Horatio Nelson was a sickly clergyman’s son who became Britain’s greatest naval hero, despite lifelong illness, losing an eye and an arm.
His daring victories against France made him famous across Europe, but his final battle at Trafalgar would turn him into a national legend.
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[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it's the start of another three-part mini-series, this time on the great naval hero, Horatio Nelson, Lady Hamilton, and the love affair that scandalised Britain.
[00:00:36] In today's episode, we will follow the life of Horatio Nelson, the sickly clergyman's son who gave an eye, an arm, and finally his life to become Britain's greatest naval hero.
[00:00:51] In parts two and three, we'll tell his story from the other side, from the perspective of Emma Hamilton, the woman born in poverty who reinvented herself and became the most famous woman in Europe. And, yes, Nelson's lover.
[00:01:08] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:14] There is an expression in English you may know: "don't judge a book by its cover". Most languages have a similar type of expression.
[00:01:24] It means that appearance can be deceptive; just because someone looks a certain way, their character and behaviour may be different.
[00:01:36] And if you were to go to the village of Burnham Thorpe on the windswept coast of Norfolk, in the east of England, in the 1760s, and poke your nose into the vicar's house, you would find a boy.
[00:01:53] He was a small boy, and not a healthy one. All his life he would suffer from seasickness, fevers, and a fragile constitution.
[00:02:05] If you lined him up next to the other boys in the village, and had to choose which one was most likely to become not just a British war hero, but probably the greatest military leader in British history, you wouldn't have picked the small, ill-looking one called Horatio Nelson.
[00:02:28] But he had two things going for him. He had an uncle who was a captain in the Royal Navy. And he had, buried somewhere inside that small, sickly body, a limitless supply of ambition and courage.
[00:02:46] At the age of twelve, he asked to go to sea with his uncle.
[00:02:51] His uncle's reply has become famous. What has poor Horatio done, he asked, that he, so weak, should be sent to rough it out at sea?
[00:03:03] But he took the boy on, and Nelson joined the navy, and essentially never left.
[00:03:11] To his uncle's surprise, his nephew turned out to be fearless.
[00:03:18] There is a story from an expedition to the Arctic, when Nelson was fifteen. One night, he slipped away from his ship and walked out across the ice. He came across a polar bear that, of course, tried to attack him. His gun misfired, so he turned it around and started beating the bear with the butt, the end you press on your shoulder. When he was finally hauled back on board and asked what on earth he had been thinking, he explained that he had wanted the bear's skin, as a present for his father.
[00:03:58] The story may well have grown in the telling. But it was the kind of story people told about Nelson, and would tell about him all his life.
[00:04:10] He rose astonishingly quickly, thanks partly to his uncle's connections and partly to sheer ability. He was a lieutenant at eighteen and a captain at twenty, commanding ships and men while barely more than a boy himself. And curiously, for one of the greatest sailors who ever lived, he suffered from terrible seasickness all his life.
[00:04:36] He served in the West Indies, in the Caribbean, where he made himself unpopular by rigidly enforcing British trade laws against American merchants.
[00:04:46] It was there, on the small island of Nevis, that he met a young widow called Frances Nisbet, known to everyone as Fanny.
[00:04:57] She was gentle, sensible, and quickly devoted to him. They married in 1787, and the future King William the Fourth, then a young naval officer himself, gave the bride away.
[00:05:13] Fanny, for better or worse, will pop up throughout this mini-series, and unfortunately history has not been kind to her.
[00:05:23] So, Nelson is a newly-married rising star in the British navy, and an ambitious one at that.
[00:05:32] But the problem was that there wasn't much fighting to be done.
[00:05:36] Britain was at peace, and a navy at peace has little use for ambitious young captains.
[00:05:44] Nelson was sent home on half pay, and he spent those years back in Norfolk with Fanny, digging his father's garden, arguing with the neighbours, and writing letters begging his superiors for a ship.
[00:05:59] And then, in 1793, revolutionary France declared war on Britain, and everything changed.
[00:06:08] Nelson got his ship, a sixty-four-gun warship called the Agamemnon, and he got a war that would last, with one short break, for the rest of his life.
[00:06:21] One of his first missions took him to the Bay of Naples, in the south of Italy, to ask the Kingdom of Naples for soldiers.
[00:06:31] He stayed a few days. He dined with the British ambassador, Sir William Hamilton, an old and cultured man he greatly admired. He also met the ambassador's wife, a dazzlingly beautiful young woman called Lady Hamilton.
[00:06:46] Now, her story is so colourful that the entire next two episodes will be dedicated to it, but for the purposes of today's episode, we just need to know that she was young, charming, but married to another man.
[00:07:03] Nelson wrote home to Fanny that he had had a satisfactory time in Naples, even describing the ambassador's wife as a young lady of "amiable manners who did honour to her station".
[00:07:16] And then he sailed away, and, to the best of our knowledge, thought little more about the beautiful ambassador's wife.
[00:07:25] Nelson spent the next years fighting the French up and down the Mediterranean, and the war began to consume him, quite literally, piece by piece.
[00:07:37] In 1794, during the siege of Calvi, on the island of Corsica, a French cannonball smashed into the ground in front of him and sprayed his face with sand and gravel. He lost most of the sight in his right eye.
[00:07:55] He shrugged it off. In his letters, he seemed almost proud of it, and he never wore an eyepatch.
[00:08:03] Then, in February 1797, came the battle that made his name.
[00:08:10] Off Cape St Vincent, on the coast of Portugal, a British fleet of fifteen ships met a Spanish fleet of twenty-seven. In the middle of the battle, Nelson saw that the Spanish ships were about to escape, and he did something that simply was not done in the Royal Navy.
[00:08:32] He pulled his ship out of the line of battle, without orders, and threw it directly into the path of the Spanish fleet.
[00:08:41] His ship was battered half to pieces. And then Nelson personally led a boarding party onto one enemy ship, captured it, and used it as a stepping stone to capture a second, larger one, scrambling from deck to deck with his sword drawn.
[00:09:02] For a captain to leave the line without orders was, technically, a court-martial offence, an offence that could have seen him put on trial by the navy.
[00:09:12] Instead, Britain made him a national hero, a knight, and an admiral.
[00:09:20] That was the thing about Nelson. He gambled, again and again, with his ships, with his men, and with his own body. And the gambles kept paying off.
[00:09:32] Well, not always...
[00:09:35] Five months later, he led a night attack on a Spanish port in Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. It was a disaster. As Nelson stepped out of his boat, a piece of grapeshot shattered his right arm above the elbow.
[00:09:54] The arm was amputated that night, by lamplight, in the surgeon's cabin of his ship.
[00:10:01] Within half an hour, it was said, Nelson was giving orders again.
[00:10:06] He came home to England depressed, in constant pain, and convinced his career was over.
[00:10:13] A one-eyed, one-armed admiral, he wrote, would never be useful to his country again.
[00:10:20] Back home, he was nursed back to health by his dutiful wife, Fanny, who patiently dressed the wound every day until it finally healed.
[00:10:30] And as for his prediction that his career was over, well, he couldn't have been more wrong.
[00:10:37] In the spring of 1798, a huge French fleet slipped out of the port of Toulon, carrying an army commanded by a young general called Napoleon Bonaparte. Nobody knew where it was going. Nelson was sent into the Mediterranean to find it, and for two exhausting months, he chased shadows.
[00:11:02] The French, it turned out, had gone to Egypt. Napoleon had a dream of conquering the East.
[00:11:10] And on the evening of the 1st of August, 1798, Nelson finally found the French fleet, anchored in a line at the mouth of the river Nile.
[00:11:24] It was late in the day. The safe, sensible choice was to wait until morning and then engage. Nelson attacked immediately.
[00:11:36] Some of his ships did something the French thought was impossible: they sailed between the anchored French ships and the shore, where there was barely enough water, so the French found themselves attacked from both sides at once.
[00:11:53] At around ten o'clock that night, the French flagship, a giant vessel called L'Orient, caught fire and exploded. The blast was so enormous that, for several minutes afterwards, the battle simply stopped. Sailors on both sides stood in silence, staring.
[00:12:15] By morning, the French Mediterranean fleet had ceased to exist. Napoleon's army was cut off, with no ships to take them home.
[00:12:27] It was one of the most complete victories in the history of naval warfare, and it turned Nelson from a British hero into a European celebrity. Medals were struck. Poems were written. The Sultan of the Ottoman Empire sent him a diamond ornament for his hat.
[00:12:48] Britain made him a baron: Lord Nelson of the Nile.
[00:12:53] He must have been thrilled, you might have thought. In fact, he was annoyed. A baron was the lowest rank of the aristocracy, and Nelson felt he deserved better.
[00:13:07] For all his brilliance, he had an almost childlike hunger for praise, for medals, for recognition.
[00:13:16] And part of it, to be fair, was about money as well as glory. Unlike other military leaders, Nelson had no great family fortune behind him; everything he had came from his pay and his prize money, and he never quite lost the feeling that his country rewarded him less generously than he deserved.
[00:13:40] Now, after the Battle of the Nile, Nelson was a hero, but physically, he was in a very bad way indeed. He had been wounded in the head during the battle, his ships were battered, and he was utterly exhausted.
[00:13:59] He needed a friendly port. And so, in September 1798, he sailed into the Bay of Naples.
[00:14:09] Waiting for him on the quayside was Emma, Lady Hamilton, the woman he had met for a few days five years earlier. She had organised a hero's welcome the likes of which even kings rarely received.
[00:14:26] And here the two stories of this mini-series meet.
[00:14:31] Emma had started life about as poor as it was possible to be, the daughter of a blacksmith who died when she was a baby. By 1798 she was the wife of the British ambassador, the closest friend of the Queen of Naples, and one of the most famous women in Europe.
[00:14:51] She had even played a part in Nelson's great victory. When his thirsty, hungry fleet needed supplies in Sicily, and neutral Naples could not officially help them, it was Emma's friendship with the Queen that helped quietly open the door.
[00:15:09] Nelson was dazzled by her. She was dazzled by him. And over the following two years, in Naples and then Sicily, they fell in love: he a married national hero, she the wife of the man he most admired.
[00:15:30] Nelson stayed in the Mediterranean far longer than he should have, his superiors in London grew more and more irritated, and when he finally came home to England in 1800, he did not come home to Fanny.
[00:15:45] He came home with the Hamiltons, with Sir William and the, shock horror, heavily pregnant Lady Hamilton. The father of the child was kept a secret, but the clue was in her name: Horatia.
[00:16:02] It was a scandal, a scandal we will go into in much more detail in parts two and three.
[00:16:09] The public adored him too much to care. The establishment cared very much indeed. And his private life had become the most famous scandal in Britain.
[00:16:22] Professionally, though, he remained untouchable, and in 1801 he proved it again at the Battle of Copenhagen, where Britain attacked the Danish fleet to break up an alliance of neutral countries that threatened British trade.
[00:16:39] It was a brutal, close-range fight, and halfway through, with the fighting at its fiercest, his commanding officer raised a signal flag ordering him to withdraw. Nelson ignored this order and, according to the story told afterwards, lifted his telescope to his blind eye.
[00:17:03] "I really do not see the signal", he said.
[00:17:06] He fought on, and he won.
[00:17:10] By 1805, Napoleon ruled most of Europe and was preparing to invade Britain, or at least, that's what most people in Britain thought. Only one thing stood in his way: the Royal Navy.
[00:17:26] And in October of that year, the combined fleets of France and Spain came out of the port of Cadiz, in southern Spain. Their fleet was a combined thirty-three ships, almost 30,000 men, and 2,600 guns.
[00:17:48] Off a cape in southwest Spain called Trafalgar, Nelson was waiting for them. His fleet had twenty-seven ships, 17,000 men and just over 2,000 guns.
[00:18:03] On paper, the numbers favoured the enemy. In reality, almost everything else favoured Britain.
[00:18:12] The Royal Navy of 1805 was probably the finest fighting force in the world. Years of blockade duty meant that British crews were constantly at sea, sailing and drilling in all weathers, while the French and Spanish crews largely sat in port.
[00:18:32] A well-trained British gun crew could fire two or even three times in the time it took their opponents to fire one.
[00:18:42] Nelson knew all this. It was the foundation that everything else was built on.
[00:18:48] As the fleets closed in on each other, on the morning of the 21st of October, he ordered a signal to be run up the masts of his flagship, HMS Victory, a message to every sailor in the fleet.
[00:19:04] England expects that every man will do his duty.
[00:19:09] The men cheered. Nelson had that effect, it seemed, on the people who served under him. His captains called themselves his band of brothers, and sailors who had never exchanged a word with him would boast, for the rest of their lives, that they had fought alongside Nelson.
[00:19:29] Now, I don't want to get too bogged down in the intricacies of these naval battles, but it is important to understand a little bit about how they tended to work.
[00:19:42] These ships were, essentially, huge floating fortresses. Most battles would involve the ships lining up against each other and blasting each other with cannon shot from close distance until one side surrendered.
[00:20:01] Nelson's plan for this battle was different. Instead of forming a traditional line, his ships would sail straight at the enemy in two columns and smash their line into pieces.
[00:20:17] This would mean they would be forced to accept terrible damage on the attack, because the ships could only fire side-on. But once they broke through, it would do three things.
[00:20:32] Firstly, it would cut the Franco-Spanish fleet in half, allowing the British to focus their attack.
[00:20:40] Secondly, by firing from a ninety degree angle, as opposed to side by side, the British ships could fire their cannons at the poorly protected fronts and backs of the enemy ships, with cannonballs smashing down the whole length of their gun decks.
[00:20:59] And thirdly, it would create an atmosphere of chaos which gave the British a serious advantage. The British sailors were better trained, they could reload and fire faster, and in a state of confusion, they had the upper hand.
[00:21:18] Nelson, of course, would lead one of the ships that would sail straight at the enemy, straight into a hail of bullets and cannon fire. To state the obvious, it was an incredibly dangerous strategy, and Nelson knew that his chances of surviving the battle were slim.
[00:21:39] This was especially so because officers did not duck down.
[00:21:46] Ordinary sailors could at least crouch behind the ship's wooden sides when the fire grew heavy. Officers were expected not to do this.
[00:21:56] Custom demanded that a commander stand upright on the open deck, calm and apparently unbothered, while the air around him filled with flying metal. This required almost indescribable bravery.
[00:22:13] And Nelson, Britain's most famous naval commander, was the epitome, the perfect example, of this.
[00:22:22] He never sheltered below deck in his cabin; he would stand on deck in his finest uniform, wearing every star and medal he owned, as the cannonballs began to strike home around him.
[00:22:35] And this was what he did at Trafalgar, facing the full might of the superior in numbers Franco-Spanish fleet.
[00:22:44] But this time, lady luck was not with him.
[00:22:49] And at the height of the battle, as the Victory lay locked against a French ship, a marksman in the enemy rigging looked down at the British quarterdeck and, through the smoke, saw a small man in an admiral's coat, glittering with stars and medals, medals his officers had advised him not to wear so as not to draw attention to himself.
[00:23:14] The Frenchman fired. The bullet struck Nelson in the shoulder and passed down through his spine.
[00:23:24] He was carried below decks, to the dark, crowded space beneath the waterline where the wounded lay. He told the doctor, "You can do nothing for me. I have but a short time to live. My back is shot through".
[00:23:39] The doctor could not disagree.
[00:23:42] Nelson was dying, but he clung onto life for another three hours, as if he could not die before learning the result of the battle.
[00:23:52] When he heard the cheers of his sailors above deck, he knew that his strategy had worked perfectly. Of the thirty-three French and Spanish ships, eighteen were captured or destroyed. Britain lost none.
[00:24:09] He asked his old friend Captain Hardy to kiss him, and Hardy knelt down and kissed his cheek.
[00:24:16] Among his final words was the simple sentence: thank God, I have done my duty.
[00:24:22] Britain gave Nelson the greatest funeral in its history.
[00:24:27] His body was brought home preserved in a barrel of brandy, and tens of thousands of people lined the streets of London in silence as the coffin was carried to St Paul's Cathedral.
[00:24:40] And the mourning never really stopped.
[00:24:43] If you go to London today, you can stand in a square named after his final battle: Trafalgar Square, right in the centre of the city.
[00:24:53] In the middle of it, on top of a column more than fifty metres tall, stands a statue of a small, one-armed man, gazing out towards the sea.
[00:25:05] That man is Horatio Nelson.
[00:25:09] OK, then, that is it for today's episode — the first part of our three-part series on Nelson and Lady Hamilton.
[00:25:16] Next up, in parts two and three, we will be telling the amazing story of Emma Hamilton, the woman who rose from poverty to become an ambassador's wife, the most famous woman in Europe, and yes, the lover of Britain's greatest naval hero.
[00:25:32] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:25:37] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
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Horatio Nelson was a sickly clergyman’s son who became Britain’s greatest naval hero, despite lifelong illness, losing an eye and an arm.
His daring victories against France made him famous across Europe, but his final battle at Trafalgar would turn him into a national legend.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it's the start of another three-part mini-series, this time on the great naval hero, Horatio Nelson, Lady Hamilton, and the love affair that scandalised Britain.
[00:00:36] In today's episode, we will follow the life of Horatio Nelson, the sickly clergyman's son who gave an eye, an arm, and finally his life to become Britain's greatest naval hero.
[00:00:51] In parts two and three, we'll tell his story from the other side, from the perspective of Emma Hamilton, the woman born in poverty who reinvented herself and became the most famous woman in Europe. And, yes, Nelson's lover.
[00:01:08] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:14] There is an expression in English you may know: "don't judge a book by its cover". Most languages have a similar type of expression.
[00:01:24] It means that appearance can be deceptive; just because someone looks a certain way, their character and behaviour may be different.
[00:01:36] And if you were to go to the village of Burnham Thorpe on the windswept coast of Norfolk, in the east of England, in the 1760s, and poke your nose into the vicar's house, you would find a boy.
[00:01:53] He was a small boy, and not a healthy one. All his life he would suffer from seasickness, fevers, and a fragile constitution.
[00:02:05] If you lined him up next to the other boys in the village, and had to choose which one was most likely to become not just a British war hero, but probably the greatest military leader in British history, you wouldn't have picked the small, ill-looking one called Horatio Nelson.
[00:02:28] But he had two things going for him. He had an uncle who was a captain in the Royal Navy. And he had, buried somewhere inside that small, sickly body, a limitless supply of ambition and courage.
[00:02:46] At the age of twelve, he asked to go to sea with his uncle.
[00:02:51] His uncle's reply has become famous. What has poor Horatio done, he asked, that he, so weak, should be sent to rough it out at sea?
[00:03:03] But he took the boy on, and Nelson joined the navy, and essentially never left.
[00:03:11] To his uncle's surprise, his nephew turned out to be fearless.
[00:03:18] There is a story from an expedition to the Arctic, when Nelson was fifteen. One night, he slipped away from his ship and walked out across the ice. He came across a polar bear that, of course, tried to attack him. His gun misfired, so he turned it around and started beating the bear with the butt, the end you press on your shoulder. When he was finally hauled back on board and asked what on earth he had been thinking, he explained that he had wanted the bear's skin, as a present for his father.
[00:03:58] The story may well have grown in the telling. But it was the kind of story people told about Nelson, and would tell about him all his life.
[00:04:10] He rose astonishingly quickly, thanks partly to his uncle's connections and partly to sheer ability. He was a lieutenant at eighteen and a captain at twenty, commanding ships and men while barely more than a boy himself. And curiously, for one of the greatest sailors who ever lived, he suffered from terrible seasickness all his life.
[00:04:36] He served in the West Indies, in the Caribbean, where he made himself unpopular by rigidly enforcing British trade laws against American merchants.
[00:04:46] It was there, on the small island of Nevis, that he met a young widow called Frances Nisbet, known to everyone as Fanny.
[00:04:57] She was gentle, sensible, and quickly devoted to him. They married in 1787, and the future King William the Fourth, then a young naval officer himself, gave the bride away.
[00:05:13] Fanny, for better or worse, will pop up throughout this mini-series, and unfortunately history has not been kind to her.
[00:05:23] So, Nelson is a newly-married rising star in the British navy, and an ambitious one at that.
[00:05:32] But the problem was that there wasn't much fighting to be done.
[00:05:36] Britain was at peace, and a navy at peace has little use for ambitious young captains.
[00:05:44] Nelson was sent home on half pay, and he spent those years back in Norfolk with Fanny, digging his father's garden, arguing with the neighbours, and writing letters begging his superiors for a ship.
[00:05:59] And then, in 1793, revolutionary France declared war on Britain, and everything changed.
[00:06:08] Nelson got his ship, a sixty-four-gun warship called the Agamemnon, and he got a war that would last, with one short break, for the rest of his life.
[00:06:21] One of his first missions took him to the Bay of Naples, in the south of Italy, to ask the Kingdom of Naples for soldiers.
[00:06:31] He stayed a few days. He dined with the British ambassador, Sir William Hamilton, an old and cultured man he greatly admired. He also met the ambassador's wife, a dazzlingly beautiful young woman called Lady Hamilton.
[00:06:46] Now, her story is so colourful that the entire next two episodes will be dedicated to it, but for the purposes of today's episode, we just need to know that she was young, charming, but married to another man.
[00:07:03] Nelson wrote home to Fanny that he had had a satisfactory time in Naples, even describing the ambassador's wife as a young lady of "amiable manners who did honour to her station".
[00:07:16] And then he sailed away, and, to the best of our knowledge, thought little more about the beautiful ambassador's wife.
[00:07:25] Nelson spent the next years fighting the French up and down the Mediterranean, and the war began to consume him, quite literally, piece by piece.
[00:07:37] In 1794, during the siege of Calvi, on the island of Corsica, a French cannonball smashed into the ground in front of him and sprayed his face with sand and gravel. He lost most of the sight in his right eye.
[00:07:55] He shrugged it off. In his letters, he seemed almost proud of it, and he never wore an eyepatch.
[00:08:03] Then, in February 1797, came the battle that made his name.
[00:08:10] Off Cape St Vincent, on the coast of Portugal, a British fleet of fifteen ships met a Spanish fleet of twenty-seven. In the middle of the battle, Nelson saw that the Spanish ships were about to escape, and he did something that simply was not done in the Royal Navy.
[00:08:32] He pulled his ship out of the line of battle, without orders, and threw it directly into the path of the Spanish fleet.
[00:08:41] His ship was battered half to pieces. And then Nelson personally led a boarding party onto one enemy ship, captured it, and used it as a stepping stone to capture a second, larger one, scrambling from deck to deck with his sword drawn.
[00:09:02] For a captain to leave the line without orders was, technically, a court-martial offence, an offence that could have seen him put on trial by the navy.
[00:09:12] Instead, Britain made him a national hero, a knight, and an admiral.
[00:09:20] That was the thing about Nelson. He gambled, again and again, with his ships, with his men, and with his own body. And the gambles kept paying off.
[00:09:32] Well, not always...
[00:09:35] Five months later, he led a night attack on a Spanish port in Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. It was a disaster. As Nelson stepped out of his boat, a piece of grapeshot shattered his right arm above the elbow.
[00:09:54] The arm was amputated that night, by lamplight, in the surgeon's cabin of his ship.
[00:10:01] Within half an hour, it was said, Nelson was giving orders again.
[00:10:06] He came home to England depressed, in constant pain, and convinced his career was over.
[00:10:13] A one-eyed, one-armed admiral, he wrote, would never be useful to his country again.
[00:10:20] Back home, he was nursed back to health by his dutiful wife, Fanny, who patiently dressed the wound every day until it finally healed.
[00:10:30] And as for his prediction that his career was over, well, he couldn't have been more wrong.
[00:10:37] In the spring of 1798, a huge French fleet slipped out of the port of Toulon, carrying an army commanded by a young general called Napoleon Bonaparte. Nobody knew where it was going. Nelson was sent into the Mediterranean to find it, and for two exhausting months, he chased shadows.
[00:11:02] The French, it turned out, had gone to Egypt. Napoleon had a dream of conquering the East.
[00:11:10] And on the evening of the 1st of August, 1798, Nelson finally found the French fleet, anchored in a line at the mouth of the river Nile.
[00:11:24] It was late in the day. The safe, sensible choice was to wait until morning and then engage. Nelson attacked immediately.
[00:11:36] Some of his ships did something the French thought was impossible: they sailed between the anchored French ships and the shore, where there was barely enough water, so the French found themselves attacked from both sides at once.
[00:11:53] At around ten o'clock that night, the French flagship, a giant vessel called L'Orient, caught fire and exploded. The blast was so enormous that, for several minutes afterwards, the battle simply stopped. Sailors on both sides stood in silence, staring.
[00:12:15] By morning, the French Mediterranean fleet had ceased to exist. Napoleon's army was cut off, with no ships to take them home.
[00:12:27] It was one of the most complete victories in the history of naval warfare, and it turned Nelson from a British hero into a European celebrity. Medals were struck. Poems were written. The Sultan of the Ottoman Empire sent him a diamond ornament for his hat.
[00:12:48] Britain made him a baron: Lord Nelson of the Nile.
[00:12:53] He must have been thrilled, you might have thought. In fact, he was annoyed. A baron was the lowest rank of the aristocracy, and Nelson felt he deserved better.
[00:13:07] For all his brilliance, he had an almost childlike hunger for praise, for medals, for recognition.
[00:13:16] And part of it, to be fair, was about money as well as glory. Unlike other military leaders, Nelson had no great family fortune behind him; everything he had came from his pay and his prize money, and he never quite lost the feeling that his country rewarded him less generously than he deserved.
[00:13:40] Now, after the Battle of the Nile, Nelson was a hero, but physically, he was in a very bad way indeed. He had been wounded in the head during the battle, his ships were battered, and he was utterly exhausted.
[00:13:59] He needed a friendly port. And so, in September 1798, he sailed into the Bay of Naples.
[00:14:09] Waiting for him on the quayside was Emma, Lady Hamilton, the woman he had met for a few days five years earlier. She had organised a hero's welcome the likes of which even kings rarely received.
[00:14:26] And here the two stories of this mini-series meet.
[00:14:31] Emma had started life about as poor as it was possible to be, the daughter of a blacksmith who died when she was a baby. By 1798 she was the wife of the British ambassador, the closest friend of the Queen of Naples, and one of the most famous women in Europe.
[00:14:51] She had even played a part in Nelson's great victory. When his thirsty, hungry fleet needed supplies in Sicily, and neutral Naples could not officially help them, it was Emma's friendship with the Queen that helped quietly open the door.
[00:15:09] Nelson was dazzled by her. She was dazzled by him. And over the following two years, in Naples and then Sicily, they fell in love: he a married national hero, she the wife of the man he most admired.
[00:15:30] Nelson stayed in the Mediterranean far longer than he should have, his superiors in London grew more and more irritated, and when he finally came home to England in 1800, he did not come home to Fanny.
[00:15:45] He came home with the Hamiltons, with Sir William and the, shock horror, heavily pregnant Lady Hamilton. The father of the child was kept a secret, but the clue was in her name: Horatia.
[00:16:02] It was a scandal, a scandal we will go into in much more detail in parts two and three.
[00:16:09] The public adored him too much to care. The establishment cared very much indeed. And his private life had become the most famous scandal in Britain.
[00:16:22] Professionally, though, he remained untouchable, and in 1801 he proved it again at the Battle of Copenhagen, where Britain attacked the Danish fleet to break up an alliance of neutral countries that threatened British trade.
[00:16:39] It was a brutal, close-range fight, and halfway through, with the fighting at its fiercest, his commanding officer raised a signal flag ordering him to withdraw. Nelson ignored this order and, according to the story told afterwards, lifted his telescope to his blind eye.
[00:17:03] "I really do not see the signal", he said.
[00:17:06] He fought on, and he won.
[00:17:10] By 1805, Napoleon ruled most of Europe and was preparing to invade Britain, or at least, that's what most people in Britain thought. Only one thing stood in his way: the Royal Navy.
[00:17:26] And in October of that year, the combined fleets of France and Spain came out of the port of Cadiz, in southern Spain. Their fleet was a combined thirty-three ships, almost 30,000 men, and 2,600 guns.
[00:17:48] Off a cape in southwest Spain called Trafalgar, Nelson was waiting for them. His fleet had twenty-seven ships, 17,000 men and just over 2,000 guns.
[00:18:03] On paper, the numbers favoured the enemy. In reality, almost everything else favoured Britain.
[00:18:12] The Royal Navy of 1805 was probably the finest fighting force in the world. Years of blockade duty meant that British crews were constantly at sea, sailing and drilling in all weathers, while the French and Spanish crews largely sat in port.
[00:18:32] A well-trained British gun crew could fire two or even three times in the time it took their opponents to fire one.
[00:18:42] Nelson knew all this. It was the foundation that everything else was built on.
[00:18:48] As the fleets closed in on each other, on the morning of the 21st of October, he ordered a signal to be run up the masts of his flagship, HMS Victory, a message to every sailor in the fleet.
[00:19:04] England expects that every man will do his duty.
[00:19:09] The men cheered. Nelson had that effect, it seemed, on the people who served under him. His captains called themselves his band of brothers, and sailors who had never exchanged a word with him would boast, for the rest of their lives, that they had fought alongside Nelson.
[00:19:29] Now, I don't want to get too bogged down in the intricacies of these naval battles, but it is important to understand a little bit about how they tended to work.
[00:19:42] These ships were, essentially, huge floating fortresses. Most battles would involve the ships lining up against each other and blasting each other with cannon shot from close distance until one side surrendered.
[00:20:01] Nelson's plan for this battle was different. Instead of forming a traditional line, his ships would sail straight at the enemy in two columns and smash their line into pieces.
[00:20:17] This would mean they would be forced to accept terrible damage on the attack, because the ships could only fire side-on. But once they broke through, it would do three things.
[00:20:32] Firstly, it would cut the Franco-Spanish fleet in half, allowing the British to focus their attack.
[00:20:40] Secondly, by firing from a ninety degree angle, as opposed to side by side, the British ships could fire their cannons at the poorly protected fronts and backs of the enemy ships, with cannonballs smashing down the whole length of their gun decks.
[00:20:59] And thirdly, it would create an atmosphere of chaos which gave the British a serious advantage. The British sailors were better trained, they could reload and fire faster, and in a state of confusion, they had the upper hand.
[00:21:18] Nelson, of course, would lead one of the ships that would sail straight at the enemy, straight into a hail of bullets and cannon fire. To state the obvious, it was an incredibly dangerous strategy, and Nelson knew that his chances of surviving the battle were slim.
[00:21:39] This was especially so because officers did not duck down.
[00:21:46] Ordinary sailors could at least crouch behind the ship's wooden sides when the fire grew heavy. Officers were expected not to do this.
[00:21:56] Custom demanded that a commander stand upright on the open deck, calm and apparently unbothered, while the air around him filled with flying metal. This required almost indescribable bravery.
[00:22:13] And Nelson, Britain's most famous naval commander, was the epitome, the perfect example, of this.
[00:22:22] He never sheltered below deck in his cabin; he would stand on deck in his finest uniform, wearing every star and medal he owned, as the cannonballs began to strike home around him.
[00:22:35] And this was what he did at Trafalgar, facing the full might of the superior in numbers Franco-Spanish fleet.
[00:22:44] But this time, lady luck was not with him.
[00:22:49] And at the height of the battle, as the Victory lay locked against a French ship, a marksman in the enemy rigging looked down at the British quarterdeck and, through the smoke, saw a small man in an admiral's coat, glittering with stars and medals, medals his officers had advised him not to wear so as not to draw attention to himself.
[00:23:14] The Frenchman fired. The bullet struck Nelson in the shoulder and passed down through his spine.
[00:23:24] He was carried below decks, to the dark, crowded space beneath the waterline where the wounded lay. He told the doctor, "You can do nothing for me. I have but a short time to live. My back is shot through".
[00:23:39] The doctor could not disagree.
[00:23:42] Nelson was dying, but he clung onto life for another three hours, as if he could not die before learning the result of the battle.
[00:23:52] When he heard the cheers of his sailors above deck, he knew that his strategy had worked perfectly. Of the thirty-three French and Spanish ships, eighteen were captured or destroyed. Britain lost none.
[00:24:09] He asked his old friend Captain Hardy to kiss him, and Hardy knelt down and kissed his cheek.
[00:24:16] Among his final words was the simple sentence: thank God, I have done my duty.
[00:24:22] Britain gave Nelson the greatest funeral in its history.
[00:24:27] His body was brought home preserved in a barrel of brandy, and tens of thousands of people lined the streets of London in silence as the coffin was carried to St Paul's Cathedral.
[00:24:40] And the mourning never really stopped.
[00:24:43] If you go to London today, you can stand in a square named after his final battle: Trafalgar Square, right in the centre of the city.
[00:24:53] In the middle of it, on top of a column more than fifty metres tall, stands a statue of a small, one-armed man, gazing out towards the sea.
[00:25:05] That man is Horatio Nelson.
[00:25:09] OK, then, that is it for today's episode — the first part of our three-part series on Nelson and Lady Hamilton.
[00:25:16] Next up, in parts two and three, we will be telling the amazing story of Emma Hamilton, the woman who rose from poverty to become an ambassador's wife, the most famous woman in Europe, and yes, the lover of Britain's greatest naval hero.
[00:25:32] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:25:37] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it's the start of another three-part mini-series, this time on the great naval hero, Horatio Nelson, Lady Hamilton, and the love affair that scandalised Britain.
[00:00:36] In today's episode, we will follow the life of Horatio Nelson, the sickly clergyman's son who gave an eye, an arm, and finally his life to become Britain's greatest naval hero.
[00:00:51] In parts two and three, we'll tell his story from the other side, from the perspective of Emma Hamilton, the woman born in poverty who reinvented herself and became the most famous woman in Europe. And, yes, Nelson's lover.
[00:01:08] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:14] There is an expression in English you may know: "don't judge a book by its cover". Most languages have a similar type of expression.
[00:01:24] It means that appearance can be deceptive; just because someone looks a certain way, their character and behaviour may be different.
[00:01:36] And if you were to go to the village of Burnham Thorpe on the windswept coast of Norfolk, in the east of England, in the 1760s, and poke your nose into the vicar's house, you would find a boy.
[00:01:53] He was a small boy, and not a healthy one. All his life he would suffer from seasickness, fevers, and a fragile constitution.
[00:02:05] If you lined him up next to the other boys in the village, and had to choose which one was most likely to become not just a British war hero, but probably the greatest military leader in British history, you wouldn't have picked the small, ill-looking one called Horatio Nelson.
[00:02:28] But he had two things going for him. He had an uncle who was a captain in the Royal Navy. And he had, buried somewhere inside that small, sickly body, a limitless supply of ambition and courage.
[00:02:46] At the age of twelve, he asked to go to sea with his uncle.
[00:02:51] His uncle's reply has become famous. What has poor Horatio done, he asked, that he, so weak, should be sent to rough it out at sea?
[00:03:03] But he took the boy on, and Nelson joined the navy, and essentially never left.
[00:03:11] To his uncle's surprise, his nephew turned out to be fearless.
[00:03:18] There is a story from an expedition to the Arctic, when Nelson was fifteen. One night, he slipped away from his ship and walked out across the ice. He came across a polar bear that, of course, tried to attack him. His gun misfired, so he turned it around and started beating the bear with the butt, the end you press on your shoulder. When he was finally hauled back on board and asked what on earth he had been thinking, he explained that he had wanted the bear's skin, as a present for his father.
[00:03:58] The story may well have grown in the telling. But it was the kind of story people told about Nelson, and would tell about him all his life.
[00:04:10] He rose astonishingly quickly, thanks partly to his uncle's connections and partly to sheer ability. He was a lieutenant at eighteen and a captain at twenty, commanding ships and men while barely more than a boy himself. And curiously, for one of the greatest sailors who ever lived, he suffered from terrible seasickness all his life.
[00:04:36] He served in the West Indies, in the Caribbean, where he made himself unpopular by rigidly enforcing British trade laws against American merchants.
[00:04:46] It was there, on the small island of Nevis, that he met a young widow called Frances Nisbet, known to everyone as Fanny.
[00:04:57] She was gentle, sensible, and quickly devoted to him. They married in 1787, and the future King William the Fourth, then a young naval officer himself, gave the bride away.
[00:05:13] Fanny, for better or worse, will pop up throughout this mini-series, and unfortunately history has not been kind to her.
[00:05:23] So, Nelson is a newly-married rising star in the British navy, and an ambitious one at that.
[00:05:32] But the problem was that there wasn't much fighting to be done.
[00:05:36] Britain was at peace, and a navy at peace has little use for ambitious young captains.
[00:05:44] Nelson was sent home on half pay, and he spent those years back in Norfolk with Fanny, digging his father's garden, arguing with the neighbours, and writing letters begging his superiors for a ship.
[00:05:59] And then, in 1793, revolutionary France declared war on Britain, and everything changed.
[00:06:08] Nelson got his ship, a sixty-four-gun warship called the Agamemnon, and he got a war that would last, with one short break, for the rest of his life.
[00:06:21] One of his first missions took him to the Bay of Naples, in the south of Italy, to ask the Kingdom of Naples for soldiers.
[00:06:31] He stayed a few days. He dined with the British ambassador, Sir William Hamilton, an old and cultured man he greatly admired. He also met the ambassador's wife, a dazzlingly beautiful young woman called Lady Hamilton.
[00:06:46] Now, her story is so colourful that the entire next two episodes will be dedicated to it, but for the purposes of today's episode, we just need to know that she was young, charming, but married to another man.
[00:07:03] Nelson wrote home to Fanny that he had had a satisfactory time in Naples, even describing the ambassador's wife as a young lady of "amiable manners who did honour to her station".
[00:07:16] And then he sailed away, and, to the best of our knowledge, thought little more about the beautiful ambassador's wife.
[00:07:25] Nelson spent the next years fighting the French up and down the Mediterranean, and the war began to consume him, quite literally, piece by piece.
[00:07:37] In 1794, during the siege of Calvi, on the island of Corsica, a French cannonball smashed into the ground in front of him and sprayed his face with sand and gravel. He lost most of the sight in his right eye.
[00:07:55] He shrugged it off. In his letters, he seemed almost proud of it, and he never wore an eyepatch.
[00:08:03] Then, in February 1797, came the battle that made his name.
[00:08:10] Off Cape St Vincent, on the coast of Portugal, a British fleet of fifteen ships met a Spanish fleet of twenty-seven. In the middle of the battle, Nelson saw that the Spanish ships were about to escape, and he did something that simply was not done in the Royal Navy.
[00:08:32] He pulled his ship out of the line of battle, without orders, and threw it directly into the path of the Spanish fleet.
[00:08:41] His ship was battered half to pieces. And then Nelson personally led a boarding party onto one enemy ship, captured it, and used it as a stepping stone to capture a second, larger one, scrambling from deck to deck with his sword drawn.
[00:09:02] For a captain to leave the line without orders was, technically, a court-martial offence, an offence that could have seen him put on trial by the navy.
[00:09:12] Instead, Britain made him a national hero, a knight, and an admiral.
[00:09:20] That was the thing about Nelson. He gambled, again and again, with his ships, with his men, and with his own body. And the gambles kept paying off.
[00:09:32] Well, not always...
[00:09:35] Five months later, he led a night attack on a Spanish port in Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. It was a disaster. As Nelson stepped out of his boat, a piece of grapeshot shattered his right arm above the elbow.
[00:09:54] The arm was amputated that night, by lamplight, in the surgeon's cabin of his ship.
[00:10:01] Within half an hour, it was said, Nelson was giving orders again.
[00:10:06] He came home to England depressed, in constant pain, and convinced his career was over.
[00:10:13] A one-eyed, one-armed admiral, he wrote, would never be useful to his country again.
[00:10:20] Back home, he was nursed back to health by his dutiful wife, Fanny, who patiently dressed the wound every day until it finally healed.
[00:10:30] And as for his prediction that his career was over, well, he couldn't have been more wrong.
[00:10:37] In the spring of 1798, a huge French fleet slipped out of the port of Toulon, carrying an army commanded by a young general called Napoleon Bonaparte. Nobody knew where it was going. Nelson was sent into the Mediterranean to find it, and for two exhausting months, he chased shadows.
[00:11:02] The French, it turned out, had gone to Egypt. Napoleon had a dream of conquering the East.
[00:11:10] And on the evening of the 1st of August, 1798, Nelson finally found the French fleet, anchored in a line at the mouth of the river Nile.
[00:11:24] It was late in the day. The safe, sensible choice was to wait until morning and then engage. Nelson attacked immediately.
[00:11:36] Some of his ships did something the French thought was impossible: they sailed between the anchored French ships and the shore, where there was barely enough water, so the French found themselves attacked from both sides at once.
[00:11:53] At around ten o'clock that night, the French flagship, a giant vessel called L'Orient, caught fire and exploded. The blast was so enormous that, for several minutes afterwards, the battle simply stopped. Sailors on both sides stood in silence, staring.
[00:12:15] By morning, the French Mediterranean fleet had ceased to exist. Napoleon's army was cut off, with no ships to take them home.
[00:12:27] It was one of the most complete victories in the history of naval warfare, and it turned Nelson from a British hero into a European celebrity. Medals were struck. Poems were written. The Sultan of the Ottoman Empire sent him a diamond ornament for his hat.
[00:12:48] Britain made him a baron: Lord Nelson of the Nile.
[00:12:53] He must have been thrilled, you might have thought. In fact, he was annoyed. A baron was the lowest rank of the aristocracy, and Nelson felt he deserved better.
[00:13:07] For all his brilliance, he had an almost childlike hunger for praise, for medals, for recognition.
[00:13:16] And part of it, to be fair, was about money as well as glory. Unlike other military leaders, Nelson had no great family fortune behind him; everything he had came from his pay and his prize money, and he never quite lost the feeling that his country rewarded him less generously than he deserved.
[00:13:40] Now, after the Battle of the Nile, Nelson was a hero, but physically, he was in a very bad way indeed. He had been wounded in the head during the battle, his ships were battered, and he was utterly exhausted.
[00:13:59] He needed a friendly port. And so, in September 1798, he sailed into the Bay of Naples.
[00:14:09] Waiting for him on the quayside was Emma, Lady Hamilton, the woman he had met for a few days five years earlier. She had organised a hero's welcome the likes of which even kings rarely received.
[00:14:26] And here the two stories of this mini-series meet.
[00:14:31] Emma had started life about as poor as it was possible to be, the daughter of a blacksmith who died when she was a baby. By 1798 she was the wife of the British ambassador, the closest friend of the Queen of Naples, and one of the most famous women in Europe.
[00:14:51] She had even played a part in Nelson's great victory. When his thirsty, hungry fleet needed supplies in Sicily, and neutral Naples could not officially help them, it was Emma's friendship with the Queen that helped quietly open the door.
[00:15:09] Nelson was dazzled by her. She was dazzled by him. And over the following two years, in Naples and then Sicily, they fell in love: he a married national hero, she the wife of the man he most admired.
[00:15:30] Nelson stayed in the Mediterranean far longer than he should have, his superiors in London grew more and more irritated, and when he finally came home to England in 1800, he did not come home to Fanny.
[00:15:45] He came home with the Hamiltons, with Sir William and the, shock horror, heavily pregnant Lady Hamilton. The father of the child was kept a secret, but the clue was in her name: Horatia.
[00:16:02] It was a scandal, a scandal we will go into in much more detail in parts two and three.
[00:16:09] The public adored him too much to care. The establishment cared very much indeed. And his private life had become the most famous scandal in Britain.
[00:16:22] Professionally, though, he remained untouchable, and in 1801 he proved it again at the Battle of Copenhagen, where Britain attacked the Danish fleet to break up an alliance of neutral countries that threatened British trade.
[00:16:39] It was a brutal, close-range fight, and halfway through, with the fighting at its fiercest, his commanding officer raised a signal flag ordering him to withdraw. Nelson ignored this order and, according to the story told afterwards, lifted his telescope to his blind eye.
[00:17:03] "I really do not see the signal", he said.
[00:17:06] He fought on, and he won.
[00:17:10] By 1805, Napoleon ruled most of Europe and was preparing to invade Britain, or at least, that's what most people in Britain thought. Only one thing stood in his way: the Royal Navy.
[00:17:26] And in October of that year, the combined fleets of France and Spain came out of the port of Cadiz, in southern Spain. Their fleet was a combined thirty-three ships, almost 30,000 men, and 2,600 guns.
[00:17:48] Off a cape in southwest Spain called Trafalgar, Nelson was waiting for them. His fleet had twenty-seven ships, 17,000 men and just over 2,000 guns.
[00:18:03] On paper, the numbers favoured the enemy. In reality, almost everything else favoured Britain.
[00:18:12] The Royal Navy of 1805 was probably the finest fighting force in the world. Years of blockade duty meant that British crews were constantly at sea, sailing and drilling in all weathers, while the French and Spanish crews largely sat in port.
[00:18:32] A well-trained British gun crew could fire two or even three times in the time it took their opponents to fire one.
[00:18:42] Nelson knew all this. It was the foundation that everything else was built on.
[00:18:48] As the fleets closed in on each other, on the morning of the 21st of October, he ordered a signal to be run up the masts of his flagship, HMS Victory, a message to every sailor in the fleet.
[00:19:04] England expects that every man will do his duty.
[00:19:09] The men cheered. Nelson had that effect, it seemed, on the people who served under him. His captains called themselves his band of brothers, and sailors who had never exchanged a word with him would boast, for the rest of their lives, that they had fought alongside Nelson.
[00:19:29] Now, I don't want to get too bogged down in the intricacies of these naval battles, but it is important to understand a little bit about how they tended to work.
[00:19:42] These ships were, essentially, huge floating fortresses. Most battles would involve the ships lining up against each other and blasting each other with cannon shot from close distance until one side surrendered.
[00:20:01] Nelson's plan for this battle was different. Instead of forming a traditional line, his ships would sail straight at the enemy in two columns and smash their line into pieces.
[00:20:17] This would mean they would be forced to accept terrible damage on the attack, because the ships could only fire side-on. But once they broke through, it would do three things.
[00:20:32] Firstly, it would cut the Franco-Spanish fleet in half, allowing the British to focus their attack.
[00:20:40] Secondly, by firing from a ninety degree angle, as opposed to side by side, the British ships could fire their cannons at the poorly protected fronts and backs of the enemy ships, with cannonballs smashing down the whole length of their gun decks.
[00:20:59] And thirdly, it would create an atmosphere of chaos which gave the British a serious advantage. The British sailors were better trained, they could reload and fire faster, and in a state of confusion, they had the upper hand.
[00:21:18] Nelson, of course, would lead one of the ships that would sail straight at the enemy, straight into a hail of bullets and cannon fire. To state the obvious, it was an incredibly dangerous strategy, and Nelson knew that his chances of surviving the battle were slim.
[00:21:39] This was especially so because officers did not duck down.
[00:21:46] Ordinary sailors could at least crouch behind the ship's wooden sides when the fire grew heavy. Officers were expected not to do this.
[00:21:56] Custom demanded that a commander stand upright on the open deck, calm and apparently unbothered, while the air around him filled with flying metal. This required almost indescribable bravery.
[00:22:13] And Nelson, Britain's most famous naval commander, was the epitome, the perfect example, of this.
[00:22:22] He never sheltered below deck in his cabin; he would stand on deck in his finest uniform, wearing every star and medal he owned, as the cannonballs began to strike home around him.
[00:22:35] And this was what he did at Trafalgar, facing the full might of the superior in numbers Franco-Spanish fleet.
[00:22:44] But this time, lady luck was not with him.
[00:22:49] And at the height of the battle, as the Victory lay locked against a French ship, a marksman in the enemy rigging looked down at the British quarterdeck and, through the smoke, saw a small man in an admiral's coat, glittering with stars and medals, medals his officers had advised him not to wear so as not to draw attention to himself.
[00:23:14] The Frenchman fired. The bullet struck Nelson in the shoulder and passed down through his spine.
[00:23:24] He was carried below decks, to the dark, crowded space beneath the waterline where the wounded lay. He told the doctor, "You can do nothing for me. I have but a short time to live. My back is shot through".
[00:23:39] The doctor could not disagree.
[00:23:42] Nelson was dying, but he clung onto life for another three hours, as if he could not die before learning the result of the battle.
[00:23:52] When he heard the cheers of his sailors above deck, he knew that his strategy had worked perfectly. Of the thirty-three French and Spanish ships, eighteen were captured or destroyed. Britain lost none.
[00:24:09] He asked his old friend Captain Hardy to kiss him, and Hardy knelt down and kissed his cheek.
[00:24:16] Among his final words was the simple sentence: thank God, I have done my duty.
[00:24:22] Britain gave Nelson the greatest funeral in its history.
[00:24:27] His body was brought home preserved in a barrel of brandy, and tens of thousands of people lined the streets of London in silence as the coffin was carried to St Paul's Cathedral.
[00:24:40] And the mourning never really stopped.
[00:24:43] If you go to London today, you can stand in a square named after his final battle: Trafalgar Square, right in the centre of the city.
[00:24:53] In the middle of it, on top of a column more than fifty metres tall, stands a statue of a small, one-armed man, gazing out towards the sea.
[00:25:05] That man is Horatio Nelson.
[00:25:09] OK, then, that is it for today's episode — the first part of our three-part series on Nelson and Lady Hamilton.
[00:25:16] Next up, in parts two and three, we will be telling the amazing story of Emma Hamilton, the woman who rose from poverty to become an ambassador's wife, the most famous woman in Europe, and yes, the lover of Britain's greatest naval hero.
[00:25:32] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:25:37] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it's the start of another three-part mini-series, this time on the great naval hero, Horatio Nelson, Lady Hamilton, and the love affair that scandalised Britain.
[00:00:36] In today's episode, we will follow the life of Horatio Nelson, the sickly clergyman's son who gave an eye, an arm, and finally his life to become Britain's greatest naval hero.
[00:00:51] In parts two and three, we'll tell his story from the other side, from the perspective of Emma Hamilton, the woman born in poverty who reinvented herself and became the most famous woman in Europe. And, yes, Nelson's lover.
[00:01:08] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:14] There is an expression in English you may know: "don't judge a book by its cover". Most languages have a similar type of expression.
[00:01:24] It means that appearance can be deceptive; just because someone looks a certain way, their character and behaviour may be different.
[00:01:36] And if you were to go to the village of Burnham Thorpe on the windswept coast of Norfolk, in the east of England, in the 1760s, and poke your nose into the vicar's house, you would find a boy.
[00:01:53] He was a small boy, and not a healthy one. All his life he would suffer from seasickness, fevers, and a fragile constitution.
[00:02:05] If you lined him up next to the other boys in the village, and had to choose which one was most likely to become not just a British war hero, but probably the greatest military leader in British history, you wouldn't have picked the small, ill-looking one called Horatio Nelson.
[00:02:28] But he had two things going for him. He had an uncle who was a captain in the Royal Navy. And he had, buried somewhere inside that small, sickly body, a limitless supply of ambition and courage.
[00:02:46] At the age of twelve, he asked to go to sea with his uncle.
[00:02:51] His uncle's reply has become famous. What has poor Horatio done, he asked, that he, so weak, should be sent to rough it out at sea?
[00:03:03] But he took the boy on, and Nelson joined the navy, and essentially never left.
[00:03:11] To his uncle's surprise, his nephew turned out to be fearless.
[00:03:18] There is a story from an expedition to the Arctic, when Nelson was fifteen. One night, he slipped away from his ship and walked out across the ice. He came across a polar bear that, of course, tried to attack him. His gun misfired, so he turned it around and started beating the bear with the butt, the end you press on your shoulder. When he was finally hauled back on board and asked what on earth he had been thinking, he explained that he had wanted the bear's skin, as a present for his father.
[00:03:58] The story may well have grown in the telling. But it was the kind of story people told about Nelson, and would tell about him all his life.
[00:04:10] He rose astonishingly quickly, thanks partly to his uncle's connections and partly to sheer ability. He was a lieutenant at eighteen and a captain at twenty, commanding ships and men while barely more than a boy himself. And curiously, for one of the greatest sailors who ever lived, he suffered from terrible seasickness all his life.
[00:04:36] He served in the West Indies, in the Caribbean, where he made himself unpopular by rigidly enforcing British trade laws against American merchants.
[00:04:46] It was there, on the small island of Nevis, that he met a young widow called Frances Nisbet, known to everyone as Fanny.
[00:04:57] She was gentle, sensible, and quickly devoted to him. They married in 1787, and the future King William the Fourth, then a young naval officer himself, gave the bride away.
[00:05:13] Fanny, for better or worse, will pop up throughout this mini-series, and unfortunately history has not been kind to her.
[00:05:23] So, Nelson is a newly-married rising star in the British navy, and an ambitious one at that.
[00:05:32] But the problem was that there wasn't much fighting to be done.
[00:05:36] Britain was at peace, and a navy at peace has little use for ambitious young captains.
[00:05:44] Nelson was sent home on half pay, and he spent those years back in Norfolk with Fanny, digging his father's garden, arguing with the neighbours, and writing letters begging his superiors for a ship.
[00:05:59] And then, in 1793, revolutionary France declared war on Britain, and everything changed.
[00:06:08] Nelson got his ship, a sixty-four-gun warship called the Agamemnon, and he got a war that would last, with one short break, for the rest of his life.
[00:06:21] One of his first missions took him to the Bay of Naples, in the south of Italy, to ask the Kingdom of Naples for soldiers.
[00:06:31] He stayed a few days. He dined with the British ambassador, Sir William Hamilton, an old and cultured man he greatly admired. He also met the ambassador's wife, a dazzlingly beautiful young woman called Lady Hamilton.
[00:06:46] Now, her story is so colourful that the entire next two episodes will be dedicated to it, but for the purposes of today's episode, we just need to know that she was young, charming, but married to another man.
[00:07:03] Nelson wrote home to Fanny that he had had a satisfactory time in Naples, even describing the ambassador's wife as a young lady of "amiable manners who did honour to her station".
[00:07:16] And then he sailed away, and, to the best of our knowledge, thought little more about the beautiful ambassador's wife.
[00:07:25] Nelson spent the next years fighting the French up and down the Mediterranean, and the war began to consume him, quite literally, piece by piece.
[00:07:37] In 1794, during the siege of Calvi, on the island of Corsica, a French cannonball smashed into the ground in front of him and sprayed his face with sand and gravel. He lost most of the sight in his right eye.
[00:07:55] He shrugged it off. In his letters, he seemed almost proud of it, and he never wore an eyepatch.
[00:08:03] Then, in February 1797, came the battle that made his name.
[00:08:10] Off Cape St Vincent, on the coast of Portugal, a British fleet of fifteen ships met a Spanish fleet of twenty-seven. In the middle of the battle, Nelson saw that the Spanish ships were about to escape, and he did something that simply was not done in the Royal Navy.
[00:08:32] He pulled his ship out of the line of battle, without orders, and threw it directly into the path of the Spanish fleet.
[00:08:41] His ship was battered half to pieces. And then Nelson personally led a boarding party onto one enemy ship, captured it, and used it as a stepping stone to capture a second, larger one, scrambling from deck to deck with his sword drawn.
[00:09:02] For a captain to leave the line without orders was, technically, a court-martial offence, an offence that could have seen him put on trial by the navy.
[00:09:12] Instead, Britain made him a national hero, a knight, and an admiral.
[00:09:20] That was the thing about Nelson. He gambled, again and again, with his ships, with his men, and with his own body. And the gambles kept paying off.
[00:09:32] Well, not always...
[00:09:35] Five months later, he led a night attack on a Spanish port in Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. It was a disaster. As Nelson stepped out of his boat, a piece of grapeshot shattered his right arm above the elbow.
[00:09:54] The arm was amputated that night, by lamplight, in the surgeon's cabin of his ship.
[00:10:01] Within half an hour, it was said, Nelson was giving orders again.
[00:10:06] He came home to England depressed, in constant pain, and convinced his career was over.
[00:10:13] A one-eyed, one-armed admiral, he wrote, would never be useful to his country again.
[00:10:20] Back home, he was nursed back to health by his dutiful wife, Fanny, who patiently dressed the wound every day until it finally healed.
[00:10:30] And as for his prediction that his career was over, well, he couldn't have been more wrong.
[00:10:37] In the spring of 1798, a huge French fleet slipped out of the port of Toulon, carrying an army commanded by a young general called Napoleon Bonaparte. Nobody knew where it was going. Nelson was sent into the Mediterranean to find it, and for two exhausting months, he chased shadows.
[00:11:02] The French, it turned out, had gone to Egypt. Napoleon had a dream of conquering the East.
[00:11:10] And on the evening of the 1st of August, 1798, Nelson finally found the French fleet, anchored in a line at the mouth of the river Nile.
[00:11:24] It was late in the day. The safe, sensible choice was to wait until morning and then engage. Nelson attacked immediately.
[00:11:36] Some of his ships did something the French thought was impossible: they sailed between the anchored French ships and the shore, where there was barely enough water, so the French found themselves attacked from both sides at once.
[00:11:53] At around ten o'clock that night, the French flagship, a giant vessel called L'Orient, caught fire and exploded. The blast was so enormous that, for several minutes afterwards, the battle simply stopped. Sailors on both sides stood in silence, staring.
[00:12:15] By morning, the French Mediterranean fleet had ceased to exist. Napoleon's army was cut off, with no ships to take them home.
[00:12:27] It was one of the most complete victories in the history of naval warfare, and it turned Nelson from a British hero into a European celebrity. Medals were struck. Poems were written. The Sultan of the Ottoman Empire sent him a diamond ornament for his hat.
[00:12:48] Britain made him a baron: Lord Nelson of the Nile.
[00:12:53] He must have been thrilled, you might have thought. In fact, he was annoyed. A baron was the lowest rank of the aristocracy, and Nelson felt he deserved better.
[00:13:07] For all his brilliance, he had an almost childlike hunger for praise, for medals, for recognition.
[00:13:16] And part of it, to be fair, was about money as well as glory. Unlike other military leaders, Nelson had no great family fortune behind him; everything he had came from his pay and his prize money, and he never quite lost the feeling that his country rewarded him less generously than he deserved.
[00:13:40] Now, after the Battle of the Nile, Nelson was a hero, but physically, he was in a very bad way indeed. He had been wounded in the head during the battle, his ships were battered, and he was utterly exhausted.
[00:13:59] He needed a friendly port. And so, in September 1798, he sailed into the Bay of Naples.
[00:14:09] Waiting for him on the quayside was Emma, Lady Hamilton, the woman he had met for a few days five years earlier. She had organised a hero's welcome the likes of which even kings rarely received.
[00:14:26] And here the two stories of this mini-series meet.
[00:14:31] Emma had started life about as poor as it was possible to be, the daughter of a blacksmith who died when she was a baby. By 1798 she was the wife of the British ambassador, the closest friend of the Queen of Naples, and one of the most famous women in Europe.
[00:14:51] She had even played a part in Nelson's great victory. When his thirsty, hungry fleet needed supplies in Sicily, and neutral Naples could not officially help them, it was Emma's friendship with the Queen that helped quietly open the door.
[00:15:09] Nelson was dazzled by her. She was dazzled by him. And over the following two years, in Naples and then Sicily, they fell in love: he a married national hero, she the wife of the man he most admired.
[00:15:30] Nelson stayed in the Mediterranean far longer than he should have, his superiors in London grew more and more irritated, and when he finally came home to England in 1800, he did not come home to Fanny.
[00:15:45] He came home with the Hamiltons, with Sir William and the, shock horror, heavily pregnant Lady Hamilton. The father of the child was kept a secret, but the clue was in her name: Horatia.
[00:16:02] It was a scandal, a scandal we will go into in much more detail in parts two and three.
[00:16:09] The public adored him too much to care. The establishment cared very much indeed. And his private life had become the most famous scandal in Britain.
[00:16:22] Professionally, though, he remained untouchable, and in 1801 he proved it again at the Battle of Copenhagen, where Britain attacked the Danish fleet to break up an alliance of neutral countries that threatened British trade.
[00:16:39] It was a brutal, close-range fight, and halfway through, with the fighting at its fiercest, his commanding officer raised a signal flag ordering him to withdraw. Nelson ignored this order and, according to the story told afterwards, lifted his telescope to his blind eye.
[00:17:03] "I really do not see the signal", he said.
[00:17:06] He fought on, and he won.
[00:17:10] By 1805, Napoleon ruled most of Europe and was preparing to invade Britain, or at least, that's what most people in Britain thought. Only one thing stood in his way: the Royal Navy.
[00:17:26] And in October of that year, the combined fleets of France and Spain came out of the port of Cadiz, in southern Spain. Their fleet was a combined thirty-three ships, almost 30,000 men, and 2,600 guns.
[00:17:48] Off a cape in southwest Spain called Trafalgar, Nelson was waiting for them. His fleet had twenty-seven ships, 17,000 men and just over 2,000 guns.
[00:18:03] On paper, the numbers favoured the enemy. In reality, almost everything else favoured Britain.
[00:18:12] The Royal Navy of 1805 was probably the finest fighting force in the world. Years of blockade duty meant that British crews were constantly at sea, sailing and drilling in all weathers, while the French and Spanish crews largely sat in port.
[00:18:32] A well-trained British gun crew could fire two or even three times in the time it took their opponents to fire one.
[00:18:42] Nelson knew all this. It was the foundation that everything else was built on.
[00:18:48] As the fleets closed in on each other, on the morning of the 21st of October, he ordered a signal to be run up the masts of his flagship, HMS Victory, a message to every sailor in the fleet.
[00:19:04] England expects that every man will do his duty.
[00:19:09] The men cheered. Nelson had that effect, it seemed, on the people who served under him. His captains called themselves his band of brothers, and sailors who had never exchanged a word with him would boast, for the rest of their lives, that they had fought alongside Nelson.
[00:19:29] Now, I don't want to get too bogged down in the intricacies of these naval battles, but it is important to understand a little bit about how they tended to work.
[00:19:42] These ships were, essentially, huge floating fortresses. Most battles would involve the ships lining up against each other and blasting each other with cannon shot from close distance until one side surrendered.
[00:20:01] Nelson's plan for this battle was different. Instead of forming a traditional line, his ships would sail straight at the enemy in two columns and smash their line into pieces.
[00:20:17] This would mean they would be forced to accept terrible damage on the attack, because the ships could only fire side-on. But once they broke through, it would do three things.
[00:20:32] Firstly, it would cut the Franco-Spanish fleet in half, allowing the British to focus their attack.
[00:20:40] Secondly, by firing from a ninety degree angle, as opposed to side by side, the British ships could fire their cannons at the poorly protected fronts and backs of the enemy ships, with cannonballs smashing down the whole length of their gun decks.
[00:20:59] And thirdly, it would create an atmosphere of chaos which gave the British a serious advantage. The British sailors were better trained, they could reload and fire faster, and in a state of confusion, they had the upper hand.
[00:21:18] Nelson, of course, would lead one of the ships that would sail straight at the enemy, straight into a hail of bullets and cannon fire. To state the obvious, it was an incredibly dangerous strategy, and Nelson knew that his chances of surviving the battle were slim.
[00:21:39] This was especially so because officers did not duck down.
[00:21:46] Ordinary sailors could at least crouch behind the ship's wooden sides when the fire grew heavy. Officers were expected not to do this.
[00:21:56] Custom demanded that a commander stand upright on the open deck, calm and apparently unbothered, while the air around him filled with flying metal. This required almost indescribable bravery.
[00:22:13] And Nelson, Britain's most famous naval commander, was the epitome, the perfect example, of this.
[00:22:22] He never sheltered below deck in his cabin; he would stand on deck in his finest uniform, wearing every star and medal he owned, as the cannonballs began to strike home around him.
[00:22:35] And this was what he did at Trafalgar, facing the full might of the superior in numbers Franco-Spanish fleet.
[00:22:44] But this time, lady luck was not with him.
[00:22:49] And at the height of the battle, as the Victory lay locked against a French ship, a marksman in the enemy rigging looked down at the British quarterdeck and, through the smoke, saw a small man in an admiral's coat, glittering with stars and medals, medals his officers had advised him not to wear so as not to draw attention to himself.
[00:23:14] The Frenchman fired. The bullet struck Nelson in the shoulder and passed down through his spine.
[00:23:24] He was carried below decks, to the dark, crowded space beneath the waterline where the wounded lay. He told the doctor, "You can do nothing for me. I have but a short time to live. My back is shot through".
[00:23:39] The doctor could not disagree.
[00:23:42] Nelson was dying, but he clung onto life for another three hours, as if he could not die before learning the result of the battle.
[00:23:52] When he heard the cheers of his sailors above deck, he knew that his strategy had worked perfectly. Of the thirty-three French and Spanish ships, eighteen were captured or destroyed. Britain lost none.
[00:24:09] He asked his old friend Captain Hardy to kiss him, and Hardy knelt down and kissed his cheek.
[00:24:16] Among his final words was the simple sentence: thank God, I have done my duty.
[00:24:22] Britain gave Nelson the greatest funeral in its history.
[00:24:27] His body was brought home preserved in a barrel of brandy, and tens of thousands of people lined the streets of London in silence as the coffin was carried to St Paul's Cathedral.
[00:24:40] And the mourning never really stopped.
[00:24:43] If you go to London today, you can stand in a square named after his final battle: Trafalgar Square, right in the centre of the city.
[00:24:53] In the middle of it, on top of a column more than fifty metres tall, stands a statue of a small, one-armed man, gazing out towards the sea.
[00:25:05] That man is Horatio Nelson.
[00:25:09] OK, then, that is it for today's episode — the first part of our three-part series on Nelson and Lady Hamilton.
[00:25:16] Next up, in parts two and three, we will be telling the amazing story of Emma Hamilton, the woman who rose from poverty to become an ambassador's wife, the most famous woman in Europe, and yes, the lover of Britain's greatest naval hero.
[00:25:32] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:25:37] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
