England: 1819–1835
Cobbett arrived back in England soon after the Peterloo Massacre. He joined with other Radicals in his attacks on the government and three times during the next couple of years was charged with libel.
In 1820, he stood for Parliament in Coventry, but finished bottom of the poll. That year he also established a plant nursery at Kensington, where he grew many North American trees, such as the black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) and a variety of maize, which he called ‘Cobbett’s corn’. Cobbett and his son tried a dwarf strain of maize they had found growing in a French cottage garden and found it grew well in England’s shorter summer. To help sell this variety, Corbett published a book titled, A Treatise on Cobbett’s Corn (1828). Meanwhile, he also wrote the popular book Cottage Economy (1822), which taught the cottager some of the skills necessary to be self-sufficient, such as instructions on how to make bread, brew beer, and keep livestock.
Cobbett was not content to let newspaper stories come to him, he went out like a modern reporter and dug them up, especially the story that he returned to time and time again in the course of his writings, the plight of the rural Englishman. He took to riding around the country on horseback making observations of what was happening in the towns and villages. Rural Rides, a work for which Cobbett is still known for today, first appeared in serial form in the Political Register running from 1822 to 1826. It was published in book form in 1830. While writing Rural Rides, Cobbett also published The Woodlands (1825), a book on silviculture that reflected his interest in trees.
While not a Catholic, Cobbett at this time also took up the cause of Catholic Emancipation. Between 1824 and 1826, he published his History of the Protestant Reformation, a broadside against the traditional Protestant historical narrative of the British reformation, stressing the lengthy and often bloody persecutions of Catholics in Britain and Ireland. At this time, Catholics were still forbidden to enter certain professions or to become Members of Parliament. Although the law was no longer enforced, it was officially still a crime to attend Mass or build a Catholic church. Although Wilberforce also worked and spoke against discrimination against Catholics, Cobbett resumed his strident and racist opposition to the noted reformer, particularly after Wilberforce in 1823 published his Appeal in Behalf of the Negro Slaves in the West Indies. Wilberforce, long suffering from ill health, retired the following year.
In 1829, Cobbett published Advice to Young Men in which he heavily criticised An Essay on the Principle of Population published by the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus. That year, he also published English Gardener, which he later updated and expanded. This book has been compared with other contemporary garden tomes, such as John Claudius Loudon's Encyclopædia of Gardening.
Cobbett continued to publish controversial material in the Political Register and in July 1831 was charged with seditious libel after writing a pamphlet entitled Rural War in support of the Captain Swing Riots, which applauded those who were smashing farm machinery and burning haystacks. Cobbett conducted his own defence and he was so successful that the jury failed to convict him.
Cobbett still wanted to be elected to the House of Commons. He was defeated in Preston in 1826 and Manchester in 1832 but after the passing of the 1832 Reform Act Cobbett was able to win the parliamentary seat of Oldham. In Parliament, Cobbett concentrated his energies on attacking corruption in government and the 1834 Poor Law.
From 1831 until his death, he farmed at Normandy, a village in Surrey.
In his later life, however, Macaulay, a fellow MP, remarked that Cobbett's faculties were impaired by age; indeed that his paranoia had developed to the point of insanity.
He was buried in the churchyard of St Andrew's Parish Church, Farnham.
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