The Years of Endurance (54 page)

Yet so long as the French controll
ed the sea lanes of the Mediter
ranean, these indications of the reviving spirit of European independence were confined to the street corner and the secret archives of the Chancelleries. It was the news of Nelson's astonishing victory, spreading outwards in ever larger ripples, that woke the closet courage of the continent. Five weeks after the battle, the Sultan of Turkey—first of the European rulers to hear the tidings —resolved to resent the intrusion of the French into his territories and, rejecting Talleyrand's insinuating diplomacy, declared a Holy War against the infidel invaders of Egypt.

But because of Nelson's lack of frigates and the very depth of his penetration into the French position, the news of his achievement travelled slowly. Its effect was not an instantaneous explosion but the spluttering of a charge of powder. For many days after the battle the victors remained in Egyptian waters, remote from a world which had lost trace of them. It took Nelson a fortnight before he could make his dismasted prizes fit for sea. Three he was forced t
o bum: the other six he sent off
to Gibraltar under escort of seven of his battleships on August 14th. Their progress up the Mediterranean was painfully slow.

Want of frigates, Nelson wrote, would be found stamped on his heart. The first vessel available to carry the report of the victory to St. Vincent, the 50-gun
Leander,
did
not leave Aboukir Bay until ne
arly a week after the
battle
. As ill-luck would have it, she and Captain Berry—
the
bearer of the official dispatches—were captured twelve days later in a calm by one of the two fugitive survivors of Brueys' line of battle.

So it came about chat no intelligence of the victory reached western Europe till September 4th, when it was brought to Naples
by the
Mutine
sloop, which Nelson on the arrival of his long-lost frigates had sent off with duplicate dispatches on August 14th. Before they arrived Nelson himself was on his way to Europe. On August 14th he had received a summons from St. Vincent to return to save Naples from
the
threat of sea-borne invasion and co-operate in the capture of a British Mediterranean base in the Balearics. Accordingly, leaving three
battle
ships and three frigates under Captain Hood to blockade Egypt, Nelson relucta
ntly
set out on the 19th for Neapolitan waters. He was still suffering from the effects of his head wound and from perpetual headaches and vomitings. The voyage, prolonged by the derelict state of his flagship, acted as an enforced holiday.

On September 22nd, towed ironically by a frigate, the
Vanguard
anchored off Naples. "
I
hope," Nelson wrote to Sir William Hamilton,
"to
be no more than four or five days at Naples, for diese are not times for idleness."
¹
He had reckoned without
the
Ambassador's lady. Accompanied by
the
King and Queen of Naples, this large, fascinating, vulgar, dynamic woman of thirty-three bore down on the Admiral with the same spirit that he himself had borne down on the French. She had only set eyes on him once before when, five years earlier during the siege of Toulon, he had borne dispatches to Naples. But she was resolved to conquer him as he had conquered Brueys. Acknowledged as a mistress of dramatic effect—her " attitudes " were the talk of the less exacting
salons
of Europe—she positively boarded the unsophisticated sailor on his own quarter-deck. Still bemused from that astonishing encounter, he described it in a letter three days later to his wife. " Up flew her ladyship and exclaiming ' O God, is it possible? ' she feu into my arm more dead than alive." She was followed by
the
King who, seizing the Admiral by the hand, hailed him as his deliverer and preserver.

It was all too much for Nelson and his poor dazed head. The loveliest city of southern Europe was in summer gala to receive him, the most voluptuous of women at his feet. After the strain and intense excitement of the summer and the dreary reaction of the voyage west, he could not refrain from yielding to all this overflow of tenderness and adulation. It seemed a sailor's due, after the hardships and deprivations of the sea. He had known
little
of luxury and

¹
Mahan,
Nelson,
I,
368-9.

nothing of Courts. He found himself when he was least able to withstand its fatal charm the adored hero of the most luxurious and enervating society in existence. He struggled for a little while: wrote to St. Vincent a week after his arrival
that he was in a country of fiddlers and puppets, whores and scoundrels: that it was a dangerous place for a simple sailor and he must keep clear of it. A fortnight later he sailed for Malta, where the islanders had risen against the French garrison at the first news of the Nile to organise a blockade of Valetta. But he left his heart behind in Naples and early in November, at the first stirrings of Continental war, he returned there to be the counsellor of an admiring King and Queen and the hero of a lovely and designing woman, and to waste his genius in an element alien to it.

While Nelson was driving in triumph under the Neapolitan sunshine England was still waiting for news. Throughout the summer the country remained in suspense. During the agony of his long chase, criticism of the young Rear-Admiral had been widespread and even his friend, Collingwood, who never doubted his skill and courage, began to have fears that his good fortune had forsaken him. About the time that he reached Alexandria the second time it became known in London that he had sailed for the first time to seek the enemy in the Levant and that Bonaparte had left Malta on June 19th. For a few days expectation, therefore, ran high. " The grand event," wrote
Lloyd's Evening Post
on Saturday, August 4th, " which has in all probability taken place in the Mediterranean between the English and French fleets, nearly occupies the entire attention of the public as if, on the fate of the expedition entrusted to Bonaparte, depended that of the existing war." Lady Spencer, catching the confidence of old St. Vincent, even speculated as to how she should treat Bonaparte when he dined, a prisoner, at her side: should she do it, she asked, " in a sincere and a brutal style? or in a false and generous one."
¹

But by the second week in August nothing had come in but vague reports from French sources that Bonaparte had landed in Egypt and—though nobody would admit this—that he had met Nelson at sea and been victorious.
²
The country, still drilling against

¹
Windham Papers,
II,
108.

²
Pitt
to
Rose,
10th
Aug.,
1798.—
Rose,
I,
216.

an increasingly dubious invasion, began to grow despondent. " At no period of the war," wrote a leading Daily on August 8th, " have public affairs been more critically situated than they are at the present moment. But we are sorry to say, that to whatever point we direct our attention, there is much to lament and little to console us
!"
The only hopeful sign was in Ireland, where, since the arrival of Lord Cornwallis as Viceroy in the middle of the rebellion, a wise combination of firmness and clemency had been producing steadying results.

On August 22nd an overland courier from Constantinople brought authentic news that the French had landed at Alexandria at the beginning of July. It caused a sudden drop in the Funds. It was offset by exciting though unreliable accounts from German newspapers of a great sea fight off Crete in which Nelson had sunk many transports and blockaded the
Orient
with Bonaparte aboard or, according to another version, driven her on to a rock.

At t
he height of the tension
caused by these reports news arrived that a small French force had landed in the west of Ireland on August 22nd. It turned out to be only a single brigade from Brest— too small to be a menace to the British and too late to be of any aid to the Irish. But though the first thing that greeted its commander, General Humbert, on his landing at Killala Bay was the sight of a French agent hanging on a tree, and though the disarmed and dispirited peasants of the west gave him little support, he boldly brushed aside the local Fencibles who attempted to oppose him. Three days later at Castlebar he plunged the whole country into alarm by routing, with a quarter of their force, 4,000 Militia and Dragoons: a disgraceful exhibition of British incompetence which justified all that experienced so
ldiers like Abercromby and Corn
wallis had said about the discipline of the Irish Army. But the ultimate defeat of Humbert's little force of veterans was a foregone conclusion. After covering a hundred and fifty miles in seventeen days in a series of swift, fox-like movements, it surrendered to Cornwallis at Ballinamuck on September 8th. A week later that noted Irish patriot, Napper Tandy, appeared in a Dunkirk brig off the lonely Donegal coast and on hearing what had happened returned at once to France.

By this time advices from Italy had made it plain not only that the French had successfully landed at Alexandria but that Nelson had missed them there and returned to Syracuse. All hope now vanished: seldom had public opinion been so depressed.
¹
Travellers' tales of French defeats at the hands of the Arabs could not dispel the gloom. The British people (save for Pitt who continued hopeful
²
) were coming to believe with their enemies that Bonaparte could not be defeated.

On September 18 th the Admiralty received official news of Nelson's departure from Syracuse on July 26th to search the Levant for the second time. Three days later certain London newspapers drew attention to a vague reference in the supplement of the Paris
Redacteur
of the 14th to an attack on Admiral Brueys' squadron by a superior British force off Beguieres in which the French flagship and several other vessels of both navies had been burnt or driven ashore. The public regarded it with scepticism, especially as no such place as Beguieres could be found on any atlas. None the less it seemed hard to explain why such unfavourable news, if not true, should have appeared in the official journal of the French Directory. During the following week no confirmation came from any source, though an ingenious person pointed out that Beguieres might be a French translation of the Arab Al-Bekir or Aboukir, midway between Alexandria and Rosetta.

The expectation of the people of England had been raised to the highest pitch. It had been repeatedly disappointed. It was now to be exceeded beyond all rational hope. At two o'clock on Monday, October ist, exactly two months after the battle, the postscript of
Lloyd's Evening Post
announced that the Hamburg mail had arrived with news of a glorious victory in which Admiral Nelson had destroyed or captured all but two of the French battleships. Next morning Captain Capel of
the
Mutine
delivered Nelson's dispatches to the Admiralty. Within a few minutes the Park and Tower guns began to fire and all
the
church bells to peal. And as the steeples started to rock, the wife of the First Lord sat down to write to the hero of England. " Joy, joy, joy to you, brave, gallant, immortal Nelson ! May the great God whose cause you so valiantly support, protect and bless you to the end of your brilliant career. . . . My heart is absolutely bursting with different sensations of joy, of

¹
British Chronicle,
10th
Sept.,
1798,

²
Stanhope,
III,
139.

gratitude, of pride, of every emotion that ever warmed the bosom of a British woman on hearing of her country's glory."
¹

There was scarcely anybody in England who did not realise the magnitude of the victory. The
Annual Register
described it as " the most signal that had graced the British Navy since the days of the Spanish Armada." The old king, when the dispatch reached him at Weymouth, read Nelson's opening words, then stopped and, standing silent for a minute, turned his eyes to heaven. It seemed to promise not only a lasting salvation for England, but preservation from anarchy, distress and misery for the still free countries of Europe, liberation for the enslaved, and in the fullness of time, peace.

For that October, as illuminations lit the streets, and cities and tithe barns reeked with celebration beef, plum puddings and punch and echoed with jubilant " Rule Britannias," the confidence of the country in the certainty of victory came flooding back. Within a fortnight the news of the Nile was followed by that of Admiral Sir John Borlace Warren intercepting a squadron of French warships and transports on their way to Lough Swilly and capturing all but two of them, including a ship of the line, three frigates and the redoubtable Wolfe Tone. The fears of the previous winter vanished in a swelling crescendo of British triumph: Gillray in one of his grandest cartoons drew the one-eyed Nelson slaying the Revolutionary crocodiles of the Nile and in another John Bull taking his luncheon of naval victories and crying out to the Frenchmen: " What, more fricasses
!
why you sons
of bitches you, where do you th
ink I shall find room to stow it all? " And
The Times,
in a report that the French Government had ordered the building of sixteen new battleships and eighteen frigates, added the comment, " Good news this for old England! It saves us the trouble and expense of building them ourselves, for they are sure to find their way into our ports! "
²