COBBETT, THE CONTENTIOUS MAN.
Part I.
FROM HIS BIRTH, IN MARCH, 1762, TO HIS QUITTING THE UNITED STATES, JUNE 1ST, 1800.
Son of a small farmer.—Boyhood spent in the country.—Runs away from home.—Becomes a lawyer’s clerk.—Enlists as a soldier, 1784.—Learns grammar and studies Swift.—Goes to Canada.—Remarked for good conduct.—Rises to rank of sergeant-major.—Gets discharge, 1791.—Marries.—Quits Europe for United States.—Starts as a bookseller in Pennsylvania.—Becomes a political writer of great power.—Takes a violent anti-republican tone.—Has to suffer different prosecutions, and at last sets sail for England.
I.
The character which I am now tempted to delineate is just the reverse of that which I rise from describing. Mackintosh was a man of great powers of reasoning, of accomplished learning, but of little or no sustained energy. His vision took a wide and calm range; he saw all things coolly, dispassionately, and, except at his first entry into life, was never so lost in his admiration of one object as to overlook the rest. His fault lay in rather the opposite extreme; his perception of the universal weakened that of the particular, and the variety of colours which appeared at once before him became too blended in his sight for the adequate appreciation of each.
The subject of this memoir, on the contrary, though he could argue well in favour of any opinion he adopted, had not that elevated and philosophic cast of mind which makes men inquire after truth for the sake of truth, regarding its pursuit as a delight, its attainment as a duty. Neither could he take that comprehensive view of affairs which affords to the judgment an ample scope for the comparison and selection of opinions. But he possessed a rapid power of concentration; a will that scorned opposition; he saw clearly that one side of a question which caught his attention; and pursued the object he had momentarily in view with an energy that never recoiled before a danger, and was rarely arrested by a scruple. The sense of his force gave him the passion for action; but he encouraged this passion until it became restlessness, a desire to fight rather for the pleasure of fighting than for devotion to any cause for which he fought.
While Mackintosh always struggled against his character, and thereby never gave himself fair play, the person of whom I am now about to speak—borne away in a perfectly opposite extreme—allowed his character to usurp and govern his abilities, frequently without either usefulness or aim. Thus, the one changed sides two or three times in his life, from that want of natural ardour which creates strong attachments; the other attacked and defended various parties with a furious zeal, upon which no one could rely, because it proceeded from the temporary caprice of a whimsical imagination, and not from the stedfast enthusiasm of any well-meditated conviction. With two or three qualities more, Cobbett would have been a very great man in the world; as it was, he made a great noise in it. But I pass from criticism to narrative.
II.
William Cobbett was born in the neighbourhood of Farnham, on the 9th of March, 1762. The remotest ancestor he had ever heard of was his grandfather, who had been a day labourer, and, according to the rustic habits of old times, worked with the same farmer from the day of his marriage to that of his death. The son, Cobbett’s parent, was a man superior to the generality of persons in his station of life. He could not only read and write, but he knew also a little mathematics; understood land surveying, was honest and industrious, and had thus risen from the position of labourer, a position in which he was born, to that of having labourers under him.
Cobbett’s boyhood, I may say his childhood, was passed in the fields: first he was seen frightening the birds from the turnips, then weeding wheat, then leading a horse at harrowing barley, finally joining the reapers at harvest, driving the team, and holding the plough. His literary instruction was small, and only such as he could acquire at home. It was shrewdly asked by Dr. Johnson, “What becomes of all the clever schoolboys?” In fact, many of the boys clever at school are not heard of afterwards, because if they are docile they are also timid, and attend to the routine of education less from the love of learning than the want of animal spirits. Cobbett was not a boy of this kind. At the age of sixteen he determined to go to sea, but could not get a captain to take him. At the age of seventeen he quitted his home (having already, when much younger, done so in search of adventures), and without communicating his design to any one, started, dressed in his Sunday clothes, for the great city of London. Here, owing to the kind exertions of a passenger in the coach in which this his first journey was made, he got engaged after some time and trouble as under-clerk to an attorney (Mr. Holland), in Gray’s Inn Lane.
It is natural enough that to a lad accustomed to fresh air, green fields, and out-of-door exercise, the close atmosphere, dull aspect, and sedentary position awaiting an attorney’s under-clerk at Gray’s Inn must have been hateful. But William Cobbett never once thought of escaping from what he called “an earthly hell” by a return to his home and friends. This would have been to confess himself beaten, which he never meant to be. On the contrary, rushing from one bold step to another still more so, he enlisted himself (1784) as a soldier in a regiment intended to serve in Nova Scotia. His father, though somewhat of his own stern and surly nature, begged, prayed, and remonstrated. But it was useless. The recruit, however, had some months to pass in England, since, peace having taken place, there was no hurry in sending off the troops. These months he spent in Chatham, storing his brains with the lore of a circulating library, and his heart with love-dreams of the librarian’s daughter.
To this period he owed what he always considered his most valuable acquisition, a knowledge of his native language; the assiduity with which he gave himself up to study, on this occasion, insured his success and evinced his character. He wrote out the whole of an English grammar two or three times; he got it by heart; he repeated it every morning and evening, and he imposed on himself the task of saying it over once every time that he mounted guard. “I learned grammar,” he himself says, “when I was a private soldier on the pay of sixpence a day. The edge of my berth, or that of the guard-bed, was my seat to study on; my knapsack was my book-case, a bit of board lying on my lap was my writing-table, and the task did not demand anything like a year of my life.” Such is will. In America, Cobbett remained as a soldier till the month of September, 1791, when his regiment was relieved and sent home. On the 19th of November, he obtained his discharge, after having served nearly eight years, never having once been disgraced, confined, or reprimanded, and having attained, owing to his zeal and intelligence, the rank of sergeant-major without having passed through the intermediate rank of sergeant.
The following was the order issued at Portsmouth on the day of his discharge:
“Portsmouth, 19th Dec. 1791.
“Sergeant-Major Cobbett having most pressingly applied for his discharge, at Major Lord Edward Fitzgerald’s request, General Frederick has ordered Major Lord Edward Fitzgerald to return the Sergeant-Major thanks for his behaviour and conduct during the time of his being in the regiment, and Major Lord Edward adds his most hearty thanks to those of the General.”
III.
At this period Cobbett married. Nobody has left us wiser sentiments or pithier sentences on the choice of a wife. His own, the daughter of a sergeant of artillery, stationed like himself at New Brunswick, had been selected at once. He had met her two or three times, and found her pretty; beauty, indeed, he considered indispensable, but beauty alone would never have suited him. Industry, activity, energy, the qualities which he possessed, were those which he most admired, and the partner of his life was fixed upon when he found her, one morning before it was distinctly light, “scrubbing out a washing-tub before her father’s door.” “That’s the girl for me,” he said, and he kept to this resolution with a fortitude which the object of his attachment deserved and imitated.
The courtship was continued, and the assurance of reciprocated affection given; but before the union of hands could sanctify that of hearts, the artillery were ordered home for England. Cobbett, whose regiment was then at some distance from the spot where his betrothed was still residing, unable to have the satisfaction of a personal farewell, sent her 150 guineas, the whole amount of his savings, and begged her to use it—as he feared her residence with her father at Woolwich might expose her to bad company—in making herself comfortable in a small lodging with respectable people until his arrival. It was not until four years afterwards that he himself was able to quit America, and he then found the damsel he had so judiciously chosen not with her father, it is true, nor yet lodging in idleness, but as servant-of-all-work for five pounds a year, and at their first interview she put into his hands the 150 guineas which had been confided to her—untouched. Such a woman had no ordinary force of mind; and it has been frequently asserted that he who, once beyond his own threshold, was ready to contend with every government in the world, was, when at home, under what has been appropriately called the government of the petticoat.
Cobbett’s marriage took place on the 3rd of February, 1792; that is, about ten weeks after his discharge; but having in March brought a very grave charge against some of the officers of his regiment, which charge, when a court-martial was summoned, he did not appear to support, he was forced to quit England for France, where he remained till September, 1792, when he determined on trying his fortune in the United States.
IV.
On his arrival he settled in Philadelphia, and was soon joined by Mrs. Cobbett, who had not accompanied him out. His livelihood was at first procured by giving English lessons to French emigrants; and it is a fact not without interest that a celebrated person who figures amongst these sketches—M. de Talleyrand—wished to become one of his pupils. He refused, he says, to go to the ci-devant bishop’s house, but adds, in his usual style, that the lame fiend hopped over this difficulty at once by offering to come to his (Cobbett’s) house, an offer that was not accepted. About this time Doctor Priestley came to America. The enthusiasm with which the doctor was received roused the resentment of the British soldier, who moreover panted for a battle. He published then—though with some difficulty, booksellers objecting to the unpopularity of the subject, an objection at which the author was most indignant—a pamphlet called “Observations on Priestley’s Emigration.” This pamphlet, on account both of its ability and scurrility, made a sensation, and thus commenced the author’s reputation, though it only added 1s. 7½d. to his riches. But he was abusing, he was abused. This was to be in his element, and he rose at once, so far as the power and peculiarity of his style were concerned, to a foremost place amongst political writers. This style had been formed at an early period of life, and perhaps unconsciously to himself.
“At eleven years of age,” he says in an article in the Evening Post, calling upon the reformers to pay for returning him to Parliament, “my employment was clipping of box-edgings and weeding beds of flowers in the garden of the Bishop of Winchester at the castle of Farnham, my native town. I had always been fond of beautiful gardens, and a gardener who had just come from the King’s gardens at Kew gave me such a description of them as made me instantly resolve to work in those gardens. The next morning” (this is the early adventure I have previously spoken of), “without saying a word to any one, off I set, with no clothes except those upon my back, and with thirteen halfpence in my pocket. I found that I must go to Richmond, and I accordingly went on from place to place inquiring my way thither. A long day (it was in June) brought me to Richmond in the afternoon. Two pennyworth of bread and cheese and a pennyworth of small beer which I had on the road, and one halfpenny that I had lost somehow or other, left three pence in my pocket. With this for my whole fortune, I was trudging through Richmond in my blue smock-frock, and my red garters tied under my knees, when, staring about me, my eye fell upon a little book in a bookseller’s window, on the outside of which was written ‘The Tale of a Tub, price 3d.’ The title was so odd that my curiosity was excited. I had the threepence; but then I could not have any supper. In I went and got the little book, which I was so impatient to read, that I got over into a field at the upper corner of Kew Gardens, where there stood a haystack. On the shady side of this I sat down to read. The book was so different from anything that I had ever read before, it was something so new to my mind, that, though I could not understand some parts of it, it delighted me beyond description, and produced what I have always considered a sort of birth of intellect.
“I read on until it was dark without any thought of supper or bed. When I could see no longer, I put my little book in my pocket and tumbled down by the side of the stack, where I slept till the birds in the Kew Gardens awakened me in the morning, when off I started to Kew, reading my little book. The singularity of my dress, the simplicity of my manner, my lively and confident air, and doubtless his own compassion besides, induced the gardener, who was a Scotchman, I remember, to give me victuals, find me lodging, and set me to work; and it was during the period that I was at Kew that George IV. and two of his brothers laughed at the oddness of my dress while I was sweeping the grass-plot round the foot of the Pagoda. The gardener, seeing me fond of books, lent me some gardening books to read; but these I could not relish after my ‘Tale of a Tub,’ which I carried about with me wherever I went, and when I—at about twenty years old—lost it in a box that fell overboard in the Bay of Fundy, in North America, the loss gave me greater pain than I have since felt at losing thousands of pounds.”
V.
Many had cause to remember, this evening passed under a haystack at Kew. The genius of Swift engrafted itself naturally on an intellect so clear and a disposition so inclined to satire as that of the gardener’s boy.
Cobbett’s earliest writings are more especially tinged with the colouring of his master. Take for instance the following fable, which will at all times find a ready application:
“In a pot-shop, well stocked with wares of all sorts, a discontented, ill-formed pitcher unluckily bore the sway. One day, after the mortifying neglect of several customers, ‘Gentlemen,’ said he, addressing himself to his brown brethren in general—‘gentlemen, with your permission, we are a set of tame fools, without ambition, without courage, condemned to the vilest uses; we suffer all without murmuring; let us dare to declare ourselves, and we shall soon see the difference. That superb ewer, which, like us, is but earth—these gilded jars, vases, china, and, in short, all those elegant nonsenses whose colour and beauty have neither weight nor solidity—must yield to our strength and give place to our superior merit.’ This civic harangue was received with applause, and the pitcher, chosen president, became the organ of the assembly. Some, however, more moderate than the rest, attempted to calm the minds of the multitude; but all the vulgar utensils, which shall be nameless, were become intractable. Eager to vie with the bowls and the cups, they were impatient, almost to madness, to quit their obscure abodes to shine upon the table, kiss the lip, and ornament the cupboard.
“In vain did a wise water-jug—some say it was a platter—make them a long and serious discourse upon the utility of their vocation. ‘Those,’ said he, ‘who are destined to great employments are rarely the most happy. We are all of the same clay, ’tis true, but He who made us formed us for different functions; one is for ornament, another for use. The posts the least important are often the most necessary. Our employments are extremely different, and so are our talents.’
“This had a most wonderful effect; the most stupid began to open their ears; perhaps it would have succeeded, if a grease-pot had not cried out in a decisive tone: ‘You reason like an ass—to the devil with you and your silly lessons.’ Now the scale was turned again; all the horde of pans and pitchers applauded the superior eloquence and reasoning of the grease-pot. In short, they determined on an enterprise; but a dispute arose—who should be the chief? Every one would command, but no one obey. It was then you might have heard a clatter; all put themselves in motion at once, and so wisely and with so much vigour were their operations conducted, that the whole was soon changed—not into china, but into rubbish.”
VI.
The tendency of this tale is manifest. It was in opposition to the democratic spirit mainly because such was the ruling spirit of the country in which the author had come to reside—a democratic spirit which has since developed itself more fully, but which then, though predominant, had a powerful and respectable party to contend against.
The constitution of the United States had indeed perfectly satisfied none of its framers. Franklin had declared that he consented to it, not as the best, but as the best that he could then hope for. Washington expressed the same opinion. It necessarily gave birth to two parties, which for a time were held together by the position, the abilities, and the reputation of the first president of the new Republic. They existed, however, in his government itself, where Jefferson represented the Democratic faction, and Hamilton the Federal or Conservative one. To the latter the president—though holding the balance with apparent impartiality—belonged; for he was an English gentleman, of a firm and moderate character, and, moreover, wished that the government of which he was the head should be possessed of an adequate force. The great movement, however, in France—which he was almost the only person to judge from the first with calm discernment—overbore his views and complicated his situation. Determined that the United States should take only a neutral position in the European contest, he was assailed on all sides—as a tyrant, because he wished for order—as a partisan of Great Britain, because he wished for peace. To those among the native Americans, who dreamt impossible theories, or desired inextricable confusion, were joined all the foreign intriguers, who, banished from their own countries, had no hopes of returning there but as enemies and invaders. “I am called everything,” said Washington, “even a Nero.”[106] His continuance in the presidency, to which he was incited by some persons to pretend for a third time, had indeed become incompatible with his character and honour.
The respect which he had so worthily merited and so long inspired was on the wane. The cabinet with which he had commenced his government was broken up; his taxes, in some provinces, were refused; a treaty he had concluded with England was pretty generally condemned; and as he retired to Mount Vernon, the democratic party saw that approaching triumph which the election of their leader to the presidency was soon about to achieve. The cry against Great Britain was fiercer; the shout for Jefferson was louder than it had ever been before.
VII.
At this time Cobbett, then better known as Peter Porcupine, a name which on becoming an author he had assumed, and which had at least the merit of representing his character appropriately, having quarrelled with a legion of booksellers, determined to set up in the bookselling line for himself; and in the spring of 1796, he took a house in Second Street for that purpose.
Though he was not so universally obnoxious then as he subsequently became, his enemies were already many and violent—his friends warm, but few. These last feared for him in the course he was entering upon; they advised him, therefore, to be prudent—to do nothing, at all events, on commencing business, that might attract public indignation; and, above all, not to put up any aristocratic portraits in his windows.
Cobbett’s plan was decided. His shop opened on a Monday, and he spent all the previous Sunday in so preparing it that, when he took down his shutters on the morning following, the people of Philadelphia were actually aghast at the collection of prints, arrayed in their defiance, including the effigies of George III., which had never been shown at any window since the rebellion. From that moment the newspapers were filled, and the shops placarded, with “A Blue Pill for Peter Porcupine,” “A Pill for Peter Porcupine,” “A Boaster for Peter Porcupine,” “A Picture of Peter Porcupine.” Peter Porcupine had become a person of decided consideration and importance.
“Dear father,” says the writer who had assumed this name, in one of his letters home, “when you used to set me off to work in the morning, dressed in my blue smock-frock and woollen spatterdashes, with a bag of bread and cheese and a bottle of small beer over my shoulder, on the little crook that my godfather gave me, little did you imagine that I should one day become so great a man.”
VIII.
Paine’s arrival in America soon furnished fresh matter for invective. Paine, like Priestley, was a Republican; and was, like Priestley, hailed with popular enthusiasm by the Republicans. Cobbett attacked this new idol, therefore, as he had done the preceding one, and even with still greater virulence. This carried him to the highest pitch of unpopularity which it was possible to attain in the United States, and it was now certain that no opportunity would be lost of restraining his violence or breaking his pen. In August, 1797, accordingly, he was indicted for a libel against the Spanish minister and his court; but the bill was ignored by a majority of one; and indeed, it would have been difficult for an American jury to have punished an Englishman for declaring the Spanish king at that time “the tool of France.” A question was now raised as to whether the obnoxious writer should not be turned out of the United States, under the Alien Act.
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.”
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.
“The History of the Protestant Reformation” turned out a more important production than the author probably anticipated—for his chief aim seems to have been to volunteer a contemptuous defiance to all the religious and popular feelings in England. The work, however, was taken up by the Catholics, translated into various languages, and widely circulated throughout Europe. The author’s great satisfaction seems to consist in calling Queen Elizabeth, “Bloody Queen Bess,” and Mary, “Good Queen Mary,” and he, doubtless, brought forward much that could be said against the one, and in favour of the other, which Protestant writers had kept back; still his two volumes are not to be regarded as a serious history, but rather as a party pamphlet, and no more racy and eloquent party pamphlet was ever written. I quote a passage of which those who do not accept the argument may admire the composition:
“Nor must we by any means overlook the effects of these institutions (monastic) on the mere face of the country. That man must be low and mean of soul who is insensible to all feeling of pride in the noble edifices of his country. Love of country, that variety of feelings which altogether constitute what we properly call patriotism, consist in part of the admiration of, and veneration for, ancient and magnificent proofs of skill and opulence. The monastics built as well as wrote for posterity. The never-dying nature of their institutions set aside in all their undertakings every calculation as to time and age. Whether they built or planted, they set the generous example of providing for the pleasure, the honour, the wealth, and greatness of generations upon generations yet unborn. They executed everything in the very best manner; their gardens, fishponds, farms, were as near perfection as they could make them; in the whole of their economy they set an example tending to make the country beautiful, to make it an object of pride with the people, and to make the nation truly and permanently great.
“Go into any county and survey, even at this day, the ruins of its, perhaps, twenty abbeys and priories, and then ask yourself, ‘What have we in exchange for these?’ Go to the site of some once opulent convent. Look at the cloister, now become in the hands of some rack-renter the receptacle for dung, fodder, and fagot-wood. See the hall, where for ages the widow, the orphan, the aged, and the stranger found a table ready spread. See a bit of its walls now helping to make a cattle-shed, the rest having been hauled away to build a workhouse. Recognise on the side of a barn, a part of the once magnificent chapel; and, if chained to the spot by your melancholy musings, you be admonished of the approach of night by the voice of the screech-owl issuing from those arches which once at the same hour resounded with the vespers of the monk, and which have for seven hundred years been assailed by storms and tempests in vain; if thus admonished of the necessity of seeking food, shelter, and a bed, lift up your eyes and look at the whitewashed and dry-rotten shed on the hill called the ‘Gentleman’s House,’ and apprised of the ‘board wages’ and ‘spring guns,’ which are the signs of his hospitality, turn your head, jog away from the scene of former comfort and grandeur; and with old-English welcoming in your mind, reach the nearest inn, and there, in a room, half-warmed and half-lighted, with a reception precisely proportioned to the presumed length of your purse, sit down and listen to an account of the hypocritical pretences, the base motives, the tyrannical and bloody means, under which, from which, and by which, the ruin you have been witnessing was effected, and the hospitality you have lost was for ever banished from the land.”
V.
The popularity of Mr. Canning had now become a grievous thorn in Cobbett’s side. That of Mr. Robinson (afterwards Lord Goderich) had at one time sorely galled him. But Mr. Robinson’s reputation was on the wane; the reputation of Mr. Canning, on the contrary, rose higher every day; and when that statesman, after being deserted by his colleagues, stood forward as premier of a new government, being taken up by Sir Francis Burdett, and many of the Whig leaders, Mr. Cobbett set no bounds to his choler; and, in company with Mr. Hunt, made at a Westminster dinner (in 1827) a foolish and ill-timed display of his usual hostility to the popular feeling.
His character, in sooth, was never so low as about this period, and in 1828, when he offered himself as a candidate for the place of common councilman (for Farringdon Without), he did not even find one person who would propose him for the office.
It is needless to add that he was now an utterly soured and disappointed man, and in this state the year 1830 found him. The close of that year was more full of melancholy presage for England than perhaps any which the oldest man then alive could remember. The success of the insurrection at Paris had shaken the political foundations of every state in Europe. Scarcely a courier arrived without the bulletin of a revolution. The minds of the intelligent classes were excited; they expected, and perhaps wished for, some great movement at home, analogous to those movements which a general enthusiasm was producing on the Continent. The minds of the lower classes were brutalized by the effects of a Poor Law which had taught them that idleness was more profitable than labour, prostitution than chastity, bad conduct, in short, than good. Consequently, there was on the one hand a widely-spread cry for parliamentary reform, and on the other a general rural insurrection. Amidst this state of things the ministry of the Duke of Wellington retired, and Lord Grey’s, composed of somewhat discordant materials, and with a doubtful parliamentary majority, took its place. Fires blazed throughout the country; rumours of plots and insurrections were rife, and the Register appeared with an article remarkable for its power, and which indirectly excited to incendiarism and rebellion. The Attorney-General prosecuted it. I had then just entered Parliament, and ventured to condemn the prosecution, not because the article in question was blameless, but because I thought that the period for newspaper prosecutions by government was gone by, and that they only excited sympathy for the offender. I was not wrong in that opinion; for the jury being unable to agree as to a verdict, Cobbett walked triumphantly out of court, and having gained some credit by his trial, was shortly afterwards returned to Parliament for Oldham, being at the same time an unsuccessful candidate for Manchester.
The election, however, was less the effect of public esteem than of private admiration, since the veteran journalist owed his success mainly to the influence of a gentleman (Mr. Fielden) who had the borough of Oldham pretty nearly under his control. Still, it was a success, and not an inconsiderable one. The ploughboy, the private of the 54th, after a variety of vicissitudes, had become a member of the British Legislature. Nor for this had he bowed his knee to any minister, nor served any party, nor administered with ambitious interest to any popular feeling. His pen had been made to serve as a double-edged sword, which smote alike Whig and Tory, Pitt and Fox, Castlereagh and Tierney, Canning and Brougham, Wellington and Grey, even Hunt and Waithman. He had sneered at education, at philosophy, and at negro emancipation. He had assailed alike Catholicism and Protestantism; he had respected few feelings that Englishmen respect. Nevertheless, by force of character, by abilities to which he had allowed the full swing of their inclination, he had at last cut his way, unpatronized and poor, through conflicting opinions into the great council chamber of the British nation. He was there, as he had been through life, an isolated man. He owned no followers, and he was owned by none. His years surpassed those of any member who ever came into Parliament for the first time expecting to take an active part in it. He was stout and hale for his time of life, but far over sixty, and fast advancing towards three score years and ten.
It was an interesting thing to most men who saw him enter the House to have palpably before them the real, living William Cobbett. The generation amongst which he yet moved had grown up in awe of his name, but few had ever seen the man who bore it.
The world had gone for years to the clubs, on Saturday evening, to find itself lectured by him, abused by him; it had the greatest admiration for his vigorous eloquence, the greatest dread of his scar-inflicting lash; it had been living with him, intimate with him, as it were, but it had not seen him.
I speak of the world’s majority; for a few persons had met him at county and public meetings, at elections, and also in courts of justice. But to most members of Parliament the elderly, respectable-looking, red-faced gentleman, in a dust-coloured coat and drab breeches with gaiters, was a strange and almost historical curiosity. Tall and strongly built, but stooping, with sharp eyes, a round and ruddy countenance, smallish features, and a peculiarly cynical mouth, he realized pretty nearly the idea that might have been formed about him. The manner of his speaking might also have been anticipated. His style in writing was sarcastic and easy—such it was not unnatural to suppose it might also be in addressing an assembly; and this to a certain extent was the case. He was still colloquial, bitter, with a dry, caustic, and rather drawling delivery, and a rare manner of arguing with facts. To say that he spoke as well as he wrote, would be to place him where he was not—among the most effective orators of his time. He had not, as a speaker, the raciness of diction, nor the happiness of illustration, by which he excels as a writer. He wanted also some physical qualifications unnecessary to the author, but necessary to the orator, and which he might as a younger man have naturally possessed or easily acquired. In short, he could not be at that time the powerful personage that he might have been had he taken his seat on the benches where he was then sitting, when many surrounding him were unknown—even unborn. Still, I know no other instance of a man entering the House of Commons at his age, and becoming at once an effective debater in it. Looking carelessly round the assembly so new to him, with his usual self-confidence he spoke on the first occasion that presented itself, proposing an amendment to the Address; but this was not his happiest effort, and consequently created disappointment. He soon, however, obliterated the failure, and became rather a favourite with an audience which is only unforgiving when bored.
It was still seen, moreover, that nothing daunted him; the murmurs, the “Oh!” or more serious reprehension and censure, found him shaking his head with his hands in his pockets, as cool and as defiant as when he first stuck up the picture of King George in his shop window at Philadelphia. He exhibited in Parliament, too, the same want of tact, prudence, and truth; the same egotism, the same combativeness, and the same reckless desire to struggle with received opinions, that had marked him previously through life, and shattered his career into glittering fragments, from which the world could never collect the image, nor the practical utility of a whole.
A foolish and out-of-the-way motion, praying his Majesty to strike Sir Robert Peel’s name off the list of the Privy Council, for having proposed a return to cash payments in 1819. was his wildest effort and most signal defeat, the House receiving Sir Robert, when he stood up in his defence, with a loud burst of cheers, and voting in a majority of 298 to 4 in his favour.
Cobbett, however, was nothing abashed; for this motion was rather a piece of fun, in his own way, than anything serious; and in reality he was less angry with Sir Robert Peel, on account of his financial measures in 1819, than on account of his being the most able speaker in Parliament in 1833.
VI.
In the new Parliament elected in January 1835, and which met on the 19th February, Cobbett was again member for Oldham. But his health was already much broken by the change of habits, the want of air, and the confinement which weighs on a parliamentary life. He did not, however, perceive this; it was not, indeed, his habit to perceive anything to his own disadvantage. He continued his attendance, therefore, and was in his usual place during the whole of the debate on the Marquis of Chandos’s motion for a repeal of the Malt Tax, and would have spoken in favour of the repeal but for a sudden attack of the throat, to which it is said that he was subject. On the voting of Supplies, which followed almost immediately afterwards, he again, notwithstanding his indisposition, exerted himself, and on the 25th of May persisted in voting and speaking in support of a motion on Agricultural Distress. At last, he confessed he was knocked up, and retired to the country, where for some little time he seemed restored. But on the night of the 11th of June, 1835, he was seized with a violent illness, and on the two following days was considered in extreme danger by his medical attendant. He then again rallied, and on Monday, the 15th, talked (says his son in an account of his death, published on the 20th of June), in a collected and sprightly manner, upon politics and farming, “wishing for four days’ rain for the Cobbetts’ corn and root crops,” and on Wednesday could remain no longer shut up from the fields, but desired to be carried round the farm, and criticised the work which had been done in his absence. In the night, however, he grew more and more feeble, until it was evident (though he continued till within the last half-hour to answer every question that was put to him) that his agitated career was drawing to a close. At ten minutes after one P.M. he shut his eyes as if to sleep, leant back, and was no more—an end singularly peaceful for one whose life had been so full of toil and turmoil.
The immediate cause of his death was water on the chest. He was buried, according to his own desire, in a simple manner in the churchyard of Farnham, in the same mould as that in which his father and grandfather had been laid before him. His death struck people with surprise, for few could remember the commencement of his course, and there had seemed in it no middle and no decline; for though he went down to the grave an old man, he was young in the path he had lately started upon. He left a gap in the public mind which no one else could fill or attempt to fill up, for his loss was not merely that of a man, but of a habit—of a dose of strong drink which all of us had been taking for years, most of us during our whole lives, and which it was impossible for any one again to concoct so strongly, so strangely, with so much spice and flavour, or with such a variety of ingredients. And there was this peculiarity in the general regret—it extended to all persons. Whatever a man’s talents, whatever a man’s opinions, he sought the Register on the day of its appearance with eagerness, and read it with amusement, partly, perhaps, if De la Rochefoucault is right, because, whatever his party, he was sure to see his friends abused. But partly also because he was certain to find, amidst a great many fictions and abundance of impudence, some felicitous nickname, some excellent piece of practical-looking argument, some capital expressions, and very often some marvellously-fine writing,[108] all the finer for being carelessly fine, and exhibiting whatever figure or sentiment it set forth, in the simplest as well as the most striking dress. Cobbett himself, indeed, said that “his popularity was owing to his giving truth in clear language;” and his language always did leave his meaning as visible as the most limpid stream leaves its bed. But as to its displaying truth, that is a different matter, and would be utterly impossible, unless truth has, at least, as many heads as the Hydra of fable; in which case our author may claim the merit of having portrayed them all.
This, however, is to be remarked—he rarely abused that which was falling or fallen, but generally that which was rising or uppermost. He disinterred Paine when his memory was interred, and attacked him as an impostor amongst those who hailed him as a prophet. In the heat of the contest and cry against the Catholics—whom, when Mr. Pitt was for emancipating them, he was for grinding into the dust—he calls the Reformation a devastation, and pronounces the Protestant religion to have been established by gibbets, racks, and ripping-knives. When all London was yet rejoicing in Wellington hats and Wellington boots, he asserts “that the celebrated victory of Waterloo had caused to England more real shame, more real and substantial disgrace, more debt, more distress amongst the middle class, and more misery amongst the working class, more injuries of all kinds, than the kingdom could have ever experienced by a hundred defeats, whether by sea or by land.” He had a sort of itch for bespattering with mud everything that was popular, and gilding everything that was odious. Mary Tudor was with him “Merciful Queen Mary;” Elizabeth, as I have already observed, “Bloody Queen Bess;” our Navy, “the swaggering Navy;” Napoleon, “a French coxcomb;” Brougham, “a talking lawyer;” Canning, “a brazen defender of corruptions.”
His praise or censure afforded a sort of test to be taken in an inverse sense of the world’s opinion. He could not bear superiority of any kind, or reconcile himself to its presence. He declined, it is said, to insert quack puffs in his journal, merely, I believe, because he could not bear to spread anybody’s notoriety but his own; while he told his correspondents never to write under the name of subscriber—it sounded too much like master. As for absurdity, nothing was too absurd for him coolly and deliberately to assert: “The English government most anxiously wished for Napoleon’s return to France.” “There would have been no national debt and no paupers, if there had been no Reformation.” “The population of England had not increased one single soul since he was born.” Such are a few of the many paradoxes one could cite from his writings, and which are now before me.
Neither did his coarseness know any bounds. He called a newspaper a “cut-and-thrust weapon,” to be used without mercy or delicacy, and never thought of anything but how he could strike the hardest. “There’s a fine Congress-man for you! If any d——d rascally rotten borough in the universe ever made such a choice as this (a Mr. Blair MacClenachan), you’ll be bound to cut my throat, and suffer the sans culottes sovereigns of Philadelphia—the hob-snob snigger-snee-ers of Germanstown—to kick me about in my blood till my corpse is as ugly and disgusting as their living carcases are.” “Bark away, hell-hounds, till you are suffocated in your own foam.” “This hatter turned painter (Samuel F. Bradford), whose heart is as black and as foul as the liquid in which he dabbles.”
“It is fair, also, to observe that this State (Pennsylvania) labours under disadvantages in one respect that no other State does. Here is precisely that climate which suits the vagabonds of Europe; here they bask in summer, and lie curled up in winter, without fear of scorching in one season, or freezing in the other. Accordingly, hither they come in shoals, just roll themselves ashore, and begin to swear and poll away as if they had been bred to the business from their infancy. She has too unhappily acquired a reputation for the mildness or rather the feebleness of her laws. There’s no gallows in Pennsylvania. These glad tidings have rung through all the democratic club-rooms, all the dark assemblies of traitors, all the dungeons and cells of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Hence it is that we are overwhelmed with the refuse, the sweeping, of these kingdoms, the offal of the jail and the gibbet. Hence it is that we see so many faces that never looked comely but in the pillory, limbs that are awkward out of chains, and necks that seem made to be stretched.”
It would be difficult to put together more pithy sentences, or more picturesque abuse than is set forth in the scurrilous extracts I have been citing; yet Cobbett’s virulence could be conveyed in a more delicate way whenever he thought proper:
“Since then, Citizen Barney is become a French commodore of two frigates, and will rise probably to the rank of admiral, if contrary winds do not blow him in the way of an enemy.”
His mode of commencing an attack also was often singularly effective from its humour and personality: “He was a sly-looking fellow, with a hard, slate-coloured countenance. He set out by blushing, and I may leave any one to guess at the efforts that must be made to get a blush through a skin like his.” Again: “Having thus settled the point of controversy, give me leave to ask you, my sweet sleepy-eyed sir!”
The following picture is equal to anything ever sketched by Hogarth, and is called “A Summary of Proceedings of Congress,” November, 1794:
“Never was a more ludicrous farce acted to a bursting audience. Madison is a little bow-legged man, at once stiff and slender. His countenance has that sour aspect, that conceited screw, which pride would willingly mould into an expression of disdain, if it did not find the features too skinny and too scanty for its purpose. His thin, sleek air, and the niceness of his garments, are indicative of that economical cleanliness which expostulates with the shoeboy and the washerwoman, which flies from the danger of a gutter, and which boasts of wearing a shirt for three days without rumpling the frill. In short, he has, take him altogether, precisely the prim, mean, prig-like look of a corporal mechanic, and were he ushered into your parlour, you would wonder why he came without his measure and his shears. Such (and with a soul which would disgrace any other tenement than that which contains it) is the mortal who stood upon his legs, confidently predicting the overthrow of the British monarchy, and anticipating the pleasure of feeding its illustrious nobles with his oats.”
Again, let us fancy the following sentences, imitating what the gentlemen of the United States call “stump speaking,” delivered with suitable tone and gesture on the hustings: “The commercial connection between this country (America) and Great Britain is as necessary as that between the baker and the miller; while the connection between America and France may be compared to that between the baker and the milliner or toyman. France may furnish us with looking-glasses, but without the aid of Britain we shall be ashamed to see ourselves in them; unless the sans culottes can persuade us that threadbare beggary is—a beauty. France may deck the heads of our wives and daughters (by the bye, she shan’t those of mine) with ribbons, gauze, and powder; their ears with bobs, their cheeks with paint, and their heels with gaudy parti-coloured silk, as rotten as the hearts of the manufacturers; but Great Britain must keep warm their limbs and cover their bodies. When the rain pours down, and washes the rose from the cheek, when the bleak north-wester blows through the gauze, then it is that we know our friends.”
Cobbett’s talent for fastening his claws into anything or any one, by a word or an expression, and holding them down for scorn or up to horror—a talent which, throughout this sketch, I have frequently noticed—was unrivalled. “Prosperity Robinson,” “Œolus Canning,” “The Bloody Times,” “the pink-nosed Liverpool,” “the unbaptized, buttonless blackguards” (in which way he designated the disciples of Penn),[109] were expressions with which he attached ridicule where he could not fix reproach, and it is said that nothing was more teasing to Lord Erskine than being constantly addressed by his second title of “Baron Clackmannan.”
VII.
I have alluded, at the commencement of this sketch, to the fact that if the life of Mackintosh was in contradiction to his instincts, and forced to adapt itself to his wishes or ideas, that of Cobbett was ruled by his instincts, to which all ideas and wishes were subordinate. His inclinations were for bustle and strife, and he passed his whole life in strife and bustle. This is why the sap and marrow of his genius show themselves in every line he sent to the press. But at the same time his career warns us how little talents of the highest order, even when accompanied by the most unflagging industry, will do for a man, if those talents and that industry are not disciplined by stedfast principles and concentrated upon noble objects. It is not to be understood, indeed, when I say that a man should follow his nature, that I mean he should do so without sense or judgment; your natural character is your force, but it is a force that you must regulate and keep applied to the track on which the career it has chosen is to be honourably run. I would not recommend a man with military propensities to enter the church; I should say, “Be a soldier, but do not be a military adventurer. Enlist under a lawful banner, and fight for a good cause.”
Cobbett acknowledged no banner; and one cannot say, considering the variety of doctrines he by turns adopted and discarded, that he espoused any cause. Nor did he consider himself bound by any tie of private or political friendship. As a beauty feels no gratitude for the homage which she deems due to her charms, so Cobbett felt no gratitude for the homage paid to his abilities. His idea of himself was that which the barbarian entertains of his country. Cobbett was Cobbett’s universe; and as he treated mankind, so mankind at last treated him. They admired him as a myth, but they had no affection for him as a person. His words were realities, his principles fictions.
It may indeed be contended that a predominant idea ran winding through all the twistings and twinings of his career, connecting his different inconsistencies together; and that this was “a hatred for tyranny.” “He always took his stand,” say his defenders, “with the minority:” and there is something in this assertion. But there is far less fun and excitement in fighting a minority, with a large majority at one’s back, than in coming out, at the head of a small and violent minority, to defy and attack a body of greater power and of larger numbers. It was this fun and excitement which, if I mistake not, were Cobbett’s main inducements to take the side he took in all the contests he engaged in, whether against the minister of the day, or against our favourite daughter of the eighth Henry, who reigned some centuries before his time. Still the tendency to combat against odds is always superior to the tendency to cringe to them, and a weak cause is not unfrequently made victorious by a bold assertion.
It must be added also, in his praise, that he is always a hearty Englishman. He may vary in his opinions as to doctrines and as to men, but he is ever for making England great, powerful, and prosperous—her people healthy, brave, and free. He never falls into the error of mistaking political economy for the whole of political science. He does not say, “Be wealthy, make money, and care about nothing else.” He advocates rural pursuits as invigorating to a population, although less profitable than manufacturing. He desires to see Englishmen fit for war as well as for peace. There is none of that puling primness about him which marks the philosophers who would have a great nation, like a good boy at a private school, fit for nothing but obedience and books. To use a slang phrase, there was “a go” about him which, despite all his charlatanism, all his eccentricities, kept up the national spirit, and exhibited in this one of the highest merits of political writing. The immense number of all his publications that sold immediately on their appearance, sufficiently proves the wonderful popularity of his style; and it is but just to admit that many of his writings were as useful as popular.
A paper written in 1804, on the apprehended invasion, and entitled “Important Considerations for the People of this Kingdom,” was placed (the author being unknown) in manuscript before Mr. Addington, who caused it to be printed and read from the pulpit in every parish throughout the kingdom. For many years this paper was attributed to other eminent men; and it was only when some one thought of attacking Cobbett as an enemy of his country, that he confessed the authorship of a pamphlet, to the patriotism of which every Englishman had paid homage.
Again, in 1816, the people of the northern and midland counties being in great distress, attributed their calamities to machinery, and great rioting and destruction of property was the consequence. Cobbett came forward to stop these vulgar delusions. But he knew the nature of the public mind. It was necessary, in order to divert it from one idea, to give it another. So, he ridiculed the idea of distress proceeding from machinery, and attributed it to misgovernment. Of his twopenny pamphlet, called “A Letter to Journeymen and Labourers,” 30,000 copies were sold in a week, and with such advantage that Lord Brougham, in 1831, asked permission to republish it. Much in his exaggerations and contradictions is likewise to be set down to drollery rather than to any serious design to deceive. I remember the late Lady Holland once asking me if I did not think she sometimes said ill-natured things; and on my acquiescing, she rejoined: “I don’t mean to burn any one, but merely to poke the fire.” Cobbett liked to poke the fire, to make a blaze; but in general—I will not say always—he thought more of sport than of mischief.
At all events, this very spirit of change, of criticism, of combativeness, is the spirit of journalism; and Cobbett was not only this spirit embodied, but—and this renders his life so remarkable in our history—he represented journalism, and fought the fight of journalism against authority, when it was still a doubt which would gain the day.
Let us not, indeed, forget the blind and uncalculating intolerance with which the law struggled against opinion from 1809 to 1822. Writers during this period were transported, imprisoned, and fined, without limit or conscience; and just when government became more gentle to legitimate newspapers, it engaged in a new conflict with unstamped ones. No less than 500 vendors of these were imprisoned within six years. The contest was one of life and death. Amidst the general din of the battle, but high above all shouts more confused, was heard Cobbett’s bold, bitter, scornful voice, cheering on the small but determined band, which defied tyranny without employing force. The failure of the last prosecution against the Register was the general failure of prosecutions against the Press, and may be said to have closed the contest in which government lost power every time that it made victims.
Such was Cobbett—such his career! I have only to add that, in his family relations, this contentious man was kind and gentle. An incomparable husband, an excellent father; and his sons—profiting by an excellent education, and inheriting, not, perhaps, the marvellous energies, but a great portion of the ability, of their father—carry on with credit and respectability the name of a man, who, whatever his faults, must be considered by every Englishman who loves our literature, or studies our history, as one of the most remarkable illustrations of his very remarkable time.