieg and became a corporal, ‘which brought me a clear two-pence per diem and put a very clever Worsted Knot on my shoulder too’. Corporal Cobbett sailed with his regiment in 1785, and after landing in Nova Scotia, where he remained for a few weeks, proceeded to St John in New Brunswick. It was, according to the traveller Isaac Weld, ‘a garrison town’ containing ‘about fifty miserable wooden dwellings and barracks’. Cobbett was to be stationed there for six months before moving a hundred miles up the St John River to Fredericton. In his account of these years he says very little about his military duties, which suggests that they were never very arduous. There was a great deal of drinking: ‘Rum was seven pence a quart … and not one single man, out of three or four hundred was sober for a week – except myself.’ The regiment’s role was supposedly to guard the frontier with America – an almost impossible task. New Brunswick was a sparsely populated province (a haven for British and French settlers and native Indians, and a refuge for loyalist Americans fleeing from the south), and consisted of huge forests with hardly any roads. Journeys had to be made on the network of rivers and lakes that crisscrossed the land, by canoe in summer and by sledge in the long, hard winter.

I was stationed on the banks of the great and beautiful river St. John [Cobbett wrote], which was more than a mile wide and a hundred miles from the sea. That river, as well as all the creeks running into it on both sides, were [sic] so completely frozen over every year by the Seventh of November or thereabouts that we could skate across it and up and down it, the next morning after the frost began, while we could see the fish swimming under the ice upon which we were skating. In about ten days the snow came; until storm after storm, coming at intervals of a week or a fortnight, made the mass, upon an average, ten feet deep; and there we were nine days out of ten, with a bright sun over our heads, and with snow, dry as hair powder, screeching under our feet. In the month of April, the last week of that month, the melting of the snow turned the river into ice again. Soon after this, symptoms of breaking-up began to appear, the immense mass of ice was first loosened near the banks of the river … and you every now and then heard a crack at many miles distance, like the falling of fifty or a hundred or a thousand very lofty timber trees coming down all together, from the axes and saws of the fellers … Day after day the cracks became louder and more frequent, till by and by the ice came tumbling out of the mouths of the creeks into the main river, which, by this time, began to give way itself, till, on some days, toward the latter end of May, the whole surface of the river moved downwards with accelerating rapidity towards the sea, rising up into piles as high as [The Duke of Wellington’s] great fine house at Hyde Park Corner, wherever the ice came in contact with an island of which there were many in the river, until the sun and the tide had carried the whole away and made the river clear for us to sail upon again to the next month of November; during which time, the sun gave us melons in the natural ground, and fine crops of corn and grass.

Such conditions were hardly suitable for conventional soldiering. There was nothing much to do except drill, and in the winter even this was impossible. Cobbett spent a great deal of time exploring the forests, hunting bears, skating and fishing. As always, he made a garden, and meanwhile he continued resolutely with his course of self-education. He studied more geometry, he learned French, he designed and built a barracks for four hundred soldiers ‘without the aid of a draughtsman, carpenter or bricklayer, the soldiers under me cut down the timber and dug the stones’. He later boasted that to stop soldiers deserting to the United States he trekked a hundred miles through uncharted forests in order to show potential deserters that they could be pursued. Such was his overall proficiency that he became a clerk to the regiment: ‘In a very short time the whole of the business in that way fell into my hands; and, at the end of about a year, neither adjutant, paymaster or quarter-master, could move an inch without my assistance.’ Cobbett was so punctual, so reliable, so industrious that after only a few months he was promoted to sergeant major over the heads of thirty longer-serving sergeants. ‘He would suffer no chewing of tobacco while they were on parade,’ his son James wrote, ‘but would go up to a man in the rank and force him to throw it from his mouth.’⁵

From this vantage point, Cobbett formed a view of the army and its officer class which has been shared before and since by many who have served in the ranks. Being sergeant major, he writes, ‘brought me in close contact at every hour with the whole of the epaulet gentry, whose profound and surprising ignorance I discovered in a twinkling’. He realised how much the higher ranks relied on the non-commissioned officers like himself to carry out the vital tasks of the regiment, leaving them free ‘to swagger about and get roaring drunk’. The only officer for whom he maintained any respect was the young Lord Edward Fitzgerald, a charming and romantic Irish aristocrat who would be cashiered for attending a revolutionary banquet in Paris in 1792. Fitzgerald, who while in Canada had lived for some time with an Indian tribe, the Bears, was wounded while helping to lead the Irish Rising of 1798 and died (aged only thirty-five) in Newgate, where Cobbett himself was to be imprisoned a few years later.

Cobbett’s insistence on his own superiority, his greater sense of duty and his industriousness might well have made him unpopular with his fellow soldiers, but this does not seem to have been the case. He formed many friendships in the regiment, and in the process developed an overall view of the injustices of the society he lived in. ‘Genius,’ he wrote later, ‘is as likely to come out of the cottage as out of the splendid mansion, and even more likely, for, in the former case, nature is unopposed at the outset. I have had, during my life, no little converse with men famed for their wit, for instance; but, the most witty man I ever knew was a private soldier. He was not only the most witty, but far the most witty. He was a Staffordshire man, he came from WALSALL and his name was JOHN FLETCHER. I have heard from that man more bright thoughts of a witty character, than I have ever heard from all the other men, and than I have ever read in all the books that I have read in my whole life. No coarse jokes, no puns, no conundrums, no made up jests, nothing of the college kind; but real, sterling sprightly wit. When I have heard people report the profligate sayings of SHERIDAN and have heard the House of Commons roaring at his green-room trash, I have always thought of poor Jack Fletcher, who if he could have put his thoughts upon paper, would have been more renowned than Butler or Swift.’⁶ ‘How often,’ Cobbett wrote of another of his soldier friends, ‘has my blood boiled with indignation at seeing this fine, this gallant, this honest, true hearted and intelligent young man, standing with his hand to his hat before some worthless and stupid sort of officer, whom nature seemed to have designed to black his shoes.’⁷

It was Cobbett’s sympathy for his fellow soldiers which, combined with his contempt for the officer class, led to his first confrontation with the establishment. From his experience as sergeant major and his control over the regimental accounts he observed that corruption was rife. The quartermaster, in charge of issuing provisions to the men, was keeping a large proportion for himself while, in particular, four officers – Colonel Bruce, Captain Richard Powell, and Lieutenants Christopher Seton and John Hall – were making false musters of NCOs and soldiers and selling for their own profit the men’s rations of food and firewood. Such practices were rife throughout ‘the system’, as Cobbett was to discover later. Corruption of one kind or another was the norm at all levels of politics, the Church, the armed services and the press, and when Cobbett voiced his indignation to his fellow NCOs they urged him to keep quiet, on the grounds that these things were widespread. When he persisted he realised that he could achieve nothing as a serving soldier, and would be in danger of extreme punishment from a court martial. His only hope lay in pursuing the issue following his discharge on his return to England. The evidence of fraud lay in the regiment’s books, but how was it possible to protect it, when the books could easily be tampered with or rewritten before any hearing took place? Operating long before the invention of the photocopier, Cobbett decided to make copies of all the relevant entries, stamping them with the regimental seal in the presence of a faithful helper and witness, Corporal William Bestland: ‘All these papers were put into a little box which I myself had made for the purpose. When we came to Portsmouth there was talk of searching all the boxes etc, which gave us great alarm; and induced us to take all the papers, put them in a bag and trust them to a custom-house officer, who conveyed them on shore to his own house, where I removed them a few days later.’

Today such evidence would be given to the authorities, and it would be up to them to undertake a prosecution. But here it was left to Cobbett, once the Judge Advocate (Sir Charles Gould) had given his approval, to act as prosecutor single-handedly, without assistance of any kind from lawyers. And from the beginning it was clear that the authorities were dragging their feet. The first indication came when Cobbett was informed that some of the charges he had alleged against the three accused (one of the four, Colonel Bruce, had since died) were to be dropped. He then learned that the court martial would take place not in London as he had requested, but in Portsmouth, where the regiment was now stationed and where it would be much easier for the accused to prejudice the proceedings. Faced with more prevarication by the Judge Advocate, Cobbett wrote personally to the Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, with the result that the venue was changed to London, much to the annoyance of the accused officers.

By now Cobbett would have been aware of the way the wind was blowing; and there were two more important questions to be settled. The first was the need to secure the regimental account books in order to prevent any possible tampering before the trial – ‘Without these written documents nothing of importance could be proved, unless the non-commissioned officers and men of the regiment could get the better of their dread of the lash.’ The second was to guarantee the demobilisation of Cobbett’s key witness Corporal Bestland so as to forestall any threat of retaliation by the military. Cobbett had given the Corporal his word that he would not call him as a witness – ‘unless he was first out of the army; that is to say, out of the reach of the vindictive and bloody lash’.

Yet Bestland, probably under suspicion of collaborating with Cobbett, was still in the ranks. By now considerably alarmed, Cobbett wrote to the Secretary at War pointing out the various obstacles that had been put in his way and making it clear at the same time that unless his key witness (not named) received his discharge he would abandon the prosecution. He had no reply. The court martial was due to convene on 24 March 1792, and on the twentieth Cobbett went to Portsmouth in an effort to discover what had happened to the regimental accounts. He found that, contrary to what he had been told, they had not been ‘secured’ at all, and were still in the possession of the accused officers. More alarming was his chance meeting on his way to Portsmouth with a group of sergeants and the regiment’s music master, all of them on their way up to London – though none had served with him in America. On returning to London he was told by one of his allies, a Captain Lane, that the men had been dragooned into appearing as witnesses at the trial, where they would swear that at a farewell party which Cobbett had given prior to leaving the regiment he had proposed a Jacobin-like toast to ‘the destruction of the House of Brunswick’ (i.e. the Royal Family). Lane warned him that if this completely false allegation were to be upheld, he could well be charged and deported to Botany Bay in Australia. So, at very short notice, Cobbett decided not only to abandon the court martial but to flee to France.

Afterwards his enemies were to make much of his flight, accusing him of cowardice. But there can be no disputing that he did the only thing possible in the circumstances. If he had not been tried for treason he might have faced charges of sedition, or even a private prosecution from the three officers. One important factor which would have weighed heavily with him – though he never mentioned it in his subsequent lengthy defence of his actions – was that he had recently married. His bride was Anne Reid, daughter of an artillery sergeant, a veteran of the American War of Independence who had served with Cobbett in New Brunswick. When Cobbett first saw Anne she was only thirteen:

I sat in the same room with her for about an hour, in company with others, and I made up my mind that she was the very girl for me. That I thought her beautiful was certain, for that I had always said should be an indispensable qualification: but I saw in her what I deemed marks of that sobriety of conduct, which has been by far the greatest blessing of my life. It was the dead of winter, and, of course, the snow several feet deep on the ground, and the weather piercing cold. In about three mornings after I had first seen her, I had got two young men to join me in my walk; and our road lay by the house of her father and mother. It was hardly light, but she was out in the snow, scrubbing out a washing tub, ‘That’s the girl for me’, I said, when we had got out of her hearing.

Six months after this meeting Cobbett was posted to Fredericton, and in the meantime the Artillery were due to be posted back to England. Worried that Anne might fall into bad company on her return to ‘that gay place Woolwich’, he sent her 150 guineas which he had saved so that she would be able to be independent of her parents – ‘to buy herself food, clothes, and to live without hard work’. When Cobbett arrived back in England four years later he found his wife-to-be working as a servant girl in the house of a Captain Brissac. Without saying a word she pressed the money, untouched, into his hands. They were married on 5 February 1792 by a curate, the Reverend Thomas, in Woolwich, and found lodgings in Felix Street, Hackney. The following month they left for France, leaving no forwarding address, and when court officials tried to locate Cobbett they could find no trace of him.

The newlyweds settled in the village of Tilque, near St-Omer in Normandy. Cobbett was delighted by France: ‘I went to that country full of all those prejudices that Englishmen suck in with their mother’s milk against the French and against their religion; a few weeks convinced me that I had been deceived with respect to both. I met everywhere with civility, and even hospitality, in a degree that I had never been accustomed to.’

Unfortunately for the Cobbetts their arrival in France had coincided with a turbulent period in that country’s history. When they set out for Paris in August they heard news of the massacre of the Swiss Guard at the Tuileries Palace and the arrest of the King and Queen. Cobbett decided to head for Le Havre and sail to America, but they were stopped more than once, and Anne, who was so indignant that she refused to speak, was suspected of being an escaping French aristocrat. Eventually, however, they reached Le Havre, and after about a fortnight were allowed to board a little ship called the Mary, bound for New York. The voyage was a stormy one, the ship ‘was tossed about the ocean like a cork’. The poultry on board all died and the captain fed the Cobbetts a dish called samp, made from ground maize. After forty-six days the Mary at last docked in New York. Anne, who was pregnant and had had to flee from two different countries in the course of six months, had by now become accustomed to what being married to Cobbett was going to be like.

* According to the Office of National Statistics, the modern (2004) equivalent of £1 in 1810 is £49.67.

2 OFF to PHILADELPHIA

COBBETT’S CAREER changed course round certain clearly defined turning points. One such was the chain of events by which he became a journalist, one of the most famous and prolific in history. He had arrived in America with his pregnant wife in October 1792 and settled in Wilmington, a small port on the Delaware about thirty miles from Philadelphia. In February 1794 he moved into Philadelphia itself – the national capital and centre of American social and political life, the scene of the first meetings of Congress and the drafting of the Constitution in 1787. Founded by the Quaker William Penn on the west bank of the Delaware River in the 1680s, Philadelphia had expanded rapidly; by Cobbett’s time the population numbered about thirty thousand, and included people of many nationalities and religions; and, since the Revolution, a large number of French refugees. Penn had designed the city on a grid pattern with wide streets of red-brick houses, the effect of which was somewhat monotonous. ‘Philadelphia,’ wrote a French visitor, the Chevalier de Beaujour, ‘is cut like a chess board at right angles. All the streets and houses resemble each other, and nothing is so gloomy as this uniformity.’¹

Cobbett and Nancy (as he called Anne) rented a modest house in the Northern Liberties district at no. 81 Callowhill Street. The climate, especially in summer, was extreme. ‘The heat in this city is excessive,’ wrote Dr Alexander Hamilton in 1774, ‘the sun’s rays being reflected with such power from the red brick houses and from the street pavement which is brick. The people commonly use awnings of painted cloth or duck over their shop doors and windows and, at sunset, throw buckets full of water upon the pavement which gives a feasible cool.’ Health was another problem: during Cobbett’s time there were two serious outbreaks of yellow fever in the city, resulting in thousands of deaths. He himself remained unimpressed not only by Philadelphia, but by America in general.

‘The country is good for getting money,’ he wrote to a boyhood friend in England, Rachel Smithers, ‘if a person is industrious and enterprising. In every other respect the country is miserable. Exactly the contrary of what I expected it. The land is bad – rocky – houses wretched – roads impassable after the least rain. Fruit in quantity, but good for nothing. One apple or peach in England or France is worth a bushel of them here. The seasons are detestable. All burning or freezing. There is no spring or autumn. The weather is so very inconstant that you are never sure for an hour, a single hour at a time. Last night we made a fire to sit by and today it is scorching hot. The whole month of March was so hot that we could hardly bear our clothes, and these parts of the month of June there was a frost every night and so cold in the day time that we were obliged to wear great coats. The people are worthy of the country – a cheating, sly, roguish gang. Strangers make fortunes in spite of all this, particularly the English. The natives are by nature idle, and seek to live by cheating, while foreigners, being industrious, seek no other means than those dictated by integrity, and are sure to meet with encouragement even from the idle and roguish themselves; for however roguish a man may be, he always loves to deal with an honest man.’²

Cobbett’s gloomy reflections closely followed the move to Philadelphia and a series of personal tragedies. His second child was stillborn, and then two months later his elder child, Toney, suddenly died. ‘I hope you will never experience a calamity like this,’ he told Rachel Smithers. ‘All I have ever felt before was nothing – nothing, nothing at all, to this – the dearest, sweetest, beautifullest little fellow that ever was seen – we adored him. Everybody admired – When we lived at Wilmington people came on purpose to see him for his beauty. He was just beginning to prattle, and to chace [sic] the flies about the floor with a fan – I am sure I shall never perfectly recover his loss – I feel my spirits altered – a settled sadness seems to have taken possession of my mind – For my poor Nancy I cannot paint to you her distress – for several days she would take no nourishment – we were even afraid for her – never was a child so adored.’³

In this depressed state of mind Cobbett toyed with the idea of leaving America and going to the West Indies to teach for a few months before returning to England. Since he had arrived in America his intentions had been uncertain. Originally, armed with a letter to the Secretary of State and future President Thomas Jefferson from the American Ambassador in Paris, he had hoped to get a job working for the American government, but Jefferson was unable to help (at that time the staff of the State Department amounted to seven people). Eventually, seeing the large number of French refugees, many of whom had fled from the recent slaves’ uprising on Santo Domingo, he decided to set himself up as a teacher of English, taking lodgers into the house he had rented and approaching the job with his usual energy. He worked all day every day, as well as doing the housework to assist his wife. He began writing a textbook to help French people learn English. Published in 1795, Le Maître Anglais, Grammaire régulière de la Langue Anglaise en deux Parties was enormously successful, running eventually, according to its author, to no fewer than sixty editions.

It was one of Cobbett’s French pupils who was the indirect cause of his becoming a political pamphleteer. In 1794 Dr Joseph Priestley, the British chemist and nonconformist theologian, had emigrated to America, landing in New York where he received a rapturous reception from various republican coteries.

One of my scholars [Cobbett recounted], who was a person that we call in England a Coffee-House politician, chose, for once, to read his newspaper by way of lesson; and, it happened to be the very paper which contained the addresses presented to Dr. Priestley at New York together with his replies. My scholar, who was a sort of Republican, or at best but half a monarchist, appeared delighted with the invective against England, to which he was very much disposed to add. Those Englishmen who have been abroad, particularly if they have had the time to make a comparison between the country they are in and that which they have left, well know how difficult it is, upon occasions such as I have been describing, to refrain from expressing their indignation and resentment: and there is not, I trust, much reason to suppose, that I should, in this respect, experience less difficulty than another. The dispute was as warm as might be expected between a Frenchman and an Englishman not remarkable for sangfroid: and, the result was, a declared resolution on my part, to write and publish a pamphlet in defence of my country, which pamphlet he pledged himself to answer: his pledge was forfeited: it is known that mine was not. Thus it was that, whether for good or otherwise, I entered in the career of political writing: and, without adverting to the circumstances which others have entered in it, I think it will not be believed that the pen was ever taken up from a motive more pure and laudable.

American politicians, previously united in the fight for independence, were already dividing into two camps – the federalists, those who followed President George Washington, who were fundamentally pro-British, or at least in favour of neutrality; and the republicans (or the Democrats, as they were later to be called), who rallied round Thomas Jefferson in his championship of all things French. Public opinion in Philadelphia was so strongly in favour of the latter that when Cobbett’s pamphlet was first published it carried neither the name of the author nor even that of the publisher, Thomas Bradford, who was frightened that the angry mob might break his windows. He need not have worried. ‘The Observations on the Emigration of Joseph Priestley’ was an immediate success, and there were eventually five Philadelphia editions as well as several in England. The fourth edition was credited to ‘Peter Porcupine’, Cobbett’s chosen pseudonym.

It opened with words that could serve as a text for the thousands and thousands Cobbett would write in a lifetime of journalism: ‘No man has a right to pry into his neighbour’s private concerns and the opinions of every man are his private concerns … but when he makes those opinions public … when he once comes forward as a candidate for public admiration, esteem or compassion, his opinions, his principles, his motives, every action of his life, public or private, become the fair subject of public discussion.’ ‘The Observations on the Emigration of Joseph Priestley’ is an extraordinarily assured performance for someone coming new to political pamphleteering. Dr Priestley (1733–1804) was a considerable figure, a distinguished scientist who had written voluminously on religious matters, whilst at the same time making pioneering experiments with oxygen, sulphuric acid and various gases. Yet the unknown Hampshire farmer’s son held him in no respect whatsoever. For a start, Cobbett had little interest in science, and regarded Priestley’s experiments as merely the hobby of an eccentric. As for religion, Cobbett, a faithful defender of the Church of England despite his generally low opinion of the clergy, nourished throughout his life the strongest possible contempt for all varieties of nonconformism – Methodism, Quakerism or, as in Priestley’s case, Unitarianism, a system of belief that denied the Trinity and the divinity of Christ (Priestley addressed his prayers to ‘the Great Parent of the Universe’).

Central to Cobbett’s argument was a denial of Priestley’s claim to be seeking asylum in America from the allegedly repressive and tyrannical authorities in Britain. Priestley had been an enthusiast for the French Revolution, unwavering in the face of the Jacobin excesses that had horrified public opinion in his native country. Middle-class Dissenters who had welcomed the Revolution’s campaign for religious tolerance and equality had formed debating clubs and societies throughout England to propagate French ideas and send messages of support to the revolutionaries. In Priestley’s home town of Birmingham, as in many other cities, a dinner had been organised to commemorate the second anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, an event that sparked off a major riot lasting for four days. During the disturbance Priestley’s house and library were burnt to the ground, to the gratification of many, including King George III. Priestley fled to London and three years later emigrated to America to join his sons, already resident there.

In Cobbett’s eyes Priestley’s hypocrisy lay in seeking ‘asylum’ from a supposedly tyrannical system which he claimed had denied him protection or redress. In fact, following the Birmingham riot, eleven of its ringleaders were indicted, of whom four were found guilty and two executed. In the meantime Priestley sued the Birmingham city council and was awarded damages of £2502.18s. to compensate for the loss of his property:

If he had been the very best subject in England in place of one of the very worst, what could the law have done more for him? Nothing certainly can be stronger proof of the independence of the courts of justice, and of the impartial execution of the laws of England than the circumstances and result of this case. A man who had for many years been the avowed and open enemy of the government and constitution, had his property destroyed by a mob, who declared themselves the friends of both, and who rose on him because he was not. This mob were pursued by the government whose cause they thought they were defending: some of them suffered death, and the inhabitants of the place where they assembled were obliged to indemnify the man whose property they had destroyed. It would be curious to know what sort of protection this reverend Doctor, this ‘friend of humanity’ wanted. Would nothing satisfy him but the blood of the whole mob? Did he wish to see the town of Birmingham, like that of Lyons, razed and all its industries and inhabitants butchered; because some of them had been carried to commit unlawful excesses from their detestation of his wicked projects? BIRMINGHAM HAS COMBATTED AGAINST PRIESTLEY, BIRMINGHAM IS NO MORE.

Such an extract is enough to show Cobbett’s clear, strong invective – his meaning immediately clear, his mastery of the language absolute. En passant he could not avoid indicting Priestley, not only for his political and religious failings, but for writing bad English: ‘His style is uncouth and superlatively diffuse. Always involved in minutiae, every sentence is a string of parentheses in finding the end of which, the reader is lucky if he does not lose the proposition that they were meant to illustrate. In short, the whole of his phraseology is entirely disgusting; to which may be added, that, even in point of grammar, he is very often incorrect.’

Cobbett’s energies however were in the main directed, not just in the Priestley pamphlet but in all his American writings, to attacking the Democrat party, and particularly, during his first years, to supporting the treaty with Britain that Washington, along with his Chief Justice John Jay, was desperately trying to get the Senate to ratify. The British government, now at war with revolutionary France, was naturally keen to stop America allying itself with the enemy. But such were the strong pro-French feelings among the Democrat politicians and the Philadelphians that it was proving a difficult task. A hysterical enthusiasm for France and the French Revolution was then the dominant political passion in the United States, and especially in Philadelphia. France had assisted America with troops and money during the War of Independence, and many Americans felt that their own revolution had inspired the French. None of the excesses of the French Jacobins could dampen the enthusiasm. Street names which included the words ‘King’, ‘Queen’ or ‘Prince’ were changed, democratic societies were formed, and men cut their hair in the ‘Brutus crop’.

Cobbett noted how some Americans even adopted the French habit of referring to one another as ‘Citizen’ and wore tricolour cockades. ‘The delirium seized even the women and children. I have heard more than one young woman, under the age of twenty, declare that they would willingly have dipped their hands in the blood of the Queen of France.’

As the birthplace of American independence, Philadelphia was one of the main centres of revolutionary pro-French frenzy. Following the execution in January 1793 of Louis XVI (formerly the ally of America), a celebratory dinner was held in the city at which a pig was decapitated and the head carried round for all the diners to mutilate with their knives. When France declared war on England the following month the French Ambassador to the United States, Edmond Genet, sent to win over America to the French cause, was given an ecstatic welcome by the Philadelphians. He had been preceded by the French frigate Ambuscade which sailed up the Delaware and anchored off the Market Street wharf flying a flag with the legend ‘Enemies of equality, reform or tremble!’. When Genet himself arrived two weeks later the citizens went wild with excitement. John Adams recalled: ‘Ten thousand men were in the streets of Philadelphia day after day, threatening to drag Washington out of his house and effect a revolution in the government, or compel it to declare in favour of the French, and against England.’ At a dinner given at Oeller’s Hotel toasts were drunk to ‘Liberty’ and ‘Equality’, a special ode recited and the Marseillaise sung – with everyone joining in the chorus (‘I leave the reader to guess,’ wrote Cobbett, ‘at the harmony of this chorus, bellowed forth from the drunken lungs of about a hundred fellows of a dozen different nations’).

The bulk of Cobbett’s early journalism was concerned with combating such hysteria. In gruesome and gory detail he catalogued all the excesses of the Jacobins in France, poured scorn on their supporters such as Thomas Paine and, generally speaking, commended those Americans, like Washington, who advocated neutrality in the dispute between France and England. In ‘A Bone to Gnaw for the Democrats’ (1795), published under his pseudonym ‘Peter Porcupine’, he savaged those American republicans who were currently predicting an English revolution. The following year he published a much longer pamphlet with a much longer, if self-explanatory, title: ‘The Bloody Buoy, Thrown Out as a Warning to the Political Pilots of America: or a Faithful Relation of a Multitude of Acts of Horrid Barbarity, Such as the Eye Never Witnessed, the Tongue Never Expressed, or the Imagination Conceived, Until the Commencement of the French Revolution, to Which is Added an Instructive Essay, Tracing These Dreadful Effects to Their Real Causes’. Although they went against the general mood, these pamphlets enjoyed an immediate success. Three editions of ‘A Bone to Gnaw’ were published in less than three months, and Cobbett’s other pamphlets were constantly reprinted in both England and America.

In the meantime, Cobbett had become a father again, and this time the child was destined to live. A daughter, Anne, was born on 11 July 1795, at a time of great heat in the city. His wife Nancy, who was having trouble breastfeeding, was also unable to sleep because of the incessant barking of the Philadelphia dogs:

I was, about nine in the evening sitting by the bed. ‘I do think’ said she ‘that I could go to sleep now if it were not for the dogs.’ Downstairs I went, and out I sallied, in my shirt and trousers, and without shoes and stockings; and going to a heap of stones lying beside the road, set to work upon the dogs, going backward and forward, and keeping them at two or three hundred yards distance from the house. I walked thus the whole night, bare-footed, lest the noise of my shoes might possibly reach her ears; and I remember that the bricks of the causeway were, even in the night, so hot as to be disagreeable to my feet. My exertions produced the desired effect; a sleep of several hours was the consequence, and, at eight o’clock in the morning, off I went to a day’s business, which was to end at six in the evening.⁴

Cobbett went to enormous pains to help his wife with the baby: ‘I no more thought of spending a moment away from her, unless business compelled me, than I thought of quitting the country and going to sea.’ Apart from the dogs, Nancy was alarmed by the frequent and violent thunderstorms in Philadelphia. Cobbett used to run home as soon as he suspected a storm was on the way. ‘The Frenchmen who were my scholars, used to laugh at me exceedingly on this account; and sometimes when I was making an appointment with them, they would say, with a smile and a bow, “Sauve la Tonnerre toujours, Monsieur Cobbett.”’⁵

Such devotion to his wife’s needs was all the more commendable in someone who was, as always, intensely active. Cobbett was now doing so well from his journalism and teaching that he decided to set up on his own as a publisher and bookseller. In May 1796 he moved with wife and baby into a house-cum-shop at 25 North Second Street, opposite Christ Church and near the terminus for the coaches to Baltimore and New York. He was taking a considerable risk. For the first time he was emerging in public from the cloak of anonymity, and setting up shop in the centre of town. ‘Till I took this house,’ he wrote later, ‘I had remained almost entirely unknown as a writer. A few persons did, indeed, know that I was the person, who had assumed the name of Peter Porcupine: but the fact was by no means a matter of notoriety. The moment, however, that I had taken a lease on a large house, the transaction became a topic of public conversation, and the eyes of the Democrats and the French, who still lorded it over the city, and who owed me a mutual grudge, were fixed upon me. I thought my situation somewhat perilous. Such tracts as I had published, no man had dared to utter, in the United States, since the rebellion. I knew that those truths had mortally offended the leading men amongst the Democrats, who could, at any time, muster a mob quite sufficient to destroy my house, and to murder me … In short, there were, in Philadelphia, about ten thousand persons, all of whom would have rejoiced to see me murdered: and there might, probably, be two thousand, who would have been very sorry for it: but not above fifty of whom would have stirred an inch to save me.’

As the bookshop’s opening day approached Cobbett’s friends, from among the fifty, urged him to be cautious, to do nothing to provoke retaliation. He, however, like Nelson, decided that the bravest course was also the safest. His shop had large windows, and on the Sunday prior to opening he filled them with all the prints he possessed of ‘Kings, Queens, Princes and Nobles. I had all the English ministry; several of the bishops and judges; the most famous admirals: and in short, every picture that I thought likely to excite rage in the enemies of Great Britain. Never since the beginning of the rebellion, had any one dared to hoist at his window the portrait of George the Third.’

On Monday morning Cobbett took down his shutters and opened the shop. Although a large crowd collected, nothing happened. The only threat of violence came in the form of an anonymous letter to his landlord John Oldden, a Quaker merchant of Chesnut (sic) Street:

Sir, a certain William Cobbett alias Peter Porcupine, I am informed is your tenant. This daring scoundrell [sic] not satisfied with having repeatedly traduced the people of this country; in his detestable productions, he has now the astonishing effrontery to expose those very publications at his window for sale … When the time of retribution arrives it may not be convenient to discriminate between the innocent and the guilty. Your property may suffer. As a friend therefore I advise you to save your property by either compelling Mr Porcupine to leave your house or at all events oblige him to cease exposing his abominable proclivities or any of his courtley [sic] prints at his window for sale. In this way only you may avoid danger to your house and perhaps save the rotten carcase of your tenant for the present.

Cobbett used the letter as the pretext for another fiery pamphlet, ‘The Scarecrow’ (1796). But although he affected great indignation he actually enjoyed engaging in controversy with his opponents. There was to be more than enough of this now that he had come out into the open and revealed the true identity of Peter Porcupine. Several pamphlets resulted: Cobbett was accused of being a deserter, a British government spy and a criminal who had fled to America to escape the gallows. They said he had been whipped when he was in Paris – hence his hatred of the French.

Cobbett was astute enough to realise that all such attacks were not just good for business but a tribute to the success of his campaign. He also knew that he was a better writer than any of his critics. In reply to them he quoted a letter to his father: ‘“Dear Father, when you used to get me off to work in the morning, dressed in my blue smock-frock and woollen spatterdashes, with my bag of bread and cheese and bottle of small beer slung over my shoulder on the little crook that my old god-father Boxall gave me, little did you imagine that I should one day become so great a man as to have my picture stuck in the windows and have four whole books published about me in the course of one week” – Thus begins a letter which I wrote to my father yesterday morning and which, if it reaches him, will make the old man drink an extraordinary pot of ale to my health. Heaven bless him. I think I see him now by his old-fashioned fire-side reading the letter to his neighbours’ – an unlikely scenario, in view of the fact that George Cobbett had been dead for four years. It would have been most unlike Cobbett to deceive his readers about this, and the assumption must be that, having been out of the country since early 1792 he had not been in touch with his family. This in turn suggests that, contrary to the impression he liked to give, Cobbett had never been close to either his father or his three brothers.

In 1796, as part of his continuing campaign to answer his critics, Cobbett published his short autobiography The Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine, in which he gave the Americans a vivid and appealing account of his boyhood in Farnham, his escape from home and his army career. It is one of his best pieces of writing, and served its purpose in showing that he was not just a hack pamphleteer but a writer with a genuinely independent spirit. The following year, 1797, he launched a daily newspaper, Porcupine’s Gazette, and closed down his monthly periodical the Political Censor. The paper was an immediate success, Cobbett claming in the first issue that he already had a thousand subscribers. By November three thousand copies were being printed. The paper flourished for the simple reason that, as the sales figures suggest, the American public, even though they might disagree with Cobbett’s views, enjoyed his writing – the robust straightforward style, the knockabout, the jokes and the nicknames.

As a journalist Cobbett was at his best when he could focus his animosity on a particular individual rather than a set of principles or ideas. This is not to say that he was uninterested in ideas, only that he needed someone, like Dr Priestley, to personify the particular variety of political hypocrisy he was attacking at any time. Labelled with appropriate nicknames, these favoured targets (mentioned at every opportunity) lent a powerful spice to his political journalism, making it compulsive reading even for his enemies. Many of the victims of his most savage attacks were not necessarily his political opponents, but had aroused his indignation by being humourless, puritanical in their attitude to morality or, above all, vain. Priestley was one such. William Wilberforce would later be another. A third was Noah Webster (1758–1843) of Webster’s Dictionary fame, a lexicographer, a grammarian, the author of a spelling book for American schools and the man responsible for the differences between American and English spelling (‘color’ for ‘colour’, etc.). Webster came from a family of strict Puritans and was highly industrious in any number of fields – though Jefferson called him ‘a mere pedagogue of very limited understanding’. Cobbett was even ruder, despite the fact that Webster supported the federalists, and missed no opportunity to call him names:

despicable creature … viper … mean shuffling fellow … were this man indeed distinguished as being descended from a famous race, for great learning and talents, for important public services, for possessing much weight in the opinions of the people, even his vanity would be inexcusable but the fellow is distinguished, amongst the few who know him, for the very contrary of all this. He comes of obscure parents, he has just learning enough to make him a fool, his public services have all been confined to silly, idle projects, every one of which has completely failed, and as to his weight as a politician, it is that of a feather, which is overbalanced by a straw, and puffed away by the gentlest breath. All his measures are exploded, his predictions have proved false, not a single sentiment of his has become fashionable, nor has the Federal Government ever adopted a single measure which he has been in the habit of recommending.⁶

Webster later saw a chance of revenge following the passing of a Sedition Act by Washington in 1798 which made it illegal ‘to write, print, utter or publish any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the Government of the United States’. Although the Act was intended to be used against French writers – by this time the USA had broken off relations with France and was preparing for war – Webster decided it could equally well be used against people like Cobbett. Affecting, like many of his type, not to have personally seen the attacks, he wrote to the Secretary of State Timothy Pickering: ‘The violence and resentment of the English knows no bounds. They are intolerably insolent and strive, by all possible means to lessen the circulation of my papers.’ (He need not have bothered, as by that stage proceedings were already under way.)

A more formidable opponent than Webster was Thomas McKean (1734–1817), a lawyer of Scottish descent who involved himself in politics, became one of the most ardent advocates of separation prior to the war with Britain, and was a signatory of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The following year McKean became the Chief Justice of Pennsylvania (a post he occupied for twenty years), and he was elected President of Congress in 1781. Though a keen Democrat and francophile, McKean was deeply conservative in matters of law, besides being, in the words of his contemporary Thomas Rodney, a man ‘of great vanity, extremely fond of power and entirely governed by passions, ever pursuing the object present with warm, enthusiastic zeal without much reflection or forecast’.⁷ A recent biographer describes him as ‘almost pathological in his insistence upon deference in his political and judicial capacities’. Among other insults, Cobbett called him ‘a little upstart tyrant’, or ‘Mrs McKean’s husband’ (the suggestion being that he was under the thumb of his dominating wife).

Already needled by these jibes, McKean was only too happy to act when his prospective son-in-law Don Carlos Martinez de Yrujo, the Spanish Ambassador, complained of certain disobliging comments which Cobbett made about himself and the Spanish King Charles IV, who had appointed him. On 18 August 1796 Cobbett was arrested and charged with criminal libel (the first of a long series of such setbacks). In a lengthy indictment McKean expressed his distaste not just for Cobbett but for all forms of satire against public figures (such as himself): ‘where libels are printed against persons employed in a public capacity they receive an aggravation, as they tend to scandalize the government by reflecting those who are entrusted with the administration of public affairs’. Political journalism had got quite out of hand, in McKean’s view:

Everyone who has in him the sentiments of either a Christian or a gentleman cannot but be highly offended at the envenomed scurrility that has raged in pamphlets and newspapers … in so much that libelling has become a kind of national crime, and distinguishes us not only from all the states around us, but from the whole civilized world …

Impressed with the duties of my station, I have used some endeavours for checking these evils, by binding over the editor and printer of one of them, licentious and virulent beyond all former example, to his good behaviour; but he still perseveres in his nefarious publications; he has ransacked our language for terms of reproach and insult, and for the basest accusations against every ruler and distinguished character in France and Spain, with which we chance to have any intercourse, which it is scarce in nature to forgive …

McKean created something of a precedent by appearing as both judge and witness at the trial, but despite this the jury sided with Cobbett by a majority of one. Not content with the verdict, McKean now made efforts to have Cobbett deported from the United States as an undesirable alien. When these failed he compiled a selection of Cobbett’s writings, including various alleged libels on public figures. Following a trial Cobbett was bound over for $4000 to be of good behaviour, at which point a more prudent man might have left McKean alone. Cobbett however was determined not to be silenced. He was especially eager to prove that despite the First Amendment the American press was no more free than the British. In a pamphlet, ‘The Democratic Judge’ (1798), he railed against the iniquity of the proceedings, pointing out (inter alia) that his comments about the King of Spain and his Ambassador were mild stuff compared to some of the scurrilous comments on George III and his allies which McKean had allowed freely to circulate. In the English edition (copies of which no doubt reached America) Cobbett tore into McKean in what must be one of the most defamatory attacks ever launched against a public figure:

His private character is infamous. He beats his wife and she beats him. He ordered a wig to be imported for him by Mr. Kid, refused to pay for it, the dispute was referred to the court of Nisi Prius; where (merely for want of the original invoice which Kid had lost) the Judge came off victorious! He is a notorious drunkard. The whole bar, one lawyer excepted, signed a memorial, stating, that so great a drunkard was he, that after dinner, person and property were not safe in Pennsylvania. He has been horsewhipped in the City Tavern, and kicked in the street for his insolence to particular persons; and yet this degraded wretch is Chief Justice of the State!

McKean, a proud, vain man, was not the sort of person to forget such an attack. In 1797, following the second of two outbreaks of yellow fever in Philadelphia, a further opportunity for prosecution arose as a result of Cobbett’s libels of another of the city’s most distinguished citizens, Dr Benjamin Rush. Rush (1745–1813) was, like McKean, a signatory of the Declaration of Independence, a close friend of Noah Webster and a fanatical republican. He had begun his career as a lawyer but changed to medicine, studying at Edinburgh University and St Thomas’s Hospital, London (where he met Dr Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith and Joshua Reynolds). Returning to Philadelphia, he began to practise medicine and had already made a name for himself when the War of Independence broke out. Rush was appointed Surgeon General to the armies, but quarrelled with George Washington and returned to his medical practice. Though a pioneer in many medical and veterinary fields (he has been credited with the possibly dubious distinction of being the founder of American psychiatry), his approach to more conventional medical matters was misguided, to put it mildly. Following the lead of the famous Edinburgh physician John Brown, Rush came to believe that nearly all ailments, even the common cold, sore throat or headache, were caused by ‘a state of excessive excitability of a spasm in the blood vessels’, and hence in most cases called for the one treatment of ‘depletion’ through bleeding and purging. ‘This conception was so simple that it came to hold for his speculative mind all the fascination of an ultimate panacea.’⁸

The test of Rush’s theory came in 1793 when the first of the epidemics of yellow fever struck Philadelphia, resulting in the death of several thousand citizens. Basing his remarks on Rush’s own account (published in 1794), Cobbett later described the doctor’s technique, prior to his discovery of bleeding.

At the first breaking out of the Yellow Fever, he made use of ‘gentle purges’; these he laid aside, and had recourse to ‘a gentle vomit of ipecacuanha’; next he ‘gave bark in all its usual forms, of infusion, powder and tincture, and joined wine, brandy and aromatics with it’; this was followed by ‘the application of blisters to the limbs, neck and head’; these torments were succeeded by ‘an attempt to rouse the system by wrapping the whole body in blankets dipped in warm vinegar’; he next ‘rubbed the right side with mercurial ointment, with a view of exciting the action of the vessels through the medium of the liver’; after this he again returned to bark, which he gave ‘in large quantities and in one case ordered it to be injected into the bowels once in four hours’; and, at last, having found that wrapping his patient in blankets dipped in warm vinegar did no good, he directed buckets full of cold water to be thrown frequently upon them!!!

Surprising as it may seem his patients died!

Rush was not a bad man, in fact he was a very conscientious and industrious practitioner. But he was excessively vain, quick-tempered and lacking in humour (he must have been painfully aware that the high death rate disproved his claim that the yellow fever was no more dangerous than measles or influenza). The attack coming from an Englishman, one moreover with no knowledge at all of medicine, was doubly insulting to a man of his self-importance. He later wrote of receiving torrents of abuse from ‘one Cobbett, an English alien who then resided in Philadelphia’,⁹ and in October 1797 he issued a writ for libel. But if he was hoping thereby to silence his antagonist, he was unsuccessful. ‘The Doctor,’ Cobbett wrote, ‘finds his little reputation as a physician, in as dangerous a way as ever a poor yellow fever man was in, half an hour after he was called to his aid. We wanted no hints from Dr Rush. We know very well what we ought to do; and, if God grants us life we shall do it completely.’

Cobbett accordingly redoubled his attacks on the doctor. Among other misdeeds, Rush, he claimed (7 October 1797), had ‘appointed two illiterate negro men and sent them into the alleys and bye places of the city, with orders to bleed and give his sweating purges, to all they should find sick, without regard to age, sex or constitution; and bloody and dirty work they have among the poor miserable creatures that fell in their way … I know several that he terrified into chilly fits, some into relapses and some into convulsions, by stopping them in the street and declaring they had the fever – You’ve got it! You’ve got it! was his usual salutation upon seeing anyone with a pale countenance.’

Rush’s action against Cobbett for libel was set down for trial in December 1797. Realising that he had little chance of successfully defending the suit in Philadelphia, Cobbett had made an application to Chief Justice McKean to have the case transferred to the Federal Court – which, he claimed, as an alien, he was entitled to do by the American Constitution:

It was towards the evening of the last day of the session when Mr Thomas [Cobbett’s lawyer], albeit unused to the modest mode, stole up gently from his seat, and in a faint and trembling voice, told the Bashaw [Pasha] McKean that he had a petition to present in behalf of William Cobbett. For some time he did not make himself heard. There was a great talking all round the bar; Levi, the lawyer was reading a long formal paper to Judges, and the judges were laughing over the chitchat of the day. Amidst the noisy mirth that surrounded him, there stood poor Thomas, with his papers in his hand, like a culprit at school just as the boys are breaking up. By and by, one of those pauses, which frequently occur in even the most numerous and vociferous assemblies, encouraged him to make a fresh attempt. ‘I present’ says he ‘may it please your honours, a petition in behalf of William Cobbett.’ The moment the sound of the word Cobbett struck the ear of McKean he turned towards the bar, and having learnt the subject of the petition, began to storm like a madman. A dead silence ensued. The little scrubby lawyers (with whom the courts of Pennsylvania are continually crowded) crouched from fear, just like a brood of poultry, when the kite is preparing to pounce in amongst them; whilst hapless Thomas, who stood up piping like a straggled chicken, seemed already to feel the talons of the judicial bird of prey. He proceeded, however, to read the petition, which being very short was got through with very little interruption, when he came to the words, ‘subject of his Britannic Majesty,’ McKean did, indeed grin most horribly, and I could very distinctly hear, ‘Insolent scoundrel!’ – ‘damned aristocrat’ – ‘damned Englishman!’ etc etc from the mouths of the sovereign people. But neither their execration, nor the savage looks that accompanied them, prevented me from fulfilling my purpose. I went up to the clerk of the court, took the book in my hand, and holding it up, that it might be visible to all parts of the hall, I swore, in a voice that everyone might hear, that I preserved my allegiance to my King; after which I put on my hat, and walked out of the Court followed by the admiration of the few and by the curses of the many.

McKean, predictably, threw out the petition, and after many delays the case finally came in on 13 December 1799. By this time, anticipating certain defeat, Cobbett had left Philadelphia and was living in New York. The move was only partly dictated by prudence. The political mood had changed, the pro-French frenzy had subsided – Napoleon had taken charge in France – and as a result the circulation of Porcupine’s Gazette, which had relied so much on attacking the Jacobins, had declined. Cobbett’s intention, however, was to resume publication of the paper in New York, where he would be out of McKean’s jurisdiction. ‘Yesterday,’ he wrote to his friend Edward Thornton at the British Embassy (18 November 1799), ‘all my goods sailed for New York, so that they are no longer, I hope, within the grasp of the sovereign people of Pennsylvania. I have some few things left at my house in 2nd Street, which will there be sold by auction, under the direction of one of my friends: in the meantime I am preparing to follow the rest, and I propose to set out from here about this day week.’ Cobbett left town on 9 December, and four days later McKean brought on the Rush libel action before three of his old colleagues. The president was Justice Edward Shippen, a candidate for McKean’s former position of Chief Justice. At the end of the case, which lasted only two days, the jury awarded Rush damages of $5000, and four days later Justice Shippen was rewarded with the job.

It was a shattering blow for Cobbett, who claimed that the damages amounted to more than the total of all those ever awarded by the Philadelphia court in libel actions. One of his lawyers, Edward Tilghman, advised him to flee the country immediately, but, very typically, Cobbett was determined to stand his ground. He wrote to Edward Thornton (25 December 1799):

‘No,’ said I to Tilghman, in answer to his advice for immediate flight. ‘No, Sir, the miscreants may, probably, rob me of all but my honour, but that, in these degenerate times, I cannot spare. To flee from a writ (however falsely and illegally obtained) is what I will never do; for though, generally speaking, to leave the United States at this time, would be little more disgraceful than it was for Lot to run from Sodom under a shower of fire and brimstone; yet with a writ at my heels, I will never go.’

Nancy Cobbett was in full agreement:

Though she feels as much as myself on these occasions, nothing humbles her; nothing sinks her spirits but personal danger to me or our children. The moment she heard Tilghman’s advice, she rejected it … she nobly advised me to stay, sell off my stock, pay the money, and go home with the trifle that may remain. It is the misfortune of most wives to be cunning on these occasions. ‘Ah, did I not tell you so!’ – Never did I hear a reproach of this kind from my wife. When times are smooth she will contradict and blame me often enough in all conscience; but when difficulties come on me, when danger approaches us, then all I say and do, and all I have said and done is right.¹⁰

Cobbett had his revenge on Rush by publishing a new paper, running to five numbers in all, called the Rush-Light, which for the power of its invective outclassed anything he had so far done. Dubbing Rush variously ‘the noted bleeding physician of Philadelphia … the Philadelphia phlebotomist … the Pennsylvania Hippocrates’, he subjected the doctor, his character and his career to savage ridicule, seizing on all his more preposterous theories – his belief that Negroes were black because of leprosy and would turn white once the disease had been eradicated – or the fact that in the grounds of the Pennsylvania Hospital Rush had erected a kind of gallows ‘with a rope suspended from it … for the purpose of curing insanity by swinging’. He went on to demonstrate the absurdity of Rush’s claim that the yellow fever of 1793 constituted no more of a threat than measles or the common cold simply by producing the daily mortality figures following Rush’s pronouncement:

Thus, you see, that though the Fever was, on the 12th September, reduced to a level with a common cold; though the lancet was continually unsheathed; though Rush and his subalterns were ready at every call, the deaths did actually increase; and, incredible as it may seem, this increase grew with that of the very practice which saved more than ninety-nine patients out of a hundred! Astonishing obstinacy! Perverse Philadelphians! Notwithstanding there was a man in your city who could have healed you at a touch, you continued to die! Notwithstanding the precious purges were advertised at every corner, and were brought to your doors and bedsides by Old Women and Negroes; notwithstanding life was offered on terms the most reasonable and accommodating, still you persisted in dying! Nor did barely dying content you. It was not enough for you to reject the means of prolonging your existence, but you must begin to drop off the faster from the moment that those means were presented to you: and this, for no earthly purpose I can see, but the malicious one of injuring the reputation of the ‘Saving Angel’ whom ‘a kind providence’ had sent to your assistance!¹¹

Cobbett also pointed out with glee that on the very same day that the jury had found against him in the Rush libel action, the President, George Washington, had died after being copiously bled in accordance with Rush’s theories. ‘On that day,’ he wrote, ‘the victory of RUSH and of DEATH was complete.’

Cobbett’s barbs were directed not only at McKean, Rush and the judge (Shippen), but at the jury, all of whose names and addresses he listed, and all the lawyers, including his own, Robert G. Harper, who he maintained had let him down while secretly supporting the other side. In common with almost every other libel lawyer through the ages, Rush’s counsel Joseph Hopkinson (the author of the patriotic poem ‘Hail Columbia’) had emphasised the great personal distress caused not only to his client but to his whole family:

Hopkinson, towards the close of a dozen pages of lies, nonsense, and bombast, gave the tender-hearted Jury a most piteous picture of the distress produced in Rush’s family by my publications against the ‘immaculate father.’ He throws the wife into hysterics, makes a deep wound in the heart, and tears, with remorseless rage, all the ‘fine fibres and delicate sympathies of conjugal love.’ From the mother, whom I have never mentioned in my life till now, he comes to the children, ‘of nice feelings and generous sensibility.’ The daughters, he, of course, sets to weeping: ‘but manlier passions swell, agitate and inflame the breasts of HIS SONS. They burn, they burst with indignation; rage, revenge, drive them headlong to desperate deeds, accumulating woe on woe.

The Rush-Light had a huge sale as well as being printed in England, and may well have caused Dr Rush to regret having sued Cobbett in the first place. Certainly it would seem to have upset him more than the original libel (Cobbett, he complained, had ‘vented his rage in a number of publications of the same complexion with those he had published in his newspaper, but with many additional falsehoods. They were purchased, lent and read with great avidity by most of the citizens of Philadelphia, and my children were insulted with them at school, and in the public streets’). Shortly afterwards he began writing a long, self-justifying memoir, Travels Through Life, in which he set out to correct the damage done to his reputation by Cobbett.

By this time Cobbett, threatened with renewed legal prosecution by McKean and realising that his journalistic scope was limited by his being effectively barred from Philadelphia, decided to return to England, where he knew he had acquired a host of readers, not to mention influential admirers in government circles. ‘The court of Philadelphia will sit again on the 2nd of June next,’ he wrote to Thornton (25 April 1800), ‘when the cause of old McKean versus Peter Porcupine will be brought on … In order, therefore, to save 2000 dollars, I propose sailing by the June packet, and am making my preparations accordingly … By the assistance of my friend Morgan, I shall be able to carry home about 10,000 dollars which … will leave me wherewith to open a shop somewhere in the West End of the town. I have revolved various projects in my mind; but this always returns upon me as the most eligible, most congenial to my disposition, and as giving the greatest scope to that sort of talent and industry which I possess … A stranger in the great city of London, and not only a stranger to the people, but to the mode of doing business, I shall feel very awkward for a time; but this will wear away.’

The Cobbetts set sail from Halifax on 11 June 1800 on the Lady Arabella. They took with them a young Frenchman, Edward Demonmaison, who was working as Cobbett’s secretary. It was not a pleasant voyage. Captain Porteus Cobbett described as ‘the greatest blackguard I ever met with’, while two army officers travelling on the boat ‘smoked Mrs Cobbett to death … talked in the most vulgar strain, and even sang morsels of bawdry in her presence’. The ship had narrowly escaped being captured by a French privateer, and on arrival in Falmouth the ‘gentry’ went into the custom house and attempted to embarrass Cobbett by reporting that he was accompanied by a foreigner (Demonmaison) – ‘when, to their utter astonishment, the collector asked if it was that Mr Cobbett who had gone under the name of Porcupine and upon receiving the affirmative, ordered the Capt. to send on board to tell me, that he should be happy to oblige me in any way he could, and that the rules concerning foreigners should be dispensed with concerning my clerk, or any person for whom I would pass my word’.¹²

3 ENGLAND REVISITED

WITH ONLY a short interval in 1792, Cobbett had been away from England for sixteen years, and on his return he was struck by how everything – ‘the trees, the hedges, even the paths and woods’ – seemed so small in comparison with New Brunswick and America. After a month in London he revisited Farnham. His parents had died, and his two brothers (the third had joined the East India Company) were in financial difficulties. ‘They are obliged to work very hard,’ he wrote to Thornton, ‘and their children are not kept constantly at school – I have given them a lift on and am devising means for making a provision for some of their sons – Never till now did I know the value of money.’

As the coach neared his old home Cobbett was overcome with mixed emotions and memories. ‘My heart fluttered with impatience mixed with a sort of fear to see all the scenes of my childhood, for I had learned before, the death of my father and mother … But now came rushing into my mind, all at once, my pretty little garden, my little blue smock-frock, my little nailed shoes, my pretty pigeons that I used to feed out of my hands, the last kind words and tears of my gentle and tender hearted and affectionate mother! I hastened back into the room! If I had looked a moment later I would have dropped. When I came to reflect, what a change! What scenes I had gone through! How altered my state … I felt proud.’

Cobbett had every reason to feel proud. As his reception at Falmouth indicated, he had returned to England a famous man. His anti-Jacobin pamphlets, all of them published in London, had been widely read and appreciated, especially by those politicians opposed to the French Revolution and now keen on prosecuting the war against Napoleon. William Windham, who was to become Cobbett’s close friend and patron, said in the House of Commons that he merited for his services in America ‘a statue of gold’.* Instead Cobbett commissioned a portrait by J.R. Smith, and this was engraved by the most fashionable engraver of the day, Francesco Bartolozzi, and put on sale in the London print shops. It shows the thirty-seven-year-old journalist looking supremely energetic and confident, ready to take on all comers from Napoleon downwards.

But the country that Cobbett had returned to was weary of the war. After nine years little had been done to restrain the march of the French across Europe, whilst at the same time the expense of the war had placed enormous tax burdens on the people (it was during this first period of hostilities that income tax was first introduced by the Prime Minister William Pitt). The pressures on the government to reach an agreement became too great, and in 1802 the Peace of Amiens was signed by the new Prime Minister Henry Addington (Pitt was awaiting developments at Walmer Castle in Kent). Persuading themselves that Napoleon had restored order to France and that the threat of Jacobinism was no more, the British people rejoiced. But a small group of politicians, implacably opposed to Napoleon, courted Cobbett. He had already been entertained only a few days after his arrival from America at a dinner given by William Windham and attended by Pitt and the future Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister George Canning. One can imagine Cobbett’s intense feeling of pride at finding himself dining with the Prime Minister when only a few years previously he had fled the country, a wanted man facing possible trial at a court martial. Cobbett was more than willing to assist the anti-peace campaign, but he remained adamant that he would never in any circumstances become a tool of the government.

This decision, immensely important in determining the course his career was to take, was not dictated entirely by principle, but by prudence and even commercial considerations. From his experiences in America Cobbett knew not only that he could attract a large readership for his paper even amongst those who disagreed profoundly with his politics, but also that his popularity was due as much to his writing skill as to the fact that his readers valued his independence in a society where the bulk of journalism was written by paid hacks. In England at this time the press comprised a number of small four-page papers with circulations of only two or three thousand, all heavily dependent on advertising and government subsidy (either in the form of advertisements or direct payments). It was only later, with the progress of The Times, that something resembling a modern newspaper emerged, commercially and editorially independent of the government. At the beginning of the century, when Cobbett returned to England, the links between politicians and the press were closer and more corrupt than they have ever been, before or since. The spread of radical opinions in the wake of the French Revolution had encouraged the view in conservative circles that the press was in some way responsible, and that steps must be taken to curb its powers either by taxation or by making papers and individual journalists and pamphleteers dependent on the government for their continued existence. The result was that almost all writers, not merely journalists, ended up in the pay of the state. As Cobbett wrote later:

The cause of the people has been betrayed by hundreds of men, who were able to serve the people, but whom a love of ease and of the indulgence of empty vanity have seduced into the service of the bribing usurpers, who have spared no means to corrupt men of literary talent from the authors of folios to the authors of baby-books and ballads, Caricature-makers, song-makers all have been bribed by one means or another. Gillray and Dibdin were both pensioned. Southey, William Gifford all are placed or pensioned. Playwriters, Historians. None have escaped. Bloomfield, the Farmer’s Boy author, was taken in tow and pensioned for fear that he should write for the people.¹

And the rewards could be very considerable. Cobbett noted later that one journalist, John Reeves, a clever lawyer of whom he was very fond, left £200,000 when he died – ‘without hardly a soul knowing that there ever was such a man’. For Cobbett, with his huge following, nothing was too much. The government offered him the editorship of either of its two papers, the Sun and the True Briton, along with the office and the printing press and the leasehold of a house, the whole package worth several thousand pounds. He refused. ‘From that moment,’ he wrote, ‘all belonging to the Government looked on me with great suspicion.’

An exception was William Windham. Born in 1750, Windham was an unlikely politician, a rich Norfolk landowner from Felbrigg near Cromer, where his family had lived since the Middle Ages. Educated at Eton and University College Oxford, he was not only a classical scholar, but also an amateur mathematician who had been deeply influenced by his friendships with Edmund Burke and Dr Johnson. It was Johnson who, when Windham was debating whether to accept a political appointment in Ireland, famously urged him to go ahead, saying that he would ‘make a very pretty rascal’. Windham later visited Johnson on his deathbed and agreed to become the guardian of his black servant Francis Barber. At the same time Johnson secured his promise that he would devote one day a week to a consideration of his failings. ‘He proceeded to observe,’ Windham wrote, ‘that I was entering upon a life that would lead me deeply into all the business of the world: that he did not condemn civil employment but that it was a state of great danger; and that he had therefore one piece of advice earnestly to impress upon me – that I would set apart every seventh day to the care of my soul: that one day, the seventh, should be employed in repenting what was amiss in the six preceding and justifying my virtue for the six to come: that such a portion of time was surely little enough for the meditation of eternity.’

In addition to their political opinions, Cobbett and Windham shared a love of ‘manly sports’, Windham being an enthusiastic boxer who had excelled at games as a schoolboy at Eton, where he was known as ‘fighter Windham’. A portrait by Reynolds shows an earnest, pale-faced man whose expression gives little away. According to Hazlitt he was an outstanding speaker, though ‘a silent man in company’. Windham described himself as ‘a scholar among politicians and a politician among scholars’. Aside from his love of boxing, what appealed to Cobbett was his obvious integrity in an age when most contemporary politicians had been compromised by corruption of one form or another. ‘My friendship with Mr Windham,’ he wrote in 1807, ‘is founded in my knowledge that he is an upright and honourable man: that in all the many opportunities that he has had, he has never added to his fortune (though very moderate) at public expense; that according to my conviction, no man can charge him with ever having been concerned in a job* and that whether his opinions be right or wrong he always openly and strongly avows them.’

In other ways Windham was more typical of his class. His attitude to the press, in particular, was shared by many (including even Cobbett in his early years, it has to be said), which helps to explain the hostility shown to so many journalists in the years to come. Newspapers, Windham once said, ‘circulated poison every twenty four hours and spread their venom down to the extremity of the kingdom. They were to be found everywhere in common ale-houses and similar places frequented chiefly by the most ignorant and unreflecting section of the community.’² Before any good could be done by the discussion of political subjects in newspapers, he said, the capacity of the people ought to be enlarged. However, as Windham was opposed to popular education, it was by no means clear how this desirable aim of his was to be achieved.

For Windham, and for Cobbett too in his early career, the French Revolution hung over their lives like a black cloud. At the back of their minds was the fear that what had happened in France – the Terror, the guillotine, the execution of the King and countless aristocrats – might happen in England. With such a different social system there was little likelihood that this would occur, but the fear that it might turned men like Windham, who could otherwise have favoured political reform and who in his younger days had been a republican, into reactionaries. To others less scrupulous, the cry of Jacobinism remained a valuable propaganda weapon to be used indiscriminately against all who advocated reform or who campaigned against political corruption. Throughout his later career, Cobbett was branded as a Jacobin by his opponents, though even when he became a radical anyone less like Marat or Robespierre would be hard to imagine. Except for a very brief period following the aborted court martial, he had never in any sense been a republican, and as for aristocrats, if they behaved like gentlemen, managed their estates well and cared for their labourers, then they generally had his approval. William Windham was a man of principle, a countryman, a sportsman and a Christian, and Cobbett respected him, and even when they later fell out, refrained from ever attacking him in print.

To Windham Cobbett owed his start in British journalism. He had originally launched a daily newspaper, the Porcupine, in October 1800, a continuation of his American paper, entirely financed with about £450 of his own money and produced from offices in Southampton Street. Cobbett was determined to take a more principled approach to journalism than his rivals. ‘Not a single quack advertisement will on my account be admitted into the Porcupine,’ he announced. ‘Our newspapers have been too long disgraced by this species of falsehood, filth and obscenity. I am told that, by adhering to this resolution, I shall lose five hundred a year.’ His main editorial purpose was to support those few politicians like Windham who opposed the negotiations, then in hand, to make peace with Napoleon. It was not a policy likely to appeal to the public, which at all levels favoured an end to the hostilities. When the Preliminaries of Peace were declared on 10 October 1801 there were extraordinary scenes in London. From his house in Pall Mall, Cobbett wrote to Windham in Norwich:

With that sort of dread which seizes on a man when he has heard or thinks he has heard a supernatural voice predicting his approaching end, I sit down to inform you, that the guns are now firing for the Peace and that half an hour ago a very numerous crowd drew the Aide-de-Camp of Bonaparte in triumph through Pall Mall! The vile miscreants had, it seems, watched his motions very narrowly and perceiving him get into a carriage in Bond Street with Otto* they took out the horses, dragged him down that street, along by your house, down to White-hall, and through the Park, and then to Otto’s again, shouting and rejoicing every time he had occasion to get out or into the carriage … This is the first time an English mob ever became the cattle of a Frenchman … This indication of the temper and sentiments of the lower orders is a most awful consideration. You must remember Sir, that previous to the revolutions in Switzerland and elsewhere, we always heard of some French messenger of peace being received with caresses by the people: the next post or two brought us an account of partial discontents, tumults, insurrections, murders and revolutions always closed the history. God preserve us from the like, but I am afraid our abominations are to be punished in this way.³

Meanwhile the mob went on the rampage and attacked Cobbett’s house as well as the bookshop he had opened in St James’s. ‘It happened precisely as I had expected,’ he wrote later: ‘about eight o’clock in the evening my dwelling house was attacked by an innumerable mob, all my windows were broken, and when this was done the villains were preparing to break into my shop. The attack continued at intervals, till past one o’clock. During the whole of this time, not a constable nor peace officer of any description made his appearance; nor was the smallest interruption given to the proceedings of this ignorant and brutal mob, who were thus celebrating the Peace. The Porcupine office experienced a similar fate.’

The same scenes were repeated a few months later when the Peace of Amiens was finally ratified. Even though on this occasion the Bow Street magistrate intervened with the help of a posse of Horse Guards to try to protect him, Cobbett’s windows were again broken and his house damaged in various ways. Shortly afterwards he was forced to sell the Porcupine, and it was merged in the True Briton, a government propaganda paper.

It was at this point that Windham and a group of friends including Dr French Laurence, Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford and the MP for Peterborough, stepped in to help Cobbett relaunch himself. Windham was a rich man with an annual income of £6000, so it can be assumed that he provided the bulk of the £650 (about £23,000 in today’s money). It would seem to have been a gift rather than an investment, and one which Cobbett only accepted on his own terms – ‘Upon the express and written conditions that I was never to be looked upon as under any sort of obligation to any of the parties.’

Any possibility of a clash between the editor and his patron would have seemed, in 1802, a very remote one. Windham had already made public his enormous admiration for Cobbett. Cobbett in his turn showered praises on his patron. ‘I shall not I am sure merit the suspicion of being a flatterer,’ he wrote to Windham in May 1802, ‘when I say that it is my firm persuasion that you, and you alone, can save our country. This persuasion is founded, not only upon my knowledge of your disposition and abilities, but upon the universal confidence in your integrity and patriotism, which at this time more than ever exists. I see and hear of men of all parties and principles, and I find the confidence of the nation to be possessed by you in a greater degree than by any other person.’⁴

The Peace of Amiens had been signed only a few weeks earlier, on 27 March 1802. For a short time there was a feeling not only of relief but of euphoria – not dissimilar to the mood following the Munich agreement of 1938. Napoleon, who had until then been an object of hatred, was turned into a tourist attraction. Crowds of British visitors flocked to Paris to see the First Consul in the flesh, shortly before he was to declare himself Emperor. In the House of Commons Windham, almost a lone voice, led the opposition, while Cobbett kept up the attack in his paper. The Emperor was apparently in the habit of lying in his bath and having Cobbett and other critics read aloud to him by an interpreter. When a particularly offensive passage was read out he would bang the bath with the guide rope, shouting out, ‘Il en a menti.’⁵ Napoleon, via the French Minister in London, M. Otto, ordered the British government to prosecute Cobbett (among others): ‘The perfidious and malevolent publications of these men are in open contradiction to the principles of peace.’⁶ In order to appease him the government did actually bring libel proceedings against a French émigré writer, Jean Gabriel Peltier, who was prosecuted by the Attorney General (later Prime Minister) Spencer Perceval and found guilty in February 1803 of libel by the judge, Lord Ellenborough (the first of his appearances in this narrative). Cobbett wrote to Windham, ‘Lord Ellenborough and the Attorney-General both told the Jury, that if they did not find him guilty, we would have war with France!!!’⁷

But the mood of euphoria following the signing of the peace did not last long. Napoleon showed quite soon that he was not only arrogant and sensitive to criticism in the British press, but cavalier in the extreme when it came to observing the terms of the 1802 treaty. The alarm was raised when he invaded Switzerland, and in the face of mounting concern the British government led by Addington finally refused to evacuate Malta on the grounds that Napoleon had failed to carry out his pledges with regard to Italy. In May 1803 war was resumed, and a year later Pitt (‘who was to Addington as London was to Paddington’) returned to take charge. The threat of a French invasion now took hold of the country, as Napoleon assembled a fleet of barges and gunboats on the French coast. Patriotic citizens rallied to the flag and joined the local militias. Broadsheets and songs were printed in their thousands, beacons were prepared to warn of invasion, and Martello towers were erected along the eastern coast. The government issued its own propaganda pamphlet, ‘Important Considerations for the People of this Kingdom’, which was distributed to the entire clergy with instructions ‘that you will be pleased to cause part of them to be deposited in the pews and part to be distributed in the aisles amongst the poor’. In stirring terms the anonymous author rallied his countrymen against the peril of the French: ‘For some time past, they have had little opportunity to plunder; peace, for a while, suspended their devastations, and now, like gaunt and hungry wolves, they are looking towards the richer pastures of Britain; already we hear their threatening howl, and if, like sheep, we stand bleating for mercy, neither our innocence nor our timidity will save us from being torn to pieces and devoured.’ There was general speculation at the time as to the authorship of ‘Important Considerations’, and various candidates were suggested, including Lord Hawkesbury (later the Prime Minister Lord Liverpool). It was not until 1809, when Cobbett came under attack from government ministers, that he revealed that he himself had written the pamphlet, offered it to the then Prime Minister Addington and refused to take any money when it was printed and distributed all over the country.

Many of his later readers might have been surprised to learn of Cobbett assisting the government in this way. But the Cobbett of this period, the four or five years following his return from America, was a different character from what he became later or what he had been before. The change of title of his paper from Porcupine to Cobbett’s Political Register said it all. In his Porcupine role in Philadelphia he had been a thorn in the flesh of the political establishment, famous for his barbs, his knockabout abuse and his nicknames. The title Cobbett’s Political Register was indicative of a more serious and responsible role. Cobbett was now the friend of statesmen like Windham, the man who dined with Pitt and Canning, the man who boasted that royalty and dukes were among the subscribers to his paper. He now saw himself as a major player, and the Political Register of this period is much concerned with the traditional political matters – who’s in, who’s out, the advisability of this or that different policy.

Despite the resumption of the war, the resignation of Addington and the return of Pitt, Cobbett’s friend Windham remained out of the government and in opposition. Pitt had wanted to include the great Liberal Charles James Fox (now disillusioned about Napoleon – ‘a young man who was a good deal intoxicated with his success’) in his cabinet, but the mad King George III, who hated Fox for having opposed the war in the first place, refused to allow this. Windham, along with Pitt’s former Foreign Secretary William Grenville and others, refused to take office unless Fox was included in the cabinet, with the result that in the short period before his death in January 1806, Pitt was confronted by three separate opposition parties, led respectively by Addington, Windham (the so-called New Opposition) and Fox, leader of the Old Opposition – those, that is, who had been against the war in its early stages (1793–1802). It was not the ideal situation for a country at war.

In his Political Register Cobbett (with Windham’s support) attacked Pitt almost as savagely as he had previously attacked Addington. His charge was that Pitt had reneged on his pledge to pursue the war against France – a course, Pitt claimed, that could be pursued without any increase in taxes. Cobbett no doubt saw himself as someone at the centre of the political stage, a view reciprocated by, among others, Charles James Fox, one of the few outstanding politicians of this period. ‘Cobbett is certainly an extraordinary man,’ Fox wrote to Windham in November 1804, ‘and if any good is ever to be done, may be powerfully instrumental in bringing it about.’⁸

In keeping with the image of himself as the friend and confidant of statesmen, Cobbett purchased a spacious country mansion at Botley near Southampton in 1805. Unfortunately it was later demolished, but a contemporary print shows a three-storeyed house with an ornamental turret and more than enough accommodation for his family and a small army of servants. Despite the success of the Political Register Cobbett could scarcely afford to live in such style. But throughout his life he was careless with money, almost always living beyond his means and relying on loans from wealthy supporters. His daughter Anne writes that his wife had little faith in Cobbett’s ‘business wisdom’, particularly as it applied to the ambitious farming and tree-planting schemes he embarked on whenever he had the opportunity, as he now did at Botley.

‘Botley is the most delightful village in the world,’ Cobbett wrote to his publisher John Wright (August 1805). ‘It has everything, in a village, that I love, and none of the things I hate. It is in a valley; the soil is rich, thickset with wood: the farms are small, the cottages neat; it has neither workhouse nor barber nor attorney nor justice of the peace, and, though last not least, it has no volunteers. There is no justice within SIX miles of us and the barber comes once a week to shave and cut hair! “Would I were poetical” I would write a poem in praise of Botley.’

Cobbett was supremely confident in his future. By the end of 1805 the circulation of the Register had reached four thousand – a very high figure for these times. In the meantime he had launched a new publication, Cobbett’s Parliamentary Debates (the original of today’s Hansard, named after the printer Cobbett eventually sold the business to). Carried away by his popularity, he felt sure enough of his prospects to expand. Shortly after buying his Botley house he bought a neighbouring farm for his brother and began negotiating the purchase of a farm for himself. Eventually he was to take on an estate of over eighty acres, on which he farmed and planted thousands of trees. ‘I have planted 20,000 oaks, elms and ashes besides about 3000 fir trees of various sorts,’ he wrote to his brother-in-law Ian Frederick Reid serving in Wellington’s army in the Peninsula. ‘How everybody laughed,’ his daughter Anne remembered, ‘at his planting such little bits of twigs at Botley.’ But although Cobbett took great aesthetic pleasure in trees, he regarded them always as a commercial venture, convincing himself that they were a valuable investment for his children and ignoring his wife’s insistence that he would be better off growing crops ‘instead of burying the money on the land with trees which he would never see come to perfection’.

It is here at Botley that we get for the first time a lengthy description of Cobbett and his family from an independent observer, and it is almost with a feeling of relief that the biographer finds it confirming Cobbett’s own view of himself and his achievements. Mary Russell Mitford was a girl of about eighteen when she visited Botley with her father Dr George Mitford, man-about-town and ruddy-faced old rogue who had changed his name from Midford to make himself sound more grand. Mitford, who combined radical opinions with social snobbery, was a compulsive gambler who quickly squandered his rich wife’s fortune as well as the £20,000 his daughter won on the Irish lottery at the age of four. Still, as with Little Nell and her grandfather in The Old Curiosity Shop, she remained devoted to her father until his death at the age of eighty, despite being plagued by money worries even after the great success of her book Our Village (1832) describing life in Three Mile Cross near Reading, where she lived in later years with her dissolute parent.

Dr Mitford was, for a time, a close friend of Cobbett. He mixed with a number of politicians in London, but more importantly he shared with Cobbett a love of hare-coursing and like him kept a kennel full of greyhounds. Mary remembered:

He [Cobbett] had at that time [about 1806] a large house at Botley, with a lawn and gardens sweeping down to the Burlesdon River which divided his territories from the beautiful grounds of the old friend, where we had been originally staying, the great squire of the place. His own house – large, high, massive, red, and square and perched on a considerable eminence – always struck me as being not unlike its proprietor … I never saw hospitality more genuine, more simple or more thoroughly successful in the great end of hospitality, the putting of everybody at ease. There was not the slightest attempt at finery or display or gentility. They called it a farm-house and, everything was in accordance with the largest idea of a great English yeoman of the old time. Everything was excellent, everything abundant, all served with the greatest nicety by trim waiting-damsels: and everything went on with such quiet regularity, that of the large circle of guests not one could find himself in the way. I need not say a word more in praise of the good wife … to whom this admirable order was mainly due. She was a sweet motherly woman; realising our notions of one of Scott’s most charming characters, Ailie Dinmont, in her simplicity, her kindness, and her devotion to her husband and her children.

At this time William Cobbett was at the height of his political reputation; but of politics we heard little, and should, I think, have heard nothing, but for an occasional red-hot patriot who would introduce the subject, which our host would fain put aside and get rid of as soon as possible. There was something of Dandie Dinmont about him, with his unfailing good humour and good spirits – his heartiness, his love of field sports, and his liking for a foray. He was a tall, stout man, fair, and sunburnt, with a bright smile and an air compounded of the soldier and the farmer, to which his habit of wearing an eternal red waistcoat contributed not a little. He was I think the most athletic and vigorous person that I have ever known. Nothing could tire him. At home in the morning he would begin by mowing his own lawn, beating his gardener Robinson, the best mower, except himself, in the parish, at that fatiguing work.

Cobbett was also a keen devotee of rural sports. Besides hare-coursing, for which he kept a huge army of dogs – thirty or forty pedigree greyhounds, pointers, setters and spaniels – hunting was another passion. ‘A score or two of gentlemen,’ he wrote, ‘riding full speed down a hill nearly as steep as the roof of a house, where one false step must inevitably send horse and rider to certain death, is an object to be seen nowhere but in England.’ Boxing and wrestling helped to preserve the strength and spirit of the working man, Cobbett being convinced during this period that an evil alliance of government ministers and Methodists was trying to eliminate such sports in order to make the ‘lower orders’ weak and compliant. Boxing matches attracted big crowds: ‘They tend to make the people bold, they tend in short, to keep alive even amongst the lowest of the people, some idea of independence.’

Another Cobbett favourite was the now forgotten ‘sport’ of single-stick. Two combatants, each with a wooden cudgel, each with an arm tied behind his back, would attempt to break their opponent’s head by drawing an inch of blood from his skull. He explained in a letter to William Windham: ‘The blows that they exchange in order to throw one another off their guard are such as require the utmost degree of patient endurance. The arms, shoulders and ribs are beaten black and blue and the contest between the men frequently lasts for more than an hour.’

Cobbett, who encouraged his young sons to engage in this so-called game, invited Windham to attend a grand single-stick competition which he organised in Botley in October 1805, and which attracted crowds of about five thousand people from all over the country. A first prize of fifteen guineas and a gold-laced hat was offered, and the event was such a success that it was repeated the following year, when even more people came, and the prize was increased to twenty guineas and the hat. ‘The whole village was full,’ Cobbett wrote. ‘Stages in the form of amphitheatres were erected against the houses and seats let to the amount of thirty or fifty pounds. Every gentleman round the country was there.’

The conventional view of Cobbett is of a man who was a Tory in his youth and who became a radical in later life, but, as usual, it is not as simple as that. Cobbett’s early American journalism was informed not so much by his political inclinations as by the simple patriotism of a man who disliked to see his country run down by foreigners. Nor was he ever in sympathy with the advocates of violent revolution or, for that matter, those whose politics were based on abstract theorising rather than, as in his own case, a practical examination of the situation. There was no ‘road to Damascus’ experience in Cobbett’s life to explain his conversion to radicalism. Instead a gradual sequence of events, culminating in his imprisonment in 1810, fundamentally altered his view of politics and the social scene. It was a repetition, on a grander scale and over a longer period, of his army experiences. In both cases he had become involved with institutions of which initially he entertained good opinions and high hopes. But the more he found out – as always with Cobbett, from his personal study and investigation – the more disillusioned he became. And in both cases it was the discovery of corruption, generally accepted as a way of life, that most roused his indignation.

But other important issues played their part in the process. In 1802, the year of the founding of the Political Register, Cobbett was beginning to realise that his knowledge of economics was minimal. ‘I knew nothing of this matter in 1802,’ he wrote. ‘I did not know what had made the Bank of England. I did not know what the slang terms of consols meant. I did not know what Dividend, omnium scrip, or any of the rest of it imported.’ Most of us are quite happy to go through life with only a shaky grasp of economics, but Cobbett was not like that. He had to find out for himself. He read Adam Smith – ‘I could make neither top nor tail of the thing.’ He read the Acts of Parliament setting up the Bank of England, which he says gave him some sort of insight ‘with regard to the accursed thing called the National Debt’. But it was not until he read Thomas Paine’s pamphlet ‘Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance’ (1796) that the scales fell from his eyes.

Leaving economics aside for the moment, Cobbett’s discovery of Paine as a purveyor of truth did perhaps have something of the road to Damascus about it, in that until this date he had persecuted Paine, just as St Paul had persecuted the followers of Jesus. Paine’s involvement with the rebels in the American War of Independence and later with the French Revolutionaries – in both cases against the British interest – and above all his denial of the divinity of Christ in his book The Age of Reason had turned him, in the eyes of the establishment, into a Guy Fawkes figure, responsible for all the unrest and the Jacobinism, all the subversive ideas that seemed to threaten the peace and tranquillity of good Englishmen.

During his Porcupine years in America Cobbett had joined in the hate campaign as wholeheartedly as anyone. His pamphlet ‘The Life of Thomas Paine’ (1796) is as vituperative as anything he ever wrote: ‘The scoundrel of a staymaker … the hoary blasphemer … he has done all the mischief he can in the world and … whenever or wherever he breathes his last, he will excite neither sorrow nor compassion.’ Cobbett again abused him in his paper the Political Censor, calling him an ‘atrocious infamous miscreant’ and many things besides. (George Washington approved, though making ‘allowances for the asperity of an Englishman for some of his strong and coarse expressions’.⁹) Yet it was now this very same blasphemer and miscreant who had managed to open Cobbett’s eyes to the nature of the economic system. Had he been wrong about Paine? And was it possible that all those politicians and writers who had portrayed Paine as the devil incarnate were equally mistaken?

In 1796 Paine had written a famous letter to Washington, whose victory over the British he had helped so much to secure, attacking the President for failing to come to his aid when he was in prison in Paris facing execution. The letter is an eloquent testimony to the general ingratitude of politicians, once they achieved power, to those who have helped them along the way. Cobbett himself was beginning to experience the same reaction. He might have thought, after the assistance he had given the government by writing, for free, ‘Important Considerations’ at the time invasion threatened, that he and his Political Register would be helped in return. On the contrary, in 1804 he found himself once again facing a libel charge.

As usual, England’s difficulty was Ireland’s opportunity. In 1803 the Irish republicans, on this occasion led by Robert Emmet, mounted a rebellion, killing the Lord Chief Justice and several English soldiers. In the Political Register Cobbett attacked the Addington government for its lack of foresight, stating that Ireland was ‘in a state of total neglect and abandonment’.¹⁰ The article was followed by three anonymous letters from Ireland signed ‘Juverna’. With a stylish and satirical pen ‘Juverna’ accused the English authorities, and in particular the Lord Lieutenant, Lord Hardwicke, of failing to do anything to prevent the uprising although they had advance information that it was going to take place. Hardwicke, it was claimed, had even returned to his official residence in Phoenix Park in order not to be in any personal danger, and had subsequently done everything possible to blame the military commander, General Fox, for what had happened. Obviously well informed, ‘Juverna’ peppered his account of the incident with a number of satirical asides on the British politicians involved, suggesting, for example, that Hardwicke was typical of ‘that tribe who have been sent over to us to be trained up here into politicians as they train the surgeons’ apprentices in the hospitals by setting them at first to bleed the pauper patients’. He was, the author continued, ‘in rank an earl, in manners a gentleman, in morals a good father and a good husband … celebrated for understanding the modern method of fattening sheep as well as any man in Cambridgeshire’.

The offence of criminal (or seditious) libel with which Cobbett was now charged had been a convenient weapon in the hands of successive governments since the sixteenth century, when according to a modern commentator ‘the Star Chamber regarded with the deepest suspicion the printed word in general, and anything which looked like criticism of the established institutions of Church and State in particular’.¹¹ John Wilkes, the great champion of press freedom, had been prosecuted for criminal libel, and throughout the first decades of the nineteenth century the charge was regularly used to silence persistent critics of the government, when necessary by putting them in prison.

In Cobbett’s trial the thrust of the attack by the prosecuting attorney Spencer Perceval (later the Prime Minister) was to humiliate Cobbett in the eyes of the court by emphasising his lowly social origins. ‘Who is Mr Cobbett?’ Perceval asked contemptuously. ‘Is he a man of family in this country? Is he a man writing purely from motives of patriotism? Quis homo hic est? Quo patre natus?’ (Who is this man? Who was his father?) The Latin tags would have been chosen deliberately by the lawyer in the knowledge that Cobbett would not understand them. Such an attitude, in an age when the government consisted almost entirely of members of the aristocracy educated in the classics at the best public schools, would not have struck the jury as unjust. But it was typical of the snobbery that Cobbett was to face throughout his career. Snobbery aside, Perceval went on to suggest (with the judge’s obvious approval) that it was not permitted, by law, to ridicule the government and its ministers in the way ‘Juverna’ and the Political Register had done. An indication of the lengths to which the law officers were prepared to go in arguing this case is the way Perceval even introduced the fact that Cobbett’s paper had referred to the Prime Minister as ‘the Doctor’. In fact Addington was generally known to all his colleagues by this nickname, the origin of which was that his father had been a doctor:

I do not mean to say that the describing such a man as Mr Addington, by the epithet of Doctor Addington, is degrading to him, nor that I would advise that such an epithet should become the subject of a prosecution in a Court of Justice: but, surely no one who has the least liberality of feeling, or the least sense of decency, could think it becoming to taunt such a gentleman as Mr Addington: a gentleman who, the more he is known, the more his character will be admired. For my part, I feel no sympathy with those who think there is any wit in such titles. Mr Addington is the son of a man who most ably and skilfully practised in a liberal profession, who by his talents became justly eminent in that profession, and whose son raised himself, by his great abilities, to one of the highest offices in this country. I again say, that for any publication calling Mr Addington ‘Doctor Addington’, or for any flippancy of that nature, standing by itself, I should think it beneath the dignity of the Right honourable gentleman to make it the subject of a prosecution; but I also say, that when you see an epithet of this nature introduced, it does show the spirits with which the libel was published and that it was a systematic attack upon the whole government of Ireland, by bringing into contempt and ridicule the persons placed by his Majesty at the head of the Government.¹²

‘The bestowing of nicknames is a practice to which Englishmen are peculiarly addicted,’ Cobbett’s counsel William Adam answered, but he made little or no attempt to justify ‘Juverna’s’ account of the Dublin rebellion, instead devoting his speech to extolling his client as a great English patriot. Summing up, the judge, Lord Ellenborough, did nothing to disguise his bias. His final words to the jury were an ominous warning not only to Cobbett but to others who might be so foolhardy as to attack the government: ‘It has been observed [by Cobbett’s counsel] that it is the right of the British subject to exhibit the folly or imbecility of members of the Government. But gentlemen, we must confine ourselves within limits. If, in so doing, individual feelings are violated, there the line of interdiction begins, and the offence becomes the subject of penal visitation.’ Taking their cue from the learned judge, the jury brought in a verdict of guilty following deliberations which lasted for only ten minutes.

Cobbett had secured a number of prominent individuals, including Windham, to appear as character witnesses, and it was perhaps thanks to them that he escaped a prison sentence on this occasion (the Register was fined £500). It may also have been the case that he was leniently treated in comparison with other libellers for divulging to the court the identity of ‘Juverna’ – Robert Johnson, a judge of the Irish Common Pleas. Cobbett handed over some of the manuscripts of the letters to the Attorney General, and later appeared as a Crown witness when Johnson himself was put on trial in November 1805. At first sight Cobbett’s betrayal of his contributor seems despicable. But, as his biographer E.I. Carlyle points out, it is significant that the incident was never referred to afterwards by his political enemies, and given the fact that they seized on anything, however trivial, to discredit Cobbett, the likelihood is that Johnson himself agreed to be identified as the author. After being found guilty he was allowed to resign with a pension of £1200 a year.

The ‘Juverna’ trial and the threat of possible imprisonment will have unnerved Cobbett and shown him that he could not expect any favours from the establishment (what he called ‘The Thing’). But in the meantime, as the threat of invasion by Napoleon receded, he was beginning to become interested in matters beyond the political controversies of the day, the sort of issues he discussed with Windham in their regular exchange of letters.

Having been out of the country for most of his adult life, Cobbett had little or no first-hand knowledge of British politics or social institutions. In the ten years he had spent in America he had retained in his memory a picture of England as he remembered it from his boyhood, a picture of rural prosperity, cottage gardens, contented villagers – an idyllic scene. In 1804, however, he went house-hunting with his wife Anne in Hampshire (prior to their settling in Botley), and saw for himself how conditions had changed:

When I revisited the English labourer’s dwelling and that too, after having recently witnessed the happiness of labourers in America; when I saw that the clock was gone; when I saw those whom I had known the most neat, cheerful and happy beings on earth, and these my countrymen too, had become the most wretched and forlorn of human beings, I looked seriously and inquired patiently into the matter and this inquiry into the causes of the effect which had made so deep an impression on my mind, led to that series of exertions, which have occupied my whole life, since that time, to better the lot of the labourers.¹³

What had caused the decline? Cobbett instanced two major factors: firstly, the continuing series of enclosures, whereby the common lands which traditionally provided labourers with a source of food and fuel to supplement their earnings had been taken over or ‘privatised’ by the rich farmers and landowners in the interest of ‘greater efficiency’. Secondly, the newly introduced Poor Laws, known as the Speenhamland System, intended when they were launched in 1795 to help the poorest labourers by making up their pay from the rates, but which had the effect of branding them as paupers, so robbing them of all self-respect.

‘The labourers are humbled, debased and enslaved,’ Cobbett wrote. ‘Until of late years, there was, amongst the poor, a horror of becoming chargeable to the parish. This feeling, which was almost universal, was the parent of industry, of care, of economy, of frugality and of early habits of labour amongst children … That men should possess spirit, that there should be any independence of mind, that there should be frankness among persons so situated, is impossible. Accordingly, whoever has had experience in such matters, must have observed, with deep regret, that instead of priding himself upon his little possessions, instead of decking out his children to the best advantage, instead of laying up in store the trifling surplus produce of the harvest month, the labourer now, in but too many instances, takes care to spend all as fast as he gets it, makes himself as poor as he can and uses all the art that he is master of to cause it to be believed that he is still more miserable than he really is. What an example for the children! And what must the rising generation be!’¹⁴

The reason Cobbett became a champion of the farm labourers, who at this time, prior to the Industrial Revolution, made up the largest single section of the British workforce, was his own personal involvement with them at Botley and in the surrounding countryside. As always with Cobbett, he started from what he saw with his own eyes – in this case, workers living in an impoverished and demoralised state, in marked contrast to what he remembered from his own boyhood.

When he himself began to farm and employ labourers at Botley, Cobbett refused to have anything to do with the Speenhamland System. ‘I have made it a rule,’ he wrote, ‘that I will have the labour of no man who receives parish relief. I give him, out of my own pocket, let his family be what it may, enough to keep them well, without any regard to what wages other people give: for I will employ no pauper.’

The result, he claimed, was a contented little community: ‘It is quite delightful to see this village of Botley, when compared to the others that I know. They seem here to be quite a different race of people.’ This was no empty boast, because it was confirmed by the many witnesses like Miss Mitford who visited Cobbett at Botley. He encouraged, he said, with his workers ‘freedom in conversation, the unrestrained familiarity … without at all lessening the weight of my authority’.

And the same principle, he said, applied with his children. By 1805 when Cobbett bought the Botley home he had four children – Anne born in America in 1795, William in 1798, John in 1800 and James in 1803. They were followed by two girls, Eleanor and Susan (born 1805 and 1807), and finally by Richard (born 1814). In spite of his workload as a journalist Cobbett took an enormous interest in the welfare and education of his children. His ideas were surprisingly liberal. Remembering, perhaps, his own harsh treatment at the hands of his father, he urged parents to make their children’s lives ‘as pleasant as you possibly can’:

I have always admired the sentiment of ROUSSEAU upon this subject. ‘The boy dies, perhaps, at the age of ten or twelve. Of what use, then, all the restraints, all the privations, all the pain that you have inflicted upon him? He falls, and leaves your mind to brood over the possibility of you having abridged a life so dear to you.’ I do not recollect the very words; but the passage made a deep impression upon my mind, just at the time, too, when I was about to become a father … I was resolved to forgo all the means of making money, all the means of making a living in any thing like fashion, all the means of obtaining fame or distinction, to give up everything, to become a common labourer, rather than make my children lead a life of restraint and rebuke.¹⁵

Cobbett moved to Botley with the welfare of his children in mind. He wanted them, first of all, to be healthy and to be able to play out of doors:

Children, and especially boys, will have some out-of-doors pursuits: and it was my duty to lead them to choose such pursuits as combined future utility with present innocence. Each has his flower-bed, little garden, plantation of trees, rabbits, dogs, asses, horses, pheasants and hares; hoes, spades, whips, guns; always some object of lively interest, and as much earnestness and bustle about the various objects as if our living had solely depended upon them.

Cobbett did not believe in forcing ‘book-learning’ on his children at an early age. There were no rules or regulations:

I accomplished my purpose indirectly. The first thing of all was health which was secured by the deeply-interesting and never-ending sports of the field and pleasures of the garden. Luckily these two things were treated in books and pictures of endless variety: so that on wet days, in long evenings, these came into play. A large, strong table in the middle of the room, their mother sitting at her work, used to be surrounded with them, the baby, if big enough, set up in a high chair. Here were ink-stands, pens, pencils, india rubber, and paper, all in abundance, and everyone scrabbled about as he or she pleased. There were prints of animals of all sorts; books treating of them – others treating of gardening, of flowers, of husbandry, of hunting, coursing, shooting, fishing, planting, and, in short, of everything with regard to which we had something to do. One would be trying to imitate a bit of my writing, another drawing the pictures of some of our dogs or horses, a third poring over Bewick’s Quadrupeds, and picking out what he said about them; but our book of never-failing resource was the French MAISON RUSTIQUE or FARMHOUSE … Here are all the four-legged animals from the horse down to the mouse, portraits and all; all the birds, reptiles, insects … and there was I, in my leisure moments to join this inquisitive group, to read the French, and tell them what it meaned in English, when the picture did not sufficiently explain itself. I have never been without a copy of this book for forty years, except during the time that I was fleeing from the dungeons of CASTLEREAGH and SIDMOUTH in 1817, and, when I got to Long Island, the first book I bought was another MAISON RUSTIQUE.¹⁶

Cobbett was busily writing at this time, but he never let it interfere with his children’s pursuits: ‘My occupation to be sure was chiefly carried on at home,’ he remembered. ‘Many score of papers have I written amidst the noise of children and in my whole life never bade them be still. When they grew up to be big enough to gallop about the house I have written the whole day amidst noise that would made [sic] some authors half mad. That which you are pleased with, however noisy, does not disturb you.’

The children were teased by friends about not going to school, and his wife Nancy was especially anxious about it, but Cobbett resisted all the pressure. ‘Bless me, so tall and not learned anything yet,’ a friend would say of one of his sons. ‘Oh yes he has,’ Cobbett replied. ‘He has learned to ride, and hunt and shoot and fish and look after cattle and sheep and to work in the garden and to feed his dogs and to go from village to village in the dark.’

Cobbett’s methods bore results. His children were soon able to help him with his work, copying and taking dictation. The boys learned French and three of them later became lawyers and published books, as did his eldest daughter Anne.

* The same thing was said by Napoleon of Thomas Paine.

* ‘Job: A low mean lucrative busy affair’ (Johnson).

* Louis Otto, French agent in Britain.

4 A CONVERT to REFORM

IN JANUARY 1806 the Prime Minister William Pitt died and George III invited Lord Grenville to form a new coalition government. This was the short-lived ‘Ministry of All the Talents’, so called because it included members of the New and Old Opposition, like Cobbett’s friend and patron Windham and also Charles James Fox, to whom the King was now partially reconciled.

Cobbett was delighted by the new situation. The old enemy Pitt was gone, and at last there was an opportunity for the new ministers to introduce reform. The general assumption was that Cobbett, as Windham’s friend and protégé, would now be given some political office or sinecure. ‘Everyone thought,’ he wrote, ‘that my turn to get rich was come. I was importuned by many persons to take care of myself as they called it.’ He could benefit not just himself but also his relatives. He could obtain, with Windham’s help, promotion for his father-in-law and brother-in-law, both of whom were serving in Wellington’s army.

But Cobbett continually stressed that he had no wish to obtain favours of this kind, as anyone else in his position would have done. All he wanted was to be an adviser, to have his opinion listened to and respected not only by Windham, but by his fellow ministers like Fox. Two particular things demanded action, in his view. He was especially incensed about the activities of Francis Freeling, the Secretary of the Post Office, who had control over newspaper distribution through the post and whom he had accused of working a number of fiddles. Cobbett wanted him sacked. He also complained vehemently about the dismissal of a clerk in the Barrack Master General’s office who had exposed corruption – a story that must have affected him particularly, as it echoed his own experience in 1792 when he himself had tried to eradicate corruption in the army, only to be forced to flee the country.

As Minister for War, Windham ought to have been sympathetic to Cobbett’s various proposals, which included a long and detailed plan for the reform of the army. The trouble was that he was now part of a system so riddled with corruption of every kind that even had he felt the urge, any reforming measures would have been difficult if not impossible for him to put into effect. Though never a ‘pretty rascal’ in Dr Johnson’s phrase, Windham was surrounded by pretty rascals on every side, the War Ministry being the most notorious for corruption and nepotism. Quite apart from that, as the tone of the Political Register became more radical, more Porcupine-like, Windham had for some time been embarrassed by his association with Cobbett. Such was the way of things, with the close association of politicians and the press, and most journalists in the pay of one party or another, that the public would have assumed that Cobbett’s articles were written to Windham’s dictation. It was certainly the case that, even at this stage, people still referred to the Political Register as ‘Windham’s Gazette’. In February 1806 Windham had taken the issue up with Cobbett: ‘You can do more, too, than you have done to show that your opinions are your own.’ For his part, Cobbett resented the suggestion that anyone should feel ashamed or embarrassed at being wrongly assumed to have written his articles. He wrote to Windham: ‘Wright states that you appeared extremely vexed at the prevalence or supposed prevalence of an opinion that “all the most violent parts of the Register were either written or suggested by you …” I must confess that I am vain enough to think that, having so long been obliged to listen to the cant of the most despicable of our opponents, he has mistaken strength for violence: and I must further confess myself proud enough to hope that, from having my writings imputed to him, no man’s character has ever suffered an injury.’¹

Sooner or later a break between the two men was inevitable. It came on 28 February 1806, only two weeks after the formation of the new ministry. Windham wrote in his diary: ‘Came away in carriage with Fox: got out at end of Downing St and went to office, thence to Cobbett. Probably the last interview we shall have.’ The Ministry of All the Talents collapsed, and for the remaining three years before his death in 1810 Windham did not hold office again. On 19 February 1809, in his final reference to Cobbett, he wrote: ‘Nearly the whole time from breakfast till Mr Legge’s coming down, employed in reading Cobbett. More thoroughly wicked and mischievous than almost anything that has appeared yet.’ He may have reflected ruefully that of all his achievements, the most significant had been the financing in 1802 of Cobbett’s Political Register, which came in the end to represent almost everything he most strongly disapproved of.

By now it was beginning to dawn on Cobbett, as it has dawned on others before and since, that there was no real difference between the parties at Westminster. The Whigs and the Tories were led by two groups of aristocrats – Windham was one of the few commoners – merely competing for power. There was therefore no point in expecting that a change in the ministry would lead to radical reform. The war, it was true, had formerly divided politicians, but now the old consensus had been restored. By 1809 Cobbett was able to describe quite clearly what the situation was like:

It must have struck every man, who has been in the habit of contemplating political motives and actions, that the interest and the importance, which discussions in the House of Commons formerly owed to consideration of Party, now exist but in a comparatively trifling degree … Parties were formerly distinguished by some great and well known principles of foreign or domestic policy. Now there are no such distinguishing marks … There are still persons wishing for a change of ministry because there are always persons who wish to obtain possession of power and emolument, but beyond that circle there are … absolutely none at all who sincerely believe that such a change would be attended with any substantial national benefit.²

Following the collapse of the Ministry of All the Talents the Whigs virtually gave up hope of forming a government, and for the next twenty-five years there was a succession of Tory ministries under a series of reactionary prime ministers, all adamantly opposed to reform of any kind. The Duke of Portland (1807–09) was followed by the lawyer Spencer Perceval (1809–12), who in turn was followed by the long-serving Lord Liverpool (1812–27), described by Disraeli as an ‘arch-mediocrity’ and referred to by Cobbett as ‘Lord Picknose’.* So opposed to any form of change was Liverpool that a Frenchman remarked that if he had been present at the Creation he would have said, ‘Conservons-nous le chaos.’

These men and their influential lieutenants Addington, who became Lord Sidmouth and Home Secretary, and the notorious Lord Castlereagh saw the purpose of government as merely to preserve the existing order. They took reassurance from Dr Johnson’s couplet (frequently quoted against them by Cobbett – though he was ignorant of its authorship):

How small, of all that human hearts endure

That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.

Ignoring the lessons of the French Revolution and convincing themselves that there was little any government could do to eradicate the inequalities and injustices in society, they were united in their determination, at all costs, to uphold the status quo, including the power of the aristocracy and its ally the Church of England, which helped to maintain a tradition of acceptance amongst the ‘lower orders’. Cobbett on the other hand proclaimed: ‘It is the chief business of a government to take care that one part of the people do not cause the other part to lead miserable lives.’ Such a view, in the eyes of Lord Liverpool, was not only deluded but dangerous. Above all, any ideas about parliamentary reform smacked of Jacobinism and had to be resolutely suppressed.

Yet there was nothing new, let alone revolutionary, about a campaign for parliamentary reform. It went back to the last decades of the eighteenth century, when it had been embraced by any number of politicians, notably Lord Grey, and even including Pitt himself. But with the spread of revolutionary ideas to England, reaction against the French Terror and the subsequent anti-Jacobin war, the country became overtaken, in Wordsworth’s words, by ‘a panic dread of change’. Following a spate of repressive measures the campaign for reform fizzled out, and the cause was kept alive only by a group of colourful individuals, all known to one another, who enjoyed loose and often temporary alliances. They had no formal organisation, though there was a wide measure of agreement as to what needed to be done.

As things stood, the majority of parliamentary seats were in the gift of wealthy landowners and members of the peerage. Others were openly put up for sale. Sitting in Parliament had little to do with benefiting the community or advocating particular policies. It was sought after for social reasons. ‘The moment a man became such [i.e. an MP],’ Cobbett’s one-time friend the diarist Thomas Creevey wrote, ‘he became at once a public man and had a position in society which nothing else could give him.’ Apart from the social advantage, being an MP was an easy means of financial gain. Members loyal to the government of the day could expect to be rewarded with sinecures or pensions (not, as we understand them, paid on retirement, but during the working life of those favoured), and their families could look forward to similar benefits. The reformers campaigned for an end to this corruption, the introduction of parliamentary constituencies based on population, and the extension of the franchise.

With Fox dead and Windham estranged from him, Cobbett now found himself more and more in the company of these reformers, ‘the dangerous, discontented half noble, half mischievous advocates for reform and innovation’, as Francis Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review, described them.³ Although government ministers and their tame journalists were doing everything possible to discredit the reformers by calling them ‘Jacobins’ and ‘Levellers’, they were all eminently respectable and in no way revolutionary. The most considerable figure among them (apart from Cobbett himself) was Sir Francis Burdett (1770–1844), a wealthy, somewhat haughty baronet married to Sophia, daughter of the banker Thomas Coutts. Thanks to his rich father-in-law Burdett had been able to buy a seat in Parliament for £4000 in 1796. A tall, slender figure and an excellent speaker, he immediately and single-handedly began to agitate for reform, proposing constituencies based on population, the right to vote being extended to freeholders, and all subject to direct taxation.⁴

The senior and most radical member of the group, Major John Cartwright, was born in 1740 and became known as ‘the father of reform’. Brother of the inventor Edmund, Cartwright campaigned for universal male suffrage and annual Parliaments, and had been a radical since before the French Revolution. From his home in Boston, Lincolnshire, the Major issued appeals and pamphlets and toured the country, tirelessly organising his ‘Hampden Clubs’ in towns and villages where men and women could meet to discuss the case for annual Parliaments and equal electoral districts. In 1806 Cartwright wrote a fan letter to Cobbett:

Sir, It was only lately I became a reader of your Weekly Register. Your energy, your indignant warmth against peculation, your abhorrence of political treachery, and your independent spirit command my esteem. As a token of it, I beg to present you with a few essays written to serve our injured country, which has for too long lain a bleeding prey to devouring factions, and which cannot be preserved, unless that public spirit and courage that were once the characteristics of England, can be revived.

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