Nelson: Britannia's God of War (34 page)

Back in London, meanwhile, Spencer had finally realised that Nelson was ill: he had secured royal authority in early May for Nelson to come home, fearful his ‘indifferent health’ would not be helped by staying at Palermo.
⁵⁸
He stressed to Nelson that he was not being recalled; indeed, Spencer would prefer that he stayed until Malta fell, but if this were not possible, he should recover his health in London rather ‘than in an inactive situation at a foreign court’.
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Nelson was quick to see the slight, intentional or otherwise, in Spencer’s choice of phrase. ‘I trust you and all my friends will believe, that mine cannot be an inactive life, although it may not carry all the outward parade of
much
ado
about
nothing
.’
⁶⁰

Exhausted by seven years of war, Nelson had hoped to go home in his flagship, which was also in need of repair. However, Lord Keith,
under strict instructions from the Admiralty not to send any ships of the line home, ordered Nelson to leave her behind. Nelson had planned one last visit to Malta, before he departed the stage with the Hamiltons, escorting the Queen of Naples to Leghorn for a royal visit to Vienna.
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Keith, though, was concerned less with such diplomatic pleasantries than with the sudden shifts of fortune of the war in northern Italy: on 6 June Genoa fell to the allies after a long siege, but eight days later Bonaparte rendered the result irrelevant with his stunning, if fortunate victory at Marengo. The efforts of the Russians, Austrians and British over the past year were reduced to nothingness in a matter of hours. The Russians left the coalition, and the defeated Austrians signed an armistice and evacuated Piedmont, Liguria, the western half of Lombardy, Tuscany and Ancona. The brief period of Anglo-Austrian cooperation, and any hope of victory, was over. Even if Austria did not make peace, she would not resume the offensive. The rejection of Bonaparte’s peace offer began to look like a mistake. Having belatedly developed a real Mediterranean strategy, the ministers learnt in late June that it was all over.
⁶²

While all this was unfolding, Nelson was on passage from Palermo to Leghorn, where he arrived on 15 June. Rather than oblige Nelson’s wish to go home in his flagship, Keith ordered every available unit to help the evacuation of Genoa. After they had left the
Foudroyant
, Nelson and the Hamiltons waited until the Queen set off overland on 10 July, following her route via Ancona on the 12th. Far from relapsing into inactivity Nelson remained on duty to the day he landed.
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*

Nelson went home overland, which at least allowed him to accompany Emma, who was anxious to avoid a sea passage owing to her pregnancy. After a fraught and adventurous journey from Leghorn to Ancona, Nelson and the Hamiltons boarded a Russian frigate for a stormy passage to Trieste, which confirmed Nelson’s opinion of Russian ships and seamen. Once in Austrian territory the journey became a triumphal procession, through Slovenia and on to Vienna, where Nelson became the centre of attention: everyone was desperate to see him and to touch his garments. He became a public spectacle.

The wealth, taste and sophistication that Nelson encountered in the Austrian capital cast the Court of Naples in a provincial light. Joseph Haydn had written a powerful ‘Mass in Time of Fear’ in D major in August 1798, which was first performed shortly after news of Nelson’s
victory reached Austria. Another performance on the Esterházy estate at Eisenstadt in early September 1800, given in the presence of the hero, seems to have cemented its identification as the ‘Nelson Mass’. If it was not inspired by Nelson, the re-dedication was well earned, for Nelson had done so much to relieve the fear that prompted Haydn to produce one of his most powerful works. Haydn also set some English verses on the battle to music, and accompanied Emma when she sang them; this was probably more to Nelson’s taste than a Catholic mass.
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Despite such entertainments, Nelson was subdued: the triumphal tour was, in reality, a rest cure for his shattered frame and exhausted mind. He wrote little and was happy to leave the performing to Sir William and the remarkable Emma, who fascinated everyone, including Haydn. For those whose ideas about public dignity were formed in the eighteenth century, there was something vulgar about the Nelson entourage, and about Emma’s dominating, expanding presence – to which some critics made pointed reference, not that they suspected she was pregnant. The whole procession seemed showy, and inappropriate. But the world had moved on since 1793: nations that wanted to mobilise their people needed heroes, and Nelson was the only contemporary hero to win his fame defeating the French. He could be lauded in the Habsburg lands because, as an admiral, his triumph did not threaten the fragile self-esteem of the insecure Emperor or his nervous court. Consequently, popular adulation greeted him in every town and city.

The excitement he attracted was not the result of dazzling social accomplishments: far from the sea and ships, he seemed to have little to say, and he demonstrated no interest in art, music, literature, architecture or scenery. Though the weather was an abiding obsession, he passed mountains and medieval cities with indifference. Utterly dedicated to his profession, he had neither time nor education for culture. His reading was dominated by professional matters, coastal pilots,
⁶⁵
naval biographies, texts on shipbuilding and charts, combined with the Bible, Shakespeare, recent English writers and the reviews. The classical world of Sir William, Lord Minto and other statesmen was a closed book; his linguistic attainments never stretched beyond a competence in French.

Despite the fame he attracted on the Continent, Nelson would have been anxious to discover how his countrymen would receive him, and
concerned that the passage of time between his heroic achievements and his homecoming would dull the public’s enthusiasm. He need not have worried. The collapse of the Second Coalition and the resurgence of the invasion threat made Nelson’s return timely. The nation’s need for a hero had grown, and no one else could challenge his centrality in the national consciousness.

When he landed at Great Yarmouth on 6 November, he was overwhelmed by the public response. He immediately wrote to the Admiralty reporting his arrival, and his fitness for service. He was less attentive to Fanny’s needs: not only did he forget that had written for her to meet him in London, but he failed to open the letters she left at Yarmouth. Swept up in local celebrations, he left town and headed for Round Wood, where he may have hoped to greet and abandon Fanny, before pressing on for London with the Hamiltons to resume his career, and his chosen mode of life. Instead they finally met in London, and the break-up of the marriage took place in public, at the Admiralty and the opera. The tactical finesse, strategic forethought and careful planning that were the hallmark of Nelson at war were nowhere to be seen. In private matters he procrastinated, though he ultimately showed his decisive qualities when he refused to succumb to social pressure and go back to his wife. To have done so would have been feeble, and utterly incompatible with the confidence he showed in following his own judgment and rejecting superior authority in 1799. It was, if not ‘heroic’, certainly decisive and consistent.
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It may have been the crowd’s adulation that brought him to a decision about the rest of his life. He was the hero, and he was entitled tolive as he chose, not to submit to the dictates of convention. Like many another great man, he could set his wife aside, with a decent settlement, and take up with his new ‘wife’, soon to be the mother of his child. It is inconceivable that he could ever have settled into the parochial trifles of Round Wood, and the slight world that Fanny occupied. His life was a public one, and he needed the company of public figures, naval officers, statesmen, diplomats – and Emma, the confidante of a Queen. Though Fanny had done nothing wrong, she was not a fit consort for a hero, and she was unable to bear his children. The problem was that Fanny did not see this, and persisted with her attempts to win him back. This was profoundly embarrassing for Nelson, and made the whole affair much more public than it might otherwise have been.

It has been customary to see the events of 1798–9 as a watershed, a period during which Nelson slipped away from the upright conventional morality of his church and his age. This interpretation is a serious mistake. Nelson was a man of the eighteenth century, who took the same relaxed view as most of his contemporaries. A better context for Nelson’s actions can be found in the irregular lifestyles of his family. Though his father was a clergyman, his elder brother Maurice lived with a woman who was not his wife, while his uncle William Suckling had a family of ‘natural’ children. Nelson’s behaviour, in short, was scarcely unusual by the standards of his age; it was only his fame, and the problems that his behaviour caused hagiographers writing in the stricter moral climate of the Victorian era, that made the affair with Emma so notorious.

Nelson arrived home just as his country had need of him. Within weeks, crushing defeat at the battle of Hohenlinden would drive Austria out of the war, and with Russia already disengaged, Britain once again stood alone. He was anxious to serve immediately, aware that St Vincent had requested him for the Channel fleet.
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Nor did Nelson waste any time calling on Spencer and his Admiralty Board. Lord Keith, recipient of so many letters about Nelson’s ill-health, may have been surprised by Admiral Young’s report of 10 November: ‘He seems to have recovered perfectly from his fatigues and to be very well. He will immediately hoist his flag in the Channel Fleet.’
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Spencer knew the political value of the hero. He had promised that Nelson would rejoin St Vincent and Troubridge in the ‘Mediterraneanised’ Channel fleet: ‘it gave me very great satisfaction to find that he had no sooner set his feet in it than he applied in the most pressing manner for service; and expressed the strongest wish to serve under your Lordship’s command.’ St Vincent, meanwhile, though glad to have Nelson join his flag, sounded a warning note: ‘he will tire of being attached to a great fleet, and want to be carrying on a predatory war (which is his metier) on a coast that he is entirely ignorant of, having never served in those seas.’
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In preparation for Nelson’s return, Spencer sent Hardy to Plymouth to take the crew of HMS
Namur
into the
San
Josef
.
Spencer thought it was ‘Nelson’s peculiar right’ to hoist his flag on this ship. ‘I have at the same time told him that if his service should be required in a smaller ship he will of course not think himself ill-treated by being removed to one.’
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The ship would of course be modified to meet Nelson’s requirements.
⁷¹
That the stern of this majestic vessel featured on his coat of arms gave her a peculiar significance.

Meanwhile, Nelson had a busy social schedule in London: everywhere he went his coach was mobbed. On 10 November he spoke at a Mansion House dinner in his honour and thanked the Lord Mayor and the City for a two-hundred-guinea sword. The King was less enthusiastic, cutting him dead at a royal levee, an insult that may have been occasioned by his Neapolitan decorations, or the campaign he and Sir William had started to have Emma received at Court. Fortunately such wounds were salved by further demonstrations of public adulation: on 20 November he was introduced into the House of Lords, and on 3 December he was the guest of honour at a dinner given by a grateful East India Company, with Henry Dundas among the Cabinet ministers and City worthies in attendance.
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Such events reflected the fact that in the two years since his last visit to England Nelson had achieved a unique national status: his triumph at the Nile had raised him above all other admirals. It was in the character of an idealised romantic hero that he entered the popular consciousness. The country had long sought a deliverer, and now they had one he was followed everywhere.
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His image was enshrined in the portrait by Lemuel Abbott, who created a heroic, almost divine figure, although he was not sure what sort of god Nelson had become.
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Copies of his picture were produced for influential clients, while a print from Daniel Orme’s picture had been a runaway success even before the Nile; all this, plus the cheap engravings that started to circulate, made Nelson one of the most recognisable faces in Britain.
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This Nelson mania was exploited in the work of the best political caricaturists of the day, notably James Gillray, whose memorable efforts linked the denigration of the Foxite Whigs (who were frustrated by Nelson’s success, as they had wanted peace with France) with the boosting of Nelson as the executor of Government policy. Gillray produced three wonderful images: ‘Nelson’s Victory’ simply showed the Opposition in suicidal despair; ‘The Extirpation of the Plagues of Egypt’ had the hero, one-armed, using a British oak cudgel to bludgeon the hostile crocodiles into submission. The two themes were integrated, meanwhile, in ‘John Bull taking a Luncheon’, which showed the corpulent embodiment of the country devouring ship-shape delicacies, while the great admirals, Nelson to the fore, competed to pile up more dishes. Outside the Whigs ran off, fearing they might be eaten.