The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett. Richard Ingrams

as he had requested, but in Portsmouth, where the regiment was now stationed and where it would be much easier for the accused to prejudice the proceedings. Faced with more prevarication by the Judge Advocate, Cobbett wrote personally to the Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, with the result that the venue was changed to London, much to the annoyance of the accused officers.

      By now Cobbett would have been aware of the way the wind was blowing; and there were two more important questions to be settled. The first was the need to secure the regimental account books in order to prevent any possible tampering before the trial – ‘Without these written documents nothing of importance could be proved, unless the non-commissioned officers and men of the regiment could get the better of their dread of the lash.’ The second was to guarantee the demobilisation of Cobbett’s key witness Corporal Bestland so as to forestall any threat of retaliation by the military. Cobbett had given the Corporal his word that he would not call him as a witness – ‘unless he was first out of the army; that is to say, out of the reach of the vindictive and bloody lash’.

      Yet Bestland, probably under suspicion of collaborating with Cobbett, was still in the ranks. By now considerably alarmed, Cobbett wrote to the Secretary at War pointing out the various obstacles that had been put in his way and making it clear at the same time that unless his key witness (not named) received his discharge he would abandon the prosecution. He had no reply. The court martial was due to convene on 24 March 1792, and on the twentieth Cobbett went to Portsmouth in an effort to discover what had happened to the regimental accounts. He found that, contrary to what he had been told, they had not been ‘secured’ at all, and were still in the possession of the accused officers. More alarming was his chance meeting on his way to Portsmouth with a group of sergeants and the regiment’s music master, all of them on their way up to London – though none had served with him in America. On returning to London he was told by one of his allies, a Captain Lane, that the men had been dragooned into appearing as witnesses at the trial, where they would swear that at a farewell party which Cobbett had given prior to leaving the regiment he had proposed a Jacobin-like toast to ‘the destruction of the House of Brunswick’ (i.e. the Royal Family). Lane warned him that if this completely false allegation were to be upheld, he could well be charged and deported to Botany Bay in Australia. So, at very short notice, Cobbett decided not only to abandon the court martial but to flee to France.

      Afterwards his enemies were to make much of his flight, accusing him of cowardice. But there can be no disputing that he did the only thing possible in the circumstances. If he had not been tried for treason he might have faced charges of sedition, or even a private prosecution from the three officers. One important factor which would have weighed heavily with him – though he never mentioned it in his subsequent lengthy defence of his actions – was that he had recently married. His bride was Anne Reid, daughter of an artillery sergeant, a veteran of the American War of Independence who had served with Cobbett in New Brunswick. When Cobbett first saw Anne she was only thirteen:

      I sat in the same room with her for about an hour, in company with others, and I made up my mind that she was the very girl for me. That I thought her beautiful was certain, for that I had always said should be an indispensable qualification: but I saw in her what I deemed marks of that sobriety of conduct, which has been by far the greatest blessing of my life. It was the dead of winter, and, of course, the snow several feet deep on the ground, and the weather piercing cold. In about three mornings after I had first seen her, I had got two young men to join me in my walk; and our road lay by the house of her father and mother. It was hardly light, but she was out in the snow, scrubbing out a washing tub, ‘That’s the girl for me’, I said, when we had got out of her hearing.

      Six months after this meeting Cobbett was posted to Fredericton, and in the meantime the Artillery were due to be posted back to England. Worried that Anne might fall into bad company on her return to ‘that gay place Woolwich’, he sent her 150 guineas which he had saved so that she would be able to be independent of her parents – ‘to buy herself food, clothes, and to live without hard work’. When Cobbett arrived back in England four years later he found his wife-to-be working as a servant girl in the house of a Captain Brissac. Without saying a word she pressed the money, untouched, into his hands. They were married on 5 February 1792 by a curate, the Reverend Thomas, in Woolwich, and found lodgings in Felix Street, Hackney. The following month they left for France, leaving no forwarding address, and when court officials tried to locate Cobbett they could find no trace of him.

      The newlyweds settled in the village of Tilque, near St-Omer in Normandy. Cobbett was delighted by France: ‘I went to that country full of all those prejudices that Englishmen suck in with their mother’s milk against the French and against their religion; a few weeks convinced me that I had been deceived with respect to both. I met everywhere with civility, and even hospitality, in a degree that I had never been accustomed to.’

      Unfortunately for the Cobbetts their arrival in France had coincided with a turbulent period in that country’s history. When they set out for Paris in August they heard news of the massacre of the Swiss Guard at the Tuileries Palace and the arrest of the King and Queen. Cobbett decided to head for Le Havre and sail to America, but they were stopped more than once, and Anne, who was so indignant that she refused to speak, was suspected of being an escaping French aristocrat. Eventually, however, they reached Le Havre, and after about a fortnight were allowed to board a little ship called the Mary, bound for New York. The voyage was a stormy one, the ship ‘was tossed about the ocean like a cork’. The poultry on board all died and the captain fed the Cobbetts a dish called samp, made from ground maize. After forty-six days the Mary at last docked in New York. Anne, who was pregnant and had had to flee from two different countries in the course of six months, had by now become accustomed to what being married to Cobbett was going to be like.

^* According to the Office of National Statistics, the modern (2004) equivalent of £1 in 1810 is £49.67.

       2 OFF to PHILADELPHIA

      COBBETT’S CAREER changed course round certain clearly defined turning points. One such was the chain of events by which he became a journalist, one of the most famous and prolific in history. He had arrived in America with his pregnant wife in October 1792 and settled in Wilmington, a small port on the Delaware about thirty miles from Philadelphia. In February 1794 he moved into Philadelphia itself – the national capital and centre of American social and political life, the scene of the first meetings of Congress and the drafting of the Constitution in 1787. Founded by the Quaker William Penn on the west bank of the Delaware River in the 1680s, Philadelphia had expanded rapidly; by Cobbett’s time the population numbered about thirty thousand, and included people of many nationalities and religions; and, since the Revolution, a large number of French refugees. Penn had designed the city on a grid pattern with wide streets of red-brick houses, the effect of which was somewhat monotonous. ‘Philadelphia,’ wrote a French visitor, the Chevalier de Beaujour, ‘is cut like a chess board at right angles. All the streets and houses resemble each other, and nothing is so gloomy as this uniformity.’¹

      Cobbett and Nancy (as he called Anne) rented a modest house in the Northern Liberties district at no. 81 Callowhill Street. The climate, especially in summer, was extreme. ‘The heat in this city is excessive,’ wrote Dr Alexander Hamilton in 1774, ‘the sun’s rays being reflected with such power from the red brick houses and from the street pavement which is brick. The people commonly use awnings of painted cloth or duck over their shop doors and windows and, at sunset, throw buckets full of water upon the pavement which gives a feasible cool.’ Health was another problem: during Cobbett’s time there were two serious outbreaks of yellow fever in the city, resulting in thousands of deaths. He himself remained unimpressed not only by Philadelphia, but by America in general.

      ‘The country is good for getting money,’ he wrote to a boyhood friend in England, Rachel Smithers, ‘if a person is industrious and enterprising. In every other respect the country is miserable. Exactly the contrary of what I expected