Nelson: Britannia's God of War (59 page)

In the months that followed his death Nelson was transformed from living hero into a national god. The greatest warrior that Britain has ever produced, and the finest naval commander of all time, passed from the mortal realm as he would have wished, in the moment of victory, surrounded by a crowd of worshippers, including the essential scribe to transmit his dying wishes and capture the moment for eternity. The scene was doubly affecting, for the hero had died slowly, drowning in his own blood as a ruptured artery filled his lungs, and remained conscious throughout. His final thoughts interleaved professional concerns, warning Captain Hardy to prepare for the imminent storm, while desperately seeking absolution, and some last sign of human warmth. To Hardy he conveyed his concerns for his funerary arrangements, and then entrusted to him the impossible task of securing a national reward for his mistress and child. The manner and location of Nelson’s passing completed his legend; it was the ideal romantic death.

The death scene has been attempted in oil, pencil and ink, celluloid and video tape, but it remains impossibly moving. Only great artists have risen to the challenge. While most biographers and artists have seen death as final it was, for Nelson, only the passage to immortality. Here his wishes, and those of the state he served, coincided perfectly.
Already the greatest celebrity of the age and a romantic icon, his transformation would be, by turns, contrived, pre-ordained, and irresistible. Each succeeding generation would modify the image to meet its own needs for edification, education and example.

The public reaction to Nelson’s death was universal, as numerous writers have testified. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was in Naples the day the news arrived:

In Britain the news was received in silence, any cheers for the victory quickly stifled by the opening line of Collingwood’s dispatch.
The
Times
rose to the occasion, stressing his unique abilities, national importance, and unequalled glory, as well as his piety. Up in Cumbria, meanwhile, Coleridge’s friend Wordsworth was unable to stifle a tear: his ‘Character of a Happy Warrior’ weaves his public lament for Nelson with the expression of his personal grief at the loss of his brother in a shipwreck. It featured an idealised Nelson, for Wordsworth took a Foxite view of Naples.
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The consequences of Nelson’s death for public life were immediate. A day of National Thanksgiving for the Victory was set for 5 December, and observed with becoming solemnity across the country. All religious buildings were crowded, while the clergy strove to express the national mood; collections totalling over a million pounds were devoted to the relief of the wounded and bereaved. For Pitt, however, the news of Nelson’s death ended his career, so great were the hopes he had placed in the hero, both strategic and political. Pitt lingered on another two months, but did not live to see Parliament reopen, and passed away shortly after Nelson’s state funeral. His own interment was on a smaller scale, with none of the glory so evident at Nelson’s.

For those who had been closest to Nelson, his death had sharply diverging results. William Nelson was advanced by Pitt to the rank of Earl: he was provided with a pension of
£
6,000, and
£
100,000 to buy a suitable house.
³
For Emma, however, the story would have a slow, tragic denouement. Denied the chance to attend Nelson’s funeral, she retreated dramatically to her bed to read over his letters. Nelson’s request that the nation should provide her a legacy was never accepted, since Pitt died before he could act on his determination to honour
the hero’s wishes. His successor, Lord Grenville, was hostile to Emma, and the new Earl Nelson also turned against her, grubbing after ‘his’ money. While Nelson’s friends advanced Emma’s claims, if only for his sake, they soon discovered that she had no legal rights. She also proved impervious to the sound advice of supporters such as Addington, Rose and Hardy. Unable to capture another admirer, her beauty and her allure fading, Emma ran through the money Nelson left her and sold the house at Merton. By 1814 she was in prison for debt, and only got out with help from old friends of Nelson. She even sold his letters, which quickly appeared in print, doing nothing to help her cause or his memory. The one asset she never cashed in was Horatia: she never even admitted that the child was hers, although she did concede that Nelson was her father – this much was obvious from Horatia’s slight physique and striking, angular face. Emma eventually died in poverty at Calais in January 1815, in the brief period between Bonaparte’s two abdications. Horatia, however, was rescued by her Matcham relatives, and lived a long and largely happy life, the wife of a country parson.
⁴

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Pitt left the arrangements for Nelson’s funeral to the Home Secretary, Lord Hawkesbury. The funerary obsequies would be the most elaborate of the age: Nelson would be buried with all the pomp and circumstance the state could muster, without a thought for the cost. Yet this was no gesture of farewell: the purpose of the ceremony was to capture the essence, the spirit and the name of Nelson for the nation. In a break with tradition, Nelson was not interred in Westminster Abbey, but would be placed under the crossing of St Paul’s – the cathedral of the City of London, the commercial heart of the Empire he had secured – as the central figure in a new national pantheon. This met the hero’s wishes, although the decision was taken by the King following an initiative by Hawkesbury:

Because this would be a state funeral the chief mourner would be
Admiral of the Fleet Sir Peter Parker, not Earl Nelson. However, the Prince of Wales was quickly emerging as a principal figure in the process: he wished to take centre stage as the chief mourner, but the King forbade such a fundamental breach of royal protocol, although he did not stop the royal princes attending in their private capacity. Prince William, as a lifelong friend, had reason enough to mourn the man; George knew only a national symbol he had met but once. Though he claimed Nelson as a ‘dear friend’ and sought to control the production of the authorised biography, he did nothing to meet Nelson’s wishes: there was no glory or credit in helping Emma, and the subject was rather too close to home. Although occasionally generous, George was already descending into an opium-fuelled world of self-delusion, in which he, rather than any real heroes, would win the war.
⁶
While George never claimed to have led the line at Trafalgar, as he did the cavalry at Waterloo, he recognised the magic of Nelson’s life, and tried to appropriate it for himself.

Nelson’s heroic national status was not contested. The state interred him as a modern deity, and the people accepted him as their deliverer, without instruction. Every aspect of the funeral was calculated to impress. The coffin was reckoned the most elaborate yet seen, heavily decorated with trophies, emblems and reminders of his earthly fame. It enclosed Hallowell’s simpler work made from the mainmast of
L
’
Orient.
They would be placed under a great sarcophagus made for, but not used by, Cardinal Wolsey, nearly three hundred years earlier. Nelson was the first commoner to be worthy of such a monument.

On 23 December, Nelson’s body was transferred from the
Victory
, anchored at the Nore where his naval career had begun, into the official yacht
Chatham
, for the journey down-river that he had known so well in life. Scott accompanied the dead hero on this last saltwater journey, in clerical attire. After receiving marks of honour and mourning – muffled bells, and minute guns – all down the river, the body was landed at the Greenwich Hospital, and taken into the care of Lord Hood until arrangements for the funeral were complete. The date was finally set only on 27 December, and work hastened at St Paul’s.
⁷
As the day approached Hood found the crowds of thirty thousand and more gathering outside the Hospital intimidating, and pleaded with Hawkesbury to send a strong force of cavalry to keep order. The local magistrates reported that ‘they never saw anything like it before’.
⁸

On 4 January the public was admitted to pay its respects to Nelson’s mortal remains, elaborately displayed in the magnificent Painted Hall, itself a temple to naval glory and national might. A party of men from the
Victory
arrived to help to convey their admiral to Whitehall on 8 January; dangerously large crowds again pressed to view the ceremonial embarkation of the coffin, and many people were injured. Once safely afloat, a carefully managed procession of boats followed the four barges that conveyed the official party and the coffin. The nineteen admirals included newly promoted Eliab Harvey, who had supported his admiral so nobly in the
Temeraire,
while Peter Parker and Lord Hood rightly took the chief places, having given him his post-captaincy, and his chance for glory. At the last minute, somewhat incongruously, Orde was substituted for an indisposed colleague. Among the captains were many Trafalgar heroes: Hardy, Bayntun, Laforey, Rotherham, Moorsom and Blackwood. Lieutenant Pasco, newly made a captain, carried a banner. The Lord Mayor followed; the full panoply of the City of London and the great commercial companies was on display. The river was empty of other traffic, and all along the banks crowds paid their respects and ships lowered their colours. A strong wind opposed the procession, but the coffin was landed as intended at 3.30, and despite a sudden rain squall it was conveyed to the Admiralty. Large crowds gathered outside, desperate for a sight of glory.

The following morning the land procession from the Admiralty to St Paul’s received a powerful reinforcement of soldiers and eminent persons. Carriages and troops had been formed up well in advance, and when the grand ceremonial funeral car began to rumble out of the Admiralty at noon there were more than two miles of official procession to follow. The procession was so long that the leading elements had arrived at St Paul’s before the last of the followers passed out of the Admiralty forecourt. The route was lined with soldiers, to control the mass of humanity that crowded the streets. The funeral car was a black monster, shaped at the bow and stern to resemble the
Victory
, and drawn by six of the King’s black horses. An advance guard cleared a path through the warren of streets around Charing Cross, then ahead of the funeral car came the chief mourner and his supporters, peers and Privy Councillors, all in rank, and finally the Princes of the Blood Royal – in reverse order, ensuring the Prince of Wales was the last man ahead of the mourning party and car.

Lady Bessborough watched the two days of solemn processions and funeral service, and recorded her impressions for her lover, a young diplomat in St Petersburg:

At Temple Bar the Lord Mayor and other dignitaries of the City of London greeted and joined the procession, the Mayor on horseback, bareheaded and carrying the City sword. Troops took up position around the west door of the cathedral as the procession arrived, and the body was carried inside, where many mourners had been seated for hours. Shortly after 2.00 p.m. the service began; but it was not until 5.33 p.m., after the words ‘and his name liveth evermore’, that the coffin was lowered into the crypt by concealed machinery. After the Garter King of Arms had completed his duties, the seamen charged with folding the
Victory
’s
flag and placing it in the grave ripped it into fragments, each taking a piece as a memento – he was, after all, their admiral. The ceremony was over shortly before six, but some mourners lingered for hours, awestruck by the finest public ceremonial laid on in England since Elizabethan times, and the most magnificent funeral ever staged. It was well worth the
£
14,000 it had cost.

The mortal remains had been placed in the centre of the City of London’s cathedral, where the power of commerce, the state and the Church of England intertwined. Bound up with power, policy and piety, Nelson had become the totem and talisman of a state fighting for survival. He might be dead and buried, but the very public performance that surrounded his interment ensured that his name and example would live on. Public burials have always been political occasions, but no British funeral has ever matched the intensity of Nelson’s interment. His rites combined the human tragedy and adulation accorded to Diana, Princess of Wales, and the regard for public services accorded to Churchill with a unique atmosphere of danger. Napoleon was
master of the Continent: only the Navy and Trafalgar stood between his armies and the coast of Britain. Grief, fear and reverence combined with the numbing cold to chill the souls of all present. After a century in which public funerals had been in decline, the Romantic era, the tensions of total war, and a growing sense of national identity ensured that when the nation’s god-hero was killed at the moment of victory his rites would be on the grand scale. The staged pageant, the Lying in State, a grand water procession, land procession, and an interminable, if majestic service were calculated to impress. The Church, in every outpost across the land, was quick to seize upon the event for a morally uplifting and very Anglican interpretation. The crowds were immense, and the cathedral full to capacity.