by Paul Collins
Cobbett found little left worth defending: "Nova Scotia had no charm for me other than that of novelty. Everything I saw was new: bogs, rocks, mosquitoes, and bullfrogs . . . In short, the most villainous piece of waste land." Even his eventual promotion to sergeant major did not allay his general dismay, for after blowing the whistle on military embezzlement and writing a pamphlet on it, Cobbett was drummed out of the service and nearly charged with sedition. But in writing his pamphlet, Cobbett discovered his two true vocations: righteous fury, and writing furiously.
Wherever he went, Cobbett found trouble-and when he couldn't find it, he made some of his own. Moving to Philadelphia in 1794, he took up the apt counterrevolutionary pen name Peter Porcupine, and enraged locals by plastering his bookseller storefront with pictures of King George. Then, for good measure, in his window display he coupled the likeness of the bloodthirsty Jean-Paul Marat with that of revered city father Ben Franklin-who was also, Cobbett helpfully explained, "a whore-master, a hypocrite, and an infidel." He called Tom Paine a wife-beater—such accusations were nothing new to Paine, as another Tory writer had already accused him of raping a cap-and in the pages of his newspaper The Porcupine he gleefully eviscerated the "malignant philosopher" Jefferson. Rather more prosaically, he also accused Declaration signer and local physician Benjamin Rush of killing his patients.
"Honour the King: Fear God," read the motto on The Porcupine, but soon Cobbett had quite a few others to fear. "There were, in Philadelphia, about ten thousand persons, all of whom would have rejoiced to see me murdered," he wrote. He was not far wrong, and when Dr. Rush finally slapped the would-be Peter Porcupine with a crushing libel judgment, it sent the nettlesome scribbler fleeing the country.
But back in his beloved Britain, Cobbett fared little better. He loved the crown, not the government that had surrounded it. And so he started an immensely popular newspaper, the Political Register, to record the speeches of Parliament and the court. This unprece-dented exposure of their machinations was duly resented by politicians, and eventually Cobbett was thrown-thrown quite enthusiastically, one gathers-into Newgate on a trumped-up charge of treason. Cobbett was left incredulous: "Having lost a fortune in America, solely for the sake of England, I was sent to prison in that same England!" Perhaps, he wondered, the problem was that it wasn't that same England. He brooded over how it was no longer the land of his youth.
And then, as always—he wrote.
If his two years in jail were meant to shut Cobbett up, it didn't work. "During my imprisonment," he boasted, "I published 364 Essays and Letters upon political subjects." He still managed to keep his Political Register going every week, even during a spell as a farmer back to America from 1817 to 1819. In the midst of this, he also became the great agricultural author of his era, writing on Cottage Economy and the popular guide The American Gardener, which remains in print today. The man sold seeds in his spare time. It seems hard to reconcile the notion of a seed merchant and garden writer with a political firebrand today you don't exactly go to the Burpee rack at the hardware store to get riled up about anything. But soil was political in Cobbett's time. And these hedges before us? They were harbingers of perhaps the greatest upheaval England had ever known.
A farm truck rumbles past me, heading toward Guildford, sweeping by a weedy graveyard of rusting tractors and plows. I bend down and examine the leaning sign jammed into the ground nearby:
EGGS
hens
duck
goose
HAY
MANURE
People still work their land here. But what, exactly, do we mean by their land? Many years ago, a rector named Augustus Jessopp pondered just this question. "If I take my handkerchief out of my pocket I show you something which certainly belongs to me; I bought and paid for it," he explained. "If I please I may—as I can—toss it into the fire and reduce it to ashes in a few moments; in fact, destroy it, practically get rid of it, annihilate it." It was his property, after all; why not? But, ah—there was a catch—for all property is not the same. Look down at the plot of land that you are standing on: "I cannot destroy it," he reasoned. "I may not quite serve it as if it were wholly and exclusively mine." So we may call our friends with the hay, eggs, and manure owners of the land, but only for now: it was once someone else's, and it will be someone else's again. Their tenancy on the land, even if for three, five, or ten generations, is temporary. This is why any owner who rails against land-use rules has forgotten a basic tenet of common law: they are the stewards of their plot, and not its sovereign.
A thousand years ago, these lands that we see before us here on the A323—all land, in fact-belonged to the king. It was granted to nobility at his pleasure, and revoked at his displeasure. These lords, in turn, let their manors to local gentry, who then sublet plots to the farmers. If anyone died intestate—as a great many of them were prone to do during plague years—land would escheat back up the chain of ownership. And nobody was unreservedly entitled to this land: it was always the king's, and subject to his taxes and demands for military service. That's why to this day in Britain the Treasure Act requires any poor sap unfortunate enough to find a buried sack of doubloons in their backyard to turn it over to the crown. But this was part of a rural covenant, for in return every village had a commons land where citizens could graze their sheep and cows. It was far from perfect. There was a tangle of laws over how often you were allowed to graze, how much turf you could dig up to burn as fuel, or how many branches you were allowed to lop off a nobleman's trees as kindling. These land arrangements stifled mobility: they ensured that the rich stayed rich and the poor stayed poor. But everyone was indeed guaranteed something.
Visit the Normandy Commons now, and you'll find a pleasant sprawl of wodn fields and trees; there's slide, monkey bars, a public loo, and a decent soccer pitch. What you will not find are sheep munching the grass, or anyone hoeing beans. We're expected to earn our livings in private dwellings now, a transition from public to private wealth that occurred before Cobbett's eyes. Parliamentary orders for the fencing off and sale of commons land-known as Acts of Enclosure—remade his countryside at a frantic pace. In the decade before Cobbett's birth in 1763, there had been 163 such acts: the first decade of the new century had seen 906. Once landowners possessed this land, they guarded it jealously. They'd bore holes into hedge stakes and funnel in gunpowder; any shivering impoverished soul unfortunate enough to steal a hedge stake for kindling would, upon tossing one onto a fire, be rewarded with a hearth-shattering thunderclap. In another town, Cobbett even found a self-styled Paradise Place encircled with signs warning of leg-snapping mantraps. He shook his head at the sight of it: fancy that as Paradise!
Commons lands—wastes, landowners now sniffed—disappeared, and private property arose in their place. This hedge in front of me—and there are now some five hundred thousand miles of them in England—arose during these years, not as quaint sidings to rural roads, but as a sentinel of newly created private property. Cobbett was outraged: "[What] could lead English gentlemen to disregard matters like these! That could induce them to tear up 'wastes' and sweep away occupiers like those I have described! Wastes indeed!"
What induced them? Why, money. Private owners tended their plots with greater efficiency and ingenuity, and sought out the latest agricultural improvements: over the span of the eighteenth century, the average weight of sheep shipped to London's Smithfield Market more than doubled, and average calf weight tripled. Even as its poor starved, England was stuffed with food; even as land became rich and thick with green hedges, the country's poor became landless. These quaint hedgerows are not the stuff of Old England: they are what killed it. Walled off from sustenance, the rural poor flooded into industrial cities, ripe for exploitation. By the time Cobbett arrived at that Liverpool dock in 1819, he found a country tipping into revolution.
Not of men-but of machines.
A road branches off from the A323, and it is so unremarkable that one can drive rig
ht past it, which is indeed what every car does:
COBBETT HILL ROAD
Parish
of
Worplesdon
I should think the parish name alone is worth stopping for. Just beyond its opening verge, hidden behind a thicket, there hides a pleasant little clearing. A placid brown hare gazes at me from it, twitches in the laziest manner possible for his species, and lopes off with a perfunctory, not-trying-terribly-hard-at-hoppinggait. He meanders up and across the deserted back road and toward a driveway bearing a sign reading COBBETT'S CLOSE.
Cobbett's close!
Oh, but is he? Is he close? I fear not. It's on some of Cobbett's old farmland, true, but it's hard to imagine a place that could now be further from Cobbett's heart. For Cobbett's Close is a trailer park—a gathering of prefabricated buildings, if you prefer—all plunked down like so many discarded cracker cartons in these woods. There they sit: modern structures not really built to last, erected on privately owned property, and not a garden plot or a grazing sheep in sight.
If you wanted a repudiation of everything Cobbett lived for, this might be it. When he wrote a book titled Cottage Economy, he was not speaking of being economical in the modern sense of cheapness: he was talking about creating a national economy of cottages. He longed to instruct the populace in moving back to the land, back to self-sufficiency, to grow and make for themselves. But the only thing you can grow in boxy prefabs like these is hydroponic weed; the only thing you can make is microwave popcorn. Cobbett saw all this coming even in his own day. 'To buy the thing, ready made, was the taste of the day," he mocked. 'Thousands, who were house-keepers, bought their dinners ready cooked: nothing was so common as to rent breasts for children to suck: a man actually advertised, in the London papers, to supply childless husbands with heirs! In this case, the articles were, of course, to be ready made."
The argument he began lives on even today. Paine and Cobbett were their era's perfect expressions of progressivism and conservatism. While Cobbett hoed turnips and railed against the mill towns and the destruction of the rhythms of rural life, Paine spent his post-Revolution years suggesting improvements in steam engines, inventing smokeless candles so that people could stay up late, and hawking the newfangled cast-iron bridge he designed. Cobbett looked to the past for Britain's salvation, Paine to the future; what they shared was a profound dissatisfaction with the present . . . oh, and with each other. Paine referred to the self-styled Peter Porcupine as "Peter Skunk," while Cobbett's pet name for Paine was generally "hypocritical monster" or the snappier "Infidel."
Indeed, Cobbett went so far in 1796 as to reprint and annotate a hostile biography The Life of Thomas Paine— a hit job secretly funded by the British government, it had been published under a pseudonym in 1791, and slyly subtitled A Defense of His Writings, the better to lure in and sucker punch Paine's own readers. But its accuracy and origins did not concern Cobbett much. Unusually for a biographer, Cobbett frankly professed ignorance of what Paine was even up to anymore, nor did he care:
How Tom gets a living now, or what Brothel he inhabits, I know not, nor does it much signify. He has done all the mischief he can do in this world; and whether his carcass is at last suffered to rot on the earth, or to be dried in the air, is of very little consequence. Whenever and wherever he breathes his last, he will excite neither sorrow nor compassion; no friendly hand will close his eyes, not a groan will be uttered, not a tear will be shed. Like Judas, he will be remembered by posterity; men will learn to express all that is base, malignant, treacherous, unnatural, and blasphemous by the single monosyllable of Paine.
As a thoughtful final touch, Cobbett added that he very much looked forward to his subject being "abandoned in death, and interred like a dog." Strange words for a man who, reporting to British readers back home while on another American sojourn twenty years later, now complained that "PAINE lies in a little hole under the grass and weeds of an obscure farm in America." And—he now added rather cryptically-"there, however, he shall not lie, unnoticed much longer." Cobbett, having gotten his old wish for Paine to be interred like a dog, now wanted to raise a monument to the man.
What?
One might question Cobbett's sanity: certainly his detractors did, and they had no lack of apparent madness to point at. One favorite sport of newspapers was to arrange vehemently pro and scabrously con quotes about issues of the day, where quoted verbatim for the pro side was Mr. William Cobbett. And quoted verbatim for the con side was . . . Mr. William Cobbett.
Generally, when a man is rabidly for one cause, and then is just as rabidly for another cause, it is not because he loves the causes: it is because he loves the rabies. But there was something more than that at work with Cobbett. His two years of jail time in London had profoundly changed him. A man who once loudly applauded the death penalty—'When you hear a man loud against the severity of the laws, set him down as a rogue," he'd written—now discovered that life looked different from the other side of the bars. Paine had died only months before, in 1809, a frail old man hounded to the last: now that he, too, was thrown against the wall, Cobbett viewed his hated old enemy differently. He passed his hours in prison reading Paine's 1796 pamphlets The Decline and Fall of the British System of Finance and Agrarian Justice, and realized with horror that all these years he'd been assailing a blood brother.
"This man, born in a humble life, knew more than all the Higher orders put together," Cobbett concluded. Though barely known alongside Common Sense, Paine's essays were indeed extraordinary. Decline and Fall decried the British government's use of unbacked paper currency to finance foreign adventurism through ever-spiraling debts; these, in turn, required more wars to shore up domestic support and foreign resources. The national debt, Paine contended, would eventually become a national bankruptcy—and strength of its financial markets could prove the country's greatest weakness. "It will not be from the inability of procuring loans that the system will break up," he admonished. "On the contrary, it is the facility with which loans can be procured that hastens the event." Paine was deeply unimpressed by the financial acumen of members of Parliament—”they only understand fox-hunting," he snapped-and he was not fooled by the smoke and mirrors the Prime Minister employed to pay down this debt: "As to Mr. Pitt's project of paying off the national debt by applying a million a year for that purpose, while he continues adding more than twenty millions a year to it, it is like setting a man with a wooden leg to run after a hare. The longer he runs the further he is off."
Instead of endless conquest and debt, Paine's sister pamphlet Agrarian Justice proposed that Britain turn inward and tend to its own assets. He thought it hopeless to turn back the clock on Enclosure Acts, nor was he particularly opposed to the wealth they brought—"I care not how affluent some may be," he shrugged, "provided that none be miserable in consequence of it." But the newly landless poor, Paine warned, now faced becoming a "hereditary race." The wealthy were becoming a hereditary race, too, thanks to land inheritance, and Paine proposed a novel way to make them pay for this new social order: estate taxes. After all, he reasoned, "personal property is the effect of Society"—so the least they could do was support the cause. The collected monies would provide minimum stake for everyone when they were getting a start in life, and when they were approaching its close. "Create a National Fund," he proposed, "out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of Fifteen Pounds sterling, as a compensation in part for the loss of his or natural inheritance by the introduction of the system of landed property; and also the sum of Ten Pounds per annum, during life, to every person now living of the age of fifty years."
What Paine proposed looks astonishingly like modern state pensions and student grants, which we take for granted now without much thinking about the seismic shifts in the social order that necessitated them. Only someone like Cobbett—sent as a soldier in a corrupt regiment to defend barren land, and returning home to find his farming commu
nity destroyed—could fully understand why Paine was assailing military debt and the menace of rural poverty. And this was why, chastened and humbled before the grave of his old enemy, the one-time Peter Porcupine had preceded his return to Liverpool with a remarkable letter to his astonished newspaper readers back home. "Our expedition set out from New York in the middle of the night," he reported, "got to the place (22 miles off) at the peep of day, took up the coffin entire; brought it off to New York; and just as we found it, it goes to England." He'd return with Paine's bones, he promised, in a couple of months. "At any rate, I will be there, or at the bottom of the sea."
But he couldn't contain himself, and Cobbett booked passage on another boat scarcely following the one bearing his letter. Quaker passengers refused to board when they heard of its cargo, muttering about God striking the vessel down; this was not an entirely fanciful expectation, as on a previous voyage lightning had struck two passengers sitting at either side of Cobbett. But he was elated at the prospect of returning with his prize—"These bones will effect the reformation of England in church and state" he giddily claimed before leaving New York—and with him arriving at the Liverpool docks just days after his first article appeared, the crowds meeting him at the docks were still abuzz over what he'd done. And that wasn't the only surprise he had in store for them: now, he announced, he was going to raise money for a grand English tomb to Paine.