Nelson: Britannia's God of War

by Andrew Lambert

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  By late 1809 there was a substantial body of literature on Nelson, and Robert Southey – poet, historian and critic, as well as Coleridge’s long-suffering friend, brother in law, and supporter – was busy surveying it for John Murray’s Quarterly Review, the leading intellectual journal of the Tory establishment. The importance of the commission was reflected by the fee: £20 per page, rather than the usual £10. Southey bore his own grudge towards Clarke, who had been given the post of Historiographer Royal which Southey had sought. For Southey, the fact that ‘a most extraordinary blockhead’ should have been allowed to work on this subject was an insult to the memory of the hero, and the literary world.33 Southey poured all his art and venom into a notice that emphasised the faults of the official life and Clarke’s proven incapacity to undertake it.34

  At Murray’s bidding, Southey began to prepare a book of his own, and he was soon dining at the Admiralty with John Wilson Croker, Admiralty Secretary and another regular Quarterly reviewer. Croker persuaded the First Lord of the Admiralty to subsidise the project by drawing the maps in-house.35 The book appeared in 1813 and was dedicated to Croker. Although his creative spark was radical, Southey was well on his way to becoming a Tory establishment figure when he addressed this national subject. His object was to complete the process begun at St Paul’s: to reclaim Nelson for the establishment, who needed to be reminded of his transcendent achievements, and their singular failure to follow up the funeral with any other appropriate monuments. For Southey, their lukewarm response contrasted markedly and unfavourably with the celebration of Nelson’s achievements among ordinary people. Southey was anxious to show the country that its leaders were men of character; however, he also used Nelson to show that the aristocracy had no monopoly on leadership, or virtue.36 His book would inspire young officers, teaching them command, leadership, humanity and the care of their men. He also highlighted the political courage that illuminated Nelson’s entire career: that implicit reliance on his own judgement that made him the greatest of all commanders.

  Southey’s book, despite its flaws, set a standard that none has matched. Its power and eloquence derive from the literary skill of the author, and the simple, powerful style of Nelson’s own writing. Moreover, Southey wrote at a time of pressing national need, in the darkest hours of the struggle with Napoleon, which added urgency and purpose to his narrative. The tone is uplifting, but carefully balanced: this is Nelson warts and all, and the book includes a stinging indictment of Nelson’s handling of the Neapolitan counter-revolution, and his relationship with Emma.37 The initial print run of three thousand copies sold out immediately, and a second edition was in hand by September.38 Despite (or perhaps because of) the objections of Emma,39 who had but a few months to live, the book remained in print, running to a fourth edition in 1830. At a very reasonable five shillings it found a ready market among the increasingly literate populace, establishing itself as the standard life.

  Coleridge and Southey were not the only poets to subscribe to the cult of Nelson. The hero found a still more passionate devotee in Lord Byron, who used Nelson to define the heroic in his masterpiece, Don Juan:

  Nelson was Britannia’s god of war;

  And still should be so, but the tide is turn’d;

  There’s no more to be said of Trafalgar,

  ‘Tis with our hero quietly inurn’d;

  Because the army’s grown more popular,

  At which the naval people are concern’d[.]

  Early drafts of the first line use ‘the popular’, or ‘the people’s’ in place of ‘Britannia’s’.40 All three are effective, while the second gives a particular twist to the line concerning ‘the naval people’. In contrast to Southey, Byron was setting Nelson against the post-war Tory establishment, dominated by two men he hated: Castlereagh and Wellington.

  No writer was more influenced by Nelson than Byron; the beautiful but flawed poet had even self-consciously imitated Nelson in his first portrait, commissioned from a naval painter in 1807. As the grandson of an admiral, Byron had a familial disposition towards the naval model of heroism, and this was only strengthened by his personal love of ships and the sea. References to Nelson litter Byron’s work, from Childe Harold to Don Juan, and also his more private thoughts. Evenhis death – in the midst of war, seeking an engagement with the enemy, before he could grow old and lose his looks – knowingly followed Nelson’s model. What Byron found in Nelson was the model for his pose, another man prepared to defy convention in following his own genius. From this image Byron created the romantic hero, and worked hard to match the ideal, in art, artifice and action. The idea of ‘erotic obsession’, which became, through Byron, a central trope of European Romanticism41 quickly came to cast a backward reflection on Nelson. Nelson’s relationship with Emma was refashioned as Byronic, and his eighteenth-century morality converted into romantic rebellion. In truth Nelson was the original Romantic hero and Byron the imitator: after all, what glory is there in the poet’s art?

  In Manfred Byron was preoccupied by the concept of a superman, a ‘Titanic figure half way between the mortals and the gods’. The conection with Nelson, the immortal memory, is obvious. The connection grew with time. Byron returned from the Mediterranean in 1811 on board HMS Volage, in company with HMS Amphion. The two ships were returning in triumph from the battle of Lissa. As the enemy closed in Nelson’s brilliant protégée William Hoste had flown the signal, ‘Remember Nelson’ from Amphion’s masthead to inspire his men.42 Byron took the opportunity to discuss the battle, along with their adored admiral, with Hoste and his officers,43 Once ashore the connections continued to pile up. Among the wealth of Byron portraits the defining ‘romantic icon’ was painted by Richard Westall in 1813.44 Westall had created the ‘romantic hero’ pictures of Nelson for Clarke and Me Arthur’s book only four years before. He went on to fulfil other Byron commissions45 his illustrations for the largely autobiographical Don Juan only reinforced the connection. So highly did Byron regard the subject that he forgave Southey his politics and his poetry to praise the famous 1811 review.46 For Byron death was a frequent companion: friends and school-fellows were struck down by war and disease, making mortality a constant feature of his life. He would die trying to be a ‘Nelsonic’ hero, not a poet. Nelson is the real-life hero at the heart of his oeuvre.

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  By the time Byron’s tribute was produced, more durable memorials to Nelson in the form of statues and monuments were beginning to appear. These were the ultimate expression of public interest: accessible to all, including the poor and the illiterate. Dublin was the first city to respond to the public demand for a monument to Nelson, and subscribers to the project included the future Duke of Wellington, then in Irish Government, who gave £100. A horseback procession of the Anglo-Irish elite attended the laying of the foundation stone by the Lord Lieutenant, but the pillar, designed by Norfolk architect William Wilkins, had a mixed reception, and a chequered history. James Joyce referred to it in Ulysses as ‘the statue of the one-handed adulterer’, while nationalists always associated it with British rule. In 1966 it was blown up by the IRA in a remarkably neat operation.47

  In 1813 a memorial was erected in Liverpool, symbolically located between the Town Hall and commercial Exchange in Mansion House Quadrangle. Over £9,000 was raised in public subscriptions for the memorial, reflecting the importance of Nelson’s career to a seaport trading with the West Indies. The large, complex plinth was overloaded with meaning and allegory. The design, by Westmacott and Wyatt, placed the dying hero across the lap of Britannia, with four prisoners, an enraged sailor, Death and Victory in attendance. The combination of contemporary dress and classical nudity makes this an uneasy and confused renderings.48 Hermann Melville, in town thirty years later as an unknown American sailor while his ship changed cargoes, was fascinated by the meaning and majesty of the image, and would give it a place in Redburn.49

  Edinburgh, Glasgow, Birmingham and Bridgetown, Barbados, all put up
memorials, although the latter is now in danger of following the Dublin pillar into oblivion as an inappropriate reminder of a colonial past. Attempts to commemorate the hero in his native Norfolk were delayed by the inability of the great and good to decide where to put the pillar. After nine years, and the return of peace, they selected Great Yarmouth, the last place in the county that Nelson had visited. By 1819, Wilkins’ 144-foot high structure, crowned with an artificial stone Britannia looking toward Burnham Thorpe, was complete.50

  London, the obvious location, had been slow to act, and even slower to complete the task. The House of Commons discussed the issue in 1816, but nothing was done. However, the clearing away of the slums, stables and warren of lanes between Charing Cross, St Martin in the Fields, Whitehall and St James’s provided a suitable space, while the addition of the National Gallery in the early 1830s provided a focal point, and in 1835 this central space was named Trafalgar Square. The King – Nelson’s old friend William – wanted to appropriate the place and stand in splendour on a level with his brother Frederick, Duke of York, already atop a nearby pillar, but he was wise enough to accept the inevitable. After William’s death a committee was formed to collect money for a Nelson memorial, and its members included Wellington, Hardy, Cockburn and Croker. The Navy was canvassed, and if HMS Snake was typical, the officers and men donated anything from one to four days’ pay.51

  The design finally selected, by William Railton, was based around a column copied from Augustus’s Temple of Mars Ultor in the Roman Imperial Forum. The choice was no accident: the Roman temple had celebrated the transformation of a dead hero – Julius Caesar – into a god, linking him with the god of war and the establishment of an Empire that would last for ever.52 The parallel was clear. Nelson, ‘the greatest naval hero that the history of the world can record’,53 had transcended human limits to become the national god of war, and peronify the vengeance of the nation. It was also the last word. Trafalgar had set the seal on Britain’s naval mastery for all time, and the combination of Nelson and the Augustan column formed the ultimate expression of global maritime power. The conscious identification of Imperial Britain with Imperial Rome, a tendency emphasised by Gibbon seventy years earlier, was becoming ever more frequent. Rome provided an example, an artistic language and a warning to the classically educated British elite.

  Since the eighteenth century Rome had been a source of inspiration for British architects, providing the ideal artistic language in which to express themes of empire and power. The Napoleonic conflict, the ultimate imperial struggle, had pitted the French version of Rome, personified by Bonaparte and his eagle-topped armies, against Nelson and the sea power of the British Empire. Both regimes used Roman motifs, models and icons to stake their claim to be the true inheritor of the all-embracing sway of Rome. With France’s political ambitions curtailed after 1815, Britain could lay claim to the imperial mantle. British architects were busy in Rome, measuring the remains, ready to translate them to modern use. From the mid-i82os onwards, British architecture would be Roman, with the opening shots being the triumphal commissions of the Marble Arch and the Constitution Hill Arch. These projects were ordered by George IV, as part of his attempt to appropriate the glory of defeating Napoleon for himself. His brother Frederick, Duke of York, was given a Trajanic/Napoleonic column, but the column that followed would be more remarkable, and more powerful. Built at the height of enthusiasm for Roman architecture, Nelson’s column was the ultimate expression of British power, written in a language that the entire civilised world could read.54 While the legislature was Gothic, reflecting the origins of British democracy and constitutional practice, and the Greek classical style was appropriate for culture, the British Museum and the National Gallery, Roman architecture stood for power, international connections, and also commerce – hence the Roman style of both the new London Exchange and the Foreign Office.

  The column and statue were in place by November 1843, but it would be another twenty-four years before Landseer’s bronze lions completed the design.55 Despite the delay in execution, the success of the composition was and remains obvious. Hitler’s view of it as the ‘symbol of British naval might and world domination’ is testimony to this – he had planned to take it back to Berlin if his invasion project of 1940 were successful. The symbolic power of the location was no less apparent to the Frenchman, Hippolyte Taine; when he visited Trafalgar Square in 1852, he could not bring himself to give the space its name, reserving his vitriol for the heroic figure far above him –‘That hideous Nelson, planted upon his column like a rat impaled on the end of a stick!’56

  The Nelson Column on Trafalgar Day, 1897

  While Nelson’s statue was being hoisted to the top of the column, another literary monument was in progress. Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas had served in the Royal Navy from 1808 to 1816, before beginning a legal and literary career. In 1843 he began work on his magnum opus, The Dispatches and Letters of Lord Nelson. This required him to locate, check and publish all the Nelson correspondence he could find, an enterprise that has never been repeated. Nicolas believed that Nelson had not received his due from his country:

  She owes to him a Name synonymous with Victory, which, with almost talismanic power inspires her Sons in the day of battle with a confidence that ensures success; and She is indebted to him for an Example to ages yet unborn, of the most ardent loyalty, the most genuine patriotism, the most conscientious sense of duty to his Sovereign and his Country, and of the highest professional skill, combined with the most generous disposition, the kindest heart, and the noblest aspirations, that ever graced a Public Man.57

  Convinced that Nelson’s own words would do full justice to his career Nicolas claimed to have omitted only a few items connected with Lady Hamilton, and the names of a few living individuals who had been criticised.58

  On applying to the second Lord Hood for access to correspondence cited in the official life, Nicolas discovered that this was not in family hands, but apparently remained with the papers of John McArthur, who had recently died. Though his family had returned a few letters, both Hood and Nicolas were convinced they had many more. On inspecting this correspondence Nicolas realised the need to see the rest: ‘there is not one that escaped his [Clarke’s] mutilations and suppressions.’ It was clear that the McArthurs were holding on to important papers, and Nicolas suggested that ‘possibly a letter from your Lordships Solicitor would do good’.59 With Nelson still a relatively controversial figure Nicolas found it necessary to allow his donors to edit the material: ‘I would use them under any restriction you might think fit to impose.’60

  On Trafalgar Day 1844, only eleven months after the completion of the column, Nicolas sent Lord Hood the first volume of his work. Nicolas was disgusted by the behaviour of the McArthur family, and hardly less so by a Mr Lamb, who refused to let him have copies of the letters in his collection ‘lest it should injure the mercantile value of the originals’.61 That Nicolas compiled seven stout volumes in little more than two years is monument to his industry. The column and the Letters rounded off a period of forty years in which the less edifying aspects of Nelson’s life, real or imagined, had faded. What remained was his heroic image, and his totemic qualities.

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  The death in 1837 of Nelson’s old friend, King William IV, symbolised the end of an era in the national understanding of Nelson. Now there were few men left who had known the hero in life. Two years later, Hardy ended his days, as Hood had, as Governor of Greenwich Hospital. Cockburn hung on until 1852, and Graham Hamond until 1862, but the longest-lived of Nelson’s captains was the precocious young commander of the Amazon: Admiral of the Fleet Sir William Parker, Bt., died in 1866, fifty-one years after Trafalgar. The passing of these old men cleared the way for a new Nelson who would meet the needs of a new age.

  William’s niece and heir was well aware of her naval heritage. She was introduced to the key aspects of the naval story as a child, in a conscious programme to prepare the little Ge
rman princess for a British future. Victoria read Southey’s biography in 1830, aged ten, later telling the author that she had enjoyed it.62 In July 1833, the fourteen-year-old princess cemented her links with naval glory by boarding HMS Victory, accompanied by her mother, the Duchess of Kent: she paid close attention to the Nelson relics and sat down to dine with the men.63 A month later, the Princess and her mother sailed from Portsmouth around the Eddystone lighthouse on board the frigate HMS Forte. The cruise provided the impressionable girl with a powerful appreciation of Britannia’s right arm in action. The price of glory was also obvious: Captian Pell had lost his leg in battle.

  On Trafalgar Day 1844, Victoria, by now Queen, visited HMS Victory again, this time accompanied by her husband, Prince Albert. Those present, who included Trafalgar veteran Captain Moubray, noted that Her Majesty had been ‘visibly affected’ by the occasion.64Albert, too, understood the shrine’s significance. Though his central German origins made the sea and the Navy novelties, he soon saw how essential they were to his adopted country. He increasingly identified with Britain’s naval past, a link symbolised by his acceptance of the dedication of Nicolas’s edition of Nelson’s correspondence.

  When Albert began commissioning fresco work for Buckingham Palace, Osborne House and the new Palace of Westminster, he gave one of his favourite artists, the Irish Romantic Daniel Maclise, the immense task of capturing Waterloo and Trafalgar for the Royal Gallery at Westminster.65 These would be vast pictures, forty-five feet long and twelve feet deep, accompanied by sixteen smaller pictures of British valour, and the death of Nelson would once more be joined with that of Wolfe. These military scenes would serve the same function as the splendid Armada tapestries, destroyed with the old House of Lords, but this time Nelson would be the central figure, reinvented as an example to future generations.