The War of Wars

by Robert Harvey

  This version was first given in Clarke and M’Arthur’s extensive Life of Nelson. Southey’s classic Life of Nelson, written in 1813, repeated the same story, as well as that of the ship’s surgeon – that he ordered his own signal for close battle to be nailed to the mast – which must have been hearsay, for surely the surgeon would have been down below tending the wounded.

  Colonel Stewart himself wrote three versions of the story, and the ‘blind eye’ gesture only emerged in the last. Terry Coleman, in his excellent revisionist biography of Nelson, points out that ‘Stewart did not mention the story in the first two versions, or in a six-page letter he wrote after the battle, and a journal’, and concluded that the story was a later piece of embroidery. He may be right, although it would have been unusual for such a senior officer to fabricate such a story. Just possibly Stewart had considered the story an unimportant detail at the time, not realizing the high colour it added to the scene.

  It served also to obscure the more important aspects of the battle. For Nelson undoubtedly did the right thing in disregarding an order from an admiral far from the scene of the battle. To continue the action was the only thing that he safely could do, for to discontinue it and withdraw would have exposed all his ships to withering and destructive broadsides as they ran the gauntlet to get out of the channel – not to mention the danger of running aground on the treacherous shoals. Vice-Admiral William Young of the Admiralty said as much to Lord Keith, both of them usually sticklers for discipline.

  Nelson was absolutely right in his act of insubordination. He was facing one of the trickiest situations of his career: unlike at Cape St Vincent he did not confront the enemy fleet in open seas; unlike the Nile he could not send his ships inshore to attack the Danes on both flanks. He was committed to a straightforward exchange of fire against an enemy with superior firepower, between shoals that trapped his fleet. There was no room for imagination or dramatic manoeuvring. It was more like a land battle than a naval one.

  Soon his position began to look critical, and it looked as if Nelson was facing his first defeat in a major fleet action. The Elephant, and the Defiance at the northern end of the line were under intense fire and seemed likely to be destroyed, while the Monarch, which was also in the vanguard under the guns of the fort, had sustained huge casualties. But then the Dannebrog, the Danish flagship, spectacularly caught fire and, with its cables cut, drifted down the Danish line sowing alarm. At half past three it blew up. Other floating batteries had also cut their cables and some had sunk; but still Nelson could not lead his ships to safety under the intense fire of the Three Crown Island shore batteries.

  Coolly, with his ship continuing to fire, he resorted to a brutal threat. He addressed a letter to the Danes: ‘Lord Nelson has directions to spare Denmark when no longer resisting but if the firing is continued on the part of Denmark Lord Nelson will be obliged to set on fire the floating batteries he has taken, without having the power of saving the brave Danes who have defended them.’ He insisted on sealing the letter with wax, and did so with great care while Stewart asked him why he was taking so long. Nelson replied that he did not want the Danes to believe he was acting in a hurry. This missive was received by the Danish Prince Regent, Frederick.

  The young prince was less concerned by the fate of the men aboard the now helpless hulks than the possibility that the British, in this desperate situation, might bombard his capital. The Danes, who had no real quarrel with the British and were already regretting their alliance with Russia, acquiesced, to Nelson’s intense relief.

  He was able to extricate his ships from that channel of death. Even then two ships collided, the Ganges and Monarch, and, three ran aground including his own Elephant. They would have been helpless if the Danish batteries had still been firing. The following day he was able to reflect on his three beached ships at the south end of the mudbank. He had salvaged all of his ships with the loss of around 350 men killed and 600 wounded: the Danes had lost some 1,800 men and 3,500 were taken prisoner in the captured ships. It was a victory on points – the least decisive of Nelson’s greatest battles.

  By a threat and a trick he had got out of an extremely dangerous situation. Stewart wrote: ‘Lord Nelson then commanded a cessation of hostilities, and by prolonging it under one pretext or another, in four and twenty hours after got our crippled ships off the shoals, and from under the guns of the enemy’s batteries . . .’

  After the battle Nelson said apprehensively to Foley: ‘Well I have fought contrary to orders and I shall perhaps be hanged. Never mind. Let them.’ Meanwhile he pressed for a more permanent truce. ‘Bomb ships’ were brought up to threaten to bombard Copenhagen. He told the Danes: ‘We are ready. Ready to bombard this night.’ Looking at the palace and wooden houses of the beautiful old city he remarked: ‘Although I have only one eye, I see that this will burn very well.’ The Danes replied that they feared the Russians would bombard them if they pulled out of their alliance, and Nelson offered to protect them with a British fleet. He personally conducted the negotiations on shore.

  At last agreement was reached. An exultant Nelson wrote:

  1st We had beat the Danes. 2nd We wish to make them feel that we are their real friends, therefore have spared their town, which we can always set on fire; and I do not think if we burnt Copenhagen it would have the effect of attaching them to us; on the contrary they would hate us. 3rd They understand perfectly that we are at war with them for their treaty of armed neutrality made last year. 4th We have made them suspend the operations of that treaty. 5th It has given our fleet free scope to act against Russia and Sweden.

  His fleet now moved up the Baltic towards its real target, the Russian fleets at Revel and Kronstadt. But then the news arrived that the Tsar had been assassinated before the battle of Copenhagen. Nelson argued that it was by no means certain the new Russian government would be any better disposed towards Britain and, with the overwhelming strength of eighteen ships, urged an attack on each of the dispersed Russian fleets at Carlscrona, Kronstadt and Revel. They could be destroyed in turn. But Parker insisted on taking the fleet back to Kioge Bay.

  On 5 May, however Parker was recalled and Nelson appointed to command the fleet. By 12 May Nelson had led it back to Revel only to fund that the Russian fleet there had gone and joined the one at Kronstadt. The new Tsar, Alexander I, meanwhile reversed policy, releasing British merchant ships which had been seized and signing an agreement with Britain under which British goods were again allowed to sail in Baltic waters. Thus the threat to Britain’s trade with the north had been decisively dispelled – partly thanks to Nelson’s skill and daring, partly to luck.

  Chapter 42

  PEACE IN OUR TIME

  After his success at Copenhagen, Nelson’s career plunged again in what had become for him a familiar pattern. Up to now, except at the Nile, he had been a subordinate commander because of his youth. Not that that made much difference; as one of his captains said, to his irritation, as far back as 1797: ‘You did just as you pleased in Lord Hood’s time, the same in Admiral Hotham’s, and now again with Sir John Jervis. It makes no difference to you who is commander-in-chief.’ He was now to gain a command of his own – but one he did not want. On his return to England in July 1801 he was promptly appointed to command the Channel Fleet in case of French invasion.

  Nelson was deeply sceptical that any such possibility existed, and justifiably so, but he took to his new duties, compiling a memorandum to the Admiralty about the threat. Unable to stay passive for long, on 4 August Nelson despatched a flotilla of gunboats and bomb vessels, as well as a ship of the line, to bombard Boulogne where there were 2,000 French soldiers. Thousands of spectators lined the cliffs of Dover and Deal to watch the action with telescopes. The attack did minimum damage, but served to warn the French to be on their guard. It was said that Nelson had been ‘speaking to the French’.

  Nelson was in an irritable mood, a celebrity increasingly unhappy with the expectations and admirers he had ar
oused. ‘Oh how I hate to be stared at,’ he complained moodily aboard his flagship. ‘Fifty boats, I am told, are rowing about her this moment to have a look at the one-armed man.’

  Nelson summoned some of his youngest captains to plan for a frontal attack on Boulogne: five squadrons would be involved. The aim was to attack the ships moored across the harbour with boarding parties supported by mortar ships at night, when the French ships could not be expected to fire back for fear of hitting their own. It was a ‘cutting-out’ expedition on a grand scale.

  Nelson was confident. He wrote to Emma: ‘It is one thing to order and arrange an attack and another to execute it. But I assure you, I have taken much more precaution for others than if I was to go myself . . . After they have fired their guns, if one half of the French do not jump overboard and swim on shore, I will venture to be hanged . . . If our people behave as I expect, our loss cannot be much. My fingers itch to be at them.’

  His adversary was France’s greatest naval commander, Admiral Louis-René Latouche-Tréville, and he was prepared: netting had been strung down from the upper rigging to the ships’ sides to repel attack. The ships were attached to one another by chains with strong cables securely anchored to the seabed. The French commander observed the British making preparations during the day of 15 August. That same night boatloads of British sailors were dropped off the coast wearing white armbands for identification at night and carrying cutlasses, pikes, tomahawks, pistols, muskets and knives. It was to be a daring inshore raid – except that the French were fully alert to them.

  Taking advantage of the incoming tide, the British boats swept silently in – and two of the foremost were carried past the French fleet by the swirling, racing waters. The French tossed a cannonball into another, which sank her. The fourth crew attempted to board the Etna. As a junior British officer abroad wrote: ‘But a very strong netting, triced up to her lower yards, baffled all our endeavours and an instantaneous discharge of her guns and small arms from about 200 soldiers on her gunwale knocked myself, Mr Kirby, the master of the Medusa, and Mr Gore, a midshipman, with two-thirds of the crew upon our backs in the boat, all either killed or wounded.’

  As the men tried to clamber across the unexpected netting they encountered, they were shot at by the French on deck. One ship was captured. But as the commanding officer of the raid reported later to Nelson: ‘I was prevented from towing her out by her being secured by a chain and, in consequence of a very heavy fire of musketry and grapeshot that was directed at us from the shore, three luggers and another brig within half a pistol-shot, and not seeing the least prospect of being able to get her off, I was obliged to abandon her.’

  By about 4 a.m. the boats were returning, having utterly failed in their task, while Nelson stood off the French coast, in a frigate, watching. At midday the British sailed back to Deal, with forty-four men killed and 128 wounded and not a single prize: only ten French-men had been killed and thirty-four wounded. The raid had been a complete, if relatively minor, fiasco. The French sang joyfully: ‘Off Boulogne, Nelson poured hell-fire! But on that day, many a drunk/Instead of wine, drank salt water/off Boulogne!’ Nelson wrote disconsolately: ‘I am sorry to tell you that I have not succeeded in bringing out, or destroying the enemy’s flotilla moored in the mouth of the harbour of Boulogne. The most astonishing bravery was evinced by many of our officers and men.’

  Later he sank into deep melancholy. He wrote to the Admiralty Secretary: ‘A diabolical spirit is still at work. Every means, even to posting up papers in the streets of Deal, has been used to set the seamen against being sent by Lord Nelson to be butchered and that at Margate it was the same thing, whenever any boats went on shore. “What, are you going to be slaughtered again?” Even this might be got over but the subject has been fully discussed in the wardrooms, midshipmen’s berths, etc . . . as I must probably be, from all the circumstances I have stated, not much liked by either officers or men, I really think it would be better to take me from this command.’ He wrote to St Vincent: ‘I own I shall never bring myself again to allow any attack to go forward, where I am not personally concerned; my mind suffers much more than if I had a leg shot off in this later business.’ At the funeral of two young midshipmen killed in the action he wept and was even more distraught when a young protégé, Captain Edward Peake, who had been wounded, subsequently died.

  Nelson had regularized his affair with Emma, and acquired a property, Merton Place in Surrey, where she could play his hostess. He was disappointed by his father’s intense disapproval of his dalliance. The elderly churchman was not in thrall to the hero-worship which surrounded his son and which legitimized his ostentatious, in some eyes, flaunting of his mistress and humiliation of his wife. Nelson defended his conduct towards Fanny, whom his father adored, in a letter: ‘My dear father – I have received your letter and of which you must be sensible I cannot like for as you seem by your conduct to put me in the wrong it is no wonder that they who do not know me and my disposition should. But Nelson soars above them all and time will do that justice to my private character which she has to my public one. I that have given her [Fanny], with her falsity . . . £2,000 a year and £4,000 in money and which she calls a poor pittance . . . I could say much more but will not out of respect to you, my dear father, but you know her, therefore I finish.’

  In December 1801 Fanny wrote imploringly: ‘Do, my dear husband, let us live together. I can never be happy until such an event takes place. I assure you again I have one wish in the world, to please you. Let everything be buried in oblivion, it will pass away like a dream. I can now only entreat you to believe I am most sincerely and affectionately your wife Frances H Nelson.’ Brutally Nelson had a secretary write back: ‘Opened by mistake by Lord Nelson, but not read.’

  Nelson blamed Fanny for turning the old man against him. Nelson’s behaviour towards Fanny was reprehensible, and his obsession with the gross and spiteful Emma distasteful, but the truth was that he had fallen out of love with the former and in love with the latter; and love is ungovernable, particularly in a man who believes he can do as he likes and fears he may have only a short time left to live. When his father’s doctor wrote to his son that the parson was dying, Nelson replied: ‘I have no hopes that he can recover. God’s will be done. Had my father expressed a wish to see me, unwell as I am, I should have flown to Bath but I believe that it would be too late; however should it be otherwise and he wishes to see me, no consideration shall detain me a minute.’ The old man died the same day. Nelson did not attend the funeral.

  The superstar admiral also fell out with one of his oldest friends and comrades in arms. Thomas Troubridge had been with Nelson at Cape St Vincent, Tenerife, the Nile and in Sicily. Troubridge was a brilliant and valiant sailor, but an even harsher disciplinarian than Nelson. However, when Nelson and Emma left Naples in 1799, he made the cardinal error of criticizing the Queen of Naples, technically the island’s sovereign, for not providing food for the starving people there:

  I am not very tender hearted, but really the distress here would even move a Neapolitan . . . I have this day saved 30,000 people from dying; but with this day my ability ceases. As the King of Naples, or rather the Queen and her party, are bent on starving us, I see no alternative, but to leave these poor unhappy people to starve, without being witnesses to their distress. I curse the day I ever served the King of Naples . . . We have characters, my lord, to lose; these people have none. Do not suffer their infamous conduct to fall on us.

  Troubridge also criticized Nelson for going with Emma to Leghorn. Nelson was furious and wrote a bitter letter to his old friend. Troubridge replied: ‘It really has so unhinged me, that I am quite unmanned and crying. I would sooner forfeit my life, my everything, than be deemed ungrateful to an officer and friend I feel I owe so much to . . . I [pray] your lordship not to harbour the smallest idea that I am not the same Troubridge you have known me.’

  When Nelson fell out with St Vincent over the issue of prize money and the
latter’s own disdain for Emma, Troubridge was chosen by the First Lord to serve on the Admiralty board. This further angered Nelson. Yet he soon returned to confiding in him in his letters, calling him his ‘old faithful friend’. But on his return to England, Nelson had begun to suspect that Troubridge was responsible for his unwanted command of the Channel Fleet – which he believed was deliberately intended to keep him apart from Emma.

  He was livid when St Vincent pointedly compared Troubridge’s ‘magic’ to his own. He complained about the ‘beasts’ of the Admiralty keeping him at sea. He was furious with Troubridge:

  Tomorrow week all is over – no thanks to Sir Thomas. I believe the fault is all his, and he ought to have recollected that I got him the medal of the Nile. Who upheld him when he would have sunk under grief and mortification? Who placed him in such a situation in the kingdom of Naples that he got by my public letters, titles, the colonelcy of marines, diamond boxes from the King of Naples, 1,000 ounces in money for no expenses that I know of? Who got him £500 a year from the King of Naples? . . .Who brought his character into notice? Look at my public letters. Nelson, that Nelson he now lords it over. So much for gratitude. I forgive him but by God I shall never forget it. He enjoys showing his powers over me. Never mind, although it will shorten my days . . . I have been rebuffed so that my spirits are gone, and the great Troubridge has what we call cowed the spirits of Nelson, but I shall never forget it . . .