The Life of Nelson, Volume 1

At daylight Troubridge, who had collected some ammunition from Spanish prisoners, started from the square to try what could be done without ladders against the citadel; but, finding every approach blocked by overwhelming force, he had to retreat. Having neither powder nor provisions, and no boats with which to return to the ship, he sent a flag of truce to the governor to say that he was prepared to burn the place down with means at his disposal, but, being most reluctant to do so, was willing to treat, upon condition of the whole party being permitted to return to the ships, free and with their arms. One scarcely knows which most to admire, Troubridge's cool audacity in making such a demand, or the chivalrous readiness with which these honorable terms were at once granted to a man whose gallant bearing compelled the esteem of his enemies. Don Juan Gutierrez had repulsed the various attempts with such steadiness and watchfulness, had managed his business so well, that he could afford to be liberal. He agreed that Troubridge's men should withdraw, carrying off with them all British equipments, even to such boats as had been taken by the Spaniards, but could still swim. On the other hand, it was stipulated that no further attempt upon the town should be made by Nelson's squadron. Prisoners on both sides were to be given up. This arrangement having been concluded, the governor directed that the British wounded should be at once received into the hospitals, while the rest of the party, with their colors flying, marched to the mole, and there embarked.

Troubridge dwelt with evident pride upon his part in this night's work,—a pride that was shared then by his superiors, and will be justified in the eyes of military men now. "The Spanish officers assure me they expected us, and were perfectly prepared with all the batteries, and the number of men I have before mentioned [8,000], under arms: with the great disadvantage of a rocky coast, high surf, and in the face of forty pieces of cannon, though we were not successful, will show what an Englishman is equal to." His conduct affords for all time an example of superb courage in the face of extraordinary and unexpected difficulty and danger, and especially of single-minded energy in carrying through one's own share of an enterprise, without misplaced concern about consequences, or worry as to whether the other parties were prospering or not. Had Nelson reached the square he would have found Troubridge there, and that was the one thing about which the latter needed to care. Nelson's own words recur to mind: "I have not a thought on any subject separated from the immediate object of my command,"—a maxim eminently suited to the field and to the subordinate, though not necessarily so to the council chamber or to the general officer. Troubridge that night proved himself invaluable as a subordinate, though the conduct of the previous attempt seems to show a lack of that capacity to seize a favorable moment, although in the presence of a superior, of which Nelson himself had given so brilliant an example at Cape St. Vincent.

The squadron remained off Teneriffe for three days after the assault, intercourse with the shore for the purpose of obtaining fresh provisions being permitted by the governor, between whom and the admiral were exchanged complimentary letters and presents of courtesy. On the 27th Nelson sailed for Cadiz, and on the 16th of August rejoined the commander-in-chief, now become Earl St. Vincent. The latter received him with generous sympathy and appreciation, which leave little doubt as to what his verdict would have been, had the gallant initiative taken by his junior at St. Vincent ended in disaster, instead of in brilliant success. Nelson's letters, sent ahead of the squadron by a frigate, had shown the despondency produced by suffering and failure, which had reversed so sharply the good fortune upon which he had begun to pride himself. "I am become a burthen to my friends and useless to my Country. When I leave your command, I become dead to the world; I go hence and am no more seen." "Mortals cannot command success," replied St. Vincent. "You and your companions have certainly deserved it, by the greatest degree of heroism and perseverance that ever was exhibited." Nelson had asked for his stepson's promotion, implying that he himself would not hereafter be in a position of influence to help the boy—for he was little more. "He is under obligations to me, but he repaid me by bringing me from the mole of Santa Cruz." "He saved my life," he said more than once afterwards. St. Vincent immediately made him a commander into the vacancy caused by the death of Captain Bowen, who had fallen in the assault. "Pretty quick promotion," wrote his messmate Hoste, who probably knew, from close association, that Nisbet had not the promising qualities with which he was then credited by his stepfather, from whom in later years he became wholly estranged.

On the 20th Nelson received formal leave to return to England in the "Seahorse," and on the 3d of September his flag was hauled down at Spithead. On the way home he suffered much. After amputation the ligature had been awkwardly applied to the humeral artery. As he would not allow the surgeon to examine the stump during the passage, this was not then discovered, but the intense spasms of pain kept him irritable and depressed. It is likely, too, that his discouragement was increased by brooding over the failure of his enterprise; believing, as he did, that had he been with the landing-party, the first attempt would have succeeded. He could scarcely fail now to see that, although it was strictly in accordance with service methods for the senior to remain with the ships, the decisive point in the plan, as first formed, was the seizure of the heights, and that there, consequently, was the true place for the one in chief command. Any captain, Troubridge especially, could have placed the ships as well as Nelson. It is self-accusation, and not fault-finding merely, that breathes in the words: "Had I been with the first party, I have reason to believe complete success would have crowned our efforts. My pride suffered."

Lady Nelson

Whatever his mental distress, however, he always, from the time of receiving the wound, wrote to his wife with careful cheerfulness. "As to my health, it never was better; and now I hope soon to return to you; and my Country, I trust, will not allow me any longer to linger in want of that pecuniary assistance which I have been fighting the whole war to preserve to her. But I shall not be surprised to be neglected and forgot, as probably I shall no longer be considered as useful. However, I shall feel rich if I continue to enjoy your affection. I am fortunate in having a good surgeon on board; in short, I am much more recovered than I could have expected. I beg neither you or my father will think much of this mishap: my mind has long been made up to such an event."

Immediately after quitting the "Seahorse" he joined his wife and father at Bath. For a time the wound seemed to be progressing favorably, but the unlucky complication of the ligature threw him back. "Much pain and some fever," he wrote to a friend soon after his arrival; and while he kept up fairly before his wife, who spoke of his spirits as very good, he confessed to St. Vincent, on the 18th of September, that he was then not the least better than when he left the fleet. "I have suffered great misery." This letter was dated in London, whither he had gone a few days before to be invested with the Order of the Bath, which was formally done by George III. in person on the 27th of September. He was graciously received by the King, who conversed with him after the ceremony, and by his manner throughout made a lasting impression upon the mind of Nelson, whose loyalty was intense. The Order of the Bath remained the most highly prized among his many decorations. At the same time was awarded him a pension of £1,000 a year.

He remained in London till near Christmas. Sir Gilbert Elliot, the late Viceroy of Corsica, who about this time became Lord Minto, saw him not long after his arrival there, as did also Colonel Drinkwater. Elliot found him looking better and fresher than he ever remembered him, although the continued pain prevented sleep, except by use of opium. He was already impatient to go to sea again, and chafed under the delay of healing, concerning the duration of which the surgeons could give him no assurance. The ligature must be left to slough away, for it was two inches up the wound, and if, in attempting to cut it, the artery should be cut, another amputation would be necessary higher up, which would not be easy, for the stump was already very short. There was consequently nothing for it but endurance. To his suffering at this time an accomplished surgeon, who sailed with him shortly before Trafalgar, attributed a neuralgic predisposition under which he then labored, and which produced serious effects upon his general health.

A singular exhibition of his characteristic animation and temperament was elicited by Drinkwater's visit. The colonel saw him shortly before the naval battle of Camperdown, fought on the 11th of October. "One of the first questions which Nelson put to me was whether I had been at the Admiralty. I told him there was a rumour that the British fleet had been seen engaged with that of Holland. He started up in his peculiar energetic manner, notwithstanding Lady Nelson's attempts to quiet him, and stretching out his unwounded arm,—'Drinkwater, said he, 'I would give this other arm to be with Duncan59 at this moment;' so unconquerable was the spirit of the man, and so intense his eagerness to give every instant of his life to the service."

Until the 4th of December his agony continued. On that day the ligature came away, giving instant and entire relief. In a letter to a friend, apologizing for delay in replying, he said: "Truly, till last Monday, I have suffered so much, I hope for your forgiveness. I am now perfectly recovered, and on the eve of being employed." On Friday, the 8th, he wrote to Captain Berry, who had led the boarders to the "San Nicolas" at Cape St. Vincent, and was designated to command the ship in which the admiral's flag should next be hoisted, saying that he was well; and the same day, with that profound recognition of a personal Providence which was with him as instinctive as his courage, he sent to a London clergyman the following request: "An officer desires to return thanks to Almighty God for his perfect recovery from a severe wound, and also for the many mercies bestowed upon him. (For next Sunday.)"

As the close attention of the skilled surgeons in whose hands he had been was now no longer needed, he returned to Bath to await the time when his flagship should be completely equipped. St. Vincent had asked that the "Foudroyant," of eighty guns, should be prepared for him; but, after his sudden recovery, as she was not yet ready, there was substituted for her the "Vanguard," seventy-four, which was commissioned by Berry at Chatham on the 19th of December. In March she had reached Portsmouth, and Nelson then went up to London, where he attended a levee on the 14th of the month and took leave of the King. On the 29th his flag was hoisted, and on the 10th of April, after a week's detention at St. Helen's by head winds, he sailed for Lisbon. There he remained for four days, and on the 30th of the month, off Cadiz, rejoined St. Vincent, by whom he was received with open arms. The veteran seaman, stern and resolved as was his bearing in the face of danger, was unhopeful about the results of the war, which from the first he had not favored, and for whose ending he was eager. Now, at sixty-four, his health was failing, and the difficulties and dangers of the British cause in the Mediterranean weighed upon him, with a discouragement very alien from the sanguine joy with which his ardent junior looked forward to coming battles. His request to be relieved from command, on the score of ill health, was already on file at the Admiralty. "I do assure your Lordship," he wrote to Earl Spencer, "that the arrival of Admiral Nelson has given me new life; you could not have gratified me more than in sending him; his presence in the Mediterranean is so very essential, that I mean to put the "Orion" and "Alexander" under his command, with the addition of three or four frigates, and send him away, to endeavour to ascertain the real object of the preparations making by the French." These preparations for a maritime expedition were being made at Toulon and the neighboring ports, on a scale which justly aroused the anxiety of the British Cabinet, as no certain information about their object had been obtained.

Nelson's departure from England on this occasion closes the first of the two periods into which his career naturally divides. From his youth until now, wherever situated, the development has been consecutive and homogeneous, external influences and internal characteristics have worked harmoniously together, nature and ambition have responded gladly to opportunity, and the course upon which they have combined to urge him has conformed to his inherited and acquired standards of right and wrong. Doubt, uncertainty, inward friction, double motives, have been unknown to him; he has moved freely in accordance with the laws of his being, and, despite the anxieties of his profession and the frailty of his health, there is no mistaking the tone of happiness and contentment which sounds without a jarring note throughout his correspondence. A change was now at hand. As the sails of the "Vanguard" dip below the horizon of England, a brief interlude begins, and when the curtain rises again, the scene is shifted,—surroundings have changed. We see again the same man, but standing at the opening of a new career, whose greatness exceeds by far even the high anticipations that had been formed for him. Before leaving England he is a man of distinction only; prominent, possibly, among the many distinguished men of his own profession, but the steady upward course has as yet been gradual, the shining of the light, if it has latterly shot forth flashes suggestive of hidden fires, is still characterized by sustained growth in intensity rather than by rapid increase. No present sign so far foretells the sudden ascent to fame, the burst of meridian splendor with which the sun of his renown was soon to rise upon men's eyes, and in which it ran its course to the cloudless finish of his day.

Not that there is in that course—in its achievements—any disproportion with the previous promise. The magnitude of the development we are about to witness is due, not to a change in him, but to the increased greatness of the opportunities. A man of like record in the past, but less gifted, might, it is true, have failed to fill the new sphere which the future was to present. Nelson proved fully equal to it, because he possessed genius for war, intellectual faculties, which, though not unsuspected, had not hitherto been allowed scope for their full exercise. Before him was now about to open a field of possibilities hitherto unexampled in naval warfare; and for the appreciation of them was needed just those perceptions, intuitive in origin, yet resting firmly on well-ordered rational processes, which, on the intellectual side, distinguished him above all other British seamen. He had already, in casual comment upon the military conditions surrounding the former Mediterranean campaigns, given indications of these perceptions, which it has been the aim of previous chapters to elicit from his correspondence, and to marshal in such order as may illustrate his mental characteristics. But, for success in war, the indispensable complement of intellectual grasp and insight is a moral power, which enables a man to trust the inner light,—to have faith,—a power which dominates hesitation, and sustains action, in the most tremendous emergencies, and which, from the formidable character of the difficulties it is called to confront, is in no men so conspicuously prominent as in those who are entitled to rank among great captains. The two elements—mental and moral power—are often found separately, rarely in due combination. In Nelson they met, and their coincidence with the exceptional opportunities afforded him constituted his good fortune and his greatness.

The intellectual endowment of genius was Nelson's from the first; but from the circumstances of his life it was denied the privilege of early manifestation, such as was permitted to Napoleon. It is, consequently, not so much this as the constant exhibition of moral power, force of character, which gives continuity to his professional career, and brings the successive stages of his advance, in achievement and reputation, from first to last, into the close relation of steady development, subject to no variation save that of healthy and vigorous growth, till he stood unique—above all competition. This it was—not, doubtless, to the exclusion of that reputation for having a head, upon which he justly prided himself—which had already fixed the eyes of his superiors upon him as the one officer, not yet indeed fully tested, most likely to cope with the difficulties of any emergency. In the display of this, in its many self-revelations,—in concentration of purpose, untiring energy, fearlessness of responsibility, judgment sound and instant, boundless audacity, promptness, intrepidity, and endurance beyond all proof,—the restricted field of Corsica and the Riviera, the subordinate position at Cape St. Vincent, the failure of Teneriffe, had in their measure been as fruitful as the Nile was soon to be, and fell naught behind the bloody harvests of Copenhagen and Trafalgar. Men have been disposed, therefore, to reckon this moral energy—call it courage, dash, resolution, what you will—as Nelson's one and only great quality. It was the greatest, as it is in all successful men of action; but to ignore that this mighty motive force was guided by singularly clear and accurate perceptions, upon which also it consciously rested with a firmness of faith that constituted much of its power, is to rob him of a great part of his due renown.

But it was not only in the greatness of the opportunities offered to Nelson that external conditions now changed. The glory of the hero brought a temptation which wrecked the happiness of the man. The loss of serenity, the dark evidences of inward conflict, of yielding against conviction, of consequent dissatisfaction with self and gradual deterioration, make between his past and future a break as clear, and far sharper than, the startling increase of radiancy that attends the Battle of the Nile, and thenceforth shines with undiminished intensity to the end. The lustre of his well-deserved and world-wide renown, the consistency and ever-rising merit of his professional conduct, contrast painfully with the shadows of reprobation, the swerving, and the declension, which begin to attend a life heretofore conformed, in the general, to healthy normal standards of right and wrong, but now allowed to violate, not merely ideal Christian rectitude, but the simple, natural dictates of upright dealing between man and man. It had been the proud boast of early years: "There is no action in my whole life but what is honourable." The attainment of glory exceeding even his own great aspirations coincides with dereliction from the plain rules of honor between friends, and with public humiliation to his wife, which he allowed himself to inflict, notwithstanding that he admitted her claims to his deferential consideration to be unbroken. In this contrast, of the exaltation of the hero and the patriot with the degradation of the man, lie the tragedy and the misery of Nelson's story. And this, too, was incurred on behalf of a woman whose reputation and conduct were such that no shred of dignity could attach to an infatuation as doting as it was blamable. The pitiful inadequacy of the temptation to the ruin it caused invests with a kind of prophecy the words he had written to his betrothed in the heyday of courtship: "These I trust will ever be my sentiments; if they are not, I do verily believe it will be my folly that occasions it."

The inward struggle, though severe, was short and decisive. Once determined on his course, he choked down scruples and hesitations, and cast them from him with the same single-minded resolution that distinguished his public acts. "Fixed as fate," were the remorseless words with which he characterized his firm purpose to trample conscience under foot, and to reject his wife in favor of his mistress. But although ease may be obtained by silencing self-reproach, safety scarcely can. One cannot get the salt out of his life, and not be the worse for it. Much that made Nelson so lovable remained to the end; but into his heart, as betrayed by his correspondence, and into his life, from the occasional glimpses afforded by letters or journals of associates, there thenceforth entered much that is unlovely, and which to no appreciable extent was seen before. The simple bonhomie, the absence of conventional reticence, the superficial lack of polish, noted by his early biographers, and which he had had no opportunity to acquire, the childlike vanity that transpires so innocently in his confidential home letters, and was only the weak side of his noble longing for heroic action, degenerated rapidly into loss of dignity of life, into an unseemly susceptibility to extravagant adulation, as he succumbed to surroundings, the corruptness of which none at first realized more clearly, and where one woman was the sole detaining fascination. And withal, as the poison worked, discontent with self bred discontent with others, and with his own conditions. Petulance and querulousness too often supplanted the mental elasticity, which had counted for naught the roughnesses on the road to fame. The mind not worthily occupied, and therefore ill at ease, became embittered, prone to censure and to resent, suspicious at times and harsh in judgment, gradually tending towards alienation, not from his wife only, but from his best and earliest friends.

During the short stay of seven months in England, which ended with the sailing of the "Vanguard," the record of his correspondence is necessarily very imperfect, both from the loss of his arm, and from the fact of his being with his family. Such indications as there are point to unbroken relations of tenderness with his wife. "I found my domestic happiness perfect," he wrote to Lord St. Vincent, shortly after his arrival home; and some months later, in a letter from Bath to a friend, he says jestingly: "Tell—that I possess his place in Mr. Palmer's box; but he did not tell me all its charms, that generally some of the handsomest ladies in Bath are partakers in the box, and was I a bachelor I would not answer for being tempted; but as I am possessed of everything which is valuable in a wife, I have no occasion to think beyond a pretty face." Lady Nelson attended personally to the dressing of his arm; she accompanied him in his journeys between Bath and London, and they separated only when he left town to hoist his flag at Portsmouth. The letters of Lady Saumarez, the wife of one of his brother captains then serving with Lord St. Vincent, mention frequent meetings with the two together in the streets of Bath; and upon the 1st of May, the day before leaving the fleet off Cadiz for the Mediterranean, on the expedition which was to result in the Nile, and all the consequences so fatal to the happiness of both, he concludes his letter, "with every kind wish that a fond heart can frame, believe me, as ever, your most affectionate husband."

On the 2d of May the "Vanguard" quitted the fleet for Gibraltar, where she arrived on the 4th. On the 7th Nelson issued orders to Sir James Saumarez, commanding the "Orion," and to Captain Alexander Ball, commanding the "Alexander," both seventy-fours, to place themselves under his command; and the following day the "Vanguard" sailed, in company with these ships and five smaller vessels, to begin the memorable campaign, of which the Battle of the Nile was the most conspicuous incident.