Cochrane (33 page)

The deputy marshal informed Cochrane that he would be on parole and might live at a nearby inn.

"I will do nothing of the kind," said the prisoner firmly, "if you take me anywhere it must be to the town gaol."

The deputy marshal agreed and asked Cochrane to accompany him there. The reply was unpromising.

"No. I will be no party to an illegal imprisonment of myself. If you want me to go to gaol, you must carry me by force, for assuredly I will not walk."

This farce was played out before a growing audience of delighted Royal Navy officers, including Cochrane's friends. But there was no alternative for the deputy marshal. Cochrane was taken to prison in a coach with a file of armed soldiers as escort. On arrival there he announced that he would eat nothing.

"I have been placed here on an illegal warrant, and will not pay for so much as a crust. So that if I am starved to death, the Admiralty Court will have to answer for it."

It was no secret to the court that Cochrane was member for Westminster, as well as a naval hero, and t
hat he had put into safekeeping
the damning evidence against his captors. Even a hunger strike, let alone his death, might bring ruin upon the ingenious Mr Jackson and his colleagues.

Cochrane relented, agreeing to eat on condition that food and drink were supplied from a hotel of his choice, for himself and his guests, and that it was all paid for by the court. This was acceded to and, night after night, the officers of the fleet were wined and dined in Cochrane's prison room at the expense of the Admiralty court.

After two weeks of this, he was brought before the judge. With feigned innocence, he maintained that he could hardly have taken a table of fees if, as the judge advocate had said, no such table existed. And if, as the Act of Parliament laid down, the table had to be publicly displayed, it would surely not have been kept on the door of the judge's lavatory. Ignoring this, the judge offered to release him on bail. Cochrane refused and was escorted back to prison.

But the friends who visited him urged that some action must be taken. There was a mood of increasing resentment among the seamen in Malta and a real possibility that they would storm the prison to set Cochrane free. The only solution was for him to escape. A file and a rope were solemnly smuggled in so that he could work on the bars of his third-floor room in preparation for the chosen night. He held his dinner party as usual. "The gaoler was purposely made very tipsy," he recalled, "to which he was nothing loth." At midnight, he lowered his possessions to his servant who was waiting below, removed the bars, looping the rope round one which he had left intact. It was easy enough to climb down from the window and draw the looped rope after him. The gig of H.M.S.
Eagle
was waiting to take him to sea, where he boarded an English packet. He arrived in Gibraltar, sold the
Julie,
which he had left there on his way to Malta, and returned to England.

His denunciation of the Admiralty court to the House of Commons was one of his few parliamentary triumphs, the members rocking with laughter at the story of his imprisonment and escape. As an illustration of the costs deducted by Mr Jackson for talking to himself in a single case, Cochrane unrolled the bill of charges along the floor of the Commons. It stretched from the speaker's table at one end of the House to the bar at the other.
²⁰

If he pursued the wretched sinecurists of the Admiralty court with less tenacity than was customary in him, after his return to England, there was a good reason for it. In his deeds of valour, in the comic opera plot of his Maltese escapade, and in almost every aspect of his life, Cochrane was the child of that period in which he lived, and which was so responsive to the "romantic" in art and behaviour. On his return from Malta he lived with his uncle, Basil Cochrane, in Portman Square. It was then that he first set eyes on a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, the beautiful orphan daughter of a Spanish dancer and an English father. Katherine Barnes, though less than half his age, was everything he could have wished. And to make her still more appealing, the match was forbidden. The most proficient novelist of Sensibility could have devised no more touching a story.

At the time of their first meeting, Kitty Barnes displayed the soft features and wide eyes of her age. Her skin was fair but her hair almost black, worn in the clustering corkscrew ringlets which were then fashionable. As she grew out of her teens, her portraits show her developing a finer and more delicate appearance. This delicacy was certainly not an indication of physical frailty. She followed Cochrane in his exile, crossed the Andes, and faced disgrace, as well as danger, at his side. In dealing with the entrenched ministerial hostility to him, she fought Cochrane's battles as diligently and enthusiastically as he had ever done himself. "Without a particle of romance in my composition," he later wrote, "my life has been one of the most romantic on record, and the circumstances of my marriage are not the least so."
²¹

Kitty Barnes lived under the guardianship of John Simpson, of Portland Place. So far as the marriage market was concerned, she had few assets apart from her appearance and natural abilities. To Cochrane, her material circumstances were not important. Within a few weeks of meeting her he had proposed marriage and had been accepted. In view of his ward's reduced circumstances, John Simpson probably felt that a future Earl of Dundonald was not a bad bargain.

It was at this point that Basil Cochrane heard a rumour as to his nephew's interest in Kitty Barnes. Uncle Basil had amassed a considerable fortune from his activities in India and was looked upon by the other members of his family as the one likely source of a substantial legacy. In his turn, Basil Cochrane enjoyed the sense of power this gave him, hinting or specifying certain actions or forms of behaviour which he would require from them as his beneficiaries. In his nephew's case, he now revealed that he had arranged a marriage for him.

There was something essentially absurd in a man of thirty-seven returning home after nearly twenty ye
ars of warfare to discover that
a marriage was being arranged for him, as though he were
an incom
petent adolescent. But that was by no means the worst of it. Uncle Basil had chosen as the prospective bride the daughter of an Admiralty court official, who had made "a very large fortune" by swindling the officers and men of the Royal Navy in a manner with which Cochrane was only too familiar. He had no intention of allowing his uncle or anyone else to dictate to him his choice in marriage. In any case, a well-publicised marriage to the daughter of such a man would make him the laughing stock of his naval comrades, his enemies, and his constituents. He told his uncle as much.

"Please yourself," said Basil Cochrane snappishly, "nevertheless, my fortune and the money of the wife I have chosen for you, would go far towards reinstating future Earls of Dundonald in their ancient position as regards wealth."

The argument continued until the point at which Cochrane finally and absolutely refused the bride whom his uncle had chosen for him.

"No," he announced, "I would rather not. It is a thing for money only, and I abhor the idea of marrying for money. I cannot and I will not."
²²

It was then that Uncle Basil began to make plans for getting married himself, a clear indication that his nephew had forfeited some or all of the proposed inheritance. Cochrane went to Kitty and urged her to elope with him. At first she refused, shocked by so extreme a measure and alarmed at the probable ruin of her reputation. But Cochrane persisted, and in the end the sixteen-year-old girl agreed. They would ride to Scotland and there conclude a "runaway" marriage. The truth was that Kitty Barnes, for all her demure appearance, was a formidable young woman and never more so than in her attachment to Cochrane. Exactly half a century later she was to proclaim publicly the depth of her feeling for him. "Such a God of a Man! A Man who could have ruled the World upon the Sea!" she called him:

The Hero of a Hundred Fights! I have followed the Fortunes of that great Man. I have stood upon the Battle Deck. I have seen the Men fall. I have raised them. I have fired a Gun to save the Life of a Man for the Honour of my Husband, and would do it again. He was a Glory to the Nation in which he was born, and there is not a Member of the Family of Dundonald that need not be proud of belonging to such a noble Man as he was.
²³

The spirit of this proclamation, latent in a girl of sixteen, perhaps made it inevitable that Kitty should at last have given way to her importunate hero. They left London in a carriage on the evening of
6
August
1812,
with Cochrane's servant Richard Carter riding outside and Kitty's maid, Anne Moxham, accompanying her mistress. They drove northward with hardly a rest, using two horses or four to pull the carriage according to the availability at the stables on the way. After travelling day and night, with Kitty "very worn", Cochrane suddenly said, "Well, thank God, we are all right." They were in Scotland.

Turning to the exhausted girl and using his pet name for her, he added, "It is all right, Mouse, we are all right now. Moxham, mind you get a comfortable room for Lady Cochrane at the Queensberry Arms. We shall soon be there."

They had passed Gretna Green and were driving towards Annan, with Cochrane in high spirits, snapping his fingers with delight.

"Mouse," he said, "we are over the Border. Here we are over the Border now and nothing but God can separate us. You are mine now, and you are mine for ever."

They went through the form of civil marriage at the Queensberry Arms at Annan on the evening of
8
August, the two servants acting as witnesses. As soon as t
he papers had been signed, Cochr
ane began to dance a sailor's hornpipe round the room, saying, "Now you are mine, Mouse, mine for ever."

"I do not know," said Kitty doubtfully, "I have had no parson or church. Is this the way you marry in Scotland?"

"Oh yes," said Cochrane happily, "you are mine, sure enough; you cannot get away."

It was hardly the most prepossessing start to married life. Cochrane had to return to London almost at once, since he was supposed to attend his uncle's own wedding in a few more days. Kitty, exhausted by the journey, was left to follow with the servants in due course. Once Cochrane had gone, she discovered that the Queensberry Arms was a far from agreeable lodging. There were no baths, no soft water for washing, and the woman who kept it was "a cross old thing". She soon followed Cochrane back to London.
²⁴

For the time being, the marriage remained a secret from his family and the couple lived apart. There was later to be considerable family argument over the first ceremony and Kitty and Cochrane were remarried in an Anglican church, at the request of her guardian, in
1818.
They were married a third time
, according to the forms of the
Church of Scotland, in
1825.
At the
1818
wedding, the liturgy required them to be referred to as "spinster" and "bachelor". This, as well as the secrecy surrounding their first marriage, gave rise to the supposition that the eldest son, Thomas Barnes Cochrane, born in
1814,
might be illegitimate. Inevitably, this proved a fruitful source of dissension as to which of Cochrane's sons was entitled to succeed him. The matter was decided in favour of Thomas when the first marriage was proved before a House of Lords committee in
1863.

Basil Cochrane soon discovered the truth of the relationship between his nephew and Kitty Barnes. He not only disinherited the rebellious young man but accused him of siding with the government over the matter of the money which Basil Cochrane believed was owing to him from the Victualling Board of the Admiralty. During Cochrane's courtship of Kitty, the Tory Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, had been shot dead in the chamber of the House of Commons by John Bellingham, an insurance broker with a lunatic determination to avenge the financial "injustices" he had suffered at the hands of the government. Basil Cochrane sought an interview with Perceval's successor, Lord Liverpool, and took the opportunity to denounce his nephew. A similar denunciation was later made to the Prime Minister on behalf of Cochra
ne's father the old Earl of Dun
donald. Cochrane remained indifferent to all this, showing no regret over his uncle's estate, which he had lost by his marriage. "I had a rich equivalent in the acquisition of a wife whom no amount of wealth could have purchased."
²⁵

While Cochrane the romantic hero appeared to triumph in war and love, the more sombre drama of his political downfall had already begun. It was his misfortune that, with rare exceptions, he performed poorly in the House of Commons and so rashly outside it that some of the Radicals themselves were prepared to disown him. Of course, he showed his habitual courage and an earnest integrity yet he was an easy prey to his political enemies. It was an essential feature of his conduct that he believed in politics as a war to be fought, but his associates had already had enough of this when Cochrane announced his intention of blowing up part of Piccadilly in defence of Sir Francis Burdett.