Apart from all these considerations, Cochrane had not chosen the most propitious time to put forward his plans. With the final collapse of the old King's mind, the Prince of Wales had entered upon his Regency in high spirits. He had not, as had been hoped, dismissed Spencer Perceval and the Tories in favour of the Whigs but life at Carlton House and Brighton sparkled for him as much as ever. Nothing more belligerent than a fishing-smack appeared on the glittering waters of the Channel beyond the Royal Pavilion. On the shaded promenades, among the lawns and trees of the Steine, rouged dandies with their high collars and low hat brims, their female companions or "flashers" hanging on their arms, rivalled the splendour of military fashion. Thomas Creevey surveyed the officers of the Prince of Wales's Hussars at the Pavilion and thought them, "very ornamental monkeys in their red breeches with gold fringe and yellow boots".12
The Prince himself, "uncommonly well, tho' very fat", appeared in full Field Marshal's uniform at the evening receptions, but his interest in the war was minimal. "Portugal and Lord Wellington begin to be out of fashion," Creevey remarked, as he watched the Regent slapping his fat thighs to keep the band in time. He not only slapped, he sang lustily until midnight, when there was a pause for iced champagne punch, lemonade, and sandwiches. "Better heard from the next room in my opinion," said John Wilson Croker, of the musical entertainment.13
Such was the society upon which Cochrane launched his secret plans. At Carlton House or the Pavilion the principal doubt was less likely to be over the feasibility of the plans than over the comparative claims of Cochrane and Napoleon to be the greatest enemy of mankind. Given the merciless choice between such weapons and the long ordeal of the Peninsula, it was Cochrane's suggestion which was regarded as outrageous by the standards of civilised warfare.
None the less, a secret committee was set up to investigate the proposals. The Regent's brother, the Duke of York, presided over it, its members including two naval commanders, Lord Keith and Lord Exmouth, as well as Sir William Congreve, inventor of the Congreve rocket. At first there was some encouragement for Cochrane. The Duke of York was in favour of the principle of attacking French ports. Congreve, "after some days' consideration, gave a favourable opinion as to the practicability of using Explosion and Sulphur vessels". When Admiral Keats was approached by the new Lord Melville, the second of his line to act as First Lord of the Admiralty, he was cautious over Cochrane's scientific warfare but added, "I should feel inclined at least to give it some trial." Lord Keith, as a member of the committee, spoke with less enthusiasm. "Of the combustible weapons I am not so well able to judge," he concluded. "Considerable nautical and military science must be combined."14
The general opinion seemed to favour Cochrane's proposals, though with some caution. Wellington, as it later proved, was opposed to them on the ground that "two might play" at such a game. Cochrane pointed out that the one who played first was going to win. At the Admiralty itself, Lord Melville seemed at first cautiously inclined to favour the plans. And then, as the spring of 1812 turned to summer, and summer to autumn, there was a long silence. Melville might be sympathetic, but Melville's voice was not the only one at the Admiralty, let alone among Spencer Perceval's ministry.15
In August, it was suggested to Cochrane that he might be given the command of a frigate to raid the Spanish coast. After all that he had done, he found the idea preposterous. It would not, he wrote angrily to Melville, "produce material change in the affairs of Europe". And then he began to inquire eagerly of the First Lord as to what decision had been made about his secret plans. "Five months have elapsed without anything being undertaken, or His Majesty's Ministers having pointed out a single obstacle or difficulty," he wrote. "I have waited day after day with increasing anxiety."16
But during those five months the swarm of enemies promised him by Mulgrave over the Gambier affair, and other affairs before that, had done their work. Melville's enthusiasm had cooled and his interest had turned elsewhere. The permanent officials, the senior commanders, the holders of places and sinecures had one opinion of Cochrane for the most part and they were not slow to let the First Lord know it. He was, said St Vincent, untruthful and not to be trusted out of sight. Lord Keith thought him crackbrained. Gambier detested him and Mulgrave despised him. Croker and Wellesley Pole were well-trained in their aversion to him. Even William Windham joined the chorus of calumny by announcing that Cochrane's "firmness of character" would make him "a bad antagonist to a French general".17
By the end of 1812, the position was clear. It had been decided that the limit of official recognition would be to give him command of a frigate. But since he had not shown himself a grateful recipient of such preferment, he was to be given nothing at all, and his secret war plans were to be dismissed from the official mind.
Perhaps Cochrane was to blame, in one respect. Throughout his negotiations with Melville, he had made it clear that he was going to fight the most bitter war against the iniquities of the prize-money system. He came close to refusing the command of a vessel, even without the offer being made, when he wrote to the First Lord, "Whilst the present system of distribution exists, I have determined not to accept a shilling of prize money."18
As soon as the old grievance of prize money was mentioned, the officials of the Admiralty had a further reason for deciding to dispense with Cochrane's services, whatever the consequences to the war or the nation. While completing his secret plans he had been at the centre of a scandal which had revealed corruption on the most bizarre scale in the administration of the system.
The experimental firing of shells from the wine pipe, as a "temporary mortar", had been carried out in the Mediterranean. Cochrane, as an unemployed naval officer, had sailed there in his little yacht, the Julie, one of the armada of ships he had seized from the French at various times. Apart from his interest in the experimental firing of the mortar, he now had the leisure to do battle with the most corrupt of all the Admiralty courts, at Malta. In Cochrane's own case, the court at Malta announced that not a penny was due to him for all the prizes the Imperieuse had taken in the Mediterranean. Instead, he was in debt to the court for the cost of the legal proceedings. Leaving the Julie at Gibraltar, he embarked on a brig-of-war for Malta, determined to make the court's practices public knowledge.
The farce of the Admiralty system was quickly revealed. A ship captured from the enemy as a prize was first under the jurisdiction of the marshal of the court. The marshal would then place it under the jurisdiction of the proctor. These two officials were entitled to charge for attending one another, instructing one another, and administering oaths to one another. All these charges were paid out of the prize money which would otherwise have gone to the officers and crew who had taken the enemy ship in battle.
The great discovery of Cochrane's visit to Malta was that one man, Mr Jackson, held both posts and both salaries of marshal and proctor. He was busily and legally amassing a fortune by fees for visiting himself to ask himself to sign monitions and other legal documents, and for agreeing with himself to do it. He was also paying himself for negotiating fees with himself, and indeed for administering the oath to himself. Still more extraordinary was the fact that the monitions which he asked himself to draw up were also addressed to himself. As Cochrane pointed out, Jackson was entitled to consult with himself as often as he felt necessary and to charge the victims of the court several pounds for doing so. The legal convolutions involved in one monition or simple standard document were charged for at about £5 or rather more than £50 by modern values. In the rare event that any prize money was actually payable once Jackson had finished with it, he also took a standard five per cent commission upon it.19
Cochrane walked into the Admiralty court one day, while the court was not sitting, and demanded to see the official table of fees. The judge advocate, who was in his office, denied that any such table existed, although an Act of Parliament required it to be displayed. Cochrane explored the building, even entering the judge's robing roo
m, without finding a copy. Before leaving, he decided to make use of the judicial lavatory. "And there," he recalled, "watered up behind the door of the Judge's retiring-chamber, was the Admiralty Court table of fees!"
He prepared to leave the law court and, as he passed the judge advocate, Cochrane was "in the act of folding up the paper, previously to putting it in my pocket". The judge advocate tried to prevent him leaving the building by standing in his path. According to Cochrane his own reply to this was reasonable enough. "I have no cause of quarrel with or complaint towards you. Guarding the judge's water-closet forms no part of your duties as judge advocate."
It is a matter of record that in general war or personal confrontation men were apt to be deterred by Cochrane's height and build. The judge advocate stood aside and Cochrane at once took the table of fees to a friend who was sailing for Sicily, and entrusted it to him. If there was consternation among the judge and court officials at the irretrievable loss of the paper, it was not to be wondered at. As Cochrane gleefully remarked, the table would, "when laid before the House of Commons in connexion with the fees actually charged . . . infallibly betray the practices of the Maltese Court".
Mr Jackson duly attempted to arrest Cochrane for an "insult" to the court. Cochrane replied that the court had not been sitting, and that Jackson's tenure of the office of proctor made his action as marshal illegal. If, as marshal, he tried to carry out the arrest, said Cochrane, "I will treat you as one without authority of any kind, so that you must take the consequences, which may be more serious to yourself personally than you imagine."
Jackson withdrew, to be replaced by another willing arrester. But this one too was the illegal holder of an office, the deputy auctioneer of the court at Malta, and Cochrane met him with the same threat. The man followed him all over the island, however, until an official of unimpeachable legality arrived and the arrest was peacefully carried out.
The deputy marshal informed Cochrane that he would be on parole and might live at a nearby inn.
"I will do nothing of the kind," said the prisoner firmly, "if you take me anywhere it must be to the town gaol."
The deputy marshal agreed and asked Cochrane to accompany him there. The reply was unpromising.
"No. I will be no party to an illegal imprisonment of myself. If you want me to go to gaol, you must carry me by force, for assuredly I will not walk."
This farce was played out before a growing audience of delighted Royal Navy officers, including Cochrane's friends. But there was no alternative for the deputy marshal. Cochrane was taken to prison in a coach with a file of armed soldiers as escort. On arrival there he announced that he would eat nothing.
"I have been placed here on an illegal warrant, and will not pay for so much as a crust. So that if I am starved to death, the Admiralty Court will have to answer for it."
It was no secret to the court that Cochrane was member for Westminster, as well as a naval hero, and that he had put into safekeeping the damning evidence against his captors. Even a hunger strike, let alone his death, might bring ruin upon the ingenious Mr Jackson and his colleagues.
Cochrane relented, agreeing to eat on condition that food and drink were supplied from a hotel of his choice, for himself and his guests, and that it was all paid for by the court. This was acceded to and, night after night, the officers of the fleet were wined and dined in Cochrane's prison room at the expense of the Admiralty court.
After two weeks of this, he was brought before the judge. With feigned innocence, he maintained that he could hardly have taken a table of fees if, as the judge advocate had said, no such table existed. And if, as the Act of Parliament laid down, the table had to be publicly displayed, it would surely not have been kept on the door of the judge's lavatory. Ignoring this, the judge offered to release him on bail. Cochrane refused and was escorted back to prison.
But the friends who visited him urged that some action must be taken. There was a mood of increasing resentment among the seamen in Malta and a real possibility that they would storm the prison to set Cochrane free. The only solution was for him to escape. A file and a rope were solemnly smuggled in so that he could work on the bars of his third-floor room in preparation for the chosen night. He held his dinner party as usual. "The gaoler was purposely made very tipsy," he recalled, "to which he was nothing loth." At midnight, he lowered his possessions to his servant who was waiting below, removed the bars, looping the rope round one which he had left intact. It was easy enough to climb down from the window and draw the looped rope after him. The gig of H.M.S. Eagle was waiting to take him to sea, where he boarded an English packet. He arrived in Gibraltar, sold the Julie, which he had left there on his way to Malta, and returned to England.
His denunciation of the Admiralty court to the House of Commons was one of his few parliamentary triumphs, the members rocking with laughter at the story of his imprisonment and escape. As an illustration of the costs deducted by Mr Jackson for talking to himself in a single case, Cochrane unrolled the bill of charges along the floor of the Commons. It stretched from the speaker's table at one end of the House to the bar at the other.20
If he pursued the wretched sinecurists of the Admiralty court with less tenacity than was customary in him, after his return to England, there was a good reason for it. In his deeds of valour, in the comic opera plot of his Maltese escapade, and in almost every aspect of his life, Cochrane was the child of that period in which he lived, and which was so responsive to the "romantic" in art and behaviour. On his return from Malta he lived with his uncle, Basil Cochrane, in Portman Square. It was then that he first set eyes on a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, the beautiful orphan daughter of a Spanish dancer and an English father. Katherine Barnes, though less than half his age, was everything he could have wished. And to make her still more appealing, the match was forbidden. The most proficient novelist of Sensibility could have devised no more touching a story.
At the time of their first meeting, Kitty Barnes displayed the soft features and wide eyes of her age. Her skin was fair but her hair almost black, worn in the clustering corkscrew ringlets which were then fashionable. As she grew out of her teens, her portraits show her developing a finer and more delicate appearance. This delicacy was certainly not an indication of physical frailty. She followed Cochrane in his exile, crossed the Andes, and faced disgrace, as well as danger, at his side. In dealing with the entrenched ministerial hostility to him, she fought Cochrane's battles as diligently and enthusiastically as he had ever done himself. "Without a particle of romance in my composition," he later wrote, "my life has been one of the most romantic on record, and the circumstances of my marriage are not the least so."21
Kitty Barnes lived under the guardianship of John Simpson, of Portland Place. So far as the marriage market was concerned, she had few assets apart from her appearance and natural abilities. To Cochrane, her material circumstances were not important. Within a few weeks of meeting her he had proposed marriage and had been accepted. In view of his ward's reduced circumstances, John Simpson probably felt that a future Earl of Dundonald was not a bad bargain.
It was at this point that Basil Cochrane heard a rumour as to his nephew's interest in Kitty Barnes. Uncle Basil had amassed a considerable fortune from his activities in India and was looked upon by the other members of his family as the one likely source of a substantial legacy. In his turn, Basil Cochrane enjoyed the sense of power this gave him, hinting or specifying certain actions or forms of behaviour which he would require from them as his beneficiaries. In his nephew's case, he now revealed that he had arranged a marriage for him.
There was something essentially absurd in a man of thirty-seven returning home after nearly twenty years of warfare to discover that a marriage was being arranged for him, as though he were an incompetent adolescent. But that was by no means the worst of it. Uncle Basil had chosen as the prospective bride the daughter of an Admiralty court official, who had made "a very large fortune" by swindling the officers an
d men of the Royal Navy in a manner with which Cochrane was only too familiar. He had no intention of allowing his uncle or anyone else to dictate to him his choice in marriage. In any case, a well-publicised marriage to the daughter of such a man would make him the laughing stock of his naval comrades, his enemies, and his constituents. He told his uncle as much.
"Please yourself," said Basil Cochrane snappishly, "nevertheless, my fortune and the money of the wife I have chosen for you, would go far towards reinstating future Earls of Dundonald in their ancient position as regards wealth."
The argument continued until the point at which Cochrane finally and absolutely refused the bride whom his uncle had chosen for him.
"No," he announced, "I would rather not. It is a thing for money only, and I abhor the idea of marrying for money. I cannot and I will not."22
It was then that Uncle Basil began to make plans for getting married himself, a clear indication that his nephew had forfeited some or all of the proposed inheritance. Cochrane went to Kitty and urged her to elope with him. At first she refused, shocked by so extreme a measure and alarmed at the probable ruin of her reputation. But Cochrane persisted, and in the end the sixteen-year-old girl agreed. They would ride to Scotland and there conclude a "runaway" marriage. The truth was that Kitty Barnes, for all her demure appearance, was a formidable young woman and never more so than in her attachment to Cochrane. Exactly half a century later she was to proclaim publicly the depth of her feeling for him. "Such a God of a Man! A Man who could have ruled the World upon the Sea!" she called him:
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