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The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett
Richard Ingrams
A remarkably perceptive and vivid life of one of England's greatest radicals.The early years of the 19th-century were ones of misery and oppression. The common people were forced into conditions of extreme poverty by enclosures and the Agricultural Revolution, and the long Tory administration of Lord Liverpool saw its task as keeping law and order at all costs. The cause of reform was a dangerous one, as William Cobbett was to find.Cobbett is best known for his ‘Rural Rides’, a classic account of early-19th-century Britain which has never been out of print. But he was a much greater figure than that implies, being the foremost satirist and proponent of reform of the time. He had a taste for provoking the deceit and vanity of the supposedly good and great, and had an abiding hatred of the establishment, or ‘The Thing’, as he christened it. In the pages of his ‘Political Register’ he lambasted corruption and excoriated hypocrisy, and was forever in fear of prosecution for libel, for which he was sent to Newgate prison for two years, which was the cause of his bankruptcy and forced him to flee to America.For all that the establishment loathed and feared him, the people loved him, and he was greeted by adoring crowds wherever he went. He was a hero of his time, and Richard Ingram’s admirable biography is both judicious, moving, sometimes funny and always utterly engaging.
The Life
and Adventures of
WILLIAM COBBETT
RICHARD INGRAMS
CONTENTS
COVER (#u944dd3b2-af77-519b-8850-09d0ec991dd4)
TITLE PAGE (#ud728ec7e-85a8-5885-9c8d-fddb32e33fd8)
INTRODUCTION (#u1709def0-fabb-5080-a98b-04d30bc9a8b1)
1 A Sweet Old Boy (#u9b7a3b27-3ad5-5a24-b769-9ff92fbf5a1e)
2 Off to Philadelphia (#ub79d46fd-c63f-5b68-b6ef-900f81253029)
3 England Revisited (#uf36534a2-457d-55fd-b4d7-1c1a555a667a)
4 A Convert to Reform (#u450b39fd-b654-5a50-95c2-f282b46e6ae1)
5 Behind Bars (#litres_trial_promo)
6 America Revisited (#litres_trial_promo)
7 Queen’s Counsel (#litres_trial_promo)
8 Rural Rider (#litres_trial_promo)
9 The Final Prosecution (#litres_trial_promo)
10 A Great Event (#litres_trial_promo)
11 Member for Oldham (#litres_trial_promo)
12 End of the Journey (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
REFERENCES (#litres_trial_promo)
BIBLIOGRAPHY (#litres_trial_promo)
INDEX (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)
PRAISE (#litres_trial_promo)
BY THE SAME AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)
COPYRIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo)
INTRODUCTION (#ulink_c3d9fcde-ee4c-5a39-9bd4-454fa81c5a5e)
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 (#ulink_8d477508-6c17-56e6-97c2-f47f87fc0204)
‘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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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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
(#ulink_aeb0e415-b581-5f25-8b58-437fca14fc97)) 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.’
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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.’
(#litres_trial_promo) ‘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.’
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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.
(#ulink_47c49c76-d79a-5c8f-9fe2-5c33e306dee6) According to the Office of National Statistics, the modern (2004) equivalent of £1 in 1810 is £49.67.
2 OFF to PHILADELPHIA (#ulink_9dea9d65-6852-5dd7-803d-d9e90f869d25)
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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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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:
