Richard Heath

“ But my purpose here is not to defend William Huntington, either as a man or a Christian, but to present him as an English agricultural labourer, struggling to develop what was in him without any help from his country—shut out, in fact, by his poverty from any share in the wealth of culture and experience England inherits from the past. We have no right to sit in judgment on such men, for they owe us nothing. We make England even appear to them the hardest of stepmothers, instead of the loving mother they have a right to expect. ”

“ When we reflect on the enormous tasks Cobbett undertook, he appears as a Hercules or a Samson. He set at defiance and fought single-handed every power of note or influence in the kingdom. Like Don Quixote's hero, Felixmarte of Hircania, he gave battle to five swinging giants at once—the Landlords and the Rural Clergy, the Bank of England and the Stock Exchange, and most difficult of all to manage, a hydra-headed monster called the London Press. And as if this was not enough sport for one man, with back-handed strokes he attacked his own allies. ”

“ It was the anniversary of the opening of the chapel, and some joyous hearts and tasteful fingers had adorned its naked walls and heavy galleries with floral wreaths and posies.
The old meeting-house was well filled, for the preacher was one who not only had a message to deliver, but was endowed with that gift of eloquence which, like sweet music, steals away every heart. The little inn-yard was crowded with vehicles, showing that preaching has not yet lost its power to attract men. ”

“ Degraded by pauperism, harried by the game laws, brutalised by drink, maddened by starvation, are you surprised that such homes produced a state of mind only to be paralleled in an old-fashioned lunatic asylum, where people were kept in cages like raging beasts of prey? Some blessed angels have been at work all over the land restraining these poor devils, binding up their wounds, sitting at their bedsides, filling their minds with a hidden hope—a hope quite undefined, but for that reason the more vast and consoling. ”

“ Nevertheless, the bicycle roundabout affords plenty of fun. Little boys, and young damsels in all the ugly glories of modern female costume, seat themselves on chairs fixed on the roundabout, while young men mount the saddles, and work the bicycles with a will. Round flies the merry circle—old men and children, lads and lassies—while Jacko,the monkey, climbs the many-coloured pole in the centre, and, gravely seated on the cross-beam, surveys the crowd, and cynic-like, doubtless, cogitates on the weakness and folly of the human race. ”

“ Outside the manor-house stood the dreadful symbols of his power: the gallows whereon to hang the men, the pit wherein to drown the women.
Nevertheless a serf could, saving his lord's right, possess property; and there must have been a certain limit to the torture that could be inflicted, since the German law fixed the highest number of blows a slave could receive at two hundred and twenty. When it was his fate to have a good master, existence was not intolerable; but under a bad one, or in times of anarchy, human imagination could hardly outstrip the fiendish cruelty of his tyrants. ”

“ How could a man with such a passion for rural pursuits, a man all eyes and ears as Cobbett was, how could such a man not fail to see and to be deeply affected by so violent a contrast in the condition of his own countrymen, and that of the people he had been living amongst? Nor would his shrewd and penetrating intellect have been long before it sought to trace out the causes which had produced such a state of things. He soon came to the conclusion that the cause was simply this,—that England was ruled by a Oligarchy for its own benefit. ”

“ Take this picture of a Norfolk village. "A stranger cannot enter the village without being struck with surprise at its wretched and desolate condition. Look where he may, he sees little else but thatched roofs—old, rotten, and shapeless—full of holes and overgrown with weeds; windows sometimes patched with rags, and sometimes plastered over with clay; the walls, which are nearly all of clay, full of cracks and crannies; and sheds and outhouses—where there are any—looking as if they had been overthrown very early in the present century, and left in the hopeless confusion in which they fell." ”

“ The degradation of pauperism is far worse than that of slavery, and of all pauperism none surely exceeded in cruelty this which fell to the lot of the English Labourer. Pampered at first, led even into a coarse luxury, he was rapidly let down until he was treated to such degradations as being put up to auction, and his labour sold to the highest bidder, or to being made to drag gravel carts like a beast of burden. ”

“ But at best it is a view which can only help men to endure; it is utterly powerless to raise them from sin, from suffering, and woe.
Oh! when will the true light shine upon our poor pagani? when will they learn that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is not a stern Fate, who dooms thousands of His creatures to want and misery? How could they, if they were truly taught His character from the Bible, and learnt there what pains the God of Moses took to prevent any of His people coming to utter poverty? ”

“ I should call him a primitive Christian, for though I do not believe the poor in Judæa had fallen at any time so low as the English poor have done, some of the apostles were not in a much more exalted station than old Ben. Poor and ignorant as he was, it was men like he who woke in the dull, sad minds of his fellow-sufferers a new hope, a belief that there was indeed a Kingdom of Heaven worth struggling to obtain. The very ignorance and poverty of the labourers cut them off from knowing anything of the Gospel, even in its narrow English form. ”

“ Half-hidden in mossy orchard- trees and surrounded by a luxuriant and fragrant garden, a cottage in Northborough would appear just the home for a Rural Poet. But Clare was something more than a mere reflector of external nature. He would have been as great a poet, and perhaps a greater, had he been born amongst bricks and mortar. Deep, intense human affection lay at the basis of his being, and almost overpowered every other faculty. ”

“ No human being, in fact, could be blamed for not seeing in this rough, unmannerly gardener, with his strange thoughts only half expressed, a great and powerful preacher.
But what could so wonderful an experience mean if he had not passed through it for others? Why, indeed, should he have been singled out for special teaching if he was not to teach his brethren? He had learned something which he believed was of infinite importance for them to know. That knowledge had come to him not from books, or even sermons, but, as he believed, by a heavenly vision and by the action of a heavenly Teacher. ”

“ Perchance the golden fields are waving in the sunlight, and the old gable-roofed farmhouses stand out in a sort of comfortable solitude, surrounded by their stacks and their barns. Down in the meadows, by the stream which waters the landscape, cattle are grazing; while afar off, on the uplands which shut in the horizon, flocks of sheep feed among the shadows. ”

“ One privilege after another has gone, until at last he is driven from the land which the toil of many generations of his ancestors has rendered fertile, to burrow with his children in the slums of some outlying village, and thence to trudge with gaunt face and discontented heart to and fro from the scene of labour, no longer sweetened by bygone memories or future hopes. ”

“ With their gable roofs of cosy thatch or of red tiles bright with moss and lichen, with their ornamented chimneys and walls of plaster laced and interlaced with heavy beams, the Cottage Homes of England, peeping out from the green lanes of Kent, or fringing the Surrey commons, or nestling in the wooded vales of Sussex, are always picturesque. They are, moreover, the one form of human habitation always in harmony with the scenery around them. ”

“ As far as he had light, he sought sincerely to regulate his own life by them, and made it the task of his existence to assert, maintain, and render them dominant over the lives of his fellow-men. William Cobbett was always and everywhere a preacher of righteousness. He had, as we have seen, a natural piety. Old age, helpless infancy, suffering poverty, always commanded his ready and reverential sympathy. In all the domestic relations he was admirable—he was a dutiful son, a loving husband, and a tender father both from choice and conviction. ”

“ An almighty, omniscient Creator is spoken of who would one day manifest Himself. Then Odin and the whole Valhalla would disappear in a general conflagration, and from the chaos would spring forth a new heaven and a new hell. The final judgment would then take place, and each individual would receive an irreversible sentence determining his fate to all eternity.
Such was the faith by which the ancient South Saxon lived and died. More than a thousand years have passed away since the whole pantheon of Scandinavian gods and goddesses fell into the limbo of forgetfulness ”

“ Can a mother forget her sucking child? Think of the Lincolnshire babies, drugged by their mothers with opium; of poor Betsey B—— who did not remember how many babies she had had. Think of mothers driving their poor little weeping children out to work before it is light, threatening to beat them if they do not go. Think of fathers sitting all day outside beer-shops, like lazy hogs basking in the sun, while their children break their backs to supply the means of parental dissipation. ”

“ Food in an average family of half a dozen children will probably come to sixteen or seventeen shillings; for, working as they all do, from morning till night, it is necessary that they should live well. And this in fact is the great and beneficial result of Kentish agricultural economy. Supper is the social meal of the day; and the honest waggoner, when he sits down after all the toils of the day, comes to it with an appetite as capacious as the omnivorous giant Jack of bean-stalk fame had the honour of dining with. ”

“ Nevertheless, if he could have seen it, there was just at that time a ruddy glare on the social horizon, which betokened a bright to-morrow. The feudal system, of whose dregs he was a victim, was rapidly passing away. Its sun was setting in blood-red clouds, and all Europe stood aghast, as men who watch in silent horror some awful conflagration. John Clare was born in that "Annus Terribilis," 1793.
He was, as I have said, a twin child, much more sickly than his sister, who died; but, like so many sickly people, the very weakness of the body seemed to give the soul more play. ”

“ In one corner stands a large bedstead, the family heirloom, completely shrouded by white dimity; while a box-bed, closed in the daytime, is the children's resting-place at night. The stores of bacon overhead, the butter, and cheese, and meal in the half-open cupboard, the variety and whiteness of the bread and cakes on the table, attest the truth of the good wife's assertion when, with simple pride, she assures her visitor "that they are not poor." ”

“ And thus a great agricultural revolution has commenced, the end whereof no sensible man would dare to prophesy. From Northumberland to Cornwall, from Norfolk to Hereford, one hears everywhere the tidings of rising life. The central wave is spreading, and the adjacent counties are forming Unions; and now they talk of a congress of representatives, that they may form a National Union. The heart of old England has heaved, and every member of the agricultural community throughout the country begins to feel the glow of a new life. ”