William Cobbett (9 March 1763 – 18 June 1835) was an English pamphleteer, journalist, politician, and farmer born in Farnham, Surrey. He was one of an agrarian faction seeking to reform Parliament, abolish "rotten boroughs", restrain foreign activity, and raise wages, with the goal of easing poverty among farm labourers and small land holders. Cobbett backed lower taxes, saving, reversing commons enclosures and returning to the gold standard. He opposed borough-mongers, sinecurists, bureaucratic "tax-eaters" and stockbrokers. His radicalism furthered the Reform Act 1832 and gained him one of two newly created seats in Parliament for the borough of Oldham. His polemics range from political reform to religion, including Catholic emancipation. His best known book is Rural Rides (1830, in print). He argued against Malthusianism, saying economic betterment could support global population growth.
Early life (1763–1791)
William Cobbett was born in Farnham, Surrey, on 9 March 1763, the third son of George Cobbett, a farmer and publican, and Anne Vincent.Ian Dyck, 'Cobbett, William (1763–1835)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 23 July 2011. He was taught to read and write by his father and he started working from an early age. He later said: "I do not remember a time when I did not earn my living. My first occupation was driving small birds from the turnip seed, and the rooks from the peas."Daniel Green, Great Cobbett: The Noblest Agitator (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 18–19.G. D. H. Cole, The Life of William Cobbett (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1971), pp. 16-18. He worked as a farm labourer at Farnham Castle,Green, Great Cobbett, p. 38.Cole, Life of William Cobbett, p. 16. and also worked briefly as a gardener in the King's garden at Kew.S. Clifford-Smith, "William Cobbett: cottager's friend", Australian Garden History, 19 (5), 2008, pp. 4–6. His rural upbringing gave him a lifelong love of gardening and hunting.Green, Great Cobbett, pp. 19, 21 and 30.
On 6 May 1783, he took a stage coach to London and spent eight or nine months as a clerk in the employ of a Mr. Holland at Gray's Inn.Green, Great Cobbett, pp. 41–42.Cole, Life of William Cobbett, pp. 22–23. He joined the 54th (West Norfolk) Regiment of Foot in 1783. In his spare time, he improved his knowledge of English grammar.Green, Great Cobbett, pp. 48–49. Between 1785 and 1791, Cobbett was stationed with his regiment in New Brunswick and sailed from Gravesend in Kent to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Cobbett was in Saint John, Fredericton and elsewhere in New Brunswick until September 1791, as he was promoted through the ranks to sergeant major, the most senior rank of non-commissioned officer.
Cobbett returned to Britain with his regiment, landing at Portsmouth on 3 November 1791. He obtained his discharge from the army on 19 December 1791. In Woolwich during February 1792, he married an American-born woman, Anne Reid (1774–1848), whom he had met while stationed at Fort Howe in Saint John.John Robert Colombo Canadian Literary Landmarks p. 47.Jenny's Spring. Their children were Anne (1795–1877), William (1798–1878), John (1800–1877), James Paul (1803–1881), Eleanor (1805–1900), and Susan (1807–1889).Cole, Life of William Cobbett, p. 437. Their daughter Anne Cobbett was the author of several domestic books including The English Housekeeper: The Manual of Domestic Management.
Refuge in France and the United States (1792–1800) Cobbett had developed an animosity towards some officers, suspecting them of corruption, and gathered evidence on the matter while in New Brunswick. His charges against them were ignored. He wrote The Soldier's Friend in 1792, in protest against the low pay and harsh treatment of enlisted men in the British army. Sensing that he was about to be indicted in retribution, he fled from Britain to France in March 1792 to avoid imprisonment. Cobbett had intended to stay a year to learn the French language, but due to the French Revolution and French Revolutionary Wars in progress, he sailed for the United States in September 1792.
In the spring of 1793, he settled in Philadelphia, then the provisional capital of the United States. Cobbett initially prospered by teaching English to Frenchmen and translating texts from French to English. He later claimed that he had become a political writer by accident: during an English lesson one of his French students read aloud from a New York newspaper the addresses of welcome that the Democrats had sent to Joseph Priestley upon his arrival in America, along with Priestley's replies. His student applauded the anti-British sentiments that were expressed, and he quarrelled with Cobbett, who then resolved to "write and publish a pamphlet in defence of my country."Green, Great Cobbett, p. 125.Cole, Life of William Cobbett, p. 55. His Observations on the Emigration of Dr. Priestley, which was published anonymously in 1794, was a violent attack on Priestley.Green, Great Cobbett, p. 127.Cole, Life of William Cobbett, pp. 57−58.
In 1795, Cobbett wrote A Bone to Gnaw for the Democrats, which attacked the pro-French Democratic Party.Cole, Life of William Cobbett, p. 59. He replied to his critics with A Kick for a Bite, which was his first work to be published under the pseudonym "Peter Porcupine"; a reviewer had compared him to a porcupine, which pleased him.Green, Great Cobbett, p. 129. He took the side of the Federalists, who were led by Alexander Hamilton, because they were friendlier to Britain than were the pro-French Democrats led by Thomas Jefferson.Green, Great Cobbett, pp. 130 and 132−134.Cole, Life of William Cobbett, p. 64.
In January 1796, he began writing a monthly tract, The Censor. It was discontinued after eight releases, and replaced by Porcupine's Gazette, a daily newspaper which ran from March 1797 until the end of 1799.Cole, Life of William Cobbett, pp. 59−60. Talleyrand, at the time a French spy in America, tried but failed to bribe Cobbett to join the French cause.Green, Great Cobbett, p. 140.Cole, Life of William Cobbett, p. 63.
Cobbett opened a bookstore in Philadelphia in July 1796. Its shop-window displayed a large portrait of George III and its interior featured a huge painting of "Lord Howe's Decisive Victory over the French". This provocative display attracted considerable attention.Cole, Life of William Cobbett, p. 62. He reprinted and published much of the extreme loyalist literature then current, including George Chalmers's hostile biography of Thomas Paine,Green, Great Cobbett, p. 147.Cole, Life of William Cobbett, p. 60. as well as his own version, reproducing Chalmer's work interspersed with contemptuous comments.
After Spain entered into an alliance with France against Britain, Cobbett expressed his anger through further pamphleteering that was highly critical of Spanish King Charles IV, in Porcupine's Gazette. The Spanish foreign minister in Philadelphia asked the United States government to prosecute Cobbett for libel of the Spanish king. Cobbett was arrested on 18 November 1797. He was tried in the State Court of Pennsylvania by Chief Justice Thomas McKean (who was also the Spanish minister's father-in-law). Despite McKean's criticism of Cobbett in his summing up, the grand jury threw out case against him by a one-vote majority.Green, Great Cobbett, pp. 168–171.
In the Gazette, he serially denounced Benjamin Franklin Bache, publisher of the Jeffersonian paper, the Aurora. Cobbett suggested that the "stubborn sans culotte" should be treated "as we would a TURK, a JEW, a JACOBIN or a DOG". He directed the same invective against Bache's successor, William Duane and his growing circle of United Irish émigrés, describing them as men "animated by the same infamous principles, and actuated by that same thirst for blood and plunder, which had reduced France to a vast human slaughter-house". In May 1798, he began publishing accounts of a Conspiracy, Formed by the United Irishmen, With the Evident Intention of Aiding the Tyrants of France In Subverting the Government of the United States.Cobbett (1798) Convening in Philadelphia's African Free School, and admitting, together with "all those who have suffered in the cause of freedom", free blacks, the Irish republicans had formed a society dedicated to the proposition (to which each member attested) that "a free form of government, and uncontrouled [sic] opinion on all subjects, [are] the common rights of all the human species". Against the backdrop of America's Quasi War with the French and of the Haitian Revolution (then still under the flag of the French Republic), for Cobbett, this was sufficient proof of an intention to organise slave revolts and "thus involve the whole country in rebellion and bloodshed".
Cobbett also campaigned against physician and abolitionist Benjamin Rush, whose advocacy of bleeding during the yellow fever epidemic may have caused many deaths. pp. 337–343. Rush won a libel suit against Cobbett. Cobbett never fully paid the $8,000 judgement, but instead fled to New York and during 1800 via Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Falmouth, Cornwall.Green, Great Cobbett, pp. 170–175.Cole, Life of William Cobbett, pp. 65–70.
The British government was grateful to Cobbett for supporting Britain's interests in America: the Duke of Kent hailed him as "this great British patriot"; the British representative in America, Robert Liston, offered him a "great pecuniary reward" (which he turned down), and the Secretary at War, William Windham, said that Cobbett deserved a statue of gold for the services he had rendered to Britain in America.Green, Great Cobbett, p. 141.Cole, Life of William Cobbett, p. 58.
Return to England and The Political Register (1800–1810) Cobbett's American writings were reprinted in Britain, with John Wright acting as his agent.Green, Great Cobbett, pp. 154 and 183.Cole, Life of William Cobbett, pp. 58 and 70. In August 1800, Windham invited Cobbett to dinner with the Prime Minister, William Pitt, and contributors to the Anti-Jacobin, including George Canning.Green, Great Cobbett, p. 183.Cole, Life of William Cobbett, p. 70. Pitt's government offered Cobbett the editorship of a government newspaper, but he chose to remain independent.Green, Great Cobbett, pp. 184–185.Cole, Life of William Cobbett, pp. 70–72. His own paper, The Porcupine, bearing the motto "Fear God, Honour the King", started on 30 October 1800, but without success, and he sold his interest in it in 1801. Less than a month later, he started the Political Register, a newspaper that appeared almost every week from January 1802 until 1835, the year of Cobbett's death. Windham and French Laurence had suggested the idea of a weekly newspaper to Cobbett and Windham raised the money to fund it by private subscription.Green, Great Cobbett, p. 207.
When the British government signed a preliminary peace agreement with France in October 1801, Cobbett emerged as one of its foremost opponents, and in the pages of The Porcupine and in his Letters to Lord Hawkesbury, he denounced the agreement as humiliating to Britain and advantageous to France.Green, Great Cobbett, p. 192.Cole, Life of William Cobbett, pp. 75–77. When news of the ratification arrived on 10 October, Cobbett refused to illuminate the windows of his house in celebration and it was attacked by a mob, which smashed all the windows.Green, Great Cobbett, p. 197.Cole, Life of William Cobbett, p. 76. When the Peace of Amiens was signed in March 1802, Cobbett again refused to illuminate his windows and the Royal Horse Guards had to protect his house from the mob.Green, Great Cobbett, pp. 197–198.