Read Nelson: Britannia's God of War Online
Authors: Andrew Lambert
Croker, to whom the book was dedicated, had a far better appreciation of the subject, and made his views clear in April 1814, when Harrison published the Nelson–Emma correspondence:
The fame of Lord Nelson is, as his life and services were, public property; and we absolutely deny the right to which any unworthy possessor of a few of his private notes may pretend, to invade (by the publication of what never was intended to pass the eye and ear of the most intimate and confidential friendship) to invade, we say, that public property, and lower the reputation of the hero and his country.
16
He concluded by wishing the letters were forgeries.
17
In 1817 Harri-son’s publisher, Thomas Lovewell, was bankrupted and Nelson’s letters to Emma were put up for auction, together with other papers still in his possession. Croker moved quickly to purchase them privately, and kept the fact hidden, seeing no reason to parade Nelson’s weakness in public. He was wise to suppress the material on Horatia’s parentage.
William James, the pioneer of modern naval history,
18
was out of his depth dealing with complex political issues, and found himself overwhelmed by the mass of evidence. He accepted the ‘Black Legend’ largely from Foote’s version, and cited Clarke, Harrison and Williams. James missed the point that Nelson had royal authority for his actions, and had been specifically directed to that end, while those who had made the agreement he annulled did so without authority.
19
In a book devoted to the quantifiable analysis of naval actions, and which is otherwise bereft of political detail, or the personal lives of officers, the passage makes strange reading.
James was followed by his bitter rival as the naval historian of the Napoleonic Wars, Edward Pelham Brenton. Captain Brenton was a protégé of Earl St Vincent and a Whig partisan. He added a new horror to Southey’s criticism of Emma, inventing the idea that she forced Nelson to take her in his barge to view Caracciolo’s corpse swinging in the breeze, an event that later gave her nightmares.
20
This was pure fabrication and, like much of his output, biased and unreliable. Admiral Sir Francis Collier, who had been on board the
Foudroyant
, condemned the passage as ‘an arrant falsehood’.
21
Meanwhile, the treatment of this subject in works of a more general nature tended to be brief, impressionistic, and repetitively incorrect. Lord Holland, Fox’s nephew and political heir, blamed Emma’s ‘baneful ascendancy of Nelson’s mind’ for his ‘indefensible conduct’ at Naples. Holland’s memoirs were edited for publication
after his death by his son and wife, and the latter had always hated Emma, who outshone her in society. The damage that such spiteful nonsense could occasion was soon evident. Holland’s Whig version was adopted wholesale by the editor of George Rose’s papers. The Reverend Leveson Vernon Harcourt combined party ties with family piety in his editorial interjections, which damned Nelson, and added Brenton’s attack on Emma and Caracciolo’s execution for good measure. The irony was that Rose was a committed Tory, and the papers Harcourt blundered into had been sent to him by Nelson so that he could rebut Fox’s attack.
22
What Rose would have made of this travesty of his intentions is not hard to guess. Lord Brougham, another old radical, and blundering Scots Tory historian Archibald Alison invented new horrors to add to those created by earlier critics.
23
Their efforts reflected the enduring power of a lie. By the time Commander Jeaffreson Miles penned his
Vindication
in 1843 the facts of the matter had been quite forgotten. The case had been settled against Nelson, and the only question was how much more artistic colour and moral outrage could be added to the original picture. As Miles saw all too clearly, the fame of the national hero was being traduced by ignorant, petty and stupid men, without a scrap of evidence, or understanding.
The power of the ‘Black Legend’ was reinforced by disappointed, disgusted Neapolitan exiles. The British, as Ruffo had observed, became unpopular for burning the fleet at the evacuation of Naples, so the returning government sloughed off as much responsibility for unpleasant or unpopular actions onto their saviours as possible. This fitted into a growing nationalist history, which often lionised the rebels for their ideals, while conveniently forgetting that they existed only as the creatures of a French army, and that they were profoundly unpopular with their fellow Neapolitans. At the same time the chief actors in the royalist cause, Ruffo and Micheroux, made sure they told their own versions of events: to exculpate themselves without offending Ferdinand, they shifted the blame onto the British. The feeble and foolish work of Clarke and Southey gave them an ideal opening: if even the ‘official’ British biographers were unable to reject the ‘Black Legend’ it must be true.
The subsequent unpopularity of the Neapolitan Bourbon regime led to guilt by association, and when French writers added their efforts to the picture the story became further confused. The first major account from the Neapolitan perspective – that of Colletta in 1838 – was highly critical, as might be expected from a man who had served the Bonapartist French regimes of Joseph and Murat, and been exiled for his part in the rebellion of 1820. His book is ‘a prolonged and solemn denunciation of Bourbon rule’. The careful, classical style and calm wording of the text
24
should not disguise the venom, and the context, of the book.
The final stage of a process already long divorced from reality came when it took literary shape. Alexandre Dumas the elder (1802–70), the son of a Revolutionary general who died after a spell in a Neapolitan gaol, and an uncritically romantic Bonaparte worshipper, was among the more significant contributors to the Black Legend. For ever linked with
The
Three
Musketeers
and
The
Count
of
Monte
Cristo,
which made his name and his fortune, Dumas’s ability to construct pacy and compelling action narratives, loosely based on historical
events, made him the most dangerous of all Nelson’s critics. He understood the power of the romantic hero, but his bias and his nationality denied him any appreciation of Nelson. It was as a fundraiser and pamphleteer rather than a historian that Dumas worked for Garibaldi during the overthrow of the Bourbons in Naples. His reward was the unsalaried post of Director of Works, which he held between i860 and 1864. This gave him access to the state archives, which he plundered for a series of articles that appeared in
L’Independente,
the local newspaper he edited. The articles were collected into the ten-volume polemic,
I
Borboni
di
Napoli,
in which bowdlerised and mangled translations of documents were used to ‘prove’ the guilt of Nelson.
Imbued with the Jacobin principles of his heroes, and having some experience of overthrowing two Bourbon regimes, Dumas was the hired pen of a new regime seeking to establish legitimacy on the basis of the crimes of their predecessors. His agenda was hardly complex. He had been involved in an anti-Bourbon plot as far back as 1834, and had used the events of 1799 in his novel
Le
Corricolo.
25
Dumas’s four-year sojourn in Naples also resulted in a major novel,
La
San-Felice,
in which Nelson and Emma featured, although not to their advantage. The book was a great success in France, despite its inordinate length. These texts gave the old romantic Bonapartist the opportunity to exact some posthumous revenge. In the process he muddied the waters, and hampered future scholars, by abstracting much of the evidence he had so obviously abused.
26
Only when these frauds and fabrications had been exposed could the debate move on. The fact that this took another forty years is not untypical of the power of myth over fact in Nelson studies. It is perhaps more surprising that the myths have become part of the Italian national consciousness, and are still retailed on the streets of Naples.
While the downfall of the Bourbon monarchy in 1861 provided an opportunity to open the archives, and vilify the old regime, the Bourbons did not give up without a fight. The deposed King of Naples retreated to Rome, and tried to repeat Ruffo’s campaign of 1799, with insurrections funded with royal gold and Papal benedictions. It took the new Kingdom of Italy years to suppress these movements, stretching the fragile political union of north and south to the limits.
27
This was hardly the political environment in which Italians, of any persuasion, would take a detached perspective on the original restoration of the detested Bourbons.
*
The debate over Naples was reopened in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century by Mahan and Laughton, who wanted to remove the stain from the hero’s name. They had adopted Nelson as the central figure in a campaign to educate the nation about the Navy – if his personal feelings had led him to act in an illegal or immoral way towards the Neapolitan rebels, then he could not be employed to serve this agenda. But this new defence provoked another furious outburst of ill-informed nonsense from a member of the Foote clan. The debate was intense, but the vehemence of Nelson’s detractors concealed a complex web of misinformation, personal malice, partisan politics and changing agendas. The case for Nelson was set out with ample footnotes in the second, revised edition of Mahan’s biography.
28
The facts of the matter were set out once again in 1903 in a significant new work of scholarship, H. C. Gutteridge’s
Nelson
and
the
Neapolitan
Jacobins
, which drew on as much evidence as could be uncovered in London, Naples and Rome.
29
Gutteridge discovered that the evidence had been largely distorted, with nothing of consequence to dispute Nelson’s account of the events, and he established Nelson’s integrity beyond reasonable doubt. But this was not an attractive version for those pursuing a rounded story. Every hero needs his fall, every great man his nemesis. Consequently few Nelson biographers have accepted the evidence assembled by Gutteridge, or the fallibility of the Neapolitan version,
30
and as a result the ‘Black Legend’ retains much of its power to this day.
The questions raised about Nelson’s conduct at Naples go to the heart of the historical process. If serious academic enquiry cannot change the way the past is viewed by academics, let alone by the wider community, we are entitled to ask whether academic history has any purpose. Most biographers have accepted the ‘crimes’ of 1799, and then sought apologetic and unconvincing explanations. They shift the ‘blame’ for his actions onto Emma, or Queen Maria Carolina, or suggest that a concussion incurred at the Nile was still warping his judgement a year later. These arguments are quite untenable. Nelson handled the events of that summer with his customary skill. He had full authority to act in the King’s name, unlike Ruffo; his firm and decisive intervention prevented further bloodshed, restored order ashore, and preserved the lives of the rebels from the fury of the populace. The traitors he saved had been abandoned by their erstwhile friends, the French, and were being slaughtered by their own countrymen. Nelson and his men stopped these murderous excesses, and handed the rebels over to the lawfully constituted authority. Of those seized by Nelson only 99, a small percentage, suffered the penalty decreed by the law of the land. In Britain such treason was punished far more severely. There is no evidence that Nelson allowed his public duty to be influenced by his private feelings, on this or any other occasion throughout his career, and in any case, he and Emma became lovers only in January 1800.
It should be stressed that the enemy in Naples was doubly threatening. The Parthenopean Republic had followed the French in overthrowing royal authority: this was an ideological war between legitimate royal authority, absolute or constitutional, and republican revolution. Yet from the start a major British political party identified these Neapolitan ideologues with the heroes of the British constitutional revolution of the seventeenth century,
31
the founding fathers of ‘The Whig Interpretation of History’.
32
The link with contemporary Foxite Whiggery, and more especially the post-1832 resurgence of liberalism as an export, which took root in Italy after 1860, gave the initial identification a posthumous veracity that was wholly unwarranted.
The ‘Black Legend’ was created by Whig sympathy for a Neapolitan Republic of which they knew only that it was led by the intelligentsia, and suppressed with the help of the British government. The subsequent horrors of the later Bourbon regime, which stood against the liberal trend of post-1830 Europe, the triumph of the Italian constitutional monarchy and ‘British’ political values, reinforced a negative image of Nelson. To find the national hero upholding a autocratic, debauched and cruel regime that had been consigned to the dustbin of history
could be explained by referring back to Southey. Southey set up the Jacobins as model patriots, their ‘revolution’ dignified by association.
33
His version made for great literature – but it happened to be untrue. Though this was demonstrated by Gutteridge, and reinforced by Callender, the ‘Black Legend’ keeps on coming back. Sometimes it seems that the truth is simply not enough.