The War of Wars (52 page)

As for Nelson, he was like a selfish, greedy child, besotted with Emma, a man who spent all his spare time in an adolescent infatuation. Yet in spite of his appalling treatment of Fanny, at this stage he still behaved with some decorum, giving her half his income and still trying to recommend her son Josiah for promotion. With the birth of a daughter, Horatia, to Emma – Fanny (like Josephine with Napoleon) had failed to provide him with a child – his passion redoubled. Love is not governed by reason, or commonsense, and has no sense of ridicule.

The middle-aged admiral was deeply in love, and perhaps his passion was sharpened by his constant presentiment that he would die soon, owing to his frail health, or would be killed in action. In turn his obsession with the closeness of death meant that he remained prepared
to take absurd risks – for dying presented few fears for a man who believed he was anyway doomed to an early grave. Nelson was beginning to thirst for an action to maintain the reputation which was sagging under the twin weights of the atrocities in Naples and his dalliance with Lady Hamilton.

Britain now had to face a new and unexpected threat, a deadly combination of the two most aggressive powers in Europe: Napoleon’s France and Tsar Paul’s Russia. The mentally unbalanced Paul had been incensed by Britain’s occupation of Malta, which had cunningly been promised him at the last moment by Napoleon. The Russians were also chafing under the British system of searching their ships, and those of other Baltic states, to prevent supplies reaching France. In December 1800 Paul ordered all British ships in Russian ports to be seized and their crews made prisoner. Then he pressured Sweden into signing a ‘treaty of armed neutrality’, which Denmark and Prussia, adroitly changing sides, soon joined. Russia, Denmark and Sweden together had some forty warships at their immediate disposal and could probably raise as many again at short notice. It was tantamount to a declaration of war by the Baltic powers against Britain. The British decided to respond decisively and with speed: as soon as the freezing weather of the Baltic winter permitted, a fleet of eighteen ships of the line was despatched on 12 March 1801 under Sir Hyde Parker and Nelson to ‘negotiate’ Denmark’s withdrawal from the league – although war was not formally declared. In the British view, the League had to be smashed before it had even begun to assemble its forces.

When the fleet arrived off Copenhagen Parker attempted to negotiate with the Danish government, but was rebuffed. The scene was set for a battle unlike any other of Nelson’s major engagements – not a fight in the open between fleets but a brutal war of attrition between the British fleet and the shore defences of the city.

Parker had placed Nelson in command of ten ships of the line, two 50-gunners, seven frigates, and nine small craft. The senior admiral remained in command of eight more ships of the line some three miles away. Nelson was presented with his trickiest challenge yet, to attack down a narrow Channel between a huge shoal – the Middle Ground –
and the shoals along the coast of Copenhagen. Along the latter a gauntlet of eighteen Danish men of war; some of them already unsafe and in poor condition, many of them no more than grounded gun batteries, mounted guard. In addition, to the north of the Channel there were two forts. It was a formidable defence.

Nelson was at his most nervously aggressive at the council of war on 31 March. According to Colonel Stewart: ‘Lord Nelson kept pacing the cabin, mortified at everything which savoured either of alarm or of irresolution. The council was told of the strength of the Swedish squadron, whereupon Nelson sharply interjected, “The more numerous the better.” As for the Russians, “I wish they were twice as many. The easier the victory, depend on it!” ’ Nelson was given a further two ships, then hoisted his flag aboard the
Elephant
on 1 April. He sent the intrepid Captain Hardy to take soundings at night in a muffled boat right under the nose of the Danish ships.

On the morning of 2 April, the wind was favourable for him to sail up the Channel between the Middle Ground and the coastal shoal. The local pilots refused to serve for fear of causing the fleet to be grounded. Captain Murray in the
Edgar
led the way. According to the log of another ship:

A more beautiful and solemn sight I never witnessed. The
Edgar
led the van . . . A man-of-war is at all times a beautiful sight, but at such a time the spectacle is overwhelming. We saw her passing on through the enemy’s fire, and moving in the midst of it to gain her station. Our minds were seized with a sort of awe. Not a word was spoken through the ship save by the pilot and helmsmen, and their commands, being chanted very much in the same manner as the responses in a cathedral service, added to the solemnity.

The plan was meticulous: the
Edgar
was to pass the first four ships firing broadsides, then anchor beside the fifth ship, the two ships behind her overtaking to engage the next two ships, and then the following ships to pass on ahead to engage one by one the ships farther forward. The idea was for all the ships to rake the first four Danish ships with repeated broadsides, but without stopping, and then engage the rest.

Disaster struck almost immediately: the
Agamemnon
went aground on the southern tip of Middle Ground, while the
Bellona
and the
Russell
also went ashore a little way farther up. Nelson himself was in the next ship, the
Elephant
, and saw that only if he passed to the west of the stranded ships was he likely to find the elusive deep-water channel. As his ships sailed down the Danish line, now just 700 feet away, the two sides exchanged murderous broadsides. The exchange lasted four terrible hours, with dreadful carnage being inflicted on both sides. On the
Edgar
142 crew members were killed; on the
Monarch
, 218 lost their lives. Nelson, deprived of three of his main ships, had sent the frigates led by Captain Riou to exchange fire with the powerful 90-gun batteries on Three Crown Island at the northern tip of the Channel.

Parker was watching helplessly more than a mile away to the north-east of the Middle Ground, entirely uncertain how the fighting was going as smoke enveloped the ferocious battle. Captain Otway, his flag captain, went in a boat to discover what was happening, and while he was away Parker ran signal 39 from the mast of his flagship, the
London
: this meant ‘discontinue the action’. The frigates, exchanging a terrible pounding with the shore batteries, obeyed, although Riou, already wounded, was deeply upset: ‘What will Nelson think of us?’ he exclaimed, and then was almost cut in two by fire from the Danish shore battery.

So arose one of the most celebrated incidents in Nelson’s career: according to Colonel Stewart, who was beside him, Nelson saw the signal and made no comment but continued pacing the deck. His signal-lieutenant asked whether he should raise the same signal over the
Elephant
, so as to pass the message down the fleet. ‘No, acknowledge it,’ said Nelson. Then he asked, ‘Is my signal – number 16 [for close action] flying?’ ‘Yes, my lord.’ ‘Mind you keep it so.’ Nelson turned to his flag captain, Foley, and remarked, ‘You know, Foley, I only have one eye. I have a right to be blind sometimes.’ He raised his telescope to his blind eye and said, ‘I really do not see the signal. Damn the signal. Keep mine for close action flying.’

This version was first given in Clarke and M’Arthur’s extensive
Life of Nelson
. Southey’s classic
Life of Nelson
, written in 1813, repeated the same story, as well as that of the ship’s surgeon – that he ordered his
own signal for close battle to be nailed to the mast – which must have been hearsay, for surely the surgeon would have been down below tending the wounded.

Colonel Stewart himself wrote three versions of the story, and the ‘blind eye’ gesture only emerged in the last. Terry Coleman, in his excellent revisionist biography of Nelson, points out that ‘Stewart did not mention the story in the first two versions, or in a six-page letter he wrote after the battle, and a journal’, and concluded that the story was a later piece of embroidery. He may be right, although it would have been unusual for such a senior officer to fabricate such a story. Just possibly Stewart had considered the story an unimportant detail at the time, not realizing the high colour it added to the scene.

It served also to obscure the more important aspects of the battle. For Nelson undoubtedly did the right thing in disregarding an order from an admiral far from the scene of the battle. To continue the action was the only thing that he safely could do, for to discontinue it and withdraw would have exposed all his ships to withering and destructive broadsides as they ran the gauntlet to get out of the channel – not to mention the danger of running aground on the treacherous shoals. Vice-Admiral William Young of the Admiralty said as much to Lord Keith, both of them usually sticklers for discipline.

Nelson was absolutely right in his act of insubordination. He was facing one of the trickiest situations of his career: unlike at Cape St Vincent he did not confront the enemy fleet in open seas; unlike the Nile he could not send his ships inshore to attack the Danes on both flanks. He was committed to a straightforward exchange of fire against an enemy with superior firepower, between shoals that trapped his fleet. There was no room for imagination or dramatic manoeuvring. It was more like a land battle than a naval one.

Soon his position began to look critical, and it looked as if Nelson was facing his first defeat in a major fleet action. The
Elephant
, and the
Defiance
at the northern end of the line were under intense fire and seemed likely to be destroyed, while the
Monarch
, which was also in the vanguard under the guns of the fort, had sustained huge casualties. But then the
Dannebrog
, the Danish flagship, spectacularly caught fire and, with its cables cut, drifted down the Danish line sowing alarm. At half
past three it blew up. Other floating batteries had also cut their cables and some had sunk; but still Nelson could not lead his ships to safety under the intense fire of the Three Crown Island shore batteries.

Coolly, with his ship continuing to fire, he resorted to a brutal threat. He addressed a letter to the Danes: ‘Lord Nelson has directions to spare Denmark when no longer resisting but if the firing is continued on the part of Denmark Lord Nelson will be obliged to set on fire the floating batteries he has taken, without having the power of saving the brave Danes who have defended them.’ He insisted on sealing the letter with wax, and did so with great care while Stewart asked him why he was taking so long. Nelson replied that he did not want the Danes to believe he was acting in a hurry. This missive was received by the Danish Prince Regent, Frederick.

The young prince was less concerned by the fate of the men aboard the now helpless hulks than the possibility that the British, in this desperate situation, might bombard his capital. The Danes, who had no real quarrel with the British and were already regretting their alliance with Russia, acquiesced, to Nelson’s intense relief.

He was able to extricate his ships from that channel of death. Even then two ships collided, the
Ganges
and
Monarch
, and, three ran aground including his own
Elephant
. They would have been helpless if the Danish batteries had still been firing. The following day he was able to reflect on his three beached ships at the south end of the mudbank. He had salvaged all of his ships with the loss of around 350 men killed and 600 wounded: the Danes had lost some 1,800 men and 3,500 were taken prisoner in the captured ships. It was a victory on points – the least decisive of Nelson’s greatest battles.

By a threat and a trick he had got out of an extremely dangerous situation. Stewart wrote: ‘Lord Nelson then commanded a cessation of hostilities, and by prolonging it under one pretext or another, in four and twenty hours after got our crippled ships off the shoals, and from under the guns of the enemy’s batteries . . .’

After the battle Nelson said apprehensively to Foley: ‘Well I have fought contrary to orders and I shall perhaps be hanged. Never mind. Let them.’ Meanwhile he pressed for a more permanent truce. ‘Bomb ships’ were brought up to threaten to bombard Copenhagen. He told
the Danes: ‘We are ready. Ready to bombard this night.’ Looking at the palace and wooden houses of the beautiful old city he remarked: ‘Although I have only one eye, I see that this will burn very well.’ The Danes replied that they feared the Russians would bombard them if they pulled out of their alliance, and Nelson offered to protect them with a British fleet. He personally conducted the negotiations on shore.

At last agreement was reached. An exultant Nelson wrote:

1st We had beat the Danes. 2nd We wish to make them feel that we are their real friends, therefore have spared their town, which we can always set on fire; and I do not think if we burnt Copenhagen it would have the effect of attaching them to us; on the contrary they would hate us. 3rd They understand perfectly that we are at war with them for their treaty of armed neutrality made last year. 4th We have made them suspend the operations of that treaty. 5th It has given our fleet free scope to act against Russia and Sweden.

His fleet now moved up the Baltic towards its real target, the Russian fleets at Revel and Kronstadt. But then the news arrived that the Tsar had been assassinated before the battle of Copenhagen. Nelson argued that it was by no means certain the new Russian government would be any better disposed towards Britain and, with the overwhelming strength of eighteen ships, urged an attack on each of the dispersed Russian fleets at Carlscrona, Kronstadt and Revel. They could be destroyed in turn. But Parker insisted on taking the fleet back to Kioge Bay.

On 5 May, however Parker was recalled and Nelson appointed to command the fleet. By 12 May Nelson had led it back to Revel only to fund that the Russian fleet there had gone and joined the one at Kronstadt. The new Tsar, Alexander I, meanwhile reversed policy, releasing British merchant ships which had been seized and signing an agreement with Britain under which British goods were again allowed to sail in Baltic waters. Thus the threat to Britain’s trade with the north had been decisively dispelled – partly thanks to Nelson’s skill and daring, partly to luck.