Nelson (101 page)

It soon became clear that the vessel was only one of many, and at daylight Nelson saw the rest of the convoy running along the land under Genoese and Greek colours. Sailing inshore at night without lights they had almost reached their destinations before being discovered, and now scuttled for the safety of Alassio, Languelia and other supposedly neutral ports. Nelson was unable to impede them, and almost lost the one prize he had taken. At noon the wind dropped, and a French war galley was rowed out of Alassio to try to recapture the prize as it lay becalmed some way astern of the
Agamemnon
. Nelson’s boats hurried reinforcements to his prize crew, and their fire forced the galley to retire, but towards evening a second attempt to retake the prize, by two Alassio gunboats, also had to be beaten off. Nelson eventually took his prize in tow and got underway for Vado, but it was no matter for celebration. Yet another convoy had successfully run the blockade and something like one hundred supply ships were sheltering snugly beneath the batteries in Alassio.
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The trouble was that Nelson needed at least a dozen frigates, sloops and brigs, and perhaps as many cutters, to stop the coastal trade, and they were simply not available. There was an opportunity to strike the supply ships en masse in Alassio Bay, and again Nelson appealed to Hotham. With three ships of the line and eight to ten frigates he could attack Alassio, as he had done before, and capture the victuallers wholesale. But instead of a green light, Nelson received the news that Hotham had struck his flag on 1 November and gone home, handing the fleet over to Vice Admiral Sir Hyde Parker as a caretaker commander-in-chief.

Few in the fleet were sorry to see Hotham go, but there was less agreement about his replacement. Nelson did not rate Parker, and would have preferred Admiral Goodall. Goodall liked Nelson, and had recommended him for the riviera command in the first place. He had expected to succeed Hotham on an acting basis, and refused to serve under Parker. Writing a generous farewell to Nelson, and no doubt to others in his confidence, Goodall quit the fleet. Nelson realised that he would have got far more from Goodall than Parker, but he
renewed his request for reinforcements and received a half-hearted response. On 8 November the new acting commander-in-chief sent the
Dido
and
Meleager
to the riviera with two cutters, but they arrived too late.
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The climax of the campaign had come and gone before they appeared.

Nelson had only four ships to meet that crisis – his own
Agamemnon
, the
Flora
frigate under Captain Robert Middleton, and the
Moselle
sloop and
Speedy
brig. Though based at Vado they also attempted to cruise off Cape di Noli near Pietra to instil confidence in the allied army but none was there when the French finally made a powerful onslaught on the Austrian front at Loano. The weather was appalling, and a snowstorm postponed the French attack for a week. When it came on 23 November the
Flora
,
Moselle
and
Speedy
had been blown away by dangerous gales, the first two back towards Leghorn and the last towards Corsica, while the
Agamemnon
herself had been drawn to Genoa by a sudden emergency in that quarter.

Nelson had responded to a summons sent by Drake on 12 November. He was needed ‘to overawe the crew of
La Brune
, which is become extremely riotous’, and to deal with a threat to De Vins’s rear. The
Agamemnon
found Genoa gripped by growing Jacobin sentiment. Drake’s house was having to be protected by a state guard, and when he and Nelson dined with the Sardinian minister on the 16th a carriage pointedly returned the captain to his boat at the lanthorn battery before dark. The Austrian chargé d’affaires and their local military commanders, as well as the Sardinian minister, were alarmed by the activities of the French frigate
La Brune
at the Genoa mole. It appeared that on 10 November
La Brune
and a number of privateers had embarked three hundred men and carried them nine miles west to Voltri, where an Austrian command post situated twenty miles behind De Vins’s lines was seized with its corn supply and £10,000 worth of Genoese livres belonging to the Austrian commissary. The French were quickly expelled by an allied counterattack from Savona, and lost their commander among others captured, but remained unchastened. Indeed, back in Genoa they plundered a Sardinian salt magazine within the town limits and raised seven hundred adventurers for another foray. Rumour had it that they
intended joining a party from the French army at Bocchetta and attacking the road between Genoa and De Vins’s army at Vado, inciting Jacobin elements within the peasantry to turn out in their support.
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Nelson was sceptical, but accepted that the French were flagrantly breaching neutrality by recruiting in Genoa, and that the ultimate possibilities were frightening. The small Austrian garrisons at St Pierre d’Arena and Voltri, near Genoa, were obviously threatened, and if the French got control of the Bocchetta pass between the town and the main Austrian lines they could cut off De Vins’s principal supply route and road of retreat. The Austrian and Sardinian ministers were making formal protests to the Genoese, but something more concrete was needed and they begged Nelson to act.

Bringing the
Agamemnon
into harbour, Nelson swiftly terrified
La Brune
and her associated privateers and transports into warping their way into the inner mole and removing their guns and powder. The officers of the enemy frigate were so frightened that their ship would be cut out that they buried it in the middle of a dozen merchantmen. To make doubly sure that none of the hostile vessels left port, on 18 November Nelson laid the
Agamemnon
between the two mole heads, ready to intercept anything trying to leave. It was a partial blockade, and risked offending Genoa, but now that the French had overstepped the mark and abused neutrality hand over fist, Nelson felt justified in a stronger approach.

His position was uncomfortable, notwithstanding. There were reports that French ships of the line might break out of Toulon and come to Genoa, where the
Agamemnon
stood to be trapped alone. Moreover, tied down here Nelson was unable to keep the promise he had given De Vins to keep the French gunboats off the Austrian flank at Pietra. As he later informed Parker, he regretted not being ‘able to divide the
Agamemnon
’ and cover both points of danger. Almost inevitably, it was while Nelson was at Genoa, and his other ships blown from their stations, that the French general hurled his men against the Austrian front line. At the forefront of the assault were six future Napoleonic generals, including André Massena, Charles-Pierre-François Augereau and Louis-Gabriel Suchet.
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The Austrians were superior in numbers and entrenched in a line of strong posts but they broke like reeds. Nelson’s purser, who was with their army, found himself running beside soldiers who had thrown down their weapons, and female camp followers fleeing with their skirts in their hands. Old De Vins was ill. His head was swollen and he could-hardly
speak, and no sooner had the French attacked than he handed his command to a deputy and fled in the dead of night in a sedan chair. It hardly encouraged his wavering soldiers, who without a reserve line to rally behind were soon streaming back towards Genoa, along the very road that Nelson was keeping open. Those who tried to stand in pockets were soon outflanked and forced to withdraw. Vado fell on the 26th and Savona three days later, so quickly that two of Nelson’s shore parties were surprised and captured on the 29th. Lieutenant Noble, Midshipmen Withers and Newman, and eleven seamen and marines fell into the hands of the French.
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The captain of the
Agamemnon
was mortified that none of his ships had been there when it mattered, and that eighteen enemy gunboats were allowed to worry the left flank of the Austrian army unscathed. But he exonerated himself with a report that the rout of De Vins had begun on the right flank, away from the coast, and the knowledge that he had preserved a line of retreat that saved up to ten thousand fleeing Austrians from capture or death, including De Vins himself. For had the French forces he had shut in Genoa succeeded in establishing themselves in the rear of the Austrian army, and closed the Bocchetta pass, the battle of Loano might have been a far more desperate affair. As it was the allies lost more than three thousand men, tens of cannons and ‘magazines of every description’. The allied armies eventually regrouped at Acqui, Ceva and Mondovi, but for a while even Genoa was threatened and Nelson had to warn British ships that not a single port on the riviera was safe to enter.
⁴⁸

Bonaparte was angry with Scherer for failing to exploit his advantage, and particularly for not marching upon Ceva to divide the Austrians from Sardinia-Piedmont and force the latter to accept terms. For Nelson it was a sad but not unexpected end to the campaign. As he sailed back to Leghorn early in December, Nelson was convinced that Britain’s allies were useless and the war as a whole futile. There was plenty of blame, and insofar as it touched himself Nelson reacted powerfully. The Austrians had been complaining about the inadequacy of British naval support for some time, and General Olivier Remigius, Count Wallis, who succeeded De Vins, was using the absence of Nelson’s ships as an excuse for the defeat at Loano. At Leghorn, Nelson suffered the indignity of seeing an aid to Wallis arrive with a file of accusations. He rebutted them immediately, and Drake and Trevor thundered in his defence at every opportunity. Even in Vienna the charges were not taken seriously, for the army was notorious for
its lethargy, but Nelson felt himself impugned when he had done his best with inadequate tools.
⁴⁹

Nelson acidly remarked that the Austrians had fought so badly that the whole of the British fleet could not have saved them, but in one respect he did sympathise with their plight. They had, after all, fought a campaign on the coast to benefit from the aid of a fleet that had never once appeared. Hotham and Parker had stripped Nelson’s force to the bone, and left it utterly unequal to its duties, no matter how well led or how busy. Even after the Austrian defeat Nelson remained acutely embarrassed, for Vado and Genoa had become unsafe ports, and ships were needed to loiter in the offing, warning British traders and men-of-war not to enter. Nothing Nelson had said had moved his admirals, and he felt bitterly disappointed and hoped the neglect might be exposed in some enquiry. He felt so ill-used that he began appealing directly to the Admiralty, over Parker’s greying head. ‘My squadron has been so reduced by the admiral and storms of wind,’ he complained, ‘that I had not ships to make the attempt and drive those gun boats away.’ Those who had shared his frustrations understood. ‘I would to God
you
had been our commander-in-chief!’ Trevor told him.
⁵⁰

Actually, no one would have been less interested in an enquiry than the British government. As Peter Jupp, the biographer of Lord Grenville, the foreign secretary, has shown, the administration had regarded the riviera campaign as an unwelcome distraction, and had urged Austria and Sardinia-Piedmont to drive through Savoy to the north rather than fritter their resources repelling the French advance along the coast. The campaign on the riviera, however poorly prosecuted by the Austrians and their allies, was their priority rather than Britain’s.

We can sense Nelson’s depression in the revival of longings for home. When things were going well Nelson preferred active service, enlivened by the prospects of action and achievement. In June Fanny had urged him to quit, but he had palmed her off with excuses, explaining that it was discourteous to rush home so soon after the king had recognised his services in a promotion. However, by Christmas, the springs had fallen from his heels, and he was weary and disillusioned. He had failed to get his distinguishing pendant – even a direct petition to the Admiralty producing a refusal – and he felt he had been abandoned on the riviera. Nelson began talking about relinquishing his naval career again, and taking a seat in Parliament.

In September, Lord Walpole and Coke of Holkham suggested he fill a vacancy for the seat of Ipswich. Nelson was tempted, though he hated political factions and insisted upon being regarded as an independent candidate, at liberty to judge every matter on a non-partisan basis. He was prepared to serve in ‘the real Whig interest’ with the Duke of Portland’s moderates, who understood the extent of French aggression and supported Pitt, but would have nothing to do with the Foxite Whigs. As patriots they might have been equally complicated and naive, but Nelson saw them as ‘vile dogs’ who excused and condoned the enemy’s excesses. The other problem about standing for Parliament was financial, ‘for although I have so often seen the French shot, yet truly I have seen little of their money’. Money was needed to buy support during electioneering, and to maintain a London establishment, a respectable table and a place in society. The plan fell through, and the Ipswich seat went to Sir Andrew Hamond, comptroller of the Navy Board.
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England still attracted him, so bleak did he construe his future with the fleet. A new commander-in-chief had come at last, the long-awaited successor to Lord Hood and a man to be reckoned with – Admiral Sir John Jervis, renowned, almost feared, throughout the service for strong opinions and an iron discipline. He arrived at St Fiorenzo on 30 November to ‘the great joy of some and sorrow of others’. Nelson may have remembered his one meeting with Jervis in the Treasury in London; Sir John certainly did, and recalled that their mutual acquaintance, Captain Locker, armed with a cane sporting an eyeglass in its head, had eagerly made the introductions. Locker had also spoken to Jervis before the admiral left England, and almost certainly reminded him of the merits of the captain of the
Agamemnon
. But in any case the new commander-in-chief was disposed to befriend Nelson. He had begun his career under Commodore George Townshend, a distant relative of Nelson’s, and gratefully remembered the kindness shown him by the ship’s first lieutenant, none other than Maurice Suckling, Horatio’s venerable uncle, whom Jervis honoured as an ‘excellent’ man.
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