by John Sugden
Nelson was sceptical, but accepted that the French were flagrantly breaching neutrality by recruiting in Genoa, and that the ultimate possibilities were frightening. The small Austrian garrisons at St Pierre d’Arena and Voltri, near Genoa, were obviously threatened, and if the French got control of the Bocchetta pass between the town and the main Austrian lines they could cut off De Vins’s principal supply route and road of retreat. The Austrian and Sardinian ministers were making formal protests to the Genoese, but something more concrete was needed and they begged Nelson to act.
Bringing the Agamemnon into harbour, Nelson swiftly terrified La Brune and her associated privateers and transports into warping their way into the inner mole and removing their guns and powder. The officers of the enemy frigate were so frightened that their ship would be cut out that they buried it in the middle of a dozen merchantmen. To make doubly sure that none of the hostile vessels left port, on 18 November Nelson laid the Agamemnon between the two mole heads, ready to intercept anything trying to leave. It was a partial blockade, and risked offending Genoa, but now that the French had overstepped the mark and abused neutrality hand over fist, Nelson felt justified in a stronger approach.
His position was uncomfortable, notwithstanding. There were reports that French ships of the line might break out of Toulon and come to Genoa, where the Agamemnon stood to be trapped alone. Moreover, tied down here Nelson was unable to keep the promise he had given De Vins to keep the French gunboats off the Austrian flank at Pietra. As he later informed Parker, he regretted not being ‘able to divide the Agamemnon’ and cover both points of danger. Almost inevitably, it was while Nelson was at Genoa, and his other ships blown from their stations, that the French general hurled his men against the Austrian front line. At the forefront of the assault were six future Napoleonic generals, including André Massena, Charles-Pierre-François Augereau and Louis-Gabriel Suchet.46
The Austrians were superior in numbers and entrenched in a line of strong posts but they broke like reeds. Nelson’s purser, who was with their army, found himself running beside soldiers who had thrown down their weapons, and female camp followers fleeing with their skirts in their hands. Old De Vins was ill. His head was swollen and he could-hardly speak, and no sooner had the French attacked than he handed his command to a deputy and fled in the dead of night in a sedan chair. It hardly encouraged his wavering soldiers, who without a reserve line to rally behind were soon streaming back towards Genoa, along the very road that Nelson was keeping open. Those who tried to stand in pockets were soon outflanked and forced to withdraw. Vado fell on the 26th and Savona three days later, so quickly that two of Nelson’s shore parties were surprised and captured on the 29th. Lieutenant Noble, Midshipmen Withers and Newman, and eleven seamen and marines fell into the hands of the French.47
The captain of the Agamemnon was mortified that none of his ships had been there when it mattered, and that eighteen enemy gunboats were allowed to worry the left flank of the Austrian army unscathed. But he exonerated himself with a report that the rout of De Vins had begun on the right flank, away from the coast, and the knowledge that he had preserved a line of retreat that saved up to ten thousand fleeing Austrians from capture or death, including De Vins himself. For had the French forces he had shut in Genoa succeeded in establishing themselves in the rear of the Austrian army, and closed the Bocchetta pass, the battle of Loano might have been a far more desperate affair. As it was the allies lost more than three thousand men, tens of cannons and ‘magazines of every description’. The allied armies eventually regrouped at Acqui, Ceva and Mondovi, but for a while even Genoa was threatened and Nelson had to warn British ships that not a single port on the riviera was safe to enter.48
Bonaparte was angry with Scherer for failing to exploit his advantage, and particularly for not marching upon Ceva to divide the Austrians from Sardinia-Piedmont and force the latter to accept terms. For Nelson it was a sad but not unexpected end to the campaign. As he sailed back to Leghorn early in December, Nelson was convinced that Britain’s allies were useless and the war as a whole futile. There was plenty of blame, and insofar as it touched himself Nelson reacted powerfully. The Austrians had been complaining about the inadequacy of British naval support for some time, and General Olivier Remigius, Count Wallis, who succeeded De Vins, was using the absence of Nelson’s ships as an excuse for the defeat at Loano. At Leghorn, Nelson suffered the indignity of seeing an aid to Wallis arrive with a file of accusations. He rebutted them immediately, and Drake and Trevor thundered in his defence at every opportunity. Even in Vienna the charges were not taken seriously, for the army was notorious for its lethargy, but Nelson felt himself impugned when he had done his best with inadequate tools.49
Nelson acidly remarked that the Austrians had fought so badly that the whole of the British fleet could not have saved them, but in one respect he did sympathise with their plight. They had, after all, fought a campaign on the coast to benefit from the aid of a fleet that had never once appeared. Hotham and Parker had stripped Nelson’s force to the bone, and left it utterly unequal to its duties, no matter how well led or how busy. Even after the Austrian defeat Nelson remained acutely embarrassed, for Vado and Genoa had become unsafe ports, and ships were needed to loiter in the offing, warning British traders and men-of-war not to enter. Nothing Nelson had said had moved his admirals, and he felt bitterly disappointed and hoped the neglect might be exposed in some enquiry. He felt so ill-used that he began appealing directly to the Admiralty, over Parker’s greying head. ‘My squadron has been so reduced by the admiral and storms of wind,’ he complained, ‘that I had not ships to make the attempt and drive those gun boats away.’ Those who had shared his frustrations understood. ‘I would to God you had been our commander-in-chief!’ Trevor told him.50
Actually, no one would have been less interested in an enquiry than the British government. As Peter Jupp, the biographer of Lord Grenville, the foreign secretary, has shown, the administration had regarded the riviera campaign as an unwelcome distraction, and had urged Austria and Sardinia-Piedmont to drive through Savoy to the north rather than fritter their resources repelling the French advance along the coast. The campaign on the riviera, however poorly prosecuted by the Austrians and their allies, was their priority rather than Britain’s.
We can sense Nelson’s depression in the revival of longings for home. When things were going well Nelson preferred active service, enlivened by the prospects of action and achievement. In June Fanny had urged him to quit, but he had palmed her off with excuses, explaining that it was discourteous to rush home so soon after the king had recognised his services in a promotion. However, by Christmas, the springs had fallen from his heels, and he was weary and disillusioned. He had failed to get his distinguishing pendant – even a direct petition to the Admiralty producing a refusal – and he felt he had been abandoned on the riviera. Nelson began talking about relinquishing his naval career again, and taking a seat in Parliament.
In September, Lord Walpole and Coke of Holkham suggested he fill a vacancy for the seat of Ipswich. Nelson was tempted, though he hated political factions and insisted upon being regarded as an independent candidate, at liberty to judge every matter on a non-partisan basis. He was prepared to serve in ‘the real Whig interest’ with the Duke of Portland’s moderates, who understood the extent of French aggression and supported Pitt, but would have nothing to do with the Foxite Whigs. As patriots they might have been equally complicated and naive, but Nelson saw them as ‘vile dogs’ who excused and condoned the enemy’s excesses. The other problem about standing for Parliament was financial, ‘for although I have so often seen the French shot, yet truly I have seen little of their money’. Money was needed to buy support during electioneering, and to maintain a London establishment, a respectable table and a place in society. The plan fell through, and the Ipswich seat went to Sir Andrew Hamond, comptroller of the Navy Board.51
England still attracted him, so bleak did he construe hi
s future with the fleet. A new commander-in-chief had come at last, the long-awaited successor to Lord Hood and a man to be reckoned with – Admiral Sir John Jervis, renowned, almost feared, throughout the service for strong opinions and an iron discipline. He arrived at St Fiorenzo on 30 November to ‘the great joy of some and sorrow of others’. Nelson may have remembered his one meeting with Jervis in the Treasury in London; Sir John certainly did, and recalled that their mutual acquaintance, Captain Locker, armed with a cane sporting an eyeglass in its head, had eagerly made the introductions. Locker had also spoken to Jervis before the admiral left England, and almost certainly reminded him of the merits of the captain of the Agamemnon. But in any case the new commander-in-chief was disposed to befriend Nelson. He had begun his career under Commodore George Townshend, a distant relative of Nelson’s, and gratefully remembered the kindness shown him by the ship’s first lieutenant, none other than Maurice Suckling, Horatio’s venerable uncle, whom Jervis honoured as an ‘excellent’ man.52
Despite this Nelson seems almost not to have cared, and was resigned to taking his ship home for an overdue refit. All he immediately asked of Jervis was justice. On 21 December he wrote to the new commander-in-chief to report the Agamemnon ‘as fit for sea as a rotten ship can be’, and to beg that if Jervis was minded to reply to the charges made by the Austrians he trusted he would be given an opportunity to explain his conduct first.53
At home the Reverend Edmund Nelson sensed the mood of his son as he read the latest of the regular epistles that reached him from the Mediterranean. On the fourth day of a new year the old man pulled out some paper to reply:
God has blessed me so infinitely, even beyond hope, by length of days to see my posterity in possession of what is more durable than riches or honours, a good name. A virtuous disposition, moral conduct, and pure religion must be the supporters of public fame, and they will fight in its defence against its known foes – envy, calumny and dirty slander.54
8
It was Sir John Jervis who made the crucial difference.
Sir John had earned his knighthood the hard way, taking a French seventy-four towards the end of the American war. He was a hard man who feared little. His discipline was sometimes savage, his rule somewhat tyrannical, and his broadsides blistering, whether delivered with the cannon or the pen. Outspoken, arrogant and acerbic, Jervis was a man of many and strong prejudices, intolerant of anything that smelt of indolence or inefficiency.
He was brutally frank with officers who did not measure up. Take James of the Raven, seeking promotion, for example: ‘I cannot help expressing my astonishment at your presumption in thinking of the rank of post-captain, which you have no possible claim to, Captain Waller who has ten times your merit, knowledge and ability having been named by me to the Admiralty as the person I desire might be distinguished.’55
Or Bowen of the Transfer: ‘Sir, I give you credit for the best intentions, but the history of your loss of men by a miserable Swede does no credit to your judgement. I am, sir . . .’56
Or Captain Aylmer, who had succeeded Miller in command of a warship: ‘Sir, Had Captain Miller continued in the command . . . the defects which the carpenter . . . has most disgracefully given . . . had never been heard of . . .’57
Historians have made much of Jervis, understandably but not always fairly. The old admiral himself was suspicious of the myths that encrusted him like barnacles, and occasionally protested. When one admirer dared to describe the captains of the Mediterranean as his ‘school’, the old sea dog reportedly scoffed, ‘No, that is too much.
They would have been as great anywhere. It was with such men that I formed a school!’ Perhaps he recognised that much had already been done with those men, and in truth a good deal has been written of Jervis in ignorance of the achievements of Lord Hood. Nelson famously said that ‘of all the fleets I ever saw, I never saw one in point of officers and men equal to Sir John Jervis’s’, but few admit Nelson had applied similar words to the same fleet before Jervis ever reached the Mediterranean.58
In fact Jervis was much like Hood. Both were self-confident, domineering, straight-talking, dogmatic even when wrong-headed, and utterly devoted to the service. Like Hood, Jervis had his fleet practising manoeuvres and improving their skills, and relished battle. Like him he knew the needs of the common sailors, and tried to keep them healthy. In one respect Jervis was a more impressive admiral than Hood, however. He was better at identifying talented officers, rewarding them by word and deed, and maintaining their effort and morale. He rescued both Fremantle and Nelson from a deep disillusionment that had brought them to the brink of quitting the Mediterranean. ‘You can have no conception how much the fleet are improved in every respect . . .,’ Fremantle told his brother after Jervis took command. ‘Before every man went his own way, and all was confusion.’59
To Nelson the great contrast was not between Jervis and Hood, but between Jervis and his immediate predecessors, Hotham and Parker. Under the new commander-in-chief there would be no malingering in St Fiorenzo or Leghorn. Immediately he tightened the cordon around Toulon, detailing an inshore squadron under Troubridge to shut the port down, and his fleet kept to the sea in all weathers, completing much of their caulking and repairs as they sailed. The gains from Sir John’s vigour were not without cost, and years later that brilliant maverick Lord Cochrane flagellated Jervis in and out of Parliament for running down the health of seamen and keeping them afloat in crazy, unserviceable ships. When the old admiral eventually became first lord of the Admiralty, he aroused even greater controversy by ill-timed reforms. He meant well, but brought with him the baggage of an experienced and unreconstructed Whig warrior, obsessed with economical reform, to his administration of the navy. His determination to slay such dragons as extravagance, waste, corruption and inefficiency commended him to the taxpayer, but less to the fleets suffering from dangerous economies and disrepair.60
A just assessment of Jervis must await a dispassionate and thorough biographer, but one achievement certainly rebounds to his credit. It was Jervis more than anyone else who restored Nelson’s faith and fighting spirit in 1796. Reading Jervis’s letters through those years, some of them written on elegant letter-headed notepaper, one often gets a softer impression of an admiral whose toughness earned him the sobriquet ‘Old Oak’. He was ruthless with backsliders and mutineers, but embraced effective officers with an almost fatherly affection. He approached them with little of the abrasive aloofness that had marked Hood, and often showed astonishing generosity, kindness, sympathy and good humour. Those officers repaid him with their loyalty, none more so than Nelson. The captain of the Agamemnon had never felt more valued than under Jervis, and his confidence and achievements flowered.
The first of Jervis’s letters to reach Nelson found him disconsolate, embittered and peevish, rather like a slighted prima donna. He was still unwell, visibly according to Lady Elliot, and felt besmirched by the allied generals and abandoned by superiors. The failure of his campaign, the Austrian accusations, the disinterest of his commanders-in-chief, the platitudinous replies from the Admiralty and the withholding of the distinguishing pendant had all soured him.61
Jervis changed all that. In January he demonstrated his regard by offering Nelson the command of a larger ship, suggesting that the Zealous would probably suit him more than the larger St George because it was a seventy-four more suited to active duties. The Agamemnon was due for recall, and by offering a transfer Jervis was clearly signalling his wish to retain Nelson’s services. Nelson found the admiral’s letter ‘most flattering’ but refused to be cheered. He wrote to his brother William that he was ‘sorry’ to note Jervis’s interest because in his ‘present mind’ he was determined to return to England with the Agamemnon. 62
After refitting and reprovisioning at Leghorn, Nelson joined the fleet at St Fiorenzo on 19 January. His men scrambled to the rigging and thronged the bulwark to cheer the new commander-in-chief’s flag flying above the Victory, and Nelso
n went aboard to report. He had spent hours with Hood in the cabin of the great three-decker, but the man who greeted him now could not have looked less like the cadaverous Irish peer. Jervis had turned sixty. His toadlike figure consisted of a stocky body and expanding paunch propped up on thick, tree-trunk legs. The face was formidable. Sir John’s jaw was set, his thin mouth firm, and the eyes flanking the sharp nose big and determined. Yet the severity of that formidable mien could quickly evaporate. Young Betsy Wynne, who once visited him with a bevy of ladies, found ‘nothing stiff or formal about him’, and was amused when the old admiral ‘desired we should pay the tribute’ due by every female ‘entering his cabin, which was to kiss him’. On such occasions a warm geniality crackling within Jervis broke his crusty exterior, and the craggy features flickered benignly. Nelson probably saw that look now. 63
From every quarter Jervis was receiving golden opinions of Captain Nelson. John Trevor, for example, considered ‘that worthy and excellent officer’ not only deserving of promotion (‘I hope soon to call [him] by another title’) but also ‘a more active and cordial cooperation between His Majesty’s fleet and the allies’. The admiral knew that his own success depended upon encouraging such spirits. When the two met, he asked Nelson a few questions about the riviera campaign, liked the answers, and directly invited him to stay with the fleet. It was a request to warm the heart of any ambitious officer, but Nelson demurred. He needed a rest, he explained, and would go home with the Agamemnon. That said, as a senior captain Nelson was close to receiving his flag, and he added that in such a case he would be privileged to return to Sir John’s fleet as a rear admiral. Nelson was still set on seeing England, but Jervis had already moved him. The next day he wrote to Fanny that if he was promoted before his ship was recalled, ‘my fair character makes me stand forward to remain abroad’. The pessimism was lifting.64