The 1805 Club uses cookies to ensure you have the best possible online experience. By continuing to use this site you consent to the use of cookies in accordance with our cookie policy.
‘See how that noble fellow Collingwood takes his ship into action!’ remarked Nelson to Captain Henry Blackwood. The Royal Sovereign leading the Lee Division was bearing down on the rear of the Combined Fleet, engaging the enemy at least fifteen minutes before any other British ship. As a midshipman observing him more closely recollected, ‘I see before me dear old Cuddie (as we called Collingwood) walking the break of the poop, with his little triangular gold-laced cocked hat, tight silk stockings, and buckles, musing over the progress of the fight and munching an apple.’ Collingwood was enjoying himself. ‘Oh Rotheram’, he exclaimed to the Royal Sovereign’s captain, ‘what would Nelson give to be here!’ According to Blackwood, ‘he fought like an Angel.’
The Royal Sovereign had a severe duel with the Spanish Santa Ana and sustained much damage to her masts and rigging. When the news came that Nelson was mortally wounded, Collingwood realised that he would have to take command and signalled Blackwood in the Euryalus to come and take the helpless hull of his flagship in tow. The ‘butcher’s bill’ listed 141 officers and crew killed and wounded. Collingwood was among them, although he did not allow his name to be included on the list. ‘Did I not tell you how my leg was hurt?’ he later wrote to his wife. ‘It was by a splinter – a pretty severe blow.’ Collingwood had married the daughter of Newcastle’s Lord Mayor in 1791.
Of the fifteen ships in Collingwood’s division at Trafalgar, only six remained in fighting trim. The rest had suffered serious damage. Most were wholly or partially dismasted. Yet, after the battle, Collingwood seems to have forgotten, or even deliberately ignored. Nelson’s signal to anchor the fleet ‘at the close of day’. While he eventually gave the order at 9pm, he was more concerned to write his now-famous dispatch, which begins, ‘The ever-to-be-lamented death of Vice Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson, who, in the late conflict with the enemy, fell in the hour of victory, leaves to me the duty of informing my Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty . . .’; and includes the poignant phrase, ‘My heart is rent with the most poignant grief for the death of a friend, to whom, by many years intimacy . . . I was bound by the strongest ties of affection.’
After Trafalgar, Collingwood was awarded a pension of £2,000, a baronetcy and the naval gold medal. He was also promoted vice admiral of the red, but he did not return to England.
Cuthbert Collingwood was born in 1748 at Morpeth, near Newcastle-upon-Tyne. His father was an unsuccessful merchant. He entered the Navy as a volunteer under the patronage of Admiral Braithwaite and was posted to the frigate Shannon in 1761. His early career was spent on the North American station and he was at the abortive British attack on Bunker’s Hill, Boston, in 1775. Acquitted by court martial for disobedience of orders, he made captain in 1780, and took command of the Hinchingbroke in succession to Horatio Nelson, and thereafter his career closely shadowed that of his friend. They served together on the West Indies station in the mid-1780s and they commanded ships at the Battle of Cape St Vincent in 1797, Collingwood in hms Excellent. Finally, they both led the British to victory at Trafalgar.
There were many similarities between the two men, but Collingwood lacked Nelson’s vision, sense of greatness, psychological awareness and predatory instincts. He carefully executed Nelson’s orders at Trafalgar. He did not contribute to them. As he remarked on seeing Nelson’s signal, ‘England expects that every man will do his duty’, ‘I wish Nelson would stop signalling. We all know what we have to do.’
Captain George Duff described him as ‘a fine, steady good officer’, and Nelson, talking to Captain Locker, exclaimed, ‘What an amiable good man he is! All the rest are geese.’ Collingwood was undoubtedly intelligent, articulate and cultivated. He had a dry sense of humour, although some thought him dour. However, his strong sense of public duty required a self-denial and stoicism that many fellow officers found stern and hard to emulate. Nonetheless, he was a good seaman and was loved by those in his own ship for his humanity, compassion, fair-mindedness and reluctance to flog. Unlike Nelson, he was not able to project these feelings to the fleet as a whole. Moreover, he found decision-making difficult, a weakness compounded by his poor ability to delegate and a fascination with minutiae. He was described by one contemporary as ‘a selfish old bear . . . with few, if any friends and no admirers. In body and mind he was iron and very cold iron.’
It is wretched that this honest and sentimental man not only lost his closest friend, Nelson, but also never returned to England to see his wife and daughter, or his beloved garden in Northumberland. He had to endure a further five years of oceanic seclusion trying to hold down the French in the Mediterranean, and died four days after his orders to return to England reached him on 3 March 1810. His body was brought to England and, like Nelson’s, lay in state in the Painted Hall at Greenwich, before being buried in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral by the side of his dear and close friend. Few men have risen to such eminence while being so long out of the public eye.
PW
Type: Tomb
Material: Stone
Location: The crypt (south side) of St Paul’s Cathedral, London
Click here to read more…
Type: Memorial
Material: Marble
Location: South transept, St Paul’s Cathedral, London
Click here to read more…
Type: Wall Plaque
Location: Morpeth
Click here to read more…
Type: Monument
Material: Marble and sandstone
Location: Tynemouth
Click here to read more…
Type: Bust and Memorial
Material: White marble
Location: At west end of Newcastle-upon-Tyne Cathedral
Click here to read more…
Regular updates from The 1805 Club’s Chairman. See the archive.
Visit Admiral Lord Nelson's own blog www.admiralnelson.org.