Part 11

“When he landed in his native country he had attained his fifty-second year. In his person he was thin, but not tall, of a spare habit, very bald, with a countenance placidly thoughtful, but when animated full of intelligence. Placed in a situation where he might have amassed immense wealth without exciting censure, he revisited England with only a modest competence. In private life he was playful and gay to a degree hardly conceivable; never carrying his political vexations into the bosom of his family. Of a temper so buoyant and elastic that the instant he quitted the council-board where he had been assailed by every species of opposition, often heightened by personal acrimony, he mixed in society like a youth upon whom care had never intruded.”

Such was the man who, in a period of national dejection which almost amounted to disgrace, came back, the one man of his generation who had upheld the honour of the British name abroad in a post of great difficulty and danger, to receive, not reward, but impeachment.

He first faced his judges on February 13, 1788, “looking very infirm and much indisposed, and dressed in a plain, poppy-coloured suit of clothes.” He was finally acquitted on March 1, 1794! The trial thus languished through seven sessions of Parliament, the total hearing occupied one hundred and eighteen sittings of the Court, and the vindication of his personal and official character from the slanders of enemies, who were at last refuted with complete discredit to his slanderers cost him about £100,000, of which no less than £75,000 were actually certified legal costs--and this was the reward that England gave to the one man who was capable of preserving to her the fruit of the victories of Clive and his gallant lieutenants!

Modern opinion, endorsed by the high legal authority of the late Sir James Stephen, has completely rejected alike the personal vilifications of such self-interested traitors as Francis and Clavering, and the emotional special-pleading of Burke and Sheridan.

“The impeachment of Warren Hastings,” he says, “is, I think, a blot on the judicial history of the country. It was monstrous that a man should be tortured at irregular intervals for seven years, in order that a singularly incompetent tribunal might be addressed before an excited audience by Burke and Sheridan, in language far removed from the calmness with which an advocate for the prosecution ought to address a criminal court.”

To some extent Hastings was recouped for the cost of his persecution, even if he was not rewarded for his distinguished services. He was granted a pension of £4,000 a year for twenty-eight and a half years, part paid in advance, and a loan of £50,000 free of interest. But meanwhile he had been fulfilling the dream of his boyhood by buying back his ancestral estate for £60,000, and another £60,000 was still owing to the lawyers.

Henceforth, disgusted, as he may well have been, with the ingratitude of the country he had served so well in so difficult a time, he retired to his old home and spent the remaining years of his life in the calm pursuits of a country gentleman, diversified by the cultivation of letters and the writing of verses.

It was in these days that he used to tell his friends how, as a little lad of seven, he had lain in the long grass on the banks of a stream that flowed through the old domain of Dalesford and dreamt the wild dream whose fulfilment had, after all, been stranger than the dream itself--for not even his boyish romance could be compared with the fact that, during the winning of the means to buy back the home of his fathers, he had risen to be the actual ruler of something like fifty millions of people, and the dictator of terms of peace and war to princes who governed territories half as large as Europe and even more populous.

But in the end he outlived both his enemies and the discredit they had tried to cast upon him. Two years before the battle of Waterloo he was summoned before the Houses of Parliament in the evening of his days to give evidence on the work of his manhood, and when he retired, after nearly four hours’ examination, the whole crowded House of Commons rose and stood uncovered and in silence as the old Empire-Keeper walked out of the Chamber.

He lived to see that empire, for which he had striven so painfully and so manfully, redeemed by the genius and valour of Rodney and Nelson and Wellington from the disgrace and degradation which had threatened it during the last decades of the eighteenth century, and three years after Waterloo he died.

His remains lie in the family church at Dalesford, and, to once more quote the words of Sir Alfred Lyall, “in Westminster Abbey a bust and an inscription commemorate the name and career of a man who, rising early to high place and power, held an office of the greatest importance to his country for thirteen years, by sheer force of character and tenaciousness against adversity, and who spent the next seven years in defending himself before a nation which accepted the benefits but disliked the ways of his too masterly activity.”

Lord Macaulay, who throughout his famous essay does him less than justice, concludes it by making almost generous amends. “Not only had the poor orphan retrieved the fallen fortunes of his line--not only had he re-purchased the old lands and rebuilt the old dwelling--he had preserved and extended an empire.[1] He had founded a policy. He had administered government and war with more than the capacity of Richelieu. He patronised learning with the judicious liberality of Cosmo. He had been attacked by the most formidable combination of enemies that ever sought the destruction of a single victim; and over that combination, after a struggle of ten years, he had triumphed. He had at length gone down to his grave in the fulness of age, in peace after so many troubles, in honour after so much obloquy.”

[1] In the territorial sense this is hardly correct. The great essayist probably meant extension in the sense of increase of prestige and influence over the still independent states of the Peninsula.

IX

_NELSON_

“_ENGLAND EXPECTS THAT EVERY MAN WILL DO HIS DUTY._”

IX

NELSON

I am conscious of more difficulties ahead in beginning this sketch than I have felt with regard to any other of the series, for, while on the one hand it would be absurd to omit from the glorious ranks of our Empire-Makers the most glorious of them all, it is at the same time practically impossible to say anything fresh or even anything that is not very generally known about the man who, however much he may once have been slighted, and however inadequately his earlier services may have been rewarded during his life, has now come to be the idol of the country that he saved from invasion and the Empire that he preserved from destruction.

His life has been written and re-written, his character and his actions have been discussed and rediscussed, the most private acts and thoughts of his life have been dragged out into the full glare of publicity--a fate which any great man would have to be a very great sinner to deserve--but when all this has been said and done there remains a single, sharply-defined individuality of this incomparable naval captain whom the whole world now acknowledges and reveres, quite apart from all national considerations, as the greatest sailor who ever trod a deck and the greatest naval strategist who ever planned a battle or took a fleet into action.

It has been said that when a nation is on the brink of ruin the Fates either hasten its end or send some great man to restore its fortunes. It certainly was thus with the Britain of Nelson’s early youth. On the 17th of October, 1781, Lord Hawke, the victor of Quiberon Bay, and the last of the great line of seamen of whom Admiral Blake was the first, died, leaving, as Horace Walpole said the next day in the House of Commons, his mantle to nobody.

Apparently, there was no one worthy to wear it. The fortunes of England were indeed at a low ebb. Both her naval and military prestige had very seriously declined. The American colonies had been lost by the worst of statesmanship at home and the worst of bungling incompetence and cowardice abroad. We had been beaten by the raw colonists on land and by the French and Dutch at sea.

At home the very highest circles of the realm were polluted by such corruption and crippled by such imbecility as would be absolutely incredible to us now, Imagine, for instance, what would be thought to-day of the post of Secretary of State for War being given to a man who had been explicitly declared by a court martial to be absolutely incapable of serving his country in any military capacity!--and yet this is only one example out of many of the flagrant abuses of this amazingly disgraceful period.

Happily, however, for the honour of the race and the safety of the Empire there had been born, twenty-three years before to a country parson in Norfolk, a boy, the fifth in a family of eleven, who fourteen years later was destined to die in the moment of victory, happy in the knowledge that he had not left his country a single enemy to fight throughout the length and breadth of the High Seas. When Horace Walpole spoke his panegyric on Lord Hawke he would probably have been very much surprised if he had been told that it was this then insignificant and unknown cousin of his own who was not only to take up the mantle of the hero of Quiberon, but to bequeath it in his turn, not to a rival or a successor, but to the country which his last triumph left mistress of the seas.

Although there doesn’t seem to be any direct proof, it may be admitted that there is sufficiently strong presumption to warrant us in believing, if we choose to do so, that Horatio Nelson, son of the Rev. Edmund Nelson, Rector of Burnham Thorpe in Norfolk, could one way or another have traced a lineage back to the old Sea Kings of the North.

Certainly he must have had some of the blood of those who fought the Armada in his veins, and it is noteworthy that a Danish poet in celebrating his valour, wisdom, and clemency during and after the great battle of Copenhagen, attempted to soothe the wounded pride of his countrymen by pointing out that Nelson was indubitably a Danish name and that after all they had only been beaten by the descendant of one of their old Sea Kings.

But however this may be, the immediate facts all show that the man who crowned and completed the work which Francis Drake and his brother pirates began came of a stock that seemed to promise but little in the way of hereditary battle-winning.

Every one on his father’s side appears either to have been a parson or to have married one. His mother’s father was a parson too, but happily she had a brother Maurice who was a captain in the Navy, and had done some very good work at a time when good work was badly wanted.

This gallant sailor was a great grand-nephew of Sir John Suckling, the poet, and it may be noticed, in passing, that on the 21st of October, 1757, the day which we now know as the anniversary of Trafalgar--Captain Maurice Suckling in the _Dreadnought_, in company with two other sixty-gun ships, attacked seven large French men-of-war off Cape François in the West Indies, and gave them such a hammering that they were very thankful for the wind which enabled them to escape.

But still more noteworthy is the opinion of Captain Maurice Suckling of his nephew when he first received his father’s request to give him a place on board his ship.

“What,” he wrote in reply to the application, “has poor Horatio done, who is so weak, that he above all the rest should be sent to rough it out at sea? But let him come, and the first time we go into action a cannon-ball may knock off his head and provide for him at once.”

The weakness here somewhat grimly alluded to was the curse of Nelson’s existence from the day that he first set foot on the deck of a ship to the moment when the bullet from the mizen-top of the _Redoubtable_ made his almost constant bodily suffering a matter of minutes.

His physical infirmities, or at any rate the weakness of his body as compared with the vast strength and tireless energy of his mind, bring him into very close relationship with William of Orange. Putting nationality aside, he was, in fact, on the sea what William was on land, and the central point in his policy was also the same--tireless and unsparing hostility to France.

With Nelson, indeed, this appears to have gone very near to the borders of fanaticism. Some of his sayings with regard to the Frenchmen of his day are absolutely ferocious. Hatred and contempt are about equally blended in them. “Hate a Frenchman as you would hate the devil!” was with him an axiom and was his usual form of advice to midshipmen on entering the service.

On one occasion in the Mediterranean he said to one of his captains who had got into a dispute about the property which the defeated French garrison at Gaieta were to be allowed to take away with them:

“I am sorry that you had any altercation with them. There is no way to deal with a Frenchman but to knock him down. To be civil to him is only to be laughed at when they are enemies.”

The same spirit breathes through nearly all his letters. Thus, for instance, he concluded a letter to the British Minister at Vienna with these words: “_Down, down with the French_ ought to be written in the council-room of every country in the world, and may Almighty God give right thoughts to every sovereign is my constant prayer.”

He seems to have had respect for every other enemy that he met; but for the French he had nothing save contemptuous and unsparing hostility. “Close with a Frenchman, but out-manœuvre a Russian” was another of his favourite sayings. This, it is to be hoped, is all past and gone; but it is instructive as giving us the key, not only to Nelson’s policy, but also to that spirit which made the British man-of-warsmen of the day absolutely prefer to fight the French at long odds than on even terms.

It was this spirit which was embodied in another of Nelson’s pet phrases: “Any Englishman is worth three Frenchmen.” Of course that would be all nonsense now; but in justice to our neighbours it ought to be remembered that the Frenchmen whom Nelson and his sailors met and conquered were the worst and not the best of their nation.

The old navy of France, the navy which had commanded the Eastern Seas in the days of Clive and which had with impunity insulted the English shores and brought an invading force into Ireland in the time of William the Third no longer existed. It had been essentially an aristocratic service like our own, its officers were gentlemen and thorough sailors, and its seamen were brave, disciplined, and obedient.

But in her blood-drunkenness France had either murdered or banished nearly every man who was fit to command a ship or who knew how to point a gun. The fleets of revolutionary France were for the most part commanded by ignoramuses or poltroons, or both, and manned by a rabble who had neither stamina, training, or discipline.

Without the slightest wish to detract from the splendour of the victories of Nelson or his comrades, I still think it is only fair to point out again, as has once or twice been done before, that when we read of French Admirals declining battle even when they had superior force, or of running away before the battle was over, or of a small British squadron crumpling up a whole fleet with very trifling loss to itself, we ought to remember that the French Admirals had little or no confidence in their officers, while the officers had still less either in their admirals or their men.

On the other hand, such a man as Nelson, Collingwood, or Hardy had simply to say that he was going to do a certain thing to convince every one serving under him that it was about as good as already done.

This brings me naturally to one of Nelson’s most striking characteristics. No man who rose to distinction in the Navy was ever guilty of so many barefaced acts of insubordination as he was. Happily for him and for us his disobedience or neglect of orders was always justified by victory. The genius for supreme command, which was far and away the strongest point in his character, manifested itself very early in his career. The event proved that he was the superior of every naval officer then afloat, whether admiral or midshipman, and he seemed instinctively to know it.

When he was commanding the old _Agamemnon_ in the Mediterranean, at the time when it was in dispute whether Corsica should fall under the rule of France or Britain, he fought two French ships, the _Ça Ira_ and the _Sans Culottes_, for a whole day and beat them. The next day a sort of general action was fought, Admiral Hotham being in command of the British fleet. Nelson naturally wanted a fight to a finish, but the Admiral was content with the capture of two ships and the flight of the rest, and in reply to Nelson’s remonstrances he said: “We must be contented. We have done very well.”

In a letter home on the subject of this action, Nelson penned a sentence which was at once prophetic in itself and closely characteristic of the writer. It was this: “I wish to be an Admiral and in command of the English fleet. I should very soon either do much or be ruined. My disposition cannot bear tame and slow measures. Sure I am had I commanded on the 14th, that either the whole French fleet would have graced my triumph or I should have been in a confounded scrape.”

That is Nelson’s mental portrait drawn by himself. No half measures would ever do for him, and in most of the letters that he sent home from his various scenes of action, whether they were written to his wife, his private friends, or the Lords of the Admiralty, we find the constant complaint, made with an insistence amounting almost to petulance, that when he saw complete triumph within his grasp his superiors either would not help him to secure it or forced him to be content with a mere temporary advantage.

Under such circumstances it was only natural that such a man should now and then break loose. He saw quite plainly that there were confused councils at home, and timid tactics afloat. He saw also that under Napoleon the power of France was growing every day.

The Board of Admiralty was apparently both corrupt and incompetent. The Mediterranean fleet had been so shamefully neglected that after Nelson had fought an action off Toulon even he was afraid to risk another without the certainty of victory because there was “not so much as a mast to be had east of Gibraltar,” and he could not possibly have re-fitted his ships. It was about this time that he said in one of his letters home:

“I am acting, not only without the orders of my commander-in-chief, but in some measure contrary to him.”

If the authorities at home had only had the same opinion of his abilities as those had who were able to watch his operations on the spot, and particularly in Italy, it is quite possible that the whole history of Europe might have been changed and that Napoleon would never have won that series of brilliant victories which cost such an infinity of blood and treasure, and which bore no fruits but such as resembled all too closely the fabled Dead Sea apples.

Nelson’s patriotism may have been of a somewhat narrow-minded order, and his hatred of the French may have partaken somewhat of the nature of bigotry, but there can be no doubt that he was the one man in Europe who saw what was coming and had the ability, if he had only had the power, to save the world from the horrors of the Napoleonic wars.

Thus, for instance, if his advice had been taken, the splendid victory of Aboukir Bay might have been turned into the decisive battle of the war which only ended with Waterloo. As it was, he to some extent took the law into his own hands. He saw perfectly well that Napoleon’s ultimate point of attack was not Egypt but India. He sent an officer with dispatches to the Governor of Bombay, advising him of the defeat of the French Fleet, and in this dispatch he said:

“I know that Bombay was their first object if they could get there, but I trust that now Almighty God will overthrow in Egypt these pests of the human race. Buonaparte has never yet had to contend with an English officer, and I shall endeavour to make him respect us.”

In another dispatch to the Admiralty he taught a lesson which we have only lately begun to learn. In those days of the old wooden-walls the handy, light-heeled frigate was to the ships of the line what the swift cruisers of to-day are to the big battleships. They were the eyes and ears of the fleet, and they could be sent on errands which were impossible to the huge three-deckers. After the battle of the Nile was won he said in this dispatch:

“Were I to die this moment _want of frigates_ would be found stamped on my heart. No words of mine can express what I have suffered, and am suffering, for want of them.”

The inner meaning of these bitter words was one of vast importance, not only to Britain, but to all Europe. They meant really that the most splendid victory that had so far been won at sea had been robbed of half its results. For want of the lighter craft, even of a few bomb-vessels and fire-ships which he had implored the authorities to send him, Napoleon’s store-ships and transports in the harbour of Alexandria escaped attack and certain destruction.

Their destruction would have enabled Nelson to carry out the policy which his genius had told him was the only true one to pursue at this momentous crisis. He would have cut off Napoleon’s communications and deprived him of his supplies. Then he would have blockaded the Egyptian Coast and left the future conqueror of Austerlitz to perish amidst the sands of Egypt. As he said to himself: “To Egypt they went with their own consent, and there they shall remain while Nelson commands this squadron--for never, never will he consent to the return of one ship or Frenchman. I wish them to perish in Egypt and give an awful lesson to the world of the justice of the Almighty.”

This was a pitiless pronouncement, but no one who has read the history of the Napoleonic wars can doubt the accuracy of Nelson’s foresight or the true humanity of his policy, for, if this had happened only a few thousands out of the five million lives which these wars are computed to have cost would have been lost. There would have been no Austerlitz, or Wagram, or Jena for France to boast of; but, on the other hand, there would have been no Leipsic, no Moscow, and no Waterloo.

As usual, however, Nelson, although he had magnificently restored the credit of the British arms at sea, was crippled by shortness of means and baulked by the stupidity and incompetence of his masters at home. Sir Sidney Smith’s policy was preferred to his, with the result that Napoleon was permitted to desert his army and live to become the curse of Europe for the next seventeen years.

But, if he did not do all he wanted to do, when Nelson won the battle of the Nile he completely established his claim to be considered one of the Empire-makers of Britain, for if he had not followed the French with that unerring judgment of his, and if he had not, in defiance of all accepted naval tactics, attacked them in what was considered to be an unassailable position--that is to say, moored off shore in two lines with both ends protected by batteries--all the work that Clive and Hastings had done in India might have been undone, and, considering the miserable state of our national defences, we might either have lost India or had to wage such an exhausting war for it that we could not possibly have taken the decisive share that we afterwards did in the overthrow of the French power.