Gradually,as he looked back upon the 'good old times,'he developed the theory expounded in his History of the Reformation.It is a singular performance,written at the period of his most reckless exasperation (1824-27),but with his full vigour of style.He declares 117in 1825that he has sold forty-five thousand copies,and it has been often reprinted.The purpose is to show that the Reformation was 'engendered in beastly lust,brought forth in hypocrisy,and cherished and fed by plunder and devastation,and by rivers of English and Irish blood,'118Briefly,it is the cause of every evil that has happened since,including,the debt,the banks,the stockjobbers,and the American revolution.'119In proving this,Cobbett writes in the spirit of some vehement Catholic bigot,maddened by the penal laws.Henry VIII,Elizabeth,and William III are his monsters;the Marys of England and Scotland his ideal martyrs.He almost apologises for the massacre of St.Bartholomew and the Gunpowder Plot;and,in spite of his patriotism,attributes the defeat of the Armada to a storm,for fear of praising Elizabeth.The bitterest Ultramontane of to-day would shrink from some of this Radical's audacious statements.Cobbett,in spite of his extravagance,shows flashes of his usual shrewdness.He remarks elsewhere that the true way of studying history is to examine acts of parliament and lists of prices of labour and of food;120and he argues upon such grounds for the prosperity of the agricultural labourer under Edward III,'when a dung-cart filler could get a fat goose and a half for half a day's work,'He makes some telling hits,as when he contrasts William of Wykeham with Brownlow North,the last bishop of Winchester.Protestants condemned celibacy.Well,had William been married,we should not have had Winchester school,or New College;had Brownlow North been doomed to celibacy,he would not have had ten sons and sons-in-law to share twenty-four rich livings,besides prebends and other preferments;and perhaps he would not have sold small beer from his episcopal palace at Farnham.Cobbett's main doctrine is that when the Catholic church flourished,the population was actually more numerous and richer,that the care of the priests and monks made pauperism impossible,and that ever since the hideous blunder perpetrated by the reformers everything has been going from bad to worse.When it was retorted that the census proved the population to be growing,he replied that the census was a lie.Were the facts truly stated,he declares,we should have a population of near twenty-eight million in England by the end of this century,121a manifest reductio ad absurdum.If it were remarked that there was a Catholic church in France,and that Cobbett proves his case by the superiority of the English poor to the French poor,he remarked summarily that the French laws were different.122Thus,the one monster evil is the debt,and the taxes turn out to have been a Protestant invention made necessary by the original act of plunder.That was Cobbett's doctrine,and,however perverse might be some of his reasonings,it was clearly to the taste of a large audience.The poor-law was merely a partial atonement for a vast and continuous process of plunder.Corrupt as might be its actual operation,it was a part of the poor man's patrimony,extorted by fear from the gang of robbers who fattened upon their labours.
Cobbett's theories need not be discussed from the logical or historical point of view.They are the utterances of a man made unscrupulous by his desperate circumstances,fighting with boundless pugnacity,ready to strike any blow,fair or foul,so long as it will vex his enemies,and help to sell the Register.His pugnacity alienated all his friends.Not only did Whigs and Tories agree in condemning him,but the Utilitarians hated and despised him,and his old friends,Burnett and Hunt,were alienated from him,and reviled by him.His actual followers were a small and insignificant remnant.Yet Cobbett,like Owen,represented in a crude fashion blind instincts of no small importance in the coming years,And it is especially to be noted that in one direction the philosophic Coleridge and the keen Quarterly Review er Southey,and the Socialist Owen and the reactionary Radical Cobbett,were more in agreement than they knew.What alarmed them was the vast social change indicated by the industrial revolution.In one way or another they connected all the evils of the day with the growth of commerce and manufactures,and the breaking up of the old system of domestic trade and village life.123That is to say,that in a dumb and inarticulate logic,though in the loudest tones of denunciation,Tories and Socialists,and nonde Radicals were raging against the results of the great social change,which the Utilitarians regarded as the true line of advance of the day,this gives the deepest line of demarcation,and brings us to the political economy,which shows most fully how the case presented itself to the true Utilitarian.
NOTES:
1.Bain's James Mill ,p.215.
2.Autobiography ,p.104.
3.Miscellaneous Work s (Popular Edition),p.131.
4.The articles from the Encyclopaedia upon Government Jurisprudence Liberty of the Press,Prisons and Prison Discipline,Colonies,Law of Nations,Education,were reprinted in a volume 'not for sale',in 1825and 1828.I quote from a reprint not dated.
5.'Government',pp.3-5.
6.'Government',p.8.
7.'Government',p.9.
8.Ibid.p.11.
9.Ibid.p.9.
10.Ibid.p.12.
11.'Government',p.9.