"After Nelson...? Viva Collingwood!" Topic

"Trafalgar and the death of Nelson spell the end of the naval wars against Napoleon – it's as convenient a historical book-end as the battle of Hastings. In fact nothing could be further from the truth, and a year after the bicentenary of the battle it is about time we paid tribute to the man who took over when Nelson died and devoted the rest of his life to securing naval supremacy against France. That man was Cuthbert Collingwood.
Despite the destruction of half of the combined Franco-Spanish fleet at Trafalgar in October 1805, Britain's strategic position was more perilous than ever a year later. Her great war prime minister William Pitt was dead and Napoleon's armies had won a crushing victory against the Austrian empire at Austerlitz in December. The British fleet, weakened as it had been by battle and constant
blockade, now had to keep control of the Mediterranean at all costs. And its Commander-in-Chief, the newly ennobled Admiral Lord Collingwood, had perhaps as hard a task as any naval commander has ever faced. He must bottle up the French and Spanish squadrons in Cadiz, Cartagena and Toulon. He must prevent a French military invasion of Sicily across the straits of Messina, just three miles wide. He must reinforce delicate diplomatic relations with a bewildering array of deys, beys, pashas, sultans, emperors, kings and queens of the Mediterranean states – many of them unstable – and all the while keep a fleet of eighty ships at sea in all weathers, with little or no support from home. Ships and men alike were worn past the point of exhaustion.

It was not as if Collingwood had no private worries of his own. He had not seen his wife and two daughters since 1803 (and he would never see them again). He had lost his closest friend and comrade Nelson as well as most of his furniture, cutlery and livestock at Trafalgar. And as if these privations were not enough, his recent elevation to a Barony had turned the head of his longsuffering dog Bounce, as he complained in a letter to his wife in April 2006…"
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Amicalement
Armand

Quite right!

An excellent piece of writing, and good history; thanks for sharing it.

Happy you enjoyed it boys!. (smile)

Amicalement
Armand