The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett. Richard Ingrams

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СКАЧАТЬ whom ‘a kind providence’ had sent to your assistance!¹¹

      Cobbett also pointed out with glee that on the very same day that the jury had found against him in the Rush libel action, the President, George Washington, had died after being copiously bled in accordance with Rush’s theories. ‘On that day,’ he wrote, ‘the victory of RUSH and of DEATH was complete.’

      Cobbett’s barbs were directed not only at McKean, Rush and the judge (Shippen), but at the jury, all of whose names and addresses he listed, and all the lawyers, including his own, Robert G. Harper, who he maintained had let him down while secretly supporting the other side. In common with almost every other libel lawyer through the ages, Rush’s counsel Joseph Hopkinson (the author of the patriotic poem ‘Hail Columbia’) had emphasised the great personal distress caused not only to his client but to his whole family:

      Hopkinson, towards the close of a dozen pages of lies, nonsense, and bombast, gave the tender-hearted Jury a most piteous picture of the distress produced in Rush’s family by my publications against the ‘immaculate father.’ He throws the wife into hysterics, makes a deep wound in the heart, and tears, with remorseless rage, all the ‘fine fibres and delicate sympathies of conjugal love.’ From the mother, whom I have never mentioned in my life till now, he comes to the children, ‘of nice feelings and generous sensibility.’ The daughters, he, of course, sets to weeping: ‘but manlier passions swell, agitate and inflame the breasts of HIS SONS. They burn, they burst with indignation; rage, revenge, drive them headlong to desperate deeds, accumulating woe on woe.

      The Rush-Light had a huge sale as well as being printed in England, and may well have caused Dr Rush to regret having sued Cobbett in the first place. Certainly it would seem to have upset him more than the original libel (Cobbett, he complained, had ‘vented his rage in a number of publications of the same complexion with those he had published in his newspaper, but with many additional falsehoods. They were purchased, lent and read with great avidity by most of the citizens of Philadelphia, and my children were insulted with them at school, and in the public streets’). Shortly afterwards he began writing a long, self-justifying memoir, Travels Through Life, in which he set out to correct the damage done to his reputation by Cobbett.

      By this time Cobbett, threatened with renewed legal prosecution by McKean and realising that his journalistic scope was limited by his being effectively barred from Philadelphia, decided to return to England, where he knew he had acquired a host of readers, not to mention influential admirers in government circles. ‘The court of Philadelphia will sit again on the 2nd of June next,’ he wrote to Thornton (25 April 1800), ‘when the cause of old McKean versus Peter Porcupine will be brought on … In order, therefore, to save 2000 dollars, I propose sailing by the June packet, and am making my preparations accordingly … By the assistance of my friend Morgan, I shall be able to carry home about 10,000 dollars which … will leave me wherewith to open a shop somewhere in the West End of the town. I have revolved various projects in my mind; but this always returns upon me as the most eligible, most congenial to my disposition, and as giving the greatest scope to that sort of talent and industry which I possess … A stranger in the great city of London, and not only a stranger to the people, but to the mode of doing business, I shall feel very awkward for a time; but this will wear away.’

      The Cobbetts set sail from Halifax on 11 June 1800 on the Lady Arabella. They took with them a young Frenchman, Edward Demonmaison, who was working as Cobbett’s secretary. It was not a pleasant voyage. Captain Porteus Cobbett described as ‘the greatest blackguard I ever met with’, while two army officers travelling on the boat ‘smoked Mrs Cobbett to death … talked in the most vulgar strain, and even sang morsels of bawdry in her presence’. The ship had narrowly escaped being captured by a French privateer, and on arrival in Falmouth the ‘gentry’ went into the custom house and attempted to embarrass Cobbett by reporting that he was accompanied by a foreigner (Demonmaison) – ‘when, to their utter astonishment, the collector asked if it was that Mr Cobbett who had gone under the name of Porcupine and upon receiving the affirmative, ordered the Capt. to send on board to tell me, that he should be happy to oblige me in any way he could, and that the rules concerning foreigners should be dispensed with concerning my clerk, or any person for whom I would pass my word’.¹²

       3 ENGLAND REVISITED

      WITH ONLY a short interval in 1792, Cobbett had been away from England for sixteen years, and on his return he was struck by how everything – ‘the trees, the hedges, even the paths and woods’ – seemed so small in comparison with New Brunswick and America. After a month in London he revisited Farnham. His parents had died, and his two brothers (the third had joined the East India Company) were in financial difficulties. ‘They are obliged to work very hard,’ he wrote to Thornton, ‘and their children are not kept constantly at school – I have given them a lift on and am devising means for making a provision for some of their sons – Never till now did I know the value of money.’

      As the coach neared his old home Cobbett was overcome with mixed emotions and memories. ‘My heart fluttered with impatience mixed with a sort of fear to see all the scenes of my childhood, for I had learned before, the death of my father and mother … But now came rushing into my mind, all at once, my pretty little garden, my little blue smock-frock, my little nailed shoes, my pretty pigeons that I used to feed out of my hands, the last kind words and tears of my gentle and tender hearted and affectionate mother! I hastened back into the room! If I had looked a moment later I would have dropped. When I came to reflect, what a change! What scenes I had gone through! How altered my state … I felt proud.’

Cobbett had every reason to feel proud. As his reception at Falmouth indicated, he had returned to England a famous man. His anti-Jacobin pamphlets, all of them published in London, had been widely read and appreciated, especially by those politicians opposed to the French Revolution and now keen on prosecuting the war against Napoleon. William Windham, who was to become Cobbett’s close friend and patron, said in the House of Commons that he merited for his services in America ‘a statue of gold’.^* Instead Cobbett commissioned a portrait by J.R. Smith, and this was engraved by the most fashionable engraver of the day, Francesco Bartolozzi, and put on sale in the London print shops. It shows the thirty-seven-year-old journalist looking supremely energetic and confident, ready to take on all comers from Napoleon downwards.

      But the country that Cobbett had returned to was weary of the war. After nine years little had been done to restrain the march of the French across Europe, whilst at the same time the expense of the war had placed enormous tax burdens on the people (it was during this first period of hostilities that income tax was first introduced by the Prime Minister William Pitt). The pressures on the government to reach an agreement became too great, and in 1802 the Peace of Amiens was signed by the new Prime Minister Henry Addington (Pitt was awaiting developments at Walmer Castle in Kent). Persuading themselves that Napoleon had restored order to France and that the threat of Jacobinism was no more, the British people rejoiced. But a small group of politicians, implacably opposed to Napoleon, courted Cobbett. He had already been entertained only a few days after his arrival from America at a dinner given by William Windham and attended by Pitt and the future Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister George Canning. One can imagine Cobbett’s intense feeling of pride at finding himself dining with the Prime Minister when only a few years previously he had fled the country, a wanted man facing possible trial at a court martial. Cobbett was more than willing to assist the anti-peace campaign, but he remained adamant that he would never in any circumstances become a tool of the government.

      This decision, immensely important in determining the course his career was to take, СКАЧАТЬ