Kitabı oku: «The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett»

1 A SWEET OLD BOY

‘I MYSELF ONLY SAW this extraordinary character but once,’ a contributor to Blackwood’s Magazine wrote. ‘He is perhaps the very man whom I would select from all I have ever seen if I wished to show a foreigner the beau ideal of an English yeoman. He was then, I shall suppose at least fifty years of age but plump and as fresh as possible. His hair was worn smooth on his forehead and displayed a few curls, not brown then but probably greyish by this time, about his ears. His eye is small, grey, quiet and good-tempered – perfectly mild. You would say “there is a sweet old boy – butter would not melt in his mouth.” I should probably have passed him over as one of the innocent bacon-eaters of the New Forest.’¹

A very similar picture is painted by a better-known witness, William Hazlitt: ‘The only time I ever saw him he seemed to me a very pleasant man: easy of access, affable, clear-headed, simple and mild in his manner, deliberate and unruffled in his speech, though some of his expressions were not very qualified. His figure is tall and portly: he has a good sensible face, rather full with little grey eyes, a hard, square forehead, a ruddy complexion, with hair grey or powdered: and had on a scarlet broad-cloth waistcoat, with the flaps of the pockets hanging down, as was the custom of gentleman farmers in the last century, as we see it in the pictures of Members of Parliament in the reign of George I.’²

The best likenesses of Cobbett confirm the picture given by these two acute observers. The cartoonist John Doyle, who did many drawings of him – they are not really caricatures – shows him (in old age) a kindly-looking, half-smiling, slightly stooping figure. No one looking at these drawings or reading the descriptions quoted would guess that this ‘sweet old boy’ was one of the most extraordinary characters in English history, the most effective, most savage and most satirical political journalist of his or any other age.

Cobbett himself is almost our only source for his earliest years. In 1796, when he was living in Philadelphia, he wrote an account of his origins to counter allegations being put about by his enemies that he was a British spy. Though the memoir had a political purpose, it is an honest, straightforward story, as one would expect from someone who always considered himself to be a happy man. There may be some omissions, but there are no deliberate falsehoods.

William Cobbett was born at Farnham in Surrey in March 1763, the third of four sons of George Cobbett, a farmer (and at one time the landlord of the Jolly Farmer Inn, which still stands on the A289 road, now renamed the William Cobbett). He never met his paternal grandfather, but one of his earliest memories was of staying with his widowed grandmother: ‘It was a little thatched cottage with a garden before the door. It had but two windows; a damson tree shaded one, and a clump of filberts the other. Here I and my brothers went every Christmas and Whitsuntide to spend a week or two and torment the poor old woman with our noise and dilapidations. She used to give us milk and bread for breakfast, an apple pudding for our dinner and a piece of bread and cheese for supper. Her fire was made of turf, cut from the neighbouring heath, and her evening light was a dish dipped in grease.’

Cobbett’s physical and mental energy, his eagerness to be always doing something, would seem to have been with him from the beginning. ‘I do not remember the time,’ he writes, ‘when I did not earn my living. My first occupation was driving the small birds from the turnip seed and the rooks from the peas. When I first trudged a field with my wooden bottle and my satchel swung over my shoulders, I was hardly able to climb the gates and stiles and at the end of the day to reach home was a task of infinite difficulty. My next employment was weeding wheat and leading a single horse at harrowing barley. Hoeing peas followed and hence I arrived at the honour of joining the reapers in harvest, driving the team and holding the plough. We were all strong and laborious and my father used to boast that he had four boys, the eldest of whom was but fifteen years old, who did as much work as any three men in the Parish of Farnham. Honest pride and happy days.’

Cobbett was not quite such an obedient and dutiful son as this account suggests. His elder brother Tom, who later recounted his memories to Cobbett’s third son James Paul, remembered him as a lively, rather rebellious boy – ‘the foremost in enterprise when anything was on foot, not remarkable for plodding, but rather the contrary, with great liveliness of spirit having a proneness to idle pursuit and to shirk steady work and an obstinate resolution for what he was bent on … He must have promised to turn out rather an ungovernable than a tractable youth. When sent to mind the pigs he would throw off a part of his upper clothes and stray away after some business that better suited his taste.’³

Tom also remembered that Bill (as he called him) used to like listening to their father reading bits out of the newspaper of an evening. Cobbett’s daughter Anne records: ‘It was tiresome for the other three boys to have to keep quiet the while but Bill used oftentimes to listen and pay attention to the reading and the others wondered how he could do it. And I’ve often thought it all very dull work, sitting there in their chimney corner obliged to refrain from their own fun.’ Bill was especially interested in speeches from Parliament, and would remind his father of who the various speakers were. Anne also remembered her father telling her how he used to make speeches aloud when by himself, ‘And go out after dark and do so. He said he recollected being on the Common, waving his arms about, and making speeches to the furze bushes.’⁴

It is tempting to read something into the fact that in his own account of his boyhood Cobbett makes scarcely any mention of his mother. The explanation is that to an exceptional degree Cobbett was from the beginning self-centred and self-sufficient. Most of us rely on others close to us, whether friends or family, for help, advice and support. But even as a boy Cobbett did not seem to need other people. Throughout his life he depended almost entirely on his own impressions, his own judgement, his own researches and conclusions. So, in his little autobiography Cobbett is the only character in full colour; the others are monochrome, sometimes not even named. The fact that he makes no mention of his mother and cannot remember his three brothers’ ages is an indication of how little they impinged on his thoughts and needs.

Cobbett left home three times in the course of his boyhood, according to his own account, from no other motive but a love of adventure. His brother Tom, however, suggested that their father was partly to blame. ‘George Cobbett,’ James Paul recorded, ‘was not of a gentle disposition, but subject to violent fits of temper, and we have reason to believe that the harshness of the parent was the cause of the son’s first quitting home.’ More than once in Rural Rides Cobbett refers, in a light-hearted way, to his father’s having beaten him – he told how once, as ‘a very little boy’ he had seen a cat ‘as big as a middle-sized spaniel dog go into a hollow elm tree, for relating which I got a great scolding, for standing to which I at last got a beating, stand to which I still did’. (It seems as if the father had got into the habit of picking on Bill, perhaps because he was the most daring of the four brothers. ‘One summer evening,’ James Paul writes, ‘he and his brothers being all together in their sleeping room, one of them noticed the figure of a crocodile printed in the corner of a large map which their father had hung against the wall and exclaimed “How ugly he looks”. William said “Aye, don’t he? I’ll cut his head off.” The others called out “No, Bill, don’t, father will be so angry.” But that did not stop him. He jumped out of bed, took his knife from his pocket and made a dash at the map, cutting into it right across the crocodile’s neck. Their father, when he came to see, said whichever of them did the mischief he was sure “Bill had a hand in it.”’)

Cobbett was only eleven when, inspired by what a fellow gardener told him while they were working together in the grounds of Farnham Castle, he set off on foot to see Kew Gardens ‘with only thirteen half pence in his pocket’. It was as he was trudging through Richmond on his way to Kew that he caught sight of Swift’s Tale of a Tub (price 3d^*) in a bookseller’s window. ‘The title was so odd that my curiosity was excited. I had the 3d, but, then, I could have no supper.’ He bought the book, went without his supper and read on until it grew too dark. There was something about it which made an indelible impression upon him, so much so that he carried it with him wherever he went, and when he lost it some years later in a box that fell into the sea on his way to North America, the loss gave him ‘greater pain than I have ever felt at losing thousands of pounds’. Why should this satire of Swift’s, directed at the various Christian Churches, have made such an impact on this half-educated farmer’s son, aged only eleven? It is, like all Swift’s work, highly sophisticated – even abstruse – full of subtleties, Latin tags and literary allusions which must have gone over the boy’s head. One can only surmise that what so impressed him, causing what he later called ‘a birth of intellect’, was simply the flow – even the flood – of words, phrases piled on top of one another, broken up with digressions and parentheses, all producing a kind of verbal intoxication, the effect of which was later to bear fruit in Cobbett’s own writing, similarly vigorous and fluent but more direct and down-to-earth, unencumbered by Swift’s vast baggage of learning.

Did Cobbett remember in later life one particular passage from this book which had such a special bearing on his own career?

It is but to venture your lungs, and you may preach in Covent Garden against foppery and fornication, and something else; against pride and dissimulation, and bribery, at Whitehall; you may expose rapine and injustice in the inns of court chapel; and in a city pulpit be as fierce as you please against avarice, hypocrisy and extortion … But on the other side, whoever should mistake the nature of things so far as to drop but a single hint in public, how such a one starved half the fleet, and half poisoned the rest; how such a one, from a true principle of love and honour, pays no debts but for wenches and play; how such a one has got a clap and runs out of his estate; how Paris, bribed by Juno and Venus, later to offend either party, slept out the whole cause on the bench; or, how such an orator makes long speeches in the senate, with much thought, little sense, and to no purpose; whoever, I say, should venture to be thus particular, must expect to be imprisoned for scandalum magnatum; to have challenges sent to him; to be sued for defamation; and to be brought before the bar of the house.

In the autumn of 1782, when Cobbett was nineteen, he went to stay with an uncle who lived near Portsmouth. Here, from the top of Portsdown, he saw the sea for the first time – ‘and no sooner did I behold it than I wished to be a sailor. I could never account for this sudden impulse, nor can I now,’ he wrote. ‘Almost all English boys feel the same inclination: it would seem that, like young ducks, instinct leads them to rush at the bosom of the water.’ (It is perhaps worth noting that Tom Paine, whose career in so many ways prefigured Cobbett’s, felt the same urge, and like Cobbett was rescued before he signed away his freedom.)

Luckily for Cobbett, when he managed to board a ship in Portsmouth dock the captain, the Hon. George Berkeley, assuming that he was running away from a pregnant girlfriend, persuaded him ‘that it was better to be led to Church in a halter to be tied to a girl that I did not like, than to be tied to the gang-way or, as the sailors call it, married to Miss Roper’. Cobbett blushed at this, which only confirmed Berkeley’s opinion. But it was not enough to deter Cobbett, and when he was on shore again he applied to the Port Admiral to be enrolled. However, his request was turned down – ‘and I happily escaped, sorely against my will, from the most toilsome and perilous profession in the world’. But the experience had given him a glimpse of another world beyond the farm, and he was never able afterwards to resume his work there with equanimity.

Cobbett called his little autobiography The Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine, an indication that he saw some similarity in his early career to a traditional romance or fairy tale, at the beginning of which the young hero sets out from home in search of fame and fortune. ‘It was on the sixth of May 1783,’ he writes, ‘that I, like Don Quixote sallied forth to seek adventures. I was dressed in my holiday clothes in order to accompany two or three lasses to Guildford fair. They were to assemble at a house about three miles from my home, where I was to attend them; but, unfortunately for me, I had to cross the London Turnpike Road. The stage-coach had just turned the summit of a hill and was rattling down towards me at a merry rate. The notion of going to London never entered my mind till this very moment, yet the step was completely determined on, before the coach came to the spot where I stood. Up I got and was in London about nine o’clock in the evening.’ (The account is contradictory as, according to the second sentence, Cobbett had not originally set out to seek adventures but with the more mundane intention of going to Guildford fair – which suggests that his leaving home was possibly not so impulsive as he would like us to believe.)

Looking back on his life, Cobbett records in two separate contexts that he had always been not only happy, but also lucky. So, arriving in London without baggage and only the small amount of money he had saved for the fair, he was befriended by a hop-merchant who had had dealings with his father and who had travelled up to London with him on the coach. This benefactor, whose name Cobbett (typically) omits, took him into his own house and in the meantime wrote to Cobbett Senior, who in turn wrote to his son ordering him to return home at once. ‘I am ashamed to say,’ Cobbett writes, ‘that I was disobedient. It was the first time I had ever been so, and I have repented of it from that moment to this. Willingly would I have returned, but pride would not suffer me to do it. I feared the scoffs of my acquaintances more than the real evils that threatened me.’

Cobbett’s friend the hop-merchant reluctantly accepted that the young man was not going home, and eventually got him a job working for a lawyer acquaintance in Gray’s Inn (he is identified only by his surname of Holland). ‘The next day,’ Cobbett writes, ‘saw me perched upon a great high stool in an obscure chamber in Grays Inn, endeavouring to decipher the crabbed draughts of my employer.’ He was to work nine months in the lawyer’s office, ‘from five in the morning till eight at night and sometimes all night long’. In the process he acquired the ability to write quickly and neatly in a clear hand – something that was to stand him in good stead later on (considering the speed at which he wrote, his manuscripts are not only legible but invariably clean, with minimal corrections). He was also able, thanks to this legal training, to write in a beautiful copperplate script.

It was the only benefit of his brief spell in Gray’s Inn. Otherwise he looked back on it as the least pleasurable period of his life. The office was gloomy and dark and the hours long. Sunday was the only break, and it was on a Sunday that when walking in St James’s Park he saw a poster appealing for recruits to the Royal Marines. Once again he acted on impulse, and without saying anything to his friends reported to Chatham where he accidentally enrolled not in the Marines but in the 54th Regiment, commanded by Lord Edward Fitzgerald and bound for service in New Brunswick, a province of Canada.

The pay was poor (2d a day) and the food barely adequate, but Cobbett enjoyed the army life mainly because he liked soldiers, and he formed many close friendships in the ranks (it was as a result of defending soldiers that he would be imprisoned in 1810). In addition, while stationed at Chatham he had time to embark on a crash course of self-education. He read voraciously all the books in the local library – novels, history, poetry and plays – and in the process absorbed enough knowledge of literature to be able, when the time came for him to write, to quote widely and to good effect. He learned by heart Oliver Goldsmith’s Deserted Village and The Traveller. From the start, his journalism is studded with references to the Bible, the plays of Shakespeare, the poems of Milton, Pope and many others, all of which he must have read during his army days. But stylistically it was Swift who most influenced him, as he influenced Paine and Hazlitt. Following Swift, these writers broke with the Johnsonian tradition of writing only for an educated audience (Swift used to read his books to his servants to make sure they were intelligible to the ordinary man). After his obsessive reading of A Tale of a Tub Cobbett must have read most of Swift’s works. It is no accident that his autobiography begins with an admirable quotation from Swift which he applies to himself: ‘The Celebrated Dean of St. Patrick somewhere observes that a man of talents no sooner emerges from obscurity than all the blockheads are instantly up in arms against him.’ Cobbett would also seem to have studied mathematics and geometry to a level at which he was able, when in Canada, to write a handbook on those subjects for teaching soldiers.

But it was the nowadays neglected subject of English grammar that especially absorbed him during his time at Chatham. Thanks to skills acquired in Gray’s Inn, Cobbett was taken on as a copyist by the Commandant of the Garrison Colonel (later General) Hugh Debbieg. Cobbett does not say as much (and does not even spell his name correctly), but Debbieg (1731–1810) was a very distinguished engineer and soldier who had served in France and Canada and had been in charge of the defences of all public buildings during the Gordon riots in London in 1780. Recognising Cobbett’s exceptional abilities, he urged him to improve himself in the business of writing, promising him promotion in exchange. Debbieg gave him a popular handbook, A Short Introduction to English Grammar by Robert Lowth, and he proceeded to learn the entire book by heart, by writing it out three times, reciting it to himself in its entirety when on guard duty. ‘The edge of my berth, or that of the guard-bed was my seat to study in; my knapsack was my bookcase; a bit of board lying in my lap was my writing desk … I had to read and to write amidst the talking, laughing, singing, whistling and brawling of at least half a score of the most thoughtless of men, and that too in their hours of freedom from all control.’

Cobbett eventually won his promotion from Debbieg and became a corporal, ‘which brought me a clear two-pence per diem and put a very clever Worsted Knot on my shoulder too’. Corporal Cobbett sailed with his regiment in 1785, and after landing in Nova Scotia, where he remained for a few weeks, proceeded to St John in New Brunswick. It was, according to the traveller Isaac Weld, ‘a garrison town’ containing ‘about fifty miserable wooden dwellings and barracks’. Cobbett was to be stationed there for six months before moving a hundred miles up the St John River to Fredericton. In his account of these years he says very little about his military duties, which suggests that they were never very arduous. There was a great deal of drinking: ‘Rum was seven pence a quart … and not one single man, out of three or four hundred was sober for a week – except myself.’ The regiment’s role was supposedly to guard the frontier with America – an almost impossible task. New Brunswick was a sparsely populated province (a haven for British and French settlers and native Indians, and a refuge for loyalist Americans fleeing from the south), and consisted of huge forests with hardly any roads. Journeys had to be made on the network of rivers and lakes that crisscrossed the land, by canoe in summer and by sledge in the long, hard winter.

I was stationed on the banks of the great and beautiful river St. John [Cobbett wrote], which was more than a mile wide and a hundred miles from the sea. That river, as well as all the creeks running into it on both sides, were [sic] so completely frozen over every year by the Seventh of November or thereabouts that we could skate across it and up and down it, the next morning after the frost began, while we could see the fish swimming under the ice upon which we were skating. In about ten days the snow came; until storm after storm, coming at intervals of a week or a fortnight, made the mass, upon an average, ten feet deep; and there we were nine days out of ten, with a bright sun over our heads, and with snow, dry as hair powder, screeching under our feet. In the month of April, the last week of that month, the melting of the snow turned the river into ice again. Soon after this, symptoms of breaking-up began to appear, the immense mass of ice was first loosened near the banks of the river … and you every now and then heard a crack at many miles distance, like the falling of fifty or a hundred or a thousand very lofty timber trees coming down all together, from the axes and saws of the fellers … Day after day the cracks became louder and more frequent, till by and by the ice came tumbling out of the mouths of the creeks into the main river, which, by this time, began to give way itself, till, on some days, toward the latter end of May, the whole surface of the river moved downwards with accelerating rapidity towards the sea, rising up into piles as high as [The Duke of Wellington’s] great fine house at Hyde Park Corner, wherever the ice came in contact with an island of which there were many in the river, until the sun and the tide had carried the whole away and made the river clear for us to sail upon again to the next month of November; during which time, the sun gave us melons in the natural ground, and fine crops of corn and grass.

Such conditions were hardly suitable for conventional soldiering. There was nothing much to do except drill, and in the winter even this was impossible. Cobbett spent a great deal of time exploring the forests, hunting bears, skating and fishing. As always, he made a garden, and meanwhile he continued resolutely with his course of self-education. He studied more geometry, he learned French, he designed and built a barracks for four hundred soldiers ‘without the aid of a draughtsman, carpenter or bricklayer, the soldiers under me cut down the timber and dug the stones’. He later boasted that to stop soldiers deserting to the United States he trekked a hundred miles through uncharted forests in order to show potential deserters that they could be pursued. Such was his overall proficiency that he became a clerk to the regiment: ‘In a very short time the whole of the business in that way fell into my hands; and, at the end of about a year, neither adjutant, paymaster or quarter-master, could move an inch without my assistance.’ Cobbett was so punctual, so reliable, so industrious that after only a few months he was promoted to sergeant major over the heads of thirty longer-serving sergeants. ‘He would suffer no chewing of tobacco while they were on parade,’ his son James wrote, ‘but would go up to a man in the rank and force him to throw it from his mouth.’⁵

From this vantage point, Cobbett formed a view of the army and its officer class which has been shared before and since by many who have served in the ranks. Being sergeant major, he writes, ‘brought me in close contact at every hour with the whole of the epaulet gentry, whose profound and surprising ignorance I discovered in a twinkling’. He realised how much the higher ranks relied on the non-commissioned officers like himself to carry out the vital tasks of the regiment, leaving them free ‘to swagger about and get roaring drunk’. The only officer for whom he maintained any respect was the young Lord Edward Fitzgerald, a charming and romantic Irish aristocrat who would be cashiered for attending a revolutionary banquet in Paris in 1792. Fitzgerald, who while in Canada had lived for some time with an Indian tribe, the Bears, was wounded while helping to lead the Irish Rising of 1798 and died (aged only thirty-five) in Newgate, where Cobbett himself was to be imprisoned a few years later.

Cobbett’s insistence on his own superiority, his greater sense of duty and his industriousness might well have made him unpopular with his fellow soldiers, but this does not seem to have been the case. He formed many friendships in the regiment, and in the process developed an overall view of the injustices of the society he lived in. ‘Genius,’ he wrote later, ‘is as likely to come out of the cottage as out of the splendid mansion, and even more likely, for, in the former case, nature is unopposed at the outset. I have had, during my life, no little converse with men famed for their wit, for instance; but, the most witty man I ever knew was a private soldier. He was not only the most witty, but far the most witty. He was a Staffordshire man, he came from WALSALL and his name was JOHN FLETCHER. I have heard from that man more bright thoughts of a witty character, than I have ever heard from all the other men, and than I have ever read in all the books that I have read in my whole life. No coarse jokes, no puns, no conundrums, no made up jests, nothing of the college kind; but real, sterling sprightly wit. When I have heard people report the profligate sayings of SHERIDAN and have heard the House of Commons roaring at his green-room trash, I have always thought of poor Jack Fletcher, who if he could have put his thoughts upon paper, would have been more renowned than Butler or Swift.’⁶ ‘How often,’ Cobbett wrote of another of his soldier friends, ‘has my blood boiled with indignation at seeing this fine, this gallant, this honest, true hearted and intelligent young man, standing with his hand to his hat before some worthless and stupid sort of officer, whom nature seemed to have designed to black his shoes.’⁷