PENGUIN BOOKS

THE PURSUIT OF VICTORY

‘The flagship of the Nelson Fleet’ Independent, Books of the Year

‘This bicentenary of Trafalgar has been marked by a spate of first-class books … None is better, though, than The Pursuit of Victory’ John Crossland, Sunday Times, Books of the Year

‘A marvellous read, intriguing, protean, with a constantly fresh eye for detail: very like its subject, really’ Richard Hill, Naval Review

‘The Pursuit of Victory stands out for its comprehensive and scholarly account’ Christopher Bland, Sunday Telegraph, Books of the Year

‘The best of the excellent crop of biographies and naval histories to appear in the bicentenary year of the battle of Trafalgar’ Jonathan Sumption, Spectator

‘This book is not only an ideal book of reference, it also makes history come alive in a most original way. To understand fully what this extraordinary man was all about, this book is the definitive article’ Royal Naval Sailing Association Journal

‘If you are looking for the definitive “life”, undoubtedly this is the one’ Peter Firth, Lloyd’s List

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Roger Knight is one of Britain’s foremost experts on naval history and a renowned Nelson scholar. He was the Chief Curator and Deputy Director at the National Maritime Museum, London, from 1988 to 2000 and is now Visiting Professor of Naval History at the Greenwich Maritime Institute, University of Greenwich. He is also an experienced yachtsman, and has sailed most of the waters described in this book.

Roger Knight

The Pursuit of Victory

The Life and Achievement
of Horatio Nelson

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published by Allen Lane 2005

Published in Penguin Books 2006

This edition is published without endnotes and bibliography. Readers wishing to consult the book’s sources and bibliography should refer to the hardback edition published by Allen Lane 2005.

Copyright © Roger Knight, 2005

Maps copyright © John Gilkes, 1005

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

The acknowledgements on pp. 684–687 constitute an extension of this copyright page

ISBN: 978-0-14-193788-5

Dedicated to the memory of Admiral of the Fleet Lord Lewin of Greenwich 1920-1999

Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Charts and Text Illustrations

Note on the Text

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Prologue

I YOUTH AND DISAPPOINTMENT 1758–1793

1 Burnham Thorpe (September 1758–April 1771)

2 The Navy in 1771

3 Horace Nelson, Midshipman (May 1771–April 1777)

4 Lieutenant to Captain: The West Indies (April 1777-November 1780)

5 Albemarle (November 1780–March 1784)

6 Boreas and the West Indies (March 1784–July 1786)

7 Senior Naval Officer, Leeward Islands (August 1786-November 1787)

8 Half-pay in Norfolk (December 1787-December 1792)

II MATURITY AND TRIUMPH 1793-1798

9 The Navy in 1793

10 The Commissioning of the Agamemnon (January–August 1793)

11 The Western Mediterranean: Frustrated Subordinate (July 1793–July 1795)

12 The Western Mediterranean: Independent Command (July 1795–December 1796)

13 La Minerve and the Blanche to Porto Ferrajo (December 1796–February 1797)

14 The Battle of Cape St Vincent and the Blockade of Cadiz (14 February–14 July 1797)

15 Disaster at Santa Cruz (14 July–4 September 1797)

16 Recovery and High Command (September 1797–May 1798)

17 Chasing the French (3 May–1 August 1798)

18 The Battle of the Nile (1 August–22 September 1798)

III PASSION AND DISCREDIT 1798–1801

19 Palermo and Naples (22 September 1798–6 August 1799)

20 Dalliance and Dishonour (7 August 1799–8 November 1800)

21 Separation (8 November 1800–March 1801)

22 Copenhagen (March–2 April 1801)

23 Commander-in-Chief, Baltic Fleet (April–June 1801)

24 Boulogne (July–October 1801)

IV ADULATION AND DEATH 1801–1805

25 Peace and the Journey to Wales (October 1801–May 1803)

26 The Peace of Amiens (October 1801–May 1803)

27 Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean (May 1803–January 1805)

28 The Long Chase (January–September 1805)

29 Trafalgar (14 September–21 October 1805)

V THE TRANSFIGURATION

30 The Funeral (9 January 1806)

31 The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

32 The Summing-up

Chronology of Nelson’s Life

General Chronology: Naval, Military and Political Events

Nelson’s Ships: Size, Armament, Complements and a Full Listing of Officers

Biographical Sketches

Glossary

Text and Illustrations Permissions

Illustrations

1. Captain Horatio Nelson, 1781, by J. F. Rigaud

2. The Reverend Edmund Nelson, 1800, by Sir William Beechey

3. Captain William Locker by Gilbert Stuart

4. Midshipmen Studying between Decks On Board the ‘Pallas’, May 1775 by Gabriel Bray

5. Cuthbert Collingwood

6. Prince William Henry, later the duke of Clarence, c. 1791, by Richard Cosway.

7. Admiral Viscount Hood by James Northcote

8. Rear-Admiral Thomas Fremantle, after Domenico Pellegrini

9. The Agamemnon cutting out French vessels at Port Maurice on the Riviera coast, 1 June 1796, by Nicholas Pocock

10. The French enter Leghorn, 30 June 1796, after Carl Vernet

11. The sword of Rear-Admiral Don Francisco Winthuysen surrendered to Nelson at the Battle of St Vincent, 14 April 1797

12. Gilbert Elliot, later Lord Minto, 1794, by Sir Thomas Lawrence

13. William Windham, secretary-at-war, 1794–1801, by Sir Joshua Reynolds

14. Admiral Sir John Jervis, before 1797, by Lemuel Francis Abbott

15. Earl Spencer, first lord of the Admiralty, 1794–1801, after John Hoppner

16. Rear-Admiral Sir Alexander Ball by Henry Pickersgill

17. The dismasted Vanguard off Sardinia, towed by the Alexander, 21–3 May 1798, by Nicholas Pocock

18. The arrival of the Vanguard at Naples, 22 September 1798, by Giacomo Guardi

19. Rear-Admiral Sir Thomas Troubridge by Sir William Beechey

20. Captain Thomas Foley

21. Captain Sir Edward Berry, after Daniel Orme

22. Captain Thomas Masterman Hardy by Domenico Pellegrini

23. Racehorse and Carcass in the ice, 4–8 August 1773, by John Cleveley

24. View of Bastia from the Victory, watercolour by Ralph Willet Miller, May 1794

25. Frances Nelson, 1798, by Daniel Orme

26. Emma Hamilton in 1800 by Johann Heinrich Schmidt

27. Nelson leading the boarding party on to the Spanish ships of the line at the Battle of Cape St Vincent, 14 April 1797, after James Daniell

28. Nelson before the attack on Santa Cruz, July 1797, by an unknown artist

29. Nelson’s reception at Fonthill, December 1800

30. A Jig around the Statue of Peace; or, All Parties Reconciled, cartoon by W. Holland, 6 October 1801

31–4. The Battle of the Nile, 1 August 1798, ‘At Evening’, ‘10 O’clock’, ‘Midnight’, ‘The Ensuing Morning’, by Robert Dodd

35. Merton by Thomas Baxter

36. Rear-Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson, 1799, by Lemuel Francis Abbott

37. Chart of the Maddalena Islands, 1802, drawn by Captain George Ryves

38. The British fleet forcing the passage of the Sound, 30 March 1801, by Robert Dodd

39. The Battle of Copenhagen, 2 April 1801, by John Thomas Serres

40. Diagram of the British fleet approaching the French and Spanish line at Trafalgar by Robert Dodd

41. The Death of Nelson, print of 1809, after Benjamin West

42. Nelson’s funeral procession on the Thames, 1806, by Daniel Turner

43. Nelson’s funeral service in St Paul’s, after A. C. Pugin

44. England’s Pride and Glory, 1890s, by Thomas Davidson

Charts and Text Illustrations

Note on the Text

Quotations from contemporary documents are based on the originals as closely as possible. Capitals and spelling have been retained as written, except in the case of ‘Jemmy’ Jameson, the master of the Boreas, whose spelling in his log was so wayward that making sense of it required decryption skills. Abbreviations have been clarified by the addition of letters within square brackets. Punctuation has had to be inserted very occasionally for the sake of clarity. Where documents have been quoted from printed sources, the editing and alterations of their authors inevitably have had to be used.

MONEY VALUES

The value of money in Nelson’s time is difficult to establish because the relative value of particular commodities changed significantly over a long period of time. Regional price variations and the widespread custom of part-payment of wages by non-monetary means further complicate the picture.

The table in Rodger (Command of the Ocean, xxiv–xxv) shows the pay of a junior naval captain at various dates from the seventeenth century to the early twenty-first. A captain was paid £200 in 1807 and £58,000 in 2003, which suggests that the value of the pound sterling has risen by a factor of about 290. This common-sense approach has much to commend it, though some historians would argue that the difference in the value of the pound between those days and today is much greater.

Acknowledgements

Hunting down Nelson manuscripts has taken me to far and interesting places. The most distant and beautiful was the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, where I held a Visiting Fellowship in 2001 for a month’s productive work and stimulus from discussions with other fellows, and where I was made welcome by Roy Ritchie and his staff. At the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, John Dann and his colleagues cheerfully and enthusiastically made available their expertise and their wonderful eighteenth-century British collections, and staff at the Houghton Library at Harvard University were similarly helpful. Nor should I forget my two-months in 1993 as the Alexander Vietor Visiting Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island, during a bracing New England spring, which gave me time to read widely as well as giving me respite from museum administration, and which enabled me to approach this book with a firm framework of ideas on the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. A belated thanks is due to Norman Fiering and his staff, as well as to all these American scholars, archivists and librarians.

Archives and libraries in the United Kingdom, large and small, were supportive and efficient, and the National Archives at Kew and the British Library a pleasure to visit and swift to produce their documents. At the other end of the scale Christine Hiskey at Holkham in Norfolk, and Andrew Helme and Sue Miles at the Nelson Museum in Monmouth, smoothed the way to many documents. Matthew Sheldon at the Royal Naval Museum at Portsmouth not only produced documents efficiently but gave me ideas for other sources. Assistance beyond the call of duty came from Francesca Altman of the Norwich Castle Museum and Gallery, Jane Cunningham of the Photographic Survey, Courtauld Institute of Art, and Richard Draisey of the Devon Record Office. Valuable help by e-mail from Adrian Webb at the Hydrographic Office at Taunton and Roger Bettridge at the Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies enabled me to gain access to their collections.

Former colleagues at the National Maritime Museum gave up their time freely. Pieter van der Merwe helped with pictures and was full of ideas; Richard Ormond and Roger Quarm were always on hand, while David Taylor has been unfailingly helpful. Gillian Hutchinson and Brian Thynne answered a stream of questions about charts. For help with the manuscripts produced in the Caird Library I have to thank Daphne Knott, Andrew Davis, Kiri Ross-Jones, among all the others, for producing manuscripts; on occasions they went to great lengths to help. Gill Davies and the librarians gave great service. Margarette Lincoln and Nigel Rigby have been supportive, while it was a great comfort to be able to call upon the expertise of Brian Lavery and Liza Verity. Colin White generously and consistently shared his knowledge of Nelson documents, and was particularly helpful in providing transcripts from papers in the National Archives of Scotland. I must also thank Kevin Hall, who kept me afloat electronically throughout this project. At the Greenwich Maritime Institute at the University of Greenwich, where I now teach, Sarah Palmer, Dean Surtees and Suzanne Bowles put up with my absences, for the writing of this book ensured that this visiting professor was exactly that and no more.

References and ideas have come from many people and I thank Huw Bowen, Robert Clark, Jonathan Coad, Charles Consolvo, Gerald Draper, Michael Duffy, Dan Finamore, Ron Fiske, Iain Hamilton, Susan Harmon, Noah Heringman, Richard Hill, Margaret Hunt, Peter Le Fevre, Iain Mackenzie, Boye Meyer Friese, Janet MacDonald, Ruddock Mackay, Campbell McMurray, Lawrie Phillips, Marie Mulvey Roberts, Victor Sharman, Ann Shirley, Bill Vaughan, Tim Voelcker and Clive Wilkinson. I have had help of a more practical kind from Alan Borg, Nicholas Courtney, Anthony Cross, Chris Gray, Patricia Haigh, Derek Hayes, Gillian Hughes, Tim Lewin, Mike Palmer, Tony Sainsbury, Chris Ware, Dennis Wheeler and Glyn Williams. Lady Glenconner very kindly showed me around Burnham Thorpe. Lord Cottesloe attempted to locate the revealing diary of his ancestor, Thomas Fremantle. Susie and Paolo Nesso in Florence tried hard to locate the streets through which Nelson passed in Pisa and Leghorn, while the Reverend Donald Thorpe, from his temporary base in the English Church in Taormina, provided information on the last days of the Bridports in Sicily. From Cadiz came advice from Agustín Guimerá and Gonzalo Búton; their enthusiasm for the subject of Trafalgar led them to put on a delightful and most instructive conference in Cadiz in 2002.

No one can approach a life of Nelson without being aware of Tom Pocock’s sustained contribution to the subject, not least for maintaining interest in Nelson in less fashionable times by his Trafalgar dinner at the Garrick Club, which I have been privileged to attend for more years than both he and I would care to admit. Terry Coleman has been most supportive, and though I do not share all his scepticism about Nelson, I have benefited from his finely honed reasoning. Two long-established scholars in the field of naval history, whom I have known for many years, Julian Gwyn and Dan Baugh, made Nelson letters available to me. Julian, now Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Ottawa, proved, to my great surprise, to have been related to Nelson. Dan’s visits from Cornell University have always been stimulating; when staying at my house, over breakfast, lunch and tea, he gives me invigorating, week-long seminars on eighteenth-century naval history, full of wisdom. John Hattendorf’s long friendship has been similarly instructive. He kindly read an early draft of the first chapters and gave me encouragement just when it was needed. Michael Stammers, that man of Norfolk, helped me with eighteenth-century Norfolk life. Marianne Czisnik’s thorough scholarship was always provoking and helpful and she generously made her newly awarded Ph.D. thesis available to me as I wrote the last chapters. For Nelson’s complicated medical history I have had the benefit of Leslie Le Quesne’s advice, transmitted over a long series of agreeable lunches with him, at which good cheer belied the sometimes gruesome subject of conversation. And it is sad to record my thanks to the late David Syrett, whose extensive eighteenth-century knowledge and gritty common sense were always available, and who will be sorely missed.

Two people gave up their time to read the script in full. Alan Pearsall, an old colleague at the National Maritime Museum and my mentor for thirty-five years, who not only taught me what was correct but also what was right, gave me as ever the benefit of his unrivalled knowledge. Nicholas Rodger had only just finished his seven-year travail with his magnificent The Command of the Ocean when he agreed to read my bulky script. I am grateful to both of them. No author is more indebted to an editor than I am to Stuart Proffitt at Penguin, and I owe also a great deal to his colleagues, Liz Friend-Smith, Richard Duguid and especially Donna Poppy. Thanks to John Gilkes for drawing the charts.

My greatest thanks are due to my wife, Jane, who made writing this book fun and possible. When I had written half the book, she, an historian trained, joined in to help after her retirement from a long career in Whitehall. We sailed in the tracks of Nelson, went together to the archives, walked the north Norfolk coast and drove over the plains of Ohio to Michigan. With Patricia Haigh she explored the streets of Pisa and Livorno and visited Bronte, while I wrote at home. Without her help and support this book would not have been ready for the bicentenary of Trafalgar.

Finally, two eminent figures from the past at the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich have influenced this book. Katherine Lindsay-McDougall, Custodian of Manuscripts at the National Maritime Museum in the 1950s, was the last person at the museum who did serious work on Nelson. It has been a pleasure to get to know her as a distinguished predecessor. For sixteen years I was able to observe closely the late Admiral Lord Lewin, when he was a trustee, then Chairman of Trustees, at the National Maritime Museum. I would refer those who might feel that Nelson’s qualities of naval leadership were unique to the concluding chapter of Richard Hill’s Lewin of Greenwich (2000). The similarities in style of these two officers in managing difficult situations and getting the best out of people are startling. Dedicating this book to Terry Lewin is not merely a gesture of formal respect but a heartfelt tribute to an inspirational man, who, though I did not realize it at the time, gave me a model of leadership with which to approach the complexities of writing about Horatio Nelson.

Blackheath, December 2004

Introduction

It is an old saying, ‘Show me the company a man keeps, and I will tell you his character.’ Why not on a similar principle, ‘Show me the correspondence which a man receives, and I will show you what manner of man he is.’

Sir John Barrow, Life of George Lord Anson (1839)

It was my good fortune to have under my command some of the most experienced officers in the English Navy, whose professional skill was seconded by the undaunted courage of British sailors.

Nelson’s speech at the dinner at the Beaufort Arms, Monmouth,
19 August 1802

Nelson’s success in hard-fought battles against the navies of France, Spain and Denmark, together with his adulterous love affair with Emma Hamilton, have made him one of the few historical figures about whom there have been several books in print at any time in the last 200 years. The first biography followed the Battle of the Nile and was published, probably, in 1801, and there was a steady succession of biographies after his death. In 1990 a bibliography published by L. C. Cowie lists over 1,300 books on the broader subject of Nelson and the American Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Of these, over a hundred are biographies, but, he comments disapprovingly, ‘Not a single biography of Nelson possesses proper bibliography, references and footnotes.’ This is no longer the case, for the list of titles has grown since Cowie wrote those words, but an early declaration of the principles of this book is necessary.* Why another biography?

There are three ways in which this book differs from those that have gone before. First, it draws upon original, primary sources, and documents printed in volumes that have been carefully selected for their accuracy. Yet many of Nelson’s letters remain unknown. The Nelson Letters project run by the National Maritime Museum and Royal Naval Museum has demonstrated clearly that many documents have remained hidden from view.* In some areas of Nelson’s life a picture emerges from these documents that is completely different from the one to be found in those biographies that repeat traditional stories from secondary sources. Second, this biography takes account of correspondence to, as well as from, Nelson. So many letters and official papers written by Nelson have survived that if one does not search for the point of view of others in the story, it is very easy to take Nelson on his own terms. This has been done many times by previous authors. The third purpose of this book is to ask why Nelson was so successful. It argues that it is not possible to understand his brilliant victories without an understanding of the British Navy, its resources, government and politicians, the navies of Great Britain’s enemies and a host of other considerations. Only once these broader and deeper factors are appreciated can one then ask how Nelson reached such extraordinary heights as a leader of men and as a controller of great fleets. Placing him more firmly in his historical context inevitably throws more light on those around him. He was above all a professional seaman; and it was the seamen and their qualities, and the intricacies of the relationship between them and their officers, upon which Nelson’s victories rested. A French naval officer was later asked what had made the greatest impression upon him at Trafalgar.

The act that astonished me the most was when the action was over. It came on to blow a gale of wind, and the English immediately set to work to shorten sail and reef the topsails, with as much regularity and order as if their ships had not been fighting a dreadful battle. We were all amazement, wondering what the English seamen could be made of. All our seamen were either drunk or disabled, and we, the officers, could not get any work out of them. We never witnessed any such clever manoeuvres before, and I shall never forget them.

How can these men be left out of the story?

I have attempted to spurn the speculation that so many of the biographers of this complex man have used to paper over the gaps in the evidence. In any case, by returning to the documents many new aspects of Nelson’s life can be revealed. Yet writing history and biography is a humbling process, and, in spite of thousands of documents, it is often difficult to penetrate the inner life of Nelson. The style of his letters is open and informal, yet only for short periods, usually under intense strain, does he reveal his true feelings. Even though many letters survive between him and his wife, Fanny, it is still not clear why and when they drifted apart, or if, indeed, they had ever been close. His relationship with Emma Hamilton is a deeper mystery. Few of her letters survive, many of them destroyed by Nelson himself. Why and how, for instance, did she goad him into a jealous fury after the birth of their child Horatia? Only novelists and screenplay writers can write with complete conviction and certainty about such matters. We are, however, on firmer ground when we examine the thoughts and opinions of those around him, especially those to be found in private correspondence between third parties. But in order to do that we need, in turn, to understand the multitude of figures in Nelson’s world. For that reason the Biographical Sketches section provides more than 200 portraits of the main characters in this story.

The core of my research has been taken, as far as possible, from archives in Britain and the United States. The principal collections are in the National Archives (the Public Record Office at Kew), the British Library and the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, with important additions in the Nelson Museum at Monmouth, the Royal Naval Museum at Portsmouth and the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine. In the United States the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the Houghton Library at Harvard University and the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, contain Nelson letters brought together by collectors in the first half of the twentieth century.

These document collections have been supplemented by books of reproduced documents. Although there is some fine scholarship amongst these volumes, they contain major pitfalls, especially those published in the nineteenth century. Early panegyric works built an emotional and imaginative scaffolding around Nelson that rivalled the one surrounding Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square when it was erected in the early 1840s. The first to be published, in 1806, was James Harrison’s Life, in which the author selected documents under the supervision of Lady Hamilton, but the most inaccurate and fanciful was published in 1809 in two volumes by James Stanier Clarke and John McArthur: The Life of Admiral Lord Nelson, KB, from His Lordship’s Manuscripts. Clarke and McArthur were responsible for creating more myths about Nelson than any other authors. William Nelson, Horatio’s unscrupulous clergyman brother, who inherited the title and owned the papers, worked hard to ensure that the best face was put on Nelson’s life. McArthur, admiral’s secretary and naval prize agent, and purser of the Victory, had already been working on a biography. Through the prince of Wales, the newly created Earl Nelson ensured that ‘a person of rank’ should also be associated with the book. The prince of Wales’s chaplain, James Stanier Clarke, was finally agreed upon as a joint author. McArthur had the advantage of knowing Nelson well, and he was helped by many of Nelson’s colleagues and friends.* This enormous work, bolstered by the transcripts of many of Nelson’s letters and supported by over 700 advance subscribers, was never meant to be anything less than a monument to a dead hero. Not surprisingly, the narrative was heavily embellished. It gave rise to many stories still extant today. Much of its inaccuracy is the result of omission, but the authors were not above adding their own evidence and stylistic improvements to Nelson’s words. The result is completely untrustworthy.

This reputation for untrustworthiness is hardly new. William James, whose massive 1820s history of naval operations during the American Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars is still widely used today, asserted that ‘Clarke and McArthur’s Life of Nelson is not of the slightest authority.’ The authors, he wrote, ‘seldom indulge in their own remarks without making a perfect braggadocio [sic] of their hero … Much, indeed, has the memory of this great man suffered by the overweening zeal of his biographers.’ In preparation for writing the book, Clarke went to sea in about 1807 in the Vestal, for he knew little of naval life. A junior officer in the ship recalled:

Captain Graham of the Vestal was a perfect boy for fun; and he loved to get up a laugh at our author’s expense. He used to concoct anecdotes and stories of Nelson, and have them ready cut and dried, and tell them as occasion served, or oftener get somebody else to tell them, as if by accident, after dinner. On these occasions Clark[e]’s eyes would sparkle; and he would lay down his half-broken biscuit, and listen; and then he would say with a chuckle, ‘that will do for my book’. Then out came his memoranda, and down it went with his ever-ready pencil. All the time we were absolutely expiring, and Graham’s look and command of countenance were irresistible.

Documents from Clarke and McArthur have not been quoted in this book.

Victorian standards of biography and historical accuracy were not generally high. An honourable exception is Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas’s impressive seven-volume edition of The Dispatches and Letters of Lord Nelson, published in 1844. But it is a work that needs to be used with care. The scarcity of documents from Nelson’s early life leads to uneven coverage: the first volume covers thirty-six years, while the remaining six volumes contain documents from the last eleven years of his life. Nicolas also omits passages showing Nelson’s weaknesses. Occasionally, he elides the surname and uses only an initial when Nelson was passing judgement and Nicolas did not want the subject’s descendants to be offended.* Nicolas also over-punctuates Nelson’s flowing prose in a way that is out of keeping with modern standards and tastes. The original letters are generally bereft of punctuation, particularly those written in haste, and some editing is necessary for sense and clarity. Nicolas indicated when he had to rely on less reliable sources (in particular, those letters transcribed by Clarke and McArthur), doing so only when the originals were not made available to him. He also prints some letters from the anonymously published two-volume The Letters of Lord Nelson to Lady Hamilton: With a Supplement of Interesting Letters by Distinguished Characters (1814), the publication of which first damaged Nelson’s reputation by revealing the true nature of his relationship with Emma Hamilton. In general, however, Nicolas published very little correspondence between Nelson and Emma.

Nicolas also used letters written to Nelson that were in the possession of John Wilson Croker, who had been first secretary of the Admiralty between 1809 and 1830. In about 1817 these papers were advertised for sale. With the agreement of Lord Liverpool, the prime minister, and Lord Melville, the first lord of the Admiralty, Croker employed someone to pose as an amateur collector in order to purchase them from, as he termed them, ‘low greedy people’. Croker used government money and his purpose in buying them was to keep them out of the public domain. He was as much concerned about any material that related to Naples as about the scandal of Nelson’s relationship with Emma Hamilton. Some thirty years later Nicolas came to know of these documents and asked Croker if he could include them in his great work. In February 1845 Croker wrote to Sir Robert Peel, the prime minister, for agreement to this proposal; having taken Melville’s advice, Croker thought it best to lend the documents to Nicolas, ‘destroying, of course, anything scandalous in itself or detrimental to the reputation of Lord Nelson’. We do not know if Croker destroyed anything. Melville and Croker were also averse to the original purchase becoming known, for ‘the very act of having bought them would be prima facie evidence that there was something very scandalous which required so unusual a proceeding’.* Peel agreed that the papers in Croker’s custody should be made available to Nicolas. Late finds of additional documents account for the chaotic organization of Nicolas’s seventh and largest volume, with the weight of administrative documents in the two years before Trafalgar finally overwhelming him: he omits hundreds of letters from this period, especially those that exist only as letter-book copies. Nevertheless, when used with care, Nicolas’s seven volumes remain the most valuable published source for Nelson’s life.

Nicolas’s work dominated writing on Nelson for 150 years, and the apparent completeness of Dispatches and Letters perhaps inhibited more searching biographical interpretation. Other documents, however, appeared in print at sporadic intervals. Thomas Pettigrew’s Memoirs of the Life of Vice-Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson appeared in 1849, publishing many letters from Nelson to Lady Hamilton and raising further doubts in the minds of Victorians about the morality of their relationship. In 1893 Alfred Morrison privately published his two-volume The Collection of Autograph Letters and Historical Documents Formed by Alfred Morrison. These documents ensured that the world knew in detail about Nelson and Emma Hamilton, and confirmed that he was the father of her daughter Horatia. They are accurately done, with only occasional traces of invasive Victorian editing. H. C. Gutteridge’s Nelson and the Neapolitan Jacobins, published by the Navy Records Society in 1903, is a fine piece of work, an attempt to arbitrate a scholarly controversy of the time that caused intense emotion. In 1932 Warren R. Dawson edited The Nelson Collection at Lloyd’s, but this is a random selection of documents that reflected the collecting of an institution over many years. Geoffrey Rawson’s Letters from the Leeward Islands (1953) contained many letters not previously in print. In 1958 George Naish edited the 600-page volume Nelson’s Letters to His Wife. His editorship depended almost entirely upon the deep knowledge of Katherine Lindsay-MacDougall, at that time the Custodian of Manuscripts in the National Maritime Museum. The high standard of scholarship in this volume makes it possible to bypass many of the absurdities of Clarke and McArthur. Other letters by and to Nelson are published in a variety of books and journals, principally in the volumes of the Navy Records Society.

In the twentieth century two biographies dominated the field. In the 1890s Alfred Thayer Mahan, a United States naval officer, brought a professional eye to The Life of Nelson: The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain. While clothed in late-Victorian assumptions and written, as its title implies, with an underlying political agenda, it still retains an authority that makes it worth reading. The other biography is Carola Oman’s Nelson, published in 1947. Thorough and full of fresh material, although it now appears over-coloured, it went through many editions and was recently reissued in 1996. Forty years ago I turned to these two books when I wrote, as an undergraduate, a paper for the Dublin University History Society. Not long after I read my paper, on 8 March 1966, I heard, from my rooms in Trinity, the early-morning explosion caused by the IRA that destroyed the top of the Nelson Pillar in O’Connell Street. From these beginnings I made my career in naval history, although I turned away from Nelson to study how the British sailing navy was built and how it worked.

Nelson, however, was never far away, especially when I was Custodian of Manuscripts in the National Maritime Museum in the 1970s and 1980s. Important collections of his letters and associated documents were under my care. Every other week someone came into the Museum Reading Room with a Nelson letter, wanting confirmation that it was an original. Only once, I believe, were the owner’s expectations realized. I purchased few Nelson manuscripts for the Museum, since collector’s prices were then (as they are now) more than any museum could afford. But it was also difficult to escape Nelson when sailing over many years, whether in the Medusa Channel off the Essex coast, beating through the grey waters of the Sound off Copenhagen or anchored in Agincourt Sound in the Maddalena Islands off Sardinia. Thus, when a chance came to write again about Nelson after my departure from the museum in 2000, I turned back to the questions that had fascinated me in the 1960s.

I have benefited from working in the early years of the twenty-first century. Access to public and private archives is now enormously enhanced by information technology, and documents are produced with exemplary speed. Helpful staff ensure that working in such institutions is a far greater pleasure than when I first began to use documents in the late 1960s, a change of attitude emphasized by the newly built and well-designed facilities at the Public Record Office and the British Library. A further advantage is that several reference works of critical importance have been published since the early 1990s. Jan Glete’s Navies and Nations and David Lyon’s Sailing Navy List, both of which appeared in 1993, provided reliable information on the ships of the Royal Navy, in much greater detail than in previous works. In the next year two books did the same for the naval officers of the period: the first was David Syrett and Richard Dinardo’s The Commissioned Sea Officers of the Royal Navy 1660–1815; the second, Roger Morriss’s Guide to British Naval Papers in North America, tracked the diaspora of British naval papers that took place primarily before the Second World War. The consolidated edition of the Naval Chronicle, published in 1998–9 – in which the editor, Nicholas Tracy, reduced forty volumes of gloriously jumbled contributions, published between 1799 and 1819, to five, organized by subject and indexed – has been similarly valuable. It is difficult to imagine or remember writing eighteenth-century naval history without these volumes, although the electronic databases that are now beginning to appear will give researchers of the future even further advantage.

Although a number of recent historians have used the present accessibility of documentary sources, this is still not to say that all the best books on Nelson are modern. Sir Julian Corbett’s The Campaign of Trafalgar (1919), for instance, remains a central work. In the main, I have relied upon those that use original documents and that are well referenced. The battles have received a great deal of detailed recent attention. Nelson’s victory at the Nile has been illuminated by the work of Michèle Battesti in La Bataille d’Aboukir and of Brian Lavery in Nelson and the Nile, both of which appeared in 1998. Peter Goodwin’s Nelson’s Ships 1771–1805 (2002) has wrung the logs and technical records dry. But there exists besides a wider body of scholarship, from Britain and many other countries, about naval power and conflict in Nelson’s lifetime, and a much clearer view of the perspectives of other nations is now possible. The first full conference of French and British naval historians took place at the Sorbonne in 1984; since that time, they have met regularly, while other meetings included Spanish and Dutch historians. The translation into English of Ole Feldbæk’s book gives the Danish view of the Battle of Copenhagen. By incorporating as much of this wider scholarship as I can, I hope to make better sense of Nelson’s achievement. My debt to many others who have written about these times, and about Nelson himself, will be obvious from the references and Bibliography.

It is worth, nevertheless, quoting an example of how secondary sources can, over 200 years, distort the story. It concerns the first days of Nelson’s naval career. Based on a reasonable spread of biographies from Robert Southey to recent works, the story, with variations, runs thus: on 27 November 1770, on 1 January 1771 or in March 1771, the young Nelson, lost and bewildered, alighted from the coach at Chatham and was unable to find his ship, the Raisonable. He knew no one and wandered around for a long time until he was given a meal by a kind-hearted officer, who then found a boat across the River Medway to take him to his ship. When he eventually did get on the ship, the captain, his uncle Maurice Suckling, who had agreed to take him aboard, was not there. For at least a day nobody would speak to him.

The log and muster books in the Public Record Office tell a different story. Captain Suckling joined the Raisonable at Chatham on 23 November 1770. ‘This day I made my appearance and ordered the pennant to be hoisted,’ he wrote in his log. Suckling supervised the fitting out of the ship, which had been ‘in Ordinary’, or reserve. Other officers joined in the following weeks. On 11 December the lower masts were hoisted in. On 1 January 1771 Suckling took care to enter his nephew in the muster book, thus establishing his place and seniority, which were to be of vital significance. It was not until 15 February 1771 that the ship moved twelve miles down the River Medway to Sheerness. Here, in the lowest reach of the river known as ‘Blackstakes’, she took on further stores and her guns. On 23 April she sailed out of the Medway and anchored at the Nore. The muster book records that the next day, 24 April, ‘Horace Nelson, Midshipman’, joined the ship, and, as was the custom, his place of origin was identified as ‘from Wells’; the date is entered clearly in a column headed ‘Made his Appearance’. Further, the direct way to the ships ‘at the Nore’ in the Thames estuary was on a sailing vessel from the London river; assisted by the tide, a constant succession of vessels serviced the warships lying there. In the 1770s it was the obvious and by far the cheapest method of travel.

Musters when the ship was at a naval base were taken by dockyard clerks from the clerk of the cheque’s department. They were documents that enabled seniority to be recorded and discipline maintained; together with the pay books, they determined pay. Late-Victorian and early-twentieth-century historians regarded these books with disdain. ‘False musters, fraudulent time and bogus certificates were not only winked at but were in the regular order of things,’ railed one of them, writing in 1929. Although they sometimes take a little interpreting, the muster books constitute as firm a piece of evidence as the navy, a mature and successful eighteenth-century bureaucracy, could generate. It is beyond the bounds of probability that young Horace was sent to Chatham two months after the ship had left for Sheerness, twelve miles down the River Medway. It is even less likely that Maurice Suckling, the captain of a newly commissioned 64-gun ship, who had been ashore on half-pay for some years, under pressure from the Board of Admiralty to get his ship commissioned, would not have been on board continually throughout these weeks. He would certainly have been present when she sailed, with an incomplete and untrained crew, the three miles from Sheerness to the buoy of the Nore in the Thames estuary. Nelson arrived just at the time when all the preparations for a commission were being completed, the usual point at which ‘the young gentlemen’ joined the ship.* It is much more likely that his joining was well organized and timed, and that his presence was not noticed among the bustling crew, with a complement of 500 officers and men much more concerned in getting the ship in a condition to sail. Maurice Suckling turned his attention to his young nephew when he had the time. The romantic view of the small, lost boy at Chatham has been accentuated and gilded by successive biographers over the last 200 years. I have, in general, ignored such myths, rather than used up space to discredit them, but some have taken root so strongly that their origins need some explanation.

The intervening two centuries from the time of his death make it easier to avoid the legends and to examine the ‘hero’ more rigorously than in previous generations. Fifty years ago, Michael Lewis, the professor of Naval History at the Royal Naval College at Greenwich, felt uneasy. ‘As a nation,’ he wrote, ‘we have done our best to kill him with kindness. We have taken him to our hearts as a National hero, and have modelled with our own hands a kind of super-waxwork which not only bears little relationship to the real article, but is so remote from life – and possibility – as to be slightly ludicrous, and certainly damaging to any real man’s long-term reputation.’ The theme is echoed more brutally in Barry Unsworth’s recent fictional examination of the Nelson legend in Losing Nelson. The main character, besotted by the idea of Nelson, who represents everything that he is not, is confronted in the last pages by the cold reality of the man in Naples, who says, ‘Heroes are fabricated in the national dream factory. Heroes are not people.’

Prologue

You do nothing by halves either to enemies or friends.

Lord Minto to Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson, 18 May 1803

Ten miles off Alexandria in Egypt, at twenty-two minutes to five on the afternoon of 1 August 1798, two signals were hoisted to the masthead of His Majesty’s 74-gun ship the Vanguard. The thirteen signal lieutenants on the surrounding ships of the squadron commanded by Rear-Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson, squinting through their telescopes in the bright late-afternoon light, read these signals as the flags fluttered to the masthead. The first signal consisted of a top flag of double vertical stripes of blue and yellow, and a bottom flag with one horizontal stripe each of blue, white and red. This was Signal No. 53. By checking the tables in their signal books, issued to the Mediterranean Fleet by Admiral Sir John Jervis, the lieutenants quickly calculated that the first signal meant ‘Prepare for Battle.’ The second signal amplified the first: a blue and yellow flag, with an all-red one beneath, denoting Signal No. 54: ‘Prepare for Battle: when it may be necessary to anchor: with a Bower or Sheet anchor Cable in abaft [by the stern], and springs etc.’

These two signals heralded a battle that was to be a turning point in Horatio Nelson’s life. It would also have a profound long-term effect upon the navy in which he served and upon the French Navy against which he fought. The signals transmitted Nelson’s decision to fight the French fleet anchored in Aboukir Bay immediately. The lateness of the hour meant a night action in barely known and shoaling waters. The French fleet had been sighted by Captain Samuel Hood of the Zealous just over two hours before, at two thirty. Yet it is unlikely that Nelson hesitated very long over the decision, or that his captains were surprised by it. To sail into Aboukir Bay at this hour was a risk; but he had experience of the complexities of Mediterranean winds and land breezes, which often meant that the winds blew parallel to the shore; and he knew the outline of the bay and its shoals more certainly than historians have previously suspected.*