Cobbett, WILLIAM, born at Farnham, Surrey, on 9th March 1762, was the son of a small farmer, and grandson of a day-labourer. From scaring crows the boy rose to be ploughman; but a visit to Portsmouth and a sight of the fleet had spoiled him for farming, when, in May 1783, a sudden freak took him to London. He reached it with just half-a-crown, and for nine months was quill-driver to a Gray's Inn attorney. Enlisting then in the 54th Foot, he first spent a year at Chatham, where he mastered Lowth's English Grammar, and read through a whole lending library—Swift's Tale of a Tub had been his boyhood's delight. Next he served as sergeant-major in New Brunswick (1785–91), meanwhile saving 150 guineas, and studying rhetoric, geometry, logic, French, and fortification. On his return he obtained a most flattering discharge; in February 1792 married; but in March went to France to get out of a court-martial on three of his late officers, whom he had taxed with peculation. Six months later he sailed for America. At Philadelphia he taught English to French refugees (Talleyrand wanted to be one of his pupils); translated from the French; and, as 'Peter Porcupine,' wrote fierce onslaughts on Dr Priestley, Tom Paine, and the native Democrats. Twice he was prosecuted for libel, and America got too hot for him, so in June 1800 he returned to England. The Tories welcomed him with open arms; and in 1802 he started his famous Wckly Political Register, which, with one three-months' break in 1817, continued till his death. But, Tory first, it altered its politics in 1804, till at last it 'became the most fierce and determined opponent of the government, and the most uncompromising champion of Radicalism.' A great lover of the country, Cobbett settled at Botley in Hampshire, where he planted, farmed, and went in for manly sports; a true soldiers' friend, he got two years in Newgate (1810–12), with a fine of £1000, for his strictures on the flogging of militiamen by German mercenaries. In 1817 money muddles and dread of a second imprisonment drove him once more across the Atlantic. He farmed in Long Island, writing all the while for the Register, till in 1819 he ventured back again, and came bringing Tom Paine's bones—the one really silly action of his life. Botley had to be sold, but he started a seed-farm at Kensington; and bent now on entering parliament, stood for Coventry (1821) and Preston (1826). Both times he failed; but his ill-advised trial for sedition (1831) was followed next year by his return for Oldham to the first Reformed parliament. His career there, if not quite a failure, was signalised chiefly by a crack-brained attack on Peel; anyhow, the late hours were too much for him, and on 18th June 1835 he died at Normanby farm, near Guildford. He was buried at Farnham.
Coarse, virulent, braggadocio, inconsistent—Cobbett was all this. He was often right, but he must have been oftener wrong, for oftener he came to abuse what once he had eulogised than vice versa. He was a very Ishmael of politics; Lord Dalting dubs him 'the contentious man.' Still, a man he was, a genuine John Bull; and if he wrote nonsense about Waterloo and the national debt, and more nonsense than sense about the Reformation, he wrote it in fine strong English. He loathed Whigs and 'mock gentlefolks,' but he honestly loved the poor—loved Nature, too, and could paint her dear English scenery with a freshness and insight wholly and solely his own. The Rural Rides (new edition, with notes by Pitt Cobbett, 1885) are unsurpassable. They were a reprint (1830) from the Register, and followed or were followed by Porcupine's Works (12 vols. 1801), the excellent and entertaining English Grammar (1818), the savage History of the Reformation (1824–27), the Woodlands (1825), the shrewd, homely Advice to Young
Men (1830), and forty or fifty more works. Cobbett was further the originator of Hansard's Debates (1806), and of Howell's State Trials (1809). See Lord Dalling's Historical Characters (5th ed. 1876), and Edward Smith's Life of Cobbett (2 vols. 1878).