For five years between 1788 and 1792, he was simply an unemployed navy officer, quietly married but without children, and living on half-pay at his father’s rectory, in the remote Norfolk village of Burnham Thorpe. On Saturdays he would ride three miles to the little tidal harbour of Overy Staithe, to sit on the sea wall, read the Navy Chronicle and watch the fishing boats.
It was not until the outbreak of war with revolutionary France, that he was given command of the sixty-four gun frigate the Agamemnon, in January, 1793. He served quite successfully in the Mediterranean, notably on the Corsica station in 1794, but he lost the sight of his right eye at the siege of Calvi, and his general health continued bad. It was only three years later that Nelson first really made his distinctive mark at the battle of Cape St Vincent in February, 1797, when he disobeyed his commander Sir John Jervis (later Lord Vincent) by breaking the battle line–‘without a moment’s hesitation’—to sail directly and alone into the huge Spanish fleet. He was promoted Rear Admiral, and appointed a Knight of the Bath. However later that year, while leading a bloody sea-borne landing at Santa Cruz in July, he lost his right arm.
The following year, 1798, he was at last given his first major command aboard his flagship the seventy-four gun Vanguard. He pursued the French fleet relentlessly back and forth across the Mediterranean. He finally trapped it outside Alexandria, anchored in Aboukir Bay. In a dazzling display of seamanship he annihilated what had been Napoleon’s Egyptian invasion fleet, at the Battle of the Nile in August 1798. This was the first great strategic British victory against revolutionary France. Gillray cartooned Nelson sweeping the enemy from the seas with a crocodile for a cudgel, and from now on his reputation spread like wild-fire among the general public.
His exploits were for the first time widely reported in the daily papers, including the newly founded The Times, which ran gossip items about him as well as battle reports. Nelson found that, unlike most other naval commanders who cultivated bluffness and understatement (like his great friend the taciturn Cuthbert Collingwood), he had a natural gift for extravagant publicity. He was a master of the peremptory official dispatch to his superiors, and the vivid post-action narrative rapidly and skilfully composed, for the benefit of the Admiralty. His account of ‘Nelson’s Patent Bridge’ for boarding enemy ships at Cape St Vincent, was celebrated in the fleet for its cheek, and quickly appeared in The Times. His description (not unbiased) of his tactics at Aboukir Bay, and the explosion of the huge French flagship L’Orient at night, was so famous that Turner painted a picture of it.
Nelson understood the essentially dramatic nature of naval command, and the natural theatre of the quarterdeck. Here a captain not only commanded an entire ship’s company for months on end, but also performed for its benefit. Time and again, in the heat and roar of action (when few men could even think clearly), Nelson not only demonstrated his extraordinary coolness, but proved he had a genius for producing the symbolic gesture and the memorable phrase: ‘A laurel or a cypress for my head’; ‘Westminster Abbey or victory’. His words and gestures before and during his last two great battles, Copenhagen (April 1801) and Trafalgar (October, 1805), became so widely known, almost proverbial, that later historians have sometimes treated them as folklore.
Yet Nelson was something of an historian himself. He kept very full diaries, and wrote brilliant descriptive and often highly emotional letters about his battles. These were not only sent to his friends and family, but also to his fellow officers and superiors, and were frequently leaked to newspapers. In fact diary-keeping and letter-writing (often later extended to memoirs) became characteristic of British naval officers of this period, just as a century later they would become characteristic of military officers on the Western Front. English naval writing during the Napoleonic War forms a literature of its own, and has subsequently inspired an entire maritime sub-genre of the modern historical novel, from C.S. Forester’s Hornblower series to Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey saga.
For Nelson, writing and deliberate phrase-making became an important expression of his turbulent personality and, increasingly, his sense of mission. It was he, and not a fellow officer, who invented ‘the Nelson touch’ in 1805, with its deliberate echo of Shakespeare’s ‘little touch of Harry in the night’ from Henry V; and it was he who adopted Shakespeare’s phrase, ‘we band of brothers’. It is significant that he kept his diary in duplicate so that it should not be lost and that in the last ninety minutes before action was joined at Trafalgar he wrote out his final diary entries, his testament, and his long battle prayer, in his own clear racing longhand, twice in full without a single alteration.
4
From the time of his return to England in 1800, now aged forty-two and the hero of the Nile, Nelson found he had become a universal celebrity, cheered by crowds, dined by City corporations, and painted by leading artists. His small, tanned, hawklike figure; his glazed right eye and his one arm, and above all the mass of decorations he always wore on his dark blue naval greatcoat (he was wearing four stars at the battle of Trafalgar), made him instantly recognisable. He was mobbed wherever he went, whether boarding a cutter in Portsmouth harbour, dining with the mayor of Norwich, or simply shopping in Piccadilly.
After his death at Trafalgar a full-blown Nelson cult developed. It produced pictures, poems, songs, medals, statues, marble busts, waxworks, china mugs, and commemorative dinners. Pubs, streets and babies, were named after him; and Haydn composed a Mass in his honour. His fellow officers introduced the after-dinner toast, ‘To the Immortal Memory’, which is drunk in Royal Navy ward-rooms around the world to this day. In 1842 Nelson’s Column with its seventeen-foot high statue on top, was erected in Trafalgar Square.
This startling phenomenon has sometimes been compared to the aftermath of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1999. But it was far more deeply-rooted, in a sense of national pride, renewed identity and wartime achievement. Trafalgar was always understood as a defensive victory, not a conquest. It was the saving of Britain from foreign invasion, and hence an assertion of freedom, not of empire. It has perhaps more revealing analogies with the Battle of Britain of 1940.
The memory of Nelson compelled huge and lasting personal loyalty among all seamen, and tales of his exploits became legendary. For many men, contact with Nelson became in retrospect the defining moment of their lives. In a tiny Kentish churchyard, on the banks of the River Rother (which flows into the Thames estuary), I once stumbled upon a tombstone whose inscription read simply: “William Burke, Purser aboard his Majesty’s ship Victory, and in whose arms the immortal Nelson died.’
The witnesses of Nelson’s death are well-known to have been Dr Beatty, his surgeon, Dr Scott his chaplain, and Thomas Hardy, his ship’s captain. Yet the small, balding middle-aged William Burke did in fact support Nelson’s head during the three agonising hours it took him to die, kneeling down between him and the bulkhead, holding his shoulders in the dark, barely speaking a word. William Burke chose to record this moment in a perfect, but surely unconscious, iambic pentameter. The memory of Nelson had inspired the retired naval purser with a another fragment of English poetry, as a noble as an unwritten line from Shakespeare’s Henry V. ‘And in his arms the immortal Nelson died.’
5
Yet many of those contemporaries who knew Nelson best recognised profound contradictions in his character. When Wellington first met him, he thought Nelson ‘a charlatan’. Lord Minto described him as ‘a great man who was in some respects a baby’. His old commander in Chief Sir John Jervis, later Lord St Vincent, one of the greatest naval leaders of his day, gave it as his deliberate opinion, nine years after Nelson’s death, that: ‘Animal courage was the sole merit of Lord Nelson, his private character most disgraceful in every sense of the word.’
Many of his superior officers thought he was arrogant and absurdly flamboyant. His high-handed actions as a young officer in the West Indies led him to be pursued
