Titans of History

NELSON

1758–1805

Before this time tomorrow, I shall have gained a peerage, or Westminster Abbey.

Horatio Nelson, on the eve of the Battle of the Nile (1798)

Horatio Nelson was one of the most daring naval commanders in history, who, through a series of stunning victories, assured British supremacy at sea during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. He was adored in his own day, despite a complicated and very public love life, and has been celebrated ever since as the man who, by defeating the French and Spanish fleets off Cape Trafalgar in 1805, saved Britain from invasion. His death at the moment of victory wins him a special place in the pantheon of British military heroes.

When Nelson was thirteen, his uncle, a naval captain, took him to sea aboard the Raisonnable. For the next eight years Nelson learned the trade of a naval officer in the West Indies and on an expedition to the Arctic. He first saw action in the American War of Independence, and by the age of twenty-one he was captain of the frigate Hinchinbrooke. He was brave and often impatient; this endeared him to some but could make him unpopular.

When war broke out with Revolutionary France in 1793 Nelson was sent to the Mediterranean. He lost his right eye during the siege of Calvi in 1794, having been hit in the face by stones thrown up by enemy shot. In March 1795, as captain of the sixty-four-gun Agamemnon, he took a leading role in taking two French ships.

The arrival of Sir John Jervis as commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean fleet was very useful to Nelson, for Jervis gave him free rein to exploit his natural abilities as a leader. During the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, Nelson was at the head of the boarding party that took the Spanish ship San Nicolas and then the larger San Josef. It was unprecedented for an officer of Nelson’s rank to throw himself into the heat of battle in such a manner, and he lapped up the public admiration that followed his success, along with the knighthood and promotion to rear admiral.

Despite Nelson’s personal fame, morale amongst the ordinary seamen of the Royal Navy was low, and 1797 saw mutinies in British waters. Nelson was given command of the Theseus and once again led raiding parties from the front, dragging his crew’s spirits up by sheer force of character—something that became known as the Nelson Touch. While attempting to storm the town of Santa Cruz, Tenerife, Nelson was seriously wounded, and his right arm had to be amputated. In 1798 he won a stunning victory over the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile. Although massively outgunned, the British fleet blew up the massive 120-gun L’Orient and took or sunk ten more ships of the line and two frigates. “Victory is not enough to describe such a scene,” wrote Nelson, soon to be Baron Nelson of the Nile. All of Europe was watching, and the anti-French coalition was boosted immensely by the performance of the Royal Navy.

Between 1798 and 1800 Nelson spent much of his time in Sicily in the arms of Emma, Lady Hamilton, a liaison that caused great scandal, as the young Emma Hamilton was married to the elderly British envoy to Naples. Lady Hamilton bore Nelson a child in 1801, on the same day that Nelson learned he was to be posted as second-in-command of the British fleet off the coast of Denmark. In April the British demolished the Danish fleet at Copenhagen. During the battle, when his commander, Vice Admiral Parker, raised a flagged signal for a withdrawal, Nelson famously ignored the order by placing his telescope to his blind eye.

Nelson was made a viscount, and in 1803 he was sent back to the Mediterranean as commander-in-chief of the fleet there. Much of 1804 was spent chasing the French fleet back and forth across the Atlantic—a pursuit that captivated the British public. On his return to London, he was mobbed in the street wherever he went.

In 1805 Nelson achieved his apotheosis. On October 21 he engaged the combined French and Spanish fleets, under his archenemy Admiral Villeneuve, off Cape Trafalgar. He took twenty-seven ships to engage thirty-three enemy vessels, signaling by flag to his own men “England expects that every man will do his duty.” Five hours of fighting began at noon, and, thanks to Nelson’s bold and ingenious tactics, by 5 p.m. the British were comprehensively victorious. But early in the battle Nelson had been hit by a musket shot, which punctured his lung and lodged in his spine. He died at 4.30 p.m., allegedly whispering to a comrade officer, “Kiss me, Hardy.”