Meanwhile, another lecturing tour had been undertaken during the autumn, extending into Scotland; and, if one may judge from the reception he met with, Mr. Cobbett was now enjoying greater popularity than at any other period of his life.[3]
The notions which Mr. Cobbett had acquired, concerning the duties belonging to the position in which he was now placed, were quite at variance with any known principles.
Until the æra of the Reformed Parliament it was accounted a preposterous thing for any member to be professedly without a party; and any one entering the House with a popular grievance at his back, as Paull and Burdett and Wardle had done in a previous generation—and as O’Connell and Hume in recent times—to a great extent stood alone. They might get supporters from time to time; but such men were not of the sort which could coalesce with the patrician nominees and the plutocrats, who had hitherto pretended to represent the Commons of England.
Had Mr. Cobbett entered Parliament a quarter of a century previously, when it was within his power to do so through aristocratic influence, he would have been the means of forming a party earnestly devoted to the objects of Reform; and it must be regarded as a serious error on his part, arising though it did from a sturdy regard for his own independence, that he should refuse to do so; and expect to sway the House of Commons, in the smallest degree, from the outside. For it was looked upon, in those days, as something bordering on the seditious, for any one outside the walls of Parliament to pretend to discuss domestic politics; and an affectation of contempt was the only answer to the cleverest and most liberal of amateur statesmanship. As for earnestness, in the consideration of any popular question, it was not there at all; the House of Commons of 1831-2 would never have passed a Reform Bill, only that the clamour of the Unrepresented made the question vital to the existence of the Whig party; and the fiercest opponents to the popular candidates, at the elections which followed, were the ministerialists themselves. To the very last the spectacle was seen of the exclusive classes clinging to what they deemed a prescriptive right to govern.
Such men, then, as Cobbett, and Silk Buckingham, and Roebuck, coming into Parliament for the first time, found themselves there under circumstances favourable only for the exercise of particular individuality; and, unless the possessor of special talents, the event proved that the individual influence of each was very small. The old members would not even listen to them; and the general feeling concerning the new men was that they were astonishingly harmless.
The opening scene has been often enough described. “Some very bad characters have been returned,” says Mr. Greville.[4] Among these “bad characters” is placed the new member for Oldham; who at once establishes his claim to such epithet, by seating himself on the front bench (usually occupied by ministers), and by commencing his first speech with these words:—
“It appears to me, that, since I have been sitting here, I have heard a great deal of vain and unprofitable conversation.”
But, really, there was nothing to be frightened at. Excepting that Mr. Cobbett seemed to think that a Reformer should be chosen Speaker of a Reformed Parliament, and that some disregard might be paid to the established rules of the House, there was nothing whatever to reward the expectations of those who had trembled at the bare thought of this “diabolical villain” treading the floor of that sacred chamber. There sat, night after night, one of the meekest, most inoffensive of men. When he got up to speak, there stood a fine, tall, hale old fellow, with a face sparkling with humour, and a voice of surprising gentleness; only roused to vehemence when the efforts to cough him down were somewhat too overpowering.
Cobbett’s short career in Parliament has, sometimes, been stigmatized as a failure. It was not a failure. He was a very regular attendant while his health lasted; and he never lost an opportunity of reminding the House what he had been sent there for. And the numerous interruptions and contradictions to which he at first became subject, rather manifested “failure” elsewhere: viz. on the part of many members to understand the awful exigencies of the time, and the responsibility which they ought to have attached to their own position. But their sensibilities were far too keen, to bear with patience Mr. Cobbett’s frequent references to the burdens under which the people still laboured; one member, at last, expressing an opinion that “the constant complaints respecting the distresses of the people were of the most injurious tendency: they were calculated to make all classes politicians”! In short, the first reformed Parliament was, itself, a great failure; and was rightly sent back to the country at the end of two unproductive sessions.
It must be said, however, that the first two or three months of Mr. Cobbett’s attendance in Parliament were not calculated to impress the House in his favour. Although he put up with malicious references to Tom Paine, and to agricultural incendiarism, with remarkable good temper, there was an amount of indiscretion about his mode of bringing up his own special topics, which mightily offended the taste of less self-assertive people. And, upon one occasion, his mode of procedure was so absurd, that he covered both himself and his cause with overwhelming contempt. The circumstances were these:—