If you leave England via the Severn bridge and drive through Wales’ Wye Valley, on a road parallel with the river, you will come to a settlement central to the history of these isles: Monmouth. I should warn you: it is a tad twee. It has an M&S Simply Food and a Waitrose. It’s that sort of small town. I should, also, declare my interest: one of my ancestors, a hardcase Welsh Borders esquire called John ap Harri, fought at Agincourt alongside Henry V, the warrior king who was born in Monmouth castle. So I confess to experiencing a small frisson of pride every time I go down Monmouth’s charming main (and almost only) street.
If, like the ap Harris and their descendants, you appreciate a ruck then — despite its genteel, beside-the-languid-Wye ambience — Monmouth is your kind of town. As well as the castle ruins, there is the Nelson Museum — the victor of the Nile and Trafalgar performed quite a lot of trysting with Emma Hamilton hereabouts. But my own personal place of “have-a-go” pilgrimage is the Wetherspoons situated (of course) on Agincourt Square.
I am an expert on that watering hole, The King’s Head, a rambling coaching inn dating from the 17th century, since I spent multitudinous hours under its stuccoed ceilings during the interval between collecting one child from Extra-Curricular Activity A at 5pm and waiting for the other to finish Extra-Curricular Activity B at 9pm. (We sometimes even spent the night in the pub, rather than do the 50-mile round trip home and back again to school in the morning. Country life, eh?) There are advantages to Wetherspoons, I find: their reputation as déclassé keeps out sanctimonious snobs. You are pretty safe from Emily Thornberry in a Wetherspoons.
I have digressed. The truest reason I love The King’s Head is that William Cobbett once gave a lecture there: an event commemorated by a nice print on the wall of the man — in red jacket, white britches and black boots, all properly Georgian — and a bit of accompanying biographical text.
Cobbett was a scrapper on the same majestic scale as our Henry V and our Horatio, except he dished it out to Vested Interest rather than Jean-Pierre Foreigner. He is the faded star of the British Awkward Squad (Capt. Jon. Swift; Vice Capt. Geo. Orwell) and he needs a boost. He needs a blue plaque on every place he ever visited. In his long life — he was born in 1763 and died in 1835 — Cobbett was a farmer, Tory, soldier, Radical, MP, agony uncle (his books include Advice to Young Men), and the founder of Hansard.
His obituary in The Times, after categorising him as a “self-taught peasant”, declared Cobbett “by far the most voluminous writer that has ever lived for centuries”. The funniest, too: when some town council somewhere banned his anti-Malthusian play Surplus Population, he riposted with a drama entitled Bastards in High Places.
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