by Max Adams
For the whole of that summer the Channel fleet kept up its blockade of Brest and the Atlantic coast of France, wearing ships and men ever thinner. Collingwood was back in Barfleur, admitting to himself and his correspondents that even his famously controlled temper had become short and ‘impatient of contradiction’.21
Nelson, meanwhile, was taking an extended break from the sea, though not from Emma Hamilton or the Neapolitan court. He had gone ashore with them at Leghorn on the day of Napoleon’s victory at Marengo in June, and travelled right across the war-torn continent – via Trieste, Vienna, Prague and Dresden to Hamburg. It is on this tour that the most penetrating portraits of him were made, by Füger and Schmidt. From Hamburg he and the Hamiltons, minus the Queen and her retinue whom they had left at Vienna, took passage to England, where they arrived in December 1800 at Yarmouth. Now Nelson was fêted as a conquering hero, and while he and Emma revelled in it, he had also to manage the introduction of his mistress and her husband to his effectively estranged wife Fanny. The scandal surrounding his time in Naples and Palermo, and the notorious ménage with the Hamiltons, had saddened many of his friends. His insubordination towards Keith had put him in ill-favour with the Admiralty. Two months later he was reunited with Collingwood for the first time in three years:
Lord Nelson is here: and I think he will probably come and live with me when the weather will allow him: but he does not get in and out of ships well with one arm. He gave me an account of his reception at Court, which was not very flattering, after having been the admiration of that of Naples. His Majesty merely asked him if he had recovered his health: and then, without waiting for an answer, turned to General——, and talked to him near half an hour in great good humour.22
In all Collingwood’s letters there is only one indirect mention of Emma Hamilton and even then, frustratingly, it is in a letter the original of which has been torn at the crucial point. There is no doubting that Collingwood did not approve of her. Both he and Sarah were staunch supporters of Lady Nelson, and Sarah later made her acquaintance. The letter in question is, however, of great interest because it contains a consciously well-tuned thumbnail portrait of England’s conquering hero, without the slightest trace of reserve on Collingwood’s part:
Lord Nelson is an incomparable man, a blessing to any country that is engaged in such a war. His successes in most of his undertakings are the best proofs of his genius and his talents. Without much previous preparation or plan he has the faculty of discovering advantages as they arise, and the good judgement to turn them to his use. An enemy that commits a false step in his view is ruined, and it comes on him with an impetuosity that allows him no time to recover. In his private character he is kind heart[ed] [MS torn] [it is] said his attachments in Italy altered his […] mending them. I could not discover what […] any great change in him …23
Nelson was soon able to witness at first hand the strength of Collingwood’s bond with his own wife. Throughout January Collingwood had been at Cawsand Bay (near Plymouth), refitting. As usual at this time of year, his thoughts were of Morpeth, of Sarah and the girls and the comforts of a Northumbrian fireside. Sarah had written to him to say that since their lease on the Morpeth house was due to expire in May, she was arranging to buy the freehold. This suited Collingwood, who much preferred Morpeth to the smoke and noise of Newcastle.
During the early part of the month he was suffering from ‘a dreadful languor that I cannot shake off’.24 Even the knowledge that he had been promoted to rear-admiral of the red was not enough to cheer him. But by the 25th his spirits had been restored by a letter from Sarah saying that she was to join him.
I am delighted at the thought of seeing her so soon, and it has cured me of all my complaints; indeed I believe the cause of them was vexation and sorrow at being, as it were, entirely lost to my family.25
The journey from Newcastle to Plymouth was extraordinarily long and arduous, especially so in winter. Sarah was to bring little Sal too, leaving Mary Patience behind to stay with relatives. Not for the first time, the nuptial bliss of the Collingwoods was to be short-lived, as Cuthbert reported to his father-in-law shortly afterwards:
I had been reckoning on the possibility of her arrival that Tuesday, when about two o’clock I received an express to go to sea immediately with all the ships that were ready; and had we not then been engaged at a court-martial, I might have got out that day: but this business delayed me until near night, and I determined to wait on shore until eight o’clock for the chance of their arrival. I went to dine with Lord Nelson; and while we were at dinner their arrival was announced to me. I flew to the inn where I had desired my wife to come, and found her and little Sarah as well after their journey as if it had lasted only for the day. No greater happiness is human nature capable of than was mine that evening; but at dawn we parted, and I went to sea.26
Nelson, who could be as sensitive to his friends’ needs as his own, wished he could have swapped places with Collingwood:
How sorry I am! For Heaven’s sake, do not think I had the gift of foresight; but something told me so it would be … If they had manned me and sent me off, it would have been a real pleasure to me. How cross are the fates!27
Two weeks later, at sea, Collingwood gave another side of the story in an intimate letter to Mary Moutray. He had heard some unpleasant gossip about Nelson’s intemperance since he had been made Duke of Brontë,28 but he assured her that the Nelson he had seen was the same old Nelson she had known at English Harbour:
He was looking very well. How surprised you would have been to have popped into the Fountain Inn, and seen Lord Nelson, my wife and myself, sitting by the fireside cozing, and little Sarah, teaching Phyllis her dog to dance. Sarah arrived the evening before I sailed, so that I have yet only seen her by the light of a smoky candle, and she really looked very well. Older, indeed, very much older; but she will wear me out.29
The same letter contains one of those thumbnail barbs that Collingwood had been cultivating for years, and would live to perfect. Mary, it seems, had recommended a young man to him to train as an officer:
Mr.——, for whom you are interested, has told me that you were known to his mother and brother; and I should on that account have felt a disposition of kindness toward him. But I will tell you freely my opinion. He is as well-bred, gentlemanly [a] young man as can be, and I dare say an excellent fox-hunter, for he seems skilful in horses, dogs, foxes and such animals. But unluckily he is a lieutenant: and as these are branches of knowledge not very useful at sea, we do not profit by them much off Ushant.30
Unsurprisingly, Collingwood found this latest cruise as tedious as any he had experienced, knowing that Sarah and little Sal were waiting for him back in port. And worse, such was the weather that they had no communication at all from shore for three weeks. ‘We are immured within the sides of our ships,’ he wrote, ‘and have no knowledge of the world or its ways.’31 At the end of March he was able to spend a few days with his loved ones, before rejoining the blockading squadron. St Vincent had come out of retirement to accept the post of First Lord at the Admiralty under Addington, and Collingwood believed rightly that the earl was kindly disposed towards him.
While he was at sea events had again overtaken Nelson’s life. At the end of January, Emma Hamilton was delivered of their daughter Horatia, in absolute secrecy. The pain of being apart from her was made worse when Nelson was summoned to the Baltic to deal with the Armed Neutrality, which Collingwood had predicted and which now threatened crucial British supplies of timber and tar. Nelson was posted as second-in-command to Sir Hyde Parker, whom Collingwood described thus:
A good tempered man, full of vanity, a great deal of pomp, and a pretty smattering of ignorance – nothing of that natural ability that raises men without the advantages of learned education.32
So it proved. At Copenhagen Hyde Parker issued his infamous order to disengage halfway through the battle, and Nelson equally famously declined to notice. It was a victory of sorts.
The Danes, who fought furiously and took very heavy casualties, agreed to suspend their co-operation with France. But it need not have been, for the prime mover in the so-called Baltic Convention, Tsar Paul of Russia, was assassinated just prior to the battle, and with his death the coalition collapsed anyway. But it was a success which not only confirmed Nelson’s stratospheric status among the British public and press, but brought joy to his friend off Brest. Collingwood saw the termination of the coalition as the almost inevitable prelude to peace.
The atmosphere in London was not nearly so relaxed. The Habeas Corpus Act, cornerstone of British justice, had been suspended, allowing political suspects to be detained without trial. A huge invasion flotilla was being prepared along the Channel coast of France. Historians will continue to speculate whether this attempt on Napoleon’s part was serious or not. It was certainly taken seriously by Addington’s government, even as peace negotiations continued. So seriously, that Nelson was given command of anti-invasion operations to still the public frenzy. He planned a series of daring attacks on the ships guarding the flotilla’s headquarters at Boulogne. These proved disastrous, but a series of harrying raids along the French coast at least convinced the public that something was being done.
Sarah and Sal stayed in Plymouth during the spring and summer of 1801, where Collingwood saw them for little more than a fortnight between cruises. Even now, though, pressed with his own cares and frustrations, he turned his thoughts homeward, asking his father-in-law to remember the gardener at Morpeth:
I should be much obliged to you if you would send Scott a guinea for me, for these hard times must pinch the poor old man, and he will miss my wife, who was very kind to him.33
At Gibraltar, Sir James Saumarez made an enterprising attack on enemy shipping in Algeciras Bay which won him the admiration of his service colleagues. Otherwise, the constant promise of peace seemed as illusory as ever. There was more good news from the Mediterranean, though, as the French army in Alexandria, the remnants of Napoleon’s invasion force of 1798, finally capitulated to the besieging British force there. In the end, it was just as Collingwood was preparing to say goodbye to his wife and daughter in October that news came of a peace treaty finally being agreed:
I was to take leave of my wife after breakfast, and we were both sad enough, when William came running in with one of his important faces on, and attempted to give his information in a speech; but, after two or three efforts, which were a confused huddle of inarticulate sounds, he managed to bring out Peace! Peace! Which had just as good an effect as the finest oration he could have made on the subject.34
It could not come too soon. For the third summer in a row Collingwood had barely seen a green leaf on a tree, except through the eyepiece of his telescope, as he told his friend Dr Alexander Carlyle. Now, as he complained to his sister in November, he found himself still in Barfleur, watching Bantry Bay for signs of another Irish uprising:
We very naturally expected that a short time wou’d have returned us all to our family and friends, but the very reverse is the case, and we are kept as far from home as possible. How long this will last I have no conjecture, but it is a proof with what caution the ministers move …35
Collingwood at least had more time for reflection now. At Bearhaven there was a good, safe anchorage, and with large numbers of ships coming and going there was a resumption of social gatherings which had been suspended during the long months on blockade. Collingwood also found time, as he did on every posting, to consider the fortunes of the indigenous population. He had little time for the Irish, and found they made poor sailors unless taken to sea very young. That did not diminish his sympathy for their plight. Now he wondered at the lack of agricultural improvement in the country; it crossed his mind too, that if the staple crop of potatoes ever failed, there would be famine in Ireland. One of Collingwood’s junior lieutenants had fallen deeply in love with a local girl, apparently larger than life in all respects – an attachment that his admiral looked on with avuncular indulgence, noting that such an undertaking ‘requires nerves’.36
Now that peace seemed finally to be only weeks away, Collingwood could reflect on it philosophically:
The object for which the war was undertaken is I hope fully obtained; it was to resist principles of revolution which the enemy disseminated in our country, and which threatened our existence as a nation … Now it remains to be proved whether the French are equally sincere and whether the Republican government is more disposed to live in amity with the world than their monarchs were. The experiment is a fair one to make: for my own part, I have been in the habit of considering a Frenchman as a restless sort of animal, prone to change, ever questing after novelty, and ready to quarrel on the smallest interruption to his pursuits. Now was this the constitution of the animal, or the policy of the Court? We shall see. I hope nature had nothing to do with it.37
In January Barfleur was allowed to return to Portsmouth, but it was a very glum Collingwood who wrote to his sister-in-law to say that there had been another mutiny in the fleet. With rising hopes of being paid off, some of the fleet’s ships had been ordered to the West Indies, and their crews, notably that of the Téméraire, had overthrown their officers. Collingwood, as one of the senior commanders, spent ten days trying twenty of the worst offenders. It was an ugly business and Collingwood was saddened and troubled by its inevitable outcome as the guilty seamen were hanged at the yardarm. But there was no conflict between his sense of humanity and his duty. Duty lay in preserving the good order of the service:
It is a melancholy thing, but there is no possibility of governing ships, so as to make them useful to the state, but by making examples of those who resist the execution of their orders, and I hope this will have such an effect upon the whole fleet that we shall have no more commotions among them. God knows there are none more desirous than I that they might return to their families.38
On a lighter note, Collingwood told his sister-in-law that in anticipation of being liberated soon, he had arranged for his most precious things to be sent up to Morpeth ahead of him; among them was Bounce, despatched by collier to Newcastle. As part of St Vincent’s naval reforms the fleet was to be cut down, and Barfleur, it seemed, was to be dismantled. Britain had started the war with 135 ships of the line and 133 frigates, against 80 line ships and 66 frigates in the French navy. She would end the war in strength, with 202 line ships and 277 frigates, as opposed to the French fleet of 39 line ships and 35 frigates.39 Such massive naval and trading superiority might be expected to have resulted in a favourable peace for Britain. But when the treaty was ratified at Amiens in March 1802 it was clear that Addington’s desire to end the war, and Talleyrand’s negotiating skills, had given France the upper hand. Britain was to return all her colonial conquests apart from Trinidad and Ceylon; she was also to return Alexandria to Turkey and Malta to the Knights of St John. Menorca was to be returned to Spain. Britain also forfeited rights to any possessions in the Low Countries. It seemed a high price to pay for more than eight years of war.
But peace was its own reward, at least temporarily. Both countries had paid for the war by expansion: Britain by trade, France by conquest. Both were carrying vast and unsustainable levels of debt. Britain now sought to reduce her debt by reducing the financial burden of the Royal Navy. France was to use the same time to institute wide-ranging political and economic reform, and prepare for the next phase of the contest. Now that her navy was being cut back, Britain must have looked increasingly like an easy target for Napoleon, but the British economy was about to make an unanticipated sidestep that would ensure her strategic and trading dominance for a century. In December 1801 the Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick had carried passengers in his steam carriage at Camborne, for the first time. In 1802 the world’s first steam-powered vessel Charlotte Dundas would be seen on the River Clyde. Before the end of the war with France Collingwood’s home town Newcastle would be at the centre of a world industrial revolution built with iron, fue
lled by coal, and running on railways powered by steam.
Collingwood was himself to play a small part in that revolution. But for the time being he was kept on tenterhooks at Portsmouth and then at Torbay as the ships of the Channel fleet, one by one, were paid off, their stores and fittings removed, and their hulks dismembered, or laid up ‘in ordinary’. Collingwood took the opportunity to acquire two hogsheads of ‘most excellent cyder’40 which he sent to Sunderland by a brig. With typical attention to detail, he gave instructions that whoever picked them up would vent them for their final journey so they might not explode on the way.
It was not until May 1802 that Collingwood finally struck his flag and headed north:
I am sure I have had my share of the war. I begun it early and see the last of it, and I hope it is the last we shall ever see.41
8
Exemplary vengeance
1803–1805
Rear-Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood was determined to settle into retirement with the relish of a man who knows he deserves it. In his fifty-fourth year his profession was catching up with him.1 His hearing was not as it had been. He was long-sighted and needed spectacles for reading. He was periodically laid low with rheumatism. Though quite tall for a naval officer at five feet ten inches, he now stooped slightly, from long practice between decks. He was thin and spare and apart from his eyes, which were ‘blue, clear and penetrating’, he was unremarkable to look at.2 His habits were as plain and simple as they had always been, and a neighbour from Morpeth later recounted that he ‘often walked down to my grandmother’s and stood with his back to the fire for a long gossip’.3
Now that he had bought the freehold of the house in Oldgate Collingwood determined to make improvements to it. He arranged for workmen to come and pull down the old walls and ‘dog houses’ at the back of the garden to open it up; and he had plans to buy the cottages opposite, demolish them, and plant a meadow to open out his view of the River Wansbeck. But when a fellow admiral (probably Roddam or Braithwaite) came calling one day and was sent into the garden to find him, Collingwood was not to be seen for some time. The admiral …