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