William Cobbett Biography Quotes 17 Report mistakes

Early Life and Self-Education
William Cobbett was born in 1763 at Farnham in Surrey, the son of a small farmer and innkeeper. From an early age he knew the routines of rural labor, the seasons, and the precariousness of life on the land. His formal schooling was brief, but he taught himself by reading and by observing how things were done in fields, shops, and barracks. A sharp eye for hypocrisy and waste, together with a gift for clear and forceful prose, would define his career long after he left the plough behind.

Soldier and Awakening to Politics
As a young man Cobbett enlisted in the British Army and served in North America. He rose in the ranks through discipline and intelligence, and he later described how he learned English grammar by drilling himself on sentences during the quiet stretches of garrison life. Military service exposed him to distant colonies and to the machinery of imperial administration. It also placed in his mind a lasting suspicion of high officials who, in his view, prospered while common men paid the price. That suspicion, directed at figures like William Pitt the Younger and later at Lord Liverpool, would become one of the strongest currents in his writing.

America and Peter Porcupine
After leaving the army Cobbett emigrated to the United States in the 1790s and entered public life as a polemicist under the pen name Peter Porcupine. In Philadelphia he edited a combative newspaper and wrote pamphlets that attacked French revolutionary ideas and their admirers in America. His fiercest legal conflict arose with the renowned physician Benjamin Rush, whom he accused of harmful medical practices; Rush sued for libel and won, and Cobbett soon departed for England. The episode confirmed his belief that courts and influence could be wielded to silence inconvenient voices, a theme he would revisit again and again.

Publisher of the Political Register
Back in England he founded the Political Register in 1802. At first he stood close to conservative positions, praising order and the British constitution while denouncing Jacobinism. Over time, however, as he saw taxation, wartime profiteering, and the burdens laid on rural laborers, he turned against what he called the system of Old Corruption. He attacked sinecures and waste, criticized the Bank of England's paper money policies, and denounced ministers such as Lord Castlereagh and Lord Sidmouth for repressive measures. His style was plain, relentless, and aimed at lay readers who lacked schooling but not intelligence.

Trial, Imprisonment, and Radicalization
Cobbett's pursuit of official abuses led to prosecution. After he condemned the flogging of militiamen, he was convicted of seditious libel and spent two years in a London prison. He continued to write from confinement, relying on the practical support of his wife, Anne, and friends across the reform movement. The experience hardened his opposition to arbitrary authority. He emerged more committed than ever to exposing the link, as he saw it, between paper credit, a swollen national debt, and the misery of laborers. His series on money and banking, later collected as Paper against Gold, distilled those convictions.

From Botley to the Two-Penny Register
Settled for a time at Botley in Hampshire, Cobbett farmed, wrote, and built a large readership. In 1816 he cut the price of the Political Register to two pence so working people could afford it; enemies derided it as Two-Penny Trash, but it reached tens of thousands and became an influential vehicle for reform ideas. He published practical guides like Cottage Economy, insisting that household skills, small-scale husbandry, and thrift could restore independence to rural families. He also gave space to radical voices, including Sir Francis Burdett and Henry Hunt, whose speeches and campaigns for representation resonated with artisans and laborers.

Exile, Thomas Paine, and Return
The government's repressive climate drove Cobbett to temporary exile in the United States in 1817. On Long Island he wrote A Grammar of the English Language and other practical works for ordinary readers. In 1819 he exhumed the remains of Thomas Paine in New Rochelle and brought them to England, hoping to erect a monument to a writer whose cause he had once opposed and later came to honor for championing the rights of the common man. The remains were later lost, but the episode symbolized Cobbett's evolving stance: loyalty to plain speech and popular rights over party.

Rural Rides and the English Countryside
After returning to England in 1819, Cobbett traversed the southern and midland counties on horseback, noting hedgerows, barns, soil, rents, and wages with the same care he brought to politics. Rural Rides, the book that grew out of these journeys, combined landscape writing with sharp social observation. He described the devastation wrought by low wages, tithes, and the manipulation of paper credit, and he depicted the resilience of small farmers and cottagers. His critique of tithes and the established Church dovetailed with his History of the Protestant Reformation, in which he argued that the poor suffered long after doctrinal battles ended.

Allies, Adversaries, and the Reform Era
Through the 1820s Cobbett aligned with radicals who pushed for parliamentary reform, including Burdett and Hunt, and lent support to Irish Catholic emancipation, whose foremost tribune was Daniel O'Connell. He condemned the Peterloo massacre and the Six Acts and urged peaceful, organized pressure for change. He chastised Tory leaders and scolded Whig ministers when Earl Grey's government moved cautiously. He opposed the Corn Laws and excoriated the boroughmongers who controlled rotten boroughs, arguing that national policy would never reflect the country's interests until representatives were chosen by a wider, freer electorate.

Member of Parliament for Oldham
The Reform Act of 1832 opened Parliament to new constituencies, and Cobbett was elected for Oldham alongside the mill-owner and reformer John Fielden. In the House of Commons he spoke with the directness of a pamphleteer, bringing petitions from working men and farmers and pressing for measures to ease taxes and rents, to dismantle sinecures, and to protect the independence of small producers. He attacked the New Poor Law of 1834, denouncing the workhouses as inhuman and warning that policy made by distant officials would crush parish life. Even as an MP he kept writing for the broader public, a parallel platform he used as effectively as any seat in the chamber.

Beliefs, Method, and Influence
Cobbett's thought fused political economy with moral economy. He distrusted paper abstractions, whether in finance or in prose, and preferred gold to paper, hands-on skill to theory, and common-law rights to bureaucratic schemes. He was a master of the open letter and the serial essay, educating readers in grammar one day and in monetary policy the next. His enemies called him inconsistent for moving from anti-Jacobin stances to radical reform, yet the thread running through his life was constancy to the interests of the laboring poor and the smallholder. Figures as different as O'Connell and Fielden found in him a trenchant ally; officials such as Lord Sidmouth and Lord Castlereagh counted him a persistent adversary.

Family, Later Years, and Death
Cobbett's household was central to his work. Anne managed business and family as he wrote at all hours, and their children grew up amid printing presses and proofs. His son John Morgan Cobbett later followed him into politics. In his final years he divided time between public duties and husbandry, maintaining the habits of a working farmer and the cadence of a weekly journalist. He died in 1835, and was buried at Farnham, amid the countryside that had shaped his voice. His legacy endures in Rural Rides, in the plain power of the Political Register, and in the example of a writer who made politics intelligible to people who tilled the soil and worked with their hands.

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