The Life of Nelson, Volume 2

Captain Hillyar, who commanded one of the frigates that were ever coming and going, writes in his journal: "If extreme kindness and attention could render me happy, I have this day experienced both from our revered and good commander-in-chief. How can I repay his kindness? By obeying his injunctions 'not to be in a hurry to get married,'72 or by a continued perseverance in discharging those duties with alacrity and honour, which he is more immediately concerned in?" "Lord Nelson talked a great deal against matrimony yesterday, and I feel will not trust me at Malta, while we are capable of remaining at sea. It was all, however, in a good natured way. He is going to charge me with two of his boys [midshipmen], I am pleased that an opportunity is offered for showing my gratitude in a small degree for his almost fatherly kindness. I wish you knew him; if he has failings, reflections on his virtues cause them to be forgotten, and the mind dwells with pleasure on a character where bravery, generosity, and good nature, are joined to a heart that can feel for the woes of others, and delights in endeavouring to alleviate them." Hillyar was experiencing what Radstock had remarked: "Gain his esteem, and there is nothing he will not dash through to put you forward." "Gain his esteem, and you will have nothing to fear, for I know not a more honourable man existing, or one who would more readily do you justice in all respects." "I am well aware," wrote another young captain to Nelson himself, "of the good construction which your Lordship has ever been in the habit of putting on circumstances, although wearing the most unfavourable appearances.... Your Lordship's good opinion constitutes the summit of my ambition, and the most effective spur to my endeavours."

Nelson loved to bestow promotion, when deserved, on the spot, to give a man his spurs, if it might be, on the field of battle; but vacancies would not always offer at the happy moment. A brother of Hillyar's was a midshipman in one of two boats, sent to visit a suspicious vessel. A sudden and staggering fire killed the lieutenant in command, besides disabling a number of the boats' crews. The men hesitated; but the lad, left in charge, cheered them on and carried the vessel by boarding. Although he was but a couple of months over fifteen, Nelson gave him at once his commission into the vacancy made by the lieutenant. One very dark night, the "Victory" being under way, a midshipman, at the imminent risk of his life, leaped into the sea to save a seaman who had fallen overboard, and otherwise would have been drowned. Nelson gave him, too, his commission the following morning; but, seeing the jubilation among the young man's messmates, and thinking the act might be a dangerous precedent, he leaned over the poop and said, smiling good-naturedly, "Stop, young gentlemen! Mr. Flin has done a gallant thing today, and he has done many gallant things before, for which he has now got his reward. But mind, I'll have no more making lieutenants for men falling overboard."

The power thus to reward at discretion, and speedily, though liable to abuse, was, he claimed, essential to the due influence of a commander-in-chief; his subordinates must feel that it was in his power to make their future, to distinguish them, and that they were in so far dependent upon him. Nevertheless, with him as with others, personal interest had a weight which qualified his argument. The premature73 and disastrous promotion of his stepson, at his request, by St. Vincent, was a practical abuse which in most minds would outweigh theoretical advantages. Writing to Sir Peter Parker about this time, he said, "You may be assured I will lose no time in making your grandson a postcaptain. It is the only opportunity ever offered me, of showing that my feelings of gratitude to you are as warm and alive as when you first took me by the hand: I owe all my honours to you, and I am proud to acknowledge it to all the world." Such enduring gratitude is charming to see, and tends to show that Nelson recognized some other reason for Parker's favor to himself than deference to Suckling's position; but it is scarcely a good working principle for the distribution of official patronage, although the younger Parker was a good and gallant officer.

Among the military duties that weighed upon Nelson, not the least was the protection of British trade. The narrow waters of the Mediterranean favored the operations of privateers, which did not have to go far from their ports, and found shelter everywhere; for the littoral states, in their weakness and insecurity, could but feebly enforce neutrality either in their continental or insular territories. In fact, both parties to the war, Great Britain and France, derived from the infringement of neutrality advantages which checked their remonstrances, and gave the feebler nations an apt retort, when taken to task in their painful efforts to preserve an attitude that was rather double-faced than neutral. If France, on the one hand, was deriving a considerable revenue from Spanish subsidies, and subsisting an army corps upon Neapolitan territory, Great Britain, on the other, could scarcely have maintained her fleet in the Gulf of Lyons, if unable to get fresh provisions and water from neutral ports; for, save Gibraltar and Malta, she had none that was her own or allied. Under these conditions, small privateers, often mere rowboats, but under the colors of France or the Italian Republic, swarmed in every port and inlet; in the Adriatic,—a deep, secluded pocket, particularly favorable to marauding,—in the Ionian Islands, along the Barbary coast, upon the shores of Spain, and especially in Sicily, whose central position and extensive seaboard commanded every trade-route east of the Balearics.

Nelson's correspondence is full of remonstrances addressed to the various neutral states—including even Austria, whose shore-line on the Adriatic was extensive—for their toleration of these abuses, which rested ultimately upon the fear of Bonaparte. He has, also, constant explanations to make to his own Government, or to British ministers at the different Courts, of the acts of his cruisers in destroying the depredators within neutral limits, when found red-handed. He makes no apologies, but stands firmly by his officers, who, when right, could always count upon his support in trouble. He never left a man in the lurch, or damned him with faint approval. "The protection afforded the enemy's privateers and rowboats in the different neutral ports of these seas, so contrary to every known law of neutrality, is extremely destructive of our commerce.... Although their conduct is infamous, yet their doing wrong is no rule why we should. There is a general principle which I have laid down for the regulation of the officers' conduct under my command—which is never to break the neutrality of any port or place; but never to consider as neutral any place from whence an attack is allowed to be made. It is certainly justifiable to attack any vessel in a place from whence she makes an attack." "I very fully approve every part of Captain –'s conduct on the above occasion," he writes to the Admiralty in such a case.

The supplying of convoys, therefore, was ceaseless, for the depredations of the marauders were unending. "I am pulled to pieces by the demands of merchants for convoys," Nelson said; and he recognized that it must be so, for he entirely disapproved of even a fast-sailing vessel attempting to make a passage unprotected. "I wrote to the Admiralty for more cruisers until I was tired," he told Ball, "and they left off answering those parts of my letters. The late Admiralty thought I kept too many to the eastward of Sicily; the Smyrna folks complain of me, so do the Adriatic, so they do between Cape de Gatte and Gibraltar. If I had the vessels, I do assure you not one of them should go prize-hunting: that I never have done, I am a poorer man than the day I was ordered to the Mediterranean command, by upwards of £1,000; but money I despise except as it is useful, and I expect my prize money is embarked in the Toulon fleet." "I am distressed for frigates," was his continual cry. "From Cape St. Vincent to the head of the Adriatic I have only eight; which, with the service of watching Toulon, and the necessary frigates with the fleet, are absolutely not one half enough." For military duties, "frigates are the eyes of a fleet. I want ten more than I have in order to watch that the French should not escape me, and ten sloops besides, to do all duties." For nine stations which ought to be filled, "I have but two frigates; therefore, my dear Ball, have a little mercy, and do not think I have neglected the protection of the trade of Malta." This was written soon after joining the station, and he represents the number as diminishing as time passed. "It is shameful!" he cries in a moment of intense anxiety.

In this fewness of cruisers he was forced to keep his vessels constantly on the go,—to the Levant, to the Adriatic, to Sicily, to Italy,—scouring the coasts for privateers, gathering merchant ships by driblets, picking up information, and at the end of the round returning to Malta with their fractions of the large convoy. When this was assembled, a frigate or a ship-of-the-line, with one or two smaller ships of war, sailed with it for Gibraltar at a date fixed, approximately, months before. Meanwhile, at the latter place a similar process of collection had been going on from the ports of the western Mediterranean, and, after the Malta convoy arrived, the whole started together in charge of a division, composed usually of vessels of war that had to return to England for repairs.

To arrange and maintain this complicated process, and to dovetail it with the other necessary cruising duties, having in consideration which ships should first go home, required careful study and long foresight—infinite management, in fact. "The going on in the routine of a station," he tells Ball, who seems to have trod on his toes, "if interrupted, is like stopping a watch—the whole machine gets wrong. If the Maidstone takes the convoy, and, when Agincourt arrives, there is none for her or Thisbe, it puzzles me to know what orders to give them. If they chace the convoy to Gibraltar, the Maidstone may have gone on with it to England, and in that case, two ships, unless I begin to give a new arrangement, will either go home without convoy, or they must return [to Malta] in contradiction to the Admiralty's orders to send them home; I am sure you see it in its true point of view." "I dare not send a frigate home without a convoy," he says later. "Not an officer in the service bows with more respect to the orders of the Admiralty than myself," he writes St. Vincent; "but I am sure you will agree with me, that if I form plans for the sending home our convoys, and the clearing the different parts of the station from privateers, and the other services requisite, and that the Admiralty in some respects makes their arrangements, we must clash." Then he points out how the Admiralty diverting a ship, unknown to him, has tumbled over a whole train of services, like a child's row of blocks.

An extremely critical point in the homeward voyage was the first hundred miles west of Gibraltar; and it was a greater thorn in Nelson's side, because of a French seventy-four, the "Aigle," which had succeeded in entering Cadiz just after he got off Toulon. For the ordinary policing of that locality he assigned a division of three frigates, under a Captain Gore, who possessed his confidence. "The enemy's privateers and cruisers," he tells him, "are particularly destructive to our trade passing the skirts of the station." Privateering was thus reduced; but when a convoy sailed, he tried always to have it accompanied through that stage by a ship of size sufficient to grapple with the "Aigle." For a while, indeed, he placed there an eighty-gun ship, but the gradual deterioration of his squadron and the increase of Latouche Tréville's obliged him to recall her, and at times his anxiety was great; not the less because Gore, like other frigate captains, entertained the fancy that his three frigates might contend with a ship-of-the-line. "Your intentions of attacking that ship with the small squadron under your command are certainly very laudable; but I do not consider your force by any means equal to it." The question of two or three small ships against one large involves more considerations than number and weight of guns. Unity of direction and thickness of sides—defensive strength, that is—enter into the problem. As Hawke said, "Big ships take a good deal of drubbing." Howe's opinion was the same as Nelson's; and Hardy, Nelson's captain, said, "After what I have seen at Trafalgar, I am satisfied it would be mere folly, and ought never to succeed."74 What Hardy saw at Trafalgar, however, was not frigates against ships-of-the-line, but vessels of the latter class opposed, smaller against greater.

It seems singular, with such a weak link in the chain of communication from the Mediterranean to England, that the Admiralty, on the outbreak of the war with Spain, in the latter part of 1804, should have divided Nelson's command at this very point, leaving as a somewhat debatable ground, for mutual jealousy, that through which valuable interests must pass, and where they must be transferred. The reason and manner of this division, impolitic and inopportune as it was, and bitterly as Nelson resented it, seem to have been misunderstood. Convinced that he could not endure another winter such as the last, he made a formal application, about the middle of August, 1804, for permission to go home for a while. "I consider the state of my health to be such as to make it absolutely necessary that I should return to England to re-establish it. Another winter such as the last, I feel myself unable to stand against. A few months of quiet may enable me to serve again next spring; and I believe that no officer is more anxious to serve than myself." In accordance with this last intimation, which speaks his whole heart, he wrote privately to the First Lord that he would like to come back in the spring, if his health were restored, as he believed it would be; and he assured him that his second, Bickerton, whose rank did not entitle him to the chief command under ordinary conditions, was perfectly fitted to hold it during his absence—in short, to keep the place warm for his return.

Nelson knew that the Admiralty was besieged with admirals, many senior to himself, seeking for employment, and that it would be very difficult for it to resist the pressure for the vacancy in "my favourite command," to resume which he was impelled by both his sense of duty and his love of glory. He wrote therefore to Elliot, and to the King of the Two Sicilies, in the same sense as he had to Melville, recalling his well-tried devotion to the interests of that Court, which a successor might not equally show, and suggesting that his cause would be strengthened by an application for his return on the part of the King. The latter consequently intimated to the British Government that he hoped Lord Nelson would be sent back. He was, in truth, so much agitated over the prospect of his going, that he offered him a house in either Palermo or Naples, if he wished to remain in the South to recruit; an offer which Elliot, equally uneasy, urged him to accept.

The Government did exactly what was asked. Nelson received permission to go to England, when he felt it necessary, leaving the command in the hands of Bickerton; but at the same time the Admiralty had to meet the rush of claimants for the vacancy, all the more pressing because rumors were afloat of a Spanish war, which would make the Mediterranean not only the most important, but, in prize-money, the most lucrative command. Among the applicants was Sir John Orde, who had been nursing a technical grievance ever since he had been passed over, in Nelson's favor, for the command of the detachment with which the Battle of the Nile was fought. Nelson's leave was issued on the 6th of October, and on the 26th Orde was given a small squadron—five ships-of-the-line—to blockade Cadiz. Being senior to Nelson, and of course to Bickerton, he could only have this position by reducing the latter's station, which had extended to Cape Finisterre. The line between the two commands was drawn at the Straits' mouth, a rather vague phrase, but Gibraltar was left with Nelson. Orde thus got the station for prize-money, and Nelson that for honor, which from youth until now he most valued. "The arrangement," wrote his friend, Lord Radstock, "will be a death-stroke to his hopes of the galleons; but as your chief has ever showed himself to be as great a despiser of riches as he is a lover of glory, I am fully convinced in my own mind that he would sooner defeat the French fleet than capture fifty galleons."

Nevertheless, Nelson was sorely aggrieved, and complained bitterly to his correspondents. "I have learnt not to be surprised at anything; but the sending an officer to such a point, to take, if it is a Spanish war, the whole harvest, after all my trials (God knows unprofitable enough! for I am a much poorer man than when we started in the Amphion,) seems a little hard: but patienza." "He is sent off Cadiz to reap the golden harvest, as Campbell was to reap my sugar harvest. It's very odd, two Admiralties to treat me so: surely I have dreamt that I have 'done the State some service.' But never mind; I am superior to those who could treat me so." His contempt for money, however acquired, except as a secondary consideration, remained unchanged. "I believe I attend more to the French fleet than making captures; but what I have, I can say as old Haddock said, 'it never cost a sailor a tear, nor the nation a farthing.' This thought is far better than prize-money;—not that I despise money—quite the contrary, I wish I had one hundred thousand pounds this moment." "I am keeping as many frigates as possible round me," he wrote to his friend Ball, "for I know the value of them on the day of battle: and compared with that day, what signifies any prizes they might take?"75 Nor did such utterances stand alone. "I hope war with Spain may be avoided," he wrote. "I want not riches at such a dreadful price. Peace for our Country is all I wish to fight for,—I mean, of course, an honourable one, without which it cannot be a secure one." But his outlays were very heavy. Besides the £1,800 annually paid to Lady Nelson, he gave Lady Hamilton £1,200 a year, exclusive of what was spent on the house and grounds at Merton; and it may be inferred from Dr. Gillespie that the cost of the cabin mess, beyond the table money allowed by the Government, was assumed by him. He himself said, early in the cruise, "Unless we have a Spanish war, I shall live here at a great expense, although Mr. Chevalier [his steward] takes every care." "God knows, in my own person, I spend as little money as any man; but you76 know I love to give away."

That he was thus sore was most natural; but it was also natural that the Government should expect, in view of his strong representations about his health, that the three weeks between the issuing his leave and Orde's orders would have insured his being on his way home, before the latter reached his station. Had things fallen out so, it would not have been Nelson, the exceptional hero of exceptional services, but Bickerton, a man with no peculiar claims as yet, who would have lost the prize-money; for Nelson himself had just won a suit against St. Vincent, which established that the moment a commander-in-chief left his station, his right lapsed, and that of the next flag-officer commenced. Nor was the division of the station an unprecedented measure. It had been extended from the Straits to Cape Finisterre at the time St. Vincent withdrew from the Mediterranean, in 1796; and in 1802, when Lord Keith asked for additional aids, on account of the enormous administrative work, the Admiralty made of the request a pretext for restricting his field to the Mediterranean, a step which Keith successfully resisted.

Before Nelson received his leave he had begun to change his mind about going home. This was due, partly, to a slight betterment in his health, which he at this time mentions; chiefly, it would seem, to the prospects of a Spanish war. This, by doubling the number of his enemies and the quarters whence they might come, contributed to the pleasurable excitement that was always a tonic to his physical frame, and roused the eager desire for conspicuous action, which was his most prominent passion. Indications also assured him that the expectation of the French coming out, in which appearances had so often deceived him, was now on the point of being realized; that Bonaparte's projects, whatever they were, were approaching maturity. His "guess," founded on the reports before him, was wonderfully penetrative. He did not see all the way through the French mill-stone, but he saw very deep into it; his inference, indeed, was one in which intuition and sagacity bore equal shares. "If the Russians continue increasing their naval force in this country [that is, in the eastern Mediterranean], I do not think the French will venture to the eastward; therefore, I rather expect they will, as the year advances, try to get out of the straits; and should they accomplish it with 7,000 troops on board, I am sure we should lose half our West India Islands, for I think they would go there, and not to Ireland. Whatever may be their destination, I shall certainly follow, be it even to the East Indies." The last allusion is interesting, for it shows the wide flight of his speculations, which had found utterance before in the casual remark that his ships were provisioned for a voyage to Madras; and, even as a guess, it struck perilously near one of Bonaparte's purposes. The splendid decision, formulated so long before the case arose, to follow wherever they went, held in its womb the germ of the great campaign of Trafalgar; while in the surmise that the Toulon fleet was bound to the West Indies, the arrow of conjecture had gone straight to the bull's-eye.

In this same letter, addressed to General Villettes, at Malta, formerly his coadjutor at the siege of Bastia, Nelson, in the intimacy of friendship, reveals what was to him at once the secret of health and the fulfilment of desire; the congenial atmosphere in which his being throve, and expanded to fulfil the limits of his genius. "Such a pursuit would do more, perhaps, towards restoring me to health than all the doctors; but I fear" (his application for leave having gone in) "this is reserved for some happier man. Not that I complain; I have had a good race of glory, but we are never satisfied, although I hope I am duly thankful for the past; but one cannot help, being at sea, longing for a little more." "I hope," he had written a few months earlier to Lord Minto, "some day, very soon, to fulfil the warmest wishes of my Country and expectations of my friends. I hope you may be able, at some debate, to say, as your partiality has said before, 'Nelson has done more than he has done before;' I can assure you it shall be a stimulus to my exertion on the day of battle.... Whatever happens, I have run a glorious race."

On the 12th of October Nelson received a piece of news which elicited instantaneously a flash of action, illustrative at once of the promptness of his decisions and of the briskness of temper that has been noted already. A letter arrived from Captain Gore, commanding the detachment outside of the Straits, that two frigates, sent from the Brest squadron by Admiral Cornwallis, had arrived, with a captain senior to himself, who had taken him under his orders, and carried two of Nelson's frigates off Cadiz to intercept the Spanish treasure-fleet expected there from America. Cornwallis's action had been taken by orders from England, but no communication to that effect, either from him or from the Admiralty, reached Nelson at this moment. Astounded by a measure which could scarcely fail to cause war, and convinced, as he said, that Spain had no wish to go to war with Great Britain, he gave himself a night to pause; but early next day he wrote to the Admiralty, intimating pretty plainly that, if done by its direction, this was not the way the commander of the Mediterranean fleet should receive word of so momentous a step taken in his district, while to Gore he sent emphatic orders to disobey Cornwallis, although the latter was Nelson's senior. Summing up with admirable lucidity the facts before him, and thereby proving that the impression under which Cornwallis's action probably was taken was erroneous, he said: "Unless you have much weightier reasons than the order of Admiral Cornwallis, or that you receive orders from the Admiralty, it is my most positive directions that neither you, or any ship under your orders, do molest or interrupt in any manner the lawful commerce of Spain, with whom we are at perfect peace and amity."