William Cobbett was born in 1762 at Farnham, the third son of a small
farmer, honest, industrious, and frugal, from whom, as his famous son
writes, “if he derived no honor, he derived no shame,” and who used to
boast that he had four boys, the eldest but fifteen, who did as much
work as any three men in the parish of Farnham. “When I first trudged
afield,” William writes, “with my wooden bottle and satchel slung over
my shoulder, I was hardly able to climb the gates and stiles.” From
driving the small birds from the turnip-seed and rooks from the peas,
he rose to weeding wheat, hoeing peas, and so up to driving the plough
for 2_d._ a day, which paid for the evening school where he learned
to read and write, getting in this rough way the rudiments of an
education over which he rejoices as he contrasts it triumphantly with
that of the “frivolous idiots that are turned out from Winchester and
Westminster Schools, or from those dens of dunces called Colleges and
Universities,” as having given him the ability to become “one of the
greatest terrors to one of the greatest and most powerful bodies of
knaves and fools that were ever permitted to afflict this or any other
country.”
At eleven he was employed in clipping the boxedgings in the gardens
of Farnham Castle, and, hearing from one of the gardeners of the
glories of Kew, he started for that place with 1_s._ 1½_d._ in his
pocket, 3_d._ of which sum he spent in buying “Swift’s Tale of a Tub.”
The book produced a “birth of intellect” in the little rustic. He
carried it with him wherever he went, and at twenty-four lost it in a
box which fell overboard in the Bay of Fundy, a “loss which gave me
greater pain than I have ever felt at losing thousands of pounds.”
He returned home, and continued to work for his father till 1782,
attending fairs and hearing Washington’s health proposed by his father
at farmers’ ordinaries. In that year he went on a visit to Portsmouth,
saw the sea for the first time, and was with difficulty hindered
from taking service at once on board a man-of-war. He returned home
“spoilt for a farmer,” and next year started for London. He served in
a solicitor’s office in Gray’s Inn for eight months (where he worked
hard at grammar), then enlisted in the 54th regiment, and after a few
weeks’ drill at Chatham embarked for Nova Scotia, where the corps were
serving. Here his temperate habits, strict performance of duty, and
masterly ability and intelligence, raised him in little more than a
year to the post of sergeant-major over the heads of fifty comrades
his seniors in service. His few spare hours were spent in hard study,
especially in acquiring a thorough mastery of grammar. He had bought
Lowth’s Grammar, which he wrote out two or three times, got it by
heart, and imposed on himself the task of saying it over to himself
every time he was posted sentinel. When he had thoroughly mastered
it, and could write with ease and correctness, he turned to logic,
rhetoric, geometry, French, to Vauban’s fortification, and books on
military exercise and evolutions. In this way, by the year 1791, when
the 54th was recalled, he had become the most trusted man in the
regiment. The colonel used him as a sort of second adjutant; all the
paymaster’s accounts were prepared by him; he coached the officers,
and used to make out cards with the words of command for many of them,
who, on parade, as he scornfully writes, “were commanding me to move
my hands and feet in words I had taught them, and were in everything
except mere authority my inferiors, and ought to have been commanded by
me.” Notwithstanding the masterfulness already showing itself, Cobbett
was a strictly obedient soldier, and left the army with the offer of a
commission, and the highest character for ability and zeal.
No sooner, however, was his discharge accomplished, than he set
himself to work to expose and bring to justice several of the officers
of his regiment, who had systematically mulcted the soldiers in
their companies of their wretched pay. His thorough knowledge of the
regimental accounts made him a formidable accuser; and, after looking
into the matter, the then Judge-Advocate-General agreed to prosecute,
and a court-martial was summoned at Woolwich for the purpose in 1792.
But Cobbett did not appear. He found that it would be necessary to call
his clerks, still serving in the regiment, and the consequences to
them in those days were likely to be so serious, that he preferred to
abandon his attempt. Accordingly, he did not appear, and the fact was
bitterly used against him in later days by his political opponents. The
whole story is worth reading, and is very fairly given by Mr. Smith. He
had now made a happy marriage with the girl to whom he had entrusted
all his savings years before, and started with her to Paris; but,
hearing on the way of the king’s dethronement, and the Bastile riots,
he turned aside and embarked for America.
He arrived in Philadelphia in October 1792, enthusiastic for the land
of liberty, and an ardent student of Paine’s works, and set to work to
gain his living by teaching English to the French emigrants there, and
by such literary work as he could get. In both he was very successful,
but soon found himself in fierce antagonism with the American press,
and, after publishing several pamphlets, “A Kick for a Bite,” “A
Bone to Gnaw for the Democrats,” &c., established his first famous
periodical, “Peter Porcupine,” which soon gained him the reputation
in England as well as America of a staunch and able loyalist, and
severe critic of Republican institutions. The only serious mistake
in his American career was his attack on Dr. Priestly, then also an
emigrant in Philadelphia. The States had become an undesirable place of
residence for him before 1798, when an intimation reached him through
the British Embassy that the English Government were sensible of the
obligations they owed him, and were prepared to advance his interests.
These overtures he steadily refused; but, finding a Royalist’s life
was becoming too hot, and having been beaten in a libel suit, which
nearly ruined him (though his expenses were nominally defrayed by the
subscriptions of his American admirers), he closed the brilliant career
of “Peter Porcupine’s Gazette,” and returned to England, having at
last, to use his own phrase, “got the better of all diffidence in my
own capacity.”
He reached home in 1800, and found himself at once courted and famous.
He was entertained by Ministers of State and publishers, but after
looking round him in his own sturdy fashion, and finding the condition
of the political and literary world by no means to his mind, while
that of the great body of the people was becoming worse every day, he
resisted all temptations and started on the career which he followed
faithfully till his death. In 1802 appeared the first number of
“Cobbett’s Political Register,” which (with the break of two months
in 1817, when he fled from the new Gagging Act to America) continued
to appear weekly till June 1835, and remains a wonderful witness to
the strength and the weaknesses of the Sussex ploughboy. During those
long years, and all the fierce controversies which marked them, he was
grandly faithful, according to his lights, to the cause of the poor:—“I
for my part should not be at all surprised,” he wrote in 1806, “if
some one were to propose selling the poor, or mortgaging them to the
fund-holders. Ah! you may wince; you may cry Jacobin or leveller as
long as you please. I wish to see the poor men of England what the poor
men of England were when I was born; and from endeavoring to accomplish
this wish nothing but the want of means shall make me desist.” And
loyally he maintained the fight against sinecures, place-hunting, and
corruption of all kinds until his death, full of years, the member
for Oldham, and the popular leader of the widest influence among the
Liberal party of the first Reform period. For the incidents of the
long struggle—how the government press turned savagely on the man whom
they had hailed on his return from America as one “whom no corruption
can seduce nor any personal danger intimidate from the performance of
his duty;” how Attorney-Generals watched him and prosecuted; how he
insisted on conducting his own causes, and so spent two years in jail,
and was mulcted again and again in heavy damages; how he fought through
it all, and tended his farm and fruit-trees, and wrote his “Rural
Rides” and “Cottage Economy,” and was a tender and loving man in his
own home, and retained the warm regard of such men as Wyndham and Lord
Radnor, while he was the best hated and abused man in England—we must
refer all (and we hope there are many) who care to know about them to
the second volume of Edward Smith’s life of Cobbett.
There are few lives that we know of better worth careful study in these
times. We have no space here to do more than quote the best estimate of
the man’s work which has ever come from one of those classes who for
thirty-five years looked on him as their most dangerous enemy:—
“I know him well, on every side
Walled round with wilful prejudice;
A self-taught peasant rough in speech,
Self-taught, and confident to teach,
In blame not overwise.
What matter, if an honest thought
Sometimes a homely phrase require?
Let those who fear the bracing air
Look for a milder sky elsewhere,
Or stay beside the fire.
There are worse things in this bad world
Than bitter speech and bearing free—
I hail thee, genuine English born—
Not yet the lineage is outworn
That owns a man like thee.”