Of Collingwood in lighter vein we also get a glimpse. How, a short time after Trafalgar, he got one of his officers to write up his biography for a pertinacious newspaper editor is a story that the Admiral himself tells in a letter to his wife.
“The editors of the Naval Chronicle have written to me for the history of my life and progress, for which they are pleased to say the world is very impatient. Now this rather embarrasses me, for I never could bear the trumpeter of his own praise. So, to get rid of it as well as I can, I have employed ⸺ to write a history for me. For my birth and parentage he has selected two or three chapters of Bamfylde Moore Carew; for my service in the West Indies and on the Spanish Main he has had good assistance in the History of the Buccaneers; and for my shipwreck he has copied a great deal out of Robinson Crusoe; all which, with a few anecdotes from the Lives of the Admirals, a little distorted, will make, I am inclined to think, a very respectable piece of biography.”
Collingwood’s dog, Bounce, was on board the Royal Sovereign at Trafalgar, tied up out of the way below, in comparative safety, on the orlop deck. According to Collingwood himself, Bounce did not like cannon firing. Wrote Collingwood about him, before the battle: “Bounce is my only pet now, and he is indeed a good fellow; he sleeps by the side of my cot, whenever I lie in one, until near the time of tacking, and then marches off, to be out of the hearing of the guns, for he is not reconciled to them yet.” After the battle, on his master being raised to the peerage, Bounce—as Collingwood whimsically describes in one of his home-letters—seemed to grasp the new situation and took to giving himself airs. “I am out of all patience with Bounce. The consequential airs he gives himself since he became a right honourable dog are insufferable. He considers it beneath his dignity to play with commoners’ dogs, and truly thinks that he does them grace when he condescends to lift up his leg against them. This, I think, is carrying the insolence of rank to the extreme, but he is a dog that does it!”[19]
As all the world knows, Collingwood never set foot in England after Trafalgar, doomed, poor homesick fellow, never more to see—
The pleasant strand of Northumberland
And the lordly towers thereby.
He wore out his life on duty, waiting and watching at sea for nearly five long and weary years, for an enemy who did not dare to face him. The Admiralty could not spare him to come home.
“He stepped into his boat from Plymouth Dock,” says the writer of a biographical sketch of Collingwood published shortly after the Admiral’s death, “on the last day of April, 1805, and returned, five years after, a peer and a corpse.” Immediately before he embarked, Collingwood had been conversing with a brother officer, who records an affecting incident. “The last time I ever saw Lord Collingwood,” wrote Sir T. Byam Martin, “he was on the point of stepping into his boat, never again to touch the British shore. We walked together for half an hour, and as long as I live I shall remember the words with which, in his accustomed mildness of expression, he alluded to the sacrifices our professional duties exact of us. He told me the number of years he had been married, and the number of days he had been with his family since the war commenced (then of many years duration). ‘My family are actually strangers to me.’ He was greatly overcome by the feelings thus excited, and, taking me by the hand, he said, ‘What a life of privation is ours—what an abandonment of everything to our professional duty, and how little do the people of England know the sacrifices we make for them!’ With this he turned from me to hide the tear which ran down his manly cheek, and saying ‘Farewell!’ walked to his boat.”
Slowly killed, if ever man was, by downright hard work, Collingwood died on the 7th of March, 1810, on board his flagship in the Mediterranean. On the day before he died his old spirit flickered up once more, and he murmured to his captain, who bent down over the brave old face, “I may live to fight the French once more.” The end drew on apace after that, and the soul of one of the grandest veterans of England at her best, passed calmly away to the presence of the God in Whom throughout every hour of his blameless life his trust had been as that of a little child for its earthly father. “He met death,” said the surgeon who attended Collingwood, “as became him, with composure and a fortitude which have seldom been equalled and never surpassed.”
We know something of how his sailors loved “Old Cuddy,” as the whole fleet called Collingwood, from what happened at Collingwood’s funeral on that May day of 1810, when Nelson’s brother-in-arms was laid to his rest beside his old messmate, friend, and companion in the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Lord Chancellor Eldon, beside whom, as a little boy of nine, the Admiral had sat in class at school, was a mourner at the funeral. “It was very affecting,” he describes, “his sailors crowded so around, all anxious to see the last of their commander. One sailor seized me by the arm, and entreated that I would take him in with me that he might be there to the end. I told him to stick fast to me, and I did take him in; but when it came to throwing some earth on the coffin (you know the part of the service ‘dust to dust’), he burst past me and threw himself into the vault!”