The boy's letters home were entertaining, and much too full of life to cause anyone to imagine that he would not grow up to be the perfect only son of his famous father. On April 3rd, Richard Brooks wrote a letter to his father from boarding school that would be his last one. He was suddenly stricken with scarlet fever and died on April 6th.
The story is made all the more tragic by an almost unforgivable blunder. The headmaster at Richard's school contacted a Cobden family friend, and each man assumed the other had wired Richard Cobden about his son's sudden death. Young Richard Brooks was already buried by the time his father got the news in a most heart-wrenching way. Cobden had just sat down to breakfast in his hotel room on Grosvenor Street in London and was going through his mail. He found the April 3rd letter from his son, and eagerly read it first. Moments later, he opened another letter that consoled him over his terrible loss. Stunned and beside himself with grief, Cobden immediately began the five-hour journey to Dunford, anguishing over how to tell his family, especially Kate. She had already lost two children and was unhealthily attached to Richard.
Cobden appeared at Dunford, ashen and drawn, and broke down as he told them what had happened. The shock was more than Kate could bear, and the loss of her beloved son took on the mythical proportions of Icarus flying into the face of the sun. After several days of denial, she fell into an almost catatonic state, sitting "like a statue, neither speaking nor seeming to hear," Cobden wrote. Hour by hour he watched his wife's hair turn white. Seven-year-old Ellen had lost her brother, and now she had lost her mother, too. Kate Cobden would outlive her husband by twelve years, but she was an emotionally stricken woman who, as her husband put it, "stumbles over [Richard's] corpse as she is passing from room to room." She could not recover from her grief and became addicted to opiates. Ellen found herself in a role too overwhelming for any young girl to play. Just as Richard Brooks had become his mother's best friend, Ellen became a replacement helpmeet for her father.
On September 21, 1864, when Ellen was fifteen, her father wrote her asking her to please look after her younger sisters. "Much will depend on your influence amp; still more on your example," he wrote. "I wished to have told you how much your Mamma amp; I looked to your good example," and he expected her to help "bring [your sisters] into a perfect state of discipline." This was an unrealistic expectation for a fifteen-year-old struggling with her own losses. Ellen was never allowed to grieve, and the burden and pain must have become almost unbearable when her father died a year later.
The very smog that helped cloak the peregrinations and violent crimes of Ellen's future husband robbed her father of his life. For years Cobden had been susceptible to respiratory infections that sent him on voyages or to the seaside or the countryside - wherever there was better air than the sooty soup of London. His last trip to London before his death was in March 1865. Ellen was sixteen and accompanied him. They stayed in a lodging house on Suffolk Street reasonably close to the House of Commons. Cobden was immediately laid up with asthma as black smoke gushed from chimneys of nearby houses, and the east wind blew the noxious air into his room.
A week later, he lay in bed praying that the winds would mercifully shift, but his asthma worsened and he developed bronchitis. Cobden sensed the end had come and made out his will. His wife and Ellen were by his bed when he died on Sunday morning, April 2, 1865, at the age of sixty-one. Ellen was the "one whose attachment to her father seems to have been a passion scarcely equaled among the daughters," said Cob-den's lifelong friend and political ally John Bright. She was the last one to let go of her father's coffin as it was lowered into the earth. She never let go of his memory or forgot what he expected of her.
Bright would later tell Cobden's official biographer, John Morley, that Cobden's "was a life of perpetual self-sacrifice… I never knew how much I loved him until I had lost him." Monday, the day after Cobden's death, Benjamin Disraeli said to members of Parliament in the House of Commons, "There is this consolation… that these great men are not altogether lost to us." Today, in the Heyshott village church there is a plaque on Cobden's family pew that reads, "In this place Richard Cob-den, who loved his fellow men, was accustomed to worship God." Despite Cobden's best intentions, he left an unstable wife to take care of four spirited daughters, and despite the many promises made by influential friends at the funeral, the "daughters of Cobden," as the press called them, were on their own.
In 1898, Jam'e reminded Ellen how "all those who professed such deep admiration and affection for [our] father during his lifetime forgot the existence of his young daughters, the youngest but 3M years old. Do you remember Gladstone at father's funeral telling mother that she might always rely on his friendship amp; her children also - The next time I met him, or spoke to him… was more than 20 years later. Such is the way of the world!"
Ellen held the family together, as she had promised her father she would. She handled the family finances while her mother moved numbly through the last few years of her unhappy life. Had it not been for Ellen's dogged cajoling and firm supervision of the family affairs, it is questionable whether bills would have been paid, young Annie would have gone to school, or that the daughters could leave their mother's house and move into a flat at 14 York Place, on Baker Street, London. Ellen's yearly stipend was 250 pounds, or at least this was what she told her mother she would need. It can be conjectured that each daughter received the same amount, insuring them a comfortable existence, as well as a vulnerability to men whose intentions may not have been sterling.
Richard Fisher was engaged to daughter Katie when Cobden died, and he rushed her into marriage before the family had stopped writing letters on mourning stationery. Over the years Fisher's greedy demands would prove a constant source of irritation to the Cobdens. In 1880, when Walter Sickert entered the lives of the Cobden daughters, Katie was married, Maggie was too spirited and frivolous to serve an ambitious, manipulative man any useful purpose, and Janie was far too savvy for Sickert to go near. He picked Ellen.
Both her parents were dead. She had no one to advise her or raise objections. I doubt that Sickert would have gained Richard Cobden's approval. Cobden was a wise and insightful man and would not have been 'fooled by Sickert's acts or enchanted by his charm. Cobden would have detested the absence of compassion in the handsome young man.
"Mrs. Sickert and all her sons were such pagans," Janie would write Ellen some twenty years later. "How sad that fate has ever brought you into their midst."
The differences between the character of Ellen's father and that of the man she would marry should have been blatantly obvious, but in Ellen's eyes the two men might have appeared to have much in common. Richard Cobden did not have an Oxford or Cambridge education and was in many ways self-taught. He loved Shakespeare, Byron, Irving, and Cooper. He was fluent in French, and as a young man he had fantasized about being a playwright. His love of the visual arts would be a lifelong affair, even if his attempts at writing for the stage were a failure. Cobden too was not adept at handling finances. He might have been savvy in business, but he had no interest in money unless he had none.
At one point in his life, his friends had to raise sufficient funds to save the family home. His financial failings were not the result of irresponsibility but were a symptom of his driving sense of mission and idealism. Cobden was not a spendthrift. He simply had loftier matters on his mind, and this may have impressed his daughter Ellen as a noble flaw rather than a blameworthy one. Perhaps it was fortuitous that in 1880, the year Sickert first met Ellen, John Morley's long-awaited two-volume biography of Cobden was published.