515. Nelson: Attack the French! (Part 2)

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For the first time, Nelson realised what he was up against.

This was nothing like the American War,

for the French Revolution had unleashed something much darker and more terrifying.

The unbridled fury of a fanatical mob. The savage passion of a people bent on slaughter.
Suddenly, he thought of home. Of his father and Fanny and the little church at Burn and Thorpe and the gentle fields and sleepy villages of England.
And at that moment, he knew he could not rest until these monsters were beaten. But high above Toulon's smoking ruins, a man in a blood-stained uniform gazed coldly across the harbour and on the face of Napoleon Bonaparte was a thin, cruel smile of satisfaction.
So that was a wholly unbiased perspective on the siege of Toulon in 1793, written by a top historian of the French Revolution, Dominic, namely yourself. And this is from your new book for children, instilling in them a due sense of patriotism and suspicion of French revolutionary fervor.
And what's it called? Nelson, God of the Seas? Nelson, Hero of the Seas. Nelson, Hero of the Seas.
The latest volume, Tom, in the best-selling Adventures in Time series. And I think people will say scrupulously fair and forensically researched.
So what I will say is that we've done, how many episodes have we done now of the French Revolution? 13, I think. Yeah.
And it's good that you're absolutely letting everyone know what your perspective on the French Revolution is, in case anyone had been in any doubt. It's not necessarily my perspective, Tom.
It's Horatio Nelson's perspective. Ah, that's what it is.
That's what it is, you see. That's what it is.
This is what a great literary artist does. He takes you into the minds of his characters.
So today, Nelson is going to war. And we left him at the end of our first episode.
France has declared war on Britain. This means that the Royal Navy must be summoned to serve both as sword and shield.
And Nelson has been given a ship, hasn't he? Yes. The Agamemnon.
Yes. So let's remind ourselves, Tom, where we we got to the french have declared war on britain we're at the beginning of 1793 and captain nelson who is 34 years old this slender sickly man but a man who is fired by a really extraordinary sense of self-belief kind of churchillian actually the kind of self-belief that in a lesser person would be the act of a lunatic.
But Nelson can talk the talk, he can walk the walk as people say. A God-given mission.
Exactly. So in February 1793, we find him at Chatham Dockyard, probably your favourite dockyard.
It is my favourite dockyard, yes. Preparing his new ship for sea, and this is the Agamemnon.
We talked in the last episode that Nelson is the embodiment of something bigger, and so is the Agamemnon. It was 12 years old.
It was built of English oak, 200 feet long, 50 feet wide. I mean, this is a very, very expensive and high class piece of hardware.
Kit, isn't it? Exactly. Hardware.
And his job, I know you love victuals and supplies. I do because it's so important.
We touched on this in the previous episode, but just to reiterate, a ship cannot spend long times at sea unless it is very well supplied. So Nelson makes sure that the Agamemnon, you know, there's biscuit and there's flour and water and beer and wine.
And I mean, they actually bring on bullocks, live bullocks at times, but also you have to keep people supplied with fruit. So this is where the American term for the English limeys comes from, because Royal Navy vessels are loaded down with limes and oranges and lemons and all kinds of things to keep scurvy at bay.
And Nelson understands this as well as anybody in the Navy. And his men are always incredibly healthy.
And this is something that, you know, you have a lot of initiative as captain captain. So it's not just that you take what is given to you.
You have to order a lot of this stuff yourself. So he has ordered the wine, the port, the sherry.
He's ordered the tea and Turkish coffee, a keg of tongues, which sounds a little bit intimidating. But also, this would appeal to you, Tom, since you're always interested in the religious dimension to history.
Nelson goes out of his way to order hundreds of prayer books and hymn books for his crew from the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge. Because he is, of course, a vicar's son, and he believes that regular services, which some captains are not brilliant at keeping up.
Nelson is very keen to keep them up because he thinks it's really important. Well, I suppose it builds a sense of community, doesn't it? Absolutely, it does.
And it reassures everybody on board that God is an Englishman, which is very important when fighting the French. Yeah, which is, as we will see from this story, it certainly appears to be.
So to get his crew, again, for an officer, for a captain, the onus is really on you to find a lot of your crew. So he puts up posters and hands out pamphlets in Norfolk.
He gets a lot of people from Norfolk. For his lieutenants, he gets old friends from his days in the Caribbean.
As his midshipman, as the kind of apprentice officers, he gets the sons of well to do Norfolk families. So people that he might owe a favor to or people that are friends of his father or something like that.
And one of these is his stepson. Josiah.
Who is 13. Yes.
Good and bad news for Josiah. The good news is he is big, he's strong, he's manly, he's very enthusiastic.
The bad news is that by common consent, Josiah is absolutely useless and a complete and utter waste of space. Well, although he will feature heroically at the end of this episode.
He will do. So that's why it's important to bring him in now.
So bear that in mind. Of course, there are press gangs that go out.
There are press gangs. But by and large, Nelson has a good reputation and so people want to serve with him because they know that he will do right by them, that there's a good chance of winning prize money.
So this is a crucial part of what you want. Anyone who's read Patrick O'Brien's novels will be familiar with the fact that Royal Navy captains are always looking for the chance to make a bit of extra money by capturing enemy ships.
And generally, there's a feeling that Nelson is someone you want to serve with. He will look out for you.
He will do right by you. And that's incredibly important.
It is very important. And the thing about doing right, we don't know many details of a lot of the crew.
We just know the names and the muster rolls. But we do know, I think this is a lovely detail, that he took 20 ships' boys from London's Marine Society, which was a charity that basically gave poor and destitute boys a second chance at sea.
So they're all from broken homes or they're from troubled backgrounds. Of these 20 boys, we know that only six of them could read and write.
They are undoubtedly malnnourished small for their age and they're given by the charity a little sea outfit with a comb and a needle and thread and some clothes and all the rest of the details of their lives are kind of lost to us so we have to imagine these 20 boys on the ship with the prayer books with the keg of tongues and all the limes and whatnot. And they're probably better fed, healthier and better looked after

than thousands of boys would have been back home in Britain.

Yeah, well, so just on the topic of health again, because it is so important.

N.A.M. Rogers, a great historian of the Navy,

he said that sailors in the Royal Navy must have been the healthiest body

of British subjects in the world.

And since Nelson is particularly attentive to this, probably, you know, the sailors on the Agamemnon are even healthier than the vast mass of sailors. And you were talking about boys, we don't know much about them, but they're, of course, the midshipmen, these little boys, you know, 13 years old when they first sign up.
We have a record from one of them when he set sail with the Agamemnon. And he wrote to his father and said, Nelson is acknowledged to be one of the first captains in the service and is universally beloved by his men and officers.
Oh, that's nice. So that's good to know, isn't it? Yes, that's very good to know.
So they set off. They join Admiral Hood's squadron off the coast of Cornwall.
That's about 50 ships of them. And of those 50 ships, 18 of them are what are called ships of the line.
That means they are fighting ships. The rest of them are frigates and kind of support ships and things.
And this is a taste of Britain's naval might, because actually at that point in 1793, there are more than 600 ships of various kinds in the Royal Navy. There are 14,000 guns.
There are 100,000 men. So this is a mighty, mighty enterprise.
Britain does not like fighting wars on land. Britain's strategy is always, we will basically give subsidies to whoever it might be, the Austrians, the Prussians, to do the fighting for us.
Which is what they've done in the Seven Years' War, haven't they? To great effect. To great effect in the Seven Years' War.
And this is what we are hoping to do again. And I think the strategy at this point, so for William Pitt, for the other British politicians, they are thinking, you know, maybe this will be another three, four, five year war.
We'll get the Austrians and the Prussians to take care of the French on land. We'll do the business by sea.
And then hopefully it'll be done and dusted. And this revolutionary nonsense will be put to bed.
Because unlike Goethe, they haven't been at the Battle of Valmy and seen a new age

of humanity beginning. So they don't fully appreciate what they're up against.
I think

that's absolutely right. If you'd said to them, you're going to be at this for what, the next

best part of 20 years, 22 years? I mean, they would not have believed you. Anyway, Admiral Hood

has been given the Mediterranean squadron. And the task of this squadron is to go down into the Med

to aid the Austrians in Italy

and to strengthen the bonds with other smaller European powers who might be useful allies.

So a good example is the Kingdom of Naples, which of course will play a very prominent role in

Nelson's life. So off they go.
And by the summer of 1793, they have reached Toulon, which is the

major French naval base on the south coast of France. I mean, basically, just to emphasize, I mean, essentially, Toulon is France's Mediterranean sea power.
Without Toulon, France cannot operate in the Mediterranean. Absolutely right.
So Toulon, as people may remember who listened to our series about young Napoleon, Toulon is a city in turmoil. There has been a royalist uprising in Toulon.
And when Hood arrives, he sends a message to the royalists. And he says, listen, if you hand over your dockyards, your ships and your forts to the Royal Navy, I will protect you.
And I will guarantee you against the revolutionary, the Jacobin armies. And amazingly, they say, OK, that sounds like a good deal.
Let's do it. And at a stroke, Hood has won control, or so it seems, of France's preeminent southern naval base.
However, getting Toulon is one thing, but keeping it is a bit more tricky. Toulon is kind of stuck between the mountains and the sea.
It can't really supply itself, so they need need supplies and as you were saying before nobody is better at kind of getting limes rustling up a few lemons a few bullocks there than nelson and so admiral hood says to nelson look can you go over please to naples king ferdinand there is pretty sympathetic to us well i mean very sympathetic yeah firstly because he's a king. Yes.
And, you know, as a king, he knows what happens to kings with French revolutionaries. In particular, his wife, his queen, Maria Carolina, is the sister of Marie Antoinette.
So she really knows what she's up against. She hates the revolution with an absolute burning, white-hot passion.
Well, understandably. I mean, Ferdinand's a terrible man.
There's nothing he enjoys more. I mean, he'd be up there with Franz Ferdinand and the Kaiser.
I mean, he loves shooting animals of every description. I think that's a very harsh comparison.
No, no, no. Well, okay.
He's worse, isn't he, really? He's far worse. He'll piss in a chamber pot and then throw it at his servants.
He will. And there's a notorious occasion where he made his coachman swallow a live frog.
He's a terrible man. Franz Ferdinand never did that.
No, he did not. We'll put that on the record.
I couldn't believe it when you brought Franz Ferdinand into this, because Ferdinand IV is a shocking man. Anyway, Nelson arrives outside Naples.
Now, of course, to somebody like Nelson, even though he's well-traveled, Naples must have been an extraordinary sight. So beneath Vesuvius, smouldering over the bay.

And Naples is one of the biggest cities in Europe at this point.

Third after London and Paris.

It is a confusing, chaotic jumble of palaces and churches.

It's a city of contrasts, I think.

A city of...

Yeah, where's the Neapolitan tourist board?

It's a place seething with excitement and tension and drama.

A very melodramatic kind of place. When he gets there, he meets...
Well, he meets one person who's not very melodramatic and another person who is. The person who isn't is the British envoy to Naples, Sir William Hamilton.
He featured in the second season of Love Island. Yes, of historical Love Island.
Britain's most famous cookhold, but that's preempting the story. I'm not a massive fan of Sir William Hamilton.
I think he's a bit of a drip, actually. He's not a drip.
I think he's a drip. I think he's a drip.
Tremendous contribution to classical scholarship. So that's wonderful.
Exactly. You arrive and he's just going to talk to you about the Etruscans.
Well, unless you're Mozart, in which case he would host you. Yeah, he would.
But I'm not. I'm not interested in volcanoes.
And he's passionately interested in volcanoes. But also you love a monkey, don't you? He kept a pet monkey.
Yeah, but I mean, I'd expect that from everybody in Naples. I think that's...
And he has tremendous tastes in women. Well, Emma Hamilton is his much younger wife.
I'm not a massive fan of Emma Hamilton, as you will know, Tom. There we disagree.
She is a lady with a colourful past. You've put down here strumpet.
Well, okay. I mean, she was.
Yeah, yeah. Am I wrong? Tell me I'm wrong.
No, but you know, a girl's got to do what she What she's got to do And again We've mentioned Goethe Goethe's a big fan of her She does these Kind of classical poses She's very brave She's very loyal She's very warm hearted And I think above all She is fun She's also Narcissistic Cruel Attention seeking And incredibly annoying Well you can't be everything We're going to future episode on this. Let's now get bogged down.
This is clearly going to be the point at which the rest of this history falls apart. They really take to Nelson.
They think Nelson is brilliant. And they promote his interests with the king and queen.
They say, come on, make sure you give him everything he needs. So off he goes back to Toulon.
When he gets back to Toulon, he discovers, oh no, terrible scenes. A fellow called Bonaparte, Corsican artillery officer, has got all these guns up to the heights.
He's bombarding the forts. The defences of Toulon are cracking.
Nelson's not there to see the fall of the city. Hood sends him off to patrol the coast of Italy, but he's in Livorno.
Leghorn. Leghorn, as the British call it, where the first boatloads of refugees arrive and he is shocked by their condition.
He writes to Fanny. He says, fathers are here without families, families without fathers.
Terrible scenes. They've had to evacuate Toulon.
The French have seized it. And of course the French, they sack the city.
Well, because it's full of counter-revolutionaries and this is the kind of the peak of of the terror. So actually, I thought this might be a chance to think about those two characters, because Nelson and Napoleon are often thought of in opposition to each other, aren't they? Well, you know the Abel Gantz film, the famous black and white film? And there's a sequence where Napoleon is fleeing Corsica with his family and a Royal Navy ship.
An officer sees it through his telescope and says, should we fire? And his captain says, no, let's not let them be. They won't do any harm.
It's Nelson. Nelson.
It's Nelson. And Nelson had wanted to finish off Napoleon.
So even in France, I guess there's a kind of recognition that Nelson is perhaps Napoleon's only worthy adversary. Well, Napoleon later on, when he moved into the Tuileries Palace, he genuinely had a little bust of Nelson.
Yeah, he's a great rival. And I think one of the interesting things about them, they are both enormous egotists.
So we were talking about Nelson's great sense of his own star quality. I mean, the only person who really rivals that in the politics of the late 18th century is Napoleon, who also believes himself to be a star and is driven by this gigantic overweening ambition.
And actually, I think one of the big differences between them is that Nelson is constrained by his institutional fealty. So he's within an institution that channels it.
I think also by temperament, I mean, he's not interested in political power. No, you're right.
He's a conservative, small C conservative. He wants to maintain and uphold the frameworks.
I mean, he's a Burkean really. Yeah, he is.
And also I think he's not a warmonger. He enjoys the excitement of command.
He recognizes that he will profit personally from war. But throughout this period, he does think that Britain should be making peace, you know, on fair terms, of course.
He's not committed to war, I think, in the way that Napoleon is. But having said that, there is a parallel because what Nelson wants to do at sea, in other words, win a complete victory, annihilate the enemy.
That is what Napoleon is aiming to do on land. And just as that is what is going to enable Napoleon to establish French rule over Europe.
So also Nelson understands that the kind of victories that he's after are essential if Britain is to survive and maintain its command of the seas. Agreed.
But in the short term, they actually need a new base in the Mediterranean now that too long has gone. And as it happens, the ideal place is Napoleon's homeland.
It's Napoleon's birthplace of Corsica. So Admiral Hood says, right, we'll go for Corsica because that's the perfect base.
It's between France and Italy. Let's go for that.
So in the spring of 1794, they target Bastia, first of all, on the eastern coast. They're bombarding the city wars.
Nelson's in the thick of the action. There is a moment when he is almost killed.
So an enemy musket ball smashes into a boulder right next to him. Huge splinters fly everywhere and they fly right past him, almost hit him.
And had they hit him, there is a good chance that could have been that. Well I mean he will of course be hit in due course.
Yeah and it's a reminder actually of how for all the sort of swashbuckling side of it this is a really serious business. You know one mischance one misstep just like putting your head above the parapets in the trenches in the First World War or something and that can be it over.
I mean that's the nature of naval warfare. And also just to point out that Nelson is always in his full uniform.
Yes. Because he feels it's the responsibility of an officer to essentially attract attention so that his men know where he is.
Yes. He leads from the front.
He is not an officer. In fact, when he's given opportunities to, oh, why don't you stay at the back and direct us from there? He always says, no, I have to be at the front.
Well, in a sea battle, it is expected that British officers will stand up. Everyone else can kind of, you know, crouch down as the bullets whistle.
An officer has to stand up. I mean, it requires insane levels of bravery.
And of course, in the long run, it will be fatal for Nelson, but in the very long run. So then Bastia falls, they move on to Calvi on the western coast of Corsica.
This is the last French fortress on the island and it's going to be a really tough nut to crack. It's backed by mountains.
They have 100 guns at Calvi and Nelson knows it will be difficult. He actually writes at this point to Fanny, a brave man dies but once, a coward all his life long.
We cannot escape death and should it happen, recollect that it is the will of him in whose hands are the issues of life and death. That's very Nelson.
He's kind of not exactly fatalistic, but he's realistic about the dangers. Or you could say he has a feeling that God has.
God is with him, that his life is in God's hands. So it's slow work.
Nelson again leading from the front and bombardment. And it's early on the morning of the 12th of July when the enemy batteries open up.
And Nelson talking to his officers and a French shot slam into the sandbags they've got heaped around them. And actually what happens is it sends up a huge spray of stones and shrapnel right into Nelson's face.
Do you know, Dominic, I've seen the very spot. Have you? I've been to the very spot and there is a marble plaque written in French.
Yeah. And it's absolutely pepper holes and I thought that's the Corsicans showing their contempt for Nelson but then of course I realised that every sign of Corsica is peppered with bullet holes it's nothing personal the lovely thing about that is it completely contradicts what Theo has written in the chat because Theo who's been chafing and fuming during the whole of this recording has written no one in France knows who Nelson is genuinely even heard of him.
Well, I suppose the Corsicans would say that Corsica isn't really France. I suppose they would.
Maybe they haven't heard of him because the signs are all peppered with bullet holes. Who knows? Yeah, maybe.
Anyway, he collapses. He is in agony.
His hands go to his eyes. He's immediately taken to the doctors, to the surgeons.
From this point onwards, he can never again see out of his right eye his

right eye has been hit with sand and all this rubbish and it's that's it it's gone so dominic

to be honest i think we've had quite enough drama as it is for this half so let's take a break at

this thrilling point and when we come back we'll see whether nelson recovers from his eye injury

or whether he retires and no one ever hears of him again. Hello, welcome back to The Rest is History.
We left you on absolute tenterhooks wondering whether the injury to his eye that Nelson sustained at the siege of Calvi will finish off his career, whether he will never be heard of again. Dominic, does it finish off his career? Or will we be hearing more of this promising young captain, Horatio Nelson? Fareed is keen to get stuck into Nelson Hero of the Seas.
I'm very happy to say that this is not the end of his career. What's amazing is that he doesn't even enter the injury in the ship's logs or even put himself on the official list of the wounded and he essentially

tells her oh it's just a scratch yeah i mean that's what he writes to fanny literally just a little scratch but he's not telling her the truth he's deliberately hiding the fact that he will never be able to see out of that eye again and actually he never wears an eye patch or anything like that and it's not that he'd lost his eye his eye is there but it looks just a little cloudy It's cloudy, doesn't it?

And he can only see out of his left eye.

Calvi falls.

So Corsica is now in britain's hands and then there is a sort of a lull as is so often the case with naval wars they're basically sent off to blockade and to faff around on the coast of italy blockading when the french when they appear stopping the french interfering endless kind of blockades of leghorn out there i mean that's what it's all about a lot of stuff in Leghorn, in Livorno. At the French, when they appear, stopping the French interfering.
It's endless kind of blockades of leghorn, aren't there? I mean, that's what it's all about. A lot of stuff in leghorn, in Livorno.
At this point, it seems pretty likely that Nelson, a lot of the sailors, of course, when they go on land, you know, in every port. Exactly.
They carouse in various ways, should we say. And it seems very likely, I think, there's an opera singer called Adelaide Correglia that Nelson had either a flirtation or a full-blown relationship with.
I think pretty clearly he did. Because he's jealous of another officer, isn't he, when this other officer sits next to her at dinner or something like this.
There are trace elements in the sources of a relationship. So he's then just faffing around for a long time, nothing happening.
There's been a the top so admiral hood one of his patrons is gone and a guy called admiral william hotham comes in and he's just a bit old and a bit sickly and he's nice isn't he he's a decent he's not a man for charging at enemy lines no he's the kind of what we have we hold let's be careful let's not you know make any silly mistakes and that's not Nelson at all he's very much the kind of admiral I would have been oh you know let's just take it let's take it easy yeah no not take it easy but I just don't you know I don't want to fancy it a bit worried what do you think I'd have been Tom well I'll tell you who I think you would be but we'll come to him in the second half oh I can't wait very imminently exciting so um there is an exciting moment because they hear reports of French sails off the coast of Genoa. They all shoot out and they track them down and they catch up with them.
And Nelson then shows tremendous courage. So just two things to say about this.
The first is that the French sails, I mean, they have a tremendous array of revolutionary names. So one of them is called the Saint-Ira.
Yeah, the revolutionary song. It will be fine.
Yeah, the revolutionary song. And that's the kind of absolute monster, isn't it? It's the largest two-decker ship in the world.
So absolutely enormous ship. But another ship is called the Saint-Colot.
So Nelson can have no doubt that he is facing a revolutionary fleet. But also the other thing to say, Nelson has been in the Navy by this point for 24 years, and he's never seen a fleet in action.
This is his first engagement in a battle. I hadn't thought about that, but it's true.
Yeah. So you can imagine he is so excited.
He can't wait, can he? He gets stuck in. He says, right, we'll go straight for, what do you think he goes for? The Saira, the largest two-decker ship in the world.
84 guns, completely outgunning his own ship, Agamemnon. And do you know who this is very bad news for? The French.
It's bad news for the French but it's also very bad news for the seven bullocks that he has on board. Oh no, do they have to throw them overboard? Throw them overboard.
Because when they beat to quarters and when they clear the decks for action, that often means that the livestock are just jettisoned. Just piled overboard.
Yeah. Yeah.
So he sails right up to the satyra. Nelson thinks he will hold his fire until the last moment.
You know, get in position so that every shot will count. And then he turns his ship and lets fly, firing again and again, pouring these broadsides into the sides of the satyra.
And because the satyra is so large, the agamemnon is much faster. It is deadly.
It's like a kind of cobra striking at an elephant. Well, one of the sailors says that the Sagira could have swallowed up the Agamemnon.
But it doesn't matter. I'll tell you what John Sugden wrote about this, about the broadside, that it was no amateur broadside, but a performance no other ship in the Mediterranean could have surpassed.
I mean, that's the pinnacle of training that Nelson has brought his crew to. And it's lethal, isn't it? It's incredibly effective.
The fighting goes on all day. The Saira is effectively crippled.
They then have a kind of break to have a sleep and then they continue the next morning. It's like a test match.
Yeah, it is. I mean, a lot of battles are like this though, aren't they? They They take days.
The Sahara has got away and it's being towed or escorted by a smaller ship called the Sanseur. And Nelson catches up with them again.
He blasts them again. And the noise so deafening that in Genoa, people think that they can hear a storm coming from across the sea.
And about 11 o'clock on the morning of the second day of the test, the two French ships strike their colours. That means they haul down their colours, they surrender.
And this to have captured two ships. Yeah, amazing.
And especially one that's the largest two-decker in the world. Exactly.
So the measure of Nelson's success is that he has lost three men. Four of his men are wounded, but the French have lost over 100.
And I think that it confirms Nelson's sense that attack is always the best policy, because he now tested his assumption that British gunnery is better than French. And specifically, I think he feels that the Republican Navy, it's lost lots of its officers, it's lost lots of its self-confidence, is pretty deficient in fighting spirit relative to his own men.
Yeah, I think that's true. And so that kind of absolutely confirms for him that faced with an enemy fleet, go for it.
That's exactly what he thinks. And he then says to Admiral Hotham, right, we've got these, let's go for the rest of the French fleet.
And Hotham says, no, I don't think we will. He says, and I quote, we must be contented.
We've done very well. And Nelson is gutted by this because he felt this was an opportunity to go after the French fleet and to knock them out of this part of the Mediterranean.
And Hotham, as far as he sees it, has been neglectful. He has not taken the chance.
But Nelson is the kind of commander who thinks that whenever you get the slightest glimmer of a chance, you must always, always go for it. So the Nelson touch, and that's what Hotham lacks.
But fortunately, Hotham gets replaced, Christmas 1795, by a new commander. And this is the man who featured in the opening passage that I read at the head of this episode.
And this is John Jervis. And John Sugden, great biographer of Nelson, has a tremendous description of Jervis.
His toad-like figure consisted of a stocky body, an expanding paunch propped up on thick tree trunk legs. But in case you think that this is a man who's not qualified to command a fleet, I mean, he really is.
He's called Old Oak. Basically, he seems hewn out of English oak.
And I think that if I'm a Hotham, you Dominic. Oh, Tom, that's kind.
I love John Jervis. I wouldn't say I was toad-like, but I mean, I suppose I'll just have to suck it up.
I think if you want to be compared to oak, you also have to suck that up. I mean, what I wrote about him myself was he had no patience for slackness and openly berated weaker men until they burst into tears.
Yes. Is that how I behave? Yes.
Oh, that's well. Can I do Chatham High Street? No.
On the other hand, he could be kind to his men and love playing practical jokes on his junior officers. Well, Theo will vouch for that.
Well, anyway, Jervis, I think he's a terrific commander.

He's a bit of a martinet, maybe.

He is, but he's brilliant at spotting talent lower down.

So recognizing captains who have it and saying, yeah, I'm backing you.

And obviously this is brilliant for Nelson, isn't it?

So he comes in, he says, look, this is a shambles.

The ships are all dirty.

He orders soap.

He says, wash the ships.

There's too much drinking.

There's girls on board.

You've let the standards slip.

Nelson and the other younger captains love Jervis.

They're like, brilliant.

This is a guy who will take the war to the French however at this point the French also have a new commander and this is the man who we last encountered looking out over with his thin cruel smile yes that is Napoleon Bonaparte so bonaparte has taken the war in italy by storm he has smashed the austrians west of genoa he's got into milan he's crushed the army of the pope this is all in the spring of 1796 and he is rolling up the allied forces on land and by doing that he's rolling up the ports exactly the can visit. So Genoa closes its harbour to the Royal Navy.
The Royal Navy are forced out of Genoa. Then the Spanish, who had previously been on the other side, change sides and say, actually, we're going to back the French after all.
Shocking behaviour from Spain, isn't it? Very bad behaviour from Spain. So Nelson has this, Nelson comments on what's going on.
We English have to regret that we cannot always decide the fate of empires on the sea. Yes, well, I mean.
I suppose that is the lesson, isn't it? It is the lesson, absolutely. Command of the sea can keep you safe, but it can't win you the war necessarily.
Exactly. And then in the autumn of 1796, Jervis gets orders from London.
And these orders, he can't have been completely surprised, but he's clearly very disappointed. The orders are withdraw from Corsica, shut down your operations in the Mediterranean, pull back to Gibraltar.
The Mediterranean is lost. You know, we have lost, the Mediterranean campaign has all been- So it's a defeat.
I mean, it's a palpable defeat. And Nelson is devastated by this.
He writes to Fanny and he says, the tragedy of all this is,'ve actually never been fitter. We've never been better disciplined.
We have a really good commander in Jervis, but we are scuttling out of the Mediterranean with our tails between our legs. And it's dishonorable, he says, to the dignity of England.
And he's not wrong. It is dishonorable to the dignity of England.
Jervis gives him one last job, says there's a British garrison on the island of Elba, of course, an island that will feature later in the story. He says, go off to Elba and get this garrison, which he does.
On the way back, there's a skirmish with a couple of Spanish frigates. And it's during this skirmish that he first is really acquainted with a young lieutenant because he's on a ship now called the Minerv because the Agamemnon is being repaired.
There's a lieutenant on the Minerv called Thomas Masterman Hardy. And Hardy is a slightly sort of wooden figure himself, isn't he? Huge man, huge, slow, stooping.
Like a kind of ox. Ox is exactly it.
But Hardy works incredibly works incredibly hard he's incredibly brave and he's very loyal to Nelson well and also Hardy basically sacrifices himself he gets captured by the Spanish and to ensure that Nelson can get away with all his prizes and things like that so Nelson owes him one then Hardy goes overboard and they go back and have a look for him So Nelson has saved Hardy's life So they are kind of bonded by that In a way that will keep them together Right the way up to the very last minutes of Nelson's life The mix of those two men They become the huge man and the much smaller man They become a sort of bit of mice and men also They become quite a good kind of double act Don't they't they well it's asterix and obelix exactly yes asterix and obelix is a good comparison in the meantime nelson is now heading back towards gibraltar and there he has been told rendezvous with jervis's fleet off the southwestern coast of portugal but they've had news the spanish fleet has set sail they think it is going to head west through the stra. It's going to head somewhere into the Atlantic and there it may well link up with the French fleet off the coast of Brittany and form this great armada.
And basically the British desperately want to intercept the Spanish fleet before this can happen. So as they're going through the Straits of Gibraltar, you know, it's very dark and foggy, incredibly thick fog.
Nelson and his lookouts are kind of scouring the horizon for the spanish and overnight on the 11th of february the lookouts on the minerv say we can hear voices in the fog we can hear we can see lights and it sounds a bit spanish and it sounds yeah and they realize they are literally sailing through the Spanish fleet. But in the fog, with their own lights dimmed and making no noise, they have not yet been detected.
So on they go through the fog. Eventually the fog clears.
Dawn comes. The lookout spot the masts of Jervis's fleet, which is waiting off Cape St.
Vincent. And Nelson races to get to Jervis's fleet to tell him the news.
And Jervis is waiting impatiently aboard his flagship for news of the Spanish so that he can begin the attack. And Dominic, what is the name of Jervis's flagship? Its name, Tom, is Victory.
Well, absolute scenes. So the fleets are lining up off the Cape of St.
Vincent and what will ensue the following day is one of the most extraordinary and heroic battles in the entire history of the Royal Navy. And we will be coming to that in our next episode.
And if you simply can't wait, and honestly, I wouldn't be able to wait for it. You can, of course, hear it straight away if you're a member of the Rest is History Club.

And if you're not, you can go to therestishistory.com and sign up there.

If not, it will be out very soon in due course.

So we will see you very soon on the high seas to meet with the Spanish fleet.

Bye bye.