Admiral Collingwood

by Max Adams

  Sarah, Lady Collingwood, who on hearing of her husband’s death was so distraught that she had to be put to bed immediately and ‘given a great deal of laudanum’,54 survived her husband by nine years, surrounded by her family and bolstered by the nation’s gratitude for her sacrifice. Her husband, whose admiral’s pay had been £1,000 per annum, managed to leave her £163,743 in his will, with £40,000 to each of his daughters – almost all of it accumulated after Trafalgar.

  11

  Fame’s trumpet

  ‘Fames’ trumpet makes a great noise, but the notes do not dwell long on the ear.’1 Collingwood was replying to Mary Moutray in a letter written in the spring of 1807. Mary had asked her old friend for a piece of wood from Royal Sovereign, as a souvenir of Trafalgar. Collingwood was surprised – he thought people had already forgotten the Action (as he called it), and wondered that Mary should want to be reminded of a battle whose memory, for both of them, was at least as painful as it was pleasurable. They had, after all, both lost a dear friend – ‘a hero whose name will be immortal’.2

  Two hundred years of hindsight confirms that Collingwood was wrong about Trafalgar, but right when he spoke of his friend Nelson’s immortality. Nelson is the English secular hero, comparable to George Washington, Jeanne d’Arc, Garibaldi – and perhaps all those figures rolled into one semi-mythical creation. The lasting notes of Nelson’s fame would please Collingwood, if only on his friend’s behalf; he himself played a part in the creation of that myth. But he could only be astonished at the thought that his own Trafalgar dispatch would be celebrated two hundred years on, in a reconstruction of Lieutenant Lapenotiere’s journey in the schooner Pickle from Trafalgar to Falmouth, and then by coach from Falmouth to the Admiralty in London.

  Collingwood is not a national hero. His memorials are a naval school of gunnery, one or two monuments, and twenty-seven streets, schools and public houses named after him in Newcastle. Even here, though, Nelson beats him with twenty-eight. Collingwood, like Nelson, died at sea. But he did not die gloriously in battle and his achievements as Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean fleet, though crucial to the progress of the war, did not set trumpets blaring on the Strand, nor yet at Charing Cross. If his life was heroic (and it is an over-used term) it was not popularly so.

  A small group of people knew very well what Collingwood had achieved. The government may have taken his services for granted, denied his officers any number of promotions and disinherited his daughters, but they at least knew they could not have conducted the Mediterranean theatre without him. They were told so by men who knew what they were talking about: St Vincent for one; the Duke of Northumberland, the Spanish juntas, and successive First Lords of the Admiralty. Wellington, as Arthur Wellesley became shortly before Collingwood’s death, appreciated his role in the first years of the Peninsular War, knowing only too well how important the navy’s support was to land operations.

  For a wider group of politically aware men and women the full breadth of Collingwood’s astonishing record and abilities became much more apparent in 1827 with the publication of G. L. Newnham-Collingwood’s memoir. Collingwood had been asked to provide information for a memoir after Trafalgar, but couldn’t think of very much to say about himself, never having been in the public eye before. His son-in-law, who married Sal in 1816 and added her name to his, produced a ‘life and letters’ biography that ran to nearly six hundred pages and five editions – the last of these in 1837 including many additional letters.

  The work was an instant success, for it opened the world’s eyes to a man whose character was only thinly sketched in the nation’s imagination. Of Trafalgar they knew much; of his other actions less than they thought. Of his humanity there were anecdotes, and some had heard of a grave humour. But the depth of his knowledge, of his skill in managing men, and his delightful wit, came as a surprise to many. One of these was Thomas Creevey, a Whig politician who had played a small part in the ‘Ministry of all the Talents’, was politically well-connected without ever himself wielding power, and who knew everyone. His diary entry for 11 August 1827 is worth quoting in full:

  Dolphin Inn, Chichester: to Miss Ord3

  You may judge of our weather at Stoke when I tell you that, with all their courage and contempt of rain, we were on horseback only once, and for less than one hour, and then were wet thro’. But if the body was not regaled, the mind was – at least by me – for I pitched my tent daily in the greenhouse, read Lord Collingwood and his life and letters right thro’, and was delighted with him. You must excuse me if I am rather pompous and boring upon this subject. You see, my dear, that altho’ the poor man was the bravest and best and most amiable of men, this personal character of his is nothing compared with the part he acts in history for the four or five years intervening between Nelson’s death and his. At that time the army was nothing compared with what it later became immediately after and Collingwood alone by his sagacity and decision – his prudence and moderation – sustained the interests of England and eternally defeated the projects of France. He was, in truth, the prime and sole minister of England, acting upon the seas, corresponding himself with all surrounding States, and ordering and executing everything on his own responsibility …

  One has scarcely patience to think that, whilst our Government had the sense to see, and to tell him again and again, that his value to them and the country was such as never could be replaced, and to implore him actually to continue his services at the known and certain sacrifice of his life, still the villains were base enough to refuse every recommendation of his in favor [sic] of meritorious officers, as he justly observes, when parliamentary pretensions were to be put in competition.

  The agreeableness of the work is greatly added to by the constant proof it affords of the early, long and intimate union between Nelson and Collingwood. Even in the novel line, I have found nothing so calculated to lumpify one’s throat as when one of those great men of war, poor Nelson, in his dying moments desires his captain to give his love to Collingwood.4

  Newnham-Collingwood’s memoir was compiled using more than four hundred letters, both to and from the Admiral. These are interspersed with anecdotes, many of them from Sal herself, naturally. Other stories came from correspondents who knew the Admiral: from his secretary William Cosway, from Lieutenant Clavell and from Smith, his servant. None of these can be taken entirely at face value. For one thing, we know Newnham-Collingwood edited and ‘improved’ some of the letters. Where they are to be compared with the later collection of letters edited by Edward Hughes in 1957, it is obvious that the son-in-law thought their style needed lightening. His selection of material is clearly intended to portray his father-in-law as a very serious naval commander with a very human side to his nature. It is an indulgent portrait, heavily informed by family tales of kindness and moral rectitude. But it is not a hagiography, and the Collingwood it produces is three-dimensional, fallible, and human.

  As Collingwood’s junior officers matured and retired, a number of affectionate accounts of their days with him emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century. Jeffrey Raigersfeld, Hercules Robinson, Abraham Crawford and Robert Hay had all become as close to him as irreverent young men can, and all four paint a very similar picture of a man whose stern reserve strangled his relations with captains and most lieutenants, but whose indulgence to midshipmen, and to ordinary sailors, was undiminished until his death. They are immensely valuable accounts, to be set against the much less enthusiastic portrayals of some of his contemporaries. Men like Codrington, Elliot and Hoste, who thought him provincial and meddling and, evidently knowing something of his background, did not believe him to be a true gentleman, whatever his accomplishments. That these views are prejudicial is unsurprising. The navy was a competitive, gossiping, rank-driven and highly self-conscious profession. Not only did Collingwood attain huge, almost untouchable power at sea, he also possessed what thousands of men desired: the friendship of Nelson.

  Men who had not suffered Co
llingwood’s micro-management at sea could sit comfortably back in their armchairs and place him among other great figures on a mantelpiece of virtue. Thackeray, who celebrated British life of that period in history as well as fiction, gave him a very prominent place indeed:

  I think, since heaven made gentlemen, there is no record of a better one than that. Of brighter deeds, I grant you, we may read performed by others; but where of a nobler, kinder, more beautiful life of duty, of a gentler, truer heart? Beyond dazzle of success and blaze of genius, I fancy shining a hundred and a hundred times higher, the sublime purity of Collingwood’s gentle glory.5

  Thackeray, writing at a time when the sort of selfless duty that Collingwood displayed was more valued than in his own lifetime, may be forgiven for such misty hyperbole. So can William Clark Russell, who wrote the first pure biography of Collingwood in 1891. It draws very heavily on Newnham-Collingwood, quite naturally, and it is firmly within the Victorian tradition of solemnity and imperial dignity.

  Collingwood remains his own most credible witness. We have six hundred or so of his letters, along with his journals, official dispatches and logs from many of the ships in which he served.6 As a record of his life these sources are rich beyond the dreams of many biographers. Their contents are frequently corroborated by the vast quantity of official papers which exist for the period, the more so because of the navy’s obsession with recording the business of its ships in what, to their commanders, was excruciating detail. Collingwood was himself a pioneer in this respect: one of the very first commanders to keep a record of the punishments which he ordered.

  The spread of this material is uneven in the extreme. Famous people are rarely born to that station. Collingwood’s family was one of thousands whose sons went to sea at an early age and whose correspondence, if it was at all regular, did not immediately demand to be saved for posterity. The first of Collingwood’s letters that survives dates from 1776 when he was already twenty-eight years old, and that is no coincidence. It was the year after his involvement in the American War of Independence which led to his promotion on the day the battle was fought at Bunker’s Hill. No letters written to either his mother or father survive. It seems likely that such an assiduous letter-writer did write to his parents; it is equally easy to imagine that on their deaths (his father in 1775; his mother by 1790) boxes full of old correspondence were discarded – their son was not yet famous. A number of his letters to Sarah survive, but none of hers to him. Surely he must have kept them. But did he destroy them when he knew he was dying, or were they destroyed by Sarah herself after his death? Or by his daughters much later? We do not know.

  From 1776 until 1785, when Collingwood was stationed in the West Indies, we have just seven letters, and these are addressed either to his brother John or his sister Betsy. 1785 is the year of the first letter between Nelson and Collingwood, when the latter was in his late thirties. Such is the concentration of surviving correspondence from his later years, that half of all the letters edited and printed by Newnham-Collingwood date from the period between January 1807 and the Admiral’s death in March 1810.

  Collingwood’s private letters to his closest confidants appear on the surface to be randomly chatty, containing all sorts of items of news, personal and professional, together with reactions to letters which he had received and his desires for his daughters’ upbringing. There is a wealth of family gossip, and whichever correspondent the letter was addressed to, it was assumed by both the sender and the recipient that it would be circulated to Cuthbert’s brother, his sisters, his wife and sister-in-law; and probably his uncles and father-in-law too. Closer analysis reveals not only that Collingwood wrote in subtly different ways to each of them, but also that his letters were structured in a consciously rhetorical way. These traits are evidence of complex undercurrents in his emotional and intellectual life.

  One of the most pronounced features of the letters is that Collingwood’s most intimate confidants were women: his wife, his sisters and his sister-in-law Mrs Stead. He by no means restricted himself to domestic and personal matters with them. A letter written to one of his sisters (either Bess or Mary) from Excellent, off Toulon, in 1796, has a typical structure.7 It begins with an apology: he has not written to her for a while, but assumes she has kept up with his news by reading his letters to Sarah. Then comes a statement of his health which also summarises his views of the station:

  I have good health, indeed a sort of constitution that all countries agree with. For the rest, it is but a languid sort of life, always at sea and little to do, but as this will only be while the French are not in condition to come out with their fleet, the state of affairs may soon take a change as they are daily getting forward in their preparation …

  Collingwood goes on to describe how the ships lay at the entrance to Toulon harbour, and how one of the French frigates has been taken in a cutting-out expedition. Then a line or two on Nelson (not yet, at this time, England’s Saviour), who has been harrying French trade along the coast with a small squadron. This is the sort of news which will have found its way into the coffee houses of Newcastle: one imagines … ‘Miss Collingwood tells me her brother and Nelson are harrying the French off Toulon …’, and so on.

  Next comes family gossip. Edward Collingwood (the cousin who left the Admiral the house and coal mine) has been building a house at Dissington, but Cuthbert thinks he will always keep Chirton for his main residence. He hears that Admiral Roddam is not in good health, but hopes that his new wife will make his last days comfortable, and ‘spare him many a long journey in pursuit of pleasures’. It is one of Collingwood’s gentler barbs.

  Then there is news of an old acquaintance, Signor Spannochi, who was a midshipman with Collingwood in Liverpool, many years before. They have met for the first time in years. Spannochi has news of the progress of the war at the court of Naples (with which both Collingwood and Nelson will become only too familiar in later years), and this leads Collingwood on to a consideration of the general state of political affairs in Europe. Here he employs a rhetorical technique very familiar from other letters. In a recent letter Spannochi was:

  lamenting the probable fate of Italy, to be ransack’d by a set of plunderers who carry desolation and misery wherever they come. Nothing can save those states but a great turn of fortune …

  Having relieved himself of his opinions on the war, Collingwood passed on to rumours of a general promotion in the navy, and brought the subject back to himself:

  I cannot say I feel much interested about [it], for though I should be very glad to be an Adml, I shou’d leave this service we are engaged in with regret and the more from the difficulty I shall have in getting employment amongst so many flag officers.

  The tone has turned from rhetoric to lugubriousness; it descends to self-pity:

  I shou’d return with more pleasure was the war quite at an end and peace established for the rest of our days: but we must take events as they come and make the best of them.

  Aware of his own negativity, Collingwood ends the letter with an upbeat list of family and friends to whom he begs his sister will remember him, and a joke about his rather too choosy unmarried cousins. While the weight of his letters was adapted to each reader, and the content changed according to the state of the war, and how busy he was, the structures are remarkably consistent. They expose a man conscious of the weight of the world’s problems on his shoulders, deeply concerned with the fate of the world, and able to switch attention instantly from global events to the most trivial matters of family gossip. He was perfectly aware of the irony, and relished it. It appealed to his sense of the ridiculous, his playful and sometimes bitter humour, and his belief that a life of war was ultimately a ludicrous but essential search for peace and the happiness of mankind. He portrayed himself variously as stoical, inadequate, self-pitying, obsessive, but caring and determined, and possessing huge relish for a fair fight.

  Such traits might perhaps explain why he and Nelson, ostensibly such
different characters, were so close. Nelson too possessed many of these traits. Was it that Collingwood shared many of Nelson’s passions, but that he had trained himself to control them, so much so that to all external appearance he had no passion at all? Certainly, when he was an admiral several of his captains found him humourless, dull and unforgiving, while his moral lectures were quite awful. But the evidence of his junior officers shows quite another side of him, as of course his letters do. Perhaps fundamentally what separated Collingwood and Nelson was their self-control – which Nelson longed for, and which Collingwood resented in himself for the shackles it bound him with. Nelson was fragile in the extreme, both physically (he was known to start at the fall of a rope’s end; his illnesses and depressions were frequent) and emotionally. He veered from crippling self-doubt to an unshakeable belief in his abilities and his destiny. Collingwood intellectualised, recognising these extremes in himself and, to a large extent, smoothing them out – at least as far as his external world was concerned. His letters allowed him to play out these contradictions so that, in his public persona as a naval officer, he might appear to be always one and the same.