Thomas Cochrane's claim to the title was duly established, but that was only the first of the battles which the 11th Earl of Dundonald had to fight. The question of whether his father had been entitled to a repayment of the 1814 fine, and half-pay as a naval officer for the period 1814-1832, was still not settled. By the will of his father, the son was bequeathed "all the monies due to me from the British Government", except for 10 per cent of the money recovered which was to be paid to Earp who had collaborated in writing Cochrane's Narrative and Autobiography. In 1864, his son applied to the Admiralty and the Home Office for the money, but the application was rejected. In 1876, Cochrane's grandson petitioned the Queen, the petition being referred to the Treasury, but without any further success. It was on 10 April 1877 that Sir Robert Anstruther and Spencer Walpole moved for a select committee to inquire into the merits of the petition. Their motion was carried and a committee set up under the Solicitor-General, Sir Hardinge Giffard, who was later to be a distinguished Lord Chancellor, as Lord Halsbury.
The select committee considered the evidence and concluded that no governments which believed Cochrane to have been guilty in 1814 would have restored his rank and honours in the manner which they had done. This was entirely logical, since he had not served the British crown between 1814 and 1832 and so could hardly have earned forgiveness for a crime which it was then believed he must have committed. In June 1876, the select committee recommended that an award of £5000 should be paid to his grandson. Cochrane himself had put his legal expenses and loss of pay at £9000, but even this recognition vindicated him by his own criteria. The Brazilian government, too, recognised that at least some of Cochrane's claims against it were justified. Of his demand for £100,000, a settlement of £40,000 was duly made.56
Unfortunately, the satisfaction among Cochrane's descendants was matched by outrage among those of Lord Ellenborough, who now regarded their famous ancestor as having been slandered in the basest manner, libelled by Cochrane in the Autobiography and by Lord Campbell in his Lives of the Chief Justices, and unfairly dealt with by the House of Commons and its select committee. Accordingly, Ellenborough's grandson, Edward Downes Law, employed a barrister, J. B. Atlay, to write The Trial of Lord Cochrane before Lord Ellenborough. The book, which appeared in 1897, confirmed that the truth of the Stock Exchange case was, ultimately, beyond proof or disproof. However, in view of the way in which Atlay was employed to write the entire book, there is a certain irony in the dismissal of Cochrane's autobiography on the grounds that he wrote it with Earp's assistance. The squabble continued until 1914, when Ellenborough's grandson himself wrote and published The Guilt of Lord Cochrane in 1814 to celebrate the centenary of the Stock Exchange trial.
Of Cochrane's immediate family, Kitty died five years after him, in Boulogne in 1865, at the age of sixty-nine. His heir, Thomas Barnes Cochrane, lived to see payment made by order of parliament in 1876, in recognition of his father's unrequited services. The nth Earl of Dundonald had chosen the army as his career and took part in the China wars. The grandson, Douglas Cochrane, earned considerable military fame as 12th Earl of Dundonald, reaching the rank of Major-General after the South African war of 1899-1901, in which he was mentioned in despatches six times. After being promoted to Lieutenant-General, he emerged from retirement to command the 2nd Life Guards in the First World War. He was the last of his line who overlapped Cochrane's own life, having been born in 1852 and succeeded to the title on the death of the 11th Earl in 1885.
Shortly before his death, the Athenaeum summarised Cochrane's attraction for the Victorians by remarking, "Everything about Lord Dundonald's career is strange and romantic. ... He inherited an earldom - and a gold watch. ... He was liker Nelson than any other officer of his generation." The world at large was familiar with the imposing figure of the old sailor, "a broad-built Scotchman, rather seared than conquered by age, with hairs of snowy white, and a face in which intellect still beams through sorrow and struggle, and the marks of eighty years of active life". His great height, somewhat reduced by a pronounced stoop, was still "commanding". The Victorians found in him the manners of a more elegant age, "good old-fashioned courtesy colouring the whole man, his gestures, and speech".57
As Cochrane himself had remarked, without having "a particle of romance" in his character, he was destined to become one of the most romantic warriors of his day. It was perhaps inevitable that he should be so described in a period later summed up by the literary catch-phrase of "the Romantic Revival". In the heroics of warfare, as well as in his attachment to a new ideal of democracy, he was as much a part of that culture as Byron or Scott. He mirrored the qualities of action and drama which Scott portrayed in fiction, while sharing the Philhellenism and democratic enthusiasm which moved both Byron and Shelley. His admiration for the greatest romantic hero, Napoleon, and his particular distaste for the Wellesleys and all then-works reflects a sympathy with the prevailing intellectual fashion. Indeed, there seems an almost Byronic grandeur in the plan to free the famous prisoner of St Helena and set him on the throne of a great South American Empire.
The extremes of Cochrane's character embraced the contraries of amiability and pertinacity, generosity and extreme touchiness. He was master of surprise in naval warfare, yet victim of an extraordinary degree of naivete in dealing with governments of every complexion. With a handful of ships, he could liberate half a continent, but his attempts to win a degree of political freedom for his own countrymen led to his repeated humiliation in the House of Commons. In his financial dealings, conditioned by the long memory of the "res angusta domi", he speculated unhesitatingly to increase his fortune and hounded British and foreign governments for every penny which he considered they might owe him. But while he seemed unremittingly mercenary, he was unpredictably generous. He gave or returned money, as in the case of the Greek government, with the appearance of caring nothing for it. In many of his campaigns on behalf of nations fighting for their independence, he gave more than he received.
"He is such a fine fellow," wrote Charles Greville in 1830, "and so shrewd and good humoured." Since Greville also believed him guilty of the Stock Exchange fraud, there is no reason to regard the judgement as mere flattery. A quarter of a century before, Mary Russell Mitford, observing the young captain of the Speedy had found him, most of all, "gentle, quiet, mild". As a matter of disposition, he seems indeed to belong to the eighteenth century rather than to its successor and to display those qualities of courtesy and benevolence which were recognised by it in the phenomenon of "the Good-Natured Man".58
But if this was the countenance which Cochrane presented to those with whom he had no quarrel, he was an implacable enemy to his opponents. Even in his old age, there was no mellowing and no sense in which past antagonisms were forgotten. In his eighties, he fought with embittered resolve to clear his name and to destroy the reputations of men like Ellenborough for the injury they had done him almost half a century before. It mattered little that most men by this time believed him innocent, or that those who remained in doubt none the less regarded any suspicion against him as insignificant by comparison with the numerous deeds of honour and gallantry which stood to his credit. As Cardinal Manning once remarked of Cardinal Newman, Cochrane was "a good hater". It mattered nothing, for example, that St Vincent had been one of the best naval commanders of his day, nor that he was a vigorous opponent of the same naval corruption which Cochrane attacked. He had put himself beyond the pale by his treatment of the brash commander of the Speedy. Even fifty-eight years later there was no forgiveness for this.59
Whether in personal conflict or general battle, Cochrane was interested in nothing but absolute victory. In naval politics or legal quarrels this was notoriously difficult to achieve. He was an artist in war, whether in the split-second annihilation of French cavalry at Port Vendre by a turning broadside from the Imperieuse, or in the concept of instant and total triumph offered to the Prince Regent in 1812, by virtue of the famous secret weapons. Yet in Engl
ish public life, complete and demonstrable victories, of the sort represented by the Gamo or the Esmeralda in war, eluded him.
Underlying his skill in war, and even his private amiability, was an embarrassing quickness to resent injury either to his reputation or his purse. He found the servants of the Admiralty, and those of the Greek or South American governments, difficult to deal with. However Cochrane's own prickliness could make him one of the most awkward partners. He might be an artist in war, but his repeated threats to resign his command and leave the stage of combat suggested, more specifically, a prima donna. Nor did he show great tolerance of the Brazilian or Greek crews who found themselves manning a vessel which was unfamiliar to them. It happened that the best Royal Navy crews had long experience of the sea, in peace and war, while those of many other nations had not. Cochrane made too few allowances for this, perhaps, but he was never guilty of mere chauvinism. As he wrote to Lord Haddington at the Admiralty: "I am not one of those, my lord, who deem it advantageous to act on the belief that one Englishman can beat two Frenchmen." In his own case, it happened that he had beaten the French, or beaten them off, on every occasion but one, when the Speedy was trapped by three battleships off Alicante in 1802. But that occasion remained in his mind, combining with wider experience to safeguard him from the comfortable nationalistic myths generated by legends of Trafalgar or Waterloo.60
The day to day chores of commanding a larger fleet seem to have been uncongenial to him and to have brought out his less admirable traits. In battle, as his tactics against the Portuguese off Bahia established, he could lead such formations with a flair worthy of his single-ship actions. As the commander of a single ship, he was supreme. Since Drake and the Elizabethans, no man could rival the successive achievements of the Speedy, the Pallas, the Imperieuse, the O'Higgins, and the Pedro Primiero. His plans for gas attacks on the enemy coast or saturation bombardment from his "temporary mortar" vessels might have altered the course of the Napoleonic and Crimean wars dramatically, or might have ended in fiasco. None the less, England had a weapon of equal potential in Cochrane himself. Armed with the conventional force of two or three frigates and a regiment or two of troops, his destruction of French commerce, communications, and supplies might have given England a decisive initiative in the most important theatre of the earlier war.
The Victorian reading public, no less than those who had heard the first news of his astonishing victories, found in him a hero of almost Byronic individualism. He had, as the Athenaeum termed it, "a mixture of rapid calculation with supreme daring". From the viewpoint of a liberal historian, Justin McCarthy observed, "Cochrane's true place was on his quarter-deck; his opportunity came in the extreme moment of danger. . . . His gift was that which wrenches success out of the very jaws of failure." He was the swashbuckling commander whose triumphs were half the result of tactical genius, and half the outcome of a practical joke played on his enemies. Then he was the valiant young lord eloping with an impecunious beauty at the cost of fortune and reputation. He was even the wrongly-imprisoned fighter, scaling the walls of his gaol, in Malta or the King's Bench, to set himself at liberty. It seemed hardly relevant that he was deeply interested in Stock Exchange speculation, and that his democratic sympathies were accompanied by the acceptance of the gallows, the press gang, and the lash as necessary evils. In this, as in his old-fashioned anti-Catholicism, he was a child of his own time, not of his admirers.61
By the time of his death, the great question of the Stock Exchange fraud seemed easily disposed of. "It is impossible to read the old Earl's narrative of this affair without indignation," said the Athenaeum. Ellenborough's conduct was condemned by two Lord Chancellors, by Campbell in his Lives of the Chief Justices, and by Brougham in Historical Sketches of Statesmen who flourished in the Reign of George III. The conduct of the judge was condemned in the Modern State Trials and even the Quarterly Review paused to brand Ellenborough for his "monstrous attempt to tinge the ermine of justice with the colour of party". Of Cochrane's Victorian sympathisers, Justin McCarthy treated his hero's enemies with some lenience, remarking that Cochrane had been "the victim of cruel, although not surely intentional, injustice". It was left to The Times, in Cochrane's obituary, to suggest the motive for such injustice, when it admitted that Cochrane was "everything which a man in office would dislike".62
He was a Radical, whereas those were the palmy days of Toryism. He was outspoken, whereas officials admire reticence and discretion. He was resolute in exposing abuses, and therefore constantly creating trouble. He was impracticable - a term still in favour for describing inconvenient excellence; and he had a strong spirit of independence - a quality which as very recent controversies have shown is singularly obnoxious to the official mind.63
It would have appeared unseemly in such an obituary to recall the zeal with which Cochrane also pursued the dead objects of his hate, including St Vincent, Gambier, Croker, and Ellenborough.
When all the arguments over prize money, promotion, political corruption, and the famous trial of 1814 were exhausted, it was to Cochrane as buccaneer that the Victorian press returned. He had, as The Times reminded its readers, held the French and Spanish at bay, seized fifty or more of their ships, including a xebec-class frigate, and defied three of their battleships with the diminutive Speedy, a vessel "about half as big as the smallest steam-tug now borne on the effective list of the navy". He seemed a more human figure than Nelson, a fit companion for Sir Francis Drake, and a man whose personal courage was dazzling. He escaped the worst that his enemies might have done to him through a brilliance of improvisation and a degree of daring which was beyond anything that his opponents in battle thought possible. William Miller, watching him at moments of extreme peril in the South American wars, saw an example of sangfroid which he would remember for the rest of his life. Marryat and his companions in the Mediterranean and the Bay of Biscay delighted in the piratical gaiety and untiring impudence with which Cochrane faced the odds against him. To his men, he was not a commander but a leader. One favourite Victorian anecdote, repeated from the Naval Chronicle, described how the boat crew of the Imperieuse, facing an apparently impregnable French shore-battery, replied when Cochrane suggested they might care to postpone the attack: "No, my lord! We can do it, if you go!"64
This was the stuff of which legends were woven, duly enshrined for the youth of late Victorian England in such schoolboy bestsellers as Macmillan's "English Men of Action" series. The baroque elegance of Nelsonian or Napoleonic battlefleets was a borrowed memory to Chilean guards of honour who still paid homage at Cochrane's tomb in Westminster Abbey. His Victorian admirers looked in vain for public memorial sculpture. But in the new democratic medium of mass publication, including Marryat's fictionalised accounts of Fort Trinidad and the Basque Roads, where his courage was commemorated, he won the tribute which had been denied him in monuments and statuary. In literature, at least, his flawless audacity and casual valour lit the dark canvas of suffering, where the futile misery of the Walcheren expedition or the long ordeal of the Peninsula haunted the public mind. There was one other name which was persistently coupled with Cochrane's, not necessarily to his own disadvantage, as the opinion of the contemporary historian Sir Archibald Alison showed.
Lord Cochrane was, after the death of Nelson, the greatest naval commander of that age of glory. Equal to his great predecessor in personal gallantry, enthusiastic ardour, and devotion to his country, he was perhaps his superior in original genius, inventive power, and inexhaustible resources.65
That Nelson's reputation should have stood in the least danger from Cochrane's during the nineteenth century seems remarkable. In a longer perspective of history, however, it is possible to see them as worthy contenders for the fame which posterity bestows upon the supreme romantic hero.
Notes
SOURCES referred to in the notes are fully described in the bibliography. The following abbreviations are used in the notes themselves.
Autobiography: Thoma
s Cochrane, 10th Earl of Dundonald, Autobiography
of a Seaman (2nd edition), 1860 Cochrane, Narrative: Thomas Cochrane, ioth Earl of Dundonald, Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru, and Brazil, 1859 Life: Thomas, 11th Earl of Dundonald and H. R. Fox Bourne, The Life of
Thomas, Lord Cochrane, 10th Earl of Dundonald, 1869 Court-Martial: Minutes of a Court-Martial holden on board H.M.S. Gladiator
... on the Trial of the Right Honourable James, Lord Gambier, 1809
Footnotes are usually given at the end of a paragraph to identify the material on which the paragraph or sequence of paragraphs is based. However, in order not to burden the narrative with an inordinate number of notes, groups of sources are sometimes cited together under one reference. So far as possible, they are cited in the order in which the material appears in the narrative.
Cochrane Page 44