Nelson: Britannia's God of War

by Andrew Lambert

  The scale and substance of the majestic funeral, with a unique assembly of naval heroes, royalty and the great, with no expense spared, did much to reconcile the nation to their loss, and in the longer term to recreate the name of Nelson as the national talisman, now translated in glory to watch over an endangered island. The state had created a very specific Nelson, but this ‘official’ version would be contested.

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  Trafalgar and the death of Nelson forced some profound questions on a stunned nation. What did Nelson stand for? What was the inner meaning of Trafalgar? How could Nelson’s legacy be used for the future, and how could such a unique life be interpreted for the common good? For the King, Nelson’s ‘transcendent and heroic services … will prove a lasting source of strength, security and glory to my Kingdom.’ The Prince of Wales, who disagreed with his father on every other issue, said much the same, in his own way: ‘His very name was a host of itself: Nelson and Victory were one and the same to us, and it carried dismay and terror to the hearts of our enemies.’10 Sidmouth spoke for the political class when he concluded ‘that he inspired all around him with the same gallant enthusiasm and ardent zeal in the service of his country which he felt himself’.11 Lady Londonderry provided a more elegiac and more intimate summation. ‘Had I been his wife or his mother, I would rather have wept him dead, than seen him languish on a less splendid day. In such a death there is no sting, and in such a grave everlasting victory.’12

  The first artistic responses came in the popular prints. The caricaturist James Gillray, sharp critic of greed, stupidity, corruption and folly, saw the core of the business. Despite his savage assaults on every other figure in contemporary British life Gillray never doubted Nelson’s genius, and treated his undoubted vanity with the lightest of touches. His death scene of December 1805 had the hero dying in the arms of the King, who took Hardy’s place, with Clarence as a common sailor, and Emma a large, mourning Britannia. Above, the angel of victory summoned Immortality with a trumpet blast.

  As soon as the Victory reached Spithead, on 4 December, she became a shrine, whose principal pilgrims were artists seeking a way to tell the story and secure a prize. Benjamin West missed the mark this time: his picture placed the scene on the upper deck, and lacked any of the warmth and drama that made his earlier painting such a success. Absurdly, he placed the entire crew on deck as an audience, in the middle of the battle! West had followed his own Death of Wolfe too closely. His audience would no longer tolerate stylised inaccuracy. He produced a second study, now located in the cockpit: the composition was better, but the central figure remained stiff and unengaging. West could not find the medium in which to convey Nelson’s magic. That said, the original picture, produced as a partnership with a leading engraver, became the popular ‘death’: it attracted thirty thousand paying viewers in the summer of 1806, and was shown to the King, while fifteen hundred good prints sold at premium prices in 1811.13

  One-time East India Company draughtsman and undischarged bankrupt Arthur Devis,14 one of the lesser lights of English painting, took longer to absorb the atmosphere. Taking passage on Victory as she passed up the English Channel to her final destination at Chatham, he absorbed the key roles of the ship as the shrine, and of the crew as disciples. He also assisted Dr Beatty at the autopsy, sketched the fatal musket ball, and accepted the doctor’s commission to paint a portrait. Devis was among the last to see the face of the dead man and his The Death of Nelson was more moving, more accurate, and more nearly right than any other image. Devis’s Nelson lies bathed in an unearthly radiant light, one that had no place, or source, in the cockpit of a battleship, surrounded by a crowd of adoring disciples. While he portrayed Nelson a trifle too dead, Devis instinctively saw what West had missed. Nelson’s death was the transfiguration of a mortal man into a divine being. While West condemned the composition as ‘A mere matter of fact (that) will never … excite awe and veneration’, the moment of immortality will always belong to Devis, and he rightly took the five-hundred-guinea prize offered by the publisher Joshua Boydell for the best death scene of Nelson. However, the West engraving of 1811 outsold the Devis, which appeared in 1812.

  Meanwhile, a far greater artist than either Devis or West, J. M. W. Turner, was at Sheerness on 22 December to sketch the Victory as she entered the river, and he went on board at Chatham. He quickly filled a notebook with brilliant sketches, striking poetry, notes and rather inferior attempts at figures and portraits. As ever, the perspective he adopted was unconventional, striking and highly effective. Turner shows us the moment the fatal shot was fired, viewed from high in the Victory’s rigging. Dwarfed by towering masts Nelson falls while the battle rages round him; Turner had pinpointed the defining moment for his The Battle of Trafalgar, as seen from the Mizzen Starboard Shrouds of the Victory. The picture was first exhibited in June 1806, and after some reworking, reappeared in 1808.15

  Turner recognised, as few contemporary artists did, his national role, and the need for a British identity: a way of seeing the world that would draw the nation together. While his landscapes defined a new cultural sensibility, his epic treatment of Nelson and the scarcely veiled classical allusions of his Carthaginian pictures would harness the state’s determination to resist Bonapartist tyranny.16 The Battle of the Nile had inspired Turner’s first battle scene, but Trafalgar took the subject and the artist to new levels. The sea was the dominant focus of his artistic endeavour: his Channel was a vast expanse, to which he gave the elemental strength to defeat invasion, and his ships stood much taller than reality allowed, the better to convey majesty and power. Following his first Trafalgar, which was widely criticised for the blotchy figures, Turner returned to his métier, the seascape, with The Victory returning from Trafalgar. Here the ship, bearing the body of Nelson, runs past the Isle of Wight. Following the convention of the genre, the great ship is shown in three positions, with fishing boats in the foreground to represent the people of Britain. Their placing is essential, for this Channel is a wide watery space, bounded by the high white cliffs of the Needles, a combination standing between Napoleon and the conquest of the world. Turner’s paintings are the most powerful images to be inspired by Nelson, and the ultimate expression of his impact on the age.

  The series of ‘death’ paintings was completed by West’s third picture, The Apotheosis of Nelson of 1807. This time the aged artist caught the mood of the time. This Nelson, posed as the dead Christ, is carried in arms of victory to a mourning Minerva, while Neptune watches. The famous signal, ‘England expects’, gives the picture a motto. The piece has been much misunderstood. West took the figures and composition from a recent canvas by a minor artist, although the original inspiration came from the religious masterpieces of the renaissance and the sculpture of Ancient Greece. The meanings are clear, if a trifle laboured: Nelson has succumbed to man’s tragic destiny, but died a glorious and well-rewarded death. This time West met his own ambition, providing a worthy scene. He wanted the image to ‘excite awe and veneration’, and did not see how this could be achieved if Nelson were represented dying in the hold, like a man in prison. His death had to meet the highest ideals of the Romantic age if it was to inspire a nation. West may not have been aware of the irony, but he could only do justice to Nelson by returning to an art form he had subverted thirty years earlier.

  One artist who stood against the tide of Nelson idolatry was William Blake, critic of Kings, empires and war. Blake, who was sympathetic to the American and French Revolutions and dreamed of an older English ‘liberty’, had a marked dislike of British naval power, which he saw as a ‘sea-monster’ that would ‘harrow and strangle nations’.17 Blake’s response to Nelson was deeply ambivalent: he did not share the euphoria that followed the victory at the Nile, because it had revived enthusiasm for war at a time when peace was in prospect, and he had seen nothing out of the ordinary in Nelson before 1805.18 Nelson’s death, however, changed everything: now Blake understood the inner meaning of the man and his status
as a secular god and national icon. Yet Blake’s response would be radically different to that of his contemporaries. Shorn of his physical being, but still affected by human weaknesses, Nelson became one of Blake’s ‘detestable Gods’ of war.19 The artist transformed the hero into a truly majestic character, one of the darkest forces in his mystical demonology. These reflections culminated in his 1809 picture: ‘The Spiritual form of Nelson guiding Leviathan, in whose wreathings are infolded the Nations of the Earth’. Leviathan, the serpent-like symbol of naval power and imperial tyranny, is wielded by Nelson to crush other nations. Though the ‘crushing’ imagery was inspired by an event two years after Nelson’s death, when Britain despoiled neutral Denmark, in Blake’s mind Nelson remained the presiding genius of the war. This picture – and its companion piece, ‘Pitt guiding Behemoth’ – have been variously interpreted as a belated, if unconventional concession to the patriotic impulse of the age,20 and as altogether more radical statements.

  Blake himself was clear: Pitt and Nelson were ‘contemptible idiots who have been called Great Men of late years’,21 and he was interested only in their meaning. Unable to avoid the mood of the age Blake concedes Nelson’s heroic status, showing him in an ideal, naked form, arm and eye restored, as any self-respecting classical artist would. Yet the effect is quickly discounted, for Blake was no admirer of military heroes. Calling Nelson ‘the heroic villain’, and showing him naked with female figures in the coils of his serpent, Blake makes his meaning clear. Nelson has moral failings at the human level, and like many of Blake’s imaginary heroes has been led astray by a malign female spirit. The figure is surrounded by a halo of lightning bolts, but they point inwards, reinforcing the anti-heroic quality of the image. The meaning was more obvious in his first sketch, where two bolts of lightning strike Nelson on the right shoulder and the groin. One of these bolts has been loosed by Christ, a figure almost hidden in the jaws of Leviathan. For all Blake’s objections, the heroic is still evident; even Blake’s exhibition catalogue of 1809 quotes Nelson’s final signal, ‘England expects’, suitably amended to include the arts.

  Blake’s images were among the most powerful of the great mass of works in oil, stone and ink that would appear in the decade between Trafalgar and Waterloo, reflecting the nation’s need to capture and flaunt Nelson’s totemic image. Only when the course of the war finally turned in 1813, and the downfall of Napoleon loomed, did the need for Nelson decline. He was replaced by lesser figures: the new heroes of a war that would be won, not the talisman of survival against all odds.

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  The literary response to Nelson’s death was just as strong as that of painters, and no less varied in the quality and outlook of the work it generated. Newspapers and journals poured out accounts of the hero’s life and death, and the events surrounding his interment. Book-length treatments were published within weeks, usually hastily assembled from news clippings and gazettes, most lacking both literary merit and insight into Nelson’s genius. The exception to this run of mediocrity was an essay by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had spent much of 1804 and 1805 as Public Secretary to Sir Alexander Ball at Malta, in which capacity he had corresponded with Nelson and written papers on aspects of Mediterranean policy. In his obituary essay on Ball, Coleridge considered the qualities that allowed some officers to rise above the ordinary. The key assets included an open mind, and the ability to assemble, sift and exploit the ideas of others. Nelson, according to Coleridge:

  with easy hand collected, as it passed by him, whatever could add to his own stores, appropriated what he could assimilate, and levied subsidies of knowledge from all the accidents of social life and familiar intercourse. Even at the jovial board, and in the height of unrestrained merriment, a casual suggestion, that flashed a new light on his mind, changed the boon companion into the hero and the man of genius; and with the most graceful transition he would make his company as serious as himself. When the taper of his genius seemed extinguished, it was still surrounded by an inflammable atmosphere of its own, and rekindled at the first approach of light.22

  Though Coleridge was not an expert on the naval profession, he understood men, methods and genius better than any other English author, and recognised the magic that made Nelson special:

  Lord Nelson was an admiral every inch of him. He looked at everything, not merely in its possible relations to the naval service in general, but in its immediate bearings on his own squadron; to his officers, his men, to the particular ships themselves, his affections were as strong and ardent as those of a lover. Hence, though his temper was constitutionally irritable and uneven, yet never was a commander so enthusiastically loved by men of all ranks, from the captain of the fleet to the youngest ship-boy. Hence too the unexampled harmony which reigned in his fleet, year after year, under circumstances that might well have undermined the patience of the best-balanced dispositions.23

  Coleridge’s absence from the host of Nelson biographers remains a matter of profound regret: his breadth of learning, intellectual sympathy and acute penetration, allied to his experience of public office and friendship with Ball, would have provided the ideal perspective from which to understand Nelson’s life and work.

  Even before Nelson’s body had returned to England, it was clear that an official life would be required. The Bishop of Exeter warned the new Earl that many ill-informed books would appear, making it wise to have an authoritative account. William Nelson agreed, and soon after the funeral he advertised in the newspapers for an author to undertake the task, thereby antagonising John McArthur, who had already spoken to the Earl on this subject and whose work had already been announced. McArthur’s object was to pre-empt the ‘numerous, uninteresting and clashing accounts’ by providing ‘one full, genuine, authentic detail of the most interesting parts of his life, illustrated by correspondence, properly selected’, and he was not impressed by the qualifications of the potential author, a Reverend Mr Nott, that the Earl had suggested. At this point the Prince of Wales intervened, calling in the Earl on 16 February 1806 and insisting that the Reverend James Stanier Clarke, his librarian and chaplain, be involved.24Clarke, who had served as a naval chaplain, was a prolix author on maritime subjects, and the first editor of the Naval Chronicle. With the Prince and Clarence leaning on him, the Earl gave way, although he stubbornly refused ‘to suffer the least scrap to go out of his own possession’.25 Clarke and Me Arthur, old colleagues on the Naval Chronicle, agreed to work together, with McArthur as the lead author, as he had already assembled materials for the project, and commissioned 1,500 guineas’ worth of paintings and illustrations. He had also secured two hundred advance orders.

  McArthur had begun the work with Nelson’s sanction, but despite his qualifications the Earl decided that Clarke should stand first on the title page.26 The Prince’s librarian quickly assumed the directorship of the project, and wrote to the Earl to ask for ‘such recollections as illustrated your brother’s character when a boy and a young man’.27 He had also asked Dr Beatty for an account of Nelson’s last hours, and was horrified when he heard that the good doctor intended to publish this under his own name, with the Prince’s blessing. His efforts to prevent this were in vain: the Authentic Narrative of the Death of Lord Nelson was published by Cadell and Davies in 1807, long before the official Life would be ready. Undeterred, however, Clarke worked his way through the small sections of the archive of correspondence that Earl Nelson was gracious enough to loan, and secured fresh material from many who had known the hero.28 McArthur, too, borrowed letters from many sources, notably the Hood family, whom he had served for many years – though unlike Clarke, he did not return them once he had made use of them.

  The book was ready to publish in the middle of 1809, but was held back because London was deserted. It would cost nine guineas, and the two volumes weighed in at over twenty-one pounds.29 Much of the cost of the book had gone on art works commissioned to embellish the product: West’s third ‘death’, the Apotheosis of Nelson, was a fr
ontispiece 30 while Nicholas Pocock’s pictures of the great battles and ships and Richard Westall’s bland action scenes illustrated the text. With the Prince at their elbow, the authors had gone for size and presentation, hoping to impress their audience by production values. However, the book’s price and format restricted its readership, while shorter and cheaper rival works arrived sooner and swept the market clean. Moreover, despite its monumental length, it was unworthy of its subject: as a contemporary review pointed out, it was neither a biography, nor a collection of correspondence, but a blundering attempt to combine the two. A key part of the problem was the lack of a strong editorial grip on the project. Clarke was a weak man, and allowed others to impose their own agendas on the project – not just the Prince, the Earl and even the resurgent Fanny, but also hostile witnesses like Captain Edward Foote. It was also discovered later that Clarke had ‘improved’ the syntax of Nelson’s letters, making his wonderfully direct English read like the work of a pretentious literary parson.

  The initial print run cannot have been large, and many copies were pre-sold, but sales were so moderate that the publishers saw ‘little hope of it ever repaying your and our advances, or anything like’. By late 1812 there were still 320 sets of the two-volume edition in stock: the publishers were still some £1,500 out of pocket, but were now anxious to close the account.31 In 1814 some copies were offloaded to the book trade, although McArthur was still trying to drum up business in the West Indies.32 By 1818 it was time to ‘remainder’. In truth the book had been a sorry production, uninspired, unremarkable, weakly compiled and produced in an absurd fashion that deprived it of its natural readership. Few men have been so unfortunate in their ‘official’ biographies – and it is even more unfortunate that the text, despite having long been discredited, continues to influence writing on Nelson.