Southey on Nelson: The Life of Nelson by Robert Southey

Southey prudently avoids more than a sketch of the exotic Ambassadorial couple. Sir William was a career diplomat and a dilettante, whose main passion in life (like his friend Lord Elgin of the Marbles), was collecting Greek and Roman sculptures and pottery. He also studied volcanoes. Sir William was sixty-two, rich, ugly, aristocratic, easy-going and sophisticated. Lady Emma was twenty-eight, a blacksmith’s daughter from Cheshire, exuberant, loud, large and stunningly beautiful. Before being recuperated by Sir William she had worked as an artists’ model and as an attendant in a Turkish Bath in the Adelphi as plain Emma Hart. Accordingly, she was said by visiting naval officers to be the most valuable and curvaceous amphora in Sir William’s collection.

‘Her figure is colossal, but well-shaped,’ wrote one admirer; ‘she resembles the bust of Ariadne’. ‘She’s a whopper’, added another, simply–Regency slang for a smasher. She was frequently painted by Romney: her thick black hair parted in the centre above large wide dark eyes, upper arms strong and bare, bosom full. She had that curious combination attractive to many men: a child’s face upon a large, voluptuous body. But Emma was not a child: quick, generous, highly intelligent and expressive, she had blossomed in the Mediterranean, learnt to speak fluent French and Italian (better than most British diplomats), host diplomatic dinners and entertainments (usually with rather too much champagne), and write vivid letters and confidential reports. She had also become the closest female confidante to Queen Marie-Carolina, who as the executed Marie-Antoinette’s sister, was a key figure in the dangerous, shifting Continental alliances against the French republicans.

Emma also had an exaggerated, operatic, Italian enthusiasm which Nelson came to adore. This was most famously expressed in her ‘Attitudes’, a form of after-dinner entertainment she had invented. Dressed in a series of thin flowing veils and shawls, she would dance across the room and strike a series of rapid, classical poses, which she would then hold in complete stillness, like living statuary. Some were based on Greek or Roman themes, others more Turkish or Egyptian. Goethe witnessed one of the more classical performances, which he pronounced truly artistic and astonishing. Sir Nathanial Wraxall witnessed another, more reminiscent of a Bacchante, which involved ‘screams, starts and embraces’, and he thought only appropriate for select, adult company.

Depending on the evening, the guests, and Emma’s mood, her ‘Attitudes’ seemed to have ranged between classical ballet, theatrical mime and nightclub striptease. She always retained her native humour, as well as her Northern accent. Once, while draped as a buxom half-naked Naiad over one of Hamilton’s larger and more expensive Greek urns, she was heard to say in a stage-whisper: ‘Don’t be afeared Sir Willum: I’ll not break your joog.’

At first Southey hints at little of this. But when Nelson met Emma again in 1798, now returning to Naples as the glorious but wounded and exhausted hero of Aboukir Bay, Southey feels free to expand. He describes the hero’s welcome in a scene strongly reminiscent of Plutarch’s account of Antony meeting the seductive Cleopatra, together with triumphal barges, feasts and music. The operatic emotion is now openly expressed: When [the Hamilton’s] barge came alongside the Vanguard, at the sight of Nelson Lady Hamilton sprang up the ship’s side, and exclaiming, ‘O God! Is it possible?’ fell into his arms–more, he says, like one dead than alive.’ This must have impressed the crew; it certainly impressed Nelson, who gallantly described it as ‘terribly affecting’.

The sexual feeling is also strongly implied, with Southey’s acute intuition that what partly attracted the battle-hardened Nelson was Emma’s promise of generous, almost maternal comforts. This was still, after all, the boy who had lost his beloved mother at the age of nine. He nicely quotes Sir William’s witty and knowing invitation to Nelson: ‘A pleasant apartment is ready for you in my house, and Emma is looking out for the softest pillows to repose those few limbs you have left.’ Later Southey describes her as having ‘totally weaned’ Nelson’s affections from Lady Nelson; and during the King and Queen’s escape from a pro-Republican mob in Naples, which Nelson engineered, he says that Emma impressed Nelson by acting with extraordinary courage and decision, ‘like a heroine of modern romance’.

Yet Southey suggests deep moral conflict in Nelson, and produces a weirdly effective passage at the start of the affair, when Nelson dines with his coffin behind his chair, antagonizes his officers, and seems close to exhaustion and mental breakdown.

Southey–in another Antony and Cleopatra passage–blames Emma’s sexual magnetism for distorting Nelson’s political and moral judgement at Naples. He implicates her (though indirectly) in the execution of the patriot Caracciolo in June 1799, which he describes as ‘a deplorable transaction! A stain upon the memory of Nelson and the honour of England.’ But worse, he holds Nelson’s ‘baneful passion’ for Emma as almost wholly responsible for the failure of his natural sense of justice and generosity (so characteristic of him as a commander at sea), thus allowing the terrible massacre of the civilian prisoners that followed in July 1799. This failure ‘stained ineffaceably his public character’. Southey’s biography here rises to one of its fiercest, most outspoken and impressive rhetorical heights.

If Nelson’s eyes had not been, as it were, spellbound by that unhappy attachment, which had now completely mastered him, he would have seen things as they were; and might perhaps have awakened the Sicilian court to a sense of their interest, if not their duty. The court employed itself in a miserable round of folly and festivity, while the prisons of Naples were filled with groans, and the scaffold streamed with blood.

At such moments it might seem as if Southey was simply casting Emma as Nelson’s sexual nemesis, and the biography has often been interpreted in this way. But Southey is far more subtle than this. He goes on to show how well Emma understood-and matched–Nelson’s own extravagant temperament, how she saved him from recurrent periods of near suicidal depression, and how she genuinely made a new home for him at Merton. While his marriage with Lady Nelson had been childless, the birth of Horatia ‘Thompson’ brought him a wholly new kind of domestic happiness. It also brought him a new sense of a future, and Southey implies that this in turn inspired him to go on to fight Trafalgar. He is brave enough to quote not only Nelson’s last naval signal and diary entry before battle, but also the whole of the open letter ‘bequeathing’ Lady Hamilton to the nation. A bequest which, Southey dryly points out, had not yet been fulfilled by 1813.

Southey was surely right in this complex, nuanced and Romantic reading of their love-affair. Much of its deep and genuine emotion appears in the passionate, unguarded letters that Nelson wrote to Emma in 1802. Although Southey had the materials Emma had supplied to Harrison in 1806 to draw on, he could not have read these particular letters. But they retrospectively confirm much of what he had been able, with some reservations, to suggest of their mutual infatuation.

“You know, my dearest Emma, that there is nothing in this world that I would not do for us to live together and have our little child with us…You, my beloved Emma, and my Country are the two dearest objects of my fond heart…My longing for you, both person and conversation, you may readily imagine. What must be my sensations at the idea of sleeping with you! It sets me on fire, even the thoughts, much more would the reality. I am sure all my love and desires are all to you, and if a woman naked were to come to me, even as I am thinking of you, I hope it might rot off if I would touch her even with my hand.’

Southey accepts Emma’s own authority for one of the most moving passages towards the end of the book. In summer 1805 Nelson is distractedly walking the little lawn in the Merton garden which he called his ‘quarterdeck’. He had not accepted a new command, and claimed to be happy in retirement, surrounded by ‘his family’. Sensing his secret restlessness, Emma ‘knew he was longing to get at the combined fleet’. She destroys her own happiness by encouraging him to ‘do his duty’–to go back and take over the Mediterranean battle station off Toulon. Southey presents this as an act of supreme unselfishness on both their parts, and a final justification of their love. ‘If there were more Emmas, there would be more Nelsons.’

In fact Emma Hamilton comes strangely to dominate the later chapters of the biography, and there is a sense in which Southey had written a great, doomed Romantic love story. Like many biographers, Southey only seems to have become aware of the underlying emotional drive of his own book after it was published. His inhibitions may also have been released by the publication of some of Nelson’s love letters to Emma in 1814, and her own death in the following year. Certainly the main additions he made to the biography, long after in 1827, consisted of expanded passages about Emma and extracts from her own letters to Nelson.

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Finally the process of writing lead Southey to revise many of his erstwhile political opinions, and his views of British Government policy in the Mediterranean, particularly where Nelson had been involved in Corsica, Sardinia, and Naples. He also came to reflect on the whole notion of patriotic ‘duty’, which is not merely the subject of Nelson’s famous Trafalgar signal, but is a powerful theme running through the whole biography, affecting not only Nelson’s career but also his love affair.

Here, paradoxically, the poet Southey, driven all his life by his own demons of duty and principle, discovered a profound sympathy for the patriot Nelson and his compulsive loyalties. It also forced the one-time disaffected radical to reconsider the meaning of English patriotism itself. In his final chapters Southey produced some of the finest, and most unexpected passages of Romantic English nationalism ever written. They were perhaps consciously intended to echo and even rival Shakespeare’s Henry V.

The death of Nelson was felt in England as something more than a public calamity; men started at the intelligence, and turned pale, as if they had heard of the loss of a dear friend. An object of our admiration and affection, of our pride and of our hopes, was suddenly taken from us; and it seemed as if we had never until then known how deeply we loved and revered him…He has left us, not indeed his mantle of inspiration, but a name and example which are at this hour inspiring hundreds of the youth of England–a name which is our pride, and an example which will continue to be our shield and our strength.

Shortly before publication in spring 1813, Southey began to feel more confident about the book. In January he wrote to his old friend Walter Scott, a rival poet of verse romances, who was also turning to prose in the shape of historical novels. He described his biography with a touch of pride as ‘a subject not self-chosen, and out of my way, but executed con amore.’

To his uncle and literary patron, Herbert Hill, he wrote in February, repeating the cautionary image of the cat walking among crockery. But now he added: ‘if I have succeeded in making the narrative continuous and clear–the very reverse of what it is in the Lives before me–the materials are, in themselves, so full of character, so picturesque, and so sublime, that it cannot fail of being a good book.’

The reviewers agreed with him. They found the book timely, well-written and surprisingly free from hagiography. They praised the ‘vigorous, plain narrative’ (The British Critic), and the intensely gripping battle scenes, ‘minute in detail, admirable in execution’ (The Eclectic Review). They also approved of the measured handling of Nelson’s character. ‘The author is not so dazzled by the glory of Lord Nelson as to be blind to his defects’, wrote The Critical Review. ‘Mr Southey has an eagle’s–or rather perhaps he would wish us to say–a poet’s eye: and he has ventured to look fully and fixedly upon the sunny radiance of Nelson’s fame, and hath both seen and marked the blots of infirmity, by which it was partially obscured.’ They all agreed that Southey had correctly identified the two great controversies of Nelson’s career–Naples and Lady Hamilton—and had thereby set the pattern for all subsequent biography.

Young Lord Byron, whose taste reflected the sharpest fashion of the day, made a point of reading Nelson as soon as it appeared, and meeting its author on one of his rare visits to London for its publication. Having mocked Southey’s verses, he was surprised by what he found in the flesh. ‘The best-looking bard I have seen for some time. His appearance is Epic; he is the only existing entire Man of Letters…His prose is perfect…His Nelson is beautiful.’

Another potentially hostile critic, William Hazlitt, who detested Southey’s shift in political beliefs, also made an exception for Nelson, and the way it was written. ‘His prose style is plain, clear, pointed, familiar, perfectly modern in texture, but with a grave and sparkling admixture of archaisms in its ornaments and occasional phraseology. He is the best and most natural prose-writer of any poet of the day: we mean that he is far better than Lord Byron, Mr Wordsworth, and Mr Coleridge for instance.’ (The Spirit of the Age)

By 1813 the immediate cult of Nelson was fading, and Wellington’s star was rising. So at first the book found its general readers slowly, but steadily enough. It was published in the same year as Pride and Prejudice, and Jane Austen herself said she was bored with books about Nelson unless they mentioned her brother. The first edition of 3,000 copies (quite large for its day) was reprinted later that summer. A third edition appeared in 1814, and after a long gap, a fourth edition in 1827, largely to incorporate the new Lady Hamilton materials. This was the last that Southey seriously revised.

However the fortunes of the biography, and the perceptions of the kind of book it was, changed radically in 1830. This followed a full-scale retrospective of all Southey’s work by Thomas Macaulay in the Edinburgh Review for January, 1830. Macaulay singled out Nelson as the finest thing Southey had ever written, destined to endure longer than any of his poetry, and to be read more widely than any of his multi-volume histories. But in doing this, he overlooked all the controversial themes Southey had so carefully explored, and ignored the complex Romantic portrait he had achieved of Nelson.

Instead Macaulay relaunched the biography as a gripping adventure story of a Boy’s Own hero: the literary equivalent of a patriotic Victorian pub sign. Given all Southey’s initial doubts, and his subsequent meticulous researches, his anxieties about Nelson and Lady Hamilton, and his concerns about Naples, it was a supremely ironic outcome. ‘No writer, perhaps, ever lived, whose talents so precisely qualified him to write the history of the great naval warrior,’ boomed Macaulay. There were no fine riddles of the human heart to read–no theories to found–no hidden causes to develop–no remote consequences to predict. The character of the hero lay on the surface. The exploits were brilliant and picturesque…it was an exact hit between wind and water.’

After this brassy endorsement, the book quickly became a bestseller, and then a Victorian classic. The young Queen herself was reported to have adored the Nelson story–as a girl. New editions appeared in 1830,1831, and in 1840, the year of Southey’s own death. There were more than a hundred editions by the end of the century. In America it was issued as a standard manual to all naval cadets, rather as John Murray had originally foreseen.

At the same time Victorian naval scholars, starting with the great Sir Harris Nicolas and his mighty edition of Nelson’s Dispatches (1844-6), began firmly to set Southey aside as a children’s book, no longer relevant to serious readers. This marginalising work was completed by Professor Geoffrey Callender’s highly critical annotated edition of 1922, which page by page, and footnote by footnote, picked minute holes in Southey’s understanding of everything from flags and knots, to navigation and international diplomacy. Yet strangely enough, even Cal-lender ended by observing that ‘the Nelson whom we know today is almost as truly Southey’s as Henry the V and Richard the III are Shakespeare’s’.

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To his great surprise, the biography immediately made Southey’s own career. Its patriotism caught a public mood, and he was offered the Poet Laureateship that autumn (on the generous recommendation of Walter Scott). His position with his publishers and the Quarterly Review was assured, and Murray later urged him to write Lives of two other notable warriors, first the Duke of Wellington, and then the Duke of Marlborough. He wrote extended essays on both for the Quarterly, as he had with Nelson; but finally–and perhaps wisely–he turned down both ideas—in Wellington’s case with the pointed comment that biographies of living persons were impertinent. He did however write an enormous, erudite and worthy three volume History of the Peninsular War (1823—1832), which has sunk without trace.

To the end of his career, Southey remained intrigued by the more introspective aspects of the form, and what biography could tell us about an inner life. He later wrote long and thoughtful Lives of John Wesley (1820), John Bunyan (1830), and the poet William Cowper (1835). They have striking passages, such as the moment when the boy Wesley is dramatically–and symbolically–saved from a house fire, ‘a brand plucked from the burning’. Yet none of them have the narrative flair and the instinctive passion of his portrait of Nelson, whom he once described in an inspired moment truly worthy of a Poet Laureate, as ‘the hero, the darling hero of England’.

SELECT CHRONOLOGY (#ulink_0fe664c2-473f-5dde-9ab0-effa0a008d7e)

1758 (29 September) Horatio Nelson born at Burnham Thorpe, Norfolk

1774 Robert Southey born in Bristol

1771 Nelson joins the Royal Navy as a midshipman at Chatham

1773 Nelson sails to the Arctic

1777 Nelson sails to the West Indies

1787 Nelson marries Mrs Fanny Nisbet on Nevis, in the British Caribbean

1788 Nelson retires to Norfolk on half-pay

1792 Southey goes to Oxford University

1793 (January) Nelson given command of HMS Agamemnon (September) Nelson first meets Emma Hamilton at Naples

1794 (July) Nelson loses sight of right eye while besieging Calvi, Corsica

1795 Southey lectures with Coleridge in Bristol

1796 Southey sails to Spain

1797 (February) Nelson ‘breaks the line’ at the Battle of Cape St Vincent (July) Nelson loses right arm at Santa Cruz

1798 (August) Nelson wins the Battle of the Nile (Aboukir Bay) Southey publishes his ballads, ‘The Inchscape Rock’ and ‘The Battle of Blenheim’

1799 Nelson in Naples with Emma Hamilton Execution of Caraccioli, and Neapolitan ‘rebels’

1800 Nelson separates from Lady Nelson

1801 (April) Nelson disobeys orders at the Battle of Copenhagen

Nelson’s illegitimate daughter, Horatia, born Southey publishes Thalaba, the Destroyer