The Nelson Touch: The Life and Legend of Horatio Nelson

446 Pages·2002·40.77 MB·English

by  Terry Coleman

The Nelson Touch
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
NON FICTION
The Railway Navvies: a history of the men who made the railways
Providence & Mr Hardy (with Lois Deacon)
Passage to America: a history of emigration from Great Britain and Ireland
The Liners: a history of the North Atlantic crossing
Thatcher's Britain: a journey through the promised lands
NOVELS
A Girl for the Afternoons
Southern Cross: a novel of early Australia
Thanksgiving: a novel in praise of America
Empire: a novel of the Texas Republic
COLLECTED JOURNALISM
The Only True History
The Scented Brawl
Movers and Shakers: collected interviews
AS EDITOR
An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress: Hardy's unpublished first novel
The Nelson Touch
The Life and Legend of Horatio Nelson
Terry Coleman
OXJORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
2002
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Oxford New York
Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires
Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul
Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai
Nairobi Sao Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto
and an associated company in Berlin
Copyright © 2002 by Terry Coleman
First published by Bloomsbury, London, 2002
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication maybe reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
is available at the Library of Congress
ISBN 0-19-514741-3
13579 10 8642
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For Lesley and for Vivien; both
This page intentionally left blank
CONTENTS
Author's Note and Acknowledgments ix
List of Illustrations xi
1 Natural Born Predator 1
2 Well Then, I Will Be a Hero 9
3 The Whole Glory of the Service 17
4 The Reduction of the New World 27
5 Fair Canada, and the Merest Boy 37
6 Subjects of the Grand Monarque 45
7 Running at the Ring of Pleasure 51
8 Let My Heart Speak for Me 61
9 I Perceive the Contrary Effect 71
10 Nelson Found Wanting 85
11 The Horror, and the Benefit to the Nation 105
12 I Shall Come Laughing Back 123
13 The Making of the Legend 139
14 The Nile, and the Happy Instrument of God 149
15 The Family, and the Great Stage of Life 165
16 Fiddlers, Poets, Whores, and Scoundrels 175
viii THE NELSON TOUCH
17 The Sicilifying of My Own Conscience 187
18 Inactive at a Foreign Court 217
19 The Homecoming 237
20 Champion of England in the North 251
21 Not Since the Armada Business 269
22 So Much for Gratitude 283
23 Planting Trees with One Hand 291
24 The Long Watch, and the Grand Race of Glory 301
25 A Legacy to My King and Country 313
26 State Funeral and Empty Chariot 327
27 The Founding of a Family 335
Appendix A: Nelson at Naples, 1799 345
Appendix B: Nelson's Text 351
Appendix C: Ships' Ratings 355
Notes and Sources 359
Select Bibliography 403
Index 409
Author's Note and
Acknowledgments
This book has been a long time in the gestation. My maternal grand-
father served more than forty years in the Royal Navy. On the editorial
staff of the Guardian I was a very junior colleague of the splendid
and modest Mark Arnold-Forster, who was I believe the youngest
commander RNVR of the 1939-45 war and who was reputed to have
gone into action, with his squadron of MTBs, waving a sabre. We
often talked ships. I once went as a reporter to meet Arthur Bugler,
who had risen from apprentice shipwright to be dockyard constructor
at Portsmouth, and he showed me over Victory, calling parts of her
by their beautiful and lost names — topgallants and futtocks, seizings
and mizens, thimbles and after-ends of horses, helves and hitches and
hoggings, vang pendants and falls. After that, wherever I went -
English Harbour on Antigua, the tiny island of Nevis, the bay of
Cap Haitien, the mouth of the Nile, Naples, Copenhagen — I looked
to see where Nelson had been. Then I began to read his manuscript
letters, and it became gradually but irresistibly clear that there was
more to Nelson than the legend. I did not set out to write a revisionist
biography. I should suspect the good faith of anyone who did set out to
do that. I started off knowing nothing, but then a pattern emerged. The
Nelson of Hotham's action seemed to explain the Nelson of the battle
of St Vincent, the hasty Nelson of the Caribbean in 1785-87 ('hasty'
is his own description of himself) shed light on the hasty Nelson of
Naples, and the Nelson of Naples was very much the man who seized