Cochrane (58 page)

' But the war in the Crimea was moving towards an independent conclusion. Sebastopol fell in September
1855
and the belligerents prepared for the Treaty of Paris, signed in the following year. The last chance for the practical demonstration of his secret weapons, or indeed for Cochrane to hold another active command in the Royal Navy, had gone for ever.

The last six years of his life were occupied equally by honours long delayed and controversies even longer established. In October
1854,
besides his rank of Admiral of the Fleet, he had been appointed to the honorary command of Rear-Admiral of the United Kingdom. Characteristically, he accepted the honour only on condition that "such distinction shall not preclude my further service to the Crown and country". This was agreed. In the following month he received a letter from Prince Albert, asking that he should also consent to be elected one of the Elder Brethren of Trinity House. Cochrane replied, accepting the honour and acknowledging the "signal acts of justice and favour
¹¹
which he had experienced from the Queen and her Consort. At the end of the Crimean War, the United Service Club, founded while Cochrane was in the King's Bench prison by men who were generally glad to see him there, elected him to honorary membership. He had always refused to put himself forward for election, claiming that he was too old to enjoy such associations and that, in any case, he preferred privacy to club life.
⁴⁸

He received the honours of his country graciously but, because he never over-estimated such thanks, without excessive gratitude. At eighty-one years old, it was evident to him that his life must end without any further active service or a chance to try his secret weapons in earnest. He therefore devoted himself to the last battle of all, the fight for personal justice.

It was on
26
May
1856
that he wrote to Palmerston, reminding him that though he had been restored to the Order of the Bath, his banner had not been replaced in Henry VII's Chapel at Westminster, down whose steps it had been ceremonially kicked in
1814.
Moreover, though he had been restored to the navy by William IV, justice demanded that he should at least receive his half-pay for the period during which he had been wrongly dismissed. And finally, since he had been unjustly condemned in
1814,
the government ought now to pay back the
£1000
fine. Palmerston replied that the question of the banner was not one for the Prime Minister to deal with. There were no funds for the repayment of fines, and no precedent for making such restitution. As for the half-pay: "I find, on inquiry, that pay or half-pay has not been granted to any naval officer for any period during which he may have been out of the service."
⁴⁹

Cochrane continued to correspond with the government on these subjects, but to no effect. Technically, the state was under no obligation to him and, so far as the public was concerned, the restoration of his rank and honours marked the official acknowledgement of the injustice done him in
1814.
The total of his "claim" against the British government was
£5000
for the cost of his fine and legal expenses plus
£4000
half-pay for the years
1814-1832.

At the same time, he was still claiming
£26,000
due to him from the Chilean government and
£100,000
from the government of Brazil. There was no obvious way of obtaining payment, and Cochrane might have been in danger of becoming little more than a laughing stock in his dotage. But, as usual, to draw the easiest conclusion was to underestimate him. In
1858,
when he was eighty-three and his health began to fail, he retired to the house of his eldest son, Lord Thomas Cochrane, at Queen's Gate, Kensington. Even Kitty, his companion through so many years, who had seemed so much his junior at the time of their marriage, was now sixty-two years old. With the aid of a professional author, G. B. Earp, Cochrane began to put together his
Narrative
of
Services
in
the
Liberation
of
Chili,
Peru,
and
Brazil.
Because he employed a man who was at least a secretary and, at the most, a collaborator, Cochrane's critics were to cast doubt on the worth of his reminiscences. Tried by the test of other contemporary accounts of the same events, they emerge with credit. Indeed, their chief failing is the disproportionate amount of space devoted to the author's financial claims against the governments whom he had served.

With the publication of the
Narrative,
in
1859,
his
Autobiography
of
a
Seaman,
whose two volumes appeared in
1859 1860,
Cochrane's reputation blazed more brightly than ever before the mid-Victorian public. The books were written to obtain the vindication from posterity which it had been so difficult to wring from governments. As they were composed, Earp found himself undertaking more and more of the work, basing the account on Cochrane's papers and documents, supplemented by the old man's memories.

However written, the events of Cochrane's life had the supreme quality of forming a classic Victorian boys' adventure story. But while they found a ready market, in this respect, they also enhanced his prestige as one of the last living relics of the great wars against France. Wellington had died in
1852
; St Vincent, Gambier, and the other naval commanders had died long before that; even the youngest survivors of the last battle, Waterloo, were not old men. The hero of the
Narrative
and the
Autobiography,
though he lay dying in the house at Queen's Gate, had first seen active service in H.M.S.
Hind
sixty-seven years before. Even when he returned from Canada in
1851,
he had been a serving officer over a period of fifty-eight years and under the flags of four countries.

He was, in almost every respect, an ideally Victorian hero. Politically, he had served the very causes which had gained so much instinctive approval by
1860.
He had fought for the freedom of those countries which, for cultural reasons in the case of Greece and economic ones in that of Chile or Brazil, seemed most clearly to deserve it by Victorian standards. Conveniently overlooking his own admiration for Napoleon, it was possible to see him as one of the great defenders of his own country's liberty against the tyranny of France. In his own cause, he had fought against the injustice and oppression of the servants of George IV in a manner now thoroughly admired by the democrats of the new age. Indeed, it would be hard to say whether the Victorians were more concerned over his innocence of the Stock Exchange fraud or whether they merely felt that his other qualities were so overwhelmingly sympathetic to them that the alleged offence had long since been paid for.

The
Autobiography
of
a
Seaman
ended with the Stock Exchange prosecution. Cochrane had intended to continue the story of his life in another volume but he was not to live long enough to write it. Instead, he left the
Narrative
of his South American service as an account of his later active career. He sent one of the first copies of this to Prince Albert and received a reply promising that the Prince would place "a high value" on the gift and asking that Cochrane should inscribe the first volume in his own hand.
⁵⁰

By the autumn of
1860,
the publication of the first two volumes of the
Autobiography
had spread Cochrane's name more widely than ever. Yet whatever the role of the books in justifying him to posterity, they were destined to achieve little more during his lifetime. In October, he underwent an operation in the house at Queen's Gate. On the last day of the month he died there, a few weeks before his eighty-fifth birthday.

His death was reported briefly at first by some papers, with
promises
that it would be noticed more fully later on. It might
"have
reaction of court and state before committing themselves to an unstinted eulogy. They had not long to wait. Whatever hesitations had been felt on the part of Palmerston's government, Victoria and Albert had no intention of allowing one of the last and most gallant of the heroes of the Napoleonic wars to pass in obscurity from the scene. On
6
November, it was announced that he was to be buried among the nation's honoured dead, in Westminster Abbey. The funeral would take place on
14
November.

Ironically, Henry VII's Chapel at Westminster had remained a source of annoyance to Cochrane, since Palmerston had refused to have his banner restored there as Knight of the Bath. After it had been ceremonially evicted from the chapel in
1814,
the banner had been retrieved from a curiosity shop. On the day before the funeral, ignoring Palmerston, the Queen ordered that the banner and insignia of her hero should be restored to their place in the chapel after an absence of forty-six years.

Victorian England had raised the public funeral almost to an art of pageantry by
1860.
The cortege itself, setting out from Kensington for the Abbey, was saluted by the tributes of the press.

Ashes to ashes! Lay the hero down

Within the grey old Abbey's glorious shade.

In our Valhalla ne'er was worthier laid

Since martyr first won palm, or victor crown.
⁵¹

The ornate hearse with six black horses, plumed and caparisoned, was followed by eight mourning coaches and a host of carriages, bearing the Chilean and Brazilian ambassadors, admirals of the Fleet, Brougham, the old Lord Chancellor, and men who had served under Cochrane's command. From
11.30
a.m. until
1
p.m., the procession passed from Kensington to Piccadilly, down St James's Street and Parliament Street, to the Abbey. Few of those who stood in silence along the route were old enough to recall the enthusiasm of the crusade against republican France, when Cochrane first went to sea as an awkward midshipman in
1793.
At eighty-five, he had lived more than twice the average span of life among his contemporaries. He represented, both in age and reputation, the link which united two centuries in deeds of gallantry and honour. As at the funeral of Wellington, eight years before, the cortege marked the end of an era. Perhaps more haunting than the public memories was the mood
inspired
by death.

A Sea-King, whose fit place had been by Blake,

Or our own Nelson, had he been but free

To follow glory's quest upon the sea,

Leading the conquered navies in his wake.
⁵²

Beyond the crowds, the Abbey doors stood open to receive the procession, th
e burial service sung to Purcell’
s chant in G minor. The coffin was borne to its place by two admirals, five captains, and the Brazilian ambassador, the choir singing an anthem specially composed by John Goss, organist of St Paul's, "O Lord God, the strength of my heart, Thou hast covered my head in the day of battle." As the mellow treble notes echoed among the vaulted stone, the words described Cochrane's fortunes in a hundred engagements with singular aptness.

The grave had been prepared in the nave of the Abbey. As the principal mourners stood round it, Brougham looked about him and said bitterly, "No cabinet minister here! No officer of state to grace this great man's funeral!"
⁵³

It was characteristic of Cochrane's life that it should be so, just as his great commemorative statue was built in Valparaiso rather than London, and that when guards of honour stood at his tomb they were Chilean or Brazilian, rather than the representatives of his own country. Indeed, despite the absence of Palmerston and his colleagues, Westminster Abbey was crowded for the funeral by those who, like Brougham, were at one with the words of the triumphal concluding anthem, Handel's "His body is buried in peace, but his memory shall live for ever".

By now, the tone of eulogy in the press seemed unanimous, from
The
Times,
which had always befriended him under Delane's editorship, to
Punch
and the
Illustrated
London
News,
where his enemies were denounced as the men of "envy, obloquy, and malice", and even as, "The crawling worms that in corruption breed". Liberal England had taken up its hero's cause and turned savagely upon the weak and frightened governments of the Regency and George IV.
⁵⁴