INTRODUCTION 



remitted. A stoppage for their knapsacks was the ground 

 of complaint that excited this mutinous spirit, which 

 occasioned the men to surround their officers, and demand 

 what they deemed their arrears. The first division of the 

 German Legion halted yesterday at Newmarket on their 

 return to Bury.&quot; 



Cobbett commented on this in his Register with such quick and 

 honourable anger, such intense contempt for wanton authority, 

 that action was tardily taken against him. His defence was far 

 less gallant and effective than his attack had been ; he was con 

 victed, condemned to two years imprisonment, to pay a fine of a 

 thousand pounds, and at the end of his imprisonment to give 

 heavy bail and find sureties for his keeping the peace for seven 

 years. Prison life in Newgate, mitigated as it was by means, 

 industry and the kindness of friends, was a sore experience, and 

 it is wonderful that the violent-minded victim was not more 

 embittered than his subsequent writings reveal. 



On his release from prison in 1812, Cobbett was entertained 

 like a martyr restored from the flames. He had maintained an 

 incredible literary activity during his two years imprisonment ; 

 he boasted of it with characteristic self-satisfaction most 

 lengthily and amusingly in his Advice to Young Men and now 

 he emerged once more into the sun of men s attention. His 

 mind was flattered and quickened. The bond for seven years 

 keeping the peace restrained his ardour, but he could not be 

 pacific in the face of tyranny, nor timid at the sight of power ; 

 and he soon began moving about the country (much in the way of 

 his more famous Rural Rides which followed, in 1821, his second 

 return from the United States), and addressing an exasperated 

 and expectant people. His boldness and readiness in public 

 controversy are amusing, and it was in one of his meetings with 

 county freeholders that he dealt thus with an opponent : 



&quot; I fixed my eye upon him, and pointing my hand down 

 right, and making a sort of chastising motion, said Peace, 

 babbling slave ! * which produced such terror amongst 

 others, that I met with no more interruption.&quot; 



A result of these journeys was the revived prosperity of the 

 Register and, in 1816, the issue of a twopenny edition (Cobbett s 

 Twopenny Trasli) for the enlightenment of the masses. 



Parliament was now the enemy against which his most powerful 

 blows were aimed. The cause of the present discontents he 

 asserted was the taxes, and this intolerable taxation proceeded 

 in turn from the want of Parliamentary Reform. At the time of 

 the Luddite agitation he deprecated violence, and was candid 

 enough to tell his audience that there was no solid objection to 

 the use of machinery ; machines distinguished the civil from the 



