William Cobbett

William Cobbett (1762-1835) was a controversial journalist, politician, and agriculturalist.  After a brief career in the military, he spent some time in France and America in the early 1790s, attracting political notice with his anti-Jacobin Observations on Priestley’s emigration, which he published while living in Philadephia in 1795.  He continued to publish loyalist literature in Philadelphia until he incurred political difficulties and returned to England in June 1800. Pitt, Windham, and the Tories welcomed his arrival and in January 1802 he began Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, which he continued, with some interruptions, until his death.  After 1804 he experienced a shift in his views, however, toward the more popular politics of reform. He agitated in his Register for numerous reforms, eventually landing him a libel conviction and imprisonment for two years in 1810.  Benjamin Flower disliked Cobbett for his “detestible principles respecting the slave trade, and the education of the poor,” his “despotic maritime code,” and his support of the war with France (Monthly Repository [1807]: xxxi; [1808]: xxxiv.).  In 1817, facing imprisonment once again for his political writings, Cobbett again fled to America.  He returned to England in 1819, farming at Kensington and continuing to promote Parliamentary reform in his periodical writings.  Upon his return, he wrote a denunciation of the fledgling English settlement in Albion, Illinois, to which both Morris Birkbeck and Richard Flower, two of the founders (the latter was Benjamin Flower's brother), responded with considerable indignation. See Richard Flower’s Letters from Lexington and the Illinois, containing a brief account of the English settlement in the latter territory, and a refutation of the misrepresentation of Mr. Cobbett (1819), and his Letters from the Illinois, 1820, 1821 (1822), the latter work edited by Flower.