By Penny Young
A summary of the 2010 Eric Paine Memorial Lecture
Two giants dominated English popular radical politics a couple of centuries ago. The two men were William Cobbett (1763-1835) and Henry Hunt (1773-1835). They fought for justice, human rights and a reformed, democratic House of Commons and went to prison because of their beliefs. Both men came from southern England, shared interests in politics and farming and both became fiercely independent MPs for northern constituencies. Hunt was a member of parliament for Preston during the passage of the Reform Bill of 1832, while Cobbett sat in the first reformed House of Commons as a member for Oldham.
The life of William Cobbett is well documented. Raised at the plough in Farnham in Surrey, he became the greatest radical political writer of the early nineteenth century, the man the essayist William Hazlitt called ‘a kind of fourth estate in the politics of the country.’ Cobbett’s Political Register was published weekly from 1802 until his death in 1835 and was read by everybody from presidents, kings and emperors to poets, soldiers and farm labourers. The establishment press or the ‘reptiles’, as he called them, loathed him. Governments plotted to suppress him and all his works that challenged them at every twist and turn. When Cobbett spoke out against the flogging of soldiers in Ely under the guard of German mercenaries, he was charged with seditious libel, found guilty and jailed in Newgate Prison for two years from 1810 to 1812. Many biographies have been written about William Cobbett and he is celebrated today.
By contrast, the name of Henry Hunt remains relatively unknown, although he was the greatest political speaker of his times. Derisively dubbed ‘Orator’ Hunt by his enemies and, like Cobbett, vilified and demonised by the establishment, Hunt was the darling of the people. When he spoke at mass public meetings, he attracted huge crowds. He was the first member of parliament to win a seat (for Preston in 1830) on a ticket of one man one vote. Hunt was the star speaker at the great reform meetings of Spa Fields in London in 1816/1817 and what went down in history as the Peterloo Massacre on St Peter’s Field in Manchester on 16 August 1819. The meeting had been called to support a reform of parliament and the abolition of the Corn Laws. Five minutes after it began, it was brought to an abrupt stop when the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry slashed their way into the crowds to arrest Hunt and the men standing with him on the platform. In his book, The Casualties of Peterloo, Michael Bush estimated that the action by the yeomanry, which was backed up by the 15th Hussars, resulted in the deaths of at least eighteen people, while the number of those injured exceeded seven hundred. The perpetrators were never brought to justice and it was Hunt and his co-defendants who were jailed. Hunt was given the longest sentence in the worst jail. He spent two and a half years incarcerated in a dank cell in Ilchester Prison in Somerset where he wrote his Memoirs.
There have been only two biographies of Henry Hunt. Robert Huish published one the year after Hunt’s death. The second was written by John Beichem. He launched his academic career with his outstanding, political biography of Hunt, which was published in 1985. Belchem’s book dispelled the myth of the violent, argumentative, vain demagogue, the man who wilfully opposed the so-called Great Reform Act of 1832. This was the image of Hunt that has been copied and repeated by historians and essayists through the ages. Beichem portrayed a very different Henry Hunt, the Wiltshire farmer who became a democratic radical, established a mass platform for parliamentary reform and who, alone in the House of Commons argued, quite correctly, that the planned reform bill was a cheat and a sham. Sadly, John Belchem’s biography is out of print.
What nobody has written about in any depth before is the unlikely but very real political partnership and close friendship between William Cobbett and Henry Hunt. Their relationship lasted in one way or another for thirty years until the deaths of both men in 1835 just four months apart. Nobody has charted its course from close friendship to deadly enmity with the various peaks and troughs in between. Quite simply, nobody was looking out for the story.
It was Hunt who began it. He became a fan of Cobbett as soon as the latter returned in 1800 from his first period of exile in the newly independent America. There, Cobbett had become the most well-known and controversial of writers and he set out to repeat the act in England. When he launched his weekly Political Register in 1802, Hunt became a loyal reader. He described in his Memoirs how he longed to become acquainted with this most celebrated writer of the day. In typical Hunt style, he took the bull by the horns and went up to London to call on Cobbett. His visit took place in 1805. It was not a particularly productive meeting. Both men took a dislike to each other. Hunt described it in detail in his Memoirs:
As I walked up Parliament Street, I mused upon the sort of being I had just left, and I own that my calculations did not in the slightest degree lead me to suppose that we should ever be upon such friendly terms, and indeed upon such an intimate footing, as we actually were for a number of years afterwards. It appeared to me that at our first meeting we were mutually disgusted with each other; and I left his house with a determination in my own mind never to see a second interview with him.
Hunt was indeed quite right in his assessment of Cobbett’s reaction. Cobbett was suspicious of Hunt and thought he was a bad character. He especially took exception to the fact that Hunt had left his own wife and was living with the wife of another man. In 1808, Cobbett wrote a private letter to his publisher, John Wright, warning him not to associate with Hunt:
There is one BEI, the Bristol man. Beware of him! He rides about the country with a whore, the wife of another man, having deserted his own. A sad fellow! Nothing to do with him.
Much to Cobbett’s fury, this letter was used against Hunt in the Westminster election of 1818 when Cobbett was in self-imposed exile in America.
Despite the initial mutual mistrust, however, Hunt persevered at forging a relationship and, despite his letter to Wright of 1808, Cobbett responded. The two men joined forces at political county meetings, taking great delight in bashing the system and baiting both the Whigs and the Tories, the Ins and the Outs, as they called them. Against all the odds, Cobbett the conservative radical, wily, experienced and fiercely independent, became the closest of friends with Hunt the democratic radical, ten years younger and totally new to the game. He addressed Hunt in his private letters as ‘my dear Hunt’. It was the highest compliment Cobbett could pay.
It is difficult to understand how it all happened. Cobbett was a busy and famous man. Hunt was a minor dabbler in county politics. What was the attraction? Cobbett possibly answered that question himself in his writings from exile in America the second time round between 1817-1819 when he explained why he liked Englishmen best.
The loud voice, the hard squeeze by the hand, the instant assent or dissent, the clamorous joy, the bitter wailing, the ardent friendship, the deadly enmity All these belong to the characters of Englishmen, in whose minds and hearts every feeling exists in the extreme.
Cobbett could have been describing himself. He was also consciously or unconsciously describing Henry Hunt. In many ways, despite the difference in age and temperament, the men were very similar, passionate and extreme in everything they did and the way they lived their lives. They also enjoyed a similar sense of humour.
It is a puzzle why the depths of their collaboration and friendship have never been explored before. The clues for it are all there. They can be found in Hunt’s Memoirs and Addresses and scattered through the numerous volumes of Cobbett’s Political Registers. The material is available, although it tends to be tucked away in dusty boxes, on scratched microfilm or hidden on obscure shelves in places like the British Library, the Library of Nuffield College, Oxford, universities in the USA and county record offices. The relationship can also be traced in contemporary comments, caricatures, lampoons, squibs and poetry as well as in diaries and letters, including those mainly from Cobbett to Hunt. Only two letters from Hunt to Cobbett survived. I believe they are the last two letters Hunt wrote to his old friend and political partner. They are doubly important because they reveal why Hunt severed relations with Cobbett. As far as I know, the two letters have never been made public before. When the two men finally fell out just before the Reform Act of 1832, the radical press sighed in oblique references and subtle hints that if only the pair could make it up, radical politics would be stronger for it. United we stand, divided we fall. Like all good stories, the story of Cobbett and Hunt is of contemporary significance.
When the pair did terminally fall out, it was like a nuclear explosion. After all the wonderful things Cobbett did with and wrote about Hunt, it is hard to read the tearing biting insults he repeatedly hurled against him. Hunt was the GREAT LIAR, the great impudent and ignorant oaf, a shuffling hulk and a carcase which only deserved to be whipped and beaten. After Cobbett wrote about Hunt’s ‘hackerings, the stammerings, the bogglings, the blunderings and the cowerings down’ of the ‘Preston cock’ in the Political Register of 12 February 1831, Hunt hit back in a public Address to Cobbett on ‘the Kensington Dunghill’. It was written in extreme bitterness:
This backbiter of every man that ever was acquainted with him, the calumniator of every one who ever rendered him a service has thought proper to put forth his impotent venom and to level his cowardly and malevolent attack upon me in an address to you, the People of Preston, in his last lying Register, I feel it a duty … to state the reasons that have caused the wretched creature thus to assail me.
Hunt went on to do so in ghastly detail.
This was a relationship that was conducted in the full glare of the public. The late Georgian and Regency public feasted on what the one wrote about the other. It was all there in black and white for everybody to read. There was Cobbett’s wife, Nancy, with her violent hatred of Hunt and her fury at her Billy’s friendship with that bad man. There was also Hunt’s long-time mistress, his beloved, beautiful Mrs Vince, illegitimate granddaughter of a baronet and part of the reason for Nancy Cobbett’s hatred. The press used Mrs Vince as a stick with which to beat Hunt. Legitimate tactics or press intrusion into private life? Cobbett stoutly defended Hunt, adding to his wife’s fury. Yet, everybody was able to read what Cobbett thought of men who dumped their wives and women who slept outside the marriage bed when he later published his Advice to Young Men. He was particularly severe about the women: ‘Here is a total want of delicacy; here is, in fact, prostitution,” he wrote.
Nancy’s attempted suicide — provoked by the renewal of her husband’s collaboration with Hunt — and the separation of Cobbett from his family were also common knowledge, as was the unfounded accusation made by Nancy that her husband had a homosexual relationship with his secretary. Cobbett’s biographers have largely avoided these matters, maybe out of a desire to protect his reputation or because they found them of no significance or because they believed the incidents were part of Cobbett’s private life and off limits. (Both George Spater and Richard Ingrams touched on the subjects.) Yet all these events sprang out of the relationship between William Cobbett and Henry Hunt and are of relevance in understanding what happened. None of it diminishes either of the men. We stand on the sidelines and admire them even more, for the men they were, for their integrity and determination to do what they believed in, and for their achievements.
These two men inspired generations. Two weeks after Cobbett’s funeral on Saturday, 27 June 1835 in Famham, the town of his birth, the deaths of both men were mourned and commemorated in a letter published in the Poor Man’s Guardian, one of the radical penny press newspapers. The letter positively remembered the two men in the heyday of their political struggle. It was a tribute from those who would help to carry the torch of reform into the future. The letter was written by the Bradford radical, Peter Bussey, one of the future leaders of the Chartist movement. It was very singular, he wrote, that within the space of a few months, they should lose two of the most staunch Reformers this country ever produced — Henry Hunt, the consistent and uncompromising advocate of equal rights, and the Member for Oldham.’ The pair had stood the test for years, braving ‘the storm of Whig and Tory vengeance.’ They fought and conquered the ‘demon-like power’ of Castlereagh, which had oppressed the country. ‘The base minions in power trembled beneath their castigations’, and the people were awoken from their slumbers. Cobbett and Hunt raised their ‘gigantic powers,’ and governments turned pale.
Two Cocks on the Dunghill is an account of the personal and political relationship between two great men at a crucial time in history. It is set against the backdrop of the aftermath of the French revolution, the wars with France and the fear of a Jacobin- style revolution in England and the demands for a reformed House of Commons. The issues, arguments and emotions resonate today. The questions raised are ever relevant. How should a government fight against a perceived foreign and home threat of ‘Terror’? When, if ever, should human rights be suspended? What role does the press play? How much integrity can there be in politics and at what cost? Two Cocks on the Dunghill is a story about corruption and greed, compassion and morality, of love, hate, jealousy and scandal and how human beings deal with them. It is also about the courage of individuals against an oppressive state and the triumph of will power and determination in adversity. On one thing I am resolved, namely that, unless snatched away very suddenly, I will not die the MUZZLED SLAVE OF THIS THING!’ wrote William Cobbett in the Political Register. He did not, and nor did Henry Hunt.
Two Cocks on the Dunghill – William Cobbett and Henry Hunt: their friendship, feuds and fights is written by Penny Young and published by Twopenny Press. Copies may be purchased either from a bookseller for £20.00, or direct from the author at: 2, The Old School, South Lopham, Norfolk, IP22 2HT for £15.00, postage and packing included. Please make cheques payable to the Two Penny Press.