Cochrane (38 page)

Not only was Ellenborough summing up for a conviction of the defendants, Cochrane included, but he was doing it with relish. Referring to Berenger's visit to Cochrane and the subsequent discovery of the uniform in the Thames, Ellenborough announced, "You have before had the animal hunted home, and now you have his skin." The
State Trials
account calls Ellenborough's style, on this occasion, "a lofty tone of scorn and irony, and contempt, never suggesting a doubt".
⁵⁴

On the subject of Cochrane's truthfulness, Ellenborough accepted the evidence of William Crane. For a hundred years afterwards, there were those who complained that the Lord Chief
Justice was a scru
pulous judge, much maligned, who had given the defendants every benefit of the doubt. In the report of the trial, published some while after the case, Ellenborough is made to say that
if
Berenger arrived in his red aide-de-camp's uniform with decorations, and
if
Cochrane saw it and did nothing, he would be party to the deception. But, according to
The Times
report of
10
July
1814,
taken in the courtroom, Ellenborough's language was far more direct. Berenger had worn the red uniform, Cochrane had lied on oath, and was almost inevitably one of the conspirators.
⁵⁵

De Berenger stripped himself at Lord Cochrane's. He pulled off his scarlet uniform there, and if the circumstance of its not being green did not excite Lord Cochrane's suspicion, what did he think of the star and medal? It became him, on discovering these, as an officer and a gentleman, to communicate his suspicions of these circumstances. Did he not ask De Berenger where he had been in this masquerade dress ? It was for the jury to say whether Lord Cochrane did not know where he had been. This was not the dress of a sharpshooter, but of a mountebank. He came before Lord Cochrane fully blazoned in the costume of his crime.

Those who read the press reports were in many cases uneasy over Ellenborough's summing-up. Then, a month later, appeared the report of the trial, in which he spoke in far more reasonable and judicious terms. It was this report which was unhesitatingly accepted by the Admiralty and the ministry, the Attorney-General praising it in the Commons as an account which would "do away the effect of those imperfect statements which misled the public mind".
⁵⁶

So far as the special jurors were concerned, the effect of Ellenborough's summing-up was never in doubt. It was just after
8.30
p.m. when they brought in a verdict of guilty on Cochrane and all other defendants. In the case of lower criminal courts sentence would have been pronounced at once, but in King's Bench a separate sitting was required for that. In the days before this happened, Cochrane-Johnstone absconded from justice, Butt set to work on some spirited libels on EUenborough, and Cochrane now began to repair some of the damage resulting from his own casualness. On
5
July, he faced the motion for his expulsion from the House of Commons. He attacked Ellenborough in language so bitter that Hansard's printers filled the report with asterisks, fearing prosecution for libel. Denouncing the Lord Chief Justice, however, Cochrane swore, "I solemnly assure this House, my constituents, and my country, that I would rather stand in my own name in the pillory every day of my life, under such a sentence, than I would sit upon the bench in his name, and with his real character for one single hour." The speech was much criticised for such improprieties, but the historian Sir Archibald Alison, having heard Cochrane on this occasion, "never entertained a doubt of his innocence".
⁵⁷

One of the minor conspirators, M'Rae, informed the Commons that Cochrane had no part whatever in the fraud. M'Rae had told the Stock Exchange investigators this before the trial. Their answer was to indict him as well. Since defendants could not give evidence in a trial, they thereby silenced him in the matter. The Commons chose to ignore this, as they ignored the post-trial affidavits in proof of Cochrane's innocence and the truth about such prosecution witnesses as William Crane. The ministry won the expulsion vote by
140
votes to
44,
a result which was surprising only in the size of the minority. Here, as elsewhere, was the evidence that many contemporaries felt strongly that justice had not been done.

The Admir
alty lost no time in dismissing Cochrane from the Royal Navy. Most important of all, however, had been his motion in King's Bench, on
14
June before Lord Ellenborough, for a new trial. He publicly admitted his mistake in agreeing to a joint defence with Cochrane-Johnstone and Butt. "Well had it been for me if I had made this distinction sooner." Since the evidence of witnesses not brought forward at the trial might now establish his innocence beyond question, Cochrane applied for a new trial. To his dismay Ellenborough refused this, on the grounds that all defendants must be present before he considered granting a new trial. Since M'Rae and Cochrane-Johnstone had fled abroad, the condition was impossible to fulfil, as
Ellenborough could see. On
20
June, Cochrane and the other defendants who had not absconded appeared for sentence. In his own defence, Cochrane offered the first affidavits sworn after the trial. Ellenborough refused them, saying that such evidence was only admissible at trial. By Ellenborough's own rule, however, a new trial was the very thing which Cochrane was denied, through no fault of his own. The snare of the law now held him fast.
⁵⁸

The court then proceeded to deal with the defendants who had appeared for sentence. All of them, including Cochrane, were sentenced to imprisonment for twelve months. Cochrane and Butt were also fined
£1000
and the others
£500.
Cochrane, Butt, and Berenger were to be put in the pillory opposite the Royal Exchange for an hour. The indignity of the pillory, the culprit with his head and hands through its holes, helpless before the derision and missiles of the mob, might seem something of an anachronism in the early nineteenth century, but it had survived none the less.

Ellenborough felt that the pillory could well be the means of reducing the reputation of the hero of the Basque Roads, the
Gamo,
and Fort Trinidad to more agreeable proportions. Napoleon in exile on Elba thought otherwise: "Such a man should not be made to s
uffer so degrading a punishment
' The government too had its doubts. Without wishing to save Cochrane humiliation, they knew that public feeling over the trial was increasingly sympathetic to him. There might well be a riot outside the Royal Exchange, a possibility made more likely by Burdett's announcement that if Cochrane were put in the pillory he, and no doubt others, would stand beside him. It was announced that the sentence of the pillory on the three offenders was to be remitted.
⁵⁹

What remained by way of disgrace was quite sufficient. Sir Thomas Byam Martin and other senior officers dined with the Prince Regent at the old Government House on the Parade at Portsmouth soon after the trial. When the meal was over and the officers were still seated around him, the Prince began to express "his indignation at the conduct of Lord Cochrane, and went on to state in strong and impressive terms, his determination to order his degradation". The Prince promised to give his personal command for Cochrane's name to be struck out of the list of the navy.

"I will never permit a service, hitherto of unblemished honour, to be disgraced by the continuance of Lord Cochrane as a member of it," said the Regent hotly. "I shall also strip him of the Order of the Bath."
⁶⁰

This had been anticipated by Cochrane's friends, including Mary Russell Mitford and her father. Miss Mitford's correspondence on the topic also revealed the extent of Cochrane's private grief in the days following the trial.

Did papa tell you that he had seen poor, poor Lord Cochrane, that victim to his uncle's villainy, almost every day ? He wept like a child to papa. And they say that the last dreadful degradation, the hacking off the spurs of knighthood, is actually meant to be put in force upon him.
⁶¹

From the King's Bench prison, where he was now confined, Cochrane learnt that the Prince's instructions had been carried out, and that his honours had been stripped from him. He was not present to witness the bizarre midnight ritual of his own dishonouring. His banner, as Knight Commander of the Bath, was taken down from its place in King Henry VII's Chapel at Westminster. Banner and insignia were ceremonially kicked out of the chapel and down the steps. A nameless man stood proxy for him while the spurs of knighthood were hacked from the boot-heels with a butcher's cleaver. For years he had challenged, insulted, and attempted to undermine the established order. Now that order would break him.
⁶²

Two sources of strength remained to him. Kitty, at eighteen years old, was already prepared to fight his battles to the end. Secondly, there were his constituents. After his Commons expulsion, a writ was moved for a by-election at Westminster. On n July
1814,
a mass meeting of
5000
constituents resolved unanimously that Cochrane was innocent of fraud and was a fit and proper person to represent them. Indeed, the support for him was evident beyond the Radicals themselves. When Sheridan was urged to grasp the opportunity of election, his reply was uncompromising. He would
fight any other opponent but, 'I
absolutely decline to put in Nomination in opposition to Lord Cochrane." At the hustings, on
16
July
1814,
Cochrane was proposed and elected by a roar of acclamation.
⁶³

Even those who were not necessarily convinced of his innocence began to have doubts as to the wisdom of a government treating Cochrane with quite such vindictive relish. Lord Ebrington was one of those who deplored the proposal to put him in the pillory. "If I am guilty," Cochrane replied, "I richly merit the whole of the sentence which has been passed upon me. If innocent, one penalty cannot be inflicted with more justice than another,"
⁶⁴

Cochrane was accommodated in two rooms of the King's Bench State House, as that part of the prison was known. If this sounds like a generous allowance, it has to be remembered that he was obliged to pay for his board and lodging in gaol. Wardens of such prisons had customarily bought their jobs as an investment, recouping the outlay with interest by charging the prisoners for rooms, food, and in some cases water. In
1729
the Warden of the Fleet and the Keeper of the Marshalsea were tried for murdering their prisoners when the inmates could not afford to pay their demands.
⁶⁵

The King's Bench had improved since then but a man was still expected to pay his way. It was intimated to Cochrane that if he would put up the money, and petition humbly, he might even be allowed to walk for half a mile round the buildings. He refused to ask for anything. Instead, he spent his time perfecting his new oil-lamp, which soon began to replace the cruder type used for lighting the Westminster streets, but was replaced itself by gas before it could make him much money. He began a p
amphlet war against Ellen
borough and those who had convicted him, while outside the prison his supporters continued to show their feelings for him. Addresses of sympathy and belief in his innocence reached him from Westminster, Culross and Paisley.

No less remarkable was the reaction of the Princess Charlotte, daughter of the Prince Regent and his estranged wife, the Princess Caroline. The day before Cochrane's re-election for Westminster, the young Princess escaped from her father's custody and sought refuge in her mother's house in Connaught Place. The Regent's brothers and the law officers of the crown followed her and tried to persuade her to return. Before long, there were two mobs in the street outside, one shouting support for Charlotte and the other for Cochrane in the Westminster election. It was the Duke of Sussex who showed the young Princess the scene and warned her of the public unrest which threatened. There would be "a popular outbreak, which it was to be feared would end in bloodshed, and perhaps in the destruction of Carlton House itself". The Princess relented tearfully, observing of Cochrane and the ministers, "Poor Lord Cochrane! I heard that he had been very ill used by them. Should it ever be in my power, I will undo the wrong." Had the Princess lived, it would certainly have been in her power, since she would have succeeded her father and become Queen in her own right in
1830.
⁶⁶

For Cochrane himself, there appeared no course but to endure imprisonment. Yet as time went by, he became convinced that his detention in the King's Bench was not only unjust, it was illegal. He was a Member of Parliament and, as such, not amenable to imprisonment for the offence of which he had been convicted. Technically he was wrong. He had been expelled from parliament after his conviction. The fact that he had been re-elected subsequently did not invalidate the sentence on him. As the months of captivity passed, however, he planned his escape from prison and by
6
March
1815
he had made everything ready for it.