about the small strutting figure, weighed down by his huge medals and his plump mistress.
Perhaps most damagingly, while on the Mediterranean station between June, 1799 and July, 1800, it was said that Nelson had become too personally involved with defending the corrupt Sicilian government at Naples, where Sir William Hamilton was Ambassador to the royal court. Here Nelson was thought to have been drawn (or perhaps seduced) into the gravest acts of political double-dealing and injustice. He was accused of disobeying orders to withdraw from Naples by Admiral Keith, of reneging on a truce signed by one of his own officers, Captain Foote, and conniving at the unjust court martial and execution of a Neapolitan patriot and naval officer Commodore Caracciolo. Worst of all, he was accused of allowing more than ninety civilian prisoners, including many women, who were officially under his protection in evacuation ships, to be returned to shore and executed in the cruellest manner by the Neapolitan authorities. Indeed some accused Nelson of war crimes in the Mediterranean.
In this glaring combination of light and shade, Nelson’s meteoric career and extraordinary seductive character offered all the moral contradictions of a peculiarly Romantic hero. But the triumph and tragedy of Trafalgar in October, 1805 meant that initially his whole reputation took on the aspect of a simple martyrdom. It was produced a period of unrestrained national mourning; a state funereal at St Paul’s attended by thirty-six admirals; and a great outpouring of Nelson tributes, reminiscences, and memorabilia.
Yet even in death Nelson provoked extreme reactions. Benjamin West, the President of the Royal Academy, painted a huge mythological tribute, with a mournful shadowy Neptune handing up the shrouded and distinctly Christ-like figure of Nelson (supported by an angel and surrounded by winged cherubs) into the arms of a resplendent and trident wielding Britannia. It was a deliberate and solemn apotheosis, perilously close to a religious Pieta.
In an altogether different spirit James Gillray executed a witty coloured cartoon, showing Nelson lying comfortably back upon the bosom of a buxom Britannia (Lady Hamilton of course, in an operatic flood of tears), while attended by a kneeling sea-captain (a grim George III) and a hysterical flag-waving midshipman (the Duke of Clarence). A sea-sprite circled overhead blowing Nelson’s own trumpet. It spouted a single word: not the expected ‘Victory’, but the self-vaunting ‘Immortality’.
6
In a newspaper article of 1811, discussing the new Romantic interest in celebrity and biography, Coleridge described these years of the English Regency as ‘emphatically, the Age of Personality’. So it was not surprising that a figure like Nelson, who seemed so much larger-than-life, was bound to exercise a fascination on people by the very vividness of his character as much as by the heroism of his actions. He had been asked to write his own autobiography as early as October, 1799, and did indeed dash off a Sketch of his life for John M’Arthur, a naval journalist working as joint-editor of The Naval Chronicle.
The result was a curious mixture of modesty and melodrama. Nelson mentions in passing the loss of eye and arm, his childless marriage, his failure to achieve spectacular prize-money (from captured ships), and his strictly local success in ‘placing the King of Naples back on his throne’. But his conclusion is like one of his battle signals hoist to the topgallant mast-head. ‘Without having any inheritance, or having been fortunate in prize money, I have received all the honours of my profession, been created a peer of Great Britain, and I may say to the reader: GO THOU AND DO LIKEWISE.’
After his death, a mass of brief memoirs were hastily published, especially dealing with disputed events at the battles of Aboukir Bay and Copenhagen, and the controversy over Nelson’s actions–and inactions–at Naples. Encouraged by Lady Hamilton, an inaccurate and highly partisan study was published by James Harrison in 1806. The following year 1807 William Beatty published his Authentic Narrative of the Death of Lord Nelson.
Then the journalist John M’Arthur joined forces with a navy chaplain and historian James Clarke, to produce a massive semiofficial assemblage of papers, The Life and Services of Horatio Viscount Nelson from his Lordships own Mss published in two enormous volumes in 1809. It drew widely on Nelson’s letters and despatches, and commissioned or republished eyewitness accounts. These volumes had the support of Lady Nelson, and were notable for the fact that they did not mention Lady Hamilton at all. They also carried, as their frontispiece to set the tone, an engraving of Benjamin West’s heroic painting.
In the following year 1810, the newly founded Quarterly Review asked one of its fiercest reviewers to make a general assessment of the state of Nelson biography. It was five years after Trafalgar, the Napoleonic war was still at its height, and a patriotic encomium might have been expected. But the reviewer chosen was unusual: the poet and one-time pro-Jacobin rebel, Robert Southey. He was given the Harrison volume, the Clarke and M’Arthur, the Beatty memoir, and several lesser studies. In a forty-two page essay published in Quarterly Review No. 5, February, 1810, Southey was highly critical of all the volumes except Beatty’s precise and moving eye-witness account. He observed that Harrison was totally unreliable, and that Clarke and M’Arthur were almost literally unreadable, as their volumes ran to thousands of pages, were five inches thick, and weighed in at almost twenty-seven pounds. The Life lacked all narrative skill and selection, did not give a convincing picture of Nelson’s character, and did not address the question of Lady Hamilton, about whom Southey appended a long and waspish footnote.
Southey concluded by making an elegant précis of Nelson’s career, and observing that none of the writers before him understood the art of biography. True biography required above all three things: ‘industry, judgement, and genius: the patience to investigate, the determination to select, the power to infer and enliven.’
Southey’s shrewd publisher John Murray (already Byron’s publisher) immediately challenged Southey to write such a biography himself. Could not Southey easily turn the 10,000-word review into short and popular portrait of Nelson, to suit the taste of wartime readers, and to inspire young sailors? If he pitched it right, Murray could print ‘a large impression’ and also count on it ‘going off as a midshipman’s manual’. He had paid a hundred guineas for the review, and he now offered a further hundred guineas for the biography, which he reckoned Southey could complete within six months.
Southey enthusiastically accepted; but almost the moment he began serious research, was assailed by doubts. What could a literary man, living in deep rural retirement with his family in the Lake District, know of naval warfare, sailing terminology, the drama of the high seas and the intricacies of maritime diplomacy? Moreover, what could a poet understand of a warrior’s temperament like Nelson’s? He wrote to his brother Tom Southey, who was the sailor in his family: ‘I am such a sad lubber that I feel half ashamed of myself for being persuaded even to review the Life of Nelson, much more to write one…I walk among sea terms as a cat does in a china pantry, in bodily fear of doing myself mischief, and betraying myself.’ It was a properly domestic and unseamanlike analogy, and one that Southey would often repeat in self-deprecation.
In fact Southey was rather better qualified than he pretended. As a young man he had indeed made his name as a Jacobin writer, and a poet of long, lurid verse romances, like Thalaba, the Destroyer (1801), and The Curse of Kehema (1810). Their length and their absurd titles suggest why Lord Byron–among others – made fun of them. The verse was execrable, and yet the story-telling was strangely compelling. Southey realised that this suggested that his prose–which his private letters already show as crisp, vivid, and wonderfully engaging–might be a stronger suit than his poetry.
So now, a family man in his mid-thirties, he had deliberately set out to re-establish himself as an historian, and had done so with great success. Murray had just published the first volume of his massive History of Brazil, which was very well-received and Southey would dedicate a further nine years to completing it in three volumes (1810-1819). It was on the basis of this work, not his poetry, that he had originally been sent the Nelson books for review and why Murray now had such confidence in him.
In fact Southey had a natural genius for shaping narrative and bold story-telling. (His children’s tale of ‘The Three Bears’ is still a favourite, partly