The Crown Prince at once sent back his principal aid-de-camp, with a verbal message, which the latter reduced to writing, as follows:—
"His Royal Highness, the Prince Royal of Denmark, has sent me, General Adjutant Lindholm, on board to his Britannic Majesty's Vice-Admiral, the Right Honourable Lord Nelson, to ask the particular object of sending the flag of truce."
To this Nelson replied in writing:—
"Lord Nelson's object in sending on shore a flag of truce is humanity; he, therefore, consents that hostilities shall cease till Lord Nelson can take his prisoners out of the prizes, and he consents to land all the wounded Danes, and to burn or remove his prizes."
This message concluded with a complimentary expression of hope that good relations would be restored between the two nations, whom Nelson always carefully spoke of as natural friends. It will be observed that he again alludes only to the flag of truce sent by the boat, and, as at first he demanded, so now he consents to a cessation of hostilities, until he can secure his prisoners and remove his prizes. If he could rightly remove his prizes, which he avowed as part of his demand, then still more he could his own ships. This part of the negotiation he took upon himself to settle; for discussion of any further matters he referred Lindholm to Sir Hyde Parker, and the Danish officer started for the "London" at the same time that the English officer pushed off to carry Nelson's second message to the Crown Prince. The latter had already sent orders to the batteries to cease firing. The battle then ended, and both sides hoisted flags of truce.
Nelson at once began to remove his ships, which had sufered more than in any other battle he had ever fought. That he was fully aware of the imminent necessity for some of them to withdraw, and of the advantage the Danes had yielded him by accepting his terms, is indisputable, and his own opinion was confirmed by that of two of his leading captains, whom he consulted. This he never denied; but he did deny that he had used a ruse de guerre, or taken unfair advantage of a truce. On the score of humanity he had consented to a cessation of hostilities, conditional upon his freedom to take out of the surrendered ships the unwounded prisoners, and to remove the prizes. If the bargain was more to his advantage than to that of the Danes—which is a matter of opinion—it was none the less a bargain, of which he had full right to reap the benefit. The Danes did not then charge him with taking an unfair advantage. On the contrary, Lindholm, who was closely cognizant of all that passed in relation to these negotiations, wrote to him: "Your Lordship's motives for sending a flag of truce to our Government can never be misconstrued, and your subsequent conduct has sufficiently shown that humanity is always the companion of true valour." The truce that then began was prolonged from day to day till April 9th. During it both parties went on with their preparations for war. "These few days," wrote Niebuhr, on the 6th, "have certainly been employed in repairing the evil [of faulty preparation] as far as possible." It is clear that the Danes understood, what Nelson's message specified, a cessation of direct hostilities, not of other movements. The British during the same days were putting bomb-vessels in place, a perfectly overt act.
Nelson's success at Copenhagen was secured by address, as it had been won by force. But it had been thoroughly won. "We cannot deny it," wrote Niebuhr, "we are quite beaten. Our line of defence is destroyed. We cannot do much injury to the enemy, as long as he contents himself with bombarding the city, docks, and fleet. The worst is the Crown Batteries can be held no longer." Two or three days later he says again: "The truce has been prolonged. The remaining half of our defences are useless, now that the right wing is broken,—a defect over which I have meditated uselessly many a time since last summer." The result was due to Nelson's sagacious and emphatic advice as to the direction and manner of the attack, by which the strong points of the Danish positions were completely and unexpectedly turned. This plan, it is credibly stated, he had formed before leaving England, although he was not formally consulted by Parker until the 23d of March.
Having regard to the general political conditions, and especially to the great combination of the North at this time directed against Great Britain, the victory of Copenhagen was second in importance to none that Nelson ever gained; while in the severity of the resistance, and in the attendant difficulties to be overcome, the battle itself was the most critical of all in which he was engaged. So conspicuous were the energy and sagacity shown by him, that most seamen will agree in the opinion of Jurien de la Gravière: "They will always be in the eyes of seamen his fairest title to glory. He alone was capable of displaying such boldness and perseverance; he alone could confront the immense difficulties of that enterprise and overcome them." Notwithstanding this, and notwithstanding that the valor of the squadron, as manifested in its losses, was never excelled, no medals were ever issued for the battle, nor were any individual rewards bestowed, except upon Nelson himself, who was advanced in the peerage to be a Viscount, and upon his immediate second, Rear-Admiral Graves, who was made a Knight of the Bath. The cause for this action—it was not a case of oversight—has never been explained; nor did Nelson consider the reasons for it, which the Prime Minister advanced to him in a private interview, at all satisfactory. If it was because a formal state of war did not exist between Great Britain and Denmark, the obvious reply of those engaged would be that they had hazarded their lives, and won an exceptionally hard-fought fight, in obedience to the orders of their Government. If, on the other hand, the Ministry felt the difficulty of making an invidious distinction between ships engaged and those not engaged, as between Nelson's detachment and the main body under Parker, it can only be said that that was shirking the duty of a government to reward the deserving, for fear lest those who had been less fortunate should cry out. The last administration had not hesitated to draw a line at the Battle of the Nile, even though the mishap of so great an officer as Troubridge left him on the wrong side. St. Vincent, positive as he was, had shrunk from distinguishing by name even Nelson at the battle which had won for himself his title. This naturally suggests the speculation whether the joint presence of St. Vincent and Troubridge at the Admiralty was not the cause of this futility; but nothing can be affirmed.
"First secure the victory, then make the most of it," had been avowedly Nelson's motto before the Nile. In the Battle of Copenhagen he had followed much the same rule. After beating the force immediately opposed to him, he obtained the safe removal of his detachment from the critical position in which it lay, by the shrewd use made of the advantage then in his hands. This achieved, and his ships having rejoined the main body, after various mishaps from grounding, under the enemy's guns, which emphasized over and over the adroit presence of mind he had displayed, it next fell to him to make the most of what the British had so far gained; having regard not merely to Denmark and Copenhagen, but to the whole question of British interests involved in the Coalition of the Baltic States. Parker intrusted to him the direct management of the negotiations, just as he had given him the immediate command of the fighting.
One circumstance, which completely changed the political complexion of affairs, was as yet unknown to him. On the night of March 24th the Czar Paul had been murdered, and with him fell the main motive force and support of the Armed Neutrality. Ignorant of this fact, Nelson's one object, the most to be made of the victory, was to get at the detachment of the Russian fleet—twelve ships—lying in the harbor of Revel, before the breaking up of the ice allowed it to join the main body at Cronstadt. The difficulty in the way lay not in Nelson's hesitation to act instantly, nor in the power of the British fleet to do so; it lay in the conflicting views and purposes of other persons, of the Crown Prince and of Parker, the representatives of Denmark and of Great Britain. Parker was resolved, so Nelson has told us, not to leave Denmark hostile in his rear, flanking his line of communications if he proceeded up the Baltic; and Nelson admits, although with his sagacious daring he would have disregarded, that the batteries which commanded the shoal ground above Copenhagen might have seriously interrupted the passage. He was ready to run risks again for the very adequate object mentioned. On the other hand the Crown Prince, while recognizing the exposure of Copenhagen, feared to yield even to the menace of bombardment, lest he should incur the vengeance of the Czar. It was to find a middle term between these opposing motives that Nelson's diplomacy was exerted.