In 1796 Paine had written a famous letter to Washington, whose victory over the British he had helped so much to secure, attacking the President for failing to come to his aid when he was in prison in Paris facing execution. The letter is an eloquent testimony to the general ingratitude of politicians, once they achieved power, to those who have helped them along the way. Cobbett himself was beginning to experience the same reaction. He might have thought, after the assistance he had given the government by writing, for free, ‘Important Considerations’ at the time invasion threatened, that he and his Political Register would be helped in return. On the contrary, in 1804 he found himself once again facing a libel charge.
As usual, England’s difficulty was Ireland’s opportunity. In 1803 the Irish republicans, on this occasion led by Robert Emmet, mounted a rebellion, killing the Lord Chief Justice and several English soldiers. In the Political Register Cobbett attacked the Addington government for its lack of foresight, stating that Ireland was ‘in a state of total neglect and abandonment’.10 The article was followed by three anonymous letters from Ireland signed ‘Juverna’. With a stylish and satirical pen ‘Juverna’ accused the English authorities, and in particular the Lord Lieutenant, Lord Hardwicke, of failing to do anything to prevent the uprising although they had advance information that it was going to take place. Hardwicke, it was claimed, had even returned to his official residence in Phoenix Park in order not to be in any personal danger, and had subsequently done everything possible to blame the military commander, General Fox, for what had happened. Obviously well informed, ‘Juverna’ peppered his account of the incident with a number of satirical asides on the British politicians involved, suggesting, for example, that Hardwicke was typical of ‘that tribe who have been sent over to us to be trained up here into politicians as they train the surgeons’ apprentices in the hospitals by setting them at first to bleed the pauper patients’. He was, the author continued, ‘in rank an earl, in manners a gentleman, in morals a good father and a good husband … celebrated for understanding the modern method of fattening sheep as well as any man in Cambridgeshire’.
The offence of criminal (or seditious) libel with which Cobbett was now charged had been a convenient weapon in the hands of successive governments since the sixteenth century, when according to a modern commentator ‘the Star Chamber regarded with the deepest suspicion the printed word in general, and anything which looked like criticism of the established institutions of Church and State in particular’.11 John Wilkes, the great champion of press freedom, had been prosecuted for criminal libel, and throughout the first decades of the nineteenth century the charge was regularly used to silence persistent critics of the government, when necessary by putting them in prison.
In Cobbett’s trial the thrust of the attack by the prosecuting attorney Spencer Perceval (later the Prime Minister) was to humiliate Cobbett in the eyes of the court by emphasising his lowly social origins. ‘Who is Mr Cobbett?’ Perceval asked contemptuously. ‘Is he a man of family in this country? Is he a man writing purely from motives of patriotism? Quis homo hic est? Quo patre natus?’ (Who is this man? Who was his father?) The Latin tags would have been chosen deliberately by the lawyer in the knowledge that Cobbett would not understand them. Such an attitude, in an age when the government consisted almost entirely of members of the aristocracy educated in the classics at the best public schools, would not have struck the jury as unjust. But it was typical of the snobbery that Cobbett was to face throughout his career. Snobbery aside, Perceval went on to suggest (with the judge’s obvious approval) that it was not permitted, by law, to ridicule the government and its ministers in the way ‘Juverna’ and the Political Register had done. An indication of the lengths to which the law officers were prepared to go in arguing this case is the way Perceval even introduced the fact that Cobbett’s paper had referred to the Prime Minister as ‘the Doctor’. In fact Addington was generally known to all his colleagues by this nickname, the origin of which was that his father had been a doctor:
I do not mean to say that the describing such a man as Mr Addington, by the epithet of Doctor Addington, is degrading to him, nor that I would advise that such an epithet should become the subject of a prosecution in a Court of Justice: but, surely no one who has the least liberality of feeling, or the least sense of decency, could think it becoming to taunt such a gentleman as Mr Addington: a gentleman who, the more he is known, the more his character will be admired. For my part, I feel no sympathy with those who think there is any wit in such titles. Mr Addington is the son of a man who most ably and skilfully practised in a liberal profession, who by his talents became justly eminent in that profession, and whose son raised himself, by his great abilities, to one of the highest offices in this country. I again say, that for any publication calling Mr Addington ‘Doctor Addington’, or for any flippancy of that nature, standing by itself, I should think it beneath the dignity of the Right honourable gentleman to make it the subject of a prosecution; but I also say, that when you see an epithet of this nature introduced, it does show the spirits with which the libel was published and that it was a systematic attack upon the whole government of Ireland, by bringing into contempt and ridicule the persons placed by his Majesty at the head of the Government.12
‘The bestowing of nicknames is a practice to which Englishmen are peculiarly addicted,’ Cobbett’s counsel William Adam answered, but he made little or no attempt to justify ‘Juverna’s’ account of the Dublin rebellion, instead devoting his speech to extolling his client as a great English patriot. Summing up, the judge, Lord Ellenborough, did nothing to disguise his bias. His final words to the jury were an ominous warning not only to Cobbett but to others who might be so foolhardy as to attack the government: ‘It has been observed [by Cobbett’s counsel] that it is the right of the British subject to exhibit the folly or imbecility of members of the Government. But gentlemen, we must confine ourselves within limits. If, in so doing, individual feelings are violated, there the line of interdiction begins, and the offence becomes the subject of penal visitation.’ Taking their cue from the learned judge, the jury brought in a verdict of guilty following deliberations which lasted for only ten minutes.
Cobbett had secured a number of prominent individuals, including Windham, to appear as character witnesses, and it was perhaps thanks to them that he escaped a prison sentence on this occasion (the Register was fined £500). It may also have been the case that he was leniently treated in comparison with other libellers for divulging to the court the identity of ‘Juverna’ – Robert Johnson, a judge of the Irish Common Pleas. Cobbett handed over some of the manuscripts of the letters to the Attorney General, and later appeared as a Crown witness when Johnson himself was put on trial in November 1805. At first sight Cobbett’s betrayal of his contributor seems despicable. But, as his biographer E.I. Carlyle points out, it is significant that the incident was never referred to afterwards by his political enemies, and given the fact that they seized on anything, however trivial, to discredit Cobbett, the likelihood is that Johnson himself agreed to be identified as the author. After being found guilty he was allowed to resign with a pension of £1200 a year.
The ‘Juverna’ trial and the threat of possible imprisonment will have unnerved Cobbett and shown him that he could not expect any favours from the establishment (what he called ‘The Thing’). But in the meantime, as the threat of invasion by Napoleon receded, he was beginning to become interested in matters beyond the political controversies of the day, the sort of issues he discussed