Lewrie, for his part, simply had a grand time, even if he was seated at least eight people away from the promising Priscilla. There was his rash sortie to be congratulated for. There was his destruction of so many French and Spanish privateers, the very bane of mercantile and maritime trade, and his re-capture and return to their owners of several prize vessels.
How had he won his knighthood? Lewrie gave them the Battle of the Chandeleur Islands off Spanish Louisiana in 1803. He had to tell them of his medals, of course, though Lewrie could (modestly!) relate that he had been present at the Battle of the Chesapeake during the American Revolution, had gotten trapped at the siege of Yorktown yet had escaped the night before the surrender, had been at St. Kitts when Admiral Hood had stymied de Grasse, had stumbled into the Glorious Fourth of June in 1794 while being chased by two French frigates and had ended up driven towards the lee of the French line of battle, and been with Nelson at the Battle of Cape St. Vincent.
“I was forced to go with him!” Lewrie chortled. “I had Jester at the time, a sloop below the Rates, near Nelson’s ship at the rear of Admiral Sir John Jervis’s line, and Nelson swung out of line to wheel about, all by himself. Had I not hauled my own wind, he would have rammed me. He shouted over, ‘Follow me, Lewrie, we’re off for glory!’ and so I went. His ship, mine, and one or two others who followed traded fire with the Santissima Trinidad, the largest warship in the world, a four-decker with one hundred and twenty guns! Huge cannon balls went whizzing by, but we weren’t hit, and I doubt we even marred her paint, but it took ’em five minutes or better to re-load! After that, he went on to win his first honours.”
“You know the estimable Admiral Nelson, Sir Alan?” an older matron gushed.
“We’ve met several times, ma’am, it is my honour to say,” Lewrie told her. Even if he is a glory-seekin’, press-hungry, temperamental arse! he thought.
First at Grand Turk Island in 1783, with no mention of how the rashly assembled attempt to oust the French invasion force had failed so miserably; at Toulon, France, at the conference just before the evacuation of Coalition forces; ashore on Corsica just after Nelson had lost the sight of his eye (with no mention of Lewrie’s mistress of the time who had dined with them!), then serving under his command along the Genoese and Ligurian coasts when Napoleon Bonaparte had invaded the Italies.
“Last I saw of him was the night before the Battle of Copenhagen,” Lewrie reminisced.
“You were there, sir?” a brewer of note asked.
“I was, though there was no ‘tin’ handed out for Copenhagen,” Lewrie replied. “We were not officially at war with the Danes, so…”
Lewrie told them of taking HMS Thermopylae into the Baltic, all alone, to scout the Swedish and Russian harbours, and the expanse and thickness of the ice that kept their fleets in port (again, with no mention of the Russian noble he carried who tried to murder him over the love of an Irish whore in London!) and of how he found him when he re-joined the fleet on the night before the battle.
“The great-cabins had been stripped for action, but for a brazier, some lanthorns, and Nelson’s bed-cot,” Lewrie described, sensing a hush round his part of the table as people leaned closer to listen in rapt interest. “It was cold, windy, and raw, just perishin’ cold in the cabins, and Nelson was tucked into his bed-cot, fully dressed, and with a chequered great-coat over his uniform, wrapped in blankets, propped up on pillows. His long-time servant, Tom, kept him supplied with hot tea, cocoa, and soup whilst Nelson dictated his orders for the morning. No notes, just from the top of his head, listing each ship under him in order of battle, assigning each which numbered ship in the Danish line to be engaged. It was uncanny! As I left, with my assignment with the frigates under Commodore Riou—a grand man and a fine seaman!—I saw the Midshipmen in the outer cabin, seated on the deck with candles, taking down Nelson’s dictation from a Lieutenant, so each ship should have written orders. I was never so awe-struck than that night, for we were anchored just out of gun-range from the Danish line of battle, and I could stand and look at their ships all lit up as they ferried shot, powder, and volunteers from shore … like Caesar must have looked upon the campfires of an enemy army, the other side of the battlefield.”
Up the table, Commodore Grierson gave him an exasperated squint.
“And did the gallant Admiral really put his telescope to his bad eye, Sir Alan?” a younger woman asked.
“I was not aboard his ship to witness it, ma’am, but I’m sure he did, just as all of us were aghast to see Sir Hyde Parker’s signal to ‘Discontinue The Action’, when we were winning,” Lewrie assured her. “We with Commodore Riou had finally forced our assigned opponents to strike, and were engaged with the Trekroner Forts. One could look astern to see that we were already victorious.”
As for that rumoured French fleet under Villeneuve that sailed for the West Indies, Lewrie could put them at ease. “I got a letter from my youngest son, Hugh, who is serving aboard a seventy-four under Admiral Nelson, informing me that Nelson and the entire Mediterranean Fleet were setting off in pursuit. Long before the French may achieve any mischief, they will be hotly engaged and utterly defeated, and the Corsican Ogre, Boney, will have lost most of his navy!”
That raised a hearty cheer, and a toast to Nelson, followed by one to the Royal Navy, followed by one waggish proposal for Napoleon to be hanged at Tyburn, and his tiny body hung in a bird cage on London Bridge!
“He’s not all that tiny,” Lewrie japed. “It might take a larger cage … much like the ones used to hang pirates on display.”
Wonder of wonders, Lewrie had met Bonaparte, face-to-face?
Up-table, Commodore Grierson heaved a silent “Oh, for Christ’s sake!”
“The first time, I was his prisoner, temporarily.” Lewrie was more than happy to relate how Bonaparte, then a mere general of artillery, had blown up his mortar vessel east of Toulon, and had ridden down to the beach where the survivors had staggered ashore.
“Didn’t make a bold picture,” Lewrie chortled, “breeches drainin’ water and my stockings round my ankles. He came to gloat and call for my parole. I told him I couldn’t, for half the crew and gunners were Spanish or French Royalists. I swore the French were from the Channel Islands and really British, so they wouldn’t be butchered on the spot, or guillotined later, and I handed him my sword, a rather nice hanger gifted me years before. We’d have been marched off, but for the arrival of a squadron of ‘Yellow-Jacket’ Spanish cavalry, so I got rescued. He’s about four inches shorter than me, is Boney, a dandy fellow with clear skin … not the yellow or Arabic brown in the caricatures, with blue-ish eyes. The second time we met, in Paris during the Peace of Amiens, he’d put on a little weight, but…”
It did not take any arm-twisting for Lewrie to relate how he and his late wife, Caroline, had taken a second honeymoon to Paris to see the sights—everyone was doing it!—and of how he had taken several swords of dead French captains in hopes they could be returned to the families. It was a young, ambitious chargé d’affaires from the newly-reopened British Embassy who had managed to arrange an exchange of those swords for his old hanger, from Napoleon’s own hands in the Tuileries Palace.
“Didn’t go well, at all,” Lewrie laughed. “Bonaparte showed up in a general’s uniform and raved about why we hadn’t sent him an Ambassador yet, even if his was in London, why we hadn’t evacuated Malta like we promised, and that we had no business tellin’ him to get out of Holland and Switzerland, I don’t recall what all. To boot, Caroline and I were the only British there, and we got stared at and ogled like a pack o’ rabid wolves. Just after that, we got word from another English tourist that Bonaparte had sicced his secret police agents on us, and we’d best flee France instanter.”