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Horatio Nelson

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Nelson was of course the British Admiral who defeated Napoleon's navies in a number of battles climaxing with Trafalgar and allowed Britian to continue its resistance to France which lead to Napoleon's eventual defeat.

Nelson's life is interesting as it illustrates how the British Navy was so succesful. Nelson was a person who came from a reasonably poor background. He was assisted into the Navy at a young age and spent most of his early years learning saling and the art of leadership by working as a midshipman in the Navy and Merchant marine. It was a system in which privilage was important but at the same time merit was critical in advancement.

Nelson's life was also interesting from the point of view that it had aspects of a Mills and Boon romance. He fell in love with the young wife of the elderly British ambassador to Naples, Lady Hamilton. This was an enduring passion which led to the birth of a child.

Nelson comes across as a man who was brave rather than a person whose tactics were deeply refined. His methods were at variance with the official Navy ordinances which emphasised a well disciplined line of ships bringing a combined weight of fire on the enemy line. At every battle he would simply plough in and order his captains to take on the enemy ship to ship. This was based on the superb training of British sailors who could fire their guns at double the rate of any other nation and the use of a flintlock ignition system to fire the guns which was more accuate than the slow burning matches used by other countries.

The author is some sort of expert on Nelson and the book is meant to be based on some material which has not been available to previous biographers. It is quite a short book of three hundred pages with reasonably big print. It is easy to read and an insight into one of Britians heroic figures.

Ever since his death at the battle of Trafalgar, Horatio Nelson has been an icon of Britishness. Like most Englishmen, I knew him largely as the man whose statue stands atop an enormous column in central London. I knew that he won an important victory over the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile and an even more important one at Trafalgar, which finally ended Napoleon's dream of conquering Britain. I knew that he lost one arm and was blind in one eye. I knew about his famous "England expects..." signal. I knew (from birdwatching holidays in the area) that he was a native of North Norfolk, that he had a notorious affair with a married woman and that, as he lay dying, he asked his friend Thomas Hardy (the sea-captain, not the novelist who was a distant relation) to kiss him. (That story, by the way, seems to be true. Tom Pocock has no truck with the alternative theory that he actually said "Kismet, Hardy"). Apart from that, however, I did not have much more biographical information about him,

I bought Tom Pocock's book after my interest was aroused by a recent trip to Portsmouth, when I visited HMS Victory for the first time since my childhood. This provides a general introduction to Nelson's life. He was the son of a Norfolk clergyman. The family were not particularly well-off financially (one of Nelson's brothers became a middle-ranking Admiralty civil servant, another an unsuccessful shopkeeper), but they had powerful connections, being related to an earlier naval hero, Sir Maurice Suckling, and to the influential Walpole family who had provided Britain's best-known Prime Minister in the eighteenth century. Their patronage was invaluable in securing Nelson's rise to high rank after he had chosen, at the age of twelve, the Navy as a career.

The book details many of the lesser-known parts of Nelson's career. He fought as a young officer in the American War of Independence and took part in an unsuccessful British attempt to invade what is today Nicaragua, then part of Spanish-ruled Central America. He served for a time in the West Indies, where he met his wife Fanny. I was surprised to learn that, for a lengthy period in the late 1780s and early 1790s he was unemployed, having offended influential officials in the Admiralty by what were seen as his over-zealous attempts to enforce laws prohibiting the newly-independent Americans from trading with the British possessions in the Caribbean. His career was saved by the outbreak of war with revolutionary France, and he spent a period commanding the British Fleet in the Mediterranean before the Battle of the Nile raised him to heroic status.

Much of Nelson's time in the Mediterranean was spent in the Kingdom of Naples, at that time an important British ally, and it was here that he met the love of his life, Emma Hamilton, for whom he was eventually to leave his wife. (Emma's husband, Sir William Hamilton, was the British Ambassador to the King of Naples). Naples was also the scene of one of the more controversial episodes in Nelson's career, his part in the suppression of the short-lived Parthenopean Republic founded after the French captured the city. Paradoxically, the Republic only commanded support among the city's aristocracy and intelligentsia, whereas the Neapolitan sans-culottes remained resolutely loyal to their King, and within a few months it was overthrown by a monarchist guerrilla army led by a Cardinal of the Church, whereupon the King took the opportunity to wreak bloody revenge upon the revolutionaries. In this he was aided by Nelson who saw them as traitors to their country and collaborators with an occupying enemy power. Another controversial episode came a few years later when Nelson gave evidence at the trial of Edward Despard, an old friend who had been accused of treason for his alleged involvement in a plot to murder King George III and stage a coup d'etat. (Despard was eventually convicted and sentenced to death).

Of Nelson's three great victories, the most hard-fought was the Battle of Copenhagen when the Danes inflicted losses on the British fleet nearly as great as those they themselves suffered. At the Nile and Trafalgar, by contrast, the French fleets were routed without the loss of a single British ship. Pocock accounts for the overwhelming nature of these victories by reference to the superior seamanship of the British sailors and the superior marksmanship and rate of fire of the British gunners, but leaves unanswered the wider question of why, in an age when France's army was the strongest in Europe, her navy should have been so inferior to its British counterpart. (There were a number of other questions about Nelson's victories that I would have liked to have seen answered).

Nevertheless, to be fair to the author, this book was written as a fairly short account of Nelson's life, at just over 300 pages, very much for the general reader rather than the specialist in naval warfare. Pocock writes as much about Nelson the man as Nelson the hero; you will find more here about Lady Hamilton than you will about questions of naval tactics or strategy. The prose is lucid and fluent, and there is much of biographical interest.