IX
NELSON
“ENGLAND EXPECTS THAT EVERY MAN WILL DO HIS DUTY.”

IX
NELSON

I am conscious of more difficulties ahead in beginning this sketch than I have felt with regard to any other of the series, for, while on the one hand it would be absurd to omit from the glorious ranks of our Empire-Makers the most glorious of them all, it is at the same time practically impossible to say anything fresh or even anything that is not very generally known about the man who, however much he may once have been slighted, and however inadequately his earlier services may have been rewarded during his life, has now come to be the idol of the country that he saved from invasion and the Empire that he preserved from destruction.

His life has been written and re-written, his character and his actions have been discussed and rediscussed, the most private acts and thoughts of his life have been dragged out into the full glare of publicity—a fate which any great man would have to be a very great sinner to deserve—but when all this has been said and done there remains a single, sharply-defined individuality of this incomparable naval captain whom the whole world now acknowledges and reveres, quite apart from all national considerations, as the greatest sailor who ever trod a deck and the greatest naval strategist who ever planned a battle or took a fleet into action.

It has been said that when a nation is on the brink of ruin the Fates either hasten its end or send some great man to restore its fortunes. It certainly was thus with the Britain of Nelson’s early youth. On the 17th of October, 1781, Lord Hawke, the victor of Quiberon Bay, and the last of the great line of seamen of whom Admiral Blake was the first, died, leaving, as Horace Walpole said the next day in the House of Commons, his mantle to nobody.

Apparently, there was no one worthy to wear it. The fortunes of England were indeed at a low ebb. Both her naval and military prestige had very seriously declined. The American colonies had been lost by the worst of statesmanship at home and the worst of bungling incompetence and cowardice abroad. We had been beaten by the raw colonists on land and by the French and Dutch at sea.

At home the very highest circles of the realm were polluted by such corruption and crippled by such imbecility as would be absolutely incredible to us now, Imagine, for instance, what would be thought to-day of the post of Secretary of State for War being given to a man who had been explicitly declared by a court martial to be absolutely incapable of serving his country in any military capacity!—and yet this is only one example out of many of the flagrant abuses of this amazingly disgraceful period.

Happily, however, for the honour of the race and the safety of the Empire there had been born, twenty-three years before to a country parson in Norfolk, a boy, the fifth in a family of eleven, who fourteen years later was destined to die in the moment of victory, happy in the knowledge that he had not left his country a single enemy to fight throughout the length and breadth of the High Seas. When Horace Walpole spoke his panegyric on Lord Hawke he would probably have been very much surprised if he had been told that it was this then insignificant and unknown cousin of his own who was not only to take up the mantle of the hero of Quiberon, but to bequeath it in his turn, not to a rival or a successor, but to the country which his last triumph left mistress of the seas.