In the Shadow of Nelson

The Life of Admiral Lord Collingwood

Denis Orde

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Maritime
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781844681648
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Vice Admiral Cuthbert (Cuddy) Collingwood may have been 10 years older than Horatio Nelson but he was Nelson's close friend from the outset. They served together for over 30 years and only at Trafalgar, was Nelson his superior officer. The relationship is all the stranger as their temperaments greatly differed. Collingwood was reserved, austere and shy but utterly competent which was why Nelson's meteoric career was so closely linked to his. Collingwood's reputation was made in battles such as The Glorious First of June (1794) and Cape St Vincent (1797). Collingwood's career survived reverses; he was court-martialed in 1777 by a commander for whom he had no respect. He was acquitted. Collingwood in The Royal Sovereign led the lee column at Trafalgar. After assuming command of the Fleet on Nelson's death he was the author of the famous Trafalgar Despatch that announced the victory and death of Nelson to the Nation. He became Commander in Chief Mediterranean Fleet but was never to return home. He died at sea in 1810. He is buried beside Nelson in St. Paul's Cathedral.

Chapter 1

Of Collingwood and Nelson

My friendship for him was unlike anything I have left in the navy – a brotherhood of more than thirty years.

So Collingwood wrote after the death of Nelson.¹

And then:

...since the year ‘73 we have been on the terms of the greatest intimacy; chance has thrown us very much together in service, and on many occasions we have acted in concert.²

They were both fledgling midshipmen when they first met in the year 1773. But there the similarity ended for Horatio Nelson was then but a boy of fifteen years, diminutive, spare, volatile, outgoing and with all the confidence and enthusiasm of youth, where Cuthbert Collingwood, ten years his senior, was by then a fully-grown man, tall, well-built, dignified, handsome, intensely reserved and not a little austere. And yet they took to each other immediately. Perhaps the one recognized in the other a devotion to duty and a strong patriotism, for both were passionately dedicated to the service of their King, Country and the Almighty. Both too were united in their hatred of the French, and, coupled with this was a determination to achieve complete mastery of their chosen profession. But whatever it was, and despite the disparity in their ages, they truly delighted in each other's company and remained the closest of friends for the rest of their lives. Almost forty-four of Collingwood's sixty-one years of life and fifty years of service were to be spent at sea in ocean solitude far from home, most of them in the isolation of command. This, given his natural reserve, meant that Collingwood made very few friends who were at all close to him. Only Nelson, of those with whom he served, was ever able to penetrate that reserve, and so it remained.

Clearly it was a friendship and a competence fully recognized and indeed encouraged by those set in command over them for with almost every advance made by the young Nelson in his inexorable and meteoric rise to fame, so Collingwood was appointed to succeed him in the command he relinquished. Their careers marched hand in hand. It was so when Collingwood took over as Master of the Lowestoffe in the year 1777/8 and it remained so until the death of Nelson twenty-eight years on at Trafalgar. And so to know the one is to know the other.

Yet, until Trafalgar, at no time did Collingwood in fact occupy a role which was subordinate to that of Nelson. Indeed there can be no doubt but that by his presence and participation and by the interventions he made in many of the engagements in which his friend was involved, he was, when in equal command, in no small part responsible for that success which was Nelson's. This undoubted fact has seldom been recognized in the wealth of literature which the life of Nelson has generated over the years. Indeed even public opinion of the day was largely silent about the contribution made by Cuthbert Collingwood and very little has ever been written of him.

It was, for instance, no coincidence that when Nelson played such a dramatic role at the Battle of Cape St Vincent which first brought him to the attention of the general public and propelled him to fame in the year 1797, his success was due in no small part to the timely arrival and considerable support of Collingwood. And in the final moments of Nelson's life on 21 October 1805, Collingwood was still there at his side, then as his second in command, executing the plan of campaign Nelson had devised, leading the attack and, after Nelson had fallen, carrying the fleet through to victory. Here again, for one last time, Vice-Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood stepped into the shoes vacated by Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson, not simply as an interregnum but as full Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, and there he remained until his own untimely death off the coast of Port Mahon, Minorca, five years on.

Many of those to whom the nation's affairs were entrusted in these momentous years no more than walked in the shadow of those giants who strode the national stage at the turn of the eighteenth century, those few men who so dominated the life of the nation at one of the most dangerous periods of its history, amongst them Pitt, St Vincent, Nelson and, later, Wellington; all men of magisterial greatness. So much so that little is ever written of others who also had a role to play. But at least those who fought at sea could count themselves fortunate to have served in the British Royal Navy through what undoubtedly were some of the most glorious years of its long and distinguished history, crowned as they were by Nelson's three great and epic victories at the Nile, Copenhagen and off Cape Trafalgar. Collingwood was one such. But, unquestionably, he too was a warrior of outstanding distinction and one of the foundation stones of the modern British Navy.

Although the appetite of Napoleon Bonaparte for territorial expansion continued unabated for another decade or so, it was in the years 1803, 1804 and 1805 that Great Britain had been most at risk of invasion. Nelson appreciated this well enough, as did William Pitt, the Prime Minister. His relief was great indeed, therefore, when he was woken at 3 a.m. on the morning of 5 November of the year 1805 to be told of the great victory off Cape Trafalgar, but also of the sad death of Horatio Nelson, intelligence delivered to the Admiralty by the captain of the frigate Pickle.

The King too recognized full well that a great danger had passed when he was woken from his bed with news of the triumph, four hours later and, with tears in his eyes, read aloud the masterful and elegant dispatch written by Cuthbert Collingwood in majestic prose, yet modest of the part he himself had played in the battle.

Yet he himself had been responsible in no small part for his friend's success, both when Nelson stepped on to the public stage and again when he left it. And such had been their friendship that despite the younger Nelson's more rapid promotion in the service, and even though much greater attention had been given to Nelson for his different escapades, at no time on his journey through life did Collingwood ever resent it.

It was fitting, therefore, that after valedictory tribute and due homage had been paid and Collingwood was finally laid to rest five years on, it was alongside his friend Nelson in St Paul's Cathedral, buried in a plain stone tomb which had been constructed to receive the body of Cardinal Lord Wolsey and donated by the Duke of Clarence. And there he rests at peace, nestling in the shadow of his friend Nelson's larger and more flamboyant sarcophagus. As in life so in death.

Although less trumpeted than many, he was a just, humane and Christian man of immense courage, determination and professional skill. Indeed, he was an ornament to his profession and probably the noblest sailor of them all.

Chapter 2

Character

Effingham, Grenville, Raleigh, Drake,

Here's to the bold and free!

Benbow, Collingwood, Byron, Blake,

Hail to the Kings of the sea!

Admirals all for England's sake.

Honour be yours and fame!

And honour, as long as waves shall break,

To Nelson's peerless name.

Henry Newbolt's poem Admirals All.

Although not an inspirational, innovative or daring commander in the way of Horatio Nelson, and whilst he did not hold the chief command at any of the great sea battles of the French war, Collingwood became, above all else, the supreme and dedicated professional. His mastery of navigation and gunnery was prodigious and the firepower of three broadsides in five minutes achieved on every ship which ever fell under his command, was legendary. Indeed, it seems that at one point during the year 1805, even one broadside a minute was achieved, albeit the eminent naval historian Dr N.A.M. Rodger considered that so exceptional was that by any possible standard that it is unlikely that it could have been sustained for long. It was this pre-eminence which was the key to Collingwood's personal success at the three great Battles of the Glorious First of June, off Cape St Vincent and at Trafalgar. So much so that, many years on, a naval gunnery base at Portsmouth, now a shore training establishment, was named HMS Excellent after the ship commanded by him to such effect at St Vincent. Seldom can a ship have been named more aptly, for it was indeed a ship of proven excellence.

As William Davies was to write in the year 1875:

...[he] had an intimate and exact knowledge of all the technicalities of his profession...He insisted on everything being done rightly, and could himself splice a rope or perform any other office of the ship with as much dexterity as a common seaman.

He was not a man to set his men to carry out a task which he could not himself perform. Here then was a man of whom it could truly be said that he had advanced on merit and on merit alone. At no time in his career was he carried forward on the back of friendship or blood relation, as sadly is too often the case, nor could it, in justice, be said of Collingwood that he ever sought favour by expressing opinions deliberately manufactured to be supportive of those who enjoyed the gift of patronage and promotion.

In later years when in supreme command in the Mediterranean with all the powers of a plenipotentiary, responsible for the direction of naval affairs from Cadiz to Constantinople, such was his integrity, his devotion to duty and his sound judgment coupled with an instinctive diplomatic skill, that the Government found it impossible to replace him. Negotiating with a plethora of ruling autocrats of disparate ambition, each with his own agenda to pursue, to which policy would inevitably be subordinated, called for supreme patience and great tact. Fortunately Collingwood possessed both of these qualities in abundance and it was as well that he did for the responsibility for decision-making was often his and his alone without any prospect of support or guidance from the distant home government given the slowness of communication. And so his domination in that theatre of war became total and by his suppression of French naval activity in the Mediterranean in the years following Trafalgar and by maintaining vital supplies of food and ammunition for the forces in the Peninsula, the balance sheet will show that Collingwood's contribution towards the success of the Spanish uprising against Napoleon was massive.

Although he acquired a reputation as a stern disciplinarian throughout his years in the service, this was never achieved by brutal repression or excessive use of the cat, for he hated the degradation of flogging.

‘I cannot for the life of me’, he would say, ‘comprehend the religion of an officer who prays all one day and flogs his men all the next.’

On those rare occasions when he did allow it, he would himself fall silent for many a long hour after the punishment had been inflicted. The records of punishment meted out on board flagships in the Mediterranean before Trafalgar show a marked contrast between those sanctioned under Collingwood's command, which were sparing, and those permitted on board, for instance, Victory when under the command of Horatio Nelson. It is of course so often the curious failing of the historian that he is tempted to judge the conduct of great men of yesteryear by the standards of today. But even if that approach was adopted with Collingwood he would still emerge as a merciful man, a man of humanity in an age of brutality, and it is this which stands as his true and lasting monument.

Rather, from 1793 onwards, he preferred to subject the drunkard, the thief, the disobedient, the neglectful and the violent offender to the performance of menial tasks, extra duty, watering of grog and exclusion from his own mess which made him the butt and object of ridicule and contempt, for, as a punishment, embarrassment was always reckoned to be the most effective weapon. At the same time he would often suggest to a young midshipman at the point of punishment of a man for disobedience to the young man's orders, which Collingwood would not allow, that the offender be spared if it was at all possible that the insubordination had been no more than a reaction to the midshipman's own failure of command.

So perhaps life at sea became more tolerable under Collingwood than under many another captain, some of whom were notorious for their abuse of power. And yet good order was renowned in the ships under his command. Indeed they became models of discipline. This was all the more impressive given that a ship's company was invariably composed of not only those genuine volunteers from Great Britain and elsewhere in the world who had been attracted to the service by the prospect of bounty, which in fact attracted but few recruits, but also those many violent and potentially mutinous convicted felons who had been sent from city gaols under the quota system, choosing service rather than the hangman's noose. With them came those many discontented individuals who had been press-ganged into the service and so were there very much against their will. Such men brought with them simmering discontent and every permutation of vice and base behaviour. Yet such was Collingwood's reputation that even that awesome and stern disciplinarian Lord St Vincent, and indeed Nelson too, spoke often enough of sending miscreants they could not tame over to Collingwood's ship so that they might be brought under control. ‘Send them to Collingwood. He will tame them if no-one can’, they would say.

In establishing methods for the maintenance of discipline at sea which were less brutalizing and less cruel than flogging, Collingwood was something of a pioneer and far ahead of his time. But it was to be another seven decades before the cat, as an accepted form of punishment in Her Majesty's Royal Navy, was finally outlawed.

Coupled with this was a constant and paternal concern for the welfare of his men which earned him, in the eyes of most, their gratitude, respect and affection. And so, behind his back, they knew him as ‘Father’. To his friend Nelson he was always ‘Coll’, but to his fellow officers he was ‘Old Cuddy’, inap...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Maps and Diagrams
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Of Collingwood and Nelson
• Chapter 2: Character
• Chapter 3: Collingwood and Nelson and The American War of Independence
• Chapter 4: Nelson and Collingwood in the West Indies
• Chapter 5: Collingwood's Marriage and Family
• Chapter 6: Collingwood at the Battle of the Glorious First of June 1794
• Chapter 7: Nelson and Collingwood at the Battle of Cape St Vincent, 1797
• Chapter 8: Discord in the Mediterranean 1798-1799
• Chapter 9: With the Channel Fleet
• Chapter 10: Collingwood and Nelson in the Countdown to Trafalgar
• Chapter 11: Nelson and Collingwood at Trafalgar
• Chapter 12: Collingwood as Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet
• Chapter 13: The End
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index