Finally, he reminds his readers that he had, in the year 1805, himself given the cue. Which was certainly the case, as may be seen by referring to his writings of that date:—
“In the printed account of my life, there is a small chasm. When I published that account I was in the midst of the revilers of England, and particularly of the English army; or, I should have then stated, that the primary cause of my leaving the army, that the circumstance which first disgusted me, and that finally made me resolve to tear myself from a service, to which my whole mind and heart were devoted, was, the abuses, the shocking abuses as to money-matters, the peculation, in short, which I had witnessed in it, and which I had, in vain, endeavoured to correct. What those abuses were, by whom they were committed, and how, after I quitted the army, I failed in obtaining redress, it would not now, after many of the parties are dead, be proper for me to state; but, if the ‘Society of Gentlemen’ have, as it is more than probable they have, access to the records of the War Office, and can obtain leave to publish the correspondence upon the subject, the public will then see that I have all my life, and in all situations, been the enemy of peculation. It is, however, incumbent upon me to state, that I have good reason to believe that my failure upon that occasion was in no way to be ascribed to Mr. Pitt, who, as far as a person in so obscure and perfectly friendless a situation as I then was, could judge, was, as to the matter in question, the friend of fair inquiry and of justice.”
We may safely dismiss this matter. Should the reader find it worth his while to rake up this old pamphlet, and compare it with Cobbett’s “full account,” he may find a stray divergence of date or of trifling fact; but nothing more than, as a careless omission, will serve to establish the good faith of the man—a class of evidence which is often as serviceable as a statement clear and unfaltering to the minutest detail. Why the affair went off as it did is obvious to any one who knows the world, and the rules of society, better than Cobbett did: it was a hopeless task, from the very first, to undertake it upon his own responsibility, without professional assistance. A mistake, however, which he seldom corrected through life; and the consequence being that he as seldom succeeded in gaining a cause: he persisted, to the very last, in being his own advocate—and with the proverbial result.
Let us turn, then, to another incident of this year. An incident which has given the biographer a good deal of trouble; as it presents an occasion upon which it has seemed difficult to reconcile two statements which, at first sight, seem to vary.
For this purpose, we must again refer to a later date in the history. In the year 1805, Mr. Cobbett made himself very offensive to the Government over the unfortunate difficulties of Lord Melville. The whole contest, between the Government and its opponents, was of the hottest; and the choicest Billingsgate passed between them. One periodical, inspired by the Pitt and Melville party, made it its business to assail Cobbett in particular; and, on the 27th of July of the above-mentioned year, the following passage occurred:—
“As Mr. Cobbett can hardly fail to read this review, I beg leave, through its medium, to ask that worthy patriot if he knows who was the author, and industrious circulator through the army, of a pamphlet entitled The Soldiers’ Friend, published about the same time, but fraught with ten times more mischief than Paine’s ‘Rights of Man’? A pamphlet calculated to render soldiers discontented with their situation, and incite them to mutiny and rebellion; a pamphlet which, in short, I have no hesitation in saying, was a considerable source of the naval mutiny at the Nore.”
Now, by the time this effusion appeared in public, Cobbett had begun to incur the severest displeasure of his opponents; he had created mortal enemies by the development of his warfare upon “corruption.” Caricature was at work, keeping pace with the most virulent attacks on the part of the ministerial press. For all which he did not care a pin, but this charge of sedition was more than he could stand. Perfectly happy (as his letters of that date will show), both in his domestic pursuits and in the general public appreciation which he was then possessing, he enjoyed fair fight; but this beginning of dark insinuation roused him; and, for the first time since his return to England, he entered upon a proud and energetic boast of the services which he had rendered to his country. The part with which we have at present to do is the answer to the charge of sedition, which is as follows:—
“During the interval of my discharge and of my departure for France, a proposition, preceded by a speech of the Secretary at War, was made in parliament to augment the pay of the army. Some parts of the speech contained matter which a person, with whom I was acquainted, and to whom I had communicated my information upon such subjects, thought worthy of remark in print. Hence arose a little pamphlet, entitled the Soldiers’ Friend. Of this pamphlet I was not the author; I had nothing to do either with the printing or the publishing of it; and I never had in my possession, or ordered to be sent to any person, or to any place, three copies of it in my life; and I do not believe that 500 copies, in the whole, ever went from the bookseller’s shop; a fact, however, that may easily be ascertained by application to Mr. Ridgway, who was the publisher of it.”
Here, then, is a distinct disavowal: a circumstance that is calculated to worry the impartial biographer, anxious to be fair toward a good (though sometimes ill-advised) man; the reason for its being a disturbing factor lying in this, that the Soldiers’ Friend is enumerated, on two distinct occasions during the closing years of Cobbett’s life, among the writings by which he had helped to benefit his fellow-men. Let us have his own words (June, 1832):—
“The very first thing I ever wrote for the press in my life was a little pamphlet entitled the Soldiers’ Friend, which was written immediately after I quitted the army in 1791, or early in 1792. I gave it in manuscript to Captain Thomas Morrice (the brother of that Captain Morrice who was a great companion of the Prince of Wales); and by him it was taken to Mr. Ridgway, who then lived in King Street, St. James’s Square, and Mr. Ridgway (the same who now lives in Piccadilly) published it. I do not know that I ever possessed the pamphlet, except for a week or two, after it was published, &c., &c.”
Now these two statements cannot, on a superficial reading, be easily reconciled; and they form, together, an instance which may be eagerly seized upon, on the part of those who would continue to represent Cobbett as a man who would wilfully utter contradictory things. But, upon examining the matter somewhat more closely, we know, even better than Cobbett himself, something of the actual circumstances. In the first place, the great probability is that Cobbett was not the originator of the pamphlet; that this Captain Thomas Morrice, or somebody else (still more interested in awakening the public mind on army-frauds) had instigated him to put his ideas upon paper. The speech of the Secretary-at-War, above referred to, occurs in a debate upon the army estimates, on the 15th February, 1792—a debate in which Mr. Fox, among others, took part; and the item of an additional allowance to the soldiers was that which was the immediate inspiration of the pamphlet; besides being, in all likelihood, productive of some little excitement in military circles generally.[6]
Secondly, it will be observed that the sting of the charge against Cobbett lay in this: that he had been instrumental in spreading sedition in the naval and military services. Now, this was totally false. It is a fact that the “Soldiers’ Friend” was afterwards circulated largely, and provoked antagonism; but of this Cobbett knew nothing, and could not know anything, for he had long been safe in Philadelphia, far away from English domestic politics, and much more concerned in earning his bread-and-cheese by hard work, than in spreading the principles of the French Revolution. Those