Men of Honour

by Adam Nicolson

  The received image of Nelson’s deathbed is of a place of quiet and privacy, surrounded by his chosen companions, as if in a shrine. It cannot have been like that. The thumping and shuddering battle was still shaking Victory to her bones. Just above his head the 32-pounder battery was still bellowing and roaring at the enemy. ‘Oh Victory, Victory,’ Nelson said, murmuring to himself as the recoil from another broadside shocked the air inside the battleship, ‘how you distract my poor brain.’ The cockpit was full of the Victory’s eighty wounded men. The shouts of those above reached down into the flickering dark. Nelson, even from the beginning, was able only to whisper, knowing he was dying, full of anxiety, repeating himself, returning to the great secret of his life. He told Beatty he was ‘gone’ and then whispered to him, ‘Remember me to Lady Hamilton. Remember me to Horatia. Remember me to all my friends. Doctor, remember me to Mr Rose; tell him I have left a will and left Lady Hamilton and Horatia to my country.’

  As one by one the French and Spanish ships around Victory struck their flags, the men cheered and at each new shout Nelson asked what the noise meant. On one of these occasions, the flag lieutenant John Pasco, who was also lying wounded in the cockpit, said it was the surrender of a Frenchman. Nelson must have known that but it betrays his frame of mind, something that has also been forgotten in our knowledge of the British victory. Nelson was intensely anxious about the battle’s outcome. ‘He evinced great solicitude for the event of the battle.’ Doctor Alexander Scott and the purser, Walter Burke, a cousin of the great Edmund Burke, tried to calm him. The two of them supported his back so that he lay in a semi-recum bent position, which was how he felt least discomfort. The huge internal loss of body fluids made him thirsty. He asked again and again for ‘drink, drink’ and ‘fan, fan’ and they gave him sips of lemonade, as was given to the other wounded, as well as water and wine. They fanned him with a paper. He became desperate for cool air. Their reassuring words irritated him. Burke told him he would carry the news of the great victory to England. ‘It is nonsense, Mr Burke,’ Nelson said, ‘to suppose I can live.’ Dr Scott, the ship’s chaplain, told him he should trust to Providence to restore him to his friends and to his country. ‘Ah Doctor!’ Nelson said, ‘it is all over; it is all over.’

  These are the words people say on their deathbeds. They murmur and repeat. Sharpness turns hazy, and present reality gives way to drift and uncertainty. The dying man is with the people who surround him and then profoundly alone. He thinks urgently of present needs and then just as suddenly moves into a much longer perspective, scarcely tethered to this life. Sudden moments of the old self appear, as if floating up in the mist. A young midshipman brought a message down from Hardy, desperately busy on the quarterdeck. Nelson asked who the boy was. It was Hardy’s aide-de-camp, a young midshipman called Richard Bulkeley. ‘It is his voice,’ Nelson said, his eyes clearly closed, and then: ‘Remember me to your father.’ Lieutenant Richard Bulkeley had been an army officer with Nelson in a desperate campaign in Nicaragua twenty years before, and had remained his friend ever since. It was to Lieutenant Bulkeley that he had told the story of his teenage vision, in which the radiant orb of heroism and glory had come to him on board the Dolphin.

  Nelson wanted Hardy and called for him again and again, thinking his absence must mean that the captain had also been killed. They were undoubtedly friends. Hardy loved and revered his admiral and Nelson loved being loved by him. Their friendship contained within it their difference in rank, but when Hardy came down to see him, over an hour after Nelson had been wounded, what they said was the conversation between friends. Its every nuance was recorded, as though this friendship and this evidence of friendship was somehow what this battle was for.

  As he was told Hardy was coming to see him, Nelson clearly summoned strength from within him, opened his eyes and sat up. They shook hands and Nelson said, ‘Well, Hardy, how goes the battle? How goes the day with us?’ That is the bright public man speaking, not the haunted, wounded figure, muttering half to himself of Emma and Horatia and the need for drink. ‘Very well, my Lord,’ Hardy said. ‘We have got twelve or fourteen of the enemy’s ships in our possession.’ ‘I hope,’ Nelson said, ‘none of our ships have struck, Hardy?’—surely a smile attached to that? ‘No, my Lord,’ Hardy said, ‘there is no fear of that.’ Then Nelson has him come nearer, the public moment quite suddenly giving way to the private. ‘I am a dead man Hardy. I am going fast: it will be all over with me soon. Come nearer to me. Pray let my dear Lady Hamilton have my hair, and all other things belonging to me.’ Just as much as the public commander, the unexampled imposer of British violence on British enemies, this quiet and tender Nelson is the figure who stands in granite eighteen feet tall on his column in Trafalgar Square. He is the hero humanised.

  Nelson comes and goes. He wants to die. He knows he is dying, but he regrets his death. He imagines Emma Hamilton there with him and feels distressed at the distress she must feel. He compares his situation to other sailors he had known who had been wounded in the spine. He talks to Beatty and tells Beatty that he is dying. ‘I know it,’ he said. ‘I feel something rising in my breast which tells me I am gone.’ It was, in all likelihood, the tide of his own blood. Beatty tells him that nothing can be done for him and, with the emotion released by expressing the words, the surgeon is then forced to turn away to hide the tears in his own eyes. Again and again, reflecting on his life, Nelson dwells on its two poles, his private and public selves. Between the sips of lemonade and watered wine, he says, almost alternately, ‘God be praised, I have done my duty’ and to the Rev. Dr Scott, ‘Doctor, I have not been a great sinner,’ the smile in that quite audible now, two hundred years later.

  Overhead, the battle continued. In front of Victory, the Bucentaure had been raked in turn by the Téméraire, Neptune, Leviathan and Conqueror. The ship scarcely existed any longer. Almost every ally around her either sailed onwards, deserting their flagship, or fell away to leeward where they could play no part in defending her. The British savagery descended on the Bucentaure. Her captain was wounded in the mouth; her first lieutenant lost a leg. The senior unwounded officer was the second lieutenant and the surgeons could not cope. In all, some 450 men were killed or wounded out of a ship’s complement of about 800. Men bled to death in the dark. No seamen were left on the upper deck; there was no rigging left for them to handle and none of the upper deck guns were serviceable. Villeneuve sent the few remaining men below to save their lives.

  The admiral alone, aware of the catastrophe happening to his ship and fleet, stayed above, walking to and fro on his quarterdeck. But no piece of flying metal saved him from ignominy. By about 1.40, half an hour after Nelson had been shot, all three of the Bucentaure’s masts went over the side. All the boats had been destroyed by gunfire. There was nothing Villeneuve could do but surrender. The imperial eagle was thrown into the Atlantic and the French admiral struck his flag. Within the remains of his ship, the dead were no longer recognisable but lay along the middle of each deck in rough piles of blood and guts through which the roundshot and the splinters had ploughed again and again. The British officers who went aboard to take command of the ships picked their way past these sights which left them with memories of little but disgust.

  The fire of the huge 136-gun Santísima Trinidad, the only four-decker in the world, with a crew of 1,115 men, just ahead of the Bucentaure, was doing terrible damage to those around her, shots removing the stomachs and arms of the British gunners. One shot, striking one of the great guns, split into jagged pieces, each one of which killed or wounded its man. But for all that, it was only a question of time before the Santísima Trinidad, surrounded by five or six British ships, surrendered. First, as an officer on the Conqueror described it, the vast vessel ‘gave a deep roll with the swell to leeward, then back to windward, and in her return every mast went by the board, leaving an unmanageable hulk on the water.’ Every sail in the Santísima Trinidad was deployed to its fullest extent, as she had been t
rying in the lightest of airs to make her way out of the encircling pack of British ships: ‘her immense topsails had every reef out, her royals were sheeted home but lowered, and the falling mass of the squaresails and rigging, plunging into the water at the very muzzles of our guns, was one of the most magnificent sights I ever beheld.’ It is something of the effect, but tripled and quadrupled, which Turner painted in his depiction for George IV of Victory losing her foremast: beauty in the destruction of beauty, the summit and depths of the sublime.

  Then, a moment of honour. The smallest battleship in the British fleet, the 65-gun Africa, captained by Henry Digby, decided to add the Santísima Trinidad to his tally of prizes. Her masts and colours had gone; she had ceased firing. He sent his first lieutenant, John Smith, with a party of men, to take command. He climbed up into the wreck of the Spanish flagship. The quarterdeck was mere devastation. None of the leading figures of the Spanish fleet was there to greet Smith. Admiral de Cisneros had been wounded. His commodore, Don Francisco de Uriarte and the captain of the ship, Don Ignacio de Olaeta, were with him also down below, wounded by the British gunfire. There was a Spanish officer on the quarter-deck and he greeted Smith with great courtesy. Smith asked for the surrender of the Santísima Trinidad. The officer told him, politely, that he was mistaken. The Santísima Trinidad had not surrendered. She had merely paused to provide the guns with more powder, and although she had lost all three of her masts, and she was roiling like a dead whale in the swell, she would soon resume the battle. Lieutenant Smith apologised for his ridiculous and insulting mistake, gathered his men about him, and was escorted back to the ladder, down the side of the flagship to his waiting boat and back to the Africa. This was honourable but mere bravado: the Santísima Trinidad did not fight again and the British ships left her to be taken in tow later, with her cargo of dead and her freight of wounded pride.

  At about 3.30, Hardy came down below again to Nelson and again their conversation makes its turns between the inner and the outer man. The flag captain suggests that Collingwood should take over command of the fleet. Nelson, with sudden energy, attempts to lift himself off his deathbed to deny that position to anyone but himself or at least to Hardy as his deputy. There is no calm going into death here, no Keatsian acceptance of its rest. The level of tension rises in him till the last. But then Nelson falls back into the arms of Scott and Burke. ‘In a few minutes I shall be no more,’ he says. And then, even more quietly, a sudden need for intimacy, perhaps for love. ‘Don’t throw me overboard, Hardy.’ Hardy says he won’t, of course he won’t. They have already discussed where he is to be buried: not in the cold enveloping muds beneath Westminster Abbey, where the old memories of the marshes hold a terror for Nelson of dissolution and softness. No, he is to be buried in St Paul’s, high and dry on the hill around which the City of London was first made. ‘Take care of my dear Lady Hamilton,’ Nelson then says, ‘take care of poor Lady Hamilton. Kiss me, Hardy.’ It is Nelson’s cheek that Hardy kneels down to kiss, their faces close, the love acknowledged and the barriers down. ‘Now I am satisfied,’ Nelson said. There, in that calm sentence, is a kind of private millennium, an arrival, a sense that the race is done. Then again he said ‘Thank God, I have done my duty.’ Hardy stood for a few minutes looking down at the man he loved and admired. Nelson’s eyes were now closed, his mind no more than half aware. Hardy knelt again and kissed him on the forehead. ‘Who is that?’ Nelson said quickly, coming up to consciousness from the depths of his reverie. ‘It is Hardy,’ the captain said. Nelson slumped back and replied, ‘God bless you Hardy.’ With that the flag captain left the cockpit for the quarterdeck. He had been with him about eight minutes and he knew he would never see him alive again.

  This minute-by-minute account of Nelson’s death is due almost entirely to the Authentic Narrative published in 1807 by William Beatty, the surgeon. It is, in one sense, Nelson’s great memorial, the depiction of the man by which he is most known. All Nelson is there: affectionate, anxious, commanding, impatient, trusting, pious, romantic, heroic, mortal. This is the figure which the 19th century inherited. Beatty’s Nelson has an air of completeness and resolution. His duty is done and in the light of that his failings are irrelevant. He worries but his worries are set to rest. Battle has become for him, as it would be for the century that followed, a kind of absolution. Deep in the company of the men who loved him, he is somehow blessed by battle and by his death within it. It is not quite a sanctification, because his sinfulness is not absent. He turns to his own guilt again and again; he thinks again and again of Emma and Horatia, both evidence, in the increasingly austere moral atmosphere of early-19th-century England, of a sin against marriage and its vows. Nelson had treated his wife abominably. In letters to Emma, he had referred to Frances Nelson simply as ‘the impediment’; he had cruelly spurned her own attempts to restore their marriage. He had explicitly longed for both her and Sir William Hamilton to die so that he and Emma might be happy together. But the sinfulness is set within the broader frame of the duty having been done, that duty consisting in the animal courage, the imposition of order, faith in his own daring, the love of his fellow officers and men, the acting out here in this bloody cockpit of the humanity of the victor. In short, as Nelson reviews his life, he recognises that, despite its sinfulness, it has been a life of honour.

  This is almost a recreation of West’s Death of Wolfe, but there are differences. Nelson, like Wolfe, expires at the moment of victory, but Nelson’s death has moved away from Wolfe’s very public setting; this moment has gone downwards and inwards towards privacy. It is an individual, not a public moment. It is a private tragedy not a public loss. West painted a version of the death of Nelson which imitated his Death of Wolfe, but the Nelson painting is a failure. It is historically false, as the Wolfe picture is historically false, but the Nelson picture is false in another sense: it rings untrue in the way that its great predecessor did not. West showed Nelson expiring on deck, with half his crew around him. It looks factually ridiculous—one blast from the Redoutable would have blown them away—but more than that it looks psychically ridiculous. The setting of the scene, the mise-en-scène, contradicts the meaning of what it hopes to portray. Other, slightly ludicrous paintings were made soon after Trafalgar of Nelson’s spirit being wafted up to heaven in the arms of Britannia, the apotheosis of his spirit, but they too are little more than historical curios. Drawing on a visual rhetoric which had meant more in the age of Rubens than of Lawrence or Goya, they were public formalities which missed the point. Only one painting of the death of Nelson registered with the spirit of the time and became, in endlessly recycled engravings and prints, the image of the moment which the 19th century preserved. It was not immensely popular at the time and engravings of it were outsold by prints of West’s painting. Nor is it, in itself, a particularly painterly work. There is a slight gaucheness, a lack of authority to the figures and its author, Arthur William Devis, is remembered for nearly nothing else. His father, Arthur Devis, had painted delicate and charming conversation pieces of mid-18th-century squires and their families, scenes from which all rhetorical grandeur had been stripped away. The father’s people look more like dolls than humans and the son’s paintings, translated forward 50 years, share some of that unreality.

  Nevertheless, there is an essence there. Devis’s Death of Nelson shows the scene in the cockpit. The space between the decks is painted too tall, and there is far too much light, most of it apparently emanating from the body of Nelson himself, but otherwise the scene is accurate, both physically and emotionally. The cockpit of the Victory is like a recreation of the tomb in which Christ’s body is laid. There is no publicity, no reference to larger aspects of the battle, let alone to imperial ambitions. The officers are in their uniforms but no Union flag disrupts the humanity of the scene. Benjamin West had sneered at it. It was, the President of the Royal Academy said, ‘A mere matter of fact [that] will never…excite awe and veneration.’ But that is why, for all its unearth
ly light, and its references to the death of Christ, the English people took it to heart as the image of a hero. A man is wounded; a man is loved; and a man dies. The absence of anything more is a reflection of his greatness. Devis’s imagery, curiously, is reminiscent of Christ’s birth in the stable.

  About a quarter of an hour after Hardy left him, Nelson became speechless. His pulse could scarcely be felt and his limbs and forehead were cold. The blood was draining from his veins. Nelson’s steward, Henry Chevalier, called the surgeon who came to him from the other wounded. Nelson suddenly opened his eyes, gazed up at the deck above him and then closed them again. No words passed but the Reverend Scott continued to rub his chest. Beatty left again and within five minutes the spirit left Nelson’s body. The steward fetched Beatty again and the surgeon confirmed it. Nelson had died at about 4.30 in the afternoon, two and three quarter hours after he had been wounded.

  The battle was won and Nelson knew of his victory. Twenty-five of the French and Spanish ships had been engaged by the British attack. Sixteen of them had by now surrendered. Victory was assured and Nelson had been martyred in its service.

  8

  Nobility

  October 21st to October 28th 1805

  Nobility: Dignity; grandeur; greatness

  SAMUEL JOHNSON, A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755

  As Nelson lay dying, one English officer was failing him. In the aftermath of Trafalgar, it was easy enough to imagine that everyone had played their part as the dictates of honour required. Certainly, Collingwood was reluctant to criticise any of the officers afterwards and only the faintest echoes survive of anything approaching cowardice in the British fleet. There is some evidence, though, that one of the English commanders, third in command after Nelson and Collingwood, Rear-Admiral the Earl of Northesk (he had unexpectedly inherited the title after the death of his elder brother), was reluctant to engage. As his flag-ship, the Britannia, approached the battle, Northesk stood on the quarterdeck, arguing with his captain, Charles Bullen. It was said that, with the fight already raging in front of them, Northesk ordered Bullen to reduce sail. After the battle, there was certainly some bitterness in the British fleet at Northesk’s reluctance to dive into the brutal and murderous mêlée which their colleagues were subject to. Edward Rotheram, Collingwood’s flag captain on the Royal Sovereign noted in his commonplace book afterwards that Northesk, ‘behaved notoriously ill in the Trafalgar action.’