Nelson: Britannia's God of War (64 page)

During the peaceful years of the late Victorian era, once the French threat had been annihilated by the German armies, interest in Nelson fell away. He seemed an inappropriate and even unnecessary figure in an era whose character was symbolised by its Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone, a man who combined moral fervour, liberal reform and tree-felling in one remarkably industrious nineteenth-century package. As the scourge of the Neapolitan Bourbons, Gladstone’s view of Nelson was obvious. He also disliked the Navy, and hoped to cut it back in order to abolish income tax. But he overlooked the fact that the masses he wished to enfranchise depended for their daily bread on free access to the sea.

The populist journalist William Stead, editor of the influential
Pall
Mall
Gazette,
using confidential figures supplied by Captain John Fisher RN, started a campaign to highlight ‘The Truth about the Navy’. In search of allies, Stead sent his first editorial to the Poet Laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, long a public critic of defence economies. Suitably roused, Tennyson produced a simple but emotive popular appeal, which appeared in
The
Times,
and the
Pall
Mall
Gazette,
on 23 April 1885.
¹
‘The Fleet’ left no one in any doubt about where Tennyson stood: Gladstonian economics had gone too far, and it was time to reinforce the defences of the country. With a poet’s sensibility
Tennyson invoked Nelson and the Fleet as the exemplars of English greatness: ‘The Fleet of England is her all in all … and in her Fleet her fate.’ The poem reflected the national mood, and Gladstone listened. Within weeks a supplementary naval estimate, the ‘Northbrook Programme’, had been placed before Parliament, and passed into law. The following year the first new life of Nelson for three decades appeared, and was soon followed by others: no sooner had the country realised it needed to improve the Navy than Nelson resumed his central role in the national identity.

Harsh economic competition from Europe and the United States, rising levels of naval spending across the globe, and the looming prospect of another major war created a growing sense of crisis. Patriotism was popular, and patriotic figures equally so, as something to which frightened people could cling. The use of Nelson’s image multiplied, and the 1890s were the prime decade for Nelson biographies, with seven significant publications. Children, too, were taught by the Cambridge Junior school history textbook that ‘Nelson thought a great deal about duty; and that he was very brave and daring, and that he was also kind and tender-hearted’ – Emma, Naples and the more contentious issues were ignored, as Nelson was used to teach the men and women of tomorrow citizenship, patriotism and moral values.
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Little wonder they grew up to prefer his moral ‘failings’ with Emma: by making Nelson a symbol of conformist excellence, educators in the new age of compulsory schooling turned him into a priggish bore. Nelson’s Victorian eminence – though nothing to do with the man himself – was later subjected to much criticism, and the notorious private life was brought out to expose the hypocrisy of Victorian society.

The naval revival reached a peak in 1891 with the Royal Naval Exhibition at the Chelsea Hospital. In a grand spectacle designed to demonstrate ‘the relation between Britannia’s naval expenditure and naval responsibilities’, Nelson was the central figure, and a full sized mock-up of the
Victory
the dominant image, complete with a ‘Death of Nelson’ by Madame Tussaud’s, based on the Devis picture. Between 2 May and 24 October almost two and a half million visitors attended, inspecting everything from Nelson artefacts to modern ships, guns, engines and boilers. A smaller travelling version of the show then toured the major cities, gradually selling off artefacts.

The exhibition was followed in 1894 by the formation of the Navy
League, whose purpose was to campaign for naval expansion and to inform the people about the importance of naval supremacy, on which the British Empire depended for trade, food supply and national existence. The chief fund-raisers for the League were City firms, involved in trade, banking and investment, through the London Chamber of Commerce. They were joined by a powerful list of retired admirals, and unemployed captains, who lent a veneer of naval authority to the proceedings. The League’s organisers were careful to link Nelson with their message. ‘Nelson’s life and death, it was foreseen, might be utilised to personify British Sea Power to the children, if not to the veterans of British democracy throughout the world.’
³
They also made full use of Trafalgar Square, celebrating Trafalgar Day in 1896 with a massive gathering that offended liberal opinion-formers and prompted George Bernard Shaw to suggest that it would be better to pull down Nelson’s column.
⁴

The Navy did not participate in such events, preferring to exploit the signs of popular enthusiasm for additional battleships in more discreet discussions with the Treasury. Unlike the League, the Admiralty had consistently failed to exploit the symbolic power of Nelson’s image. In 1892 the only other Nelson ship left, HMS
Foudroyant,
was sold, and quickly passed on to a firm of German ship-breakers. This prompted a public outcry, but the Admiralty refused to reconsider. Privately they told one critic that they did not wish to see the ship preserved because she had ‘discreditable’ associations – a reference was to the liaison with Emma, the suppression of the Neapolitan revolution and the execution of Caracciolo. A private citizen saved the ship, and restored her to provide seamanship training for underprivileged boys. Sadly she was wrecked on Blackpool beach in June 1897.
⁵
The ‘discredit’ has persisted to this day: the Royal Navy has not reused the name. The remaining Nelson ship would have to wait for her salvation.

The Navy League’s propagandising use of Nelson was accompanied by an altogether more cerebral appropriation of his legacy. While the Chelsea exhibition had been opening the eyes of the nation at large, the theoretical argument for naval power was being set out in clear and exemplary form by an American naval officer. In his two ‘Sea Power’ books of 1890 and 1892, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan argued that the basis for success in the modern world was the possession and use of an ocean-going battlefleet navy, capable of securing access to colonies and markets. Mahan’s purpose was to persuade his
countrymen to build such a navy, and join the British in a partnership to lead the world in the twentieth century. Mahan was praised and lionised in Britain, and his books changed the intellectual climate. Even Gladstone recognised them as the books of the era; and in 1894, aware that the tide of opinion was running against his policy of low tax and small defence budgets, he resigned rather than accept increased naval spending.

The previous year, the Navy Records Society had been founded by naval historian Professor John Knox Laughton and the Director of Naval Intelligence Captain Cyprian Bridge. Their purpose was to assemble, digest and publish the most important material on the naval past, as a source of ideas, doctrine and education for the modern Navy. The Society brought Laughton into close contact with Mahan, who came to rely on ‘the naval historian’ as a living resource from which he drew information, archival advice, support and companionship. Over time their relationship deepened as the two men recognised their shared interests. Nelson dominated their work between 1895 and 1900. With the centenary of his greatest achievements looming, many aspects of the great admiral’s life and career were thrown under the spotlight. A debate about who was ‘responsible’ for the nature of the attack at the Nile was only a foretaste of what was to come.

Laughton produced three major Nelson books: a single-volume edition of his correspondence in 1886, a brief life in 1889, and the more broadly based
The
Nelson
Memorial
:
Nelson
and
his
Companions
in
Arms
in 1896. Though Laughton remained a man of the mid-nineteenth century, and took a rather defensive attitude to the more scandalous aspects of the story, he opened a new era in Nelson scholarship, from which important results would flow. Mahan, meanwhile, more political scientist than historian, was concerned to use the hero as ‘the embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain’, to teach naval strategy by example. His 1897
Life
of
Nelson
followed the argument of his earlier texts, but shifted the focus to the individual, to show how Nelson used ‘sea power’ to decisive effect. He was the first senior naval officer to examine Nelson’s life, and his book, written in a ponderous, stately style, found a ready audience: the reviews were universally good, and within a year it had sold over five thousand copies in Britain at a imposing
£
1.80, making it the best-selling naval biography of the age.

Mahan used a limited range of sources, and his approach was literary and impressionistic rather than academic, which led him to perpetuate
a number of the less credible Nelson embellishments, notably those provided by Emma. He also decided – bizarrely, and on the basis of little more than a single sentence – that Nelson was no seaman. It was unfortunate, too, that in his creditable effort to save Nelson’s reputation, Mahan criticised Captain Foote’s self-justificatory ‘Vindication’ of his conduct in Naples.
⁶
Mahan’s comments provoked Foote’s grandson, Francis Pritchett Badham, to mount an assault on Nelson’s veracity, and as an aside, on the integrity and scholarship of his two advocates.
⁷
Badham sent his attack on Mahan and Nelson to the leading British historian Samuel Rawson Gardiner, for publication in the prestigious
English
Historical
Review
. Despite his friendship with Laughton, Gardiner concluded that he and Mahan were wrong, and published Badham’s paper.

The Neapolitan Revolution has been interpreted by Italian liberals, notably the Neapolitan historian Benedetto Croce, as the beginning of national regeneration and the movement for independence, ‘when modern Italy, the new Italy, our Italy was born’.
⁸
Because Nelson helped to restore the corrupt Bourbon regime and suppress the movement for Neapolitan autonomy, his actions have always been portrayed in the darkest terms by Italian historians – and by those liberal British historians who had sympathies with Italian nationalism.
⁹
This politically motivated interpretation has cast a long shadow over Nelson’s otherwise glorious career.

Undeterred by such attitudes, Laughton and Mahan addressed the evidence and began to uncover the facts. After three years’ hard work they overwhelmed Badham, and then demolished the host of ill-informed, hostile critics who refused to see the truth. While Laughton worked at the sources, Mahan prepared a series of reports and papers that culminated in the comprehensive revision of his chapters on Naples in the second (1899) edition of his
Life
of
Nelson.
The chapters were significantly longer, and adopted a scholarly approach to the use of evidence. This was the only time Mahan ever rewrote one of his books. Eventually the two men amassed enough evidence to secure a victory. Having published Badham, Gardiner was mortified to find that his old friend Laughton, and the famous American, had been right all along, and advised using the Records Society, of which he was a Vice-President, to settle the matter. Laughton set H. C. Gutteridge, a young Cambridge graduate, to work on the Italian archives. Gutteridge’s Records Society volume of 1903,
Nelson
and
the 
Neapolitan
Jacobins
, was the culmination of their efforts.
¹⁰
The evidence in Gutteridge’s collection was conclusive, exposing the frauds and malpractice that lay behind so much of the hostile evidence. Taking its cue from Bonaparte and Alexandre Dumas, a version of the Neapolitan past had been created that bore scant relationship with the events of 1799.

By 1900 Laughton had made the Royal Navy historically aware, and taken the past into the core of naval thinking, creating a discipline and a professional body in the process. Yet though the work of Laughton, Mahan and Gutteridge was undoubtedly successful in changing policy, it had less impact on popular opinion about Nelson: they were understandably infuriated by the careless repetition of the old myths in the prestigious
Cambridge
Modern
History
.
Still more debate on Nelson’s tactics was prompted by the centenary of Trafalgar. This time Laughton stood aside, passing the task to his friend Julian Corbett, a key member of Admiral Sir John Fisher’s unofficial staff, who provided a masterful analysis of the Trafalgar campaign, British naval tactics, and the application of maritime power in national strategy. Corbett’s
Campaign
of
Trafalgar
was a historical monograph that doubled as a modern teaching text, linking the events of 1805 to the needs of officers in 1910: it was the culmination of the work begun in the early 1890s, and gave the Navy a Nelson they could understand.
¹¹

Just how much Corbett’s work was needed became obvious during 1907, when politicians, admirals and generals discussed the threat of invasion. Their historical understanding was so weak that both the army and the navy accepted that Nelson had been ‘decoyed’ to the West Indies by Villeneuve. Here Bonaparte’s lies proved more credible than Nelson’s truth.
¹²
Little wonder the Navy was happy to accept the simplest of pasts, in which Nelson always attacked: this avoided the need to do as he had done, to think, reflect and analyse the demands of war at sea in the broadest context.
¹³