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.
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 of our opponents, he has mistaken strength for violence: and I must further confess myself proud enough to hope that, from having my writings imputed to him, no man’s character has ever suffered an injury.’1
Sooner or later a break between the two men was inevitable. It came on 28 February 1806, only two weeks after the formation of the new ministry. Windham wrote in his diary: ‘Came away in carriage with Fox: got out at end of Downing St and went to office, thence to Cobbett. Probably the last interview we shall have.’ The Ministry of All the Talents collapsed, and for the remaining three years before his death in 1810 Windham did not hold office again. On 19 February 1809, in his final reference to Cobbett, he wrote: ‘Nearly the whole time from breakfast till Mr Legge’s coming down, employed in reading Cobbett. More thoroughly wicked and mischievous than almost anything that has appeared yet.’ He may have reflected ruefully that of all his achievements, the most significant had been the financing in 1802 of Cobbett’s Political Register, which came in the end to represent almost everything he most strongly disapproved of.
By now it was beginning to dawn on Cobbett, as it has dawned on others before and since, that there was no real difference between the parties at Westminster. The Whigs and the Tories were led by two groups of aristocrats – Windham was one of the few commoners – merely competing for power. There was therefore no point in expecting that a change in the ministry would lead to radical reform. The war, it was true, had formerly divided politicians, but now the old consensus had been restored. By 1809 Cobbett was able to describe quite clearly what the situation was like:
It must have struck every man, who has been in the habit of contemplating political motives and actions, that the interest and the importance, which discussions in the House of Commons formerly owed to consideration of Party, now exist but in a comparatively trifling degree … Parties were formerly distinguished by some great and well known principles of foreign or domestic policy. Now there are no such distinguishing marks … There are still persons wishing for a change of ministry because there are always persons who wish to obtain possession of power and emolument, but beyond that circle there are … absolutely none at all who sincerely believe that such a change would be attended with any substantial national benefit.2
Following the collapse of the Ministry of All the Talents the Whigs virtually gave up hope of forming a government, and for the next twenty-five years there was a succession of Tory ministries under a series of reactionary prime ministers, all adamantly opposed to reform of any kind. The Duke of Portland (1807–09) was followed by the lawyer Spencer Perceval (1809–12), who in turn was followed by the long-serving Lord Liverpool (1812–27), described by Disraeli as an ‘arch-mediocrity’ and referred to by Cobbett as ‘Lord Picknose’.* So opposed to any form of change was Liverpool that a Frenchman remarked that if he had been present at the Creation he would have said, ‘Conservons-nous le chaos.’
These men and their influential lieutenants Addington, who became Lord Sidmouth and Home Secretary, and the notorious Lord Castlereagh saw the purpose of government as merely to preserve the existing order. They took reassurance from Dr Johnson’s couplet (frequently quoted against them by Cobbett – though he was ignorant of its authorship):
How small, of all that human hearts endure
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.
Ignoring the lessons of the French Revolution and convincing themselves that there was little any government could do to eradicate the inequalities and injustices in society, they were united in their determination, at all costs, to uphold the status quo, including the power of the aristocracy and its ally the Church of