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If he had been the very best subject in England in place of one of the very worst, what could the law have done more for him? Nothing certainly can be stronger proof of the independence of the courts of justice, and of the impartial execution of the laws of England than the circumstances and result of this case. A man who had for many years been the avowed and open enemy of the government and constitution, had his property destroyed by a mob, who declared themselves the friends of both, and who rose on him because he was not. This mob were pursued by the government whose cause they thought they were defending: some of them suffered death, and the inhabitants of the place where they assembled were obliged to indemnify the man whose property they had destroyed. It would be curious to know what sort of protection this reverend Doctor, this ‘friend of humanity’ wanted. Would nothing satisfy him but the blood of the whole mob? Did he wish to see the town of Birmingham, like that of Lyons, razed and all its industries and inhabitants butchered; because some of them had been carried to commit unlawful excesses from their detestation of his wicked projects? BIRMINGHAM HAS COMBATTED AGAINST PRIESTLEY, BIRMINGHAM IS NO MORE.
Such an extract is enough to show Cobbett’s clear, strong invective – his meaning immediately clear, his mastery of the language absolute. En passant he could not avoid indicting Priestley, not only for his political and religious failings, but for writing bad English: ‘His style is uncouth and superlatively diffuse. Always involved in minutiae, every sentence is a string of parentheses in finding the end of which, the reader is lucky if he does not lose the proposition that they were meant to illustrate. In short, the whole of his phraseology is entirely disgusting; to which may be added, that, even in point of grammar, he is very often incorrect.’
Cobbett’s energies however were in the main directed, not just in the Priestley pamphlet but in all his American writings, to attacking the Democrat party, and particularly, during his first years, to supporting the treaty with Britain that Washington, along with his Chief Justice John Jay, was desperately trying to get the Senate to ratify. The British government, now at war with revolutionary France, was naturally keen to stop America allying itself with the enemy. But such were the strong pro-French feelings among the Democrat politicians and the Philadelphians that it was proving a difficult task. A hysterical enthusiasm for France and the French Revolution was then the dominant political passion in the United States, and especially in Philadelphia. France had assisted America with troops and money during the War of Independence, and many Americans felt that their own revolution had inspired the French. None of the excesses of the French Jacobins could dampen the enthusiasm. Street names which included the words ‘King’, ‘Queen’ or ‘Prince’ were changed, democratic societies were formed, and men cut their hair in the ‘Brutus crop’.
Cobbett noted how some Americans even adopted the French habit of referring to one another as ‘Citizen’ and wore tricolour cockades. ‘The delirium seized even the women and children. I have heard more than one young woman, under the age of twenty, declare that they would willingly have dipped their hands in the blood of the Queen of France.’
As the birthplace of American independence, Philadelphia was one of the main centres of revolutionary pro-French frenzy. Following the execution in January 1793 of Louis XVI (formerly the ally of America), a celebratory dinner was held in the city at which a pig was decapitated and the head carried round for all the diners to mutilate with their knives. When France declared war on England the following month the French Ambassador to the United States, Edmond Genet, sent to win over America to the French cause, was given an ecstatic welcome by the Philadelphians. He had been preceded by the French frigate Ambuscade which sailed up the Delaware and anchored off the Market Street wharf flying a flag with the legend ‘Enemies of equality, reform or tremble!’. When Genet himself arrived two weeks later the citizens went wild with excitement. John Adams recalled: ‘Ten thousand men were in the streets of Philadelphia day after day, threatening to drag Washington out of his house and effect a revolution in the government, or compel it to declare in favour of the French, and against England.’ At a dinner given at Oeller’s Hotel toasts were drunk to ‘Liberty’ and ‘Equality’, a special ode recited and the Marseillaise sung – with everyone joining in the chorus (‘I leave the reader to guess,’ wrote Cobbett, ‘at the harmony of this chorus, bellowed forth from the drunken lungs of about a hundred fellows of a dozen different nations’).
The bulk of Cobbett’s early journalism was concerned with combating such hysteria. In gruesome and gory detail he catalogued all the excesses of the Jacobins in France, poured scorn on their supporters such as Thomas Paine and, generally speaking, commended those Americans, like Washington, who advocated neutrality in the dispute between France and England. In ‘A Bone to Gnaw for the Democrats’ (1795), published under his pseudonym ‘Peter Porcupine’, he savaged those American republicans who were currently predicting an English revolution. The following year he published a much longer pamphlet with a much longer, if self-explanatory, title: ‘The Bloody Buoy, Thrown Out as a Warning to the Political Pilots of America: or a Faithful Relation of a Multitude of Acts of Horrid Barbarity, Such as the Eye Never Witnessed, the Tongue Never Expressed, or the Imagination Conceived, Until the Commencement of the French Revolution, to Which is Added an Instructive Essay, Tracing These Dreadful Effects to Their Real Causes’. Although they went against the general mood, these pamphlets enjoyed an immediate success. Three editions of ‘A Bone to Gnaw’ were published in less than three months, and Cobbett’s other pamphlets were constantly reprinted in both England and America.
In the meantime, Cobbett had become a father again, and this time the child was destined to live. A daughter, Anne, was born on 11 July 1795, at a time of great heat in the city. His wife Nancy, who was having trouble breastfeeding, was also unable to sleep because of the incessant barking of the Philadelphia dogs:
I was, about nine in the evening sitting by the bed. ‘I do think’ said she ‘that I could go to sleep now if it were not for the dogs.’ Downstairs I went, and out I sallied, in my shirt and trousers, and without shoes and stockings; and going to a heap of stones lying beside the road, set to work upon the dogs, going backward and forward, and keeping them at two or three hundred yards distance from the house. I walked thus the whole night, bare-footed, lest the noise of my shoes might possibly reach her ears; and I remember that the bricks of the causeway were, even in the night, so hot as to be disagreeable to my feet. My exertions produced the desired effect; a sleep of several hours was the consequence, and, at eight o’clock in the morning, off I went to a day’s business, which was to end at six in the evening.
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Cobbett went to enormous pains to help his wife with the baby: ‘I no more thought of spending a moment away from her, unless business compelled me, than I thought of quitting the country and going to sea.’ Apart from the dogs, Nancy was alarmed by the frequent and violent thunderstorms in Philadelphia. Cobbett used to run home as soon as he suspected a storm was on the way. ‘The Frenchmen who were my scholars, used to laugh at me exceedingly on this account; and sometimes when I was making an appointment with them, they would say, with a smile and a bow, “Sauve la Tonnerre toujours, Monsieur Cobbett.”’
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Such devotion to his wife’s needs was all the more commendable in someone who was, as always, intensely active. Cobbett was now doing so well from his journalism and teaching that he decided to set up on his own as a publisher and bookseller. In May 1796 he moved with wife and baby into a house-cum-shop at 25 North Second Street, opposite Christ Church and near the terminus for the coaches to Baltimore and New York. He was taking a considerable risk. For the first time he was emerging in public from the cloak of anonymity, and setting up shop in the centre of town. ‘Till I took this house,’ he wrote later, ‘I had remained almost entirely unknown as a writer. A few persons did, indeed, know that I was the person, who had assumed the name of Peter Porcupine: but the fact was by no means a matter of notoriety. The moment, however, that I had taken a lease on a large house, the transaction became a topic of public conversation, and the eyes of the Democrats and the French, who still lorded it over the city, and who owed me a mutual grudge, were fixed upon me. I thought my situation somewhat perilous. Such tracts as I had published, no man had dared to utter, in the United States, since the rebellion. I knew that those truths had mortally offended the leading men amongst the Democrats, who could, at any time, muster a mob quite sufficient to destroy my house, and to murder me … In short, there were, in Philadelphia, about ten thousand persons, all of whom would have rejoiced to see me murdered: and there might, probably, be two thousand, who would have been very sorry for it: but not above fifty of whom would have stirred an inch to save me.’
As the bookshop’s opening day approached Cobbett’s friends, from among the fifty, urged him to be cautious, to do nothing to provoke retaliation. He, however, like Nelson, decided that the bravest course was also the safest. His shop had large windows, and on the Sunday prior to opening he filled them with all the prints he possessed of ‘Kings, Queens, Princes and Nobles. I had all the English ministry; several of the bishops and judges; the most famous admirals: and in short, every picture that I thought likely to excite rage in the enemies of Great Britain. Never since the beginning of the rebellion, had any one dared to hoist at his window the portrait of George the Third.’
On Monday morning Cobbett took down his shutters and opened the shop. Although a large crowd collected, nothing happened. The only threat of violence came in the form of an anonymous letter to his landlord John Oldden, a Quaker merchant of Chesnut (sic) Street:
Sir, a certain William Cobbett alias Peter Porcupine, I am informed is your tenant. This daring scoundrell [sic] not satisfied with having repeatedly traduced the people of this country; in his detestable productions, he has now the astonishing effrontery to expose those very publications at his window for sale … When the time of retribution arrives it may not be convenient to discriminate between the innocent and the guilty. Your property may suffer. As a friend therefore I advise you to save your property by either compelling Mr Porcupine to leave your house or at all events oblige him to cease exposing his abominable proclivities or any of his courtley [sic] prints at his window for sale. In this way only you may avoid danger to your house and perhaps save the rotten carcase of your tenant for the present.
Cobbett used the letter as the pretext for another fiery pamphlet, ‘The Scarecrow’ (1796). But although he affected great indignation he actually enjoyed engaging in controversy with his opponents. There was to be more than enough of this now that he had come out into the open and revealed the true identity of Peter Porcupine. Several pamphlets resulted: Cobbett was accused of being a deserter, a British government spy and a criminal who had fled to America to escape the gallows. They said he had been whipped when he was in Paris – hence his hatred of the French.
Cobbett was astute enough to realise that all such attacks were not just good for business but a tribute to the success of his campaign. He also knew that he was a better writer than any of his critics. In reply to them he quoted a letter to his father: ‘“Dear Father, when you used to get me off to work in the morning, dressed in my blue smock-frock and woollen spatterdashes, with my bag of bread and cheese and bottle of small beer slung over my shoulder on the little crook that my old god-father Boxall gave me, little did you imagine that I should one day become so great a man as to have my picture stuck in the windows and have four whole books published about me in the course of one week” – Thus begins a letter which I wrote to my father yesterday morning and which, if it reaches him, will make the old man drink an extraordinary pot of ale to my health. Heaven bless him. I think I see him now by his old-fashioned fire-side reading the letter to his neighbours’ – an unlikely scenario, in view of the fact that George Cobbett had been dead for four years. It would have been most unlike Cobbett to deceive his readers about this, and the assumption must be that, having been out of the country since early 1792 he had not been in touch with his family. This in turn suggests that, contrary to the impression he liked to give, Cobbett had never been close to either his father or his three brothers.
In 1796, as part of his continuing campaign to answer his critics, Cobbett published his short autobiography The Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine, in which he gave the Americans a vivid and appealing account of his boyhood in Farnham, his escape from home and his army career. It is one of his best pieces of writing, and served its purpose in showing that he was not just a hack pamphleteer but a writer with a genuinely independent spirit. The following year, 1797, he launched a daily newspaper, Porcupine’s Gazette, and closed down his monthly periodical the Political Censor. The paper was an immediate success, Cobbett claming in the first issue that he already had a thousand subscribers. By November three thousand copies were being printed. The paper flourished for the simple reason that, as the sales figures suggest, the American public, even though they might disagree with Cobbett’s views, enjoyed his writing – the robust straightforward style, the knockabout, the jokes and the nicknames.
As a journalist Cobbett was at his best when he could focus his animosity on a particular individual rather than a set of principles or ideas. This is not to say that he was uninterested in ideas, only that he needed someone, like Dr Priestley, to personify the particular variety of political hypocrisy he was attacking at any time. Labelled with appropriate nicknames, these favoured targets (mentioned at every opportunity) lent a powerful spice to his political journalism, making it compulsive reading even for his enemies. Many of the victims of his most savage attacks were not necessarily his political opponents, but had aroused his indignation by being humourless, puritanical in their attitude to morality or, above all, vain. Priestley was one such. William Wilberforce would later be another. A third was Noah Webster (1758–1843) of Webster’s Dictionary fame, a lexicographer, a grammarian, the author of a spelling book for American schools and the man responsible for the differences between American and English spelling (‘color’ for ‘colour’, etc.). Webster came from a family of strict Puritans and was highly industrious in any number of fields – though Jefferson called him ‘a mere pedagogue of very limited understanding’. Cobbett was even ruder, despite the fact that Webster supported the federalists, and missed no opportunity to call him names:
despicable creature … viper … mean shuffling fellow … were this man indeed distinguished as being descended from a famous race, for great learning and talents, for important public services, for possessing much weight in the opinions of the people, even his vanity would be inexcusable but the fellow is distinguished, amongst the few who know him, for the very contrary of all this. He comes of obscure parents, he has just learning enough to make him a fool, his public services have all been confined to silly, idle projects, every one of which has completely failed, and as to his weight as a politician, it is that of a feather, which is overbalanced by a straw, and puffed away by the gentlest breath. All his measures are exploded, his predictions have proved false, not a single sentiment of his has become fashionable, nor has the Federal Government ever adopted a single measure which he has been in the habit of recommending.
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Webster later saw a chance of revenge following the passing of a Sedition Act by Washington in 1798 which made it illegal ‘to write, print, utter or publish any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the Government of the United States’. Although the Act was intended to be used against French writers – by this time the USA had broken off relations with France and was preparing for war – Webster decided it could equally well be used against people like Cobbett. Affecting, like many of his type, not to have personally seen the attacks, he wrote to the Secretary of State Timothy Pickering: ‘The violence and resentment of the English knows no bounds. They are intolerably insolent and strive, by all possible means to lessen the circulation of my papers.’ (He need not have bothered, as by that stage proceedings were already under way.)
A more formidable opponent than Webster was Thomas McKean (1734–1817), a lawyer of Scottish descent who involved himself in politics, became one of the most ardent advocates of separation prior to the war with Britain, and was a signatory of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The following year McKean became the Chief Justice of Pennsylvania (a post he occupied for twenty years), and he was elected President of Congress in 1781. Though a keen Democrat and francophile, McKean was deeply conservative in matters of law, besides being, in the words of his contemporary Thomas Rodney, a man ‘of great vanity, extremely fond of power and entirely governed by passions, ever pursuing the object present with warm, enthusiastic zeal without much reflection or forecast’.
(#litres_trial_promo) A recent biographer describes him as ‘almost pathological in his insistence upon deference in his political and judicial capacities’. Among other insults, Cobbett called him ‘a little upstart tyrant’, or ‘Mrs McKean’s husband’ (the suggestion being that he was under the thumb of his dominating wife).
Already needled by these jibes, McKean was only too happy to act when his prospective son-in-law Don Carlos Martinez de Yrujo, the Spanish Ambassador, complained of certain disobliging comments which Cobbett made about himself and the Spanish King Charles IV, who had appointed him. On 18 August 1796 Cobbett was arrested and charged with criminal libel (the first of a long series of such setbacks). In a lengthy indictment McKean expressed his distaste not just for Cobbett but for all forms of satire against public figures (such as himself): ‘where libels are printed against persons employed in a public capacity they receive an aggravation, as they tend to scandalize the government by reflecting those who are entrusted with the administration of public affairs’. Political journalism had got quite out of hand, in McKean’s view:
Everyone who has in him the sentiments of either a Christian or a gentleman cannot but be highly offended at the envenomed scurrility that has raged in pamphlets and newspapers … in so much that libelling has become a kind of national crime, and distinguishes us not only from all the states around us, but from the whole civilized world …
Impressed with the duties of my station, I have used some endeavours for checking these evils, by binding over the editor and printer of one of them, licentious and virulent beyond all former example, to his good behaviour; but he still perseveres in his nefarious publications; he has ransacked our language for terms of reproach and insult, and for the basest accusations against every ruler and distinguished character in France and Spain, with which we chance to have any intercourse, which it is scarce in nature to forgive …
McKean created something of a precedent by appearing as both judge and witness at the trial, but despite this the jury sided with Cobbett by a majority of one. Not content with the verdict, McKean now made efforts to have Cobbett deported from the United States as an undesirable alien. When these failed he compiled a selection of Cobbett’s writings, including various alleged libels on public figures. Following a trial Cobbett was bound over for $4000 to be of good behaviour, at which point a more prudent man might have left McKean alone. Cobbett however was determined not to be silenced. He was especially eager to prove that despite the First Amendment the American press was no more free than the British. In a pamphlet, ‘The Democratic Judge’ (1798), he railed against the iniquity of the proceedings, pointing out (inter alia) that his comments about the King of Spain and his Ambassador were mild stuff compared to some of the scurrilous comments on George III and his allies which McKean had allowed freely to circulate. In the English edition (copies of which no doubt reached America) Cobbett tore into McKean in what must be one of the most defamatory attacks ever launched against a public figure:
His private character is infamous. He beats his wife and she beats him. He ordered a wig to be imported for him by Mr. Kid, refused to pay for it, the dispute was referred to the court of Nisi Prius; where (merely for want of the original invoice which Kid had lost) the Judge came off victorious! He is a notorious drunkard. The whole bar, one lawyer excepted, signed a memorial, stating, that so great a drunkard was he, that after dinner, person and property were not safe in Pennsylvania. He has been horsewhipped in the City Tavern, and kicked in the street for his insolence to particular persons; and yet this degraded wretch is Chief Justice of the State!
McKean, a proud, vain man, was not the sort of person to forget such an attack. In 1797, following the second of two outbreaks of yellow fever in Philadelphia, a further opportunity for prosecution arose as a result of Cobbett’s libels of another of the city’s most distinguished citizens, Dr Benjamin Rush. Rush (1745–1813) was, like McKean, a signatory of the Declaration of Independence, a close friend of Noah Webster and a fanatical republican. He had begun his career as a lawyer but changed to medicine, studying at Edinburgh University and St Thomas’s Hospital, London (where he met Dr Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith and Joshua Reynolds). Returning to Philadelphia, he began to practise medicine and had already made a name for himself when the War of Independence broke out. Rush was appointed Surgeon General to the armies, but quarrelled with George Washington and returned to his medical practice. Though a pioneer in many medical and veterinary fields (he has been credited with the possibly dubious distinction of being the founder of American psychiatry), his approach to more conventional medical matters was misguided, to put it mildly. Following the lead of the famous Edinburgh physician John Brown, Rush came to believe that nearly all ailments, even the common cold, sore throat or headache, were caused by ‘a state of excessive excitability of a spasm in the blood vessels’, and hence in most cases called for the one treatment of ‘depletion’ through bleeding and purging. ‘This conception was so simple that it came to hold for his speculative mind all the fascination of an ultimate panacea.’
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The test of Rush’s theory came in 1793 when the first of the epidemics of yellow fever struck Philadelphia, resulting in the death of several thousand citizens. Basing his remarks on Rush’s own account (published in 1794), Cobbett later described the doctor’s technique, prior to his discovery of bleeding.
At the first breaking out of the Yellow Fever, he made use of ‘gentle purges’; these he laid aside, and had recourse to ‘a gentle vomit of ipecacuanha’; next he ‘gave bark in all its usual forms, of infusion, powder and tincture, and joined wine, brandy and aromatics with it’; this was followed by ‘the application of blisters to the limbs, neck and head’; these torments were succeeded by ‘an attempt to rouse the system by wrapping the whole body in blankets dipped in warm vinegar’; he next ‘rubbed the right side with mercurial ointment, with a view of exciting the action of the vessels through the medium of the liver’; after this he again returned to bark, which he gave ‘in large quantities and in one case ordered it to be injected into the bowels once in four hours’; and, at last, having found that wrapping his patient in blankets dipped in warm vinegar did no good, he directed buckets full of cold water to be thrown frequently upon them!!!
Surprising as it may seem his patients died!
Rush was not a bad man, in fact he was a very conscientious and industrious practitioner. But he was excessively vain, quick-tempered and lacking in humour (he must have been painfully aware that the high death rate disproved his claim that the yellow fever was no more dangerous than measles or influenza). The attack coming from an Englishman, one moreover with no knowledge at all of medicine, was doubly insulting to a man of his self-importance. He later wrote of receiving torrents of abuse from ‘one Cobbett, an English alien who then resided in Philadelphia’,
(#litres_trial_promo) and in October 1797 he issued a writ for libel. But if he was hoping thereby to silence his antagonist, he was unsuccessful. ‘The Doctor,’ Cobbett wrote, ‘finds his little reputation as a physician, in as dangerous a way as ever a poor yellow fever man was in, half an hour after he was called to his aid. We wanted no hints from Dr Rush. We know very well what we ought to do; and, if God grants us life we shall do it completely.’
Cobbett accordingly redoubled his attacks on the doctor. Among other misdeeds, Rush, he claimed (7 October 1797), had ‘appointed two illiterate negro men and sent them into the alleys and bye places of the city, with orders to bleed and give his sweating purges, to all they should find sick, without regard to age, sex or constitution; and bloody and dirty work they have among the poor miserable creatures that fell in their way … I know several that he terrified into chilly fits, some into relapses and some into convulsions, by stopping them in the street and declaring they had the fever – You’ve got it! You’ve got it! was his usual salutation upon seeing anyone with a pale countenance.’
Rush’s action against Cobbett for libel was set down for trial in December 1797. Realising that he had little chance of successfully defending the suit in Philadelphia, Cobbett had made an application to Chief Justice McKean to have the case transferred to the Federal Court – which, he claimed, as an alien, he was entitled to do by the American Constitution:
It was towards the evening of the last day of the session when Mr Thomas [Cobbett’s lawyer], albeit unused to the modest mode, stole up gently from his seat, and in a faint and trembling voice, told the Bashaw [Pasha] McKean that he had a petition to present in behalf of William Cobbett. For some time he did not make himself heard. There was a great talking all round the bar; Levi, the lawyer was reading a long formal paper to Judges, and the judges were laughing over the chitchat of the day. Amidst the noisy mirth that surrounded him, there stood poor Thomas, with his papers in his hand, like a culprit at school just as the boys are breaking up. By and by, one of those pauses, which frequently occur in even the most numerous and vociferous assemblies, encouraged him to make a fresh attempt. ‘I present’ says he ‘may it please your honours, a petition in behalf of William Cobbett.’ The moment the sound of the word Cobbett struck the ear of McKean he turned towards the bar, and having learnt the subject of the petition, began to storm like a madman. A dead silence ensued. The little scrubby lawyers (with whom the courts of Pennsylvania are continually crowded) crouched from fear, just like a brood of poultry, when the kite is preparing to pounce in amongst them; whilst hapless Thomas, who stood up piping like a straggled chicken, seemed already to feel the talons of the judicial bird of prey. He proceeded, however, to read the petition, which being very short was got through with very little interruption, when he came to the words, ‘subject of his Britannic Majesty,’ McKean did, indeed grin most horribly, and I could very distinctly hear, ‘Insolent scoundrel!’ – ‘damned aristocrat’ – ‘damned Englishman!’ etc etc from the mouths of the sovereign people. But neither their execration, nor the savage looks that accompanied them, prevented me from fulfilling my purpose. I went up to the clerk of the court, took the book in my hand, and holding it up, that it might be visible to all parts of the hall, I swore, in a voice that everyone might hear, that I preserved my allegiance to my King; after which I put on my hat, and walked out of the Court followed by the admiration of the few and by the curses of the many.
McKean, predictably, threw out the petition, and after many delays the case finally came in on 13 December 1799. By this time, anticipating certain defeat, Cobbett had left Philadelphia and was living in New York. The move was only partly dictated by prudence. The political mood had changed, the pro-French frenzy had subsided – Napoleon had taken charge in France – and as a result the circulation of Porcupine’s Gazette, which had relied so much on attacking the Jacobins, had declined. Cobbett’s intention, however, was to resume publication of the paper in New York, where he would be out of McKean’s jurisdiction. ‘Yesterday,’ he wrote to his friend Edward Thornton at the British Embassy (18 November 1799), ‘all my goods sailed for New York, so that they are no longer, I hope, within the grasp of the sovereign people of Pennsylvania. I have some few things left at my house in 2nd Street, which will there be sold by auction, under the direction of one of my friends: in the meantime I am preparing to follow the rest, and I propose to set out from here about this day week.’ Cobbett left town on 9 December, and four days later McKean brought on the Rush libel action before three of his old colleagues. The president was Justice Edward Shippen, a candidate for McKean’s former position of Chief Justice. At the end of the case, which lasted only two days, the jury awarded Rush damages of $5000, and four days later Justice Shippen was rewarded with the job.
It was a shattering blow for Cobbett, who claimed that the damages amounted to more than the total of all those ever awarded by the Philadelphia court in libel actions. One of his lawyers, Edward Tilghman, advised him to flee the country immediately, but, very typically, Cobbett was determined to stand his ground. He wrote to Edward Thornton (25 December 1799):
‘No,’ said I to Tilghman, in answer to his advice for immediate flight. ‘No, Sir, the miscreants may, probably, rob me of all but my honour, but that, in these degenerate times, I cannot spare. To flee from a writ (however falsely and illegally obtained) is what I will never do; for though, generally speaking, to leave the United States at this time, would be little more disgraceful than it was for Lot to run from Sodom under a shower of fire and brimstone; yet with a writ at my heels, I will never go.’
Nancy Cobbett was in full agreement:
Though she feels as much as myself on these occasions, nothing humbles her; nothing sinks her spirits but personal danger to me or our children. The moment she heard Tilghman’s advice, she rejected it … she nobly advised me to stay, sell off my stock, pay the money, and go home with the trifle that may remain. It is the misfortune of most wives to be cunning on these occasions. ‘Ah, did I not tell you so!’ – Never did I hear a reproach of this kind from my wife. When times are smooth she will contradict and blame me often enough in all conscience; but when difficulties come on me, when danger approaches us, then all I say and do, and all I have said and done is right.
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Cobbett had his revenge on Rush by publishing a new paper, running to five numbers in all, called the Rush-Light, which for the power of its invective outclassed anything he had so far done. Dubbing Rush variously ‘the noted bleeding physician of Philadelphia … the Philadelphia phlebotomist … the Pennsylvania Hippocrates’, he subjected the doctor, his character and his career to savage ridicule, seizing on all his more preposterous theories – his belief that Negroes were black because of leprosy and would turn white once the disease had been eradicated – or the fact that in the grounds of the Pennsylvania Hospital Rush had erected a kind of gallows ‘with a rope suspended from it … for the purpose of curing insanity by swinging’. He went on to demonstrate the absurdity of Rush’s claim that the yellow fever of 1793 constituted no more of a threat than measles or the common cold simply by producing the daily mortality figures following Rush’s pronouncement:
Thus, you see, that though the Fever was, on the 12th September, reduced to a level with a common cold; though the lancet was continually unsheathed; though Rush and his subalterns were ready at every call, the deaths did actually increase; and, incredible as it may seem, this increase grew with that of the very practice which saved more than ninety-nine patients out of a hundred! Astonishing obstinacy! Perverse Philadelphians! Notwithstanding there was a man in your city who could have healed you at a touch, you continued to die! Notwithstanding the precious purges were advertised at every corner, and were brought to your doors and bedsides by Old Women and Negroes; notwithstanding life was offered on terms the most reasonable and accommodating, still you persisted in dying! Nor did barely dying content you. It was not enough for you to reject the means of prolonging your existence, but you must begin to drop off the faster from the moment that those means were presented to you: and this, for no earthly purpose I can see, but the malicious one of injuring the reputation of the ‘Saving Angel’ whom ‘a kind providence’ had sent to your assistance!
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Cobbett also pointed out with glee that on the very same day that the jury had found against him in the Rush libel action, the President, George Washington, had died after being copiously bled in accordance with Rush’s theories. ‘On that day,’ he wrote, ‘the victory of RUSH and of DEATH was complete.’
Cobbett’s barbs were directed not only at McKean, Rush and the judge (Shippen), but at the jury, all of whose names and addresses he listed, and all the lawyers, including his own, Robert G. Harper, who he maintained had let him down while secretly supporting the other side. In common with almost every other libel lawyer through the ages, Rush’s counsel Joseph Hopkinson (the author of the patriotic poem ‘Hail Columbia’) had emphasised the great personal distress caused not only to his client but to his whole family:
Hopkinson, towards the close of a dozen pages of lies, nonsense, and bombast, gave the tender-hearted Jury a most piteous picture of the distress produced in Rush’s family by my publications against the ‘immaculate father.’ He throws the wife into hysterics, makes a deep wound in the heart, and tears, with remorseless rage, all the ‘fine fibres and delicate sympathies of conjugal love.’ From the mother, whom I have never mentioned in my life till now, he comes to the children, ‘of nice feelings and generous sensibility.’ The daughters, he, of course, sets to weeping: ‘but manlier passions swell, agitate and inflame the breasts of HIS SONS. They burn, they burst with indignation; rage, revenge, drive them headlong to desperate deeds, accumulating woe on woe.
The Rush-Light had a huge sale as well as being printed in England, and may well have caused Dr Rush to regret having sued Cobbett in the first place. Certainly it would seem to have upset him more than the original libel (Cobbett, he complained, had ‘vented his rage in a number of publications of the same complexion with those he had published in his newspaper, but with many additional falsehoods. They were purchased, lent and read with great avidity by most of the citizens of Philadelphia, and my children were insulted with them at school, and in the public streets’). Shortly afterwards he began writing a long, self-justifying memoir, Travels Through Life, in which he set out to correct the damage done to his reputation by Cobbett.
By this time Cobbett, threatened with renewed legal prosecution by McKean and realising that his journalistic scope was limited by his being effectively barred from Philadelphia, decided to return to England, where he knew he had acquired a host of readers, not to mention influential admirers in government circles. ‘The court of Philadelphia will sit again on the 2nd of June next,’ he wrote to Thornton (25 April 1800), ‘when the cause of old McKean versus Peter Porcupine will be brought on … In order, therefore, to save 2000 dollars, I propose sailing by the June packet, and am making my preparations accordingly … By the assistance of my friend Morgan, I shall be able to carry home about 10,000 dollars which … will leave me wherewith to open a shop somewhere in the West End of the town. I have revolved various projects in my mind; but this always returns upon me as the most eligible, most congenial to my disposition, and as giving the greatest scope to that sort of talent and industry which I possess … A stranger in the great city of London, and not only a stranger to the people, but to the mode of doing business, I shall feel very awkward for a time; but this will wear away.’
The Cobbetts set sail from Halifax on 11 June 1800 on the Lady Arabella. They took with them a young Frenchman, Edward Demonmaison, who was working as Cobbett’s secretary. It was not a pleasant voyage. Captain Porteus Cobbett described as ‘the greatest blackguard I ever met with’, while two army officers travelling on the boat ‘smoked Mrs Cobbett to death … talked in the most vulgar strain, and even sang morsels of bawdry in her presence’. The ship had narrowly escaped being captured by a French privateer, and on arrival in Falmouth the ‘gentry’ went into the custom house and attempted to embarrass Cobbett by reporting that he was accompanied by a foreigner (Demonmaison) – ‘when, to their utter astonishment, the collector asked if it was that Mr Cobbett who had gone under the name of Porcupine and upon receiving the affirmative, ordered the Capt. to send on board to tell me, that he should be happy to oblige me in any way he could, and that the rules concerning foreigners should be dispensed with concerning my clerk, or any person for whom I would pass my word’.
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3 ENGLAND REVISITED (#ulink_4dccb3b9-cb91-5c9b-85a1-3d283265f20e)
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’.
(#ulink_38830f2c-90a6-546f-b50c-8c409c024ed9) 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.
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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
(#ulink_67cef9cd-762e-5d97-a308-3e92bd8b7fb9) 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.’
(#litres_trial_promo) 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
(#ulink_fc680ad2-3c5f-545c-99ed-332193e84e3d) 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.
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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.’
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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.’
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’
(#litres_trial_promo) 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!!!’
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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.’
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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.
