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the commander of the blockading squadron, had indeed refused to take upon himself the responsibility; but Lord Cochrane thought there were officers in his fleet perfectly capable of carrying out any design, however daring and difficult, and to whom was justly due the commission of a duty likely to win so great renown. But the Admiralty were in great straits-their very existence might be said to depend at this time on the success of their naval measures. There was no time for communicating with the fleet and arranging with the officers. They knew Cochrane to be capable, and in the hour of their need they turned to the servant whom they had persecuted, defrauded, and vilified, and whom, when their turn was served, they were about to persecute, defraud, and vilify again. They commanded Cochrane to undertake the duty; and Cochrane, probably with no reluctance, undertook it. The

bomb-ships, mortar and rocket vessels, explosion and fire-ships, were prepared in great profusion; and Cochrane, in the Imperieuse, sailed for the fleet. How gallantly he led the attack in an explosion-ship charged to the brim with destruction, how he dashed at the boom and blew it to fragments,* how the fireships, when the boom was rent asunder, were steered straight upon mighty line-of-battle ships, and not exploded until the explosion blew their own crews into the sea; how the panicstriken Frenchmen ran themselves arround and liners struck to frigates, and how a midshipman might have taken a 74, had he known her state; how Cochrane, hot in action in the Imperieuse, threw out signal after signal to the fleet to come up and complete the conquest, and how Gambier, instead of acting, called a council of war, and then decided to postpone action-all these things have been told in many a naval tale, and are to be found vividly narrated in the Annual Register of 1809. The rage of Cochrane when he saw the tide rise and no ships came to take possession, and

* Lord Cochrane, in his Autobiography, claims to have effected the destruction of the boom, though popular history attributes it to the weight and impetus of the Mediator, conducted by Captain Wooldridge,

witnessed the French vessels rise from their beds and gradually escape from his grasp, may be imagined. The French fleet consisted of ten line-ofbattle ships, a 54-gun store-ship, four frigates, and other craft. These were assailed solely by frigates and smaller vessels; and such was the vigour of the attack, that nearly all were driven on shore, four were destroyed, and most of the others so injured as to be unfit for further service. The French Admiral, Allemand, was sent to a court-martial, and the captain of the Calcutta was shot for having surrendered to the Imperieuse. The discreditable inaction of Lord Gambier was probably owing to infirmity of purpose rather than to any design of spoiling Cochrane's undertaking. Had he advanced his ships and completed the destruction of the enemy he would have reaped the chief glory of the vietory, and Cochrane would have had the praise awarded to a brave subordinate. The Ministry also had need of a great success. Altogether, it is not probable that the incompleteness of the blow is attributable to jealousy on the Admiral's part. To some extent, however, it was so as regards the captains. Many were unquestionably angry at the slight cast upon them in sending an officer foreign to their squadron to plan and carry out an attack, which they thought in justice should have been entrusted to themselves. Nor had they any personal interest in furthering the interloper's plans. It is not improbable, therefore, that at the council of war some of these did not stimulate the Admiral's ardour. For his heroic services on this occasion the King conferred on Lord Cochrane the Knighthood of the Order of the Bath.

The imperfect victory of the Basque Roads raised such a storm of indignation at home, that the Ministry were placed in a position of extreme embarrassment. It was necessary to support their Admiral, and to support their Admiral it was necessary to discard Cochrane. The indignation of the latter knew no bounds, and he was supported by the popular voice. He was regarded as the achiever of a noble deed, baulked of the full fruits of his prowess by the jealousy and imbecility of an official superior, and (however unjustly) as the victim of the jealousy of the Government. The Ministry proposed a Vote of

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Thanks to Lord Gambier, Lord Cochrane, and the officers and seamen. Cochrane refused to be included, and opposed the Vote with intense vehemence. The Ministry endeavoured to buy him off. They offered him the command of an independent squadron and a regiment. Cochrane was inflexible; and though the Vote was carried, Lord Gambier was constrained to demand a court-martial. If all that has since been said is true, the political turpitude of those days was frightful. This court-martial was a packed tribunal, the witnesses summoned were either officers who had not been present or who had already expressed their willingness to stand by the Admiral; the captains who were unfavourable were kept out of the way. The authentie charts actually in the possession of the Admiralty were suppressed, and charts known to be useless were produced, and that chart on which the decision of the Court professed to be founded was-Lord Cochrane asserts in his Autobiography-expressly fabricated for the occasion. Under such circumstances there could be but one result. Gambier was acquitted. Another cireumstance is alleged, of incredible baseness. In the first despatch of Lord Gambier, the Admiral spoke of Cochrane's conduct in the terms it had so nobly deserved. The Board of Admiralty directed Lord Gambier to make a fresh report of the action. Accordingly Lord Gambier forwarded a new despatch, in which Cochrane's services were altogether passed over!

test, he allowed himself to be arrested on an illegal warrant by an illegal officer. The captive dictated the terms of his captivity, held out until the Court became alarmed at detaining the member for Westminster from his seat in the House, and made overtures of peace; Cochrane rejected them, and made his escape.

Soon after his return to England, Lord Cochrane communicated to the Prince Regent a tremendous secret--a means of warfare so destructive that the souls of the Committee who were entrusted with the inquiry shrank from it. Through all the vicissitudes of his subsequent career Lord Cochrane locked the secret in his own bosom. He was resolved that if it were to be divulged at all, it should be divulged for the benefit of England only. In 1846, when a war with France seemed inevitable, the secret plans were submitted to another commission of the three most eminent Engineers of the time; and they also, as their predecessors had done, were unanimously of opinion that the adoption of the proposed plans "would not accord with the feelings and principles of civilized warfare." And for the same reason their employment against Sebastopol and Cronstadt during the recent Russian war was refused.

In 1812 Lord Cochrane married. This important event was characterized by his usual fearlessness and contempt of base motives. His uncle, Basil Cochrane, who had acquired a large fortune in India, and who had designated his Seeing that nothing was to be hoped gallant nephew his heir, wished him to from a Ministry to whom he had made marry a lady whose great fortune would himself so utterly obnoxious, Lord have restored the family to prosperity. Cochrane turned his assaults upon the Lord Cochrane not only refused, but monstrous abuses which then existed married a lady of respectable family, in naval administration; and not con- but no fortune, but who in every other tent with the encounter of so terrible a respect was worthy of his choice. foe as the British Board of Admiralty, His uncle disinherited him, and abanhe attacked the Maltese Admiralty doned his cause to his adversaries. The Court, of the equity of whose proceed- Parliamentary year of 1813 was occuings an estimate may be formed from pied by a series of fierce and damaging the fact that they had actually brought attacks on the general and naval corhim in debt for the prizes he had taken ruption of the Administration. The in the Imperieuse. The Court had many Ministry were exasperated to the highinherent powers, and was sure of the est pitch, and an opportunity offered support of the Admiralty at home; but itself, on which they eagerly seized, its business had been so mismanaged and pushed on their revenge without that it was illegally constituted. Of scruple or remorse. The subject is a this Cochrane took as much advantage painful one, and difficult to tell in a as if he had been attacking a Spanish short compass; but there is a short abgalleon on the sea. After a bitter con- stract of the transaction and of the trial

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in the Chronicle of the Annual Register for 1814, pp. 19 and 324, and in the History of the same volume. Sir Alexander Cochrane having been appointed to the North American station, appointed his nephew his flag-captain. Lord Cochrane was about to sail in the flag-ship the Tonnant when the storm burst upon him. He had unfortunately engaged in speculations on the Stock Exchange; he had also unfortunately become acquainted with one Capt. De Berenger. About midnight on the 20th of February, a person calling himself Colonel de Bourg, aide-de-camp to Lord Cathcart, presented himself at the Ship Hotel, Dover, announcing that Bonaparte had been killed, that the Allied armies were in full march for Paris, and immediate peace was certain. Having forwarded similar intelligence by letter to the Port Admiral at Deal, he started for London in a post-chaise, exchanged it there for a hackney-coach, and drove to Lord Cochrane's house. The funds rose when the intelligence reached town. But it was soon discovered that a gross imposition had been practised, and the impostor was traced. Immediately on learning the report in which his name was involved Lord Cochrane hastened to town from Chatham, and lost not a moment in publishing the name of De Berenger, his unknown visitor of the 21st. This he did by an affidavit dated March 11th, in which, contrary to the wishes of his legal advisers, he frankly accounted for all his acts, and the occupation of his whole time on the 21st of February. He was engaged that morning at a lamp manufactory in Cock-lane-not at the Stock Exchange or near it-when a note was brought him, the signature of which he could not decipher. His servant told him it was from an army officer; and thinking the writer might have come from his brother, who was then dangerously ill with the army in Spain, Lord Cochrane hastened home. There he found De Berenger, who entreated to be taken on board the Tonnant, telling a piteous tale of his debts and his distress. Lord Cochrane refused; and De Berenger, having borrowed a civilian's hat and coat from Lord Cochrane, alleging that, being a prisoner within the Rules of the Queen's Bench, he could not, without exciting suspicion, return to his lodgings in the

dress he then wore-namely, a grey great coat, a green uniform, and a military cap-departed. The allegation was that the whole scheme was a fraudulent concoction (as no doubt it was) for the purpose of raising the funds, and that Lord Cochrane was a party to it. This charge, which rested mainly on the circumstances that had occurred at his Lordship's house, was supported by the fact that Lord Cochrane had on the 12th February purchased £139,000 omnium on a time bargain, and that this stock was sold at an advance on the 21st, the day of the imposture. The other parties charged with complicity in the fraud besides De Berenger, who appears to have played his part for hire, were Cochrane's uncle, Mr. Cochrane Johnstone, who held £420,000 omnium and £100,000 consols; and Mr. Butt, who held £200,000 omnium, and £178,000 consols. The three persons accused held speculative stock to the amount of £1,600,000; and as such an event as the defeat of the French armies, the death of Napoleon, and the entry of the Allies into Paris, would cause an immense rise in the funds (omnium was then as low as 274, and consols at 67), the gain upon such a sum might easily amount to £100,000. The same stock-broker dealt for all the three persons, and sold their stock according to the market; the gain aetually realized was calculated to exceed £10,000, and was admitted to have been £6,500. It is certain that Lord Cochrane shared in the vicious stock-gambling of those days, and that he had acted frequently in conjunction with Cochrane Johnstone and Butt; it may be taken as proved, that the two latter were parties to the fraud; the question now is, was Lord Cochrane a confederate in or cognizant of the fraud by which the others sought to raise the price of the funds? A prosecution was instituted by the Committee of the Stock Exchange against the parties accused; and Lord Cochrane, Cochrane Johnstone, Butt, de Berenger, and four understrappers in the plot, were tried in the Court of Queen's Bench before Lord Ellenborough. It is impossible to go at length into the circumstances surrounding the proceedings, especially as the conduct of the trial has been made the occasion of the most bitter charges and recriminations. It must suffice to say, that while the case against the other

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accused was clearly proved, the circumstances which would involve the complicity of Lord Cochrane were inferential merely, were weakly supported by evidence, that the case was pressed unfairly against him by the counsel for the prosecution, and mismanaged by himself and counsel; that Lord Ellenborough (without charging against him any corrupt motive in the exercise of his judicial functions) so ruled the proceedings, and summed up the evidence in such terms, as to secure a conviction.* The guilt of the other parties was clearly proved, the transaction was such as to admit of any number of confederates and any degree of guilty knowledge; and the jury were, perhaps, unable to separate parties who had been allied in so many transactions. The result was a verdict of guilty against the whole. The sentence on Cochrane was that he pay a fine of £1000, be imprisoned in the Marshalsea twelve months, and (with de Beranger and Butt) to stand one hour in the pillory before the Royal Exchange. The disgraceful part of this sentence was remitted; indeed, the popular feeling in favour of Lord Cochrane was so strong that the Ministry dared not put it in execution, and their object was better secured by the sentence and remission than by an actual enforcement of the sentence. There were, however, punishments which the Ministry were able to inflict with safety as the natural consequences of the conviction. Lord Cochrane was dismissed the Navy, degraded

The charges raised against Lord Ellenborough by Lord Cochrane and his friends are of a most damnatory character. In calmer times, some of these have been disavowed; e. g. Lord Brougham now admits that the Lord Chief Justice "tried the cause as he would have tried any other in which he thought there was conflicting evidence. I think he was wrong in the opinions he had formed, but honestly wrong;" and the accusation that Lord Ellenborough was a member of the Ministry which ordered the prosecution, and that he came down from the Cabinet to preside at the trial, is without foundation; for the "Ministry of all the Talents," the only Ministry of which Lord Ellenborough was a member, had been broken up seven years before.

from the Knighthood of the Bath (his banner was "kicked out of the chapel, according to ancient form, by the king-at-arms "), and expelled the House of Commons by a majority of 140 to 44-after a debate, in which Lord Cochrane, who had made a daring escape from his prison and appeared in his place in the House, was permitted to make a statement in defence. In the minority are to be found the names of such men as Joseph Butterworth, Lord Ebrington (now Earl Fortescue), Charles Grant, sen., J. Lambton (Earl of Durham), Lord Nugent, Lord William Russell, the Marquis of Tavistock, and Samuel Whitbread, men second to none in sagacity and sense of honour. Sir Francis Burdett was also one-a man who, however extreme his radicalism, and however bound by selfinterest to support his colleague, was far too high-minded to support what he thought to be wrong. The electors of Westminster were of the same opinion; for when the new writ was issued, no one dared to offer himself in opposition to Lord Cochrane, and he regained his seat in Parliament, though convicted and a prisoner. At the time, and in subsequent years, Lord Cochrane made the most frantic efforts to show that this stain upon his honour had been inflicted without grounds. His most intimate friends, who knew best his actions and the motives that had actuated his conduct, were persuaded of his innocence; his counsel, Lord Brougham, was, and is, firmly convinced of his innocence; Lord Campbell was, and is, of the same conviction, and even says, in his "Lives of the Chief Justices," that this trial caused "such uneasy reflections in Lord Ellenborough's mind, as were supposed to have hastened his end." Lord Chief Justice Abinger was likewise convinced of Lord Cochrane's innocence.

With the catastrophe of his conviction closes his Autobiography, a work of more exciting interest than any naval fiction that has been imagined. The very nature of such a work is to be egotistic; but beneath the intentional narrative of his own deeds, there lies a substratum of which the noble writer was probably unconscious, and in which is to be found a far better picture of himself than any laboured analysis of character could produce. We see here an ardent, impe

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tuous, generous nature, strictly logical when action was in question, but utterly injudicial in self-guidance or in its relation to others; an excitable, self-confident man of genius, in whom the sense of a perpetrated or supposed wrong is quickly engrafted on the mind and becomes a fixed idea. His whole history is tinged with the colour of a perpetual grievance of some kind or other. Those who are not with him are against him. Whatever is evident to him as truth is so self-evident as to force him to assume dishonesty on the part of all who hold the contrary. The Autobiography also shows how insubordinate Cochrane was to all authority over him, and how generous and considerate to all who depended on him. His fierce fights for the advancement of his officers unconsciously testify the guiltlessness of his mad adherence to the friends who were engaged in the fraud. The reader of this work will readily perceive how such a man could be made by others to put on the appearance of complicity, and why he so wildly and unnecessarily threw away his chances of dissociating his conduct from theirs.

When Lord Cochrane's term of imprisonment had expired, he issued from the Marshalsea a disgraced man. The final overthrow of the French Emperor had brought about a peace that was to endure for forty years, and had Cochrane been proved innocent, as he was found guilty, there would have been no field for his daring valour, his fiery energy, his cool calculation, and impetuous execution. It was while thus quivering under undeserved disgrace, and forbidden the service of his own country, that overtures were made to him to take the command of the naval force of the Republic of Chili. The circumstances were such that Cochrane accepted the offer with avidity. The Spanish provinces of South America, oppressed by every form of misgovernment, had risen to throw off the Spanish yoke, and it was always Cochrane's passion to combat on the side of freedom; it offered a field of action in which the fiery sense of disgrace might be drowned in new excitement-new glories might be achieved to shame his adversaries and, above all, it removed him from that country where his unparalleled services had been returned by obloquy and shame. In November,

1818, Lord Cochrane, his wife, and family, arrived at Valparaiso, and took the supreme command as ViceAdmiral of Chili. Space will not permit (even were the pursuit worth the pains) to trace the irregular operations by which the liberation of these republies was effected; particular mention can be made only of those brilliant achievements which added new rays to the circlet of fame which already surrounded his brows. On the conquest of Spain by the French, the South American colonies of that kingdom refused submission to the usurper; and although, when the Spaniards rose against the French, the Spanish colonists acknowledged the sovereignty of Ferdinand, the lesson of liberty, once learned, was not forgotten; and almost simultaneously Chili, Peru, and other provinces declared themselves independent. They had, however, no contemptible enemy to deal with. In the contest with the French, veteran armies had been enured to war, and officers had been trained into excellent commanders; the tenacity of the Spaniards under disaster is a national characteristic. The Spanish armies in South America were numerous and disciplined, and commanded by experienced officers. The viceroys were in possession of all the resources of the country, of all the principal towns, and of the seaports, many of which-as Callao and Valdivia-were remarkable examples of Spanish skill in fortification. But, more than all, the Spaniards were in full command of the sea; and while reinforcements of disciplined troops, munitions of war, and aids of every kind could be poured in at pleasure, the success of the patriots was hopeless. It was the perception of this fact that induced the insurgents of Chili and Peru to enlist Cochrane in their cause. To any other man the case would have seemed desperate-to Cochrane difficulties were things to be overcome. The Spanish fleet consisted of numerous fine frigates and brigs, and heavilyarmed merchant ships, which were continually recruited from Europe. The squadron of the patriots consisted of a 50-gun frigate, recently taken from the Spaniards, a 56-gun and a 44-gun frigate, both formerly merchant ships, and a few sloops of war of 18 and 20 guns. The equipment of these vessels was miserable in the extreme, and

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