Cochrane

by Donald Thomas

  Even the Speedy could hardly take on three battleships at once, indeed most commanders would have hauled down the ensign and surrendered without further ado. A well-aimed broadside from the Dessaix would sink the brig in an instant. Cochrane decided that it might just be possible to outmanoeuvre the three battleships and escape to the open sea. He put the Speedy under full sail to take advantage of the wind and told his men to trundle the fourteen 4-pounder guns overboard. They would be useless in any action against the three great ships and their weight would only slow the brig down. Then he ordered his men to the sweeps, the long oars which were worked by sailors to move a ship when becalmed or to give her extra speed in an emergency.

  The three French ships had moved apart to block every way of escape. Cochrane's first concern was to manoeuvre the Speedy rapidly and unexpectedly so that she seldom faced the menacing broadsides of the battleships as their rows of guns towered above her. But by avoiding the broadsides he inevitably exposed the ship to the chase-guns in the bows or stern of the French battleships. As the shot ripped through the sails of the brig, fragments of wooden spars fell away and clattered on the deck.

  So long as she remained pinned between the French battleships and the Spanish coast, the Speedy would inevitably be destroyed. But if she could gain the open sea, there was a chance that lightness and greater manoeuvrability would enable her to elude the French until darkness fell and she could escape. Cochrane ordered all the stores to be thrown overboard to lighten the ship still further, as the French men-of-war closed in. Then, under full canvas, he brought the little brig on a course between the Dessaix and one of the other ships. The French were taken aback at first, since they expected Cochrane to sail away from them rather than towards them, but the captain of the Dessaix, Christie Palliere, was in time to order a hasty broadside as the brig sped past. When the rolling gun-smoke thinned and cleared, the Speedy was still afloat and heading for the horizon.

  Palliere immediately tacked in pursuit, while the brig dodged and turned to avoid capture. For an hour, the chase continued but with each salvo from the guns in the Dessaix1s bows more holes appeared in the tattered rigging of the Speedy. As she lost canvas, the Dessaix was soon within musket shot of her and then, overhauling her, turned broadside on and fired. It was as well for Cochrane and his men that the speed with which the battleship turned carried her too far, so that the heavier shot plunged into the sea just ahead of the Speedy's bows. But the full force of scattered grape-shot struck the rigging, cutting apart the sails until they hung in shreds, and tearing away spars and sections of the masts. Without guns or rigging, there was no more to be done. Cochrane ordered the colours to be hauled down.

  He was escorted aboard the Dessaix and stood face to face with his late adversary Palliere on the French quarterdeck. As was customary, he took off his sword and offered it to his captor. Palliere shook his head.

  "I will not accept the sword of an officer who has for so many hours struggled against impossibility," he said courteously.

  Cochrane was indeed a prisoner, but he was permitted to continue wearing his sword.28

  The Speedy had sailed for the last time under Cochrane's command but, as he was taken on the Dessaix to Algeciras, he was able to reckon up the prizes of thirteen months in command. He had captured over fifty other vessels, 122 guns, and 534 prisoners. On his arrival at Algeciras, he was still treated more like a guest than a prisoner by Captain Palliere. The two men were on the Dessaix when Sir James Saumarez attacked Algeciras with his squadron. "It shall not spoil our breakfast," said Palliere coolly, as they sat in the stern cabin of the battleship. The meal continued until a British round shot crashed through the stern timbers of the Dessaix, showering the breakfast table with broken glass from a wine bin which had been under the sofa.29

  As a matter of fact, Cochrane's unusual experience of the Royal Navy's gunnery lasted for no more than a couple of weeks, before he was exchanged and returned to Gibraltar. He owed this exchange to the arrival of a squadron of Spanish ships on 12 July. The garrison band of Gibraltar assembled on the foreshore, playing "Britons, Strike Home!" as Sir James Saumarez and his squadron put to sea again, the Royal Marine band on the poop of his flagship Caesar piping, "Come, cheer up, my lads, 'tis to glory we steer!" The two fleets met at twilight, Captain Keats of the Superb dashing between the two columns of the Spanish ships, firing to right and left of him. In the darkness and the smoke, he caused such confusion that two Spanish ships, the San Hermenegildo and the Real Carlos, each mistook the other for a British attacker and exchanged heavy broadsides. The sails of the Real Carlos began to burn and soon the hull caught fire. In this state she collided with the San Hermenegildo, whom she was still fighting, and set fire to her as well. As both ships blew up, Captain Keats boarded and captured the San Antonio. It was the second captain of this ship for whom Cochrane was exchanged.

  Because he had lost the Speedy, Cochrane was automatically court-martialled, the trial taking place on board the Pompee in Rosia Bay on 18 July. There was no doubt that he would be acquitted. He had done all that could be expected of him when the brig was confronted by three battleships. Most commanders would have given up far more easily. On the other hand, if his case had been inquired into too strictly, the use of the Speedy to carry the packets in order to facilitate the profits of a merchant who happened to be a friend of the commandant of Port Mahon was bound to come to light. He was hurriedly and formally set free.

  From St Vincent's correspondence, it seems that he rather hoped that Cochrane would be removed from his consideration by remaining a prisoner of the French or the Spanish. But Cochrane had returned as the twenty-six-year-old commander who had won a victory over the Gamo which was already passing into legend, and who had fought a heroic, if hopeless, action against three French battleships. To refuse him either promotion to post-captain or a new command might stir up a hornet's nest. St Vincent delayed as long as he could, and then compromised. Cochrane was promoted post-captain with effect from 8 August 1801, the date on which the Admiralty received confirmation of his acquittal by the court-martial of 18 July. Those who alleged that his promotion had been too long withheld were duly silenced. But the new rank carried no new command with it. Smarting under this ingenious punishment by the First Lord, Cochrane returned to Edinburgh. He was a captain without a ship, and a hero without a battle to fight.

  It mattered less than it might have done. Just as the war had been precipitated by a change of public mood as much as by the logic of policy, so now there was a general but ill-defined inclination for peace. Neither side in the war had gained a decisive advantage after almost a decade of military and naval struggle. The British had seized a few overseas territories, while France had established her influence in Italy. But Pitt and others concluded that Buonaparte having gained supreme power in France, was a reasonable man who would be content with what he had won. The revolutionary horrors of 1793 had long ceased to be sufficient pretext for continuing the war.

  In the autumn of 1801, Lord Cornwallis and Talleyrand met at Amiens to draw a treaty restoring the two nations, in effect, to their status quo of 1793. France would leave Naples and southern Italy. England would evacuate Malta and return all conquests except for Trinidad and Ceylon. The Cape of Good Hope, seized by England as a precaution, was returned to Holland. The affairs of Europe itself were to be left aside. Negotiations dragged on until the following March, when the major European questions still remained unresolved. But peace had been decided on, and so the Treaty of Amiens was signed. Sheridan called it a peace which everybody was glad of and nobody was proud of. The elder Lord Palmerston dismissed it sourly as "the peace which passeth all understanding". Such sentiments were quite contrary to popular taste. When General Lauriston brought the terms to London, the delighted crowds whose predecessors had roared, "War with France! War with France!" on that winter day in 1793, dragged his carriage through the streets in triumph. But before the agreement of Amiens was signed, those whom it concerned m
ost closely had already begun to prepare in their minds the renewed war that must come. The young Lord Cochrane had no idea when it would come or whether there would be a part in it for him. He needed desperately the chance to win his fortune in battle, but the enemy at home who robbed heroes of the pounds, shillings and pence of courage had also to be defeated. In such warfare, a man could not afford to show the chivalry which he might accord to an enemy who was French or Spanish.30

  3

  "A Sink of Corruption"

  BECALMED by the new peace, the hero of fifty sea fights, the victor of the Gamo incident, and the gallant defender of his little brig against three French battleships, returned home. Like all the best heroes, he appeared modest and self-contained. At twenty-six years old, with his mop of red hair, awkward height, and beak of a nose, he was beginning to acquire a certain physical distinction which the caricaturists could put to good use. But the shallow waters of naval politics and parliamentary intrigue concealed worse perils than the Catalan coast and Cochrane was well aware that he must begin a new apprenticeship. One of those with whom he allied himself was the Radical country gentleman William Cobbett. It was at Cobbett's house, in a soft and leafy Hampshire valley, that Mary Russell Mitford first saw the young naval hero. She found him "as unlike the common notion of a warrior as could be. A gentle, quiet, mild young man, was this burner of French fleets as one should see in a summer day. He lay about under the trees, reading Seldon on the Dominion of the Seas, and letting children (and children always know with whom they may take liberties) play all sorts of tricks with him at their pleasure."1

  The mild bookishness was no mere pose. Cochrane felt the need to complete that education which had been imparted during his boyhood so randomly. Gathering up the remains of his prize money, he travelled to Edinburgh to enter himself as a student of the great Professor of Moral Philosophy, Dugald Stewart. Like so many nineteenth-century academics renowned for their teaching rather than for publications, Dugald Stewart's name passed into obscurity. But to the progressively-minded sons of the ruling class at the turn of the century, he was the great educator. His pupils included Walter Scott, Lord Palmerston, Francis Jeffrey, later editor of the Edinburgh Review, Lord Cockburn, a future solicitor-general, Henry Brougham, one day to be Lord Chancellor, and James Mill, political philosopher and father of John Stuart Mill.

  Though he was the great tutor of the Whigs and the patrician Radicals, Dugald Stewart's enemies swore that he was indoctrinating the country's future leaders with the politics of revolutionary France. His students found him a thin pale man, as Lord Cockburn recalled, with intense grey eyes, shaggy brows, and the high bald dome of intellect. He combined tenacious argument with the vocal agility of a great actor or preacher, as he demonstrated irrefutably the nature of constitutional wisdom and the virtues of the ideal republic. His more earnest followers declared that to hear Dugald Stewart was to sit at the feet of a new Demosthenes. More worldly spirits thought him every bit as good as Mrs Siddons.

  Cochrane worked a good deal harder than the younger students, partly because "it was necessary to be economical", and work was cheaper than pleasure. His compensation was the physical and architectural splendour of Edinburgh in the early nineteenth century. A new series of vistas had been added by the classicism of Robert Adam, rivalling the mediaeval city and the castle on the hill. Corinthian columns, mellow gold, and ceiling frescoes brought interior grandeur to such buildings as the Advocates' Library. Sir David Wilkie swore that the city combined the noblest of Prague and Salzburg, the most romantic of Orvieto and Tivoli. Edinburgh, remarked Chopin, speaks to the imagination.2

  Poverty and the discipline of war taught Captain Lord Cochrane to subordinate personal comfort and private inclination to the stern demands of public duty. Marriage and domestic attachments were still an unattainable luxury to a man in his position. A wife was not an asset to a naval officer looking for advancement. Indeed, marriage was the one pretext which St Vincent needed to put an end to Cochrane's career altogether. "Sir," he had written to one of his favourite lieutenants. "You having thought fit to take yourself a wife, are to look for no further attentions from your humble servant."3

  But Cochrane's time at Edinburgh was important in his development. He went there with a personal grievance, he emerged with a political philosophy. Called upon to advise a junior officer treated as he had been, Cochrane's answer was unequivocal.

  "If you have, in the exercise of your profession, acquired a right which is wrongfully withheld - demand it, stick to it with unshaken pertinacity - none but a corrupt body can possibly think the worse of you for it; even though you may be treated like myself - you are doing your country good service by exposing favouritism, which is only another term for corruption."4

  But with the coming of peace, Lord St Vincent had also chosen to make his mark as a reformer by investigating dockyard corruption. Such revelations would hardly have served national morale while the war was in progress but just before the Treaty of Amiens was actually signed, the gouty First Lord wrote to the Commissioners at the dockyards of Plymouth, Portsmouth, Chatham, and Woolwich, ordering them to put their books and papers under seal at once, pending an official inspection. When the Public Thanksgiving on i June 1802 was safely over, the necessary arrangements were made. From August until October, the Board of Admiralty toured the dockyards, reporting from Sheerness on 16 October, "the Public has been, suffered to be defrauded to a very considerable extent, and delinquencies passed unpunished". St Vincent himself had already written to Addington, the Prime Minister, from Plymouth, "We find abuses to such an extent as would require many months to go thoroughly into, and the absolute necessity of a Commission of Enquiry to expose them appears to the Admiralty Board here in a much stronger light than ever."5

  As St Vincent soon discovered, there were men at every level who resisted any such investigation. There were sailors who enlisted on ships at sea and dockyard hulks simultaneously, thus drawing double pay. At the other social extreme, there was the Deputy Commissioner who enjoyed a house, servants, salary, private yacht and crew, all paid for from the funds of his dockyard, which he had not even visited for the past four years. Government ministers grew uneasy over what might be made public by their First Lord's proposed "Commission of Inquiry". By the autumn of 1802 it was evident to them that the French had no more intention of fulfilling the terms of the Treaty of Amiens than they had. Renewed war seemed inevitable. It was all very well for St Vincent to insist on commissions of inquiry, but whatever "sink of corruption" lay in the dockyards was likely to be exhumed in the middle of a new and more desperate struggle against the power of Buonaparte. There were already popular movements growing in England which opposed a renewal of war. They and their more influential sympathisers might do untold damage to Britain's military resolve with such ammunition as St Vincent would unwittingly provide.6

  The prospect of war made an autumn sitting of parliament necessary, though there was no indecorous haste and the session began on 22 November with the shooting season over. The cabinet and the First Lord argued, until St Vincent refused to take his seat in the Lords. Faced with inevitable public scandal sooner or later, Adding-ton chose to placate St Vincent and delay the crisis. The commission was agreed to, though the government managed to reduce some of its proposed powers as the price of consent. Five commissioners were appointed, two naval officers and three lawyers. Three of the five were also Members of Parliament.

  The Commission issued fourteen reports, the first, on naval storekeepers at Jamaica, on 12 May 1803; the last, on the Royal Hospital at Greenwich, on 30 June 1806. Most of the old accusations were documented and many more were proved. In private shipyards, 300 men could build seven ships a year. In naval yards 3000 men could barely manage to repair seven ships a year. The Navy Board had never checked what money in the yards was paid to whom, or why. That was left to the dockyard clerks. "It is scarcely to be credited' said the Commissioners in their Sixth Report. Worse still, the Navy Board
had never checked any of the paybooks. Three of its four members had no idea whether anyone else checked them either.7

  But the ministers need not have worried. Even these revelations, when they came, were lost in the greater drama of the new war. By the beginning of 1803, Buonaparte was raging at the British ambassador, Lord Whitworth, over England's failure to withdraw from Malta. Britain replied, suggesting that the withdrawal be postponed for ten years and that the island of Lampedusa should then be made an alternative base. Addington forwarded counter-accusations of French interference in Italy and the preparation of an invasion force on the Channel coast, near Boulogne. In the Commons, on 11 February, a Bill was introduced extending militia training to twenty-eight days. News of this brought a summons from Buonaparte to Lord Whitworth. The great Consul harangued the ambassador, swearing that he would as soon see the English in possession of the Faubourg St Antoine as of Malta. England must choose either to join him and share the spoils of Europe, or oppose him and be crushed. The invasion force at Boulogne was mentioned. So long as there were two parties in England, Buonaparte explained, one for peace and one for war, France must prepare for either eventuality. Orders for the raising of 500,000 troops were therefore to be given. If England chose war, Buonaparte promised to lead the invasion himself.8

  On 8 March, the King informed the Commons that England was under threat of invasion from the French and Dutch Channel ports. Militia regiments throughout the kingdom were mobilised. The speed with which the two nations flew to war contrasted strongly with the diplomatic pas-de-deux of 1792. But this time it was not fear of revolutionary contagion nor outrage over butchery disguised as "the stern justice of the people" which forced Addington to issue his ultimatum. England now faced the simple military reality of a great European power, armed and led by a man in whose shadow the rest of the Continent trembled.