Without these written documents nothing of importance could be proved, unless the non-commissioned officers and men of the regiment should happen to get the better of their dread of the lash; and, even then, they could only speak from memory. All, therefore, depended upon those written documents, as to the principal charges. Therefore, as the court-martial was to assemble on the 24th of March, I went down to Portsmouth on the 20th, in order to know for certain what was become of the books; and I found, as indeed I suspected was the case, that they had never been secured at all; that they had been left in the hands of the accused from the 14th of January to the very hour of trial; and that, in short, my request as to this point, the positive condition as to this most important matter, had been totally disregarded. There remained, then, nothing to rest upon with safety but our extracts, confirmed by the evidence of Bestland, the corporal, who had signed them along with me; and this I had solemnly engaged with him not to have recourse to, unless he was first out of the army; that is to say, out of the reach of the vindictive and bloody lash. He was a very little fellow, not more than about five feet high, and had been set down to be discharged when he went to England; but there was a suspicion of his connexion with me, and therefore they resolved to keep him. It would have been cruel, and even perfidious, to have brought him forward under such circumstances; and, as there was no chance of doing anything without him, I resolved not to appear at the court-martial, unless the discharge of Bestland was first granted. Accordingly, on the 20th of March, I wrote from Fratton, a village near Portsmouth, to the Judge-Advocate, stating over again all the obstacles that had been thrown in my way, complaining particularly that the books and documents had been left in the possession of the accused, contrary to my urgent request and to the positive assurances of the Secretary at War, and concluding by demanding the discharge of a man, whom I should name, as the only condition upon which I would attend the court-martial. I requested him to send me an answer by the next day, at night, at my former lodging; and told him,[5] that unless such answer was received, he and those to whom my repeated applications had been made, might do what they pleased with their court-martial; for that I confidently trusted that a few days would place me beyond the scope of their power. No answer came, and as I had learned in the meanwhile that there was a design to prosecute me for sedition, that was an additional motive to be quick in my movements. As I was going down to Portsmouth I met several of the sergeants coming up, together with the music-master; and as they had none of them been in America, I wondered what they could be going to London for; but, upon my return, I was told by a Captain Lane, who had been in the regiment, that they had been brought up to swear that at an entertainment given to them by me before my departure from the regiment, I had drunk ‘the destruction of the House of Brunswick.’ This was false; but I knew that that was no reason why it should not be sworn by such persons, and in such a case. I had talked pretty freely upon the occasion alluded to; but I had neither said nor thought against the King; and, as to the House of Brunswick, I hardly knew what it meant. My head was filled with the corruptions and the baseness in the army. I knew nothing at all about politics. Nor would any threat of this sort have induced me to get out of the way for a moment, though it certainly would if I had known my danger, for glorious ‘Jacobinical’ times were just then beginning. Of this, however, I knew nothing at all. I did not know what the Suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act meant. When you have a mind to do a thing, every trifle is an additional motive. Lane, who had enlisted me, and who had always shown great kindness toward me, told me they would send me to Botany Bay; and I now verily believe, that if I had remained, I should have furnished a pretty good example to those who wished to correct military abuses. I did not, however, leave England from this motive. I could not obtain a chance of success, without exposing the back of my poor faithful friend Bestland, which had I not pledged myself not to do, I would not have done. It was useless to appear, unless I could have tolerable fair play; and, besides, it seemed better to leave the whole set to do as they pleased, than to be made a mortified witness of what it was quite evident they had resolved to do.
“Such is the true history of this affair, which had the public-robbers given it as it stood, unmutilated, not a word should I ever have published, by way of defence or explanation.”
Cobbett then proceeds to show the hollow and tricky nature of the attack, by summing up the points which tend obviously to show that the whole is a trumped-up charge against his honour and his reputation; first stating that the five letters from himself, which appear in the pamphlet, were the least important of twenty-seven which he actually wrote, including one to Mr. Pitt, and one, in the shape of a petition, to the King. He then reminds his readers that he would have scarcely put himself to the expense of two or three months’ living in London, and to the trouble of writing so many letters and of dancing attendance at the Horse Guards, if he hadn’t a good case and were not in earnest about it; that nine years had elapsed since his return to England, and no process had been taken upon the opinion of the Attorney-General and his colleague; that his “Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine” was reprinted in London, in 1796, at the express desire of Mr. Canning, i.e. only four years after the incident, and yet nothing had been done to supply the omission (in that publication) of the court-martial story; that he had, when dining with Mr. Pitt in August, 1800, talked freely about Fitzgerald and about the army “for the express purpose of leading him on to talk about the court-martial, but it was avoided. In fact, they all well knew that what I had complained of was true, and that I had been baffled in my attempts to obtain justice only because I had neither money nor friends.” That General Carleton (late Governor of Nova Scotia) had visited him in England, since his return, and that the Duke of Kent had talked to him in Halifax about the regiment and its affairs in the year 1800; yet both these distinguished officers must have known all about the court-martial, the Governor’s name, in point of fact, having occurred in one of the “charges.” Besides this, there could be little doubt that the whole facts were not put before Sir John Scott and Sir John Mitford, or their opinion would have been very different from what it was.
Finally, he reminds his readers that he had, in the year 1805, himself given the cue. Which was certainly the case, as may be seen by referring to his writings of that date:—
“In the printed account of my life, there is a small chasm. When I published that account I was in the midst of the revilers of England, and particularly of the English army; or, I should have then stated, that the primary cause of my leaving the army, that the circumstance which first disgusted me, and that finally made me resolve to tear myself from a service, to which my whole mind and heart were devoted, was, the abuses, the shocking abuses as to money-matters, the peculation, in short, which I had witnessed in it, and which I had, in vain, endeavoured to correct. What those abuses were, by whom they were committed, and how, after I quitted the army, I failed in obtaining redress, it would not now, after many of the parties are dead, be proper for me to state; but, if the ‘Society of Gentlemen’ have, as it is more than probable they have, access to the records of the War Office, and can obtain leave to publish the correspondence upon the subject, the public will then see that I have all my life, and in all situations, been the enemy of peculation. It is, however, incumbent upon me to state, that I have good reason to believe that my failure upon that occasion was in no way to be ascribed to Mr. Pitt, who, as far as a person in so obscure and perfectly friendless a situation as I then was, could judge, was, as to the matter in question, the friend of fair inquiry and of justice.”
We may safely dismiss this matter. Should the reader find it worth his while to rake up this old pamphlet, and compare it with Cobbett’s “full account,” he may find a stray divergence of date or of trifling fact; but nothing more than, as a careless omission, will serve to establish the good faith of the man—a class of evidence which is often as serviceable as a statement clear and unfaltering to the minutest detail. Why the affair went off as it did is obvious to any one who knows the world, and the rules of society, better than Cobbett did: it was a hopeless task, from the very first, to undertake it upon his own responsibility, without professional assistance. A mistake, however, which he seldom corrected through life; and the consequence being that he as seldom succeeded in gaining a cause: he persisted, to the very last, in being his own advocate—and with the proverbial result.
Let us turn, then, to another incident of this year. An incident which has given the biographer a good deal of trouble; as it presents an occasion upon which it has seemed difficult to reconcile two statements which, at first sight, seem to vary.
For this purpose, we must again refer to a later date in the history. In the year 1805, Mr. Cobbett made himself very offensive to the Government over the unfortunate difficulties of Lord Melville. The whole contest, between the Government and its opponents, was of the hottest; and the choicest Billingsgate passed between them. One periodical, inspired by the Pitt and Melville party, made it its business to assail Cobbett in particular; and, on the 27th of July of the above-mentioned year, the following passage occurred:—
“As Mr. Cobbett can hardly fail to read this review, I beg leave, through its medium, to ask that worthy patriot if he knows who was the author, and industrious circulator through the army, of a pamphlet entitled The Soldiers’ Friend, published about the same time, but fraught with ten times more mischief than Paine’s ‘Rights of Man’? A pamphlet calculated to render soldiers discontented with their situation, and incite them to mutiny and rebellion; a pamphlet which, in short, I have no hesitation in saying, was a considerable source of the naval mutiny at the Nore.”