William Cobbett: A Biography in Two Volumes, Vol. 2

CHAPTER XXVI.
“I NOW BELONG TO THE PEOPLE OF OLDHAM.”

The progress of the Reform Bill is the foremost topic of the day; and the near prospect of Mr. Cobbett’s election, by some popular constituency, is now more obvious.[1] In the course of September, 1831, there appears his first address to the electors of Manchester, in response to an invitation conveyed to him from a committee formed with the object of endeavouring to secure his return.

The objects which Cobbett now professed to have in view were considerably in advance of those of some years previously; and their publication, in this address, shows distinctly the rapid growth of opinion amongst the mass of the people. Not only the abolition of sinecures, and of all pensions the merit of which could not be readily granted; abolition of tithes; reduction of the standing army; and an equitable adjustment of the currency, were recapitulated, as reforms urgently called for; but he now declared that the National Debt ought to be wiped out, by the sale of ecclesiastical estates, the misapplied portion of the property of corporate bodies, and all the Crown lands; and so to reduce taxation, and the cost of its collection, as to give some hopes of greater prosperity and happiness to “this industrious nation.”

Of course, these things were “revolutionary” for that age. Every great change is revolutionary; but the bad odour attaching to an epithet, in some minds, is no index to the value of the ideas represented. Important changes in the mode of government, particularly as to a greatly-lessened waste of public money, naturally appeared monstrous and wicked to the governing classes, and to their adherents; at a period when bishops died worth half-a-million. And it came just as naturally to the minds of the reformers, the longer the question was delayed, that, by whatever name their proposals might be designated, there could be nothing so monstrous and wicked as to persist in a system which made the rich richer and the poor poorer.

The events of the past fifteen years had made a wonderful difference in the minds of the labouring classes. The power of a cheap serial, first exemplified in the publication of Cobbett’s twopenny Register, had become fully recognized. The Penny Magazine, Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, and similar publications were now beginning their respective careers with astonishing success; along with a host of political sheets. A new sort of education was spreading: that sort of education which made men think for themselves; and, for the first time in history, the “lower orders” were beginning to take an interest in the affairs of other nations beside their own. Well might statesmen be affrighted at the progress of revolution in France and Belgium, and at the growing importance of the American Republic! The knowledge of political good and evil, fresh from those democratic sources, might well alarm them; for it was sinking deep into minds, the fertility of which had been produced by their own haughty failures.

So Mr. Cobbett’s address to the electors of Manchester was denounced as utterly subversive of the institutions of the country. However, he went down to Manchester in the course of the winter, and delivered several lectures, with the object of showing that his principles, on the contrary, would tend to conserve, instead of destroy. Lord Radnor had previously written a letter to one of the Manchester papers[2] warmly supporting him, and offering his aid, in case of a subscription being made. And Cobbett now found, upon visiting Manchester, that he had already won his way into the hearts and minds of the people there. Before he left, a dinner was given in his honour, at which Mr. John Fielden, manufacturer, of Todmorden, presided.

The following will give an example of his general reception in Lancashire. Most of Cobbett’s “egotism” was displayed in answer to personal attacks, and we owe a good deal of biographical matter to those occasions on which he chose to answer. One evening in the House of Lords, the Earl of Falmouth, in passing a sneer over to Lord Radnor, concerning the latter’s nomination-borough of Downton, insinuated that the loss of that borough would be “a bad thing for Cobbett, whom the people would scarcely elect, if left to themselves.” Lord Falmouth had a taste of Mr. Cobbett’s lash, as a reward for his temerity; and Cobbett concluded his paper thus:—

The month of June saw the triumph of the Parliamentary Reformers, and eager preparations were made for canvass. Expectation ran high: the newly-enfranchised took the matter into their own hands; and amongst these were the people of Lancashire. Manchester had sent a member to Parliament in some long past age, but had been for centuries unrepresented, and was now to have two members. Oldham, with a population of over 50,000, was, likewise, to elect two.

Early in July, 1832, Mr. Cobbett received a letter from an Oldham friend, informing him that it was determined to put him in nomination; and that two strangers having unexpectedly commenced a canvass, his friends had at once announced his name, along with that of Mr. John Fielden; the latter having consented to the proposal, with the understanding that Cobbett should be his colleague, if not elected for some other place. Several other constituencies had been thought of; but this unmistakable earnestness on the part of Lancashire decided the matter; and when, in the course of December, the elections came off, Fielden and Cobbett were at the top of the poll for Oldham. The people of Manchester had also put Mr. Cobbett in nomination, but, the result of the contest at Oldham being made known there on the first day of the poll, the votes intended for him were transferred to other candidates.

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:—

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:—

A number of gentlemen, led by Mr. Attwood, the member for Birmingham, conceived it to be only just and proper that an inquiry should be made into the state of the country, and the prevailing distress.[5] Lord Althorp considered any such inquiry unadvisable, “because it might lead to an investigation of the consequences produced by the changes in the currency;”—he was willing to consider the subject when it came fairly before the House, but objected to the proposed mode of entertaining it. The motion was lost, by a narrow majority; and it was renewed, about a month afterwards, in another form, only to fail again. Thus, the Whig ministry set their faces against the very Reformers which they had themselves called up.

But Mr. Cobbett wants, above all things, the very thing that Lord Althorp deprecates: “an investigation of the consequences produced by the changes in the currency,” and he is resolved to have it, one way or another. And he can think of no surer means than that of fixing the onus of the public distresses upon the author of those changes in the currency, which he had always considered to be a leading cause of the distress.

Sir Robert Peel was, at this time, leader of the opposition, and the most distinguished man on the Tory side,—admired alike by friend and foe. The hopes of the Tory party were centred in Peel, for no man who had pretended to lead them, since the days of Pitt, could boast a tenth part of the talents which he possessed. His first important part in public affairs had been the carrying through Parliament, in 1819, the bill for the resumption of cash payments; a measure which Mr. Cobbett had treated with ridicule, as one certain to be productive of prolonged disaster to the country. Cobbett’s predictions were, to a great extent, verified by events; and he considered himself, thenceforward, an authority upon that abstruse topic. And he now brought forward a resolution, to the effect that Peel’s “want of knowledge,” displayed in his repeated failures to adjust the currency, since the year 1819, merited his ignominious dismissal from the Privy Council.

No scheme could have been invented, better than this, in order to show Cobbett’s headstrong ineptitude on certain occasions. To go no farther,—the inconsistency of protesting that there was no imputation on Peel’s honour, while proposing what would have been (for him) the very deepest disgrace, was typical of much that explains Cobbett’s frequent failure to impress men of cultivation and refinement; and he gave, in this instance, a signal example of his neglect to consider the fitness of things. Most of what he said was perfectly true, and could not be answered, and was not answered; but the outrageous method of bringing the question forward not only spoilt it all, but brought down upon his head deserved derision. Fielden, and Attwood, and three others, manfully supported him; while the rest laughed and jeered, to their heart’s content.

It was nearly a month after this episode, before Cobbett’s voice was again heard. At length, however, he seems to have learned the temper of the House; and we soon find him thanking “hon. members for the attention with which, &c.” He generally had something to say upon any topic connected with taxation and the well-being of the people, and on several occasions delivered long and effective speeches; as on the Poor Laws, suppression of disturbances in Ireland, and the proposed Factory regulations. On this last question Mr. Fielden was in the front rank as an agitator; and was intensely gratified with the support of his colleague, especially when Cobbett, speaking of the factory children, alluded to “three hundred thousand of the most helpless creatures in the world holding up their hands for mercy.” And one matter appears on the journals of the House, upon Mr. Cobbett’s motion, which resulted in a Select Committee.[6]

In the spring of the following year, ominous signs appeared, which proved that the change in his habits, necessitated by his parliamentary attendance, was telling upon Cobbett’s vigorous constitution; and he was absent from his post for two whole months. The period which elapsed after the dissolution, and before the meeting of the new Parliament in 1835, was not sufficient for thorough restoration to health, and he resumed his duties with a bad cough clinging to him. On the 10th of March, he attempted to speak upon the motion of the Marquess of Chandos to abolish the malt-tax; but he found his voice so hoarse, that he could not make the gentlemen immediately in front hear him; and was obliged to sit down. He still valiantly attended, however, and spoke on several occasions; the last being on the 25th May, in a discussion on agricultural distress.

But his time was come: his place in the House of Commons knew him no more; and, when the House assembled on the evening of the 19th June, a whisper circulated upon the benches to the effect that the member for Oldham was dead.

FOOTNOTES

CHAPTER XXVII.
“I HAVE BEEN THE GREAT ENLIGHTENER OF THE PEOPLE OF ENGLAND.”[1]

So this long fight was over.

For forty years past, Cobbett had waged incessant warfare against political hypocrisy and corruption; here represented by revolutionary theorists; there by political adventures; now, by venal courtiers; again, by uncompromising partisanship in the press. Heedless of personal danger, and proud of his native soil and of his fellow-countrymen, he had never flinched from the pursuit of those whom he regarded as the enemies of his country’s welfare. Often blindly passionate, but always honest, and dominated by the convictions of the hour, he had presented the unexampled phenomenon of a man who could face, single-handed, the world in arms; insusceptible alike to the arts of intrigue, and to the cozening of partisanship.

The character of the London newspaper press, in the earlier years of the present century, bears no comparison with its now-existing posterity, either in character, ability, or influence. Our leading journal, indeed, should scarcely know its own grandfather: appealing, as it does, to the taste of the most highly-cultivated minds of the age; and quite indifferent to anything but the task of representing the best public opinion of the day. As for a “government organ,” there is no such thing; your newspaper now gets upon the wings of the day, or what it supposes the wings of the day, and there catches the best breeze that it can. There is no space for mutual recriminations, with ostentation of “private wire,” and elaborate political and literary reviews, if even the taste for dirt-throwing had not vanished. The doctrine of the survival of the fittest is found to hold good, in journalism as in everything else; and there cannot, possibly, be any better token of the improvement of the age, in taste and morals, than the elevated tone of the more successful leaders of public opinion in our own days.

When the History of the newspaper-press comes to be properly written, it will not be a mere record of the struggles and strifes of proprietors; the successes of the few, and the failures of the many; nor even the extraordinary wealth of anecdote furnished by personal history. Along with these matters will have to be introduced critical studies, derived from close examination of the journals; discovering the amount of prescience with which each may be credited, and the growth and decay of their influence; tracing motives of particular partisanship to their source; and estimating their relative places, in the grand temple of the Fourth Estate.

The task of that historian will find its best reward, in the endeavour to comprehend the first quarter of the nineteenth century. He will see the press first enslaved, then reckless, then persecuted; then partially enslaved again; then gradually presenting a prospect that it will, one day or other, become purified into something like dignity and respectability. For all this long while, it has been strangely unable to endure rivalry and opposition; and its members have vied with one another, as to which could employ the foulest epithets, impute the wickedest motives to opponents, or fawn the most gracefully upon “patrons.” There was no place for independence, in those days; for independent principles were considered to hide the wolf of Jacobinism. The alteration in tone, consequent upon a change of proprietorship, went under the favourite stigma of “profligacy.”[2] As for party-spirit, there never was a truer dictum than that laid down by Mr. Cobbett, in one of the later numbers of the London Porcupine: “The press is as much shackled and restrained by the spirit of party, as it could be by the most restrictive laws.”

From the day of the first appearance of the Political Register, a new æra dawned for journalism. Its originality in plan, and the power with which it was written, awakened envy; its plain English, and rapid acquisition of independence in opinion, provoked opposition. And the success, with which its early career was marked, brought imitators into the field. But that which soon characterized it, more particularly, was an inflexible hostility to such newspapers, and such persons, who endeavoured to extenuate or explain away the misuse of public money. People sadly wanted educating upon this point. The principles of Walpole and Newcastle had borne fruit. The Treasury was surrounded by hungry adventurers; and there were hundreds of men, as late as William Pitt’s time, who had sucked-in these principles, as it were, with their mothers’ milk. And if we consider that, when Cobbett began the fight, and for some time after, there was no one else had the courage, or was in the mind, to expose it all, we shall understand the singular position in which he stood. For an anonymous writer to sit down, and write off a malicious paragraph or two with insinuations of venality, was one thing; but, for a man, well-known in the flesh, renouncing the editorial “we,” and affecting the first-person-singular, proceeding to tell a plain story, fearless of the consequences, was a phenomenon which startled Society; the effect produced being similar to that which occurs upon poking your walking-stick into an ants’ nest.

Decent Society never forgave Mr. Cobbett. No matter! Upon that man’s memory lies the credit of having been chiefly instrumental in restoring political purity to the nation. The whole domestic history of England, between 1800 and 1835, is distinguished by the struggles of the nation to emancipate itself from corruption in Church and State. The pioneer was William Cobbett; and no history of those struggles, which does not place him high among the “leaders and guiders” of men, will be worthy of the name.

As to how far Mr. Cobbett’s ideas and predictions have been accepted, is not the purpose of the present work; if, even, its limits did not forbid such an essay. It is certain that he was largely pirated, during his lifetime, both in speeches and in newspaper articles. But he lost so much weight, in the minds of dispassionate men, by such unbounded extravagance as was displayed in his “History of the Reformation;” and his cotemporaries were so cruelly lashed and scolded, when the advocacy of their own views exceeded the truth, that the significance of his career could not be properly understood by his generation. It is almost surprising that more bad institutions did not fall before his trenchant blows; yet, with respect to those that remain,[3] and are doomed, it may safely be recommended to ransack the Political Register for the best arguments and illustrations, with which to defy their supporters. On many great questions Cobbett was far in advance of his time; perhaps on nothing more so than in the foresight with which he contemplated the development of popular ideas. To us, in Liberal-Conservative times, the following passage (May, 1833) seems a commonplace; but, to the privileged classes of his own days, the words were as the words of Micaiah in the ears of Ahab:—

The grave was literally his last enemy. The announcement of Cobbett’s death was the close of a strife, in which had been displayed the singular spectacle of the Champion of the Press arrayed against its own licentiousness; in which the dangers attendant upon the conjuring up of new foes had been counted as nothing, while there was a principle to be maintained, or a touch of cant to be exposed. And, now that he was gone for ever, the whole fraternity acknowledged his genius and his talents; and confessed that a good, and great, and honest heart had departed from among them. Throughout the land, with almost unanimity, the newspapers teemed with his praises; and those were not few, who, having not long since boasted of their hatred, now frankly declared that Mr. Cobbett was a man of whom his countrymen might justly be proud, as one of the greatest that England had ever produced.

The last years of Mr. Cobbett’s domestic life were of singular tranquillity. Surrounded as he was by a family, the individual members of which had “never caused him a day’s anxiety,” his hearth was a complete antithesis to the stormy scenes outside. And he had that felicity, the first wish of every good man’s heart, of seeing his sons and daughters bear the fruits of his own example, in a correct estimate of the duties and the discipline of life. Not only that. Age never came upon him in crabbed form. There was a soft, genial nature about Mr. Cobbett, which no surface vehemence could exorcise. Even, when dealing his heaviest blows upon the heads of the poor “borough-mongers,” or when pouring his most terrible sarcasms around, his energy was the energy of warmth; as though heated with his own heart’s blood. It would be difficult to find any one essay among his writings, which, fairly analyzed, did not betray honest, impetuous affection for the cause immediately on hand. You cannot fail, as you read, to recognize the unpaid advocate. That he was ridiculously vain of his success in life, is no more than could be expected of a half-educated man, who had held, for more than a generation, such extraordinary power with the lower and middle classes; but such vanity, fostered sometimes by individuals and sometimes by the crowd, was not of that sort typified by the Napoleons and the Masaniellos of life. No: the sword laid down, and the helm removed from the brow, left this warrior a homely citizen, resting with the children, and the birds, the fruits and flowers, and the sweetest hospitalities.

So, old age brought nothing to Mr. Cobbett, of the burthen. “Always at work or sleep,” the work he did at seventy years of age was not excelled in quality by that of any previous period of his life; and, had it not been for the enforced change of habits brought about by his attendance in parliament, he might have lived another decade or so. He had, even, inured himself to noisy Fleet Street. Speaking, somewhere, of his upper room in Bolt Court, he says,—

“The birds sing better, and sing louder, and more, and stronger in a cage, than they do when at large;” adding that “the best pastorals have been written in smoky garrets.” Naturally enough, if a man hath a garden in his own heart.

But, in truth, much of Cobbett’s wonderful staying-power lay in his splendid mental and physical health. An active and temperate existence, in which nothing was allowed to run to waste, warded-off the approaches of senility. Excepting only a tumour which gave some trouble for a few months[4] during 1824, he had known nothing of illness; beyond those trifling matters to which even the best constitutions are liable under given circumstances. After reaching his threescore-and-ten, he could still boast of riding over the country with the youngest; or doing a day’s work against any one of his labourers.

This was an astonishingly active, fully-worked life; in which nothing of the morbid could possibly find entrance. An early riser, and no lingerer at meals, Cobbett never confessed to having any leisure time. Social pleasures, as such, would seem to have been almost unheeded, if not despised. Yet his hospitality was unbounded, and overflowing with good nature; and he was always at the service of persons who applied to him for advice, or, even, of those nondescript individuals who would claim the privileges of half-acquaintanceship, and call upon him to indulge a sort of curiosity.

And, of all this vigour, and heartiness, and true daily purpose, nothing failed, in the green old age of William Cobbett.

Very difficult as it is to point to a date, at which Cobbett’s name will be forgotten—it is easy to understand why the popular estimate of the man, at the period of his death, still holds good, in the Anglo-Saxon breast: why his character, falling so far short of perfection, is still counted worthy of the lasting honour of Englishmen. For, his faults were the faults of his race: so often virtues in disguise. Coming from the pure Saxon peasant stock, he caused a healthful infusion of fresh blood into the spirit of his age, and so brought his fellow-countrymen to see, once more, the native energy, and pugnacity, and honesty of purpose, which had so often won the battle of freedom, now brought to bear upon new conditions and new circumstances. Thus it is, that the thoughtful and unbiased student looks upon Cobbett’s character and career. Full of faults, it is no incoherent jumble of a character, without principles and without light; but one having brave and high aims. A special lot in life; which must, by its very nature, bring upon the man some measure of contumely: in which a false step or two would count against him a thousandfold. A special career; pursued with a single eye, an honest purpose, and a persevering heart. A life, that needs no Apologist: but presenting a consistent story; worthy of all that has given us renown, and enabled us to dictate the principles of freedom to the whole world.

The last uneventful years of Mr. Cobbett’s domestic life were spent, at least as far as the public demands upon his time would allow, among the scenes and the occupations which he loved so well: those of his earliest recollections. The garden at Kensington becoming too small for his ambitious seed-farming experiments, the well-known manor-farm of Barn Elm was occupied for three or four years. But, in the summer of 1832, this was relinquished; and Mr. Cobbett retired farther into Surrey, to a locality not many miles from his birthplace, in the adjoining parish of Ash. Normandy farm (contiguous to that of Wanborough, whence Mr. Birkbeck had departed for the golden west) lies in a lonely, unfrequented district, with a poor, wet soil; and it was one that required a great deal of money expended upon it. But it suited Cobbett’s seed-farming tastes:—

But nothing could ward off the perils incident to late hours in London. After his first parliamentary session, there were evident signs of his constitution failing him; and, although revived somewhat in summer, each new winter brought back a cough, which forbade rest at night, and gradually helped to bring the end nearer. A visit to Ireland, in 1834, seemed to be undertaken with all his old powers; his writing and his humour were as good as ever. But the following winter proved to be the last, and the early months of the year 1835 were a constant struggle to keep up to the post at which he meant to die.

Not that he meant to die, yet. There were new plans, only a month before Cobbett’s death, which exhibited anything but the lapse of mental or physical power. There was to be a new Cobbett’s Evening Journal, a special feature of which was the full publication of important discussions in parliament, which were not elsewhere faithfully reported: those affairs, viz., in which Hume, and the other economists beside himself, had the leading share.

Also, the Register was to be dropped, “in full blaze,” on his next birthday, the 9th of March, 1836:—