by John Sugden
precedence over the other captains forming a court, and served immediately beneath any admirals present. Nothing was said about commodores. They were not full-blown flag officers like the admirals, but superior in rank to any captain, including the senior captain. In compliance with the strict wording of the regulations, Nelson, although a commodore, had been deferring to Jervis’s flag captain, Robert Calder, and taking his place with the ordinary captains, but when the case of Gourly was brought forward he protested. Nelson submitted a memorial to the court asserting the right of commodores to take precedence over senior captains. There was no resentment at his intervention, Nelson’s claim was willingly admitted, and he duly took his place before Calder. Pride and punctilio were both important considerations for Nelson, but his decision to mount the challenge at the beginning of Gourly’s trial rather than, say, before the preceding case of a surgeon’s mate indicted for mutinous behaviour, may not have been accidental. The likelihood is that Nelson wanted a bigger voice in the proceedings, and used his influence on behalf of the accused. Gourly would probably have been acquitted anyway, but it was typical of Nelson to defend good men.51
Nevertheless, there was one case that shook even his loyalty to the core. It concerned a particularly zealous captain of his own squadron, a man for whom he had considerable professional respect: Charles Sawyer of the frigate Blanche. In September 1796, Sawyer’s immediate superior, Captain Cockburn, brought Nelson a disturbing report with several supporting papers. The commodore was astonished, torn between his revulsion for the alleged offences and sympathy for a man obviously ruined. ‘How melancholy!’ he told Jervis in reporting his suspension of Sawyer from duty and the arrest of his officers. ‘Indignation and sorrow are so mixed in my mind that I know not which predominates!’52
Sawyer was the son of a respected admiral who had begun his career alongside Jervis, serving under Commodore Townsend and Lieutenant Maurice Suckling. The son was now about thirty years old and had been in the navy for near twenty of them, becoming a post-captain in 1794. There was every chance he would eventually receive his flag as an admiral. Captain Sawyer was also an educated man, and Nelson had lent him books, as was his wont. Unfortunately, in between reading he was using his rank to indulge in regular acts of homosexuality, some of them with minors. Two midshipmen were occasionally summoned to Sawyer’s cabin in the Blanche. One, a seventeen-year-old, later testified that the quartermaster of the Blanche sent him to the captain’s quarters, where Sawyer ‘hauled me down in his cot and put my hand on his privates. When I got up he made me promise that I would not tell any one of it.’ At Leghorn the captain even tried to make the boy share a hotel room with him. A black seaman also complained that ‘the captain had frigged him, and he had frigged the captain’, while Sawyer’s coxswain was not only seen in the captain’s cot several times, but openly condemned his commander as a ‘manfucking bugger’.53
As stories spread the captain became an object of derision, contempt and loathing in the ship, and authority was undermined. The first lieutenant and others attempted to lay charges before Nelson, but as applications for courts martial went through a ship’s captain, Sawyer was able to block them. Furthermore, he tried to silence his accusers by threatening countercharges of his own, and warning them that their careers would be damaged ‘unless . . . matters can be accommodated’. Throughout the high summer of 1796 Sawyer hung on, prevaricating and threatening whistle-blowers in turn, but the miserable matter simply grew too notorious to hide. After trying to turn a blind eye to the situation, Cockburn finally drew the subject to Nelson’s attention, and it went to the naval courts.
Sawyer considered running, but then decided to stick it out in an effort to save his pay and prize money. He tried to discredit the witnesses by laying countercharges against six of them, as he had threatened, but when his case went before a court at St Fiorenzo on 18 October he was convicted and dismissed the service. Nelson was no doubt glad to be elsewhere.54
Sawyer’s career was finished, and he had made himself a pariah, but Nelson took no pleasure in his fall. Reviewing the charges, Nelson had interviewed Sawyer ‘fully’, hoping to hear a denial, but none came. Perhaps no one but Nelson would have shown any further charity to the dishonoured captain, but Nelson seems to have written to him after his dismissal, and it was to the commodore that the friendless man turned for help in winding up his naval affairs. Sawyer’s letter is worth quoting in full:
I cannot sufficiently thank you for your kind sentiments towards me, which notwithstanding all my misfortunes, I trust I am not altogether undeserving. I am obliged to you for the money for the Hermitage, which I hope you will find good. Herewith, I send you a letter which I had written to you principally on the subject of prize money. Any information you can give me that way I shall be very much obliged to you for. I am sorry to be troublesome to you, but as I have now no boat at command, nor cannot by any means procure one, may I request you will have the goodness to send by one of yours any information you can give me relative to prize money. Believe me, sir, your very obedient servant, C. Sawyer. Captain Preston will return your [copy of] Josephus [probably Antiquities of the Jews], for which I return you many thanks.55
Sawyer got his prize money.
George Cockburn of the Meleager proved a more satisfying beneficiary of Nelson’s friendship. The future would grant Cockburn fame of a kind. He captured Washington in the War of 1812, burned the presidential mansion, and became the jailer of Napoleon, but here in 1796 we have him in his mid-twenties, at the beginning of a long and successful career. Although the teenage diarist Betsy Wynne thought Cockburn sprightly, fine and fashionable, and a colleague reported his ‘splendid and inexhaustible talents’, one gains the impression of an able, dependable and utterly impeccable but stiff Scot, dour and distant. Few people got close to him, and he cannot have been an easy colleague.56
Yet Nelson discovered something of a kindred spirit in him, a daring man strong on duty. ‘We so exactly think alike on points of service that if your mind tells you it is right, there can hardly be a doubt but I must approve,’ Nelson wrote to the junior officer. Accordingly, he pushed Cockburn forward, encouraging his every success. He persuaded Jervis to give him a bigger frigate, prompting his transfer to La Minerve, a French prize, put glowing tributes to him in dispatches, and in 1797 quietly ordered a commemoration sword to be made for him in England. It was a small gesture, but typical of Nelson. The sword, which Maurice Nelson thought ‘very handsome’, was a personal gift, honouring Cockburn’s capture of a Spanish frigate while serving under Nelson’s command. It was both a personal ‘thank you’ and an unsolicited and spontaneous tribute from a friend and professional to a colleague. We can imagine Cockburn’s feelings on receiving such tangible testimony of his commodore’s regard, gratuitously and unexpectedly bestowed. The recipient was not good at expressing intimate emotions, but responded to this and many other favours with a rare attachment to Nelson. ‘Next to my own father, I know of none whose company I so much wish to be in, or who I have such real reasons to respect,’ he told his chief. Half a century later, unconsciously speaking for many, he wistfully recalled Nelson’s ‘never failing kindness of heart’.57
XXIII
COMMODORE NELSON
You – with fidelity the Land –
Shall own the splendours of his High Command –
To him shall be her grateful praises given;
To him – her champion – sent down from heaven!
Ode to the Memory of . . . Lord Viscount Nelson, 1806
1
ON 20 May 1796 Commodore Nelson sat over a desk in Leghorn writing a letter to Sir William Hamilton, one of the closest of his correspondents. Disturbing rumours were abroad and Nelson had been listening to them. Anyway he thought he detected the drift of French intentions towards Italy. ‘Although the French Directory tell the Grand Duke they will respect the neutrality [of Tuscany] . . . I have great reason to believe they only wish to lull the Grand Duke, and
then to take possession of Leghorn and to treat Tuscany as an enemy. I wish I may be mistaken.’1
Essentially he was not. In the summer of 1796, Bonaparte’s tour de force gathered terrifying momentum. His army marched north of Genoa and into Italy, spreading consternation and terror before it. The French stormed through Tuscany, frightened the papal states into submission, and stripped them of arts, provisions and money at bayonet point. Then they turned towards Leghorn. Bonaparte decided that if the Austrians made another attempt to relieve Mantua, the British might seize Leghorn to annoy his flank, so he moved first.
Everyone had stories of the French invasion of Italy. The Wynnes of Lincolnshire estate, with four charming daughters, learned about it in Florence. ‘Nothing can be compared to the alarm in which Papa and Mama were set on their hearing that the French were at Bologna,’ wrote seventeen-year-old Betsy. They fled to Leghorn, where Fremantle of the Inconstant was evacuating the British community, arriving on 24 June after an all-night coach ride. The British consulate was in ‘a most terrible bustle and noise – all packing up and getting on board the ships. We hardly had time to get a little breakfast, they hurried us so terribly to quit the place.’ Consul John Udny had much to save. After twenty-three years out of England, he had a carriage, horses, furniture, porcelain, plate and paintings as well as liveried servants divided between Leghorn and a rented house in Pisa, and the procession of his goods trundling to the mole only managed to clear the essentials. All the British round and about were on the move. When Udny’s carriage reached Pisa to collect a fellow diplomat and his confined lady, it was seized by refugees trying to reach Leghorn. Lady Elliot, wife of the viceroy of Corsica, was also in town after fleeing Lucca with four of her children. Desperate to reach her husband, she got a place on a departing store ship just as Bonaparte’s soldiers streamed into the suburbs, and took the news into Bastia on the 26th.2
The Leghornese were alarmed and angry at the French boots crunching contemptuously over Tuscan neutrality, but some inhabitants had personal reasons to fear the incursion. The governor, Francesco Spannochi, was a Neapolitan and noted Anglophile, with service in the Royal Navy and the friendship of Captain Collingwood to his credit. He faced a difficult task defending his country’s sovereignty and keeping the French and British apart. For Signora Adelaide Correglia the appearance of the French portended the end of her relationship with a British commodore and the maintenance he provided.
Adelaide was then renting accommodation in the spa resort of Bagno di Pisa, a three-day coach ride north of Leghorn, in the house of ‘Carlo Tarbato’ – possibly Carlo Lorenzo Turbati, the Pisan lawyer, or one of his family. It was probably not the house for which Nelson had been paying upwards of a year. More likely that was in Leghorn itself, closer to the heart of naval business, but Bagno di Pisa was replete with accommodation to let, much of it in single rooms equipped with a bath, bed and fireplace sufficient for convalescent summers spent drinking and immersing in rejuvenating waters. Late in 1795 Adelaide had been having trouble with what Fremantle had described as ‘a sort of abscess in her side’, and she was still receiving maintenance from Nelson. Thus, on 15 June 1796, Thomas Pollard, the commodore’s agent, paid £20 to ‘Adelaide as p[er] order’. This, with whatever else she earned, had probably permitted her to take temporary lodgings in Bagno di Pisa for the purpose of regaining her health.3
A fortnight before the French invaded Leghorn, Adelaide had a visitor. The Inconstant frigate was moored in Leghorn roads for a refit, and the incorrigible Captain Fremantle was again at large, looking for sex. ‘Can’t find Madalina,’ he scribbled in his diary on 15 June. But the next day he had more success at Bagno di Pisa. ‘Went to Pisa baths,’ he wrote. ‘Called on Adelaide, who was quite recovered and looked well.’ Nine days later, within twenty-four hours of definite news of the French advance reaching Leghorn, Adelaide was in Fremantle’s frigate. Although Adelaide was Nelson’s lover, and Fremantle his friend, it is difficult not to suspect that the meeting was a ‘professional’ one. At any rate, she seems to have retired quickly upon the arrival of the Wynnes and Mrs Pollard. ‘Adelaide came off in the evening,’ wrote Fremantle.4
Whether two-timing or not, these meetings were brought to an abrupt end when Fremantle was suddenly recalled to duty. If Adelaide made her way back to Pisa on the 26th she would have found the road full of Bonaparte’s soldiers marching south.
2
Sent back to his station on 18 June, Nelson was in Genoa when he heard of the thrust at Leghorn, wrestling with different facets of the enemy’s successes. He was trying to establish packet services between Leghorn, Corsica and Spain, halt Genoa’s slide into hostility, and deal with more neutral complaints about his ships. The republic’s coast had become a hostile shore, with only the city of Genoa itself a safe haven for British vessels, and that seethed with Jacobin influence, fanned by a new and bellicose representative of the French Directory, Monsieur Guillaume-Charles Faypoult, the minister plenipotentiary.
Nelson met this fresh round of neutral complaints without the benefit of a strong defender on the spot. Drake had gone to Vienna, and only the British consul, Joseph Brame, manned this threatened outpost. No one had much time for Brame. Nelson thought him ‘a poor creature, and more of a Genoese than an Englishman’, and Sir John Jervis, who had been responsible for his appointment in the first place, said he was dishonest and confused. The admiral suspected Brame of corruptly inflating the prices of provisions supplied to the British fleet to benefit some accomplice, and growled that the consul was ‘in a state of imbecility during his best days’ and ‘upon his deathbed would take money from Swede, Dane or the devil’.5
Poor Brame, whose wavering scrawl presaged imminent physical collapse, was not the best man to rescue Nelson from the accusations of neutrals. He also knew that French influence in Genoa was increasing while his own wilted, and counselled moderation in all of Britain’s dealings with the Italian republic. Perhaps it was his fear of annoying the Genoese that led him to meet their complaints so meekly. When Castiglione, the Genoese secretary of state, sent him three notes dated between 28 May and 16 June and in sum charging Nelson’s people with seizing neutral property, attacking ships in Genoese havens, and ill-treating some of their crews, he had not mounted a fierce rebuttal. Instead, he had promised an investigation and forwarded the complaints to the British foreign secretary. Nelson was furious. He was stung by what he denounced as exaggerations and lies, and even more so that Brame should see fit to send them home without first giving him the opportunity to reply.
Nelson’s visit to Genoa was therefore unusually stormy. He berated Brame for his weak response to Castiglione’s complaints, and refused to be appeased by the consul’s excuses. Brame miserably insisted that Genoa would have sent their allegations to London anyway, and he had not consulted Nelson because he thought he had sailed for England. As he worked out his anger, Nelson framed answers to the charges, and countered with some of his own, submitting verbal and written protests that British ships were being fired upon the length and breadth of the Genoese coast.6
Then, in the midst of the paper war, Nelson heard the feared news that Bonaparte had marched upon Leghorn.
Among others, Fremantle raised the alarm. Still in Leghorn when word of the impending invasion of Tuscany arrived from Florence, he immediately sent the Blanche to Jervis with the news, and appealed to any ship on the riviera to come to his aid. It was obvious that he would have to organise an evacuation, and Nelson sailed from Genoa with Cockburn’s Meleager for company on 24 June.7
The calms and fickle winds typical of those seas were against the Captain and Meleager as they drove towards Leghorn, and it was the morning of 27 June that they finally made the northern road. Upon his arrival, Nelson saw crowds of ships quitting the mole, more than forty sail in all, and heard the roar of guns. Fremantle had been magnificent. With typical efficiency he had held out till the last minute, securing a place on a ship for every Briton and most of their belongin
gs. According to Udny the operation filled three days and nights and nothing but furniture and bad debts were left behind.
It had been touch and go. As the French penetrated the outskirts of the town Governor Spannochi made a bold stand. While the British were loading their ships at the mole, he doubled his guards to prevent interference as long as he could. But the French cavalry soon spilled into the town and seized the batteries on the mole, and wild shots began flying at the departing Inconstant. Ten or twelve enemy privateers swarmed after the British convoy, and one of the ships was actually being towed into captivity as Nelson arrived. The commodore instantly signalled to the Meleager to hold the rest of the privateers at bay, and then to support the Inconstant in chaperoning the convoy to Corsica, while the Captain remained. Before long the last white sails of the fleeing ships dipped over the blue horizon, and Bonaparte was left to vent his fury on Spannochi. Pointedly establishing his headquarters in Udny’s abandoned house, the little Corsican defamed the governor as a pro-British rogue and ‘macaroni eater’, who had allowed Fremantle to impound two French ships and attempted to stir the people to resist Bonaparte’s soldiers. He arrested Spannochi, imperiously demanded the Grand Duke of Tuscany punish him and shipped him unceremoniously to Florence under guard.8
The British evacuees sailing southwestwards towards St Fiorenzo made the best of their situation, transforming the decks of the ships into occasional ballrooms, and young Betsy Wynne fell deeply in love with Fremantle. The captain was less forthcoming, though he did allow that Betsy was ‘a very good humoured sensible dolly, not particularly handsome but a little healthy thing’.9