Admiral Charles Tyler: ‘Confidante to Lord Horatio Nelson’
Jonathan Smyth's latest Times Past column looks at Charles Tyler who was born in Cavan, and went on to command a ship during the battle of Trafalgar in 1805.
Cavan may have plenty of water, yet it is a landlocked county and perhaps historically, not a place you would associate with people who joined the navy. So, it was a surprise to find someone from Cavan who served in the English navy, rising to the rank of admiral and a close confidante of Lord Nelson.
Charles Tyler was born in Co Cavan in 1760, the third son of Peter Tyler, Captain of the 52nd Regiment, and his wife, the Hon Anna Maria Roper, daughter of the 8th Lord Teyham. A muster list for HMS Preston held in the British National Archives, records Charles Tyler's birthplace as Cavan, Ireland. It is feasible that the Tylers resided in Cavan town which was a barrack town. Sadly, little is known of Charles Tyler's early life; his father who worked for the Lord Lieutenancy died in Ireland, in 1763.
Charles married, firstly, Anne Rice, a daughter of Charles Rice, and secondly, in 1788, Margaret Leach, a daughter of Alexander Leach. Anne and Charles had one child, Charles Tyler Jnr, who later disappeared, and a search party was formed with the assistance of Lord Nelson. By his second marriage Charles had four daughters and two sons.
Gibraltar
Tyler’s naval career began as a servant boy at Chatham aboard the guardianship ‘Barfleur 98’. He served for a period on ‘Arethusa 32’ on the North American station, followed by time on the 'Preston 50’. An injury sustained to his leg rendered him almost immobile and for two years he required crutches. In 1779, Tyler was promoted to lieutenant and thereafter served on ‘Culloden 74’, ‘Britannia 100’, and ‘Edgar 74’, and witnessed the ‘Third Relief of Gibraltar’ in the autumn of 1782; that Christmas he became a naval commander on the ship ‘Queen’ which was sent to intercept ‘enemy privateers’. In 1801, he took part in the naval battle of Copenhagen. His major claim to fame was that he would captain the warship ‘Tonnant’ during the battle of Trafalgar, which took place west of Cape Trafalgar, Spain, in a section of the sea that lay between the Strait of Gibraltar and Cádiz.
AWOL
Shortly before the battle of Trafalgar, Charles told Nelson of his eldest son’s escapades. Charles Jr who went missing along with his Maltese girlfriend, a woman described as an opera dancer. During dinner, aboard HMS Victory, Nelson and his fellow captains broached the topic of Tyler's missing son while they hammered out strategies for the forthcoming engagement at Trafalgar.
Nelson heard that Tyler junior was in debt to the tune of £700 and was by then quite likely languishing in an Italian jail. On 30 September 1805, Nelson wrote to Tyler, telling him he would take steps to find his wayward son and that they would aim to do so before ‘any great length of time’. Nelson's letter inevitably boosted Tyler's morale when the battle began in October 1805. At Trafalgar, Charles performed with distinction on the HMS Tonnant. Prior to Trafalgar, Nelson already had secretly paid Tyler junior’s debt from his own purse and, in 1806, the young man returned redeemed, from Italy. Nelson's letter to admiral Tyler was rediscovered in 2017 and then auctioned at Bonham's of London where it fetched £11,875.
Afterwards, I learned of an earlier letter, dated the third of June 1801, this time from Tyler to Nelson, requesting that Charles Tyler Jnr might be permitted to sit an examination for the position of Lieutenant which he evidently attained. This letter is now in the care of the Royal Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Tyler was counted as one of Nelson’s ‘band of brothers'.
Nelson’s Pillar
Vice-Admiral Collingwood in his first report of the action at Trafalgar, bumptiously asserted that on October 21, 1805: ‘… a victory gained which will stand recorded as one of the most brilliant and decisive that ever distinguished the British Navy’. Nelson was central to this decisive battle, thus rendering Napoleon’s high sea capers to the history books. The battle of Trafalgar was a famous win for Nelson, who died from wounds received. Nelson became a national hero in Britain and the battle strategies that have fascinated military historians ever since.
But what of the Cavan born Captain of the Tonnant? Oliver Warner wrote: Of the adventures of the Tonnant, Captain Tyler, there are various descriptions, among them one by Lieutenant Clements, who said that ‘we went down in no order, but every man to take his bird. They (enemy ships) cut us up a good deal, until we got on our broadside to bear on a Spanish ship in breaking the line, when we gave her such a thundering broadside that she did not return a gun for some minutes, and a very few afterwards.’
The beaten ship in question was the ‘Monarca’. By evening, the ‘Tonnant’ recorded that 26 of her crew had perished while 50 survived. Counted amongst the injured was Tyler himself. Oliver Warner’s book ‘Trafalgar’ is well worth a read if that sort of topic floats your boat.
In 1809, Nelson’s Pillar was erected in Dublin to mark the victory, however, the gung-ho glorification of Britain’s maritime past did not sit well with everyone in Ireland after 1922 and, in March 1966, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising, Liam Sutcliffe a young republican managed to plant an explosive that toppled old Nelson from his Dublin perch. Sutcliffe later decried the ugly giant needle that replaced Nelson as something worse than the old pillar had ever been.
Later life
Charles Tyler eventually rose to the position of full Admiral. In 1812, he moved to Cape Town, South Africa, in command of the Cape of Good Hope Station. In 1816, he was awarded the Order of the Bath, and later became Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath. In September 1835, he died two months after his wife and they were buried together in St Nicholas Church, Glamorganshire, Wales, where a monument was erected in their memory.
Beginning life in Cavan, Charles Tyler became one of Nelson’s right-hand men, taking part in one of the most famous sea battles in history and rose to lead England’s navy (His story has all the elements of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera). But then again, when setting out to research a topic you never knows what the high tide of historical research will bring in.
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