FOOTNOTES
[1] According to a private letter, addressed to his friend Thomas Mellersh of Godalming, there were proposals to elect him at Manchester, at Glasgow, at Oldham, at Preston, and at Dudley.
[2] “With respect to the measures which ought to be adopted, I have no hesitation in saying that my decided opinion is that, for the safety of the State, the eternal peace of the country, the well-being of the people, the preservation of property, and the maintenance of anything like liberty, measures must be adopted to the full extent of any that have ever as far as I recollect been proposed by Mr. Cobbett. I am persuaded that he has all these objects sincerely at heart. I wholly acquit him of any personal ambition, except probably that anxious desire for fame, and that wish to live in the grateful recollection of his countrymen, which are the signs of an exalted and of a noble spirit. Sordid views of interest he certainly has none—no petty ambition. The good of the people is what he seeks; his fame—the mere fact of his being thought of to represent Manchester—is the assurance that he has the means of promoting it.”
This extract is of no mean value, as testimony from a man who had known him personally for thirty years. The Committee at once printed the letter in broadside.
[3] Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine (Nov. 1832) describes Cobbett’s reception in Edinburgh in very generous terms, declaring that Pasta, Paganini, nor Fanny Kemble created half such sensation. “He presented himself before an impatient house, filled from floor to ceiling, which rose to greet him in a tumultuous rapture. His appearance is highly favourable; his ease, tact, and self-possession are unrivaled. He was neither overpowered nor taken by surprise with these demonstrations of the modern Athenians.”
“Mr. Cobbett is still of stately stature, and must in youth have been tall. He must then, in physiognomy, person, and bearing, have been a fine specimen of the true Saxon breed;—
“The eyes of azure, and the locks of brown,
And the blunt speech, that bursts without a pause,
And free-born thoughts, which league the soldier with the laws.”
… His thin, white hairs and high forehead, the humour lurking in the eye, and playing about the lips, betokened something more than the squire in his gala suit; still, the altogether was of this respectable and responsible kind. His voice is low-toned, clear, and flexible, and so skilfully modulated, that not an aspiration was lost of his nervous, fluent, unhesitating, and perfectly correct discourse. There was no embarrassment, no flutter, no picking of words; nor was the speaker once at fault, or in the smallest degree disturbed, by those petty accidents and annoyances which must have moved almost any other man.… He is, indeed, a first-rate comic actor, possessed of that flexible, penetrative power of imitation which extends to mind and character, as well as to their outward signs. His genius is, besides, essentially dramatic. We have often read his lively characteristic dialogues with pleasure and amusement, but to see him act them, and personate Lord Althorp, pommelled and posed by the future Member for Oldham, was a degree beyond this. He was in nothing vehement or obstreperous, though everybody had anticipated something of this kind; and his subdued tone and excellent discretion gave double point to his best hits.… The humour of his solemn irony, his blistering sarcasm, but especially his sly hits and unexpected or random strokes and pokes on the sore or weak sides of the Whigs, told with full effect. To oratory, in the highest sense of the term, Mr. Cobbett never once rises, but he is ever a wily, clear, and most effective speaker.”
“Mr. Cobbett expressed himself highly gratified with his reception in Edinburgh. In Glasgow, and other parts of the country, he has been, if that were possible, still more popular. And at this we rejoice, as evidence of affection for the cause to which, whatever fastidious persons may think, Cobbett has been a useful, rough pioneer, and most powerful auxiliary.”
The Rev. George Gilfillan gives (“Gallery of Literary Portraits,” 2nd Ser.) an animated account of Cobbett’s appearance in Edinburgh, and is very fair, albeit shrewd enough, in his entire estimate of Cobbett’s character.
[4] “Memoirs,” ii. 335.
[5] Vide the Courier newspaper, March, 1833.
[6] It appeared, from a petition presented to the House of Commons by Mr. Cobbett, that a policeman, one William Popay, had been acting the part of an amateur spy, by joining several political unions of the time, and had even urged their members to the adoption of violent courses. This discovery, and the debate thereon, produced great excitement at the time; and Popay was, in consequence of the report of the Committee, dismissed from the police force.
CHAPTER XXVII.
“I HAVE BEEN THE GREAT ENLIGHTENER OF THE PEOPLE OF ENGLAND.”[1]
So this long fight was over.
For forty years past, Cobbett had waged incessant warfare against political hypocrisy and corruption; here represented by revolutionary theorists; there by political adventures; now, by venal courtiers; again, by uncompromising partisanship in the press. Heedless of personal danger, and proud of his native soil and of his fellow-countrymen, he had never flinched from the pursuit of those whom he regarded as the enemies of his country’s welfare. Often blindly passionate, but always honest, and dominated by the convictions of the hour, he had presented the unexampled phenomenon of a man who could face, single-handed, the world in arms; insusceptible alike to the arts of intrigue, and to the cozening of partisanship.
The character of the London newspaper press, in the earlier years of the present century, bears no comparison with its now-existing posterity, either in character, ability, or influence. Our leading journal, indeed, should scarcely know its own grandfather: appealing, as it does, to the taste of the most highly-cultivated minds of the age; and quite indifferent to anything but the task of representing the best public opinion of the day. As for a “government organ,” there is no such thing; your newspaper now gets upon the wings of the day, or what it supposes the wings of the day, and there catches the best breeze that it can. There is no space for mutual recriminations, with ostentation of “private wire,” and elaborate political and literary reviews, if even the taste for dirt-throwing had not vanished. The doctrine of the survival of the fittest is found to hold good, in journalism as in everything else; and there cannot, possibly, be any better token of the improvement of the age, in taste and morals, than the elevated tone of the more successful leaders of public opinion in our own days.
When the History of the newspaper-press comes to be properly written, it will not be a mere record of the struggles and strifes of proprietors; the successes of the few, and the failures of the many; nor even the extraordinary wealth of anecdote furnished by personal history. Along with these matters will have to be introduced critical studies, derived from close examination of the journals; discovering the amount of prescience with which each may be credited, and the growth and decay of their influence; tracing motives of particular partisanship to their source; and estimating their relative places, in the grand temple of the Fourth Estate.
The task of that historian will find its best reward, in the endeavour to comprehend the first quarter of the nineteenth century. He will see the press first enslaved, then reckless, then persecuted; then partially enslaved again; then gradually presenting a prospect that it will, one day or other, become purified into something like dignity and respectability. For all this long while, it has been strangely unable to endure rivalry and opposition; and its members have vied with one another, as to which could employ the foulest epithets, impute the wickedest motives to opponents, or fawn the most gracefully upon “patrons.” There was no place for independence, in those days; for independent principles were considered to hide the wolf of Jacobinism. The alteration in tone, consequent upon a change of proprietorship, went under the favourite stigma of “profligacy.”[2] As for party-spirit, there never was a truer dictum than that laid down by Mr. Cobbett, in one of the later numbers of the London Porcupine: “The press is as much shackled and restrained by the spirit of party, as it could be by the most restrictive laws.”
From the day of the first appearance of the Political Register, a new æra dawned for journalism. Its originality in plan, and the power with which it was written, awakened envy; its plain English, and rapid acquisition of independence in opinion, provoked opposition. And the success, with which its early career was marked, brought imitators into the field. But that which soon characterized it, more particularly, was an inflexible hostility to such newspapers, and such persons, who endeavoured to extenuate or explain away the misuse of public money. People sadly wanted educating upon this point. The principles of Walpole and Newcastle had borne fruit. The Treasury was surrounded by hungry adventurers; and there were hundreds of men, as late as William Pitt’s time, who had sucked-in these principles, as it were, with their mothers’ milk. And if we consider that, when Cobbett began the fight, and for some time after, there was no one else had the courage, or was in the mind, to expose it all, we shall understand the singular position in which he stood. For an anonymous writer to sit down, and write off a malicious paragraph or two with insinuations of venality, was one thing; but, for a man, well-known in the flesh, renouncing the editorial “we,” and affecting the first-person-singular, proceeding to tell a plain story, fearless of the consequences, was a phenomenon which startled Society; the effect produced being similar to that which occurs upon poking your walking-stick into an ants’ nest.
Decent Society never forgave Mr. Cobbett. No matter! Upon that man’s memory lies the credit of having been chiefly instrumental in restoring political purity to the nation. The whole domestic history of England, between 1800 and 1835, is distinguished by the struggles of the nation to emancipate itself from corruption in Church and State. The pioneer was William Cobbett; and no history of those struggles, which does not place him high among the “leaders and guiders” of men, will be worthy of the name.
As to how far Mr. Cobbett’s ideas and predictions have been accepted, is not the purpose of the present work; if, even, its limits did not forbid such an essay. It is certain that he was largely pirated, during his lifetime, both in speeches and in newspaper articles. But he lost so much weight, in the minds of dispassionate men, by such unbounded extravagance as was displayed in his “History of the Reformation;” and his cotemporaries were so cruelly lashed and scolded, when the advocacy of their own views exceeded the truth, that the significance of his career could not be properly understood by his generation. It is almost surprising that more bad institutions did not fall before his trenchant blows; yet, with respect to those that remain,[3] and are doomed, it may safely be recommended to ransack the Political Register for the best arguments and illustrations, with which to defy their supporters. On many great questions Cobbett was far in advance of his time; perhaps on nothing more so than in the foresight with which he contemplated the development of popular ideas. To us, in Liberal-Conservative times, the following passage (May, 1833) seems a commonplace; but, to the privileged classes of his own days, the words were as the words of Micaiah in the ears of Ahab:—
“It is not by harshly and rudely resisting the claims of the people, that you put a stop to the progress of democracy. It is by yielding in time; by yielding to what is manifestly just in the people’s demands; by removing expenses so clearly unjust towards the people, and so clearly unnecessary to the support of good and efficient government; it is by taking from their backs burdens which they cannot bear without ruin; and which they ought not to bear at all. It is by means like these; by doing these things, which satisfy all reasonable men, and putting them on your side; it is by these that you check, and put a stop to, the progress of democracy; and not by acts which plainly tell the people that they are to expect no redress of their grievances as long as the present order of things shall exist.”
The grave was literally his last enemy. The announcement of Cobbett’s death was the close of a strife, in which had been displayed the singular spectacle of the Champion of the Press arrayed against its own licentiousness; in which the dangers attendant upon the conjuring up of new foes had been counted as nothing, while there was a principle to be maintained, or a touch of cant to be exposed. And, now that he was gone for ever, the whole fraternity acknowledged his genius and his talents; and confessed that a good, and great, and honest heart had departed from among them. Throughout the land, with almost unanimity, the newspapers teemed with his praises; and those were not few, who, having not long since boasted of their hatred, now frankly declared that Mr. Cobbett was a man of whom his countrymen might justly be proud, as one of the greatest that England had ever produced.
The last years of Mr. Cobbett’s domestic life were of singular tranquillity. Surrounded as he was by a family, the individual members of which had “never caused him a day’s anxiety,” his hearth was a complete antithesis to the stormy scenes outside. And he had that felicity, the first wish of every good man’s heart, of seeing his sons and daughters bear the fruits of his own example, in a correct estimate of the duties and the discipline of life. Not only that. Age never came upon him in crabbed form. There was a soft, genial nature about Mr. Cobbett, which no surface vehemence could exorcise. Even, when dealing his heaviest blows upon the heads of the poor “borough-mongers,” or when pouring his most terrible sarcasms around, his energy was the energy of warmth; as though heated with his own heart’s blood. It would be difficult to find any one essay among his writings, which, fairly analyzed, did not betray honest, impetuous affection for the cause immediately on hand. You cannot fail, as you read, to recognize the unpaid advocate. That he was ridiculously vain of his success in life, is no more than could be expected of a half-educated man, who had held, for more than a generation, such extraordinary power with the lower and middle classes; but such vanity, fostered sometimes by individuals and sometimes by the crowd, was not of that sort typified by the Napoleons and the Masaniellos of life. No: the sword laid down, and the helm removed from the brow, left this warrior a homely citizen, resting with the children, and the birds, the fruits and flowers, and the sweetest hospitalities.
So, old age brought nothing to Mr. Cobbett, of the burthen. “Always at work or sleep,” the work he did at seventy years of age was not excelled in quality by that of any previous period of his life; and, had it not been for the enforced change of habits brought about by his attendance in parliament, he might have lived another decade or so. He had, even, inured himself to noisy Fleet Street. Speaking, somewhere, of his upper room in Bolt Court, he says,—
“The birds sing better, and sing louder, and more, and stronger in a cage, than they do when at large;” adding that “the best pastorals have been written in smoky garrets.” Naturally enough, if a man hath a garden in his own heart.
But, in truth, much of Cobbett’s wonderful staying-power lay in his splendid mental and physical health. An active and temperate existence, in which nothing was allowed to run to waste, warded-off the approaches of senility. Excepting only a tumour which gave some trouble for a few months[4] during 1824, he had known nothing of illness; beyond those trifling matters to which even the best constitutions are liable under given circumstances. After reaching his threescore-and-ten, he could still boast of riding over the country with the youngest; or doing a day’s work against any one of his labourers.
This was an astonishingly active, fully-worked life; in which nothing of the morbid could possibly find entrance. An early riser, and no lingerer at meals, Cobbett never confessed to having any leisure time. Social pleasures, as such, would seem to have been almost unheeded, if not despised. Yet his hospitality was unbounded, and overflowing with good nature; and he was always at the service of persons who applied to him for advice, or, even, of those nondescript individuals who would claim the privileges of half-acquaintanceship, and call upon him to indulge a sort of curiosity.
And, of all this vigour, and heartiness, and true daily purpose, nothing failed, in the green old age of William Cobbett.
Very difficult as it is to point to a date, at which Cobbett’s name will be forgotten—it is easy to understand why the popular estimate of the man, at the period of his death, still holds good, in the Anglo-Saxon breast: why his character, falling so far short of perfection, is still counted worthy of the lasting honour of Englishmen. For, his faults were the faults of his race: so often virtues in disguise. Coming from the pure Saxon peasant stock, he caused a healthful infusion of fresh blood into the spirit of his age, and so brought his fellow-countrymen to see, once more, the native energy, and pugnacity, and honesty of purpose, which had so often won the battle of freedom, now brought to bear upon new conditions and new circumstances. Thus it is, that the thoughtful and unbiased student looks upon Cobbett’s character and career. Full of faults, it is no incoherent jumble of a character, without principles and without light; but one having brave and high aims. A special lot in life; which must, by its very nature, bring upon the man some measure of contumely: in which a false step or two would count against him a thousandfold. A special career; pursued with a single eye, an honest purpose, and a persevering heart. A life, that needs no Apologist: but presenting a consistent story; worthy of all that has given us renown, and enabled us to dictate the principles of freedom to the whole world.
The last uneventful years of Mr. Cobbett’s domestic life were spent, at least as far as the public demands upon his time would allow, among the scenes and the occupations which he loved so well: those of his earliest recollections. The garden at Kensington becoming too small for his ambitious seed-farming experiments, the well-known manor-farm of Barn Elm was occupied for three or four years. But, in the summer of 1832, this was relinquished; and Mr. Cobbett retired farther into Surrey, to a locality not many miles from his birthplace, in the adjoining parish of Ash. Normandy farm (contiguous to that of Wanborough, whence Mr. Birkbeck had departed for the golden west) lies in a lonely, unfrequented district, with a poor, wet soil; and it was one that required a great deal of money expended upon it. But it suited Cobbett’s seed-farming tastes:—
“I took a farm,” he says, in his characteristic way, “for several purposes: 1. To please myself, and to live at the end of my days, in those scenes in which I began them; 2. To make the life as long as nature, unthwarted by smoke and confinement, would let it be; 3. To make a complete Tullian farm; 4. To make a Locust coppice; 5. To raise garden seeds in the best possible manner.”
But nothing could ward off the perils incident to late hours in London. After his first parliamentary session, there were evident signs of his constitution failing him; and, although revived somewhat in summer, each new winter brought back a cough, which forbade rest at night, and gradually helped to bring the end nearer. A visit to Ireland, in 1834, seemed to be undertaken with all his old powers; his writing and his humour were as good as ever. But the following winter proved to be the last, and the early months of the year 1835 were a constant struggle to keep up to the post at which he meant to die.
Not that he meant to die, yet. There were new plans, only a month before Cobbett’s death, which exhibited anything but the lapse of mental or physical power. There was to be a new Cobbett’s Evening Journal, a special feature of which was the full publication of important discussions in parliament, which were not elsewhere faithfully reported: those affairs, viz., in which Hume, and the other economists beside himself, had the leading share.
Also, the Register was to be dropped, “in full blaze,” on his next birthday, the 9th of March, 1836:—
“Then, putting out the Register, at the end of the 91st volume, I shall … have time to write a history of MY OWN LIFE, showing the progress of a ploughboy to a seat in parliament; beginning his career by driving the rooks and magpies from his father’s pea-fields and his mother’s chicken-yard; and ending, by endeavouring to drive the tithe and tax devourers from the fruits of the labour of his industrious countrymen.”
It was in the month of June, 1835, that Cobbett had his first, and last, serious illness.
He still dictated material for the Political Register, and continued personally to inspect his little farm, at the last by being carried in a chair. On the 16th his eldest son (writing to a friend) speaks confidently of his being in a fair way of getting strength again; and there was no very great alarm until the following day. A sudden change, however, occurred on that morning; his strength gradually wasted; and on the 18th of June, at a few minutes after one p.m., he passed away, as gently as a child would fall asleep.