The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett. Richard Ingrams

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ considerations. From his experiences in America Cobbett knew not only that he could attract a large readership for his paper even amongst those who disagreed profoundly with his politics, but also that his popularity was due as much to his writing skill as to the fact that his readers valued his independence in a society where the bulk of journalism was written by paid hacks. In England at this time the press comprised a number of small four-page papers with circulations of only two or three thousand, all heavily dependent on advertising and government subsidy (either in the form of advertisements or direct payments). It was only later, with the progress of The Times, that something resembling a modern newspaper emerged, commercially and editorially independent of the government. At the beginning of the century, when Cobbett returned to England, the links between politicians and the press were closer and more corrupt than they have ever been, before or since. The spread of radical opinions in the wake of the French Revolution had encouraged the view in conservative circles that the press was in some way responsible, and that steps must be taken to curb its powers either by taxation or by making papers and individual journalists and pamphleteers dependent on the government for their continued existence. The result was that almost all writers, not merely journalists, ended up in the pay of the state. As Cobbett wrote later:

      The cause of the people has been betrayed by hundreds of men, who were able to serve the people, but whom a love of ease and of the indulgence of empty vanity have seduced into the service of the bribing usurpers, who have spared no means to corrupt men of literary talent from the authors of folios to the authors of baby-books and ballads, Caricature-makers, song-makers all have been bribed by one means or another. Gillray and Dibdin were both pensioned. Southey, William Gifford all are placed or pensioned. Playwriters, Historians. None have escaped. Bloomfield, the Farmer’s Boy author, was taken in tow and pensioned for fear that he should write for the people.¹

      And the rewards could be very considerable. Cobbett noted later that one journalist, John Reeves, a clever lawyer of whom he was very fond, left £200,000 when he died – ‘without hardly a soul knowing that there ever was such a man’. For Cobbett, with his huge following, nothing was too much. The government offered him the editorship of either of its two papers, the Sun and the True Briton, along with the office and the printing press and the leasehold of a house, the whole package worth several thousand pounds. He refused. ‘From that moment,’ he wrote, ‘all belonging to the Government looked on me with great suspicion.’

      An exception was William Windham. Born in 1750, Windham was an unlikely politician, a rich Norfolk landowner from Felbrigg near Cromer, where his family had lived since the Middle Ages. Educated at Eton and University College Oxford, he was not only a classical scholar, but also an amateur mathematician who had been deeply influenced by his friendships with Edmund Burke and Dr Johnson. It was Johnson who, when Windham was debating whether to accept a political appointment in Ireland, famously urged him to go ahead, saying that he would ‘make a very pretty rascal’. Windham later visited Johnson on his deathbed and agreed to become the guardian of his black servant Francis Barber. At the same time Johnson secured his promise that he would devote one day a week to a consideration of his failings. ‘He proceeded to observe,’ Windham wrote, ‘that I was entering upon a life that would lead me deeply into all the business of the world: that he did not condemn civil employment but that it was a state of great danger; and that he had therefore one piece of advice earnestly to impress upon me – that I would set apart every seventh day to the care of my soul: that one day, the seventh, should be employed in repenting what was amiss in the six preceding and justifying my virtue for the six to come: that such a portion of time was surely little enough for the meditation of eternity.’

In addition to their political opinions, Cobbett and Windham shared a love of ‘manly sports’, Windham being an enthusiastic boxer who had excelled at games as a schoolboy at Eton, where he was known as ‘fighter Windham’. A portrait by Reynolds shows an earnest, pale-faced man whose expression gives little away. According to Hazlitt he was an outstanding speaker, though ‘a silent man in company’. Windham described himself as ‘a scholar among politicians and a politician among scholars’. Aside from his love of boxing, what appealed to Cobbett was his obvious integrity in an age when most contemporary politicians had been compromised by corruption of one form or another. ‘My friendship with Mr Windham,’ he wrote in 1807, ‘is founded in my knowledge that he is an upright and honourable man: that in all the many opportunities that he has had, he has never added to his fortune (though very moderate) at public expense; that according to my conviction, no man can charge him with ever having been concerned in a job^* and that whether his opinions be right or wrong he always openly and strongly avows them.’

      In other ways Windham was more typical of his class. His attitude to the press, in particular, was shared by many (including even Cobbett in his early years, it has to be said), which helps to explain the hostility shown to so many journalists in the years to come. Newspapers, Windham once said, ‘circulated poison every twenty four hours and spread their venom down to the extremity of the kingdom. They were to be found everywhere in common ale-houses and similar places frequented chiefly by the most ignorant and unreflecting section of the community.’² Before any good could be done by the discussion of political subjects in newspapers, he said, the capacity of the people ought to be enlarged. However, as Windham was opposed to popular education, it was by no means clear how this desirable aim of his was to be achieved.

      For Windham, and for Cobbett too in his early career, the French Revolution hung over their lives like a black cloud. At the back of their minds was the fear that what had happened in France – the Terror, the guillotine, the execution of the King and countless aristocrats – might happen in England. With such a different social system there was little likelihood that this would occur, but the fear that it might turned men like Windham, who could otherwise have favoured political reform and who in his younger days had been a republican, into reactionaries. To others less scrupulous, the cry of Jacobinism remained a valuable propaganda weapon to be used indiscriminately against all who advocated reform or who campaigned against political corruption. Throughout his later career, Cobbett was branded as a Jacobin by his opponents, though even when he became a radical anyone less like Marat or Robespierre would be hard to imagine. Except for a very brief period following the aborted court martial, he had never in any sense been a republican, and as for aristocrats, if they behaved like gentlemen, managed their estates well and cared for their labourers, then they generally had his approval. William Windham was a man of principle, a countryman, a sportsman and a Christian, and Cobbett respected him, and even when they later fell out, refrained from ever attacking him in print.

      To Windham Cobbett owed his start in British journalism. He had originally launched a daily newspaper, the Porcupine, in October 1800, a continuation of his American paper, entirely financed with about £450 of his own money and produced from offices in Southampton Street. Cobbett was determined to take a more principled approach to journalism than his rivals. ‘Not a single quack advertisement will on my account be admitted into the Porcupine,’ he announced. ‘Our newspapers have been too long disgraced by this species of falsehood, filth and obscenity. I am told that, by adhering to this resolution, I shall lose five hundred a year.’ His main editorial purpose was to support those few politicians like Windham who opposed the negotiations, then in hand, to make peace with Napoleon. It was not a policy likely to appeal to the public, which at all levels favoured an end to the hostilities. When the Preliminaries of Peace were declared on 10 October 1801 there were extraordinary scenes in London. From his house in Pall Mall, Cobbett wrote to Windham in Norwich:

With that sort of dread which seizes on a man when he has heard or thinks he has heard a supernatural voice predicting his approaching end, I sit down to inform you, that the guns are now firing for the Peace and that half an hour ago a very numerous crowd drew the Aide-de-Camp of Bonaparte in triumph through Pall Mall! The vile miscreants had, it seems, watched his motions very narrowly and perceiving him get into a carriage in Bond СКАЧАТЬ