He was one of an agrarian faction seeking to reform Parliament, abolish "rotten boroughs", restrain foreign activity, and raise wages, with the goal of easing poverty among farm labourers and small land holders.

In Woolwich during February 1792, he married an American-born woman, Anne Reid (1774–1848), whom he had met while stationed at Fort Howe in Saint John.

His student applauded the anti-British sentiments that were expressed, and he quarrelled with Cobbett, who then resolved to "write and publish a pamphlet in defence of my country.

Its shop-window displayed a large portrait of George III and its interior featured a huge painting of "Lord Howe's Decisive Victory over the French".

After Spain entered into an alliance with France against Britain, Cobbett expressed his anger through further pamphleteering that was highly critical of Spanish King Charles IV, in Porcupine's Gazette.

[31] He directed the same invective against Bache's successor, William Duane and his growing circle of United Irish émigrés,[32] describing them as men "animated by the same infamous principles, and actuated by that same thirst for blood and plunder, which had reduced France to a vast human slaughter-house".

[35] Cobbett also campaigned against physician and abolitionist Benjamin Rush,[36] whose advocacy of bleeding during the yellow fever epidemic may have caused many deaths.

[42][43] In August 1800, Windham invited Cobbett to dinner with the Prime Minister, William Pitt, and contributors to the Anti-Jacobin, including George Canning.

[1][46][47] His own paper, The Porcupine, bearing the motto "Fear God, Honour the King", started on 30 October 1800, but without success, and he sold his interest in it in 1801.

[51][52] When the Peace of Amiens was signed in March 1802, Cobbett again refused to illuminate his windows and the Royal Horse Guards had to protect his house from the mob.

[54] Cobbett immediately began a pamphlet, Important Considerations for the People of the Kingdom, warning the country of the consequences of a French invasion.

[58][59] The Evangelical movement was campaigning to reform the sports and recreations of the common people, intending to replace bull-baiting, boxing, singlestick, wrestling and racing with Sunday Schools and psalm singing.

[60][61] Cobbett in the Register criticised the Evangelicals' hostility to rural and athletic sports, "which string the nerves and strengthen the frame, which excite an emulation in deeds of hardihood and valour, and which imperceptibly instill honour, generosity, and a love of glory.

[1] Cobbett published the Complete Collection of State Trials between 1804 and 1812 and amassed accounts of parliamentary debates from 1066 onwards, but financial difficulties obliged him to sell his shares in it to T. C. Hansard in 1812.

Cobbett was found guilty of treasonous libel[dubious – discuss] on 15 June 1810, after objecting in The Register to the flogging at Ely, Cambridgeshire of local militiamen by Hanoverians.

[69] On his release, a dinner in his honour in London was attended by 600 people and directed by Sir Francis Burdett, who like Cobbett was a strong advocate of parliamentary reform.

As few people could afford to pay six or seven pence for a daily newspaper, the tax restricted the circulation of most journals to those with fairly high incomes.

Nonetheless, he began criticising William Wilberforce for endorsing the Corn Laws, for his personal wealth and opposition to bull and bear-baiting, and particularly for his approval of "the fat and lazy and laughing and singing negroes".

With the government intending to suspend habeas corpus, and fearing arrest for his arguably seditious writings, Cobbett again fled to the United States.

[23] On Wednesday 27 March 1817, he embarked at Liverpool for New York on the ship Importer, with D. Ogden as master, accompanied by his two eldest sons, William and John.

The plan was to disinter Paine's remains from his New Rochelle, New York farm for a heroic reburial on his native soil, but the bones were still among Cobbett's effects when he died 16 years later.

That year he also founded a plant nursery at Kensington, where he grew many North American trees, such as the black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia), and with his son, a variety of maize he called "Cobbett's corn".

[6] Not content to let information be brought to him for his newspaper, Cobbett did his own journalistic work – especially on his repeated theme of the plight of rural Englishmen.

In 1829, Cobbett published Advice To Young Men, in which he criticised An Essay on the Principle of Population by the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus.

[86] Cobbett continued to publish controversial content in his Weekly Political Register and was charged in July 1831 with seditious libel for a pamphlet entitled Rural War, endorsing the Captain Swing Riots, in which rioters were smashing farm machinery and burning haystacks.

[88][89] Because the New Poor Law deprived the people of this right to relief, Cobbett believed that the social contract was broken and that therefore the duty of allegiance was dissolved.

[89]: 208  A week before his death, he wrote to a friend: "[B]efore the passing of the Poor-Law Bill, I wished to avoid [a] convulsive termination.

"[1] Among historical biographers, Ian Dyck claimed that Cobbett endorsed "the eighteenth-century Country Party platform";[90] Edward Tangye Lean described him as "an archaic English Tory".

[citation needed] Cobbett has been praised by thinkers of various political persuasions, such as Matthew Arnold, Karl Marx, G. K. Chesterton, A. J. P. Taylor, Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson and Michael Foot.

The Brooklyn-based history band Piñataland performed a song about William Cobbett's quest to rebury Thomas Paine entitled "An American Man".