The War of Wars (53 page)

After his success at Copenhagen, Nelson’s career plunged again in what had become for him a familiar pattern. Up to now, except at the Nile, he had been a subordinate commander because of his youth. Not that that made much difference; as one of his captains said, to his irritation, as far back as 1797: ‘You did just as you pleased in Lord Hood’s time, the same in Admiral Hotham’s, and now again with Sir John Jervis. It makes no difference to you who is commander-in-chief.’ He was now to gain a command of his own – but one he did not want. On his return to England in July 1801 he was promptly appointed to command the Channel Fleet in case of French invasion.

Nelson was deeply sceptical that any such possibility existed, and justifiably so, but he took to his new duties, compiling a memorandum to the Admiralty about the threat. Unable to stay passive for long, on 4 August Nelson despatched a flotilla of gunboats and bomb vessels, as well as a ship of the line, to bombard Boulogne where there were 2,000 French soldiers. Thousands of spectators lined the cliffs of Dover and Deal to watch the action with telescopes. The attack did minimum damage, but served to warn the French to be on their guard. It was said that Nelson had been ‘speaking to the French’.

Nelson was in an irritable mood, a celebrity increasingly unhappy with the expectations and admirers he had aroused. ‘Oh how I hate to be stared at,’ he complained moodily aboard his flagship. ‘Fifty boats, I am told, are rowing about her this moment to have a look at the one-armed man.’

Nelson summoned some of his youngest captains to plan for a frontal attack on Boulogne: five squadrons would be involved. The aim was to
attack the ships moored across the harbour with boarding parties supported by mortar ships at night, when the French ships could not be expected to fire back for fear of hitting their own. It was a ‘cutting-out’ expedition on a grand scale.

Nelson was confident. He wrote to Emma: ‘It is one thing to order and arrange an attack and another to execute it. But I assure you, I have taken much more precaution for others than if I was to go myself . . . After they have fired their guns, if one half of the French do not jump overboard and swim on shore, I will venture to be hanged . . . If our people behave as I expect, our loss cannot be much. My fingers itch to be at them.’

His adversary was France’s greatest naval commander, Admiral Louis-René Latouche-Tréville, and he was prepared: netting had been strung down from the upper rigging to the ships’ sides to repel attack. The ships were attached to one another by chains with strong cables securely anchored to the seabed. The French commander observed the British making preparations during the day of 15 August. That same night boatloads of British sailors were dropped off the coast wearing white armbands for identification at night and carrying cutlasses, pikes, tomahawks, pistols, muskets and knives. It was to be a daring inshore raid – except that the French were fully alert to them.

Taking advantage of the incoming tide, the British boats swept silently in – and two of the foremost were carried past the French fleet by the swirling, racing waters. The French tossed a cannonball into another, which sank her. The fourth crew attempted to board the
Etna
. As a junior British officer abroad wrote: ‘But a very strong netting, triced up to her lower yards, baffled all our endeavours and an instantaneous discharge of her guns and small arms from about 200 soldiers on her gunwale knocked myself, Mr Kirby, the master of the
Medusa
, and Mr Gore, a midshipman, with two-thirds of the crew upon our backs in the boat, all either killed or wounded.’

As the men tried to clamber across the unexpected netting they encountered, they were shot at by the French on deck. One ship was captured. But as the commanding officer of the raid reported later to Nelson: ‘I was prevented from towing her out by her being secured by
a chain and, in consequence of a very heavy fire of musketry and grapeshot that was directed at us from the shore, three luggers and another brig within half a pistol-shot, and not seeing the least prospect of being able to get her off, I was obliged to abandon her.’

By about 4 a.m. the boats were returning, having utterly failed in their task, while Nelson stood off the French coast, in a frigate, watching. At midday the British sailed back to Deal, with forty-four men killed and 128 wounded and not a single prize: only ten French-men had been killed and thirty-four wounded. The raid had been a complete, if relatively minor, fiasco. The French sang joyfully: ‘Off Boulogne, Nelson poured hell-fire! But on that day, many a drunk/Instead of wine, drank salt water/off Boulogne!’ Nelson wrote disconsolately: ‘I am sorry to tell you that I have not succeeded in bringing out, or destroying the enemy’s flotilla moored in the mouth of the harbour of Boulogne. The most astonishing bravery was evinced by many of our officers and men.’

Later he sank into deep melancholy. He wrote to the Admiralty Secretary: ‘A diabolical spirit is still at work. Every means, even to posting up papers in the streets of Deal, has been used to set the seamen against being sent by Lord Nelson to be butchered and that at Margate it was the same thing, whenever any boats went on shore. “What, are you going to be slaughtered again?” Even this might be got over but the subject has been fully discussed in the wardrooms, midshipmen’s berths, etc . . . as I must probably be, from all the circumstances I have stated, not much liked by either officers or men, I really think it would be better to take me from this command.’ He wrote to St Vincent: ‘I own I shall never bring myself again to allow any attack to go forward, where I am not personally concerned; my mind suffers much more than if I had a leg shot off in this later business.’ At the funeral of two young midshipmen killed in the action he wept and was even more distraught when a young protégé, Captain Edward Peake, who had been wounded, subsequently died.

Nelson had regularized his affair with Emma, and acquired a property, Merton Place in Surrey, where she could play his hostess. He was disappointed by his father’s intense disapproval of his dalliance. The
elderly churchman was not in thrall to the hero-worship which surrounded his son and which legitimized his ostentatious, in some eyes, flaunting of his mistress and humiliation of his wife. Nelson defended his conduct towards Fanny, whom his father adored, in a letter: ‘My dear father – I have received your letter and of which you must be sensible I cannot like for as you seem by your conduct to put me in the wrong it is no wonder that they who do not know me and my disposition should. But Nelson soars above them all and time will do that justice to my private character which she has to my public one. I that have given her [Fanny], with her falsity . . . £2,000 a year and £4,000 in money and which she calls a poor pittance . . . I could say much more but will not out of respect to you, my dear father, but you know her, therefore I finish.’

In December 1801 Fanny wrote imploringly: ‘Do, my dear husband, let us live together. I can never be happy until such an event takes place. I assure you again I have one wish in the world, to please you. Let everything be buried in oblivion, it will pass away like a dream. I can now only entreat you to believe I am most sincerely and affectionately your wife Frances H Nelson.’ Brutally Nelson had a secretary write back: ‘Opened by mistake by Lord Nelson, but not read.’

Nelson blamed Fanny for turning the old man against him. Nelson’s behaviour towards Fanny was reprehensible, and his obsession with the gross and spiteful Emma distasteful, but the truth was that he had fallen out of love with the former and in love with the latter; and love is ungovernable, particularly in a man who believes he can do as he likes and fears he may have only a short time left to live. When his father’s doctor wrote to his son that the parson was dying, Nelson replied: ‘I have no hopes that he can recover. God’s will be done. Had my father expressed a wish to see me, unwell as I am, I should have flown to Bath but I believe that it would be too late; however should it be otherwise and he wishes to see me, no consideration shall detain me a minute.’ The old man died the same day. Nelson did not attend the funeral.

The superstar admiral also fell out with one of his oldest friends and comrades in arms. Thomas Troubridge had been with Nelson at Cape St Vincent, Tenerife, the Nile and in Sicily. Troubridge was a brilliant and valiant sailor, but an even harsher disciplinarian than Nelson. However, when Nelson and Emma left Naples in 1799, he made the cardinal error of criticizing the Queen of Naples, technically the island’s sovereign, for not providing food for the starving people there:

I am not very tender hearted, but really the distress here would even move a Neapolitan . . . I have this day saved 30,000 people from dying; but with this day my ability ceases. As the King of Naples, or rather the Queen and her party, are bent on starving us, I see no alternative, but to leave these poor unhappy people to starve, without being witnesses to their distress. I curse the day I ever served the King of Naples . . . We have characters, my lord, to lose; these people have none. Do not suffer their infamous conduct to fall on us.

Troubridge also criticized Nelson for going with Emma to Leghorn. Nelson was furious and wrote a bitter letter to his old friend. Troubridge replied: ‘It really has so unhinged me, that I am quite unmanned and crying. I would sooner forfeit my life, my everything, than be deemed ungrateful to an officer and friend I feel I owe so much to . . . I [pray] your lordship not to harbour the smallest idea that I am not the same Troubridge you have known me.’

When Nelson fell out with St Vincent over the issue of prize money and the latter’s own disdain for Emma, Troubridge was chosen by the First Lord to serve on the Admiralty board. This further angered Nelson. Yet he soon returned to confiding in him in his letters, calling him his ‘old faithful friend’. But on his return to England, Nelson had begun to suspect that Troubridge was responsible for his unwanted command of the Channel Fleet – which he believed was deliberately intended to keep him apart from Emma.

He was livid when St Vincent pointedly compared Troubridge’s ‘magic’ to his own. He complained about the ‘beasts’ of the Admiralty keeping him at sea. He was furious with Troubridge:

Tomorrow week all is over – no thanks to Sir Thomas. I believe the fault is all his, and he ought to have recollected that I got him the medal of the Nile. Who upheld him when he would have sunk under grief and mortification? Who placed him in such a situation in the kingdom of Naples that he got by my public letters, titles, the colonelcy of marines, diamond boxes from the King of Naples, 1,000 ounces in money for no expenses that I know of? Who got him £500 a year from the King of Naples? . . .Who brought his character into notice? Look at my public letters. Nelson, that Nelson he now lords it over. So much for gratitude. I forgive him but by God I shall never forget it. He enjoys showing his powers over me. Never mind, although it will shorten my days . . . I have been rebuffed so that my spirits are gone, and the great Troubridge has what we call cowed the spirits of Nelson, but I shall never forget it . . .

Even the long-suffering Sir William Hamilton was now at breaking point. He wrote:

I have passed the last 40 years of my life in the hustle and bustle that must necessarily be attendant on a public character. I am arrived at the age when some repose is really necessary, and I promised myself a quiet home, although I was sensible, and said so when I married, that I should be superannuated when my wife would be in her full beauty and vigour of youth. That time is arrived, and we must make the best of it for the comfort of both parties.

Unfortunately our tastes as to the manner of living are very different. I by no means wish to live in a solitary retreat, but to have seldom less than 12 or 14 at table, and those varying continually, is coming back to what was become so irksome to me in Italy during the latter years of our residence in that country . . . I have no complaint to make, but I feel that the whole attention of my wife is given to Lord N and his interest at Merton. I well know the purity of Lord N’s friendship for Emma and me, and I know how very uncomfortable it would make his lordship, our best friend, if a separation should take place, and am therefore determined to do all in my power to prevent such an extremity, which would be essentially detrimental to all parties, but would be more sensibly felt by our dear friend than by us.

In March 1803 the tolerant old man died. By that time Nelson’s reputation was in tatters again. It was ever thus. His undistinguished early career and oblivion in the West Indies had been followed by the glory of Cape St Vincent, which had been succeeded by the glorious failure at Tenerife, then by the triumph at the Nile, then by the squalid comedy of excess and cruelty at Naples, then the triumph at Copenhagen, then by failure at Boulogne and the cruelty of his treatment of his wife, father and Sir William Hamilton all for Emma’s sake. By that time too peace had broken out; and Napoleon’s formidable British foe, his reputation savagely compromised, was contemplating the prospect of a quiet life for the first time.

The Treaty of Amiens reflected Britain’s long weariness with war, as well as the inadequacy of Britain’s new prime minister, Addington, appointed after King George III fell out with Pitt over the issue of Catholic emancipation. Negotiations began on 1 October 1801, but it was not concluded until 27 March 1802. Its terms were some of the most shameful in British history. Britain surrendered virtually every outpost in the Mediterranean, including Elba, Minorca and the key outpost of Malta, which was to be evacuated in three months and occupied by Neapolitan troops guaranteed by the six major powers. Of the territories she had gained in the war, only Ceylon and Trinidad were to remain in British hands, while the latter was to remain her only significant outpost in the West Indies. France retained all her continental possessions except for Naples and the Papal States. Piedmont, Elba and Liguria effectively became French satellites. Holland was also effectively annexed, and Napoleon soon made it clear that Switzerland would be also.