Nelson

by John Sugden

  Another rare quality was his confidence and political courage. Nelson held clear opinions about what the navy’s obligations were, and had the courage to discharge those obligations whatever the prevailing opinion or standing orders. His judgements were not always correct. When he overthrew the policies of his superiors in the Leeward Islands in the 1780s it did not rebound to the advantage of the islanders, or possibly even to Britain. Even his unquestioned daring at the battle of Cape St Vincent appears so brilliant largely because it was successful. But in those and other instances he proved himself willing to back his judgement and take whatever personal consequences arose, even if it brought him into conflict with authority.

  That combination of professionalism, determination to achieve, missionary zeal, self-confidence, initiative and courage was rare indeed. Any individual, talented and dedicated in his or her field, who strives for perfection – further, to achieve more than anyone had done before – is likely to make a difference.

  Nelson’s determination to succeed, and to discharge his duty, was revealed in the occasional resolution and ruthlessness that suppressed an inherently sympathetic nature. He was not a man to shirk difficult tasks if he deemed them necessary. At sea he could punish his seamen strongly, as he had done aboard the Boreas, though rarely it seems gratuitously, or without looking for mitigating causes. As a combatant he fought his wars vigorously, priding himself on unflinching blockades, and – as at Cadiz – even occasionally extending the conflict to civilians in aid of a specific military end.

  His leadership, however, and his ability to win the loyalty of colleagues and subordinates stand out boldly from the record. Among great military and naval commanders, Nelson rates as a fine example of inspirational leadership. Like Alexander of Macedon he almost always led from the front. It was not necessarily a sensible custom, especially in large engagements, where control is best exercised from a clear vantage point, but it invariably raised his stock with the common sailor and gave them an example to follow.

  Nelson’s leadership was based on more, however. He was a firm commander, as most of his men wanted him to be, professionally admired and personally liked. Not for Nelson a distant, cold autocracy. He stood up for ‘poor seamen’ who regarded him as their ‘friend and protector’, and spoke familiarly with them as equals, encouraging them to confide in him. He championed deserving junior officers as did no one else in the Mediterranean fleet. Nelson’s relationship with his men was symbiotic. They had an influential and caring champion and he loyal followers. In time, especially on the Agamemnon and Captain, repeated successes cemented the relationship, for from them also flowed prize money, opportunities for promotion and simple pride in achievement.18

  There was, in addition, an unusual and infectious attentiveness about Nelson that endeared him to many followers, and the process extended beyond the single ships he commanded. In the Mediterranean, Nelson enjoyed the friendship of most professionals with whom he mixed. A man of strong opinions, he often reacted hastily to events, and incautious, sometimes foolish, remarks are not difficult to find in letters he wrote to family and friends. But reflection and a natural sympathy for others often revealed a surprising diplomacy in his character, and he successfully related to or mediated between difficult parties. In 1798 Elliot thought Nelson ‘not less capable of providing for its [the country’s] political interests and honour on occasions of great delicacy and embarrassment. In that new capacity I have witnessed a degree of ability, judgement, temper and conciliation.’ Politicians such as Hamilton, Elliot, Drake, Trevor, Udny and Jackson, soldiers such as Villettes and De Burgh and members of the merchant community spoke well of him. The massive correspondence generated by the British in the Mediterranean during the period 1793–7, combed assiduously for this book, has much praise and few hard words for Nelson.19

  Those abilities were most important, perhaps, in binding fellow captains to his purposes. They gave him one solution to the snag in the new kind of battle that was evolving. For with the retreat from the tactics of line ahead came greater confusion, and greater problems of command and control. Nelson knew the importance of detailed planning, but equally that no preconceived plan could entirely encompass the shifting circumstances of battle. Communication and flexibility were essential. By inducting his captains into the process of command, and by imparting his ideas and intentions to them, Nelson unlocked their initiative and reduced dependence upon the signal books. The process may not always have been productive. At Santa Cruz the captains pressed Nelson to make his unwise second attack. But it did send his captains into battle fully aware of what was expected of them. By 1797 he had the germ that would lead to Collingwood’s oft-quoted remark before Trafalgar, ‘I wish Nelson would stop signalling. We all know what we have to do!’20

  These qualities help explain why he was outstanding and became a successful admiral. In 1797 the foundations of his career as a public hero were also in place. Ability, success and acclamation do not always go together. In the sixteenth century England’s first national hero, Sir Francis Drake, understood the importance of broadcasting as well as performing deeds, and planned a series of autobiographical works. Nelson was on the same road. Damned with faint praise under early commanders-in-chief, he sailed into 1797 determined to lay his exploits in print before the public as he saw them. He had learned that heroes sometimes have to make themselves, both on and off the battlefield.

  And his appeal, in this respect, was peculiarly potent. For unlike many, whose triumphs were difficult to represent as other than purely personal ones, Nelson always identified his cause with that of the nation. Whether acting rightly or wrongly, he represented his struggle as one for the good of the realm. His honour was his country’s honour, and his triumphs the country’s triumphs. He succeeded or suffered in ‘England’s’ name, and it was easy for the public to acclaim him their hero.

  But of course this benefits from hindsight. At the time of Nelson’s homecoming in 1797 most would have cast his ultimate fortune very differently. Many, even those who recognised that he embodied qualities that could have taken him further, might have predicted a respectful retirement. Admiral Nelson, the hero of Cape St Vincent, adorning the functions of local dignitaries, or perhaps even occupying some future seat on the board of Admiralty. Few, probably, would have looked at a middle-aged, disabled war hero without a war and realised that all that had gone before had merely been an apprenticeship, and that Horatio Nelson’s great years still lay ahead.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  MY interest in Horatio Nelson was kindled in another time – in the immediate post-war world, when the admiral was still generally revered and Trafalgar Day was ritually commemorated on national radio. Boys’ literature of all kinds held him up for emulation and I was only nine years old when it first touched me. A few years later I did my first serious reading about Nelson in the long gone S. R. Thomas library of Ainthorpe High and the Central Reference Library in Hull. Later still, I spent much of the sixties passionately collecting and reading books about Nelson, collating detailed bibliographies, and scribbling primitive accounts of aspects of his story. It was in those early years that the idea of writing a major biography of Nelson was born, and it survived my first contacts with the scholars whose books I so enjoyed. Carola Oman and Oliver Warner, at that time the leading interpreters of the admiral’s career, overlooked my obvious inexperience, and encouraged me, answering tiresome enquiries and gently pointing me in the right direction.

  Discouragement came later, as I imbibed, like most others, the idea that there was nothing else to be said about Nelson. Hundreds of titles had been published about him, and most followed predictable courses, repeating well-known stories and quoting familiar letters. As a university undergraduate I recoiled and turned to new ground, and my doctorate dealt with one of Nelson’s naval contemporaries rather than the man himself. However, the expeditions I made to the British Library, Public Record Office and National Maritime Museum in the seventies were an aw
akening. It was then that I realised the extent of the unused material that existed for a biography of Nelson. Writers were borrowing excessively from previous biographies and histories, and apocryphal stories and statements passed from book to book without any serious attempt having being made to verify them. Moreover, nearly all the biographers drew most, and most commonly all, their primary material from a few long-known printed sources, including nineteenth-century biographies and the classic collections of Nelson letters made by Nicolas, Pettigrew, Morrison and Naish.

  These were excellent sources as far as they went. But the sum of all such publications left hundreds of Nelson letters unpublished. Not only that, but some periods and aspects of Nelson’s career were only thinly covered by the letters, or not at all, and there were obvious dangers in reconstructing the life of a controversial public figure from his own version of it.

  And the archives were brimming with other under- or unused records, including many relevant collections of private papers, logs, musters, court-martial transcripts, legal records, and extensive files of correspondence in the archives of the Admiralty, Colonial, Foreign, War and Home Offices. It seemed to me that a new major biography was needed, one that would transcend the familiar publications, ground Nelson’s story in credible primary sources and rest upon a thorough and complete overhaul of all the relevant material. My ambition to write the book was rekindled, but for many years available opportunities and other interests drew me elsewhere. Extensive commitments in American history, focused on the Old Northwest and War of 1812 periods, prevented more than the occasional sortie into Nelsoniana. It was not until the later eighties that I began to rehabilitate my Nelson project along the lines I had devised.

  The task has been larger than I anticipated and almost forbidding. At times I felt like one of the figures in Conrad’s Typhoon, being battered by successive and mountainous seas. No sooner had a hardwon mastery of one set of files been achieved than another rolled threateningly forward. Even now, after several years in the archives, I am sure there are still Nelson nuggets to be quarried. In addition to the major collections, answering many of the troubling enquiries necessitated special searches in far-flung places. It soon became clear that the work would extend to more than a single volume, and I decided to end my first in 1797, when Nelson stood on the brink of international fame and had assumed the appearance that would be remembered, with one sleeve empty and one eye sightless. Here, therefore, I have dealt in full with the part of Nelson’s life that has least interested his biographers, his early life and rise to significance. The campaigns of the Nile, Copenhagen and Trafalgar, as well as the notorious affair with Emma Hamilton, must remain waiting in the wings.

  In writing this book I have tried to balance the needs of scholars and intelligent lay readers; Nelson, after all, always belonged to the public at large rather than to any narrow elite. The words of a favourite novelist, L. P. Hartley, have been one guide. ‘The past is a foreign country,’ he famously remarked, ‘they do things differently there.’ Hartley’s wisdom not only warned us that historical men and women must primarily be judged by the practices, attitudes and values of their own time and place, and not ours, a truth understood by all good historians, but suggested the path of the historical biographer. Like the foreign guide, we must lead readers gently through an alien world. Footnotes are a particular difficulty in a work of this kind. Some will have wanted more, while others are quickly intimidated by pages of apparently meaningless dates and docket numbers, and I have had to economise. To save space to source quotations and identify the most useful or unusual of the extensive manuscript materials on which this book is largely based, I have reduced references to the published documents in Nicolas and Naish. These last are easy to find, as both editors generally arranged their material in chronological order. On the other hand, the published transcripts contain errors, sometimes many errors, and where practicable I have worked from originals. Most of the manuscript files also employ a rough date order, but additional clarification has sometimes been necessary.

  Such a project necessarily incurs many debts, and it is pleasing to record here the names of those who assisted. As usual the staffs of many institutions extended hospitality and information during my search for material, and I would like to thank the Archives Nationales du Quebec; Linda Bankier of the Berwick-upon-Tweed Record Office; the British Library, London; the British Newspaper Library, Colindale, London; Roger Bettridge, County Archivist, and the staff of the Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies, Aylesbury; Jane Smith, the Burrell Collection, Glasgow; the Central Register Office, Southport, Merseyside; Claire Bechu of the Centre Historique des Archives Nationales, Paris; the City Museum and Records Office, Portsmouth; John C. Dann, Barbara DeWolfe and John C. Harriman who ‘welcomed me aboard’ at the William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and introduced me to the most civilised tradition I have ever met in an archive – the mandatory break for midmorning English tea; James R. Sewell, City Archivist at the Corporation of London Records Office; Dr Jane Cunningham, librarian at the Courtauld Institute of Art; Martine de Boisdeffre, Direction des Archives de France, Paris; Janie C. Morris, librarian in the Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; David Beasley, librarian of the Goldsmiths’ Company, London; Stephen Freeth, Keeper of Manuscripts at the Guildhall Library, Aldermanbury, London; the John Hay Library, Brown University, Rhode Island; Jennie Rathbun, Reference Assistant in the Houghton Library of the Harvard College Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Gayle M. Barkley of the Department of Manuscripts in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California; the Institute of Historical Research, London; Rosemary Reed, the Central Reference Library, Kingston-upon-Hull; H. M. Gilles, Emeritus Professor, and Dr Geoff Gill, Reader, both at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, the University of Liverpool; the London Library; Josh Graml of the Mariner’s Museum, Newport News, Virginia, a self-confessed fan of ‘Baron Crocodile’; Mrs Pia Crowley of the Mercers’ Company, London; Leslie Fields, Associate Curator, the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York City; Sandra Burrows of the newspaper division of the National Library of Canada, Ottawa, whose superb assistance has now told in four of my projects; the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; the staff of the library of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, who suffered my incessant demands for manuscripts with unfailing courtesy and understanding; Sandra McElroy, Assistant Keeper in the Division of Arts and Industry, National Museum of Ireland, Dublin; Ruth Kenny, Erika Ingham and Helen Trompeteler of the National Portrait Gallery, London; Sighle Bhreathnach-Lynch, Curator of Irish Art, the National Gallery of Art, Dublin; the National Register of Archives, London; Andrew Helme and his staff who extended such able assistance during my visits to the Nelson Museum in Monmouth, Gwent; the Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois; Loraine Barutti of the Department of Manuscripts, New York Historical Society, New York; the staff of the Norfolk Heritage Centre, Norwich, particularly Dianne Yeadon for her invaluable help in tracing Nelson connections in Norfolk; Faith Carpenter, the curator and designer of the Norfolk Nelson Museum, Great Yarmouth, who specially opened to allow me access to the collection; the County Archivist and staff of the Norfolk Record Office, Norwich; the Northumberland Record Office, Newcastle-upon-Tyne; Karen Wright of the Paston College, North Walsham, Norfolk; Professors Roberta Ferrari and Mario Curreli of the University of Pisa; the Public Record Office, Kew; Dr Karen Schoenewaldt, registrar at the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia; Jonathan Spain of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, London; Mr N. K. D. Ward, Headmaster, Royal Hospital School, Holbrook; the Royal Naval Museum, Portsmouth; the John Rylands Library, Manchester; Sarah Davis, the Shropshire Records and Research Centre, Shrewsbury; Lisa Dowdeswell, the Society of Authors; Dr Peter Beal of Sotheby’s, London; the University Library of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Chris Petter, Special Collections librarian at the University of Victoria, British Columbia; the university libraries of Hull, Lancaster and Warwick;
Lieutenant Commander C. W. (Dick) Whittington, then of HMS Victory; the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine, London; and the Westminster Archives Centre, London.

  Among individuals who have offered help, material and suggestions at different times I should notice several fellow members of the Nelson Society, including Ray and Ann Evans, David Shannon, Derek Hayes, Louis Hodgkin, Victor Sharman, Clive Richards, and Jim Woolward. In Britain I would also like to thank authors Carola Oman, Oliver Warner, Professor Christopher Lloyd, Professor Michael Lewis, Leonard W. Cowie, Tom Pocock, Surgeon Vice Admiral Sir James Watt, Sir Ludovic Kennedy, Brian Vale, and Dr J. C. G. Binfield of Sheffield University, who not only reviewed my early explorations into the naval and political history of Nelson’s day but also first taught me the difference between a dissertation and a book. Many other individuals made contributions, including Derek Barlow, Stephen Brockman, and Lily Lambert McCarthy, whose collection of Nelsoniana now graces the Royal Naval Museum at Portsmouth, and who eight years ago urged me to write ‘the Nelson of the decade’. Peter and Dorothy Lowe first took me around the north Norfolk coast and Burnham Thorpe, and their son Julian generously gave of his time in Norwich. For one whose extra-English qualifications are ineffective beyond court shorthand and the rudiments of Swedish, I am greatly indebted to Dr Harold Smyth, Dr Antonelle Bernabo, Isabel Rubio Gomez and Stewart Platts for help with translations. Numerous friends rallied around in North America, including Helen Hornbeck Tanner, Doug Clanin and Art and Shirley Wolfe. The enthusiasm and expertise of Guy St Denis of London, Ontario, proved of great value in clarifying certain episodes of Nelson’s career.