Nelson's finest hour

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The Evening Standard

On or about 12 September 1805 Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington, then a major-general in his mid-thirties, found himself in the anteroom of the Colonial Secretary, Lord Castlereagh, together with a one-armed admiral, whom he had no difficulty in recognising as Nelson. They began to converse.

"If I can call it conversation," Wellesley noted, "for it was almost all on his side and all about himself, and in a style so vain and silly as to surprise and almost disgust me."

Suspecting he had struck the wrong note, Nelson left the room for a moment to discover the identity of his companion, and returned "a different man, both in manner and matter; all that I had thought the charlatan style had vanished, he talked like an officer and statesman ... I don't know that I ever had a conversation that interested me more."

This extraordinary contrast between the mountebank and the commander of genius makes Nelson simultaneously a fascinating and a frustrating biographical subject.

With his touchy-feely emotionalism, his craving for adulation, his relentless selfadvertisement, careful cultivation of his image and his sexual intemperance, he is very much a hero for the present day, one of the earliest examples of the Princess Diana syndrome.

Yet, at the same time, his passionate patriotism, his fanatical devotion to duty - "He brought heroism into the line of duty. Verily he is a terrible ancestor," Conrad wrote - and his ferocious, allconsuming desire utterly to annihilate his country's enemies, particularly the French, make him a man of a very different age.

Trafalgar was both his greatest triumph and his apotheosis. He had always envied Wolfe, dying at the moment of victory at Quebec, and had admired Benjamin West's painting of the event. Why had West never painted anything else like it, he asked the artist when he met him at Fonthill Abbey in 1800. Because there were no other such subjects, West replied.

Nelson's death provided one, and West duly painted the scene, setting it on the Victory's quarter-deck, with Nelson nobly expiring surrounded by his officers, rather than in the lowceilinged, dark and sordid orlop, surrounded by buckets of blood and severed limbs, where he actually died.

The modern public view of Trafalgar tends to follow West's line and avoids harsh reality. The centenary of the battle came a year after the signing of the Entente with France: the Admiralty ordered the fleet not to make any special display, while a lecture on Nelson "should not include anything which might wound the susceptibilities of France or of any other foreign nation".

Next year there will also be no naval review, though not as a diplomatic gesture, but because the Navy has no ships. And the vice-chairman of the commemoration committee has been reported as saying: "Trafalgar is very much an international battle and we will pay homage to all heroes. There is no jingoism here and we are not seeking to say, 'We won, you lost' to France or Spain."

The sentiment might be well-meaning, but it is hardly meaningful as regards the battle. Trafalgar was one of the decisive battles of modern times, far more significant than Austerlitz, fought at the same time.

It strapped France into the straitjacket of Europe and put an end to its supremacy for good. Britain, on the other hand, became dominant at sea; Trafalgar was the foundation on which the immense expansion of the empire over the next century was based.

The anniversary is not, of course, until next year, but the van of the fleet of books that will commemorate it, cracking on under royals and studding-sails, is already in sight. The 130-gun Santisima Trinidad among them is John Sugden's Nelson: A Dream of Glory (Cape, £25), the massive, magisterially detailed first volume of what will surely be the definitive life.

It takes the story up to 1797: Nelson has lost his sight in one eye after a skirmish in Corsica, his right arm during a foolhardy raid on Tenerife, has invented " Nelson's Patent Bridge for Boarding First Rates" by capturing the San Josef over the deck of the San Nicolas at the battle of Cape St Vincent, but his triumphs - the Nile, Copenhagen and Trafalgar - are yet to come.

Andrew Lambert's much shorter biography, Nelson: Britannia's God of War (Faber, £20), is good on the influence of sea power on history, and also examines in some detail the two controversial episodes of Nelson's life: his treatment of his wife, Fanny, after leaving her for Emma Hamilton, and his alleged betrayal of the armistice given to the defeated Jacobin rebels at Naples, followed by the execution of the Neapolitan officer Francesco Caracciolo.

He excuses the rejection of Fanny on the grounds that all 18th- century husbands behaved in this manner: only Victorian prudishness found it reprehensible; further, Fanny was not a suitable consort for a hero, but was too obtuse to realise this.

His defence against the other charge is more convincing: in a strictly legal sense Nelson's actions were justified. Nevertheless, both episodes leave an unpleasant taste.

Roy Adkins's Trafalgar: The Biography of a Battle (Little, Brown, £20) is a clear - perhaps too clear, for such a confused action - narrative of the battle, which uses the testimonies of eyewitnesses to good effect, alternating them with details of naval life in Nelson's time: devotees of Patrick O'Brian will raise a quizzical eyebrow at the statement that lobscouse is identical with skillagree, and is a breakfast dish.

Trafalgar: The Men, The Battle, The Storm, by Tim Clayton and Phil Craig (Hodder, £20) is a more dramatic - and, hence, less clear - account, and is to some extent revisionist.

The battle was a far more close-run thing than it is usually made out to be. Nelson's tactic of breaking the enemy line, though intrepid, was reckless: had the Combined Fleet's gunnery been better, the British ships could have been destroyed before reaching the line. At close quarters-however, we had the carronades - the ultimate antipersonnel weapon of the time - while the enemy did not.

Finally, in Nelson's Purse(Bantam Press, £20) Martyn Downer relates how, when working for Sotheby's, he discovered a red dispatch box, which once belonged to Alexander Davison, Nelson's friend and agent, containing Nelson's blood-stained purse, some of his correspondence and other memorabilia.

Inspired by this, he has written the biography of Davison, a not overly honest merchant and banker, who was imprisoned twice, for corruption and peculation.

Unfortunately, Downer has made the disastrous decision to semi-fictionalise some episodes of the life, thus robbing an interesting story of its verisimilitude.

His priorities, too, are different from those of others writing on Nelson: the climax of his book is not 21 October 1805, the date of Trafalgar and of Nelson's death, but 21 October 2002, when, at auction, the purse was sold for £270,650 (including Sotheby's fee).