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.