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with nothing but thirteen half-pence in his pocket. From Kew, Cobbett eventually drifted onward into a miserable apprenticeship in a London law office, then back to his native farmland, and finally into a marines enlistment that sent him to the New World just as the Revolution ended.
    Cobbett found little left worth defending: "Nova Scotia had no charm for me other than that of novelty. Everything I saw was new: bogs, rocks, mosquitoes, and bullfrogs . . . In short, the most villainous piece of waste land." Even his eventual promotion to sergeant major did not allay his general dismay, for after blowing the whistle on military embezzlement and writing a pamphlet on it, Cobbett was drummed out of the service and nearly charged with sedition. But in writing his pamphlet, Cobbett discovered his two true vocations: righteous fury, and writing furiously.
    Wherever he went, Cobbett found trouble-and when he couldn't find it, he made some of his own. Moving to Philadelphia in 1794, he took up the apt counterrevolutionary pen name Peter Porcupine, and enraged locals by plastering his bookseller storefront with pictures of King George. Then, for good measure, in his window display he coupled the likeness of the bloodthirsty Jean-Paul Marat with that of revered city father Ben Franklin-who was also, Cobbett helpfully explained, "a whore-master, a hypocrite, and an infidel." He called Tom Paine a wife-beater—such accusations were nothing new to Paine, as another Tory writer had already accused him of raping a cap-and in the pages of his newspaper The Porcupine he gleefully eviscerated the "malignant philosopher" Jefferson. Rather more prosaically, he also accused Declaration signer and local physician Benjamin Rush of killing his patients.
    "Honour the King: Fear God," read the motto on The Porcupine, but soon Cobbett had quite a few others to fear. "There were, in Philadelphia, about ten thousand persons, all of whom would have rejoiced to see me murdered," he wrote. He was not far wrong, and when Dr. Rush finally slapped the would-be Peter Porcupine with a crushing libel judgment, it sent the nettlesome scribbler fleeing the country.
    But back in his beloved Britain, Cobbett fared little better. He loved the crown, not the government that had surrounded it. And so he started an immensely popular newspaper, the Political Register , to record the speeches of Parliament and the court. This unprece-dented exposure of their machinations was duly resented by politicians, and eventually Cobbett was thrown-thrown quite enthusiastically, one gathers-into Newgate on a trumped-up charge of treason. Cobbett was left incredulous: "Having lost a fortune in America, solely for the sake of England, I was sent to prison in that same England!" Perhaps, he wondered, the problem was that it wasn't that same England. He brooded over how it was no longer the land of his youth.
    And then, as always—he wrote.
    If his two years in jail were meant to shut Cobbett up, it didn't work. "During my imprisonment," he boasted, "I published 364 Essays and Letters upon political subjects." He still managed to keep his Political Register going every week, even during a spell as a farmer back to America from 1817 to 1819. In the midst of this, he also became the great agricultural author of his era, writing on Cottage Economy and the popular guide The American Gardener, which remains in print today. The man sold seeds in his spare time. It seems hard to reconcile the notion of a seed merchant and garden writer with a political firebrand today you don't exactly go to the Burpee rack at the hardware store to get riled up about anything. But soil was political in Cobbett's time. And these hedges before us? They were harbingers of perhaps the greatest upheaval England had ever known.
    A farm truck rumbles past me, heading toward Guildford, sweeping by a weedy graveyard of rusting tractors and plows. I bend down and examine the leaning sign jammed into the ground