by David Crane
The Robert Quayle from St Domingo, carrying cotton, sugar, tea, coffee and mahogany; the Unicorn from Demerara with its rum and molasses; the Sally from Trinidad with its lime juice and indigo; the Vestal from New York with cotton and flaxseed, the Integrity from Charleston; they were all in Liverpool this Sunday. Before the day was out the Jackson would sail from Gravesend for Oporto and the Minerva for Gibraltar and the Anna for Riga and the Acorn for St Petersburg, and for as long as most people could recall it was the navy that had controlled these sea channels. It had kept open the Great Belt and the Baltic, it had supplied Britain’s armies in Spain with its specie from South America and its grain; it had suppressed the coastal trade of Europe and turned the Mediterranean into a British lake. There had been reverses against the Americans – though they were being quietly massaged away – and there had been little to brag of since Trafalgar but for the public and sailor alike a British warship was the British character in action and the Royal Navy officer the incarnation of everything that made Britain innately superior to her enemies. Over the last few years the victories of Wellington’s armies in Spain had gone some way to redressing the balance, but if the young Romantic, Thomas De Quincey, might thrill to the tragic heroics of the 23rd Dragoons at Talavera, it was in the virtues of the meritocratic, professional navy and not of the hunting field – resilience, discipline, self-reliance, skill, initiative, intelligence and patriotism – that an industrialising, entrepreneurial, thrusting, inventive, self-confident, stubbornly independent nation liked to see herself reflected.
It was a seductive idea, and one that would only grow and mutate with the century, and if there was no more truth in it than in most other national myths, the mere assumption of superiority had given the navy a psychological advantage that turned myth into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Over the last two decades the Bellerophon had played its part in some of the greatest victories of the war, and no veteran of the Nile or Trafalgar or the Glorious First of June – still less any French sailor skulking out of sight in Rochefort – would have had a moment’s doubt of the outcome should the French squadron ever venture out from the safety of the Basque Roads.
There were fortunes to be made in the navy out of prize money too, and if Jane Austen’s Sir Walter Elliot might lament it as the death knell of all rank and society, a commercial nation of shopkeepers knew what a wonderful lubricant it could be. During the course of the war the corruption of the Admiralty prize courts had been a standing grievance among fighting sailors, but a rich ship was a happy ship and the lure of the prize money had successfully woven patriotism and greed into a kind of symbiotic double-helix that had printed aggression and daring into the DNA of every ambitious officer.
In a culture and navy of this kind, simultaneously romantic and mercenary, it is probably no coincidence that so many of the navy’s leading captains were Scottish, and Frederick Maitland of the Bellerophon was only ordinary in the sense that there were so many like him. At the age of almost thirty-eight, he was no longer the brilliant young frigate captain of the popular imagination, but with his thin clever face, long nose and high cheekbones, he might have been the archetype of the Nelsonian officer, the kind of sailor – and the kind of face – that would have again made Sir Walter and his barber despair of the ravages that long years at sea could inflict on a man’s complexion.
With the Maitland appearance (the family were not known in Edinburgh society for their looks) came the aristocratic Maitland connections, though even a boy of his background still had to make his own way in Nelson’s navy. From the seventeenth century the sons of the gentry had been entered into the service from a very early age, and while a junior officer like the young Wellington – Arthur Wesley as he then was – could happily trade commissions in and out of half a dozen regiments before he heard a shot fired in anger, the Frederick Maitlands of the navy had to learn and earn their promotions the hard way.
Maitland had first seen battle as a midshipman during the French Revolutionary Wars at the Glorious First of June, and the next dozen years were spent in almost continuous fighting up and down the French and Spanish coasts. In 1799, he had been chased down and captured in the cutter Penelope, but that had been the only setback in a charmed career that had brought him a rich haul of prizes, prize money, votes of thanks and ultimately, in March 1815, on Bonaparte’s escape from Elba, the command of the old Billy Ruffian.
The war had been good to Maitland, but as he prepared to join Sir Henry Hotham’s blockading squadron off the French coast he could not have dreamed that the best was yet to come. The fighting now belonged to the army and not the navy and there would have seemed little chance of either profit or excitement. On 24 May, however, the Bellerophon sailed from Cawsand Bay in Cornwall, and so it was that in the early hours of 18 June, in light winds and ‘small rain’, Captain Frederick Maitland found himself again in the Basque Roads, with La Rochelle and the Ile de Rey to the north and the great opening to the Gironde to the south. Between them lay the estuary of the Charente and Rochefort and the French squadron he had been despatched to watch. They were waters he knew well, and as the Bellerophon hove to for the captain of the Ulysses to come aboard, it would have been odd if his mind had not gone back to the last time he had been here, in the April of 1809. And odder still if he had not thought of another Scottish sailor, the most famous fighting captain of them all, ‘Le Loup de Mer’, as the French called him, to whose help he had gone that day.
7 a.m.
Le Loup de Mer
On the south side of the Thames, at the junction of Southwark’s Borough Road and Blackman Street, Thomas Cochrane was beginning the last forty-eight hours of his year-long sentence in one of the sadder curiosities of early nineteenth-century London. A few hundred yards to the north-west a great gallows beam high on the roof marked the entrance to Horsemonger Lane’s Surrey gaol, but King’s Bench prison dealt only in the small change of human misery and humiliation – in the debtors and bankrupts and their wives and children who lived here on the crumbling edges of society and on whatever their friends and families could provide to keep life and soul together.
A cell in the King’s Bench – fifteen feet by ten and containing three beds – was the first room that Leigh Hunt could recall and its barrack-like corridors, filled with the laments ‘of aged and unhappy parents’ and weeping wives, his earliest introduction to the geography of London. Less than half a mile to the north, Dickens’s Marshalsea might provide copy for a lifetime of shame, but if one was looking for a genuine microcosm of the world’s greatest metropolis, a sink for all the deluded hopes, aspirations and ambitions that a voracious, commercial and imperial capital generated and disappointed, then the King’s Bench and its floating and permanent population of debtors was the place.
It was not like Newgate to the north of the river, nor Horsemonger Lane, nor even the Marshalsea, and with its spacious parade and its speciously handsome Georgian buildings, its tap rooms, coffee house, marketplace and games of rackets, its atmosphere lay somewhere between an open prison, a refuge centre and a college for which the only entry qualifications were failure and ill-fortune. For the payment of a fee a debtor could enjoy the freedom of the prison ‘Rules’, an area of three square miles surrounding the gaol; but the immense spike-topped wall was a reminder that when night fell, and the last visitor had left and the only sounds were the cries of ailing babies, and the only view that of a blind wall just feet away, the King’s Bench was still a prison.
Sometime in the middle hours of a March night three months earlier, when the watchman was at the farthest point of his prison rounds, a prisoner had paused in the window of his fourth-storey room with a length of rope looped around him and another shorter length in his hand. The fourth floor of the building was almost on a level with the top of the prison wall, and for a sailor in the prime of life a moment’s work was enough to throw a running noose over a spike, and another to swing his six-foot-two-inch frame out of the window and, hand-over-hand, across the
twelve-foot gap between sill and outer wall.
The prison wall was thirty-five feet high, and the narrow well beneath pitch-black, but once across he hauled himself on to the top and perched precariously between spikes while he secured the second rope to the ironwork. He had arranged with an old servant of his a safe house somewhere in the shadow of the prison wall below him, and had lowered himself nearly halfway down when his makeshift rope, smuggled into the prison in pieces, snapped and sent him crashing the last twenty feet to the ground.
The bruised and unconscious escapee was Thomas Cochrane, better known as Lord Cochrane, demagogue rabble-rouser, inventor, Member of Parliament, heir to the 9th Earl of Dundonald, and the most brilliant, ungovernable and imaginative naval captain the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had produced. In the previous August, Cochrane had been sentenced to the stocks, a £1,000 fine and a year in the King’s Bench on a charge of fraud, but his troubles with the authorities had really started – if they did not start with his birth – on an April day five years earlier when he had joined Frederick Maitland and the rest of Admiral Gambier’s blockading force keeping an enemy fleet bound for the West Indies bottled up close to Rochefort in the inner Aix Road.
Cochrane knew these coastal waters and shore defences intimately, and with a record for courage and unorthodoxy that stretched back to the first years of the war, had been despatched by the Admiralty in the Imperieuse to mastermind a fireship attack on the French fleet. As a junior captain he knew well enough that his arrival would ruffle the feathers of the more senior captains in the fleet, but for once in his turbulent life he had the authority of the Admiralty behind him, and on the night of 11 June a mixed flotilla of fireships and bomb-vessels under his command had slipped off into the dark of a moonless night towards the coast and the double lines of the French fleet anchored under the guns of the Ile d’Aix.
Nobody who saw that attack ever forgot it – Cochrane had lit up a moonless night sky with a pyrotechnic exercise in the sublime that would have brought Sir William Hamilton and the whole of the Neapolitan School to watch – but to turn a French humiliation into a victory on a par with the Nile needed Admiral Gambier to follow up. The evangelical, Methodistical, psalm-singing, hypocritical, canting old woman – as one captain called him – had hated the idea of fireships from the first, and as he refused all urgings from Cochrane to follow up the attack and finish off a helpless and stranded enemy, a battle that had started off as a fight between the Royal Navy and the French turned into a war between the navy’s most brilliant, outspoken and unforgiving sea captain and his own Admiralty.
The Battle of the Basque Roads was not over, as Gambier fervently hoped; it was just beginning, and it would be fought now in the newspapers, Parliament, pamphlets and the courts. For a country that had been forced to live off some pretty thin gruel since Trafalgar any victory was a relief, but as the implications of Gambier’s despatches were mulled over, and a puzzled public wondered what Nelson would have done and Cochrane refused to be flattered, bullied, bribed or promoted into silence, the country and the navy divided along predictable political lines. ‘Lord Gambier’s plan,’ the radical politician, Sir Francis Burdett said, ‘seemed a desire to preserve the fleet – Cochrane’s plan, to destroy the enemy’s … What if Nelson, at the Nile or Trafalgar, had acted on that principle.’
It was telling that the intervention came from Burdett, because ranged on Cochrane’s side were the reformers, the radical press, young officers in the service such as Maitland and Jane Austen’s brother Francis, and that amorphous body ‘the people’; on Admiral Gambier’s, the Tory Ministry, the Admiralty, the placemen, the senior captains who knew where their own interests lay, and most dangerous of all to his cause, Cochrane himself. Even before the Basque Roads he had made some powerful enemies in the Admiralty and Parliament by his outspoken attacks on naval abuses, and those very qualities of rule-breaking fearlessness and self-confidence that made him unrivalled at sea, simply rebounded on him in the world of institutional self-interest, sycophancy, cronyism, evidential procedures, court rulings and political chicanery in which his campaign against Gambier had mired him.
It was a campaign he could never win, but he was so used at sea to winning battles that could not be won, so lacking in the normal mechanisms of self-preservation, that he could not see what was going to happen even when Gambier resorted to a court martial to clear his name. The Admiralty moved quickly to despatch a hostile witness like Maitland to Ireland before the trial started, but that was simply overkill because with a court packed with Gambier’s friends and Cochrane’s own angry, intemperate character to work on, the verdict was never in doubt. ‘His Lordship’s conduct on that occasion, as well as his general conduct and proceedings as Commander-in-Chief of the Channel Fleet,’ the judge advocate read out in the great stern cabin of HMS Gladiator at Portsmouth, ‘was marked by zeal, judgment, ability, and an anxious attention to the welfare of His Majesty’s Service … the said Admiral the Right Honourable Lord Gambier is hereby most honourably acquitted.’
For William Wilberforce – an evangelical ally of the God-fearing Gambier – the verdict was a clear manifestation of ‘the Goodness of Him who has established your righteous cause’, and yet if Wilberforce was right He was working in mysterious ways. In the same month that a court martial was exonerating Gambier at Portsmouth, the Walcheren disaster was exposing the incompetence and inadequacy of both government and Admiralty, and for the rest of the war the most brilliant captain Britain possessed was left fretting on half pay, his fertile, inventive mind consumed with experiments for gas warfare and sulphur ships or endless battles against the institutional corruption of an establishment that had no intention of forgetting the Basque Roads.
He was an odd mix, Cochrane: a Romantic without a ‘particle of romance’ in his body; a ‘Sea Wolf’ who eloped with his sixteen-year-old bride; a man of violence with a curiously quixotic streak to his nature; a chivalrous, gentlemanly exponent of ‘shock and awe’ before anyone had dreamed of the term; and a supreme exponent of amphibious warfare who was utterly at sea on land. From his earliest days in the service he had invariably made a point of choosing the wrong enemies to fight, and in these years after the Gambier trial – dangerous years of growing tension between the radicals and the government – he seems to have gone out of his way to broaden the field of attack, taking on anyone and everyone from the wretched proctor, marshal and general panjandrum of the Admiralty court in Malta to Wellington’s powerful clan, the Wellesleys.
It is possible that, in spite of himself, Cochrane might still have got away with his campaign if he had not chosen his friends as unwisely as he chose his enemies. In the February of 1814 it even seemed as if there might at last be a way back into active service, but then occurred an event that, like some bizarre demonstration of chaos theory, would send Cochrane to the King’s Bench and in doing so change the political contours of two continents.
Sometime after midnight on 21 February 1814, while France was still locked into the final, bloody endgame of the Napoleonic era, a man in a grey coat and the red uniform of the general staff was heard loudly knocking at the door of the Ship Inn at Dover. The landlord of the nearby Packet Boat came over to see what the commotion was, and the stranger announced himself as Lieutenant Colonel Du Bourg, aide-de-camp to Lord Cathcart, Britain’s ambassador with the advancing allied armies to the Emperor Alexander’s Russia.
He had just been landed by a French vessel, he said, and needed pen, paper and a horse and rider to take an urgent message to Admiral Foley at Deal. ‘I have the honour to acquaint you,’ he rapidly wrote to the admiral, ‘that the L’Aigle from Calais, Pierre Duquin, Master, has this moment landed me near Dover, to proceed to the capital with despatches of the happiest nature … my anxiety will allow me to say no more for your gratification than that the Allies obtained a final victory; that Bonaparte was overtaken by a party of Sacken’s Cossacks, who immediately slayed him, and divided his body between them; G
eneral Platoff saved Paris from being reduced to ashes; the allied sovereigns are there, and the white cockade is universal; and immediate peace is certain.’
Foley could do nothing until the morning, and even then fog prevented the use of the Admiralty’s semaphore system linking the coast with London, but by that time ‘Du Bourg’ and his chaise and four were well on their way to the capital and the news of Napoleon’s death about to hit the city’s stock exchange. On the previous Saturday the price of Omnium – the most volatile of government securities – had closed at 26¾, but within moments of the Exchange opening at ten it and all stock had begun to rise, faltering briefly before soaring again when another chaise and four, decked out with victory laurels, and occupied by three ‘French’ officers sporting the white Bourbon cockade, swept into the city to put an end to all doubts about Du Bourg’s story.
There were large profits to be had for anyone who sold at 32 – immense margins for those who just a couple of weeks earlier had bought Omnium at 19⅛ – and by the time that the news came through that Bonaparte was alive and the price had slumped back to its morning 26½, the damage was done.
The Stock Exchange had immediately set up a committee to enquire into the hoax, and by the beginning of March the trail was leading towards Cochrane. For those supporters who never lost the faith this was all part of an overarching government plot to ruin him, and yet even for the neutral the long chain of associations, circumstantial evidence, personal and business connections and dealing patterns that placed him at the heart of the fraud left questions that needed answering.
Cochrane had certainly made money out of the hoax, and his worthless uncle, Andrew Cochrane-Johnstone – the corrupt and shameless ex-governor-slaver of Dominica – was up to his neck in it, but if Cochrane was innocent the circumstantial evidence was all that his enemies could possibly want. On the day that the conspirators had ridden up to London, Cochrane was at a factory in Cock Lane working on a new design of ship’s convoy lamp, but a message from a servant had brought him back to his house in Green Street, where a man he knew as De Berenger and who had been masquerading as Du Bourg – a soldier of fortune and debtor living within the more liberal ‘Rules’ of the King’s Bench – was there waiting for him.