Horatio Nelson(1758–1805)

Horatio Nelson was born at Burnham Thorpe rectory in north-west Norfolk on 29 September 1758, the sixth of eleven children of the Reverend Edmund Nelson, rector of the parish, and Catherine Suckling, great-niece of Sir Robert Walpole. His mother died when he was nine. At twelve, in January 1771, he was sent to sea by his uncle Captain Maurice Suckling as a midshipman aboard HMS Raisonnable at the Nore, and from there into a six-year apprenticeship on every kind of vessel the late-Georgian navy could put a boy onto: a West Indies merchantman, an Arctic exploration ship that took him in 1773 within ten degrees of the North Pole, and a fourteen-month tour of the East Indies station that left him so wrecked by malaria he had to be invalided home from Bombay. He passed his lieutenant's examination at eighteen in April 1777 and was posted to the Caribbean.

He was made post-captain at twenty in June 1779 on the Jamaica station, one of the youngest in the Royal Navy, and spent the early 1780s in command of frigates in the West Indies enforcing the Navigation Acts against American shipping. He married Frances Nisbet on Nevis on 11 March 1787. The long peace after Versailles left him on half-pay at Burnham Thorpe for five years from 1788 to 1793, walking his father's parish and reading the available naval history in three languages. War with revolutionary France returned him to sea in January 1793 as captain of HMS Agamemnon, sixty-four guns, on the Mediterranean station. He lost the sight of his right eye in the siege of Calvi in Corsica on 12 July 1794, struck by gravel thrown up by an enemy shot. At the battle of Cape St Vincent off the Portuguese coast on 14 February 1797 he broke the standing line of battle on his own initiative, took HMS Captain across the bow of the Spanish van under Admiral Jervis, and boarded the San Nicolás and from her quarterdeck the San Josef behind her, in the action he afterwards called "the patent bridge for boarding first-rates". He was knighted and made rear-admiral on the strength of it. He lost his right arm at a night assault on Santa Cruz de Tenerife on 25 July 1797.

He was given command of the inshore squadron in the Mediterranean in May 1798 with orders to find and destroy the French expedition Bonaparte had embarked at Toulon. He chased it for seventy-three days across the inland sea, missed it twice at Alexandria, and on the evening of 1 August 1798 found Vice-Admiral Brueys's fleet of thirteen ships of the line at anchor in Aboukir Bay east of Alexandria. He attacked at dusk in shoal water on an unsurveyed coast. Captain Foley of HMS Goliath took half the British line through a gap inshore of the French van; the French were caught between two fires; the flagship Orient, one hundred and twenty guns, blew up at twenty-two minutes past ten o'clock and the shock of her going was felt at Rosetta twenty miles away. Eleven of the thirteen French sail of the line were taken or destroyed. Bonaparte's army was stranded in Egypt and the Mediterranean closed against France for the remaining seven years of the war. The Sultan in Constantinople sent him the chelengk, a diamond plume from his own turban; the King of the Two Sicilies created him Duke of Bronte in perpetuity; the British government made him Baron Nelson of the Nile.

At the Battle of Copenhagen on 2 April 1801, sent against the armed neutrality of the Baltic powers under Sir Hyde Parker, he led the inshore attack against the moored Danish line off the city; when Parker hoisted the signal to break off the action three hours into the fight, Nelson put his telescope to his blind right eye and said, by his flag-captain's account, "I really do not see the signal", and pressed on to victory. He was created Viscount Nelson of the Nile and of Burnham Thorpe in May 1801. In May 1803 he was given the Mediterranean command and took up the long blockade off Toulon that occupied the next two years, with brief intermissions, until April 1805, when Vice-Admiral Villeneuve broke out of the harbour with the combined fleet and ran for the West Indies. Nelson chased him across the Atlantic and back, missed him at Antigua by four days, and finally cornered the combined fleet of thirty-three ships of the line at Cadiz. On 21 October 1805, off Cape Trafalgar, with twenty-seven British ships against the thirty-three under Villeneuve, he attacked in two columns at right angles to the enemy line, by a plan he had explained to his captains a fortnight earlier in the great cabin of HMS Victory and called, in writing, "the Nelson touch". The combined fleet was broken: eighteen taken or sunk, none of the British line lost. He was struck by a musket-ball from the mizzen-top of the Redoutable at a quarter past one in the afternoon and died in the cockpit of Victory at twenty past four, having been told that the day was won. The threat of a French invasion of Britain ended that afternoon and did not return in his century or the next.

The body was preserved in a cask of brandy for the voyage home, transferred at Gibraltar to spirits of wine, and lay in state at Greenwich for three days at the beginning of January 1806 in a coffin made from the timbers of L'Orient, the French flagship he had blown up at the Nile seven years earlier. The funeral procession through the City of London to St Paul's on 9 January 1806 was three miles long. He was buried in the crypt under the dome in a black sarcophagus that had been carved for Cardinal Wolsey three centuries before and had stood unused at Windsor since the dissolution of the monasteries. Trafalgar Day is still kept by the Royal Navy on 21 October each year, and the twelve flags he sent up Victory's mizzen halyard at twenty minutes to twelve that morning, signifying "England expects that every man will do his duty", are still hoisted in their order on the same ship in dry dock at Portsmouth. The Nelson name today carries his memory as the surname of the one-armed Norfolk vice-admiral who broke the French navy at Aboukir, refused his commander's signal at Copenhagen, and gave Britain seven years of unchallenged dominion of European waters in the four hours and a quarter of fighting that ended his life off Cape Trafalgar.