Nelson: The Sword of Albion

INTRODUCTION

In eight short years Horatio Nelson, already a rear admiral and a national hero, turned himself into a major international figure and a deathless icon. Rich in the admiration of his countrymen and women, he was almost universally acknowledged to be the nation’s champion during a period of grave danger. At his peak his opinion on naval affairs carried more weight with ministers and prime ministers than that of any other officer, and his ability to inspire a fleet was unmatched. Appointed commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean in 1803 he bore one of the most awesome burdens of any public servant, commanding an area three times the size of Napoleon’s European empire with a handful of ships and influencing the destinies of half a dozen great powers and as many other significant nations. A perfectionist, constantly reaching for heights greater than he or anyone else had scaled, he delivered one sensational success after another in circumstances that would have repelled most contemporaries. In the parlance of today he was simply Britain’s one and only superstar. As the Earl of Malmesbury remarked, Nelson possessed ‘the singular power of electrifying all within his atmosphere, and making them only minor constellations to this most luminous planet … Every victory was greater than the last. Every additional difficulty seemed only to bring some new proof of the combination and powers of his mind, as well as the invincible force of his arms.’ His life was a mission with the essence of a tour de force, hurrying toward a bloody climax in the greatest clash of armour of the war, and one that would shape the fate of empires.

Nelson may have seemed an Achilles, but he was not without the proverbial heel. His was no steady upward trajectory, but a career of ups and downs in which victories were sometimes snatched from crippling reverses, not all of his making. And throughout, those closest to the revered warrior saw another man: emotional, disappointed, irritable, lonely, embittered, and above all acutely vulnerable. He searched for glory and what he called happiness—for him, no less than the utilitarian philosophers, a condition to which man naturally aspired—but while the former gathered in full measure, the latter eluded him to the end. As his achievements thrust him before an ever larger public, the fault lines in his character were exposed, and his marital relations became the meat of public ridicule.

The Nelson record has been much distorted, most grossly by those who have deified or denigrated the admiral, but mystification had its roots in the man himself, for no man wanted more to be a hero. He exhibited his trophies, stage-managed public appearances, and manipulated the press to shape the desired image. When soliciting a vote of thanks from the London Corporation after his victory at Copenhagen, for example, he personally suggested an appropriate wording. Not wishing to appear immodest, he claimed to have taken it from the letter of ‘a dear friend’. The tribute pronounced him ‘the Victor of the Nile, the conqueror of Copenhagen, St Vincent’s prop, the hero of the 14th February [battle of Cape St Vincent], the terror and stop of the Northern Confederacy, the restorer of the King of Naples, the preserver of Rome, the Avenger of Kings, and the Guardian Angel of England. The only man who in this war has been 127 days in battle and ever came off covered with glory, honor, virtue and modesty, The pride of his country and friends.’

But of course no one but Nelson himself so assiduously counted his actions, or the enemy ships destroyed or taken in his train, and when the original eulogy is traced the ‘friend’ reveals herself as none other than Emma Hamilton, the admiral’s mistress and most extravagant partisan. Yet even her embellishments were not enough for Nelson, who added to the litany of accomplishments. It was he who inserted the claim to have been ‘the terror and stop of the northern confederacy’, and whereas Emma had described him as ‘the man of men’ who had triumphed in 127 engagements, the admiral made it ‘the only man’ who had emerged from 127 days of battle. In this, as on many other occasions, Nelson sought to place every strut to his fame on public record.

The early biographers reflected Nelson’s interest in his posterity. Theirs were ‘monuments’ erected to praise a famous man, written under the gaze of influential patrons and participants they could not afford to offend. They dodged controversies to dwell upon the more splendid of their hero’s public services. Shortly after Nelson’s death Lady Hamilton hired James Harrison, the editor of a series of British classics, to write a biography and he spent much of 1806 and 1807 at her home in Merton, accessing confidential papers and interviewing witnesses. With a large family to support, Harrison’s affairs were ‘desperate’, and he depended entirely upon a frugal stipend from his publisher and Emma’s legendary largesse. The Life was published in 1806. It is by no means as worthless as most subsequent writers would have us believe, but betrayed its origins, traducing the wronged Lady Nelson, who thought it a vile publication, and offering a spotty coverage of an illustrious career. A planned revision never appeared. On his part, William Nelson, the admiral’s brother, who received an earldom from a grateful nation, engaged a cleric named Nott to produce a rival publication using papers in his possession, but on learning that the Prince of Wales was patronizing a third project he deferred to its authors, John McArthur and James Stanier Clarke, the editors of a ponderous but popular serial entitled The Naval Chronicle.

Although Clarke claimed to have studied ‘naval literature’ since ‘early life’ it was McArthur (1755–1840), doctor in law, who was the key figure in what came to be recognized as the official life of Nelson, launched in two spacious volumes in 1809. He had been a prize agent and long standing promoter of the admiral. In 1799 he ferried Nelson’s only fragment of autobiography into print, and—if his own story is to be believed—persuaded the admiral to accept him as the authorized biographer. In all walks he had been a thorough partisan. When Sir Hyde Parker approached him with a vindication of his own shaky performance as commander-in-chief of the Baltic, McArthur advised against its publication, since it contained ‘so many improper and ill-founded strictures’ upon Nelson’s ‘conduct’ during the campaign. Clarke and McArthur’s book reflected the support of many naval friends and acquaintances, as well as the Nelson family, but it too confined itself largely to the creditable. McArthur’s reputation has seesawed. Once uncritically plagiarized by legions of successors, he is now as lazily dismissed as an irrelevance. His work is certainly a difficult one, partisan and stuffed with inadequately rendered documents, but much quarried from the admiral’s papers found its only home in the book’s pages, and some of the eyewitness testimony has lasting value. However, from inception it was a commemoration, not a balanced portrait.

In the 1840s the worthy Nicholas Harris Nicolas, who abandoned the navy for a career as a lawyer and historian, published what is still the most scholarly and comprehensive collection of Nelson’s letters and dispatches, but even he felt constrained in treating the more delicate aspects of his hero’s life. On their way to high Victorianism, with its emphasis on sobriety and strict morality, the educated classes did not relish dwelling upon the shortcomings of their national hero, especially at a time when the naval power he had bequeathed was transparently a pillar of the nation’s security, worldwide empire, and prosperity. Works exposing a shabbier side to the coin were usually unsuccessful. The Letters of Lord Nelson to Lady Hamilton, published by Thomas Lovewell of London in 1814, was condemned as fraudulent and fell into lasting disrepute. Its ‘editors’ have never been identified, although Emma Hamilton, who was injured by the publication, insinuated that Harrison was to blame. The hostile reception received by the book aborted a promised sequel. However, originals of some of the published letters have since come to light, and show that the transcriptions were generally accurate, even if one of the deletions preserved the secret of the parentage of Nelson’s daughter, Horatia.

A similar fate befell Thomas J. Pettigrew’s documentary biography of Nelson, published in 1849. Among the hundreds of additional documents it published, often in an abridged form, was proof that the admiral had sired a daughter by another man’s wife. Like the Letters the book was fiercely resisted, and its author denounced as a fraud and a blackguard who had published calumnies that should never have seen the light of day. It was only with the issue of Alfred Morrison’s collection of Nelson-Hamilton papers in 1893 and 1894 that the actual relationship between Nelson, his mistress, and his daughter was finally conceded. Over a far longer period a different, but equally heated, tit-for-tat exchange was occurring over the events of June 1799, with accusers marshaling every specie of evidence, tainted or not, to condemn Nelson’s handling of Neapolitan Jacobins in Naples, and apologists as vigorously defending the admiral’s own version of his conduct.

For long we have expected more of biography than this, and today it might be said that no corner of the lives of past public men and women escapes modern scrutiny. During the twentieth century Nelson continued to attract attention, but most of the important works were studies of specific aspects rather than biographies. Julian Corbett and Edouard Desbriere on Trafalgar, William Hardman on the blockade of Malta, Ludovic Kennedy on Nelson’s professional relations, Dudley Pope and Ole Feldbaek on the Baltic campaign, and Brian Lavery and Michelle Battesti on the Nile, among a few others, count as major contributions to our understanding of Nelson’s service career. Several important collections of documents also appeared, but the biographies reflected a popular rather than a scholarly tradition, and while some were pleasing and worthwhile introductions, few made much of an impression on the mass of imperfectly known primary sources. This tradition also contaminated the evaluation of the literature, and many unadventurous titles were hailed as standard works, while serious efforts sometimes went unsung. There was little appreciation of what needed to be done. In truth, the century produced one major Nelson biography, Carola Oman’s magnificent Nelson of 1946. In 1905, Walter Sichel’s Emma, Lady Hamilton surpassed all existing Nelson biographies in terms of scholarship. Of later biographical studies, Jack Russell’s Nelson and the Hamiltons (1969), though undocumented and cloaked in a folksy language, and Winifred Gerin’s Horatia Nelson (1970), a study of Nelson’s daughter, were the only ones to be based upon an extensive study of the relevant manuscript and published primary evidence.

A lacuna in interest in Nelson lasted from the late 1960s to the 1990s, when military topics fell into disfavor, and academic historians shunned narrative history in favor of socioeconomic analysis. In a postwar and postimperial world it was also easy to forget what Britain had owed to her navy. I can vividly remember an Oxford don flatly advising me to abandon naval history on the grounds that it ‘didn’t contribute much to knowledge’. And if Nelson remained widely respected he possessed, as a reviewer of one of the more successful biographies grudgingly acknowledged, ‘the wrong magic’. Nevertheless, from that hiatus there emerged a number of enthusiasts who appreciated the weaknesses of the existing studies and the need for a renewed assault upon the forbidding collections of underused or unexplored manuscript materials. My own awakening occurred in the seventies, when working on a doctorate relating to Nelson’s time, and the immensity of that stock of material came into view. I knew how Lewis and Clark must have felt gazing upon what seemed to be a primeval wilderness west of the Mississippi, beckoning to be explored for all its difficulties and hidden pitfalls. It was clear to me that it was time for another major reappraisal, one that would initially eschew the secondary books and build the portrait anew from its true foundations. For long the project simmered, but after six years of concentrated work my earlier volume, Nelson: A Dream of Glory (2004), was published. It was the first biographical study to trawl the full range of primary sources and to tackle the admiral’s earlier life in depth, and judging by a considerable correspondence it has been useful, although I am still finding new material I wish I had used.

I did not realize when I embarked upon the book that others would be pursuing similar ideas, but the first years of the new century, coinciding with the bicentenary of Trafalgar, produced an explosion of refreshing close-grained scholarship. A number of valuable monographs appeared, and a few multisourced and penetrating biographies. Professor Roger Knight’s The Pursuit of Victory (2005) is magisterial, an extensive well-researched and eminently judicious work with a particular emphasis on the naval aspects. Indeed, in that respect, it is to be doubted if it will ever be superseded, for no previous biographer had brought to the subject such a command of the nuts and bolts of the eighteenth-century navy, gained in a lifetime of study. Meanwhile, a fine German scholar, Marianne Czisnik, completed an unusually conscientious doctorate on Nelson for the University of Edinburgh, and turned it into Nelson: A Controversial Hero (2005), a book that also deserves a place on the top Nelson shelf, as well as a more robust edition. Her forthcoming collection of the correspondence of Nelson and Emma Hamilton will lay foundations for the major life that this mercurial woman so obviously needs. Like Czisnik, Professor Andrew Lambert, our most visible naval historian, was particularly interested in the use posterity made of the admiral’s memory. An admirer of Nelson and a Norfolk man to boot, he sympathetically reviewed the admiral’s life in Nelson: Britannia’s God of War (2004), and demonstrated his continuing contribution to the naval tradition, drawing upon a formidable expertise in the navy of the nineteenth century. The appearance of these studies coincided with The Command of the Ocean (2004) in which N. A. M. Rodger, arguably the greatest British naval historian since Julian Corbett, surveyed his country’s rise to naval superiority in a richly faceted history. Never had so much erudition been focused upon Nelson and his age.

The naval aspects were particularly well served by these studies, but none came close to exhausting the enormous amount of material available. The British Library alone holds 129 volumes of relevant Nelson and Hamilton papers. Some areas of Nelson’s life remained relatively unexplored, and myths continued to abound; as fast as some were knocked down, others pressed forward. Partisans of Nelson have searched for reasons to exalt. Their hero has been described as a great seaman, although few who knew him gave him that reputation. His ships occasionally performed surprising navigational feats, but this was largely because he drove his captains, masters, and pilots to do what they might not otherwise have attempted. More surprising are the repeated claims that Nelson possessed literary talent. Undoubtedly his letters yield occasional vivid phrases, but Nelson, who knew eighteenth-century literature and letters too well, frankly admitted that his was the unlettered pen of a seaman. His friend, Collingwood, may have brought a certain Richardsonesque quality to his communications, but not Nelson.

On the other hand, in other quarters there has been an accentuation of the negative. Nelson is sometimes portrayed as a warmonger and political reactionary. He certainly reveled in naval glory, which he equated with personal honor and patriotic endeavor, but the long contest with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, and the catalogue of human disasters that he was forced to witness, developed in him a clear view that war was to be seen primarily as a road to peace. His later correspondence is peppered with allusions to the importance of pacifying Europe. ‘God send a finish to it for the benefit of mankind’, he wrote in 1804. ‘I have only to wish for a battle with the French … That over … I most sincerely hope that by the destruction of Buonaparte that wars with all nations will cease.’

It is even more misleading to damn him as a reactionary, although he defended largely unreconstructed monarchies, and the war—a struggle for national survival on an unprecedented scale—drove Nelson, as many others, into more extreme positions than they would have ordinarily taken. As I explained in my earlier volume, at their roots Nelson’s views were unremarkable among eighteenth-century Englishmen of his class. Rather he was distinguished by his earnestness. From his father, the rector of Burnham Thorpe in Norfolk, he took a more prominent piety than most. ‘I own myself a believer in God,’ he wrote in 1801, ‘and if I have any merit in not fearing death, it is because I feel that his power can shelter me when he pleases, and that I must fall whenever it is his good pleasure.’ He shared with his countrymen a common patriotism, with its suspicion of foreigners, but adopted the deeper commitment to public duty espoused by his uncle, Captain Maurice Suckling, who mentored him during those first years in the navy. Likewise, Nelson subscribed to the standard conservatism, and believed that the English constitution, with its creaking balance between Crown, Lords and Commons, theoretically protected the property and liberties of all. But within those parameters he was, as that freethinker Sir William Hamilton said, of a liberal tendency. He saw nothing unnatural in a social order full of distinctions, except that he strongly advocated the reward of merit, and espoused an increasingly old-fashioned paternalism, which emphasized the duties of those above to those who served them below. The central role of government was to protect and reward loyal subjects, and to address their just grievances. This took him far from reactionary politics.

Failures of paternalism, at home or abroad, tended to arouse Nelson’s sympathies. He spoke up for the impoverished agricultural laborers and the abused seamen in England, for the peasants of Sardinia and the Two Sicilies, and the client underlings of the Ottoman Porte. He disliked the French Revolution not only because it threatened his country and the stability of Europe, but also because regimes that willfully oppressed, massacred, and robbed sections of their peoples were the very antithesis of paternal government. Nowhere did he express his view of government more vividly than in relation to Bronte, the Sicilian duchy awarded him by a grateful king of Naples. ‘My object at Bronte’, he said, ‘is to make the people happy by not suffering them to be oppressed [and] to enrich the country by the improvement in agriculture.’ The theme occurs and reoccurs in his correspondence. A combination of benevolent rule and loyal service would create Bronte the Happy, or so he hoped.

Many of the misconceptions have arisen from partial views of the evidence. But the quantity of letters to, from, and about Nelson, and the supply of relevant public documents now available are so vast as to be almost inexhaustible, and furnish the materials for a comprehensive and intimate portrait. The present work is not a history of the Royal Navy or the war at sea, although both figure prominently. It is a biography, and must address the many different facets of its subject with equal care. Like most people, Nelson was driven by public and private aspirations and anxieties that competed for his time and attention, and they intermingle here as they did in life. The fighting admiral, fleet manager, diplomat, and self-publicist; the patron, friend, lover, and father; the disillusioned patriot, the patient plagued by bodily infirmities, and the commoner looking for security in a society dominated by lineage, land, and property; the estate improver; and the strong man and the weak are among the many Nelsons with their attendant tragedies and triumphs with whom we must contend to recreate the whole man. As Sir Winston Churchill said of his biography of Marlborough, his illustrious ancestor, ‘It is my hope to recall this great shade from the past, and not only to invest him with his panoply, but make him living and intimate to modern eyes.’

Following my usual practice, I built this book from primary sources gathered in more than fourteen years of research. The bulk of them are unpublished, but the original manuscripts of those that have been printed were used wherever possible or practical. I attempted to approach the subject as objectively as possible, without axes to grind, and to allow my conclusions to develop naturally from the accumulation and evaluation of evidence. My constant concern has been whether my account fairly reflected the evidence seen, irrespective of whether it supported, contradicted, or modified received opinions where they existed. I believe that readers are best served by forthright independent scholarship, unconditioned by preconceptions, and the advantage of going to the secondary sources at the end of a project, when a mastery of the evidence has been acquired, is that the historian quickly learns which authors stand on firm ground. In my notes I have alluded to those I have found most useful, although I am sure there are others in such well-tilled fields. Their conclusions are not necessarily the same as mine, for scholars look through different eyes, but they will give the deeper inquirer a range of qualified opinion.

I hope this book will be enjoyed by intelligent laymen and women, as well as those with more permanent or professional commitments in the area. In the interests of clarity I decided to modernize most of the spelling and punctuation when quoting original material, but the wordings and meanings have been scrupulously preserved. Footnotes are a serious problem. Had I acknowledged every source, they would have filled a large volume of their own. I opted to identify quotations and the lesser known pieces of evidence, but have skimped the great published collections, most of which are conveniently organized on a chronological basis.

Nelson: A Dream of Glory told of a young man driven by a need to achieve, using the navy to make his way through Georgian society. We followed his search for a command of his chosen profession, promotion, the patronage of influential persons, and a good marriage. He endured much routine service, chequered levels of support, and a prolonged spell of unemployment, but from the beginning showed flashes of an unusual spirit and physical and political courage, and, after the outbreak of the French wars in 1793, established a solid reputation in the Mediterranean. Nevertheless, it was not until 1797 that he became a national hero by an astonishing display of initiative and bravery in the battle of Cape St Vincent and became a rear admiral. Within months of these achievements, however, a disastrous attack on Tenerife and the loss of his right arm threatened to end Nelson’s active naval career. The possibility of a peace contributed to his despondency, and we left the disabled Nelson at the age of thirty-nine, returning home to an uncertain future.

Fortunately for him, the country had need of her admirals.

When Nelson was invalided home in 1797 Britain had been fighting France for more than four years. She had no powerful allies, and because the war had been financed by expensive loans, her national debt had spiraled. The cream of her relatively small army had been lost in poor-paying, disease-ridden campaigns in the West Indies, and at a time when military strength still depended upon the foot soldier, she was further disadvantaged by her modest population of eleven million. France’s armies had been depleted, and she would introduce conscription in September 1798, but her population of twenty-five million gave her a large reserve of muscle. In these circumstances, the navy was Britain’s essential safeguard, protecting her trade, colonies, and wealth, and of course the realm itself. An island, Albion had long since invested in her wooden walls, outstripping her rivals in dockyard facilities (she had three times as many drydocks as France and Spain combined) and her reservoir of experienced seamen. Her growing industrial power, itself stimulated by naval and military demand, was also delivering some technical advantages, including—in the earlier years of the war—superior numbers of carronades, the heavy guns that gave British ships such powerful hitting power at shorter ranges. Yet even at sea the British could not be complacent. Using conscript labor, her naval rivals could often build ships faster than Britain, and they were able to annex the dockyard facilities of numerous satellite powers. Had it not been for Britain’s battle superiority and ability to destroy, capture, and purloin enemy ships, the naval arms race would have been in doubt.

Britain never needed her wooden walls more, for the wars in Europe were embarking upon a new and more dangerous phase. In 1799 Napoleon Bonaparte overthrew the French Directory and used a new constitution to consolidate power, originally as the first of three ruling consuls. In 1804 he had himself crowned hereditary emperor. Some of Napoleon’s internal reforms, in the realms of finance, law and order, administration, and jurisprudence, were far from contemptible, but he also became a dictator far distant from popular sovereignty, dominating the government, turning the press into an organ of state propaganda, censoring or controlling education and the arts, and creating the elements of a police state. Of wider import, he was consumed by dreams of empire, and turned Europe into a battlefield. As one German diplomat, charged with accepting Napoleon’s claim to hereditary kingship too readily tartly replied, he would build Bonaparte a statue of gold if he would only leave Prussia alone. Of those willing to resist, Britain was Napoleon’s most stubborn foe, and unsheathed her navy as the principal weapon of her survival.

Returning home in 1797, almost broken by the fatigues and afflictions of years of war, Horatio Nelson could not have predicted that eventful future. If there was peace, it was not clear what use Britain might make of the disabled veteran of a bloody defeat, and a retirement on ‘half pay’ seemed as likely a prospect as any. Yet within months he would go forth as his country’s champion in a new round of hostilities, and attempt, as he often said, what Man can do.

BOOK ONE

THE BAND OF BROTHERS

‘I had the happiness to command a Band of Brothers … Each knew his duty, and I was sure would feel for a French ship.’

Nelson to Lord Howe, 8 January 1799

‘His activity and zeal are eminently conspicuous even amongst the Band of Brothers. Each, as I may have occasion to mention them, must call forth my gratitude and admiration.’

Nelson to Earl Spencer, 25 September 1798

I

RECOVERING

From Gallici Bonaparte sailed,

Nelson from Albion’s sea;

Chains were our lot had one prevail’d,

The other sets us free.

‘Imitation of a Greek Epigram’, c.1798

1

AS soon as he arrived at Spithead in the Seahorse frigate on 1 September 1797, Rear Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson wrote to the Admiralty for permission to haul down his flag and go ashore to restore his health. Between five and six in the afternoon he disembarked at the new sally port in Portsmouth to a novel welcome. A waiting crowd raised ‘three cheers’ and the admiral ‘very politely thanked’ his admirers. It was the first time that Nelson had returned to such a greeting, a measure of his growing celebrity and a good omen. Another quickly followed. A day later a private note from George, Earl Spencer, the first lord of the Admiralty, complimented Nelson upon his ‘very glorious though unsuccessful attack on Santa Cruz’ and wished him a speedy recovery in Bath. The gesture revived the wounded admiral’s spirits, for it suggested that, although he had lost his right arm, the esteem of this powerful patron had not been diminished by Nelson’s bloody repulse at Tenerife, and that there were prospects of receiving another command.

Nelson immediately took a coach for Bath, and sped towards the two people who loved him the most but from whom he had been separated these past four and a half years, Fanny, his adoring wife, and his father, Edmund, still the rector of Burnham Thorpe in Norfolk, where Nelson had been born, but now visibly showing his seventy-five years. For ten years they had been a triumvirate – Nelson a rising star of the British fleet but so often at sea, and Fanny and Edmund, the keepers of the home fires, as often waiting and praying for his safe return. The last letter Fanny had received from her husband, written in the tortured, unfamiliar scrawl of his remaining hand, had told its own dreadful story, and now she longed to nurse him back to health. On the evening of Sunday, 3 September (the day before the official dispatches about Tenerife were published in London) the admiral’s coach arrived at her rented house at 17 New King Street, a plain, terraced three-storey dwelling with dormer windows above and servants’ quarters below, and interiors cheered by the pictures Fanny had hung on the walls and the notes from her pianoforte. Her father-in-law, who had recently returned to Bath from one of his peregrinations, used the house whenever he could, especially in the colder months.

The Reverend Edmund Nelson was frail and narrow shouldered but his long grey locks and soft, gentle face added distinction to the dark clerical clothes, while at thirty-six Lady Nelson remained petite and brown-haired with fine features that were interesting rather than beautiful, and a habit of demonstrating with dainty hands. The admiral himself was another matter. A local newspaper thought he looked ‘in good health and spirits’, but Fanny would have seen further. Thirty-nine years had not erased the distinct boyishness in Nelson’s appearance, and his thin voice still reflected the unmistakable country drawl of his native county, but the shock of long sandy-brown hair, as uncontrollable as ever and pulled into a pigtail that greased the collars of his uniform coats in long hauls, was streaking with grey, and his sensitive face was looser and more lined. The scars of four years of war were painfully plain. The left eye looked bright because the pupil of the right, effectively sightless, was unnaturally dilated and part of the eyebrow above was missing. The admiral still suffered occasional pain from an abdominal hernia caused by a blow received off Cape St Vincent, but most obviously of all, his right sleeve was empty, where the arm had been cut off below the shoulder after being shattered by grape shot. He had the look of a man who was still sick.

Nelson was occasionally feverish, but the unhealed stump of his arm was the constant irritant, and only opium suppressed extreme pain and allowed fitful sleep. One of the silk ligatures sealing his arteries still protruded from the wound at the end of the stump, refusing to come away, and preventing it from closing as well as inviting infection. The patient suffered excruciating pain each day when a surgeon tested the ligature in the course of redressing the wound. In Bath a surgeon named Nicholls reported for daily duty, while the services of a local physician, Dr Falconer of 29 The Circus, and Joseph Spry, an apothecary, attended more intermittently. Fanny also rallied to her broken husband with courage and care. She was shocked to see the arm cut ‘so high towards the shoulder’, but eventually mastered the grisly dressings, and assumed innumerable burdens, from writing Sir Horatio’s letters to cutting his meat at the table. Thus accommodated, Nelson waited impatiently for his wound to close, stirring at every sign of improvement. After one fairly quiet night he informed his brother that his ‘personal health’ was ‘never … better’ and his arm ‘in the fairest way of soon healing’.

Physical dependency pushed Nelson closer to his wife, and their relationship remained strong, despite the admiral’s guilty secret. Like many officers exiled for long periods on far-off stations, he had not been strictly faithful to the woman fretting back home. He had taken a little Italian mistress in Leghorn, Tuscany, in 1794, maintaining her in a house, and on one occasion carrying her aboard his ship to Vado Bay, where he had been temporarily stationed. The French occupation of Leghorn in 1796 had driven a wedge between Nelson and Adelaide Correglia, but they continued to communicate through Genoa until resuming their physical relationship at Porto Ferraio on Elba at the turn of the year. It was there that Nelson had last seen Adelaide in January 1797, only eight months before the reunion with Fanny. A newly discovered account shows that Nelson’s passion for Adelaide had been strong towards the end, and that he would brook no male competition. Our witness is James Noble, one of Nelson’s lieutenants, who was recuperating from wounds at the time, and found himself escorting Signora Correglia when his commander was otherwise detained. His unpublished autobiography records:

The following occurrence was near costing me the commodore’s [Nelson’s] friendship, from a false feeling and unjust suspicion, viz. – while at Porto Ferraio the officers of the Blanche gave a ball [January 1797], and thinking it would amuse me … although my wounds were unhealed, I asked permission to go, which was granted, and I was asked to take Adelaide, which I readily consented to, being sure that I would be the more welcome. The commodore … [requested] that when I came away I should put her on shore, and let [Israel] Co[u]lson, the coxswain, see her to her lodgings. I was induced to stay much longer [at the ball] to gratify her than I should have done otherwise. When I put ashore, [it] being very cold, and having some distance to row afterwards, I was induced [by Adelaide] to walk up with her and take a cup of chocolate, making Colson accompany me. This gave rise to unworthy ideas [in Nelson], which the emaciated state of my frame ought to have protected me from, if no other. A great coolness ensued for some days … I refused to dine in the [commodore’s] cabin. He sent for me the third day. An explanation having taken place, I dined there that day, and the commodore showed me afterwards more kindness than ever.

Naval officers were used to such liaisons, which were generally regarded as temporary affairs of convenience, and in the Mediterranean most fellow officers knew about Nelson’s relationship with Adelaide, but none of them spoke of it in England, not even Fanny’s son, Josiah Nisbet, a petty officer on his stepfather’s ships, who surely had some inkling of what was going on. Such was the confidentiality shrouding the episode that half a century later Noble deleted the incident from a printed version of his autobiography.

Nelson did not regard his two years of trysting in Italy as a threat to his marriage, but kept it from Fanny, who seems never to have known about it. But that autumn of 1797 Sir Horatio was able to bring his wife good news – of her son. Josiah was a mere seventeen-year-old. He lacked the years and experience to qualify for a commission in His Majesty’s navy, but had nevertheless shot precipitately through the lower ranks. On 26 May that year, when still apparently sixteen, he had been appointed a lieutenant in Nelson’s flagship, Theseus, in flat contravention of the rule that six years of ‘sea time’ and a minimum age of twenty were indispensable for such an appointment. To get Josiah commissioned while under age, Nelson had done ‘a little cheating’, falsifying Josiah’s record and finding three loyal captains to sign the ‘passing certificate’ that testified that the applicant had passed the necessary examination. Not only that, but Nelson had even gerrymandered his stepson over the next slippery step up the ladder, and persuaded his commander-in-chief, Earl St Vincent, to appoint the boy acting commander of the Dolphin hospital ship, a post confirmed by the Admiralty on 18 September. Josiah Nisbet was absurdly young and immature for the honour, but there he was, master and commander of one of His Majesty’s ships of war. It was one of the most spectacular examples of nepotism on record, but sitting by her fireside in New King Street Fanny was delighted. If her boy could make post-captain, his next step, he would probably become one of the youngest admirals in the service.

Bath, that town of restorative waters, apothecaries, doctors and enfeebled but fashionable gentry in search of health, was a favourite resort of the Nelsons, and Sir Horatio had first come here as a junior captain recuperating from the pestilential climes of the Caribbean. Now old haunts brought many chance encounters with friends and acquaintances, one ‘Honest Bob’ Man, the admiral who had blotted his record the previous year by abandoning the Mediterranean fleet and sailing to England without orders. Man was worried that his flight had cost him a share in the prize money taken on the station after his departure, and wanted Nelson’s support. Sir Horatio’s convalescent state deterred Man from pressing the subject immediately, but he reserved it for long letters.

Nelson had his own anxieties about status and prize money. He had certainly risen in rank and reputation, achieving national fame as the hero of the battle of Cape St Vincent, but his subsequent defeat at Tenerife and his disabling wound raised questions, especially if the war ended, as some thought likely, and the size of the naval establishment withered. What future could a half-blind, one-armed admiral expect? The press was speculating that he might be offered a place on one of the ‘public boards’ but that was neither certain nor appealing for a man of Nelson’s age and energy. And yet he had little money to fall back upon. He had made little prize money, and when arrears of pay had been made up, he would be left with quarterly payments of ‘half pay’ (the stipend awarded unemployed officers), amounting to no more than £77 9s. 9d. for a man of his rank, and about £2000 of savings in government stocks. On 6 October his main account with his bankers, Marsh, Page and Creed of Norfolk Street in London, stood at a mere £2248. Another £4000 lay in an account under the name of his brother, Maurice Nelson, and his friend Alexander Davison, but every penny of that had been left to Fanny by her uncle. It was all a very small fortune with which to confront the expenses and expectations held of an admiral and Knight of the Order of the Bath. The most embarrassing deficiency was his complete lack of property, that indispensable symbol of eighteenth-century English gentrification. There was no ancestral home for any of the Reverend Edmund’s extensive brood to inherit. Their father had been one of the relatively indigent middling classes, a respected, educated, but property-less clergyman who had been content to spend his days serving his fellow man while remaining a life tenant of the rectory of Burnham Thorpe, a patrimony of a relative, Lord Walpole. Returning from the wars, Sir Horatio was immediately challenged by the need to find a modest, affordable property that would support his status and house his family.

Nelson had always regarded glory and honour, rather than money, as his motor, but that too depended upon further employment. Fanny and Edmund would probably have been content to see Sir Horatio retired, a respected war hero, even if they had to struggle on stinted means, but Nelson’s ardent need to achieve would never have allowed him to settle for it, and as his wound healed he yearned for a summons from the Admiralty. His hopes of active service rose in the late summer. It was clear that he retained the confidence of Spencer, as well as St Vincent, his old commander-in-chief, and far from damning him, the news of Tenerife seemed only to increase the admiration of the public. Knowing nothing of Nelson’s role in conceiving and planning the attack, the press saw him as the gallant executor of a misconceived adventure, the hero of a hopeless mission. The Times, for example, aired many doubts about the wisdom of the attempt to capture Tenerife, which did ‘not appear to have been judiciously planned’, but the gallantry of those charged with the attack was beyond all praise. Nelson’s role was even exaggerated, for The Times depicted the desperately wounded admiral ‘exert[ing] himself in snatching from a watery grave a number of gallant fellows that were paddling about him’ as his boat carried him back to his ship, and told how he had scaled her side without the aid of a ‘boatswain’s chair’, assistants or his shredded right arm. The sympathy for him was almost universal. ‘This gallant and valuable officer is already able to write with his left hand,’ one paper consoled its readers in September. ‘It is indeed a curious fact that he had for some time practised with his left hand, in case any accident should happen to his right.’ Several weeks later another confidently predicted that Nelson was soon to be re-employed in ‘command of a secret expedition’, and there was ‘no officer in His Majesty’s fleet more capable of executing any service of difficulty or danger’.

To Nelson such praise was a tonic. He derived enormous pleasure opening the stream of admiring letters. Hood, the old commander-in-chief who had been his greatest role model, sent congratulations. So did the Corporation of London, and Sir Horatio’s old friend the Duke of Clarence, who welcomed his return ‘covered with honour and glory’ and declared that he wanted to be among the first to shake his remaining hand. The London Guildhall and that famous venue for public meetings, the London Tavern, rang with toasts to his name, and the freedoms of Bristol and Norwich were on their way. Old neighbours sent gifts of game, including the mighty Coke, who dominated the politics of northern Norfolk. Coke talked about getting the county magistrates to send a public letter of thanks and sent sixteen partridges, five pheasants and four hares. In January the town hall of Norwich proudly exhibited the sword Nelson had taken from the dying Spanish admiral off Cape St Vincent, suspending it from the flukes of an anchor with the hero’s new coat of arms below. It was sharply energising. ‘The moment I am cured I shall offer myself for service,’ Nelson wrote to St Vincent, ‘and, if you continue to hold your opinion of me, shall press to return with all the zeal, although not with all the personal [physical] ability I had formerly.’ Be damned to the blind eye and missing arm!

After a brief interlude in Bath, Nelson and Fanny were back in London by about 18 September with business in mind. Nelson’s uncle, William Suckling, had offered them lodgings at his house in Kentish Town, but Maurice Nelson, the admiral’s brother, had found a more convenient address, apartments at 141 Bond Street, an area of interesting shops and circulating libraries only a short walk through Piccadilly to St James’s and the Admiralty. It was a flat-roofed house on the south-west side of the street, consisting of three storeys over a shop, lit by a trio of regular windows to the front. The landlord, a young fellow named Jones, was connected to Admiral Man. ‘I am persuaded he will do everything in his power to render his apartments agreeable,’ wrote Man, ‘and any service you are pleased to tender him will I am sure be gratefully acknowledged.

The move put Nelson close to the heart of public affairs, and on better days he ventured about town. He reached Greenwich Hospital, where he took his old Mediterranean friend, Sir Gilbert Elliot, to dine with the governor, their mutual comrade, Lord Hood, and where he renewed his friendship with the lieutenant governor, his beloved ‘sea-daddy’, Captain William Locker, who was invited to Bond Street. Other naval friends and acquaintances exchanged news here and there, or grumbled about prospective unemployment in these leaner times. In November Betsy Fremantle called at Nelson’s apartments with the news that her wounded husband, Nelson’s colleague Captain Thomas Fremantle, who had shared the miserable voyage home in the Seahorse, was still in pain but at least would keep his arm. Also arriving at the convalescent’s door was Captain Richard Bulkeley, an army friend from West Indian days, who brought two sons to see the hero of Cape St Vincent. Sir Horatio showed the boys his sword, and the youngest, an eleven-year-old, was so spellbound that he resolved at once to go to sea.

The constant visitors must have tired one in such pain, but he was forever hospitable. A Norfolk man learned how ‘happy’ the admiral was to meet a ‘countryman’, and relatives he had not seen for many years crowded into his quarters. Maurice, the loyal brother with the ‘open frank manner’, lived only a short walk away in Rathbone Place, and must often have called with Sukey, his common-law wife. More wearing was the Reverend William Nelson, Horatio’s other older brother, who arrived at the end of September grubbing for favours as always, ‘the roughest mortal … who ever lived’, according to Fanny. He wanted to attend Nelson’s investiture into the Order of the Bath at St James’s, and was even more interested in securing a prebendary stall, the ‘nearer home and the larger the income the better’. Armed with a list of those within the gift of government, his heart was set upon the stall said to have become vacant in Norwich Cathedral. The report proved to be ill founded, but before scuttling back to Hilborough, where his parish church sat in an attractive Norfolk lane near the Wissey, William had impressed upon his brother the need to grovel before the great while ‘the iron is hot’ to wheedle some comparable appointment. The admiral’s brother-in-law, Thomas Bolton, was far more agreeable, and became a constant companion during his brief stay in the capital. No doubt Nelson managed the journey to Kentish Town to see Uncle William Suckling, now at the summit of his career as comptroller of customs, though far from well. The last of his children were off his hands – the daughter married and the youngest son, Horace, about to receive the living of Barsham in Suffolk, a family home – but the old patriarch who had done so much for the young Nelson had only another year to live.

If those who met Nelson at this time expected a self-pitying invalid they would have been surprised. Rarely was the paradox of physical weakness and mental determination so evident as in those months after his return to London, when he adjusted to mutilation and disability. As Sir Gilbert Elliot remarked, Nelson was obviously in ‘a great deal of violent pain’ but ‘better and fresher than I ever remember him’. As on so many occasions, his strength of mind and purpose overcame pain and disability.

2

The iron surely grew hotter as the war with revolutionary France neared the end of its fifth year and peace negotiations stalled. Britain was confronted with impossible terms. France demanded compensation for the destruction of her ships in Toulon in 1793, and wanted the Cape of Good Hope returned to Holland, which she controlled, a concession that would have threatened Britain’s communications with India, a hub of her trade empire. The elected five-man Directory that now governed France may have been less doctrinaire than its predecessors, but belligerence remained a stock tool, partly, perhaps, because its restless army was better employed abroad than destabilising the regime at home. To fuel Britain’s pessimism, her one effective ally, Austria, made a separate peace with France at Campo Formio in October, leaving the island power the sole significant adversary of the military colossus of Europe.

Britain would fight on, but no one was quite sure how. William Wyndham, Baron Grenville, the foreign secretary, was a gritty warrior, determined to contain France within her pre-war geographical boundaries, and to keep the Low Countries, from which Britain could be threatened with invasion, out of hostile hands. Britain’s best course, he said, was to bring Austria, Prussia and Russia into an anti-French coalition, a formidable diplomatic task given the exhaustion, diverse interests and mutual distrust of the great powers, even if oiled with British money. But Pitt’s hard-working secretary of war, Henry Dundas, was reluctant to mire the country in the continental entanglements that were unfortunately necessary for complete victory, and favoured a defensive campaign in which the navy – still superior if not supreme at sea – would secure Britain and its interests and inflict maximum damage on enemy commerce and colonies. His policy presaged a long-drawn-out economic struggle. Whichever road was pursued, the country had need of her fleets and admirals.

On 18 September, upon returning to London, a frail one-armed officer arrived at the Admiralty in Whitehall. He may have spoken to Spencer in the oak-panelled first-floor boardroom, but was also entertained in the adjacent Admiralty House, where the first lord resided. At least Countess Spencer, if we can believe a second-hand account, thought the visitor ‘so sickly it was painful to see him’. It took a little conversation to reveal a man who knew his business.

In the Spencers Sir Horatio had unquestionably secured his most important patrons to date. George John, Earl Spencer, was the same age as Nelson, and the brother of the influential Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Tall and well-put together, he was nevertheless reserved, polished and gentle rather than flamboyant. A well-connected top-drawer Whig, Spencer had split from the radical Foxite wing on the outbreak of the war and aligned himself with Pitt, whose assessment of the nature of the threat to Britain was much the surer. On that Nelson entirely agreed. Spencer had headed the Admiralty since 1794, and long corresponded with Nelson, recognising in him an officer not to be wasted. His wife, Lavinia, the daughter of the Earl of Lucan, was herself a pillar of London society, famed for beauty, conversation and charm. The historian Edward Gibbon admiringly said that she brought ‘the simplicity and playfulness of a child’ to ‘sense and spirit’. Nelson, with his ready eye for handsome females, would also have been impressed by the thirty-five-year-old petite, big-eyed and interesting face peering from beneath huge hair, and appreciated the liveliness and wit. The Spencers, he found, also had a personal connection. The earl’s uncle, Dr Charles Poyntz, of North Creake, Norfolk, was a personal friend of the Nelsons, and in fact had stood godfather to Sir Horatio’s youngest sister, Kate. The Spencers knew the county well, and could interlace their table talk with East Anglian gossip about such ghosts from Nelson’s past as Sir Mordaunt Martin.

Armed with the good opinions of the Spencers and Admirals Hood and St Vincent, Nelson had never felt securer, and for the first time the king’s favour also seemed within his grasp. Nelson had been ushered into the august presence of George III as early as 1783, when he had been a young protégé of Admiral Hood, but four years later struck up a close but unfortunate friendship with the king’s wayward sailor son, Prince William Henry, later destined to become the Duke of Clarence and King William IV. Grossly inexperienced, Nelson hoped to strengthen his influence, or ‘interest’ as eighteenth century folk called it, by the relationship, but the king thought him an inadequate mentor who failed to improve his son’s behaviour. The prejudice lingered, and George was one of the few who criticised Nelson for the failure at Tenerife, which he viewed as an empty display of valour. Nevertheless, a rapprochement with the king was necessary, as Nelson had to be formally inducted into the prestigious Order of the Bath, the knighthood he had won off Cape St Vincent, and Spencer repaired the necessary bridges so well that Nelson became a familiar figure on the royal fringe during the months that followed.

Attendance at the royal levees, when courtiers, foreign envoys, ministers, major office holders, Church leaders, diplomats, peers, knights and leading officers of the armed services were admitted to the king’s presence at St James’s Palace for one or two hours on stipulated weekday afternoons, not only conferred a degree of royal favour but afforded opportunities to meet the movers and shakers in contemporary Britain. At 12.30 on Wednesday, 27 September, Nelson duly appeared, probably chaperoned by Spencer, but bringing in his train his brother William and two naval protégés, John Waller and Jonathan Culverhouse. It was customary for officers returning from service abroad to be presented to His Majesty, where they bowed to kiss the royal hand, and when the levee closed the king retired to his closet to prepare to formally invest a new public hero with the Order of the Bath.

The vacancy among the ‘knights companions’ had been much coveted, among others by Charles O’Hara, the governor of Gibraltar, and Robert Calder, Lord St Vincent’s captain of the fleet, but there was no dissent that day. The Privy Chamber, which hosted the ceremony, was crowded with the knights and officers of the order in ceremonial garb, as well as some of the great men of state. They shuffled serenely into the king’s closet, ‘making the usual reverences’ to His Majesty: the deputy ‘king of arms’; the ‘Windsor herald’, Francis Townshend, in his mantle, chain and badge of office, with the sceptre of the Bath in his hands; George Naylor, the genealogist of the order; the bearer of a cushion of crimson velvet, upon which Nelson’s red ribbon and star were reverently borne; and behind, the knights in a solemn body. At a command from ‘Farmer George’ Nelson was admitted, and led forward by Naylor, Sir William Fawcett, an army officer, and the diplomat James Harris, Lord Malmesbury, who delivered the sword of state to the sovereign. Admiral Nelson bowed to receive first the accolade of knighthood, and then the ribbon and star, handed up by His Royal Highness Frederick, Duke of York, the ‘grand master’ of the order, and placed over the admiral’s right shoulder by the king. Nelson kissed the royal hand, the procession returned to the Privy Chamber in the order in which they had come, and the deed was done. It was cemented the following day, when Nelson’s party returned to St James’s Palace to appear at the Queen’s ‘drawing room’, a subordinate levee open to women as well as men. Apart from the usual parade of ministers and public servants, including Lord Loughborough, the Lord Chancellor, whom William Nelson thought a useful means of advancement, Nelson found many familiar faces in the throng, including Clarence, the Spencers, Hoods and Howes, and the Hon. John Trevor, his diplomatic colleague, who had arrived from Turin with his wife.

The two days of pomp may have taken their toll, for one witness remarked that ‘Sir Horatio Nelson’s health does not appear to be much mended, if we are to judge from his appearance at the levee on Wednesday. He looked very sickly.’ But they thawed the frost between Nelson and his sovereign. Sir Horatio wrote to St Vincent that His Majesty had asked after the earl’s health, and we may conclude from Nelson’s tone that the interview had gone satisfactorily. According to one of several questionable versions of the meeting, George jocularly remarked that though Nelson had lost a limb his ‘country has a claim for a bit more of you’. If true, it implied an anticipation of his return to active service.

The warm glow of royal favour must have been infinitely pleasing to a Church, king and country man like Nelson, and that it seemed genuine rather than a mere matter of duty was suggested by the admiral’s regular attendance at the levees that followed. In this surreal, glittering world the parson’s boy from Norfolk rubbed shoulders with the elite of the nation, nearly all of them far wealthier than he, if poorer in honour. In a world dominated by the social network, patronage and the giving and receiving of favours, they were a crucial cast of characters. Nelson attended the levees six times between 4 October and 20 December, mixing regularly with Spencer, Sir Andrew Hamond (comptroller of the Navy Board) and fellow admirals, some of them friends from way back, such as Sir Robert Kingsmill and Charles Pole. The great political luminaries shared their views, including the Earl of Chatham, a former first lord of the Admiralty, Malmesbury the diplomat, Sir Charles Grey the Whig reformer, Grenville the foreign secretary, and his cousin, Pitt himself, the first lord of the Treasury and chancellor of the exchequer, who in modern terms was the prime minister. Among these august figures there were voices that spoke highly of Nelson’s abilities, and not simply as a naval officer. All three of the senior diplomats who had worked with Nelson in the Mediterranean – Trevor, Francis Drake and Sir Gilbert Elliot – had come home to add to the chorus of approval. Trevor we have seen, and Drake attended the levee of 4 October.

These encounters familiarised Nelson with the manners and mores of the ruling class, created connections and increased his ‘interest’. Further access came through invitations from these new acquaintances. On 15 November he duly appeared at a ‘grand entertainment’ mounted by the Speaker of the House of Commons at his home in Palace Yard, where Chatham, Spencer, Hood, Duncan, Vice Admiral Sir Richard Onslow, Pitt, Dundas, the Lord Mayor of London, and the Master of the Rolls jostled for prominent places. A particular admirer willing to open doors was William Windham, the secretary at war, whose pride in Nelson stemmed from his Norfolk heritage and position as the member of parliament for Norwich. On 25 November Nelson joined Windham for breakfast with Lord William Bentinck, a ‘Portland’ Whig destined to become a liberal governor general of India, and three days later for dinner with the Lord Chancellor, Grenville, Sir Gilbert Elliot, now Earl of Minto, and two politicos, Richard, Lord Lavington, and George, Earl of Cholmondeley. The next day, 29 November, Nelson endured his most fulsome public tribute yet, when he was the guest of the Corporation of London at a Guildhall dinner and received the freedom of the city in a golden box. The occasion was crowned by an admiring speech from the city chamberlain – none other than the once notorious radical John Wilkes, now a solid member of the Establishment and within weeks of his death. It was tiring but entirely satisfying to a man as hungry for attention as Nelson, and the conversations about public affairs that accompanied these ceremonies and repasts must have considerably enlarged the sea views that Sir Horatio brought to the table.

Never before had Nelson been so admired and visible. It was the beginning of an acclamation that would reach extraordinary unprecedented proportions in the years to come. Though a defeat, Tenerife had enhanced the image of the daring admiral created by the battle of Cape St Vincent. These first steps in deification were taken by a man who was, however, still in great pain, and unsure of where his health might take him. Much as he longed to return to duty, and as his political masters were disposed to oblige him, that physical barrier had yet to be overcome.

3

The ligatures binding the arteries in the stump of his arm should have come away about ten days after amputation, but one remained, week after week and month after month, protruding from the bottom of the stump and preventing the wound from closing. In Bond Street, William Cruikshank, an eminent London surgeon who dressed the arm daily, gently tested the stubborn ligature, but it shot excruciating pain through the patient and refused to come away. John Rush, an army surgeon and inspector general of hospitals, James