The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2 OFF to PHILADELPHIA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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