Nelson: The Essential Hero (48 page)

[It is] not from any desire to get a few hundred pounds that actuates me to address this letter to you; but, my dear Lord, justice to the brave officers and men who fought on that day. ... I think the King should send a gracious Message to the House of Commons as a gift to this Fleet; for what must be the natural feelings of the Officers and men belonging to it, to see their rich Commander-in-Chief burn all the fruits of their victory, which, if fitted up and sent to England, as many of them might have been by dismantling part of our Fleet, would have sold for a good round sum?

The Battle of Copenhagen proved a political embarrassment to the Government and to the Admiralty. They had always hoped that the Danes could be brought to withdraw from the Northern Alliance without the application of force; the two countries had not technically been at war at the time; and no one could be found in England who had any hatred towards the Danes. The war was against France, and Denmark had been drawn into the alliance with Russia out of fear, as had the other signatories. The battle had achieved its object but, now that all was over, those in authority almost seemed as if they wished to forget all about it. George III's own indifference, possibly feigned, towards the recent events in the Baltic was borne home to Nelson when, upon his return, the King asked him, ‘Lord Nelson, do you get out?’ - meaning, in the parlance of the time, did circumstances and his health permit Nelson to take part in the social world. Nelson was so infuriated that he is recorded as having been tempted to say: ‘Sir, I have been out and am come in again. Your Majesty perhaps has not heard of the Battle of Copenhagen! ’

It was not until 12 April that Sir Hyde Parker saw lit to take his fleet, now reduced to seventeen sail-of-the-line (two had been sent home) further into the Baltic. Three days before, Nelson, who had been fuming over the delay caused by the Armistice talks, had written to St Vincent: ‘I make no scruple in saying that I would have been at Revel fourteen days ago. ... I wanted Sir Hyde to let me at least go and cruise off Carlscrona to prevent the Revel ships from getting in to join them [the Swedes].’ The passage was extremely difficult: all the ships had had to be lightened to get through, and Nelson’s
St George
had to have some of her guns removed. This meant that she was twenty miles astern of the fleet when the news came through that a Swedish squadron had been sighted at sea. Nelson was so eager not to miss what he imagined to be an impending battle that he ordered a boat lowered, and expressed his intention of catching up with the
Elephant
and shifting his flag to her. The weather was bitterly cold and, Tom Allen having forgotten to have his boat-cloak ready, Nelson got into the boat without it. He refused the offer of a coat from another officer aboard - saying, ‘No, I am not cold; my anxiety for my country will keep me warm’ - and made the five-hour journey to join the fleet in plain uniform, so anxious was he that they might already have weighed and sailed for action. As it turned out, the Swedes, on seeing the approach of Parker’s ships, had wisely returned to Karlskrona. It was not until midnight that Nelson stepped aboard the
Elephant
, to be greeted by his old friend Foley, and by that time the Baltic air had set its mark on his weakened frame. He was later to tell Emma how ‘A cold struck me to the heart. On the 27th I had one of my terrible spasms of heart-stroke. . . . From that time to the end. of May I brought up what everyone thought was my lungs, and I was emaciated more than you can conceive.’

Nelson was still as eager as ever to get the ships into the Gulf of Finland to prevent the junction of the Russian fleets from Kronstadt and Reval, which would be possible as soon as the ice melted at the latter port. Parker, true to his nature, preferred to wait off Karlskrona, and thus immobilise the relatively unimportant Swedish squadron at anchor there. As events turned out, the Tsar Alexander I now ordered his fleet to abstain from all hostilities. His father’s pro-French policy was at an end, and so to all effects and purposes was the necessity for a British presence in the Baltic. St Vincent meanwhile had received the despatches from Copenhagen and had made up his mind: Sir Hyde Parker must be recalled, and Nelson was to take over the command (Parker was never employed again). Nelson immediately took the fleet east - determined, even though he knew that the Russians were no longer hostile, to prevent the junction of their two fleets until such a time as the Armed Neutrality had been disbanded. The Tsar remonstrated when Nelson’s ships appeared off Reval, asking for ‘the prompt withdrawal of the fleet under your command’. Nelson was quick to see that tact and diplomacy, not arms, were what was now required. He sent a letter to the Tsar stating that his arrival at Reval was intended as no more than a desire to pay his respects to the new ruler of Russia, and that he would be sailing immediately for the Baltic. On 19 May the Armed Neutrality was dissolved. The threat to Britain from the North, the threat to her trade and to her maritime requirements, was over. On 14 June, Nelson’s repeated requests for relief from his command were answered. His old friend Sir Charles Pole, another one of Locker’s pupils and now a vice-admiral, arrived to relieve Nelson. Once again, his mission accomplished by the annihilation of an opposing fleet, Nelson sailed for Yarmouth. This time, more befittingly than on the previous occasion, he was without civilian accompaniment, and aboard a small naval brig. He had made it clear that he did not want to deprive the fleet of a larger vessel. In much the same vein as he had so often written to Fanny, he now wrote to Emma: ‘I am fixed to live a country life, and to have many (I hope) years of comfort. . .

Nelson’s
first action upon arrival in Yarmouth was to visit the wounded from Copenhagen in the naval hospital. No one knew better than he the price that was paid for such victories and, while the press and the public might write fulsome articles or cheer him in the streets, they little knew the roar of battle, the scream and whimper of jagged wooden splinters, or the crash and confusion as masts and yards came tumbling down. Like most men of action — much though he adored adulation - he may have reserved in some corner of his heart a feeling of distaste, or even perhaps contempt, for the fat burghers, bechained mayors, simpering ladies and elegant gentlemen (it was the age of the dandy) who celebrated the result of events which they did not understand. The word ‘Victory’, so dear to him, implied not only many dead, but also legless and armless seamen, young men part-destroyed before they had hardly shaken hands with life, and limitless suffering among women and children for whom there would be no providers. He was soon to see, as news of Napoleon’s invasion plans were carefully leaked to demoralise his countrymen, how the southern counties of England would be temporarily evacuated by all those who could afford to leave their homes and travel north.

Meanwhile he hoped for nothing more than a long rest, a holiday with Emma and inevitably of course, for the sake of appearances, Sir William. He longed to see Horatia again - his one pledge to the future. She would inherit neither his name nor his titles. . . . When his peerage was gazetted in the August of that year, the succession was remaindered first upon his old father, should he outlive him, and then upon his male heirs and, in default, to the male heirs of his sisters. He now joined the Hamiltons at Burford Bridge in Surrey and, for a few weeks only, enjoyed the peace of the quiet posting-inn where they were staying, lodged in the shadow of Box Hill. East Anglia seemed to call him no longer and, after his landing at Yarmouth and proceeding to London, he never again revisited his home county. The associations were now perhaps somewhat uncomfortable - childhood at the parsonage, his long years on the beach, Fanny, Round Wood, and the failure of his marriage. Surrey, so gentle and romantic a county, was Emma and the future. It is significant that the house which he was soon to buy, Merton Place, was also in Surrey, and that it would prove a far call from the humble cottage which he had long ago envisaged as the home to which he and Fanny would finally retire.

While he and Sir William went fishing in the company of his brother the Reverend William and his wife and daughter, Emma, and a young captain, Edward Parker, who was acting as Nelson’s aide-de-camp, the post-chaises rumbled past the inn. Their route lay between Portsmouth and London; they carried the news from the Channel and the directives from the capital. Nelson’s holiday was to be all too brief. On 20 July he was summoned to Whitehall. With the Treaty of Luneville, which had been signed in February that year, Bonaparte had been relieved of all his foreign enemies with the exception of Portugal and Britain. He dealt with the former by inducing Spain to declare war upon her neighbour. Now, with the whole of the Continent secure behind him, he could afford to devote his undivided attention to Britain. It was only her sea power which still held out against him, which had recaptured Malta, was on the point of compelling his Army of the East to abandon Egypt, and which had just been instrumental in causing the dissolution of the Armed Neutrality of the North by Nelson’s victory at Copenhagen. The only way to strike at Britain was across the Channel.

Those ‘Narrow Seas’, which Drake had helped secure for his country over two centuries before, were still her defensive moat. As Jacques Bainville put it in his biography :

Napoleon had to seize England by the throat and overcome her; anything else could only postpone the day of reckoning. ... If he had not realised that, he would not deserve his fame as an extraordinary man, and there would be a vast lacuna in his genius. And it is a poor tribute to his intelligence to suppose that the camp at Boulogne, the building of a whole fleet for transporting his army across the Channel, were mere feints. Actually, it was Napoleon himself who, by prolonging his sojourn in Italy after the coronation in Milan, strove to delude the English into the belief that his projects against them were a blind. ... If a crossing of the Channel at last succeeded and a French army landed, that would be the end of England as surely as the day when William the Conqueror set foot on the island. It was a decisive game that was in play.

It was because the threat was so serious that Nelson was now summoned to London. Among the numerous measures being taken by the Government was the formation of a ‘Squadron on a Particular Service. This consisted of a large squadron of light craft, consisting of frigates, gun-and bomb-vessels, floating batteries and numerous other small craft, for the defence of the coast from Beachy Head to Orford-ness. Although it was hardly the kind of command that under normal circumstances would have been given to an admiral of Nelson's rank and renown, Addington and St Vincent had concluded that no one less than Nelson would serve to take charge of it. His name alone, it was felt, would inspire his countrymen with confidence and would instil into the enemy, if not fear, the knowledge that Britain was sending against them the finest of her seamen - the men who had already destroyed the flower of their fleet at Aboukir Bay. It has been suggested that another reason why St Vincent was anxious to appoint Nelson to this command was that he wished at all costs to remove him from the company of Emma, and a relationship which had already become a public scandal and was making a laughing-stock of a man whose worth he well knew and admired so much. There may have been something of that behind the reasons for his choice. Certainly Nelson, who had returned from the Baltic largely on grounds of ill-health, would have hardly seemed the appropriate man to be appointed to a command which would involve great physical activity, constant exposure to Channel weather, and a berth aboard a ship no larger than a frigate. His proneness to seasickness in small ships was well known and he was - at any rate during this period of his life -always at his best in command of large ships-of-the-line. A man like Captain Riou, had he had the rank and had he survived Copenhagen, would have been ideally suited to this type of service.

Nelson's brother Maurice had recently died and he took time off to see his ‘widow', a lady whom Maurice in fact had never married, and he also made sure of paying a visit to little Horatia. It was during this period of his life that Nelson received a letter from his wife, who was staying at Bath, as was his father whom she lovingly and conscientiously looked after in his old age :

My Dear Husband, I cannot be silent in the general joy throughout the Kingdom, I must express my thankfulness and happiness it hath pleased God to spare your life. All greet you with every testimony of gratitude and praise. This victory is said to surpass Aboukir. What my feelings are your own good heart will tell you. Let me beg, nay intreat you, to believe no wife ever felt greater affection for a husband than I do. And to the best of my knowledge I have invariably done everything you desired. If I have omitted anything I am sorry for it.

On receiving a letter from our father written in a melancholy and distressing manner, I offered to go to him if I could in the least contribute to ease his mind. By return of post he desired to see me immediately but I was to stop a few days in town to see for a house. I will do every thing in my power to alleviate the many infirmities which bear him down.

What more can I do to convince you that I am truly your affectionate wife ?

Fanny’s letter went unanswered. But, on 27 July, already arrived at Sheerness to take over his command, he was writing to Emma in jocular tone: ‘Tonight I dine with Adi. Graeme, who has also lost his right arm, and as the Commander of the Troops has lost his leg, I expect we shall be caricatured as the
lame
defenders of England.’ He had already written a long memorandum to St Vincent, analysing the enemy’s object, possible method and means of transporting his forces across the Channel, and his suggested dispositions of the forces available. He concluded : ‘The moment the enemy touch our coast, they are to be attacked by every man afloat and on shore : this must be perfectly understood.
Never fear the event.'
He hoisted his flag in the frigate
Medusa
of 32 guns and by 3 August was off Boulogne in company with a number of bomb-ketches. This was not a raid of any great moment, but rather an opportunity for him to take a first look at the enemy’s defences and the preparations for the invasion. Two or three floating batteries were sunk and a brig was forced to run aground. The action achieved little else, for it was not Nelson’s intention to harm civilians (‘The town is spared as much as the nature of the service will admit’). But the very fact that it was aggressive, as opposed to all the
defensive
works by which they were surrounded, put heart into the coastal dwellers of England. Crowds of people collected at Dover, gazing seaward as their ancestors had so often gazed before, and took heart as they listened to the distant rumble of gunfire, and heard ‘Nelson speaking to the French’.