Examine the real man behind the legend of Horatio Nelson and you will find a complex personality, whose virtues inspired a navy to absolute victory.
By Colin White
Last updated 2011-02-17
Examine the real man behind the legend of Horatio Nelson and you will find a complex personality, whose virtues inspired a navy to absolute victory.
My London taxi driver was absolutely certain. 'Of course Nelson wore an eye-patch' he told me, 'look at the statue in Trafalgar Square - there's a ruddy great patch on it!' As it happens, however, the massive statue on the top of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square does not portray the great hero with an eye-patch. Nor indeed does any contemporary portrait of Nelson. He never wore one because he did not need to. His blind right eye was externally undamaged and so there was no unsightly disfigurement to be concealed.
It was during this process that Nelson the Man became overshadowed by Nelson the Hero.
The black patch is nevertheless a powerful part of the Nelson legend, as my conversation with the taxi driver shows, and it has taken a great deal of careful PR work in the run-up to the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar to start to displace it from the public consciousness. And although it is a comparatively unimportant aspect of Nelson's story, the eye-patch is certainly a useful symbol for the way in which the story of Nelson has been mythologised in the years since our greatest admiral died, at the moment of his greatest triumph, at the Battle of Trafalgar on 21 October 1805. It was during this process that Nelson the Man became overshadowed by Nelson the Hero.
Nelson was undoubtedly a hero - one of the greatest Britain has ever produced. A naval captain before he was 21, a household name throughout most of Europe at 39 and killed in action just weeks after his 47th birthday, he lived a colourful and crowded life.
He won three of the most decisive naval victories in British history at the Nile (1798), Copenhagen (1801) and Trafalgar, and he was seriously wounded four times in the process. He always led from the front - even, at the Battle of Cape St Vincent in 1797, personally leading the British boarding parties that captured two Spanish battleships in ferocious hand-to-hand fighting. If the Victoria Cross had been in existence in his lifetime, he would have qualified for it on at least three occasions.
...we are in danger of obscuring the very human qualities that made him so successful.
On the other hand, if we over-emphasise his heroic qualities, and place him on too high a pedestal, we are in danger of obscuring the very human qualities that made him so successful. Much new research has emerged since the start of the 21st century that has deepened our understanding of Nelson the man, and has refreshed and revitalised his story in some very exciting and challenging ways.
Chief among the new research initiatives is The Nelson Letters Project, sponsored jointly by the National Maritime and Royal Naval Museums. Over 1,400 hitherto unpublished Nelson letters have been unearthed in archives all over the world, covering all aspects of Nelson's life and career.
Amongst the new material located by the Project is a large collection of Nelson's operational orders to his captains, as well as personal notes to them explaining his ideas. This enables us, as it were, to watch over Nelson's shoulder at critical moments in his career in a sustained and detailed manner, not possible before.
And when we do this the picture of Nelson the commander that emerges is both compelling and engaging. We can get a sense of what it was like to be present at one of Nelson's briefings and to listen to him as he shared his thoughts and ideas in his characteristically boyish and enthusiastic manner.
...when the news of his death spread through the British fleet after Trafalgar, many of his men broke down and cried.
Another insight that emerges from the new material is the scale and detail of Nelson's interest in all those who served with him. Other senior officers were certainly as concerned as he with the general health and well-being of their crews, but Nelson displayed throughout his career a close personal interest in individuals, as well as an ability imaginatively to engage with their particular needs and problems. Scarcely surprising then, that when the news of his death spread through the British fleet after Trafalgar, many of his men broke down and cried.
It is now clear, therefore, that Nelson owed his success in battle more to his skills as a man-manger, and as a fleet administrator, than to tactical innovation.
Indeed, another comparatively new insight is that Nelson was not really a tactical innovator at all. There has been extensive research into the development of tactical thought in the 50 years preceding Trafalgar, and this has shown that the individual elements of the famous plan that Nelson employed at the battle - attacking in divisions instead of a single line; breaking through the enemy line; bringing about a close-quarters, 'pell-mell' battle - had all been tried and tested before.
It is no coincidence that Nelson's command methods are now forming the basis of modern management courses...
Nelson's special contribution to the British success was to bring all these elements together into a single plan, which he then communicated in advance to his captains, both in verbal briefings and in writing. This level of pre-battle consultation and briefing may seem commonplace to us - but in 1805 it was truly revolutionary. It is no coincidence that Nelson's command methods are now forming the basis of modern management courses - for example the National Maritime Museum's very popular and successful 'Leading Lives' initiative, aimed at sixth-formers.
With his gift for the telling phrase, Nelson dubbed his battle plan 'The Nelson Touch'. He first used the phrase in a letter to his beloved mistress, Emma Hamilton - which serves as a reminder that Nelson's extraordinary private life is one of the reasons why he remains so attractive and fascinating 200 years after his death. The Victorians, with their obsessive need for pure, spotless heroes, tried hard to eliminate Emma from the story of his life - even going so far as to suppress passionate passages in his letters to her, which were considered too 'warm' to be publicly acceptable.
So Emma Hamilton has been allowed to take her rightful place at Nelson's side in the story...
They took a similar approach to Nelson's famous request for a kiss from his devoted Flag Captain Thomas Hardy, as he lay dying in the sick bay of the Victory. The Victorians, unable to accept the idea of two fighting men kissing each other, therefore decided that Nelson must have suddenly started speaking Turkish - 'Kismet [fate] Hardy' - and that Hardy had misheard him.
Nowadays we are more realistic about our heroes and can accept that it is possible for someone to be heroic without being unrealistically virtuous. So Emma Hamilton has been allowed to take her rightful place at Nelson's side in the story, and meticulous research has restored the censored passages in his letters - revealing him, in the process, as an eloquently romantic writer.
Research, too, has sunk the ludicrous 'Kismet' theory with all hands. No fewer than three eyewitness accounts of Nelson's death have survived, and all of them mention the kiss. Indeed we now know that the kiss was being talked about in the British fleet within days of the battle - and not with sniggers but with tears. Men who had just endured the hell of a close-quarters battle, and the ferocious storm that followed it, perfectly understood the request for a final gesture of tenderness by the man who had led them by tenderness and affection.
It is, on reflection, not surprising that my taxi-driver thinks that the statue of Nelson in Trafalgar Square sports an eye-patch. After all, it is placed so high above everybody's head, that it is impossible to see the details of the figure clearly. It is a powerful demonstration of the danger of placing our heroes on high pedestals - the truth quickly becomes obscured.
Now I see what Emma Hamilton saw in him.
Indeed, the famous statue, on its over-tall column, is one of my least favourite representations of Nelson. It is far too grand and imposing and conveys little of the humanity that made Nelson so special. For me, one of the most powerful images of the great man is in the Nelson Gallery of the Royal Naval Museum, alongside HMS Victory in the Historic Dockyard at Portsmouth. It is a modern wax figure based on all the very latest research into what he looked like, and is generally agreed by most Nelson experts to be a very close likeness.
A few years ago I was in the gallery, watching visitors examining the many treasures that are displayed there. I noticed in particular one young woman. She stood in front of the figure of Nelson for fully five minutes, until her partner went up to her and broke her reverie. She turned to him with a wicked grin and said, 'Now I see what Emma Hamilton saw in him!'
That is the Nelson that I hope people will encounter in this bicentenary year - the warm, flesh-and-blood human being with whom we can engage, not the cold, stony hero cut off from us on the top of his column.
Books
Admiral Collingwood: Nelson's Own Hero by Max Adams (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005)
The Enemy at Trafalgar: Eyewitness Narratives, Dispatches and Letters from the French and Spanish Fleets by Edward Fraser (Chatham Publishing, 2004)
Admiral Lord Nelson: Context and Legacy by David Cannadine (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)
The Pursuit of Victory: The Life and Achievement of Horatio Nelson by Roger Knight (Allen Lane, 2005)
Men of Honour: Trafalgar and the Making of the English Hero by Adam Nicolson (HarperCollins, 2005)
Nelson and the Nile: The Naval War Against Bonaparte 1798 by Brian Lavery (Caxton Editions, 2003)
Nelson: A Personal History by Christopher Hibbert (Penguin Books, 1995)
Dr Colin White is Director, Trafalgar 200 at the National Maritime Museum, and guest curator for the Museum's bicentenary exhibition, Nelson and Napoleon. He is also chairman of the official Nelson Commemorations Committee, co-ordinating the Trafalgar Festival. He has led the search for unpublished Nelson letters, and is author of Nelson - The New Letters (Boydell and Brewer, 2005) and Nelson the Admiral (Sutton, September 2005). In October 2005 he presented a two-part series, Nelson - the Latest News, for BBC Radio 4.
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