He was greatly respected at home and abroad. On his first trip to America, he was invited to stay in the White House. He gained the admiration and friendship of author Harriet Beecher Stowe after she came to visit him at Dunford in 1853 and the two of them discussed the importance of “cultivating cotton by free labour.” In an essay she wrote a year later, she described him as a slender man of small stature who had “great ease of manner” and “the most frank, fascinating smile.” Cobden was a peer to every powerful politician in England, including Sir Robert Peel, the father of the police force that would one day take on Cobden’s future son-in-law, Jack the Ripper, and lose.
Richard Cobden was devoted to his family and became the only stability in his daughters’ young lives after his only son, Richard Brooks, died at age fifteen in 1856. He was in boarding school near Heidelberg, and was healthy, mischievous, and adored. His mother had turned him into her best friend during her husband’s frequent absences.
Ellen adored her big brother, too. “I send you a little curl of my hair, that you may sometimes think of one who loves you very much,” she wrote him when he was off at boarding school. “You will write to me very soon and tell me how long it will be before I shall have the pleasure of seeing you.” The affection was mutual and unusually sweet. “I shall bring down some presents for you,” Richard wrote her in his boyish scrawl. “I will try to get you a little kitten.”
Richard’s letters hint at the mature, insightful, and witty man he might have become. He was a practical jokester whose April Fools’ Day naughtiness included writing “kick me out of the shop” in German and giving the note to a French boy to present as a shopping list at a nearby grocery store. Yet Richard Brooks was tenderhearted enough to be concerned about a family friend’s dog, who might need an “extra blanket” during the “east winds.”
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.