Cochrane the Dauntless

by David Cordingly

  Later that morning Cochrane spotted a schooner onshore and, apparently unaffected by their recent brush with death, he ordered the boats to be lowered and sent to chase her down. However, the weather worsened and at 3.00 p.m. the ship’s guns were fired as a signal for the boats to return. The next day they headed north, rounded Ushant and set a course for Basque Roads where they were due to rendezvous with a British squadron under the command of Commodore Richard Keats. It was while they were speeding south that an incident occurred which made almost as much of an impression on Marryat as the grounding on the shoal. At one o’clock on the afternoon of 25 November a young marine named John Bennet fell overboard. Several members of the crew promptly jumped into one of the boats hanging from the quarter davits by the ship’s stern and asked to be lowered down to save the man. Cochrane ‘who was a cool calculator, thought the chance of losing seven men was greater than that of saving one, so the poor fellow was left to his fate’. Marryat was particularly upset because the young man was a strong swimmer and made strenuous efforts to regain the ship. He was still visible when they were a mile to windward. They watched him rising to the top of a large wave and then sinking into the trough beyond. There was a great deal of muttering among the crew about the cruelty of the captain but, with the benefit of his later experience, Marryat had to admit that Cochrane had been forced to make a hard decision and chosen the lesser of two evils.

  Four days later, at daybreak on 29 November, a number of strange sails were sighted to leeward. As they drew closer the lookouts on the Imperieuse identified the flags and sails of the British squadron they were looking for. There were four ships of the line, three frigates, a sixth-rate ship and a brig sloop. They were cruising off the entrance to Basque Roads, keeping a lookout for any movement from the French warships anchored in the vicinity of the Ile d’Aix. The Imperieuse hove to and lowered a boat so that Cochrane could be rowed across to Keats’s flagship, HMS Superb. The two men had last met in Gibraltar when Keats had been a member of the court martial which was held on the loss of the Speedy.

  Cochrane’s orders were to cruise independently of the squadron and to harass enemy shipping so the next few weeks were spent intercepting and capturing French merchant ships, transports and local trading vessels. With a ship as fast and powerful as the Imperieuse there was little opposition and the only action which put serious demands on Cochrane’s disciplined crew was an attack on the Bassin d’Arcasson. The entrance was defended by a fortress called Fort Roquette which was armed with four 36-pound carriage guns, a thirteen-inch mortar and two field guns. Cochrane organised an expedition to storm the fort. The pinnace and the jolly boat, filled with armed men and led by Lieutenant Mapleton, set off before dawn on 6 January 1807. The French soldiers must have fled because Mapleton’s force entered the fort without a single casualty, and were able to spike the guns, destroy the gun platforms and gun carriages, burn the military stores and blow up the magazine. Having left the fort itself in ruins Mapleton and his men captured a galliot and a pinnace and returned to the ship. When Cochrane sent his despatch to Keats describing the action he gave full credit to all concerned and he also enclosed details of the vessels captured or destroyed by the crew of the Imperieuse since 15 December 1806. In the space of three weeks they had seized eight vessels and destroyed seven. Marryat, who was experiencing life on board a man-of-war for the first time, would later observe, ‘The cruises of the Imperieuse were periods of continual excitement, from the hour in which she hove up her anchor till she dropped it again in port; the day that passed without a shot being fired in anger, was with us a blank day; the boats were hardly secured on the booms than they were cast loose and out again; the yards and stay tackles were for ever hoisting up and lowering down.’

  For the remainder of January 1807 they continued to cruise in the vicinity of Basque Roads, never far out of sight of the squadron. A final foray took place on 27 January when Cochrane lowered the boats off Les Sables d’Olonne and sent an armed force to attack the French signal posts. The following day the carpenters of three of the squadron’s ships of the line came on board the Imperieuse to survey her rudder. It was evident that the ship needed dockyard attention and two days later, following a visit by Cochrane to Keats’s flagship, the Imperieuse was on her way back to Plymouth. They had a rough passage home: on some days the ship was driving into steep seas stirred up by gale-force winds; on others they were hit by sudden squalls accompanied by lightning and flurries of rain and hail. The wind dropped to a fresh breeze as they ran into Plymouth Sound. On 11 February they dropped anchor in seven fathoms as a heavy downpour swept across the anchorage. A week later the Imperieuse was towed through the Narrows into the sheltered expanse of the Hamoaze. For the next two months she was out of action and in the hands of the dockyard.

  7

  The Westminster Election

  1807

  The weeks of keeping watch in all weathers off the Atlantic coast of France had taken their toll. Cochrane frequently suffered a relapse when returning home after a demanding spell of active service. On 3 April 1807 he wrote to the Admiralty and explained that he had suffered greatly in his health during the past winter ‘from the necessity I was under of being constantly on deck, there being neither Master or Pilot, or any other person on board the Imperieuse to whom I could trust, either by day or night, the pilotage of the ship when close in shore’.1 He asked their Lordships to appoint a captain to take over command of his ship for two months until he had sufficiently recovered. He followed this with a second letter in which he enclosed a doctor’s certificate. Thomas Seagram, surgeon, of 17 Wigmore Street, confirmed that he had examined Lord Cochrane and he ‘appears to be in that state of debility of health requiring a respite from duty at present’.2

  The Admiralty agreed to Cochrane’s request and appointed an acting captain in his place. On 17 April the Imperieuse put to sea under the command of Captain Alexander Skene and a week later she was cruising the waters between Brest and Ushant. The crew were not impressed by their new captain. According to Marryat, ‘our guns were never cast loose, or our boats disturbed from the booms. This was a repose which was, however, rather trying to the officers and ship’s company, who had been accustomed to such an active life’.3

  On 27 April the government led by Lord Grenville, ‘The Ministry of all the Talents’ as it had been optimistically called, was forced to dissolve parliament and call another general election. Encouraged by William Cobbett, Cochrane decided to forsake the corrupt and demanding voters of Honiton and to stand as a parliamentary candidate for Westminster, the most democratic and high-profile constituency in the country. His impending crusade to reform naval abuses and corruption would, he believed, carry more weight if he represented the City of Westminster rather than a distant borough in which the election process was notably undemocratic. He proposed to stand as an independent member ‘disclaiming all attachment to parties or factions’, but circumstances led to him being called a radical, a label which suited his naturally rebellious temperament and his habit of questioning authority.

  The parliamentary system and election procedures of Britain in the early nineteenth century had changed little since the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the accession of William and Mary to the throne. The House of Lords and the House of Commons were dominated by the aristocracy and the landed gentry. Elections took place on a limited scale but very few Members of Parliament were democratically elected in the modern sense.4 In the counties every man with freehold property worth forty shillings a year had the right to vote but in practice it was the local lord or squire who usually determined who should be sent to Parliament. The electoral system in the boroughs was eccentric in the extreme and depended on historic custom and practice. There were seats like Bodmin where only members of the local corporation could vote; in some boroughs the voting was restricted to freemen of the borough; there were the potwalloper boroughs like Honiton and Aylesbury; and there were the rotten boroughs and pocket boroughs where t
he right to vote was restricted to the owners or occupiers of certain houses or plots of land. Old Sarum, the most notorious of the rotten boroughs, was a mound of earth with no houses on it at all. Only twenty boroughs had more than a thousand electors; Westminster with an electorate of more than 11,000, voters was outstanding and was among the few places where there was open political discussion and actively fought election battles.

  Many seats in Parliament could be bought, usually for very large sums of money. At election time newspapers carried advertisements announcing the sale of whole boroughs. Sir Francis Burdett, who was one of Cochrane’s political rivals for the seat at Westminster and later became his friend and ally, bought the seat of Boroughbridge in Yorkshire for £4,000 in 1796. He later spent a total of £94,000 in two Middlesex elections. In addition to the buying and selling of seats and the bribery and corruption in the boroughs, there were also a considerable number of safe government seats which were in the patronage of the government of the day.

  Within the Houses of Parliament the political process was labyrinthine. The labels of Whig and Tory were applied to the two major groupings of leading politicians and their supporters but the parties bore little resemblance to the political parties of today. Members of Parliament were influenced in their views and their actions, not by party discipline, but by ties of kinship, friendship and patronage, and above all by the interests which they represented. Some members had commercial interests in the West Indies or the East Indies, others had interests in the City, and there were a growing number of wealthy industrialists. A great many had landed interests – when a local squire was returned to Parliament he went as a spokesman for a local community that was self-sufficient and self-governing and he cared little about the political discussions and manoeuvring which took place in Parliament.

  It was the task of the king to choose a prime minister who was able to command sufficient support among the various factions to be able to assemble a government. With so many interests at work it is little wonder that governments came and went so frequently. In the thirty years between 1782 and 1812 most administrations lasted no more than two years, some no more than a few months. The first administration of William Pitt the Younger which held power for eighteen years, from 1783 to 1801, was unusual. With the nation at war from 1793 and the growing fear of a French invasion, Pitt was able to rely on the support of the king and persuade a group of his Whig opponents to join his administration.

  In spite of its shortcomings the British constitution was regarded with pride by most Englishmen, and was admired by many foreign observers. It seemed to combine the benefits of absolute monarchy, aristocracy and democracy in a subtle system of checks and balances. There were, however, a growing number of critics of the constitution who wanted more equal representation of the people and an end to bribery, patronage and parliamentary corruption. John Wilkes had led the way in the 1760s with attacks on the king and the government which stirred up considerable popular support. Regarded as a dangerous agitator he was forced to flee England for a time but on his return he was elected MP for Middlesex. His imprisonment in 1768 sparked riots in Southwark with mobs roaming the streets chanting ‘Damn the King, damn the government, and damn justice’. The early stages of the French Revolution inspired a wave of republican feeling in England and Scotland, particularly among working people and independent craftsmen. From 1789 onwards there was a rapid growth of clubs and societies dedicated to political reform. These were particularly concerned with the unfair and unrepresentative electoral system and the failure of successive governments to tackle serious social problems such as low wages, bad working conditions, overcrowded prisons and the plight of the poor and the elderly.

  The advocates of political reform came to be known as radicals and their cause was given added impetus by the publication of Tom Paine’s Rights of Man in 1791,5 a hard-hitting rebuttal of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution published the previous year. Burke had denounced the political theories on which the Revolution was based and warned his countrymen that the popular uprising in Paris would lead to war, tyranny and a military dictatorship. Tom Paine, the son of a Norfolk farmer, had spent twelve years in America where his political writings were much admired and were partly responsible for the Declaration of Independence of 1776. His Rights of Man was dedicated to President George Washington and set out his belief that all men have equal rights in nature and therefore the right to equal representation. He questioned the hereditary right of kings and aristocrats to govern, and recommended that a large part of the annual revenue be diverted towards the relief of the poor, the education of children and support for the elderly. Paine had some difficulty in finding a printer prepared to publish his text but when it was published it sold in thousands and became a textbook and inspiration for the radical movement. It sparked off an explosion of popular revolt in Scotland with mob riots in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dundee.

  The setting up of the guillotine in Paris, the execution of King Louis XVI and the French declaration of war on Britain produced a backlash against the radical reformers who were regarded as subversive troublemakers. Tom Paine had to take refuge in France. The working men’s clubs were regarded with increasing suspicion and in 1799 the Combination Acts outlawed trade unions and decreed that any worker combining with a group of other workers was liable to be sentenced to three months in jail or two months’ hard labour.

  For several years the reform movement lay dormant. It revived during the election of May 1807 and the Westminster constituency became the battleground for the radical cause. Cochrane found himself at the centre of a maelstrom of political activity. There were two seats to be contested. At the general election of 1806 the Westminster electors had returned to Parliament an admiral and a playwright. The admiral was Samuel, Viscount Hood, who had made his name at the Battle of the Saints (1782). He had been MP for Westminster since 1784 but did not contest the 1807 election.6 The playwright was Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the celebrated author of The Rivals and The School for Scandal. Sheridan had entered Parliament in 1780 and his brilliant oratory and his friendship with Charles James Fox, the leader of the Whigs, had secured him the posts of under-secretary for foreign affairs and then secretary of the Treasury. Now, aged fifty-six, he was heavily in debt and had degenerated into a corpulent and drink-sodden wreck of a man. He had put his name forward for re-election but, in spite of his occasional flashes of oratory, was no longer a serious contender for the seat.

  The most serious rival to Cochrane was Sir Francis Burdett. He came from a wealthy family and had greatly increased his wealth by his marriage to the daughter of Thomas Coutts, the banker. He had followed his education at Westminster and Oxford by travelling the Continent on the grand tour and had been in Paris during the early months of the French Revolution. The experience had led to him becoming a supporter of the revolutionary ideals. When he entered Parliament at the age of twenty-six he had embraced the cause of parliamentary reform, and now, at thirty-seven, was regarded as the leader of the radicals. He had the support of Cobbett as well as that of Francis Place, the Charing Cross tailor who was the principal organiser of the local radical organisation. The other candidates were Colonel John Elliott who had replaced Admiral Hood as the Tory candidate, and James Paull, a former merchant who had stood as a radical at the last election and been defeated. Paull had assumed he would be the official radical candidate this time and was so enraged when Sir Francis Burdett entered the field that he challenged him to a duel. The Times reported that this took place on Wimbledon Common ‘in consequence of a misunderstanding’.7 At the first firing neither duellist was hit but when they fired their pistols a second time both men fell to the ground. Paull had a minor wound in his leg but Burdett was more severely wounded in the thigh and was prevented from taking an active part in the election campaign.

  On 2 May a ‘numerous and most respectable meeting of the Independent Electors of Westminster’ was held at the St Alban’s Tavern in a street off Pa
ll Mall. There it was resolved that ‘the known character of Lord Cochrane as a brave and meritorious Naval Officer, and his principles as a Political Man, entitle him to the warmest approbation of this meeting’.8 It was agreed that Lord Cochrane was a fit and proper person to represent the City of Westminster in Parliament and the meeting resolved to use all possible exertions for promoting and securing his Lordship’s election. During the course of the next week Cochrane gave election dinners in Willis’s Rooms in St James’s and he hired committee rooms in Richardson’s Coffee House in Covent Garden as a base for his campaign.9 A local hack was commissioned to write an election broadside which was headed: ‘Victory! Cochrane! Reform!’ It combined the patriotic sentiments typical of the naval songs of the period with a reference to reform as a reminder that, although standing as an independent, Cochrane was a supporter of the radical cause:

  All hail to the hero – of England the boast,

  The honour – the glory – the pride of our coast;

  Let the bells peal his name, and the cannon’s loud roar

  Sound the plaudits of Cochrane, the friend of her shore.

  From boyhood devoted to England and Fame