“No sooner does a man become in any degree formidable to her [‘corruption’], than she sets to work against him in all the relationships of life. In his profession, his trade, his family; amongst his friends, the companions of his sports, his neighbours, and his servants. She eyes him all round, she feels him all over, and if he has a vulnerable point, if he has a speck, however small, she is ready with her stab. How many hundreds of men have been ruined by her without being hardly able to perceive, much less name, the cause; and how many thousands, seeing the fate of these hundreds, have withdrawn from the struggle, or have been deterred from taking part in it!”
In the year 1809, Mr. Cobbett was at about the zenith of his fame. Completely emancipated from the aristocratic influence under which he had, several years before, appeared as a political writer in England, his eyes were thoroughly opened to the need of Parliamentary Reform. Early this year his energies had been principally directed on behalf of this popular cause, but he had also dealt hardly with certain notorious scandals. When our history comes to that period, we shall see the various means made use of by his opponents in the endeavour to silence him; but it is necessary now to refer to that year, because one of those means was the circulation of a pamphlet with the following title:—
“Proceedings of a General Court Martial held at the Horse Guards, on the 24th and 27th of March, 1792, for the trial of Captain Richard Powell, Lieutenant Christopher Seton, and Lieutenant John Hall, of the 54th Regiment of Foot, on several charges preferred against them respectively, by William Cobbett, late Sergeant-Major of the said regiment; together with several curious letters which passed between the said William Cobbett and Sir Charles Gould, Judge-Advocate-General; and various other documents connected therewith, in the order of these dates.” [London, 1809.]
Copies of the pamphlet were distributed broadcast over the country, and in Hampshire, where Cobbett was then living, carriage people threw them out to the passers-by as they drove along. A very great number must have got into circulation; and, as pamphlets go, it is not now a particularly rare one. Of government pamphleteering we shall have more to say anon; for the present, we will confine ourselves to Cobbett’s full and complete answer as given in an address to the people of Hampshire, in the “Political Register” for June 17, 1809. Full, complete, and satisfactory it was; nobody referred to the matter again. Even the pamphleteering system itself fell into desuetude for several years. Other and more arbitrary means were adopted, in the attempt to stifle this voice—to shut this mouth.
The pamphlet consisted chiefly of a selection of letters, which passed between the accused officers, the Judge-Advocate-General, and William Cobbett; and concluded with an account of the trial. The three officers appeared perfectly willing to meet the charges; and as for the prosecutor there could be no doubt as to the earnestness of his intention,[4] up to within about a week of the date first appointed for the court-martial. That date was the 24th of March; and, on the court assembling, no prosecutor appeared, the result being a postponement to the 27th. On that day, the court having reassembled, the Judge-Advocate-General was himself sworn, and deposed that he had made ineffectual efforts to discover the prosecutor, whilst the landlady at whose house Cobbett had lodged stated that he had removed the previous week. This witness also produced the three last letters of the Judge-Advocate-General to William Cobbett, unopened; which letters stated (1) that an important witness for the prosecution was not likely to be well enough to attend, (2) that the day of the trial was fixed, and (3) that the trial was postponed. The charges were then read, to the effect that the accused had made false musters, mustered persons who were not soldiers, made false returns to the Brigadier-general commanding at New Brunswick, misapplied work-money earned by the non-commissioned officers and men, deducted firewood from the allowance, and disposed of it for their own purposes, disposed of clothing belonging to the men, and obliged them (whilst they were clothed in rags) to accept of an inadequate sum in lieu of the said clothing, signed false certificates respecting the clothing, and defrauded the men of bread. After the “acquittal,” a memorandum was submitted to the law officers of the crown, upon the whole case. Their opinion was, that, unless there were proof of conspiracy with others, Cobbett could not be criminally prosecuted; but that the parties injured by his conduct, which was certainly most highly blamable, might maintain actions upon the case against him.
Such was the offending pamphlet: on the 3rd of June, 1809, a notice appears in the “Political Register,” of its publication, evidently under the sanction of Government; also, that Mr. Cobbett will take the earliest opportunity of giving a full account of the matter. He repudiates positively every insinuation of having acted, at any time of his life, dishonestly or dishonourably; at the same time, had the whole of the papers connected with this affair been published without misrepresentation he never would have noticed the thing at all, but have left the documents to speak for themselves. A fortnight later a double number of the “Register” contains the full account, with a great deal more in the shape of commentary, touching the topics of the day;—it occupies the fifth of a series of Letters to the people of Hampshire, which Cobbett was then writing, on the subject of Parliamentary Reform. And it is necessary, in order to do justice to the whole story, to reproduce a great portion of it here.
After repeating the tale of his honourable discharge from the army, he proceeds to say:—
“The object of my thus quitting the army, to which I was, perhaps, more attached than any man that ever lived in the world, was to bring certain officers to justice for having, in various ways, wronged both the public and the soldier. With this object in view, I went straight to London the moment I had obtained my liberty and secured my personal safety, which, as you will readily conceive, would not have been the case if I had not first got my discharge.… This project was conceived so early as the year 1787, when an affair happened that first gave an insight into regimental justice. It was shortly this: that the quarter-master, who had the issuing of the men’s provisions to them, kept about a fourth part of it to himself. This, the old sergeants told me, had been the case for many years; and they were quite astonished and terrified at the idea of my complaining of it. This I did, however; but the reception I met with convinced me that I must never make another complaint, till I got safe to England, and safe out of the reach of that most curious of courts, a COURT-MARTIAL. From this time forward I began to collect materials for an exposure, upon my return to England. I had ample opportunities for this, being the keeper of all the books, of every sort, in the regiment, and knowing the whole of its affairs better than any other man. But the winter previous to our return to England, I thought it necessary to make extracts from books, lest the books themselves should be destroyed. And here begins the history of the famous court-martial. In order to be able to prove that these extracts were correct, it was necessary that I should have a witness as to their being true copies. This was a very ticklish point. One foolish step here would have sent me down to the ranks with a pair of bloody shoulders. Yet it was necessary to have the witness. I hesitated many months. At one time I had given the thing up. I dreamt twenty times, I daresay, of my papers being discovered, and of my being tried and flogged half to death. At last, however, some fresh act of injustice toward us made me set all danger at defiance. I opened my project to a corporal, whose name was William Bestland, who wrote in the office under me, who was a very honest fellow, who was very much bound to me for my goodness to him, and who was, with the sole exception of myself, the only sober man in the whole regiment. To work we went, and during a long winter, while the rest were boozing and snoring, we gutted no small part of the regimental books, rolls, and other documents. Our way was this: to take a copy, sign it with our names, and clap the regimental seal to it, so that we might be able to swear to it when produced in court. All these papers were put into a little box, which I myself had made for the purpose. When we came to Portsmouth there was a talk of searching all the boxes, &c., which gave us great alarm, and induced us to take out all the papers, put them in a bag, and trust them to a custom-house officer, who conveyed them on shore to his own house, whence I removed them in a few days after.
“Thus prepared, I went to London, and on the 14th of January, 1792, I wrote to the then Secretary at War, Sir George Yonge, stating my situation, my business with him, and my intentions; enclosing him a letter or petition from myself to the King, stating the substance of all the complaints I had to make; and which letter I requested Sir George Yonge to lay before the King. I waited from the 14th to the 24th of January without receiving any answer at all, and then all I heard was that he wished to see me at the War-office. At the War-office I was shown into an antechamber amongst numerous anxious-looking men, who, every time the door which led to the great man was opened, turned their eyes that way with a motion as regular and as uniform as if they had been drilled to it. These people eyed me from head to foot, and I never shall forget their look, when they saw that I was admitted into paradise, without being detained a single minute in purgatory. Sir George Yonge heard my story; and that was apparently all he wanted of me. I was to hear from him again in a day or two, and after waiting for fifteen days, without hearing from him or any one else upon the subject, I wrote to him again, reminding him that I had from the first told him that I had no other business in London; that my stock of money was necessarily scanty; and that to detain me in London was to ruin me. Indeed, I had in the whole world but about 200 guineas, which was a great deal for a person in my situation to have saved. Every week in London, especially as, by way of episode, I had now married, took at least a couple of guineas from my stock. I therefore began to be very impatient, and, indeed, also very suspicious that military justice, in England, was pretty nearly akin to military justice in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The letter I now wrote was dated on the 10th of February, to which I got an answer on the 15th, though the answer might have been written in a moment. I was, in this answer, informed that it was the intention to try the accused upon only part of the charges which I had preferred; and from a new-modelled list of charges sent me by the Judge-advocate, on the 23rd of February, it appeared that, even of those charges that were suffered to remain, the parts the most material were omitted. But this was not all. I had all along insisted that, unless the court-martial were held in London, I could not think of appearing in it; because, if held in a garrisoned place like Portsmouth, the thing must be a mere mockery. In spite of this, however, the Judge-advocate’s letter of the 23rd of February informed me that the court was to be held at Portsmouth or Hilsea. I remonstrated against this, and demanded that my remonstrance should be laid before the King, which, on the 29th, the Judge-advocate promised should be done by himself; but, on the 5th of March, the Judge-advocate informed me that he had laid my remonstrance before—whom, think you? Not the king, but the accused parties, who, of course, thought the court ought to assemble at Portsmouth or Hilsea, and doubtless for the very reasons that led me to object to its being held there.
“Plainly seeing what was going forward, I, on the 7th of March, made, in a letter to Mr. Pitt, a representation of the whole case, giving him a history of the obstacles I had met with, which letter concluded thus: ‘I have now, sir, done all a man can do in such a case. I have proceeded regularly, and I may add, respectfully, from first to last; if I am allowed to serve my country by prosecuting men who have injured it, I shall do it; if I am thwarted and pressed down by those whose office it is to assist and support me, I cannot do it; in either case, I shall be satisfied with having done my duty, and shall leave the world to make a comparison between me and the men whom I have accused.’ This letter (which, by-the-bye, the public robbers have not published) had the effect of changing the place of the court-martial, which was now to be held in London; but, as to my other great ground of complaint, the leaving of the regimental books unsecured, it had no effect at all; and it will be recollected that, without those books, there could be, as to most of the weighty charges, no proof adduced without bringing forward Corporal Bestland, and the danger of doing that will be presently seen. But now, mark well as to these books: as to this great source of that kind of evidence which was not to be brow-beaten, or stifled by the dangers of the lash. Mark well these facts, and from them judge of what I had to expect in the way of justice. On the 22nd of January I wrote to Sir George Yonge, for the express purpose of having the books secured; that is to say, taken out of the hands and put out of the reach of the parties accused. On the 24th of January he told me that HE HAD taken care to give directions to have these documents secured. On the 18th of February, in answer to a letter, in which I (upon information received from the regiment) complained of the documents not having been secured, he wrote to me—and I have now the letter before me, signed with his own hand—that he would write to the colonel of the regiment about the books, &c.: ‘although,’ says he, ‘I cannot doubt but that the regimental books have been properly secured.’ This was on the 18th of February, mind; and now it appears, from the documents which the public-robbers have put forth, that the first time any order for securing the books was given was on the 15th of March, though the Secretary told me he had done it on the 24th of January, and repeated his assertion in writing on the 18th of February. There is quite enough in this fact alone, to show the public what sort of a chance I stood of obtaining justice.