Nelson (91 page)

Unfortunately, Hotham’s numerous professional shortcomings also sprung readily to mind. It had been Hotham who had allowed a dozen French sail to run from Toulon to Golfe Jouan in 1794. ‘The opportunity was lost by admirals of fighting them, and it is a thousand to one if we ever have so fair an opportunity [again],’ Nelson complained. Equally telling by Nelson’s lights was Hotham’s lenient handling of a mutiny on the
Windsor Castle
. Upon enquiry the complaints of the men had been found to be frivolous, and Nelson believed the admiral had done nothing to deter similar insubordination. ‘I am satisfied it would have been better to have burned the ship and all the villains in her,’ he said fiercely.
¹¹

As far as Nelson was concerned, Hotham’s command lacked energy. The admiral’s ships of the line were in such a poor way that he dreaded
the damage a battle or storm might bring, and preferred to conserve them in St Fiorenzo or Leghorn rather than risk them at sea in all weathers. Although his frigates watched the enemy the ‘blockade’ was a farce. Impudent coasters plied to and from the French relatively unchecked, and British merchantmen were left open to the attacks of enemy privateers and naval squadrons. With his bases far to the east, it was impossible for Hotham to keep the enemy battle forces at Golfe Jouan and Toulon under proper surveillance.
¹²

Nelson’s doubts about Hotham were soon confirmed. On 3 November he returned to Golfe Jouan from Leghorn, where he had picked up stores and mail, and found that the French had slipped through the net once more, putting to sea after the British scouts had been driven eastwards by gales. Hotham sent the tireless
Agamemnon
to find them while he withdrew with his battle fleet to St Fiorenzo, and after two days Nelson saw the missing squadron back in Toulon, reunited with the rest of the enemy Mediterranean fleet. Another chance to attack the French piecemeal had been lost, and the French fleet now numbered twenty-two warships, a force comparable to its British counterpart. ‘I see plainly they will keep us in hot water the whole winter,’ Nelson scribbled in one of his regular letters to the Duke of Clarence.
¹³

With such a force at their disposal the French could make sorties against British merchantmen, or transport soldiers to Italy or Corsica. Corsica was indeed a sore point for Nelson, especially when he heard rumours that the French were boasting that their New Year’s dinner would be eaten on the island. He had lost the sight of an eye liberating the island, as well as Lieutenant Moutray and other good men, and he fancied that British suzerainty was proving beneficial, and that ‘the inhabitants [would] grow rich, and, I hope, happy under our mild government’. On his visits to the island he occasionally walked into the countryside with a stick and noticed changes that pleased him: wheat fields where there had once been scrub, and the increased security of the ordinary people. Even though Hotham had united his force at St Fiorenzo, Nelson worried that the French might force a landing on Corsica through Ajaccio, and advised Elliot, the viceroy, to station enough men in the port ‘to keep the gates shut for a few days’ until relief forces could be mobilised. Italy Nelson conceived to be in even greater danger.
¹⁴

The captain of the
Agamemnon
may have been concerned for the safety of his country’s allies and possessions, but it was not from a
conviction that the French fleet, even with the advantage of numbers, could maintain any extended superiority at sea. Rather the danger arose from their ability to use weather and circumstance to produce a local, short-lived superiority that might nevertheless be decisive. Nelson made no mistakes about the respective fighting qualities of the competing navies. If the French were ‘mad enough’ to tackle the British fleet, he said, the result would entirely vindicate the bullish expectations of an English public accustomed to naval victories.
¹⁵

Nelson was influenced by that tradition of victory, but still regretted that in this naval arms race the numbers were beginning to swing in favour of the French. For although an outnumbered British fleet would, he felt sure, defeat the French it would not achieve the victory Nelson wanted. He aspired to achieve something altogether overwhelming and decisive: in fact, the most an admiral or general could achieve under arms, the total destruction or irreversible overthrow of an enemy force. Like Hood he worked towards annihilation. Showing contempt for a lauded naval victory of Lord Howe, won in the Atlantic on ‘The Glorious First of June’ in 1794, Nelson wrote to his brother, ‘If we
only
make a Lord Howe victory, take a part [of the fleet] and retire into port, Italy is lost!’
¹⁶

The implication was plain. In Nelson’s opinion nothing short of the total, the perfect, victory dreamed of by Lord Hood would do in the Mediterranean. The trouble was that Hotham, devoid of the means and disposition, seemed unlikely to supply it. Nelson himself was soon temporarily mothballed. After reporting to the admiral at St Fiorenzo, Nelson was sent to Leghorn to refit and load fresh water and supplies. He arrived on 13 November, and while the weary
Agamemnon
underwent essential repairs indignantly suffered a period of frustrating inaction.

The sustained excitement of the Corsica campaign and its aftermath was gone, and in its place there endured the dull tedium of Leghorn, a town of two commodious harbours, walled forts and straight streets. Without momentum Nelson lapsed into his familiar irritable despondency. Sometimes he was left the senior officer in Leghorn, and found himself ordering ‘surveys’ of ships and stores, but he still felt neglected and grumbled about being ‘tired’ and ‘kicked about’.
¹⁷

A pause was, he realised, necessary. Without her wounded masts
the ship looked ‘little better than a wreck’ in the dockyard, and it took the best part of two months to replace them and overhaul the hull, rigging and sails. The men also needed a respite. About fifty men had died since the siege of Calvi, and seventy were still sick, some seriously. Frank Lepee, Nelson’s servant of many years and the owner of a set of china much admired by Fanny for its beauty, was sinking beneath epilepsy and mental illness. Eventually he became so ‘deranged’ that Fanny suggested a place be found for him in Greenwich Hospital, of which Captain Locker was now governor. Instead, Nelson first entrusted him to the naval surgeon at Leghorn and then in posts aboard the
Zealous
and
Diadem
, but his sense of responsibility for the man remained, and in 1798 he willed Lepee a legacy of £50. Eventually Nelson found another servant as durable as Frank, the ever-loyal Tom Allen, who had left the land in Sculthorpe, Norfolk, to go to sea as a youth.
¹⁸

Necessary for ship and men as the recess may have been, Nelson was worried that the French would leave Toulon and offer battle to Hotham while the
Agamemnon
was unfit for sea. He still doubted the wisdom of the war, and thought Britain’s allies incompetent, fickle and undeserving of support. He suspected that they would merely drain Britain of resources. ‘Had we left the continent to themselves, we should have done well, and at half the expense,’ he sighed. As far as he was concerned Britain could do worse than make a peace on fair terms and leave the continentals to squabble among themselves. The general trend of the war had become dispiriting, but Nelson’s competitive spirit was always aroused by the prospect of battle, and at least a crisis seemed to be looming. Using timber from Genoa and Leghorn, the French had seven new ships of the line almost completed in Toulon. When launched they would raise the number of capital ships in the French Mediterranean fleet to twenty-two, enough to create serious mischief. And it was afoot. At Marseilles and Toulon more than a hundred transports were being fitted out, and thousands of soldiers mobilised. But whither were they bound? Italy? Corsica? Perhaps Spain? Nelson did not know, but he was sure they would be at sea soon and every week the
Agamemnon
spent in Leghorn seemed an agony.
¹⁹

While new opportunities remained remote, old occurrences still caused concern. Nelson’s damaged eye still pained him and its residual vision had dissolved into a general darkness. As the gravity of the loss became obvious he measured it against the tardy recognition of his
Corsican achievements, almost passed over by both Hood and Stuart. ‘I have got upon a subject near my heart, which is full when I think of the treatment I have received,’ the aggrieved captain told his uncle. ‘Every man who had any considerable share in the reduction [of Corsica] has got some place or other – I, only I, am without reward.’ To Fanny he wrote the same day, ‘Had I been done justice . . . I believe the king would not have thought any honour too great for me.’
²⁰

Even the prize money generated by the sale of public French property and ships in Corsica was threatened by innumerable ‘ridiculous’ applications. Looking after themselves, Nelson and Villettes, who had commanded the land forces at Bastia, contended that their claims were superior to those of the naval captains who blockaded the port. No doubt Nelson was trying to distinguish between those who did ‘hard fag’ and others whose duties were routine, but he also resented the many unworthy attempts to dip into the proceeds. In addition to the eight ships regularly involved in the blockade of Bastia, others which ‘accidentally assisted for one moment and were gone the next’ were at the trough. As the proceedings dragged on over one to two years and then three, Nelson concluded that Corsica had impaired his pocket as well as his health. Some three hundred pounds’ worth of expenses had never been refunded, and Nelson felt so stinted that he made an unsuccessful application to the secretary for war for an allowance covering his period of service with the army.
²¹

He relied upon Lord Hood to put matters right. The admiral had misrepresented Nelson’s part in the Corsican campaign but at least felt guilty about it, and armed with medical certificates relating to Nelson’s injury he had gone home promising to raise the whole affair with the authorities. Hood reached England by the end of November 1794, and ‘took the earliest opportunity of explaining’ to Lord Chatham at the Admiralty ‘the very illiberal conduct of General Stuart’. He handed over the testimonials, and even tackled the Speaker of the House of Commons on the subject. While the Hoods made the inevitable pilgrimage to Bath, where his lordship gave ‘ten thousand thanks’ for Nelson’s informative letters from the fleet and happily entertained ‘your good little woman’, Chatham approached the king. But for some reason the suit stalled, perhaps because of the appointment of a new board of Admiralty with Earl Spencer at its head.
²²

Hood did not fail Nelson at this point, however. He again pitched into the fray, beseeching Spencer to grant Nelson a pension for the loss of his eye. The new first lord demurred. The only precedents he
knew for such pensions compensated the loss of a limb, and he doubted Nelson’s injury could be considered an equivalent, but he promised to assist the captain when a ‘proper opportunity’ presented itself. Out in the Mediterranean, Nelson learned about the machinations, but, thinking of the numerous influential applications falling upon the new first lord of the Admiralty, he did not expect that ‘proper opportunity’ would arrive soon. He eventually fixed his hopes upon the next general promotion. Now high in the list of post-captains, he stood a chance of being elevated to the rank of rear admiral, but surprisingly shrank from getting a ‘flag’ at the moment. There were too many admirals in the Mediterranean, and such a promotion would probably send him home, unemployed and surplus to requirements. At this stage he rather hoped to be made colonel of the marines, a sinecure sometimes available to senior captains. As colonel of marines Nelson would receive an additional stipend without threatening his chances of employment.
²³

Passing through this slough, Nelson sampled the diversions of Leghorn, a substantial town sandwiched between the bay and irregular mountain peaks. He strolled along its broad main street between weathered frescos, or explored the church with the painted ceiling in its spacious square. He visited the lodgings of fellow officers at Coulson’s or the Lion Rouge, or dined with them at Curry’s. And somewhere, perhaps at the Teatro dagli Armeni opera house, he met Adelaide Correglia.
²⁴

We owe our introduction to Adelaide to Captain Thomas Francis Fremantle, a Hampstead man by birth and the son of a Buckinghamshire squire, sponsored by, among others, the Marquis of Buckinghamshire. Like so many naval officers, Fremantle had gone to sea too early, and though seven years younger than Horatio Nelson he had packed more into his life than most men twice his age. He had survived shipwreck, imprisonment, unemployment and battle, and earned the plaudits of many superiors. Nelson had seen him command the
Tartar
off Corsica and though he probably thought Fremantle’s discipline too severe, he knew him to be a top-class professional. Baby-faced, soft-featured, short and shading towards the portly, he nonetheless made agreeable company and was dependable and considerate to fellow officers. His conversation, like Nelson’s, reflected considerable
reading, and ninety works of history, literature, languages and nautical procedure accompanied his travels. But in addition Fremantle was particularly sensuous, and his insatiable appetite for women features in a singular diary in which Fremantle exposes for us the colourful underbelly of life in the Mediterranean fleet.

Fremantle’s short but startlingly frank entries recorded his perpetual search for prostitutes, or ‘dollies’ as he usually called them. Thus, we read ‘as before, found Nina, who is the prettiest little woman in Leghorn’ in 1794; ‘called on an uncommon[ly] pretty dolly whom I christen Mrs Hill’, and ‘sleep with Mrs Hill’ in 1795; and ‘called to see a Venetian dolly – ravenous bitch!’ in 1796. When polite society came calling, Fremantle frequently bundled his dollies out of the way. ‘Nelson, Harneck, Anna dined with me,’ he wrote on 27 December 1796. ‘Carried Dolly on shore at one o’clock.’ Fremantle’s diary has now been lost and is known to us only from excerpts published half a century ago, but we owe to those our first as well as our clearest glimpses of Adelaide Correglia.
²⁵