Horatio Nelson: pocket GIANTS

Peter Warwick

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780750962667
• eBook ISBN: 9780750963596
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Why is Nelson a hero? Because he was a captain before he was 21, a man who shaped the course of history from the decks of his ships, hailed as a saviour of the nation, a hero killed in action at the moment of his greatest victory at the Battle of Trafalgar and immortalized ever since. What lies beneath the romantic legend of Horatio Nelson? What did he do before he became famous? Why did he fall from grace twice? Did he really put a telescope to his blind eye? Why did Victory's signal lieutenant change his 'England expects....' signal at Trafalgar? What made his leadership special? This book traces Nelson's spectacular and often controversial career from a Norfolk parson's son who entered the Royal Navy at the age of twelve, through his youth as a difficult and ambitious naval subordinate, his rise to admiral and celebrity, his fighting career and his outstanding victories at the battles of the Nile, Copenhagen and ultimately Trafalgar.

1

A Norfolk Childhood

Let them alone. Little Horace will beat them!

Mrs Catherine Nelson (attributed)9

Horatio Nelson was born seven weeks early, on 29 September 1758, in the parsonage house at Burnham Thorpe in north Norfolk. His father, the Reverend Edmund Nelson, was rector of the parish. Although his mother Catherine was proud to be the great-niece of Sir Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister, his background was by no means grand – he described himself as belonging to a ‘middling class of people’.10 He was christened Horatio after Walpole’s son, but to his family he was always known as ‘Horace’. There were seven other surviving children in the family and, throughout his life, Nelson appears to have been happiest when surrounded by his siblings. He was at heart a family man and his family was an important source of inner strength.

Life was not easy, especially when his generous, fun-loving and strong-willed mother died on Boxing Day 1767. Her death left the 9-year-old boy emotionally insecure and vulnerable. In middle age he was to say, ‘the thought of former days brings all my mother into my heart, which shows itself in my eyes.’11 Eventually, after three lonely years, he decided he would like to go to sea, possibly seeing the navy as a substitute for the love and domesticity that had died with Catherine. He asked his brother William to write to their maternal uncle, the brave and urbane Captain Maurice Suckling RN, asking him to take the boy aboard with him. Suckling wrote back, ‘What has poor little Horace done, who is so weak, that he above all the rest should be sent to rough it at sea? But let him come, and the first time we go into action a cannon ball may knock off his head and provide for him at once.’12

There are many tales about ‘little Horace’, but we have to be very wary of their veracity, since they can frequently be attributed to the vivid imagination of his elder brother William and to his early hagiographers, such as James Stanier Clarke and John McArthur, whose The Life of Admiral Lord Nelson was published four years after his death. It is as if they were compelled to show that from his earliest days there was something special about Nelson. Three of the tales are, however, worth retelling.

Nelson, aged 5, had gone off alone bird’s-nesting and failed to return home on time. His anxious family went in search of him. He was found under a hedge, happily admiring his day’s collection of eggs. His angry grandmother said she was surprised fear had not driven him home, to which Nelson is supposed to have replied, ‘Madam, I never saw fear!’13

In January 1770, Nelson, now aged 11, set off with his elder brother, William, to boarding school in North Walsham, some 40 miles away. They were stopped by snowdrifts and came back home. Their father, a strict disciplinarian, admonished them and insisted they try again, this time leaving it to their ‘honour’ to return only if they found it ‘dangerous’. William was all for giving up but Horatio stiffened his resolve with the words, ‘Remember, brother. It was left to our honour!’14

At Paston School in North Walsham there was a large pear tree close to the schoolhouse. Nelson’s classmates lowered him on knotted sheets from the dormitory window into the tree. He picked as many pears as he could and, when safely back inside, handed them to his friends, keeping none for himself. Nelson claimed, ‘I took them because every other boy was afraid!’15 In spite of a large reward, none of them informed on him.

Paston School was the second Nelson attended, the first being the Royal Grammar School in Norwich. It was comparatively new and its curriculum was more liberal than was typical at the time. Boys were taught French as well as the Classics. Nelson appears to have enjoyed Shakespeare’s plays and often quoted or paraphrased lines from them in his later letters. Henry V was clearly his favourite. Here is the story of a great leader, visionary yet pragmatic, powerful yet responsible. Henry V was Nelson’s unwitting guide to the reality of tough decision-making and courageous personal challenge.

Nelson’s boyhood experience gave him another crucial attribute. It was one that would guide and influence him for the rest of his life: religious faith. Nelson had an early introduction to religion. He assisted his father at the altar of All Saints’ church, Burnham Thorpe, where he even stood as godfather at baptisms. Every night and morning of his life, Nelson knelt in prayer, developing a faith that seldom referred to Jesus Christ or the Trinity. He believed in predestination or providence. It was as if he had a direct line to God.

In his private journal in 1791, he wrote, ‘When I lay me down to sleep I recommend myself to the care of Almighty God, and when I awaken I give myself up to His direction amidst all the evils that threaten me.’ In one of his letters to Emma Hamilton, composed shortly after the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801, he wrote, ‘I own myself a believer in God, and if I have any merit in not fearing death, it is because I feel that I must fall whenever it is His good pleasure.’16

For the thirty-four years of his naval life, his soaring ambition for glory and honour was complemented by a genuine humility before the Almighty.

Notes

    9  Harrison, James, Life of the Rt Honourable Horatio, Lord Viscount Nelson (1806), pp. 8–9.

  10  Sugden, Nelson: A Dream of Glory, p. 32.

  11  White, Colin, The Nelson Encyclopaedia (2002), p. 121.

  12  Clarke, J.S. & McArthur, J., The Life of Admiral Lord Nelson KB, 2 vols (1809), vol. 1, pp. 13–15.

  13  Ibid.

  14  Ibid.

  15  Ibid.

  16  White, The Nelson Encyclopaedia (2002), p. 213.

2

Learning the Ropes

Firstly you must always implicitly obey orders, without attempting to form any opinion of your own regarding their propriety. Secondly, you must consider every man your enemy who speaks ill of your king; and thirdly you must hate a Frenchman as you hate the devil.

Horatio Nelson, 179317

The timing was perfect. In 1770, when William Nelson wrote on his brother’s behalf to Captain Maurice Suckling, their uncle had recently been appointed to the command of His Majesty’s Ship Raisonnable, a 64-gun third-rate battleship of the line recently brought into service because of a threatened war with Spain over the ownership of the Falkland Islands. Suckling invited his 12-year-old nephew to join the ship at the royal dockyard at Chatham. The entry in the Raisonnable’s muster book for 24 April 1771 records, ‘Horace Nelson, Midshipman’. Nelson’s extreme youth was typical for the time. It must, nevertheless, have been a tremendous shock for him to move suddenly from the quiet rural life of a Norfolk coastal village to the cramped, crowded, dark and dangerous world of an eighteenth-century warship, with sights, sounds and smells all unfamiliar to him, and doubly so since his uncle was not there to greet him. Nelson spent his first few days in this strange wooden world alone and homesick.

His stay in Raisonnable was short lived: the Falklands crisis abated. Suckling wisely removed his nephew to a merchantman, the Mary Ann, for sea experience. The episode had one unintended consequence, which Nelson described:

I returned a practical seaman, with a horror of the Royal Navy, and with a saying then constant with the seamen, ‘Aft the most honour, forward the better man!’ It was many weeks before I got in the least reconciled to a man-of-war, so deep was the prejudice rooted, and what pains were taken to instill this erroneous principle in a young mind.18

It was a raw experience but it had a beneficial impact on the evolution of Nelson’s leadership style.

He returned to the naval service because, being a structured service, it offered a hierarchy for promotion and, more importantly for Nelson, the opportunity for glory and heroism. The success of his apprenticeship, nevertheless, rested upon ‘interest’ – and this meant the support of Maurice Suckling. He seems to have planned a variety of experiences for his nephew, including keeping him out of the big ships of the line, so that the young Nelson’s independent spirit could have free rein, giving his individuality every opportunity to assert itself.

Nelson’s aim, as with all midshipmen, was to complete the six years of sea service which would then allow him to sit for his lieutenant’s exam – a critical and essential step in any young officer’s naval career. Nelson needed to be a practical seaman if he was to rise to the top of his profession. In the Royal Navy this skill came before social respectability. It meant ‘learning the ropes’ in order to acquire all-round competence in boat and ship handling; inshore, coastal and ocean navigation; weather and sea conditions; and all the activities of an able seaman. This technical knowledge was the basis for respect when assuming the responsibility of command: Nelson could always claim that he had done whatever he asked others to do.

Nelson’s earliest experience of command came at the age of 14 when he was put in charge of a ship’s boat near Chatham with a crew of fifteen grown men. The waters of the Thames Estuary became very familiar to him. The experience made him ‘confident of myself amongst rocks and sands, which has many times since been of great comfort to me’, as the battles of the Nile and Copenhagen, both fought in shoals, were to show.19 Thorough practice was the key to success, and Suckling’s interest ensured that Nelson was placed on voyages to the Arctic, the Indian Ocean and the West Indies.

The Arctic was Nelson’s first real taste of adventure. This was the age of exploration and in 1773 an expedition, commanded by Commodore Constantine Phipps, set sail under the joint auspices of the navy and the Royal Society. Two bomb vessels, Racehorse and Carcass, were fitted out in an attempt to reach the North Pole. It would be a risky voyage and Phipps was ordered to recruit only ‘effective men’. Such a request would seem to preclude a boy of 14. Nelson’s uncle lied, however, about his nephew’s age. Also, according to Nelson, ‘I fancied I was to fill a man’s place. I begged to be his coxswain,’ to which, ‘finding my ardent desire for going with him’, the captain of the Carcass, Skeffington Lutwidge, agreed. Later Nelson was to write that he had been given charge of the Carcass’s four-oared cutter and twelve crew, ‘and prided myself in fancying I could navigate her better than any other boat in the ship’.20

The ice was particularly thick that summer and the ships only managed to get to 80° 48´ N, a little to the north-east of Spitzbergen. There they were held fast by the ice and were in real danger. For one moment it looked as if they would have to abandon the ships and take to the small boats, dragging them across the ice. Fortunately, the temperature rose and the ice loosened its grip, allowing the expedition to return to Great Yarmouth. Nelson had enjoyed a rare experience, fed his restless energy and boosted his seamanship skills and growing self-confidence. He had also had a brush with a polar bear!

The story of this encounter, on 4 August 1773, has become part of the Nelson legend. Surprisingly,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction in Search of Nelson
• 1 A Norfolk Childhood
• 2 Learning the Ropes
• 3 Frigate Captain
• 4 America and the West Indies
• 5 The Mediterranean
• 6 Cape St Vincent
• 7 The Battle of the Nile
• 8 Naples
• 9 Emma
• 10 Copenhagen
• 11 Trafalgar
• 12 Immortal Memory
• Timeline
• Further Reading
• Web Links
• Copyright