by John Sugden
The full biography by Clarke and McArthur was hardly more critical. Frequently analysis and coherent narrative were abandoned in favour of doctored selections from the admiral’s correspondence. Although the authors professed to expose ‘the private feelings and motives, as well as the great principles of his public and professional character’, they trod warily – necessarily so when so many of the dramatis personae were still alive. McArthur probably knew about the mistress Nelson had abandoned in the Mediterranean, but saw no virtue in publishing what could only have been deeply repugnant to Lady Nelson. When it came to the admiral’s notorious affair with Emma Hamilton the plea of ignorance failed, so the authors merely declared the subject off limits. Henceforth, they said, their book would be ‘exclusively devoted to his more splendid public character’.7
So eagerly was the heroic interpretation of Nelson’s life embraced that for many years writers only ventured beyond it at their peril. When Thomas Joseph Pettigrew, an eminent medical man, antiquary and early Egyptologist, published his Memoirs of the Life of Vice-Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson in two hefty volumes in 1849 it was hissed out of print. Like his predecessors Pettigrew employed a documentary style of presentation, but his was an industrious, honourable and significant work. It had the inestimable advantage of following Sir Harris Nicolas’s monumental seven-volume set of The Dispatches and Letters of Vice Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson, published in 1844–6, still, for all its omissions and suppressions, the single most important book on the subject. In addition Pettigrew consulted papers with the Admiralty, something few of his successors felt it necessary to do, and hung his narrative around six hundred original documents he had somehow purchased from a collection formerly owned by Lady Hamilton.8
Those new letters, which proved beyond question that Nelson’s only surviving child was the progeny of an adulterous affair with Emma Hamilton, accounted for much of the violent reaction. Nelson’s faithful admirers castigated Pettigrew for publishing ‘letters written in his most unguarded moments’ and stamping ‘his memory with infamy’. Some even declared the letters forgeries, and Pettigrew died in 1865 with his reputation clouded. It was not until some of Pettigrew’s Nelson papers were used by John Cordy Jeaffreson for Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson (1888) and a number found their way into print as The Hamilton and Nelson Papers (1893–4) that the besmirched biographer was vindicated.9
By steering away from Nelson’s questionable private life and through a succession of heroic deeds against ill-intentioned foreigners the early biographies polished his image for popular consumption. But the major works were inedible compositions, and it was the new poet laureate, Robert Southey, who interpreted the admiral’s career for the nation in his classic Life of Nelson, endlessly reprinted since its first appearance in 1813. Southey admitted the difficulties naval history caused him. ‘I walk among sea terms as a cat goes in a china pantry, in bodily fear of doing mischief, & betraying myself,’ he wrote. Yet, though he added little new information his beautifully economic prose cemented the admiral’s status as the authentic British hero.10
Shorn of indiscretions Nelson made an ideal patriotic hero. Like most men of modest means he was interested in prize money, but seldom made pecuniary gain alone the engine of his larger actions. In fact he risked financial ruin in the public service several times. Nelson was relentlessly self-seeking, but it was attention, recognition and applause rather than money that fascinated him. As he once famously said, he wanted his name to stand on the record when those of the money-makers had been forgotten. The rewards he sought were more readily compatible with selfless and dutiful patriotism.
Southey’s Nelson was the ideal public servant who placed man above Mammon and ‘resolved to do his duty, whatever might be the opinion or conduct of others’. Moreover, whereas the Duke of Wellington was an aloof patrician with scant regard for the rank and file, as well as an unpopular Tory premier, Nelson appealed to Everyman. He was a monarchist, but disdained the sectional interests of elites and strove for the good of the nation as a whole, and he was to a considerable extent protective of and beloved by all ranks. Fittingly, therefore, though (unlike Wellington) he was only stingily rewarded by government he was acclaimed by the people as their champion.11
While Southey claimed Nelson for the nation, he particularly directed his book to the budding naval officers who would protect Britain’s control of the seas. The first important interpretative biographies of Nelson, published at the end of the nineteenth century, were even more conscious of his importance as a professional role model. Their interest was the admiral rather than the man, and they presented him as the ultimate exemplar of naval achievement. Nelson had inspired earlier sea officers, of course. His offensive spirit and belief in total victory had encouraged Hoste, Cochrane, Perry, Pellew and Codrington to win the last battles of the age of fighting sail. Nevertheless, it was not until the dawn of a new century that historians scrutinised Nelson’s career in detail to distil lessons for the ironclad navies of another time.12
The interest during this period was hardly surprising. The empire was at its height and the mother country’s massive economic power and global influence transparently rested upon naval muscle. It was also an age of awakening giants, such as the United States and Japan, and of international tension and imperial competition as the European powers divided into two armed camps and partitioned Africa. The American theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan’s seminal Influence of Sea Power Upon History (1890) was only the best known of several works that turned the eyes of ambitious nation-states towards maritime capability. Conflict was in the air, big battle fleets were building in Europe, America and Asia, and the British premier Lloyd George lobbied his electorate for a mandate on pensions and dreadnoughts. The Royal Navy saw off the German challenge during the First World War, but only just.13
Amid such ‘navalism’ the study of sea power flourished, and just as Clausewitz had ransacked the campaigns of Napoleon for his celebrated treatise on military principles, so emboldened naval historians turned to Nelson. Mahan’s magisterial Life of Nelson, originally published in two volumes in 1897, was the first important synthetic biography of the English admiral. Detailed, mature and informed, it was also an articulate and well-crafted narrative and remains the foundation of all subsequent assessments of Nelson the commander.
But in no sense did Mahan and his associates offer a comprehensive portrait. Their gaze, like those of the first generation of Nelson scholars, remained fixed upon his professional career, and though they ploughed long and deep furrows in the letters published by Nicolas and Morrison few looked much further for information. Perhaps worse, they were unduly idolatrous. Mahan was upset at suggestions that his hero could make a false statement – though many will be instanced in our pages – while his British counterpart, Sir John Knox Laughton, would brook no stain on the professional judgement of a man he saw as the ultimate naval icon. Sir John was a bonny fighter, as his fiercely independent contributions to the Dictionary of National Biography cuttingly attest, but he charged too vigorously and enjoyed bayoneting the wounded. His savage dismissal of Pettigrew’s book demonstrated not only his lack of interest in non-naval matters but also his capacity for forming hasty and ill-judged opinions.14
The generations confronting the Nazi war machine were probably the last to take the importance of the Royal Navy as read. To them it was still a shield about which there could be no complacency, and during the Second World War the image of Nelson remained a potent one. A remarkably wooden Laurence Olivier even portrayed the admiral in a British film designed to win American hearts to a crusade against the European dictators.15
It was at this time that the last full-dress biography of Nelson was published, first in the United States in 1946 and the following year in Britain. The author was Carola Oman (Lady Lenanton), who had inherited from her father, the noted Oxford don Charles W. C. Oman, the taste and tools for history and a rarer recognition that even groundbreaking research needs to be turned in
to a literate and accessible text. Her prize-winning Nelson was admirable in its scope and proportions. Unlike her main predecessors, she tackled her subject in the round, the man as well as the commander, and cast a mature and balanced eye over manuscripts unused by previous scholars, including mushrooming deposits at the National Maritime Museum and a rich collection of Lady Nelson’s papers made by Lady Llangattock. Both archives subsequently furnished material for George P. B. Naish’s invaluable supplement to Nicolas – Nelson’s Letters to His Wife and Other Documents, 1785–1831 (1958). Today, almost sixty years after Oman completed her book, it stands with Mahan’s as one of the two touchstones against which all other biographies must be measured.16
By the 1960s a sea change in the nation’s attitude to Nelson was becoming apparent. The admiral himself would not have been surprised at the growing indifference a securer generation was showing its naval heritage, for it had always been thus. In 1802 he had misquoted Thomas Jordan’s ancient epigram:
Our God and sailor we adore,
In time of danger, not before;
The danger past, both are alike requited,
God is forgotten, and the sailor slighted.17
Moreover, the empire was imploding and in an introspective postcolonial world generated as much shame as pride. In Britain academe became more insular, increasingly absorbed with socio-economic and constitutional change, and naval history, which had once earned knighthoods for eminent practitioners, became at best unfashionable, and, among intellectuals recoiling from anything that smacked of militarism, disreputable. As for Horatio Nelson, he was no longer sacred. His importance to our island story seemed uncertain, and the virtues for which he was synonymous – open-mouthed patriotism, public duty and personal courage – curiously outmoded. Amid growing cynicism common folklore and fiction focused ever more upon the admiral’s sexual rather than naval conquests.
At least a way opened for a franker portrait of the man, but although valuable monographs treated aspects of Nelson’s career few biographies in the half-century after the war took the subject very far. Professional historians had little interest, and popular writers satisfied themselves with well-known published sources and uncritical recapitulation. Only two quite different workers took their jackets off. The journalist Tom Pocock stubbornly refused to accept that there was nothing new to be said about Nelson and devoted a series of works to the subject during a particularly lean period. His books were undocumented and popular in style, but rested upon a substantial amount of fresh material, some of it from sources previously unexplored by any scholar. Pocock’s Horatio Nelson (1987) was the most adventurous biography for forty years, but his most original contribution was The Young Nelson in the Americas (1980).18
Terry Coleman’s Nelson: The Man and the Myth (2001) came from very different cloth. Nelson aficionados disliked the book, but it was a bravely irreverent work of commendable industry and added interesting facts and opinions. Regrettably, the author also ignored some of the recent research, and subjected Nelson’s career to an uneven and occasionally vindictive criticism. In that he encapsulated the spirit of his age as surely as the hagiographers of the nineteenth century had reflected theirs. A belief that only pejorative judgements can be measured ones seems to have entrenched itself not only in sales-obsessed journalism but also in academic worlds that once echoed to the clarion call of objectivity. As N. A. M. Rodger has written without total exaggeration, ‘no modern university historian could possibly write the life of a famous hero and hope to preserve his reputation, unless he destroyed that of his subject’. But sound portraits of complex and changing individuals are no more produced by the selection and exaggeration of the negative than they are by the positive. While Coleman’s book was refreshing in a tradition dominated by drum-beaters, it hardly offered a satisfying alternative.19
The need for a new full-dress biography has become increasingly evident. Much of the manuscript material remains relatively unexplored. The one hundred and fifteen volumes of Nelson papers in the British Museum, with other relevant deposits there, were closed during the war years, when Oman wanted to consult them, and no subsequent biography has shown systematic use. The Nelson collections at the National Maritime Museum have been considerably enriched over the years, and the Phillipps–Croker papers, originally preserved by Lady Hamilton and acquired as Oman’s book was going to press, alone contained thousands of unpublished documents. Most notably of all, neither Oman nor any successor made more than marginal use of the labyrinthine files of the Admiralty, Foreign, Colonial, War and Home Offices in the Public Record Office – hundreds of volumes and boxes of first-hand material of every description. As recently as 2002 another collection of Nelson papers, preserved by the aforementioned Alexander Davison, came onto the market. The present biography is the first to be based upon a systematic and comprehensive trawl of these and the other primary sources, published and unpublished, bearing upon Nelson and his activities.20
Then, too, our knowledge of Nelson had grown through disparate books and journals. Among relatively recent studies transforming our understanding of his times and career N. A. M. Rodger’s The Wooden World (1986), Brian Tunstall and Nicholas Tracy’s Naval Warfare in the Age of Sail (1990) and Brian Lavery’s Nelson and the Nile (1998) must be mentioned. For several years Colin White has been preparing a valuable supplementary volume of fresh Nelson letters for publication, and the Society for Nautical Research, the Nelson Society and the 1805 Club have contributed to a swelling body of revisionary material in the volumes of the Mariner’s Mirror, the Nelson Dispatch and the Trafalgar Chronicle. A work of assessment and integration is obviously needed.
It is time to fill the gaps in Nelson’s record, explain all its twists and turns and remove the persistent mythology. Some phases and facets of his career have been particularly neglected. The first thirty-five years, for example, though almost three-quarters of Nelson’s life, detained a mere forty pages of Pettigrew’s large two-volume biography and only twice as many of Mahan’s. Even Oman devoted only 17 per cent of her text to that earlier period. Partly this reflects a notion that the admiral’s final years as a history maker are the focus of public interest and need to be reached as hastily as possible, and partly the relative dearth of published sources for the career of the young Nelson which make it difficult to recover. Origins have a fascination of their own, however, and studies of human development have long alerted us to the vitally formative nature of early years. It is high time that Nelson’s, with the experiences and individuals shaping them, were fully addressed.
Nelson’s rise to prominence in the Mediterranean between 1793 and 1797 has only slightly been less underwritten, although it was during those years that he learned the art of an admiral and earned the recognition of his peers. In the present volume I have redressed these imbalances and provided the first comprehensive reconstruction of Nelson’s earlier career. In the process fresh information has had to be complemented by the modification or deletion of some of the canonical stories about Nelson. He actively promoted his own legend, and was being lionised before his death. Embellishments, misconceptions and outright fictions have continued to flourish, and the need to trace stories to source and ground a new biography in a professional evaluation of credible primary evidence has become a major imperative.
There have been many Nelsons because there have been many writers, tailoring material to different purposes, but I stand with the Duke of Wellington when he espoused the balanced portrait. Wellington only met Nelson once, in the summer of 1805, when the rising but comparatively obscure general visited the secretary for war and colonies in London after his return from India. Finding himself waiting in an anteroom with the immediately recognisable figure of Horatio Nelson, Wellesley (as he then was) began to converse, ‘if I can call it conversation, for it was almost all on his side and all about himself’ and in ‘a style vain and so silly as to surprise and almost disgust me’. But suspecting shortly that his audience was ‘somebody’, Ne
lson briefly left the room to investigate, returning ‘a different man, both in manner and matter’. Now he spoke as an ‘officer’ and ‘statesman’, and in later life Wellington couldn’t recall ‘a conversation that interested me more’.
Reflecting, the general mused that ‘if the secretary of state had been punctual and admitted Lord Nelson in the first quarter of an hour I should have had the same impression of a light and trivial character that other people have had, but luckily I saw enough to be satisfied that he was really a very superior man. But certainly a more sudden and complete metamorphosis I never saw.’ Wellington’s experience has been much quoted, but its warning about misleading abstractions is often forgotten. To understand Nelson it is necessary to see the whole of the man. In fact the triviality and the professionalism observed by Wellington were born of a common dynamic. They were both driven by Nelson’s need for distinction and acclaim. It spurred him to extreme endeavour, and to theatrical vanity. Both were sides of a single coin.21
The sea and seafaring necessarily feature substantially in every biography of Nelson, but we must remember that he was also a Georgian, governed by the circumstances of his age and influenced by its beliefs and attitudes. The eighteenth-century England that moulded Nelson is often lost among the swelling sails, fierce cannonades and straining shrouds and stays. A product of modest ‘middling’ stock, he rose to become a peer of the realm, but throughout remained a quintessential late eighteenth-century man. Neither an autocrat nor a populist, Nelson adhered to his notion of a naturally hierarchical society in which deferential inferiors were bound to betters by a system of paternalism. It was this vision, with its emphasis upon mutual obligations between governors and governed, that shaped his exercise of authority as well as his political attitudes. When we put Nelson back into the society in which he lived many of his actions and reactions readily fall into place.
