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Nelson: a life of heroism and scandal
00:43:29
Dominic Sandbrook revisits the life of the naval hero who led the British fleet to victory at Trafalgar, but whose torrid affair scandalised Georgian society
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- [00:01]
Ryan Reynolds
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David Musgrove
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- [01:50]
David Musgrove
Welcome to the History Extra podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of Beer BBC History Magazine Horatio Nelson is one of the most well known figures from British history. His leadership of the British fleet to victory at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 and his death during the same battle has rendered him a national hero for generations. However, Nelson was also embroiled in a huge scandal during his lifetime due to his passionate affair with Lady Emma Hamilton and more recently, questions have been raised about his attitude towards slavery and the slave trade. Historian and co host of the Rest Is History podcast, Dominic Sambrook has written a book for children about the life of Nelson as part of his Adventures in Time series. In today's episode, he speaks to David Musgrove about the complexities of the man and the challenges of writing history for young people.
- [02:51]
Dominic Sandbrook
I'd done seven Adventures in Time books for children before and I was casting around for a subject for number eight. And Nelson just seemed obvious because he's such a Titanic character. He's one of the great incarnations of Britishness, I think. So Nelson was born in 1758 and he died in 1805. He is, I think, arguably the greatest leader that Britain has ever produced. He is most famous for his victories against the fleet of Revolutionary and then Napoleonic France and the Napoleonic Wars. The Battle of the Nile, the Battle of Copenhagen, the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, and most famously, the Battle of Trafalgar. So even people who know very little about British history or naval history will almost certainly know that it is Nelson who wins the Battle of Trafalgar from the deck of HMS Victory. And he's struck down. In October 1805, the 21st of October, he is struck down by a French sniper in the moment of his apotheosis of his kind of apogee winning this extraordinary victory, probably the greatest naval victory of the age. One of the great naval victories of all time, one that absolutely cements Britain's control over the seas and enshrines Britain as the world's greatest naval and then later kind of industrial power. Nelson is struck down and killed. He's taken below decks, incredibly kind of Hollywood friendly death scene. He's dying, the victory is being won, his officers are in tears, all of this kind of thing. And then he's brought back. His body is brought back to Britain, preserved in alcohol for again, an extraordinary state funeral, one of the great funerals, one of the great set piece occasions in all British history. And even at the time, people thought of Nelson as somebody genuinely exceptional. So not merely an extraordinary leader of men, but also a man of extraordinary personal courage. And he became Britannia's God of war, is one of the sort of phrases associated with him. He became seen as an embodiment of British resistance to Napoleonic France and of British patriotism and British identity.
- [04:54]
Interview Host
Okay. And you describe his life in beautiful color and detail in the book. I just want to talk a little bit about how you write for children because you're a historian, you're famous for writing books about the 20th century for adults. But now you've started writing these books for children as well. And the PR blurb says that the stories you're telling are every bit as exciting as those of Harry Potter. Now, Harry Potter is clearly fictional so do you have to make anything up to make these stories work?
- [05:21]
Dominic Sandbrook
The answer is kind of yes and no.
- [05:22]
Interview Host
Actually.
- [05:22]
Dominic Sandbrook
It's a really. If you don't mind, I'll give a complicated answer to what is ultimately quite a complicated question. So you're absolutely right. I had written vaguely scholarly books for adults all my working life. And then in 2020 I decided. So it's when Covid hit. I decided because my son was 7, that I wanted to find narrative, historical narratives for him to read. And I couldn't find anything. And so I decided to write them myself. And obviously that was a big. For any writer, that's a huge challenge to change your entire kind of writerly idiom to write for a completely different audience. And I wanted to write them as history books, not as people often refer to them as novels. They're not novels, they're history books. But you're absolutely right, there are different challenges for children than for adults. So although I read all the biographies of Nelson, I read loads of books about the Royal Navy, let's say, or about Napoleonic wars, just as I would if I were writing this for an adult. Your way into the story is different. A child, you know, a reader of, let's say 10, is impatient with constant equivocation and qualification. You know, it can't just be on the one hand. On the other hand, some people think that, other people think that they're like, come on, tell me the story, what do you think? So you have to do that. But also the huge information dumps that we're used to in adult history books, I. E. You know, that bit in 20 pages in where the author, even in the most ground pleasing book, says, I'm now going to give you a lot of background and context. That's the point where your 10 year old stops reading because they think, okay, it's just like a school book, it's extremely boring. So I found that I had to find a way to kind of package that for the young reader and that that did involve a bit of imagination. In other words, Nelson arrives, he goes to sea when he's 12, he's on his uncle Captain Morris Suckling's ship. And I wanted to obviously explain to the reader all about the Royal Navy and how it works and like what it is and what it's like to be in this wooden world. And I had to give all that to Captain Suckling to say, to tell Nelson and to construct a scene in which he tells him all about it. Now there must have been scenes like that. It's not like an alien suddenly enters. It's not Doctor who, but I have to use a little bit of imagination. But all of that said, even the most scrupulous historian writing a book for adults is using their imagination all the time. Imagining what people might have thought, putting themselves in other people's shoes, crafting the introduction to a chapter to bring people in. So I always thought I'm going to be as strict with myself as possible in terms of not inventing much dialogue or basically when people say things, they're things that we know they maybe they wrote. So basically they say it rather than write it. And to never strain, you know, never push too far in kind of inventing incidents, in putting words in people's mouths that I don't think they realistically would have said all of that kind of stuff. So it is a very different kind of challenge. But the bedrock is the history. And I approach it ultimately as I would approach any history book for an adult. Same number of chapters, same structure, everything cross referenced with the existing biographies or the scholarship. You know, I read all the Nelson biographies. So in a way I hope that what the, let's say 1012 year old reader gets is a kind of distilled and more exciting version of what an adult reader would be getting if they were reading lots of different Nelson books.
- [08:47]
Interview Host
Yeah. And you do allow yourself to try and get into some of the complexities. It's not just a simplistic tell, is it? Because you do have little piffy, little footnotes at points, don't you, where you try and nuance what you've said in the text.
- [08:58]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, exactly. So in other words, I don't want. I'm very conscious that there is always a danger, particularly these days now that the sort of, as it were, the public debate about history is very moralized, that there is a tendency to see things kind of black and white, good and evil. And I don't think 1011 year olds should be encouraged to do that. I think so. For example, the single most sort of scandalous episode in Nelson's career, he's in Naples. He's assisted the King and Queen of Naples to basically regain the city from local revolutionaries. And then there's a very complicated series of events where Nelson was accused at home of having tricked the revolutionaries and handed them over to be executed. And some historians say this was bad form from Nelson. You know, he behaved poorly, he deceived the revolutionaries, others say he had no choice. And this is your classic issue where at some point the child reader, just like an Adult reader has to make up their own mind. You tell them what happened, you tell them what people said at the time. You give a little bit of, on the one hand and not too much because it's not a history textbook. And then you say, I don't have a hotline to God. A historian doesn't deliver absolute truth. And you know what? I don't think that should be any different for a children's book and for an adult's book. I think it's actually a bad habit of a lot of historians to assume that they are the voice of this is the truth about the British Empire or whatever it might be. I think actually that's for the reader to decide, not you.
- [10:24]
Interview Host
The writer now going to challenge you on the moralizing bit because the title of the book is Hero of the Sea. So you are making a value judgment there to say that he was a heroic figure.
- [10:34]
Dominic Sandbrook
No, no, no, I think that's the scrupulous historical judgment. I don't think any, even the most Frenchified historian couldn't possibly disagree with that, Dave.
- [10:41]
Interview Host
Okay, okay. So you definitely see him as a heroic figure. We're going to get into slavery conversation a bit because you do tackle that in the book.
- [10:50]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah.
- [10:50]
Interview Host
And there's this difficult bit about this letter, this controversial letter which was written in 1805 from the deck of Victory to the slave owner Simon Taylor, a friend of Nelson's, because the letter is deemed to be evidence of Nelson being basically in favor of slavery.
- [11:08]
Dominic Sandbrook
Okay, well, there's lots of different things to unpack here. Let's start with the issue of heroism. Then we'll move on to slavery. The overwhelming majority of people in 1805 at the point that Nelson died, thought he was an exceptional human being. So obviously his sailors, the people who work with him, his captains, all of those people, they think he's remarkable. They don't think he's perfect. And there are lots of people in the kind of higher restaurants, the Admiralty, who find Nelson quite annoying because he can be quite vain and he can be very self promoting and sort of difficult, prickly sometimes. But most people think they have lived and worked alongside somebody who was remarkable. And this includes, by the way, his opponents. So Don Francisco Gravina, who was the admiral of the Spanish contingent fighting Nelson when he died, an Englishman went to meet him on his deathbed and he said to him, it's a consolation to me that I'm going to join Nelson, the greatest hero that the world has ever produced. I mean, maybe if you're very cynical you would say, maybe this was embellished. Of course it wasn't. Dave, you and I know that this is exactly what the Spaniard would have said on his deathbed. So case closed. Now to the other issue, the slavery issue. First of all, even if Nelson did have views that we would now regard as abhorrent, that is true of almost every single person who's ever lived. So, you know, Socrates, Julius Caesar, whoever it might be, Martin Luther King, Gandhi undoubtedly had views on all kinds of issues that we would now disagree with. That doesn't diminish their status as remarkable human beings. I never think that the job of somebody reading about history is to act as a kind of hanging judge, as a sort of prosecutor. As for Nelson and slavery, there's no doubt in my mind that Nelson ultimately supported the institution. That he's from a sort of fairly conservative background, son of a vicar. But there's no sense that his father, the Reverend Nelson, Edmund Nelson, no sense of him being an abolitionist. He doesn't mix with abolitionists. He is instinctively very conservative, kind of king and country. So it would be actually out of character for him to have secretly been an abolitionist. He is very conscious of the importance of the Caribbean to Britain's economy, to its kind of security. It's from the profits from the Caribbean in parts that Britain is able to fund the infrastructure of war. So again, I don't think there's any doubt that Nelson would have been very suspicious. He would have been extremely wary, to put it mildly, of more radical abolitionists. All of that said, there's no evidence that he had any investments in the slave trade. He never took slaves. He never wrote or said anything remotely racist. There were black seamen in the Royal Navy. Nelson at one point captured a Portuguese ship, I think it's Portuguese, and freed the slaves on the ship. So in other words, other than serving in the Royal Navy and operating in the Caribbean, as so many people did, he's not personally implicated in the slave trade in the way that, for example, an earlier hero of kind of the Ladybird book school of history, Sir Francis Drake, might have been. Now, to the letter, the letter was greatly publicized by opponents of abolition. They said, oh, look, Lord Nelson was a great opponent of abolition and a great supporter of the slave trade. Actually, almost all Nelson scholars now believe that that letter was doctored by the sort of the slaveholders and their supporters because they wanted to get Nelson's now dead at this point, because they wanted to have Nelson's name. And so they exaggerated and amplified what they thought Nelson might have said. But again, actually that's sort of playing by the critics game. Because even if he had, right, even if he had had views that you and I would say, gosh, I don't agree with that at all, that's very unsettling. Would that tarnish his reputation beyond any conceivable repair? And I would say not. I would say that's approaching history in completely the wrong way. The way to approach history is not to think, well, I have this standard of values and they're basically the same as my own. What an extraordinary coincidence that is. And if this person in the past doesn't quite measure up, then they're obviously a bad guy. I think that's a terrible way of approaching the past, actually. I don't, I don't think there should be either one issue or one yardstick by which we judge people who lived before us. And I definitely think we shouldn't be encouraging young readers to approach history in a kind of finger wagging, moralistic spirit. I think actually the otherness, the difference of the past is the joy of it.
- [15:36]
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- [15:51]
Interview Host
Because there's some other things I've picked up. What I thought was very interesting about your analysis of Nelson. You describe him as restless and anxious at one point. What made him restless, do you think? What drove this man to such feats of martial glory?
- [16:03]
Dominic Sandbrook
It's a great question. What makes anybody tick? I suppose he's not from an exceptional family. His family is quite well connected. So through his mother's family they're related to Sir Robert Walpole. But his father is a very mild mannered Reverend Edmund Nelson. Very mild mannered man who's, you know, perfectly happy to basically mold her in this rectory in East Anglia. And Nelson's siblings, he doesn't seem to have had an especially close relationship with them really. And you know, again, they're not enormously driven, ambitious people. I think he's a very good example actually of what historians often find really maddening, which is the importance of character in history. He lost his mother at quite a young age. I mean that's a kind of terribly cliched thing to say about as in a vertical, as great men of history, that often there is a lack in their childhood, there is an absence. They feel the need to fill. We know that he's got a kind of romantic sense of destiny. He's an egotist. Great men of history, I mean I use the term, I know how loaded the term is. But great men of history often have an enormous sense of ego and that's something that obviously Nelson's superiors found very off putting. He has a sense of a sort of show busy sense of himself as the star of the story and he's determined to turn himself into the star of the story. From quite a young age he's impatient for glory with every kind of bauble that he's given from the government. He always thinks it's not enough, you know, his peerage isn't enough, he wants a better peerage, all of that kind of thing. He wants a fancy country house, all of this. There is a previous person I'd written about in this series from a completely different period of time is Alexander the Great. And the Greeks said of Alexander the Great that he had this thing they called pothos which was this sense of kind of, this kind of yearning, a kind of dreaminess again, the kind of restlessness, never satisfied, always pushing beyond when most of us would say great, I've conquered a bit of Persia, brilliant, I'm going to go home. Nelson has that I think as well. Nelson is never satisfied when he's lying dying below decks in the Victory in the kind of hideous scene, the kind of surgeon's cockpit, dark, his lungs are filling with blood. He's been back, has been shot through and he's told how many ships they've taken. An extraordinary number I think it's then in the mid teens and he says oh it is well, but I'd bargain for 20, I wanted 20. Now to get 20 ships would have just been mind boggling. I mean these are hugely expensive, highly produced kind of floating gun platforms. To take one or two is a great feat. You could say in some ways Nelson is a monster. He's a monster of egotism. He is so driven. He must have been exhausting in some ways. And it's got always got to be about him. And yet at the same time people find that magnetic and charismatic and that kind of drive which ultimately I think you cannot really explain other than by reference to a kind of temperament. That drive is what sets him apart from so many of his colleagues. I mean there are many brilliant Royal Navy officers in 1800 because this is probably the most well drilled, the most highly trained, the most professional and competent organization of any kind in the world. But even by the standards of the organization, Nelson stands apart. And that comes down to personality.
- [19:19]
Interview Host
I wonder, then the character also surely links into his health problems the way that he dealt with his many health problems, because what did he have? He had malaria. He had a hernia, shot in the head and the arm, blind in one eye. I mean, for most people, that would have been enough, wouldn't it? You know, that would have been a recipe for bed rest. But he seems to have just carried on, regardless of all these disabilities.
- [19:42]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah. And that, again, is something that I think, as a sort of scholarly historian, you might find frustrating, which is it comes down to, again, the individual personality. The Royal Navy, you're taking your life in your hands to some extent by joining the Royal Navy. So if you are posted to the Caribbean or if you're sent to India, both of which, obviously Nelson was. You know, you do run the risk of disease. He was hideously ill in a terrible expedition in Nicaragua during the war of American independence. He gets malaria in India, as you said. He's hit in the eye by shrapnel in Corsica. He then is shot in the elbow in Tenerife. And all of these things actually are testament to his personal courage. So he's constantly putting himself in harm's way. In Trafalgar, he is told, frigate captain says to him, as they're going into battle, as they're proceeding, they're making this sort of slow, stately progression towards the combined fleet of the enemy. A frigate captain says, you will be a target in your uniform with the reproductions of your medals on your chest. You should basically run the battle from a frigate. And Nelson says, no, because that's not what a leader does. I mean, this is very Alexander the Great, actually. I lead from the front. I have to be in the front line and my men have to see me because that will inspire them. And it undoubtedly does inspire them. So the health problems are partly a reflection of the personal courage, but also he's also just a very sickly person. And part of this is, I think, the malaria, which is always with him, which dogs him for decades. But he gets seasick. He's very highly strung, actually. It's an odd thing that somebody who, in the heat of battle is so calm and so composed, calculating a lot of. When he's not fighting battles, he's very kind of jittery and anxious. He's always getting these terrible headaches. He can't sleep. His bowels are a total mess. He gets seasick. I mean, it's a bonkers thing to say. About somebody who's probably the most famous Briton who's ever gone to sea. But he's. He often struggles with seasickness, and I think that makes this story so. I was thinking about this for a child, in a way, you could say for a child reader, that's quite disappointing because you want your hero to be really manly and to be robust and all of that stuff. Or do you? Because maybe as a child, you're conscious that you yourself are seasick and are sometimes a bit sickly and all of that kind of stuff. And maybe it makes Nelson more of a sympathetic character, more of a sympathetic protagonist, that he has all these flaws and he's not perfect. That actually people all would say at the time, he's physically very unprepossessing. He's not very tall. He's very slender. People are often shocked at how sickly, how weak he looks. You know, this isn't the great towering kind of figure of their imagination. To me, that makes him all the more endearing.
- [22:27]
Interview Host
Okay. And then also there's this sense that he's very Shakespearean as well. He draws inspiration from Shakespeare and particularly Henry V and this band of brothers idea. Tell us about that.
- [22:36]
Dominic Sandbrook
This is an interesting thing because this is also the tension between the individual and the collective. Because you could argue, of course, the triumph at Trafalgar and the Britain's victory in the Napoleonic wars is actually nothing to do with individuals at all. It's to do with British industry, the sinews of finance, the taxation that pays for this extraordinary navy, and the teamwork of all of these hundreds of people. Nelson loves the idea of the teamwork, and he seems to have been a particularly keen aficionado of Shakespeare's plays. You mentioned Henry V and this idea of the band of brothers. It's a phrase he uses a lot. You know, lots of people listen to the podcast will know the speech. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers, all that stuff. So Nelson says that of the. Particularly of the people that went into that had chased Napoleon across the Mediterranean, caught up with him in Abu Gibay, the Battle of the Nile, this is really the moment that Nelson kind of writes himself into the history books, smashing Napoleon's fleet, destroying Napoleon's plan to conquer Egypt. And Nelson always refers to his captains from that day as his band of brothers. He has this kind of slightly sentimental view, I think of, especially when he's in charge, that all of his captains will know his minds. They'll be his men. They'll be part of his team. He invites them to his cabin, he has these dinners with them, he sets out his plans and this is true for the rest of his career. So in the build up to Trafalgar, when he's got a lot of captains that he doesn't really know who are much younger men, again, he is very keen on this kind of band of brothers idea. We will be like Henry V and his paladins before Agincourt. He will have them over to his cabin and he will have dinner with them and he will, you know, be very relaxed and very welcoming. And we know this because a lot of them wrote home at the time to their wives and whatnot and said, oh, this is brilliant. Actually, Nelson is the most tremendous man. He's a great host. I love meeting Nelson. It's wonderful to be part of his team. And the fact that he has this idea in his head that he's got from Shakespeare again, I think, is. It's actually very Hollywood, the idea that he's got this idea drawn from the kind of annals of English legend and he is determined to make it a reality and part of his own life again. I think as a writer for children, children's history book, I mean, that is basically a gift.
- [24:48]
Interview Host
Yeah. So he's a great subject for you to write about because he's good copy. But there is a bit of a problem, isn't there, in the sense that he's also got a scandal, this massive scandal about his relationship with Emma Hamilton. Can you just give us a little bit of a sense about how big a scandal that was and how you deal with that in the narrative that you wrote?
- [25:06]
Dominic Sandbrook
So, funnily enough, just on a sort of a technical level, that was a much bigger challenge to me than the slavery issue or the stuff with the execution, the revolutionaries, because I thought that is the thing that he will lose. Reader's sympathy. So Nelson was married to a woman called Fanny Nisbet, who he had met. She was quite young and she is widowed. She's been widowed very young. He meets her in the Caribbean, she is the daughter of a landowner and she comes back with him to England and they are, to all intents and purposes, happily married that they don't have children. And people would sometimes say she's a kind of an odd wife for him because she's really lovely, she's shy, she's very sweet, she's very reserved. And Nelson is so driven and so sort of bumptious that they're a funny pair, put it that way. But everything seems to be fine. There's no hint whatsoever of any discord. And actually, just before he goes to the Battle of the Nile, they have dinner with some sort of high society people. And one of the. I think it's the hostess says, she writes, gosh, he's so attentive to his wife. You know, they're so close and all this kind of thing. Anyway, Nelson goes off, he fights the Battle of the Nile. He's a tremendous hero. And then he goes to Naples afterwards where he's greeted as a hero. And there, the British representative in Naples is this guy, Sir William Hamilton, who's an expert on kind of vases and Vesuvius and stuff. And his wife is Emma Hamilton, much younger, who is. I mean, people had very strong views about Emma at the time. And no doubt some of the listeners to this podcast have strong views. I actually think Emma is a terrible person. She has had a very unhappy life, actually, and has been very badly treated. She has ended up. She's come from poverty and she's ended up as Sir William Hamilton's sort of mistress and then his wife. And she's showy, she's a bit of a diva. She has to be the star of every party. She's famous for doing these attitudes, as they're called, where she basically kind of mimes scenes from mythology and stuff. She's got kind of big hair, she's a big kind of blousey woman. Some people think she's brilliant, some people absolutely despise her. Most of Nelson's fellow officers absolutely hate her. Nelson is utterly smitten with Emma and she with him. And he starts carrying on with her in Naples and then in Sicily, and then they all decide to go back to England together, all of them. Sir William Hamilton, Emma and Nelson. Now, by this point, Emma and Nelson are basically carrying on under Sir William Hamilton's nose. And by the time they get to England, she is pregnant with Nelson's child. There's a terrible scene where he goes to see Fanny. He's been waiting all this time, and his dad, they meet in a hotel in central London with Sir William Hamilton, the pregnant Emma and Nelson. So it's again, very kind of HBO drama, this ghastly scene, all incredibly awkward. And Nelson then behaves, I think I can reasonably say, extremely badly. He treats Fanny really badly. He sends a succession of kind of very cold letters. He breaks off their marriage and basically says, you're dead to me. The marriage is dead. I will never speak to you again. Here's some money. Be off with you. I'm Going to live with Emma where she does. And in the context of 1801, 1802 or whatever it is, this is unbelievably scandalous. Everybody knows about it. It is played out in public. It is like the most public tabloid 21st century scandal. You know, all the leading cartoonists, sort of Gilray or whatever produce these scathing cartoons of Sir William Hamilton as the kind of cuckolded old relic of Emma Hamilton as a kind of bare breasted Cleopatra as Nelson is this sort of feckless, deluded Mark Anthony. And this has played out, you know, in public. And a lot of his fellow officers were horrified by this. They would sort of said Nelson is such a great man, such a tremendous chap. He's fallen for this woman and completely disgraced himself. And obviously some people ever since have said this is very harsh on Nelson but more particularly on Emma. Everyone always blames the woman, don't they? You know, this is how it works. Personally I do think Emma, she was very cruel to Fanny, the jilted wife. She was very mean about her. In her letters she basically encouraged the rest of Nelson's family to break off relations with Fanny which I think is, you know, bad behavior from Emma. People who visited Nelson's and Emma's house at Merton, they would say it's a terrible place because basically they built a shrine to themselves and filled it with pictures of themselves, you know, and as you can imagine, I mean for any of us going to see if our friend behaved like that, you would think badly of them. So I do think badly of Nelson for that and obviously writing that for an 11 year old and they're meant to be sympathizing with Nelson as you rightly said Dave. The tight subtitle is Nelson Hero of the Seas. I had to think about how to handle it and actually the way to. I decided that the way to handle it is just to be completely honest about it and to say this is what happened. You know, people took different sides. Lots of people thought Nelson behaved badly. He probably did behave badly. People aren't perfect. There's no such thing as a perfect hero. But you, the child reader can make up your own mind.
- [30:11]
Interview Host
Yeah. And you do kind of invite the reader to reflect on his reputation when at the point, when he writes that letter to Fanny saying, you know, it's over in 1801 and then he writes a letter to Emma saying off we go. And I think you invite the reader to just. I just think if Nelson had died at that point prior to his tremendous victory At Trafalgar, would his reputation have been. Obviously, it wouldn't have been anything like it because he wouldn't have won this major battle. But would he have been in any way the same sort of man as we see him today?
- [30:38]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, I think that's right. I think there's that point before Trafalgar. So Nelson slightly redeemed himself by his victory in the Battle of Copenhagen. So that came just in the middle of all this great hullabaloo. And I think Copenhagen was actually very important for Nelson, for Nelson's public reputation, because he was becoming actually a bit of a joke. And that's one thing he couldn't bear to be being criticized was one thing, but being laughed at I think he found unbearable because I don't think he was blessed with a tremendous sense of humor, certainly not about himself. But then there's a sort of period where he's just basically hanging around. It's clear the war, the thing with the Napoleonic War is their very stop start. And so there are long periods of sort of 6 months, 12 months where there's actually nothing happening the way there's a truce or supposedly a piece.
- [31:22]
Interview Host
That's not very good for your Hollywood narrative, is it?
- [31:24]
Dominic Sandbrook
No, it's not good for the Hollywood narrative. So I think the seasons have to keep jumping ahead. I think I've got it all planned out, Dave. So I think he needs Trafalgar, really. He needs that kind of nationalistic military apotheosis to banish the memories of Emma. I mean, basically after he died, I think everybody was still very embarrassed by Emma's presence. So Fanny, when he died, she kind of puts on her widow's weeds and she goes about in Bath, where she spends a lot of time. And people are very polite to her. And everyone says, oh, she's very decorous and respect. She's been treated very badly, but she's very respectable. She's given a pension. So she ends up actually a very rich woman. Emma, you know, Nilsen's dying words, like, please don't forget Lady Hamilton. Be kind to Lady Hamilton. Everybody hates Lady Hamilton. So when he dies, they're like, right, brilliant. Let's forget about Lady Hamilton. Let's not give her anything. And she has a terrible life afterwards and ends up. She goes to France, ironically, and just spends a lot of time drinking. And it feels very hard done by. And in a way you can argue that, as I said, she's not my favorite person in history by any means. I think she has probably been very hard Done by and very poorly treated.
- [32:29]
Interview Host
Okay, we've skipped over far too much stuff here and we haven't really got time to consider Nelson's life in its full narrative. But let's finish on the battle of Trafalgar, which obviously is the key moment in his life. And you've kind of talked a little bit earlier about how British naval victories were not just of great men, it was the system behind that kind of carried it through. So this is an odd question, but how important was Nelson to the victory at Trafalgar?
- [32:52]
Dominic Sandbrook
I think Nelson's really important because Nelson, he's outnumbered. The French and Spanish have more ships, and French and Spanish, if they can slip past Nelson, they can evade him. Who knows what they could do? They could strike west and attack Britain's colonies in the Caribbean on which so much of British economic power depends. Or of course, there is always this fear. If they win control of the Channel, Napoleon can amass an army, a bologne. Napoleon, realistically is probably not going to conquer Britain, but he could wreak terrible damage on Britain's naval infrastructure, on the dockyards and so on, as the Dutch had done. In that he can do a bit of a kind of Dutch raid on the Medway type thing. So the threat to Britain is very Great Britain's never going to beat Napoleon on land. The only way to do it really is a long term campaign where you win control of the seas, squeeze his empire and hope that in the long run it will basically fall apart, which is of course what happens. But Nelson's approach is, he says, listen, the way to beat them is we have to have this what he calls a pell mell battle and we have to go straight at them and we have to, you know, previous naval battles, you're always quite cautious because you've basically got this hardware that's extremely expensive and you don't want to risk it. Nelson says, no, we will absolutely risk it. We go straight at them. And I believe that if we just go right at them instead of shilly shallying, as people have often done for decades, we can annihilate them. That's his word, to annihilate the enemy. And Nelson, he welds together all of these different captains. He explains his plan, naval plans. Naval tactics are really tricky because the weather, the waves, all of that stuff can mess up an elaborate strategy. So in a way there is a brilliant simplicity to Nelson's plan. He says, look, we'll go straight at their line. We will smash their line into a series of pieces by approaching them from the flank. And then we'll polish off the different pieces kind of individually. And it works brilliantly. A lot of admirals that he had worked with, Admiral Hotham, for example, in the 1790s were much more cautious. You know, you don't risk everything on one slashing maneuver like this. But Nelson's genius is that he says, look, we have the best trained men, we have the best ships, let's use them, let's not mess around. Let's go straight at the enemy and destroy them completely. And the result is a victory beyond the dreams of any other, of any of Nelson's fellow officers. What does he capture? 21 of the enemy ships of the line. He takes thousands of prisoners, kills thousands of French and Spanish seamen and destroys really French and Spanish sea power. I mean, not just for a generation, effectively, he destroys it forever. So in that one day in October 1805, Nelson's vision of a sort of death or glory, all or nothing battle achieves two things. First of all, it frees Britain permanently from the threat of invasion. So that threat had hung over Britain since the very beginning of the French Revolutionary wars in the early 1790s. I would say. I think most naval historians would say by the end of October 1805, it is gone permanently and it will never really return because the French are never going to have control of the seas. But secondly, what he does by winning control of the seas, that sets up Britain for a century of dominance. So Britain is then unchallenged, really until the First World War. Even the Germans, with their dreadnoughts before the First World War, don't really manage to challenge British naval supremacy. Now part of that is Nelson's personal leadership and his vision. And of course part of that is the infrastructure that is behind him. The dockyards, the manufacturers, the thousands of people working on the ships, all of that kind of stuff. So it's the kind of combination of the two. But you need that spearhead, you need somebody with that sort of vigor and enterprise to say, let's go for it and let's knock them out once and for all. And I think most of Nelson's comrades would not have done that. And what makes him distinctive is the sort of extravagance, in a way, of his offensive vision.
- [37:00]
Interview Host
He was some gambler, wasn't he? He was a risk taker, right, a risk taker.
- [37:04]
Dominic Sandbrook
Not many risk takers where most of them work, so some of them don't work. Probably the most famous one is Tenerife, where he attacks the they land in Tenerife. That's where he loses his arm when he's shot in the elbow. It's a mad scheme to basically get this Spanish treasure fleet they think has been sailing from the gold of Mexico, and it ends up disastrous. Whenever Nelson's doing raids on land, the listeners are ever catapulted back on time and they find themselves being invited to join a Nelsonian raiding party. That is an invitation you should definitely decline. Whenever he's on land, it ends disastrously and everybody's killed. But at sea, his gambles almost always work to perfection.
- [37:40]
Interview Host
Okay, so stay in the boat with Nelson. That's. That's your advice?
- [37:43]
Dominic Sandbrook
Definitely don't get out of the boat in Naples because you'll contract all kinds of unpleasant diseases.
- [37:47]
Interview Host
Right, Last thing to finish up. I just want to confirm that these books are definitely for children. Right, Aren't they? Because. Because you, presumably, you want everyone to follow your view that Nelson's a hero. You want adults and children alike to see the heroism in this man.
- [38:00]
Dominic Sandbrook
I do think everybody should think that because it's so clearly true. I don't think there have been many examples in history of people saying Nelson wasn't an extraordinarily impressive, charismatic, decisive figure. I sort of struggle, actually maybe a total paucity and weakness of my imagination. I struggle to see the interpretation that says that Nelson was actually a terrible man because, I mean, so many people at the time obviously thought he wasn't and thought he was great. But, yeah, I do think everybody should read these books. And actually, the weird thing is a lot of adults do read them. So I think it's partly because they're quite short. And as you know, Dave, my books for adults are generally 300,000 words long. So, you know, it was quite a big challenge for me to go from writing Brilliant, I'll write 200 words about the IMF bailout of 1976 to thinking I can do the Napoleonic wars in, you know, 200 pages. That's fine. But. Yeah, do you know what? I think the difference between children's books and adults books is not as great as people. I think the qualities you strive for are the same, which are a good story, good characters, a little bit of complexity, but ultimately you want it to be fun, because otherwise, what's the point.
- [39:09]
Interview Host
Yeah. Which is why I presume that the ninth book in your series will be on the IMF bailout.
- [39:14]
Dominic Sandbrook
Definitely. Kids across Britain are absolutely gagging for that book on James Callahan, hero of the land.
- [39:22]
David Musgrove
That was Dominic Sandbrook, historian of the 20th century, co host of the Rest is History Podcast and the author of the Adventures in Time History books for children. His book Nelson Hero of the Seas is published by Particular Books. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer Arden.