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Title: William Cobbett
Author: G.K.Chesterton
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Title: William Cobbett
Author: G.K.Chesterton
First published 1925
CHAPTER I THE REVIVAL OF COBBETT
CHAPTER II A SELF-MADE MAN
CHAPTER III THE TRAGEDY OF THE PATRIOT
CHAPTER IV REVOLUTION AND THE BONES OF PAINE
CHAPTER V THE AMATEUR HISTORIAN
CHAPTER VI THE RURAL RIDER
CHAPTER VII LAST DAYS AND DEATH
CHAPTER I - THE REVIVAL OF COBBETT
This chapter is here called 'The Revival of Cobbett.' As originally
planned, only a little while ago, it was to have been called 'The
Neglect of Cobbett.' It is not unimportant to realise how recent has
been the change. It is but a year or two ago that I had the great and
(it is to be feared) the undeserved honour of reading a paper an the
subject to the Royal Society of Literature on my admission to that body,
which certainly consists almost entirely of men who know much more
about literature than I do. It was a graceful formality on such an
occasion for the least learned person in the room to lecture to all the
rest. Yet on that occasion the chairman, who was much more of a literary
expert than I am, re-marked on my having chosen an obscure and largely
forgotten writer, just as if I had been lecturing on one of the last and
least of the Greek sophists, or one of the numberless and nameless
lyrists among the Cavaliers. Between then and now the change from
neglect to revival has taken place. It is true that it is not until the
first beginnings of the revival that we ever even hear of the neglect.
Until that moment even the neglect is neglected. When I delivered the
highly amateur address in question, the memory was already stirring, in
others besides myself. But it is not out of egotism that I give this
but because it happens to illustrate the first fact to be
realised about the present position of Cobbett.
In one sense, of course, Cobbett has never been neglected. He has only
been admired in the way in which he would have specially hated to be
admired. He who was full of his subject has been valued only for his
style. He who was so stuffed with matter has been admired for his
though not perhaps for his manners. He shouted to the uproarious
many, and his voice in a faint whisper has rea who
delicately applauded a turn of diction or a flight of syntax. But if
such applause be rather disconcerting to the demagogue, the real revival
of his demagogy would be even more disconcerting to the academic
admirer. Now I mean by the revival of Cobbett the revival of the things
that Cobbett wished to revive. They were things which until a little
while ago nobody imagined there was the slightes
such as liberty, England, the family, the honour of the yeoman, and so
on. Many of the learned who, on the occasion above mentioned, were very
indulgent to my own eccentric enthusiasm, would even now be a little
puzzled if that enthusiasm became something more than an eccentricity.
Cobbett had been for them a man who praised an extravagant and
impossible England in exact and excellent English. It must seem strange
indeed that one who can never hope to write such English can yet hope to
see such an England. The critics must feel like cultivated gentlemen
who, after long relishing Jeremy Taylor's diction, should abruptly
receive an unwelcome invitation to give an exhibition of Holy Dying.
They must feel like scholars who should have lingered lovingly all their
lives over the lapidary Babylonian jests and vast verbal incantations of
the wonderful essay on Urn-B and then have lived to see it sold by
the hundred as the popular pamphlet of a bustling modern movement in
favour of cremation.
Nevertheless, this classic preservation of Cobbett in an urn, in the
form of ashes, has not been quite consistent with itself. Even now it
would seem that the ashes were still a little too hot to touch. And I
only mentioned my own little effort in academic lecturing because it
concerned something that may be repeated here, as relevant to the first
essentials of the subject. Many professors have in a merely literary
sense recognised C but few have modelled themselves
upon their model. They were always ready to hope that their pupils would
write such good English. But they would have been mildly surprised if
any pupil had written such plain English. Yet, as I pointed out on that
occasion, the strongest quality of Cobbett as a stylist is in the use he
made of a cert the sort of use commonly called
abuse. It is especially his bad language that is always good. It is
precisely the passages that have always been recognised as good style
that would now be regarded as bad form. And it is precisely these
violent passages that especially bring out not only the best capacities
of Cobbett but also the best capacities of English. I was and am
therefore ready to repeat what I said in my little lecture, and to
repeat it quite seriously, though it was the subject at the time of
merely amused comment. I pointed out that in the formation of the noble
and beautiful English language, out of so many local elements, nothing
had emerged more truly beautiful than the sort of English that has been
localised under the name of Billingsgate. I pointed out that English
excels in certain angular consonants and abrupt terminations that make
it extraordinarily effective for the expression of the fighting spirit
and a fierce contempt. How fortunate is the condition of the Englishman
and how relatively melancholy that of the Frenchman
who can only give them a blow of the foot! If we say that two people
fight like cat and dog, the very words seem to have in them a shindy of
snaps and screams and scratches. If we say 'comme le chat et le chien,'
we are depressed with the suggestion of comparative peace. French has of
course its own depths of resounding power: but not this sort of
battering ram of bathos. Now nobody denies that Cobbett and his enemies
did fight like cat and dog, but it is precisely his fighting passages
that contain some of the finest examples of a style as English as the
word dog or the word cat. So far as this goes the point has nothing to
do with political or moral sympathy with Cobbett's cause. The beauty of
his incessant abuse is a matter of art for art's sake. The pleasure
which an educated taste would receive in hearing Cobbett call a duchess
an old eat or a bishop a dirty dog is almost onomatopoeic, in its love
of a melody all but detached from meaning. In saying this, it might be
supposed, I was indeed meeting the purely artistic and academic critic
half way, and might well have been welcomed, so to speak, with an
embrace of reconciliation. This is indeed the reason why most lovers of
English letters have at least kept alive a purely literary tradition of
Cobbett. But, as it happened, I added some words which I will also take
the liberty of mentioning, because they exactly illustrate the stages
of this re-emergence of the great writer's fame from the field of
literature to the field of life. 'There is a serious danger that this
charm in English literature may be lost. The comparative absence of
abuse in social and senatorial life may take away one of the beauties of
our beautiful and historic speech. Words like "scamp" and "scoundrel,"
which have the unique strength of English in them, are likely to grow
unfamiliar through lack of use, though certainly not through lack of
opportunity for use. It is indeed strange that when public life presents
so wide and promising a field for the use of these terms, they should be
suffered to drop into desuetude. It seems singular that when the careers
of our public men, the character of our commercial triumphs, and the
general culture and ethic of the modern world seem so specially to
invite and, as it were, to cry aloud for the use of such language, the
secret of such language should be in danger of being lost.' Now, when I
drew the attention of those authoritative guardians of English
literature, responsible for the preservation of the purity of the
English language, to this deplorable state of things--to the words that
are like weapons rusting on the wall, to the most choice terms of abuse
becoming obsolete in face of rich and even bewildering opportunities in
the way of public persons to apply them to--when I appealed against this
neglect of our noble tongue, I am sorry to say that my appeal was
received with heartless laughter and was genially criticised in the
newspapers as a joke. It was regarded not only as a piece of mild
buffoonery but as a sort of eighteenth- as if I only
wished to bring back cudgels and cutlasses along with wigs and
three-cornered hats. It was assumed that nobody could possibly seriously
hope, or even seriously expect, to hear again the old Billingsgate of
the hustings and the election fight. And yet, since those criticisms
were written, only a very little time ago, that sort of very Early
English has suddenly been heard, if not in journalism, at least in
politics. By a strange paradox, even the House of Commons has heard the
sound of common speech, not wholly unconnected with common sense. Labour
members and young Tories have both been heard talking like men in the
street. Mr. Jack Jones, by his interruptions, has made himself a
judicious patron of this literary revival, this attempt to save the
heritage of E and Mr. Kirkwood has said things about
capitalists of which even Cobbett might be proud.
Now, I have only mentioned my premature lament over the bargee, that
disreputable Tom Bowling, because it serves to introduce a certain
equally premature rejoicing which explains much of our present position.
The Victorian critics had insisted on regarding the violence of Cobbett
as entirely with the result that they find
themselves suddenly threatened with that sort of violence advancing on
them from the future. They are perh and at least
they are very naturally puzzled. They had always been taught that
Cobbett was a crank whose theories had been thrashed out long ago and
found to be quite empty and fallacious. He had been preserved only for
and even that was rude and old-fashioned, especially in the
quaint Saxon archaism of calling a spade a spade. They little thought to
have heard the horrid sound, the hideous word 'spade' itself, shake the
arches of St. Stephen's as with a blasphemy. But the question is not
merely one of idioms but of ideas. They had always supposed at least
that Cobbett's and they found they were still
exploding. They found that the explosion which missed fire a hundred
years ago, like that of Guy Fawkes three hundred years ago, still has a
time fuse whose time w and that the location of the
peril (I regret to say) was also not very far from the same spot as Guy
Fawkes's. In a peril of that sort it is very important to understand
what and I doubt if the comfortable classes
understand what is happening much better than they did in Cobbett's
day--to say nothing of Guy Fawkes's. And one reason why I originally
agreed to write this little book, is that I think it a matter of life
and death that it should be understood.
The cudgel has come back like a boomerang: and the common Englishman, so
long content with taking half a loaf, may yet in the same tradition of
compromise confine himself to heaving half a brick. The reason why
Parliamentary language is unparliamentary and Westminster has been
joined to Billingsgate, the reason why the English poor in many places
are no longer grumbling or even growling but rather howling, the reason
why there is a new note in our old polite politics, is a reason that
vitally concerns the subject of this little study. There are a great
many ways of but the way most relevant here is
this. All this is happening because the critics have been all wrong
about Cobbett. I mean they were specially wrong about what he
represented. It is happening because Cobbett was not what they have
always repr not even what they have always praised
him as being. It is happening because Cobbett stood for a reality of
and realities can return whether we understand them
or not. Cobbett was not merely a wrong-headed fellow with a knack of
saying the right word about the wrong thing. Cobbett was not merely an
angry and antiquated old farmer who thought the country must be going to
the dogs because the whole world was not given up to the cows. Cobbett
was not merely a man with a lot of nonsensical notions that could be
a man looking to turn England into an
Eden that should grow nothing but Cobbett's Corn. What he saw was not an
Eden that cannot exist but rather an Inferno that can exist, and even
that does exist. What he saw was the perishing of the whole English
power of self-support, the growth of cities that drain and dry up the
countryside, the growth of dense dependent populations incapable of
finding their own food, the toppling triumph of machines over men, the
sprawling omnipotence of financiers over patriots, the herding of
humanity in nomadic masses whose very homes are homeless, the terrible
necessity of peace and the terrible probability of war, all the loading
up of our little island the wealth that may mean
famine and the culture t the bread of Midas and the
sword of Damocles. In a word, he saw what we see, but he saw it when it
was not there. And some cannot see it--even when it is there.
It is the paradox of his life that he loved the past, and he alone
really lived in the future. That is, he alone lived in the real future.
The future was a fog, and in some ways his largely
instinctive intelligence was foggy enough about it. But he and he alone
had some notion of the sort of London fog that it was going to be. He
was in France during the French R amid all that world of
carnage and classical quotations, of Greek names and very Latin riots.
He must have looked, as he stood there with his big heavy figure and
black beaver hat, as solemn and solid a specimen as ever was seen of the
Englishman abroad--the sort of Englishman who is very much abroad. He
went to America just after the American R and played the part
of the old Tory farmer, waving the beaver hat and calling on those
astonished republicans for three cheers for King George. Everywhere,
amid all that dance of humanitarian hopes, he seemed like a survival and
a relic of times gone by. And he alone was in any living touch with the
times that were to come.
All those reformers and revolutionists around him, talking hopefully of
the future, were without exception living in the past. The very future
they happily prophesied was the future as it would have been in the
past. Some were dreaming of a remote and s some of
a true and
some of a heroic past and others of a
past more dubious. But they all meant by their ideal democracy what
democracy would have been in a simpler age than their own. The French
republicans were living in the lost republics of the M in
the cold volcanoes of Athens and Thebes. Thei but
no modern state is small enough to achieve anything so great. We might
say that some of those eighteenth century progressives had even got so
far as the reign of Pepin or Dagobert, and discovered the existence of
the French Monarchy. For things so genuine and primarily so popular as
the French Monarchy are generally not really discovered until they have
e and when they are discovered they are generally
destroyed. The English and to some extent the American liberals were
living in one sense e for they were not destroying
what had recently been discovered. They were destroying what had
recently been destroyed. The Americans were defying George the Third,
under the extraordinary idea that George the Third ruled England. When
they set up their republic, the simple colonists probably really did
think that England was a monarchy. The same illusion filled the English
W but it was only because England had once been a monarchy. The
Whigs were engaged permanently in expelling the Stuarts, an enjoyable
occupation that could be indefinitely repeated. They were always
fighting the battles of Naseby and Newbury over again, and defying a
divine right that nobody was defending. For them indeed Charles the
First walked and talked half an hour, or half a century, or a century
and a half, after his head was cut off and they themselves could walk
nowhere but in Whitehall, and talk of nothing but what happened there.
We can see how that long tradition lingered in a light and popular book
like Dickens's Child's History of E and how even the child was
still summoned to take part in that retrospective revolution. For there
were moments when even Mr. Dickens had the same obsession as Mr. Dick.
But the point is that these idealists--most of them very noble
idealists--all saw the future upon the simple pattern of the past. It is
typical that the American band of comrades were called the Cincinnati,
and were named after Cincinnatus the Consul who threw away the toga to
take the plough. But Cobbett knew a little more about ploughing. He knew
the ploughshare had stu and he knew as nobody else
knew upon what sort of stone it had struck. He knew that stone was the
metal out of which the whole modern unless the
operation could be stopped in time. He knew it indeed only blindly and
but nobody else knew it at all. Nobody else had felt the
nobody el nobody else had any notion of
what was really coming upon the world.
I mean that if you had gone to Jefferson at the moment when he was
writing the Declaration of Independence, and shown him the exact picture
of an Oil Trust, and its present position in America, he would have
said, 'It is not to be believed.' If you had gone to Cobbett, and shown
him the same thing, he would have said, like the bearded old gentleman
in the rhyme, 'It is just as I feared.' If you had confronted Carnot
with Caillaux, the old revolutionist would have wondered what
inconceivable curse could have fallen on great France of the soldiers.
If you had confronted Cobbett with some of our similar specimens, he
would have said it was what might be expected when you gave over great
England to the stockjobbers. For men like Jefferson and Carnot were
thinking of an ancient agricultural society merely changing from
inequality to equality. They were thinking of Greek and Roman villages
in which democracy had driven out oligarchy. They were thinking of a
medieval manor that had become a medieval commune. The merchant and man
of affairs was a small and harmless by-pro they had
no notion that it would grow large enough to swallow all the rest. The
point about Cobbett is that he alone really knew that there and not in
kings or republics, Jacobins or Anti-Jacobins, lay the peril and
oppression of the times to come.
It is the riddle of the man that if he was wrong then, he is right now.
As a dead man fighting with dead men, he can still very easily be
c but if we imagine him still alive and talking to
living men, his remarks are rather uncomfortably like life. The very
words that we should once have read as the most faded and antiquated
history can now be read as the most startling and topical journalism.
Let it be granted that the denunciation was not always correct about Dr.
Priestley or Dr. Rush, that the abuse was not really applicable to Mr.
Hunt or Mr. W let us console ourselves with the fact that the
abuse is quite applicable to us. We at least have done all that
Cobbett's enemies were accused of doing. We have fulfilled all those
we have justified all those most unjustifiable
we have come into the world as if to embody and fulfill in a
belated fashion that highly improbable prediction. Cobbett's enemies may
or may not hav but anyhow we have. Cobbett's
contemporaries may or may not have decreased the national wealth, but it
is decreased. Paper money may not have driven out gold in his lifetime,
but we have been more privileged than he. In a mere quarrel between the
eighteenth century and the nineteenth century he may easily appear
but in a quarrel between the nineteenth century and the twentieth
century he is right. He did not always draw precise diagrams of things
as they were. He only had frantic and fantastic nightmares of things as
they are. The fame of Cobbett faded and indeed completely vanished
during our time of prosperity or what is counted our time of prosperity.
For in fact it was only the prosperity of the prosperous. But during all
that time his version of the doubts about what Carlyle called the
profit-and-loss philosophy practically disappeared from the modern mind.
I have mentioned Carlyle but as expressed by Carlyle the same doubts
were not the same thing. Carlyle would have turned capitalism into a
sort of feudalism, with the feudal loyalty on the one side and the
feudal liberality on the other. He meant by the profit-and-loss
philosophy a small and mean philosophy that could not face a small loss
even for the sake of a great profit. But he never denied that there
could be a great profit, he never contradicted the whole trend of the
age as Cobbett did. On the contrary, Carlyle called the capitalist by a
romantic name, where Cobbett would have called him by a shockingly
realistic name. Carlyle called the capitalist a captain of industry, a
very sad scrap of Victorian sentimentalism. That romantic evasion misses
the whole point, the point that Cobbett kept steadily in sight all his
life. Militarism would be much less respectable and respected if the
captain of a line regiment had pocketed the rent of every acre that he
fought for in Flanders. Capitalism would be much more respectable and
respected if all the master builders climbed to the tops of towers and
fell off, if there were as many capitalists knocked on the head by
bricks as there were captains killed at the front by bullets. But as I
pointed out in a connection already mentioned, Carlyle was really rather
an optimist than a pessimist. Certainly Carlyle was an optimist where
Cobbett was a pessimist. Cob he not only called a
spade a spade, but he used it like a resurrectionist--not merely like a
reformer weeding out small evils. We might say that the mere reformer
calls a spade a spud. Carlyle gave hints and suggestions rather darkly
that the whole busi but he never really dared to
wish that it had never begun. He told the rich sternly how they should
dispose of their wealth, he did not, like Cobbett, tell them coarsely
how they had collected it. The consequence was that Carlyle has been
exhibited as a Puritan, a pessimist, a prophet of woe. Cobbett has not
been exhibited at all. Carlyle has been set over against Mill and
Macaulay as a sort of official opposition, but Cobbett's opposition was
not sufficiently official. Carlyle has been allowed to grumble like a
choleric old major much respected in the club. Cobbett has been entirely
removed, like the enfant terrible, kicking and screaming, lest he should
say something dreadful in the drawing room. Hence the big secret with
which he was bursting has actually been t his
condemnation was so large and sweeping that it had to be hidden in a
hole. The Victorians were quite cultivated enough and broad-minded
enough to realise that there must be some reminder amid their rejoicings
of human fal lest Mr. George Augustus Sala should
seem a creature all too bright and good for human nature's daily food.
They had something of the imperial imagination and philosophic outlook
of the ancient Egyptians, who set a skeleton at the banquet to remind
them of mortality and a more melancholy mood that might mingle
harmlessly with the mood of joy. Carlyle was the skeleton of the feast.
But Cobbett was not the s he was the skeleton in
the cupboard.
In short, Carlyle did criticise the profit-and-loss school, but not the
profitableness of the whole world in which it was made. Certainly he did
not question the assumption that it was at least profitable in the sense
of being practicable. But since then deeper forces have moved and darker
riddles begun to be and it is not the superficial
abnormalities and accidents but the whole main movement and purpose of
the nineteenth century that is brought in question. We have come back to
doing what Carlyle never really did, what Cobbett always wanted to do,
to make a real reckoning of ultimate loss and profit on the
profit-and-loss philosophy. Even in the economic sphere the answer has
been looking more and more doubtful. We talk of it as the age of
but it is a question how long even profiteers will make
profits. We talk and so it is, in the rather
sinister sense of living on capital.
So in some old romance of some old manor-house and manorial family there
might come a dark hour in its annals and a dark cloud upon its towers (a
thunderstorm thrown in, or the fall of some shield or picture or garden
statue or anything necessary to the novelist's taste in doom); and
through the darkened halls and corridors the master of the house would
pass to some dim disordered library and take down some forbidden or
neglected volume, in which are traced strange emblems or figures or maps
or charts of hidden things, or forgotten runes and riddles returning
only with the end. So the Englishman of the twentieth century is to-day
groping his way back past all the literatu past all
the varied Victorian romances of fashionable progress in Macaulay and
fashionable reaction in C till he finds far up on a high shelf
the old thick, leather-bound volumes, with faded print and the barely
decipherable title of 'Cobbett's Register'; and taking down the book,
amid the gathering storm and the growing darkness, reads this old story.
CHAPTER II - A SELF-MADE MAN
It is now rather more than a century and a half since a small boy of the
poorer sort was occupied in scaring rooks where they rose, as they still
rise, in black flotillas flecking the great white clouds that roll up
against the great ridges of Surrey and the southern shires. Yet further
south where the Sussex hills take on an outline at once more opulent and
more bare there was repeated a rhyme that might run like a refrain
through much of his story.
Bees are bees of Paradise,
Do the work of Jesus Christ,
God made bees and bees make honey,
God made man and man makes money,
God made man to plough and reap and sow,
And God made little boys to scare away the crow.
And so the little boy in question continued to scare away the crow, in
obedience to that providential arrangement.
The little boy was destined to grow up into a tall and vigorous man, who
was to travel far and into strange places, into exile and into prison
and into P but his heart never wandered very far from the
simple ideals that are summed up in that verse. He was no mere dreamer
or more or less lovable loafer, of the sort sometimes associated with
the village genius. He would have been as ready as any man of the
utilitarian school to admit that men would do well to imitate the
industry of bees. Only, those who look at his literary industry may be
tempted to say that he had more sting than honey. Similarly he was no
mere romantic or sentimentalist, such as is sometimes associated with a
love of the rural scene. He would have been as ready as any merchant or
trader to face the fact that man, as God has made him, must make money.
But he had a vivid sense that the money must be as solid and honest as
the corn and fruit for which it stood, that it must be closely in touch
with the realities and he waged a furious war on
all those indirect and sometimes imaginary processes of debts and shares
and promises and percentages which make the world of wealth to-day a
world at the worst unreal and at the best unseen. He was most
immediately concerned, in the conditions of the hour, with what he
regarded as the fugitive and wasteful paper-chase of paper money. But
what he was at once predicting and denouncing, like a small cloud that
had not yet become a universal fog, was that vast legal fiction that we
call finance. In any case, against a world in which such financial
mysteries were multiplying every day, in which machinery was everywhere
on the march, and the new towns spreading with the swiftness of a
landslide, in which England was already well on the way to becoming
merely the workshop of the world, against the whole great crawling
labyrinth of the modern state which is almost one with the modern city,
there remained in him unaltered, cut deep into the solitary rock of his
soul, the single clause of his single creed: that God made man to plough
and reap and sow.
For this was William Cobbett, who was born in 1762 at a little farm at
Farnham in Surrey. His grandfather had been an ordinary agricultural
labourer, one of a class drudging for a miserable wage, and fallen so
far from anything resembling the pride of a peasantry that in English
history it had utterly sunk out of sight. It was something that has
hardly been known there rests on all its records
the ancient silence of slavery. It was to these slaves that the heart of
Cobbett continually turned, in what seemed to many its dizzy and
incalculable turnings. Those that were trampled and forgotten alike by
the Tory squire and the Radical merchant were those whom Cobbett eared
exactly as both Patrician and Plebeian citizens might have
been puzzled by a sage whose first thought was of the slaves. And if
ever in this land of ours the poor are truly lifted up, if ever the
really needy find a tongue for their own needs, if ever progressives and
reactionaries alike realise upon what ruins were built both their order
and their reform, how many failures went to make their success, and what
crimes have set their house in order, if they see the underside of their
own history with its secrets of sealed-up wrath and irrevocable
injustice--in a word, if a great people can ever repent, then posterity
may see achieved by this agency also, by this one lonely and angry bee
in whom society saw nothing but a hornet, the work of Jesus Christ.
His father was a small farmer a but the son could
have but a very rudimentary and rustic schooling. The son was perhaps
all his life' a little too prone to p and from an
early age he played the schoolmaster to himself. We have many notes of
notably a glimpse which shows him gaping at the broad
farcical title of 'The Tale of a Tub,' so much in his own verbal
fashion, and buying it and trying to understand it. He read it under a
haystack, and it was so that there fell across him in his first sunshine
the shadow of that dark but not ignoble spirit who a hundred years
before had seen the first victory of our Venetian oligarchy and
despaired. For many have discussed whether Cobbett owed anything to
Swift's style, but few have sufficiently considered his connection with
Swift's cause or creed. Anyhow, precious little of either could have
been made out by a farmer's boy reading 'The Tale of a Tub' under a
haystack. For the rest, there is something of the boy's adventure story
running through his boyhood. He embodied the recognised romance of
England by running away to sea. He also embodied his own rather
recurrent and fitful sagacity by running back again.
He was a character from his earliest years. There was a sort of calm
impetuosity about his movements. He set out one day to escort some girls
to the village fair, dressed up in all his village finery. He saw a
coach with 'London' on it, and inconsequently got on to it and went
careering away, leaving his lady friends, his fair, his farm, and his
family behind him like things of the past. Fortunately he met a friend
of his father's in London, who got him a post as clerk in a lawyer's
office. He hated the lawyer's office, as he hated lawyers and law, all
as he hated long words and pedantry and petty tyranny. He took
another plunge with the sa he took the King's
shilling and enlisted as a private soldier. Here he
for there was much more of the soldier than the lawyer about him.
Moreover, he was none the less a country boy because he had played the
traditional part of the country boy who comes up to London where the
streets are paved with gold. He was tall and strong, with a stride for
which there seemed to be no room in the narrow streets, which went with
a better swing on the long marches over the hills and far away. His
lungs, which in every sense played so large a part in his life, demanded
the deep air of the open places. Fifty years afterwards, at Westminster,
as lie would have said, he was to find himself dying in another den of
lawyers. He was much happier anyhow in
indeed, he
was not only happy but fortunate. He was recognised as a good soldier,
and rose to be corporal and sergeant and eventually a sort of secretary
to the whole regiment, assisting the adjutant. All this time he had been
teac and also (what is pleasingly characteristic)
teaching the adjutant grammar. Anyhow it is obvious that he was
trustworthy and that he was trusted. He wa rose
early, an early bird ready to cat he kept an eye on
he was as busy as a business man. Such a man generally dies
but it is just here that there appears that little
twist or bias which decided how William Cobbett was to live and die.
Cobbett began to note something queer and quite wrong about the
regimental accounts. He soon discovered that a number of officers were
simply pocketing money meant for the regimental food. Then it was that
there appeared the deplorable difference between Cobbett and a really
respectable and successful man. All his life long he never could leave
things alone. He was a business man: but he could not mind his own
business. He k but he had never learnt to wink the
other eye. H but he fell into the melancholy
mistake of supposing that all worms ought really to be treated as worms.
He had not the fine instinct which makes the really successful
secretary-bird distinguish between the earthworms of the underworld and
the silkworms of the smart set. It is not suggested that he was a pure
altruist, a spotless then as always his action
involved a vast amount of vanity, of self-assertion, of sensationalism
and crudity, also a vast amount of inconsistency and inconsequence. The
point is that, whatever his other vices, he did not really know how to
rise in the world. H and discovered too late that in
denouncing what he supposed to be a detail of individual swindling in
his own regiment he had really challenged a system running through the
whole British Army, or for that matter through the whole British
Constitution. Where his restless meddling thought to let the regimental
cat out of the bag, or out of one particular knapsack, he found he had
roused from its lair a sort of Tammany Tiger. He was not by any means
clear or consistent about it. The truth is he was quite out of his
yet he was perfectly right in feeling that there were depths of
degradation. While he was in the Army his protes
when he had left it the Government granted
Cobbett could not get what he demanded as the conditions of that
enquiry, he refused even to attend it himself, and the whole protest
went by default. In a society like ours, it is very common for scandals
that are too big to be cured to fizzle out like that, as if they were
too small to be considered.
It was while he was a soldier that lie took another of those
characteristic steps, that might seem to many like steps over a
precipice. But it is essential to realise about him that the very first
step always had about it something almost stiff and automatic in its
composure, however stormy might be the consequences or however much he
might rave back against the storm. In this connection we must try to
remember what is so entirely forgotten: the Stoic ideal of the end of
the eighteenth century. The secular ideals of humanity fossilise very
fast, and nothing but religion ever remains. Stoicism is stratified amid
layers of but it was a fine thing in its day, when
it stiffened with heathen virtues the Revolutionists of France and
America. Our luxurious and orientalised fashions and fictions have a
great deal to learn from the Roman virtues advocated in Sandford and
Merton. That is why they certainly will not learn it. It must be
admitted that in Mr. Cobbett there was a touch of Mr. Barlow. All his
life he admired people who did t especially if they
did them under difficulties. He admired home-made bread or home-brewed
ale even if some would call it the bread of affliction or consider it
very bitter beer. Very early one morning he was going some of his
military rounds in his sergeant's uniform, when the grey day was just
breaking over fields of snow. He had a great power of sketching a
lands and somehow such a twilight of grey and
silver remains long in the reader's memory. At the end of a small yard
he saw a girl with dark hair scouring out some pots and pans. He looked
at her again and saw she was very beautiful. Then he said with a sort of
fatal finality: 'That's the girl for me.' And indeed she was the wife
who was with him when he died fifty years afterwards, on those Surrey
hills that were his home.
Another incident attaches itself to her memory which is very significant
of Cobbett's career from its earliest days. Doubtless he had before and
since taken many girls to fairs, or failed to take them to fairs, like
those who must have waited wondering after the incident of the coach.
But like many combative, objective men he was really by nature very
faithful in relatio and he makes us believe it by a
very convincing account of his one serious temptation to
unfaithfulness. Unfaithfulness is never so vivid to an unfaithful man.
By the time he returned to England, it was with the perfectly simple and
concentrated purpose of seeking out the girl he had seen in the snow. In
the old days he had come to a sort of un and had
solemnly placed in her hands a sealed packet of money, telling her to
use it whenever she was in need. Then his regiment crossed the Atlantic
and she was lost in the labyrinth of the poverty of a modern town. For a
long time he at last he tracked her to a slum where
she was working as the poo and she handed him back
his packet of money with the seal unbroken.
It is clear that for Cobbett that small gesture of repayment seemed as
splendid as the throwing of the gauntlet. To enter into his sense of
triumph we must understand something that is found in him through life,
and especially found in him, when it is generally rarest, in youth. It
is something seldom understood in a soci an
oligarchy which can only understand what we call 'honour' as it is
understood by gentlemen. It was the self-respect of the poor, which all
modern industrial society has been slowly crushing to death. To find it
anywhere uncrushed and even uncowed was to Cobbett like the noise of a
great victory in a war of the world. When the poor servant-girl stood up
and handed him back his little handful, there were things in it that
neither snobs nor Bohemians will ever understand. There was at once
fidelity and defiance, there was at once loyalty and solitude, there was
a hard pride in work and a fi there was dignity,
there was justice, above all there was triumph. Not here at least had
the almighty meanness of the modern world prevailed, that lopped all
lofty simplicities and lamed all lovers' here was a romance
rounded and complete and solid as the seale here in
this unhappy world was a story with a happy ending. In all the long
comedy of the contrast between the heart of man and its surroundings,
never has there been a stranger disproportion than between the outside
and the inside of tha of a young man finding his
first love left alone with her honour and her pride. To any one passing
in the street there could have been nothing visible but a tall and
shabby soldier staring at a servant-girl on a door- but in his own
narration it becomes easy to understand that she came back to him with
all the beauty of banners.
I have dwelt on this one case of the contrast between the external
homeliness of poverty and the internal glow of its occasional festivals
and triumphs, because this is something very near to the whole secret of
the man's life. It was always of such small tragedies and small triumphs
that he was thinking when he talked about the problem of poverty. He
differed from many modern social reformers and from most modern
philanthropists, in the fact that he was not merely concerned with what
is called the welfare of the workers. He was very much concerned for
their dignity, their good name, their honour, and even their glory. Any
humane man may desire the well-being of his servants, as he may the
well-being of his horses or his sheep. But he does not commonly expect a
horse to bring back a nosebag, full of oats, to which the conscientious
quadruped does not think himself entitled by the terms of the contract.
He does not expect a sheep to fire up and take offence, either at being
bribed with grass or water, or at being criticised as the black sheep of
the flock. He does not expect the sheep to offer to fight the sheep-dog,
when accused of running away from the wolf. In short, he does not expect
horses and sheep to ha but Cobbett, always so
eccentric and paradoxical, did really desire peasants and working-men
to have a sense of honour. The agony of rage in which so much of his
life was passed was due to the consciousness that this popular sense of
honour was everywhere being broken down by a cruel and ignoble
industrialism. His whole life was a resistance to the degradation of the
to their degradation in the literal sense of the loss of a step,
of a standing, of a status. There lay on his mind, like a nightmare of
machinery crushing and crunching millions of bones, all the detailed
destruction of the private property and domestic traditions of
all the selling up and breaking up of furniture,
all the pawning of hei all that is meant by the
awful sacrifice of the wedding-ring. He thought of a thousand stories
like the story of the servant-girl: except that these stories did not
have a happy ending.
His wife was soon to discover that if she had married (as she had) one
of the most constant and considerate of husbands, she had also married
one of the most restless and incalculable of men. It would be
instructive to have a diary of Mrs. Cobbett, as well as the endless
autobiographies of Mr. Cobbett. But she remains in the background of
his life in a sort and is known to us only by the
praises that he never ceased to give her. She was soon called upon to go
on some of his interminable travels. When he found in the case of Army
corruption, to use one of his own homely sort of figures, that he had
bitten off more than he could chew, he retired in disgust to France, and
remained there through some of the most thrilling days of the French
Revolution. Yet it is typical of him that he took with immense
seriousness to the subject of French grammar, as a pendant to his
devouring hobby of English grammar. When he set sail again from France
it was not for England but for America, where he and his wife remained
in exile for seven years. Their travels were not without their
for his first child died and his second was still-born, and
it was not until he was more finally established that a living child
rejoiced the most enthusiastic of fathers. But through all these early
days we have the same vigilant activi as in the
touching story of his striding up and down all night and driving away
the howling dogs that his wife might sleep.
But there is another moral affecting the man and his work and arising in
this connection out of an incident like that of his courtship and
marriage. From the start we find him standing up sternly and almost
priggishly for ideals of thrift and self-control. He might almost have
been mistaken for a supporter of Smiles and Self-Help, if it were not
for his second phase in raising a riot far more reckless than that of
Wilkes and Liberty. But he enormously strengthened his case for Liberty
by being the very antithesis of Wilkes. He justified his riot precisely
because it could not be mistaken merely for riotous living. No sane
person could pretend that Cobbett only sympathised with poverty because
he sympath because he sympathised with improvidence
and irresponsibility and imbecile waste. Nobody could say he was merely
an idler sympathising with idlers, or a wastrel sympathising with
wastrels, or a man who loved ignorance preferring those who were
ignorant. He was not even a man like Byron or Burns, whose sincere love
of public liberty could be confused with a love of private licence. His
case against industrialism was immensely strengthened by the fact that
he himself was quite cut out to be the industrious apprentice. When he
said that thousands were not only unlucky but unjustly oppressed, he
said it with the authority of one who might quite well have been the
hundredth lucky man who was the only hope of industrial competition. He
who was so obviously a self-educated man might surely have been a
self-made man. At least he stood a better chance of it than the
thousands who were told to live only for that remote chance. When he
said that the chance was worthless he was a reasonable and valid
when he said that most men were unfairly equipped for the
struggle, he was better equipped than most. It was a much wiser Mr.
Smiles, himself entirely capable of self-help, who saw that the poor
were really and truly helpless. And this second consideration comes back
to the same truth as the first. It comes back to the fundamental truth
of the modern state. Our commercialism does not punish the vices of the
poor, but the virtues of the poor. It hampers the human character at its
best and not and makes impossible even the merits
that it vainly recommends. Capitalism has prevented the poor man from
saving more than it has prevented him from spending. It has restrained
him from respectable marriage more than from casual immorality. It may
be that Socialism threatens to but it is capitalism
that destroys it. This is doubtless what is meant by saying that
capitalism is the more practical of the two.
Cobbett was eminently and emphatically a respectable man. He was
denounced as a demagogue, he was thrown in prison like a felon, he was
all his life in the midst of riot and abuse, he was regarded as the
inaugurator of red ruin and the but he remained to
the last a highly respectable person, in the sense that he valued what
are called the respectable virtues. That he was respectable to the last
is perhaps less remarkable than that he was respec
and perhaps especially respectable at the first. That period of youth,
which is commonly excused as the irresponsible period, was with him by
far the most responsible period. It was during that period that he was
improving his mind, limiting his luxuries, schooling himself in simple
habits and rising in his military profession. He married the girl whose
independence and probity he so much admired: and he was all his life a
model husband and father. He was respectable and he might easily have
been respected. It is his great virtue that he preferred to be reviled.
It is his great glory that having taken the first steps in the
successful life as it has been lived by so many successful men, he
preferred to make himself a mockery and a cockshy for every worldly wit
or comfortable critic to laugh at as a failure for a hundred years. He
might have been a self- but he died unfinished, trying to make
something better than himself.
Finally, he was by nature a traditionalist and he was by tradition a
Tory. He appeared first as a solid and loyal supporter of Church and
K and he appeared with complete success. As we shall see, his place
was prepared for him his path was straight before
him to the position of a great party leader. It seemed to most honest
people, it seemed to him quite honestly, his logical and legitimate
goal. It is his glory that he never reached his goal. It is his merit
that his fallen figure was found far astray, and picked up, so to speak,
a puzzle for pedants and a sort of suicidal wreck
when he had set out on his journey stiff with so many
strict loyalties and so many respectable conventions. For there dwelt
within him a divine spirit more r a spirit that
could not feed on fictions or sleep at the d an
insomnia of intelligence that could not c a lidless
eye that could not escape from seeing a surge of spontaneous protest
almost as involuntary as vomiting and stronger than the strength of
fear, a voice not to be strangled, which forever, in a fashion so fierce
and unfamiliar that it startled men like the roar of a blind beast,
appealed from tyranny to God.
CHAPTER III - THE TRAGEDY OF THE PATRIOT
A book like this can be but a bare outline a life so full as that of
William Cobbett. nevertheless an outline is needed, and is an outline
that is not often supplied, is the advantage of such a small scope that
it can focus what often seems formless and sprawling, through being too
large to be seen. Cobbett produced a vast and vol
and vast and voluminous masses of work have been produced about Cobbett.
Most of it is interesting an but none of it is the
truth. What is wanted in modern biography is something as simple as the
single line that marks the sweeping curve or the sharp corner in a
weather-chart, that yet more simple line that runs round the nose or
chin is a caricature. There have been caricatures enough of Cobbett but
they caricatured the wrong features. They missed the point. The subject
of Cobbett has been
but when it has been
simplified, it has been simplified wrong.
The story of C a tragedy of a certain type. It was
the disillusionment of a patriot. That definition covers all that is
called its bewildering inconsistency. I do not mean to imply that he
lost his patriotism. He most certainly retained it that was the tragedy.
But he began by having the ordinary optimistic patriotism that looks
outwards, and it changed into a pessimistic patriotism that looked
inwards. His earlier and more cheerful attitude was one of mere
but it grew to be a much more gloomy attitude when it
seriously passed from defiance to defence. It was like the difference
between a man blowing a trumpet and a man examining the condition of a
gun. But there was also bound up in it the whole business of the modern
of the industrial individualism that produced the
in short, the whole problem of modern England. We
may, say of Cobbett, as of more than one great man, that some of the
most important incidents in his life happened after he was dead. But the
truth to seize at this stage is the truth about this transition from a
sort of centrifugal nationalism, that was cheery and even cheeky, to a
sort of centripetal nationalism that was grave and even grim. A modern
writer, resembling Cobbett only in having proved that the highest
literary genius can be combined with publicity and popular journalism,
has called one of his books of essays An Englishman Looks at the World.
It would have fitted very well the first essays of Cobbett. But the time
came when a deeper, a darker, a more withering experience might have
carried the title: An Englishman Looks at England.
The first fact about this first phase is that the patriotism of Cobbett
was the passionate patriotism of the exile. He went to America while he
w so that even his memories of England were almost
memories of childhood. They had not only the glamour of distance, but
the glamour of which Wordsworth wrote, the glory and the freshness of a
dream. The islands of the blest were supposed to lie to the west like
A but every man who has really sailed to Atlantis knows that the
islands of the blest are left behind. Certainly all the islanders who
have ever set forth from these islands to the modern Atlantis are at one
in having that homing imagination that wings its way backward into the
sunrise. Greatly as they have disagreed among themselves, they all agree
in that. Perhaps the one rallying point for all Britons is that their
songs in America have been songs of exile. The most familiar of them
represents the Irishman with his bundle bound for Philadelphia, or the
Englishman whistling 'Falmouth is a fine town' as he walks down the
street of Baltimore, or the Scotsman rising to that high note not
unworthy of the waters of Babylon.
But still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.
So strong is such a tradition that later generations will dream of what
they have never seen. The nationalism is most intense where the nation
is only a name. Irish American is more Irish than Irish. The English
colonial loyalist is more loyal than an Englishman. The loves and
hatreds harden in that hard air under those clear skies of the western
world. They are unsoftened by all internal doubts
from being on the spot. But with Cobbett this ignorance of interior
details combined with the memories of one who had from childhood an eye
for detail, especially for the details of fields and skies. He
remembered England as a and felt as homesick in
America as a boy sent to a big, bare, strange, uncomfortable boarding
Nowhere in the world does an Englishman feel so much a stranger as in
America. He does not necessarily dislike America, and Cobbett himself
came to like it in the long run. He simply feels it is a stranger place
than France or Flanders or I that it is really the other side of
the world like the other side of the moon. But if an Englishman still
feels like this, in spite of the hypnotism of the talk about an
Anglo-Saxon race and the hope of an Anglo-American alliance, it was
immeasurably more so when Cobbett landed in what had quite recently been
enemy territory. He met not only an alien atmosphere but a blast of
hatred against England.
There were indeed some Americans who sympathised with England as
compared with France. They were those grouped around Hamilton, who being
avowedly anti-popular in his politics was not likely to be very popular
in his personality. They counted a certain number of New England
P for almost the only real resemblance between New England and
Old England was that neither of them could make head or tail of France.
But though historians divide American opinion into the French party and
the English party, I suspect that the atmosphere of popular sympathy was
far more French than English. The whole romance of America consisted of
rebellion against E except that part of it that consisted of
rescue by France. Nobody who knows what popular legends are like could
expect the princess suddenly to take the side of the dragon against St.
George. It was quite true, of course, that England was by no means
merely a dragon and France was by no means only a saint. But in
revolutions strong enough to overthrow all historic authorities and
create a new nationality there must be the sort of impatient simplicity
that sees character and few men at that moment
could persuade a real American mob that England was not so black as she
was painted. Moreover, the men of that age did not talk about racial
and they were bound to France by something like a religious
unity. To leave out the definite democratic creed in judging Jefferson
and his contemporaries is exactly like leaving Mahomedanism out of
Mahomet. England did not believe in t and, being
honest in those days, did not pretend to do so for a moment. I take it
that the air that Cobbett had to breathe was not only American but
Anti-English.
It is part of the picturesque combat of personalities throughout his
life that his first cockshy was, of all men in the world, the famous
Priestley, the Unitarian and friend of French or American ideals in
England. Priestley was a type of the sort of idealist whose ideals are
pure but ju the sort of internationalist who is
specially unpopular among nationalists. The slight superiority in the
tone of such intellectuals towards the popular patriotism of their hour
aroused Cobbett to a rage quite ignorant and incongruous and yet not
unhealthy. What probably made the refined Unitarian very annoying to the
unrefined Surrey farmer was the notion of attacking England in America.
For exile affected the Surrey farmer in quite the opposite way. It drove
him to representing England as a sort of Eden from which he and Dr.
Priestley h only that Priestley slandered that
paradise and it was left for Cobbett to defend it. In a series of
furious pamphlets with the appropriate signature of Peter Porcupine, he
not only attacked the English democrats but to a great extent the
American democracy. It is important to note that his motive was much
more patriotism than conservatism. It is sometimes said that Cobbett
men talk of him as a T
but even from the start the ease was more complex than that. His old
father the farmer, if he was a Tory, was a Tory with ideas of his own,
for he defended the A and Cobbett had first gone to
America bearing a letter to the great Thomas Jefferson. He did not
defend England because England was monarchical and he was a Royalist, or
because England was aristocratic and he was a snob, or because England
was the home of Toryism and he was a Tory. He defended England because
England was attacked and he was an E and his real rage was
reserved for other Englishmen who attacked her, or seemed to him not
sufficiently to defend her. For this reason he extravagantly abused Dr.
Priestley, for this reason he extravagantly abused Tom Paine, the author
of The Age of Reason: writing a bitter burlesque life of that author,
full of innocent lies: a story with a strange sequel. For this reason he
lectured the wondering people of that western land about the beauty of
the British Constitution, of British laws, of British landlords, of
British military policy, of almost everything, in fact, that he was
afterwards famous for rending and rolling in the mud.
Meanwhile his pamphleteering was getti those quaint
studies of English grammar in the corners of the cold barracks at
daybreak had trained him not only in l and the
furious tenderness of exile gave him inspiration. Towards the end of his
American visit he showed his uncontrollable fancy for having a finger in
every pie by denouncing an American doctor as a quack. He lost his case
and was cast in heavy damages so that he decided to quit the country,
leaving behind him a farewell address to the Americans, one of the least
friendly farewells to be found in literature. This last American
injustice, as he saw it, finally reconciled hi and
it was in a glow of romantic reaction in favour of everything English
that the exile re-entered England. The crisis of his life came between
that hour and the hour some seventeen years later when he left it once
The Tories of England, waging war against Republicans abroad and
Radicals at home, naturally received the great reactionary with a roar
of welcome. The most prominent figure in the political group that
received him was William Windham. He was a fine specimen of the old
E that is, he was a Whig more Tory than the Tories. He
was a fine specimen of the cultivated gent and
therefore he was educated enough to see that the uneducated demagogue
was a genuine English man of letters. He and his friends gave Cobbett
the practical backing necessary for the founding of the celebrated
Cobbett's Register. It may be well to remark that Cobbett's Register
really was Cobbett's. He retained his intellectual independence he made
no party compact with Windham or anybody else: nay, he flatly refused
money from his friends in a way almost tartly honourable. But Windham
and he were at one with the enthusiasm with which they flung their
energies into the defence of Old England against the French Revolution
and its American sympathisers. The swing and momentum of his American
triumphs carried Cobbett on like a tide, and he may well have felt that
he was at the top of his fortunes. It was just about this time that
curious things began to happen.
All the time he had wandered on the bare baked prairies under the hard
white light of the western skies, he had remembered the high green
fields of his father's farm and the clouds and the comfort of the rain.
For him even more than for Nelson, and in another sense, there was
something united and almost interchangeable in the three terms of
England, home, and beauty. But his was no mere landscape-painter's but a
land-owner's and a land-worker' and he pored more and more
intently over the practice and detail of the farming he had known in
boyhood. As he looked at crops or barns or orchards, it seemed as if the
frown on his shrewd square face became first thoughtful and then
doubtful. Things and bit by bit he began to work
out in his own mind a notion of the cause. For instance, it was
essential to true farming that the farmer should be secure on his farm.
If he was not legally and literally a peasant proprietor, he must at
least be rooted like a peasant. At the moment peasants were being rooted
out like weeds instead of being rooted like trees. Landlords were
refusing to grant the long leases that gave a
were chopping them up into shorter terms, and shifting and evicting for
higher rents. And when he looked for the cause of this, he thought he
had found it in the new fluctuation of prices and even of the value of
in the paper money that symbolised to him such insecurity and
shuffling and sharp practice. It meant the destruction not only of the
old sort of yeoman but of the old sort of squire. Stockbrokers and Jews
and jobbers from the town were driving out he would
appeal to the great leaders of the party of the gentry to save them. He
turned to his own Tory leaders, to Windham and the party of P for
they were the natural saviours of the green countryside from this yellow
fever of finance.
There is sometimes in a great comedy a scene of almost tragic irony,
when some simple character enters, eager, voluble, and full of his
subject, and pours it out quite confidently to a group of listeners. It
is long before even the spectator realises that the listeners are very
silent. It is much longer before the speaker realises it. It is long
before even a hint leads him to look, at first with doubt and at last
with horror, at the significant and sinister smile faintly present on
all those unanswering faces. That was the sort of scene that occurred in
history when Cobbett came rushing to his Tory friends with his great
scheme for saving English agriculture. He did not understand that
restrained smirk on the pinched face of P that shadow of something
like shame that may have rested for a moment on the more generous face
of Windham. We could imagine one of them looking at the ceiling and the
and neither answering a word.
For William Cobbett had not in fact the faintest notion of what manner
of men he served, or what sort of Government he was supporting. If
Cobbett eventually found that the Tories were not satisfactory, it was
for the very simple reason that he found that the Tories were not
Tories. They may have had a desire to restore the old regime in France,
largely because it would mean France being less vigorous and victorious
than under the new regime of Napoleon. But they had not the faintest
desire to save the old regime in England. Why should they? Men like Pitt
and Perceval and the rest were more entangled with the new world than
ever th and were in much closer touch with the
stockbrokers than with the farmers. Above a11 they had no notion of what
Cobbett was talking about when he talked of giving the farmer the
stability of a yeoman. The only laws they could imagine as applicable to
rural life were the game laws. For that purpose perhaps it was desirable
that the country should continue to exist. It was seldom possible to
start a hare in Lombard Street, and quite awkward to shoot a partridge
in Threadneedle Street. Otherwise there was really no reason why Lombard
Street and Threadneedle Street should not extend to the ends of the
earth. The educated class in England knew much more about preserving
pheasants than peasants: it was an aitch they were very careful not to
The biographies of Cobbett commonly say that he began life as a Tory and
afterwards changed his politics and became a sort of Radical. The
proportions of this picture are misleading. Cobbett was never anything
that an enemy would call a turncoat or a friend would call a brand from
the burning. There is no sharp break in his life, breaking the very
backbo such as there is in the life of a penitent
or the life of a traitor. It is not true that he belonged successively
to two parties: it is much truer to say that he never belonged to any.
But in so far as there were elements of the Radical in him at the end,
there had been traces of them from the beginnin}