Kitty, as the new Countess of Dundonald, sought an interview with Lord Grey who "expressed his readiness to do all he can". But still there was "something in the way". Cochrane himself appealed once more to William IV, asking for a private audience. The King was at Brighton, where the audience was granted at the Royal Pavilion on 27 November. William listened attentively to Cochrane's claim for a chance to hear and answer whatever charges were now being privately uttered against him over the Stock Exchange affair or his service in Chile, or any other matter. He asked for a fair investigation. Whatever the King's more obvious failings, his naval experience and allegiance had given him a natural admiration for Cochrane's achievements. He promised to see that the case was "fairly looked into".8
The early weeks of 1832 passed, and still nothing was done. Burdett, one of the most loyal of Cochrane's friends, offered to raise a campaign in parliament over the way in which an allegedly sympathetic government was dragging its heels. But it was Kitty who went first to Lord Grey and then to the King himself. From Grey she learnt that "there are two individuals in the Cabinet who will not give in". But, even without consulting his government, William had the power to grant a free pardon and it was this for which Kitty, with Cochrane's reluctant consent, at length asked.9
His reluctance was a symptom of chronically sensitive pride. A pardon, he thought, implied forgiveness of an offence. But it was his claim that he had never been guilty of any offence in the first place. To the world at large, it meant simply that he had been innocent, that his innocence was now recognised, that Lord Ellenborough and all those who had sought the downfall of the hero in 1814 were now rebuked by the powers of a more enlightened age.
For the moment, the attention of the world was diverted to the momentous fate of the Reform Bill, which would extend the vote into the middle classes of society and abolish forever the corruption of rotten boroughs and their attendant political patronage. As the Bill passed the Commons for the last time, Cochrane wrote:
It is a rare felicity for a nation to be governed by men having the liberality and justice which induce them to confer free institutions peacefully on the country; institutions which merit the gratitude of all who now exist, and will receive the unqualified applause of future generations. The page of history affords no parallel to the present event.10
A fortnight after the letter was written, on 2 May, the Privy Council bowed to royal command and Cochrane received his free pardon. Six days later, the public read that the new Earl of Dundonald had been restored to the Navy List, and that he was now gazetted as Rear-Admiral of the Fleet. The tables were turned with a vengeance on his dead persecutors. The Mulgraves and the Melvilles were generally consigned to oblivion; Ellenborough was soon held up to criticism by Lord Campbell's famous Lives; Liverpool and his creatures were subjects of derision as the weak and frightened ministries of a sick and hated king. The portrait of George IV which ruled the Victorian imagination was not that of the boisterous Regent, but of Thackeray's bilious ogre in The Four Georges.
On the day after his appointment, Cochrane was summoned to a royal levee at St James's where, as on other occasions, "congratulations poured in from all quarters". As the reputations of his old enemies rotted and withered, it seemed that for him the promise of his own election ballad had at last come true.
The laurels of fame, that encompass his head, Shall bloom when the triumphs of warfare are fled; For the friend of REFORM and of FREEDOM at home, More immortal shall make him in ages to come.11
The dawn of the newest and greatest reign of the nineteenth century, with Victoria's accession in 1837, saw in Cochrane every admirable quality. He was the sailor-hero, the liberator of oppressed nations, the champion of freedom in his own land, and that most appealing of popular legends - the brave man wrongly accused and condemned, to whom justice is at length done. To add to his other honours, the new King Otho of Greece had made him Grand Commander of the Order of the Saviour of Greece.
He was sixty-two years old when the Queen came to the throne and had no intention whatever of becoming a mere ornament to the naval profession. There would be wars to fight and actions of one sort or another in which the Royal Navy would be engaged. In the present interval of peace, he turned his attention to his inventions, particularly the application of steam power to naval warfare. One of the more bizarre applications was the curing of fevers among his men in tropical or sub-tropical regions. In Greece, the unfortunate Dr Gosse had contracted fever and visited Cochrane on the steamship Mercury while still suffering the effects. Cochrane had devised a curative bath, using steam from the ship's boilers. He lifted Gosse up and put him into the currents, making him perspire copiously. "My illness disappeared as by enchantment," wrote the surprised patient.12
Cochrane was far from having invented the first steamship or even having supervised its construction. But in the case of the Rising Star, built for Chile, he was able to claim that this steamship with its retractable paddle was among the first to cross the Atlantic and that he was responsible for its design. During the reign of William IV and the earlier years of Victoria, he turned his attention to the problem of devising a rotary engine, capable of turning a ship's paddle or propeller directly, to replace the old reciprocating engines with their simple backward and forward movement. He fitted out a little steamboat of his own, on the Thames, as a floating laboratory.
By 1834 he was already urging his invention on Sir James Graham, as First Lord of the Admiralty. Both Graham and his successor, the Earl of Minto, were sympathetic. In 1839, the Secretary to the Admiralty, Sir John Barrow, wrote to Cochrane:
I am commanded to acquaint your lordship that the opinions received of your revolving engine are favourable to the principle, and that it has not been stated that there are any insurmountable obstacles to its practical execution.13
But novelty did not commend itself to the officials of the Admiralty in general. In 1842, Cochrane was still trying to persuade another First Lord, the Earl of Haddington, that the Royal Navy must exploit the power of steam if its ships were to remain a match for the newer and heavier American frigates or the latest warships launched by France. He was also concerned that Royal Navy officers would continue to think in terms of blockades and the tactics of the Napoleonic wars, which were entirely outmoded by steam.
A couple of heavy line-of-battle ships, suddenly fitted, on the outbreak of war, with adequate steam-power, would decide the successful result of a general action; and I am assured that I could show your lordship how to fit a steam-ship which, in scouring the Channel or ranging the coast, could take or destroy every steam-ship belonging to France that came within view.14
Haddington visited him at Portsmouth in August to inspect the work on which Cochrane had already spent £16,000 of his own money. The First Lord ordered a small steamship, the Firefly to be put at Cochrane's disposal. The experiments were so successful that the Admiralty decided to order the building of a frigate on the lines of Cochrane's suggestions. By the beginning of 1843 he had also patented another of his inventions, one of the earliest ship's propellers. Yet even some more sympathetic of his patrons, like Lord Minto, saw only a need for "occasional steam power" to assist the sails. A speed of five knots, to aid a ship in getting into or out of battle, or off a lee shore, was considered sufficient. Minto could not see why Cochrane should "wish to steam the Vanguard or the Queen at the rate of ten miles an hour".15
However, during 1844 and 1845 he was much occupied with the new steam frigate being built according to his plans and which was launched as H.M.S. Janus at the end of 1845. In the main, she was a success, though there were the usual deficiencies and delays which customarily seemed to try Cochrane's patience, and that patience was somewhat shorter now chat he had reached his seventieth birthday.
But while much of his time was taken up by practical questions of design, or the improved construction of boilers, or other technical matters, he was obsessed as ever by the need for England to prepare for war on the basis of h
is own "secret plans", which he had first submitted to the Prince Regent a quarter of a century before. While William IV was still on the throne, Cochrane had gone down to
Brighton and in another audience at the Royal Pavilion tried to persuade the King of the value of his plans for gas attacks and saturation bombardment. He had not, of course, used them in Greece or South America because he had promised the Prince Regent that they would never be employed except in the service of his own country. William listened, agreed that the plans had "value", and praised Cochrane's "honourable conduct in keeping his secret so long and under such inducements to an opposite course".16
Nothing more happened, and Cochrane took the matter up with his friend Lord Lansdowne who held office in Lord Grey's government as President of the Council. But four years later, Lansdowne would still promise only to press the plans on the government "if the occasion arises, which I sincerely hope it will not". At that time, in 1838, the potential enemy was Russia, whose growing influence in Afghanistan was seen as a challenge to British ambitions in India. But Russia, in Lansdowne's view, would "yield to remonstrance", and there would be no need of the secret weapons. The truth was that men like William IV and his ministers accepted that war was an inevitable occurrence between great nations but even in war there were certain notions of decorum and civilisation which ought to be observed. Other men, like Wellington, had expressed the sceptical view that "two could play" at Cochrane's game. Cochrane answered this in a letter to Lord Minto on 3 August 1840.17
Your lordship will perceive, that "although two can play at the game", the one who first understands it can alone be successful. In the event of war, I beg to offer my endeavours to place the navy of France under your control, or at once effectually to annihilate it.18
"I shall bear your offer in mind," Minto replied coolly, "but there is not the slightest chance of war."19
In 1846, Cochrane's friend Lord Auckland became First Lord of the Admiralty, the post which he had held briefly in 1834. During the intervening period he had been Governor-General of India and was well aware that, contrary to Minto's placid assumption, Victorian England had a very good chance of being involved in one sort of war or another. His own experience had been of the Afghan war of 1838-1842 and the ill-fated British march on Cabul to thwart Russian ambitions in Afghanistan. It hardly required a tremendous feat of imagination to foresee the war with Russia which broke out in the following decade.
Auckland set up a secret committee, consisting of Sir Thomas Hastings, Surveyor-General of the Ordnance, Sir J. F. Burgoyne, and Lieutenant-Colonel J. S. Colquhoun. They considered Cochrane's plans under three headings: camouflage, saturation bombardment, and gas attack. Reporting confidentially to the First Lord on 16 January 1847, they agreed that the plan for the first of these should be made available to the Admiralty. The bombardment and the gas attack they thought should not even be experimented with. They had no doubt that the weapons concerned would be successful but, if used in war, "It is clear this power could not be retained exclusively by this country." And, in any case, they rejected the weapons inevitably because such devices would not "accord with the feelings and principles of civilised warfare". The details should "remain concealed" in their secret file.20
There was no more that Cochrane could do at the time, though he warned Auckland that the French appeared to be developing equally "uncivilised weapons" in the form of guns firing shells fast and low, annihilating any ship which attempted to approach and slaughtering her crew. "I submit that, against such batteries as these, the adoption of my plans Nos. 2 and 3 would be perfectly justifiable." 21
Apart from improved gunnery, the French were in fact living on the lessons of the Napoleonic naval war. As Cochrane discovered, the basis of their new strategy was to avoid battles between fleets or large squadrons and trust to fast cruisers which would destroy England's commerce. The Prince de Joinville was a leading advocate of this. Cochrane had anticipated them to some extent by advising the Admiralty to think less in terms of battleships and more in terms of smaller faster boats.
"Give me a fast small steamer," he remarked, "with a heavy long-range gun in the bow, and another in the hold to fall back upon, and I would not hesitate to attack the largest ship afloat."22
His support for what he called a "mosquito fleet" was based upon his experience of steamships like the Karteria in Greece. Small and manoeuvrable vessels with well-trained crews were the answer, even though they might carry only one or two guns. His recommendation to the Admiralty was simple: "As large a gun as possible, in a vessel as small and swift as possible, and as many of them as you can put upon the sea." Lord Exmouth, who as Sir Edward Pellew was famed as commander of the Arethusa and later as the victor in the battle of Algiers, surveyed the plan of Cochrane's war-steamers in 1826 with astonishment.23
"Why," he said, "it's not only the Turkish fleet, but all the navies in the world, that you will be able to conquer with such craft as these."24
Despite all the interest shown in Cochrane's inventions and his secret plans, and despite his rank as flag-officer, he had not been appointed to any command. This was his own doing. In 1839 he had written to Lansdowne and to Lord Melbourne, as Prime Minister, pointing out that though he had received a free pardon, his rank as Knight Commander of the Bath had not been restored to him. If he was now recognised to be innocent of the Stock Exchange fraud, why was this not done ? So long as there was any question of his guilt, he would not hold a command.
He managed to convince himself that on the marriage of Victoria and Albert, in 1840, his honours would be restored as a royal gesture. But nothing was done. Instead, he was awarded a pension for good and meritorious service, in the following year, at the age of sixty-six. When Peel became Prime Minister, Cochrane took up the matter of the Bath with him. Peel replied to him on 7 November 1844, reminding him that he had received a pardon and had been restored to the naval list.
Adverting to that circumstance, and to the fact that thirty years have now elapsed since the charges to which the free pardon had reference were the subject of investigation before the proper judicial tribunal of the country, her Majesty's servants cannot consistently with their duty advise the Queen to reopen an inquiry into these charges.25
But there was now some question, soon raised memorably by Lord Chief Justice Campbell himself, as to whether Ellenborough's court had been proper or judicial in its standards. And, as Cochrane was to discover, his role as hero of the new age had attracted the admiration of the Queen and Prince Albert for his courage and loyalty. With his innate talent for publicity, he duly published a pamphlet in February 1847, Observations on Naval Affairs, listing his services to the navy and the evidence of injustice done to him over the Stock Exchange fraud. He had, of course, made similar appeals before but now he made them to contemporaries who regarded the rulers of England in 1814 as morally and politically alien. It happened that in June 1846 Sir Robert Peel's government had resigned over the failure to impose a Coercion Bill to maintain public order in Ireland. When Cochrane made his appeal in the following February, it was to the first specifically Liberal government under Lord John Russell, an administration which had every reason to admire Cochrane's beliefs and crusades on behalf of liberty.
Within the cabinet and the Privy Council, opinion was still divided, Cochrane's main supporters being Auckland and Lansdowne. Auckland began to consult senior naval officers, to see what support there was for Cochrane's reinstatement. Sir Thomas Byam Martin, who had been present at Government House, Portsmouth, when the Prince first announced Cochrane's degradation in 1814, warned Auckland that many officers might oppose full restoration of honours.
"Yes," said the First Lord, "I am aware of such an opinion."
But Auckland went on to praise Cochrane's "great enterprise and talent". In the event of war, it would be "highly desirable" to call upon his services. Martin agreed that the majority opinion would favour full restoration, remarking of Cochrane that "his gallantry, enterprise,
and professional intelligence was acknowledged throughout the service".26
Even while this discussion was taking place, Lord Lansdowne, now Leader of the House of Lords, was granted an audience by the Queen in order to present Cochrane's case. Victoria listened, and then announced that "with or without the approval of her Privy Councillors, she would confer the next vacant Order of the Bath upon Lord Dundonald".27
Nor was this all. Cochrane received a private message from Buckingham Palace.
Her Majesty has had conversation as to the justice of some further atonement for the injuries that have been inflicted on me, and. .. she said it was a subject of regret that such was not in her power; but should the subject be entertained by her advisers, her concurrence should not be wanting.28
The "atonement" which he had in mind was the repayment of the fine inflicted in 1814, as well as pay from the time of his dismissal from the navy until his reappointment by William IV. This would involve a reversal of the original verdict, an act beyond Victoria's constitutional power at that time. Yet there was no doubt of the admiration which she and Albert felt for Cochrane and his career. Lord John Russell, as Prime Minister, assured him of this in a letter of 12 May.
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