The War of Wars

by Robert Harvey

  Whether he was right or not, he sailed straight into the teeth of the gale on that fateful night of 21 October. Colossal waves battered the ships, many of them already crippled, rolling about helplessly with gaping holes and hundreds of wounded men lying in agony aboard. The Redoutable, the French hero of the fight, sank behind the ship towing her. The flagship Bucentaure had to be cut adrift and was seen crashing on to the shoals three miles away with the loss of the remainder of its crew. The whole fleet was being driven back towards the rocks. During the gale, as the ships struggled to maintain position and feared that they would all perish ashore, the wind veered abruptly, allowing them to gain a few miles distance. As dawn struck the storm continued unabated, and other French prizes went aground, sank or had to be destroyed.

  Blackwood, towing the once mighty Santissima Trinidad, the floating colossus that had been the pride of the Spanish fleet, evacuated the crew and burned the ship; the Santa Anna, its proud, unwieldy sister, suffered the same fate. ‘The French commander-in-chief is at this moment at my elbow’, commented Blackwell. Villeneuve gazed out impassively at the wild and fearful scene of these towering infernos tossing and turning in a raging gale. His emotions can only be imagined at the loss of his greatest ships, wrestling with relief that at least they would not now join the British fleet.

  Blackwood wrote to his wife: ‘Ever since last evening we have had a most dreadful gale of wind, and it is with difficulty that the ships who tow them [the prizes] keep off the shore. Three, I think, must be lost, and with them, above 800 souls each. What a horrid scourge is war.’ It was one of the strangest scenes in history, a glimpse into the Apocalypse. Altogether twelve prizes were destroyed in three days of continuous raging gales. The British limped home with none of their ships lost, but with, only four prizes out of the original sixteen. In the hold of the Victory, the body of Nelson had been preserved in a huge cask filled with brandy.

  It was Guy Fawkes night, and the same evening an officer aboard the fastest messenger in the English fleet, the schooner Pickle, landed and was conveyed at speed up to London to reach the Admiralty at one o’clock in the morning with the news of the victory and of Nelson’s death. The secretary of the Admiralty received him and conveyed him to the sleepy, elderly First Lord, Barham. The two men promptly informed Pitt, who unusually could sleep no longer, and the King, who was dumbstruck for five minutes, before settling down to write by urgent despatch to dozens more, including Fanny and Lady Hamilton.

  The latter fell into a catatonic trance for ten hours. The wife of George Fremantle, a captain who had survived, remarked accurately that ‘regret at [Nelson’s] death is more severely felt than joy at the destruction of the combined fleet’. Lady Harriet Cavendish observed: ‘Poor Lord Nelson. The universal gloom that I hear of from those who have been in town is the strongest proof of the regret he so justly deserved to occasion as otherwise I suppose such a victory at such a moment is everything, both for our honour and safety, and could have driven us half wild.’ The Prince of Wales was unable to compose himself.

  The report that the ‘combined fleet is defeated but Nelson is no more’ ran like wildfire into the streets. Lady Bessborough commented: ‘How truly he has accomplished his prediction that when they met it must be to extermination. He could not have picked out a finer close to such a life. Do you know, it makes me feel almost as much envy as compassion; I think I should like to die so.’ The Morning Chronicle wrote sadly: ‘What is likely to be the inward ejaculation of Buonaparte? – “Perish the twenty ships – the only rival of my greatness is no more!” – He was, as a captain, equal in his own element of the sea, to what Napoleon, with a base degeneracy of motive, has proved himself to be on land.’

  A day later the London mob went wild in celebration of Trafalgar. On 9 November Pitt gave a brief and laconic reaction after his carriage was drawn by huge crowds to the Lord Mayor’s banquet. ‘Europe is not to be saved by any single man. England has saved herself by her exertions and will, I trust, save Europe by her example.’

  Modern historiography has understandably tried to demythologize Nelson and rightly has focused upon his weaknesses as well as his strengths. Of the former he had plenty: the early readiness to suck up to his masters, including such unworthy objects of his attentions as Prince William, his colossal vanity, his severity, his involvement in the corruption and brutality of the Neapolitan court, his obsession with Emma Hamilton, who was nothing if not a hard-boiled social climber for all her charms (although she may have genuinely been devoted to him). But these were the defects of a naïve, not a bad man. Even his friends considered him a ‘baby’ in many respects. Like many sailors he was a simpleton when it came to politics and women, and he should not be faulted for being so. He certainly aspired to heroism and gloried in fame, but saw no need to moderate his private conduct accordingly. He had become a symbol in a country desperate for heroes after years of hardships and unrelenting war, and quite understandably felt that this should not invade his personal life.

  He was also the greatest commander of fleets Britain ever possessed, a fearless leader of men with a magnificent understanding of how to lead his ships. Like so many masters of their craft he saw no need to adjust his habits to the expectations of the crowd: it was enough that he delivered the victories they needed. The road to glory was arduous, dogged by ill-health, false starts and setbacks. The string of victories attests to his genius – Cape St Vincent, the Nile, Copenhagen and Trafalgar. He was peerless, in a country that depended on the naval service for its survival.

  His personal conduct was childish rather than malevolent, and comparatively mild for the period: his affairs in ports overseas were standard practice among most naval officers, and the infatuation of a middle-aged man with a lusty girl half his age far from exceptional in an age graced with the likes of the Prince Regent and Napoleon himself. Childlike vanity can be excused in a man who had so much to be vain about.

  There was to be the inevitable unseemly bickering around his bier. His grasping and worthless elder brother William was to secure the earldom that Nelson never had, as well as his pension, of which some £100,000 was paid as a lump sum and £5,000 a year was granted to himself and his successors tax-free in perpetuity – colossal sums for the time. Nelson’s long-suffering wife Fanny, by contrast, secured only £2,000 a year as a pension, and the £1,000 a year her husband had left her – which however provided for a comfortable middling existence.

  Emma received the house at Merton and just £500 – a belated official revenge. She was shunned. Bitterly she wrote: ‘Let them refuse me all reward. I will go with this paper fixed to my breast, and beg through the streets of London, and every barrow woman shall say, “Nelson bequeathed her to us.” ’ She soon got through her modest inheritance from Nelson and her more generous one from Sir William Hamilton, dying at the age of fifty in Calais, pursued by her creditors. Horatia was longer lived and married a clergyman.

  Chapter 48

  DEATH OF A STATESMAN

  It was ironical that in death Nelson was to serve his country almost as much as in life. For catastrophe had overtaken Britain’s continental allies of such a magnitude that without Nelson’s victory the will of the British people to go on fighting might have been destroyed. At the very instant that Nelson was paying for his last and greatest feat with his slow and agonizing death, his equal on land, Napoleon Bonaparte, was on his way to execute the first of the truly devastating strokes in his career that were to establish him as one of the greatest military commanders that ever lived.

  In an incredible demonstration of military mobility and discipline, Napoleon marched an army of 350,000 men, many of them all the way from the Channel ports where they had been posted to strike at Britain, in less than two months to surround a huge Austrian army at Ulm on 20 October, the day before Trafalgar. They secured its surrender almost without bloodshed and then went on to win the greatest victory of his career at Austerlitz on 2 December 1805.

  Reports of the Aust
rian debacle at Ulm reached the British on 3 November. It was a Sunday and Pitt was appraised by Lord Malmesbury, translating a Danish newspaper. Grenville wrote with bleak despondency: ‘One’s mind is lost in astonishment and apprehension. An army of 100,000 men, reckoned the best troops in Europe, totally destroyed in three weeks . . . Yet even this, I am afraid, is only the beginning of our misfortunes. We are plunging into a sea of hitherto unthought of difficulties . . . Time and reflection may suggest topics of confidence which I have hitherto looked for in vain.’ Lady Bessborough wrote: ‘You have no idea of the consternation here. I am so terrified, so shocked with the news I scarcely know what to wish. This man moves like a torrent.’

  The prime minister, reeling from the threat of the invasion that had hung over Britain like a dagger throughout the summer, the weakness of his government, of which he was the only real force, and bad news from Ulster, was now an ill and weakened man. Years of responsibility on those still young shoulders, unsupported by a wife and family, whose chief companion had been the port bottle, had taken their toll.

  With the news of Trafalgar he made one last show of his old determination. The ‘secret expedition’ had by now nearly reached Italy. The prime minister despatched General Don with 6,000 Hessian troops to the Elbe and a force of guards under General Edward Paget to follow, with every available unit after that – some 21,000 altogether. ‘We shall see Bonaparte’s army either cut off or driven back to France and Holland by Christmas,’ said Pitt. He had little hope of inflicting an immediate defeat, but his aim was to stiffen the Prussians, dithering in indecision, to enter the war and support their Austrian and Russian allies who might otherwise sue for peace.

  During the next few weeks there was virtually no news from the continent, only conflicting rumours: fog and ice held up despatches from Germany. It was rumoured that the French had suffered a terrible rout and that Napoleon had been killed. Pitt himself was too much of a realist to believe the gossip. But he preserved his show of optimism: ‘. . . Great as have been the pecuniary efforts which His Majesty has made for the common cause, he is ready still to extend them to such a farther amount as may enable those Powers to bring an active force of from two hundred to two hundred and fifty thousand men; and His Majesty has no doubt of being enabled himself to augment his own active force . . . to not less than sixty thousand men.’ He urged the ‘ancient spirit of Austria’ to ‘remain unshaken and undismayed’. Arthur Wellesley, who spent several days with him at the same country house in November, found him resolute, lunching heartily, riding a great deal and, as always, drinking port copiously in the evening. On the advice of his doctors he went to Bath, where the waters improved his gout.

  On 29 December the news first reached him of Napoleon’s great victory at Austerlitz and the possibility that the defeated Austrians were suing for a separate peace. Rosebery memorably described the scene:

  Austerlitz killed him. He was at Bath when he received the news. Tradition says that he was looking at a picture gallery when he heard the furious gallop of a horse. ‘That must be a courier,’ he exclaimed, ‘with news for me.’ When he had opened the packet he said, ‘Heavy news indeed,’ and asked for brandy. He hurriedly swallowed one or two drams; had he not, says an eye-witness, he must have fainted. He then asked for a map, and desired to be left alone. He had gout flying about; the shock of the tidings threw it back on some vital organ. From this day he shrank visibly. His weakness and emaciation were painful to witness. Still, he did not abate his high hopes, or his unconquerable spirit.

  Simultaneously eight British transports with 2,000 troops had got lost on their way to Bremen. The British army on the Elbe was also clearly in serious trouble – even though Lord Paget remarked optimistically: ‘I long to be at the rascals. You may depend upon it we will play with them.’ The young Arthur Wellesely had been despatched in charge of a brigade in Lord Cathcart’s division. Although the mob ran riot in dismay at news of Austerlitz, and the troops had to be called in, order and optimism soon returned. The size of the defeat had not been confirmed, nor the Austrian collapse. Pitt remarked cheerfully: ‘It is impossible not to disbelieve above nine tenths of the French bulletins and not to doubt a good deal of the armistice as stated.’ But on 4 January he was seized with another acute attack of gout.

  The last great event of his life was still to be played out. Pitt had personally supervised arrangements for Nelson’s funeral with the Garter King of Arms, down to details of the military decorations to be awarded. On 9 January 1806, the funeral was held, attended by 30,000 troops lining the way from Greenwich, where the body had been lying in state, to St Paul’s. It was drawn on a wagon shaped like the Victory and took three and a half hours to reach the cathedral through the hundreds of thousands lining the route.

  The crew of the Victory followed the coffin on foot, which arrived in deathly silence. Inside 7,000 dignitaries sat on a specially built dais seventeen tiers high. The huge flag of the Victory had been torn in pieces for each one of the forty-eight surviving crewmen to keep and the body was lowered to the tomb twenty feet below. It was a magnificently choreographed occasion of solemnity by Pitt to sustain the national spirit of defiance at a desperate time. Nelson in death had performed his final duty, and the legend was now to snowball steadily, gathering size, with the dedication of Trafalgar Square to the hero, the erection of Nelson’s column and perhaps most humbly and most movingly, the placing of replicas of Nelson’s ships along each of the lampstands that line London’s stateliest avenue, the Mall, where the admiral can look down upon them for posterity. Thus Nelson’s fleet still lives on in the centre of London today.

  Now it was Pitt’s turn to breathe his last. He arrived at his villa on Putney Heath, Bowling Green House, on 12 January. On entry he told his eccentric niece, Lady Hester Stanhope, who acted as his hostess to ‘roll up that map [of Europe hanging on the wall]; it will not be needed these ten years.’ This may have reflected an intention to concentrate the war effort in the colonies, now that Europe was apparently lost. He believed he would still see Britain through to victory, but he knew that years of struggle lay ahead after Austerlitz.

  After the weekend he felt better and went out for a ride, but on the afternoon of 13 January the news of the Austrian armistice was confirmed, as well as of a pact between the Prussians and the French. The King and the cabinet had agreed that the British expeditionary armies should be recalled. Pitt acquiesced. The following day Wellesley, recently returned, called on him and as they talked at length Pitt fainted. Unlike Nelson he seems to have had no presentiment of death, but was undoubtedly dying. Wellesley went to Grenville, Pitt’s closest colleague through so much of the war and now in sad opposition. Grenville broke down in tears at the news of his first cousin’s final illness.

  Pitt sat blankly staring, neither conversing nor reading. Gout had spread throughout his body. He took to his bed. After a brief rally, he became feverish, then delirious. He talked of his faithful niece: ‘Dear soul, I know she loves me.’James Stanhope, his nephew, reported: ‘He spoke a good deal concerning a private letter from Lord Harrowby, and frequently inquired the direction of the wind; then said, answering himself, “East, ah! That will do; that will bring him quick”; at other times he seemed to be in conversation with a messenger, and sometimes cried out, “Hear, hear!” as if in the House of Commons.’

  Benjamin Disraeli heard an amusing story about what he claimed were Pitt’s last words. An elderly House of Commons waiter and keeper of its secrets told him: ‘You hear many lies told as history, sir,’ he said; ‘do you know what Mr Pitt’s last words were?’ – ‘Of course,’ said Mr Disraeli, ‘they are well known . . . “O my country! how I love my country!” ’ for that was then the authorized version. ‘Nonsense,’ said the old man. ‘I’ll tell you how it was. Late one night I was called out of bed by a messenger in a postchaise, shouting to me outside the window. “What is it?” I said. “You’re to get up and dress and bring some of your meat pies down to Mr Pitt at Putn
ey.” So I went; and as we drove along he told me that Mr Pitt had not been able to take any food, but had suddenly said, “I think I could eat one of Bellamy’s meat pies.” And so I was sent for post-haste. When we arrived Mr Pitt was dead. Them was his last words: “I think I could eat one of Bellamy’s meat pies.”

  This version, although delightful, is almost certainly apocryphal. Canning believed the true words to be: ‘I am sorry to leave the country in such a situation.’ He was quoting the clergyman attending Pitt, insisting that theatricals were highly untypical of him. He died at 2.30 in the morning of 23 January, just three months after Nelson.

  In the space of three short months Britain had gone from euphoria at the news of Trafalgar, to shock at the news of Ulm, to despair followed by grim determination at the news of Austerlitz. Britain had now lost the two towering figures who had come to embody its thirteen-year-long struggle with the militarized hordes of revolutionary France at almost the same time. The country appeared forlorn, rudderless and directionless, in the hands of confused minor politicians.

  The twelve previous months had seen history at its most capricious, showering the world with violent shocks – the defeats of the Austrians at Marengo and Hohenlinden, the crowning of Napoleon as Emperor, the naval chase to the West Indies, the resurrection of the coalition against Napoleon, the near-invasion of Britain, the death of Nelson, victory at Trafalgar, the news of Ulm and Austerlitz and now this, the loss of the leader who had come to symbolize Britain’s undying resistance to the French. Nothing had stayed constant for more than a month or two at a time. Every time Britain’s hopes had been raised, they were dashed immediately afterwards. The country was numbed by changes of fortune.