Southey on Nelson: The Life of Nelson by Robert Southey. Richard Holmes
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sources, and yet still retain a poet’s feel for the vivid turn of phrase or memorable image. In this unusual combination of the scholarly and the imaginative, Southey had all the makings of a fine biographer, whatever his subject might be.
He had not renounced poetry, and would continue to publish works, now increasingly patriotic, like The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo (1816). But he saw history and biography as the new direction to his mature career, even though he pretended to lament it. In 1810 he wrote to his friend Walter Savage Landor: ‘I have an ominous feeling that there are poets enough in the world without me, and my best chance of being remembered will be as an historian.’ Later he would add simply: ‘by nature I am a poet, by deliberate choice an historian.’
Like all good biographers, Southey was soon drawn deeply into his subject, finding Nelson’s life both more inspiring and more enigmatic than he had at first expected. In the event the six month project took over two years to complete, and Southey was still writing in spring 1813. He combed minutely through Clarke and M’Arthur, carefully re-assembling the narrative of Nelson’s career, but boldly reconstructing it in a series of superbly visualised scenes. From the original chaos of these materials, an overwhelming sense of Nelson’s destiny emerged with almost hypnotic power, a destiny that had seized him even in childhood.
Southey sticks remarkably close to the original sources in official despatches and eyewitness accounts. There is not a single quoted phrase of Nelson’s, or exchange of dialogue, that does not have an authentic written source, and often several. Unlike modern scholars’ convention, Southey only occasionally chooses to acknowledge these–notably in the case of Beatty–but prefers to present unbroken historical narrative. Yet such is the crisp, factual style of the narration, that the reader never feels he is straying into fiction. Instead Southey selects and dramatises–or ‘infers and enlivens’-with enormous success, achieving a genuine sense of modern epic, especially in his four great battle set-pieces–Cape St Vincent, Aboukir Bay, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar.
Besides Clarke and M’Arthur, Southey also characteristically undertook a wide sweep of research and enquiry, especially in controversial areas. He read with exacting attention the independently published accounts of Boswell on Corsica; Captain Edward Berry at Aboukir Bay; of Captain Edward Foote at Naples (together with a civilian eyewitness to the atrocities, Helen Maria Williams); of Colonel William Stewart, a military liaison officer at Copenhagen; of Dr Beatty and Nelson’s chaplain, Alexander Scott, at Trafalgar.
He gave full consideration to the materials that Lady Hamilton had supplied to Harrison and others, even when he did not approve of them, or even fully trust them. He made contact with John Wilson Croker, a formidable Tory figure then Secretary to the Admiralty, who after initial suspicions, whole-heartedly backed the book and provided Southey with charts, maps, strategic plans, and the full co-operation of the Admiralty’s cartographic department. The biography was eventually dedicated, with nice diplomacy, to Croker.
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Southey also knew that much would stand or fall on the authenticity he could bring to his accounts of naval actions. He was not in fact a complete landlubber. He had himself twice sailed across the Bay of Biscay to Lisbon, both rough voyages of over a fortnight each way. His friend Coleridge had sailed in a wartime convoy to Malta in 1804, and become intimate friends with one of Nelson’s ‘band of brothers’, Alexander Ball, then civilian Governor of Malta, but in 1799 Captain of the ship that took on the French flagship L’Orient in Aboukir Bay. Coleridge had made notes about Nelson from Ball’s conversation, which he supplied to Southey, and had also been in Naples at the time of Trafalgar and witnessed the reaction to the news of Nelson’s death. Coleridge’s materials, both published and unpublished, were skilfully incorporated into Southey’s biography.
But Southey’s most confidential source was his own much-admired naval brother Tom, who had actually been a lieutenant at the Battle of Copenhagen, though serving in Sir John Hyde’s squadron rather than directly under Nelson himself. Though later Tom was court marshalled for insubordination, he remained a lively source of combat details and atmosphere, as well as offering to check all Southey’s dreaded ‘naval terms’ in proof. What Southey wanted above all from Tom was the feel of an actual battle at sea, and the way ordinary men behaved under the extreme stress of battle conditions and physical violence. Only then could he make a true judgement of what made Nelson extraordinary.
In December, 1812, while still trying to pull the battle sections of the biography together, he wrote to Tom: ‘You used to speak of the dead lying in the shoal water at Copenhagen; there was the boatswain’s mate, or somebody, asked for–when he was lying face upwards under the stern, or somewhere. Tell me the right particulars of this, which is too striking a circumstance to be lost.’ He also asked about the behaviour of the gun crews, the fear that some of the canons were ‘honeycombed’ and would blow up, the things that men did and said in the heat of battle, and the English gunner’s savage cry, ‘here goes the death of six!’ whenever the canons were fired. ‘This is a thing which would be felt.’
Several of these incidents found their way into the account of Copenhagen, which is one of the triumphs of Southey’s battle narratives. It opens with a superbly orchestrated description of the perilous approach of the British fleet through the Danish Sound–conjuring up the names of Prince Hamlet at Elsinore, the astronomer Tycho Brahe on the Isle of Huen, and Queen Matilda escaping from Cronenburg Castle. The battle itself reaches its climax in the legendary incident of Nelson putting his telescope to his blind eye.
This Southey had carefully compiled from two different eyewitness accounts—by the ship’s surgeon, Mr Ferguson (1806), and by the liaison officer Colonel Stewart (1809)–together with Clarke and M’Arthur’s commentary, and Tom Southey’s memories of later gossip in the fleet. Skilfully fitting together these varied and sometimes contradictory records of Nelson’s precise words and gestures on the quarter deck of the Elephant, Southey produced the dramatic composite version which has become, as it were, scriptural.
‘I have only one eye–I have a right to be blind sometimes’–and then, putting the glass to his blind eye, in that mood of mind which sports with bitterness, he exclaimed, ‘I really do not see the signal!’ Presently he exclaimed , ‘Damn the signal! Keep mine for closer battle flying. That’s the way I answer such signals! Nail mine [No. 16]. to the mast!’.
But Southey produces far more than the heroics of battle. His account of the aftermath of Copenhagen, for example, and Nelson’s sense of absolute exhaustion and growing anxiety, is wonderfully captured.
The sky had suddenly become overcast; white flags were waving from the mastheads of so many shattered ships; the slaughter had ceased, but the grief was to come, for the account of the dead was not yet made up, and no man could tell for what friends he might have to mourn. The very silence which follows upon the cessation of such a battle becomes a weight upon the heart at first, rather than a relief…[Nelson] had won the day by disobeying his orders, and, in so far as he had been successful, had convicted the Commander-in-Chief of an error in judgement. ‘Well’, said he, as he left the Elephant, ‘I have fought contrary to orders, and I shall, perhaps, be hanged. Never mind: let them!’
Some of the small, discordant, surreal moments of the battle are particularly memorable. When a cannon shot shattered a large ‘kettle’ of bacon and beans on the gun deck of the Monarch, at a time when she was taking terrible punishment from the Danish guns, ‘amid the tremendous carnage’ the English sailors with ‘singular coolness’ carefully scooped up the spilled food from the deck, and nonchalantly ate as they continued to fire their cannons. This vivid incident, which says a number of things about Nelson’s navy, almost certainly came from Tom Southey.
All the battles are narrated with superb, panoramic sweep and then stunning immediacy. Southey manages to retain an almost balletic sense of the great fleet manoeuvrings. Yet he continually plunges the reader into close-up moments of chaos and violence. The massive explosion of L’Orient, which brought the entire battle to a halt for several minutes, is one such; Nelson’s own death aboard the Victory is another.
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