The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett. Richard Ingrams

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СКАЧАТЬ He falls, and leaves your mind to brood over the possibility of you having abridged a life so dear to you.’ I do not recollect the very words; but the passage made a deep impression upon my mind, just at the time, too, when I was about to become a father … I was resolved to forgo all the means of making money, all the means of making a living in any thing like fashion, all the means of obtaining fame or distinction, to give up everything, to become a common labourer, rather than make my children lead a life of restraint and rebuke.¹⁵

      Cobbett moved to Botley with the welfare of his children in mind. He wanted them, first of all, to be healthy and to be able to play out of doors:

      Children, and especially boys, will have some out-of-doors pursuits: and it was my duty to lead them to choose such pursuits as combined future utility with present innocence. Each has his flower-bed, little garden, plantation of trees, rabbits, dogs, asses, horses, pheasants and hares; hoes, spades, whips, guns; always some object of lively interest, and as much earnestness and bustle about the various objects as if our living had solely depended upon them.

      Cobbett did not believe in forcing ‘book-learning’ on his children at an early age. There were no rules or regulations:

      I accomplished my purpose indirectly. The first thing of all was health which was secured by the deeply-interesting and never-ending sports of the field and pleasures of the garden. Luckily these two things were treated in books and pictures of endless variety: so that on wet days, in long evenings, these came into play. A large, strong table in the middle of the room, their mother sitting at her work, used to be surrounded with them, the baby, if big enough, set up in a high chair. Here were ink-stands, pens, pencils, india rubber, and paper, all in abundance, and everyone scrabbled about as he or she pleased. There were prints of animals of all sorts; books treating of them – others treating of gardening, of flowers, of husbandry, of hunting, coursing, shooting, fishing, planting, and, in short, of everything with regard to which we had something to do. One would be trying to imitate a bit of my writing, another drawing the pictures of some of our dogs or horses, a third poring over Bewick’s Quadrupeds, and picking out what he said about them; but our book of never-failing resource was the French MAISON RUSTIQUE or FARMHOUSE … Here are all the four-legged animals from the horse down to the mouse, portraits and all; all the birds, reptiles, insects … and there was I, in my leisure moments to join this inquisitive group, to read the French, and tell them what it meaned in English, when the picture did not sufficiently explain itself. I have never been without a copy of this book for forty years, except during the time that I was fleeing from the dungeons of CASTLEREAGH and SIDMOUTH in 1817, and, when I got to Long Island, the first book I bought was another MAISON RUSTIQUE.¹⁶

      Cobbett was busily writing at this time, but he never let it interfere with his children’s pursuits: ‘My occupation to be sure was chiefly carried on at home,’ he remembered. ‘Many score of papers have I written amidst the noise of children and in my whole life never bade them be still. When they grew up to be big enough to gallop about the house I have written the whole day amidst noise that would made [sic] some authors half mad. That which you are pleased with, however noisy, does not disturb you.’

      The children were teased by friends about not going to school, and his wife Nancy was especially anxious about it, but Cobbett resisted all the pressure. ‘Bless me, so tall and not learned anything yet,’ a friend would say of one of his sons. ‘Oh yes he has,’ Cobbett replied. ‘He has learned to ride, and hunt and shoot and fish and look after cattle and sheep and to work in the garden and to feed his dogs and to go from village to village in the dark.’

      Cobbett’s methods bore results. His children were soon able to help him with his work, copying and taking dictation. The boys learned French and three of them later became lawyers and published books, as did his eldest daughter Anne.

^* The same thing was said by Napoleon of Thomas Paine.

^* ‘Job: A low mean lucrative busy affair’ (Johnson).

^* Louis Otto, French agent in Britain.

       4 A CONVERT to REFORM

      IN JANUARY 1806 the Prime Minister William Pitt died and George III invited Lord Grenville to form a new coalition government. This was the short-lived ‘Ministry of All the Talents’, so called because it included members of the New and Old Opposition, like Cobbett’s friend and patron Windham and also Charles James Fox, to whom the King was now partially reconciled.

      Cobbett was delighted by the new situation. The old enemy Pitt was gone, and at last there was an opportunity for the new ministers to introduce reform. The general assumption was that Cobbett, as Windham’s friend and protégé, would now be given some political office or sinecure. ‘Everyone thought,’ he wrote, ‘that my turn to get rich was come. I was importuned by many persons to take care of myself as they called it.’ He could benefit not just himself but also his relatives. He could obtain, with Windham’s help, promotion for his father-in-law and brother-in-law, both of whom were serving in Wellington’s army.

      But Cobbett continually stressed that he had no wish to obtain favours of this kind, as anyone else in his position would have done. All he wanted was to be an adviser, to have his opinion listened to and respected not only by Windham, but by his fellow ministers like Fox. Two particular things demanded action, in his view. He was especially incensed about the activities of Francis Freeling, the Secretary of the Post Office, who had control over newspaper distribution through the post and whom he had accused of working a number of fiddles. Cobbett wanted him sacked. He also complained vehemently about the dismissal of a clerk in the Barrack Master General’s office who had exposed corruption – a story that must have affected him particularly, as it echoed his own experience in 1792 when he himself had tried to eradicate corruption in the army, only to be forced to flee the country.

      As Minister for War, Windham ought to have been sympathetic to Cobbett’s various proposals, which included a long and detailed plan for the reform of the army. The trouble was that he was now part of a system so riddled with corruption of every kind that even had he felt the urge, any reforming measures would have been difficult if not impossible for him to put into effect. Though never a ‘pretty rascal’ in Dr Johnson’s phrase, Windham was surrounded by pretty rascals on every side, the War Ministry being the most notorious for corruption and nepotism. Quite apart from that, as the tone of the Political Register became more radical, more Porcupine-like, Windham had for some time been embarrassed by his association with Cobbett. Such was the way of things, with the close association of politicians and the press, and most journalists in the pay of one party or another, that the public would have assumed that Cobbett’s articles were written to Windham’s dictation. It was certainly the case that, even at this stage, people still referred to the Political Register as ‘Windham’s Gazette’. In February 1806 Windham had taken the issue up with Cobbett: ‘You can do more, too, than you have done to show that your opinions are your own.’ For his part, Cobbett resented the suggestion that anyone should feel ashamed or embarrassed at being wrongly assumed to have written his articles. He wrote to Windham: ‘Wright states that you appeared extremely vexed at the prevalence or supposed prevalence of an opinion that “all the most violent parts of the Register were either written or suggested by you …” I must confess that I am vain enough to think that, having so long been obliged to listen to the cant of the most despicable СКАЧАТЬ