Decisive naval battles are the rarest of military engagements. The difficulty of finding and closing with your enemy has always meant that naval warfare is extended periods of boredom followed by short sharp battles from which the loser could usually slip away before total destruction.
Horatio Nelson gave the lie to this. His career reads as a successful effort not to beat his enemy, but annihilate him. The brief hours of his battles shifted the balance of power in Europe. Why Nelson was the most successful naval commander in history becomes abundantly clear in Edgar Vincent’s new biography. It is the best modern book on the admiral and one of the best biographies of its kind that I have read.
Born to a provincial Norfolk rector in 1758, Horatio Nelson early believed his career was a call to glory. Writing an account of his life in 1799, he recalled a youthful vision he had aboard ship while recovering from malaria:
A sudden glow of patriotism was kindled within me, and presented my king and country as my patron. My mind exulted in the idea. “Well then” I exclaimed, “I will be a hero, and confiding in Providence I will brave every danger.”
This ambition manifested itself first in physical courage. At every engagement, Nelson personified the sailor’s saying of “Aft the most honour, forward the better man.”
The formative influence in Nelson’s life was his maternal uncle, Maurice Suckling, a navy captain. In 1770, at the age twelve, the young Horatio begged for and received a place on his uncle’s ship, going up the side of HMS Raisonnable. Of the thirty-five years left to him, twenty-eight were spent at sea. With the help of his uncle, who had risen to become comptroller of the Royal Navy, Nelson rose through the ranks to captain.
In 1793, after five years of peace and a frustrating search for perferment, France declared war on England and Holland, and Nelson got his ship, the Agamemnon. He served in the Mediterranean under Admirals Hood and Jervis, who both appreciated his aggressiveness and grasped how to handle him: Nelson needed constant recognition of his work. The Mediterranean fleet’s service was not glorious until Valentine’s Day 1797, when Jervis and his fifteen ships-of-the-line caught eighteen Spaniards off Cape St. Vincent. Jervis’s battle plan failed, and it was the quick action of Nelson and Thomas Troubridge, two captains who instinctively sensed how the attack must go, that turned an indifferent engagement into a victory. Nelson’s star had risen.
Cape St. Vincent was a victory, but not over the French. A vast army was being readied in Toulon, and the great question was where Bonaparte and his troops were headed. In 1798, Nelson was given an independent command in the Mediterranean to destroy France’s armada. Bad weather let the French escape from Toulon, and bad luck—Nelson’s frigates missed the rendezvous, leaving his fleet blind—made the chase fruitless for weeks. But, finding the French fleet in Aboukir Bay on the Nile, Nelson fulfilled his mission.
It was dusk and the French were anchored against the shore, confident their position was strong enough to repel any assault. They were wrong. Nelson never feared shallow water and without hesitation struck the French from both sides and through the middle of their line. What resulted was as complete a victory as any in the annals: eleven of the thirteen French ships-of-the-line were destroyed or captured. The war in the Mediterranean was effectively over: India safe, French domination of Italy threatened, Bonaparte trapped.
No admiral in the age of sail had been able to overcome the limitations of operational command. In battle, a commander was akin to us in our living rooms, watching distant events unfold and helplessly awaiting news. Nelson used inspiration and preparation to assure that battles unfolded as he wanted. He spent the long stretches of time that characterized fleet work—blockading, convoy protection, foraging—teaching his officers to act in union under any contingency of battle.
The Battle of the Nile was a shining moment in a dark year for England—the Irish had risen and the French were victorious everywhere. But instead of ordering Nelson home to recuperate from a head wound and receive due recognition, the admiralty sent him to deal with the duplicitous Neapolitan court. The king was viewed as an important ally in the coalition Pitt was trying to build. Nelson was thrown into the intrigue, and here began his famed love affair with Emma Hamilton, the wife of the British ambassador. She was an exceptional woman who had risen from the bottom—first by her body and then by her active mind—and Nelson was overwhelmed by her attentions during his convalescence. The Nile made him a Hero and Emma brought him love—something he had not found in his marriage. The rest of his life can be seen as a dual attempt to achieve recognition—money and patronage—for his military achievements and to formalize his relationship with Emma.
In 1801 Nelson was sent to Denmark to break up the Northern Alliance that had formed against England. He gained control of the campaign from his ineffectual superior and won at Copenhagen, but due to political miscalculation the campaign was not viewed as a victory by the public. Again, Nelson felt done down by his superiors.
He was also beset by financial worries, by guilt over his wife, by a desire to live with Emma and their newborn daughter Horatia, and by a fervent need to be recognized at his actual worth by the government. The public adulated him and life as a public man only drove up his considerable expenses. This section of Vincent’s book makes painful reading as the woeful letters almost overshadow the greatness of the naval officer.
When the Peace of Amiens failed in 1802, Nelson was given full command. He had no trouble separating himself from the stupor of sensual love. He built his fleet into the most disciplined of units. The whole of Nelson’s effort was to bring the French to battle. Finally, on October 21, 1805, the combined French and Spanish fleets met the English at the western mouth of the Straits of Gibraltar. In the battle off Cape Trafalgar, nineteen of the enemy’s thirty-three ships were captured or destroyed with no British losses. Vincent’s telling of Trafalgar is stirring, but too brief. (It does not compare to John Keegan’s superb, almost broadside by broadside, account in his Price of Admiralty—a book that is the right companion to this biography.) Shot by a sniper’s bullet, Nelson died during Trafalgar, but he lived long enough to know the outcome—characteristically he was chagrined that they had not taken twenty ships. His work was done; from then on Napoleon would concentrate on continental campaigns—places he could march—and British naval mastery would not again be challenged until the 1890s.
Edgar Vincent has served immortal Nelson well. He has given just enough of tactics while serving the man up whole for those who favor biography over tactical study. I can imagine no better life of one of history’s greatest captains.
