The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett

During his Porcupine years in America Cobbett had joined in the hate campaign as wholeheartedly as anyone. His pamphlet ‘The Life of Thomas Paine’ (1796) is as vituperative as anything he ever wrote: ‘The scoundrel of a staymaker … the hoary blasphemer … he has done all the mischief he can in the world and … whenever or wherever he breathes his last, he will excite neither sorrow nor compassion.’ Cobbett again abused him in his paper the Political Censor, calling him an ‘atrocious infamous miscreant’ and many things besides. (George Washington approved, though making ‘allowances for the asperity of an Englishman for some of his strong and coarse expressions’.9) Yet it was now this very same blasphemer and miscreant who had managed to open Cobbett’s eyes to the nature of the economic system. Had he been wrong about Paine? And was it possible that all those politicians and writers who had portrayed Paine as the devil incarnate were equally mistaken?

In 1796 Paine had written a famous letter to Washington, whose victory over the British he had helped so much to secure, attacking the President for failing to come to his aid when he was in prison in Paris facing execution. The letter is an eloquent testimony to the general ingratitude of politicians, once they achieved power, to those who have helped them along the way. Cobbett himself was beginning to experience the same reaction. He might have thought, after the assistance he had given the government by writing, for free, ‘Important Considerations’ at the time invasion threatened, that he and his Political Register would be helped in return. On the contrary, in 1804 he found himself once again facing a libel charge.

As usual, England’s difficulty was Ireland’s opportunity. In 1803 the Irish republicans, on this occasion led by Robert Emmet, mounted a rebellion, killing the Lord Chief Justice and several English soldiers. In the Political Register Cobbett attacked the Addington government for its lack of foresight, stating that Ireland was ‘in a state of total neglect and abandonment’.10 The article was followed by three anonymous letters from Ireland signed ‘Juverna’. With a stylish and satirical pen ‘Juverna’ accused the English authorities, and in particular the Lord Lieutenant, Lord Hardwicke, of failing to do anything to prevent the uprising although they had advance information that it was going to take place. Hardwicke, it was claimed, had even returned to his official residence in Phoenix Park in order not to be in any personal danger, and had subsequently done everything possible to blame the military commander, General Fox, for what had happened. Obviously well informed, ‘Juverna’ peppered his account of the incident with a number of satirical asides on the British politicians involved, suggesting, for example, that Hardwicke was typical of ‘that tribe who have been sent over to us to be trained up here into politicians as they train the surgeons’ apprentices in the hospitals by setting them at first to bleed the pauper patients’. He was, the author continued, ‘in rank an earl, in manners a gentleman, in morals a good father and a good husband … celebrated for understanding the modern method of fattening sheep as well as any man in Cambridgeshire’.

The offence of criminal (or seditious) libel with which Cobbett was now charged had been a convenient weapon in the hands of successive governments since the sixteenth century, when according to a modern commentator ‘the Star Chamber regarded with the deepest suspicion the printed word in general, and anything which looked like criticism of the established institutions of Church and State in particular’.11 John Wilkes, the great champion of press freedom, had been prosecuted for criminal libel, and throughout the first decades of the nineteenth century the charge was regularly used to silence persistent critics of the government, when necessary by putting them in prison.

In Cobbett’s trial the thrust of the attack by the prosecuting attorney Spencer Perceval (later the Prime Minister) was to humiliate Cobbett in the eyes of the court by emphasising his lowly social origins. ‘Who is Mr Cobbett?’ Perceval asked contemptuously. ‘Is he a man of family in this country? Is he a man writing purely from motives of patriotism? Quis homo hic est? Quo patre natus?’ (Who is this man? Who was his father?) The Latin tags would have been chosen deliberately by the lawyer in the knowledge that Cobbett would not understand them. Such an attitude, in an age when the government consisted almost entirely of members of the aristocracy educated in the classics at the best public schools, would not have struck the jury as unjust. But it was typical of the snobbery that Cobbett was to face throughout his career. Snobbery aside, Perceval went on to suggest (with the judge’s obvious approval) that it was not permitted, by law, to ridicule the government and its ministers in the way ‘Juverna’ and the Political Register had done. An indication of the lengths to which the law officers were prepared to go in arguing this case is the way Perceval even introduced the fact that Cobbett’s paper had referred to the Prime Minister as ‘the Doctor’. In fact Addington was generally known to all his colleagues by this nickname, the origin of which was that his father had been a doctor:

I do not mean to say that the describing such a man as Mr Addington, by the epithet of Doctor Addington, is degrading to him, nor that I would advise that such an epithet should become the subject of a prosecution in a Court of Justice: but, surely no one who has the least liberality of feeling, or the least sense of decency, could think it becoming to taunt such a gentleman as Mr Addington: a gentleman who, the more he is known, the more his character will be admired. For my part, I feel no sympathy with those who think there is any wit in such titles. Mr Addington is the son of a man who most ably and skilfully practised in a liberal profession, who by his talents became justly eminent in that profession, and whose son raised himself, by his great abilities, to one of the highest offices in this country. I again say, that for any publication calling Mr Addington ‘Doctor Addington’, or for any flippancy of that nature, standing by itself, I should think it beneath the dignity of the Right honourable gentleman to make it the subject of a prosecution; but I also say, that when you see an epithet of this nature introduced, it does show the spirits with which the libel was published and that it was a systematic attack upon the whole government of Ireland, by bringing into contempt and ridicule the persons placed by his Majesty at the head of the Government.12

‘The bestowing of nicknames is a practice to which Englishmen are peculiarly addicted,’ Cobbett’s counsel William Adam answered, but he made little or no attempt to justify ‘Juverna’s’ account of the Dublin rebellion, instead devoting his speech to extolling his client as a great English patriot. Summing up, the judge, Lord Ellenborough, did nothing to disguise his bias. His final words to the jury were an ominous warning not only to Cobbett but to others who might be so foolhardy as to attack the government: ‘It has been observed [by Cobbett’s counsel] that it is the right of the British subject to exhibit the folly or imbecility of members of the Government. But gentlemen, we must confine ourselves within limits. If, in so doing, individual feelings are violated, there the line of interdiction begins, and the offence becomes the subject of penal visitation.’ Taking their cue from the learned judge, the jury brought in a verdict of guilty following deliberations which lasted for only ten minutes.

Cobbett had secured a number of prominent individuals, including Windham, to appear as character witnesses, and it was perhaps thanks to them that he escaped a prison sentence on this occasion (the Register was fined £500). It may also have been the case that he was leniently treated in comparison with other libellers for divulging to the court the identity of ‘Juverna’ – Robert Johnson, a judge of the Irish Common Pleas. Cobbett handed over some of the manuscripts of the letters to the Attorney General, and later appeared as a Crown witness when Johnson himself was put on trial in November 1805. At first sight Cobbett’s betrayal of his contributor seems despicable. But, as his biographer E.I. Carlyle points out, it is significant that the incident was never referred to afterwards by his political enemies, and given the fact that they seized on anything, however trivial, to discredit Cobbett, the likelihood is that Johnson himself agreed to be identified as the author. After being found guilty he was allowed to resign with a pension of £1200 a year.

The ‘Juverna’ trial and the threat of possible imprisonment will have unnerved Cobbett and shown him that he could not expect any favours from the establishment (what he called ‘The Thing’). But in the meantime, as the threat of invasion by Napoleon receded, he was beginning to become interested in matters beyond the political controversies of the day, the sort of issues he discussed with Windham in their regular exchange of letters.

Having been out of the country for most of his adult life, Cobbett had little or no first-hand knowledge of British politics or social institutions. In the ten years he had spent in America he had retained in his memory a picture of England as he remembered it from his boyhood, a picture of rural prosperity, cottage gardens, contented villagers – an idyllic scene. In 1804, however, he went house-hunting with his wife Anne in Hampshire (prior to their settling in Botley), and saw for himself how conditions had changed:

When I revisited the English labourer’s dwelling and that too, after having recently witnessed the happiness of labourers in America; when I saw that the clock was gone; when I saw those whom I had known the most neat, cheerful and happy beings on earth, and these my countrymen too, had become the most wretched and forlorn of human beings, I looked seriously and inquired patiently into the matter and this inquiry into the causes of the effect which had made so deep an impression on my mind, led to that series of exertions, which have occupied my whole life, since that time, to better the lot of the labourers.13

What had caused the decline? Cobbett instanced two major factors: firstly, the continuing series of enclosures, whereby the common lands which traditionally provided labourers with a source of food and fuel to supplement their earnings had been taken over or ‘privatised’ by the rich farmers and landowners in the interest of ‘greater efficiency’. Secondly, the newly introduced Poor Laws, known as the Speenhamland System, intended when they were launched in 1795 to help the poorest labourers by making up their pay from the rates, but which had the effect of branding them as paupers, so robbing them of all self-respect.

‘The labourers are humbled, debased and enslaved,’ Cobbett wrote. ‘Until of late years, there was, amongst the poor, a horror of becoming chargeable to the parish. This feeling, which was almost universal, was the parent of industry, of care, of economy, of frugality and of early habits of labour amongst children … That men should possess spirit, that there should be any independence of mind, that there should be frankness among persons so situated, is impossible. Accordingly, whoever has had experience in such matters, must have observed, with deep regret, that instead of priding himself upon his little possessions, instead of decking out his children to the best advantage, instead of laying up in store the trifling surplus produce of the harvest month, the labourer now, in but too many instances, takes care to spend all as fast as he gets it, makes himself as poor as he can and uses all the art that he is master of to cause it to be believed that he is still more miserable than he really is. What an example for the children! And what must the rising generation be!’14

The reason Cobbett became a champion of the farm labourers, who at this time, prior to the Industrial Revolution, made up the largest single section of the British workforce, was his own personal involvement with them at Botley and in the surrounding countryside. As always with Cobbett, he started from what he saw with his own eyes – in this case, workers living in an impoverished and demoralised state, in marked contrast to what he remembered from his own boyhood.

When he himself began to farm and employ labourers at Botley, Cobbett refused to have anything to do with the Speenhamland System. ‘I have made it a rule,’ he wrote, ‘that I will have the labour of no man who receives parish relief. I give him, out of my own pocket, let his family be what it may, enough to keep them well, without any regard to what wages other people give: for I will employ no pauper.’

The result, he claimed, was a contented little community: ‘It is quite delightful to see this village of Botley, when compared to the others that I know. They seem here to be quite a different race of people.’ This was no empty boast, because it was confirmed by the many witnesses like Miss Mitford who visited Cobbett at Botley. He encouraged, he said, with his workers ‘freedom in conversation, the unrestrained familiarity … without at all lessening the weight of my authority’.

And the same principle, he said, applied with his children. By 1805 when Cobbett bought the Botley home he had four children – Anne born in America in 1795, William in 1798, John in 1800 and James in 1803. They were followed by two girls, Eleanor and Susan (born 1805 and 1807), and finally by Richard (born 1814). In spite of his workload as a journalist Cobbett took an enormous interest in the welfare and education of his children. His ideas were surprisingly liberal. Remembering, perhaps, his own harsh treatment at the hands of his father, he urged parents to make their children’s lives ‘as pleasant as you possibly can’:

I have always admired the sentiment of ROUSSEAU upon this subject. ‘The boy dies, perhaps, at the age of ten or twelve. Of what use, then, all the restraints, all the privations, all the pain that you have inflicted upon him? He falls, and leaves your mind to brood over the possibility of you having abridged a life so dear to you.’ I do not recollect the very words; but the passage made a deep impression upon my mind, just at the time, too, when I was about to become a father … I was resolved to forgo all the means of making money, all the means of making a living in any thing like fashion, all the means of obtaining fame or distinction, to give up everything, to become a common labourer, rather than make my children lead a life of restraint and rebuke.15

Cobbett moved to Botley with the welfare of his children in mind. He wanted them, first of all, to be healthy and to be able to play out of doors:

Children, and especially boys, will have some out-of-doors pursuits: and it was my duty to lead them to choose such pursuits as combined future utility with present innocence. Each has his flower-bed, little garden, plantation of trees, rabbits, dogs, asses, horses, pheasants and hares; hoes, spades, whips, guns; always some object of lively interest, and as much earnestness and bustle about the various objects as if our living had solely depended upon them.

Cobbett did not believe in forcing ‘book-learning’ on his children at an early age. There were no rules or regulations:

I accomplished my purpose indirectly. The first thing of all was health which was secured by the deeply-interesting and never-ending sports of the field and pleasures of the garden. Luckily these two things were treated in books and pictures of endless variety: so that on wet days, in long evenings, these came into play. A large, strong table in the middle of the room, their mother sitting at her work, used to be surrounded with them, the baby, if big enough, set up in a high chair. Here were ink-stands, pens, pencils, india rubber, and paper, all in abundance, and everyone scrabbled about as he or she pleased. There were prints of animals of all sorts; books treating of them – others treating of gardening, of flowers, of husbandry, of hunting, coursing, shooting, fishing, planting, and, in short, of everything with regard to which we had something to do. One would be trying to imitate a bit of my writing, another drawing the pictures of some of our dogs or horses, a third poring over Bewick’s Quadrupeds, and picking out what he said about them; but our book of never-failing resource was the French MAISON RUSTIQUE or FARMHOUSE … Here are all the four-legged animals from the horse down to the mouse, portraits and all; all the birds, reptiles, insects … and there was I, in my leisure moments to join this inquisitive group, to read the French, and tell them what it meaned in English, when the picture did not sufficiently explain itself. I have never been without a copy of this book for forty years, except during the time that I was fleeing from the dungeons of CASTLEREAGH and SIDMOUTH in 1817, and, when I got to Long Island, the first book I bought was another MAISON RUSTIQUE.16

Cobbett was busily writing at this time, but he never let it interfere with his children’s pursuits: ‘My occupation to be sure was chiefly carried on at home,’ he remembered. ‘Many score of papers have I written amidst the noise of children and in my whole life never bade them be still. When they grew up to be big enough to gallop about the house I have written the whole day amidst noise that would made [sic] some authors half mad. That which you are pleased with, however noisy, does not disturb you.’

The children were teased by friends about not going to school, and his wife Nancy was especially anxious about it, but Cobbett resisted all the pressure. ‘Bless me, so tall and not learned anything yet,’ a friend would say of one of his sons. ‘Oh yes he has,’ Cobbett replied. ‘He has learned to ride, and hunt and shoot and fish and look after cattle and sheep and to work in the garden and to feed his dogs and to go from village to village in the dark.’

Cobbett’s methods bore results. His children were soon able to help him with his work, copying and taking dictation. The boys learned French and three of them later became lawyers and published books, as did his eldest daughter Anne.

* The same thing was said by Napoleon of Thomas Paine.

* ‘Job: A low mean lucrative busy affair’ (Johnson).

* Louis Otto, French agent in Britain.

4 A CONVERT to REFORM

IN JANUARY 1806 the Prime Minister William Pitt died and George III invited Lord Grenville to form a new coalition government. This was the short-lived ‘Ministry of All the Talents’, so called because it included members of the New and Old Opposition, like Cobbett’s friend and patron Windham and also Charles James Fox, to whom the King was now partially reconciled.

Cobbett was delighted by the new situation. The old enemy Pitt was gone, and at last there was an opportunity for the new ministers to introduce reform. The general assumption was that Cobbett, as Windham’s friend and protégé, would now be given some political office or sinecure. ‘Everyone thought,’ he wrote, ‘that my turn to get rich was come. I was importuned by many persons to take care of myself as they called it.’ He could benefit not just himself but also his relatives. He could obtain, with Windham’s help, promotion for his father-in-law and brother-in-law, both of whom were serving in Wellington’s army.

But Cobbett continually stressed that he had no wish to obtain favours of this kind, as anyone else in his position would have done. All he wanted was to be an adviser, to have his opinion listened to and respected not only by Windham, but by his fellow ministers like Fox. Two particular things demanded action, in his view. He was especially incensed about the activities of Francis Freeling, the Secretary of the Post Office, who had control over newspaper distribution through the post and whom he had accused of working a number of fiddles. Cobbett wanted him sacked. He also complained vehemently about the dismissal of a clerk in the Barrack Master General’s office who had exposed corruption – a story that must have affected him particularly, as it echoed his own experience in 1792 when he himself had tried to eradicate corruption in the army, only to be forced to flee the country.

As Minister for War, Windham ought to have been sympathetic to Cobbett’s various proposals, which included a long and detailed plan for the reform of the army. The trouble was that he was now part of a system so riddled with corruption of every kind that even had he felt the urge, any reforming measures would have been difficult if not impossible for him to put into effect. Though never a ‘pretty rascal’ in Dr Johnson’s phrase, Windham was surrounded by pretty rascals on every side, the War Ministry being the most notorious for corruption and nepotism. Quite apart from that, as the tone of the Political Register became more radical, more Porcupine-like, Windham had for some time been embarrassed by his association with Cobbett. Such was the way of things, with the close association of politicians and the press, and most journalists in the pay of one party or another, that the public would have assumed that Cobbett’s articles were written to Windham’s dictation. It was certainly the case that, even at this stage, people still referred to the Political Register as ‘Windham’s Gazette’. In February 1806 Windham had taken the issue up with Cobbett: ‘You can do more, too, than you have done to show that your opinions are your own.’ For his part, Cobbett resented the suggestion that anyone should feel ashamed or embarrassed at being wrongly assumed to have written his articles. He wrote to Windham: ‘Wright states that you appeared extremely vexed at the prevalence or supposed prevalence of an opinion that “all the most violent parts of the Register were either written or suggested by you …” I must confess that I am vain enough to think that, having so long been obliged to listen to the cant of the most despicable of our opponents, he has mistaken strength for violence: and I must further confess myself proud enough to hope that, from having my writings imputed to him, no man’s character has ever suffered an injury.’1

Sooner or later a break between the two men was inevitable. It came on 28 February 1806, only two weeks after the formation of the new ministry. Windham wrote in his diary: ‘Came away in carriage with Fox: got out at end of Downing St and went to office, thence to Cobbett. Probably the last interview we shall have.’ The Ministry of All the Talents collapsed, and for the remaining three years before his death in 1810 Windham did not hold office again. On 19 February 1809, in his final reference to Cobbett, he wrote: ‘Nearly the whole time from breakfast till Mr Legge’s coming down, employed in reading Cobbett. More thoroughly wicked and mischievous than almost anything that has appeared yet.’ He may have reflected ruefully that of all his achievements, the most significant had been the financing in 1802 of Cobbett’s Political Register, which came in the end to represent almost everything he most strongly disapproved of.

By now it was beginning to dawn on Cobbett, as it has dawned on others before and since, that there was no real difference between the parties at Westminster. The Whigs and the Tories were led by two groups of aristocrats – Windham was one of the few commoners – merely competing for power. There was therefore no point in expecting that a change in the ministry would lead to radical reform. The war, it was true, had formerly divided politicians, but now the old consensus had been restored. By 1809 Cobbett was able to describe quite clearly what the situation was like:

It must have struck every man, who has been in the habit of contemplating political motives and actions, that the interest and the importance, which discussions in the House of Commons formerly owed to consideration of Party, now exist but in a comparatively trifling degree … Parties were formerly distinguished by some great and well known principles of foreign or domestic policy. Now there are no such distinguishing marks … There are still persons wishing for a change of ministry because there are always persons who wish to obtain possession of power and emolument, but beyond that circle there are … absolutely none at all who sincerely believe that such a change would be attended with any substantial national benefit.2