The Peace of Amiens had been signed only a few weeks earlier, on 27 March 1802. For a short time there was a feeling not only of relief but of euphoria – not dissimilar to the mood following the Munich agreement of 1938. Napoleon, who had until then been an object of hatred, was turned into a tourist attraction. Crowds of British visitors flocked to Paris to see the First Consul in the flesh, shortly before he was to declare himself Emperor. In the House of Commons Windham, almost a lone voice, led the opposition, while Cobbett kept up the attack in his paper. The Emperor was apparently in the habit of lying in his bath and having Cobbett and other critics read aloud to him by an interpreter. When a particularly offensive passage was read out he would bang the bath with the guide rope, shouting out, ‘Il en a menti.’5 Napoleon, via the French Minister in London, M. Otto, ordered the British government to prosecute Cobbett (among others): ‘The perfidious and malevolent publications of these men are in open contradiction to the principles of peace.’6 In order to appease him the government did actually bring libel proceedings against a French émigré writer, Jean Gabriel Peltier, who was prosecuted by the Attorney General (later Prime Minister) Spencer Perceval and found guilty in February 1803 of libel by the judge, Lord Ellenborough (the first of his appearances in this narrative). Cobbett wrote to Windham, ‘Lord Ellenborough and the Attorney-General both told the Jury, that if they did not find him guilty, we would have war with France!!!’7
But the mood of euphoria following the signing of the peace did not last long. Napoleon showed quite soon that he was not only arrogant and sensitive to criticism in the British press, but cavalier in the extreme when it came to observing the terms of the 1802 treaty. The alarm was raised when he invaded Switzerland, and in the face of mounting concern the British government led by Addington finally refused to evacuate Malta on the grounds that Napoleon had failed to carry out his pledges with regard to Italy. In May 1803 war was resumed, and a year later Pitt (‘who was to Addington as London was to Paddington’) returned to take charge. The threat of a French invasion now took hold of the country, as Napoleon assembled a fleet of barges and gunboats on the French coast. Patriotic citizens rallied to the flag and joined the local militias. Broadsheets and songs were printed in their thousands, beacons were prepared to warn of invasion, and Martello towers were erected along the eastern coast. The government issued its own propaganda pamphlet, ‘Important Considerations for the People of this Kingdom’, which was distributed to the entire clergy with instructions ‘that you will be pleased to cause part of them to be deposited in the pews and part to be distributed in the aisles amongst the poor’. In stirring terms the anonymous author rallied his countrymen against the peril of the French: ‘For some time past, they have had little opportunity to plunder; peace, for a while, suspended their devastations, and now, like gaunt and hungry wolves, they are looking towards the richer pastures of Britain; already we hear their threatening howl, and if, like sheep, we stand bleating for mercy, neither our innocence nor our timidity will save us from being torn to pieces and devoured.’ There was general speculation at the time as to the authorship of ‘Important Considerations’, and various candidates were suggested, including Lord Hawkesbury (later the Prime Minister Lord Liverpool). It was not until 1809, when Cobbett came under attack from government ministers, that he revealed that he himself had written the pamphlet, offered it to the then Prime Minister Addington and refused to take any money when it was printed and distributed all over the country.
Many of his later readers might have been surprised to learn of Cobbett assisting the government in this way. But the Cobbett of this period, the four or five years following his return from America, was a different character from what he became later or what he had been before. The change of title of his paper from Porcupine to Cobbett’s Political Register said it all. In his Porcupine role in Philadelphia he had been a thorn in the flesh of the political establishment, famous for his barbs, his knockabout abuse and his nicknames. The title Cobbett’s Political Register was indicative of a more serious and responsible role. Cobbett was now the friend of statesmen like Windham, the man who dined with Pitt and Canning, the man who boasted that royalty and dukes were among the subscribers to his paper. He now saw himself as a major player, and the Political Register of this period is much concerned with the traditional political matters – who’s in, who’s out, the advisability of this or that different policy.
Despite the resumption of the war, the resignation of Addington and the return of Pitt, Cobbett’s friend Windham remained out of the government and in opposition. Pitt had wanted to include the great Liberal Charles James Fox (now disillusioned about Napoleon – ‘a young man who was a good deal intoxicated with his success’) in his cabinet, but the mad King George III, who hated Fox for having opposed the war in the first place, refused to allow this. Windham, along with Pitt’s former Foreign Secretary William Grenville and others, refused to take office unless Fox was included in the cabinet, with the result that in the short period before his death in January 1806, Pitt was confronted by three separate opposition parties, led respectively by Addington, Windham (the so-called New Opposition) and Fox, leader of the Old Opposition – those, that is, who had been against the war in its early stages (1793–1802). It was not the ideal situation for a country at war.
In his Political Register Cobbett (with Windham’s support) attacked Pitt almost as savagely as he had previously attacked Addington. His charge was that Pitt had reneged on his pledge to pursue the war against France – a course, Pitt claimed, that could be pursued without any increase in taxes. Cobbett no doubt saw himself as someone at the centre of the political stage, a view reciprocated by, among others, Charles James Fox, one of the few outstanding politicians of this period. ‘Cobbett is certainly an extraordinary man,’ Fox wrote to Windham in November 1804, ‘and if any good is ever to be done, may be powerfully instrumental in bringing it about.’8
In keeping with the image of himself as the friend and confidant of statesmen, Cobbett purchased a spacious country mansion at Botley near Southampton in 1805. Unfortunately it was later demolished, but a contemporary print shows a three-storeyed house with an ornamental turret and more than enough accommodation for his family and a small army of servants. Despite the success of the Political Register Cobbett could scarcely afford to live in such style. But throughout his life he was careless with money, almost always living beyond his means and relying on loans from wealthy supporters. His daughter Anne writes that his wife had little faith in Cobbett’s ‘business wisdom’, particularly as it applied to the ambitious farming and tree-planting schemes he embarked on whenever he had the opportunity, as he now did at Botley.
‘Botley is the most delightful village in the world,’ Cobbett wrote to his publisher John Wright (August 1805). ‘It has everything, in a village, that I love, and none of the things I hate. It is in a valley; the soil is rich, thickset with wood: the farms are small, the cottages neat; it has neither workhouse nor barber nor attorney nor justice of the peace, and, though last not least, it has no volunteers. There is no justice within SIX miles of us and the barber comes once a week to shave and cut hair! “Would I were poetical” I would write a poem in praise of Botley.’
Cobbett was supremely confident in his future. By the end of 1805 the circulation of the Register had reached four thousand – a very high figure for these times. In the meantime he had launched a new publication, Cobbett’s Parliamentary Debates (the original of today’s Hansard, named after the printer Cobbett eventually sold the business to). Carried away by his popularity, he felt sure enough of his prospects to expand. Shortly after buying his Botley house he bought a neighbouring farm for his brother and began negotiating the purchase of a farm for himself. Eventually he was to take on an estate of over eighty acres, on which he farmed and planted thousands of trees. ‘I