Nelson: Britannia's God of War (4 page)

For all the horror and human cost, battle was not the object of war, only the means to an end. Nelson’s real concern was the exploitation of sea power in the wider conflict with France. It was only by annihilating the enemy fleets that Britain could exploit the sea at the strategic level to sustain her own efforts, and crush those of France. Sea power would pressure French clients and puppets, ultimately prompting a pan-European uprising against the Bonapartist tyranny. Nelson was well aware of these issues, predicting the longer course of the war in June 1803. It would be national resistance in Portugal, Spain, Russia and parts of Italy and Germany that brought down Bonaparte, not the feeble policies and dynastic concerns of the old regimes.

The impact of sea power on the economic endurance of a large state like France was exceedingly slow – the grinding attrition of blockades contrasted starkly with Bonaparte’s rapid, decisive land campaigns – but also terribly certain. Between 1689 and 1815 Britain and France fought seven major wars, and France was bankrupt at the end of every single one. The difference after 1793 was that France plundered her neighbours, and kept on plundering them until the rest of Europe finally acted as one. The Royal Navy stopped France from enjoying her conquests, and denied her the opportunity to rebuild her economy. Everywhere there was room to float a ship, the British were to be found, harassing the enemy, and trading with anyone who could pay.
The war between 1793 and 1815 was at root an economic struggle, and it was won by the stronger economy.

Britain had no desire to conquer territory on the European mainland. Her aims were restricted to removing the French from the Low Countries, especially the port city of Antwerp, and re-establishing a stable, peaceful European system, in which her role would be to balance the players, and press her commercial advantages. Five major coalitions and numerous alliances and subsidy treaties bear testimony to Britain’s role as the linchpin of resistance to French aggression. The question facing the British government and its advisers was how to use its strengths – naval power, economic endurance and a balance of power policy – to defeat France. In reality, the only method was to exhaust every French offensive option against Britain – invasion, economic warfare, alliances and global strikes – while slowly crushing her resources. This strategy caused problems with resource allocation, for Britain had a limited fund of ships, men, soldiers and transports, and every theatre called out for more. From 1793 the offensive was split between Northern Europe, where every effort proved inadequate and futile, and the West Indies, where the French islands were largely secured by 1797. Only after the Nile did the British Government focus on the Mediterranean, because all other options had been exhausted and Austria called out for a fleet. The results were spectacular, because sea power could block the French once they tried to leave the western European theatre. However, the ministers were never wholehearted about Austria, and rightly so: Vienna was playing its own game. For much of this period the biggest problem was the endless compromises caused by the political needs of alliance warfare: British aims were blocked by allied concerns, and pure strategy was deflected by political problems.

The security of merchant shipping was another issue that had constantly to be borne in mind. In a theatre like the Mediterranean with endless harbours for small privateers and pirates, it was essential to convoy the most valuable merchant ships, and coerce the Barbary corsairs to ensure they did not attack British ships, or those supplying the British. Convoys heading for Britain were commonly escorted by ships heading for a home dockyard to refit. Although often short-handed and sluggish, their presence deterred all but the most powerful enemy forces. Protection was also needed for the valuable British sugar islands in the West Indies, since the wealth they generated was one of
the economic foundations of the war effort. So valuable were they that Nelson left his station and chased the enemy to the West Indies in 1805: he went to save the country, not just a few islands.

Perhaps Nelson’s greatest achievement was to render simple and direct everything that was, for lesser men, complex and imponderable. He removed uncertainty, doubt and fear from his subordinates. For Nelson’s Prussian contemporary, Carl von Clausewitz, genius in war was largely a natural gift: it enabled one man to triumph over rules, or simply set them aside. It was an intellectual attainment: judgement, insight, comprehension leading to swift and correct decision.
¹¹
Those who can do their duty in war are not uncommon: professionalism, teamwork, comradeship and shared danger can generate fighting men. Junior leaders, the petty officers and lieutenants who exercise tactical control, require more reflective attainments, to meet the uncertainties of battle with effective, predictable responses. This is the province of doctrine, the accepted methods of operating that have been the bedrock of fighting forces since the dawn of warfare. Yet genius requires a more open field of action. As soon as he was given an independent command, Nelson combined responsibility for his ship and crew with authority to act as he thought fit. From his first detached service, in Nicaragua in 1780, he demonstrated the confidence to act on his own judgement, accepting the awful responsibility of ordering men into battle and the possibility of criticism from higher authority.

Fleet command during Nelson’s era required the integration of administrative tasks with strategic-level management, tactical command and high-level diplomatic and inter-service cooperation. While many men were given such commands, only a handful of them rose to the task. Most fell back on precedent, caution and fear. Among the handful who rose to the challenge, none has equalled the subject of this book. Nelson served the political leadership of the day, upheld his country and constitution, placed his trust in God, and did his duty. He cared deeply for his men, as human beings. He sought peace through victory in war. In an age when nations needed heroes who were larger than life and twice as impressive, Britain’s hero was a slight, mutilatednaval officer. Nelson saved his country, and in the process became ‘Britannia’s god of war’.

The testimonies of Nelson’s mistress, wife and elder brother, not to mention his own brief and embellished accounts, sought to create an image of the young hero as a paragon of manly virtues: honest, brave, loyal and self-effacing. Even his petty larceny – for such is the reality of his orchard-raiding as a schoolboy – was dignified by pious sentiments. The truth of Nelson’s all-too brief childhood was rather more prosaic.

Horatio Nelson was born at Burnham Thorpe in north Norfolk on 29 September 1758, the sixth of eleven children. His father, Reverend Edmund Nelson, was a Church of England cleric. Edmund’s family background was firmly middle-class; though intelligent and well educated, he lacked ambition, seeming happy with a quiet life in the Rectory at Burnham. The connections that would provide his numerous family with opportunities for advancement came from his wife’s family. Catherine Suckling was related to the powerful Walpole family, close neighbours of the Nelsons but far above them in wealth and social rank. She was the grand-neice of Sir Robert Walpole (later Lord Orford), the first British Prime Minister, who had built a dynastic power base in north Norfolk. It was the Walpole connection that secured Edmund the living at Burnham, and Horatio was named after Sir Robert’s son, his godfather.

Growing up in an isolated community, with few social equals, young Horace (as he was known in childhood) would have been well aware of his status. His family had servants and were on visiting terms with the minor Walpoles. But they did not visit Lord Orford’s residence; though they were close to wealth, status and privilege, the Nelsons were still on the outside. For an ambitious young man, the family’s connections would provide an opening, but individual effort in the service of the nation would be needed in order to convert this opportunity into social and economic promotion.

The vast skies and raw winds of north Norfolk have not changed since Nelson’s day, but then agriculture and fishing rather than tourism dominated the region, and the sea played an important part in local trade. No great events marked his childhood, which passed in a constant cycle of seasonal changes. The war with France that raged from 1756 to 1763 gave Britain global power, but Nelson was too young to have appreciated 1759, the year of victories when the Church bells rang for Quebec, Quiberon, Lagos and Minden. These events would enter his consciousness later, as examples and precedents.

The real influences on young Horace’s early years were closer to home: the sense of duty inculcated by his father’s role in the community, and the awareness of death sharpened by the tragic events in his own family. Five of his siblings died in childhood or as young adults, and his mother died when he was only nine. The latter event left an aching emotional void, manifested most obviously in his violent mood swings, as well as in his compulsion as an adult to secure the unthinking worship of those in authority and private ease in the arms of a powerful woman. Yet he always kept his duty and his personal life separate, never allowing private desires to hinder the execution of his public functions.

Perhaps he learnt this lesson from Edmund, who never remarried and selflessly devoted himself to bringing up his children. He was a considerate, calm father who neither crushed his children’s spirits nor expected too much of them: his amiable but chronically unambitious younger sons, Edmund and Suckling, were indulged with the same concern as Horace. Although Edmund was not a role model to Nelson, nor the spur that drove his ambition, the rector’s personal charm and expressive use of language were important elements in the make-up of the admiral, while his sermons and moral authority helped
Nelson to find his own voice when he needed to justify his actions. A brief period in a boarding school provided a useful halfway house for the challenges of a naval career.

This career was influenced most strongly, however, by his Suckling uncles, Maurice and William. Maurice had made his name, and a worthwhile sum of money, after a successful battle in the West Indies on 21 October 1759. He lived in some style in South Norfolk, and as a childless widower he was an ideal patron for his sister’s children. William Suckling took the eldest Nelson boy, also named Maurice, into public service in the Excise Office, then moved him to the Navy Board when Captain Suckling became the professional head of naval administration. Horace, meanwhile, took the initiative, as he was to do throughout his life. Reading that Captain Suckling was to command one of the ships being mobilised for a possible war with Spain over the Falkland Islands, he asked his elder brother William to write to their father, then taking the cure at Bath, to ask if he could go to sea – though it is probable that Suckling had already mentioned the subject to Edmund.

Captain Maurice Suckling, Nelson’s uncle

 

The opportunity that Suckling offered to Nelson was typical of eighteenth-century naval careers, which generally began through personal contact: the better the connection, the better the start a young
officer could make. Successful senior officers could ensure that their protégés picked up their trade, and a wide circle of potential patrons. Careers began early, at twelve or thirteen, and required financial support. For the first four to six years the young man would not be a commissioned officer. He was a trainee, often rated as a midshipman, and would only be commissioned if he passed a professional examination, and possessed certificates for six years’ service. Horace’s path to a commission was smoothed by Suckling’s connections. Captain Suckling found the boy the right ships, the right officers and the right stations, as well as taking charge of his education and paying his allowance.

*

In March 1771 Nelson joined the sixty-four-gun line-of-battle ship HMS
Raisonnable
, then lying in the River Medway off Chatham dockyard.
¹
Within days the ship had moved down river to Sheerness, and Nelson witnessed his first flogging. When the armament was cancelled in May, Suckling shifted into the stationary guardship HMS
Triumph
. He felt that Nelson’s interests would be best served by going to sea, however, so he sent him in a merchant ship that was trading with the West Indies, commanded by one of his old petty officers. By serving as a crew member for a year, the thirteen-year-old acquired a head for heights and a wide range of practical seafaring skills, maintaining the rigging, heavy hauling, anchoring and unmooring, as well as gaining an insight into the common seaman’s far from favourable view of the Navy. In July 1772. Nelson rejoined Suckling on the
Triumph
,
which had shifted back to Chatham while he was away. Already convinced by his uncle of the need to master practical seafaring arts, Nelson secured command of the only active vessel at the anchorage, the large boat that carried orders and officers from Chatham to London. Sailing in the shallow, tidal waters of the Thames and Medway, he developed the judgement necessary for inshore operations, a skill that would be vital to his later career.

Nor was this enough. The following year an expedition was in prospect. The Royal Society, patron of Captain Cook’s celebrated voyage to the South Seas, which returned home in 1771, now proposed a voyage to the North Pole. When two warships were selected, Nelson, desperate to join, circumvented an order that no boys be taken by persuading Captain Skeffington Lutwidge to rate him coxswain on HMS
Carcass
– named for the explosive shells she was built to fire, not the
more obvious meaning. Doubtless Suckling played a key role, as the ship was fitted out at nearby Sheerness.
²
Unfortunately for the young hero there was no glory to be had in the Arctic: they discovered nothing and the ships were nearly lost after becoming trapped in the ice.

Suckling clearly had no intention of keeping his nephew idle at home, since he next quickly secured him a midshipman’s berth on the frigate HMS
Seahorse
,
destined for the Indian Ocean. The ship’s master, Surridge, was a talented navigator and teacher.
³
Unfortunately Captain George Farmer lacked leadership skills and his ship was far from happy: two first lieutenants were court-martialled inside a year. The voyage was an eventful one for Nelson: he saw his first gun fired in anger, at a Mysorean cruiser, and he met midshipman Thomas Troubridge, another name for the future. Finally he was struck down with malaria and invalided home in early 1776. He arrived at Woolwich dockyard just days before his eighteenth birthday.

In 1802 Nelson told how this voyage found him in the depths of despair about his career prospects: he felt that by being invalided, he had failed, letting down his ship and all who served in her. But his spirits soon revived, with the cooler climates and the abatement of the malarial symptoms, and he decided to seek the patronage of his king and country. He resolved to be a hero, trusting in providence that it was his destiny.
⁴

The subtext of this outburst in 1802 was clear. Nelson was telling his audience that he had made it to the top without human help. This was not true: Suckling remained the architect of his career when he returned to England. He was now Controller of the Navy and MP for Portsmouth, a man of enormous influence. Any captain would be happy to help his nephew: Nelson completed his sea service on board HMS
Worcester
,
supported by letters from his uncle to her captain. After six months at sea as an acting lieutenant Nelson was examined for his commission. On 9 April 1777 a board of three captains, chaired by his uncle, met at the Navy Board on Tower Hill. Needless to say he passed, although he lacked the full six years’ sea service, and was a year too young. For the mature Nelson, however, Suckling’s influence was an embarrassing fact that needed to be explained away. Many years later either he or William Nelson told John McArthur that Suckling had concealed their relationship from his two colleagues.
⁵
This is highly unlikely. There was no need to hold the examination in London other than to indulge Suckling, and Nelson’s
contemporary report of the matter makes no mention of the subterfuge.
⁶
He could expect Suckling to hold the Controller’s post for many years, certainly long enough for him to secure the next two steps to captain. His career had been made: the next few years would demonstrate whether he would become the officer his uncle had worked so hard to educate.

*

Nelson was commissioned a lieutenant on 19 April, and appointed to the thirty-two-gun frigate HMS
Lowestoffe
,
whose captain was William Locker. The selection was no accident. Locker was an excellent seaman and a sympathetic commander: he had served under Lord Hawke, the greatest fighting admiral of the previous generation, and shown great courage in boarding an enemy vessel, which left him with a crippled leg. Suckling considered him the ideal officer to direct the next stage of Nelson’s education. Having mastered seamanship, the newly made lieutenant was anxious to learn about war. Characteristically, Nelson was soon on the closest possible terms with his captain. Long hours at sea and shared professionalism allowed the two officers to discuss naval tactics: the reflective Locker guided Nelson’s development as a commander and leader of men, as well as his tactical judgement. The two men became firm friends, despite the older man being twice Nelson’s age and his commanding officer. Locker became Nelson’s naval ‘father’, providing example, guidance and confessional. Other officers would earn Nelson’s esteem and affection, but none came close to Locker. The relationship remained close to the end of Locker’s life. It was at Locker’s request that Nelson sat for a portrait with John Francis Rigaud, RA.

Nelson and his new ship were soon off to the West Indies, escorting a convoy of merchant ships. Convoys were necessary because the American colonies were in open revolt, and their privateers were active. Furthermore there would be opportunities for prize-taking, and for glory. An active officer could make his name in war, and secure his place on the list of post captains. Once there he would become an admiral in the fullness of time, if he outlived those above him, and did not disgrace himself. Not that Nelson was going to let any opportunity pass to push himself forward, to show himself in a heroic light. His opportunity came as ‘captain’ of the
Little
Lucy
,
named for Locker’s daughter. Since the main targets were small colonial schooners bent on breaking the blockade it made sense to purse them in a similar vessel.
In her Nelson took his first prizes, and demonstrated his initiative. The newly-made lieutenant took particular pride in a very smart piece of boat handling in severe weather.

Captain William Locker