Enemies of the State Read Online Free PDF Page B

axed. It was, perhaps a slow and painful death, personified by the painter J M W Turner in his haunting The Fighting Temeraire , as a graceful ship-of-the-line gilded by a dying sun, is towed along by a black, ugly steam tug to be broken up. Soldiers and sailors had seen death up close and personal. Life, to them, was cheap. Murder was always a solution. Such men were dangerous.
    William Pitt died, worn out by his exertions, in January 1806, but true to the promise he had made seven years earlier, as soon as was expedient after the war, the hated income tax was dropped. This of course meant that indirect taxation – duties on goods – had to increase. And this time all consumers were hit, including and most especially the poor. In 1815, Liverpool’s government spearheaded by the men who were due to dine with Lord Harrowby in February 1820, introduced the Corn Laws, one of the most divisive and class-conscious pieces of legislation ever put forward. Napoleon’s Continental System had totally collapsed by 1814 as Prussia, Russia and Britain conspired to drive his armies back into France. This meant that European ports were open and cheap, foreign corn was available and bread – the staple diet of most Englishmen – was affordable. 1813, 1814 and 1815 were also years of good harvests at home, so for a very brief period as war came to an end, rural distress was lessened and there seemed a light at the end of the tunnel of economic gloom.
    The Corn Laws changed all that. Faced with a loss of profits because of foreign competition, parliament (by definition and to a man, all landowners) placed a price on corn which affected the opening and closing of ports. Economically, this was slow and cumbersome, but to the people it seemed (and it is difficult to argue against this) that the real aim of government was to keep the cost of bread artificially high. If bread was dear, everything was dear – rent, clothes, other foodstuffs. The euphoria at the end of the war quickly changed to a dark mood of defiance and the scene was set for a class war bordering on revolution.
    Over all this was the enigmatic figure of William Cobbett. From 1802, the pamphleteer had written a series of polemical, from-the-shoulder articles in his Weekly Political Register . As the essayist Charles Hazlitt wrote of Cobbett, he would take on everyone and anyone. As a writer, he is enormous fun to read, if only because he is so inconsistent. In one passage, he extols the courage and honesty of Sir Francis Burdett, the radical MP. In another, he fairly burns paper:
    he is a sore to Westminster; a set-fast on its back; a cholic in its belly; a cramp in its limbs; a gag in its mouth; he is a nuisance, a monstrous nuisance in Westminster and he must be abated.
    He attacked: Pitt and his paper money; Robert Peel, the War Secretary; Thomas Malthus, the population parson, 15 William Wilberforce, hero of the anti-slavers; Scotsmen; Americans; tea; corruption; Methodists; Quakers; Unitarians; and the landlord of the George Inn, Andover.
    In fact, he was by no means so bold face-to-face with his opponents and, although he served time in prison for his views, was just as likely to run to the safety of America (whose towns he said at one stage should be burnt down) as to stay. Ironically, the thing that Cobbett hated most was hypocrisy and in this, he was as guilty as the next man.
    Why is Cobbett so important in this story? Because the Political Register , especially in its cheaper form of the Twopenny Trash , reached thousands of the working class and was more of a Bible to them than any other radical tract. 16 Those who read it believed it. Those who could not read it had it read to them, and still believed. Oddly, Samuel Bamford, the radical weaver from Middleton who witnessed ‘Peterloo’, 17 believed that Cobbett’s works calmed the working class. This is difficult to accept; every line of Cobbett’s is contentious – it was