Great lawyers like Lords Campbell, Brougham, and Erskine have commented on this case, all of them expressing their belief in Lord Cochrane’s innocence. Lord Campbell was of opinion that the verdict was “palpably contrary to the first principles of justice, and ought to have been reversed.” The late Chief Baron, Sir Fitzroy Kelly, in criticising the trial, ends by expressing his regret that “we cannot blot out this dark page from our legal and judicial history.” These are the opinions of legal luminaries who were in the fullest mental vigour and acumen at the time of the trial. They were intimately acquainted with all the facts, and we may accept their judgment that a great and grievous wrong had been done to a nobleman of high character, who had not spared himself in the service of the State. Their view was tardily supported by the Government in restoring Lord Cochrane to his rightful position in the Navy.
The part taken by the late Lord Playfair in the rehabilitation of Lord Dundonald has been told by Sir Wemyss Reid in his admirable “Memoirs” of Playfair. Lord Dundonald died in October, 1860, and by his last will bequeathed to his grandson, the present gallant earl, whose brilliant achievements as a cavalry leader in the great Boer War have shown him to be a worthy scion of a warrior stock, “all the sums due to me by the British Government for my important services, as well as the sums of pay stopped under perjured evidence for the commission of a fraud upon the Stock Exchange. Given under my trembling hand this 21st day of February, the anniversary of my ruin.”
Lord Playfair was an intimate friend of the much-worried admiral, and while he was a member of the House of Commons he made a strenuous effort to carry out the terms of the above will by recovering the sums mentioned in it. He moved for a Select Committee of the House, which could not be refused, “as,” to quote Playfair, “the whole world had come to the conviction that Dundonald was entirely innocent.” The Committee was appointed, and was composed of many excellent men, including Spencer Walpole, Russell Gurney, and Whitbread.
What followed shall be told in Playfair’s own words. “I declined to go upon the Committee,” he writes in his Autobiography, as edited by Sir Wemyss Reid, “as my feelings of friendship were too keen to make me a fair judge. The Committee felt perfectly satisfied of Lord Dundonald’s innocence, but they hesitated as to their report from lack of evidence; at the critical point an interesting event occurred.
“In 1814 Lord Dundonald and Lady X were in love, and though they did not marry, always held each other in great esteem for the rest of their lives. Old Lady X was still alive in 1877, and she sent me a letter through young Cochrane, the grandson, authorising me to use it as I thought best. The letter was yellow with age, but had been carefully preserved. It was written by Lord Dundonald, and was dated from the prison on the night of the committal. It tried to console the lady by the fact that the guilt of a near relative of hers was not suspected, while the innocence of the writer was his support and consolation.
“The old lady must have had a terrible trial. It was hard to sacrifice the reputation of her relative; it was harder still to see injustice still resting upon her former lover. Lord Dundonald had loved her and had received much kindness from her relative, so he suffered calumny and the injustice of nearly two generations rather than tell the true story of his wrong.
“I had long suspected the truth, but I never heard it from Lord Dundonald. The brave old lady tendered this letter as evidence to the Committee, but I declined to give it in, knowing that had my friend been alive he would not have allowed me to do so. At the same time I showed the letter to the members of the Committee individually, and it had a great effect upon their minds, and no doubt helped to secure the report recommending that the Treasury should pay the grandson the back salary of the admiral.
“The interesting letter itself I recommended should be put in the archives of the Dundonald family, and this I believe has been done.”