Nelson: Britannia's God of War (27 page)

Though Nelson’s obsession with Naples has often been interpreted as a distraction that deflected him from the pursuit of the enemy,
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in reality, without Naples and her ports, Nelson would not have reached the Nile, and would have been forced to abandon his cruise without a battle. Naples was the most important point in the Mediterranean to anyone thinking about the logistics of maintaining a fleet: the Neapolitan campaign was motivated by fleet logistics and grand strategy, not personal feelings or misguided admiration of the Bourbon
court. In contrast to Naples, neither Malta, which did not fall for many a long month, nor Minorca, which fell easily but was indefensible without the fleet, could provide skilled manpower for repairs, supply the fleet with food, water or stores, or offer any troops. These small islands were the fruit of naval success, not the springboard to Continental victory. Those who have criticised Nelson for refusing to obey orders to shift his priority to the security of Minorca have failed to understand this crucial distinction.

Nelson could not have failed to be swayed by the reception he received in Naples – he admitted that the praises of the court and popular cries of ‘Nostro Liberatore’ were enough ‘to make me vain’
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– but he was concerned that the locals were wasting precious opportunities to follow up his success.
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Anxious to patch up his ships he requested Hamilton to prepare the Castellamare dockyard to heave down the
Culloden
, find masts for his flagship and refit other ships. The campaign in the central Mediter-ranean was left in Nelson’s hands. Instructions from London were invariably out of date, and rather general; as for St Vincent, once he had finally heard the glorious news of the Nile, he conceded that Nelson would ‘do much better by following your own impulse’. St Vincent himself would hold the shield of the Mediterranean fleet in the straits, to meet the danger that the Brest fleet might try to relieve the army in Egypt, while Nelson acted as his sword arm, dispersing his force to attack on all fronts.
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The close accord between Nelson’s actions and the official instructions sent to St Vincent on 3 October reflected the growing importance of the theatre to the ministry, and the opportunity for a new coalition against France.
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At this point, the politics of coalition warfare compromised Nelson’s purely strategic aims. His own priority – o destroy the French transports at Alexandria, to ensure Bonaparte’s army would never return to Europe – would never be pursued.
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After the grand theatre of his official welcome at Naples on 22 September – complete with royal greetings, huge crowds and fainting ambassadress – and a ball to mark his fortieth birthday, Nelson was quick to turn his attention to bigger issues. His ships were being repaired, if more slowly than he would have liked, and he was anxious to make the next move. He soon realised that Naples was a city of talk, rather than action: ‘a country of fiddlers and poets, whores and scoundrels’, he declared, somewhat ungratefully, the morning after the ball.
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Furthermore, it was badly sited to support the wider campaign
he was planning, striking north against the French while keeping control of the choke point around Malta. Syracuse was a far better location for a sailing fleet. In short, ‘Naples is a dangerous place, and we must keep clear of it’, as he observed in early Octobers
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– but he would not escape so easily.

On 4 October 1798 Nelson wrote directly to Pitt:
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To days later he was gazetted Baron Nelson of the Nile and Burnham Thorpe. He was now Lord Nelson.

Nelson interpreted the signs in Naples to mean that the moment was opportune, an opinion largely based on that of Hamilton, the agent of British policy.
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In their haste they misunderstood Austria’s opportunistic Italian policy, and overrated the Neapolitans, who were putting on a show of strength without substance. Nelson’s initial failure to see past the fine new uniforms and smart appearance of King Ferdinand’s army was widely shared, especially by their Austrian commander, General Mack. While no one foretold just how feeble the army would be on the day of battle, Nelson soon recognised Mack’s inadequacies.
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Realising that Naples could not stand against France, he placed his hopes in an Austrian intervention.

Nelson left Naples on 15 October. He had not planned to return, but Ferdinand felt safer with him close by, and used his rank to secure this comfort. When Hamilton reported that Austrian Chancellor Thugut had promised support to Naples if she went to war, Nelson restricted his cruise to Malta.
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Here news of the Nile and the plundering of churches had sparked a revolt on 2 September, driving the French garrison into Valletta.
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Saumarez supplied the insurgents with a thousand French muskets from the captured ships when he passed on 25
September, and Nelson detached Ball to support them early in October. Arriving off the island on 24 October, Nelson realised that the three-thousand-man garrison was secure behind the stupendous fortifications, and had supplies for over a year. Tedious blockades were not part of Nelson’s repertoire, so he left Ball to sustain the effort. Back at Naples on 5 November, the royal family exacted a ‘promise’ that Naples Bay would never be without a British man-of-war.
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However, this was the cost of alliance, not a gesture of sycophancy.

In exchange for this naval presence Nelson expected action. The Anglo-Neapolitan war party, Hamilton and Nelson, allied with Acton and the Queen, received a powerful boost from a forged French plan to attack Naples,
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and persuaded Ferdinand, against his better judgement, to take the initiative. An amphibious force would seize Leghorn, to disrupt French communications in the north, while the main army under Mack drove the enemy from Rome. At the last moment, news from Vienna changed the Bourbons’ mood: Chancellor Thugut was refusing to honour the Austrian guarantee, insisting that it was a purely defensive arrangement, only invoked if France was the aggressor. In truth, Austria feared a Prussian stab in the back, and decided to wait until Russia guaranteed her security in turn. Vienna withdrew the guarantee of Naples on the very day Ferdinand decided to go to war, and subsequently accused Britain of trying to drag Austria into the conflict.

It was too late to pull back. An Anglo-Portuguese squadron with five thousand Neapolitan troops secured Leghorn without a fight on 29 November. Leaving Troubridge to blockade Toulon and Genoa, Nelson returned to Naples on 5 December. It was well that he did, for the main offensive had flattered only to deceive. Mack marched quickly to Rome, King Ferdinand entering the city in triumph on 29 November with a suspicious lack of resistance. The far smaller French force had withdrawn, regrouped, and a week later launched an audacious attack – in the face of which the undertrained and poorly led Neapolitan army panicked and ran away. Nelson evacuated the royals, the British community and a large amount of treasure from Naples to Palermo before the rampant French arrived. They left on 23 December, and the
Vanguard
soon ran into a terrible gale. Emma attended to the Bourbon exiles and nursed the youngest of the Princes, who died in her arms. It was her courage and resolve in a crisis that won Nelson’s admiration and ultimately his heart.

After these terrible events, Nelson was closely bound to the interests of the Neapolitan court, partly by a sense of responsibility, partly by strategic motives: Ferdinand was a major ally and his ports on Sicily were essential to British command of the Mediterranean. Moreover, to abandon him with half his kingdom under French rule would annihilate Britain’s reputation as an ally. The events of the past three months had shown Nelson at his best: repairing his fleet, developing a new strategy, exploiting the opportunities of the war and meeting the disasters of Mack’s army by rescuing vital British allies and their resources from the French. He had saved Sicily, and the operational capability of his fleet. He had made mistakes, but they reflected the intelligence to hand rather than poor judgement.

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The New Year did not open auspiciously for Nelson. Despite the consummate skill with which he had conducted the evacuation from Naples, such retreats brought no glory and little credit. Now anchored in Palermo harbour, he was honour-bound to support his royal allies. While Ferdinand didn’t object to his exile, given Sicily’s fine hunting and food, Maria Carolina had little reason to celebrate. Recent events had exposed the republican underside of Neapolitan life that she had long feared, reprising the fate of her less fortunate sister in Paris, but this time more as farce than tragedy. The base ingratitude of the aristocracy, the bourgeois and the clergy was simply monstrous. The traitors had destroyed the sacred bond that united monarch and subject, and could not be forgiven – on this point the British and their allies were as one. In the midst of a war for national survival, French-supported traitors threatened the very existence of the state, and Pitt’s government felt this danger as keenly as Naples.

Nelson had no sooner disembarked his royal passengers and their retinue than he had to face further disagreeable news. The Foreign Secretary had directed the Admiralty to send Captain Sir William Sidney Smith – spy, mercenary and part-time diplomat – with a curious commission as naval officer and associate Minister to the Sublime Porte, or Turkish court. In finding a job for his cousin the Foreign Secretary simply ignored the command arrangements of St Vincent and Nelson, and Smith did not help matters by calmly assuming command of ships from Nelson’s squadron.
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Nelson had spread his forces to the best effect: Rear Admiral Duckworth covered Toulon from Minorca; Smith was active, if unpredictable,
on the Levant station where Troubridge would shortly arrive to attack the transports at Alexandria; Ball commanded the blockade of Malta. Nelson threatened privately to come home on ‘health’ grounds if Smith were not placed under his authority.
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Nor was this an empty gesture: he asked Fanny to take a house in London, preferably the one his uncle Maurice had occupied near Hyde Park. He was further annoyed by the failure of the ministers to do anything for his family: the Prime Minister and the First Lord had not responded to his pleas to promote Maurice shortly after the Nile.
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To make matters worse, one relative who was honoured, the newly promoted Captain Josiah Nisbet, continued to behave in a rough and doltish manner.
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The war continued to go badly on the mainland, with the French advance on Naples aided by treachery and cowardice. Only the lower orders, the
lazzaroni
,
were prepared to fight for the King. They made the French pay dearly for the city, but were betrayed by their social superiors, who opened the gates of Fort St Elmo to the invader.
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At Palermo Nelson, full of energy, ideas and optimism, was the mainspring of Bourbon resistance. He removed all the detested French émigrés from Sicily, tried to save the abandoned ships of the Bourbon navy from the French and stiffened the resolve of his hosts by promising not to leave Palermo. His widely spread forces were threatened by a rumoured French fleet from Brest arriving in theatre. If they came he would link up with Duckworth near Minorca, but he was confident the French would go to Toulon, not attack the British. He would defend Minorca only when it was attacked: he was prepared to run risks in order to recover the far bigger prize of Naples.
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This analysis, the basis of his decision to ignore Keith’s orders in July, was based on strategic judgement, not short-term or personal considerations.

To defend Sicily, meanwhile, Neapolitan troops were recovered from Leghorn, and local forces raised. Sicilians did not share the Neapolitan taste for alternative political systems, and their hatred of anything French was primeval: when a shipload of ophthalmia patients from Bonaparte’s Egyptian army landed at Augusta, they were butchered by an angry crowd.
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Amidst the chaos and bloodshed, Nelson received a letter from Admiral Lord Howe, and took the time to explain his tactics at the Nile to ‘our great master in naval tactics and bravery’: he stressed the importance of his ‘band of brothers’ of Howe’s signal system, and that the state of the wind meant ‘we always kept a superior force to the enemy’.
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He might not have been
one of Howe’s school, but the praise of this Grand Old Man was worth more than any popular acclaim. Equally pleasing were the comments Elliot, now Lord Minto, had made in supporting the vote of thanks in the House of Lords; it was a timely boost to his flagging morale to discover how much his countrymen appreciated his services.