Nelson: The Essential Hero (58 page)

Following hard on the heels of the south-westerly a hailstorm struck the capital as the coffin was being landed at Whitehall Stairs. The next day, as if to celebrate the famous unpredictability of the British climate, dawned clear and cold. The sky was as cloudless and blue as it is in East Anglia when the wind cries off the North Sea. Admiral Sir Peter Parker, who all those long years ago had first promoted Nelson to Captain in the West Indies, was foremost of the mourners, together with thirty* other flag-officers and one hundred captains. The Prince of Wales, the Duke of Clarence, later to be the ‘Sailor King’

William IV (who had occasioned Nelson so much trouble in the West Indies), the Duke of York, the nobility, and all the notables of gentry and city were present to pay their last respects to a man who had risen from the obscurity of a Norfolk parsonage to a sphere of immortality whither he had been beckoned by that ‘radiant orb’. George Matcham, Nelson’s nephew, recalled : ‘The procession moved on slowly, the sailors lining the streets, and the Band playing the Dead March in Saul. At Temple Bar it was joined by the Mayor and suite, who took their place after the Prince of Wales. At St Pauls we got out, and walked in procession up the Passage. It was the most aweful sight I ever saw. All the Bands played. The Colours were all carried by the Sailors and a Canopy was held over the Coffin, supported by Admirals.’ For sadly obvious reasons Nelson’s ‘bequest to the nation’, the woman whose name had been on his lips in his last hour, could not be present. Dr Scott, as thoughtful as he was faithful, afterwards wrote to Emma that ‘the very beggars left their stands, neglected the passing crowd, and seemed to pay tribute to his memory by a look. Many did I see, tattered and on crutches, shaking their heads with plain signs of sorrow. This must be truly unbought affection of the heart.’ As the cortege passed through the streets of London, the city which he had defended against the aggression of Napoleon, the vast crowd lining the route bared their heads, and in this sound and in their sighs could be detected the long susurrus of the sea.

His body had been placed within that coffin which Ben Hallowell had had made for him out of the mainmast of
L'Orient
, and this was now lowered into a sarcophagus of black marble which had been originally intended for Cardinal Wolsey. It rests exactly beneath the cupola of St Paul’s, simple and austere, surmounted by a viscount’s coronet, and inscribed only with his name and the dates of his birth and death. Nearby rest Cooke of the
Bellerophon
and Duff of the
Mars
, two captains who were also killed at Trafalgar, as well as the faithful Collingwood who joined him five years later, worn out by his subsequent years as Nelson’s successor as Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean. Not far away, in the full flower of high Victorian pomp and splendour, rises the great tomb in which rest the remains of Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington, that other giant who completed upon the land the task that Nelson had begun upon the sea.

Just as the Battle of the Nile had occurred at a moment when the nation’s spirits were at a low ebb as it faced the new Napoleonic Europe and the threat to India, so Trafalgar put fresh heart into a Britain that was confronted by disaster upon the Continent. Napoleon’s forces had overwhelmed the Austrians at Ulm. The Third Coalition was shattered, and once more Britain faced the land mass of Europe totally dominated by the Corsican genius. Lord Auckland remarked that, ‘The news from Cadiz came like a cordial to a fainting man.’ Thus, two out of Nelson’s three great victories acquired an additional significance in British history because of their inspirational effect upon morale. The third, Copenhagen, which had been politically embarrassing, had nevertheless been of the utmost importance in economic terms, saving the City of London, and indeed the Navy itself, from what would almost certainly have been ruin. Those who were in the know acknowledged Copenhagen as the triumph that it was, but it could not be given the public acknowledgement that it deserved. Trafalgar on the other hand was celebrated then, as it has been ever since, as the crowning glory of British naval achievement. It has never been equalled.

Nelson’s relatives, as he had accurately surmised, were well looked after by those in authority. His brother William, a cleric very unlike his father, in being neither simple nor without worldly aspirations, was made an earl. A pension of £5,000 a year was attached to the new title, while Nelson’s sisters each received £15,000. Fanny received a pension of £2,000 a year for life. The new earl also received a large grant from Parliament to enable him to purchase an estate. All those, then, who legitimately had a claim upon their country’s gratitude for the services which their dead relative had rendered were taken care of in a handsome manner. But Emma? There was little or nothing that could be done for her, even in an age when many public men kept mistresses quite openly, and when the profligate behaviour of George Ill’s sons was common knowledge. The fact remained that Emma could still only be acknowledged as the widow of Sir William Hamilton, former envoy to the court of Naples. On the surface of it she might have seemed well enough provided for, with the annuities left her by her husband and her lover, together with the possession of Merton Place. It is true that if she had lived very quietly like a widow she might have stayed on at Merton with Horatia, but if she had been temperamentally suited to such a life she would never have risen to become Sir William’s wife, nor Nelson’s adored mistress. It was not only her financial imprudence that caused her downfall but also her open heart, for after the splendours of Naples and Palermo -and even, in a quieter way, of Merton in its brief heyday - she could never understand that she could neither afford to entertain largely, look after poor relatives, nor, above all, to indulge in gambling. In 1808 a meeting of her friends managed between them to raise enough money to cope with her more immediate debts, but they could not hold back for ever the increasing pressure of her creditors. In the following year the banker Abraham Goldsmid bought Merton and she subsequently lived at various addresses in the heart of London, all within a short distance of Piccadilly and the fashionable world where once she had shone on the arm of her husband in the company of the Victor of the Nile. Her last years are tragic to contemplate. Her Nelson relics were gradually sold off, while in 1810 the death of her mother, Mrs Gadogan, left Emma without that shrewd old counsellor who had been largely responsible for making her fortune in the world although in her last years she had been unable to check its decline. Emma was imprisoned for debt, she suffered from jaundice with all its debilitating and depressing effects, and in July 1814, taking Horatia with her, she fled to Calais. Her last days are best described by her daughter:

At the time of her death she was in great distress, and had I not, unknown to her, written to Lord Nelson to ask the loan of £10, and to another kind friend of hers, who immediately sent her £20, she would not literally have had one shilling till her next allowance became due. Latterly she was scarcely sensible. I imagine that her illness originally began by being bled whilst labouring under an attack of jaundice whilst she lived at Richmond. From that time she was never well, and added to this, the baneful habit she had of taking wine and spirits to a fearful degree, brought on water on the chest. She died in January, 1815, and was buried in the burying ground attached to the town.

The site of her grave is unknown. A few months later the Battle of Waterloo brought Napoleon’s career to an end.

Horatia grew up never knowing that Emma was her mother, although she happily acknowledged that Nelson was her father. She had a vague suspicion that her mother might have been the Queen of Naples. She found a home with Nelson’s favourite sister, her aunt, Mrs Matcham, and in 1822 married the Reverend Philip Ward. So the Nelson blood returned to the church, and Horatia’s subsequent life followed the pattern of her paternal grandmother. As wife to a clergyman, mother of many sons, she lived in the quiet countryside, far from the roar of guns, affairs of state, or the ever-expanding imperial and industrial world of a Britain which Nelson had helped to make mistress of the seas. She died aged eighty-one. Nelson’s prayer that her life should be a happy one had been answered.

Fanny Nelson, like so many who suffer from delicate health, also reached a ripe age, dying at seventy-three, having outlived her son Josiah Nisbet. The latter, for whom Nelson had once striven so much, and who had occasioned him such trouble and concern, never made a success in the Navy. Ashore he did much better, had an instinct for business, married well, and left his wife and children comfortably off when he died at the age of fifty. His was a life not untypical of thousands of others and, indeed, so many names have only survived into posterity because in one way or another they were at some time connected with Nelson. This can never be said of Hardy, who, like others of Nelson’s close friends and ‘Band of Brothers’, went on to prove that their leader was not a strange freak of nature but merely one who grew from the same stock, but happened to have the touch of genius added. He was made a baronet the year after Trafalgar, later became First Sea Lord, and died as Governor of Greenwich Hospital in 1831.

The most decisive naval engagement of the nineteenth century after Trafalgar was fought by Vice-Admiral Sir Edward Codrington at Navarino. in 1827 when, in command of an allied fleet that included those former enemies the French and the Russians, he annihilated the Turko-Egyptian navies. It was a victory in the Nelson tradition and led in due course to the liberation of Greece. Codrington had been Captain of the
Orion
at Trafalgar. In his instructions to his senior officers and allies prior to the battle he had - somewhat tactlessly perhaps in view of the French presence - quoted Nelson’s words before Trafalgar : ‘No captain can do very wrong who places his ship alongside that of an enemy.’

Nelson needs no further epitaph.