Cutting Nelson down to size

An attempt to tease out the man from the legend" is Terry Coleman's description of his biography of Nelson. The book certainly provides a startlingly new view of our national hero, cutting him decisively down to size. But it is by no means a simplistic hatchet job, stuffed with unsubstantiated allegations. Its conclusions, for the most part utterly convincing and completely engrossing, rest upon careful, detailed and rigorous research. It is a real pleasure to follow the progress of the author's arguments, though his editors have unfortunately not seen fit to curb a slight tendency towards circumlocutory and repetitive exposition.

The most serious charge Terry Coleman brings against Nelson concerns the latter's actions at Naples in 1799. Here, after a failed revolution, the rebels occupying the town's fortresses capitulated and were given generous terms of surrender in a formal treaty signed by the commanders of the Neapolitan, Turkish, Russian and British forces.

Nelson arrived from Palermo with his squadron two days later. At first he repudiated the treaty, then said he would do nothing to break it. Encouraged by this, the republicans left the castles and embarked on vessels which, they believed, would transport them, as agreed by the treaty, to Toulon. Instead they were kept prisoner and 99 were later hanged. "I did my duty to the Sicilifying of my own conscience, and I am easy," he later wrote speciously.

Nor does he appear, as legend has it, to have been loved by his men: as commander of the Boreas frigate, during a commission which lasted 18 months, he flogged 66 of 142 seamen and marines: an extraordinarily high proportion. Careless of his own life, he was as careless of the lives of his subordinates. "My pride suffered," he wrote after the failure of an attack on the citadel at Tenerife in 1797. He mounted another, knowing it to be a forlorn hope. He lost an arm, but 148 officers and men lost the number of their mess. It was not the business of a rear-admiral - as he then was - to lead fewer than 1,000 men in a raid on a fortified citadel with a garrison of around 8,000. Hyperactivity, however, was as much to blame as pointless bravado. The former quality served him ill the following year, when the French fleet arrived in Alexandria only a few hours after his hurried departure. Had he delayed, he would have caught their transports and troopships, might even have captured Bonaparte himself - and decisively changed the course of history.

Napoleon is conventionally compared to Wellington; as personalities, however, he and Nelson are much closer - not merely because both married and abandoned creole heiresses, but because both are thoroughly modern men, as military commanders intent on the utter annihilation of their enemies. Wellington, more a man of the 18th century, thought it ungentlemanly to shell general officers and their staff. In other respects, too, Nelson could hardly be more modern: he manipulates facts to suit himself, is a master of the sound bite, and displays a mania for theatrical self-presentation equal to that of any present-day politician. Like a modern sportsman, he refers to himself in the third person: "Nelson soars above them all," he writes to his father, and, like Maradonna, refers to himself as the "Hand of God".

Terry Coleman even strips him of much of his reputation as an admiral. At the Battle of the Nile, Foley of the Goliath made the decisive move by going between the French line and the shore. Copenhagen was won by an unscrupulous and hardly honest ruse de guerre. Only at Trafalgar was the victory due to Nelson's tactics. In the end it is hard not to concur with Lord St Vincent's remark in the postscript of a letter of 1814: "Animal courage was the sole merit of Lord Nelson, his private character most disgraceful, in every sense of the word".