by John Sugden
Arriving on his station, Nelson found that his force effectively amounted to two or three frigates, the Lowestoffe, Meleager and Leda, and a twenty-four-gun sloop, the Amphitrite. Though little known, their commanders were Nelson’s first captains, and seemed to have liked him. Charles Tyler of the Meleager, a slight, handsome, hawkfaced officer who limped from a wound taken in the American war, would grace two of Nelson’s great victories and carry a lock of his admiral’s hair into retirement. On his ship were two lieutenants Nelson also learned to admire. One, Walter Serecold, would distinguish himself at Nelson’s side in Corsica, and the other was the celebrated Thomas Masterman Hardy. The captain of the Leda was George Campbell, who would later sign himself Nelson’s ‘very much obliged and faithful friend’ in days before his life soured and turned him to suicide. Anthony Hunt commanded the Amphitrite, and William Wolseley the old Lowestoffe. Two years older than Nelson though junior in rank, Wolseley was another who had been tried and tested in battle, and carried inside him a bullet received during an attack on Trincomalee ten years before. He and Nelson formed a good friendship during their brief service together, and even agreed to pool prize money. It seems that Nelson benefited most from the arrangement; he only salvaged a deserted French gunboat that December, whereas the Lowestoffe sent six neutrals into Leghorn, all suspected of shipping French supplies. Nonetheless, Wolseley reaped a reward of a different kind when the following spring Nelson persuaded Hood to transfer him to a better frigate, the Imperieuse. ‘I hope we may soon meet again,’ Wolseley wrote to his benefactor, ‘and that I shall have the pleasure of shaking you by the hand.’66
Nelson’s ships cruised off St Fiorenzo, where the French kept the greater part of their Corsican troops, and as far southwest as Calvi, punished by December gales. Fortunately Tuscany had now thrown in its lot with the allies and Leghorn was a secure base at their backs. The captains intercepted some supplies running to or from Corsica and kept the French frigate squadron holed up in St Fiorenzo, but Nelson was occasionally diverted to other duties. In December, Hood ordered the Agamemnon to patrol the Italian riviera, and towards the end of the year Nelson was given the job of escorting a mutinous ship, the Arethusa, to Porto Ferraio in Elba, where she was to be temporarily decommissioned.67
Although the year drew to its close with the Jacobins counterattacking on different fronts, Nelson clung to his belief that the war would not last. As long as Hood held the French fleet in his fist, Britain’s command of the Mediterranean was unchallenged and hardly warranted the maintenance of a large fleet. Some of the captains began talking of going home, and Nelson flirted with the possibility of going out to the West Indies as second-in-command to the Duke of Clarence. There were also times when he thought of the world he had left behind and the people who loved and waited for him, but active service remained in his soul.68
The first letter from Fanny had reached him in Tunis at the end of November, brought from the fleet by the Nemesis. It reminded the captain of sleepy, silent Norfolk, where the harvest was in, the barren fields were being swept by cruel east winds and the salt marshes were spotted with redshanks, gulls and oystercatchers. There, he knew, were two people who yearned for his return. The Reverend Edmund Nelson confessed that though he loved silence and solitude he felt a superfluity of both when his favourite son was away. He and Fanny comforted each other when they were together. Fanny had taken apartments at Swaffham during the summer, trying to maintain a semblance of normal existence with the help of one or other of the Thurlow girls of Burnham as her maids. Her music amused her, but she had little society and even the annual visit to the Walpoles seemed empty without her husband. The first of many lonely Christmases followed, and then she began thinking of following the reverend to Bath in the spring . . . if Horatio did not come home.69
7
Seventeen hundred and ninety-three had been a momentous year, but its dying gasps had one more dramatic twist of fate for the war in the Mediterranean. British naval supremacy was suddenly overthrown. In the last days of the year Toulon fell, and with it all immediate prospects of ending the naval war east of Gibraltar.
It was a huge blow and a serious blot on Hood’s record. He had been starved of satisfactory reinforcements to the last, and wretchedly served by the allies, but he had also stubbornly refused to listen to the advice of his military men and failed to make adequate preparations for a withdrawal. When the besieging Jacobins drove in important outposts on the night of 17 December the old admiral finally knew the moment had come. It was his duty to destroy the dockyards, arsenal and enemy warships before pulling out his forces, but the job was botched. Thirteen ships of the line were taken out or destroyed, but eighteen were abandoned to the republicans. Eighteen capital ships were left to challenge the British Mediterranean fleet and to threaten her allies. For Hood, the man who had criticised Rodney for failing to consummate a victory, Hood the completist, Hood who had inspired Nelson with his perfectionism, it was a terrific oversight, and one that would cast a long and dark shadow.
Hood was showing serious weaknesses in leadership. The British military men were fed up with him, and dissatisfaction was spreading to some of the naval officers. ‘He has had the ingenuity of making nine out of ten in this squadron his avowed enemy by his overbearing and tyrannical conduct,’ wrote Fremantle of the Tartar. The admiral was accused of favouritism, and was said to have treated one of his senior subordinates, Rear Admiral Sir Hyde Parker, with ‘acrimony and vile humour’.70
When the allies abandoned Toulon the dire plight of the local French royalists and any townspeople suspected of sympathising with them created fearful scenes at the waterfront. Some were taken off by the retreating forces, while others, wailing and weeping, stampeded for what boats there were, terrified of being sacrificed to a brutal enemy, and leaving homes, property, friends and families behind. Those who escaped were lucky. Behind they left chaos, as the rabble ran bawling about the streets like bulls, smashing into shops and houses, looting and murdering. ‘The mob rose,’ Nelson heard from refugees who reached Leghorn. ‘Death called forth all its myrmidons, who destroyed the miserable inhabitants in the shape of swords, pistols, fire and water. Thousands are said to be lost . . . Fathers are here without families, and families without fathers, the pictures of horror and despair.’ When the republicans marched in, their ferocity was unbridled. Hundreds of people were executed. The mob bound loving couples back to back and tossed them into the harbour to jeer at as they drowned. ‘Each teller,’ said Nelson, ‘makes the scene more horrible.’71
Nelson heard the news at Leghorn. He had realised that Toulon was difficult to hold without sufficient soldiers to command the surrounding heights, but expected the allies to cling to the harbour, at least until the French fleet and arsenal were destroyed, a feat he believed to be the work of no more than ‘an hour’. Nelson blamed Hood’s subordinates for the failure to burn the enemy ships, rather than the admiral himself, whom he still judged ‘the best officer I ever saw’. He was relieved to hear that his patron was safe in Hyères Bay outside Toulon and notified the Admiralty. Furthermore, with typical consideration he also wrote to Lady Hood to say that her husband was safe. ‘She must be very uneasy,’ he remarked. No other officer in the fleet seems to have imagined the anxieties the black tidings from the Mediterranean would cause Lady Hood, and she was deeply moved by Nelson’s letter and kept it to show her husband. ‘Lady Hood speaks much of you,’ Fanny told Nelson a year later. ‘Will never forget the letter you wrote her.’72
What most distressed Nelson was the stream of refugees that reached Leghorn, old and young, sick and well, all ruined and destitute with their own harrowing stories to tell. To Nelson it was a stark demonstration of the corrosive effects of revolution. However unfeeling Britain’s rulers might be, it seemed to him, they had never in his lifetime sunk to this. Instead of protection ‘the poor inhabitants’ of Toulon were subjected to the tyranny of a crazed mob, oppressed, pillaged and murdered. It had happened in P
aris and other places, as Nelson had read in the papers, but this he saw at first hand. It brought home to Nelson the humanitarian and moral dimensions of constitutional conflict as nothing had done before, and fed his growing hatred for the new republic.73
He found himself the senior British officer at Leghorn when the first boatloads of refugees from Toulon arrived. Late in December two bulging brigs arrived filled with two hundred or so miserable passengers, some women and children, and about half wounded British servicemen. The next day it was La Billette corvette with another seventy French men and women. When Nelson tried to send them ashore old John Udny, the British consul, explained that the governor had refused the refugees permission to land. The fall of Toulon had sent a shock wave through the Mediterranean because it portended a major shift of power. Tuscany, which had only recently gone into the allied camp, was beginning to reconsider the propriety of its decision. Udny was ailing and ready to take to his bed, but no doubt encouraged by Nelson he managed to persuade the governor to compromise. The British and some of the sick and wounded from the first two transports were allowed to occupy buildings outside Leghorn on a temporary basis, but the rest and the passengers on the corvette were left on the ships in a ‘wretched state’. Udny could only suggest that Nelson authorise him to hire a ship to house them in better quarters offshore while the politicians thrashed out a solution.74
Nelson was not on the best of terms with Governor Franco Seratti. The governor did not like the way Nelson talked to him man to man, rather than through Udny, and Hood had even felt it necessary to order an apology. Besides, Nelson could scarcely contain his contempt for a man he believed to be ‘frightened to pieces’ by the Jacobin successes. Perhaps wisely the refugee issue went to Hood and Lord Hervey, Britain’s man in Florence, who arrived in Leghorn to discuss the problem at the beginning of the New Year. After some difficulties the Grand Duke of Tuscany consented to give the French refugees temporary asylum on Elba, and four thousand of them were soon landing there ‘in want of every necessary of life’, many of them sick or injured survivors of days at sea without access to a surgeon.75
The fall of Toulon did more than displace a dejected stream of humanity. It cost Britain a naval supremacy in the Mediterranean that would not be regained within five war-torn years.
XVIII
CORSICA
He leads: we hear our Seaman’s call
In the roll of battles won;
For he is Britain’s Admiral
Till the setting of her sun.
George Meredith, Trafalgar Day
1
‘CORSICA is a wonderful fine island,’ Nelson wrote to Fanny from his cabin in the Agamemnon on 13 February 1794. Certainly it was wild, its granite masses towering above a beautiful blue sea and some of its peaks snow-capped even in the most sweltering summers. It was a land of mountains with deep, ragged gorges, of marshy coastal plains, narrow, rocky harbours, and hills covered in timber and thorny maquis thicket. It was a land where a hardy peasantry fished for coral or cultivated olives, fruit and cereals while their sheep, goats and cattle foraged in the scrub. It was also, as every informed Briton then knew, a tortured island, ruled for centuries by foreigners, and torn by brave but bloody struggles for independence.1
Britons of that time went into Corsica the way the Philhellenes later went into Greece, stuffed with romantic ideals about freedom and self-determination, but most of them emerged bruised and disillusioned. Nelson was no exception. In 1794 he regarded the unruly and proud Corsicans as ‘brave’ and ‘free’ spirits, led by a great champion. Even in England Pasquale de Paoli was a symbol of patriotic fortitude. He had spent forty of his seventy years trying to liberate his homeland, first from the Genoese and then, after their claim to the island was sold, from the French. A man of considerable ability and huge determination, Paoli had created a regular army, established a semblance of order and democracy, founded a university and defeated the Genoese, but in 1769 he was driven out by the French and began years of exile. The British applauded him, giving him a pension and admitting him to select circles, but after the French Revolution he returned to Corsica, lured by possibilities of the island achieving a more autonomous relationship within a new liberal France. He was installed as governor in 1791, but soon saw his people sliding into a fresh revolt, disaffected by a raft of issues that included sovereignty, religion, land ownership, taxation, language and access to public offices. Now, aged but unbroken, Paoli was a rebel again, with a price on his head and an army of partisans. Nelson was moved by the loyalty he inspired. ‘This is pure affection,’ he wrote. ‘Paoli has nothing to give them, no honours to bestow. It is the tribute of a generous people to a chief who had sacrificed everything for their benefit. I hope he will live to see the Corsicans truly free.’2
Paoli’s forces may have been durable and sure-footed mountain fighters, but they were undisciplined and ill-equipped, and resembled nothing so much as a savage banditti, armed with fowling pieces and clad in woollen jackets, waistcoats, breeches, buff leather gaiters and dirty old ill-fitting French uniforms. They outnumbered the several thousand French troops who held Corsica with the aid of some native sympathisers, but were unequal to expelling them. The French controlled the strategic northern peninsula of Cape Corse, and their garrisons in St Fiorenzo, Bastia and Calvi were strongly entrenched and impregnable to irregular forces. Paoli turned to the British for help.
Nelson was not by nature an interventionist. He had begun the war believing that French republicanism would burn itself out if left alone, but the oppression of people generally disturbed him and he understood the importance of defending important liberties. He also knew that Corsica was important to Britain – increasingly so. As long as the French had bases in Corsica, its ports were havens for hostile warships and privateers. British shipping in the eastern Mediterranean was unsafe, and the Italian states, whether allied or neutral, were exposed to attack. Hood’s expulsion from Toulon had now increased the island’s significance tenfold. The Royal Navy needed a new base in the Mediterranean. Naples was too far from the French coast, which the British needed to watch or blockade, while Genoa was unfriendly. Tuscany had suitable ports at Leghorn and Porto Ferraio in Elba but was wavering in its allegiance to the allies. The obvious alternative was Corsica. It had to be taken.
No one knew that more than Lord Hood. He was sceptical of the amount of support Paoli could provide a British task force, and was still smarting from the hiding Linzee’s squadron had taken at St Fiorenzo the previous year, a defeat some blamed upon the inadequacies of the partisans. However, the admiral’s needs had multiplied. He needed a base, and he needed a victory to restore morale among the allies and silence critics at home. On 4 January he put Captain Edward Cooke and an engineer on Corsica to investigate the feasibility of an invasion. Their report was encouraging. Despite their strength, the enemy garrisons seemed conquerable. Small boats were still shifting supplies along the coast from one French stronghold to another, but Nelson’s blockade had reduced provisions and sickness was said to be spreading among the defenders. Enemy morale was believed to be low. Hood decided to go ahead.3
A more distinguished party stepped upon Corsican soil on 14 January. One of the trio was Sir Gilbert Elliot, an urbane diplomat soon to rule the island as Britain’s viceroy, and with him were two senior army officers, Lieutenant Colonel John Moore (later the hero and victim of Corunna) and Major George Frederick Koehler. They were charged with preparing the ground for an invasion. Elliot ascertained that Paoli was willing to swap one set of masters for another and allow Corsica to become a British protectorate in return for the expulsion of the French, while the army officers studied the military situation. They were told that the French had 2,600 men on the island (actually an understatement), and concluded that though Calvi would be a hard nut to crack there was ‘every reason to hope for success’. At about the same time Nelson was landing Lieutenant Andrews, where he spent three days practising his French upon the partisans,
assuring Paoli that Hood would help him and looking for suitable places to disembark men and stores.4
For Hood the liberation of Corsica was imperative, but the job had to be done quickly. Now that a residue of the French fleet was at large and the Jacobins were counterattacking on land, the British fleet had to be stretched thin to meet its many obligations east of Gibraltar. Hood could not tie forces up in Corsica indefinitely.
At Hyères, Hood gathered his forces. Sixty sail of warships and transports were needed, but men were scarce. The fleet was so under strength that Hood applied for help to Malta and Naples, while hundreds of British soldiers from the 11th, 25th, 30th and 69th regiments were serving as auxiliary marines on the ships. Altogether, even reinforced by the 50th and 51st regiments from Gibraltar at the end of 1793, the British had no more than three thousand of their soldiers cooperating with the fleet. A few French royalists joined them, but after the repossession of Toulon there was a reluctance to rely on foreign soldiers.
While Hood fought with logistics, the invasion of Corsica suddenly thrust Captain Nelson to the forefront of the Mediterranean campaign. His blockade of the island, previously simply precautionary, became an operation of the first importance, paving the way for the British landings by gathering intelligence, encouraging the partisans and reducing the resources of the French garrisons. In recognition Hood increased the size of Nelson’s command. During January four frigates, the Juno, Romulus, L’Aigle and Tartar, the twenty-four-gun La Billette and the Fortune gunboat joined his squadron, though Hood was soon having to recall the Lowestoffe. By trying to ensure that no more than one ship at a time reprovisioned at Leghorn, Nelson tightened his vigil, focusing his efforts on clearing the coasts of enemy gunboats and starving St Fiorenzo and Calvi of supplies.5