Horatio Hornblower

Horatio Hornblower is a fictional officer in the British Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, the protagonist of a series of novels and stories by C. S. Forester.

He later became the subject of films and radio and television programmes, and C. Northcote Parkinson elaborated a "biography" of him, The True Story of Horatio Hornblower.

As the Napoleonic Wars progress, he steadily gains promotion as a result of his skill and daring, despite his initial poverty and lack of influential friends.

[citation needed] The actions of the Royal Navy at the time, documented in official reports and in the Naval Chronicle, provided much of the material for Hornblower's fictional adventures.

[5][6] Frederick Marryat has been identified as "the father of the seafaring adventure novel from which all others followed, from C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower to Patrick O'Brian's Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin".

[7] Hornblower and the eponymous protagonist of Marryat's novel Peter Simple both start their careers rather unpromisingly and without influential friends, but advance through hard work, honesty, and bravery.

[citation needed] Hornblower is courageous and intelligent, and a skilled seaman, but he is burdened by intense reserve, introspection, and self-doubt, and is described as "unhappy and lonely".

His introverted nature and incredibly high standards isolate him from the people around him, including his closest friend, William Bush, with whom he is frequently foul-tempered.

Hornblower possesses a highly developed sense of duty, refusing to put personal benefit in the way of the best interests of his service and his country.

Due to time spent as a prisoner of war early in his career, he is adept in both French and Spanish, which frequently proves useful in when fighting ships of those nationalities.

He is given command of the sloop Le Rêve while still only an acting lieutenant; the vessel blunders into a Spanish fleet in the fog, resulting in Hornblower's capture and imprisonment in Ferrol.

As a junior lieutenant, he serves in HMS Renown under Captain Sawyer, whose bouts of paranoia on a mission to the Caribbean strain discipline to breaking point.

In 1803, renewed hostilities against France seem imminent, and Hornblower is confirmed in the rank of commander, and appointed captain of the sloop-of-war HMS Hotspur.

After gruelling service during the blockade of Brest aboard Hotspur, he is promised a promotion to post captain by Commander-in-Chief William Cornwallis and is recalled to England.

Hornblower is sent on a secret mission to recover gold and silver from a sunken British transport on the bottom of Marmorice Bay within the Ottoman Empire with the aid of pearl divers from Ceylon.

In the friendly port of Palermo, Hornblower oversees the repairs of the battle damage, but just as this work is finished, the ship is given to the King of the Two Sicilies to keep him as an ally.

Later in the timeline, but written of in the first novel in order of publication, he makes a long, difficult voyage in command of the frigate HMS Lydia round the Horn to the Pacific, where his mission is to support a megalomaniac, El Supremo, in his rebellion against the Spanish.

He is sent with his coxswain, Brown, and his injured first lieutenant, Bush, to Paris for a show trial and execution on charges of piracy for using a false flag to enter a French-held harbour despite him raising the British ensign before opening fire.

After a winter sojourn at the chateau of the Comte de Graçay, during which he has an affair with the nobleman's widowed daughter-in-law, the escapees travel down the River Loire to the coastal city of Nantes.

There, he recaptures a Royal Navy cutter, the Witch of Endor, mans the vessel with a commandeered gang of galley prisoners, and escapes to the Channel Fleet.

As an indication of Admiralty approval of Hornblower's actions, Lt. Bush is promoted into Witch of Endor as commander, and shortly thereafter to post captain, with "the dockyard job at Sheerness waiting for [him]."

When Hornblower arrives home, he discovers that his first wife Maria has died in childbirth, that the baby boy survives, and that Lady Barbara (now widowed after Admiral Leighton died of wounds sustained during the attack on Rosas that Hornblower had observed as a prisoner) has taken charge of the child, with her brothers Lords Wellesley and Wellington acting as godfathers.

A national hero in the eyes of the public and a useful propaganda tool for various politicians and the Prince Regent, he is made a Knight of the Order of the Bath and appointed a Colonel of Marines (a sinecure which confers a salary without any additional duties).

He foils an assassination attempt on Tsar Alexander I of Russia and is influential in the monarch's decision to resist the French invasion of the Russian Empire.

After a brusque hearing before a military tribunal, the Count and he are both sentenced to death, but he is granted a stay of execution and ultimately released due to Napoleon's defeat at the Battle of Waterloo.

It is to be noted that this final story, while an interesting addition to the saga, is empirically incompatible with historical fact, since the Duke of Wellington, Lady Barbara’s brother and Hornblower’s own brother-in-law, died some days before Napoleon III’s hasty return to France.

Be that as it may, at the end of his long and heroic career, Hornblower is wealthy, famous, and contented, a beloved, indulgent husband and father, and finally free of the insecurities and self-loathing that had driven him throughout his life.

In The Happy Return, Bush is serving with Hornblower for the first time, but other books in the series set earlier in his career completely disregard that.

According to Parkinson, Hornblower in later life became a director of P&O, governor of Malta (1829–1831), commander in chief at Chatham (1832–1835), a viscount (in 1850), and Admiral of the Fleet, dying at the age of 80 on 12 January 1857.

[32] Like Hornblower, Harrington comes from a modest background, lacking patronage of any sort, and throughout the series accrues promotions, peerages and other honours, rising to the rank of admiral.