Cochrane (2 page)

1

The Lords of C
ulross

In
the last years of the eighteenth century, when the vogue for picturesque and romantic scenery coloured the middle-class view of nature, the bay of Culross was reckoned to be well worth a visit. Some of its admirers swore that it matched anything to be found on the Rhine. A dozen miles above Edinburgh, the northern shore of the Firth of Forth broke into a series of wooded bays, set in the hills of Kinross. In deep green billows, the foliage rose like a leafy, undulating wall from the dark rocks of the foreshore. Sloping gardens and rustic cottages, which were more romantic to view than to inhabit, marked the road where market carts and occasional carriages rumbled between Kincardine and Rosyth.

Above the bay of Culross, the ridge of the hill was distinguished by the fine south front of Cu
lross Abbey. Its Renaissance fac
ade and corner turrets, in so leafy a setting, suggested one of the smaller chateaux of the Loire. The house had been begun in
1608,
from designs by Inigo Jones, and had been commissioned by Edward Bruce, lawyer, diplomat, and Master of the Rolls. True, it was not a real abbey of the sort made so thrillingly fashionable by the Gothick novels of the
1780s
and
1790s.
Yet it adjoined the ruins of the original Cistercian monastery, which Malcolm, Earl of Fife, had founded in
1217.
Young ladies and gentlemen of sensibility, seeing Culross on a stormy night, the wind chasing the clouds across the sky, the moon glimmering fitfully on water, dark trees, and mediaeval ruins, were transported from reality to the fantasies of Mrs Radcliffe and her followers, whose three-volume "horrid novels" were the current sensation of circulating libraries in Edinburgh and London.

However, behind the charming view there lay a changing and often disagreeable reality. Like so many great houses, this one had been built at the height of a family's fortunes and had descended to those who could ill support its expenses.

The splendour of the Inigo Jones house was not disputed. Among the fine drawing rooms of the first floor, with their spacious long gallery, was an apartment hung with Gobelins tapestries. Here the King, who was both James VI of Scotland and James I of England, was royally entertained in
1617.
The Bruce family in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had been men of business and figures of political influence, the creators of wealth and the arbiters of policy. But their line dwindled until only one daughter remained at Culross, Lady Elizabeth Bruce. She married William Cochrane of Ochiltree and bore him a son who inherited Culross. Indeed, he inherited more than that. His Cochrane kinsmen had been Earls of Dundonald since
1648
when the title was conferred on Sir William Cochrane, a loyal supporter of Charles I, by the hard-pressed King. In
1758,
the
7th
Earl had gone to Canada on General Wolfe's staff, in the campaign to drive the French from the St Lawrence settlements. A few months later, news came to Culross that the Earl had been killed in the preliminary assault on Louisberg. Major Cochrane of Culross was now the
8th
Earl of Dundonald.

When the Bruces were succeeded by the Cochranes, the men of business and law gave way to those who for five centuries or more had known little but the arts of war, by land and sea. In previous reigns, their abilities had been highly esteemed, bringing them rewards or favours from their royal masters. But in the age of the House of Hanover, as the power of patronage passed into ministerial hands, such rewards were few and the favours short-lived. Still the Cochranes lived and died in the old profession of their ancestors, as though the new era of commerce and parliamentary influence had not come into being. Three of them died in Marlborough's wars, then the
7th
Earl fell at Louisberg and Colonel Charles Cochrane, son of the
8th
Earl, was killed at Yorktown in the last stages of the American War of Independence, having been aide-de-camp to Cornwallis.

For the most part, the Cochranes attained modest rank and little fame. Their choice of life, as Samuel Johnson termed it, was unfortunate. Commerce, industry and invention were creating the new wealth of the eighteenth century. The profession of arms might be admired in moments of national peril, tolerated when necessary, but was mostly regarded with priggish contempt.

After enjoying his earldom for twenty years, Major Cochrane of Culross died in
1778.
The abbey and its estates passed to his son, Archibald Cochrane, as
9th
Earl of Dundonald. The new Earl was thirty years old. His son, whose na
val career was to begin so inau
spiciously in
1793,
was almost three. The
9th
Earl also brought to
Culross his beautiful but delicate wife Anna, who bore him four sons, the survivors of her seven pregnancies.

The misfortunes of the new generation at Culross began early. Anna died in
1784,
after ten years during which she had been pregnant more often than not. The widowed Earl, increasingly preoccupied by expedients to save the estate from bankruptcy, handed over the care and education of his four sons to a series of hired tutors. Pedagogues of all sorts came and went with disconcerting rapidity. As a rule they were remembered more for their personal oddities than for any learning which they imparted. Young Thomas Cochrane was much impressed by a French tutor, Monsieur Durand, who was a Catholic and refused to set foot inside the kirk. Worse still, he caused outrage among the suspicious Presbyterians by interrupting their Sunday devotions with the sound of gunfire, as he opened hostilities from the churchyard against the magpies who were stripping the Culross cherry orchards while the owners prayed. Other tutors were less engaging and were remembered without affection. There was one pedant whom Thomas Cochrane could only recall as the man who had boxed his ears for asking the difference between an interjection and a conjunction. Seventy years later, Cochrane admitted that this response had permanently extinguished all his remaining interest in philology.
¹

The young Thomas Cochrane, who assumed the courtesy title of Lord Cochrane, as his father's heir, had little systematic education. On the other hand, he was well informed in history and practical science. He showed a natural aptitude and enthusiasm for learning, with a mind whose strong alliance of intellectual power and quick imagination was to make him an equally formidable opponent in war or politics. His sense of history and locality was naturally developed by an interest in his own ancestors and in the events which had made Culross both famous and infamou
s. The journey to Rosyth was en
livened by the sight of the remote crossroads where John Blackadder, Laird of Tulliallan, had lain in wait for the Abbot of Culross, Sir James Inglis, in
1530,
and had treacherously murdered him. In Culross itself was the spot where, in
1038,
King Duncan of Scotland had fought a desperate defensive battle against the invading Danes. Defeated at last, the King withdrew towards Perth, accompanied by the one man whose loyalty had never yet failed, his commander-in-chief, Macbeth.
²

The Cochranes of the eleventh century perhaps fought on the other side at Culross. According to family tradition, they were "sea rovers" from Scandinavia whom the fortunes of war brought to Scotland. It was not until the thirteenth century, however, that their name first appeared in official Scottish documents as "Coveran", and then as "Cochran". A hundred years later, while England was ruled by the Plantagenets, the family assumed a new importance in Scotland's affairs in the person of Robert Cochran. His taste for fine architecture was combined with an ability to hew his opponent to pieces with a broadsword in a remarkably short space of time. It was the latter quality which recommended him to James III of Scotland. Thomas Cochrane later remarked that his ancestor played the same role to King James as Cardinal Wolsey was to do to Henry VIII, though with a different conclusion.

Unscrupulous in most things, Robert Cochran was loyal to his master, crushing the power of the Scottish nobility in order to reinforce the authority of the King. James duly rewarded him with the Earldom of Mar. Exasperated by this, the disgruntled knights and noblemen met to plan their vengeance, which was to take effect at a ceremonial military gathering. They fell upon Robert Cochran there and brought him to the bridge at Lauder. The bodies of other courtiers lynched by the plotters were already dangling from the bridge. Cochran coolly suggested that if they proposed to despatch him in the same manner, then his rank as Earl of Mar entitled him to die by a silk cord from his own pavilion. By way of answer, one of the knights wrenched off the gold chain about Cochran's neck, and slipped the noose over him. A moment later, King James's trusted servant dropped over the side of the bridge, and died as the rope sprang taut.

Surprisingly, in view of their way of life and the troubled times, no other Cochrane died by the hangman's art. A near exception was Sir Joh
n Cochrane, younger son of the 1
st Earl of Dundonald. When the Protestant Duke of Monmouth raised the west of England against the Catholic James II, Sir John joined the Earl of Argyll's simultaneous rebellion in Scotland. After its failure, he was taken prisoner and sentenced to death. It required only the arrival of the death warrant from London to seal his fate. But his daughter, showing the traditional spirit and audacity of the Cochranes, dressed herself as a man and "twice attacked and robbed the mails (between Belfor and Berwick) which conveyed the death-warrants". At the same time, she persuaded Father Petre, King James's confessor, to forward a bribe of
£5000
for Sir John's life. A pardon was accordingly obtained. Bishop Burnet, staunchly Whig and Protestant, preferred another story. According to this, the King pardoned Sir John after a private interview, during which the prisoner betrayed details of secret negotiations between the rebels and William of Orange, who was to depose the King three years later and reign as William III. Not that Burnet was prepared to forego the story of the bribe entirely, remarking that Sir John had "a rich father, the Earl of
Dundonald:
And he offered the Priests
£
5000
to save his son. They wanted a stock of money for managing their designs: so they interposed so effectually, that the bargain was made."
³

Whatever the precise truth, Sir John had had a very narrow escape. His cautionary experience persuaded the rest of the Cochrane family to spend most of the next century in loyal, if humdrum, service to the crown.

Eventful and vivid though his family history might be, the young Thomas Cochrane was quite as apt to be influenced by the present as by the past. His background, in this respect, differed markedly from that of English political patrons and their favourites, who knew that lucrative administrative posts as ' 'placemen" of the ministry, no less than the political reward of sinecure employments, were theirs by right to manipulate or enjoy. As late as
1833,
Lord Macaulay, writing of Sir Robert Walpole in the
Edinburgh Review,
could remark equably, 'That he practised corruption on a large scale is, we think, indisputable. . . . Walpole governed by corruption because, in his time, it was impossible to govern otherwise . . . the House of Commons was in that situation in which assemblies must be managed by corruption or cannot be managed at all." The attitude of men of affairs in the eighteenth century could hardly be more accurately mirrored. Despite the scorn of later generations, the recent memories of "corruption" were not unduly disquieting to Macaulay, either as essayist or as minister of the crown. When Cochrane, with his clear sense of honour and political decency, encountered the easy-going ministerial politics of his time, ha
d
showed neither respect nor mercy to his opponents.
⁴

His childhood world made him ill-equipped for the great moral compromise of public life. Culross was idyllic, though not remote, bounded by the hills of Kinross, the smooth waters of the Forth, and the city of Edinburgh a dozen miles downstream, already fulfilling its claim to the
cliche
,
"The Athens of the North". To Cochrane, Edinburgh was always the natural seat of learning and jurisprudence, of fine art and high society. The noble buildings of the defunct

Scottish parliament served as a reminder that at the beginning of the century Scotland had still been free of the borough-mongering and ministerial bribery of Westminster politics.

Worse still, Westminster showed its scorn for the Scots, the "Sawneys" and "North Britons", as an inferior breed whose very religion was despised. A group of Presbyterians sought an interview with Lord Thurlow, the Lord Chancellor, to ask that they should not continue to suffer civil and political disqualifications merely for being Presbyterians. "Gentlemen," said the Lord Chancellor, "I'll be perfectly frank with you. Gentlemen, I am against you and for the Established Church, by God. Not that I like the Established Church a bit better than any other church, but because it
is
established. And whenever you can get your damned religion established, I'll be for that too. Good morning to you."
⁵