The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Preface.
• The Life of Richard Cobden
• Chapter I.: Early Life.
• Chapter II.: Commercial and Mental Progress.
• Chapter III.: Travels In West and East.
• Chapter IV.: The Two Pamphlets.
• Chapter V.: Life In Manchester, 1837–9.
• Chapter VI.: The Foundation of the League.
• Chapter VII.: The Corn Laws.
• Chapter VIII.: Cobden Enters Parliament—first Session.
• Chapter IX.: Cobden As an Agitator.
• Chapter X.: The New Corn Law.
• Chapter XI.: Sir Robert Peel’s New Policy.
• Chapter XII.: Renewed Activity of the League—cobden and Sir Robert Peel—rural Campaign.
• Chapter XIII.: The Session of 1844—factory Legislation—the Constituencies.
• Chapter XIV.: Bastiat—new Tactics—activity In Parliament—maynooth Grant—private Affairs.
• Chapter XV.: The Autumn of 1845.
• Chapter XVI.: Repeal of the Corn Laws and Fall of the Government.
• Chapter XVII.: Correspondence With Sir Robert Peel—cessation of the Work of the League.
• Chapter XVIII.: Tour Over Europe.
• Chapter XIX.: Election For the West Riding.—purchase of Dunford.—correspondence.
• Chapter XX.: Miscellaneous Correspondence On Social and Political Movements.
• Chapter XXI.: The Don Pacifico Debate—the Papal Aggression—correspondence With Mr. Bright On Reform—kossuth.
• Chapter XXII.: The Protectionists In Office.
• Chapter XXIII.: The Panic of 1853.
• Chapter XXIV.: The Crimean War.
• Chapter XXV.: Death of His Son.
• Chapter XXVI.: Chinese Affairs—cobden’s Motion—the Dissolution.
• Chapter XXVII.: The Indian Mutiny—private Affairs—second Journey to America.
• Chapter XXVIII.: Return From America.—the New Ministry.
• Chapter XXIX.: The French Treaty.
• Chapter XXX.: Holiday and Return to Paris.
• Chapter XXXI.: The Tariff—the Fortification Scheme.
• Chapter XXXII.: The Policy of the Commercial Treaty.
• Chapter XXXIII.: Miscellaneous Correspondence, 1859–60—paris—return to England.
• Chapter XXXIV.: The American War—fortification Schemes—international Law.
• Chapter XXXV.: Correspondence With Mr. Delane.
• Chapter XXXVI.: The Danish War—last Speeches In Parliament—correspondence.
• Chapter XXXVII.: Speech At Rochdale—the Land Question—correspondence—last Days and Death.
• Chapter XXXVIII.: Conclusion.
• Appendix
• Note A. (see P. 115).
• Cobden to W. C. Hunt On the Hours of Labour.
• Full Text of the Last Letter Written By Mr Cobden
• Bibliography of Richard Cobden, Based On the British Museum Catalogue
• Biography, Criticism Etc

CHAPTER XXV.

death of his son.

1856.
Æt. 52.At this moment Cobden was stricken by one of those cruel blows from which men and women often recover, but after which they are never again what they were before. He lost his only son, a boy of singular energy and promise. The boy, who was now fifteen years old, was at school at Weinheim, about fourteen miles from Heidelberg. He was suddenly seized by an attack of scarlet fever, and died in the course of three or four days (April 6, 1856), before his parents at home even knew that he was ill. There was nothing to soften the horror of the shock. Cobden was the first to hear of what had happened. His friend, Chevalier Bunsen, had recommended the school, a few miles away from Charlot-tenburg, his own residence. The schoolmaster sent Bunsen a telegraphic message, and took for granted that Bunsen would communicate with Cobden. Bunsen, on the other hand, took it for granted that the news would be sent by the schoolmaster. The result was that Cobden heard nothing until he heard all. In a letter to one of the most intimate of his friends, he told how the blow feel:—

“I had invited Colonel Fitzmayer from the Crimea to breakfast at nine on the Thursday. When I came down from my sleeping-room in Grosvenor Street, I found him and the breakfast waiting. My letters were lying on the table, and I apologized for opening them before beginning our meal, and the third letter I opened informed me that my dear boy,1856.
Æt. 52. who by the latest accounts was described as the healthiest and strongest in the school, was dead and in his grave. No one not placed in the same situation can form the faintest conception of my task in making the journey to this place [Dunford], which took me five hours, bearing a secret which I knew was worse than a sentence of death on my poor wife, for she would have gladly given her life, a dozen times, if it were possible to save his. I found her in the happiest spirits, having just before been reading to my brother and the family circle a long letter from the dear boy, written a few days previously, and when he was in the best possible state of health. I tried to manage my communication, but the dreadful journey had been too much for me, and I broke down instantly, and was obliged to confess all. She did not comprehend the loss, but was only stunned; and for twenty-four hours was actually lavishing attentions on me, and superintending her household as before.”

I have been told how he entered his house at nightfall, and met his wife unexpectedly on the threshold; she uttered an exclamation as she caught his haggard and stricken face. His little children were making merry in the drawing-room. He could only creep to his room, where he sat with bent head and prostrate, unstrung limbs. When the first hours were over, and the unhappy mother realized the miserable thing that had befallen her, she sat for many days like a statue of marble, neither speaking nor seeming to hear; her eyes not even turning to notice her little girl whom they placed upon her knee, her hair blanching with the hours.

It would be a violation of sacred things to dwell upon the months that followed. Cobden felt as men of his open and simple nature are wont to feel, when one of the great cruelties of life comes home to their bosoms. He was bewildered 1856.
Æt. 52.by the eternal perplexities of reconciling untimely death with the common morality of things. “God!” he exclaims, repeating a commonplace of the grave, so old and well-worn, yet ever fresh in its pathos, “what a mystery of mysteries is this life—that one so young and bright, around whom our hopes and dreams had been twining themselves for fifteen years, should be in a few hours struck down and withered like a weed!” His was not a soul to lose itself in brooding over the black enigma. There is not a word of rebellion. He accepts the affliction as a decree of the inscrutable Power, and his quiet and humble patience touches us the more, because we discern the profound suffering beneath it. His anguish at the blighting of his own love and hope, was made keener by the strange torpor which now and for long afflicted his wife. His tenderness and devotion to her in the midst of all this agony, were unremitting and inexhaustible. Six weeks after the fatal news had come, he was able to write to his brother-in-law—“I have not been out of her sight for an hour at a time (except at the funeral) since we learnt our bereavement; and I do not believe she would have been alive and in her senses now, if I had not been able to lessen her grief by sharing it.” And this urgent demand upon his sympathies and attention continued beyond weeks, into months.

“My poor wife,” he writes to a friend,1 makes but slow progress in the recovery of her health. She is on the lawn or in the field all day with a little spade in hand, digging up the weeds; it is the only muscular effort she can make, and it unfortunately leaves her mind free to brood over the one absorbing subject. The open air must in time give her strength, but as yet she had not been able to pass a night without the aid of opiates. Her friends must have pity and forget her for a time. She is not a heroine; but hers is a terrible case, and might have taxed the energies of the1856.
Æt. 52. strongest mind of her sex. I am sure that they who are impatient with her under such a severe trial, can never have realized in their minds the ordeal she has had to go through. She requires the patience and tender treatment of a child. It is true, as Bright says (who is one of the tenderest-hearted creatures I know), that we know but imperfectly what a mother suffers in such a case.”

“To the same friend, a fortnight later, he says:2 —“I cannot prove as good as my word by coming to town this week, but my poor wife will accompany me on Monday. She is as helpless as one of her young children, and requires as much forbearance and kindness. God knows how much the comfort and regularity of her domestic life have always been made subservient, willingly and meekly so, to my political engagements, without one atom of ambition to profit by the privileges which to some natures offer a king of compensation for family discomfort. And, bearing this in view, I have from the moment that this terrible blow fell on us, determined to make every other claim on my time and attention subordinate (even to the giving up of my seat) to the task of mitigating her sufferings. No other human being but myself can afford her the slightest relief. I sometimes doubt whether for the next six months I shall be able to leave her for twenty-four hours together.”

He repeats with the helpless iteration of an incurable grief, how hard is the case of a mother, who had not seen her son waster gradually away as she tended his death-bed, but who suddenly and in a moment stumbled over his corpse as she passed cheerfully from room to room. She never to the last submitted to the blow with the graces of resignation, and hence she never had the comparative solace that might have come either from religion or from reason. To the end she 1856.
Æt. 52.fought against her fate. “But if there be one act of contumacy.” Cobden wrote in tender deprecation, “which God would pardon beyond all others in his creatures, it is surely that which springs from the excessive affection of a mother for her child.”

The external trifles of life were in sombre accord with the tragedy that overshadowed their hearts. All things, small as well as great, in which cobden was concerned, seemed to go wrong. His best cows lost their calves. The fruit in the orchard was all blighted. A fine crop of hay lay spoiling in the rain. Deeper than these vexations was his anxious concern for Mr. Bright. For eighteen years almost without an interval Mr. Bright had been at work in public causes. The labour of prepartion and advocacy would in itself have been enormous, but the strain was peculiarly intensified by the fact that the labour was pursued in face of misrepresentation and obloquy such as few English statesmen have ever had to endure. At a time when repose would under any circumstances have become necessary, instead of repose came the violent excitement of the Russian War. Mr. Bright’s health gave way, and many of his friends began to fear that he was permanently disabled. “I think of him,” Cobden wrote, “with more serious apprehension than he is aware of.” And his correspondence with their common friends shows the reality of his solicitude. This is an extract from one of his letters of that time—“I have always had a sort of selfish share in Bright’s career, for I have felt as though, when passing the zenith of life, I was handing over every principle and cause I had most at heart to the advocacy of one, not only younger and more energetic, but with gifts of natural eloquence to which I never pretended..... Perhaps there never were two men who lived in such transparent intimacy of mind as Bright and myself. Next to the loss of my boy, I have had no sorrow so constant and great as from his illness. The two together make me feel quite unnerved, and I seem to1856.
Æt. 52. be always feeling about in my mind for an excuse for quitting the public scene. Bright’s loss, if permanent, is a public calamity. If you could take the opinion of the whole House, he would be pronounced, by a large majority, to combine more earnestness, courage, honesty, and eloquence, than any other man. But we will not speak of him as of the past. God grant that he may recover!”3

Mr. Bright and his family were staying in the autumn of this year at Llandudno. It happened that a friend, about the same time, offered the use of her house in the neighbourhood of Bangor to Cobden. Mrs. Cobden seemed to be falling into a settled torpor, which alarmed her husband. Dreading the winter gloom and the association of home, he resolved to try a great change, and accepting his friend’s offer, he went with his family to Wales. Here the clouds slowly began to show a rift. Mr. Bright and he paid one another visits, with the bargain exacted by Cobden that not a word should be exchanged about politics. He was slightly reassured as to his friend’s condition. At home there were signs of better things. Everybody about them was kind and neighbourly. Friendly offices were pressed on the suffering mother by good women, “such indeed,” says Cobden, “as are found in the middle and upper ranks in every corner of Britain.” Mrs. Cobden roused herself to talk her own Welsh among the poor people who knew no other language, and who brightened up and became confidential the moment that they were addressed in their own tongue. Her little children gradually became a diversion and resource. But her husband could not permit himself to do more than hope that she was perhaps recovering. His own mind began to recover its tone, and his interest in public affairs to revive. Lord Brougham among others was very anxious to impress 1856.
Æt. 52.upon him the doctrine that it is Work only, and not Time, that can relieve the mind from the pressure of bereavement. “If I had only my own case to consult.” Cobden said, “I would at once return to the duties of life, and try to escape from the thoughts of the past in the hard labour and turmoil of politics.”

Of the prospects of domestic legislation, he writes—“I suppose the work to be attempted next session is law reform; and nothing is more pressing. Thorough measures, such as simplifying the sale of land up to something like the Irish Encumbered Estates standard, shall have my hearty support as industriously in the way of votes as if I were in the government. But I tell you candidly, I think this work would be better done if the Tories were in. The Lords rule this land in ordinary times supremely. It is only once in ten or twenty years that with a great effort the country thrusts them off from some bone of contention, but merely to leave them in possession of the rest of the carcase as securely as ever. Now the Lords look on the Tories as their party. They know that to enable them to keep office something must be done, and as they cannot satisfy the Radicals in organic questions, they strain a point to let their men have the credit of some thorough practical reforms of the law and administration. Hence the good round measure of Chancery Reform which the Peers passed for the Derby-Disraeli government. And depend on it, if we were now on the left-hand side of the Speaker’s chair again, there would be a better measure of law reform passed than we are likely to see next session.”4

Nowhere can prospects be calculated with so little certainty as in parliamentary politics. The session for which Cobden thus anticipated such tranquil occupation, proved to be one of the most striking landmarks in his history.

[1]To Joseph Parkes, May 23, 1856.

[2]To Joseph Parkes, June 4, 1856.

[3]To Joseph Parkes, Nov. 11, 1856.

[4]To J. Parkes, Dec. 11, 1856.