Admiral Collingwood Read online

  His final illness, though debilitating and terribly painful, did not dull his sense of duty, nor did it dull his humour. With all his cares, he still took the keenest interest in his officers and men. In particular, he was famous in the navy for bringing on talent, both from the officer class and the lower ranks. Indeed, against the modern trend that meant an officer had to ‘pass for a gentleman’, Collingwood still preferred them, as he put it, ‘to come through the port-hole not at the cabin window’.15 Perhaps because it mattered to him so much, he was critical of those who did not respond to his encouragement, as he confided to his sister in April 1809:

  But you may have heard that I am reckoned rather queer in the promotion of young men. I advance a great many who have not a friend to speak for them, while those I respect most in the world sometimes plead in vain. Those who are diligent and promise to be useful officers never miscarry. And if your friend is such an one send him to me…

  Mrs Currel’s son never can be a sailor: he has something very odd in his manner, or rather he has no manner at all, but saunters a melancholic for a week together, unnoticing and unnoticed, except when I give him a little rally to make his blood circulate, and this I do, not in the expectation that it will make him better in his profession, but merely for his health’s sake.

  It is a pity she had not put him apprentice to Jno. Wilson, the apothecary; he might have gone on very wisely. His gravity would have established his reputation as a learned doctor, and if he did poison an old woman now and then, better do that than drown an entire ship’s company at a dash by running on the rocks.

  [P.S.] Bounce desires his best respects to your dogs16

  This is the wickedly sardonic side of his character, revealed almost exclusively to his family, and especially to his sisters, in thirty-five years of correspondence. In one letter, to John Davidson, he described the Bedouin practice of towing prisoners behind galloping horses, and regaled him with the story of a washerwoman who had been abducted by them and whose headless body had later been discovered: ‘did not tow well, I suppose.’17

  Collingwood’s officers and crew admired him, above all, for another side: his humanity and sense of justice, and his consummate skill in handling men and ships. Readers of O’Brian’s Ionian Mission will recognise as a classic Aubrey-ism the following anecdote, recounted by Collingwood’s first biographer, and son-in-law, G. L. Newnham-Collingwood. A midshipman had reported one of the ordinary seamen, a man who had been at sea for many years, for swearing at him. The usual punishment for such a serious offence was flogging. Collingwood wrote a letter to the young man, saying:

  In all probability the fault was yours. But whether it were or not, I am sure it would go to your heart to see a man old enough to be your father, disgraced and punished on your account; and it will, therefore, give me a good opinion of your disposition, if, when he is brought out, you ask for his pardon.

  When, after receiving this letter, the midshipman duly begged the man off his punishment, Collingwood said to the sailor, though with a show of pained reluctance:

  This young gentleman has pleaded so humanely for you, that in the hope that you will feel a due gratitude to him for his benevolence, I will for this time overlook your offence.18

  No wonder it was later said by one of his junior officers that a look of displeasure from him was worse than a dozen lashes at the gangway from another captain. This was the Collingwood touch. Its essence was distilled in an anecdote of John Scott’s (who, as Lord Eldon, became Lord Chancellor) from around the time of the Spanish Armament in 1790:

  I met Lord Collingwood in the Strand: he was a school-fellow of mine under Moises. I had not seen him in many years – he had been so long on board Ship that he walked with difficulty – we shook hands – I observed that tears flowed down his cheeks – I asked him what so affected him – He said that a few days before, his ship’s company were paid off – that he had lost his children – all his family – that they were dear to him, and he could not refrain from what I had noticed.

  I attended his funeral at St Paul’s and was much affected by the grief manifested by some Seamen who had served under him. I was a Bearer, and a poor Black Sailor in Tears laid fast hold of my Arm, and attended almost the whole Ceremony.19

  One reason for this affection may have been that Collingwood hated flogging, and used the lash so little that he acquired a reputation for having banned its use on his ships. He found physical brutality hard to reconcile with his faith, and once said:

  I cannot for the life of me, comprehend the religion of an Officer, who prays all one day, and flogs his men all the next.20

  He managed his crews so skilfully that Sir John Jervis advised captains who had particularly awkward seamen aboard to send them to him: ‘Old Cuddy’ would soon sort them out.

  One of Collingwood’s most celebrated attributes was his bravery, which first won him his promotion to lieutenant in the amphibious assault on Charlestown in 1775 (more usually known as the battle of Bunker’s Hill). In three great fleet actions he distinguished himself, disdaining the enemy’s fire; and in one case, at the battle of Cape St Vincent, he sailed into the chaos and destruction of a furious mêlée to rescue Nelson. He was ‘as brave an old boy as ever stood’21 and after Trafalgar the celebrated frigate captain Henry Blackwood wrote that he had ‘fought like an angel’.22

  His handling of ships was equally renowned. Without his tactical cunning Trafalgar might never have been fought. In August 1805, with a squadron of four, he saw off a French detachment of sixteen ships by a series of brilliant feints and ruses which enabled him to establish the crucial blockade of Cadiz that led directly to the action at Trafalgar (he had taken over command of the fleet from Nelson who was in England, resting). And when, finally, Collingwood emerged from Nelson’s shadow after that battle to assume control of Mediterranean operations he showed that he was fully equal to the enormous diplomatic and strategic task that faced him:

  He was in truth the prime and sole minister of England, acting upon the sea, corresponding himself with all surrounding States, and ordering and executing everything upon his own responsibility.23

  Collingwood did have his detractors; not just lazy historians who have conflated his attributes with Nelson’s to make a single hero; in his own day he was thought by those who did not know him to be a dour and unimaginative provincial. Captains like Thomas Fremantle and Edward Codrington compared him unfavourably with Nelson. But there is more than a hint of snobbery there, perhaps most acutely observed by Jane Austen, whose brothers were captains in the Royal Navy:

  A man is in greater danger in the navy of being insulted by the rise of those whose father, his father might have disdained to speak to… than in any other line.24

  Although he was the son of a debt-ridden trader from a northern coal-town, Collingwood was probably the most erudite naval officer of his day: Thackeray held him up as the perfect English gentleman, and a senior diplomat admitted that he wrote better than any of them.

  The harsh carmine pink exterior of the Hotel del Almirante follows old English naval tradition: an iron-oxide based paint used as a cheap timber preservative and said to ward off scurvy. To the north-east, on the other side of the harbour, lies another Georgian mansion. This is Golden Farm, said to have been Nelson’s residence when he stayed in Mahon in 1799; probably the association is mythical, for in 1799 Nelson was busy with his Neapolitan ménage à trois, though he did indeed visit the island, and hated it.

  Right next to the cliff edge a set of rock-cut steps winds down to the little cove called El Fonduco, where the deep purple-blue waters of the harbour still shelter fishing boats and where a cluster of houses seems to lean out over the quay. From the slipway here Collingwood could be rowed out with little fuss to Ville de Paris in his barge. In the old days Bounce would swim behind, but in August 1809, at the age of nineteen and crippled, like his master, by rheumatism, the dog fell overboard in the night and was drowned. Collingwood wrote:

  He is
a great loss to me. I have few comforts, but he was one, for he loved me. Everybody sorrows for him. He was wiser than [many] who hold their heads higher and was grateful [to those] who were kind to him.25

  Collingwood, having been told by his doctor that a spell ashore might help his non-existent appetite and ease his sore limbs, tried riding a horse, but could not. On 22 February 1810 he resigned his command. On the 25th he walked his last few painful steps on land, down to the cove at El Fonduco, where he was rowed out to his flagship. Ville de Paris was windbound for a few days but finally, on 6 March, the wind came round to the west and she set sail for England. He told Captain Thomas he was dying, but reassured him that he was coming to his end comfortably, and with no regrets. He died at sea the following day.

  On 28 April the Newcastle Courant reported:

  On Saturday last, the Nereus frigate arrived at the Great Nore, with the remains of the late Lord Collingwood. They are now lying in state, in the royal hospital for seamen at Greenwich, and are to be entombed in St Paul’s cathedral, with those of His Lordship’s illustrious friend and commander NELSON. A monument will be erected by the public, in the same place, in grateful memory of his services.

  A magnificent monument to Cuthbert Collingwood by John Graham Lough stands looking out to sea at Tynemouth. Below it are mounted four cannon taken from Royal Sovereign, the flagship from which he was the first to open fire at Trafalgar. There is a cenotaph to him in St Nicholas’ cathedral in Newcastle on which, every 21 October, a wreath is laid by his townsmen. A hundred yards away on the Side, the ancient street where he was born in 1748, a small bust set above a doorway looks down, mostly unnoticed by passersby. In Morpeth the red brick townhouse that he lived in during those brief periods when he was not at sea, still stands. And in a thousand hedgerows across Northumberland grow the oak trees that he planted for the future security of his country. But for a sense of his abiding presence, there is nothing to beat the short walk from Collingwood House to the cliff and down the rock-cut steps to El Fonduco, where he climbed into his admiral’s barge for the last time with the words, ‘Flagship, Coxswain’.

  Maps

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  A large piece of plum cake

  1748–1771

  In the wars against France that began in 1793 and, with a short break in 1802, ended at Waterloo twenty-two years later, Britain had four supreme commanders in the field. By chance, each succeeded his predecessor for reasons of declining health (or death), and each emerged at a time when his special skills were exactly those needed, in exactly the right place.

  The first of these was John Jervis, born in 1735 and by the start of the war already a vice-admiral. He had fought in the Seven Years’ War against France which ended in 1763, and at Quebec had been entrusted with General Wolfe’s dying message to his fiancée. By 1795 he was Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean fleet and his naval philosophy was beginning to stamp itself on a generation of commanders. He was severe, demanding and a feared disciplinarian. He loathed corruption, disloyalty and cowardice, and his strategy for beating the French was to bring overwhelming naval force to bear against them, not just to keep them at bay but to destroy France as a sea power. Having lost control of the Mediterranean at the end of 1796, he defeated a Spanish fleet off Cape St Vincent in February 1797, then sent Nelson to victory at the battle of the Nile a year later. In 1799 he briefly retired from active service, once more assumed command of the Channel fleet, then finally became First Lord of the Admiralty in Henry Addington’s government.

  In this post he ruthlessly reformed naval administration and tackled the corruption then rife in the dockyards, but he was criticised by William Pitt for leaving the navy under-strength when war resumed in 1803. Nevertheless, he was given another active command in 1806 before finally retiring a year later at the age of seventy-one. He died in 1823. As supreme commander at sea, though, Earl St Vincent, as he then was, had effectively passed his baton to Nelson in 1798.

  This son of a Norfolk parson, forty-one years old and already a famously wounded war hero, though with a very mixed record, was no great administrator like Jervis; still less a politician. He was a battle commander. His first great fleet engagement had been the battle of Cape St Vincent in 1797 under Jervis. Here, he brilliantly precipitated the action by plunging his ship Captain pell-mell into the enemy line. A year later he tracked down the French Mediterranean fleet at Aboukir Bay (in what became known as the battle of the Nile) and destroyed it, stranding Bonaparte and his army in Egypt and re-establishing British maritime control between Cadiz and Malta. In 1801 he fought another battle at Copenhagen; less necessary and less glorious, but equally effective in stamping British naval supremacy on the Baltic and North Sea which was so vital for trade.

  After the illusory Peace of Amiens in 1802, the next three years concentrated the navy’s purpose: to prevent, at all costs, invasion by Napoleon’s army of England. The trick was at one and the same time to bottle the enemy up in her ports, and tempt her to come out and fight the decisive battle at a time and place of the Royal Navy’s choosing. The Long Watch, as it was called, ended in overwhelming victory at Trafalgar. That battle is popularly thought to have destroyed forever the French maritime threat. It did nothing of the sort. But at the precise moment of Nelson’s death the mantle of supreme battle commander fell on the shoulders of the fifty-seven-year-old Cuthbert Collingwood.

  For the next four and a half years he blockaded, chased, outwitted; took, burnt and attempted to destroy the ships of the French fleet to ensure that Bonaparte did not regain control of the Mediterranean. He supported the Spanish uprising, prevented Sicily from falling into French hands, kept Turkey and Russia neutral, policed the Adriatic (and while he was at it stood by to rescue the Pope from Rome and the Archduke of Austria from Trieste). And all the while he had to deal with the bloody and incestuous politics of North Africa. These tasks required a man with skills that went far beyond those of a battle commander. Collingwood had to be both diplomat and statesman, in effect a viceroy, and it happened that he was the only man in the navy (apart, perhaps, from Saumarez in the Baltic, performing a similar role, though on a smaller scale) who could have carried it off.

  At the point of his death, in March 1810, and by one of those ironies with which history is littered, the focus of the war moved from sea to land, from east to west; the Sepoy General Arthur Wellesley emerged as the surgeon who would lance Bonaparte’s Spanish ulcer and later, as the Iron Duke, ultimately defeat him on the continent of Europe.

  The reputations of Wellington and Nelson speak for themselves. Nelson was a professional hero, Wellington a soldier/statesman in the tradition of Marlborough. St Vincent is not nearly so popularly known as his achievements deserve; but he is at least recognised by serious historians as a major influence on British maritime strategy during the Napoleonic wars. Neglect of Collingwood is harder to fathom, though the historian Piers Mackesy, writing of the war in the Mediterranean at this period, did not underestimate him:

  The splendour of the navy’s work in the theatre after Trafalgar has been obscured by the absence of fleet actions; and the name of Lord Collingwood has equally been dimmed by his inability to bring an enemy fleet to battle. The fights were small, fierce encounters of sloops and gunboats, cutting-out expeditions, attacks on batteries. Only once did the enemy come out in force. Yet the scale was heroic; and over the vast canvas towers the figure of Collingwood.1

  Wellington was the son of an earl, learning his craft on the playing fields of Eton, and in India in the Mahratta wars. But in an era when birth mattered at least as much as talent, it is remarkable that St Vincent, Nelson and Collingwood all came from much more ordinary backgrounds, and all went to sea at the same age. St Vincent was the son of a politically unconnected barrister, who gave the young John Jervis £20 at the age of thirteen – but never a penny more after that – and sent him off to join the navy. His poverty as a midshipman meant that he spent more time on the lower decks than he did with other offi
cers. His education was a practical one: years and years of apprenticeship at sea.

  Nelson’s family were genteel country folk. They had no wealth, but there were useful connections, through the Suckling family – Nelson’s uncle Maurice was a Comptroller of the Navy – and the Walpoles. Without this influence Nelson could not have been made post-captain at the extraordinarily young age of twenty. Even so, he served his time in the midshipman’s berth from his early teens, and one of his outstanding traits as a commander was his understanding of both officers and men.

  Cuthbert Collingwood’s family had no money, but they were from ancient Northumbrian stock. An earlier Sir Cuthbert had been involved in the Reiver wars of the late sixteenth century, at a time when the Anglo-Scottish border was ruled, if that is the right word, by rival warlords and their clans. These were hard people, used to fighting and robbing and sleeping with one eye open. Sir Cuthbert Collingwood was a man of some consequence, able to raise eight hundred or even a thousand men to go raiding against families with whom he was feuding. He was kidnapped on one occasion by a Scots war party after a raid went horribly wrong, but he was not averse to meting out justice to his own: he executed seventeen of his tenants to prevent another feud from starting.2

  One of his descendants, George Collingwood, was heavily implicated in the Jacobite rebellion of 1715: he was executed at Liverpool and his Eslington estate was forfeited, in a nice irony, to the Greenwich Hospital for Seamen. The Admiral’s side of the family had never been anything other than loyal Hanoverians. His father, also Cuthbert, was a Newcastle trader, respectable but not wealthy. He had been apprenticed to a merchant, and then set up in business for himself. When the business went bankrupt, his debtors were distillers, oil-men, soap-boilers and druggists.3 His wife, Milcah, who hailed from near Appleby in Westmoreland, bore him ten children.4