Cochrane Read online

  Cochrane

  Donald Thomas

  US Naval Institute Press (2002)

  Tags: Military, Non Fiction

  Militaryttt Non Fictionttt

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  SUMMARY:

  The fictional heroics of C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower and Patrick O'Brian's Jack Aubrey are pale imitations of the deeds of Admiral Lord Thomas Cochrane, one of the most daring and successful real-life heroes the naval world has ever seen. In this fascinating account of his life, Donald Thomas fills in the details of Cochrane's winning exploits against the French Navy, actions that earned him the title "Sea Wolf" from Napoleon. Despite his extraordinary accomplishments and the controversies that plagued his long life, today the admiral is not well known outside the naval community. Thomas's splendid narrative is certain to give the valiant and romantic sea warrior the recognition he deserves. His meticulous scholarship and index, notes, and bibliography make the biography a useful reference. The battle descriptions are particularly noteworthy, especially that of the Basque Roads in 1809 when Cochrane nearly achieved another Nile. Cochrane's battles on land as a politician are described with equal attention to colorful detail. While mounting a vigorous campaign against corruption in the Admiralty, he gained many enemies, who, in turn, framed him in a sensational stock exchange fraud case. Imprisoned briefly, he fought back with his usual intensity, restored his reputation, and returned to sea, bound in 1818 for the wars of independence in South America. Once again with nearly total disregard of danger, he helped liberate Brazil and Chile from colonial rule. Upon his death in 1860, a few weeks before his eighty-fifth birthday, he received a hero's burial in Westminster Abbey.

  COCHRANE

  BRITANNIA'S SEA WOLF

  DONALD THOMAS

  CASSELL

  Cassell Military Paperbacks

  Cassell & Co Wellington House, 125 Strand, London WG2R OBB

  Copyright © Donald Thomas 1978

  First published by Andre Deutsch 1978 This Cassell Military Paperbacks edition published 2001 Reprinted 2001, 2002 (three times)

  The right of Donald Thomas to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 0-304-35659-X

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd., Reading, Berks.

  Father and Marion

  Contents

  PREFACE II

  The Lords of Culross 15

  Steering to Glory 46

  "A Sink of Corruption" 76

  "Excessive Use of Powder and Shot" 120

  In the Face of the Enemy 146

  "Announce Lord Cochrane's Degradation" 190

  The Devil's Admiral 245

  Under Two Flags 279

  See, the Conquering Hero Comes! 318

  NOTES 352

  BIBLIOGRAPHY 366

  List of Plates

  1. Captain Lord Cochrane (National Maritime Museum)

  2. Election Candidates (The British Library)

  3. The Capture of the Gamo (National Maritime Museum)

  4. Cochrane's Enemies: Lord St Vincent, John Wilson Croker, Lord Gambier and Lord Chief Justice Ellenborough (All National Portrait Gallery)

  5. The Attack on the Basque Roads (National Maritime Museum)

  6. Cochrane's Design for a Temporary Mortar (The British Library)

  7. Cochrane's Design for 'Stink Vessels' (The British Library)

  8. Portraits of Cochrane in middle life and old age (National Portrait Gallery)

  Maps

  The Basque Roads, April 1809 page 154

  South America 1818-1825 page 246

  Valdivia, February 1820 page 257

  Preface

  THE life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, later 10th Earl of Dundonald, is more extraordinary than that of Nelson, and more far-fetched than anything which the late C. S. Forester permitted Horatio Hornblower. With a brig-sloop, which The Times later described as half the size of the smallest Victorian naval tug, he harried the French and Spanish shipping of the Mediterranean, seizing over fifty vessels, one of them a powerful frigate, many times the size of his own warship and carrying over three hundred seamen and marines. As a frigate captain himself, he kept the French coast in turmoil and, with his single ship, halted the main French advance into Catalonia for over a fortnight. With his explosion vessels and fire-ships at the Basque Roads, he reduced the French fleet to an array of stranded hulls, helpless before the guns of the British squadron.1

  Such exploits might, perhaps, make him little more than a Horn-blower who had stepped from the pages of fiction into the centre of Napoleonic sea warfare. Unlike his fictional counterpart, however, Cochrane entered parliament and became a Radical reformer, a quarter of a century before the Reform Bill of 1832. As a democrat and an opponent of wholesale official corruption, he fought the Admiralty administration and the naval system as determinedly as he fought the French. By his account, these enemies revenged themselves on him by means of forged charts to secure his naval disgrace, and by a carefully organised prosecution to convict him as one of the principal movers of the greatest Stock Exchange fraud of the century.

  That he should have survived imprisonment as a felon, then established his innocence, and ended his long life as admiral of the fleet is more than most works of fiction could accommodate. They would hardly risk including in addition the account of his campaigns as a mercenary admiral, in the service of liberty, in the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean, or his achievements in setting free more territory than Napoleon conquered. After so much, it seems hardly surprising that he should also have devised plans for poison gas and saturation bombardment, offering them to the Prince Regent in 1812, the year in which the waltz was first introduced into the ballrooms of London.

  His personal enmities were fierce and prolonged, their nature being indicated by the presence of two senior admirals, the senior admiralty civil servant, and a lord chief justice as his principal antagonists. A century after the events had taken place, the grandson of Lord Chief Justice Ellenborough was still trying to demonstrate that despite the public vindication of Cochrane's innocence he was, after all, guilty of the great Stock Exchange fraud.

  Even in our time, reactions to Cochrane remain strong. John Gore, the most recent editor of Thomas Creevey's papers, describes Cochrane in that work as "one of the most splendid naval commanders that ever paced a quarter-deck". This was very much the view of Cochrane's later contemporaries in the Victorian period. At the other extreme, Doris Langley Moore in The Late Lord Byron describes him as "mercenary and dilatory" and as "the grasping admiral, whose numberless postponements of action are a curiosity of naval history". No one could have been more surprised by this last judgement than Cochrane's contemporary critics, whose general complaint was that he was all too ready to attack precipitately and take unacceptable risks. It was discipline rather than impetuousness, which Cochrane lacked in the view of his Victorian biographer J. W. Fortescue, who rather quaintly suggested that many of his hero's problems might have been solved if only he had had a public school education.2

  As in the case of so many biographical subjects, each age has seen in Cochrane what it has wanted to. His immediate contemporaries regarded him as a splendid national advertisement for superior British seamanship. The Radicals cheered him as a champion of democracy, Scott and the Romantics saluted him as the liberator of n
ations oppressed by foreign rule. To the Victorians, he was the supreme example of the hero of a boys' adventure story brought to life. It is no coincidence that Captain Marryat, who served as a midshipman under his command, used Cochrane's exploits as the subject-matter of some of his fiction. His guilt or innocence of the Stock Exchange fraud remains ultimately beyond proof or disproof, but his Victorian admirers thought such a crime morally impossible in so fine a man. The controversy was not settled, however, since a later generation still found the figure of the flawed hero more psychologically interesting than the unblemished variety.

  In modern terms, Cochrane is perhaps most illuminating when seen against the social panorama of his age and in the full dimensions of his naval, political and personal life. Directly or obliquely, his story lives in the poetry of Scott or Moore, the diaries of Creevey, the letters of William Beckford, the novels of Marryat, as much as in the despatches of the time, the court reports, or the contemporary press. One of the most important documents is the Autobiography of a Seaman, written in the last months of his life. As an old and dying man, he used a professional writer, G. B. Earp, to assist him. Inevitably, the question was raised as to how much of the book was Cochrane's and how much Earp's. Fortunately, the more important sections can be checked against the logs of the Pallas and the Imperieuse, the reports of the Naval Chronicle, naval despatches, transcripts of trials, and independent contemporary accounts. By this test, the Autobiography is fair and accurate in its account of the naval career. For the disputes with the Admiralty, and particularly the controversy over the Stock Exchange trial, it is inevitably a partisan document, whether Cochrane wrote it himself or it was written by Earp from his dictation or notes. In the case of Cochrane's Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru, and Brazil, there is corroboration of its events in the memoirs of William Miller, W. B. Stevenson, and other witnesses of the campaign against the Spanish in Chile and Peru.

  In writing the present account of Cochrane's life, I have been most grateful for the assistance given by a number of libraries and institutions. My thanks are particularly due to the Bodleian Library, Oxford; Bristol Central Library; the British Library, Departments of Manuscripts and Printed Books, and the Newspaper Library, Colin-dale; Cardiff Central Library; the London Library; the Ministry of Defence Library; the National Library of Scotland; the National Maritime Museum; the Public Record Office; the library of University College, London; the University Library, London, and the library of the University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology.

  Finally, I must acknowledge the advice and help of Mr Piers Burnett, Mr Michael Thomas, and Mr Alan Williams at various stages of the writing of the book, and my wife's enthusiasm during its long completion.

  1

  The Lords of Culross

  IN the last years of the eighteenth century, when the vogue for picturesque and romantic scenery coloured the middle-class view of nature, the bay of Culross was reckoned to be well worth a visit. Some of its admirers swore that it matched anything to be found on the Rhine. A dozen miles above Edinburgh, the northern shore of the Firth of Forth broke into a series of wooded bays, set in the hills of Kinross. In deep green billows, the foliage rose like a leafy, undulating wall from the dark rocks of the foreshore. Sloping gardens and rustic cottages, which were more romantic to view than to inhabit, marked the road where market carts and occasional carriages rumbled between Kincardine and Rosyth.

  Above the bay of Culross, the ridge of the hill was distinguished by the fine south front of Culross Abbey. Its Renaissance facade and corner turrets, in so leafy a setting, suggested one of the smaller chateaux of the Loire. The house had been begun in 1608, from designs by Inigo Jones, and had been commissioned by Edward Bruce, lawyer, diplomat, and Master of the Rolls. True, it was not a real abbey of the sort made so thrillingly fashionable by the Gothick novels of the 1780s and 1790s. Yet it adjoined the ruins of the original Cistercian monastery, which Malcolm, Earl of Fife, had founded in 1217. Young ladies and gentlemen of sensibility, seeing Culross on a stormy night, the wind chasing the clouds across the sky, the moon glimmering fitfully on water, dark trees, and mediaeval ruins, were transported from reality to the fantasies of Mrs Radcliffe and her followers, whose three-volume "horrid novels" were the current sensation of circulating libraries in Edinburgh and London.

  However, behind the charming view there lay a changing and often disagreeable reality. Like so many great houses, this one had been built at the height of a family's fortunes and had descended to those who could ill support its expenses.

  The splendour of the Inigo Jones house was not disputed. Among the fine drawing rooms of the first floor, with their spacious long gallery, was an apartment hung with Gobelins tapestries. Here the King, who was both James VI of Scotland and James I of England, was royally entertained in 1617. The Bruce family in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had been men of business and figures of political influence, the creators of wealth and the arbiters of policy. But their line dwindled until only one daughter remained at Culross, Lady Elizabeth Bruce. She married William Cochrane of Ochiltree and bore him a son who inherited Culross. Indeed, he inherited more than that. His Cochrane kinsmen had been Earls of Dundonald since 1648 when the title was conferred on Sir William Cochrane, a loyal supporter of Charles I, by the hard-pressed King. In 1758, the 7th Earl had gone to Canada on General Wolfe's staff, in the campaign to drive the French from the St Lawrence settlements. A few months later, news came to Culross that the Earl had been killed in the preliminary assault on Louisberg. Major Cochrane of Culross was now the 8th Earl of Dundonald.

  When the Bruces were succeeded by the Cochranes, the men of business and law gave way to those who for five centuries or more had known little but the arts of war, by land and sea. In previous reigns, their abilities had been highly esteemed, bringing them rewards or favours from their royal masters. But in the age of the House of Hanover, as the power of patronage passed into ministerial hands, such rewards were few and the favours short-lived. Still the Cochranes lived and died in the old profession of their ancestors, as though the new era of commerce and parliamentary influence had not come into being. Three of them died in Marlborough's wars, then the 7th Earl fell at Louisberg and Colonel Charles Cochrane, son of the 8th Earl, was killed at Yorktown in the last stages of the American War of Independence, having been aide-de-camp to Cornwallis.

  For the most part, the Cochranes attained modest rank and little fame. Their choice of life, as Samuel Johnson termed it, was unfortunate. Commerce, industry and invention were creating the new wealth of the eighteenth century. The profession of arms might be admired in moments of national peril, tolerated when necessary, but was mostly regarded with priggish contempt.

  After enjoying his earldom for twenty years, Major Cochrane of Culross died in 1778. The abbey and its estates passed to his son, Archibald Cochrane, as 9th Earl of Dundonald. The new Earl was thirty years old. His son, whose naval career was to begin so inauspiciously in 1793, was almost three. The 9th Earl also brought to Culross his beautiful but delicate wife Anna, who bore him four sons, the survivors of her seven pregnancies.

  The misfortunes of the new generation at Culross began early. Anna died in 1784, after ten years during which she had been pregnant more often than not. The widowed Earl, increasingly preoccupied by expedients to save the estate from bankruptcy, handed over the care and education of his four sons to a series of hired tutors. Pedagogues of all sorts came and went with disconcerting rapidity. As a rule they were remembered more for their personal oddities than for any learning which they imparted. Young Thomas Cochrane was much impressed by a French tutor, Monsieur Durand, who was a Catholic and refused to set foot inside the kirk. Worse still, he caused outrage among the suspicious Presbyterians by interrupting their Sunday devotions with the sound of gunfire, as he opened hostilities from the churchyard against the magpies who were stripping the Culross cherry orchards while the owners prayed. Other tutors were less engagi
ng and were remembered without affection. There was one pedant whom Thomas Cochrane could only recall as the man who had boxed his ears for asking the difference between an interjection and a conjunction. Seventy years later, Cochrane admitted that this response had permanently extinguished all his remaining interest in philology.1

  The young Thomas Cochrane, who assumed the courtesy title of Lord Cochrane, as his father's heir, had little systematic education. On the other hand, he was well informed in history and practical science. He showed a natural aptitude and enthusiasm for learning, with a mind whose strong alliance of intellectual power and quick imagination was to make him an equally formidable opponent in war or politics. His sense of history and locality was naturally developed by an interest in his own ancestors and in the events which had made Culross both famous and infamous. The journey to Rosyth was enlivened by the sight of the remote crossroads where John Blackadder, Laird of Tulliallan, had lain in wait for the Abbot of Culross, Sir James Inglis, in 1530, and had treacherously murdered him. In Culross itself was the spot where, in 1038, King Duncan of Scotland had fought a desperate defensive battle against the invading Danes. Defeated at last, the King withdrew towards Perth, accompanied by the one man whose loyalty had never yet failed, his commander-in-chief, Macbeth.2