Читать книгу The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett - Richard Ingrams - Страница 7

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.