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 & still more on your example,” he wrote. “I wished to have told you how much your Mamma & 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 & 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.