Southey on Nelson: The Life of Nelson by Robert Southey

EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

Once he became a fleet-commander, Nelson always liked to lead his ships into battle flying naval signal number sixteen from his topgallant mast-head. Signal number sixteen consisted of two flags, one above the other: the uppermost white with a blue cross, the one below a patriotic red, white and blue. Even at the battle of Trafalgar, after he had issued the immortal message ‘England expects that every man will do his duty’, Nelson hoisted signal number sixteen as his last general command to his battle fleet.

Its meaning was a dare as much as an order, and it was particularly relished by his officers, his ‘band of brothers’, who considered it typical of Nelson’s attitude to life in general. Signal number sixteen, applicable in all conceivable circumstances, meant: ‘Engage the enemy more closely’.

It was flying at 1pm on 21 October, 1805, when Nelson was hit by a musket ball on the quarter deck of the Victory; and it was still flying when he died three hours later, in the surgeon’s cockpit, asking Captain Hardy to kiss him farewell, and to tell him how many enemy ships had surrendered.

Even before his heroic death at Trafalgar aged forty-seven, Nelson had become a national legend in a way that was virtually without precedent. His personal bravery, his astonishing aggression in battle, his loyalty to his fellow officers and his kindness towards his able seamen (especially his young midshipmen), were famous throughout the Royal Navy. But his gallantry, his self-sacrifice, and his fervent patriotism had made him a celebrity, in a quite modern sense, throughout the whole of England. Nelson was a new breed of war hero, a profoundly Romantic figure, who had caught the popular imagination and become the embodiment of a new kind of English nationalism.

There were, of course, historical reasons for this. The patriotic war against revolutionary France, which began in earnest in 1793, brought growing fears of invasion and subversion. By 1800, the military successes of Bonaparte had personalised this threat, and even brought fears of defeat and dictatorship. This slowly transformed the mood of radical discontent, and popular disaffection, that had gripped England (and especially its writers and intellectuals) for over a decade. Nelson became the personal focus of a deep, stirring movement of national unity and recovered common purpose. It was no coincidence that he led the most glamorous and successful of the British armed services of the period, and that there were very few families of the landed and middle classes–the families of Jane Austen’s novels–who did not have a father, brother, son, grandson, or uncle in the navy.

The Royal Navy was also a powerful and modern force. An English warship or ‘ship of the line’, carrying upward of seventy-four, eighty-six, or a hundred guns and a crew and armed personnel of 500 was the most sophisticated, complex and expensive military machine of its time. The English fleets were small compared to those of France or Spain, but they were better equipped and disciplined, with fierce loyalties among the crews, and strong family affections (and rivalries) between the officers. English navigation and gunnery could not be matched, and when Nelson boasted that ‘one Englishman was worth three Frenchmen’, he meant that his crews could sail across the Atlantic twice as fast, and his gunners fire three broadsides to their one.

English fleets might appear virtually anywhere in the world–off the coasts of America, India, Egypt, the Baltic states, or throughout the Mediterranean–and until the successes of Wellington’s armies after 1811, they represented the one check to Bonaparte’s global ambitions. In this sense the Royal Navy, and its figurehead in Nelson, represented not only England, but a certain kind of European freedom.

But Nelson had become a legend, above all, because of his charismatic personality. For the English public, his whole life was seen as one unbroken act of heroism, starting as a fifteen-year-old midshipman fighting a polar bear on an artic ice flow, and continuing without check until Trafalgar some thirty years later. Yet in fact neither recognition nor success came quickly to Nelson.

After mixed service in the West Indies, South America, the Baltic, Canada and the Caribbean, Nelson was a seasoned officer and a post-captain at the age of thirty. But he had never yet commanded a ship larger than a small frigate, the twenty-eight-gun Boreas; he suffered from sea-sickness, recurrent malaria, and severe bouts of depression; and he frequently considered resigning from the Service. For five years between 1788 and 1792, he was simply an unemployed navy officer, quietly married but without children, and living on half-pay at his father’s rectory, in the remote Norfolk village of Burnham Thorpe. On Saturdays he would ride three miles to the little tidal harbour of Overy Staithe, to sit on the sea wall, read the