Southey on Nelson: The Life of Nelson by Robert Southey

In fact Southey had a natural genius for shaping narrative and bold story-telling. (His children’s tale of ‘The Three Bears’ is still a favourite, partly because of its perfect construction, a masterly accumulation of comic suspense.) He also revealed an outstanding ability to research and organize complex sources, and yet still retain a poet’s feel for the vivid turn of phrase or memorable image. In this unusual combination of the scholarly and the imaginative, Southey had all the makings of a fine biographer, whatever his subject might be.

He had not renounced poetry, and would continue to publish works, now increasingly patriotic, like The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo (1816). But he saw history and biography as the new direction to his mature career, even though he pretended to lament it. In 1810 he wrote to his friend Walter Savage Landor: ‘I have an ominous feeling that there are poets enough in the world without me, and my best chance of being remembered will be as an historian.’ Later he would add simply: ‘by nature I am a poet, by deliberate choice an historian.’

Like all good biographers, Southey was soon drawn deeply into his subject, finding Nelson’s life both more inspiring and more enigmatic than he had at first expected. In the event the six month project took over two years to complete, and Southey was still writing in spring 1813. He combed minutely through Clarke and M’Arthur, carefully re-assembling the narrative of Nelson’s career, but boldly reconstructing it in a series of superbly visualised scenes. From the original chaos of these materials, an overwhelming sense of Nelson’s destiny emerged with almost hypnotic power, a destiny that had seized him even in childhood.

Southey sticks remarkably close to the original sources in official despatches and eyewitness accounts. There is not a single quoted phrase of Nelson’s, or exchange of dialogue, that does not have an authentic written source, and often several. Unlike modern scholars’ convention, Southey only occasionally chooses to acknowledge these–notably in the case of Beatty–but prefers to present unbroken historical narrative. Yet such is the crisp, factual style of the narration, that the reader never feels he is straying into fiction. Instead Southey selects and dramatises–or ‘infers and enlivens’-with enormous success, achieving a genuine sense of modern epic, especially in his four great battle set-pieces–Cape St Vincent, Aboukir Bay, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar.

Besides Clarke and M’Arthur, Southey also characteristically undertook a wide sweep of research and enquiry, especially in controversial areas. He read with exacting attention the independently published accounts of Boswell on Corsica; Captain Edward Berry at Aboukir Bay; of Captain Edward Foote at Naples (together with a civilian eyewitness to the atrocities, Helen Maria Williams); of Colonel William Stewart, a military liaison officer at Copenhagen; of Dr Beatty and Nelson’s chaplain, Alexander Scott, at Trafalgar.

He gave full consideration to the materials that Lady Hamilton had supplied to Harrison and others, even when he did not approve of them, or even fully trust them. He made contact with John Wilson Croker, a formidable Tory figure then Secretary to the Admiralty, who after initial suspicions, whole-heartedly backed the book and provided Southey with charts, maps, strategic plans, and the full co-operation of the Admiralty’s cartographic department. The biography was eventually dedicated, with nice diplomacy, to Croker.

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Southey also knew that much would stand or fall on the authenticity he could bring to his accounts of naval actions. He was not in fact a complete landlubber. He had himself twice sailed across the Bay of Biscay to Lisbon, both rough voyages of over a fortnight each way. His friend Coleridge had sailed in a wartime convoy to Malta in 1804, and become intimate friends with one of Nelson’s ‘band of brothers’, Alexander Ball, then civilian Governor of Malta, but in 1799 Captain of the ship that took on the French flagship L’Orient in Aboukir Bay. Coleridge had made notes about Nelson from Ball’s conversation, which he supplied to Southey, and had also been in Naples at the time of Trafalgar and witnessed the reaction to the news of Nelson’s death. Coleridge’s materials, both published and unpublished, were skilfully incorporated into Southey’s biography.

But Southey’s most confidential source was his own much-admired naval brother Tom, who had actually been a lieutenant at the Battle of Copenhagen, though serving in Sir John Hyde’s squadron rather than directly under Nelson himself. Though later Tom was court marshalled for insubordination, he remained a lively source of combat details and atmosphere, as well as offering to check all Southey’s dreaded ‘naval terms’ in proof. What Southey wanted above all from Tom was the feel of an actual battle at sea, and the way ordinary men behaved under the extreme stress of battle conditions and physical violence. Only then could he make a true judgement of what made Nelson extraordinary.

In December, 1812, while still trying to pull the battle sections of the biography together, he wrote to Tom: ‘You used to speak of the dead lying in the shoal water at Copenhagen; there was the boatswain’s mate, or somebody, asked for–when he was lying face upwards under the stern, or somewhere. Tell me the right particulars of this, which is too striking a circumstance to be lost.’ He also asked about the behaviour of the gun crews, the fear that some of the canons were ‘honeycombed’ and would blow up, the things that men did and said in the heat of battle, and the English gunner’s savage cry, ‘here goes the death of six!’ whenever the canons were fired. ‘This is a thing which would be felt.’

Several of these incidents found their way into the account of Copenhagen, which is one of the triumphs of Southey’s battle narratives. It opens with a superbly orchestrated description of the perilous approach of the British fleet through the Danish Sound–conjuring up the names of Prince Hamlet at Elsinore, the astronomer Tycho Brahe on the Isle of Huen, and Queen Matilda escaping from Cronenburg Castle. The battle itself reaches its climax in the legendary incident of Nelson putting his telescope to his blind eye.

This Southey had carefully compiled from two different eyewitness accounts—by the ship’s surgeon, Mr Ferguson (1806), and by the liaison officer Colonel Stewart (1809)–together with Clarke and M’Arthur’s commentary, and Tom Southey’s memories of later gossip in the fleet. Skilfully fitting together these varied and sometimes contradictory records of Nelson’s precise words and gestures on the quarter deck of the Elephant, Southey produced the dramatic composite version which has become, as it were, scriptural.

‘I have only one eye–I have a right to be blind sometimes’–and then, putting the glass to his blind eye, in that mood of mind which sports with bitterness, he exclaimed, ‘I really do not see the signal!’ Presently he exclaimed , ‘Damn the signal! Keep mine for closer battle flying. That’s the way I answer such signals! Nail mine [No. 16]. to the mast!’.

But Southey produces far more than the heroics of battle. His account of the aftermath of Copenhagen, for example, and Nelson’s sense of absolute exhaustion and growing anxiety, is wonderfully captured.

The sky had suddenly become overcast; white flags were waving from the mastheads of so many shattered ships; the slaughter had ceased, but the grief was to come, for the account of the dead was not yet made up, and no man could tell for what friends he might have to mourn. The very silence which follows upon the cessation of such a battle becomes a weight upon the heart at first, rather than a relief…[Nelson] had won the day by disobeying his orders, and, in so far as he had been successful, had convicted the Commander-in-Chief of an error in judgement. ‘Well’, said he, as he left the Elephant, ‘I have fought contrary to orders, and I shall, perhaps, be hanged. Never mind: let them!’

Some of the small, discordant, surreal moments of the battle are particularly memorable. When a cannon shot shattered a large ‘kettle’ of bacon and beans on the gun deck of the Monarch, at a time when she was taking terrible punishment from the Danish guns, ‘amid the tremendous carnage’ the English sailors with ‘singular coolness’ carefully scooped up the spilled food from the deck, and nonchalantly ate as they continued to fire their cannons. This vivid incident, which says a number of things about Nelson’s navy, almost certainly came from Tom Southey.

All the battles are narrated with superb, panoramic sweep and then stunning immediacy. Southey manages to retain an almost balletic sense of the great fleet manoeuvrings. Yet he continually plunges the reader into close-up moments of chaos and violence. The massive explosion of L’Orient, which brought the entire battle to a halt for several minutes, is one such; Nelson’s own death aboard the Victory is another.

One of his most effective biographical techniques is to set the scene of a coming battle, and then ignite it with a few words from Nelson. He carefully describes the tactics, the plans and risks, bringing them to a climax of suspense, and then–as if he had prepared a well-laid a fire–he sets light to the whole with a single phrase by Nelson.

The evening before Aboukir Bay is one such a masterly passage, which ends with the following characteristic exchange. ‘Captain Berry, when he comprehended the scope of the design, exclaimed with transport, “If we succeed, what will the world say?”–“There is no if ‘in the case,” replied the Admiral; “that we shall succeed is certain, who may live to tell the story is a very different question.”’

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In the light of modern research, Southey’s biography does have many technical shortcomings. He is too close to the war against Napoleon to set it in any larger European context. He has nothing like the modern scholar’s access to the Nelson and Admiralty archives. He frequently over-simplifies the manoeuvrings and chaos of a large naval battle and, despite his conversations with Tom Southey, he often underestimates the stunning, brutal violence of naval warfare for officers and seamen alike. Clipped phrases like ‘he was almost cut in half, lose all meaning. Alexander Scott, the chaplain aboard the Victory at Trafalgar, described it as finding himself suddenly plunged into ‘a butcher’s shambles’ of human body parts. He refused to write any detailed memoirs, and was traumatised for years afterwards.

But the portrait of Nelson is admirable in its depth, and contrasting lights. What is most striking is its mixture of flamboyant patriotism and grim psychological realism. It is not a flat portrait, or hagiographic study. It presents an immensely powerful and seductive figure, who is also restless, self-deluding and vain. There are many penetrating glimpses of Nelson’s inner doubts and turmoil. Southey emphasises his weakness as a child, the disastrous loss of his mother at the age nine, and writes a moving passage about Nelson’s boyhood homesickness, which in a sense continues until he meets Emma Hamilton. He isolates the episode of young Nelson’s despair, on the voyage back from India, and suggests a moment of intensely Romantic selfdedication to the idea of ‘heroism’ itself. He describes the depressions, professional frustrations and bitterness of Nelson’s middle period; his anger with the Admiralty; his disillusion with many superior officers; and hints at the physical disappointments of his marriage with Frances Nisbet, later Lady Nelson.

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One of Southey’s main challenges as a biographer was how to write about Nelson and Emma Hamilton. Here he was faced with subtle problems of libel, scandal and biographical convention. Although Nelson had separated from his wife in 1800, he had never divorced Lady Nelson, never publically acknowledged his liaison with Emma Hamilton (though he lived openly with her on their estate at Merton from 1801), nor officially recognised his daughter by her, Horatia ‘Thompson’, born in February 1801. Clarke and M’Arthur had simply refused to write about Lady Hamilton. Yet the affair was common knowledge throughout the Navy, and probably across most of England, since it was depicted so often and with such relish in Cruickshank’s and Gillray’s openly erotic and mocking cartoons.

At the time of writing in 1810-13, both women were alive, although living in characteristically different styles. Lady Nelson was established frugally and respectably on her large Suffolk estate, influential at Court, and receiving a fine state pension of £3,500. She would live into her seventies. Emma, on the other hand, was recklessly besporting herself, drinking heavily, gambling, mortgaging the Merton estate, and talking hypnotically to a stream of visitors about her ever-beloved Nel. But by 1812 she had become obese, confused and virtually bed bound; and was rumoured to be selling off Nelson’s letters to pay her debts. In 1815 she was to die in Calais, tragically exiled, penniless and alcoholic, aged only forty-nine.

Accordingly, Southey decided to adopt a double strategy. Only the most discreet and gracious mention would be made of Lady Nelson, and certainly very little of her shortcomings as a wife. As a result, ironically, she is reduced to something of a cipher in his biography. But the story of Nelson and Emma, however scandalous, was too emotionally revealing for Southey not to use it as fully as he dared. Emma in fact gave him unique opportunity to write about the private life of a public figure. She gave him access to Nelson’s turbulent inner world, and thereby allowed him to give Nelson’s character a truly Romantic dimension.

His tactic was to state formally and solemnly at the outset that there was absolutely no ‘criminal connection’ (viz. sexual relationship) between them, and that it was simply ‘an excessively romantic’ friendship which brought Nelson much trouble. He then proceeded to write about it in such a way that it was clear to any adult reader that here was the grand passion of Nelson’s life, an ‘infatuated attachment’ of a supremely sexual nature. It was a love-affair that kept Nelson alive to fight the battle of Trafalgar, but also in some matters–political as well as moral–severely and permanently damaged his reputation.

Southey describes how Nelson and Emma first met fleetingly in 1793 at Naples, a strategic key to the Western Mediterranean, and at that time the largest city and port in Italy. Here Emma was established as the picturesque young wife of the charming and eccentric Ambassador to the Court of King Ferdinand and Queen Marie-Carolina (sworn enemies of Napoleon), Sir William Hamilton. Nelson immediately took to them both, and innocently described Emma (in a letter home to his wife), as ‘a young woman of amiable manners’ who did honour to her diplomatic station. Southey adds, choosing his words carefully: ‘thus that acquaintance began which ended in the destruction of Nelson’s domestic happiness’.

Southey prudently avoids more than a sketch of the exotic Ambassadorial couple. Sir William was a career diplomat and a dilettante, whose main passion in life (like his friend Lord Elgin of the Marbles), was collecting Greek and Roman sculptures and pottery. He also studied volcanoes. Sir William was sixty-two, rich, ugly, aristocratic, easy-going and sophisticated. Lady Emma was twenty-eight, a blacksmith’s daughter from Cheshire, exuberant, loud, large and stunningly beautiful. Before being recuperated by Sir William she had worked as an artists’ model and as an attendant in a Turkish Bath in the Adelphi as plain Emma Hart. Accordingly, she was said by visiting naval officers to be the most valuable and curvaceous amphora in Sir William’s collection.

‘Her figure is colossal, but well-shaped,’ wrote one admirer; ‘she resembles the bust of Ariadne’. ‘She’s a whopper’, added another, simply–Regency slang for a smasher. She was frequently painted by Romney: her thick black hair parted in the centre above large wide dark eyes, upper arms strong and bare, bosom full. She had that curious combination attractive to many men: a child’s face upon a large, voluptuous body. But Emma was not a child: quick, generous, highly intelligent and expressive, she had blossomed in the Mediterranean, learnt to speak fluent French and Italian (better than most British diplomats), host diplomatic dinners and entertainments (usually with rather too much champagne), and write vivid letters and confidential reports. She had also become the closest female confidante to Queen Marie-Carolina, who as the executed Marie-Antoinette’s sister, was a key figure in the dangerous, shifting Continental alliances against the French republicans.

Emma also had an exaggerated, operatic, Italian enthusiasm which Nelson came to adore. This was most famously expressed in her ‘Attitudes’, a form of after-dinner entertainment she had invented. Dressed in a series of thin flowing veils and shawls, she would dance across the room and strike a series of rapid, classical poses, which she would then hold in complete stillness, like living statuary. Some were based on Greek or Roman themes, others more Turkish or Egyptian. Goethe witnessed one of the more classical performances, which he pronounced truly artistic and astonishing. Sir Nathanial Wraxall witnessed another, more reminiscent of a Bacchante, which involved ‘screams, starts and embraces’, and he thought only appropriate for select, adult company.

Depending on the evening, the guests, and Emma’s mood, her ‘Attitudes’ seemed to have ranged between classical ballet, theatrical mime and nightclub striptease. She always retained her native humour, as well as her Northern accent. Once, while draped as a buxom half-naked Naiad over one of Hamilton’s larger and more expensive Greek urns, she was heard to say in a stage-whisper: ‘Don’t be afeared Sir Willum: I’ll not break your joog.’

At first Southey hints at little of this. But when Nelson met Emma again in 1798, now returning to Naples as the glorious but wounded and exhausted hero of Aboukir Bay, Southey feels free to expand. He describes the hero’s welcome in a scene strongly reminiscent of Plutarch’s account of Antony meeting the seductive Cleopatra, together with triumphal barges, feasts and music. The operatic emotion is now openly expressed: When [the Hamilton’s] barge came alongside the Vanguard, at the sight of Nelson Lady Hamilton sprang up the ship’s side, and exclaiming, ‘O God! Is it possible?’ fell into his arms–more, he says, like one dead than alive.’ This must have impressed the crew; it certainly impressed Nelson, who gallantly described it as ‘terribly affecting’.

The sexual feeling is also strongly implied, with Southey’s acute intuition that what partly attracted the battle-hardened Nelson was Emma’s promise of generous, almost maternal comforts. This was still, after all, the boy who had lost his beloved mother at the age of nine. He nicely quotes Sir William’s witty and knowing invitation to Nelson: ‘A pleasant apartment is ready for you in my house, and Emma is looking out for the softest pillows to repose those few limbs you have left.’ Later Southey describes her as having ‘totally weaned’ Nelson’s affections from Lady Nelson; and during the King and Queen’s escape from a pro-Republican mob in Naples, which Nelson engineered, he says that Emma impressed Nelson by acting with extraordinary courage and decision, ‘like a heroine of modern romance’.

Yet Southey suggests deep moral conflict in Nelson, and produces a weirdly effective passage at the start of the affair, when Nelson dines with his coffin behind his chair, antagonizes his officers, and seems close to exhaustion and mental breakdown.

Southey–in another Antony and Cleopatra passage–blames Emma’s sexual magnetism for distorting Nelson’s political and moral judgement at Naples. He implicates her (though indirectly) in the execution of the patriot Caracciolo in June 1799, which he describes as ‘a deplorable transaction! A stain upon the memory of Nelson and the honour of England.’ But worse, he holds Nelson’s ‘baneful passion’ for Emma as almost wholly responsible for the failure of his natural sense of justice and generosity (so characteristic of him as a commander at sea), thus allowing the terrible massacre of the civilian prisoners that followed in July 1799. This failure ‘stained ineffaceably his public character’. Southey’s biography here rises to one of its fiercest, most outspoken and impressive rhetorical heights.

If Nelson’s eyes had not been, as it were, spellbound by that unhappy attachment, which had now completely mastered him, he would have seen things as they were; and might perhaps have awakened the Sicilian court to a sense of their interest, if not their duty. The court employed itself in a miserable round of folly and festivity, while the prisons of Naples were filled with groans, and the scaffold streamed with blood.

At such moments it might seem as if Southey was simply casting Emma as Nelson’s sexual nemesis, and the biography has often been interpreted in this way. But Southey is far more subtle than this. He goes on to show how well Emma understood-and matched–Nelson’s own extravagant temperament, how she saved him from recurrent periods of near suicidal depression, and how she genuinely made a new home for him at Merton. While his marriage with Lady Nelson had been childless, the birth of Horatia ‘Thompson’ brought him a wholly new kind of domestic happiness. It also brought him a new sense of a future, and Southey implies that this in turn inspired him to go on to fight Trafalgar. He is brave enough to quote not only Nelson’s last naval signal and diary entry before battle, but also the whole of the open letter ‘bequeathing’ Lady Hamilton to the nation. A bequest which, Southey dryly points out, had not yet been fulfilled by 1813.

Southey was surely right in this complex, nuanced and Romantic reading of their love-affair. Much of its deep and genuine emotion appears in the passionate, unguarded letters that Nelson wrote to Emma in 1802. Although Southey had the materials Emma had supplied to Harrison in 1806 to draw on, he could not have read these particular letters. But they retrospectively confirm much of what he had been able, with some reservations, to suggest of their mutual infatuation.

“You know, my dearest Emma, that there is nothing in this world that I would not do for us to live together and have our little child with us…You, my beloved Emma, and my Country are the two dearest objects of my fond heart…My longing for you, both person and conversation, you may readily imagine. What must be my sensations at the idea of sleeping with you! It sets me on fire, even the thoughts, much more would the reality. I am sure all my love and desires are all to you, and if a woman naked were to come to me, even as I am thinking of you, I hope it might rot off if I would touch her even with my hand.’

Southey accepts Emma’s own authority for one of the most moving passages towards the end of the book. In summer 1805 Nelson is distractedly walking the little lawn in the Merton garden which he called his ‘quarterdeck’. He had not accepted a new command, and claimed to be happy in retirement, surrounded by ‘his family’. Sensing his secret restlessness, Emma ‘knew he was longing to get at the combined fleet’. She destroys her own happiness by encouraging him to ‘do his duty’–to go back and take over the Mediterranean battle station off Toulon. Southey presents this as an act of supreme unselfishness on both their parts, and a final justification of their love. ‘If there were more Emmas, there would be more Nelsons.’

In fact Emma Hamilton comes strangely to dominate the later chapters of the biography, and there is a sense in which Southey had written a great, doomed Romantic love story. Like many biographers, Southey only seems to have become aware of the underlying emotional drive of his own book after it was published. His inhibitions may also have been released by the publication of some of Nelson’s love letters to Emma in 1814, and her own death in the following year. Certainly the main additions he made to the biography, long after in 1827, consisted of expanded passages about Emma and extracts from her own letters to Nelson.