Cochrane (31 page)

But since Cochrane was permitted only to answer questions, not to ask them, these issues were never debated. When he strayed from the short and direct answer to carefully phrased questions, the judge advocate, or the president, or Admiral Young, would order him back to the point.

The majority of the witnesses, when asked if Gambier had done everything that might reasonably be expected of him, said that he had. They were his captains and subordinates for whom there was nothing to be gained by slandering their commander-in-chief. Moreover, they had heard of the evidence of Stokes and Fairfax. The Aix-Boyart channel was no more than a mile wide, beset with shoals on every side, and there was the mysterious group of rocks between the British fleet and the French anchorage, a hidden peril lying no more than a dozen feet or so below the surface. When asked if Gambier had done all that his duty required, most of them were content to agree that he had. In any case, they felt no great affection for Cochrane who had, in a sense, been promoted to lead the attack in preference to them. If they were going to risk their careers and reputations at the court-martial it would not be merely in order to vindicate him.

One of the captains who seemed likely to support Cochrane was George Seymour of H.M.S.
Pallas,
who was to become an admiral and Knight Commander of the Bath in the years ahead. Gambier called him to give evidence but as soon as his unwillingness to co-operate became clear, Gambier said swiftly, "I have no further questions to propose to Captain Seymour."
⁶³

Seymour, like Cochrane, protested that his oath obliged him to tell the whole truth and, despite exchanges and interruptions, he went on to confirm that Gambier
might safely have attacked at 11
a.m. on the morning of
12
April when virtually the entire French fleet was aground. But Gambier had waited at anchor for three hours more, only sending in an attacking force after Cochrane had gone in alone with the
Imperieuse.

Another future admiral, Captain Pulteney Malcolm of H.M.S.
Donegal,
gave evidence that the delay actually increased the risk to the British ships, since the French fleet was righted and set afloat during that time. Finally, he was asked whether, when the French fleet was afloat once more, he would have shown prudence and hesitation or risked an attack with his ships. "The risk was then small," said Malcolm, "and, of course, I would have sent them in instantly."
⁶⁴

Captain Broughton of H.M.S.
Illustrious
was a third officer who, independently of any attachment to Cochrane, swore that Gambier could have sent in the fleet, in response to the signals from the
Imperieuse,
two or three hours earlier. But Broughton had an even more interesting piece of information. As soon as the attack was over, he had taken soundings in the very place where Fairfax and Stokes had discovered their now famous "rocks". There were no rocks. At this injudicious revelation, the president halted that line of questioning abruptly. Broughton's evidence on other matters was equally compromising. From the safe distance of the
Caledonia
once more, Stokes had calculated that any attack via the Aix-Boyart channel would have been "at half range of shell and point blank shot". Captain Broughton, reconnoitring the channel, not only found that some of the fortifications on the island had no guns in them, but that even those which fired could not reach him.
⁶⁵

Despite the evidence of Broughton and others who had been in the forefront of the action, the general opinion of Gambier's officers was unequivocally that he had done all that might be expected of him.

Gambier's defence was, repeatedly, that to have attacked the French fleet on
12
April, in the manner suggested by Cochrane, would have involved danger and "risk" to the ships of the Royal Navy. To Cochrane, this sort of talk was preposterous. Of course warships incurred risk and danger, that was their purpose. Had Nelson, or Hood, or St Vincent ever pleaded that it was too dangerous or risky to attack the enemy?

Day after day, the battle of the Basque Roads was re-fought at the green baize table on H.M.S.
Gladiator.
On the morning of
4
August, Gambier announced that his defence was concluded, and the officers of the tribunal remained alone in the great cabin, considering their verdict. At one o'clock, the court was opened again and the spectators admitted. The judge advocate took the sheet of paper on which the findings had been written and read out the verdict:

The charge has not been proved against the said Admiral the Right Honourable Lord Gambier
...
his Lordship's conduct on that occasion, as well as his general conduct and proceedings as Commander-in-Chief of the Channel Fleet . . . was marked by zeal, judgment, ability, and an anxious attention to the welfare of His Majesty's service
...
the said Admiral the Right Honourable Lord Gambier is hereby most honourably acquitted.

"Hand me up my Lord Gambier's sword," said Sir Roger Curtis, acting his part as president. He returned it to Gambier, expressing his "peculiar pleasure" in carrying out this official duty. "Having so far obeyed the command of the court," he added, "I beg you will permit me in my individual capacity, to express to you the high gratification I have upon this occasion."
⁶⁶

Now that justice had apparently been done, Gambier was the subject of many more congratulatory messages. "My dear friend," wrote Wilberforce to him, actually undertaking such secular correspondence on a Sunday, "surely even on this day it cannot be improper for me to mix my congratulations with yours on the happy tidings which, on my return from Church, have just now reached me - congratulations animated with a grateful sense of the Goodness of Him who has established your righteous cause."
⁶⁷

While Wilberforce spoke boldly of Gambier as this "true specimen of Christian heroism", Morton Pitt went further in denouncing the Order of the Bath as a degraded award since the authorities had bestowed it on Cochrane. Gambier must refuse to defile himself by wearing it even if it were offered him. "My dear Jim," wrote Morton

Pitt, "If they could undo what they have foolishly done, and withdraw that ribbon from Lord Cochrane's unworthy shoulder, it might be deemed a decoration or an honour; but to accept it now would be assenting to a stigma being put upon you, for such it must be thought. The Order of the Bath is degraded for a time."
⁶⁸

Hannah More also rejoiced with an almost evangelical fervour at Gambier's acquittal. But, behind everything, she saw the plotting of revolution, as she complained to Lord Barham:

What a tempestuous world do we live in! Yet terrible as Buonaparte is in every point of view, I do not fear him so much as those domestic mischiefs - Burdett, Cochrane, Wardle, and Cobbett. I hope, however, that the mortification Cochrane, &c, have lately experienced in their base and impotent endeavours to pull down reputations which they found unassailable, will keep them down a little.
⁶⁹

Not all the opinions were on Gambier's side. There was one, addressed by a French prisoner to his captor, which merited at least some respect. "The French admiral was an
imbicile"
he admitted, "but yours was just as bad. I assure you that, if Cochrane had been supported, he would have taken every one of the ships. They ought not to have been alarmed by your
briilots,
but fear deprived them of their senses, and they no longer knew how to act in their own defence."
⁷⁰

The opinion was, of course, that of Napoleon during his long exile on St Helena.

There remained only the vote of thanks. The parliamentary session of
1809
was over by the time of Gambier's acquittal, so that the vote was postponed until the opening of the next session in January
1810.
Cochrane tried to forestall the ministers by demanding in the Commons that the minutes of the court-martial should be produced before the House. This would have enabled him to debate their contents, as well as the conduct of the trial and the way in which evidence had, allegedly, been manufactured or suppressed. Cochrane promised to prove that the charts of Stokes and Fairfax must be false. Moreover, since Gambier himself had at no time been closer than seven miles to the guns of the French fleet - let alone within range of them - on what conceivable argument was he entitled to a vote of thanks ?

The ministry had had six months to prepare for this onslaught and, once again, they deflected Cochrane's attack with the greatest ease.

First of all, they amended Cochrane's motion so that it asked for the "sentence" of the court-martial, instead of the minutes of the proceedings, to be produced before the House. The amendment, which was carried easily, had the effect of reminding the world that Gambier had been acquitted, without detailing any of the evidence or argument leading up to that verdict. Whatever disquiet there might have been in the press, the ministry was master in its own house.

There was, of course, the added consideration that whatever Gambier had done, or not done, the government needed the vote more than he did himself. Despite the misgivings of the more liberal Whigs and the Radicals, their numbers were, as Cochrane admitted, "nothing compared to the organised masses in power, or eager to place themselves in power". When the members of the Commons had passed through the lobbies,
161
had approved the vote of thanks and only
39
had opposed it.
⁷¹

Something of Cochrane's tarnished reputation as a naval hero survived, and he still claimed the loyal support of many Radicals. But to the majority of his contemporaries he had suffered a considerable humiliation at the hands of the Admiralty and of those whose power he had sworn to curb. In reality, his plight was worse than he knew. His career as a Royal Navy captain was over. Morton Pitt's vision of the Order of the Bath and his other honours being stripped from him was prophetic, as the high adventure of the
Gamo
and Fort Trinidad was darkened by the public drama of disgrace. The most extraordinary events of his life lay ahead, deeds performed where all the world could see, in countries which were mere names to most of his compatriots. But for the immediate future, the many enemies he had made in the government and the Admiralty were triumphant over him. For several years, at least, the courage required of him was of a higher order than any he had so far shown.

6

"Announce
Lord
Cochrane's Degradation"

T
he
displeasure of the Admiralty and the ministers over Cochrane's behaviour was quickly and clearly shown. In the very month of Gambier's court-martial, the first troops and ships of the so-called Walcheren expedition crossed the Channel. Their object was the destruction of French ships in the Scheldt, and the seizure of three arsenals and dockyards: Flushing, Antwerp, and Terneuse. Under the Earl of Chatham and Sir Richard Strachan, a total of
40,000
troops,
35
sail of the line,
5
smaller ships,
18
frigates and
200
attendant craft was to be employed.

Cochrane first urged the Admiralty to undertake an invasion of the Biscay islands instead. In default of this, he argued
in
favour of an
attack on the Scheldt, using the same weapons as at the Basque Roads, rather than the cumbersome invasion fleet with its
40,000
troops. Their Lordships were not interested. Off the Kentish coast, the great armada rode at anchor. A more impressive display than the fine ships with their cheering men would have been hard to imagine. True, the Earl of Chatham, as Master General of the Ordnance, was not much qualified by experience to command such a force, but the court and the ministry had favoured him.

With his plans rejected, Cochrane was prepared merely to serve as captain of the
Imperieuse,
since the frigate was to form part of the expedition. To his dismay, he was informed that he had been superseded in his command. There was no further employment for him in the Royal Navy. During the bitter months which followed the court-martial he was left to draw his own conclusions as to his future prospects. At Walcheren, the expeditionary force, badly led and appallingly provisioned, lost half its men in the fever-infested islands of the Scheldt estuary. The nation mocked its leaders.

Great Chatham with his sabre drawn,

Stood waiting for Sir Richard Strachan;

Sir Richard, longing to be at 'em,

Stood waiting for the Earl of Chatham.

In three months,
11,000
men were prostrate with dysentery. There was one hospital ship and no proper medicine. The water was so foul that every drop had to be shipped from England. Medical authorities knew the islands as breeding grounds of fever, but no one consulted these authorities before the expedition sailed. As for the military initiative, its advantage of surprise had been lost by anchoring the great armada off the Kent coast as conspicuously as though for a royal review. In consequence, Flushing was taken in the first attack, and then nothing more was accomplished. After months of sickness and misery, the English invalids disembarked at the Kent ports again, bringing the "Walcheren sickness" with them. Cochrane reflected that a French fleet, inferior in strength to that of the Aix Roads, had evaded a force infinitely more powerful. The Portland government fell, scapegoat for the humiliations of the Scheldt. The reputation of the navy fared worse than that of the army, as Byron later described it in the fourth stanza of
Don Juan,
discussing "heroes".

Nelson was once Britannia's god of war,

And still should be so, but the tide is turn'd;

There's no more to be said of Trafalgar,

'Tis with our hero quietly inurn'd;

Because the army's grown more popular,

At which the naval people are concern'd;

Besides, the prince is all for the land service,

Forgetting Duncan, Nelson, Howe, and Jervis.

The faces of the new ministry were familiar enough, its leader, Spencer Perceval, having been Cochrane's opponent while Chancellor of the Exchequer. Cochrane turned to his own affairs, withdrawing to Portman Square to perfect his secret war plans at his uncle Basil's house. He soon crossed swords with the Hon. Charles Yorke, the new First Lord of the Admiralty. When it was known that Cochrane proposed to attack the new ministry in the Commons, Yorke informed him that he could have his command of the
Imperieuse
again, if he sailed that week. Cochrane reacted indignantly, and Yorke thereupon dismissed him observing that, "It is neither my duty nor my inclination to enter into controversy with you." In any case, scientific warfare occupied Cochrane's time. In March
1812,
he revealed to the Prince Regent his array of secret weapons and well-laid plans. While Napoleon remained undisputed master of most of Europe and Wellington struggled onward through the Peninsula at stupefying cost, Cochrane saw total victory within his grasp. To the Prince Regent in his fairy palace beside the sea at Brighton, he offered triumph over France in a matter of weeks at the cost of virtually no British casualties. He was not drifting into the deceptions of lunacy but had, at last, turned his father's example as a scientific innovator to practical use. As the taste of the civilised world turned from the minuet to the quadrille, Cochrane had conceived the principles and demonstrated the techniques of poison gas and saturation bombardment.
¹

His scheme appeared, at first glance, so preposterous that he made no attempt to convince the Admiralty or the ministry to begin with. All too easily, they would have found means to dismiss him as a fool as well as a villain. Instead, he drew up a "Plan for the Destruction of the Naval Power of France", and addressed it to the Prince Regent directly on
2
March
1812.
It was simply argued but carefully detailed, including diagrams of the weapons and their methods of use. Against such forms of warfare there could be no resistance and little form of defence. The world would wake one morning to find the British army, with naval support, in control of the entire coast of France. A military blow would thus be delivered which would infallibly cripple the power of Napoleon to continue the war. His surrender might be expected within a few weeks as the British overran France itself.

The proposal needed to be carefully and tactfully introduced, if Cochrane were not to be disregarded as a madman. He justified it to the Prince with massive understatement.

On the first blush of the proposition, it might, by some persons be considered as speculative and visionary, and even Your Royal Highness may probably regard it as extravagant and improbable; but, I confidently trust, there will be no difficulty in removing such impression from Your Royal Highness's mind, as the plan calculated to sustain it, is of the simplest kind and founded on the known principle that, the expansion of ignited powder is in the line of least resistance.
²

The first part of Cochrane's secret plan was to replace the conventional bombardment of enemy ports by a close-range attack of such intensity that every ship in the harbour or anchorage would be destroyed or crippled. Indeed, as he promised the Regent, he could "destroy them in the strongest lines of defensive anchorage". Conventional bombardment of dockyards was a long-range attack of doubtful accuracy. Mortars had the best range, but their short squat barrels were anchored at an angle of
45
degrees. Even their range could only be adjusted by using a stronger or weaker charge to fire them. For the Royal Navy to sail in at close quarters was not only dangerous but involved a technical problem which was not always easy to overcome. The closer the battleships came to the harbour, the more effectively the harbour mole or walls screened their targets from them. Cochrane asked only for the use of three old hulks in order to conquer this difficulty and saturate the harbour at Flushing with a devastating storm of
6000
shells, raining down on the helpless French fleet within a matter of minutes. He would "in an instant overwhelm Flushing . . . dismount the cannon, and destroy the Ships to which they may afford protection".
³

Flushing was, of course, only the first of many targets. Within a matter of days, Toulon, Brest, and the great anchorages of France would be a graveyard of burnt and half-submerged ships.

How were the attacks to be carried out ? In an illustrated appendix to his plan, Cochrane revealed the design of his "Temporary Mortars or Explosion Ships". The old hulks wo
uld first have their sides rein
forced and braced by extra timbers. The bottom of the hull would be filled in with old cannon and iron embedded in clay. These precautions would ensure that the force of any explosion went upward and not through the bottom or sides of the vessel. Above the clay there must be a layer of gunpowder the length and width of the ship. Above that there would be a thinner layer of junk wadding, and finally the ranks of shells and carcases. This huge mortar would then be packed round on either side by old mooring chains and cables.
⁴

The explosion ships would be guided to their targets during the hours of darkness and anchored at a convenient distance from the mole or outer fortification. These barriers, which made close bombardment so difficult for conventional ships, were no impediment to Cochrane's "temporary mortars", since their whole purpose was to lift shells up and over the defences. As he explained to the Prince Regent, "The Explosion Vessels would be invisible in the darkness of the night, until the Shells and Carcases, rising in the air, and spreading as they fly, should scatter devastation on all around."
⁵

It was true that the mortar was fixed in one position and could not itself be adjusted. But Cochrane had found a remedy for this by means of shifting the ballast of the vessel so that it could be made to list further towards its target, thus angling the mortar to do the most damage. He had perfected this "so as to give the largest Carcases and Shells a sufficient, but not more than a sufficient momentum to plunge through the Decks of large Ships, and lodge in the holds of those of a smaller Class".
⁶

To forestall his critics, Cochrane also revealed that he had undertaken a "confidential trial" in the previous year with the aid of Sir John Stuart. He had converted a wine pipe into a mortar, using only three pounds of powder for each shell. In the resulting explosion, it had bombarded an area
230
yards across with
8
-inch shells. By a logical extension, three old hulks, of which there was no shortage in English yards, would saturate an area half a mile square with
6000
missiles. The attack would be swift, devastating, and decisive in its psychological effect on the enemy. Because of the intensity which Cochrane envisaged, it might well have been the Regency equivalent of a nuclear weapon.

Yet that was only the beginning of the plan. The destruction of the French fleet and coastal fortifications would swing the balance of the war in England's favour, but it was a mere preparation for the decisive blow. The next appendix to Cochrane's proposals showed the construction and mode of operation of "Sulphur Ships", or, as he called them more familiarly, "Stink Vessels".

His inherited enthusiasm for chemistry had led Cochrane to experiment in the manufacture of a gas which might be used for military purposes. The most promising was a mixture of vapour given off by burning charcoal and sulphur. The effect of the gas was, as Cochrane politely put it, to destroy "every animal function". Had the Spanish been possessed of such a weapon before
1808,
he demonstrated how they might have taken the fortress of Gibraltar without firing a shot. "Had Lord Nelson understood the principles now submitted to Your Royal Highness, he could have destroyed the Danish Fleet without the loss of a man."
⁷

The hulks which were to be used for the gas attacks, or to release "volumes of noxious effluvia", as Cochrane termed it, were intended for use against Flushing and Cherbourg, in the first instance. "If conducted at a proper time to a fit situation," said Cochrane, "their effect is inevitable." Once again, a bed of clay was to be laid at the bottom of the ship, with the charcoal on an upper deck so that air would circulate between the two layers and aid the coal in burning steadily but not too fast. Above the charcoal, the sulphur compound was laid. With the wind blowing inshore, the sulphur ships would be driven broadside-on against the mole or wall, and the gas or vapour would roll inland like a thick yellow fog. As it engulfed the dockyard and defences, perhaps already shattered by saturation bombardment, the enemy would be faced with the choice of suffocation or precipitate retreat. As the gas moved inland, carrying all before it, the wind would clear the air around the burnt-out stink vessels. The British troops might then occupy the fortifications at their leisure.
⁸

It was never suggested that Cochrane's plans were in the least preposterous. Indeed, the secret committees appointed to consider them in the nineteenth century feared only that they might fall into the hands of other nations. As late as
1895,
his Victorian biographer, J. W. Fortescue, wrote: