One word still for gallant old Jervis, the man who first confirmed the discipline of the navy. His firmness was the secret. When the Irish conspirators on board the Channel fleet had spread the spirit of mutiny in 1797, Jervis was warned from the admiralty that his fleet was in danger. It was suggested to him by some of his officers, to stop the letters from home: "No," said he, "the precaution is useless: I will answer for it that the commander-in-chief of this fleet will know how to maintain his authority, if it is threatened."
But he left nothing to chance: he prohibited communication between the ships—he sent for the captains of marines, and ordered that their men should mess and sleep separately from the sailors; that the sailors should not be suffered to converse in Irish, and that the officers should be on the alert. He hanged the detected mutineers without delay. Forgiveness was out of the question. To Captain Pellew, who had interceded in favour of a mutineer, whose conduct had previously been irreproachable, he replied, "We have, we think, punished only the worthless. It is time, that our men should learn, that no past conduct can redeem an act of treason."
Nothing could be more rational, or even more necessary, than this determination; for treason is the most comprehensive of all crimes. The mere robber, or murderer, commits his single act of guilt—but the guilt of the traitor may cost the lives of thousands. The traitor is never to be regarded as a solitary criminal, and this maxim was never more necessary than at this moment. If laws are to be turned into sentimentality, and conspiracy is to be dealt with like the tricks of children, there must be an end of all security to honest men. If the villains who have been lately inflaming the Irish mind into madness, had been hanged by the sentence of the drum-head, within half an hour after their seizure, there would have been no necessity, at this moment, for keeping up a garrison of 45,000 men in Ireland. Martial law is the only law fit for the ruffians of the torch and pike, and the gibbet is the only moral which they will ever comprehend. To suppose that the Irish conspirators had even entertained the expectation of forming an established government, or of being suffered by England to raise a republic—or that any man out of Bedlam could have dreamt of the possibility of waging a successful war against England, while her fleets might starve Ireland in a week, and nothing but English alms even now enables her to live—would be absolute folly. The true object of Irish conspiracy was, and is, and will always be, robbery and revenge; a short burst of rapine and blood, followed by again running away, again begging pardon, again living on alms, and again laughing at the weak indulgence and insulted clemency of England.
Jervis, instead of listening to the cant of men of blood whining about their wives and children, hanged them; and, by thus ridding his fleet of a nest of villains, saved it from destruction, and perhaps, with it, saved not merely the lives of thousands of brave men, whom their impunity might have debauched into conspiracy, but saved the honour of our naval name, and restored the enfeebled hopes of his country.
We here quote with pleasure from the Frenchman:—"Jervis, in the face of those symptoms, which threatened the British navy with disaffection, sternly devoted himself to the establishment of implicit obedience. The efficient organisation of the fleet was the labour of his life, and occupied his latest thoughts. Never rash himself, he nevertheless opened the way for the most daring deeds. Nelson rushed into the arena, and, with the rapidity of lightning, showed the latent results of the change. The governing principle witnessed, rather than decreed the change. Its source, in fact, was not in the Admiralty, but in those floating camps, wherein the triumphs which astonish us are gradually elaborated. Official power is but the inert crucible which transmutes the subsidies of Parliament into ships. But a quickening principle is wanting to those immense fleets, and the admirals supply it. Jervis and Nelson rapidly transmitted the creative spark, and bequeathed a certain sort of sovereignty under the distrustful eye of the English Admiralty—a kind of dynasty arose—'the mayors of the palace took the sceptre from the do-nothing kings.'"
All this is comparatively just. But the Frenchman peeps out under the panegyrist, after all. Can it be conceived that any other human being, at the end of nearly half a century, would quote, with the slightest degree of approval, the report of Decrès, the French minister of the marine to Napoleon, in 1805, after all Nelson's victories, and just preceding the most illustrious of them all—Trafalgar?
"The boasting of Nelson," writes Decrès, "equals his silliness, (ineptie)—I use the proper word. But he has one eminent quality—namely, that of aiming among his captains only at a character for bravery and good fortune. This makes him accessible to counsel, and consequently, in difficult circumstances, if he commands nominally, others direct really."
We have no doubt that, after scribbling this supreme ineptie, Decrès considered himself to have settled the whole question, and to have convicted Nelson of being simply a bold blockhead—Nelson, the man of the hundred fights—the prince of tacticians—the admiral who had never been beaten, and from whom, at the battle of Aboukir, Decrès himself was rejoiced to make his escape, after having seen the ruin of the French fleet.
We find a good deal of the same sort of petulant perversion, in the narrative of Nelson's conduct at Naples. M. Gravière suddenly becomes moral, and tells us the ten-times-told story of Lady Hamilton. But what is all this to the naval war? Englishmen are not bound to defend the character of Lady Hamilton; and if Nelson was actually culpable in their intercourse, (a matter which actually has never yet been proved,) Englishmen, who have some morality,—not Frenchmen, who make a point of laughing at all morality—may upbraid his conduct. But a French stoic is simply ridiculous. There are perhaps not fifty men in all France, who would not have done, and are not doing every day, where they have the opportunity, all that this moralist charges Nelson with having done. Even if he were criminal in his private life, so much the worse for himself in that solemn account which all must render; but he was not the less the conqueror of Copenhagen, Aboukir, and Trafalgar.
The hanging of Caraccioli also figures among the charges. We regret that this traitor was not left to die of remorse, or by the course of nature, at the age of eighty. We regret, too, that he could allege even the shadow of a capitulation for his security. We equally regret the execution of Ney under a similar shadow. But Caraccioli had been an admiral in the Neapolitan service, had joined the rebellion by which rapine and slaughter overspread the country, and had driven the King into exile. No man more deserved to be hanged, by the order of his insulted, and apparently ruined King;—he was hanged, and all rebels ought thus to suffer. They are made for the scaffold.