Nelson (71 page)

Similarly, he disliked the radical political movements that emerged in Britain during the 1790s because he considered them the monstrous offspring of growing republicanism across the Channel. The strand of protest that took its lead from Tom Paine’s
The Rights of Man
and
The Age of Reason
was particularly dangerous in his view. Paine’s attacks upon the monarchy, aristocracy and church, his espousal of atheism, ‘natural rights’, equality and the sovereignty of the people, and his suggestions for the redistribution of wealth and republicanism were anathema to everything Nelson considered necessary to an ordered, moral and disciplined society. Even the most restrained of Paine’s followers, such as the humble artisans of the London Corresponding Society, who spread the cause of annual parliaments and universal manhood suffrage, were in Nelson’s eyes the irresponsible assailants of a constitution that was basically sound.
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In Nelson’s mind king and country were one, and his extreme patriotism is shown, as much as anything, by his strong suspicion of most things French, an opinion he had expressed as early as his trip to St-Omer in 1783. Today it seems xenophobic, and the term has tripped easily off biographers’ tongues, but Nelson was far from an undiscriminating hater of foreigners. In 1787 he had spoken about joining the Russian navy, and expressed a positive admiration for the Danes and Swedes. The French were, for him, a special case, and to understand his prejudices we have to place them firmly in their eighteenth-century context.

At that time such prejudices would have seemed unremarkable and even commonplace. For Nelson’s was not a complacent generation
brought up on decades of late twentieth-century security. In fact half of the forty-eight years of Nelson’s lifetime, from 1758 to 1805 inclusive, saw Britain at war, and all but two of those years of conflict involved France. France was more than a rival for commercial and overseas power: she was a formidable threat to Britain’s sovereign survival. With a population of twenty-five million, two and a half times that of mainland Britain, France possessed a far greater army and immense continental influence. Indeed, she was the most dreaded land power in Europe, her most effective rivals merely rambling, ill-coordinated, mid-continental empires with calcified forces. True, her navy was second to Britain’s, with between only 76 and 115 operational ships of the line in 1793, but France was even capable of neutralising that disadvantage through diplomacy. Thus in the closing years of the American revolutionary war, she had drawn Spain, the third largest naval power, into an anti-British alliance, and encouraged most of the rest of Europe to go as far as resisting Britain’s crucial naval blockades. The so-called ‘league of armed neutrality’ included the other major continental navies of Russia, Holland, Sweden and Denmark, and Britain was temporarily isolated and surrounded by hostile or unfriendly powers. Across the Atlantic, on the rebellious Atlantic seaboard, the French navy had used a temporary superiority over the Royal Navy to force a British army to surrender at Yorktown in 1782.

Nelson’s generation grew up under the shadow of France. Overseas, British naval power had got the better of the French in Canada and India, but in Europe the great continental power still seemed a giant and hungry ogre only a bound away, separated from England by a thin strip of water that Bonaparte dismissed as a contemptible ditch. Only the Royal Navy stood in its way. There seemed no worthier ambition, and no more useful patriotic service, than to topple France and disperse the cloud it had thrown over Albion for good.

Horatio Nelson spoke endlessly of England. An act of union had bound England and Wales to Scotland at the beginning of the century, but Nelson seldom referred to ‘Britain’. His England embraced the whole island, but it was an island of free-born men and women, protected by an advanced constitution, ruled by a relatively benign monarch and shielded by its navy from the despots of Europe. Nelson’s concept may have been basic, but it was neither singular nor eccentric, and most of his countrymen would have recognised it. The closing years of the eighteenth century tested every shibboleth, but Nelson’s beliefs only intensified as the political landscape of Europe was torn apart by revolution.

On the morning of 14 July 1789 the Continent changed forever when a ragged Parisian crowd made a murderous assault on the Bastille. They were afraid that their king, Louis XVI, was gathering soldiers to halt the process of constitutional reform.

The ‘French Revolution’ was in fact the sum of successive waves of revolution, unwittingly unleashed by an insolvent king scratching around for additional resources. In 1788 the clerics and nobles had defended their ancient exemptions from taxation, and forced Louis to convene the long-defunct Estates General. The election of the commoners to the third estate the following year brought a battery of civil servants, lawyers and merchants of the rising bourgeois into government, all imbued with classical liberalism and eager to attack the inequitable tax system and the aristocratic monopoly on the higher offices of state. Behind them railed the voices of a poor battered by rents, low wages, unemployment, inflation, famine and manorial dues. No sooner was the third estate elected than it was refashioning government into a National Assembly, increasing the power of its own and dismantling the
ancien régime
. A declaration of rights vested sovereignty in the people rather than the king, and declared men free and equal before the law.

Following the story in the
Norfolk Chronicle
, Nelson was initially neither surprised nor alarmed, for he had seen the destitution in the French countryside and had never been blind to burdens that oppressed the poor, at home or abroad. He was willing to urge reform within a constitutionally acceptable framework, and like many, perhaps most, educated Britons saw little to concern himself in the early stages of the French Revolution. After all, for a few years it seemed that France was simply shifting from continental absolutism towards the British model of a limited monarchy accountable to the people. If it improved the lot of the people in the process, that was all to the good.
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But then the revolution across the Channel lurched ferociously to the left, leaving the vaunted English constitution in its wake. The French king gave ground, humiliated and debased. On a wet, cold October day in 1789 he was brought with his family from Versailles to Paris with the mob running before him to announce the arrival of ‘the baker, the baker’s wife and the baker’s boy’. Violence increased and the Catholic church had its lands confiscated and its links with the pope savaged. In 1791 a constitutional monarchy based on a
taxpayer suffrage was established, but the Jacobin republicans, who overthrew their moderate opponents, fanned hatred against the king, aristocracy and Church.

It was the outbreak of European war in 1792 that sealed the fate of king and nobles. The crowned heads of Europe, some of them related to Louis, were the principal threats to the revolution in France. On 20 April the French Legislative Assembly, which had been elected under the new constitution, pre-empted foreign intervention by declaring war on Austria and Prussia. War was useful to the revolutionaries at that time. It helped unite a divided people behind them, as wars generally do, and legitimised the elimination of aristocrats and royalists who could now be portrayed as dangers to the realm from within.

In August the French monarchy collapsed in violence. A Jacobin mob stormed the royal residence in Paris, butchering the Swiss Guards and smashing the place to pieces. The next month the jails were rifled for royalists and nobles and a thousand or so were slaughtered outright. On 22 September the republic was proclaimed and four months later the king was guillotined before a baying crowd. A year later three thousand five hundred heads rolled in a single month. Perhaps up to forty thousand French people were massacred in the Terror.

Infused with the popular English ideal of a stable society based on a partnership of Church, aristocracy and people, Nelson shared the general shock at news of the Gallic excesses. They only strengthened his own beliefs. The republicans had merely unleashed alien, destructive and violent forces that were not delivering any of the essentials of good government. Instead of order there was chaos, and in place of freedom and security of person and property there developed a vindictive repression and wholesale plunder, torture and murder. Against this background the virtues of the English constitution shone brighter still. ‘All this part of the world who have seen republican principles hate and detest the name,’ Nelson would write from the Mediterranean in 1796. ‘God forbid England should be so miserable. She would be poor indeed. The dominion of modern republicanism is so cruel to the very poor as well as to the rich that England never, I hope, will submit to such slavery. Our liberty is, I hope, too firmly fixed to be moved but with our lives. Every village through which the French retreat takes arms against them, and [they] even kill those who are sick, and this is in a country where the will of the monarch constitutes the law.’
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Nelson had always disliked the French, but it was the revolutionary
wars that turned his prejudice into a corrosive hatred. He began them by doubting the wisdom of intervention, though from a personal point of view he was grateful for the employment. Convinced that the revolution would destroy itself, he actually believed his country’s ‘wisest’ course was to stand back and watch it happen. But the appalling atrocities the republicans visited upon their own dissidents – anti-centralists, anti-Jacobins and monarchists – sharpened Nelson’s hostility. He witnessed the fates of the defeated Royalists of Toulon in 1793, and in 1795 and 1796 saw the devastation Bonaparte’s pillaging hordes created in Italy. French imperialism was not invariably destructive. It introduced some benign reforms and adopted anti-denominational rather than anti-religious policies, but nowhere was its capacity for plunder more obvious than in Italy, where French armies lived off the land and a sum of fifty-three million livres was levied on the occupied territories before the end of July 1796. Nelson’s determination to spare Britain similar ruin increased his ferocity. ‘To serve my king, and to destroy the French I consider as the great order[s] of all, from which little ones spring,’ he wrote in 1799. ‘And if one of these little ones militate against it . . . I go back to obey the great order and object, to
down, down
with the damned French villains. Excuse my warmth, but my blood boils at the name of a Frenchman. I hate them all – Royalists and Republicans.’
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Nelson’s extremism was stimulated by fears, not so much from any regard for French arms, for which he cared little, but from the more invidious infiltration of their political principles. For the wars that broke out were not in the end just dynastic and national disagreements, territorial squabbles and commercial and imperial competitions, although they were in part all five. They were also ideological conflicts fought for minds. Monarchism, Christianity and self-determination were, in Nelson’s view, pitted against republicanism, atheism and imperialism. ‘It is their infernal principles I dread, not their prowess,’ he remarked. He knew that those ideas, cloaked in the language of liberty, popular sovereignty and natural rights appealed to every suppressed group. They were capable of slicing through ancient orthodoxies as a hot knife through butter, and of infecting and destabilising England without a single French soldier landing on her soil.
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The war of ideas intensified the conflict and forged the minds of generations, even in Britain, which eventually escaped direct invasion. There the earlier stages of the French Revolution were favourably received, but opinion soon veered. The first flickers of political
radicalism were stifled by vigorous government repression, and more effectively flattened by the mass loyalism that followed the outbreak of war with France in 1793. As the years passed French excesses eroded the enthusiasm of some of the most liberal Englishmen, even though the momentum of the republicans waned after 1795. The radical poet Wordsworth, one of many inspired by the birth-throes of the revolution, dismally pronounced it a failure. Coleridge gave up on it after the French invaded neutral Switzerland in 1798 and the utopian Southey was turned into a Tory.

If minds as razor keen as these, predisposed to welcome reform, were bent in the white heat of revolutionary conflict, it is not surprising that Nelson, who had damned republicanism from the beginning and seen it face to face, felt vindicated. It was the Whig rhetorician Edmund Burke who perhaps came to speak most clearly for his later opinions. Once the scourge of the king’s ‘friends’ and an architect of economical reform, the author of
Reflections on the Revolution in France
and champion of tradition wrote in a private letter that ‘our all, body and soul, is at stake. We must be the victims of Jacobins, or what is worse, we must be Jacobins, if this whole is not levelled with the ground.’
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The winter of 1792 descended upon Burnham early. A heavy fall of snow had come and gone by the middle of December, but even in that deadened land Horatio Nelson felt the pulse of life quickening.

Towards the end of the year he had stayed for a second time with the Walpoles at Wolterton, and uncomfortably noted that the activities of the new corresponding society in nearby Norwich promoted ‘principles certainly inimical to our present constitution, both in Church and State’. The Dissenters, whose struggles with the disabling Test and Corporation Acts had put them among the foremost critics of government, particularly annoyed him, and he wished someone would arrest their outspoken champion, Joseph Priestley. Nelson greatly applauded the Lord Lieutenant of Norfolk when he summoned magistrates to meet him in December with the intention of stripping the licences from any publicans who offered their premises for radical meetings.
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