Historical Characters

VI

The attack on the Hanoverian troops, who had nothing to do with the question as to whether the militiamen were flogged justly or not, was doubtless most illiberal and unfair. Those troops simply did their duty, as any other disciplined troops would have done, in seeing a superior’s order executed. It was not their fault if they were employed on this service; neither were they in our country or our army under ordinary circumstances. They had lost their own land for fighting our battles; they were in our army because they would not serve in the army of the enemy.

But we can hardly expect newspaper writers to be more logical and just than forensic advocates. A free press is not a good unmixed with evil; there are arguments against it, as there are arguments for it; but where it is admitted as an important part of a nation’s institutions, this admission includes, as I conceive, the permission to state one side of a question in the most telling manner, the corrective being the juxtaposition of the other side of the question stated with an equal intent to captivate, and perhaps to mislead.

Two years’ imprisonment, and a fine of £1000 only wanted the gentle accompaniment of ear-cropping to have done honour to the Star Chamber; for, to a man who had a newspaper and a farm to carry on, imprisonment threatened to consummate the ruin which an exorbitant fine was well calculated to commence.

Cobbett was accused of yielding to the heaviness of the blow, and of offering the abandonment of his journal as the price of his forgiveness. I cannot agree with those who said that such an offer would have been an unparalleled act of baseness. In giving up his journal, Cobbett was not necessarily giving up his opinions. Every one who wages war unsuccessfully retains the right of capitulation. A writer is no more obliged to rot uselessly in a gaol for the sake of his cause, than a general is obliged to fight a battle without a chance of victory for the sake of his country. A man, even if a hero, is not obliged to be a martyr. Cobbett’s disgraceful act was not in making the proposal of which he was accused, but in denying most positively and repeatedly that he had ever made it; for it certainly seems pretty clear, amidst a good deal of contradictory evidence, that he did authorize Mr. Reeves, of the Alien Office, to promise that the Register should drop if he was not brought up for judgment; and if a Mr. Wright, who was a sort of factotum to Cobbett at the time, can be believed, the farewell was actually written, and only withdrawn when the negotiation was known to have failed. At all events, no indulgence being granted to the offender, he turned round and faced fortune with his usual hardihood. In no portion of his life, indeed, did he show greater courage – in none does the better side of his character come out in brighter relief than when, within the gloomy and stifling walls of Newgate, he carried on his farming, conducted his paper, educated his children, and waged war (his most natural and favourite pursuit) against his enemies with as gay a courage as could have been expected from him in sight of the yellow cornfields, and breathing the pure air he loved so well.

“Now, then,” he says, in describing this period of his life, “the book-learning was forced upon us. I had a farm in hand; it was necessary that I should be constantly informed of what was doing. I gave all the orders, whether as to purchases, sales, ploughing, sowing, breeding – in short, with regard to everything, and the things were in endless number and variety, and always full of interest. My eldest son and daughter could now write well and fast. One or the other of these was always at Botley, and I had with me – having hired the best part of the keeper’s house – one or two besides, either their brother or sister. We had a hamper, with a lock and two keys, which came up once a week or oftener, bringing me fruit and all sorts of country fare. This hamper, which was always at both ends of the line looked for with the most lively interest, became our school. It brought me a journal of labours, proceedings, and occurrences, written on paper of shape and size uniform, and so contrived as to margins as to admit of binding. The journal used, when my eldest son was the writer, to be interspersed with drawings of our dogs, colts, or anything that he wanted me to have a correct idea of. The hamper brought me plants, herbs, and the like, that I might see the size of them; and almost every one sent his or her most beautiful flowers, the earliest violets and primroses and cowslips and bluebells, the earliest twigs of trees, and, in short, everything that they thought calculated to delight me. The moment the hamper arrived, I – casting aside everything else – set to work to answer every question, to give new directions, and to add anything likely to give pleasure at Botley.

“Every hamper brought one letter, as they called it, if not more, from every child, and to every letter I wrote an answer, sealed up and sent to the party, being sure that that was the way to produce other and better letters; for though they could not read what I wrote, and though their own consisted at first of mere scratches, and afterwards, for a while, of a few words written down for them to imitate, I always thanked them for their pretty letter, and never expressed any wish to see them write better, but took care to write in a very neat and plain hand myself, and to do up my letter in a very neat manner.

“Thus, while the ferocious tigers thought I was doomed to incessant mortification, and to rage that must extinguish my mental powers, I found in my children, and in their spotless and courageous and affectionate mother, delights to which the callous hearts of those tigers were strangers. ‘Heaven first taught letters for some wretch’s aid.’ How often did this line of Pope occur to me when I opened the little fuddling letters from Botley. This correspondence occupied a good part of my time. I had all the children with me, turn and turn about; and in order to give the boys exercise, and to give the two eldest an opportunity of beginning to learn French, I used for a part of the two years to send them for a few hours a day to an abbé, who lived in Castle Street, Holborn. All this was a great relaxation to my mind; and when I had to return to my literary labours, I returned fresh and cheerful, full of vigour, and full of hope of finally seeing my unjust and merciless foes at my feet, and that, too, without caring a straw on whom their fall might bring calamity, so that my own family were safe, because – say what any one might – the community, taken as a whole, had suffered this thing to be done unto us.

“The paying of the workpeople, the keeping of the accounts, the referring to books, the writing and reading of letters, this everlasting mixture of amusement with book-learning, made me, almost to my own surprise, find at the end of two years that I had a parcel of scholars growing up about me, and, long before the end of the time, I had dictated my Register to my two eldest children. Then there was copying out of books, which taught spelling correctly. The calculations about the farming affairs forced arithmetic upon us; the use, the necessity of the thing, led to the study.

“By and by we had to look into the laws, to know what to do about the highways, about the game, about the poor, and all rural and parochial affairs.

“I was, indeed, by the fangs of government defeated in my fondly-cherished project of making my sons farmers on their own land, and keeping them from all temptation to seek vicious and enervating enjoyments; but those fangs – merciless as they had been – had not been able to prevent me from laying in for their lives, a store of useful information, habits of industry, care, and sobriety, and a taste for innocent, healthful, and manly pleasures. The fiends had made me and them penniless, but had not been able to take from us our health, or our mental possessions, and these were ready for application as circumstances might ordain.”

VII

At length, however, Cobbett’s punishment was over; and his talents still conferred on him sufficient consideration to have the event celebrated by a dinner, at which Sir Francis Burdett presided. This compliment paid, Cobbett returned to Botley and his old pursuits, literary and agricultural. The idea of publishing cheap newspapers, under the title of “Twopenny Trash,” and which, not appearing as periodicals, escaped the Stamp Tax, now added considerably to his power; and by extending the circulation of his writings to a new class, – the mechanic and artisan, in urban populations, – made that power dangerous at a period when great distress produced general discontent – a discontent of which the government rather tried to suppress the exhibition, than to remove the causes. Nor did Cobbett speak untruly when he said, that the suspension of the Habeas Corpus, and the passing of the celebrated “Six Acts,” in the year 1817, were more directed against himself than against all the other writers of sedition put together. But notwithstanding the exultation which this position gave him for a moment, he soon saw that it was one which he should not be able to maintain, and that the importance he had temporarily acquired had no durable foundation. He had no heart, moreover, for another midsummer’s dream in Newgate. Nor was this all. Though he had not wanted friends or partisans, who had furnished him with pecuniary aid, his expenses had gone far beyond his means; and I may mention as one of the most extraordinary instances of this singular person’s influence, that the debts he had at this time been allowed to contract amounted to no less than £34,000, a sum he could not hope to repay.

For the first time his ingenuity furnished him with no resource, or his usual audacity failed him; and with a secrecy, for which the state of his circumstances accounted, he made a sudden bolt (the 28th of March, 1817) for the United States, informing his countrymen that they were too lukewarm in their own behalf to justify the perils he incurred for their sakes; and observing to his creditors that, as they had not resisted the persecutions from which his losses had arisen, they must be prepared to share with his family the consequences of his ruin.

Sir Francis Burdett had been for many years, as we have seen, his friend and protector, and had but recently presided at the festival which commemorated his release from confinement; but Sir Francis Burdett was amongst those from whom Cobbett had borrowed pretty largely; and though the wealthy baronet could scarcely have expected this money to be repaid, yet, having advanced it to a political partisan, he was not altogether pleased at seeing his money and his partisan slip through his fingers at the same time; and made some remarks which, on reaching Cobbett’s ears, irritated a vanity that never slept, and was only too ready to avenge itself by abuse equally ungrateful and unwise.

Part III

FROM QUITTING ENGLAND IN 1817 TO HIS DEATH IN 1835

Settles on Long Island. – Professes at first great satisfaction. – Takes a farm, – Writes his Grammar. – Gets discontented. – His premises burnt. – He returns to England, and carries Paine’s bones with him. – The bones do not succeed. – Tries twice to be returned to Parliament. – Is not elected. – Becomes a butcher at Kensington. – Fails there and is a bankrupt. – His works from 1820 to 1826. – Extracts. – New prosecution. – Acquitted. – Comes at last into Parliament for Oldham. – Character as a speaker. – Dies. – General summing up.

I

The epoch of Cobbett’s flight from England was decidedly the one most fatal to his character. So long as a man pays his bills, or sticks to his party, he has some one to speak in his favour; but a runaway from his party and his debts, whatever the circumstances that lead to his doing either, must give up the idea of leaving behind him any one disposed to say a word in his defence. Cobbett probably did give up this idea, and, having satisfied himself by declaring that the overthrow of the regular laws and constitution of England had rendered his person as a public writer insecure, and his talents unprofitable, in his native country, seemed disposed to a divorce from the old world, and to a reconciliation with the new. At all events, he viewed America with very different eyes from those with which he had formerly looked at it. The weather was the finest he had ever seen; the ground had no dirt; the air had no flies; the people were civil, not servile; there were none of the poor and wretched habitations which sicken the sight at the outskirts of cities and towns in England; the progress of wealth, ease, and enjoyment evinced by the regular increase of the size of the farmers’ buildings, spoke in praise of the system of government under which it had taken place; and, to crown all, four Yankee mowers weighed down eight English ones! During the greater part of the time that these encomiums were written, Cobbett was living at a farm he had taken on Hampstead Plains, Long Island, where he wrote his grammar, the only amusing grammar in the world, and of which, when it was sent to his son in England, 10,000 copies were sold in one month.

A year, however, after his arrival at Long Island, a fire broke out on his premises and destroyed them. The misfortune was not, perhaps, an untimely one.

Whatever Cobbett might have been able to do in the United States as a farmer, he did not seem to have a chance there of playing any part as a politician. He was not even taken up as a “lion,” for his sudden preference for Republican institutions created no sensation amongst men who were now all heart and soul Republicans. He was not a hero; and he could not, consistently with his present doctrines, attempt to become a martyr. He had, to be sure, the satisfaction of saying bitter things about the tyranny established in his native land; but these produced no effect in America, where abuse of monarchical government was thought quite natural, and he did not see the effect they produced at home. Moreover, they did not after all produce much effect even there. His periodical writings were like wine meant to be drunk on the spot, and lost a great deal of their flavour when sent across the wide waters of the ocean. They were, indeed, essentially written for the day, and for the passions and purposes of the day. Arriving after the cause which had produced them had ceased to excite the public mind, their sound and fury were like the smoke and smell of an explosion without its noise or its powers of destruction. Cobbett saw this clearly, though even to his own children he would never confess it.

II

The condition of England, moreover, at this moment excited his attention, perhaps his hopes. A violent policy can never be a lasting one. The government was beginning to wear out the overstretched authority that had been confided to it and the community was beginning to feel that you should not make (to use the words of Mr. Burke) “the extreme remedies of the State its daily bread.” On the other hand, the general distress, which had created the discontent that these extreme remedies had been employed to suppress, was in no wise diminished. The sovereign and the administration were unpopular, the people generally ignorant and undisciplined, neither the one nor the other understanding the causes of the prevalent disaffection, nor having any idea as to how it should be dealt with.

Such is the moment undoubtedly for rash or designing men to propagate wild theories; and such is also the moment when bold men, guided by better motives, will find, in a country where constitutional liberty cannot be entirely destroyed, the means of turning the oppressive measures of an unscrupulous minister against himself. With the one there was a chance of war against all government, with the other a chance of resistance against bad government. The revolutionist and the patriot were both stirring, whilst a vague idea prevailed amongst many, neither patriots nor revolutionists, that our society was about to be exposed to one of those great convulsions which overturn thrones and change the destiny of empires.

Cobbett was probably too shrewd to look on such a crisis as a certainty; but he was very probably sanguine enough to build schemes on it as a possibility. Besides, there were strife and contention in the great towns, and murmurings in the smaller hamlets; and, where there were strife and contention and murmurings, such a man as Cobbett could not fail to find a place and to produce an effect. This was sufficient to make him feel restlessly anxious to re-appear on the stage he had so abruptly quitted. But he was essentially an actor, and disposed to study the dramatic in all his proceedings. To slink back unperceived to his old haunts, and recommence quietly his old habits, would neither suit his tastes, nor, as he thought, his interests. It was necessary that his return should be a sensation. Too vain and too quarrelsome to pay court to any one, he had through life made friends by making enemies. His plan now was to raise a howl against the returning exile as an atheist and a demagogue amongst one portion of society, not doubting that in such case he would be taken up as the champion of civil and religious liberty by another.

III

The device he adopted for this object was disinterring, or saying he had disinterred, the bones of Thomas Paine, whom he had formerly assailed as “the greatest disgrace of mankind,” and now declared to be “the great enlightener of the human race,” and carrying these bones over to England as the relics of a patron saint, under whose auspices he was to carry on his future political career.

Now, Paine had been considered the enemy of kingly government and the Christian religion in his time, and had greatly occupied the attention of Cobbett, who had styled him “an infamous and atrocious miscreant,” but he had never been a man of great weight or note in our country; many of the existing generation scarcely knew his name, and those who did felt but a very vague retrospective interest in his career. In vain Cobbett celebrated him as “an unflinching advocate for the curtailment of aristocratical power,” and “the boldest champion of popular rights.” In vain he gave it clearly to be understood that Paine did not believe a word of the Old Testament or the New; nobody, in spite of Cobbett’s damning encomiums, would care about Paine, or consider a box of old bones as anything but a bad joke. So that after vainly offering locks of hair or any particle of the defunct and exhumed atheist and Republican at a low price, considering the value of the relics, he let the matter drop; and, rubbing his hands and chuckling with that peculiar sardonic smile which I well remember, began to treat the affair as the world did, and the inestimable fragments of the disinterred Quaker suddenly disappeared, and were never heard of more.

But though his stage trick had failed to give him importance, his sterling unmistakable talent and unflagging energy were sufficient to secure him from insignificance. Cobbett in England, carrying on his Register, charlatan as he might be, unreliable as he had become, was still a personage and a power. He supplied a sort of writing which every one read, and which no one else wrote or could write. People had no confidence in him as a politician, but, in spite of themselves, they were under his charm as an author. He was not, however, satisfied with this; he now pretended to play a higher part than he had hitherto attempted. In his own estimate of his abilities – and perhaps he did not over-rate them – his talent as an orator might, under cultivation and practice, become equal to that which he never failed to display as a pamphleteer.

A seat in the House of Commons had become then the great object of his ambition, and with his usual coolness, which might, perhaps, not unadvisedly be termed impudence, he told his admirers that the first thing they had to do, if they wanted reform, was to subscribe 5000l., and place the sum in his hands, to be spent as he might think proper, and without giving an account of it to any person. “One meeting,” he says, arguing this question – “one meeting subscribing 5000l. will be worth fifty meetings of 50,000 men.”

On the dissolution of Parliament, at the demise of George III., he pursues the subject. “To you” – he is speaking to his partisans – “I do and must look for support in my public efforts. As far as the press can go, I want no assistance. Aided by my sons, I have already made the ferocious cowards of the London press sneak into silence. But there is a larger range – a more advantageous ground to stand on, and that is the House of Commons. A great effect on the public mind I have already produced, but that is nothing to the effect I should produce in only the next session of June in the House of Commons; yet there I cannot be without your assistance.”

Coventry was the place fixed on as that which should have the honour of returning Cobbett to the House of Commons. Nor was the place badly chosen. In no town in England is the class of operatives more powerful, and by this class it was not unnatural to expect that he might be elected. The leading men, however, amongst the operatives, whilst admiring Cobbett, did not respect him. The Goodes and the Pooles – men whom I remember in my time – said in his day, “He is a man who will assuredly make good speeches, but nobody can tell what he will speak in favour of, or what he will speak about. That he will say and prove that Cobbett is a very clever fellow, we may be pretty sure; but with respect to every other subject there is no knowing what he will say or prove.”

Nor did the story of Paine and his bones do Cobbett any service with the Coventry electors. Some considered his conduct in this affair impious, others ludicrous. “I say, Cobbett, where are the old Quaker’s bones?” was a question which his most enthusiastic admirers heard put with an uncomfortable sensation.

He puffed himself in vain. His attempt to enter the great national council was this time a dead failure, and clearly indicated that though he might boast of enthusiastic partisans, he had not as yet obtained the esteem of an intelligent public. This, however, did not prevent his announcing not very long afterwards that bronze medals, which judges thought did justice to his physiognomy, might be had for a pound apiece – a price which he thought low, considering the article. The medals, however, in spite of their artistic value, and the intrinsic merit of the person they represented, were not considered a bargain; and some of Mr. Cobbett’s most devoted friends observed that they had had already enough of his bronze. This was preparatory to his starting to contest Preston (1826). But he was no better treated there than at Coventry, being the last on the poll, though as usual perfectly satisfied with himself, notwithstanding a rather remarkable pamphlet got up by a rival candidate, Mr. Wood, which placed side by side his many inconsistencies.

Mr. Huish, in a work called “Memoirs of Cobbett,” published in 1836, states that this singular man now appeared in a new character that required no constituents; coming forth “as a vendor of meat, and weekly assuring his readers that there never was such mutton, such beef, or such veal, as that which might be seen in his windows, an assurance which continued uninterruptedly,” says this author, “until one inauspicious day, when it was replaced by the announcement of William Cobbett, butcher, at Kensington, having become a bankrupt.”107 But this story, though told thus circumstantially (I have not, for the sake of brevity, copied the exact words, but in all respects their meaning), though generally repeated, and apparently confirmed by other contemporaneous writers, is incorrect; and we are not to count amongst Cobbett’s eccentricities that of cutting up carcases as well as reputations.

IV

But whatever the other pursuits Cobbett had indulged in since his return to England, none had interfered with those which his literary talents suggested to him.

“A Work on Cottage Economy,” a Volume of Sermons, “The Woodlands,” “Paper against Gold,” “The Rural Rides,” “The Protestant Reformation,” were all published between the years 1820 and 1826. His “Rural Rides,” indeed, are amongst his best compositions. No one ever described the country as he did. Everything he says about it is real. You see the dew on the grass, the fragrance comes fresh to you from the flowers; you fancy yourself jogging down the green lane, with the gipsy camp under the hedge, as the sun is rising; you learn the pursuits and pleasures of the country from a man who has been all his life practically engaged in the one, and keenly enjoying the other, and who sees everything he talks to you of with the eye of the poet and the farmer.