Losing Nelson (15 page)

I left the ships there on the table and went upstairs to my study. I took down Laughton’s edition of the letters and despatches, opened it at random, and began to read aloud.

As to myself, upon the general question, that if a man does not do his utmost in time of action, I think but one punishment ought to be inflicted. Not that I take a man’s merit from his list of dead and wounded
 …

I was self-conscious at first, but I persisted. I wanted to find his voice. Then, as I settled into the reading, my intentions of mimicry were somehow cancelled out. The sounds I began to make were not a stranger’s, but they were not mine either. And they were not the accents of rural Norfolk. The voice that came was slightly metallic, with a slur on the dental consonants caused by the tongue being held too close to the roof of the mouth.

It was not his voice—how could it be? It was not a friendly voice at all. It ended by frightening me.

I
could not stay in the study after this. I thought of going back down to the basement and perhaps rearranging some of the cabinets—always a soothing occupation. But I suddenly felt enormously weary, so much so that I could hardly keep on my feet. I was averaging no more than four hours’ sleep at night during all that period. For some time now I had been sleeping at odd times of the day, a habit quite new to me.

I went along the passage to the living room and sat in the big old armchair, the one I always used, dark green in colour and very capacious. I wrapped myself in the patchwork rug that my mother made, which I always kept over the back of the chair. I saw her making this rug. I suppose I was three years old, or perhaps four. She had her own room where she did this kind of work, and I was allowed in there. She used odds and ends of different-coloured wool to make the
squares, any colour at all, it didn’t seem to matter. Use enough colours and they will not clash, she said. The table was heaped with bright remnants.

I found this rug some time after she was gone. It was in a spare bedroom, rolled in a cotton bag, in the big drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe. I think my father put it away there, or told the housekeeper to do so. There was a housekeeper then, a Mrs. Bryce. I suppose I was eleven when I found it, one day during the summer holidays. In those August afternoons I would sometimes go to the bedroom, get out the rug, and spread it on the bed. I would take off my clothes: shoes, jacket, trousers, shirt, underclothes—socks always last, for some reason. It always had to be in the same order. When I was naked I would creep under the rug until it came over my head, but in such a way that I did not disturb the edges at the sides or foot. If I failed in this, I would have to spread the rug out and try again. I would lie there on my back, quite still, in the dimness under the rug. I would feel the warmth spread over me, and with the warmth there seemed to come the scent of my mother. No-one ever found out about this, and after the beginning of the new term I never did it again. Now, when the rug was warm, I still sometimes imagined I could catch the scent of her in it.

I slept long, perhaps two hours. When I woke it was late afternoon; the light was already fading. I was not conscious of having dreamed, but I had woken with some vague feeling of horror, and as I sat there this became clearer and colder and I knew it had concerned the
Ça Ira
and the terrible damage she had suffered, a disabled beast, cut off from the pack, wallowing there with her heavy cannon that she could not bring to bear while Horatio savaged her hindparts, rent her, and bled her. Images of the slaughter on her decks came to me, the sounds of it, always the same sounds: crash of shot in the timbers,
keening of shrapnel, shrieks of the men on the raked decks, cheers from our English lads as they gave the crappos a good drubbing. Shrieks and cheers again mingling …

I sat there as the room grew darker around me, trying to break free from these thoughts. After all, war was war; it had been a triumph, Horatio had acted with great gallantry and panache. It was the next day that the
Ça Ira
was taken. She was too much hurt to repair her masts in the night and make good her escape. She waited there, bleeding into the sea. All through the night her surgeons worked in the after cockpit, sweating in the close heat, fighting to win the race against gangrene, sawing and slicing on the improvised operation table in a stench of blood and sawdust and rum, with buckets for the amputated parts and a brazier to warm the blades, lessen the shock of the cold steel.

And then, with her masts gone and most of her guns out of action, at five minutes past ten next morning, she surrendered. Andrews, the name of the lieutenant that Horatio sent aboard her to take possession. He would have needed a strong stomach, walking about on those decks. Three hundred and fifty dead and wounded, getting on for half her total complement. And on the
Agamemnon
, in the whole engagement, thirteen men slightly wounded, no dead. We were right to hail it as a triumph, to thank the Almighty for his manifold favours, as we did that following Sunday, holding services on the decks of the ships. Horatio did his duty and came out with credit.
Thank God I have done my duty
. His last words …

Upon this thought, quite unbidden, there again came into my mind the verdict of the poet laureate of the day, Robert Southey, most famous of all his biographers, on the events in Naples in 1799—the sticking point of my book.
A stain upon the memory of Nelson and the honour of England
. I had always discounted this judgement. Southey was influenced by the views of Charles James Fox and the
Whig politicians; he listened to the malicious innuendos of republican sympathizers; he actually allowed himself to believe that Horatio had tricked the Neapolitan Jacobins into quitting their forts under promise of safe conduct, only to have them arrested and handed over to the vengeance of Ferdinand and Maria Carolina.

Horatio could never have stooped to such a thing. His nature was too noble; he was the incarnation of the spirit of fair play, that profoundly British virtue, for which we are known far and wide. But the slanders had persisted, maintained an evil life on their own, in spite of his many champions. Buried somewhere in this great heap of argument, two centuries old by now, was the bright fragment that would clear his name. How glorious to be the one to find it, to see it glint like gold among the husks of old polemic. My name would be joined with his for as long as his deeds were remembered. Charles Cleasby, the vindicator of Horatio Nelson.

I got up to put on the standard lamp behind the chair. But Southey’s unjust words remained in my mind, despite the light that came flooding. I decided to check the reference once again. Pointless—I was completely familiar with the words—but there was a semblance of purpose in it, and anything was better than sitting on there, a passive prey to his vilifiers. I was worried about returning to my study so soon, because of that inimical voice. I entered the room somewhat apprehensively, but everything seemed quiet and accustomed in there. I found the passage almost at once:
To palliate it would be in vain; to justify it would be wicked: there is no alternative, for one who will not make himself a participator in guilt, but to record the disgraceful story with sorrow and with shame
.

Strong words indeed, and beautifully put, however misguided. The most robust response I had so far found was J. K. Laughton’s in the preface to his selection of Horatio’s letters and despatches, which came out in 1886:
Southey was wrong. There is another alternative. We
neither palliate, nor justify, nor record; we deny. The story is a base and venomous falsehood
.

My heart warmed to this sturdy and patriotic rebuttal by the then professor of modern history at King’s College, London. Historians were more personal and more passionate in those days. I was sure that Laughton was in the right of it, but unfortunately he calls no witnesses, he refuses to admit any evidence outside of Horatio’s own words, as contained in his letters and despatches. The reasoning is therefore circular. Of course it is right, in a way, that it should be circular. After all, Nelson is in a special category as our quintessential hero and quintessential national representative. We British do not extol cunning as a virtue, but courage and honour. Horatio is the soul of honour, he tells the truth under all circumstances, therefore his own reports of the business are to be believed without reservation, therefore Southey’s verdict is false.

Certainly Horatio’s words are there and he never wavered in them. There is his letter to Alex Stephens written nearly four years later, in the February of 1803:
I very happily arrived in Naples and prevented such an infamous transaction from taking place; therefore when the rebels surrendered, they came out from the castles as they ought, without the honours of war and trusting to the judgement of their sovereigns
.

This is clear enough but lacking in detail. The transaction he was referring to is the treaty with the rebels signed before his arrival. The crux of the thing is in the last few words. Did these people, when they came out of their forts, think that they were going to be shipped to France in accordance with the treaty, or did they think they were going to be handed over to their Sicilian majesties? That is the argument, that is the form it has taken; but for me there was no argument at all. To believe that they didn’t know what they were coming out to is to believe that Horatio was first a party to fraud and afterwards covered it up by lying. No-one could believe that who knew him as I
did. The difficulty lay not in knowing what to believe but in finding the proof of his innocence.

He is not helped by those of his defenders who try to gloss over the business or even, in their generous sympathy, actually misrepresent the facts. Carola Oman is a case in point. A surprising thing, to my mind, that it should be a woman to write one of the best lives of Horatio this century. First published in 1947, containing much new material, it is a detailed and vivid picture of the man. Yet coming to his dealings in Naples on the morning of June 26, 1799, this is what she writes:
Sir William Hamilton sent the Cardinal a hasty assurance that Lord Nelson would do nothing, pending instructions from Palermo, to break the Armistice, a statement which Nelson … later confirmed in his own hand
.

This confirmation in Horatio’s own hand I had not so far found, nor, as far as I knew, had anyone else. The ambassador’s note, however, does exist:
Lord Nelson begs me to assure your Eminence that he is resolved to do nothing that can break the Armistice which your Eminence has accorded to the Castles of Naples
.

That is the whole text. Nothing about pending instructions, nothing about Palermo. Palermo, of course, was where the king and the queen were, having fled to Sicily from the advancing French. What led Carola Oman, so generally scrupulous, to insert that phrase into her text as if it were an integral part of Hamilton’s note? She would have had that note before her, as did I. It is hard not to conclude that she was taking for granted the very thing she should have been trying to prove: that these people knew when they came out of the forts that the fulfilling of the treaty depended on the endorsement of their offended sovereigns—an endorsement not yet received.

A being of such shining honesty as Horatio is not to be defended by sleight of hand. Nor is it to be done by glaring omission. In the most recent biography I had read, that of Christopher Hibbert,
published in 1994, in a total of almost five hundred pages, only five lines are devoted to June 26, 1799, surely one of the most important dates in Nelson’s entire life. Hibbert refers to the rebel garrisons emerging under the treaty as refugees, which suggests that they were already outside the forts before the intention was formed to arrest them, which completely begs the question of why they left the forts in the first place. As I sat there that March evening, as darkness settled over the stricken
Ça Ira
, I was swept once again by the ardent desire to clear him, free him forever from the bungling of his friends as well as from the malice of his foes. Everything lay there, in those few days of June. The clue was there if I could find it. I fell to pondering the sequence of events yet again.

Already by the twenty-fifth, relations between Horatio and Cardinal Ruffo are breaking down. For hours the two of them argue, face to face in Horatio’s cabin on the
Vanguard
, in the hot June weather, the cardinal speaking French, the admiral English, and the ambassador interpreting. Emma in the background, dressed in white, with a broad-brimmed hat. Perhaps she throws in the occasional few words in her mixture of Lancashire and Neapolitan. She peers through the bay window of the cabin to see if anyone she knows is in the pleasure boats out in the bay.

The dispute continues. Horatio does not hate Italians in the way he hates the French, but he regards them as immoral and lacking in the military virtues. He distrusts Ruffo as a devious and probably treacherous cleric. To Ruffo he seems irascible, overbearing, ignorant of the real situation in Naples. Horatio refuses to accept the treaty that Ruffo, as commander of the royalist forces, has signed in King Ferdinand’s name. The rebels are traitors; they must surrender unconditionally and be delivered to the justice of their sovereign. Ruffo insists that the treaty to which he has put his name should be honoured.
The people in the forts are misguided patriots. The best way to heal the wounds of civil war is to be lenient with the vanquished.