William Cobbett Part 1 -Royalist To Radical
There’s something deliciously perverse about a man who travels three thousand miles to defend the British Crown from American republicans, only to return home and spend the rest of his life calling the same monarchy a nest of parasites and plunderers.
William Cobbett, that most contrary of Englishmen, managed this pirouette with shameless consistency. Or do I mean shameless? He never actually changed his mind about anything fundamental – he simply discovered that the real enemy wasn’t where he’d been looking.
The young Cobbett sailed to America in 1792 fresh from his stint as a sergeant major in the army. He’d already shown his talent for making enemies by attempting to expose corruption amongst his fellow officers. On arrival he threw himself into the political pamphlet wars of Philadelphia with enthusiasm. Writing under the pseudonym Peter Porcupine, he savaged American democrats, French revolutionaries, and anyone else who dared suggest that kings might be an optional extra in the great scheme of governance.
His pamphlets had titles like “A Bone to Gnaw for the Democrats” and “The Bloody Buoy,” which rather gives you a flavour. Cobbett didn’t just disagree with his opponents; he eviscerated them with the sort of gleeful viciousness that would make a modern Twitter mob blush. He described American democracy as “a government of blackguards for blackguards”. When a Philadelphia mob smashed his shop windows, he was positively delighted – nothing confirmed his arguments quite like his enemies proving they were the sort of people who smashed shop windows.
Yet even then, there were hints of what was to come. Cobbett’s royalism wasn’t the deferential variety of the country squire touching his forelock to his betters. It was combative, argumentative, and shot through with a profound suspicion of anyone who claimed to be acting in the people’s interest whilst lining their own pockets. He defended the Crown not because he loved hierarchy, but because he despised humbug, and American republicans struck him as humbugs.
The transformation began almost the moment he returned to England in 1800 having made the US too hot to be comfortable. Cobbett had expected to be welcomed as a returning hero who’d fought the good fight against foreign sedition. Instead, he found himself largely ignored by the very establishment he’d championed. Worse still, he began to notice that the corruption he’d railed against in America was rather more endemic at home than he’d cared to admit. The same instinct that had made him suspicious of American democracy now turned its merciless gaze on British institutions.
Fame came when he launched his Political Register in 1802. Initially, this was meant to be a respectable Tory journal, the sort of thing that would earn him a government pension and the approval of his social superiors. But his pen too sharp to maintain such dreary respectability for long. He just couldn’t help himself. Within a few years, the Political Register had become the scourge of everything Cobbett had once defended.
The Napoleonic Wars provided the perfect laboratory for his evolving politics. Taxes soared and ordinary people suffered whilst government contractors grew fat on military spending. Cobbett’s fury found its true target. He began to see that the real enemy wasn’t foreign republicans or domestic radicals, but what he termed “The Thing” – that interconnected web of placemen, pensioners, tax-farmers, and profiteers who battened on the nation’s wealth whilst ordinary folk bore the burden. It was his version of the “deep state”.
His attack on the flogging of militiamen at Ely in 1809 showed the pattern. When local militiamen were sentenced to be flogged for demanding their back pay, Cobbett exploded with righteous indignation. This wasn’t about constitutional theory or abstract rights – it was about men being brutally punished for asking for wages they’d earned. His subsequent imprisonment for seditious libel only confirmed what he’d begun to suspect: that the system he’d once defended was rotten to its core.
Prison transformed Cobbett from a Tory journalist into something far more dangerous – a radical with intimate knowledge of how power actually worked. He emerged from Newgate with his contempt for authority refined and his understanding of popular grievances sharpened by personal experience. The man who’d once defended the established order now dedicated himself to exposing its hypocrisies and contradictions.
Like so many of today’s populist firebrands, Cobbett combined genuine insight into systemic corruption with a talent for inflammatory rhetoric that sometimes obscured more than it revealed. His instinct for the jugular, his contempt for conventional wisdom, and his ability to articulate popular resentment against distant elites is instantly recognisable to anyone familiar with modern media.
But there’s a crucial difference that makes Cobbett both more admirable and more frustrating than his modern counterparts. His political journey was driven by a genuine evolution in understanding rather than mere opportunism. When he switched sides, it wasn’t because he’d calculated which position would be more profitable.
This intellectual honesty came at considerable personal cost. Cobbett’s political transformation alienated him from polite society whilst his combative personality ensured he made enemies even amongst his natural allies. He was too radical for the Tories, too independent for the Whigs, and too bourgeois for the working-class radicals. He was certainly radical, but he wasn’t really a radical. He didn’t have any theory about how the world should be. He just hit out at individuals doing stuff that was wrong.
In our own age of political polarisation, when changing one’s mind is seen as weakness rather than wisdom, Cobbett’s example offers both inspiration and warning. His willingness to follow his convictions wherever they led, regardless of personal cost, is admirable. But his inability to doubt his own certainty, even when spectacularly wrong, reminds us that intellectual courage without intellectual humility can be a dangerous combination. William Cobbett never learned to question his own infallibility – a failing that would cost him dearly both in the purse and in his long term reputation.
