Denman, who prosecuted, employed a very different tone towards Cobbett from the tone that Perceval had used at the first of Cobbett’s trials. Perceval, when prosecuting Cobbett for some articles on Ireland in the Register in 1803, asked the jury with the patrician insolence of a class that held all the prizes of life, ‘Gentlemen, who is Mr. Cobbett? Is he a man writing purely from motives of patriotism? Quis homo hic est? Quo patre natus?’ No counsel prosecuting Cobbett could open with this kind of rhetoric in 1831: Denman preferred to describe him as ‘one of the greatest masters of the English language.’ Denman’s speech was brief, and it was confined mainly to a paraphrase of certain of Cobbett’s articles and to comments upon their effect. It was no difficult task to pick out passages which set the riots in a very favourable light, and emphasised the undoubted fact that they had brought some improvement in the social conditions, and that nothing else had moved the heart or the fears of the ruling class. But the speech was not long over before it became evident that Cobbett, like another great political defendant, though beginning as the accused, was to end as the accuser. His reply to the charge of exciting the labourers to violence was immediate and annihilating. In December 1830, after the publication of the article for which he was now being tried, Brougham, as President of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, had asked and obtained Cobbett’s leave to reprint his earlier ‘Letter to the Luddites,’ as the most likely means of turning the labourers from rioting and the breaking of machines. There stood the Lord Chancellor in the witness-box, in answer to Cobbett’s subpœna, to admit that crushing fact. This was a thunderclap to Denman, who was quite ignorant of what Brougham had done, and, as we learn from Greville, he knew at once that his case was hopeless. Cobbett passed rapidly from defence to attack. Grey, Melbourne, Palmerston, Durham, and Goderich had all been subpœna’d in order to answer some very awkward questions as to the circumstances under which Thomas Goodman had been pardoned. The Lord Chief Justice refused to allow the questions to be put, but at least these great Ministers had to listen as Cobbett told the story of those strange transactions, including a visit from a parson and magistrates to a ‘man with a rope round his neck,’ which resulted in Goodman’s unexplained pardon and the publication of a statement purporting to come from him ascribing his conduct to the incitement at Cobbett’s ‘lacture.’ Cobbett destroyed any effect that Goodman’s charge might have had by producing a declaration signed by one hundred and three persons present at the lecture—farmers, tradesmen, labourers, carpenters, and shoemakers—denying that Cobbett had made the statement ascribed to him in Goodman’s confession, one of the signatories being the farmer whose barn Goodman had burnt. He then proceeded to contrast the treatment Goodman had received with the treatment received by others convicted of incendiarism, and piecing together all the evidence of the machinations of the magistrates, constructed a very formidable indictment to which Denman could only reply that he knew nothing of the matter, and that Cobbett was capable of entertaining the most absurd suspicions. On another question Denman found himself thrown on the defensive, for he was now confronted with his own misstatements in Parliament about Cook, and the affidavits of Cook’s father present in court. Denman could only answer that till that day no one had contradicted him, though he could scarcely have been unaware that the House of Commons was not the place in which a Minister’s statement about the age, occupation, pay, and conduct of an obscure boy was most likely to be challenged. Denman made a chastened reply, and the jury, after spending the night at the Guildhall, disagreed, six voting each way. Cobbett was a free man, for the Whigs, overwhelmed by the invective they had foolishly provoked, remembered, when too late, the wise saying of Maurice of Saxony about Charles V.: ‘I have no cage big enough for such a bird,’ and resisted all the King’s invitations to repeat their rash adventure. To those who have made their melancholy way through the trials at Winchester and Salisbury, at which rude boys from the Hampshire villages and the Wiltshire Downs, about to be tossed across the sea, stood shelterless in the unpitying storm of question and insinuation and abuse, there is a certain grim satisfaction in reading this last chapter and watching Denman face to face, not with the broken excuses and appeals of ignorant and helpless peasants, but with a volleyed thunder that swept into space all his lawyer’s artifice and skill. Justice plays strange tricks upon mankind, but who will say that she has not her inspirations?
One more incident has to be recorded in the tale of suppression. The riots were over, but the fires continued. In the autumn of 1831 Melbourne, in a shameful moment, proposed a remedy borrowed from the evil practices which a Tory Parliament had consented at last to forbid. The setting of spring guns and man-traps, the common device of game preservers, had been made a misdemeanour in 1826 by an Act of which Suffield was the author. Melbourne now proposed to allow persons who obtained a license from two magistrates to protect their property by these means. The Bill passed the House of Lords, and the Journals record that it was introduced in the House of Commons, but there, let us hope from very horror at the thought of this moral relapse, silently it disappears.
When Grey met Parliament as Prime Minister he said that the Government recognised two duties: the duty of finding a remedy for the distress of the labourers, and the duty of repressing the riots with severity and firmness. We have seen how the riots were suppressed; we have now to see what was done towards providing a remedy. This side of the picture is scarcely less melancholy than the other; for when we turn to the debates in Parliament we see clearly how hopeless it was to expect any solution of an economic problem from the legislators of the time. Now, if ever, circumstances had forced the problem on the mind of Parliament, and in such an emergency as this men might be trusted to say seriously and sincerely what they had to suggest. Yet the debates are a mêlée of futile generalisations, overshadowed by the doctrine which Grey himself laid down that ‘all matters respecting the amount of rent and the extent of farms would be much better regulated by the individuals who were immediately interested than by any Committee of their Lordships.’ One peer got into trouble for blurting out the truth that the riots had raised wages; another would curse machinery as vigorously as any labourer; many blamed the past inattention of the House of Lords to the labourers’ misery; and one considered the first necessity of the moment was the impeachment of Wellington. Two men had actual and serious proposals to make. They were Lord King and Lord Suffield.
Both of these men are striking figures. King (1776–1833) was an economist who had startled the Government in 1811 by calling for the payments of his rents in the lawful coin of the realm. This dramatic manœuvre for discrediting paper money had been thwarted by Lord Stanhope, who, though in agreement with King on many subjects, strongly approved of paper money in England as he had approved of assignats in France. Lord Holland tells a story of how he twitted Stanhope with wanting to see history repeat itself, and how Stanhope answered with a chuckle: ‘And if they take property from the drones and give it to the bees, where, my dear Citoyen, is the great harm of that?’ King was always in a small minority and his signature was given, together with those of Albemarle, Thanet, and Holland, to the protest against establishing martial law in Ireland in 1801, which was written with such wounding directness that it was afterwards blackened out of the records of the House of Lords, on the motion of the infamous Lord Clare. But he was never in a smaller minority than he was on this occasion when he told his fellow landlords that the only remedy for the public distress was the abolition of the Corn Laws. Such a proposal stood no chance in the House of Lords or in the House of Commons. Grey declared that the abolition of the Corn Laws would lead to the destruction of the country, and though there were Free Traders among the Whigs, even nine years after this Melbourne described such a policy as ‘the wildest and maddest scheme that has ever entered into the imagination of man to conceive.’
Suffield (1781–1835), the only other politician with a remedy, is an interesting and attractive character. Originally a Tory, and the son of Sir Harbord Harbord, who was not a man of very tender sensibilities, Suffield gradually felt his way towards Liberalism. He was too large-minded a man to be happy and at ease in an atmosphere where the ruling class flew instinctively in every crisis to measures of tyranny and repression. Peterloo completed his conversion. From that time he became a champion of the poor, a fierce critic of the Game Laws, and a strong advocate of prison reform. He is revealed in his diary and all the traditions of his life as a man of independence and great sincerity. Suffield’s policy in this crisis was the policy of home colonisation, and its fate can best be described by means of extracts from a memoir prepared by R. M. Bacon, a Norwich journalist and publicist of importance, and printed privately in 1838, three years after Suffield had been killed by a fall from his horse. They give a far more intimate and graphic picture of the mind of the Government than the best reported debates in the records of Parliament.
We have seen in a previous chapter that there had been at this time a revival of the movement for restoring the land to the labourers. One of the chief supporters of this policy was R. M. Bacon, who, as editor of the Norwich Mercury, was in close touch with Suffield. Bacon set out an elaborate scheme of home colonisation, resembling in its main ideas the plan sketched by Arthur Young thirty years earlier, and this scheme Suffield took up with great enthusiasm. Its chief recommendation in his eyes was that it applied public money to establishing labourers with a property of their own, so that whereas, under the existing system, public money was used, in the form of subsidies from the rates, to depress wages, public money would be used under this scheme to raise them. For it was the object of the plan to make the labourers independent of the farmers, and to substitute the competition of employers for the competition of employed. No other scheme, Suffield used to maintain, promised any real relief. If rents and taxes were reduced the farmer would be able, but would not be compelled, to give better wages: if taxes on the labourers’ necessaries were reduced, the labourers would be able to live on a smaller wage, and as long as they were scrambling for employment they were certain to be ground down to the minimum of subsistence. The only way to rescue them from this plight was to place them again in such a position that they were not absolutely dependent on the farmers. This the Government could do by purchasing land, at present waste, and compelling parishes, with the help of a public loan, to set up labourers upon it, and to build cottages with a fixed allotment of land.
Suffield’s efforts to persuade the Government to take up this constructive policy began as soon as Grey came into office. His first letters to Bacon on the subject are written in November. The opposition, he says, is very strong, and Sturges Bourne and Lansdowne are both hostile. On 17th November he writes that a peer had told him that he had sat on an earlier committee on this subject with Sturges Bourne, as chairman, and that ‘those who understood the subject best agreed with Malthus that vice and misery alone could cure the evil.’ On 19th November he writes that he has had a conference with Brougham, with about the same success as his conference with Lansdowne and Sturges Bourne. On the 23rd he writes that he has been promised an interview at the Home Office; on the 25th ‘no invitation from Lord Melbourne——the truth is he cannot find one moment of leisure. The Home Office is distracted by the numerous representations of imminent danger to property, if not to life, and applications for protection.’ Later in the same day he writes that he has seen both Grey and Melbourne: ‘I at once attacked Grey. I found him disposed to give every possible consideration to the matter. He himself has in Northumberland seen upon his own property the beneficent effects of my plan, namely of apportioning land to cottagers, but he foresaw innumerable difficulties.’ A House of Lords Committee had been appointed on the Poor Laws at the instance of Lord Salisbury, and Suffield hoped to persuade this committee to report in favour of his scheme. He therefore pressed Grey to make a public statement of sympathy. Grey said ‘he would intimate that Government would be disposed to carry into effect any measure of relief recommended by the Committee; very pressed but would call Cabinet together to-morrow.’ The interview with Melbourne was very different. ‘Next I saw Lord Melbourne. “Oppressed as you are,” said I, “I am willing to relieve you from a conference, but you must say something on Monday next and I fear you have not devoted much attention to the subject.” “I understand it perfectly,” he replied, “and that is the reason for my saying nothing about it.” “How is this to be explained?” “Because I consider it hopeless.” “Oh, you think with Malthus that vice and misery are the only cure?” “No,” said Lord Melbourne, “but the evil is in numbers and the sort of competition that ensues.” “Well then I have measures to propose which may meet this difficulty.” “Of these,” said Lord Melbourne, “I know nothing,” and he turned away from me to a friend to enquire respecting outrages.’ Suffield concludes on a melancholy note: ‘The fact is, with the exception of a few individuals, the subject is deemed by the world a bore: every one who touches on it is a bore, and nothing but the strongest conviction of its importance to the country would induce me to subject myself to the indifference that I daily experience when I venture to intrude the matter on the attention of legislators.’
A fortnight later Suffield was very sanguine: ‘Most satisfactory interview with Melbourne: thinks Lord Grey will do the job in the recess.’ But the sky soon darkens again, and on the 27th Suffield writes strongly to Melbourne on the necessity of action, and he adds: ‘Tranquillity being now restored, all the farmers are of course reducing their wages to that miserable rate that led to the recent disturbances.’ Unhappily the last sentence had a significance which perhaps escaped Suffield. Believing as he did in his scheme, he thought that its necessity was proved by the relapse of wages on the restoration of tranquillity, but vice and misery-ridden politicians might regard the restoration of tranquillity as an argument for dropping the scheme. After this the first hopes fade away. There is strong opposition on the Select Committee to Suffield’s views, and he is disappointed of the prompt report in favour of action which he had expected from it. The Government are indisposed to take action, and Suffield, growing sick and impatient of their slow clocks, warns Melbourne in June that he cannot defend them. Melbourne replies that such a measure could not be maturely considered or passed during the agitation over the Reform Bill. Later in the month there was a meeting between Suffield and Melbourne, of which unfortunately no record is preserved in the Memoir, with the result that Suffield declared in Parliament that the Government had a plan. In the autumn of 1831 an Act was placed on the Statute Book which was the merest mockery of all Suffield’s hopes, empowering churchwardens or overseers to hire or lease, and under certain conditions to enclose, land up to a limit of fifty acres, for the employment of the poor. It is difficult to resist the belief that if the riots had lasted longer they might have forced the Government to accept the scheme, in the efficacy of which it had no faith, as the price of peace, and that the change in temperature recorded in Suffield’s Diary after the middle of December marks the restoration of confidence at Whitehall.