 Just informed by John Hattendorf that the U.S. Navy has no opinion about Admiral Lord Nelson or the context surrounding him, so I don't need to give the usual disclaimer that the views here are my own, but I'll say it anyways just in case. So this is me, this is not the U.S. Navy talking. All right, so what am I here to talk about? Let's see. So in 2002, the BBC put together a poll of the hundred greatest Britons, which was voted on by the public. And it's a really silly exercise, to be totally honest. Some of them aren't even British, so Bono, the lead singer of U2, not British, but I think he comes in at about 80 something, 86, yep. Some aren't even real, like King Arthur appears on the list. So it's a silly exercise. It's also a silly exercise because it operates under the assumption that the public would have some insight into what greatness is or be able to agree upon a definition of what greatness is, right? That's also what's silly about it. And so this silly exercise produced, like I said, silly results. Now some of them are not that silly. I think Churchill's a strong choice for number one, sure. And I'm sure that all the history teachers in Britain were very proud that Ismbar Kingdom Brunel finished second. That's a big win for them. But Diana, I don't know. I mean, no offense. That seems a little high for her. Okay. Nelson, though, is number nine, which is what we're here to talk about today. Why would I take a silly exercise like this seriously? Well, the reason I think it's worth thinking about a little bit is that he's actually the only admiral on the entire list. This is from a country that supposedly set the standard for naval power. Now there are some other naval men. So you can find that's James Cook at 12. Sorry about the blue there. Those are some generals. We'll come back to them. Cook at 12. Francis Drake is at 49. Robert Falcon Scott 54. Walter Raleigh at 93. But these are explorers. These are not proper fighting admirals like Nelson. The topic for another talk is how they ended up with being two real fighting generals. You've got Wellington at 15 and Monty at 88 on the list and one and Baden Powell, the founder of the scout. So it's a weird list. But I want to focus on this idea that there aren't really any other admirals on the list. Why Nelson? Why is Nelson set apart? What makes him extraordinary? But before we get to those questions, I thought we might propose some revisions to this list. Some men who I think would make a strong case to be included, all of whom were members of Nelson's generation. They entered the Navy in the same way. They were trained in the same way. They were given opportunities to lead in the same context and they fought in the same wars. So how about Edward Pellew over here? Some of you will have heard of him from the Hornblower novels. He's knighted for his dashing exploits as a frigate captain. Along with one other frigate, he managed to chase a French ship of the line aground. It's a remarkable action. He helped rig a lifeline to save women and children from the wreck of the East India man Dutton. He was commander in chief of the East India station and later led the bombardment of Algiers in 1816. Or how about James Somerez? Who, like Pellew, began his career as a dashing frigate captain. After being knighted, he rescued Nelson of all people from disaster just before the Battle of the Nile, then commanded a British squadron that managed to confuse two Spanish three-deckers into firing on each other at night, catching fire and exploding. Most importantly, from 1808 to 1812, he served as commander in chief of the Baltic. Even though Britain was technically at war with Sweden, he used skillful diplomacy to keep open the supply lines of vital stores from the Baltic back to Britain, all while harassing Napoleon's allies from Denmark to Russia. Or how about Cuthbert Collingwood, who served with distinction at the Battle of the Gouriers 1st of June at the Battle of Cape St. Vincent and most impressively as Nelson II in command at Trafalgar. After the battle, he skillfully saved numerous ships from sinking in a storm and then served as commander in chief of the Mediterranean for the next five years, promoting the rebellion in Spain and carefully negotiating the complex politics of Naples and Sicily, the Ottoman Empire in North Africa. Now, all three of these men were personally as brave as Nelson. All three were far better diplomats and statesmen than Nelson. All three made enormous contributions to the defeat of Napoleonic France. All three received peerages. All three were famous in their own time. All three would have made a list of the hundred greatest Britons 200 years ago. And yet today, they're comparatively speaking nowhere to be found. There are a few statues of each if you know where to look. You can ask me later if you're curious. But if you compare their fame to Nelson, well, it's just not the same thing. He stands atop his column in Trafalgar Square. There are memorials to him all over Britain and the Empire in Dublin in Glasgow in Liverpool to name a few. There are more than a hundred pubs named after either Nelson or Victory or Trafalgar. Nelson also gives his name to Nelson, New Zealand, Nelson, New Hampshire, Nelson, New York. He's buried under the crossing at St. Paul's Cathedral. Collingwood is nearby. He's actually right next to Nelson, but he's clearly not in the middle, right? Nelson is in the middle. Collingwood's off to the side. Wellington, if you notice, is squeezed into a corner of the nave, right? So Nelson is so famous that I can say to people that I study Nelson's navy and they know what I mean. So what I want to do today is to demonstrate that in many respects, Nelson was actually an ordinary naval officer. That's not to say that he was an average naval officer. That's something different, but he was clearly talented. But rather to highlight the ways in which he was the product of a system that identified, trained, and promoted talented officers. Now, in telling this story, it'll become clear why most people have heard of Nelson, but most people haven't heard of Pelu Salma as in Collingwood. Maybe you all have, but in general, they're not as famous. Nelson did some extraordinary things and he died at precisely the right moment to make him a national hero in ways that his peers could never hope to be. But I hope you'll also learn the ways in which Nelson was a product of his time and of his navy. So almost everything about Nelson's life and career before 1797, that is to say before his 39th birthday, was ordinary. So we'll start at the beginning. Nelson was born on the 29th of September in 1758 at the Rector's house at Burnham Thorpe in Norfolk. And it's one of these little hamlets right up here on the coast. So there's Norfolk and this is where you are within it. Burnham Thorpe exactly is right next to the sea, which is one of the ordinary things about his birth. Norfolk is an ordinary county to be from. So this map shows you all the historic counties of England with the percentage of officers in the navy who came from them. The darker the shading, the more came from there. And you'll see that Norfolk is a very ordinary shade here. It's not quite as popular a place to be from as London or Devon or Kent, Hampshire and Cornwall, but it's perfectly within the realm of what was ordinary. Nelson also had ordinary parents. So his father was the rector of Burnham Thorpe and most of the relatives on that side were also Norfolk clergymen. His mother was a cousin of the Second Ord Walpole, so she had some connections. That's important, but it didn't make Nelson a member of the aristocracy. Fundamentally, Nelson was a typical member of the professional classes. So it's this group right here, which would be people like other navy officers and army officers, also lawyers, doctors, and clergymen. That's where Nelson is from. Those are the kind of parents he came from. And within the navy, that's the most common background for all naval officers. Only a few people, like one in 25 or so, were sons of people with titles and about another 17% were sons of what you call the landed gentry. That's not Nelson's family. They're from a step down from that. They're members of the professional class. So Nelson is an ordinary son of an ordinary rector in an ordinary seaside parish. Why did he join the navy? Again, for pretty ordinary reasons. He had a connection to the navy in the form of his mother's brother, Captain Maurice Suckling, who was appointed to command a ship in 1770. So Suckling took his 12-year-old nephew on board with him. Again, ordinary. Look at the age at which most people joined the navy. In this time, you'd normally join between the ages of about 12 and 15. There's the most common band. That's Nelson right there in the 12. You did this because of the requirements of the lieutenants exam. If you wanted to be a commissioned officer, you had to pass the lieutenants exam. In order to pass the lieutenants exam, you had to be 20 years old, and you had to know what you were doing as a sailor. So if you also had to have six years experience at sea, so if you had to be 20 years old with six years experience at sea, the best time to join is about age 12, 13, or 14. So that makes perfect sense. You join at 12 to get plenty of experience. So that's what Nelson did. Now unfortunately for him, the crisis that it caused the Navy to mobilize in 1770 soon passed. So the Navy sort of didn't have many rooms, many spaces for him. So his uncle sent him on board a merchant ship, headed to the West Indies to gain experience. He was gone for 14 months. And you can imagine that when he came back, how different he must have seemed to his parents as an experienced sailor. He was back in the Navy in 1773, though, and sorry for the poor quality here, but he went on a voyage to the Arctic where he famously encountered a polar bear. This is not what happened. He did however see a polar bear and people worried that he was going to get eaten by the polar bear. He did not smack it in the mouth as far as we know. He ran away from the polar bear as all sensible people would. This ship was also lucky to escape the ice. Then he ended up on a frigate headed for the East Indies. So he went to Madras and Calcutta and Bombay. He was back in England in 1776, which meant he was 18 years old with experience all around the world. And this again was typical, the British deployed ships all around the world, around the Empire. And long voyages were the best way to learn navigation, seamanship, and the leadership skills that he would need as an officer. Now in April 1777, Nelson told a lie. He lied about his age so that he could pass the lieutenant's exam. This was in fact typical, though, and increasingly so over time. So Nelson's passing down in this period when it's a little bit less typical, sort of maybe 20, 30% are lying about their age. But over time, you can see that more and more people started to lie about their age. Why was this? Well, Nelson added 17 months to his age. So he passed when he was 18 years old and he pretended like he was 20. He got a false birth certificate from his parish that said he was born when he wasn't. And he gave it to his examiners to prove that he was 20. You did this because once you had six years experience at sea, there was no reason to stay as a midshipman. If you could pass the exam and you knew what you were doing, the goal was get that commission because then you could actually launch your career. And from the examiner's point of view, what do they care? As long as you can do what the test, I'll tell you a second what the test looks like. As long as you can actually demonstrate those skills, the examiners don't care if you're 18, 19, 20. That's not really the important part. What they want to know is you can actually do what you're supposed to be able to do. So what are you supposed to be able to do? Well, this is Nelson's passing certificate. And so there's his name and you can see that these are the ships that he served on and what his rating was and how long he served on them. And you see he has more than six years experience at sea. This in here, it tells you what he's able to do, which is really hard to read. So I gave a later version here. This is the printed copies that they started to do later in the century. And you can see that his skills are he can splice, not reef a sail, work a ship in sailing, ship his tides. You can read the rest of it. The key is it's the skills of a sailor first. And then it's the skills of a mathematician so that he can be a navigator. So those are the two key things that he needed to do. And Nelson demonstrated that he could do those things. So there was no reason to wait around. So you tell a white lie to say you're a little bit older than you are. Nelson with experience in three oceans was well prepared. He was commissioned as a lieutenant the day after his exam and appointed to a frigate bound for Jamaica. Now we all know why a frigate would need to be bound for Jamaica in 1777, of course, because the rebellion in the colonies meant that all of Britain's Atlantic colonies were in jeopardy. The next year France declared war, turning that rebellion into a much bigger war. Nelson saw combat for the first time here in the American war in North America. The generation of Collingwood, Pellew, and Salmaras almost universally had the same experience. So these guys were at Bunker Hill, they were in the attack on Charleston, had the major actions in the West Indies, and in the minor chases of American privateers. Again, this was perfectly ordinary. Nelson had ordinary experiences in the American war. His first real distinguishing moment was an assault on a Spanish fort in Nicaragua. He later had this painted, this is in 1781, you can't read that at the bottom, but he had this painted to commemorate it, so that's the fort in the background. It was his first chance to show his talent under fire. The assault was successful. The downside was that Nelson caught malaria and had to go back to England with many of the other British troops. He was actually pretty lucky to survive. So that's the ordinary part about Nelson in the American war. What was really important for him though wasn't so much the combat experience, it was the fact that he made two key promotions over the course of the war. So in Nelson's Navy, there were three ranks below that of Admiral. So you had post captains, commanders, and lieutenants. You can see what they would command. And you could move very quickly from one to the other. So you could get promoted from lieutenant to commander to post captain, depending on how good you were, whether you had the right connections, whether you had the right patron, that sort of thing. But from the time you made it to post captain until you were promoted to Admiral, that could only happen by seniority, which effectively meant waiting for old admirals to die, and then everybody gets bumped up the list. And in Nelson's era, that would mean about 20 years at that rank. So for ambitious officers like Nelson, the key was to get promoted quickly to post captain. That was the goal. You wanted to get up quickly to post captain so that then you would be still vigorous enough to be an admiral when the time came. So Nelson was only a lieutenant for a year. Why was this? Well, he was the nephew of a prominent naval officer. Remember we met Maurice Suckling earlier. Suckling at this time was now controller of the Navy, which is sort of like chief accountant. But he's an important person. So the commander in chief of the West Indies, who was Spider-Man, Sir Peter Parker, said that it was important to promote the son of the controller of the Navy. This is an important person. So Parker saw that Nelson was in the West Indies, he was under his command. And so he brought Nelson onto his flagship. And that was a great way to get ahead. Because if you were on the flagship and a position came open in the fleet, the admiral didn't have far to look to find a candidate to go get that position. So Nelson gets moved onto the flagship in large part because of his uncle, right? But then tragedy struck for Nelson because his uncle died, which removed any incentive that Parker had to look out for them anymore, right? His uncle's no longer around, he's not important. But Nelson was promoted anyways. And that's I think a really important point to make is that Parker promoted Nelson because he clearly saw in him that he was going to be a talented officer. And so Nelson became a commander in December 1778. He'd only been a lieutenant for about a year. Now we often think of patronage, the system by which these men are promoted, as a form of corruption, right? Only those who are connected can get ahead. And that's true, it is that. But it's not really the whole story. So patrons wanted their clients, so senior officers wanted their junior officers to be talented. Because if they kept promoting bad people, then it reflected poorly on you. And it also might jeopardize the performance of the fleet. These are people actually doing things, right? So you need to make sure that people below you know what they're doing. So Parker promoted Nelson quickly, not just because of his uncle, but because he saw in Nelson a talented young officer. And senior officers depended on junior officers to execute the mission, to get prize money. Remember that Admiral's got a cut of prize money that was gotten by their subordinates. And to demonstrate to other senior officers that Parker could identify and develop talent. Now senior officers also thought it was useful to look out for the sons of powerful men. Both things can be true, as it was in Nelson's case. He's moved to the flagship because of his uncle, but then promoted on his own merit. And again, this is typical. So if we look at the relationship between social background and promotion prospects, I'll explain this in a second, you can see that there is not really a correlation between your social rank and whether you got promoted. So what you see here is the different categories I showed you earlier. These are the most socially elite. So people who are sons of peers of the land, the land of Gentry, the wealthy landowners, professional men like Nelson in this category. And the percentage of them that are actually promoted to post-captain, which remember as I told you, is the highest rank that you could be promoted to on merit. And you can see that above a certain threshold, so after column between column D and E, there's no correlation between your social background and your promotion prospects. So the way I read this is to say that above a certain threshold of social respectability. In other words, as long as you're not from the actual working class, another way to think of it is, as long as you know which roughly knife and fork and spoon to use at dinner, if you can like not make a fool yourself around the captain's table, if you're above that threshold, then what mattered instead was whether you knew what you were doing. So it did, social respectability did matter, but it was mainly just a bar you needed to clear and then talent came into play. So there are exceptions at both ends. Of course, there are plenty of title people who end up way above where they should have been. This number looks really low. In part that's because there just aren't that many title people, so the sample I took to get here was pretty small. But there are lots of examples of incompetent, well-connected people promoted in the Navy. On the flip side of this, there's also examples at the other end. So famously, John Perkins was promoted to post captain even though he was born into slavery. So there are really extreme examples of both ends. But in general, what mattered was social respectability. If you had a little bit of that, then what mattered was your talent. So every post captain's formula for how they got promoted to that point was slightly different. And in Nelson's case, it was a little bit of connections with his uncle and then his own merit. So in June 1779, Parker made Nelson a post captain, which meant that Nelson could no longer be promoted any further on merit. So at the age of 20, he risen as far and as fast as talent and influence could take him. Now Nelson's quick promotions, you might think, were extraordinary. In fact, they're simply above average, which I don't mean to say is not great, but he was promoted faster than most officers but he wasn't the fastest. He was a lieutenant at 18 and a post captain at 20. But I found plenty of examples of officers who were post captains at 19. Pellew, who I mentioned earlier, made his own son a post captain at 18. This is the point is this wasn't because his son had any talent, by the way, this was pure corruption. Nelson was precocious but he was not an exception. The promotion system was flexible enough to identify an advanced talent at a young age. So compare Nelson to his peers literally. So these are the other men, Nelson first here, the other men who were also made peers, elevated into a peerage during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars for their service in the Navy. So this is really Nelson's peer group. What you can see is that Nelson is the youngest of the bunch who's promoted a post captain. He's promoted at 20, but he's not such an outlier. There are plenty of people promoted a post captain just a year or two later. There are some here at 31 that's a little bit different, but I'll talk about Collingwood in a second. The other thing that's ordinary about Nelson in this group is his father's occupation, right? All of these guys are not all of them, but most of them are from the professional classes that I pointed out earlier. There is you know a gentry here, Duncan is from a pretty well-to-do family in Scotland. Keith is an interesting story, so he is a member of a noble family in Scotland, but most of his male relatives were Jacobites and were therefore traitors in the context. So this is not the kind of people you wanted to be related to and yet he still made it to a peerage. So they also don't have many aristocratic links. So Nelson's mother's cousin is a link, sure, and Middleton's great great uncle, okay? But mainly these people got there on their own on the backs of their own efforts in the war. So the other thing to mention here is that promotion is faster in wartime. So can connect Nelson here and Collingwood, right? Collingwood literally followed Nelson into three successive commands while under Parker in the West Indies. So he was moved into the next command that Nelson had just vacated one after the other and yet you see that Collingwood is ten years older. Well the major difference here is just that Nelson happened to be born at just the right time to be as young as possible in the American war. So Collingwood doesn't get the benefit of that, he's older, but that's not a reflection of his talent. So among the best and brightest, Nelson looks mostly like the rest of them. Now most of these men won their peerages on the backs of their active naval service. They won great fleet battles, so Jarvis wins the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, Duncan wins the Battle of Camperdown, or they were expert diplomats like Salmorez in the Baltic. They didn't win their peerages because of their connections to the aristocracy or to royalty or because of their parents' lofty birth. And yet you may not have heard of many of the officers on this list, nor did the British voting public in 2002. So why is that? So I think that's a good place to pause for a second to just sort of assess where we are. What I've tried to do so far is to tell you something new about Nelson. I hope some of that was new to you. Before 1797, Nelson was just an above-average naval officer. After 1797, I hope you'll forgive me, I don't have a ton that's to say that's new, but of course that's why you're all here. You didn't actually come to hear me tell you about an average naval officer whose career sputtered out, right? You came here because Nelson is Nelson. And the eight years that made him Nelson are 1797 to 1805. But there's lots more to say just because I'm not saying anything new, I think it's still important to talk about. There's lots to analyze, lots to argue about. I am going to move away from this sort of statistical context in Nelson's life to more of a narrative style. And I'm going to try to make the following argument. Forgive me for just giving my thesis at the beginning here. Why was Nelson extraordinary? Well, I think there are three reasons. One, he led by example and inspired his subordinates. Few officers had as devoted a following as Nelson did. Two, he's a brilliant, flexible tactician, which is something that I'll get to in a couple of points. And three, this is a weird one, it sounds odd to put it up here. He sought the complete destruction of the enemy. Now who wouldn't, right? Of course he would. But Nelson did so in ways that were different from the other members of his generation and it's one of the reasons why you can identify him as different from the rest of them. But I also don't want you to buy into the whole Nelson myth, right? Maybe you come away with this with a little bit better understanding for some of his flaws. He had more opportunities in most of his peers. He had four major fleet battles in his life, which is one or two more than most ever got. He was a shameless self promoter who benefited from good timing both in life and death. Always leave them wanting more, and he sure did. His two greatest triumphs didn't accomplish what they were celebrated for accomplishing, which is something I'll explain a little bit more as we go through. So that's where I'm headed. Let's go to a reminder about the context, right? So what is Nelson doing all this in? He's doing this in the context of the Great Wars. So from 1792-93 until 1815 Europe is embroiled in war on the aftermath of the French Revolution. The first threat for Britain is fear that the French Revolution would spread, the ideology would spread around the continent, and then later on the threat is that Napoleon would actually outright conquer Britain or other countries in Europe. So two decades of nearly continuous global warfare. They're called the first total wars by some historians. I'll leave that debate for something else, but this period is when Nelson is making his name. So the plan is to move chronologically through Nelson's peak. I'll start with the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, where you can see a lot of those positive qualities on display, the leading from the front and the tactical brilliance. So we're going to get some examples of this right now. So in 1797, Nelson was well up on the Captain's seniority list, but he hadn't done anything that really marked him out as unusual. He was part of the British Mediterranean fleet, which in February 1797 was fending off sorties from both the French and the Spanish. And so on Valentine's Day, the British caught a larger Spanish fleet off the coast of Cape St. Vincent in southwestern Spain. Now even though they were outnumbered, the British attacked. The Spanish responded cleverly. This is part of the clever Spanish response that you can see here. The Spanish are in white, the British are in black. And part of their force delayed the center of the British fleet. It might have provided an opportunity for the Spanish force to escape and fight another day, but Nelson seized the initiative and wore out of line to head off the Spanish. So this is a couple of an hour or so later. And what you see happen is Nelson and Captain, the name of his ship, had worn out a line this way and gone to cut off the Spanish who were trying to escape that way. And Collingwood in excellent had tacked to do the same thing. And what that did is it stopped the Spanish from from getting away, would allow the rest of the British fleet to catch up and caused a melee. And that's exactly what the British wanted. So Nelson's ship ended up fighting two Spanish ships at once. His ship was severely damaged. He was in real trouble. Collingwood came up and excellent on the other side of him fired into one of the Spanish ships which damaged it so badly that it got entangled with the first Spanish ship. So now there are two Spanish ships together. Nelson boarded the first Spanish ship, took it, then used that ship to board the second Spanish ship and took it as well. Right? That was Nelson's great move. This is the print that was brought up later called Nelson's Patent Bridge for Boarding First Rates. Right? So here is Nelson's ship boarding the first Spanish ship and then the second Spanish ship here. Right? Okay. This is remarkable and you see two of Nelson's positive qualities in action. Tactical awareness, the decision to wear out a line was really important, and the willingness to lead boarding parties from the front. He led the boarding parties himself. He took the surrender of the Spanish Admiral himself. He was there risking his own life. The Battle of Cape St. Vincent is the first example of Nelson's coolhead under fire which was his most extraordinary quality. He saw the tactical situation clearly and reacted decisively. He didn't as is sometimes claimed disobey orders. That's something you'll hear a lot about at Cape St. Vincent. He understood what Jarvis who became Earl St. Vincent wanted to do and he took effective action himself. He basically just took the initiative even if he wasn't directly ordered to do so. There was no question that this was the right move. Now we also start to see Nelson's opportunistic side after the battle. So the Spanish were decisively defeated. I'll talk more about that later. They lost four ships out of some 20. That's a decisive defeat. Nelson had taken two of the four. So he would have been famous regardless of what happened after the battle. You take 50% of the ships captured. You're going to be famous. But he made sure of it. So he gave interviews to the press. He made sure he wrote clever little stories about what he'd done. He talked about how when the Spanish Admiral surrendered he handed the Spanish Admiral sword to his boson who like stuck it under his arm and gave a winning smile or something like that. So Nelson made sure to play up all the stories about his great action. He wasn't responsible for this print so someone else drew this up. But when he heard about it he made sure that the right people saw that this had come out. He didn't hesitate to raise his own profile. He also made it known that as a reward for his great actions it was proposed to give him a baronet seat. Now that's a hereditary knighthood. So he'd be Sir Horatio Nelson and then all of his male descendants would also be Sir Horatio Nelson or Sir whatever. But he didn't have any sons. So he made it known that he didn't want to be a baronet. He wanted to be a knight of the bath. He'd still be Sir Horatio Nelson. That's very good. But why would you want to be a knight of the bath? Well because you get to wear a bright red sash and so everybody knows that you are a knight of the bath and a big star. So we got a bright red sash and a big star to say look at me I am remarkable. Now as a coda to Saint Vincent Nelson who was promoted to rear admiral after the battle that wasn't because of anything he'd done it was just the time as the seniority came up. It didn't stop him from risking his life. So he led small boat actions against the Spanish in Cadiz. He nearly died in hand to hand combat at least two or three times and even lost his right arm. This print comes after the Battle of the Nile so I'm sorry it's a little bit out of order but it's the best shot of his one arm which he loses here in a small boat action attacking a Spanish fort after the Battle of Cape Saint Vincent. Why was he doing this? Why was he being so reckless? Well the British had just suffered two major mutinies in the channel fleet at Spithead and the Knorr in 1797 and morale was at the lowest ebb and so Nelson and other officers thought it was really important to keep people busy meaning attack attack attack to raise morale he wet assaults himself. It's a remarkable couple months and he nearly dies for it. So this injury provided a good reason to go back to England where he was first able to enjoy the public attention that he'd earned after the Battle of Saint Vincent and that's where you really start to see Nelson the white ball goes off like oh okay I can make something out of this right. Alright so on to the Nile. So the Battle of the Nile demonstrates a couple of interesting things. Another of the extraordinary qualities right inspiring his subordinates to take risks. He really did weed them effectively there and it's the first time you see his recognition that a new kind of victory was going to be necessary in the war. It also demonstrates some of his less laudable qualities so this is he's given an opportunity to go fight at the Nile because his patron Saint Vincent who would just help win the Battle of Cape Saint Vincent gave him the command over the heads of some other admirals who might have had a better claim on this command. Now that's to Nelson's credit. We should give him credit for being so valuable that Saint Vincent would say I want to make sure you get put in the right place but it's also important to remember that there were lots of good fighting officers who didn't get nearly as many opportunities as Nelson did and in any case on this assignment it's fair to say that Nelson actually failed. This is my argument that the Battle of the Nile is famous for all the wrong reasons okay. His second greatest triumph was in many ways a consolation prize following his original failure. The whole point was that Nelson squadron would keep the French expedition from landing in Egypt that was the point. Nelson squadron would blockade too long and keep him from leaving and if that didn't work it would catch him at sea. Instead this is an expedition with Napoleon Bonaparte on board remember. Bonaparte's army escaped in part because Nelson and his flag captain actually demonstrated some poor semen ship that caused his ship to be dismantled in a storm. It was also bad luck to be fair to Nelson so Nelson knew that they were going to Egypt went all the way to Egypt expecting to find them there there was no one there so he left. The French then when a different route arrived in Egypt Nelson was like where'd you go and went back to Egypt to find the French having already landed. So it was bad luck that he missed him but he did miss him and the troops do get ashore and the French go on to campaign. Now I don't want you to leave here thinking that everything that Nelson did at sea in those last eight years of his life worked out. And also most of the credit for the Battle of the Niles victory goes to Nelson's captain specifically Thomas Foley in Goliath. So the British are coming from this direction into this bay where the French are at anchor here in this line. And when the British come in Foley realizes that there's room for the British to get on the inshore side of the French here and since the French are at anchor they can then double up all of the French ships at the head of the line. But Foley was the one who realized this he's the one who managed to get inshore. Nelson arrives later he takes advantage of it unlike at St. Vincent though Nelson himself isn't making any brilliant tactical decisions instead what he's doing is he's giving his subordinates the confidence to take that risk because you notice one of the British ships goes aground. If they calculated wrong and ended up aground over here it could have been easily turned into a loss. So that's a bold move but it was a bold move by one of his subordinates. All right what's different about the Nile though is how completely the British won. I said that the Spanish were decisively defeated at the Battle of Cape St. Vincent having lost four ships. Well at the Battle of the Nile the French lost all but two ships. This is the explosion of the French flagship L'Orient which the magazine caught fire and exploded concussed everybody the battle sort of stopped for about an hour while people try to figure out what had happened really remarkable. It's about this time that Nelson starts to realize that a different kind of victory is necessary and he famously writes what the country needs is the annihilation of the enemy. We can no longer fight battles where we just take a couple enemy ships and they go back to port and everybody's happy instead we need to actually destroy the enemy at sea that's what that's what it's going to take to win these war. In the context of the French Revolution what was needed now was the complete destruction of the enemy and Nelson seems to recognize this earlier than most. So compare the Nile to previous major fleet victories right. The Battle of Kiberon Bay in the Seven Years War the British lose two ships of the line the enemy lose about a third 2900 casualties the Battle of the Chesapeake this is a British defeat they lose about a third of their ships some 600 casualties Gourius 1st of June maybe a fifth of or a quarter of the enemy ships are lost lots of casualties but not a whole lot in terms of the number of the fleet same Vincent same thing the Nile 84% of the of the French fleet is destroyed with 7000 casualties estimated no one's even really sure because the Lorient blew up so dramatically. So the Nile stands out here. Now after the Battle of St. Vincent Nelson's self-promotion had made him a celebrity after the after the Battle of St. Vincent right after the Battle of the Nile Nelson almost threw all that away so he's created Baron Nelson of the Nile prints like this are drawn up where Nelson is the coconut tree and his captains are the coconuts he's celebrated again very widely Baron Nelson of the Nile is very impressive but remember that St. Vincent had been made an Earl which is a higher rank for having won a battle where only four ships of the line were captured. Nelson gets an entire French fleet and is only made into Baron Nelson of the Nile he's jealous he thinks that this was not sufficient reward and so when the Ottoman Sultan gives him a diamond chalink this big diamond spray from his own turbine Nelson decides I'm going to wear this all the time this is my new favorite thing to demonstrate that someone at least appreciates what I've done right so after the Nile he's really concussed and exhausted that print you saw earlier with the painting with the arm cut off he has a big facial injury at the Nile that's really dramatic and so he's really beat up and bruised he's sent to Naples where he's supposed to be supporting the kingdom against the French but instead famously of course he almost throws it all away despite being married he fell in love with Emma Hamilton wife of the British minister in Naples and became entangled not only in a really confusing menage à trois but also in Neapolitan court politics so he had to evacuate the royal family after his meddling in foreign affairs had ended in disaster more disconcertingly for his career he disobeyed direct orders from superior officers who were ordering him to put to sea and the Ability only lightly reprimanded him for this that was the strength of his celebrity which is something we'll come back to and we can see his celebrity here in some way so there's Emma painted by George Romney about 15 years before she meets Nelson here's a print drawn up where I guess Nelson and Emma are supposed to be you know in a Egyptian coffin they were never at the Nile but who cares it's not the point right I think this is Hamilton who's a little jealous there's a cuckold thing going on here that's one idea I don't know why Nelson's in a red coat don't worry about it over here we've got Nelson and Emma smoking I know you can't read this but it says so basically like that old man is not enough for me I need some youthful vigor and Nelson saying I'll give you youthful vigor over here in the corner or we can see here this is Hamilton who's looking at the beauties of antiquity while Nelson and Emma are up on the wall here clearly about to do naughty things to each other so there's all these prints that are drawn up they're famous for this here after William Hamilton dies and Emma and Emma well you know gained some weight shall we say Emma is very sad to see Nelson go off to sea so this is Dido in despair right these are these are public figures and they're celebrated in their press for their very open public life celebrated is maybe the wrong word but they do certainly become celebrities now eventually Nelson's tenure in Naples actually ended successfully sort of at least according to the Neapolitan's and he was made the Duke of Bronte in Naples now since a dukedom is far superior to a barony he began signing his name Nelson and Bronte which you can see down here remember his handwriting looks weird because he's writing with his left hand he had to teach himself how to do that but he's began signing his name Nelson and Bronte on all his documents but he also then spent 10 months in Palermo ignoring his duty again a bone apart escapes from Egypt during this time Nelson was supposed to be at sea to stop him and he's not he jeopardizes his reputation by continuing on with Emma he's ordered back to England and he would have had a disgraceful end to his career in that case if he hadn't been so famous his fame saves him he rescued his reputation from this fiasco in the Mediterranean by doing what he did best right leading ships into action this time in 1801 at the battle of Copenhagen so this is a print of the battle it was in difficult circumstances against a fortified enemy he performed well we can also see again here his opportunities right this is another major fleet battle that Nelson gets a chance to participate in his third one and his tactical understanding you can also see Copenhagen now Nelson's second in command at Copenhagen which makes sense right you would never after Nelson's disgraceful behavior in the Mediterranean no one was given going to give him an independent command so they made sure that he was number two and he sent to attack the weak of armed neutrality which is what Russia Denmark and Sweden had formed to convince at least one of them that it was better to be Britain's friend than its enemy so the commander-in-chief Sir Hyde Parker chose Denmark so they led an assault on Copenhagen Nelson actually led the assault Parker stayed back in reserve and the Danish ships were well fortified in the harbor it's a bloody slow battle but the harbor was arranged in such a way that Nelson was able to maneuver his ships to attack the weakest of the Danish defenses and still get bomb vessels in position to bombard the city which would force the Danes to negotiate so by the early afternoon this had nearly been accomplished but Parker who remember is far away doesn't really understand what's happening and is worried that it's all going wrong so he gives Nelson a signal to retreat and if Nelson had obeyed the signal he would have had to cross in front of the strongest of the Danish defenses which would have been catastrophic and might have thrown away victory snatch victory there you go snatch victory from the jaws of defeat something like that that's it yep lower on defeat from the jaws of victory that's it okay and so Nelson famously said to his flag captain you know Foley I have only one eye and I have a right to be blind sometimes so he put the telescope up to his blind eye and said I really don't see that signal and his captains when he didn't repeat it followed his lead and so he stayed put right and eventually the Danes surrendered so again we see Nelson's coolness under fire his leadership qualities on display again I don't want to overstate disobeying orders here he knew more than Parker did he knew that on the spot he was aware of what was happening Parker wasn't it was a relatively easy signal to disobey we can also add it to the list of increasingly bloody battles so the Danes lose all nine ships of the line that are engaged and with 2,800 casualties it's another complete victory so before we get to the great climax Trafalgar let's assess our list of Nelson's positive and negative traits right so he led by example and inspired his subordinates we saw this at Saint Vincent we saw this in the coastal actions after Saint Vincent and at the Nile we saw how he was a brilliant flexible tactician at Saint Vincent and at Copenhagen we saw how he sought the complete destruction of the enemy at the Nile and at Copenhagen but on the other hand we saw that you know Saint Vincent gave him the opportunity to go to the Nile and he was given another opportunity to rescue his career after his disgraceful performance at Copenhagen he's also a shameless self-promoter who benefited from good timing we saw that after Saint Vincent and after the Nile and finally we've seen how the Nile did not accomplish what it was celebrated for accomplishing the French landed so now let's turn to Trafalgar where I think we'll see all of these traits on display so his final appointment is commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean from 1803 for two years he watched the French and Spanish prepare for sea all the while knowing that the true threat was Napoleon's army camped across the English Channel the question was could the French and Spanish combine their forces to cover an invasion in the summer of 1805 he chased the combined French and Spanish fleet across the Mediterranean and to the West Indies and back with no success and finally in October after the invasion threat had passed which I'll come back to his fleet caught them off the Cape Trafalgar in southwestern Spain and that's when the battle happened I promise I'll come back to that invasion thing now at Trafalgar we can see most of Nelson's positive and negative traits the fleet he was commanding was largely unknown to him right he chased the combined fleet back and forth across the Atlantic but half the ships he commanded at Trafalgar had just arrived from England he had only a few weeks to get to know them to instruct them in his likely tactics in the event of a battle and to assess their qualities and some of them were not up to par so he quickly worked out which captains were likely to be aggressive made sure that they would be at the front of the line in the event of a battle he then communicated clearly with them and said this is what I want to do when we fight and then he inspired them to follow his lead by actually leading them into battle now usually flag officers in major battles like this position themselves in the middle of their fleets so that's what Nelson had done at the Nile for example but in this case he divided his force into two columns and he led one of them so there is victory at the head of one of the column and this is royal sovereign where Collingwood is the other admiral in the fleet so Nelson is always ready to lead by example and put himself in bodily danger now one way that historians have interpreted this sort of death wish is to talk about his dream of glory so this is a subtitle one of the many biographies in Nelson like a dream of glory it's not quite right to say that he had a death wish though but it is fair to say that he'd come to terms with the possibility that he was going to die in action and he was very prepared for this so this is a very poor quality image but it's the prayer that he scribbles out right before the battle saying you know may the great god bless this endeavor and keep me in all the rest of it he's ready to die before the battle even begins he's ready to sacrifice himself for his country and this combination of the willingness to die with the fact that he died at the moment of his greatest triumph goes some way towards explaining his posthumous fame so sending the famous signal England expects that every man will do his duty was also an act of self promotion this is also part of building the myth up right so he this signal is really complicated it involves a lot of like telegraphic things it's it takes up a long time lots of flags going up and down it was also entirely unnecessary like of course do your duty you're about to sail into battle and it takes so long to decipher it that it loses a lot of the effect right so Collingwood was on the other ship he was famously complaining this whole time like stop signaling let's just get on with it right everybody knows what we're here to do but it's all part of the Nelson mythos okay now tactically the two columns were effective especially since Nelson aimed like he was headed towards the front of the combined fleet and then turned this way at the last minute which meant that all these ships had to turn around to come back to re-engage so it was an effective tactic it also helped even the numbers of the two fleets and it created a melee which is what the British wanted the British tended to fire hard fast and low into French and Spanish hulls in the hopes of destroying men and ships Nelson wasn't responsible for this but he capitalized on it and he encouraged his captains to engage directly in the chaos so his tactical choices helped realize the larger strategic goal of the complete destruction of the enemy the French of course tended to adopt a different approach firing at ships rigging and massed in an attempt to disable them they also stationed lots of sharpshooters in their own rigging so they could fire down on British decks and it was one of these shots that killed Nelson it's a little ironic that the most dangerous thing that Nelson did at Trafalgar was to put victory at the head of this line because it meant that there are very light winds so for hours as victory is approaching all of these ships can rake victory down the line and yet that's not what killed Nelson it was the the sniper or the shot from the from the other deck his secretary didn't survive that raking fire these are Nelson's socks that he was wearing at the battle but that's not his blood that's the blood of his secretary that was cut in half by a cannonball during the battle so Nelson died during the much more ordinary but of course horribly dangerous part of the melee portion of the battle now before he died he knew that he'd won a great victory what's update the list so there's Trafalgar at the bottom take about two-thirds of the enemy ships some 15,000 casualties including prisoners of war a massive victory over both the French and the Spanish it effectively destroys the Spanish Navy for a generation as he died he famously asked his flag captain Thomas Hardy to kiss him that's effectively the scene on the cover of my book which you can find for far too much money on Amazon I think the e-book is affordable they tell me we'll see his funeral was attended by hundreds of thousands of mourners in London and his elevation from naval hero to as Lord Byron later put it Britannia's god of war began what got lost in all the celebrations of Nelson's great victory is that it didn't do what it claimed it had done right it did not won the war and it certainly hadn't prevented a French invasion so let's go back to the invasion as I talked about earlier so this is a strategic situation in 1805 here's Napoleon with his army in blue camped on the edge of the English channel hoping to invade and what the French need to do is eliminate Cornwallis's fleet here so they can gain control of the channel to cover an invasion right here is the fleet that was supposed to gain control of the channel Villeneuve coming in here in blue lost his nerve and turned back that way then at that point Austria and Russia declare war and go marching in Central Europe Napoleon says well I guess we're not invading and look out I need to be in Central Europe and the army de-camps at the end of August see 27 August there goes the army so Napoleon's left there's no invasion force anymore then the French fleet puts to sea in October and that's when the battle of Trafalgar happens so it manifestly didn't prevent an invasion the invasion had already been prevented by Sir Robert Calder here on the edge of there and the fact that Villeneuve lost his nerve okay so it's important I think now the BBC you wouldn't know that from the poll of course they said Nelson is one of the 10 100 Greatest Britons because he prevented an invasion of Britain right that's the number one thing that the BBC says about that's the one liner about him in advertising the poll the other thing to remember is that Napoleon heading east this did not go well for Britain and our allies right the culmination of that campaign is the battle of Austerlitz in December 1805 one of Napoleon's greatest victories it's not for another 10 years after 1805 incorporating all of Wellington's campaigns in Spain and Portugal Napoleon's failed invasion of Russia the entire war of 1812 that the British finally emerged triumphant so Trafalgar helped sure like I said it broke the back of the Spanish Navy and it really demoralized the French but the French built a brand new fleet in the last 10 years of the war at Antwerp and significant forces escaped Britain's blockade after 1805 there's a fleet action at San Domingo in the West Indies in 1806 and lots of close calls and there might have been more so there's more to naval affairs in great battles of course count with smaller actions of varying degrees of significance Nelson's great victory didn't end the war at sea and didn't prevent an invasion and yet he's famous for both right that speaks to the nature I think of celebrity and the ways in which he'd prime the public to celebrate his victory and his death the country needed a hero and Nelson stepped forward to provide one so one final trip through our arguments for Nelson's place on the hundred greatest Britons as illustrated at Trafalgar we saw him lead from the front inspire his subordinates we saw his tactical acumen we saw that he saw the complete destruction of the enemy we also saw that this was his fourth major fleet battle we also saw that he was a shameless self-promoter who died at just the right moment at the moment of his greatest triumph and we also saw that his greatest triumph didn't accomplish what it was celebrated for accomplishing so in most respects Nelson I think was an ordinary naval officer his background was typical he entered the navy was commissioned and promoted and put into positions of command in much the same way that other talented officers were the navy he served operated an effective system which identified him as a talented officer at a young age and gave him opportunities to succeed he led ships that were better equipped than the French and Spanish with a higher percentage of experienced sailors which you'll hear about next week or in a month sorry the british also developed more effective gunnery tactics than the arrivals there's also a culture among british officers that encouraged them to take the initiative and be aggressive Nelson wasn't responsible for these developments but he capitalized on them he added to that his two outstanding traits his coolhead under fire which allowed him to take tactical assessments quickly and act decisively and his gift for self-promotion he had major flaws as a statesman but he was also a gifted leader of men he's on the list of hundred greatest britains because he sought a glorious death in the service of his country glory required celebrity which he promoted glory also required complete victory which he recognized sooner than most met the complete annihilation of the enemy he's also on the list because of his flaws so Pellew Collingwood and Salmerez especially Salmerez feel like these distant heroes sort of encased in marble but Nelson had human flaws and his private life was lived in public in that way he shares some similarities actually with Diana to go back to where we started at the beginning of the talk and i think i'll leave you there thanks a lot