Cochrane (32 page)

Wherein this plan consisted it is impossible to say, for its secret is still buried in the archives of the War Office; but it is generally supposed to have had its root in some new and appalling explosive.
⁹

The details of the "secret weapons" were not divulged until the end of the nineteenth century, when the papers were deposited in the British Museum, and Cochrane's offer to Palmerston of even more elaborate devices was outlined in the posthumous publication of the latter's correspondence in the
Panmure Papers
in
1908.
Cochrane kept his original promise to the Prince Regent never to divulge the plans of the weapons "except for the honour and advantage of my own country".
¹⁰

To Cochrane, in
1812,
the possibilities of the new weapons seemed awesome. Wellington had reached Badajoz, but he was two years and hundreds of miles from the French frontier. Napoleon, driving the Russian armies back to Borodino and thence to Moscow, held the initiative. But what if the secret weapons were used? The French would wake one morning to find their Channel ports in the hands of the Royal Navy, their fleet sunk, and the invading English army already on the road from Normandy to Paris. The power of Napoleon would be destroyed at its root.

The lessons of the Western Front in
1914-1918
may make such optimism seem naive. No one who has read such accounts as Robert Graves's
Goodbye To All That
needs to be reminded how effectively the British gas-companies devastated their own front fine as the wind briefly but capriciously changed direction. The risk of failure, even of disaster, in
1812
was considerable, yet the gamble might have been justified. Cochrane had already proved his ability to command an attack with conventional weapons. With his secret devices and a much smaller number of men than had been squandered in the Walcheren affair, he might well have done decisive damage to the defences and morale of France.
¹¹

Shock, rather than admiration, was the reaction of some of the Regent's advisers on examining the ingenious proposals, as men who remembered the elegance and propriety with which many of the European battles of the eighteenth century had been fought. At Fontenoy in
1745,
for instance, as the red and blue ranks of the two armies faced one another with the decorum of a ceremonial parade, silent and still before the opening of the battle, it was said that a group of French officers had crossed to the English lines and said gallantly, "Messieurs les Anglais, fire first!"

Apart from all these considerations, Cochrane had not chosen the most propitious time to put forward his plans. With the final collapse of the old King's mind, the Prince of Wales had entered upon his Regency in high spirits. He had not, as had been hoped, dismissed Spencer Perceval and the Tories in favour of the Whigs but life at Carlton House and Brighton sparkled for him as much as ever. Nothing more belligerent than a fishing-smack appeared on the glittering waters of the Channel beyond the Royal Pavilion. On the shaded promenades, among the lawns and trees of the Steine, rouged dandies with their high collars and low hat brims, their female companions or "flashers" hanging on their arms, rivalled the splendour of military fashion. Thomas Creevey surveyed the officers of the Prince of Wales's Hussars at the Pavilion and thought them, "very ornamental monkeys in their red breeches with gold fringe and yellow boots".
¹²

The Prince himself, "uncommonly well, tho' very fat", appeared in full Field Marshal's uniform at the evening receptions, but his interest in the war was minimal. "Portugal and Lord Wellington begin to be out of fashion," Creevey remarked, as he watched the Regent slapping his fat thighs to keep the band in time. He not only slapped, he sang lustily until midnight, when there was a pause for iced champagne punch, lemonade, and sandwiches. "Better heard from the next room in my opinion," said John Wilson Croker, of the musical entertainment.
¹³

Such was the society upon which Cochrane launched his secret plans. At Carlton House or the Pavilion the principal doubt was less likely to be over the feasibility of the plans than over the comparative claims of Cochrane and Napoleon to be the greatest enemy of mankind. Given the merciless choice between such weapons and the long ordeal of the Peninsula, it was Cochrane's suggestion which was regarded as outrageous by the standards of civilised warfare.

None the less, a secret committee was set up to investigate the proposals. The Regent's brother, the Duke of York, presided over it, its members including two naval commanders, Lord Keith and Lord Exmouth, as well as Sir William Congreve, inventor of the Congreve rocket. At first there was some encouragement for Cochrane. The Duke of York was in favour of the principle of attacking French ports. Congreve, "after some days' consideration, gave a favourable opinion as to the practicability of using Explosion and Sulphur vessels". When Admiral Keats was approached by the new Lord Melville, the second of his line to act as First Lord of the Admiralty, he was cautious over Cochrane's scientific warfare but added, "I should feel inclined at least to give it some trial." Lord Keith, as a member of the committee, spoke with less enthusiasm. "Of the combustible weapons I am not so well able to judge," he concluded. "Considerable nautical and military science must be combined."
¹⁴

The general opinion seemed to favour Cochrane's proposals, though with some caution. Wellington, as it later proved, was opposed to them on the ground that "two might play" at such a game. Cochrane pointed out that the one who played first was going to win. At the Admiralty itself, Lord Melville seemed at first cautiously inclined to favour the plans. And then, as the spring of
1812
turned to summer, and summer to autumn, there was a long silence. Melville might be sympathetic, but Melville's voice was not the only one at the Admiralty, let alone among Spencer Perceval's ministry.
¹⁵

In August, it was suggested to Cochrane that he might be given the command of a frigate to raid the Spanish coast. After all that he had done, he found the idea preposterous. It would not, he wrote angrily to Melville, "produce material change in the affairs of Europe". And then he began to inquire eagerly of the First Lord as to what decision had been made about his secret plans. "Five months have elapsed without anything being undertaken, or His Majesty's Ministers having pointed out a single obstacle or difficulty," he wrote. "I have waited day after day with increasing anxiety."
¹⁶

But during those five months the swarm of enemies promised him by Mulgrave over the Gambier affair, and other affairs before that, had done their work. Melville's enthusiasm had cooled and his interest had turned elsewhere. The permanent officials, the senior commanders, the holders of places and sinecures had one opinion of Cochrane for the most part and they were not slow to let the First Lord know it. He was, said St Vincent, untruthful and not to be trusted out of sight. Lord Keith thought him crackbrained. Gambier detested him and Mulgrave despised him. Croker and Wellesley Pole were well-trained in their aversion to him. Even William Windham joined the chorus of calumny by announcing that Cochrane's "firmness of character" would make him "a bad antagonist to a French general".
¹⁷

By the end of
1812,
the position was clear. It had been decided that the limit of official recognition would be to give him command of a frigate. But since he had not shown himself a grateful recipient of such preferment, he was to be given nothing at all, and his secret war plans were to be dismissed from the official mind.

Perhaps Cochrane was to blame, in one respect. Throughout his negotiations with Melville, he had made it clear that he was going to fight the most bitter war against the iniquities of the prize-money system. He came close to refusing the command of a vessel, even without the offer being made, when he wrote to the First Lord, "Whilst the present system of distribution exists, I ha
ve deter
mined not to accept a shilling of prize money."
¹⁸

As soon as the old grievance of prize money was mentioned, the officials of
the
Admiralty had a further reason for deciding to dispense with Cochrane's services, whatever the consequences to the war or the nation. While completing his secret plans he had been at the centre of a scandal which had revealed corruption on the most bizarre scale in the administration of the system.

The experimental firing of shells from the wine pipe, as a "temporary mortar", had been carried out in the Mediterranean. Cochrane, as an unemployed naval officer, had sailed there in his little yacht, the
Julie,
one of the armada of ships he had seized from the French at various times. Apart from his interest in the experimental firing of the mortar, he now had the leisure to do battle with the most corrupt of all the Admiralty courts, at Malta. In Cochrane's own case, the court at Malta announced that not a penny was due to him for all the prizes the
Imperieuse
had taken in the Mediterranean. Instead, he was in debt to the court for the cost of the
legal proceedings. Leaving the
Julie
at Gibraltar, he embarked on a brig-of-war for Malta, determined to make the court's practices public knowledge.

The farce of the Admiralty system was quickly revealed. A ship captured from the enemy as a prize was first under the jurisdiction of the marshal of the court. The marshal would then place it under the jurisdiction of the proctor. These two officials were entitled to charge for attending one another, instructing one another, and administering oaths to one another. All these charges were paid out of the prize money which would otherwise have gone to the officers and crew who had taken the enemy ship in battle.

The great discovery of Cochrane's visit to Malta was that one man, Mr Jackson, held both posts and both salaries of marshal and proctor. He was busily and legally amassing a fortune by fees for visiting himself to ask himself to sign monitions and other legal documents, and for agreeing with himself to do it. He was also paying himself for negotiating fees with himself, and indeed for administering the oath to himself. Still more extraordinary was the fact that the monitions which he asked himself to draw up were also addressed to himself. As Cochrane pointed out, Jackson was entitled to consult with himself as often as he felt necessary and to charge the victims of the court several pounds for doing so. The legal convolutions involved in one monition or simple standard document were charged for at about
£5
or rather more than
£50
by modern values. In the rare event that any prize money was actually payable once Jackson had finished with it, he also took a standard five per cent commission upon it.
¹⁹

Cochrane walked into the Admiralty court one day, while the court was not sitting, and demanded to see the official table of fees. The judge advocate, who was in his office, denied that any such table existed, although an Act of Parliament required it to be displayed. Cochrane explored the building, even entering the judge's robing room, without finding a copy. Before leaving, he decided to make use of the judicial lavatory. "And there," he recalled, "watered up behind the door of the Judge's retiring-chamber, was the Admiralty Court table of fees!"

He prepared to leave the law court and, as he passed the judge advocate, Cochrane was "in the act of folding up the paper, previously to putting it in my pocket". The judge advocate tried to prevent him leaving the building by standing in his path. According to Cochrane his own reply to this was reasonable enough. "I have no cause of quarrel with or complaint towards you. Guarding the judge's water-closet forms no part of your duties as judge advocate."

It is a matter of record that in general war or personal confrontation men were apt to be deterred by Cochrane's height and build. The judge advocate stood aside and Cochrane at once took the table of fees to a friend who was sailing for Sicily, and entrusted it to him. If there was consternation among the judge and court officials at the irretrievable loss of the paper, it was not to be wondered at. As Cochrane gleefully remarked, the table would, "when laid before the House of Commons in connexion with the fees actually charged . . . infallibly betray the practices of the Maltese Court".

Mr Jackson duly attempted to arrest Cochrane for an "insult" to the court. Cochrane replied that the court had not been sitting, and that Jackson's tenure of the office of proctor made his action as marshal illegal. If, as marshal, he tried to carry out the arrest, said Cochrane, "I will treat you as one without authority of any kind, so that you must take the consequences, which may be more serious to yourself personally than you imagine."

Jackson withdrew, to be replaced by another willing arrester. But this one too was the illegal holder of an office, the deputy auctioneer of the court at Malta, and Cochrane met him with the same threat. The man followed him all over the island, however, until an official of unimpeachable legality arrived and the arrest was peacefully carried out.