Cochrane (4 page)

The Earl was dumbfounded by this reply. He had pacified his creditors, borrowed a further
£22,400
and was irretrievably in debt unless coal tar were adopted. Why should it not be? Still with young Lord Cochrane in tow, he began to visit shipbuilders, to see if there was some special technical problem involved in using coal tar, some minor defect which he might be able to overcome. He received his answer at last from a shipbuilder in Limehouse.

"My lord," said the man, "we live by repairing ships as well as by building them, and the worm is our best friend. Rather than use your preparation, I would cover ships' bottoms with honey to attract worms."
¹⁴

Similar objections, wrote Lord Cochrane, were "everywhere encountered" among the shipbuilders. "Neither they, nor any artisans in wood, would patronise a plan to render their work durable." As for the Admiralty and the Navy Board, it was common knowledge that many of the clerks in the King's dockyards also acted as agents for the private contractors. They were hardly likely to recommend to the Board a substance which would lead to a recession among those on whose behalf they acted and whose profits they shared.
¹⁵

Father and son returned, suitably chastened, to Culross. But though the Earl's fortunes had taken such a turn for the worse, he was confident that some other scientific development might yet secure the future of his family. To make assurance doubly sure, he began to work on a host of projects simultaneously. Perhaps it was his election to the Royal Society of Scotland which gave him the confidence to launch out in this manner, but the other members of the British Tar Company grew uneasy. Its future might be unpromising but at least it was not actually losing money. Joseph Black went to Culross and was alarmed to find that the Earl had lost his enthusiasm for coal tar and was now pottering about with experiments for manufacturing salt or attempting to produce sal ammoniac. "I endeavoured to dissuade him from the pursuit of these for the present, and advised him to attend to the branches of his manufacture which had already succeeded and were bringing in money."
¹⁶

It was certainly true that the coal tar process was a scientific success, but the refusal of the Admiralty and the reluctance of shipbuilders to use it had put an end to its commercial use. Without such patronage, a return of
£5000
a year on the
£22,400
investment was impossible. Perhaps, then, the salvation of Culross lay in the manufacture of salt. The Earl published
T
he Present State of the Manufac
ture of Salt Explained,
only to find his time and enthusiasm expended in the literary snarling of a pamphlet-war with men who disagreed over his figures for the populations of Britain and France, or for the amount of salt imported. Meanwhile, the shadow of total ruin spread over Culross and its inhabitants.

As he pottered about his experimental "salt-pan", the Earl noticed that the process produced a quantity of soda. But for the time being he was obsessed by salt-manufacture and the production of alkalis was an irrelevance. He had, without realising it, revolutionised the manufacture of soap and glass, as he discovered when other men took his soda, used it instead of scarce barilla, and made their fortunes. While his financial position grew worse, he spread his intellectual resources as widely as his borrowed capital. The bankrupt estate at Culross began to produce alumina for silk and calico printing, British gum as a substitute for imported gum Senegal, sal ammoniac, and white lead. The Earl himself began to experiment in making bread from potatoes, as an aid to the poor.

Not one of these activities was on a scale sufficient to cover its own costs and, as the noble inventor dissipated his energies and abilities, his behaviour grew progressively odder. He certainly drank more heavily as his commitments grew more oppressive, but he also assumed something of the character of a scientific Micawber, hoping every day that a sudden miracle in technology would manifest itself to retrieve the family fortunes.

The Earl's four sons can have expected little from the estate and they were the least surprised of anyone when in
1793,
when Thomas Cochrane was seventeen, Culross Abbey and the family lands had to be put up for sale to satisfy the creditors. The Earl had a special brochure printed and opened it with an appeal "To his Countrymen". He admitted that "There are few situations in which it may be thought proper for an individual to bring himself or his private concerns forward to the public eye." In the present case it had been done "with reluctance". However, the reluctance and a habitual reference to the "res angusta domi" which had handicapped the author's genius, were quickly followed by a well-balanced promotional address for the sale of Culross. There was no sentimental grief for a lost family home, no picture of the scenic beauties of the place. The Earl summed up Culross Abbey as an industrial asset, listing the quantities of coal and fire-clay which might be mined there, once the woods, which had been so much admired by lovers of the Romantic scene, were chopped down and the ground cleared. Not that the woods were without significance, of course. Timber was fetching a high price as conflict with France threatened and obliged the Admiralty to build more ships.

The financial catastrophe which had overtaken the Earl in no way diminished his enthusiasm for scientific investigation. While he and his creditors were in prolonged negotiation for the disposal of Culross, he produced his largest and most important publication,
A Treatise Shewing the Intimate Connection that Subsists between Agriculture and Chemistry.
But once again, he was in advance of his time. What was dismissed as eccentricity in the Earl of Dundonald was to be hailed as the genius of discovery in Sir Humphrey Davy. Indeed, the most bitter irony of all was still far in the future, when the Earl was an old and dying man, struggling to support his ailing mistress and her child in Parisian squalor, to which he had been driven by the most remorseless of his creditors. From the miseries of this exile, where drink had become his last consolation, the old man heard that their Lordships of the Admiralty had conceived an interesting new idea. In
1822,
they had asked a committee of the Royal Society, under the chairmanship of Sir Humphrey Davy, to investigate the possibility that coal tar might be an effective and cheap preservative for ships' bottoms. The committee reported favourably and their Lordships congratulated themselves on their acumen. Not only was their suggestion vindicated but the cantankerous Scottish earl who had taken out a patent in the
1780s,
had neither heart nor money to renew it in
1806.
The Admiralty, by biding its time, got the process for nothing.

The Earl was preoccupied with the dispersal of his family. He also remarried in
1788,
choosing a handsome widow, Isabella Raymond. She died in
1808,
her dark and aquiline beauty preserved in her portrait by Gainsborough. On marrying Mrs Raymond, he parted with young Lord Cochrane and his brother Basil, who spent six months at Mr Chauvet's military academy in Kensington Square, London, with a view to subsequent careers in the British Army. One member of the family who had done well in the world, at that time, was the scapegrace uncle, Andrew Cochrane-Johnstone. He was very nearly a full colonel and well placed to persuade the Horse Guards to provide a commission for Lord Cochrane in the
104th
Foot, a regiment well down the seniority list of the army. There was a family row when the boy returned from Chauvet's and swore that he hated military life and would prefer the navy. The Cochranes, he was made to understand, were no longer rich enough to indulge such fads. So the two youngsters were seen off to London again by stage-coach, that being the most economical conveyance. The Earl's agent watched them go, observing, "It is true they have not had very much education, but they are strong and fine to look at and very sensible and will get on anywhere."
¹⁷

It seemed that Lord Cochrane, at least, was about to prove the agent wrong on this last point. The great drama raged over an improbable pair of items - a bilious yellow waistcoat and matching trousers. The colour happened to be that of the Whig party, to which the Earl was firmly attached, and he had conceived the novel idea of sending his son off to join his regiment in the party colours. "I was
admonished never to be ashamed
' wrote Cochrane, describing the ordeal, for the Earl regarded party and loyalty as matters for proud display. Moreover, his son must look like a young officer of fashion. This, too, the Earl interpreted somewhat oddly. He had the youth's head cropped and its remains plastered down with "a vile composition of candlegrease and flour". The net result was that Lord Cochrane, in clothes cut absurdly for his height, and outrageously coloured, appeared in the London streets looking more like a pantomime clown than an infantry officer. Hoots of laughter followed his progress and the gang of ragged boys near Charing Cross jeered him until he almost wept. The misery of these weeks determined him that he would take his chance anywhere rather than in the loathsome profession of the army. Summoning up his courage, he returned home to inform his father.
¹⁸

The Earl was first speechless with surprise and then furious. When the boy begged to be saved from "the degradation of floured head, pigtail and yellow breeches", the Earl, seeking some rational basis for his anger, accused Lord Cochrane of insulting him personally and the Whig party in general. He proceeded to box the boy's ears in a very spirited manner. But as the latest of innumerable rows between father and son subsided into sullen separation, the most important question remained unanswered. The Cochranes had been sometimes imprudent and often unfortunate, but they had never flinched from their adversaries and they had borne adversities of many kinds with a courage which was wholly admirable. Robert Cochran, facing execution, had treated his murderers with haughty contempt, but here stood the latest of his line, a gangling ninny who ran home to his father because some rough boys shouted rude words at him near Charing Cross. The Earl's anger must have masked his dismay as he wondered what more could be done for his son and heir.
¹⁹

The solution to this and many more problems was at hand. While the hopeful young cadets attended Mr Chauvet's military cramming course in Kensington Square, another building in that same group of handsome dwellings standing in semi-rural parkland close to the London road might have caught their attention. It was a residence of the French ambassador, the Marquis de Chauvelin, who since the revolution of
1789
had embraced the more fashionable title of "Citizen Chauvelin". But for all his revolutionary protestations, the young Marquis matched the type of the aristocratic nincompoop quite as well as any young nobleman of the old order. He was incompetent in negotiation and tactless in diplomacy, despised by the ministers of George III and suspected of bourgeois inclinations by the apostles of pure revolution in Paris.

It was not Chauvelin who attracted most attention but another, older man whose pos
ition was that of a mere attache
. In the mornings he worked among his books, writing his memoirs it was said. In the afternoons he went out to keep his private and secret diplomatic appointments. The young men of Mr Chauvet's military academy watched him limp towards his carriage, a man in early middle-age with a puffy, rounded face and full figure, wearing leather breeches with top boots, a round hat and short tail-coat, his hair arranged in a little queue. He was known to the Prime Minister, William Pitt, and to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Grenville, as a "deep" and "dangerous" man. The other inhabitants of the square heard that he had once been Bishop of Autun, until he cast his allegiance on the side of the revolution. His name was Charles Maurice Talleyrand, the future Foreign Minister of Napoleon, and perhaps the greatest name in European diplomacy.
²⁰

Talleyrand's mission in the spring of
1792
was to form an alliance with England or, at least, to persuade Pitt's government to remain neutral in the republic's war against Austria and Prussia. Talleyrand was an anglophile with many friends in English cultural life and in the Whig opposition. The Tories were less well-disposed to him, the Foreign Secretary writing to George III on
28
April
1792
that Talleyrand was not to be considered as more than an attach^. The print-shops of Piccadilly exhibited "strong" caricatures of a smooth
-
tongued and two-faced ex-bishop. When Chauvelin, Talleyrand, and other members of the French embassy went to Ranelagh one evening, where ladies and gentlemen of fashion sipped cool drinks or walked among the pleasure gardens, listening to the music, the "fas
h
ionables" gathered themselves up at the sight of murderers in their midst and fled precipitately.
²¹

Talleyrand failed to get his alliance, but he persuaded Pitt to announce England's neutrality, which was a valuable consideration when the Duke of Brunswick's army drove back the French towards Paris in a few months' time. He returned to Paris in July
1792,
where his "wisdom" and "circumspection" had already been proclaimed by the
Chronique de Paris
on
11
June.