Horatio Nelson

A country parson's son from Norfolk, Horatio Nelson became Britain's most celebrated admiral, winning a series of crushing sea victories in the wars against revolutionary and Napoleonic France. Bold to the point of disobedience, he lost an eye and an arm in action and was killed at the moment of his greatest triumph, off Cape Trafalgar in 1805. His death made him a national hero.

Nelson was born on 29 September 1758 at Burnham Thorpe in Norfolk, the sixth of eleven children of the Reverend Edmund Nelson. His uncle, the naval captain Maurice Suckling, took him into the navy at the start of 1771, when he was twelve. He sailed to the West Indies and the Arctic, served in the East Indies until malaria sent him home, and became a lieutenant in 1777. In 1779, aged twenty, he was made a post-captain. In 1787, on Nevis, he married a widow, Frances Nisbet. After the American war he spent five years ashore on half-pay.

War with revolutionary France in 1793 brought him a ship in the Mediterranean. Besieging Calvi on Corsica in 1794, he lost most of the sight of his right eye. At the Battle of Cape St Vincent on 14 February 1797 he broke away from the British line without orders and personally led boarding parties onto two Spanish warships, an exploit that made him famous. That July, leading a night attack on Santa Cruz de Tenerife, he was shot in the right arm, which was amputated; the assault failed.

In 1798 Nelson hunted the fleet that had carried Napoleon's army to Egypt, finding it in Aboukir Bay on 1 August. At the Battle of the Nile his captains slipped between the French and the shore, attacked from both sides and destroyed or captured all but four of the French warships, stranding Napoleon's army in Egypt. He was made Baron Nelson of the Nile. In Naples he fell in love with Emma, wife of the British envoy Sir William Hamilton, and became entangled in Neapolitan politics. When royalist forces retook the city from its short-lived republic in 1799, Nelson overrode a surrender agreement, had the rebel admiral Francesco Caracciolo tried and hanged, and handed many rebels over for execution. Critics have condemned this as a breach of faith; defenders note the agreement was never authorised by the king. His relationship with Emma, who bore him a daughter, Horatia, in 1801, ended his marriage.

In 1801 Nelson went to the Baltic as second-in-command of a fleet sent to break up an alliance of northern powers opposed to British blockade practices. On 2 April he attacked the Danish fleet at Copenhagen. A famous, possibly mythical story has him ignoring a signal to withdraw by putting his telescope to his blind eye. After three hours of fighting, a truce followed, and he was made a viscount.

When war resumed in 1803, Nelson took command in the Mediterranean aboard the Victory. In 1805 he chased Admiral Villeneuve's fleet to the West Indies and back, and in London that September had his only meeting with the future Duke of Wellington. Taking command off Cádiz, he planned to break the enemy line in several places instead of fighting it ship against ship. On 21 October 1805 his 27 ships met the 33 of the Franco-Spanish fleet off Cape Trafalgar. At about quarter past one a French marksman shot him through the shoulder and spine, and he died below deck some three hours later, aged 47, as the Battle of Trafalgar ended in a decisive British victory.

His body, preserved in spirits, was brought home, and after a state funeral on 9 January 1806 he was buried in St Paul's Cathedral. His reputation has been questioned: he privately defended West Indian slavery and opposed William Wilberforce's abolition campaign, and in former colonies his monuments have been contested: Irish republicans blew up Nelson's Pillar in Dublin in 1966, and his statue in Bridgetown, Barbados, was removed in 2020.

Our 1800 map shows Europe in the middle of Nelson's wars, with Britain facing revolutionary France.