The Life of William Cobbett, Written by Himself


Introduction

As Gillray's title suggests, this eight plate series purports to be a kind of graphic autobiography of William Cobbett, the radical political pamphleteer. It is (loosely) derived from at least two autobiographical sources written by Cobbett: The Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine (Cobbett's some-time nom de plume) written early in his career and published in England in 1796, and a long article, titled "The Court Martial," in Cobbett's Weekly Political Register created in June of 1809 in response to renewed scrutiny of Cobbett's attempt to expose corruption in his former army regiment. But the series also contains and repeats assertions about his past activities (of varying veracity) from his numerous political opponents.

The epigraph for the series which appears on the first plate ("Now you lying Varlets you shall see how a plain Tale will put you down" derives (with some modification) from the famous tavern scene in Henry IV Pt. 1 where Price Hal exposes Falstaff's horrendous lies and exaggerations by plainly stating what really happened earlier in the evening. Cobbett had himself used the phrase as the epigraph of The Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine to suggest that his plain-spoken autobiography would rebut the gross misrepresentations of his character by his enemies in America. Gillray's appropriation of the phrase for his own epigraph announces what is in fact the method for the entire set of plates: to use Cobbett's words (or more accurately what Gillray pretends are Cobbett's words) against him. His apparent autobiography, then, becomes a scathing satire.

William Cobbett

Francesco Bartolozzi, after John Raphael Smith
William Cobbett [December 15, 1801?]
© National Portrait Gallery, London

In Democracy, or a Sketch of the Life of Buonaparte (1800) Gillray had told the story of Napoleon's life in a series of eight panels. But all of those panels were contained on a single large page. The Life of William Cobbett is on a whole different scale. Each panel is a separate plate with room for a much more elaborate and detailed design. As Cynthia Roman has argued, Gillray's series can thus be seen in the tradition of the multi-plate "Hogarthian Progresses" and indeed details in The Life of William Cobbett can be traced back to images in Hogarth's Four Stages of Cruelty, Industry and Idleness, and The Rake's Progress.

Some of the plates in the series (1, 2, 4, 7, 8) are signed by Gillray "inv. & fec" suggesting that Gillray invented, designed, and etched them; others (3, 5, 6) are signed "des & fec." indicating that, in those cases, he may have drawn and etched the plates from an existing or suggested design provided by another source.

Apart from the 20-plate Hollandia Regenerata in 1796, The Life of William Cobbett is the largest series Gillray ever produced. And in the complexity of design, the finish of the elements, including the wide range of indoor and outdoor backgrounds, it is much more sophisticated than Hollandia. It is in fact most similar to the projected 20-plate series Consequences of a Successful French Invasion (1798) commissioned by Sir John Dalrymple of which only four plates were completed. Given the time and effort that must have gone into each plate (really two plates including the separately etched accompanying text), it's hard to imagine that The Life. . . was not also a commissioned piece or at least produced while Gillray was on a renewed government pension. The design hints would, then, most likely have come from a government source. This theory of government support is all the more likely because Gillray's approach is strikingly similar to another effort going on at the same time.

Anyone reading the London Star, or the London Pilot, almost anytime after May 15, 1809 would have seen a version of the following advertisement for a pamphlet called Elements of Reform. And anyone reading the July 1st issue of the British Critic or the June 1st issue of the Monthly Magazine would have seen an announcement of its publication.

Newspaper Clipping

Advertisement from London Star
[Numerous dates]
© Newspaper Archive

And one could be forgiven for assuming that the pamphlet being advertised was created by Cobbett and summarized his current views. But as Cobbett himself points out in his Weekly Political Register for May 27 1809, it was created without his knowledge and with the sole intent of sowing confusion about his aims.

It consists of passages from my writings, against Reform and against Reformers; and the object of it is, to counteract, by the publication of these passages, the effect of what I am now writing in favour of reform. (Register: 816.)

In other words, like The Life of William Cobbett, Written by Himself it is using his personal history and past expressions against him.

The cost of putting together the pamphlet and of advertising it in several different publications would not have been insignificant. And it would also have included the time and effort to reprint the Proceedings of the General Court Martial from 1792 which was also included in the advertisement and which also reflected badly on Cobbett. Clearly someone with deep pockets and a corresponding deep dislike of Cobbett was behind a coordinated effort to discredit him. In June of 1809, Gillray's former employer at the Anti-Jacobin, George Canning, was part of the current administration as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. His Under-Secretary was Charles Bagot. A letter from John Sneyd to Gillray at the time (included in George Canning and His Friends) suggests that Gillray was working with them.

I should be glad to hear that you have benefited. . . by the efforts I have been making in your favour. Mr. Bagot promised that he would see you often and inform you what was going on before it was known to the publick at large. and I have pledged myself that you never will mention his name, which in these times of enquiry seems to frighten all publick men. . . . Canning, I:307)

This does not prove that the Portland adminstration helped finance Gillray's series on Cobbett, but the combination of the timing and the players involved certainly makes it more probable.

William Cobbett

Cobbett was one of those fiercely independent, self-made men who had opinions about everything, a gift for expressing those opinions, and a nearly total indifference to the number of people he might alienate in the process.

Born in 1763 at Farnham, he was the grandson of a day labourer and the third son of a farmer who later in life ran a public house. His father taught Cobbett the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic. But when he was not helping his father and brothers, Cobbett was always working in one way or another to improve that basic education.

He seems to have had an impulsive and restless energy that often outstripped caution. At eleven, he left his father's farm and without telling anyone, travelled to Richmond and managed to get job at the royal garden at Kew. In the autumn of 1792 while on a visit to his Uncle near Portsmouth, a similar impulse led Cobbett to engineer interviews with Captain Berkley of the Pegasus and Port-Admiral Evans in an (unsuccessful) attempt to join the navy. But though he returned to the plough, he was, as he says, "spoiled for a farmer" and when in May of 1763, he chanced to cross the London Road on his way to a fair at the same time that the coach bound for the city was approaching, Cobbett simply got on board and by the evening arrived in London. By sheer luck, a fellow passenger happened to know his father and took Cobbett under his wing, eventually finding him a job at a law office, where he was able to significantly improve his writing and orthographic skills. But after eight or nine months pent up in a dark office copying legal documents, Cobbett had had enough. A chance encounter in a park with an advertisement for the marines led Cobbett to Chatham where he joined what turned out to be not the marines but the army.

Having enlisted at the beginning of 1784, Cobbett spent the next year at Chatham before being sent off to join the 54th regiment in Nova Scotia under (the later infamous) Lord Edward Fitzgerald. Before leaving, however, Cobbett used his considerable free time to read as widely as his lending library would allow, but especially to teach himself grammar. His skill and industry were soon rewarded with a promotion to Corporal and, once arrived in Nova Scotia, with the responsibiity as clerk for the regiment. In this capacity he would have seen or transcribed much of the administrative paperwork for the regiment, including documentation of the purchases and distribution of supplies. Further promotions followed, so that within a year and a half of arriving in Halifax, Cobbett had attained the highest rank among enlisted men—sergeant-major.

According to his own account in his Weekly Political Register, Cobbett was also put in charge of implementing the regiment's officer training in a new system devised by General David Dundas. For at least some of the officers, Cobbett created what we would now call cheat sheets on large cards which detailed the appropriate troop movements and the corresponding commands.

In 1787, while examining distribution records in his role as clerk, Cobbett noticed that

the Quarter Master who had the issuing of the men's provisions to them, kept about a fourth part to himself. This, the old sergeants told me, had been the case for many years; and they were quite astonished and terrified at the idea of my complaining of it. This, I did, however; but the reception I met with convinced me that I must never make another complaint 'till I got safe to England, and safe out of reach of that most curious of courts, a Court Martial.

Outraged at the unfairness to the common soldiers in the regiment and his own powerlessness to rectify it within the regimental hierarchy, Cobbett resolved upon two actions that were to have significant effects upon his future. One was the determination to address the plight of enlisted men. This effort likely resulted in The Soldier's Friend, a pamphlet uncovering military abuses for which Cobbett was either the sole, or a contributing, writer. Another was to bring to trial the officers in his regiment responsible for stealing from the other men. But Cobbett knew he would need evidence to prove his claim. So he and another enlisted man, Corporal Bestland, began making copies in secret of the pertinent documents.

After resigning from the military, Cobbett began writing to the relevant authorities to make his case against the officers. Those included letters to the Secretary of War Sir George Yonge, the Judge Advocate Charles Gould, Prime Minister William Pitt, and even the King— 27 in all. Almost from the beginning, there was if not an actual conspiracy on the part of the government, at least a considerable reluctance to pursue the truth. There were delays in responding to Cobbett's allegations, changes in the charges that Cobbett had proferred, the loss of 22 of the 27 letters, and the lack of protection of key regimental evidence. When it became obvious that his case would fail from the loss or suppression of these key documents, and, even worse, that he himself would likely be tried for seditious libel, Cobbett left the country, initially for France for aproximately six months, and then for America where he spent most of the next eight years.

In America he found his true calling as a political writer, writing in defense of Britain against American detractors, attacking French revolutionary supporters like Joseph Priestley, and pro-French interests in the United States. He also founded two new outlets for his political beliefs—The Censor and, later, The Pocupine Gazette. The popularity of his no-holds-barred style of journalism attracted offers from both Talleyrand and Pitt to write propaganda for them. But in each case Cobbett declined, preferring, as always, to remain independent.

Unfortunately, Cobbett's fondness for vigorous argument and colorful, quotable expressions, while great for increasing the circulation of his publications, would get him in trouble with the law (more than once). After an article branding an American Doctor Benjamin Rush as, in effect, a murderer for his persistent use of therapeutic blood-letting during a yellow fever epidemic, Cobbett was sued for libel, lost, and returned to England in 1800.

The Impetus for the Series

Back in England, Cobbett continued his political writing. He was initially Pro-Tory, but after the signing of the Treaty of Amiens, and like William Windham with whom he had become friends, he became more and more critical of what he considered a policy of appeasement and capitulation on the part of the Tories.

But by 1804, he had come to regard politics on both sides of the chamber—both Whig and Tory— as riddled with corruption and waste. And he began to be associated with men like Horne Tooke and Francis Burdett supporting radical Parliamentary reform and the election of independent reform candidates like James Paull.

By 1809 and in the context of the war against Napoleon, Cobbett's attacks upon the Canning's and Castlereagh's conduct of the war in Spain, his ardent support of the investigation of the Duke of York's liasion with Mary Ann Clarke and her sale of commissions in the army, and his insistence on the need for substantial reform in Parliament must have seemed like a dangerous attack upon the very foundations of the British government and military discipline.

Resurrecting the incidents in Cobbett's career when he also accused the military of corruption and was unsuccessful in proving his case would have seemed to savvy media manipulators like Canning as one way of undermining Cobbett's own authority. Gillray's The Life of William Cobbett: Written by Himself was, I suspect, the likely result. But even before Gillray's series had been published, Cobbett was arrested and eventually imprisoned for an article opposing the brutal flogging of members of the English militia by hired German mercenaries.

Cobbett continued to write for and direct the Political Register from prison.

Sources and Reading

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