Nelson: Britannia's God of War (63 page)

However, it would be many years before Maclise started work on his Nelson. In the interval, his friend Clarkson Stanfield produced two major Nelson canvases, establishing him as the marine artist of the era. Following royal commissions, including his 1832
Portsmouth
Harbour,
with
Victory
taking centre stage, the United Services Club commissioned him to paint a Trafalgar for their imposing new building (now the Institute of Directors). Stanfield represented the state of the battle at 2.30, sacrificing art for historical accuracy. The picture is full of ships, but short of meaning. Despite being a very wooden image, it was immediately more popular than Turner’s romantic interpretation.
⁶⁶
A decade later Stanfield produced a more compelling composition,
The
Victory
Being
Towed
into
Gibraltar,
for Sir Morton Peto, the engineering contractor who had put up Nelson’s Column. It shows the battered flagship and her sad cargo being towed to safety by Thomas Fremantle’s
Neptune
.
⁶⁷
While a far better reproduction of the sea than Turner’s 1806
Victory,
it lacked his emotional engagement. Stanfield reproduced what he had seen; Turner’s pictures were the creation of a towering imagination.
⁶⁸

Between 1844 and 1865 Stanfield served as curator of the gallery that had been established at the Royal Naval Hospital at Greenwich, overseeing an important programme of cleaning and restoration that kept the art and the space in good order for another century.
⁶⁹
The original impulse for this gallery had come from William Locker, Nelson’s old captain, a Deputy Governor of the Hospital and a minor but discerning collector of Nelsoniana. His 1795 proposal that the Painted Hall be used as a National Gallery of Marine Paintings to generate revenue for the charity that ran the Hospital was finally taken up in 1823 by his son Edward Hawke Locker, Secretary to the Hospital and Civil Commissioner. The younger Locker augmented the existing collection by securing twenty-nine pictures from George IV, who had tired of naval glory, and commissioning major paintings to fill in gaps in the coverage of naval history.
⁷⁰
In 1829 the King handed over two
majestic sea-battle pictures, de Loutherbourg’s
Glorious
First
of
June
and Turner’s overwhelming
Trafalgar
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The collection of paintings was supplemented by relics, most notably the famous bloodstained coat, found by Sir Harris Nicolas in 1845; Albert bought it for
£
150 and placed it in a sealed case among Stanfield’s newly refurbished pictures.
⁷²
The remarkable price paid reflected the quasi-religious significance of the artefact.

Most of the visitors to the Greenwich collection read its history lesson in a conventional linear manner, as a record of Britain’s rise to imperial power on the oceans. These viewers knew exactly what Nelson meant: he had given them the empire of the world, and its trade flowed past the building. In this way the Victorians began to strip away the wonder and the magic of Nelson and his greatest battle. The literal images that were increasingly favoured in the gallery were not devoid of meaning and power, but their concern with fact and form invited an unthinking response. Stanfield’s images played a major role in the development of the Victorian understanding of the Nelson cult, while his restoration of the Painted Hall and cleaning of many older pictures preserved the best work from previous generations.
⁷³
He oversaw the introduction of a new, popular aesthetic to the Nelson story.

*

The new ideas on heroism were no less evident in the literary responses to Nelson generated during the Victorian era. Thomas Carlyle was among the most influential makers of Victorian culture, and no writer saw history in grander terms than he did: for him, it was ‘poetry, prophecy, biography and social criticism – all in one
⁷⁴
He wanted to create modern prose epics, to provide the Victorians with a past that helped them plot the course ahead. His 1839 essay,
Heroes
and
Hero
Worship,
helped to shape a new sensibility, elevating the great men of the age to a quasi-religious status – and he did not ignore Nelson. Indeed, a brief biography of Nelson was among Carlyle’s earliest writings, composed for an encyclopaedia in the early 1820s. If his source was Southey, the approach was altogether more elevated. Carlyle saw no reason to discuss the ‘only stain’ – the story of Carracioli – ‘and his fervid though pure attachment to Lady Hamilton’.
⁷⁵
Carlyle’s Trafalgar was the capstone on the naval greatness of England, while Nelson’s life was distinguished by ‘unremitting exertion of a mind gifted with the most acute penetration, the loftiest ardour, the most inflexible
determination; and the last scene of it was fitly, though mournfully, adapted to its general tenor’. For Carlyle, ‘Nelson’s name will always occupy a section in the history of the world, and be pronounced wherever it is understood, as that of a HERO.’
⁷⁶

Carlyle’s approach to history, as the work of great men recorded for example, enjoyed a long popularity, though few aspired to match his elevated conception of purpose, or achieved his insight. Investing every ounce of his being in his work made Carlyle a unique talent, and if his theme endured, his intensity could not. Over time his thoughts became common currency, but their deeper meaning was lost. The Victorians put their heroes on pedestals and looked to them for uplifting examples, but this process inevitably reduced them to a homogenised stereotype: Christian hero, moral, pure, chivalric and evangelical. While some of their contemporaries might come close to this model, it was only through a strenuous editing process that it could be reconciled with the biographies of earlier heroes such as Nelson.

The first Victorian
Life
of
Nelson
was produced by Thomas Pettigrew (1791–1865), a surgeon and antiquary whose father had served as a naval surgeon on the
Victory,
though long before Nelson’s day. While best known for establishing Horatia’s paternity beyond doubt, Pettigrew also dealt with the folly of the ‘Black Legend’ of Naples.
⁷⁷
The book coincided with a renewed interest in Nelson that was closely connected to the French naval revival, a link symbolised by Petti-grew’s dedication to Lord Auckland, First Lord of the Admiralty at the time the book went to press – though he died suddenly before it appeared. Pettigrew had access to private correspondence Croker had withheld from Nicolas, and also received liberal support from the Admiralty, notably from two of Croker’s relatives. Unfortunately for the causes he espoused, Pettigrew’s literary style was rather heavy-going: while his treatment of the material and his analysis of the evidence were an improvement on Clarke, his prose was a steady procession, quite incapable of competing with Southey even if the text had been shorter, and published in a cheap format. The book stirred up a newspaper controversy, principally over Emma and Horatia, and quickly went into a second edition. Yet it soon faded from the limelight, and remains largely unknown. The Victorians already knew about Nelson, and while Pettigrew had evidence and ambition, he lacked the talent to change their minds. His book did succeed, however, in drawing attention to the
nation’s failure to honour Nelson’s wishes for Emma and Horatia. He provided enough evidence to revive the claim, and after a prolonged discussion during 1852– 4 between radical MP Joseph Hume and successive Prime Ministers, a Civil List pension of £300 was raised, to be split between Horatia’s three daughters.
⁷⁸

Like Nicolas before him, Pettigrew’s methods and values were those of an age increasingly interested in the past, and the practical lessons, moral examples and future prognoses it could offer. However, the impact of both works would be limited by their cost: the later volumes of the Nicolas edition, the most ‘interesting’ by any calculation, did not sell well, and the series was not reprinted until 1997. Instead the growing popular appetite for Nelson biography would be satiated by Southey – taken entire, or in essence.

The Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) had produced a
Life
in 1837, an abridgement of Southey’s text. However, it retained Southey’s damning verdict on Nelson’s public and private affairs at Naples in 1799 – a poor return for Nelson’s active support of the SPCK.
⁷⁹
Despite this condemnation the book still managed to end on a morally uplifting note: it hinted at immortality, although carefully ascribing the idea of sanctity to simple sailors, and concluded with an uplifting eulogy of Nelson as ‘a martyr patriot’.
⁸⁰
The function of the edition was to provide for the intellectual needs of the newly literate classes, with a ‘suitable’ text, moral if not religious. In an age influenced by Carlyle’s vision of the heroic Nelson remained the quintessential figure, the ultimate hero, romantic icon and the national talisman.

*

Daniel Maclise’s inclusive fresco of Waterloo for the Royal Gallery at the Palace of Westminster was finally completed in December 1861 – the same month that Albert died, victim of an unromantic complaint occasioned by the medieval, but hardly chivalric, drains of Windsor. With one big wall covered the artist moved to design ‘Trafalgar: the Death of Nelson’. For this his research was meticulous, as befits the taste of the time, and incorporated the famous coat that his patron had secured, along with visits to the
Victory
and samples of rope, fittings and other gear. The composition includes over seventy life-sized figures on the upper deck of
Victory,
with the fallen Nelson in the arms of Hardy at the focal point. There is no glory or triumphalism here: the price of success is shown life-sized and with disturbing power.
⁸¹
  Madise’s picture reflects a new mood: while the hero falls, mortally wounded, death and mutilation surround him, at the heart of the image. Moreover, Nelson’s blood can be seen on the deck, along with that of his men, something the previous generation of artists had scrupulously avoided – gods do not bleed. Here, however, all are united in duty, and death, and the sacrifice is far more democratic than had been allowed hitherto. This Nelson is not a god – just one of many men to die that day.
⁸²
Perhaps without realising it, Albert had succeeded in ‘dethroning’ Nelson: by demoting him from the divine status he had been accorded by an earlier era, a metaphorical space was opened up for a restored and newly respected monarchy.

The picture took nearly two years to execute, using a complex new fresco technique that Albert had sent Maclise to learn in Germany. By the time it was finished, the great project to embellish the Houses of Parliament was collapsing: Albert ‘had been the directing mind and without his determined support the enterprise would probably have ended sooner’.
⁸³
Anxious to save money, and unimpressed by the relative unpopularity of the two battle pieces, the Commission cancelled Maclise’s remaining work, and the smaller paintings were never executed. Yet the Nelson was universally praised as a masterpiece of narrative art in the high romantic style.
⁸⁴
The
Art
Journal
concluded: ‘We are a maritime power, but it is the only picture which we yet possess entirely worthy of our naval history.’
⁸⁵

Such judgements reflect the triumph of literalism over the ethic of an earlier age. For the mid-Victorians, Nelson simply could not be the chivalric hero, the ideal knight: his flaws were too great, and his sense of duty too sophisticated. The moral climate, too, had noticeably chilled, and conduct that had attracted adverse comment in 1800 was now considered absolutely immoral. The problem was how to make use of the greatest hero of all without condoning his life. Daniel Maclise met this task head-on, and succeeded brilliantly. His scene presented the House of Lords with a demonstration of duty, heroism and democratic carnage.

By 1865 the country had humanised Nelson, and his status was steadily being reduced. In an age of minor wars and dangerous exploration, he was vulnerable to being displaced by the temporary heroes of the day – priggish lightweights like Admiral Sir Edmund Lyons, who explicitly courted comparisons with Nelson during the Crimean War. Such men, however, knew nothing of the danger of invasion, or
high-intensity combat. Mid-Victorian Britain never had to meet the challenge of total war: the rivalry of the Second Bonapartist Empire, unlike that of the First, was dismissed with a pair of arms races. Consequently, the need to develop fresh versions of Nelson was limited. However, this comfortable world would not last indefinitely, and a new Nelson would be needed when the external environment darkened. The only question was what form the new image would take.