Nelson's Battles. Nicholas Tracy
Oliver Warner, remarked that
with the Battle of the Nile, such a light fell upon Nelson as might have distressed a man of another stamp. He welcomed it. He loved being a hero. Twin ardours burnt in him. One was for fame: the other for Emma Hamilton. Through his admiration for Lady Hamilton, Nelson made himself, at times, ridiculous. The evidence is overwhelming, some of it forced from reluctant friends.27
There is no denying that following his victory, the experience of adulation in so dissipated a court as that of Naples, and the constant attention of Sir William Hamilton’s beautiful and forceful wife Emma, went to Nelson’s head. For some months he neglected his duty, and exercised irresponsibly the latitude for ignoring orders which he allowed himself with such good results at the battles of Cape St Vincent, and Copenhagen, and which he was willing that his subordinates exercise when they were well placed to interpret his general intention. The Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean, Admiral Lord Keith, wrote to his sister that Nelson at Palermo was ‘cutting the most absurd figure possible for folly and vanity’.28 And Sir John Moore wrote that in the Neapolitan Court Nelson was ‘covered with stars, ribbons and medals, more like a Prince of an Opera than the Conqueror of the Nile. It is really melancholy to see a brave and good man, who has deserved well of his country, cutting so pitiful a figure.’29 Eventually, he was ordered home. Writing shortly after his death, Collingwood admitted that Nelson ‘liked fame, and was open to flattery, so that people sometimes got about him who were unworthy of him’. But, he concluded, Nelson was ‘a loss to his country that cannot easily be replaced’.30
In extenuation, it should be noted that the psychological strain was so great for Nelson in the days before the Nile battle, and later before Copenhagen, and when he sailed on what was to be his last campaign, that he experienced tormenting physical pain. If he had been brought straight back to England for a period of leave with his family after the Nile he might have dealt with the inevitable reaction with better balance. There is also reason to suspect that the head wound he received at the Nile affected his judgment.
Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, only met Nelson once, in September 1805 shortly before Nelson sailed on his last campaign. At first Nelson did not know who Wellesley was, and paraded all the foolish affectation of which he was capable. When he discovered Wellington’s identity, however, he entirely changed his manner.
All that I had thought a charlatan style had vanished, and he talked of the state of the country and of the aspect and probabilities of affairs on the continent with a good sense, and a knowledge of subjects both at home and abroad, that surprised me equally and more agreeably than the first part of our interview had done; in fact, he talked like an officer and a statesman.… I don’t know that I ever had a conversation that interested me more.31
His character was inconsistent, but most who knew him were able to come to terms with the vagaries, and the common man responded to him with wholehearted devotion.
He was loyal to his family, but in the end he deserted his wife for Emma Hamilton. Fanny was a quiet and dignified woman who was devoted to Horatio, and remained close to his father for the rest of his life.32 She had a reputation even before she met Nelson for being a sympathetic listener to ‘difficult’ people, and Nelson’s flag-captain at Trafalgar, Thomas Masterman Hardy, regarded her as the best of women. He deprecated his friend’s conduct. Fanny, however, was not one to feed his vanity, and her solicitude for his safety provoked him. She was made desperately unhappy by her husband’s betrayal, and good society in England did not exonerate him. The King all but snubbed him, and there was never any possibility that Emma would be accepted at court.
Emma was boisterous, more than a little vulgar, and incapable of any sympathy for her displaced rival, but she filled a need. She was a woman who is more easily respected in the twenty-first century than in her own. A blacksmith’s daughter who had been taken up by a succession of ‘protectors’ because of her beauty and vivacity, she had eventually been passed on to Sir William Hamilton by his nephew. She made the best of her vicissitudes, and retained an affection for all her lovers. Sir William was a remarkable man who used his post as Envoy to the Court of Naples to study antiquities and natural history. He eventually married Emma when he was sixty-one in 1791, but he accepted with complacency her attachment to Nelson. In Palermo, and again in England, the three shared a home.
During the last years of his life, Nelson was totally dependent emotionally upon Emma. She bore him the only child he was to have, a daughter, Horatia. A second child died soon after birth. Nelson called her his ‘wife’, and after Sir William’s death she most certainly was in every way but the legal formalities. Nelson’s evident wish to remake her into the domestic anchor that he had lost in Fanny, however, showed the limitations of his perceptiveness.
She was no less devoted to him. When the Franco-Spanish fleet was assembling in the late summer of 1805, however, she understood that he could not be happy unless he took command of the forces arrayed against them. According to Southey, she said: ‘Nelson, however we may lament your absence, and your so speedily leaving us, offer your services immediately, to go off Cadiz; they will be accepted, and you will gain a quiet heart by it.’ Southey had it that Nelson ‘looked at her ladyship for some moments; and, with tears in his eyes, exclaimed – ‘Brave Emma! Good Emma! if there were more Emmas, there would be more Nelsons; You have penetrated my thoughts.’33
Probably this recollection, which must have originated with Emma herself, was a pastiche. Nevertheless, it is consistent with her regard for Nelson as a hero who must be faithful to his duty. In his will, witnessed in the cabin of the Victory just before she came within range of the enemy guns, Nelson left Emma and Horatia to the care of his ‘King and Country’. Sadly to relate, both failed in their obligation to him.34
Nelson’s fatherly interest in his midshipmen continued all his life, and took the place of the son he never had. He tried to promote the naval career of Fanny’s son Josiah, and was exasperated by the latter’s drunkenness, but Josiah may perhaps be excused his failures which came to a head at the time of Nelson’s triumph at the Nile and betrayal of his mother. He later did well in business. Nelson had more success with his protégés such as William Hoste, Edward Parker who died of wounds after the abortive raid on Boulogne in 1801, and John Quilliam who was first lieutenant of Victory at Trafalgar.
Nelson’s Early Career
It is only necessary to sketch in the chronicle of Nelson’s life before he came to assume the responsibility of commanding British battlefleets. From the contemporary biography by Robert Southey, to those by Tom Pocock, Christopher Hibbert and Roger Knight, Nelson’s life has been the subject of numerous books.
He was born in Burnham Thorpe in Norfolk in 1758, the son of the rector. His mother died when he was young, leaving him with the chief recollection that she ‘hated the French’, and a great sense of loss he was never able to resolve. Horatio first joined the navy in 1770 when the fleet was mobilised during the Falkland Islands crisis.35 His mother’s brother, Captain Maurice Suckling, introduced him to the service. When the danger of war passed, Nelson made a voyage on a commercial vessel to the West Indies, and then on the Carcass, a survey vessel, which penetrated the ice fields north of Spitzbergen. Allegedly, Nelson had to be rescued from a youthful effort to kill a polar bear. He then made the voyage in a frigate to the East Indies. His promotions came fast, helped by Suckling’s appointment as Comptroller of the Navy Board in 1775 which gave him a patron with influence enough to take the exam for lieutenant at the early age of eighteen. Suckling had also given him a good grounding in seamanship, and in human relations.
In 1779 Nelson was ‘made’ Post-Captain at the very early age of twenty by an appointment to command the frigate Hinchinbrook. In 1780 he saw his first active service in a land operation against San Juan de Nicaragua, and nearly died there of fever. He recovered when he was invalided home, and an appointment to command the frigate Albemarle, which took him to the healthier climate of Canada, completed the cure. After the conclusion of the American Revolutionary War, Nelson was fortunate enough to obtain the appointment to the frigate Boreas in which he sailed to the West Indies with Lady Hughes as a passenger.
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