Attributed to Thomas Elliott (fl.1790-1800)

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THE AGE OF NELSON, WELLINGTON AND NAPOLEON by Andrew Roberts The period between the fall of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 and the surrender of Emperor Napoleon I on 15 July 1815 was an era in which the greatness of the ideas and issues placed before Mankind was matched by that of the personalities who also shaped the age. In those 26 years, Western Europe was faced with the huge emerging concepts of post-Enlightenment thought -- Liberalism, Nationalism, Equality, human perfectibility, Revolution versus Reaction, Legal Codification, Franchise Reform, Secularism, the Abolition of Slavery, and more -- but fortunately she was also granted giants to guide her through the morass. The Declaration of the Rights of Man promulgated by the Assemblée Nationale during the opening stages of the French Revolution required the unanimity of the globe for their achievement; they brooked no geographical frontiers but were held to be applicable to all people in all countries. Yet they had this central paradox: the international utopia that they proclaimed could only be applied to countries beyond France by that most nationalist of engines: the Grand Armée. Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité could only be imposed in the wake of French armies marching literally from one end of the continent of Europe (Portugal) to the other (Russia). Thus from soon after the French revolutionaries guillotined King Louis XVI in 1793 until Napoleon Bonaparte's final defeat at the hands of the Duke of Wellington at the battle of Waterloo in June 1815, Europe was at war -- with only one brief period of peace in 1802-3 which was recognised by both sides as a mere breathing-space. The final cost in lives of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars has been estimated at no fewer than six million souls. The names of the great battles fought during that era -- Valmy, the Pyramids, the Nile, Seringapatam, Marengo, Assaye, Ulm, Trafalgar, Austerlitz, Jena-Auerstadt, Eylau, Friedland, Oporto, Aspern-Essling, Wagram, Talavera, Fuentes d'Onoro, Albuera, Salamanca, Borodino, Vitoria, Leipzig, Waterloo and many others -- are testament to the magnitude of the struggles. The list of capital cities through which Napoleon Bonaparte rode in triumph is an astonishing one, including Madrid, Brussels, Berlin, Warsaw, Vienna, Moscow, Cairo, and Milan (where he crowned himself King of Italy). Yet every campaign threw up greater and stronger coalitions against him -- there were seven in all -- and served only to devalue the ideas for which he claimed to be fighting. Napoleon could abolish the Holy Roman Empire, sign concordats with the Catholic Church, rationalise the currency and weights and measures, impose the Code Napoléon, embark on magnificent building and irrigation projects, promulgate the abolition of slavery and feudalism, institute meritocracy in place of nepotism, create the Légion d'Honneur -- become in effect a new Caesar -- but he could not alter human nature. This ordains that Liberty, Equality and Fraternity are mutually exclusive, and anyhow impossible to institute by force, as was proved in Paris by the employment and ultimate failure of the guillotine to usher in Robespierre's new utopia. To prevent Napoleon even attempting to impose the new French concepts on monarchical, conservative, independent, protestant and sovereign Britain, it was imperative that he did not ride in triumph through yet another capital city -- London. On 27 July 1801, Vice-Admiral Viscount Nelson of the Nile and Burnham Thorpe was appointed to command the Royal Navy's anti-invasion forces on the Channel Station. Although he failed in his attack on French invasion vessels in Boulogne three weeks later on 15 August -- coincidentally Napoleon's birthday -- the man Byron was to dub 'Britannia's god of war' was determined to prevent any hostile landing from taking place. What he demanded of himself was not simply a victory over France, but a victory of 'annihilation'. This he achieved at the cost of his own life at the battle off Cape Trafalgar on Monday, 21 October 1805. Equally determined was Major-General Sir Arthur Wellesley, who commanded an anti-invasion force based at Hastings. He had been present at the sublime moment at the Lord Mayor's Banquet at the Guildhall the month after Trafalgar when the mortally ill prime minister, William Pitt the Younger -- another giant of the age -- had declared: 'England has saved herself by her exertions and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example.' (Years later Wellington said of this one-sentence speech: 'Nothing could be more perfect.') Shortly before his death two months after that speech, in January 1806, Pitt confided to Wellington that the Iberian peninsula would be the place where Napoleon would attempt to kindle 'the sort of war which will not cease till he is destroyed'. Neither man could have known that it would be Wellington himself who would eventually destroy Napoleon in the Austrian Netherlands (modern-day Belgium), after fighting a six-year guerrilla war in Spain and Portugal in which he did not take a single day's leave. Both Nelson, in defending Britain, and Wellington, in commanding her offensives, were necessary to destroy Napoleonic ambitions, but neither man could have succeeded had those ambitions not been Alexandrine in their hubris. Nelson won because the Combined Fleets of France and Spain were needed for the invasion of Britain, a massively ambitious project for Bonaparte to undertake. Similarly, Wellington won Waterloo in part because Napoleon lost 450,000 men in the snows of Russia three years before. In seeing himself as a reincarnated Alexander the Great (who had conquered the world by thirty), Napoleon was drawn into making the megalomaniacal decisions that encompassed his own downfall. Yet he did take Moscow, thus getting further than Adolf Hitler managed 130 years later in an age of mechanized warfare. Napoleon stood for reform, revolution, right of conquest, and unlimited territorial acquisition; Nelson and Wellington -- in complete contrast -- stood for continuity, tradition, conservative political evolution and, crucially, British independence. They saw themselves as defending the European pre-1789 status quo, not as empire-builders of the Napoleonic stamp. The fact that Trafalgar and then Waterloo opened up the prospect of one hundred years of British imperial expansion provides one of the many paradoxes of this tumultuous period, and also that most rare of historical phenomena -- a happy ending. HORATIO, VISCOUNT NELSON (1758-1805) by Andrew Roberts Admiral Lord Nelson is unquestionably Britain's greatest naval hero; his memory is still toasted every 21 October on the anniversary of his last and greatest victory, the battle of Trafalgar in 1805. His story is a sublime one of patriotism, courage and leadership; two centuries after his death it still has the power to thrill the hearts of Britons. Born in Burnham Thorpe in Norfolk on 29 September 1758, the fifth surviving son of its rector Edmund Nelson, Horatio Nelson went to sea aged only twelve on the 64-gun warship Raisonnable, under the command of his maternal uncle Captain Maurice Suckling. It is said that he was violently sea-sick. His first real sea-going experience was gained on a journey to the West Indies on a merchantman, and soon afterwards he rejoined his uncle on the harbour guardship Triumph. Suckling ensured the boy became expert at navigation and boat sailing, and he soon knew the pilotage of the Medway and Thames expertly. His training in practical seamanship could not have been better, and he was chosen for an Arctic voyage aged only 14, as coxswain of the captain's gig. On his return, he was sent to the East Indies on board the 20-gun Seahorse. Travelling to every station 'from Bengal to Bassorah', his health broke down, and he was invalided home. It was a depressing period for him, but also one that seems to have fired him with a powerful sense of personal destiny. 'I almost wished myself overboard,' he later said of this time. 'But a sudden glow of patriotism was kindled within me. Well then, I exclaimed, I will be a hero, and confiding in Providence I will brave every danger'. By April 1777 Nelson was eighteen, had passed his naval examinations and had been promoted to second lieutenant aboard the 32-gun frigate Lowestoffe, under the command of his great friend Captain William Locker. Locker's military philosophy was simple: 'Lay a Frenchman close and you will beat him.' It was a lesson that Nelson was to take to heart. After serving with Locker in Jamaica, Nelson was promoted to post-captain and -- only four months short of his twenty-first birthday -- transferred to the flagship of the commander-in-chief, Sir Peter Parker. He rose by dint of his charm, intelligence, application and great maritime ability, but nor was he hindered by Suckling's promotion to the comptrollership of the Royal Navy. Nepotism might have been an 18th-century disease, but it helped along the career of our finest master and commander (and also that of the Duke of Wellington). In January 1780, by then captaining a frigate, Nelson took part in the disastrous amphibious assault against the Spanish possessions of San Juan. Yellow fever killed the vast majority of the British seamen, and Nelson himself only survived because he was recalled to Jamaica, and afterwards had to return to England where he had to spend a year rebuilding his health. When he did go back to sea, sailing to Canada, he got 'knocked up with scurvy'. Nelson's was always a delicate constitution, which makes his achievements all the more remarkable. It was while he was commanding the frigate HMS Boreas, on an unpopular mission trying to prevent Britain's West Indian colonists trading with the now-independent United States of America, that Nelson married a young widow from the island of Nevis, Mrs Frances Nisbet. There followed six years of peace, in which Nelson had to eke out an existence on half-pay, living with his parents. On the outbreak of war with Revolutionary France in 1793, however, he was at last given his first large ship, the 64-gun frigate Agamemnon, and ordered to join the Mediterranean Fleet. It was when he was at Naples that he met Lady Hamilton, the wife of the British minister there, Sir William Hamilton. On 12 July 1794, while besieging the Corsican town of Calvi, a cannonball struck the ground near where he was standing, the splinters from which blinded him in his right eye. The next year, after a daring and successful attack against the French outside Toulon, Admiral Sir John Jervis appointed Nelson to the rank of commodore. It was three years later, fighting under Jervis during the battle of Cape St Vincent, that Nelson displayed his flair for independent decision-making. Risking court-martial and disgrace for leaving the line of battle, Nelson -- having spotted that the two divided sections of the Spanish fleet were about to reunite -- sailed his ship HMS Captain into the 80-gun San Nicolas and led a boarding party which captured her. No sooner had the Spanish vessel struck her colours than -- shouting 'Westminster Abbey or glorious victory!' -- Nelson proceeded to board an even larger enemy ship that had drifted alongside, the 112-gun San Josef. Jervis embraced Nelson when he went aboard the flagship after the battle; the commodore was knighted and promoted to rear-admiral. Later in 1797, leading an expedition to try to capture a Spanish treasure ship sheltering at Tenerife, Nelson lost his right arm to grapeshot from the fortress of Santa Cruz. 'A left-handed admiral will never again be considered,' he lamented. 'I am become a burden to my friends and useless to my country.' Events the following year spectacularly proved otherwise. It was Nelson's inspired guess that General Bonaparte's fleet -- which had slipped past the British blockade of Toulon -- had made for Egypt, and on the evening of 1 August 1798, Nelson finally caught up with it at anchor in Aboukir Bay at the mouth of the Nile. By sailing round the head of the French line to attack from the landward side, Nelson won one of the most decisive victories in naval history. Only four French ships escaped out of seventeen, and Napoleon's army was left utterly stranded in Asia. Nelson was elevated to the peerage and deluged with valuable presents from the Tsar of Russia, Sultan of Turkey, City of London, East India Company, and so on. It was when he was recuperating in Naples from a severe wound to the forehead incurred during the battle of the Nile that he also fell in love with Emma Hamilton. Although it has been presented by romantics as one of the great love affairs of history, in fact she must have been a rather irritating woman, who did nothing to prick Nelson's understandable tendency to vanity. For all Nelson's genius at the Nile, nothing could be done by Britain to hinder Napoleon's domination of the European continent. In order to maintain the British blockade of France, for complex political reasons it sadly became necessary to attack the Danish fleet at Copenhagen in April 1801. Vice-Admiral Nelson was second-in-command to Admiral Sir Hyde Parker, and when he was ordered to 'discontinue the action' he put his telescope to his blind eye and joked: 'I really do not see the signal'. The subsequent victory completely vindicated this act of gross insubordination. At the end of Britain's short-lived Peace of Amiens with France, Nelson was appointed to command the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean, where he proceeded to blockade Toulon, not stepping off his flagship HMS Victory for more than ten days in the next two years. With a vast army at Boulogne ready to cross the Channel at any moment the Navy could be decoyed away, the newly-crowned Emperor Napoleon posed by far the greatest invasion threat to the United Kingdom between the Spanish Armada in 1588 and the evacuation from Dunkirk in 1940. It was not to be until 21 October 1805 that Nelson managed to close with the enemy, after a long and exhausting transatlantic journey to the West Indies attempting to track down the large Franco-Spanish combined fleet under the command of the French Admiral Pierre Villeneuve. In essence, Nelson's battle plan at Trafalgar was to sail through the enemy's line in two columns, cutting it roughly into equal thirds, and then to concentrate the British firepower on the rear two thirds, thus equalling up the numbers between the combined fleets' 33 ships and the British fleets' 27. It was imaginative and daring and was nicknamed by his captains 'the Nelson Touch'. The plan was also superbly successful, although it required great skill and courage to implement it since the enemy were able to fire broadsides into the British ships for an agonisingly long time before they were able to respond. Nelson led one column in HMS Victory, Rear-Admiral Collingwood the other. It was just before battle was joined that Nelson ordered John Pasco to hoist his famous and stirring signal to the fleet: 'England expects that every man will do his duty.' The plan went precisely according to Nelson's specifications, but during the battle a sniper from the rigging of the French 74-gun Redoutable shot Nelson, the ball striking his left shoulder and mortally wounding him. 'They have done for me at last,' he told Victory's Captain Hardy. 'My backbone is shot through.' Before he died, however, Hardy was able to inform Nelson that fourteen enemy ships had surrendered, for the loss of not one British vessel. 'Thank God I have done my duty,' answered Nelson, as he slipped into Immortal Glory. NELSON CHRONOLOGY 1758 Sept 29 Born 1767 Dec 26 His mother, Catherine, died 1770 Nov Entered as midshipman on 64-gun Raisonnable 1773 Sailed to the Arctic 1777 A lieutenant, he sailed to Jamaica 1778 Dec Appointed to first command, of 16-gun brig Badger 1780 Feb Took part in disastrous Nicaraguan expedition 1783 Mar Failed to capture Turks Island 1784 July Arrived in Antigua in command of 28-gun frigate Boreas 1787 Mar 11 Married Fanny Nisbet at Nevis, British West Indies 1793 Appointed to command 64-gun Agamemnon Sept Met Emma Hamilton in Naples, the wife of the British ambassador 1794 July 12 Lost right eye at Calvi in Corsica 1797 Feb 14 Helped to win the battle of Cape St Vincent; promoted to rear-admiral and knighted July 24 Lost right arm in failed attack on Santa Cruz, Tenerife 1798 Aug 1 Destroyed French fleet at the battle of the Nile at Aboukir Bay; wounded in the head Nov 6 Created Baron Nelson of the Nile 1799 Began adulterous relationship with Emma Hamilton 1801 Jan Promoted to Vice-Admiral, left Lady Nelson Apr 2 Won the battle of Copenhagen on board his 74-gun Elephant 1802 Mar 25 Peace of Amiens ended the French Revolutionary War 1803 May 16 End of Amiens Peace signalled the start of the Napoleonic War May 18 Sailed to take up command in the Mediterranean, arriving off Toulon in July Aug France assembled huge force at Boulogne to invade Britain 1804 Blockaded French fleet in Toulon, in Victory 1805 April (until July) Chased French Admiral Villeneuve to West Indies and back Aug 18 Arrived at Portsmouth and returned to country home, Merton Place Sept 14 Rejoined Victory at Portsmouth Sept 28 Arrived off Cadiz to take command of the British fleet blockading Villeneuve Oct 21 Died at the moment of glorious victory at the battle of Trafalgar 1806 Jan 9 State Funeral procession from the Admiralty to burial at St Paul's Cathedral

Attributed to Thomas Elliott (fl.1790-1800)

A 74-gun third rate of the Royal Navy departing from Portsmouth, the harbour crowded with vessels, large and small, including an anchored flagship flying the Royal Standard

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Attributed to Thomas Elliott (fl.1790-1800)
A 74-gun third rate of the Royal Navy departing from Portsmouth, the harbour crowded with vessels, large and small, including an anchored flagship flying the Royal Standard
oil on canvas
27 x 43in. (68.7 x 109.3cm.)

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Lot Essay

Portsmouth, principal home of the Royal Navy for many centuries, was the largest naval establishment in the world for much of the long period of British supremacy at sea. The site of the first naval dockyard in Britain begun in 1540, although an important fleet anchorage long before then; the main dockyard was expanded time and again throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Countless famous ships were built there and, in peace and war, the size and scale of its facilities domnated the naval scene for many generations.

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