by Max Adams
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About Admiral Collingwood: Nelson’s Own Hero
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Table of Contents
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For my son Jack, with love
Contents
Cover
Welcome Page
Dedication
Epigraph: ‘Northumberland’, by Sir Henry Newbolt
INTRODUCTION
The Collingwood touch
MAPS
Home waters
The Atlantic
The Mediterranean
CHAPTER 1
A large piece of plum cake: 1748–1771
CHAPTER 2
Out of all patience: 1772–1777
CHAPTER 3
The bonds of our amity: 1777–1786
CHAPTER 4
A comfortable fire and friends: 1787–1792
CHAPTER 5
The sharp point of misfortune: 1793–1795
CHAPTER 6
Two thunderbolts of war: 1795–1799
CHAPTER 7
Hope of peace alone: 1799–1802
CHAPTER 8
Exemplary vengeance: 1803–1805
CHAPTER 9
Giddy with the multiplicities: 1806–1808
CHAPTER 10
Viva Collingwood: 1808–1810
CHAPTER 11
Fame’s trumpet
Preview
Picture Section
About the Wood Engravings
About the 2015 edition
Acknowledgements
Source notes
APPENDIX 1
Collingwood’s Trafalgar dispatch
APPENDIX 2
Collingwood’s commissions: 1761–1810
Bibliography
Index
About Admiral Collingwood
Reviews
About Max Adams
Also by Max Adams
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
Northumberland
When England sets her banner forth
And bids her armour shine,
She’ll not forget the famous North,
The lads of moor and Tyne;
And when the loving cup’s in hand,
And honour leads the cry,
They know not old Northumberland
Who’ll pass her memory by.
When Nelson sailed for Trafalgar
With all his country’s best,
He held them dear as brothers are,
But one beyond the rest.
For when the fleet with heroes manned
To clear the decks began,
The boast of old Northumberland
He sent to lead the van.
Himself by Victory’s bulwarks stood
And cheered to see the sight;
“That noble fellow Collingwood,
How bold he goes to fight!”
Love, that the league of Ocean spanned,
Heard him as face to face;
“What would he give, Northumberland,
To share our pride of place?”
The flag that goes the world around
And flaps on every breeze
Has never gladdened fairer ground
Or kinder hearts than these.
So when the loving cup’s in hand
And honour leads the cry,
They know not old Northumberland,
Who’ll pass her memory by.
Sir Henry Newbolt
INTRODUCTION
The Collingwood touch
Visitors to Menorca arriving in vast eight-decker cruise ships at the island’s main harbour, Port Mahon, are disgorged at the bottom of the cliff on which the town perches. It is one of the great maritime arrivals. To reach the town, and for a magnificent view back across the harbour, they must climb a broad stone staircase which for three centuries has been called Pigtail Steps, after the hairstyles of generations of English sailors. At the beginning of Patrick O’Brian’s novel Master and Commander, these are the steps from which Jack Aubrey looks out in vain to catch a glimpse of the Sophie, his first command.
This was where Sophie’s real-life counterpart, a tiny 14-gun sloop called Speedy, brought her famous prize, the 32-gun xebec frigate Gamo, in 1801, shortly before peace broke out in the Mediterranean and Menorca was returned to Spanish control after a century of British domination. Even today, the bars that line the waterfront have an air of the English navy about them: their massive timber roofs remind one of the ‘tween decks of a first-rate ship of the line, and their walls are made of bricks brought out from England as ships’ ballast. Most tourists come to Menorca for the reliable summer climate; some stay on and brave winter storms: the tramontana and the mistral. Few miss Mahon’s peculiarly attractive hybrid architecture which lends it an atmosphere of eighteenth-century Portsmouth crossed with Catalan baroque: the town that gave the world mayonnaise.
Of the many English visitors who come here every year, a small number regularly book rooms at Collingwood House, a respectable establishment lying a mile out from the busy town centre just off the road to Es Castell, at the end of a drive whose palm trees shade it from the worst of the midday sun. Fransisco Pons Mantonari, an educated man from very old Menorquin stock, has owned Collingwood House for more than forty years. When he came across the place in 1961, in the days before package holidays were generally affordable, it had been owned by the German sculptor Waldemar Fenn, and was in a lamentable state: its reconstruction has been a labour of love. Little of the original furnishing remained, and its current comforts represent a life’s work. After decades of Fascist rule all records and deeds had been lost, and only local oral tradition was left to permit the association with Admiral Lord Collingwood: battle commander, diplomat, wit and bosom friend and hero of Nelson. Eventually, however, an old military map1 turned up which showed that the house had been called Collingwood House at least as early as 1813. So Mantonari called his new business the Hotel del Almirante, but kept its English name too.
Today, restored to Anglo-Balearic splendour, this house overlooking the deep waters of Mahon harbour is a cliff-top shrine to an English naval officer and statesman largely neglected by posterity. It attracts not just genteel couples of a certain age, but also enthusiasts of naval history. Every Thursday morning during the season Mantonari, accompanied by the magnificent red macaw which sits complacently on his shoulder, gives guided tours of the hotel for guests, and anyone else who is interested. At a quarter-past ten, a small crowd gathers under a sign outside which is painted with a likeness of Collingwood holding his telescope, but looks as though it ought to read ‘Admiral Benbow’. Once inside, one could be forgiven for thinking this was somewhere in Devon or Cornwall: there is dark polished oak panelling, and thick carpet on the floor. A pendulum clock ticks.
Mantonari is a seasoned performer. As he guides visitors through the foyer, past an original letter of Collingwood’s hanging on the wall (cunningly framed with glass both front and back on a hinged mount) he nods at a portrait of Nelson which overlooks the bottom of the stairs: an engraving of the tragic hero writing his last letter to Emma Hamilton before Trafalgar. Mantonari pretends not to allow the name of Nelson to be spoken in his hotel; and laughs. Next to Nelson is a picture of Collingwood. It doesn’t have the melodrama of the Nelson portrait. Collingwood was not a melodramatic man. His portraits suggest a stern, if kindly, headmaster, with flowing white hair and piercing eyes that might be about to laugh or to admonish. Stripped of his uniform and medals he might even pass for a notary, or a family doctor. It is hard to imagine him screaming ‘Fire!’ at his gun crews in the midst of battle. He holds his chin in one hand, with a tel
escope under his other arm. The telescope might symbolise a memory of his obituarist: Collingwood’s ‘grey hair streaming to the wind with eyes like an eagle’s, on the watch’.2 The real telescope, still in the possession of his family, was no show-piece: it has been repaired with an oilcloth and tar bandage, and the lenses are clouded with the salt spray of the Mediterranean. The hand on the chin is there not to make him look thoughtful, which he does anyway, but to hide a fold of flesh that sagged increasingly as he aged: a man old before his time.
Biographers of Nelson have tended to paint the relationship between the two men as a sort of Holmes-Watson partnership, with Collingwood cast as the doughty but dull Watson to Nelson’s brilliant Holmes. Holmes might be an appropriate fictional double for Nelson: a bold, sometimes erratic, passionate genius, capable of inspiring adoration in both men and women; but Collingwood is hopelessly miscast as Watson. He was a better seaman than Nelson, a subtler diplomat, and despite his conservative politics, a naval reformer at least fifty years ahead of his time. What Collingwood lacked, and admired above all else in his friend, was the irresistible Nelsonian impetuosity that allowed his enemy no time to recover once he had made a mistake: England’s Saviour had himself, with typical immodesty, called it the Nelson touch. If there is a fictional counterpart to Collingwood, it is Jack Aubrey, Patrick O’Brian’s very human English epitome.
Nelson was ten years younger than Collingwood. They first met, according to Collingwood, in 1773, when Nelson was just fifteen, and immediately fell into ‘habits of friendship’3 that lasted until Nelson’s death thirty-two years later. Apparently almost complete opposites in character, they became each other’s hero. And when, at half-past four on the afternoon of 21 October 1805, Collingwood’s journal recorded that Captain Hardy had informed him of the death of the Commander-in-Chief, we can be sure not only that England had lost her hero, but that Collingwood had lost his closest friend, as an eye-witness recounted in a letter home:
[Admiral Collingwood is] as bold as a lion, for all he can cry! – I saw his tears with my own eyes, when the boat hailed and said my lord was dead.4
Next to Collingwood’s portrait on the staircase at the Hotel del Almirante is an unsigned eighteenth-century cartoon in the style of Gillray, entitled The English Lion dismembered. It depicts the humiliating trial of Admiral Sir John Byng, whose squadron failed in 1756 to prevent the French from taking Menorca during the Seven Years’ War. Byng was executed by firing squad: pour encourager les autres, as Voltaire put it; not that English naval officers needed much encouragement, for Byng was roundly condemned in the service. In the Georgian Royal Navy, commanders were expected to take on and beat a superior force. Byng’s defence, satirised, went like this:
With thirteen ships to twelve, says B..g
It were a shame to meet ‘em.
And then with twelve to twelve a thing
Impossible to beat ‘em.
When more to many, less to few
And even still not right
Arithmetic will plainly shew
’Twere wrong in B..g to fight
Further up the staircase is a picture of Collingwood’s dog Bounce, beloved companion for nearly twenty years.5 Bounce was an almost perfect naval dog: intelligent and faithful, a fine swimmer; a sympathetic soul and the only creature on a ship carrying eight hundred men that his master could properly confide in, but sadly intolerant of gunfire. During battle or live-firing exercises he would creep down to the safety of the orlop deck. The portrait, of recent date, depicts Bounce as a Jack Russell terrier; but this cannot have been the case, for when Collingwood first acquired the dog he wrote home to his sister, saying how much Bounce was admired and indulged by the men, and noting that he had already grown as tall as his master’s writing table. An English sheepdog perhaps, or a Newfoundland; not a terrier. Mantonari tells his audience that Bounce is said to have come from Menorca, and may have been one of those piebald, flop-eared, rangy pointers known locally as rabbit dogs, famed for their almost human personalities. What a pity that in the summer of 1808 Bounce – aged eighteen – was too tired to go ashore with his master at Cadiz and ‘have his picture taken’.6
Upstairs, in the lobby, guests and visitors are shown Mantonari’s Titian: ‘not a very good Titian, but it is a Titian’. He recounts the story of Collingwood’s ghost, said to have been seen pacing through the house on quiet nights and fingering odd notes on the piano. He shows us the door to Collingwood’s own room (No. 7), and points to the padded leather coverings on all the doors that lead off the lobby. For sound-proofing, perhaps, when Collingwood was in conference with his many officers, or with envoys, interpreters, local dignitaries and military personnel. These were the years after Trafalgar. His friend and comrade Nelson was dead, and Collingwood became virtual viceroy of the Mediterranean, dealing with a fleet of eighty ships and maintaining relations with deys, beys, pashas, sultans, kings and queens, generals and diplomats, from Cadiz to Constantinople; managing relations of literally Byzantine complexity.
Collingwood’s staff consisted of a flag captain (Richard Thomas), a first lieutenant (the excellent John Clavell)7 and a secretary (William Cosway, who later tried to marry one of his daughters, but was discouraged after a terrible coaching accident left him a cripple).8 There were rear-admirals and captains too; but the number of men for whom he was responsible must have been in the region of twenty-five thousand, and such were the stakes – complete domination of Europe by Bonaparte; invasion of England; loss of Britain’s colonies – that Collingwood himself admitted he was ‘giddy with the multiplicities’.9 He was what we would now call a control freak, never delegating to others what he could do himself. And meticulous: orders for fresh vegetables were given the same attention as letters to emperors. Economical, too. His out-of-pocket expenses claim for the entire Mediterranean fleet in the four years after Trafalgar amounted to a paltry £54.10 And during that famous action, in the extraordinarily frightening heat of battle, he calmly retrieved a sail which had been shot away by the enemy, neatly folded it and stowed it in a locker for future use.
Collingwood House was conveniently situated. It lay a mile or so south-east of Port Mahon, the bustling capital of Menorca, and overlooked a secure anchorage: from his window the Admiral could see his flagship, the magnificent 110-gun three-decker Ville de Paris. It was also far enough away from the port to escape the noise of rowdy sailors on shore leave, and merchants and local dignitaries seeking favours. Everybody seemed to want his attention. To a request from the Spanish governor of the island that Collingwood put down a mutiny in the army garrison, he replied that really it was none of his business, though if the French prisoners escaped from the Lazaretto he would see to the matter.11 But when he heard about the problems the church of Santa Maria was having with its organ, he saw an opportunity for diplomatic advantage. This grand church in the centre of town, opposite the Ajuntament, or town hall, had had an organ built: a magnificent affair of three thousand pipes. An elaborate, not to say over-elaborate, wooden housing had been ordered from Austria.
Austria in 1809 was at the centre of Napoleon Bonaparte’s schemes for the conquest of Europe. Nevertheless, the housing was transported overland from Vienna to somewhere on the Italian coast, perhaps Genoa or Livorno. There it remained, with no merchant ship able or brave enough to run the gauntlet of the French fleet in Toulon. Collingwood sent a frigate to fetch it, and it would be no surprise if his carpenters helped install it. The organ can still be heard at full blast every day during the summer months, when incurious tourists pass by on their way to the shops.
Across the road in the Ajuntament are portraits of King George III and Queen Charlotte. They, like the bow and sash windows of many of the older houses, are a reminder that for most of the eighteenth century Menorca was a British possession. It was not an easy island to hold. Its numerous beaches and creeks made amphibious assault by an enemy relatively easy,12 and so a large garrison was required to be stationed there. But the prize was the ha
rbour: Porto de Máo as it is in Catalan. It was said that there were four safe ports in the Mediterranean: June, July, August and Mahon. It is a natural harbour, up to 100ft deep all along its three-mile length and almost up to the quayside (Collingwood himself surveyed it as a master’s mate in 1771). It never silts up, its only disadvantage being that it is impossible to enter in a northerly wind, and difficult to leave in a southerly. Strategically, it afforded the British a base from which to watch the enemy fleet in its stronghold at Toulon: the blockade was a mainstay of naval policy in the French wars. The first British base was built at Mahon in the late seventeenth century, and even now the naval establishment on the north shore is physically little changed from Collingwood’s day.
By the time Collingwood leased or bought his house in 1809, Menorca was back in the hands of the Spanish, ceded to them at the Treaty of Amiens seven years earlier. First a friend, then ally, then vassal of France, Spain had risen in revolt against Bonaparte in May 1808, and within months the British fleet was again able to shelter, repair and take on stores in Mahon. By this time Collingwood had been away from home for more than six years. From the start of the war in 1803, right through the Trafalgar campaign, his elevation to a barony – a ‘barreny’, he called it, worth thirty shillings a year13 – and years of wearying blockade and fruitless chase, not once had he even seen the coast of England, let alone his precious vegetable patch and the simple pleasures of the ‘quarterdeck walk’ in his garden at Morpeth. He had inherited a coal mine at Chirton near North Shields, and was trying to master its complexities from a distance of two thousand miles. And the world was moving on. Within three years, a few miles upriver from Collingwood’s birthplace in Newcastle, William Hedley would present Puffing Billy to the world and launch the railway age.
Collingwood was desperate to see his wife, whom he adored but whose spending, now that she was a member of society, had long since outstripped his pay. He missed his two daughters, whose childhood had passed him by, and he had been worn to a thread by his unbroken six-year tour of duty. His repeated requests for leave had been turned down by an Admiralty deploying a combination of emotional blackmail and flattery. When he resigned his commission in February 1810 it was because he knew he was dying. What ultimately killed him, according to the doctor who conducted his post-mortem, was a stoppage of the pylorus, or inferior aperture of the stomach: cancer.14 But it is legitimate to say that forty-four years of selfless duty to his country had worn him out. No sensational wounds, no last great victory, no martyrdom in battle.