Conjuror of victory

THE bicentennial of the battle of Trafalgar does not fall until October 21st. But a long season of festivities begins next week with a fleet review off Spithead involving 35 navies—including, gallantly, those of France and Spain. A battle re-enactment in the Solent will use ten tonnes of gunpowder. That's about as much as one ship, HMS Victory, Nelson's flagship, used during the battle itself, but still enough for a most satisfying pop. Along the British coast, nearly every harbour will hold some sort of activity. Events are also planned at Toulon and Cadiz, principal naval bases of France and Spain, and at St Paul's Cathedral in London, where Horatio Nelson's body was buried after the battle.

There is a flood of books too. The fascination with Nelson's battle successes and his love affair with Emma Hamilton has ensured that the Nelson industry has been flourishing for two centuries. There are more than 100 Nelson biographies, with well over ten times that number of books on the admiral and the American revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Do any of these new books really add anything to the Nelson story? Yes.

For a start—and this is somehow typical of the man—Nelson has fresh and voluble ways of telling his own story. Until not long ago historians assumed that most of Nelson's correspondence was in the public domain—notably in the seven-volume collection of letters edited by Sir Nicholas Nicolas and published in 1844-46. In 1999 the Royal Naval Museum in Portsmouth chose to test this assumption by commissioning “The Nelson Letters Project”, led by Colin White, an occasional reviewer for The Economist, who is the museum's deputy director and currently on secondment to the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, to oversee the Trafalgar festivities. By revisiting archives in Britain and elsewhere, Mr White and colleagues have unearthed 1,300 uncatalogued Nelson letters, a good 20% more than were known about before. About two-fifths of these are private correspondence to friends, colleagues and family; others have to do with intelligence and patronage. A big part of the new material is made up of copies of his orders to his captains.

While not quite the new Nelson “autobiography” that Mr White claims for it, the collection, covering all periods of Nelson's life, is nonetheless riveting. The admiral that emerges is open, engaged, alive; he writes as one imagines he spoke. Passages cut out or ignored by prudish Victorian editors show how passionately Nelson corresponded with Lady Hamilton almost to the end. A brief letter, written at sea, to one of his captains, Thomas Fremantle, underscores both his passion for her and his closeness to the officers under him. “My dear Fremantle—If you don't come here on Sunday to Celebrate the Birthday of Santa Emma Damn me if I ever forgive you, so much from your affectionate Friend as you behave on this occasion.”

Also published for the first time is the written battle plan for the Nile campaign of 1798. Nelson was chasing the French fleet that had landed Napoleon in Egypt, threatening British possessions in India. This letter anticipates the better known 1805 battle plan, “The Nelson Touch”. In large letters, boldly inked, are the words: “The Destruction of the Enemy's Armament is the Sole Object”, proof of Nelson's determination to annihilate the enemy. Perhaps the most striking new find, though, is a rough sketch from early September 1805, about the tactics Nelson intended to use against the Franco-Spanish fleet. Where Nelson intends to show how the centre of the enemy's line was to be cut, his pen digs emphatically into the paper. The spine-tingling sense, Mr White says, is of standing over Nelson's shoulder.

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Roger Knight, of the University of Greenwich, is not the first Nelson biographer to make use of new materials, but he is the most thorough. He dismisses many of the old canards about Nelson, recycled to this day out of suspect secondary sources. He does not always take Nelson at his word, letting others speak too. The result is a wonderfully clear portrait of a complex man, seen squarely in his time. There is every reason to think that this superb work will become the definitive Nelson biography.

Mr Knight's story is of how Nelson came to gain what the author calls a “psychological ascendancy” over his adversaries at sea, paralleled in history only by Napoleon on land. Mr Knight argues that very little in his early career marked Nelson out as a cut above a talented generation of young officers, bar great good luck. He was helped to sea by a naval uncle and was promoted to lieutenant at the start of the American revolutionary war, ensuring a rapid rise at a time when officers were in short supply. As a young post-captain of blatantly immature political skills, Nelson was fortunate to spend years in the West Indies rather than closer to London's riven party politics, but even abroad he earned the lasting displeasure of the king, George III, by allowing his head to be turned by the boorish, bullying Prince William Henry, later Duke of Clarence and the king's younger son.

Much later, in 1799, it was turned again by the Queen of Naples, Marie-Antoinette's sister, during Nelson's attempted defence of the kingdom, an English ally. Nelson's moral and political judgment were deeply compromised when he allowed English ships to be used as anti-republican kangaroo courts by Neapolitans seeking revenge on their compatriots. Even an admiral was hung, and English officers were appalled that their vessels had become such “engines of turpitude”. The blame was entirely Nelson's, and lay in his infatuation with Emma Hamilton, the queen's confidante.

Yet despite his flaws, Mr Knight contends, Nelson dug deeper at every stage for new skills and talents. His disgrace at Naples was redeemed two years later at the battle of Copenhagen, not just by the famous naval victory, but by a masterly diplomatic settlement immediately afterwards.

Mr Knight describes well how Nelson was, in the words of a contemporary, “in some respects, as trivial a man as ever made a name”. His vanity in always wearing the baubles awarded by foreign powers was ridiculed by his superiors. Vain he was. Yet, just like Winston Churchill with his cigar and boiler suit, Nelson understood better than they the part that decorations played in his style of leadership.

Above all, Nelson took a number of supreme battle decisions, any one of which would have earned him naval immortality. At St Vincent in 1797, he wore his ship out of the line and boarded two Spanish ships. At the Nile in 1798—perhaps his finest action—he changed the course of the war by sailing in the fading light straight into Aboukir Bay to destroy the anchored French fleet, thus isolating Napoleon's army. The stunning seamanship required, notably in anchoring by the stern in order to come to a halt opposite the French ships, was a measure of the trust in which he held his officers and men. At Trafalgar, almost a summing-up of what went before, Nelson shattered the combined fleet by taking it head-on.

Inspiration, informality and attention to detail were three of Nelson's chief priorities. As Cuthbert Collingwood, his second-in-command, wrote soon after Trafalgar: “He possessed the zeal of an enthusiast, and everything seemed, as if by enchantment, to prosper under his direction. But it was the effect of system, and nice combination, not of chance.” Mr Knight sets his Nelson in the context of an 18th-century navy where professional zeal and individualism in the pursuit of a shared goal often made up for a lack of social advantages. Nelson was of his time, for the navy later quickly became aristocratic and hierarchical. Adam Nicolson, in a strikingly original way, also attempts to set the navy at Trafalgar in a broader context. By addressing history's “underlayer”, he paints the mental landscape of the men who went into battle, asking why and how “the idea of the hero flowered here”.

Some historians will not like this approach, and not just because Mr Nicolson quotes earlier, discredited, biographers of Nelson. By the author's own confession, his is a slippery approach to history. Broadly, Mr Nicolson argues that a tradition of violence had long run through English affairs. By the end of the 18th century, the sequence of violent and revolutionary events in Europe, and the Napoleonic threat of invasion, had bred a form of millenarian fever in England, full of blood-drenched visions of the end of time, when “utter violence gives way to the moment of utter peace”. The only radical vision that an alarmed conservative elite could allow full outward expression of was that of an “unrivalled creation of a God-blessed, ragingly commercial British empire”. Nelson was seen as “the fleet-burning conjuror of victory”, though in reality he was methodical and politically conservative. The parallels of Nelsonian war with the apocalyptic Romanticism of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and even William Blake are underscored: Nelson's was the hand that dared seize the fire.

The Nelsonian essence of battle, Mr Nicolson explains, was the “liberation of individual energies to ensure victory”. There is, he suggests, a parallel between the way Adam Smith thought of economics and Nelson thought of war: the individual's uncompromising pursuit of individual ends also best serves the general good. While the Spanish fleet was marked by a peasant/aristocratic mentality, and the French fleet by an uncomfortable mix of ancient and revolutionary, “Nelson's fleet carried a capitalist charge.”

And some charge. Mr Nicolson brings to life superbly the horror, devastation and gore of Trafalgar. After the battle, and during the long storm that followed, with Nelson dead from a musket ball in the spine, English sailors performed extraordinary feats of seamanship and bravery, saving the lives of thousands of injured and exhausted opponents. Charity after victory, honour and self-restraint: these colour Britons' view of themselves today. Only Churchill—and he was not a military man—has shaped the British national sense of identity more.