The Duke of Wellington and Admiral Nelson feature in everyone’s list of famous Englishmen (though the Duke was born in Ireland), and they did once meet, while Wellington was still Sir Arthur Wellesley.
In 1834, in the presence of some friends who had been discussing the ‘egotism and vanity’ of Nelson, Wellington recollected their meeting in September, 1805, in a waiting room at the Colonial Office, 14 Downing St. Both men were waiting to see Lord Castlereagh. Secretary for War. Wellelsey had just come back from nine years hard campaigning in India, and Nelson had returned from giving the French fleet a hard time in the West Indies. Said Wellington: ‘Lord Nelson was, in different circumstances, two quite different men, as I myself can vouch, though I only saw him once in my life, and for, perhaps, an hour. It was soon after I returned from India. I went to the Colonial Office in Downing Street, and there I was shown into the little waiting-room on the right hand, where I found, also waiting to see the Secretary of State, a gentleman, whom, from his likeness to his pictures and the loss of an arm, I immediately recognized as Lord Nelson. He could not know who I was, but he entered at once into conversation with me, if I can call it conversation, for it was almost all on his side and all about himself, and in, really, a style so vain and so silly as to surprise and almost disgust me. I suppose something that I happened to say made him guess that I was somebody, and he went out of the room for a moment, I have no doubt to ask the office keeper who I was, for when he came back he was altogether a different man, both in manner and matter. All that I had thought a charlatan style had vanished, and he talked of the state of this country and the probabilities of affairs on the Continent with a good sense, and a knowledge of subjects both at home and abroad, that surprised me equally and more agreeably than the first part of our interview had done; in fact, he talked like an officer and a statesman. . . and certainly, for the last half or three-quarters of an hour, I don’t know that I ever had a conversation that interested me more. Now, if the Secretary of State had been punctual, and admitted Lord Nelson in the first quarter of an hour, I should have had the same impression of a light and trivial character that other people have had; but luckily I saw enough to be satisfied that he was really a very superior man; but certainly a more sudden and complete metamorphosis I never saw’.
What Happened Next
Given that Wellington himself was described as a man for whom ‘no dose of flattery was too strong for him to swallow’, some contemporaries felt that his initial view of Nelson as a man with a high conceit of himself was a bit rich, but posterity has been kinder to Wellington – who is still seen as an unquestionably great man with minor faults – than to Nelson, a man over whose reputation hangs the shadow of what Wordsworth called the ‘great crime’ of the handing over of radicals in Naples in 1799 for torture and execution, a shadow which has lengthened over the years – see Barry Unsworth’s novel Losing Nelson (1999).