Southey on Nelson: The Life of Nelson by Robert Southey

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 for years for £20,000’s worth of civil damages. Sir Hyde Parker, whose signal to withdraw he famously ignored at Copenhagen in 1801, always considered him dangerously impetuous in action and a grave diplomatic liability. Lord Keith was regularly infuriated by his refractory attitude to strategic commands in the Mediterranean.

He was frequently accused of vanity and self-importance. His separation from his wife, Frances Nisbet, in 1800 was thought shameful by many, including most of his relatives. His increasingly public liaison with the young and extravagant Lady Emma Hamilton, was considered scandalous, then vulgar, and finally humiliating. His stepson, Josiah Nisbet, came to hate him and frequently expressed the hope that with his one eye and one arm Nelson might one day conveniently fall over the side of his flag ship. His old friend and one time subordinate, Sir Thomas Troubridge, viewing things from the cool high chambers of the Admiralty, thought that popular fame (and Emma Hamilton) had gone to his head, and to other parts of his body too. Many, like Gillray and Cruikshank, thought that there was something irresistibly ludicrous about the small strutting figure, weighed down by his huge medals and his plump mistress.

Perhaps most damagingly, while on the Mediterranean station between June, 1799 and July, 1800, it was said that Nelson had become too personally involved with defending the corrupt Sicilian government at Naples, where Sir William Hamilton was Ambassador to the royal court. Here Nelson was thought to have been drawn (or perhaps seduced) into the gravest acts of political double-dealing and injustice. He was accused of disobeying orders to withdraw from Naples by Admiral Keith, of reneging on a truce signed by one of his own officers, Captain Foote, and conniving at the unjust court martial and execution of a Neapolitan patriot and naval officer Commodore Caracciolo. Worst of all, he was accused of allowing more than ninety civilian prisoners, including many women, who were officially under his protection in evacuation ships, to be returned to shore and executed in the cruellest manner by the Neapolitan authorities. Indeed some accused Nelson of war crimes in the Mediterranean.

In this glaring combination of light and shade, Nelson’s meteoric career and extraordinary seductive character offered all the moral contradictions of a peculiarly Romantic hero. But the triumph and tragedy of Trafalgar in October, 1805 meant that initially his whole reputation took on the aspect of a simple martyrdom. It was produced a period of unrestrained national mourning; a state funereal at St Paul’s attended by thirty-six admirals; and a great outpouring of Nelson tributes, reminiscences, and memorabilia.

Yet even in death Nelson provoked extreme reactions. Benjamin West, the President of the Royal Academy, painted a huge mythological tribute, with a mournful shadowy Neptune handing up the shrouded and distinctly Christ-like figure of Nelson (supported by an angel and surrounded by winged cherubs) into the arms of a resplendent and trident wielding Britannia. It was a deliberate and solemn apotheosis, perilously close to a religious Pieta.

In an altogether different spirit James Gillray executed a witty coloured cartoon, showing Nelson lying comfortably back upon the bosom of a buxom Britannia (Lady Hamilton of course, in an operatic flood of tears), while attended by a kneeling sea-captain (a grim George III) and a hysterical flag-waving midshipman (the Duke of Clarence). A sea-sprite circled overhead blowing Nelson’s own trumpet. It spouted a single word: not the expected ‘Victory’, but the self-vaunting ‘Immortality’.

6

In a newspaper article of 1811, discussing the new Romantic interest in celebrity and biography, Coleridge described these years of the English Regency as ‘emphatically, the Age of Personality’. So it was not surprising that a figure like Nelson, who seemed so much larger-than-life, was bound to exercise a fascination on people by the very vividness of his character as much as by the heroism of his actions. He had been asked to write his own autobiography as early as October, 1799, and did indeed dash off a Sketch of his life for John M’Arthur, a naval journalist working as joint-editor of The Naval Chronicle.

The result was a curious mixture of modesty and melodrama. Nelson mentions in passing the loss of eye and arm, his childless marriage, his failure to achieve spectacular prize-money (from captured ships), and his strictly local success in ‘placing the King of Naples back on his throne’. But his conclusion is like one of his battle signals hoist to the topgallant mast-head. ‘Without having any inheritance, or having been fortunate in prize money, I have received all the honours of my profession, been created a peer of Great Britain, and I may say to the reader: GO THOU AND DO LIKEWISE.’

After his death, a mass of brief memoirs were hastily published, especially dealing with disputed events at the battles of Aboukir Bay and Copenhagen, and the controversy over Nelson’s actions–and inactions–at Naples. Encouraged by Lady Hamilton, an inaccurate and highly partisan study was published by James Harrison in 1806. The following year 1807 William Beatty published his Authentic Narrative of the Death of Lord Nelson.

Then the journalist John M’Arthur joined forces with a navy chaplain and historian James Clarke, to produce a massive semiofficial assemblage of papers, The Life and Services of Horatio Viscount Nelson from his Lordships own Mss published in two enormous volumes in 1809. It drew widely on Nelson’s letters and despatches, and commissioned or republished eyewitness accounts. These volumes had the support of Lady Nelson, and were notable for the fact that they did not mention Lady Hamilton at all. They also carried, as their frontispiece to set the tone, an engraving of Benjamin West’s heroic painting.

In the following year 1810, the newly founded Quarterly Review asked one of its fiercest reviewers to make a general assessment of the state of Nelson biography. It was five years after Trafalgar, the Napoleonic war was still at its height, and a patriotic encomium might have been expected. But the reviewer chosen was unusual: the poet and one-time pro-Jacobin rebel, Robert Southey. He was given the Harrison volume, the Clarke and M’Arthur, the Beatty memoir, and several lesser studies. In a forty-two page essay published in Quarterly Review No. 5, February, 1810, Southey was highly critical of all the volumes except Beatty’s precise and moving eye-witness account. He observed that Harrison was totally unreliable, and that Clarke and M’Arthur were almost literally unreadable, as their volumes ran to thousands of pages, were five inches thick, and weighed in at almost twenty-seven pounds. The Life lacked all narrative skill and selection, did not give a convincing picture of Nelson’s character, and did not address the question of Lady Hamilton, about whom Southey appended a long and waspish footnote.

Southey concluded by making an elegant précis of Nelson’s career, and observing that none of the writers before him understood the art of biography. True biography required above all three things: ‘industry, judgement, and genius: the patience to investigate, the determination to select, the power to infer and enliven.’

Southey’s shrewd publisher John Murray (already Byron’s publisher) immediately challenged Southey to write such a biography himself. Could not Southey easily turn the 10,000-word review into short and popular portrait of Nelson, to suit the taste of wartime readers, and to inspire young sailors? If he pitched it right, Murray could print ‘a large impression’ and also count on it ‘going off as a midshipman’s manual’. He had paid a hundred guineas for the review, and he now offered a further hundred guineas for the biography, which he reckoned Southey could complete within six months.

Southey enthusiastically accepted; but almost the moment he began serious research, was assailed by doubts. What could a literary man, living in deep rural retirement with his family in the Lake District, know of naval warfare, sailing terminology, the drama of the high seas and the intricacies of maritime diplomacy? Moreover, what could a poet understand of a warrior’s temperament like Nelson’s? He wrote to his brother Tom Southey, who was the sailor in his family: ‘I am such a sad lubber that I feel half ashamed of myself for being persuaded even to review the Life of Nelson, much more to write one…I walk among sea terms as a cat does in a china pantry, in bodily fear of doing myself mischief, and betraying myself.’ It was a properly domestic and unseamanlike analogy, and one that Southey would often repeat in self-deprecation.

In fact Southey was rather better qualified than he pretended. As a young man he had indeed made his name as a Jacobin writer, and a poet of long, lurid verse romances, like Thalaba, the Destroyer (1801), and The Curse of Kehema (1810). Their length and their absurd titles suggest why Lord Byron–among others – made fun of them. The verse was execrable, and yet the story-telling was strangely compelling. Southey realised that this suggested that his prose–which his private letters already show as crisp, vivid, and wonderfully engaging–might be a stronger suit than his poetry.

So now, a family man in his mid-thirties, he had deliberately set out to re-establish himself as an historian, and had done so with great success. Murray had just published the first volume of his massive History of Brazil, which was very well-received and Southey would dedicate a further nine years to completing it in three volumes (1810-1819). It was on the basis of this work, not his poetry, that he had originally been sent the Nelson books for review and why Murray now had such confidence in him.

In fact Southey had a natural genius for shaping narrative and bold story-telling. (His children’s tale of ‘The Three Bears’ is still a favourite, partly because of its perfect construction, a masterly accumulation of comic suspense.) He also revealed an outstanding ability to research and organize complex sources, and yet still retain a poet’s feel for the vivid turn of phrase or memorable image. In this unusual combination of the scholarly and the imaginative, Southey had all the makings of a fine biographer, whatever his subject might be.

He had not renounced poetry, and would continue to publish works, now increasingly patriotic, like The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo (1816). But he saw history and biography as the new direction to his mature career, even though he pretended to lament it. In 1810 he wrote to his friend Walter Savage Landor: ‘I have an ominous feeling that there are poets enough in the world without me, and my best chance of being remembered will be as an historian.’ Later he would add simply: ‘by nature I am a poet, by deliberate choice an historian.’

Like all good biographers, Southey was soon drawn deeply into his subject, finding Nelson’s life both more inspiring and more enigmatic than he had at first expected. In the event the six month project took over two years to complete, and Southey was still writing in spring 1813. He combed minutely through Clarke and M’Arthur, carefully re-assembling the narrative of Nelson’s career, but boldly reconstructing it in a series of superbly visualised scenes. From the original chaos of these materials, an overwhelming sense of Nelson’s destiny emerged with almost hypnotic power, a destiny that had seized him even in childhood.

Southey sticks remarkably close to the original sources in official despatches and eyewitness accounts. There is not a single quoted phrase of Nelson’s, or exchange of dialogue, that does not have an authentic written source, and often several. Unlike modern scholars’ convention, Southey only occasionally chooses to acknowledge these–notably in the case of Beatty–but prefers to present unbroken historical narrative. Yet such is the crisp, factual style of the narration, that the reader never feels he is straying into fiction. Instead Southey selects and dramatises–or ‘infers and enlivens’-with enormous success, achieving a genuine sense of modern epic, especially in his four great battle set-pieces–Cape St Vincent, Aboukir Bay, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar.

Besides Clarke and M’Arthur, Southey also characteristically undertook a wide sweep of research and enquiry, especially in controversial areas. He read with exacting attention the independently published accounts of Boswell on Corsica; Captain Edward Berry at Aboukir Bay; of Captain Edward Foote at Naples (together with a civilian eyewitness to the atrocities, Helen Maria Williams); of Colonel William Stewart, a military liaison officer at Copenhagen; of Dr Beatty and Nelson’s chaplain, Alexander Scott, at Trafalgar.

He gave full consideration to the materials that Lady Hamilton had supplied to Harrison and others, even when he did not approve of them, or even fully trust them. He made contact with John Wilson Croker, a formidable Tory figure then Secretary to the Admiralty, who after initial suspicions, whole-heartedly backed the book and provided Southey with charts, maps, strategic plans, and the full co-operation of the Admiralty’s cartographic department. The biography was eventually dedicated, with nice diplomacy, to Croker.

7

Southey also knew that much would stand or fall on the authenticity he could bring to his accounts of naval actions. He was not in fact a complete landlubber. He had himself twice sailed across the Bay of Biscay to Lisbon, both rough voyages of over a fortnight each way. His friend Coleridge had sailed in a wartime convoy to Malta in 1804, and become intimate friends with one of Nelson’s ‘band of brothers’, Alexander Ball, then civilian Governor of Malta, but in 1799 Captain of the ship that took on the French flagship L’Orient in Aboukir Bay. Coleridge had made notes about Nelson from Ball’s conversation, which he supplied to Southey, and had also been in Naples at the time of Trafalgar and witnessed the reaction to the news of Nelson’s death. Coleridge’s materials, both published and unpublished, were skilfully incorporated into Southey’s biography.

But Southey’s most confidential source was his own much-admired naval brother Tom, who had actually been a lieutenant at the Battle of Copenhagen, though serving in Sir John Hyde’s squadron rather than directly under Nelson himself. Though later Tom was court marshalled for insubordination, he remained a lively source of combat details and atmosphere, as well as offering to check all Southey’s dreaded ‘naval terms’ in proof. What Southey wanted above all from Tom was the feel of an actual battle at sea, and the way ordinary men behaved under the extreme stress of battle conditions and physical violence. Only then could he make a true judgement of what made Nelson extraordinary.

In December, 1812, while still trying to pull the battle sections of the biography together, he wrote to Tom: ‘You used to speak of the dead lying in the shoal water at Copenhagen; there was the boatswain’s mate, or somebody, asked for–when he was lying face upwards under the stern, or somewhere. Tell me the right particulars of this, which is too striking a circumstance to be lost.’ He also asked about the behaviour of the gun crews, the fear that some of the canons were ‘honeycombed’ and would blow up, the things that men did and said in the heat of battle, and the English gunner’s savage cry, ‘here goes the death of six!’ whenever the canons were fired. ‘This is a thing which would be felt.’

Several of these incidents found their way into the account of Copenhagen, which is one of the triumphs of Southey’s battle narratives. It opens with a superbly orchestrated description of the perilous approach of the British fleet through the Danish Sound–conjuring up the names of Prince Hamlet at Elsinore, the astronomer Tycho Brahe on the Isle of Huen, and Queen Matilda escaping from Cronenburg Castle. The battle itself reaches its climax in the legendary incident of Nelson putting his telescope to his blind eye.

This Southey had carefully compiled from two different eyewitness accounts—by the ship’s surgeon, Mr Ferguson (1806), and by the liaison officer Colonel Stewart (1809)–together with Clarke and M’Arthur’s commentary, and Tom Southey’s memories of later gossip in the fleet. Skilfully fitting together these varied and sometimes contradictory records of Nelson’s precise words and gestures on the quarter deck of the Elephant, Southey produced the dramatic composite version which has become, as it were, scriptural.

‘I have only one eye–I have a right to be blind sometimes’–and then, putting the glass to his blind eye, in that mood of mind which sports with bitterness, he exclaimed, ‘I really do not see the signal!’ Presently he exclaimed , ‘Damn the signal! Keep mine for closer battle flying. That’s the way I answer such signals! Nail mine [No. 16]. to the mast!’.

But Southey produces far more than the heroics of battle. His account of the aftermath of Copenhagen, for example, and Nelson’s sense of absolute exhaustion and growing anxiety, is wonderfully captured.

The sky had suddenly become overcast; white flags were waving from the mastheads of so many shattered ships; the slaughter had ceased, but the grief was to come, for the account of the dead was not yet made up, and no man could tell for what friends he might have to mourn. The very silence which follows upon the cessation of such a battle becomes a weight upon the heart at first, rather than a relief…[Nelson] had won the day by disobeying his orders, and, in so far as he had been successful, had convicted the Commander-in-Chief of an error in judgement. ‘Well’, said he, as he left the Elephant, ‘I have fought contrary to orders, and I shall, perhaps, be hanged. Never mind: let them!’

Some of the small, discordant, surreal moments of the battle are particularly memorable. When a cannon shot shattered a large ‘kettle’ of bacon and beans on the gun deck of the Monarch, at a time when she was taking terrible punishment from the Danish guns, ‘amid the tremendous carnage’ the English sailors with ‘singular coolness’ carefully scooped up the spilled food from the deck, and nonchalantly ate as they continued to fire their cannons. This vivid incident, which says a number of things about Nelson’s navy, almost certainly came from Tom Southey.

All the battles are narrated with superb, panoramic sweep and then stunning immediacy. Southey manages to retain an almost balletic sense of the great fleet manoeuvrings. Yet he continually plunges the reader into close-up moments of chaos and violence. The massive explosion of L’Orient, which brought the entire battle to a halt for several minutes, is one such; Nelson’s own death aboard the Victory is another.

One of his most effective biographical techniques is to set the scene of a coming battle, and then ignite it with a few words from Nelson. He carefully describes the tactics, the plans and risks, bringing them to a climax of suspense, and then–as if he had prepared a well-laid a fire–he sets light to the whole with a single phrase by Nelson.

The evening before Aboukir Bay is one such a masterly passage, which ends with the following characteristic exchange. ‘Captain Berry, when he comprehended the scope of the design, exclaimed with transport, “If we succeed, what will the world say?”–“There is no if ‘in the case,” replied the Admiral; “that we shall succeed is certain, who may live to tell the story is a very different question.”’

8

In the light of modern research, Southey’s biography does have many technical shortcomings. He is too close to the war against Napoleon to set it in any larger European context. He has nothing like the modern scholar’s access to the Nelson and Admiralty archives. He frequently over-simplifies the manoeuvrings and chaos of a large naval battle and, despite his conversations with Tom Southey, he often underestimates the stunning, brutal violence of naval warfare for officers and seamen alike. Clipped phrases like ‘he was almost cut in half, lose all meaning. Alexander Scott, the chaplain aboard the Victory at Trafalgar, described it as finding himself suddenly plunged into ‘a butcher’s shambles’ of human body parts. He refused to write any detailed memoirs, and was traumatised for years afterwards.

But the portrait of Nelson is admirable in its depth, and contrasting lights. What is most striking is its mixture of flamboyant patriotism and grim psychological realism. It is not a flat portrait, or hagiographic study. It presents an immensely powerful and seductive figure, who is also restless, self-deluding and vain. There are many penetrating glimpses of Nelson’s inner doubts and turmoil. Southey emphasises his weakness as a child, the disastrous loss of his mother at the age nine, and writes a moving passage about Nelson’s boyhood homesickness, which in a sense continues until he meets Emma Hamilton. He isolates the episode of young Nelson’s despair, on the voyage back from India, and suggests a moment of intensely Romantic selfdedication to the idea of ‘heroism’ itself. He describes the depressions, professional frustrations and bitterness of Nelson’s middle period; his anger with the Admiralty; his disillusion with many superior officers; and hints at the physical disappointments of his marriage with Frances Nisbet, later Lady Nelson.

9

One of Southey’s main challenges as a biographer was how to write about Nelson and Emma Hamilton. Here he was faced with subtle problems of libel, scandal and biographical convention. Although Nelson had separated from his wife in 1800, he had never divorced Lady Nelson, never publically acknowledged his liaison with Emma Hamilton (though he lived openly with her on their estate at Merton from 1801), nor officially recognised his daughter by her, Horatia ‘Thompson’, born in February 1801. Clarke and M’Arthur had simply refused to write about Lady Hamilton. Yet the affair was common knowledge throughout the Navy, and probably across most of England, since it was depicted so often and with such relish in Cruickshank’s and Gillray’s openly erotic and mocking cartoons.

At the time of writing in 1810-13, both women were alive, although living in characteristically different styles. Lady Nelson was established frugally and respectably on her large Suffolk estate, influential at Court, and receiving a fine state pension of £3,500. She would live into her seventies. Emma, on the other hand, was recklessly besporting herself, drinking heavily, gambling, mortgaging the Merton estate, and talking hypnotically to a stream of visitors about her ever-beloved Nel. But by 1812 she had become obese, confused and virtually bed bound; and was rumoured to be selling off Nelson’s letters to pay her debts. In 1815 she was to die in Calais, tragically exiled, penniless and alcoholic, aged only forty-nine.

Accordingly, Southey decided to adopt a double strategy. Only the most discreet and gracious mention would be made of Lady Nelson, and certainly very little of her shortcomings as a wife. As a result, ironically, she is reduced to something of a cipher in his biography. But the story of Nelson and Emma, however scandalous, was too emotionally revealing for Southey not to use it as fully as he dared. Emma in fact gave him unique opportunity to write about the private life of a public figure. She gave him access to Nelson’s turbulent inner world, and thereby allowed him to give Nelson’s character a truly Romantic dimension.

His tactic was to state formally and solemnly at the outset that there was absolutely no ‘criminal connection’ (viz. sexual relationship) between them, and that it was simply ‘an excessively romantic’ friendship which brought Nelson much trouble. He then proceeded to write about it in such a way that it was clear to any adult reader that here was the grand passion of Nelson’s life, an ‘infatuated attachment’ of a supremely sexual nature. It was a love-affair that kept Nelson alive to fight the battle of Trafalgar, but also in some matters–political as well as moral–severely and permanently damaged his reputation.

Southey describes how Nelson and Emma first met fleetingly in 1793 at Naples, a strategic key to the Western Mediterranean, and at that time the largest city and port in Italy. Here Emma was established as the picturesque young wife of the charming and eccentric Ambassador to the Court of King Ferdinand and Queen Marie-Carolina (sworn enemies of Napoleon), Sir William Hamilton. Nelson immediately took to them both, and innocently described Emma (in a letter home to his wife), as ‘a young woman of amiable manners’ who did honour to her diplomatic station. Southey adds, choosing his words carefully: ‘thus that acquaintance began which ended in the destruction of Nelson’s domestic happiness’.