“To describe the various instances of their ignorance, and the various tricks they played to disguise it from me, would fill a volume. It is the custom in regiments to give out orders every day from the officer commanding. These are written by the adjutant, to whom the sergeant-major is a sort of deputy. The man whom I had to do with was a keen fellow, but wholly illiterate. The orders, which he wrote, most cruelly murdered our mother tongue. But, in his absence, or during a severe drunken fit, it fell to my lot to write orders. As we both wrote in the same book, he used to look at these. He saw commas, semi-colons, colons, full-points, and paragraphs. The questions he used to put to me, in an obscure sort of way, in order to know why I made these divisions, and yet, at the same time, his attempts to disguise his object, have made me laugh a thousand times. As I often had to draw up statements of considerable length, and as these were so much in the style and manner of a book, and so much unlike anything he had ever seen before in man’s handwriting, he, at last, fell upon this device: he made me write, while he pretended to dictate! Imagine to yourself me sitting, pen in hand, to put upon paper the precious offspring of the mind of this stupid curmudgeon! But here a greater difficulty than any former arose. He that could not write good grammar, could not, of course, dictate good grammar. Out would come some gross error, such as I was ashamed to see in my handwriting. I would stop; suggest another arrangement; but this I was, at first, obliged to do in a very indirect and delicate manner. I dared not let him perceive that I saw, or suspected his ignorance; and, though we made sad work of it, we got along without any very sanguinary assaults upon mere grammar. But this course could not continue long, and he put an end to it in this way: he used to tell me his story, and leave me to put it upon paper; and thus we continued to the end of our connexion.
“He played me a trick upon one occasion, which was more ridiculous than anything else, but which will serve to show how his ignorance placed him at my mercy. It will also serve to show a little about Commissioners sent out by the Government. There were three or four Commissioners sent out to examine into the state of the provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Their business was of a very extensive nature. They were to inquire into the number of the people, the extent of their settlements, the provisions expended upon them, and a great variety of other matters. Upon all these several heads they were to make a Report, and to subjoin to it a detail in figures. It required great ingenuity to frame these tables of figures, to bring the rude and undigested materials under general heads, dividing themselves into more particular sections, and then again subdividing themselves, and so on, and showing, at last, a sort of total, or result of the whole. To frame this appendix to the Report, and to execute in any moderate space of paper required a head, an eye, and a hand; and to draw up the Report itself was a task of a still superior order. The Commissioners, the name of one of whom was Dundas … who or what he was besides, I know not; and I have forgotten the names of the rest. But they closed their work at Fredericton in New Brunswick, where I was with my regiment. As the arrival of every stranger was an excuse for a roaring drunk with our heroes, so this ceremony now took place. But the Commissioners had their Report to make. And what did my ass of an adjutant do, but offer to do it for them! They, who in all likelihood, did not know how to do it themselves, took him at his word; and there was he, in the sweetest mess that ever vain pretender was placed in. He wanted to get some favour from these Commissioners, and relied upon me, not only to perform the task, but to keep the secret. But then, the part he had to act now was full of difficulty. The Report of these fellows was no concern of mine. It could not, by any contrivance, be hooked in amongst my duties. He therefore talked to me, at first in a sort of ambiguous manner. He said that the Commissioners wanted him to do it,—and, d——n them, he would not do it for them. Then, when I saw him again, he asked me something about it, showing me their rude mass of papers at the same time. I now began to find what he would be at; but I affected not to understand him, turned the matter as soon as I could, and so we parted. At this time I had long been waiting to go and see an old farmer and his family, and to shoot wild pigeons in the woods; and, as the distance was great, and a companion on the journey necessary, I wanted a sergeant to go with me. The leave to do this had been put off for a good while, and the adjutant knew that I had the thing at heart. What does he do now, but come to me, and after talking about the Report again, affect to lament, that he should be so much engaged with it, that there was no hope of my being permitted to go on my frolic, till he had finished the Report. I, who knew very well what this meant, began to be very anxious for this finishing, to effect which I knew there was but one way. Tacked on to the pigeon-shooting the report became an object of importance, and I said, ‘Perhaps I can do something, sir, in putting the papers in order for you.’ That was enough. Away he went, brought me the whole mass, and tossing them down upon the table: ‘There,’ said he, ‘do what you like with them; for, d——n the rubbish, I have no patience with it!’ Rubbish it really was, if we looked only at the rude manner of the papers; but the matter would to me, at this day, have been very interesting. I d——d the papers as heartily as he did, and with better reason; but they were to bring me my week’s frolic; and, as I entered into everything with ardour, this pigeon-shooting frolic, at the age of about 23 [27], was more than a compensation for all the toil of this Report and its appendix. To work I went, and with the assistance of my shooting-companion sergeant, who called over the figures to me, I had the appendix completed in rough draft, in two days and one night. Having the detail before me, the Report was short work, and the whole was soon completed. But before a neat copy was made out, the thing had to be shown to the Commissioners. It would not do to show it them in my handwriting. The adjutant got over this difficulty by copying the report; and having shown it, and had it highly applauded,—‘Well then,’ said he, ‘here sergeant-major, go and make a fair copy.’ This was the most shameless thing that I ever witnessed. This report and appendix, though I hated the job, were, such was my habit of doing everything well, executed with so much neatness and accuracy, that the Duke of Kent, who afterwards became Commander-in-chief in those provinces, and who was told of this report, which was in his office at Halifax, had a copy of it made to be kept in the office, and carried the original with him to England as a curiosity; and of this fact he informed me himself. The duke, from some source or other, had heard that it was I who had been the penman upon this occasion, though I had never mentioned it to anybody. It drew forth a great deal of admiration at Fredericton, and the Lieutenant-governor, General Carleton,[5] asked me in plain terms, whether it was I who had drawn up the Report. The adjutant had told me that I need not say but it was he, because he had promised to do it himself. I was not satisfied with his logic; but the pigeon-shooting made me say, that I certainly would say it was done by him if any one should ask me. And I kept my word with him; for, as I could not give the question of the governor the go-by, I told him a lie at once, and said it was the adjutant. However, I lied in vain; for, when I came to Halifax, in my way from the United States to England, ten years afterwards, I found that the real truth was known to a number of persons, though the thing had wholly gone out of my mind; and after my then late pursuits, and the transactions of real magnitude in which I had been concerned, I was quite surprised that anybody should have attached any importance to so trifling a thing.”
It appears that the Duke of Kent, who was Commander-in-chief at that station a few years later, was one of the “persons” who got wind of this affair; and in 1800, when Cobbett was returning to England the second time, the Duke saw him, and showed that he had kept the veritable copy as a curiosity, having had it transcribed for the use of the Governor. Further—
“When I told him the whole story, he asked me how much the Commissioners gave me; and when I told him not a farthing, he exclaimed most bitterly, and said that thousands of pounds had, first and last, been paid by the country for what I had done.”
It must be noted, too, that there were individual cases of benefit arising from the example of our very smart sergeant. Several men caught the “grammar”-fever, whilst an increasing zeal appeared, in the performance of duty, on the part of many of his comrades. So far, indeed, that his services to the regiment were at last recognized in public orders. When the regiment was relieved and sent home in the autumn of 1791, Cobbett applied for his discharge; which he obtained, accompanied by a flattering testimonial from his major,[6] to his “good behaviour, and the services he had rendered the regiment.”
And, with all his duties, Cobbett found time for his share of sports; skating, fishing, shooting, and even gardening, took some portion of his hours of liberty. He could work, and he could play, but could never be idle for a minute.
It must have been in the year 1787, when Cobbett was about twenty-five years of age, that he first saw his future wife. She was the daughter of an artilleryman, and then only about thirteen, and, although so very young, won the heart of our sergeant in a twinkling. Her character, too, had been moulded by careful and untiring parents; and when the lover came by, there was the promise of a genuine helpmeet for one, who required in that respect a woman of unquestioned propriety, of great industry, and of unfailing discretion. How quickly he prospered, and the whole story of his courtship, with the one great risk that it ran of being annulled, is all told in the “Advice to a Lover;” suffice it to say here, that not only was there never a moment’s regret, but that Cobbett, to the last day of his life laid all his fame and all the earthly prosperity which he had enjoyed, to the happy choice which he had made in his wife. The first trial came, early enough in the history of the affair, to be a real trial, when the artillery were sent home, and carried the sergeant’s hopes along with them, besides 140 or 150 guineas of his savings in the girl’s pocket.