Cochrane Read Online Free

failed. Yet in the general brevet promotion of army officers in 1803, Cochrane-Johnstone was passed over. Indeed, he was made to resign his commission. He wrote to the Prince of Wales saying that he had heard his resignation was to be cancelled and that he was to be made a major-general. A cold official reply informed him that if he had heard anything of the kind, he was sadly in error. Cruelly misjudged, he sat in the comfort of his Harley Street house, describing himself, moist-eyed, to all who would listen as "an innocent man, who had devoted his life and fortune to the service of his King and Country". In order to be immune from arrest for debt and to turn unreservedly to "speculation", he bought the parliamentary seat of Grampound. The constituency was so notoriously corrupt that even an anti-reform House of Commons made an exception and abolished it a decade before 1832. When the authorities chose to topple Thomas Cochrane from a hero's pinnacle, the rogue uncle was a handy instrument. 9
    The 9th Earl himself exercised the most direct influence over his son's development. Quick-tempered, anxious, unpredictable, he was crotchety with good reason, tight-fisted because he had nothing to give. He harped querulously on the "res angusta domi", that convenient Latin tag conditioning his family to frugality and parsimony. In politics he was a Whig, approving progress and emancipation at a future date which seemed to recede infinitely. When he ventured out of Culross, to visit Edinburgh or London, he returned complaining tetchily, "This is an age of sentiment, novels, and overstrained refinement." He despised those who tried to sail "with the tide of the popular". While disliking political oppression, he deeply suspected men like William Wilberf orce whom he saw parading their "misguided phrenzy or opinion, making a bustle about Slave Trade, Freedom, and emancipation of Negroes, while they will turn their eyes from scenes of domestic and national misery". In fact the young Wilberforce's evangelical enthusiasm embraced the suppression of Sabbath-breaking, drunkenness, and indecent literature at home, as well as slavery overseas. To the Earl, he seemed just the type to become the dupe of violent revolutionaries. "He surely does not foresee the consequence of ill-timed alterations." 10
    Even before the death of his young wife, the Earl himself turned away from politics to the immediate question of the "res angusta domi". It was both a corroding anxiety and, at the same time, the spur to achievement. He vowed to redeem the family fortunes, perhaps to hand on to the young Lord Cochrane a flourishing estate whose wealth would be greater and more enduring than that of his ancestors who had built Culross. The new fortunes of the Cochranes would not lie in war, nor in the corrupt ministerial favouritism of Westminster and the "places" found for political sycophants. The riches would be those of the new age which was dawning in Europe, the wealth of reason and the rewards of enli ghtenment. The 9th Earl of Dundonald would be remembered as a great scientist, inventor and manufacturer of his day.
    It was less absurd than it might seem. As a young man, the Earl had spent a short while in the navy. During this period, he had noticed the ravages of worms on the bottoms of ships, where they ate into the structure of the hull. The replacement of so much rotten timber was a considerable drain on the resources of the Admiralty. A few ships were "hobnailed", the bottoms covered with large-headed iron nails, but this was far too expensive a method to be undertaken often. The 9th Earl, pondering this problem, thought of the coal on the Culross estate. It was only mined in a small way, the Earl's philanthropic principles forbidding the use of colliers' wives and daughters as "beasts of burthen" in hauling the coal to the surface. He had undertaken some simple experiments of his own with coal, in a kiln. When it was "reduced" to coke, a thick black