by John Sugden
About the Book
Nelson: A Dream of Glory is the most comprehensive and thoroughly researched account ever written of Horatio Nelson's rise to international fame. Giving us the private as well as the public man, it combines ground-breaking scholarship with a brilliantly vivid and compelling style.
‘A magnificently-researched and thoughtful work which locates Nelson in a global context.’ Linda Colley
‘Massively authoritative.’ Max Hastings, Sunday Telegraph
‘This monumental tome is the finest yet written on England’s naval hero... Sugden’s brilliant book is chock-full of fascinating details. And if the second volume turns out as well as this, his life of Nelson will be one of the historical masterpieces of our time.’ Frank McLynn, Daily Express
PIMLICO
725
NELSON
The recipient of numerous awards, John Sugden has degrees from three British universities and was formerly a lecturer and senior research fellow. He has pursued historical research in archives throughout Britain and North America and his books and many articles have been published to great acclaim. With Nelson Dr Sugden returns to a lifelong interest in naval history. A member of the Society for Nautical Research for forty years, his publications include a popular biography of Sir Francis Drake. It was while researching a doctorate on Nelson’s navy thirty years ago that he recognised the extent of the untapped materials and the need for a major new biography.
Praise for Nelson: A Dream of Glory
‘This monumental tome is the finest yet written on England’s great naval hero... chock-full of fascinating detail, from Nelson’s battles to his first mistress, Adelaide Correglia.’ Frank McLynn, Daily Express
‘Sugden’s account... is richly absorbing, and his fluent, buoyant prose scuds along, carrying the reader with it. This must surely become a standard life.’ Jane Ridley, Spectator
‘Sugden makes very effective use of the new material to challenge the traditional story. Moreover... he has tracked down some of the little known characters – junior officers, even ordinary seamen, and brought them alive by meticulous research.’ Colin White, Observer
‘A masterpiece of the biographer’s art... A book that will be the yardstick by which all other Nelson biographies will be judged for decades to come.’ Neil Hanson, Sunday Times
‘Sugden’s passion for his subject and astonishing research reveal the blossoming hero in a new light.’ Lucy Moore, Daily Mail
‘The massive, magisterially detailed first volume of what will surely be the definitive life.’ T. J. Binyon, Scotsman
‘The most detailed study of Nelson ever published.’ F. J. M. Scott, History Today
NELSON
A Dream of Glory
JOHN SUGDEN
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
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Epub ISBN 9781446444580
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Published by Pimlico 2005
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Copyright © John Sugden 2004
John Sugden has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in Great Britain by
Jonathan Cape in 2004
Pimlico edition 2005
Pimlico
Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
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Random House UK Limited Reg. No. 954009
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780712667432 (from Jan 2007)
ISBN 0712667431
Hope revives within me. I shall
recover, and my dream of glory be fulfilled.
Nelson will yet be an admiral.
Horatio Nelson, aged twenty-one, shipped home with malaria, 1780
This one is for my mother, Lily,
who told me that Nelson was the great man;
for Phil, who prefers James Cook;
and for Terri,
who alone of us has crewed aboard a tall ship
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Praise
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
List of Illustrations
Maps
Introduction
I: Prologue: Duel at Midnight
BOOK ONE: The Prelude, 1758–92
II: The Small World of Burnham Thorpe
III: Captain Suckling’s Nephew
IV: Northward Ho!
V: East Indies Adventure
VI: Lieutenant Nelson
VII: The First Commands
VIII: In the Wake of the Buccaneers
IX: Fighting Back
X: ‘The Poor Albemarle’
XI: Love in St-Omer
XII: Hurricane Harbour
XIII: Old Officers and Young Gentlemen
XIV: Dearest Fanny
XV: The Prince and the Post-Captain
XVI: Beachcombing
BOOK TWO: ‘To Glory We Steer’, 1793–7
XVII: Captain of the Agamemnon
XVIII Corsica
XIX: A Long and Hazardous Service
XX: Two Meetings with French Gentry
XXI: Drifting to Leeward
XXII: From Flag Captain to Ship-Boy
XXIII: Commodore Nelson
XXIV: The Happy Moment
XXV: Who Will Not Fight For Dollars?
XXVI: More Daring Intrepidity Was Never Shown
XXVII: Useless to my Country
Acknowledgements
Notes and Citations
Abbreviations
Select Bibliography
Glossary
Picture Section
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Captain Horatio Nelson, 1781 (copyright National Maritime Museum, London).
2. Rear-Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson, K.B., 1797 (by permission of the Royal Hospital School, Holbrook, Ipswich).
3. Edmund Nelson (author’s collection).
4. Catherine Nelson (author’s collection).
5. Ann Suckling (copyright National Maritime Museum, London).
6. Nelson’s Norfolk (author’s collection).
7. Burnham Thorpe Rectory (author’s collection).
8. Norwich School (courtesy of Julian Lowe).
9. The Paston School, North Walsham (author’s collection).
10. Maurice Suckling (author’s collection).
11. Skeffington Lutwidge (author’s collection).
12. The Carcass and the Racehorse, 1773 (a
uthor’s collection).
13. George Farmer (courtesy of the Hull Reference Library).
14. Edward Hughes (courtesy of the Hull Reference Library).
15. Charles Pole (author’s collection).
16. William Locker and his family (author’s collection).
17. Peter Parker (courtesy of the Hull Reference Library).
18. Cuthbert Collingwood (copyright National Maritime Museum, London).
19. Mary Moutray (by permission of Clive Richards).
20. English Harbour, Antigua (author’s collection).
21. Prince William Henry (author’s collection).
22. Frances, Lady Nelson (copyright National Maritime Museum, London).
23. House of William Suckling (author’s collection).
24. Courtenay Boyle (author’s collection).
25. George Andrews (by permission of the Nelson Society).
26. Samuel, Viscount Hood (author’s collection).
27. John Jervis, Earl St. Vincent (author’s collection).
28. Gilbert Elliot, Earl of Minto (author’s collection).
29. Charles Stuart (courtesy of Glasgow Museums: Art Gallery and Museum, Kelvingrove).
30. Francis Drake (copyright The British Museum).
31. John Trevor, Viscount Hampden (courtesy of Lord Hampden/ the Trustees of the Glynde Endowment Settlement; Photographic Survey, Courtauld Institute of Art).
32. Thomas Francis Fremantle (courtesy of Sir Ludovic Kennedy).
33. Thomas Troubridge (author’s collection).
34. Thomas Ramsay (copyright The British Museum).
35. William Hoste (author’s collection).
36. Battle of Cape St. Vincent, 1797 (author’s collection).
37. Boarding the San Nicolas, 1797 (author’s collection).
INTRODUCTION
Nelson was once Britannia’s God of War
And still should be so, but
The tide has turned;
There’s no more to be said of Trafalgar.
’Tis with our hero quietly inturr’d.
Lord Byron, Don Juan
‘NEVER,’ recalled secretary John Barrow of the Admiralty, ‘can I forget the shock I received on opening the board-room door the morning after the arrival of the despatches, when Marsden called out, “Glorious news! The most glorious victory our brave navy ever achieved – but Nelson is dead!”’1
To the British people, and many others fighting Napoleon, the death of Nelson in 1805 was one of those ineffaceable events that live as long as memory. The nation won its greatest naval victory and went into mourning. As Josiah Wedgwood the younger remarked, ‘grief and regret’ were ‘so general and so strong as quite to check and abate the delight the victory would otherwise have created in all our bosoms’.2
Britons of every stamp remembered where they heard the news and the thoughts it inspired. The essayist Charles Lamb, no admirer of public persons, confessed to have been a follower of Nelson ever since he had seen him walking in Pall Mall ‘looking just as a hero should look’. Now, he felt ‘very much cut about it indeed’ because ‘nobody is left of any name at all’. The Wordsworths were in their native Lake District. Dorothy burst into tears, while her brother refused to believe that Nelson was dead until he had run into a Patterdale inn to confirm the tidings. A partially unreconstructed radical, William Wordsworth did not approve of all that Nelson had done, but reflected deeply enough to compose a poetic tribute to ‘the happy warrior’.3
Coleridge was in Naples when the news reached him. ‘When he [Nelson] died it seemed as if no man was a stranger to another, for all were made acquaintances in the rights of a common anguish,’ he wrote. ‘Never can I forget the sorrow and consternation that lay on every countenance . . . Numbers stopped and shook hands with me, because they had seen tears on my cheek and conjectured that I was an Englishman, and several, as they held my hand, burst themselves into tears.’ But it was that other old pantisocrat, Robert Southey, who perhaps best captured the national mood. ‘The death of Nelson was felt in England as something more than a public calamity,’ he remembered from the perspective of another eight years. ‘Men started at the intelligence and turned pale, as if they had heard of the loss of a dear friend. An object of our admiration and affection, of our pride and of our hopes, was suddenly taken from us, and it seemed as if we had never, till then, known how deeply we loved and reverenced him.’4
That huge sense of loss manifested itself in a torrent of memorabilia and a multiplicity of monuments. Horatio Nelson, the Norfolk commoner, was raised in stone like the heroes of antiquity. Great columns, arches and statues were erected in far distant places. Some, though weathered or crumbling, still stand as mute testimony to the great debt the British public felt they owed the man now dead.
More than thirty substantial monuments were created in a vast and enduring surge of grief and pride. State patronage contributed, but most of the memorials depended upon public subscriptions and private enthusiasm, and took many forms. Alexander Davison, Nelson’s friend and prize agent, planted trees at Swarland in Northumberland to represent the positions of the ships in the battle of the Nile. A rough granite pillar, twelve feet high, was hauled on rollers from Aird’s Bay in Scotland by local iron-workers and erected on a hill at Taynuilt in Argyll and Bute. Twelve hundred men of the Sea Fencibles (a kind of naval home guard) were reported to have thrown up a twenty-foot triumphal arch at Cork in Ireland in just five hours on 10 November 1805, and a high tower built on Portsdown Hill overlooking Britain’s greatest naval base at Portsmouth was financed by veterans of the battle of Trafalgar.5
The history of these monuments is instructive. They did more than remind new generations of a dead hero. They represented the nation itself and an uncomplicated patriotism that for long sustained it. The citizens who raised those stones saluted a man who had rescued them from foreign domination. He stood for freedom and national endeavour. He was the very epitome of the greatness of Britain, a founder of its security and worldwide influence. Enemies certainly understood, whether rival powers or anti-colonialists. In 1940 Hitler talked about dismantling the famous column in Trafalgar Square and shipping it to Berlin as a concrete symbol of Britain’s defeat, while twenty-six years later Irish republicans blew up the impressive pillar and statue that had been a focal point in Dublin for more than a century. Both Bridgetown in Barbados and Montreal in Canada have talked about moving their huge Nelson statues to obscurer locations, where they are less capable of offending nationalist sentiment.
Even in Britain changing political attitudes to the state have rebounded upon the Nelson memorials. During the nineteenth century, when the admiral enjoyed a tremendous popular appeal, the statues in Glasgow and Trafalgar Square became places of pilgrimage and venues for radical protest. But more distant and sceptical generations allowed many of the monuments to decay, and not so long ago the relatively unadorned statue unveiled in Birmingham in 1809 was threatened by doctrinaire city councillors. The city’s first public statue, the Birmingham monument had been financed by a true cross-section of the community, and even its triumphalism was moderated to appease local Quaker sentiment. But for these modern critics Nelson had become nothing more than an embarrassing war monger and the symbol of an unsavoury empire.
Biographies of Nelson are also monuments, and equally reflect shifting opinion. The first major biographies were largely compilations, often reproducing badly bowdlerised chunks of primary material with little in the way of synthesis or analysis to act as a guide. Like the stone pillars their duty was to commemorate, and most that put the hero in a poor light was exorcised. In the words of one of the more competent scribes, it was Nelson’s ‘ardent love of country, his fervent attachment to his profession, [and] his acute skill and accurate judgement in nautical affairs’ that alone concerned the historian. So, at least for a time, also thought James Harrison, hired by Nelson’s former mistress, Lady Hamilton, to produce the two-volume Life of the Rt Honourable Horatio, Lord Visco
unt Nelson in 1806. Information furnished by her ladyship and other associates of Nelson lent Harrison ‘a considerable store of novelties’, among which treasures were revealing love letters that the author subsequently published anonymously to his patron’s disadvantage. But the biography itself, though impaired by a spite towards Nelson’s wronged wife that led her to denounce it as ‘the basest production that ever was offered to the public’, generally eschewed controversial ground in favour of the story of a selfless patriot.6
It was James Stanier Clarke, librarian and chaplain to the Prince of Wales, and Dr John McArthur ‘of Horndean, Hampshire’ (as he signed himself) who supplied what came to be regarded as the standard life, however. Their ponderous twin tomes entitled The Life of Admiral Lord Nelson were published in 1809. Based upon contributions from many of Nelson’s friends, colleagues and relations, as well as papers still held by his wife and brother, the book claimed great authority. The ‘editors’ were in a position to learn much about their subject. Noted for his skill with a sword rather than a pen, McArthur may have met Nelson as early as 1782 and certainly served him as prize agent in the Mediterranean during the 1790s. Both men had edited the Naval Chronicle, an on-going miscellania of matters afloat that had published a fragment of autobiography written by Nelson in 1799.
In that self-congratulatory fragment Nelson pointed the way for his biographers, representing his life as an exemplification of the maxim ‘that perseverance in any profession will most probably meet its reward’, and omitting most that did not relate to heroic deeds, stalwart service and public duty. His sketch exaggerated some of his achievements and denied the considerable nepotism that had lubricated his career. No self-effacing hero, Nelson had always played to his public, proclaiming himself its champion and inviting idolatry. As the epigraphs to the following chapters show, he did not mistake his constituency. The admiral had his critics but the British public responded rapturously.