5 - Popular Image

Summary

An important element in Nelson's style as a leader was his awareness of, and iinterest in, his public image. He was, essentially, a ‘performance leader’: someone who acted out his leadership. He appreciated the importance of distinctive dress and appearance, even to the extent of making a virtue of his missing arm: ‘I am Lord Nelson. See, here's my fin!’ he once replied, when challenged by one of his ships in the Baltic in 1801. He was the first admiral to use signals as a way of inspiring his men, as well as for operational purposes. The most famous example is of course the one he made at Trafalgar, ‘England Expects That Every Man Will Do His Duty.’ However, for some years before he had used the standard operational signal, ‘Engage the Enemy More Closely’ almost as a personal motto, flying it throughout the action at both the Nile and Copenhagen. Above all, he revelled in the honours and awards that came his way and was not afraid of wearing them, and showing them off. However as the letter to Sir Isaac Heard, Garter King at Arms, printed here shows he was careful to get royal permission to wear his orders: ‘it is my wish to be correct in all these points therefore I am thus troublesome’ (84).

The conspicuous wearing of large numbers of medals on public occasions does not seem unusual today. But Nelson was in advance of his time and his behaviour was therefore viewed with suspicion by many of his contemporaries. When General Sir John Moore saw him arrayed in all his orders and decorations for a royal gala, he famously remarked, ‘he looks more like a Prince of the Opera than the Conqueror of the Nile’, and this aphorism has been often repeated by Nelson's biographers – usually as evidence of Nelson's vanity.

Vain he certainly was, but then he had plenty to be vain about. Moreover his use of distinctive dress, and his apparent obsession with his own image, was much more subtly nuanced than a simple attribution of vanity suggests. So, for example, the letter printed here to Lord Spencer, asking that the San Josef (which he had captured at St Vincent) should be reserved as his flagship (83) can be read at one level as a particularly blatant example of his tendency to self-promotion.