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Seething with tension.
In the shadow of mount vesuvius, naples was one of the most glamorous and violent cities on earth.
It was a city of churches and opera houses, coffee bars and ice cream parlours, graceful squares and shadowed alleys, elegant mansions and stinking slums.
It was home to scholars and thieves, monks and musicians, princesses and dancing girls.
It was a hotbed of crime where a wrong turn could mean a knife in the ribs.
But it was also a city of pleasure where every night was rich with possibility.
Above it all towered the volcano.
Sometimes, when it smouldered at night, you could see flashes of fire near the summit and taste the acrid smoke in the air.
That was part of the city's glamour too.
The sense of danger, the shadow of death.
As the vanguard sailed into the harbour on a bright Saturday morning in September 1798, danger and death were very far from the mind of Nelson.
Yet, although he could hardly have known it, one of the darkest chapters in his life was about to begin.
So that is from one of the great biographies of Admiral Horatio Nelson Adventures in Time Nelson, Hero of the Seas, published in paperback this Thursday and written by.
The rest is history's very own Dominic Sandbrook.
And it describes the moment, on Saturday, the 22nd of September 1798, when Horatio Nelson, victor of the nile, limps into naples to kick off one of the most melodramatic and blood-soaked and controversial episodes of his entire life.
And i say limped because, rather embarrassingly, its masts have been smashed up in a storm and so the vanguard had to be towed into the bay of naples.
And And Dominic.
We described this scene in our most recent episode, where we were telling the story of Emma Hamilton, the housemaid prostitute, kept mistress, who rose from the slums of the Industrial Revolution and London to the palaces of southern Italy.
And that rise has put her in pole position to greet Horatio Nelson, the hero of the Battle of the Nile, the most celebrated hero in Britain.
Napoleon's most feared enemy as he arrives into Naples.
And if we did Emma Hamilton in our last episode, then last year we did a five-part series on Nelson, didn't we?
And this is going to be the continuation.
It is exactly, Tom.
So hello, everybody.
Many of you will remember that we did that season on Nelson last year.
So we traced his story from his birth in 1758 in a Norfolk vicarage.
He joined the Royal Navy as a teenager, effectively.
He rose up the ranks.
He became a national hero for the first time after showing enormous courage at the Battle of Capes and Vincent.
Captures two ships, doesn't he?
Captures two ships, leaping from ship to ship.
An amazing swashbuckling scene.
And then his kind of patriotic apotheosis.
That's where we ended the last series.
In 1798, he has pursued the French fleet, the armament, as it was called. across the Mediterranean.
He has found them at Aboukir Bay, near the mouth of the Nile, and he has destroyed them in this fantastic kind of scene, this night attack.
And we will be telling the story in this series of what happens next the last seven years of his life.
And there is so much to say, isn't there?
Because we've got the scandalous relationship with Emma.
We've got revolution and counterrevolution in Naples, very controversial.
We've got the Battle of Copenhagen, where he puts his telescope to his wrong eye.
And then, of course, we will be visiting his great victory and death at Trafalgar.
So, so much to look forward to.
Yeah, one of the great epics.
In I mean the great epic, a lot of his biographers would argue in English and in British kind of military naval and indeed all history I would say.
I think it's my favourite story in British history.
Well, there's lots of controversial moments on which, Tom, you and I disagree.
I think it's fair to say.
We're going to disagree agreeably, aren't we?
Yeah, like they do on The Rest is Politics.
That's exciting.
Anyway, let's remind ourselves where we ended the last series.
So Nelson is about to turn 40.
He is this famously physically slight and sickly character.
He has lost his right arm because he was shot in the elbow.
And he has lost the sight in one of his eyes, though not the eye itself.
I know you want to point out, Tom, that he doesn't look like a pirate.
No, he doesn't wear an eye patch.
He wears neither an eye patch nor a sort of hook instead of a hand.
I think he would have been better if he'd had, but...
Well important when we come to the Battle of Copenhagen, where he puts his telescope to his wrong eye, or does he?
He's not wearing an eye patch.
That's what listeners have to bear in mind.
He has won the Battle of the Nile.
He has destroyed Napoleon's fleet.
It is the most stunning victory in British naval history.
The only reason it's not better known today is because I think it's eclipsed in the public imagination by Trafalgar.
Nelson had not lost a single ship.
He had captured or destroyed 11 out of the 13 French battleships.
This meant that Napoleon was stranded in Egypt, that he was cut off from France, and this victory gave Britain control of the Mediterranean.
I mean, arguably, you could argue for a generation and indeed for good.
And they had lost that control to the French fleet two years before.
So this is a stunning reversal of fortune.
Exactly.
When the news reached England, there was this explosion of patriotic joy.
So his wife, Nelson, is married, of course.
He has a wife called Fanny, whom he met in the Caribbean.
She's been waiting with his elderly father, the Reverend Edmund Nelson.
And they are delighted when they get the news.
And everybody's delighted.
There are fireworks.
There are bonfires.
There's flags.
There are balls.
It is a tremendous moment.
It's sort of one of those great memorable national occasions, the news of the Battle of the Nile.
Now, George III rewarded Nelson with a barony.
Nelson being Nelson, he has a kind of diva quality.
He is disappointed because he wanted a Viscountcy.
I mean, he doesn't get it, does he?
Because George III worries that he doesn't have the funds to sustain a Viscountcy.
Exactly.
And Nelson's problems with money will be a kind of running theme through this series.
However, the advantage of being a baron, I gather, is that he can, from this point on, sign himself not as Horatio Nelson, but as Nelson.
So he's not gone home.
This is an important point.
He's staying away for much longer.
Why? for a couple of reasons.
First of all, his own ships have been badly damaged.
So, as you said Tom, not just the Vanguard but the Alexander and the Culloden are in a terrible state.
And Naples is the kind of nearest safe, friendly harbour where they can be repaired.
But also Naples is an absolutely crucial ally for Britain in the Mediterranean, because the Mediterranean up to this point has been very much a kind of French lake.
And so Britain has been desperate to find and preserve the fragile alliances that it has.
So maybe we should talk a little bit about Naples.
So you did that lovely reading.
I mean, what else is there to say?
Do you know what?
There's loads to say.
Well, take it away.
So Naples is the capital of the kingdom of the two Sicilies and that's been independent of Austria for about 60 years.
Naples is the third biggest city in Europe.
It has about a third of a million people living in the shadow of the volcano, as you described.
As all Nelson's biographers describe, it has this unique sort of atmosphere that it has, I guess, to this day.
This sense of danger and excitement, the sort of narrow alleys, the great palaces, all of this kind of thing.
I think it remains to this day the one city in Europe that if you go to it as another European, it genuinely feels foreign.
Yes.
I've always thought the most almost Latin American city in Europe, that sort of atmosphere, extremes of wealth and property.
Yeah.
Great excitement and exoticism, but also, you know there's a very good chance you will leave without your wallet.
Our Latin American listeners will be so offended by that.
I withdraw that comment.
It's a thrilling, faintly dangerous place.
Exactly.
So it's not really Nelson's kind of place actually, because Nelson in many ways, up to this point, has been Quite a puritanical character.
I would say.
He's not a tremendous carouser.
He works very hard.
He broods.
He worries about his health.
He's not really the person you would take on a night out, I would say.
Would you?
He will come to love it.
I mean, that's the striking thing for reasons that we will be exploring.
But he later called it a country of fiddlers and poets, whores and scoundrels.
And that gives you a sense of, I think, how a lot of people in the Royal Navy thought about naples.
Well, i think they see naples, and indeed italy, as a kind of seductive woman.
Exactly yes, so naples supposedly it's also named parthenope, after one of the sirens who had seduced odysseus, and that sense of it as a city that seduces and corrupts again is an important part of the story.
I think now nelson has been to naples before.
He went in 1793, during the siege of toulon, when admiral hood, one of his mentors, sent him to ask for supplies and reinforcements, And back then he made a very favorable impression on the British envoy to Naples, the British minister in Naples, who's Sir William Hamilton, and his wife Emma, whom you described in our previous episode.
So the Hamiltons will come to them.
But the other key figures for Nelson are the royal couple, the king and queen of Naples.
Again, we talked about them last time, Ferdinand IV and Maria Carolina.
Ferdinand IV, he's this absolute buffoon of a man.
He's a total oaf.
He forces his coachmen to eat live frogs.
He chases people around with an overflowing chamber pot.
He spends all his time hunting.
He's Franz Ferdinand without all the good bits.
Yeah, without the good bits.
And he talks like a woman.
He does.
He's got a high voice.
And his wife talks like a man.
Maria Carolina, who is a Habsburg, an Austrian and importantly, the older sister of Marie Antoinette.
Now, she is quite a serious person.
She's effectively been running the state for the last 20 years or so.
She is smart.
She is ruthless.
And for her, opposition to France is not merely political.
It is personal.
I shall always regard them as the murderers of my sister, Marie Antoinette, as the oppressors of all monarchies, as the villains who have seduced and put dagger and poison into the hands of all classes and peoples against legitimate authority, and who have blighted my existence.
This is really, really deep-seated with her.
Why wouldn't it be?
They've killed her sister.
It makes sense.
I mean, of course, but at the same time, all the social circumstances that had existed in Paris... had fostered revolutionary sentiment exist even more in naples because there you have again you have a kind of feudal system that is patently in decline and the gap between the very rich in their palazzos enjoying their classical statuary and so on and the people in the slums is very very wide so in a sense, Dominic, it's a tinderbox.
I knew the tinderbox was coming.
I could just see the tinderbox coming.
The spark of revolution is waiting to be struck.
Four sentences off, I thought there's a tinderbox coming.
Well, here's the interesting thing about Naples that I think it's important for people to get into their heads.
So on the one hand, you do have very rich, very reactionary people at the top and whatnot, but you also have an enlightened elite.
So a kind of you know, your liberal metropolitan elite, if you like.
Do you know, I heard that phrase coming.
Yeah, of course you did.
Of course you did.
Well listen, I mean, there's one thing about the rest of history, is?
You know, there's only 10 phrases in the English language and we like to use them all often.
So these are people who are, I hate to say it, you can see this coming as well, poets, writers.
Prune juice drinkers.
Do they wear sandals? intellectuals of all kinds unlike the honest rough um uh beggars and poor people who love the royal family well this is the distinction right on the one hand you have these people who are called in the in the books the jacobin i mean they're not really jacobin but that's the label that is kind of attached to them and they are reformers they're enlightened they're infused with the ideals of the french revolution um they're probably actually you know they're the people who are most similar to the presenters of this podcast But then on the other hand, you have these people called the Lazzaroni, and these are beggars and street urchins, and they're kind of the raucous mob of the streets.
Now, they're not quite the same as the sans-culottes in Paris because, as we discussed in our French Revolution series, the sans-culottes are actually not the very poorest, whereas the Lazzaroni are.
They like to dress very colourfully.
They're the kind of people that if you're going on a grand tour and you go to Naples – they're the people you want to look at.
You know oh hello, look at their exotic costumes and their sort of filthy ways.
And one of one of the um, the kind of the attitudes the shows that emma hamilton puts on, is to dress up as one of the the, the urban poor, and do a, a native dance.
That's so tasteful.
Oh, that's lovely.
That's reflects so well on her tom.
Well, the queen loves it and the, the people love all.
The rich people love it.
The people love their queen.
These people do love the king and queen.
They are very, very pro-monarchy.
They are very, frankly, very reactionary.
They're the kind of the populists of the streets.
So you've got this sort of tension.
This is the cauldron seething with tension.
Bubbling over.
It's bubbling.
Well, not quite bubbling, but it's simmering.
Into which Nelson arrives in September 1798.
Now, as we described last time, when the vanguard is towed into the harbour, The city is already celebrating.
And the reason it's celebrating is that Naples has lived in the shadow of the possibility of a French attack because the French have.
Since the late 1790s, they've been pouring through Italy.
They have taken Rome quite recently.
Yeah, just earlier in the year, wasn't it?
Yeah.
And the Neapolitans are frightened that the French will keep going.
And they see Nelson, therefore, as their great liberator.
But there is, I mean there is a kind of tension, a problem here for the King and Queen which is obviously they're pro-British.
They want to give Nelson the warmest welcome they possibly can, but officially they're neutral.
And if they openly celebrate Nelson, then that might be a kind of casus belli.
And this, I think, is where Emma comes in, because she can celebrate Nelson, because she herself is British and her association with the king and queen make it clear that she is kind of speaking for them.
And so she organizes this great fiesta.
She parades Nelson through the streets in a carriage and all the crowds go wild for him.
And really the king and queen thereby are enabled to have the best of both worlds.
They celebrate Nelson, but they don't piss off the French.
Yeah, although they're pretty blatant themselves.
So Ferdinand and Maria Carolina actually greeted Nelson in the harbour and came for breakfast.
They had a big breakfast with him.
But it's not public.
No, in private, I guess.
But the crowds, they're shouting, Viva Nelson, Nostro Libatore.
There are banquets and balls.
And of all these balls, which are enormous by Neapolitan standards…
The most famous is thrown inevitably over the Hamiltons themselves.
So just to remind people, if there's anybody who didn't listen to our last episode, Sir William Hamilton is 67 years old.
He's this kind of tall beaky cerebral sophisticated detached, ironic character who's been Britain's man in Naples for what?
Almost 30 years.
And Emma, 34, as you said, she is a former prostitute.
She's come from an excruciatingly poor and deprived background.
And she has advanced thanks to her charisma and her charm and her sense of glamour, I guess.
The excitement that surrounds her.
She's a celebrity.
She is.
She's an international celebrity.
Like Nelson, of course.
Yes.
Well, we'll see.
There are definite similarities.
So they throw, for example, a massive party for his birthday.
Thousands of guests.
Special crockery decorated with Nelson's monogram.
There's this sort of great sense of excitement.
And Emma throws herself into this, so she dresses up in a kind of nelson themed costume, doesn't she?
Yeah, and it is very clear that this, i think you know nelson always.
Let's be frank, we're great fans of nelson, but nelson is far from perfect.
So nelson always had a susceptibility to flattery and a thirst, an insatiable thirst for attention.
And for somebody who has just been on this, You know this incredibly gruelling mission chasing the fleet across the Mediterranean.
Then the drama and excitement of the Battle of the Nile.
The enemy ship, Lorient, exploding in front of him.
Hundreds of people being killed, all of this.
He's still got concussion by some accounts.
You know, he has been hit in the head, hasn't he?
Yes, he's got a great chunk of his scalp is missing.
He's got kind of a bit of flying metal hit it.
So if you imagine psychologically, right, he arrives in this city, very exciting place.
He's greeted by these very glamorous people.
He's taken to balls and parties that are all about him.
His head is kind of whirling the whole time.
And it does, I think, slightly go to his head.
I mean, he admits this himself.
He says it was the most distinguished reception that ever, I believe, fell to the lot of any human being.
That's quite a big thing to say of yourself.
He wrote to his father at one point and said, it is enough to make me vain.
And I think there's a degree of self-knowledge there.
There is.
I mean, it's pretty vain, even before it started.
But he's also getting presents and things from foreign monarchs.
The most famous is the thing called the shilling sent to him by the Ottoman sultan.
Well, I mean, let's be honest.
He loves bling as well as attention.
And the more medals, the more sashes, the more kind of gaudy bits of jewelry that he can attach to his hat, the better.
And I do think so.
You quoted him writing to his father, who is a vicar who lives in a chilly rectory in Norfolk.
It's basically the opposite of celebrating a victory in Naples with a glamorous international celebrity.
And I think that that contrasts kind of subliminally, is working away in nelson's mind and of course in the long run it will affect his attitude not just to his father and to the place that he grew up but to his wife fanny, who is also in this cold and chilly norfolk rectory.
I think that's dead right.
I think there's a slight sense here and here.
You know, i think listeners can make their own minds up because biographers have done the same.
So biographers are perhaps a little bit more critical of nelson and of emma suggests that at this point there's a kind of dizziness, almost that his head is ringing anyway when he turns up in the harbour but slightly begins to be turned.
Anyway, clearly the key figures in his relationship with Naples are the Hamiltons.
So, Sir William Hamilton, it's definitely not the ideal point in Sir William Hamilton's career for Nelson to have arrived.
Sir William Hamilton is quite old at this point.
There's a sense in which he has gone native a little bit.
So His loyalties are slightly divided between those to Britain and those to the Neapolitan courts, which he's so close.
You don't think he would argue that they're indistinguishable, that Naples is the last major power in the Mediterranean allied to Britain.
And so therefore, it's essential to prop them up.
And actually, the Admiralty agrees with this.
I mean, this is definitely British policy.
He would definitely make that case.
And There is an element of truth in it.
And yet I think, if any diplomat will tell you, you always have to understand that it's a complicated dance, isn't it?
Between your superiors in London and the people that you are, especially if, as in this case, the guy who's the king is an absolute buffoon and his wife has very pronounced vested interest and the city's a tinderbox, as we have already established.
And if the king's wife, the queen, best friends with your own wife, which is the state of play with William and Emma Hamilton, because Emma and the Queen are absolute besties at this point exactly, exactly.
And I think what's obvious from the very beginning is that, for completely understandable reasons, Nelson is besotted with the Hamilton's.
No, I do.
I mean, I love, you know, I love a vicar.
But there's a contrast between a vicar in a chilly rectory and a glamorous and faintly cynical aristocrat who collects erotic freezes from buried Roman cities.
But Nelson has always craved father figures, hasn't he?
He's had them all his life, especially in the Navy.
Captain Locker, Admiral Hood, Sir John Jervis.
You know, he loves...
A very self-confident, impressive, older man who takes him under his wing.
And he wants that man to love him.
And William Hamilton, despite everything that is going to happen.
I mean, he is devoted to Nelson, which people find very odd in due course.
But his devotion to Nelson, I think, is absolutely genuine.
Although he's not as devoted as his wife.
That's true.
That's so true.
So Emma Hamilton, as we've said, a celebrity.
She is a very, very glamorous and sexy woman.
And she's close to age in Nelson.
Well, he's 40.
She's in her early to mid 30s.
And she makes a huge fuss.
I mean she had fallen into his arms in a sort of mock faint or a real faint when he arrived in the harbor.
Oh, God, is it possible you're alive?
All this kind of thing.
And then when they install him in their house, the palazzo Cesar, and she makes a great fuss of him.
She tends to his wounds.
She cuts up his food because, of course, he's only got one arm.
She pours his wine.
She tells everybody, look what a great man he is, all of this kind of thing.
I think you would – almost anybody – would have found that very, very flattering.
He loves attention.
He always has thought that he's a star and he's always had this slight sense.
Oh, I haven't had the respect that I deserve.
Why would this not go to your head?
Of course it goes to his head, I think, a little bit.
There's probably no one in Europe better qualified to give him exactly what he wants in terms of adulation.
Because Emma, the reason that she's an international star, she has these attitudes which you think are ludicrous.
But I mean basically, the point of them is that they bring to life classical statuary or friezes or whatever.
And people are stunned by it.
So Emma is very, very good at bringing to life scenes from kind of antique heroism and giving it a kind of massive histrionic charge.
And you cannot imagine anything better suited to Nelson's taste, because this is, you know, all his Christmas is coming at once.
Not only is he being celebrated as a hero, but he's being celebrated as a hero in the most dramatic and up-to-date manner possible by probably the most famous woman in Europe.
And his cup overfloweth.
And not merely that, but actually there is no place in Europe that is better suited to be the backdrop for a kind of theatrical spectacle.
And Nelson has always regarded himself to some degree as a character on a stage, maybe playing a classical hero or whatever.
And here he is in Naples, in the shadow of Vesuvius.
With this fabulously attractive and famous woman who so a kind of sample of the way that she addresses him.
Joy, joy, joy to you, brave, gallant, immortalized Nelson.
This is how she talks to him all the time.
And it has to be said, this is not how Fanny talks back in Norfolk is accustomed to address her husband.
Shall I tell you something, Tom?
This is actually what Theo, this is how Theo addresses me behind your back.
Yeah, well, I know you were clearly the Emma, I am the Fanny.
Now, here's the funny thing.
I think in some ways Nelson is oblivious to the possible implications of this because there is a kind of boyish innocence to him.
And the proof of that... Do you think?
I do, because I think he writes to Fanny...
And he is so tactlessly open about his relationship with the Hamiltons.
Yeah, she's great.
I've met this girl.
She's brilliant.
Well, this is the thing.
He tells the story about Emma falling into his arms in the harbour.
He tells that to Fanny in a letter to Fanny.
He says, I cannot wait to introduce you to this woman, Emma Hamilton.
She's one of the very best women in the world.
How few could have made the turn she has.
By the turn, he means the progress, the self-improvement.
She's an honor to her sex.
A kindness with Sir William to me is more than I can express.
Now, I think if you're planning to have an affair with somebody.
I completely agree.
You don't write that to your wife.
I completely at this point.
Absolutely.
He isn't.
But I mean, nelson is not an innocent.
I mean, he's been conducting an affair with a woman in livorno, up in the north of italy, for four years so yeah, but you can be a man of flesh and blood and yet have this slight um, you cannot sense what's coming.
Okay, i don't think he senses what's.
Yeah, i mean, i think at this point the appeal of emma is that she is saying he's brilliant.
Yes, you know, she's just going on and on about how wonderful you are, you're a hero and all of that.
That's the focus.
But I wouldn't say that, you know, oh, he's kind of innocent.
You know, he is at this point, to reiterate, having an affair.
But he is more innocent than he might be, I would say.
I don't think he has any agenda here.
So anyway, there's the issue.
Obviously his wife Fanny, when she gets these letters, is not she's not exactly over the moon.
But there's also a kind of political dimension to this.
Because as we've said, Sir William and Emma are incredibly close to the royal couple.
And that means that Nelson, who has always been a massive sucker for royalty because listeners will remember, in the previous series he massively sucked up to the future William IV, who was a very boorish bloke in a way that did not endear him to his superiors at the Admiralty.
And I think that's another point of correspondence with Emma, who's kind of very much the working class.
Tory loves a king and a queen, especially a queen.
And Nelson, obviously, instinctively, that those are his politics as well, I think.
Yeah, I think so.
So what that means is that when he gets wind of a Neapolitan plan, a new sort of departure in the war, He is perhaps not as sceptical as he might otherwise have been.
So this plan comes really from Maria Carolina.
Remember, she hates the French.
Now that the Neapolitans have heard the news of the defeat of Napoleon's fleet in Egypt, they say gosh, couldn't we launch a counterattack against the French in Italy?
Basically, what Maria Carolina wants to do is to send Naples' army north to drive the French out of Rome, which they captured in what is it February, I think it was and then push on into Tuscany.
And if they can get into Tuscany, then her family in Austria, the Habsburgs, may well look at this.
This is what she's hoping and rejoin the war.
And that will allow them to avenge Marie Antoinette together.
I mean, I think this is the great gamble that Nelson takes, really, isn't it?
Is that he has to weigh up, will Austria come into the war?
Yeah.
And I think it's not mad to think that they would because, you know, Maria Carolina is herself Austrian.
The Austrian royal family have every reason to hate the French.
And the prospect of crushing the French between the two flanks.
I mean, this is what Nelson loves to do.
It's basically what he'd done at the Battle of the Nile.
So you can see why it would appeal to him.
The one thing I will say, though, about Nelson, though, Tom, is that Nelson at sea is unbeatable.
Nelson on land is always a fiasco.
Nelson is very poor judge of military stuff on land.
And the issue is also naples has no real military tradition, it has no history of winning land battles, but it does have an austrian general, doesn't it?
It does, and it has an excellent history of exciting, colorful military uniforms.
But but as we knew, as we discovered in our series about the first world war, the more colorful the uniform, usually the worse the army.
Anyway, there's a couple of other things.
So Kicking the French out of Italy has long been a really important British war aim.
So you could see why he likes that.
He wants to please the Hamiltons.
He wants to please the King and Queen.
And he has new orders from London.
And the new orders from London, this reinforces something you were saying earlier.
He must give the most cordial and unlimited protection to the king and queen of Naples and, and I quote most carefully, avoid giving them the smallest cause for suspicion, jealousy or offense.
And the irony of this is the admiralty have sent him these orders because they think Nelson can be proud and tactless and that he might offend the Neapolitan monarchy.
What they don't realize is that he will go to the completely the opposite extreme and he will align himself completely with them.
Well, it's a reminder of just how far Nelson is from London.
And it takes a long time for messages to travel from, say, Naples back to Britain and vice versa.
So Nelson really is on his own here.
And, as you said, when it comes to geopolitics and land wars, he is much less confident than he is at sea.
On the naval campaign.
There is one further issue, which is that Malta is occupied by the French, and Nelson is conducting a blockade of Malta because he can see that strategically, that will be key as well.
Because if they can roll the French out of Italy and secure Malta, then that will absolutely set Britain's mastery of the Mediterranean on very, very solid foundations.
The upshot of this is that Sir William Hamilton, Emma Hamilton are super keen on this expedition.
Nelson is very keen on it.
Yes, this is the time to strike.
Let's do this.
So by early October 1798, the preparations are in full swing.
The Austrians have sent them a general to command the army, who is General Mack.
They have mustered more than 30,000 men in very fancy new uniforms.
There's a great scene when Maria Carolina, like kind of Elizabeth at Tilbury, rides out to inspire them.
She's all dressed up as well.
Nelson thinks he's great.
I mean, he writes to Fanny and says, oh, she is a great king.
And he also writes to London and says, these are the finest troops in Europe.
So we will see.
So we'll see how that works out for them.
Anyway, on the 22nd of November, in driving rain, this army marches out of Naples on the road that leads north.
And ahead is Rome.
And ahead is the most controversial episode of Nelson's life.
Brilliant.
What a cliffhanger.
And we will find out whether the Neapolitan forces sweep the French back into France or whether they don't.
After the break.
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Hello, welcome back to The Restless History, and it is November 1798.
The army of Naples, in their splendid uniforms, have marched north to Rome.
They've been encouraged by Nelson, by his new pals the Hamiltons, and the way we set it up, Dominic.
Before the break, people might think it's going to be a complete fiasco, but actually initially, it isn't.
So they trudge through the rain, trudge through the mud, they reach the outskirts of Rome and they find that the French have basically melted away.
They're nowhere to be seen.
And so on the 29th of November, absolute scenes.
King Ferdinand, this boorish oaf who basically all he can interested in is making foot money, frogs and going hunting.
He rides into Rome in triumph and he saluted across Europe as, you know, the new Caesar.
So the British ambassador in Russia describes him as manly and vigorous.
I don't think he's ever been described as before.
And he has a week to celebrate.
And then on the 7th of December.
Oh, dear.
France declares war on Naples.
And what happens then?
Yeah, nothing good, unfortunately.
So the very next day, King Ferdinand, who's been celebrating, hears the news that a French army is marching on Rome.
And of course, they have been waiting, thinking, well, maybe the Austrians will pile in.
But the Austrians don't, do they?
The Austrians completely let them down.
I think it's harsh to blame the Austrians for this.
I mean, I think the finger of blame points very squarely at King Ferdinand and the Neapolitan army.
Because the first thing he does when he hears news that the French are coming, He immediately summons his carriage, leaps into his carriage.
I'm out of here.
Yeah.
Let's go back to Naples.
And Naples, great banter.
People said he came, he saw, he fled, which is basically exactly what he did.
Now, as for the Neapolitan army, the finest troops in Europe, according to Horatio Nelson.
They collapse within hours, some units within minutes.
Yeah.
Well, you know what Nelson said in the wake of this collapse?
He'd been bigging them up before.
Now he says the Neapolitan officers have not lost much honour.
But God knows, they had but little to lose.
God, he's changed.
He's changed.
Yeah, hasn't he?
Hasn't he?
Yeah, because a lot of them didn't even fire a shot.
They ran away straight away.
They left all their artillery behind.
They left their guns behind.
They left their baggage behind.
I mean the French claim this is a great military victory but to be honest, they're not really fighting anybody, because they've all run away.
I'm not criticizing them.
I'd run away as well.
Right.
Well, okay.
So in the next two weeks, the French just keep coming, obviously.
They retake Rome.
They continue south.
So we get to Christmas 1798.
Christmas is coming, and the French are basically marching now on Naples.
Now we described Naples as a tinderbox and the match, or whatever it is, the bit that is struck has been struck.
Even though it's raining.
Right, exactly.
So Naples is now, I mean, it was pretty chaotic before.
It's now an absolute, utter, unbridled chaos.
The city is crowded with refugees.
The local kind of do-gooders, the bien-pensants, the enlightened liberal metropolitan elites.
The Jacobins, they're called.
The Jacobins.
They're cock-a-hoop.
And Maria Carolina, I mean, if you're the sister of Marie Antoinette, you kind of know how this ends, right?
So they're holed up in the royal palace at Capodimonte, Ferdinand and Maria Carolina.
He's, you know, gone rampaging around with his chamber pots, like in a massive state.
She, with her husky voice, is kind of taking refuge.
Oh, no.
I'm going to have my head chopped off.
Yeah, under the bed, like thinking that she's going to turn out like Marion Toinette.
Outside in the streets, there are kind of rival gangs and mobs fighting.
The pillaging and burning has already started.
It's a real kind of end-of-the-world kind of scene.
And the climax comes.
I mean, why is there no great film of this?
The climax comes on Christmas Eve.
The king and queen arranged this lavish banquet, but this has been done to distract people.
A cover, isn't it?
It's a cover.
Because actually, they've decided that they will flee to the second capital of the kingdom in the two Sicilies, which is in the real Sicily, which is Palermo.
That's confusing, isn't it?
The thing is they don't trust their own ships to take them because there have been rumours.
They've heard reports that Republican ideas have been sweeping through the crews.
None of that nonsense in the Royal Navy.
Not at all.
The person they want to take them is Horatio Nelson.
Now remember, not only is he close to them because of the Hamiltons, he's close to them because he's been told by the Admiralty do not, under any circumstances, let them down at all.
So he says, fine, I'll take you and I'll take as much of the royal treasure as you can carry.
And so, as night falls on Christmas Eve, they kind of scuttle down to the harbour with their bodyguards.
Emma Hamilton comes with them.
She's in charge of escorting the royal treasure.
And Sir William Hamilton, his erotic vases and whatever.
And the boats that are sent to pick him up are commanded by somebody who will be featuring later in the series, who is Nelson's flag captain.
So on board the Vanguard, a man called Thomas Hardy.
An enormous man, isn't he?
An enormous kind of balding man.
He likes flocking people.
Well, he does, and we'll come to this.
So he takes them all back and the King and Queen take Nelson's cabin on board, the Vanguard and the Hamiltons take Hardy's and off, the ship glides into the darkness.
And as they go, they can see flames rising from the shore behind them, and it's not coming from Mount Vesuvius.
It's coming from the city that is increasingly ablaze.
It's like the scene from, if people are familiar with The Godfather Part II.
There's a scene when Al Pacino has to flee Cuba in the Cuban Revolution.
And it's this similar sort of atmosphere, kind of the streets full of people, the sense of panic and whatnot.
Anyway, things don't get any better for them, do they?
Because the next day, Christmas Day, they're in the Bay of Naples and there's a colossal storm.
Now, of course, Nelson is used to storms, but his passengers are not.
So William Hamilton says, so I'm not going to drown.
And he retires to his cabin with a loaded pistol and says I'll blow up my brains rather than kind of sink to the deep.
Isn't there one of the ambassadors who's going with them?
He has a kind of erotic portrait of his mistress.
And he's so worried that he'll drown and go to meet his maker that he throws it overboard.
Much to his later regret.
That's mad.
That's a very poor choice of action in a storm.
Now the other thing is the royal couple have their youngest son.
Prince Carlo Albert is nine years old and he's terrified by the storm.
And this is a terrible story, actually.
He goes into a fit, doesn't he?
A kind of convulsive fit that goes on for hours.
And he dies in Emma Hamilton's arms.
So she's trying to comfort him because she's so close to the family.
And she's regarded.
I'm not always the most pro-Emma commentator.
But she is regarded as having behaved very well.
She doesn't lose her composure.
She behaves absolutely splendidly.
Shall I quote Kate Williams?
Refusing to let the experience of being sick defeat her or to droop under the atmosphere of panic.
She tried to comfort peevish courtiers who had never known hardship and struggled to keep some kind of order in the rolling ship.
And I think you do get there a glimpse of what Nelson admires about her.
You know, she is a woman for a crisis.
She has spirit, Tom.
She has balls.
She has spunk, doesn't she?
She does.
She absolutely does.
Right.
So they survive.
They endure the storm.
The next day, through the rain, they see Palermo, the kind of domes and the churches and the palazzi and whatnot.
Now, if Naples was sort of glamorous exotic, a little bit dilapidated Palermo is?
All these things on steroids.
So even as they disembark, there's these huge crowds of beggars and whatnot.
And here in Palermo, they will stay for the next five months.
And they're kind of secure, aren't they?
Because as long as the Royal Navy maintains command of the seas, the French can't get to Sicily.
Exactly.
So it is kind of a flight from Varennes which Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette attempted and were foiled.
The Neapolitan royals, they get away.
And in fact, what subsequently happens may give us perhaps a flavour of what might have happened in France, had the flight to Varennes continued and the king and queen got away.
Well, we'll come back to what happens in Naples because that's very colourful.
But let's just look at Nelson.
So Nelson and the Hamiltons move in together into a Palermo palace called the Palazzo Palagonia.
And it has erotic friezes all over the ceilings showing Zeus getting up to his business.
Of course it does.
So, Nelson is I mean this will be the.
I mean we're going to say this sentence about 400 times in this series.
Nelson is absolutely shattered.
He is mentally and physically exhausted.
His letters home are full of complaints basically about his poor mental health and his bowels.
Yeah, he's not.
He's not a well man.
Yeah, so his mind and his his, his bowels are both, both shot.
There's a sort of sense, i think, when you sort of read the nelson biographies by the john sugden and roger knight and whatnot, i think there's a sense that nelson is, you know, is he depressed?
Is he suffering from ptsd?
I mean, maybe this is trying to impose modern labels onto somebody in the past, which is a bad idea.
But when you look at his letters, he writes to a friend of his called Lady Parker.
You, who remember me always laughing and gay, would hardly believe the change, but who can see what I have and be well in health?
And then to Fanny.
My health is tolerable, but my mind is full of sorrow, not for myself, for I care not, but for my country and the world.
And obviously It's been a terrible embarrassment and disappointment to him that the Neapolitan army has behaved so badly and they've had to scuttle back to Palermo.
But also the fact, I think, that it comes so soon after the Battle of the Nile, his great triumph.
If you were to plot his mental state on a graph, it'd be all over the place, up and down.
Well, I think also he feels isolated and alone.
He's a long way from London and he's acting commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean.
And there are all these terrible decisions he has to make. without really anyone to advise him.
Well, you say without really anyone.
Well, he does, of course.
There are the Hamiltons.
And it's probably around now, say the first months of 1799, that he finds in Emma an increasing source not just of advice but of comfort.
Comfort, yeah.
And what I think gives the game away is is that he starts buying her props for her attitudes.
That is such a bad sign, I have to say.
And it's not long before both of them are kind of mooning over one another, giving each other pet names.
You do it.
No, you do it.
No, you do it.
All that kind of stuff.
Oh, God.
And there's obviously kind of a very intense physical attraction.
But I do think also we've touched on this before.
They are very similar personalities.
They're both very charismatic.
They're both very famous.
They're both very histrionic.
They're both very prone to depression.
But they are also very determined, bold, aggressive, I think, in their kind of instincts.
And you can see why they get on.
And, above all, the reason that Nelson thinks Emma is brilliant is that Emma thinks Nelson is brilliant.
So you said how Nelson's disappointed that he isn't made a Viscount.
So she writes to him and says, if I was king of England, I would make you the most noble puissant, Duke Nelson, Marquess Nile, Earl Alexander, Viscount Pyramid, Baron Crocodile and Prince Victory, that posterity might have you in all forms.
You could see why this would appeal to someone who is always hungry for recognition and praise.
I think there are a couple of things.
I think one of them is they both crave attention and they crave attention from other talented and driven people.
So I think that's part of it.
They feed that.
I think both of them feed in each other something else which you might say is a little bit darker, which is a sense oh, the world is against me.
And Nelson has always had a strain of self-pity, hasn't he?
There's always been a side of him that falls out with superiors at the Admiralty or whatever, because he thinks he isn't getting his due.
And Emma, I think, is the kind of partner who says to you Now, come on, put this into perspective.
You know calm down.
You're brilliant.
Well, but she is the kind of partner who says you're totally right.
They should be festooning you with honors.
They, you know, all of this.
And she will always, always do that to him and him to her.
And they both love it.
It's what they want more than anything, I would say.
And she, of course, has had a very hard life.
I mean, you know, hard beyond Nelson's wildest dreams.
And again, I think he respects what she's made of herself.
Well, he mentioned the turn, didn't he?
The turn she's made in his letter to Fanny.
So quite early on, there are rumours and whispers in the fleet.
So on the 16th of January, so they'd only been in Palermo for, what, three weeks?
Another British captain called George Hope left Palermo on the Alcmeney.
And he went to Gibraltar.
And when he got to Gibraltar he said to other officers Nelson is idling in Palermo and making himself ridiculous with Lady Hamilton.
Now, at about the same time, a slightly baleful figure in Nelson's life, Admiral Lord Keith, who is An absolutely textbook casting agency.
Duh, formidable Scotsman.
Not the kind who would be impressed by Emma's attitude.
Not at all.
He arrives in Gibraltar and he writes home to his sister and he says everybody says Nelson is cutting the most absurd figure possible for folly and vanity.
There's a French officer called Damat who's actually serving the Neapolitans confusingly and he writes around the same time.
Nelson's officers are increasingly mortified and disgusted by his behavior with the hamiltons.
Now the question which historians biographers, grapple with which i think tom and i probably we have different opinions about, and indeed nelson's officers and comrades had different opinions at the time is how much is this people projecting a kind of misogyny and a snobbery onto the nelson emma relationship And how much is it?
You know his genuinely slightly nauseating mooning and showing off and victimhood and blah blah, blah.
I think there is definitely a strong vein of misogyny here.
So to look at Keith, Keith is arriving to take Nelson's place as commander in chief.
There are going to be disagreements over Nelson's strategy.
Nelson has based himself in Palermo because he sees it as a launchpad for reconquering Naples and for maintaining the blockade of Malta.
Keith doesn't think that this is a valid reason.
So there is a kind of deep-seated strategic disagreement there.
But it's easier for Keith to cast Nelson's reasons for being in Palermo that he's kind of playing Antony to Emma's Cleopatra.
And it's turbocharged, I think, by what we were talking about earlier, this idea that Naples and Italy and Palermo are like kind of whores, seducing honest British tars and corrupting them.
And actually, the very idea of Parthenope, the siren, kind of luring sailors onto the rocks.
I think that all of this is kind of bubbling away.
And in a sense it becomes easier for both Nelson's critics and his admirers in the Royal Navy to blame Emma for this, which casts Nelson himself as a kind of very, very kind of supine figure ludicrously supine rather than engage the fact that actually this is about issues of strategy and questioning Nelson's judgment as a naval and military figure.
But a quick counter argument and I know we don't want to get massively bogged down in this, but one might be you might say they don't just blame Emma.
So actually a lot of this is about blaming Emma, nelson himself, so that i think there is probably a degree.
I mean this there's no doubt there's a degree of um, misogyny in the way and snobbery in the way that people talk about emma, but that doesn't necessarily mean that there's no kernel of truth in this as well and that perhaps nelson is slightly, you know the mooning and whatnot.
Maybe that is slightly embarrassing for a lot of his comrades.
I think the other thing is it's not just about, i mean, clearly Emma begins to undermine the idea of the band of brothers that has been so important to Nelson.
She is Yoko to the Beatles.
I knew that comparison was coming.
Before I even embarked on the research for this, I knew.
I'm being very predictable in this episode.
But I think what she stands for, which is a kind of showiness.
I mean, obviously the attitudes are about show and about spectacle and whatnot.
That for some of these people who are ingrained in the values of the service duty, responsibility.
You know I was going to say sobriety.
That's not really the right word for the Royal Navy.
Yeah, you know what I mean.
Well, there's a very interesting episode, and you talked about Captain Hardy.
He's a great flogger at maintaining discipline.
Emma has a reputation among the seamen, the common seamen, as someone who is a woman of compassion who can be appealed to, and there are men who are condemned by Hardy to be flogged.
They appeal to Emma and, And Hardy then flogs them twice, both for the original crime And because they appealed over his head to Emma Hamilton.
And you can see exactly why that would infuriate Nelson's captains.
Yeah, it's that thing.
If you've read anyone who's read the Master and Commander books, the Patrick O'Brien books, there is nothing more destabilizing to a ship, a lot of people argue, than when you have a very glamorous, attractive woman on board and it turns some people's heads and it starts to mess with the chain of command and all of this kind of thing.
There's that.
There's also something else you alluded to earlier, which is Nelson's love of bling.
And I think there's a sense that some people think Nelson is starting to become a little bit un-British.
A little bit Italian.
Yeah, he's hanging around with Italians.
He's got this massive feathered ornament in his hat sent to him by the Sultan.
All of this sort of stuff.
Now, has Nelson therefore completely lost the plot?
I think that would be very harsh.
As Andrew Lambert says in his biography, Nelson is exhausted.
He may well still have concussion.
He has been through this military trial in the Battle of the Nile and the chase that if it happened today you know anyone who had been through it you would say gosh, they must have PTSD.
They must have this, that and the other.
So probably he is a bit dizzy, as it were, kind of morally and intellectually and emotionally dizzy.
And that's not necessarily surprising.
But also he's failed because he had backed the Neapolitans to attack Rome, and now that seems to have collapsed.
And it looks as though everything he'd been trying to do with the stabilisation of Italy is ashes.
And that's terrible for him.
He's now got Admiral Keith turning up, whose talent for man management isn't all it could be, I think, making him feel a failure.
And in Palermo, he doesn't really have a kind of secretariat.
He doesn't have people on hand who he can turn to.
So I can entirely understand the degree of pressure that he's under.
Tom is very much your, you know, Nelson would love you, Tom.
You don't like to hear a word against Nelson.
Well, we are approaching the most controversial episode in Nelson's career, and I will have things to say about that.
But I do, I generally feel I mean.
The reason why Nelson is such a remarkable figure is that firstly, he is genuinely heroic, brilliant admiral.
He never lets up on that.
And secondly, I think he is genuinely a man of honour.
And what happens in Italy is a drag on that reputation.
He starts to betray his wife, but also he gets led by the swirl of Italian power politics into a whirlpool that doesn't leave him looking quite as honourable as I think in the main he tends to be.
Okay, well, let's get into this.
So what's been going on in Naples while he's been swanning around in Palermo with Emma?
The French have occupied the city.
They've cracked down on the Lazzaroni.
They've abolished the monarchy.
They've set up a new Parthenopian republic run by the poets and writers and whatnot, the so-called Jacobins.
As we said, this is an elite from quite a narrow social group.
So intellectuals, people who are Freemasons, people who are merchants, The majority of the Neapolitan population are very Catholic, quite small-c conservative, and monarchist.
And outside the city, this new regime has very little support at all.
And there are immediately rebellions all over rural Calabria.
Now King Ferdinand, seething in his sort of oafish way in Palermo, thinks brilliant and he sends an agent to lead this fight back.
And this guy is a former treasurer to the papacy in his 50s, called cardinal rufo.
Rufo has never commanded an army before, but he's he.
He's a smart guy, he knows what he's doing.
He lands on the mainland in early february.
He raises the standard of the holy cross.
He says come on, fight for your church, fight for your king.
And he recruits 20 000 volunteers who are called the soldiers of the army of the holy faith.
They are kind of ruffians.
Ruffo's riffraff.
Yeah, they're kind of bandits, criminals and whatnot.
And they're like, great.
All restraints are off.
We're going to enjoy this.
They advance through Calabria.
When they get into a town, they take town after town.
They will loot and pillage.
They lynch people.
They find somebody who kind of speaks French.
He's a Freemason who's got Republican or reformist sympathies.
String him up.
String him up.
Exactly.
If they basically, if they can't find them, they'll string some other people up anyway, just for the fun of it.
And Cardinal Ruffo is, I mean, he's very upset about this, but there's not a lot he can do.
There's nothing he can do.
Because his riffraff are riffraffing.
They're not going to listen to him.
Anyway, by the beginning of May 1799, they pretty much surrounded Naples.
This republic is clearly doomed.
The French troops, the French garrison.
They hole up in the Castel Sant'Elmo which overlooks the city.
And the so-called Jacobins.
They hole up in two other castles on the waterfront, the Castel d'Elovo and the Castel Nuovo.
And basically they know if the Sanfordisti get into the city and get hold of us, they will literally tear us to pieces.
Cardinal Ruffo, to his credit, is like, I don't really want to see the city destroyed.
I don't want a massive bloodbath.
And to cut a very long and incredibly complicated story short, he effectively wants to do a deal with the Jacobins.
They'll surrender.
They'll come out of the castles.
We'll put them on boats in the harbor and they can go off to Toulon France, and we'll be rid of them forever and there won't be any more killing.
And Ferdinand and Maria Carolina clearly do not like this idea because they're it's really important to them that the ringleaders in particular are punished, that they cannot be allowed to get away scot-free.
And particularly those who they feel have personally betrayed them.
And there's a kind of a representative figure of that class of person who's a guy called Francesco Caracciolo.
And he's an aristocrat from Naples who had actually served with the Royal Navy, both against the Americans in the War of Independence in the Napoleonic Wars.
And he had helped escort the royal family from naples to palermo, had then gone back to palermo and had joined the the revolution.
So he's a kind of representative of the kind of man that the king and queen are desperate to see punished exactly now.
They want somebody to handle this personally, because they don't trust rufo to do it.
And so, on the 10th of june, king ferdinand asks nelson, can you sail back to naples please, um supervise the retaking of the city and handle this issue of the jacobin in these castles.
Now nelson has a choice to make here, but his orders from london, to be fair to him, are pretty clear.
You know, give the king and queen what protection they need and, to repeat, avoid giving them the smallest cause for suspicion, jealousy or offense.
So two days later, he sets off for palermo with a small army.
Now, while he's sailing, Naples descends into total and utter chaos.
Riffo's army break into the city.
They begin the kind of sack of the city.
Thousands of buildings ransacked and burned.
Hundreds of people, I mean, we can't be sure, but hundreds of people are slaughtered.
Basically, if you look vaguely kind of liberal, in other words, if you, for example, have short hair which is a sign of Republican sympathies, kind of Roman haircut then there's a good chance that somebody will impale you on a pike and carry you through the streets.
Basically, these Jacobins in the castles are in a total funk.
They beg Rufo for a deal and they end up signing this what's called a capitulation, on the 22nd of June.
It's basically this.
They'll come out of the castles.
They'll give over any weapons they have.
Rufo will let them go to Toulon, and that will be the end of that.
And when Maria Carolina hears this, she is absolutely shocked, furious.
Can i read out what she tells emma, you're gonna do it in her voice.
Yeah, it's a masterpiece of infamy, so infamous and absurd that it revolts me even to speak of it.
See, do you know what?
I know that you're in touch with edward hapsburg, the um, the bearer of the hapsburg torch.
He would be very offended that you've done a hapsburg accent in that way.
As a sort of character from oliver, she has the body of a woman but the voice of a man, right?
Well Anyway, three days after that, so on the 25th, Nelson arrives in Naples with 18 ships of the line and he now has a big decision to make.
On the one hand, Cardinal Ruffo had no authority to do this deal with the Jacobin.
They're actually still in these castles.
They haven't come out yet.
So Nelson could say, well, this deal is a nothing deal.
It's null and void.
You're still in rebellion, and you deserve exemplary punishment.
On the other hand…
Honor might demand that the deal has been agreed and you honor the deal.
And clearly the Jacobite and the castles themselves think the deal is still on, because the very next day, the 26th, they march out of the castles as agreed.
They hand over their weapons and they're escorted to Neapolitan ships waiting in the harbor.
So they're thinking, brilliant, thank God we've come out of this for their lives.
And these are thousands of people, right?
I mean, you know, five to 10,000 people or something like that.
Exactly, exactly.
And they assume, As per the deal, we're on our way to Toulon.
The Republic hasn't worked out.
Thank goodness this has ended without a terrible bloodbath.
And we can rely on Admiral Nelson as an Englishman, man of honour, given his word, all of that.
He hasn't given his word, has he?
No, but he will.
That, I guess, is, you know, he's not going to just string them up.
That's exactly what they think.
Now, two days after that, Nelson orders that some of the Jacobins start to be transferred to British ships in the harbour, to Royal Navy ships.
And at the same time, other prisoners are being brought aboard from the city.
These are people who have been rounded up by the kind of the riffraff mobs.
And this is clearly a great shock to the Jacobins who are being brought aboard the British ships, to nelson's own captains.
Every source that we have on this has an agenda, has a different agenda.
So you know you have to be a little bit careful.
But according to the british consul charles lock, admittedly not a fan of nelson, he described how two of nelson's captains, samuel hood and benjamin hallowell, immediately went to nelson, said this is not right at all.
Like these people thought they were effectively under our protection, Either we should let them go to Toulon, as agreed or, if we're not going to do that, we should let them go back to the castles and basically resume the siege like have a fair fight of it.
This is not honourable.
It's a breach of faith with them.
Crucially, it's not how we behave in the Royal Navy.
This is not what we should do.
And this to me does have the ring of plausibility that Nelson snaps at them and he says I see you all against me.
The slight self-pity that he often has.
I'm determined to obey my orders, right or wrong.
It shall be done.
I will be obeyed.
To me that is the tone of somebody who actually feels a little bit guilty about what he's doing and knows it's not entirely honourable, but feels he's trapped and he has no choice.
So what to make of this?
I mean, there are a very, very broad range of opinions on this right.
Yeah, because the upshot is a series of executions.
Yes yeah, so let's get, if we get into the execution.
So we mentioned um caracciolo, the admiral, the who's.
They see he's a traitor.
And he's been hiding out disguised as a peasant.
So he gets dragged in front of Nelson in his rags.
Yes.
Nelson convenes a court-martial.
Remember, this is on a British ship.
And he'd been serving with the Royal Navy.
Yeah.
So a lot of Nelson's officers are looking at this guy with sympathy.
He's their old comrade.
He is the court-martial.
He's found guilty and is sentenced to be hanged.
And some of Nelson's officers say to him could you not at least commute the sentence so that he's shot?
You know, he can die in a more decorous, dignified way.
And some of the others say, why not hold off on this?
Wait for King Ferdinand to arrive in Naples.
Maybe he'll pardon this guy.
Or maybe, you know, he'll take the decision himself and it won't be on us.
And Nelson says, no, I'm not going to wait.
I've got my orders.
Caracciolo is hanged from the yardarm.
He hangs there until sunset and then his body is thrown into the sea.
And they weigh him down and then subsequently it bobs back up again.
Yes, it's floating around for ages.
Looking all kind of white, white and green.
One British lieutenant says, I have to say this amused me, which it probably shouldn't have.
The seamen of our fleet consoled themselves that it was only an Italian prince and the admiral of Naples that was hanging.
A person of very light estimation compared with the lowest man in a British ship.
The bulldog spirit there.
Now that sets the tone for what follows.
The French troops are allowed to go to Toulon.
When they evacuate their fort.
Yeah, because they're prisoners of war.
I guess, would be Nelson's thinking.
They're not traitors.
Yes.
So maybe, I mean, who can say?
Maybe 8,000 people or so were put on trial.
And Nelson himself is not embroiled in that process, is he?
No, but some of them are tried on board his flagship.
Of course.
Well, nelson approves of it.
I mean he thinks it's tremendous.
I mean he says he congratulates himself on driving the french to the devil and in restoring peace and happiness to mankind, and undoubtedly he sees this process of executions as being part of that, uh process of restoring peace and happiness to mankind.
But he's not.
It's not as it had been, say with caraccioli, that he is personally handling the legal process.
No, i mean the execution.
So the number of people who are executed.
There are very different estimates.
Maybe about 3 000 people are put into prison, maybe about 100 120, 150 are executed.
The executions are often pretty grim.
If you're lucky, you'll have your head chopped off.
If you're unlucky, you're basically put onto a ladder with a rope around your neck and then street urchins will cling to your feet to hang you effectively.
So it's not the best way to die.
Ferdinand and Maria Carolina are delighted with all this.
They hand out rewards to Nelson's captains, to his crews, lots of bling.
Nelson gets loads more bling himself.
He gets a diamond-studded sword that once belonged to Louis XIV.
And above all, as his chief reward, he gets his dukedom.
He's made the Duke of Bronte, which is a town in Sicily, in the foothills of Mount Etna, which becomes enormously important to Nelson.
The weird thing is he never, ever visits it.
He dreams of retiring there though, doesn't he?
Yeah.
Like a British advertising executive retiring to Provence.
That's exactly what it is.
He in his mind it is like a kind of, you know, a sort of a house in provence or whatever.
In reality it's rather run down, i think, and he'd have found it very disappointing.
He employs a very effective land agent who, i think, whips it into some kind of shape, but i agree, i don't think it.
It's not provence.
And he always, from this point on, would science himself, nelson and bronte.
Of course he does.
And again, this is the kind of thing that to some people in britain is just a bit embarrassing.
You know, Come on, you should be above this kind of thing.
I mean, we know how Nelson feels about it, that the king of Naples has rewarded him in a way that his Britannic majesty has signally failed to do.
Now, news of these executions begins to spread quite quickly.
And I mentioned a guy, I think, earlier called Charles Locke, who is the British consul.
He has turned against Nelson and Emma, in particular because his wife hates Emma.
And it's Locke who is the key person in spreading the news of the executions in Britain.
He writes home and he says, Nelson's completely lost the plot.
He is an accessory to this bloodthirsty vengeance in a very un-British way.
And he's been encouraged by Emma, who is a total and utter monster.
And we know that the gossip spread very quickly because, for example, within a few weeks, society kind of weak hostess called Lady Bespera is writing.
I am miserable at the accounts I've read of the cruelties at Naples, but worst of all that my dear, delightful Nelson should have let himself be drawn in to so disgraceful an action.
I hope the account's not true, as I've only read it in the newspapers, for I cannot bear it.
So this is the great blot on Nelson's escutcheon.
Yeah.
This is without a doubt the most controversial episode in his career.
I mean, the most notorious episode.
And so there's a kind of a range of perspectives on it, isn't there?
Yeah.
Again, I think it's one of these things that the listeners can make up their own minds to some degree.
But if you start at one extreme, Andrew Lambert, very great naval historian, he says not only did Nelson do nothing wrong, Nelson behaved absolutely brilliantly.
Lambert says, the death toll was trifling.
That's a direct quote.
The penalty for a failed rebellion in time of war was well understood.
He says these people were basically the enemies of all that is good and right.
They had it coming.
When they had their rebellion, they knew what was coming.
Why is there anything to debate here?
Nelson absolutely did the right thing.
Then in the middle you have John Sugden, whose titanic Nelson biography is probably the definitive one.
He says Nelson's in an impossible situation here.
He can either, you know, his orders are to stick to the king and queen of Naples.
What can he do?
You know, he can't really get out of it.
And then you have more critical Roger Knight.
Roger Knight says, you know, this is the one moment in Nelson's career when he doesn't measure up.
If he'd been smart, if he'd been more experienced, more measured, more reflective, he would have played for time.
He would have waited till King Ferdinand arrived in Naples.
And then he'd have let the king do it all.
And he wouldn't have done it on British ships and all of this kind of thing.
And he sort of let himself down there.
And Roger Knight says this is because and I quote his naive attachment to the point of sycophancy to the Hamiltons and to Maria Carolina, and that this is definitely a black mark.
And there's actually an even more critical take, isn't there?
Is it Jonathan North?
Yes.
So his book came out just before the pandemic.
So 2018, I think, called Nelson at Naples.
And he's basically read every conceivable source there is on this topic.
And his conclusion is actually very damning.
And so, to quote him, my view, after having looked at as much of the material as possible, is that Nelson did indeed commit a crime at Naples and was guilty of betraying the prisoners.
So I and I, you know, it's a very, very comprehensive analysis of the sources.
And, you know, I'm convinced by it.
At the same time, I do also think that Sugden's point has value, that this is a chaotic and turbulent situation.
I think Nelson makes the wrong decision, but I can understand the stresses that perhaps led him to behave in a less honourable way than was his norm.
But I do think he committed war crimes.
I do think he was at fault.
I don't know what I think about this, to be brutally honest.
I guess the truth is the most damning thing is not what any historian thinks or what we think.
It's what Nelson's own contemporaries thought.
And we know that some of Nelson's friends and comrades in the Royal Navy thought he behaved poorly, don't we?
And I think the fact that his own captains, members of his kind of band of brothers, said you know, you don't have to do this.
And to do it on a British ship, it's just not right.
When these guys have been promised safe passage, it's just not right.
I feel that that's pretty overwhelming.
Yeah.
So the first kind of celebrated biography of Nelson written by Robert Sow, the poet laureate, great enemy of Byron, who's very laudatory thinks Nelson is brilliant.
But he does say about this episode that it is a stain on the memory of Nelson and upon the honour of England.
And I think that people admire Nelson so much that they don't want to believe it's true.
I don't know if you've read Barry Unsworth's novel Losing Nelson, which is about a kind of scholar of Nelson, a biographer of Nelson, who's so obsessed by him that he's driven mad by the possibility that Nelson might have behaved poorly.
And I think biographers of Nelson, I think, are very reluctant to face up to the possibility that he might have got things so badly wrong.
And I think that's true of his contemporaries as well, of his captains, of his friends.
So for me, one easy fix, as it were, is to say even heroic and impressive people have feet of clay.
And in time of war, where you're making impossible decision after impossible decision, there's every chance that you'll get one or two of them wrong and that they'll look very dishonorable and have terrible consequences.
I mean that's the nature of commanding in a time when hundreds of people's, thousands of people's lives depend upon your decisions.
But Dominic, of course, there is another fix, which is to blame everything on a woman.
And there is a convenient woman to hand who can be blamed.
Yeah.
So this starts straight away.
So we mentioned the story spreading in England.
Lady Holland of all people, Tom.
Wrote in her journal.
A few weeks later, Naples now exhibits a scene of revenge more bloody than the Sicilian Vespers.
Lady Hamilton has not been remiss in adding her quota to the barbarity which inflames every breast.
Now I know this has been quite a long episode, so we don't have time to delve massively into all this.
But it's pretty clear that quite soon after the story is spread, people started to say oh, it's all Emma Hamilton's fault.
She's so close to the queen.
She was adding names to the list.
She was celebrating while the executions were taking place.
All of this kind of thing.
Maybe she was, but I think it's probably exaggerated and probably I mean.
Quite clearly, there's an awful lot of projection, a lot of Lady Macbeth kind of stuff going on.
Yes, absolutely.
And I think also there is clear evidence that actually you know we talked about Emma trying to get the men who are being flogged by Captain Hardy off their punishment.
She is clearly guilty.
She's so close to the Queen.
People are coming to her with requests and she is asking for people to be let off.
She gives the Queen a kind of long list.
She adds to it herself.
The Queen says, no, you're far too soft-hearted.
Equally, I think there are times when she is upset on behalf of the Queen.
Or she feels, say with Caraccioli, who she toasts his execution.
With a wine glass in hand, right?
With a wine glass in her hand.
And I think she feels that he's been a traitor both to her beloved Royal Navy and to her beloved Queen.
And I think she's a very emotional woman who clearly swings between toasting the execution of an admiral and kind of going to someone who she's very close to, namely the Queen, and saying please let all these people off and being rebuffed.
But I think there's probably enough there, you know, raising a toast to an execution of an admiral who lots of people on Nelson's ships would have known.
You can see how these stories would have spread.
So, Tom, this is so disappointing because this was set up to be a massive argument.
And actually, we've both ended up taking much more measured positions.
We've basically turned into the rest is politics after all.
We have.
We're agreeing agreeably.
Oh, no.
Right.
But what lies behind this? is what we'll be coming to next time.
Because what lies behind all this is the deepening relationship between Nelson and Emma Hamilton.
Because as we have said, at some point in the early months of 1799, they have begun an affair.
And as we look ahead to the next episode, Nelson is preparing.
He will eventually return to England.
And there he will face perhaps the most threatening situation an implacable adversary of his life.
It is, of course, not the French.
It is the disapproval and derision of the British people.
Well, unbelievable excitement.
What a cliffhanger.
And if you want to hear all five subsequent episodes, then you can do that by going to therestesshistorycom and signing up there.
But for now, I will say goodbye.
Goodbye.
Alistair Campbell here from The Rest is Politics.
Now we've just released a series on one of the most controversial and consequential people of the past 50 years Rupert Murdoch.
I think you can argue that he is the most consequential figure of the second half of the 20th century.
He holds power longer than anyone else in our time.
And it's meaningful power.
It's phenomenal power.
Power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.
This is where he becomes not just a newspaper owner, he becomes a major newsmaker.
Fuck dacre publish.
There is always a premium on bringing him gossip.
I don't know what you mean by down market and up market.
That is so english class-ridden snobbery.
When you talk like that, How you get it doesn't make any difference.
Actually, to be perfectly honest, whether it's true or not doesn't make much difference.
There is a massive, massive scandal brewing.
This was industrial, illegal activity.
And that, I think, is what really cuts through to the public and thinks you people are really, really bad.
I would just like to say one sentence.
This is the most humble day of my life.
There is no Donald Trump without Fox News.
His dream was always to elect a president of the United States.
The bitter irony is that that turned out to be Donald Trump.
A man he detests.
He is conquering the world.
There's nothing less than this methodical step-by-step progress to take over everything.
To hear more, just search The Rest Is Politics wherever you get your podcasts.
