By the end of September he was back in Greece but he was coldly received. He no longer had a role to play and he had to suffer ten miserable weeks of being treated with contemptuous indifference by those in power while his naval accounts were scrutinised. On 26 November he wrote to Count Capodistrias offering his resignation. He asked that the sum of £20,000, which was due to be paid to him when Greece achieved independence, should be used for the relief of wounded seamen and the families of those who had died during the conflict.34 His resignation was accepted and he received a gracious reply thanking him for his services on behalf of Greece. ‘You have taken part in her restoration and she will reckon you, with sentiments of profound gratitude, among her first and generous defenders.’35
He was grudgingly lent the brig Proserpine to take him home but was treated with such calculated rudeness by her captain that he lodged a formal complaint. Fortunately his reputation still remained high among naval men and Admiral Heyden, who had commanded the Russian fleet at Navarino, offered to give him a passage on the Russian corvette Grimachi as proof of his esteem. He further promised to ‘receive him with the honours due to his rank and with musical honours; and at his departure I will man the yards’.36 The corvette left Poros on 20 December and took him to Malta where he was warmly welcomed by Admiral Sir Pulteney Malcolm who had commanded the 74-gun ship Donegal at Basque Roads and had been one of the few captains to come out in support of Cochrane at Lord Gambier’s court martial in 1809. Malcolm arranged for him to travel to Naples on HMS Racer and from there he made his way to Paris to rejoin his family. His active life as a naval commander in battle and an admiral in the service of foreign powers was over.
20
The Fightback
1828–1851
During his last months in Greece and the early months of 1829, Cochrane was more depressed than he had been at any time since his imprisonment following the Stock Exchange trial. So much had been expected of him by the Greeks and by the supporters of the Greek cause throughout Europe that his evident failure to influence the course of the war was humiliating and bitterly disappointing. When Captain Grenfell, who had proved such a capable commander in Brazil, learnt that Cochrane had returned from Greece, he wrote from Rio de Janeiro, urging him to rehoist his flag and resume command of the Brazilian navy. Cochrane refused the offer and told him, ‘The mental fever I contracted in Greece has not yet subsided, nor will it probably for some months to come.’1 There seems little doubt that he had suffered a nervous breakdown and it is not hard to see why his usually indomitable character was finally brought low. Apart from the troubles he had endured with his men and his ships, and the intrigues, rivalries and needless slaughter he had witnessed, he had found himself ostracised by the British government, side-lined by the Royal Navy, and was now unable to return to Britain for fear of prosecution under the Foreign Enlistment Act.
The year 1829 was also marked by family tragedies. On 6 August his youngest brother, Archibald, died at the age of forty-seven leaving a wife and young children. They had served together in the navy in the early days and, when Archibald had retired with the rank of captain, Cochrane had suggested that he come out and join him in South America. Later in the year Kate gave birth to a stillborn child after suffering what were described as ‘dreadful puerperal convulsions’. This did not quench her lively and spirited nature but in later years Cochrane always blamed her difficulties on this unhappy event.
During his brief visit to England during the summer of 1828, Cochrane had addressed a lengthy petition to the Duke of Clarence asserting his innocence of the Stock Exchange fraud and asking him to persuade his brother, King George IV, to reinstate him ‘in that rank and station in the Royal Navy which he previously held’.2 The document was passed to the Cabinet and was predictably rejected by the Duke of Wellington who was now Prime Minister. However, events in England soon began to turn in Cochrane’s favour, coinciding with the lifting of his depression and the recovery of his old energy and determination. In the spring of 1830 he was staying in Florence with his family and met Charles Greville, the diarist and associate of Palmerston and other members of the Tory Cabinet. They talked at length about the political situation in England where the movement for parliamentary reform was gathering momentum. Greville recorded in his diary a conversation with Cochrane: ‘I thought things would explode at last in England, which he concurred in, and seemed to like the idea of it, in which we differ, owing probably to the difference of our positions.’ A few days later Greville rode out to Cochrane’s villa, ‘where we found them under a matted tent in the garden, going to dinner. He talks of going to Algiers to see the French attack it. He had made £100,000 by the Greek bonds. It is a pity he ever committed a robbery; he is such a fine fellow, and so shrewd and good humoured.’3 Cochrane had invested his £37,000 salary advance in Greek funds which had apparently made an enormous profit and would enable him to live in some style when he returned to London later in the year.
The two events which cleared the path for Cochrane’s return were the death of the king and the fall of the Tory government. King George IV died in June 1830 and was succeeded by the Duke of Clarence who became William IV. The new king had spent his early years in the navy and was known to be an admirer of Cochrane. In November the Duke of Wellington’s Tory government fell and was replaced by a Whig government led by Lord Grey, with Lord Melbourne as Home Secretary, and Cochrane’s friend Lord Brougham as Lord Chancellor. The first task of the new government was to steer through Parliament the Reform Bill which incorporated many of the measures which Cochrane and his radical friends Sir Francis Burdett, Henry Hunt and William Cobbett had been fighting for since the days of the Westminster election of 1807.
While he had been out of the country Cochrane had prepared a comprehensive review of his case. When he and his family arrived in London in the autumn of 1830 he had several copies printed and on 10 December one copy was forwarded through Lord Melbourne to the king, accompanied by a brief petition in which Cochrane stressed that he ‘had no participation in, and no knowledge, not even the most indistinct or remote, of the crime under the imputation of which I have been so variously and so unceasingly punished. It is this alone which impels me to approach your Majesty…’4 Other copies of the review were sent to Cabinet ministers. There were sympathetic replies from Lord Grey and Lord Melbourne but Lord Brougham warned that there was opposition from some ministers and sixteen months were to pass before Cochrane learnt the results of his petition.
One reason for the delay was that the controversial Reform Bill was causing uproar in Parliament and each time the bill was rejected there were riots and angry public meetings throughout the country. It was observed by enemies of reform that there were popular disturbances wherever William Cobbett or other radical speakers appeared in the country districts. In April 1831 Parliament was dissolved and in May the Whigs were returned with an increased majority. Lord Grey and his ministers spent much of the rest of the year endeavouring to get the bill, with amendments, through the House of Commons and the House of Lords.
On 1 July, Cochrane’s father died at his lodgings in Paris at the age of eighty-three. He had fallen out with his eldest son at the time of the Stock Exchange trial and they had had little contact since. The old earl’s third wife had died nine years before and he had spent the last years of his life in poverty.5 The fifty-five-year-old Lord Cochrane now became the tenth Earl of Dundonald. But although he inherited the title and the name borne by a long line of Scottish ancestors, he still had to clear that name of the crime for which he had been fined, imprisoned, stripped of the Order of the Bath and struck off the Navy List. On 27 November he succeeded in obtaining a personal interview with King William at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton. The king was sympathetic to his cause and promised to see that his case was examined by the appropriate authorities.6 Kate, now Lady Dundonald, had several meetings with Lord Grey, the Prime Minister, who assured her that he would do all he could to help, and friends such
as Sir Francis Burdett continued to lobby on his behalf in Parliament. At last, at a meeting of the Privy Council on 2 May 1832, a free pardon was granted and the same day he was reinstated as an officer of the Royal Navy. The London Gazette published the announcement from the Admiralty Office: ‘This day, in pursuance of His Majesty’s pleasure, the Earl of Dundonald was promoted to be Rear-Admiral of the Blue, taking rank next after the Hon George Heneage Lawrence Dundas.’7 It was in the uniform of a rear-admiral that Cochrane (as we shall continue to call him) was presented to the king at a royal levee held at St James’s Palace on 9 May.
Hanover Lodge, the home of Cochrane and his family in the 1830s. The house was one of several villas in Regents Park, London, designed by Decimus Burton.
Soon after returning to England from Italy, Cochrane had bought Hanover Lodge, a handsome villa situated on land to the north of the John Nash terraces in Regents Park. He had asked his brother William to look for a suitable property and on 3 November 1829 William had written to him to say that he and their naval uncle Alexander had been to see an excellent house in the park, ‘with two acres of land, with three drawing rooms, a dining room and a library on the ground floor and eight bedrooms above with standing for two carriages and stabling for eight horses’.8 The house had been designed by Decimus Burton for Colonel Sir Robert Arbuthnot, a hero of the Napoleonic campaigns.9 Cochrane purchased the property for £12,000 from Lady Arbuthnot and for a few years it was the family home. For most of her adult life Kate had lived and brought up her children in lodgings, or had stayed for months at a time with relations, or had lived in what must always have seemed temporary accommodation in Valparaiso, Santiago, Lima, Rio de Janeiro, Boulogne, Brussels, Paris and Florence. She was now able to live and entertain in a manner which suited her outgoing temperament and her place in society. Hanover Lodge had spacious tree-lined grounds bordering the Regents Park Canal. After overseeing extensive improvements to the interior of the house, Kate filled the reception rooms with classical busts and statues, Chinese vases and portraits and paintings ‘of the gallant Admiral’s achievements, by sea and land’. The household included three men servants, a lady’s maid, a cook, a nursery maid, a house maid, a scullery maid and a governess for the two younger children – Lizzie was aged ten when they moved into the house; Arthur was eight. In the summer of 1832 when all the improvements had been completed, Kate held a fête-champêtre – a magnificent reception with the grounds lit by a variety of lamps, dinner in a marquee adjoining the house and dancing till midnight. The guest list included the Prince of Canino, the Duke and Duchess of Padua and a glittering gathering of British aristocracy, naval and military officers and people of note in London society.10
With the ending of the long war against Napoleonic France in 1815 the Admiralty had drastically reduced the numbers of men and ships in service. There was therefore no reason for Cochrane to expect to be given a command. However, he ruled himself out of the running anyway by making it known that he would not accept an appointment unless he was restored to the Order of the Bath and fourteen years were to pass before this was achieved. He spent these years industriously working on scientific projects and inventions. This was not a new departure, of course. He had been one of the first naval officers to use Congreve rockets; the explosion ships at Basque Roads had been of his own devising; and he had used kites to distribute propaganda leaflets on the coast of France in 1805.11 The convoy lamp on which he was working at the time of the Stock Exchange trial had failed to interest the Admiralty but a few years later he won the £50 prize by entering the lamp under the name of another person. In 1812, following his discovery of the sulphur mines in Sicily, he had worked out a method for using poison gas as a deadly weapon against enemy naval bases and he had submitted the details in his ‘Secret War Plans’ which were considered by a high-level committee but subsequently rejected.12 And he had shown himself to be years ahead of most of his contemporaries by his recognition that steam power would replace sail as the propulsion for ships. He had demonstrated his faith in this by ordering the Rising Star for the Chilean navy and then insisting that steam-powered warships be built for the Greek navy.
On his return from Italy in 1830 he became involved in the construction of the tunnel which was being built under the Thames from Rotherhithe to Wapping under the direction of Marc Brunel, the French-born engineer and father of Isambard Kingdom Brunel.13 Progress had been hampered by the influx of mud and Cochrane devised and patented a method of using compressed air to assist in the excavations. He continued to correspond with Marc Brunel and in 1833 they were discussing ways of improving steam engines. Cochrane had invented a steam-powered rotary engine which theoretically had a number of advantages over the reciprocating steam engine which used pistons and connecting rods to convert the steam power into a circular motion to drive the wheels of a locomotive or the paddle wheels of a ship. The rotary engine was lighter and smoother running and had fewer moving parts. ‘There are no beams, cranks, side rods, connecting rods, parallel motions, levers, slide valves, excentrics,’ Cochrane wrote of his rotary engine. ‘As the moving parts of the Revolving Engine pursue their course in perfect circles (without stop or hindrance) this Engine is capable of progressive acceleration, until the work performed equals the pressure of steam on the vacuum, or on the atmosphere: – an advantage which the Reciprocating Engine does not possess.’14
Initially he used his rotary engine to drive a small boat on the Thames. His experiments were sufficiently successful to persuade the directors of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway to come down to London to examine his prototype model and they subsequently allowed him to use George Stephenson’s Rocket for further experiments.15 The famous locomotive had been withdrawn from service after mechanical problems but when trials were held in October 1834 using Cochrane’s rotary engine to drive the Rocket the results were disappointing. However, in December the directors of the London and Greenwich Railway offered to build two of his rotary engines. They were concerned about the jarring vibrations of reciprocating engines on the elevated viaducts of the railway and thought that the smooth-running rotary engine would be more suitable. Trials of the first locomotive driven by rotary engines were held on 24 June 1835 and proved more satisfactory than those carried out with the Rocket, but serious defects soon developed and by the end of the year the engine had completely broken down. Another engine was built, but problems continued, leading to a dispute and legal proceedings between Cochrane and the railway company. By the time he withdrew from the venture in October 1838 he had spent at least £4,000 of his own money on the project.
Unlike his father who had tended to abandon his experiments when they went wrong and move on to other projects, Cochrane refused to admit failure. He was certain that the problems encountered with his rotary engine could be overcome and his next move was to persuade the Admiralty to carry out tests with his engine at Portsmouth dockyard. These were so successful that in due course the navy paid for his engine to replace the unsatisfactory engines in the small steam vessel Firefly. Throughout the many years that he worked on his rotary engine Cochrane remained convinced that it would prove a commercial success and make his fortune. This is confirmed in a letter he wrote in 1839 to his old friend James Guthrie, the surgeon, who had retired to Scotland and was living in a small village in Fife overlooking the Firth of Tay. The letter was written in a reflective mood from Hanover Lodge and is worth quoting at some length:
The Rocket, designed by George and Robert Stephenson. The famous locomotive, which had won the Rainhill trials in 1829, was lent to Cochrane five years later for experiments with his rotary steam engine.
Dear Guthrie,
This is the sixth of May, and thirty eight years have now passed since the affair of the Gamo, when we were together in the little Speedy. How many things have passed; how many acquaintances have departed since that day, leaving scarcely a trace to recall them to mind! I have often, however, thought of you, though I have not written now for a long
time. The truth is I have had an absorbing pursuit, that of perfecting the Rotary or Revolving Engine which I am glad to tell you has been crowned with the most complete success and will shortly realise a fortune. The most talented engineers have examined the engine made for the Admiralty which are now setting up in Portsmouth Yard, and they have at last given up their opposition.
He went on to give Guthrie news of his family: his eldest son, Thomas, was with his regiment in Canada; his second son, Horace, was with the army at Malta; his third son, Arthur, had just joined HMS Benbow; and his daughter
is with my youngest son Ernest, with Lady Dundonald at Boulogne; who resides there for her health, which is by no means good – nor has it so been for many years. I am as grey as a badger, but on the whole wear pretty well, considering the rough kind of usage I have had in my time. Pray how are you, and how is Mary Guthrie, to whom I must pay my respects whenever I get to the north. I have now made up my mind to sell this nice pretty place, for two reasons; first Lady Dundonald has not resided here for years; and secondly it is a costly place to keep up, and inconvenient to me in that respect, seeing that my sons are now drawing bills, and wanting promotion, and that my engine has cost money and not yet returned any – though I hope it will soon do so.16
Cochrane the Dauntless Page 36
