Southey on Nelson: The Life of Nelson by Robert Southey

Southey on Nelson: The Life of Nelson by Robert Southey
Richard Holmes

Robert Southey

LIVES THAT NEVER GROW OLDA radical new series – edited by Richard Holmes – that recovers the great classical tradition of English biography. Every book is a biographical masterpiece, still thrilling to read and vividly alive.This short, brilliant, action-packed biography appeared only eight years after Nelson’s death at the Battle of Trafalgar (a scene unforgettably described). It helped transform Nelson into the most popular wartime hero that Britain has ever placed on top of a column.It first gave currency to the proverbial stories of his courage and exhibitionism, from the ‘blind eye’ at Copenhagen, to ‘Kiss me, Hardy’ and the scandal of ‘Beloved Emma’ at Naples. It was written by the romantic poet and historian Robert Southey, a one-time radical who was converted to patriotism by Nelson’s shining (though not ‘untarnished’) example.

Southey on Nelson

The Life of Nelson by Robert Southey

EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

Richard Holmes

Table of Contents

Cover Page (#uf54506ed-4bdf-5ebb-990c-8523f2a1a284)

Title Page (#uc42cea6d-24c5-57e2-8007-2ca89bd93bc4)

INTRODUCTION (#uf4e41a29-a055-58d5-b236-883d72127acf)

SELECT CHRONOLOGY (#ue80782b7-7432-5af5-8094-d32fcace179b)

AUTHOR’S PREFACE (#ucf463152-e4ad-5ce1-bebe-d1f9e124a777)

THE LIFE OF NELSON (#u23529fe7-e266-5d72-be05-8a91f0cbb49c)

ONE (#ud5fa2a84-f673-5577-9c58-e3c57705dbe3)

TWO (#u6040366b-e99d-5b29-8a6c-a4f41927b164)

THREE (#ue2c2486b-2404-5271-9ef4-5931919af981)

FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)

FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)

SIX (#litres_trial_promo)

SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)

NINE (#litres_trial_promo)

FURTHER READING (#litres_trial_promo)

INDEX (#litres_trial_promo)

Classic Biographies Edited by Richard Holmes (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

INTRODUCTION (#ulink_eff510f0-e74d-5112-bf08-fa6e29927047)

1

Once he became a fleet-commander, Nelson always liked to lead his ships into battle flying naval signal number sixteen from his topgallant mast-head. Signal number sixteen consisted of two flags, one above the other: the uppermost white with a blue cross, the one below a patriotic red, white and blue. Even at the battle of Trafalgar, after he had issued the immortal message ‘England expects that every man will do his duty’, Nelson hoisted signal number sixteen as his last general command to his battle fleet.

Its meaning was a dare as much as an order, and it was particularly relished by his officers, his ‘band of brothers’, who considered it typical of Nelson’s attitude to life in general. Signal number sixteen, applicable in all conceivable circumstances, meant: ‘Engage the enemy more closely’.

It was flying at 1pm on 21 October, 1805, when Nelson was hit by a musket ball on the quarter deck of the Victory; and it was still flying when he died three hours later, in the surgeon’s cockpit, asking Captain Hardy to kiss him farewell, and to tell him how many enemy ships had surrendered.

2

Even before his heroic death at Trafalgar aged forty-seven, Nelson had become a national legend in a way that was virtually without precedent. His personal bravery, his astonishing aggression in battle, his loyalty to his fellow officers and his kindness towards his able seamen (especially his young midshipmen), were famous throughout the Royal Navy. But his gallantry, his self-sacrifice, and his fervent patriotism had made him a celebrity, in a quite modern sense, throughout the whole of England. Nelson was a new breed of war hero, a profoundly Romantic figure, who had caught the popular imagination and become the embodiment of a new kind of English nationalism.

There were, of course, historical reasons for this. The patriotic war against revolutionary France, which began in earnest in 1793, brought growing fears of invasion and subversion. By 1800, the military successes of Bonaparte had personalised this threat, and even brought fears of defeat and dictatorship. This slowly transformed the mood of radical discontent, and popular disaffection, that had gripped England (and especially its writers and intellectuals) for over a decade. Nelson became the personal focus of a deep, stirring movement of national unity and recovered common purpose. It was no coincidence that he led the most glamorous and successful of the British armed services of the period, and that there were very few families of the landed and middle classes–the families of Jane Austen’s novels–who did not have a father, brother, son, grandson, or uncle in the navy.

The Royal Navy was also a powerful and modern force. An English warship or ‘ship of the line’, carrying upward of seventy-four, eighty-six, or a hundred guns and a crew and armed personnel of 500 was the most sophisticated, complex and expensive military machine of its time. The English fleets were small compared to those of France or Spain, but they were better equipped and disciplined, with fierce loyalties among the crews, and strong family affections (and rivalries) between the officers. English navigation and gunnery could not be matched, and when Nelson boasted that ‘one Englishman was worth three Frenchmen’, he meant that his crews could sail across the Atlantic twice as fast, and his gunners fire three broadsides to their one.

English fleets might appear virtually anywhere in the world–off the coasts of America, India, Egypt, the Baltic states, or throughout the Mediterranean–and until the successes of Wellington’s armies after 1811, they represented the one check to Bonaparte’s global ambitions. In this sense the Royal Navy, and its figurehead in Nelson, represented not only England, but a certain kind of European freedom.

3

But Nelson had become a legend, above all, because of his charismatic personality. For the English public, his whole life was seen as one unbroken act of heroism, starting as a fifteen-year-old midshipman fighting a polar bear on an artic ice flow, and continuing without check until Trafalgar some thirty years later. Yet in fact neither recognition nor success came quickly to Nelson.

After mixed service in the West Indies, South America, the Baltic, Canada and the Caribbean, Nelson was a seasoned officer and a post-captain at the age of thirty. But he had never yet commanded a ship larger than a small frigate, the twenty-eight-gun Boreas; he suffered from sea-sickness, recurrent malaria, and severe bouts of depression; and he frequently considered resigning from the Service. 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.