William Cobbett . Edward E. Smith
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were omitted. But this was not all. I had all along insisted that, unless the court-martial were held in London, I could not think of appearing in it; because, if held in a garrisoned place like Portsmouth, the thing must be a mere mockery. In spite of this, however, the Judge-advocate’s letter of the 23rd of February informed me that the court was to be held at Portsmouth or Hilsea. I remonstrated against this, and demanded that my remonstrance should be laid before the King, which, on the 29th, the Judge-advocate promised should be done by himself; but, on the 5th of March, the Judge-advocate informed me that he had laid my remonstrance before—whom, think you? Not the king, but the accused parties, who, of course, thought the court ought to assemble at Portsmouth or Hilsea, and doubtless for the very reasons that led me to object to its being held there.
“Plainly seeing what was going forward, I, on the 7th of March, made, in a letter to Mr. Pitt, a representation of the whole case, giving him a history of the obstacles I had met with, which letter concluded thus: ‘I have now, sir, done all a man can do in such a case. I have proceeded regularly, and I may add, respectfully, from first to last; if I am allowed to serve my country by prosecuting men who have injured it, I shall do it; if I am thwarted and pressed down by those whose office it is to assist and support me, I cannot do it; in either case, I shall be satisfied with having done my duty, and shall leave the world to make a comparison between me and the men whom I have accused.’ This letter (which, by-the-bye, the public robbers have not published) had the effect of changing the place of the court-martial, which was now to be held in London; but, as to my other great ground of complaint, the leaving of the regimental books unsecured, it had no effect at all; and it will be recollected that, without those books, there could be, as to most of the weighty charges, no proof adduced without bringing forward Corporal Bestland, and the danger of doing that will be presently seen. But now, mark well as to these books: as to this great source of that kind of evidence which was not to be brow-beaten, or stifled by the dangers of the lash. Mark well these facts, and from them judge of what I had to expect in the way of justice. On the 22nd of January I wrote to Sir George Yonge, for the express purpose of having the books secured; that is to say, taken out of the hands and put out of the reach of the parties accused. On the 24th of January he told me that HE HAD taken care to give directions to have these documents secured. On the 18th of February, in answer to a letter, in which I (upon information received from the regiment) complained of the documents not having been secured, he wrote to me—and I have now the letter before me, signed with his own hand—that he would write to the colonel of the regiment about the books, &c.: ‘although,’ says he, ‘I cannot doubt but that the regimental books have been properly secured.’ This was on the 18th of February, mind; and now it appears, from the documents which the public-robbers have put forth, that the first time any order for securing the books was given was on the 15th of March, though the Secretary told me he had done it on the 24th of January, and repeated his assertion in writing on the 18th of February. There is quite enough in this fact alone, to show the public what sort of a chance I stood of obtaining justice.
Without these written documents nothing of importance could be proved, unless the non-commissioned officers and men of the regiment should happen to get the better of their dread of the lash; and, even then, they could only speak from memory. All, therefore, depended upon those written documents, as to the principal charges. Therefore, as the court-martial was to assemble on the 24th of March, I went down to Portsmouth on the 20th, in order to know for certain what was become of the books; and I found, as indeed I suspected was the case, that they had never been secured at all; that they had been left in the hands of the accused from the 14th of January to the very hour of trial; and that, in short, my request as to this point, the positive condition as to this most important matter, had been totally disregarded. There remained, then, nothing to rest upon with safety but our extracts, confirmed by the evidence of Bestland, the corporal, who had signed them along with me; and this I had solemnly engaged with him not to have recourse to, unless he was first out of the army; that is to say, out of the reach of the vindictive and bloody lash. He was a very little fellow, not more than about five feet high, and had been set down to be discharged when he went to England; but there was a suspicion of his connexion with me, and therefore they resolved to keep him. It would have been cruel, and even perfidious, to have brought him forward under such circumstances; and, as there was no chance of doing anything without him, I resolved not to appear at the court-martial, unless the discharge of Bestland was first granted. Accordingly, on the 20th of March, I wrote from Fratton, a village near Portsmouth, to the Judge-Advocate, stating over again all the obstacles that had been thrown in my way, complaining particularly that the books and documents had been left in the possession of the accused, contrary to my urgent request and to the positive assurances of the Secretary at War, and concluding by demanding the discharge of a man, whom I should name, as the only condition upon which I would attend the court-martial. I requested him to send me an answer by the next day, at night, at my former lodging; and told him,[5] that unless such answer was received, he and those to whom my repeated applications had been made, might do what they pleased with their court-martial; for that I confidently trusted that a few days would place me beyond the scope of their power. No answer came, and as I had learned in the meanwhile that there was a design to prosecute me for sedition, that was an additional motive to be quick in my movements. As I was going down to Portsmouth I met several of the sergeants coming up, together with the music-master; and as they had none of them been in America, I wondered what they could be going to London for; but, upon my return, I was told by a Captain Lane, who had been in the regiment, that they had been brought up to swear that at an entertainment given to them by me before my departure from the regiment, I had drunk ‘the destruction of the House of Brunswick.’ This was false; but I knew that that was no reason why it should not be sworn by such persons, and in such a case. I had talked pretty freely upon the occasion alluded to; but I had neither said nor thought against the King; and, as to the House of Brunswick, I hardly knew what it meant. My head was filled with the corruptions and the baseness in the army. I knew nothing at all about politics. Nor would any threat of this sort have induced me to get out of the way for a moment, though it certainly would if I had known my danger, for glorious ‘Jacobinical’ times were just then beginning. Of this, however, I knew nothing at all. I did not know what the Suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act meant. When you have a mind to do a thing, every trifle is an additional motive. Lane, who had enlisted me, and who had always shown great kindness toward me, told me they would send me to Botany Bay; and I now verily believe, that if I had remained, I should have furnished a pretty good example to those who wished to correct military abuses. I did not, however, leave England from this motive. I could not obtain a chance of success, without exposing the back of my poor faithful friend Bestland, which had I not pledged myself not to do, I would not have done. It was useless to appear, unless I could have tolerable fair play; and, besides, it seemed better to leave the whole set to do as they pleased, than to be made a mortified witness of what it was quite evident they had resolved to do.
“Such is the true history of this affair, which had the public-robbers given it as it stood, unmutilated, not a word should I ever have published, by way of defence or explanation.”
Cobbett then proceeds to show the hollow and tricky nature of the attack, by summing up the points which tend obviously to show that the whole is a trumped-up charge against his honour and his reputation; first stating that the five letters from himself, which appear in the pamphlet, were the least important of twenty-seven which he actually wrote, including one to Mr. Pitt, and one, in the shape of a petition, to the King. He then reminds his readers that he would have scarcely put himself to the expense of two or three months’ living in London, and to the trouble of writing so many letters and of dancing attendance at the Horse Guards, if he hadn’t a good case and were not in earnest about it; that nine years had elapsed since his return to England, and no process had been taken upon the opinion of the Attorney-General and his colleague; that his “Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine” was reprinted in London, in 1796, at the express desire of Mr. Canning, i.e. only four years after the incident, and yet nothing had been done to supply the omission (in that publication) of the court-martial story; that he had, when dining with Mr. Pitt in