Cochrane (60 page)

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:
Thomas Cochrane, 10
th Earl of Dundonald,
Autobiography

of
a
Seaman
(2nd
edition),
1860
Cochrane,
Narrative:
Thomas Cochrane, ioth Earl of Dundonald,
Na
rrative
of
Services
in
the
Liberation
of
Chili,
Peru,
and
Brazil,
1859
Life:
Thomas, 11
th Earl of Dundonald and H. R. Fox Bourne,
The
Life
of

Thomas,
Lord
Cochrane,
10
th
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.

PREFACE

1.
THE LORDS OF CULROSS

2.
STEERING TO GLORY