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 Street with Otto* they took out the horses, dragged him down that street, along by your house, down to White-hall, and through the Park, and then to Otto’s again, shouting and rejoicing every time he had occasion to get out or into the carriage … This is the first time an English mob ever became the cattle of a Frenchman … This indication of the temper and sentiments of the lower orders is a most awful consideration. You must remember Sir, that previous to the revolutions in Switzerland and elsewhere, we always heard of some French messenger of peace being received with caresses by the people: the next post or two brought us an account of partial discontents, tumults, insurrections, murders and revolutions always closed the history. God preserve us from the like, but I am afraid our abominations are to be punished in this way.3
Meanwhile the mob went on the rampage and attacked Cobbett’s house as well as the bookshop he had opened in St James’s. ‘It happened precisely as I had expected,’ he wrote later: ‘about eight o’clock in the evening my dwelling house was attacked by an innumerable mob, all my windows were broken, and when this was done the villains were preparing to break into my shop. The attack continued at intervals, till past one o’clock. During the whole of this time, not a constable nor peace officer of any description made his appearance; nor was the smallest interruption given to the proceedings of this ignorant and brutal mob, who were thus celebrating the Peace. The Porcupine office experienced a similar fate.’
The same scenes were repeated a few months later when the Peace of Amiens was finally ratified. Even though on this occasion the Bow Street magistrate intervened with the help of a posse of Horse Guards to try to protect him, Cobbett’s windows were again broken and his house damaged in various ways. Shortly afterwards he was forced to sell the Porcupine, and it was merged in the True Briton, a government propaganda paper.
It was at this point that Windham and a group of friends including Dr French Laurence, Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford and the MP for Peterborough, stepped in to help Cobbett relaunch himself. Windham was a rich man with an annual income of £6000, so it can be assumed that he provided the bulk of the £650 (about £23,000 in today’s money). It would seem to have been a gift rather than an investment, and one which Cobbett only accepted on his own terms – ‘Upon the express and written conditions that I was never to be looked upon as under any sort of obligation to any of the parties.’
Any possibility of a clash between the editor and his patron would have seemed, in 1802, a very remote one. Windham had already made public his enormous admiration for Cobbett. Cobbett in his turn showered praises on his patron. ‘I shall not I am sure merit the suspicion of being a flatterer,’ he wrote to