The son of a small Surrey farmer, a respectable Tory and churchman, ventured to plead against certain extraordinary cruelties being inflicted on Englishmen whose hands were tied, by the whips of German superiors; who were then parading in English fields their stiff foreign uniforms and their sanguinary foreign discipline.  In the countries from which they came, of course, such torments were the one monotonous means of driving men on to perish in the dead dynastic quarrels of the north; but to poor Will Cobbett, in his provincial island, knowing little but the low hills and hedges around the little church where he now lies buried, the incident seemed odd—­nay, unpleasing.  He knew, of course, that there was then flogging in the British army also; but the German standard was notoriously severe in such things, and was something of an acquired taste.  Added to which he had all sorts of old grandmotherly prejudices about Englishmen being punished by Englishmen, and notions of that sort.  He protested, not only in speech, but actually in print.  He was soon made to learn the perils of meddling in the high politics of the High Dutch militarists.  The fine feelings of the foreign mercenaries were soothed by Cobbett being flung into Newgate for two years and beggared by a fine of L1000.  That small incident is a small transparent picture of the Holy Alliance; of what was really meant by a country, once half liberalised, taking up the cause of the foreign kings.  This, and not “The Meeting of Wellington and Blucher,” should be engraved as the great scene of the war.  From this intemperate Fenians should learn that the Teutonic mercenaries did not confine themselves solely to torturing Irishmen.  They were equally ready to torture Englishmen:  for mercenaries are mostly unprejudiced.  To Cobbett’s eye we were suffering from allies exactly as we should suffer from invaders.  Boney was a bogey; but the German was a nightmare, a thing actually sitting on top of us.  In Ireland the Alliance meant the ruin of anything and everything Irish, from the creed of St. Patrick to the mere colour green.  But in England also it meant the ruin of anything and everything English, from the Habeas Corpus Act to Cobbett.

After this affair of the scourging, he wielded his pen like a scourge until he died.  This terrible pamphleteer was one of those men who exist to prove the distinction between a biography and a life.  From his biographies you will learn that he was a Radical who had once been a Tory.  From his life, if there were one, you would learn that he was always a Radical because he was always a Tory.  Few men changed less; it was round him that the politicians like Pitt chopped and changed, like fakirs dancing round a sacred rock.  His secret is buried with him; it is that he really cared about the English people.  He was conservative because he cared for their past, and liberal because he cared for their future.  But he was much more than this.  He had two forms of moral manhood very rare in our time: