Mediterranean base of Minorca
Every aspect of what he did, given his inadequate force, had been perfectly reasonable, without being in any way heroic, but as a result the Mediterranean base of Minorca had been lost by the British. The government ministers did their best to blame Byng and the English broad- sheet writers rubbed their hands with pleasure. Byng was a gent, not a fighter, and as a result of the popular clamour against him, abetted by the astonishingly corrupt desire among ministers for self-preservation, he was famously shot for cowardice, And, in Voltaires famous words, to encourage the others. His death was intended to satisfy a widespread de- mand for aggressive leadership, not among the cultured and political élite, but among the non-enfranchised populace.
At that level, throughout the 18th century, another vision of admirable behaviour persisted. The mob did not want the smooth, conformable man, the slick hypocrite who could so politely manoeuvre his way into the rewards of high politics and high society. They wanted his very oppo- site, the clever thief, the man who thrived not by using the well oiled wheels of society, but by opposing them and cheating them, by attending only to the wellbeing of his own heroic self. The notion of the hero – alive in England in the 17th century and again in the 19th – had gone underground in the 18th century and flourished there as the criminal king, full of daring, guile, violence when needed, and a flamboyant theatricality, which emerged nowhere more entrancingly than when on the way to the gallows. For conservative supporters of the status quo, such as Henry Fielding, the novelist and magistrate, nothing was more subversive of that order than the behaviour of the show-off thief as he was taken to his judicial execution at Tyburn. The crowd views him as a hero dressed in imagi- nary glory. He is puffed up with Pride and passion.
The day appointed by law for the thiefs shame is the day of glory in his own opinion. His procession to Tyburn and his last moments there, are all tri- umphant; attended with the compassion of the meek and the tender-hearted, and with the applause and the admiration and envy of all the bold and hard- ened. His behaviour in his recent condition, not the crimes, how atrocious soever, which brought him to it, are the subject of contemplation. And if he hath sense enough to temper his boldness with any degree of decency, his death is spoken of by many with honour, by most with pity, and by all with approba- tion.
This extraordinary passage, written by Fielding in 1751, part of his Inquiry into the Cause of the Late Increase in Robbers, might be the template on which the heroic figure of Nelson himself was based. Every single keyword and key phrase of the Nelsonian amalgam is there: hero, pride, passion, the day of glory, his last moments, triumphant, the compassion of the meek and the tender-hearted, applause, admiration, envy of all the bold and hard- ened, his death spoken of by many with honour, by most with pity, and by all with approbation. It is as if, half a century before, the appetite was there among the mob in the streets en route to Tyburn for the kind of figure which Nelson would provide them in the late 1790s and early 1800s. The public figure of Nelson is modelled not on the Newcastle-Byng template, the big, solid, respectable, pru- dent and lying establishment, but on the bold, brave, tricky, clever, daring, nimble-minded and nimble-fingered, counter-culture hero of the thief.
The appetite for such a hero was certainly there, but the 18th-century cult of gentlemanly courtesy could not satisfy it. It was fed by a stream of twopenny broadsheets and sixpenny pamphlets, filled with journalistic accounts of criminals in Newgate prison in London. For sale singly or bound in collections for a shilling, by 1760 almost 1,300 of these Newgate prison lives had been published.
Men of charm, wit, honour, violence and great profes- sional skill, with a protean ability to appear and disappear, with no social standing, money or education, alert for captures, prizes and victories, ready to risk all for the glory of their triumphs: more connects the image of the naval hero and the thief than divides them. There is, in other words, something in the national hero of 1805 which looks like an adopted and legitimised criminality. Nelson and his band of brothers might be seen as a set of sanctioned villains, living lives that oscillated between intense risk and predatory gain, a role in which a deeply prepared public consciousness welcomed and adored them. And in that role, distinguishing them from the stiff establishment fig- ures with whom the populace in general felt little sympathy, two qualities were central: daring and sincerity.
