HORATIO NELSON: A HERO By HENRIK BERING A REVIEW OF “NELSON: THE SWORD OF ALBION” BY JOHN SUDGEN
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Having spent months searching for Bonaparte’s fleet, Horatio Nelson’s task force finally found it anchored in Aboukir Bay, Egypt, on Aug. 1, 1798. In the ensuing attack, in which the French got hammered from both inside and outside their line of anchorage, one of HMS Swiftsure’s midshipmen observed the devastation aboard the French flagship, L’Orient: “The brave Brueys, the French commander-in-chief, having lost both his legs, was seated with tourniquets on the stumps, in an armchair facing the enemy, and giving instructions for extinguishing the fire, when a cannon ball . . . put a period to his gallant life, by nearly cutting him in two.” The attempt to put out the fire failed. L’Orient blew up in a thunderous flash.
Nelson-style close-quarter fighting isn’t for the fainthearted, and for decades the study of things military was frowned upon by British academics of the post-1960s vintage. An Oxford don thus once advised the author John Sugden to drop his interest in British naval history, as it “didn’t contribute much to knowledge,” blithely ignoring the fact that Britain had owed its greatness to its navy. For those disenchanted with Britain’s imperial past, Nelson was but a reactionary warmonger.
Fortunately, Mr. Sugden didn’t take the advice and has now produced “Nelson: The Sword of Albion,” the second and final volume of his mammoth Nelson biography. Where Roger Knight’s excellent “The Pursuit of Victory” (2005) stuck mainly to the naval side, Mr. Sugden delivers the man in full. On the professional level, this means tracing Nelson’s evolution from aggressive naval officer to superior strategist “consistently pre-empt[ing] the thoughts of his political masters back in England.”
But it also means providing informal glimpses. Nelson mischievously teaches a little Italian princess to say “Damn your eyes”; sitting for two portrait painters, he jokes that this was “the first time he had been attacked from both larboard and starboard.” We join his visit to the underground cemetery of the Capuchin monastery near Palermo, when the head of one of the cadavers rolls off, upsetting the ladies in his party. We are told of the wondrous workmanship of his “chelengk,” a diamond-encrusted hat ornament given to him by the sultan of Turkey in appreciation for his victory at the Nile, and even of his favorite dish: macaroni.
Mr. Sugden’s first volume, “A Dream of Glory” (2004), left Nelson despondent about his future: He had gained a knighthood for the 1797 battle of Cape St. Vincent, in which against orders he had taken on the Spanish flagship and two other foes, but shortly after he had lost his right arm in a failed amphibious action on Tenerife. Already blind in one eye, he bleakly wrote of needing “a hut to put my mutilated carcass in.”
The Battle of the Nile, which left Napoleon’s expeditionary force stranded among the pyramids, marked Nelson’s return to the fray and re-established Britain as a player in the Mediterranean. Mr. Sugden explores Nelson’s involvement in the affairs of the fragile Kingdom of Naples in minute detail, including the most controversial episode of his career, his handling in 1799 of Naples’s French-allied Jacobins. Ousted by an uprising, they had been promised free passage by the local cardinal, only for the treaty to be broken by Nelson. Among the 100 executed was Francesco Caracciolo, the treacherous commander of the Neapolitan navy, who swung from the yardarm of his former flagship.
Breaking treaties of surrender isn’t normally a hot idea, since it makes troops think twice about surrendering in the future. To avoid chaos, Nelson had initially agreed to respect the treaty. But letting a man like Caracciolo, with his intimate knowledge of the coastline, go free was deemed too risky, so for Nelson it became a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils, though, as Mr. Sugden suggests, he was less than proud of his conduct.
Decisive as he was in crisis, Nelson was an emotional man with a great need for sympathy and praise, and to some extent he let his infatuation with Emma Hamilton, the wife of Sir William, the British envoy to the court of Naples, influence his dispositions. This tie and the fact that he loathed “being taught his lesson like a schoolboy” by his commander in chief, Lord Keith, explain what Mr. Sugden terms “his limpet-like attachment to Sicily” from the summer of 1799, when the island of Minorca, off the coast of Spain, would have been a better base. In the Admiralty, doubts arose about his reliability, while cartoonists relished portraying the lovers as a modern-day Antony and Cleopatra.
Despite Mr. Sugden’s fair-mindedness, it is hard to warm to the impulsive and overwrought Emma—caressing a Turkish commander’s sword still covered with the blood from 20 beheaded French prisoners isn’t exactly ladylike—but she filled an emotional need that his devoted wife, Frances, was incapable of meeting.
Dispelling the Admiralty’s reservations, Nelson reverted to his fighting best in the Baltic campaign of 1801: Having beaten the Danes at Copenhagen, Nelson, now as commander in chief, went on to deliver a textbook example of muscular diplomacy, convincing the Swedes and the Russians that fighting him wasn’t in their interest.
Nelson’s final posting put him in charge of the Mediterranean. Due to peacetime cutbacks, his naval superiority was “paper thin,” which required a careful setting of priorities. “The old Nelson had been a lethal weapon that needed some direction,” Mr. Sugden writes. “The new one was as keen a sword, but one that thought like the commander-in-chief of a large and important theatre.”
What he desired was a victory “superior to the Nile,” a “pell-mell” battle, in which superior British gunnery skills would tell, which is precisely what he achieved at Trafalgar on Oct. 21, 1805, against a much stronger Franco-Spanish fleet: The Brits killed or captured 14,000 of their foes, while their own casualties numbered 1,700. It is “almost incredible,” says Mr. Sugden, “that so decisive a victory . . . could have been won in open water.” Regrettably, Nelson was himself among the dead, felled by a sniper’s bullet.
Mr. Bering is a writer and critic.
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