When Wellington met Nelson

One of many copies of a lost painting
 by John Prescott Knight,
imagining the famous meeting

I used to think of Nelson and Wellington as brothers in arms – Britain’s two preeminent military leaders of the Napoleonic wars, working together to defeat Napoleon on land and at sea. But in fact their careers barely overlapped, with Wellington serving abroad while Nelson was becoming famous at home, and a whole decade between Trafalgar (1805) and Waterloo (1815). 

And they met only once. 

This chance meeting took place on the 12th of September 1805, when Lord Castlereagh, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, had invited Nelson and Wellington (then Major General Wellesley, not yet a Duke) for consultations. The two men could easily have missed each other, but Castlereagh was running late and as they waited for their separate appointments they enjoyed a profitable conversation – though only after an embarrassing start. 

Britain at this time was at the height of anxiety. 160,000 French troops were massed just across the Channel and had been threatening invasion for some time. A few weeks before, Austria had re-entered the war to join the alliance against France, but no-one in Britain yet knew that this had persuaded Napoleon to postpone the invasion. 

Wellesley had recently returned from India, having distinguished himself by his success in several battles against India forces sympathetic to the French. Like Nelson, he was personally brave and had learned the value of decisive aggression against the enemy, even when outnumbered. He was also known to be meticulous in his planning. But he was nine years younger and not yet a household name. 

Wellesley recognised Nelson easily enough. But he later recounted how Nelson had no idea who he was. This account was made by Wellington in later life, in 1834, in conversation with John Wilson Croker, who wrote: “We were talking of Lord Nelson, and some instances were mentioned of the egotism and vanity that derogated from his character”. 

Croker goes on to quote Wellington's response as follows: 

“I am not surprised at such instances, for Lord Nelson was, in different circumstances, two quite different men, as I myself can vouch, though I only saw him once in my life, and for, perhaps an hour. It was soon after I returned from India. I went to the Colonial Office in Downing Street, and there I was shown into a little waiting room on the right hand, where I found, also waiting to see the Secretary of State, a gentleman, whom from his likeness to his pictures and the loss of an arm, I immediately recognised as Lord Nelson. 

"He could not know who I was, but he entered at once into conversation with me, if I can call it conversations, for it was almost all on his side, and all about himself, and, really, in a style so vain and silly as to surprise and almost disgust me. 

"I suppose something I happened to say may have made him guess that I was somebody, and he went out of the room for a moment, I have no doubt to ask the office keeper who I was, for when he came back he was altogether a different man both in manner and matter. All that I had thought of charlatan style had vanished and he talked of the state of the country and of the aspect and probability of affairs on the continent with a good sense and a knowledge of subjects at home and abroad that surprised me... In fact he talked like an officer and a statesman. 

"The Secretary of State kept us long waiting, and certainly for the last half or three-quarters of an hour I don't know that I ever had a conversation that interested me more.” 

We don’t know what insights Nelson may have given that were of such interest to Wellington, although in her biography of Wellington, Elizabeth Longford asserts that “Nelson undoubtedly helped to form the future Duke of Wellington’s ideal of the great captain who could see far beyond his own flagship or headquarters”. According to another account of the meeting, published in the Edinburgh Review of 1838, the two men exchanged compliments. Wellesley congratulated Nelson on his recent decisive victories, and Nelson said he hoped Wellesley would be given the opportunity lead an expedition against the French on the continent. 

And Nelson left no record of what he thought about the encounter. He took to sea again the very next day, and they never had the chance to meet again, of course, because six weeks later he lay dying on the deck of his flagship, HMS Victory, having just won the Battle of Trafalgar. 

So, their meeting was a stroke of luck. Croker quotes Wellington (who was keen on talking about the hand of Providence) as saying: “Now, if the Secretary of State had been punctual and admitted Lord Nelson in the first quarter of an hour, I should have had the same impression of a light and trivial character that other people have had, but luckily I saw enough to be satisfied that he was really a very superior person.” 

Longford suggests that “it is by no means impossible that Castlereagh did it on purpose”, to bring the two men together. 

References

- Saul David: All the King’s Men, Penguin 2013
- Elizabeth Longford: Wellington: Years of the Sword, Literary Guild 1969
- The Croker Papers, Vol II p.35 

See also:
When Donne met Kepler
When Chekhov met Tolstoy
When Leonardo met Michaelangelo

When Mahler met Freud

When Margery Kempe met Julian of Norwich
When Milton met Galileo
When Conrad met Laurence of Arabia
When Dr Johnson met Flora Macdonald

When James met Eliot

When Keats met Wordsworth
When Shaw met Kipling 

When Donne met Kepler

On 23rd October 1619, the poet John Donne, newly in holy orders and taking part in his first and only overseas diplomatic mission, dropped in on the astronomer Johannes Kepler on his way to Vienna. Two of the great and ingenious thinkers of their generation, the two men really had little in common, but they shared a natural curiosity and a restlessness about bringing order to their understanding of the universe. 

We have evidence that they talked about Kepler’s latest discoveries. But perhaps the most curious thing about this meeting is what they did not talk about.

Astronomy at this time was at its most controversial. Kepler was among those whose work called into question the orthodox view that the universe was a fixed and perfect creation. He demonstrated that planets move in ellipses, not circles, and he wrote about his observations of the creation of new stars (supernovas). 

Meanwhile, Galileo’s pioneering use of telescopes was gathering evidence that supported Copernicus’ theory that the sun, and not the earth, was at the centre of the known universe. But in 1615, the Inquisition pronounced the Copernican theory heretical, and books that favoured it, including Kepler’s Epitome of Copernican Astronomy, were banned.

Donne knew about Kepler and had read his book De Stella Nova (Of New Stars), published in 1606. We know this because two years later Donne mentions it in Biathanatos, a tract arguing that committing suicide is not necessarily a sin. Donne used Kepler’s description of supernovas as evidence that medieval and classical authorities, such as Aristotle who had said that stars were immutable, could be wrong.

Now, knowing of King James I’s interest in astronomy (James had visited Kepler’s predecessor as Imperial Mathematician, Tycho Brahe, in Denmark thirty years earlier), Kepler was keen to meet the English delegation that had appeared on his doorstep. He wanted their help promoting his new book to the King. This latest work, Harmonia Mundi (Harmony of the World) mentions his discovery of a connection between the length of time it takes a planet to complete an orbit and its average distance from the sun.

Donne by this time was at a turning point in his life. His wife, whom he’d married for love and at great social disadvantage, had recently died, and now as a priest he was reluctantly accompanying James Hay, Viscount Doncaster, in a delicate diplomatic mission to Bavaria. 

Passing through Linz, he had an unmissable opportunity to exchange some ideas with the famous astronomer. But what did they talk about?

Donne and Kepler were very different characters. Kepler, a man of empirical rigour, was physically frail and not the man of the world that Donne had been in his youth; a Lutheran, he refused to convert to Catholicism when that would have been advantageous, while Donne famously abandoned his Catholic upbringing. And one way of looking at their meeting could be as a clash of faith vs reason, because Donne did express disquiet with new science. In An Anatomy of the World, he wrote that "new philosophy calls all in doubt… Freely men confess that this world's spent When in the planets and the firmament They seek so many new... Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone". And yet this is too neat. Donne loved nothing more than playing with ideas and metaphor, ingeniously adopting scientific ideas in his poetry. 

Perhaps Donne’s speculative nature was brought down to earth, as it were, by Kepler’s academic scruples. But the only surviving evidence that the meeting took place at all shows only that they talked about Kepler’s book and his desire to promote it. 

This is a letter written by Kepler to a relation in England, asking for help in this task. The letter says: “I have talked with a Doctor of Theology named Donne, who was travelling with His Royal Majesty's envoy, Mr. Doncastre [sic], -and appeared here on October 23…  I told him that I had ordered the dedication copies [presumably of Harmonia Mundi dedicated to King James], and added that, because I had seen the envoy here, I wanted to ask his Grace to convey and commend the work.”

That’s it. It’s all we know about their conversation, except that it’s likely to have been undertaken in Latin, the usual lingua franca. But we can be sure they did not talk about an odd way in which their intellectual paths had crossed already.

This concerned Kepler’s Somnium (The Dream), a work featuring an imagined voyage to the Moon, which was circulating in manuscript. In the book, the mother of the narrator summons a demon, and Kepler became very upset that gossip began to spread identifying this character with Kepler’s own mother, who was in fact accused of witchcraft. 

Kepler was so sensitive to this that he took offence at even slight provocations. One instance is in a later revised version of Somnium, in which he wrote: "If I am not mistaken, the author of that insolent satire called Ignatius, His Conclave, got hold of a copy of this little work of mine; for he stings me by name at the very beginning”. 

The remark in Ignatius in question is a sceptical jibe at scholars’ employment of reason without faith. It refers first to Galileo “who of late hath summoned the other worlds, the Stars to come neerer to him, and give him an account of themselves" and then Kepler “who (as himselfe testifies of himself)…that no new thing should be done in heaven without his knowledge”. 

What Kepler can’t have known, was that Donne was the author. Ignatius, His Conclave was published anonymously in 1611 and Donne’s authorship not recognised until after his death. 

As it was, Donne sailed on to Vienna, arriving in early November. Doncaster’s mission to help negotiate peace between Catholic and Protestant factions on the continent was unsuccessful, and Donne never took part in anything similar again, becoming Dean of St Paul’s in 1621. But it’s interesting that in the meantime, in 1620, Donne’s friend Sir Henry Wotton visited Kepler, to try to persuade him to move to England. 

Kepler’s mother died in 1621, shortly after an official accusation of witchcraft, which she continued to deny. Kepler and Donne died within a few months of each other in 1630/31.

References
- Katherine Rundell: Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, Faber, 2022.
- Jeremy Bernstein: ‘Heaven’s Net: The Meeting of John Donne and Johannes Kepler’. The American Scholar, vol. 66, no. 2, 1997 http://www.jstor.org/stable/41212614.
- R. Chris Hassel, Jr: ‘Donne's "Ignatius His Conclave" and the New Astronomy’. Modern Philology. Vol. 68, No. 4 (May, 1971), https://www.jstor.org/stable/436567 

See also:
When Chekhov met Tolstoy
When Leonardo met Michaelangelo

When Mahler met Freud

When Margery Kempe met Julian of Norwich
When Milton met Galileo
When Conrad met Laurence of Arabia
When Dr Johnson met Flora Macdonald

When James met Eliot

When Keats met Wordsworth
When Shaw met Kipling