The man who was vindicated many years after the event

Thomas Cochrane was a British naval officer who had a brilliant career fighting the French during the Napoleonic wars, then became an admiral in the navies of various Latin American independence movements and had an equally successful record fighting for them.

His exploits helped to inspire a number of great works of naval fiction, almost certainly including some of the events of both C.S. Forester's "Hornblower" books and Patrick O'Brien's "Master and Commander" series. 

As I write this post, a reproduction of Montagu Dawson's painting "The smoke of battle - the gallant Speedy" hangs on the wall of the room, depicting the capture in 1801 by HMS Speedy under Cochrane's command of the Spanish frigate El Gamo.

The battle shown in the painting was an extraordinary victory by Lord Cochrane. The disparity between the two vessels was staggering:

• HMS Speedy: A small 14-gun brig with a severely depleted crew of just 54 men.

• El Gamo: A powerful Spanish xebec-frigate carrying 32 heavy guns and a crew of over 300 men.

Recognising that he could not win a conventional long-range or medium-range cannon duel, Cochrane utilized a brilliant tactical gamble. He ran the Speedy directly alongside El Gamo, locking the vessels together. Because the Spanish ship was so much taller, its heavy cannons could not be depressed low enough to hit the Speedy; their broadsides flew harmlessly through the British ship's rigging.

Patrick O'Brien's hero Jack Aubrey uses the same tactic to capture the Spanish frigate Cacafuego

Lord Cochrane was also at one stage a radical MP in the British House of Commons, before inheriting his father's peerage and becoming 10th Earl of Dundonald. (Until he inherited the earldom he could sit in the House of Commons despite being referred to as "Lord" Cochrane because this was what's called a courtesy title.)

In 1814 he was convicted of stock exchange fraud, expelled from the House of Commons, stripped of his rank and honours, and  and jailed. He escaped from prison and went abroad, and that's when he became an admiral for various revolutionary movements.

The fraud conviction remained a source of controversy for two centuries. 

• In 1832 Cochrane was granted a free pardon by the Crown. While a pardon does not legally erase a conviction, it cleared his record enough for him to be immediately reinstated into the Royal Navy with a promotion to Rear-Admiral.

• Restoration of Honours (1847): Queen Victoria formally restored his knighthood and invested him back into the Order of the Bath.

• Posthumous Exoneration (1877): Decades after his death, a fresh investigation by a parliamentary committee officially concluded that Cochrane was innocent of the fraud. In recognition of this, his grandson was paid the back-pay of his naval rank that had been withheld during his 18-year exile.

Nevertheless, even into the 21st century the fraud conviction continued to cast something of a cloud over his reputation. It would however appear that  a new book has finally dispelled that cloud and resolved that controversy in Cochrane's favour.

This month Peter Moore brought out a book called

"A Dangerous Game: Thomas Cochrane's Life on the Edge."

Moore's book draws on new source documents, I think the best way to convey what it says about the stock exchange scandal is to quote from a review of "A Dangerous Game" in the TLS by one of the most distinguished living naval historians, N.A.M. Rodger;

  

 

Not often someone is finally  vindicated two centuries after the event, but that does seem to have been what has happened.