Cochrane (34 page)

The origin of this plan was the House of Commons committee in February
1810
which was to look into the disaster of the Walcheren expedition. In order to restrict the details of incompetence on the part of the military authorities, the ministry decided that the proceedings would be secret and that no member of the public would be allowed to hear them. This provoked anger among the Radicals of Westminster, whose debating society, "The British Forum", placarded the walls of the city with a denunciation of the Commons' action as an "outrage upon the public feeling".
²⁶

On
19
February, the attention of the House was drawn to this affront by the Hon. Charles Yorke, and the Bill of Rights of
1689
was invoked to commit the author of the placard, John Gale Jones, to Newgate for daring to infringe the privileges of parliament by his criticism. Jones was still in prison several weeks later. Burdett rose in the House on
12
March, denouncing the imprisonment as an abuse of power, and demanded his release. His motion was defeated by
139
votes.

Frustrated by the ministerial power in the House itself, Burdett took up his pen and denounced the imprisonment still more strongly in
Cobbett's Weekly Political Register
of
24
March
1810.
He described the unreformed Commons scathingly as "a part of our fellow subjects, collected together by means which it is not necessary for me to describe". He accused them of arbitrary government, under the pretext of "parliamentary privilege", which rivalled the authoritarian regimes of the Tudors and Stuarts.

Three days later, Thomas Lethbridge, the member for Somerset, laid the article before the Commons and complained of a breach of privilege. On
5
April, a debate on this matter took place, lasting all night, and at seven thirty the next morning, the Commons voted by
189
to
152
for the committal of Burdett to the Tower of London. Within an hour, Charles Abbot, the Speaker of the House, had signed the warrant. Half an hour after that, the serjeant-at-arms, Francis Colman, arrived at
78,
Piccadilly to arrest the culprit. But Burdett was not there. He had been at Wimbledon during the debate and returned to his house in Piccadilly after Colman's visit. He agreed to see Colman the next day, but made it quite clear that he had no intention of submitting to arrest.

By
7
April, there was considerable danger of a riot in the streets of London. The serjeant-at-arms insisted to Burdett, "I shall be obliged, sir, to resort to force, as it is my duty to execute the warrant." Burdett replied that the warrant was illegal and that he would never submit, except to "overwhelming force". Already a mob of Radical sympathisers had gathered in the street outside and it was clear that a regiment of troops would be needed to carry out the arrest. Other sympathisers blocked the approaches to the Tower on land and even, by the use of small boats, on the river itself. The crowd in Piccadilly obliged all passers-by to shout, "Burdett for ever!" and when the Earl of Westmorland, going past them, refused to chant the words at their command, they pelted him with mud and garbage.
²⁷

By night, the growing swarm of spectators outside number
78
spilled from Piccadilly into the squares on either side. In Berkeley Square they found the house of the unfortunate Thomas Lethbridge, who had raised Burdett's breach of privilege. Even though he had let it to someone else, every window was smashed. The assault on Lord Castlereagh's house was equally vigorous, Castlereagh hastily slipping out in his greatcoat and trying to disguise himself as one of the attackers. The houses of Lord Chatham, Spencer Perceval, Charles Yorke, and other ministerial figures had their windows broken, frames torn out, shutters wrenched off, even the chandeliers, glass, and furniture in the rooms themselves destroyed. By the light of the flaring torches or links which the rioters carried, the same scenes were enacted in St James's Square, Albemarle Street, and along Piccadilly. From such combustible indignation, the long-feared spectre of revolution might rise. There were troops at hand, but it was by no means certain that the regiments in question, the Life Guards, the Foot Guards, and the
15th
Light Dragoons, could be relied upon. Francis Place was assured "that the Foot Guards and the
15th
Light Dragoons were much more disposed to fight the Life Guards than they were disposed to obey an order to attack the people".
²⁸

Improbable though such a drama might seem, the ministry and the authorities grew more apprehensive by the hour. The guns at the Tower of London were mounted and made ready for action, while the ditches around it were flooded as a defensive barrier. Piccadilly itself was the scene of a cavalry charge by the Life Guards, who temporarily scattered the crowd up a number of side streets. But the sympathisers reassembled. Indeed, they collected long ladders and boarding from a nearby building site, provoked the cavalry to charge again, and suddenly ran out a shoulder-high obstruction across Piccadilly. As the horses shied away, the rioters bombarded the Life Guards with missiles and mud.

During all this, Cochrane was inside the house with Burdett, Francis Place, and the Radical leaders, organising the defence. Unfortunately, he took his task far more literally than they did. This was war, albeit the enemy was the serjeant-at-arms of the House of Commons rather than Napoleon. He arrived on
8
April with a large barrel and set to work, announcing that he had contrived "an effectual mode of defence against any force that could be used". Francis Place, Henry Hunt, and the other Radical leaders soon realised with dismay that the barrel contained gunpowder. As though he had been defending Fort Trinidad again, Cochrane was mining the front of
78
Piccadilly. When the time came, he would be able to blow up an entire regiment of attackers, taking the front of Burdett's house and a considerable portion of Piccadilly with them.
²⁹

Accustomed by long practice to a deft military solution of such problems, there is no indication that Cochrane had thought of the political or criminal consequences. It seems not to have crossed his mind either that Sir Francis Burdett's commitment to the Radical cause might stop short of having his elegant and fashionable town house reduced to rubble. For all concerned, the act was the one thing needed to turn riot into revolution, and to increase the penalty for failure from a short period under arrest to public execution. However, the plan certainly brought the defenders of
78
Piccadilly to a sense of the real alternatives facing them: surrender or bloodshed.

As the appearance of the gunpowder concentrated the minds of the Radical leaders on this prospect, they convened a Piccadilly "council of war". Francis Place, more thoroughly alarmed than most by
Cochrane's hot-headedness, aske
d the one relevant question. "It will be easy enough to clear the hall of constables and soldiers, to drive them into the street or to destroy them, but are you prepared to take the next step and to go on?" They were not. The use of gunpowder was rejected and Cochrane withdrew to the tranquillity of Portman Square.
³⁰

When he returned next day, Burdett had gone. During the early morning, the sheriff and a party of soldiers had crept into the basement area at the rear of the house, broken in through a servant's window, and surprised Burdett in his drawing room. With improbable aptness, he was engaged in teaching his son to translate Magna Carta. Still protesting that the warrant was illegal, he was arrested, the crowd outside having no idea that anything of the kind had happened. He was bundled into a coach and driven away before his supporters could help him. Escorted by cavalry, he reached the Tower by a circuitous route. There he remained a prisoner until
21
June, when parliament was prorogued and his confinement automatically came to an end.
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Cochrane dutifully played his part in the resulting meetings and addresses of protest. Yet it was in the Commons that he scored a rare and
notable political success in a
well-prepared speech on the abuses of sinecures and the failure of England's rulers to reward the merits and valour of the nation's servants.

On
11
May, John Wilson Croker proposed a vote for the ordinances of the navy. It was at this time that Samuel Bamford, one of the early Radicals, was admitted to the Strangers Gallery of the House as the guest of Cochrane and Burdett. For the benefit of England's unenfranchised masses he recorded the scene.

I found myself in a small gallery, from whence I looked on a dimly lighted place below. At the head of the room, or rather den, for such it appeared to me, sat a person in a full loose robe of, I think, scarlet and white. Above his head were the royal arms, richly gilded; at his feet several men in robes and wigs were writing at a large table, on which lamps were burning, which cast a softened light on a rich ornament like a ponderous sceptre of silver and gold, or what appeared to be so.
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Some of the members were sombrely dressed, others wore military uniforms. There was Canning, "with his smooth, bare, and capacious forehead", and Castlereagh, "with his handsome but immovable features". On the opposition benches sat Brougham, Cochrane, and Burdett, "his head carried back and held high as in defiance". When Cochrane rose to deliver his attack on the abuses of patronage, it was a formidable ordeal. Indeed, if his speeches were sometimes less than impressive, it was not merely the failure of inspiration but the sheer impossibility of making himself heard against the mighty expression of ministerial disapproval. Bamford described the way in which Cochrane and the little band of Radicals struggled for audience, while the government supporters ignored them.

Some of the members stood leaning against pillars with their hats cocked awry; some were whispering by half dozens; others were lolling upon their seats; some with
aims
a-kimbo were eye-glassing across the house; some were stiffened immovably by starch, or pride, or both; one was speaking, or appeared to be so, by the motion of his arms, which he shook in token of defiance, when his voice was drowned by a howl as wild and remorseless as that from a kennel of hounds at feeding time. Now he points menacing to the ministerial benches - now he appeals to some members on this side - then to the speaker; all in vain. At times he is heard in the pauses of that wild hubbub, but again he is borne down by the yell which awakes on all sides around him. Some talked aloud; some whinnied in mock laughter, coming, like that of the damned, from bitter hearts. Some called "order, order", some "question, question", some beat time with the heel of their boots; some snorted into their napkins; and one old gentleman in the side gallery actually coughed himself from a mock cough into a real one and could not stop until he was almost black in the face.
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Against hostility of this kind, Cochrane rose to make his speech. The lounging ministerial members on the opposite benches listened a moment and withheld their jeering. In part, this was because of the gruesome nature of what Cochrane was describing. He was listing the tariff for lost arms and legs, detailing the pensions awarded to naval officers who had suffered such injuries in battle. The going rate for a leg was
£40,
and for both legs
£80.
Arms were rated at anything from
£45
to
£91
each. A senior officer like Sir Samuel Hood might receive as much as
£500
for his injuries, but he was still nowhere near the top of the Admiralty pension list. That eminence was reserved, perhaps predictably, for a civil servant and political appointee who was not required to go to sea nor to expose himself to risk of injury: the Secretary of the Admiralty. "He," said Cochrane, "retired, in full health, on a pension of
1 500/.
per annum."

That was only the beginning. Lord Arden's sinecure, paid to him for supporting the government of the day, exceeded by
£274
"all that is paid to the wounded officers of the whole British navy, and to the wives and children of those dead or killed in action". The amount of Lord Camden's sinecure was only
£1000
less than every pension paid to every retired officer of the Royal Navy from admiral down to lieutenant. Every disablement pension paid to the navy's wounded heroes was, in total, almost
£4000
less than the sum paid to the Admiralty commissioners, their wives and their clerks.

For once, the House listened to Cochrane's denunciation of naval abuses. During his term of unemployment by the Admiralty he had found the time to compile his figures with care and to garb them with images of comparison which blazoned them before parliament and the public. Even his ministerial listeners shouted with laughter when he turned to his next victims.

I find upon examination that the Wellesleys receive from the public
34,729
.,
a sum equal to
426
pairs of lieutenants' legs, calculated at the rate of allowance of Lieutenant Chambers's legs. Calculating for the pension of Captain Johnstone's arm,
viz.,
45/
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