Napoleon was dead. An officer arriving in Dover proclaimed it aloud: the Cossacks had slain the Emperor, Louis XVIII had been acknowledged, and the allied armies were on the eve of entering Paris. The intelligence bore every attribute calculated to inspire belief, not least the uniform of him who conveyed it. It possessed but one flaw: it was utterly false. Yet, before that defect could be discovered, securities had changed hands and fortunes had shifted from pocket to pocket.
On the 21st of February, 1814, the war still absorbed public minds, ministries, and markets alike. In the chronicle of Major Arthur Griffiths, a traveler from Dover purported to be an aide-de-camp to Lord Cathcart, entrusted with dispatches of the utmost consequence. He did not confine his utterances to the inn parlor. He transmitted the tidings to the naval port officer at Deal, that they might reach the government by means of the semaphore telegraph. Thus did falsehood endeavor to travel by the very conduits of authority. A traveler’s rumor was transformed, or appeared to be transformed, into official military intelligence.
The funds rose. Griffiths records an advance of ten percent and the considerable gains amassed by those who sold at that critical juncture. Above all, he delineates an elemental mechanism: to announce peace before it exists, to let sanguine expectations drive prices upward, and to withdraw from the market before the contradiction arrives. The intelligence required no prolonged endurance; a few hours were quite sufficient for those who were privy to its fleeting nature.
The man in uniform hastened toward London in a post-chaise. Having reached the capital, he changed conveyances and directed himself to the house of Lord Cochrane. This choice was to impart to the affair an amplitude the traveler had perhaps scarcely anticipated. Cochrane was a naval officer renowned for his feats of arms. He was then preparing the Tonnant to put to sea with a convoy. Yet his honor, his rank, and his connections did not shield him from suspicion; they merely gave him farther to fall.
On that morning, Cochrane was not at home. According to the declaration he subsequently framed for his defense, he was superintending in the City the manufacture of certain lamps of his own invention, intended for the vessels of his convoy. A servant brought him a note left by a military visitor. The signature was difficult to decipher. Cochrane, who was daily awaiting news of a brother grievously wounded in the Iberian Peninsula, sent word that he would return home as soon as his business permitted.
Upon his return, he found a man with whom he was but slightly acquainted: de Berenger. The narrative which this visitor laid before him bore no relation whatever to the death of Napoleon. He declared himself a debtor detained within the rules of the King's Bench, and implored Cochrane to convey him to America. The officer refused. The regulations of the naval service forbade any such disposal of a passage on board. De Berenger thereupon altered his entreaty: to return in uniform would attract perilous attention; might he be accommodated with a suit of civilian clothes?
Cochrane maintained that he gave him a hat and coat taken from the apparel set aside for his forthcoming embarkation. A mere courtesy of a few moments, according to his version; the succor furnished to an accomplice to facilitate a disguise, according to the case that weighed so heavily against him. Here it was that a trivial domestic object became intertwined with a vast operation on the Stock Exchange. The borrowed coat forged a material link between the officer’s dwelling and the courier who had disseminated the false intelligence.
This visit was by no means the sole circumstance retained against him. His brokers had sold securities on the very day of the fraud. In the eyes of the prosecution, the two events answered to each other with fatal precision: the purveyor of the falsehood had gone to change his clothes at the home of a man who profited by the rise. Cochrane countered with a different explanation. He had already held the stock, had long looked for a favorable issue to the war, and had previously left a standing order to sell should the funds attain a specified price. In his submission, the execution of this order required no fresh instructions that morning.
His defense further urged that he held fewer securities than at other times. Had he orchestrated the rise, why had he not exposed himself more boldly to reap the harvest? Why should he have spent the morning busying himself with patent lamps instead of securing his gains? These interrogatories possess persuasive force; yet they remain the arguments of a defendant. Nor does his presence in a workshop suffice, of itself, to determine the extent of his knowledge. The entire cause resides in the chasm between an actual sale, an actual interview, and that criminal confederacy which the law must establish beyond doubt.
The verdict of 1814 went against him. Cochrane was sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment, a fine of five hundred pounds, and the pillory. This last penalty appears upon the record of the sentence, though it must not be inferred that it was ever carried into execution. The consequences extended far beyond his confinement: he was stripped of his rank in the Royal Navy, and his name was erased from the roll of the Order of the Bath. The man whose military triumphs had earned him renown became the man whom public institutions had openly degraded.
Griffiths unreservedly espouses his cause. He charges Lord Ellenborough, the presiding judge, with political animosity, cites eminent jurists who condemned the verdict, and portrays the subsequent restoration of Cochrane’s dignities as an act of reparation. His chapter constitutes a sustained plea, nourished largely by the officer’s own declarations. He goes so far as to invoke Cochrane’s status as a gentleman to dismiss the notion of any guilty cognizance of the scheme. Yet this class-conscious assurance resolves none of the questions raised by the morning visit, the raiment, and the transactions of the brokers. The reader may follow the reasoning of the defense without mistaking the chronicler’s admiration for fresh judicial evidence.
Cochrane subsequently recovered his naval rank and his honors, yet the archive was not closed by this reinstatement. Having succeeded as Earl of Dundonald, he died in October 1860. In his last will and testament, as quoted by Griffiths, he bequeathed to his grandson the sums he held to be still owing by the Government, notably the pay withheld after his conviction. The date affixed to that instrument was the 21st of February: decades later, the day of the false intelligence remained, in his mind, the anniversary of his ruin.
The cause then found a second champion in Lord Playfair, a friend of the late admiral. The latter sought to obtain the payment of these arrears for the descendant. A parliamentary committee was duly appointed. Griffiths relates, upon the authority of Playfair’s memoirs, the intervention of an aged gentlewoman whose name remains concealed. She was said to have preserved a letter written by Cochrane during his imprisonment. In it, the prisoner was said to have asserted his innocence while shielding a kinsman of his correspondent, whom he affirmed to have been implicated in the fraud.
Playfair recounts that, out of loyalty to his departed friend, he declined to tender this letter formally in evidence, but exhibited it privately to the members of the committee. To this he attributed a decisive influence upon their recommendation that the arrears be paid. It is a seductive denouement: that of a man who submitted to dishonor in order to guard a secret. Yet it reaches us only through a second-hand recollection, burdened with an anonymous correspondent and an instrument that was never formally lodged as evidence before the committee. It cannot warrant the narration of a posthumous acquittal which this chapter does not substantiate.
The false death of Napoleon required no more than a single morning to enrich those who sold at the propitious hour. Cochrane devoted a lifetime to combating the aftermath of that morning. A uniform, a civilian coat, a broker's sale order: the selfsame objects sustained two irreconcilable histories. The court chose the one; the admiral’s defenders never ceased to recount the other.