Adjectives and phrases that have been applied to Admiral Lord Nelson in recent biographies, articles, and book reviews include “gauche, vain, priggish, hypochondriacal,” “petulant, undignified, self-pitying,” “nervy,” “emotional, disappointed, irritable, embittered,” “peevish,” “taciturn,” and “a political simpleton and an insignificant private man.” Many of those are true, but he was also unquestionably the greatest military hero whom England has ever produced, indeed the very personification of heroism itself. In his brief forty-seven years, before he was shot down at the climax of his almost impossibly adventurous life, Horatio Nelson mixed fearless gallantry, unrelenting aggression, a powerful sense of duty, faith in God, hatred of the French in general and French revolutionaries in particular, and a genius for both naval strategy and tactics with monstrous vanity, ceaseless self-promotion, and a driving ambition. Yet ambition is not a sin if allied to extraordinary ability, which in his case it undoubtedly was.
Benjamin Disraeli wrote to Queen Victoria in 1879: “It is quite true that [Field Marshal Lord] Wolseley is an egotist and a braggart. So was Nelson. . . . Men of action, when eminently successful in early life, are generally boastful and full of themselves.”1 The prime minister was right to remind the queen-empress that a great man does not also have to be a sweet and modest one. Referring to oneself in the third person is an unfailing litmus test of vanity and pomposity, indeed, often of incipient megalomania, and Horatio Nelson spectacularly failed it, writing of himself that “Nelson is as far above doing a scandalous or mean action as the heavens are above the earth.”2 He also published a brief account of his own career ending with the words “Go thou and do likewise,” doubtless knowing full well that no one could.3
Yet for all his personal failings and his infidelity to his long-suffering wife, Fanny, Horatio Nelson saved his country from a far more serious danger of invasion than even that later posed by Adolf Hitler and secured its domination of the world’s oceans for more than a century. Besides these gigantic achievements, who cares about a bit of peevishness and undignified petulance? Several of more than one hundred of Nelson’s biographers should get their priorities right: His story is a sublime one of patriotism, courage, and leadership, and two centuries after his death it still has the power to thrill the hearts of freedom-loving people everywhere.
Born in Burnham Thorpe in Norfolk on September 29, 1758, the fifth surviving son of its rector, Reverend Edmund Nelson, Horatio went to sea before his thirteenth birthday aboard the 64-gun warship Raisonnable, under the command of his maternal uncle, Captain Maurice Suckling. Although it was not unknown for young officers to go to sea as early as Nelson, he was fortunate to have his uncle as captain, who became a father figure to him. Despite the Royal Navy’s being a natural career destination for a Norfolk younger son with a captain in the family, Nelson was violently seasick, a malaise that recurred throughout his career.
The Royal Navy was a tough upbringing for a boy who had lost his mother when he was nine. Ordinary Royal Navy seamen, known as ratings, though not the officers like him, were often the sweepings of the prison hulks or the gleanings of the press gangs, who deserted the moment they could. The traditions of the navy of those days have been summed up as “rum, prayers, sodomy and the lash.” Sailors received a tot of rum once a day when the sun went over the yardarm and prayers were read on Sunday mornings; the rest was up to the individual.
Captain Suckling ensured the young Horatio became proficient in navigation and sailing and soon knew the pilotage of the Rivers Medway and Thames expertly. His training in practical seamanship could hardly have been better, and he was chosen for an Arctic voyage at only age fourteen, as coxswain of the captain’s gig. It was there he was popularly believed to have killed a polar bear in mortal combat, although evidence for this is sketchy. On his return, he was sent by the Admiralty to the East Indies on board the 20-gun Seahorse, but in the course of traveling to every station from Bengal to Bassorah (modern-day Basra in Iraq), he caught malaria and had to be invalided home. “I almost wished myself overboard,” he later said of this inactive time in his life.4
Yet as his ship rounded the Cape of Good Hope, Nelson had a strange, still-unexplained vision of “a radiant orb” and “a sudden glow,” which he took to be a direct sign from the Almighty, and as he put it, “A sudden glow of patriotism was kindled within me. . . . I will be a hero, and confiding in Providence, I will brave every danger.”5 Nelson’s powerful lifelong sense of personal destiny seems to have stemmed from this odd teenage metaphysical experience.
By April 1777 the eighteen-year-old Nelson had passed his naval examinations and been promoted to second lieutenant aboard the 32-gun frigate Lowestoffe, under the command of his friend Captain William Locker. Locker’s military philosophy was simple: “Lay a Frenchman close and you will beat him.”6 It was supported by the practical evidence of the better-trained and -provisioned Royal Navy’s being able to fire three broadsides in the same two-minute time frame that it took the French and Spanish navies to fire two. It was a fundamental lesson of warfare in the age of fighting sail that Nelson took to heart, and later exploited to the full.
After serving in Jamaica he was promoted to post-captain and—four months short of his twenty-first birthday—transferred to the flagship of the commander in chief, Sir Peter Parker. This was fast-track promotion by the standards of the navy, though by no means unknown. He rose by dint of his intelligence, application, and superb maritime ability; nor was he hindered by Suckling’s promotion to the influential financial post of comptroller of the Royal Navy. Nepotism might have been an eighteenth-century disease, and is widely denounced today, but there is no escaping the fact that it greatly helped the career of our finest naval commander.
In January 1780, by then captaining a frigate, Nelson took part in the disastrous amphibious assault against the Spanish possessions of San Juan. Yellow fever killed the vast majority of the British seamen who died in that campaign, and Nelson, suffering from ague, survived it only because he was recalled to Jamaica, and afterward was ordered to return to England, where he spent a year rebuilding his health. When he did go back to sea, sailing to Canada and America, he got “knocked up with scurvy.” (He wasn’t impressed when he visited New York in 1783, saying that “money is the great object here. Nothing else is attended to.”)7
Commanding the frigate HMS Boreas between 1784 and 1787, on an unpopular mission to prevent Britain’s West Indian colonists from trading with the newly independent United States of America, he was not the compassionate commander whom Victorian and later hagiographers have made out. In his eighteen months commanding the Boreas, Nelson ordered the flogging of 54 of his 122 seamen and 12 of his 20 marines, an astonishing 47 percent of the entire crew. He thought Christmas Day as good as any other to hang a mutineer.
It was also as captain of the Boreas that Nelson met and soon afterward married a young widow from the Caribbean island of Nevis, Frances (Fanny) Nisbet, niece of the president of the Council of Nevis, in 1787. She was not a great beauty, and often shy, but a kind and loving wife who certainly did not deserve the very public humiliations that lay in store. There is no reason to suppose that Nelson did not love her when they got married, although it was a financially advantageous match for him.
There then followed six years of peace in which Nelson had to eke out an existence on half pay, living with his father and wife in Norfolk and developing the reactionary Tory views that were profoundly opposed to the precepts of the French Revolution. These went so far as to include a wholly atavistic belief in the divine right of kings. He was delighted, therefore, when in February 1793 Revolutionary France declared war on Britain only a matter of days after the execution of Louis XVI.
On the outbreak of war, Nelson was given his first large ship to command, the 64-gun frigate HMS Agamemnon, and ordered to join the Mediterranean fleet at Naples. On July 12, 1794, during the siege of the Corsican town of Calvi, a cannonball struck a piece of stone on the ground near where Nelson was standing, fragments from which blinded him in his right eye. (Contrary to popular belief he never wore an eye patch, but only a green shade attached to his hat.) It was in this campaign that his reputation for utter fearlessness was born. As a child he is reputed to have said to his grandmother: “Fear? I never saw fear.”
Nelson emerged from this period of the war convinced that he was one of God’s instruments for punishing French regicide, atheism, and egalitarianism, and he would do it through an unvarying policy of attack, characterized by repeated exhibitions of near-suicidal bravery.
The next year, after a daring and successful attack against the French outside Toulon, Admiral Sir John Jervis appointed Nelson to the rank of commodore, but it was three years later, fighting under Jervis in the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, that he displayed his flair for independent decision making. Risking court-martial and disgrace for leaving the line of battle without permission, Nelson—having spotted that the two divided sections of the Spanish fleet were about to reunite—sailed his ship, HMS Captain, straight into the 80-gun San Nicolas and led a boarding party, which captured her, becoming the first Englishman successfully to board an enemy ship of the line since Sir Edward Howard in 1513. Yet no sooner had the Spanish vessel struck her colors than Nelson proceeded to board a much larger enemy ship that had drifted alongside, the 112-gun San Josef, which he also captured. Jervis embraced Nelson when he went aboard the flagship after the battle; the commodore was knighted and promoted to rear admiral.
Demonstrating a flair for self-promotion that soon made him unpopular with fellow officers, Nelson sent accounts of his own valor and success back to London for maximum distribution, including in the newspapers. He didn’t need to exaggerate his successes, however, and his brother officers understandably felt he left them in his shade. Nonetheless, in a Britain starved of good news, it helped turn him into a popular hero, what today would be called a celebrity.
Later, in 1797, leading an expedition to try to capture a Spanish treasure ship sheltering at Tenerife, Nelson lost his right arm to grapeshot from the fortress of Santa Cruz. It was cut off below the shoulder in an operation undertaken without anesthetic. “A left-handed admiral will never again be considered,” he lamented. “I am become a burden to my friends, and useless to my country.”8 In fact, the opposite was true; to have lost both an eye and an arm in action only underlined for his men the fact that Nelson would never ask them to do something that he was not willing to undertake himself, and the nation took note.
Fanny had not seen her husband for nearly five years when he returned as Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson, hero of the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, blind in one eye and with only one arm. Fanny nursed the infected stump of his arm and due to what one biographer has called her angelic tenderness, he recovered well enough to sail off again to the Mediterranean to hunt down Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt, which had left Toulon in May 1798.9
In England, Nelson had been on half pay, suffering from an abdominal hernia from the battle, occasionally feeling feverish, and taking laudanum (essentially opium) to dull the pain of the daily dressings that his wound required. Nelson had a slight frame, as his admiral’s uniform in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich shows. He was five feet five inches tall, had a delicate constitution, and thought of himself as never far away from death, which doubtless went toward explaining his great courage in battle.
Returning to sea again as soon as he had recovered, Nelson made an inspired guess: that Napoleon’s fleet—which had slipped past the British blockade of Toulon—had headed for Egypt, and on the evening of August 1, 1798, he finally caught up with it lying at anchor at Aboukir Bay at the mouth of the Nile. “Before this time tomorrow,” he told his officers on the eve of battle, “I shall have gained a peerage or Westminster Abbey.”10 Marine archaeology undertaken at the time of the battle’s bicentenary has underlined how brilliant but risky Nelson’s maneuver was. By sailing five ships through shallows around the head of the French line to attack from the landward side as well as the seaward, where the French had not armed their guns, Nelson won one of the most decisive victories in naval history. Bravery and luck played only a limited part in Nelson’s victories; his superb seamanship and acute ability to exploit opportunities were a much more important part of his naval strategy, born of the Royal Navy’s excellent on-the-job training. (In the Egyptian National Museum in Cairo are French muskets and coinage that have been brought up from the seabed.) Out of seventeen French capital ships, only four escaped, leaving the French Army utterly stranded in Asia. Nelson’s headlong attack has been criticized, but he went ahead because the wind was fair and the French were unprepared, which they might not have been the next day.
After the Battle of the Nile, Nelson was indeed elevated to the peerage and deluged with valuable presents from the czar of Russia, the sultan of Turkey, the City of London, the East India Company, and so on. He was not yet forty years old, and the adulation contributed to the burgeoning of his colossal vanity. It was when he was recuperating in Naples from a severe wound to the forehead that he sustained at the Nile that he fell in love and began an affair with Emma Hamilton.
Nelson’s decent, dowdy, long-suffering wife, Fanny, tended him and loved him, but when he encountered the electrifying charms of Emma, Lady Hamilton, poor Fanny didn’t stand a chance. Emma was the wife of the British minister in Naples, Sir William Hamilton, an aesthete and sophisticate who was thirty-five years older than she, and perfectly amenable. At the Frick Gallery in New York, you can see George Romney’s rosy-cheeked smiling Emma Hamilton, the saddest picture in the gallery when one thinks of the shambolic debt-ridden alcoholic that she became. Emma is blue eyed, peachy skinned, and happy, with a turquoise ribbon in her hair and a trusting smile. It is easy to see how Nelson—and everyone else—fell for her so instantaneously, although there was never any question of their being able to live together, given the social and religious mores of the day.
One problem in describing Emma Hamilton is that she changed so much during her life, altering herself with her circumstances. Against Romney’s beautiful portrait of Emma at the Frick, we have the diplomat Sir Gilbert Elliot, later 1st Earl of Minto, saying that she had a figure that was “nothing short of monstrous in its enormity, and the easygoing manner of a barmaid.” As for the songs that she insisted on singing at dinners in Nelson’s honor, the socialite Lady Holland described them as “vile discordant screaming.” Emma would perform cringe-makingly embarrassing impromptu dances, too. “It was certainly not of a nature to be performed except before a select company,” recorded one guest, “as the screams, attitudes, starts and embraces with which it was interrupted gave it a peculiar character.” Despite all this, she was undoubtedly extremely sexy, and ensorcelled Nelson with ease. A modern biographer of Nelson, John Sugden, describes the young Lady Hamilton as “an arresting presence in the prime of life, tall, stronG-limbed, voluptuous, her stunningly beautiful countenance as expressive and commanding as it was classical, cast with an enormous angry auburn mane, and all held in the service of an energetic, vibrant, and often tempestuous personality. She was constitutionally histrionic, besotted with attention, noise and company, in which she thrived and shone.”11
Emma encouraged Nelson’s sense of self-importance. Indeed, when he complained that he had been made only a baron, the lowest rank in the order of peerage, she told him she would not be content until he was also “Marquis Nile, Viscount Pyramid and Baron Crocodile.”
When Nelson finally returned to Britain from Naples, he was an adored national figure. Ladies wore bonnets with THE HERO OF THE NILE embroidered in sequins. When he toured the countryside, workingmen would unharness his horses and pull his carriage along themselves. He loved all this and actively manipulated his image, sanctioning idealized portraits and prints that looked absolutely nothing like him. He rode in triumph in the Lord Mayor’s show, yet was received coldly at court by King George III, who prized marital fidelity, and—most unusual for the Hanoverians—even practiced it personally. This did not hinder Nelson’s professional advancement, however, since admirals who brought great victories were prized by everyone.
For all Nelson’s genius at sea, nothing could be done by Britain to hinder Napoleon’s domination of a land empire comprising much of the western half of the European continent, and Britain still stood in danger of invasion from Napoleon’s huge Grande Armée soon to be stationed in the Channel ports. In order to maintain the blockade of France, it became necessary to attack the Danish fleet at Copenhagen in April 1801. Vice Admiral Lord Nelson was second in command to Admiral Parker, and when, fearing mounting costs from the shore batteries, Nelson was ordered to “discontinue the action,” he simply ignored it and fought on through to total victory. (The phrase “to turn a blind eye” refers to this incident, in which Nelson is popularly believed to have put his telescope to his blind eye and joked: “I really do not see the signal.” Sadly, it is untrue.)
As at Cape St. Vincent, the subsequent victory completely vindicated this act of gross insubordination, but it did not make him popular with all his fellow admirals. Nelson’s own commanding officer and mentor, the earl of St. Vincent, later wrote that “animal courage was the sole merit of Lord Nelson, his private character most disgraceful, in every sense of the word.” Yet he nonetheless also said that Nelson “possessed the magic art of infusing his own spirit into others.”12 This was key to Nelson’s war leadership: He was loved by ordinary seamen in the fleet and had the ability to inspire others, sometimes simply by his mere presence at an action. Not for nothing has he been described as “a natural-born predator.”13 This popularity with the seamen was all the more remarkable in a tough disciplinarian, yet he gave them victory (and thus also prize money).
Against this love of Nelson must be set the accusation that he was responsible for a heinous war crime in Naples in late June 1799. There is little doubt that Nelson’s actions led directly to the executions in cold blood of ninety-nine Italian pro-Jacobin prisoners of war after the British commander on the spot, Captain Edward Foote, had signed a treaty guaranteeing their safety once they had surrendered. Certainly, when one visits the near-impregnable Castel dell’Ovo in Naples today, one immediately recognizes how hard it would have been to capture if the rebels had not voluntarily surrendered it.
Nelson’s supporters maintain that it wasn’t exactly a treaty, that Foote had no authority to sign it in any case, that it was the Neapolitan royalists rather than the British who had found the Jacobins guilty after a proper court-martial, that the victims were legally rebels rather than genuine soldiers and thus later prisoners of war, and so on, but as the British Whig leader Charles James Fox pointed out, Nelson’s behavior did “stain the British name.” This was underlined when Nelson refused to allow a Christian burial for the rebel naval commander, Commodore Francesco Caracciolo, after he was hanged from the yardarm, ordering instead that the corpse be merely weighted down and tossed into the sea.* Emma’s bloodthirstiness in toasting the man’s death was equally distasteful.
Nelson’s biographer Tom Pocock concludes that it was Caracciolo’s “misfortune that his path crossed Nelson’s at a time when the latter was displaying an uncharacteristic ruthlessness in carrying out the cruel customs of war.”14 Nelson saw himself as acting on behalf of an ally, the Bourbon king Ferdinand I and Queen Maria Carolina of the Two Sicilies, whom he had helped escape from a Jacobin-inspired revolution that had set up the republic lasting 144 days, and who had given Nelson the estate of Bronte on Sicily.* He was not cold-blooded, but saw his occasional acts of cruelty to be nothing more than doing his duty.
Nelson, who loathed Jacobinism, effectively agreed to the Neapolitan government’s insistence that the rebels be treated as though they were mutineers at sea. The nearest analogy might be if some Bolsheviks had fallen into the hands of the czarist Whites during the Russian civil war, and the Whites’ ally Winston Churchill had not striven to save them. Although it is no justification in law, it is worth pointing out that had the Neapolitan Jacobins won, they would almost certainly have shown the Neapolitan branch of the Bourbon family the same lack of mercy that their Parisian counterparts had to their French cousins.
At the end of Britain’s short-lived Treaty of Amiens with France in May 1803, Nelson was appointed to command the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean, where he proceeded to blockade Toulon, not stepping off his flagship, HMS Victory, for more than ten days over the next two years. Meanwhile, Napoleon, who was crowned emperor of France in December 1804, amassed by far the greatest invasion threat to the United Kingdom between the Spanish Armada in 1588 and Hitler’s Operation Sealion in 1940. It was in order to destroy the combined French and Spanish fleets that were expected to carry Napoleon’s invasion force across the Channel that Nelson left England for what turned out to be the last time in the autumn of 1805.
One of those accompanying Nelson on his final journey from The George Hotel at Portsmouth to HMS Victory was someone called Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin. (Omens rarely come more blatant than that, except perhaps in the case of his distant kinsman Colonel Richard Pine-Coffin.) The poet Robert Southey witnessed Nelson’s departure from Southsea beach. “A crowd collected,” he recalled, “pressing forward to obtain sight of his face; many were in tears, and many knelt down before him, and blessed him as he passed. England has had many heroes, but never one who so entirely possessed the love of his fellow-countrymen.”15
“I entreat, my dear Emma, that you will cheer up,” Nelson wrote to Lady Hamilton on September 17, “and we will look forward to many, many happy years; and be surrounded by our children’s children.”16 In fact, their illegitimate only child, Horatia, did go on to have ten children. Nelson looked forward to peace, but only one on British terms, having written the previous year: “I most sincerely hope that by the destruction of Buonaparte [sic] that war with all nations will cease.”17 It was one of the few times in his life that the admiral was being naïve.
On October 19, 1805, the French and Spanish combined fleet of thirty-three ships of the line suddenly left the safety of Cádiz harbor in southern Spain and attempted to pass through the Straits of Gibraltar. Nelson immediately gave chase with his twenty-seven ships of the line. Although outnumbered in ships, men, and guns, he put his trust in the superb fighting quality of his fleet and promised the Admiralty back in London that they could rely upon his every exertion “that as an Enemy’s Fleet they may be annihilated.”18 Annihilation was a word he used often; it was what he ceaselessly looked for in battle and what sets him apart from many other commanders in history. Of course it was easier in naval than in military engagements, because ships sink with their entire crews on board, but nonetheless Nelson’s hatred of the French and their Revolution was total and intimately bound up with its atheism, which, as the son of a clergyman, he could be expected to see in existential terms. (The duke of Wellington, by contrast, was a Francophile who had been schooled in France, spoke French, and became ambassador to Paris. His sole animus was against Napoleon personally.)
The dawn of Monday, October 21, 1805, was misty, but it gave way to fine weather a few hours later when the combined fleet was spotted from the topmost masts of HMS Victory, a few miles to the west of Cape Trafalgar off the coast of southwest Spain near Cádiz. Nelson summoned his captains and explained his battle plan, which was in essence to smash through the enemy’s line in two columns, cutting it roughly into equal thirds, and then to concentrate the faster and more accurate British firepower on the rear two thirds, thus equaling up the numbers between the combined fleet and the Royal Navy. Edmond Jurien de la Gravière, the nineteenth-century French naval historian, wrote, “Le genie de Nelson c’est d’avoir compris notre faiblesse.” (“The genius of Nelson was to have understood our weakness.”) He was right; Nelson hoped to bring on the “pell-mell” battle that he believed would give him a chance to destroy more enemy ships than in traditional line-versus-line engagement. So he signaled the fleet to “form order of sailing in two columns.” It was imaginative and daring, and his captains—he borrowed from Shakespeare to call them a band of brothers—later called it the “Nelson Touch.”
The plan required tremendous skill and courage to implement, because the enemy would be able to fire broadsides into the British ships for an agonizingly long time before they could respond. Nelson led one column in Victory, and Vice Admiral Sir Cuthbert Collingwood, his second in command, the other in HMS Royal Sovereign. Another of his orders, “No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of an enemy,” has been wrongly interpreted as being contemptuous of Nelson’s French and Spanish enemies, because it seemed to assume that if they were placed alongside each other, the Royal Navy would inevitably be victorious. In fact, it marked Nelson’s concern that some of the ships at the tail ends of the two British columns would not get into close-quarter action with enough October daylight to ensure the crushing result he craved. It also recognized the superior rate of fire that the better-trained British gun crews had over their French and Spanish counterparts.
At 11:35 A.M., while the drums were beating the call to action, the gun ports were being raised, the cannons run out, and the decks sanded down to make them less slippery when the blood started to spurt, Nelson ordered his famous signal—“England expects that every man will do his duty”—to be hoisted from his flagship. He told Flag Lieutenant Pascoe that he hoped it would “amuse the fleet.”19 Whether it amused the sailors that day is unknown, but it has certainly inspired generations of his fellow countrymen.
He himself then set off, painfully slowly due to a weak wind, to engage no fewer than three French ships: the Neptune, Bucentaure, and Redoutable. Nelson’s battle plan involved his captains keeping their composure and steadying their men and steering silently in line ahead taking broadside fire as they did so. To be on the receiving end of a full-scale broadside from a ship of the line was a truly terrible thing, but Collingwood coolly ate an apple as Royal Sovereign was being raked with fire, before he could return a shot. The battle went precisely according to Nelson’s plan.
Under heavy fire from the Bucentaure and Redoutable, Victory managed to sail between them, pouring fire into each as she passed. Bucentaure was raked from helm to stern, and the 74-gun Redoutable was then rammed by Victory, swinging to starboard as the rigging of the two great ships locked together. Today we can scarcely comprehend the horror of a sea battle such as Trafalgar. For hour after hour, cannons fired 18-, 24-, and sometimes even 32-pound iron cannonballs that smashed into the wooden hulls of warships, sending long shards of timber and splinters flying around decks packed with men. The twenty-seven British ships of the line at Trafalgar had a total of 2,148 guns on board, many of them of much higher caliber than the 400 guns deployed on both sides at the Battle of Waterloo, which was fought in a far larger area.
The French and Spanish had 2,862 guns at the battle, so together there were more than 12 times more cannons at Trafalgar than at Waterloo. And they were kept even more busy. In four hours at Trafalgar, HMS Victory spent between 6 and 7 tons of gunpowder, firing 4,243 cannonballs and 371 double-headed grape- and case shot, and 4,000 musket balls. For those up on the top deck there was the ever-present terror of being raked with grapeshot. The firing of the Royal Marines stationed at the hammock nettings of HMS Victory was at point blank range, and any hope the French might have had of boarding her was destroyed by the murderous fire aimed at them by the 68-pound carronades firing grapeshot from her bow and stern. The British broadsides from below were fired at such short range that to miss was next to impossible. Yet the same was true of the French snipers stationed in Redoutable’s rigging.
Nelson had paid a guinea each for the four large, silver-embroidered stars of various orders of chivalry that were sewn onto his coat, plus twenty-five shillings for the Neapolitan order of St. Ferdinand. These made him conspicuous even at a distance. The place he chose to stand during the battle also meant that, as one of his biographers put it, “it did not take marksmanship to hit an admiral covered in stars at fifty feet.”20 He was almost inviting a sharpshooter’s bullet as he sparkled away on the quarterdeck of HMS Victory that afternoon. The sniper’s musket was charged with a lead ball that you can see today in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, measuring 0.59 inch in diameter and weighing 0.77 ounce. It hit Nelson in the shoulder, knocking him to the ground.
In the din of the battle, no one heard the shot, but its effect was devastating to both Nelson and Britain. The ball “struck Nelson high in the front of his left shoulder, piercing the epaulette and dragging pieces of gold lace and silk pad with it as it drove deep into his body.” He suffered fractured ribs, a perforated lung, a spinal injury, and a ruptured artery, “but apparently made little complaint,” merely stating “I felt it break my back.”21 To prevent the crew from becoming demoralized, a handkerchief was placed over his face so that no one could recognize him as he was taken belowdecks. Once there and lain down he told Victory’s Captain Hardy, “They have done for me at last. My backbone is shot through.” The surgeon quickly ascertained that the admiral was correct, and there was nothing that could be done for him. It was a poignant, slow, painful death in the lantern-lit cockpit.
For another three hours, Nelson’s life ebbed away as the battle continued. First the Redoutable surrendered, with 522 dead out of a complement of 643, then the Spanish flagship Santísima Trinidad. “I should have liked to have lived a little longer,” he said. “Don’t throw me overboard, Hardy,” he added, and “Hardy, I believe they have done it at last.” Before Nelson expired, however, Hardy was able to inform him that fourteen enemy ships had “struck” their colors—that is, surrendered—for the loss of not a single British vessel. Nelson, therefore, knew that he had won a truly extraordinary victory and would be remembered as one of the greatest admirals in history. Indeed, the final count was even better: twenty-two enemy ships were sunk or captured for no ship lost to the Royal Navy. Nelson’s last words were sublime. “Thank God I have done my duty,” he said, as he slipped into immortal glory.22 The king shrewdly observed to Nelson’s brother that it was precisely the death that Nelson would have wanted.
The victory at Trafalgar gave Britain a global naval dominance that it was to enjoy for the next hundred years, until the Germans started building their High Seas fleet before World War I. More immediately, it relieved any fears that Britons had that Napoleon could invade the home islands, however successful he might be on the Continent, fears that until then had been very real, to the point that mothers would scare their children into good behavior by the threat that otherwise “Boney might come.” Britons did not know how they could win a land war against Napoleonic France, but they now knew they could not lose a naval one.
Thus when Nelson died at Trafalgar, the young poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was in Italy at the time, found himself repeatedly accosted by Englishmen he did not know, with tears running down their (and his) cheeks. Benjamin West portrayed Nelson ascending into the arms of a deified Britannia. Dogs, carnations, streets, the tallest column in London, and a new strain of gooseberry were all named after him. He was a particularly English hero; when the Irish Republican Army wanted to make an anti-English protest to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising in 1966, they blew up the statue of Nelson in the middle of Dublin.
Nelson’s funeral at St. Paul’s Cathedral brought London to a halt; it had been a long time since anyone had inspired such popular adulation, and there was to be no such public outpouring of raw emotion until the death of Diana, princess of Wales, in 1997. Although eight admirals, all of them in tears, carried his coffin, such was his controversial status in the Admiralty because of his ceaseless self-promotion and occasional refusal to obey orders that eighteen other admirals refused to attend. (It was a male-only occasion from which both Lady Nelson and Lady Hamilton were excluded.) An unpublished firsthand account of the funeral stated how “on seeing the diminutive stature of the man it’s surprising that the bullet was able to find its mark,” and “In the middle of this really triumphal pomp he was laid to rest about the kings and the giants of the ages.”
A grateful nation awarded Nelson’s brother an earldom and the huge pension of £5,000 a year, a sum that continued to be paid annually to the family until 1947. His wife was taken care of in his will, but such was the custom of the day, not Emma. Although Nelson’s last thoughts had been of his country and duty, his penultimate ones were of Emma. Like King Charles II on his deathbed who ordered “Let not poor Nellie starve”—of his mistress, Nell Gwyn—but who was ignored, no one did anything for Emma Hamilton, either. She died an alcoholic obese pauper in Calais in 1815. Neither man could mention his mistress in the will for propriety’s sake, and no other family member had any interest in being generous.
The war leadership lessons we learn from Nelson are straightforward: Grasp the initiative and don’t let the enemy wrest it back; break the rules and disobey orders if necessary; show extraordinary bravery leading from the front; practice for battle ceaselessly, as Nelson did in his two-year siege of Toulon, so that the men behave in combat as if it were second nature; loathe your enemy with a clear blue ideological flame; have a treasury back home prepared to finance the organization of fantastically expensive operations (it is estimated that in 1805 some 40 percent of Britain’s entire national tax revenue was spent on the Royal Navy); take your lieutenants into your confidence and inspire them; and foster a reputation for berserk offensives that always keep the enemy on the defensive.
And what of those undoubted personality failings? “The vanity, the absurdly inflated amour propre, the love of flattery,” believes the historian John Adamson, “were integral to the realization of Nelson’s genius as a naval commander. Nelson the incorrigible show-off was part and parcel of Nelson the victor of Trafalgar.” Dreadful husband, passionate lover, convinced Francophobe, and vain egotist, Nelson was also Britain’s greatest hero who made his country impregnable from invasion for more than a century. Although he could not win the Napoleonic Wars, Nelson ensured that Britain did not lose them. Although Napoleon marched in triumph through almost all the great capital cities of Europe of the day—Madrid, Vienna, Warsaw, Berlin, Milan, Turin, Prague, Amsterdam, and Dresden, just as he did through Cairo and Moscow—Nelson guaranteed that he never marched through London. In Trafalgar Square today, Horatio Nelson stands atop a 160-foot column, but he stands even higher than that in the love and regard of his people. For he was, as his devoted Emma Hamilton put it so perfectly, “the guardian angel of England.”