Kitabı oku: «The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett», sayfa 2
It was Cobbett’s sympathy for his fellow soldiers which, combined with his contempt for the officer class, led to his first confrontation with the establishment. From his experience as sergeant major and his control over the regimental accounts he observed that corruption was rife. The quartermaster, in charge of issuing provisions to the men, was keeping a large proportion for himself while, in particular, four officers – Colonel Bruce, Captain Richard Powell, and Lieutenants Christopher Seton and John Hall – were making false musters of NCOs and soldiers and selling for their own profit the men’s rations of food and firewood. Such practices were rife throughout ‘the system’, as Cobbett was to discover later. Corruption of one kind or another was the norm at all levels of politics, the Church, the armed services and the press, and when Cobbett voiced his indignation to his fellow NCOs they urged him to keep quiet, on the grounds that these things were widespread. When he persisted he realised that he could achieve nothing as a serving soldier, and would be in danger of extreme punishment from a court martial. His only hope lay in pursuing the issue following his discharge on his return to England. The evidence of fraud lay in the regiment’s books, but how was it possible to protect it, when the books could easily be tampered with or rewritten before any hearing took place? Operating long before the invention of the photocopier, Cobbett decided to make copies of all the relevant entries, stamping them with the regimental seal in the presence of a faithful helper and witness, Corporal William Bestland: ‘All these papers were put into a little box which I myself had made for the purpose. When we came to Portsmouth there was talk of searching all the boxes etc, which gave us great alarm; and induced us to take all the papers, put them in a bag and trust them to a custom-house officer, who conveyed them on shore to his own house, where I removed them a few days later.’
Today such evidence would be given to the authorities, and it would be up to them to undertake a prosecution. But here it was left to Cobbett, once the Judge Advocate (Sir Charles Gould) had given his approval, to act as prosecutor single-handedly, without assistance of any kind from lawyers. And from the beginning it was clear that the authorities were dragging their feet. The first indication came when Cobbett was informed that some of the charges he had alleged against the three accused (one of the four, Colonel Bruce, had since died) were to be dropped. He then learned that the court martial would take place not in London as he had requested, but in Portsmouth, where the regiment was now stationed and where it would be much easier for the accused to prejudice the proceedings. Faced with more prevarication by the Judge Advocate, Cobbett wrote personally to the Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, with the result that the venue was changed to London, much to the annoyance of the accused officers.
By now Cobbett would have been aware of the way the wind was blowing; and there were two more important questions to be settled. The first was the need to secure the regimental account books in order to prevent any possible tampering before the trial – ‘Without these written documents nothing of importance could be proved, unless the non-commissioned officers and men of the regiment could get the better of their dread of the lash.’ The second was to guarantee the demobilisation of Cobbett’s key witness Corporal Bestland so as to forestall any threat of retaliation by the military. Cobbett had given the Corporal his word that he would not call him as a witness – ‘unless he was first out of the army; that is to say, out of the reach of the vindictive and bloody lash’.
Yet Bestland, probably under suspicion of collaborating with Cobbett, was still in the ranks. By now considerably alarmed, Cobbett wrote to the Secretary at War pointing out the various obstacles that had been put in his way and making it clear at the same time that unless his key witness (not named) received his discharge he would abandon the prosecution. He had no reply. The court martial was due to convene on 24 March 1792, and on the twentieth Cobbett went to Portsmouth in an effort to discover what had happened to the regimental accounts. He found that, contrary to what he had been told, they had not been ‘secured’ at all, and were still in the possession of the accused officers. More alarming was his chance meeting on his way to Portsmouth with a group of sergeants and the regiment’s music master, all of them on their way up to London – though none had served with him in America. On returning to London he was told by one of his allies, a Captain Lane, that the men had been dragooned into appearing as witnesses at the trial, where they would swear that at a farewell party which Cobbett had given prior to leaving the regiment he had proposed a Jacobin-like toast to ‘the destruction of the House of Brunswick’ (i.e. the Royal Family). Lane warned him that if this completely false allegation were to be upheld, he could well be charged and deported to Botany Bay in Australia. So, at very short notice, Cobbett decided not only to abandon the court martial but to flee to France.
Afterwards his enemies were to make much of his flight, accusing him of cowardice. But there can be no disputing that he did the only thing possible in the circumstances. If he had not been tried for treason he might have faced charges of sedition, or even a private prosecution from the three officers. One important factor which would have weighed heavily with him – though he never mentioned it in his subsequent lengthy defence of his actions – was that he had recently married. His bride was Anne Reid, daughter of an artillery sergeant, a veteran of the American War of Independence who had served with Cobbett in New Brunswick. When Cobbett first saw Anne she was only thirteen:
I sat in the same room with her for about an hour, in company with others, and I made up my mind that she was the very girl for me. That I thought her beautiful was certain, for that I had always said should be an indispensable qualification: but I saw in her what I deemed marks of that sobriety of conduct, which has been by far the greatest blessing of my life. It was the dead of winter, and, of course, the snow several feet deep on the ground, and the weather piercing cold. In about three mornings after I had first seen her, I had got two young men to join me in my walk; and our road lay by the house of her father and mother. It was hardly light, but she was out in the snow, scrubbing out a washing tub, ‘That’s the girl for me’, I said, when we had got out of her hearing.
Six months after this meeting Cobbett was posted to Fredericton, and in the meantime the Artillery were due to be posted back to England. Worried that Anne might fall into bad company on her return to ‘that gay place Woolwich’, he sent her 150 guineas which he had saved so that she would be able to be independent of her parents – ‘to buy herself food, clothes, and to live without hard work’. When Cobbett arrived back in England four years later he found his wife-to-be working as a servant girl in the house of a Captain Brissac. Without saying a word she pressed the money, untouched, into his hands. They were married on 5 February 1792 by a curate, the Reverend Thomas, in Woolwich, and found lodgings in Felix Street, Hackney. The following month they left for France, leaving no forwarding address, and when court officials tried to locate Cobbett they could find no trace of him.
The newlyweds settled in the village of Tilque, near St-Omer in Normandy. Cobbett was delighted by France: ‘I went to that country full of all those prejudices that Englishmen suck in with their mother’s milk against the French and against their religion; a few weeks convinced me that I had been deceived with respect to both. I met everywhere with civility, and even hospitality, in a degree that I had never been accustomed to.’
Unfortunately for the Cobbetts their arrival in France had coincided with a turbulent period in that country’s history. When they set out for Paris in August they heard news of the massacre of the Swiss Guard at the Tuileries Palace and the arrest of the King and Queen. Cobbett decided to head for Le Havre and sail to America, but they were stopped more than once, and Anne, who was so indignant that she refused to speak, was suspected of being an escaping French aristocrat. Eventually, however, they reached Le Havre, and after about a fortnight were allowed to board a little ship called the Mary, bound for New York. The voyage was a stormy one, the ship ‘was tossed about the ocean like a cork’. The poultry on board all died and the captain fed the Cobbetts a dish called samp, made from ground maize. After forty-six days the Mary at last docked in New York. Anne, who was pregnant and had had to flee from two different countries in the course of six months, had by now become accustomed to what being married to Cobbett was going to be like.
* According to the Office of National Statistics, the modern (2004) equivalent of £1 in 1810 is £49.67.
2 OFF to PHILADELPHIA
COBBETT’S CAREER changed course round certain clearly defined turning points. One such was the chain of events by which he became a journalist, one of the most famous and prolific in history. He had arrived in America with his pregnant wife in October 1792 and settled in Wilmington, a small port on the Delaware about thirty miles from Philadelphia. In February 1794 he moved into Philadelphia itself – the national capital and centre of American social and political life, the scene of the first meetings of Congress and the drafting of the Constitution in 1787. Founded by the Quaker William Penn on the west bank of the Delaware River in the 1680s, Philadelphia had expanded rapidly; by Cobbett’s time the population numbered about thirty thousand, and included people of many nationalities and religions; and, since the Revolution, a large number of French refugees. Penn had designed the city on a grid pattern with wide streets of red-brick houses, the effect of which was somewhat monotonous. ‘Philadelphia,’ wrote a French visitor, the Chevalier de Beaujour, ‘is cut like a chess board at right angles. All the streets and houses resemble each other, and nothing is so gloomy as this uniformity.’1
Cobbett and Nancy (as he called Anne) rented a modest house in the Northern Liberties district at no. 81 Callowhill Street. The climate, especially in summer, was extreme. ‘The heat in this city is excessive,’ wrote Dr Alexander Hamilton in 1774, ‘the sun’s rays being reflected with such power from the red brick houses and from the street pavement which is brick. The people commonly use awnings of painted cloth or duck over their shop doors and windows and, at sunset, throw buckets full of water upon the pavement which gives a feasible cool.’ Health was another problem: during Cobbett’s time there were two serious outbreaks of yellow fever in the city, resulting in thousands of deaths. He himself remained unimpressed not only by Philadelphia, but by America in general.
‘The country is good for getting money,’ he wrote to a boyhood friend in England, Rachel Smithers, ‘if a person is industrious and enterprising. In every other respect the country is miserable. Exactly the contrary of what I expected it. The land is bad – rocky – houses wretched – roads impassable after the least rain. Fruit in quantity, but good for nothing. One apple or peach in England or France is worth a bushel of them here. The seasons are detestable. All burning or freezing. There is no spring or autumn. The weather is so very inconstant that you are never sure for an hour, a single hour at a time. Last night we made a fire to sit by and today it is scorching hot. The whole month of March was so hot that we could hardly bear our clothes, and these parts of the month of June there was a frost every night and so cold in the day time that we were obliged to wear great coats. The people are worthy of the country – a cheating, sly, roguish gang. Strangers make fortunes in spite of all this, particularly the English. The natives are by nature idle, and seek to live by cheating, while foreigners, being industrious, seek no other means than those dictated by integrity, and are sure to meet with encouragement even from the idle and roguish themselves; for however roguish a man may be, he always loves to deal with an honest man.’2
Cobbett’s gloomy reflections closely followed the move to Philadelphia and a series of personal tragedies. His second child was stillborn, and then two months later his elder child, Toney, suddenly died. ‘I hope you will never experience a calamity like this,’ he told Rachel Smithers. ‘All I have ever felt before was nothing – nothing, nothing at all, to this – the dearest, sweetest, beautifullest little fellow that ever was seen – we adored him. Everybody admired – When we lived at Wilmington people came on purpose to see him for his beauty. He was just beginning to prattle, and to chace [sic] the flies about the floor with a fan – I am sure I shall never perfectly recover his loss – I feel my spirits altered – a settled sadness seems to have taken possession of my mind – For my poor Nancy I cannot paint to you her distress – for several days she would take no nourishment – we were even afraid for her – never was a child so adored.’3
In this depressed state of mind Cobbett toyed with the idea of leaving America and going to the West Indies to teach for a few months before returning to England. Since he had arrived in America his intentions had been uncertain. Originally, armed with a letter to the Secretary of State and future President Thomas Jefferson from the American Ambassador in Paris, he had hoped to get a job working for the American government, but Jefferson was unable to help (at that time the staff of the State Department amounted to seven people). Eventually, seeing the large number of French refugees, many of whom had fled from the recent slaves’ uprising on Santo Domingo, he decided to set himself up as a teacher of English, taking lodgers into the house he had rented and approaching the job with his usual energy. He worked all day every day, as well as doing the housework to assist his wife. He began writing a textbook to help French people learn English. Published in 1795, Le Maître Anglais, Grammaire régulière de la Langue Anglaise en deux Parties was enormously successful, running eventually, according to its author, to no fewer than sixty editions.
It was one of Cobbett’s French pupils who was the indirect cause of his becoming a political pamphleteer. In 1794 Dr Joseph Priestley, the British chemist and nonconformist theologian, had emigrated to America, landing in New York where he received a rapturous reception from various republican coteries.
One of my scholars [Cobbett recounted], who was a person that we call in England a Coffee-House politician, chose, for once, to read his newspaper by way of lesson; and, it happened to be the very paper which contained the addresses presented to Dr. Priestley at New York together with his replies. My scholar, who was a sort of Republican, or at best but half a monarchist, appeared delighted with the invective against England, to which he was very much disposed to add. Those Englishmen who have been abroad, particularly if they have had the time to make a comparison between the country they are in and that which they have left, well know how difficult it is, upon occasions such as I have been describing, to refrain from expressing their indignation and resentment: and there is not, I trust, much reason to suppose, that I should, in this respect, experience less difficulty than another. The dispute was as warm as might be expected between a Frenchman and an Englishman not remarkable for sangfroid: and, the result was, a declared resolution on my part, to write and publish a pamphlet in defence of my country, which pamphlet he pledged himself to answer: his pledge was forfeited: it is known that mine was not. Thus it was that, whether for good or otherwise, I entered in the career of political writing: and, without adverting to the circumstances which others have entered in it, I think it will not be believed that the pen was ever taken up from a motive more pure and laudable.
American politicians, previously united in the fight for independence, were already dividing into two camps – the federalists, those who followed President George Washington, who were fundamentally pro-British, or at least in favour of neutrality; and the republicans (or the Democrats, as they were later to be called), who rallied round Thomas Jefferson in his championship of all things French. Public opinion in Philadelphia was so strongly in favour of the latter that when Cobbett’s pamphlet was first published it carried neither the name of the author nor even that of the publisher, Thomas Bradford, who was frightened that the angry mob might break his windows. He need not have worried. ‘The Observations on the Emigration of Joseph Priestley’ was an immediate success, and there were eventually five Philadelphia editions as well as several in England. The fourth edition was credited to ‘Peter Porcupine’, Cobbett’s chosen pseudonym.
It opened with words that could serve as a text for the thousands and thousands Cobbett would write in a lifetime of journalism: ‘No man has a right to pry into his neighbour’s private concerns and the opinions of every man are his private concerns … but when he makes those opinions public … when he once comes forward as a candidate for public admiration, esteem or compassion, his opinions, his principles, his motives, every action of his life, public or private, become the fair subject of public discussion.’ ‘The Observations on the Emigration of Joseph Priestley’ is an extraordinarily assured performance for someone coming new to political pamphleteering. Dr Priestley (1733–1804) was a considerable figure, a distinguished scientist who had written voluminously on religious matters, whilst at the same time making pioneering experiments with oxygen, sulphuric acid and various gases. Yet the unknown Hampshire farmer’s son held him in no respect whatsoever. For a start, Cobbett had little interest in science, and regarded Priestley’s experiments as merely the hobby of an eccentric. As for religion, Cobbett, a faithful defender of the Church of England despite his generally low opinion of the clergy, nourished throughout his life the strongest possible contempt for all varieties of nonconformism – Methodism, Quakerism or, as in Priestley’s case, Unitarianism, a system of belief that denied the Trinity and the divinity of Christ (Priestley addressed his prayers to ‘the Great Parent of the Universe’).
Central to Cobbett’s argument was a denial of Priestley’s claim to be seeking asylum in America from the allegedly repressive and tyrannical authorities in Britain. Priestley had been an enthusiast for the French Revolution, unwavering in the face of the Jacobin excesses that had horrified public opinion in his native country. Middle-class Dissenters who had welcomed the Revolution’s campaign for religious tolerance and equality had formed debating clubs and societies throughout England to propagate French ideas and send messages of support to the revolutionaries. In Priestley’s home town of Birmingham, as in many other cities, a dinner had been organised to commemorate the second anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, an event that sparked off a major riot lasting for four days. During the disturbance Priestley’s house and library were burnt to the ground, to the gratification of many, including King George III. Priestley fled to London and three years later emigrated to America to join his sons, already resident there.
In Cobbett’s eyes Priestley’s hypocrisy lay in seeking ‘asylum’ from a supposedly tyrannical system which he claimed had denied him protection or redress. In fact, following the Birmingham riot, eleven of its ringleaders were indicted, of whom four were found guilty and two executed. In the meantime Priestley sued the Birmingham city council and was awarded damages of £2502.18s. to compensate for the loss of his property:
If he had been the very best subject in England in place of one of the very worst, what could the law have done more for him? Nothing certainly can be stronger proof of the independence of the courts of justice, and of the impartial execution of the laws of England than the circumstances and result of this case. A man who had for many years been the avowed and open enemy of the government and constitution, had his property destroyed by a mob, who declared themselves the friends of both, and who rose on him because he was not. This mob were pursued by the government whose cause they thought they were defending: some of them suffered death, and the inhabitants of the place where they assembled were obliged to indemnify the man whose property they had destroyed. It would be curious to know what sort of protection this reverend Doctor, this ‘friend of humanity’ wanted. Would nothing satisfy him but the blood of the whole mob? Did he wish to see the town of Birmingham, like that of Lyons, razed and all its industries and inhabitants butchered; because some of them had been carried to commit unlawful excesses from their detestation of his wicked projects? BIRMINGHAM HAS COMBATTED AGAINST PRIESTLEY, BIRMINGHAM IS NO MORE.
Such an extract is enough to show Cobbett’s clear, strong invective – his meaning immediately clear, his mastery of the language absolute. En passant he could not avoid indicting Priestley, not only for his political and religious failings, but for writing bad English: ‘His style is uncouth and superlatively diffuse. Always involved in minutiae, every sentence is a string of parentheses in finding the end of which, the reader is lucky if he does not lose the proposition that they were meant to illustrate. In short, the whole of his phraseology is entirely disgusting; to which may be added, that, even in point of grammar, he is very often incorrect.’
Cobbett’s energies however were in the main directed, not just in the Priestley pamphlet but in all his American writings, to attacking the Democrat party, and particularly, during his first years, to supporting the treaty with Britain that Washington, along with his Chief Justice John Jay, was desperately trying to get the Senate to ratify. The British government, now at war with revolutionary France, was naturally keen to stop America allying itself with the enemy. But such were the strong pro-French feelings among the Democrat politicians and the Philadelphians that it was proving a difficult task. A hysterical enthusiasm for France and the French Revolution was then the dominant political passion in the United States, and especially in Philadelphia. France had assisted America with troops and money during the War of Independence, and many Americans felt that their own revolution had inspired the French. None of the excesses of the French Jacobins could dampen the enthusiasm. Street names which included the words ‘King’, ‘Queen’ or ‘Prince’ were changed, democratic societies were formed, and men cut their hair in the ‘Brutus crop’.
Cobbett noted how some Americans even adopted the French habit of referring to one another as ‘Citizen’ and wore tricolour cockades. ‘The delirium seized even the women and children. I have heard more than one young woman, under the age of twenty, declare that they would willingly have dipped their hands in the blood of the Queen of France.’
As the birthplace of American independence, Philadelphia was one of the main centres of revolutionary pro-French frenzy. Following the execution in January 1793 of Louis XVI (formerly the ally of America), a celebratory dinner was held in the city at which a pig was decapitated and the head carried round for all the diners to mutilate with their knives. When France declared war on England the following month the French Ambassador to the United States, Edmond Genet, sent to win over America to the French cause, was given an ecstatic welcome by the Philadelphians. He had been preceded by the French frigate Ambuscade which sailed up the Delaware and anchored off the Market Street wharf flying a flag with the legend ‘Enemies of equality, reform or tremble!’. When Genet himself arrived two weeks later the citizens went wild with excitement. John Adams recalled: ‘Ten thousand men were in the streets of Philadelphia day after day, threatening to drag Washington out of his house and effect a revolution in the government, or compel it to declare in favour of the French, and against England.’ At a dinner given at Oeller’s Hotel toasts were drunk to ‘Liberty’ and ‘Equality’, a special ode recited and the Marseillaise sung – with everyone joining in the chorus (‘I leave the reader to guess,’ wrote Cobbett, ‘at the harmony of this chorus, bellowed forth from the drunken lungs of about a hundred fellows of a dozen different nations’).
The bulk of Cobbett’s early journalism was concerned with combating such hysteria. In gruesome and gory detail he catalogued all the excesses of the Jacobins in France, poured scorn on their supporters such as Thomas Paine and, generally speaking, commended those Americans, like Washington, who advocated neutrality in the dispute between France and England. In ‘A Bone to Gnaw for the Democrats’ (1795), published under his pseudonym ‘Peter Porcupine’, he savaged those American republicans who were currently predicting an English revolution. The following year he published a much longer pamphlet with a much longer, if self-explanatory, title: ‘The Bloody Buoy, Thrown Out as a Warning to the Political Pilots of America: or a Faithful Relation of a Multitude of Acts of Horrid Barbarity, Such as the Eye Never Witnessed, the Tongue Never Expressed, or the Imagination Conceived, Until the Commencement of the French Revolution, to Which is Added an Instructive Essay, Tracing These Dreadful Effects to Their Real Causes’. Although they went against the general mood, these pamphlets enjoyed an immediate success. Three editions of ‘A Bone to Gnaw’ were published in less than three months, and Cobbett’s other pamphlets were constantly reprinted in both England and America.
In the meantime, Cobbett had become a father again, and this time the child was destined to live. A daughter, Anne, was born on 11 July 1795, at a time of great heat in the city. His wife Nancy, who was having trouble breastfeeding, was also unable to sleep because of the incessant barking of the Philadelphia dogs:
I was, about nine in the evening sitting by the bed. ‘I do think’ said she ‘that I could go to sleep now if it were not for the dogs.’ Downstairs I went, and out I sallied, in my shirt and trousers, and without shoes and stockings; and going to a heap of stones lying beside the road, set to work upon the dogs, going backward and forward, and keeping them at two or three hundred yards distance from the house. I walked thus the whole night, bare-footed, lest the noise of my shoes might possibly reach her ears; and I remember that the bricks of the causeway were, even in the night, so hot as to be disagreeable to my feet. My exertions produced the desired effect; a sleep of several hours was the consequence, and, at eight o’clock in the morning, off I went to a day’s business, which was to end at six in the evening.4
Cobbett went to enormous pains to help his wife with the baby: ‘I no more thought of spending a moment away from her, unless business compelled me, than I thought of quitting the country and going to sea.’ Apart from the dogs, Nancy was alarmed by the frequent and violent thunderstorms in Philadelphia. Cobbett used to run home as soon as he suspected a storm was on the way. ‘The Frenchmen who were my scholars, used to laugh at me exceedingly on this account; and sometimes when I was making an appointment with them, they would say, with a smile and a bow, “Sauve la Tonnerre toujours, Monsieur Cobbett.”’5
Such devotion to his wife’s needs was all the more commendable in someone who was, as always, intensely active. Cobbett was now doing so well from his journalism and teaching that he decided to set up on his own as a publisher and bookseller. In May 1796 he moved with wife and baby into a house-cum-shop at 25 North Second Street, opposite Christ Church and near the terminus for the coaches to Baltimore and New York. He was taking a considerable risk. For the first time he was emerging in public from the cloak of anonymity, and setting up shop in the centre of town. ‘Till I took this house,’ he wrote later, ‘I had remained almost entirely unknown as a writer. A few persons did, indeed, know that I was the person, who had assumed the name of Peter Porcupine: but the fact was by no means a matter of notoriety. The moment, however, that I had taken a lease on a large house, the transaction became a topic of public conversation, and the eyes of the Democrats and the French, who still lorded it over the city, and who owed me a mutual grudge, were fixed upon me. I thought my situation somewhat perilous. Such tracts as I had published, no man had dared to utter, in the United States, since the rebellion. I knew that those truths had mortally offended the leading men amongst the Democrats, who could, at any time, muster a mob quite sufficient to destroy my house, and to murder me … In short, there were, in Philadelphia, about ten thousand persons, all of whom would have rejoiced to see me murdered: and there might, probably, be two thousand, who would have been very sorry for it: but not above fifty of whom would have stirred an inch to save me.’
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