Alan Bell, editor
LORD COCKBURN
Selected letters
282pp. Edinburgh: John Donald. £25.
0 85976 630 6
Henry Cockburn has never been what newspapers now routinely call an “acclaimed” writer. Nor was he exclusively a writer. He was a lawyer, a politician, a pioneer environmentalist. Nevertheless, his writings, which were for the most part published after his death in 1854 and which have never been easy to find, have held the attention of readers from that day to this. A generous and skilful selection of his superb letters has long been hoped for, and that book has at last been published.
Cockburn was born in 1779. His was a Lowland family of lawyer-lairds, members of Scotland’s noblesse de robe. The Cockburns were connected – in an era of furious connection – to the first family in North Britain, the almighty Dundases. In 1796, the Younger Pitt’s minister Henry Dundas received a kinsman’s request, for a sinecure, from Cockburn’s father. “Your namesake Henry in spite of every remonstrance and some degree of severity on my part, persists in being a limb of the Law” – please let him have the Presentership of Signatures. Henry Cockburn (both he and his namesake were often Harrys) did better than that before long, but he was to bite this hand by turning Whig and resigning his post as Depute to the Lord Advocate.
He remained a limb of the law, and went on to shine as a pleader in court. In the course of the 1820s, he took to assembling the Memorials of his Time, which was followed by the two volumes of the Journal, where retrospect gave way to a chronicle of “occurrences as they have arisen”. The Memorials is a performative text: it enacts and assessesis a text which anticipates and enacts the Whig triumph of 1832, when the Reform Act delivered an extension of the franchise and a crisis start was made on the Augean stables of the electoral system. “The Scotch Millennium seems to me to have arrived”, Cockburn exulted in 1829. And eighteen months later, despite concerns about the “extraordinary rise of popular influence”, Ireland, the national debt, poor rates and the “decline of our commercial monopoly”, he exults again. Here is “the majesty of public opinion – that true representative on earth of Omnipotence, omnipresent, just, instinctive, resistless, the asylum of all right, the exposer of all wrong – established, not in newspapers and in pamphlets, but on the very seat of government! These are the scenes that we have lived to see, and been allowed to assist in promoting.” As Scotland’s Solicitor-General in the Grey administration, he helped to write the Scotch Reform Bill. He then joined the bench of judges in Edinburgh. But Harry Cockburn was never to be lost in the Lord Cockburn of his later incarnation.
In a collection of essays, Lord Cockburn: A bicentenary commemoration 1779–1979, the editor, Alan Bell, commended the letters, saying he might one day edit them. His present introduction says that Cockburn’s special claim to fame lies “in a posthumous literary reputation still cherished in his native Edinburgh”. Cherished elsewhere too, of course – by John Sparrow in Oxford and John Clive in Harvard, for instance, neither of them diaspora Scots. There is nothing parochial or provincial, or petit-maître, about Cockburn’s appeal. But it is true that he is intensely local and intensely Scottish, a man who went little, and largely on duty, to the Wen – London. He did once make a grand tour of the Continent, and found it remarkably like Scotland, with Europe harbouring an Arbroath. Displayed in this selection, in his plenitude, is the homely, pawky patrician cherished in his native city.
Alan Bell is a biographer of Sidney Smith and his edition of Cockburn’s letters rests on an expert knowledge of the Edinburgh of Smith’s sojourn there, and of the inner circle, to which Cockburn belonged, of the Edinburgh Review. Bell’s notes are pledged both to locality and to the dates and distinctions of the legal and landed aristocracies of the North. Cockburn was a self-seen “son of the gentry” who took the Liberal side in political contention. He came to the seigneurial view that Walter Scott was not cosy in his Abbotsford nest – what with the disagreeableness of Lady Scott, and his eventual restriction to the company of printers, players and “low Torries”. Cockburn’s justiciary duties took him round and round his native land like some august gypsy, and his book on the subject, Circuit Journeys, abounds in encounters with old laird friends, couthy provosts, the “worthy” of this place and that, and in a minute attention to the Scotland whose landscapes he loved and whose scowling weathers he deplored. He was a great walker, but Ben This and Ben That were apt to be rained off. Meanwhile, poor people are thin on the ground. Of the bathers of Rothesay, he classifyingly observed: “men and women, ladies and gentlemen, proceed with their respective visits to the sea”.
Whig politics, and the politics of the Kirk, which suffered the Disruption of 1843 when its Evangelical, “Wild” wing walked out of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland – the “Venerable”, as it was known – are less prominent here than the human being who engages in these activities but in many others besides. Cockburn, a Lord of Session, admired the mutineer ministers of the Disruption, if somewhat equivocally, for challenging the law of the land and for their possession of an ancient Presbyterian zeal.
Cockburn is thought Classical, but was drawn to Romantic tastes and initiatives, to ruins, towers and castles, and he experienced a recoil from the “mathematical” New Town that was going up around him. He disliked the “brilliancy” of Macaulay’s prose (his conversation, though, was that of a Flanders draught horse, compared with the “light fiery Arabianism” of the brilliant Francis Jeffrey). But he also felt that Gibbon was stylistically unsound, a danger to the young; this might have entailed an attraction to the new prose of Dickens and Carlyle, but Cockburn can’t be said to have written accordingly. He launched into letter-writing in the full flush of a juvenile sensibility. A restless and ambitious young man of feeling, he was to smile at a female correspondent of later years with the injunction that she might at least sit down and write him a letter “describing your emotions”. His own youthful emotions were described. As time goes by, a wiser and funnier man appears in the letters.
The letters of his maturity, though, remain youthful in so often seeming playful, allusive, figurative, teasing, shocking, and they are sufficiently these things to be a problem at times for any annotator who means, as in this case, to be terse. There are a couple of interesting times here when more was or must have been known and might have been noted. The poet Thomas Campbell, one of the circle of Cockburn’s early friends, produced a couplet about a premarital Adam, lonely in the Garden of Eden: “The world was sad! the garden was a wild! / And man, the hermit, sighed – till woman smiled”. When Campbell married, late in life, the news was transmitted by Cockburn: “‘Tam the hermit sighed, till woman smiled.’ Her name is Sinclair – from Liverpool – know nothing about her. No money. This step I take to be more poetical than prudent”. Pegasus, he feared, would be burdened with such a wife. Meanwhile the Tam joke might have been mediated.
Likewise, a reference to “an old good natured stammering schoolfellow of ours, Pat. Sellar” carries a note which explains that this was probably a factor of the Earl of Sutherland, but leaves it to be inferred that he was also , probably, or surely,the much-denounced enforcer of the Highland Clearances, supposed to have uttered the invidious cry: “Damn her, the old witch; she has lived too long. Let her burn!”. Sellar was charged with homicide as a result of his efforts, and acquitted. (Cockburn tried a case where tenants had “rioted” over their eviction. They could not be acquitted, he remarked at Inverness, the majesty of the law had to be upheld, but the conviction “was founded on most scandalous facts. The people who had sown, and were entitled to reap, their corn, had their houses pulled down, with no other houses to go to, no poor house, no ship, nothing but the bare beach to ly upon”. The jury recommended leniency and the sentence was light.)
Allusion reaches its apogee in a letter of 1808, where Cockburn denies authorship of a poem, “Geraldine”. The joke has taken, he told the poet James Grahame.
“You have been censoring one of Shakespeare’s best little pieces, modernised by Warton. This is the poem of which Shakespeare says in a letter to a cousin of Spencer’s, a relation of Sir Henry Wotton’s, “Well beloved Sire – I send you one of my best litt. pieces ycleped The Holy Grove or Geraldine, composed upon the sadde going awaye of yr neece . . . . So you may criticise Geraldine as you please or dare, being Dick’s own.”
Who is this Dick Shakespeare? Having attributed the poem to Cockburn in my book Cockburn’s Millennium (1975), I have since reached the conclusion that it may have been shared with his great friend John Richardson, who left his romantic town to become a London solicitor, and who married Betsey, niece of the Miss Hills of Woodhall near the Pentland Hills. Cockburn and his friends used to foregather at Woodhall, to go for walks and revise each other’s poems, a cénacle of Whig Romantics.
All this matters more than the poem might seem to be worth. Geraldine was a heroine’s name of the period (dropped by Coleridge and in Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel), and the poem in her praise forms part of a vast cento of favourite bits of verse – another period feature, a version of sensibility’s commonplace book – patched together by these Whig Romantics. The Pentlands anthology, compiled between 1807 and 1809, excludes Shakespeare and includes stanzas of their own, and the choices closely correspond to those of The Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse of 1926, edited by David Nichol Smith, who was keen to show an organic growth of Romantic from pre-Romantic nature poetry; the shock of the new thereby both diminished and enhanced. The anthology, by friends of the recently launched Edinburgh Review, which has long been considered hostile to Romantic writers, leads off with two passages, in Cockburn’s hand, from “Tintern Abbey”. He and his anthology set store by the treasuring of favourite places and early scenes. Wordsworth’s poem suggests an aspect of Cockburn’s complex nostalgia.
He was to rebuild and inhabit an old house nearby, causing it to grow a tower “cheered morning and evening by the ring of masons’ chisels – those larks and nightingales of architecture. Yet in the surgency of one’s own walls there is great delight”. Half his life was passed at Bonaly, in flight from the law and the city, in pursuit of “nature and romance”.
