Cochrane the Dauntless

by David Cordingly

  Restless, energetic, constantly engrossed in new projects or old vendettas, Cochrane must have been exceedingly difficult to live with. Kate patiently suffered his obsessions and his extended absences for many years. Her correspondence suggests that she had a love affair with Lord Auckland around 1825 but she remained loyal to Cochrane, bore him two more children and went out of her way to help him clear his name in the years following his return from Greece.19 It was not until Cochrane was in his sixties that they drifted apart. He remained faithful to her and, apart from her feelings for Lord Auckland, Cochrane was always the most important man in her life. Shortly after his death Lady Dundonald, as she was then called, was cross-examined by a House of Lords Committee of Privileges. This had been set up to establish their eldest son’s legitimacy and his right to inherit the earldom (their third son, Arthur, had challenged the legality of their Scottish marriage in the hope of gaining the title). Interrogated under oath by the Lord Chancellor and other lawyers, Kate revealed the details of Cochrane’s courtship of her, their elopement and marriage, and their subsequent life together. During the course of the extended interviews she was suddenly overcome by the memory of him and launched into a passionate defence of the man she had loved and worshipped.20

  Kate was an orphan. Her full name was Katherine Corbett Barnes (although she sometimes signed herself Catherine Corbet Barnes, and when this was questioned by the Committee of Privileges she said she was a careless girl when it came to spelling). Her father was Thomas Barnes of Romford in Essex and her mother was believed to be a Spanish dancer.21 When Cochrane first met her she was living with her widowed aunt, Mrs Jackson, at 9 Bryanston Street, close to Portman Square. Mrs Jackson’s husband had kept a stationer’s shop in nearby Oxford Street, but the house in Bryanston Street had been given to Mrs Jackson by her brother, James Corbett. Mrs Jackson was responsible for bringing up Kate and had sent her for two or three years to a school at Great Marlow in Buckinghamshire.

  The exact date of Kate’s birth is not known but she told the Committee of Privileges that when she first met Cochrane she was sixteen or seventeen years old.22 They were introduced by Captain Nathaniel Cochrane who had been a friend of Mr Jackson and was a cousin of Cochrane. He had been flag lieutenant to Rear-Admiral Alexander Cochrane in the West Indies and, according to Kate, was ‘a very fine fellow’.23 In 1812 Cochrane was still living with his rich uncle Basil Cochrane in his grand house in Portman Square. He had called to see Kate on several occasions during January and February and after a while had proposed to her but she had refused him. ‘I refused all sorts of things of the kind,’ she recalled. Around this time Cochrane fell seriously ill, ‘and they sent his servant, Richard Carter, to me to tell me he was dying, and also Captain Nathaniel Cochrane came to say how very ill he was, and to ask me if I would walk in front of the house in the square, that I might let him see me, which I did; and he was lifted up to the window of his bedroom, looking like a corpse. My heart was softened to see that great man, the hero of a hundred fights.’24

  When he recovered from his illness Cochrane had an interview with Kate’s aunt. He told her that he wished to marry Kate but would have to marry her secretly in Scotland because his uncle had someone else in mind for him to marry – a rich heiress and the daughter of an Admiralty official. Basil Cochrane wanted to restore the fortunes of the Dundonalds and he was prepared to leave his nephew, the heir to the earldom, a very large portion of his estate if he married the heiress. Cochrane did not wish to upset his uncle but had no intention of marrying for money. His solution was to sweep Kate off to the village of Annan on the Scottish border a few miles beyond Gretna Green. Kate’s aunt eventually agreed to the arrangement on the understanding that Cochrane gave his written promise that he would marry Kate as soon as they reached Annan and he must agree that her servant, Ann Moxham, accompany them and witness the ceremony. Ann was ‘a bettermost woman of that class’, according to Kate. ‘She was older than I was considerably, but we, being girls together used to talk and laugh, and she sang remarkably well.’25

  On 6 August 1812 Cochrane and his bride-to-be set off for Scotland. They took a post chaise which was sometimes drawn by two horses and sometimes by four. Kate, Ann Moxham and Cochrane travelled inside the carriage, and Richard Carter, Cochrane’s servant, travelled outside with the driver. It was more than three hundred miles from London to the Scottish border and they journeyed at speed through the day and the night, changing horses as they went. Kate remembered little of the journey or any of the sights en route. ‘I was very tired, I was very worn. I was young. I did not think of castles or towns, or anything else. We went rolling on and on, and I slept, and so did he.’ They clattered through Carlisle, caught a glimpse of the glistening waters of the Solway Firth and as they passed through Gretna Green, Cochrane breathed a sigh of relief.

  ‘It’s all right Mouse, we are all right now,’ he said. ‘Here we are over the border now, and nothing but God can separate us.’ Kate recalled that he snapped his fingers in the way Scotsmen did when they were pleased. They arrived at the village of Annan on the evening of 8 August. The steaming horses came to a halt outside the Queensbury Arms which was run by an elderly and bad-tempered landlady who spoke with such a broad Scottish accent that Kate had difficulty in understanding her. Cochrane was in a jovial mood but he was also in a hurry. He seated himself at the table in the main room, and wrote away on a piece of paper:

  ‘I, Sir Thomas Cochrane commonly called Lord Cochrane of the Kingdom of Scotland being desirous for particular reasons to avoid a public marriage do hereby acknowledge and receive Catherine Corbett Barnes as my lawful wife.’ He signed his name and then got Kate to copy out the following words which he had written out for her: ‘I Catherine Corbet Barnes of the Parish of Marylebone in the county of Middlesex do accept and declare Sir Thomas Cochrane commonly called Lord Cochrane to be my lawful husband promising faithfully to keep secret this deed of marriage until I shall be permitted in writing under the hand of my said accepted husband to disclose the same.’26

  When she had signed her name Cochrane called Richard Carter and Ann Moxham.

  ‘Dick,’ he said, ‘I want you to put your name to that. You must read it and sign it.’ Carter did so, and then Ann Moxham added her signature. When the servants had gone to their rooms Cochrane astonished Kate by raising his hands in the air and dancing a sailor’s hornpipe. He told her that now she was his for ever. Kate was not so sure.

  ‘I do not know,’ she said, ‘I have had no parson and no church. Is this the way you marry in Scotland?’ Cochrane assured her that all was well, and then sprang another surprise. He told her he must hurry back to London immediately. His uncle was going to be married on the 11th or 12th and he was expected to be at the wedding. He said that he had given full instructions to Dick and he would bring her back as soon as arrangements could be made. He kissed her, said he had no time to lose and went off in the post chaise.

  Kate was tired and thought she would retire to her room. The old lady lit the way upstairs to the bedroom. When Kate said she would like to have a bath, she was told:

  ‘No, you cannot have a bath. There are no baths at the Queensbury Arms.’

  ‘Can you give me some soft water?’

  ‘No, you cannot have any soft water,’ said the landlady and told her that she had been doing a lot of washing and had already used up all the soft water.

  ‘What kind of place do you call this,’ said Kate, ‘where you have no soft water for people and no bath.’

  ‘It is the Queensbury Arms at Annan,’ she was told.

  Kate, Dick Carter and Ann Moxham stayed two nights at the inn and then headed south in the Glasgow to London stagecoach. They reached London on the evening of 13 August and Kate went back to stay with her aunt in Bryanston Street. She recalled finding a packet of wedding cake in the house and when Cochrane came round to see her he explained that he had attended his uncle’s wedding and that his uncle had now left town.

  U
nable to acknowledge publicly that Kate was his wife, but frustrated by the restrictions imposed by seeing her at the house of her aunt, Cochrane decided that they would spend a delayed honeymoon on the Isle of Wight. On 18 August, accompanied once again by Dick Carter and Ann Moxham, they travelled to the south coast and took a boat across the Solent to Ryde. They spent a month in a cottage close to that of Lord and Lady Spencer who were family friends. Lord Spencer, when First Lord of the Admiralty, had smoothed the way for Cochrane’s advancement from midshipman to master and commander. From Ryde they travelled to Cochrane’s house at Holly Hill and they remained there until the next session of parliament opened and Cochrane had to return to London to take up his parliamentary duties.

  The year 1813 was comparatively uneventful. Cochrane continued to work on various inventions, in particular on the design of an effective lamp for the use of ships in convoys, and on the design of gas lamps for street lighting. He continued to speak his mind in parliamentary debates but his views on naval abuses and his criticism of the way in which the Admiralty were conducting the war at sea were not helpful to the war effort. He made little or no effort to lobby his fellow MPs and his speeches were inevitably regarded by most of them as subversive and unpatriotic. In 1814 the naval and political establishment were at last given the opportunity to put down the troublemaker in their midst.

  15

  The Stock Exchange Scandal

  1814

  While Cochrane was preoccupied with his marriage, his inventions and his parliamentary battles, momentous events were taking place on the Continent. In June 1812 Napoleon marched into Russia with an army of more than 650,000 men gathered from twenty nations. At Borodino the Russian army made a stand and for twelve hours Napoleon’s troops fought the most bloody and costly battle of the war. The Russians lost nearly half their army, and the French lost 30,000 men including fifty generals. Napoleon pressed on and entered Moscow on 14 September. The city was empty and abandoned and was soon on fire. The Russians refused to parley and in mid-October, with dwindling food supplies and winter approaching, Napoleon ordered the retreat from Moscow. It was five hundred miles to the Russian border, the countryside had been laid waste and by the second week of November the temperature was thirty degrees below zero. Men and horses died from cold, starvation and the attacks of marauding Cossacks. By 18 December, Napoleon was back in Paris having lost between 500,000 and 570,000 of his Grand Army. He blamed everyone but himself for the disaster. Chaptal, who was one of his ministers, observed, ‘after his return from Moscow those who saw most of him noticed a great change in his physical and moral constitution… I did not find the same consistency in his ideas or the same strength in his character; one noticed only inconsequent leaps of imagination. There was not the old taste and faculty for hard work.’1 The Russian campaign had shown the world that Napoleon was no longer invincible, and there were other signs that his domination of Europe might be drawing to an end.

  In Spain the British Army, with the support of Spanish guerrillas, was relentlessly driving the French troops out of the country. In July 1809 Wellington had advanced to within seventy miles of Madrid and at Talevera he had defeated an army led by Marshal Soult and Napoleon’s brother, Joseph. There were setbacks and retreats during the next three years but on 22 July 1812 Wellington fought and won a crucial battle at Salamanca and three weeks later he entered Madrid. During the course of the next fourteen months he would fight his way northwards and lead his army across the frontier into France.

  The British government’s concern with defeating Napoleon had diverted attention from an increasingly hostile United States. America’s trade and shipping were constantly disrupted by the actions of British warships; the impressment of American sailors by the British navy was deeply resented; these and other grievances, together with the ambitions of a number of American congressmen who were looking for an opportunity to conquer Canada, led to the United States declaring war on Britain in June 1812. The resulting ‘War of 1812’ began badly for Britain, particularly at sea. In August the American frigate USS Constitution defeated the British frigate Guerriere in the first of a number of single-ship actions in which American warships were victorious. American privateers proved remarkably successful at intercepting and capturing British merchantmen, while on Lake Erie a squadron of British ships was soundly beaten by an American squadron under Commodore Perry. ‘We have met the enemy and they are ours,’ Perry reported. ‘Two ships, two brigs, one schooner and one sloop.’2 The only break in this humiliating sequence of events for the Royal Navy was a single-ship action which took place off Boston: on 1 June 1813 the British frigate Shannon commanded by Captain Philip Broke engaged the American frigate Chesapeake, Captain Lawrence. Like Cochrane, Broke had trained his men to a remarkable pitch, and the speed and accuracy of the Shannon’s gunnery proved decisive in a ferocious action which lasted barely fifteen minutes and left the decks of both ships strewn with dead and dying seamen.

  There had been rumours in some English newspapers that Cochrane might be sent to America with a squadron of frigates. The Morning Chronicle had claimed on 6 July 1813 that ‘Lord Cochrane is appointed to command the Saturn for North America’. Such speculation suggests that, in spite of his very public quarrels with the Admiralty, he was still regarded in some quarters as a second Nelson. But it was his uncle Alexander who gave him a chance to resume his naval career. Vice-Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane had recently been appointed commander-in-chief of the North American station. He was known to be tough and capable and it was hoped that he would breathe fresh life into the navy’s efforts across the Atlantic. He invited Cochrane to become his flag captain and when he sailed for America in a frigate to take up his new appointment, he left Cochrane to oversee the fitting out of his flagship, the 80-gun Tonnant, which was lying at Chatham. When the ship was ready for sea she had orders to escort a convoy of merchantmen to America.3 Cochrane now divided his time between Chatham dockyard, and the factory in the City which was producing the prototype for his convoy lamp, and his new home in Green Street, where Kate was pregnant with their first child.

  For five years Cochrane had been on half-pay but as flag captain of a ship of the line he would earn a respectable salary, while his particular skills as a coastal raider were well suited to action on the American seaboard. Unfortunately this bright future was to be blighted by the machinations of the youngest of his seven uncles. The Hon. Andrew Cochrane had changed his surname to Cochrane-Johnstone when he married Lady Georgiana Johnstone, daughter of the Earl of Hopetoun. He and Cochrane had always got on well, but he was a completely untrustworthy character, his life a catalogue of dishonest dealings. Lord Dundonald, his eldest brother, described him as ‘an unprincipled villain, swindler and coward’.4 He had joined the army at the age of sixteen and had reached the rank of colonel by 1797 when he was appointed Governor of Dominica. His rule in the West Indian island became notorious for corruption, extortion and brutality and according to one authority, ‘he drove a brisk trade in negros and kept a harem’.5 He was recalled in 1803 to face a court martial but was acquitted. His wife had died in Dominica and he had married a rich Creole heiress but they soon divorced. On his return to Britain he became a friend of William Cobbett (it was he who had first introduced Cochrane to Cobbett at the time of the Honiton election) and he was elected Member of Parliament for the rotten borough of Grampound. He returned to the West Indies and his naval brother Alexander, then commander-in-chief of the Leeward Islands, appointed him navy agent for the Prize Court at Tortola where he was accused of bribery and corruption. Alexander told his brother Basil, ‘I shall ever sincerely regret that my attachment to him as a brother induced me to repose in him the trust that I did.’6

  In May 1813, Andrew Cochrane-Johnstone met and became friends with a Prussian aristocrat in his early forties who called himself Captain De Berenger, a man of many talents with contacts in the highest quarters – he had given advice on military matters to the Duke of Cumberland, and ma
de drawings for the Prince Regent.7 Cochrane-Johnstone persuaded his brother Alexander that De Berenger had useful skills to offer Cochrane in preparing the flagship for America. As a talented marksman he would be able to train members of the crew in sharp shooting (there were reports that American ships had been employing sharpshooters to good effect). De Berenger also had ideas for new methods of boarding and had developed a flame-throwing device. ‘It was thus,’ Cochrane wrote in his autobiography, ‘that I was subsequently brought into contact with a man who eventually proved my ruin.’8 Exactly when Cochrane first met De Berenger is not clear. Cochrane says he was first introduced to him at a dinner given by his brother Andrew in January 1814 but it seems they actually met in the previous December when Cochrane asked De Berenger to make drawings for his convoy lamp patent. Whatever the circumstances of their meeting, Cochrane’s involvement with Andrew Cochrane-Johnstone and De Berenger was to prove disastrous. Between them the disreputable uncle and the Prussian adventurer had devised an ingenious plot to make large sums of money on the Stock Exchange by spreading a rumour that Napoleon was dead.9

  Early on the morning of 21 February, De Berenger knocked on the door of the Ship Inn at Dover and demanded to see the landlord. He said that he was the bearer of important news and must have a horse and rider to send a message to Vice-Admiral Foley, the port admiral at Deal. De Berenger was wearing a grey military coat over a red uniform jacket with a large star on the chest (the colour of the coat and jacket would be of vital importance in the subsequent court case). Sitting down in the inn he wrote a letter to Admiral Foley explaining that he had just arrived on a ship from Calais and must proceed to London at once with despatches. The Allies had obtained a final victory and ‘Bonaparte was overtaken by a party of Sachen’s Cossacks, who immediately slayed him and divided his body between them. General Platoff saved Paris from being reduced to ashes. The Allied Sovereigns are there and the white cockade is universal; an immediate peace is certain.’10 He signed himself Lieutenant-Colonel R. Du Bourg, Aide-de-Camp to Lord Cathcart, who was the British ambassador to Russia.