William Cobbett
Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘William Cobbett’
In January 1807, newspapers breathlessly reported that Napoleon Bonaparte’s rampage across Europe was at an end — but was it true?
In January 1807, as Napoleon Bonaparte’s armies swept across the Continent building his French Empire, British newspapers printed a cheering story about how the Russians had inflicted a calamitous defeat on Napoleon. William Cobbett didn’t believe a word of it, and expressed his doubts in a masterly metaphor which made ‘red herrings’ into a household proverb.
Riding through Sussex, William Cobbett comes across a large family relaxing together in front of their charming cottage.
Radical MP William Cobbett was a man of strong emotions. Among them was a rooted objection to the Revd Thomas Malthus, who in a learned study on population begged Government to dampen the birth-rate among the working classes, or else the planet would soon be stalked by famine, war and pestilence. Cobbett faced the prospect of impending catastrophe without anxiety.
William Cobbett recalls his first taste of classic literature, for which he had to go without his supper.
At eleven, William Cobbett’s (1763-1835) ambition was to be a gardener at Kew. It would be a step up from clipping hedges and weeding flower beds for the Bishop of Winchester back home in Farnham, but it meant walking all the way to Richmond, a distance of nearly thirty miles as the crow flies, and with threepence all his wealth.
Some likened tax-and-spend to a refreshing shower of rain, but for William Cobbett the rain wasn’t falling mainly on the plain man.
William Cobbett castigated the Government for overtaxing employers, and then congratulating themselves on handing out a little welfare to the underpaid and unemployed while pocketing the difference. Better, Cobbett said, to stop the job-killing taxes, so the working man can have a fair crack at dignified independence.
William Cobbett makes a distinction between everyday business and the murky world of Westminster lobbyists and financial speculation.
William Cobbett, MP for Oldham, was sometimes accused of being anti-trade because he criticised the cosy arrangement between Government, big banks and big business. He replied with his customary vigour, distinguishing clearly between two kinds of commerce, the free trade that promotes liberty and the cronyism that endangers it.
Oldham’s firebrand MP William Cobbett rips into the the City of London for blocking economic and political progress in India.
In 1813, the East India Company held a Government-sponsored monopoly over all trade between London and her colonies, but a history of scandals and mismanagement led to calls for free trade. The City of London objected strongly in a Commons debate in January 1813, and William Cobbett MP could hardly believe his ears.