Cochrane (18 page)

Cochrane was already meditating plans which, he believed, might alter the entire course of the long war against Buonaparte, bringing victory to England with dramatic suddenness. But first the naval war must be carried ashore. In the new year of
1807,
the
Imperieuse
was south of the Gironde, just off the Bassin d'Arcachon. This flat, wooded coast, with its long sandy beaches and dunes, concealed the narrow entrance to the almost landlocked anchorage of Arcachon. In that entrance, a convoy of French merchant vessels and a few escorting gun-boats had taken refuge from Cochrane's activities. Their position was well chosen. The shoals prevented the
Imperieuse
from coming in close, while the convoy itself rested securely under the guns of Fort Roquette, guarding the entrance to the Bassin d'Arcachon. Knowing that Cochrane might attack the convoy with his ship's boats, the French beached their vessels and moved the troops from Fort Roquette to stand guard over them at night.

Cochrane ordered his attack before daylight on
7
January, using cover of darkness to approach, since Foit Roquette was formidably armed on all sides, not merely on its seaward walls. The frigate's boats pulled slowly towards the low coastline of south-west France, where the convoy lay. The French troops on the beach were watching, well-prepared for an assault. But as they scanned the dark, calm sea, they saw nothing. Cochrane guessed that they would expect him to attack the convoy and had allowed them to post the infantry on the beach. Most of the garrison was there when he entirely outmanoeuvred them by launching his marines against the feebly-held battery of Fort Roquette itself. Such an attack would have been unthinkable if it had been fully garrisoned, but the troops guarding the convoy knew nothing until the pre-dawn sky behind them was suddenly rent with the flashes and explosions of Cochrane's attack. There was little the convoy party could do to reach their base, while the men of the
Imperieuse
systematically destroyed the four
36-
pounders of Fort Roquette, as well as two field-guns and a
13
-pound mortar. Then came a roaring explosion, flames streaking like rockets into the sky, as Cochrane's men blew up the powder magazine, sending up with it the gun platforms and carriages, the military stores, and reducing Fort Roquette to a ruin.

Worse still, the French troops on the exposed shore now had to retreat to a defensive position elsewhere. Cochrane's landing party fell upon the undefended French convoy, setting ablaze the seven merchant vessels and gun-boats. Only then did he give orders to withdraw, remarking that it was "prudent" to leave since, no doubt, "a general alarm had been excited along the coast". He regretted not having the leisure to warp the French vessels off the sand and take them as prizes. But the risk to his men would have been too great, and so the coasters had to be destroyed.
⁵⁶

With three French naval vessels and twelve merchant ships destroyed or captured, he returned to the main squadron, now cruising off Rochefort. Captain Keats, squadron commander, ordered him to provision and water two ships for a further six weeks, one of them, the
Atalante,
having already been on blockade for eight months without a break. As the
Atalante
was hauled alongside, Cochrane was appalled at her condition. The refusal of squadron commanders and the Admiralty to allow such ships to return to port had reduced her to a useless hulk. Eight months, he remarked, was enough "to ruin the health, break the energy, and weary the spirit of all employed in such a vessel".

There was worse yet. The commander of the
Atalante
and some of his officers came on board the
Imperieuse
to tell Cochrane of the desperate plight of their sloop. The foremast, the bowsprit, and the foreyard were all sprung. The
Atalante
was leaking so badly that she shipped twenty inches of water an hour and the pumps could hardly keep pace with it. In short, she was "wholly unfit to keep the sea". The next gale, said her commander, would see the end of her.

Cochrane confirmed these fears, all too easily, by his own inspection of the vessel. He reported the state of the
Atalante
at once to the squadron commander. But Captain Keats was unimpressed. From time to time, he had sent some of the junior officers from the flagship to inspect such hulks. These young lieutenants invariably reported back that the wallowing blockaders were fit for weeks or months of further duty before it was necessary to allow them to put into a port. Cochrane was invited to mind his own business and Keats sent the
Imperieuse
back to Plymouth to ensure that he did so. The frigate herself had not been in dock since the previous November, the mere loss of a false keel on the Ushant rocks being considered too trivial to take a ship out of service for proper inspection and repair.

At Plymouth, Cochrane went at once to the official dockyard builder and to Admiral Sutton, the officer commanding. They listened unmoved as he protested at the plight of the
Atalante
and her crew. When it was evident that he had made no impact upon them, Cochrane drew himself up and launched one of those melodramatic thunderbolts, which he was apt to resort to in such difficulties. "The first news we shall have from Rochefort, if there should happen to be a gale of wind, will be the loss of the
Atalante"
he announced.

Admiral Sutton was not won over by such stage rhetoric as this. The weather grew worse and then the storms passed. There was quiet satisfaction among Admiral Sutton and his entourage at being able to quote the words of the troublesome young Scot against him. And then came the signal, which the gales had delayed. H.M.S.
Atalante
had foundered in the heavy seas off the Biscay coast.
⁵⁷

It was the end of the
Atalante
but the beginning of a new crusade. The schooner
Felix,
also in Keats's squadron had gone down, taking her crew with her. There soon came into Cochrane's hands copies of letters written by the commander of the
Felix
to Keats, imploring him to take account of the state of the ship and the number of men sick, and to allow him to sail for England at once. The request was dismissed. The ship's surgeon wrote confidentially on
14
November
1806,
"She sails worse and worse, and I think the chances are against our ever bringing her into an English port." On
14
January
1807,
he added that "every endeavour" had been made by himself and the commander, Lieutenant Cameron, to get the
Felix
sent home, "but without success". Eight days later, the schooner and her exhausted crew went down in a Biscay squall.
⁵⁸

The financial arithmetic of ministerial dishonesty had been an uncertain political platform for Cochrane, in terms of general electoral appeal. But no man of sense would fail to respond to the dark, simple drama of the lost ships, the criminal indifference of a squadron commander, the callousness of Lord St Vincent commanding the Channel Fleet, and the open cynicism of the comfortable Admiralty placemen. While the
Imperieuse
was docked for repairs, he was given leave of absence to stand for parliament in the general election of May
1807,
which followed the dismissal of the Whig government by the King and their replacement by the Tories under the Duke of Portland. "Naval reform" had given him a banner under which to fight. All he needed was a battleground.

There was no question of standing for Honiton again. Those voters who had been done out of a bribe on the last occasion were prepared to take an easy revenge upon him. The strategy which had served him in
1806
was now so well-known as to be a national joke, and there was not even the hope of repeating his Honiton success elsewhere. A young man with political ambitions would normally have surrendered his independence and gone to a political patron who, in effect, owned seats in parliament, constituencies where there were few electors, all of whom voted under their master's scrutiny. He might promise to act in the House of Commons as his patron dictated, or he might buy the seat. The patrician Radical, Sir Francis Burdett, had bought Boroughbridge in Yorkshire for six years for
£4000
from the Duke of Newcastle's trustees in
1796.
But since Cochrane had sworn to destroy such political corruption, he could hardly afford to enter the Commons by means of it.

Fortunately there was one constituency which, even before the Reform Bill of
1832,
had moved far towards representative democracy. This was the City of Westminster, which had the incidental advantage of being the best-publicised electoral district in the country. It was a constituency in which male ratepayers were entitled to vote and where many of the residents were, in fact, ratepayers. Geographically, it extended from the City of London in the east to Kensington in the west, from Oxford Street in the north to the Thames in the south. Instead of the half dozen or few score electors upon whom the "rotten boroughs" depended, Westminster boasted some
10,000
voters. They were not entirely incorruptible, but it proved notoriously difficult to bribe all of them to the same end.

The Westminster electors were not always progressive or Radical in their views. One of the members had been Charles James Fox, until his death the year before. Sheridan had put himself forward as a successor at the by-election but the electors preferred Earl Percy, son of the Duke of Northumberland. Francis Place remembered with disgust the sight of the Duke distributing bread, cheese, and beer to the mob from the steps of his house near Charing Cross, in order to ensure his son's election. The beer, ladled out in the hats of coal-heavers, led to a riot among the crowds and to the gutters running with the spilt brew.

At the general election of
1806,
however, Westminster had returned Sheridan and Samuel Hood. By the spring of
1807,
after so many elections in a few months, the mood of the constituency was hardly predictable. Yet Westminster was the one seat which offered Cochrane even a faint hope of re-election to the House of Commons. He did not propose to stand as a Radical but as an "independent" candidate, devoted to the cause of naval reform.

Sheridan was first among his opponents, an extinct volcano of rhetoric, now under a regime of three to six bottles of wine a day, fortified by brandy, which gave him the appearance of a worn-out debauchee and the constitution of a man with dropsy and an inflamed liver. He, least of anyone, wanted to face an election fight.

When the King dismissed the Wh
igs, Sheridan conceded that men banged their heads on brick walls, but George III was uniquely determined to collect the bricks to build the wall to bang his head against. Referring to Cochrane, Sheridan wrote to his son Tom, "I will have nothing to do with the Popery Lord." For all his reforming sympathies, Cochrane had a deep Protestant suspicion of the Catholic Church and was opposed to any extension of its political influence so long as it retained the practice of hearing confessions.
⁵⁹

The defeated Radical candidate at the last election, James Paull, a former merchant, ran again under the banner of "Liberty, Protection, Peace". Francis Place and the official Radical organisation disliked him, however, and withdrew their support. John Elliot, a brewer was the "ministerial" candidate.

When
Cochrane joined the contest, the Radicals themselves were first to attack him. One of them, Henry Hunt,
alias
"Orator" Hunt, described the scepticism of the movement in the country and of its wealthy leader, Sir Francis Burdett. "So little faith had Sir F. Burdett and his friends in the sincerity of Cochrane's principles that they never drank his health, or even mentioned his name." Francis Place and the Radical electioneers of Westminster ignored him. William Godwin, father-in-law of Shelley and prophet of the new intellectual order, dismissed Cochrane with contempt. "He is the greatest fool I ever met with." By contrast, when James Paull addressed his supporters at a grand election dinner on i May
1807,
he conceded that Cochrane was "a young man of understanding, and who had received a good education; but
...
he did not conceive him a fit representative for Westminster".
⁶⁰

Undeterred by this, Cochrane moved into the constituency. He lodged with his rogue uncle, Andrew Cochrane-Johnstone, in Harley Street, and set up his committee rooms in hotels and taverns in Covent Garden, Golden Square, Cockspur Street, and New Bond Street. His election dinners were held in Willis's Rooms, St James's, and other meet
ings of his supporters by the gl
immering yellow oil light of upper rooms in Westminster taverns. At the St Alban's Tavern he was closely questioned as to why he had chosen to stand for Westminster, having already been member for Honiton. He replied disingenuously: "A man representing a rotten borough cannot feel himself of equal consequence in the House with one representing such a city as Westminster."
⁶¹