Historical Characters

This having been objected to by the Attorney General, a new course of prosecution was adopted. Nearly all Cobbett’s writings were brought together into one mass, and he was charged with having published throughout them libels against almost every liberal man of note in America, France, and England. Under such a charge he was obliged to find recognisances for his good behaviour to the amount of 4000 dollars, and it was hoped by a diligent search into his subsequent writings to convict him of having forfeited these recognisances.

His enemies, indeed, might safely count on his getting into further troubles; nor had they long to wait. A Doctor Rash having at this time risen into great repute by a system of purging and bleeding, with which he had attempted to stop the yellow fever, Cobbett, who could ill tolerate another’s reputation, even in medicine, darted forth against this new candidate for public favour with his usual vigour of abuse. “Can the Rush grow up without mire, or the flag without water?” was his exclamation, and down went his ruthless and never-pausing flail on poor Dr. Rush’s birth, parentage, manners, character, medicine, and everything that was his by nature, chance, or education. This could not long continue; Cobbett was again indicted for a libel.

In tyrannies justice is administered unscrupulously in the case of a political enemy; in democracies also law must frequently be controlled by vulgar prejudice and popular passion. This was seen in the present case. The defendant pleaded, in the first place, that his trial should be removed from the Court of the State of Pennsylvania to that of the United States. It was generally thought that as an alien he could claim to have his cause thus transferred. This claim, however, was refused by the chief justice, whom he had recklessly affronted; and the trial coming on when a jury was pretty certain to be hostile, Cobbett was assessed in damages to the amount of 5000 dollars; nor was much consolation to be derived from the fact that on the 14th December, the day on which he was condemned for libelling Rush, General Washington died, in some degree the victim of that treatment which the libelled doctor had prescribed.

The costs of the suit he had lost, added to the fine which the adverse sentence had imposed, made altogether a considerable sum. Cobbett was nearly ruined, but he bore himself up with a stout heart; and for a moment turning round at bay faced his enemies, and determined yet to remain in the United States. But on second thoughts, without despairing of his fortunes, he resolved to seek them elsewhere; and set sail for England. This he did on the 1st of June, 1800; shaking the dust from his feet on what he then stigmatised as “that infamous land, where judges become felons, and felons judges.”

Part II

FROM JUNE 1ST, 1800, TO MARCH 28TH, 1817, WHEN, HAVING ALTOGETHER CHANGED HIS POLITICS, HE RETURNS TO AMERICA

Starts a paper, by title The Porcupine, which he had made famous in America. – Begins as a Tory. – Soon verges towards opposition. – Abandons Porcupine and commences Register. – Prosecuted for libel. – Changes politics, and becomes radical. – Prosecuted again for libel. – Convicted and imprisoned. – Industry and activity though confined in Newgate. – Sentence expires. – Released. – Power as a writer increases. – Government determined to put him down. – Creditors pressing. – He returns to the United States.

I

The space Cobbett filled in the public mind of his native land was at this time, 1800, considerable. Few, in fact, have within so brief a period achieved so remarkable a career, or gained under similar circumstances an equal reputation. The boy from the plough had become the soldier, and distinguished himself, so far as his birth and term of service at that time admitted, in the military profession; the uneducated soldier had become the writer; and, as the advocate of monarchical principles in a Republican state, had shown a power and a resolution which had raised him to the position of an antagonist to the whole people amongst whom he had been residing. There was Cobbett on one side of the arena, and all the democracy of democratic America on the other!

He now returned to the Old World and the land for which he had been fighting the battle. His name had preceded him. George III. admired him as his champion; Lord North hailed him as the greatest political reasoner of his time (Burke being amongst his contemporaries); Mr. Windham – the elegant, refined, classical, manly, but whimsical Mr. Windham – was in raptures at his genius; and though the English people at this time were beginning to be a little less violent than they had been in their hatred of France and America, the English writer who despised Frenchmen and insulted Americans, was still a popular character in England.

Numerous plans of life were open to him; that which he chose was the one for which he was most fitting, and to which he could most easily and naturally adapt himself. He again became editor of a public paper, designated by the name he had rendered famous, and called The Porcupine.

The principles on which this paper was to be conducted were announced with spirit and vigour. “The subjects of a British king,” said Cobbett, “like the sons of every provident and tender father, never know his value till they feel the want of his protection. In the days of youth and ignorance I was led to believe that comfort, freedom, and virtue were exclusively the lot of Republicans. A very short trial convinced me of my error, admonished me to repent of my folly, and urged me to compensate for the injustice of the opinion which I had conceived. During an eight years’ absence from my country, I was not an unconcerned spectator of her perils, nor did I listen in silence to the slander of her enemies.

“Though divided from England by the ocean, though her gay fields were hidden probably for ever from my view, still her happiness and her glory were the objects of my constant solicitude. I rejoiced at her victories, I mourned at her defeats; her friends were my friends, her foes were my foes. Once more returned, once more under the safeguard of that sovereign who watched over me in my infancy, and the want of whose protecting arm I have so long had reason to lament, I feel an irresistible desire to communicate to my countrymen the fruit of my experience; to show them the injurious and degrading consequences of discontent, disloyalty, and innovation; to convince them that they are the first as well as happiest of the human race, and above all to warn them against the arts of those ambitious and perfidious demagogues who could willingly reduce them to a level with the cheated slaves, in the bearing of whose yoke I had the mortification to share.”

II

The events even at this time were preparing, which in their series of eddies whirled the writer we have been quoting into the midst of those very ambitious and perfidious demagogues whom he here denounces. Nor was this notable change, under all the circumstances which surrounded it, very astonishing. In the first place, the party in power, after greeting him on his arrival with a welcome which, perhaps, was more marked by curiosity than courtesy, did little to gratify their champion’s vanity, or to advance his interests. With that indifference usually shown by official men in our country to genius, if it is unaccompanied by aristocratical or social influence, they allowed the great writer to seek his fortunes as he had sought them hitherto, pen in hand, without aid or patronage.

In the second place, the part which Mr. Pitt took on the side of Catholic emancipation was contrary to all Cobbett’s antecedent prejudices: and then Mr. Pitt had treated Cobbett with coolness one day when they met at Mr. Windham’s. Thus a private grievance was added to a public one.

The peace with France – a peace for which he would not illuminate, having his windows smashed by the mob in consequence – disgusted him yet more with Mr. Addington, whose moderate character he heartily despised; and not the less so for that temporising statesman’s inclination rather to catch wavering Whigs than to satisfy discontented Tories. These reasons partly suggested his giving up the daily journal he had started (called, as I have said, The Porcupine), and commencing the Weekly Political Register, which he conducted with singular ability against every party in the country. I say against every party in the country; for, though he was still, no doubt, a stout advocate of kingly government, he did not sufficiently admit, for the purposes of his personal safety, that the king’s government was the king’s ministers. Thus, no doubt to his great surprise, he found that he, George III.’s most devoted servant, was summoned one morning to answer before the law for maliciously intending to move and incite the liege subjects of his Majesty to hatred and contempt of his royal authority.

The libel made to bear this forced interpretation was taken from letters in November and December, 1803, signed “Juverna,” that appeared in the Register, and were not flattering to the government of Ireland.

III

If we turn to the state of that country at this time, we shall find that the resignation of Mr. Pitt, and the hopeless situation of the Catholics, had naturally created much discontent. Mr. Addington, it is true, was anything but a severe minister; he did nothing to rouse the passions of the Irish, but he did nothing to win the heart, excite the imagination, or gain the affection of that sensitive people. The person he had nominated to the post of Lord Lieutenant was a fair type of his own ministry, that person being a sensible, good-natured man, with nothing brilliant or striking in his manner or abilities, but carrying into his high office the honest intention to make the course he was enjoined to pursue as little obnoxious as possible to those whom he could not expect to please. In this manner his government, though mild and inoffensive, neither captivated the wavering nor overawed the disaffected; and under it was hatched, by a young and visionary enthusiast (Mr. Emmett), a conspiracy, which, though contemptible as the means of overturning the established authority, was accompanied at its explosion by the murder of the Lord Chief Justice, and the exposure of Dublin to pillage and flames. The enemies of ministers naturally seized on so fair an occasion for assailing them, and Cobbett, who held a want of energy to be at all times worse than the want of all other qualities, put his paper at their disposal.

In the present instance, the writer of “Juverna’s” letters, calling to his aid the old story of the wooden horse which carried the Greeks within the walls of Troy, and exclaiming, “Equo ne credite Teucri!” compared the Irish administration, so simple and innocuous in its outward appearance, but containing within its bosom, as he said, all the elements of mischief, to that famous and fatal prodigy of wood; and after complimenting the Lord Lieutenant on having a head made of the same harmless material as the wooden horse itself, thus flatteringly proceeded: “But who is this Lord Hardwicke? I have discovered him to be in rank an earl, in manners a gentleman, in morals a good father and a kind husband, and that, moreover, he has a good library in St. James’s Square. Here I should have been for ever stopped, if I had not by accident met with one Mr. Lindsay, a Scotch parson, since become (and I am sure it must be by Divine Providence, for it would be impossible to account for it by secondary causes) Bishop of Killaloe. From this Mr. Lindsay I further learned that my Lord Hardwicke was celebrated for understanding the mode and method of fattening sheep as well as any man in Cambridgeshire.”

The general character of the attack on Lord Hardwicke may be judged of by the above quotation, and was certainly not of a very malignant nature. It sufficed, however, to procure a hostile verdict; and the Editor of the Political Register was declared “Guilty of having attempted to subvert the King’s authority.”

This, however, was not all. Mr. Plunkett, then Solicitor-General for Ireland, had pleaded against Mr. Emmett, whose father he had known, with more bitterness than perhaps was necessary, since the culprit brought forward no evidence in his favour, and did not even attempt a defence. Mr. Plunkett, moreover, had himself but a short time previously expressed rather violent opinions, and, when speaking of the Union, had gone so far as to say that, if it passed into a law, no Irishman would be bound to obey it. In short, the position in which he stood was one which required great delicacy and forbearance, and delicacy and forbearance he had not shown. “Juverna” thus speaks of him:

“If any one man could be found of whom a young but unhappy victim of the justly offended laws of his country had, in the moment of his conviction and sentence, uttered the following apostrophe: ‘That viper, whom my father nourished, he it is whose principles and doctrines now drag me to my grave; and he it is who is now brought forward as my prosecutor, and who, by an unheard-of exercise of the royal prerogative, has wantonly lashed with a speech to evidence the dying son of his former friend, when that dying son had produced no evidence, had made no defence, but, on the contrary, acknowledged the charge and submitted to his fate’ – Lord Kenyon would have turned with horror from such a scene, in which, if guilt were in one part punished, justice in the whole drama was confounded, humanity outraged, and loyalty insulted.”

These observations, made in a far more rancorous spirit than those relating to Lord Hardwicke, could not fail to be bitterly felt by the Solicitor-General, who was probably obliged, in deference to Irish opinion, to prosecute the editor of the paper they appeared in.

He did so, and obtained 500l. damages.

Luckily for Cobbett, however, he escaped punishment in both suits; for the real author of these attacks, Mr. Johnson, subsequently Judge Johnson, having been discovered, or having discovered himself, Cobbett was left without further molestation. But an impression had been created in his mind. He had fought the battle of loyalty in America against a host of enemies to the loss of his property, and even at the hazard of his life. Shouts of triumph had hailed him from the British shores. The virulence of his invectives, the coarseness of his epithets, the exaggeration of his opinions, were all forgotten and forgiven when he wrote the English language out of England. He came to his native country; he advocated the same doctrines, and wrote in the same style; his heart was still as devoted to his king, and his wishes as warm for the welfare of his country; but, because it was stated in his journal that Lord Hardwicke was an excellent sheep-feeder, and Mr. Plunkett a viper – (a disagreeable appellation, certainly, but one soft and gentle in comparison with many which he had bestowed, fifty times over, on the most distinguished writers, members of Congress, judges and lawyers in the United States – without the regard and esteem of his British patrons being one jot abated) – he had been stigmatised as a traitor and condemned to pay five hundred pounds as a libeller.

He did not recognise, in these proceedings, the beauties of the British Constitution, nor the impartial justice which he had always maintained when in America, was to be found in loyal old England. He did not see why his respect for his sovereign prevented him from saying or letting it be said that a Lord Lieutenant of Ireland was a very ordinary man, nor that a Solicitor-General of Ireland had made a very cruel and ungenerous speech, when the facts thus stated were perfectly true. The Tory leaders had done nothing to gain him as a partisan, they had done much that jarred with his general notions on politics, and finally they treated him as a political foe. The insult, for such he deemed it, was received with a grim smile of defiance, and grievous was the loss which Conservative opinions sustained when those who represented them drove the most powerful controversialist of his day into the opposite ranks.

Nor can the value of his support be estimated merely by the injury inflicted by his hostility. When Cobbett departed from his consistency, he forfeited a great portion of his influence. With his marvellous skill in exciting the popular passions in favour of the ideas he espoused; with his nicknames, with his simple, sterling, and at all times powerful eloquence, it is difficult to limit the effect he might have produced amongst the classes to which he belonged, and which with an improved education were beginning to acquire greater power, if acquainted with their habits and warmed by their passions, he had devoted his self-taught intellect to the defence of ancient institutions and the depreciation of modern ideas.

But official gentlemen then were even more official than they are now; and fancying that every man in office was a great man, every one out of it a small one, their especial contempt was reserved for a public writer. If, however, such persons, the scarecrows of genius, were indifferent to Cobbett’s defection, they whose standard he joined hailed with enthusiasm his conversion.

These were not the Whigs. Cobbett’s was one of those natures which never did things by halves. Sir Francis Burdett, Mr. Hunt, Major Cartwright, and a set of men who propounded theories of parliamentary reform – which no one, who was at that time considered a practical statesman, deemed capable of realization – were his new associates and admirers.

Nor was his change a mere change in political opinion. It was, unfortunately, a change in political morality. The farmer’s son had not been educated at a learned university – having his youthful mind nourished and strengthened by great examples of patriotism and consistency, drawn from Greece and Rome: – he was educating himself by modern examples from the world in which he was living, and there he found statesmen slow to reward the advocacy of their public opinions, but quick to avenge any attack on their personal vanity or individual interests. It struck him then that their principles were like the signs which innkeepers stick over their tap-rooms, intended to catch the traveller’s attention, and induce him to buy their liquors; but having no more real signification than “St. George and the Dragon,” or the “Blue Boar,” or the “Flying Serpent;” hence concluding that one sign might be pulled down and the other put up, to suit the taste of the customers, or the speculation of the landlord.

And now begins a perfectly new period in his life. Up to this date he had always been one and the same individual. Every corner of his being had been apparently filled with the same loyal hatred to Frenchmen and Democrats. He had loved, in every inch of him, the king and the church, and the wooden walls of Old England. “Who will say,” he exclaims in America, “that an Englishman ought not to despise all the nations in the world? For my part I do, and that most heartily.” What he here says of every one of a different nation from his own, he had said, and said constantly, of every one of a different political creed from his own, and his own political creed had as yet never varied. But consistency and Cobbett here separated. Not only was his new self a complete and constant contradiction with his old self – this was to be expected: but whereas his old self was one solid block, his new self was a piece of tesselated workmanship, in which were patched together all sorts of materials of all sorts of colours. I do not mean to say that, having taken to the liberal side in politics, he ever turned round again and became violent on the opposite side. But his liberalism had no code. He recognised no fixed friends – no definite opinions. The notions he advocated were such as he selected for the particular day of the week on which he was writing, and which he considered himself free on the following day to dispute with those who adopted them. As to his alliances, they were no more closely woven into his existence than his doctrines; and he stood forth distinguished for being dissatisfied with everything, and quarrelling with every one.

IV

The first tilt which he made from the new side of the ring where he had now taken his stand was against Mr. Pitt – whom it was not difficult towards the close of his life to condemn, for the worst fault which a minister can commit – being unfortunate. Cobbett’s next assault – on the demand of the Whigs for an increase of allowance to the king’s younger sons – was against Royalty itself, its pensions, governorships, and rangerships, which he called “its cheeseparings and candle-ends!” Some Republicans on the other side of the Atlantic must have rubbed their spectacles when they read these effusions; but the editor of the Register was indifferent to provoking censure, and satisfied with exciting astonishment. Besides, we may fairly admit, that, when the King demanded that his private property in the funds should be free from taxation (showing he had such property), and at the same time called upon the country to increase the allowances of his children, he did much to try the loyalty of the nation, and gave Cobbett occasion to observe that a rich man did not ask the parish to provide for his offspring. “I am,” said he, “against these things, not because I am a Republican, but because I am for monarchical government, and consequently adverse to all that gives Republicans a fair occasion for sneering at it.”

In the meantime his periodical labours did not prevent his undertaking works of a more solid description; and in 1806 he announced the “Parliamentary Register,” which was to contain all the recorded proceedings of Parliament from the earliest times; and was in the highest degree useful, since the reader had previously to wade through a hundred volumes of journals in order to know anything of the history of the two Houses of Parliament. These more serious labours did not, however, interfere with his weekly paper, which had a large circulation, and, though without any party influence (for Cobbett attacked all parties), gave him a great deal of personal power and importance. “It came up,” says the author, proudly, “like a grain of mustard-seed, and like a grain of mustard-seed it has spread over the whole civilised world.” Meanwhile, this peasant-born politician was uniting rural pursuits with literary labours, and becoming, in the occupation of a farm at Botley, a prominent agriculturist and a sort of intellectual authority in his neighbourhood. From this life, which no one has described with a pen more pregnant with the charm and freshness of green fields and woods, he was torn by another prosecution for libel.

V

The following paragraph had appeared in the Courier paper:

“London, Saturday, July 1st, 1809.

“Motto. – The mutiny amongst the Local Militia, which broke out at Ely, was fortunately suppressed on Wednesday by the arrival of four squadrons of the German Legion Cavalry from Bury, under the command of General Auckland.

“Five of the ringleaders were tried by a court-martial, and sentenced to receive five hundred lashes each, part of which punishment they received on Wednesday, and a part was remitted. A stoppage for their knapsacks was the ground of complaint which excited this mutinous spirit, and occasioned the men to surround their officers and demand what they deemed their arrears. The first division of the German Legion halted yesterday at Newmarket on their return to Bury.”

On this paragraph Cobbett made the subjoining observations:

“‘Summary of politics. Local Militia and German Legion.’ See the motto, English reader, see the motto, and then do, pray, recollect all that has been said about the way in which Bonaparte raises his soldiers. Well done, Lord Castlereagh! This is just what it was thought that your plan would produce. Well said, Mr. Huskisson! It was really not without reason you dwelt with so much earnestness upon the great utility of the foreign troops, whom Mr. Wardle appeared to think of no utility at all. Poor gentleman! he little thought how great a genius might find employment for such troops; he little imagined they might be made the means of compelling Englishmen to submit to that sort of discipline which is so conducive to producing in them a disposition to defend the country at the risk of their lives. Let Mr. Wardle look at my motto, and then say whether the German soldiers are of no use. Five hundred lashes each! Ay, that is right; flog them! flog them! flog them; they deserve it, and a great deal more! They deserve a flogging at every meal time. Lash them daily! Lash them daily! What! shall the rascals dare to mutiny, and that, too, when the German Legion is so near at hand? Lash them! Lash them! Lash them! they deserve it. Oh! yes, they deserve a double-tailed cat. Base dogs! what, mutiny for the sake of the price of a knapsack! Lash them! flog them! base rascals! mutiny for the price of a goat-skin, and then upon the appearance of the German soldiers they take a flogging as quietly as so many trunks of trees.”