‘My dear Eliza – The feelings which you must have experienced, unused as you have been to the lamentable changes of this uncertain life, must have even exceeded that which I suffered in mind from the unexpected and unmerited ruin in which I am unhappily involved. Shocked as I am, and distressed as I am, yet I feel confidence. God is my judge that the crime imputed to me I did not commit… I am distressed on your account more than on my own; for knowing my innocence, and unable to speak of the private acts of any other, I cannot bring myself to believe that I shall be disgraced and punished without cause.’29
Cochrane’s outspoken attacks in Parliament, and the part he had played in the court martial of Lord Gambier, had made him many enemies. They now took the necessary steps to complete his disgrace. At a dinner of senior naval officers at Portsmouth the Prince Regent expressed his determination to order his degradation and his removal from the Navy List. ‘I will never permit a service, hitherto of unblemished honour, to be disgraced by the continuance of Lord Cochrane,’ he declared. ‘I shall also strip him of the Order of the Bath.’30
A cartoon depicting ‘Things as they have been. Things as they now are.’ Cochrane the naval hero is contrasted with Cochrane the disgraced civilian. On the right are the walls of the King’s Bench Prison.
Within a week of the trial the Admiralty issued an order which ended Cochrane’s career as an officer of the Royal Navy. This was followed by a further blow on 5 July when the government introduced a motion in the House of Commons to order his expulsion from Parliament. Sir Francis Burdett and Samuel Whitbread were among those who spoke on his behalf but Cochrane, who had been released from prison in order that he might address the House, launched into such a violent attack on Lord Ellenborough and the jury that Castlereagh warned the reporters present that they could be prosecuted for libel if they published the speech as given. Numerous asterisks replaced Cochrane’s swear words in the Hansard report.31 Most of the members present felt that he had damaged his cause by his intemperate language but his outburst evidently convinced a number of MPs of his innocence. When the vote was taken 144 members voted for his expulsion but 44 members were prepared to vote against the motion.
Cochrane’s speech revealed the extent of his bitterness. He had previously enjoyed considerable fame as a naval hero and a parliamentary crusader but these worlds were now closed to him. It is little wonder that he had moments of despair. Mary Russell Mitford, who had seen Cochrane in his heyday playing with the children on the lawns of William Cobbett’s house, wrote to a friend, ‘Did papa tell you that he had seen poor, poor Lord Cochrane, that victim to his uncle’s villainy, almost every day? He wept like a child to papa. And they say that the last dreadful degradation, the hacking off the spurs of knighthood, is actually to be put in force upon him.’32
The Prince Regent’s threat to strip Cochrane of his knighthood was duly carried out. On 11 August a strange midnight ritual took place at Westminster Abbey. Cochrane’s coat of arms and banner were taken down from King Henry VII’s Chapel by Mr Townshend, the Bath King of Arms. The banner was then kicked out of the chapel and down the steps ‘according to the ancient form, by the King of Arms’.33 To strip him of the honour he had been awarded for his heroic role in the fireship attack at Basque Roads was the ultimate revenge of the establishment. Many years later, under a more forgiving regime, he would fight to have this honour restored.
The Prince Regent, the Admiralty and the politicians had done their best to bring him low, but Cochrane still had many friends and supporters. His radical friends and associates in and out of Parliament were his most forthright defenders. William Cobbett wrote a thundering series of articles in the Weekly Political Register which resulted in a record circulation of 7,000 copies. And most heartening of all was the reaction of Cochrane’s Westminster constituents. Following his expulsion from Parliament a writ was issued for a by-election at Westminster. On 11 July, Sir Francis Burdett addressed a mass meeting of 5,000 electors. He urged them ‘to vindicate the character of an illustrious person who had rendered great services to the country’ and he condemned the malice of his enemies. To prolonged applause from the assembled crowd he said that if Lord Cochrane was to stand in the pillory he should feel it his duty to stand beside him. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who had been Cochrane’s opponent in previous elections, announced that he would not stand against him as a candidate, and Henry Brougham and Major Cartwright followed his lead. On 16 July, Cochrane was returned unopposed by the electors of Westminster as their Member of Parliament.
This encouraging news was followed three days later by further good news. The young Lord Ebrington, supported by Lord Nugent, had put forward a motion in Parliament asking for the pillory sentence to be rescinded on the grounds of Cochrane’s outstanding services to his country. On 19 July, Lord Castlereagh announced that a royal pardon had been extended to all persons currently under sentence of the pillory. There is little doubt that there would have been a riot and much smashing of windows by sailors and Westminster electors if Cochrane had been subjected to this medieval punishment.
The trial, the verdict and the sentence imposed on Cochrane aroused considerable controversy at the time and continued to do so for many years, fanned by Cochrane’s subsequent attempt to impeach Lord Ellenborough, and by the accusations which he made in his autobiography that the trial was politically motivated and ‘that a higher authority than the Stock Exchange was at the bottom of my prosecution’.34 His vendetta against Lord Ellenborough prompted Ellenborough’s family to respond and resulted in several publications challenging his accusations. The most comprehensive analysis of the circumstances surrounding the trial, J. B. Atlay’s The Trial of Lord Cochrane before Lord Ellenborough, was commissioned by one of Ellenborough’s grandsons. All except two of Cochrane’s many biographers have argued more or less passionately that he was innocent of involvement in the fraud, but the tendency of most of them to accept Cochrane’s autobiographies uncritically somewhat weakens their arguments. The most detailed and scholarly account of Cochrane’s early life has concluded that ‘the question of his guilt cannot be satisfactorily resolved’ but nevertheless provides compelling evidence to show that he was an innocent victim of his uncle’s plotting.35
Legal opinion over the years has been critical of the manner in which Lord Ellenborough conducted the trial, and several high-ranking lawyers (including three Lord Chancellors) who reviewed the case during the course of the nineteenth century concluded that Cochrane should have been found not guilty. While his conviction would certainly be regarded as ‘unsafe’ in the present state of the law, it is almost impossible to apply today’s standards to a trial that took place in 1814.36 However, it is worth noting that there are a number of points on which lawyers then and now agree. The first was expressed by Sir Fitzroy Kelly, who became Attorney General in 1858 and later Lord Chief Baron. He wrote of Cochrane’s trial, ‘I have thought of it much and long during more than forty years, and I am profoundly convinced that, had he been defended singly and separately from the other accused, or had he at the last moment, before judgement was pronounced, applied with competent legal advice and assistance for a new trial, he would have been unhesitatingly and honourably acquitted.’37 Because Cochrane was not separately represented it could not be said on his behalf that, although he was closely associated with Cochrane-Johnstone, Butt and De Berenger, he was not personally aware of what they were up to – the line he took at the sentencing procedure after the verdict.
The second point concerns Lord Ellenborough’s insistence that the defence must begin presenting their case at 10.00 p.m., after the jury had already spent thirteen hours listening to the case for the prosecution. Today this would have been grounds for setting aside the verdict, probably leading to a fresh trial. James Scarlet, one of the defence counsel at the time and subsequently Lord Abinger, remarked many years later that he was satisfied of Cochrane’s innocence, ‘and I believe it might have been established to the satisfaction of the jury,
if the judge had not arbitrarily hurried on the defence at a late hour’.38
Finally there was no evidence produced to show that Cochrane was personally involved in, or had any knowledge of, a plot before De Berenger arrived at his house. It is possible that he realised or suspected then that something was wrong and it is conceivable that he joined the conspiracy but only at that late stage. But if that was the case why was he not separately represented and why was his defence not run on those lines? It has been suggested that a combination of aristocratic disdain and his belief in his own innocence convinced him that he was invulnerable, and that he should do his best to help the others to be acquitted. Henry Brougham was certain that family loyalty contributed to Cochrane’s downfall: ‘I take upon me to assert that Lord Cochrane’s conviction was mainly owing to the extreme repugnance which he felt to giving up his uncle, or taking those precautions for his own safety which would have operated against that near relation.’39
Cochrane’s sense of family loyalty is underlined by a letter he received from Cochrane-Johnstone’s daughter Elizabeth more than forty years after the trial when he was busy preparing his autobiography. She had been living in her father’s house at the time of the hoax and so presumably had some inkling of what he was up to. ‘Many years I cannot wish for you,’ she wrote,
but may you live to finish your book and if it pleases God may you and I have a peaceful deathbed. We have both suffered much mental anguish tho’ in various degrees for yours was indeed the hardest lot that an honourable man can be called on to bear. Oh, my dear cousin, let me say once more, while we are still here, how ever since that miserable time, I have felt that you suffered for my poor father’s fault – how agonising that conviction was – how thankful that tardy justice was done you – may God restore you fourfold for your generous tho misplaced confidence in him and for all your subsequent forbearance.’40
While Cochrane tried to settle down to the restrictions of life behind the walls of the King’s Bench Prison, Napoleon was having to get used to exile on the Italian island of Elba. During the course of February 1814 he had fought a series of rearguard actions as the Allied forces advanced on Paris. He still had the support of his soldiers and his generals but the people of France were weary of war and the Parisians in particular were not prepared to die to defend their homes. When Tsar Alexander of Russia, King Frederick William of Prussia and Prince Schwarzenberg of Austria entered Paris at the end of March they encountered no opposition. The French Senate deposed Napoleon and on 6 April he was asked to abdicate. He accepted the inevitable. ‘Very good, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘since it must be so, I will abdicate. I have tried to bring happiness to France and have not succeeded. I do not wish to increase our sufferings.’41 It was agreed that he must leave the shores of France and take up residence as Emperor and Sovereign of the Isle of Elba. On 26 April 1814 he arrived at the little port of St Raphael, near Cannes, and two days later he embarked on the British frigate Undaunted. He was wearing the uniform of the Old Guard with the star of the Légion d’Honneur on his chest. He greeted Captain Ussher of the Undaunted ‘with great condescension and politeness’ and plied him with questions about his ship and the passage to Elba. In fifteen months’ time, following his escape from Elba and his defeat at Waterloo, he would surrender to Captain Maitland of the Bellerophon and ply him with similar questions.
16
The Wilderness Years
1814–1818
The damaging effect of the Stock Exchange trial on Cochrane’s life cannot be exaggerated. In the words of one historian, ‘At a stroke all his prospects were destroyed, and Lord Cochrane confronted a future devoid of any means of income, without resources, and possibly without honour.’1 It was not the sentence itself which was so painful: imprisonment could be endured and overcome, as it was by Sir Francis Burdett, William Cobbett, Henry Hunt and other outspoken writers, journalists and politicians of this period. It was the consequences of the guilty verdict which were so damaging: Cochrane lost his livelihood as a naval officer, the profession he had so thoroughly mastered and which had brought him fame and prize money; and he lost his political credibility – it is true that his crusade for naval reform and his support for the radicals had made him enemies but his distinguished naval record and his position as the heir to an earldom had given him a certain authority. He now became an outsider, seen by many as an embittered man fighting for lost causes. But most wounding of all was the stain on his honour and on his family name. The rest of his life would be a long-running campaign to restore his damaged reputation and to clear his name. There would be numerous diversions and adventures but he could never forget the ‘period of my life in which occurred circumstances beyond all others painful to the feelings of an honourable man’. When he came to compile his autobiography at the age of eighty-four he was still bitter and would recall how, at the news of his conviction and sentence ‘my heart for the first time sank within me, as conscious of a blow, the effect of which it has required all my energies to sustain.’2
After his initial depression Cochrane settled down to life in the King’s Bench Prison. Throughout the autumn and winter he continued to work on his designs for the convoy lamp and his plans for the gas lighting of street lamps. He prepared a long and rambling letter to Lord Ellenborough, and he had visits from his family and friends. He could walk with them in the courtyard and watch his fellow prisoners playing draughts and skittles. Kate visited him regularly but he discouraged her from coming to live with him in the prison: ‘My lovely Kate. You know the inconvenience of this place, and how impossible it is for me to make a single room in a prison comfortable to you. I would not willingly put you to inconvenience, and induce you to sacrifice anything to my satisfaction. No, not for the whole world. This is not a place favourable to morality. I wish you to remain, as you are, uncorrupted by the wickedness of this world.’3
He had completed eight months of his sentence when he decided to escape. He would later explain that his decision was prompted by his determination to assume his seat in Parliament and to remind the members ‘that their sentence of expulsion had been reversed by the People’ and to demand a ‘strict investigation into the cause of my suffering, and into the conduct of my Judge’.4 No doubt he also became increasingly restless at being confined behind the prison walls and the idea of a daring escape appealed to his sense of adventure. It was a foolish idea and gained him nothing but further notoriety and harsher conditions. A servant had smuggled in some lengths of rope and on the night of 6 March 1815 he made his attempt. The windows of his room were level with the top of the outer prison wall and only a few feet from it. For a sailor accustomed to working with ropes at a considerable height above a moving deck, it was a simple operation. He made a loop in the end of the rope and when the night watchman had made his rounds he threw the rope across so that the loop caught in the spikes on top of the wall. He swung himself across, climbed over the spikes and let himself down on the far side of the wall. All would have been well had the rope not snapped when he was still more than twenty feet from the ground. He fell heavily on his back and was knocked unconscious. He recovered, found there were no bones broken and made his way to the nearby house of a former servant of the family. By the time the prison authorities had discovered that he had escaped, he was on his way to Holly Hill, his house in Hampshire.
There was an immediate hue and cry, and a poster was issued advertising a three hundred guinea reward for his capture. The poster included a description which scarcely did justice to his impressive height and powerful physique: ‘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.’5
There were rumoured sightings of him in the City of London, in Hastings, in France and in the Channel Islands. That he might be at his Hampshire home does not seem to have occurred to anyone. He remained there for two weeks enjoying
the company of Kate and their baby son Tom and then headed back to London. On the afternoon of 21 March he walked into the Clerks’ Room in the Houses of Parliament dressed in his usual grey trousers and greatcoat and told them he intended to speak in the Commons. He was informed that he could not take the necessary oath to speak until the writ for his election at Westminster had been fetched from the Crown Office in Chancery Lane. While he waited for the writ to arrive, Cochrane entered the debating chamber and, according to the official account of the incident, ‘he sat down on the Privy Councillors Bench on the right hand of the chair, at which time there was no member present, prayers not having been read’.6 An urgent message must have been sent to Southwark because after a while the Marshal of the King’s Bench Prison arrived with two or three of his officers and some assistants and told Cochrane that he was arresting him. Cochrane refused to acknowledge his authority and said that he had no right to arrest a Member of Parliament. There was a struggle, Cochrane was overpowered and taken back to the King’s Bench Prison.
Cochrane the Dauntless Page 27