514. Nelson: Hero of the Seas (Part 1)

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Only available with TurboTax Live full service. On the quarter deck of his flagship, the Victory, a small slender figure gazed out at the horizon.
He wore a smart blue coat with gold-embroidered decorations and a dark cocked hat. He had only one arm, and if you looked closely, you might have noticed that his right eye was dull and sightless.
All his life he had waited for this moment. Growing up in a sleepy village at the edge of England, he had always loved stories of the sea.
He had joined the Royal Navy when he was 12, sailing to the Arctic, the Caribbean, India, and North America. He had won fame and honor in battle after battle, losing an arm and the sight in one eye, and becoming one of the most famous men in the world.
But this was the supreme challenge, the hour of destiny, a single titanic showdown to decide the mastery of the seas once and for all. He nodded to one of his lieutenants.
A moment later, the first of 31 little flags began to climb up the masts, sending a signal to the rest of the fleet. England expects that every man will do his duty.
And on ship after ship, men began to cheer, raising their voices, shaking their fists in the air, their hearts pounding with passion and pride. Now more than ever, they were ready.
And Dominic, after that reading, my heart too is pounding with passion and pride because that is the opening of your new book aimed at children but a brilliant read that I think would be hugely enjoyed by all patriotic British adults as well Nelson Hero of the Seas and you've described it as a new life and times of Britain's greatest hero out now for readers of all ages. All ages, Tom.
All ages. And I think Nelson is Britain's greatest hero.
Yes. Yes, I agree with you.
I think he's one of the most exceptional leaders that Britain ever produced. I know Lord Byron called him famously Britannia's god of war.
You think there's a different dimension to Nelson's character and it goes back to this word hero, the heroes of the classical world. So he's Britain's answer, I suppose, indeed, to these kind of mythic characters who embody something much bigger than themselves.
Well, people may remember that we did an episode on Trafalgar about three years ago. And in that, I suggested that Nelson is a kind of hero in the classical sense.
Classical heroes were terrible. And there's no question that Nelson is a great leader because he does inspire his men to fight and, of course, to kill with a terrifying sense of unbridled passion.
And in a way that seemed to Britain's enemies on the sea, most notably the French,

something kind of almost more than human.

And Adam Nicholson, who wrote a brilliant book on Trafalgar,

he described the Royal Navy under Nelson as the most effective maritime killing machine in the world.

And there is something lethal about him in the way that there was, say, about Henry V,

who we did a series on earlier.

But he is also very much a Christian hero. Nelson did not enjoy war for war's sake.
And everyone who knows about Nelson, the one thing that they'll probably remember is that his dying phrase is, kiss me Hardy. And we'll come to Hardy over the course of this series.
But Hardy wrote about Nelson, it was not a foolish passion for fighting, for he was the most gentle of all human creatures and often lamented the cruel necessity of it. But it was a principle of duty which all men owed their country in defense of her laws and liberty.
And in that duty, his record of achievement, when you come up close to it, it's just amazing. I mean, just stunning victory after stunning victory.
And it matters, I mean, vastly more than Henry V's victory, which leads to nothing. Nelson's victories, I mean, they secure Britain from invasion.
And by establishing the supremacy of the Royal Navy, which endures basically for a century, I mean, maybe even more than that, it's what enables the British Empire to become the global power that it does. It essentially provides the global shield for the process of making the world a single kind of polity.
Yeah, globalization. Globalization.
People may feel that all of these things are bad things, but also, for instance, it enables the abolitionists to use the Navy to destroy the slave trade. For good and bad, he's an incredibly momentous figure.
And I think absolutely worth

revisiting, even if you hadn't done a book about him. And also, of course, it provides an interesting

counterpoint to what we're doing in the French Revolution, because Nelson defines himself very

much against the revolution. He definitely does.
And I think it's important to say he's not just

a killing machine. He is a subtle diplomat.
Even when he's not fighting, he is a brilliant manager of men. I mean, he's a brilliant embodiment, actually, of bigger things.
We haven't done much in the rest of his history about 18th century Britain, the century in which Britain actually became the most modern country in the world, an industrial superpower. Yeah.
It's. He, I think, is a brilliant window into the story of British parliamentary government, the sinews of finance, the story of imperial expansion.
We'll obviously touch on the slave trade, but also everything that he achieves. What makes it such a great story is it's a combination of his individual genius, and I don't think genius is too strong a word, with the structures of finance, bureaucracy.
And the Industrial Revolution. Yeah.
Beyond that, this world of canals and turnpikes and mills and manufactories that has enabled Britain already in the Seven Years' War, and then will do again in the Napoleonic Wars, to overturn centuries of French hegemony and Britain to step forward as the kind of handmaiden of modernization in the world. I mean, I think he is the human embodiment of everything that is making Britain the great power that it becomes in the 19th century.
And that's why it's a telling that Hitler's plan for the occupation of Britain, if he'd secured it, would be to remove the great column of Nelson in the aptly named Trafalgar Square and take it to Berlin. Nelson, in a way, is the embodiment of Britain's sense of its own greatness in the 19th century.
But the other thing about Nelson that makes him such an appealing subject is that as well as being this remarkable naval leader, he's a very human figure. I find him quite a lovable figure, but he's also quite a comical figure at times.
His love life is often hilarious. It's colourful to say the least, isn't it? He has a tremendous sense of his own uniqueness and his own exceptionalism.
He has a star quality. He believes himself to be a star.
And of course, that can be incredibly exciting and inspirational, but it can, as you say, also be quite funny. Perhaps if I was being incredibly harsh, I would say there are moments of slight David Brent behaviour from Nelson.
Yes, when those medals seem to clank a bit too much. Yeah, exactly.
So let's get into his story. And Theo has this under a very, very strict instructions, because as Frenchman, he's terrified that this will balloon into a 20 part series.
You know, the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, the second 20 minutes.
Anyway, we talked about the sense of immense flux, immense change and progress and excitement in the 18th century. But Nelson is born into a part of the world that actually is very sleepy.
He's born in Norfolk, Burnham Thorpe, in September 1758. He's not that far from the sea, a couple of hours walk.
If he'd walked down to the sea as a little boy, he would have heard sailors speaking Dutch or German or whatever. So it is...
Kind of broad horizons. Yes, it's both kind of deep England, but it's connected to the rest of Europe.
It's a world in which most people, of course, are farm laborers. Very few in that part of Norfolk can read and write.
His father is the local vicar. So his father is the Reverend Edmund Nelson.
And I think the Reverend Edmund Nelson is quite a sweet character, isn't he? I mean, the weird thing about Nelson is he gets this incredible drive and fighting spirit from somewhere, but he definitely doesn't get it from Edmund. No.
Because Edmund just likes, you know, curling up with an improving book or sitting by the fire and musing on times gone by. Yes, toasting a slice of bread.
Exactly. With his toasting fork.
I mean, but I guess one thing that he does get from his father, who is ministering to people who are often illiterate, I guess, and quite poor, is that Nelson picks up a very hierarchical sense of how society should be ordered. Yeah, he does.
In which those who are well off, which would include, of course, the vicar, but local squires as well, are owed obedience and deference by the poor. But equally, the poor can expect to treated well by the well-off.
So it's, I suppose, a kind of very paternalistic sense of hierarchy. Yeah, absolutely.
And this, of course, is exactly what Nelson will find on the ships of the Royal Navy. A stern but kindly father.
Exactly. I think that's how he thinks a captain should be.
But a captain, like a squire, should look out for those below him. Yes, absolutely.
And Nelson is absolutely wedded to this concept. And it's what makes him very loved.
Yeah, his men know this, absolutely, and love him for it. So Nelson's mother, Catherine Suckling, she was related sort of slightly distantly to the Walpole family, a great family of Sir Robert Walpole.
So they do have family connections. They have 11 children.
Horatio is the sixth. His mother died when he was nine on Boxing Day 1767.

And she left him one great legacy, which listeners will be delighted to hear, was an intense suspicion of the French.

So Nelson once told a friend, he said, I'll never have a Frenchman on board my ship except as a prisoner.

I put no confidence in them.

Forgive me, but my mother hated the French.

So I don't know where his mother got this from. Yeah, where she got that from.
Just the general culture of the 18th century, I suppose, Tom. And his mother was just a very good judge.
Well, I suppose that France is the great enemy for Britain, even before the revolutionary period. You know, it's the great rival in the Seven Years' War.
Exactly. And it's the traditional enemy, isn't it? It is.
In a sense, an English woman does France honour by hating it, you might say. Right.
It's respect. It's respect.
It's the respect for a fearsome and sinister adversary, but one at your level. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, she's not bothering to hate the Dutch, say, or the Danes.
No, no, no. No one cares about them.
So the Reverend Nelson is now a single parent from 1767, and he needs to find places for all his children. So an older brother goes off to the tax office, the girls, he finds work

in local haberdashers and things like that. But he sends Horatio and his brother William away to

boarding school. First of all, they went to a school in Norwich, then they went to a school

called Pates Grammar School. And later on in Nelson's life, there were a whole load of

anecdotes told about his school days, which were made up. Yeah, it's kind of stuff from Plutarch, isn't it? Exactly.
But my favorite one, which I guess possibly has the ring of truth. They were in the dorm apparently one night and they were all talking about these pears that were growing on the trees in Frogger Jones's garden.
And Nelson said, oh, to the older boys, you don't have the guts to go and get them. I'll get them.
And he climbed out of the window, got all these pairs, climbed back up to the window, and then distributed them, but he didn't keep any for himself. And the boys said, why don't you want them? And he said, I don't actually like pairs.
I only took them because the rest of you were afraid. So you see, I mean, it doesn't really matter if that's true or not, because it is true, obviously, to his character.
Exactly. Which he will display later in life, in which courage is the absolute leitmotif of his achievements.
So it is kind of Plutarchan in that sense. There is no possible way that you can undervalue Nelson's physical courage.
His physical courage is extraordinary. No, unbelievable.
Yeah. The other thing he obviously took from his school days, and we can know this from his letters and whatnot, is he clearly did like Shakespeare.
And he liked in particular Henry V because he is clearly obsessed by the band of brothers speech because he refers to it again and again. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
And I think that that speaks to, that gives you a little sense of the sort of romantic yearnings I think that he has. But also, again, that kind of sense of paternalism, because Henry V speech refers to people being gentled by that sense of brotherhood.
It doesn't matter how mean you are. And Nelson is very, very keen on that.
He's very keen on helping people rise above what other people might have thought was their station. And it will benefit Nelson himself, who will end up a peer of the realm.
Absolutely, it will, yes. I mean, it's the essence of his leadership, isn't it, the Band of Brothers idea? Yeah.
So when he's 12, his father, they must have read in the newspapers or heard talk of a crisis brewing in, of all places, the Falkland Islands. Unheard of.
Where there's very bad behaviour from Spanish speakers, not for the first time or the last time, who are trying to wrest control of these very clearly British islands. What are they thinking? They hear that his uncle, so this is Catherine Suckling's brother, Morris, is going to sea.
He's an experienced Royal Navy officer, and he's taking a ship called a Raisinable to sea. And the Nons use this as an opportunity to say could you take Horatio with you you know this would be a great start for Horatio and it makes sense the Navy right because he's obviously not got the personality of a clergyman that much is clear if he's climbing out of windows and nicking pairs stealing pairs don't have that in the Church of England the army was very expensive to buy a commission in the army, but the navy is different.

The only things that Edmund, the vicar, needs to pay for, really, are his uniform and his

sea chest and a little bit of kit.

And then off he goes, because the navy is more meritocratic than the army.

Yeah.

But also, it's just sufficiently open to nepotism.

Exactly.

That it will benefit Nelson.

So as a person who's not going to be an able seaman, you join as a midshipman, don't you? Yes, you do. This is kind of like a trainee officer.
And you're not really allowed to join the Navy until you're 13. Yeah.
But Nelson gets in at the age of 12 because Morris Suckling pulls strings for him. And it's that blend of meritocracy and nepotism suits Nelson to the ground.
It does indeed. Absolutely it does.
So Morris actually at first says, why poor Horatio? Why Horatio? Why he that is so weak that he above all the rest should be sent to rough it out at sea? And that actually expresses something that is a theme throughout Nelson's career. People are always astonished when they see him.
Well, he's very slight, isn't he? And he's very sickly. He actually gets seasick.
And he's always got headaches and stomach problems and all of this kind of thing. He's got a great mop of hair that seems to weigh him down.
I mean, he looks like a schoolchild. Yeah.
Until quite later, you know, in his teens. Absolutely, he does.
And actually, Morris says, well, the first time we go into action, a cannonball may knock off his head and provide for him at once.

But I'll take him. Yeah.
And so he packs up his trunk and goes off. And Dominic, where does he head to to join the Navy and embark on his adventures at sea? I hope you're not going to bring this up every time this place recurs in the story.
This is the one time you're out to say it. He goes to Chatham.
Yeah, he does. Which is Tom's favorite place.
He goes to Chatham by coach. And yes, we will one day do a podcast all about Chatham as Tom and the Chatham tourist board desperately are hoping.
So he goes down to Chatham, which is the great dockyard. Chatham is the epitome of modernity, I guess, isn't it? With its rope works and its kind of systems for building the ships and providing for the ships and repairing them and all of that kind of thing.
Yeah, I always remember a phrase that I picked up when I read Nahum Roger, who's the great historian of the Royal Navy, when we did our episode on Trafalgar. He said that the naval establishments represented in many respects so many islands of the 19th century in the 18th century countryside.
Yeah. That a place like Chatham or Portsmouth, that this is the cutting edge of technology and industrialisation anywhere in the world.
This is the absolute smithy of British greatness because the Royal Navy is incomparable. It's the future.
It's a preview of the future. It is the future.
So Nelson goes down there and he gets on the ship, the Raisin Arbles. And Dominic, the Raisin Arbles, I mean's French.
Yeah. So presumably this is a captured French ship.
It must be a captured ship. And you'll often see that, that their ships have the wrong names.
Yeah. Because they've been captured.
Of course, each ship, just to stress this, each ship is an exceedingly expensive and modern piece of kit, of hardware. So one thing that's important to remember from the very beginning is the one thing most people don't want to do is to lose their ship because they're so expensive so to capture an enemy's ship is the ultimate and it's quite rare you know it doesn't happen as often as you would think because often sea battles are a bit inconclusive aren't they and as we'll see in Nelson's career yeah one of the extraordinary things about him is that his sea battles are never inconclusive.
Well, yes. And I think that this is a running theme that we'll explore over the series, that for most of the 18th century, the concept of a sea battle is that you line up and you fire at each other across a distance, precisely because you don't want to risk losing a ship.
But the technological advances that are being honed in the dockyards and the expertise that British gunners are able to display relative to their adversaries means that people like Nelson over the course of the 1790s are starting to think, actually, we can practice, aim for a battle of utter annihilation in which we will capture ships. And this is a key, key theme.
And Nelson basically becomes the cutting edge of that concept. He does indeed.
But for the time being, he's obviously just a midshipman. He's 12 years old.
You can imagine him on the ship, probably terrified. Who's show Nelson reporting for duty, sir? Exactly.
Nervous, but excited. And actually, when I was writing this in the Adventures in Time book, I thought to myself, this is so much the trajectory of so many great children's stories.
Tom Brown's school days. Yeah, the little boy who has to literally learn the ropes.
Yeah, of course. We know the names of the other boys.
There's one in particular called Charlie Boyles, who was also from Norfolk, who seems to have taken him under his wing. Thanks to the captain, they would have learned astronomy, navigation, gunnery.
They'd have learned to climb the ropes. They'd have learned swordsmanship, pistol shooting.
But captains usually instructed their midshipmen in other things as well, the more civilized arts. So they might learn to dance or they might learn to speak French.
But not in Nelson's case. No.
They would one day go ashore to represent Britain in Naples or in Menorca or wherever it might be. And they would be expected to be gentlemen.
So it's not just how to run the ship, it's how to be a gentleman. And actually, going back to your point about the modernity, when he's off on the Raisin Arbre, he is now part of the most modern institution of its kind anywhere in the world.
So the best financed, the best organized, the biggest bureaucracy. I mean, the headquarters at the Admiralty is the world's most modern office building.
And the reason for this, of course, and we should just spend a moment to explain why the Navy matters so much. Britain is much smaller than France.
Britain cannot possibly compete with France's land army. The way it succeeds is by trade and by the Royal Navy protecting the sea lanes that keep that trade going.
So I had a passage in my book, which I admit has a slight degree of invention, where Uncle Morris, Captain Suckling, reads Nelson, a passage from A Naval History of England, which was genuinely published in 1735 by Thomas Ledyard. Our trade is the mother and nurse of our seaman, our seaman the life of our fleet, and our fleet the security and protection of our trade, and both together are the wealth, strength, and glory of Great Britain.
And I think Nelson absolutely, you know, he goes off to the Caribbean, he goes off to India. He is the embodiment of that ethos of trade and naval power interlinked.
I mean, I think that to serve on a Royal Navy ship, it's like a constant process of education. So it's very moving that Nelson keeps a weather log from when he starts as a midshipman right the way up to his death.
And he's recording everything that he sees in terms of the weather and the behaviour of the seas and everything, because this is what will enable him to understand what he's doing. But on top of that, as you said, he's learning science.
So it's like going to MIT or something. He's learning how the economy functions.
So it's like going to business school. Obviously you're learning the art of gunnery and all that kind of stuff, but you are also seeing the world.
You're on a constant horizon expanding process of education. So if you are the kind of boy who is curious, you know, this is an amazing, amazing opportunity.
And Nelson is exactly the kind of boy who is out there to take full advantage of it. Absolutely.
And he must have been good from the beginning, because by the time he's 14, his uncle has got him. Well, first of all, his uncle gets him a birth for a time going off to the Caribbean.
We don't know much about that. It seems that as a midshipman, he would almost certainly have spent all his time pretty much on the ship, kind of fetching and carrying, learning the ropes and all that stuff.
Then he commands a longboat that goes up and down the Thames, sort of transporting men and messages, kind of visitors to the ship, people going back to London, all that kind of thing. Again, that's quite a responsibility for a 14-year-old.
And then his first really great adventure. I mean, this is the strange thing about his life.
You know, most of us would love to have one of these adventures. Nelson has so many that they all kind of, you know, he must have forgotten half of them.
But this is a tremendous one. So May 1773, one of his uncle's friends is putting together a crew to go to the Arctic because they've been told to go and find the Northeast Passage, which is basically, if you look at a map, there's this great frozen island, Spitsbergen, inside the Arctic Circle.
And they're hoping they can find a channel to the east of Spitsbergen that will take them around the top of Russia. If you go all the way around the top of Russia, you'll eventually get to Japan.
Get to Japan. Yeah.
And then China. And one of the captains of this expedition, a man with the splendid name of Skeffington Lutwidge.
Yeah, which is clearly made up. Oh, it's very Harry Potter.
He owes Uncle Morris a favor. And he says, I'll take Nelsonelson even though the admiralty has actually said please just take people who experience this is no place yeah so nelson is absolutely the youngest person on this expedition by miles yeah so they set off to the arctic and again this is a brilliant example of the navy's modernity they have pioneering sort of arctic suits called fianort suits i love that why isn't someone manufacturing them now? Fianort's a brilliant marketing word.
It is. They have huge quantities of tea and of sugar and wine and soup.
They have chronometers, sea clocks that will allow them to work out their time. The great invention.
Exactly. And off they go.
And he must have for the first time have seen seals and whales and things like that, which must be very exciting. The Royal Navy are not very good on preserving marine fauna, are they? No.
So they only have to see a walrus and they're kind of shooting it. Yeah, exactly.
And they get to Spitsbergen and whalers say to them, passing whalers say, there's very thick ice nearby, you know, watch out. But they keep going anyway because, you know, they're British.
Ah, whatever. Let's plow on.
And basically by the end of July, they've got very deep in the ice pack. It's incredibly foggy.
And there's these two ships and they keep going very slowly. It's very like the terror, if you've seen that TV drama.
Franklin Expedition, isn't it? Yeah. And then eventually they just grind to a halt and they're completely trapped in this ice.
And they hear the cracking of ice all around them. Now there's a story at this point, Tom, that I know you love, but which is undoubtedly untrue.
Would you like to tell it anyway? So the story goes, and this is reported throughout the 19th century in escalatingly dramatic terms, that Nelson ends up confronting a polar bear and he pursues it and kills it. And I'll quote from one of the Victorian accounts.
On his return, Captain Lutwidge reprimanded him for leaving the ship without leave and in a severe tone demanded what motive could possibly induce him to undertake so rash in action. The young hero with great simplicity replied, I wish, sir, to get the skin for my father.
But we know that Edmund Nelson was the kind of man who would have no business with a polar bear's skin. And as you say, we know that this didn't actually happen because we have the log.
The log simply says a bear came close to the ship on the ice, but on the people's going towards him, he went away, which is a good deal deal less dramatic but you will always see in books about nelson the polar bear kind of dramatic images of the young hero i actually had to really restrain myself when i did this book i'm saying heroic forbearance from not having you know the bear strikes at chapter seven or something but anyway he doesn't fight the bear in the in the book so basically what they were going to have to do was unload the ship and drag everything on these launches towards where they hoped they would find the sea and then wave and basically hail a whale. I mean, a terrible scene.
They could, I mean, probably they would have died, I would say, unless they were very lucky. But he is fortunate.
Dame Fortune smiles on him, I think it's fair to say, throughout his career. Because they've been dragging these launches for two days, or one and a half days, I think it is, and going back to the ship to sleep.
And then one day, they get up to do it again, have another go, and they hear this great cracking sound. The ice is breaking up, and what is better, the current is carrying their ship towards the sea.
Southwards. So tremendous scenes.
They end up making it back home. They haven't found the Northeast Passage.
But again, for a teenager, what is he? 14, 15? 15. Yeah.
It is an unbelievable experience. And he gets a silver watch out of it, doesn't he? Yes, he's given by the commanders of the expedition a silver watch that he treasures for the rest of his life.
It's engraved with the details of this kind of Arctic expedition. So this is an amazing training.
So today, while lads will be doing GCSEs, he's off braving the Northeast Passage. Exactly.
And then as if that's not enough, when he gets back, Captain Suckling says, oh, well, I found you another little trip, actually. Little berth.
One of my friends is looking for a midshipman on his ship, the Seahorse, to go to India. And there, their job is to, the Royal Navy is basically providing protection.
It's escorting East India Company trading ships from local pirates and raiders and so on and so forth. And this is Nelson's introduction to the fact that being in the Royal Navy obliges you to have a sense of geopolitics.
Yes, absolutely. Because he's kind of dealing with the local bigwigs along the Indian coast and so on.
Exactly. So he goes on this massive journey.
Now he's been to the Arctic and now he goes off on this journey. They go down, round Africa, you know, obviously the heat rising, great sense of excitement as they near India.
When he's on this very long voyage, he meets two people who are very important for him. One is a young able seaman called Thomas Truebridge.
The fact that he's an able seaman tells you that he's from a humbler background. So he hasn't gone through that midshipman kind of initiation.
Exactly. He's not on, as it were, the fast track.
But Troubridge, as we will see, becomes a very close friend and comrade of Nelson. And then sadly, a bit of a rival at the end of their lives.
Their relations sour a little bit, but he's really important for Nelson and his name will come up again and again. And then the other person is the ship's master, who's an Irishman called Thomas Surridge.
And he can spot that Nelson is very talented. And Surridge spends a lot of time with him, teaching him navigation.
He gets Nelson- Lots of maths, isn't there? Yeah, to take the measurements on the ship. He says, yeah, you do it.
Yeah. And Surridge is the first in a series of patrons, father figures, I suppose.
Edmund Nelson, his own father, is not a very good father figure to him because they're so different. Also, he's so far away and he's sat there in front of his fire reading about the Bible.
Exactly. That's not going to help you kill the French.
No, no, no, no, no. Or indeed fight off a polar bear, if only apocryphally.
No. So he spends the summer of 1775 escorting company ships to and fro across the indian ocean he goes to basra he goes to bombay he goes to ceylon now sri lanka but this is not a a healthy place for royal navy sailors so sickness is very common in early 1776 nelson falls ill with what i think most biographers believe is malaria.
It's malaria, isn't it? Yeah. He is seriously ill and arguably he never really recovers.
I mean, this is the thing with malaria in the late 18th century. If you get it, it will quite probably plague you for the rest of your life.
So he is sent back home to save his life and off they go. He's feeling quiteent, isn't it? It's very despondent.
You know, he's very ill. He must be worrying that his career is over almost before it's begun.
Well, Nelson is not. I think it's fair to say, just to talk about his psychology, we said he was slender and he's sickly and whatnot.
He's also given to very extravagant mood swings, isn't he? When he's depressed, he's properly depressed.

He's sweating.

He's feverish.

They're going round Africa.

And he's incredibly miserable.

And as you say, I think he thinks, oh, it's all up.

You know, I might die or I'm too sick to stay in the Navy. But then, Dominic, his zeal for king and country comes to his rescue.

Can I read it?

Do read it, Tom.

That would be lovely.

Okay.

Yeah, as you say, he's rounding Africa. He has this kind of, this flash of insight and he wrote about it.
I could discover no means of reaching the object of my ambition. After a long and gloomy reverie in which I almost wished myself overboard, a sudden glow of patriotism was kindled within me and presented my king and country as my patron.
My mind exulted in the idea. Well, then, I exclaimed, I will be a hero.
And confiding in providence, I will brave every danger. I love Nelson, Tom.
And you know what? I think he really did think that.

I don't think he's making that up.

Do you?

I think that's exactly the kind of thing he thinks.

Well, I know that we have

a lot of listeners in their teens,

maybe wondering what to do

with their lives.

And I think that they could

all profit from that.

They could indeed.

Right.

Let's take a break.

And when we return,

let's take the lieutenant's exam

and let us confront

some of the worst people

we will meet in this story. The tax dodgers of the American colonists.
See you then. Hello, welcome back to The Rest is History.
We are following the career of England's greatest hero, Horatio Nelson. And Dominic, we left him feeling sorry for himself and then getting a patriotic glow.
And so he's come back from India full of patriotism. What's going on? So the big thing for him, as for any midshipman, is to get up the next stage to pass the lieutenant's exam.
He does that in April 1777. I love this.
He has to go to a board to a board. Yeah.
To the naval office in the city. There are three officers.
Yeah. And one of these officers, who's that? By an extraordinary stroke of fortune, it's his uncle Morris.
Right. There's a turn up for the books.
Now, uncle Morris said later that he only said to the other examiners at the end, after they had all agreed to pass Horatio. Of course he did.
Only at the end did he say, well, bad we've decided to pass him because as it happens, he's my nephew. Clearly this isn't the case.
And it's that point, isn't it? The Navy is one of the most meritocratic institutions in the world at that point. But it is also, by our standards, riddled with nepotism and patronage.
Well, you need patrons. and that's accepted.
And Nelson understands this as someone who is dependent on patronage, that they will help him. And in due course, when he's in a position to offer patronage, he will do so and go to great efforts to do it.
That's the system. And feel that it's, you know, it's not corrupt, that it's his duty.
No. And nobody at the time, if you'd said to them, this is corruption, they would have frowned.
They would have said, no, that's the system. We just want that put on the record.
Nelson does nothing wrong here. And also he's going to pass anyway because he's brilliant.
He has been to the Caribbean. He's been to the Arctic.
He's been to India. He literally does know the ropes.
And he's about 10. He has sailed for almost 50,000 miles.
So clearly he is going to pass. I mean, he's up there with Captain Cook's goat.
So now he's on this ladder that hopefully if he plays his cards right, you know, the dream is you're on this ladder. There are a lot of people competing, but what you want is to see your name on that captain's list.
You know, the bottom of the captain's list, you've got onto the list. You become lieutenant, don't you? Then you become master and commander and then you become captain.
Exactly. And your name will be posted in the London Gazette, and you might, if you're lucky, get a ship of your own, because there are actually more ships than there are captains, which is a slight issue.
You mentioned master and commander. Those books, the Patrick O'Brien books, and particularly the first one, master and commander, is brilliant on this sort of sense of gnawing anxiety.
You really need to get on the captain's list because only then can you start to make any serious money out of this. Yeah, people who've listened to this podcast in the beginning will know that initially I was very opposed to Patrick O'Brien because there was an excess of rope and I have now seen the light.
You have indeed, yeah. And I recognise that they are just as good as everyone says.
It was a very lovely moment when you admitted how wrong you'd been. I can sometimes admit I'm wrong.
So what he really needs to get on is a war. And I said in the first half that often fortune is with him.
And once again, fortune is with him because at precise this point, remember, it's April 1777. There is a dispute about paying rightful taxes, which some listeners may be familiar with in the American colonies.
Talks with the rebels have broken down. American privateers have started attacking British merchant ships.
There is already talk of them potentially threatening the most lucrative part of Britain's empire, the sugar islands of Jamaica and Barbados. And so Nelson immediately gets a posting, a second in command, on a frigate called the Lowest Off, which is bound for Jamaica.
So the American Revolution, not all bad. Not all bad, no.
Because it gives Nelson his opportunity. Because it did give one of history's greatest characters the chance to advance, which is lovely.
Yeah. Well, that's good to bear in mind.
That's nice for our American listeners to have some kind words from us for once. So when when he's on the lowest off, he meets another of these really, really important patron figures, a captain called William Locker.
Locker is extremely experienced. He has fought against the French many times.
He fought against them 20 years earlier. He got a French bullet in his leg, hasn't he? He did.
He got a French bullet in his leg because he had stormed a French privateer. And Locker is massive for Nelson because Locker teaches him, I think, two things.
Number one is how to be a leader. Locker is quite a kindly captain.
He's paternalistic. He believes it's better to be loved than to be feared.
Of course, there's always an element of fear. I mean, you have to have respect.
So, you know, the occasional flogging, everyone expects that. Everybody thinks, I mean, we do that and the rest is history with the producers yeah yeah so there's that element to locker and then the other one is that locker says to him you know how to beat the french you go straight at them going close because we will always have better firepower better discipline and none of this faffing around from a distance yeah blasting at each other so this is so interesting because this is people working this out so it's even in the 1780s this sense that actually we're good enough on the royal navy that we can go in close we can go in hard exactly we can change our tactics we can adopt something else picks up on this yes lay a frenchman close and you will beat him locker says and actually big preview we will end this series at the Battle of the Nile.
And after the Battle of the Nile, Nelson wrote to Locker. So this is years later when Nelson is an international celebrity.
And Nelson said to Locker, pretty much everything I have is down to you. My old friend, nothing can alter my attachment and gratitude to you.
My only merit in my profession is being your scholar and our friendship will never end, but with my life. Yeah, very moving.
And again, reflection of the way in which the bonds of patronage and teaching kind of serve to join the generations in the Navy. It's really, really important.
They do. But also a little insight there, I think, into a part of Nelson's character.
He's very sentimental, isn't he, Nelson? So if anybody listens to this and thinks, oh, this would be a good Hollywood melodrama or big series, I think Nelson, he thinks like that. He thinks he's the character in a tremendous story and he behaves accordingly.
All his emotions are in bold colours, not pale pastels. Yeah.
And it's a British version of the displays of sensibility that we've been talking about in the French Revolution series.

Yeah. And it's a British version of the displays of sensibility that we've been talking about in the French Revolution series.
Yeah. That you wear your emotions on your sleeve.
And Nelson absolutely does that. Yeah.
Even when his sleeve is just dangling there because his arm has been lost. But we'll come to that.
All right. So the lowest off arrives in the Caribbean.
Now, sailors hate going to the Caribbean. They hate it because...
Well, they kind of do and they kind of... I mean, captains quite like it, don't they? Because they say you're either going to die or you're going to win glory.
Or you can make a lot of money. But for ordinary sailors, the risks here of dysentery or malaria or of yellow fever are very great indeed.
But of course, what keeps them coming back is the importance of this part of the world to Britain's economy and particularly sugar. And so this, I guess, Tom, is the point at which we should discuss the perhaps slight shadow that has grown over Nelson's reputation in the last, what, five, 10 years in Britain when his name comes up in the newspapers and whatnot.
And this is the question of Nelson and slavery. So I think one thing we should say right at the outset is there was one thing that Nelson definitely is not, and that is an abolitionist.
He is not an abolitionist by any vague stretch of the imagination, is he? No, it's simply something that he doesn't contemplate. And I think this is the age where abolitionism is starting to pick up steam.
So we did an episode on Benjamin Lay, the Quaker abolitionist. And he's really, even among Quakers, he's seen as exceptional.
And by the time that Nelson is going to the Caribbean, the Quakers have pretty strongly come out against slavery. And you're starting to get evangelicals as well.
But Nelson's not a part of this. He spent his childhood in Norfolk, and then he spent it at sea.
He would have no time to engage with it. It's plausible.
His father is a vicar, but does not seem to have been. But the father doesn't seem to have had any abolitionist sentiment either.
So I think it's actually very plausible. If you think that Nelson went away to sea when he was 12, that he has probably never at that point come up against any abolitionist ideas at all.
And as time goes on, he obviously hears of them, but I guess they're not being promoted by people within his service because the Royal Navy is hardly a hotbed of abolitionism at this point. Undoubtedly, he must have seen slavery.
There are about 200,000 slaves in Jamaica alone at this point, but it's important to say he's never personally involved in it. So he doesn't own slaves.
He never serves on a slave ship. He never trades in slaves.
He never invests his money in sugar plantations. So he's not like he's escorting slave ships or anything of that kind.
There is a letter though, isn't there, in which he seems to show, while impatience perhaps would be putting it kindly with William Wilberforce, the evangelical who in Britain is leading campaign against the slave trade. And it's a controversial letter, isn't it? Yes, it does.
I can't remember what he calls it. Something like the damnable doctrine of abolitionism or something like that.
Yeah, I'm still not clear whether this is, because people have argued that this has been doctored. Others say no, it hasn't.
I know that Michael Taylor, who's written brilliantly on abolitionism, says that it is authentic. So I would probably trust his expertise on this.
Well, here's the thing. I think there's consensus of Nelson scholars about this letter.
That there is definitely a letter written by Nelson and it reflects his undoubted scepticism about abolitionism. However, there's no doubt whatsoever that this letter was doctored after his death.
It was kind of, to use the terminology, not unfamiliar to other people in the podcasting world. It was like a dossier that had been sexed up, Tom, by pro-slavery advocates after his death because they wanted the interest, the interest exactly, because they wanted to make it look as though Nelson was more fervently in favor of slavery and against abolitionism than perhaps he may have been.
And so what he actually wrote is very hard to decipher because what we've got is the kind of doctored version. The one thing we can say is that there was no evidence actually that Nelson was racist.
So this is again, you know, the know the sort of oh Nelson's column must fall kind of school of thought is well since he's not an abolitionist and since he seems to have been at least shall we say to be kind to him very skeptical about abolitionism maybe he was a racist I don't think there's any evidence whatsoever that he was racist we have thousands of his letters and he never never expresses a hint of prejudice in them. And as we'll see in due course, he's going to be going to war with the support of black communities.
Black sailors in the fleet, for example. He has black sailors serve on his ships.
In fact, one of them is illustrated, isn't he, on the panelling of Nelson's column, The Freezers. Yeah, George Ryan, who served on the victory, actually.
On the victory at Trafalgar. But in an expedition that we're coming to a minute where a British force go off to land on the sinisterly named and aptly named Mosquito Coast, and they're looking for support from the local Indians and from black communities that have been settled there.
And Nelson gets on brilliantly well with them. So just to quote John Sugden, who's the great biographer of Nelson, he's talking about the Indians and the black communities there.
On his part, Horatio was impressed by the durability of the natives and their skill in weaving the boats around grassy islands and through tumbling rapids. On theirs, the Indians saw a young man of no great strength or size struggling with them in vain without any of the common European arrogance.

So Nelson is ready to admire courage where he finds it.

Definitely. We know that later on the Nelson family had a black servant called Price who was a freed man, not a slave.

And Nelson actually later in life said to Emma Hamilton, I'd love it if Price could come to live with us.

He is, quote, as good a man as ever lived. And Price actually said, no, I've got better things to do than hang around with Emma Hamilton, which I think is very reasonable.
That's clearly not the behaviour of a man who has a kind of racial prejudice. But I think the honest truth is that Nelson isn't really interested.
I think that's absolutely right. I think he's just not interested in it.
He's interested in sext and yeah cannon and all that kind of stuff absolutely

he is so now that he's in the caribbean in the late 1770s obviously his focus is the war and the war is going very badly the british army in north america is 3 000 miles from home they've got very poor supply links but also the americans are being funded first of all with arms and also with money from France. Then in 1778, the French enter the war directly.
And then in 1779, the Spanish. The goal for people like Nelson now is basically try to hold on to as much as we can, particularly in the Caribbean.
And he spends a lot of time and makes a great name for himself, actually, readying the defenses of Jamaica against a possible French attack. And that never comes.
And in a way, that's a shame for Nelson. Because he doesn't have a chance to...
Yeah. Even so, he has done well enough for the British commander in the Caribbean, Admiral Sir Peter Parker, in 1779, to make him a captain, to put him on that list, the much prized captain's list.
And the other thing that he gets from his time in the Caribbean is that he, again, he makes more friends who will be with him throughout his career. And the most celebrated of these is a round faced man from the banks of the Tyne called Cuthbert Collingwood, who had actually known Nelson since 1773.
So I mean, a long time and was 10 years older, but doesn't become a captain when Nelson becomes captain, but will do in due course. And there's a sense in which over the course of Nelson's career, Collingwood is always just behind him.
He is. With his dog.
With his dog bounce. And in fact, at Trafalgar, Collingwood will command one of the two columns.
He will indeed. Alongside Nelson.
So worth mentioning him at this point. So Nelson is now given a ship called the Hinchinbrook, a 28-gun frigate.
It is his own ship. What an amazing moment this is for him to be piped onto the ship for the first time as the captain.
But his life almost ends at this point because he, as you suggested earlier, Tom, he goes on an incredibly harebrained and foolhardy a completely mad expedition

I think it's fair to say that whenever Nelson goes anywhere on land

that goes wrong

yeah a disaster is not far away

so the governor of Jamaica has this mad scheme

this British force will land on the Mosquito Coast

which is on the sort of borderland of Honduras and Nicaragua

they'll raise support among the local Indians

then they'll strike inland

they'll go up the San Juan River

through the jungle

seize this Spanish fort

from there they'll go all the way to the Pacific

I don't know. support among the local Indians.
Then they will strike inland. They'll go up the San Juan River through the jungle, seize this Spanish fort.
From there, they'll go all the way to the Pacific. They'll establish a base on the Pacific and they might be able to intercept the treasure fleets from Lima.
It's the kind of plan that looks very good when you're with a map. Yeah.
You know, in the officer's mess in Kingstown or something. Exactly.
When you get there and you find there's just mosquitoes and snakes everywhere, it's terrible. Exactly.
And this is precisely what happens. So they set off.
Nelson, even as they set off in early 1780, he's a little bit anxious because the troops, the soldiers they're taking are basically all ragged. Half of them are absolutely wasted on rum or something.
So they look like pirates. They get to the San Juan River.
It's incredibly hot and muggy. As you said, there's snakes and caimans everywhere.
Yeah, there's a famous bit where the local Indian leaders are very impressed with Nelson because it turns out he spent all night snuggled up with an incredibly poisonous snake. And he kind of stands up and throws out his blanket and the snake goes flying.
And they feel that he's destined for greatness as a result. That very alexander the great isn't it isn't it so anyway they get to this spanish fort they realize oh we only brought half the cannonballs what a disaster they're all the way back in you know the mouth of the river or whatever oh well we'll have a crack at the fort anyway and they get stuck in this swamp underneath this fort fever then takes hold the british literally turn yellow so nelson is now bright yellow with yellow fever he's too sick to leave his tent he's probably going to die because spoiler alert out of 2 000 men who sail up that river nine out of 10 of them die left behind two and a half thousand men and for absolutely nothing and then there's an incredible stroke of luck admiral parker who's in charge in the caribbean says i actually want nelson back in jamaica i'm going to send collingwood to take over the hinchin brook so right so that's collingwood following in nelson's footsteps nelson's footsteps yeah so basically nelson is relieved and ordered back to jamaica and he's too ill to walk he's kind of carried back to the ship to go back to Jamaica and he goes all the way back to Port Royal and he's extremely ill on the verge of death really.
And he is cared for by a friend's housekeeper who is called Cuba, who is a black freed woman. And she's supposed to have had kind of skill with medicine.
And Cuba basically nurses him back to life without cuba he would have died i think a doctor came and examined him in the late summer of 1780 and diagnosed bilious vomitings nervous headaches visceral obstructions and many other bodily infirmities i mean you don't want that do you you definitely don't want that and the doctor actually said look he can't stay here in the caribbean he's got to go back to england otherwise he really will die. Very like when he comes back from India, isn don't want that, do you? You definitely don't want that.
And the doctor actually said, look, he can't stay here in the Caribbean.

He's got to go back to England.

Otherwise, he really will die. Very like when he comes back from India, isn't it? Well, the same thing happens again.
Whenever Nelson is ill and has to go on a long voyage, the glow of patriotism returns. Well, God speaks to him.
Yes. God has chosen him to serve his country.
And he believes this, I think, absolutely literally. he feels all his life

that he is

you know he's being summoned by this

kind of, this visionary, this prophetic sense of fire, which he associates with God and that God is his guide.

You know, God has called him.

And in all his letters, you know, which we have, which are sent to the Admiralty in his correspondence, and you can compare them with other letters written by people of similar rank, Nelson is far readier to invoke God than any of his peers. Interestingly, I was reading a thing the other day.
Always God, never ever Jesus or Christ. It's always the Almighty.
No, because Jesus is a loser. Yeah.
But God smites and all that kind of thing. Exactly.
Pillars of fire. Exactly.
I said his sense is prophetic. Nelson proclaims in a prophecy, Nelson will yet be an admiral.
I shall recover and my dream of glory be fulfilled. Oh, I love it.
So he gets better. He's eventually sent back to North America and he assists in the evacuation of New York, where the Loyalists are being evacuated in 1783.

He would have seen, of course, Tom, the thousands of escaped slaves

who were being rescued by their British friends

and taken north of the border to Canada and to freedom.

So that's great news for Nelson and for everybody.

He has a spell where he's been stopping American ships from coming out,

I think from Boston Harbor, perhaps.

Yeah, exactly. There's a lot of blockading, which I've skipped over.
And his crew start going down with scurvy. And essentially Nelson, he's been inexperienced and he hasn't planned ahead.
And this teaches him a crucial lesson that you absolutely need to have regular supplies of fruit on board. And this is one aspect of Nelson that really needs emphasising, is that he's not just about the fighting, he's also about the preparation.
He's brilliant at this, yeah. And from that point on, he will ensure that the ships that he commands always have enough supplies of fruit.
Exactly. And actually, if people are sufficiently interested in Nelson after this series to want to read the world's longest ever books published which are John Sugden's Titanic Lies of Nelson there's enormous quantitative stuff in there about the ordering of limes and it's absolutely fascinating because it's this is a way in which the Royal Navy are way in advance of any other comparable organisation anywhere in the world and it's a prefiguring I suppose of Amazon's ability to send you a plug or something.
I guess so. Yeah.
I mean, this is where it's beginning. The victualling board, or whatever it's called, is the best of its kind that's ever existed at this point.
Because without that, the ships can't stay for weeks and months and often years at sea. Exactly.
So the big thing he gets from the American campaign is he meets Admiral Samuel Hood,

a vicar's son like Nelson.

Hood is another one of these people who is saying, you know, we need to develop a new kind of naval warfare to sail straight at the enemy.

Going hard.

Going hard.

Total annihilation.

Total victory.

So again, another building block in Nelson's sort of ideology of war, if you like.

The war is over. He comes home.
He's now a captain. He's got a powerful patron, Admiral Hood.
Admiral Hood introduces him to George III, which is great. He goes off to France, doesn't he? He goes there to learn the language, ostensibly, which he signally fails.
He goes with a friend on the packet boat to Calais, and he is impressed, to be fair to him, by the French countryside. He says, very handsome country, but he's appalled by two things.
By the inns? Yeah, French hospitality, which he thinks is terrible. He stayed in one inn and he said, in England, we would consider this a pigsty.
But in France, they think this is, you know, it's Roulay and Chateau Hotel or something. And the other thing is the gap between the rich and poor in France.
Did you see this? Yeah, I did. So there's no middling group of people such as Nelson himself.
He says there's only very rich and very poor. I'm not actually sure that's true because that slightly contradicts what we were saying at the beginning of the French Revolution series.
But it might be true to Nelson's perspective. I think it's true that he thinks it anyway, should I put it that way.
And then, you know, what's he going to do in peacetime? Peacetime is always quite boring. And actually, what is worse, he is given what he clearly regards as a terrible job.
He is sent back to the Caribbean to patrol against smuggling. But Dominic, just to say, I mean, it is a terrible job, but it's better than being stuck at half pay back at home.
Of course it is. So in that sense, it's a marker of, you know, that he's still in the running for promotion.
Exactly. That's absolutely true because he could, of course, have been put, yeah, basically on the reserve list.
Yeah. Kind of mouldering.
So he goes back to the Caribbean. His job is basically to stop the plantation owners in the Caribbean trading for cheap American goods, which they now have a taste for, but which are prohibited since the peace with the rebel colonists.
The Navigation Acts. He hates the plantation owners.
He says they're trash because they're smuggling, and he thinks this is very unpatriotic of them. However, on one of these islands, the island of Nevis, he makes a friend called John Richardson Herbert, who is the president of the local council.
Herbert agrees with him about this clampdown on smuggling. They become friends.
You know, Nelson is always looking for kind of an older man to be a kind of father figure to him. And Herbert plays this role for a bit.
And one day, so the story goes, he meets a little boy playing under the table. There's a little boy at Herbert's house.
And Nelson sort of says, who are you? And this boy says, oh, I'm Josiah. And then this woman comes in.
And this is a woman in her mid-twenties called Fanny, who is Josiah's mother. She's Herbert's niece.
Her husband, who is a doctor, has died and left her a widow, a single mother with this little boy. And she's come back to live with her uncle on Nevis.
She's a very, very sweet person, isn't she, Fanny? She plays the piano. Kind, solicitous, gentle.
Yeah, she speaks French. She paints watercolours.
She's just a lovely person. She's perhaps, if you were being harsh, you would say a little bit bland.
Is that harsh, Tom? A little bit wet. A bit wet, maybe.
I think of her as a kind of Dickensian. The kind of woman that a Dickens hero would end up marrying and wouldn't be as fun as all the grotesques that you've met over the course of the novel.
Exactly. A kind woman who's supportive of her husband but basically has nothing to say for herself.
Yeah, And actually on the subject of grotesques,

because they end up getting married in 1787.

And the man who gives away,

gives her away and is the witness at the wedding is none other than a royal prince,

William Henry,

who will go on to become the sailor King,

William the fourth in due course.

And he's an absolute lout.

He's a terrible man.

And he's basically,

it's a tricky gig for Nelson because he's been appointed to serve as chaperone really. Yeah.
To William. And William is useless.
He's trapped because Nelson himself is a kind of very reserved man. He's not a man who enjoys kind of necking entire barrels of port.
Yeah. And they're flogging his crew.
You know, he likes a cup of tea of an afternoon. But at the same time, you know, this is a prince and Nelson is a royalist.

So he's completely torn.

And he's essentially been appointed by his superiors, including Admiral Hood, to try and keep the prince on the straight and narrow.

And Nelson doesn't feel able to do this.

And it's the one kind of blot.

It's the one time where he damages his career, I think.

And his superiors start kind of thinking, oh, we're not sure about him. That's right, because the Admiralty are very cross with Nelson.
They say, you were told to keep William Henry in check and to stop him flogging people and shouting and being sick everywhere and stuff. And actually, he's totally disgraced himself in the Caribbean.
And it's all your fault. And Nelson, because he's deferential and hierarchical.
He doesn't know what to do. He can't bring himself to discipline William Henry.
And also, Dominic, just to say that all this stuff with the smugglers, I mean, again, it would have been easier for Nelson to just leave that because he's making enemies, some of whom are in the Royal Navy itself. Yes, exactly.
So it's a bad time for him, I think. Now, William Henry says to everybody, oh, she'll be a wonderful match for Horatio.
She's a pretty girl, sensible girl. Pretty filly.
I'm sure he won't repent the step he's taken. But actually, everybody else says, I think he probably will repent the step he's taken because they're such temperamental opposites.
Now, Nelson's love life in later episodes, when we do the second season of Nelson in the spring, which we will, you will see that the issue with Fanny is basically that they should probably never have got married in the first place. She does not have any understanding of what I might call it the slightly histrionic quality in Nelson's character.
She's a sweet person though. She is.
I'm very much team Fanny. She is.
And when she comes back to England, she will look after Nelson's elderly father. You know, she will be like a daughter to him.
She will indeed. Because this is what happens.
They come home later that year, 1787. They've got Josiah in tow.
Poor Josiah. He's not a brilliant person, actually.
I don't know why I'm feeling sorry for him. He's a bit of an oaf himself.
But they send him off to boarding school. And then they go back to Burnham Thorpe, to Norfolk, to live with the Reverend Edmund Nelson.
So he's doddering around thinking about sermons. Fanny arrives and- She keeps house.
Yeah, exactly. Very well.
So she and Edmund actually become the very best of friends. And they're talking about sermons and she's doing her kind of embroidering or something and talking to the servants.
She loves it. That's what she wants.
Yeah. Shall we, my dear, go and see the birds? Exactly.
That kind of thing. But Nelson is bored out of his mind.
He reads the paper. He digs the garden.
He goes hair coursing, which is sort of hunting. And he comes back and he says, oh, I didn't enjoy that.
By this point, it's 1788, and in September he turns 30.

And in 1788, he must be thinking, you know, my career's finished.

The only thing that could conceivably come to my rescue would be a major convulsion in European affairs. But it's 1788.
What could possibly happen? So summer 1789, we can surmise that Nelson one day opened the Norfolk Bugle or whatever and read to his horror.

Shenanigans in France.

Of seditious and subversive behavior on the streets of Paris. Now, the thing is, Nelson has been primed to dislike the French by his mother.

He thinks the French, they're Britain's enemies.

He's been to France. He

thought it was terrible. The very poor quality of inns, all of that.
But what is more ideologically

he is primed to dislike everything about the French Revolution. Nelson, as you read out that

passage, Tom, king and country is what fires him and he never, ever questions it. There's a famous comment that comment that he made he supposedly makes it's possibly apocryphal but it's very famous that he supposedly told a young midshipman first you must always obey orders secondly you must consider every man as your enemy who speaks ill of your king and thirdly you must hate a frenchman as you do the devil and i think the reason why this reverberates even if it's apocryphal, is that it does kind of sum up Nelson's sense of morality, really, because we've talked about his sense of a beneficent hierarchy, a paternalistic hierarchy, but that obeying orders, I mean, that would include obeying the orders that you get from God.
So it's resonance with his deep sense of piety. You must consider every man as your enemy who speaks ill of your king.
I mean, Nelson, like a huge majority of people in Britain generally, views the British constitution with its neutered monarchy, its balance of powers, as the best constitution that there could possibly be. And one that every other country, including the French, would benefit from adopting.
And of course, there are lots of people in France who agree with that, actually.

Yeah.

Mirabeau and people like that in the revolution.

So Nelson absolutely sees he wouldn't be loyal to a king who was a tyrant.

He's loyal to a king who serves as a symbol of what Nelson sees as the best constitution

you could possibly have.

Which, of course, George III does pretty well, I would say.

Yeah, he does it fine.

I mean, partly by being mad.

But also his enthusiasm for farming, Tom, which I think is always very endearing. That as well.
And then thirdly, him stated Frenchman as you do the devil. I mean, that is a sense, of course, that is then sharpened by the revolution.
Exactly. Because Nelson correctly comes to see the revolution as a mortal threat to Britain's independence and to the constitution that Nelson admires so highly.

So Nelson is off stage in the early years of the revolution.

We can only really surmise, but you can imagine what he thinks when he reads about the flight of Iran, the declaration of war,

all the things that we covered.

Well, Britain's not at war with France at this point.

No, it's not.

So he must have read all this, and you can imagine that he regards this

through disapproval, but also mounting excitement, I would imagine, as he thinks Britain is going to be drawn into this conflict. Because for an ambitious officer, the idea of a war with France, I mean, that is something to get the sort of blood flowing.
By late 1792, as listeners to our French Revolution series will know, the Prussians and the Austrians have been beaten back. France is expanding.
It is very clear that war is coming. And by December, the orders have basically gone out.
The word has gone out, prepare for war. You know, war is coming.
Because the king at this point is on trial in France and in due course is going to be sentenced to death. Exactly.
And will be executed in the early weeks of 1793. On the 6th of January 1793, Nelson is ordered to report to the Admiralty and he is told, we have a ship for you.
It is the 65-gun Agamemnon. And this is always his favourite ship, isn't it? It's always the one he looks back on with the fondest memories.
Eggs and bacon, its crew called it because they always used to give them little kind of nicknames because they didn't know how to pronounce classical terms. So they call it the eggs and bacon.
Yeah. On the 1st of February, France declares war on Britain.
On the 4th of February, and we are told in health and in great spirits, Nelson kisses Fanny goodbye and takes the coach south to Chatham and to war. And Dominic, they will not meet again for another four years.
And when Nelson comes back, he will be a hero, but he will also be severely maimed. So what we've got to come, the battles of Cape St.
Vincent and Tenerife, the hunt for Napoleon and the Titanic showdown of the Battle of the Nile nile tom what can people do if they want to hear

those right now well if you want to show the kind of nelsonian spirit of initiative and dash you can

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