The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett. Richard Ingrams

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СКАЧАТЬ they took out the horses, dragged him down that street, along by your house, down to White-hall, and through the Park, and then to Otto’s again, shouting and rejoicing every time he had occasion to get out or into the carriage … This is the first time an English mob ever became the cattle of a Frenchman … This indication of the temper and sentiments of the lower orders is a most awful consideration. You must remember Sir, that previous to the revolutions in Switzerland and elsewhere, we always heard of some French messenger of peace being received with caresses by the people: the next post or two brought us an account of partial discontents, tumults, insurrections, murders and revolutions always closed the history. God preserve us from the like, but I am afraid our abominations are to be punished in this way.³

      Meanwhile the mob went on the rampage and attacked Cobbett’s house as well as the bookshop he had opened in St James’s. ‘It happened precisely as I had expected,’ he wrote later: ‘about eight o’clock in the evening my dwelling house was attacked by an innumerable mob, all my windows were broken, and when this was done the villains were preparing to break into my shop. The attack continued at intervals, till past one o’clock. During the whole of this time, not a constable nor peace officer of any description made his appearance; nor was the smallest interruption given to the proceedings of this ignorant and brutal mob, who were thus celebrating the Peace. The Porcupine office experienced a similar fate.’

      The same scenes were repeated a few months later when the Peace of Amiens was finally ratified. Even though on this occasion the Bow Street magistrate intervened with the help of a posse of Horse Guards to try to protect him, Cobbett’s windows were again broken and his house damaged in various ways. Shortly afterwards he was forced to sell the Porcupine, and it was merged in the True Briton, a government propaganda paper.

      It was at this point that Windham and a group of friends including Dr French Laurence, Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford and the MP for Peterborough, stepped in to help Cobbett relaunch himself. Windham was a rich man with an annual income of £6000, so it can be assumed that he provided the bulk of the £650 (about £23,000 in today’s money). It would seem to have been a gift rather than an investment, and one which Cobbett only accepted on his own terms – ‘Upon the express and written conditions that I was never to be looked upon as under any sort of obligation to any of the parties.’

      Any possibility of a clash between the editor and his patron would have seemed, in 1802, a very remote one. Windham had already made public his enormous admiration for Cobbett. Cobbett in his turn showered praises on his patron. ‘I shall not I am sure merit the suspicion of being a flatterer,’ he wrote to Windham in May 1802, ‘when I say that it is my firm persuasion that you, and you alone, can save our country. This persuasion is founded, not only upon my knowledge of your disposition and abilities, but upon the universal confidence in your integrity and patriotism, which at this time more than ever exists. I see and hear of men of all parties and principles, and I find the confidence of the nation to be possessed by you in a greater degree than by any other person.’⁴

      The Peace of Amiens had been signed only a few weeks earlier, on 27 March 1802. For a short time there was a feeling not only of relief but of euphoria – not dissimilar to the mood following the Munich agreement of 1938. Napoleon, who had until then been an object of hatred, was turned into a tourist attraction. Crowds of British visitors flocked to Paris to see the First Consul in the flesh, shortly before he was to declare himself Emperor. In the House of Commons Windham, almost a lone voice, led the opposition, while Cobbett kept up the attack in his paper. The Emperor was apparently in the habit of lying in his bath and having Cobbett and other critics read aloud to him by an interpreter. When a particularly offensive passage was read out he would bang the bath with the guide rope, shouting out, ‘Il en a menti.’⁵ Napoleon, via the French Minister in London, M. Otto, ordered the British government to prosecute Cobbett (among others): ‘The perfidious and malevolent publications of these men are in open contradiction to the principles of peace.’⁶ In order to appease him the government did actually bring libel proceedings against a French émigré writer, Jean Gabriel Peltier, who was prosecuted by the Attorney General (later Prime Minister) Spencer Perceval and found guilty in February 1803 of libel by the judge, Lord Ellenborough (the first of his appearances in this narrative). Cobbett wrote to Windham, ‘Lord Ellenborough and the Attorney-General both told the Jury, that if they did not find him guilty, we would have war with France!!!’⁷

      But the mood of euphoria following the signing of the peace did not last long. Napoleon showed quite soon that he was not only arrogant and sensitive to criticism in the British press, but cavalier in the extreme when it came to observing the terms of the 1802 treaty. The alarm was raised when he invaded Switzerland, and in the face of mounting concern the British government led by Addington finally refused to evacuate Malta on the grounds that Napoleon had failed to carry out his pledges with regard to Italy. In May 1803 war was resumed, and a year later Pitt (‘who was to Addington as London was to Paddington’) returned to take charge. The threat of a French invasion now took hold of the country, as Napoleon assembled a fleet of barges and gunboats on the French coast. Patriotic citizens rallied to the flag and joined the local militias. Broadsheets and songs were printed in their thousands, beacons were prepared to warn of invasion, and Martello towers were erected along the eastern coast. The government issued its own propaganda pamphlet, ‘Important Considerations for the People of this Kingdom’, which was distributed to the entire clergy with instructions ‘that you will be pleased to cause part of them to be deposited in the pews and part to be distributed in the aisles amongst the poor’. In stirring terms the anonymous author rallied his countrymen against the peril of the French: ‘For some time past, they have had little opportunity to plunder; peace, for a while, suspended their devastations, and now, like gaunt and hungry wolves, they are looking towards the richer pastures of Britain; already we hear their threatening howl, and if, like sheep, we stand bleating for mercy, neither our innocence nor our timidity will save us from being torn to pieces and devoured.’ There was general speculation at the time as to the authorship of ‘Important Considerations’, and various candidates were suggested, including Lord Hawkesbury (later the Prime Minister Lord Liverpool). It was not until 1809, when Cobbett came under attack from government ministers, that he revealed that he himself had written the pamphlet, offered it to the then Prime Minister Addington and refused to take any money when it was printed and distributed all over the country.

      Many of his later readers might have been surprised to learn of Cobbett assisting the government in this way. But the Cobbett of this period, the four or five years following his return from America, was a different character from what he became later or what he had been before. The change of title of his paper from Porcupine to Cobbett’s Political Register said it all. In his Porcupine role in Philadelphia he had been a thorn in the flesh of the political establishment, famous for his barbs, his knockabout abuse and his nicknames. The title Cobbett’s Political Register was indicative of a more serious and responsible role. Cobbett was now the friend of statesmen like Windham, the man who dined with Pitt and Canning, the man who boasted that royalty and dukes were among the subscribers to his paper. He now saw himself as a major player, and the Political Register of this period is much concerned with the traditional political matters – who’s in, who’s out, the advisability of this or that different policy.

      Despite the resumption of the war, the resignation of Addington and the return of Pitt, Cobbett’s friend Windham remained out of the government and in opposition. Pitt had wanted to include the great Liberal Charles James Fox (now disillusioned about Napoleon – ‘a young man who was a good deal intoxicated with his success’) in his cabinet, but the mad King George III, who hated Fox for having opposed the war in the first place, refused to allow this. Windham, along with Pitt’s former Foreign Secretary William Grenville and others, СКАЧАТЬ