William Cobbett was an English pamphleteer, journalist, politician, and farmer born in Farnham, Surrey.
49 Facts About William Cobbett
2.
William Cobbett was one of an agrarian faction seeking to reform Parliament, abolish "rotten boroughs", restrain foreign activity, and raise wages, with the goal of easing poverty among farm labourers and small land holders.
3.
William Cobbett's radicalism furthered the Reform Act 1832 and gained him one of two newly created seats in Parliament for the borough of Oldham.
4.
William Cobbett's best known book is Rural Rides.
5.
William Cobbett argued against Malthusianism, saying economic betterment could support global population growth.
6.
William Cobbett was taught to read and write by his father and he started working from an early age.
7.
William Cobbett's rural upbringing gave him a lifelong love of gardening and hunting.
8.
William Cobbett joined the 54th Regiment of Foot in 1783.
9.
Between 1785 and 1791, William Cobbett was stationed with his regiment in New Brunswick and sailed from Gravesend in Kent to Halifax, Nova Scotia.
10.
William Cobbett had developed an animosity towards some officers, suspecting them of corruption, and gathered evidence on the matter while in New Brunswick.
11.
William Cobbett wrote The Soldier's Friend in 1792, in protest against the low pay and harsh treatment of enlisted men in the British army.
12.
William Cobbett arrived at Wilmington, and settled in Philadelphia during the spring of 1793.
13.
William Cobbett initially prospered by teaching English to Frenchmen and translating texts from French to English.
14.
William Cobbett later claimed that he had become a political writer by accident: during an English lesson one of his French students read aloud from a New York newspaper the addresses of welcome that the Democrats had sent to Joseph Priestley upon his arrival in America, along with Priestley's replies.
15.
In 1795, William Cobbett wrote A Bone to Gnaw for the Democrats, which attacked the pro-French Democratic Party.
16.
William Cobbett replied to his critics with A Kick for a Bite, which was his first work to be published under the pseudonym "Peter Porcupine"; a reviewer had compared him to a porcupine, which pleased him.
17.
William Cobbett took the side of the Federalists, who were led by Alexander Hamilton, because they were friendlier to Britain than were the pro-French Democrats led by Thomas Jefferson.
18.
Talleyrand, at the time a French spy in America, tried but failed to bribe William Cobbett to join the French cause.
19.
William Cobbett reprinted and published much of the extreme loyalist literature then current, including George Chalmers's hostile biography of Thomas Paine, as well as his own version, reproducing Chalmer's work interspersed with contemptuous comments.
20.
William Cobbett was tried in the State Court of Pennsylvania by Chief Justice Thomas McKean.
21.
The British government was grateful to Cobbett for supporting Britain's interests in America: the Duke of Kent hailed him as "this great British patriot"; the British representative in America, Robert Liston, offered him a "great pecuniary reward", and the Secretary at War, William Windham, said that Cobbett deserved a statue of gold for the services he had rendered to Britain in America.
22.
William Cobbett immediately began a pamphlet, Important Considerations for the People of the Kingdom, warning the country of the consequences of a French invasion.
23.
William Cobbett formed a close friendship with Windham, who became his patron and shared his anti-Jacobinism and his love of rural and athletic sports.
24.
William Cobbett intended to campaign for Parliament in Honiton in 1806, but was persuaded by Thomas Cochrane, 10th Earl of Dundonald to let him campaign in his stead.
25.
William Cobbett was found guilty of treasonous libel on 15 June 1810, after objecting in The Register to the flogging at Ely, Cambridgeshire of local militiamen by Hanoverians.
26.
On his release, a dinner in his honour in London was attended by 600 people and directed by Sir Francis Burdett, who like William Cobbett was a strong advocate of parliamentary reform.
27.
William Cobbett could sell only about a thousand copies a week.
28.
In 1816 William Cobbett began publishing the Political Register as a pamphlet.
29.
William Cobbett wrote The American Gardener, one of the earliest horticultural books published in the United States.
30.
William Cobbett arrived back in Britain at Liverpool by ship in November 1819.
31.
William Cobbett joined with other radicals in attacks on the government and was charged with libel three times in the next couple of years.
32.
William Cobbett began riding about the country observing events in towns and villages.
33.
Rural Rides, a work for which William Cobbett is still known, appeared first in serial form in the Political Register from 1822 to 1826, and then in book form in 1830.
34.
William Cobbett contrasted the Evangelical reformers' campaign for the abolition of black slavery with their support for the "factory slavery" of British workers.
35.
William Cobbett argued that black slaves were better fed, clothed and housed than British workers, and were better treated by their masters.
36.
In 1829, William Cobbett published Advice To Young Men, in which he criticised An Essay on the Principle of Population by the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus.
37.
William Cobbett continued to publish controversial content in the Political Register and was charged in July 1831 with seditious libel for a pamphlet entitled Rural War, endorsing the Captain Swing Riots, in which rioters were smashing farm machinery and burning haystacks.
38.
William Cobbett still sought to be elected to the House of Commons.
39.
William Cobbett was defeated in Preston in 1826 and in Manchester in 1832, but after the passage of the Reform Act 1832, Cobbett won the seat of Oldham.
40.
In Parliament, William Cobbett concentrated his energies on attacking corruption in government and the 1834 Poor Law.
41.
William Cobbett believed that the poor had a right to a share in the community's wealth and that the Old Poor Law was the last remaining right that English workers possessed, and which set them apart from other countries which had no such provision.
42.
From 1831 until his death, William Cobbett managed a farm named Ash in the village of Normandy, Surrey, a few miles from his birthplace at Farnham.
43.
William Cobbett died there after a brief illness in June 1835 and was buried in the churchyard of St Andrew's Church, Farnham.
44.
William Cobbett is considered to have begun as an inherently conservative journalist.
45.
William Cobbett was angered by the corrupt British political establishment, and became increasingly radical and sympathetic to antigovernment and democratic ideals.
46.
William Cobbett provided a panegyric extolling rural England during the Industrial Revolution, the latter of which he was not in sympathy.
47.
William Cobbett wished England would return to the rural England of the 1760s, in which he had been born.
48.
Unlike fellow radical Thomas Paine, William Cobbett was not an internationalist cosmopolitan and did not endorse a republican Britain.
49.
William Cobbett's writing style was parodied by Horace and James Smith in their collection, Rejected Addresses.