by David Crane
Cochrane had his explanation for this, and why De Berenger was later found with his bank notes at the port of Leith, but the case ultimately came down to a question of the colour of the coat De Berenger had been wearing when he arrived. He had told Cochrane that he had to get out of the country to escape his creditors, and according to Cochrane’s version, had turned up in the green uniform of a sharpshooter – a red uniform, a Hackney driver, William Crane, was ready to swear – to press his plea for help and, curiously, to ask for the loan of a change of clothes to throw the King’s Bench officers off his scent.
It was the word of the coachman against Cochrane, but by the time that he was indicted for fraud and committed to trial at the Court of the King’s Bench only Cochrane can have imagined innocence would prove any defence. He was so entirely sure of his case that, beyond his initial affidavit, he took no part in the proceedings, and was not even in court when the Lord Chief Justice, Edward Law – the same able, bruising, jury-hectoring ‘bulldog’ of the Tory government, Lord Ellenborough, who had tried the Hunts – began a trial that for ‘partiality, misrepresentation, injustice, and oppression’ would run the Gambier court martial close. ‘You have before had the animal hunted home,’ Ellenborough told the jury, referring to the discovery of Du Bourg’s red uniform in the Thames, ‘and now you have his skin … De Berenger stripped himself at Lord Cochrane’s. He pulled off his scarlet uniform there, and if the circumstances of it not being green did not excite Lord Cochrane’s suspicion, what did he think of the star and the medal? It became him, as an officer and a gentleman, to communicate his suspicion of these circumstances. Did he not ask De Berenger where he had been in this masquerade dress? It was for the jury to say whether Lord Cochrane did not know where he had been. This was not the dress of a sharpshooter, but of a mountebank. He came before Lord Cochrane fully blazoned in the costume of his crime.’
It took the jury two-and-a-half hours to reach a guilty verdict, and on 20 June 1814, Cochrane and those defendants who had not fled the country appeared again before Ellenborough for sentencing. In the intervening days Cochrane and his lawyers had dredged up a number of witnesses ready to support his testimony, but true to form all new evidence was ruled inadmissible and a sentence of an hour in the pillory, a £1,000 fine and a year’s imprisonment handed down. ‘His appearance was … pitiable,’ wrote Crabb Robinson in his diary that night. ‘When the sentence was passed he stood without colour in his face, his eyes staring and without expression and it was with difficulty that he left the court like a man stupefied.’
It is impossible to be sure of Cochrane’s absolute innocence, or the degree of his complicity, but his own de haut en bas disdain for the whole legal process made him again his own worst enemy. It was only at the sentencing that he made any attempt to distance himself from the hoaxers, and in standing or falling with men who were plainly guilty, in resting his case in the last resort – as he always had and always would – on an overweening sense of self that was equally impregnable to criticism or fact, the Romantic hero of the Byronic age took on the machinery of the state with all the self-destructive consequences that inevitably followed.
The Establishment did not just want to send him down, it wanted him humiliated, and if it was too frightened to put the people’s champion in the stocks there were subtler methods at their disposal. ‘I will never permit a service, hitherto of unblemished honour, to be disgraced by the continuance of Lord Cochrane,’ the Prince Regent told a dinner of naval officers at Portsmouth, ‘I shall … strip him of the Order of the Bath.’ He was, perhaps for the only time in his life, as good as his word. Cochrane’s name was removed from the Navy List and at midnight, on 11 August 1814, in an arcane and vindictive ceremony of symbolic disgrace, beneath the great fan-vaulted ceiling of Westminster Abbey’s Henry VII chapel, his coat of arms and banner were removed by Bath King of Arms from the walls, and his banner of knighthood – the reward for his heroics in the Basque Roads – kicked out of the chapel and down the steps ‘according to the ancient form’.
Gambier’s victory was complete. Cochrane was expelled from the navy, he was expelled from the Commons by a vote of 144 to 44, and although the voters of Westminster, the most numerous, independent and famously uncontrollable of all the parliamentary constituencies, returned him unopposed as their member at the subsequent election, he was a ruined man. His escape from gaol – the news of it went round London on the same day that news from Elba reached the capital – was only one more, sad codicil to this. It was an act of theatre, desperation, publicity and folly in equal measures. A 300-guinea reward was offered for his capture and a poster of fatuous inaccuracy posted: ‘Escaped from the King’s Bench prison, on Monday the 6th day of March, instant, Lord Cochrane. He is about five feet eleven inches in height, thin and narrow-chested, with sandy hair and full eyes, red whiskers and eyebrows.’
It was little wonder that with this description, the towering, broadly built Cochrane was sighted from the City to the Channel Isles, but this was no ordinary escape. It was the publication of his grievances he wanted and not simply his freedom. Two weeks after slipping over the King’s Bench wall he appeared in the clerk’s room in Parliament to claim his right to speak in the Commons as the elected member for Westminster. William Jones, the Marshal of the King’s Bench – another target of Cochrane’s campaigning hatred – was sent for to re-arrest him, and after a scuffle with his officers, Cochrane was overpowered and dragged back to prison. This time, though, it was not to his two comfortable rooms on the top floor of the Bench’s State House but to a subterranean and airless ‘strong room’, fourteen feet square, without windows, fire, table or bed, and smelling of some cross between slaughter-house dump and barracks latrine. Within weeks it had taken a dangerous toll on his health, with symptoms of what appeared to be putrid fever or typhus developing. The last thing that the authorities wanted was a martyr of Cochrane’s stature, and after twenty-six days he was moved to another cell to see out the final weeks of his sentence.
There was, though, one last and very Cochrane-like complication. His release, scheduled for 20 June 1815, was dependent on the payment of the £1,000 fine, and this he refused to do. His friends had urged him, subscriptions would have settled it in a trice, but Cochrane would not budge. One of the jurors at the hoax trial, uneasy at his complicity in the verdict, even offered to pay the fine but as Cochrane told another jury it was ‘justice he wanted and not mercy’. And on the morning of Sunday 18 June, as Maitland’s Bellerophon patrolled Cochrane’s old haunts off the Aix Road, and the great standard-bearer of the hated Wellesley clan, the Duke of Wellington, prepared to give battle, and consols fell, and the City nervously waited on the next rumour from Belgium, and an obdurate Cochrane languished in the King’s Bench, justice in England was an endangered ideal.
8 a.m.
The ‘Article’
On the same page of The Examiner that carried the news of Lord Cochrane’s imminent justification was a small item bringing the latest intelligence from the front. There had been no information coming out of Paris since the previous Monday, and while it was pretty certain that Bonaparte must by now have joined his army, anything else was guesswork. ‘It is very difficult for people who are not military to make any particular guesses,’ Leigh Hunt wrote with a becoming show of humility, reserving his barb for the end, ‘and soldiers are no doubt in the habit of making fine jokes of the speculations of Editors in this way. It is generally supposed however, that he will endeavour to strike a blow in the Low Countries, where the people are decidedly averse to their new masters; and … should the Duke of WELLINGTON come in contact with him, we shall have a better opportunity of judging of his Grace’s genius for war than has yet been offered.’
It was a small dig but nicely judged – who had Wellington ever beaten, his enemies wanted to know? – and Hunt was not the only man this morning wondering the same, nor George Keppel the only soldier thinking of prize fights. It had always irked Wellington that Bonapa
rte dismissed him as a mere ‘sepoy general’, and from Hunt and his friend Haydon in London, sparring over their respective champions, to the army in Brussels there was a genuine sense of anticipation that here, finally, on the field of Waterloo, ‘When Greek meets Greek,’ as Sir Augustus Frazer told his wife, are ‘now the two great captains fairly met.’
It would have been inconceivable to his old soldiers that they might have to fight under another general and unimaginable that they could lose under ‘Old Nosey’. In the weeks before Wellington arrived in Brussels the young Prince of Orange had been in command of the army, and a ‘hundred times a day’, the old Peninsula-hand William Wheeler had told his family, the question is asked, ‘Where is Wellington, surely we shall not be led to battle by that boy.’
‘I never remember anything that caused such joy,’ Wheeler wrote again when a general order announced that ‘Silly Billy’ was surrendering ‘the Command of the Army into the more able hands of His Grace the Duke of Wellington’. Throughout the day soldiers of the 51st were rushing up to him ‘almost frantic’ with the news, and that night, as they sat over their hollands and tobacco, singing and dancing and ‘reminding each other of the glorious deeds done in the Peninsula’, they drank in gin ‘to the health of their old commander’ and told themselves that if every Frenchman was a Boney they would still give them a good thrashing.
On the morning of the 18th, William Wheeler still had his hollands, still had his tobacco, and was still talking about the Peninsula, and Wellington, for one, knew that if he was going to win the battle it was the Wheelers who were going to win it for him. A few weeks earlier Wellington had met the Whig politician and gossip Thomas Creevey in the Parc in Brussels, and Creevey, an old political sparring partner from the days when the duke was still no more than an ex-sepoy general, had famously asked him what he reckoned would happen.
‘“By God! I think Blücher and myself can do the thing!”
“Do you calculate on any desertions in Bonaparte’s army?”
“Not upon a man, from the Colonel to the private … We may pick up a marshal or two, perhaps, but not worth a damn …”
Just then a British infantryman came in sight, peering about at the Parc and its statuary.
“There,” said Wellington, pointing to the small scarlet figure, “There, it all depends upon that article whether we do the business or not. Give me enough of it, and I am sure.”’
Wellington had not got the ‘article’ in anything like the quantity he wanted, but along the length of the allied line, carefully eked out to stiffen the resolve of less experienced units, were the old Peninsula men who had taken him from Portugal to Toulouse. Even for soldiers who could remember the preludes to Vittoria and Salamanca the night had been terrible, but for a canny old Walcheren and Peninsula campaigner like Wheeler, fully recovered now from the bad leg wound that had ended his war at the Nivelle, there was always ‘an angle’ to be exploited – a handy box of Spanish dollars to be dug up, a ham or brandy to be filched, an arrangement over an apple tree to come to with the French – or, if all else failed, an endless supply of phlegmatic, good-humoured patience to call on.
He had struck lucky the day before, when on the two days’ march from Grammont to Waterloo, he had picked up a purse dropped as a squadron of Belgian heavy cavalry, fleeing from Quatre Bras, had thundered through Nivelles. There were not many left of the battalion who had marched into France with Wellington just over a year before, but the few of them still there in his company had banded together to share their plunder, and the ‘Godsend’ had already come in handy, buying them bread and cheese from a local peasant and enough brandy and hollands to leave them, ‘in the expression of one of my old comrades’, as he told his family, ‘wet and comfortable’, and fraternally consoled by the thought that at least the French were in the same boat.
It is unlikely that William Wheeler asked himself what he was doing there, not even when the gin and brandy had worn off and only the tobacco his family disapproved of kept his benumbed and shivering body and soul together, but it was certainly a question that his opposite number across the valley would have wanted an answer to. It was bad enough for the French soldier to have been driven out of Spain by aristocratic amateurs of the George Keppel stamp, but for a citizen soldier brought up on the heady doctrines of liberty and equality, there was something degrading – something, even, that smacked of betrayal – about a hardened, professional old sweat like Wheeler and a species of discipline and animal courage that owed more to drink and the lash than to patriotism or gloire.
The charge would not have remotely worried either Wheeler or Wellington – any notion that his men had volunteered out of ‘fine military feeling’ was ‘all stuff’, Wellington insisted – but it would have been more irritating still that the British soldier took an inverted pride in the very brutality that no self-respecting Frenchman would have tolerated. The average British redcoat might not have volunteered out of any high patriotic ideals, but that did not stop him defining himself in opposition to everything that was foreign, or putting up with gallows, the lash and the firing squad in the same way his countrymen at home put up with the most barbaric penal system in Europe.
The Jacobin’s ‘liberty’ and John Bull’s ‘freedom’ had never been the same thing – the freeborn Englishman’s right to be hanged for stealing a sheep was the price he paid for a country without a police or the overweening presence of the state – but there was something else at work in the William Wheelers of Wellington’s army that French indignation missed. For all his talk of ‘the scum of the earth’ Wellington knew better than anyone that that was only half a truth, and in the loyalties that had bound his troops together in Spain, in the extraordinary alchemy that could turn the detritus of the assizes and prisons into the finest army Britain had ever had, abstract notions of patriotism took on a solid actuality that existed nowhere else in national life. ‘As much as I desire to see my dear native land, my home and all dear relations, old playmates and neighbours,’ Wheeler had written home in 1814, after a wound had taken him away from the 51st, ‘I would much rather rejoin my Regiment again and take my chance with it. Then, when this long protracted war is over, if fortune should favour me I should have the proud satisfaction of landing on my native shores with many a brave and gallant comrade, with whom I have braved the dangers of many a hard-fought battle. This is the first time of my being absent from my Regiment since I entered into it and I hope it will not be long before I should hear the sound of its soul stirring bugles again.’
For the last six years the regiment had been his family and country, and if Wheeler probably would not have troubled himself to say why he fought, he knew the answer was not the abject subservience of which the French accused him. ‘When I look around me and see so many strange faces,’ he movingly wrote of his return from hospital to the 51st and to England nine months before, ‘I am a wonder to myself, scarcely four years has rolled over, ere, at this place I embarked with about 900 of my comrades. Where are they now? I could not muster one company out of the whole number. The battle field, fatigue, privations and sickness has made sad havoc in the ranks of as fine a set of young fellows as ever belonged to the service.’
It was not the fear of the lash that had wreaked this havoc or left the ‘Diehards’ of the 57th lying like a pack of cards where they had fallen on the field of Albuera four years earlier. It was not any external discipline that fuelled the ‘vengeance and grief’ of the 79th after the death of their Colonel Philip Cameron at Fuentes d’Onor. They were not Scottish ‘hirelings’ in the 92nd who had taken such crippling casualties in the bloody defence of Quatre Bras two days before. It would not be treason to their own country that would leave the Irishmen of the 27th of Foot dead within their perfect square before the day was out, and no one in the army needed telling that. In the anonymous memoir of a lowland Scot of the 71st at Waterloo can be heard another and more bitter note, but in the voice of William Wheeler, in its inimitable mix of tolera
nce, curiosity and disdain, in its unsentimental affections and clear-eyed scepticism, in its infinite capacity for putting up with incompetence and misery – the drenching rains of Waterloo, waking in Spain to find your head frozen to the ground – we can hear the voice that links the men of Waterloo in a tradition of dogged, grumbling, ironic endurance to the soldiers of Inkerman and to the trenches of the Great War.
And at eight o’clock in the morning, as Wheeler’s brigade quit their cornfield and took up their positions on the high ground above the chateau of Hougoumont, and all down the line Wellington’s ‘article’, the British infantryman, with his contradictory qualities and vices, his courage and brutality, his love of fighting and invincible contempt for foreigners, his petty venality, sporadic viciousness and his kindness, his drunkenness and sober resolution, his iron discipline, wildness and impiousness, cleaned his weapon and got ready for battle, it was this tradition that was taking shape. Very occasionally that article has a name, saved by chance or heroics from anonymity – Wheeler of the 51st; William Hooper of the 40th who had just hours to live; the unbloodied recruit Bartram vomiting with fear; the thirty-seven-year-old Norman Macdonald of Harris ‘shivering like an aspen’ on the ridge by La Haye Sainte; Shaw the Lifeguardsman; Graham of Hougoumont fame; Ewart of the Scots Greys – but he was, as the soldier-poet Edmund Blunden, who would fight with his descendants just miles from the slopes of Waterloo in another war, wrote, ‘called Legion, or nothing’. He was Scottish, he was Irish, he was English, he was Welsh; he had been recruited from the islands and the cities, from the plough and from the loom; he had been tricked out and bought, like Coleridge’s gentle shepherd; he had been plucked from Newgate and the transport ships; he had woken from a drunken stupor to find himself a soldier; he had fallen for the spurious glamour of a recruiting poster; he had been dispossessed of his croft; he had been promised land; he had been bribed out of the militia; he had volunteered.