I was stationed on the banks of the great and beautiful river St. John [Cobbett wrote], which was more than a mile wide and a hundred miles from the sea. That river, as well as all the creeks running into it on both sides, were [sic] so completely frozen over every year by the Seventh of November or thereabouts that we could skate across it and up and down it, the next morning after the frost began, while we could see the fish swimming under the ice upon which we were skating. In about ten days the snow came; until storm after storm, coming at intervals of a week or a fortnight, made the mass, upon an average, ten feet deep; and there we were nine days out of ten, with a bright sun over our heads, and with snow, dry as hair powder, screeching under our feet. In the month of April, the last week of that month, the melting of the snow turned the river into ice again. Soon after this, symptoms of breaking-up began to appear, the immense mass of ice was first loosened near the banks of the river … and you every now and then heard a crack at many miles distance, like the falling of fifty or a hundred or a thousand very lofty timber trees coming down all together, from the axes and saws of the fellers … Day after day the cracks became louder and more frequent, till by and by the ice came tumbling out of the mouths of the creeks into the main river, which, by this time, began to give way itself, till, on some days, toward the latter end of May, the whole surface of the river moved downwards with accelerating rapidity towards the sea, rising up into piles as high as [The Duke of Wellington’s] great fine house at Hyde Park Corner, wherever the ice came in contact with an island of which there were many in the river, until the sun and the tide had carried the whole away and made the river clear for us to sail upon again to the next month of November; during which time, the sun gave us melons in the natural ground, and fine crops of corn and grass.
Such conditions were hardly suitable for conventional soldiering. There was nothing much to do except drill, and in the winter even this was impossible. Cobbett spent a great deal of time exploring the forests, hunting bears, skating and fishing. As always, he made a garden, and meanwhile he continued resolutely with his course of self-education. He studied more geometry, he learned French, he designed and built a barracks for four hundred soldiers ‘without the aid of a draughtsman, carpenter or bricklayer, the soldiers under me cut down the timber and dug the stones’. He later boasted that to stop soldiers deserting to the United States he trekked a hundred miles through uncharted forests in order to show potential deserters that they could be pursued. Such was his overall proficiency that he became a clerk to the regiment: ‘In a very short time the whole of the business in that way fell into my hands; and, at the end of about a year, neither adjutant, paymaster or quarter-master, could move an inch without my assistance.’ Cobbett was so punctual, so reliable, so industrious that after only a few months he was promoted to sergeant major over the heads of thirty longer-serving sergeants. ‘He would suffer no chewing of tobacco while they were on parade,’ his son James wrote, ‘but would go up to a man in the rank and force him to throw it from his mouth.’5
From this vantage point, Cobbett formed a view of the army and its officer class which has been shared before and since by many who have served in the ranks. Being sergeant major, he writes, ‘brought me in close contact at every hour with the whole of the epaulet gentry, whose profound and surprising ignorance I discovered in a twinkling’. He realised how much the higher ranks relied on the non-commissioned officers like himself to carry out the vital tasks of the regiment, leaving them free ‘to swagger about and get roaring drunk’. The only officer for whom he maintained any respect was the young Lord Edward Fitzgerald, a charming and romantic Irish aristocrat who would be cashiered for attending a revolutionary banquet in Paris in 1792. Fitzgerald, who while in Canada had lived for some time with an Indian tribe, the Bears, was wounded while helping to lead the Irish Rising of 1798 and died (aged only thirty-five) in Newgate, where Cobbett himself was to be imprisoned a few years later.
Cobbett’s insistence on his own superiority, his greater sense of duty and his industriousness might well have made him unpopular with his fellow soldiers, but this does not seem to have been the case. He formed many friendships in the regiment, and in the process developed an overall view of the injustices of the society he lived in. ‘Genius,’ he wrote later, ‘is as likely to come out of the cottage as out of the splendid mansion, and even more likely, for, in the former case, nature is unopposed at the outset. I have had, during my life, no little converse with men famed for their wit, for instance; but, the most witty man I ever knew was a private soldier. He was not only the most witty, but far the most witty. He was a Staffordshire man, he came from WALSALL and his name was JOHN FLETCHER. I have heard from that man more bright thoughts of a witty character, than I have ever heard from all the other men, and than I have ever read in all the books that I have read in my whole life. No coarse jokes, no puns, no conundrums, no made up jests, nothing of the college kind; but real, sterling sprightly wit. When I have heard people report the profligate sayings of SHERIDAN and have heard the House of Commons roaring at his green-room trash, I have always thought of poor Jack Fletcher, who if he could have put his thoughts upon paper, would have been more renowned than Butler or Swift.’6 ‘How often,’ Cobbett wrote of another of his soldier friends, ‘has my blood boiled with indignation at seeing this fine, this gallant, this honest, true hearted and intelligent young man, standing with his hand to his hat before some worthless and stupid sort of officer, whom nature seemed to have designed to black his shoes.’7
It was Cobbett’s sympathy for his fellow soldiers which, combined with his contempt for the officer class, led to his first confrontation with the establishment. From his experience as sergeant major and his control over the regimental accounts he observed that corruption was rife. The quartermaster, in charge of issuing provisions to the men, was keeping a large proportion for himself while, in particular, four officers – Colonel Bruce, Captain Richard Powell, and Lieutenants Christopher Seton and John Hall – were making false musters of NCOs and soldiers and selling for their own profit the men’s rations of food and firewood. Such practices were rife throughout ‘the system’, as Cobbett was to discover later. Corruption of one kind or another was the norm at all levels of politics, the Church, the armed services and the press, and when Cobbett voiced his indignation to his fellow NCOs they urged him to keep quiet, on the grounds that these things were widespread. When he persisted he realised that he could achieve nothing as a serving soldier, and would be in danger of extreme punishment from a court martial. His only hope lay in pursuing the issue following his discharge on his return to England. The evidence of fraud lay in the regiment’s books, but how was it possible to protect it, when the books could easily be tampered with or rewritten before any hearing took place? Operating long before the invention of the photocopier, Cobbett decided to make copies of all the relevant entries, stamping them with the regimental seal in the presence of a faithful helper and witness, Corporal William Bestland: ‘All these papers were put into a little box which I myself had made for the purpose. When we came to Portsmouth there was talk of searching all the boxes etc, which gave us great alarm; and induced us to take all the papers, put them in a bag and trust them to a custom-house officer, who conveyed them on shore to his own house, where I removed them a few days later.’
Today such evidence would be given to the authorities, and it would be up to them to undertake a prosecution. But here it was left to Cobbett, once the Judge Advocate (Sir Charles Gould) had given his approval, to act as prosecutor single-handedly, without assistance of any kind from lawyers. And from the beginning it was clear that the authorities were dragging their feet. The first indication came when Cobbett was informed that some of the charges he had alleged against the three accused (one of the four, Colonel Bruce, had since died)