Britain’s greatest naval hero left a riddle with his 'final' words

Admiral Horatio Nelson lay dying in the hull of his flagship as the Battle of Trafalgar raged around him, brought down by a French bullet. The year was 1805 and Nelson was Britain’s most recognizable naval hero, having made his name during the Napoleonic Wars. He’d gained a title and famously lost an arm along the way and was almost as famous for his risqué personal life as his daring exploits.

There was little to be done for Nelson’s wound: a French sniper had fired a deadly shot that struck the British fleet commander in the shoulder, passing through his ribs and spine. As Nelson’s life ebbed away, the ship’s captain, Thomas Hardy—a trusted subordinate who had served alongside Nelson for years—remained on deck, overseeing a battle that would eventually end in a decisive British victory. Amid the cannon fire, Hardy went below deck twice to update Nelson on the bloody battle. It was during one of these visits that Nelson supposedly whispered a request that would become immortal: “Kiss me, Hardy.” According to the account of the ship’s surgeon, William Beatty, Hardy leaned down and kissed Nelson’s cheek, for  a moment, and then kissed him again on the forehead.   

In the centuries that followed, “Kiss me, Hardy,” became almost apocryphal, treated as Nelson’s famous last words, even though Beatty claimed that Nelson’s final words were “Thank God, I have done my duty,” repeatedly uttered as the admiral was deep in pain. The meaning of “Kiss me, Hardy” has been hotly contested since the early 19^th century, especially as Nelson became synonymous with Britain’s national identity. The naval hero still looms large in the country’s national consciousness, rendered in bronze, atop a column nearly 170 feet tall in London’s Trafalgar Square. 

Some have speculated that “Kiss me, Hardy” may have had elements of queerness, while others have argued that the words were an expression of friendship between two men whose lives have been bonded together by the years-long bloodshed of the Napoleonic Wars. Most recently, Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery has renewed the debate. The museum included a pair of paintings of Nelson’s final moments in a “queer relationships” collection, with the explanation: 

There is no way to know whom Nelson desired in the privacy of his own thoughts. But simply considering the broader possibilities opens a door into a richer understanding of life in the mighty British navy in the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as a deeper appreciation for the nuances of gender and sexuality in the era. 

Nelson’s rise to fame 

“Nelson is the presiding genius of naval warfare,” explains naval historian and Nelson biographer Andrew Lambert. 

Nelson was born in 1758 in circumstances that were neither illustrious nor privileged. His path to naval heroism was unlikely: as a child, he was slight and often ill. “What has poor Horace done, who is so weak, that he, above all the rest, should be sent out to rough it out at sea,” his uncle once wrote in a letter. Still, he joined the navy in 1771, at the age of only 13; by 20 years old, he captained his first ship. 

Amid the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars, Nelson quickly distinguished himself as a daring and highly effective commander, one with a rare capacity to see the bigger picture: “He is significantly more talented than a very large cohort of exceptionally brave, professional, successful officers,” says Lambert. 

His military success translated into immense fame back home, particularly after the 1798 Battle of the Nile, which dealt a fatal blow to Napoleon Bonaparte's ill-fated attempt to expand into Egypt. “Britain became gripped by Nelson mania, celebrating him in statues, paintings, prints and songs, and copying his portrait on to tea-trays and jugs, earrings, brooches, fans, ribbons and shawls,” writes historian Jenny Uglow. Even Jane Austen participated, temporarily donning an Egyptian-inspired, fez-like “Mamaloec cap” in celebration. 

By the time Nelson sailed the British fleet to the Battle of Trafalgar, his reputation was cemented and his celebrity confirmed. When the sharpshooter’s bullet found him, Nelson was commanding 33 British ships from the deck of the HMS Victory, which was captained by Hardy. Nelson, Lambert explains, had “enormous regard” for Hardy, as well as trust. 

That was significant: Nelson and Hardy would have lived together in close quarters while navigating deeply precarious situations. Trust was a matter of life and death, creating close personal and professional bonds. This was true of Nelson and Hardy’s relationship; In 1797, Nelson endangered himself and his ship, Le Minerve, to rescue rather than abandon Hardy, announcing, "I'll not lose Hardy.” 

In the end, though, it was Hardy who lost Nelson.

When Nelson was hit, he knew that the shot was fatal. He supposedly turned to Hardy and said: “Hardy, I believe they have done it at last.” After he was taken below, Beatty reports Nelson asking for Hardy repeatedly, impatiently: "Will no one bring HARDY to me? He must be killed: he is surely destroyed.” In the immediate aftermath of Nelson’s death, another captain wrote: “Poor Hardy […] I feel for him more, perhaps, than our short acquaintance justifies.”

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Romantic friendship in Britain’s navy

In Georgian Britain, Nelson’s dying request for a kiss wasn’t unusual. Lambert notes that Nelson would likely have kissed other dying men on the forehead himself as an act of comfort. In the small space of a naval ship, far from friends and family on land, in moments of pain and fear, all sailors had was one another. Lambert interprets the kiss as “a last human touch.”

But Nelson’s supposed last words offer a glimpse into the intimate ways that men in Nelson’s navy would relate to one another. “Male intimacy is a huge part of the life of people in that class position. A feature that historians sometimes call romantic friendship is very important for them, so these men will have very close, intense relationships,” says historian Seth Stein LeJacq, who works on the queer history of the British Navy. “The letters that they write to each other will sometimes be very flowery and full of language that you would not expect between platonic friends today.” The way these men communicated with each other can flummox 21^st-century observers. 

“You could be totally platonic and still write sappy letters to each other, hug each other, share a bed,” says LeJacq. “That’s a total possibility and nobody’s going to look askance at you for doing that.” Quite a lot could hide within that ambiguity.  

 The Walker’s explanation of its inclusion of Nelson and Hardy makes an argument that reflects the complicated relationships of men at sea: 

Part of the reasons for these relationships was the reality of the navy as an institution. “It’s this giant cross-section of society,” says LeJacq. Press-ganging, a practice where the British Navy forced sailors into service, contributed to its diversity, drawing men from across the globe. That includes men who may have used Georgian labels like mollies or flops, terms that have largely fallen out of fashion for more inclusive terms like queer. 

Queerness in the navy doesn’t appear to have been a secret in Georgian England, for in the era’s pop culture, the trope is a familiar one. One blockbuster novel from the 1740s, The Adventures of Roderick Random, features “wonderful, very obviously queer characters,” including as a pink-clad dandy named Captain Whiffle. LeJacq points also to a particularly saucy joke in Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park: “Certainly, my home at my uncle’s brought me acquainted with a circle of admirals. Of Rears and Vices, I saw enough.” Like so many British people of the time, Austen had a direct connection to the navy, with two brothers in the service.

Queerness was also more tolerated in the British navy than modern observers may assume. “Officially the laws are very harsh; in practice they’re not applied that frequently, actually, and we see a lot of tolerance,” explains LeJacq. In the cases he’s studied, authorities used “a lot of discretion and leniency when they can. They work hard in many cases to get away from the harshest punishments.” 

That’s in large part because the navy had bigger problems, namely desertion. "They’re constantly struggling to have enough sailors to man their ships because it’s an enormous navy, and it’s this existential threat—they’re worried the French are going to cross the channel and take over,” says LeJacq. That fear contributed to Nelson’s hero-like status: He personally stood between Napoleon and the beaches of England. 

Nelson’s scandalous personal life

Complicating suggestions of Nelson’s queerness was his very scandalous—and very public—personal life. Nelson was married to a woman he’d met in the West Indies and carried home to Britain in 1787. But by 1800, he had famously abandoned his wife for his mistress, Emma Hamilton. Both were charismatic and larger-than-life: Emma, an artist’s model and celebrity in her own right, was “a real sex symbol for the time,” says LeJacq. The pair met in Naples, where Nelson became close with both Emma and her much-older husband, Sir William Hamilton, then the British ambassador to the Italian city.

Nelson and Emma were far from discreet in their affair. Not only did the union produce a daughter, but Nelson and Emma’s arrangement with her husband was unusual. The trio shared a home in England and when Sir William died, both Nelson and Emma were at his side. Prominent men had mistresses almost as a matter of course, but Nelson socialized with Emma on his arm and eventually separated from his wife entirely. The affair became a fixture of the popular press, a tabloid storyline. When caricaturist James Gillray depicted Nelson’s death, he imagined the dying man cradled in the arms of a Britannia who bears a striking resemblance to Emma.  

As he lay dying, Nelson spoke repeatedly of Emma and their daughter, asking Hardy to make sure Emma received his hair and his belongings. The 2006 biography England’s Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton suggests that Nelson was thinking of Emma when he spoke his last words, confused by pain and blood loss. “It seems likely that Nelson, already on the subject of Emma, was trying to say, ‘Kiss Emma for me, Hardy.’” But nobody interpreted it that way at the time—Hardy included.  

Nelson’s dramatic death became an important part of his story, carved deep into British national memory, and “Kiss Me, Hardy,” took on a life of its own, becoming the type of national myth making mined by the British comedy troupe Monty Python. Still, as Lambert points out, there is simply no hard evidence of a romantic relationship with Hardy despite centuries of speculation and innuendo: “There is no evidence, and the press of the day is remarkably scurrilous. If there'd been any hint, it would have been somewhere,” says Lambert. 

But the ambiguity remains: “If we’re thinking from the perspective of an early 19^th-century person, it would not be at all surprising that you would say ‘kiss me’ on your deathbed to a dear friend or colleague or colleague in arms, a brother that you were fighting alongside,” says LeJacq. “You obviously could say that to your lover in your last moments. It was an ambiguity that certainly existed for them, and it clearly exists for us as well.”