Читать книгу Southey on Nelson: The Life of Nelson by Robert Southey - Richard Holmes - Страница 5

Even before his heroic death at Trafalgar aged forty-seven, Nelson had become a national legend in a way that was virtually without precedent. His personal bravery, his astonishing aggression in battle, his loyalty to his fellow officers and his kindness towards his able seamen (especially his young midshipmen), were famous throughout the Royal Navy. But his gallantry, his self-sacrifice, and his fervent patriotism had made him a celebrity, in a quite modern sense, throughout the whole of England. Nelson was a new breed of war hero, a profoundly Romantic figure, who had caught the popular imagination and become the embodiment of a new kind of English nationalism.

There were, of course, historical reasons for this. The patriotic war against revolutionary France, which began in earnest in 1793, brought growing fears of invasion and subversion. By 1800, the military successes of Bonaparte had personalised this threat, and even brought fears of defeat and dictatorship. This slowly transformed the mood of radical discontent, and popular disaffection, that had gripped England (and especially its writers and intellectuals) for over a decade. Nelson became the personal focus of a deep, stirring movement of national unity and recovered common purpose. It was no coincidence that he led the most glamorous and successful of the British armed services of the period, and that there were very few families of the landed and middle classes–the families of Jane Austen’s novels–who did not have a father, brother, son, grandson, or uncle in the navy.

The Royal Navy was also a powerful and modern force. An English warship or ‘ship of the line’, carrying upward of seventy-four, eighty-six, or a hundred guns and a crew and armed personnel of 500 was the most sophisticated, complex and expensive military machine of its time. The English fleets were small compared to those of France or Spain, but they were better equipped and disciplined, with fierce loyalties among the crews, and strong family affections (and rivalries) between the officers. English navigation and gunnery could not be matched, and when Nelson boasted that ‘one Englishman was worth three Frenchmen’, he meant that his crews could sail across the Atlantic twice as fast, and his gunners fire three broadsides to their one.

English fleets might appear virtually anywhere in the world–off the coasts of America, India, Egypt, the Baltic states, or throughout the Mediterranean–and until the successes of Wellington’s armies after 1811, they represented the one check to Bonaparte’s global ambitions. In this sense the Royal Navy, and its figurehead in Nelson, represented not only England, but a certain kind of European freedom.