The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane - Earl of Dundonald Thomas Barnes Cochrane (guided reading books TXT) 📗

the close of the latter year, his uncle, Sir Alexander Cochrane, having been selected for the command of the fleet on the North American station, appointed him his flag-captain—an appointment resting only with the Commander-in-Chief, and one with which the Government could not interfere. It was always Lord Cochrane's belief that the implacable enmity of his foes in the Admiralty Office—determined to prevent by irregular means, since no regular course was open to them, his return to naval work—helped to bring about the cruel persecution by which his whole life was embittered. But it must be admitted that the dishonesty of one of his own kinsmen—about which a chivalrous sense of honour caused him to be reticent during nearly fifty years—conduced to this result.

The chief agent of the fraud practised upon him was a foreigner, named De Berenger. This man, clever and unscrupulous, had been associated with Mr. Cochrane Johnstone, an uncle of Lord Cochrane's, in certain stock-jobbing transactions. In that or in some other way he became known to Lord Cochrane and to his other uncle, Sir Alexander Cochrane; and, being a smart chemist and pyrotechnist, it was proposed that he should accompany Lord Cochrane to North America, and assist him in the trial of his recently-discovered method of attacking forts and fleets in a secret and irresistible manner. With that object—of course clandestine—Sir Alexander Cochrane sought the permission of the Admiralty to employ De Berenger as a teacher of sharp-shooting, in which he was a well-known adept. This was not granted, and near the end of 1813, Sir Alexander set sail for Halifax, leaving Lord Cochrane to follow in the Tonnant, in charge of a convoy, and in getting the Tonnant ready for sea his lordship was busy during January and February, 1814. In the former month De Berenger sought him out and earnestly requested that, his official appointment being refused, he might be taken on board in a private capacity and allowed to rely upon the success of his work for recompense. Lord Cochrane declined to employ him without some sort of sanction from the Admiralty, and De Berenger left him with the avowed intention of doing his utmost to procure this sanction.

He was otherwise occupied. Being in urgent need of money, with which to evade the grasp of his numerous creditors, he returned to his stock-jobbing pursuits—if indeed he had not been engaging in them all along; using his proposal for employment under Lord Cochrane as a blind or as a secondary resource. Instead of furthering his efforts to obtain this employment, he contrived a plan for causing a sudden rise in the funds, and thereby securing a large profit to himself and his accomplices. On the 20th of February he presented himself at the Ship Hotel at Dover, disguised as a foreigner and calling himself Colonel De Bourg, professing that he brought intelligence from France to the effect that Buonaparte had been killed by the Cossacks, that the allied armies were in full march towards Paris, and that a speedy cessation of the war was certain. Thence he hurried up to London and was traced to have gone, on the following morning, to Lord Cochrane's house. The ostensible object of that visit was to renew his application for employment on board the Tonnant. The real object was, by means of a trick, to get possession of a hat and cloak, with which to disguise himself afresh, and thus try to elude the pursuit of agents of the Stock Exchange, who would soon seek to punish him for his fraud. The disguise was given to him in all innocence, and might have been successful, had not Lord Cochrane, on finding how grossly he had been deceived, volunteered to assist in punishing the culprit. Leaving the Tonnant, in which he was about to start from Chatham, he returned to London, and gave full information as to his share in the transaction, with the view of furthering the cause of justice and clearing himself from all blame.

That was prevented by as wanton a prosecution and as malicious a perverting of the forms of justice and the principles of equity as the annals of English law, not often abused even in a much less degree, can show. The straightforward evidence furnished by him was made the handle to an elaborate machinery of falsehood and perjury for effecting his own ruin. The solicitor who had managed the cause of the Admiralty at the court-martial on Lord Gambier, and therein proved his skill, was entrusted with the ugly work. By him an elaborate case for prosecution was trumped up, and Lord Cochrane, hindered from sailing to North America in the Tonnant, and hindered from obtaining any other employment in his country's service during four-and-thirty years, was, on the 8th of June, placed in the prisoner's dock at the Court of King's Bench on a charge of conspiring with his uncle, Mr. Cochrane Johnstone, with De Berenger, and with some other persons, to defraud the Stock Exchange. Lord Ellenborough, who presided at the trial, delivered a charge which was even more virulent and more marked by political spite than was his wont, and the too compliant jury brought in a verdict of "guilty." Lord Cochrane vainly sought for a new trial, and vainly adduced abundant proof of his innocence. The chance of justice that is every Englishman's right was denied to him. He was sentenced to an hour's detention in the pillory at the entrance of the Royal Exchange, to a year's imprisonment in the King's Bench Prison, and to a fine of a thousand pounds.

The first part of the sentence was not insisted upon, as Sir Francis Burdett, Lord Cochrane's noble-hearted colleague as member for Westminster, avowed his intention of standing also in the pillory, if his friend was subjected to that indignity, and of thus encouraging the storm of popular indignation, that, without any such encouragement, would probably have led to consequences which the Government, already hated by all Englishmen who loved their birthright, dared not brook. But the unworthy vengeance of his persecutors was amply satisfied in other ways. He had already suffered more than most men. "Neglect," he said, "I was accustomed to. But when an alleged offence was laid to my charge, in which, on the honour of a man now on the brink of the grave, I had not the slightest participation, and from which I never benefited, nor thought to benefit one farthing, and when this allegation was, by political rancour and legal chicanery, consummated in an unmerited conviction and an outrageous sentence, my heart for the first time sank within me, as conscious of a blow, the effect of which it has required all my energies to sustain."

It is needless now to say anything in proof of Lord Cochrane's innocence of the charge brought against him. The world has long since reversed the verdict passed at Lord Ellenborough's dictation. That an officer and a gentleman of Lord Cochrane's reputation should have demeaned himself by becoming a party to the fraud of which he was accused, is, to say the least, improbable. That, if he had been guilty of that fraud, he should not have availed himself of the only benefit that could be derived from it by investing in the stocks when they were low and selling out during the brief time of their artificial value, is far more improbable. That, when the fraud was perpetrated, and its chief instrument was undiscovered, he should have left the Tonnant in order to expose him, instead of taking him away from England, and so almost ensuring the preservation of the secret, is utterly impossible.

His only faults were too great faith in his own innocence and a too chivalrous desire to protect, or rather to abstain from injuring, his unworthy kinsman. "I must be here distinctly understood," it was said by Lord Brougham, in his "Historic Sketches of British Statesmen," "to deny the accuracy of the opinion which Lord Ellenborough appears to have formed in this case, and deeply to lament the verdict of 'guilty' which the jury returned after three hours' consultation and hesitation. If Lord Cochrane was at all aware of his uncle Mr. Cochrane Johnstone's proceedings, it was the whole extent of his privity to the fact. Having been one of the counsel engaged in the cause, I can speak with some confidence respecting it, and I take upon me to assert that Lord Cochrane's conviction was mainly owing to the extreme repugnance which he felt to giving up his uncle, or taking those precautions for his own safety which would have operated against that near relation. Even when he, the real criminal, had confessed his guilt by taking to flight, and the other defendants were brought up for judgment, we, the counsel, could not persuade Lord Cochrane to shake himself loose from the contamination by abandoning him."

Part of a letter addressed to the Earl of Dundonald in 1859, on the anniversary of his eighty-fourth birthday, and shortly after the publication of the first volume of his "Autobiography of a Seaman," by the daughter of the man whose wrong-doing had conduced so terribly to his misfortunes, may here be fitly quoted:—"You are still active, still in health," says the writer, "and you have just given to the world a striking proof of the vigour of your mind and intellect. Many years I cannot wish for you; but may you live to finish your book, and, if it please God, may you and I have a peaceful death-bed. We have both suffered much mental anguish, though in various degrees; for yours was indeed the hardest lot that an honourable man can be called on to bear. Oh, my dear cousin, let me say once more, whilst we are still here, how, ever since that miserable time, I have felt that you suffered for my poor father's fault—how agonizing that conviction was—how thankful I am that tardy justice was done you. May God return you fourfold for your generous though misplaced confidence in him, and for all your subsequent forbearance!"

Another extract from a letter, from one out of a multitude of tributes to the Earl of Dundonald's honourable bearing, which were tendered after his death, shall close this introductory chapter. "Five years after the trial of Lord Cochrane," wrote Sir Fitzroy Kelly, now Lord Chief Baron, on the 17th of December, 1860, "I began to study for the bar, and very soon became acquainted with and interested in his case, and I have thought of it much and long during more than forty years; and I am profoundly convinced that, had he been defended singly and separately from the others accused, or had he at the last moment, before judgment was pronounced, applied, with competent legal advice and assistance, for a new trial, he would have been unhesitatingly and honourably acquitted. We cannot blot out this dark page from our legal and judicial history."

CHAPTER II. THE ISSUE OF THE STOCK EXCHANGE TRIAL.—LORD COCHRANE'S COMMITTAL TO THE KING'S BENCH PRISON.—THE DEBATE UPON HIS CASE IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, AND HIS SPEECH ON THAT OCCASION.—HIS EXPULSION FROM THE HOUSE, AND RE-ELECTION AS MEMBER FOR WESTMINSTER.—THE WITHDRAWAL OF HIS SENTENCE TO THE PILLORY.—THE REMOVAL OF HIS INSIGNIA AS A KNIGHT OF THE BATH.

[1814.]

The famous and infamous Stock Exchange trial occupied the 8th and 9th of June, 1814; but the sentence was deferred until the 21st of the same month, in consequence of Lord Cochrane's demand for a new trial. That demand was not complied with, in spite of the production of overwhelming evidence to justify it; and the victim of Lord Ellenborough and the tyrannical Government of the day was at once conveyed to the King's Bench Prison. No time was lost in heaping upon him all the indignities which, in accordance with precedent and in excess of all precedent, might supplement his degradation.

The first was a notice of motion which would result in his expulsion from the House of Commons. Lord Cochrane promptly availed himself of the opening thus afforded for a public avowal of his innocence. To the Hon. Charles Abbot, then Speaker of the House, he wrote from his prison on the 23rd of June. "Sir," runs the letter, "I respectfully entreat you to communicate to the Honourable House of Commons my earnest desire and prayer that no question arising out of the late convictions in the Court of King's Bench may be agitated without affording me timely notice and full opportunity of attending in my place for the justification of my character. From the House of Commons I hope to obtain that justice of which too implicit reliance on the consciousness of my innocence, and circumstances over which I had no control, have hitherto deprived me. The painful situation in which I am placed is known to the House, and I trust that I shall be enabled to demonstrate that a more injured man has never sought redress from those