Neither the Luddite fires kindled by starving operatives nor the fires that blazed in southern England twenty years later were of Cobbett’s making. He understood the provocation and cried aloud against the wickedness that drove the English labourer to violence ; but always was Cobbett for constitutional reform. Were his writings inflammatory? His enemies said so; and Cobbett, for his part, hoped and believed they ‘really were inflammatory; for they inflamed the people against the corruption, bribery, fraud, and perjury, which had been the great cause of all their miseries.’

But no revolutionary was William Cobbett. Always he took his stand on the old things, which he loved, and railed fiercely against the new, which he detested. Never till his death could he be persuaded to turn republican, though no man assailed more sharply the occupant of the throne. It was enough for Cobbett that monarchy belonged to the old England of the ages of faith. The Commonwealth, with its prohibition of mince pies, its puritanism and its cant of ‘godliness,’ was the only republic England had known, and to Cobbett the reign of Cromwell was a nightmare.

‘I knew my countrymen well,’ Cobbett wrote; and his boast was justified. He knew them well. His very prejudices were theirs. He is as English as Dickens in his hatred of charity schools and all that pertained to the new commerce.