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.