But, of all his admirers, no one seems to have equalled Mr. Windham, in the warmth and eagerness with which that gentleman courted Cobbett’s friendship.
The Right Hon. William Windham (“the first gentleman of the age … the ingenious, the chivalrous, the high-souled,” according to one of Macaulay’s juster judgments) was an enthusiast; and, in the eyes of those persons who shrug their shoulders when a man acts as though he had some faith in his own opinions, whimsical. Deeply reverential toward the memory of Mr. Burke, his own genius was not unfitted to bear forth, to another generation, the name and the principles of that great man. Windham was beloved and admired by all persons of refinement and sensibility; and if he has left a name not so widely known as some of his cotemporaries, it must be laid to the account of an extreme self-consciousness, and an honourable delicacy, which prevented him from serving always in the ranks of party with unreasoning devotion.
Mr. Windham’s peculiar scare was French Jacobinism; and he, along with the leaders of the party who held similar views, thought that there could be no lasting cessation of hostilities with Buonaparte, whilst the ascendancy of the latter involved the spread of Democratic principles. Mr. Windham was, naturally, a zealous admirer of that arch anti-Jacobin, whose writings had so disturbed the bile of American Democrats; and, upon Porcupine’s arrival in London, he immediately sought his acquaintance. With Windham was associated Dr. French Laurence, another intimate friend of the lamented Burke, who also ably represented in Parliament the opinions of that statesman.
Mr. Windham was, at this time, Pitt’s Secretary-at-War; and, according to the entry in his diary,[2] he appears to have met Cobbett for the first time on the 7th of August, 1800 (probably at Windham’s official residence). Mr. Cobbett’s references to this occurrence represent Mr. Pitt as having been very polite to him on the occasion, and as having inspired him with great admiration for his person and manners. He was altogether pleased and gratified by his reception, and by the ready condescension with which the company present conversed with him. But, of course (as he said more than thirty years afterward), “it was natural for Pitt and his set to look at me a little, to see what they could make of so efficient a piece of stuff.” Mr. Pitt’s habitual austerity and hauteur pretty generally disappeared at the dinner-table; and Cobbett saw him, for the first time, at one of these happy moments. So that, what with his very natural pride at the invitation, and his satisfaction at finding that the King’s ministers were such highly-agreeable fellows, he felt more than ever disposed to use his talents in the support of monarchy. He resolved to set up a daily paper; and left Mr. Windham’s dinner-table with that resolve uppermost in his mind.
That Mr. Pitt miserably erred, in the prosecution of the European war, has long since been established, with all minds not wedded to the notion that our rulers are of Divine appointment. What opposition there was to his ideas, in his own day, was considered to proceed only from the partisans of revolution; and it was easy to apply the term “disaffected,” to humanitarians who hated war, or to the suffering poor who wanted bread. But, notwithstanding that the Government expenditure was over fifty millions per annum,[3] and that the ordinary expenses of housekeeping had increased 300 per cent. in seven years, the war was popular with all classes that had anything to fear from modern doctrines. The political ignorance of even the majority of the House of Commons of that day would put to shame the very students of our time. And it is not too much to say that, had Lord Grenville been anything of a statesman beyond the name, he would scarcely have treated Napoleon’s overtures for peace, made at the close of the year 1799, with mere contempt, and allowed a fair opportunity for a general pacification to pass away because he must have, as a basis, the reinstatement of the Bourbons upon the throne of France. Ministers wanted to come out of the contest, in point of fact, with GLORY; and any peace, which did not involve the attainment of the objects with which the war was, professedly, being carried on, was certain also to involve their prestige, if not their places. This may be said without any disparagement to their honour. Mr. Pitt, Mr. Windham, Lord Grenville,—all of them and their supporters, honestly believed that their mission was, not only to keep French principles out of England, but to smother them throughout Europe. Sternly, earnestly, they kept to their purpose; forgetting, or, more probably, never having taken to heart, the prodigious expansion which the eighteenth century had produced in the human mind, and the certainty of its development in the line of liberty; whilst confounding, in one heterogeneous estimate, the unstable Gaul, the restless Pole, the high-spirited Celt, and the conservative Briton.
So Mr. Pitt’s supporters in the press, reflecting the fearsome notions of their chief, and dreading, as from the Evil One himself, the faintest breath of democracy, could only regard the “masses” as unfit for more than the mere semblance of political rights. The impossibility of phlegmatic John Bull ever permitting, on his own soil, such follies and excesses as the French Jacobins had perpetrated never entered their minds. “Law and Order,” as personified in George III. and his ministers, was the only antithesis to “Anarchy.” Some of these writers lived to see the perilous consequences of the repressing system; and a few survived to note the blessings which flowed from general political enlightenment. Some, to the very last, shut their eyes to the inevitable, and could prognosticate only decay; others, sooner or later, discerned the signs of the times, and served worthily in the van of progress. Of these latter, one of the first, one of the most earnest, one of the bravest, was Mr. William Cobbett.
And it is not uninteresting to note that, on the very morrow of Mr. Windham’s dinner-party, the dimness began to clear away from Cobbett’s mind. Better and nobler hopes for the future of England, founded upon something more solid than class-prescriptions, unfolded themselves; the veil began to part, behind which was hidden the framework of misgovernment alike with the skeletons of its framers; a glimmer of dawn, the expansion of which was soon to light up a path, so startlingly and unexpectedly distinct from his previous conceptions, appeared,—a path, not upon the mossy turf of favour and privilege, leading on to other mossy turves, but one trending up-hill, among stones and briers—which stones would, at last, beaten down into the earth by later footsteps, provide a firm foot-hold—which briers, refreshed by successive showers, would yet emit a sweet and blessed odour!
Here is his own account; and the man, or the woman, who can read it without emotion, need scarcely go on with this history:—