The first word of Edgar Vincent’s biography of Nelson is not encouraging. It is ‘Jump!’, which is what a sailor is supposed to have shouted to young Horatio as he boarded the boat that was to take him out to his first ship. How does Mr Vincent know that the sailor shouted that? He might have said, ‘Mind the gap.’ Happily this is the only invented dialogue and only occasionally does the author let his imagination loose in describing how somebody walked, or seabirds wheeled, or what a gun-deck looked like after receiving a broadside. He uses colloquialisms, too: spin, networking and icon, but, in the context, these are appropriate.
Almost all other quotations come from printed sources – particularly the voluminous Nicolas and Morrison collections – but this is not to say that there is little that is new. Most will come fresh to his readers and a little documentary research adds spice, such as Countess Spencer’s worries about Nelson: ‘The dear little creature puts me in a fidgit about his health’, from the Althorp Papers in the British Library. But it is a pity that he has not quoted from the Fanny Nelson letters, which the National Maritime Museum bought at Sotheby’s last year.
There is such a richness of material because Nelson was a hero to his contemporaries and his letters were kept, his sayings remembered. A tireless letter-writer, he was a phrase-maker (‘I am all soul and sensibility’) and handy with a quip, as when warning a sporting friend of the approaching French with, ‘If they come up the Mediterranean and you have a mind for a shooting party, come with your frigates.’
The Nelson industry is gearing up for the bicentenary of Trafalgar in two years’ time and more biographies are on the way. This one is twice the length of most and its weight in content and pounds (nearly three, which makes it hard on the wrist for reading in bed) suggests that, given its distinguished publisher, it should offer something original. We are spared the familiar accusations of bloodthirstiness in quelling the rebellion at Naples and suicidal intent at Trafalgar but offered some piquant possibilities. Was he threatening to resign his command before Trafalgar for love of Emma? If so, it was only a ploy, thinks Vincent. Was Sir William Hamilton finally threatening Emma with divorce? Just a hint, probably.
A few characters and events have been ignored. For one, Sir Sidney Smith; wildly irritating with his sub-Nelsonian posturing he must have been but he did complete Nelson’s victory at the battle of the Nile by defeating the French ashore, and he did plan to upstage Nelson and make Trafalgar unnecessary by attacking the enemy fleet in Cadiz with rockets and torpedoes, Pearl Harbor-style. For another, Edward Despard; an Irish friend of Nelson’s youth, he emerged two decades later as a terrorist planning a coup d’Ztat and the assassination of the king, yet Nelson spoke warmly of his former character at his trial; that took courage.
This full-blown biography offers a profusion of detail about Nelson’s health and finances, his way with the welfare and discipline of his men and how his battles were fought and usually won. He was, as is shown, a war-winner, particularly when directed by the formidable old Earl St Vincent, who used him like an Exocet. In the 21st century, with satellite surveillance and signals intercepts, his problems seem almost insurmountable. The enemy fleets kept escaping from blockaded ports and disappearing, leaving him with no idea of where they were going. This is powerfully presented, but the author might have stressed the consequence of Trafalgar. He describes how the Grande ArmZe had already struck camp on the Channel coast before the battle to march east, where victory at Austerlitz awaited, but that did not reduce the importance of Nelson’s victory. Napoleon had announced that he would return the following year to invade England. Thanks to Nelson, he never did.
Terry Coleman’s recent, impeccably researched, biography left the reader wondering why Nelson was so admired, let alone loved. In this book, that question is answered in the second half, just as the reader might be wondering whether so much detail and so many quotations are really necessary. It is then that Nelson materialises as he probably was, faults and all. Networking and spinning, ambitious, impetuous and insecure, self-absorbed and hysterical when in love; also a commander and seaman of instinctive genius and a kind, generous man, subject to the cruel contingencies of war. But then his contradictions have always been at the heart of his fascination – those and the homeric story which prompts Edgar Vincent to write of ‘the poetry of Trafalgar’. This becomes a true portrait of an extraordinary man.
Tom Pocock’s The Terror Before Trafalgar (John Murray, £20) was published last year.
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