Nelson: Britannia's God of War (26 page)

In the months that followed the victory of the Nile, Nelson, battered and concussed, stood at the epicentre of a tidal wave of euphoria and enthusiasm that spread slowly but irresistibly from Aboukir Bay to the Admiralty. As more than one contemporary observed, as the victor in the most complete naval battle ever fought and the saviour of India, he had become an immortal. He could expect to be made a peer of the realm, and richly rewarded by a grateful King and country. Yet before he returned home to claim these rewards, accusations of reprehensible behaviour in both the private and public sphere would threaten to tarnish his name. Some biographers have been quick to convict Nelson of acting dishonestly, conniving in judicial murder, dishonouring his flag and his country, and abandoning his wife for another woman.
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Yet only the last of these is a matter of fact. The other supposed offences – taking vengeance on defeated enemies in cold blood, dishonouring his service and his country, being a party, principal or associate in a crime – are so wholly and obviously out of character that Nelson’s admirers have sought an excuse to explain his behaviour: the concussive blow to the head at the Nile, exhaustion, the enervating and corrupting atmosphere of the Neapolitan Court, or the blandishments of a designing woman. It is curious that such admirers did not pause to consider that the ‘crimes’ might be fictional.

The scene of Nelson’s ‘disgrace’ would be Naples, the largest city in Southern Italy. Renowned for its easy-going eighteenth-century morality, Naples had long been a favourite destination for pleasure-seekers. Located on a sweeping bay, tumbling down from the hills to the shore, Naples was a strikingly beautiful city – complete with an active volcano, Vesuvius, and the recently uncovered remains of Pompeii – but it was also densely populated and unstable. The local defences were primarily intended to guard against the city’s inhabitants, not an external enemy: the key fortress of St Elmo commanded the city, not the approaches, while the sea forts were old and feeble.

For the past sixty years Naples had been capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, ruled by kings from the Spanish branch of the Bourbon dynasty. King Ferdinand I was an idle buffoon devoted to the pleasures of the chase and the table. He left the business of state to his wife, Maria Carolina, sister of the ill-fated Marie Antoinette, and his Minister Sir John Acton, an able administrator with a multi-national background. The French Revolution and the execution of the Queen’s sister had shattered the easy-going calm of the Bourbon regime. The emergence of a Jacobin movement among the aristocracy and bourgeoisie threatened the old order of king and church, while the Queen had drawn her husband into an Austrian alignment, and away from the more obvious link with his royal brother, the King of Spain. Naples had fought in defence of Italy, but left the war in 1796 with the defeat of Austria. An uneasy peace persisted to the middle of 1798, though it was constantly threatened by French plundering. Naples was too weak to take on France alone – while the Emperor of Austria, the Queen’s nephew and son-in-law, who did not share her unrelenting hatred of the French, was reluctant to intervene on Naples’ behalf.

The longstanding British representative at the Bourbon court was Sir William Hamilton, an ageing connoisseur and serious vulcanologist. Hamilton’s close relationship with Acton, his long years of service and elevated manners made him an effective peacetime envoy, but he was quite out of his depth in such an elemental conflict. The British victory at the Nile had transformed the Italian situation, encouraging Ferdinand and Maria Carolina once again to look to Austria for a lead in renewing the war with France. Hamilton and Nelson had met in 1793; now they developed a close personal and political rapport that would endure for the rest of their lives. This relationship would be the key to the political developments of the next eighteen months.
Without Hamilton’s insight, advice and linguistic skills Nelson would have been politically impotent at Naples. Hamilton, meanwhile, would use Nelson’s energy to push the soporific court into war.

Hamilton’s position at court had been reinforced by the close friendship that developed between his wife and the Queen. After many years as a widower, Hamilton had been sent his nephew’s cast-off mistress, whom he took in, educated and ultimately married. This caused no concern in permissive Naples, where Emma’s charm and rapid mastery of Italian helped to open doors, and her artistic performances made her one of the ‘sights’ of the city. Emma had been an artist’s model, and in Naples her ‘attitudes’ – performances in which she took up well-known classical poses, including some from wall-paintings at Pompeii and Herculaneum – had an astonishing impact. Sir William, friend of Garrick and an enthusiastic supporter of the theatre, provided artistic direction, but it was Emma’s raw talent and striking presence that earned the admiration of major figures from Goethe to Madame de Stael. The attitudes evolved into pantomime shows, and the only setting that could do them justice was Naples.
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Although Emma was firmly established at the Neapolitan court by 1798, it is unlikely that she would have forgotten her impoverished and precarious origins. These explain her later behaviour, which some have inappropriately condemned as self-seeking and grasping.
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Emma would always need a guardian and protector, someone of position, wealth and power. Her relationship with Sir William was based on mutual esteem, and there is no evidence that she was unfaithful to him before 1798–9, despite her public prominence and the lax morals of the city. Initially Sir William was amused and entertained by her, but as she developed into an effective political partner he conceded a large degree of equality. As long as they were in Naples the Hamiltons lived in polite society, and Sir William had no wish to go home. Emma was acceptable in Naples, where her common manners and speech, unusual background and notoriety were hardly unique. In London, despite Sir William’s promises of a reception at court, it was unlikely that she would be accepted so easily.

The woman that Nelson met was tall and strikingly beautiful, if by now on the heavy side; she was also capable, persuasive and confident. She had earned his undying gratitude through her intervention, real or otherwise, to facilitate the watering of the fleet at Syracuse only weeks before, and he soon realised, if he had not known before, how close
she was to the Queen. This was no ordinary woman. Her obvious ‘performance’ after boarding the
Vanguard
was carefully contrived –it is important to know what you are doing if you want to be caught by a one-armed man – but there was also genuine emotion. Emma won Nelson over in much the same way that she had won over Hamilton: by joining in his world, and taking a role in his drama, as she had in Sir William’s dramatics. Her political access, linguistic skills and fortitude in adversity, prominently displayed in the evacuation from Naples and the stormy passage to Palermo, gained her access to his inner life. Once there she provided him with an environment in which he could relax his exhausted mind and body. The home Emma provided was so attractive, in contrast with his own peripatetic, parochial domestic arrangements, that he could not bear to give it up, whatever the cost. After living among the great events of the Neapolitan court, Round Wood cannot have seemed very enticing; nor can Fanny’s descriptions of dinners with the damp and depressing local worthies have competed with the chance the court offered for refined conversation on his favourite subjects – war, strategy and self.

Emma Hamilton posing in an ‘attitude’, sketched from life

 

Sir William was content to share his wife and his home with his friend, and seemed to take pleasure in Nelson’s obvious affection for Emma, much as he had relished the attention her ‘attitudes’ had received in earlier days. We do not know when that sharing became something more than close friendship, or whether Sir William ever resented his demotion in her affections. The only time he ever protested about their actions was when they affected his comfort, spoilt his peace, or hampered his fishing. After all, Emma had been handed on to him, and at his age it would have been unbecoming to protest the
loss of one aspect of her affection. She remained a devoted companion and comfort to the end: he died in her arms. In his will he left his favourite picture of Emma to Nelson, a remarkable testament to their friendship. The moral issues that have fixated biographers seem to have had no place in Sir William’s world. Emma was free to act according to her own judgement, rather than being bound by social and religious convention.

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Even as Nelson and his tiny squadron headed for Naples, his mission was changing. The French had been thrown onto the defensive, and it would no longer be enough simply to keep Bonaparte cut off in Egypt. Nelson was well aware that he had to exploit every opportunity to strike at the French, who were still reeling after Aboukir Bay, and that the best prospect lay in Italy. If British and Austrian interests could be reconciled, and the Neapolitans drawn into the alliance, the French could be driven back over the Alps. As the only friendly Mediterranean power with suitable ports from which the fleet could operate, Naples was the strategic key to the Anglo-Austrian partnership that Foreign Secretary Grenville had created.

Hamilton reported the rapturous response of the Neapolitan royal family and people to news of the battle, which had arrived on
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September. ‘You have now completely made yourself, my dear Nelson,
immortal
.’ More significantly, he reported that King Ferdinand had thirty thousand troops, with another fifty thousand being raised.4 Such a force, Hamilton believed, could clear the French out of Italy.
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Prime Minister Acton told Nelson that Naples would join the war when Austria was ready.
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Hamilton believed Austria would go to war on receiving news of the Nile, while the Neapolitans were talking of occupying Rome. In truth, he was indulging in a little wishful thinking, but it chimed in with the euphoria of the hour.

After the Nile, Nelson moved onto a new level of command. No longer did he have the luxury of a single target and no allies to satisfy; now he had a host of partners, each with their own political agenda, and had to negotiate the complexities of conducting coalition operations across large theatres. In an alliance, as Clausewitz wrote in 1805,‘it is endlessly difficult to satisfy all the interests at stake
without
undu
ly
violating
sound
strategic
principles
and reducing the probability of success.’
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Hitherto Nelson’s missions had been restricted to the conduct of war at sea, or occasionally on land, and only dealt with allies
and soldiers at the tactical level. Now he was responsible for the development and execution of British strategy and policy in the central and eastern Mediterranean. He had to balance the concerns and ambitions of the Turks, the Russians, the Neapolitans and the more distant Austrians with the requirements of British policy. Many senior naval officers – Hotham, most conspicuously and most recently – had found the change from fleet command to theatre command beyond them.

Nelson’s trusted ‘band of brothers’ would be crucial to his success: Troubridge, Ball and Hood executed complex tasks under Nelson’s overall direction. His furious response when Captain Sidney Smith was sent into ‘his’ theatre with quasi-independent powers was not a matter of personalities or vanity, but of command and responsibility. Nelson could not control the theatre when junior officers did not report directly to him.

The main danger came from a superior enemy fleet, intent on relieving Bonaparte or – although this was far less likely – on seeking battle to recover command. After St Vincent and the Nile, Nelson knew the quality of the French and Spanish fleets. This gave him the confidence to take the initiative. Though the French still had a useful naval force, the two battleships that escaped from the Nile, along with a half a dozen weak, old ex-Venetian and ex-Maltese sixty-fours and smaller craft, were spread from Alexandria to Toulon, via Corfu, Ancona and Malta. Without a concentrated enemy threat Nelson could disperse his own resources for maximum impact. The Two Sicilies provided the central position, combining location with resources – a dockyard, food and water. Controlling the Kingdom would also enable him to keep the two basins of the Mediterranean separate, to isolate the French army in Egypt, support the siege of Malta and bolster British influence in Italy. Moreover, Naples had a large army that might, with Austrian aid, clear all Italy of the French, to the inestimable benefit of British trade – it was certainly a prize worth fighting for.