Читать книгу The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett - Richard Ingrams - Страница 8

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.