The War of Wars

by Robert Harvey

  On the first anniversary of the Battle of the Nile, Nelson, acting more like an oriental potentate than a British admiral, described how he was feted in a letter to his wife:

  A large vessel was fitted out like a Roman galley. On the oars were fixed lamps and in the centre was erected a rostra column with my name, at the stern elevated were two angels supporting my picture. More than 2,000 variegated lamps were fixed round the vessel, an orchestra was fitted up and filled with the very best musicians and singers. The piece of music was in great measure my praises, describing their distress, but Nelson comes, the invincible Nelson, and we are safe and happy again.

  Nelson accepted a dukedom from King Ferdinand of Naples, that of Brontë (the Greek word for thunder) and an estate on the fertile volcanic slopes of Mount Etna, which in fact was largely uncultivated and yielded no income at all in his lifetime. The East India Company had granted him £10,000 in recognition of his actions on the Nile, which he generously shared with his father and brothers and sisters. But Nelson was now suffering from hubris after the Nile and three times ignored the direct orders of the new commander of the Mediterranean Fleet, Lord Keith, to send ships to protect Minorca; in the end he sent off four under-armed sloops. He wrote sarcastically to the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Spencer, alluding to Keith’s failure to prevent the combined French and Spanish fleet from escaping from the Straits of Gibraltar to Cadiz. The Admiralty wrote back congratulating him on rescuing Naples but chiding him for disobeying Keith. Nelson replied: ‘I only wish that I could have been placed in Lord Keith’s situation . . . I would have broke the orders like a piece of glass: in that case, the whole marine of the French would have been annihilated . . . although I regret to say it, I do not believe any sea officer knows the sea and land business of the Mediterranean better than myself.’

  The admiral was by now virtually out of London’s control. Their lordships could not easily act against the British hero they had built up in the public’s mind. To Keith’s alarm, in his absence from the Mediterranean, Nelson was appointed commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean Fleet. Nelson’s folie de grandeur was on painful display in his reply to an unjustified accusation of his profiteering from contracts for beer and wine for his fleet. ‘I defy any insinuations against me or my honour. Nelson is as far above doing a scandalous or mean action as the heavens are above the earth.’ More accurately, he was sharply criticized for the appalling conditions in which Naples’s 10,000 rebel prisoners were held. In September Troubridge was sent to take the port of Civita Vecchia near Rome and accepted the eternal city’s surrender – thus fulfilling a prophecy, claimed Nelson, that he would take Rome one day with his ships. Nelson’s actions began to be criticized in England. Fox launched a ferocious attack on Britain’s greatest hero in parliament, without actually naming him:

  I wish that the atrocities of which we hear so much, and which I abhor as much as any man, were indeed unexampled. I fear that they do not belong exclusively to the French . . . Naples for instance has been what is called ‘delivered’, and yet, if I am rightly informed, it has been stained and polluted by murders so ferocious, and by cruelties of every kind so abhorrent, that the heart shudders at the recital. It has been said not only that the miserable victims of the rage and brutality of the fanatics were savagely murdered, but that in many instances their flesh was eaten and devoured by the cannibals who are the advocates and the instruments of social order. Nay, England is not totally exempt from reproach if the rumours which are circulated be true.

  I will mention a fact, to give ministers the opportunity, if it be false, of wiping away the stain that must otherwise fix upon the British name. It is said that a party of the republican inhabitants of Naples took shelter in the fortress of the Castle de Uovo. They were besieged by a detachment from the royal army, to whom they refused to surrender, but demanded that a British officer should be brought forward, and to him they capitulated. They made terms with him under the sanction of the British name. It was agreed that their persons and property should be safe, and that they should be conveyed to Toulon. They were accordingly put aboard a vessel, but before they sailed their property was confiscated, numbers of them were taken out, thrown into dungeons, and some of them, I understand, notwithstanding the British guarantee, actually executed.

  Meanwhile Nelson’s increasingly flagrant affair with Lady Hamilton, which may not have started until the return of the court to Naples, was also beginning to scandalize opinion in Britain, as was Sir William’s seeming acquiescence in his own cuckoldry. After Nelson, who seemed simultaneously to be ‘vainglorious’ and in wretched health, went to sleep with her, she would rise to gamble away his money at £500 a night at the gaming tables. The Times wrote slyly: ‘Heroes and conquerors are subdued in their turn. Mark Antony followed Cleopatra into the Nile, when he should have fought with Octavius! And laid down his laurels and power, to sail down the Cydnus with her in the dress, the character, and the attitudes of Venus.’

  Nelson’s wife Fanny, separated from him for two years, wrote seeking to join him, but Nelson said he could not guarantee her safety. When summoned briefly to visit Keith at Leghorn and leave his beloved Emma, he wrote adoringly to her:

  Separated from all I hold dear in this world what is the use of living if indeed such an existence can be called so . . . no separation no time my only beloved Emma can alter my love and affection for you, it is founded on the truest principles of honor, and it only remains for us to regret which I do with the bitterest anguish that there are any obstacles to our being united in the closest ties of this world’s rigid rules, as we are in those of real love. Continue only to love your faithful Nelson as he loves his Emma, you are my guide I submit to you, let me find all my fond heart hopes and wishes with the risk of my life as I have been faithful to my word never to partake of any amusement or to sleep on shore . . . my only hope is to find you have equally kept your promises to me, for I never made you a promise that I did not as strictly keep as if made in the presence of heaven, but I rest perfectly confident of the reality of your love and that you would die sooner than be false in the smallest thing to your own faithful Nelson who lives only for his Emma.

  Nelson neglected his duties to set off on a five-week pleasure cruise aboard his flagship with the Hamiltons, visiting Syracuse’s Roman ruins and then Malta. During one of his ‘nights of pleasure’ on the trip, Emma conceived a child by Nelson. Sir William continued to turn a blind eye.

  Nelson conveyed the Queen and her daughters to Leghorn, where he refused to join Keith but travelled instead to Vienna with his lover. They journeyed by land to Trieste in four carriages with three luggage wagons. They reached Vienna, where the Queen’s daughter was Empress. Nelson, now emaciated and prematurely old, made an odd contrast with the by now vast Lady Hamilton. They were feted like royalty. Nelson and the Hamiltons then travelled overland across Europe before sailing down the Elbe to catch a ship to Yarmouth. Nelson spent some £3,500 on the journey – some £700,000 at today’s prices. At Yarmouth the crowds detached the horses from his carriage and pulled it themselves.

  He stayed with Fanny on his first night home, where she underwent the ordeal of entertaining the Hamiltons to dinner. He was mobbed in the Strand and was given a ceremonial sword by a grateful City of London. But the newspapers were full of ribaldry: Cruikshank depicted the ménage à trois smoking pipes, with Lady Hamilton commenting, ‘The old man’s pipe was always out, but yours burns with full vigour.’ Nelson replies: ‘Yes, I’ll give you smoke, I’ll pour a whole broadside into you.’ The unhappy Fanny had to endure fraternizing in public with Nelson and his mistress. At the theatre on Drury Lane she uttered a cry and fainted.

  Nelson began to quarrel with his old mentor St Vincent. The crusty old disciplinarian had always enjoyed an unusually cordial relationship with Nelson, in spite of the latter’s repeated insubordination, owing to his spectacular naval victories and also the ruthless streak in the younger man, which St Vincent admired. The quarrel
was mundane, about prize money. As Nelson was commander of the Mediterranean Fleet, he claimed the prize money due to the senior admiral – one-eighth from three frigates which had been taken at Finisterre. St Vincent, who was the senior admiral, insisted that Nelson’s command did not extend that far.

  One of Nelson’s virtues was his generosity – some would say recklessness – with money and, for someone so illustrious who had been in so many battles, he had secured little in prize money, preferring glory to the mere lucre acquired in capturing defenceless merchantmen. His share of the four frigates would have amounted to £13,000, which would have been a very useful sum at a time when Nelson was deeply over-extended, partly owing to his generosity towards the Hamiltons (which had helped to secure Sir William’s acquiescence in the undignified arrangement), partly because he had taken an expensive house off Piccadilly, so as to live in a manner suitable to one of his fame.

  St Vincent appears to have softened when he met Nelson in Torquay and the two old friends reminisced and planned together:

  Nelson was very low . . . appeared and acted as if he had done me an injury, and felt apprehensive that I was acquainted with it. Poor man, he is devoured with vanity, weakness, and folly; was strung with ribbons, medals, etc, and yet pretended that he wished to avoid the honour and ceremonies he everywhere met with upon the road . . . I could discover by the manner of Lord Nelson, when he was here, that he felt he had injured me, but we parted good friends, and as he owes all the fame, titles, badges, and distinctions he wears [to] my patronage and protection, and I still continue kind to him in the extreme, I hardly think it possible he can break with me.

  As the next adventure approached, Nelson’s infatuation with Emma grew to manic proportions: he wrote to her three times a day on occasion. Emma, for her part, dazzled London with her extraordinary sex appeal, although she was hugely overweight, which was attested to by almost everyone who met her. She also displayed a shrewish intelligence tainted by mean-spiritedness. She portrayed Fanny in these terms, in one of her very few letters:

  The apoticarys widow, the Creole with her heart black as her feind like looking face was never destined for a Nelson for so noble minded a creature. She never loved him for himself. She loved her poor dirty escalopes [Aesculapius, Fanny’s first husband, Dr Nisbet] if she had love, and the 2 dirty negatives made that dirty affirmative that is a disgrace to the human species [Josiah]. She then starving took in an evil hour our hero she made him unhappy she disunited him from his family she wanted to raise up her own vile spue at the expence and total abolation of the family which shall be immortalized for having given birth to the saviour of his country. When he came home maimed lame and covered with glory she put in derision his honnerable wounds She raised a clamour against him because he had seen a more lovely a more virtuous woman who had served with him in a foreign country and who had her heart and senses open to his glory to his greatness and his virtues.

  This can be excused as an illiterate outburst of jealousy. Yet many of Nelson’s family, his father excepted, took her side against Fanny, who was whispered about behind her back as cold and prim. Fanny felt utterly humiliated as her husband’s infatuation with Emma became more obvious, yet she still wrote to him with tenderness and sought to reconstruct the marriage. Sir William himself made no complaint to the man who had made him a figure of ridicule, whom he considered a close friend, perhaps because he recognized that at his age his own physical flame had gone out.

  As for Nelson, he was like a selfish, greedy child, besotted with Emma, a man who spent all his spare time in an adolescent infatuation. Yet in spite of his appalling treatment of Fanny, at this stage he still behaved with some decorum, giving her half his income and still trying to recommend her son Josiah for promotion. With the birth of a daughter, Horatia, to Emma – Fanny (like Josephine with Napoleon) had failed to provide him with a child – his passion redoubled. Love is not governed by reason, or commonsense, and has no sense of ridicule.

  The middle-aged admiral was deeply in love, and perhaps his passion was sharpened by his constant presentiment that he would die soon, owing to his frail health, or would be killed in action. In turn his obsession with the closeness of death meant that he remained prepared to take absurd risks – for dying presented few fears for a man who believed he was anyway doomed to an early grave. Nelson was beginning to thirst for an action to maintain the reputation which was sagging under the twin weights of the atrocities in Naples and his dalliance with Lady Hamilton.

  Britain now had to face a new and unexpected threat, a deadly combination of the two most aggressive powers in Europe: Napoleon’s France and Tsar Paul’s Russia. The mentally unbalanced Paul had been incensed by Britain’s occupation of Malta, which had cunningly been promised him at the last moment by Napoleon. The Russians were also chafing under the British system of searching their ships, and those of other Baltic states, to prevent supplies reaching France. In December 1800 Paul ordered all British ships in Russian ports to be seized and their crews made prisoner. Then he pressured Sweden into signing a ‘treaty of armed neutrality’, which Denmark and Prussia, adroitly changing sides, soon joined. Russia, Denmark and Sweden together had some forty warships at their immediate disposal and could probably raise as many again at short notice. It was tantamount to a declaration of war by the Baltic powers against Britain. The British decided to respond decisively and with speed: as soon as the freezing weather of the Baltic winter permitted, a fleet of eighteen ships of the line was despatched on 12 March 1801 under Sir Hyde Parker and Nelson to ‘negotiate’ Denmark’s withdrawal from the league – although war was not formally declared. In the British view, the League had to be smashed before it had even begun to assemble its forces.

  When the fleet arrived off Copenhagen Parker attempted to negotiate with the Danish government, but was rebuffed. The scene was set for a battle unlike any other of Nelson’s major engagements – not a fight in the open between fleets but a brutal war of attrition between the British fleet and the shore defences of the city.

  Parker had placed Nelson in command of ten ships of the line, two 50-gunners, seven frigates, and nine small craft. The senior admiral remained in command of eight more ships of the line some three miles away. Nelson was presented with his trickiest challenge yet, to attack down a narrow Channel between a huge shoal – the Middle Ground – and the shoals along the coast of Copenhagen. Along the latter a gauntlet of eighteen Danish men of war; some of them already unsafe and in poor condition, many of them no more than grounded gun batteries, mounted guard. In addition, to the north of the Channel there were two forts. It was a formidable defence.

  Nelson was at his most nervously aggressive at the council of war on 31 March. According to Colonel Stewart: ‘Lord Nelson kept pacing the cabin, mortified at everything which savoured either of alarm or of irresolution. The council was told of the strength of the Swedish squadron, whereupon Nelson sharply interjected, “The more numerous the better.” As for the Russians, “I wish they were twice as many. The easier the victory, depend on it!” ’ Nelson was given a further two ships, then hoisted his flag aboard the Elephant on 1 April. He sent the intrepid Captain Hardy to take soundings at night in a muffled boat right under the nose of the Danish ships.

  On the morning of 2 April, the wind was favourable for him to sail up the Channel between the Middle Ground and the coastal shoal. The local pilots refused to serve for fear of causing the fleet to be grounded. Captain Murray in the Edgar led the way. According to the log of another ship:

  A more beautiful and solemn sight I never witnessed. The Edgar led the van . . . A man-of-war is at all times a beautiful sight, but at such a time the spectacle is overwhelming. We saw her passing on through the enemy’s fire, and moving in the midst of it to gain her station. Our minds were seized with a sort of awe. Not a word was spoken through the ship save by the pilot and helmsmen, and their commands, being chanted very much in the same manner as the responses in a cathedral service, added to
the solemnity.

  The plan was meticulous: the Edgar was to pass the first four ships firing broadsides, then anchor beside the fifth ship, the two ships behind her overtaking to engage the next two ships, and then the following ships to pass on ahead to engage one by one the ships farther forward. The idea was for all the ships to rake the first four Danish ships with repeated broadsides, but without stopping, and then engage the rest.

  Disaster struck almost immediately: the Agamemnon went aground on the southern tip of Middle Ground, while the Bellona and the Russell also went ashore a little way farther up. Nelson himself was in the next ship, the Elephant, and saw that only if he passed to the west of the stranded ships was he likely to find the elusive deep-water channel. As his ships sailed down the Danish line, now just 700 feet away, the two sides exchanged murderous broadsides. The exchange lasted four terrible hours, with dreadful carnage being inflicted on both sides. On the Edgar 142 crew members were killed; on the Monarch, 218 lost their lives. Nelson, deprived of three of his main ships, had sent the frigates led by Captain Riou to exchange fire with the powerful 90-gun batteries on Three Crown Island at the northern tip of the Channel.

  Parker was watching helplessly more than a mile away to the north-east of the Middle Ground, entirely uncertain how the fighting was going as smoke enveloped the ferocious battle. Captain Otway, his flag captain, went in a boat to discover what was happening, and while he was away Parker ran signal 39 from the mast of his flagship, the London: this meant ‘discontinue the action’. The frigates, exchanging a terrible pounding with the shore batteries, obeyed, although Riou, already wounded, was deeply upset: ‘What will Nelson think of us?’ he exclaimed, and then was almost cut in two by fire from the Danish shore battery.

  So arose one of the most celebrated incidents in Nelson’s career: according to Colonel Stewart, who was beside him, Nelson saw the signal and made no comment but continued pacing the deck. His signal-lieutenant asked whether he should raise the same signal over the Elephant, so as to pass the message down the fleet. ‘No, acknowledge it,’ said Nelson. Then he asked, ‘Is my signal – number 16 [for close action] flying?’ ‘Yes, my lord.’ ‘Mind you keep it so.’ Nelson turned to his flag captain, Foley, and remarked, ‘You know, Foley, I only have one eye. I have a right to be blind sometimes.’ He raised his telescope to his blind eye and said, ‘I really do not see the signal. Damn the signal. Keep mine for close action flying.’