“… I am happy to think that I am likely to be of some use in uniting men in support of the throne, the Church, and the real liberties of the people, against the conspirators of loan-makers and directors, directors of all sorts, I mean; East India as well as Bank … whether I shall draw them out at last I know not. I wish I may. But they have now such a load to toil against, that I am apt to think they will desist, and by-and-by glance at my present writing as a proof of my disaffection and abandonment of principle. If it please God to give me health, that shall not serve them, though. Pray keep a good look-out, for, if they say only a word, I wish to meet it instantly.”
“… Is it really true that the cowards have given up Malta? Why, they went to war for Malta! ‘Malta,’ said Dundas, in his villainous brogue, ‘Malta! Malta! en parpatooaty, es tha trewly Breetush oabjuct of ware!’ And now he gives it up! For God’s sake look at his speech, Reg., vol. iii. p. 1662. But be sure not to talk of it to any one, as I should then be anticipated.”
“… Have you seen Reeves? I think I must come to a plain understanding with him; for I hate cold half-friendships. I think my two last numbers must have staggered such people.”
Mr. Cobbett is in town in November to attend Judge Johnson’s trial; but he is at Botley House again in January. Mr. Wright pays them another visit, too, having been desired to bring a fine large twelfth-cake, also “the portfolio with all the boys’ pictures in it.”
That some people were getting “staggered,” as Cobbett says, is by no means unlikely. He has been publicly called upon to “defend himself from the charge of not having joined the opponents of Sir Francis Burdett;” when, lo! it is discovered that an acknowledgment must be made, of at least some claim, on the part of the latter, to represent the Middlesex constituency, as against his opponent:—
“The former sentiments and expressions of Sir Francis Burdett were not, for the most part, so wrong in themselves as in the season of their application. Some of them, indeed, were such as no time or place would justify.… His language, and many of his acts, during the former election, as well as previous to it, were seditious to a degree bordering upon treason; they did, in my opinion, totally incapacitate him as a member of Parliament.… He chose to disgrace himself and his cause by an appeal to the worst passions of the worst part of the people. But if nothing of a seditious nature has appeared in the conduct of Sir Francis Burdett since that election, upon what principle will his opponents justify their resentment against him, whilst they are so ready to overlook the political sins of others?”
A few months earlier in this year, the ministerial part of the press had classed Burdett and Cobbett together as “a party endeavouring to create despondency.” This appears to have been the beginning of it; and Mr. Cobbett, on looking more dispassionately into Burdett’s claims as a politician, finds that the leading objects of both their minds are the same,—
“It will be recollected that, on the 2nd of July last, application was made to Parliament for a grant of 591,842l., wherewith to pay off the arrears of the Civil List; … Sir Francis Burdett took the liberty to say a few words to the thirty or forty persons who were about to grant this half-million of money, which was to be raised upon the people.… He objected to the ground upon which the minister had made this application, and could not see, he said, why the rise in prices and the consequent abridgment of every man’s comforts should be urged as a reason for augmenting the amount of the Civil List. He complained that there was a waste of the public money.… He did not declaim against taxes, but against their too great amount, and against the misapplication of them.…”
and protests that none but a contractor, a farmer-general, a paper-money maker, or a hired author, could find anything objectionable in the sentiments thus expressed. In short, Mr. Cobbett has discovered that the advocates of parliamentary reform are not, necessarily, a faction seeking to subvert the throne. He has had his grievance, some ten or a dozen years, against the “public-robbers;” but he has groped about, in pursuit of them, in crooked bye-ways: has even rubbed shoulders with them without knowing it: has now come in sight of the highway along which are running other pursuers, whose distant shouts have, till now, been unmeaning, because misunderstood.
He looks with abhorrence at the prospect of a revival “of those political animosities which were, during the last war and at the last peace, so fruitful in national calamity and disgrace, which destroyed all freedom of discussion and almost of intercourse; and which, while it sheltered all the follies and faults of the minister even from inquiry, exposed every word and act of every other man to misrepresentation and suspicion.”
Here, then, we have Mr. Cobbett fairly started upon his mission. Parliamentary opposition, hitherto, had meant a struggle for power and place, with the biggest share in the nation’s loaves and fishes; it would henceforth signify a determination to watch the grasping hand, to restrain the thirsty leech. And Mr. Cobbett will, at any cost, keep the nation on the alert concerning the proper disposition of its resources.
In the hope which Cobbett now indulged, of arresting, if possible, the enormous growth of the public debt, he began to advocate a union of the two opposition parties. We find him, then, about this time, obliged to defend himself from the charge of supporting Mr. Fox, whose “seditious ravings” it had once been “impossible to hear without indignation.” And the charge would naturally be indefensible on the part of a hireling. But the C. J. Fox that was now praised was not the C. J. Fox who once coquetted with Jacobins. In Cobbett’s eyes, Jacobinism was now dead and buried. The risk of anarchy had departed from British shores. The peace of Amiens had proved a failure; and the Whigs, who had opposed that treaty from one point of view, were beginning to coalesce with the Windhamites, who had opposed it from another. For some time past there had been hopes of a union of all the great men of the country, in a strong, “broad-bottom’d” administration, as the only means of restoring public confidence.
So, although Mr. Cobbett is ready to admit the claim of the heaven-born minister to a place among the great, he now declines any longer to support him, as hitherto. Not only that: he proceeds to instruct Mr. Pitt on the causes of his failure as a statesman. Rather cool, this, for the quondam ploughboy! But he must needs prove that Mr. Pitt has deserted his principles, in order to justify his own new position. As to the charge of versatility, he thinks that “inconsistency” means “the difference between profession and practice.” The best exposition of this “difference” is found in an article of the Register, toward the close of the year 1805:—
“If I praised Mr. Pitt, it was Mr. Pitt the ‘heaven-born’ minister, with regard to whose character I had participated in the adoption of those notions so prevalent amongst the ignorant crowd about twenty years ago. It was Mr. Pitt the corner-stone of the confederacy against republican France: Mr. Pitt who had openly and solemnly vowed never to make peace with France till the political balance of Europe should be completely restored, and till safety and tranquillity could be obtained for England; it was this Mr. Pitt that I praised, and not the Mr. Pitt who advised, who defended, and who extolled the peace of Amiens. The Mr. Pitt that I praised, as a financier, was the Mr. Pitt who, in the year 1799, declared that he would carry on the war for any length of time without the creation of new debt; and not the Mr. Pitt who, in less than two years afterwards, justified the peace as necessary for the husbanding of our resources, having, in the interim, created new debt to the amount of about seventy millions sterling. If I praised Mr. Pitt, as an upright public man, as a real patriot, it was the Mr. Pitt who began his career with professions of incorruptible purity, and who, in the warmth of his zeal, had proposed to reform the Parliament itself, rather than not cut off the means of corruption; and not the Mr. Pitt who procured to be passed the bill relating to the Nabob of Arcot’s debts (of which bill I had never yet heard); nor the Mr. Pitt who, notwithstanding the information of Mr. Raikes, suffered the practices of Lord Melville and Trotter to go on unchecked; no, no; not the Mr. Pitt who lent forty thousand pounds of the public money, without interest, to two members of Parliament—never making, or causing to be made, any record or minute of the transaction, and never communicating any knowledge of it even to the cabinet ministers.… The English Constitution that I extolled was that Constitution which, to use the words of Mr. Pitt himself (in his early days), carefully watches over the property of the people; that Constitution which effectually prevents any misapplication of the public money, or severely punishes those who may be guilty of such misapplication; and which, above all things, provides that the money raised upon the people, by the consent of their representatives, shall not in any degree, or under any name, be given to those representatives by the ministers of the crown, and especially in a secret manner. This Constitution I hope yet to see preserved in its purity; and were it not for that hope, neither hand nor pen would I move in its defence. But it will be so preserved, or we are the most base of mankind.”
A number of persons were now ready to support these views of Mr. Cobbett; and a still greater number, animated by fear, or by envy, assailed him with the utmost virulence. His friends told him that the circulation of the Register would be diminished if he persisted in opposing Pitt; that the advocacy of Burdett would operate unfavourably upon its reputation. He assured them all, however, that he was receiving better support than ever, and that the great majority of his correspondents acknowledged, that conviction of the truth of his reasonings, and of the rectitude of his motives, was stealing into their minds.
If there was one man who could stand up before the country with pure hands, that man was William Pitt. But it was not given to him to inspire other men by his example in this matter. The system of political corruption was too strongly holden for the best-intentioned reformer to undertake its reduction, without risking his political existence. The creed, common to Whigs and Tories, that the king and the country were to be ruled for the exclusive benefit of the “ruling” families, was the basis of the system; and only a Samson, who should himself perish amid the wreck, might essay its destruction.
As early as 1802 Mr. Cobbett had ventured upon a sarcasm with reference to the clerkship to “the Pells.” This celebrated sinecure, worth 3000l. a year, was in the power of Pitt to take to himself without reproach: as is well known he declined, and it fell into the hands of Addington, who bestowed it upon his son, then only twelve years of age. Cobbett thought this was setting decency at defiance; seeing that the immaculate minister, about this time, persecuted a poor tradesman of Plymouth[9] for doing what everybody around was doing.
A stray shaft or so was discharged from time to time; but not till three years after did the fight really commence. At last, in 1805, with the exposure of Lord Melville’s naval mal-administration, the whole matter was ripe for discussion; and in August of that year appears the first of those curious pension-lists,[10] which were, for the ensuing quarter of a century, the stock-in-trade of radical grievance-mongers. It was now open war. Mr. Cobbett, for the second time in his life, found himself standing alone. Aristocratic friends were deserting him, whilst the new ones were yet only gathering. As for the abuse, with which he was favoured by his opponents, it was as unreasoning as it was disgraceful.
[1] Harding was succeeded by John Budd before the year was out.
[2] Also printed in the Supplement to vol. ii. of the Register.
[3] This undertaking has long since made the name of Hansard famous; but this is the place to remind the reader, that its origin, and successful issue for a number of years, is one of the long-forgotten public services of William Cobbett. The original form is still retained.
[4] Addl. MSS. 22,906-7, in the British Museum, is a collection, formerly in the possession of the late Mr. Dawson Turner, from which some of the interesting letters in the text addressed to Mr. Wright are derived. The cause of their preservation will appear in the sequel.
[5] A curious device of Mr. Pitt’s, by which 10,000 men could be transferred, in a few hours, to any part of the coast. It provoked a good deal of current satire.
[6] In support of Mainwaring’s candidature for Middlesex.
[7] On the Irish Additional Force Bill, in Register of Sept. 29. The letter was not absolutely free from provocable matter.
[8] The first of a series of letters to Mr. Pitt, on the “Causes of the Decline of Great Britain.” Cobbett upbraids the heaven-born minister with having deserted his own principles, and thus exposed his former staunch supporters (among whom is C.) to the charge of having deserted him.
[9] One Hamlin, a tinman, who had offered Addington a large sum of money for an appointment in the Customs. He was prosecuted, fined, and imprisoned, although he solemnly declared his ignorance of the crime, having seen for years Government places publicly advertised for sale, besides having probably received money for his vote from the agents of the Government itself.
[10] After Cobbett’s first list of pensions, &c., the plan was copied by others, and the lists at last swelled, under different hands, to a volume of several hundred pages:—“The Black Book; or, Corruption Unmasked. Being an Account of Places, Pensions, and Sinecures, the Revenues of the Clergy and Landed Aristocracy; the Salaries and Emoluments in Courts of Justice and the Police Department; the Expenditure of the Civil List; the Amount and Application of the Droits of the Crown and Admiralty; the Robbery of Charitable Foundations; the Profits of the Bank of England, arising from the Issue of its Notes, Balances of Public Money, Management of the Borough Debt, and other Sources of Emolument; the Debt, Revenue, and Influence of the East India Company; the State of the Finances, Debt, and Sinking Fund. To which is added Correct Lists of Both Houses of Parliament, showing their Family Connexions, Parliamentary Influence, the Places and Pensions held by Themselves or Relations; distinguishing also those who Voted against Catholic Emancipation, and for the Seditious Meeting and Press Restriction Bills. The whole forming a Complete Exposition of the Cost, Influence, Patronage, and Corruption of the Borough Government.” (London, John Fairburn, 1820.) This interesting volume kept increasing in bulk until the æra of the Reform Bill.
END OF VOL. I.
GILBERT AND RIVINGTON PRINTERS, ST. JOHN’S SQUARE, LONDON.