Quotes: Nelson - The Immortal Memory (1988) by David Howarth and Stephen Howarth

He is remembered not mainly because he was a great admiral, a great tactician, or even a great hero in the military sense – but because he was an exceptionally kind and lovable man. Not that he was a saint, far from it: he was vain, sometimes irritable, often self-pitying, and unfaithful to his wife in one tremendous love affair. Yet somehow his human faults seem to have made the people who knew him love him all the more. No admiral ever won such personal devotion. When he died at Trafalgar, his fleet forgot its victory in an astonishing spontaneous outburst of grief: the commander they lost seemed more important to them than the triumph they had won. Many of them expressed their feelings then and there. The despatch sent to the Admiralty by Admiral Collingwood as second-in-command might well have glorified the victory; but he wrote, ‘My heart is rent with the most poignant grief.’ Captain Blackwood, the senior frigate captain, wrote home to his wife: ‘On such terms it was a victory I never wished to have witnessed.’ And Thomas Hardy, captain of HMS Victory and tough as leather: ‘His death I shall forever mourn.’ A sailor down in the gloom of a gundeck found a stub of pencil and a piece of paper, and wrote home: ‘Our dear Admiral Nelson is killed... Chaps that fought like the devil sit down and cry like wenches.’ And Dr Scott, who was the Admiral’s chaplain: ‘When I think, setting aside his heroism, what an affectionate, fascinating little fellow he was, I become stupid with grief.’

These are not terms in which the navy often remembers admirals. But even now, nearly two centuries after his death, it still looks on Nelson with respect and unique affection. Any account of his life should ask the question why, and try to find the answer.       

 

Nelson was a prolific writer – seven large volumes of his letter, despatches and memoranda were published in the 1840s, followed over a century later by an eighth; and they were only the ones that happened to have survived. Sometimes he made a particular effort to ensure the preservation of a document: for example, there are two copies – one in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, the other in the Public Records Officer at Kew – of his last diary and his prayer before Trafalgar, and he wrote both copies himself. More often, his letters were kept by correspondents – even before he became famous – for the simplest and best of reasons: he was far away from those who loved him, and the letters brought him closer. They were and are a pleasure to read, for his voice comes through clearly – chatty, warm-hearted and considerate, with an elegance of style derived from his own wide reading, and the rhythms of the King James Bible – and no doubt the letters were reread many times. In that sense, he wrote a continuing, informal autobiography from the age of fifteen to his dying day.       

 

When Horatio made up his mind, he asked his older brother William to write to his father, who was at the time in Bath, to tell him what he wanted to do. It is not recorded why he asked William to write, or why he chose the sea; but he may have thought William was a more persuasive letter-writer, and as for the sea, there are two likely reasons. The first was Burnham [Thorpe, Norfolk, Nelson’s birthplace] itself.

It is only three miles from the church to the open sea. But the sea, all along that coast, seems strangely remote: it is hidden behind at least a mile of salt marshes and dunes, crossed by ancient dykes and ditches and divided by tidal creeks. The nearest creek, only a mile from home, reaches in to another Burnham, Burnham Overy – there are ten Burnhams in the district, each with a different second name – and Burnham Overy has a quay, or staithe, and good shelter for fishing boats which lie at anchor or, at low water, angled in the mud, even in winter when the north-east wind whistles in across the marshes. Burnham Overy is a natural magnet for a small boy, the place where Nelson would have learnt the feel of a boat, as soon as he was big enough to walk there and clamber aboard; would have learnt also to work an oar and hoist a sail as soon as his arms could do it, and perhaps even to set a course along the winding creek and out through the sandbanks to the open sea.

The other reason was his uncle, Captain Suckling. Horatio had certainly met him, and certainly heard his sea-faring stories: he remembered one when he was sailing into battle at Trafalgar on the day he died. The children would look out for his name in the newspaper, and one day they read of the Falklands ‘disturbance’, and that he had been given a new command. Their father was not altogether surprised when William’s letter reached him in Bath: indeed, he may have been grateful to have a son who knew exactly what he wanted to do. He saw no difficulties, and wrote to his brother-in-law, who replied with oft-quoted and heavy-handed humour: ‘What has poor Horatio done, who is so weak, that he should be sent to rough it out at sea? But let him come, and the first time we go into action a cannon ball may knock off his head and provide for him at once.’

HMS Raisonnable (strictly, the name has two ns, though Nelson spelled it with one) was lying at Chatham on the Medway. To get there from Burnham was quite a formidable expedition. So far as one knows, the little boy had never before been outside Norfolk, and had only travelled about twenty miles within it, when he went to school. Peter, his father’s odd-job-man, put him on the coach to King’s Lynn. The Rector [Nelson’s father] met him there and accompanied him to London. They arrived in winter, early in 1771; and from the capital his father sent him on by coach, for the final stage of the journey, alone.

The boy was a little over twelve, and very small for his age – as a man he was under five foot six – and Chatham was a busy bewildering place with thousands of sailors and ‘dockyard mateys’, hundreds of officers and scores of ships. Something must have gone wrong: either the Rector and Captain Suckling had not arranged a rendezvous, or else Suckling could not be there, or else Horatio arrived at an unexpected hour. Whatever the reason, he could not find his ship, or anyone who could spare the time to tell him what to do or where to go. Finally he was shown the way, but once on board he found no waiting uncle, nor anyone who would pay the least attention to him. His entire first night on a warship was spent waiting on deck. He grew up to be famously fearless, but his introduction to the navy, that first day and night in Chatham, may have been the most daunting experience in his life.

By coincidence, the naval dockyard at that time contained his last ship as well as his first. In his loneliness, he can scarcely have imagined that one day he would also walk her decks, as a commander-in-chief; but he must have seen her, for she was lying close to the two-decked, 64-gun Raisonnable, and was markedly larger – a first-rate, three-decked ship of the line, her sides pierced for one hundred guns. As yet her stern was unadorned, for her name, in yellow letters twelve inches high, would not be painted on until later that summer. But first-rates were rare, and merited curiosity; so perhaps, when he finally met his uncle, he may have learned a few other things about the impressive ship – that she had been launched six years before, was still untried in battle, and would be called Victory. However, if he had time for that, it would have been very brief; for ‘poor Horatio’ was in the navy now, signed on as a captain’s servant, and pitched in to do the best he could in a harsh, rigorous and completely unfamiliar way of life.

Servant was the technical words for such boys: in fact, they were apprentice officers. It was an extremely tough existence for children – living crowded in the cockpit, below the waterline of a ship, dark and damp and comfortless and cold; instantly doing whatever they were told; always able and willing to race to the masthead 170 feet above the deck; long hours of school, and the same food the sailors had. As another twelve-year-old wrote at that time, ‘We live on beef which quite makes your throat cold in eating it, owing to the maggots which are very cold when you eat them, like calves’ foot jelly or blomonge, being very fat indeed.’ The writer must have been a tough little boy, for he added emphatically: ‘I do like this life very much.’ 

Like it or not, this was the usual way – practically the only way – to start a career as a naval officer. One of the perquisites of a captain was the right to carry thirty or forty servants in his ship’s books. Some captains, besides their stewards, cooks and valets, carried superfluous men like barbers and musicians; but most made up the numbers by taking the sons of their friends to sea, and good ones took a great interest in the education of their crowd of little boys. One consequence of this was that almost all naval officers came from a narrow social class. On the whole, they were no aristocrats – those went into the army. They were certainly not what were called the lower classes; in fact most crews disliked the few men, known as tarpaulin captains, who had worked their way up from a humble beginning. Most of them were the minor landed gentry, the squires of England. It was an unfair system, with no pretence of democracy. But it did at least produce officers who had lived under naval tradition from their childhood, and were intensely proud of the service.

 

Suckling knew his nephew needed sea-time to start him on his climb up the ladder of promotion: but he could not find any naval ship that was starting a suitable voyage with a suitable captain, so he transferred the boy to a merchant ship belonging to the trading house of Hibbert, Purrier and Horton, and named Mary Ann. On 25 July 1771, she sailed from London for the West Indies. Her route took her past Kent’s North Foreland, through the Straits of Dover – giving Nelson his first glimpse of a country he would come to detest obsessively – and on down the Channel. Thus, somewhere between the Scillies and Ushant, he first saw an empty horizon ahead, first felt the motion of a ship in the open ocean, first looked down at a bow-wave, up at taut rigging and drawing sails, first worked aloft in a rolling ship – and also, very probably, first felt seasick: for he was sick in bad weather all his life.

Little is known of that first voyage. It lasted about a year, in which time Mary Ann called at Jamaica and Tobago, and presumably many of the islands in between. Beyond that, the only certain records are that the captain was named John Rathbone, that he had served under Suckling as master’s mate in the naval ship Dreadnought, and that the voyage had a deep effect on Nelson. ‘If I did not improve my education,’ he wrote long afterwards, ‘I returned a practical seaman.’ He was thirteen, quite old enough in those days to think of himself as a practical seaman, but young enough to feel a little too conceited about it. He also returned ‘with a horror of the Royal Navy’, for he had thoroughly absorbed the prevailing attitude of merchant seamen towards the king’s ships. Pay there was always lower than in merchant ships, and notoriously late in coming; discipline was severe; leave was minimal; and – particularly in time of war, when the chronic shortage of volunteers was worst – the infamous press gangs would make up the shortfall by force. Nelson characterized the whole ‘with a saying then constant with seamen: “Aft the most honour, forward the better man”’ – because officers were quartered aft and crews forward. ‘It was many weeks before I got in the least reconciled to a man-of-war, so deep was the prejudice rooted; and what pains were taken to instil this erroneous principle in a young mind!’ Yet the experience served him well in later life, for it taught him two things which he never forgot: an outsider’s view of the Royal Navy, and a sailor’s view of his officers.

Clearly, he was rather a handful when he returned to Suckling in the Triumph. But Suckling welcomed him back with courtesy and kindness, with the last year’s news of the family – his father was in good health, and still the Rector, and Maurice, the oldest brother, had asked for Suckling’s influence to get a job in the Navy Office – and also with a sensible and effective way of directing his energy. He promoted the bumptious boy to midshipman, and ‘as my ambition was to be a seaman, it was always held out as a reward, that if I attended well to my navigation I should go in the cutter and decked long-boat’ – not as a passenger, but as a working member of the crew, and later, in command.

Thus, in the first months back under Captain Suckling’s eye, Nelson learned to sail a boat in the estuaries of the Medway and the Thames. Francis Drake was another boy who had had his first lessons there, and naval youngsters still do, still using the same rather clumsy boats that Nelson would have known. It is just as good a place to learn now as it was then: strong tides, and miles of mudbanks and shifting sandbanks covered at high water – these are the best of teachers. And the satisfaction of growing competence and confidence is just the same too – ‘By degrees,’ Nelson said, ‘I became a good pilot, and confident of myself among rocks and sands, which has many times since been of the very greatest comfort to me.’

Exciting as his new skills were, Nelson evidently viewed them only as a means to an end, a way of getting on in the service to which he was (at least for the time being) entirely ‘reconciled’. To swing round a buoy in the Medway was not his idea of naval life, so he set about finding a voyage for himself; and in 1773 he decided what it should be. The great news of the day was that two naval ships were to make a scientific expedition to the Arctic. Without a war to provide satisfactory employment and assist promotion, such rare expeditions were the only way for a junior officer to improve his status. Competition to take part was correspondingly keen, and at first there seemed little chance that the young midshipman would be accepted: until his fifteenth birthday – still some months away – he would officially be a boy, and he was told no boys were going, ‘as being of no use’. However, as still happens to a certain extent, age limits were not an absolute bar to a competent person, but a useful means of rejecting the incompetent. Nelson was plainly becoming as competent as many older men, and on his own admission, ‘nothing could prevent my using every interest to go.’ He had met the captain of one of the ships, who had the unusual name of Skeffington Lutwidge, and shrewdly persuaded him that he was not applying as a boy, but as a practical seaman, to do a grown man’s job. No doubt Captain Suckling put in a good word for him, while Nelson himself ‘begged I might be coxswain: which, finding my ardent desire for going with him, Captain L. complied with, and has continued the strictest friendship to this moment.’ He had not yet met the senior of the two captains, Constantine Phipps, who later became Lord Mulgrave, but ‘he also’, he wrote, ‘continued his kindest friendship and regard to the last moment of his life.’ This was the first time Nelson is seen to exercise his persuasive charm. Until then, he probably did not know he had it, and nobody now can quite define its quality. But looking back, one can see the results. Every captain he served under, even the earliest, was aware of it, and all – except one, perhaps – remained his firm friends for the rest of their lives, or his.

The Arctic expedition had two objectives – to sail as close as possible to the North Pole, and to renew the search which the English had been pursuing since Elizabethan times for a north-east passage by way of Siberia to the Pacific Ocean. In terms of science and exploration, it was not a success. The two ships – Phipps’ Racehorse and Lutwidge’s ominously named Carcass – set out on 4 June 1773, reached Spitzbergen on 28 June, and two days later were stuck in the ice. Sending Lutwidge out with the master of Racehorse to see if there was any way through, Phipps learned that ‘they had ascended a high mountain, whence they commanded a prospect extending to the east, and north-east, ten or twelve leagues, over one continued plain of smooth unbroken ice, bounded only by the horizon’ – and there, drifting somewhat with the floes, they remained. With ‘the weather exceedingly fine and mild, and unusually clear, the scene’, Phipps recorded, ‘was beautiful and picturesque’, and the ships’ companies were allowed to play on the ice all day – probably many of them were not much further from boyhood than Nelson. But as the ice gradually piled up and threatened to crush the ships’ hulls, plans had to be made to abandon them and escape in the boats – just the kind of thing which, as the navy was learning, would bring Nelson to the fore. ‘I exerted myself’, he remembered later, ‘to have the command of a four-oared cutter, which was given me, with twelve men; and I prided myself in fancying I could navigate her better than any other boat in the ship.’

It is quite likely that he could. Certainly, by then, he would have fared little worse than anyone else; and one may guess that his twelve men agreed, for he already had some of the key characteristics which would make him the navy’s best-loved commander: an infectious enthusiasm, a pleasure in seamanship and a buoyant self-confidence, matched by confidence in his sailors, and a sympathetic understanding for them as well. No doubt there was a good deal of adolescent cockiness too: but it seems that even from the beginning, all the elements were present, and most people tolerated his cockiness as later they tolerated his vanity.

At length, however, the ships were got out safely, returning to England to be paid off on 15 October – just over a fortnight after Nelson’s fifteenth birthday – and the only well known result of the expedition was a story which he would probably have liked to forget. With one seaman, he left his ship by walking across the ice in a fog. When it cleared, they were seen, a long way off, trying to attack a polar bear with one musket between them which did not work. Captain Lutwidge had to fire a gun to frighten the bear away. During the reprimand that followed, Nelson explained (according to Lutwidge) that he wanted to take the bearskin home as a present for his father. It was Lutwidge who told the story, never Nelson, and Nelson’s Victorian biographers, eager hero-worshippers, quoted it to prove his courage as a boy. A rather ridiculous painting, done many years later to prove the same point, shows the youth about to club an astonished and frightened-looking bear with the butt of his musket. In fact, there was a crevasse between him and his prey, and as Lutwidge must have told him very clearly, the episode was much more foolish than brave. But it is worth remembering all the same, for it is one of the first records of some other characteristics he never lost: a degree of recklessness when faced with a goal he wanted very much; a readiness to disobey orders, at the risk of his career and even his life; and perhaps even then, the unforced affectionate charm which so often let others overlook his faults.

 

Many of the things Nelson wrote about himself were boastful and seem distasteful to a modern reader, but in justice one has to read them in their context. Almost all of them come from a memoir he wrote in 1799, and sent to two men called Clarke and McArthur, who were jointly occupied in writing the earliest of his many biographies. Nelson was at sea in the Mediterranean at the time, and Clarke and McArthur seem not to have asked for his permission to write a biography, or even told him they were doing so. Nevertheless, when he heard of it, he wrote to McArthur:

‘My dear Sir, I send you a sketch of my life, which I am sensible wants your pruning-knife, before it is fit to meet the public eye; therefore, I trust you and your friend will do that, and turn it into much better language. I have been, and am very unwell, therefore you must excuse my short letter. I did not even know that such a book as yours was contemplated, therefore I beg you will send me the two volumes, and consider me as a sincere friend to the undertaking. That every success may attend you, is the sincere wish of your obliged friend, Horatio Nelson.’

Printing that graceful note at its beginning gave an air of authority to the work, which turned out to be three volumes; but it was misleading. McArthur was a clergyman and Clarke was an admiral’s secretary, and they could not be expected to know the whole of Nelson’s history or of his motives. A basic reason for his writing the account as he did was to make sure, so far as he could, that they got things right, and especially that they put the cause of his actions before the Admiralty, which he believed had often misjudged him. However, they did not do what he asked. They did not use a pruning-knife at all, but published the whole thing. What he had written was a guide to them and a self-justification to the Admiralty: but it all appeared as part of his biography, and since it was the only account of his life that was written in the first person, it has been eagerly used by biographers ever since. It makes him seem very conceited, which few people thought him at the time. It is quite different from the contents of his letters, which are kind and affectionate, careful to express his admiration for his friends and colleagues. In short, this document, written for the private guidance of Clarke and McArthur, should never have been regarded as a basis for the truth about Nelson’s character. Sometimes he accused himself of vanity, and sometimes it was true: he liked praise as much as the next person, and the adulation poured upon him in later life would have turned anyone’s head. But somehow it always turned back again, in a way which would not have happened if vanity had been a fundamental part of his character. Perhaps it is a matter of interpretation, but it seems fairer to say that if he had a permanent weakness of character, it was not vanity, but the inability to be anything other than frank. In an ideal world, that would not be a failing.

Vain or not, Nelson’s patrol of the Mosquito Coast proved him to Admiral Parker, and on his return to Jamaica, Parker rewarded him with the highest appointment he could give: on 11 June 1779, he promoted Nelson to the rank of post-captain.

The rank signified than an officer was capable of commanding a ship of twenty guns or more; Nelson was given command of the 28-gun frigate Hinchinbrook, with a complement of about two hundred men. To be ‘made post’, as the phrase went, was the most critical step in an officer’s career. The new captain’s name was ‘posted’ in the Navy List, and it was an appointment for life. Subsequent promotion was strictly by seniority; nobody could be promoted over his head. When Nelson became a captain, he was still only twenty years old. Thereafter, he only had to live long enough, without disgrace, and he was sure to become an admiral.

As commander-in-chief in the Indies, Parker made many captains, because had many vacancies to fill. Captains were being lost not through battle so much as through fever: the old wardroom toast, ‘A bloody war and a sickly season’ (which brought quick promotion), was often proposed. [...] The space for Nelson’s promotion came because the captain of the Hinchinbrook was killed by accident. ‘We all rise by deaths’, he wrote a few years later to his brother William, who had become a vicar. ‘I got my rank by a shot killing a Post-Captain, and I most sincerely hope I shall, when I go, go out of [the] world the same way; then we all go in the line of our Profession – a Parson praying, a Captain fighting.’

In the long run, this way of promotion had disadvantages. A young post-captain had to wait a very long time before he could hope for a further step up the ladder: Nelson himself waited eighteen years, and many of his contemporaries even longer. Lord St Vincent, who was another commander-in-chief, was quoted as saying that he would promote a hundred captains to open the way for one was who needed as an admiral. But the one who was needed did not necessarily become a flag officer, for the other ninety-nine could clog the higher ranks. The system that the navy came to have far too many senior captains and admirals, and most of them, with no hope of ever getting a ship to command, found themselves year after year on ashore on half-pay. The worst congestion came when the size of the navy was being cut down after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Next time naval war was declared, in the Crimea in the 1850s, there were unemployed lieutenants in their sixties, admirals who had not set foot on a ship for most of a lifetime, and commanders-in-chief who were over eighty and did not quite understand the changes that had happened since they had been boys. In making Nelson post at twenty, Parker was looking a very long way ahead, hoping at least that in twenty-five years’ time Nelson would be fit for higher command. Presumably Parker thought he would, and presumably – which may have been just as important – the redoubtable Lady Parker thought the same.

Nelson was then unassailably a captain, but he still did not look like one. A little later, by chance, on board the Barfleur – the flagship of Lord Hood, at anchor in the narrows off Staten Island – he was to meet no less a person than Prince William Henry, the son of King George III. The prince was then a midshipman, and ‘had the watch on deck,’ as he wrote later, ‘when Captain Nelson... came in his barge alongside, who appeared to be the merest boy of a captain I ever beheld; and his dress was worthy of attention. He had on a full-laced uniform; his lank unpowdered hair was tied in a stiff Hessian tail, of an extraordinary length; the old-fashioned flaps of his waistcoat added to the general quaintness of his figures, and produced an appearance which particularly attracted my notice; for I had never seen anything like it before, nor could I imagine who he was, nor what he came about. My doubts were, however, removed when Lord Hood introduced me to him. There was something irresistibly pleasing in his address and conversation; and an enthusiasm, when speaking on professional subjects, that showed he was no common being.’

No common being: Admiral Parker, Lord Hood, the prince, everyone recognized in spite of his meagre dress that Nelson had the uncommon qualities of a captain. These had two aspects, not easily combined. First there was the intellectual, almost bookish, understanding of naval strategy and tactics, and the social grace to talk of these things with seniors; and secondly the ability to control a difficult, diverse and potentially dangerous crew of several hundred men and weld them into an efficient, contented company.

Nelson was an exceptionally kindly man all his life, but he could be extremely tough if he thought the good of the service demanded it. Everyone knows the fearsome punishments the navy used in those days, especially the flogging with the cat-o’-nine-tails. Nelson’s instinct undoubtedly was to avoid such barbarities, but he was perfectly capable of ordering a man to be flogged: he could never have been a captain otherwise. It may be difficult to see these things through modern eyes, but ships then in wartime were manned partly by volunteers, partly by men rounded up by the press-gang, and partly by vagrants and layabouts and minor criminals who were sentenced to the ships instead of prison. So in every naval crew there were extremely lawless elements.

However, nobody wanted to be shipmates with a man who got drunk, stole, murdered or endangered them all by sleeping on watch; and a good sailor knew as well as anyone that there had to be drastic punishments. Crews did not like captains who were too easy-going. What they looked for in a captain was first and foremost professional competence, which would get them out of tight corners and win them prize money, and after that, strict justice in accordance with the naval law and custom which everyone understood.

That was precisely what Nelson was able to give them: supreme confidence, firm naval justice and also a certain touch of his own; a touch of human sympathy and understanding and humour, and always generous praise and thanks for jobs well done. Perhaps nobody now can put it exactly into words, but the fact is that all through his life his crews responded to his personality with total loyalty and devotion.

 

Bound for the West Indies to take part in the constant naval patrols, HMS Boreas sailed from Long Reach at daylight on Monday 12 April [1784], just after high water; and as Locker read in a letter from Nelson, until they reached the open ocean, the voyage was not a happy one. ‘Since I parted from you,’ he wrote, ‘I have encountered many disagreeable adventures.’ They had scarcely weighed anchor when ‘the damned pilot – it makes me swear to think of it – run the Ship aground, where she lay with so little that the people could walk round her till next high water. That night, and part of the next day, we lay below the Nore with a hard gale of wind and snow; Tuesday I got into the Downs; on Wednesday I got into a quarrel with a Dutch Indiaman who had Englishmen on board, which we settled, after some difficulty. The Dutchman has made a complaint against me; but the Admiralty fortunately has approved my conduct – a thing they are not very guilty of when there is a likelihood of a scrape.’

It took six days to arrive at Spithead, and there Nelson had to take on board some less than welcome passengers: Lady Hughes, a chatterbox wife of the commander-in-chief of the Leeward Islands, and Rosy, their unmarried, exceedingly unattractive daughter. The only thing as plain as poor Rosy was her mother’s determination to find her a husband. Observing bluntly that ‘the mother will be the handsomer in a few years’, Nelson was horrified to realize that whatever the gorgeous Miss Andrews might have thought, Lady Hughes’s opinion was that a young post-captain would be a very suitable match. Instant action was required to make it clear he was unavailable. Putting himself ashore, he hired two horses and ‘a young girl’ as a riding partner, and set off for a pleasant trot, no doubt being as obvious as possible about the whole business.

It was nearly a disaster. He could not control his mount, and as he clung on desperately, the ‘blackguard horse’ bolted, ‘carried me all around the works into Portsmouth by the London gates, through the town, out at the gate that leads to [the] Common, where there was a waggon in the road, which is so very narrow that a horse could scarcely pass. To save my legs, and perhaps my life, I was obliged to throw myself from the horse, which I did with great agility; but, unluckily, upon hard stones which has hurt my back and my leg... It was a thousand to one that I had been killed.’ And ‘to crown all,’ the girl’s horse bolted too, and was stopped by a complete stranger.

One may readily imagine Nelson hobbling and cursing back to Boreas, and the girl, perhaps disdainful of him, going gratefully away on the arm of the ‘gallant young man’ who ‘saved her from the destruction which she could not have avoided.’ However, the bruises and embarrassment were worth while: though Lady Hughes was still ‘an eternal clack’, she took the point, and did not press Rosie further on the unwilling captain. After all, there were plenty of other young men around.

Lady Hughes was evidently a realistic and good-natured woman. As she talked Boreas – ‘dear Boreas’ – across the Atlantic, she took a great liking to Nelson, and understood his rebuff to Rosie too well to hold it against him. Very much later, she wrote about the voyage; and although she was self-deprecating – ‘As a woman, I can only speak of those parts of his professional conduct which I could comprehend’ – she left a vivid and oft-quoted picture of Nelson’s views of captaincy. He had taken about thirty midshipmen with him, mostly (in the usual way) the sons of friends and relatives. Among such a number, said Lady Hughes, ‘it may reasonably be supposed there must have been timid spirits, as well as bold. The timid he never rebuked, but always wished to show them he desired nothing that he would not instantly do himself: and I have known him say, Well, sir, I am going a race to the mast-head, and beg I may meet you there. No denial could be given to such a request; and the poor little fellow instantly began to climb the shrouds. Captain Nelson never took the least notice in what manner it was done, but when they met in the top, spoke in the most cheerful terms to the midshipman, and observed how much any person was to be pitied who could fancy there was any danger, or even anything disagreeable in the attempt.’

Of course there could be a great deal of danger going aloft – one slip could be fatal – and first time off, it can be most disagreeable to climb perhaps 140 feet up the swaying, windy rigging. However large the vessel, its deck looks unnervingly small from such a height, and at the mast-head, you seem to be on an inverted pendulum, swinging out over the water from side to side in a most disconcerting way. But as Lady Hughes noticed, ‘After this excellent example, I have seen the same youth who before was so timid, lead another in like manner, and repeat his commander’s words.’

She also noticed how much attention Nelson paid to the midshipmen’s schooling – not only in navigation and seamanship, but also in the social graces. When they eventually reached Barbados and went to dine with the governor, Nelson asked Lady Hughes’s permission to take of the midshipmen along, explaining to her and the governor: ‘I make it a rule to introduce them to all the good company I can, as they have few to look up to, besides myself, during the time they are at sea.’

Such consideration was admirable, but Nelson’s consciousness of his rank had another side, which earned him enemies and hindered his career. He showed it first in Madeira. On arrival there at the beginning of June, he and Lady Hughes paid the customary visits to the governor and the consul. The consul did not return the compliment as he should have done, saying the government had not provided him with a boat for such purposes. Nelson thought this was a paltry excuse, and promptly banned any further contact with him. Apart from anything else, this meant he was not invited to a party in Boreas to celebrate the king’s birthday on Friday 4 June. It may have been just as well for him, in one way. A word which often crops up in Nelson’s letters is ‘bumper’, meaning a glass of wine full to the brim. When ‘drinking a toast in a bumper’, the idea was to down it all in one go without spilling a drop – and at the party, ‘after dinner, the healths of the king, queen and their thirteen children [they still had two more to come] were drunk in as many bumpers.’            

The Nelson brothers both took advantage of such opportunities as the island afforded: two days after the party, William conducted divine service on board, and received ‘thanks for his excellent discourse’; the captain, meanwhile, ordered four and a quarter casks of Madeira for friends at home and abroad. When they set sail again after a week in port, Nelson’s good humour was much restored, even though (as he disparagingly said of the ladies) his ship was still ‘pretty well filled with lumber.’ He lectured the ship’s company on the diet and hygiene necessary to survive a four-year tour of the tropics; when crossing the equator, they had the usual jollifications, with ‘King Neptune’ coming on board and ducking all those who had not been through the ceremony before; and soon he had relaxed sufficiently to describe Rosy and Lady Hughes as ‘very pleasant good people’. Unfortunately he found he could do little with Rosie’s brother, who was one of the midshipmen; and when they arrived in the Leeward Islands, towards the end of June 1784, Admiral Sir Richard Hughes turned out to be the same as the rest of the family – bearable, but quite ineffectual.

‘Tolerable,’ was Nelson’s opinion, ‘but I do not like him, he bows and scrapes too much for me.’ There seemed little to recommend him as a commander-in-chief: he lived in an ordinary boarding house (‘not much in the style of a British Admiral’, said Nelson sniffily); he had only one eye – not the result of some glamorous action, but of trying unsuccessfully to spear a cockroach with a table fork; now, all he wanted in Barbados was a quiet life. It did not take long for Nelson to reach a firm conclusion: ‘The Admiral and all about him are great ninnies.’ And with that began one of the most infuriating periods of Nelson’s career.

It was not only the difference in personalities which raised his hackles, and which made the next nine months on the station wretched and frustrating for him. In his Memoir, he gave a succinct description of the real problem he faced in the West Indies: ‘The Americans, when Colonists, possessed almost all the trade from America to our West India Islands; and on the return to Peace [after the War of Independence], they forgot, on this occasion, they became foreigners, and of course had no right to trade in the British Colonies.’ But of course they were trading, and no one was trying to stop them: ‘Our Governors and Custom-house Officers pretended that by the Navigation Act they had a right to trade; and all the West Indians wished what was so much in their interest.’

Nelson had found he was senior captain on the station, and he took his responsibility seriously: he knew the trade was illegal and foretold strategic problems if it was not stopped. But Admiral Hughes was extremely weak-willed. ‘He is led’, Nelson wrote to Locker, ‘by the advice of the Islanders to admit the Yankees to a Trade; at least to wink at it. He does not give himself the weight I think an English Admiral ought to do. I, for one, am determined not to suffer the Yankees to come where my ship is; for I am sure, if once the Americans are admitted to any kind of intercourse with these Islands... they will become first the Carriers, and next have possession of our Islands, are we ever again embroiled in a French war.’

This makes Nelson sound very anti-American, which he was not – in later years, in the Mediterranean, he was glad to offer free protection to American merchant ships there. He had no orders to do so, and knew he was making a gesture of international consequence by giving the shelter of the British flag to Americans; but as he said at that time, ‘I am sure of fulfilling the wishes of my sovereign, and I hope of strengthening the harmony which so happily subsists between the two nations.’

Similarly, in the Caribbean in 1784, fulfilling the wishes of the sovereign was all he wanted to do, and he was certain what those wishes must be. The Navigation Act spelled them out clearly. Hughes claimed to have no specific orders from Britain – ‘Very odd,’ said Nelson, ‘as every captain of a man-of-war was furnished with the statures of the Admiralty, in which was the Navigation Act.’ Hughes then asserted that ‘he had never seen the book.’ Of course Nelson promptly showed it to him: he ‘seemed convinced’, said he had not noticed the Act before, and issued orders for its enforcement. ‘Having given Governors, Custom-house Officers and Americans notice of what I would do,’ the Memoir continues, ‘I seized many of their Vessels, which brought all parties upon me...’

It was impossible to argue against the strict legality and correctness of Nelson’s actions, yet only four people in the whole of the British Caribbean supported him. Hughes, as commander-in-chief should have been one of them, but he was not: in December 1784, after pressure from traders, governors and corrupt customs officers throughout the region, he rescinded his order of enforcement. His new instruction was that foreign merchantmen should be stopped and their approach reported to the local governor, who would then decide whether they should be allowed into port or not. If they were, Nelson was ‘on no account to hinder or prevent such foreign vessel from going in accordingly, or to interfere any further in her subsequent proceedings.’

This was the most serious dilemma Nelson had ever faced. ‘I must either disobey my orders,’ he told Locker, ‘or disobey Acts of Parliament, which the Admiral was disobeying.’ He decided on the former. ‘I wrote to the Admiral that I should decline obeying his orders, till I had an opportunity of seeing and talking to him, at the same time making him an apology.’ Sir Thomas Shirley, a general in the army and Governor-General of the Leewards, was outraged, and told Nelson plainly that ‘old respectable officers of high rank, long service and a certain life are very jealous of being dictated to in their duty by young gentlemen.’ That is certainly true, and Shirley must have been considerably taken aback by Nelson’s vigorous reply: ‘I have the honour, Sir, of being as old as the Prime Minister of England, and think myself as capable of commanding one of His Majesty’s ships as that Minister is of governing the State.’

It is a revealing remark. Most people thought he was being excessively officious – and rashly so, from the career point of view: Hughes warned him that if he carried on, he would be bound to ‘get into a scrape’. But, ‘trusting to the uprightness of my intentions’, Nelson did carry on; and the example of Pitt may have given him strength. Perhaps he remembered his own words of a year before, and saw himself in them: ‘Mr Pitt, depend upon it, will stand against all opposition. An honest man must always in time get the better of a villain.’

[...]

Altogether, Nelson’s actions during this period – his only peacetime commission – came near to professional suicide. Though technically right, he was creating immense ructions with influential men, and causing the far-off Admiralty no end of trouble. He also put himself at severe financial risk. Just after the collision with Moutray, the islanders of Nevis banded together to sue him for the trade he had lost them, claiming £40,000 from a man whose full pay was £260 a year.

‘I was so persecuted from one island to another’, he wrote, ‘that I could not leave my Ship.’ For eight weeks he remained in Boreas to avoid arrest, writing to his uncle William Suckling (who had worked all his life for the Customs), to Hughes, the Admiralty, the secretary of state and – trusting on his slight connection – even to the king. Hughes by then was thinking of getting some senior captains out from England, so that Nelson could be court-martialled, but the civil trial in Nevis intervened; and to Nelson’s immense relief the judge shared his attitude to the law. In spite of the islanders’ plaintive description of a marine sentry as ‘a man with a drawn sword’ who they were sure was there to cut their throats, the seizures of American ships were upheld. Nelson was acquitted; and three months later, a reply came from England, saying that his costs would be met by the Treasury. The Admiralty acknowledged he was right, but simultaneously they used an unusually subtle device to indicate their displeasure with the captain who stuck so punctiliously to the rules. The rules, or naval tradition at least, said that after any action, praise or blame went to the most senior officer involved; and as Sir Richard was commander-in-chief, he and Governor Shirley received official commendation for their hard work and efforts in protecting British trade.

 

Thus, by the time Nelson and Fanny first met a few days later, in the middle of March 1785 – just after he had said goodbye to Mrs Moutray – each had an idea of the other, and was predisposed to investigate a little further. Fanny saw much what she had been led to expect: a naval captain about her own age, slightly built, tanned, rather shy, very earnest, serious and polite, with a face not handsome but engaging, and an even more engaging ability to relax completely with her little boy. Nelson, to his surprise, saw a new incarnation of his ‘dear, sweet friend’, and wrote enthusiastically that ‘her manners are Mrs Moutray’s’ – but without the encumbrance of a husband. Her accomplishments, too, were those of an elegant lady: she spoke French fluently (which, given his own difficulties with the language, would have impressed him); she sewed beautifully (some examples of her delicate needlework survive); she was said to be very musical (untrue, in fact); her eyes were dark grey, her features quite fine, her figure suitably feminine, and her complexion unusually fair for the tropics, for she was a creature not of the sun but of the salon, venturing outdoors only with a parasol and remaining always in the shade.

In short, she was a fairly ordinary woman of her time, class and place. But compared to the greater number of merchants’ wives, prostitutes and black slaves (together, the majority of females in the Caribbean), there were not many like her; each had a rarity value; and presumably very few of the eligible women had an appealing young child. To many a young man like Nelson, then – lonely, affectionate and of fatherly disposition – the idea of an instant family is very beguiling, and there can be little doubt that Josiah, just five years old, formed a definite part of the attraction which Nelson swiftly felt. Within a few months, he was writing ‘Give my love to Josiah’, ‘How is my little Josiah?’ and ‘My dear Josiah shall ever be considered as one of my own.’

There is great poignancy in that last remark. Nelson, child of a large and loving family, was obviously looking forward to having a family of his own, with children of his own blood as well as Josiah. But in the ‘Sketch of my life’ which he wrote for his first biographers, this was all he felt able to say of Fanny, and of the years he spent with her:   

‘In March of this year [1787] I married Frances Herbert Nisbet, widow of Dr Nisbet, of the island of Nevis; by whom I have no children.’ However, the enormous private sadness compressed into those few words was, during the summer of 1785, unimaginable. Money, or the lack of it, was the only problem Nelson could foresee then, and in November he turned again to his uncle William Suckling with ‘a business which perhaps you will smile at... and say “This Horatio is for ever in love”.’ As he pursued his wooing, in a curiously formal fashion, Fanny responded likewise. The long interval between meeting and their marriage was dictated by President Herbert. Uncle William learned that Nelson had admitted to Herbert, ‘I am as poor as Job; but he tells me he likes me, and I am descended from a good family... but he also says, “Nelson, I am proud, and I must live like myself, therefore I can’t do much in my lifetime; when I die she shall possess the major part of my property. I intend going to England in 1787 and remaining there my life; therefore, if you two can live happily together till that event takes place, you have my consent.”’

Nelson ended his begging letter: ‘Who can I apply to but you? Don’t disappoint me, or my heart will break.’ Uncle William, who had heard it all before, was somewhat put out by the emotional blackmail, for he was thinking of getting married himself, and would need all his money for that. But family loyalty prevailed: he promised his help, and Nelson, reassured, was able to concentrate on his two favourite preoccupations, love and duty.

They had often conflicted before, but never so much. He proposed to Fanny in July 1785, and in mid-August he had to go to Barbados, and was not back until the end of the year. In March 1786 he had to cruise again, supposedly for three months; but apart from brief visits in July and October, duty kept him away from Nevis for most of the next twelve months, until the day he wed.

Duty always came first. From Barbados (which he nicknamed ‘Barbarous Island’), he wrote to Fanny: ‘Never, never do I believe shall I get away from this detestable spot. Had I taken your advice and not seized any Americans, I should now have been with you; but I should have neglected my duty, which I think your regard for me is too great to have wished me to have done. Duty is the greatest business of a Sea-officer. All private considerations must give way to it, however painful it is.’ This meant that a very large proportion of the letter was by letter, between two people who inevitably must have become almost imaginary to each other. It is probably not going too far to say that, instead of a flesh-and-blood woman, Nelson was courting an idea.

He did miss her, and when he received his first letter from her, he was as thrilled as a teenager: ‘My dearest Fanny, What can I say? Nothing, if I speak of the pleasure I felt at receiving your kind and affectionate letter; my thoughts are too big for utterance. You may suppose that everything which is tender, kind, and truly affectionate has possession of my whole frame. Words are not capable of conveying an idea of my feelings...’

Often the best love-letters are unplanned. They may end up disjointed, even incoherent, but if the writer begins without knowing what he is going to write and finishes without remembering what has been written, the result is at least authentic. Nelson’s reply to Fanny’s first letter has that authenticity of feeling – ‘I have begun this letter, and left off, a dozen times; and found I did not know one word from another... therefore expect nothing but sheer stupidity.’ Writing from English Harbour in Antigua, fifty miles from Nevis, he rambles and gossips, telling her with touches of humour of things he has done, places and people he has seen, and ends: ‘Although I am just away from salt water, yet, as I am in a hurry to get the Berbice away, that she may reach Nevis by the evening, I must finish this thing; for letter I cannot call it. I have a newspaper for Miss Herbert [the President’s daughter]; it is all I have to offer that is worth her acceptance; and I know she is as fond of a bit of news as myself. Pray give my compliments to her, and love to Josiah.’

There are little intimacies here which carry echoes of conversations in Nevis, and a real sense of the closeness he felt to Fanny – an invitation from an islander ‘made amends for his long neglect, and I forgot all anger: I can forgive sometimes, you will allow’, while another islander ‘says he understood and believed I was gone to England – Whistle for that! The country air has certainly done me service. I am not getting fat, my make will not allow it: but I can tell you, and I know your tender heart will rejoice, that I have no more complaint in my lungs, and not the least pain in my breast.’

So she had heard all his problems while he was in Nevis – his dislike of the station, his wish to get back to England, his health – and had teased and sympathized and warned him not to gain weight: all exactly the kind of things Mrs Moutray or any other well disposed woman would have done. But no other unmarried woman had been sufficiently well disposed; and since the only way Nelson seemed able to respond to a kindly woman friend was to fall in love with her, it followed that if she was unmarried, he was likely to propose to her. By the chances of Dr Nisbet’s death and President Herbert’s position in Nevis, Fanny just happened to be the one. Many years later, in a love-letter to another woman, Nelson wrote that he had a ‘fond heart – a heart susceptible and true.’ He underlined the last phrase, and it was the single most accurate thing he ever wrote about himself.

Susceptible as ever, he had wasted little time in proposing to Fanny; but as the months away on duty lengthened, the spontaneous delight of that first enthusiastic response from Antigua vanished. Certainly, he wrote many expressions of esteem and affection; certainly, he was an inexperienced lover, and a busy man, and on both counts may have found it difficult to maintain, at a distance, the original authentic note of joyous confusion. Later, indeed, it did come back: ‘You will not be surprised at the glorious jumble of this letter.’ However, that was eleven years after his wedding, when he was writing to Lord St Vincent while sitting opposite Emma Hamilton. ‘Were your Lordship in my place, I much doubt if you could write so well; our hearts and our hands must be all in a flutter.’ When courting Fanny in the Caribbean, frequently hundreds of miles from her, his ‘fond, susceptible heart’ was indeed true; but only, it appears, in the sense of being unwaveringly loyal, which was a part of his nature anyway.

Even making every allowance, most of Nelson’s letters on the way to the altar are pedestrian. ‘The foundation of all conjugal happiness, real love, and esteem is, I trust, what you believe I possess in the strongest degree towards you’, says one. ‘I declare solemnly, that did I not conceive I had the full possession of your heart, no consideration should make me accept your hand.’ (One wonders, had she proposed to him? Or was it a reference to the rumour that Admiral Hughes had offered another captain £5,000 to marry Rosy?) ‘Separated from you, what pleasure can I feel?’, another letter asks rhetorically. ‘None, be assured: all my happiness is centred with thee; and where thou art not, there I am not happy. Every day, hour, and act convince me of it... I daily thank God, who ordained that I should be attached to you. He has, I firmly believe, intended it as a blessing to me; and I am well convinced you will not disappoint his beneficent intentions.’

Correct, formal, stilted – ragged sentiments of the Bible and Shakespeare – presumably he thought she would like this kind of letter, and presumably she did: at any rate, they did not put her off. It is hardly the stuff of romantic love, especially from a man who could be so headily romantic as he; but he specifically said, many times, that he did not love her in that way. What is more, other people – including Prince William – said as much to him, and he agreed. The prince, now a captain, returned to the West Indies late in 1786. Spending more time with Nelson than Fanny could, ‘his royal highness often tells me, he believes I am married; for he never saw a lover so easy, or speak so little of the object he has a regard for. When I tell him I certainly am not, he says, “Then he is sure I must have a great esteem for you, and that is not what is (vulgarly), I do not much like the use of that word, called love.” He is right: my love is founded on esteem, the only foundation that can make the passion last.’

There is something in that, indeed, but it is an observation one might expect more from a priest, a philosopher or a man already long and happily married. Yet whether he was showing an ominously intellectual approach to marriage, or an unusual degree of maturity for a twenty-seven-year-old, there is no evidence that he ever thought of changing his mind then – rather the contrary. A year after their first meeting, he said to Fanny: ‘With my heart filled with the purest and most tender affection, do I write this; for were it not so, you know me well enough to be certain that even at this moment I would tell you of it.’ And he would have done; he could never hide his feelings – ‘I cannot carry two faces.’ He knew himself as well as anyone can, and had found, in his own words, ‘an amiable woman’. She and Josiah were what he wanted and needed, as he was for them, and he confidently expected a lifetime of contentment, slowly and surely building the bricks of esteem and affection into a happy household, unglamorous but solid, just as his parents’ marriage had been. In this light, two unintended prophesies he made at the time are all the more painful. The first was in a letter to his brother William: ‘The dear object you must like. Her sense, polite manners, and to you I may say, beauty, you will much admire; and although at present we may not be a rich couple, yet I have not the least doubt but that we shall be a happy pair – the fault must be mine if we are not.’ And the second was to Fanny herself: ‘How uncertain are human expectations, and how vain the idea of fixing periods for happiness.’  

 

For his own part, Nelson faced only one slight problem in Naples: he felt obliged to return the king’s hospitality, not an easy thing to do in a man-of-war which had been five months at sea. [Sir William] Hamilton came to the rescue. Everything necessary for a royal entertainment was ferried out to Agamemnon from the embassy. At ten o’clock on Sunday morning, 15 September [1793], the Hamiltons arrived for breakfast on board. The king was scheduled to follow three hours later for lunch, when he would be entertained with a cannonade and a demonstration of broad-sword fighting; but before this could happen, an urgent message came from Sir John Acton. A French man-of-war and three vessels in convoy were reported 250 miles away. There were seven Neapolitan warships and one 40-gun Spaniard in Naples Bay ready for sea, but none showed the least inclination to move, so Nelson ‘had nothing left but to get to sea, which I did in two hours’. The Hamiltons were taken ashore, everything belonging to the embassy was hastily returned – with the exception of a butter dish, overlooked in the hurry – and in a manner which must have impressed all observers, Nelson and Agamemnon quit the bay.

Despite the effort, the Frenchman was not found. On the other hand, Sir William Hamilton’s butter dish was, and twelve days later, at anchor in the neutrals waters of Leghorn (present-day Livorno), Nelson wrote with thanks and apologies to Hamilton. Hamilton’s reply was warm: he and his wife would always remember Nelson’s visit with pleasure, hoped he would return, and promised him welcome at any time. This was more than a social platitude – the two men had taken to each other at once. Hamilton found the younger man’s vigour and energy appealing; Nelson saw a man similar to his father, scholarly, kind and wise; and they continued to correspond until they met again, five years later. The first encounter had lasted only four days; after the second, the whole of the rest of their lives would become intertwined, with both men loving one woman, and all three, whenever possible, living together as one household.

In the autumn of 1793, however, Emma Hamilton and her already colourful past – blacksmith’s daughter, artist’s model, unmarried mother, cast-off mistress – made only a limited impression on Nelson. To Fanny, he mentioned her merely in passing as ‘a young woman of amiable manners, who does honour to the station to which she is raised’ – and he added that she had looked after Josiah very well. He did not think of her then as a possible lover; apart from anything else, he may have acquired one already, and certainly had done so long before he saw Emma for the second time. In Leghorn again in 1794, his colleague Captain Thomas Fremantle noted in his diary, ‘Dined at Nelson’s and his Dolly’. Her name was Adelaide Coregglia. A single note survives from Nelson to her, written (surprisingly) in French, and (less surprisingly) full of mistakes – ‘Je suis partant en cette moment pour la Mere’. He came back to her: once more in Leghorn in August 1795, Fremantle ‘dined with Nelson. Dolly aboard who has a sort of abscess in her side. He makes himself ridiculous with that woman’ – which rings true, remembering his infatuations with Mary Simpson and Miss Andrews. Fremantle recorded two more evenings with ‘Nelson and his Dolly’, the last on 27 September 1795, adding grumpily, ‘Very bad dinner indeed.’ Even then the affair may have continued, for another year later, writing from Leghorn to Sir Gilbert Elliot in Corsica in August 1796, Nelson let slip an oblique reference – ‘One old lady tells me all she hears, which is what we wish.’

There can be little doubt that ‘Dolly’ was Nelson’s lover in that particular port, perhaps passing on information – even if it was only gossip, it could prove to be important. But at the same time, there can be no doubt it was nothing more than a diversion with some practical benefits. The response to the naval toast ‘To wives and sweethearts’ is always ‘And may they never meet.’ Nelson, like may sailors, left his marriage vows at Gibraltar, without loving his wife the less – after fifteen months apart, he could still write to her: ‘All my joy is placed in you, I have none separated from you; you are present to my imagination, be I where I will.’

 

That day – 14 February, St Valentine’s Day, 1797 – Admiral Jervis’s fleet again contained fifteen sail of the line, as it had before the terrible gale in the Straits of Gibraltar. But it had only been at that strength for eight days, for, after the gale, further disasters had befallen it. At Christmas, while Nelson was dancing in Elba, the rest of the fleet had celebrated the season in Lisbon – with the exception of Bombay Castle, impossibly hard aground at the mouth of the River Tagus. On the fleet’s New Year return downriver, another ship suffered a similar accident and had to go to Lisbon for repairs. With these losses, and the two gale-damaged vessels out of action, only ten were left to take their cruising station off Cape St Vincent, the south-west corner of Portugal. It was not until 6 February, following the unexpected, scandalous reappearance of Admiral Man’s squadron in England, that Jervis finally received some of the reinforcement he needed so urgently, and then it was only five ships. But he was pleased with the Admiralty’s choice of captains – ‘I thank you very much for sending me so good a batch’, he wrote. ‘They are a valuable addition to my excellent stock.’

‘Of all the fleets I ever saw,’ Nelson had once observed, ‘I never beheld one in point of officers and men equal to Sir John Jervis’s, who is a commander-in-chief able to lead them into glory.’ Few people would have envied the commander-in-chief’s responsibility that morning: the stakes for which he was playing were very high indeed. The Dutch fleet had joined with the French in Brest, and had already attempted an invasion of Ireland. Admiral Lord Bridport, brother of Admiral Hood, was in charge of the Brest blockade, but his Channel fleet had been driven back to England by bad weather, and it was only the same weather which had prevented a successful Irish landing. If the Spanish fleet should also penetrate to Brest, it would make a formidable combination. Jervis was fully aware of the possibility – ‘A victory’, he remarked as the weather brightened, ‘is very essential to England at this moment.’

Yet, like most of his officers and men, he had no more than commonsense worries: he had made his will the night before; and as daylight revealed his fleet in two perfect columns, he knew it could never be more ready to fight. The numbers and disposition of the enemy gradually became apparent, reported to him moment by moment as he walked with Calder and Hallowell on Victory’s quarterdeck, and his response has often been remembered as a classic illustration of a determined admiral.

‘There are eight sail of the line, Sir John.’

‘Very well, sir.’

‘There are twenty sail of the line, Sir John.’

‘Very well, sir.’

‘There are twenty-five sail of the line, Sir John.’

‘Very well, sir.’

‘There are twenty-seven sail of the line, Sir John – near double our own’

‘Enough, sir, no more of that! The die is cast, and if there are fifty sail I will go through them.’

Ben Hallowell – Canadian by birth, hugely built, immensely strong and with the face of an experienced boxer – could not prevent himself crying out: ‘That’s right, Sir John, that’s right!’ Giving the commander-in-chief an ox-like slap on the back, he added with glee: ‘And, by God, we’ll give a damned good licking.’

Determination, confidence, enthusiasm; and also that phrase – odd, considering the Fighting Instructions – ‘I will go through them.’ At the Saints in 1782, Rodney had ignored the convention of opposing lines ahead and had gone through the French line to win; at an inconclusive action against a Franco-Spanish fleet off Toulon in 1744, Hawke had left the line of battle, in defiance of orders, and taken the only prize of the day. Jervis knew all about these men, and like their unconventional approaches: ‘Hawke,’ he said, ‘when he ran out of the line, sickened me of tactics.’ Today, as he understood the shape of the enemy, Jervis too, decided to ignore convention. Indeed, he had to, for two reasons. First was the disparity of numbers. Dividing the enemy, and engaging one part before the other was able to assist it, would reduce that. Second was the simple fact that the Spanish were already in two distinct, loosely formed groups, nine ships in the van, eighteen in the rear. It would take them much time and effort to form a line ahead; he would save them the trouble. ‘The circumstances of war in these seas’, he commented judiciously, ‘required a considerable degree of enterprise’, and, forming his expert fleet into a single line ahead, he sent it straight towards the gap between the Spanish groups.

[...]

‘At 12.50 p.m.,’ the log in Captain recorded, ‘the Commodore ordered the ship to be wore [altering course by bringing the stern, rather than the bow, towards the wind] when she was immediately engaged with the Santissima Trinidad and 2 other 3-decked ships.’ Nelson’s dramatic move, breaking out of line in order to cut off the flight of the Spanish admiral, is often remembered as his first great disobedience: certainly it led directly to the ‘very essential’ British victory that followed, and began his national and international fame. But ‘at 12.51 p.m.’ the log in Victory recorded, ‘General Signal: Take out suitable stations and engage enemy as arriving up in succession.’ The times were almost identical. Rather than an immense but crucial disobedience, Nelson anticipated and pre-empted Jervis’s order by something up to one minute. This does not diminish the bravery and tactical brilliance of the act. It does show how closely he and Jervis understood each other in professional matters. Troubridge too: when the line had first tacked to follow the Spaniards around, Culloden had hoisted the repeating flags and was turning before the signal had reached Victory’s masthead. ‘Look at Troubridge!’ Jervis said then. ‘He tacks his ship as if the eyes of all England were upon him!’ When Nelson wore out of line seconds ahead of the order, Collingwood quickly followed him, and Calder, Jervis’s flag captain, asked if they should be recalled. ‘No,’ Jervis answered decisively, ‘I will not have them recalled. I put my faith in those ships. It is a disgrace they are not supported.’

[...]

To a generation brought up with radar and missiles as the weapons of surface warfare, the physical closeness of these sailing battles remains astonishing; but even at the time people found the sight impressive. Collingwood’s first opponent was the 112-gun San Salvadore del Mundo; he was ‘not farther from her when we began than the length of our garden.’ She soon surrendered to his efficient fire, and Excellent concentrated on the next, San Ysidro, ‘so close alongside that a man might jump from one ship to the other. Our fire carried all before it, and in ten minutes she hauled down her colours... then making all sail, passing between our line and the enemy, we came up with the San Nicholas of 80 guns, which happened at the time to be abreast of the San Josef, of 112 guns: we did not touch sides, but you could not have been put a bodkin between us.’ They were, in fact, about ten feet apart. It is worth measuring that distance from a wall and imagining the wall as the hull of an enemy ship, its great guns blazing and smoking. Firing directly into a hull virtually touching her own, there was so much power behind Excellent’s shot that it burst clean through one ship and into the next; and as they tried to escape, both Spaniards became inextricably entangled with each other. ‘My good friend, the Commodore, had been long engaged with those ships,’ Collingwood related, ‘and I came happily to his relief, for he was dreadfully mauled.’

Nelson described the contest Captain and Culloden had been enduring as ‘apparently, but not really, unequal’. Even so, Culloden was crippled and had fallen astern, while Captain’s fore topmast had been shot away, along with her wheel, and most of her rigging, ‘not a sail, shroud or rope standing’. Captain could no longer chase or serve in the line; but Collingwood’s intervention, and the collision of the two Spaniards, brought about an event which was never forgotten by anyone who saw it or heard of it: calling for boarders to make ready, Nelson ordered his captain, Ralph Miller, to put the helm to starboard for another, deliberate collision. In moments all three ships were intertwined.

Edward Berry was the first to board San Nicholas, with enormous enthusiasm: it was the first time he had had something definite to do in the battle, for he had recently been promoted from being Nelson’s first lieutenant to commander, and, as he did not yet have a ship of his own, was a passenger in Captain. Lieutenant Charles Pierson of the 69^th Regiment then led his soldiers over; they were serving as marines, as they had done with Rodney at the Battle of the Saints. (Their part in the Battle of the Cape St Vincent brought the regiment a second naval honour: the double distinction remains unique in the British Army.) Captain Miller tried to follow the boarders over, but Nelson prevented him – ‘No, Miller, I must have that honour’ – and all pushed through together, under fire through the internal windows of the Spaniard’s cabin, breaking down the doors, swarming over the quarterdeck and poop. Under small arms fire from the next ship, San Josef, Berry hauled down the ensign; Nelson ordered men onward to board San Josef; and, as he himself leapt over, ‘a Spanish officer came upon the quarterdeck rail, without arms, and said the Ship had surrendered.’

Below decks, the Spanish admiral was dying. His captain knelt on the quarterdeck in front of Nelson and gave him his sword. Taking his hand, Nelson helped him to his feet and asked him to tell his officers and men ‘that the Ship had surrendered; and’, Captain Locker and Prince William read, in almost identical letters, ‘on the quarterdeck of a Spanish First-rate, extravagant as the story may seem, did I receive the swords of the vanquished Spaniards, which as I received I gave to William Fearney, one of my bargemen, who placed them with the greatest sang-froid under his arm.’

Even Nelson found it a little difficult to credit at first, for in crossing from one defeated ship to another and accepting the surrender of both, he had done something no one had ever done before. His own reaction, and Fearney’s phlegmatic gathering up the swords like so much brushwood, are exactly what most people would have felt and done in the circumstances: hardly able to believe it, but carrying on just as if it happened all the time. Yet even as they were doing it, everyone realized it was something entirely new in naval history, something which would set that battle apart from all others. As soon as they were able, people began to write home about it, and when Collingwood wrote to his wife Sarah, he could have spoken for them all. ‘Such a day’, he said in dazed relief. ‘It was indeed a glorious one, and it seldom falls to the lot of any man to share in such a triumph. First, my love, I am as well as I ever was in my life, and have pretty well got the better of my fatigue. Now for history.’

 

The third note out of tune with the rest came from Fanny. As ever, she was filled with anxiety, ‘far beyond my powers of expression... Altogether, my dearest husband, my sufferings were great... I shall not be myself till I hear from you again.’ She called his actions ‘wonderful and desperate’; but there was no congratulation. Instead, ‘What can I attempt to say to you about Boarding? You have been most wonderfully protected; you have done desperate actions enough. Now may I – indeed I do – beg that you never Board again! LEAVE IT for CAPTAINS.’

Nelson was quite capable of coping with professional jealousies, but one can only guess at his thoughts when he realized that, of all people, his wife could not find words to praise him. Some have suggested she was being humorous, but she was not: the riskier his adventures, the more truly frightened she was, for him as her beloved husband, and for herself as his dependant. When she begged him never to board again she was utterly serious, and further than ever from understanding what drove him on.

The Battle of Cape St Vincent changed Nelson’s naval life for ever: fame had come to him, at long last. He was thirty-eight years old, a rear admiral, a knight and a hero. He was hardly likely to change his way of doing things; even if he had wanted to, for Fanny’s sake, he could not have done – it would have meant changing himself. In his professional life, the name ‘Nelson’ was beginning to mean something special and different, something new and exciting; it was beginning to acquire its sense of magic for the navy. The aftermath of that battle also shows something important in his personal life: namely, that it had not altered anything like as much as his professional life.

 

From Cadiz to Santa Cruz is one thousand miles. At six o’clock in the morning on 15 July, with three ships of the line, three frigates, a cutter and St Vincent’s blessing, Nelson sailed. He was away precisely one month. On the morning of 16 August, he sighted St Vincent’s fleet again and requested permission to come on board the flagship to bid farewell for ever to his commander-in-chief – ‘A left-handed admiral will never be considered as useful; therefore the sooner I get to a very humble cottage the better, and make room for a sounder man to serve the state.’ Calvi had taken his right eye, and now Tenerife his right arm: he could imagine no future for himself at sea. ‘I am become a burden to my friends, and useless to my country... When I leave your command, I become dead to the world; I go hence, and am no more seen.’

Preparations had been as good as possible, from the construction of strong, light scaling ladders to the regular conferences between commanding officers on the outward voyage. A fourth frigate and a bomb vessel had joined en route, and all knew what they were to do. While the liners lay off out of sight, the frigates would close in after dark. Thomas Oldfield, captain of marines, and Thomas Troubridge (nicknamed ‘General’ for the operation) would lead ashore 250 marines, ninety named seamen and a further hundred volunteers, all in six boats rowed with muffled oars and tied in line together, to avoid being separated in the night. Without warning, they would attack the heights and batteries to the north-east of the town, while the bomb vessel opened fire on the town itself. At dawn the liners would close in, ready to fire on the town, when Troubridge would present its governor with an ultimatum, which he would be mad not to accept. All Nelson would require was for the ship from Manila to be surrendered, with all her cargo on board or on shore and all treasure or bullion anywhere in town belonging to the Spanish crown. Alternatively, ‘I shall destroy Santa Cruz, and the other towns in the island, by a bombardment, and levy a very heavy contribution on the island.’

But there was no alternative plan if, once the operation was started, any delay occurred and surprise was lost; and that was exactly what happened. The frigates met unexpected strong offshore currents and winds, and by dawn on 22 July had failed to get within a mile of their landing point. Inevitably they had been sighted, and Troubridge withdrew to consult with Nelson. The captain felt an assault on the heights might still succeed; Nelson agreed, and prepared to batter the town’s defences. But now the weather was calm; the liners could get no closer in than three miles; and as for the heights, ‘the enemy had taken possession, and seemed as anxious to retain, as we were to get them.’

Probably Nelson should have abandoned the whole business. But, ‘thus foiled in my original plan, I considered it necessary for the honour of our king and country not to give over the attempt...’ Self-confidence slipped, it seems, into over-confidence: he decided to repeat the night-time boat attack, and this time, to lead it himself.

He should never have done so, and that is not being wise after the event: as a rear admiral and commander of the whole squadron, he had no business in the vanguard. But again, he was incapable of doing otherwise, though he recognized the risks – ‘Tomorrow’, he wrote to St Vincent, ‘my head will probably be crowned with either laurel or cypress.’

William Hoste and Josiah were with him in Theseus. During the Battle of Cape St Vincent, Hoste had contrived to make Nelson ‘promise never to leave him again’, as Nelson told Fanny. In the same letter, though, he had also said that he was sending Josiah into another ship. The blunt reason was that ‘he must be broke of being at my elbow’. That night, however, Josiah was insistent. As the landing party was making ready, he appeared in Nelson’s cabin kitted out with pistols and sword. A theatrical conversation took place: ‘Should we both fall, Josiah, what would become of your poor mother?’, Nelson is supposed to have said. ‘The care of Theseus falls to you. Stay, therefore, and take charge of her.’ ‘Sir,’ Josiah apparently replied, ‘the ship must take care of herself. I will go with you tonight if never again.’

Whether or not such a conversation actually occurred, he went, and both Nelson and he were glad of it, for it became Josiah’s finest hour. But William Hoste had to remain on board.

[...]

During the remainder of that night, charged with the sense of ghastly failure, Hoste heard from Josiah some of the details of disaster: how the defending batteries had opened fire when the boats were still hundreds of yards from land; how Nelson, in the act of leaping ashore, had been struck down, hit, with many others, in the right arm by a raking burst of grape-shot; how he had fallen back, gushing blood and gasping that he was a dead man; how Josiah had gripped his shattered arm and staunched the flow with a tourniquet of neckerchiefs; how one of the sailors had torn off his own shirt to make a sling for the rear admiral; how Josiah had taken command of the boat, taking it close in to avoid the deadly fire, then directed it back to the squadron. Hoste heard too how, when Nelson regained consciousness, he ordered as many men as possible to be gathered into the boat from the sea; how they had approached Seahorse, Fremantle’s frigate, only to have Nelson refuse to go on board, saying he would rather die than alarm Betsy by appearing in such a state when he knew nothing of her husband’s fate; and how, when at last they found Theseus, Nelson had refused any help – ‘Let me alone,’  the wounded admiral cried, with the anger typical of someone in a state of profound shock. ‘I have yet my legs left, and one arm. Tell the surgeon to make haste and get his instruments – I know I must lose my right arm, so the sooner it is off the better.’

It was cut off high up, near the shoulder, and (on Nelson’s order) thrown overboard. The knife seemed bitterly cold to him – ever after he made sure that surgeons in his ships warmed their blades before operating. The crude operation was over inside half an hour; then, but not before, he was given opium to ease the dreadful pain.

Throughout, the crackle and thunder of fire from the shore continued; and with daylight the completeness of failure became clear. Fremantle had been shot in the right arm too and taken back to Seahorse where Betsy demanded to tend him herself: he, at least, did not have to endure amputation. Lieutenant Weatherhead, Hoste’s best friend, was mortally wounded. Nearly a thousand officers and men had set out; a quarter of them were killed. A further 240, under Troubridge, only returned because of Troubridge’s own audacity and the gallantry of the Spanish commander. Separated from the others, their ammunition wet and useless, they had taken refuge in a convent, prepared bombs and grenades, and advanced into the town only to find themselves facing eight thousand troops. Troubridge announced that unless he and his men were allowed to retreat in an honourable manner, he would make every effort to burn the town; the governor of the island replied than an honourable retreat was entirely acceptable, and provided wine, bread and replacement boats. When he learned of the unwarranted courtesy, Nelson responded as best he could, with the gift of a cheese and a cask of English beer. Both were accepted, as was a third offer from the rear admiral: he himself would take the Spanish governor’s despatches back to Spain, and become the herald of his own defeat.                        

 

In the city of Bath, on 2 September 1797, a letter addressed in an unrecognizable spidery scrawl was delivered to the house rented by Lady Nelson and her father-in-law. Whoever had written it was either extremely old or extremely ill, and Fanny realized the strange handwriting was her husband’s, she was too frightened to read his words. The Rector could not help: his eyes were too weak, and he had never wished to interfere with God’s workings by wearing spectacles. Fortunately his daughter Susannah was visiting at the time, and to her small, apprehensive audience, she read out Nelson’s first left-handed letter home, an unhappy message from a man much in need of comfort.

‘I shall not be surprised if I am neglected and forgotten; probably I shall no longer be considered as useful,’ it said. ‘However, I shall feel rich if I continue to enjoy your affection. The cottage is now more necessary than ever.’ Nelson was sure that Fanny would be as pleased with a letter from his left hand as from his right, ‘and I know it will add much to your pleasure to find that Josiah, under God’s providence, was principally instrumental in saving my life.’ He begged that neither she nor his father should think much of ‘this mishap’ – he himself had grown used to it – and ended, in a postscript after he had rejoined the fleet off Cadiz, ‘I think I shall be with you perhaps as soon as this letter... the first you will hear of me will be at the door.’

Without Susannah, the letter might have lain unread until after its author’s return. Barely twenty-four hours after she had steeled herself to hear the worst, Fanny heard the most welcome sound she had known in more than four years of waiting: her husband’s voice echoing down the street, as he directed his coachman to the rented front door.

[...]

One can only imagine that reunion – the fluttering delight that her husband was back and alive, the awful strangeness of his first one-armed embrace, the realization that he had to turn his head to see anything or anyone on his right. Then, after the initial excited clamour, the most dreadful novelty: the actual stump. It needed dressing, and a doctor was called. But since a doctor would not always be available, Nelson insisted that Fanny should attend and learn how to do it herself. She did, finding quite soon that it did not disgust her and that she could do it well; and so began the happiest seven months of her whole life, and of their marriage.

 

[The Battle of the Nile]

‘It began at sunset, and was not finished at three the next morning: it has been severe; but God favoured our endeavours with a great victory.’ On 9 August Nelson was writing to the governor of Bombay: after ‘this glorious battle... fought at the mouth of the Nile, at anchor’, one of his first thoughts was to pass the news to the East India Company and Britain’s colonies in India – they could stand down their defences, for Napoleon’s army would never reach them. ‘I trust the Almighty God will, in Egypt, overthrow these pests of the human race. It has been in my power... to take eleven sail of the line, and two frigates: two sail of the line and two frigates have escaped me.’

At the height of the conflict – wounded, nearly blind, thinking he might die, but already certain of the struggle’s outcome – he had begun writing a report to St Vincent. Its text became famous all over Europe.

‘My Lord: Almighty God has blessed His Majesty’s arms in the late battle... The enemy were moored in a strong line of battle for defending the entrance of this bay, flanked by numerous gunboats, four frigates and a battery of guns and mortars on an island in their van; but nothing could withstand the squadron your lordship did me the honour to place under my command. Their high state of discipline is well known to you, and with the judgment of the captains, together with their valour, and that of the officers and men of every description, it was absolutely irresistible... I was wounded in the head, and obliged to be carried off the deck, but the service suffered no loss by the event: Captain Berry was fully equal to the important service then going on, and to him I must beg leave to refer for every information relative to this victory.’

[...]

Daylight showed Bellerophon with all her three masts gone: for more than an hour, she had engaged L’Orient alone, before drifting dismasted out of line, leaving a gap which was rapidly filled by two other British vessels. Majestic had only her foremast left. Of course there were casualties in every ship, although Leander had only fourteen wounded and no dead, and Zealous, astonishingly, had only seven wounded and one dead. But Bellerophon, Majestic and Vanguard suffered the highest casualties – between them, 129 killed (including Majestic’s Captain Westcott) and 366 wounded, including Nelson. Hurtling through the air, a fragment of shot struck him on the forehead above his blind eye and opened a gaping wound. The rush of blood, and the flap of skin hanging over his good eye, blinded him. As he fell into absolute darkness, he thought he was dying, and begged to be remembered to Fanny.

When his face was cleaned, an inch of his skull was visible, but there was no apparent fracture. Stitching the wound up, the surgeon said cautiously – for such things were never predictable – that the admiral was in no immediate danger, and urged him to rest in the quietest possible place, the bread room, deep down in the hold. Nelson did so, but not for long: neither his secretary, who was also wounded, nor the chaplain were able to take his dictation; so while the battle continued and the ship shuddered around him, he began writing his famous dispatch himself, already quite certain that victory would come.

He had not finished when a message arrived from Berry saying L’Orient was ablaze. Pallid and bandaged, Nelson climbed up five decks to see the conflagration, and ordered Vanguard’s one remaining boat to make ready to pick up survivors of the inevitable explosion. But after such a blow to his head, he could not stay upright: sick and giddy, he was taken below to lie down on his cot, as, after L’Orient’s stunning end, the action picked up again and continued through the night. Perhaps he slept. Certainly, in other ships, after ‘fighting for nearly twelve hours’, officers and men dropped in exhaustion and slept where they fell – fourteen-year-old Midshipman Elliot fell asleep as he was hauling up a shroud hawser.

At dawn, the survivors saw clearly for the first time the devastation they had wrought. To those who had served below decks, it was particularly shocking. One of them, a copper named John Nicol, had been stationed at the magazine, and spent ‘the busiest night of my life’ passing out gunpowder to boys and women – there were several women in the fleet: at least one died of her wounds, and in the middle of the battle, another gave birth to a son. Nicol had been at the Battle of Cape St Vincent, and ‘saw as little of this action as I did of the one on 14 February’. In the morning, he went on deck to view the fleets, ‘and awful sight it was.’ Everywhere there were ruined ships, and ‘the whole Bay was covered with dead bodies, mangled, wounded and scorched...’ Nelson, ‘weak, but in good spirits’, could see the destruction from his cabin windows, and even he was a little overawed by what he saw and what he learned from his captains, as they visited and reported to him. Only thirteen of his fourteen 74s had been engaged: Culloden, to Troubridge’s frenzied mortification, had run on to one of the sandbanks – everyone felt extremely sorry for him, and later Nelson made sure that, like all the others, he was awarded a medal. But neither the little Mutine nor a single one of the liners was irreparably damaged; and of the thirteen French liners, ten had been captured, one had exploded, and only two had escaped. ‘Victory’, said Nelson, ‘is not a name strong enough.’

 

On 16 September [1799], four weeks after quitting Aboukir but still en route to Naples, he started his reply: ‘My dearest Fanny: I hardly know where to begin.’ While she and all in Britain wondered and worried, the tide of congratulation had begun to flood south from Italy. ‘My head is almost turned by letters already, and what am I not to expect when I get on shore?’ Lady Hamilton had described Queen Maria’s display of frantic relief, and Nelson hoped he would not have to see it for himself. The letter became a long one, eventually sent on 25 September, three days after the Vanguard’s arrival in Naples. With his inescapable frankness, he told Fanny all about it.

‘Sir William and Lady Hamilton came out to sea... Alongside my honoured friends came... Up flew her Ladyship, and, exclaiming ‘Oh God, is it possible?’, fell into my arm more dead than alive. Tears, however, soon set matters to rights, when alongside came the King... He took me by the hand, calling me his deliverer and preserver, with every other expression of kindness. In short, all Naples calls me Nostra Liberatore, for the scene with the lower classes was truly affecting. I hope one day to have the pleasure of introducing you to Lady Hamilton. She is one of the very best women in this world.’ He must have realized that Fanny would find this hard to believe: she already knew Emma’s early reputation as a mistress to the rich so well that Nelson immediately added: ‘How few could have made the turn she has. She is an honour to her sex, but I own it require a good soul. Her kindness with Sir William to me is more than I can express. I am in their house... My God Almighty bless you, my dearest Fanny, and grant us in due time a happy meeting.’ And he ended as he always did: ‘Ever your most affectionate husband, Horatio Nelson.’

Four and half a months later, he wrote again from sea: ‘I think I shall run mad... Last night I did nothing but dream of you, altho’ I woke 20 times in the night. In one of my dreams I thought I was at a large table – you was not present – sitting between a Princess, who I detest, and another. They both tried to seduce me and the first wanted to take those liberties with me which no woman in this world but yourself ever did. The consequence was I knocked her down and in the moment of bustle you came in and, taking me in your embrace, whispered, “I love nothing but you, my Nelson.” I kissed you fervently and we enjoyed the height of love.’

He was writing, of course, to Emma. Fanny never had inspired, never would inspire, such erotic passion – perhaps she was the anonymous other, or even the ‘Princess, who I detest’. If so, did Nelson, in his dream, knock her down because he knew in conscience she must keep him from Emma? Because he was disgusted by the notion of Fanny as a physical seductress, her angular body mimicking the movements of Emma’s voluptuous, sensuous shape? Because he was disgusted at his own delight, horrified to know this was one love affair he could not leave at Gibraltar?

His first biographers prefaced their three-volume work with the warning that they might show ‘sometimes, perhaps, more minutely than the generality of readers may approve, the private feelings and motives of this extraordinary man’. But their courage failed them: Emma became ‘this wicked siren’; Nelson’s private journals were edited to leave her out – they applied ‘the pruning-knife’ there, indeed; they ignored his love-letters entirely, and could not bring themselves to mention his and Emma’s daughter; and by the end of their second volume, with a whole book still to go, they simply gave up, saying that all the rest would be ‘exclusively devoted to his more splendid public career.’

It could have been merely a decent reticence, but it seems not. The problem for those Victorian authors was threefold: firstly, Nelson did make a laughing-stock of himself; secondly, that and immorality did not square with the concept and the carefully developed image of a national hero; and lastly, they appeared unable even to comprehend, far less accept, that love may be superseded, honestly and without any intent or desire to deceive. So they made a sanitized champion, and for a while, though in a different way, Nelson was as fraudulent himself. Seduced by the image of his own heroism, he behaved as he thought a hero should; and embarrassed almost everyone who knew him.    

 

In Palermo [during the first months of 1799], the Nelson-Hamilton household was becoming progressively odder. Sir William’s name for it was the motto of the Knighthood of the Bath, Tria Juncta in Uno, Three Joined in One. He was no cuckold; he knew perfectly well what was going on between Emma and Nelson, but he was happy, for he had always predicted that something of the sort would happen – that he would be ‘superannuated’ while Emma was still young – and he both liked and admired Nelson. But Nelson was starting to display one of his least attractive characteristics: if he thought someone did not know his name and heroism, he told them himself. This happened to a visiting Scottish major. ‘Have you heard of the battle of the Nile?’ Nelson asked him, and without waiting for an answer told him that it was the most extraordinary battle ever fought, unique for being at night, at anchor, and won by a one-armed admiral. The major bower courteously three times, and thought to himself. ‘Had the speech been made after dinner, I should have imagine the hero had imbibed an extra dose of champagne.’ Emma’s behaviour that evening was a great deal worse. To receive a Turkish messenger, Nelson dressed up in his furry scarlet pelisse and diamond aigrette with the clockwork star. Deeply impressed, the Turk announced he had decapitated twenty French prisoners in one day. He drew his sword to prove it, and showed off the bloodstains. Emma, said the Scottish soldier, took the sword, ‘beamed with delight, and... looking at the encrusted Jacobin blood, kissed it...!’ One woman fainted; some people clapped; ‘but many groaned and cried “shame” loud enough to reach the ears of the admiral, who turned pale, hung his head, and seemed ashamed... Poor Nelson was to be pitied – never was a man so mystified and so deluded!’

 

In the middle of August 1799, with a certain degree of satisfaction, Nelson informed his second-in-command that ‘Lord Keith is gone, and all my superior officers; therefore I must now watch from Cape St Vincent to Constantinople.’ From the 17^th of that month to the beginning of December, when Keith returned, Nelson was commander-in-chief Mediterranean, but only in an acting capacity – though the Admiralty gave him the authority, he was not granted the permanent rank. All the same, it was agreeable to be in undisputed charge, not least because of Palermo’s central location: flying his flag in a transport, he could remain there with Emma, and with a clear naval conscience as well.

Instructing his officers to distribute the fleet between Oporto, Lisbon, Cadiz, Minorca, Naples, Sicily, Malta and the Levant, he allowed them the latitude of experience he always did allow, and which, under St Vincent, he had learned to expect for himself – ‘in short, to act in the best manner for his majesty’s service. In giving this command I know to whom I trust, and that it is not necessary to enter into the detail of what is to be done.’

To be able to delegate so freely and confidently shows either a commander who is certain of his subordinates, or one who is shirking responsibility. Nelson and his captains knew which he was, and personally he was sure he gave a good example to anyone. On a visit to Minorca in October, he took time to write the ‘sketch of his life’, and he ended it with an uplifting moral: ‘Perseverance in any profession will most probably meet its reward. Without having any inheritance, or having been fortunate in prize-money, I have received all the honours of my profession, been created a peer of Great Britain, etc. And I may say to the Reader, GO THOU AND DO LIKEWISE.’

Unfortunately, some of those readers were beginning to hear scandalous gossip about his private life. One year earlier he had been instrumental in causing an identical embarrassment to his greatest enemy: French despatches, intercepted and sent to England after the Battle of the Nile, had included an agonized letter written by Napoleon following his discovery that Josephine, his wife, was having an affair. On 24 November 1798 the letter had been published in the London Morning Chronicle. Copies reached Paris before the end of the month, making the young general, trapped in Egypt, a laughing-stock. Now, in the autumn of 1799, Troubridge wrote to Nelson from Naples: ‘I fear, my lord, that some person about Sir William Hamilton’s house sends accounts here; as I have frequently heard things which I knew your lordship meant to keep secret.’ And from aged Admiral Samuel Goodall in London came a discreet warning: ‘They say here you are Rinaldo in the arms of Armida’ – Armida being a legendary Saracen princess who lured Christian knights, including Rinaldo d’Este, into her magic garden. ‘To be sure,’ Goodall continued, ‘’tis a very pleasant attraction, to which I am very sensible myself. But my maxim has always been Cupidus voluptatum, cupidor gloriae [Be eager for pleasure, more eager for glory]. Be it as it will, health and happiness attend you.’

Making ready to take over from Spencer Smith as Minister in Constantinople, Lord Elgin was in Gibraltar. Newspapers there had started to run ‘unpleasant paragraphs’ on Nelson, as Lady Elgin reported to her mother in Scotland: ‘They say that there never was a man turned so vain glorious (that’s the phrase) in the world as Lord N. He is now completely managed by Lady Hamilton.’ On their eastward journey, the Elgins had to stop at Sicily, and could not politely refuse an invitation. Emma’s outstanding beauty was in her face: she had always tended to plumpness, and in Naples had become quite fat. Lady Elgin (all of twenty-one years old) confirms this in astonishment: ‘She is indeed a Whapper! and I think her manner very vulgar. It is really humiliating to see Lord Nelson, he seems quite dying and yet as if he had not other thought than her.’

Sir William was beginning to complain of the expense, which, he said, ‘I can by no means afford, as it is now a year that Lord Nelson has lived with us and, of course, the numerous train of officers that come to him on business’. To make it worse, Emma adored gambling. ‘Her rage is play,’ wrote an English visitor, ‘and Sir William says when he is dead she will be a beggar.’ (He was right: twelve years after his death, and nearly ten after Nelson’s, she died of drink, alone and in poverty.) Rumours said Nelson and Sir William had quarrelled and even fought over the costs. This is inconceivable: Nelson would certainly have contributed to the expenses. But it is possible that he could not fully pay his way; and the mere rumours of an illicit love and late-night parties were enough to do him great harm.

 

Earlier in the year [1799], after conquering Jaffa, Napoleon had led the Army of Egypt further north and laid siege to Acre. A combined garrison of Turkish soldiers and British sailors under [Sir Sidney] Smith’s command defended it for six weeks, until, in May, reinforcements arrived at the same time as several hundred of Napoleon’s men caught bubonic plague, the Black Death. Raising the siege, the French retreated across the Sinai desert – almost all, including Napoleon, on foot – in temperatures reaching above 130° Fahrenheit [54 °C], until they came again to Aboukir Bay. There they encountered the same force, ferried across the sea from Acre by Smith. Another battle of Aboukir took place, but on land, and between the Turks and French; and this time the French won – ‘a victory’, said Napoleon, ‘that will hasten the return of the army to France.’

He was wrong; but it did hasten his own return. Opening negotiations for the exchange of prisoners, he sent a young officer out to Smith’s flagship. On board, all was courtesy. The officer was given some English newspapers with news of Europe; and as he departed, Smith, in perfect French, remarked in an off-hand manner: ‘Lord Nelson understands the Directory desires your Commander-in-Chief to return at once to France.’  

It was true. It is galling to find out your enemy knows more of your affairs than you do yourself, but Smith did not mean to tease: he hoped to tempt Napoleon into sailing, then capture him at sea.

Hearing of the defence of Acre, Nelson wrote Smith a warm and honest letter: ‘The bravery shown by you and your companions is such as to merit every encomium which all the civilised world can bestow. Be assured, my dear Sir Sidney, of my perfect esteem and regard, and do not let anyone persuade you to the contrary. My character is that I will not suffer the smallest tittle of my command to be taken from me: but with pleasure I give way to my friends, among whom I beg you will allow me consider you.’

On 18 August – the day after Nelson assumed the acting role of commander-in-chief – Napoleon put to sea [at Aboukir Bay] without saying a word to the men he was deserting. On 22 August he transferred to a new Venetian-built frigate. By the end of September he was in his native Corsica. On 6 October he embarked again, and as dusk was falling that evening sighted English ships. On 9 October, while Nelson was sailing from Palermo to Minorca, Napoleon landed in France. One month later, in Paris, he masterminded a coup against the Directory; and on 12 December he became First Consul of France.

To go from refugee to national leader in less than four months was a brilliant transformation. If Smith’s plan had worked fully and Napoleon had been captured, no doubt Nelson would have been the first to hail his ingenuity; and of course the history of Europe would have been very different. Instead, Napoleon had escaped across nearly two thousand miles of sea supposedly under Nelson’s command. It was perhaps the greatest single misfortune of his distraction in Palermo.

A commander-in-chief is entitled to the credit, and should accept the blame; yet no one appears to have blamed the admiral directly, and that was fair – even today, the sea is a very good place for one small ship to hide. However, Nelson did lose his command, and not just a little of it, but the whole thing; for Lord Keith returned to the Mediterranean.  

 

Many people assumed then, and have done since, that if Nelson was guilty of loving Emma and hurting Fanny, he was also guilty of deceiving Sir William. But Hamilton was a man of the world, urbane and wise, who perfectly understood the problem he had foreseen so long before: himself growing old and his wife remaining irrepressible, buoyant and ambitious. He still loved her, although he sometimes found her exasperating, and he loved and respected Nelson. From his point of view, nothing could have been better than for her to fall in love with the man he esteemed most in the world. All his life, he was a contented non-Christian, but he used religious terms to express his personal creed, and one day put his tolerant wisdom into three short, memorable sentences:

‘My study of antiquities has kept me in constant thought of the perpetual fluctuation of everything. The whole art is really to live all the days of our life; and not with anxious care disturb the sweetest hour that life affords – which is the present. Admire the Creator, and all His works, to us incomprehensible, and do all the good you can upon earth; and take the chance of eternity without dismay.’

That gentle philosophy made deception unnecessary, and jealousy impossible; and when he died, in April 1803, he bequeathed a favourite portrait of Emma to Nelson, ‘my dearest friend, the most virtuous, loyal and truly brave character I ever met with. God bless him,’ he ended firmly, ‘and shame fall on those who do not say amen.’

 

[The French blockade prior to Trafalgar]

Off Brest, Cornwallis’s tactic was to remain as close as possible to the Isle of Ushant, the westernmost point of France. There he covered both the western mouth of the Channel and the approaches to Brest; and this was perhaps a harder blockade than that of Toulon. The northern part of the Bay of Biscay is a notorious stretch of sea, foggy, cold and stormy, where strong tides set through the rocks of Ushant. ‘Mariners must exercise the greatest caution’, the modern Admiralty Pilot says of it, still with the studied elegance of eighteenth-century style. ‘This island is surrounded by dangers; rocks are numerous and some lie far from the land; fogs and thick weather are not uncommon; the tidal streams are strong, and the extent of their influence seaward undetermined... Sailing vessels, except those bound from western French ports should not, as a rule, pass in sight of Ouessant [Ushant] but, even with a fair wind, should make a good westing, bearing in mind that the prevailing winds and currents have a tendency to set towards Ouessant and into the Bay of Biscay when southward of that island. To get well westward is therefore of the greatest importance.’

No such options existed for the blockading fleet. Among outsiders, the difficulties of a naval blockade – especially a prolonged one – were not well understood: Collingwood complained that ‘city politicians’ imagined it was as easy as standing guard at a door. ‘So long as the ships are at sea they are content,’ he said morosely, ‘little considering that every one of the blasts which we endure lessens the security of the Country.’ To keep the approaches to Brest under close observation, they had to sail in constant sight of this lethal shore, or at least with their frigates in sight of it; and in the prevailing south-westerly winds, it lay to leeward, so that the fleet was constantly blown towards it. By modern standards the ships were unhandy, slow to go about and slow to windward; and probably no modern mariner would dare to explain how they were able to stand off and on, estimating the tidal streams and currents, night and day, summer and winter, constantly solving the problems of navigation and ship-handling – and this not merely in one ship, but in a whole fleet. The achievement astonished the French, who looked out every morning and saw the sail still there, and it is just as astonishing now. So is the crews’ toughness: anyone, seaman or not, can imagine this life in ships with no shelter on deck and no warmth below, exposed to the rain and fog and to seas with a fetch of several thousand miles. They only relaxed in settled westerly gales when the French could not conceivably have left the harbour: then they could run for shelter in Plymouth Sound, a hundred and fifty miles across the Channel.

In one respect, Cornwallis’s fleet had the advantage over Nelson’s off Toulon: their weather was worse, but they had a home port within reach. They never went in there unless they were forced to, and when they did they were seldom allowed ashore; but at least they could land their sick and ask for dockyard repairs, and perhaps hear some news of their families and the world. An inspection of Collingwood’s ship ‘began by discovering slight defects... and the farther we went in the examination, the more important they appeared’. It turned out she was ‘so completely rotten as to be unfit for sea. We have been sailing for the last six months with only a sheet of copper between us an eternity.’ But he was able to ask for, and receive, a sounder vessel from home. Nelson’s fleet had no such luck. Their nearest ports under British control were Malta and Gibraltar, each between six and seven hundred miles away – much too far to be any use as bases. So they had to depend entirely on themselves: cure their own sick, repair their own ships, and find their own provisions where they could.

Another serious difficulty which few people on shore considered was that after a time, the interminable sailing to nowhere became almost unbearably dull and uncomfortable. Almost all sailing ships are beautiful, being blends of art and science, and one cannot quite avoid a romantic picture of these blockading fleets, investing them on their ceaseless watch with qualities of gallantry and splendour. But remembering their beauty, it is easy to forget their other qualities. The beauty of a ship is external, and comes mostly by chance: the functional shape of a hull, and the natural shape of a sail filled with wind, make spacious curves which please the human eye. The naval ships of Nelson’s time had less beauty of line than many others: they were bluff, square, solid, built for seaworthiness and fighting strength. Still, they had the rough beauty of master-craftsmanship and fitness for their purpose, and no doubt their size, slowness and silence gave them a stately air when they were under way. But not many artists who painted them had also lived in them. People who had knew only too well that they were damp, insanitary and overcrowded, with no provision whatever (except in the officers’ cabins) for any physical comfort. Every description of them ought to evoke a smell – of tar, bilge water, sodden timber, old salt meat, rum, gunpowder and closely packed human bodies.

It was extremely difficult to describe these things to friends and family, and compared to Wellington’s soldiers, Nelson’s sailors wrote very few letters home. Staying at sea, hardly touching the land, for months – eventually years – on end, the crews were turned in on themselves. From each other they had no privacy whatever, but from the outside world they suffered the isolation of hermits. They received their orders from the flags the admiral hoisted. Sometimes they came within hailing distance of another ship. In calm weather, captains were rowed from ship to ship, and the boats’ crews had the chance to hear the gossip of the fleet.          But news of events in the world only reached them as distant rumours long out of date, and news of home was rare, especially on the Mediterranean station, where it could take six months to receive a reply to a letter. Soldiers could, and did, write of their marches: they saw foreign places and met strange people, and their life was something most people at home could comprehend. But sailors saw nobody but their shipmates, and nothing but the sea and other ships, and distant shores; and their work and daily life could only be described in sailor’s language. There were tens of thousands of men at sea in the blockade, but none of them wrote very much about it. Perhaps they felt that no one else would be interested in what seemed to them so tedious; perhaps they sometimes found a pen, or a pencil and paper, and a corner of a bench to put the paper on, and they found their minds a blank at the problem of telling land-lubberly relatives what they were doing. Except after a battle, they had virtually nothing to tell. At all events, only the most literate of them, with the strongest family ties, wrote letters at all, or hoped to receive them. The majority lost all touch with their families while they were at sea. Whether they liked it or not, the ship became the only home they had.

Even Nelson sometimes found himself at a loss: ‘Our days pass so much alike that having described one, you have them all... We cruise, cruise, and one day so much like another that they are scarcely distinguishable.’ At the same time, Hardy, like everyone else, was looking forward to the French coming out and making ‘a Dust during the winter... This is so barren a spot for the pen that I really have nothing to say but that we are anxiously waiting for the French fleet, as there is no prospect of going into port until they have been beat’ – and that was after only three months on the station, in the autumn of 1803. A year later, he wrote plaintively to a friend in Malta: ‘I have not seen a female face these sixteen months’, and admitted he would even be prepared to pay attention to a certain ‘Old Maid’ they both knew.

Almost every man in the fleet had to endure the same frustration. There were a few lucky ones, Bickerton amongst them: his wife had come out to Malta, and Nelson kindly allowed him every opportunity to see her there. For most of the officers and all of the men, there was no such pleasurable diversion, and Nelson felt the lack as much as anyone; going to bed about nine and rising at five, he told Emma that each night he would ‘dream of what is closest to my heart’. She suggested she could come out and join Lady Bickerton, or even come and live in Victory. A few years earlier, Nelson might have agreed; now, however, he scotched both ideas gently but firmly: he was more likely to see Merton before Malta, and as for Emma living aboard, ‘Imagine what a cruise off Toulon is! Even in summer time we have a hard gale every week, and two days heavy swell. It would kill you, and myself to see you. Much less possible to have Charlotte [his niece], Horatia, etc. on board ship! And I who have given orders to carry no women to sea in the Victory to be the first to break them!’

In this monotonous, monastic world, keeping up the fabric of the ships, and the health, morale and discipline of their crews, became a constant preoccupation. Fortunately one of the captains knew of, and had charted, ‘a beautiful little bay, or rather harbour’ inside Maddalena Island, north-east of Sardinia. Only two hundred miles from Toulon, it had two entrances, but no name; so Nelson called it Agincourt Sound, after the ship from which it had first been charted, and gratefully made it his operational base. The island supplied wood and water, sheep, bullocks, some fruit and vegetables, and a convenient central location. Judging the three most critical areas to be the heel of Italy, Toulon and the Straits of Gibraltar, he lessened the tedium by rotating the ships between them. Scurvy was avoided by distributing as many as thirty thousand Maltese oranges a week; dull food was given more flavour with plenty of onions; stocks of fresh water were kept as sweet and abundant as possible; during the summer, the alcohol ration – the sailors’ only lawful pleasure – was all wine, and in winter half wine and half grog.

Fully replenished, Victory carried four months’ worth of supplies for nine hundred men, and Nelson and his officers would breakfast together off tea, hot rolls, toast and cold tongue. From seven o’clock they would work at the business of the day until two, when a band began to play on deck; at 2.45 the admiral’s dinner was announced with drums and the tune of ‘The Roast Beef of Old England’. Dinner lasted for an hour and a half, or two hours, with three courses, each accompanied by a different wine, and ending with fruit, coffee and liqueurs. The band played again, while the diners walked on deck until six, when tea was served; and this very sociable part of the day ended at eight in the evening with a rummer of punch, and cake or biscuits. Nelson’s dinners were well known among the officers of his fleet: the food and drink were better than their own, and he was a host of unequalled charm. Whenever the weather was fine, the flag which signalled his invitations was hoisted and eagerly acknowledged by his guests. He did not care very much what he ate personally, he drank comparatively little, and he was often on a self-imposed, mainly vegetarian diet; but he liked to give pleasure, and his hospitality was part of his technique for keeping the fleet happy and efficient. Captains led lonely lives with great responsibility and frequent physical hardship, often remaining on deck all night in bad weather, sometimes unable even to change their clothes for a week at a time; many, in their quieter hours, devised odd little diversions for themselves. One kept an aviary; another brewed spruce bear in his cabin; a third took to growing mustard and cress on his quarterdeck. But after an invitation to Nelson’s flagship each was rowed back to his own ship revived by an afternoon of good living and conversation, and spell-bound afresh by the admiral’s friendship. His secretary noticed how they were all ‘wonderfully attached to him, and as contented as men can be. Those that had been a long time in this country before we arrived and were anxious to get home have forgot that entirely’; and from the captains, the same feeling percolated down through their own ships’ companies.

Of course it was not always so agreeable: the navy’s iron-hard discipline was never allowed to relax, and even in Victory there were floggings; foul weather, especially during winter, could isolate all the ships from each other for weeks on end, and the sources of fresh supply could not always be relied on. When they failed, everyone, officers and men alike, could find themselves drinking water as dark as pear-bark, with small things swimming in it, and eating beef that had been preserved for ten years or more, and biscuits so full of cold jelly-like maggots that when they swallowed, their throats were quite chilled. Sometimes they did not bother with the beef, but carved it into boxes and models, for it was as hard as wood, and took a polish well. Generally, however, the system worked well: it became unusual to find more than ten or twenty men sick throughout the whole fleet, and for all their discomfort, hard work and boredom, the only real resentment anyone felt was against the French, who would not come out and fight, and let everyone get it over with and go home. As much as anything else, Nelson’s officers admired his tenacity and patience, and one of them wrote with confidence: ‘If the enemy venture out, we are sure of a victory over them. If they continue in port, we may expect the continuance of [Nelson’s] victory over himself, the hardest victory of all! For a high heart like his, to endure a destiny where there is nothing to display but the melancholy miracles of passive valour!’

 

It may be that the cult of Nelson was deliberately fostered in its early days, to divert national attention from Napoleon’s continuing achievements on land, against which it seemed, for many years more, that Britain could do nothing. But if that was all there was, he would have been long forgotten by now. To the very unsophisticated, he may still be imagined as a kind of comic-book superhero, defeating the arch-villains, the French. But (though St Vincent remarked, ‘I do not say the enemy cannot come; I only say they cannot come by sea’, and would probably spin in his grave at the thought of a Channel Tunnel) official relations with the French have improved since, and if Nelson were only the hammer of the Frogs, his fame would have been very unfashionable now.

The theatrical element of his life was perceived as quickly as the pious, the sacrificial, the violent and the ardently nationalistic elements: trying to console Emma, a friend and neighbour pointed out that ‘his time was to die’, and Nelson’s old friend Lord Minto came to feel that his death, at the hour of victory, was ‘the finest close and crown, as it were, of such a life’. One contemporary, Lady Bessborough, went so far as to say, ‘It makes me feel almost as much envy as compassion – I think I should like to die so.’ Aside from the pain, who would not? The moment is inevitable, and he would have liked to live; but dying, we must all relinquish our loves, and few can face that passage surrounded by devoted friends, and confident of an outstanding achievement. The theatrical side certainly has an enduring appeal, which is why people continue to read and write about Nelson, and to make and watch films on him: whichever way the succeeding generations interpret it, he left a perfectly formed story which still grips the imagination of each.          

A great many people have tried to explain the unique response that Nelson could win from almost everyone. All such explanations must be more or less subjective: everyone can select attractive aspects from such a many-sided character, and everyone so inclined can find something to disapprove of. ‘The man’, said Dr Scott, ‘possessed the wisdom of the serpent with the innocence of the dove.’ Less poetically, Lord Minto observed: ‘He is in many points a really great man, in others a baby.’ Some people dislike what they read of his boyish vanity, or his apparent self-pity when he was feeling ill, or his love for Emma; some are still embarrassed by his dying request for a kiss from Hardy. They may choose to ignore all these, and to glorify the violence of his life and death, his nationalism or his reverence for the monarchy; but that must be a mistake. Others, preferring to take the opposite view, make the same mistake: for if you take out one part from the whole, the man is lost.

[...]

Today, nearly two hundred years after Nelson’s death, with two world wars and other naval conflicts behind us, we may perhaps be a little nearer than most of the intervening generations to the moral values of his own Georgian England: we can value humane behaviour and kindness more highly than strict rectitude. During his lifetime, his portrait was often painted, and he said that hardly any of the pictures looked exactly like him – once, indeed, an artist refused a commission, and when asked why, explained: ‘There is such a mixture of humility and ambition in Lord Nelson’s countenance that I dare not risk the attempt.’ Since then, perhaps rashly, many writers have risked the attempt, and no doubt none of their pen-portraits is exactly like him either. Yet we can certainly know him better than many did a century ago, be glad that he was not a saint, and like him better for it. He was a man like any other, but unlike almost any; and simple though it is, that, more than anything else, is probably why people today still feel both admiration and affection for him, and think it is worth while remembering him.