Nelson (109 page)

Commodore Nelson was also struck by Miller’s protective but firm control of his men. Hoste, who later served under him, said that
anyone who felt ‘uncomfortable under his command . . . must be miserable indeed under that of any other’, and small incidents spoke volumes about his careful stewardship. After a respected oarsman had been killed off Cadiz in 1797, Miller ‘had two 18 pound shot tied to the body, and when ready to bury it, I made the crew lay their oars across, and each, by my example, uttering an emphatic “God bless him”, we committed his remains to the deep. Few have prayers equally sincere said over them . . .’ Men watching this touching tribute of a captain to one of their comrades had no doubts about how deeply they were valued.
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Unfortunately, the beginning of 1796 found Miller greatly dissatisfied with his situation. Despite his services, he had twice seen junior officers promoted over his head, and it was rumoured that an expected promotion to post-captain had not been confirmed by the Admiralty. Miller felt trapped in the unhappy command of the
Mignonne
frigate, and unburdened his thoughts to both Elliot and Nelson. In August, Nelson’s own rank of commodore was confirmed. It entitled him to name a flag captain to manage his ship and leave him free to direct a squadron, and he immediately named Miller for the post, supposing the latter ‘would be glad to leave his present command’. As it happened, Miller had already got another post, as captain of the frigate
Unite
, but he readily abandoned it to join his benefactor, fully aware that he owed the appointment to the commodore’s ‘kindness in asking for me from a situation that was intolerable’.
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In choosing Miller, Nelson knew he had secured the right officer to establish the regime he wanted aboard the
Captain
, but he also illustrated his aptitude for understanding the problems of other officers and searching for solutions. John Gourly may also have benefited. At one time he had been a temporary lieutenant on the
Agamemnon
, and later he commanded the
Vanneau
brig and served with her under Nelson’s command in 1796. Gourly was generally a safe officer, but the
Vanneau
struck a rock off Porto Ferraio in October 1796 and sank. Nelson was there when it happened, and his boats tried and failed to haul the stricken brig to safety. There was an inevitable court martial.

That occurred on board the
Barfleur
in Mortella Bay, St Fiorenzo, on 29 October, and Nelson was a member of the court under the presidency of Admiral William Waldegrave. The details of the affair need not detain us, except for the small one relevant to our theme. According to the regulations of the time, the senior captain of a fleet took

precedence over the other captains forming a court, and served immediately beneath any admirals present. Nothing was said about commodores. They were not full-blown flag officers like the admirals, but superior in rank to any captain, including the senior captain. In compliance with the strict wording of the regulations, Nelson, although a commodore, had been deferring to Jervis’s flag captain, Robert Calder, and taking his place with the ordinary captains, but when the case of Gourly was brought forward he protested. Nelson submitted a memorial to the court asserting the right of commodores to take precedence over senior captains. There was no resentment at his intervention, Nelson’s claim was willingly admitted, and he duly took his place before Calder. Pride and punctilio were both important considerations for Nelson, but his decision to mount the challenge at the beginning of Gourly’s trial rather than, say, before the preceding case of a surgeon’s mate indicted for mutinous behaviour, may not have been accidental. The likelihood is that Nelson wanted a bigger voice in the proceedings, and used his influence on behalf of the accused. Gourly would probably have been acquitted anyway, but it was typical of Nelson to defend good men.
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Nevertheless, there was one case that shook even his loyalty to the core. It concerned a particularly zealous captain of his own squadron, a man for whom he had considerable professional respect: Charles Sawyer of the frigate
Blanche
. In September 1796, Sawyer’s immediate superior, Captain Cockburn, brought Nelson a disturbing report with several supporting papers. The commodore was astonished, torn between his revulsion for the alleged offences and sympathy for a man obviously ruined. ‘How melancholy!’ he told Jervis in reporting his suspension of Sawyer from duty and the arrest of his officers. ‘Indignation and sorrow are so mixed in my mind that I know not which predominates!’
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Sawyer was the son of a respected admiral who had begun his career alongside Jervis, serving under Commodore Townsend and Lieutenant Maurice Suckling. The son was now about thirty years old and had been in the navy for near twenty of them, becoming a post-captain in 1794. There was every chance he would eventually receive his flag as an admiral. Captain Sawyer was also an educated man, and Nelson had lent him books, as was his wont. Unfortunately, in between reading he was using his rank to indulge in regular acts of homosexuality, some of them with minors. Two midshipmen were occasionally summoned to Sawyer’s cabin in the
Blanche
. One, a seventeen-year-old,
later testified that the quartermaster of the
Blanche
sent him to the captain’s quarters, where Sawyer ‘hauled me down in his cot and put my hand on his privates. When I got up he made me promise that I would not tell any one of it.’ At Leghorn the captain even tried to make the boy share a hotel room with him. A black seaman also complained that ‘the captain had frigged him, and he had frigged the captain’, while Sawyer’s coxswain was not only seen in the captain’s cot several times, but openly condemned his commander as a ‘manfucking bugger’.
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As stories spread the captain became an object of derision, contempt and loathing in the ship, and authority was undermined. The first lieutenant and others attempted to lay charges before Nelson, but as applications for courts martial went through a ship’s captain, Sawyer was able to block them. Furthermore, he tried to silence his accusers by threatening countercharges of his own, and warning them that their careers would be damaged ‘unless . . . matters can be accommodated’. Throughout the high summer of 1796 Sawyer hung on, prevaricating and threatening whistle-blowers in turn, but the miserable matter simply grew too notorious to hide. After trying to turn a blind eye to the situation, Cockburn finally drew the subject to Nelson’s attention, and it went to the naval courts.

Sawyer considered running, but then decided to stick it out in an effort to save his pay and prize money. He tried to discredit the witnesses by laying countercharges against six of them, as he had threatened, but when his case went before a court at St Fiorenzo on 18 October he was convicted and dismissed the service. Nelson was no doubt glad to be elsewhere.
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Sawyer’s career was finished, and he had made himself a pariah, but Nelson took no pleasure in his fall. Reviewing the charges, Nelson had interviewed Sawyer ‘fully’, hoping to hear a denial, but none came. Perhaps no one but Nelson would have shown any further charity to the dishonoured captain, but Nelson seems to have written to him after his dismissal, and it was to the commodore that the friendless man turned for help in winding up his naval affairs. Sawyer’s letter is worth quoting in full:

I cannot sufficiently thank you for your kind sentiments towards me, which notwithstanding all my misfortunes, I trust I am not altogether undeserving. I am obliged to you for the money for the Hermitage, which I hope you will find good. Herewith, I send you a letter which I had written to you principally on the subject of prize money. Any information you can give me that way I shall be very much obliged to you for. I am sorry to be troublesome to you, but as I have now no boat at command, nor cannot by any means procure one, may I request you will have the goodness to send by one of yours any information you can give me relative to prize money. Believe me, sir, your very obedient servant, C. Sawyer. Captain Preston will return your [copy of] Josephus [probably
Antiquities of the Jews
], for which I return you many thanks.
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Sawyer got his prize money.

George Cockburn of the
Meleager
proved a more satisfying beneficiary of Nelson’s friendship. The future would grant Cockburn fame of a kind. He captured Washington in the War of 1812, burned the presidential mansion, and became the jailer of Napoleon, but here in 1796 we have him in his mid-twenties, at the beginning of a long and successful career. Although the teenage diarist Betsy Wynne thought Cockburn sprightly, fine and fashionable, and a colleague reported his ‘splendid and inexhaustible talents’, one gains the impression of an able, dependable and utterly impeccable but stiff Scot, dour and distant. Few people got close to him, and he cannot have been an easy colleague.
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Yet Nelson discovered something of a kindred spirit in him, a daring man strong on duty. ‘We so exactly think alike on points of service that if your mind tells you it is right, there can hardly be a doubt but I must approve,’ Nelson wrote to the junior officer. Accordingly, he pushed Cockburn forward, encouraging his every success. He persuaded Jervis to give him a bigger frigate, prompting his transfer to
La Minerve
, a French prize, put glowing tributes to him in dispatches, and in 1797 quietly ordered a commemoration sword to be made for him in England. It was a small gesture, but typical of Nelson. The sword, which Maurice Nelson thought ‘very handsome’, was a personal gift, honouring Cockburn’s capture of a Spanish frigate while serving under Nelson’s command. It was both a personal ‘thank you’ and an unsolicited and spontaneous tribute from a friend and professional to a colleague. We can imagine Cockburn’s feelings on receiving such tangible testimony of his commodore’s regard, gratuitously and unexpectedly bestowed. The recipient was not good at expressing intimate emotions, but responded to this and many other favours with a rare attachment to Nelson. ‘Next to my own father, I know of
none
whose company I so much wish to be in, or who I have
such real reasons to respect,’ he told his chief. Half a century later, unconsciously speaking for many, he wistfully recalled Nelson’s ‘never failing kindness of heart’.
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You – with fidelity the Land –
Shall own the splendours of his High Command –
To him shall be her grateful praises given;
To him – her champion – sent down from heaven!
Ode to the Memory of . . . Lord Viscount Nelson
, 1806

O
N
20 May 1796 Commodore Nelson sat over a desk in Leghorn writing a letter to Sir William Hamilton, one of the closest of his correspondents. Disturbing rumours were abroad and Nelson had been listening to them. Anyway he thought he detected the drift of French intentions towards Italy. ‘Although the French Directory tell the Grand Duke they will respect the neutrality [of Tuscany] . . . I have great reason to believe they only wish to lull the Grand Duke, and then to take possession of Leghorn and to treat Tuscany as an enemy. I wish I may be mistaken.’
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Essentially he was not. In the summer of 1796, Bonaparte’s
tour de force
gathered terrifying momentum. His army marched north of Genoa and into Italy, spreading consternation and terror before it. The French stormed through Tuscany, frightened the papal states into submission, and stripped them of arts, provisions and money at bayonet point. Then they turned towards Leghorn. Bonaparte decided that if the Austrians made another attempt to relieve Mantua, the British might seize Leghorn to annoy his flank, so he moved first.

Everyone had stories of the French invasion of Italy. The Wynnes of Lincolnshire estate, with four charming daughters, learned about
it in Florence. ‘Nothing can be compared to the alarm in which Papa and Mama were set on their hearing that the French were at Bologna,’ wrote seventeen-year-old Betsy. They fled to Leghorn, where Fremantle of the
Inconstant
was evacuating the British community, arriving on 24 June after an all-night coach ride. The British consulate was in ‘a most terrible bustle and noise – all packing up and getting on board the ships. We hardly had time to get a little breakfast, they hurried us so terribly to quit the place.’ Consul John Udny had much to save. After twenty-three years out of England, he had a carriage, horses, furniture, porcelain, plate and paintings as well as liveried servants divided between Leghorn and a rented house in Pisa, and the procession of his goods trundling to the mole only managed to clear the essentials. All the British round and about were on the move. When Udny’s carriage reached Pisa to collect a fellow diplomat and his confined lady, it was seized by refugees trying to reach Leghorn. Lady Elliot, wife of the viceroy of Corsica, was also in town after fleeing Lucca with four of her children. Desperate to reach her husband, she got a place on a departing store ship just as Bonaparte’s soldiers streamed into the suburbs, and took the news into Bastia on the 26th.
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The Leghornese were alarmed and angry at the French boots crunching contemptuously over Tuscan neutrality, but some inhabitants had personal reasons to fear the incursion. The governor, Francesco Spannochi, was a Neapolitan and noted Anglophile, with service in the Royal Navy and the friendship of Captain Collingwood to his credit. He faced a difficult task defending his country’s sovereignty and keeping the French and British apart. For Signora Adelaide Correglia the appearance of the French portended the end of her relationship with a British commodore and the maintenance he provided.

Adelaide was then renting accommodation in the spa resort of Bagno di Pisa, a three-day coach ride north of Leghorn, in the house of ‘Carlo Tarbato’ – possibly Carlo Lorenzo Turbati, the Pisan lawyer, or one of his family. It was probably not the house for which Nelson had been paying upwards of a year. More likely that was in Leghorn itself, closer to the heart of naval business, but Bagno di Pisa was replete with accommodation to let, much of it in single rooms equipped with a bath, bed and fireplace sufficient for convalescent summers spent drinking and immersing in rejuvenating waters. Late in 1795 Adelaide had been having trouble with what Fremantle had described as ‘a sort of abscess in her side’, and she was still receiving maintenance from Nelson. Thus, on 15 June 1796, Thomas Pollard, the commodore’s agent, paid £20 to ‘Adelaide as p[er] order’. This, with whatever else she earned, had probably permitted her to take temporary lodgings in Bagno di Pisa for the purpose of regaining her health.
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