Historical Characters: Mackintosh, Talleyrand, Canning, Cobbett, Peel

by Baron Henry Lytton Bulwer Dalling and Bulwer

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.