CHAPTER XII.
NELSON'S CAREER, AND GENERAL EVENTS IN THE MEDITERRANEAN AND ITALY, FROM THE OVERTHROW OF THE ROYAL GOVERNMENT IN NAPLES TO THE INCURSION OF THE FRENCH FLEET UNDER ADMIRAL BRUIX.
JANUARY-MAY, 1799. AGE, 40.
The four and a half months of unbroken residence in Palermo, which followed the flight of the Court from Naples, were full of annoyance and distress to Nelson, independent of, and additional to, the disquieting struggle between his passion and his conscience, which had not yet been silenced. The disasters in Naples continued. The Neapolitan Navy had been left in charge of one of the Portuguese officers, who soon found himself compelled to burn the ships-of-the-line, to prevent their falling into the hands of the revolutionists,—a step for which he was severely, but apparently unjustly, censured by Nelson. The peasantry and the lower orders of the city took up arms, under the guidance of their priests, and for some time sought, with rude but undisciplined fury, to oppose the advance of the enemy; but such untrained resistance was futile before the veterans of France, and on the 23d of January, 1799, Championnet's troops entered the city. This was followed by the establishment of the Parthenopeian Republic, a name which reflected the prevailing French affectation of antiquity. For all this Nelson blamed the Emperor, and formed gloomy forebodings. "Had the war commenced in September or October," he had written amid the December disasters, "all Italy would at this moment have been liberated. Six months hence, when the Neapolitan Republic will be organized, armed, and with its numerous resources called forth, I will suffer to have my head cut off, if the Emperor is not only defeated in Italy, but that he totters on his throne in Vienna." To this text he stuck. Three months later, when the preparations of Austria and Russia were complete, he wrote: "The French have made war upon the Emperor, and have surprised some of his troops. Serve him right! why did he not go to war before?" But the rapid, continuous, and overwhelming successes of the Coalition, between April and August, showed how untimely had been the step he had urged upon the King of the Sicilies, disregardful of the needed preparations and of the most favorable season—February to August—for operations in Italy. Naples never recovered such political equilibrium as she had possessed before that ill-advised advance. In Nelson's career it, and its reverses, were to the Battle of the Nile what Teneriffe was to St. Vincent; and it illustrates the inadequacy to success of merely "going ahead," unless both time and method are dictated by that martial intelligence which Nelson so abundantly possessed, but in this case failed to use.
Not in Naples only did fortune now administer to him rebuffs, which seemed singularly to rebuke the change of direction and of base which he had been persuaded to give to his personal efforts. Immediately upon his arrival in Palermo, he heard from St. Vincent that a comparatively junior captain, Sir Sidney Smith, had been sent out by the Cabinet, bearing, besides his naval commission from the Admiralty, one from the Foreign Office as envoy to Turkey, conjointly with his brother, Spencer Smith. This unusual and somewhat cumbrous arrangement was adopted with the design that Smith should be senior naval officer in the Levant, where it was thought his hands would be strengthened by the diplomatic functions; but the Government's explanation of its intentions was so obscure, that St. Vincent understood the new-comer was to be independent of both himself and Nelson. This impression was confirmed by a letter from Smith to Hamilton, in which occurred the words, "Hood naturally falls under my orders when we meet, as being my junior," while the general tone was that of one who had a right, by virtue of his commission alone, to take charge of such vessels, and to direct such operations, as he found in the Levant. This impression was fairly deducible from a letter of the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, that Smith forwarded to Nelson; after which, without seeking an interview, he at once went on for Constantinople.
Nelson immediately asked to be relieved. "I do feel, for I am a man," he wrote to St. Vincent, "that it is impossible for me to serve in these seas, with the squadron under a junior officer. Never, never was I so astonished." With this private letter he sent an official application for leave. "The great anxiety I have undergone during the whole time I have been honoured with this important command, has much impaired a weak constitution. And now, finding that much abler officers are arrived within the district which I had thought under my command, ... and, I flatter myself, having made the British nation and our gracious Sovereign more beloved and respected than heretofore; under these circumstances I entreat, that if my health and uneasiness of mind should not be mended, that I may have your Lordship's permission to leave this command to my gallant and most excellent second in command, Captain Troubridge." In similar terms, though more guarded, he wrote to Earl Spencer. At the same time he took proper steps to prevent the official impropriety, not to say rudeness, which Smith was about to commit by taking from Hood his charge, without either the latter or Nelson receiving personal instructions to surrender it. He sent Troubridge hastily to Alexandria to take command there, with orders that, upon Smith's arrival, he should deliver up the blockade to him, and return to the westward. "I should hope," he wrote to Spencer, "that Sir Sidney Smith will not take any ship from under my command, without my orders;" but he evidently expected that he would, and was determined to forestall the possibility of such an affront.
Nelson's services had been so eminent, and were at this time so indispensable, and his exceptions to the manner in which Smith had been intruded into his command were so well founded, that the matter was rectified as rapidly as the slow round of communications in that day would permit. The Admiralty disclaimed any intention of circumscribing his control in the Mediterranean, and Smith received peremptory orders from St. Vincent to report himself to Nelson by letter for orders. The latter of course carried out the Admiralty's wishes, by intrusting to Smith the immediate direction of operations in the Levant, while retaining in his own hands the general outlines of naval policy. He kept a very tight rein on Smith, however, and introduced into the situation some dry humor, unusual with him. The two brothers, envoys, he addressed jointly, in his official letters, by the collective term "Your Excellency." "I beg of your Excellency," he says in such a letter, "to forward my letter to Sir Sidney Smith, Captain of the Tigre. I have this day received letters from Sir Sidney Smith, in his Ministerial capacity, I believe. I wish that all Ministerial letters should be written in your joint names; for it may be difficult for me to distinguish the Captain of the man-of-war from the Joint Minister, and the propriety of language in one might be very proper to what it is in the other." To the naval captain he writes: "I must direct you, whenever you have Ministerial affairs to communicate, that it is done jointly with your respectable brother, and not mix naval business with the other. I have sent you my orders, which your abilities as a sea-officer will lead you to punctually execute."
Nelson resented to the end this giving to a junior naval officer, by a side-wind, an authoritative position in diplomatic affairs, which, on the naval side, properly belonged to him. "Sir Sidney should recollect," he told Earl Spencer, meaning doubtless that the latter also should recollect, "how I must feel in seeing him placed in the situation which I thought naturally would fall to me." It was a singular step on the part of the Government, justified neither by general practice, nor by particular ability on the part of the person chosen; and all Nelson's care and decision were insufficient to prevent the consequent evil, although he was perfectly clear in his intimation to "Your Excellency," the joint ministers, that they should "upon all occasions, arrange plans of operations with me," and not with Captain Sir Sidney Smith. Smith was active and fought well; but, as far as he dared, he did as he pleased in virtue of his diplomatic commission, looked only to the interests of his own small part of the field, and, as will appear later, flatly disobeyed both the spirit and the letter of Nelson's orders, as well as the Government's purpose, concerning the French army in Egypt. The general sound judgment and diplomatic ability of Nelson, who was thus superseded, had on the other hand been fully recognized—formally by the Government, explicitly by St. Vincent and Minto, both of whom had personal experience of his conduct in such matters. "What relates to co-operation with the armies of the allied powers cannot be in better hands than yours," wrote the former. "You are as great in the cabinet as on the ocean, and your whole conduct fills me with admiration and confidence." "There is one other point of excellence," said Minto in the House of Peers, "to which I must say a single word, because I am, perhaps, the man in the world who has had the best opportunity of being acquainted with it. The world knows that Lord Nelson can fight the battles of his country: but a constant and confidential correspondence with this great man, for a considerable portion of time, has taught me, that he is not less capable of providing for its political interests and honour, on occasions of great delicacy and embarrassment. In that new capacity I have witnessed a degree of ability, judgment, temper, and conciliation, not always allied to the sort of spirit which without an instant's hesitation can attack the whole Spanish line with his single ship." Of Nelson's superior fitness in this respect, the unfortunate choice of Sidney Smith for his anomalous position was to furnish the Government an additional proof.
It was not in this matter only that maritime affairs in the East took a turn contrary to Nelson's wishes. Since he had persuaded himself that to bolster up the corrupt and tottering throne of Naples was the most important of his functions, he had become desirous that the isolation and blockade of the French army in Egypt,—a factor so decisive by its numbers, its brilliant efficiency, and the singular genius and renown of its general and his lieutenants,—should be assumed by some of the allies of Great Britain, although he was never slow to express his want of confidence in their navies. He was urgent, both with the joint ministers and with the representatives of Russia and Turkey, that the fleets of these two powers should relieve Hood off Alexandria, in order to strengthen his own hands on the coast of Italy and off Malta. Neither Russia nor Turkey was easily to be convinced. Egypt was no affair of the former's, except as it concerned the general cause; and from that point of view it was as much the business of Great Britain, already on the spot, as it was hers. With twenty thousand troops about to enter into a campaign in Northern Italy, as allies of Austria, Russia had undeniable interests there, as well as in the Ionian Islands, which commanded the entrance to the Adriatic, a sea important to communications between Austria and Lombardy. The islands also were, in the hands of France, a threat to the Turkish mainland. It was against these, therefore, that the Russo-Turkish forces directed their efforts, greatly to Nelson's disgust, and there they remained, chained by the obstinate resistance of Corfu, until the 1st of March, 1799, when it surrendered. The fifty-gun ship "Leander," which had been taken by the French seventy-four "Généreux," when carrying Nelson's despatches after the Nile, was here recaptured and restored to Great Britain.