Nelson the Commander

by Bennett, Geoffrey

  Two facets of this extract merit comment. First, its uncritical adulation, which was echoed by other newspapers. As has been mentioned already, Nelson's name had long been known in Paris, whilst in the Mediterranean 'a person sent me a letter . . . directed as follows, "Horatio Nelson, Genoa". On being asked how he could direct in such a manner, his answer was, "Sir, there is but one Horatio Nelson in the world." I am known throughout Italy; not a kingdom or state where my name will be forgotten.' But to gain recognition in England Nelson had had to wait until early in this year of his return. And the emotional fervour with which public opinion then acclaimed his conduct of Cape St Vincent was not quenched by his subsequent failure to take Santa Cruz. His wound raised him above criticism. Pitt, Lord Dundas (Secretary for War) and St Vincent were blamed for the debacle. Nelson remained 'the pride of the British Fleet and the terror of the enemy'.

  Of second interest is the speed with which he joined his wife. Four years separation had not cooled his devotion to her, nor hers for him. Both had expressed this again and again in their frequent letters. He had penned stirring accounts of his manifold activities afloat and ashore, seldom forgetting to include news of Josiah. All began 'My dearest Fanny', and ended, 'Your most affectionate Horatio Nelson'. Many expressed such sentiments as, 'rest assured . . . of my most perfect love . . . and esteem for your person and character, which the more I see of the world the more I admire' (29 June 1797). She had written of her friends, especially those whom she made in Bath whose society was of as much benefit to her spirits as the waters were for her health; she had also told him the naval gossip of the day, and given him news of the family, in particular of his ageing father to whom she was as much attached as her husband was to his stepson. All began 'My dearest Husband', and ended, 'Your affectionate wife Frances Nelson'. And many expressed such sentiments as 'tomorrow is our wedding day, when it gave me a dear husband, and my child the best of fathers' (11 March 1797).

  Indeed, the letters which Nelson and Fanny exchanged during these four long and eventful years (of which so many have survived), would call for no special comment were it not for later events which were now less than a year away. For this reason certain undercurrents are worth noting as evidence that theirs was not a marriage of 'twin souls'. Nelson too often expressed the ardent hope that he would soon return home and be able to retire with his wife to some cottage in the country - but in the next sentence made abundantly clear that the Navy was his mistress, that for so long as the war continued his Country had first claim upon him, and that he wanted nothing so much as immortal fame. And Fanny as often complained of her health, expressed acute anxiety for her husband's safety coupled with disappointment at his failure to return home, first with Hood, later in the Agamemnon, afterwards in the Captain, and showed too little pride in his achievements to satisfy his vanity. (10)

  Any shortcoming in their relationship were, however, far from their thoughts when they came together in September 1797. 'I found my domestic happiness perfect', Nelson told St Vincent, while Fanny was much concerned for her husband's wound. The ligature applied onboard the Theseus held fast to the artery and nerve, so that the stump was hot and swollen, the pain being sufficiently severe for him to have to take opium at night to ensure sleep: 'I have suffered great misery', he wrote. Ten days after Nelson's return, he and Fanny moved to London, to lodgings in fashionable Bond Street, so that the wound might be examined by the best surgeons. William Cruickshank, who had been a partner of the famous Dr Hunter of St George's Hospital, and Thomas Keate, surgeon to the Prince of Wales, rejected a further operation: they recommended the application of poultices, and advised that time and rest would be the best of healers.

  But to persuade a man imbued with so much burning energy and spirit to rest was beyond Lady Nelson's powers. With their physical relationship impaired - for him by pain, for her by the repulsion which all but overwhelmed her sensitive nature when she daily dressed his wound - the Navy called him far more strongly than his wife could do. He was not to be satisfied with the honour of investiture with the Order of the Bath by King George III, and receiving the Freedom of the City of London in Guildhall, coupled with the security of a pension of £1,000 ($2,400) a year. He 'had now attained the appearance made familiar by the most famous series of his portraits, for which the original sketches were made during the next few months. . . . The fixed dim right eye, the empty right sleeve, were painful novelties to his family, but that his old infective high spirits were untouched was . . . equally obvious. . . . He was . . . very slight, (11) far from handsome, unaffectedly simple in address, and of no great dignity, ''indeed, in appearance nothing remarkable either way''. . . . The outstanding impression of those who encountered [him] . . . was of a man so active in person, so animated in countenance and so apposite and vehement in conversation that little else was recollected.' (Carola Oman in her Nelson.)

  And those who now 'encountered him' were not only old friends like Hood and Locker, both at Greenwich, but Pitt and others among the great. Above all, as the newspapers reported, he was 'daily at the Admiralty', keeping in touch with the progress of the war, and in a fever of anxiety lest there should be another decisive action before he might be fit enough to rehoist his flag. His satisfaction at the news of 'Admiral Duncan's total destruction of the Dutch fleet at Camperdown' on 11 October was tempered by a maddening regret: 'I would give this other arm to be with Duncan at this moment.'

  However, in November, he found time to visit Suffolk. He went there to buy his first home, Roundwood Farm, Rushmere. It was to be a haven for his wife and his father - but he himself was not destined to live there. On the morning of 4 December he awoke free of pain for the first time. The surgeon, when he undid the bandaged arm, discovered that the ligature had come away at last. It would only be a matter of days before the wound was healed. And this news, conveyed to the First Lord on Nelson's next visit to the Admiralty, bore early fruit: St Vincent wanted no flag officer back under his command more than Nelson. So, said Spencer, he should rehoist his flag in the 80-gun Foudroyant, which was due to be launched in January and commissioned in February. But no sooner had Nelson chosen Edward Berry to be his flag captain, than he heard that the Foudroyant's completion was delayed. On 8 December he told Berry:

  'If you mean to marry, I would recommend your doing it speedily, or the to be Mrs Berry will have very little company; for I am well and you may expect to be called for every hour. We shall probably be at sea before the Foudroyant is launched. Our ship is at Chatham, a seventy-four, and she will be choicely manned.'

  In the event, Berry had ample time to marry his cousin, Louisa Forster. 'Our ship' was the 74-gun Vanguard, and her commissioning was also delayed: she was not ready for Nelson to hoist his flag at Spithead until 29 March 1798.

  On his last night in London he and Fanny dined with the Spencers. 'A most uncouth creature', Lady Spencer thought him, but when he spoke, 'his wonderful mind broke forth'. And on this occasion 'his attentions to [Fanny] were those of a lover. He . . . sat by her; apologising to me by saying that he was so little with her, that he would not, voluntarily, lose an instant of her society.' Yet next day he left Fanny with instructions to move into Roundwood as soon as possible - 'it is right you should be in your own cottage' - without the sympathetic reflection that, since he had chosen to go abroad again so soon, she would have been happier in cosmopolitan Bath than in provincial Ipswich.

  On 7 April, after a week's detention by contrary winds, HMS Vanguard sailed for Lisbon to join St Vincent's fleet off Cadiz.

  VI Aboukir Bay 1798

  Of Nelson's years in the Agamemnon, Captain and Thesus, Mahan aptly wrote, as was noted in Chapter III:

  'This was the period in which expectation passed into fulfilment, when development, long arrested by unpropitious circumstances, resumed its outward progress under the benign influence of a favouring environment, and the bud, whose rare promise had long been noted by a few discerning eyes, unfolded into the brilliant flower, desti
ned in its maturity to draw the attention of the world.'

  A change was now at hand.

  'We see the same man at the opening of a new career. . . . Before leaving England [in the Vanguard] he [was] a man of distinction only; prominent, possibly, among the many distinguished men of his own profession, but the steady upward course [had] as yet been gradual. . . . No present sign [had] so far [foretold] the . . . burst of meridian splendour with which the sun of his renown was soon to rise upon men's eyes.' (Mahan in his Life of Nelson)

  The Vanguard was in company with St Vincent's flagship for only forty-eight hours. As soon as 2 May 1798 she was ordered to quit the fleet that was blockading the Spaniards in Cadiz, and to join the 74-gun Orion, Captain Sir James Saumarez, and Alexander, Captain Alexander Ball, at Gibraltar. On the 9th these three ships-of-the-line, accompanied by three frigates, sailed into the Mediterranean and set course for the Gulf of Lions, because their admiral had brought with him from England these words from the First Lord: 'I am very happy to send you Sir Horatio Nelson again, not only because I believe I cannot send you a more zealous, active and approved officer, but because I have reason to believe that his being under your command will be agreeable to your wishes.' Forgetting the failure of Santa Cruz, remembering who was chiefly responsible for his St Valentine's Day victory, St Vincent answered: 'You could not have gratified me more than in sending him. His presence in the Mediterranean is so very essential that I mean to . . . send him away . . . to endeavour to ascertain the real object of the preparations in the making by the French.'

  The Commander-in-Chief's choice of Nelson to lead this reconnaissance of Toulon in a Mediterranean from which the British fleet had been withdrawn eighteen months before, so angered his other flag officers, the fifty-five-year-old Sir William Parker, Rear-Admiral of the Red, and the nine years younger Sir John Orde, Rear-Admiral of the White, both of whom were, therefore, senior to Nelson as well as older, that Orde challenged St Vincent to a duel, for which offence he was, not surprisingly, ordered home. Neither could know that Nelson was also the Admiralty's choice, expressed in another letter from Spencer, which was already on its way from Whitehall, to reach the Commander-in-Chief soon after the Vanguard parted company:

  'When you are apprised that the appearance of a British squadron in the Mediterranean is a condition on which the fate of Europe may at this moment . . . depend, you will not be surprised that we are disposed to strain every nerve, and incur considerable hazard in effecting it. . . . If you . . . send a detachment into the Mediterranean [instead of going in person with the fleet], I think it almost unnecessary to suggest . . . the propriety of putting it under the command of Sir H. Nelson, whose acquaintance with that part of the world, as well as his activity and disposition . . . qualify him in a peculiar manner for that service.'

  This letter went on to order more than a reconnaissance: Nelson's squadron was to comprise not less than ten ships-of-the-line, to which end St Vincent's fleet was to be speedily reinforced. The latter responded by sailing ten of his best 74s, plus one 50, most of them veterans of The Saints, the Glorious First of June, Cape St Vincent and Tenerife, all under Troubridge in the Culloden since he had no flag officer junior to Nelson, to join the three that reached the Gulf of Lions on 17 May, without awaiting the arrival of a mere eight from home. Many months were to elapse, so uncertain and slow were communications in those days, before St Vincent learned whether the trust which he thus reposed in Nelson would be repaid.

  To explain the British Government's - and their Commander-in-Chief's - anxiety at 'the preparations making by the French', it is necessary to go back to the autumn of the previous year, 1797. With the defeat of Austria (which she blamed on the British withdrawal from the Mediterranean), and the failure of Lord Malmesbury's attempts to negotiate a peace at Lille consequent on the death of the Anglophile Catherine of Russia, Britain stood alone against France's attempt to dominate Europe, except for one faithful ally, little Portugal, which allowed St Vincent's fleet to use the Tagus as a haven. To overcome their implacable foe, the French Directory in October appointed Bonaparte to command a new Armée d' Angleterre, which would achieve a more decisive result than their previous ineffective forays against Ireland and Wales: 'It is in London that the misfortunes of Europe are planned: it is in London that we must end them.' But the Corsican's initial ardour for a major expedition across the Channel soon cooled: in February 1798 he reported that no landing on the English coast was feasible: 'make what efforts we will [after Duncan's victory at Camperdown], we shall not for many years acquire the control of the seas. To make a descent upon England, without being master of the sea, is the boldest and most difficult operation ever attempted.' So the Directory looked elsewhere for employment for their ablest general.

  Some months before this Bonaparte had written to Talleyrand:

  'Why do we not take possession of Malta? Vice-Admiral Brueys (1) might very well cast anchor there and make himself master of the place. Four hundred Knights and 500 soldiers are all that form the garrison of Valletta. The inhabitants, who number 100,000, are friendly to us and greatly disgusted with the Knights. . . . With the islands of Sardinia, Malta and Corfu, we shall be masters of the whole Mediterranean.'

  And also:

  'To go to Egypt, to establish myself there and found a French colony will require some months. But as soon as I have made England tremble for the safety of India, I shall return to Paris and give the enemy its death-blow. . . . Turkey will welcome the expulsion of the Mamelukes' [the military order whose members were the de facto rulers of Egypt].

  So in March Bonaparte was appointed to command an Armée d' Orient with orders even more ambitious than he had himself suggested, and which it was supposed could be safely executed because the British Fleet had abandoned the Mediterranean. Having first seized the strategically important island of Malta before it succumbed to the covetous blandishments of Austria or Russia, he was to go on to conquer Egypt (ignoring the embarrassing fact that this was a vassal state of France's ally, Turkey), . as a stepping-stone for an advance further east, whose aim would be the destruction of Britain's growing power in India.

  These objectives were, however, kept so secret that, from a vessel which he intercepted in the Gulf of Lions, Nelson could only confirm that the French were preparing a large overseas expedition at Toulon and in nearby ports such as Marseilles and Genoa, 'probably [for] Sicily, Malta and Sardinia and to finish the King of Naples at a blow', but possibly 'to be landed at Malaga and march through Spain' to attack Portugal. Nor was he watching Toulon on 19 May when the expedition, comprising more than 30,000 troops, sailed in some 300 transports escorted by thirteen sail-of-the-line and seven frigates, with Brueys' flag in the no-gun Orient in which the twenty-nine-year-old Bonaparte was accommodated, expecting 'to be seasick the entire voyage'. The British ships had been driven away from the French coast by a violent gale which, on the night of the 20th, dismasted the Vanguard to the west of Sardinia. Taken in tow by the Alexander, Berry's ship only reached the safety of San Pietro Bay, instead of being wrecked on a lee shore, because Ball rejected Nelson's order to ensure the Alexander's safety by casting off the tow, with words that were to turn them into enduring friends: 'I feel confident that I can bring her [the Vanguard] in safe. I therefore must not, and by the help of Almighty God, will not leave you.'

  Four days under the eye of a Governor who readily admitted that he had no power to enforce the British squadron's withdrawal from an island allied to France, and the strenuous efforts of Ball's and Saumarez's men, as well as Berry's, sufficed to fit the Vanguard with jury masts - days in which Nelson confessed to his wife: 'I ought not to call what has happened to the Vanguard by the cold name of accident. I believe firmly that it was the Almighty's goodness to check my consummate vanity. I hope it has made me a better officer, as I feel confident it has made me a better man.' But Providence did more than this for Nelson when he sailed again on the 27th to rendezvous with his three frigates which had lost
touch with his flag during the gale. Early on the 28th he fell in with a merchantman out of Marseilles which told him that Brueys had slipped out of Toulon. Since he could not search for the French armada with only three ships-of-the-line when he had no inkling of its destination, he continued to await his frigates. Instead, on 4 June, he fell in with the brig Mutine, Captain Thomas Hardy, who brought news of having sighted them en route for Gibraltar, their senior officer having decided on this course after receiving news of the Vanguard's disabling accident. 'I thought [they] would have known me better', was Nelson's comment on a decision that was to hamper so seriously his search for Brueys.

  But Hardy also brought good news, that Nelson could expect reinforcements. Three days later Troubridge joined his flag, increasing his strength to thirteen ships-of-the-line, plus the 50-gun Leander, a force that was a match for Brueys' fleet. This transformed his purpose: it had been limited to gaining intelligence of French intentions: now he was empowered 'to use his utmost endeavours to take, sink, burn or destroy the Armament preparing by the Enemy at Toulon'. But his joy at finding himself in command of so large a force was tempered by the knowledge that he had no secure base east of Gibraltar, that for supplies he must depend upon neutral states who would fear Bonaparte more than Britain - and by regret that Troubridge could not be his second-in-command. This went by seniority to the forty-one-year-old Saumarez, of whom Nelson was covertly jealous because he had already fought in four fleet actions including The Saints and Cape St Vincent. Saumarez, on the other hand, had openly criticized Nelson's unconcealed ambition for honour and glory, describing him in such terms as 'our desperate Commodore': he considered Nelson to be something of an upstart (just as many thought this of Field-Marshal Montgomery's egocentricity in the Second World War). However, no friction marred their relationship during the coming weeks - 'I have passed the day on board the Vanguard [Saumarez wrote on one occasion], having breakfasted and stayed to dinner with the Admiral' - even though Nelson could not feel for his second-in-command the affectionate trust which he placed in Troubridge, Berry and Ball.