'Absent from you, I feel no pleasure: it is you, my dearest Fanny, who are everything to me. Without you I care not for this world. . . . This you are well convinced are my present sentiments: God Almighty grant they may never change. Nor do I think they will: indeed, there is, as far as human knowledge can judge, a moral certainty they cannot: for it must be real affection that brings us together.'
`The Navy,' wrote the Boreas's first lieutenant, Thomas Wallis, 'lost its greatest ornament by Nelson's marriage. It's a national loss that such an officer should marry. Had it not been for that circumstance I foresee he would be the greatest officer in the Service.'
Nelson and Fanny made their first home together in the parsonage at Burnham Thorpe, from which his father moved out into a nearby cottage. And the five uninterrupted years that they lived there together should have laid the foundations of an enduring partnership. They proved to be the reverse: Nelson and Fanny were as fire and water; as a hawk mated to a dove. There might be love in the physical sense, but there was little intellectual companionship, no spiritual comradeship. His enormous vitality was at odds with her shy, retiring disposition. She was afflicted with such frequent colds and suffered so much from rheumatism and nervous debility, that she became more and more concerned with herself rather than for her husband.
More important, Nelson, having spent the greater part of sixteen years at sea, could not rest content with the quiet life of a country gentleman. The Navy proved to be his enduring passion; another ship was his chief ambition; and as time passed and none was vouchsafed him, he grew more and more restless. Above all, he and Fanny were unable to seal their marriage with a child. And it was he who suffered the greater disappointment when none was born; for all his devotion to him, Josiah was of Fanny's blood: Nelson wanted a child of his own.
However, not too much, indeed little, should be made of Nelson's and Fanny's incompatible temperaments at this stage of their lives. For after they were parted he wrote (in August 1793): 'I shall rejoice to be with you again. Indeed, I look back as to the happiest period of my life . . . being united to such a good woman'; and a year later: 'All my joy is placed in you, I have none separated from you.' The consequences, tragic for her, near disastrous for his career, always a stain on his character, were nearly a decade away. In 1792 their marriage seemed to be a satisfactory one, except for Nelson's growing anxiety for another sea command. Hood, now Second Naval Lord as well as a Member of Parliament for the City of Westminster, from which he had unseated the redoubtable Charles James Fox, assured him that 'a ship in peaceable times was not desirable; but that should any hostilities take place, I need not fear having a good ship'. But though a dispute with Spain over Nootka Sound, Vancouver Island, so nearly threatened war that Howe was required to hoist his flag in command of a fleet of thirty-one sail-of-the-line in Torbay in the summer of 1790, this promise was not fulfilled.
'My not being appointed to a ship is so very mortifying that I cannot find words to express what I feel,' Nelson told Prince William, now Duke of Clarence. Hood did not conceal the reason: 'The King was impressed with an unfavourable opinion of me,' which Nelson ascribed to 'a prejudice at the Admiralty . . . against me, which I can neither guess at, nor in the least account for.' His pride would not allow him to admit that the officious zeal with which he had carried out his peacetime duties in the Boreas, had spoiled the reputation he had gained for himself as a young captain of exceptional promise up to and including his time in the Albemarle, chiefly in war. Against such influential friends as the King (stricken with his first attack of mental illness in 1788), the Duke of Clarence (preoccupied with the Regency crisis), and Lord Hood, he had to count more opponents than the docile Hughes, and the dishonest government officials in the Leeward Islands, in an age that placed little value on honesty in the handling of public money; in which 'fiddling the books' was rife in the highest places.
Whether Nelson would, nonetheless, have been given a command if a war in 1790 had required more ships to be commissioned, is a question that was rendered academic by the Nootka Sound Convention. But for how much longer than this he would have had to wait before receiving a further appointment, was answered sooner than anyone expected. Pitt's confident prophecy, made in 1791, that 'there never was a time when, from the situation of Europe, we might more reasonably expect fifteen years of peace', was proved false within a year. And 'when danger looms close at hand, the best men . . . are not left in the cold shade of official disfavour.'
III Ship-of-the-Line 1793-1796
Britain's initial reaction to the French Revolution, begun by the storming of the Bastille in July 1789, was one of sympathy for a nation that had endured the absolute rule of a frivolous and extravagant monarchy, epitomized in King Louis XIV, le Roi Soleil, ever since the States-General had last been allowed to meet as long ago as 1614. But when 'liberté, egalité, fraternité' were enforced by atrocities that culminated in the massacres of September 1792, this sympathy waned and, with the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793, evaporated altogether. Pitt, for whom the Revolution had seemed a domestic upheaval without repercussions on British policy, lost all hope of keeping the peace when the Convention not only proclaimed France a republic, but offered help to any nation that would throw off the shackles of monarchy. France's subsequent declarations of war on Austria, Sardinia and Prussia, the first involving occupation of the Austrian Netherlands followed by a threat to invade Holland, was Britain's 'moment of awakening'. As 'Peter Simple' has expressed it,
'Almost overnight the silly Lefties [headed by Charles James Fox] who had been fawning on the French Revolution, much as the silly Lefties of our own time fawned on the Russian Revolution [of 1917], were utterly discredited. Englishmen of every class suddenly realized that their ancient rights and liberties were in peril [as they did again in 1939]. Complacency and appeasement were sloughed off. Britain stood to arms. And a stunned French Ambassador [Chauvelin] reported to his Government that the English were scarcely recognizable.' Daily Telegraph, 11 April 1969.
France reacted with a declaration of war in February 1793, and in the same year Holland and Spain joined the First Coalition in a titanic struggle that, with one brief interval, engulfed Europe for more than two decades.
For Nelson, this new war with France came at a propitious time. He had reached the prime age of thirty-five, with fourteen years seniority as a post-captain, without achieving command of a ship-of-the-line; nor had Divine Providence favoured him with a chance to prove himself in battle. Now Britain must 'look to her moat': against an enemy with such a large Fleet, every available British warship would be needed. (1) On 7 January 1793 Nelson wrote jubilantly to Fanny: 'After clouds come sunshine. . . . Lord Chatham [the Prime Minister's elder brother, who had succeeded Howe as First Lord in 1788] yesterday made many apologies for not having given me a ship before this time, but that if I chose to take a 64-gun ship to begin with, I should as soon as in his power be removed into a 74.' Three weeks later he was appointed to the Agamemnon. Built at Buckler's Hard on the Hampshire Beaulieu river in 1781, she was 'without exception one of the finest 64s in the Service . . . with the character of sailing most remarkably well'. Chatham kept his promise in August, but by then Nelson was so satisfied with the Agamemnon that he rejected the offer of a larger vessel. 'I cannot give up my officers,' he wrote of a body whose lieutenants included his cousin, Maurice Suckling, and George Andrews, brother of the girl whom he had loved at St Omer, and whose gunroom messed his stepson, Josiah, now twelve years old. And the years which he spent in her hold a peculiar relation to Nelson's story. This was the period in which expectation passed into fulfilment, when development long arrested by unpropitious circumstances resumed its outward progress under the benign influence of a favouring environment, and the bud, whose rare promise had long been noted by a few discerning eyes, unfolded into the brilliant flower, destined in its maturity to draw the attention of the world. (Mahan in his Life of Nelson)
Leaving a disgruntled wife in
lodgings in the Norfolk town of Swaffham, because she refused to stay at Burnham Thorpe alone, Nelson joined the Agamemnon at Chatham on 7 February. With a crew composed largely of volunteers, which his old friend Locker, now Commodore at Sheerness, did much to help him obtain, Nelson sailed from the Nore in mid-April to join Rear-Admiral William Hotham's division, with which he spent the next two months off the Scillies, keeping the approaches to the Channel open for a homebound convoy of East Indiamen, 'not having seen a single Frenchman'. In June these five ships-of-the-line joined six more under Hood, with his flag in the 100-gun Victory, and set course for the Mediterranean, where Nelson's friend and patron assumed the appointment of Commander-in-Chief of a fleet totalling twenty-two sail-of-the-line.
Hood's first objective, before he could give seaborne support to the Austrian army against the French in northern Italy, was the large French fleet lying in Toulon, off which he arrived in the latter half of July, to be reinforced some weeks later by a Spanish fleet under Admiral Don Juan de Langara, of 'very fine ships [twenty-four of-the-line] but shockingly manned'. Hood's problem, as Nelson noted, was how to induce 'these red-hot [French] gentlemen' to come out and give battle. But a close Anglo-Spanish blockade was of small consequence to the French commander, Rear-Admiral the Conte de Trogoff, when the task of commissioning thirty-one sail-of-the-line of a Navy that had sacrificed many of its officers to the guillotine, proved insuperable. By 17 August the faction which had seized power in Toulon had had enough of the Revolution; declaring for King Louis XVII and alliance with England, they deposed Trogoff and surrendered both port and fleet.
Nelson chanced to be elsewhere when Hood's and de Langara's seamen and marines occupied this 'strongest place in Europe'. The Agamemnon had been detached to Naples with dispatches for Sir William Hamilton, the sixty-three-year-old British Minister to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, (all of Italy to the south of the Papal States and the island of Sicily) whose enthusiasm for collecting Italian old masters and Etruscan vases (2) was only rivalled by his esoteric interest in volcanoes. Neapolitan troops were urgently required at Toulon as reinforcements against advancing Republican forces. Judging the need to persuade the Court to meet this requirement sufficient to override Hood's orders - that the Agamemnon was to rejoin the fleet at its anchorage in Hyeres Bay without delay - Nelson accepted Hamilton's invitation to be his guest at the Palazzo Sessa so that he could add his own persuasive words to those of the Minister's negotiations with the singularly foolish King Ferdinand I, and his Prime Minister, the ambitious Sir John Acton, a French-born Englishman who owed his appointment to the machinations of the king's dominant partner, the forceful, cold-blooded Queen Maria Carolina, sister of the unfortunate Queen Marie Antoinette who was about to lose her head on the guillotine.
It was in this way that Nelson met for the first time Hamilton's second wife (his first had died in 1782), the twenty-eight-year-old former Emily Lyon, better known to the artist Romney as Emma Hart. Having been persuaded to take this amoral young country girl from the Paddington Green bed of his impecunious nephew, Charles Greville, into his own more sumptuous one, the British envoy had married her in 1791 so that she would be persona grata in a city which was then, after Paris, the largest on the European continent. Nelson was sufficiently impressed by her beauty and captivating personality to tell Fanny: 'Lady Hamilton has been wonderfully kind and good to Josiah. She is a young woman of amiable manners . . . who does honour to the station to which she is raised.' (Daughter of a Cheshire blacksmith, she had begun life as a nursemaid in Wales.) But there was no more between them than that: 'not a ripple disturbed the surface of his soul'. (Mahan in his Life of Nelson.)
Nelson was too busy arranging the embarkation of 6,000 troops. Moreover, he had no sooner sealed his diplomacy by inviting the King, accompanied by the Hamiltons, on board the Agamemnon (the Queen was in purdah, pregnant with one of her seventeen children), than a French warship was reported off Sardinia, escorting a small convoy, and 'I had nothing left for the honour of our Country but to sail, which I did in two hours afterwards'. He showed this devotion to duty just four days after the Agamemnon's arrival at Naples; and it was to be five years before he saw either Sir William or Emma again.
Nelson found his quarry, a 40-gun frigate, in Leghorn, but since she would not leave the safety of this neutral port for so long as a British ship-of-the-line lay to seaward, he moved on, to reach Toulon on 5 October. There Hood rewarded his initiative at Naples, and the success attending his diplomacy, of which the arrival of the much-needed troops was abundant proof, with a fresh mission. The Agamemnon was ordered to join Commodore Robert Linzee's squadron at Cagliari in Sardinia. En route, Nelson had his first brush with the enemy, here described in his own words. On the 22nd the Agamemnon 'fell in with five sail of French men-of-war, four frigates and a brig [in fact, three frigates, a corvette and a brig]. Brought one of the frigates to action [for some three hours] but a calm prevented our capturing her. The other frigates . . . found enough to do to take care of their consort. . . . [and] declined bringing us again to battle although with such a superiority they ought to have taken us. . . . We lost only one man killed and six wounded, although my ship was cut to pieces, being obliged to receive the enemy's fire under every disadvantage, believing for a long time one of the enemy to have been [a ship]-of-the-line. . . .
'We know now . . . that it was the Melpomène, 44 guns, 400 men, who got the dressing from us. She had 24 men killed, 50 wounded, and the ship so much damaged as to be laid up dismantled. . . . She would have struck long before we parted but for the gunner who opposed it, and the colours were ordered to be struck by general consent when we ran into a calm whilst the other [French] ships came up with a fresh breeze and joined their consort. She is allowed . . . to be the finest frigate out of France and the fastest sailer; we were unlucky to select her; the others we could outsize. Had she struck I don't think the others would have come down and I should have had great credit in taking her from such a superior force. . . .
'I had every disadvantage but in the zeal and gallantry of my officers and ship's company. . . Their force united was 170 guns, 1,600 men, to Agamemnon 64 guns, 345 men; the enemy superior to us, 1,255 men. Had they been English a 64 never could have got from them.'
This spirited action is discussed further in Chapter IV. Here one comment will suffice: in Nelson's view one Englishman was a match for three Frenchmen.
On arrival at Cagliari 'we worked all night fishing our masts and yards and stopping shot holes, mending sails and splicing our rigging' so as to be ready to sail again next day, because Hood's orders required Linzee's squadron to proceed to Tunis as soon as it had been reinforced by the Agamemnon. 'You are to expostulate with . . . the Bey . . . on the impolicy of his giving . . . support to so heterogenous a government as the present one of France, composed of murderers and assassins, who have recently beheaded their Queen in a manner that would disgrace the most barbarous savages.' (Hood's, not Nelson's, strong words: the latter was far from being the only Englishman who 'hated the French'.) A French convoy, escorted by an 80-gun ship-of-the-line and a frigate, all lying in Tunis Bay, was proof of this support.
The Bey agreed that regicide was a heinous crime, but 'if historians told the truth, the English had once done the same'. Nelson wanted to treat this impertinent answer in one of two ways: arguing that the Bey was no better than a pirate, he pressed Linzee to seize the French ships without further ado; alternatively, if Linzee insisted on respecting Tunisian neutrality, he should offer the Bey a bribe of £50,000 ($120,000) to surrender the convoy, which was worth at least £300,000 ($720,000). But the Commodore refused to go beyond the letter of his instructions; and, to Nelson's disgust, when Hood was apprised of the position, the squadron was ordered to withdraw lest the Bey be driven to joining the war on the side of France.
Another paragraph in Hood's new orders was, however, some consolation: Nelson was rewarded for his near capture of the Melpomène.
'Thank G
od! Lord Hood has ordered me . . . to command a squadron of frigates off Corsica and the coast of Italy, to protect our trade, and that of our new ally, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and to prevent any ship or vessels of whatever nation, from going into the port of Genoa. I consider the command as a very high compliment, there being five older captains in the fleet.'
Now he would be on his own, able to use his initiative, unhindered by the pusillanimous attitude of a man such as Linzee. His likely opponents were two French frigates in San Fiorenzo Bay, another at Bastia, and the damaged Melpomène lying at Calvi. He spent a month in pursuit of them before calling at Leghorn for provisions and water towards the end of December, when he heard bad news from Toulon. Directed by an energetic, twenty-four-year-old Corsican major, who spelled his name Napoleone Buonaparte, and whose first choice of a career had been service in the French Navy rather than the Army, Revolutionary artillery had gained command of the roadstead. Thus compelled to relax their tenuous hold on Toulon, the allies had managed to wreck the arsenal, burn nine French ships-of-the-line, and carry off four more, including Trogoff's flagship, the 120-gun Commerce de Marseille, before withdrawing their troops. But the evacuation had been carried out in such haste, with consequent panic and confusion, especially among the Neapolitan and Spanish forces, that as many as eighteen French sail-of-the-line had escaped destruction.
This considerable reverse tempted Nelson into writing that 'our sea war is over in these seas', and into supposing that he would see more action if he could arrange a transfer to the West Indies. He had yet to appreciate the strategic importance of the Mediterranean in Britain's struggle against the French. He also underestimated his Commander-in-Chief, aged sixty-nine but 'as active as a man of forty'. If Hood was to keep an effective watch on the French fleet in Toulon, he needed a secure base nearer than Gibraltar to which to send his ships to replenish with provisions and water. Since Spain had retaken Minorca in 1782, and was now wavering in her loyalty to the First Coalition, he turned his eyes on Corsica, whose resistance leader, General Pasquale de Paoli, had offered to cede it to the British if they would help him expel the hated French, to whom Genoa had sold the island in 1768 against the wishes of its people. Having established a close blockade of the island, Hood ordered Nelson, whom he now recognized to be his most outstanding subordinate, to conduct a series of coastal raids - seizing one 'happy moment' to land sixty of the Agamemnon's seamen and marines to burn Corsica's only mill and throw its store of flour into the sea, another to destroy four vessels loaded with wine - to divert the attentions of the garrison from San Fiorenzo Bay on the north coast the while General Sir David Dundas disembarked 4,000 troops there early in January 1794.
Nelson the Commander Page 4
